L'état profond, c'est moi

Drawing by Signe Wilkinson, November 2019.

Well, it's Saturday, so we're asking for the third time in the past six weeks which inspector general Trump fired last night. Today it's the state department, whose inspector general, Steve Linick, "no longer" enjoys Trump's "fullest confidence" and will be replaced, Politico said, with an "ally of Vice President Pence", because that's what we naturally want in an inspector general, somebody who's already beholden to a White House patron.

Or putting it another way,

A State Department spokesperson said that Amb. Stephen Akard, a former career Foreign Service officer, "will now lead the Office of the Inspector General at the State Department" in an acting capacity.

He won't actually be the inspector general, he'll just play one in the news, and "lead the office" while the inspector general doesn't exist. This would make such a great plot for a Gogol story if Gogol hadn't used the title for a different idea.

But why?

Pruitt: Not Just Funny

A leaner but not hungrier Scott Pruitt, from your Rectification Central, exposing the former Oklahoma attorney general as a liar since March 2015. 

When you're enjoying the latest story about EPA administrator Scott Pruitt's corruption—he tried, during work hours and from his office and in clear contravention of ethics law, to pressure the CEO of the Chick-fil-A company into getting his wife a restaurant franchise because it was too much work for her to apply for it in the normal way, and succeeded in getting the chief of Concordia Partnerships of Social Impact to give her a gig ($2000 plus travel expenses) to "help organize" their Annual Summit in New York last September, in a more ordinary kind of Republican welfare—don't forget that these antics are directly connected to the protection of our natural environment.

That is, while Pruitt seems to be spending all his time shopping for luxury furnishings for his office and his apartment, or rather (illegally) forcing the EPA's employees to work as his personal shoppers, for everything from $130 gift pens to $2000 mattresses to be obtained on the cheap from Trump's Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, he is in fact working to prevent the EPA from doing its work, for instance as in last October's attempt to repeal Obama's Clean Power Plan, which will, hopefully, fail, but not for want of effort on Pruitt's part, because Pruitt doesn't believe carbon dioxide emissions have anything to do with global warming, as you can read today from Ars Technica:

Puffed Tweet

Photo by Libération. Looks like Macron 23.7% and Le Pen 21.9% to the second round, with Fillon and Mélenchon in the 19s, third and fourth respectively, and the ci-devant Socialist pretty much dead for the moment.

Not the worst result you can imagine, by any means, especially since the polls for the deuxième tour favor Macron very strongly, as if Obama's intervention for Macron and Trump's for Le Pen may have made a difference (Trump's in the opposite direction from the one intended).

Clinton led Trump by 2-3 points
Remain led Leave by 1-2 points
Macron leads Le Pen by 26 points in runoff polls

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 23, 2017

Most enjoyable Schadenfreude point is the way rightwing Twitter is unable to understand that the first-round numbers—not an exit poll but a statistically valid sample of real votes—are real, and keeps reporting partial numbers from the officials as if they were going to last:

LE PEN AT 25.2%, MACRON AT 21.1%: INTERIOR MINISTRY AT 8:21PM

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 23, 2017

That's commtment, reporting the #fakenews up to the very last minute. https://t.co/8ISOU1IcDm

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 23, 2017

Hope to post something more funny or profound later, but in the meantime have some more Puffed Tweet and useful links:

Limerick

Photo by Stephen Crowley/New York Times.

There once was a toady called Pruitt
Who was terribly anxious to do it.
   But instead of a chick
   He inserted his dick
In a rare Chinese vinegar cruet.

Bonus: That time I caught Scott Pruitt lying in court (had nothing to do with the EPA, either; it was Obamacare). I'd forgotten all about it.

O disingenuity!

Arthur Rackham, Nibelungs at work, 1910. Via Encore Editions.

So while SCOTUS is hearing the oral arguments, and nobody has yet found a member of Congress from when the Affordable Care Act was passed in March 2010 who thought that it prevented federally run exchanges from offering subsidized health insurance premiums, a friend-of-the-court brief suggests that some smart guys knew all about it:

 Six states, led by Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, say that it “came as no surprise” to them that Congress made subsidies available only through state-run exchanges. Congress was trying to “entice” the states to set up their own exchanges, and this “conditioning of tax credits was the primary means of doing so.” The six states point out that in November 2012, two months before the deadline for establishing state exchanges, Pruitt challenged in court the I.R.S. rule granting subsidies through federally run exchanges.

It may not have surprised them exactly, but it certainly took them a while to find out. Pruitt filed his lawsuit, Pruitt v. Sebelius, in January 2011, without mentioning the Moops issue of whether subsidies are available to federally run exchanges at all; the substance of the case was