Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

Just catching up on some Trump news I didn’t get around to yesterday:

• Trump gave William Barr total authority to declassify and release anything he wants regarding the Russia investigation. This is a transparent attempt to allow Barr to cherry pick items and release them out of context, knowing that the press will give them big play even though they know they’re being played. This was the Republican strategy during the Benghazi and email investigations, and it worked great.
• The Washington Post reports that Trump is obsessed with giving a contract to build his wall to a big-time Republican donor:
  

  President Trump has personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News, according to four administration officials….[Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commanding general of the Army Corps] was summoned to the White House again Thursday, after the president’s aides told Pentagon officials — including Gen. Mark Milley, the Army’s chief of staff — that the president wanted to discuss the border barrier. According to an administration official with knowledge of the Oval Office meeting, Trump immediately brought up Fisher, a company that sued the U.S. government last month after the Army Corps did not accept its bid to install barriers along the southern border, a contract potentially worth billions of dollars.

  The weird thing is that this might not be corrupt in the usual meaning of the word. Apparently Fisher’s CEO is a sort of Trump-esque blowhard who goes on conservative radio and TV to claim that he has fabulous new technology that would allow him to build 200 miles of the wall in less than a year. Trump is totally enamored of this claim, even though the Army Corps of Engineers apparently isn’t.

• A doctored video was released that seemed to show Nancy Pelosi slurring her words like a drunk while she addressed a crowd. It was immediately referenced on Fox News, of course, even though it was obviously a fake. So far Donald Trump hasn’t retweeted it, but give him time.
• And did I mention that Trump held a press conference yesterday in which he called on various staffers to confirm for the cameras that he had been totally calm in his meeting with Pelosi earlier in the day? I did, didn’t I? Still, it’s worth mentioning again: Trump was totally calm. He did not storm out of the meeting like a child because Pelosi had said something mean about him. Capiche? He was totally, extremely, exceptionally, strikingly calm. Really, really calm. CALM, dammit. Don’t you guys listen?

A few weeks ago Elizabeth Warren asked her audience, “Have you seen what it costs to put a new set of tires on your car?” As it happens, I got new tires today, and the answer is $600 for the extremely average passenger tires I need for my Mazda 3. That seemed like a lot! But naturally that got me wondering: Is that a lot? It turns out the answer is a resounding no. The cost of tires has plummeted over the past 50 years:

There are two things going on here. First, adjusted for inflation, the cost of tires is about half what it was in 1968. Second, tires last about twice as long as they used to: 40,000 miles vs. 20,000 miles. When you put those two things together, we pay about one-quarter as much for tires over the course of 40,000 miles as our parents did during the Summer of Love. What’s more, modern radial tires are safer than old tires; they handle better than old tires; and they’re less prone to punctures than old tires. How about that?

Rob Pinney/London News Pictures via ZUMA

Here’s the latest on Julian Assange:

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, has been indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday — a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues.

….The New York Times, among many other news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government — the act that most of the charges addressed….Barry J. Pollack, a lawyer for Mr. Assange, said his client was being charged with a crime “for encouraging sources to provide him truthful information and for publishing that information.” That dramatic step, he said, removed the “fig leaf” that the case about his client was only about hacking.

….The Obama administration had also weighed charging Mr. Assange, but rejected that step out of fears that it would chill investigative journalism and could be struck down as unconstitutional.

Obama, Trump, whatevs. They’re both just establishment shills of the security state. Not a dime’s worth of difference between them.

Oh wait.

The Washington Post gets us up to speed on the Fed’s latest report about the wellbeing of American households:

Are Americans benefiting from the strong economy — aside from the rich? A Fed report raises questions.

….Almost four in 10 people (39 percent) said they wouldn’t be able to scrape together the cash to meet a $400 emergency expense.

Just to save everybody some trouble next year, here’s how that question has been answered since the Fed started asking it:

So the answer is: yes, the non-rich have benefited from the strong economy. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they haven’t benefited nearly as much as they should have:

Donald Trump is holding a press conference where he’s forcing staffers to file in front of the cameras and tell reporters that he was totally calm at yesterday’s meeting with Nancy Pelosi. Totally. Calm.

I am not making this up.

It’s way too early to be wasting our time on Democratic primary polls, but . . . it’s a slow day and Monmouth has a semi-interesting twist: providing polling results just for the early-voting states. Here are the results:

Kamala Harris is right up there with Sanders in second place, and Elizabeth Warren isn’t far behind. Only eight months to go before the Iowa caucuses!

Wildflower season was great around here, and then I went off to the Blue Ridge Parkway and took pictures of even more wildflowers. I’ve got zillions of ’em, and that’s not even counting the half dozen I still haven’t identified. This means that you’re going to see lots of wildflowers over the next year.

Here’s a pretty one to make up for yesterday’s stinknet. This is a moonglow morning glory surrounded by (I think) some California shrub deerwood.

After doing the previous post I got curious about how much money American farmers are getting for their products. That is, flat cash receipts independent of any government aid. Here’s the answer:

In short, soybean revenues were flat last year and will be down $3 billion this year. However, that’s made up for elsewhere. Total revenue for all commodities has basically been stable for the past four years.

I don’t know what I’m missing here, but whenever I look into farm issues (exports, imports, prices, revenue, income, etc.) I never seem to see the catastrophe of the day that’s getting headlines. China tariffs or not, America’s (mostly corporate) farms seem to be chugging along pretty normally.

So many soybeans.Imago via ZUMA

We have a new one-year plan, comrades:

The Trump administration rolled out a $16 billion aid package for the U.S. farm sector, which primarily will take the form of direct payments to farmers to offset losses resulting from the trade conflict with China….The program is a reprise of a similar initiative in 2018 which had authorized $12 billion in funding.

$12 billion for not selling our soybeans wasn’t enough! This year we will distribute $16 billion for not selling our soybeans. Soon, we will be world leaders in not selling soybeans.

On a more serious note, here is a short quote from the USDA’s projection of farm income a couple of months ago:

Inflation-adjusted net farm income is forecast to increase 8 percent in 2019, to $69.4 billion.

This forecast was published after China had already retaliated against Trump’s tariffs—so presumably that had been taken into account—but before Trump announced his new $16 billion worth of farm aid. Taken at face value, this means that the new forecast for net farm income is $85.4 billion, a whopping 33 percent increase over last year.

The USDA had already projected that direct government aid would account for one-sixth of net farm income this year. If farm operations really get another $16 billion, that will double to one-third of net farm income. Somehow this all seems unlikely, but I’m not quite sure where the math goes wrong. It sure looks as if farm income was already projected to go up and now Trump is going to increase it even more.

This, of course, was inevitable:

Rex Tillerson, a man who is “dumb as a rock” and totally ill prepared and ill equipped to be Secretary of State, made up a story (he got fired) that I was out-prepared by Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Hamburg, Germany. I don’t think Putin would agree. Look how the U.S. is doing!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 23, 2019

Somebody needs to ask Trump why he hired Tillerson if he’s dumb as a rock. And while we’re at it, has anyone collected all the Trump tweets insulting former members of his staff that he originally hired? Somebody should!