Visitors to the Shanghai Disney Resort in China will soon get to use a smartphone app to reserve a time to visit their favorite attraction without waiting in a long line — at no additional cost. But some Disney fans are irked because the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim launched a similar app in July at a cost of $10 a day….“It’s just the latest money grab,” wrote a Disney fan who goes by @RobertofDisney on Twitter. “There’s no reason it shouldn’t be free.”
The Chinese are laughing at us, as usual. Soon Disneyland will be a ghost town as visitors head to Shanghai instead to take advantage of its free Maxpass. I hope Donald Trump does something about this.
Donald Trump Jr. told Senate investigators on Thursday that he set up a June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer because he was intrigued that she might have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, saying it was important to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s “fitness” to be president. But nothing came of the Trump Tower meeting, he said, and he was adamant that he never colluded with the Russian government’s campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election.
So…Don Jr. wanted to collude, and he would have except that it turned out the Russians didn’t have any good dirt. Do I have that right?
Why not cut deals with Democrats, jam the GOP establishment up, and let them whinge to their reporter friends about it?
It’s not, after all, like cutting deals with Democrats on legislation means that Trump will suddenly be a liberal or conservatives will have no reason to support him. Obviously Trump and Democrats will continue to disagree about immigration and gun control [etc.]….But on the other stuff, why not do the things he said he was going to do? Cut a deal with Democrats on infrastructure. Cut a deal with Democrats to reform the tax code without making a huge giveaway to the rich. Cut a deal with Democrats to lower premiums and deductibles, thus addressing actual people’s actual gripes with Obamacare.
It would work. It would be popular. It would be a legislative legacy. And while it would make Ryan and McConnell angry, they’d no more be in a position to stop it than they were in a position to stop Trump and Schumer from making a deal on the debt ceiling.
I don’t get it. This would only work if these bills got to the floor of the House for a vote. But they wouldn’t. Paul Ryan would just toss them in the waste bin and move on.
Now, it’s possible this could work if the bills were so popular, and Trump pushed them so skillfully, that Republicans began to fear losing their seats if they opposed them. But what are the odds? Trump doesn’t have the attention span to really sell this stuff. The vast majority of Republicans are in safe districts that they don’t have to worry about. And the first time Democrats crossed Trump, he’d dump them.
Republicans control Congress. Like it or not, that’s who Trump has to deal with.
It’s a long-running talking point spouted by Trump administration members and the president himself: Undocumented immigrants are taking jobs away from black and Hispanic Americans. Hours after President Trump dismantled an Obama-era program that had granted 800,000 young undocumented immigrants permission to live and work in the United States, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders again made the claim.
“It’s a known fact that there are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients; that over 950,000 of those are African Americans in the same age group; over 870,000 unemployed Hispanics in the same age group,” Sanders said during Tuesday’s press briefing. “Those are large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs.”
What Sanders leaves out is that those 800,000 DACA recipients also buy lots of stuff, creating jobs for other people. In fact, the amount of stuff they buy is almost exactly equal to the wages of the jobs they take. In other words, if every DACA recipient got deported tomorrow, GDP would decrease by about the equivalent of 800,000 jobs. It would help nobody.
This is why immigration doesn’t generally have a big effect on employment. It can have a small effect, because the economic activity of immigrants might not precisely match the wages they take out of the economy. This is why you see studies showing that undocumented workers are responsible for tiny changes in employment and wages, usually somewhere between -2 percent to +2 percent, mostly clustering around zero.
The moon is playing hide-and-seek with the clouds in today’s picture. I’m curious about where the rust color comes from. This was late enough at night that it wasn’t residual light from sunset. I don’t think it’s an artifact of the camera either. Could it be a streetlight reflecting off the lens hood or something?
Rather than clearing the deck for Republicans to be able to work on tax reform, the short-term extension means that they now have to contend with yet another round to deal with the budget and debt ceiling before the end of the year. That clogs up the whole business, while providing Democrats with the ability to maintain their leverage. That is precisely why the Republicans were trying to bargain for a longer time horizon—they wanted to get these two things off their plates for at least a year and be able to move on to the one big thing they all want to accomplish…tax cuts.
This isn’t quite right. Sure, Ryan and McConnell wanted a longer horizon on the debt ceiling. This risked scuttling the whole bill, but they figured that tying the debt ceiling to Harvey aid gave them a decent shot at passing it even though the ultras would yell and scream. It was a risk they were willing to take.
But the continuing resolution on the budget was never going to be longer than three months. This means that Ryan and McConnell were always going to be hip deep in budget negotiations all the way through the end of the year. I can’t imagine they ever entertained the prospect of clearing this off their plates.
In other words, the only thing they lost yesterday was the fight over the debt ceiling. But that costs them very little. If they can put together a budget that gets Democratic support—which they’ll need if they want to bust the sequestration cap on defense spending—they can almost certainly get Democratic support for raising the debt ceiling too. This does make things harder for them, since they need 60 votes in the Senate to raise the debt ceiling, but a budget agreement would come with assurances of enough Democratic votes to get it through.
This is why I don’t think Republicans lost much yesterday. The rest of the year was going to be tied up with budget negotiations no matter what, and tying the debt ceiling bill to the budget only makes things slightly harder. The debt ceiling gives Democrats a little more leverage, but only a little.
A couple of weeks ago I read Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, and I was a little surprised to learn that the evangelical movement has been in pretty weak shape for the past decade or so. One reason is that the old warhorses—Falwell, Robertson, Dobson—are either old or dead, and very few new warhorses have taken their place as leaders of the movement. What’s worse, many of the new ones who have developed high public profiles, like Rick Warren, are less interested in the old social hot buttons and prefer to devote more of their time to things like helping the poor. This partly explains why evangelicals were so eager to support Donald Trump, even though he’s pretty obviously the least godly president in recent memory. They were looking for any port in a storm, and their followers liked Trump. So they jumped on his coattails in hopes that some of his popularity would rub off on them.
This decline is heavily age dependent—and not because of abortion. Young people feel about the same way toward abortion as older people. The real fault line is gay marriage. As the old evangelicals became ever more strident about it, they lost the loyalty of young people who just weren’t willing to buy the anti-gay hatred. Among 18-29 year-olds, only about 8 percent currently identify as evangelicals.
(Apparently the whole issue of gay rights did damage on a broader scale too. Old-school hardliners like James Dobson were absolutely manic about it, and as it became clear they were losing the battle it did serious spiritual damage. Some of them began to think America was doomed. Others just gave up. This spiritual crisis at the top contributed to the decline of white evangelical churches as a whole.)
Here are two other interesting things from the report. First is a map of American states ranked by diversity of religion. The authors use the HHI scale, which is normally used to measure concentration within industries, so you can think of this as representing how much of a monopoly a single church has in each state:
The least diverse state in the country is Mississippi, followed closely by Alabama and Arkansas. These are states where Southern Baptists rule. The most diverse states are New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California.
And since this here is a political blog, this chart shows which parties are most popular within various religions. I don’t think there are any big surprises.
As always, keep in mind that this is a message to Trump’s base, not to anyone else. The message is: I’m anti-immigrant but I still have a heart. This is precisely the message they want to hear, because it is precisely how they think of themselves. They’re sick of people accusing them of being racist or xenophobic or just plain nasty because they’re opposed to the brown hordes coming over the border. Trump is the only one who understands this, and that’s why they love him.
Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA
This morning I suggested that President Trump’s deal with Democrats to extend government funding and the debt ceiling for three months was, in fact, something of a relief to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. They wanted a deal that solved their near-term problems, but because the ultra-cons in their own party opposed any kind of compromise, they also wanted to keep their fingerprints off it. Having Trump do the dirty work was perfect for them.
I think it’s safe to say that no one on the planet agrees with me:
Wall Street Journal: “Trump stuns GOP…likely to inflame tensions between the president and his fellow Republicans…Senate Republican aides said the deal registered as a rebuke.”
Washington Post: “Trump confounded his party’s leaders…upended sensitive negotiations over the debt ceiling…follows a summer of presidential stewing over McConnell and Ryan.”
Politico: “Republicans seethed privately and distanced themselves publicly from the deal…doesn’t appear to help Republicans at all…undercut leadership.”
New York Times: “Reflected friction between the president and his party…an extraordinary public turn for the president…Republican leaders looked grim but resigned afterward.”
LA Times: “Caught Republican leaders off guard and severely undercut their legislative strategy…left several Republican lawmakers seething…McConnell made clear that the deal was Trump’s, even as he agreed to support it.”
I suppose Occam’s Razor supports this view. Trump was most likely being his usual dickish self. He’s mad at McConnell and Ryan right now, so he decided to screw them over with a clumsy warning that he might team up with Dems if they don’t start toeing the Trump line.¹ Anything more complicated than that is probably beyond Trump’s emotional and cognitive range.
And yet…there’s still something odd about this. Two somethings, in fact:
Here’s what McConnell said after the Oval Office meeting: “The president agreed with Sen. Schumer and Congresswoman Pelosi to do a three-month [funding extension] and a debt ceiling into December, and that’s what I will be offering based on the president’s decision, to the bill.” Since when does McConnell just roll over and do whatever Trump says? And since when does he make it very very clear that this isn’t his fault, no how no way, it’s just what the president wants to do?
The reason Republicans are “stunned” is because this is supposed to be a terrible deal for them. But is it? Right now Democrats have a lot of leverage because Republicans need to get so much done between now and the end of the month. Even routine dilatory tactics would kill them. Now McConnell has the opportunity to clean up a few things and then spend a couple of months negotiating the budget. That works in his favor. And what does he lose? Supposedly, he could have pushed through a longer debt ceiling increase if it was tied to Harvey aid because Dems would have been unwilling to vote against it. I have my doubts about that, but in any case, a longer debt ceiling increase is precisely what the conservative ultras were against. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of Republicans who would have voted against Harvey aid if it included a 2-year debt ceiling increase. That was leadership’s big problem, not Democrats.
I’m no legislative guru, but if I didn’t know better I’d say that today’s outcome sounds like a preplanned bit of McConnell kabuki. OK, we’re agreed. In the morning Paul will call a 3-month increase ridiculous. We’ll pretend to argue about it in the Oval Office. Halfway through you’ll cut us off and agree with the Democrats. Be sure to make it look real, Mr. President! Then Paul and I will come out looking whipped, and I’ll make it clear that we hate this and are only doing it because the president laid down the law. We’ll even manage a few leaks to make it look more authentic. Everybody loves it when anonymous sources deliver some dirt. Everyone in? Good.
I know, I know. There’s no way. This kind of stuff only happens in bad movies, and Trump is incapable of playacting like this anyway. But damn. This whole deal still looks so good for McConnell and Ryan that I’d swear it was choreographed.
¹This has never made any sense, since Republicans control the floor of Congress. Trump can work with Democrats all he wants, but their bills are going precisely nowhere unless Ryan and McConnell let them. For some reason, though, this possibility seems to be taken seriously by a lot of people.
Since I was yanking Steve Schafer’s chain yesterday, today’s photo is for him. This is my friend Helga’s beautiful falcon, Dreki. (That’s Icelandic for dragon.) Apparently he’s eagerly waiting for October 1, when rabbit season opens. I think I’m glad I’m not a rabbit.
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