This is a very good use of 280 characters in Twitter:

1. Tax cut backers say corp rate cut will encourage investment by businesses
2. During interview with Gary Cohn, WSJ asks CEOs to raise hands if they’ll boost investment if rates cut
3. Few CEOS raise hands
4. Cohn asks: “Why aren’t the other hands up?” pic.twitter.com/aGn8gHPQTh

— Chris Manjaro (@ChrisManjaro1) November 14, 2017

The CEOs, of course, have no particular reason to lie about this. They’re already hoarding cash and could easily boost investment right now—but only if they thought it would earn them a good return. A lower tax rate won’t change that, so there’s no special reason to think they’ll invest more. The rate cut will mostly be used for stock buybacks, increased dividends, and higher salaries for executives.

Needless to say, Gary Cohn knows this perfectly well.

Jeff Sessions just said we’ve seen a spike in violent crime “the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1960s.” Is that true? Let’s roll the tape:

Sessions should have said “since the 1980s,” but that’s a minor mistake. In fact, the violent crime rate rose more than 3 percent in both 2015 and 2016, and that’s the biggest spike since 1991. Hate crimes were even worse, rising about 5 percent last year. So Sessions is on solid ground if he just changes his decade.

Now, I wouldn’t get too bent out of shape about this. The gasoline lead phaseout that led to the big crime drop of the 90s and aughts has mostly been played out. At this point, we’re probably going to see fairly flat crime rates with small spikes up and down from year to year. The current increase is worrisome, but not something to panic about unless it continues for several years. That said, Sessions is well within his rights to call it out.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Yesterday there was a bit of fuss on social media over the possibility that Attorney General Jeff Sessions would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Uranium One and Hillary’s emails and the Clinton Foundation and all that. Today, this came up at a congressional hearing:

Sessions said the department would need a “factual basis” to appoint a second special counsel to investigate a host of GOP concerns — and he rejected the suggestion by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that such a basis already existed….Jordan said he appreciated Sessions was considering appointing such a person, but asked, “What’s it gonna take to get a special counsel?” Near the end of a testy exchange, Sessions said, “Looks like is not enough basis to appoint a special counsel.”

On Monday Sessions wrote a letter to Congress regarding the Clinton charges, but my take is not that he was laying the groundwork for appointing a special counsel. Just the opposite: he seemed to be laying the groundwork for declining to appoint a special counsel. He punted the whole issue to the career staff, which is almost certain to recommend against a special counsel since there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing. That will give Sessions the backup he needs to stand up to President Trump, who’s been pushing for the Justice Department to “investigate the Democrats.”

Sessions is an odd bird. Ideologically, he’s my polar opposite, so he’s going to do lots of things I don’t like. But he also seems to have a pretty intense streak of personal honor and respect for the law. That’s how he views himself, at any rate, and pushing him to violate that honor is likely to accomplish nothing except to make him even more stiff-necked. So I’ll go out on a limb and predict that he won’t appoint a special counsel to investigate all these empty allegations. We’ll see.

But don’t get too comfortable. I’m sure the House and Senate will spend plenty of time on this stuff. There’s an election coming up, after all.

Huzzah! Jim Puzzanghera and Lisa Mascaro of the LA Times have finally written a story explaining the obvious: the Republican tax plan is doomed unless it’s deficit neutral in 2028 and beyond. Which it isn’t. In fact, it’s worse than I thought: they report that even a temporary business tax cut would probably increase the deficit past 2028 and therefore violate the Byrd Rule. So what are Republicans planning to do about this?

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who drafted the Senate bill, acknowledged the Byrd rule challenge. “The House has to understand that we have to comply with the Byrd rule…I think they understand that we have difficulties,” Hatch told reporters Thursday. Asked how he would resolve the problem, Hatch said, “You’ll have to wait and see. We’re working on that as we speak. It’s not an easy thing.”

I dunno. Republicans can produce their own outlandish revenue estimate using dynamic pixie dust. They can ignore the Byrd Rule. They can magically create a hundred-year window so that deficits only count after 2118. They could tack on a big tax increase in 2028, on the assumption that it will just get repealed before it ever takes effect. In practice, however, all of these things are just a hair away from killing the filibuster, and there are at least a few Republicans who won’t vote to do that.

So what are they planning to do?

Charles Bertram/TNS via ZUMA

Sigh:

The Trump administration made its debut at a United Nations conference on climate change on Monday by giving a full-throated defense of fossil fuels and nuclear energy as answers to driving down global greenhouse gas emissions….President Trump, who ran on a pledge to revive the American coal industry and whose cabinet includes a number of prominent oil and gas enthusiasts, sent his team here with a clear message — that extracting and using significant amounts of oil, gas and coal would be a priority of the administration.

If Trump wanted to skip the conference, that would be fine. He’s already committed to pulling out of the Paris agreement anyway. Or, if his team attended but didn’t say anything, that would be fine too. Or if they attended but talked only about the (very) few things they’re doing that are climate friendly.

But to attend a climate conference and use it as a stage for telling everyone that the United States is going to produce lots and lots of coal, and fuck you if you don’t like it? What kind of person does that? Does Trump really think that Appalachian coal miners are ever going to hear about this—or care about it if they do?

It would be great if Trump announced a massive new push to develop carbon sequestration technology that could be exported to poor countries still reliant on coal. But he hasn’t done that. He just blathers about “clean coal” as if that’s the natural state of anything that comes out of US soil. I’m not sure what the point was of giving everyone in the world such an obvious middle finger, but then, I’m not Donald Trump.

A few hours ago:

Goog lord. Did the Times cut and paste this paragraph from a Breitbart piece? pic.twitter.com/wT7Qj9rK7Q

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 14, 2017

Now:

NYT changes 2nd graf of its Sessions investigation story. pic.twitter.com/uQLvXrzNpq

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) November 14, 2017

I guess this is better? We’ve gone from “acquire much of the United States’ uranium,” which is flatly wrong, to “approve the sale of uranium,” which is slightly less wrong.

In fact, what happened is this: the Obama administration allowed a Russian company to acquire a Canadian company called Uranium One, which owned about 10 percent of our uranium production capacity, not 10 percent of our uranium.¹ The actual amount of uranium it produces is about 5 percent of total US uranium production. What’s more, the Russian company has no license to export this uranium, so it’s going to stay in the United States no matter who owns the mines.

So why not just say “uranium mining capacity” and qualify it with “a modest amount”? And why not add a brief sentence saying that no actual uranium has been approved for export outside the US? Even in a quick summary graf neither one takes up a lot of room, and omitting them leaves readers with an extremely distorted view of what happened.

Everyone knows this is all that happened, and everyone knows that Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong when the State Department joined eight other agencies in approving the deal. But this is no longer about Clinton anyway. The whole thing is a last-ditch attempt to smear special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who headed the FBI when the Uranium One deal went through and is now causing Republicans a lot of heartburn over his investigation of Trump-Russia ties.² Blow enough smoke over this, and maybe he’ll be forced to resign—and a new, less aggressive special prosecutor can be appointed. It’s all pretty transparent, and every reporter writing about this knows exactly what’s going on.

¹It was originally estimated that Uranium One owned 20 percent of US uranium mining capacity, but that was later revised to 10 percent.

²The theory here is that both the Uranium One deal and Mueller’s investigation are Russia-related. The FBI was allegedly investigating some kind of bribery related to Uranium One back in 2010, when Mueller was director, so….

Critics question whether Mueller’s own ties to the bureau as well as fired FBI director James Comey now render him compromised as he investigates allegations of Russian meddling and collusion with Trump officials in the 2016 race.

Got it? There’s more at the link if you’re interested in the long version of the Mueller conspiracy theory.

This is, for now, just unconfirmed gossip, but Charles Bethea writes at the New Yorker that in the late 70s and early 80s, Roy Moore cruised his local mall so obsessively that at one point he got himself banned:

This past weekend, I spoke or messaged with more than a dozen people—including a major political figure in the state—who told me that they had heard, over the years, that Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls. Some say that they heard this at the time, others in the years since.

….Greg Legat, who is now fifty-nine and living in East Gadsden, was, from 1981 to 1985, an employee at the Record Bar, a store that was in the Gadsden Mall….Legat says that he saw Moore there a few times, even though his understanding then was that he had already been banned. “It started around 1979, I think,” Legat said. “I know the ban was still in place when I got there.”

….Two officers I spoke to this weekend, both of whom asked to remain unnamed, told me that they have long heard stories about Moore and the mall. “The general knowledge at the time when I moved here was that this guy is a lawyer cruising the mall for high-school dates,” one of the officers said. The legal age of consent in Alabama is sixteen, so it would not be illegal there for a man in his early thirties to date a girl who was, say, a senior in high school. But these officers, along with the other people I spoke to, said that Moore’s presence at the mall was regarded as a problem…. “I heard from one girl who had to tell the manager of a store at the mall to get Moore to leave her alone.”

This might all be completely factual, or it might be one of those things that lots of people have “heard,” but without any firsthand evidence. For now, though, I guess it’s safe to say that nobody will be surprised if this turns out to be true.

UPDATE: The news site AL.com has a similar story:

Roy Moore’s penchant for flirting with teen girls was “common knowledge” and “not a big secret” around Gadsden, according to some area residents….”Him liking and dating young girls was never a secret in Gadsden when we were all in high school,” said Sheryl Porter. “In our neighborhoods up by Noccalula Falls we heard it all the time. Even people at the courthouse know it was a well-known secret.

….Another former waitress, Victoria Beverstock, told AL.com today that she was 20 years old and working at The Poor House restaurant in 1992 when Moore came in a few times a week to eat and do paperwork. She said he made her and the other waitresses uncomfortable by staring at them and flirting.

“He watched us girls quite openly,” said Beverstock. “His eyes crawled over our shirts and our backsides. He was so open about it that I would try and handle his order as quickly as possible. “When you didn’t smile and flirt back with him, give him an opening, he became rude and demanding,” she said.

Et cetera.

Albin Lohr-Jones/Avalon via ZUMA

Last September, WikiLeaks sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr. via Twitter, suggesting that he look into a new anti-Trump site. This site, as it happens, is now part of Mother Jones, and Don Jr. promised to ask around about it. Which he did. Then, according to Julia Ioffe at the Atlantic, the Trump/WikiLeaks conversation continued:

On October 3, 2016, WikiLeaks wrote again. “Hiya, it’d be great if you guys could comment on/push this story,” WikiLeaks suggested, attaching a quote from then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton about wanting to “just drone” WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. “Already did that earlier today,” Trump Jr. responded an hour-and-a-half later. “It’s amazing what she can get away with.”

Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again, asking, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks.”

WikiLeaks didn’t respond to that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr….“Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,” WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk….Just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau pointed out, Donald Trump himself tweeted, “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”

Two days later, on October 14, 2016, Trump Jr. tweeted out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. “For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/,” he wrote.

There doesn’t appear to be anything illegal here, but as Ioffe points out, “At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.”

I suppose we already know that Trump would have happily accepted compromising documents straight from Vladimir Putin himself, so this is hardly a surprise. But it’s not exactly a credit to the principled patriotism of the Trump family, either.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

I’m late getting to this, but here’s the latest on Roy Moore:

A fifth woman has come forward to accuse former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore of inappropriate sexual conduct. Beverly Young Nelson, 55, said Moore, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate, assaulted her when she was a 16-year-old high school student working as a waitress in Gadsden, Ala.

….A few days before Christmas in 1977, Nelson said, she brought her high school yearbook into the restaurant and Moore asked if he could sign it. She said yes, and he wrote, “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say ‘Merry Christmas.’”

….About a week or two later, Nelson said, Moore offered her a ride home. Unable to reach her boyfriend, who was supposed to pick her up, she accepted….But instead of driving to the highway, Nelson said, Moore drove to the back of the restaurant and began to grope her, putting his hand on her breasts and later squeezing the back of her neck, attempting to force her head toward his crotch. “I thought that he was going to rape me,” she said. “I was twisting and I was struggling and I was begging him to stop.”

As far as I can tell, the best rule of thumb for judging accusations like this has nothing to do with whether or not the man is generally an asshole. Plenty of assholes don’t engage in sexual abuse and plenty of sexual abusers are nice guys in other areas of their lives. Rather, it’s the number of women who come forward. Men who engage in sexual abuse or sexual harassment, whether with teenagers or adults, don’t usually do it only once. So if there’s only a single allegation, and the man denies it, I would probably remain tentatively skeptical. If there are multiple allegations—Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Louis C.K., etc.—then I’d take it as prima facie evidence of guilt unless there’s some pretty serious evidence to the contrary.

Obviously this isn’t a perfect heuristic, but I think it’s close. Mitch McConnell certainly seems to rely on it. Shortly before the press conference announcing Nelson’s allegation he declared, “I believe the women,” and told Roy Moore he should step down. He knows perfectly well that more shoes are likely to drop before Election Day.

This is a house in Ballina, Ireland, just across the river from Killaloe. I love this picture in all its aspects. The girl walking by even has red hair. It’s perfect.

Nor is it the only house in Ballina with the windows boarded over and painted. Someday I’ll show you closeups of both this one and the other one.