Our mission to get Professor M’s cats to Chicago proceeds apace. We’re basically covering one state per day, and today we drove across Wyoming. I’m writing this from a hotel room in Cheyenne with a couple of cats watching me.

But I really need to give a shoutout to the state troopers in Nevada. Outside of Elko I got pulled over for going 94, which was a little unfair since I’m pretty sure I wasn’t going more than 91. But the officer barely even gave me a warning. In fact, not only did he just mildly suggest that I should use my cruise control, he warned me that the speed limit dropped to 65 mph about a mile ahead and there was another trooper there with a radar gun. Sure enough, that was the case. I wonder if the poor guy is wondering why everyone seemed so well-behaved that day?

As you might imagine, I80 is not exactly a photographer’s paradise, and there hasn’t been time for side trips. Maybe I’ll find better pickings when we get to Chicago.

I’m on the road today—and for the next few days, helping Dr. Marc drive his cats to Chicago. That’s Mocha on the left and Timmy on the right. They seem to be taking the trip pretty well so far. They’ll be in their new home on Monday.

Oh great:

The Pentagon will deploy an additional 1,800 U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, senior defense officials announced Friday, a modest increase in the U.S. military’s presence in the Middle East meant to deter aggressive Iranian actions.

This isn’t a big deployment or anything, but any kind of increase is symbolic of our endless commitment to the Saudis. Blech.

The LA Times reports that drugmakers “fought hard against California’s groundbreaking drug price transparency law, passed in 2017.” I’ll bet they did! So what have we learned?

Pharmaceutical companies raised the “wholesale acquisition cost” of their drugs — the list price for wholesalers without discounts or rebates — by a median of 25.8% from 2017 through the first quarter of 2019, according to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. (The median is the point at which half the prices are higher and half are lower.)

Naturally you’d like to see this in chart form:

As you can see, cheap generics saw the largest increase, more than doubling in cost. Everything else increased 20-30 percent. And if prices went up that much in California, it’s a safe bet they went up that much in your state too.

Why? Well, why not? It’s not as if anyone in power right now is going to stop them.

This is a Fremont’s death camas. That seems like a pretty sinister name for an ordinary little wildflower, but perhaps it’s not so ordinary after all:

All parts of the plant contain a toxic alkaloid that some consider more potent than strychnine. Recent evidence suggests that the Lewis and Clark expedition accidentally ate death camas bulbs ground into a bread. This halted the entire expedition while the soldiers recovered.

Recovered? Perhaps it should be renamed the Fremont’s unpleasantness camas.

Remember that military aid to Ukraine that totally wasn’t held up until Ukraine agreed to investigate the Biden family? Well, about that:

The White House gave a politically appointed official the authority to keep aid to Ukraine on hold after career budget staff members questioned the legality of delaying the funds, according to people familiar with the matter, a shift that House Democrats are probing in their impeachment inquiry.

….The involvement of a political official like Mr. Duffey in the apportionment process is unusual, according to several former OMB officials. Career staff below the political level at OMB with years, and sometimes decades, of technical knowledge of the funding process have historically overseen the routine process, according to the former officials.

Michael Duffey is formerly the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, and apparently the official explanation for his involvement is that he “wanted more insight into the apportionment process.” Quite so. I’m sure there was nothing untoward going on here.

Liu Jie/Xinhua/ZUMA

Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail today:

Meanwhile, a Fox News poll released Wednesday night shows 51 percent of voters would like to see Trump impeached and removed from office, an uptick since the House launched the inquiry focused on Trump’s July call in which he pressed the leader of Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

For what it’s worth, this is another reason for the House to move deliberately on impeachment: it takes time for public opinion to move, and public opinion is, in the end, what will either save Trump or doom him. If and when support for impeachment gets up to about 65 percent, it’ll be time to hold a vote and send things to the Senate.

So where have I been all day? Sort of semi-asleep, it turns out.

The effect of the dex is getting more unpredictable lately. This week, the dex crash came Wednesday morning, so I woke up, ate breakfast, and then went back to sleep until about lunchtime. I’ve been awake but drowsy ever since.

This is probably why the news seems even more dispiriting than usual. The Turks are rolling into Kurdish Syria and all Donald Trump has to say is, hey, the Kurds weren’t with us on the beaches of Normandy, so what kind of ally are they anyway? This has apparently finally gotten a rise from his evangelical fans, not because they care about the Kurds but because the Turks might end up killing some Christians too. I guess Trump forgot that the fate of Christians in the Middle East is a big deal to American evangelicals.

Here in California, the winds are picking up and PG&E is afraid that sparks from their electric lines might start a wildfire. You’d think the answer to this problem, in the greatest nation on earth, would be to install safer transformers and so forth, but I guess that’s beyond us. So instead they’re just shutting off electricity to a million people or so. Boo yah.

In other news, Ronan Farrow says Matt Lauer raped someone but NBC didn’t care. On the campaign trail, the yahoos are out in force, declaring their learned skepticism that any school in the 70s would decline to allow a pregnant woman to teach classes. And Republicans are still circling the wagons around their cult leader.

I think I’ll go back to bed now.

This is a typical farmhouse landscape in Colombia, taken on the road between Bogotá and Choachí, which you can learn more about here. This picture seemed like a good candidate for black and white, but after trying several different conversions I wasn’t happy with any of them. In the end, I think color suits it best.

Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

The White House has made it official: they are going to stonewall every congressional subpoena for anything and everything. In a way, I suppose that’s not surprising. What is surprising—a little bit, I guess—is that they’ve announced their intentions via a letter from the White House counsel that reads like a Rush Limbaugh monologue, not a legal document.

You can read the whole thing here, but allow me to summarize the three numbered sections:

1. The House impeachment inquiry is not a real impeachment inquiry because no vote has been taken. But just in case you think you can get around this by taking a vote, forget it. The inquiry is also invalid because Democrats “have not established any procedures affording the President even the most basic protections demanded by due process under the Constitution and by fundamental fairness.”
2. The impeachment inquiry is nothing more than a “naked political strategy” to overturn the 2016 election. It’s totally invalid.
3. There’s no legitimate basis for the inquiry because President Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine was “completely appropriate” and everyone knows it.

This is batshit insane. Due process is for the impeachment trial, not the initial inquiry. The political motivation for impeachment is irrelevant. And the whole point of the inquiry is to establish whether Trump did anything wrong. The fact that Trump himself says he did nothing wrong is hardly conclusive evidence.

But this letter was plainly not written with legal arguments in mind. No lawyer would do anything but laugh at it. Rather, it’s aimed at Trump’s base and, especially, Fox News. It provides them with approved talking points going forward, and I expect to hear versions of these talking points 24/7 throughout conservative media for weeks to come.