From the Los Angeles Times:

Brett J. Talley, President Trump’s nominee to be a federal judge in Alabama, has never tried a case, was unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Assn.’s judicial rating committee, has practiced law for only three years and, as a blogger last year, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee, denouncing “Hillary Rotten Clinton” and pledging support for the National Rifle Assn.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, approved him for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.

So what qualification did Talley have? Answer: he’s conservative and he’s young. At age 36, he’s likely to stay on the bench 30 or 40 more years. He’s also white and male, which seems to be something Trump values pretty highly too:

That chart comes from “How Donald Trump Is Remaking the Federal Courts in His Own Image,” a piece by Kate Harloe on our main site. It’s worth a read. Thanks to Republican stonewalling in 2016, there are a huge number of judicial vacancies for Trump to fill, and it turns out that this is one of the few things he’s doing with speed and efficiency:

Beyond new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump has already nominated judges to more than half the vacancies, putting forward an astonishing 18 names for federal appellate courts and 40 more for the district courts. Of those, 12 have been confirmed. By this time in Obama’s first year, only two circuit court judges and four district judges had been confirmed.

This is one reason why Republicans are so loath to criticize Trump. Sure, they want to pass their tax bill, and they need Trump for that. But they also want to remake the federal judiciary, and as long as Trump keeps sending them Federalist Society nominees they’re not likely to care too much what else he does.

This chart sits at the middle of a big controversy:

This is CBO’s estimate of how many people would skip buying health insurance if the individual mandate were repealed. Within two years, 12 million people would drop out, and they’d do it because the tax penalty for non-insurance went away: “In CBO and JCT’s estimation, with no penalty at all, only a small number of people who enroll in insurance because of the mandate under current law would continue to do so solely because of a willingness to comply with the law.”

Right now, the penalty is either $695 or 2.5 percent of your income. Very few people have a penalty greater than $1,500, while the cost of insurance is many times that. Is this really enough to motivate so many people to comply with the law? Republicans tend to think this is ridiculous, but both CBO and JCT have stuck to their guns on the mandate for years—and they aren’t staffed with idiots. Unfortunately, CBO is not in the business of explaining its methodology, so we have no way of knowing what this is based on.

But maybe we can take a crack at it ourselves by looking at other areas where individuals are fined for not obeying the law. Traffic offenses seem like a promising avenue of investigation, but there aren’t too many studies of how traffic fines correlate with breaking the law. However, a few years ago a study got released based on an increase in speeding fines in the Netherlands. It was especially noteworthy because the increase in fines could be checked against actual speeding, thanks to automated speed-measuring systems. The study’s conclusion is that fines have only a small effect: “If the fine increases by 1%, then the offence rate detected by an ASMS will decline by 0.14%.”

In the case of Obamacare, the penalty increased from zero, so we don’t have a percentage increase to work with. But let’s assume that for the average person this feels like a tripling of the fine. In that case, we’d expect a 28 percent decline in the offense rate. The total number of people uninsured before Obamacare took effect was about 45 million, which we can take as the starting “offense” rate. So that suggests the mandate was responsible for about 12-13 million people getting insurance.

There’s obviously a lot of guesswork here, since we don’t have a true baseline to work with. Nor do we know if the response to the mandate is similar to the response to speeding fines. Nonetheless, it gives us a ballpark kind of estimate, which matches up surprisingly well with CBO’s estimate. Apparently the individual mandate really does work.

NOTE: For what it’s worth, I did the arithmetic on this as I was writing the post. I didn’t know beforehand how it would turn out. Needless to say, I’d be interested in seeing similar correlations from other relevant studies.

UPDATE: This post originally contained a footnote about Adjusted Gross Income on your tax return, but it was wrong and didn’t really impact anything else very much. So I’ve deleted it.

TPG via ZUMA

China has announced that it’s opening up its financial sector to foreign ownership:

The relaxation in the securities industry potentially paves the way for Wall Street investment banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase to increase their presence in China’s hard-to-crack domestic market….China will allow foreign companies to hold 51% of domestic-securities firms….The country will also remove caps for foreign stakes in Chinese banks….The government also will allow 51% foreign ownership in Chinese life-insurance companies in three years and lift that restriction entirely in five years.

That’s all well and good, but here’s the part that puzzles me:

China took a major step in opening up its financial sector, announcing a relaxation of restrictions on foreign ownership in the securities and banking sectors just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump concluded his visit to Beijing.

I’m no China tea-leaf reader, but was this calculated? Did China deliberately wait until Trump was gone so that he couldn’t hold a joint appearance with Xi Jinping crowing about it? Did the American team even know this was coming? So far, Trump has tweeted nothing about it.

Or was the timing related to domestic politics, with Xi not wanting it to look like this happened due to American pressure? But if that was the case, why not wait a few weeks so there’s not even a question about the timing?

Are there any thoughtful China watchers out there who care to chime in on this? It sure looks like a calculated slight to me, but what do I know?

David Dinkins was mayor of New York City from 1990 to the end of 1993. His successor, Rudy Giuliani, was credited for turning around New York’s crime problem, but current mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks that’s unfair:

“Dinkins got a raw deal largely because of race,” Mr. de Blasio said in a telephone interview before his re-election. “And he got a raw deal because he was not a loud, showy personality and he wasn’t always trying to claim credit. But any normal assessment of history would say, wait a minute, he added cops, that’s why this turned around.”

“The thing I learned from that is an audacity of how to deal with what appeared to be an intractable problem,” Mr. de Blasio added. “The fact that we’re the safest big city in America today directly links to his actions with getting resources from Albany to get us the size of the police force we needed. None of his predecessors figured out how to do it. I’m not sure his successor, who took a lot of the credit for work done with resources Dinkins got — I’m not sure his successor could have pulled it off in Albany as a political reality.”

Let’s roll the tape:

Unless Rudy Giuliani was a time traveler, he’s not the guy responsible for New York City’s crime decline—and this isn’t just because Dinkins was the guy who put 5,000 more cops on the street. It’s because crime began declining in 1990, when Dinkins took office, and kept declining at roughly the same rate after Giuliani took over.

I don’t doubt that Bill Bratton and CompStat helped. Maybe broken-windows policing helped too. Violent crime in New York has declined more than in many big cities. But these things helped only at the margins.

Giuliani was lucky. He inherited Dinkins’ increase in the police force, and he inherited the effects of the EPA’s phaseout of leaded gasoline. He may have done a good job with the resources he was given, but he’s not the guy who made New York City safe. It’s long past time to acknowledge that.

I have three new notes to offer about the Republican tax plan. You have to see them to believe them.

#1: The Golf Course Deduction

The Republican plan eliminates deductions for student loan interest, alimony payments, moving expenses, major medical expenses, school supplies purchased by teachers, and tax credits for parents who adopt children. Sure this hurts some people, but it’s gotta be done. We have to pay for all the rate cuts somehow.

But there’s one deduction they kept: a “conservation easement” for owners of golf courses. I know that sounds like something from SNL or The Onion, but it’s not. It’s really something Republicans decided not to touch.

#2: SALTing the Wounds

For us ordinary schmoes, the Republican tax bill eliminates the deduction for the state and local taxes we pay. But for the rich it’s a whole different matter. Folks with pass-through businesses—hedge funds, private equity firms, etc.—not only get a super-special tax rate of only 25 percent, they also get to deduct their state and local taxes.

Now, this might just be a drafting error, but apparently Republicans are dragging their feet on adding language that would clear it up once and for all. They seemed to be hoping that no one would notice, since it’s a pretty arcane provision, but someone did. We’ll see if they eventually feel forced to address it.

#3: The Interview

Gary Cohn, the chief economic advisor to President Trump, gave an interview to John Harwood on CNBC today where he explained why he loves the Republican tax plan:

Cohn: The most excited group out there are big CEOs, about our tax plan.

Cohn: And we see the whole trickle-down through the economy, and that’s good for the economy.

Cohn: On the estate tax, if you look at the couple of groups who are the biggest advocates for repealing the estate tax, it really is the pass-through business and it’s the farmers.
Harwood: Are you seriously saying with a straight face that getting rid of the estate tax is about farmers and not about very wealthy families?
Cohn: What I’m saying is that it benefits farms, it benefits small businesses, it benefits a lot of different people.
Harwood: Small businesses with more than $11 million estates?
Cohn: We do not believe that death should be a taxable event.

So now we know. Cohn has told us that CEOs are really excited; the rest of will have to be satisfied with a bit of trickle-down; and they have every intention of completely eliminating both the estate tax and the capital gains tax on inherited wealth. “We do not believe that death should be a taxable event.”

The Republican tax bill has always been horrible, but when you dig into the details it gets worse and worse. It seems like every page has either a hidden giveaway, some kind of punishment aimed at Republican enemies, or a straight-up gift to the super-rich. Has there ever in American history been a major tax bill this venal?

The LA Times today says that Obamacare has finally become a political winner for Democrats:

In Maine, voters resoundingly backed a ballot measure to expand Medicaid through the federal healthcare law….And worries about healthcare in Virginia helped fuel a solid victory for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam and Democratic legislative candidates across the state.

That evidence seemed a little thin, so I headed over to the Kaiser website to see how Obamacare has been doing in their tracking poll. I haven’t checked in on that for a while. Here are the latest favorability ratings:

Obamacare favorability rose steadily but modestly through the first half of 2016, and there was only a slight difference between men and women. Then, in mid-2016 its favorables accelerated—but only among women. Favorability among men continued to rise at about 2 percent per year, but among women it began rising at the astonishing rate of about 10 points per year. In the most recent survey, favorability among women outpaced men 56-46.

Around the same time there’s also some acceleration in favorability among independents and the young, though it’s not as dramatic as the acceleration among women. I’m not sure what caused this. The obvious explanation is that it had something to do with Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination, though if that’s the case it’s odd that the faster pace has continued long after the election was over.

Alternatively, maybe it’s a sign that women are just less politically stubborn than men. After seeing what Obamacare could do, and noticing that the sky hadn’t fallen, perhaps women began changing their minds and feeling more warmly toward it. After all, what’s wrong with decent health care at a decent price for everyone, especially if it hasn’t turned America into a socialist hellhole where we all have to wait months to see our government doctor? Conversely, perhaps men are more likely to stick to their guns regardless of the evidence.

Any other guesses?

As long as we’re mocking Fox News today, let’s see how their response to the Roy Moore news is evolving through the day. Here it was shortly after the allegations were first published:

The “Clinton Cult” stuff is still top and center. Moore is covered below that, and the headline is “Baseless Attack.” A few hours later it morphed into this:

With even most Republicans starting to realize that groping a 14-year-old is something to take seriously, Moore is now at the top of the page and the headline is “Roy Moore Under Fire.” The subhead puts Moore’s denial first, but at least includes the fact that “GOP lawmakers” are “signalling” outrage.

I will update this later once Fox News finally figures out that they probably should at least pretend that the charges are serious and really disturbing. I imagine they’ll still figure out some way to blame liberals and the media for it, though.

UPDATE: Uh oh. They’re backsliding:

Does this look like the kind of guy who can pull off a Trump impersonation?Dan Herrick via ZUMA

National Review editor Rich Lowry explains how Trumpists have turned on Ed Gillespie so fast it’s a wonder they didn’t suffer whiplash:

As of last week, Gillespie looked to be gaining on Ralph Northam fast (I thought he had a good chance to win). Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, the self-declared keeper of the Trumpist flame, believed Gillespie had cracked the code by fashioning a “Trumpism without Trump.” He managed, per Bannon, to close the enthusiasm gap “by rallying around the Trump agenda,” and Democrats needed to be “very, very worried.”

At least that was the party line until the race was called soon after the polls closed at 7 p.m. Then, Gillespie became an establishment tool who had betrayed Trumpism and the president. A Bannon spokesman blasted Gillespie for allegedly having no message and being inauthentic, which is quite the charge coming from people who will change what they are saying on a dime, depending on the imperatives of the political spin of the hour.

Lowry believes that there’s really no such thing as “Trumpism without Trump.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it’s certainly true that, at the very least, it requires a blowhard candidate in the Trump mold. A milquetoasty guy like Gillespie had no chance of pulling it off and probably shouldn’t have tried.

Beyond that, “Trumpism,” such as it is, is mostly just a garden variety conservative agenda with a border wall tacked on. Trump’s extreme popularity with his base isn’t really about taxes or abortion or Obamacare, it’s about his willingness to rabidly attack everyone and everything they hate. As Lowry suggests, this is not really something that can define an entire party. There just aren’t enough people who are willing to go down that road, and even fewer who can pull it off.

However, there are some, and Trump might bring more of them out of the woodwork. After getting blindsided by Trump, Republicans should keep a very sharp lookout for these pestilences. Believe it or not, there are worse things than Donald Trump.

On London’s double-decker buses, the front seat on the top level provides a panoramic view of the whole street. For tourists, at least, it’s the primo seat to get. For tourists who like to snap photos, it’s the uber-primo seat. Naturally, I made a beeline for it every time we got on a bus.

But here’s a funny story. One of the things I wanted to do was take some pictures through raindrops on the front window. You can get some interesting effects that way, and London has lots of famous sights to use for the background. Unfortunately, I bring good weather with me every place I go. Seriously, I do. And I did it again on this trip. Aside from a bit of drizzle, it barely rained at all, and never when I was on the bus. Bummer, huh? Now you’ve heard it all: someone who visited London for a month in October and complained that there wasn’t enough rain.

Anyway, this picture was taken from my usual perch on the #9 bus. We’re on Kensington High Street near Argyll Road headed west. Look at all the pretty brake lights!

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

The Washington Post has a bombshell accusation against Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for senator in Alabama. Leigh Corfman says that four decades ago, when she was 14, Moore struck up a conversation on a park bench and then offered to look after her while her mother went into the courthouse for a child custody hearing:

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

Corfman’s mother confirms this, as do two of her childhood friends. The Post adds this: “Three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.”

BREAKING: MCCONNELL on Roy Moore: “If these allegations are true, he must step aside.” pic.twitter.com/onUoPG1NIA

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) November 9, 2017

Moore says the allegations are “completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign.” The Post says its story is based on interviews with “more than 30 people who said they knew Moore between 1977 and 1982, when he served as an assistant district attorney for Etowah County in northern Alabama.” Also this: “Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post….All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women say they don’t know one another.”

Stay tuned.