It's been a good week for quoting French kings, it seems -- and it's only mercredi! First there was Donald Trump's petulant response to his private lawyer (and reputed "fixer") getting raided by the feds: "It's an attack on our country, in a true sense." Many compared Trump's equation of his own personal legal troubles with an attack on the country at large to King Louis XIV's famous statement: "L'état, c'est moi." For Louis, this statement (essentially: "I am the state") was in large part true -- but not so much for Donald Trump. Trump (thankfully) is not an absolute monarch, so for him to say a federal investigation of his lawyer is "an attack on our country" is laughable, at best.

Today, however, the quote that sprang to mind was not from the Sun King, but from his great-grandson, Louis XV, who was known as "the Beloved" and ruled from the age of five years old until his death (which happened 15 years before the revolution that forever changed the whole "the king is the state" concept of French government). Louis XV (or possibly his mistress, reports vary) is said to have predicted: "Après moi, le déluge" ("After me, the flood"). Since his successor's head was forcibly removed from his body (by the device named for Dr. Guillotin), this turned out to be a pretty accurate prediction.

Nowadays, of course, not only is the state not Trump (not by a long shot), but political revolutions don't end with actual severed heads. Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the news that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan will not be running for re-election. After Ryan, there will be no political "flood" (since political terminology has moved on a bit), but there may indeed be a "wave" -- or even (as the more optimistic Democrats are predicting) a "tsunami." Rather than be drowned by it, Ryan is paddling away as fast as he can. This, of course, also gives rise to another rather damp metaphor, that of rats fleeing a sinking ship.

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Federal agents just searched the homes and offices of the personal lawyer of the president of the United States. That is an extraordinary thing to say, but then we live in extraordinary times. The search warrant would not have been granted unless probable cause existed that Michael Cohen had participated in a crime. Furthermore, that subpoenas would not be effective in securing proof of this crime or crimes, therefore a no-knock warrant was necessary (in other words, to prevent Cohen from destroying evidence). But make no mistake about it, the real target of this search was Donald Trump himself. Because the federal investigations (plural) are getting closer and closer to Trump by the day.

Federal prosecutors in general, and Robert Mueller in specific, play their cards pretty close to the vest. They're like icebergs -- you can only see ten percent of what is going on. A full ninety percent remains hidden, beneath the waves. This makes it tough to try to figure out what Mueller is up to, and that is by design. The only breadcrumbs we have are the public documents filed in courts. These may or may not indicate exactly what is going on -- and usually only do so in a tangential way (at least until the very end of the investigation, when all is usually revealed).

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There's an important distinction to make before Mark Zuckerberg sits down in front of Congress to answer questions about what Facebook is, what they do, and what they've been up to recently (that they really shouldn't have been). As more and more political scandals swirl around Facebook, and as Zuckerberg prepares to answer for his company's actions, both the congressmen who will be questioning him and the public at large need to understand something that has long been somewhat of a rule of thumb in Silicon Valley. Because anyone who uses an online service that is free should stop to consider this fact. You sign up for Facebook (or whatever other service or webpage) and you are not asked for any money. What this means is that you are not their customer, in the traditional sense, instead you are merely their product. You and your data are a commodity which the company monetizes and sells to whomever is willing to pony up some money to see it.

This is not an abstract issue -- it is Facebook's (and many other companies') basic business model. They lure you in with the promise of free stuff, and when they get enough takers then they bundle the data they've collected together and sell it to other companies. They don't own you, per se, but they do own your data. All of it. After all, you voluntarily gave it to them for free.

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First, Donald Trump announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum. Then China reacted with $3 billion in tariffs on U.S. goods (mostly farm goods -- fruit, nuts, and pork). Trump hit back with the threat of tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods. The Chinese, not to be outdone, announced that if this happens they'll be slapping their own tariffs on $50 billion in American goods -- most notably, soybeans. Trump then tripled down, announcing further tariffs on $100 billion of Chinese goods. So begins the great Sino-American trade war of 2018. Or, as we like to call it, the Trump trade war. Why not give proper credit where it is due, after all?

The stock market reacted to the latest salvos by dropping over 750 points today. It clawed back some of this at the very end of the day, but it was yet another day of volatility. The markets were down for the whole first quarter of this year, for the first time in a long time. The Trump bump has given way to the Trump slump, in other words. Also, the March jobs report was pretty underwhelming, and wages still have yet to rise for millions of hardworking Americans.

Now, a quick historical quiz: what were Republicans saying just three short months ago about the economy? Back in January, before stocks took their first dive, the GOP was pleased as punch with the gigantic tax cut they had just passed for the wealthy and corporations, and they all were optimistically predicting that the economy would now "be unleashed" and thus soar to new heights. We would all, to use a memorable phrase, soon get tired of all the winning.

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This is going to be a rather strange column for me to write, because it centers on a few subjects that I don't normally write about. In fact, I usually studiously avoid writing about these subjects. But with all the hoo-hah over the reboot of the television sitcom Roseanne, I felt it was time to chime in on popular television culture and my own television viewing preferences. Again, two subjects that I normally strive to avoid, mostly because this just isn't that kind of blog. So if these subjects bore you to death, I'd just stop reading right now. Fair warning.

I have to begin an article about Roseanne with a personal admission. It's been a "guilty pleasure" television show of mine for a while now. I actually completely missed the first-run seasons, as I watched little-to-zero television during the 1980s and 1990s. For most of this time I didn't even own a television set. So I missed Roseanne in its heyday. I still haven't seen a complete episode of Cheers, either, which always seems to astonish people when I admit to it.

But after getting married, I did buy a television. At that point, I started paying attention to late-night television comedians, since a very large slice of the American public gets all its news and politics from such shows. But the shows didn't come on until 11:30, and there wasn't much on just before they aired. So I found myself watching Roseanne reruns.

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Another Wednesday, another Democratic win in a special election to celebrate. That's the way it feels, at any rate, hearing the news from Wisconsin, where a liberal judge beat out an N.R.A.-supported conservative by a 12-point margin (56 percent to 44 percent). This follows on the heels of Conor Lamb's victory in Pennsylvania, and the incredible upset of Doug Jones over Roy Moore in Alabama. Throughout much of last year, special elections got Democrats fired up nationwide, only to fall short when the votes were counted (such as Jon Ossoff's painful loss in Georgia). But since November, this tide seems to have turned. Now Democrats are not just posting big gains but actually winning these elections, many in states and districts where they really should be losing big-time. Wisconsin's was the latest of these, although Wisconsin is admittedly more of a purple state than, say, Alabama.

Republicans, not to put too fine a point on it, are freaking out. As well they should. There's a change in the air, and it's not going to benefit them in the midterms, to state it bluntly. The smarter Republicans realize this and are steeling themselves for the outcome. Mitch McConnell, in a recent interview with a Kentucky newspaper, admitted as much: "This is going to be a challenging election year. We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don't know whether it's going to be a Category 3, 4, or 5." By "a challenging election year," McConnell really means "a challenging election year for Republicans," of course. This is significant, since McConnell's leadership of the Senate is much less at risk than Paul Ryan's continuing as speaker of the House. Democrats have a much steeper hill to climb to win back the Senate, but even McConnell is getting worried, in other words.

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Red-state teachers are currently in open revolt against the failure of conservatives to deliver on their economic promises. Republicans in these states embraced tax cuts because (as they told everyone) this would unleash the economy and prosperity for all would soon follow. What happened instead is the same thing that always happens when supply-side economics is attempted -- falling tax revenues which force massive cuts to what were formerly untouchable parts of the budget. Like education. But the teachers are tired of taking it on the chin and are now fighting back. They're sick of being paid a pittance (compared to teachers in other states), they're sick of the lack of resources for their students (books and classrooms that are falling apart), and they're sick of dodges like four-day weeks which desperately try to paper over the hard, cold fact that if you cut taxes on a massive scale, you will have less money to spend to educate your children.

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President Donald Trump signaled this weekend that the DACA kids (formerly known as DREAMers) will essentially be on their own, because the effort to pass legislation to address their dire situation is now dead. Of course, that's where things stand today -- by tomorrow, or next week, Trump could take a radically different stance which will contradict his hard tone expressed over Easter weekend. After all, he's certainly done so before.

Throughout it all, Trump's one consistency is a laughable attempt to place the blame for the whole mess on Democrats. This is ridiculous, since Trump himself singlehandedly caused this crisis, and Trump himself has consistently played politics with the issue rather than reaching a concrete deal to move forward. Anyone with two eyes can see this, but Trump continues to insist otherwise in a futile attempt to score political points.

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By Trumpian standards, this has been a relatively quiet week. After all, the president only fired a single cabinet secretary, and zero high-ranking aides! Plus, Trump hasn't attacked Stormy Daniels on Twitter even once, after her bombshell interview on 60 Minutes last Sunday. For Trump, this shows some newfound restraint.

Of course, everything is relative. Perhaps Trump is hunkering down in a desperate attempt to convince a high-profile lawyer (or even just any lawyer) to join his shrinking legal team. It would be kind of hard to interview new lawyers when you're making news by publicly and personally attacking Stormy Daniels, for obvious reasons. Trump's legal team these days is down to the bare bones, after one lawyer quit last week and his replacement decided at the very last minute that he had "conflicts" and couldn't accept the job after all. Superlawyer Ted Olson also piled on, in an interview explaining why he wasn't exactly rushing to join the Trump White House:

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Today, we're going to take a trip down the rabbit hole with Schrödinger's (Cheshire?) cat. If that sounds like a mixed-up metaphor, that's because it is. Our fantastical journey starts off as a Charles Dodgson-style syllogism, but since it contains such circular logic it winds up being an Erwin Schrödinger-style thought experiment. Did they or didn't they? Well, until the wave function collapses into a single eigenstate, President Donald Trump's lawyer's lawyer would have us all believe that they both did and didn't, at the same time. The cat is both alive and dead, in other words. While this may be the most obscure and confusing lead paragraph I have ever personally written, such obscurity seems to be almost required these days, to talk about the growing sex scandal (or non-sex scandal) surrounding Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.

While many have heard of the Schrödinger's cat paradox, only students of pure logic are usually familiar with the work of Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) in the field of syllogisms. Here is a sample, in case you've never seen one before:

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