If you want to understand why evangalical Christians have been so willing to prostitute their faith in service of Donald Trump, this poll from ABC News tells most of the story:

The decline has been pretty evenly spread among young and old; college and high school grads; men and women; liberals and conservatives; and both mainstream and evangelical Protestants. However, the decline is much larger among whites than among blacks or Hispanics. And the share of people who self-ID as Catholics has stayed steady.

The first decade of the 21st century was a tough one for evangelical Protestants. Their numbers fell, their political influence waned, their most popular leaders died off or retired, and they got badly crushed on the issue of gay rights and gay marriage. By 2012 the movement was in pretty sorry shape, and it only got worse after Obergefell.

Then Donald Trump came along and threw them a lifeline. Sure, he was a philanderer, a faker, a liar, an avatar of mammon, and very plainly not a religious man himself. But Trump made evangelicals the same offer he makes with everyone: he’d adopt their causes as his own and fight for them publicly, but only in return for unconditional public support. Maybe it was a devil’s bargain, but they took it. If you had lost 20 percent of your followers in the past decade and watched helplessly as modern culture steamrolled nearly everything you believe in, you might have too.

The Republican jihad against Robert Mueller took another step today:

Vice President Pence on Thursday urged special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to bring his investigation into Russian election interference to a close, saying “it’s time to wrap it up.”

….Pence was asked Thursday by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell if he believes the investigation is a “hoax,” as Trump has repeatedly characterized it. “Our administration has been fully cooperating with the special counsel, and we’ll continue to,” Pence said. “What I think is that it’s been about a year since this investigation began. Our administration has provided more than a million documents. We’ve fully cooperated in it, and in the interest of the country, I think it’s time to wrap it up.”

A whole year! I wonder how Pence felt about Whitewater and Benghazi and Hillary’s emails after their first year?

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Rep. Devin Nunes says that all this business about his subpoenas endangering intelligence sources is hogwash. Nothing he’s asked for has anything to do with any particular individual. He’s just investigating whether the Justice Department has abused the FISA court as a means of destroying President Trump.

The Washington Post got a look at Nunes’ subpoena:

The subpoena, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, demands “all documents referring or related to the individual referenced in Chairman Nunes’ April 24, 2018 classified letter to Attorney General Sessions.” That is the only material the subpoena seeks.

The individual in this subpoena isn’t necessarily the intelligence source the FBI is worried about. But if he is, then Nunes knows damn well his subpoena is about an individual. And if he isn’t, then Nunes knows damn well that he’s issuing subpoenas in the dark. And all for the nakedly partisan purpose of protecting Donald Trump at all costs. He plainly doesn’t care about anything else.

When the history of our time is written, the astonishing thing won’t be that we elected Trump president. The astonishing thing will be that one of America’s two major political parties almost immediately swore utter and total fealty to him. The story of how that happened is the story of America’s decline in the post-Gingrich era.

As we all know, prices for standard procedures in hospitals can vary by enormous amounts. Go to one hospital and your hip replacement will cost $15,000. Go to a different one and it will cost $80,000. And if you’re not insured and have to pay full list price? You better get used to just hobbling around.

But it’s even worse than that. Sarah Kliff points to a new paper that examined hospitals in the Philadelphia area and compared prices within the same hospital for the most standardized procedure imaginable: a lower limb MRI. Here you go:

The price varies from about $400 to $2,800 at different hospitals. But even within a single hospital, the price varies between $500 and $1,800 depending on who your insurer is. That’s because some insurers are able to negotiate better deals than others. Needless to say, these differences may very well translate into different copays and different out-of-pocket costs for patients. And if you have a high-deductible plan, that can mean thousands of dollars.

This might all seem kind of crazy, but it’s the free market at work. And thank God for that. If we had the government interfering and setting prices, everyone would be paying the identical $380 Medicare price for a lower limb MRI, just like they do in France and Japan. There’s no telling what havoc this could wreak on the salaries of hospital CEOs.

This is Rosario Beach. It’s on the southern end of Fidalgo Island between Everett and Bellingham in Washington State. It looks even prettier in the photograph than it does in real life, and far more peaceful. It was actually a fairly busy place when we were there, with lots of kids running around and a bunch of annoying photographers and bird watchers tramping all over. But you can forget all that because they’ve been cropped out of this picture.

Ropi via ZUMA

Here’s the latest from Novartis:

NBC News: In a new statement (their third) Novartis says they paid $1.2 million to Michael Cohen, had one meeting with him and determined he would be “unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to US healthcare policy matters.” https://t.co/110QeSSycX pic.twitter.com/QGuYT0M93I

— Tom Winter (@Tom_Winter) May 9, 2018

Man, does this deserve some scrutiny from the SEC. Why would anyone think that Donald Trump’s famously obnoxious bagman and fixer had any expertise in US health care policy? Answer: No one does. Why would Novartis hold one meeting and then pay Cohen $1.2 million anyway? Answer: As a bribe, more or less. What other possibility is there?

There’s a sense in which I sympathize with Novartis here. Trump has made it crystal clear that he’s a crudely transactional politician. If you want something, you have to give him something. If you praise him, he’ll refrain from attacking you. If you cross him, he’ll do his best to destroy you. As a result, Trump is the object of lots of praise because everyone knows this is how you stay on his good side. Then everyone hears the praise, and they assume Trump must be doing a good job. This is how cults of personality work in early stage autocracies.

Ditto for the bribes. You take a look at what Trump does to companies he’s annoyed with—Comcast, Boeing, Amazon, etc.—and who needs the grief? Just hire the insider dude for “consulting” and be done with it. Just praise Trump and move on. It’s what companies do in banana republics around the world, and America is lately little more than a really big banana republic.

But this has to stop. If Novartis and AT&T take it on the chin, too bad. They’re probably no more guilty than lots of companies, but corporate America¹ needs to learn that sucking up to Trump isn’t cost free. Some heads need to roll here.

¹Novartis isn’t actually an American company, but you get the idea.

UPDATE: Here is Ed Silverman’s account:

“He reached out to us,” the Novartis employee said….The employee could not explain why Novartis would have agreed to a deal with a lawyer with no background in health care and without deep Washington ties.

….In March 2017, a group of Novartis employees, mostly from the government affairs and lobbying teams, met with Cohen in New York….“At first, it all sounded impressive, but toward the end of the meeting, everyone realized this was a probably a slippery slope to engage him. So they decided not to really engage Cohen for any activities after that,” the employee continued. Rather than attempt to cancel the contract, the company allowed it to lapse early in 2018 and not run the risk of ticking off the president. “It might have caused anger,” this person said.

Roger that.

Dan Drezner, who refuses to ever give Donald Trump credit for his successes,¹ has once again adopted a cynical attitude toward our president’s foreign policy tactics. In this case, he’s being snarky about Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal:

Plan B begins to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Underpants Gnomes Theory of Profit. Step 1 is terminating the Iran Deal. Step 3 is Iran complying with all U.S. demands. Step 2? Step 2 is a wee bit hazy.

There are at least two possibilities for Step 2:

• We will starve Iran into submission, just like we did with North Korea.
• We will bomb Iran into submission, just like we did with North Vietnam.

Those both worked great! There are other possibilities too, like encouraging the entire Middle East to engage in a brutal war of Sunni vs. Shia. Really, there are loads of options here. Just ask John Bolton.

¹Drezner is the tenured professor who apparently has so much free time that he is now past the 300 mark in his #ToddlerinChief series on Twitter. This series is frivolous and ill-mannered and I urge you not to read it. I also urge Tufts University to discipline Professor Drezner for his disrespectful attitude toward our president.

Just in case there was any doubt, Donald Trump provided his definition of “fake news” today:

The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2018

If it’s negative, it’s fake! But here’s a weird thing: there is a new study of network news coverage today. It comes from the Media Research Center (motto: “Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias”). Here it is:

So where did Trump get 91 percent? Did he feel like adding that extra 1 percent gave the number more credibility? And will MRC change their chart to match Trump’s mistake? Stay tuned! In any case, Vox presents some additional data to show just how right Trump is:

Only Fox News is providing the appropriate level of Michael Cohen coverage: almost none. Meanwhile, CNN and MSNBC are spending tons of time on this non-story! Fake news!

Mother Jones; J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Rep. Devin Nunes has lately taken to demanding that the Justice Department turn over records of the Mueller investigation. For obvious reasons, records of active investigations are normally confidential since the FBI doesn’t want to (a) hurt innocent people who may get caught in their net and (b) doesn’t want to alert the guilty to what they’re doing. Nunes, of course, would very much like to alert the guilty, which is why he wants this stuff.¹

All that is bad enough. But it gets worse:

Last Wednesday, senior FBI and national intelligence officials relayed an urgent message to the White House: Information being sought by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes could endanger a top-secret intelligence source….After the White House sided with the department’s decision to refuse the request, Nunes (R-Calif.) publicly vented his frustration, saying Sunday that he may try to hold Sessions in contempt for refusing to comply.

….For the intelligence agencies, Nunes’s request threatened to cross a red line of compromising sources and methods of U.S. intelligence-gathering, according to people familiar with their views. Intelligence officials fear that providing even a redacted version of the information Nunes seeks could expose that person and damage relationships with other countries that serve as U.S. intelligence partners.

….On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R.-Wis.) said he had not discussed the matter with Nunes but added that he expected congressional subpoenas to be enforced. “We expect the administration to comply with our document requests,” Ryan said.

So there you go. You can decide for yourself whether you believe the intelligence community, but they claim that turning over these docs could get people killed. Nunes, however, is so obsessed with covering for Donald Trump that he doesn’t care. He’s the ringleader of the conservative claim that the Mueller probe is a liberal fraud designed to bring down a Republican president, and if that means pretending that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and every other federal agency is corrupt, so be it. If it means leaking information that could get people killed, that’s probably OK too.

And Paul Ryan is perfectly fine with this. Welcome to the Republican Party in 2018.

¹He says he wants it in order to conduct oversight on possible misconduct by Mueller, but I think we can safely laugh that off.

Here are the rent indexes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for three of the most expensive cities in America, adjusted for overall inflation:

Until the late-90s, rents in these cities bounced around but ended up roughly flat compared to 1960. Since then, it’s been all uphill. In San Francisco, rents are currently 73 percent above their 1960 level. New York is up 30 percent and Los Angeles is up 28 percent.

Of course, family income has also gone up over that period, even adjusted for inflation. Here’s how those indexes compare to real median family income:

In all three cities, rent is a smaller share of family income today than it was in 1960 but a bigger share than it was in 1990.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it’s worth, these are Metropolitan Statistical Areas, not just the core cities themselves. New York includes Newark, and Los Angeles includes Orange County. However, although San Francisco includes Oakland, it doesn’t include Silicon Valley.