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Tax Day 2016 will arrive a few days late on Monday, April 18. But the toxic talking points from the GOP are right on schedule. The usual Republican broadsides about "Gestapo-like tactics" from the Internal Revenue Service and its "armed personnel in flak jackets" have been joined by new sound bites from the GOP's best and brightest. At an Americans for Tax Reform conference hosted by Grover Norquist, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch warned that the Internal Revenue Service "is the most feared federal agency in the country." Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas), the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, declared the IRS is "ineffective, it's inept, it is crooked and it's vindictive." Meanwhile, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce apparently placed identical newspaper op-eds in all 50 states lamenting, "This year, Washington, D.C., is expected to rake in a record-breaking $3.36 trillion in tax revenue, $115 billion more than it did last year."

But while the Republicans are only too happy to remind you about the horrors of taxation in general and the IRS in particular, they'd prefer to stay silent on about their roles in gutting the agency, starving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue and redirecting trillions of dollars to the very richest among us. Here, then, are 10 helpful Tax Day reminders from the Republican Party.

1. Congressional Republicans slashed the IRS budget by 17 percent since 2010 ...
Given the right-wing rhetoric, Americans could be forgiven for believing an out-of-control IRS is growing like crazy. But it's not. Thanks to the House Republican majority that swept into power in 2011, the agency has seen its budget slashed by 17 percent since fiscal year 2010. The result of the draconian reductions from $13.6 trillion in 2010 to $11.2 trillion in 2016?  Full time staff has been reduced by 14 percent and enforcement staff has contracted by a staggering 23 percent, even as individual returns have jumped by 7 percent and new laws passed by Congress have added to the agency's work load.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Virgin Islands Republican Party:

The Republican Territorial Committee held a joint meeting Saturday at a gun range in St. Croix, but the meeting erupted into chaos with attendees shouting over one another, calling for points of order, and at one point, Gwen Brady, an elected delegate, being allegedly shoved to the ground, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News. [...]

Virgin Islands Republican Party Vice Chairman Herb Schoenbohm told the paper that Brady was “slammed against the wall and thrown to the floor because she objected to the Gestapo-like tactics of the V.I. Chairman John Canegata.”

Police were called, a police report filed, people called other people the Gestapo and so forth. You'd think Republicans in the Virgin Islands would be a considerably more laid-back bunch than their mainland counterparts, if for no other reason than the decent weather—but nope. Maybe the first sign things were amiss was the decision to have their important and hotly contested political meeting at a gun range.

Schoenbohm also blasted the location of the meeting, telling the paper that Canegata was "banging the table with a large ammunition cartridge being used as a gavel" and walking around with a "firearm on his belt."

"People are not used to a Republican meeting being in a combat zone and will avoid future meetings if something isn’t done about his lack of control," Schoenbohm continued.

Now, now. In Texas Republicans would get offended if you didn't use an ammunition cartridge as gavel.

Here's something outrageous from a courtroom in (surprise!) Mississippi. Jeff Weill, a local county circuit judge, held a local public defender, Chris Routh in contempt on Wednesday … for doing his job. The Clarion-Ledger reports:

Weill was hearing arguments from the state to revoke the bond given in County Court to a woman her office represented. The woman was in court with her 3-month-old baby and both began to cry. Routh requested a finding on why bail for the accused was being denied and Weill immediately said he wanted order in court, according to an affidavit filed in state Supreme Court. The affidavit said Weill took a 10 minute break and then held Routh in contempt.

Attorney Merrida "Buddy" Coxwell, representing Routh, filed an emergency appeal with the state high court. A three-judge panel of the court granted the petition in part filed on behalf of Routh. It said Routh should be immediately released from custody after posting a $500 bond while he appeals his contempt citation to the state high court.

"The actions of Judge Weill on yesterday in effect criminalized the very job we are sworn to do," stated Hinds County Public Defender Michele Purvis Harris. "Chris Routh was jailed for doing nothing more than representing his client."

Once again, the judiciary demonstrates a concerning bias toward the state. The idea that a public defender would be held in contempt—without bond!—for requesting a finding on bail for their client is outrageous. It not only stifles the ability of the public defender to do their job, it destroys any possibility of a fair trial. And lest you think Judge Weill was simply having a bad day, this isn’t the first time he’s been especially hard on public defenders. 

This time, House Republicans say, they're really going to have an Obamacare replacement plan. It's not like all the other dozens—literally dozens—of times in the past six years since they've been promising it. This time it'll really happen "soon,” but don't expect it to actually be a real, actual, legislative kind of thing.

"Give us a little time, another month or so," House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) told reporters this week. "I think we’ll be pretty close to a Republican alternative."

Upton is one member of a four-person task force that is supposed to come up with a replacement plan for the healthcare law, at the behest of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). For now, the group is still in "listening mode," Upton said. When asked who they are listening to, Upton said: "You name it – the world." […]

Even now, the healthcare reform task force is not expected to produce an actual bill to replace the law, Ryan’s office said Friday.

“[Legislative] text is not necessary to show exactly what you’re going to do,” spokeswoman AshLee Strong said. “The point is not to have a vote on the floor and have it go nowhere.”

Sure. Of course, this time they do have Speaker Paul Ryan and his mission statement. Surely that'll make the difference! What they don't have, however, is time. They couldn't do anything legislative on health care even if they wanted to. Between today and the election, they're scheduled to work just some 11 weeks out of the 29 before Nov. 8. Between now and Oct. 1, when the new fiscal year starts and they have to pass some kind of spending bill, they have about 60 days to figure out what that's going to be. Given that they haven't been able to do that in the three-and-a-half months they've been working on it so far, fat chance they manage to get anything else accomplished.

That's just logistics, though. The other part of if is that they have had six years to come up with something and come up empty. Six. Years. And nothing. There's no non-magical reason to think this year will be any different.

Hey, if you're Ted Cruz and you’re despised by every single person who has ever known you for any length of time except your wife, then you may as well put on some rose-colored glasses and pretend the sun is shining, right? That's exactly what he did Monday, reports Nick Gass.

Participating in a town hall event on ABC's "Good Morning America," the Texas senator responded to a taped question from a man in Louisiana who noted that Cruz has developed a reputation in the Senate for being an obstructionist and asked him how he would mend those fences.

Just last Thursday, Cruz refused to apologize in another interview for calling Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor last July.

"Now, I will plead guilty to having stood up to the career politicians in Washington, stood up to both Democrats and leaders of my own party, because what's happening in Washington is broken," Cruz said, adding, "Now fast-forward after we win, once we win, I believe that I'm going to have a very productive and positive relationship with Congress."

Ted Cruz is the only person who believes this, which ranks it among his most preposterous and fantastical of claims. Of his 53 Senate GOP colleagues, only one has wholeheartedly endorsed him: Utah Sen. Mike Lee. Idaho Sen. Jim Risch wasn’t sure whether he had really endorsed Cruz. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham never officially endorsed Cruz, he just said he would campaign for him because Donald Trump would be such a disaster for the Republican party. Basically, the same idea as this tepid support from Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse:

Democrats scored a big coup over the weekend in Minnesota, as state Sen. Terri Bonoff made a late—and unexpected—entry into the race against GOP Rep. Erik Paulsen. News of a possible Bonoff bid only surfaced late on Thursday; on Saturday, she announced her campaign at a party convention. Lobbyist Jon Tollefson, who had been the only Democrat in the race but had raised little money, immediately dropped out and endorsed Bonoff.

Bonoff ran for this seat once before, when it became open in 2008. However, the Democratic Party's official endorsement that year went to Iraq vet Ashwin Madia, and she declined to challenge him in the primary. Madia went on to lose to Paulsen 48-41 (an Independence Party candidate took 11 percent), and since then, the incumbent has won re-election three times, never with less than 58 percent of the vote.

But Minnesota's 3rd Congressional District, located in the Minneapolis suburbs, voted for Barack Obama by a narrow 50-49 margin in 2012, making Paulsen one of the few Republicans to sit in a seat the president won—and thus a tempting target for Democrats. The problem for Team Blue, though, has always been candidate recruitment, but in Bonoff, they've just landed a legitimate contender with the right sort of moderate profile for a district like this.

What's more, Bonoff's decision to join the race despite the late hour is one of the most concrete signs we've seen to date that Democrats are really starting to feel that a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz nomination could damage the GOP downticket. (Bonoff specifically called Paulsen out for failing to "reject" what the two Republican presidential frontrunners "stand for.") However, while Paulsen is very conservative, he's generally been very smart about avoiding controversy. He's also an excellent fundraiser: He took in a hefty $516,000 in the first quarter and has $2.3 million in the bank.

But Bonoff, unlike many candidates who find themselves startled at how much money it takes to run for Congress, gets it.

The Goldman Environmental Foundation announced Monday the six recipients of its annual Goldman Environmental Prize, the largest eco-related prize in the world. The prize, established in 1989 by the late civic philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman, is also known as the Green Nobel. Chosen to represent Earth’s different geographic zones, each prize recipient will receive $175,000, no strings attached. It’s not unusual for them to donate their award or plow it back into their environmental efforts. 

The recipients this year are Edward Loure, of Tanzania; Leng Ouch, Cambodia; Zuzana Caputova, of Slovakia; Luis Jorge River Herrera, of Puerto Rico; Destiny Watford, from the United States; and Máxima Acuña, of Peru. 

An invitation-only ceremony tonight in San Francisco likely will be more solemn than usual. Early last month, one of last year’s recipients of the prize, Berta Cáceres, was found shot dead in a small town in her homeland of Honduras, near the border of El Salvador. The slaying is unsolved. The 44-year-old indigenous leader of the Lenca people was co-founder and coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. Goldman awarded her the prize for "a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam" at the Rio Gualcarque. 

“We really hope people will treat Berta’s death as a wake-up call,” said David Gordon, executive director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, which was launched by the late San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman as a way to honor grass-roots environmental activists around the world. [...]

Mr. Gordon said Ms. Cáceres’s death highlighted what he called a growing problem of environmental activists being subjected to threats and assaults, often over land conflicts.

Republican Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, deep in a tough battle for his political life, is making a big deal out of being the lone holdout against the Republican blockade of President Obama's Supreme Court nominee. He's met with Merrick Garland, and made headlines last month when he said Republicans should "man up" and hold hearings on his nomination. Kirk has also decided that it's a far safer bet for him to try to entirely avoid the debacle of being a Republican, and skip the convention this year. 

His Democratic opponent Rep. Tammy Duckworth is not impressed, she told Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet.

I asked Duckworth about how Kirk was getting easy good press for bucking the party, and that's when she told me, "I think he is all about smoke and mirrors. He gets a lot of attention for doing nothing.

". . . It's what he does," she added. "What will impact the race will be if he pledges not to vote for [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell unless he holds a hearing" for Garland.

I asked Duckworth about Kirk putting some distance between himself and what could well be a chaotic GOP convention.

"I think he is trying to distance himself from his entire personal voting record in Washington and the Republican Party," Duckworth said.

That pretty much nails it. Kirk was happy to be a cog in the Republican obstruction machine. He's had moe than five years to break with Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans but didn't bother until now, in a tough re-election. Up until now, he didn't particularly care if he was representing his Illinois constituents—or doing McConnell's bidding.

Please donate $3 to help Tammy Duckworth end the Mark Kirk farce and turn the Senate blue.

The Des Moines Register Guard and columnist Kathie Obradovich (the writer who was recently on the receiving end of one of Sen. Chuck Grassley's unhinged tirades) are getting a little bit fed up with the senior senator from Iowa's myriad excuses for not having confirmation hearings on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee. These excuses, she writes, are "mostly nonsense."

Obradovich allows Grassley one concession in his ridiculous excuses: the Senate does indeed get to decide when to withhold its advice and consent. But, she argues, "Grassley’s correct that the Senate doesn’t have to do anything, but it’s not a reason why it shouldn’t." 

She skewers the rest of his lame excuses, and he's come up with a lot of them: the people should decide (they did that in 2012); he's mad that Obama wants justices who can empathize (a truly disturbing objection); Biden said something hypothetically 14 years ago that justifies what Republicans are doing now; the court doesn't need more than eight judges; and the media shouldn't call Merrick Garland a "moderate," because Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. "They turned out that they're going to make law instead of interpreting law," he says.

That, she says, is "a naked political argument from Grassley."

[He] has been trying to claim his goal is to avoid mixing up the court nomination in election-year politics. Well, nobody really bought that one, anyway. Keep trying, senator.

He will, indeed, keep trying and excuses are likely to get thinner and more ridiculous as time goes on. Because Grassley is becoming more ridiculous as time goes on and the pressure on him to end this blockade increases. He's already cracked in media interviews, and he stood on the Senate floor and unleashed an incoherent tirade on the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Who knows what he'll do next to try to justify his actions?

Please donate $3 today to help retire this guy.

At Time, Jim Grant has been charging up the megaphone for another go at the GOP’s favorite reason why we can’t have nice things: the national debt. Grant, winner of the 2016 Amity Shlaes Award for Mangling History and Economics in the Service of Republicans*, follows a tack that’s all too familiar to anyone who has been unlucky enough to listen to five minutes of economics news in the last three decades.

To understand our financial fix, put yourself in the position of the government. Say you earn the typical American family income, and you spend and borrow as the government does. 

This is … exactly how not to understand the national debt. The government is not a person. The government is not a company. The way in which the economy works with sovereign nations is nothing like how it deals with the entities that operate under those sovereigns. This little analogy is useful only for the purpose of distorting what’s actually happening. As Matt O’Brien points out.

The United States government has $13.9 trillion in debt, and I feel fine.

You should, too. …

The government, after all, is immortal. It doesn't have to pay back everything it owes like you or I do. It just has to pay back the interest it owes, so that investors will keep lending to it on good terms.

And, as you might have noticed, they are. 

How many times has this happened, now, and how many times will it take before the airlines begin feeling embarrassed by it?

A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic.

The UC Berkeley student was calling his uncle to tell him about a speech he had attended by the UN Secretary General, and he was speaking Arabic because that's what his uncle speaks.

He told his uncle about the chicken dinner they were served and the moment when he got to stand up and ask the secretary general a question about the Islamic State, he said. But the conversation seemed troubling to a nearby passenger, who told the crew she overheard him making “potentially threatening comments,” the airline said in a statement.

For this, a Southwest employee was summoned to make sure all of this talk about the United Nations and chicken dinners was on the up-and-up, and we can all spot the moment when things went to hell here.

The man introduced himself in Arabic and then switched to English to ask, “Why were you speaking Arabic in the plane?”