In my Twitter feed, everyone is getting a big kick out of the question on the right from a recent PPP national poll of Republicans. Agrabah, it turns out, is the fictional city where Aladdin lives in the 1992 Disney cartoon. I’ve never seen the movie, so I didn’t know this before today.

Anyway, as much as I applaud PPP for turning their polls into a continuing series of jokes, I think people are taking the wrong lesson from this. Is it shocking that 30 percent of Republicans want to bomb a city they’ve never heard of? Not really. Maybe they confused it with Ar Raqqah, the ISIS capital. Maybe this was just a way of showing that they support a stronger bombing campaign in general. Who knows?

No, the big news here is that 57 percent admitted they weren’t sure. This is amazing. In polls like this, “Not Sure” usually gets about 10 percent, even for questions that it’s dead certain most people have no clue about. Overall, this poll question demonstrates an admirable ability to admit ignorance. That’s far less common than you might think.

Oh come on, now he’s just trolling us for sure:

Brzezinski: Do you like Vladimir Putin’s comments about you?

Trump: Sure. When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.

Scarborough: Well, I mean, also, it’s a person that kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously, that would be a concern, would it not?

Trump: He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.

Scarborough: Yeah. But, again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.

Trump: Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, you know.

Scarborough: What do you mean by that?

Trump: There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me the question. You asked me a different question. So that’s fine.

“Joseph Kony? Bad guy, no doubt about it. But at least he’s a Christian, unlike what we have now. And a tough guy too, a leader. He knows what he wants and he’s willing to fight for it.”

This is turning into a bad Mel Brooks film.

Here’s a depressing story for you. After years of acrimony and negotiations, the various factions who get water from the Klamath River basin finally hammered out a water-sharing agreement in 2008 that was lavishly praised by Rep. Greg Walden, who represents the area. In 2014, the last of the holdouts signed on and it looked like a war that had lasted over a decade might finally be over. But the Republican Party has gone nuts since 2008, and Greg Walden apparently went nuts right along with them:

As it turns out, Walden, a tea party favorite, is now chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which makes him the House’s third-most powerful member. Given Republicans’ views on federal power, you’d think he’d continue to support a bottom-up agreement like this, particularly since the majority of his constituents decided they needed it. But conservative orthodoxy holds that dam removal is never good — apparently even when, as in this case, the dams are antiquated, environmentally disastrous and privately owned, and when nearly every constituency in the community would benefit.

So here is what the basin got for doing everything right. After five years of struggle for congressional approval of the Klamath agreement, the four Democratic senators of California and Oregon introduced authorizing legislation in January. But this month, just ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline dissolving the agreement if it hasn’t gained Congress’ approval by then, Walden unveiled a draft House bill that will almost surely kill the deal. It omits dam removal — the agreement’s centerpiece — and includes an unrelated provision to turn over 200,000 acres of federal timberland to two counties on the California-Oregon border. Given the new provision’s controversial content and the timing of the House bill, Walden must have known it had no chance of passage. In essence, his move consigned the Klamath’s “best and longest-lasting solution” to Washington’s black hole.

It’s just obstruction for the sake of obstruction. Or because Walden hates the Obama administration, which OKed the deal. Or, perhaps he did it for the sake of some particular interest group that’s donated money to him. Who knows? It’s insanity.

From Vox:

If you’ve seen Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens (and by now, you probably have)….

This was written at 7:20 am. The film had been showing for less than twelve hours. Still, this kind of attitude makes me nostalgic. If I were 19 again, this would have applied to me too.

Apparently Donald Trump can literally say anything now and get away with it. Here he is on Vladimir Putin’s comments from this morning:

“It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” Trump said in a statement. “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”

No doubt—though this “highly respected” man is now directly threatening American military forces in a crucial area of Syria: “Earlier this month, Moscow deployed an SA-17 advanced air defense system near the area and began ‘painting’ U.S. planes, targeting them with radar in what U.S. officials said was a direct and dangerous provocation.” No worries, though. Trump apparently thinks Putin is a great guy who’s eager to restore world peace.

By the way, I notice that most news stories about Putin have started to distance themselves from suggesting that he called Trump “brilliant” or “outstanding.” They’re now more correctly translating Putin’s description as “lively” or “colorful.” Nonetheless, the media still seems to be on the “budding bromance” bandwagon, even though Putin didn’t really say anything complimentary about Trump. I wonder if Trump will change his tune once he finds out?

Republicans and Democrats have agreed on a year-end budget package that will increase the deficit by around $500 billion or so. There’s been a bit of grumbling about the bill from the Republican side, but mostly it’s not about the spending. It’s about the lack of shutdown bait like defunding Planned Parenthood and banning Syrian refugees. Paul Waldman comments:

Let’s be honest: despite all their talk about what we’re handing to the next generation and how government should balance its books just like a family does, when it comes down to actually making choices, Republicans are no more concerned about deficits than Democrats are. Crying about the deficit is a tool they use to constrain policies they don’t like. When it comes to the policies they do like, how much the government will have to borrow to fund them is barely an afterthought. So can we stop pretending they actually care about deficits?

I doubt it. Loads of people have been making this very simple point for years and years, but it’s done no good despite the plain evidence of the past few decades. Reaganomics was explicitly built on the idea that Republicans had paid far too much attention to deficits in the past. George Bush the Elder passed a budget bill that actually did reduce the deficit, and was pilloried for it. George Bush Jr. blew up the deficit with tax cuts and Republicans thought it was great. Over the past 35 years, the only time Republicans have seriously tried to rein in the deficit was during the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Republicans routinely insist that they care deeply about balanced budgets, and just as routinely this claim gets reported at face value. All the evidence in the world points in exactly the opposite direction, but it doesn’t matter: the conventions of journalism require reporters to pass along what politicians say, not what they mean. Overall, this is probably a good thing. But it sure does make it hard for the average Joe to understand what’s really going on.

LA Times reporter Michael Hiltzik has spent time reporting from Russia and speaks the language well. Via email, he offers this explanation of what Vladimir Putin really said about Donald Trump today:

From what I can hear from the video you posted, he calls Trump a “yarkom chelovekom.” In my dictionary, “yarkii” can be “clear, bright, dazzling.” You sometimes hear Russians using the term to denote the bright sky of a bracing, clear morning.

Brilliant I think would be wrong to the extent it connotes intelligence—that’s not what Putin’s driving at. Outstanding is a pretty lazy translation. Bright personality captures the meaning, but not the idiomatic tone, of the word. Very colorful is downplaying the real meaning.

I’d go with something like vivid. The word also could mean garish, but I think Putin was trying to be complimentary, and garish would be criticism.

I’d guess that the reason all the translations agree on “talented” is that —though I can’t hear it in the clip—Putin probably used “talantlivii,” which is a common Russian adjective, stolen from the French.

So Putin was probably just trying to say that Trump is a big personality. Hiltzik says—and I agree—that Putin wasn’t especially trying to say anything either good or bad about Trump—though knowing Putin, it’s a good guess that he approves of big personalities. Basically, he was just trying to state the obvious about Trump. In any case, there you have it.

On Wednesday, a judge in Brazil ordered the temporary suspension of WhatsApp, a popular Facebook messaging app. Everyone went nuts. Mark Zuckerberg said he was “stunned.” The CEO of WhatsApp said it was “sad to see Brazil isolate itself from the rest of the world.” Users moved in droves to another messaging app.

Today, another judge lifted the ban because “it does not seem reasonable that millions of users are affected” over a tiff between WhatsApp and a judge.

Fair enough. The first judge pretty clearly overreacted. But apparently this whole thing started because the judge wanted access to messages from a suspect in a drug trafficking trial. The judge issued legal warrants several months ago, but What’sApp refused to comply.

Does WhatsApp have a response to this? Do they think the warrant is invalid? Do they think they don’t have to respond to warrants? Or what? I’m generally opposed to governments hoovering up messages and phone calls without a warrant, but if there’s a warrant in a legitimate criminal case, then you have to turn things over. What am I missing?

Pew Research routinely comes out with long, detailed surveys of interesting things, and I usually thumb through them looking for intriguing tidbits. Today it’s “Parenting in America,” and you’ll be unsurprised to learn that middle-class parents generally have a more positive view of things than poor parents. I may have more to say about this later, but in the meantime here’s a tidbit that answers a question I’ve pondered more than once: how old should kids be before they’re allowed to do stuff on their own?

I don’t know how this has changed over time, but these figures sure seem strange. I played on my own in front of my house when I was five,¹ but today’s parents think you need to be 10—and a substantial fraction think you need to be over 12 to play in front of the house unsupervised.

Ditto for the others. I suppose 12 isn’t unreasonable for staying home alone, but again, a substantial fraction think you need to be 14 or 15 or even 18.

As for public parks, holy cow. The average age for allowing kids to play in a park without adult supervision is 14, and there’s a substantial fraction who think you literally have to be an adult yourself before you should be allowed to go to a park on your own.

Unsurprisingly, Pew says that the answers are correlated with income, which is correlated with the kind of neighborhood you live in. If you live in a safe neighborhood, the average age for playing in front of the house is 9. If you live in a poor neighborhood, it’s 11. This makes sense.

Still, the overall numbers sure strike me as high. Of course, I’ve led a sheltered existence, so maybe I just don’t get it. But the world is a safer place than it was 30 years ago. Do kids really need to be ten just to play in the front yard these days?

¹I called my mother to confirm this. She did.

The opening line of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground is “I am a sick man…a spiteful man.” Or is it? I once read a fascinating introduction to Dostoyevsky’s famous novella that began by collecting a dozen different translations of that line, all of them suggesting a slightly different meaning. So what did Dostoyevsky really mean? It may be impossible to say for sure in English.

That’s how I feel today, reading the news that Vladimir Putin praised Donald Trump at a news conference. Here are eight different translations of Putin’s remarks:

He is a brilliant and talented person without a doubt…

He is a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt…

He is a very bright person, talented without any doubt…

He’s a very colorful person. Talented, without any doubt…

He is a standout, talented person, without any doubt

He is a bright personality, a talented person, no doubt about it…

He is a very flamboyant man, very talented, no doubt about that…

He’s a very lively man, talented without doubt…

Needless to say, these are very different things. “Outstanding” suggests that Putin thinks well of Trump. “Bright” suggests a more neutral assessment. And “flamboyant” and “lively” suggest that he thinks Trump is a blowhard.

So what did Putin really say? Beats me. But video of his remarks is above for anyone who wants to provide a deeper analysis of Putin’s word choice and what it really means in Russian.