From Caitlin Dewey:

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the National Dairy Council.

….For decades, observers in agriculture, nutrition and education have griped that many Americans are basically agriculturally illiterate. They don’t know where food is grown, how it gets to stores — or even, in the case of chocolate milk, what’s in it. One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early ’90s, found that nearly 1 in 5 adults did not know that hamburgers are made from beef. Many more lacked familiarity with basic farming facts, like how big U.S. farms typically are and what food animals eat.

I think Dewey misses the real question here: Why did the National Dairy Council commission a survey about whether chocolate milk comes from brown cows? I don’t know, and I can find no trace of the NDC’s survey online. However, common sense suggests that it has something to do with the milk industry’s endless battle to convince the American public that chocolate milk is good for you.

I agree, of course, since I think that chocolate anything is good for you. But I’ll concede that Science™ doesn’t really have my back on this. In any case, who cares? I’m pretty sure that 7 percent of Americans believe the sky is blue because it’s surrounded by a giant ocean.

But I do wonder where these 7 percent think white milk comes from?

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, it’s kind of a slow news day. Why do you ask?

John Arthur Brown/ ZUMA Wire

Ezra Klein makes an argument about Obamacare that I’ve heard a lot of lately:

If Republicans wipe out the Affordable Care Act and de-insure tens of millions of people, they will prove a few things to Democrats. First, including private insurers and conservative ideas in a health reform plan doesn’t offer a scintilla of political protection, much less Republican support. Second, sweeping health reform can be passed quickly, with only 51 votes in the Senate, and with no support from major industry actors. Third, it’s easier to defend popular government programs that people already understand and appreciate, like Medicaid and Medicare, than to defend complex public-private partnerships, like Obamacare’s exchanges

This sounds pretty plausible to me. If passing a cautious, incrementalist program like Obamacare doesn’t provide any protection against Republicans destroying it, Democrats have no motivation to bother with cautious, incrementalist programs. They might as well just bend the rules, pass national health care, and be done with it. If insurance companies don’t like it, tough. Democrats contorted themselves into pretzels to design a program acceptable to insurers, and were rewarded with disaster. Insurers screwed up both their pricing and participation so epically that they brought Obamacare to its knees, and when Republicans proposed ditching the whole thing they just sat on their hands. It’s obvious now that the support of the insurance industry provides zero—or maybe negative—benefit. So the hell with them.

And that’s all in addition to the fact that the Bernie movement has made single-payer health care a live possibility in a way it’s never been before.

Republicans are basically hellbent not on any positive agenda, but on repealing everything Obama did in his eight years. Dodd-Frank. Obamacare. Paris. Higher taxes on the rich. A less interventionist approach to the Middle East. Immigration. Cuba. Net neutrality. Almost literally, they have nothing left of their own that they’re interested in doing. If the technology existed, it wouldn’t surprise me if they tried to reanimate the corpse of Osama bin Laden on the grounds that it was a mistake to kill him and leave the field open to ISIS.

Note to Republicans: I’m just joking about that.

Msgt. Lance Cheung/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Wait a second. WTF is going on here?

Qatar will sign a deal to buy as many as 36 F-15 jets from the U.S. as the two countries navigate tensions over President Donald Trump’s backing for a Saudi-led coalition’s move to isolate the country for supporting terrorism. Qatari Defense Minister Khalid Al-Attiyah and his U.S. counterpart, Jim Mattis, completed the $12 billion agreement on Wednesday in Washington, according to the Pentagon.

A couple of weeks ago the president of the United States goaded Saudi Arabia into leading a blockade of Qatar. It was time to crack down on support for Iranian-backed terrorists! Today, his secretary of defense agreed to sell Qatar three dozen F-15s. I guess Trump must have forgotten to tell Mattis that Qatar was on the presidential shit list.

James Comey told President Trump three times that he wasn’t personally under investigation. That wasn’t enough. Trump didn’t want his friends under investigation either, so he fired Comey when the investigation continued. Can you guess what happened next?

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.

….The obstruction-of-justice investigation of the president began days after Comey was fired on May 9, according to people familiar with the matter. Mueller’s office has now taken up that work, and the preliminary interviews scheduled with intelligence officials indicate his team is actively pursuing potential witnesses inside and outside the government.

That’s from the Washington Post. Trump’s fans, of course, continue to believe that the big scandal isn’t Trump’s likely obstruction of justice, but the fact that this stuff has been leaked. It’s the Deep State at work. After all, nothing ever leaked in Washington DC until Trump took office. Right?

The Senate voted 97-2 this afternoon in favor of tougher sanctions on Russia:

The sanctions legislation the Senate passed overwhelmingly Wednesday afternoon would represent a major power grab from the White House on U.S.-Russia policy….It would pave the way for Congress to wield far more control over the country’s fraught relationship with Russia….If it becomes law, the president would find it far more difficult to pursue the kinds of Russia sanctions relief that his team is said to have discussed with Russian officials before his inauguration. Those discussions, and potentially others, are what have gotten this White House in the hot water it’s in now.

I’m OK with this both on the merits (Russia deserves tougher sanctions) and as a matter of governance (Congress should assert itself instead of leaving foreign policy solely to the president).

But here’s the part I’ve never liked about congressional sanctions: they last forever until Congress lifts them, and political considerations make it very difficult to lift sanctions. I’d prefer to see them treated more like a criminal sentence, put in place for a specific amount of time.

In the case of Russia, for example, perhaps they’d be put in place for 2-4 years. For the first two years, the president has no discretion. For the next two years, the sanctions stay in place but the president has authority to reduce or eliminate them. After four years they’re lifted completely unless Congress affirmatively votes to renew them.

This would prevent sanctions from settling into an eternal ooze due to little more than inertia. It would also prevent the lifting of sanctions from becoming enormous public spectacles. They’d just quietly end at some point unless half the House and 60 percent of the Senate felt strongly enough that they needed to stay in place.

Here’s a beautiful snowy egret. This one was up in a tree near Dana Point harbor that was egret central. There must have been at least a dozen of them nesting there. This was great for taking photos, but the price was a car covered with bird droppings. I really should have parked a little farther away.

Plus we have a bonus picture today: a snowy egret using its aileron flaps to slow down for a landing near its nest. Our little egret baby is obviously looking forward to lunch. Yum yum!

Well, the Fed has gone ahead and raised interest rates, as expected:

“The labor market has continued to strengthen,” the Fed said in an upbeat statement published after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee. The Fed added that economic growth “has been rising moderately so far this year,” making no mention of the reported weakness last winter.

Hmmm. Both GDP growth and new job creation have been modest over the past year. The unemployment rate is down, but it’s increasingly looking like the headline unemployment rate is not a great measure of labor tightness. Here’s a couple of other measures. First, hourly wages of production workers:

Ordinary workers did pretty well in 2015, but it’s been all downhill since then. Over the last few months, their earnings have barely risen at all. That’s hardly consistent with a tight labor market.

And here’s the core PCE inflation rate, the Fed’s favored measure of inflation:

It’s nowhere near the Fed’s target of 2 percent, and if you can see any acceleration in this chart you have sharper eyes than me. It looks dead flat at around 1.6 percent for the past four years. That’s also hardly consistent with a tight labor market.

The economy is doing OK, and perhaps that’s the best argument in favor of the Fed’s strategy: they’ve been slowly raising interest rates and the economy hasn’t fallen off a cliff. On the other hand, the labor market for the working and middle classes sure doesn’t look especially tight. Inflation isn’t rising and wage growth has been anemic.

It’s hard to see how raising interest rates is doing anybody outside the top 1 percent any good. I sure hope Janet Yellen knows what she’s doing.

The Commerce Department reported today that retail sales in May were down 0.3 percent. But not really. Inflation was actually negative last month, so in real terms the decline was only 0.1 percent. It also means the decline wasn’t “the sharpest since a 1% decrease in January 2016.” There have been five declines in the past two years bigger than May’s, including a drop of 0.32 percent just three months ago.

So should we just relax about last month’s weak retail figures? I’ll let you decide. For the affirmative, there’s this chart:

Nothing much there, really. But for the negative, there’s this chart:

The trendline is pretty steadily down. Roughly speaking, this confirms my current belief that the economy is still doing OK, but a little less OK as time goes on. It seems like our nine-year expansion may be slowly running out of steam.

Here’s a teensy little bit of good news for you:

After a wave of pushback, American Airlines said Tuesday that it would not reduce the distance between economy seats on some of its new airplanes to make space for higher-priced seats near the front….American Airlines said in a statement Tuesday that it “received a lot of feedback from both customers and team members” about its plans to squeeze the pitch by one inch on those seats.

“It is clear that today, airline customers feel increasingly frustrated by their experiences and less valued when they fly,” the airline said.

I would provide my own interpretation of what this “feedback” was like, but this is a family site. Let’s just say that “increasingly frustrated” and “less valued” would more accurately be translated as “boiling with rage” and “treated like pieces of shit.” Oops. Family site. Make that “treated like flying fecal material.”

Anyway, at least we seem to have finally gotten a quantitative assessment of how far people can be pushed. American’s plan was to reduce legroom from 30 inches to 29 inches, and that was the final straw. So I guess 30 inches will now become the industry standard. For most of you, this actually doesn’t matter much. For us tall folks, it’s pretty intolerable. It’s one reason (among several) that I avoid flying at all costs these days.

Jeff Stein is making this a daily thing. Good for him.

Same story today. No p.1 health care coverage in LA Times; NYT; WashPo; or WSJ. You can learn a lot about North Korea, Jeff Sessions, & Uber pic.twitter.com/DKyk6WU2hJ

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_Vox) June 14, 2017