Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg reports today that Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump has widened considerably from Russian campaign collusion:

FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings … SoHo development with Russian associates … 2013 Miss Universe pageant … sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch … dealings with the Bank of Cyprus … efforts of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and White House aide, to secure financing for some of his family’s real estate properties.

….The roots of Mueller’s follow-the-money investigation lie in a wide-ranging money laundering probe launched by then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara last year, according to the person.

I’ll confess to some mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this stuff is all semi-related to Russia, and might therefore be relevant to the campaign issue. On the other hand, we’ve all seen what happens when special prosecutors get out of control and start investigating everything under the sun. So far this looks like it’s still legitimately tied to Mueller’s original brief, but it’s a close call.

Donald Trump sure knows how to screw up, doesn’t he? He fired James Comey because the FBI was investigating Russia and he fired Preet Bharara because he was leading an investigation of money laundering. The end result was to bring more attention to both of these issues and put them in the hands of a guy with a big budget and nothing else to distract him. Nice work, Donald. Anybody else you want to fire?

I don’t have any special reason for posting this. I just happened to be looking at it. For full-time workers, women’s earnings have been steadily getting closer to men’s for the past four decades, but that seems to have leveled out since the end of the recession. It’s been stuck at around 81-82 percent ever since 2010:

This is hardly the most important part of Donald Trump’s interview with the New York Times today, but still:

So pre-existing conditions are a tough deal. Because you are basically saying from the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan. Here’s something where you walk up and say, “I want my insurance.” It’s a very tough deal, but it is something that we’re doing a good job of.

Trump still doesn’t know the difference between health insurance and life insurance. And yet, he says the senators he met with at lunch “couldn’t believe it, how much I know about it. I know a lot about health care.” Uh huh.

On a different note, this interview is just a long series of anodyne questions with no real attempt to pin down Trump on anything of substance. Aside from conversational stuff, here’s a fairly complete list of the questions they asked:

• How was your lunch [with Republican senators]?
• You are generally of the view that people should have health care, right?
• Did the senators want to try again [to pass health care]?
• Where does it go from here, do you think?
• How’s [Mitch] McConnell to work with?
• Will you go to Britain? Are you going to make a state visit to Britain?
• A lot of people are curious about your conversation with President [Vladimir V.] Putin at dinner. Not surprising. But what did you all talk about…?
• You asked them [Republican senators] about it [Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer] at lunch?
• Sorry to interrupt. The email, though, said something I thought was really interesting, and I wonder what you thought of it. It said this “is part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump.” So whatever actually happened at the meeting—
• So, what do you interpret that to mean, now that you have seen it?
• I do want to come out, on the email, now that you have seen that email that said Russia’s government — I mean, how did you — did you interpret it that way?
• Given what’s happened since then, though, was it a political mistake to have fired him [James Comey], given what’s happened?
• But look at the headache it’s caused, you know?
• Do you wish you had done it on Day 1?
• What would be the line beyond which if Mueller went, you would say, “That’s too far, we would need to dismiss him”?
• Did you shoo other people out of the room when you talked to Comey?
• This is why I want to come back to that email, because, like — does it concern you? Let’s say that the election didn’t change because of anything Russia did, which has been your point, right? You point —
• But did that email concern you, that the Russian government was trying something to compromise—
• Last thing, if Mueller was looking at your finances and your family finances, unrelated to Russia — is that a red line?

There aren’t more than two or three probing questions in the whole bunch. And the only attempt at a follow-up of any kind was from Peter Baker on the Don Jr. email. I get that it’s entertaining to let Trump ramble and free associate—and I admit that it does produce news sometimes—but a high school reporter could have conducted this interview. What’s the point of bothering with it if you’re just going to lob a bunch of Fox & Friends nerf ball questions and then let Trump blather?

Michael Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA

I can only assume that Donald Trump barely even knows what he’s saying anymore. Here he is during an interview with the New York Times, griping about Attorney General Jeff Sessions:

In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.

….Mr. Trump also faulted Mr. Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings when Mr. Sessions said he had not met with any Russians even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”

And former FBI director James Comey too:

….The president added a new allegation against Mr. Comey….Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.

In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believes Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,’’ Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”

Trump apparently thinks that blocking embarrassing investigations is part of the attorney general’s job. If Sessions wasn’t willing to do that, “I would have picked somebody else.” Does Trump have any idea what he’s admitting here?

And, in restrospect, he now thinks Comey was trying to blackmail him. This despite the fact that Mother Jones had written about the dossier weeks before and it was common knowledge that it was out there.

I’m not even sure what to say about this stuff anymore. Nothing matters, does it? Trump really could gun someone down in the Oval Office and Fox News would report that Trump had stopped a terrorist attack.

From a Vox roundup of Republican reactions to the failure of their health care bill, here is senator John Thune:

Some Democrats have claimed Obamacare repeal collapsed because Republicans spent years falsely promising on the campaign trail that they had a better alternative waiting in the wings.

But Thune said he’d drawn just the opposite conclusion from the whole project. “I think Democrats will say Republicans had all this time and they didn’t have any ideas [to fix Obamacare]. But the problem is we have too many ideas,” Thune said. “It’s a challenge on how to take all these different policies and knit them together in a way that gets you an actual health bill.”

Poor Republicans. They’re bursting with so many great ideas that they just can’t seem to whittle them down to manageable size. A meeting of the Republican caucus must be practically electric with intellectual fervor.

Alternatively, what Thune meant by “too many ideas” is that some Republicans want to hurt the poor a lot in order to fund a big tax cut for the rich, while some want to hurt the poor a little less in order to fund a slightly smaller tax cut for the rich. The devil is in the details, amirite?

From the president of the United States, asked about the unemployment rate:

When we got those great reports, I kept saying—you know, those numbers were 4.2, 4.3—I said, for a long time, they don’t matter. But now I accept those numbers very proudly. I say they do matter.

This is laughable, but here’s the thing: I suspect that his supporters love this kind of attitude. After all, that’s how most of us treat information.¹ If it supports our opinion, we trumpet it. If it doesn’t, we dismiss it. That’s how normal people who want to win arguments deploy facts and figures, and Trump’s fans view him as a normal guy who wants to win, not some academic egghead.

Bottom line: Donald Trump may be an asshole, but he’s our asshole.

¹Not you, of course. I mean other people.

I like this picture a lot, and it was a stroke of luck. The swells at Huntington Beach were tiny the day I was there, but one of them hit just right to produce a splash about eight feet high. I was in the right place at the right time, and happened to have my camera set to a high shutter speed (1/800th of a second). That was enough to freeze the water and produce a great shot. A very minor bit of photoshopping lightened the shadow covering the boy and brightened up the color of his trunks a bit. Welcome to Southern California.

According to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, voters in Trump-friendly places are getting a little more frustrated with the president they elected. Here are the top things they dislike:

A couple of days ago, I asked a conservative friend what he thought of Trump after six months. The first thing he said was, “I wish he’d quit tweeting.” Even Trump fans seem to realize that his tweets make him look like an idiot, and this reflects badly on them too.

Remember the Cruz Amendment? It’s probably as dead as the rest of Trumpcare, but HHS has released an analysis anyway. Long story short, they project that enrollment will go up and average premiums will go down compared to Obamacare.

And that’s actually possible. The Cruz Amendment would allow insurers to offer both full-coverage plans (i.e., ACA compliant) and stripped-down plans. The full-coverage plans would be expensive and would appeal to the old and sick. The stripped-down plans would be cheap and would appeal to the young and healthy. It’s entirely possible that the gain of healthy people would be greater than the loss of sick people, and that a pool with more healthy people would indeed have lower average premiums.

Of course, this is all sleight of hand. Averages are meaningless here. What we want to know is how much premiums will skyrocket for sick people, who have no choice but to buy the full-coverage plans. Here is the HHS estimate:¹

These numbers are derived from a “proprietary elasticity estimate,” so I have no idea how they’re calculated. In any case, HHS estimates that both the young and the healthy will flee the full-coverage plans, meaning that nearly half the pool for those plans will be the old and the sick. Given this, it’s hard to believe that average premiums in this pool will rise from $360 to only $625. That seems…optimistic. The trick, it turns out, is that HHS is assuming a $12,000 deductible per person (!). That would certainly help to keep premiums down. As a public service, then, I’ve added the green bars, which is my estimate of what these premiums would be if we ratcheted that back down to Obamacare’s more defensible $7,000 deductible. Comparing apples to apples, premiums actually triple. At least.

Additionally, HHS projects that by 2024 about half of all customers will still choose to enroll in a full-coverage plan, which also strikes me as a wee bit optimistic. But who knows? Since most people would still be protected by Obamacare’s subsidies, which go up as premiums go up, maybe lots of people really would stay in full-coverage plans, even with the sky-high deductibles. Of course, that would cost the government a lot of money, and sure enough, HHS projects that by 2024 the Cruz Amendment would cost the feds an extra $10 billion per year.

If Republicans allow CBO to finish its score of the Cruz Amendment, I guess we’ll find out if they agree. In the meantime, take this with a big grain of salt. HHS is not exactly a neutral party in this.

BY THE WAY: If you decide to look at the HHS analysis, you’ll notice that the first half is all estimates of the Cruz Amendment assuming a single risk pool. You should ignore this and move straight to the second half, which assumes two risk pools. This is practically the whole point of the Cruz Amendment, so I have no idea why they even bothered with estimates for a single risk pool.

¹HHS actually provides both low and high estimates. I averaged them to produce a single number.

Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun/TNS via ZUMA

Just how stifling is it on university campuses these days? What with all the trigger warnings, safe spaces, heckler’s vetoes, diversity worship, and humorless lefties, it’s a wonder there’s any time left to teach classes.

But how bad is it really? The Martin Center posts stories about ill-treated conservatives periodically, and these are picked up by National Review, where I see them. But are these stories the tip of a massive iceberg of intolerance on American campuses? Or is a weekly outrage pretty much all there is, representing a minuscule fraction of the 1.5 million professors currently teaching on university campuses?

I don’t really have any way of knowing, and I usually just scan the outrages and move on. Today, though, I was intrigued. Here is George Leef:

Leftists are notorious for their lack of a sense of humor….One faculty member who recently discovered that is Professor Trent Bertrand of Johns Hopkins. Make that formerly of Johns Hopkins. A joke he told in his international-economics course earlier this year led to complaints by three students that he had created a “hostile learning environment” for them. That’s bad enough, but the university’s overreaction was mind-boggling.

That sounds kind of grim. A single offhand witticism that went a little awry and the guy is toast. What on earth did he say? Here’s the joke:

An American loses his job due to his work being off-shored. He is very depressed and calls a mental health hot line. He gets a call center in Pakistan where the call center employee asks, “What seems to be the problem?” The American responds that he has lost his job due to the work being sent overseas and states, “I am really depressed and actually suicidal.” The call center employee says, “Great. Can you drive a truck?”

What a knee slapper! This is from Bertrand himself, so we can be sure that his enemies aren’t exaggerating what he said. I conclude two things:

• Bertrand was a contract instructor with three classes left before the end of the semester. Maybe they should have just let him finish up instead of escorting him off campus.
• Bertrand is an asshole.

This was not some offhand witticism. This was a carefully conceived joke whose sole purpose was to cast Muslims as suicide bombers. Bertrand told it with malice aforethought even though it really has nothing to do with offshoring.¹ Nor is this a matter of contention. Bertrand happily admits that he regaled his class with this jest.

Without knowing more, I won’t weigh in on whether Bertrand should have been escorted off campus by security. But if this is the kind of thing National Review is defending, it makes me think they’re a little short on genuine campus outrages.

¹If you’re unclear about this, replace “offshored” with “laid off thanks to Obamacare.” It works just as well.