This stuff cracks me up:

President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping were calling each other friend by the end of their springtime retreat at Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago — a relationship that would have been unimaginable months earlier….On Monday in Japan, Trump expressed his new view: “I like him a lot. I consider him a friend. With that being said, he represents China; I represent the United States.”

Expect the good times to continue when Xi figuratively rolls out an ultra-wide red carpet to host Trump in Beijing — a “state visit-plus” in the words of the Chinese ambassador to the United States….The Chinese, much like the Japanese and South Koreans on the first two stops of Trump’s five-nation Asia tour, believe the gilded treatment is the best way to play to Trump’s ego and disarm him, and thereby blunt his demands that China open up its economy and take a harder tack against North Korea, according to experts and former government officials.

Flattery never hurts, of course, but what Abe and Xi are doing is so obvious that it’s hard to believe it would work even on Trump. But apparently it does. Trump is so titanically un-self-aware that he apparently has no idea that his hosts are all but openly mocking him with their displays of pomp and signed baseball hats and so forth. What a clown.

According to a quickie analysis from the folks at CIRCLE, youth turnout was pretty ho-hum in New Jersey but through the roof in Virginia: up from 26 percent in 2013 to 34 percent in 2017. And young people voted massively in favor of the Democrat:

If this is correct, it’s big news. I mean, even if you buy the idea that kids just didn’t like Hillary Clinton much, it’s pretty startling that they’d vote for Ralph Northam in such wildly bigger numbers. Northam isn’t exactly Bernie Sanders, after all.

The most obvious explanation is that (a) Trump’s victory galvanized them and (b) the racial crap at the end of the Virginia campaign really pissed them off. What’s more, Virginia was expected to be a close race. New Jersey wasn’t, so turnout stayed about the same as in the past.

This is all guesswork at the moment, and might change when we get more solid numbers. But along with reports that minority turnout was also up in Virginia—which powered a huge Democratic shift in the state legislature that nobody predicted—it provides some hope for 2018 and 2020. If Donald Trump has finally provided the magic formula for motivating Democratic constituencies to vote in midterm elections, the Trumpublican era may turn out to be a blessedly short one.

Andrej Sokolow/DPA via ZUMA

Driverless cars are getting closer:

Waymo, the autonomous car company from Google’s parent company Alphabet, has started testing a fleet of self-driving vehicles without any backup drivers on public roads, its chief executive said Tuesday. The tests, which will include passengers within the next few months, mark an important milestone that brings autonomous vehicle technology closer to operating without any human intervention.

….The tests are a show of engineering prowess by Waymo at a time when traditional automakers and other tech companies like Uber race to develop similar vehicles….Waymo said its driverless cars hit the public roads last month. The company did not say whether it was testing the driverless cars in environments considered challenging for autonomous vehicles, like bridges or tunnels, or more difficult conditions, like driving at night or in rain and snow — usually not a big concern in the dry Phoenix climate.

Waymo’s CEO says, “Fully self-driving cars are here,” which may be a bit of puffery but probably isn’t too far from the truth. But here’s something I don’t get:

Waymo is limiting the trials to a region around Phoenix, where it has been conducting a ride-testing program this year, and plans to expand the testing area over time. The company said it planned to use the driverless vehicles to launch a commercial ride-hailing service for the general public, but did not offer any detail on when, where or how.

I Am Not An Engineer, but it strikes me that a commercial taxi is one of the hardest things for a self-driving car to do. The car has to be prepared to go absolutely anywhere. The passengers are different every time. And the technology has to be able to negotiate things like airports, which strikes me as a challenge.

Wouldn’t it be easier to start off with something that drives a semi-fixed route? Or perhaps a limited number of fixed routes? Or even a leasing program, where the cars are used by people who could receive a little bit of training about what to expect and how to interact with the car?

Why is everyone so obsessed with ride hailing services?

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA. Pinocchio nose by Kevin Drum.

Oh man, I almost forgot about this. Remember the other day I mentioned that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is a multi-billionaire? Funny story about that.

It turns out that in his financial disclosure to Congress, his net worth only amounted to about $700 million. Forbes asked him about this, and Ross said it was because he had put about $2 billion into family trusts that he didn’t have to disclose:

So began the mystery of Wilbur Ross’ missing $2 billion. And after one month of digging, Forbes is confident it has found the answer: That money never existed. It seems clear that Ross lied to us, the latest in an apparent sequence of fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers that have been going on with Forbes since 2004. In addition to just padding his ego, Ross’ machinations helped bolster his standing in a way that translated into business opportunities. And based on our interviews with ten former employees at Ross’ private equity firm, WL Ross & Co., who all confirmed parts of the same story line, his penchant for misleading extended to colleagues and investors, resulting in millions of dollars in fines, tens of millions refunded to backers and numerous lawsuits. Additionally, according to six U.S. senators, Ross failed to initially mention 19 suits in response to a questionnaire during his confirmation process.

….Ross’ questionable assertions to Forbes, combined with a recent controversy about a multimillion-dollar stake in a shipping company that does big business with close associates of Vladimir Putin, paint a clearer picture of the commerce secretary’s tactics….“Wilbur doesn’t have an issue with bending the truth,” says David Wax, who worked alongside Ross for 25 years and served as the No. 3 person in his firm. Another former colleague, who requested anonymity, was less circumspect: “He’s lied to a lot of people.”

Wilbur Ross sounds like a man who really fits into Donald Trump’s cabinet, doesn’t he? He lies a lot. He pretends he has more money than he does. He has oddly unexplained ties to Russian tycoons. He loves trade barriers. He apparently has a titanic but fragile ego. I wonder who recommended this guy to Trump?

Oh, and the whole Forbes piece is well worth a read. Ross is really quite the guy.

Lee Jae-Won/AFLO via ZUMA

This is from ABC News:

Pushback against Donald Trump helped lift Democrats to governorships in the two highest-profile U.S. elections since the 2016 presidential contest. In Virginia, voters by a 2-1 margin said they were casting their ballot to show opposition to Trump rather than support for him. In New Jersey the margin was nearly 3-1. And Trump’s weak approval rating among voters in Virginia, 40 percent, was weaker still in New Jersey, a dismal 34 percent.

Relatedly, a surge in turnout by politically liberal voters boosted Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, as did a broad advantage on health care, which voters by a wide margin identified as the top issue in the vote.

That’s good news. It provides some hope that Republicans will start to realize how bad Trump is for their brand. If Virginia voters opposed Trump by 2-1, it’s quite possible that Republicans would have won if someone else had been in the White House.

I wish Republicans were willing to turn against Trump just on principle, but I’ll take what I can get. America will be a much better place if we can demonstrate once and for all that Trump-style politics has no home here anymore.

Democrat Ralph Northam, winner of today's election for governor of Virginia.Brian Cahn via ZUMA

It appears the Democrat Ralph Northam has won the Virginia governor’s race by a healthy margin. I guess I’m surprised. I know he was leading in most of the polls, but I don’t trust Southern states. Somehow they always seem to end up electing Republicans when everything is said and done. Plus there’s the fact that my Twitter feed has been practically on fire for the past week, packed full of jittery liberals who were convinced that Northam was blowing it. But he didn’t.

Normally, I wouldn’t really care all that much about a race like this. Northam is hardly a progressive firebrand, and Ed Gillespie isn’t a tea party nutball. If he had won it wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. Except for one thing: In the final two weeks of the campaign, Gillespie shamelessly decided to follow the Trump playbook, appealing all but openly to the worst kind of racist sentiment in Virginia. What’s worse, nobody on the conservative side of the aisle even blinked about it.

If you haven’t been following this, the best short summary comes from Ramesh Ponnuru, whose Monday column at Bloomberg was dedicated to outlining everything Gillespie did—but solely in order to explain that race had nothing to do with any of it. No sir. It was just a bunch of boring policy differences that all coincidentally happened to have racial underpinnings and just happened to be the ones that blanketed the airwaves in grainy, panic-inducing ads over the final two weeks of the campaign. Like this one, which lays out one of those boring policy differences in a calm, technocratic way that isn’t designed at all to trigger any racial anxiety among white folks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0UiqMDbpAw

Ponnuru’s column is titled, “Why Democrats’ Race-Baiting Often Backfires.” Ponnuru should be ashamed of writing stuff like this, and I suppose someday he will be. In the meantime, though, thank God he was wrong. The last thing we need is for a bland white Republican who’s behind in the polls to discover that racial triggers are still the royal road to victory. As it turns out, they aren’t.

In fact, it now looks as though they backfired bigly—but on Republicans, not Democrats. Republicans are getting shellacked up and down the ballot in Virginia and are close to losing their majority in the legislature. Medicaid won in Maine. Democrats gained control of the governor’s mansion in New Jersey. And although polls haven’t closed yet in Washington, there’s a pretty good chance that Democrats will run the table there too. This has been a very bad day for the Trumpified Republican Party and a very good day for a desperately needed resurgence of decency and resistance in America.

The Penn Wharton Business Model has analyzed the Republican Tax plan and reports back that it will have the following effect on GDP:

What’s that? The chart is too small and you can’t see the difference? No worries: your eyes are fine. The problem is that there virtually is no difference. PWBM figures that by 2027 GDP would be .58 percent higher than it would be under current law. That’s a difference of .05 percent per year. And that’s with dynamic pixie dust included.

In other words, GDP growth over the past couple of decades has averaged about 2.3 percent per year. The Republican tax plan would increase that to…2.35 percent. This is not exactly the supercharged 3 percent economy Donald Trump promised us.

And it gets worse after 2027. Thanks to the $5 trillion in extra debt the tax cut generates, the economy would lose even this tiny amount of extra growth and maybe even grow slower than it would under current law. Between 2017 and 2040, the total net effect of the Republican plan is basically zero.

But a bunch of rich people would be a lot richer. Mission Accomplished!

Kevin Drum gets results!

Disney will no longer ban the Los Angeles Times from advance screenings of its movies following a backlash from critics groups, news outlets and journalists, who were boycotting those same screenings in protest.

OK, fine, it didn’t have anything to do with me:

The lifting of the blackout follows an outpouring of solidarity for the Times after the paper’s film coverage was blacked out by Disney due to a story that examined the business relationship between the company’s flagship Californian theme park, Disneyland, and the city of Anaheim….On Monday, entertainment sites like The A.V. Club and Flavorwire, as well as a pop culture writer for the Washington Post, said they would skip the screenings until the ban on the Times was lifted….The New York Times joined the growing boycott on Tuesday afternoon, not long before the reversal of the ban was announced.

Good for them. If we could just get political journalists to show the same kind of moxie toward the daily briefing, we’d really be cooking.

You can’t really go wrong with a lovely yellow rose. This one was blooming in our garden last spring, and I figure I ought to put it up before spring comes again. Feel free to meditate on this as the election results from Virginia come in.

Yesterday, as I was searching for some data on corporate use of tax havens, I clicked on the wrong link at Gabriel Zucman’s site. What I got instead was a slide presentation about the personal use of tax evasion among rich Scandinavians. Here’s one chart from the presentation:

If you look solely at tax evasion caught by audits (red dots), the rich have a higher rate of tax evasion than the poor, but not by a huge amount. However, it you include the use of offshore tax havens (blue dots), it turns out that the super rich avoid a lot of taxes. Here’s the result:

At the very tippy top, tax payments actually become regressive. The super-duper rich pay lower rates than the merely super-rich.

Now, maybe you don’t care about this. It’s Scandinavia, after all. And if the top 0.01 percent has declared war on the top 1 percent, maybe we should just get out the popcorn and watch the show.

But it’s a good bet that Americans use tax havens just as much as Scandinavians, and there’s increasing evidence about the power and influence that the super-duper rich exercise over politics. This is especially true in the post-Citizens United era. The Koch brothers are already famous for their spending, and the Mercers are now in the spotlight too. Tom Steyer is spending his money running ads urging the impeachment of President Trump. More and more billionaires are willing to fund their favored candidates almost without limit. That’s how we end up with this:

.@RepChrisCollins (R-NY) on tax reform: “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.'”

— Cristina Marcos (@cimarcos) November 7, 2017

For more on this, check out the New York Times today, which has a lengthy piece about how the Paradise Papers reveal exactly how the ultra-rich use tax havens to avoid paying taxes. It’s bracing stuff.