David Pecker, owner of the National Enquirer and its infamous safe.Jennifer Podis/The Palm Beach Post/ZUMAPRESS

Last week we all heard about “the safe,” the legendary repository of decades of dirt on Donald Trump that had been dug up and then faithfully reburied by the National Enquirer. Today, the New York Times reports that Trump has always been interested in more than just paying hush money via the Enquirer to women he’s had affairs with. He wants the whole safe:

He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates….“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording.

The move by Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen indicated just how concerned they were about all the information amassed by the company, American Media, and its chairman, David Pecker, a loyal Trump ally of two decades who has cooperated with investigators….There was perennial talk about American Media’s business troubles. And Mr. Trump appeared to take a world-wearier view of the wisdom of leaving his sensitive personal secrets in someone else’s hands:

“Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Pecker in a conversation with Mr. Cohen, musing about an unfortunate mishap befalling his good friend.

Nobody knows what’s in the safe, and given Trump’s reputation it’s possible it contains nothing that could really do him any harm. Then again, it might contain plenty. At the very least, there’s evidence that Trump was and is worried about it.

A question for Republicans: How nervous are you with the knowledge that reams of blackmail material might exist that could be used against the president of the United States? And keep in mind that this is material that’s merely locked in an ordinary safe—no fancy encryption, no firewall, no passwords that need to be hacked—and, for all anyone knows, has already been stolen? Does that bother you?

It seems to bother Trump.

Demonstrators gather in April to protest the fatal police shooting of Crown Heights native Saheed Vassell on Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street.Taidgh Barron/ZUMA

Atrios declares Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post one of America’s Worst Humans today. The link goes to the Splinter’s Katherine Krueger, who explains:

Gather ‘round before I have a fucking stroke.

Kessler’s “analysis” column was responding to a reader who asked about a viral [Beto] O’Rourke clip, during which the congressman, who is running against Ted Cruz, says: “Black men, unarmed, black teenagers, unarmed, and black children, unarmed, are being killed at a frightening level right now, including by members of law enforcement without accountability and without justice.”

But Glenn, tell me, are we really killing so many unarmed black kids?…Perhaps most egregiously, Kessler cast aside the case of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was murdered by a police officer while holding a toy gun….So, the “frightening” part is NOT that police officers are gunning down literal children in our streets. In fact—*shoving glasses up nose, sniveling wildly*—that’s actually statistically quite rare, you see!! As if the very idea that police are killing anyone, particularly children, in our streets AT ALL is not “frightening” enough. This column is what happens when you’re straining so hard to uphold some misplaced standard of “objectivity” and are so horned up about delineating fact from fiction that you lose any sense of moral clarity

Kessler’s moral clarity is perfectly fine. The question from his reader was about whether police are killing unarmed black kids at “frightening levels.” He concludes that they aren’t, and he’s right. Here’s a recent paper that examines the number of all unarmed suspects killed by police in 2014 (the year Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson) and 2015:

Another component of the national debate is that police are wantonly killing unarmed suspects, especially if they are black. We find no support for this claim in our data….Less than 1 percent of the victims of police killing in our data were unarmed. In other words, police killings of unarmed suspects—especially unarmed black men—garner massive media coverage (and not without reason), but they are far less common than the prevailing narrative suggests.

“Less than 1 percent.” How much less than 1 percent? The authors seem oddly reticent to provide a number, but it slips out a few paragraphs later:

Next, we turn to the important question of whether there are racial disparities in officer killings of unarmed or less threatening suspects. However, as noted earlier, the extremely low number of killings of unarmed suspects undercuts this claim from the start. Indeed, there are so few killings of unarmed suspects that those killings (n = 4) cannot be statistically scrutinized.

According to this paper, there were two (2) police killings of unarmed suspects each year. That’s all suspects—all races and all ages. Kessler, by contrast, uses an independent Washington Post database that contains more detail on age and race, and concludes that during the period 2015-2018 there was at most one shooting of an unarmed black child (it depends on whether you consider 12-year-old Tamir Rice “armed” because he had a toy gun). Among older children during the same years, police killed three unarmed black teens and six unarmed teens who were white or Hispanic. Altogether, Kessler counts roughly one unarmed child and two unarmed teens of all races who were killed by police each year.

(Things change when we get to adults, but the number depends a lot on how you defined “armed”: Do you count only guns as arms, or do you also count knives, bats, etc? Kessler doesn’t count knives and other weapons and therefore concludes that 90 unarmed black adults were killed over the course of four years. The other study counts anything potentially lethal as “armed,” and thus finds only a total of four killings of unarmed adults over the course of two years.)

There is nothing wrong with any of this. Are unarmed children being gunned down by police at harrowing levels? Obviously not, if this data is correct. Are unarmed suspects in general being gunned down at massive levels? It turns out that this depends on whether you count someone wielding a knife as “unarmed.”

I have my issues with fact checkers, but this one is perfectly fine. Nonetheless, Kessler obviously knows he’s going to get his ass handed to him merely for addressing this question with anything other than the usual bromides:

There’s little question the black community faces extraordinary levels of violence. But whether O’Rouke’s statement qualifies as Pinocchio or Geppetto-worthy depends on how you hear it. There have been virtually no shootings of unarmed children by police in the past five years. But hundreds of black children have been homicide victims.
Given the varying interpretations of O’Rouke’s statement, we won’t offer a rating. But readers are welcome to provide their own judgment below.

Go ahead, @ me.

Yesterday I challenged you to figure out why working-class white voters identified themselves with the Democratic Party quite stably for nearly two decades—including 2008, when about half of them voted for Obama—but then suddenly abandoned the party in big numbers starting a year after Obama was elected. The most common guess had to do with the tanking of the economy, but that doesn’t really work. There have have been good times and bad times ever since World War II, and the bad times don’t routinely cause working class whites to abandon the Democratic Party. Besides, if that were the case, you’d expect this group to steadily return to the party after about 2012, when the economy recovered. They didn’t.

No, it’s something else. To help you out, here’s another chart. It’s from the Wall Street Journal, and it shows gun sales suddenly rising starting in 2009 and then suddenly slumping after 2016. Sales were high during the Obama era, and only during the Obama era.

What could be the cause of this? Whatever could be the cause?

This is last month’s full moon, rising above the dome of the Greek Orthodox church across the street from me. I remember taking a similar picture a couple of years ago, and it turns out the surrounding trees have grown a lot since then. There are now only one or two very narrow sightlines that allow a picture like this. Everything else looking in this direction is blocked by trees, fences, and light poles.

By the way, this is a composite picture, like pretty much every picture of the full moon. If I expose this shot correctly to get the dome and the cross, the moon is just a blown-out white blur—which means the best time to take moon pictures is just before sunset, when both the moon and the terrestrial surroundings are about equally bright. Unfortunately, that usually kills the color. It’s always something, isn’t it? In this case, I took separate exposures of the dome and the moon and then overlaid them in Photoshop.

Donald Trump is really getting desperate:

What’s going on at @CNN is happening, to different degrees, at other networks – with @NBCNews being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2018

I’m sure you haven’t forgotten this, but here’s the tape of Trump’s interview with Lester Holt shortly after he fired James Comey:

This was basically an admission that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation. It’s been out there for more than a year, just sitting around for everyone to hear over and over and over: a bald admission that Trump obstructed justice. For some reason Trump never seemed to understand just how badly he had incriminated himself in this interview, but it sounds like maybe one of his lawyers finally got through to him. So now there’s a new story: Lester Holt fudged the tape!

This is, needless to say, ridiculous and unhinged. Trump must be completely freaked out at this point, and after telling this absurd lie about fudging the tape his lawyers must be freaked out too. Telling an obvious tall tale in an effort to discredit a piece of damaging evidence does nothing except make the evidence even more damaging in a court of law. This whole thing is really starting to come unraveled.

Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA Press

This story hasn’t been retracted since it ran yesterday, so….

President Donald Trump told North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their Singapore summit in June that he’d sign a declaration to end the Korean War soon after their meeting, according to multiple sources familiar with the negotiations. But since then, the Trump administration has repeatedly asked Pyongyang to dismantle most of its nuclear arsenal first, before signing such a document.

….Here’s the background: North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, which started the war….Fighting ceased in 1953, but the warring parties only signed an armistice — a truce — which means the war technically continues to this day….This is one major reason North Korea has oriented its foreign policy around how to deter a future attack by the United States and South Korea, mostly by developing a strong nuclear program that includes around 65 nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach all parts of the US mainland.

But during a New Year’s Day address, Kim noted that he wanted to focus more on improving his country’s economy, which is one of the world’s poorest. To do so, experts tell me, Kim needs a peace declaration to end the Korean War. This would provide political cover for him to denuclearize part — or, less likely, all — of his arsenal.

….It seems like Kim took Trump at his word in Singapore. And in the agreement Kim and Trump signed after their summit, two items about establishing peace between the two countries came before a denuclearization commitment, which helps explain why North Korea thinks a peace declaration should come before nuclear concessions. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly asked Pyongyang to hand over 60 to 70 percent of its nuclear warheads within six to eight months. That pressure angered Kim, a source told me, since the North Korean leader believes he was promised that a signed declaration would come before any nuclear concessions — which may be the reason statements from Pyongyang about nuclear talks have turned increasingly antagonistic.

It’s easy to believe this is true, and it’s pretty nuts. There’s nothing wrong with signing a formal end to the Korean War, of course, but this is something Kim wants. Just like a formal meeting with the American president was something Kim wanted. The idea that the US should give Kim a couple of freebies before he does anything of substance is monumentally naive considering North Korea’s past behavior.

Then again, if Trump really did promise this and then reneged, it would appear to Kim that the United States was once again reverting to its past behavior: making promises and then breaking them at the slightest justification. For example, after the 1994 Agreed Framework was signed, the US routinely missed shipments of heavy oil; failed to build the two light-water reactors it had promised; and refused to remove North Korea from its list of state-sponsored terrorism.

This history convinced Kim that the United States was not a trustworthy negotiating partner. So if it’s happened again, it’s small wonder that Kim is acting badly. It all depends on what Trump really promised Kim, and there’s no formal or informal record of that since Trump doesn’t believe in such things. But it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if Trump cavalierly offered a final peace treaty—which Kim took very seriously—and then got talked out of it by his advisers when he got home. If that’s the case, it explains a lot.

Second-quarter results are in, and it sure is a good time to be a big corporation in America:

But times are fatter for some corporations than others:

So let’s rephrase this: Donald Trump may not have done much for American manufacturing, but it sure is a good time to be a big bank in America!

A little girl and her security blanket at the Orange County Fair.

Well, now, here’s an odd story. A Super PAC associated with Paul Ryan seems to have gotten hold of the entire federal security clearance application for a Democratic candidate challenging Dave Brat’s seat in Virginia. This is a sensitive and highly classified document, of course, especially since Abigail Spanberger used to work for the CIA. How on earth did the Super PAC get its hands on this?

The super PAC released a statement on Tuesday…saying that the document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the United States Postal Service by America Rising, a separate Republican-aligned research firm. “C.L.F. follows the letter of the law in examining any candidate’s background and Ms. Spanberger was no different,” Courtney Alexander, a spokeswoman for the group, said in the statement. The group also released a portion of the security clearance application, blacking out some personal information.

Huh. A FOIA request. Now, as it turns out, a standard FOIA request form makes it pretty easy to ask for someone’s SF-86 form:

Of course, the fact that you can ask for it doesn’t mean you’ll get it. But in this case, BuzzFeed reports that they did:

BuzzFeed News can confirm that an unredacted copy of the federal security clearance application was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by America Rising, a research group allied with the Republican Party, which then shared it with the Congressional Leadership Fund.

….The decision by USPS to release the unredacted document was unusual, FOIA and security clearance expert Bradley Moss, an attorney with Mark S. Zaid, P.C., told BuzzFeed News. The SF-86 form is an extensive and probing questionnaire that asks applicants for all manner of personal background details….“Someone at the USPS FOIA office is getting fired,” Moss said….“SF-86 paperwork is categorically privacy-protected and to my knowledge has never been released through FOIA to a third party absent a privacy waiver,” he added.

So it sounds like America Rising submitted a routine FOIA request, and someone in the Post Office screwed up and sent them everything. Either that, or someone in the Post Office doesn’t like Abigail Spanberger and decided to help out her opponent. I imagine the USPS Inspector General will take a look into this and figure out what happened.

The oddest thing about this whole affair is that apparently America Rising was primarily interested in learning that Spanberger was briefly a teacher at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a school in Virginia funded by the Saudi Arabian government. According to the New York Times, “The super PAC validated that suspicion in its response, going on at some length to try to link the school — called “Terror High” in an earlier news article — to terrorist activity.”

Seriously? That’s what they were after? Jesus.

Here’s a chart for you to ponder over:

Between 1992 and 2008, the identification of the white working class with the Democratic Party stayed pretty stable. No matter who the presidential candidate was—Clinton, Gore, Kerry, or Obama—they were about evenly split beween identifying Democratic and identifying Republican.

That was true all the way up to 2008, when Obama was first elected. But then the white working class suddenly defected to the Republican Party in huge numbers. By 2010, net Democratic ID was -12 percent. By 2012 it was -14 percent. By 2015 it was -22 percent. And by 2016 it was -25 percent.

This all started in 2010, so it wasn’t caused by Mitt Romney. The second plummet started in 2014, so it wasn’t caused by Donald Trump. Fox News got its start in 1996, so it seems unlikely that they were the proximate cause. So what’s your guess? What happened between 2010 and 2015 that suddenly caused the white working class to abandon the Democratic Party in large numbers?