I love this photo from Huntington Beach. Not because there’s anything special about it per se, but because this guy is just so perfect. He looks like he parachuted directly out of Baywatch or The OC. He is the perfect Southern California lifeguard.

What is the most male-dominated industry in the United States? I don’t know for sure, but it might well be “evangelical preacher”:

Trump White House met with 100 Christian evangelical leaders last week. Again. https://t.co/MfjsGHkp2q pic.twitter.com/2IJ5ggjHQ1

— New Civil Rights (@newcivilrights) August 1, 2017

And what is the most conservative-dominated demographic in the United States? Military officers? Surgeons? Evangelical preachers? I don’t know that either, but I would nominate cigar smokers. What’s the deal with that? A friend of mine is a cigar smoker, and has steadily stopped socializing with his fellow cigar smokers because their get-togethers have become full-on Trumpathons. As near as I can tell, the cigar-smoking demographic is about 99 percent conservative, and he agrees. Why is that? Does anyone know?

California has one of the most successful Obamacare exchanges in the country. Partly this is because California is a big state, which makes it a competitive place for health insurers. But it’s also because California is a liberal state and has done everything it can to make its exchange work well. That pays off.

Today, California announced rate increases for 2018. Here’s a summary:

• All 11 insurers who are in the market are staying in 2018.
• The price of the lowest-priced silver plan will go up 9.2 percent.
• This includes a one-time hit of 2.8 percent thanks to the implementation of ACA’s health insurance tax. Without that, the increase would be 6.4 percent.
• If consumers shop around, the average rate increase is 3.3 percent.
• Thanks to Donald Trump’s playground attempts to sabotage Obamacare by playing coy over preserving CSR subsidies for the poor, “all health plans in Covered California will add a surcharge of the amount needed to cover the costs of the CSR subsidy program to their on-exchange Silver-tier products.” The surcharge varies by region and insurer, but averages about 14 percent on top of the nominal rate increase.
• The surcharge will go away if Trump confirms that CSR subsidies will continue.

Of course, federal subsidies will go up too in 2018. Families with modest incomes—who make up 87 percent of the total—will see little or no net rate increase in 2018.

We have some interesting results from a YouGov poll released last week. First up, here are the number of Republicans who trust Donald Trump more than various news sources:

Republicans trust Trump by enormous margins over mainstream news sources. They trust Trump by enormous margins over conservative news sources. And they even trust Trump by 2:1 over Fox News (54 percent vs. 23 percent).

In other words, reporting what Trump does hardly has any effect. In fact, it probably helps Trump since most Republicans figure it’s just more lies and fake news designed to make their guy look bad. As a result, here are a few thing Republicans believe:

• 44 percent say Obamacare has been a “complete” failure.
• 47 percent explicitly say that punishing biased news outlets is more important than protecting freedom of the press.
• 28 percent approve of creating a single-payer system for the US, even though only 15 percent approve of Obamacare.
• 54 percent think the FBI investigation of Trump is a politically motivated attempt to embarrass him, and 65 percent approve of Trump’s firing of James Comey.
• 68 percent think Trump understands important issues “in detail.”

How do you fight stuff like that if the usual news outlets are now almost entirely untrusted by Trump voters? Maybe there’s no way. Maybe all you can do is pick off some of the moderates in the middle and leave the hard core Republicans alone to their fantasies.

My M-protein level is back down after its little spike last month. That’s good news. The longer this particular maintenance regime keeps the multiple myeloma in check, the better. Aside from that, I have a sore knee, a blister on my toe, and a rash. The knee is from God know’s what, while the blister and rash are from too much Disneyland on a hot day. Also from getting old.

Fox News

Last year, DNC staffer Seth Rich was shot to death near his home in Washington DC. In May, Fox News ran a segment suggesting that Rich had provided Wikileaks with internal DNC emails, and was rubbed out in retaliation. Because, you know, that’s the kind of thing the DNC would do. Sean Hannity was all over this for days and days until Fox finally retracted the story.

Now, private investigator Rod Wheeler, who was a source for the story, is suing Fox. He alleges that he was falsely quoted, and that Fox originally ran the story at the behest of the White House. NPR has the story:

The Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the death of a young Democratic National Committee aide, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday….Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration’s ties to the Russian government. His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.

….The lawsuit focuses particular attention on the role of the Trump supporter, Ed Butowsky, in weaving the story….On April 20, a month before the story ran, Butowsky and Wheeler — the investor and the investigator — met at the White House with then-press secretary Sean Spicer to brief him on what they were uncovering. The first page of the lawsuit quotes a voicemail and text from Butowsky boasting that President Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story just before it went to air and was published.

Butowski was one of the big Benghazi conspiracy theorists, but as you might expect, he now says was just joshing around about Trump reviewing the story. Spicer says the meeting with Butowski was just some routine stroking of a big donor. Nothing to see here, folks.

But then again, maybe there is:

Lawsuit DEFINITELY designed to be incendiary. But here’s key detail: Wheeler (no relation) has written records of what he actually said. pic.twitter.com/rI29z3akcb

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 1, 2017

Here’s where the guy who said he’s behind everything we know about Benghazi says he has no credibility.

He said it–not me! pic.twitter.com/LA9vOGmuPg

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 1, 2017

Oops. Wheeler (still no relation) has both Zimmerman and Butowsky on the record admitting he didn’t provide those quotes. pic.twitter.com/IqTBatG0tw

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 1, 2017

The trial should be a fun evisceration of Fox News, even if Spicer and Trump don’t end up on the stand. Stay tuned.

¹Nice use of scare quotes here from the Daily Beast.

Jared Kushner chatted with a group of congressional interns yesterday, and warned them not to leak anything he said. One of them promptly leaked an audio recording of the session, and Wired has it. Here is Kushner on his goal of bringing peace to the Middle East:

He doesn’t directly answer either question, but he does reveal that, from his extensive research, he’s learned that “not a whole lot has been accomplished over the last 40 or 50 years.” He also notes that he’s spoken to “a lot of people,” which has taught him that “this is a very emotionally charged situation.”

Later in the clip, Kushner expresses frustration at others’ attempts to teach him about the delicate situation he’s been inserted into, saying, “Everyone finds an issue, that, ‘You have to understand what they did then’ and ‘You have to understand that they did this.’ But how does that help us get peace? Let’s not focus on that. We don’t want a history lesson. We’ve read enough books. Let’s focus on how do you come up with a conclusion to the situation.”

….Finally, Kushner closed with the following statement of reassurance: “So, what do we offer that’s unique? I don’t know.”

Kushner refers to the whole thing as a “problem set” that he’s been given, and assures everyone that he’s done a ton of research about it. How reassuring.

Klimentyev Mikhail/TASS via ZUMA

Thanks to Donald Trump, our relationship with Russia is going off the rails. Think about what’s happened in just the past year.

First, Russia interfered with our election. Obama retaliated in a measured way by kicking out a few diplomats and seizing a couple of Russian compounds that had been used as bases for spying. Under normal circumstances, Russia probably would have re-retaliated in some measured way, and that would have been it. Our relationship would have been ice cold, but that’s all.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump became president, and he obviously had every intention of cozying up to Vladimir Putin. Because of this, his own party took matters out of his hands and passed a new round of sanctions against Russia—sanctions that have severely angered our European allies. This would never have happened under any other president. As a result, Putin decided to retaliate massively by kicking out hundreds of US diplomats from Moscow. Now, even fairly moderate folks are so pissed off they’re chanting USA! and pushing for yet more retaliation on our side. Maybe we should provide lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine? And if we do that, what does Putin do next?

As long as Putin is in charge of Russia, I don’t think good relations were ever in the cards. But things don’t need to spiral out of control either. With anyone else in the White House, they wouldn’t have. With Trump, we have three brand new risks we never had before. We have the risk that Trump himself will do something stupid. We have the risk that Congress will do something stupid out of fear that Trump will do something stupid. Finally, there’s the risk that Putin will do something stupid because he knows that Trump is a buffoon who’s unlikely to stop him.

This is no way to run a country. Or a planet. Everyone needs to settle down over Russia. We don’t need another Cold War.

There is too much going on. I can’t keep up. Just for the record, here’s a brief recap of stuff I haven’t written full posts about:

Gen. John Kelly was so pissed off over Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey that he considered resigning as secretary of homeland security. But he stayed, and now he’s Trump’s chief of staff. This suggests that maybe Kelly doesn’t have a tremendous amount of respect for Trump’s judgment.

A prankster emailed Anthony Scaramucci pretending to be Reince Priebus, the day after Priebus was fired. He told Scaramucci that he wasn’t a very classy guy:

The very real Scaramucci responded: “You know what you did. We all do. Even today. But rest assured we were prepared. A Man would apologize.” Fake Priebus wrote back: “I can’t believe you are questioning my ethics! The so called ‘Mooch’, who can’t even manage his first week in the White House without leaving upset in his wake. I have nothing to apologize for.” Actual Scaramucci responded: “Read Shakespeare. Particularly Othello. You are right there. My family is fine by the way and will thrive. I know what you did. No more replies from me.”

I think we would all like to know very much what the Mooch knows that Priebus did.

Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake—a Republican—decided to trash the Republican Party today. He writes in Politico that Republicans acted really badly during Obama’s presidency, and in the Trump era they’re still being cowardly:

Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos….Silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.

There was a time when the leadership of the Congress from both parties felt an institutional loyalty that would frequently create bonds across party lines in defense of congressional prerogatives in a unified front against the White House, regardless of the president’s party….But then the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?

Finally, a number of Republicans have made it clear that they have no enthusiasm for making another run at health care. For now, Obamacare is safe from Congress. Whether it’s safe from Donald Trump’s vindictive personality is another question entirely.

A few weeks ago, the press got wind of the fact that Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian attorney early in the 2016 campaign. The Trump brain trust got together to discuss how to respond:

The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.

But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.

That’s from Ashley Parker, Carol Leonnig, Philip Rucker, and Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post. It might be the greatest lead I’ve read all year. Congratulations to whoever came up with it.

So who was the source for this story? Spicer? Priebus? Someone else? Poor old Donald hasn’t yet figured out that when you treat people badly, they’re likely to treat you badly in return. And government employees sign standard contracts, not the Trump specials that threaten to ruin their lives if they ever say anything bad about him. He might want to think about that.