Is it finally Friday? I swear, it’s seemed like Friday ever since Monday. But now it finally is.
This is Hilbert in one of his favorite spots. In the late afternoon, when it’s time to bring in the cats for the day, Hilbert likes to run away and make us chase him. Most of the time, though, he only wants us to chase him this far, where he flops on the ground and demands a tummy rub. He’s then happy to be picked up and taken inside.
Hopper, on the other hand, is not so easily bribed. She likes being chased around because it’s fun. Sometimes the fun can last a tiringly long time. However, when we give up, all we have to do is close the door with a loud click. Within a minute she’ll be there demanding to know why she’s been locked out. We open the door and she scoots right in.
Mom is fine! My warning of “grave consequences” caused the Russkies to back down from their plan to nuke her neighborhood. It just goes to show that credible threats really can deter bad behavior from our adversaries.
A private plane declared an emergency this morning shortly after taking off from John Wayne airport here in Orange County. The plane immediately turned around, but missed the runway and instead landed on the 405 freeway. It burst into flames, and the pilot and a passenger were injured. Cub reporter Kevin Drum was on the scene after the airport had been reopened.
So far this is all pretty routine. Trump lies, gets caught in lie, blah blah blah. Trump is hardly the first politician to lie routinely. But what kind of person makes up a freakish lie like this?
Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!
This is not just a lie, it’s the sign of a deteriorating personality. Joe and Mika say it outright: “Donald Trump is not well.” How long is it going to be until everyone accepts this?
Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who is obsessed with nonexistent voter fraud, is now the vice chairman of a White House commission charged with confirming Donald Trump’s claim that three million (or five million) fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton, and this is the only reason he lost the popular vote. This is a complete waste of time, but Kobach is eager to help. Yesterday he sent out this letter to every state’s secretary of state:
The progressive community is up in arms about this, as it should be, and several states have already told Kobach to pound sand. But this isn’t really a direct attempt to suppress black or Hispanic votes. Atrios is right about its purpose:
Kobach knows this game with databases. You program them to make soft matches — similar names, party affiliation — and then accuse everyone of having a match of having voted twice. Of course this almost never ever ever ever happens and certainly doesn’t happen enough to swing elections, but gotta lock up potential Dem voters any way you can.
Kobach doesn’t have the resources or the remit to pursue any fraud cases. What he wants to do is come up with a number for people registered twice. Or dead people who are registered. Or people registered at two different addresses. He will then claim that all of them are examples of fraud and announce that 23.7 percent of all registration is fraudulent. We’ve already seen this movie, and the sequel is bound to be the same.
In reality, none of this matters, and Kobach knows it. Double registrations invariably turn out to be different people who happen to have the same name and birthdate. Dead people invariably turn out to be…dead people. It just takes a while for them to be removed from the rolls. And people registered at two different addresses are just people who have moved. Their old registration will get purged eventually, but it doesn’t happen instantly. We go through this game in California every time a Republican loses a close election, and in every case the amount of actual registration fraud is zero.
And, of course, even the fake registrations (Mickey Mouse, Donald Drump, etc.) are just fake registrations. Nobody ever tries to vote with them. That’s the reason for this registration exercise in the first place. There’s basically no evidence of in-person voting fraud, so instead Republicans try to make the case for registration fraud. It’s all they’ve got.
A lot of registration databases in the United States really are maintained sloppily. We could use some improvements. But we’ll never get them as long as Republicans see them as a tool to demand voter ID laws that suppress Democratic voters.
UPDATE: Sorry! Kris Kobach is not the former Kansas secretary of state. Unfortunately, he’s still their secretary of state. The post has been corrected.
This is pretty amazing. Donald Trump hasn’t actually done much of anything in the past five months except flap his jaws. But it’s been some pretty expensive flapping. CBO’s last projection of the federal deficit was released in January. Literally nothing has happened since then except for Trump shooting off his piehole every day and congressional Republicans demonstrating that they can’t control their own lunatics. But that’s been enough. CBO’s projection of the federal deficit over the next decade has already increased nearly a trillion dollars:
The deficit in 2017 alone is projected to be $134 billion higher than CBO estimated when Obama left office. Why? “One reason for the sharp rise in the deficit in 2017 is the slow growth in revenue collections through May and the slow growth expected for the rest of the year.” And why is revenue collection so slow? CBO doesn’t say, but here’s a good guess:
How much of the tax revenue shortfall is rich people making low estimated tax payments in hopes their taxes will be cut? All of it? https://t.co/XD39DdBldj
The one thing that Republicans have made clear is that they’re really, really committed to cutting taxes on the rich. And they’ll probably make the tax cuts retroactive too. So why not lowball your quarterly tax payments in hopes they come through? It’s probably a pretty good bet.
The CBO has released its long-term analysis of Medicaid spending under the Republican health care bill (BCRA), which means I can now update my chart with the most official numbers we have. But it wasn’t easy. CBO, bless their black little hearts, doesn’t provide spending in nominal dollars because “in the agency’s judgment, a presentation in nominal dollars can be misleading.” They are absolutely correct about that, but it’s a pain in the ass when you actually want nominal dollars so you can deflate them.
Luckily, CBO lets the cat out of the bag in the first paragraph, estimating that Medicaid spending under BCRA will grow 3.5 percent per year from 2026 to 2036. I can back out nominal dollars from that. They also estimate that medical inflation will average 3.7 percent, not 3 percent, so I can update my chart with that too. Here’s the result:
Surprised? I am. But CBO estimates that most of the damage of the Republican bill would happen in the first decade, when real spending would decrease about 1.8 percent per year (that’s growth of 1.9 percent compared to inflation of 3.7 percent). In the second decade, real spending would decrease about 0.2 percent per year (growth of 3.5 percent compared to inflation of 3.7 percent). In total, real spending would decline about 24 percent over the next two decades, which probably means that enrollment would be forced down about 24 percent too.
POSTSCRIPT: A note to fellow progressives. CBO normally presents spending numbers in comparison to its “baseline” projections of future spending. In chart form, what you see is a line going sharply up (the baseline) and another line going up at a slower rate (spending under BCRA). Please stop using charts like this.
All this does is play into the Republican narrative that BCRA is merely “restraining the rate of growth of Medicaid.” But BCRA does worse than that. In real terms, it actually cuts spending. However, you can only see that if you ditch the baseline and just chart out actual spending projections adjusted for medical inflation.
This is another California sunflower, this time taken at our local bird sanctuary. It caught my eye because it was similar to a wildflower picture I took about 30 years ago that’s always been one of my favorites. Just a little pop of yellow surrounded by gray and green.
WaPo’s Carolyn Johnson points me to an analysis by Avalere Health that extends the CBO’s analysis of Medicaid cuts under the Republican health care bill. I’ve taken the liberty of roughly turning it into a single line, which provides us with estimates of Medicaid spending all the way out to 2036:
Click the link above for the full Avalere report, which breaks out Medicaid cuts among children, adults, the elderly, and the disabled. It’s carnage as far as the eye can see.
UPDATE: Apparently the CBO will release its own long-term projections later today. I don’t expect them to be very different.
President Trump insists that he no longer watches Morning Joe, but just as the program was ending today he tweeted that he “heard” the program speaks badly of him. Uh huh. So naturally he insulted both Joe and Mika and then tweeted this about Mika Brzezinski:
…to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!
Republican congressional leaders moved quickly to repudiate his words. The reaction underscored the increasing sense on Capitol Hill that members of his party increasingly have little fear of publicly contradicting the president. Recent polling has shown that even among Republican voters, many view his tweets as a distraction.
But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has gotten into Trump’s good graces by being an even more ridiculous attack dog than Sean Spicer, defended her boss:
“I don’t think that the president’s ever been someone who gets attacked and doesn’t push back,” she said in an interview on Fox News. “There have been an outrageous number of personal attacks, not just at him but to frankly everyone around him.”
Yeah, that’s pretty unusual for a president to get attacked by lots of people. Unprecedented even. It’s probably never before happened in the whole history of the United States.
The part Trump doesn’t get is that pretty much everyone is just laughing at him for this stuff. It’s long since been obvious that Trump makes empty threats constantly. Threats against people, threats against news organizations, threats against foreign countries, even threats against the laws of physics. But he never follows up on them. They’re just a way of getting attention. They were sort of amusing back when he was a TV reality show host trying to get his name in Page Six, then they were alarming when he was running for president, and now they’re just sort of pathetic. But he has no idea, does he?
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