Michael Cohen is in the news again. Not for this:

But because he’s been “invited” to testify before the Senate committee investigating the Trump-Russia connection:

“I declined the invitation to participate, as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered,” Cohen told ABC News in an email Tuesday.

After Cohen rejected the congressional requests for cooperation, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to grant its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, and ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, blanket authority to issue subpoenas as they deem necessary.

Martin Longman didn’t expect this:

It’s still a bit premature to be effusive or unreserved in my praise here. But I have to give credit where it is due. The Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have shown courage here and real indications of seriousness. I wouldn’t have predicted it but I’m willing to acknowledge it now.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has historically been more serious and bipartisan than most committees, so this is probably not quite as surprising as it seems. Nonetheless, it’s good to see some confirmation that there are still a few redoubts of integrity in Donald Trump’s Washington DC.

Google’s Simon Rogers presents us with a map of the words each state’s residents query most often:

Hmmm. Beautiful is the winner, coming up #1 in five different states. Pneumonia is next. It’s #1 in three cold, northern states—which makes sense—but also in Alabama for some reason. There are also several unique oddities:

• In Idaho, they want to know how to spell quote. Do they quote people a lot in Idaho? And why do they have trouble spelling it?
• In Wisconsin, they want to know how to spell Wisconsin. This is a serious failure of their primary school system.
• In Washington DC, they want to know how to spell nintey, a word that doesn’t exist. That seems appropriate. Perhaps this is a misspelling of ninety by the mapmaker? If so, why does ninety occupy so much attention in DC?
• Lots of people in Vermont are apparently thinking of fleeing to Europe, but only after they figure out how to spell it. Ditto for South Dakotans who want to go to college.

The headline of this post is a Twitter test. How many people do you think will correct me because they don’t actually click the link?

UPDATE: Yes, Washington DC is fixated on ninety. But why?

The Washington Post reports that rigorous instruction is being done earlier and earlier these days:

A group of students at Woodside Community School in Queens peered up at their teacher one morning this month, as she used an overhead projector to display a shape. It looked like a basic geometry lesson one might find in any grade school, except for the audience: They were preschoolers, seated cross-legged on a comfy rug.

“What attributes would tell me this is a square?” asked the teacher, Ashley Rzonca.

A boy named Mohammed raised his hand, having remembered these concepts from a previous lesson. “A square has four angles and four equal sides,” he said.

Oh please. When I was in preschool we had to solve a differential equation in our heads before we got our chocolate milk.¹ This is nothing. Kids these days need to toughen up.

¹Apologies. I’m exaggerating. I didn’t even go to preschool. Differential equations didn’t come until first grade.

The State Department held a briefing today. Dave Clark, a reporter for Agence France Presse, asked acting assistant secretary Stuart Jones a pointed question about President Trump criticizing Iranian democracy while standing next to officials of Saudi Arabia—not exactly a beacon of democracy itself. “How do you characterize Saudi Arabia’s commitment to democracy?” he asked. Is democracy a barrier against extremism? Here’s the reply:

This is being characterized as a 20-second silence, but in fairness I think it was more like 19 seconds. That kind of exaggeration is typical of the fake news media.

The Paris climate accord is not legally binding. At any time, the United States can simply announce that its goals have changed and release a new, less ambitious plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (a “Nationally Determined Contribution” in Paris-speak). Since everything is entirely voluntary and there’s no legal enforcement mechanism for any of it, David Roberts says there’s no reason to consider pulling out:

Trump can weaken the US NDC, without penalty. He can roll back all of Obama’s carbon regulations, without penalty. He can simply fail to meet the targets of the NDC, without penalty. All he has to do is explain himself at the five-year review, and the explanation can be as minimal as he likes.

Paris’s only constraint on Trump comes through intangibles like reputation and influence. It imposes absolutely no practical or legal constraint on his actions—not on trade policy, not on domestic energy policy, nothing.

That means all talk of Paris being a “bad deal” for the US, or hurting US trade, or affecting the US coal industry in any way, is nonsense. Paris does not and cannot do any of those things. The US voluntarily offered up an NDC and can voluntarily offer up a different or weaker NDC any time it wants.

This is an awkward fact for the nationalist contingent. They need Paris to be a boogey man. So they’ve ginned up a novel legal argument.

This novel legal argument is even more comical than these kinds of paper-thin justifications usually are, and you can read all about it at the link. But I think Roberts misses the point. Since Paris is voluntary, there’s no concrete reason for Trump to pull out or to stay in. The United States can do whatever it wants either way. The whole thing is about signaling, and that’s something that rules Trump’s world. Barack Obama considered it important to signal that America was committed to addressing climate change. Trump is committed to a worldview in which climate change is a hoax. He wants a dramatic way to signal this, and pulling out of Paris would be just the ticket.

Needless to say, you can decide for yourself if climate change is a hoax. The data is very clear and easily obtainable.

Is the intelligence community going overboard with the leaks?

I fear playing into Trump’s “it’s all about leaks” narrative, but I’m growing increasingly uncomfortable with nature of leaked information.

— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) May 30, 2017

I don’t have a firm opinion about this yet, but I will say this: Whoever is leaking the dirt about Jared Kushner is doing a very considered job of it. Instead of just dropping a big bomb, they seem to be very carefully dropping one tiny new item every few days. First we hear that a person “close to Trump” is part of the FBI investigation. Then we hear it’s Kushner. Then we hear it’s about Russia. Then we hear it’s about setting up backchannel comms. This guarantees a steady drip of new headlines and keeps the story in the news for weeks and weeks. It’s the most damaging possible way of handling leaks like this.

I’ll cop to some partisan feelings about this. Is it wrong to deliberately string this stuff out in order to cause maximum damage? Sure, of course. But it’s also what Julian Assange did to Hillary Clinton. It’s what Judicial Watch did to Clinton. It’s what the FBI did to Clinton. It’s what Republican congressional committees did to Clinton. This is just the way the game is played these days, and there are no innocents on either side of the aisle.

As Donald Trump is (yet again) pondering a “broad shakeup” of his staff because he can’t conceive that his problems might be of his own making, his communications director has resigned. Michael Dubke says it’s for “personal” reasons, but it seems more likely that he’s getting out while the getting is good. Why wait to be fired as part of a Jared-Ivanka-Donald purge, after all?

The Washington Post reports that President Trump prefers to receive his daily intelligence briefing in comic book form, but we already knew that. However, this is new to me:

Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.

….Though career intelligence analysts often take the lead in delivering them, Trump likes his political appointees — Pompeo and Coats — to attend, along with national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Pompeo and Coats, whose offices are in McLean, Va., have had to redesign their daily routines so that they spend many mornings at the White House.

It’s appropriate for the intelligence chiefs to be present periodically. But forcing two of them to blow off an hour or two of their time every day isn’t. It’s dumb management.

So why does Trump do it? Mostly for ego and dominance reasons, I suppose. He might also still be convinced that the intelligence community is his enemy and will play games with the orders he gives them. So he wants his own appointees present to make sure they do what he wants.

These are both the marks of an insecure leader. It’s not a good sign.

National Cemetery, Los Angeles, California.

A couple of days ago Paul Krugman wrote about the Trump double-cross:

Let’s talk about West Virginia, which went Trump by more than 40 percentage points, topped only by Wyoming. What did West Virginians think they were voting for?

They are, after all, residents of a poor state that benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.

….Trumpcare, the budget office tells us, would cause 23 million people to lose health insurance, largely through cuts to Medicaid….Then we need to add in the Trump budget, which calls for further drastic cuts in Medicaid, plus large cuts in food stamps and in disability payments. What would happen to West Virginia if all these Trump policies went into effect? Basically, it would be apocalyptic.

….So many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were the victims of an epic scam by a man who has built his life around scamming. In the case of West Virginians, this scam could end up pretty much destroying their state. Will they ever realize this, and admit it to themselves? More important, will they be prepared to punish him the only way they can — by voting for Democrats?

Since I happened to be chatting about this yesterday, I want to offer an alternative explanation for what’s going on here. More accurately, I guess, it’s a supplementary explanation, since there’s not much question that Donald Trump has indeed pulled a very long con on voters like the ones in West Virginia.

Basically it’s this: what do you expect if Democrats don’t support their own policies? For the past five years, Republicans have battered Obamacare as the most horrific policy ever enacted. Democrats have—what? Hidden under rocks, mostly. Moderates looked at the polls and decided to avoid even talking about Obamacare. Progressives mostly scorned it as a piece of crap and spent their energy explaining why we should all support single-payer instead. So what’s the result? Lots of people think Obamacare is horrific. After all, that’s what one side says, and the other side hardly even fights back.

West Virginians on Medicaid probably have no idea they’re getting it via Obamacare. West Virginians who buy insurance from Healthcare.gov probably have no idea they’re insured via Obamacare. West Virginians who got a payroll tax break early in the Obama years probably have no idea they even got it, let alone that it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got new roads or schools from the stimulus program probably have no idea it came from Democrats. West Virginians who got an increase in the minimum wage in 2007-09 probably have no idea it was passed by Democrats.

On the other hand, they certainly do know that Obamacare is destroying the nation; that Democrats want to take away their guns; that Mexicans took away all their jobs; that Obama wanted to let a flood of ISIS terrorists into the country; and that fanatical leftists want to allow men into their daughters’ bathrooms.

Republicans are going to say what they’re going to say. There’s not much you can do to stop them from lying. What you can do is to loudly and proudly demand credit for the stuff you’ve done. If no one really knows that you subsidized their insurance or provided them with Medicaid or raised their wages or built them new schools, you can hardly expect them to vote for you.