Asset forfeiture is a damn mess in Texas.  Law enforcement can seize the property of those arrested for a crime and have not been found guilty.  That means that they can take your stuff without due process.

Law enforcement says it really, really helps them with convicting drug dealers and terrorists.

Yeah, but … it would also help them convict me if I was arrested with trumped up (see what I did there?) charges. If they took all my assets, I couldn’t hire a lawyer or an investigator, eat actual food before trial, or pay the electricity bill.

The sheriff of Rockwall County, Texas (think suburb of Dallas) went to the White House and met with Trump.  Trump loves asset forfeiture and, coincidently, so does the sheriff.

Trump announced to the public at this meeting that he would like to know the name of the state senator supporting reforming asset forfeiture …

 “President Donald Trump invited the sheriff of a small Texas County to ‘destroy’ the career of a state senator who sought to ban a controversial law enforcement practice by naming the lawmaker during a White House meeting.”

The issue is being debated in the Texas State Senate. Republican State Senator Konni Burton and Democratic State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa are the two people leading this fight in the Texas Senate.

Being that Konni represents a district near the sheriff’s county, and she is the Republican fighting for due process, it’s most likely that Konni is the one who Trump wants to destroy. Of course, Konni is a woman so destroying her puts another notch in Trump’s belt.

Sumbitch.

Look, I am no Konni Burton cheerleader. She’s anti-choice and kisses up to Greg Abbott, but for Trump to use the White House to “destroy” a damn state senator he doesn’t even know, is … yeah, crazy. It’s crazy.

I don’t think Trump meant Democratic State Senator Chuy Hinojosa.  Chu is a damn American hero and Trump couldn’t touch him with a fifty foot pole. In fact, Chuy might use “Trump wants to destroy me” on his campaign literature.

Thanks to Kyle for the heads up.

This is not about politics.  It is about snooty.  Coffee snooty.

I get alerts from something called Woot! It’s not as good as it was a couple of years ago because it was really good so they sold it to someone else for a boatload of money and someone else ruined it.  Still, I occasionally get a good deal there on weird stuff.

And speaking of weird ….

This morning their main deal was this jewel.

It is a coffeemaker that posts Instagrams of itself, Facebook chats with other coffeemakers in the neighborhood, tweets comebacks to Donald Trump, and makes your day better because your coffee was brewed at 103 degrees instead of the subpar 104.  It also knows how high you are. Well, they call it your altitude but we all know what they mean, right?

And a bargain at about $160.

From 2011 to 2013, Americans were up in arms over the debt ceiling.  The Treasury was statutorily unable to borrow any more money to pay for things Congress has already bought.  Republican brinksmanship over what was normally considered a piece of housekeeping legislation led to US credit being downgraded. They were demanding policy concessions, wipeouts of program funds and other draconian cuts before approving anything.

If we reach a debt cap without any relief, the Treasury can take “extraordinary measures” to keep the government solvent and/or open.  They can suspend statutory “investment” into certain pension or other funds in order to meet day-to-day operating costs.  But that is merely a temporary stop-gap, buying you months, only.

“Extraordinary measures?” Excuse me, sir, but WTF?

The same problem raised its ugly head in 2015, but through a deal executed by Weeper of the House John Boehner and President Obama, the debt ceiling was suspended without any cap until a future date, at which point a calculated ceiling would be reinstated.

That future date, March 16, 2017, is upon us in 5 weeks.

The next day, the ceiling will be reset to cover all of the debt issued up until that time.  That new ceiling is estimated to be $20.1 trillion.  At that point, any new spending will not be covered by the ceiling. Experts estimate that extraordinary measures will keep us afloat until mid-summer, and then the United States of America will default.

Da Guy ostensibly in charge of all this made headlines last year by saying he would renegotiate the debts rather than raise the ceiling.  By which he means renege on the debts and get the debtors to accept partial payments, which technically is what bankruptcy does.  He vaguely walked it back when professionals pointed out he was talking out his ascot.  Like all his vague walkbacks, he’s a little confused on what he believes, but he still thinks he’s right.

Toward that end, he has nominated for Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a 3-term backbench Tea Bagger from South Carolina who denies that the US can default, and the ceiling is all smoke and mirrors; Former Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-Arson Hole, SC) wants to burn it all down:

MULVANEY: It depends, if we don’t make structural changes, if we don’t actually send the message to the markets, to the people to businesses that we’re going to be fiscally responsible then yeah I won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling I have no difficulty in doing that. I think it’s important that that message does get out and if that’s the opportunity we have to force a discussion on that issue then I say we do that.

Dat Guy’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, however, the guy who has to PAY for all these shenanigans, is Steve Mnuchin, a hedge fund and bank predator dude who, for all his corporate plundering, recognizes that most of his holdings won’t be worth a plugged nickel if T-bills, -notes and  -bonds collapse.  He wants this debt ceiling thing taken care of immediately, if not sooner.  Suspend the ceiling or raise it, he doesn’t care which, so long as he’s not responsible for a global bonfire of the Treasuries.

said the OMB Director-designee, almost verbatim

This means that, once again, the White House is in the middle of a crisis it can’t understand, beset by the voices of corporatism on one side and nihilism on the other.  The key players aren’t even in place yet: neither has been confirmed by the Senate, although both have passed out of committee. For that matter, the appointment and hiring of executive branchers is so far behind, that even in the West Wing people are rattling around like six dried peas in a quart tin can.  So there’s no one to deal with the burgeoning tragedy.

Mixed messages and a dim understanding at the top.  Mixed messages and competing visions among the staff.  Empty heads in the West Wing; Empty desks throughout the Executive branch.  The United States is going to default on its debt in 5 weeks.

It is unclear whether the United States Government is going to let it do so, or not.

Meanwhile, Nero Twittles.

California Republican Congressvarmint Tom McClintock was greeted on Saturday morning by protestors who scared the beejebbers outta him.

McClintock said that during the meeting, he was advised by staff that the situation outside was “deteriorating” and that it was the Roseville Police Department’s decision to provide a police escort out of the building.

In an interview, McClintock said he believes there was an “anarchist element” among organizers of the protest whose purpose was to “disrupt” the meeting.

You wanna know what else is deteriorating, you damfool?  Our access to health care, our standing in the world, our children’s chances at an education, and your likelihood at getting reelected.

Okay, here’s the vicious protestors – get ready to gasp:

Holy damn cow! How scared he must have been! It looks like a damn AARP meeting.  Even inside the room, they had to have a special area to park all the walkers.

Wimp.  The congressman is a wimp. His staff is even sillier.

So, now let’s talk about “anarchist element.” Does the congressman know what an anarchist is?  Anarchist are people who do not believe in government.  The people at the protest are there because they do believe in government. Somebody please explain to him that he’s the anarchist and if he’s scared by what he sees in the mirror, then he needs to break the damn thing because he’s in for 7 years of bad luck anyway.

So if you want to scare your congressvarmint, rent a walker and make a sign.  That’s some scary stuff.

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman in the NYT yesterday tell us exactly how much leash Steve Bannon is allowing brain-damaged Resident Dat Guy.

He watches as much TV as he can, wanders the halls in his bathrobe, and mocks the one voice (unnamed) among his aides who thinks things are going bigly badly.  He makes sure to critique Spicer’s press briefings and is “obsessed with the décor.”

He will linger on the opulence of the newly hung golden drapes, which he told a recent visitor were once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt but in fact were patterned for Bill Clinton. For a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, [Dat Guy] was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.

Alternative decor: Betsy Ross sewed these from the sails of a pirate ship

So basically, while Bannon slips him things to sign, Dat Guy is acting WH Communications Director, and Decorator-in-Chief.  Based on the job he’s doing, while allegedly refusing his pay and accepting $1.00 a year salary (and has THAT been confirmed?) Dat Guy is still being grotesquely and grossly overpaid.

Steve, this doesn’t look like a drapery requisition form…

Look, all I can figure is that he grabbed Bannon by the pussy and is now being extorted.

The New York Times, tucked neatly in a long story so that most people will overlook it.

Mr. Priebus bristles at the perception that he occupies a diminished perch in the West Wing pecking order compared with previous chiefs. But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

(Italics are mine because I can’t stop reading that sentence over and over and over.)

Wait a minute. Are they saying that Bannon put himself on the National Security Council?  Without Trump’s permission? And that Trump has no idea what he’s signing? Hellfire, even Radar O’Reilly didn’t have the gall to do that.

On another topic: I know you’re not supposed to make fun of the way people look.  But, Bannon looks like he smells bad.  And you get the idea that he’s not just a slob himself but that he’s a slob at home, too.  I will bet you my best pair of pink boots that the worst job in America is the cleaning crew at Bannon’s home. I shiver just thinking about it.

Somebody needs to send this guy back to Breitbart and the subhuman culture over there where people don’t pick their noses and wipe it on their dinner napkin.

Thanks to Deb for the heads up.