Sigh. Another conservative judge with a vendetta has declared Obamacare unconstitutional. Here’s the reasoning:

• The individual mandate is an exercise of Congress’s taxing power (you have to pay a tax unless you have insurance).
• Last year’s tax bill reduced the tax penalty to zero.
• Therefore the mandate is no longer an exercise of the taxing power.
• But the Supreme Court has already ruled that the mandate is not justified by the Interstate Commerce clause.
• So the mandate has no constitutional backing at all.
• Therefore the individual mandate is unconstitutional.
• The mandate is not severable from the rest of Obamacare. If it’s unconstitutional, then all of Obamacare is unconstitutional.

According to this logic, Congress can never enact a tax of zero, even temporarily. It can enact a positive tax. It can enact a negative tax. But not a zero tax. This is going to come as quite a shock to the millions of people who pay a rate of zero on capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes.

Anyway, the judge hasn’t issued an injunction, so Obamacare is still the law of the land. If he does, it will get overturned and eventually sent to the Supreme Court. Again. This is not something to panic about yet.

POSTSCRIPT: In the meantime, Saturday is the last day to enroll in Obamacare in most states. If you or anyone you know is insured under Obamacare, make sure to enroll now.

Hilbert has always enjoyed tipping over wastebaskets, but I think this is the first time he’s dived into the one in the laundry room. At first he looked like he was going to curl up and take a nap in there, but then he saw all the delightful cardboard and started gnawing on it. He was having a pretty good time until some guy with a camera barged in and started taking pictures.

Here is today’s least surprising headline:

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker Signs Bills Stripping Powers From Incoming Governor

As near as I can tell, not a single elected Republican has criticized this move. Not one. Meanwhile, New Jersey Democrats have proposed a ballot measure that would put in place an appalling permanent gerrymander in their favor. The opposition from fellow Democrats was immediate, overwhelming, loud, and sustained, including from New Jersey’s Democratic governor.

But you know, both sides.

Every year we learn that lots of people don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense. Here’s the Post yesterday:

Four in 10 adults still say they don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense, according to the latest Federal Reserve report on the economic well-being of Americans. While that is an improvement over 2013, when half of Americans said they could not cover a $400 expense, it remains elevated at a time when unemployment is so low and wages are rising.

This is a reminder, says Heather Long, “that the U.S. economy has deep structural problems that are far from being cured.”

I suppose so. But I finally got curious about where this statistic comes from every year like clockwork, and the answer turns out to be the Federal Reserve’s “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.” It’s based on their annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), which they’ve been conducting since 2013. Here are a couple of charts from the 2017 report:

Both of these charts suggest that although we’re not yet in financial nirvana, pretty much everyone has been doing steadily better over the past five years. And only 7 percent of the population reports that they’re finding it “difficult to get by.” Now here’s the $400 emergency expense chart:

That’s going steadily up too. It’s certainly true, as Fed chair Jerome Powell says, that aggregate statistics “tend to mask important disparities by income, race and geography,” but it’s also true that things are getting better for just about everyone.

They aren’t getting better very fast, though, and there’s probably a recession due in the next year or two. That’s when we’ll find out just how resilient our economy really is and how well our lowest-income workers are doing.

Well, as long as they can only write in German I guess we're OK.Philippe Clément/Belga via ZUMA

Google Mail has a feature called Smart Compose. It’s basically autocomplete for email. It watches the stuff you write, and eventually it figures out the phrases you use most often and suggests them right away when it looks like you’re about to use one of them. Derek Thompson is…discomfited by this:

Some technology works, so people like it; and some technology doesn’t work, so people hate it. Google’s Smart Compose belongs to a different category: tech that people hate because it works. Smart Compose has an uncanny ability to auto-complete replies with my exact phraseology—to do precisely the thing for which it is designed—and it is for this very reason that I (and, I’ve gathered, many others) find it so unbelievably creepy.

….In a recent interview with a source for another story, I brought up my issues with Gmail’s auto-complete function, and we ended up talking about that for several minutes. “It can be so stressful!” he said. “Sometimes I see Gmail suggest a sentence and then I feel like I have to come up with a better sentence than the machine, because I don’t want my response to feel robotic.”

….That’s why we—or I, at least—hate Smart Compose. Not, again, because the tech is bad. But because it’s good enough to illuminate the exclamation-marked inauthenticity of our correspondence.

I have two things to say. First, chill out. Smart Compose only works with stock phrases that we use a lot. But we all use stock phrases a lot, and they don’t make up a big share of what we say and write. Figuring out that See y is likely to be See you tomorrow is hardly a threat to our humanity.

Second: This is only a problem for us hyperverbal, hypereducated types, who like to think of ourselves as intellectual powerhouses and creative geniuses. A lot of us are pretty insecure when someone (or something) suggests that we might not be the smartest example of homo sapiens on the planet. But you’d better get used to it. Smart Compose may be nothing more than autocomplete on steroids, but it’s really not going to be long before computers can write our blog posts and emails and great American novels for us. If you’re under 50, you might as well suck it up and get ready.

Here’s a guess: the first serious use of AI in the newsroom will be to replace editors, not writers. Roughly speaking, AI will take reporters’ notes or rough copy—or even what we humans laughingly call finished copy—and turn it into great prose. We’ll still need someone around to nag us about issues of substance, but the robots will compose sentences and paragraphs better than us. What’s more, they’ll be able to churn out multiple versions of our writing instantly: the magazine version, the 6th-grade version, the TV script version, the Spanish version, the PowerPoint deck, etc. Just tell it what you need and you’ll get it.

Reporters will last a little longer, but just a little. I’m giving editors until, oh, 2035. I think that’s generous. Reporters will be out of business by 2040. Better get ready.

Did Donald Trump personally meet with David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, to ask him to pay hush money to women he’d had sex with? Yesterday I was unsure about this because I’d read it in the Daily Mail, not the most reliable source in the media landscape. But apparently they were right. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

As a presidential candidate in August 2015, Donald Trump huddled with a longtime friend, media executive David Pecker, in his cluttered 26th floor Trump Tower office and made a request. What can you do to help my campaign? he asked, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., offered to use his National Enquirer tabloid to buy the silence of women if they tried to publicize alleged sexual encounters with Mr. Trump. Less than a year later, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Pecker to quash the story of a former Playboy model who said they’d had an affair. Mr. Pecker’s company soon paid $150,000 to the model, Karen McDougal, to keep her from speaking publicly about it. Mr. Trump later thanked Mr. Pecker for the assistance.

OK, fine, but this story is dated November 9. Why is it suddenly getting new attention? Did something new get reported on Thursday? It was all over CNN last night:

I’m confused. However, I guess one thing is clear: Donald Trump has been lying about this all along. He was in the room, and he personally directed David Pecker to pay hush money to Karen McDougal.

I can barely keep up with the news anymore. Here is just today:

• Donald Trump’s inauguration committee is under investigation. Apparently they managed to spend twice as much as any other recent president for an inaugural celebration that was half the size of any other recent president.
• Maria Butina pleaded guilty to infiltrating the NRA on behalf of Russia.
• Trump is now on his fourth (fifth?) version of events surrounding hush money paid to his mistresses.
• But wait. Trump was present at meetings where hush money was discussed (though note the source).
• Republicans who eagerly impeached Bill Clinton and called for the prosecution of John Edwards are now busily taking to the airwaves to insist that extramarital sex is no big deal, payoffs don’t count as campaign contributions, and lying about trivial sex stuff is just something everyone does.
• Before big events, Trump crushes up Adderall and snorts it.
• Wait. What? I can’t tell if that one is a joke or not.
• Both Newt Gingrich and Jared Kushner are rumored to be candidates for Trump’s chief of staff. Wouldn’t it be awesome if they were co-chiefs?
• Trump has decided he doesn’t want to shut down the government after all.
• The Senate voted to end US support for the war in Yemen.

I’m probably missing some stuff. I don’t even know anymore.

Bruce Bartlett makes a prediction:

The budget crisis begins in three weeks when Democrats take control of the House. The countdown has begun. Expect every major media outlet to join the drumbeat for immediate deficit reduction. https://t.co/ytx91I3ahy

— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) December 13, 2018

And just in time, look who’s here to help!

CBO says there are 121 options in this report, but that’s not really correct. For starters, we can eliminate all the ones that raise taxes. That’s just crazy talk. Then there’s military spending, and obviously we can’t afford to cut that. And there are nine that are so small they’re relegated to an appendix. We can skip those.

So that leaves 56 options. Those include cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and I think we all know they’re going nowhere. So now we’re down to 41 options. If we adopted every single one of them, it would cut the federal budget by somewhere between 2.6 percent and 3.8 percent.

My prediction, of course, is that we’ll adopt zero of these. But I guess the game must be played. After two years of being in power and ballooning the deficit, Republicans must pretend that now the deficit is suddenly urgent again. Just like it suddenly became urgent on January 20, 2009.

It’s all such dumb, kindergarten-level stuff. But Bartlett is right: everyone will pretend to go along with it. Sigh.

Here are some lovely pink roses¹ hanging from our trellis after our once-per-year rainstorm last week.² I love pictures of flowers with raindrops on them, and they’re surprisingly hard to fake. I’ve tried various ways of tossing water on flowers, but somehow I never get quite the same effect as genuine rain. Does anyone know why?

¹Hang on a second and I’ll ask Marian what variety they are. Tick… tick… tick. I’m back. She doesn’t remember.

²That’s what it feels like, anyway.

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

New Jersey Democrats are showing some of the same political ingenuity that we’ve typically seen only from Republicans in the past:

Legislative power brokers across the country have long designed district lines in back-room deals that entrenched their control for years, if not decades. But now, Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey are carrying out a power grab in an unusually public fashion: They are seeking to make Republicans a permanent minority by essentially writing gerrymandering into the State Constitution.

[blah blah blah]

…Typically, a proposed constitutional amendment requires a three-fifths majority in the state legislature before it can get on the ballot. But since no Republican supports the redistricting plan, it seems unlikely that it would ever succeed in either chamber in Trenton. Instead, Democratic leaders are digging deep into the state’s laws and using a provision allowing an amendment that passes the state legislature with a simple majority in two consecutive calendar years to be placed on the ballot.

Democrats have scheduled a vote on the redistricting plan for Monday, the final day the legislature is to meet this year. Then they are likely to bring it up again in early January, satisfying the two-year requirement in less than a month. Should the measure pass in both instances, the proposal could be put on the ballot in November.

I am all for this. Is that because I’m a political hack who eagerly looks forward to giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine? Of course not. It’s more that … it would … oh hell. Yes, that’s part of it. The prospect of watching Republicans whine and moan about this is really pretty delightful.

But here’s the real reason: this is the only thing that will ever get the Supreme Court off its butt to do something about gerrymandering. I’m dead serious here. Conservatives on the Supreme Court aren’t likely to ever address gerrymandering until it’s crystal clear that Democrats can be every bit as ruthless and shady as Republicans. As long as red-state Republicans pass bill after bill screwing Democrats, while blue states like California and New Jersey and New York do nothing, there will always be a majority on the Supreme Court to shrug it off as a “political” question and do nothing.

The Supreme Court is likely to hear a gerrymandering case later this year that merges a suit over Democratic gerrymandering in Maryland with a suit over Republican gerrymandering in Wisconsin. That’s a good start to getting them to take gerrymandering seriously, and the New Jersey stunt might force a bit of rethinking too. I hate the fact that I believe this, but I do, in fact, believe pretty strongly that conservatives on the Supreme Court will never strike down even the most egregious gerrymanders unless Democrats prove that they can play the game too. So let’s play.