At Salon, Heather Digby Parton writes—No, the “grown-ups” won’t save us: A favorite Beltway fantasy bites the dust again:

[...] One would have thought Americans had learned their lesson after having lived through the disaster of the George W. Bush years. But 16 years later the Republican Party served up another unqualified, ill-equipped nominee, and he, too, became president without winning the most votes. Once again the establishment tried to reassure the public that he would be held in check by the vice president and the respectable appointees: Gen. Jim Mattis at the Pentagon, Gen. John Kelly at Homeland Security and — after the first choice was fired — Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. Since the military is the only institution left in America that maintains even the slightest respect among the public, this seemed like a good idea. These men had commanded legions; surely they could control the likes of President Donald Trump.

That’s not happening. The people who were supposed to help Trump become a responsible leader have instead followed their boss into his morass of lies, corruption and incompetence. As Tom Ricks (who encouraged these people to join the administration for the good of the country) pointed out in a piece for Politico, they have degraded their reputations without making the slightest improvement in Trump’s performance as a leader.

Defense Secretary Mattis embarrassed himself on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on this past Sunday by bizarrely asserting that by appointing him, a big supporter of NATO, the president had endorsed the alliance. This came despite the fact that Trump had behaved like an ill-mannered boor at the annual NATO meeting in Brussels and refused to publicly affirm the mutual defense imperative known as Article 5. Mattis claimed that it doesn’t matter what Trump said; we should be content that he deigned to attend the meeting at all. [...]

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                   ~Horace, Odes, 23 BCE

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BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Obama Campaign 2.0:

It also seems reasonable to question the effectiveness of the President's political organization. It is possible the "bubble" of the White House has numbed the political instincts of a great campaigner and his staff. The President has a significant role to play in off-year elections. Historically, the President's political party loses seats in Congress. But strong Presidents have occasionally bucked the trend and prevented a crippling of their agenda. This requires a campaign of sorts, albeit not as large and complex as a presidential campaign. Will a political campaign run out of Washington, not Chicago, be as effective as the previous campaign given an anti-incumbent political environment?

David Plouffe, if reporting is correct, has been given charge of overseeing the overall campaign by posting as outside adviser to the DNC. His strategy is simple: get 15 million first-time Obama voters to turn out again. Mid-term elections are usually party base turnout elections. The broader electorate is not fully engaged because no major candidate is on the ballot. Turnout falls down to mostly committed partisans of either party. Plouffe's strategy is to engage them once again betting they will support Democrats. The Vote 2010 initiative is a gamble to change the composition of the electorate by bringing first time voters into the Democratic base. Driven byMyBO it will rely on the 2008 team of community organizers and volunteers. So the "change the electorate" model is still in place.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump, so good at the military, your head will spin, destroys NATO in 3 days. Armando joins to discuss this and the insane claim that Jared Kushner accepted the task of secretly negotiating the most sensitive topic in the world with Russia, then forgot he did it.

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The “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street in New York City has so enraged a sculptor that he felt the need to add a shitty sculpture of a dog urinating on the famous statue of a young girl facing down the Wall Street bull:

“This is corporate nonsense,” Gardega told The Post of “Fearless Girl,” saying it was put opposite artist Arturo Di Modica’s famed bull as a publicity stunt by a Boston-based financial firm.The Upper West Side artist sniffed that he even made his dog particularly poorly just to stick it to “Fearless Girl” even more.

“It has nothing to do with feminism, and it is disrespect to the artist that made the bull,” he said. “That bull had integrity.”

Congrats on drawing even more attention to the “corporate nonsense!” You can see his piss-poor statue below. Tourists and onlookers are not impressed:

But many female passers-by Monday said “Fearless Girl” has come to represent women taking on Wall Street — and just about anybody else standing up to financial firms — and that Gardega’s peeing dog is misogynistic.

“That’s an a–hole move. You call this art?” said one woman, who kicked the dog statue as she walked by.

Bravo, lady. Good luck working out your issues with women, Alex Gardega.  Enjoy your 15 seconds of fame today.

Interesting. We’re on to the week of March 19th in our endless pursuit of catching up on GunFAIL, and for the first time in recent memory, the leading category for the week is not the number of people who accidentally shot themselves. Unfortunately, though, it’s the number of kids who were accidentally shot. Nineteen kids were accidentally injured by gunfire from March 19-26, and sixteen people accidentally shot themselves during that time. Of course, some of these accidents count under both categories. Worse still, some of them also count among the 15 fatalities from gun accidents, as well. In fact, six minors were killed in gun accidents during the week, ages 2, 4, 8, 11, 13 and 16.

Among the week’s more bizarre incidents—as our title indicates—we had an accidental discharge in a public library in Fairbanks, AK. And curiously, nobody was willing to take the rap for it. A library patron was shot, but nobody was willing to say they had the gun, or saw anyone else who did. We also had an aspiring gunsmith in Pierce Co., WA who accidentally injured himself when a shotgun he’d aspired to smith apparently aspired to be a bomb instead, and exploded in his hands.

In Deltona, FL, another super-dexterous 3-year-old somehow managed to fire one of those guns they’re not strong enough to pull the trigger on. Luckily, no one was hurt this time. Remarkable, given that car in which both the child and the gun had been left was in the local elementary school parking lot at dismissal time. And in Houston, TX, a man who believed he’d heard an intruder breaking into his home grabbed his gun and accidentally shot his girlfriend. She’ll be OK. Not sure about their relationship. And alas, no further word on any intruder.

There are several more remarkable stories below the fold, mixed in with the usual assortment of the mundane, the idiotic, and the tragic. I guess I’ll never get completely used to it.

There’s bad ideas and then there is this—Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal recently said Oregon Republicans might hire right-wing militias like the Oathkeepers and/or the Three Percenters. From The Guardian:

Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal, however, told the Guardian that recent street protests had prompted Portland Republicans to consider alternatives to “abandoning the public square”.

“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” he said. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”

Asked if this meant Republicans making their own security arrangements rather than relying on city or state police, Buchal said: “Yeah. And there are these people arising, like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.”

Asked if he was considering such groups as security providers, Buchal said: “Yeah. We’re thinking about that. Because there are now belligerent, unstable people who are convinced that Republicans are like Nazis.”

The Three Percenters organization were involved in the standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. They arrived to provide support to Ammon Bundy and his crew, but opted to stay at arm’s length, staying in the town of Burns and tracking law enforcement activity, reporting back to Bundy and his crew. Both The Oathkeepers and the Three Percenters were involved in the Bundy ranch standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014. 

Instead of hiring highly partisan gun fanatics, perhaps they should consider a simpler path and deliver a more popular message and legislation that actually helps citizens? How would you feel about seeing these people surrounding your state’s capitol, essentially deputized to act on behalf of one political party? 

Or maybe it’s past the tipping point. Maybe it’s just too late. But while orange Julius aka the questionably mentally deficient commander-in-thief tries to make up his addled mind if he believes in marine biology or industry funded woo, the Great Barrier Reef is undergoing another bleaching event that may be even worse than the devastating ones it already endured in the last two years. The year 2017 is turning out to be worse than any year so far:

Prior to 2017, the Great Barrier Reef had suffered through three major bleaching events in modern history – 1998, 2002 and 2016 – and underwater and aerial surveys earlier this year indicated that 2017 would offer little reprieve, with scientists confirming back-to-back bleaching events were taking place. They had maintained hope that things would cool off quickly, but further surveys have now revealed that seems unlikely, along with the true extent of the current damage.

It’s so bad that some experts say the reef can no longer be saved, others are only a little bit more hopeful: 

Members agreed that, in our lifetime and on our watch, substantial areas of the Great Barrier Reef and the surrounding ecosystems are experiencing major long-term damage which may be irreversible unless action is taken now.

“The planet has changed in a way that science informs us is unprecedented in human history. While that in itself may be cause for action, the extraordinary rapidity of the change we now observe makes action even more urgent.”

It’s unlikely that the US will lead the way in saving the world’s reefs or anything else from the effects of climate change. At least not for another election cycle or two.

Now that the GOP is running the whole show in Washington, you'd think we might be able to avoid yet another manufactured debt ceiling crisis. Apparently not. Donald Trump and his aides are angling to raise the debt ceiling by the end of July, blindsiding GOP lawmakers. Politico writes:

Lawmakers in both parties thought they’d have until the fall to act, and they had planned to roll the always-difficult vote into a broader spending package that could be more easily swallowed. That strategy may now have to be tossed aside with the debt limit deadline approaching faster than expected.

The White House request raises the prospect of a bruising fight over the debt limit — not just between Republicans and Democrats but within both parties. The GOP is torn over whether to combine spending cuts with the debt ceiling lift, and Senate Democrats are already signaling they may push for their own concessions because their votes are going to be needed to avoid a devastating government default. [...]

“We have to do it. We can’t let the government default,” said Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). But, he added, “I don’t know if it has to be done” before the August recess.

If you're sensing a bit of alarm from Hatch, it's because he knows any default on the nation's debt could be calamitous for both the economy and, by extension, congressional Republicans.

In 2011, the GOP’s fight over the debt ceiling resulted in a credit downgrade and the sequester cuts loathed by Democrats and hawkish Republicans. In 2014, the Senate shut off the chamber’s microphones and held a debt limit vote open for more than an hour to avoid spooking Wall Street again.

Texas House Republican Matt Rinaldi called ICE on hundreds of peaceful demonstrators who were protesting the state’s racist, anti-immigrant “show me your papers” legislation, telling House Democrats, “fuck them, I called ICE.” According to the Observer, Rinaldi also threatened to “put a bullet” in a colleague’s head after sparking a full-on screaming match with other legislators on the House floor and claiming he was physically threatened. But according to one legislator, “no assault occurred.” 

Rinaldi did confirm in a Facebook post that he called ICE, ironically backing up what protesters have been saying all along—“show me your papers” isn’t at all about community safety, but instead about racism directed at Latinos and immigrants. ”The true intentions of SB4 came to light today on the House floor,” said state Rep. Ramon Romero. “Matt Rinaldi looked into a House gallery full of Americans exercising their first amendment rights against SB4—Americans of all ages and ethnicity—and he only saw ‘illegals’’: 

Earlier, at the beginning of the incident, Rinaldi told Romero on the House floor that the hundreds of protesters who were chanting in the gallery were a “disgrace,” Romero told the Observer.

Romero said that prompted Representative Cesar Blanco to tell Rinaldi that Italian immigrants “are just like us,” and Rinaldi responded, “Yeah, but we love our country.”“Fuck them, I called ICE,” Rinaldi said, according to Romero.

“He saw a bunch of people who look Latino, and he assumed they were undocumented,” Rep. Romero said. “So how can he say SB4 won’t lead to racial profiling?”

Black women are used to being invisible. And yet, we continue to forge ahead in many sectors of industry across the country, despite being ignored and left behind by funders. One such industry is technology—which is missing a huge opportunity to capitalize on investing in black women. Black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. According to the the 2011 U.S. Census Bureau, we are also the most educated people in the country, the highest percentage of any group enrolled in college and part of the largest and most engaged group of early tech adopters. All of this should make us an easy sell to venture capitalists looking to invest in startups run by black women. But investors simply don’t seem to be interested.

The fact that black women are educated and entrepreneurial yet so underfunded is a confluence of broadening thoughts of diversity, use of technology, and economic policy. The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 increased limits for tax write-offs for startups, such as the ability to deduct cell phone bills and depreciation, and health care costs. This was great news for black women, who tend to be younger when they found their companies, have more debt, and less access to capital. Black women have greater difficulty receiving funding from investors and creditors, and difficulty securing lending due to racial bias.

But tax write-offs don’t make up for the funding gap. When black women are funded, they get the short end of the stick, with the average raise round totaling just $36,000. Compare that figure to the composite of the average white male startup founder, who banks an average of $1.3 million in funding. 

As usual, so much of this is about race and gender. White men are understood as the default experts for literally everything (there was even a recent political philosophy journal that published an issue about Black Lives Matter without a single black person’s perspective) so it’s hard for women, and especially black women, to be seen as credible in any field and, particularly, technology. Which is really so unfortunate because this lack of investment in diversity also means a lack of innovation and fresh ideas. And much of this comes down to networks. If a black woman doesn’t have access to networks to fund her idea, it doesn’t matter how great the idea is.

Whatever else you might say about Donald Trump, he's certainly been inspiring Americans to adopt a regular exercise routine.

Marches are planned in Washington, D.C., and a 135 other cities Saturday, according to organizers, which include many of same groups that organized the previous anti-Trump rallies.

Saturday's "March for Truth" will include speeches from Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks and Javier Muñoz, the star of Hamilton, among other actors and musicians. Members of Congress will address several rallies, including Texas Rep. Al Green, who has been one of the most outspoken voices calling to impeach Trump.

The focus of the march will be to "call for urgent investigations into Russian interference in the U.S. election and ties to Donald Trump, his administration and his associates." Want to attend? You can go here to find your nearest march. Go, have fun, bring signs.

There was a point, in the before-days, when you really didn't have to hold rallies for basic concepts like science. There was also, or so the stories go, a time when Congress would feel some primal urge to investigate foreign efforts to bend American elections to their will without being shamed into it by the public. But those are just stories, and the current Republican-held Congress isn't interested so long as the result is an administration that will rubber-stamp their efforts to roll back civil rights, voting rights, the American safety net.

So here we are.

An undocumented Michigan dad has temporarily staved off deportation after his attorney filed a last-minute application to reopen his immigration case Tuesday. 

Jose Ricardo Valle Rodriguez, father of a 2-year-old U.S. citizen, came to the U.S. from El Salvador without permission nearly 15 years ago when he was only 17. Even though he’d been in contact with immigration court, he missed a date due to a clerical error when his notice to appear was sent to the wrong address, a fact confirmed by his attorney through the Freedom of Information Act. As a result, Valle Rodriguez was ordered deported in 2005. Last week, as the family was out running errands, Valle Rodriguez’s wife pulled their car over for a black SUV that was trailing them. They believed it to be police. It wasn’t:

“I didn’t think nothing of it, because where it was [in our neighborhood] that’s where they drop kids off for the bus,” Karina Valle says. Then the truck put its lights on.

Valle, assuming it was the police, says she pulled off a busy road into the parking lot of the sheriff’s office. Suddenly, she says, several more unmarked cars pulled in, blocking the exit. “And I instantly knew, this is not the police. This has to be ICE.

“I said to my husband, ‘I think this is immigration.’ And he just quickly looked at his son. And got so worried.”

Valle Rodriguez has been in detention since, with his advocates fearing that he could have been deported as soon as the court opened Tuesday, “the most common day of the week for deportations.” But following his attorney’s move, Rodriguez remains in the country, though is still in detention. Brad Thomson “said he won a similar case involving an incorrectly entered ZIP code, and he’s optimistic he will prevail in Rodriguez’s case,” but ICE is as unpredictable as it is incompetent, and he could still be deported “depending on whether the case is reopened.”

I'm not sure how many ways are left to say that Donald Trump is an idiot man-child, but by God we'll be using every one of them before we finally wrap him up in a nice warm jacket and send him on his way. We have learned from leaks that he prefers intelligence briefings with pretty pictures, not words, and that he has an attention span so short as to require acrobatics from his briefers—for example, peppering his own name through an intelligence briefing so that he keeps reading—in order to keep him from wandering off on tangents.

And it's still not working.

Yet there are signs that the president may not be retaining all the intelligence he is presented, fully absorbing its nuance, or respecting the sensitivities of the information and how it was gathered.

As an aside, this sounds very suspiciously like how the papers began to gingerly suggest that President Ronald Reagan was perhaps not fully with us, late in his term. As a not-aside, these observations are not exactly state secrets. The last one in particular has been on full public display this month, thanks to Trump's offering up of code-word Israeli intelligence to Russian visitors for no fathomable legitimate reason, and Trump's penchant for egregious lies has the whole world wondering if he does it on purpose or if the idiot man-child simply cannot remember basic facts about what he's been told and what he himself has done. But the sourcing of this new Washington Post story cautiously tap-dancing around the sitting president's possible incapacities should raise a few alarms.

This portrait of Trump as a consumer of the nation’s secrets is based on interviews with several senior administration officials who regularly attend his briefings. Some of the interviews were conducted in early May, before the president’s meeting with the Russians.

Translation: Several senior intelligence officials who regularly attend Trump's briefings are concerned enough about the abilities of the idiot man-child to chat, anonymously, to the Washington Post. But none of them are courageous to put their names anywhere near the rather alarming premise the Post is painting. Assuming the Post’s writers aren’t simply making these intelligence concerns up, we can presume the deep background conversations on this one were humdingers.

Per usual, first there's Donald Trump's "reality"...

And then there's reality, courtesy of WSJ:

Republicans, who control both chambers, are scouring the tax code, searching for ways to offset the deep rate cuts they desire. But their proposals for border adjustment—which would tax imports—and for ending the business interest deduction and making major changes to individual tax breaks for health and retirement have all hit resistance within the party. The only big revenue-raising provision with anything close to Republican consensus is repealing the deduction for state and local taxes, and that idea faces objections from blue-state lawmakers in the party.

The GOP’s dreams have collided with interest-group lobbying and the tax system’s reality. Politicians all profess to hate the tax code, but they don’t agree on exactly what they hate. Voters gripe about complexity but are wary of losing cherished breaks that are woven into the economy.

Who could've known tax reform could be so difficult? The biggest problem: Republicans have no way to pay for all the tax breaks they want to bestow on businesses and high-income individuals. One of the only new ideas—Paul Ryan's border adjustment tax on imported goods—hasn't gone over well and Ryan's basically already lost the messaging war on it.