Danil Shamkin/NurPhoto via ZUMA

In the past couple of days we’ve seen several emails showing that during the time Donald Trump was running for president there were internal conversations at the Trump Organization about building a Trump Tower in Moscow. But was Trump himself involved? ABC News says yes:

Four months into his campaign for President of the United States, Donald Trump signed a “letter of intent” to pursue a Trump Tower-style building development in Moscow, according to a statement from the then-Trump Organization chief counsel, Michael Cohen.

….The involvement of then-candidate Trump in a proposed Russian skyscraper deal contradicts repeated statements Trump made during the campaign, including telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that his business had “no relationship to Russia whatsoever.”

Needless to say, this is why so many people were suspicious of Trump’s weasely statements about Russia during the campaign. Does a letter of intent count as a “relationship” with Russia? Or does it only become a relationship if you actually end up signing a deal to do something?

Most of us would say that an LOI does indeed imply a relationship, but to Trump this is all meaningless. It’s not a matter of whether his words are truthful, but whether his words work. Since he won the election, that means his words were the right ones to use. Only losers worry about anything else.

Bill Ingalls/Planet Pix via ZUMA

I haven’t quite made sense of the latest Russia news, which is why I haven’t written about it. The news itself is easy enough to digest—some new emails about the Trump Organization pursuing a deal in Moscow while Trump was running for president—but I can’t quite figure out how much of it is really new and how much of it is really important. I’ll let you know when I’ve made up my mind.

In other news, Trump is getting some flak for his performance during a press conference with the Finnish president. After taking two questions each from American and Finnish reporters, Trump suggested they take a couple more:

A visibly surprised Niinisto obliged and gestured to a third Finnish journalist. “Please,” he said.

“Again?” said Trump, mistaking the woman for another female reporter who had asked a question earlier in the news conference. “You’re gonna give her — the same one?”

“No, she is not the same lady,” Niinistö replied. “They are sitting side by side.”

“We have a lot of blond women in Finland,” the reporter interjected.

True enough. And as presidential gaffes go, this was pretty minor. Then again, it is always politically inadvisable to suggest that all (insert historically marginalized demographic group here) look the same. This principle certainly applies to Trump, a magnet for charges of sexism and racism.

Seriously? Blond white women are a historically marginalized demographic group? And it’s somehow a problem to confuse two of them if you’re a “a magnet for charges of sexism and racism”? I’m willing to slam Trump for just about anything these days, but this is really stretching, folks.

On the other hand, Trump’s love of Oval Office photographs really does reveal something about his personality:

He tells aides, from senior White House advisers to his private bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to snap the photos on cellphones, or he shouts for Shealah Craighead, the official White House photographer, to come in. The often impatient president will sometimes pose for several minutes per sitting, taking variations of a photo with a single group. He even stands with people to inspect the photos.

….Several advisers and aides say Trump appears happiest when showing off the Oval Office, almost seeing it as the ultimate prize, just as he once showed off his celebrity photos, trophies and other memorabilia, such as Shaquille O’Neal’s shoes, at Trump Tower. 

….But Trump also uses the photo sessions to assert his dominance over visitors. He doesn’t accept no for an answer, repeatedly encouraging people reluctant to pose, including reporters and others who may feel uncomfortable taking photos with the president. One business executive said everyone knew the picture was a demand in a recent meeting, even though some other executives said they felt squeamish afterward because the photos can become fodder for criticism in a polarized political era.

Also worth noting: Trump doesn’t like being on the same level as other people. His pictures—and his Oval Office meetings—are always done with him sitting behind his desk. He doesn’t just like to assert his dominance, he likes to do it in almost comical ways. The weird thing is that Trump is hypersensitive about being laughed at, but nobody seems to have the guts to tell him that everyone laughs at him for transparent stunts like this. He’s completely oblivious.

If this were just a personality quirk of an otherwise competent president, we’d all shrug. The problem is that this is all there is to Trump. When it comes to marketing and self-promotion, he’ll take all the time necessary. When it comes to the substance of the job, he can’t manage to summon the enthusiasm to read more than two bullet points. For example, here’s another excerpt from his tariff meeting a couple of weeks ago:

At one point in the meeting, Navarro pulled out a foam board chart. Trump didn’t pay attention to it, saying “I don’t even know what I’m looking at here.”

One whole chart! And Navarro made it nice and big. But Trump couldn’t be bothered to even glance at it.

Things are a little slow this evening, so here’s my latest health update. Nickel version: nothing has changed. In fact, the two test results I actually care about were exactly the same as last month to two decimals. Maybe Kaiser is saving money by just pretending to run lab tests?

Anyway, everything is fine, and obviously the multiple myeloma remains well under control. The only downside is that over the past few months the chemo med has started to eat away at my energy a little more than usual. As near as I can tell, I now require 9-10 hours of sleep per day. That normally means 8 hours at night and then a 1-2 hour nap sometime during the day. That’s annoying.

Chuck Myers via ZUMA

From George Leef at National Review:

Progressives need a steady stream of excuses for their manufactured outrage. The latest is statues and monuments that are supposedly harmful to “marginalized” people because they depict men who fought for the Confederacy (or were imperfect in other ways). Mute bits of metal and stone don’t actually do anything, don’t oppress anyone, don’t send any message. They could merely be ignored in favor of doing something constructive for the poor and supposedly “marginalized,” such as pushing for school choice or getting rid of harmful licensing laws. But that’s the last thing the Left wants.

And of course George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are next, then the book burnings will start, blah blah blah. Good God. Where does NR find these people?

This little fellow is a gray hairstreak butterfly. At least, I think so; it’s my best guess based on “Butterflies of Orange County.” Contrary opinions welcome in comments.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The synthetic CDO, a villain of the global financial crisis, is back….In the U.S., the CDO market sunk steadily in the years after the financial crisis but has been fairly flat since 2014. In Europe, the total size of market is now rising again—up 5.6% annually in the first quarter of the year and 14.4% in the last quarter of 2016, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

I’d normally be all over this kind of thing. This is how it starts. Pretty soon, the Wall Street boys will be breaking out the bottles of Cristal again. And it is worth keeping an eye on. But I decided to redraw the chart from the Journal, and I have to admit it’s a little hard to get too bent out of shape:

If you squint, you can see a tiny blip upward at the far right end of the chart. Granted, the scale of the chart makes it look really small. Still, after soaring 600x during the housing bubble, it’s soared…1.3x since last year.

So, yes, let’s keep an eye on this. But even I find it hard to get too worried yet.

Song Qiong/Xinhua via ZUMA

Dara Lind reports on the “500-year” flood currently engulfing Houston:

Tomball, Texas, Public Works director David Esquivel told a local paper there this year that the Houston area had “two 500-year storms back to back”: over Memorial Day weekend of 2015 and early April 2016. That means that Hurricane Harvey constitutes the third “500-year” flood in three years.

….Either Houston is incredibly unlucky or the risk of severe flooding is a lot more serious than the FEMA modeling has predicted — and the odds of a flood as bad as the ones Houston has seen for the past few years are actually much higher than 1 in 500.

I’m going with Door #2. When everything is finally totted up, the flooding from Hurricane Harvey will probably be classified as a 1000-year flood, making this 3-year string even less likely. And while some of this probably is just coincidence, it’s almost certainly also a consequence of global warming, which creates more intense storms with higher levels of water vapor.

I wrote about this yesterday, and naturally got some pushback. “Harvey is unprecedented because it got stalled by a front, not because of climate change,” said one tweeter. That’s true about the front, and of course no one can say that climate change “caused” the flooding. But you can say that climate change increased the probabilities. Maybe it made Harvey a little more intense. Maybe it increased Harvey’s water vapor content a little bit. Maybe it made the front a little bit stronger. Add it all up and climate change didn’t cause Harvey, but it probably made it a few percent more likely and a few percent worse than it otherwise would have been. And at the tail end of bell curves, a few percent can mean a lot. It can turn a 500-year event into a 30 or 50 or 70-year event. Multiply this by the entire country, where the probabilities average out, and you can say without a doubt that climate change will produce more drought, more wildfires, more intense storms, and more flooding.

That’s how this stuff works. No big weather event ever has a single cause, but climate change skeptics are unwise to hang their hats on that. Likewise, I think that climate change hawks are unwise to shy away from blaming climate change for individual events. Their fear, generally, is that you can’t prove the role of climate change in any single extreme weather event, and they don’t want to open themselves to charges of alarmism. That’s admirable, but maybe just a bit too precious.

Over the weekend, Jonathan Swan reported on life in the Oval Office. This happened during John Kelly’s first week as Trump’s chief of staff:

“John, you haven’t been in a trade discussion before, so I want to share with you my views. For the last six months, this same group of geniuses comes in here all the time and I tell them, ‘Tariffs. I want tariffs.’ And what do they do? They bring me IP. I can’t put a tariff on IP.” (Most in the room understood that the president can, in fact, use tariffs to combat Chinese IP theft.)

“China is laughing at us,” Trump added. “Laughing.”

Kelly responded: “Yes sir, I understand, you want tariffs.”

Tariffs, baby, we want tariffs. On what? iPhones? Computers? T-shirts? Who cares. Just bring the man some tariffs!

Here’s a fascinating tweet from our commander-in-chief:

Wow – Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood! We have an all out effort going, and going well!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017

Once in 500 years? Hmmm. Here are a couple of relevant illustrations from the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which was recently made public:

Down on the Gulf Coast, the number of “precipitation events” that exceed the largest amount expected over five years has already gone up 40 percent since 1901. By about 2030, what used to be a 5-year event around Houston will occur every two months. This means that Hurricane Harvey used to be a 500-year event, but maybe not anymore. Maybe it’s now a 20 or 30-year event.

These kinds of extreme flooding events will increase thanks to (a) rising sea levels, (b) an increase in tropical storm intensity (though not frequency), and (c) greater rainfall from tropical storms. Here are a few excerpts from the report:

• Global mean sea level (GMSL) has risen by about 7–8 inches since 1900, with about 3 of those inches occurring since 1993 (very high confidence). Human-caused climate change has made a substantial contribution to GMSL rise since 1900 (high confidence)….Assuming storm characteristics do not change, sea level rise will increase the frequency and extent of extreme flooding associated with coastal storms, such as hurricanes and nor’easters (very high confidence).
• Both theory and numerical modeling simulations (in general) indicate an increase in tropical cyclone (TC) intensity in a warmer world, and the models generally show an increase in the number of very intense TCs.
• The average tropical cyclone rainfall rates within 500 km (about 311 miles) of the storm center increased by 8% to 17% in the simulations, which was at least as much as expected from the water vapor content increase factor alone.
• Urban flooding results from heavy precipitation events that overwhelm the existing sewer infrastructure’s ability to convey the resulting stormwater. Future increases in daily and sub-daily extreme precipitation rates will require significant upgrades to many communities’ storm sewer systems, as will sea level rise in coastal cities and towns.

Folks on the coast might want to think about urging President Trump to take this a little more seriously.

Since we’re talking a lot these days about the burden of corporate taxes on American businesses, maybe we should start off the conversation with something simple: a chart that shows how much corporations pay in taxes in the first place. These are not statutory rates. After all the deductions and credits and carryforwards and so forth are factored in, this is the amount they actually paid:

Republicans are right: corporations are clearly groaning under the tax burden we impose on them. Their taxes need to be cut ASAP.