This is just a note about the Senate health care bill. Do not believe any prattle about Mitch McConnell “being OK with a loss.” Or about “moderate Republicans” who will vote against it. Or about conservatives who are “revolting.” Or about “desperate attempts” to hold the Republican caucus together.

Next week the CBO will release its score of the bill. They will confirm that it doesn’t increase the deficit. The Senate will debate for a day or two; pass a few minor amendments; and then pass the bill. The vote will be 51-50, with Vice President Pence breaking the tie.

If Paul Ryan is smart, he will simply bring up the Senate bill for a vote and be done with it. It will pass because everyone will understand that this is their only chance. Either vote yes, or else give up on repealing Obamacare and give Democrats a big win.

The only way to break this cycle is to generate some new opposition. Senate Republicans already know that Democrats oppose the bill, AARP opposes the bill, hospitals oppose the bill, and so forth. They don’t care. The Democrats won’t vote for them no matter what they do and the others aren’t threatening to withdraw campaign support. They oppose the bill, but only on paper. They also know that their bill will take away health coverage from millions. They don’t care about that either. They never have.

This is it. There’s a week left. Lefties need to generate some new opposition to the bill that wavering senators are actually afraid of. Any ideas?

Catblogging is a few minutes early this week because I have to drive Marian to the airport. She’s flying to Colorado via Phoenix, where it’s a balmy 112º today. Apparently this means that the tarmac won’t melt the wheels of her plane, so everything should be hunky dory.

In cat news today, Wim Van Neer of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels has been collecting ancient cat specimens for the past decade and putting them through the genetic wringer. His conclusion: “It was the Egyptians who turned them into the lovable fur balls we know today.” Thanks, Egyptians!

A couple of days ago I wrote a post responding to Peter Beinart’s recent article about Democrats and illegal immigration. It was a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I intended to write one thing and then ended up writing something else, which made the post a little disjointed. Then it turned out I’d made an arithmetic mistake, and had to rewrite a chunk of the piece on the fly. Blecch.

But I did promise to eventually write the piece I initially had in mind, so here it is. I’m a little pressed for time, so I’ll keep it short.

Statistics aside, one of Beinart’s main points was not that liberals should become big opponents of immigration, but that they should be willing to admit that there are drawbacks as well as benefits to large flows of illegal immigration. It’s a complicated issue, and everyone should be willing to admit it.

I agree completely, and this is hardly a problem limited to immigration. Naturally, I blame it mostly on conservatives, but I imagine conservatives blame it mostly on liberals, so I won’t bother trying to assign blame. Either way, the upshot is that there never appears to be any political advantage to admitting that an issue has both upsides and downsides. Every issue important enough to be worth talking about does, but there’s hardly any audience left that cares.

I have no idea what, if anything, we can do about this. But I will say this. I lurk on a number of message boards populated by liberals, and what they say privately is very often more nuanced than what they say publicly.¹ On immigration, there are probably lots of liberals willing to concede that there needs to be a limit to the flow of undocumented workers. There are cultural, economic, and nationalistic reasons for this. But there’s little benefit to saying so in public. It just invites massive social media swarms insisting that you’re a closet racist.

I’ve long been on record as a moderate liberal on immigration. I think there are benefits to keeping illegal immigration to a modest level,² and details aside, I think the way to do this is a rigorous version of E-Verify along with tough employer sanctions. In my own personal utopia, I’d pair this up with a national ID card. Basically, if undocumented immigrants can’t get jobs, they’ll stop coming. There’s no need for a wall.

I wonder how many liberals agree with me, more or less? I wonder how many are waiting for someone else to say it before they do? I wonder how many just flatly don’t consider it worth the blowback, so they stay quiet? Questions, questions.

¹As you might imagine, this is partly because the boards I’m attracted to aren’t run by shouters and nutballs. Still, I’m curious: is the same true of moderate conservative boards? Any wingers out there care to comment?

²And drawbacks to getting too tough on illegal immigration. There are good reasons to protect our borders, but there are economic, humanitarian, and police state reasons not to have a goal of zero illegal immigration.

NBC News asked Americans who they believe: Donald Trump or James Comey. The results are pretty much America in a nutshell:

Democrats and Republicans live in different worlds. Democrats believe Comey by a margin of +74 percent. The Republican margin is -40 percent. That’s a difference of 114 percent. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a partisan gap that wide on anything.

But I guess it’s no surprise. If you get your news from Fox and Drudge and talk radio, it’s obvious that Comey is just a big fat liar who has it in for Trump. It’s Spock’s beard at work.

Avik Roy has a request:

I’m very open to thoughtful critiques of the Senate bill from the left. “MILLIONS WILL DIE” is not it.

— Avik Roy (@Avik) June 23, 2017

OK, here’s my Top 5 list:

1. Medicaid: The Senate bill slashes spending on Medicaid in order to cut taxes on the rich. This is a cruel and unnecessary tradeoff for the richest country in the history of the world.
2. Death Spiral: It eliminates the individual mandate; reduces subsidies for the poor; reduces benchmark plans to an actuarial value of 58 percent; and increases deductibles and copays. Whatever instability Obamacare currently has, this will make it far, far worse.
3. Essential Health Benefits: Like the House bill, the Senate bill makes it easy for states to cut essential health benefits, which motivates insurers to offer low-end policies for the working poor that are worthless—but only if you read the fine print.
4. More Uninsured: It will lead to tens of millions fewer people having health coverage. CBO will provide an exact number in a few days, but we already know it’s going to be big.
5. Lifetime Caps: Guts protections against annual and lifetime caps, and because of the way the bill is written, it’s likely to do this even for employer insurance, not just for the individual market.

There’s more, like the substantial increase in premiums for older workers and the quiet kickback to insurance company CEOs. And what are the benefits? Unless you’re rich or you really, really want to cut funding for Planned Parenthood, it’s hard to see any.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Saudi Arabia and other Arab states that have severed ties with Qatar issued a list of severe demands to end the worst regional diplomatic crisis in years, telling their Persian Gulf neighbor to close state broadcaster Al Jazeera, curb ties with Iran and end Turkey’s military presence on its soil….The government of Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani has 10 days to accept the demands, which include paying reparations and providing information on all opposition groups it has supported, the document says, without specifying what penalties the Saudi-led group will impose if Qatar fails to comply.

And there you have it. Does Saudi Arabia really care about Qatar’s tightrope walk relationship with Iran, which it shares a gigantic gas field with? Or the 200 Turkish troops in Qatar? Or its ties to Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood?

Well, sure, they care. But Qatar is just pursuing standard small-country diplomacy, trying to balance its alliances so it doesn’t become a client state of the local hegemon. It’s hardly a threat to Saudi Arabia.

But Al Jazeera is, because it provides a view of the outside world to ordinary Saudi citizens that’s not controlled by the Ministry of Keeping Everyone In Line. That’s really the only thing Qatar does that’s truly threatening.

Metzel Mikhail/TASS via ZUMA

Never forget:

Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House….Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

….The White House turned to Congress for help….But Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went further, officials said, voicing skepticism that the underlying intelligence truly supported the White House’s claims. Through a spokeswoman, McConnell declined to comment, citing the secrecy of that meeting.

Key Democrats were stunned by the GOP response and exasperated that the White House seemed willing to let Republican opposition block any pre-election move.

This is from the Washington Post. Read the whole thing.

Here’s a story for you. My mother grew up in a Republican family.¹ When Herbert Hoover was on the radio, everyone listened. But later she became a Democrat. What happened?

Well, she went off to college. But not some bleeding heart lefty bastion. She went to USC, which was even more Republican in 1950 than it is now. She didn’t get indoctrinated by a bunch of fuzzy liberal professors.

So what caused the switch? I asked her once, and she said that during her college years she came to the conclusion that Republicans were just mean. So she became a Democrat.

This struck me because I’ve long used the exact same word in the privacy of my own thoughts. I can write a sophisticated critique of conservative ideology as well as the next guy, but the truth is that it mostly boils down to a gut feel that Republicans are mean. I’ve never said this out loud because it sounds so kindergarten-y, but there it is. I think Republicans are mean, just like my mother did.

But now our time has come. Donald Trump started it, with his contention that Paul Ryan’s health care bill was “mean.” Today, Barack Obama picked up the ball, writing on Facebook about the “fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation.” And then Chuck Schumer weighed in with a big red poster calling the Senate health care bill “meaner.”

So that’s that. It’s now OK to ditch the ten-dollar words and just spit it out. Republicans are mean.²

¹I’ve never figured out what the deal was here. My grandfather was very much a working-class guy, an electrician for Western Union. But he hated FDR. I don’t know why.

²The weird thing about this is that I live in Orange County and I know lots of conservatives. For the most part, they aren’t mean. But put ’em together in a single political party, and it’s all torches and pitchforks.

This comes via a 4th-grade friend, who got it from some guy on Facebook, who probably got it from Daily Kos, who got it from Wikipedia:

In the criminal convictions contest, the score is Republicans 89, Democrats 1. And that’s not even counting all the high-level Iran-Contra folks who probably would have been convicted of various felonies if they hadn’t been pardoned by GHW Bush.

Among Democrats, there’s been only one criminal conviction in the past 50 years. The unlucky schmoe is Ron Blackley, who was collateral damage from a special prosecutor who even Ken Starr thought was kind of nuts. The guy ran amuck in a futile attempt to pin something on Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy,¹ and in the process he managed to win a perjury conviction against Blackley, who served as Espy’s chief of staff, for failing to disclose a pittance in consulting fees from a former consulting business in Mississippi.

I wonder if Donald Trump can break Nixon’s record? One thing going against Trump is that he’s barely able to hire anyone these days, and you can’t garner lots of corruption convictions if you don’t have anyone working for you. On the other hand, he’s Trump. You never know.

¹He got a grand jury to hand down a bunch of indictments, but his case was so thin that Espy didn’t even bother mounting a defense. The jury acquitted Espy of everything.

A field of California poppies at sunset, as the flowers start to close up for the night. You are getting sleepy, sleepy….