The Disunited Nations Building

The Trump regime is apparently looking to eliminate at least half of America's funding to the United Nations as a major component of planned State Department cuts, according to Foreign Policy magazine, and it would mean billions in cuts to aid programs for refugees, vaccine and medical help, and UN peacekeeping forces.

State Department staffers have been instructed to seek cuts in excess of 50 percent in U.S. funding for U.N. programs, signaling an unprecedented retreat by President Donald Trump’s administration from international operations that keep the peace, provide vaccines for children, monitor rogue nuclear weapons programs, and promote peace talks from Syria to Yemen, according to three sources. 

The push for such draconian measures comes as the White House is scheduled on Thursday to release its 2018 budget proposal, which is expected to include cuts of up to 37 percent for spending on the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign assistance programs, including the U.N., in next year’s budget. The United States spends about $10 billion a year on the United Nations. 

It remains unclear whether the full extent of the steeper U.N. cuts will be reflected in the 2018 budget, which will be prepared by the White House Office of Management and Budget, or whether, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has proposed, the cuts would be phased in over the coming three years. One official close to the Trump administration said Tillerson has been given flexibility to decide how the cuts would be distributed.
On March 9 in New York, U.S. diplomats in a closed-door meeting warned key U.N. members, including wealthy donors from Europe, Japan, and South Korea, to “expect a big financial constraint” on U.S. spending at the United Nations, said one European diplomat. “There are rumors of big cuts to the State Department budget, but again, on our side, no figures,” the diplomat said. 

The cuts would fall heaviest on U.N. programs, like peacekeeping, UNICEF, and the U.N. Development Programme, that are funded out of the budget of the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. It remains to be seen whether other U.N. agencies popular with Congress, like the World Food Programme and U.N. refugee operations — which are funded out of separate accounts in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the State Department, respectively — will get hit as hard. But one source tracking the budget proposal said the Trump administration is considering cuts of up to 36 percent on humanitarian aid programs. 

Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said cuts of this magnitude would create “chaos.”

So yeah, America under the Trump regime can apparently afford tens of billions in new Pentagon weapons, but $10 billion for UN is going to be cut in half as a kind estimate.  But those are our priorities now, and this is who we are to the rest of the world: the most powerful military on earth simply doesn't care about anyone on the planet who isn't an American.

Oh well. F35's don't just fall out of the sky, folks.  (Well, maybe they do, but it still costs billions to make one apparently.)

It's also worth keeping in mind that chaos is exactly the kind of thing that's good for Trump business interests, especially those in Russia.

Just sayin'.

StupidiNews!

• A massive Nor'easter is expected to dump more than 2 feet of snow in parts of Eastern Pennsylvania, New York, and New England over the next 48 hours.
• California lawmakers are working on a plan to provide student aid to cover tuition and living expenses to tens of thousands on student loans.
• North Korea is threatening "merciless" action should joint continuing US/South Korean military exercises "infringe" on North Korean waters.
• Bank of England CEO Christina Hogg is stepping down after British lawmakers unanimously leveled criticism at her over failure to disclosing her brother works for Barclays Bank.
• Security vulnerabilities in the Nintendo Switch could become a serious problem if users leave the system unpatched.

Last Call For The Losing Score

The Congressional Budget Office estimates for the American Health Care Plan Trumpcare are out and they're even worse than expected as Vox's health care reporter Sarah Kliff explains.

The Congressional Budget Office report on AHCA runs five pages, and you can read it here. Here are the key points it makes:

• CBO estimates 14 million would lose coverage in 2018, mostly people in the individual market. This report projects that much of the early coverage loss would stem from repealing Obamacare’s mandate that all Americans purchase coverage or pay a fine. “Some of those people would choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums,” the report concludes.
• After that, increases in the uninsured would be from Medicaid cuts. After 2018, CBO thinks that most of the increase in the number of uninsured would stem from changes the AHCA would make to Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, an expansion that allowed many more low-income adults to enroll in the program. The bill would “freeze” enrollment in that program on January 1, 2020. Medicaid enrollees would trickle off the rolls as their incomes changed. And this would lead to another big decline in coverage. The number of uninsured, CBO projects, would rise by 21 million in 2020 and hit 24 million in 2026.
• The individual market would remain small but stable. CBO projects that as the individual market shrinks, premiums would rise between 10 to 15 percent as some healthy people flee in 2018. But over the next few years, the agency expects premiums to go down to 10 percent lower than under Obamacare. CBO thinks more young people will come into the market, as the GOP plan makes a number of changes to make the market more appealing to younger, healthier enrollees.
• AHCA would be a huge cut to Medicaid. CBO estimates it would reduce spending on the health program for low-income Americans by $880 billion over the next decade. This helps explain why AHCA would reduce the deficit: The bill is spending a lot less money on entitlement programs.

In other words, the CBO estimates are actually worse that the Brookings Institute estimate from last week, if that tells you anything.

In fact you know it's bad, because Republicans like Paul Ryan are only talking about the long term 10% premium costs long term, and the deficit reduction.  Never mind it ruins health care for tens of millions of people, right?

This report confirms that the American Health Care Act will lower premiums and improve access to quality, affordable care. CBO also finds that this legislation will provide massive tax relief, dramatically reduce the deficit, and make the most fundamental entitlement reform in more than a generation. 

Yeah.

Read em and weep boys.

Steve King's Still A White Nationalist

If, somehow, you're still uniformed as to Iowa Congressman Steve King's long, long history of public racism over the years in light of his awful tweet over the weekend that was so bad that David Duke applauded it, today King doubled down on his statement that Americans can't save the country with by having "somebody else's babies".

Rep. Steve King doubled down Monday on comments he made over the weekend in which he appeared to criticize foreigners and immigrants, drawing complaints of insensitivity on social media and from some of his Hill colleagues. 

King, a prominent Iowa Republican and a vocal advocate against illegal immigration, tweeted Sunday, "We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." 

Asked by CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" to clarify his comments, King said he "meant exactly what I said." 

"You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies. You've got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to teach your children your values," King said, paraphrasing remarks he said he's delivered to audiences in Europe. "In doing so, you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, and you can strengthen your way of life." 

King said he'd like to see less of an emphasis on race in the future. 

"If you go down the road a few generations, or maybe centuries, with the inter-marriage, I'd like to see an America that is just so homogenous that we look a lot the same," he said. 

King, who was expressing support in his original tweet for far-right Dutch candidate Geert Wilders, predicted that "Europe will be entirely transformed within a half-century." 

King has long been concerned about the decline of "American culture," and said he merely wished to see immigrants better assimilate into the United States. Pressed whether he saw all Americans as equal, the Iowa congressman said their backgrounds mattered. 

"I'm a champion for Western civilization," King said, adding that all people do not contribute to American society equally. "They contribute differently to our culture and civilization."

This is literally White Nationalism Theory 101 here, that the "white race" is being wiped out by interracial couples, and that (white) American civilization is being supplanted by non-white (non) Americans who are not worthy of being considered as such and never will be.

I mean, this is actual Stormfront propaganda here, being spouted by a seven-term US Congressman. And King in particular has had a long history of this, well before the Trump era.  Josh Marshall has been covering Steve King for years at TPM. (So have I.)

Today people are apparently finding out and being terribly surprised that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is a white nationalist and racist and has been that more or less openly for years. Before yesterday's paean to "culture and demographics", Steve King was saying that for every Dreamer who's a valedictorian there are a hundred running drugs. The list of similar statements is all but endless.

We've been on the King beat for years. You can go through our archives and find dozens of offensive, stupid and frequently outright racist comments from King. But there's something more specific about King. King frequently speaks in the language of white nationalists and neo-Nazis who speak of 'white genocide' and America being overrun by non-whites.

He does and he has been for years.  But here's the thing: despite this long and visible history of racism, Steve King keeps getting reelected by Iowans to represent them in Congress.

The problem isn't Steve King.  It's the people who vote for Steve King time and time again despite his racism...or specifically because of it.

The American Health Don't Care Act

We now know what the Republican message is ahead of this week's CBO score of the GOP's Obamacare replacement plan, the American Health Care Act.  Republicans spent the weekend telling news shows that kicking millions of people off Medicaid will be doing them a favor.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, on Sunday said that Republican health care reform could not succeed unless people lost access to Medicaid.

Fox News host Chris Wallace noted during an interview with Jordan that House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) plan to replace the Affordable Care Act would phase out the law’s Medicaid expansion by 2020.

But Jordan argued that the 11 million people covered by Medicaid expansion should lose their coverage even sooner.

“Isn’t that going to create chaos and throw millions of people off of heath insurance?” Wallace wondered.

“The plan we passed that every Republican supported last Congress said there’s a two year effective date,” Jordan explained. “So, you would repeal Obamacare. But there’s still two years transition time. Everyone knows you need a transition time to bring back a market place.”

“I don’t view success as keeping Americans on Medicaid,” he added. “I view success as bringing down the cost of insurance so families can pick the plan that fits needs. That’s what we’re doing. We have a two year transition time for that.”

“And again, remember what we told the voters. We said we’re going to repeal Obamacare, not keep Medicaid expansion around forever. We said we were going to repeal it. So, let’s do that.”

So here's the new message:  If we kick all those people off Medicaid, we'll be able to lower your premiums, so don't worry Trump voters.  We'll take care of you.

Nothing could be further from the truth though.  Republicans have repeatedly said that the goal of their replacement plan wasn't having people with coverage, it was "lowering costs" so that everybody could afford it (which is nonsense because that's literally what Medicaid is for.)

It's still going to be an easy sell to Trump voters of course, because he'll fix whatever real problems the AHCA has.  They're counting on that.  The problem is the Republicans running in 2018 aren't Trump.  They're the ones with the angry town hall constituents and voters threatening to ruin them.

Can Trump, Mitch, and Paul Ryan keep enough of them in line?

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Tensions between Turkey and the Netherlands continue to rise ahead of elections in both countries as Turkey's large ex-pat community in Rotterdam is the center of protests.
• A man who scaled the White House fence late Friday evening faces up to 10 years in federal prison if convicted of felony trespassing.
• Japan plans its largest display of naval force since WW II as it will send a helicopter carrier on a three-month tour of the South China Sea in May before joining joint US/Indian exercises. 
• Saudi Arabia's defense minister will meet with Donald Trump and other US officials in Washington as the Syrian civil war heads into its seventh year this week.
• AT&T faces allegations of "digital redlining" in Cleveland as internet groups charge the company discriminates against low-income neighborhoods with lack of broadband access.

Last Call For The Other Side

I know it's fish, barrel, and fully automatic shotgun time here when I pull out an Other Side post ot have a good laugh at the "intellectual right" but this one was too good to pass up: Weekly Standard's Irwin Stelzer compares sanctuary cities to...wait for it...the segregationist South of the '60s.

The left is attempting to breathe life into the slave-owning and segregationist groups' interposition doctrine. Shades of Little Rock, where President Eisenhower nationalized the entire 10,000-man National Guard to prevent Gov. Orval Faubus from using it to interpose his will between the federal government's mandate to desegregate its schools and his state. And of Gov. George Wallace, another Democrat, who planted himself in a schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama in a show of preventing enforcement of federal writ, only to have President Kennedy do to him what Eisenhower had done to Faubus, and prove that federal law trumps "states' rights".

Our liberal governors and mayors are in the tradition of their Democratic predecessors in Arkansas and Alabama. They have interposed themselves between the federal government and their sanctuary states and cities, ordering their police to refuse to allow federal agents do fulfill a federal mandate to remove illegal aliens, especially felons, from the country. If statues could smile, those being removed from public places would be grinning from marble ear to marble ear at the resurrection of their legal theory. Ike was famous for his grin, Jack for his cool. But both understood a challenge to federal authority when they saw it, and didn't hesitate to use the threat of force to face down challenges to that authority. Your move, Donald.

So not only is this clown comparing sanctuary cities to segregation (you know, resisting a government order to stop treating people as human beings vs making sure people aren't treated as human beings, OK) but he's more than willing to entertain sending in the National Guard to do...what, exactly?  Round up people and deport them?

Sure.  That makes you the good guys here, Irwin.  Jesus.  That's just like Little Rock.

The Price Is Wrong

If this footage of Trump regime HHS Secretary Tom Price doesn't end up in Democratic party commercials across America, then we really do deserve to lose.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd asked Price how he could call the Affordable Care Act a “failing system” if millions of people were being covered under the law.

“Can you say for certain that once this bill is passed that nobody will be worse off financially when it comes to paying for health care?” Todd asked.

“There are a lot of people worse off right now,” Price insisted, opining on the cost of premiums under Obamacare.

“I notice you ducked the aspect of whether you can guarantee that nobody will be worse off financially,” Todd pressed.

“I firmly believe that nobody will be worse off financially in the process that we’re going through,” Price replied. “Understanding that they’ll have choices that they can select the kind of coverage that they want for themselves.”

“There’s costs that needs to come down, and we believe that we’re going to be able to do that through this new system,” he added. “There’s coverage that’s going to go up.”

Here's the video:



Again, this one's falling-off-a-log simple, guys.  Tens of millions of Americans will be worse off thanks to the GOP replacement plan for Obamacare.  It's time for the Dems to start hitting back. 

The Mess In Texas

A majorly awaited ruling from the 5th Circuit on Texas's redistricting came down this week and it's a home run for the good guys as the 2-1 decision finds Texas Republicans indeed three drew districts in 2011 in order to specifically disenfranchise black and Hispanic voters in the state.

Ruling that Republicans redrew the Texas congressional map to intentionally discriminate against Latino and black voters in a “rushed and secretive process,” a federal court panel invalidated three districts, including one in Travis County, in an order issued late Friday.

However, in voiding the districts, drawn by the Texas Legislature in 2011, the San Antonio-based panel did not mandate or discuss any remedies to correct the problems.

But the long-awaited ruling has the potential to create more districts with larger populations of Latino voters “and probably more Democratic districts, which would be good for Democrats in Texas and also nationally,” said Michael Li, redistricting counsel at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

The 2-1 ruling described a chaotic, hurried process that led to the 2011 congressional maps, redrawn to add four new districts, thanks to the state’s rapid population growth.

It was a time of “strong racial tension and heated debate about Latinos, Spanish-speaking people, undocumented immigration and sanctuary cities, and the contentious voter ID law,” the court said.

The court criticized Republican lawmakers for providing “misleading” information about the new map’s impact on minority voters and noted that Democrats and minority advocates were shut out of the map-drawing process.

“The rushed and secretive process suggests that defendants did want to avoid scrutiny of whether their efforts in fact complied with the (Voting Rights Act) or were intended to do so, or whether they were only creating a facade of compliance,” said Friday’s order by U.S. District Judges Xavier Rodriguez and Orlando Garcia.

What this means is that there's a very good chance that Justice Kennedy would side with the Supreme Court's four liberals on this, as the ruling is based off of Kennedy's findings in another Texas redistricting case from 2006 that voided another district for the same reason.

It also means that the counter-argument is garbage.

Writing in dissent, Justice Jerry Smith of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the majority’s order tended to “miss the forest for the trees.”

“Texas redistricting in 2011 was essentially about politics, not race. All sides concede that — whether it is a good thing or not — Texas has a strong correlation between race and party,” Smith wrote. “It naturally follows that actions taken to disadvantage Democrats will disproportionately affect non-Anglo voters, regardless of the intent.”

Got that?  There's no way in Texas that drawing districts to hurt Democrats wouldn't harm non-white voters, so why bother protecting them?  That's literally the definition of systemic racism, guys.

Texas can be placed back under federal pre-clearance of districts if the Supreme Court lets this stand. Unfortunately, the pre-clearance would be run by Jeff Sessions.

So in the long run? This ruling actually doesn't matter.  Sessions will do everything he can to see that Texas Republicans are able to draw more districts that harm Democrats, black and Hispanic voters.  Period.

Because Republicans are the party of systemic racism.  Period.

Sunday Long Read: Iran Into Donald

This week's Sunday Long Read is Adam Davidson's deep dive into Trump's failed hotel in Azerbaijan, which for all intents and purposes was a massive scheme for laundering money for Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

The Azerbaijanis behind the project were close relatives of Ziya Mammadov, the Transportation Minister and one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Azerbaijan is among the most corrupt nations in the world. Its President, Ilham Aliyev, the son of the former President Heydar Aliyev, recently appointed his wife to be Vice-President. Ziya Mammadov became the Transportation Minister in 2002, around the time that the regime began receiving enormous profits from government-owned oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. At the time of the hotel deal, Mammadov, a career government official, had a salary of about twelve thousand dollars, but he was a billionaire.

The Trump Tower Baku originally had a construction budget of a hundred and ninety-five million dollars, but it went through multiple revisions, and the cost ended up being much higher. The tower was designed by a local architect, and in its original incarnation it had an ungainly roof that suggested the spikes of a crown. A London-based architecture firm, Mixity, redesigned the building, softening its edges and eliminating the ornamental roof. By the time the Trump team officially joined the project, in May, 2012, many condominium residences had already been completed; at the insistence of Trump Organization staffers, most of the building’s interior was gutted and rebuilt, and several elevators were added.

After Donald Trump became a candidate for President, in 2015, Mother Jones, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and other publications ran articles that raised questions about his involvement in the Baku project. These reports cited a series of cables sent from the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan in 2009 and 2010, which were made public by WikiLeaks. In one of the cables, a U.S. diplomat described Ziya Mammadov as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, told reporters that the Baku hotel project raised no ethical issues for Donald Trump, because his company had never engaged directly with Mammadov.

According to Garten, Trump played a passive role in the development of the property: he was “merely a licensor” who allowed his famous name to be used by a company headed by Ziya Mammadov’s son, Anar, a young entrepreneur. It’s not clear how much money Trump made from the licensing agreement, although in his limited public filings he has reported receiving $2.8 million. (The Trump Organization shared documents that showed an additional payment of two and a half million dollars, in 2012, but declined to disclose any other payments.) Trump also had signed a contract to manage the hotel once it opened, for an undisclosed fee tied to the hotel’s performance. The Washington Post published Garten’s description of the deal, and reported that Donald Trump had “invested virtually no money in the project while selling the rights to use his name and holding the contract to manage the property.”

A month after Trump was elected President, Garten announced that the Trump Organization had severed its ties with the hotel project, describing the decision to CNN as little more than “housecleaning.” I was in Baku at the time, and it had become clear that the Trump Organization’s story of the hotel was incomplete and inaccurate. Trump’s company had made the deal not just with Anar Mammadov but also with Ziya’s brother Elton—an influential member of the Azerbaijani parliament. Elton signed the contracts, and in an interview he confirmed that he founded Baku XXI Century, the company that owns the Trump Tower Baku. When he was asked who owns Baku XXI Century, he called it a “commercial secret” but added that he “controlled all its operations” until 2015, when he cut ties to the company. Elton denied having used his political position for profit.

An Azerbaijani lawyer who worked on the project revealed to me that the Trump Organization had not just licensed the family name; it also had signed a technical-services agreement in which it promised to help its partner meet Trump design standards. Technical-services agreements are often nominal addenda to licensing deals. Major hospitality brands compile exhaustive specifications for licensed hotels, and tend to approve design elements remotely; a foreign site is visited only occasionally. But in the case of Trump Tower Baku the oversight appears to have been extensive. The Azerbaijani lawyer told me, “We were always following their instructions. We were in constant contact with the Trump Organization. They approved the smallest details.” He said that Trump staff visited Baku at least monthly to give the go-ahead for the next round of work orders. Trump designers went to Turkey to vet the furniture and fabrics acquired there. The hotel’s main designer, Pierre Baillargeon, and several contractors told me that they had visited the Trump Organization headquarters, in New York, to secure approval for their plans.

Ivanka Trump was the most senior Trump Organization official on the Baku project. In October, 2014, she visited the city to tour the site and offer advice. An executive at Mace, the London-based construction firm that oversaw the tower’s conversion to a hotel, met with Ivanka in Baku and New York. He told me, “She had very strong feelings, not just about the design but about the back of the hotel—landscaping, everything.” The Azerbaijani lawyer said, “Ivanka personally approved everything.” A subcontractor noted that Ivanka’s team was particular about wood panelling: it chose an expensive Macassar ebony, from Indonesia, for the ceiling of the lobby. The ballroom doors were to be made of book-matched panels of walnut. On her Web site, Ivanka posted a photograph of herself wearing a hard hat inside the half-completed hotel. A caption reads, “Ivanka has overseen the development of Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku since its inception, and she recently returned from a trip to the fascinating city in Azerbaijan to check in on the project’s progress.” (Ivanka Trump declined requests to discuss the Baku project.)

Jan deRoos, the Cornell professor, developed branded-hotel properties before entering academia. He told me that the degree of the Trump Organization’s involvement in the Baku property was atypical. “That’s very, very intense,” he said.

The sustained back-and-forth between the Trump Organization and the Mammadovs has legal significance. If parties involved in the Trump Tower Baku project participated in any illegal financial conduct, and if the Trump Organization exerted a degree of control over the project, the company could be vulnerable to criminal prosecution. Tom Fox, a Houston lawyer who specializes in anti-corruption compliance, said, “It’s a problem if you’re making a profit off of someone else’s corrupt conduct.” Moreover, recent case law has established that licensors take on a greater legal burden when they assume roles normally reserved for developers. The Trump Organization’s unusually deep engagement with Baku XXI Century suggests that it had the opportunity and the responsibility to monitor it for corruption.

And the rest of the story details a lot of evidence displaying quite a bit of corruption, including the aforementioned money laundering for the Iranians.  The Mammadovs were up to their necks in graft, bribery and cooking the books, and Ivanka Trump helped oversee the entire mess.

The rotten apple doesn't fall far from the tree if you were thinking that Trump's daughter was the "nice one" folks.  She's just as corrupt as our criminal-in-chief.

The Purge Continues: DoJ Edition

At the Department of Jusitce, it's not unusual for an incoming AG to ask US attorneys to leave, normally the deal is that the attorney stays until a suitable replacement is found.  Obama and Eric Holder kept several Bush-era attorneys because they were good prosecutors, others were let go and replaced.  Chris Christie was a Bush-era US Attorney for New Jersey when he resigned in 2008 to run for Governor.  That kind of stuff happens all the time. Bill Clinton famously cleaned house, and Dubya turned around and fired nearly all of Big Dog's appointments in the middle of his second term.

What doesn't happen is the Attorney General collecting the heads of 46 US attorneys at once, a day after FOX News host Sean Hannity demands a "purge" of the Justice Department on TV.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked for the resignations of 46 US attorneys, igniting anger from officials who say they were given no warning about their dismissals. 

The Justice Department announced the firings Friday afternoon, and many prosecutors had not been formally notified or even told before they were fired, according to a law enforcement source. Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente was in the beginning stages of calling each US attorney individually to tell them they had to resign when the DOJ issued a statement. 

A law enforcement source charged that "this could not have been handled any worse" because there was little warning. Many prosecutors found out through media reports that they had to resign today. 

A Justice Department spokeswoman explained that forced resignations are a matter of course when turning the agency over to a new administration. 

"As was the case in prior transitions, many of the United States attorneys nominated by the previous administration already have left the Department of Justice. The attorney general has now asked the remaining 46 presidentially appointed US attorneys to tender their resignations in order to ensure a uniform transition," Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores said. 

It is common for administrations to ask holdovers to step down, but what is less common is the abruptness of Friday's announcement. Two sources familiar with the Justice Department tell CNN they were unsure for some time whether such an action would happen and had been looking for some type of announcement -- but received radio silence. 

"There was not any particular clarity from the Justice Department as to what the future held for the US attorneys" until now, one source said. 

But the Justice Department argues that the agency will continue to function as normal. 

"Until the new US attorneys are confirmed, the dedicated career prosecutors in our US attorney's offices will continue the great work of the department in investigating, prosecuting, and deterring the most violent offenders," Flores said.

And of course among the carnage is Preet Bharara, the US Attorney for Manhattan.  If the name sounds familiar, his district included Wall Street, and of course, Trump Tower in NYC.  Trump spoke to him personally in December to ask him to stay on.  Now?  Looks like Preet is out on the street.

It’s unclear whether Bharara might be asked to complete some of his cases before leaving office. A Justice Department spokeswoman said the request for resignations applied to “all Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys.” An administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said all U.S. attorneys were being asked to submit resignations and that they were all expected to be accepted.

“Until the new U.S. attorneys are confirmed, the dedicated career prosecutors in our U.S. attorney’s offices will continue the great work of the department,” Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said in a statement.

If Bharara submits his resignation and it’s accepted, some of the most prominent and difficult Justice Department investigations could be disrupted. They include inquiries into Deutsche Bank AG’s handling of “mirror trades” that helped Russian clients convert rubles into Western currency, a high-profile securities fraud case against Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and political corruption cases involving New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and aides to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Bharara had been heralded by Republicans and Democrats for aggressively prosecuting corruption in Albany. One of the reasons he may have been asked to stay was because of his pursuit of several political corruption cases of Democratic state officials.

While incoming presidents have changed out U.S. attorneys before -- most notably Bill Clinton -- the latest purge comes in a politically charged atmosphere as Democrats call for a special counsel to look into the Trump camp’s relationships with Russia during the presidential campaign.

You do the math.

Last Call For You Are The Perfect Drug

If you could build the perfect Trump regime FDA commissioner, you'd want somebody who:

• Was a doctor for credibility
• Taught med school for even better credibility
• Was a long-time Big Pharma lobbyist for decades
• Had a previous stint at the Dubya FDA somewhere
• Sat on multiple drugmaker corporate boards
• Worked at a conservative think tank
• Was against the Affordable Care Act
• Wrote for a conservative policy magazines and newspapers
• Was a venture partner for drug startups

I mean, does a guy like that even exist (oh yeah, he'd have to be a white guy) at all?  Man, who could fit this kinda legendary bill of PharmaBro douchebaggery?

President Donald Trump will nominate Scott Gottlieb, a conservative drug industry insider and former FDA and CMS official, to serve as FDA commissioner, the White House confirmed Friday evening.

Oh.  Well then.

Gottlieb has broad experience in regulating health care and working for the industry. He received nearly $200,000 in payments in 2015 from eight pharmaceutical companies, according to a federal database tracking drug industry payments. All were classified as “general” payments, meaning they were for things like travel and lodging, consulting or speaking fees. In 2014, he received more than $160,000 in general payments from companies.

Gottlieb has been on GlaxoSmithKline’s research and development board since 2010, according to his resume, and previously was on its oncology board. He advises Bristol Meyers Squibb on its cancer drugs and Cell Biotherapy, an oncology start up. Gottlieb was a senior adviser to Vertex Pharmaceuticals, maker of expensive cystic fibrosis drugs, from 2009 through 2016.

He holds seats on the boards of drug companies Daiichi Sankyo and Tolero Pharmaceuticals; medical lab company American Pathology Partners; MedAvante, a contract research organization, and Glytech, which makes an FDA-approved insulin dosing support system. He has also served on the board of insurance and medical diagnostic companies.

Gottlieb was FDA’s deputy commissioner for medical and scientific affairs from 2005 to 2007, and chief policy adviser to the CMS administrator in 2004, during implementation of Medicare Part D. Earlier he was a senior adviser and director of medical policy development at FDA, where he worked on issues like orphan drugs, and combination products.

Gottlieb has long been a resident fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He serves on the Federal Health IT Policy Committee, which makes recommendations to HHS’s Office for Healthcare Information Technology. He practices medicine at New York University where he is a clinical assistant professor.

Gottlieb's free-market health policy positions are well known thanks to regular op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, and FDA-related testimony to Congress. This fall he gave testimony criticizing FDA’s regulation of generic drugs, during a hearing on pharmaceutical industry competition occasioned by the rising prices of the EpiPen.

Oh yeah, this guy is the gotdamn Maserati of Pharmabros.  He's Martin Shkreli with policy chops.  You need to invent cloning and approve the FDA cloning procedure just to make copies of this mofo right here.

Hope you liked food and drug regulations because man, they are going the hell away.

Nobody To Blame But Themselves

Congratulations, rural red state and Rust Belt Trump voters!  You just screwed yourself out of thousands of dollars a year and will be the people who suffer the most under Trumpcare. Nate Cohn at the NYT Upshot explains:

The people who stand to lose the most in tax credits under the House Republican health plan tended to support Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to a new Upshot analysis. 

Over all, voters who would be eligible for a tax credit that would be at least $1,000 smaller than the subsidy they’re eligible for under Obamacare supported Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton by a seven-point margin. 

The voters hit the hardest — eligible for at least $5,000 less in tax credits under the Republican plan — supported Mr. Trump by a margin of 59 percent to 36 percent.

Congratulations, MAGA folks.  You played yourself every step of the way.

The plan would hit older and rural Americans hardest because it wouldn’t provide a larger tax credit to people with more expensive plans. Older Americans pay the highest premiums, and the law would allow insurers to raise premiums for older customers even further. The AARP opposes the bill as a result.

Trumpcare is a disaster that would badly hurt millions of Americans.  But the Americans who are going to suffer the most will be the ones who supported Trump by the largest margins, in particular older Americans and poorer Americans in rural areas.

You know, Trump voters.

I'd say that you're getting what you deserve, except for the fact the rest of us have to deal with the mess these crap-throwing primates are causing too.  We're right here in this mess with you, and we're the ones who are going to have to clean it up.

Again.  But in the meantime, Medicaid expansion is going to get nuked, and pre-ACA Medicaid along with it.

Most of the people who got insurance through Obamacare were the more than 11 million poor people who benefited from the Medicaid expansion that 31 states, plus Washington, DC, adopted. And they have the most to lose under the American Health Care Act, the Republican replacement. 

The Republican plan rolls back the expansion, taking 4 million to 6 million people off the rolls, according to Standard & Poor’s. But it goes further than that as well. 

The AHCA converts Medicaid from a matching program, in which the federal government chips in a set amount for every dollar states spend on beneficiaries, to a capped subsidy, where the feds give states a set amount per enrollee every year, an amount that rises according to a fixed formula instead of according to need. 

The cumulative effect, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is a $370 billion cut to federal funding to Medicaid over 10 years. Some of that money could be made up for by states, but most of it won't be. 

And because Medicaid is already the cheapest insurance there is in America — cheaper per person than either Medicare or private insurance — cuts of that scale will necessitate kicking millions of people off the program.

And all of that will go to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts.  Do you get it now, Trump voters?
"Make America Great Again" means you won't be around long enough to see it.

That Dipstick From Accounting Doesn't Know Squat

As Chuck Pierce reminds us, the biggest media falsehood over the last several years that doesn't personally involve Barack Obama is the idiotic notion that GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is some sort of policy wonk.

I had thought that the burlesque comic opera The Agony of Paul Ryan, Genius had closed on the night in 2012 when Joe Biden laughed the zombie-eyed granny starver off the stage during their debate. (That was the night that Ryan demonstrated that he knew it snowed in Afghanistan in the winter.) But I had not reckoned with his many fanboys among the kept political press. He ascended to become Speaker of the House, largely because nobody else wanted the job after John Boehner got kicked to the curb by the crazy people.

Now he is out there pimping the dungheap that is the new healthcare reform bill as though Mitch and Murray from downtown were lighting his pants on fire. He even lost the suit coat and broke out the PowerPoint on Thursday. It was like watching something on cable access late at night, or a flop-sweaty rookie substitute teacher, and it was hilarious—except for the parts where people will lose their health insurance and die, of course. And this is what he said and, peace be unto Dave Barry, I am not making it up, either:

Paul Ryan said that insurance cannot work if healthy people have to pay more to subsidize the sick.

This is literally how all insurance works. If someone's house burns down, some of your fire insurance money goes to help that person rebuild. If someone gets sick, some of your premium, healthy person, goes toward that person's coverage. Increasingly, I have come to believe that Paul Ryan is a not particularly bright creature from another world. Let us see if we can explain this to the lad.

Let's say that, in 1986, a 16-year-old lad loses his father to a sudden heart attack. Despite the fact that the family's construction firm is relatively prosperous due to its generous share of government contracts, the family's finances are considerably straitened. For the next two years, the young man and his mother receive Social Security survivor's benefits. Of course, these came from millions of people who had Social Security withheld from their paychecks and whose fathers did not die young due to a sudden heart attack. One of them was, say, a 32-year-old sportswriter for the Boston Herald, who had Social Security withheld from what he was paid to watch the Red Sox blow the '86 World Series, and whose father was still alive, but slipping fast into Alzheimer's. Some of his money went to make sure Paul Ryan could complete high school and go on the college and get the BA in economics that made him the smartest man in the world. 

Ouch, man.  Ouch.

Pierce is right, of course.  The entire point of insurance is that healthy people who pay premiums help subsidize sick people (who also pay premiums).  The Law of Large Numbers states that as long as you have enough healthy people paying in, the system works.  It's not the best deal for the healthy people, but then again you never know if a car accident, cancer, or a pregnancy (hey those cost money too) is around the corner.  You're healthy now.  Eventually you won't be.

Car insurance (eventually you'll be in an accident), home insurance (eventually something will catch on fire), and life insurance (you too are mortal) work the same way.  It's there when you need it.

What Ryan's trying to do is tell people "Well that's not fair!  And our plan will fix that!"  Well yes, it'll "fix" that, by wrecking the entire concept of health insurance, turning it from "helping sick people" to "lowering costs because dead people don't really need health care."

This is kind of a basic thing here but surprise, Republicans want to wreck it in favor of tax cuts for wealthy people.  Actual health care doesn't matter, but tax cuts, well.

And so it goes.  Hey, we voted for them. Now we're getting what we deserve.

StupidiNews!

• With South Korea's Constitutional Court unanimously upholding the impeachment and removal of Park Geun-hye, the now former president faces prosecution for bribery.
• Tens of thousands remain without power in upstate New York this morning after a near-hurricane force windstorm downed thousands of trees and power lines near Rochester.
• A bus crash in Nepal has killed at least 25 as the overcrowded vehicle veered off a hilly road near Jajarkot, in the western part of the country.
• Nearly six million fewer Americans have filed their tax returns this year compared to this point last year, a drop that has even long-time tax professionals concerned.
• Republican senators are taking aim at FCC net neutrality measures, claiming that the rules are hurting telemedicine at the expense of internet pornography by treating them as the same.