The American economy gained 196,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 106,000 jobs. The unemployment rate remained at 3.8 percent.

Behind the headline number, the number of people in the labor force dropped by 369,000 and the number of employed people dropped by 201,000. The labor participation rate dropped from 63.2 percent to 63 percent, losing its recent gains and continuing its long-term record of flatness since 2016. These aren’t great numbers, especially after such a weak February report.

Earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers increased at an annualized rate of 3.2 percent in March. With inflation running at about 1.5 percent lately, this means blue collar workers saw an increase of 1.7 percent at an annualized rate. That’s not bad.

Overall, this is a mediocre jobs report. The top line number is sort of average, but the underlying numbers are pretty weak, especially since we’d normally expect a bigger rebound after February’s poor report. It’s not a reason to panic, perhaps, but it’s hardly great news, either. Time for a rate cut?

This is a picture of—perhaps—a pink trumpet tree.¹ It lives on the parkway about ten yards from our house and the view is straight up from the bottom of the tree against a blank, overcast sky. But overcast though it might be, it still shows up as bright white when you expose for the blooms.

I took this yesterday morning as a lark. Usually photos taken from extreme angles don’t work well, but this one did—largely, I think, because the blooms are so nice and the pure white background is sort of startling. In any case, this is our answer to Washington DC’s cherry blossom outbreak.

¹As always, let me know in comments if it’s actually something else.

Our president has had yet another brainstorm to remake the Fed in his image:

President Trump has told confidants he wants Herman Cain on the Federal Reserve board, but will wait until his background check is completed before making the formal announcement, according to two senior administration officials familiar with the decision….As with any Trump “decision,” administration officials are quick to attach an asterisk. This time, their hesitation is less about Trump changing his mind than about something coming up in Cain’s background check that could complicate the situation.

Yeah, that’s Herman “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan” Cain. Kind of a perfect fit for Trump, actually.

"How are you doing on your differential equations, sweetie? You don't want to end up at UCLA, do you?"Marijan Murat/DPA via ZUMA

Caitlin Flanagan recounts her years as a college counselor at an elite prep school in Los Angeles during the 90s:

It was true that a quarter of the class went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT, and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible….A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.

The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them.

….I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.

But there’s good news!

I will now add as a very truthful disclaimer that the horrible parents constituted at most 25 percent of the total, that the rest weren’t just unobjectionable, but many—perhaps most—were lovely people who were so wise about parenting that when I had children of my own, I often remembered things they had told me.

Only 25 percent of them were complete, unrepentant assholes! Not bad!

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has asked the IRS to turn over six years of President Trump’s tax returns. What took him so long?

Mr. Neal said throughout that he was chiefly concerned with crafting a request, alongside the House general counsel and the Ways and Means Committee staff, that could withstand legal challenge. “I am certain we are within our legitimate legislative, legal and oversight rights,” he said on Wednesday.

Hmmm. Here’s the part of the letter that justifies the request:

So weeks of review with his legal staff has produced this? A letter saying they need Trump’s tax returns in order to conduct oversight on whether the IRS is properly auditing them? And for this they need not just his tax returns since 2017, but also for the four years before he was president?

It may turn out that the statutory authority of Congress to request tax returns is so absolute that none of this matters. But just in case it’s not, this sure seems like a mighty flimsy excuse. It’s true that no one on the Ways and Means Committee has ever publicly stated a different reason (i.e., “we’re gonna get the son of a bitch” or something similar), a habit that has produced several losses for Trump in federal courts. Still, couldn’t they have come up with something better? This strikes me as pretty thin.

The reason Donald Trump hates wind power is because of offshore wind turbines like these. He engaged in an epic battle to keep them away from his golf club in Scotland, but lost. Earlier this year, he was even ordered to pay the government's legal costs for defending themselves against his lawsuit. That's why he hates wind turbines.Benoit Doppagne/Belga via ZUMA

A couple of days ago President Trump said the noise from wind farms might cause cancer. Not the wind turbines themselves, the noise from the turbines. Is Trump right? Iowa is a leader in wind production, so the AP asked Iowa’s governor:

Asked about Trump’s claim, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds refused to say the president was wrong, saying it was not her place to do so. “You know how those things change. One year coffee is good for you and the next year coffee causes cancer,” she said. “That’s what happens. We’ve got a lot of people that are driving the industry and investing in the industry and we should be proud of our position.”

The unwillingness of Republicans to criticize even the most idiotic of Trump’s ramblings is really something to behold.

NBC News is getting into the act too:

NBC News is also reporting that some on the Mueller team say his findings paint a picture of a campaign whose members were was manipulated by a sophisticated Russian intelligence operation. Some of that information may be classified.

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) April 4, 2019

Apparently there are multiple (?) members of Mueller’s team who are pretty unhappy with Barr’s summary of their report. And they’ve been grumbling about it to people who are willing to speak up if reporters call them. So why didn’t anyone call them on the day the Barr summary was released? Why wait a week?

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

The Washington Post chimes in tonight on the Mueller team’s unhappiness with William Barr’s summary of their report:

Some members of the office were particularly disappointed that Barr did not release summary information the special counsel team had prepared, according to two people familiar with their reactions. “There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead,” according one U.S. official briefed on the matter.

Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could made public, the official said. The report was prepared “so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly,” the official said. “It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself.”

Mueller’s team assumed the information was going to be made available to the public, the official said, “and so they prepared their summaries to be shared in their own words — and not in the attorney general’s summary of their work, as turned out to be the case.”

Gee, I wonder why Barr didn’t like the Mueller team’s own summary of their work. It would have been quick and easy to release, and presumably it would have been a very accurate precis of what the full report says.

I wonder.

Xinhua via ZUMA

Hum de hum:

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

I am shocked. Please continue:

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

….The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions.

Really? Mueller’s report came with its own summary? Multiple summaries, in fact? Who would have guessed?

Apparently Barr’s team says that even the summaries contain classified information and have to be scrubbed. I doubt there’s very much of that, and anyway, the whole point of a summary is that it’s short. That means it can be scrubbed quickly even if it does have some classified bits and pieces. So why are even the summaries being held up while the entire report is reviewed? It’s almost as if Barr just isn’t very eager to let the public know what’s in there.

This is the skylight in our house. Yes, it’s trapezoidal. No, I don’t know why. Our cats used to like sleeping in the square of sunshine it let through, but then it broke a few years ago and got replaced by a modern new skylight with built-in UV protection. It no longer produces much warmth, so the cats ignore it. They call this progress.

And now for the main reason for posting this. At the bottom center, there’s a face in the clouds. Who do you think it looks like?