Atrios on torture:

If I was involved in this stuff and avoided prosecution…I’d count my blessings and not think, “hey, maybe I should stick around and pursue the highest job in order to ensure that I would have renewed media scrutiny for all that torture.” … The problem isn’t simply that these people weren’t prosecuted (though they should have been). It’s that they weren’t even shamed enough to think that maybe the public spotlight wasn’t the best thing for them.

So why didn’t that happen? Unfortunately, I think public polling offers us all the explanation we need:

The American public supports torture by a pretty wide margin, and Republicans support it almost unanimously. This means there’s really not much reason for anyone to feel ashamed about it or to think it will hurt their reputation or their ability to work in government.

The bottom half of the poll graphic explains why so many people feel this way: they’re scared. This is hard for people like me to understand: It never even occurs to me to feel scared in any of the situations they asked about. At airports I mostly feel annoyed. At movies I mostly wish Hollywood made better stuff. At sporting events I wish the guy in front of me wasn’t wearing a big hat.

But scared people support bad policies. They support interning people of Japanese ancestry. They support napalm and carpet bombing. And they support torture. The only way to change this is to figure out a way to make people less scared. Obviously we haven’t done that yet.

The CDC released its latest quarterly estimate of the uninsured today, which covers the period up through Q3 of 2017:

UPDATE: I’ve been publishing this chart for years, but suddenly everyone thinks it’s misleading because it starts at 9 percent. I will have more to say about this later, but here’s the same chart with a y-axis that starts at zero:

Is this better? I’m not so sure. END UPDATE

Since 2015, the CDC’s estimate of the uninsured has been stable at 10-11 percent. This is pretty obviously the final steady-state result of Obamacare, and it represents a drop of 6 percentage points since 2013, or about 17 million people. We only have 28 million to go to get everyone covered.

And as long as we’re on the subject of CDC stats, here’s one showing the rise in the number of people getting flu shots every year:

I’m a little surprised the number is so low for the non-elderly, though I’m not one to talk. It was only a few years ago that I ever bothered to get one. I wonder what the big dropoff in 2004 was all about? Ah, wait: according to the technical notes there was a flu vaccine shortage that year. The funny thing is that it seemed to have a surprisingly long-term effect. Just by eyeball, it looks like it took about five years for the number of people getting a flu shot to catch up to its old trendline.

Even for Donald Trump, this is a weird story. Here’s the setup:

President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech Wednesday that he made up information in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S. ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether that was the case.

“Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,’ ” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio obtained by The Washington Post….“I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know….He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case I feel differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check because I can’t believe it.’ ”

So far, this is typical Trump: bragging about how ignorant he is but supposedly getting the better of his oh-so-urbane counterpart anyway. But then “his guy” comes back with the numbers:

‘Well, sir, you’re actually right. We have no deficit but that doesn’t include energy and timber … And when you do, we lose $17 billion a year.’ It’s incredible.”

Energy? Timber? WTF is that supposed to be about? Here’s our actual trade deficit with Canada:

For the past three years, we’ve had a trade deficit in goods with Canada of about $20 billion, mostly because we import lots of oil and natural gas from them (about $70 billion in 2017). But that’s only tangible goods. We export a lot of services to Canada (financial services, computer services, etc.), and as a result we’ve been running a total trade surplus of about $5 billion. This is what Trudeau was talking about. It has nothing to do with timber, and the number $17 billion doesn’t show up anywhere.

This information takes about five minutes to look up. What kind of “guys” does Trump have who come back to him with a cockamamie story like this? Or did they come back with the real numbers and now Trump is just inventing a tall tale about his triumph over Justin Trudeau? Or what? Can anyone out there make any more sense of this story than I can?

POSTSCRIPT: Also, if this story is anywhere close to true, can you just imagine what Trudeau told his people when he got back? I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that debrief.

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

Gabriel Sherman reports that Donald Trump met with John “Let’s Bomb Iran!” Bolton a few days ago to discuss hiring him as National Security Advisor:

Sources added that Trump spent much of the time with Bolton fuming that McMaster was speaking privately with Barack Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice. “Trump kept saying, ‘Can you believe it? To Susan Rice? Can you believe it?’ ”

I wonder how Trump knew this? Surely H.R. McMaster wasn’t foolish enough to tell him—or anyone else, for that matter? Susan Rice has been a Republican bogeyman ever since they made idiots out of themselves trying to pretend that Rice was responsible for deliberately misleading the nation about Benghazi. Trump, of course, doesn’t know Susan Rice from Rice-a-Roni, but he knows that she’s bad, and that therefore it’s bad that McMaster talks to her occasionally.

Then there’s this:

Sources said Trump has discussed a plan to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions. According to two Republicans in regular contact with the White House, there have been talks that Trump could replace Sessions with E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt, who would not be recused from overseeing the Russia probe.

This would be Pruitt’s dream come true, but it would be a horror show for everyone else. For all his faults, Sessions does have a sense of integrity about applying the law. Pruitt has no such constraints. He is consumed solely by ambition and a hatred of liberals, and he would do whatever Trump wanted.

In other news, Trump has hired TV economist Larry Kudlow to head up the National Economic Council. Here is Kudlow’s background: he has a BA in history and a long history of blathering about supply-side economics on TV and radio. He should fit right in. If all of these moves take place, it would mean:

• Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Jeff Sessions, and Gary Cohn

  have been replaced by

• Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Scott Pruitt, and Larry Kudlow.

And you thought Team Trump couldn’t get worse? Think again.

Remember this from the 2016 Republican Convention? Good times.Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

As part of his bizarre obsession with the 2016 election, Donald Trump has insisted for a long time that deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe conspired against him during the campaign. Why? Pay close attention:

• McCabe’s wife is a Democrat.
• She ran for office in Virginia a few years ago.
• Like all Democrats, she got help from then-governor Terry McAuliffe.
• McAuliffe is famously one of Hillary Clinton’s good buddies.
• Therefore McCabe was in league with Hillary to defeat Trump. This is why Hillary was never charged in the email case even though we all know she was totally guilty and should have spent the rest of her life in prison.

Trump has tweeted more than once that McCabe should be fired, and now he’s close to getting his wish:

Mr. McCabe is ensnared in an internal review that includes an examination of his decision in 2016 to allow F.B.I. officials to speak with reporters about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that Mr. McCabe was not forthcoming during the review, according to the people briefed on the matter. That yet-to-be-released report triggered an F.B.I. disciplinary process that recommended his termination — leaving Mr. Sessions to either accept or reverse that decision.

For what it’s worth, note that McCabe was arguing in favor of investigating the Clinton Foundation, which would hurt Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump. Whatever. So what is it that McCabe supposedly did wrong?

The details of why the inspector general viewed Mr. McCabe as not forthcoming are not clear.

Anyway, McCabe is scheduled to retire on Sunday, but if he gets fired on Friday instead it will reduce his retirement benefits. Trump actually tweeted a few months ago that he thinks it would be outrageous if McCabe got his full benefits:

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go?!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2017

Our government is being run like a mafia family. A very, very petty mafia family.

In honor of Pi Day, today’s lunchtime photo comes a little early. This is a picture of Interstate 5 as you make the final descent into the San Joaquin Valley after crossing the Grapevine. Like pi, it seems to extend to infinity, going on forever and ever.

Not impressed? Sorry, it was the best I could do. I racked my brain for pi references I could make to any of the photos in my queue, but came up empty. So this is it.

By the way, today is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. He is, of course, famous for the definition of pi in his general theory of relativity, which he first wrote down while reviewing a patent application for a system of synchronized pie tins connected via telegraph wires:

This was a technical correction to Isaac Newton’s definition of pi, which occurred to him when he got bonked on the head by a falling apple:

In practice, Newton’s definition of pi is still used by working physicists today. Einstein’s definition is needed only for pies the size of the solar system.

BY THE WAY: Today is American Pi Day. In Europe, where they typically write the month first, 314 is April 31st, which is the day after April 30th, which is May 1st. Then there’s (American) Two Pi Day, which is on June 28. It’s even better than Pi Day because everyone gets two pies.

ALSO: Congratulations to St. Louis, which scored the coveted 314 area code back in 1947, and Marin County, which snagged the 628 area code just a few years ago.

Brian Cahn via ZUMA

Just for the record, all the absentee ballots have finally been counted in the Pennsylvania 18th district special election, and Conor Lamb is the winner by 627 votes. All that’s left now is to see if Republicans try to overturn the decision via a recount.

A couple of days ago, Brad DeLong noted that when unemployment is low there should be pressure to increase wages. But that doesn’t seem to be happening today. So he linked to a piece by Nick Bunker, who suggests that we should look instead at the prime-age employment rate, which seems to correlate better with wage growth.

I’m usually interested in blue-collar wages rather than overall wages—which includes the earnings of doctors and lawyers and computer programmers—and while reading this it occurred to me that growth in the prime-age employment rate ought to correlate with growth in blue-collar wages. So I looked into it. In the spirit of publishing null results, there appears to be no correlation at all:

I would think that two years of employment growth—no matter where it’s starting from—would lead to at least some growth in blue-collar wages. But the correlation is actually slightly negative. This seems odd. What do you think the reason could be? Is prime-age employment completely disconnected from blue-collar employment? Or is it something else?

Here is Ben Carson’s initial response when CNN reported on the purchase of a $31,000 dining room set for his office:

“New tables, chairs, in that room whatsoever — zero awareness of this purchase being made,” the spokesman said. “Neither one of them knew this purchase was being made. The secretary knew that the table and chairs were old because somebody fell out of a chair once. That’s literally it. So they had nothing to do with the purchase, nothing to do with anything around that.”

Today’s news:

Emails show Carson and his wife selected the furniture themselves. An August email from a career administration staffer, with the subject line “Secretary’s dining room set needed,” to Carson’s assistant refers to “printouts of the furniture the Secretary and Mrs. Carson picked out.”…The career administration staffer sent the quote to Carson’s office, specifically Carson’s chief of staff and his executive assistant, casting further doubt on the agency’s assertion that the purchase was made entirely by career staff.

But you know what makes this really bizarre? Carson didn’t especially want the dining room furniture in the first place:

Why lie about this? The true story, it turns out, is that a Carson aide asked if the dining room chairs could be repaired. They were 30 years old and had become wobbly. Career staff eventually suggested a new dining room set, which Carson didn’t really want. He preferred using the budget money for portraits of previous HUD secretaries. However, that was prohibited by Congress, so the money went to the dining room set instead. Candy Carson was apparently so uninterested in the whole thing that Jacie Coressel was “still waiting” to hear from her a day after her initial email. Eventually, though, Carson and his wife had some input into which dining room set to buy, and three weeks later the quote came in—which a career staffer called “very reasonable.”

There’s nothing really wrong with any of this. Why lie about it?

I don’t want to throw cold water on Conor Lamb’s apparent victory tonight, but I do want to point out one little thing: when a congressional seat opens up and there’s no longer an incumbent, that can produce a 10-point swing all by itself. Back when Democrats still ran candidates in the Pennsylvania 18th district, Tim Murphy typically won with about 63 percent of the vote. This means that a non-incumbent Republican could probably expect about 55 percent of the vote—that is, a 10-point victory. A zero-point victory for Conor Lamb is, therefore, roughly a 10-point swing in favor of the Democrats.

Everyone should probably ignore the “20-point swing” nonsense that cable news has been regurgitating endlessly. This is based on Donald Trump’s winning margin in the presidential election, but that’s apples-to-oranges. It’s congressional contests that matter. Besides, a 10-point swing is still pretty good, especially since Democrats got outspent 4-to-1, so there’s no need to exaggerate things. Let’s all stay reality-based here.