I have read the entire Nunes memo. It took two minutes. There is nothing there that hasn’t already been leaked. It basically claims that the FBI relied on the Steele dossier in its FISA application for a wiretap on Carter Page, but didn’t reveal to the FISA court that Steele was just a Hillary stooge peddling fake news. Even if this were true, it would hardly be a big deal. But it’s not. The dossier was almost certainly nothing more than a bit of extra corroboration that was acknowledged as speculative. Of course, we’ll never see any of the FISA applications so we can judge for ourselves, and Nunes knows it.

But who cares? This was always a show for the media. And it worked great. I don’t even have the courage to turn on Fox News to see how they’re playing this.

Starmax/Newscom via ZUMA

The president of the United States early this morning:

The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans – something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2018

The “sacred investigative process”!

I am, generally speaking, pretty confident that we will all survive Donald Trump and the country will get back to normal. But it’s stuff like this that gives me pause. If you want to make a case for the slippery slope into fascism or whatever, this is your best bet. Real authoritarians—as opposed to wannabes like Trump—would recognize this playbook and nod approvingly. The first thing you have to do is get control of the security forces. That means smearing the leadership as corrupt and then purging them, to be replaced by loyalists.

Of course, you can’t do this unless your own party goes along. And boy howdy, are Republicans going along.

You need a core of devoted followers. Trump has that in evangelicals and racially aggrieved whites.

You need the press to report everything at least neutrally even if they know your charges are obviously phony. That’s happening too.

And you need a weak opposition. Trump has that because, let’s face it, the FBI has never been a liberal favorite. Most of the time we’re griping about their racial insensitivity or their treatment of suspects or their mass surveillance. It’s hard to turn on a dime and suddenly become their biggest boosters.

Finally, you need to put on a show for the masses, and we’re sure getting that with the Nunes memo, aren’t we?

Like I said, I still think everything turns out OK. Republicans have been running this playbook for a long time. Today it’s FBI corruption. Before that it was Hillary’s emails, Benghazi, the IRS, Solyndra, and Fast & Furious. And before that it was their insane investigatory jihad against Bill Clinton. Even now I don’t think most people have come to grips with just how much of the Clinton stuff was invented and planned as part of a very deliberate campaign.

The GOP has been Newt Gingrich’s party since 1994. I’m not sure it’s even fair to say that Trump is taking it to new levels. He’s just bringing it to life more effectively than anyone before him. Either way, though, he is Newt Gingrich’s Platonic ideal of a politician made flesh. You bluster for the cameras endlessly. You use words to change reality. You attack any institution that can offer a credible alternative to your reality. You lie so often it becomes the truth. You pretend to be a populist but make sure to retain the support of the corporate class. Newt wrote the playbook. Trump is finally the quarterback who can follow it.

Here is the Wall Street Journal today:

Wage growth accelerated, with average hourly earnings for private-sector workers climbing 0.34% on the month and up 2.9% over the past year. That was the strongest year-over-year gain since June 2009.

I am so tired of reading this kind of thing, especially in a newspaper aimed at the financial and business communities. The Journal is presenting nominal wage growth and calling it the “strongest” since 2009. But who cares? If inflation is running at 5 percent, that would be a wage decrease. If it’s running at 0 percent, that would be terrific growth. So what does real wage growth look like?

Adjusted for inflation—which is the only metric that matters to economists and workers alike—wages were up slightly more than 1 percent. The last time we saw growth that high was…16 months ago.

Real wage growth of 1 percent isn’t horrible. I happen to prefer looking at wages for nonsupervisory workers, which were up only about 0.6 percent, but that’s a matter of taste. What’s not a matter of taste is adjusting for inflation. Real wage growth in January was OK, but it was no record breaker.

The American economy gained 200,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 110,000 jobs. That’s OK but not great. The employment-population ratio stayed flat yet again, and the headline unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1 percent. The absolute number of unemployed workers went up by 108,000, which is not great news, and 153,000 workers dropped out of the labor force—also not great news.

Overall, this report strikes me as a little weaker than the topline number suggests, but still decent.

Wages of production and nonsupervisory workers were up 2.4 percent. That’s only slightly above inflation, so we’re back to sluggish wage growth after a single month of good news.

Jon Chol Jin and Evan Vucci/AP

I barely know how to react to this stuff anymore:

The White House has grown frustrated in recent weeks by what it considers the Pentagon’s reluctance to provide President Trump with options for a military strike against North Korea, according to officials, the latest sign of a deepening split in the administration over how to confront the nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong-un….The Pentagon, they say, is worried that the White House is moving too hastily toward military action on the Korean Peninsula that could escalate catastrophically. Giving the president too many options, the officials said, could increase the odds that he will act.

It’s possible, I suppose, that all these leaks are part of a carefully orchestrated plan to make sure North Korea really believes Trump will retaliate if they lob a nuke in our direction. They probably already know that, but a little extra insurance never hurts. Right?

But that’s not likely. This is not an administration known for its ability to create complex plans and keep them under wraps. Most likely, the Pentagon really is scared that Trump might decide to bomb North Korea just because it’s the opposite of what Obama did.

Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Albuquerque Journal/ZUMAPRESS

A few years ago, the Obama administration issued a rule saying that if a restaurant owner collected tips and put them in a pool, all the money had to go back to the wait staff. This rule is currently being litigated on the grounds that it exceeds the power of the Department of Labor, and maybe that’s true. But the Trump administration wasn’t happy with just that. They wanted to repeal and replace the rule, but they also wanted to retain their populist street cred. So they commissioned a study to show that the Obama rule wasn’t necessary anyway since tips would all be distributed to workers regardless.

Now, common sense tells you this is very, very unlikely. The new rule doesn’t forbid employers from skimming money off the top of the pool,¹ and human nature being what it is, this means that some employers will. Not everybody has a heart of gold, after all. And sure enough, that’s what the study concluded. Here is Bloomberg Law:

Senior department political officials—faced with a government analysis showing that workers could lose billions of dollars in tips as a result of the proposal—ordered staff to revise the data methodology to lessen the expected impact, several of the sources said….Later calculations showed progressively reduced tip losses….[Officials] wound up receiving approval from the White House to publish a proposal Dec. 5 that removed the economic transfer data altogether, the sources said.

….Former career and political officials at the DOL and the White House Office of Management and Budget, joined by business and employee-side regulatory attorneys, all told Bloomberg Law that scrapping a completed analysis from a significant proposal would mark a troubling departure from the government’s mission. Agencies and OMB are expected to ensure that all available data are brought to bear during notice-and-comment rulemaking, the sources said. White House Office of Management and Budget’s regulatory review staff was familiar with the data, before the proposed rule was released, sources said. It’s not clear whether OMB Director Mick Mulvaney approved the deletion of the numbers.

In a nutshell: they did the study; it produced results they didn’t like; so they covered up the study. Anyone who wants to comment on the new rule will have to do so without access to the Department of Labor’s own analysis.

Welcome to the Trump administration, ladies and gentlemen.

¹Via “administrative fees,” “management share,” “first aid trust fund,” or just plain taking the money and not bothering with any kind of official excuse. For what it’s worth, EPI estimates that workers would lose about $6 billion under the new rule.

I’m endlessly amazed at the stuff conservatives decide to kvetch about. Today at National Review, Philip DeVoe is unhappy that the Cleveland Indians have decided to get rid of their mascot, Chief Wahoo. Just to remind you, this is Chief Wahoo:

The chief has been slowly disappearing for years, and Cleveland finally decided this year to remove the logo entirely from on-field play. You can still buy Chief Wahoo souvenirs, but that’s it. So what is DeVoe’s issue?

While several activist groups have celebrated the move as long overdue, as the mascot has been accused of being offensive to Native Americans, it’s unclear why the ball club made the decision.

….First, was there any real pressure to change the logo? The modern fight to purge professional sports teams of Native American mascots was seemingly abandoned in 2016 when the Washington Post found that nine of ten Native Americans polled took no offense at the Washington Redskins’ logo or team name….Second, the mascot didn’t come from a place of racism originally, and modern Indians fans don’t wear it out of spite or to perpetuate stereotypes. Indians pitcher Allie Reynolds, himself a Native American, was the inspiration for the name, as “Chief Wahoo” was a sobriquet for Reynolds. Plus, the original image was intended to be jovial, whereas the oft-cited problem with Native American mascots is that they perpetuate a stereotype of savagery.

All in all, it looks like an unnecessary and misguided attempt at heading off a controversy.

Let’s spell this out. DeVoe’s argument, I guess, is that not every Native American objects to the Chief Wahoo logo. It’s not the subject of any special feeding frenzy right now. Nobody thought of it as racist back in 1946.¹ And it’s not like Wahoo is scalping a white man or anything. So why think ahead and get rid of him now?

This is almost a parody of the anti-anti-racist position. Conservatives practically never complain about actual racism, but even the tiniest movement to oppose racism manages to get their hackles up. Getting rid of the chief is just about the tiniest movement you can imagine, but even so it prompts a conservative complaint. And then they wonder why minorities keep on voting against Republicans. It’s a mystery, isn’t it?

¹A notably enlightened era, apparently.

This is a Painted Lady butterfly, one of the most common butterfly species in the world. Apparently it can live anywhere it’s warm enough, which very much includes Southern California. This one lives about a hundred feet from my house.

Or lived, I should say. I took this picture last September, and Painted Ladies have a lifespan of less than a month. But it was pretty while it lasted.

Here's some infrastructure work near my house. There's a lot of it going on right now! You may be wondering how we manage to fund this, so here's how we did it. First, the state of California raised its gas tax by 12 cents per gallon to raise $34 billion for new construction projects. Second, Orange County raised its sales tax by half a cent in 1990, and then renewed it in 2006 to pay for an additional $13 billion in local projects. Third, the neighborhood I live in is currently repaving all its streets and building new curb cuts for the disabled. The money for this comes from association dues. All three of these have one thing in common: they tax residents in order to raise actual money to pay for infrastructure improvements. This is how adults do it.Photo by Kevin Drum

So. Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan. As near as I can tell, here’s the skinny:

• It’s really more like a $1 trillion plan.
• States are expected to put up $800 billion.
• The federal government will put up $200 billion.
• But the money will be taken from other projects.

In other words:

• Net new spending from the federal government will be zero.
• The incentives to states will be far too small to prompt any truly new development—though I have no doubt that states will compete ferociously to get federal money for projects they were going to do anyway.
• The private sector will get involved only if they can make money via tolls, use fees, etc. That is to say, taxes.

In yet other words:

• There is nothing there. There will be no new publicly-funded infrastructure.

Would anybody care to tell me if I’m missing anything here?

How should Democrats respond to President Trump’s immigration proposal? Before I answer, let’s take a look at what the public thinks of immigration. First up, here is Gallup on support for cutting immigration levels:

Second, here is Pew on who supports building a border wall:

Third, here is CBS News on views about DACA:

Let’s summarize:

• Even among Republicans, the desire to reduce immigration has gone steadily down over the past two years. This is despite Donald Trump’s best efforts to weaponize the subject.
• Most people oppose a border wall. Support comes mainly from the white, the old, the evangelical, and the uneducated. I know how much Republicans hate it when this is pointed out, but these are basically the most racially resentful segments of the population.
• Everyone supports DACA. Even Republicans support it overwhelmingly, 79 percent to 18 percent.

I’m not personally wedded to our current levels of legal immigration. The numbers are fairly arbitrary, after all, and if a modest reduction in green card quotas—or a reallocation of some kind—is what it takes to buy peace, I’d probably support it. At the same time, what incentive do Democrats have to make any kind of bargain at all? Even among Republicans, nearly half are satisfied with current immigration levels. The wall is basically a nativist wet dream. And support for Dreamers is overwhelming across the board.

Their best strategy is probably to set some reasonable terms publicly and then walk away from the table. The political price would be minimal, or maybe even positive. And what happens next? If Republicans allow DACA to expire and Donald Trump starts deporting Dreamers, it will be a nightmare. Republican will be desperate for a deal at that point. They’re talking tough right now, but that’s mostly just cover for a widespread fear of what happens to them if Dreamers start getting shipped off to Mexico on their watch.

Here’s the problem for Democrats: taking this position will almost certainly cause some human misery. Republicans won’t fold easily, and in the meantime Dreamers will indeed get deported to a country they’ve never lived in. But liberals don’t like human misery, and Republicans hold them hostage to this sense of basic decency all the time. It happened with CHIP. It happened with the shutdown. And it’s happening now with DACA. Democrats fold because they actually care about the pain that their actions might cause.

Republicans are well aware of this, so they perversely have an incentive to deliberately provoke human misery as a bargaining tool against Democrats. This is the kind of tough-guy politics that makes me ill, but maybe it’s time for Democrats to stop providing this incentive.