The Iowa caucus is on Monday, so let’s take a look at the very last of the—well, hold on. Let’s take a look at the weather forecast first:

Chilly! The caucuses are held in the evening, so ignore the balmy 33° daytime forecast. It’s gonna be freezing weather with snow showers. And now, here are the final poll numbers, courtesy of Real Clear Politics:

You can see the much-discussed Sanders surge over the past week, along with slumps from both Warren and Buttigieg. But keep an eye on all those folks below 10 percent. If they stay below 15 percent in the first round of voting, their votes will then get parceled out among the big four in the second round. So who’s most likely to pick up the votes from disappointed Klobuchar, Yang, and Steyer voters? That’s an excellent question, and I don’t know. But I suppose the conventional wisdom says the Klobuchar folks are most likely to switch to Biden. As for the Yang and Steyer voters, who knows?

Anyway, the voting starts at 7 pm Central time and should finish by around 8 pm. Tick tick tick.

Apparently Tim Murphy did something we frown upon—kicked a homeless person? told a lame joke on Slack?—so our editors packed him up and sent him to Iowa to watch political commercials. I guess that’s better than sending him to Wuhan. Maybe?

Anyway, I don’t know why anyone would treat a valued employee this way, but journalism is a tough business these days. Click here if you want to read Tim’s report while thanking God that you didn’t get sent to Iowa.

Yes, Rupert, you're worth $20 billion. But you're still just worthless riffraff.Prensa Internacional/ZUMA

It seems likely—or at least possible—that Brexit and acquittal will happen on the same day. Tomorrow Britain will no longer be part of the EU and Donald Trump will be officially innocent of crimes that he clearly committed. This seems altogether appropriate.

Tiny things can change history. Brexit won in June 2016 by only two percentage points. Trump won in November 2016 by about one percentage point in three states. If things had been just slightly different, David Cameron would be sleeping his way through a few more years of being prime minister and Hillary Clinton would be fighting off yet another stupid investigation from Jason Chaffetz.

The fact that they aren’t is a testament that the power of lies and culthood has become overwhelming on both sides of the Atlantic. Brexit was the result of a steady stream of lies about curved bananas and barmaid cleavage, followed by a very specific hail of lies about the NHS and immigrants from Nigel Farage. Trump is the result of a steady stream of lies from the Gingrichified conservative movement, followed by a very specific hail of lies about health care and immigrants from Trump himself.

One common denominator in both of these things is Rupert Murdoch. Without the Murdoch media, it’s unlikely that either Brexit or Trump would have succeeded. What’s most galling about this is that I don’t think Murdoch really cares about either one. He just wants to monetize eyeballs and doesn’t much care how it’s done.

But what’s done is done. Our job now is to spend the next decade trying to return common decency and at least a passing respect for the truth to political life. I’m not sure what odds I’d give on that succeeding now that everyone’s seen the immense success of Murdochization. But we have to try.

I promised you a beard, so here’s a beard. I grew this in 2002, when I was switching roles at my old company from divisional manager to VP of strategic acquisitions. I asked for a six-week vacation before I took up my new role, and I figured that was a good time to find out what I looked like with facial hair. Mine grows very slowly, so I knew it would take a while.

In the end, it all worked out poorly. The beard, as expected, looked lousy, and the new job didn’t fit me either. After six months I left. I did a few different things over the next couple of years, and then accidentally ended up in the blogging and then magazine-writing world. And all because strategic acquisitions didn’t appeal to me. It’s funny how life works sometimes.

For God's sake, will you *please* just shut up?Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

A friend writes to me this morning: “A lot of folks on the left are mischaracterizing Dershowitz’s argument, which they don’t need to do — it’s awful enough already.”

Crap. Does this mean I have to figure out what Dershowitz said and then decide if he’s been misquoted? For a wacko has-been, he sure does know how to keep the spotlight on himself, doesn’t he? But I guess with a wacko has-been in the White House, it’s good times for these guys. Anyway, here is Politico’s summary:

Responding to a question about how presidents conduct foreign policy, Dershowitz asserted Wednesday that “every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest.” Therefore, he continued, “if a president did something that he believes will help him get elected — in the public interest — that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

But tweeting Thursday, Dershowitz insisted that he “did not say or imply that a candidate could do anything to reassure his reelection, only that seeking help in an election is not necessarily corrupt.” Concluding his string of posts, he wrote: “Critics have an obligation to respond to what I said, not to create straw men to attack.”

Well . . . “cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment” is strong language. I’m hardly surprised it got interpreted the way it did. Still, I guess Dersh is just making the same argument that I’ve made several times myself, namely that presidents do stuff all the time with one eye on their reelection. Should I establish diplomatic relations with Cuba? Should I keep troops in Iraq? Should I take a chance on killing Osama bin Laden? These are all legitimate foreign policy issues, and they’ll inevitably be viewed favorably by some voters and not by others. Presidents can hardly be unaware of this, and as Dershowitz says, making a decision that will be good for reelection isn’t necessarily corrupt.

But applying this to the Ukraine matter is just willfull distortion. This wasn’t a common issue of, say, “What will voters think of getting tough on aid to Ukraine?” In fact, Trump very much hoped that voters would never even learn what he was doing. Hell, it wouldn’t have worked if voters knew he was behind it.

No, this was a secret decision to defy the will of Congress and then lie to them about it, all in return for a foreign leader agreeing to lie in a very explicit way about a single campaign opponent. In Dershowitz’s list of presidential motivations (national interest, corruption, or some mix of the two) this was pure corruption. There was zero national interest involved in Ukraine announcing an investigation of Burisma Holdings. It’s possible that Trump himself didn’t understand that, but only because his narcissism is so off the charts that he literally conflates “good for Trump” with “good for the country.” That’s how his company worked, after all. The rest of us, however, understand that this is a ridiculous standard.

Now can we stop talking about Alan Dershowitz? Come on, folks.

Why yes, he is.Ryan Rahman/Pacific Press via ZUMA

This is ridiculous. Yesterday the rumor mill said it was all but certain that the Senate would vote to call witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial. Today it’s now all but certain that they won’t. I know that internet time speeds everything up, but this is ridiculous. Nothing happened in the past 24 hours. But hey, Trump sets new precedents for bad behavior every day, so why not set another?

If the Senate chooses to not hear from witnesses, it will be the first time a presidential impeachment trial does not include witnesses. The previous impeachments both included new witnesses who did not testify as part of the House investigation.

There you have it. The Trump Republicans are going beyond even the Radical Republicans and the Gingrich Republicans in their partisan rancor. Why am I not surprised?

For the record, if Republicans stick together and prevent witnesses from testifying, I think it’s because they now realize it could cause real trouble. In the best case (for them), Bolton confirms that Trump tried to extort Ukraine for fake dirt on Joe Biden, but everyone already knows that. If it could be ignored for the past four months, it can be ignored for the next four days. But the worst case is that Bolton says something new that leads to questioning of other witnesses and eventually to something that even Republicans can’t ignore. Even the supposedly moderate Republicans are probably scared to death of that.

In the final quarter of 2019, real GDP grew 2.1 percent:

This is OK. It’s not great, but it’s OK, especially in the 128th month of an economic expansion. The fourth quarter results mean that we ended the year with annual growth of 2.3 percent:

Again, this is an OK number, but nothing to write home about. US economic growth has been remarkably steady since the end of the Great Recession, never breaking out of a range of 1.5-3.0 percent.

And for you political types who demand to know what this means for the election, it probably means nothing. Economic growth is good enough that it doesn’t provide Donald Trump with any big problems, but it’s low enough that he’s still vulnerable. Altogether, economic growth is probably a wash for the 2020 campaign.

I’ve been on one of my little photo vacations for the past four days and it was pretty exhausting.¹ But it was also one of my best ever. As you know, my rule of thumb is to visit places so beautiful that you can basically just point your camera around and end up with lots of great pictures. This time I drove up Interstate 15 to Las Vegas, then cut across 59/389/89A to Page, Arizona. It was absolutely stunning, one of the most beautiful trips I’ve ever taken. My main goal was to shoot pictures of the slot canyons near Page, but I also visited Hoover Dam, Horseshoe Bend (three times), Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, and all sorts of things in between. This was my first time seriously taking lots of panoramic shots that would have to be stitched together later in Photoshop, and also my first time seriously using the HDR function in my camera. More about that later, but both of these techniques turned out to be perfect for the slot canyons.

The bad news is that this means the photos need a lot of tedious processing before I can even get to the normal stage of editing them. However, I also took plenty of ordinary shots that required only a few minutes of preparation. This one is of Mitchell Butte at sunset, right near Monument Valley. It required no editing at all, though I think I did about 30 seconds of work on it just so I didn’t feel like I was being too lazy.

¹Why exhausting? Lots and lots of driving, for one, and working to a tight schedule for another. This kind of photography is all about the light, which meant I was constantly on the run to get to places when the light was right, mostly early and late in the day. Sadly, my body is not built for that sort of thing anymore.

Just for the record, everyone understands that John Bolton could tell us everything he knows about Trump anytime he wants to. Right? He just has to pick up the phone and ask 60 Minutes if they’d like to do an interview. It would be on the air by this Sunday.

Alternatively, he can call me and I’ll do the interview. It would be a total softball. “Tell me everything interesting you know about Donald Trump,” I’d ask. Then I’d turn on the tape recorder and sit back to await my Pulitzer Prize.

Hendrick Holtzius, 1616, "The Fall of Man." Note: Picture has been cropped to keep the cat.Album / National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

I think we can all agree that good food manners are a good idea when you’re in a crowded, confined space like an airplane. Natalie Compton recommends, for example, that you not bring smelly foods like tuna sandwiches on board a flight.

Fine, I guess. But then there’s this:

Avoid: Eating “loud” foods

Before you start chomping into that perfectly crisp Fuji apple, consider the travelers with misophonia, a disorder that triggers physical and emotional responses to sounds like chewing, tapping and gum-snapping. But beyond them, the sound of gnawing on that fruit, or on corn nuts, or carrots, can be just plain obnoxious to everyone. Consider the auditory stimuli of eating your in-flight food, and avoid items that are noisier than most.

Seriously? We should avoid apples on the million-to-one chance that your seatmate happens to have a bizarre aversion to the sound of someone eating an apple? I’m surprised this leaves any food at all that can be eaten on airplanes. Pretty much any food is bound to have at least two or three people in the country who are triggered by its sound, smell, color, or Proust-like associations from youth.

I wouldn’t mention this except that it’s become entirely too common in daily life. We are endlessly being told that we should be sensitive about something we never thought twice about before, usually because there’s some small number of people who have serious reactions to it. Sometimes these people even invent pseudo-Greek names for their conditions even though there’s no known cause; it’s not listed in any diagnostic manual; and researchers make up out of thin air the claim that it’s quite common.

But life can’t be lived this way. We can’t go around avoiding anything that might trigger a reaction in a tiny number of people. Go ahead and eat that apple.