It’s kind of slow today so far, so here’s the latest data from the Border Patrol:

It’s looking more and more like Trump’s bluster caused a temporary dip in illegal border crossings, but we’re now back up to the same rates as before. A big mouth only gets you so far, apparently.

The American economy gained 164,000 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 a so-so 74,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate dropped to 3.9 percent, but this was entirely due to people dropping out of the labor force. The number of employed workers stayed exactly the same and the employment-population ratio dropped slightly. Wages of production and nonsupervisory workers were up 2.8 percent. That’s a little higher than the rate of inflation, so blue-collar workers saw a bit of a pay increase last month.

This was a pretty weak jobs report. Blue collar wages rose decently, but the drop in the unemployment rate is illusory, generated not by more people working but by more people dropping out of the labor force. The number of new jobs was OK, but nothing to write home about. The whole thing was very meh.

Yesterday I took up the critical question of whether millennial men really are slackers. Their unemployment rate is pretty normal these days, but I also wanted to check out their employment rate compared to an older generation. I couldn’t quite find what I wanted, but a reader nudged me to try harder, and I eventually found the BLS data I needed. Here it is:

As we know, the employment-population ratio for men has been declining steadily for decades. The question is, is it declining faster for young men than for older men? The answer is no: both are declining at exactly the same rate. Back in the 70s, young men had a higher employment ratio than middle-aged men by about 1 percentage point. Today, they also have a higher employment ratio by about 1 percentage point.

So purely in terms of having a job, today’s young men are about the same as young men half a century ago. There’s no evidence of an increase in slackerism.

In our last episode of Health Update, my M-protein level was starting to rise, indicating that the Revlimid was losing effectiveness and the multiple myeloma was staging a comeback. This is normal and expected after two years. When it got above 1.0, it would be time to switch to a second-line treatment. In the end, I got nearly three years out of the Revlimid, but the time has now come to move on:

The new treatment will consist of an oral version of my old friend Velcade teamed up with Darzalex, a monoclonal antibody that’s one of the slew of new treatments that have been approved over the past few years. I will also once again be taking the evil dex, a sleep killer marketed as a corticosteroid. During my last round of dex, I used my treatment nights to write a 40-page tutorial on special and general relativity. I can’t really say why I did that, but I’m sure it would have been a publishing sensation if I had ever published it.

Anyway, the new treatment will start in a week or so. It’s once a week for two months, then once every two weeks for two months, and then once a month. The total length of time depends on how I respond. Once the M-proteins are back under control, I’ll begin a maintenance routine which will hopefully last a couple of years. Keep your fingers crossed.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and the president in happier times.Handout/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Today is beyond nuts. The president’s lawyer has admitted that the president paid off a porn star to keep her quiet during the campaign and has been lying about it ever since. He also admitted that the president fired the FBI director because he had refused to publicly state that the president wasn’t under investigation. He also thinks that pretty much everyone in the Justice Department should be fired in order to bring the current investigation of the president to a halt. And they should probably all be investigated themselves. Oh, and we also learned that the president’s bagman/fixer has been under a wiretap for at least the past several weeks, which might explain some of the panic emanating from the White House. [UPDATE: It was a pen register, not a wiretap. In other words, just a record of incoming and outgoing calls, not recordings of conversations.]

Meanwhile, the president’s most corrupt underlings are engaged in a brutal war of all-against-all. Over at the Atlantic, Elaina Plott reports that an aide to Scott Pruitt tried to push a damaging story about Ryan Zinke in order to get the spotlight off of Pruitt’s own massive corruption problems:

In the last week, a member of Pruitt’s press team, Michael Abboud, has been shopping negative stories about Zinke to multiple outlets, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the efforts, as well as correspondence reviewed by The Atlantic….The stories were shopped with the intention of “taking the heat off of Pruitt,” the sources said.

….Abboud alleged to reporters that an Interior staffer conspired with former EPA deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski to leak damaging information about the EPA, as part of a rivalry between Zinke and Pruitt. The collaboration, Abboud claimed, allowed the Interior staffer to prop up Zinke at the expense of Pruitt, and Chmielewski to “get back” at his former boss.

….It is unclear the extent to which Pruitt was aware of these events. Even so, the message from PPO, according to the senior official, was: “Basically, y’all are in trouble.” A White House official with knowledge of the events added: “Absolutely nothing Scott Pruitt did would surprise me.” Heather Swift, a spokeswoman for Interior, and Raj Shah, a spokesman for the White House, both declined to comment.

In case you’re confused, the story is that Zinke planned to leak damaging information about Pruitt. So Pruitt then leaked that story in order to damage Zinke.

As for whether Pruitt was aware of these events, give me a break. Hell, it was probably his idea. Pruitt is now at the center of so many corruption allegations that I can’t even keep track of them, and his defense for every one of them has been that it was somebody else’s fault and he had no idea what was going on. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together believes him. Why believe him this time?

But wait. I forgot. Let’s get back to the president for a minute. The president’s lawyer also said that he opposed having the president talk to the special counsel because he didn’t want the president walking into a perjury trap. But a perjury trap only works if the target has done something wrong and gets blindsided during an interview. That’s how Ken Starr bagged Bill Clinton. It doesn’t work if either (a) the target has done nothing wrong or (b) the target knows a perjury trap is coming. Since Donald Trump insists he’s done nothing wrong and his lawyer has obviously warned him about a perjury trap, then he should have nothing to worry about.

Just a wild guess here, but I’m thinking that Trump has not only done something wrong, but he’s done so many things wrong that he can’t even keep them straight. Thus a perjury trap remains a live possibility.

Anyway, it’s kind of funny that Republicans are so disturbed by perjury traps these days. They seemed to think they were great fun back in 1998.

Oh, and one other thing. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was so affronted at being called a liar at the WHCD last weekend, has been lying about Stormy Daniels all along too. Or maybe Trump has been lying to her. Who knows? In any case, she’s refusing to comment about it. I think this is probably a smart move.

How about a lovely calla lily to end the week? Well—almost end, anyway. The cats, as usual, will truly end the week.

This is the Ford Mustang, the only sedan that will be left in Ford's product line by 2020. Its fuel economy is an SUV-like 18-25 mpg.Ford Motor Company

Last week Ford announced that they were discontinuing production of nearly all their sedans. From now on, it would just be trucks and SUVs.

The proximate cause of this, I assumed, is that low gas prices have driven higher demand for SUVs and lower demand for gas-sipping cars. And that’s part of it. But there’s another thing at work: high mileage sedans are necessary to meet federal CAFE standards, which apply to a carmaker’s entire fleet. At least, they used to be necessary. Dan Neil thinks this is what’s really behind Ford’s decision:

In my view, Ford’s announcement last week was about the weather in Washington, D.C. Management has calculated that it will no longer need the mileage offsets from sales of smaller, less-profitable vehicle lines to meet its CAFE obligations. Last month Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt announced an effort to roll back the 2025 standards hammered out by the agency and automakers during the Obama administration. It is also widely expected that Mr. Pruitt will go after California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act allowing it (and 11 other states) to set its own tailpipe rules.

Who needs fuel economy? Not the US of A! And with higher fuel economy standards about to get deep sixed by the Trump administration, why bother making all those crummy little tin cans that you never really wanted to make in the first place?

By the way, a recent study funded by the Pentagon found that a bunch of Pacific atolls that host billions of dollars of military hardware will probably be underwater—or close to it—within a few decades. But don’t worry. A few more years of driving around in SUVs is worth it.

Last night, Rudy Giuliani implied not just that President Trump doesn’t have to talk to Robert Mueller if he doesn’t want to, but that he’s far too busy to talk to Mueller. He’s got important stuff he’s working on! Korea! Iran! Syria!

Here’s is Trump’s schedule today:

This will be followed by a weekend of golf. I’m thinking he could maybe fit in a few minutes for an interview.

Rudy Giuliani’s admission last night that Donald Trump personally paid hush money to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign is still at the top of the news. But just because I find it so amusing, I want to highlight Sean Hannity’s full and complete response to this:

Oh, I didn’t know that. He did? But there’s no campaign finance law?

For any normal interviewer, the next question would have been: “But the president denied knowing anything about this. Why did he lie about it?” And that would have been a little tough to answer. But that’s why you do these things on Fox News instead of a real news channel.

Corporate earnings are in and Q1 was a blockbuster quarter!

Thanks, Republican Party! You came through for big corporations again.