Texas Tribune

Dan Patrick, late of hate radio fame and now our illustrious, Lt. Guv., has once again failed in his quest to allow good Texans to have school choice destroy public education.  Late last week, the House, under last surviving normal person in the Texas GOP, Joe Strauss, approved the budget 103-88 without the “school choice” bill.

Lt. Dan demanded a vote.  He got it.  Boom.

So you were, like me, terrified when you saw that a man who had purchased a ticket was being dragged off an airplane by security forces, bloodied, and then blamed for the treatment because he should have complied.  The whole thing was his fault because compliance was expected.

Now you know how black men in America have felt for a long time.

After obstructing the TrumpRussia probe, repealing their Obamacare repeal, nuking the filibuster, applauding the not-quite-successful Syria attack, and stealing a Supreme Court seat, Congress has declared itself tired and is taking a two-week vacation.  Four days after they come back, however, a deadline looms:  April 28 is when the current budget Continuing Resolution (CR) expires.  Unless Congress passes another CR, the government will shut down for lack of authorization to pay anybody.

GOP Caucus Room: We’re TIRED

Which is fine, because without a new debt ceiling, we don’t have any more borrowing power to pay anybody with, anyway.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, the deal on the debt ceiling reached back when the GOP was obstructing the Obama Administration expired, and a new ceiling took effect on March 16, right around the $20 trillion mark.

This ceiling is the limit on what the US can borrow to pay for things that Congress has already approved in a budget.  (Think: raising your credit card limit so you can pay all your other bills.)  As we also discussed, there are extraordinary measures – aka accounting tricks – that the Fed can do that will eke things out for a few months.  These include suspending investment into the fed workers’ savings fund and the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) which is an emergency reserve used to protect the dollar, or prop up the peso (or attack the yaun.)  The Fed can also suspend new borrowing for the main federal pension fund, and repurpose that debt to keep the government solvent, and open.

Extraordinary Measures

Without an angry bunch of Republicans trying to browbeat a Democratic President into accepting a pharma-full of right wing poison pills in order to prevent the bankruptcy of the United States of America, there hasn’t been a lot of noise around the debt ceiling.   Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has gone ahead and instituted the extraordinary measures, but robbing Peter’s pension to pay Paul only works until Peter is tapped out, which is estimated to occur sometime in the fall.  By November, at the latest, the US will be in default of its foreign obligations.

In the past, just the mere GOP threat that this could happen resulted in the US having its credit rating downgraded.  This meant that the cost of borrowing has gone UP for us, just adding fuel to the burning spiral.

The ceiling, the ceiling, the ceiling is on fire!

Furthermore, the actual budget, not just a CR, needs to be passed by October 1, which is the start of the federal fiscal year.  This is the document put out by the Trump MalAdministration a few weeks ago, which was notable in that – like TrumpCare – everyone hates it, just for different reasons.

Where this leaves us is this: three separate but interrelated actions need to be taken by Congress in order to keep the lights on and the wolves away from the shores.  The authorization to spend money on running the country expires on 4/28.  It needs to be extended until 10/1, when a new authorization for the coming fiscal year is due.  And around that same 10/1, the ability to borrow money to support these authorizations needs to be enhanced with a higher debt ceiling.

All this would seem like a breeze for the GOP, which controls Congress, the Courts and the White House for the first time in 10 years, and who have only to exert the same political will to fund the government that they did to steal it in the first place.

And yet, they failed in exactly that exertion of will while trying to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (the ACA aka ObamaCare) because the Crazy Uncle Fox wing of the GOP still believes in Magical Thinking Ideological Purity Tests.  They didn’t want to just remove the structural supports and let it collapse of its own weight, the way the “normal” GOP profiteers wanted to.  Rather, if they couldn’t burn the whole thing to the ground, immediately, they wanted no part of it, and so formed temporary common cause with the Democrats, who like most Americans, are perfectly happy to leave healthcare in place.

The enemy of my enemy is still a Tuco-Bagger

This same internecine cat fight awaits the budget and debt negotiations.  In fact, it was the same cat fight that took place under Obama – the Tea Birchers have not changed their hoods: they still want huge tax cuts, they still want to zero out spending other than military, they still want non-whites to suffer in silence, and they still eschew all reason and scientific or mathematical evidence of ANY impending doom.

This fight will not only rage in Congress.  As in so many other issues, the Trump MalAdministration is a White House divided against itself.  While Mnuchin is blasé about raising the debt ceiling, and considers it so automatic as to be a done deal, Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, thinks the debt ceiling is a “fabricated crisis. “  As a Tea Bircher Congressman from South Carolina, Mulvaney voted four times against raising it. And Trump also signaled in the past that he expects a “pound of flesh” in exchange for raising it.  While that doesn’t always signal intent with Dat Guy, it does show that he knows as little about the debt ceiling as he does about Every. Thing. Else.

This, of course, means that the budget and debt fights will STILL be loaded with poison pills, as crazy people argue amongst themselves as to who is the Truest Conservative.  Meanwhile, Democrats, the rest of America, and the world, will anxiously pray that we’re not watching an extinction-level event.

At least it would have been over quickly.

What’s worse, Trump’s failure to lead, at all, in any way, coupled with his grip-it-and-rip-it style of presidenting, has created chaos and uncertainty on every front among every observer in every market on the globe.  Lack of confidence in his ability to get anything done has turned leading economic indicators sluggish, a Trump Slump, if you will.  We are actually on the verge of the next recession, foreshadowed by a general contraction that began prior to his election, but exacerbated to the point of certitude by his moronic ineptitude ever since.

The coming Trumpression could be avoided, but Trump and the Birchers don’t rely on evidence, reason or common sense.  In fact, we face a shutdown EVEN BEFORE HIS 100th DAY!  Just them being the guys in charge of fixing the situation is actually making the situation worse.  Confidence in them, AS the United States, is dropping though the floor.

…and, God, that’s NOT good!

Okay, so there’s this guy named Sebastian Gorka. He’s a member of a White House team known as the Strategic Initiatives Group, which was set up by Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner and is a Deputy Assistant to the President.

Gorka and wife

I thought it was a little weird that he wore some kind of damn military-looking outfit to the inaugural balls, but after the way KellyAnn Conway was dressed that day, most everything else looked pretty sane.

Well, looking weird and prancing around with Nazi medals are two different things.  I mean, KellyAnn stopped with the helmet hat and awful shoes, but Sebastian took the whole thing to the edge of Holy Cow!

Members of a Hungarian ultranationalist group with ties to the World War II-era Nazis have said they are proud that a top Trump administration adviser wore the group’s medal at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump.

Look, I am certain that he wasn’t the only Nazi there that day, but if you’re an American citizen, the only military uniform you ought to be wearing is one of ours.

And then there’s this.

The US State Department lists Vitézi Rend as a Nazi-linked group, which could render members ineligible for visas. Gorka became a US citizen in 2012.

But, not to worry —

Gorka called NBC investigation “fake news” and added that he had “completely distanced” himself from white supremacist and Nazi ideology groups.

Uh, then what’s the deal with the medal?  And the uniform?  Isn’t that kinda like saying, “I love the Nazis, except of course that killing Jews part.”

Thanks to Chloe Bear for the heads up.

This might be promising.

An alleged Russian hacker has been arrested in Spain at the request of American authorities.

His arrest set cybersecurity circles abuzz after Russian broadcaster RT raised the possibility it was linked to the US presidential election.

Pyotr Levashov was arrested in Barcelona at the end of last week on a US computer crimes warrant, a spokeswoman for Spain’s National Court, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with court rules, told the Associated Press.

I dunno about the accuracy of all this.  One story says he was arrested at his apartment with the police bashing in his door and another says he was arrested at the airport.

But it’s still more reliable than a Trump tweet.

Bannon, y’all.

The Washington Post did a big, long, documented, well researched story explaining how Bannon used loopholes and felonies to make himself one rich sumbitch.  Take the time to read it but be aware that your jaw will drop and hit your keyboard so be careful.  Bannon set up non-profits to funnel money to himself and friends.

Among the fun parts of the article is this:

Bannon, Schweizer and Robinson were linked through nonprofit organizations and filmmaking work. Bannon and Schweizer had made the film about President Ronald Reagan together in 2004; more recently, they were colleagues at Breitbart News. Schweizer sat on the board of Robinson’s Young America’s Foundation, which had paid Bannon $404,904 to produce films in 2010 and 2011, documents show, and would pay him almost $173,000 in 2012.

In the document seeking tax-exempt status for the GAI [Government Accountability Institute, a non-profit famed by Bannon], Bannon signed a document under penalty of perjury repeatedly attesting that each of them “has no family or business relationships with any other persons involved with GAI.”

A GAI spokeswoman told The Post that the relationships were later disclosed in the group’s annual filing with the IRS — submitted in November 2013, nine months after the GAI’s tax-exempt status was approved.

Charities are required to disclose business relationships among their directors on their initial applications for tax exemption so that the IRS can examine whether the organization is being formed for a proper public purpose.

So, there you have it.  Perjury. And ironically, no accountability.

Thanks to Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.

A note from Alfredo before the lunchtime rush: That’s why Republicns spent the last eight years cutting the budget of the IRS and trying to impeach the IRS Commissioner – so there would never be an investigation of the far right’s extensive use of 501(c)(3)s to elect Republican presidents and ensure a permanent conservative majority on the Supreme Court.