Al Franken has resigned from the Senate, effective sometime in the next few weeks. He says some of the allegations against him are false, while others he “remembers differently.” But, he says, it’s not about him. It’s about what’s best for Minnesotans.

It’s pretty clear that Franken is resigning only under duress. He didn’t admit guilt, and he didn’t apologize. He said he regretted that, in his initial shock, he gave the “false impression” that he was “admitting to things he hadn’t done.” And there’s obviously some bitterness here: bitterness over his forced resignation while Donald Trump remains in office and the Republican Party supports Roy Moore—and, presumably, some bitterness that his Democratic colleagues abandoned him.

This isn’t over. The women who made the original allegations are almost certain to speak out further. Will Franken respond?

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Why did Sen. Rand Paul’s neighbor attack him early last month? Washington Post reporter Justin Jouvenal persuaded Jim Skaggs to give him a tour of the gated neighborhood where it happened, and thinks he has the answer:

They might have sparred over health care or taxes, but an acquaintance of both said they stood in their yards roughly a decade ago shouting at each other over the grass clippings Paul’s mower had shot on Rene Boucher’s property. “ ‘I ask him, I tell him and he won’t pay attention,’ ” the acquaintance, Bill Goodwin, recalls Boucher saying after the argument. “ ‘One of these days.’ ”

….Skaggs said Boucher was exacting about the standards for his yard — landscaping bags filled with waste were a common site on his property. Neighbors said Paul had a reputation for a more relaxed style that some felt didn’t always jibe with a community that features gas lamps, Greek statuary and a 13-page packet of rules. The senator had a pumpkin patch, compost and unraked leaves beneath some of his trees. Goodwin said it annoyed Boucher that Paul did not consistently cut his grass to the same height, and leaves from Paul’s trees blew on his property.

….[Boucher’s lawyer] said the old tensions over landscaping were triggered on Nov. 3 by a fresh incident he declined to detail.

A friend of mine has a neighbor like Boucher. He vacuums his lawn. He measures the distance between his petunias. He complains when the wind blows leaves into his yard from neighboring trees. He became outraged some years ago when my friend replaced his lawn with native plants, and hasn’t spoken to him since.

This stuff happens. I guess it even happens to famous people.

This is all you're allowed to know about Don Jr's testimony today.Alex Edelman via ZUMA

Donald Trump’s eldest son spent several hours under the klieg lights today testifying in front of the House Intelligence Committee. But he didn’t say much:

Donald Trump Jr. on Wednesday cited attorney-client privilege to avoid telling lawmakers about a conversation he had with his father, President Donald Trump, after news broke this summer that the younger Trump — and top campaign brass — had met with Russia-connected individuals in Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. Though neither Trump Jr. nor the president is an attorney, Trump Jr. told the House Intelligence Committee that there was a lawyer in the room during the discussion, according to the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California. Schiff said he didn’t think it was a legitimate invocation of attorney-client privilege.

I’m so tired these days. Unlike a lot of people, I recovered pretty quickly from Trump’s election. I didn’t binge eat or have trouble sleeping or find myself unable to concentrate on work. But over the past year he’s steadily worn me down. Every day we get more stuff like this. It’s completely insane, but there’s nothing much any of us can do except acknowledge it and move on. His cabinet won’t stop him. His family won’t stop him. The Republican Party won’t stop him as long as he keeps nominating judges they like. The Democratic Party has no power to stop anybody. And foreign leaders think he’s nuts.

Our country is being run as if the mafia won the presidency last year. There are still plenty of guardrails around to keep us from becoming, once and for all, a banana republic with nuclear weapons, but for how long? Do we really have to spend the next three years praying every day that the guardrails can hold up just a little bit longer?

I learned something new today. Every year, fracking operations in the United States produce more than a billion barrels of oil and gas. And we’re basically just giving it all away:

That’s right: the whole industry is a huge money sink. If you invested $100 in the S&P 500 a decade ago, you’d have $180 today. If you invested $100 in fracking, you’d have…

$69.

The Wall Street Journal explains what’s going on:

Returns from individual wells can be good, but shale wells tend to pop online with a gush and then peter out fairly quickly. That has meant operators sink profits back into more new wells that can take another two years to become profitable, with shareholders told to hang on for a payday.

“The mañana never quite materializes,” Mr. McMahon says.

One factor sapping profits is that many shale producers paid extravagantly to lease land for drilling in places such as the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico. Many operators drop out those land-acquisition costs from the break-even-price calculations they tout to shareholders. While most shale operators claim they have hundreds, if not thousands, of well locations they say can muster a 10% profit margin or more, the number of in-the-money wells is far smaller when costs for land, pipelines and other infrastructure and overhead is factored in.

Remind me again why we’re doing this? Fracking is bad because it releases methane; bad because it destabilizes fault lines; bad for pumping poisonous dreck into the ground; and of course, bad for climate change. But all along I figured that at least greed could explain why we put up with this. Greed explains a lot of odious human behavior. But what’s the point of frantically digging up all our fossil fuel resources now now now if no one is even making any money from it?

Christopher Ingraham reports today on a new study that says Americans are less happy than they used to be and feel “bodily aches and pains” at the highest rate in the world:

Aware that some of this could be attributable to question translation issues or cultural differences (for instance, Americans may just be more predisposed to complain about pain than members of other nations), the authors ran the numbers controlling for age, gender, marital status, labor force status and education. The United States remained an outlier even when these factors were accounted for.

Hmmm. None of these things are actually related to either translation issues or cultural differences. Let’s go to the source and see what the authors think of possible language problems:

We have considered that and cannot entirely discount it; there must remain a chance that these subjective data on feelings of pain are, in some way, painting a misleading picture. However, a nation like the UK, which also uses English, and has a culture that is somewhat like that of the USA, shows up with similar pain levels — markedly below the American answers — to other west European nations.

That makes more sense. Weirdly, though, it’s just not true. Here’s the chart in Ingraham’s piece:

The biggest English-speaking countries in the world (Canada isn’t included for some reason) all score the highest, and both Australia and Great Britain are fairly close to the US, not to Western Europe. If anything, this supports the notion that language might have something to do with it. But there’s also this to consider:

In general, residents of richer countries complain more about pain than residents of poorer countries. This obviously doesn’t explain everything, but it makes the high ranking of the United States a little less surprising. I can think of a few possible explanations for this:

• Richer people have higher expectations. Minor aches and pains loom large when you have fewer other things to worry about.
• Sedentary lifestyles produce greater levels of pain.
• Richer people are bombarded with advertising for pain relief. Not only does this constantly remind them of pain, but it also reminds them that pain relief is easily available and therefore (in theory) treatable.
• Related: richer people are asked about their “pain scale” whenever they see a doctor or visit an emergency room.
• Richer people are just whinier.
• Poorer people are more likely to think of pain as just another one of those things that you bear in life. What’s the point of complaining?

On the “cultural differences” front, there are two interesting cases. The first is Belgium, where the survey team reports results separately for rich Flanders and poor Wallonia. The second is Germany, where they report separately for the regions that were formerly East and West. In both cases, the poor region reports either more pain or the same level of pain. They don’t follow the general trend at all. I have no idea what, if anything, to make of this, but maybe someone else has an idea.

NICKEL SUMMARY: I’m not sure what to think of this. But I’ll bet that the high level of pain reporting in the US is mostly related to something other than actual pain levels.

These are the Scariff Islands, taken on a rainy day near Beenarourke. This is, allegedly, “the most famous view in Ireland,” and it might well be so. If it’s not, I’d certainly like to see the winner. The small island on the left is Deenish. The larger island just behind it is Scariff.

The latest on the Republican tax bill:

“It’s death to Democrats,” said conservative economist Stephen Moore, who advised Trump’s campaign on tax policy. “They go after state and local taxes, which weakens public employee unions. They go after university endowments, and universities have become play pens of the left. And getting rid of the mandate is to eventually dismantle Obamacare,” Moore said in an interview, arguing that it would accelerate “a death spiral” in the health-care law’s marketplaces.

Sure, we all knew this, but conservatives aren’t supposed to admit it in public, are they? I guess they just don’t care anymore.

Rep. Elijah Cummings wrote a letter today saying that he had recently spoken to a whistleblower who has agreed to talk to the House Oversight Committee. The New York Times passes along the story:

Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, told a former business associate that economic sanctions against Russia would be “ripped up” as one of the Trump administration’s first acts, according to an account by a whistle-blower made public on Wednesday….Mr. Flynn had worked on a business venture to partner with Russia to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East until June 2016, but remained close with the people involved afterward. On Inauguration Day, according to the whistle-blower, Mr. Flynn texted the former business associate to say that the project was “good to go.”

….According to the account detailed in the letter, the whistle-blower had a conversation on Inauguration Day with Alex Copson of ACU Strategic Partners….During the conversation, Mr. Copson told the whistle-blower that “this is the best day of my life” because it was “the start of something I’ve been working on for years, and we are good to go.” Mr. Copson told the whistle-blower that Mr. Flynn had sent him a text message during Mr. Trump’s inaugural address, directing him to tell others involved in the nuclear project to continue developing their plans.

“This is going to make a lot of very wealthy people,” Mr. Copson said.

Here’s a bit of Cummings’ letter:

This man was our top national security official for a month or so. Why? Because Donald Trump hires only the very best people.

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Another woman has accused Sen. Al Franken of inappropriate behavior. She is anonymous, and says that when she was on Franken’s radio show in 2006 he reached over to kiss her, saying, “It’s my right as an entertainer.” Two colleagues independently verified her account.

And with that the dam has broken. Franken categorically denied the story, but nearly a dozen Democratic woman in the Senate have called on Franken to resign. DNC chair Tom Perez has called on him to resign. And several male senators have joined the crowd. It’s finally starting to look unlikely that he can survive.

I continue to be muddled about this. There are now half a dozen women who have made very similar accusations against Franken. Obviously that’s meaningful. At the same time, the first accusation came from radio host Leeann Tweeden, and Franken says the events she describes happened very differently. Tweeden accepted Franken’s apology, but then further accusations came from anonymous women who say Franken grabbed their butts at photo ops. And now there’s this.

But something still doesn’t feel right. Some of the accusations are about things that can morph from jokes into harassment with just the slightest change in emphasis. Some of the accusations are too similar, almost as if they’re being cribbed from each other. Franken was not in a position of authority over any of the women, which is usually a part of the abuse syndrome. What’s more, none of this behavior squares with Franken’s behavior toward the women he’s worked with, and there hasn’t been so much as a peep from anyone saying that “everyone knew,” which is also pretty common when these accusations come to light.

I don’t know. It looks like Franken is going to be forced out of the Senate, and I’m not happy about that. Maybe he’s a serial groper who deserves to be shunned, but I’m still not convinced. There’s something not quite right about all this.

UPDATE: I’ve changed a few bits in this post to make my point a little sharper and remove some things that might be construed as belittling.

UPDATE 2: There’s now another accusation of groping against Franken. This one is from Tina Dupuy, a progressive writer and former Democratic staffer:

Tweeden’s story rang true to me. I’d told myself I was the only one. I’d been groped by Franken in 2009.

It happened at a Media Matters party during the first Obama inauguration….I asked to get a picture with him. We posed for the shot. He immediately put his hand on my waist, grabbing a handful of flesh. I froze. Then he squeezed. At least twice….Al Franken’s familiarity was inappropriate and unwanted. It was also quick; he knew exactly what he was doing.

Apparently Franken plans to make an announcement tomorrow. The consensus, obviously, is that he’s going to announce his resignation.

The times, they are a changing:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is taking the stores out of Wal-Mart. The retail behemoth with more than 11,700 locations around the world announced Wednesday that it will shorten its legal name to Walmart Inc.

….Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in 1962 in Rogers, Ark., after opening several stores with other names including a Walton’s 5 & 10. The name Walmart came from Bob Bogle, one of the first store managers, according to Mr. Walton’s autobiography. The company incorporated in 1969 as Wal-Mart Inc., then became Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in 1970 when it went public.

I’m afraid the Wall Street Journal missed the real story here: Wal-Mart also removed its hyphen. Actually, they did this years ago, but no one seemed to catch on, possibly because the company’s legal name was still Wal-Mart. But now there’s no excuse.

Hyphens have always been the great disappearing punctuation mark, used for a short while and then abandoned, and now Walmart has abandoned the last vestige of Sam Walton’s hyphen. As usual, though, it did yeoman work for decades before it was finally killed off. So let’s all observe a moment of silence and respect for Walmart’s hyphen.