A company in New York claims that it owns the trademark rights to “Yosemite National Park” and wants $50 million to give it up. This is not a joke. It’s actually happening. The Park Service isn’t yet giving in on this, but it is caving on a bunch of other names, including the Ahwahnee Hotel:

On March 1, the famed Ahwahnee — a name affixed to countless trail guides and family memories — will become the Majestic Yosemite Hotel. And Curry Village, a collection of cabins near the center of the park that has carried the same name since the 1800s, will become Half Dome Village, park spokesman Scott Gediman said Thursday.

….Also affected will be: Yosemite Lodge at the Falls, becoming Yosemite Valley Lodge. Wawona Hotel, becoming Big Trees Lodge. Badger Pass Ski Area, becoming Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area.

Coming soon: Yellowstone National Park will be renamed Majestic Geysers Park. Redwood National Park will become Incredible Trees Park. And Everglades National Park will become Big Swampy Park.

UPDATE: This is probably not actually as outrageous as I thought. More here.

“It’s a depressing thing when you have to evaluate candidates’ wins and losses by weighing the relative effectiveness of their lies….And the moderators, naturally, did no fact-checking of any kind. The result was a debate that probably left viewers less informed than they were coming in.”

That’s Dylan Matthews commenting on last night’s debate. As for me, all I can do is shrug these days. I expect exaggerations and spin from politicians as a matter of course, but this year is different: Republicans seem to have finally woken up to the fact that they can say literally anything they want and pay no price for it. Their audience wants to be lied to, and being needled the next day by fact checkers does them no harm.

Nonetheless, I really have to give Donald Trump special props. Back in October he brazenly denied saying that he called Marco Rubio “Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator” even though it was right on his own website. Moderator Becky Quick simply wasn’t prepared for this, and initially apologized because she didn’t have a cite for the quote right in front of her.

Now fast forward to last night and Trump does the same thing again. Neil Cavuto quotes Trump as supporting “up to 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods” and Trump interrupts him to call the New York Times a bunch of liars. He then launches into a bowl of word salad so Palinesque that it leaves Cavuto dazed and confused. “I’m sorry, you lost me,” Cavuto says, and Trump then proceeds to lose him a bit more.

All of this despite the fact that the Times has Trump on tape telling them what he’d do to fight Chinese currency manipulation: “I would do a tariff….I would do a tax, and the tax — let me tell you what the tax should be. The tax should be 45 percent.”

For this, I give Donald Trump a special award. Not because his lies last night were any worse than anyone else’s, but because they were so cheerfully brazen. Maybe it should be a statuette of Rose Mary Woods showing reporters how the 18-minute gap could have happened. And in the future, debate moderators really need to learn to have their sources right in front of them when they ask Trump a question.

Overall, this was sort of a boring debate, though it heated up a bit at the end. On a substantive level, there’s not much to say: nobody really said anything new. I guess that’s just the nature of things when you get to the sixth debate. My take:

Bush: He relentlessly tried to be reasonable. Apparently he thinks that eventually this will be a winning strategy, and maybe he’s right! But not tonight. He didn’t do anything to help himself.

Carson: At his best, he was in snoozeville. At his worst, he was incoherent. He’s a goner.

Rubio: He’s a hard duck to analyze. Rubio basically has a bunch of index cards in his head, and he recites one of them whenever he gets a question. The thing is, his index cards aren’t bad. And he recites them reasonably well. But eventually they just get old. That’s how it felt tonight—until he pulled out a brand new index card and attacked Cruz hard at the end. It was a good attack! It might help him. Maybe.

Trump: Fairly quiet by his standards. He did well responding to Cruz about “New York values.” His closing statement about the sailors was probably effective. His endless prevarication on the 45 percent tariff was a loser. Not his most dynamic performance, but he did OK. His numbers will probably go up.

Cruz: He was good tonight. He handled the natural-born citizen thing pretty well. Trump pwned him on New York values, but that helped Trump more than it hurt Cruz. His explanation of his tax plan was pretty much incomprehensible, and it was made worse when Rubio went after it, but I think that was his only real stumble. He’s a good debater, and probably picked up a few points tonight.

Kasich: He seemed like an island, totally disengaged from everyone else on the stage.

Christie: As always, he tried to seem like (a) the adult in the room and (b) the toughest guy in the room. It worked OK tonight, and he might pick up a point or two. But nothing more.

Overall, I’d say Trump, Cruz, and Rubio might gain a bit. Bush and Carson will drop a bit. Kasich and Christie will stay in nowhere-land.

Transcript here.

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10:20 – Kasich: Mailman father blah blah blah. Bush: “Detailed plans count.” Oh Jeb…. Christie: Dammit, America is a hellhole and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Carson: Zzzzz. Rubio: Obama wants to ruin America. Hillary too. Cruz: Benghazi! Radical Islamic terrorism! Political correctness! Trump: If I’m president, we will win on everything we do.

10:19 – Time for closing statements. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

10:13 – Bush: We just heard a big spat between two “backbench” senators. Burn!

11:11 – Ooh. Big attack on Cruz from Rubio. Cruz says half the things Rubio said were false. But what about the other half?

11:04 – “We want Rand! We want Rand!” Well, don’t we all?

11:01 – Is it a blind trust if Don, Eric, and Ivanka Trump run the company? Um, no. Pretty sure it’s not. But I’ve actually been a little curious about what Trump would do with his company if he won.

10:57 – Christie says current Republican Congress “consorted” with Barack Obama. Quelle horreur!

10:55 – Big fight between Rubio and Cruz. Now Christie comes in to break it up. Let’s talk entitlement reform!

10:52 – Rubio says that Cruz’s tax plan would be bad for seniors. He’s right, but I doubt anyone understood what he said.

10:49 – Carson just gave an answer that I flatly didn’t understand. I’ll have to review it later.

10:46 – It’s tax time. I’m guessing everyone is in favor of cutting them. Especially on corporations and the rich.

10:43 – Now Cruz says his business tax is like a tariff. No, it’s not. But who’s counting, anyway?

10:41 – Cruz says Trump and Bush are both right about China. Such a peacemaker. The answer is a flat tax. Wait, what? What did I miss?

10:40 – Boos when Trump attacks Bush. The arena must have a big Bush cheering section.

10:39 – Trump also wants a trade war against Japan.

10:38 – Rubio: the answer to all our problems is to do the opposite of Barack Obama.

10:36 – So…Trump says the NYT lied, but I guess they didn’t. Imagine that. Trancript here.

10:35 – OK, but what about the tariff, Donald? Blah blah blah. Biggest bank in the world has an office in his building. But he’s totally open to a tariff.

10:35 – Did Trump call for 45 percent tariff on China? He says, of course not. He says he’d only do it if he stayed mad at them. Or something.

10:30 – Bush still trying to be reasonable. It’s so crazy it might work!

10:29 – “Radical Islamic terrorism.” Say it. SAY IT!

10:24 – Trump: “There’s something going on and it’s bad.” I guess that’s Trump’s campaign in a nutshell.

10:22 – Bush: “You can’t make rash statements.” Exciting as always!

10:21 – Jeb Bush steps up and defends letting Muslims into the country. Good for him.

10:19 – No follow-up, of course.

10:18 – These guys have lots of criticism of Obama, but they sure are shy about proposing actual concrete measures to step up the fight against ISIS.

10:15 – Should we send 20,000 ground troops to Iraq to fight ISIS? Carson says we should just give the military whatever they ask for. That’s it. And we should send in lots of special ops to put ISIS on the run. Uh huh.

10:11 – The fights between Trump and Cruz have been amusing, but generally speaking this debate has been pretty boring. Lots of canned applause lines and not a lot else.

10:10 – Does Saudi Arabia suck? Kasich says they need to stop funding radical clerics and madrasses. But what if they don’t?

10:07 – Ooh. Bush brings out the old Jerusalem chestnut. Go Jeb!

10:05 – New York values? William F. Buckley came out of Manhattan! New Yorkers were great after 9/11! So there.

10:01 – Sorry for the hiatus. So what’s going on? Guns? Looks like everyone is in favor of guns, guns, and more guns.

9:37 – The hamsters that power motherjones.com seem to be tired tonight. Sorry about that. If you’re having trouble commenting, keep trying!

9:34 – Cruz mostly treats natural-born citizen controversy as a joke. Probably smart.

9:31 – Audience booing Trump again.

9:30 – Audience booing Trump when he starts talking about polls.

9:27 – Audience not happy that Neil Cavuto asks Cruz about whether he’s a natural-born citizen. Cruz calls it a “birther” theory.

9:23 – Ah, an old favorite: Cruz turns a million-dollar loan from Goldman Sachs into an attack on the liberal media. That never gets old, does it?

9:20 – Trump says Syrian refugees are Trojan horses.

9:19 – Carson: What if someone hit us with an EMP, cyber-attack, and dirty bomb all at once? That would be pretty bad.

9:18 – Carson already whining about not getting enough questions.

9:17 – Rubio: Benghazi! Also: Obama has betrayed Israel, gutted the military, and apologized on ten world tours. That’s quite the memorized applause list.

9:13 – Bush: ISIS has a caliphate the size of Indiana! Also, US military has been totally gutted. Can’t even project power anymore.

9:11 – I wonder if anyone is going to acknowledge that American sailors did cross into Iranian waters near a major military base?

9:09 – If economy collapses next January, Kasich will balance the budget. That should work great.

9:06 – Cruz just can’t wait to bring up the American sailors. Ugh. Apparently he would have nuked Tehran immediately upon their capture.

8:57 – “The pirates are fighting in advance.” Huh?

8:48 – What will Donald Trump say tonight? In just a few minutes we’ll find out!

You remember Lamar Smith, don’t you? He’s the nutbag congressman from Texas who’s been harassing NOAA because they’ve published papers saying the climate has warmed up. Smith knows that climate change is a hoax, so he wants NOAA to turn over vast troves of email that his staff can trawl for evidence of the government’s massive conspiracy to fudge the data.

So far NOAA hasn’t cooperated, but Smith can harass them because he’s the chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Climate change is science,¹ so that puts it squarely in his bailiwick.

But there’s more to science than climate change. You know what else is science? Cybersecurity. And do you know one of the key cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the US government? Email servers. And do you know who used private email servers a few years ago? Hillary Clinton. And do you know what she was writing emails about? Benghazi. So that means Benghazi falls under Smith’s jurisdiction:

Science Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) on Wednesday launched his own investigation of Clinton’s private email server, invoking the panel’s jurisdiction over cybersecurity issues. The new investigation will focus on the private IT companies involved in maintaining the Clinton server.

….The Smith probe, according to three letters sent to the company’s involved with the server, will focus on Colorado-based Platte River, which housed Clinton’s server after she left State; Datto, the Connecticut-based back-up company they used as a backstop; and SECNAP, a Florida company that provided cybersecurity for her server.

It’s about damn time, if you ask me. John Boehner wouldn’t allow investigations like this because he was scared it would make congressional Republicans look like idiots. That’s typical Boehner. Just another gutless Beltway sellout. But Paul Ryan is running things differently, and now Smith has been unleashed. Finally, we’ll get the truth.

And please: no whining about how this is obviously just a witch hunt designed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Oversight is one of Congress’s most solemn duties. The truth is out there, folks.

¹Supposedly, anyway.

The continuing conversation about whether Ted Cruz is eligible to be president is a travesty. But I have to confess, it’s also sort of delightful.

First the travesty part: Ted Cruz was born a US citizen. No one doubts that. This is enough to be “natural born” and thus eligible for the presidency. No one doubted that either—until Donald Trump brought it up. Then it suddenly became a topic of endless discussion. That’s a travesty. One of these days Trump is going to casually mention that aliens really did build Stonehenge, and by the next day MSNBC, Fox, the New York Times, and conservative talk radio are all going to become obsessed with neolithic building techniques. Crikey.

But there’s also a delightful part to this. I could quote a number of people on the legal aspects of this issue, but here’s Jack Balkin on the “key theoretical questions” about being a natural born citizen:

Should be understood as a lay member of the public would understand it or whether is a legal term of art?…Fixed concept [or] common law concept subject to evolutionary development?…Depends only on English common law authorities [or] on statutory changes?…Has become liquidated in practice by congressional statutes?…Cannot be altered by Congress [or] read together with Congress’s powers under the Naturalization Clause?

My, my, what an originalist jumble! Should we rely on documents that are centuries old to try and divine Jemmy Madison’s probable interpretation of “natural born”? Or maybe go even further back and rely on English common law? Or perhaps the collective hivemind of Congress in 1790?

It’s a pretty problem. At least, it is if you take originalism seriously. I don’t, especially, since it’s pretty obviously just an intellectual charade designed to justify conservative constructions of the law. But Ted Cruz does, and now he needs to deal with the fallout. Bummer, dude.

I will be liveblogging tonight’s Republican debate. It’s on the Fox Business Channel at 9 pm Eastern. That’s 6 pm Pacific—or as we like to call it around here, God’s Time Zone.

The Fox Business Channel is probably somewhere on your cable dial, but you might want to check to make sure. If it’s not, you can watch the debate online at FoxBusiness.com. As you probably know, since Rand Paul has been whining about it endlessly, tonight’s debate is down to a mere seven candidates: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush. I think we can expect some passive-aggressive needling of Ted Cruz from Trump (“I’m not saying you aren’t natural born, but people out there are talking….”); some SOTU-inspired crocodile tears about the lack of civility in Washington; and several stirring defenses of the Second Amendment rights of gun dealers to avoid background checks.

Should be fun! See you tonight.

Matthew Dickinson finally made it to a Trump rally:

As I was leaving the event, a reporter for a local New Hampshire television station pulled me aside for an on-camera interview in which he asked me the secret of Trump’s appeal. Put on the spot, I answered, “I think this is part of his appeal, is he doesn’t say things — he doesn’t shy away from saying things that people might think but most politicians aren’t comfortable saying.”

Actually, I think this gets it exactly backward. Sure, Trump uses blunt language that most politicians don’t, but for the most part he’s not really saying anything new or different. Every Republican candidate wants to fight ISIS, close the borders, lower taxes, scrap the Iran deal, repeal Obamacare, etc. Policywise, Trump is a pretty typical modern Republican.¹

The biggest part of his appeal, ironically, is what he doesn’t say: for all his endless talk, Trump never provides any detail. He never feels pinned down by reality. Other candidates feel obligated to explain their positions when they’re pushed, but Trump just shrugs and says not to worry; it’s all going to happen exactly like he says. Likewise, when he’s on stage he plows his way through a set-piece laundry list of all the stuff he wants to do, and the crowd goes wild. It’s pure affinity politics and the audience loves it. I doubt that most of them really think he can do all the stuff he promises, but it’s a satisfying dream, and they like the dream.

This is what people keep getting wrong about Trump. He’s not really channeling anger so much as he’s channeling dreams and aspirations. He’s selling a delightful movie version of the presidency—or maybe a one-man Broadway show version—and at least for the few minutes Trump has them in his spell, his fans love it.

¹His only real heterodox stand is that he doesn’t want to touch Medicare or Social Security. His foreign policy is a little hard to get a handle on, but it’s basically pretty Cruz-esque: loud and blustery, but not really much committed to foreign interventions.

I keep coming back to this story in the Washington Post today:

William Merideth had just finished grilling dinner for his family when he saw a drone hovering over his land. So he did what he said any Kentuckian might do — he grabbed his Benelli M1 Super 90 shotgun, took aim and unleashed three rounds of birdshot. “The only people I’ve heard anything negative from are liberals that don’t want us having guns and people who own drones,” said the truck company owner, now a self-described “drone slayer.” Downing the quadcopter, which had a camera, was a way to assert his right to privacy and property, he said.

My initial reaction: hooray for Merideth! A nice dinner of buckshot seems about right for a drone hanging around my backyard.

On further thought, this may seem excessive. Dangerous, too, especially if you live in a suburb or a city. The owner of the drone in question says it was 200 feet up, and really, who cares if someone is watching you from 200 feet up? But this is what gives me pause:

“There is gray area in terms of how far your property rights extend,” said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center….According to the Federal Aviation Administration, every inch above the tip of your grass blades is the government’s jurisdiction. “The FAA is responsible for the safety and management of U.S. airspace from the ground up,” said an agency spokesman, echoing rules laid out on its website.

If this is really true, then a drone could fly right into my backyard and hover around looking for anything it wants. Thieves could keep a close eye out to see when houses are empty. Peeping Toms could be staring through our second-story windows. Busybodies could film you at night while you were disposing of bodies in your backyard.

I don’t know what the answer to this whole drone revolution is. All I can say is that I’m not on board with the laissez faire idea of just letting ’em rip and then deciding later what we want to do. There are too many dangers that are already obvious, and will plainly become even more pressing as the drone population grows from the millions to the billions. Especially in the case of hobbyist drones, there’s really no compelling interest for non-regulation except that they’re having fun and don’t want anyone to spoil their party. I don’t find that especially persuasive. I’d really like to see some tightening of the rules for using drones sooner rather than later, especially in populated areas. We can ease up later if it seems wise.

This is apropos of nothing in particular. I was just noodling around on something else and happened to run across this data, so here it is. The economic recovery of the Bush years might have been pretty anemic for most of us, but it was sure a great time for the corporate world: Between 2001 and 2006, pretax profits went up 3x and after-tax profits went up even more. These profits dipped during the Great Recession, of course, but they’ve fully recovered since then. All in all, since the start of the 21st century the income of ordinary folks has declined about 5 percent, but after-tax profits in the nonfinancial sector have gone up nearly 4x. Nice work, business titans!

My Twitter feed has been alight with mockery of the latest from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley: “We’ve never, in the history of this country, passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion,” she said at a press conference today. What an idiot!

But, you know, always click the link. Here’s the full quote:

When you’ve got immigrants who are coming here legally, we’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion. Let’s not start that now.

This still isn’t quite correct: After World War I a series of immigration restrictions were passed that explicitly favored northern European whites; limited immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans; and banned Asian immigrants almost entirely. Still, Haley can be forgiven for not knowing about this or other examples of restrictive immigration laws. It’s not especially common knowledge these days. In any case, she obviously wasn’t pretending that Jim Crow and its ilk never existed.

So let’s dial down the faux outrage. Haley was doing the Lord’s work here, criticizing Donald Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the country. In fact, given the context, she might have meant to refer not to immigrants at all, but merely to people visiting the country on ordinary visas—in which case she didn’t really say anything wrong at all. Either way, though, she did nothing worse than betray an incomplete knowledge of American history while talking off the cuff. It’s hardly a big deal.