Here’s a lover’s pair of redwood trees near the Ahwanee Hotel, highlighted in the warmth of the early morning sun. Happy Valentine’s Day!

UPDATE: Look, these trees are made of wood and they look kind of reddish in the sunlight. So, they’re redwoods, right?

I guess not. Luckily, Marian took a ranger tour of Yosemite’s trees on Thursday, and the ranger identified the left-hand tree as a ponderosa pine and the right-hand tree as an incense cedar. If you got both trees right, treat yourself to some ice cream!

Stormy Daniels: Clinton Wallace/Globe Photos/ZUMA; Michael Cohen: Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Oh FFS:

President Trump’s lawyer said he paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket https://t.co/QtqUeqSFxG

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 14, 2018

Please go on:

Full statement from Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on his payment to Stormy Daniels: pic.twitter.com/pG2SQkPJ9r

— Tarini Parti (@tparti) February 14, 2018

Michael Cohen is Trump’s longtime fixer lawyer. Even so, the twitterverse seems to have some skepticism about all this:

I would note: Michael Cohen says neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump Campaign reimbursed him for the payment to Stormy Daniels. He does not say that Donald J. Trump did not reimburse him. https://t.co/3KMhvq2ApV

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) February 14, 2018

“Mr. Cohen…didn’t rule out Mr. Trump reimbursing him for the payment.” https://t.co/XA2Cz6Bh52

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) February 14, 2018

OK, here’s my guess: Cohen paid Stormy; Kushner paid Cohen; Ivanka paid Kushner; Don Jr. paid Ivanka; and Don Jr.’s end-of-year bonus from The Trump Organization was $130,000 higher than last year thanks to his outstanding performance. You don’t believe me? Fine. Come up with a better theory.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

So has the White House finally settled on a single story about Rob Porter’s history of domestic violence? You know, basic stuff like how much they knew and when they knew it? I guess not:

The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, said on Tuesday that the bureau delivered final results in January of its background investigation into Rob Porter….But the White House allowed Mr. Porter to continue serving in his post until the accusations surfaced publicly in press reports last week.

….Mr. Wray also told lawmakers that the bureau delivered its first report on Mr. Porter to the White House in March [2017], months earlier than White House officials said they learned of the problems with his background check….Mr. Wray’s testimony pointed up a contradictory and frequently changing story line from the White House about a scandal that has engulfed the West Wing. It has raised questions about the credibility of President Trump’s most senior advisers…and the degree of tolerance they may have shown to an ambitious colleague apparently eager to cover up a dark past.

Yeah, this “raises questions” about the credibility of Donald Trump’s senior aides. That would make more sense if they hadn’t lied about similar stuff relentlessly over the past year, long since blowing up any credibility they had in the first place.

As for waiting to fire Porter until accusations against him were made public, that’s par for the course. Remember Michael Flynn? Remember how long he was kept on after the White House knew he had lied to the FBI? Answer: until it became public. What a coincidence.

Is this the real heritage of Anglo-American law enforcement?

While I was wending my way up to Yosemite on Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech to the winter conference of the National Sheriff’s Association. As usual with these kinds of things, he said nice things about sheriffs. They keep us safe. They work hard. And they’re the backbone of local policing: “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement,” he told them.

Good stuff. Except for that last part. As I understand things, Twitter went crazy, claiming that the word “Anglo” was a dog whistle for white and “sheriff” was a dog whistle for Bull Connors. This is so preposterous I can hardly believe it happened, but it turns out that even a couple of senators chimed in to condemn this brutally racist remark. Aaron Blake, after clearing his throat long and hard to make sure we know he disapproves of both Sessions and Donald Trump, thinks we liberals should knock it off. Among lawyers, after all, the term Anglo-American is pretty routine:

Is it possible that Sessions inserted the term to provoke? In the sense that anything is possible, yes. But the term is so noncontroversial in legal circles that Obama and his administration used it with some regularity.

….This is the danger in overreacting for Trump’s opponents….They are convinced that Trump has forfeited the benefit of the doubt. But erasing any benefit of the doubt and having your outrage on a hair-trigger can play into Trump’s hands. The more reactions like this occur, the more credible Trump’s case becomes that opponents are reading the worst into everything he and his administration say and do, and the more his claim to be a victim of political correctness and an overzealous media rings true to his already-dug-in base.

A thousand times yes. This is precisely the kind of thing that makes ordinary people think that liberals are nuts. Even if this were a dog whistle, our best option would be to let it go. It’s so subtle that no one would believe our explanation. In this case, where it almost certainly wasn’t a dog whistle, we sound even crazier for somehow inventing racism where none exists and then inventing a cockamamie story about it. Unfortunately, that means the next time, when there really is racism involved, no one will believe us then either.

There’s so much real racism in American society that we hardly need to invent more. And the last thing we need to do is provide ammunition for the folks who think that liberals make everything into racism.

A mushroom in Kenmare after a light drizzle.

Last night I posted a picture of the night sky at Yosemite taken “more or less” from my hotel window. That means, of course, that it wasn’t actually taken from my hotel window. But it was pretty nearby.

This morning, however, provides a better chance to show the real view as the sun rises in the valley. It’s nice to wake up to this! That’s Glacier Point, and off in the other direction is Half Dome. Bluebirds are cavorting in the trees, there’s no snow on the ground, and temps are in the high 40s. Pretty good for February.

Guess what? I’m on vacation this week. Can you guess where I am? Huh? Can you?

You figured it out, didn’t you? I figured we ought to spend some time in Yosemite before Donald Trump decides to auction it off to the highest bidder in order to fund improvements to LaGuardia Airport. As you can see, it was overcast-ish at dusk, but the clouds blew off a couple of hours later and the night sky is beautiful. Here’s the view more or less from our hotel room:

Three doors in Caherdaniel.

The first door is right across from the Blind Piper, a nice pub that’s also a restaurant favored by tour buses. If you’ve ever taken a bus tour of the Ring of Kerry, there’s a good chance you’ve eaten there. The second door is from a spectacularly overgrown house at the north end of town. Actually, it’s probably not technically in Caherdaniel at all, but I figure it’s close enough. The third door is across from the Blind Piper on the inland side of the Ring. It’s the door to a storage shed.

This is just a harmless little "cleaning robot." Sure it is.Kenjiro Matsuo/AFLO via ZUMA

Over the weekend, I heard the name Andrew Yang for the first time. Who’s that? Well, he’s running for president, and as the New York Times points out, he’ll have plenty of competition. There are likely to be a lot of people running in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020:

Only one of them will be focused on the robot apocalypse.

That candidate is Andrew Yang, a well-connected New York businessman who is mounting a longer-than-long-shot bid for the White House. Mr. Yang, a former tech executive who started the nonprofit organization Venture for America, believes that automation and advanced artificial intelligence will soon make millions of jobs obsolete — yours, mine, those of our accountants and radiologists and grocery store cashiers. He says America needs to take radical steps to prevent Great Depression-level unemployment and a total societal meltdown, including handing out trillions of dollars in cash.

That sounds great! If Yang is also in favor of spending a few billion dollars on lead remediation, he’d punch all of my hot buttons. Dean Baker, however, isn’t impressed with talk of massive job losses to robots:

Such mass displacement implies rapid productivity growth, presumably along the lines of the 3.0 percent growth the country saw in the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973 and again from 1995 to 2005….In the years since 2005 productivity growth has been close to 1.0 percent.

….Somehow most reporting has failed to recognize the relationship between job-killing robots and GDP growth. If we do see the more rapid productivity growth envisioned by those concerned about job-killing robots, then deficits will certainly not be a problem. The country will be seeing enormous growth in its productive capacities and will need lots of spending to keep workers employed and fully utilize its capacity.

Quite right. It won’t happen for at least a decade, but eventually artificial intelligence will get to the point where it will, in fact, produce enormous productivity growth. And no, deficits will no longer matter. We won’t quite be in the mythical post-scarcity society of Star Trek fame, but we’ll be close. The main problem of economics will no longer be business cycles or inflation or trade deficits or even unemployment per se. It will be strictly about how to distribute the fruits of a society in which both human labor and capital stock are no longer of any value.

I imagine that Baker is being snarky in his response: if you really believe in the robot apocalypse, then why do you care about Social Security solvency or the federal deficit? You need to pick one or the other. But that’s a real conundrum, and one that I think about periodically. Here’s my answer: I do believe in the robot apocalypse and I don’t think Social Security solvency or spiraling federal deficits will be a long-term issue. By the time 2035 rolls around, our productive capacity will be so high that supporting the elderly will be a minor issue.

So why do I care about Social Security? Or deficits? That’s easy too: because I might be wrong. Basically, I support sensible economic planning as an insurance policy, and I’ll support it until the day that it literally isn’t necessary anymore. If I’m right, no real harm is done. If I’m wrong, we’ll have sensible economic policies to fall back on.

But I’ll bet I’m right. Eventually.

The new Trump budget is out. Let’s see. SNAP (food stamps) loses $17 billion. The Post Office loses $4 billion, primarily by giving them “the ability to address their expenses—including the cost of personnel.” In other words, by slashing pay and pensions. Low-income energy assistance is eliminated. Foreign aid is cut $5 billion. PBS funding is eliminated. Ditto for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. HUD loses $9 billion, including a $4 billion cut in rental assistance. Etc. etc.

On the mandatory spending side, the budget proposes cuts of $266 billion to Medicare over ten years. SNAP loses $213 billion. Obamacare is eliminated, of course. “Waste and abuse” will generate savings of $187 billion. Farmers lose $47 billion. Subsidized student loans go away, as does the student loan forgiveness program. Blah blah blah.

None of this matters, of course. This is just a symbolic document designed to demonstrate that Donald Trump has his heart in the right place. The goal is to show how tough he is on social welfare programs for poor people while spending oodles of money on defense. In fact, his budget does not propose even a dollar in defense reductions. Amazing, no? Apparently there’s not a single program in the entire Department of Defense that ought to be eliminated or cut back.

And of course there’s this:

But even with these reductions, which combine for more than $3 trillion in cuts over 10 years, it would not bring the budget into balance because of the lost tax revenue and higher spending on other programs. The White House projects a large gap between government spending and tax revenue over the next decade, adding at least $7 trillion to the debt over that time. In 2019 and 2020 alone, the government would add a combined $2 trillion in debt under Trump’s proposed plan. Even with upbeat economic forecasts and its numerous proposed cuts to social programs, most of which are dead-on-arrival in Congress, the Trump administration projects it would run a deficit of $450 billion in 2027.

I’m sure this will be reported as an amazing U-turn for Republicans, who have always cut the deficit when they’ve been in power in the past. Reagan did. Bush did. Right?

Anyway, here’s the bottom line. Corporations and the rich get a big tax cut. The Pentagon gets a big spending increase. Poor people will get screwed. And even with all the unlikely assumptions and magic asterisks they could think up, the budget deficit will still increase.

Ladies and gentlement, this is your Republican Party. The party of fiscal discipline.