The Friday jobs report just came in and it recorded a major downward miss. The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February and unemployment ticked up. It’s always important to remember that these reports are fairly noisy on a monthly basis and, especially recently, they’ve been subject to major revisions. Having said that, a lot of politics and economics commentary for the last month or two has been based on other single-month reports which are ripe for narratives but don’t necessarily tell us a lot. The political calculus is perhaps clearer than the economics one. The White House needs a good macro-economic trend to come into focus pretty quickly. Because from an electoral standpoint you need several months of favorable or at least “moving in the right” direction numbers in order for those shifts to show up in public attitudes.

Here’s another video I recommend to you, following up on the shipping one from last night — but on a different topic. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-RI) office sent out the video this afternoon. It’s a speech the senator gave on the Senate floor today. It’s about Trump, Russia and Jeff Epstein. Among other things, it reminds us of how Bill Barr bamboozled most of the U.S. press into thinking the Mueller investigation came up empty on Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia. But this is a broader story. The speech runs almost an hour long. But it’s worth it. There’s so many details in the speech it defies easy summary. The best overview is to think of all the ways Donald Trump was and is connecting to the Russian government and the oligarch para-government. Whitehouse then shows that Jeff Epstein is right there at almost every point of contact. It’s a mix of old information, new investigating and a pretty close analysis of emails in the Epstein Files that wouldn’t really jump out at you on their own but become quite interesting when lined up with other outside information which places them in context. Whatever that “thing” is, Epstein is just as tied up in it as Trump —mand at a lot of points he seems to be a connecting tie. You can watch the speech after the jump.

Humiliation is Donald Trump’s calling card. It’s the other side of domination. It’s an expression of domination. When I heard the news today of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s ouster, which has certainly been telegraphed for weeks, it seems exquisitely Trump that he allowed her to go to Capitol Hill and get pressed on the entirely predictable question of whether she is having sex with her notional top aide — Corey Lewandowski — when she had only one day left on the job.

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Kate and Josh talk election returns and Trump’s new war with Iran.