My sister rightly commands me to show you Donald Trump’s reaction to being gently corrected by a female astronaut on board the space station:

As any high school boy can tell you, yes, Trump flipped her off in a semi-deniable way. Such class. And the Sun returns the favor by replaying his gesture in slo-mo just to make sure everyone gets it.

Oh hey, look at this:

Nearly three years into President Trump’s aggressive efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, prices…will actually drop next year, and the number of insurers offering plans will go up.

Here it is in chart form:

Not bad.

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts via ZUMA

The WeWork saga is nearing an end:

SoftBank Group Corp. won approval from WeWork’s board to take control of the troubled co-working startup, in a deal that would hand co-founder Adam Neumann nearly $1.7 billion and sever most of his ties with the company….The deal is expected to value the company at about $8 billion, a far cry from what it was expected to fetch in an initial public offering earlier this year and even less than the $47 billion at which a January investment from SoftBank pegged its worth.

This whole thing is even crazier than it looks. For starters, the outside world has known for years that WeWork’s business model was nuts. The Wall Street Journal made that clear two years ago and there were plenty of hints years before that. The company was a nothingburger propped up by the mad stylings of Adam Neumann.

What’s even crazier is that SoftBank must have known this all along. It’s one thing for the outside world to be fooled, but Softbank was a major investor. They must have seen the books. They must have known about Neumann’s sketchy insidery deals. They must have known there was nothing really special about yet another office leasing company, even if it did “activate the space” and appeal to millennials. Space is space.

So how is it that within the span of ten months, SoftBank reduced its valuation of WeWork from $48 billion to $8 billion? Was their January valuation all just part of the scam?

And here’s another little nugget to chew on: even now, on a revenue basis, WeWork is valued at more than 5x the level of IWG, its stodgy old competitor that does pretty much the exact same thing they do. Even after all the revelations of the past few weeks, WeWork still looks plenty overvalued.

Donald Trump says the impeachment inquiry is a witch hunt, and I suppose he ought to know. After all, he was the king of the “Lock her up” chant in 2016, and to this day he’s seemingly convinced that Hillary Clinton committed high crimes and misdemeanors with her emails when she was Secretary of State.

And in a way, who can blame him when Clinton’s email problems produced flood-the-zone coverage like this in our nation’s paper of record?

The wheels of justice grind slow but exceeding fine, and three years later the State Department has finally decided that no one really did anything wrong after all:

“While there were some instances of classified information being inappropriately introduced into an unclassified system in furtherance of expedience,” the report said, “by and large, the individuals interviewed were aware of security policies and did their best to implement them in their operations.”

The report concluded, “There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

I guess I hardly need to tell you where this article ended up, do I?

Lest you think it’s unfair to hold the Times accountable for a conclusion reached three years after their Hillary jihad took place, they could have reached the same conclusion themselves if they’d actually read the entire FBI report, which was released in early September of 2016. I read it, and it flipped my view of Emailgate completely from “sloppy bad judgment but not illegal” to “Hillary did nothing wrong, period.” Of course, the FBI report was 58 pages long, so who can blame anyone for just skimming it? Clinton was obviously sleazy and had been her whole life, so what were the odds that the email affair was just another Republican hit job?

Pretty high, actually, but the Times still hadn’t figured that out in 2016. Bygones, I suppose. Still, you’d think there might at least be an apology in the works or something.

PRRI released the results of a new poll recently, and they always have something interesting to noodle over. You can read the full results here, but here’s a sample:

Even Republicans, who support Trump by a massive margin, say that his personal conduct makes them less likely to vote for him. More importantly, independents are hugely turned off by Trump’s behavior. These are the votes he needs to win, and it sure doesn’t look like he’s making any inroads there.

Back when I used to fly a lot, I always wondered why business class seats were so much more expensive than coach. They weren’t twice as expensive, as you’d expect, they were four times, maybe five times as expensive. Why?

I don’t fly very much anymore so I don’t care as much. However, a few months ago, when I flew to Bogotá, Avianca Airlines offered me a first class, fully-reclining pod seat for $700, compared to $400 for a coach seat. What a bargain! But I figured I had just lucked out with some kind of Avianca deal and thought no more about it.

Today, though, I booked a flight home on American. The coach fare was $587, which is really $617 when you add in my one checked bag. A first-class seat was $694 with free checked bags. When did this start happening? Is it because I booked a flight that was only two days away? Have first/business class seats gotten cheaper? Did I just get lucky? Or what?

As you may recall, I fell into a creek during my trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway earlier this year. This picture is the reason why.

You see, I took some shots of the creek and then saw the flowers on the other side. Perhaps it would be a better picture, I thought, if I could get those flowers in the foreground. So I tiptoed my way across to the opposite bank, but lost my balance and fell in halfway across. Thanks to my instinctive sense of self-preservation, however, I sacrificed my body in order to keep the camera from getting wet.

In retrospect, the obvious question is: why didn’t I just take off my shoes and walk across normally? Beats me. That sure would have been smart.

The other question is: was it worth it? I would say probably not, since the flowers aren’t prominent enough to make a big enough difference. But your mileage may vary.

Noted without comment because—well, because why bother?

Just to be clear, I’m not a fan of Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax. It introduces needless problems and accomplishes nothing that other, more conventional taxes can’t also accomplish. But then I come across something like this:

Fox guest Peter Morici on Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax: “$50 million is big, but it’s not as big as you think.” pic.twitter.com/TZx8z2a6sl

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) October 21, 2019

And now I hope Warren wins and makes the wealth tax a centerpiece of her campaign. Why? Just to watch Republicans fall all over themselves explaining to America that in their world $50 million is sort of chump change. I would very much like to see that.

From Glenn Kessler, trying to figure out what President Trump meant when he said that Saudi Arabia would pay for 100 percent of our new troop deployment there:

White House officials would not explain what Trump meant.

Nor would Defense officials or State officials. The Saudis declined comment too. So what’s up?

The answer is obvious, of course: the Saudis aren’t paying for 100 percent of our troop deployment. Trump is just making this up. Any other questions?