Donald Trump plans to levy tariffs on overseas steel and aluminum, and now the trade wars have begun. From Reuters:

The European Union is considering applying 25 percent tariffs on $3.5 billion of goods — a third steel, a third industrial goods and a third agricultural — to “rebalance” bilateral trade, EU sources said. “We will put tariffs on Harley-Davidson, on bourbon and on blue jeans — Levis,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told German television.

Hmmm. Harley-Davidsons are made in—what? Wisconsin, right? In Menomonee Falls, actually, about 50 miles from Janesville, where Paul Ryan lives. The Jim Beam bourbon distillery is in Clermont, Kentucky, about 20 miles from Mitch McConnell’s house in Louisville. Levi’s is headquartered in San Francisco, about two miles from Nancy Pelosi’s house.

This is just hilarious, isn’t it? Donald Trump has turned us all into idiots.

What is the deal with New Yorkers? Here is Chris Smith on CompStat, the computerized crime-tracking system first used in New York:

No New York invention, arguably, has saved more lives in the past 24 years. CompStat has helped drive down the city’s crime rates to historic lows….There is also considerable debate on just how much credit CompStat, and the NYPD in general, deserves for the crime decline. Cities including Houston and Phoenix saw similar declines and attributed them mostly to economic development and community policing. “Two decades of an expanding economy, and mass incarceration, have contributed the most to the crime drop,” says Rick Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “Smarter policing, informed by digitized crime data, has contributed in a number of places, including New York City. But we don’t know how much.”

Crime began dropping in New York years before CompStat was up and running. Crime dropped in Los Angeles and Toronto and Stockholm at the same time, even though they didn’t have CompStat. And crime dropped everywhere in New York City, regardless of how strongly various areas were targeted by CompStat.

How can we still be arguing about this? I don’t doubt that CompStat is a good management tool, and it might be effective at keeping crime rates low after they’ve already dropped. However, there’s simply no reason to think it had a significant effect on the huge drop in crime in New York City during the 90s and aughts. The evidence just doesn’t fit. Knock it off, folks.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Today she announced President Trump's unconditional surrender to the NRA.Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

From the Wall Street Journal:

At a televised meeting earlier in the week with lawmakers, Mr. Trump had endorsed a Senate proposal to significantly expand background checks on gun sales and said he wanted to see sales of some firearms restricted to people who were 21 or older. He also suggested some guns be taken away from people without due process. All of these stances run counter to the positions of the NRA, the nation’s largest gun-rights organization.

I remember that meeting. It was on Wednesday. On Thursday Trump met with the NRA. So what happened today?

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Friday morning Mr. Trump now considers a federal increase in the minimum age as likely unrealistic….On background checks, Ms. Sanders dialed back the president’s stance. He is seeking “not necessarily universal background checks, but certainly improving the background-check system. He wants to see what that legislation, the final piece of it looks like,” she said.

That didn’t take long. I guess Sanders didn’t bother saying anything about taking away people’s guns since everyone knows that was just blue-sky blathering in the first place. Ditto for the assault weapons ban. The bottom line appears to be that Trump now supports Sen. John Cornyn’s feeble “Fix NICS” bill and that’s about it. What a surprise.

Perhaps you remember a Republican attempt from a few weeks ago to invent a scandal about Sen. Mark Warner. The basic story was that Warner had tried to set up a meeting with bogeyman Christopher Steele of “dossier” fame, and … um, that was about it. It was never quite clear why this might be a scandal, but when your scandals tend to look like a serial killer’s bulletin board I suppose that every little bit helps:

Anyway, Warner is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and as Marco Rubio confirmed, Warner had already told them all about this. It turns out that Warner had sent text messages to Washington lawyer Adam Waldman asking him to arrange the meeting, and Waldman had turned over the texts to the committee. Then, somehow, those texts got leaked to Fox News. But how? Here’s Nicholas Fandos of the New York Times:

In January, one of [Devin] Nunes’s staff members requested that copies be shared with the House committee as well…

Ah. Devin Nunes. Of course. Anyway, it turns out the original texts had page numbers on them, but the copies handed over to Nunes didn’t. Guess which ones Fox News had?

The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak….Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan last month to inform him of their findings.

….AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, released a statement after this article was published, saying, “The speaker heard the senators on their concerns and encouraged them to take them up directly with their counterparts.”

In other words, Ryan couldn’t care less. And needless to say, Nunes doesn’t care either since he’s the one who leaked the stuff in the first place. This is what the House Intelligence Committee has become: basically an R&D center for producing inane oppo research in service of Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theories. Nice work, guys.

Our Commerce Secretary tries his hand at justifying his trade war over steel and aluminum:

Wilbur Ross on @CNBC now: “There’s about 1 ton of steel in a car. The price of a ton of steel is $700 or so, so 25% on that would be one half of 1% price increase on the typical $35000 car. So it’s no big deal.” pic.twitter.com/SHJ7gYW9kS

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) March 2, 2018

Two things. First, that comes to $175, which is more than most families will get from the Republican tax cut they’re so proud of. They need to make up their minds whether $175 is a huge gift to the working class or “no big deal.” Second, isn’t it cute that Ross thinks the “typical” car costs $35,000? I wonder what kind of car he drives?

The stock market has been on a wild ride lately, but after a big drop yesterday it’s now back on its trendline of the past couple of years:

For the time being, all that’s happened is that a few big drops have wiped out the huge gains of December and January. Until December, the market had gained about 16 percent per year in both 2016 and 2017. Now it’s reverted to that. Only if it starts to drop further will it be a sign of serious investor worries.

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via ZUMA

Nicolle Wallace of NBC News reports that more shakeups are coming:

The White House is preparing to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser as early as next month in a move orchestrated by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

….A leading candidate to become President Donald Trump’s third national security adviser is the auto industry executive Stephen Biegun, according to the officials. Biegun, who currently serves as vice president of international governmental affairs for the Ford Motor Company, is no stranger to the White House. He served on the National Security Council staff from 2001 to 2003, including as a senior staffer for then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Nobody else has confirmed this yet, so maybe it’s just a bum steer from Wallace’s sources. Then again, Trump has dismissed this as “fake news,” and that’s often a pretty good indicator that something is true. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

President Trump’s newly announced steel and aluminum tariffs are widely seen as a strike against China. But here’s an odd thing: the tariffs are based on a pair of Commerce Department reports (steel here, aluminum here) that examine whether domestic production of these products is essential to national security. However, the reports recommend tariffs only on raw aluminum and raw steel mill products (plates, wire, sheeting, etc.), and when it comes to raw metals, we hardly get any at all from China:

It’s pretty much the same deal for aluminum:

There might be a case that these products are crucial for national security and our supply shouldn’t be dependent on uncertain sources, but that only holds water if you consider Canada, Brazil, and Mexico to be uncertain sources. This is just me, but I can’t say I stay up nights worrying that Canada might cut off our supply of steel and aluminum if we get into a war.

But things get even odder when you broaden your horizon. If you look at more advanced steel products, we do indeed import a lot from China:

But these products aren’t included in the tariffs. Apparently we’re worried about being dependent on Canada and Brazil, but not on China. This is … peculiar, no?

Windmill, Madera County, California.

This comes from a study by James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, who says that (a) mass school shootings are not on the increase, and (b) in general, schools are safer than they’ve been since the 90s.