Should I break my promise yet again and show you more pictures of my mother’s kittens? I can’t help myself. Of course I should. I was over yesterday and took a batch of pictures while mama was taking a break from her squirming horde. It was hard to get all of them to show their faces to the camera at once, but eventually I did it. Sort of. This picture is a composite of the two best shots I got.

For the record, in this picture they are just a bit over three weeks old.

As I said yesterday, I don’t plan on featuring my mother’s kittens again until next Friday. However, she took a picture with her iPad and I decided to convert it to black and white in the style of Edward Weston—which I’m sure he’d approve of. As you can see, the kittens have opened their eyes but have not yet climbed out of their box. They have peered out of the box, though, and are aware that there’s a whole different world out there. I don’t think it will be long before mom has a whole flock of kittens underfoot.

Just a quick reminder: every primary features a series of interesting “new” candidates. This year Mike Bloomberg is one of them. If they have anything at all going for them,¹ they typically gain popularity at first when no one really knows anything about them; they peak when the media starts running mildly critical stories about them; and then they decline as the oppo starts and the media starts printing the “investigations” it’s been working on for the previous few weeks. Here is a helpful diagram drawn on the back of a paper napkin:

Bloomberg is at the peak of the mostly nontoxic learning phase and just transitioning into the extremely toxic oppo/investigations phase. Today, for example, the New York Times is running a moderately combative story about Bloomberg’s philanthropy while the Washington Post is running a very damaging article about sexist comments and a hostile environment for women at his eponymous company. Meanwhile, the oppo folks are busily dumping audio of Bloomberg making arguably racist comments about stop-and-frisk. Bloomberg is highly likely to lose some of his support over the next couple of weeks, after which he will either recover or he won’t. It all depends on how well everyone else is doing and how good a job reporters and oppo researchers do in digging up damaging material. In any case, there’s no need to panic just yet.

FWIW, this is also approximately where Amy Klobuchar is at. She’s a little less vulnerable than Bloomberg since she’s been in high-profile campaigns before and probably doesn’t have a lot of skeletons waiting to tumble out of her closet, but this is also the stage where people who are sort of interested in her start to learn more about positions she’s taken that maybe they aren’t too thrilled with. Stay tuned!

¹For example, $50 billion.

Killing standards for tailpipe emissions in cars and trucks may seem easy, but you can only do it if you can show there's an actual reason for it. A stroke of a pen won't do the job.Kevin Drum

Presidential candidates often talk about what they’d do on “Day One.” This is dumb. There’s very little of any substance that presidents can do by executive order on their first day. Take Donald Trump. On his first day he signed an order aimed at “minimizing the economic burden” of Obamacare. It was meaningless. Two days later he pulled out of the TPP trade deal. This was not meaningless at all, but Trump could only do it because we were never part of TPP in the first place.

A better question to ask candidates is: What executive actions would you begin on Day One? You see, it’s not just a stroke of a pen for most things. Back in 1946, after FDR had vastly expanded the federal government with an alphabet soup of new agencies, Congress passed the Administrative Procedures Act. The basic idea behind the APA was this: after the New Deal and World War II it was obvious that big government was here to stay, and this meant that only executive agencies had the manpower and knowledge to keep rules and regulations up to date in a world that changed relentlessly. But if that was the case, then Congress wanted to make sure that presidents couldn’t just arbitrarily change those rules whenever they felt like it. So the APA put in place specific procedures that had to be followed. In particular, agencies were not allowed to change rules “arbitrarily or capriciously.”

Long story short, this means that most regulations of any real importance take 3-4 years to get through the stages of research, drafting, public comment, and publication of the final text. If you want to make sure that something takes effect during a term of office, you’d better start the wheels turning within your first year. President Obama’s new fuel economy standards, for example, were announced in May 2009 but weren’t finalized until August 2012. Lawsuits can drag things out even further. Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in June 2014, but it was still waiting for a ruling in the DC Circuit Court in 2017, at which time Trump’s EPA asked for and received a stay pending its own review. At that point it was effectively dead. Obama had waited too long to get it solidly in place.

Over at the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer has a good piece about how this all works—or doesn’t. When Trump took office, he immediately decided to weaken Obama’s fuel economy standards. The problem was that those standards had been finalized years before and were not the target of lawsuits. The only way to change them was to go through the entire regulatory process as defined by the APA.

Luckily for us, Trump is an idiot. Or, more precisely, he likes to hire idiots who are eager to feed him happy talk about how easy it will be to do what he wants. As a result, no one bothered to perform the kind of rigorous analysis that’s required to finalize this kind of thing:

To change a federal rule, the executive branch must do its homework and publish an economic study arguing why the update is necessary. But Trump’s official justification for SAFE is honeycombed with errors. The most dramatic is that NHTSA’s model mixed up supply and demand: The agency calculated that as cars got more expensive, millions more people would drive them, and the number of traffic accidents would increase, my reporting shows. This error—later dubbed the “phantom vehicles” problem—accounted for the majority of incorrect costs in the SAFE study that the Trump administration released in 2018….Once this and other major mistakes are fixed, all of SAFE’s safety benefits vanish, according to a recent peer-reviewed analysis in Science.

….The errors they and other independent analysts found are staggering in their scale. At one point, the NHTSA team forgot to divide by four. Elsewhere, it used bad data, claiming that, in the future, there will be fewer of certain types of fuel-saving engines than there are on the road already. But these errors pale in comparison to NHTSA’s insertion of millions of “phantom vehicles” onto American roads.

….Last month, [Tom] Carper, the Democratic senator from Delaware, alleged that a new version of the NHTSA study admits that SAFE will impose $34 billion of costs on the American economy. (NHTSA had once promised $230 billion in net benefits.) The new study also admits that SAFE will cost consumers an extra $1,400 at the pump on average—and that SAFE will not save hundreds of lives a year, as it once claimed, Carper said.

If, in fact, the Trump administration performed a shoddy analysis that, when corrected, shows that his proposal has no actual benefits, it’s unlikely to pass judicial review. That pesky Administrative Procedures Act doesn’t allow Trump to arbitrarily change published regulations just because he wants to thumb his nose at Obama. But that’s what he did, and his appointees were happy to whomp up a draft proposal that used made-up numbers to justify whatever the boss wanted. Apparently they didn’t realize that this isn’t allowed.

Trump’s rules are in limbo right now. It’s possible that some kind of compromise will be reached that both California and the big carmakers will accept. If that happens, and there are no lawsuits, then judicial review won’t matter. If not, it will end up in court. And it will probably lose.

Kevin Drum

I have one more quick point I’d like to make about the great subtitle war. (My fuller response is here.) A great deal of the pushback I got went something like this: Anyone who knows anything about cinema prefers subtitles to dubbing. Only idiots who can’t read would choose a dubbed movie instead.

It’s true that movie buffs around the world prefer subtitles. But the reason that you and I and nearly all cinema sophisticates prefer subtitles is because we can read quickly and easily. For us, subtitles don’t interfere much with the rest of the movie.

But for some people this isn’t true. You don’t have to be simpleminded for subtitles to be a big distraction. You just have to be a fairly normal person who reads a little more slowly than the highly verbal, highly educated folks who read this blog. In other words, you have to be like the large majority of moviegoers.

Are these people idiots? To hear the Twitter response I got from an awful lot of lefties, you’d think so. And then we wonder why the white working class has soured on us. Such a mystery.

Here is Hopper on her beloved fence, posing with our neighbor’s camellia. Next week, perhaps it will be time to check in on our kittens again.

Rashawn Ray wants us to stop treating African Americans as a monolithic group:

Black Americans vote on par or higher than their state population. They represent a significant share of Democratic voters, especially in states like South Carolina (nearly 60%). Despite representing this large voting bloc, polls such as Quinnipiac continue to frame black Americans as a monolithic group, while disaggregating white people by age, political identification and education.

I argue it is important to see the heterogeneity of black Americans. Others agree. Professor Eddie Glaude Jr said: “We have to be more nuanced in how we talk about black voters. I would love to see the breakdown of the Q poll. Age. Class. Etc.” Rolling Stone writer Jamil Smith said, “I’ve examined the newest Quinnipiac poll very thoroughly … and unfortunately, it does not break down black voters by age, class, education, or even gender. Just ‘Black.’ White respondents receive more nuanced treatment in the poll.”

The problem here is not one of racism, but of statistics. The average poll reaches about a thousand people. Of those, about 13 percent are likely to be black. If you then break things down by, say, age, you’ll have only about 30-40 respondents in each group. Unfortunately, as the group size goes down, the margin of error for each group goes up. In this case, the margin of error for each of the age groups is upwards of 15-20 percent, which makes the results useless. It would be a dereliction of duty to even report them.

Some polls oversample blacks and Hispanics to avoid this problem, but that’s expensive. It’s usually done infrequently, and only for surveys specifically aimed at reporting the views of one ethnic group. So don’t blame Quinnipiac for this. It’s a problem of arithmetic and money, not bad faith.

Arkansas purged 18,000 recipients from its Medicaid program via work requirements.Andrew DeMillo/AP

The DC Court of Appeals ruled this morning against pilot projects that impose work requirements on Medicaid. Why? Because the Medicaid statute identifies one, and only one, goal for the Medicaid program: to furnish medical assistance on behalf of families who can’t afford it. That’s it. And yet, a pilot project in Arkansas that added work requirements had exactly the opposite effect:

A critical issue in this case is the Secretary’s failure to account for loss of coverage, which is a matter of importance under the statute. The record shows that the Arkansas Works amendments resulted in significant coverage loss. In Arkansas, more than 18,000 people (about 25% of those subject to the work requirement) lost coverage as a result of the project in just five months.

But the HHS Secretary barely even acknowledged this, instead basing his approval on three points related to overall community health:

These three alternative objectives all point to better health outcomes as the objective of Medicaid, but that alternative objective lacks textual support. Indeed, the statute makes no mention of that objective….While we have held that it is not arbitrary or capricious to prioritize one statutorily identified objective over another, it is an entirely different matter to prioritize non-statutory objectives to the exclusion of the statutory purpose.

So that’s that. The court ruled that the statutory purpose of Medicaid is to provide health care to people who can’t afford it. More coverage is good, less coverage is bad, and you can’t justify less coverage by inventing a bunch of alleged benefits that have nothing to do with the goals of Medicaid. The end.

Until the Supreme Court gets hold of this, of course. We’ll see what kind of textual magic they can whomp up.

Attorney General Bill Barr said today that he wants President Trump to stop tweeting about criminal cases. “I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” he said.

Among the liberal twitterati, there are two interpretations of Barr’s comments:

• Barr wants Trump to stop tweeting about criminal cases because it’s wrong.
• Barr wants Trump to stop tweeting about criminal cases because it would be better to pass along his corrupt wishes quietly.

I think you can guess which interpretation has the most traction in lefty-land. Oddly enough, I’m withholding judgment, even though “he’s lying” is the smart money bet for practically anything that any of Trump’s minions says. I suppose my guess is that Barr’s message is something in between: I’m not an idiot, Donald. I already know what you want. But your blabbing gives the game away, so just shut up and let me politicize the Justice Department on my own.

This is Inkblot, the bestest cat ever, investigating a turtle who somehow waddled its way over from our lake. No turtles were harmed in the making of this photograph, but Inkblot sure looks like he might like to sample a bit of turtle soup or something.

The musical accompaniment is “Happy Together,” by, um, you know.