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Via HuffPost, here are the latest results from a YouGov poll about trust in the FBI. Note that these are net results: that is, trust minus distrust, fair minus unfair, etc. Feast your eyes:
It would be interesting if we had data on general trust in the FBI going back a while, wouldn’t it? Are Democrats suddenly big fans? Or have Republicans suddenly developed a massive distrust of the FBI? Luckily Pew Research has a few years of data on this, so let’s take a look:
These are, once again, net results (percent approval minus percent disapproval). For years there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats. Then Democratic views bumped up a bit in the September 2016 poll—even though that was after James Comey had called Hillary Clinton “extremely reckless,” causing her lead over Trump to shrink by a couple of points. Republicans, however, had just finished up their “Lock Her Up!” national convention and weren’t satisfied with a mere verbal thrashing. Their views of the FBI spiked downward.
After that, Democrats stayed steady. But by February of this year the net Republican view of the FBI was a mere +19 percent: 55 percent approval vs. 36 percent disapproval. This has no historical precedent among the traditional party of law-and-order. But now it’s May, and things have gotten even worse: according to the YouGov poll, net trust of the FBI among Republicans is -10 percent. Donald Trump and Fox News and congressional Republicans have convinced more than half of Republicans that the FBI is a cesspool of corruption and bias against conservatives.
That’s remarkable enough. But keep in mind that the FBI was almost single-handedly responsible for keeping Hillary Clinton out the White House. Even so, Republicans think the FBI is biased against them. This is what Trump has done to the Republican Party.
As weekend readers already know, I was up all night on Saturday. Why? Because I was suddenly seized by a desire to go out to Anza-Borrego to do some stargazing. My sister-in-law had sent me a link to some Milky Way photos taken there, and it’s finally late enough in the year that the Milky Way rises at a reasonable hour. So out I went.
Unlike Ireland, which was a bust thanks to cloud cover, Anza-Borrego was great. It’s not the darkest possible place even in Southern California, but it’s pretty good. That makes this the first time I’ve ever really seen the Milky Way, and I have to say that it’s not all that spectacular to the naked eye. Maybe I was too busy with the camera to ever let my eyes truly adjust. But it was certainly a very fine photography subject.
I have two pictures of the galactic core for you. The first one was taken around 1:30 am. The (supposed) key to a great Milky Way photo is to find something interesting to contrast it with, and Anza-Borrego didn’t really offer a lot of options on this score. I tried various things, but in the end a bit of unlit cactus turned out the best:
The second shot was taken at 3 am, and by then the core had wheeled around to a more nearly vertical position:
May 20, 2018 — Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California
I didn’t do anything fancy for either of these pictures. They were exposed for ten seconds with the lens wide open and ISO set to 10000. From there I popped them into Photoshop, did a modest bit of manipulation to brighten the stars and darken the background, and that was it.
POSTSCRIPT: For folks who want to geek out a little more, the big problem with Milky Way photography is noise. Because of the rotation of the earth, you can’t expose for more than 20 seconds before you start to get a bit of motion blur, and even that’s pushing it. And your lens can only open as wide as it can open. In my case that was f/2.4, but even a better camera is unlikely to go past f/2 or maybe f/1.4. That means you have to crank up the ISO to get a good exposure, and that in turn means a noisy picture. The in-camera noise reduction does a surprisingly good job, but obviously it has limits, and you can see those limits in these pictures.
For us amateurs who don’t have pricey equatorial mounts, the answer to this problem is to take a series of photos in RAW mode and then use specialized software to “stack” them. The software aligns the images, subtracts the noise by comparing them all, and then allows you to make adjustments. For you RAW fans out there, you’ll be glad to know that I did take all my shots in RAW mode, but I didn’t take a lot of identical photos from the same spot and didn’t try to stack them. Maybe another time.
Then again, maybe I should buy one of the new generation of very cheap equatorial mounts, which cost as little as a few hundred dollars these days. If I thought I was going to do this more than a few times, I’d be tempted.
After looking at the latest trade deficit figures, I think I’ve figured out why Donald Trump decided to call off his trade war on China. As you can see, after skyrocketing during the Obama administration, Trump has turned things around and the trade deficit is now getting smaller.
Wait. That doesn’t seem quite right, does it? But this chart comes straight from Trump administration data, so it must show Trump winning. That’s what he promised: winning so often that we’d get tired of it. So dammit, that’s what this chart shows. MAGA!
Baxter Street in Echo Park, one of the steepest roads in Los Angeles, is about to get a makeover….The narrow road has a 33% grade, the third steepest in Los Angeles and 10th in the nation. In recent years, navigation apps have directed more drivers to Baxter Street to avoid traffic jams along nearby Glendale Boulevard. But the apps don’t tell drivers how treacherous the road can be, especially in rainy weather.
I hate stories like this. They tease you with stuff about Baxter Street being the third-steepest in Los Angeles, but they don’t tell you which street is the first steepest. Come on! And who keeps track of stuff like this, anyway? The Federal Steep Roads Agency?
Baxter Street is the fifth steepest. Is there an updated list that puts it at tenth? Or maybe it’s tenth in the world? I dunno. And I’m surprised that California has seven of the top ten. I wouldn’t have guessed that. Here is the story of Baxter Street from KCET:
It began as a sliver of land in an 1853 survey, separating empty real estate tracts in what was then the city’s northwest corner. The city designated that narrow strip Baxter Street in 1872, and when subdividers eventually carved those empty tracts into housing developments in the late 1890s, they honored the surveyors’ lines and imposed a grid pattern on the hilly land. Then, the arrow-straight line of Baxter Street made some practical sense. As Matthew Roth of the Auto Club Archives noted in an interview, the road — like many of L.A.’s so-called secret stairways — functioned as a pedestrian access path for a streetcar line along present-day Echo Park Avenue.
Baxter later became a proving ground for automobiles, as manufacturers staged elaborate stunts to demonstrate their vehicles’ power. In one such event in 1916, a four-wheel-drive truck loaded with 4,300 pounds of baled hay groaned its way up the grade, pausing twice for newspaper cameras.
So there you have it. Back in 1872, they built streets on gridlines like real men and didn’t let mindless frippery stop them. It’s not like today, when we’re all soft and lazy and break the lovely gridlines whenever we feel like it for no reason except that they make streets “too steep.” It’s sad that we’ve lost that can-do American spirit: nowadays LA doesn’t allow new streets to have more than a 15 percent gradient. Here’s a guy skateboarding down Baxter Street:
Duke Energy officials show off the latest coal ash leak from one of their power plants. This one leaked coal ash into the Dan River at Eden, NC in 2014.John D. Simmons/TNS/ZUMAPRESS
Poor Scott Pruitt. He’s dedicated to tearing down every environmental rule he can think of, but it turns out he’s doing a shoddy job of it. And while his boss might not care about that, it turns out that the courts do. Here’s the Washington Post today:
In March, as part of Scott Pruitt’s aggressive campaign to roll back federal regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed relaxing standards for storing potentially toxic waste produced by coal-burning power plants.
EPA officials cited a study indicating that forcing utilities to get rid of unlined coal ash ponds too quickly could strain the electrical grid in several regions of the country. But when environmental advocates scrutinized the specifics, they discovered a problem: The evidence cited was not established scientific research. Instead, the agency was relying on a four-page document by the utility industry’s trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, which has acknowledged that its conclusions were not “part of or a summary of a larger study.”
….The coal ash proposal is among the more than half-dozen major EPA moves that have been snagged by procedural and legal problems. The delays threaten to tarnish Pruitt’s image as an effective warrior in President Trump’s battle against federal regulations, a reputation that has so far saved the EPA administrator his job amid an array of investigations into ethical and management lapses.
Pruitt thinks that science is just hogwash, yet another part of the academy controlled by liberals and whale huggers. So he’s fine with justifying EPA’s proposals using excerpts from industry pamphlets, fossil fuel advertising, or whatever else comes to hand. Unfortunately for him, the court system takes the idea of science a little more seriously and wants to see actual analysis performed by actual scientist who have at least a nodding acquaintance with actual evidence. This is a serious roadblock to Pruitt’s ambitions. Sad.
Many of you already saw this on Friday, but just in case you never got around to clicking through I want to share again this headline from the front page of Friday’s LA Times:
Russian inquiry losing public support Trump’s frequent attacks seem to be eroding confidence in the Mueller probe among Republicans
It’s not just due to Trump’s frequent attacks, of course. It’s Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson at Fox News. It’s Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal. It’s Devin Nunes in the House of Representatives. It’s Breitbart and Andrew McCarthy and Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs. They are, collectively, the vanguard of a new movement dedicated not just to partisan spin, but to the outright invention of a fake reality that they repeat over and over and over until their audience starts thinking there must be something to it. And as Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery point out, it all started back in 2016:
There are many things we know about the 2016 campaign now that we didn’t know then—or rather, that you, the public, weren’t told … Big tech companies knew about their platforms being used for propaganda … Intelligence agencies knew a foreign adversary was attacking election infrastructure, campaigns, and individuals … Congress stood idly by … The nation’s biggest media organizations too often fell into a rut of sensationalism and he-said-she-said false equivalency.
Together, these failures opened the door wide to the biggest threat our democracy may have ever faced: Weaponized disinformation. That’s the thread connecting them all, and the one running straight into 2018.
As we’ve been thinking here at MoJo about what we need to do to tell this year’s most important stories—the ones that others might be missing—we keep coming back to this fact. We can’t wait until a week from Election Day to find out who’s trying to manipulate the outcome. We need to investigate and expose them before it’s too late.
So that’s what we’re doing. We’re hoping to build a team dedicated to identifying and tracking the forces behind disinformation, and we’ve started a new fundraising campaign to get it started.
It’s hard to think of anything more important. Weaponized disinformation is the Big Lie. It’s what intimidated the FBI into helping elect Donald Trump. And it’s a coordinated effort to erase the ability of a free press to do its job.
Click here to make a tax-deductible donation. We hope to raise $350,000 before June 30—$250,000 to meet our budget, and an extra $100,000 to get this special project off the ground. There’s no better cause. Or, if money is tight, click here to find out other ways you can help.
In just the past couple of days, Donald Trump has produced such a storm of horseshit that I never even got around to noting this story from the Washington Post:
President Trump has personally pushed U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages, according to three people familiar with their conversations, a dramatic move that probably would cost these companies billions of dollars.
….Brennan and Trump have met at the White House about the matter several times, beginning in 2017, and most recently four months ago, the three people said. The meetings have never appeared on Trump’s public schedule. Brennan has spent her career at the Postal Service, starting 32 years ago as a letter carrier. In 2014, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors voted to appoint her as postmaster general.
….Trump has met with at least three groups of senior advisers to discuss Amazon’s business practices, probing issues such as whether they pay the appropriate amount of taxes or underpay the Postal Service, according to the three people. These groups include Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Domestic Policy Council Director Andrew Bremberg. Bremberg has served as a key liaison with Brennan.
Everyone—everyone—knows why Trump is doing this. He hates the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, and he’s trying to exact some revenge by going after Bezos’s main business, Amazon. In any other presidency, this would be a major scandal. Unless you’re Richard Nixon, you don’t use the power of the presidency to conduct personal campaigns of vengeance against companies or people you happen to be mad at. You just don’t do it. With Trump, however, this bit of retribution is so trivial that it’s hardly worth noting. Of course Trump is using the presidency to settle personal scores. Hell, his whole agenda is motivated primarily by a desire to take revenge against Barack Obama for making fun of him in 2011.
Still, just for the record, this is happening. Trump has tried numerous times to jack up Amazon’s shipping fees, and he’s co-opted his Treasury Secretary and others to spend their time on this too. This might put the postal service out of business. It would certainly hurt plenty of other companies. He doesn’t care. He just wants people to know what happens if they cross him. It’s like Trump’s presidency is a real-life mashup of The Godfather and The Count of Monte Cristo. This would be an entire book chapter if it been part of, say, the Grant administration’s scandals. Today, it’s barely worth a shrug.
I was out all last night and got home around 7 am. I immediately rolled into bed and then woke up at the crack of lunchtime. I took a shower, went out for lunch, got my car washed, and then picked up some groceries for dinner. I didn’t bother checking the news. It’s Sunday. Why bother?
But of course, eventually I did. A few dozen f-bombs later, I figure I should at least do a roundup. Here we go.
First up is Donald Trump. By now we’re all used to both his Twitter rants and his insistence that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt. Lately, we’ve also gotten used to his claim that the real crime is the conspiracy between Democrats, the media, and the FBI to hide their own scandals while trying to destroy his presidency. But even by Trump’s usual standards, this morning’s lick-spittled harangue was extraordinary. My feeble skills with the English language aren’t adequate to describe it, so I’ll just show you the final entry:
I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!
As you all know, I’m an optimist about Trump. I think he got elected because of a weird perfect storm of shit—not because of a sea change in public opinion—and we’ll get back to normal fairly soon. He’s not a harbinger of the future of American politics. But I’m having a harder and harder time maintaining this attitude as Trump navigates ever closer to banana republic territory. I’m no fan of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but I’ve mentioned before that he really does seem to be an honorable person by his own lights. I sure hope I’m right about that. He needs to loudly and clearly refuse Trump’s request, and the rest of the Republican Party needs to make it plain that it’s had enough. Every party wants to win, but there have to be limits if you want to keep up even the pretense of supporting democracy. Even if you don’t think Trump has breached those limits before, he sure has now. It’s time to step up.
Next up is the school shooting in Santa Fe. The lieutenant governor of Texas is in the news because he believes schools should have fewer entrances and exits. And more armed guards. Or something. He seems not to know that Santa Fe High School was already considered “hardened”—a word I can barely believe we use to describe schools these days—and had not one, but two armed guards. It didn’t do any good.
Then Oliver North, a man who should have been shamed out of polite society long ago, spoke up in his new role as president of the NRA. He agreed, naturally, that schools ought to be locked down even more, and then resurrected a musty old favorite: our real problem, he suggested, is “youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence”—which is exactly the opposite of the truth compared to 30 years ago. But then he pulled a whole new rabbit out of his hat: The real real problem is that so many kids have been on Ritalin since early childhood. “They’ve been drugged in many cases,” he said. Yes, you heard that right: our kids have been sedated into shooting up schools.
I would just like to say that, all things considered, I think I preferred it back when the NRA maintained a cowardly silence after school shootings, figuring that the fuss would go away within a week or so. We’ve now seen the alternative, and it’s even more repugnant and stupid.
Next up is Trump again. Apparently he’s “putting the trade war on hold” after getting a few vague promises from China to consider the possibility of maybe thinking about someday buying a little more stuff from the United States. No promises, but they’ll give it the ol’ college try. Punishing China was practically the only thing in Trump’s campaign arsenal that was truly directed at helping the working class, and now the negotiator-in-chief has suddenly given up on it. Poof. There’s literally nothing left in his agenda that would help the working class even in theory.
Moving on to Donald Trump Jr., it turns out he didn’t just meet with sketchy Russians who promised him help with his father’s presidential campaign. He also met with sketchy Middle Eastern folks who offered him help because they hated the Iran nuclear deal so much. Are there any sketchy foreign autocrats Don Jr. didn’t meet with?
What else? Roger Stone said he’s prepared to be indicted. “It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election,” Stone told NBC News. Uh huh. The US intelligence and law enforcement community sure has it out for anyone who’s ever supported Trump, don’t they?
Rudy Giuliani is back in the news too. He says that Robert Mueller told him the Russia investigation would be wrapped up by September 1. “You don’t want another repeat of the 2016 election where you get contrary reports at the end and you don’t know how it affected the election,” he said with a straight face. I guess he never got the memo from his boss that James Comey’s letter about Hillary Clinton’s emails eight days before the 2016 election HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH TRUMP’S HISTORICALLY EPIC VICTORY. Donald would have won anyway because of his superior strategy and the fact that Crooked Hillary is a big ol’ crooked crook who ought be behind bars.
There’s probably some stuff I’m forgetting, but my ability to hold back the f-bombs is limited these days. I’d better quit now. However, because I’m a rotten bastard at heart, I’m going to leave you with this:
According to his complaint, Ellis, 37, was trying to buy breakfast at Burger King one morning in November 2015 when the cashier asserted that his $10 bill was bogus. Ellis insisted otherwise, and when the cashier wouldn’t budge, Ellis said he would take his $10—all he had to his name—and leave. Instead of returning the bill, restaurant staff called the police. Ellis was arrested and later charged with forgery of a bank note—a crime that can carry a life sentence, according to the complaint.
The arrest triggered a probation violation, and Ellis ended up spending three months in jail. But aside from the obvious, something has been bugging me ever since I read this story: why did it take three months to clear him? I couldn’t find anything beyond what was reported in the original AP story:
He wasn’t released from jail until February 2016, when prosecutors dropped the forgery charge after the Secret Service concluded Ellis’ bill was real, the lawsuit says.
I’ve had banknotes checked before by cashiers. Usually they just run a pink marker across them or something. But even supposing this particular cashier didn’t have a marker, or didn’t care, or was just trying to make trouble, is it really possible that the Boston Police Department couldn’t figure out if the banknote was real within a few minutes? And even if you suppose they couldn’t, this is one of the primary jobs of the Secret Service. It can’t possibly take them three months, can it? Three minutes seems more like it.
Aside from bureaucratic incompetence of one sort or another, the only way this makes sense is if they took the word of a Burger King cashier so seriously that they figured this homeless guy was part of a ring of incredibly sophisticated criminals who make counterfeit bills that are well nigh indistinguishable from the real thing—and who then waste their talent on ten-dollar bills. I assume the Secret Service would refuse to comment on some specious grounds or another, so it’s probably pointless to ask them. But I would sure like to know how the combined efforts of the Boston PD and the Secret Service managed to take three months to figure out that a ten-dollar bill was real.
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