Little Marco Rubio Seems to Have Riled Up the Worst MAGA Loyalists

My winter book prediction that Marco Rubio will be the first Cabinet member over the side is looking better and better. In the various press events in the Oval Office, such as the one this week with El Salvador's sexy beast president Nahib Bukele, Rubio generally looks as though he's sitting in a recliner made up of vipers. Now, according to Politico, Rubio has riled up the wrath of MAGA.

Peter Marocco, the Trump administration official in charge of dismantling USAID, left a meeting at the White House last week to return to his office at the State Department. But when he arrived, Marocco could not enter the building: security told him he was no longer an employee there, according to a person familiar with the situation. Word of Marocco’s firing quickly tore through the Republican Party and MAGA ecosystem, startling President Donald Trump’s loyalists who viewed the aide as part of an elite cohort of administration true believers. Loud voices on the right piled on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing him of undermining their disruptive agenda.

For the purposes of context, we should note that, since the administration decided that USAID was a fat target of opportunity, it has unleashed horrors in places that the president once referred to as "shithole countries" and which he otherwise probably couldn't find on a map. From NPR:

We are close to 300 [worshipers] but nowadays we are only less than 150. People are sick at home," says Chondwe — or Pastor Billy as everyone calls him — as he greeted congregants on a Sunday in early April at the entrance to his church, the Somone Community Center, a branch of the Pentecostal Holiness Church in Zambia. People are falling ill because the U.S.-funded clinics where they got their HIV medications and care have suddenly been shuttered. The staff is gone. The electricity has been shut off. Some patients have already run out of their daily pills that keep HIV at bay—and they have started to feel the physical consequences of the virus surging back.

The Trump Administration, in January, abruptly halted the vast majority of U.S. foreign assistance in light of their America First agenda. Officials said that lifesaving aid — such as HIV medications—would continue to flow. But the reality on the ground shows otherwise. An untold number of people with HIV have simply and suddenly lost access to their medication.

Lord above, there's no "agenda," least of all an "America First" one. There is only cruelty and deceit, all the way down.

That's the word Theresa Mwanza, 32, liked to use to describe her 10-year-old daughter, Dorcas. When Dorcas would get home from school, she'd often play house, pretending to prepare nshima — a thick traditional porridge — for her imaginary family. "I'm thinking she'll be very family-oriented when she grows up," says Theresa in Bemba, a local language spoken in parts of Zambia. It's now been eight days since both Dorcas and her mom, Theresa, took the last of their HIV medications. A single mom and an only child, they've always taken their medicine together at 8 p.m. each night. The change in routine has confused the little girl.

So far, without their medication, Theresa feels okay. But Dorcas has developed a fever and chills — and she feels weak. Flu-like symptoms are often one of the first symptoms after someone goes off HIV treatment — the level of virus rises and the body tries to fight it off. Worried, Theresa now stays home to tend to her daughter — who often rests on a mat by the tree outside their home. But it means Theresa isn't going house to house to do laundry and odd jobs, their main source of income.

So Rubio fires this guy and the MAGA crew decides that Rubio has gone soft.

“That’s where the fight happened. They did not see eye to eye on killing USAID off forever or keeping part of it around,” said the White House official. The State Department official pushed back on the idea that Rubio was against a full shutdown of the agency: “Any assertion that we are looking to keep USAID operational is categorically false.

Unspeakable doesn't even begin to cover it.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has gone completely around the bend again. Luckily for him, if not for the rest of us, he long ago first went around the bend and now he knows the way back.

At issue was his relentless conviction that there is an environmental cause for the increase in autism diagnoses, as opposed to the consensus that autism is a neurological condition tied to genetics. Except this time, the Secretary couched his belief in an argument that was bizarre even by his standards, which are considerable. From ABC News:

"They'll never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted."

Naturally, people diagnosed with autism who work, and pay taxes, and play baseball, and write poetry, and date subsequently have made themselves known, loudly and eloquently. "Nothing but the best people" never will not be funny, but it's really less so this time around.

On Thursday, the administration completed the destruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by laying off 1500 of 1700 employees, leaving the CFPB so understaffed that it can no longer fulfill itsconstitutionally affirmed mission. From the American Prospect:

The purge was an apparent exploitation of a loophole that an appeals court handed Vought and CFPB leadership last weekend. D.C. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson had forbidden CFPB to fire employees or act to shut down the agency with a preliminary injunction. On appeal, the D.C. Circuit upheld part of the injunction but granted CFPB authority to fire workers or stop work, but only “after a particularized assessment” that workers are “unnecessary to the performance of the defendants’ statutory duties,” or that the stopped work “would not interfere with the performance of the defendants’ statutory duties.”

Ever since the CFPB was shepherded into law by Senator Professor Warren, it has returned over $21 billion to citizens from whom it had been bilked, swindled, grifted, and otherwise lifted by credit card companies, investment banks, student loan pirates, and other modern three-story men of the financial service industry. This, of course, could not be allowed to stand. If there's one thing our current crop of high-interest quacks feel entitled to do besides swindle the public, it's having to work hard to do it. The CFPB stood in the way, as was carefully explained in Project 2025, that conservative Hunger Games policy agenda that the president is enacting despite the fact that he didn't know what it was when he was running for president.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Bald Eagle Train" (Bukka White): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1932, is the Easter parade in Dublin to celebrate the holiday and to commemorate the 1916 Rising. Some 2,500 members of the IRA, some freshly freed by Eamon de Valera, march by the General Post Office, recently rebuilt after having been blown all to hell in the 1916 fighting. Tiocfaidh ár lá, I guess. History is so cool.

From the sports pages, it warms the heart of the shebeen to see our beloved Montreal Canadiens back in the NHL playoffs. And in the unlikely event that they manage to beat the Washington Capitals and Putin's favorite chew-toy, Alex Ovechkin, we may be cranking the Orgasmatron to 11. Also, we GAA fans, especially those of us with deep familial loyalty to Kerry Irish football, bid farewell recently to legendary player and coach Mick O'Dwyer, who coached Kerry during its remarkable tally of eight All-Ireland championships. From the Irish Independent:

“I am interested in all sports. In fact, I am a sports’ fanatic and will follow all sports on the television. I never drank or smoked but I was addicted to sport; it was an obsession. Football was what was there when I was growing up in Waterville, so naturally I went for that. I loved it and of course, I had a very handy (golf) handicap.”

My friend Jimmy Deenihan, who began a successful political career after winning five All Ireland medals for Kerry under Micko, told the Independent:

He taught us to be magnanimous in victory and graceful in defeat,” Jimmy Deenihan, who won five All-Ireland medals under O’Dwyer, told me following his death. We won a lot — but when he lost, it was a case of no recriminations. He valued us as individuals and he never restricted what we did. He gave players like Eoin Liston and Pat Spillane the freedom to play their own game. He was confident that we would all make the right decisions on the pitch... and of course we were lucky that the same players were together for years.”

Good on you, Micko. Safe home now.

Discovery Corner: hey, look at what we found! From Archaeology News:

Archaeologists in Stuttgart have unearthed the remains of over 100 Roman-era horses buried in what is now believed to be one of the largest known ancient Roman horse cemeteries in southern Germany. Found during a construction project in Bad Cannstatt, a historic district in Stuttgart, the find yields new information on the Roman military’s cavalry use and the relationship between soldiers and their horses.

The horses belonged to a Roman cavalry unit known as an “Ala” that was stationed at Hallschlag between 100 and 150 CE, LAD lead archaeologist Sarah Roth said. “The troop with nearly 500 riders probably had at least 700 horses; losses had to be constantly replaced,” she said.

The burial site is approximately 400 meters from the ancient cavalry fort and 200 meters from the nearest Roman civilian settlement. The animals were interred in shallow graves, on their sides with bent or extended legs. Radiocarbon dating shows they were buried over time rather than in the direct wake of a single catastrophic event. Roth explained in an LAD press release, “The horses do not seem to have died suddenly all together due to some cataclysmic event like battle or epidemic. Rather, they died during the presence of the Ala due to illness, injuries, or other reasons, or were no longer able to fulfill their duty as military horses.

At least they were treated with some dignity, and there is no evidence that anyone, you know, beat them. I hate myself now.

Hey, CBC, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Scientists have identified fossil dinosaur footprints from a new species in B.C. and Alberta. They're believed to be the first tracks found in the world to be identified as belonging to club-tailed ankylosaurs, offering new insights about gaps in the fossil record. The new species, which has been named Ruopodosaurus clava, would have been an armoured dinosaur about five to six metres long, reports a new study published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Victoria Arbour, curator of paleontology at the Royal B.C. Museum and lead author of the new study, said Ruopodosaurus would have lumbered through the coastal redwood forests between the Rocky Mountains and an inland sea that covered Saskatchewan and Alberta during the Middle Cretaceous, about 100 million to 94 million years ago.

I've always had a fondness for ankylosaurs, those armored tanks with legs, whose tails ended in a big-ass club. I find that nobody ever had found their footprints before, considering that those heavyweight jamokes probably sank four inches into the ground on every step just walking through the woods.Glad we found some at last. Happy now, actually.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. (Hang in there, Pedro.) And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.