President Obama has nominated aging white male Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and so far the kabuki is playing out as expected. I’ll leave commenting on that to others. Here’s what I’m curious about: assuming that we ever get to the point of arguing about Garland on the merits, what will be the primary attack from Republicans?

The reason I ask is that I’ve been impressed in the past with their ability to come up with inventive smears that never would have occurred to me. Here’s my best shot at a conspiracy-theory-friendly attack aimed at firing up the tea-party base:

AUGUST 30, 2013: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today that records of visitors to the White House were off limits to requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)….In today’s ruling, Chief Judge Merrick Garland wrote that Congress, in drafting the FOIA law and Presidential Records Act, didn’t intend for records such as the president’s appointment calendar to be subject to disclosure.

….Garland wrote that making the records subject to FOIA would raise separation-of-powers concerns, because it would force the president to either give up his right to secrecy about his choice of visitors…. “Construing the term ‘agency records’ to extend to White House visitor logs—regardless of whether they are in the possession of the White House or the Secret Service—could substantially affect the President’s ability to meet confidentially with foreign leaders, agency officials, or members of the public,” he wrote.

The fix is in! Merrick Garland allows Obama to keep his appointment book secret, and Obama nominates him to the Supreme Court. Typical Chicago thuggery. Did you know Garland is from Chicago too? It figures, doesn’t it?

Release Obama’s appointment book! Don’t allow left-wing extremist Merrick Garland to hide Obama’s meetings with Bill Ayers and George Soros!

Why are men quoted so much more often than women in news stories? Amanda Taub notes a couple of obvious points today: men tend to cite other men disproportionately, and there are way more men in senior positions than women. This makes it hard even for a well-meaning journalist to achieve anything close to gender balance in her reporting.

But there’s another problem:

Research shows that men tend to be more confident in their opinions and less worried about being publicly wrong….That’s a dynamic I’ve encountered in my own reporting again and again: Women I interview are much more cautious about hewing closely to their own research and area of expertise, and much more likely to insist on speaking off the record when making a controversial or critical argument. My male sources, on the other hand, are much more willing to freely hold forth on whatever I ask about, confident that whatever opinions they might have are useful enough to share with my readers.

The result is often that female experts give me little information beyond what I already know from reading their published work — and that the men’s quotes are the ones that survive final edits.

There are times when I think we could just replace the entire literature of gender politics with the simple phrase “Men are pigs,” and we probably wouldn’t lose much. But I suppose that’s unfair.

For what it’s worth, though, I’ll offer a second take on this problem: journalists are way too addicted to colorful quotes. Hell, they’re too addicted to quotes, period. Sometimes quotes really do make complex subjects easier to understand, but most often they really don’t. They’re just colorful. And human. And they break up all the boring prose about some boring study or other that came to some boring conclusion about some boring problem.

Journalists should use the quote crutch a lot less than they do. The fact that men are willing to spill forth volubly on whatever crosses their minds doesn’t mean you have to put it in print. Unless it offers something genuinely new, just skip it and write in your own words instead. This also forces you to decide what you really want in your own words, instead of dropping in a quote that happens to say what you wanted to say all along, but weren’t allowed to because it would constitute an opinion.

If anything, I’m railing against an even more intractable problem than sexism. Journalism is aimed at people, and people like to hear what other people have to say. Beyond that, quotes demonstrate that you’ve been working the phones and doing real reporting. So there’s not much chance of reducing journalism’s love affair with quotes that do little except to provide color. But it’s worth a try.

POSTSCRIPT: I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will anyway: I’m not talking about every kind of journalism here. If you’re writing a profile, you’re going to use lots of quotes. If you’re writing a man-in-the-street roundup, you’re going to use lots of quotes. There are plenty of times when quotes are useful and appropriate. I just suspect that it’s less often than most reporters think.

Max Boot is decidedly impressed with Vladimir Putin—and equally unimpressed with President Obama:

In his latest interview in the Atlantic with Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama tries to wave away what Putin has done in Syria and Ukraine: “The fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a player. You don’t see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there’s not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important.”

It’s telling that Obama thinks that the only thing that matters is the agenda at international gab-fests. That’s because the president, like most European heads of state, lives in a 21st century, post-power world where international law is more meaningful than brute force. Putin, by contrast, inhabits a 19th century, Realpolitik world where strongmen act to advance their own interests with scant regard for the feelings of other states, much less of multilateral institutions such as the G20 or the United Nations. In the clash between these two incompatible visions of the world, there is no doubt which one is winning: From Crimea to Syria, Putin is rewriting the rules of the international game in his favor.

This is such a tired cliche: Putin the 19th-century strongman, a modern-day Clausewitz who upends the world by simply taking charge and doing whatever he wants. Meanwhile, Obama mewls helplessly on the sidelines, issuing empty condemnations from the State Department but unable to stop the he-man who’s bullying him.

Sigh. Can you imagine the conservative reaction if Obama announced a bombing campaign with limited objectives, and then withdrew after six months? It would be merciless. He’s abandoning our ally! He was never serious in the first place! Our enemies are laughing at us! We need to crush our enemies, not annoy them with pinpricks!

But when Putin does this, he’s the reincarnation of a new world order, not a guy with a smallish military and a grand total of one (1) military base outside his own territory. Putin, like Donald Trump, is a helluva marketing genius, but that’s largely thanks to all the American conservatives who are in such thrall to him. To read Boot, you’d think Putin’s six-month air campaign around Aleppo was the most dazzling show of military brilliance since the landing at Inchon.

The whole conservative approach to power is incoherent these days. Almost universally they agree that “America can’t be the policeman of the world.” But when America isn’t the policeman of the world we’re treated to endless sad scoldings about the fading of American power.

Let it go, guys. Syria is a quagmire that no outside power can win. Obama knows this and has mostly stayed out. Putin knows this too, and exerted the minimal possible force to prevent the fall of his occasional ally Assad—and then got out as fast as he could. Frankly, they both show greater common sense than most American conservatives.

Tyler Cowen notes this morning that core inflation is now running around 2.3 percent, its highest rate since 2008. “As I’ve been saying, I see very little chance of an aggregate demand-based recession this year, the Fed’s December interest rate hike was not an obvious mistake, and we are not in any operative way in a liquidity trap right now.”

Perhaps so. But the Fed uses trimmed mean PCE as its preferred measure of inflation, and this hit 1.86 percent in January. True, it’s been drifting slightly upward for the past year, but so far the only sign of escalating inflation is a single month that’s about a tenth of a point higher than the average of the past couple of years. I’m happy to see the economy show signs of inflation, no matter how minuscule, but I’d probably wait a bit before drawing any conclusions from this. There’s no reason for the Fed to react in a panic every time inflation comes anywhere close to their target rate.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. In Illinois presidential primaries, Republican voters choose delegates, not candidates. Normally this doesn’t matter since they just vote for the delegates pledged to their guy. This year, though, there were some unusual exceptions:

This is big: Trump voters’ aversion to candidates w/ foreign-sounding names cost him at least 2 delegates. Example: https://t.co/o7X6c6DrBR

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 16, 2016

Nabi Fakroddin gets 4,500 votes less than other 2 Trump dels, allows Kasich to snatch a CD6 delegate h/t @Redistrict pic.twitter.com/KXqiiB1jZJ

— Taniel (@Taniel) March 16, 2016

More whoa: in #IL02, a Trump candidate named “Taneequa Tolbert” received 11% fewer votes than “James Devors” https://t.co/Sf2V2p0Edc

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) March 16, 2016

Well, it looks like Trump and Clinton are winning just about everything tonight. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. My job is to distract you from the horror show that has become the 2016 presidential primary. So let’s talk about traffic.

For the millionth year in a row, Inrix announced today that Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the nation.¹ This isn’t really news, but I did notice something odd about the rankings. Take a look at the table below:

These are the ten worst stretches of highway in the country, and they’re found, unsurprisingly, in our three largest cities. But in Chicago and New York City, the most rage-inducing time of the week on these extended parking lots is Friday. In LA, it’s mostly Tuesday and Wednesday; Friday takes the top spot in only one out of six. Why is that? Please leave your guesses in comments.

¹But not the worst anywhere: London beats Los Angeles by a wide margin. And if Inrix collected data for Africa and Asia, I’ll bet no US city would even make the top 100.

With opioid painkiller addiction now at epidemic levels, the CDC has finally issued new guidelines for primary care doctors:

The guidelines recommend what many addiction experts have long called for — that doctors first try ibuprofen and aspirin to treat pain, and that opioid treatment for short-term pain last for three days, and rarely longer than seven. That is far less than current practice, in which patients are often given two weeks or a month worth of pills.

The guidelines are meant for primary care doctors, who prescribe about half of all opioids but often have little training in how to use them. They call for patients to be urine tested before getting prescriptions and for doctors to check prescription drug tracking systems to make sure patients are not secretly getting medicine somewhere else. Currently, 49 states have such systems, but only 16 require that doctors use them, according to experts at Brandeis University.

It’s worth noting that the actual text of the guidelines makes it very clear that they’re aimed at chronic pain sufferers. There are 12 recommendations, and only one addresses acute pain:

Long-term opioid use often begins with treatment of acute pain. When opioids are used for acute pain, clinicians should prescribe the lowest effective dose of immediate-release opioids and should prescribe no greater quantity than needed for the expected duration of pain severe enough to require opioids. Three days or less will often be sufficient; more than seven days will rarely be needed.

This sounds like sensible advice. In the past, opioid painkillers were reserved for very serious acute pain (post-op, for example), but that’s changed over the past few decades. A lot of kids grow up today expecting powerful painkillers for things like sprained ankles, which just aren’t all that painful. Is this because doctors have changed their habits? Because parents are more demanding? I don’t know. But it probably doesn’t make sense. If you sprain your ankle, ice it down and take some aspirin. You’ll live through it.

Beyond that, there are obviously cases where acute pain can last longer than seven days. When I broke a bone in my back, I took morphine on and off for a couple of months. But I’m naturally skeptical of opioid painkillers, and my doctor had to talk me into taking more pills, not fewer. I can easily imagine someone with a different attitude who’s determined to rid themselves of any pain whatsoever and gobbling down more pills than they should.

As usual with laws and guidelines, the actions of a modest number of abusers is likely to make life more annoying for everyone else. Hopefully, doctors will take these rules seriously, but will still be allowed to use their common sense to decide when the rules need to be bent.

David Dayen brings hope to my withered soul. A few days ago he described a Senate hearing that seemingly brought both liberals and conservatives together on a subject close to my heart: antitrust law. “The fact that both parties want the government to stop monopolies,” he says, “could finally force the agencies to get aggressive and protect the economy”:

We have four airlines serving 80 percent of all passengers. We have four cable and Internet companies providing most of the nation’s cell-phone and television service. We have four big commercial banks, five big insurance companies (only three if two proposed mergers go through this year), and a handful of producers selling every major consumer product. Even when you think you have a choice, like in the array of online travel-booking sites, two companies (Expedia and Priceline) own all the subsidiaries.

….Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who chairs the subcommittee, worried that the agencies lack the resources to deal with the merger wave. Ranking member Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat, questioned the “conduct remedies” agencies use in lieu of blocking mergers—for instance, forcing the merged company to sell off retail outlets or business lines to maintain competition.

….Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley brought up consolidation in the market for seeds, and how that creates issues in the food-supply chain—if one set of seeds is tainted and a monopoly controls seed distribution, the consequences of safety hazards magnifies. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, expressed concern about “platform monopolies”—Internet giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon, who “use their positions … to stifle competition and inhibit the free flow of ideas.”

Over the past few decades, America has undergone a sea change in antitrust law. It’s now all about “consumer welfare”—which means, in practice, that big mergers are fine as long as the mergees can make a credible case that the combined entity will be good for consumers. You will be unsurprised to learn that high-powered marketing departments are very good at collecting data to show exactly that, and that high-powered attorneys are extremely good at turning this data into bulletproof legal arguments. The result is that very few mergers are ever turned down.

But this siren call has led us down a long, blind alley. It turns out that in the short term, plenty of big mergers really can be good for consumers. In the longer term, though, very few are. All the promises and regulations in the world will never change the fact that once a market is dominated by three or four huge corporations, competition becomes flabby and listless. In markets with low barriers to entry, this isn’t too big a deal. New entrants will build new markets regardless. But in markets with high capital costs or other barriers to entry, it can cause unhealthy and needless stagnation.

We’d be better off returning to an older, cruder rule: ensuring that there are plenty of competitors in every market and refusing to allow any single company to become too dominant. As near as I can tell, there’s a real tipping point around the number three or four. If a market is dominated by four companies or less, that’s when it starts to wither.

Even a single company can make a big difference. Take a look at the cell phone market: T-Mobile tried several times to engineer a merger with another provider, but couldn’t get approval. So instead they adopted a strategy of genuine competition, hoping that lower prices and better features would upset the market and bring them new customers. This has had a huge impact on the mobile phone industry, and it never would have happened if the number of providers had made that final, fatal slide from four companies to three.

Needless to say, even a crude market share rule doesn’t make things simple. You’ll still have arguments over what counts as a single market (online advertising or the entire advertising industry?). You’ll have arguments over just how big a single company should be allowed to get (30 percent share or 50 percent share?). You’ll have industries where it’s not easy to have lots of competitors. And you’ll have some industries where the returns to scale to are so potent that small companies just flatly can’t compete.

There’s no easy panacea. But “consumer welfare” is an open invitation to thousand-page regulatory filings that dive deep down a rabbit hole and never come up for air. A smart team of attorneys can make a credible case that just about anything is good for consumers if you look at it in just the right way. A simple market dominance test, however, isn’t so easy to game. It may not be perfect, but it would be a lot better than what we have now.

Competition is the core engine of capitalism. If you have plenty of it, you can make do without a lot of other regulations. But once you allow competition to wither, there’s little choice left. The remaining companies have lots of market power, lots of political power, and not much desire to see markets get disrupted. They have to be heavily regulated—and even that won’t work very well. You just end up in an endless game of cat and mouse.

Why bother? The federal government should do its best to ensure that markets have plenty of competition, and then it can afford to get out of the way and regulate fairly lightly. Other companies will do their work for them. What’s not to like?

Here’s a weird story. Somebody with access to the proper codes managed to steal $100 million from Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve. But that’s not the weird part. Lots of people would steal $100 million if they could. The weird part is trying to figure how they thought they could get away with it:

The breach began on a quiet Friday last month, when a series of payment instructions arrived at the New York Fed seeking the transfer of nearly $1 billion out of the Bangladeshi account….By the time officials at Bangladesh Bank, the country’s central bank, returned to work, five requests moving about $100 million had gone through. Further transfers totaling roughly $850 million were blocked after “the American bank raised a money laundering alert,” a spokesman for Bangladesh Bank has said.

….The wire transfer of $20 million to Sri Lanka went to the account of a newly formed nongovernmental organization, according to officials in Dhaka. The Sri Lankan bank handling the account reported the unusual transaction to the country’s central bank under that country’s anti-money-laundering laws and authorities reversed the transfer.

The Philippines’ Anti-Money Laundering Council is preparing charges against a number of people allegedly involved in the illegal transfer, council Chairman Amando Tetangco, who is also the governor of the Philippines’ central bank, told The Wall Street Journal in a brief interview late Saturday. He refused to identify those who may be charged but said more details would be revealed later.

So the thieves tried to steal $1 billion, but the Fed got suspicious at the prospect of that much money being transferred into private accounts. Big surprise. Still, that was only after $20 million got sent to accounts in Sri Lanka and $80 million to accounts in the Philippines—which was then deposited in a Manila businessman’s bank account and transferred to three large casinos. But these transfers were identified and nobody got their hands on that money either.

In the movies, the thieves would never have been caught because the tech-savvy member of their crew would immediately start routing the money through dozens of proxies and hundreds of accounts. After 30 seconds of laptop argle bargle, the money would be untraceable.

In real life…it turns out wire transfers don’t work that way. So here’s the weird part: why did these guys think this plan would work? Did they seriously think they could transfer $1 billion to private accounts around the world and no one would notice? Or was this heist even more interesting than it sounds, with a whole lot of very high-ranking government officials involved in covering it up? One way or another, this caper was either dumber than it sounds or a lot smarter than it sounds. I can’t wait to find out which.

I’ve periodically argued that, conventional wisdom notwithstanding, Americans aren’t especially angry at the moment and the country isn’t in especially bad shape. My most recent post along those lines is here.

The obvious pushback is that averages don’t tell the story. Even if 80 percent of Americans are relatively content, the other 20 percent might be mad as hell—and with good reason. Wages are down over the past decade. Globalization has taken away lots of good, semi-skilled jobs. Illegal immigration has taken away the unskilled jobs. Culturally it feels like traditional values are under attack. Etc.

All fair points. But the question isn’t whether some voters are angry. Some voters are always angry. The question is whether they’re angrier than usual. On that score, Ed Kilgore passes along an excerpt from Michael Cohen’s upcoming book on the 1968 presidential election, American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division. The scene is a George Wallace rally at Madison Square Garden:

Outside the arena shoving matches and fistfights broke out repeatedly as Birchers, Nazis, and Klansmen tussled with Trotskyists, Yippies, and Black Power activists….With the crowd inside at a fever pitch, the guest of honor arrived….”It was uncontrolled release of frenzied, pulsating passion that seemed almost more sexual than political … It may have been the loudest, most terrifying sustained human din ever heard in New York,” wrote Robert Mayer in Newsday.

….Then, with the traditional airing of grievances, the sermon began. Wallace fired broadsides against the “pseudo-intellectuals” and “theoreticians” ….”All you need is a good barber!” he yelled at the dozens of hecklers in the crowd. “Why don’t you come down here … and I’ll autograph your sandals!” As yet another fight broke out in the balcony, Wallace offered no quarter. “Well, you came for trouble and you got it!”

Kilgore notes that the grievances of Wallace voters and Trump voters aren’t identical, though there’s considerable overlap. “The most powerful parallel, however, is perhaps the most dangerous: the joy of the crowds over the sheer demagoguery of their candidate.”

Exactly. In 1968 the economy was booming. It wasn’t globalization driving the Wallace crowds. In 2016 the civil rights revolution is 50 years old. It isn’t riots on the streets of Baltimore and Chicago driving Trump’s crowds. What drove Wallace crowds was Wallace. What drives Trump crowds is Trump.

It’s never been my argument that Trump voters don’t have anything to be angry about. But when has that not been true? When was the last time that 10 or 20 or 30 percent of the country didn’t have something eating at them? The difference this year is not that the electorate is “finally” fed up. We hear that every four years. It’s not that they’re angrier than usual. The evidence just doesn’t support that. It’s not gridlock, it’s not wage stagnation, it’s not gay marriage, and it’s not ISIS. The difference is simple: Donald Trump. If you base your campaign on demagoguery—and you’re good at it—you’ll always find a receptive audience.

That’s all that’s happened this year. America isn’t in worse shape than usual, and voters aren’t angrier than usual. We need to stop saying this. The difference—the only difference— is that we have a candidate willing to cynically mine the anger that’s always out there waiting to be tapped, consequences be damned. That’s it.