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The Koch brothers are not going to be using their money this cycle to save the Republicans from Donald Trump, says a spokesman.

"We have no plans to get involved in the primary," said James Davis, spokesman for Freedom Partners, the Koch brothers’ political umbrella group. He would not elaborate on what the brothers' strategy would be for the Nov. 8 election to succeed Democratic President Barack Obama.

Three sources close to the Kochs said the brothers made the decision because they were concerned that spending millions of dollars attacking Trump would be money wasted, since they had not yet seen any attack on Trump stick.

The Kochs have also been in this game long enough to know that there are levers of power that are more important for their end game than the White House. After all, what good is having the White House if the Senate goes back to Democrats? And they can look ahead to 2020 and redistricting, so they know shoring up and increasing their state level wins is critical. Jane Mayer, who really did write the book on the Kochs, explained the strategy a few weeks ago:

Where the influence of money goes so much further, and what people who are interested in this need to take a look at, is the lower levels: the state and even local elections. There's Koch money that's been going into school board races, questions about funding mass transit in Tennessee, or funding a zoo in Ohio. They're fighting the expansion of Medicaid in South Dakota and all over the country. Their organizations are flooding money into universities and colleges in order to try and recruit young people to their point of view and then train them as cadres to go into their political groups. It's a comprehensive system to change America. So presidential politics certainly is the splashiest arena, but it's not actually the place where they have the most influence.

Here's where we need to be like the Kochs. The smart money right now isn't in the presidential primaries. It's in fighting the Kochs on all our own home turfs.

Please donate $3 today to help turn the Senate blue. The future of the Supreme Court depends on it.

Texas Republicans' drive to find the stupidest people in the state and elect them to office seems, if anything, to be picking up steam.

[Republican Mary Lou Bruner] received 48 percent of the vote in a three-person GOP primary for a seat on the Texas State Board of Education this Tuesday, falling just short of the 50 percent needed to claim victory. She will compete in a May runoff election against Keven Ellis, a chiropractor and city school board president who earned 31 percent of the vote.

Some things that Mary Lou Bruner has stated she believes: Obama used to be a gay prostitute. Climate change is a hoax promoted by the communists and, specifically, by Karl Marx himself. Slavery is not the reason for the American Civil War, but we have been led to think that through a conspiracy by historians who "waited until all of the people who were alive during the Civil War and the Restoration died of old age." School shootings started only after “the schools started teaching evolution.” That there may have been dinosaurs on Noah’s ark, and the reason there are no dinosaurs now is that Noah only brought baby dinosaurs that starved to death when he let them loose back on land.

Presuming that Texas Republicans do not find their long-lost sense of shame between now and this May—and evidence that they will is sparse—she is likely to become one of the most powerful people in America when it comes to content of the textbooks Texas children, and therefore children in quite a few other states besides, find on their desks in coming years.

An openly raving Damn Lunatic. It may be time to consider walling the state of Texas off. I am not ruling out an airlift to rescue the remaining sane people.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Late Night Snark: Down in the Drumpfs

“It was a critical Super Tuesday for the Republican Party. Donald Trump won seven states. Of course, the seven states that Donald Trump won were shock, denial, guilt, anger, bargaining, depression, and Alabama.”

---James Corden

“Analysts say Hillary Clinton's plan to defeat Donald Trump involves painting Trump as ‘dangerous and bigoted.’ She plans on doing this by quoting Trump accurately.”

---Conan O'Brien

-

Clip of Mitt Romney: "Whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there's Trump magazine, and Trump Vodka, and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not."

Stephen Colbert: "True. Trump has put his name on some terrible investments. For example, four years ago he endorsed Mitt Romney for president."

---The Late Show

-

“Donald Trump can seem appealing until you take a closer look, much like the lunch buffet at a strip club, or the NFL, or having a pet chimpanzee. Sure, it seems fun, but someday Koko's gonna tear your fucking limbs off."

---John Oliver

"This has been quite a month for black people at the top of their professions. Chris Rock got a sweet gig handing out statues to white people. Political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry was emancipated from her job at MSNBC. And the first black president got told he can’t name a successor to the guy who gutted the Voting Rights Act and said that black students might be better off attending less-advanced schools. On the plus side, global warming has made February a lot less white."

---Samantha Bee on Black History Month

Your west coast-friendly edition of Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

It flew a bit under the radar given the avalanche of political headlines in advance of Super Tuesday, but at an election eve rally in Valdosta, Georgia, Donald Trump got a mighty intriguing celebrity validation.

At that rally, in the heart of the Deep South, Trump was endorsed by NASCAR royalty. On the stage with him stood a stock car racing legend (Bill Elliott), as well as trio of current NASCAR drivers (Elliott’s son Chase, as well as Georgia native David Ragan and veteran Ryan Newman).

Perhaps more importantly, Trump was also endorsed by the CEO of the stock car racing franchise, Brian France. This was no minor endorsement by a nondescript businessman. The France family has been synonymous with NASCAR since its inception—indeed, it was Brian France’s grandfather, “Big Bill” France, who co-founded the organization in 1948.

Of course, befitting its Southern roots at a time when partisan realignment was the rule south of the Mason-Dixon, NASCAR has been tied with Republicanism for most of its history. Usually this has simply manifested itself in endorsements and donor cash, although the sport’s winningest driver, “The King” Richard Petty, did manage a quixotic and unsuccessful bid to be North Carolina’s secretary of state in 1996, losing to Democrat Elaine Marshall. 

In recent years, however, the image-conscious franchise has made some changes. Mindful of their reputation as a bastion of Southern White Males, they began Drive for Diversity, a recruiting program for female drivers and male racers of color. It has met with mixed success, most notably in aiding in the development of top driving talent like Kyle Larson (one of the sport's hottest young drivers whose maternal grandparents were Japanese-Americans interned at Tule Lake, California).

On a more explicitly political note, last spring the organization publicly denounced the ill-conceived Indiana “religious freedom” statute. Perhaps more intriguing: In what is now a deeply ironic gesture, NASCAR pulled two awards banquets from a Trump-owned resort in the wake of his conflation of immigration with criminal behavior, a decision that Trump ripped with predictable Trumpian bombast.

Costco is well known as a high-road employer, in stark contrast to companies like Walmart and McDonald’s. And now, Costco is raising wages:

The second-largest U.S. retailer will start paying at least $13-to-$13.50 an hour, up from $11.50-to-$12 an hour, the company said Thursday in a conference call with analysts. The increase will cut its earnings per share in the next three months by 1 cent, and by 2 cents in the following three quarters, the Issaquah, Washington-based company said. [...]

Costco’s highest hourly pay is about $22.50, and the company plans to give those workers about a 2.5 percent raise this year, Galanti said. It takes a full-time Costco employee about four years to reach the top of the pay scale, he said.

Meanwhile, Walmart is looking for credit for boosting pay to $10 an hour.

The FBI and our alphabet of intelligence agencies have been salivating over the prospect of an encryption back door for years. The San Bernardino shootings are just the most recent pretext to weaken privacy protections. Here’s a primer on the FBI vs. Apple fight that’s easy to read even for people who use a simple Jitterbug cellphone for the elderly.

Even assuming nothing but benevolence from our myriad government agencies, a back door created for them would eventually find its way into the hands of hackers and other governments.

Donald Trump has a healthcare "plan" now, one that he prefaced with the claim that "the American people have had to suffer under the incredible economic burden of the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare," which "has tragically but predictably resulted in runaway costs, websites that don't work, greater rationing of care, higher premiums, less competition and fewer choices."

Try telling that to the 20 million people who have health insurance because of the law, Mr. Trump. 

MILWAUKEE — President Obama came to this city on Thursday to highlight the success of the Affordable Care Act, which he said had now allowed 20 million people to gain health care coverage, a new high.

"Today I can announce that thanks to the law, 20 million more Americans now know the security of health insurance," Mr. Obama said.

In its last comparable estimate, in September, the administration said that 17.6 million uninsured people had gained coverage under the health law because of the new public marketplaces, the expansion of Medicaid and the opportunity for young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26.

Breaking down those gains: 6.1 million uninsured young adults ages 19 to 25 are now insured; about three million African Americans gained insurance, with their uninsured rate dropping by more than 50 percent ; the uninsured rate among Hispanics dropped by more than 25 percent, with about 4 million Hispanic adults gaining coverage; and 8.9 million White adults go coverage, dropped  the uninsured rate for by more than 50 percent. 

Brent Brown from Mosinee, Wisconsin is one of those millions. He's also a Republican who never voted for President Obama and in fact, he writes to the president, "was very vocal in my opposition to you—particularly the ACA." And then, this.

There are Republicans out there who are not so secretly hoping that House Speaker Paul Ryan will ride to their rescue this summer, and somehow leave a brokered convention the new Republican nominee for president. Those people are apparently not paying a lot of attention to the fact that he can't even control a few dozen maniacs in the House. This former Budget Committee chairman and his leadership team is failing at coming up with a budget, even though he inherited an already voted on and approved blue-print from his predecessor.

House leaders have been trying for weeks to find a way to ease conservatives’ concerns about the added spending by presenting different proposals for cutting funds in parts of the budget not covered by the appropriations legislation.

The latest proposal unveiled Thursday would allow members to vote on a stand alone measure that would cut $30 billion from mandatory spending programs like food stamps, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid before moving on to a separate vote on a budget that maintains the 2015 deal to increase overall spending to $1.07 trillion for the annual appropriations bills.

Leaders hoped the two-step process would give conservatives some space to back down from threats to block the critical spending outline, but the proposal was met with a new set of difficult demands.

He's handing the maniacs Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid cuts on a silver platter—in an election year!—and it's not enough for them. They want—and are demanding—more. Specifically, they want "more than just a show vote on legislation that has no future in the Senate where Democrats will likely filibuster any spending cuts." Which is an impossible thing, unless they can convince Mitch McConnell to go nuclear in the Senate, and get rid of the filibuster. Which is not going to happen, considering McConnell already has enough on his hands with the Supreme Court fight. Combine that fight with cutting Social Security and Medicare, in an election year? There is not 51 Republican votes in the Senate to go there.

And still Paul Ryan either can't or won't break that news to the problem children and move on to pass some spending bills. Instead, he's letting this fight draw out and the maniacs gain steam. Before he knows it, he's going to be dealing with a government shutdown fight, just before everyone goes home for the fall's last campaign push. And they want him as the standard-bearer for the party?

Well, you know what they say: “stupid is as stupid does.” And apparently, Joseph Pryor “did.” Pryor was identified as one of the men yelling, pushing and shoving protestors at a Donald Trump rally in Louisville, Kentucky, on Tuesday. Pryor’s Facebook page identified him as a future Marine, and until his appearance at the rally he was. He has since been kicked out of the Corps.

“Joseph Pryor demonstrated poor judgment in his use of social media that associates him with a racially charged altercation at a political rally. Hatred toward any group of individuals is not tolerated in the Marine Corps and he is being discharged from our delayed entry program effective yesterday.”

Numerous videos of the assault went viral, including one of Pryor almost following one protestor. Pryor took a screenshot of that moment and made it his Facebook cover page. Many, many thanks are owed to Pryor for making himself so much more identifiable. 

Republican presidential "candidate" Marco Rubio says he's not sorry about bringing up the important national topic of Donald Trump's penis.

"Oh, no. Please," Rubio said. "I mean, Donald Trump has now spent a year doing this on a regular basis. In fact, there was not a speech or debate that Donald Trump does that he doesn't personally offend or try to offend somebody."

Besides, he said, he only made the comment "one time, to a guy who needs to be stood up to." And because it was in response to another attack from Trump, it was fair to defend himself.

Truly, an inspirational leader. A dollop of he-started-it, a dash of he-deserved-it-anyway. If Trump and Rubio were preschool-aged brothers explaining to their parents why the entire living room was now covered in flour, broken glass, and the majority of nana's ashes, Marco Rubio would be nailing this.

But let's be honest here. When it comes right down to it, every last Republican campaign boils down to the candidates comparing the relative size of their penises. National security? Mine is bigger than yours. Should we torture people? Candidate Jr. says yes we should. Deporting refugees? I bet you don't have the stones to deport women and children, but I do! America went to war in Iraq because of the primal neoconservative belief that America would only be respected if we reminded the world of our inherent manliness. Even when Republican women run for office, we have to hear about that time they castrated a hog and how that is a damn fine metaphor for what they'll do in Washington.

So Marco Rubio is not breaking new ground here, any more than Donald Trump is breaking new ground when he talks about border walls or scary Muslims or the inherent goodness of torture. Like Trump, he's just moving past the high-minded rationalizations and cutting to the chase. Sure, Donald Trump acts like a tough guy, but how do we know he's really endowed with the requirements for high office? I am very much looking forward to the Republican "post-mortem" on this one. Once they've scraped the remnants of the party off the highway, I mean.

The Republican blockade of a Supreme Court nominee from President Obama is all well and good for them with all their talk about "letting the voters decide" by picking the next president. Until you get to the part about who their party is apparently going to pick.

Senate Republicans on Thursday declined to say whether they would prefer that Trump fill the court vacancy instead of Obama. 

"I'm not going to answer that question," Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) said, chuckling, when asked about whom he more trusted to make the selection.

"I wouldn't want to rank it," echoed Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).

"I'm not going to get into it," added Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). […]

"I'm not in charge of the process," [Sen. Ron] Johnson [R-WI] said Thursday. "This is being blown way out of proportion by the left."

Because, you know, it's just the Supreme Court, the Constitution and the possibility that Donald Trump—Donald Trump—has the opportunity to set the direction for the court. What's the big deal? Yes, Ron Johnson really is that dumb. The rest of them are just spineless hypocrites.

Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is 20/20 Foresight for Republicans:

What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …

• Teachers should not need to work two jobs to make ends meet, by Mark E Andersen
• Trump supporter's lies about the KKK are standard GOP talking points, by Ian Reifowitz
• The Republican Party's Ku Klux Klan 'problem' is much bigger than just Donald Trump, by Chauncey DeVega
• Why does America elect judges, anyway, by Sher Watts Spooner
• Romney's warning: Trump is too much like me, by Jon Perr
• The Cuba—USA relationship. It's complicated, by Susan Grigsby
• Barbara Jordan. 'She always did sound like God,’ by Denise Oliver Velez
• Playing politics with pain, by DarkSyde
• 12 questions for Bruce Bartlett, economic historian and former Reagan adviser, by David Akadjian
• While Republicans are voting for hope, Democrats are voting out of fear, by Egberto Willies
• Coverage of the Republican primary in Puerto Rico and Democratic caucus in Maine, by Daily Kos Elections

• Louisiana is the world capital of incarceration, and its public defense system is nearly out of money: Per capita, the state has more people under lock and key than any other place in the world—1,341 per 100,000, nearly twice the overall rate in the United States:

Its public defender service, a network of state-funded lawyers that provides legal representation to poor Louisianans, is in meltdown, with most of its district offices set to cancel all new cases or close down entirely by next summer. [...]

The crisis is part of the wider financial malaise of Louisiana that sees the state struggling under a $1.6bn budget shortfall. In the 2017 annual budget proposed by the state’s new governor John Bel Edwards and approved last month by the legislature, the public defender service is dealt a crushing blow—62% cuts that will slash state funding from $33m to under $13m.

•  Economic Policy Institute—with no provision on currency manipulation, TPP likely to cause bigger job-killing trade deficit for the U.S.:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries lacks an absolutely key component to keep it from doing potential damage to the U.S. economy. The missing piece of this trade and investment deal is a set of restrictions and/or enforceable penalties against member countries that engage in currency manipulation. Currency manipulation is one of the key driving forces behind the high and rapidly rising U.S. trade deficit with the 11 other members of the TPP. In 2015, the U.S. deficit with TPP countries translated into 2 million U.S. jobs lost, more than half (1.1 million) of which were in manufacturing. Without such provisions against currency manipulation, the TPP could well follow other trade agreements and leave even greater U.S. trade deficits in its wake.

•  Chris Christie’s endorsement of Trump doesn’t play well in New Jersey or the internet:

In a remarkably swift descent, Mr. Christie’s endorsement of Donald J. Trump for president, his repeated side-by-side appearances with the real estate mogul and his adoring, 31-minute televised gaze at him on Tuesday night have turned the Republican governor into the subject of unusually biting and intense ridicule.

• Oregon bill to dump coal and double state’s renewable energy capacity headed for governor’s signature:

Oregon's Senate has passed a bill to eliminate coal power from the state's electric mix by 2035 and require two utilities to meet half of customer demand with renewable energy by 2040.

Senate Bill 1547— the result of an agreement struck between Pacific Power andPortland General Electric, clean energy advocates and environmental nonprofits — passed despite repeated attempts by opponents to kill the bill.

• Fossil fuel magnates $107 million into Republican presidential SuperPacs in 2015:

Fossil fuel millionaires collectively pumped more than $100m into Republican presidential contenders’ efforts last year – in an unprecedented investment by the oil and gas industry in the party’s future.

About one in three dollars donated to Republican hopefuls from mega-rich individuals came from people who owe their fortunes to fossil fuels – and who stand to lose the most in the fight against climate change. [...]

Cruz, who more than any other Republican candidate openly rejects mainstream science on climate change, banked some 57% of the funds to his Super Pac, or about $25m, from fossil fuel interests, according to campaign filings compiled by Greenpeace and reviewed by the Guardian.

• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up another out-of-hand Gop debate, and more on Trump & authoritarianism. Cleveland’s new riot toys. Travis Rosen’s first-hand account of the CO caucuses that just might inspire you to become the Dem you’ve always wanted to be!

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