White House/ZUMA

As part of the House impeachment inquiry, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has asked for voluntary testimony from five employees of the State Department. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s response was crystal clear: go pound sand. His response says, in order, that the House request is legal BS; it provides too little time to prepare; it denies opportunity for counsel; it asks for too many documents; and it’s nonsense to suggest that if they don’t appear it constitutes obstruction. It is nothing more than an attempt to “intimidate, bully, and treat improperly the distinguished professionals of the Department of State.”

So that will be the Fox News line on all of this. But what will be the Democratic reponse? Pompeo makes no bones that he will throw up every roadblock he possibly can: “I will use all means at my disposal to prevent and expose any attemps to intimidate the dedicated professionals whom I am proud to lead and serve alongside at the Department of State.”

These things always end up in negotiations between the relevant staffs, and perhaps the request and Pompeo’s response are merely maximal opening bids. But I bet not. I hope the House committee is ready to issue subpoenas quickly if, as I expect, the negotiations go nowhere.

Today brings some more sobering news on the economic front. The monthly Purchasing Managers Index declined yet again in September, capping a ten-point drop over the past year. It is now well below 50, the point at which activity is not merely growing slowly, but actually contracting:

Virtually every subindex declined in September, as did 15 out of 18 industries (the three exceptions were Miscellaneous Manufacturing; Food, Beverage & Tobacco Products; and Chemical Products).

Over the past four months, production is down, employment is down, inventories are down, customer inventories are down, prices are down, exports are down, and imports are down. All are below 50. “Global trade remains the most significant issue,” said the chair of the ISM, “as demonstrated by the contraction in new export orders that began in July 2019. Overall, sentiment this month remains cautious regarding near-term growth.”

If global trade weren’t in such a rut, all of these indexes would likely still be expanding. Thanks, Donald.

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts via ZUMA

In news that really shouldn’t surprise anyone by now, a new and massive metastudy has concluded that there’s not much evidence that cutting back on red meat will improve your health. The usual suspects are outraged:

If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers said. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits.

….The new analyses are among the largest nutrition evaluations ever attempted and may influence future dietary recommendations….Already they have been met with fierce criticism by public health researchers. The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other groups have savaged the findings and the journal that published it.

I am terminally sick and tired of these groups. They have shown time and again that they simply don’t care about the evidence. All they seem to care about is that their reputations might suffer if they ever admitted that they had been wrong about something.

I date the start of the modern nutrition research frenzy to the Framingham study, which showed that saturated fat didn’t really have much effect on anything. However, in a portent of things to come, the public was somehow told exactly the opposite: that saturated fat was a deadly killer. It’s been downhill since: not just fat, but salt, cholesterol, eggs, palm oil, and nearly anything else you can think of spent the next 50 years in the barrel. It’s only in the last couple of decades that a few researchers have been brave enough to raise their hands and suggest that the evidence behind all this was crap.

In a way, there’s nothing wrong with that. Nutritional research is really hard, and it’s not surprising that a lot of it has turned out to be either wrong or at least questionable. But the nutrition community has never been satisfied to present their findings with the humility they deserve. They accept nothing less than the most apocalyptic interpretation of every study that even faintly supports their prior beliefs, and have shown virtually no willingness to accept new evidence that points in the other direction.

The plain fact is that we know squat about nutrition. Sure, you should eat a reasonably balanced diet and not do obviously stupid things—and for my money, I’d cut back on refined sugar.  Beyond that, listen to your doctor if you have a specific condition.

If you want to eliminate or cut back on meat for other reasons—animal welfare, climate change, etc.—that’s fine. It might even make you feel better. Who knows? But if you want to be healthier, I recommend brisk exercise daily and pretty much whatever diet you feel like stuffing into your gullet.

Li Muzi/ZUMA

The New York Times reports that a few weeks after Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine, Trump called the prime minister of Australia and asked for his help in an investigation of the Mueller report—an investigation that he hoped would discredit Mueller and help his reelection chances.

Over at National Review, Charles Cooke says that while Ukrainegate may be bad, the Australia call is a nothingburger:

It seems pretty unreasonable to me to (a) invest the power of investigation in the executive branch, (b) demand the executive branch conduct an investigation, and then (c) claim that if that investigation ever intersects with the personal political interests of the head of that executive branch, it’s ipso facto illegitimate. What is our standard here? “You must investigate this topic, but don’t ask any questions that might redound to your benefit”? Come now.

Come now indeed. The issue here isn’t that a legitimate investigation might just happen to produce findings favorable to Trump. That would be fine. But aside from the fact that this was never really a legitimate investigation to start with, we aren’t talking about Trump keeping himself at arm’s length and letting the chips fall where they may. We’re talking about Donald Trump explicitly getting on the phone to encourage an ally to help him.

By itself that may or may not be a big deal. But it sure shows a pattern of behavior, doesn’t it? If your goal is to make a case that Trump has been abusing the power and influence of the presidency to benefit himself personally, this is one more brick in the wall. Quite reasonably, I think that’s exactly how the public will see it.

This is just a reminder. You may now go about your regular business.

Apostate Republican Peter Wehner asks today, “What’s the matter with Republicans?” His answer is the usual one: tribalism, self-interest, and fear of constituents who love Donald Trump. All true, I’m sure, but it misses perhaps the most important factor: Kool-Aid.

For the past 20 years Republicans have been drinking their own Kool-Aid. They believe that Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt politician of our era. They believe that Barack Obama engaged in a calculated campaign of illegal executive orders throughout his entire second term. They believe that Democrats secretly—or not so secretly—favor open borders with Mexico as a cynical ruse to increase the number of Democratic voters. They believe that progressives, if given power, will make it all but illegal to practice the Christian faith.

Against that backdrop, ask yourself this: is it really that big a deal to ask the Ukrainian leader to investigate Joe Biden? I mean, sure, maybe Trump shouldn’t have done it. But compared to everything Democrats have done—IRS targeting, Benghazi, emails, killing the filibuster, Kavanaugh, DACA, the list is just endless—it maybe rates a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s a trivial molehill that Democrats and their media enablers are trying to turn into a mountain.

And besides, even if Trump was a little over his skis in his conversation with Ukraine’s president, there really is a huge scandal surrounding Joe Biden. Right? Clearly the guy tried to call off the Ukrainian dogs in order to help his son make a ton of money, and used a billion dollars in taxpayer money to make his threat good.

Don’t just shake your head at this. Lots of Republicans believe it. And frankly, a lot of you probably believe equally crazy things about them. The big difference is that while some liberals may watch more MSNBC than is good for them, they also ingest other news that prevents them from going entirely over the edge. A great many conservatives don’t. It’s just Fox and Hannity and Breitbart 24/7.

So they stick with Trump. Some of them do it because they’re cynical and just want to hold onto power, but a lot of them do it because they aren’t cynical and truly believe Ukrainegate is a minor thing that wouldn’t rate a blurb on page A10 if a Democrat did it. They are entirely unaware that the narrative they hear on Fox is anything but the straight story. This is true of both Republican members of Congress as well as the rank and file.

The Kool-Aid is powerful. Don’t underestimate it. And don’t expect even smart Republicans to admit that it’s the real problem. Even the smart ones are afraid of it, after all.

The Washington Post reports that Obamacare has probably made people healthier:

It is difficult to prove conclusively that the law has made a difference in people’s health, but some strong evidence has emerged in the past few years. Compared with similar people who have stable coverage through their jobs, previously uninsured people who bought ACA health plans with federal subsidies had a big jump in detection of high blood pressure and in the number of prescriptions they had filled, according to a 2018 study in the journal Health Affairs.

And after the law allowed young adults to stay longer on their parents’ insurance policies, fewer 19- to 25-year-olds with asthma failed to see a doctor because it cost too much, according to an analysis of survey results published earlier this year by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There’s more along these lines, and it’s nice to see it highlighted. At the same time, there’s something weirdly pointless about all these studies. I mean, we all know what Obamacare did: it gave lots of people access to decent health care that they didn’t have before. And either you believe that access to decent health care is good for your health or you don’t. If you do, then Obamacare has to have worked almost by definition. If you don’t, then we should dismantle the entire health care industry and spend our money on something else.

We all know the answer to this question, and we’ve proved it by putting our money where our mouths are: we believe, strongly and unequivocally, that access to decent health care is an enormous benefit. Given that, it’s not really possible to believe that providing access to decent health care for the poor is anything but good for them. Right?

Ukrainegate is about Donald Trump holding military assistance hostage unless a foreign leader agreed to help him win an election. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this has never happened before. It is an obvious and flagrant abuse of power.

Nothing that was said—or yelled or tweeted—over the weekend has changed this.

Untitled No. 43, cat and camera, 2019

Scott Varley/Orange County Register via ZUMA

Being sick has its advantages: I ended up watching a bunch of Fox News yesterday to find out what the Foxbot take on Ukrainegate is. Roughly speaking, it was: nothing to see here, the real scandal is Joe Biden.

I don’t feel like repeating all this nonsense, but it’s probably useful to provide the NYTbot take on Ukrainegate. That is to say, the consensus view of everyone who’s not a Trump water carrier. Here we go:

• First off, Ukraine is a very corrupt country. This is the one thing that all sides agree on.
• In particular, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General in 2016 was Viktor Shokin, a man so corrupt that both the IMF and pretty much every European country insisted he be removed if Ukraine wanted any assistance from the outside world.
• At this time, Shokin was not investigating Burisma, the energy company on which Hunter Biden held a board seat. This is one of the (many) reasons he was considered corrupt.
• Joe Biden later told the story of Shokin’s firing like this: “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.” Now, this might be a bit of Biden exaggeration, but it accurately describes the general attitude toward Shokin at the time.
• A new Prosecutor General was appointed and immediately reopened the investigation into Burisma. In other words, by switching prosecutors Biden probably made things harder on his son, not easier.
• The new prosecutor eventually reached a deal with Burisma. As with everything in Ukraine, it’s unclear if this was on the up-and-up, but in any case it happened after Trump had won election and Joe Biden no longer had any power or influence.
• There has never been even a hint of evidence that Hunter Biden did anything wrong. He’s a Washington lobbyist who sits on various boards and had done a few small jobs for Burisma during the Obama administration. The head of Burisma at the time was trying to assemble an “all-star” board of directors and approached Hunter Biden. Was this an attempt to curry favor with the White House? I wouldn’t be surprised. But that has nothing to do with Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, which he says was mostly about corporate governance.
• The new prosecutor has stated many times that his investigation came up with absolutely nothing on Hunter Biden.
• Likewise, there’s not a hint of evidence that Joe Biden ever did anything wrong.

So that’s the Biden side of the story. Your Foxbot friends will never hear any of this, so I figure it’s useful for you to have it all in one place. I assure you that there is no partisan slant to any of this. This is pure conventional wisdom, agreed to by virtually everyone outside the Trump orbit.

Next, of course, is the timeline for the shakedown of Ukraine over Trump’s desire for them to reopen the investigation into Hunter Biden yet again. We’ll do that some other time.