A couple of weeks ago it was duckling season, so gosling season can’t be far behind, can it? Indeed not. Our lake is now full of adorable baby Canada geese. Aren’t they the cutest little things you’ve ever seen?

A question for the bird people: the particular brood that I saw the other day had 11 goslings. That’s not possible, is it? What kind of goose could sit on a nest with 11 eggs in it? Do multiple geese share daycare duties if their eggs hatch at the same time? Or what?

UPDATE: Yes, it turns out that Canada geese often form “creches” of goslings from several different nests. Here’s a picture of a 40-gosling creche on the Thames a few years ago, courtesy of the Daily Mail.

West Coast Surfer/DPA via ZUMA

As you may know, California has decided to make rooftop solar mandatory in all new houses starting in 2020. But you might not know this:

In addition to the solar mandate, the commission approved new insulation and air filter requirements for newly built homes. In all, the new residential requirements are expected to make a single-family house $9,500 more expensive to build on average, but save $19,000 in reduced utility bills over a 30-year period, according to the Energy Commission. Monthly mortgage payments should rise by an average of $40, but utility bills should fall by $80, a commission analysis says.

The $9,500 estimate you keep hearing about includes not just the solar panels, but also the new insulation and air filter stuff. And it’s all likely to make homes in California less expensive by the only metric that matters: monthly payments.

I don’t have a strong opinion about this mandate because I haven’t spent any time digging into it. Tentatively, I’d say that it sounds like a good idea even if it’s not the best idea ever. There’s no law that says we can’t have both rooftop solar and utility-scale solar, after all. We have lots of sunshine in California, so why not make use of it as broadly as we can?

Rooftop solar does present genuine issues for utilities, especially if it includes net metering (the ability to sell excess power back to the grid). Still, these issues aren’t insurmountable, and utilities generally protest too much. Solar and wind are the future until something better comes along, and I’m perfectly happy to live in a state that not only cares about climate change, but also has a powerful hedge against future increases in the price of gas and oil.

This is more or less what American politics is still about. But not for much longer.

How bad are things today? And by “things,” I mean Donald Trump.

Pretty bad. Trump is like a kid who finally gets to make his own dinner and decides to have chocolate pizza covered with marshmallows along with a chocolate shake and then some chocolate pudding for dessert. When it’s all over, we’re going to wake up with a bad stomach ache.

However, because I am who I am, I believe that Trump is an aberration, not a harbinger of the future. Liberalism tends to come in short spurts in America, followed by longer periods of conservatism as everyone takes a breather. The Obama presidency was a pretty modest contribution to liberalism, and I suspect that our breather will be fairly modest too.

This is all some throat clearing before I say that I’m happy to see that Ezra Klein is coming around on this too, for a related but distinct reason:

In White Rage, Carol Anderson reflects on the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and the way the nation has always been transfixed by black rage, by images of “rampaging, burning, and looting.” But not all rage is so visually arresting….When President Franklin D. Roosevelt justified his abandonment of anti-lynching laws because, otherwise, the Southern Democrats who chaired powerful committees would “block every bill I ask Congress to pass,” he was genteelly operating within the customary boundaries of a transactional political system, but he was cooly rationalizing a morally gruesome choice.

….Thinking back on those eras is a reminder that, in America, periods of racial progress have always triggered periods of political instability. The Civil War is the most profound and bloody example but far from the only one. Richard Nixon, the last president to evince so little respect for constitutional norms, was also a “law and order” candidate who promised to represent a silent majority frustrated by rapid racial advancement and unnerved by black anger.

Viewed from this perspective, it is not surprising that the first African-American president was followed by a candidate like Trump, who promised to put the restoration of America’s dominant political majority above the niceties of normal politics, who is visibly enraged by Black Lives Matter protests and kneeling NFL players.

As always, I’d like to add one thing to this: even granting everything Klein says, Trump won only barely, and only thanks to a bizarre confluence of outside circumstances. It’s a huge mistake to ascribe too much historical importance to something that squeaked into existence by less than 1 percent of the vote in three states. Trump may be president, but not because America suddenly underwent a vast change of heart:

I wonder often about how this period in American life will look to future historians. One possibility that has been much discussed is that it will be seen as the dawn of America’s descent into illiberalism. But another possibility — one that’s less often considered — is that it will eventually look like the turbulence that has always accompanied racial progress in this country, and it will eventually be seen as modest compared to the upheavals of our past.

This depends, of course, on what happens next — on the judgment Americans render on Trump in 2020, on whether our political institutions or fundamental freedoms are weakened in the meantime, on the way we navigate the demographic turbulence already disrupting our politics. But America has absorbed worse than this into its story of progress. As Anderson says, we are an aspirational country, and the power of being an aspirational country comes in having something to live up to. Now it is our generation’s work to write the next chapter.

Quite so. Trump tells us far more about the Republican Party than he does about America. One man of Trump’s limited abilities is just not enough to change America’s destiny right now. Climate change is real. Demographic change is real. Artificial intelligence is real. Trump may be able to delay our reckoning with the future, but these are the things that are going to mold our next few decades no matter how much they frighten Trump’s base of white voters. Donald Trump, far from being the birth of something new, almost certainly represents the last gasp of the great cultural battle that began in the 1960s and is now, finally, almost exhausted. We have different fights ahead.

If you want to understand why evangalical Christians have been so willing to prostitute their faith in service of Donald Trump, this poll from ABC News tells most of the story:

The decline has been pretty evenly spread among young and old; college and high school grads; men and women; liberals and conservatives; and both mainstream and evangelical Protestants. However, the decline is much larger among whites than among blacks or Hispanics. And the share of people who self-ID as Catholics has stayed steady.

The first decade of the 21st century was a tough one for evangelical Protestants. Their numbers fell, their political influence waned, their most popular leaders died off or retired, and they got badly crushed on the issue of gay rights and gay marriage. By 2012 the movement was in pretty sorry shape, and it only got worse after Obergefell.

Then Donald Trump came along and threw them a lifeline. Sure, he was a philanderer, a faker, a liar, an avatar of mammon, and very plainly not a religious man himself. But Trump made evangelicals the same offer he makes with everyone: he’d adopt their causes as his own and fight for them publicly, but only in return for unconditional public support. Maybe it was a devil’s bargain, but they took it. If you had lost 20 percent of your followers in the past decade and watched helplessly as modern culture steamrolled nearly everything you believe in, you might have too.

The Republican jihad against Robert Mueller took another step today:

Vice President Pence on Thursday urged special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to bring his investigation into Russian election interference to a close, saying “it’s time to wrap it up.”

….Pence was asked Thursday by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell if he believes the investigation is a “hoax,” as Trump has repeatedly characterized it. “Our administration has been fully cooperating with the special counsel, and we’ll continue to,” Pence said. “What I think is that it’s been about a year since this investigation began. Our administration has provided more than a million documents. We’ve fully cooperated in it, and in the interest of the country, I think it’s time to wrap it up.”

A whole year! I wonder how Pence felt about Whitewater and Benghazi and Hillary’s emails after their first year?

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Rep. Devin Nunes says that all this business about his subpoenas endangering intelligence sources is hogwash. Nothing he’s asked for has anything to do with any particular individual. He’s just investigating whether the Justice Department has abused the FISA court as a means of destroying President Trump.

The Washington Post got a look at Nunes’ subpoena:

The subpoena, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, demands “all documents referring or related to the individual referenced in Chairman Nunes’ April 24, 2018 classified letter to Attorney General Sessions.” That is the only material the subpoena seeks.

The individual in this subpoena isn’t necessarily the intelligence source the FBI is worried about. But if he is, then Nunes knows damn well his subpoena is about an individual. And if he isn’t, then Nunes knows damn well that he’s issuing subpoenas in the dark. And all for the nakedly partisan purpose of protecting Donald Trump at all costs. He plainly doesn’t care about anything else.

When the history of our time is written, the astonishing thing won’t be that we elected Trump president. The astonishing thing will be that one of America’s two major political parties almost immediately swore utter and total fealty to him. The story of how that happened is the story of America’s decline in the post-Gingrich era.

As we all know, prices for standard procedures in hospitals can vary by enormous amounts. Go to one hospital and your hip replacement will cost $15,000. Go to a different one and it will cost $80,000. And if you’re not insured and have to pay full list price? You better get used to just hobbling around.

But it’s even worse than that. Sarah Kliff points to a new paper that examined hospitals in the Philadelphia area and compared prices within the same hospital for the most standardized procedure imaginable: a lower limb MRI. Here you go:

The price varies from about $400 to $2,800 at different hospitals. But even within a single hospital, the price varies between $500 and $1,800 depending on who your insurer is. That’s because some insurers are able to negotiate better deals than others. Needless to say, these differences may very well translate into different copays and different out-of-pocket costs for patients. And if you have a high-deductible plan, that can mean thousands of dollars.

This might all seem kind of crazy, but it’s the free market at work. And thank God for that. If we had the government interfering and setting prices, everyone would be paying the identical $380 Medicare price for a lower limb MRI, just like they do in France and Japan. There’s no telling what havoc this could wreak on the salaries of hospital CEOs.

This is Rosario Beach. It’s on the southern end of Fidalgo Island between Everett and Bellingham in Washington State. It looks even prettier in the photograph than it does in real life, and far more peaceful. It was actually a fairly busy place when we were there, with lots of kids running around and a bunch of annoying photographers and bird watchers tramping all over. But you can forget all that because they’ve been cropped out of this picture.

Ropi via ZUMA

Here’s the latest from Novartis:

NBC News: In a new statement (their third) Novartis says they paid $1.2 million to Michael Cohen, had one meeting with him and determined he would be “unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to US healthcare policy matters.” https://t.co/110QeSSycX pic.twitter.com/QGuYT0M93I

— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) May 9, 2018

Man, does this deserve some scrutiny from the SEC. Why would anyone think that Donald Trump’s famously obnoxious bagman and fixer had any expertise in US health care policy? Answer: No one does. Why would Novartis hold one meeting and then pay Cohen $1.2 million anyway? Answer: As a bribe, more or less. What other possibility is there?

There’s a sense in which I sympathize with Novartis here. Trump has made it crystal clear that he’s a crudely transactional politician. If you want something, you have to give him something. If you praise him, he’ll refrain from attacking you. If you cross him, he’ll do his best to destroy you. As a result, Trump is the object of lots of praise because everyone knows this is how you stay on his good side. Then everyone hears the praise, and they assume Trump must be doing a good job. This is how cults of personality work in early stage autocracies.

Ditto for the bribes. You take a look at what Trump does to companies he’s annoyed with—Comcast, Boeing, Amazon, etc.—and who needs the grief? Just hire the insider dude for “consulting” and be done with it. Just praise Trump and move on. It’s what companies do in banana republics around the world, and America is lately little more than a really big banana republic.

But this has to stop. If Novartis and AT&T take it on the chin, too bad. They’re probably no more guilty than lots of companies, but corporate America¹ needs to learn that sucking up to Trump isn’t cost free. Some heads need to roll here.

¹Novartis isn’t actually an American company, but you get the idea.

UPDATE: Here is Ed Silverman’s account:

“He reached out to us,” the Novartis employee said….The employee could not explain why Novartis would have agreed to a deal with a lawyer with no background in health care and without deep Washington ties.

….In March 2017, a group of Novartis employees, mostly from the government affairs and lobbying teams, met with Cohen in New York….“At first, it all sounded impressive, but toward the end of the meeting, everyone realized this was a probably a slippery slope to engage him. So they decided not to really engage Cohen for any activities after that,” the employee continued. Rather than attempt to cancel the contract, the company allowed it to lapse early in 2018 and not run the risk of ticking off the president. “It might have caused anger,” this person said.

Roger that.

Dan Drezner, who refuses to ever give Donald Trump credit for his successes,¹ has once again adopted a cynical attitude toward our president’s foreign policy tactics. In this case, he’s being snarky about Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal:

Plan B begins to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Underpants Gnomes Theory of Profit. Step 1 is terminating the Iran Deal. Step 3 is Iran complying with all U.S. demands. Step 2? Step 2 is a wee bit hazy.

There are at least two possibilities for Step 2:

• We will starve Iran into submission, just like we did with North Korea.
• We will bomb Iran into submission, just like we did with North Vietnam.

Those both worked great! There are other possibilities too, like encouraging the entire Middle East to engage in a brutal war of Sunni vs. Shia. Really, there are loads of options here. Just ask John Bolton.

¹Drezner is the tenured professor who apparently has so much free time that he is now past the 300 mark in his #ToddlerinChief series on Twitter. This series is frivolous and ill-mannered and I urge you not to read it. I also urge Tufts University to discipline Professor Drezner for his disrespectful attitude toward our president.