The gray pod that sits on my desk is Hilbert’s territory. Hopper has never shown much interest in it.

Until the last couple of weeks, that is. Suddenly it’s her new favorite place. However, because she’s such a compact cat, you can barely see her over the sides. Naturally this leads Hilbert to think the pod is unoccupied and ready for him, so he jumps up on the desk. You won’t believe what happens next! I’ll show you next week.

This is not a picture of Donald Trump signing the executive order that rescinded DACA. No photographers were invited to that event. Peculiar, isn't it? But you get the idea.D. Myles Cullen/Planet Pix via ZUMA

From Donald Trump, the president of the United States:

Everybody wants to solve the DACA problem. They’ve been wanting to solve it for a long time. It should’ve been solved by President Obama….But they didn’t solve it, he didn’t solve things. And he did something that he didn’t have the right to do. You understand, he did an executive order and that was no good. And by the way, the court — it wasn’t me. The courts were not upholding that executive order.

This is not true. There were no lawsuits over DACA. There were threats of lawsuits, which Trump caved in to, but that’s all. No courts were ever involved. DACA is set to end solely because Donald Trump issued an executive order on September 5.

As usual, the question is: lying or stupid? Take your pick.

Prensa Internacional via ZUMA

Steve Wynn, the casino mogul who was a vice-chair of Donald Trump’s inauguration committee and is currently the finance chairman of the Republican Party, is apparently a sexual predator on par with Harvey Weinstein.¹ The Wall Street Journal has an extensive investigation, which opens with an account from a woman who came to Wynn’s office to give him a manicure:

After she gave Mr. Wynn a manicure, she said, he pressured her to take her clothes off and told her to lie on the massage table he kept in his office suite, according to people she gave the account to. The manicurist said she told Mr. Wynn she didn’t want to have sex and was married, but he persisted in his demands that she do so, and ultimately she did disrobe and they had sex, the people remember her saying….Mr. Wynn later paid the manicurist a $7.5 million settlement, according to people familiar with the matter.

….Beyond this incident, dozens of people The Wall Street Journal interviewed who have worked at Mr. Wynn’s casinos told of behavior that cumulatively would amount to a decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Wynn….Some said that feeling was heightened at times by the presence in a confined office space of one or more of his German shepherds, trained to respond to commands in German.

The Journal contacted more than 150 people who work or had worked for Mr. Wynn; none reached out to the Journal on their own. Most of those who spoke to the Journal about Mr. Wynn said they worried that doing so could hurt their ability to work elsewhere because of his influence in the casino industry and the state.

If I had to guess, I’d say Las Vegas is full of men like Wynn. But unlike Hollywood, where actresses can expect some support if they tell stories of sexual assault, no one in Vegas wants to run afoul of powerful casino owners. Ditto for Wall Street and dozens of other industries. Hollywood may be low hanging fruit, but it’s about time that some of these other industries got a close look too.

¹Needless to say, Wynn denies everything.

This is not quite the same as the New York Times’ infamous front page the day after James Comey released his memo about Hillary’s emails, but the online version of the Washington Post is giving it a run for its money right now:

The Post might have gotten the story second, but they’re obviously making up for lost time now.

GLAAD has released a survey of people’s comfort level with various situations in which they interact with LGBT persons. Discomfort is up in every category since last year:

Andrew Sullivan tries to figure out what’s going on:

The question is, why? The mainstream media has no other explanation than, well, Trump, and a culture more tolerant of intolerance. That may well be part of it. But no one seems to notice the profound shift in the tone and substance of advocacy for gay equality in recent years, and the radicalization of the movement’s ideology and rhetoric. That is also surely having an impact.

For a couple of decades, many non-leftists, in the wake of the plague, took more control of the messaging of gay rights….But since Obergefell? As many of us saw our goals largely completed and moved on, the far left filled the void. The movement is now rhetorically as much about race and gender as it is about sexual orientation (“intersectionality”), prefers alternatives to marriage to marriage equality, sees white men as “problematic,” masculinity as toxic, gender as fluid, and race as fundamental. They have no desire to seem “virtually normal”; they are contemptuous of “respectability politics” — which means most politics outside the left.

To his credit, Sullivan prefaces all this with “Let’s not get carried away here.” That’s progress! Writing once a week fits his personality better than daily blogging ever did.

That said, the differences from 2016 to 2017 are all in the range of 2-3 percentage points. That’s basically meaningless, and to the extent it does mean anything I’d say that Trumpism is more than enough to explain it. This is something to keep an eye on, but nothing more.

And one more thing: I can’t pretend to any deep knowledge of gay culture, but the focus on transgender people and academic gobbledegook is at least many years old. And during those years, GLAAD reports declines in the discomfort of dealing with LGBT folks. It’s only in 2017 that it ticked up slightly. You have to really stretch things to suggest that lefty rhetoric was innocuous for years and then suddenly had a big negative effect in 2017.

I say this as no big fan of the academic left and its gobbledegook, but the most likely explanations here are (a) Trump, (b) randomness, and (c) when you get up to the 70 percent level of acceptance, the rest of the way is going to be tough sledding. Basically, you probably have to wait for people to die in order to make further progress. But maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see next year.

GDP growth figures are out today, and the economy kept up its good performance in the fourth quarter. GDP growth since the previous quarter was up 2.6 percent on an annualized basis:

And since 2017 is now in the history books, we also have growth figures for the whole year. The economy grew 2.3 percent in 2017:

This is perfectly respectable. However, just to state the obvious, it’s a long way from the sustained 3 percent growth that Donald Trump thinks his tax cut will generate. I doubt that he’ll come close to that in 2018, let alone for several years in a row.

Imago via ZUMA

The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant (“The People’s Paper”) has quite the intriguing story today. Apparently AIVD, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, broke into the computer systems of a nondescript building in Moscow a few years ago. They had no idea what was there, but eventually they figured it out. It was the workplace of Cozy Bear, Russia’s most infamous hacking group:

That’s how the AIVD becomes witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents. It won’t be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes.

….The Cozy Bear hackers are in a space in a university building near the Red Square. The group’s composition varies, usually about ten people are active. The entrance is in a curved hallway. A security camera records who enters and who exits the room. The AIVD hackers manage to gain access to that camera. Not only can the intelligence service now see what the Russians are doing, they can also see who’s doing it. Pictures are taken of every visitor. In Zoetermeer, these pictures are analyzed and compared to known Russian spies.

….Access to Cozy Bear turns out to be a goldmine for the Dutch hackers. For years, it supplies them with valuable intelligence about targets, methods and the interests of the highest ranking officials of the Russian security service [which they share with the United States]….In return, the Dutch are given knowledge, technology and intelligence. According to one American source, in late 2015, the NSA hackers manage to penetrate the mobile devices of several high ranking Russian intelligence officers. They learn that right before a hacking attack, the Russians search the internet for any news about the oncoming attack.

de Volkskrant says the Dutch are pretty pissed off that our intelligence services, in an effort to prove that Russia really did interfere with the US election, have repeatedly bragged about the remarkable efforts of a “Western ally.” However, the details in this story come from both American and Dutch sources, so apparently there are at least a few folks in the Netherlands who figure they might as well brag about it themselves now that the operation is over.

If all this is true, the primary sources for our knowledge of the 2016 election hacking are the Dutch operation and the NSA penetration of Russian mobile devices. Those are some pretty good sources, and it accounts for why the US intelligence community is so certain that Russia was behind all the various hacks. And there are other Russian attacks, too, which are described in some detail in the story. I wonder if they have similar intelligence about Wikileaks?

I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but—oh, who am I kidding? What’s a blog for if not to beat a few dead horses? You’ve probably already heard that Donald Trump said today that the US is actually in favor of a strong dollar policy, thus ending the Mnuchin crisis of a few hours earlier. The whole world breathed a sigh of relief.

However, I’d like to put this in perspective. Here’s what the dollar/euro exchange rate has looked like over the past few days:

Unbelievable, isn’t it? Mnuchin ran his mouth off and the dollar lost…half a cent. Six hours later Trump set things right, and the value of the dollar settled in at 0.8 euros, a rate that was identical to where it was 24 hours before. We really dodged a bullet, didn’t we?

Look, it’s not a great idea for Treasury secretaries to blab about stuff without thinking through the consequences. But the conventional wisdom is positively cultish in the way it insists on nothing but gnomic utterances from the Fed and the Treasury. On Wednesday the dollar dropped 0.6 percent all on its own. It probably would have done the same thing today, but thanks to the mob mentality of currency traders it only took an hour. So what?

Anyway, the dollar is back up temporarily thanks to Trump, but over the next few days it’s going to do whatever it was going to do anyway. Nothing Mnuchin or Trump said made any actual difference, no matter how many columnists insist otherwise. This episode tells us nothing except that currency traders overreact to news like this in hopes of making an ultra-short-term profit. That’s all.

K.C. Alfred/San Diego Union-Tribune via ZUMA

If you’re curious to know what conservative immigration hardliners think about Donald Trump’s new DACA proposal, here is Mark Krikorian. He’s OK with citizenship for Dreamers. He’s OK with the lack of E-Verify. But he’s pretty unhappy with the rest of it:

If — as the White House promised just days ago — the amnesty were confined to those who now actually have DACA work permits (or even those who had them but didn’t renew), administering the amnesty would be relatively straightforward….But going beyond DACA beneficiaries to those who could have applied but didn’t is a different thing….The other work of USCIS would grind to a halt, delaying other legal immigration applications….What’s more, expanding the amnesty beyond DACA beneficiaries is morally dubious. The reason they have a compelling case for amnesty before all enforcement measures are in place and legal immigration curbed is that not only did they arrive here as minors but they voluntarily came forward and provided their information to the government. Those who chose not to do so should not be granted the same extraordinary act of mercy.

….Then there’s the legal immigration “cuts.” The outline says that no new applications for the visa lottery and the chain-migration categories would be accepted, limiting family immigration to spouses and minor children. Great! But it also provides for the continuation of those categories (and reallocation of the lottery visas) until the admission of all 4 million people on the current chain-migration waiting lists….In other words, legal immigration would not actually be reduced until after President Kamala Harris’s successor took office.

Krikorian calls Trump’s proposal a “preemptive surrender.” I imagine Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh would not be so polite about it. Here’s where Breitbart is at the moment:

I don’t have any comment about this. I just wanted to give you a taste of what the other side thinks of Trump’s proposal. The liberal side is aghast at the reductions in legal immigration. The conservative side is aghast that the reductions aren’t harsh enough. That doesn’t leave much room to cut a deal. If there’s going to be any agreement here, it’s going to be because there are enough moderates on both sides that they can pass a bill with no help from the hardliners on both sides.

Prensa Internacional/ZUMAPRESS

Last May, Robert Mueller was appointed special prosecutor after Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey. Within a month, according to the New York Times, Trump wanted to fire him too:

President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive….After receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation.

This was back in the days when conservatives had just started testing out possible attack lines against Mueller: he’d had a fight over fees with a Trump golf club; he had worked for a firm that represented Jared Kushner; and he was angry at not being chosen to replace Comey at the FBI. Those seem almost quaint now that Mueller is routinely painted as a full-blown Hillary Clinton shill and traitor to his country on Fox News every night.

McGahn was almost certainly correct last June: the blowback from firing Mueller really would have been enormous, possibly even leading to impeachment charges. But maybe not anymore. Republicans have now spent so much time demonizing Mueller and the FBI that Trump might be able to get away with it. He’d certainly have the rock solid support of the entire conservative media establishment, which would immediately go into overdrive explaining that the investigation has been a plot from the very start by the Democratic Party and the Deep State to get rid of a president who’s promised to end their corrupt hegemony over American politics. And there are plenty of members of Congress who’d join right in.

These are bad times. I hope we get through them OK.