President Trump explains why he called off the military strike on Iran:

On Monday they shot down an unmanned drone flying in International Waters. We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!

As usual with Trump, I have no idea whether I should believe this. It doesn’t seem very likely that the president would only be given a casualty estimate ten minutes before the missiles were going to be launched.

Still, true or not, it demonstrates a surprisingly . . . mature attitude. Good for him.

A US Navy missile tracking ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz last year.Jonathan Clay via ZUMA

The New York Times reports that President Trump was nearly ready to authorize a military strike on Iran that would have taken place around 9 pm Eastern time, but then….

As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president’s top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations. Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.

The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.

This is . . . unusual. I’m not surprised it leaked, since an awful lot of people had to have known about it, but I wonder what caused Trump to pull back?

My own guess is that for all his bluster, Trump is genuinely afraid of getting into a war. It’s one of his few good qualities.

Hope Hicks, who probably knows Donald Trump as well as anyone, thinks he was serious when he said he’d be happy to accept campaign dirt from a foreign government:

Q: The President last week told George Stephanopoulos that he would take information about an opponent from a foreign adversary in the next election….Do you think that was a joke?

A: I don’t know. I have not discussed that remark with the President….I don’t think that was a joke based on what I saw.

So there you have it. Trump was issuing an open invitation for his overseas friends—if he has any—to dig into their intelligence files and send him whatever they have on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Good to know.

I don’t know if I really believe this, but Facebook usage has plummeted in the past year according to a report in the Guardian:

According to the analysis, Facebook has more users than it did a year ago but they’re spending less time on the site and they’re engaging less with what they see. If this is true, it explains Mark Zuckerberg’s sudden epiphany that Facebook should deemphasize news feeds and pay more attention to privacy. Or, in any case, that it should say that it’s doing those things.

Tomorrow is the first day of summer! What are your plans?

Michael Tomz and Jessica Weeks, a pair of political scientists, recently did a bit of research to find out what people thought about foreign election interference. They surveyed several thousand people, giving them different scenarios for foreign meddling (endorsements, contributions, hacking into voting systems) and asked what they thought about each of them. Here are the basic results:

This is odd. “Stay Out” means what it sounds like: in this scenario the foreign country did nothing. And yet, 5 percent of the respondents disapproved. On the other end, 10 percent of the respondents were OK even if a country hacked our election machines to change the vote count.

What the hell? Is this for real, or just some kind of mistake? Here’s another question:

A full 18 percent of the respondents supported economic sanctions against a country that did nothing. This is nuts. What could account for it? Maybe this:

*Disapproval levels were strongly partisan: large numbers of both Democrats and Republicans were OK with foreign interference as long as it hurt the other party. This effect was strongest for things like simply endorsing a candidate, but still noticeable even for more extreme actions like contributing money, spreading lies, or hacking voting machines.

In other words, the results of the top chart are probably real: a small number of people were upset if a country stayed neutral because they actively wanted foreign interference against the opposition party. Likewise, a small number of people approved of vote machine hacking, presumably on the assumption that it would be used to help their own party.

These numbers aren’t huge, and it’s just a survey. So I guess we shouldn’t get too bent out of shape about it. Still, this hardly instills a lot of faith in our fellow voters, does it?

As we all know, Joe Biden screwed up big time in remarks at a fundraising event on Tuesday. His topic was civility in politics. Here’s the pool report:

Mr. Biden then recalled his time serving in the Senate. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Mr. Biden said, briefly channeling the late Mississippi senator’s Southern drawl. Mr. Biden said of Mr. Eastland, “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”

Mr. Biden then brought up a deceased Georgia senator, “a guy like Herman Talmadge, one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys. Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Linguistically, the question is whether Biden was downplaying the racism of old-school Southern senators. The view of the twitterverse is that he was. The opposing view is that he was doing just the opposite: he was choosing the worst people he could think of to make a point that getting things done is always possible.

Politically, the question is whether it will hurt Biden. Nate Silver proposes a two-pronged test: (a) do average voters care about this? and (b) would it be a gaffe if anyone else had said it? Silver concludes that the answer to both is yes, so it’s likely that this will do Biden some damage.

Time will tell. But I have a different test: does this incident play into a preconceived notion about Biden? That is, before this did people think that maybe Biden wasn’t entirely reliable on racial issues? Among the Democratic base, the answer is yes: Biden’s opposition to busing; his treatment of Anita Hill; and the 1994 crime bill all make him problematic. But I don’t think any of that stuff has filtered up to the median voter. As far as they’re concerned, Biden is just fine on race:

The real question, I think, is whether Biden’s remarks will cut into his support among African Americans. If it does, that could do him some real damage.

These are probably all legit businesses. But how can you know for sure?Google Maps

In the latest version of how everything good eventually gets ruined, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google Maps has been widely hijacked:

Google’s ubiquitous internet platform shapes what’s real and what isn’t for more than 2 billion monthly users. Yet Google Maps, triggered by such Google queries as the one Ms. Carter made, is overrun with millions of false business addresses and fake names, according to advertisers, search experts and current and former Google employees. The ruse lures the unsuspecting to what appear to be Google-suggested local businesses, a costly and dangerous deception.

Back when Google Maps was a good way to navigate around town but not much else, it was pretty accurate. But then millions of people started using it to locate businesses too, and that made it a target for scammers. It’s an example of what I was talking about yesterday: motivations change when something becomes popular enough to matter. If there’s no money to be made, everything is great. But as soon as there’s the chance of real money at stake, the scammers start to swarm.

There are ways to fight this kind of thing, of course, but it’s a neverending battle and it’s the reason that the results of starting up a new program of any kind are difficult to predict. Sure, the initial result might be positive (reducing poverty, making online maps more convenient) but what happens when the new program is no longer new, but simply an expected part of life? Then calculations change. And change again. And again. Real life is always a dynamic process, not a static one.

UPDATE: A reader emails to tell a different story about Google Maps:

I was a victim of a different version of this scam. Around Christmas last year someone filed an automated report that my house’s location was inaccurate and dropped a pin for my house over an abandoned house in my neighborhood.

UPS delivers to the Google maps address and a large portion of my online holiday shopping was delivered to the wrong address. (USPS went to the right place and one of the drivers did not deliver to the abandoned house.) I was not harmed by this as Amazon resent everything, but it was annoying and we all pay higher Amazon prices now because of this.

With the fake business scam, at least you can protect yourself once you know about it. You just have to treat Google Maps more cautiously. But if someone screws with your house location, there’s no way for you to know it unless you just happen to be poking around and notice that your address is wrong.

This is a helluva headline:

It doesn’t say that Trump has “changed his strategy” or “lost faith in the opposition” or anything like that. It just says that he figured it would be easy peasy to get everyone to cave in to his bluster, and it wasn’t—so he doesn’t care anymore. And of course he “chewed out his staff” over this, because nothing is ever Donald’s fault. Such a charming guy.

Here are quarterly tariff receipts over the past few years:

Tariffs normally run about $40 billion per quarter. In the latest quarter, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, that was $35 billion higher. This amounts to $140 billion per year.

These tariffs are paid by US companies that import goods and are then passed along to consumers as higher prices. There are currently 130 million households in the United States, which means that Trump’s tariffs are costing the average household in America more than $1,000 per year.

It’s actually more than that, since the tariffs probably also have a negative impact on wages and GDP growth. But without even doing any fancy math to account for that, we’ve still got a simple cost of $1,000 per household to pay for Trump’s trade war. I hope all those working-class folks who voted for Trump because he said he’d look out for them are starting to figure out that it was a con all along. A thousand dollars is a lot of money.