At The Nation, David Dayen writes—How Banks Want To Make It Easier To Launder Money. An excerpt:

The persistent whistling you’re hearing around financial centers in Manhattan is coming from contented bank executives. Since the election of Donald Trump, their companies’ stock prices have soared, amid expectations of regulatory abandonment. Their former colleague ex–Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn is setting policy inside the White House, and their former lawyer Jay Clayton plans to blind the SEC to their money-making schemes. If Republicans can get their act together on major legislation, bank executives will be rewarded with a triple bounty of tax cuts: on their corporate taxes, their individual rates, and the Obamacare taxes that fall entirely on the wealthy.

But what’s the old saying about giving someone an inch and their taking a mile? Instead of smiling at their good fortune and getting down to the business of ripping off clients for profit, the world’s largest banks want to do less to stop drug lords, tax cheats, and terrorists from moving money through their institutions—at precisely the moment when the regulators are poised to walk off the field themselves.

The ask comes in the form of a report the Clearing House Association, a financial-industry trade group, released last week. The report proposed numerous reforms to the anti–money laundering (AML) compliance process, complaining that “the nation’s financial firms are effectively deputized to prevent, identify, investigate, and report criminal activity.”

Financial firms are forced into this duty because of a federal law, the Bank Secrecy Act, in place since 1970. Since banks, you know, perform banking transactions, they are uniquely positioned to detect when a drug lord or a sketchy hedge fund is trying to wash illicit money through legitimate channels. When transactions are larger than $5,000, or have hallmarks of terrorist financing, tax evasion, or money laundering, they must file a suspicious activity report (SAR) and deliver them to federal regulators. This provides raw data for law enforcement to connect the dots on criminal activity.

The report would have you believe that these SARs are so burdensome (“carefully crafted, highly detailed”) that they cost the industry more than it takes to fund the FBI. So to be clear, here’s what’s in a SAR: the subject of the transaction’s personal information, the date of the transaction, the name of the bank where it occurred and its contact information, and a written description of the activity.

That’s it. [...]

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

“Slowly, however, the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made. That woman has been but a "silent partner" in the building of the outer temples of thought and action during the ages when she has been denied the tools of self-expression in art and science, in literature and politics, is no proof that her contribution has been small even in these lines. It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman's brain!”
                    ~Anna Garlin Spencer, Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912
 

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Super PACs got 25% of their cash from just five donors:

In the immortal words of California's Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh, "Money is the mother's milk of politics." This year, billionaire donors have turned it into cream. Just five of the ultra-wealthy have contributed a fourth of all the money received by Super PACs that are having a powerful impact on the elections.

Individuals are limited to $2500 direct contributions to a candidate's campaign. But there is no limit on contributions to Super PACS. These aren't supposed to coordinate with the campaigns, but that is a joke.

HIGH IMPACT STORIES • TOP COMMENTS

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin rounds up news from the livelier town hall meetings, plus thoughts on shared values, the Milo crash, and Trump’s penchant for generals. The 4th Circuit upholds Maryland’s assault weapons ban. And an in-depth look at just WTF Comey was up to. 

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No one is an island unto themselves. We all live our lives together within a society that's held together by tenuous threads which interconnect us. One of the most cherished and claimed values of western societies is freedom of thought, and a belief the public is entitled to their own opinions and can believe whatever they want to believe. But it's only true with regards to the personal. Once we start talking about policy, we all have to have a common framework on the extent of what's inside the box called life. We first have to agree there is a box and it has six sides.

The only way the world can work is if people with differences can agree on certain fundamental truths. If we all look up at the sky, we at least have to agree the sky is blue. A belief the sky is red isn’t an “alternate fact” to tolerate and placate. It’s just fucking wrong. 

Because if we can't agree on what the nature of reality is, then we can't really have a conversation which goes anywhere. And the inability to have a reasonable discussion impacts important public policies, because one can’t debate issues if some people believe two and two equaling four is fake news. We might as well be debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin with fucking martians, since that might be more productive than trying to reason with someone who uses the words of Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, Alex Jones or the dipshit-in-chief as indisputable truth. To paraphrase something Voltaire once wrote, those that can make people believe nonsense, can use people to facilitate atrocities.

As part of a protest against Trump administration policies which impact free speech, including attempts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, an alliance of theater owners are planning a nationwide protest by screening1984, Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s novel and warning about authoritarianism starring John Hurt.

You have to marvel at just how dedicated Republicans are to making every individual American life more miserable. You know what Americans need less of, says Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake? Americans need less internet privacy. Stupid internet privacy rules, messing with the profit margins of gargantuan telecommunications companies.

The rules require broadband service providers to obtain permission from consumers before using certain personal information for marketing purposes.

The FCC passed the rules using its authority under the 2015 net neutrality rules, which said internet providers must treat all web traffic the same.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) this week said he is planning to introduce a resolution to undo the privacy rules, arguing that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should have jurisdiction over privacy issues and not the FCC.

Telecoms companies have been lobbying for the rule change, because ... well, we all have a pretty good idea why. Democrats are opposed.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit on Tuesday upheld a Maryland ban on assault-style semi-automatic rifles. The 10-4 ruling in the case of Kolbe v. Hogan overturned a decision by a three-judge panel of the same court. The ruling held that the designated firearms are "not protected by the Second Amendment." The 2013 law was passed in the wake of the massacre of six adults and 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012. The young killer committed the murders with an assault-style rifle, the Bushmaster XM15-E2S, a firearm patterned on the widely available AR-15.

Specifically, the law prohibits sales or other transfers of a list of 81 guns and similar models. It includes both pistols, shotguns, and centerfire, semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and have at least two of three characteristics—grenade launcher, flash suppressor/flare launcher, or folding stock. Also banned are sales or transfers of magazines than can hold more than 10 rounds. Penalties for buyers and sellers range up to three years in prison.

Tim Dickinson comments:

The federal appeals court—based in Richmond, Virginia, and known for its conservative bent—upheld a Maryland prohibition of assault weapons in unvarnished language, writing that "the banned assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are not constitutionally protected arms."

The Fourth Circuit ruling re-affirms previous court decisions that also placed assault weapons outside the scope of Second Amendment protections of gun ownership. But this ruling [...] goes further by addressing the AR-15 by name, tracing the weapon's military pedigree from the M-16 rifle and finding that the AR-15 can be banned based on the plain language of the Supreme Court's infamous Heller decision. (That ruling, written by the late activist conservative justice Antonin Scalia, discovered a constitutional right for individual gun ownership.)

At issue was whether Maryland has banned firearms that meet the test of "dangerous and unusual weapons" that the Supreme Court said in District of Columbia v. Heller applies to firearms “that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like" and not “in common use for lawful purposes.” Such firearms, the majority ruled, are not protected by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The majority in Heller ruled that “that each individual has the right to own a gun” and keep it at home, but also noted that government can pass restrictions on ownership as long as they don’t violate that right. 

Claire L. Parkinson’s scientific paper “Arctic sea ice decay simulated for a CO₂-induced temperature rise” was published in Climate Change in 1979, the peer-reviewed journal, when it was just 2 years old. So was the Vermont native’s doctorate in geography and climatology. Parkinson’s paper, co-authored by William W. Kellogg, was pretty much ignored. What it argued, based on mathematical modeling, is that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide above preindustrial levels would make the Arctic free of ice in late summer probably sometime in the middle of the 21st century. 

We now know that four-decades-old prediction was spot on, as Sabrina Shankman points out in a story in the Pulitzer-winning InsideClimate News. In fact, the likelihood of the scenario Parkinson and her colleague posited then could occur a decade or more before mid-century. As scientists in the past 20 years have been predicting, whenever summers do become ice free in the Arctic, the global impact will be titanic. Indeed, we appear to be feeling some of that impact already.

Today, Parkinson is a distinguished senior climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Project Scientist for the Aqua Earth-observing satellite mission and has pages of scientific papers and a few books on her résumé.

She became interested in math in first grade. When she graduated from university with a math degree in 1970, however, she hadn’t yet figured out what she wanted to do with it. But since she also had an interest in Antarctica, she enrolled in graduate school at Ohio State University’s Institute for Polar Studies, now the Byrd Polar Research Center, with the specific goal of getting to spend time on the ice-bound continent. She managed to talk her way onto her first expedition there in 1972, but it was a close thing. 

The captain of the ship was “horrified” to learn that there would be a woman aboard and that the research team would be coed for the first time. But Terry Hughes, the expedition’s leader stood up for her. “Terry understood that going to Antarctica was the whole reason I wanted to be at the Institute of Polar Studies, so he included me on the expedition,” Parkinson said.

When she returned from Antarctica, she became a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. That’s where she and Kellogg developed the model that underpinned their study.

Iowa is fed up with Donald Trump and the Paul Ryan agenda. First Sen. Chuck Grassley took it on the chin at a town hall today, and now Sen. Joni Ernst is on video fleeing a town hall after only a handful of questions. The crowd erupted in anger chanting “Do your job!” as she fled through a side door. The Iowa Starting Line blog was there to capture the moment:

Want to see if your elected representatives are going to be holding a town hall near you? CLICK HERE TO SEE THE TOWN HALL PROJECT'S LIST OF EVENTS.​ If your representative is not on that list, call them and ask to hold a town hall.

Attending a town hall near you? Send pics, videos, and your reports to socialmedia@dailykos.com.

Are you ready to raise hell against Congress for enabling Trump? Members are back in their districts on February recess, and it's time to turn out at rallies and town hall events to hold them accountable.

Daily Kos Elections recently completed calculating the 2016 presidential election results by congressional district. With ticket-splitting rates at historic lows, and presidential results highly correlated with congressional results, these numbers serve as a strong predictor of future House election outcomes. Accordingly, the districts that saw Hillary Clinton’s margin improve the most compared to Barack Obama’s 2012 margin could point toward future trends in House races. Below we’ll take a look at the 25 districts that swung hardest toward Clinton, all of which moved by at least 13 points.

As shown on the map above (see here for a larger image), the vast majority of these 25 seats are heavily suburban, well-educated, diverse, and concentrated in Sun Belt states like California and Texas. Twenty of them ranked in the top fifth of all districts by the share of adults with a college degree, and college-educated white voters in particular voted much more strongly Democratic than whites without a degree did in 2016 when compared to past elections. Two of the remaining seats were majority Latino, and the last three were in Utah, where socially conservative Mormon voters who usually lean heavily Republican were exceptionally hostile to Trump.

Overall, Clinton won 15 of these districts, although six of those were already dark blue. Trump won the other 10, including four of them by double digits. However, six districts flipped from Romney to Clinton, while another six saw the GOP margin shrink from greater than 20 percent to less than 10 points. Congressional Republicans hold 17 of these seats and Democrats just 8. However, all of those House Republicans performed much better than Trump did, and only two prevailed by less than 10 points. However, many of their seats could be particularly vulnerable if the 2016 presidential trend filters further downballot, or if they retire.

A prefatory note on Utah is necessary. As a Mormon, Mitt Romney was unusually popular in the Beehive State for a Republican, while Donald Trump was even more uniquely despised by Republican voters there. Many of them abandoned Trump for conservative independent Evan McMullin, himself a Mormon, magnifying the state’s swing away from Republicans in 2016. In fact, McMullin even came in second over Clinton with 24.5 percent in the Provo-based 3rd District. That seat saw the biggest drop in the Republican margin over Democrats of any seat, with Trump’s 25 percent margin a giant 35 percent smaller than Romney’s 59-point victory in 2012.

Trump has found supporters among some of the most dangerous and disreputable members of society. We know that white supremacists, Russian presidents, xenophobes, and homophobes all consider him an ally. And among the latest group to see him as a champion are the members of the anti-vaccine movement. 

President Trump’s embrace of discredited theories linking vaccines to autism has energized the anti-vaccine movement. Once fringe, the movement is becoming more popular, raising doubts about basic childhood health care among politically and geographically diverse groups.

To be fair, parents certainly have the right to make choices for their children that they think are appropriate and in the best interests of their health and well-being. But when these choices endanger others and are discredited by science, at what point do they become unreasonable? And when exactly did science and medicine become the enemy of the right? Is it when they became the Moral Majority? Surely, they can find a way to believe in religion and science at the same time.

Public health experts warn that this growing movement is threatening one of the most successful medical innovations of modern times. Globally, vaccines prevent the deaths of about 2.5 million children every year, but deadly diseases such as measles and whooping cough still circulate in populations where enough people are unvaccinated.

Of course, Trump has no knowledge of such matters as science, public health, or even facts, but that has never stopped him from supporting ridiculous conspiracy theories. Even with renowned neurosurgeon Ben Carson as a potential cabinet pick. Perhaps now would be a good time to make Ben’s experience in medicine useful.

Politico has a story explaining how Donald Trump's staffers are locked in a constant, daily battle to keep the barely coherent man-child from launching one of his famous incoherent tantrums. It's pathetic. It's deeply embarrassing. It's the story of a team constantly attempting to feed praise of Donald Trump to friendly outlets so that they could turn around and show it back to their boss, a constant scramble to feed his unending need for public praise. Because if they didn't do it he'd get sullen and cranky and lash out like a petulant little child.

The key to keeping Trump’s Twitter habit under control, according to six former campaign officials, is to ensure that his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise. And when no such praise was to be found, staff would turn to friendly outlets to drum some up — and make sure it made its way to Trump’s desk.

So whenever there were negative stories about Trump, which has been All The Damn Time, they'd go to outlets like "Breitbart, Washington Examiner, Fox News, Infowars and the Daily Caller" with alternative story ideas for how freakin' swell Donald Trump was, and then once they got one of those friendly (Infowars!) outlets to take the bait, the staff would tweet those stories out, then print out, for Trump, that friendly coverage to make the idiot manchild feel like he was getting sufficient praise for his little pronouncements and wars and fits. That, and only that, would calm him.

The whole thing reads like Trump's staff treats him like a dangerous zoo animal let loose in the White House. Gotta keep him happy. Gotta rub his belly when he says to. Don’t let anyone rattle the bars of his little cage or we’re all dead. And never, never leave him alone:

This is the 484th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue). The spotlight usually appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the Feb. 18 Green Spotlight. More than 26,480 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.

OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES

Desert Scientist writes—Water! “This diary begins a series of four diaries on the old “elements.”  We know now that these are not elements. Water, for example, consists primarily of one Oxygen and two Hydrogen atoms (both of which are elements), plus various other compounds as impurities, such as the combination of salts in salt water, and in many cases pollutants. That said, the four old “elements,” Air, Earth, Fire and Water, will serve well as symbols of the required necessities of life on this planet. I start with water because as a long-time South-westerner I developed a strong attachment to this scarce resource (See my diary on desert water at www.dailykos.com/...). I am now living in the Pacific Northwest, but water is still an issue, especially drinking water, although not as much as it was in New Mexico and Arizona.  Here the streams have been damed and are often polluted, and even Puget Sound, that vast southern part of the Salish Sea, is stressed.  Yet many of us in the United States worry more about money than water, as is well illustrated by the current difficulties at Standing Rock. The slogan “Water is life” used by the demonstrators at Standing Rock is so much of a truism as to be overlooked by those requiring quick profits in the present year. They often act as if water was an unlimited resource.”

John Chapman writes—Infrastructure and Resource Extraction Projects Slow under Trump Administration (the NEPA freeze): “While much of the discussion so far has focused on regulation and funding, the federal government also plays the lead role in planning the projects that improve our infrastructure and allow for resource extraction. Interestingly, preliminary data shows that the federal government is actually slowing down in its approval of projects relating to infrastructure and resource extraction. This type of slowdown was not seen in the first few weeks of the Obama or George W. Bush administrations—what is going on now is not a general feature of a transitioning administration. Now, I do not claim to have tracked down every single project related to infrastructure or resource extraction. However, it is possible to get a general picture of how these activities are progressing by taking a look at one important step in the process required for major projects that need to be approved by the federal government. By looking at ‘Notices of Availability’ of Environmental Impact Statements (which are published in the Federal Register) we have a snapshot of the progress that the government is making on some of their largest and most controversial projects.”

At some point, one would think, the Republican Party is going to eventually need legislators who are not deeply, deeply stupid.

While defending the need to build a costly wall along the southern U.S. border, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) claimed on Wednesday that nuclear bombs could be hidden inside bales of marijuana smuggled into the United States through Mexico.

“I can suggest to you that there are national security implications here for a porous border,” Franks told CNN host Brianna Keilar on Wednesday. “We sometimes used to make the point that if someone wanted to smuggle in a dangerous weapon, even a nuclear weapon, into America, how would they do it? And the suggestion was made, well, we’ll simply hide it in a bale of marijuana.”

Yes. Yes, of course. That is exactly how a foreign terrorist group would want to smuggle a nuclear weapon into this country—by wrapping it in a gigantic bale of the thing that all the United States border agencies are furiously searching for in the first place. Ideally, something that all the security dogs could smell from 100 yards away.

This seems a perfectly logical plan that all the bright terrorists would be super-duper eager to carry out, so long as there is no border wall to stop them. Quick, wrap everything in marijuana! The Americans will never find it then! Ha ha ha!

Ahem. You know, these are supposedly the best our nation has to offer—the people chosen by our citizens as the most capable, the brightest, the keenest minds we can bring to bear on our national problems.

That is the theory, anyway. We probably need to re-evaluate that.

In the seemingly unending list of tasks and duties Donald Trump and his team are systemically screwing up, among the biggest screw-ups is the team's inability to properly staff his own government. Donald Trump has more than 500 Senate-confirmed offices sitting empty because he hasn't nominated anyone for those positions—and he hasn't nominated anyone for those positions because the chief requirement for each and every one of them is that the nominee must never have criticized Trump or worked against him in any capacity, and there just ain't 500 qualified people in the country who meet that test.

The result is a hiring effort stuck up to its axles in Donald Trump's ego, and it's wreaking havoc as his senior cabinet officials try to staff their departments only to have their choices shot down by the White House.

When an informal adviser to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently recommended a candidate for a high-level Senate-confirmed position at the agency, the adviser was told that the candidate had little chance of getting the job because the person had previously worked for an organization that was seen as being at odds with Trump’s policy positions, one person familiar with the issue said.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has clashed with White House officials over top officials in his department, sources say. The White House saw some of Mnuchin’s picks as too liberal or not supportive enough of Trump, sources say. Trump has yet to name Mnuchin’s No. 2, nor has he tapped any undersecretaries or assistant secretaries at the department.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has struggled with the White House to appoint his own aides, with significant pushback from the White House over deputy positions and ambassadorships. Several high-level people were delayed or scuttled because they didn't agree with Trump during the campaign or because the White House preferred someone else [...]

And on and on. If it seems like this administration continues to be staggeringly incompetent, there's a fine reason for that: they still don't have anyone who actually knows what they're doing on the team. People like Tillerson and DeVos were picked for their ideologies, but know nothing about the departments they're supposed to be leading. Underlings who might know more are being nixed because anyone who might know what the hell they're doing probably wasn't a Trump supporter during the campaign, and therefore Trump's team doesn't want to risk letting them in the building.