Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group.

As you surely know by now, Donald Trump’s lawyer arranged a payment of $130,000 to porn star Stephanie Clifford—aka Stormy Daniels—during the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. However, Trump didn’t have an affair with her and this was not hush money. It was, um, a donation to the arts.

Roger that. I don’t think I can maintain a pretense of being shocked by this all-too-expected tawdry behavior from Trump, but there’s another part of the story that I am a bit shocked by. It turns out that Slate had the story all along:

Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, said on Friday that in a series of interviews with Ms. Clifford in August and October 2016, she told him she had an affair with Mr. Trump after meeting him at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament. She told him that Michael D. Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, had agreed during the presidential campaign to pay her the $130,000 if she kept the relationship secret….She forwarded Mr. Weisberg a draft amendment to the original agreement in which the parties were referred to by pseudonyms. Mr. Weisberg shared it with The Times.

….Shortly after the text message exchange, Ms. Clifford stopped responding. Mr. Weisberg said that his conversations with the actress were on the record but that he was not prepared to write the story without her consent.

I don’t know what promises Weisberg made to Clifford, so my dismay has to be a bit tentative here. That said:

• Clifford told Weisberg that Trump’s lawyer was promising her hush money.
• She had documentary evidence to this effect.
• Trump was a presidential candidate, which makes this a matter of considerable public importance.
• This all happened during the final weeks of the campaign.
• Everything Clifford said was on the record.
• But Weisberg never published it.

Am I missing something here? Unless Weisberg explicitly promised not to publish the story without written consent, why did this remain Slate’s little secret during one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes?

UPDATE: Slate editor Julia Turner explains further via Twitter:

A few clarifications on this @nytimes piece. Slate didn’t publish the Stormy Daniels story because we were unable to confirm it, not because Daniels asked us not to. Daniels asked us to pay her for her account. We explained that we don’t pay sources. She then declined to cooperate with us further. We set out to verify Daniels’ story, but were unable to confirm either the affair or the payout. The draft of the settlement agreement we saw did not include the parties’ real names. Given all those factors, we felt we did not have enough to publish.

I dunno. It sounds like there was enough here to run the story. They had clear statements from Clifford/Daniels. They had a document from Trump’s lawyer with fake names. They had a source who suddenly dropped off the map, suggesting pretty strongly a payment had been made. A story that laid all this out clearly seems like it would have been legit.

Here is Hopper up on the patio cover. She is, as usual, wondering why her Food-Getter is always pointing the big glass eye at her whenever she goes up there. “Because you’re so cute!” says the Food-Getter. Whatever. She’s cute all the time, isn’t she?

For some reason there’s been a lot of chatter lately about wages finally going up after eight years of economic expansion. Really?

For ordinary workers, wages went up in 2015 and 2016 but have been pretty flat in 2017. In December their wages increased a whopping 0.17 percent compared to the previous year. That doesn’t seem very impressive to me.

Wage growth for all workers has gone up slightly more—0.38 percent in December—but that’s still nothing to write home about. And anyway, that includes wage growth for everyone, including doctors and lawyers and CEOs. My own view is that the economy is doing well when ordinary workers see wage gains, so that’s what I look at. And there’s just no there there for 2017.

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts/Newscom via ZUMA

James Damore, you may recall, is the Google engineer who wrote a memo on an internal chat board suggesting (among other things) that women might be underrepresented among the ranks of engineering because of innate differences in their job preferences. He was subsequently fired in a very public manner and is now suing Google. Megan McArdle says the company may rue the day it fired Damore:

Google has an immense amount to lose, even if a court ultimately vindicates its corporate culture. The company’s internal systems, featuring an immense array of internal employee communications, will be ripped open to scrutiny. If I were a Google executive, I wouldn’t want to bet that employees haven’t said much worse things in emails and on message boards than those featured in the lawsuit. Things that are plainly, inarguably, expensively illegal.

But I also wouldn’t want even milder utterances to turn up as testimony in a lawsuit. Because every nasty comment and intemperate remark about Republicans or white males or conservative Christians is going to get broadcast to the public when this case goes to trial. And as you may have noticed, those folks are half the country.

Hmmm. I guess I’ve got one question and one comment.

The question is this: will Google’s internal communications really be “ripped open to scrutiny”? This is a question for the legal eagles. There are, obviously, terabytes of Google internal communications, but surely there are limits to what you can get during discovery? “I hate Republicans” is not illegal. Can Damore’s counsel really demand every personal utterance that’s hostile to conservatives or conservative values?

The comment is: Would it really hurt Google all that much even if Damore did uncover a bunch of intemperate comments? Silicon Valley companies are already pretty vocal about supporting liberal social values. How much will it matter if the engineers and marketers and sales folks who work for Google confirm this?

As for “inarguably illegal” messages, I’d be pretty surprised if any of those show up. Conservatives aren’t a protected class, and anyway, I doubt very much that executives or HR people ever engaged in this stuff. You never know, of course, but I’m skeptical.

This is just a random thought, so bear with me. It’s about why the White House isn’t really trying very hard to deny Donald Trump’s “shithole countries” comment. In fact, they seem to be kind of gleeful about it. Why?

One of the bedrock beliefs of many conservative whites is that political correctness is out of control. This isn’t just about college kids with their safe spaces and trigger warnings, either. It’s everywhere and it’s out of control. For chrissake, whistling at a woman is paying her a compliment! “Mexican day” at the staff cafeteria is meant with affection! Ebonics is just plain bad grammar!

And come on, their thinking goes, all those third-world countries really are shitholes. Everyone knows it, but only Donald Trump has the guts to just say it.

This isn’t quite racism or sexism per se, it’s a fundamental disagreement about what racism and sexism are. Donald Trump has a lot of fans who wouldn’t dream of using the n-word or insisting that women should stay home with the kids.¹ In their personal lives, they’re probably genuinely decent to everyone around them. But they still feel like they’re walking on eggshells all the time for fear they’ll say something the PC cops have recently banned. Or they feel like there are things they can’t say at all because they don’t have the vocabulary for it. Educated folks might carefully argue that “merit-based” immigration is the way to go because “assimilation” is harder for immigrants from “culturally disparate” countries with “low GDPs and high crime rates.” But Joe Sixpack doesn’t know those words and doesn’t know which ones are acceptable anyway. So he’s tongue-tied. He can’t say anything at all.

Until Donald Trump comes along. He’s basically saying that we all know those fancy words are just the liberal elitist version² of “shithole countries,” and he’s giving Joe permission to say so. Go ahead and use the words you know and ignore the faux gasps from all those liberal scolds who believe the same thing but just won’t say it in plain language. You’re no more racist than they are.

Right or wrong, this is liberating for them. Trump isn’t so much appealing to racism as he is telling people you’re not a racist. Just imagine what a sigh of relief this brings to a lot of working-class whites who aren’t, themselves, especially racist but feel like they have to constantly watch every word they say or else they’ll be accused of it anyway. This is the appeal of Trump beyond his flat-out deplorable base.

¹He also has some who would. Let’s put them aside for the moment.

²I suppose someone could do an Airplane style translation skit about this that would be amusing.

Inflation is running wild!

U.S. consumer prices rose in December, bolstering expectations that long-weak inflation is set to gain strength in the new year….Prices rose 0.3% in December when excluding the often-volatile categories of food and energy, the largest increase for so-called core prices since January 2017. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had predicted core prices would rise a more modest 0.2% versus November.

Needless to say—except that I guess I need to say it—what really matters is the inflation rate compared to the previous year, not the previous month. Here it is for core CPI:

Yes, that tiny blip at the end is the thing that’s “bolstering expectations” that inflation is going up. FFS. Can we please stop this nonsense?

Ray Tang/London News Pictures via ZUMA

Stung by Michael Wolff’s portrayal of him as a childlike idiot in Fire and Fury, President Trump embarked on a series of public events this week designed to show the country that he’s well briefed and in command of his administration. How’s that going?

Monday evening: Tries to sing along to the national anthem but can’t remember all the words. Grade: C

Tuesday morning: Holds televised roundtable on immigration. Absent-mindedly agrees to abandon his immigration plan and adopt the Democrats’ plan instead until Kevin McCarthy interrupts to correct him. Grade: D

Wednesday noon: Tells the press that he got letters from a “lot” of TV anchors saying that Tuesday’s immigration session was “one of the greatest meetings they’ve ever witnessed.” Grade: C-

Wednesday afternoon: Announces that Norway has purchased a batch of F-52 fighters, a plane that doesn’t exist. Trump’s confusion probably stemmed from his belief that Norway had bought 52 F-35 jets. In fact, Norway has authorized the purchase of only 40 F-35s. Grade: D-

Thursday morning: After watching Fox & Friends, tweets that he opposes extension of warrantless surveillance, something that his administration has been pushing for weeks. This sends Congress into a temporary tizzy until an aide tells Trump what he’s done and he puts up a second tweet walking back the first one. Grade: F

“House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.” This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2018

Thursday morning: Meets with members of Congress and asks why we accept immigrants from “shithole countries.” Grade: F

Thursday afternoon: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, insists that DACA and Dreamers are different things and he wants everyone to get that straight. In fact, they are the exact same thing. Grade: F

Thursday afternoon: In the same interview, forgets he has an upcoming meeting five minutes after being told he has an upcoming meeting. Grade: D

The week isn’t over yet, but so far Trump has earned a D-. If it were anyone else it would be a flat F, of course, but Trump gets his own curve. If he manages to speak in more-or-less complete sentences, he’s doing pretty well.

Donald Trump gave a long interview to the Wall Street Journal today. An hour in, an aide reminded him he had another meeting coming up:

White House official: Excuse me, I just—we have about two or three minutes left and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

Mr. Trump: Oh I do?

Five minutes later:

Unknown: Yeah, let’s finish on that and then you really do have to go, you’ve got a Roosevelt Room full of people waiting for you. So go ahead.

Mr. Trump: I do?

Unknown: Yes, you do.

Sharp as a tack, our president.

I’m back from lunch. It’s a nice day, so I walked. There was a lovely egret in our storm channel that I’d like to get a picture of someday. So did anything happen while I was go—

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met Wednesday.

That’s from the Washington Post. Apparently the White House isn’t denying that Trump said this, which prompted the following from CNN’s White House correspondent, Jim Acosta:

What we have to come to grips with—and I almost have to think back to the day when we were at Trump Tower when the president was commenting on Charlottesville, and he was saying there were very fine people on both sides, saying there were very fine people among the white supremacists and the Nazis—is that the president of the United States just seems to have a problem here, Wolf, in this area. And we can tiptoe around it, we can dance around it and not really put our finger on it, but the president seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color from other parts of the world.

This statement from Trump, Acosta said, “cuts to the very core of who he is.”

Remarkable worlds from CNN’s Jim Acosta. Not surprising. But these are not ways reporters talk on network or cable network TV. Watch this! pic.twitter.com/2gUqdlREOd

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 11, 2018

This is a view of the Irish coastline near Whitestrand. I think the far spit of land is where our house was located, about a mile inland from the tip of the peninsula.

This is a good example of “just point your camera and you’ll get something gorgeous,” which is pretty typical of County Kerry. If, like me, you’re a photographer of limited skill, a vacation in Kerry is very rewarding.