Dinendra Haria/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA

Um…

The White House has developed a plan to force out Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose relationship with President Trump has been strained, and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, within the next several weeks, senior administration officials said on Thursday. Mr. Pompeo would be replaced at the C.I.A. by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas who has been a key ally of the president on national security matters.

Pompeo has mainly distinguished himself by being the most political CIA chief in recent history, but I suppose if you’re going to be openly political you might as well be in an explicitly political job like Secretary of State. As for Cotton, he strikes me as pretty inexperienced to be head of the CIA, but who knows?

Of the major players in the Trump administration when it began, this would mean that Trump has lost or fired: Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Mike Flynn, and Rex Tillerson. Of the original campaign crew, only Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions are left, and both seem to be on thin ice these days.

But don’t worry. Things are going great. Like a Swiss watch.

This is literally apropos of nothing. I happened to get pointed to a Ross Douthat tweetstorm about declining fertility rates, and it made me curious about what our fertility rate actually looks like. So here it is:

I really have nothing at all to say about this. As it turns out, our fertility rate did start dropping during the Great Recession. It seemed like it was flattening out around 2013, but then it started declining again. Does this matter? Is it a blip, or a sign of problems to come? Does it mean we need more immigrants? Should I even care if our population is going to start shrinking a few decades from now? Robots are going to be running the whole planet by then, after all. It all beats me. But at least now you know what the basic shape of the water is.

After briefly dropping in the polls following sexual misconduct allegations, Roy Moore is once again leading Doug Jones in the Alabama race for senator. Naturally this reminds me of an old Doonesbury cartoon:¹

The flip side of this, of course, is that bad news can be disclosed too soon. After a month or two, supporters have had plenty of time to get over their shock and start inventing reasons why they really need to vote for the cretin anyway.

Of course, this cartoon is from 1976. In the internet age, everything has been speeded up by a factor of two or three. One week was plenty of time for James Comey’s letter to kill Hillary Clinton, while four weeks was way more than enough time for Donald Trump’s supporters to rationalize away the Access Hollywood tape. If the Washington Post had really been on a political vendetta against Roy Moore, they would have run their story right about him now, not three weeks ago.

¹Just as there’s a Trump tweet for everything, there’s an old Doonesbury cartoon for everything.

This is the Jack Sparrow actor at Disneyland. He crosses back and forth on the raft to Tom Sawyer’s Island, and he was really good. You can see that he has the look down (we’ll forgive the sunscreen on his nose), and he had the accent and mannerisms close to perfect too. And he was great with the kids, who swarmed around him and squealed with delight whenever he said something funny—which was often. I’d like to say that he has a bright future in Hollywood, but it probably turns out that he’s pre-med studying to be a neurosurgeon or something. Isn’t that always the way?

Ars Technica reports on Comcast’s statement of net neutrality:

Starting in 2014, the webpage, corporate.comcast.com/openinternet/open-net-neutrality, contained this statement: “Comcast doesn’t prioritize Internet traffic or create paid fast lanes.” That statement remained on the page until April 26 of this year. But on April 27, the paid prioritization pledge was nowhere to be found on that page and remains absent now.

What changed? It was on April 26 that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced the first version of his plan to eliminate net neutrality rules. Since then, Pai has finalized his repeal plan, and the FCC will vote to drop the rules on December 14.

And so it begins. This is just a toe in the water.

I’ll be damned. Wonkblog’s Andrew Van Dam points out today that GDP has finally closed the huge gap with potential GDP that opened up after the Great Recession. He’s right:

I’m not sure I ever believed this would happen, even though CBO predicted exactly this a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately, there’s some bad news embedded here: one or two quarters of GDP above potential is an almost infallible predictor of a recession. All we need now is a housing bubble, a stock bubble, and a spike in oil prices and we’ll have everything in place to kick off 2018.

I’m sitting here trying to absorb my previous post. I just woke up, so give me a minute.

OK. Here’s what happened. It’s 6 am on the East Coast. Donald Trump is up and puttering around. He fires up Twitter and sees this from stale old rabble rouser Ann Coulter:

VIDEO: Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches! pic.twitter.com/11LgbfFJDq

— Jayda Fransen (@JaydaBF) November 28, 2017

Intriguing! So he clicks and heads over to Jayda Fransen’s Twitter feed. It’s got a big picture of Donald Trump on top! He likes that. So he scrolls. Ooh, more videos of Muslims acting horrifically. Are they real? Well, they’re real enough if they come from the president of the United States! So he picks a few and retweets them. Then it’s back to his usual puerile boasting about the economy and rants against the fake news.

This is not normal, even for Trump. He’s not a subtle man, but he usually has the animal cunning to at least leave himself a veneer of deniability for his ethnic hatreds. This time, though, he goes full frontal. Why?

1. It’s his way of helping Roy Moore.
2. He wants people talking about this instead of the appalling tax bill Republicans are moving through Congress.
3. He’s officially gone from occasionally delusional to full crazy uncle.
4. Who the hell knows?

I know we’ve all said this a hundred times, but are Republicans ever going to seriously do something about this? I know they want to pass their tax bill and don’t want to get involved with stuff like this, but when is enough enough? Are any of them planning to say anything at all about this? Ever?

NYT on Donald Trump’s descent into complete delusion. https://t.co/zJCxO4qV7l pic.twitter.com/dLFXRzdyGn

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) November 29, 2017

What in the everlasting fuck is this?

With Bill O’Reilly gone, is Fox News keeping up the good fight against us secular liberals and our war on Christmas? Probably. So here’s some raw data for you, courtesy of Google’s ever-entertaining Ngram Viewer:

Hmmm. Since 1970, use of the word Christmas has gone up by almost 50 percent, while the word holiday has gone up only about 33 percent. As a check, Easter has stayed totally flat. Apparently there was never really much of a war in the first place: it turns out that the forces of Santa Claus have been implacably grinding out a victory all along. Except at the White House, of course:

So important to thank our service members for their service, especially those away from their families during the holidays. pic.twitter.com/QSOM8elUNx

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) November 28, 2017

Preparations are underway to celebrate the holidays at the @WhiteHouse! pic.twitter.com/N5qZ1NP8ez

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) November 22, 2017

Does the individual mandate work? CBO estimates that if it’s repealed, 13 million fewer people will buy insurance. That’s something like two-thirds of all Obamacare enrollees, which means that CBO thinks it has an enormous impact. Without it, Obamacare collapses.

A few weeks ago I linked to a study of traffic fines that suggested the CBO estimate was at least plausible. But that’s all it did. Today, though, Matt Fiedler—formerly chief economist of Obama’s CEA and currently a Brookings fellow—presented some evidence about the mandate that was much more on point. He looks solely at people whose income is above 400 percent of the poverty level, which means they don’t qualify for federal subsidies. If they didn’t buy insurance before Obamacare, the only reason they have to buy it now is the mandate penalty. So did they?

Starting in 2014, when the mandate took effect, the number of uninsured in this group dropped by a third. As a check, nothing happened in Massachusetts, which already had a mandate.

This is strong evidence that the mandate works. These people receive no subsidies, so there was really nothing that made insurance more attractive to them when Obamacare went into effect. They started buying it because they didn’t want to pay the fine, even though they made enough money that the fine wasn’t that big a deal. For poorer people, it makes sense that the mandate penalty would have an even greater effect. When you’re poor, you really can’t afford to pay this kind of penalty, especially when you qualify for subsidies and might as well spend the money on something useful instead.

I’m still not sure that killing the mandate would cause two-thirds of Obamacare customers to drop out, but it might. And it sure looks likely that at least half would drop out. Either way, Obamacare would be toast.

And we probably won’t have to wait long to find out. If the mandate is eliminated, it doesn’t really matter whether CBO is right or wrong. All that matters is whether insurance companies think CBO is right. If they do, we won’t have to linger around for a death spiral to kill Obamacare. Insurers will just exit the market en masse, and that will be that.