Here is my new blogging home:

This is not intended to make anyone jealous. It’s purely informational. Also, I met one of my neighbors this morning:

I told him I had just arrived from America, and his reply was, “Bah.” I guess that’s appropriate.

The expression on this little girl’s face is priceless. I took this picture at Disneyland, on the raft leaving Tom Sawyer’s Island, and I figure she’s either bored by the whole TSI experience or annoyed at being forced to leave so soon. Hard to say which. But she’s definitely projecting some attitude.

Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post via ZUMA

I know what you’re thinking: no president has ever been successfully impeached, so of course it would set a new record. But that’s not what I have in mind.

At the moment, we have five living ex-presidents: Carter, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. Has this ever happened before? Yes! When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, we also had five living ex-presidents: Van Buren, Tyler, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan. This lasted for 320 days, when Tyler died on January 18, 1862.

It’s also happened twice since then, most recently when George W. Bush was inaugurated. This lasted for more than three years, until Ronald Reagan died on June 5, 2004.

We will exceed that record in 2020—assuming everyone stays alive until then. But we can do better! If we impeach Trump, we’ll have six living ex-presidents. I think this is a record worth trying for. Republicans like setting records, don’t they?

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

I’ve still got an hour before I have to leave for the airport, so let’s take note of two examples of party dynamics today.

First up is Bernie Sanders and his Medicare-for-All bill. What’s been the response among the lefty wonkocracy? Let’s call it…hesitation. Everyone’s for single-payer, that’s not the problem. But Bernie’s plan has issues. And he doesn’t say anything about how he’ll pay for it. Plus it might be too generous. And how do we handle all the people with employer health care who will be nervous about losing their doctor? Etc. etc.

Compare this to Repeal and Replace. It literally had no detail at all, but Republicans ran on it for seven years and everyone was all for it. During that time, no one on the right spent more than a few minutes seriously wondering what the replacement would look like. There were occasional “white papers” that tossed out the usual Republican cocktail—tort reform, state lines, high-risk pools, HSAs, blah blah blah—but that was it. Nobody cared.

Next up: Hillary Clinton’s memoir. What’s been the reaction on the left? Endless griping. Why is she relitigating 2016? Why won’t she accept any blame for her loss? Why won’t she just go away? Haven’t we had enough of the Clintons?

On the right, I guess losers don’t write post-election memoirs. Do they? And if they do, the response is mostly respectful. The guy’s a true conservative and should be proud of his service to the nation.

On the left, we just can’t help ourselves. We have to get things off our chests, regardless of whether it’s useful or helpful. If we want to flatter ourselves, we call this a dedication to intellectual honesty. If we want to be a wee bit more self-aware, we’d call it an endless hunger to show off our intellectual chops. Is it helpful? Does it work? Hard to say. But it’s all part of who we are. And it’s very much not a part of who conservatives are.

This is the Killarney Pub in Huntington Beach. I had lunch there on Monday and—

Oh, who cares where I had lunch on Monday? I have much more important news: I’m going on vacation! Can you guess where? Huh? Can you?

Yep: Marian and I are going to Ireland. We’ll be in County Kerry for a couple of weeks, a few miles south of Killarney in the general vicinity of Sneem. I expect it to be cool, relaxing, and rainy. Then it’s off to England, where we’ll spend three weeks in London. If you happen to live in either Kerry or London and want to get together for lunch or something, just drop me a line. My sister is housesitting for us, so Hilbert and Hopper will be in good hands.

However, this is only a partial vacation. I expect to blog the entire time at a reduced pace and possibly at odd hours. Other folks might also fill in here, though that’s up to the gods. The only way to know for sure is to check in now and again to see what’s here.

I’ll be traveling today and tomorrow, but I’ll most likely post something on Friday or Saturday, assuming we don’t get hopelessly lost and fall into the North Atlantic. Keep an eye on Donald for me while I’m gone.

Starmax/Newscom/ZUMA

Over at Vox, Ezra Klein has an interview with Hillary Clinton about the 2016 election. Here’s his nickel summary:

Clinton is not a radical or a revolutionary, a disruptor or a socialist, and she’s proud of that fact. She’s a pragmatist who believes in working within the system, in promising roughly what you believe you can deliver, in saying how you’ll pay for your plans. She is frustrated by a polity that doesn’t share her “thrill” over incremental policies that help real people or her skepticism of sweeping plans that will never come to fruition. She believes in politics the way it is actually practiced, and she holds to that belief at a moment when it’s never been less popular.

This makes Clinton a more unusual figure than she gets credit for being: Not only does she refuse to paint an inspiring vision of a political process rid of corruption, partisanship, and rancor, but she’s also actively dismissive of those promises and the politicians who make them.

This makes me sad, but not because I disagree with Clinton. In fact, I agree completely. The Bernie revolution was never going to happen, and neither will the Trump revolution. Otto von Bismarck had a saying about this: Politics is the art of the possible. If you want to get things done you have to understand that.

But there’s another saying, this one from Mario Cuomo: You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. Would Clinton have won if she could have figured out the poetry part? I guess we’ll never know.

Catherine Rampell writes about the latest Republican effort to punish the poor:

Never accuse Republicans of being uncreative. Once again, they’ve found an innovative way to punish the poor and simultaneously increase budget deficits — all with one nifty trick!

To pull off this impressive twofer, they would put every American applying for the earned-income tax credit (EITC) through a sort of mini-audit before getting their refund. This would both place huge new burdens on the working poor and divert scarce Internal Revenue Service resources away from other audit targets, such as big corporations, that offer a much higher return on investment…. The language is vague but appears to refer to a Heritage Foundation proposal that would require the IRS to “fully verify income through a review of Form W-2, Form 1099, business licensing or registration, and relevant invoices” before dispensing any refunds. So, a mini-audit.

Rampell is right about almost everything. But she gives Republicans too much credit for being creative. They’ve been going after the EITC ever since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. Here is David Cay Johnston in Perfectly Legal:

The most vociferous critics of the credit were those in the forefront of the campaign to cut taxes on the rich, notably House Speaker Newt Gingrich…. President Clinton, fearing that the new Republican majority had the votes to savage the program, proposed a diversion. How would Congress feel, Clinton asked, about giving the IRS more than $100 million a year just to audit applicants for the credit to make sure that only the deserving working poor benefited? Congress went for the deal.

In 1999, for the first time, the poor were more likely to have their tax returns audited. The overall rate for people making less than $25,000 was 1.36 percent, compared with 1.15 percent of returns filed by those making $100,000 or more.

Republicans have been obsessed for decades with fraud among the working poor who receive the EITC. At the same time, they’ve also been obsessed with reducing funding for audits of rich people:

During the Trump era, I’m sure we can count on audits of the rich continuing to go down, while audits of the poor get a new lease on life. He’s a populist, you see.

Percy Alban via ZUMA

Cassidy-Graham, the last-ditch effort by Republicans to replace Obamacare, is probably going nowhere. But how about a more modest bipartisan bill to authorize Obamacare’s CSR subsidies? No dice, apparently:

Meanwhile, a bill aiming to bring the parties together to shore up insurance markets is in jeopardy, people close to the negotiations said…GOP legislators have been open to authorizing the funds, and insurers have warned they would have to raise premiums or pull out of insurance markets if the funds disappear. But Republicans say that in return, they want to offer states more flexibility in implementing the ACA.

…Even if Senate Republicans and Democrats bridge their differences, [White House legislative-affair director Marc] Short suggested in an interview last week that Mr. Trump was extremely unlikely to sign a bill that guaranteed insurer payments without other changes in the health-care system. “The president has no interest in bailing out insurance companies,” he said.

Trump is doing everything he can to force Obamacare to fail, even though it’s fundamentally in good shape. One way or another, he refuses to be embarrassed by the spectre of a functioning health care program that provides insurance to millions at a reasonable cost. That would be more than he could bear. It’s not his program, after all.

Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA

Yesterday I wrote about freezing your credit records, so I guess I should stay up on the latest news. Via the New York Times, here it is:

You howled in protest, and Equifax had no choice but to respond.

On Tuesday, the company said it would waive all fees until Nov. 21 for people who want to freeze their Equifax credit files. It will also refund any fees that anyone has paid since Thursday, though the company would not say whether this would be automatic.

Why do I hate credit reporting agencies? Let me count the ways. It’s beyond unbelievable that Equifax didn’t do this immediately, since there’s certainly no reason that anyone should have to pay for a freeze that they need only because of Equifax’s own negligence. But this level of imperiousness is par for the course for these guys.

For any normal company, a fee like this would have been lifted instantly. They’d understand immediately that anything else would be an epic PR disaster. But the thing is, you aren’t a customer of Equifax. They don’t give a rat’s ass about you. Nor do they care about a PR disaster. It’s not as though they’ll lose your business, after all, since they never did any business with you in the first place. All they do is collect all your financial data without your permission and then sell it to other people.

(Actually, that’s not all they do. They also make your life hell if you have the gall to find an error in your credit record and ask them to fix it.)

Needless to say, Equifax declined to talk to the Times reporter about any of this, because why should they? However, he did hear something from a reader:

A reader named Kimberly Casey forwarded me an email exchange between her and Mr. Adams where he apologized and said that a service to “lock” Equifax, Experian and TransUnion files simultaneously would be coming soon.

This is beyond belief. There are three credit reporting agencies, and if you want your credit records frozen you have to order a freeze from all of them. This was outrageous when I wrote about it twelve years ago, and obviously nothing has been done about it since then. Why? Because none of the credit reporting agencies care about you. Their customers are the businesses who request credit checks, and their attitude toward everyone else is that they should pound sand. Congress lets them get away with this because—well, who knows? Probably because Congress doesn’t really care either unless their reelection is threatened somehow.

Where are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when you need them? They should be screaming about this. The credit reporting agencies have gotten away forever with treating consumers like bothersome children: screwing up their credit records, ruining their lives, making it deliberately difficult and expensive to lock accounts, and making money off the whole thing by offering “insurance” against problems that they themselves cause. Someone in Congress who allegedly cares about ordinary working folks should introduce a bill to regulate the hell out of these folks. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it’s hard to think of any industry that more richly deserves it.

What kind of duck is this? Is it just a common duck type of duck that happens to be gray? They seem to hang out with our white ducks a lot. Does that mean they’re young ducks who will grow up to be white ducks? Or maybe white swans like in the fairy tale? Or is this just a breed of duck that happens to be gray? We’ve never seen ducks around here like this, so it’s all new to us.