Here is Hilbert resting magnificently on his red blanket on my desk. Upstairs, he has a gray-and-white polka dot blanket on Marian’s desk. I really need to clean this thing over the weekend. At this point, I think there might be more cat fur than actual blanket on my desk.

Apparently Donald Trump has promised to appoint Chris Christie attorney general. Or secretary of state. Or, I dunno, maybe Christie will be in charge of a special task force to lock up Marco Rubio and his entire family in Guantanamo Bay and take their oil. Bada bing. It’s a mystery.

Not much is happening in the Democratic race in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders seems to have given up, and there’s been only one new poll in the last week. Still, just for the record, here are the final Pollster aggregates one day before the primary. Hillary Clinton continues to lead by more than 20 points.

If the future of my country weren’t at stake, I’d say that things are getting genuinely entertaining in the Republican primary race. Here is Marco Rubio this morning dishing on Donald Trump:

Let me tell you something, last night in the debate, during one of the breaks — two of the breaks — he went backstage, he was having a meltdown. First he had this little makeup thing applying, like, makeup around his mustache because he had one of those sweat mustaches. Then, then he asked for a full-length mirror. I don’t know why, because the podium goes up to here. But he wanted a full-length mirror. Maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet — I don’t know.”

Fabulous! I can’t wait for Ted Cruz to join in too.

But if these guys really want to hit Trump where it hurts, there are two things they need to do. First, they have to get under Trump’s skin. Trump favors torturing the families of terrorists, so maybe going after his family will work. Or pointing out repeatedly how badly he got played in his various deals. Or mocking his vanity. Anything that makes him look ridiculous and provokes an atomic reaction. Second, they need to say things that might actually sway Trump’s supporters. This shouldn’t be hard, since both Rubio and Cruz were born and bred in the tea party movement and supposedly know what makes its supporters tick. There’s no point in saying that Trump lies. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying he’s a racist. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying he’s not ideologically pure. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying that he’s an embarrassment. They don’t care.

So what do they care about? That he’s tough. That he’s not PC. That he takes on the politicians and the media. So that’s where to hit him. Show that he’s all hat and no cattle. Show that he’s afraid to really tell the truth. Badger him on his tax returns. Tell stories about how he kowtows to reporters. And above all: whatever you say, say things outrageous enough to force the media to pay attention to you.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s no need to be obsessively truthful in all this. Take Rubio’s little story above. I imagine it’s true. But if it’s exaggerated a wee bit—well, tell it anyway. And lots more like it. That’s what Trump does. If you can make Trump spend all his time denying that he’s a weenie by picking apart tiny details in your stories, you’re on the road to the White House.

POSTSCRIPT: This is just an aside, but am I the only one who finds it a little creepy that apparently Rubio can change his personality on a dime? I mean, he seems to have decided a couple of days ago to become a young Donald Trump, and he’s already doing a bang-up job. I think that even most professional actors would have trouble learning a new part that quickly.

Last night I suggested that under the pressure of the debate, Donald Trump had flubbed by saying that America has the highest taxes in the world. Via email, a friend corrects me:

No, it wasn’t a flub. He’s been saying that for weeks, that we have the highest taxes in the world, full stop. Nothing about corporate or business. Media has such a hard time keeping up with all the crap that comes out of his mouth, they just haven’t gotten around to highlighting this one, but he’s been saying it repeatedly in both interviews and his rallies.

Sigh. I realize this is just spitting into the wind, but here’s the total tax bill for every OECD country as of 2012. This is everything: federal, state, payroll, excise, sales tax, property tax, etc. Everything:

We don’t pay the highest taxes. We pay the lowest except for Chile and Mexico, which belong to the OECD only by courtesy in the first place. They’re both poor countries with average wages about a quarter of ours.

But I guess this is just more of those lying government statistics. Unemployment is really 42 percent. Illegal immigration is skyrocketing. Obamacare premiums are up 30, 40, 50 percent. American taxes are the highest in the world.

Well, hell. If I believed that stuff—and why wouldn’t I if I were some ordinary rube listening to Trump speak?—I suppose I’d vote for Trump too. This is yet another example of the conservative movement creating its own Frankenstein. Fox and Rush and Heritage and all the rest of them have been hawking phony statistics for years, and now Trump is beating them at their own game. He’s realized that you don’t have to offer any fancy explanations and you don’t have to stretch the truth only a little bit. You can just say anything you want. And now all the folks that have spent years lying just a little bit are aghast.

Is it the weekend yet?

The saga of Gerald Friedman’s analysis of Bernie Sanders’ domestic spending plan continues. I initially said it was ridiculously optimistic, but then backed off a little bit. In the meantime, defenders of Sanders and Friedman demanded that critics do an actual analysis of the plan before slagging it further. So now Christina and David Romer have done that. It’s not pretty:

Unfortunately, careful examination of Friedman’s work confirms the old adage, “if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

….Friedman says that the additional spending under the proposed policies would rise from $300 billion in the first year to close to $600 billion in the fifth….An output increase of 9% in 2026 from this amount of spending is grossly out of line with all existing evidence about the impact of changes in government spending…..Friedman’s figures for the effect of additional government spending exceed conventional ones by at least a factor of four.

We have a conjecture about how Friedman may have incorrectly found such large effects. Suppose one is considering a permanent increase in government spending of 1% of GDP….Then one might be tempted to think that the program would raise output growth each year by a percentage point….In fact, however, in this scenario there is no additional stimulus after the first year….The impact on the level of output after a decade would be only 1%.

….A second problem with Friedman’s analysis is that even if the estimated effects of Senator Sanders’s policies on demand were correct, it is highly unlikely that the impact on output that he foresees could actually come to pass….Friedman’s focus on demand-side effects is the assumption that there is currently a very large output gap….However, a wide range of evidence suggests that while there is likely some output gap currently, it is not nearly large enough to accommodate growth of 5.3% per year for ten years.

….The bottom line of our evaluation of Professor Friedman’s analysis is that it is highly deficient. The estimated demand-induced effects of Senator Sanders’s policies are not just implausibly large but literally incredible. Moreover, even if they were not deeply flawed, Freidman’s enormous estimates of demand-fueled growth could not and would not come to pass. Even very generous estimates of the amount of slack still present in the American economy would not be enough to accommodate demand-driven growth of anything near what Friedman is estimating. As a result, inflation would soar and monetary policy would swing strongly to counteract them. Finally, a realistic evaluation of the impact of Senator Sanders’s policies on productive capacity (something that is neglected in Friedman’s analysis) suggests that those impacts are likely small and possibly negative.

This is brutal. As near as I can tell, the Romers are basically suggesting that Friedman’s paper might generously get a C- if it were turned in by an undergraduate art history major. It’s riddled with basic mistakes. Sanders may or may not have good ideas about how to reform America’s spending priorities, but their impact on the economy would be modest, not huge.

Well, that was bracing. Rubio and Cruz obviously both decided to take on Donald Trump at the same time, and they actually gave Trump some trouble. Aside from simply attacking him more than usual, they adopted the Trumpian tactic of interrupting at every opportunity so he had a hard time responding coherently. The downside is that it made the whole debate look a bit like kindergarten play time. The upside is that they finally got under Trump’s skin.

Trump ran into a couple of land mines tonight. Asked about his tax returns, he made up a feeble excuse about how he’s always being audited and that’s why he can’t release his returns. He could release them anyway, of course, and he can certainly release returns from a few years ago, since presumably those audits are done. He’s going to have to address that, though he can probably bluster his way past it long enough to get through Super Tuesday. In any case, Trump tried to make it look like he’s being persecuted by the IRS with all these audits, but Rubio and Cruz now have a really good attack line: If Trump is being audited, maybe there’s something fishy going on. Shouldn’t the public know about that?

The other land mine was on health care. Dana Bash joined Cruz and Rubio in pressing Trump on whether there was anything more to his health care plan than simply allowing insurance companies to compete across the entire country (in debatespeak, this was “getting rid of the lines”). Oddly enough, Trump allowed himself to get pressured into saying that this was literally his entire plan, which even for Trump strains the boundaries of idiocy. “Getting rid of the lines” might or might not be a good idea (it’s probably a good idea if it’s properly regulated), but its effect on health care costs would be quite modest. Beyond that, suggesting that insurance companies would all be happy to insure people with pre-existing conditions if the lines were eliminated—well, I’m not sure what to say about that. It’s fantasy land.

Trump had a minor hiccup when he claimed that the US has the highest taxes in the world. He probably meant to say that we have the highest corporate rates—which is close to true if you look at statutory rates—but instead he insisted that this applied to everything: “We pay more business tax, we pay more personal tax. We have the highest taxes in the world.” That’s basically the opposite of the truth. But I suppose this is the kind of flub that never seems to hurt him.

A bigger flub was his preposterous claim that he didn’t support the Libya war. There’s clear and abundant evidence that he did and it’s all available on YouTube. These kinds of shameless lies never seem to hurt him, though. I’m not sure if this time will be any different.

Best line of the night: After Trump reminded everyone about Rubio’s repeat-o-matic meltdown a couple of weeks ago, Rubio produced the night’s best zinger: “I see him repeat himself every night, he says five things: everyone’s dumb, he’s gonna make America great again, we’re going to win, win win, he’s winning in the polls, and the lines around the state. Every night.” It’s funny because it’s true! And I’m not even sure if it was rehearsed.

Scorecard: I think Trump took some real hits tonight. He could start to lose a few points in the polls, especially if he spends the next week fending off questions about his tax returns and his $1 million fine and his health care plan. Rubio and Cruz both did well, but I give Rubio the edge. His attacks were a little sharper and the rest of his debate performance was a little better. Carson and Kasich were, of course, nonentities. Never has it been so obvious that no one cares about them anymore.

Debate transcript here.

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10:53 – And that’s a wrap.

10:52 – Trump: Politicians are all talk, no action. Vote Trump!

10:51 – Cruz: Blah blah blah. He’ll do everything.

10:50 – Rubio: The time for games is over. We need to bring an end to “the silliness, the looniness.”

10:50 – Kasich says he has loads of experience. He wants people to “think about” giving him their vote.

10:49 – Closing statements! Carson says his hands have saved lots of lives.

10:44 – When are we going to get a question about general relativity?

10:39 – Kasich thinks President Obama should have brokered an agreement with Apple. You bet. That would have worked great.

10:36 – Rubio says the government isn’t asking Apple to create a backdoor for the iPhone. In fact, that’s exactly what they’re asking for. Rubio clearly has no idea what a backdoor is.

10:34 – Wolf has completely lost control of this debate. In fairness, I’m not sure anyone could do any better.

10:32 – Cruz does an extended riff on Trump being a liar. Trump responds with an attack on Cruz for his Iowa shenanigans.

10:30 – Trump, Cruz, and Rubio are now in a three-way fight. Trump: “He’s a choke artist [Rubio] and he’s a liar [Cruz].”

10:25 – Donald Trump is not just criticizing the Libya war, he’s literally praising Qaddafi. He’s also claiming he didn’t support the Libya war, which is demonstrably a huge whopper. He was quite vigorous in his support.

10:21 – Carson whines about not getting called on. This is true, but it’s because no one cares about him anymore. Now that he finally gets some time, he complains that the IRS suddenly started auditing him after he began criticizing President Obama. The IRS is corrupt and it should be eliminated.

10:17 – Wolf asks about North Korea. Trump wanders off on the $21 trillion deficit. “We can’t afford to defend everyone.” Japan, Korea, Europe, they should all be paying us to defend them.

10:15 – The Rubio-Cruz-Trump fights have been great! The gloves are finally off, I guess. I wonder if it’s doing Trump any damage?

10:10 – Trump says he doesn’t want to take sides between Israel and the Palestinians. “But I’m totally pro-Israel.” Okey doke.

10:07 – Cruz asks again why Trump won’t release past tax returns. Trump: I’m being audited. Cruz: How many years? Trump: Four or five. (It was two or three ten minutes ago.) Unfortunately, Wolf goes to a commercial just as it gets good. Trump really has no excuse for not releasing returns from before the years he’s being audited. He blew it big time on this. He should never have used the audits as an excuse.

10:05 – Marian is distracted. She says the debate background looks like a hot dog.

10:03 – Cruz: The only reason Trump isn’t releasing past returns is because there’s something bad in them.

10:01 – Cruz says Trump needs to release his taxes because he’s being audited. Public needs to know if there’s some kind of fraud the government is investigating.

9:57 – Trump says you don’t learn anything from tax returns. Then he says he’s being audited and he’ll release his tax returns when the audit is done. Uh huh. Hugh Hewitt says Trump promised to release his tax returns on his radio program. Is he going back on his word? Trump says no one heard that because no one listens to Hewitt’s program.

9:53 – Now Wolf pushes Trump on what he’s going to cut to make up for his $10 trillion tax cut. Trump: “Waste fraud and abuse.” That’s it!

9:52 – Trump says we have the highest taxes in the world. Naturally Wolf doesn’t question this. Even for Trump, this is wildly removed from reality.

9:50 – Now Cruz going after Trump on health care too. Wolf wants to move on, but no one will let him.

9:43 – Hmmm. Rubio must have been practicing holding his ground against a loudmouth. He’s dishing pretty well against Trump.

9:41 – Bash asks Trump to talk more about his health care plan. He drones on some more about the lines. Bash: “Is there anything you’d like to add to that?” Trump: “No! There’s nothing to add. What’s to add?”

9:39 – Trump: I watched Rubio melt down two weeks ago. Rubio: Trump only knows five things: Everyone’s dumb, we’re going to make America great again, win win win, we’re leading in the polls, and lines around the states. Bash breaks up the fight.

9:38 – Trump: Rubio doesn’t know about the lines. Rubio, sarcastically: That’s it? What’s your plan? Trump: You’ll have so many different plans. It’ll be beautiful.

9:36 – Bash: “Getting rid of state lines will solve all our health insurance problems?” Trump: You betcha.

9:35 – Trump says insurance companies are wrong when they say they need a mandate if they’re required to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Just another insurance company hustle.

9:33 – Zzzzz. Rubio reciting his index card on health care.

9:29 – Rubio says Trump was pro-life until recently. He wouldn’t trust him to appoint judges who defend religious freedom.

9:27 – Trump now hares off on a spiel about Cruz attacking his sister. He wants an apology. Cruz isn’t buying.

9:25 – Trump goes off on a tangent about Ted Cruz supporting the appointment of John Roberts, who allowed Obamacare to stand. Cruz throws Roberts under a bus, saying he only supported him because he was the nominee of the party.

9:22 – Cruz refuses to say whether he’d trust Donald Trump to appoint conservative justices.

9:20 – Trump: Hispanics love him, Univision loves him. He’ll be the greatest president for Hispanics ever.

9:09 – Trump accuses Rubio of lying. Rubio accuses Trump of lying. Trump says it was 30 years ago. Rubio: “I guess there’s a statute of limitation on lies.”

9:06 – Rubio now asking people to google “Trump Polish workers.” I think they were Romanian workers, but whatever. Then some stuff about Trump going bankrupt and Trump University getting sued. Then Trump goes after Rubio for his mortgage. Then they just start shouting at each other. Update: I misheard. Trump got in trouble for hiring Polish workers 30 years ago. The Romanians are the ones he hires at Mar-a-Lago today. Trump sure does seem to love Eastern Europeans, doesn’t he?

9:03 – How is Trump going to get Mexico to pay for the wall? Trump doesn’t answer, of course. He starts ranting about the president of Mexico using a bad word on television.

8:56 – Trump is now just randomly insulting Cruz for not having any friends.

8:54 – Rubio doing his best to take on Trump over immigration: he hired illegal immigrants and paid a fine, he hired foreigners at Mar-a-Lago, etc. Seems to have drawn a little blood.

8:45 – Kasich, Rubio, and Cruz are having none of Carson-geddon. America is great, anyone can become president, etc.

8:42 – Ben Carson starts off apocalyptic: “America is heading off the abyss of destruction.” Um….

8:40 – Hey! The debate is starting already? I guess I screwed up. I thought 8:30 was for the pregame chitchat. But it looks like we’ll be starting up any second.

A few hours ago I wondered why none of the other Republican candidates has seriously attacked Donald Trump. I got a bunch of responses, most of which related to policy. They can’t attack him for his xenophobia because most of them support the same policies he does (against Muslim immigration, for a border wall, etc.). They can’t attack him for his crazy tax plan because they all have crazy tax plans. They can’t attack him for wanting to steal Iraq’s oil because Republican voters probably think that sounds like a great idea.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. After all, Trump doesn’t generally attack his rivals at a policy level. He branded Jeb Bush for all eternity by calling him low energy. He got under Ted Cruz’s skin by suggesting he wasn’t a natural-born citizen. He went after Ben Carson by see-sawing between (in Conor Friedersdorf’s words) “implying that Carson is an unstable thug who can’t be trusted in office because of violent things that he wrote about in his memoir, and declaring that his memoir is obvious bullshit that only dupes would believe.”

In other words, forget about policy. Make it personal. Go after Trump for being a crappy businessman. Go after him for his serial affairs and divorces. Go after him for refusing to open his company’s books or his tax returns. Go after him for his miserly record of charitable giving. Go after him for trying to kick an old lady out of her house. More generally, I’m sure the other candidates all set their oppo dogs loose long ago. That’s what you do in campaigns. So what did they find?

Oh wait:

Multiple Republican campaign sources and operatives have confided that none of the remaining candidates for president have completed a major anti-Trump opposition research effort….Presented with that void, outside conservative groups have frantically moved to cobble something together….The same was true with a professional opposition researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity. This past fall, she decided to start digging into Trump as a side gig to her own job, convinced that the campaign staff either wasn’t up to the task or were too unfamiliar with bankruptcy and SEC filings (as opposed to more traditional political documents).

“They didn’t know how to get a grip on it,” the researcher said. “It’s just being able to connect the dots and to know where to work.”

….It is treated as a truism among Republicans that a vast reservoir of damaging opposition research remains untouched. It’s a suspicion that Democrats aren’t challenging. Indeed, one Democratic opposition research said that they’ve spent the past eight months compiling material on Trump as he’s risen up the ranks. That’s actually not a lot of time. Democrats had started focusing on Mitt Romney in 2009 — a full two years before he ran again for the presidency. But those eight months have produced some good.

That researcher estimated that of all the material they’ve compiled — court and property records, newspaper clips and videos — approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.

Holy shit. This is malpractice on a grand scale. With all the money sloshing around the primary, nobody could manage to find a few million bucks to put together a professional ratfucking operation? Republicans really are losing their mojo.

I have run out of excuses. I don’t have any house guests. I’m not going out to dinner tonight. Nobody is celebrating a birthday. My computer and I are fully available to liveblog tonight’s Republican debate.

So I shall. It “starts” at 8:30 pm Eastern on CNN, but it really starts at 9 pm. See you then.

A few hours after declaring that he had no plans to attack Donald Trump—“I didn’t run for office to tear up other Republicans”—Marco Rubio launched this attack on Donald Trump:

At a rally late yesterday, Rubio called out Trump by name and faulted him for being insufficiently hostile to Obamacare and insufficiently supportive of Israel. “He thinks parts of Obamacare are pretty good,” Rubio scoffed, before casting himself as the only true scourge of the law. Rubio noted that Trump “has said he’s not going to take sides on Israel versus the Palestinians because he wants to be an honest broker.”

News reports marvel at the fact that Rubio mentioned Trump by name. Greg Sargent calls his attack “searing.” I call it…what? Pathetic? Mystifying? An attack deliberately meant to fail?

Come on. Even tea partiers like the part of Obamacare that protects people with pre-existing conditions, and that’s the part Trump says he supports. And with the exception of Rubio’s neocon pals, even hardcore Republicans don’t much object to candidates keeping up a pretense of being honest brokers between the Israelis and Palestinians. They all know it’s done with a wink and a nudge.

In other words, Rubio is “attacking” Trump on the very things that will hurt him the least. So what’s the point? Even in the realm of 11-dimensional chess I can’t figure this out. If anything, this “attack” is likely to help Trump, not hurt him.

There are, needless to say, lots of puzzling and mysterious features of the Donald Trump phenomenon. But surely one of the most puzzling is the weird aversion that all the other candidates have to really going after him. I’m not talking here about the fact that attacks don’t seem to have much effect on Trump. I’m talking about the fact that no one has been willing to mount any kind of sustained, powerful attack at all. It’s crazy. These guys are Republicans. They were born to attack. It’s the party of Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It’s the party of Willie Horton and the Arkansas Project and swift boating. But all we’ve seen against Trump are the occasional hesitant pitty-pats.

WTF is going on? I know all about the collective action issue blah blah blah. That’s not enough. Trump has been the frontrunner for months, and it’s obvious that his supporters value toughness. Take down the alpha, and you get the alpha’s followers. What is everyone so afraid of?