Last week, John Lott released a working paper showing that illegal immigrants in Arizona “are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.” I didn’t bother reading it or reporting on it because Lott is spectacularly dishonest and unreliable in his work and it’s not worth the time to pore through his dreck to find out how he tortured the data. Anyway, I figured that someone else would do the work eventually, and today Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute comes through. I’m sorry that Alex had to waste a week of time he’ll never get back on this, but since he did let’s find out what Lott got wrong:

Lott wrote his paper based on a dataset he obtained from the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) that lists all admitted prisoners in the state of Arizona from 1985 to 2017….The variable that Lott focused on is “CITIZEN.” That variable is broken down into seven categories. Lott erroneously assumed that the third category, called “non-US citizen and deportable,” only counted illegal immigrants. That is not true….A significant proportion of non-U.S. citizens who are deported every year are legal immigrants who violate the terms of their visas in one way or the other.

I’m sure it was an honest mistake. Nowrasteh uses a more reliable variable to get a better estimate, but even so, it counts both legal and illegal immigrants. So he provides both a high and low estimate for the number of illegal immigrants in Arizona prisons:

In other words, illegal immigrants are a smaller percentage of the prison population than the overall population.

There are all sorts of potential sources of error here, including pretty much all of the estimates of everything. That’s just the way it goes with this stuff. In any case, I imagine that Lott will come roaring back, insisting that he knew all along about the limitations of the CITIZEN variable and then filling the web with statistical gobbledygook to show that he was right all along. Maybe. But given his track record, I’ll believe the Cato estimates until someone I trust comes along to tell me that Lott has a point.

I don’t have any special reason to post this. I just felt like it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks overall inflation, of course, but they also track inflation for specific types of products: cars, medical care, computers, etc. Here are the inflation rates since 2005 for nine different categories compared to the overall inflation rate:

If you’re putting kids through college, you’re in big trouble. If you spend lots of money on clothing, vacation, and gadgets, you’re in good shape.

In a new paper, Alex Tabarrok and Nathan Goldschlag investigate whether heavyhanded government regulation has been responsible for a decline in dynamism in the American economy. They define dynamism about the way you’d expect: fewer startups, less job creation, aging firms, and weak productivity growth. Their approach is pretty simple: different sectors of the economy are regulated at different levels, so if regulation is at fault you’d expect to see a correlation between, say, regulation level and startup activity. But you don’t:

One paper doesn’t settle anything, of course, but this is basically an admission against interest since I doubt that Tabarrok wanted to come up with this answer. But he did. And as he notes, the paper got published in a good journal even though it’s a negative result. That’s good! Negative results should get published more often.

Needless to say, this doesn’t imply that regulation is good. It just says that regulation doesn’t seem to be responsible for reduced entrepreneurial activity or weak productivity growth. The answer lies somewhere else.

Prince of Darkness Sidney Blumenthal.Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

Jonathan Swan says that Devin Nunes isn’t done. Apparently he was so thrilled with the response to his memo about the FBI that he’s planning to write about other agencies too:

Republicans close to Nunes say there could be as many as five additional memos or reports of “wrongdoing.”

….Nunes hinted at what’s coming next in an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier on Friday….”We are in the middle of what I call phase two of our investigation, which involves other departments, specifically the State Department and some of the involvement that they had in this.”

….A Republican source briefed on Nunes’ investigations told me some of the work focuses on the activities of two longtime backers of Bill and Hillary Clinton: Sid Blumenthal and controversial activist Cody Shearer. The Guardian has reported that the FBI reviewed a second Trump-Russia dossier which Shearer — an ally of Bill Clinton’s White House back in the ’90s — put together.

Hillary Clinton! The State Department! Sidney Blumenthal!!! This is practically every Republican bugaboo all in one package. What can possibly go wrong?

In the meantime, Democrats plan to ask the House Intelligence Committee on Monday to release their memo too. I’m sure there will be no problem with that. Republicans are totally dedicated to transparency, after all. Right?

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of odd contrails in the sky, and today I got some pictures with my phone. Here’s what the path looks like at the start of their flight:

I’m pretty sure airplanes don’t take off at a 45 degree angle. So it’s a missile test of some kind, right? Or a military jet? Here’s the middle of the path:

And here’s the end of the path as it flies out over the Pacific Ocean:

I’ve enhanced this photo so you can see another odd thing: the black trail ahead of the contrail. The missile, or whatever it is, is following the exact path of some earlier missile without the slightest deviation. I don’t doubt the precision of our armaments, but this seems almost creepily accurate.

Also: it’s coming from the south, so it’s not something out of Vandenberg. Do they test missiles from Camp Pendleton? Does anyone know what this is?

UPDATE: The black trail is the shadow of the contrail. I’ve never seen that before, so that’s pretty interesting. The airplane/missile/UFO is still a bit of a mystery, though. The betting money in comments is that this is an ordinary commercial jet flying out of San Diego, and the steep angle of ascent is just a trick of perspective. That seems really unlikely to me. I never saw anything like this until about a month or so ago, and since then I’ve seen it several times. And anyway, San Diego is just too far away for this. Maybe something out of Ontario? Or March air base? Or a new aircraft carrier floating around on Lake Elsinore?

The Treasury Department is going to be borrowing a lot of money this quarter:

No worries. At least the rich are getting richer and schoolteachers are getting an extra $1.50 per week:

Paul Ryan doesn’t want you to see this deleted tweet where he said that the GOP’s trillion dollar plus giveaway to the rich is justified because a secretary got a buck fifty a week out of the deal. pic.twitter.com/7gtoyCB0wh

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) February 3, 2018

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Baby steps:

The release of the memo mattered less than #releasethememo.

After weeks of buildup, the three-and-a-half-page document about alleged F.B.I. abuses during the 2016 presidential campaign made public on Friday was broadly greeted with criticism, including by some Republicans. They said it cherry-picked information, made false assertions and was overly focused on an obscure, low-level Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

It didn’t live up to the hype.

But the campaign, captured in the hashtag #releasethememo, which was trending on Twitter for days, may have a far more significant impact than the memo’s contents. It was a choreographed effort by House Republicans and top White House officials to push a highly contentious theme — that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department abused their powers to spy on the Trump campaign, and relied on dodgy information from a former British spy paid by Democratic operatives.

What began as an ember more than two weeks ago was fanned into a blaze by conservative media titans, presidential tweets and Republican lawmakers urging people to use social media to pressure Congress to make the memo’s contents public. “I invite everybody to use the hashtag #releasethememo,” Representative Raúl Labrador, the Idaho Republican, said on Fox News during the campaign’s infancy, adding that Americans would be “shocked” when the memo was released.

That’s Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times. It’s nice to see the news pages engaging in this kind of obvious scrutiny, but that scrutiny only matters if they do something about it—and if the rest of the media joins them. As Mazzetti says, this was a choreographed effort—an obviously choreographed effort—led by a guy with a hustler’s track record and starring a memo whose basics have been known for weeks. And yet, it worked. It got a ton of coverage in the Times and elsewhere.

This kind of thing has always been part of politics, but there was a time when serious news outlets didn’t give a lot of coverage to allegations that were so obviously partisan and specious. Today, the power of conservative media is so strong that everyone feels obligated to cover even the dumbest stuff. After all, it’s “out there.” You can’t ignore it.

Maybe not. But maybe it’s time to at least start trying again.

The stock market had a bit of a bad day today:

Donald Trump didn’t mention this in his tweetbragging about the economy today, and liberals are so damn honest that every mention I’ve seen is about how this isn’t really his fault anyway. Which is true. But would it kill us to rub Trump’s nose in this for a day before acknowledging that?

Of course, there might be another reason for downplaying this. The Nunes memo is turning out to be even more dishonest and empty-headed than we suspected, and it looks to me like it’s now Democrats who want to keep it in the news. I’d like to say that this time Republicans have finally gone too far, but I’ve thought that a few dozen times before. We’ll see.

Forget the Nunes memo. What you are all really wondering about is what happened when Hilbert found Hopper occupying his pod. Prepare to be shocked!

Here’s how it played out. Hilbert jumped up on my desk. He did a cat version of a double take. Then he started licking Hopper. This is usually the prelude to a bit of paw karate, but this time Hopper wasn’t playing. She just wanted to snooze. Hilbert was confused. So he walked to the window sill, turned around, and stuffed himself into the pod. Hopper still didn’t move. She was totally dedicated to her nap. So we ended up with this:

Hilbert had done everything he could think of, but he still didn’t have sole possession of the pod. He was so dismayed he couldn’t sleep. He just sat there staring into space wondering what was going on.

That lasted about five minutes, which is a long time for a cat. Then he went to sleep.

BY THE WAY: The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that last week’s picture was taken in the daytime, while this one is clearly taken at night. This is making you suspicious. Does this week’s photo really follow from last week’s?

Well, yes, in spirit. The thing is, the next morning Hopper was back in the pod and the pictures I took were a lot better. So I used one of those to illustrate the opening stage of this little drama. It’s just poetic license.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

I’m not going to flood the zone on the Nunes memo. Others can do that. But I want to highlight a point I made in the previous post: we’ve known what was in the memo for weeks. There have been hundreds of stories about it, and the actual charges it lays out are so weak that they’ve usually been treated as just a brief aside. The main story has always been about the partisan fight over releasing the memo.

In other words: we’ve had weeks to mull over the possibility that the FBI’s FISA application for Carter Page relied partly on the Steele dossier, and nobody has cared much. There have been no blaring headlines about it. There have been no experts telling us that this is a bombshell. It hasn’t spawned any new reporting, or if it has, the reporting has come up dry. The accusations in the memo just aren’t very important even if they’re true.

So now the memo is out, and it says what we all thought it said. Nobody cared very much before, so there’s no reason to care very much now. It’s all just spectacle.

And by the way, here are the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee:

• Devin Nunes, Chairman
• Mike Conaway
• Peter King
• Frank LoBiondo
• Tom Rooney
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
• Michael Turner
• Brad Wenstrup
• Chris Stewart
• Rick Crawford
• Trey Gowdy
• Elise Stefanik
• Will Hurd

Remember those names. Intelligence committees have long been the last refuge of serious, bipartisan congressional work. These are the people who have destroyed that.