Mouneb Taim/Pacific Press via ZUMA

We have fired some missiles at Syria again:

Mr. Trump characterized it as the beginning of a sustained effort to force Mr. Assad to stop using banned weapons….“We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents,” Mr. Trump said.

….Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday night that the strike was completed and was designed as a one-night operation. “Right now this is a one-time shot and I believe it has sent a very strong message to dissuade him to deter him from doing it again,” he said.

The Trump White House runs like a Swiss watch, doesn’t it?

I don’t want to get bogged down in a dense discussion about American involvement in Syria, but I will say this: I’m not opposed to the proposition that anyone who uses chemical weapons should be prepared to pay a price. A judicious enforcement of the taboo against chemical weapons is worth it. If we commit to this, however, it can’t apply solely to countries we don’t like. It better apply to everyone, even if they’re fighting a war we don’t care much about. Are we prepared for that?

A few weeks ago, the Justice Department’s inspector general rushed out a draft copy of its report on Andrew McCabe to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Why? So that Sessions could fire McCabe 26 hours before he qualified for his full pension and retired.

Well, the final report has now been released and I’ve read it. But first, here are the background facts:

• As deputy director of the FBI, McCabe had oversight authority over all FBI investigations, including the Clinton email investigation and the Clinton Foundation investigation.
• A year earlier, McCabe’s wife had run as a Democrat for a state senate seat in Virginia. Like most Democratic candidates, she received money from a PAC controlled by Clinton pal Terry McAuliffe. During the 2016 presidential campaign, conservative media went berserk over this, claiming that McCabe had gone easy on Clinton because of his wife’s connections.
• Near the end of the 2016 campaign, the Wall Street Journal ran an article implying that McCabe had also tried to slow walk the Clinton Foundation investigation.
• In fact, McCabe had done just the opposite: in a phone call with the Justice Department he had refused to allow any political interference with the investigation. A few days after the original article appeared, McCabe authorized an FBI press liason to tell this to the Journal on background for a follow-up article that appeared on October 30.

Everyone accepts this as the basic background of the case. What’s more, as deputy director, McCabe was authorized to speak to the press on background or to allow others to do it for him. The question is: did McCabe lie about authorizing this disclosure to the Journal? The inspector general says he did, and lays out the following timeline:

1. October 31, 2016: McCabe speaks to FBI Director James Comey about the Journal article. McCabe says he told Comey what he had done. Comey says he didn’t.
2. May 9, 2017: The FBI inspection division, which is investigating a series of leaks, talks to McCabe. McCabe says he doesn’t know where this particular leak came from.
3. July 28, 2017: The DOJ inspector general interviews McCabe, who says he doesn’t know who authorized the press liason to talk to the Journal.
4. August 1, 2017: McCabe calls the inspector general to change his testimony. He now says that he recalls authorizing the disclosure.
5. August 18, 2017: The FBI inspection division re-interviews McCabe, who confirms that he authorized the disclosure.
6. November 29: The inspector general interviews McCabe again. McCabe confirms yet again that he authorized the disclosure.

The inspector general’s report concludes that McCabe lied multiple times: to Comey (#1), to the FBI inspection division (#2), to the inspector general (#3), and finally on November 29 when he told the inspector general his version of the conversation with Comey (#6).

McCabe has defended himself against all the charges:

• He believes his recollection of the conversation with Comey is correct, and it’s Comey who is mistaken.
• He says that the May 9 interview was about an entirely different matter and touched on the Journal article only briefly. “That is reflected in the fact that in a 12-page draft statement prepared by INSD, the WSJ article occupied a single paragraph.” McCabe says he never meant to imply that he didn’t authorize the disclosure.
• He says the July 28 interview was primarily about the FBI’s overall handling of the Clinton email case. “The OIG investigators assured him they would not ask questions about matters that could involve him.” When they suddenly asked McCabe about the Journal article, “He attempted multiple times to end the discussion as quickly as possible.” That caused him to flub his response, and two days later he called back to correct his testimony.

I don’t know any more about this than anyone else, but McCabe’s defense sounds sort of sketchy. That said, this whole thing is over the most trivial and common kind of leak imaginable: a senior official defending himself and the bureau—truthfully—against a newspaper article that was objectively incorrect.¹ The information McCabe leaked was intended to defend both himself and the integrity of the FBI, and it was literally no more than a sentence or two that was completely harmless. The biggest charge is that McCabe’s leak effectively confirmed that the FBI was investigating the Clinton Foundation, but was anyone really in any doubt about that anyway?

I dunno. The inspector general didn’t believe McCabe’s story and concluded that he had “lacked candor.” Maybe that’s a firing offense no matter what the issue is and no matter who does it. But it sure sounds to me like the kind of thing that wouldn’t normally get a guy fired 26 hours before his retirement unless the president of the United States was gunning for him. Obviously Trump was, and he issued his usual unhinged gloating over the downfall of an enemy after the inspector general’s report was released:

DOJ just issued the McCabe report – which is a total disaster. He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey – McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2018

¹And not just incorrect: it was part of a coordinated campaign of character assassination from a presidential campaign.

As you know from Monday’s photo, I was in San Pedro last weekend—and the particular area of San Pedro I was in turned out to be teeming with cats. By coincidence, I also got an email from a reader who wanted more cats, please. So here you go: the cats of San Pedro. Three were sociable and three were not. Can you figure out which is which?

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?