Last Call For Garland Parade

Mitch and Chuck on Merrick Garland:

“The tradition had been not to confirm vacancies in the middle of a presidential [election] year,” McConnell told Meet the Presshost Chuck Todd. “You’d have to go back 80 years to find the last time it happened… Everyone knew, including President Obama’s former White House counsel, that if the shoe had been on the other foot, [Democrats] wouldn’t have filled a Republican president’s vacancy in the middle of a presidential election.”

“That’s a rationale to vote against his confirmation,” Todd argued. “Why not put him up for a vote? Any senator can have a rationale to not to vote for a confirmation. Why not put Merrick Garland on the floor and if the rationale is, ‘You know what? Too close to an election,’ then vote no?”

McConnell laughed defensively.

“Look, we litigated that last year,” the Majority Leader stuttered. “The American people decided that they wanted Donald Trump to make the nomination, not Hillary Clinton.”

McConnell argued that Democrats should focus on the issue at hand, the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

“There’s no rational reason, no basis for voting against Neil Gorsuch,” McConnell opined.

“You say it’s been litigated, the Garland situation,” Todd replied. “For a lot of Senate Democrats, they’re not done litigating this… What was wrong with allowing Merrick Garland to have an up or down vote?”

“I already told you!” McConnell exclaimed. “You don’t fill Supreme Court vacancies in the middle of a presidential election.”

“Should that be the policy going forward?” Todd interrupted. “Are you prepared to pass a resolution that says in election years any Supreme Court vacancy [will not be filled] and let it be a sense of the Senate resolution, that says no Supreme Court nominations will be considered in any even numbered year? Is that where we’re headed?”

“That’s an absurd question,” McConnell complained. “We were right in the middle of a presidential election year. Every body knew that either side — had the shoe been on the other foot — wouldn’t have filled it. But that has nothing to do with what we’re voting on this year.”

Dems should say that since Trump is already campaigning that they can't possibly allow Gorsuch to get a vote and filibuster him, since we can't possibly nominate and confirm a Supreme Court nominee during that time.

Shutdown Countdown, Con't

Don't look now, but the party that can't even pass its own healthcare legislation after seven years needs to come up with a budget in less than four weeks or the government shuts down. Stan Collender:

Funding for the federal government will run out at midnight on April 28. If some type of new appropriation isn't enacted by then, there will be a government shutdown the next day.

You would think the Republican-controlled Congress would want to deal with this immediately, especially in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act repeal/replace debacle.

But the Senate will be in recess from next Friday until April 24 (the House comes back on April 25) and isn't planning to consider a new funding deal until then. Once it comes back to Washington, Congress will be in session for less than a week before the shutdown will begin.

President Trump has proposed $18 billion in cuts to domestic programs for the rest of fiscal 2017 that the White House will want included in the new funding bill. He's also proposed initial spending for a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Congressional Democrats are against the president's proposals. While they're very likely to vote against the funding bill no matter what, House and Senate Democrats are almost guaranteed to vote against it if any of these hot button items are included.

And guess what?  The GOP budget might not even make it out of the House.

Republican leaders are eager to avoid a government shutdown but the demise of their Obamacare repeal could leave some conservatives spoiling for a fight that raises the odds of a standoff.

The House Freedom Caucus, which helped bring down the GOP health-care bill, says Republicans have yet to notch a significant victory, despite controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House. One top promise they and other conservatives had to hoped to deliver on with the Obamacare repeal was defunding Planned Parenthood over its provision of abortions.

Now, their next chance comes with a spending measure needed to keep the government operating after April 28, when current funding runs out. But Democrats, and some Republicans, strongly defend the group, which provides many health services to women. The battle, which nearly led to a shutdown in 2015, could be enough to set Congress on a path to another one.

“I’m very concerned and we are going to have to try and work in a bipartisan fashion,” Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said Monday.

House Speaker Paul Ryan suggested Tuesday that the spending measure was the wrong place to wage the Planned Parenthood fight.

“We think reconciliation is the way to go” on defunding the group, Ryan told reporters, referring to the mechanism Republicans were trying to use for the health-care bill that allows them to avoid a filibuster from Senate Democrats.

But to do that, it will have to make it past the same GOP House Freedom Caucus that scrapped Trumpcare because it wasn't draconian enough. Anyone want to take bets on whether or not this turns into a disaster?

Too late, I'm thinking.

 

Some Inciting News In Kentucky

The big local story today is the ruling by a federal judge that then GOP candidate Trump did incite violence at one of his campaign rallies in Louisville last spring, and that the lawsuit against him can proceed.

A federal judge in Louisville said in a ruling that then-candidate Donald Trump incited the use of violence against three protesters when he told supporters at a campaign rally a year ago to "get 'em out of here."

U. S. District Judge David J. Hale of the Western District of Kentucky also wrote in an opinion and order released Friday that because violence had broken out at a prior Trump rally and that known hate group members were in the Louisville crowd, Trump's ordering the removal of an African-American woman was "particularly reckless."

Citing case law from tumultuous 1960s race riots and student protests, Hale rejected motions to dismiss the pending complaint against Trump and three supporters in the crowd that was filed by three protesters after a March 1, 2016, campaign rally in Louisville. Only a portion of the defendants' motion was granted, but the decision means that the bulk of the claims will proceed. Hale referred the case to Magistrate Judge H. Brent Brennenstuhl.

The protesters, Henry Brousseau, Kashiya Nwanguma and Molly Shah, are seeking unspecified monetary damages. They claim they were assaulted by audience members who were riled up by Trump. Besides Trump, the lawsuit names three defendants in attendance — Matthew Heimbach, a leader with the white supremacist group Traditional Youth Network from Paoli, Indiana; and Alvin Bamberger, a member of the Korean War Veterans Association from Ohio; and an unknown individual.

The men were caught on video pushing and shoving Nwanguma to usher her out of the Kentucky International Convention Center after Trump's urging from the stage. Trump's lawyer, R. Kent Westberry of Louisville, had argued that the suit's allegations threaten fundamental constitutional protections by chilling political speech and that those accused of assaulting the three were not acting for or at the direction of Trump or the campaign. Instead, they were acting on their own initiative and for their own purposes, Westberry wrote. 

People didn't believe me that Trump was a threat when I brought this up after this happened 13 months ago.  They didn't believe me when I said he was generating white identity politics to win over white voters and that he was a clear danger to the country.

They believe me now.

Sunday Long Read: The Technology Of Immortality

This week's Sunday Long Read is New Yorker author Tad Friend's piece on Silicon Valley's quest to find the fountain of youth: clinical immortality and the end of aging.  Nobody it seems is more interested in finding the keys to controlling human lifespan more than the young titans of tech, who want to be around to see -- and to direct -- human development long, long into our future.

For decades, the solution to aging has seemed merely decades away. In the early nineties, research on C. elegans, a tiny nematode worm that resembles a fleck of lint, showed that a single gene mutation extended its life, and that another mutation blocked that extension. The idea that age could be manipulated by twiddling a few control knobs ignited a research boom, and soon various clinical indignities had increased the worm’s life span by a factor of ten and those of lab mice by a factor of two. The scientific consensus transformed. Age went from being a final stage (a Time cover from 1958: “Growing Old Usefully”) and a social issue (Time, 1970: “Growing Old in America: The Unwanted Generation”) to something avoidable (1996: “Forever Young”) or at least vastly deferrable (2015: “This Baby Could Live to Be 142 Years Old”). Death would no longer be a metaphysical problem, merely a technical one.

The celebration was premature. Gordon Lithgow, a leading C. elegans researcher, told me, “At the beginning, we thought it would be simple—a clock!—but we’ve now found about five hundred and fifty genes in the worm that modulate life span. And I suspect that half of the twenty thousand genes in the worm’s genome are somehow involved.” That’s for a worm with only nine hundred and fifty-nine cells. The code book is far more complex for animals that excite our envy: the bee larva fed copiously on royal jelly that changes into an ageless queen; the Greenland shark that lives five hundred years and doesn’t get cancer; even the humble quahog clam, the kind used for chowder, which holds the record at five hundred and seven.

For us, aging is the creeping and then catastrophic dysfunction of everything, all at once. Our mitochondria sputter, our endocrine system sags, our DNA snaps. Our sight and hearing and strength diminish, our arteries clog, our brains fog, and we falter, seize, and fail. Every research breakthrough, every announcement of a master key that we can turn to reverse all that, has been followed by setbacks and confusion. A few years ago, there was great excitement about telomeres, Liz Blackburn’s specialty—DNA buffers that protect the ends of chromosomes just as plastic tips protect the ends of shoelaces. As we age, our telomeres become shorter, and, when these shields go, cells stop dividing. (As Blackburn said, “It puts cells into a terribly alarmed state!”) If we could extend the telomeres, the thinking went, we might reverse aging. But it turns out that animals with long telomeres, such as lab mice, don’t necessarily have long lives—and that telomerase, the enzyme that promotes telomere growth, is also activated in the vast majority of cancer cells. The more we know about the body, the more we realize how little we know.

Still, researchers plunge ahead. Understanding isn’t a precondition for successful intervention, they point out; we had no real grasp of virology or immunology when we began vaccinating people against smallpox.

In the murk of scientific inquiry, every researcher looks to a ruling metaphor for guidance. Aubrey de Grey likes to compare the body to a car: a mechanic can fix an engine without necessarily understanding the physics of combustion, and assiduously restored antique cars run just fine. De Grey is the chief science officer of Silicon Valley’s sens Research Foundation, which stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence—a fancy way of saying “Planning Your Comprehensive Tune-up.” An Englishman who began his career with a decade of work in A.I., he speaks with rapid fluidity, often while stroking his Rasputin-length beard. De Grey has proposed that if we fix seven types of physical damage we will be on the path to living for more than a thousand years (assuming we can avoid getting hit by a bus or an asteroid).

When I met him at the sens office, in Mountain View, he told me, “Gerontologists have been led massively astray by looking for a root cause to aging, when it’s actually that everything falls apart at the same time, because all our systems are interrelated. So we have to divide and conquer.” We just need to restore tissue suppleness, replace cells that have stopped dividing and remove those that have grown toxic, avert the consequences of DNA mutations, and mop up the gunky by-products of all of the above. If we can disarm these killers, de Grey suggests, we should gain thirty years of healthy life, and during that period we’ll make enough further advances that we’ll begin growing biologically younger. We’ll achieve “longevity escape velocity.”

De Grey vexes many in the life-extension community, and one reason may be his intemperate life style. He told me, “I can drink as much as I like and it has no effect. I don’t even need to exercise, I’m so well optimized.” Until recently, he maintained two girlfriends and a wife. Now, he said, “I’m engaged, and my polyamorous days are behind me.”

But the main reason is his prophetic air of certainty. His 2007 book, “Ending Aging,” is replete with both exacting research into the obstacles to living longer and proposed solutions so ambitious that they resemble science fiction. De Grey’s fix for mitochondrial mutation, for instance, is to smuggle backup copies of DNA from the mitochondria into the vault of the nucleus, which evolution annoyingly failed to do—probably because the proteins needed in the mitochondria would ball up during their journey through the watery cell body. His fix for that, moving the DNA one way and the proteins that it produces another, amounts to a kind of subcellular hokey pokey. A number of scientists praise de Grey for anatomizing the primary threats, yet they see troubleshooting all seven pathways through such schemes—and you have to troubleshoot them all for his plan to work—as a foredoomed labor. Matt Kaeberlein, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington, said, “It’s like saying, ‘All we have to do to travel to another solar system is these seven things: first, accelerate your rocket to three-quarters of the speed of light . . . ’ ”

The great majority of longevity scientists are healthspanners, not immortalists. They want to give us a healthier life followed by “compressed morbidity”—a quick and painless death. These scientists focus on the time line: since 1900, the human life span has increased by thirty years—and so, as a consequence, have cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and dementia. Aging is the leading precondition for so many diseases that “aging” and “disease” are essentially metonyms. Accidents and violence are the leading causes of death up to age forty-four, then cancer rises to the top, and then, at sixty-five, heart disease. Healthspanners want to understand the etiologies of cancer and heart disease and then block them. Why do we almost never get those diseases at age two? How can we extend that protection to a hundred and two? But if we cured cancer we would add only 3.3 years to an average life; solving heart disease gets us an extra four. If we eliminated all disease, the average life span might extend into the nineties. To live longer, we’d have to slow aging itself.

Conquering both genetic diseases and stopping the aging clock will be the big medical goal of the 21st century.  Of course, solving that riddle will only lead to a host of other issues to be tackled, the most pressing being where do you put billions of humans who do not age when we're already doing a great job of wrecking the only planet we currently have.  Still, the titans of tech see this as another problem they have the unique capability of solving.  Maybe they're right.

Maybe.

Predictions And Predilections

Joy-Ann Reid, MSNBC weekend host and Daily Beast columnist, gives us her take on the first 70 days of the Trump regime and finds that things are falling apart very quickly now for the White House.

Occam’s Razor is the logical principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best. And the notion that Trump’s inner circle is so laden with Russian nationals, Russian mob figures and people affiliated with Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin by accident is a hell of a stretch. Even his chief TV flak, Boris Ephstein, is a Russian émigré, who entered Trumpworld through his collegiate friendship with Trump’s son Eric. Ephstein was recently let go from the White House without explanation, and sorry but it’s hard to believe that it was because of his bullying personality in TV greenrooms, which has been Boris’ M.O. since he popped up on cable news in 2010.

Can all that we have heard thus far been a series of coincidences? Can it all be mere happenstance? Much simpler is the notion that members of Russia’s spy services saw an opportunity to recruit a useful idiot in Trump, given that his greed and lust for power matched that of the Russian oligarchs themselves. They had an assortment of people in Trumpworld to use as potential conduits. There was Trump’s longtime crony Roger Stone, Manafort’s old lobbying partner, who pushed Trump to favor the U.S.S.R.’s point of view over Ronald Reagan’s during the 1980s, when Vlad Putin was still a KGB agent, and has bragged about his “back channel” to WikiLeaks. There’s Flynn, for whom Russia had provided financial rescue and who was inexplicably brought into the inner sanctum of the White House despite the many clouds swirling over him. There’s Donald Jr., Trump’s son and namesake who was eager to ink condo deals with Russian buyers. And of course, there’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a sort of mini-Trump whose morally promiscuous business dealings include canoodling with a sanctioned Russian bank.

We know that Russian media outlets and their cutouts fed Trump conspiracy theories and fake news about Hillary Clinton to repeat and retweet. We know that Carter Page went to Russia last July just before the first WikiLeaks oppo dumps. We know that Stone had an uncanny ability to predict the oppo dumps before they happened. J.D. Gordon by his own admission was dispatched to Cleveland to flip the Ukraine plank at the RNC. And we know that Flynn brought his people with him to the National Security Council (for awhile, including his conspiracy theory-loving namesake son). And when he was forced out, he left that former DIA aide, Ezra Cohen Watnick, behind, over the objections of his successor.

Will this series of inferences ever be conclusively proved? Who knows. But the Trump presidency is permanently tainted by the implications of their clear use of Russian propaganda to batter Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Trump’s legitimacy will forever be questioned because of his personal enthusiasm for WikiLeaks’ peddling of Russia-hacked emails.

Even if he survives, Trump’s leadership in Washington is in tatters. The Freedom Caucus doesn’t fear him. What’s left of the Republican moderates don’t respect him. The Democrats will have nothing to do with him. And his fair weather friend, Paul Ryan, is a disaster as speaker of the House who is fighting harder for tax cuts for the top one percent than for anything in the Trump campaign agenda and making enemies of the Breitbartians in the process. The Senate Intelligence Committee is showing signs of conducting a real investigation into Trumpgate, and there are fewer and fewer Devin Nunes’ professing a willingness to destroy themselves on Trump’s behalf. Republican partisans are openly advising the GOP-led Senate to cram through their Supreme Court nominee and then wash their hands of Donald J. Trump forever.

Barring some dramatic change—and we should seriously worry about what Trump and Bannon might cook up in that regard—this only goes in one direction, and that’s further downhill.

And I'll cut off our usual suspect on this now: yes, I understand that applying Occam's Razor to clouds of circumstantial evidence that never panned out to legally significant proof of wrongdoing is exactly what Republicans have been doing to Hillary Clinton for 25 years.  I get that, believe me.

But this is increasingly not circumstantial evidence.  There's a lot of actual wrongdoing here, and a lot of intelligence on it.  And everyone who's in the know on this says this is a major, major issue, and that the Russians did real and lasting damage to us.  For Trump to continue to associate with Moscow is unconscionable even if he's somehow innocent.

So yeah, I'm tired of it.  And it's looking like the rest of the country is getting tired of it too.

NC Goes Straight Down The Crapper, Con't

North Carolina Republicans, faced with billions of dollars in boycotts over the state's awful, bigoted "bathroom bill", have cracked...sort of.  They have repealed the law in exchange for a moratorium on anti-discrimination ordinances by cities and counties until 2022.

Gov. Roy Cooper signed the measure into law a few hours after the General Assembly approved it, coming up against a Thursday deadline that threatened to bar the state from hosting championship sports events through 2022.

The result is a compromise as controversial as HB2 itself, dividing politicians and advocates over whether they can support it or not. The final version of the bill wasn’t completed until late Wednesday, following days of intense behind-the-scenes negotiations over dozens of proposals.

“In a perfect world, with a good General Assembly, we would have repealed House Bill 2 fully today and added full statewide protections for LGBT North Carolinians,” Cooper said at a news conference. “Unfortunately our supermajority Republican legislature will not pass these protections. But this is an important goal that I will keep fighting for.”

The Democratic governor negotiated the compromise with the Republican leaders of the legislature, House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger.

“It was a very measured approach,” Moore told reporters after the legislation was passed. “I think this bill, as written, is also something that is very defensible in court. I think it’s something the public supports. No one is 100 percent happy, but I would say I’m 95 percent happy.”

Whether the repeal and other provisions in the new law will be sufficient to put the state back in contention to host NCAA sports championships remains to be seen. Moore told reporters after the session that business leaders who have been intermediaries in recent negotiations have told him this version of the bill would satisfy NCAA concerns.

NCAA president Mark Emmert said the NCAA’s “Board of Governors will determine whether this is a sufficient change in the law to return.”

“Over the next several days I hope we’ll have something to announce,” Emmert said Thursday at a news conference. “I’m personally very pleased we have a bill to debate and discuss.”

Emmert acknowledged the NCAA’s four specific objections to HB2 were not entirely addressed: “They repealed some of those areas but not all of them. The question the board is debating will be is repealing two or three enough?”

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article141656549.html#storylink=cpy

Faced with a GOP super-majority in both the state House and Senate, Cooper really didn't have much of a choice.  The bill removes the state's bigotry, but also stops new local protections for LGBTQ folks in NC for another nearly 5 years, meaning it's still 100% legal to fire someone, deny them housing, or to deny them goods and services in the state over sexual orientation.  In other words, the state is back to where it was before HB2 was passed, and that wasn't exactly a good place from an equality standpoint either.

My home state still has a long, long way to go, but it at least gets rid of the codified bigotry.  But it goes back to bigotry by neglect as the default.  This is about more than bathrooms, in the state that 50 years ago proved it was more about lunch counters.

Do better, people of NC.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Mike Flynn wants to flip, guys.  It's on.

Mike Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, has told the Federal Bureau of Investigation and congressional officials investigating the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia that he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution, according to officials with knowledge of the matter.

As an adviser to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and later one of Mr. Trump’s top aides in the White House, Mr. Flynn was privy to some of the most sensitive foreign-policy deliberations of the new administration and was directly involved in discussions about the possible lifting of sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama administration.

He has made the offer to the FBI and the House and Senate intelligence committees through his lawyer but has so far found no takers, the officials said.

Mr. Flynn’s attorney, Robert Kelner, declined to comment.

It wasn’t clear if Mr. Flynn had offered to talk about specific aspects of his time working for Mr. Trump, but the fact that he was seeking immunity suggested Mr. Flynn feels he may be in legal jeopardy following his brief stint as the national security adviser, one official said.

Now, Flynn was let go for a reason, he's dirty as hell.  Flynn knows how this game works, and if he doesn't have anything substantial, immunity is a hell of a price for the FBI to pay considering what we know about Flynn already is enough to put him away for a very long time.  On the other hand, if he's willing to turn evidence against Trump, as National Security Adviser, he'd know where the bodies are buried (and that may not entirely be a figure of speech in this case.)

Please note the FBI has yet to take Flynn up on his offer.  I'd be extremely wary too.  Option one: It could be that the Feds already know what Flynn has to offer, in which case Mr. Flynn is going to crash and burn.  Option two: It also could be Flynn is offering more than he really knows, and the FBI doesn't want to give up the immunity card this early in the proceedings.

The third option is that Trump was never the target, but Flynn was.  Now, maybe with Flynn they can open an investigation into Trump directly, but we don't know.  All we know is Flynn wants immunity for the info he has.  Flynn at least thinks there's a bigger target on the list at this point, or he's trying to invent one to save his ass.

We'll find out sooner rather than later at this point.

High Nunes, Con't

So the NY Times did some digging and identified GOP Rep. Devin Nunes's White House sources, meaning at this point we now have a direct link between the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the regime he's supposed to be investigating.

A pair of White House officials played a role in providing Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.

The revelation that White House officials assisted in the disclosure of the intelligence reports — which Mr. Nunes then discussed with President Trump — is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election.

Mr. Nunes has also been faulted by his congressional colleagues for sharing the information with President Trump before consulting with other members of the intelligence committee.

The congressman has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe coming to the committee with sensitive information. He first disclosed the existence of the intelligence reports on March 22, and in his public comments he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.

Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

Nunes took intelligence information from the White House and leaked it in order to blow a hole in the investigation.  What he forgot was that he was in over his head from minute one on this, and when he tried to backtrack, realizing how screwed he was, he just made it worse.

His final effort was to refuse to identify his sources, as if journalists smelling blood would simply drop the story in the name of solidarity with having to deal with confidential information.

No such luck, as the Times burned him and his sources this afternoon. 

Mr. Cohen-Watnick is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser. The officials said that earlier this month, shortly after Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter about being wiretapped on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.

Officials said the reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle in advance of his inauguration.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the intelligence, and to avoid angering Mr. Cohen-Watnick and Mr. Ellis. Officials say that Mr. Cohen-Watnick has been reviewing the reports from his fourth-floor office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where the National Security Counsel is based.

Trump's wiretap paranoia became a "will anyone rid me of this troublesome Obama" moment, and it looks like Cohen-Watnick stepped up.  He blabbed to Nunes, who being a Trump campaign surrogate, was trustworthy.

And then Nunes told the world, expecting that his "revelations" would sink the previous president and prove Trump was somehow being stalked.  Only, well, Nunes isn't that bright.  He got info from the White House...in order to brief the White House.

Which means Nunes was given the information in order to provide cover for Trump, period. He then lied about it, badly.  He's now been completely busted for it, because if there's one thing Washington DC cannot abide, it's a terrible liar in a position of power.

Now, the real fun begins. The bigger story remains that Trump and his campaign were picked up by FISA surveillance because they were talking to suspected foreign agents that the NSA wanted to keep an eye on, both before and after the election.

That part hasn't changed.  But we now know to what ridiculous lengths Trump will go in order to try to stonewall us from finding out why they had these conversations, and what was said.  Nunes figured this double back was going to clear Trump.

Instead it's ended up burying Nunes at the very least.

Perception As Reality In The Trump Era

The Trump regime is staggering across America like Polyphemus, the mythical cyclops blinded by Odysseus, but as damaged as the beast is, it's still quite able to harm anything in its path.  Unfortunately that includes both friend and foe as House Republicans found out last week as Trump continues to lash out at anything in reach.  For now, the White House is attempting to contain the carnage and counter the narrative by deploying loyalists to Super PAC groups that support the regime in order to turn perception into reality.

President Donald Trump is undergoing his first staff shake-up less than three months into his term, sending deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh to bolster the flagging outside groups that were meant to support his agenda, according to a Republican source close to the White House.

The move caps a rough stretch for Trump, who has seen his young administration dogged by controversy, his travel ban executive order blocked twice in court, and a health care bill he supported go down in flames.

Walsh, a close ally of chief of staff Reince Priebus, served as chief of staff at the Republican National Committee when Priebus was chairman, and she was one of a number of RNC staffers he brought with him to the White House, including press secretary Sean Spicer.

The move has the blessing of the highest ranks of the White House. “You’ve got to have somebody from the inside who has the blessing of the man himself,” said the source close to the White House.

Reality TV huckster Trump knows that if everyone starts calling him a loser, a loser he will be.  People are starting to fight back against him.  He's coming across as Darth Vader, not the Rebel Alliance he conned America into thinking he was.  Cities and states are starting to turn against him and his policies.

The city of Seattle sued U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on Wednesday over its executive order seeking to withhold federal funds from "sanctuary cities," arguing it amounted to unconstitutional federal coercion.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray told reporters the Constitution forbade the federal government from pressuring cities, “yet that is exactly what the president’s order does. Once again, this new administration has decided to bully.”

“Things like grants helping us with child sex trafficking are not connected to immigration,” Murray said, adding: "It is time for cities to stand up and ask the courts to put an end to the anxiety in our cities and the chaos in our system."

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions threatened on Monday to strip Justice Department grants from cities and other local governments that choose to shield illegal immigrants from deportation efforts.

Trump, who made tougher immigration enforcement a cornerstone of his campaign, directed the government in his Jan. 25 executive order to cut off funding to sanctuary jurisdictions. That order has yet to be put into effect, but Sessions' announcement seemed to be the first step in doing so.

At some point the courts will give the people a victory against Trump large enough that he will have to act by force, as all tyrants eventually do.  When that happens, America will be tested like it hasn't been in 150 years.

Last Call For The Last Clinic In Bevinstan

Kentucky's last abortion clinic in Louisville is now deep into a legal battle to stay open after Gov. Matt Bevin ordered it closed earlier this week due to state TRAP laws passed during the General Assembly session earlier this year.  Should the lawsuit against the state fail, Kentucky would become the first US state with zero abortion access.

Gov. Matt Bevin's administration is seeking to shut down Kentucky's only abortion provider, prompting a federal lawsuit by the clinic to block the move it says would have “a devastating impact on women.”

Bevin’s administration has ordered the EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville to stop providing abortions starting Monday, claiming it lacks proper agreements for patient care in the event of a medical emergency.

EMW's lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Louisville, calls the order "blatantly unconstitutional" and asks a federal judge to bar the Bevin administration from revoking the EMW clinic's license.

"They've made it clear they won't stop until no woman can get an abortion in Kentucky," said Donald L. Cox, a lawyer for EMW. "It's just an attempt to ban abortion in Kentucky."

The state's announcement in a March 13 letter that it is revoking the license makes the EMW clinic the latest enforcement target of the administration of Bevin, an anti-abortion Republican who has called himself an “unapologetically pro-life individual.”

Over the past year, the Bevin administration has blocked abortions at Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky's Louisville clinic and at an EMW clinic in Lexington over licensure disputes, leaving EMW’s downtown Louisville clinic as Kentucky’s sole abortion provider.

Officials with the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services, which licenses abortion clinics, has argued its actions are based on patient safety.

But EMW, joined in its lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, said the clinic already complies with the law and says that if the state succeeds in forcing it to close, “abortion will be effectively banned in the commonwealth.”

This is the first major TRAP law legal test in the Trump era, and once again for those of you playing at home, TRAP stands for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, swamping clinics with burdensome regulations and laws that make it impossible for clinics to stay open in the name of "patient safety".  So far the courts have stopped red states short of getting rid of their last provider, but that was before the Trump regime assumed control of the Justice Department.

Now there's a very real possibility that nationwide TRAP laws could be passed, even for blue states. As it is, abortion clinics are being closed too in states like California because of economic reasons.

Still, Kentucky's last clinic is, for now, remaining open.  For how long, is anyone's guess.

Dark Money Isn't Funny

With Trump reeling as his regime plummets to new record approval rating lows, the dark money funnel that fed the GOP is coming to the rescue, going after Democratic senators up for re-election in 2018 in Trump states.

Making America Great, a nonprofit run by Rebekah Mercer, one of Trump’s most influential donors, will begin airing $1 million in television ads on Wednesday, coupled with a $300,000 digital advertising campaign. The TV ads will run in the District of Columbia, along with ten states Trump carried in the presidential election where a Democratic senator is up for re-election in 2018: West Virginia, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan, North Dakota, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Montana and Pennsylvania. The digital campaign also will focus on voters in those states.

“Our group will be a conduit to highlight President Trump’s achievement to the rest of the country,” says Emily Cornell, who is moving from the Mercer-funded data firm Cambridge Analytica to run Making America Great’s day-to-day operations. “We are here to promote successes and hold accountable broken promises -- not just to those who voted for Trump, but to all Americans.”

Trump can use the PR boost. On March 27, Gallup reported his job approval rating fell to a new low of 36 percent, two points lower than his predecessor, Barack Obama, ever reached during his eight-year tenure in the White House.

The president could soon face added difficulties from House Republicans in passing legislation to keep the government running. Current funding runs out later this month. He’ll also have to contend with Democratic opposition to his Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch. Trump donors, including Mercer, were upset that the Trump-backed Republican health care bill did not receive more outside support to counter its critics.

“Over the last couple weeks, we’ve aggressively tried to launch Making America Great,” says David Bossie, the group’s chief strategist. “We have the full support of the White House, and our effort is proud to be stepping up to help President Trump move his agenda forward.”

It's probably the only strategy the GOP has at this point.  Ruining the Democrats' chances to take back the Senate by putting the Dems on permanent defense for 20 months is a tactic that works.  Another midterm with record low turnout, depressed by "but the Dems are just as awful if not worse!" ads for the next year plus is just what the GOP needs to stay in power.

And of course these donors have unlimited funds for "advocacy" like this.  Thanks, Supreme Court!

No Gorsuch Thing As A Free Lunch, Con't

It's becoming readily apparent that enough Democrats will stand together in the Senate to filibuster Trump regime Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch over Merrick Garland's stolen seat and Trump being under investigation.  GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is warning once again that Republicans will deploy the "nuclear option" to remove the ability to filibuster Supreme Court picks if necessary, but unlike the Democrats who need only 41 of 48 votes to sustain a filibuster, the GOP may not have the 50 of their 52 Senate votes required to change the rules.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday left Judge Neil Gorsuch with two roads to the Supreme Court: winning over all of the party’s remaining swing votes, or relying on the so-called nuclear option.

The five Democratic senators up for reelection next year in states where President Donald Trump won by single digits have all endorsed a filibuster of Gorsuch, while the five facing voters next year in states Trump won by double digits all remain undecided. Gorsuch would have to carry all five of those fence-sitters to overcome a Democratic filibuster — plus his home-state Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Maine independent Sen. Angus King, and another more surprising senator.

But after liberals raised the pressure on Democrats to oppose Gorsuch and the National Rifle Association targeted four red-state Democrats with $1 million in pro-Gorsuch ads, Trump’s nominee ended the day with his chances at beating a filibuster lower than ever.

“The issue is whether Gorsuch has earned 60 votes, which according to our Republican friends, has always been the standard for a significant decision by the Senate — and at present, I don’t think they’re even close,” liberal Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told Politico. “So I don’t see this as being a make-or-break determination for any of those red-state Democrats.”

On Tuesday alone, nine Democrats came out against the nominee — although one, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, has not clarified his decision on a filibuster. The flurry came as liberal activists dug in their heels further ahead of a series of nationwide protests that the anti-Gorsuch “People’s Defense” coalition has planned for Saturday.

And that leaves the nuclear option on the table...if the GOP can trigger it.

Mitch McConnell told his leadership team in private this week what’s becoming increasingly obvious on Capitol Hill: Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch probably won’t get 60 votes to avoid a filibuster.

But the Senate majority leader had an equally pressing message: Republicans should have no compunction about pulling the trigger on the “nuclear option” — with Democrats resisting a high court nominee as well-pedigreed as Gorsuch.

“Feel no guilt,” McConnell said, according to attendees.

McConnell’s attempt to buck up his GOP ranks, relayed by three sources in attendance, underscores the high stakes of the Gorsuch battle as the Senate barrels toward a likely nuclear showdown next week: His confirmation is, to put it mildly, a can’t-lose for Republicans.

That was true after Senate Republicans waged a yearlong blockade of Merrick Garland that positioned the GOP to pick someone else now. But the spectacular collapse of the Obamacare repeal effort last week makes Gorsuch all the more urgent for President Donald Trump and reeling Hill Republicans.

McConnell is so confident that Republicans will win the Gorsuch fight that the Kentucky Republican predicted he’ll be confirmed by a week from Friday.

Do we really think the GOP has its act together enough now to pull this off?  Besides, where will we be next week on Russia?

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump/Russia story is rapidly becoming the Trump/Russia cover-up, and the guy at the heart of the attempt to stonewall on evidence is once again GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, the current House Intelligence Committee chair.  Last week, Nunes abruptly canceled Intel committee hearings scheduled for today that were supposed to include testimony from, among other witnesses, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates.  Now we find out the Trump Regime may very well have directed Nunes to cancel those hearings as a last ditch effort to keep Yates from public testimony.

There was supposed to be a public hearing on Tuesday that could have shed important light on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, including whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives.

But House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) abruptly cancelled the hearing — which was scheduled to include former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former DNI James Clapper, and former CIA Director John Brennan — late last week. Ranking member Adam Schiff (D-CA) called it an “attempt to choke off public info.”

Now, thanks to letters between Yates and the Justice Department reviewed by the Washington Post, it appears the Trump administration tried to prevent Yates from testifying about links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

The letters, sent earlier this month, said Yates could not testify at a congressional hearing about Trump’s potential association with Russia because the topics “are likely covered by the presidential communications privilege.” Justice Department officials recommended she consult with the White House when deciding what details to disclose to the Intelligence Committee.

The White House called the Post’s story “entirely false” in an unsigned statement.

Yates, while still acting attorney general, played a central role in the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s discussions with the Russian ambassador, and his withholding of information from the Trump administration, before Trump asked for his resignation.

The White House is trying to pretend that it didn't take action to stop Yates from testifying about Trump/Russia connections she discovered, in particular involving recently fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.  Nevertheless, the same day that Yates's lawyer wrote back to the White House stating Yates's intent to testify, the hearing was cancelled by Nunes.

Democrats are continuing to blast Nunes and are calling for his resignation as House Intel Committee chair.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes’ announcement last week that officials from the transition team of President Donald Trump had been inadvertently surveilled by the U.S. intelligence community came at the behest of the White House, Rep. Eric Swalwell said Tuesday morning.

Nunes (R-Calif.) confirmed Monday that he had traveled to the White House to meet with his still-unnamed source on the day before he made his announcement but denied that the public disclosure was coordinated in any way with Trump administration officials. The White House, Nunes said in a CNN interview, simply served as a secure location for reviewing classified information and “I’m quite sure that I think people in the West Wing had no idea that I was there.”

But Swalwell (D-Calif.), also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, disputed the chairman’s argument Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It’s not an internet cafe. You can’t just walk in and receive classified information,” Swalwell said of the White House, adding that when a member of Congress visits, “everyone in the building knows that you’re there in the building.”

“This is done because the White House wanted it to be done,” the California Democrat said. “And this is what a cover-up to a crime looks like. We are watching it play out right now.”

If Nunes wanted to view classified materials, Swalwell said, there are secure facilities for doing so at the Capital, making a trip to the White House unnecessary. “If this was done the proper way, they could have brought it over, shared it with both parties of the committee,” he said.

Swalwell also wondered aloud why Nunes has been unwilling to share the source of his information when committee members have “always been on the same team up until now.”

That this looks bad for Nunes is a massive understatement, especially now that later this afternoon, Nunes declared that he would not be sharing his sources with the rest of the committee.

It really won't be too much longer I'd think.

Rolling Coal Rolling Over You

The Trump regime is putting an end to nearly all Obama-era climate measures today, and in the stroke of a pen, the United States becomes the largest single threat to the planet. We should be treated as such by the rest of the world, and for what benefit to the American economy?  Coal jobs are never coming back.

President Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday to roll back most of President Barack Obama’s climate change legacy, celebrating the move as a way to increase the nation’s “energy independence” and to restore thousands of lost coal mining jobs.

But energy economists say the expected order falls short of both of those goals — in part because the United States already largely relies on domestic sources for the coal and natural gas that fires most of the nation’s power plants.

“We don’t import coal,” said Robert Stavins, an energy economist at Harvard University. “So in terms of the Clean Power Plan, this has nothing to do with so-called energy independence whatsoever.”

Administration officials said the new order would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to start the legal process of withdrawing and rewriting the Clean Power Plan, Mr. Obama’s climate change policy. Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, said in an interview on ABC News on Sunday that it will help the United States “be both pro-jobs and pro-environment” and described it as the “energy independence executive order.”

Yet, coal miners also should not assume their jobs will return if Trump’s regulations take effect.

The new order would mean that older coal plants that had been marked for closings would probably stay open, said Robert W. Godby, an energy economist at the University of Wyoming. That would extend the market demand for coal for up to a decade.

But even so, “the mines that are staying open are using more mechanization,” he said. “They’re not hiring people.”

“So even if we saw an increase in coal production, we could see a decrease in coal jobs,” he said.

Of course, this administration doesn't give a damn about the environment, and given the massive cuts in regulatory ability to keep food, water, and the air safe under this regime, the damage will almost certainly be irreversible.

I suspect the rest of the world will not stand idly by.

Cause Of Death: Neglect

As the Trump regime has broadly hinted at since last week's epic meltdown of the Trumpcare bill in the House, Greg Sargent notes that Trump could very well let existing Obamacare provisions collapse through simple refusal to enforce them.

Now that the GOP plan to wipe out Obamacare lies in smoking ruins, President Trump is mulling a new and fiendishly clever scheme: allow the law to collapse, or even further undermine it through executive action, and pin the blame for the resulting human toll on Democrats. As it happens, Trump does have the tools to inflict immense damage on the Affordable Care Act and hurt a lot of people in the process.

But once you subject this strategy to a moment’s scrutiny, it becomes obvious that it will not bring about the result Trump wants. Indeed, the thinking here reflects a resolute refusal to appreciate an important reason the repeal effort melted down in the first place.

Over the weekend, Trump tweeted: “ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE.” This reaffirmed what he’d said on Friday, which is that the law will soon “cease to exist” — that Democrats will own the fallout and will be desperate to deal. As many quickly pointed out, this suggested Trump may go further than merely standing by as the law supposedly implodes, as he had previously contemplated doing, and may seek to actively harm the law. On “Fox News Sunday,” Reince Priebus declined to divulge the strategy.

If Trump wants, he can unleash serious damage by undermining the individual markets in three ways. Insurers currently making decisions will closely scrutinize signs from the administration to gauge those markets’ long-term viability. His administration can weaken the individual mandate through various mechanisms, which would mean fewer younger and healthier people and higher premiums. It can pull back on all forms of outreach designed to get people to enroll on the marketplaces. Or it can stop paying “cost-sharing reductions” to insurance companies, which enable them to reduce out-of-pocket costs for lower-income enrollees, which may encourage insurers to flee the markets. 

But Sargent says that won't work.

One of the hidden morals of the Great Republican Health Care Crackup of 2017 is that the American people flatly rejected replacing the ACA with something substantially more regressive. The GOP plan would have cut Medicaid spending by $800 billion, leaving 14 million fewer people with Medicaid coverage, while delivering an enormous tax cut to the rich. Americans clearly disapproved of this outcome. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that a majority opposed the GOP plan, but more to the point, 74 percent of voters, including 54 percent of Republicans, opposed cutting Medicaid. The public broadly opposed the GOP plan’s most prominent mechanism for rolling back spending to cover poor people.

The rejection of the GOP plan is an important historical marker in our interminable health-care debate. The American people were presented with the first genuine effort at a GOP consensus ideological alternative to Obamacare — one that would do away with the ACA’s effort to guarantee free or affordable coverage through government spending and regulations — and decided they preferred sticking with the latter. The Quinnipiac poll also found that 51 percent oppose repeal and 61 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the issue. As Jonathan Cohn puts it, the ACA “has shifted the expectations of what government should do ― and of what a decent society looks like.” There are zero indications that Trump and GOP leaders are capable of acknowledging this possibility.

Where we go from here is up to Trump and the GOP still, but we now know that they, not the Democrats, will own the outcome.