Here’s a fascinating chart from Patrick Egan:

Everyone seems to have figured out that Trump is a moron, and they’re not too thrilled by his nonexistent leadership skills either. But how is it that he’s lost only a few points on honesty? He lied about his inauguration turnout. He lied about Obama wiretapping him. He lied about 3 (or 5) million votes from illegal immigrants causing him to lose the popular vote. He lied about London’s mayor because of a petty grudge. He lied (repeatedly) about saving money on an order for F-35 jets. Hell, the New York Times has a comprehensive list of hundreds of lies here.

Maybe he started from such a low base that he didn’t have very far he could fall? Ha ha. I’m just kidding. We all know the answer: Fox News. Anyone who watches Fox thinks all these things that Trump said are true. It must be nice being president in a country with a loyal state media. Just ask Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi.

Via Axios, here is some polling research from MIT professor Chris Warshaw about the popularity of major legislation passed or proposed since 1990:

TARP and Clintoncare were two of the most reviled pieces of legislation in the past three decades. Trumpcare has them beat handily. Will Republicans really vote for a bill that even most Republicans aren’t very happy with? They might. Stay tuned.

Before everyone starts cackling too much over Donald Trump’s exile to the lonely hinterlands of today’s G20 family portrait, keep in mind that the same thing happened to Obama in 2009. I’ll let the Daily Mail explain:

On the other hand, we’ll always have this:

A perfect metaphor of the United States right now. pic.twitter.com/hyotCHn4Zu

— shauna (@goldengateblond) July 7, 2017

This is Hopper begging to be let in the front door. If I open the door, there are two typical outcomes: (a) she ignores me and saunters off, or (b) she uses the house as a (very minimal) shortcut into the backyard. In neither case does she really want to come inside. She just wants to make sure that I am still obedient to her whims.

Over at Wonkblog, Elizabeth Winkler says that Donald Trump’s trade threats seem to be working:

Since January, G-20 countries have imposed 29 percent fewer protectionist policies than they did in the same period in 2016. And it’s not because the United States is playing nice: Since January, U.S. policymakers have imposed 26 percent more protectionist policies on its G-20 peers than during the same period a year before, according to the report.

….Caroline Freund, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, calls this a “backlash to the backlash against globalization.”…“If [Trump] is going to go on a trade rampage, they don’t want to attract extra attention by imposing new measures,” Freund said.

Technically these figures are correct. But they’re pretty misleading. The other G20 countries have cut back on their trade actions against everybody in the G20, not just the US:

In 2017 so far, G20 countries have cut back on protectionist activities against the US by 29 percent, but they’ve cut back against everyone else by 46 percent. Here’s how this translates: last year, only 9 percent of G20 protectionism was aimed at the US. This year it’s 12 percent.

This suggests a harsher relative attitude toward the US this year, not a milder one. The real difference here is that the rest of the G20 is trying to cut back overall on protectionist activities while the US isn’t. But thanks to Trump’s threats, they’re not cutting back very much against the US. It doesn’t seem as if anyone is really all that afraid of him.

With 2017 half over, we can now take a look at semiannual job growth over the past five years:

Hum de hum.

A couple of weeks ago, Kellyanne Conway denied that the Senate health care bill cut Medicaid. “These are not cuts to Medicaid,” she said. “This slows the rate for the future.”

This is the lamest, tiredest trope imaginable, and it’s flat-out false. In inflation-adjusted dollars—the only kind that honest people use—CBO estimates that the Senate bill cuts Medicaid spending by about 18 percent over the next decade. As a result, 15 million fewer people will receive Medicaid by 2026. That’s a cut by anyone’s definition.

But Ramesh Ponnuru isn’t concerned about this. Instead, he’s mad at PolitiFact for saying that the Senate bill “rolls back who is eligible”—i.e., that it kills the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare. That’s not quite right: according to CBO’s analysis, the Senate bill gradually reduces the federal share of payment for Medicaid expansion from 90 percent to 57 percent. Because of this, “CBO expects that no additional states would expand eligibility.”

This may seem like a thin distinction, but Ponnuru is so mad about it that he brought it up again today. “So far, no correction,” he says.

Fine. PolitiFact got something wrong. They should correct the record. But I sure wish conservatives could work up the same level of indignation for an administration that flatly lies about Medicaid and a Republican bill that slashes Medicaid funding so much that it tosses 15 million poor people off the rolls. Instead, they’re busy concocting rickety arguments that Medicaid is “lousy” and then making pie-in-the-sky suggestions that we should use Medicaid money to help the poor buy private insurance instead. But they know perfectly well that’s not an option on offer, and never likely to be in any practical way. It’s just a way of soothing their consciences without any danger of supporting any actual real-world spending.

Life is less about facts and figures than it is about priorities. Over the past few months, conservatives have pretty clearly shown us theirs.

On May 9, Reality Winner, an NSA contract worker, downloaded a file that outlined details of Russian hacking efforts just before the 2016 election. On June 5, the Intercept published her file.

But something interesting happened between May and June: someone used the Winner document as the basis to create a forgery of a different top-secret document that named a specific Trump aide who had colluded with Russia. This forgery was apparently shopped around to journalists, including Rachel Maddow, who described what happened on her show last night.

So…who had access to the Winner file before it was published? Who’s peddling this stuff? Was it from a Trump opponent who meant it to be taken seriously but didn’t quite do the job well enough? Was it from a Trump supporter who hoped someone in the mainstream media would publish it and then look like a fool? Was it from someone in the intelligence community who wanted to sow seeds of doubt in news organizations that receive stolen documents? Good question! As Maddow mentioned, two other news organizations have had to retract stories recently based on problems with “sourcing.” This might be part of a concerted effort to discredit the media looking into the Trump-Russia connection.

I will say one thing, though: Maddow compared this to the fake documents that CBS published about George Bush’s National Guard service. That’s a dead end. We have a pretty good idea of where those came from, and it wasn’t some part of the deep state. It was just an idiot with a grudge against Bush.

The American economy added 222,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 132,000 jobs. That’s a decent number, about equal to the average of the past three years. The headline unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.4 percent, but that’s probably because a lot of new grads entered the labor force in June and haven’t yet found jobs.

Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees went up at an annual rate of 2.3 percent. Inflation has been declining for the past couple of months, so this represents a small increase on an annualized basis. Nothing to write home about, but at least it’s positive. All in all, this was a pretty positive report with no real downsides.

Here’s something kind of awesome. Wonkblog’s Christopher Ingraham points us to a district court opinion that justifies its conclusion with a chart drawn in Excel:

Is this common? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chart in a judicial opinion before, but then, I don’t read a whole lot of judicial opinions. In any case, if this is a trend, I heartily approve.

In case you’re wondering, Judge Joseph Goodwin used this chart to demonstrate that US attorneys are lazy bastards who make plea deals for everything and barely ever do the work of actually bringing someone to trial: “In FY 1973, each federal prosecutor handled over eight criminal trials on average. By FY 2016, the average number of criminal trials handled by each federal prosecutor plummeted to 0.29 trials.”

For that reason, he rejected a plea deal in the case at hand. US attorneys are hardly overworked, he said, so let’s have a trial:

The law is the law, and I am satisfied that enforcing the law through public adjudications focuses attention on the heroin and opioid crisis….A jury trial tells a story….Moreover, the attendant media attention that a jury trial occasions communicates to the community that such conduct is unlawful and that the law is upheld and enforced.

….The secrecy surrounding plea bargains in heroin and opioid cases frequently undermines respect for the law and deterrence of crime. The bright light of the jury trial deters crime, enhances respect for the law, educates the public, and reinforces their sense of safety much more than a contract entered into in the shadows of a private meeting in the prosecutor’s office.

For the reasons stated, I REJECT the plea agreement.

Does this make sense? Will it be upheld if it’s appealed? Beats me. But I love the chart. Good job, judge.