John Angelillo/CNP via ZUMA

A couple of days ago I saw a link to a new study suggesting that Russian Twitter bots had cost Hillary Clinton three percentage points in the 2016 election. This seemed pretty unlikely to me, so I was curious to read the paper and see what the authors really said.

Long story short, they amassed a huge database of tweets starting a month before two events: the Brexit vote and the American presidential vote. They identified human tweeters vs. bots using criteria that seem pretty reasonable. They confirmed that the share of human tweets in a geographical area closely predicted the vote in that same area. Then they applied a big ol’ econometric model to figure out how much influence bots had.

Before we get to that, though, here are some of the conclusions they drew about Twitter:

• With rare exceptions, retweets are all done within two hours of the original tweet. After that, your tweet is effectively dead.
• Bots don’t retweet much—about a tenth as much as humans.
• Humans retweet other humans much more than they retweet bots.
• Bots generate a lot of activity from humans who are on their side: each bot tweet, on average, produces two new human tweets.
• Bots are more effective than humans at generating tweets from humans who are on the other side.

And now for the net effect of bots. The authors calculate actual tweet traffic and then compare it to a model counterfactual in which bots don’t exist. Generally speaking, there are bots on both sides of any issue, and they mostly cancel each other out. But not totally. The tweet pattern they predict in the counterfactual is a little different than the actual tweet history:

At this point, I think I was right to be skeptical. The bot effect is small and random, and depends heavily on the precise specification of their model. The biggest effect appears to be that in the counterfactual, pro-Trump tweets dwindle away in the two weeks before Election Day, but in the real world, where bots were working tirelessly away, pro-Trump traffic stays pretty strong.

However, the authors ignore all that and look solely at tweet traffic on the day before the election. Oddly, pro-Clinton traffic spikes way upward in the five days before the election while the pro-Trump traffic dies off in the day before. As a result, for this single day there’s more pro-Clinton traffic than pro-Trump traffic, and the difference between pro-Trump and pro-Clinton traffic is bigger in real life than it is in the bot-free counterfactual. This suggests that bots helped Clinton on the last day before the election, and the authors estimate that the bots contributed to an increase in the Clinton vote of 3.23 percentage points.

This is pretty thin stuff, but if Fox & Friends picks up on it then Trump will finally have his excuse for losing the popular vote: the bots did it! For the rest of us, I wouldn’t take this very seriously. In fact, even for the authors it’s more of a passing comment than a real conclusion of their paper. There’s not a ton of evidence for their model; there’s very little evidence for the causal effect of higher tweet volume on voting; and there’s no evidence at all to support the idea that only Twitter traffic on the last day before the election makes a difference. All in all, there’s some interesting stuff in this paper, but the effect of bots on voting behavior isn’t part of it.

I think I agree with Karen Tumulty about this:

Best ad of the 2018 campaign so far. And she won. Against the Democratic establishment. https://t.co/5bouccA27m

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) May 23, 2018

Obviously McGrath has a great story, but note that she also has a great voice. This is one of the most underrated things in politics, and it’s not really something you can teach. You can improve your speaking skills with practice, but voice control is really, really hard. It’s what separates great actors from mediocre ones.

Anyway, McGrath will now be up against Republican Rep. Andy Barr in the general election. He’s won his last couple of elections pretty comfortably, but only against weak competition. The Cook Political Report rates the district as Lean Republican, but I wouldn’t be surprised if McGrath manages to win anyway. Tim Murphy has the whole story here.

Yang Chenglin/Xinhua via ZUMA

I never got around to commenting on Donald Trump’s latest announcement about Iran. It was delivered by Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State, and it demanded that Iran do all of the following:

1. Deliver a full account of the “military dimensions” of its prior nuclear program.
2. Verifiably abandon all work on nuclear weapons “in perpetuity.”
3. Stop all uranium enrichment, which includes closing its heavy water reactor.
4. Never start up plutonium reprocessing.
5. Provide the IAEA with “unqualified access” to “all sites throughout the entire country.”
6. Halt development of nuclear-capable missiles.
7. End proliferation of ballistic missiles.
8. Release all citizens of the US and its allies.
9. Stop support of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
10. Permit the disarming and demobilization of all Shia militias in Iraq.
11. End all military support of the Houthi militia in Yemen.
12. Withdraw all forces from Syria.
13. End support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
14. Stop harboring senior al-Qaida leaders.
15. End the Quds Force’s support for terrorists and militant partners around the world.
16. End all threatening behavior against its neighbors, including threats to destroy Israel, firing of missiles into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, threats to international shipping, and cyberattacks.

Everybody in the world has already made this point, but I’ll add one more to the chorus: this is just a longwinded way of saying that the US will never, ever remove sanctions on Iran. They will be in place forever. This is the Trump Doctrine on Iran. Dan Drezner describes it like this:

The Trump administration is hoping for the foreign policy equivalent of lucking into an inside straight. They hope that renewed sanctions can tip Iran’s civil society into open revolt and destabilize the regime. I’ll leave it to the Iran experts to assess the likelihood of that outcome. As a sanctions expert, I will say this: Trump has given Iran’s theocratic regime the perfect scapegoat to offer up to explain Iran’s stagnant economy. Now everything can be blamed on the renewed sanctions, rather that Iran’s indigenous dysfunctions.

This sounds right, except that drawing to an inside straight isn’t all that unlikely. Pompeo’s plan is more like hoping to hit a hole in one: it’s not going to happen and everyone knows it. Trump’s real plan appears pretty simple: tighten the screws on Iran until he provokes them to do something stupid, and then join up with Israel and Saudi Arabia to wipe them off the map.

Real lefties would call me naive, but I never really thought I’d see the day when you could reasonably say that Iran is a more reliable negotiating partner than the United States. But now I’ve seen it.

This is a small copse of cottonwood trees in the middle of the Ahwahnee Meadow. Based on advice from a guide, I risked walking out to take the photo since everything in the meadow is dormant in winter. In any other season, this would be verboten. Yosemite Falls is out of frame to the right in the background.

No, this is not what we're talking about.Emmy Eats

From Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association:

If the administration has its way, it will be perfectly legal for sport hunters to lure bears with greased doughnut bait piles to kill them.

That’s not a sentence I ever expected to read, but these are strange times. In case you’re curious, the broader topic here is whether it should be OK to kill bear cubs and their mothers in Alaska’s national wildlife preserves. Republicans say yes because they’re Republicans. Trump says yes because Obama banned it. So the greased donut piles will probably be legal again very soon.

South Korean president Moon Jae-In waves to the crowd as Donald Trump stands slack-jawed behind him.Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Sigh.

Trump, who has pitched himself as the ultimate negotiator, has focused on ambitious deals as president but has struggled with the fine print….Supporters stress that sometimes Trump’s ambitious efforts do pay off, as with the massive tax cut bill he signed into law late last year.

Going into the North Korea meeting, senior administration officials say, the president has been almost singularly focused on the pageantry of the summit —including the suspenseful roll-out of details. He has not been deeply engaged in briefing materials on North Korea’s nuclear program, said three people with knowledge of the White House efforts….Driven by gut instinct, Trump rarely dives deep as he prepares to meet with foreign counterparts. For the North Korea meeting, insiders say, he is motivated by the idea of scoring a historic deal and is tickled by suggestions he could win a Nobel Peace Prize — especially since Barack Obama won the honor early in his presidency.

FFS. Trump had nothing to do with the tax cut. He was, as Grover Norquist once put it so pungently, merely a human-shaped object with “enough working digits to handle a pen.” The tax cut would have passed if Mickey Mouse had occupied the Oval Office.

So that leaves zero ambitious deals that Trump has negotiated. It’s not for lack of trying, either. He tried to repeal Obamacare. He tried to negotate on DACA. He tried to declare a trade war on China. He tried to bully Mexico and Canada into ripping up NAFTA and starting over. He tried to persuade Russia to deal with him on Syria. He failed in every case because he had no idea what he was doing; what the other side wanted; or how to get there. He just wanted to make a loud threat and then declare victory, and the result has been nothing but a trail of wreckage in his wake. No one in America of either party trusts him any longer, and neither does any country in the world—with the peculiar quasi-exceptions of Israel and Saudi Arabia.¹

Anyway, now North Korea is up. Everyone with more than a marble or two clattering around inside their skull knows that Kim Jong-un is never going to give up his nukes. No one except Donald Trump, that is. And I guess even he’s starting to get the message:

President Donald Trump said a planned June 12 summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “may not work out,” adding if it doesn’t happen then “maybe it would in the future.”

I sure hope Republicans get their money’s worth in judicial appointments from supporting this cretin. I never realized that selling your soul came so cheap.

¹Why “quasi”? Because as near as I can tell, both countries trust that Trump is on their side, but both also have nothing but contempt for him. They figure they can gull him into doing what they want and ignore his idiot son-in-law, and that’s good enough.

Wait for it... Usgs/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Perhaps I’m hypersensitive to this kind of thing, but I’ve noticed an uptick in “reasonable” takes on the Mueller investigation lately. I’ve seen this from both liberals and conservatives and it goes something like this:

1. Crackpots on the right think the FBI has been utterly corrupted and the investigation is all about the Deep State trying to destroy Trump.
2. Crackpots on the left are all about the pee tape and how Trump was practically a KGB asset.
3. But look: conservatives have a point when they say the FBI investigation seems like it was opened on sort of flimsy grounds, especially during a presidential campaign.
4. At the same time: liberals have a point that some people around Trump were a little overzealous about who they were willing to work with during the campaign, regardless of whether they eventually did anything illegal.
5. Bottom line: There’s some smoke here, and the Trump folks deserve to pay a price for their actions. But it’s hardly Watergate 2.0.

As a person who often finds some value in dialing down the volume, I understand the appeal of arguments like this. But not in this case. So far, I’m sticking to my belief that Donald Trump probably didn’t personally collude with Russia. Beyond that, though, there’s just a mountain of evidence that points to massively illegal and unethical activity running through every facet of both the Trump campaign and the Trump White House. And that mountain is just what’s on the public record now. Once we learn everything that Mueller has discovered, the mountain is likely to turn into a super volcano.

I’m not surprised to hear some conservatives promoting the “reasonable” version of the Mueller investigation. But I am surprised that even some liberals are starting to hint at accepting it. I sure hope this doesn’t gain any more traction. There’s no need to go all X-Files on this, but there’s also no reason to downplay any of it. What Trump has done, and is still doing, almost certainly is Watergate 2.0.

A few weeks ago I suggested that the gig economy still didn’t seem like a very big deal. I based this on the fact that the share of part-time workers isn’t growing, which you’d expect to see if gig work is becoming more common. That’s a crude but fairly effective metric, but I promised to post better evidence if anything came my way.

Now it has. In a new report, Larry Mishel of EPI refers to previous estimates that the gig economy accounts for somewhere between ½-1 percent of the total economy. That’s pretty small, but when you account for total hours worked by typical gig workers it becomes even smaller:

Uber drivers have high turnover and, on average, work only part of the year (an average of three months) and part time (an average of 17 hours per week). This means that an Uber driver provides roughly 12.5 percent as much “employment,” or total hours of work in a year, as a full-time, full-year worker. There are about 833,000 Uber driver participants in a year. If one weights participants by their weeks worked and their weekly hours, then Uber drivers amount to 90,521 full-time, full-year equivalent (FTE) workers and account for just 0.07 percent of national FTE employment. We scale this proportion by Uber’s two-thirds share of the gig economy (according to research by Seth Harris of Cornell University and Alan Krueger of Princeton University) and find that the entire gig economy—online platform employment—accounts for just 0.1 percent of national FTE employment.

Roughly speaking, Mishel estimates that the gig economy acounts for 0.1 percent of total hours worked in the American economy. He also, to my surprise, mentions in passing that Uber alone accounts for two-thirds of this. So not only is the gig economy small, but it’s basically just Uber and a few tiny stragglers. In other words, it’s probably best if everyone stops hyping the gig economy too much.

And as long as we’re on the subject, the real subject of Mishel’s paper is a close look at how much Uber drivers typically earn. You can read the report for more detail, but here’s an excerpt of his main findings. The short answer is: not much.

UPDATE: Larry Mishel says that the gig economy might be a bit higher than he originally suggested, but still pretty tiny:

.@kdrum Thanks for writing about my report on Uber and the gig economy: https://t.co/mwcKjTbeX3 @Alan_Krueger tells me he believes that Uber is half, not 2/3 of gig economy. Others say that gig work sold to employers could double my estimate. Add all that, still pretty small.

— Larry Mishel (@LarryMishel) May 23, 2018

Artist's conception of MNC Lido City, a billion-dollar "integrated lifestyle resort" near Jakarta that will feature Trump-branded hotels, residences, and a golf course.MNC Land

China recently invested $500 million in an Indonesian project that will feature Trump-branded hotels and a golf course. The investment looks like it’s already paying off:

The U.S. and China have agreed on the broad outline of a deal that would save imperiled Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp., according to people with knowledge of the matter in both countries, as the two sides move closer to resolving their trade dispute.

The details are still being hammered out, the people said. If completed, the Trump administration would remove the ban on U.S. companies selling components and software to ZTE, a penalty that has threatened to put the company out of business. Instead, ZTE would be forced to make big changes in management, board seats and possibly pay significant fines, the people said.

You have to hand it to China. They know how the game is played and they don’t bitch about it. They just do what they have to do. Maybe it’s retaliation, maybe it’s a bribe, maybe it’s the right word in the right ear. Whatever it is, there are no hard feelings. It’s just business, not personal.

Shera Bechard, the Playboy model who supposedly had an affair with RNC bigwig and Trump donor Elliott Broidy.John Chennavasin via ZUMA

Today the Associated Press tells the long, sad story of Elliott Broidy and George Nader, the former once convicted of bribery-by-another-name and the latter once convicted of pedophilia. Quite a team, no? Anyway, they had a grand plan to make tons of money from the Trump presidency, and the AP story includes this sad and all-too-normal anecdote:

Nader wanted more: He wanted a photo of himself with the president — a big request for a convicted pedophile.

Broidy was co-hosting a fundraiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee in Dallas on Oct. 25. The Secret Service had said Nader wouldn’t be allowed to meet the president. It was not clear if the objections were related to his convictions for sexually abusing children….There was another issue. RNC officials had decreed there would be no photos with the president without payment. Broidy suggested that Nader meet the suggested threshold with a donation between $100,000 and $250,000.

It’s unclear exactly how the two issues were resolved. Records from the Federal Election Commission show no donations from either George Nader or “George Vader,” but on Nov. 30, Broidy gave $189,000 to the RNC — more than he had given to the RNC in over two decades of Republican fundraising.

The result: a picture of Nader and Trump grinning in front of the American flag.

Frankly, I doubt that being a convicted pedophile is a big deal in the Trump White House. As long as the money showed up, neither Trump nor anyone else probably cared.

In any case, this is not what the story is about. It’s about Broidy, the connected Republican insider, and Nader, the connected Middle East guy, teaming up to wage a lobbying war against Qatar in hopes of eventually wrangling huge consulting contracts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who both detested Qatar. Things seemed to be going well for a while, especially after the Saudis blockaded Qatar, but then sort of fell apart when Nader was detained earlier this year at Dulles airport as he was transiting through the United States. On the bright side, Broidy ended up with a $600 million contract with the UAE, so it wasn’t all for nothing. If you want to know more, read the whole story for all the twists and turns.

But it’s hard to pretend not to notice the elephant that never gets mentioned. You may recall that a few weeks ago a judge ordered Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen to reveal all his clients. It turned out he had only three: Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, and … Elliott Broidy. What’s more, he only represented Broidy on one thing: a hush money payment to a Playboy model he had an affair with, some of which was used to pay for an abortion. When that was revealed, Broidy immediately confessed in a surprisingly workmanlike statement and that was that.

The whole thing seemed odd, leading Paul Campos to make the case that it was actually Donald Trump who had the affair, with Broidy taking the fall for him. Campos made a decent case, but it was purely speculative and quickly dropped out of sight.

However, after reading this AP story it sure seems a helluva lot more likely that Campos was right. It always seemed odd that Broidy had paid Shera Bechard $1.6 million for her silence, considering that an affair with a guy like Broidy was hardly front-page news. However, an affair with Trump would be front-page news, and this was right in the middle of Broidy’s big campaign to get Trump to help him out with the Qatar business. What better way to ingratiate yourself with Trump than to offer to cover this up for him? According to the Wall Street Journal, the hush money was paid in “late 2017,” exactly the same time that Broidy made his donation to the RNC in order to get Nader his picture with Trump.

This helps to resolve the biggest problem with Campos’s theory: a cover-up like this never seemed like the kind of favor even a close friend was likely to help with. Not only did it cost Broidy $1.6 million, but he had to take the chance that the “affair” would become public and he’d end up taking the rap for having an affair and paying for an abortion. Even your best buddy wouldn’t do something like that for you.

But by last November Broidy could practically smell his deals finally coming together. There was the $600 million deal with the UAE plus another deal worth $1 billion that he was pitching to Saudi Arabia. If he thought that taking a fall for Trump could be the final brick that would bring this all together, why wouldn’t he do it? The money was chicken feed by comparison, and maybe he told his wife all about it and she didn’t care. The whole thing finally makes sense.

Anyway, at this point you can count me a believer in Campos’s theory. If I had to guess, I’d say that Cohen, as usual, got the job of dealing with Bechard’s demands. But he didn’t want the money to come from Trump, even under a phony name, now that Robert Mueller was scouring every inch of Trump’s business. Somehow this reached Broidy’s ears—he and Cohen were both deputy finance chairs of the RNC at the time—and he offered to help. Cohen immediately took him up on it, and of course Trump knew all about it.

Is this true? I’m not sure we’ll ever know. But it seems pretty plausible.