James Comey told President Trump three times that he wasn’t personally under investigation. That wasn’t enough. Trump didn’t want his friends under investigation either, so he fired Comey when the investigation continued. Can you guess what happened next?

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.

….The obstruction-of-justice investigation of the president began days after Comey was fired on May 9, according to people familiar with the matter. Mueller’s office has now taken up that work, and the preliminary interviews scheduled with intelligence officials indicate his team is actively pursuing potential witnesses inside and outside the government.

That’s from the Washington Post. Trump’s fans, of course, continue to believe that the big scandal isn’t Trump’s likely obstruction of justice, but the fact that this stuff has been leaked. It’s the Deep State at work. After all, nothing ever leaked in Washington DC until Trump took office. Right?

The Senate voted 97-2 this afternoon in favor of tougher sanctions on Russia:

The sanctions legislation the Senate passed overwhelmingly Wednesday afternoon would represent a major power grab from the White House on U.S.-Russia policy….It would pave the way for Congress to wield far more control over the country’s fraught relationship with Russia….If it becomes law, the president would find it far more difficult to pursue the kinds of Russia sanctions relief that his team is said to have discussed with Russian officials before his inauguration. Those discussions, and potentially others, are what have gotten this White House in the hot water it’s in now.

I’m OK with this both on the merits (Russia deserves tougher sanctions) and as a matter of governance (Congress should assert itself instead of leaving foreign policy solely to the president).

But here’s the part I’ve never liked about congressional sanctions: they last forever until Congress lifts them, and political considerations make it very difficult to lift sanctions. I’d prefer to see them treated more like a criminal sentence, put in place for a specific amount of time.

In the case of Russia, for example, perhaps they’d be put in place for 2-4 years. For the first two years, the president has no discretion. For the next two years, the sanctions stay in place but the president has authority to reduce or eliminate them. After four years they’re lifted completely unless Congress affirmatively votes to renew them.

This would prevent sanctions from settling into an eternal ooze due to little more than inertia. It would also prevent the lifting of sanctions from becoming enormous public spectacles. They’d just quietly end at some point unless half the House and 60 percent of the Senate felt strongly enough that they needed to stay in place.

Here’s a beautiful snowy egret. This one was up in a tree near Dana Point harbor that was egret central. There must have been at least a dozen of them nesting there. This was great for taking photos, but the price was a car covered with bird droppings. I really should have parked a little farther away.

Plus we have a bonus picture today: a snowy egret using its aileron flaps to slow down for a landing near its nest. Our little egret baby is obviously looking forward to lunch. Yum yum!

Well, the Fed has gone ahead and raised interest rates, as expected:

“The labor market has continued to strengthen,” the Fed said in an upbeat statement published after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee. The Fed added that economic growth “has been rising moderately so far this year,” making no mention of the reported weakness last winter.

Hmmm. Both GDP growth and new job creation have been modest over the past year. The unemployment rate is down, but it’s increasingly looking like the headline unemployment rate is not a great measure of labor tightness. Here’s a couple of other measures. First, hourly wages of production workers:

Ordinary workers did pretty well in 2015, but it’s been all downhill since then. Over the last few months, their earnings have barely risen at all. That’s hardly consistent with a tight labor market.

And here’s the core PCE inflation rate, the Fed’s favored measure of inflation:

It’s nowhere near the Fed’s target of 2 percent, and if you can see any acceleration in this chart you have sharper eyes than me. It looks dead flat at around 1.6 percent for the past four years. That’s also hardly consistent with a tight labor market.

The economy is doing OK, and perhaps that’s the best argument in favor of the Fed’s strategy: they’ve been slowly raising interest rates and the economy hasn’t fallen off a cliff. On the other hand, the labor market for the working and middle classes sure doesn’t look especially tight. Inflation isn’t rising and wage growth has been anemic.

It’s hard to see how raising interest rates is doing anybody outside the top 1 percent any good. I sure hope Janet Yellen knows what she’s doing.

The Commerce Department reported today that retail sales in May were down 0.3 percent. But not really. Inflation was actually negative last month, so in real terms the decline was only 0.1 percent. It also means the decline wasn’t “the sharpest since a 1% decrease in January 2016.” There have been five declines in the past two years bigger than May’s, including a drop of 0.32 percent just three months ago.

So should we just relax about last month’s weak retail figures? I’ll let you decide. For the affirmative, there’s this chart:

Nothing much there, really. But for the negative, there’s this chart:

The trendline is pretty steadily down. Roughly speaking, this confirms my current belief that the economy is still doing OK, but a little less OK as time goes on. It seems like our nine-year expansion may be slowly running out of steam.

Here’s a teensy little bit of good news for you:

After a wave of pushback, American Airlines said Tuesday that it would not reduce the distance between economy seats on some of its new airplanes to make space for higher-priced seats near the front….American Airlines said in a statement Tuesday that it “received a lot of feedback from both customers and team members” about its plans to squeeze the pitch by one inch on those seats.

“It is clear that today, airline customers feel increasingly frustrated by their experiences and less valued when they fly,” the airline said.

I would provide my own interpretation of what this “feedback” was like, but this is a family site. Let’s just say that “increasingly frustrated” and “less valued” would more accurately be translated as “boiling with rage” and “treated like pieces of shit.” Oops. Family site. Make that “treated like flying fecal material.”

Anyway, at least we seem to have finally gotten a quantitative assessment of how far people can be pushed. American’s plan was to reduce legroom from 30 inches to 29 inches, and that was the final straw. So I guess 30 inches will now become the industry standard. For most of you, this actually doesn’t matter much. For us tall folks, it’s pretty intolerable. It’s one reason (among several) that I avoid flying at all costs these days.

Jeff Stein is making this a daily thing. Good for him.

Same story today. No p.1 health care coverage in LA Times; NYT; WashPo; or WSJ. You can learn a lot about North Korea, Jeff Sessions, & Uber pic.twitter.com/DKyk6WU2hJ

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_Vox) June 14, 2017

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates today:

The tame inflation and weak retail-sales data released Wednesday won’t deter the Federal Reserve from raising short-term interest rates later in the day but do raise doubts about another rate hike in September….Vince Reinhart, chief economist at Standish Mellon AsseInft Management, said Fed officials repeated the same message over and over: the weak first-quarter spending was transitory, the economy is at full employment and inflation is headed toward the goal of 2%.

Really? Inflation is “headed toward” the goal of 2 percent? If that’s the case, it’s sure doing it in a roundabout way. I’m no economist, but it sure looks to me like every conceivable measure of inflation has been dropping like a stone all year.

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via ZUMA

President Trump met with 15 Republican senators today, and the Associated Press reports that he had nothing good to say about the Paul Ryan health care bill that passed the House last month:

One source said Trump called the House bill “mean, mean, mean” and said, “We need to be more generous, more kind.” The other source said Trump used a vulgarity to describe the House bill and told the senators, “We need to be more generous.”

The first thing that comes to mind, obviously, is that Trump sure seemed pretty pleased with the bill back when it passed, didn’t he? He had a grand old time celebrating in the Rose Garden with Paul Ryan and the gang. “Premiums will be coming down….Deductibles will be coming down,” he said. “It’s a great plan….What we have is something very, very incredibly well-crafted.”

But let’s put this aside and concentrate on something more important: what was Trump’s vulgarity? Was it something that sounds vaguely like “mean mean mean,” and the first source misheard it? Or was the first source just too delicate to mention the word? Either way, the public deserves to know what Trump said. Who will be the first senator to tell us?

During today’s congressional testimony by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–CA) frequently interrupted Sessions as he meandered off the topic she asked about. This is a standard game: senators get only a short time for questioning, so witnesses often meander as a way of chewing up time and running out the clock. On the other hand, sometimes witnesses legitimately need time to fully answer a question, and are being badgered into “yes or no, please” by showboating senators.

At one point during her questioning, Harris was trying to get a straight answer about why Sessions thought he could refuse to testify regarding conversations he had with President Trump. Harris was pressuring Sessions and Sessions was tap dancing artfully when John McCain suddenly interrupted to complain that Harris wasn’t allowing Sessions to respond. Committee chair Richard Burr admonished McCain (“Senators will allow chair to control the hearing”) but then admonished Harris too (“Senator Harris, let him answer”). Here’s the relevant part of the questioning:

And here are a few Twitter reactions:

Speaking for myself, I’d guess that McCain’s interruption was likely due to several things: Harris is a woman; Harris is new to the Senate; Harris is a Democrat; Harris’s questioning was pretty aggressive; Sessions is a former senator and colleague of McCain’s; and McCain is a cranky old man.

But I doubt that race was part of it, either consciously or otherwise. School me in comments if you think this is insufferably naive.