This is a small copse of cottonwood trees in the middle of the Ahwahnee Meadow. Based on advice from a guide, I risked walking out to take the photo since everything in the meadow is dormant in winter. In any other season, this would be verboten. Yosemite Falls is out of frame to the right in the background.

No, this is not what we're talking about.Emmy Eats

From Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association:

If the administration has its way, it will be perfectly legal for sport hunters to lure bears with greased doughnut bait piles to kill them.

That’s not a sentence I ever expected to read, but these are strange times. In case you’re curious, the broader topic here is whether it should be OK to kill bear cubs and their mothers in Alaska’s national wildlife preserves. Republicans say yes because they’re Republicans. Trump says yes because Obama banned it. So the greased donut piles will probably be legal again very soon.

South Korean president Moon Jae-In waves to the crowd as Donald Trump stands slack-jawed behind him.Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Sigh.

Trump, who has pitched himself as the ultimate negotiator, has focused on ambitious deals as president but has struggled with the fine print….Supporters stress that sometimes Trump’s ambitious efforts do pay off, as with the massive tax cut bill he signed into law late last year.

Going into the North Korea meeting, senior administration officials say, the president has been almost singularly focused on the pageantry of the summit —including the suspenseful roll-out of details. He has not been deeply engaged in briefing materials on North Korea’s nuclear program, said three people with knowledge of the White House efforts….Driven by gut instinct, Trump rarely dives deep as he prepares to meet with foreign counterparts. For the North Korea meeting, insiders say, he is motivated by the idea of scoring a historic deal and is tickled by suggestions he could win a Nobel Peace Prize — especially since Barack Obama won the honor early in his presidency.

FFS. Trump had nothing to do with the tax cut. He was, as Grover Norquist once put it so pungently, merely a human-shaped object with “enough working digits to handle a pen.” The tax cut would have passed if Mickey Mouse had occupied the Oval Office.

So that leaves zero ambitious deals that Trump has negotiated. It’s not for lack of trying, either. He tried to repeal Obamacare. He tried to negotate on DACA. He tried to declare a trade war on China. He tried to bully Mexico and Canada into ripping up NAFTA and starting over. He tried to persuade Russia to deal with him on Syria. He failed in every case because he had no idea what he was doing; what the other side wanted; or how to get there. He just wanted to make a loud threat and then declare victory, and the result has been nothing but a trail of wreckage in his wake. No one in America of either party trusts him any longer, and neither does any country in the world—with the peculiar quasi-exceptions of Israel and Saudi Arabia.¹

Anyway, now North Korea is up. Everyone with more than a marble or two clattering around inside their skull knows that Kim Jong-un is never going to give up his nukes. No one except Donald Trump, that is. And I guess even he’s starting to get the message:

President Donald Trump said a planned June 12 summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “may not work out,” adding if it doesn’t happen then “maybe it would in the future.”

I sure hope Republicans get their money’s worth in judicial appointments from supporting this cretin. I never realized that selling your soul came so cheap.

¹Why “quasi”? Because as near as I can tell, both countries trust that Trump is on their side, but both also have nothing but contempt for him. They figure they can gull him into doing what they want and ignore his idiot son-in-law, and that’s good enough.

Wait for it... Usgs/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Perhaps I’m hypersensitive to this kind of thing, but I’ve noticed an uptick in “reasonable” takes on the Mueller investigation lately. I’ve seen this from both liberals and conservatives and it goes something like this:

1. Crackpots on the right think the FBI has been utterly corrupted and the investigation is all about the Deep State trying to destroy Trump.
2. Crackpots on the left are all about the pee tape and how Trump was practically a KGB asset.
3. But look: conservatives have a point when they say the FBI investigation seems like it was opened on sort of flimsy grounds, especially during a presidential campaign.
4. At the same time: liberals have a point that some people around Trump were a little overzealous about who they were willing to work with during the campaign, regardless of whether they eventually did anything illegal.
5. Bottom line: There’s some smoke here, and the Trump folks deserve to pay a price for their actions. But it’s hardly Watergate 2.0.

As a person who often finds some value in dialing down the volume, I understand the appeal of arguments like this. But not in this case. So far, I’m sticking to my belief that Donald Trump probably didn’t personally collude with Russia. Beyond that, though, there’s just a mountain of evidence that points to massively illegal and unethical activity running through every facet of both the Trump campaign and the Trump White House. And that mountain is just what’s on the public record now. Once we learn everything that Mueller has discovered, the mountain is likely to turn into a super volcano.

I’m not surprised to hear some conservatives promoting the “reasonable” version of the Mueller investigation. But I am surprised that even some liberals are starting to hint at accepting it. I sure hope this doesn’t gain any more traction. There’s no need to go all X-Files on this, but there’s also no reason to downplay any of it. What Trump has done, and is still doing, almost certainly is Watergate 2.0.

A few weeks ago I suggested that the gig economy still didn’t seem like a very big deal. I based this on the fact that the share of part-time workers isn’t growing, which you’d expect to see if gig work is becoming more common. That’s a crude but fairly effective metric, but I promised to post better evidence if anything came my way.

Now it has. In a new report, Larry Mishel of EPI refers to previous estimates that the gig economy accounts for somewhere between ½-1 percent of the total economy. That’s pretty small, but when you account for total hours worked by typical gig workers it becomes even smaller:

Uber drivers have high turnover and, on average, work only part of the year (an average of three months) and part time (an average of 17 hours per week). This means that an Uber driver provides roughly 12.5 percent as much “employment,” or total hours of work in a year, as a full-time, full-year worker. There are about 833,000 Uber driver participants in a year. If one weights participants by their weeks worked and their weekly hours, then Uber drivers amount to 90,521 full-time, full-year equivalent (FTE) workers and account for just 0.07 percent of national FTE employment. We scale this proportion by Uber’s two-thirds share of the gig economy (according to research by Seth Harris of Cornell University and Alan Krueger of Princeton University) and find that the entire gig economy—online platform employment—accounts for just 0.1 percent of national FTE employment.

Roughly speaking, Mishel estimates that the gig economy acounts for 0.1 percent of total hours worked in the American economy. He also, to my surprise, mentions in passing that Uber alone accounts for two-thirds of this. So not only is the gig economy small, but it’s basically just Uber and a few tiny stragglers. In other words, it’s probably best if everyone stops hyping the gig economy too much.

And as long as we’re on the subject, the real subject of Mishel’s paper is a close look at how much Uber drivers typically earn. You can read the report for more detail, but here’s an excerpt of his main findings. The short answer is: not much.

UPDATE: Larry Mishel says that the gig economy might be a bit higher than he originally suggested, but still pretty tiny:

.@kdrum Thanks for writing about my report on Uber and the gig economy: https://t.co/mwcKjTbeX3 @Alan_Krueger tells me he believes that Uber is half, not 2/3 of gig economy. Others say that gig work sold to employers could double my estimate. Add all that, still pretty small.

— Larry Mishel (@LarryMishel) May 23, 2018

Artist's conception of MNC Lido City, a billion-dollar "integrated lifestyle resort" near Jakarta that will feature Trump-branded hotels, residences, and a golf course.MNC Land

China recently invested $500 million in an Indonesian project that will feature Trump-branded hotels and a golf course. The investment looks like it’s already paying off:

The U.S. and China have agreed on the broad outline of a deal that would save imperiled Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp., according to people with knowledge of the matter in both countries, as the two sides move closer to resolving their trade dispute.

The details are still being hammered out, the people said. If completed, the Trump administration would remove the ban on U.S. companies selling components and software to ZTE, a penalty that has threatened to put the company out of business. Instead, ZTE would be forced to make big changes in management, board seats and possibly pay significant fines, the people said.

You have to hand it to China. They know how the game is played and they don’t bitch about it. They just do what they have to do. Maybe it’s retaliation, maybe it’s a bribe, maybe it’s the right word in the right ear. Whatever it is, there are no hard feelings. It’s just business, not personal.

Shera Bechard, the Playboy model who supposedly had an affair with RNC bigwig and Trump donor Elliott Broidy.John Chennavasin via ZUMA

Today the Associated Press tells the long, sad story of Elliott Broidy and George Nader, the former once convicted of bribery-by-another-name and the latter once convicted of pedophilia. Quite a team, no? Anyway, they had a grand plan to make tons of money from the Trump presidency, and the AP story includes this sad and all-too-normal anecdote:

Nader wanted more: He wanted a photo of himself with the president — a big request for a convicted pedophile.

Broidy was co-hosting a fundraiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee in Dallas on Oct. 25. The Secret Service had said Nader wouldn’t be allowed to meet the president. It was not clear if the objections were related to his convictions for sexually abusing children….There was another issue. RNC officials had decreed there would be no photos with the president without payment. Broidy suggested that Nader meet the suggested threshold with a donation between $100,000 and $250,000.

It’s unclear exactly how the two issues were resolved. Records from the Federal Election Commission show no donations from either George Nader or “George Vader,” but on Nov. 30, Broidy gave $189,000 to the RNC — more than he had given to the RNC in over two decades of Republican fundraising.

The result: a picture of Nader and Trump grinning in front of the American flag.

Frankly, I doubt that being a convicted pedophile is a big deal in the Trump White House. As long as the money showed up, neither Trump nor anyone else probably cared.

In any case, this is not what the story is about. It’s about Broidy, the connected Republican insider, and Nader, the connected Middle East guy, teaming up to wage a lobbying war against Qatar in hopes of eventually wrangling huge consulting contracts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who both detested Qatar. Things seemed to be going well for a while, especially after the Saudis blockaded Qatar, but then sort of fell apart when Nader was detained earlier this year at Dulles airport as he was transiting through the United States. On the bright side, Broidy ended up with a $600 million contract with the UAE, so it wasn’t all for nothing. If you want to know more, read the whole story for all the twists and turns.

But it’s hard to pretend not to notice the elephant that never gets mentioned. You may recall that a few weeks ago a judge ordered Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen to reveal all his clients. It turned out he had only three: Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, and … Elliott Broidy. What’s more, he only represented Broidy on one thing: a hush money payment to a Playboy model he had an affair with, some of which was used to pay for an abortion. When that was revealed, Broidy immediately confessed in a surprisingly workmanlike statement and that was that.

The whole thing seemed odd, leading Paul Campos to make the case that it was actually Donald Trump who had the affair, with Broidy taking the fall for him. Campos made a decent case, but it was purely speculative and quickly dropped out of sight.

However, after reading this AP story it sure seems a helluva lot more likely that Campos was right. It always seemed odd that Broidy had paid Shera Bechard $1.6 million for her silence, considering that an affair with a guy like Broidy was hardly front-page news. However, an affair with Trump would be front-page news, and this was right in the middle of Broidy’s big campaign to get Trump to help him out with the Qatar business. What better way to ingratiate yourself with Trump than to offer to cover this up for him? According to the Wall Street Journal, the hush money was paid in “late 2017,” exactly the same time that Broidy made his donation to the RNC in order to get Nader his picture with Trump.

This helps to resolve the biggest problem with Campos’s theory: a cover-up like this never seemed like the kind of favor even a close friend was likely to help with. Not only did it cost Broidy $1.6 million, but he had to take the chance that the “affair” would become public and he’d end up taking the rap for having an affair and paying for an abortion. Even your best buddy wouldn’t do something like that for you.

But by last November Broidy could practically smell his deals finally coming together. There was the $600 million deal with the UAE plus another deal worth $1 billion that he was pitching to Saudi Arabia. If he thought that taking a fall for Trump could be the final brick that would bring this all together, why wouldn’t he do it? The money was chicken feed by comparison, and maybe he told his wife all about it and she didn’t care. The whole thing finally makes sense.

Anyway, at this point you can count me a believer in Campos’s theory. If I had to guess, I’d say that Cohen, as usual, got the job of dealing with Bechard’s demands. But he didn’t want the money to come from Trump, even under a phony name, now that Robert Mueller was scouring every inch of Trump’s business. Somehow this reached Broidy’s ears—he and Cohen were both deputy finance chairs of the RNC at the time—and he offered to help. Cohen immediately took him up on it, and of course Trump knew all about it.

Is this true? I’m not sure we’ll ever know. But it seems pretty plausible.

Via HuffPost, here are the latest results from a YouGov poll about trust in the FBI. Note that these are net results: that is, trust minus distrust, fair minus unfair, etc. Feast your eyes:

It would be interesting if we had data on general trust in the FBI going back a while, wouldn’t it? Are Democrats suddenly big fans? Or have Republicans suddenly developed a massive distrust of the FBI? Luckily Pew Research has a few years of data on this, so let’s take a look:

These are, once again, net results (percent approval minus percent disapproval). For years there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats. Then Democratic views bumped up a bit in the September 2016 poll—even though that was after James Comey had called Hillary Clinton “extremely reckless,” causing her lead over Trump to shrink by a couple of points. Republicans, however, had just finished up their “Lock Her Up!” national convention and weren’t satisfied with a mere verbal thrashing. Their views of the FBI spiked downward.

After that, Democrats stayed steady. But by February of this year the net Republican view of the FBI was a mere +19 percent:  55 percent approval vs. 36 percent disapproval. This has no historical precedent among the traditional party of law-and-order. But now it’s May, and things have gotten even worse: according to the YouGov poll, net trust of the FBI among Republicans is -10 percent. Donald Trump and Fox News and congressional Republicans have convinced more than half of Republicans that the FBI is a cesspool of corruption and bias against conservatives.

That’s remarkable enough. But keep in mind that the FBI was almost single-handedly responsible for keeping Hillary Clinton out the White House. Even so, Republicans think the FBI is biased against them. This is what Trump has done to the Republican Party.

As weekend readers already know, I was up all night on Saturday. Why? Because I was suddenly seized by a desire to go out to Anza-Borrego to do some stargazing. My sister-in-law had sent me a link to some Milky Way photos taken there, and it’s finally late enough in the year that the Milky Way rises at a reasonable hour. So out I went.

Unlike Ireland, which was a bust thanks to cloud cover, Anza-Borrego was great. It’s not the darkest possible place even in Southern California, but it’s pretty good. That makes this the first time I’ve ever really seen the Milky Way, and I have to say that it’s not all that spectacular to the naked eye. Maybe I was too busy with the camera to ever let my eyes truly adjust. But it was certainly a very fine photography subject.

I have two pictures of the galactic core for you. The first one was taken around 1:30 am. The (supposed) key to a great Milky Way photo is to find something interesting to contrast it with, and Anza-Borrego didn’t really offer a lot of options on this score. I tried various things, but in the end a bit of unlit cactus turned out the best:

The second shot was taken at 3 am, and by then the core had wheeled around to a more nearly vertical position:

I didn’t do anything fancy for either of these pictures. They were exposed for ten seconds with the lens wide open and ISO set to 10000. From there I popped them into Photoshop, did a modest bit of manipulation to brighten the stars and darken the background, and that was it.

POSTSCRIPT: For folks who want to geek out a little more, the big problem with Milky Way photography is noise. Because of the rotation of the earth, you can’t expose for more than 20 seconds before you start to get a bit of motion blur, and even that’s pushing it. And your lens can only open as wide as it can open. In my case that was f/2.4, but even a better camera is unlikely to go past f/2 or maybe f/1.4. That means you have to crank up the ISO to get a good exposure, and that in turn means a noisy picture. The in-camera noise reduction does a surprisingly good job, but obviously it has limits, and you can see those limits in these pictures.

For us amateurs who don’t have pricey equatorial mounts, the answer to this problem is to take a series of photos in RAW mode and then use specialized software to “stack” them. The software aligns the images, subtracts the noise by comparing them all, and then allows you to make adjustments. For you RAW fans out there, you’ll be glad to know that I did take all my shots in RAW mode, but I didn’t take a lot of identical photos from the same spot and didn’t try to stack them. Maybe another time.

Then again, maybe I should buy one of the new generation of very cheap equatorial mounts, which cost as little as a few hundred dollars these days. If I thought I was going to do this more than a few times, I’d be tempted.

After looking at the latest trade deficit figures, I think I’ve figured out why Donald Trump decided to call off his trade war on China. As you can see, after skyrocketing during the Obama administration, Trump has turned things around and the trade deficit is now getting smaller.

Wait. That doesn’t seem quite right, does it? But this chart comes straight from Trump administration data, so it must show Trump winning. That’s what he promised: winning so often that we’d get tired of it. So dammit, that’s what this chart shows. MAGA!