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.

Carlos Osorio/The Toronto Star via ZUMA

I’ve mostly tried to ignore the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. In a nutshell, he appears to be an academic who got caught in a war with lefty students and now makes his living by touring the country and denouncing political correctness. There are lots of folks out there with the same schtick, and he’s just the latest flavor of the month. A year from now he’ll be a trivia question.

But today’s profile of Peterson in the Washington Post gave me pause:

The world is wretched with weak men. Slouchers, slackers, chumps, low-status dudes who have amassed a crumpled pile of inferior habits and made the world a messier place.

Or so Jordan Peterson will tell you. But fear not, the doctor is here to help, preaching his thoroughly footnoted gospel of order and discipline, one rule at a time — in a popular book, in lectures far from his ivory tower roost and, most potently, on YouTube.

If Peterson really does help young men with his advice, then more power to him. But it got me curious: are 20-something men more likely to be slackers and chumps than in the past? There’s no simple way to answer that, of course, but I started browsing through a few statistics that might give us some clues. The most obvious one is unemployment:

It looks like young men of the past decade are unemployed at about the same rate as they always have been. I’d like to also check the employment-population ratio for this age group, but apparently the BLS doesn’t collect that data.

I’m not going to post a mountain of charts for all the other indicators of how young men are doing. Instead I’m just going to present a quick rundown of a few of them:

• College graduation: Up since 1980, but women are up even more.
• Marriage rate: Down considerably over the past five decades. Among 30-year-old men, about 40 percent are married today compared to 80 percent in the 60s.
• Drugs: Since 1991, marijuana use appears to be roughly steady, while the use of all other illicit drugs is down.
• Alcohol: Both binge drinking and alcohol use in general is down.
• Violent crime: Way down.
• Median income: Has plummeted:
  

  

The marriage rate of young men is way down and the median income of young men is way down. The other indicators are mostly positive. Leaving aside anecdotal evidence, what else should we be looking at?

Siavosh Hosseini/NurPhoto via ZUMA

WTF?

President Trump reimbursed Michael D. Cohen, his longtime personal lawyer, for the $130,000 payment that Mr. Cohen has said he made to keep a pornographic film actress from going public just before the 2016 election with her story about an affair with Mr. Trump, according to Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s lawyers.

Giuliani said this on the Hannity show. According to the Times, it “appears to contradict” what Trump has been saying for the past several months.

Well, no, it doesn’t “appear” to contradict. It just flat out contradicts what Trump has said. It also contradicts what Michael Cohen has said. So somebody is lying here, and there’s no good reason that Giuliani would suddenly volunteer to go on Hannity’s show to lie about this. In fact, he specifically said to Hannity, “I’m giving you a fact that you don’t know.” He’s working for Trump these days, and it’s obvious that Giuliani must have advised Trump that he needs to get out ahead of this. He must be afraid that Cohen has already ratted out Trump.

There was also this fascinating tidbit from Giuliani: “That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the president reimbursed that over the period of several months.” Why would Trump have to reimburse it over several months? Is he really that broke? Did he do it just to humiliate Cohen? Did he do it in $9,999 chunks so it didn’t have to get reported? What’s the deal here?

Speaking of ways that Republicans are screwing the very same people who voted them into office, Sarah Kliff highlights a chart that I missed yesterday. It’s from that Commonwealth Fund survey showing the increase in the uninsured:

It turns out that the Republican sabotage of Obamacare hasn’t affected Democrats. Their uninsured rate has continued to fall. But among Republicans, the number of those without health insurance has nearly doubled, from 7.9 percent to 13.9 percent. That’s higher than it was before Obamacare.

Tell me again why anyone votes for these guys?