Paul Krugman is a target for conservatives everywhere, and for that reason he’s careful with his facts.¹ But National Review’s Kevin Williamson thinks he’s finally caught Krugman in an error:

Professor Krugman argues, for the obvious reason that basing government decisions on falsehoods is bound to lead to bad results: “Listening to a garrulous old guy spout nonsense is annoying in the best of circumstances. But when this particular old guy controls the world’s largest military, nukes included, it’s downright scary.”

I wouldn’t call Professor Krugman a garrulous old guy who spouts nonsense — he is only 65 years old — but, for the record, with 1,347,300 active-duty troops, the United States does not have the world’s largest military. It is No. 3. I point that out only because Professor Krugman as a columnist cannot lean very hard on wit or charm and must therefore attend carefully to the details.

Conservatives really, really want to catch Krugman in an error, don’t they? I think it’s obvious that Krugman is talking here about military spending, in which the US is indeed the world leader. How else could you do it? Sure, China has more troops, but we have ten times more carrier groups. India has more troops than us too, but we have ten times more aircraft. Without bothering to check, I’m going to say that we also have more submarines, more cruise missiles, more stealth bombers, and more ICBMs than both countries put together.

I dunno. How would you define “largest” military? Troops alone seems like a bad metric, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: Williamson emails to say that his piece was meant as a joke. I didn’t pick up on that.

¹I assume he would be regardless, but this is just extra motivation.

Good news! It turns out that American corporations aren’t spending their tax windfall solely on pointless stock buybacks that do little except enrich CEOs and investors. They’re also spending their money on pointless mergers and acquisitions that do little except enrich CEOs and investors:

“With some deals being done at big earnings multiples,” warns the Wall Street Journal, “companies and their investors may find they haven’t spent wisely when the dust eventually settles.” True enough. But one thing we know is that big mergers are good for CEO compensation. So even if all this tax money goes completely to waste, there’s a silver lining, amirite?

From Ben Carson, former neurosurgeon who is now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development:

There are more complexities here than in brain surgery.

Actually, Carson is wrong. Brain surgery is every bit as complex as running a gigantic government department. It’s just totally different, and expertise in one has nothing to do with ability in the other. You’d think someone smart enough to be a brain surgeon could figure that out.

So: Sam Nunberg. Remember him? He was a young Trump aide for a while, but he got fired after someone wrote a bad magazine profile and Nunberg got the blame. He was quickly rehired, but shortly after Trump announced his presidential campaign Business Insider reported that Nunberg had a history of making racist social media attacks—like calling President Obama a “Socialist Marxist Islamo Fascist Nazi Appeaser.” So he was fired again.

Fast forward to the present, and special prosecutor Robert Mueller has subpoenaed Nunberg to (a) testify in the Trump-Russia probe and (b) turn over all documents related to a wide range of Trumpworld players. Today Nunberg went crazy, appearing on every TV show he could find to announce that he was going to ignore the subpoena and Mueller should just arrest him if he wanted to. This would be peculiar behavior for anyone, but it’s especially peculiar for Nunberg, since he’s a lawyer and knows perfectly well he has no legal leg to stand on. So what’s going on?

Presumably Nunberg doesn’t want to go to jail. Presumably he also knows that Mueller is a serious guy who will, in fact, throw him in jail for contempt if he has to. He must think that, somehow, this public display of defiance will turn out for the best. What could be going through his head?

• This is a huge wet kiss of loyalty to Donald Trump. Maybe Nunberg thinks Trump will reward him with a pardon or something.
• Maybe he thinks that if one person stands up to Mueller, it will start a revolt among all the other people Mueller is sending subpoenas to. After all, is Mueller going to throw them all in jail?
• Maybe he thinks this will prompt Trump to fire Mueller.
• Maybe he thinks Mueller is going nuts, demanding endless document production even from minor players. Nunberg may hope to spark a partisan discussion about prosecutorial overreach that will … do something. I’m not really clear on how he thinks this might end.
• Or maybe Nunberg has just lost his marbles.

It’s all very strange. So far this a Twitter and cable news phenomenon, getting only modest coverage elsewhere. But what happens next?

UPDATE: Nunberg has suddenly changed his mind and says he’s probably “going to end up cooperating” with Mueller. The currently favored theory on Twitter is that Nunberg was drunk this morning and is only now sobering up.

Several months ago I posted a picture of a sunset in Ireland. I promised another one someday, and today’s the day. Sort of: this is actually the same sunset. It was taken about ten minutes after the first picture and with a much longer focal length, which gives it an entirely different look. Nevertheless, it’s sunset in Waterville, just like the other one.

adrianhancu/123RF

Jane Mayer reports today in the New Yorker on the events of August 2016, three months before the election:

According to an article by the Washington Post, that month the C.I.A. sent what the paper described as “an intelligence bombshell” to President Obama, warning him that Putin was directly involved in a Russian cyber campaign aimed at disrupting the Presidential election—and helping Trump win. Robert Hannigan, then the head of the U.K.’s intelligence service the G.C.H.Q., had recently flown to Washington and briefed the C.I.A.’s director, John Brennan, on a stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted. (The content of these intercepts has not become public.)

Um, what? A “stream of illicit communications”? Between “Trump’s team and Moscow”? I would like to know more about that! I’ll bet everyone would like to know more about that. When did this happen? Who, precisely, is “Moscow”? Is this shorthand for people in government, or just some private citizens who live in Moscow? And what exactly does “illicit” mean?

This is almost certainly the single most interesting sentence published today.

Here’s yet another entry from the “nobody could have predicted” file:

The California bullet train will take longer to build and cost more than previously estimated under a soon-to-be-released business plan, but plans to begin the project by linking the Bay Area to the Central Valley remain intact, according to the rail authority’s new chief executive, Brian Kelly….Kelly did not disclose the new price tag for completing the entire Los Angeles to San Francisco system.

The last cost increase was announced only last month. And of course, California is still light years away from having the money to build the train, with neither federal nor private sector funding anywhere in sight. This is nuts.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Kicking things up a notch this morning, President Trump decided to casually threaten Canada and Mexico that tariffs on steel and aluminum would stay in place unless they caved in on NAFTA negotiations

We have large trade deficits with Mexico and Canada. NAFTA, which is under renegotiation right now, has been a bad deal for U.S.A. Massive relocation of companies & jobs. Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed. Also, Canada must..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 5, 2018

Apparently even Republicans are getting fed up with this idiocy:

Congressional Republicans are maneuvering to stop President Trump from levying harsh tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, arguing the move runs counter to the core of their economic agenda and could even cause political problems heading into the 2018 midterms.

“We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan,” AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), said in a statement Monday….Members of the House Ways and Means Committee were also circulating a letter arguing against the tariffs, and high-ranking Senate Republicans have voiced their opposition….But it’s difficult to predict how far Republicans would go to stand up to Trump.

Ah yes, how far will Republicans go to stand up to Trump? Will they send him a stern letter? Or, being Congress and all, will they pass legislation removing Trump’s authority to unilaterally levy new tariffs? Congress mostly leaves tariffs up to presidents, but as the Washington Post delicately puts it, “Congressional leaders believe that approach has worked well — until now.”

Still, if you go to war with Trump, you have to expect you’re going to get a real war. Trump could easily blow up so badly that he’d decide to engage in a scorched-earth campaign against the traitors in the Republican Party, leading to a tidal wave of losses in the November midterms unprecedented in human history. I wouldn’t put it past him. So I guess there’s that for Paul Ryan to think about.

Democrats are getting ready to join Republicans in support of a bill to water down the Dodd-Frank banking regulations passed after the 2008 financial crisis:

Congress’s appetite for pulling back bank regulations shows the renewed clout of the financial sector in Washington, not just in the GOP but also among Democrats. Eight years after nearly every Senate Democrat backed a sweeping set of new rules for financial firms large and small, the party is now split, with moderates, several of them facing tough midterm election contests, working with the opposing party.

The core of the new bill exempts about two dozen financial companies with assets between $50 billion and $250 billion from the highest levels of scrutiny by the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank. Supporters argue that the legislation would bring much-needed relief to midsize and regional banks that were treated like their much larger counterparts under the 2010 legislation known as Dodd-Frank. Opponents say it would weaken the oversight needed to stave off the type of dangerous lending and investing that brought the U.S. economy to its knees.

It’s all about the poor community banks! And yet, I was curious. Just how are community banks doing these days? At great expense, the research team here at Mother Jones clicked a few links to retrieve Fed data on bank performance. Here it is:

I am just a humble blogger with no experience in the mighty financial industry, but it sure looks to me as if banks are doing fine. It also looks to me as if community banks are doing about as well as the big banks. Sure, they took a hit in the 4th quarter of 2017, but that was due to one-time writedowns on deferred tax assets prompted by the new Republican tax legislation. They’ll make it all up and more thanks to lower tax rates going forward.

Now, tell me again why we need to loosen the rules on banks?

Here’s the latest on President Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum:

Peter Navarro, an adviser and the architect of many of Mr. Trump’s campaign trade promises, confirmed on Sunday that the president would not exclude any country from the tariffs but said individual companies could apply for exemptions for certain products.

This is Donald Trump’s dream: having corporate CEOs come to him on their knees, begging for tariff exemptions. And this has other benefits: every CEO in America will say nice things about him because they don’t want to ruin their chances of getting an exemption. And who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump aides whispered in their ears that maybe they could do a little more than just say nice things.

This is an open door for corruption, which I suppose is why Trump likes it. Nobody else should, though.