Why is Donald Trump using the word SPY every ten minutes or so even though there’s zero evidence that Stefan Halper was spying in any normal definition of the word? A friend of Trump explains:

Trump told one ally this week that he wanted “to brand” the informant a “spy,” believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public. He went on to debut the term “Spygate” on Wednesday, despite its previous associations with a 2007 NFL scandal over videotaping coaches.

I’m pretty sure we all knew this, didn’t we? Just like his use of wiretap last year. But it will achieve its purpose. Conservative media now has its marching orders, and soon enough the rest of the media will follow up with thumbsuckers titled “When Is a Spy Not a Spy?” or “The Spy Who Wasn’t” or “Stop It. Stefan Halper Wasn’t Spying on Trump.” Plus there will be 2,000-word explainers galore from national security reporters about how professionals use the word spy and why Trump is wrong to use it.

And that’s fine. All that matters to Trump is that it gets lots of play. Why, this post has already repeated the word spy nine time. Oops. Ten times. It’ll be about ten thousand before this is over, and that’s all most of the public will remember about it.

Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA

The latest:

JUST IN: North Korea state news says a foreign ministry official will suggest the country’s leadership reconsider U.S.-North Korea summit, says future of summit is entirely up to Washington pic.twitter.com/6h7gAK7yR4

— Reuters World (@ReutersWorld) May 23, 2018

On the one hand, this is exactly how North Korea operates, so it’s not much of a surprise. On the other hand, what’s the point of all this? The summit was North Korea’s idea in the first place. Why offer a summit, have it accepted, and then play hard-to-get? What would North Korea get out of having the summit canceled?

Is this just ordinary expectation lowering? Or an effort to humiliate Trump a little bit beforehand in order to soften him up? Given their behavior so far, what do we think North Korea is hoping to get out of all this? Can some Korea experts please chime in?

Aaron Schlossberg hiding from the press behind his now infamous umbrella.

Over at National Review, Dan McLaughlin writes about Aaron Schlossberg, the New York lawyer caught on video multiple times screaming racial epithets at people:

Naturally Schlossberg lit up Twitter and also provoked plenty of real-life protests. McLaughlin compares this public act of shaming to The Scarlet Letter, and sure, whatever. He also agrees that Schlossberg is a horrible person, with only the reasonable caveat that “it’s fair to ask — just as Hawthorne implicitly asked — how far we should go, and how indelibly the stain should endure.” So far, so good. But after all this throat clearing, he ends with this:

What is striking is the fact that the sorts of people most eager to exact punishment on Schlossberg are precisely the same folks who would lecture us no end about how terrible it is to be morally judgmental and how backward the world of the Puritans was. What we see today in the moral furies over racism is that the human need to enforce social norms against sin remains, and still extends beyond just the letter of the law. People who say they don’t want to judge sin invariably just want to judge different sins. They may denounce moralizers for hypocrisy in being against sin without being sinless, but theirs is the true hypocrisy. We have always needed moralizers, we have always wanted to be moralizers, and we always will.

This is a great example of how conservatives too often write about race: There always has to be a “but” that’s the real point of the piece. In this case, it’s liberals who are supposedly hypocrites because they condemn racism but don’t condemn every other form of human behavior that some people dislike. Why this is hypocrisy is beyond me, unless you literally think we should never pass judgment on anything—except racism. I’m not aware of anyone like that, though.

So what we’re left with is: humans all condemn certain behaviors; those behaviors depend on culture, era, and personal beliefs; and racism is bad. But even though McLaughlin is no ultra, he still can’t condemn an egregious act of racism and just leave it at that. Why not? Why does the real sin of racism always have to be the fact that liberals point it out and condemn it?

Today’s photo was taken near sunset in the Angeles National Forest. When I first saw it on the computer when I got home, I didn’t care all that much for it. In fact, I almost didn’t bother saving it. But I did, and ever since it’s been sitting in the lunchtime queue, where I see it every day.

The black blob running across the top is cloud cover. It never rained that day, but the clouds were threatening and dark most of the time, and got even darker toward dusk. The result is a thin band of orange sunset, and that’s what either makes or breaks the picture. At first I disliked it, but that single patch of color grew on me the more I looked at it. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but it’s become one of my favorites. It works better at a larger size, but the blog is 630 pixels wide, so that’s what you get.

Kris Grogan/Planet Pix via ZUMA

I’ve been vaguely wondering for a while if fentanyl will upend the market for heroin, cocaine, and other opioids. Fentanyl is not only super powerful, but you can make it in a lab, like meth, which means it should be pretty attractive to both users and sellers. Keith Humphreys agrees:

Opium poppy-sourced drugs depend on control of arable land in countries where law enforcement is a minimal or at least corruptible presence. Plant-based opium production also requires a substantial number of agricultural worker….Even if old-line agriculturally based producers shift some of their opioid business to fentanyl, as have a few Mexican cartels, they find themselves in a weaker position because they no longer gain the political capital they once did from providing plentiful drug-production jobs to local residents.

Transnational criminal organizations with smuggling expertise are also being financially squeezed by fentanyl….Fentanyl, being enormously more potent per gram, is so compact that people with no particular smuggling expertise can ship it overseas in a regular-size piece of mail with little chance of it being detected.

….If synthetic drugs become dominant, the United States and other consuming nations will no longer be concerned about developing-world drug crops, removing a burr from under the saddle of international relationships and potentially weakening insurgencies abroad at the same time.

Well, that’s interesting. But fentanyl has been around for a long time, and only recently has its use become widespread. Why? Is it hard to make outside an industrial lab? Is it just too dangerous? A few grains can be deadly, after all. Is there more here than meets the eye?

I don’t know. But if you’re interested in a little ground-level perspective, read “The Walter White of Wichita,” by Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster. It’s about the guy who started the first fentanyl epidemic in the early 90s.

Here’s a fascinating chart from NBC News:

The two parties were pretty even until 1990, when Democrats started a steady rise in the number of women who ran for a seat in Congress. This opened up a wide gap against Republicans.

Then came Donald Trump and women responded in huge numbers. The number of women running for office skyrocketed, nearly reaching parity with men. Meanwhile, Republicans saw a noticeable decrease in the number of women.

The gender gap between Democrats and Republicans has always been around, but if this chart is telling us anything, it got way bigger when the groper-in-chief took up residence in the Oval Office. That’s not really surprising, but the size of the Democratic response is.

Republicans have now lost not just nonwhites, and not just the young, but women as well. All they’ve got left are white men over 30. They’re managing to do pretty well with them so far, but how long can they keep it up?

This should be fun. As instructed, I took the evil dex two hours before coming in to the infusion center. Now I’m here, and it turns out they have to push some Benadryl into me before they start the chemo itself. So I’ve got dex fighting to keep me awake and Benadryl fighting to make me drowsy. Exciting! Which drug will win?

Today I start my second round of chemotherapy. The big difference this time around is a new drug—Darzalex—which takes way longer to infuse than the drug from the 2014 round of chemo. As a result, my weekly sessions are scheduled to last seven hours starting at 8:30 am.

But! The medical center has plenty of electricity and plenty of WiFi, and I have plenty of portable technology. So I intend to blog my way through the whole thing. It may be a little slower than normal, since I’ll have to use the cursed virtual keyboard instead of my beloved clicky Das Keyboard, but them’s the breaks. With any luck, I’ll be back online in an hour or so, right after they’ve finished poking and prodding me and connecting me to a machine that goes beep.

I have a question for Lesley Stahl. Why did it take you 18 months to tell this story about Donald Trump?

Yin Bogu/Xinhua via ZUMA

Hmmm. President Trump’s use of ALL CAPS on Twitter seems to be growing. This morning produced half a dozen examples:

• SPY
• SPYGATE
• SPYING
• RIGHT TO TRY
• DODD FRANK
• WITCH HUNT

This seems like an increase to me. Is it? Can someone please check? And what does it mean? Perhaps it’s just a phase he’s going through. Or maybe it polls well. Or maybe it relates to Trump’s mental state. Then again, it might actually be the work of Trump’s Twitter team. The Boston Globe reports:

West Wing employees who draft proposed tweets intentionally employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax in order to mimic the president’s style, according to two people familiar with the process. They overuse the exclamation point! They Capitalize random words for emphasis. Fragments. Loosely connected ideas. All part of a process that is not as spontaneous as Trump’s Twitter feed often appears.

….When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process. Trump then picks the one he likes best. While staff members do consciously use poor grammar, they do not intentionally misspell words or names, one person familiar with the process explained.

So there you have it. Bad grammar: OK! Bad spelling: SAD!