Donald Trump has pardoned Scooter Libby, who was convicted in 2007 of lying about his role in exposing an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame, because her husband was an annoyance to the Bush administration. There’s very little point to this pardon, since Libby never spent a day in jail and has long since been readmitted to the bar. However, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway explained, “Many people think that Scooter Libby was the victim of a special counsel gone amok.”

Hmmm. A special prosecutor run amok. I wonder who else might be a victim of a special prosecutor run amok? Oh right:

Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added…does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

I suppose all of Mueller’s victims deserve pardons too, don’t they? Of course they do.

On the subject of Libby, however, I’ll offer up this hot take: he was basically just a spear carrier for his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney. As long as Cheney is walking around free, I don’t really have a big problem with pardoning the fall guy.

Billy Bennight/UPPA/ZUMA

Stormy Daniels got ripped off:

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer negotiated a deal in late 2017 to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model who said she was impregnated by a top Republican fundraiser, according to people familiar with the matter. Michael Cohen, whose office, home and hotel room were raided by federal agents this week, arranged the payments to the woman on behalf of Elliott Broidy, a deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee with ties to Mr. Trump.

….The deal, which hasn’t previously been reported, prohibits the Los Angeles woman from disclosing her alleged relationship with Mr. Broidy in exchange for $1.6 million to be paid to her over two years in quarterly installments, these people said. The first payment was due Dec. 1, according to one of the people.

Stormy only got $130,000. What a chump.

Broidy says the whole thing was totally above board. He paid for the woman’s abortion and then tossed in an extra $1.599 million because he wanted to “help her financially during this difficult period.” As long as she kept her big mouth shut, that is. Helluva guy, isn’t he? Who says Republicans have a mean streak? I’ll give Laura Rozen the last word:

It’s like RNC finance committee is a street gang where you have to sleep with a playmate & pay hush money to join https://t.co/9Rf7boYmZO

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) April 13, 2018

From the Wall Street Journal today:

The plutocrats seem to be doing well. But don’t just take the word of some radical, capitalism-hating lefty at Mother Jones. The numbers speak for themselves:

Those bank-killing Dodd-Frank regulations have really devastated Wall Street, haven’t they? Thank God for last year’s Republican tax cut. If not for that, Jamie Dimon could probably barely afford his yacht moorage fees anymore.

The LA Times reports:

Southern California drivers are paying the highest pump prices for gasoline in 2½ years amid fears that prices could jump even further if the United States takes military action against Syria….Oil prices shot up this week after President Trump tweeted that missiles “will be coming” to Syria following allegations of a government chemical-weapons attack on a rebel-held Syrian town last weekend.

Hmmm. Gasoline prices always go up in California around this time of year as refineries switch to their summer blend.¹ Nationwide, there’s been a slow, steady rise in gasoline prices over the past couple of years, but no spike in the past month:

The price of oil doesn’t seem to have spiked either:

This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since, as the Times story itself notes, Syria doesn’t have any oil. Striking Syria may or may not be a good idea, but I doubt it will have any serious effect on gasoline prices.

¹And as refineries mysteriously shut down for a month or two due to “unanticipated” problems.

The last time I checked on the 2017 NAEP tests, their website said results had been delayed and would be released…eventually. So I missed it last week when they finally came out. As Bob Somerby says, this isn’t too surprising since barely anyone in the media bothered reporting on it.

Why didn’t the new scores get any attention? Too much Trump babble, perhaps. Or it might have been that the overall results were kind of mediocre, but not horrible or anything. So that leaves reporters with no easy narratives to attach to this year’s results. That said, if you look closely you’ll see some troubling news. First off, the people who make charts for the NAEP have difficulty counting to two:

This would have been more perfect if it had been the result for 8th grade math, but you go to war with the embarrassing errors you have, not the embarrassing errors you wish you had. NOTE: See update here.

Second, our white children are continuing to fall behind in math:

These results obviously demonstrate that there’s something wrong with white culture, even though politically correct liberals try to tap dance around it. Is it because white families don’t value education? Or because white kids are ostracized if they “act Asian”? Or is it something innate in white brains? More op-eds on this, please.

Finally, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Among the smartest kids, math scores are going up. Among the dullest, scores are going down. In 1990, the slow kids were 68 points behind the smart kids. Today they’re 77 points behind.

If you sense that I’m not taking this as seriously as I should, I plead guilty. But apparently no one else cares much, so why not just have a laugh instead? Except for that final chart about the growing smart-slow gap. That really is kind of disturbing. The full results are here.

Shutterstock

I don’t know how obvious this is, but I try not to spend too much time on what I think of as the Trump soap opera. You know: every tweet, every lawsuit, every piece of evidence that Trump is a moron, every news report that he’s going crazy, every rumor about the Mueller investigation, etc. etc. There have to be better things to do with our lives, right? Still, some days practically beg for at least a roundup. So here goes.

• The Republican Congress, in an act of almost superhuman duplicity, brought yet another balanced budget amendment to the floor of the House. They didn’t actually want it to pass, and it didn’t. Maybe next time Democrats should all vote for it just to screw with their minds.
• James Comey says that during dinner in 2017, Trump was absolutely obsessed with the “pee tape.” I guess that means we should all update our priors about how likely it is to actually exist.
• According to the Washington Post, Comey also writes in his new book that “Comey describes Trump as a congenital liar and unethical leader, devoid of human emotion and driven by personal ego.” More importantly, says David Corn, is the revelation that neither Trump nor any of his aides seemed to care about possible Russian interference in the election. The Post describes it this way: “Comey recalls being struck that neither Trump nor his advisers asked about the future Russian threat, nor how the United States might prepare to meet it. Rather, he writes, they focused on ‘how they could spin what we’d just told them.’ “
• Trump’s personal attorney/bag man, Michael Cohen, noted in a court filing today that he might plead the Fifth Amendment on certain subjects.
• In other Cohen news, it turns out that Cohen apparently had a habit of recording conversations. All of them. “If you are looking for evidence, you can’t do any better than people talking on tape,” Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, told the Washington Post. Such recordings “would be considered a gold mine,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who specializes in legal ethics.
• You already know that Trump suddenly decided to look into rejoining the TPP. He also suddenly decided to order a report on the Post Office’s finances. This is presumably part of his jihad against Jeff Bezos, and he’s hoping to somehow prove that Amazon is getting a sweetheart deal that should be revoked.
• Kevin Chmielewski, a longtime Trump supporter, was Scott Pruitt’s deputy chief of staff until Pruitt fired him in March. Chmielewski met with several congressional Democrats recently, and they wrote a letter today about what Chmielewski told them. I could summarize it for you, but really, you need to read it for yourself. The true flavor only comes through if you read (and read and read) about the astonishing number of sketchy activities that Pruitt engaged in. He apparently thought he’d been appointed pope, not EPA administrator.
• The Wall Street Journal says that Trump is planning to “ratchet up” the pressure on China over trade. I guess there must be an election coming up.
• The media went crazy over a story about the National Enquirer paying off a former doorman at a Trump building who said he knew of a secret Trump “love child.” The feeding frenzy wasn’t so much about the love child story itself, but about the news that the AP had the story last August but decided not to publish it. They did so today, and it turns out that lots of other outlets knew about it too—and hastily went to press after the AP story dropped. Here’s the New Yorker version, written by Ronan Farrow.

I’m probably missing a few things, but it’s dinnertime here in California. I’m going to go eat.

Canadians are usually pretty mild mannered, but get them on the subject of hockey or health care and they suddenly lose their shit:

We have gold-plated, employer-provided family health insurance from a major US corporation and it is so totally, utterly fucked, in every single way, every single time, and so totally, utterly worse than either the Canadian or UK system, so very much more expensive…

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 13, 2018

So badly administered, so high-handed, so untrustworthy, so inconvenient, so bureaucratic, and so inadequate in every way — and this is PINNACLE of American health-care achievement.

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 13, 2018

The US “system” is unworthy of the name. It is a toxic soup of rent-seeking, featherbedding, jobsworthing, and buck-passing, and it costs many multiples of the systems everyone else in the rich world uses.

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 13, 2018

JFC, America, you could do so much better than this. Everyone else in the rich world has is so much better than you. EVERYONE. You suffer under the yoke of a system that doesn’t deliver, picks your pocket, and then spits on you.

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 13, 2018

You should be in the streets with torches and pitchforks.

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) April 13, 2018

OK, sure, that’s all true, but what about hip replacements? That’s the real measure of a health care system, isn’t it?

Spring having sprung, it’s also duckling season. On Sunday we saw our first brood of ducklings of the year—in fact, the first in many years. From a photographic viewpoint, the fascinating thing about ducklings is that they always look out of focus. Even when you know for a fact that the camera’s focus is perfect, somehow they still look a little fuzzy. The optical principles involved are, I’m sure, fascinating.

The first picture was taken on Monday evening near sunset. The second picture—which is in pretty good focus!—was taken on Tuesday morning.

Behold our president:

President Trump, in a stunning reversal, told a gathering of farm state lawmakers and governors on Thursday morning that he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal he pulled out of within days of assuming the presidency.

Ramesh Ponnuru says: “It would be easy for Trump critics to use this episode to point out the thoughtlessness and malleability of some Trump stances and the emptiness of some of his words. Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) is probably right, though, to take the high road.”

I applaud Sasse’s forbearance, but I’m not really in a high-road mood these days. My guess is that our moron-in-chief has finally figured out that TPP was, to a large extent, explicitly designed to create a trade region that excludes China, so now he’s suddenly interested in it. Or, more to the point, he says he is. I doubt that Trump actually cares much about it except as a way to make China nervous, since this kind of dimwitted bluffing is really all he knows. I imagine he’ll lose interest once the China trade war has played out. TPP haters can probably relax.

From Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of a book on trends in Google searches:

I was blown away by how frequently people are searching for ways to do abortions themselves now. These searches are concentrated in parts of the country where it’s hard to get an abortion and they rose substantially when it became harder to get an abortion….That’s pretty disturbing and I think isn’t really being talked about. But I think, based on the data, it’s clearly going on.

I’m not sure what kind of search terms Stephens-Davidowitz is using here, but it sounds like this deserves more attention. For example, you could read “Inside the Top-Secret Abortion Underground,” by Nina Liss-Schultz, from our March issue.

Beyond that, I can show you the search trend over the past few years for abortion in general:

Did searches spike when Trump was elected because people were worried about whether abortion would be banned? Or because lots of people got depressed and started considering having an abortion?

UPDATE: More here based on an online survey given to people who Googled terms related to self-induced abortion: “1,235 respondents completed the survey. The vast majority of the sample was female (96%), and 41% were minors. Almost three-quarters (73%) indicated that they were searching for information because they were pregnant and did not or may not want to be. Eleven percent had ever attempted to self-abort. One-third of respondents did not know if abortion was legal in their state of residence, and knowledge of legality did not differ by age.”

Note also that interest was strongest in the South, where legal abortion is most constrained.