Modern Republicans support:

• Torture of enemy combatants.
• Separating kids from their parents at the border.
• Drug tests for the poor who apply for food assistance.
• Viciously racist rhetoric from their president.
• Mass incarceration.
• Cutting back on medical care for the poor.
• Ending asylum for those fleeing violence in their home countries.
• Police brutality in poor neighborhoods.

By “support” I mean that they either actively support these things or else they’re happy to let them continue without any criticism. This is the fundamental human cruelty and venom at the heart of the contemporary GOP.

This isn’t new, but Donald Trump has brought it to the surface and supercharged it. So now it’s time for everyone to decide. Whose side are you on?

A few months ago Republicans unanimously voted to pass a huge tax cut for corporations and the rich. This will increase the deficit over the next ten years by about $2 trillion, but today Republicans got that old-time religion again:

The group of senators were bombarded with more questions about family separation, until Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) stepped in to end the line of questioning. He admonished the group of journalists for focusing on the wrong story and suggested that family separation at the border is not a crisis. “I apologize, guys, we came here to talk about a crisis,” he said, visibly agitated….“God help us if we don’t solve this debt crisis. This is the No. 1 topic in America today, and we’ve got to solve it.”

Here’s how they plan to solve it:

First they add nearly a trillion dollars to a defense budget that’s already the biggest ever and by far the biggest on the planet. Then they slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, SNAP, TANF, veterans affairs, retirement benefits, and anything else that doesn’t especially benefit the rich.

There’s all the usual drivel about how this won’t hurt anyone because the cuts come from clamping down on wastefraudandabuse. Plus spending cuts on the poor will hypercharge economic growth. And anyway, it’s tough love that will put the poor back to work and give them back their dignity.

In other words, the usual. And none of this will ever get a vote on the House floor, let alone the Senate. Still, this is their vision for America. In December we got their tax cuts for the rich, now we’re getting their spending cuts for the poor. That’s the Republican way.

Thanks to my work on the lead-crime hypothesis, I’m keenly aware that crime has plummeted over the past 25 years. I’m also keenly aware that most people don’t know this. But why? Brendan Nyhan points me to a new paper today by Jane Esberg and Jonathan Mummolo that investigates this question.

For starters, they confirm via Gallup surveys that people really are still misinformed. In fact, more people are misinformed about crime than they were 15 years ago. About two-thirds of all Americans continue to think that crime is rising:

Long story short, the authors conclude that the problem isn’t due to mismeasurement, nor does it have anything to do with local conditions. People are just as misinformed in high-crime areas as they are in low-crime areas. It doesn’t appear to have anything to do with grandstanding “tough on crime” politicians either. The culprit appears to be simple: no one is really informing the public that crime has dropped. News outlets report on monthly or yearly crime reports but rarely point out that, in general, there’s been a huge drop in crime since the early 90s. I’d add to this that an astonishing amount of local TV news continues to be dedicated to crimes ranging from murder to random hit-and-runs. If you get most of your news from TV, you simply wouldn’t notice anything has changed because, in fact, the amount of TV coverage of crime hasn’t changed.

So far this is only mildly interesting: the news business has little interest in reporting long-term crime trends, so most people have no idea crime is on the decline. But what happens if you do inform them? That should make a difference in opinions about public policy, right? Nope:

When people are told that crime is dropping, they appear to believe it and remember it. However, their opinions about various crime-related policies barely budge. The only real change is a personal one: they’re less likely to say they plan to buy a gun.

That’s sort of discouraging, isn’t it? Still, I wouldn’t take it too seriously. It takes a while for people to change long-held positions, and a single exposure to crime stats probably isn’t enough to do it. What’s really needed is a news media that’s way less reliant on “if it bleeds it leads” but offers far more repetition of the dry and tedious truth that America has a lot less crime than it used to. Unfortunately, that’s not very likely. Exaggerating crime is good for business, so that’s what our news industry gives us.

Sunflowers in the fading winter light at the Sand Canyon wash.

Elizabeth Holmes and her "big blue unblinking eyes" as photographed by Martin Schoeller for the Theranos website.Theranos Inc.

I have an ongoing joke about how I’m full of great ideas but no one ever listens to me. Like, teleportation would be great! Why won’t the scientists listen to me and invent it? Do I have to do everything around here?

Yeah, it’s lame. But I’m now reading Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. He’s the Wall Street Journal reporter who started exposing Silicon Valley darling Theranos as a fraud a few years ago, and the book is…

…just astounding. From reading Carreyrou’s Journal pieces, I thought I more or less knew the Theranos story. But no. It’s basically a real-life version of my joke. Elizabeth Holmes had an idea: wouldn’t it be great if we could do hundreds of blood tests with just a tiny thumb prick of blood? And that was it. She was a freshman chemical engineering major who dropped out of Stanford and had no idea how to do this. She literally had nothing. She just thought it was a good idea. Based on that, she was able to raise millions of dollars and hire hundreds of people to see if they could bring her idea to life.

They couldn’t. It was sort of like someone saying, wouldn’t it be great if we could cure diabetes? It sure would! Now go invent something that does it.

But as bizarre as this sounds, that was Theranos. And even more bizarrely, it’s not even the weirdest thing about the whole story. For starters, Elizabeth Holmes, who was 22 when she started the company, literally sounds like a modern-day Svengali. She simply stared at people earnestly with her “big blue unblinking eyes” and they were mesmerized into giving her money and letting her do anything she wanted with it.

If you’re looking for something to take your mind off the current political horrors, I really recommend this book. It is far more fascinating than I expected.

Conventional wisdom says that the Republican tax bill was widely unpopular and hasn’t helped either Donald Trump or the GOP more generally. And yet:

Right around the time the tax bill passed, Trump’s approval rating started to climb, and it’s been climbing ever since. Maybe this is just a coincidence. But regardless of what people say, it sure looks as if the mere act of passing something substantial made Trump a more presidential figure.

The Trump administration justifies its policy of splitting up parents and children on the border by claiming that the number of fake families has skyrocketed:

“Again, let’s just pause to think about this statistic: 314 percent increase in adults showing up with kids that are not a family unit,” she said. “Those are traffickers, those are smugglers, that is MS-13, those are criminals, those are abusers.”…A DHS representative provided The Washington Post with the hard numbers behind Nielsen’s statistic. There were 46 cases of fraud — “individuals using minors to pose as fake family units” — in fiscal 2017, the period from October 2016 through September 2017. In the first five months of 2018, there were 191 cases. That is an increase of 315 percent.

This is kind of weird. That’s not an increase of 315 percent. On a monthly basis, which is all that matters, it’s an increase from 3.8/month to 38.2/month. That’s an increase of 905 percent. Why wouldn’t the Trumpies use this bigger, more dramatic number? Needless to say, my spidey sense began tingling—both because the real number is so gigantic and because the Trump administration didn’t use it. Why? They usually love gigantic numbers.

I went looking for more numbers on this and couldn’t find them. However, TRAC provided some broader figures that are interesting. First, here are total new immigration prosecutions:

The total number of new prosecutions is about the same as it was between 2008-2016. So what charges are being brought? Here’s a table for April 2018:

Virtually all the prosecutions are for an attempted reentry by someone previously deported. The only category that’s both relevant to “individuals using minors to pose as fake family units” and big enough to include 38 charges per month is the second one, 08 USC 1324. What does that look like over time?

Nothing seems to be happening here. It’s about the same as it’s always been.

I may be totally off base here, looking at the wrong thing. That said, the usual criticism of the 315 percent number is that it represents an increase from a tiny base, which makes it sort of meaningless. But I have a different question: What do prosecutions for “individuals using minors to pose as fake family units” look like over time? Is the number really rising? Is it rising because prosecutors have been told to prioritize it, or because human smuggling is really on the increase? If DHS can provide the 315 percent number, I assume they can provide the number for every month over the past decade. I’d like to see that.

The space-cadet-in-chief wants to create a new branch of the armed services:

President Trump said Monday that he would direct the Defense Department and the Pentagon to create a new “Space Force” — an independent sixth branch of the armed forces….Trump said Monday that the branch would be “separate but equal” from the Air Force and that Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would oversee its creation. “It is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space,” Trump said, adding that he didn’t want to see “China and other countries leading us.”

Everyone knows why he’s doing this, right? He wants to make sure that if America ever has a space force, all the history books and the murals and the plaques will forever record that it was “created in 2018 by President Donald Trump.” That’s the only thing he cares about.

Kris Kobach in happier days with his pal Donald Trump.Peter Foley/CNP via ZUMA

Here’s something to cheer you up. A few years ago, Kris Kobach, the odious immigration hardliner who is currently Kansas Secretary of State, shepherded a voter ID bill through the Kansas legislature. Today, a Republican federal judge struck down the law in an opinion so incendiary it’s a wonder Kobach himself didn’t go up in flames. She ruled that the law was unconstitutional; that Kobach produced no real evidence of voter fraud; that Kobach’s “expert witnesses” were cretins; and that the law prevented tens of thousands of legal voters from casting ballots.

But that’s not the best part. Kobach chose to personally represent Kansas in this case, and he persistently flouted the rules of evidence by failing to disclose documents and repeatedly trying to introduce new data that he had not given opposing lawyers a chance to see:

The disclosure violations set forth above document a pattern and practice by Defendant of flaunting disclosure and discovery rules that are designed to prevent prejudice and surprise at trial. The Court ruled on each disclosure issue as it arose, but given the repeated instances involved, and the fact that Defendant resisted the Court’s rulings by continuing to try to introduce such evidence after exclusion, the Court finds that further sanctions are appropriate.

Rick Hasen tells us about these “further sanctions”:

And Kris Kobach himself gets the ultimate sanction from the court for his failure to comply with the court’s evidentiary rules: he has to go back to school to learn evidence! pic.twitter.com/nBYL1wqOm6

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) June 18, 2018

Ha! There’s no one more deserving of being humiliated like this than Kris Kobach. The only question left is whether the voters of Kansas will interpret this as a well-deserved rebuke that makes him unsuitable to become their governor in November; or if Kobach will somehow convince them that it was the act of an elitist judge who loves voter fraud because she’s black. I can hardly wait.

I had a window seat on my flight back to Orange County on Saturday, and during our final approach I snapped this lovely picture of our old blimp hangars. I got lucky with the dramatic sky and the sun peeping through at just the right place, and then, for some reason, I decided I wanted to make the picture look like a 40s-era Kodachrome slide from when the hangars were built. I didn’t quite get there, but I think I got close.