Crime and Puzzlement

Somebody's Twitter avi.

An unusual take from National Review's legal beagle Andrew C. McCarthy ("Robert Mueller's Plan") on the Mueller investigation: that they're not building up a criminal case, because

No prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, “Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.”?

This proves that the litigation documents Mueller files from time to time, such as indictments and statements of guilt, are not addressed to a jury, which shows McCarthy that there is no crime, which demonstrates that the special counsel's behavior is very reprehensible:

There's the beef!

Drawing by Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times via Democratic Underground.

This is not my idea—I got it from Paul Campos at LGM—but nobody seems to be picking up on it, including Campos, and it seems to me a bit of proof positive that Donald Trump Jr.'s NOTHINGBURGER meeting of June 9 2016 was, in fact, a very precise part of the sequence that led to the successful efforts of Russian intelligence services to get Big Donald elected president of the United States. From the story lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin told AP about his participation in the meeting (via Vox):

During the meeting, Akhmetshin said Veselnitskaya brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee. Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump associates and suggested that making the information public could help the Trump campaign, he said.

It's that there are some documents we all have access to that detail the flow of funds to the DNC, illicit or otherwise. They look like this,

and they're what you find if you put "contributions" into the search box at the WikiLeaks DNC emails dump posted July 22 2016.

In other words, what Akhmetshin is saying, wittingly or not, is that the information Natalya Veselnitskaya brought to Trump Tower that day consisted of printouts from the hack of the Democratic National Committee conducted by "Fancy Bear" between January 2015 and May 2016. That's what she and Akhmetshin were offering the Trump campaign in return for help, should Trump become president, in lifting the sanctions imposed on Russian oligarchs by the Magnitsky Act.

These particular emails weren't in point of fact anything the Trump campaign could use, because none of the contributions were illicit, which is why you don't hear much about them. Of course Kushner, Manafort, and Little Donald didn't know that yet. And they could easily have imagined that there might be other emails among the 20,000 that were useful in other ways. Like they could be curated into looking like proof that the DNC was improperly tipping the scales in Hillary Clinton's favor against candidate Bernie Sanders, as the later Podesta emails included the texts of Clinton's very highly paid Goldman Sachs talks, which could be made to look as if she was secretly promising to be their White House puppet, and so on. Something like that.

So this really was the meeting where the whole plan, quid and quo, took shape.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Thanks, Rich, for cluing me in. Even if it was unconscious.

Starbursts for Rich Lowry! The original bombshell, Hedy Lamarr, via Nerdist (because this one was a lot smarter than Sarah Palin, you might be astonished to learn how much smarter.)

There was another bit of Rich Lowry/National Review idiocy I wanted to write about that has suddenly turned much funnier, or more serious, depending on how you look at it:

Meanwhile, the New York Times has another “bomb-shell” report about Russia, this time a meeting between a shady Russian operative and Donald Trump, Jr. and some others from the campaign.

Uh, Rich, are you entirely sure you want to dive into this?

Two quick points.

One, this jumped out at me given that we are about a year into this thing:

While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.

The first!

Oh, Rich! What's betraying him here is his authoritarianism. When he sees "first confirmed private meeting" he thinks that means "confirmed by the authorities". He thinks nobody really knows if any of the other ones took place at all—it's all beastly rumors! Maybe nobody met anybody at all!

But what the Times means is, in fact "confirmed to a Times reporter by one of the participants in the meeting":

Who cares about the deficit?

Pretty porky putti! From Christopher at ReptileMind.

The answer could be a lot simpler than you think: rich people are overwhelmingly terribly, terribly concerned about our burgeoning annual budget deficits—and nobody else is.

That's the indication of an ongoing study conducted by Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University, a survey of "Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good". [jump]

Who says?

Everybody keeps telling us that small business is the "engine of job creation" in the United States, but it's not so clear. Following up a post from Ontario at Kos:

According to Who creates jobs? Small vs. large vs. young by John C. Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda, NBER Working Paper No. 16300 (2010), small business is not that much of a job creator. Looking at Census Bureau data for the decade from 1992 to 2005, they found that

businesses tend to create jobs in proportion to their importance in the economy. Thus, large mature firms—those more than ten years old and with more than 500 workers—employed about 45 percent of all private-sector workers and accounted for almost 40 percent of job creation and destruction in this study.

 Where small size of the firm had an effect, it wasn't because it was small but because it was new:

The real driver of disproportionate job growth, they find, is not small companies, but young companies. It is the startup firms that generate the surge of jobs that earlier research attributed to small companies.

After which they sell out to Microsoft (that's the program), or fold and put together a job-creating emo band or gourmet taco truck.

Oh, one other thing—money really does help!

We've just been talking about it, right?

According to a report issued Friday by the Bruce Baker for the Albert Shanker Institute, "Revisiting The Age-Old Question: Does Money Matter In Education?" (h/t Huffington Post)

Does money matter? Yes. On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes. In some studies, the size of this effect is larger than in others and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent – in other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do schooling resources that cost money matter? Yes. Schooling resources which cost money, including class size reduction or higher teacher salaries, are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger than others and there is also variation by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do state school finance reforms matter? Yes. Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes. While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising.

Read up on the evidence yourself, and pass it on.

Where is abortion worst? Where it's illegal

and in more ways than one, according to a new report from the Guttmacher Institute (via ThinkProgress):

• Highly restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates. For example, the abortion rate is high, at 29 and 32 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age in Africa and Latin America, respectively—regions where abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of countries. In Western Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds, the abortion rate is 12 per 1,000.
• Where abortion is legal on broad grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is illegal in most circumstances, it is generally unsafe. For example, in the United States, where abortion is legal on broad grounds, induced abortion results in 0.6 deaths per 100,000 procedures. In Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, abortion results in 30 and 460 deaths per 100,000 procedures, respectively.

Prohibitions on abortion mean more abortions, not fewer. File it under facts for your brother-in-law.

¿Cuomo lo quieres?

Some have asked--actually, they haven't, but it's always good to be prepared--why I should display such hostility toward Governor Cuomo, given how skillful he has proven at getting our dreadful legislature to do things of which, as an unreconstructed liberal, I must approve. Well, here's why.

Morning addition

A cool example of properly sourced evidence that the postulates of Republican geometry just don't correspond to reality surfaced on NPR this morning: the theory says a 2% surtax on personal income over a million dollars will prevent small businesspersons from hiring workers, but in fact you can't find a small businessperson who will be so prevented. Tamara Keith, the reporter, asked numerous senators and representatives and multiple business organizations for an appropriate example, then went on Facebook to look for themselves, but nobody could come up with a single one. NPR did find a couple of qualified millionaires, but they didn't think the tax would have any effect on hiring, and in fact they turned out to be Democrats. Okay, just because you don't know any black swans doesn't prove all swans are white, and this informal inquiry doesn't prove that no such millionaires exist, but I think we know where the burden of proof just went. The Republican theory applies basically to proprietors who report company profits as personal income, and I'm guessing that there really aren't any such people paying themselves a million-dollar salary--if you're picking up that kind of profit you'll surely prefer paying corporate taxes on it.

[edited to note the reporter by name, and then messed with some more because I can't keep my hands off it]

Very good evidence that your Republican brother-in-law is wrong

It often seems as if there isn't any public evidence for the dangerousness of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, like all those farmers whose kitchen sinks turned into torches got gagged as part of their settlement agreements.

One of the things I'd like to do with this blog is to use it as a kind of night depository for the carefully sourced demonstration that things your Republican brother-in-law "knows" to be the case actually aren't, like this story about polluted ground water in a heavily fracked district of Wyoming (a version published today in Bloomberg was picked up by Daily Kos, but it turns out Pro Publica put out a more detailed story three weeks ago):

EPA finds Fracking Fluid Chemicals in Wyoming drinking water

I mean, not for the coherent body of things one is "working on", that you'd want to keep in a properly bibliographical storage system like Zotero, but for those isolated facts of which you may suddenly wish you could remember where they came from.