Lots of juicy news is breaking about Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen. Today the FBI raided Cohen’s Manhattan law offices and his hotel suite in the Loews Regency on Park Avenue. Cohen’s attorney said in a statement. “I have been advised by federal prosecutors that the New York action is, in part, a referral by the Office of Special Counsel, Robert Mueller.”

Word is that Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud and campaign finance violations, and the records seized included those pertaining to the payoff to Stormy Daniels. That sound you hear is coming from Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, who is whooping it up. According to WaPo,

Among the documents seized were privileged communications between Cohen and his clients — including those with Trump, according to a person familiar with the investigators’ work. Investigators took Cohen’s computer, phone and personal financial records as part of the search of his office at Rockefeller Center, the person said.

Good times.

Update: Just heard on NBC that Rod Rosenstein signed off on the raids, and Trump just called the Mueller investigation “an attack on our country.” Will Trump be restrained from firing Rosenstein and Mueller?

Of all the times for things to go to hell in Syria, it had to be just as Freaking Lunatic Whackjob John Bolton is taking over as National Security Adviser to Clueless Malevolent Moron Trump. They might as well call in Dick the Dick Cheney to complete the Trifecta of Doom.

James Hohmann:

A year ago, President Trump’s new administration announced that removing Assad from power was no longer a priority of the United States government. Soon afterward, the man known as “the Butcher of Damascus” launched a sarin attack that killed more than 80 Syrians. Seeing gruesome images of murdered children prompted Trump to order airstrikes on the airfield that had been used by planes that dropped the gas.

Fast forward almost exactly one year. During a rally in Ohio the Thursday before last,Trump contradicted and undercut months of public commitments from diplomatic and military leaders that America would not cut and run from Syria. Speaking off the cuff during what was supposed to be a speech about infrastructure, the president declared: “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now!”

The next day, news broke that Trump had suspended more than $200 million in stabilization funds for Syrian recovery efforts — to the grave consternation of the professionals at Foggy Bottom.

“I want to get out,” Trump added last Tuesday at the White House during a news conference with Baltic leaders. “I want to bring our troops back home. … It’s time.”

This declaration caught military commanders off guard. Top national security aides persuaded Trump not to immediately pull out the 2,000 Americans who are on the ground during a meeting later in the day. Then they crafted a statement in the Situation Room designed to reassure allies in the region. But for Assad and his patrons in Moscow and Tehran, the president’s preferences were crystal clear.

Then, on Saturday night, at least 40 people were killed in another apparent chemical attack on a besieged, rebel-held enclave near Damascus.

It’s a damn shame Trump is too bleeping stupid to make the connection between his own words and their consequences.

Max Boot, remembered for his knee-jerk support of the Bush-Cheney atrocities in the Middle East, is singing a different tune with Trump:

On April 7, 2017, the U.S. armed forces fired 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase to punish Bashar al-Assad for his use of chemical weapons against his own citizens. The Syrian president reportedly celebrated the one-year anniversary of the strike on Saturday by ordering another attack with chemical weapons that opposition activists said killed dozens of people in the city of Douma. This appears to be at least the eighth such attack by Assad this year — and the most brazen. Having seen that the United States would not react to his repeated violations of international laws, Assad has intensified his use of weapons of mass destruction. …

….Since taking a victory lap for his cruise-missile strike, Trump has left Assad, along with his Russian and Iranian backers, undisturbed to continue their meticulous work of mass murder. Trump even discontinued support for rebel groups fighting Assad and instead focused narrowly on the goal of eradicating the Islamic State. Now, with the finish line in sight, Trump appears to have set a deadline of October for the Defense Department to pull our troops out — even though the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, Israel and the Arab states are all telling him that this would be a monumental mistake. A premature departure will risk the success of the anti-Islamic State campaign and hand eastern Syria to Assad and his patrons.

Trump announced today that he would decide “soon” what to do about Syria. He’s treating the crisis like a reality show episode. See also Trump’s real Syria policy is hypocrisy.

Juan Cole provides background on what’s going on in Syria. He adds:

Trump’s response to Khan Sheykhoun in 2017 was a one-off with no real military or political impact. I strongly suspect that any response he makes now will be similar, a fireworks show for his domestic constituency without much downstream consequence in Syria itself.

Obama decided not to bomb Syria in September of 2013 because the British parliament voted against a joint operation and because the Republicans in Congress made it clear that they would not support an Obama strike on Syria. Russia offered to sequester Syrian sarin gas stockpiles, and Obama took them up on the offer. It appears that some 90 percent of the sarin stockpiles were in fact destroyed or removed. Saturday’s attack used chlorine, a common industrial chemical.

Since Trump’s own strike on the Shuayrat base last year did not forestall the Douma gassing, it is difficult to understand why Trump thinks a strike in 2013 by Mr. Obama would have done so.

The big question is whether the mercurial and erratic Trump will now rethink his decision to get out of Syria entirely by next fall. The US special operations troops that would be pulled out are in the Syrian far east, embedded among Kurds, and have nothing to do with the Damascus area.

The AP reports:

Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s concern with his safety came at a steep cost to taxpayers as his swollen security detail blew through overtime budgets and at times diverted officers away from investigating environmental crimes.

Altogether, the agency spent millions of dollars for a 20-member full-time detail that is more than three times the size of his predecessor’s part-time security contingent.

Pruitt is clearly a five-alarm flake. I recall that his background is entirely in law and Oklahoma politics, not in business. As much as I hold corporations and CEOs in disdain, I think even Exxon would have weeded this whackjob out.

Pruitt’s ambitious domestic and international travel led to rapidly escalating costs, with the security detail racking up so much overtime that many hit annual salary caps of about $160,000. The demands of providing 24-hour coverage even meant taking some investigators away from field work, such as when Pruitt traveled to California for a family vacation.

The EPA official said total security costs approached $3 million when pay is added to travel expenses.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said late Friday that Pruitt has faced an “unprecedented” amount of death threats against him and his family.

However,

A nationwide search of state and federal court records by AP found no case where anyone has been arrested or charged with threatening Pruitt. EPA’s press office did not respond Friday to provide details of any specific threats or arrests.

Pruitt has said his use of first-class airfare was initiated following unpleasant interactions with other travelers. In one incident, someone yelled a profanity as he walked through the airport.

Pruitt has been dragging this oversize security detail around with him on family vacations. The article also says that on occasions when Pruitt has to pay for his own plane tickets, he flies coach. Apparently he’s a five-alarm tightwad with his own money.  He got behind on paying the people who were giving him the sweet deal on the Capitol Hill brownstone, and he wasn’t taking their hints he should leave, so they changed the locks.

Now, on to Jared Kushner. Somehow, the Kushner Company got the money to buy out its partner in the 666 Fifth Avenue property.  Vornado Realty Trust is selling its shares to the Kushners. But no one seems to know if this means the Kushners have a new partner or where the money came from.  WTF? And why would the Kushners want to double down on this turkey?

Note also that JP Morgan Chase agreed to a $600 million loan to help the Kushners develop the Brooklyn properties I wrote about awhile back. Seems a bit risky, JP Morgan Chase.

Paul Manafort keeps trying to wriggle out of being prosecuted by Robert Mueller. He’s filed motions to dismiss the cases against him, none successful so far. Late yesterday he filed a motion arguing that evidence found in a storage unit should be suppressed because the FBI lacked a proper warrant.

The FBI first got into the Alexandria, Va. storage unit last May with the assistance of an employee who worked at two or more of Manafort’s companies, an agent told the federal magistrate judge who issued the warrant. Then, the agent used what he saw written on so-called Banker’s Boxes and the fact there was a five-drawer filing cabinet to get permission to return and seize many of the records. …

… The warrant U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan issued for the storage locker on May 27 authorized FBI agents to seize virtually any financial or tax records relating to Manafort or his business partner Rick Gates. Also approved for seizure were any records relating to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, his Party of Regions, a pro-Ukraine think tank called the European Center for a Modern Ukraine and a slew of offshore companies connected to Manafort.

The warrant also indicates that among the records FBI agents were authorized to seize from Manafort’s unit were all records “related to, discussing or documenting the Podesta Group.” Manafort engaged the Podesta Group for Ukraine-related lobbying. The lobbying group belatedly filed a foreign agent registration for that work last year. Earlier this year, the Podesta Group abruptly disbanded. It has not been charged.

Manafort’s lawyers are arguing that the employee was not authorized to allow anyone into the unit and that the warrant was overly broad. I’m no lawyer, but this seems a stretch.

Summarizing this Rachel Maddow segment would be too time consuming, so please watch the video. You can skip the first three minutes if you are short on time.

Before you lift your jaw off the floor, here’s a juicy bit Maddow left out. Samantha Dravis, the woman on the payroll who couldn’t be bothered to come to work, is a former girlfriend of Rob Porter.

Josh Marshall writes,

InsideEPA, an EPA trade sheet, reports that Scott Pruitt’s downfall is the work of disgraced former White House aide Rob Porter, who leaked damaging information about Pruitt to retaliate against a former girlfriend who told White House officials about Porter’s history of domestic violence.

As was basically reported at the time, Porter’s downfall seems to have started when a former girlfriend, Samantha Dravis, went to White House officials and told them what she knew about Porter’s past, particularly his abuse of two ex-wives. Dravis was a top aide to Scott Pruitt, the EPA Administrator. …

… Dravis’s resignation was announced earlier today.

There’s also a lot of new reporting about Michael Cohen’s business deals and how they might be interesting to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Investigators were particularly interested in interactions involving Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and a former Trump Organization employee. Among other things, Cohen was involved in business deals secured or sought by the Trump Organization in Georgia, Kazakhstan and Russia.

And what about the infamous $130,000 Cohen paid Stormy Daniels that Trump says he knew nothing about? It seems unlikely that Cohen just casually shelled out that much money out of his own pocket to any woman who claimed an affair with Trump.  That money had to come from somewhere. This suddenly puts the Daniels saga into the middle of the rest of Trump’s messes, and possibly connects to the Russian investigation if any of that hush money can be traced to overseas sources.

Finally, just to get a better idea of what a freak show the Trump Administration is, see “Rex Tillerson’s $12 million army of consultants.”

It was one of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s core goals: radically reshaping the State Department to make it leaner, cheaper and modernized to the standards of a former private-sector CEO.

Now that Tillerson has been fired, the vaunted “Redesign” initiative he launched faces an uncertain future, but at least one clear legacy: around $12 million spent just for private consultants who in some cases charged the State Department more than $300 an hour.

Yep; Tillerson had hired a bunch of pricey business consultants to come in and make the State Department more “efficient.” Yet Tillerson refused to work with anyone who had any experience with the State Department and appeared to not appreciate that it wasn’t Exxon, or even Procter & Gamble.

Congressional aides and former State Department officials noted that, despite months of work, Tillerson’s redesign initiative has had few, if any, tangible accomplishments. …

…Tillerson and his top aides “had disdain for the professionals,” one former senior State Department official said. “You had years of blueprints for reform developed internally, two QDDR documents, and thousands of career officers and civil servants who crave change and reform and would’ve been thrilled to work on this effort at no added taxpayer expense.”

“Instead,” the former official added, “they chose to lavish money on contractors and consultants who knew nothing about the organization.”

If you have ever worked for a company that hired outside consultants to “streamline” things, and the consultants turned out to be a pack of clueless empty (but very expensive) suits who spent no time talking to employees and whose recommendations totally bleeped up your department because the suits had no clue what your department even did when they issued their recommendations, you’ll appreciate this.

One State staffer on the redesign team complained about the Insigniam consultants in particular, saying they showed a poor grasp of how the State Department functions and little appreciation for diplomats’ training and experience. In one meeting with State Department employees last year, the staffer recalled, the Insigniam consultants puzzled their audience with an awkward attempt at explaining the importance of context in conversations.

“They would say something like, ‘If I said to you, ‘Get me some water,’ you’d know to get a cup and go to the sink and bring me back the water, but if you said that to someone in China, they might just scoop up some water from a puddle on the ground.’ And they said this to a room full of diplomats!” the staffer said. “It was painful. We were literally objecting to the way they were talking. We were trying to educate them on what we did so that they could actually help do the job they were hired to do.”

Yep. That’s what running the government like a business looks like.

Over the years we’ve talked a lot about right-wing authoritarianism here on The Mahablog. I’ve said in the past that much of the U.S. political and social Right amounts to an authoritarian movement dressed up to look like populism. That was before Trump; now it’s twice as true.

Tom Edsall has a column up called “The Contract With Authoritarianism.” He calls the Trump Administration an “authoritarian moment,” but he also notes that this moment has roots in Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.” Actually it has roots that go back a long time before that Richard Hofstadter wrote about right-wing authoritarians (which he called pseudo-conservatives) back in the 1950s and 1960s, and he traced their origins to several decades before that.

Anyway, Edsall notes some new books coming out analyzing our current political climate in terms of authoritarians versus people who genuinely appreciate liberty and autonomy. One of the book authors wrote, “Authoritarianism is now more deeply bound up with partisan identities. It has become part and parcel of Republican identity among non-Hispanic white Americans.” Another said,

Over the last few decades, party allegiances have become increasingly tied to a core dimension of personality we call “openness.” Citizens high in openness value independence, self-direction, and novelty, while those low in openness value social cohesion, certainty, and security. Individual differences in openness seem to underpin many social and cultural disputes, including debates over the value of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity, law and order, and traditional values and social norms.

Johnston notes that personality traits like closed mindedness, along with aversion to change and discomfort with diversity, are linked to authoritarianism:

As these social and cultural conflicts have become a bigger part of our political debates, citizens have sorted into different parties based on personality, with citizens high in openness much more likely to be liberals and Democrats than those low in openness. This psychological sorting process does not line up perfectly with older partisan differences based on class, because those higher in income and education also tend to be higher in openness.

So, in our endless squabbles over whether Trump voters were more motivated by economic anxiety or by racism, the answer seems to be that economic anxiety and racism are part and parcel of the same syndrome. The decades-long pattern of disappearing manufacturing, mining and other once-secure jobs and reduced opportunity in much of “red” America fuels resistance to other changes such as increasing racial and social diversity. And for decades our so-called “liberal” leadership in the Democratic Party has allowed this situation to fester without really addressing it in any comprehensive way. Republicans never addressed it either, of course, but then Republicans never even pretended to be for working people, until recently.

If you understand all this, it’s clear that what’s fueling much of our gun craziness is plain old fear. Firearm rights activists may talk about liberty, but what they mean by that is security. They are obsessed with being able to defend themselves against whatever frightens them. And, of course, to many of us their fears are irrational; the proliferation of guns (plus fear) themselves are a bigger threat. (See “Guns are responsible for the largest share of U.S. homicides in over 80 years, federal mortality data shows.”) But no amount of reasoning will help them see that.

Plus, people who genuinely value liberty do not use intimidation to deprive others of liberty. Intimidation is the tool of authoritarianism. In particular, what is “open carry” about but the right to intimidate?

This week the Right worked itself up into a frenzy because of reports of a caravan — which included women and children escaping violence — that was moving north through Mexico toward the U.S. border.

With a sarcastic half-smile, Nikolle Contreras, 27, surveyed her fellow members of the Central American caravan, which President Trump has called dangerous and has used as a justification to send troops to the border.

More than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, waited patiently on Wednesday in the shade of trees and makeshift shelters in a rundown sports complex in this Mexican town, about 600 miles south of the border. They were tired, having slept and eaten poorly for more than a week. All were facing an uncertain future.

“Imagine that!” said Ms. Contreras, a Honduran factory worker hoping to apply for asylum in the United States. “So many problems he has to solve and he gets involved with this caravan!”

The migrants, most of them Hondurans, left the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula on March 25 and for days traveled north en masse — by foot, hitchhiking and on the tops of trains — as they fled violence and poverty in their homelands and sought a better life elsewhere.

This sort of collective migration has become something of an annual event around Easter week, and a way for advocates to draw more attention to the plight of migrants.

If you were paying no attention to right-wing media you might not have heard of any of this, but I take it the Right went full-scale insane about the caravan. Trump watches Fox News, so he’s ordered National Guard to patrol the border. Meanwhile, a Latina friend on Facebook wrote,

It got so bad even a writer for Breitbart told people to chill.

The coverage became so distorted that it prompted a reporter for Breitbart News who covers border migration, Brandon Darby, to push back. “I’m seeing a lot of right media cover this as ‘people coming illegally’ or as ‘illegal aliens.’ That is incorrect,” he wrote on Twitter. “They are coming to a port of entry and requesting refugee status. That is legal.”

In an interview, Mr. Darby said it was regrettable that the relatively routine occurrence of migrant caravans — which organizers rely on as a safety-in-numbers precaution against the violence that can happen along the trek — was being politicized. “The caravan isn’t something that’s a unique event,” he said. “And I think people are looking at it wrong. If you’re upset at the situation, it’s easier to be mad at the migrant than it is to be mad at the political leaders on both sides who won’t change the laws.”

(Do keep reading ‘You Hate America!’: How the ‘Caravan’ Story Exploded on the Right.)

So, in other words, Trump is sending National Guard to the border not because there’s a crisis, but because of a routine movement of refugees seeking legal asylum from violence. But this is what authoritarians thrive on — manufactured fear and intimidation.

Another of the authors of the new books on authoritarianism wrote that “Western liberal democracies have now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate them.” I am reminded of the work of Erich Fromm, the psychiatrist and philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany and had witnessed the rise of the Third Reich firsthand:

We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect. … Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of German imperialism. …

…It was the irrational doubt which springs from the isolation and powerlessness of an individual whose attitude toward the world is one of anxiety and hatred. This irrational doubt can never be cured by rational answers; it can only disappear if the individual becomes an integral part of a meaningful world. [From Fascism, Power, and Individual Rights]

And, again, I blame politicians of both parties for this. Globalism may be an overall good for economies, but too many people were left behind and people in power made no attempt to address their legitimate grievances. And now a large part of our population is uncomfortable with western liberal democracy — as Fromm wrote, they are afraid of genuine freedom — and long instead for the order and security that authoritarianism promises. This is a much deeper problem than just “racism.” I wrote in 2016,

We all have a deep need for a sense of connection to others and belonging to whatever society we are planted in, Fromm said. People who are jerked around and treated as disposable cogs for too long are likely to lose that sense of connection or belonging. And then they are likely to give themselves to an authoritarian dictator, because through him they think they will find power. That’s really what Trump was promising — stick with me, and you’ll share in my power. The system won’t kick you around any more.

There’s no question there’s a lot of racism and sexism and nativism and a lot of other things going on with Trump voters that cannot be tolerated or overlooked. My argument is that those isms are symptoms, not causes, but to deal with those symptoms requires making changes than enable alienated people to become integral parts of a meaningful world. And that won’t begin until we address their economic concerns a lot more seriously and aggressively than we have since Franklin Roosevelt’s day.

But we are reaping the consequences of non-action, and both political parties are to blame for it.

The trade war with China is heating up. Yesterday the Trump Administration threatened to put tariffs on 1,300 more Chinese exports. China has threatened 25 percent tariffs on 106 U.S. products. The stock market promptly dropped 500 points when it opened today.

Conventional wisdom says the stock market is over-reacting.

Paul Krugman:

I think it’s worth noting that even if we are headed for a full-scale trade war, conventional estimates of the costs of such a war don’t come anywhere near to 10 percent of GDP, or even 6 percent. In fact, it’s one of the dirty little secrets of international economics that standard estimates of the cost of protectionism, while not trivial, aren’t usually earthshaking either. …

…Yet there is a reason why stock prices might overshoot the overall economic costs of a trade war. For a trade war that “deglobalized” the U.S. economy would require a big reallocation of resources, including capital. Yet you go to trade war with the capital you have, not the capital you’re eventually going to want – and stocks are claims on the capital we have now, not the capital we’ll need if America goes all in on Trumponomics.

Or to put it another way, a trade war would produce a lot of stranded assets.

Basically, we’re calibrated to be really good and efficient at producing X, and a trade war could push us into producing Y instead, which would require a lot of shifting and re-tooling and moving around of assets. We end up putting resources into producing things we used to be able to import at less cost, and that’s a drag on the economy overall. This also is a big hit on existing corporate assets. So, while a trade war might not bring on the Great Depression, if I had money in the stock market I might be thinking of pulling it out, too.

And then there’s this:

Trump, Navarro et al are showing that they really are as unhinged and irresponsible as they seem, and markets are taking notice. Imagine how these people would handle a financial crisis.

That might be the bigger factor here. The investor class has been happy with Trump, thinking he’d give them the tax cuts and deregulation they wanted. But now it may be dawning on them that they’ve been backing an angry, dimwitted child who has no clue what he’s doing.

I usually agree with Martin Longman, but I have issues with his March 29 post, “All Mass Shooters Are Mentally Ill.” He writes,

If you decide, for whatever reason, to kill a bunch of strangers, there’s something wrong with your brain. I’d say that you’re ill. We can debate whether individual shooters know right from wrong and just want to do wrong, or if they’re too mentally impaired to realize that what they’re doing is immoral and illegal. In other words, insanity can be a defense in some cases. But it seems wrong to ask whether or not these people are mentally ill. Of course they are.

I’m not a psychiatrist, but I don’t think Martin Longman is, either. Most of the articles by mental health professionals I’ve seen on this subject say that most mass shooters are not mentally ill. See, for example, “Stop Blaming School Shootings on Mental Illness, Top Psychologist Warns” and “Experts Say There’s Little Connection Between Mental Health And Mass Shootings.”

Regarding “there’s something wrong with your brain” — maybe, maybe not. There are some kinds of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, that can be diagnosed by brain scans, but my understanding is that brain researchers can’t yet sort mass killers from not mass killers using current diagnostic tools.

One neuroscientist doing research into brain configurations thought to be associated with violence was disconcerted to find out that his brain exhibited those same configurations. So, while there may be something to his finding that low activity in the orbital frontal cortex is connected to violent tendencies, that’s not a reliable predictor of anything.

Science aside, popular ideas about what constitutes aberrant behavior signifying “mental illness” often is more about sociology than psychology. For example, there’s a strong correlation between gun violence and a history of domestic abuse, but I have yet to see widespread shrieking that domestic abusers must be “mentally ill.” I guess men who abuse women aren’t aberrant enough yet.

Are Klansmen and lynchers “mentally ill”? Are young  people who run away to join ISIS “mentally ill”? What about Dylann Roof, who’d been raised to be a racist? There’s an article at WaPo about some loser kid still living with Mama with no job, ambition or prospects who has become a neo-nazi, and frankly if he were mine I would have drop-kicked his ass out of my house. Is he “mentally ill”? He’s maladjusted, certainly. Is social maladjustment the same thing as “mental illness”? In which case, who among us doesn’t qualify, at least part of the time? The only difference between “normal” and “pathology” would be a matter of degree.

Three years ago I wrote a post titled “Are Guns Nuts Too Mentally Ill to Own Guns?” I intended the title to be tongue in cheek. But what I had found is that researchers were finding a correlation between men exhibiting angry, impulsive behavior and the ownership of multiple firearms. And men exhibiting angry, impulsive behavior who own multiple firearms are much more likely than other people to become mass shooters. But they don’t all become mass shooters. No psychiatrist can predict with any certainty which of these guys are mostly harmless and which will be the next Stephen Paddock, or which brooding, maladjusted teenager will run off and join ISIS, shoot up his school, kill himself, or straighten up and become an accountant.

In the case of the angry, impulsive gun owners, even if they were compelled to undergo some kind of psychotherapy, unless they want to change (which would be rare) it’s not going to work. Maybe if you kept them on a strong enough dose of Diazepam they’d be less likely to be violent, or at least be easier to get along with. But then they wouldn’t be able to drive cars or operate heavy equipment, either.

“Insanity” is a term found only in law, not in medicine. The idea is that someone who is “insane” is not responsible for his acts and may be found not guilty of a violent crime. But that’s rare. Severely psychotic people, whose thoughts are so scrambled they really don’t know reality from fantasy or right from wrong, generally don’t commit violent crimes, if only because they also tend to be too mentally disorganized to make and carry out plans. Some of our mass shooters, notably Jared Loughner, James Holmes and Adam Lanza, arguably were sick enough that they should have been confined to some sort of group home where they could be monitored. Lanza’s case was particularly tragic in that he’d had a psychiatric workup that recommended a course of treatment, but his parents refused the recommendations. And then his mother kept him at home and catered to his symptoms in a house full of firearms.

So, yeah, sometimes they are “mentally ill.” But most of the time, they aren’t “ill” with anything there’s any treatment for, or that all kinds of other people who don’t become mass killers don’t have also.

So, the “mental illness” label isn’t telling us anything useful. It doesn’t give up actionable information that will sort the mass killers from the general population before they start shooting. But it does (in some people’s minds) provide a handy-dandy excuse for arguing that guns aren’t the problem. But there are crazy people in other countries, too, and somehow they have much lower rates of gun violence. Because they have a harder time getting guns.

See also Guns are responsible for the largest share of U.S. homicides in over 80 years, federal mortality data shows.

Today, financial media are bravely declaring that maybe the stock market has corrected all it will correct and will go back up now, but usually buried in the article somewhere is the disclaimer that maybe we’re wrong. Since much of the recent volatility can be blamed on the White House, even the Wall Street guys must realize that they could be standing on quicksand.

Anyway, today’s news —

The Environmental Protection Agency signed off last March on a Canadian energy company’s pipeline-expansion plan at the same time that the E.P.A. chief, Scott Pruitt, was renting a condominium linked to the energy company’s powerful Washington lobbying firm.

Both the E.P.A. and the lobbying firm dispute that there was any connection between the agency’s action and the condo rental, for which Mr. Pruitt was paying $50 a night.

“Any attempt to draw that link is patently false,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for Mr. Pruitt, said in a written statement.

Nevertheless, government ethics experts said that the correlation between the E.P.A.’s action and Mr. Pruitt’s lease arrangement — he was renting from the wife of the head of the lobbying firm Williams & Jensen — illustrates why such ties to industry players can generate questions for public officials: Even if no specific favors were asked for or granted, it can create an appearance of a conflict.

Just an appearance, of course.

The E.P.A.’s review of the Alberta Clipper project was one of at least a half dozen regulatory matters before the E.P.A. related to clients who were represented by Williams & Jensen at the time that Mr. Pruitt was living part-time in the Capitol Hill condo.

Williams & Jensen, for example, was lobbying the E.P.A. early last year, according to its disclosure reports, on behalf of both Oklahoma Gas and Electric, a major coal-burning utility, and Concho Resources, a Texas-based oil and gas drilling company. …

…In March 2017, while Mr. Pruitt’s lease at the Washington condo was in effect, the E.P.A. issued a letter giving the pipeline project the second-best rating it offers out of 10 possible scores. The agency concluded that while the project raised “environmental concerns,” the review had adequately examined the alternatives and determined that “no further analysis or data collection is necessary.”

Pruitt is also drawing attention for excessive travel expenses and for bypassing the White House to give favored employees big raises. Even so, Pruitt is likely to keep his job.

Jonathan Chait has a much-derided piece up at New York that says Trump’s corruption, not the Russia scandal, is his real political liability. I tend to agree with Steve M that Trump’s evident corruption alone isn’t going to separate Trump from his base, and probably not from most right-leaning voters. To them, “drain the swamp” never meant a return to clean government, but kicking out leftists and Democrats.

That Trump is easily the most corrupt POTUS ever to sit in the White House is, to me, beyond dispute. Most of the big, splashy scandals touching previous presidential administrations, such as Teapot Dome, did not involve the presidents themselves. Watergate was an exception. And Trump makes Nixon look almost honest. Do read Joy Crane and Nick Tabor, “501 Days in Swampland,” on a comprehensive list of Trump’s self-dealing so far, that we know of.  And, seriously, Teapot Dome looks like just a regular day at the office for anyone in the Trump cabinet.

And, of course, Trump supporters will just say “What about Crooked Hillary?” And that atones for all sins.

No, the corruptions alone will not cause Trump’s approval ratings to go even lower. “Getting” what’s going on requires taking in explanations that are too complex to fit on a bumper  sticker, which pretty much guarantees that they won’t make the teevee news. And most Americans won’t hear about it.

However, that doesn’t mean Trump is exempt from ruin. For example, what if Trump’s corruption went on trial?

A federal judge Wednesday allowed Maryland and the District of Columbia to proceed with their lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of accepting unconstitutional gifts from foreign interests, but limited the case to the president’s involvement with the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte’s ruling dismissed other sections of the lawsuit that raised concerns about the impact of foreign gifts to the president from Trump Organization properties outside of Washington.

Maryland and D.C. accuse the president of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which bans the president and other federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments as well as U.S. states. Specifically, they allege nearby businesses have been subjected to increased competition as a result of the foreign traffic to the Trump Hotel.

Media coverage of this trial could cause media to cover a small portion of Trump’s corruption as evidence dripped out day by day. It’s the drip, drip, drip of scandal that wears down administrations. Jennifer Rubin writes,

If Maryland and the District are successful, Trump may be ordered to do something he has so far avoided and which spineless Republicans have refused to demand — namely, disclose what his businesses receive from foreign governments, and either permanently jettison his ties to those operations or reject payments and other things of value from foreign governments (e.g. trademarks in China). Congress could of course choose to approve Trump’s receipt of his emoluments, but House and Senate Republicans — who like the rest of us don’t actually know what Trump’s businesses receive from what sources — have been loath to do that.

Moreover, if a Democratic Congress is elected, it can choose explicitly to disallow Trump’s receipt of foreign emoluments, setting up a possible constitutional clash. If either Congress or a court holds that Trump must give up certain parts of his operations (or segregate any monies and other valuable offerings from foreign governments), he may finally need to decide whether the presidency is worth giving up parts of his financial empire. Moreover, before a final decision on his retention of foreign emoluments, either Congress or litigants (in one of three cases currently ongoing) could demand a raft of financial records exposing for the first time Trump’s finances, including his tax returns.

There are some ifs in there, but there is potential for real damage.

But Trump has other liabilities. The stock market is taking another tumble today on news that China is retaliating in Trump’s trade war and after Trump’s bizarre bad-mouthing of Amazon. A friend of mine who understands markets better than I do pointed out that from November 9th of 2016 to January 26 of 2018, the Dow Jones Industrial average climbed roughly 8,500 points, or about 47 percent, to an all-time high of about 26,616. But then, “with his revolving-door cabinet, protectionist stance, incipient trade war, and constant barrage of attacking tweets (Amazon his latest target), the Dow has been in free-fall, currently at about 23,600, giving up 3,000 points since the all-time high (that is, giving back 35% of its total gains since Election Day) and firmly in correction territory.”

My friend thinks the market will slide further, and if it does its going to piss off the investor class. (Update: See “The Stock Market Is Having its Worst Second Quarter Since the Great Depression” at Fortune.)

As far as the Mueller investigation is concerned, I don’t expect any real fireworks before Paul Manafort goes on trial in July. As it is, right now if you stopped the average American on the street and asked who Paul Manafort is, most probably couldn’t tell you. Mueller is still making connections between Manafort/the Trump campaign and Russia, but most Americans haven’t heard the details. Trial coverage could change that. And if the July trial doesn’t do the trick, Manafort is set for another trial in September. Just as mid-term campaigns are heating up.

The fact that Trump is too stupid to keep his ass covered is a factor here, too. We learned today that Trump floated an invitation for Putin to visit Washington, which was completely not brilliant for somebody who needs to prove he’s not in Putin’s pocket.

Right now, most Republicans in Congress are standing by Trump, but if Republicans lose the House as is currently being predicted in many quarters, that could change. Will they want him at the top of the ticket in 2020? Some of them might decide that playing Howard Baker and impeaching Trump’s ass would be the noble, selfless — and politically smart — next step.

So yeah, the blimp has some leaks. It’s not going to stay afloat forever.

Recently, you might recall, Republicans in Congress passed a tax cut that is causing the deficit to explode. The U.S. federal budget deficit was $587 billion in 2016 and in 2019 is expected to be around $1 trillion, give or take, it says here in a Forbes article.

But today George Will warns us sternly that Americans will rue the day if they get paid family leave.

Evidently it is now retrograde to expect family planning to involve families making plans that fit their resources. Which brings us to the approaching birth of a new entitlement: paid family leave after the birth or adoption of a child. This arrival will coincide with gargantuan deficits produced primarily by existing entitlements.

Will may not be responsible for this headline, but it’s what got my attention:

Right-wing media continue to howl that “entitlements,” not the tax cuts, are responsible for the budget deficit. Never mind that the nearly half-trillion increase in the budget deficit projected for 2019 is being caused entirely by the tax cuts. Evan Horowitz wrote at FiveThirtyEight:

There is no wide-reaching entitlement funding crisis, no deep-rooted connection between runaway debts and the broad suite of pension and social welfare programs that usually get called entitlements. The problem is linked to entitlements, but it’s much narrower: If the U.S. budget collapses after hemorrhaging too much red ink, the main culprit will be rising health care costs.

Aside from health care, entitlement spending actually looks relatively manageable. Social Security will get a little more expensive over the next 30 years; welfare and anti-poverty programs will get a little cheaper. But costs for programs like Medicare and Medicaid are expected to climb from the merely unaffordable to truly catastrophic.

What’s needed, then, is something far more focused than entitlement reform: an aggressive effort to slow the growth of per-person health care costs. Or — if that’s not possible — some way to ensure that the economy grows at least as fast as the cost of health care does.

Republicans have been incapable of addressing the root cause of our out-of-control health care costs, because the primary reason our health care costs are out of control has to do with the way we pay for health care. See “Why the U.S. Spends So Much More Than Other Nations on Health Care” at the New York Times. The biggest difference between the U.S. health care system and everybody else’s is that the prices we pay for everything are much, much higher. And that’s because everybody else has gone to some kind of national system that imposes price controls. We allow for whatever prices the market will bear, and it’s threatening to eat our economy.

But you know Republicans — they think the purpose of a health care system is to ensure profits for health care industry executives and stockholders. If anybody actually gets health care along the way that’s a plus, but it’s not the central concern.

All that said — George Will is really, really put off by all these irresponsible people who want to take some time off from their jobs after their babies are born but who can’t afford to do without two paychecks coming in. Who do they think they are? They should just wait until they are more financially secure, even if that’s past the age of menopause. If ever.

(I have known women who went back to work within a week of having babies. I have had babies, so I know that after only a week one is still passing afterbirth. And exhausted, I might add.)

Government-mandated paid family leave clearly is going too far for Will.

Although this will advance the left’s agenda of broadening and destigmatizing dependence on government, many conservatives support it in the name of “family values,” and because free stuff polls well. But it will not be free for someone, so the argument is about who should pay. The debate will concern ways to disguise the benefit’s costs while requiring others to pay for it.

I would argue that healthy babies and stable families (which require mothers who are not collapsing from exhaustion) are a positive good for the nation, so we all benefit from them, directly or indirectly. But like most righties, Will can’t see beyond a transference of wealth argument. If they aren’t his babies, why should he have to pay to care for them?

Of course, Will is also opposed to abortion, and recently wrote a column that said allowing couples to abort a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome amounts to “genocide.” He also opposes funding Planned Parenthood and is infamous for uncritically repeating whackjob conspiracy theories about it. See, for example, “Planned Parenthood and the barbarity of America.” He was outraged at PP for selling fetus body parts. I can’t find that he ever wrote a retraction after it was determined that Planned Parenthood was not, in fact, selling fetus body parts.

So, Will isn’t terribly interested in helping poor women with family planning, and he’s been against abortion even for medical reasons for years. But he is outraged over paid family leave as an “entitlement” that will somehow break the bank and erode the moral fiber of the nation, or something. I’m waiting for him to propose that anyone making less than median wage be sterilized so that they aren’t irresponsibly making babies that are going to cost him money.