Jason Freedy/Image of Sports/Newscom via ZUMA

Major League Baseball is pondering the possibility of moving games in cities affected by the coronavirus outbreak:

This could take on several forms, these people said. Teams could play at other MLB stadiums in cities less affected by the crisis, when its primary tenant is on the road. They could stay at their spring training facilities in Arizona or Florida and stage regular-season contests there, since those places are experienced at hosting major-league games. Baseball has even received outreach from outside parties with facilities large enough to host MLB teams if they can’t play at home.

Nothing has been decided, these people said, but all of the options are being considered as viable possibilities. Ultimately, baseball realizes it might have no choice in the matter, as local governments begin to assert their authority. MLB hopes to treat each team’s situation individually and make determinations about how to proceed on a case-by-case basis, the people familiar with the matter said.

IANAEpidemiologist, but isn’t this kind of crazy? Shouldn’t this be a federal decision, not a local one? Seattle and New Rochelle may be outbreak centers right now, but does anyone believe that’s likely to stay the case for long? Once we start testing widely and the disease has spread a little more, it’s going to be nationwide. At that point, isn’t it the CDC that has the greatest knowledge? Why put this on the backs of local health authorities who are limited in what they know and under intense pressure not to ruin local businesses?

Right now, nobody knows what to do because we’re hearing a dozen different messages from a dozen different sources: Mike Pence, Anthony Fauci, local health authorities, state health authorities, cable news, Trump’s tweets, doctors who have just returned from Italy, and so forth. It’s time for this to stop. I know that Donald Trump doesn’t want to risk his reelection by doing anything unpopular, but it’s time for the federal government to show some leadership anyway. We shouldn’t leave it up to MLB to decide if they want to play games in front of the usual crowds. We should tell them whether it’s safe to play in front of the usual crowds.

Cover Images via ZUMA

Flying to the moon is expensive:

The rocket and spacecraft NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon could cost $50 billion, according to a government watchdog report released Tuesday — far more than the space agency had said it would need to meet a White House mandate to return to the lunar surface by 2024….The new IG report blames both NASA’s lax oversight of the program and Boeing’s poor performance for costly delays that would ratchet up the price beyond the $35 billion NASA previously had said it would cost to land astronauts on the moon by 2024.

You’d figure that since we’ve already been to the moon once, our second try should be a lot less expensive. And you’d be right: the Apollo program cost about $150 billion in today’s dollars. If Orion really does come in at $50 billion it will be a pretty good bargain.

I remain unclear on why exactly we want to resume manned missions to the moon—and please don’t say helium-3. Personally, I’d be a lot more interested in building a true orbiting space station infrastructure that’s maybe a hundred times the size of what we have now. But if that’s a dumb idea too, I’m happy to wait until technology has advanced before we spend more money on putting lots of meat sacks into space. I don’t think it would be a long wait in any case.

Brian Cahn/ZUMA

There’s not a whole lot to say about tonight’s results. Obviously Joe Biden won today’s primaries in another landslide and just as obviously this is the end for Bernie Sanders. The only question left is whether the Sanders team will accept this, or whether they’ll pretend yet again that next week’s contest is the real test.

I get how disappointing this is for lots of people. But I hope that time will give everyone a clearer view of things. Bernie had his biggest impact in 2016, when he pushed the Democratic Party firmly to the left. This was a considerable accomplishment, but he never managed to take the next step and convince a majority of Dems that we needed an insurrection against the establishment. Nor did he do it this time around. For better or worse, most Democrats didn’t want to get rid of their establishment in 2016 and they really don’t want to get rid of it now. They saw what happened when Republicans got rid of theirs, and it’s the last thing they want. Rather, they want an establishment that can defeat the nihilistic chaos of contemporary conservatism and govern responsibly.

Beyond that, I hope that disappointed Bernie supporters take another look at Biden’s positions and come to realize that there’s less difference between the two men than it seems. Even without Republican obstruction, Medicare for All was never going to pass. A flat $15 federal minimum wage was never going to pass. Free college was never going to pass. The Green New Deal was never going to pass. A wealth tax was never going to pass. In fact, we’ll be lucky if even Biden’s versions of these things can pass.

So in practice there’s not a lot of sunlight between them. But even in theory there’s less than it seems. Biden’s health care plan is pretty good. His climate change plan is surprisingly good. He supports a $15 minimum wage. His tax plan is certainly less ambitious than Bernie’s, but it’s all in the same direction.

Donald Trump has given too many people a frighteningly good look at what a revolution looks like. For now, this is just not what most Democrats want, even if the roles are reversed. They want responsible leadership and moderate change that’s not scary. They will eventually come around to the idea of a revolution, I think, but it will take another decade or two. That’s less time than it seems.

Kay Nietfeld/DPA via ZUMA

Our loyalist nominee to head up the intelligence community has begged off testifying before Congress:

Acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell has declined to appear before Congress on Tuesday to speak about foreign election threats….[Grenell] asked President Trump to be excused from the briefings because he anticipated pointed questions from Democrats about politically volatile subjects — such as intelligence assessments that Russia is once more interfering in U.S. politics.

But wait. There’s more:

The intelligence community’s top counterintelligence official, William Evanina, will appear instead….Grenell’s name had been included in a list of briefers given to Congress on Feb. 27 and again Monday, people familiar with the matter said….The latest list of briefers, provided to Congress on Tuesday morning, included Evanina in lieu of Grenell.

It’s not just that Grenell is afraid of Trump being pissed off if the truth happens to emerge during today’s testimony. He’s specifically afraid that Trump will be pissed off at whoever happens to deliver the truth. So he fobbed it off on someone else. A true profile in courage.

How about a mystery photo today? I took this picture at the OC Zoo last year, but the owl wasn’t in a cage. It was perched on a zookeeper’s arm. I took a bunch of pictures, and then, just as I was about to ask the guy what kind of owl this was, he got called away and disappeared. So I don’t precisely what species this is. But I’ll bet somebody in comments does.

If I remember correctly, it was about a foot tall. That’s all I can tell you about it.

UPDATE: It’s a Western screech owl.

Win some, lose some. Today Democrats won one:

House Democrats scored a major legal victory Tuesday as a federal appeals court panel granted them permission to access grand jury secrets from Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. The 2-1 ruling from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision in favor of the House’s ability to see the deleted passages in the public version of the Mueller report.

I assume the Trumpies can ask for a hearing in front of the full DC court, but since the makeup of the court leans liberal that might not be worthwhile. Their only real option now is an appeal to the Supreme Court. If they refuse cert, that would be the end of the line.

However, I’d warn everyone not to expect a lot from this. A ruling that goes the right way would be nice from a rule-of-law standpoint, but I doubt that there’s anything super incriminating under those redactions. We would have heard about it by now if there were.

Yesterday President Trump announced that he was considering a big slug of fiscal stimulus to keep the economy going in the face of the coronavirus epidemic. And what would this stimulus consist of? A tax cut, of course.

However, the tax cut he has in mind is the payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare. This is not a new idea. You may recall that Barack Obama initiated a payroll tax cut as part of his follow-up stimulus package in 2010. His reasoning was simple: payroll taxes are paid mostly by the poor and middle class, so when you cut those taxes you’re putting money directly into the hands of people who need it and will spend it right away. It was a good idea.

But is cutting payroll taxes still a good idea today? Let me put it this way: it’s certainly not the worst idea the Trump administration could have come up with. The problem is that a tax cut is only effective as stimulus if the problem is that people lack money. In 2009 that was indeed the case. Today it’s not. Consumers have plenty of money, but the coronavirus will (probably) make them reluctant to spend it. It will also make them afraid to leave the house. A payroll tax wouldn’t change either of those things: if consumers get more money, most of it is likely to go straight to savings.

However, it’s important that if Congress does approve a payroll tax cut, it needs to be done right. The cut needs to be in the form of a certain number of percentage points (say, from 6 percent to 4 percent) so that the middle class really does benefit more than the rich. And the reduced flow of taxes to Social Security and Medicare needs to be made up by contributions from the general fund. It would be stupid to use payroll taxes as a stimulus with a side effect of making Social Security go bankrupt sooner.

So what would be better than a payroll tax cut? That’s not easy to say for a short and temporary shock that’s going to hit both the supply side and the demand side. My guess, however, is that we need to do our best to target it toward those who are going to be most affected by the coronavirus. For example, the feds could promise to pay 100 percent of all testing and hospitalization due to COVID-19. That would be a sizeable sum and would precisely help those who need it most. Since a lot of people are likely to lose their jobs thanks to coronavirus fears (think cruise ship workers, convention organizers, airline workers, etc.), a temporary increase in unemployment benefits would probably be useful. And since the elderly are the hardest hit by the coronavirus, it might be wise to come up with something that benefits them. Maybe a temporary reduction in Medicare copays and hospitalization limits?

It’s also worth noting that not everything has to be precisely targeted. We are forever talking about infrastructure spending, and this is the kind of thing that could most likely be increased without running any risk of spreading the virus. The key thing, as always, is to pick projects that can be started quickly. By now we really ought to have a few in mind, shouldn’t we?

Yegor Aleyev/TASS via ZUMA

I did not realize that the oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia was really a price war between Russia and the United States. The LA Times sets me straight:

At 10:16 a.m. on a wet and dreary morning, Russia’s energy minister walked into OPEC’s headquarters in central Vienna knowing his boss was ready to turn the global oil market upside down.

Alexander Novak told his Saudi Arabian counterpart Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman that Russia was unwilling to cut oil production further. The Kremlin had decided that propping up prices as the coronavirus ravaged energy demand would be a gift to the U.S. shale industry. The frackers had added millions of barrels of oil to the global market while Russian companies kept wells idle. Now it was time to squeeze the Americans.

….For more than three years, President Vladimir Putin had kept Russia inside the OPEC+ coalition, allying with Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to curb oil production and support prices….But the OPEC+ deal also aided America’s shale industry, and Russia was increasingly angry with the Trump administration’s willingness to employ energy as a political and economic tool. It was especially irked by the United States’ use of sanctions to prevent the completion of a pipeline linking Siberia’s gas fields with Germany, a project known as Nord Stream 2.

So Russia is keeping output high and Saudi Arabia has increased its output in turn. Today they both increased their output even more:

Saudi Arabia escalated its oil price war with Russia on Tuesday as its state-owned company pledged to supply a record 12.3 million barrels a day next month, a massive increase to flood the market. The supply hike — more than 25% higher than last month’s production — puts Aramco above its maximum sustainable capacity, indicating that the kingdom is even tapping its strategic inventories to dump as much crude on the market as quickly as possible.

Moscow responded within minutes, with Energy Minister Alexander Novak saying Russia had the ability to boost production by 500,000 barrels a day. That would put the country’s output potentially at 11.8 million barrels a day — also a record.

This is, of course, nuts. The OPEC+ coalition was originally planning to cut production by 1.5 million barrels and wanted Russia to respond with a cut of its own. Instead, the two countries plan to increase production by 2-3 million barrels. Other OPEC members are following suit. This means they’re promising to supply the market with something like 5-6 million barrels more than they really want to.

However, I can only assume that most investors are taking this as posturing more than anything else, since oil prices actually rebounded a bit this morning instead of plummeting further. If anyone were taking seriously the prospect of OPEC and Russia following through with supply increases like this, the price of oil would be lucky to be in double digits, let alone in the 30s.

Anyway, stay tuned.

Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images via ZUMA

Why is President Trump so obsessive about insisting that the coronavirus is no big deal, everything is under control, no worries, etc.? It seems self defeating. Obviously the virus is going to do what it does regardless of what he says, and Trump’s Pollyanna routine is just going to make him seem ever further out of touch the worse things get.

Maybe. But I have another theory. This is not something that I believe Trump has thought through, but something that he’s adduced via pure, subconscious animal cunning, of which he is well endowed. Here it is:

All that matters is setting expectations. Ronald Reagan said over and over that lower taxes would bring the economy out of recession, so when the economy did finally rebound in 1984 it was low taxes that got the credit. The three previous years were all forgotten.

Likewise, what matters now is telling people that everything is OK; there are lots of test kits available; the death rate will be low; and Democrats are just a bunch of worrywarts. Eventually, when the coronavirus epidemic ebbs out, Trump will take credit for being right all along and the previous few months will be forgotten. By fall, Trump will seem like the bearer of comfort and relief while Democrats will seem like a bunch of partisan crybabies screeching that the sky is falling.

You will, of course, note that this is a completely sociopathic attitude. It assumes that Trump cares only about his own political future, not about containing damage from the coronavirus itself. The fact that his rosy nonsense might actually get more people killed either never occurs to him or else he just doesn’t care.

If this is how Trump thinks, there’s no upside to being a pessimist. It doesn’t distinguish him from anyone else and it makes him unpopular since no one likes being constantly lectured about not going to movies, always washing your hands, taking care of grampa, and so forth. From a purely cynical political point of view, Trump’s attitude is almost all upside and virtually no downside.

POSTSCRIPT: One other thing. Always keep in mind one of Trump’s axioms of management: when other people are in charge everything is terrible; when I’m in charge everything is great. He is currently in charge, so ipso facto things must be great.

NOTE: Of course, Trump’s approach will fail miserably if the coronavirus mutates and turns into a scourge that wipes out half the population. But it probably won’t! And if it does, Trump’s lizard brain probably realizes that nothing he says or does will matter anyway.

Friday was a dex night and I was bored, so I got in my car and drove around looking for pictures to take. Sometime in the wee hours of Saturday morning, while I was drifting east on Whittier Blvd., I saw this shop. Or, not a shop, really, just a gate. A beat up, worn out gate.

I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know. What I do know is that it perfectly captures my internal monologue most of the time these days: a beat up, worn out gallery of Tourette’s. Maybe yours too?