Cezary Podkul at ProPublica writes—Paul Ryan Says ‘Death Tax’ Hurts Wisconsin Small Businesses. IRS Data Shows Otherwise:

Does the estate tax really hurt small businesses? House Speaker Paul Ryan thinks so.

He revived this longstanding debate in a May 17 column in the Kenosha News, in which he defended the Republican plan to abolish the levy on inherited wealth. Ryan wrote that the “death tax” can “result in double, and potentially even triple, taxation on small businesses and family farms, both of which are prevalent in Wisconsin.” [...]

Ryan wrote in his op-ed that small businesses make up nearly 98 percent of all employers in Wisconsin. The vast majority file federal returns as individuals, at an income tax rate up to 44.6 percent, he wrote. Via estate taxes, he contended, heirs pay taxes a second time on the same assets.

The current federal estate tax threshold is about $5.5 million for an individual and $11 million for a married couple. For 2015 — the last year for which statistics are available — the IRS said 61 estates in Wisconsin got hit with the tax. Is that a lot or a little? Here are some numbers for context. [...]

Another way to contextualize the data is to look at the overall number of deaths in Wisconsin. According to the state’s Department of Health Services, about 50,000 Wisconsin residents die each year. Since 61 estates were taxed in 2015, only about one-tenth of 1 percent of all deaths in Wisconsin generate an estate tax bill.

That’s slightly lower than the U.S. average. Nationally, about 1 in 500 estates are big enough to get hit with the federal estate tax, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. [...]

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QUOTATION

“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
                    ~Col. John M. Chivington, 1864 remark cited in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Determining the real oil flow could cost BP billions:

Here's a question that is bothering me: why are BP and the Federal government telling two different stories about the importance of closing the vents on the containment cap over BP's leaking well?

It's certainly possible that the government's position (that the vents should be closed) is wrong, and if so, they need to clarify the record. But I'm far more suspicious of BP's position -- that we don't need to close the vents -- and it all comes down to one reason: money.

Let me explain. The one thing that everybody agrees on is that if the vents were closed and we could bring all the oil to the surface, we'd have a good idea what the flow rate actually is. Another independent researcher is now pegging the rate at 100,000 barrels per day, but if we captured all the oil, we'd have a much more reliable figure for the flow-rate.

So what does that have to do with money? Well, if you were BP, you'd know the fines that will be levied against you are calculated by the barrel. And if you're BP and you've been spewing 100,000 barrels per day since April 20, you be looking at a fine so far of $21.5 billion -- a fine that's growing ever single day. (That's if they get hit with the $4,300 per barrel maximum.)

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, it’s Comey Day, and Greg Dworkin and Armando are on hand for the pre-game and kickoff. Other threads are also unraveling, too. A Miss Universe contestant says Trump’s behavior in Moscow was less than discreet. And that 19.5% sale of Rosneft? Qatar bought it!

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The Guardian’s Julie Carrie Wong reports:

Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who assaulted a Guardian journalist on the eve of his election to the US House of Representatives, has issued a full and unequivocal apology to the reporter and agreed to donate $50,000 to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The congressman-elect apologized to the reporter, Ben Jacobs, in a letter received late on Wednesday as part of an agreement that settles any potential civil claims.

“My physical response to your legitimate question was unprofessional, unacceptable, and unlawful,” Gianforte wrote. “As both a candidate for office and a public official, I should be held to a high standard in my interactions with the press and the public. My treatment of you did not meet that standard.”

Gianforte has also made an in-person apology directly to Jacobs.

The tech millionaire still faces misdemeanor assault charges that could cost him a pitiful $500 in fines and six months in the slam. But you can bet that he will do zero time in lock-up. Maybe the judge will sentence him to community service and let him use his time in Congress to fulfill that requirement. It’s hard to imagine Jacobs getting off easily if he had been the one charged with assault. Hard to imagine he wouldn’t have gotten dinged for a felony. 

In the immediate aftermath of the incident in which he body-slammed Jacobs, breaking his glasses, and punching him repeatedly, Gianforte and his campaign lied about what happened, claiming Jacobs had provoked the attack by aggressively questioning the then-candidate. Gianforte addressed that false claim in his apology, careful to avoid characterizing the lie as a lie:

“Notwithstanding anyone’s statements to the contrary, you did not initiate any physical contact with me, and I had no right to assault you,” he wrote. “I am sorry for what I did and the unwanted notoriety this has created for you. I take full responsibility.”

If there was any doubt that jails are horrific places that only serve to debase and dehumanize people, let the Milwaukee County Jail serve as a prime example. Over the last few years, there have been deaths of several inmates at the jail as well as hideous allegations of abuse of pregnant women during their incarceration. Meanwhile, Sheriff David Clarke remains completely unbothered—following Donald Trump and the Republicans around the country, parroting conservative talking points and making himself the go-to black face of their party, despite being a Democrat.

Supposedly, his loyalty (and we all now how big Trump is on loyalty!) had gotten him a job in the administration that was never confirmed, which if it happens might mean that his term as sheriff is coming to an end. Let’s hope so because he has proven incredibly unfit to hold any office, never mind be responsible for the lives of incarcerated human beings. 

On Wednesday, a jury agreed that the jail is liable for some of the ways that it has abused inmates and decided to award a woman $6.7 million after she was raped repeatedly by a guard when she was held in custody in the jail back in 2013. She was pregnant at the time and also one of the women who was shackled during childbirth, a practice that seems to have been commonplace at the jail.

The guard, Xavier Thicklen, was acting under his scope of employment when the sexual assaults occurred and therefore Milwaukee County is liable for the damages amount, the jury determined.

The jury also found there was "no legitimate government purpose" to shackle the woman during childbirth labor, but jurors did not find she was injured and therefore awarded her no monetary damages, according to Theresa Kleinhaus, a Chicago attorney who litigated the case with other attorneys from the firm.

It’s incredible that sexual assault is acknowledged as having caused damage but the actual bondage of this woman, against her will, while giving birth was somehow not seen as harmful. Who exactly was on this jury, anyway? What is their standard for what causes injury?

Let's count the people that the House Trumpcare bill, which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is fast-tracking in the Senate with some changes, will screw. There's the disabled, the children, and even the people with employer-provided insurance. Oh, and the people on Medicare, too it turns out. The Kaiser Family Foundation took a look at what repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with Trumpcare would do to Medicare, since it would disproportionately hit lower-income people in the 50-64 age bracket.

The loss of coverage for adults in their 50s and early 60s could have ripple effects for Medicare, a possibility that has received little attention.  If the AHCA results in a loss of health insurance for a meaningful number of people in their late 50s and early 60s, as CBO projects, there is good reason to believe that people who lose insurance will delay care, if they can, until they turn 65 and go on Medicare, and then use more services once on Medicare.  This could cause Medicare to increase, and when Medicare spending rises, premiums and cost-sharing do too.

A 2007 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at previously uninsured Medicare beneficiaries helps explain this dynamic. It showed a direct relationship between lack of insurance (pre-65) to higher service use and spending (post-65).  Previously uninsured adults were more likely than those with insurance to report a decline in health, and a decline in health (pre-65) was associated with 23.4% more doctor visits and 37% more hospitalizations after age 65. Depending on the number of people who lose coverage and how long they remain uninsured, the impact for Medicare may initially be modest, but could compound with time.

In addition, the AHCA would repeal the Medicare payroll tax imposed on high earners, a change that would accelerate the insolvency of the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and put the financing of future Medicare benefits at greater risk for current and future generations of older adults—another factor to consider as this debate moves forward.

So that's not good for the one group of people seemingly shielded from the effects of ACA repeal and Trumpcare—the Medicare population not yet needing the assistance of Medicaid for long-term care. The only people who are completely protected from the effects of this are the super rich who will always be able to pay for their own health care.

"Moderate" Republicans being what they are—Republicans—are going to be pretty easily bought off when it comes to Trumpcare. A handful of them—including the two in this story—have been making a lot of noise about protecting the populations of their states who have benefited from Medicaid expansion. The reality is they don't care if millions of people are cut out of Medicaid, they just don't want it to happen right away.

Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) have proposed a seven-year phase out of federal funding for the Medicaid expansion, beginning in 2020 and ending in 2027.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proposed a shorter, three-year phase out that would end in 2023 at the Senate lunch on Tuesday.

Portman’s and Capito’s willingness to end the program is significant, in that it suggests centrists will not demand that the Medicaid expansion be permanent, and that Republicans may be able to find a common ground on the critical issue if the additional federal funds are phased down more slowly.

Portman told reporters Wednesday that a “significant glidepath” is needed, saying “we have a proposal out there for seven years, and we'll see where we end up.”

We'll end up with something like 10 million uninsured because of the end of the Medicaid expansion, that's where we'll fucking end up, Portman. Or maybe we won't because they'll be dead. Either way, that's all on Republicans.

The AP highlights this huge shift from Obama-era immigration policy—the “silent raids” targeting undocumented immigrants who, after years of regularly checking in with ICE, are suddenly getting cuffed, detained, and deported after their meetings with immigration officials.

According to the AP, ICE is tracking nearly 1,000,000 undocumented immigrants—82 percent have no criminal record. Many of these immigrants, so long as they’ve shown that they are staying out of trouble, have been allowed to leave their meetings and stay in the U.S. with their families. This process can repeat every three months, six months, and sometimes up to a year. 

But the Trump-era has seen the turbo-boosting of a frightening occurrence—undocumented immigrants, simply following the rules by heeding the federal government’s instructions to meet with immigration officials, walk into ICE offices but don’t walk back out:

In Michigan, Jose Luis Sanchez-Ronquillo reported to authorities for more than four years before he was arrested at an April check-in and sent to a Louisiana detention facility. The 36-year-old father of two came into contact with police during a traffic stop and lost his immigration case in 2012. But he was then repeatedly allowed to stay, said Shanta Driver, his lawyer.

In Virginia, 33-year-old Cesar Lara was detained in May after living here for a decade. The Mexican house painter wound up with a deportation order after he was arrested in 2012, when officials stopped him for removing wood from a forest, said his mother, Maria De Lara.

“(Trump) said they were just going to deport pure criminals and bad people, and my son is not a criminal,” she said. “He’s working for the community.”

Of the 970,000 people on ICE’s radar, “it’s hard to know how many immigrants with deportation orders are being detained,” noted the AP. But “in Atlanta, immigration attorney Charles Kuck said one in five of his clients with scheduled check-ins has been detained since Trump took office, something that hardly ever happened during the prior administration.”

A reminder that underneath all the questions about Russia and tax returns and white nationalists and take-your-pick, the heart of the Trump-Pence administration remains a big ol' grift.

Dozens of House and Senate Democrats plan to sue President Donald Trump in the coming weeks, claiming he is breaking the law by refusing to relinquish ownership of his sprawling real-estate empire while it continues to profit from business with foreign governments.

The lawsuit follows months of threats from Democratic lawmakers that Trump, by refusing to sell off his companies or place them in a blind trust, is in ongoing violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause — which prohibits the president from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments — and might face consequences.

Whether or not anything comes of it in the Republican-controlled Congress—hint: they don't give a damn—the fact remains that Donald Trump is not allowed to accept cash from foreign governments by the U.S. Constitution itself and yet he's doing it anyway. He attempted to dodge this inherent lawbreaking by claiming his business would be tracking those payments and donating them away again; as soon as anyone bothered to check up on that, however, the company said that no, they were not in fact doing that because it would be a horrible bother. So he is violating the Constitution, and in the absence of any single individual Republican lawmaker finding some integrity squirreled away in a closet the rest of America is reduced to filing suit against the sitting president in an attempt to compel him to stop.

This would be a different lawsuit from the one that has already been filed by several businesses who say they're being hurt by competing Trump companies' grifts. As for the question of legal standing:

“Members of Congress we say have standing because the emoluments clause says without the permission of Congress, you can’t accept any gift, etc., etc., from a foreign state,” Nadler said. “We are injured by being denied our right to vote on this, that’s our standing.”

Again, there's no legitimate reason for Republicans to be turning a blind eye to these grifts. They're doing that purely because they consider the party agenda they want Trump to sign to be more important than whether he's broken any laws. Since we're in the middle of living it, it's difficult to wrap the national psyche around just how deplorable a notion that is. When this is all finally over, though, there are going to be a lot of new names added to the history books—and what the books have to say about each of them won't be kind.

Battles regarding the removal of long-standing confederate monuments have been making the rounds in the South as of late. Though this debate isn’t necessarily new, recently in Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia, folks have gone to absurd lengths to protect their beloved monuments. This has included intimidation and harassment, violence, death threats against public workers and contractors and the passage of laws that have made it almost impossible to make any changes to monuments. Louisiana even went so far as to pass a bill in the House requiring an actual election before any war memorial can be removed or altered. But surprisingly, the attachment to confederate memorials is not limited to Southern states. Arizona is now engaged in its own debate about removing six confederate memorials, the most recent of which was erected in 2010.

But Arizona's Confederate memorials don't date back to [the Civil War] era.

They tell another, even less well-known story: one of white Southerners who moved to Arizona in the post-World War II era and brought their fondness for intimidating black citizens with them. The state's oldest Confederate memorial was dedicated nearly 80 years after the Civil War ended, in 1943. The newest, shockingly, went up in 2010.

How truly ugly is this? Decades after Arizonians should clearly know better and be on the right side of history, their hatred and racism are on full display—literally, as monuments. Then again, it’s not all that surprising. This is the “show me your papers” state as well as the home of “English only” laws. So, the idea of intimidating black people being a pastime for some white folks in the state doesn’t exactly sound farfetched. And evidence of their anti-black racism could be seen well into the mid-and late twentieth century.

"As thousands of Southerners moved to a drier climate, they brought with them an identity grounded in the constant presence of Confederate symbols," [historian William Stoutamire writes]. "Confronted with Arizona's secessionist history, they felt the need to memorialize and commemorate the Confederacy's attempted extension into the Southwest."

By then, the civil rights movement was ramping up across the country. Not coincidentally, honoring the Confederacy suddenly became a popular pastime for white people with a tenuous connection to the Old South.

It was hardly a fringe movement: When the Civil War centennial rolled around in 1961, Arizona recognized the anniversary by flying the Confederate flag over the State Capitol. [...]

In the 1990s, however, the Arizona chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans experienced a resurgence, and once again began erecting monuments to the Confederacy.

According to one hell of an eye-opening report, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General found that an unnamed (um, why exactly?) senior executive from the Executive Office of Immigration Review, a federal department responsible for adjudicating immigration cases, abused their position by—among a shit ton of egregious acts that “violated federal statutes, federal regulations, and DOJ policy”—maintaining “inappropriate relationships” with subordinates, retaliating “against employees who refused to hire the executive’s friends,” soliciting and accepting gifts, and participating in an “inappropriate quid pro quo scheme with a contract company.” Despite the rap sheet, “prosecution of the executive was declined.” Drain the swamp, y’all! 

On seven occasions, the OIG said, the unnamed official awarded jobs or contracts to close friends. In one instance, the person promoted a friend before the subordinate was eligible, and in another instance, the person promoted a friend who did not have the right qualifications. The person also shared nonpublic information with friends about a pending DOJ contract and lobbied for friends to get higher contractor salaries, the report summary said.

"The OIG found that this conduct violated federal statutes, federal regulations, and DOJ policy," according to the report.

Additionally, the official asked a DOJ contractor to employ and train personal friends, in exchange for an offer to participate in and award a purchase agreement to the contractor, the OIG said.

The employee also “lacked candor and provided false statements to the OIG in relation to the executive’s conduct in the above‐described matters, in violation of federal statute and regulation,” according to the investigation summary.

But still no prosecution for the unnamed executive.

There’s been surprisingly little attention focused on something as legitimately corrupt and scandalous as what’s described in this report, but that’s perhaps due to the corrupt and scandalous popular vote loser in the White House overshadowing everything. Still, why hasn’t this person been named? Which administration brought them onboard? And why have there been no consequences for this outrageous misconduct in a federal department, especially during the administration that’s always pointing to undocumented immigrants as the criminals and “bad hombres”?

But then again, look who’s in the White House and the culture he’s encouraging. As David Waldman tweeted, “I wonder where they got the idea that you could just get away with whatever the fuck.”

Trey Gowdy is bringing his crack investigating skills, honed by years of failing to produce any new information on Benghazi, to the chair of the House Oversight Committee. Or he will if the full Republican conference approves the recommendation of the Republican Steering Committee, anyway.

House GOP leaders encouraged Gowdy to run upon learning of Chaffetz’s looming departure. He is a close ally of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on a panel comprised of unpredictable Freedom Caucus conservatives with rocky relationships with leadership.

Is that “unpredictable” as in “might decide Trump isn’t extremist enough and investigate him for something”? Anyway, we know Gowdy will be all reliable and leak to the right reporters and do the right things to create just enough appearance of independence for people who only care about appearances.

It is unclear which direction Gowdy will take his part of the Trump-Comey investigation, which has quickly become one of the most contentious political scandals in modern American history. While the House and Senate intelligence committees have jurisdiction over Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election, questions of obstruction and how Trump may have tried to influence the probe fall more into Oversight’s purview, at least in the House.

Ha. Yeah. That’s one of the ways his predictability and ties to Paul Ryan factor in. He’ll take that investigation whichever way will make it look like he’s doing something while doing the most possible to bury it.

For his part, Gowdy demonstrated his status as a Very Serious Person by releasing a statement defining the jurisdiction of the Oversight Committee. Scintillating stuff that reveals exactly nothing about what he’ll actually do with the chair.

Among the most interesting series of questions asked during the whole lengthy Senate Intelligence Committee hearing were questions that had little to do with Trump, or his meetings with James Comey. In fact, they were questions that Comey was clearly not expected to answer.

Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, working in brisk prosecutorial style, spent her seven minutes asking Comey question after question, one after another. Many were questions that she obviously knew the former FBI director would not, or could not, answer in an open forum. The theme to these questions:

Sen. Kamala Harris of California pressed James Comey on Thursday to reveal whether Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions played any inappropriate role in the Russia investigation.

Harris asked if Sessions had reviewed additional documents on the Russian investigation before he recused himself. Obviously, Comey didn’t know. Harris asked about documents Sessions read after he recused himself. Who had he talked to? What did he read? What did he know?

Occasionally Harris darted to a question that addressed the Trump regime more broadly.

"Are you aware of any meetings between the Trump administration officials and Russian officials during the campaign that have not been acknowledged by those officials in the White House?” she asked.

But the failure to secure an answer on these questions in the public hearing was clearly not a concern to Harris. Which suggests that 1) she was getting these questions in front of the public as part of a plan, and 2) there’s a good chance some of these same questions were fired at Comey in the closed session.