Where indeed? I don’t know. I have always been skeptical that we’ll find any proof of outright collusion between Trump and Russia. On the other hand, there’s already plenty of evidence out there that something happened. And God knows both Trump and the Republican Party are acting so panicked that they pretty obviously think the Mueller investigation is not going well for them.

Anyway. What’s my guess? On a scale of 1 to 10, I think it will end up around a 6 or 7. Let’s call it…oh, I don’t know, maybe Iran-Contra territory?

Last October my doctor decided I no longer needed bloodwork done every month. Every three months was enough. That turned out to be bad timing. My latest test is not a disaster or anything, but my maintenance chemo med is definitely losing some punch.

This is not surprising. My understanding of the literature is that Revlimid generally works for about two years, and I’ve been taking it for 30 months. When my M-protein level gets above one, it will probably be time to switch to a third-line medication. Luckily, there’s been an explosion of new drugs for multiple myeloma lately, so there are several to choose from.

Those will eventually give out too, but the really good news is that this is no longer necessarily a death sentence. There have been some spectacular results recently in clinical trials of CAR-T therapy and various other methods of genetically altering T-cells to become better cancer fighters. In an impressive number of cases, it puts multiple myeloma into complete remission, which has never before been possible. Still, the longer my other meds hold out the better, since I’d just as soon let the clinical trials go on as long as possible before I myself become a guinea pig. However, when the time finally comes, I’m going to try to get into one of these trials and it might actually cure me.

Of course, these days I have strong motivation to hold on. Not only do I want to be around to see Donald Trump lose in 2020, but I also want to be around long enough to see Atrios eat crow over driverless cars. Keep those posts coming, Dr. A!

There is a test coming up for the news media. I can’t wait to see how they do.

As you probably know, Fresno Rep. Devin Nunes has a memo. It’s four pages long. It’s classified. It’s the subject of a relentless conservative Twitter campaign called #releasethememo. And it will blow the FBI out of the water.

Sight unseen, I’m willing to say this: No it won’t. It will show nothing. It will not show that the FBI illegally surveilled anyone. It will not show that the FBI warrant to wiretap Carter Page was based on the Steele dossier.¹ It will not show that a secret cabal within the FBI was trying to elect Hillary Clinton. It. Will. Show. Nothing.

Everybody in Washinton is keenly aware that Devin Nunes has pulled this kind of stunt before. Everybody knows he will do anything to defend Trump. Everybody knows this includes flat-out lies of any sort. Everybody knows there’s about zero chance that his memo actually has any substance at all.

We’ve seen this movie before, after all. Republicans in Congress spent all of 2016 dripping out “bombshells” about Hillary Clinton’s emails that turned out to be nothing. Some of them misrepresented testimony. Some of them misrepresented simple facts. Some of them were just lies. And yet the press gobbled them up every time, printing headline after headline about the latest “scandal” in emailgate. This peaked with the Comey memo 11 days before the election, which took up the entire upper half of the New York Times the next day.

So here’s the test: Republicans are doing the same thing again. They’re dribbling out FBI conspiracy theory stories constantly, hoping that the press will feel obligated to write about them. Eventually, no matter what the stories themselves say, the public will vaguely get the idea that the FBI is kind of dirty and anti-Trump.

The Nunes memo is an especially egregious part of this campaign. There’s nothing there. I guarantee it. This is because the story makes no sense. It’s because Devin Nunes is a known fabricator. It’s because there’s no real scandal around the Steele dossier anyway. So if and when the memo is leaked or released, will the press give it the attention it deserves—a couple of paragraphs on A17—or will it get a big headline on the front page? I don’t have high hopes. My guess is that the memo will be leaked to one outlet, which will give it banner coverage bcause they have an “exclusive.” Then everyone else will feel like they have to fall in line. And the memo will have done its job. Its contents hardly even matter.

But maybe not. I can still hope.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg writes that he’s surprised the Nunes PR stunt has worked so well:

After all, Republicans insinuating that a memo written by a Republican committee chairman in a Republican-controlled Congress during a Republican presidency is being hidden from the public by some force or entity other than the Republicans strikes me as kind of hilarious. As is the idea that all of these Republicans saw it, but no one leaked it because leaking is just wrong. (It is wrong, but come on.) That said . . . hey, it was just crazy enough to work.

Uh huh.

¹As a side note, it’s amusing that half the time Republicans insist that Carter Page was a nobody, just a minor staffer in the Trump campaign who had no influence at all. The other half of the time it’s an outrage that the FBI was investigating a senior assistant to a guy running for president.

Speaking of Sen. Ron Johnson, he’s also the guy peddling the theory that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is making the opioid crisis worse. Doctors are overprescribing opioids to Medicaid recipients, he says, and poor people are then selling them on the black market.

Now, the overprescribing of opioids is a well-known problem, and it’s been associated with doctors who work with all of the following health plans:

• Employer-based health care
• Medicare
• VA hospitals
• Individual health plans
• Medicaid
• Boutique health providers
• Emergency rooms
• Military health care
• All the remaining doctors not associated with any of the above

In other words, the overprescribing of opioids has been associated with every possible health plan in America. But in Johnson’s world, that turns into “Medicaid expansion is making the opioid crisis worse.” Plus there’s this:

The epidemic of opioid overprescribing peaked in 2011, but Medicaid expansion didn’t start until 2014. It could hardly be a driving factor in all this. It’s true, as Keith Humphreys points out, that opioid overdose deaths have kept on rising, but that’s mostly due to heroin and fentanyl, which are black market drugs that have nothing to do with Medicaid.

But Ron Johnson doesn’t care. He bought a ticket for the Trump train, and he’s gonna go wherever the tracks take him.

Illustration based on photo by Yin Bogu/Xinhua via ZUMA

Hum de hum. The right-wing conspiracy machine is really going off the rails. That is, it’s going even more off the rails. But wait. Once you’re off the rails, can you go more off the rails? You’re already off the rails! I don’t know.

Anyway, you know what I mean. Yesterday brought us two shiny new stories. First there was Rush Limbaugh, who suggested—just asking questions, folks!—that maybe the intelligence community deliberately fed false intelligence about Iraqi WMDs to the Bush administration:

What if the intel on the war in Iraq was another disinformation campaign to damage another Republican president?…But just what if? The, quote, unquote, intelligence community misrepresented on purpose the degree to which Hussein had WMDs, cause, I’ll tell you, it was a very, very embarrassing moment for the Bush administration….What if Saddam weapons of mass destruction was also a false narrative designed to…? Did it ultimately embarrass Bush? Did it weaken the U.S. military? Whatever it did, I mean, it opened the doors for the Democrats to literally destroy his presidency in the second term.

I know what you’re thinking: Come on, that’s just Rush. He’s a jackass. And that’s true enough. But if you have the guts to click the link and read the whole rant, you’ll see that it’s based on reports that there’s a “secret society” in the FBI dedicated to destroying Donald Trump:

That is not Rush Limbaugh in the video above. It’s Republican Ron Johnson, the senior United States senator from the state of Wisconsin. And he doesn’t even have the excuse of being forced to get his crazy on because there’s an election coming up. His term isn’t over until 2022.

And yet, there he is retailing a story about a secret society within the FBI whose goal is to destroy Donald Trump. All Limbaugh did was pick up that ball and run with it.

The hell of it is that there was a sort of secret society in the FBI. It was a bunch of agents in the New York office who were obsessed with destroying Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. And they had enough clout that they were able to effectively blackmail FBI director James Comey into releasing the infamous letter that, in the end, did destroy Hillary Clinton.

I do not believe that America is on a slide to fascism under Donald Trump. However, that’s mostly because of the quality of the resistance that he’s touched off. But that resistance is sure going to need to step up its game. The Republican Party, from Ron Johnson to Devin Nunes to Tom Cotton, has demonstrated that they are not planning to rein in Trump. Far from it. They are determined to turn the party into equivalent of what dittoheads are to Rush Limbaugh. If that means smearing the FBI into compliance, that’s fine.

The resistance doesn’t have just one lunatic to fight, they have an entire party that’s apparently willing to go down any dark alley that presents itself if only it helps keep them in power. They will not accept defeat easily.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has a pretty good roundup of the entire Republican effort to destroy the FBI in order to discredit the Russia investigation. It’s worth a read. If you look at it through the lens of a party trying to bring the FBI to heel, it’s pretty scary stuff. The FBI’s leadership knows they can stop the heat they’re getting anytime they want. All they have to do is agree to support Trump and smear Democrats whenever they’re asked to.

Chuck Schumer finally got it right yesterday:

Senate negotiators found themselves back at Square 1 on immigration on Tuesday, as the Senate Democratic leader withdrew the biggest gesture he had made to strike a deal: an offer to fully fund President Trump’s proposed wall at the Mexican border. “The wall offer’s off the table,” the leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, told reporters at the Capitol a day after senators overcame an impasse to end a three-day government shutdown.

Schumer has been widely mocked for this, since it’s obvious that Democrats are, in fact, willing to fund the wall. It was already in their previous proposals, after all. So what’s the point?

That’s easy: Schumer has figured out that if there’s another government shutdown, it needs to be seen as the Republicans’ fault. So he’s going to negotiate a deal that gives Republicans most of what they want in return for DACA—except for the wall. If they refuse to pass another continuing resolution—or Trump threatens to veto it—because it doesn’t contain funding for the wall, then it’s their fault. Democrats were the voice of sweet reason, but Trump was so obsessed with his stupid wall that he shut down the government over it.

Cryin’ Chuck Schumer fully understands, especially after his humiliating defeat, that if there is no Wall, there is no DACA. We must have safety and security, together with a strong Military, for our great people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2018

In other words, it’s a trap. It’s also a fairly obvious trap, so the question is how Republicans are going to react to it. We’ll have to wait and see.

Yesterday the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declared the state’s congressional districts unconstitutional because they had been so badly gerrymandered. The result of the 2016 election bears out how effective the gerrymander was: Republicans won 54 percent of the congressional vote but received 72 percent of the congressional seats (13 out of 18).

Conventional wisdom says that federal courts are unlikely to accept an appeal since the ruling was based solely on state law. Because it was a per curiam decision there was no lengthy opinion to explain the court’s reasoning, but they made clear that it was based on violations of the Pennsylvania state constitution.

However, even though the Pennsylvania case doesn’t officially have any bearing on federal cases of gerrymandering, it does provide yet another boost to the already skeptical judicial atmosphere surrounding them. The Supreme Court has never ruled against a redistricting plan, treating it as a purely political question, but that could change this year when the court rules on a pair of gerrymandering cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. They’ll turn on the power of technology in a couple of fundamental ways:

• In the past, courts correctly assumed that gerrymandering could be taken only just so far. Human minds can only do so much, after all. But computerized mapping has become so advanced that it’s now possible for even the most dimwitted party leader to create a wildly gerrymandered map at the touch of a button. There’s no longer anything that prevents any state with one-party control from adopting the most partisan gerrymander that’s mathematically possible.

  This changes things considerably. The basic question here is: at what point does a quantitative change become so large that it becomes a qualitative change? Similar questions are at the root of many recent privacy cases. In the past, for example, there was a natural limit to how extensively law enforcement agencies could track people since surveillance required human manpower that was in limited supply. But modern technology has changed that: cell phones and cheap video cameras and keyword analysis of wiretapping make it possible to track dozens or hundreds of people with virtually no effort. Is that something the founders expected?

• If technology has created this problem, it’s likely that technology is also the solution. In the cases that have appeared before the court recently, plaintiffs have argued that it’s now possible to rely on clear and impartial computerized algorithms that put hard restraints on the allowable amount of gerrymandering. Chief Justice John Roberts famously called this “sociological gobbledygook” in the oral arguments for one of the current cases, but it’s not clear if a majority of the court still agrees with him about this.

My sense of the Supreme Court is that they’ve been too reluctant to acknowledge the changes that technology have made in the political landscape. It makes maximal gerrymandering a routine occurrence. It allows police departments to keep an unlimited number of people under constant surveillance. It allows states to suppress minority votes using sophisticated data mining techniques that quickly find alternate justifications for their actions.

Needless to say, this is only going to get worse as technology improves. When technology makes something 20 percent or 30 percent more effective, it’s easy for the court to decide that nothing fundamental has changed and its old rules should still apply. But when technology makes something 100 percent or 500 percent more effective, it gets a lot harder. Something fundamental has changed, and that means technology almost certainly has to be the answer.

Of course, that also means Supreme Court justices are sometimes asked to make rulings based on arguments that rely on intricate algorithmic disputes. This is decidedly not something they’re comfortable with, but if they want to stay relevant in the 21st century they’re probably going to have start doing it anyway. Not every question can be solved by recourse to the text of a document written in 1787.

Remember that photo of the yellow house in Ballina, the one with the picture of a window painted on the front? I promised to eventually show you closeups of the painted window, along with another one in Ballina, and today’s the day. The one on the left is from the yellow house. The one on the right is from a nearby, paler yellow house. I’m not sure if this business of covering up windows and then painting pictures of windows on them is some kind of Ballina tradition, or if it’s just a coincidence. Maybe some Irish readers would like to chime in?

Stormy Daniels: Clinton Wallace/Globe Photos/ZUMA; Michael Cohen: Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Stormygate continues to amble along. By now everyone agrees that evangelical Christians and other Trump supporters couldn’t care less that Donald Trump had a lengthy affair with a porn star shortly after his wife had a baby. I mean, Melania was probably gross looking, right? What was the guy supposed to do?

But there’s still the issue of that $130,000 paid to Stormy Daniels a few weeks before the election in return for her agreement to say the affair never happened. Trump and his comically bellicose attorney, Michael Cohen, have somehow managed to avoid having to address this even though nobody denies the payment itself. That’s enough of a knothole for the good folks at Common Cause to jump through:

Today, Common Cause filed complaints with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that the payment of $130,000 to Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels), through an LLC, was an unreported in-kind contribution to President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign committee in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act. The complaint also asks the agencies to determine whether the payment was made by the Trump Organization or some other corporation or individual, which would additionally make it an illegal in-kind contribution to the campaign. Corporations are prohibited from contributing to federal candidates and individual contributions are limited to $2,700.

I eagerly await comment from election law experts about the critical question at the core of this lawsuit: Is hush money a campaign contribution that needs to be reported to the FEC? Maybe! In the meantime, the folks at CREW uncovered an interesting tidbit this morning:

President Trump is accused of paying $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels to hide an affair a month before the election. In what is probably just a coincidence, the Trump campaign transferred $130K to the Trump businesses a month after the election. pic.twitter.com/KKknIC9ClC

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) January 23, 2018

Huh. So…maybe the Trump Organization paid off Stormy, and then got reimbursed by the campaign? I would normally be skeptical on the grounds that no one could possibly be this stupid, but this is Trump we’re talking about.

Then again, maybe the Russians paid off Stormy! I definitely think that’s plausible enough that Robert Mueller should subpeona Cohen for a brief chat under oath. Remember, kids, attorney-client privilege doesn’t cover conversations made with the intention of committing or covering up a crime or fraud.

Gary M Williams/EFE via ZUMA

Roughly speaking, there are three institutions that can investigate a president:

• The press
• The opposition party in Congress
• The FBI and the Justice Department

Donald Trump has declared war on all three. Coincidence?