Brian Cahn/Zuma Press

Donald Trump has apparently forgotten that his previous story about Russia was very simple: he had no business ties at all, not in any way, shape, or form.

….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2018

Ah yes, just some light looking around. “Somewhere” in Russia.

The New York Times has a good roundup of just how non-light Trump’s interest in a Moscow version of Trump Tower has been over the years. It’s still not treason, and probably not even illegal, but it’s sure not a good look for someone who was running for president. Trump now claims that “everyone knew” all along about his pursuit of a Russia deal, but the truth is that he did everything possible to keep it secret during the campaign. Robert Mackey provides the real story:

The existence of such a project, which was being negotiated in secret during the entire span of the Republican primary campaign — from at least October 2015, when Trump signed a letter of intent with a Russian developer, through January 2016, when [Trump lawyer Michael Cohen] called an aide to Putin’s spokesman, until some time after Trump secured the nomination in June — was not known about or reported at the time. There was no indication in the outline of Cohen’s confession sketched out by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday as to why the proposed deal was dropped, but the timeline might offer a clue. Cohen suddenly backed out of a trip to Russia arranged by the Kremlin on the afternoon of June 14, 2016 — about three hours after the Washington Post revealed that Russian hackers had penetrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee and stolen documents related to the election.

Cohen, of course, has admitted to lying to Congress when he said that Trump’s involvement with any kind of Russia deal had ended by January 2016—before the Iowa caucuses. In reality, his involvement continued throughout the entire primary. Thursday’s news also provided us with this bizarro tidbit reported by BuzzFeed:

President Donald Trump’s company planned to give a $50 million penthouse at Trump Tower Moscow to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the company negotiated the luxury real estate development during the 2016 campaign, according to four people, one of them the originator of the plan.

There’s no telling if Trump himself had any idea this was being discussed, or if it was just a meathead idea ginned up by Trump’s friends. My own personal guess is this: Trump himself had very little to do with any of this. What’s more, he was smart enough never to do anything illegal. His idiot son Don Jr., however, is a different story. Legal stuff becomes illegal when you lie about it to, say, Congress or the FBI, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Don Jr. did that. This accounts for a big part of why Trump is so frantic about this whole thing. Aside from the obvious political poison of it, he’s afraid—or perhaps even knows—that Mueller has the goods on his boy.

This whole affair is both tragedy and farce at the same time. Either way, though, it seems like it’s finally nearing a climax. Stay tuned—though I doubt that’s advice anyone needs at this point.

On November 7 I reported that voter turnout in California had been lousy this year. On November 9 I reported that I had screwed up: voter turnout had actually been pretty great. Using estimates from David Dayen, I figured that total turnout would turn out to be about 12.7 million, or 50.4 percent of eligible voters. Today the Sacramento Bee provided us with nearly final numbers:

More than 25 million Californians were eligible to vote in the election, and nearly 19.7 million of them were registered — both record-highs. About 12.7 million Californians are expected to have voted in the November elections — the highest number in a general election midterm cycle in state history.

That was a pretty good estimate from David! Let this be a lesson to everyone: it takes a long time to count votes in California, so don’t jump to conclusions unless you really know what you’re talking about.

ALSO: We flipped seven seats from Republican to Democratic, 18 percent of the national total. That’s kicking ass.

I would normally be at lunch when Lunchtime Photo is scheduled to appear—thus the name—but today is Darzalex day and I’m stuck at the infusion center for a while. So I’m skimming the news and it turns out that Trump fixer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. That’s actually a crime! Who knew? But I’ve got a poser for you:

1. Cohen now admits that he worked on a Trump Tower project in Moscow all the way through June 2016, as Trump was running for president.
2. Trump says this is correct, and it’s what he told Mueller’s investigators last week.
3. He also says Cohen is a liar, making stuff up to get a reduced sentence.

How can this all be true at once? Is it like one of those puzzle-book things where Trump turns out to be his own mother? Who can figure out this stumper for us?¹

¹Aside from the obvious answer that Trump is a goon who automatically calls everyone he doesn’t like a liar. That answer is way too boring. I want something better.

We’re nearing the end of my Overexposed LA™ series. Only one more to go after this one!

This extremely bright photo is a picture of the new Metro station under construction at 2nd and Broadway. It’s part of the “Regional Connector” currently under construction, which links up the Blue Line, the Gold Line, and the Expo Line. When it’s done, it will allow Blue Line trains to make the entire trip from Long Beach up to Azusa and allow Expo Line trains to make the entire trip from Santa Monica out to East LA:

The Regional Connector is a $2 billion project that’s supposed to be completed in 2021. And here it is:

The single biggest feature of Obamacare is its subsidies: if you buy health insurance from an Obamacare exchange, you’re eligible to receive federal tax credits that substantially reduce the net cost of your premiums. However, this applies only to health plans on the exchanges, which have to obey rules about minimum coverage levels.

Naturally, Donald Trump hates this—though for reasons that remain murky aside from his general hatred of Barack Obama and all his works. In any case, he’s now aimed a howitzer at Obamacare’s subsidies:

The Trump administration is urging states to tear down pillars of the Affordable Care Act, demolishing a basic rule that federal insurance subsidies can be used only for people buying health plans in marketplaces created under the law.

….States could allow the subsidies to be used for health plans the administration has been promoting outside the ACA marketplaces that are less expensive because they provide skimpier benefits and fewer consumer protections. Even more dramatic, states could let residents with employer-based coverage set up accounts in which they mingle the federal subsidies with health-care funds from their job or personal tax-deferred savings funds to use for premiums or other medical expenses.

So if you have a scammy little plan with huge deductibles and lots of stuff that’s not covered, no problem! Trump will let you use your Obamacare tax credits to pay for it.

Now, you may be wondering what’s wrong with this. Why not let people buy skimpy plans if they want to? The answer can get a little complicated, but there are two basic problems with this:

• First, one of the purposes of Obamacare was to set minimum federal levels for health care plans. This protects consumers from rip-off micro-plans with lots of fine print that you only notice after you try to file a claim and get rejected. If you want to take your chances with a plan like this, that’s fine, but there’s no reason that taxpayer dollars should fund this kind of junk. Obamacare insists on minimum quality levels, which makes shopping easier and keeps the scammers at bay.
• Second, and more important, Obamacare requires insurers to charge everyone the same amount. This means Obamacare creates one big pool of customers in each state, with the healthier folks essentially subsidizing the sicker folks—which is how health insurance is supposed to work. However, if healthy folks can choose cheap micro-plans, they’re removing themselves from the pool. The only people left are those with average or poor health, and naturally insurers will have to raise their prices if those are the only customers in the pool. Eventually, this produces two separate markets: a cheap, scammy one for the young and healthy and an expensive, high-quality one for everyone else.

Oh, and this plan to allow Obamacare subsidies to be used for non-Obamacare plans is probably illegal too.

In any case, this is something Republicans have been hellbent on ever since they took over in 2017. A key part of all their proposals has been something—anything—that will split up the market so that insurance becomes more expensive for the older and sicker. This price increase will cause even more people to drop out, leaving a pool that gets continually older, sicker, and more expensive. This is a well known doom loop that’s called a “death spiral” in the health insurance biz.

So this is the latest Republican attempt to touch off a death spiral and to just generally screw with health insurers, who have only recently begun to finally get a good handle on what the Obamacare pool looks like and what kind of premiums they need to charge. Previous attempts to scare insurers out of the Obamacare market looked promising until this year, when lots of insurers returned to Obamacare, so now it’s time to try again.

These guys will never give up. They are relentless in their efforts to ruin Obamacare and take away health coverage from millions. Why? At this point, after five years of experience, we know that Obamacare is working tolerably well and that it’s done little or no damage to the broader health care industry. But it is funded by some moderate taxes on the wealthy, and I guess that’s simply intolerable. The only plausible conclusion is that Republican leaders and their big donors are just bad people, meanspirited and insatiable in their greed. No other explanation really seems to work.

The CDC announced today that life expectancy at birth declined once again in 2017. But what does this mean precisely?

Life expectancy is estimated using something called a life table, which shows the death rate for each age cohort in the previous year. That is, it shows the probability of dying between 0 and 1, between 1 and 2, and so forth. Add up all those probabilities and then apply some arithmetic, and you get life expectancy.

So if you want to see the raw data, you want a life table. And since life expectancy at age 65 was up, we’re only interested in ages 0-64. Here it is for 2017:

This isn’t a complete life table, but it gives us a sense of what’s going on: Nearly all the increase is between ages 25-44. (Statistically, the mortality rate among 55-64 year olds is basically flat.) This increase is almost entirely limited to whites: the mortality rate increased 0.63 percent among white males and 0.87 percent among white females.

Put this all together and the aggregate life expectancy for a newborn American baby went down from 78.7 years to 78.6 years. The current best theory to explain this remains the increase in “deaths of despair”—suicide, alcohol abuse, and drug overdoses—observed primarily among rural whites.

But don’t worry: if you’re reading this you’re probably college educated and have a fairly high income. Your life expectancy is around 85 or so, compared to about 77 for the poor. This is the biggest demographic disparity in life expectancy. It easily overwhelms the gaps from gender, race, geography, and everything else.

Just for the record, all the election results are finally in. Democrats won 40 new seats in the House and lost two in the Senate. It’s too bad about the Senate, but a tough map is a tough map. Overall, this counts as a pretty damn big wave election.

This is the most pointless, nerdy thing imaginable, but I’m going to post it anyway. As you may know, Britain has basically three options when it comes to Brexit:

• Remain: cancel the whole thing and stay in the EU.
• May Deal: go ahead with Brexit on the terms negotiated by prime minister Theresa May.
• No Deal: exit the EU with no deal at all in place.

A recent poll asked the British public what they thought about each of these options. Here’s how they responded:

Take a careful look at this:

• Remain is preferred to the May Deal.
• The May Deal is preferred to No Deal
• But No Deal is preferred to Remain.

This is an example of a hoary old political science result: namely that preferences are not transitive. Even if you prefer A to B, and B to C, you might still prefer C to A. However, real-life examples of this are hard to find, and textbooks often have to resort to obviously clunky, made-up examples. But this one is real! Textbook authors everywhere will be eternally grateful to the British public for this.

This is the highly regarded VW Amarok pickup truck. Would you like to buy one? Too bad! You can't.Volkswagen

Oh crap. Someone finally told Donald Trump that we levy a 25 percent tariff on European light trucks—which is why you’ve never seen a European light truck on sale at your local VW or Mercedes dealer. The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that US tariffs are way more unfair than European tariffs, but of course that’s not Trump’s conclusion:

The reason that the small truck business in the U.S. is such a go to favorite is that, for many years, Tariffs of 25% have been put on small trucks coming into our country. It is called the “chicken tax.” If we did that with cars coming in, many more cars would be built here…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2018

…..and G.M. would not be closing their plants in Ohio, Michigan & Maryland. Get smart Congress. Also, the countries that send us cars have taken advantage of the U.S. for decades. The President has great power on this issue – Because of the G.M. event, it is being studied now!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2018

That’s right: Trump has now decided that it would be great if we did the same thing to European cars just because he’s pissed off at GM. What a moron. And while we’re on the subject of Trump being a moron, I realize that the “Trump word salad” genre is kind of stale, but sometimes you just have to share a really juicy example. Here it is:

I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off base with what they’re doing, number one. Number two, a positive note, we’re doing very well on trade, we’re doing very well — our companies are very strong. Don’t forget, we’re still up from when I came in, 38 percent or something. You know, it’s a tremendous — it’s not like we’re up — and we’re much stronger. And we’re much more liquid. And the banks are now much more liquid during my tenure. And I’m not doing — I’m not playing by the same rules as Obama. Obama had zero interest to worry about; we’re paying interest, a lot of interest. He wasn’t paying down — we’re talking about $50 billion lots of different times, paying down and knocking out liquidity. Well, Obama didn’t do that. And just so you understand, I’m playing a normalization economy, whereas he’s playing a free economy. It’s easy to make money when you’re paying no interest. It’s easy to make money when you’re not doing any pay-downs, so you can’t — and despite that, the numbers we have are phenomenal numbers.

We’re doing very well on trade? We’re up 38 percent? We’re more liquid? We’re talking about $50 billion “lots of different times?” Obama “made money” because he didn’t have to pay interest? Even by Trump standards, which I can usually decipher eventually, what does this mean? Here are my guesses:

• Trade is strong? But the dollar remains strong and the trade deficit is growing—which Trump keeps telling me is horrible and unfair. What am I missing?
• Hmmm. 38 percent. What’s up 38 percent? My best guess is that he’s talking about the Dow Jones average starting from Election Day. Anybody have a better guess?
• I suppose he’s talking about bank reserves here? It’s true that they’re better than they were in, say, 2008, but that improvement happened almost entirely on Obama’s watch and almost entirely because of Obama’s regulations.
• I have no idea what the $50 billion thing is.
• Trump’s mention of “pay downs” suggests he’s talking about the federal deficit. If that’s the case, it means he’s claiming that Obama was only able to reduce the annual deficit because interest rates were so low. And sure, that helped. But here’s the thing: between 2017 and 2018, net interest payments increased only $50 billion. The real deficit killer was corporate income taxes, which dropped nearly $100 billion even though the economy was strong and corporate profits were record-setting. Needless to say, this is thanks to the Republican tax cut. If Trump wants to finger someone for making the deficit harder to control, he only has to look in the mirror.

That’s your day in Trump. Not all of it, of course, since I’m not a strong enough man for that. But enough.

This is a llama. If it were a camel, I’d make a lame joke about hump day, but it’s not. It’s just a llama, and llamas don’t have humps. Still, he looks happy. Llamas always look happy, don’t they?