In the mysteriously mumbly style we’ve come to expect from him, Ben Carson has dropped out of the presidential race without actually saying that he’s dropping out of the presidential race:

I have decided not to attend the Fox News GOP Presidential Debate tomorrow night in Detroit…I do not see a political path forward in light of last evening’s Super Tuesday primary results. However, this grassroots movement on behalf of “We the People” will continue…I will discuss more about the future of this movement during my speech on Friday at CPAC in Washington, D.C.

So that means he’s out. Right?

Looking for something to cheer yourself up? I don’t have much for you, but I have something: Donald Trump seems to be getting slightly less popular lately. He’s still winning plenty of Republican primaries, but ever since the first week of January his net unfavorables have been drifting upward slowly but fairly steadily.

This won’t help Republicans much, since all their other candidates appear to be getting unpopular even faster than Trump. And although Hillary Clinton is doing a little better than Trump, she’s not going great guns in the favorability race either. In fact, as near as I can tell, everyone is becoming less popular except for Bernie Sanders, who appears to be the only person left in America with a positive favorable rating.

If there’s a difference here, I’d say that Hillary has been getting pilloried ever since Benghazi, while Trump has only barely been attacked at all. Once Democrats really start hammering him, he probably has further to fall. That’s the glass-half-full analysis, anyway. Take it for what it’s worth.

I’ve now written my quota of one non-Trump post this morning, and surely that’s enough? So let’s move on. I’m fascinated to see that Joe Weisenthal picked up on something that I noticed too during Trump’s late-night press conference on Tuesday:

Notice that he kept saying “I disavow” over and over again, but never said “I disavow David Duke” or “Disavow white supremacist groups”

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) March 2, 2016

Here’s what happened. A reporter asked Trump once again to comment on the David Duke/KKK endorsement, and Trump whined that he had already written a Facebook post and a tweet and, really, just how many times was he supposed to disavow the guy? But as Weisenthal points out, Trump repeatedly said “I disavow, I disavow, I disavow,” without ever mentioning who he was disavowing. And since the reporters weren’t given mics, you really couldn’t hear what the question was about. You’d only know if you’ve been following this controversy.

I don’t think this was a mistake. Trump has done it too many times. On Facebook, on Twitter, on Good Morning America, and then again last night. His ritualistic phrase is “I disavow” without providing a clear, simple soundbite about who or what he’s disavowing. Nor does he ever say anything more in the way of condemnation. His Twitter and Facebook posts, for example, had merely this terse comment: “As I stated at the press conference on Friday regarding David Duke- I disavow.”

It’s pretty clear what’s going on here. Technically, Trump is in the clear. He has disavowed David Duke. But there is no soundbite or video snippet that shows him clearly criticizing either Duke or the KKK or white supremacist groups in general. And as Trump knows better than anyone, it’s audio and video excerpts that really matter. That’s what people see, not brief Twitter or Facebook posts.

Trump now has the best of all worlds. He can truthfully say that he’s repeatedly denounced David Duke. He can mock the media for unfairly making a big deal out of it. But for his less savory supporters, there’s no video of him clearly and unequivocally condemning the Duke or the KKK—and they understand perfectly well what this means. They’re old hands at the wink and the nod.

If it were anyone else, I’d say this was all carefully calculated. But Trump has such an instinctive grasp of TV that I wouldn’t be surprised if this just came naturally to him without any real thought. He is truly a master of the modern media era.

UPDATE: This is fascinating. One minute after publishing this, I wandered over to The Corner and read a Jonah Goldberg post making exactly the same point I did. Goldberg doesn’t think Trump’s phrasing is an accident either:

It is obvious to me that Trump didn’t want to denounce David Duke and the Klan in the Jake Tapper interview. The “bad earpiece” explanation is a transparent lie….And when Tapper mentioned the KKK, Trump still didn’t say, “Wait a second . . . ” and rip into the Klan. The question is, Why?

….Denouncing the Klan should be easy. You shouldn’t have to think about it….The one thing you shouldn’t do is sound like you’re reluctant to condemn the Klan(!) or that you’re dog-whistling that you don’t really mean it when you do. Yet when you watch the Tapper interview, it becomes clear what is really going on: He think condemning the Klan will hurt him with conservatives or southerners or both….In other words, the issue isn’t that conservative opponents of Trump think he’s a Klan supporting racist, it’s that Trump thinks many of his conservative supporters are. And that’s just one reason I don’t want this guy speaking for me.

Yep. And when was the last time Goldberg and I agreed about something? It just goes to show that Trump really does bring people together.

The Mosul dam in Iraq was apparently flawed from the first day it was built. The only thing that kept it standing was maintenance performed literally continuously:

“We used to have 300 people working 24 hours in three shifts but very few of these workers have come back. There are perhaps 30 people there now,” [Nasrat] Adamo said in a telephone interview from Sweden, where he works as a consultant. “The machines for grouting have been looted. There is no cement supply. They can do nothing. It is going from bad to worse, and it is urgent. All we can do is hold our hearts.”

At the same time as the bedrock is getting weaker and more porous, the water pressure on the dam is building as spring meltwater flows into the reservoir behind it. Giant gates that would normally be used to ease the pressure by allowing water to run through are stuck.

….“The fact that the bottom outlets are jammed is the thing that really worries us,” said [Nadhir] Ansari, now an engineering professor at the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. “In April and May, there will be a lot more snow melting and it will bring plenty of water into the reservoir. The water level is now 308 metres but it will go up to over 330 metres. And the dam is not as before. The caverns underneath have increased. I don’t think the dam will withstand that pressure.

“If the dam fails, the water will arrive in Mosul in four hours. It will arrive in Baghdad in 45 hours. Some people say there could be half a million people killed, some say a million. I imagine it will be more in the absence of a good evacuation plan.”

I don’t know anything about the politics of this situation—apparently Baghdad is dawdling on a contract to repair the dam—but this sure seems like the kind of thing America could offer help with. If you want to win hearts and minds and demonstrate why Iraqis should prefer an alliance with the US to the chimera of ISIS, what better way than an emergency airlift of money, equipment, and engineers to keep this dam intact?

Well, it looks like it’s going to be Clinton vs. Trump this fall.

Donald Trump is delivering his victory speech right now, and I see that he’s officially started his great presidential pivot. He’s mostly saying the same things as always, but saying them with noticeably less bombast than usual. (It’s true that he started to relapse into bluster a bit toward the end, but he’s got plenty of time to learn. Give him a few weeks and he’ll seem almost like a normal person.) And that stage! He’s got the whole American flag thing going, along with a setup designed to look like it’s straight out of the White House briefing room. He’s even taking questions like an ordinary politician.

And just to make it all perfect, he’s got his own personal flunky now. Chris Christie, having sold his soul four days ago, was required to stand dutifully behind Trump the entire time. It looked excruciating. But that’s life in Trumpland. If Christie didn’t know this before, he does now.

In any case, this is the stage of the race in which Trump starts to calm down a bit so that all the Republicans who loathe him can start telling themselves that maybe he’s not so bad after all. With any luck, by August they’ll have completely forgotten that they once thought he was a crypto-fascist demagogue and racist. You’ll know this transformation is happening when people start commenting that he’s “really grown” since those tumultuous early days of the primaries. Stay tuned.

The LA Times reports that millennials still aren’t buying homes the way their parents did:

The last three years of recovery and job growth have raised hopes that millennials, adults under 35 years old, will soon be crowding open houses and kicking the slow-moving home-building industry into higher gear….Trouble is, the housing market itself faces powerful head winds. Changes in demographics and in the industry have held back demand and supply. Neither is likely to be unleashed any time soon.

Surveys by the National Assn. of Home Builders show that less than 20% of new construction in recent years has been for entry-level properties. Before the recession, that share typically hovered around 30%….“This is the first time in the supply history of housing where, for whatever reason, a giant new generation is not being served,” said G.U. Krueger, a Los Angeles housing economist who does research for CalPERS’ advisors and other investors. “To me, it’s incomprehensible.”

This might not be quite as incomprehensible as Krueger thinks. Via Calculated Risk, here’s the Case-Shiller index of housing prices:

Housing prices haven’t returned to their pre-crash highs, but they’ve recovered quite a bit. Roughly speaking, they’re about 80-100 percent higher than they were in 2000.

And how have millennials done since then? According to census data, the median 25-34 year old earned about $35,000 in 2000. The median 25-34 year old household earned $61,000.

In 2014, adjusted for inflation, median millennial income was down to $31,000. Median household income was down to $54,000.

In other words, millennial income is down about 10 percent while house prices are up 80-100 percent. Just in the past four years alone, housing prices are up by a third. This makes things a lot more comprehensible: millennials just can’t afford the housing market these days. Unlike boomers and some Xers, they don’t have an existing house that’s appreciated, which helps offset the cost of a new house. Nor do they have faith that housing prices will rise forever, which might tempt them into buying a house even if they had to borrow and scrimp. Millennials who earn more than average will still buy homes, but they have to be farther above the average than in the past, and that means there are fewer of them.

Maybe I’m missing something, but this doesn’t seem all that hard to understand. If I were a home builder, I probably wouldn’t build a lot of starter homes either. There just aren’t that many starters out there who can afford to buy them anymore.

In response to my final post of last night, I got this in comments:

GreenAnura: Two days straight, nothing but Donald Trump posts. Will we go a third day?

SpecialNewb: Maybe we’ll get a post on how the media is covering Trump too much.

Oof. A touch, I do confess. But Quiddity comes to my rescue:

Since 21 January (arbitrary start date), over 40 days, Kevin has made 48 posts critical of Trump out of a total of 228. That’s 1 per 4.75.

Data! Now we’re talking. And 21 percent isn’t so bad, is it? Especially when all these posts have been monolithically critical of DJT.

Still, this hits me at a sore spot. Yesterday I didn’t post much. That wasn’t because I was snoozing the day away or playing hooky at the movies. It’s because I wrote three straight Trump posts and couldn’t stand the thought of writing another. Unfortunately, with everyone finally coming to the conclusion that Trump is actually going to win the Republican race, the political news is nonstop Trump. I couldn’t really find anything else to write about, so I gave up. I finally wrote another post in the evening, but it was about….Donald Trump.

Then this morning I started out with yet another post about Trump. Finally, just before lunch, I wrote a post about Apple and the FBI. My streak was broken! Hooray! But today is Super Tuesday, so it’s not likely to last. Aside from some Bernie/Hillary news, today is going to be all about Trump.

I genuinely feel conflicted about this. I really hate being consumed by Trump. But these days, is there any bigger news in American politics? What to do?

And is this yet another post about Trump? Or should it be filed under “navel gazing”? I’ll let Quiddity decide.

The FBI wants Apple to produce a special version of its iPhone operating system that will allow them to hack into the phone of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino terrorists. They’ve generally been trying to portray this as a limited request that applies to just one case, but in testimony before Congress today they acknowledged explicitly that this isn’t true:

FBI Director James B. Comey appeared first, and while the Justice Department has tried to cast the issue as narrowly focused on one iPhone, he acknowledged early in the hearing that if the government succeeds in this case it could set a precedent for other cases.

….Comey acknowledged in his testimony Tuesday afternoon that this case could potentially set a precedent, pointing out that the same could be true of the ruling a day earlier in New York. “That’s just the way the law works, which I happen to think is a good thing,” he said.

If the federal government prevails here, Comey said they could go back and seek assistance in unlocking other devices in the future. But he also said that the larger questions about balancing encryption and the needs of law enforcement would not be resolved by a decision here.

This is the fundamental problem. When most people think about a “backdoor” for an encrypted device, they picture a master password of some kind. The danger, of course, is that if one person has that password, someone else might be able to get hold of it too.

But backdoors come in lots of flavors. The FBI wants a special version of iOS that allows them to try thousands of passcodes without bricking the phone. But engineers have to write that code. It gets stored in Apple’s version control system. Maintenance engineers update it when new iPhones come out. Librarians keep track of it. Other librarians make sure it’s backed up. That’s a lot of people who know how to access a very valuable piece of code. How safe do you think it would  be?

No telling. And even if you trust Apple’s legendary security, how about Microsoft’s? Or Google’s? Or Samsung’s? Once you build a backdoor, you’ve compromised security for everyone. This is the problem Congress has to deal with.

For years, liberals have been arguing that the Republican Party is built on appeals to racist sentiment. It’s gotten subtler over time, but it’s still there. Sometimes it’s overt, other times it merely takes the form of tolerating racial animus in others. Sometimes it comes wrapped in a policy package, other times it’s wrapped in dog whistles. Either way, it’s all part of the GOP’s electoral strategy. They know their base well.

Republicans, needless to say, don’t take kindly to this. It’s all phony and cynical, a way for liberals to take principled differences and turn them into racial appeals of their own. Sure, there may be racists who vote for Republicans, but there are plenty who vote for Democrats too. It’s liberals who are addicted to playing the race card.

But now we’re living through the era of Donald Trump. He started his campaign on a racial note, suggesting that Mexicans who immigrated to the US illegally were largely murderers and rapists. He’s proposed a ban on Muslims visiting the United States. He has made China, Japan, and Mexico his scapegoats for lost American jobs. He was one of the original birthers, and to this day refuses to renounce it. This weekend, on national TV, he declined to condemn the Ku Klux Klan or disavow the support of white supremacists. All of this has had the effect of making him relentlessly more popular with the Republican base. Over at the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens is appalled:

It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years. Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate, he will not win the presidency, but he will help vindicate the left’s ugly indictment. It will be left to decent conservatives to pick up the pieces—and what’s left of the party.

A few days ago, I asked liberals to oppose Trump. It was a straight-up moral pitch. Sure, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz would be harder to beat than Trump, but a better chance of winning the presidency wasn’t worth the cost of boosting the fortunes of a racist thug like Trump. At a level deep in our souls, a Trump campaign—to say nothing of a possible Trump victory—is bad for liberalism and bad for the country. We should do the right thing by fighting Trump at every turn and taking our chances in November.

But when it comes to doing the right thing, it’s conservatives who truly have the tough choice this year. Trump looks likely to win the Republican nomination, and that means the right thing for them to do is to literally hand the presidency to Hillary Clinton. Can you imagine how hard that’s going to be? Hillary Clinton! And we’re asking them to vote for her. Or, at the very least, to campaign against Trump and cast a protest vote. Either way, they’re giving up their chance to kill Obamacare, to nominate a Supreme Court judge, to restore religious liberty as they see it, and to repeal all those executive orders they hate.

Will they do it? I don’t know, but it’s no joke to say that I feel their pain. All the cynicism and schadenfreude in the world can’t mask how hard this is going to be. Conservatives are about to be tested as few political movements ever are.

My sister is not happy about John Oliver dragging our family name into the spotlight of the Donald Trump media frenzy. Meh. If our family name has even the tiniest power to make Trump look ridiculous, the world is welcome to it. But I will at least say this: we Drums are from Ulmet, not Kallstadt. Totally different village, a good 30 miles away. We Ulmetites are solid, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth types.