Aaron Chown/PA Wire via ZUMA

Michael Schmidt of the New York Times held an impromptu interview with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago yesterday, and there are takes galore lighting up the internet. Probably all of them are accurate, but for my money the main takeaway isn’t something you can illustrate with an excerpt from the interview. But I’ll try anyway:

SCHMIDT: What are you willing to do on infrastructure? How far are you willing to go? How much money?

TRUMP: I actually think we can get as many Democrat votes as we have Republican. Republicans want to see infrastructure. Michael, we have spent, as of about a month ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East. And the Middle East is worse than it was 17 years ago….And if you want $12 to fix up a road or a highway, you can’t get it…. I believe we can do health care in a bipartisan way, because now we’ve essentially gutted and ended Obamacare.

….Wait, wait, let me just tell you. … Also, beyond the individual mandate, but also [inaudible] associations. You understand what the associations are….So now I have associations….That’s gonna be millions and millions of people….Now I’ve ended the individual mandate. And the other thing I wish you’d tell people. So when I do this, and we’ve got health care, you know, McCain did his vote. … But what we have. I had a hundred congressmen that said no and I was able to talk them into it. They’re great people.

Two things: No. 1, I have unbelievably great relationships with 97 percent of the Republican congressmen and senators. I love them and they love me. That’s No. 1. And No. 2, I know more about the big bills. … [Inaudible.] … than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes.

….I’ll tell you something [inaudible] … Put me on the defense, I was a great student and all this stuff. Oh, he doesn’t know the details, these are sick people….But Michael, I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most….I believe that because of the individual mandate and the associations, the Democrats will and certainly should come to me and see if they can do a really great health care plan for the remaining people.

This is a taste, but you have to read the whole interview to really get it. This simply is not a man in full control of his mental faculties. He’s always been narcissistic and blowhardish, but over the course of the interview he’s completely unable to stay focused on a topic for even a few seconds. He veers off into his Electoral College win constantly. He stops to insist there’s no Russian collusion at least a dozen times. He displays no knowledge of anything. It’s like talking to a third-grader.

I don’t know what’s going on with the guy, but even by Donald Trump standards he’s not all there. This is not someone who should be occupying the Oval Office.

Kevin Drum didn’t get results after all:

Earlier today it looked like the peculiar streak of $10,000 low trades had finally come to an end. But no! The low trade for December 28 is now $10,000. Apparently the $10,000 trade comes at the end of each day.

This is very strange. Is it real? Is someone out there really willing to sell some bitcoin every day for $10,000? Is it an artifact of Coindesk’s tracking software? Something to do with the new futures market? Mind tricks from a Jedi trader? It’s pretty mysterious.

Look at this. It’s an outrage! At first it was just one or two seagulls. Then a few more. Now we have an entire flock of them camping out every day at our lake. What are they doing here? They’re seagulls, not lakegulls. They should go back to the sea.

The tiny town of Nipton, on the eastern edge of California in the Mojave Desert,¹ is about to become Marijuanaville:

The nation’s largest publicly traded marijuana company, American Green, recently bought the town for $5 million, with plans to develop a “cannabis-driven” resort on the edge of the Mojave….The company will double the size of the five-room Nipton Hotel, and the Whistlestop Cafe is being redone. Camping will be encouraged, and Shearin said the company will add to the half-dozen tents on raised platforms already in place….“Cannabis will be everywhere, if you want it,” Shearin said. “You want to smoke a fatty? You want to dab? You do that. But don’t blow smoke on a family that’s enjoying the scenery.”

So…they’re going to add five hotel rooms and a few tents in the middle of a desert? The cannabis folks really know how to party, don’t they? If we want a real cannabis resort, I guess we’re going to have to wait for the Indian gaming casinos to get into the biz. After all, free-flowing marijuana, like free-flowing alcohol, is great for their business model.

¹And, perhaps not coincidentally, about an hour from Las Vegas.

Kevin Drum gets results!

Yesterday I complained that for the past four weeks, the lowest trade for bitcoin has been exactly $10,000. Suspicious! Today, a reader emails to tell me that the low trade is $13,611.86. Interesting! I don’t know what happened, but I intend to take all the credit. You’re welcome, bitcoin folks.

Today, the LA Times presents a great example of the hack gap. They invited a conservative and a liberal to make a list of the top 10 under-covered stories of the year.

Adam Johnson, a media analyst for FAIR, mostly wrote about things that genuinely didn’t get a lot of coverage: the South Korean peace movement, starvation in Yemen, hate crimes against transgender people, the rise in deaths at the Mexican border, and the prosecution of inauguration protestors. His items are clearly left-wing—as they’re supposed to be—but they’re all fact-based and only two of them are explicitly anti-Trump.

Then there’s Sean Davis, former CFO of the Daily Caller and former aide to Sen. Tom Coburn. His list is a little different. The Russia investigation is ridiculous! The economy is booming! The stock market is booming too! Trump crushed ISIS! The FBI is in tatters! And that’s just the first five. He also tells us that the Iran deal has collapsed; ESPN is in big trouble thanks to its “seemingly nonstop left-wing politics”; and Betsy DeVos has restored the rule of law to college campuses. You can only call these under-covered if you’ve never watched Fox News.

Bottom line: the liberal writer mostly chose stories that truly didn’t get a lot of attention,¹ and they span the gamut of potential topics. Obviously you can argue with them, but they’re all essentially fact-based. The conservative writer, conversely, just rewrote President Trump’s Twitter feed—but with a little less restraint than Trump shows.² This, ladies and gentlemen, is the hack gap at work.

¹The main exception is item 3, “President Trump’s unprecedented non-Russia corruption.” I wouldn’t call that under-covered, but it sure doesn’t seem to have really sunk in yet.

²Also with one major exception: “We still know nothing about what motivated the Vegas shooter.”

New York City is on its way to crime rates lower than anyone could have imagined a couple of decades ago:

It would have seemed unbelievable in 1990, when there were 2,245 killings in New York City, but as of Wednesday there have been just 286 in the city this year — the lowest since reliable records have been kept. In fact, crime has fallen in New York City in each of the major felony categories — murder and manslaughter, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny, and car thefts.

….The numbers, when taken together, portray a city of 8.5 million people growing safer even as the police, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, use less deadly force, make fewer arrests and scale back controversial practices like stopping and frisking thousands of people on the streets. “There is no denying that the arc is truly exceptional in the unbroken streak of declining crime,” said William J. Bratton, who retired from his second stint as police commissioner last year.

I should note that the lead-crime hypothesis predicted this. In fact, I did predict this four years ago. As long as lead poisoning rates stay low, there’s simply no reason to think that crime rates will change dramatically because of stop-and-frisk or anything else.

Lead is no longer significantly responsible for changes in crime rates. That happened between 1990-2010 as the number of lead-poisoned children plummeted. But everyone under 30 today was born in a low-lead environment, and there’s not much lower for things to go. So when you see crime spikes either upward (Chicago) or downward (New York) it has nothing to do with lead exposure. Other factors are now far more at play.

However, what you can say is that, generally, low crime rates are here to stay. Better or worse policing can change things at the margin, but we’re just not ever going back to the 70s and 80s. Thanks, EPA!

C-SPAN

Politico’s Susan Glasser did a podcast last week with Max Boot and Eliot Cohen, both of whom are Republican foreign policy hawks deeply disturbed by the election of Donald Trump. But Boot is clear-eyed enough to see that the biggest damage Trump is doing probably isn’t in the foreign arena:

I think, in many ways, the damage he’s doing at home is even worse, where he’s undermining the rule of law. He’s actively obstructing justice. He’s backing—he’s lending the support of the presidency to monsters like Roy Moore. He is exacerbating race relations. He is engaging in the most blatant xenophobia, racism, and general bigotry that we have seen from the White House.

….I think the ascendancy of Trump…reveals something about the Republican grassroots…there is a lot of prejudice, racism, homophobia, all sorts of dark impulses out there, that I think were largely kept cloaked when you had leaders of the party like Mitt Romney and John McCain, who were fine individuals who did not appeal to the dark side of human nature. But Donald Trump is not a fine individual and he appeals to that dark side, and he has shown how much of the support for Republican candidates around the country is based on some of these dark impulses. And frankly, to me, it’s been unnerving. It’s been deeply disturbing as somebody who was a life-long Republican, because what I see happening is that a lot of the criticisms the Democrats have made about Republicans—and which I resisted for years—have actually been vindicated.

Policywise, Trump is mostly a standard-issue Republican. That’s never been the big reason to fear him any more than any other conservative in the White House. The two big reasons have always been:

• The chance that he’ll touch off a nuclear war, either deliberately or by accident. The odds of this are probably low: maybe around 1-2 percent. But that’s 1-2 percent higher than it would be with anyone else.
• In Boot’s words, his blatant xenophobia, racism, and general bigotry.

Boot is disgusted by Trump’s public bigotry, and finally can’t deny any longer that both Trump and the Republican Party are actively exploiting this for political gain. The sad thing here is not that it took a toxic buffoon like Trump to make this clear, but that Boot is still in a tiny minority in his own party. Most Republicans continue to deny that bigotry has anything to do with anything, despite the overwhelming evidence of two years of Trump. I wonder what it would take to get them to open their eyes?

Donald Trump denied that he would be golfing this week:

America sees you, sir pic.twitter.com/hDwNfBF01e

— Sulome Anderson (@SulomeAnderson) December 27, 2017

It’s trivial in the scheme of things, but the president pretending he’s not golfing WHEN EVERYONE CAN SEE HE’S GOLFING is representative of so much.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 26, 2017

This is hilarious, of course, but I think it’s mainly an example of who Trump is addressing when he speaks. He’s not really speaking to the press, or to you and me, or to anyone on Capitol Hill. He’s speaking to his fans. They won’t see him golfing, and newspapers won’t splash it on the front page, and Fox News won’t cover it. So tomorrow or the next day Trump will tweet about how the lying media says he was golfing, and his fans will believe him.

But what about the rest of us? That’s the funny thing. I suspect that Trump likes the fact that we all know he’s lying. He wants us to know that he can say anything he wants and there’s nothing we can do about it. To him, that’s a sort of power that he enjoys showing off.

This is a fountain at Trafalgar Square. I took this picture with a moderately long shutter speed (1/4 of a second), which provides a little bit of velvet but with enough detail to still see the water spouts clearly. I took both longer and shorter exposures, and this was the one I liked best. Maybe someday I’ll put them all up in a gallery and you can decide which look you prefer.