Democratic lawmakers in Maryland have long been pushing legislation that would issue a statewide ban on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial practice which entails injecting water, sand, and chemicals underground to crack shale rock and release oil and gas. In a surprise move on Friday afternoon, Maryland’s GOP Governor Larry Hogan announced his “full support” for that legislation, saying that after looking at the science, he concluded that “the possible environmental risks of fracking simply outweigh any potential benefits.”

This legislation, I believe, is an important initiative to safeguard our environment, and I urge members of the Legislature on both sides of the aisle in both houses to come together and finally put this issue to rest once and for all. Protecting our clean water supply and our natural resources is pretty important to Marylanders, and we simply cannot allow the door to be opened to fracking in our state.

Hogan’s move came as a surprise to fracking opponents, about a dozen of whom were arrested yesterday while protesting fracking outside the state Capitol. A two-year temporary ban on fracking in Maryland is going to expire later this year, and until Friday, supporters and opponents weren’t sure where Hogan stood. Hogan allowed that temporary ban to become law in 2015, but only because he refused to either sign or veto it.

Now, Hogan is joining a small club of what was, until today, exclusively Democratic governors who don’t support the practice. In 2014, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo banned fracking in the state, after state researchers concluded a five-year study on the potential environmental, economic, and public health risks. That study didn’t definitively prove adverse health effects, but it also didn’t disprove them—which was enough to give the state health commissioner “reason to pause.”

Evidently, Hogan also has reason to pause. On Friday, he said even strict environmental regulations on the practice wouldn’t be enough. “The choice to me is clear,” he said. “Either you support a ban on fracking, or you are for fracking.”

The timing of Bharara’s firing was always strange. While it’s not abnormal for an incoming administration to ask for U.S. attorneys to resign after taking office, it is abnormal to do so 50 days into a term and with practically zero notice. It’s even weirder to do so after telling an attorney—Bharara, in this case—that he would be kept on, as recently as two days before he was canned.

As with most things Trump-related, Occam’s razor has always pointed to incompetence. The Trump administration has not been here before and does not know how things are done; in the hands of Trump and his aides, even simple maneuvers are badly mishandled. But in this caser, smoke is beginning to point to fire.

Bharara had been asked to investigate potential violations by Trump of the Emoluments clause two days before he was asked to resign. And on Friday, ProPublica reported that Bharara was in the middle of investigating Health and Human Services chief Tom Price for insider trading and for trading health stocks while introducing health legislation as a congressman. It is unclear exactly which transactions Bharara was looking at—though there are many possibilities! But Bharara’s firing already raised more questions than it answered, and this additional information only makes the timing more suspect.

Andrew Wheeler, an energy attorney and a registered lobbyist for Murray Energy, is “expected” to be offered the deputy administrator position at the Environmental Protection Agency, sources told Politico on Friday. The article cautioned that the White House’s decision “has not yet been finalized.” Indeed, in an email to me, Wheeler said, “I have not been offered any position.” He did not respond to a follow-up asking if he’s actually interested in the job, or if he’s been in contact with the administration.

If Wheeler is given the gig, it appears he would be yet another powerful bureaucrat who falsely denies the science of climate change. In 2006, when he served as a Republican staffer for the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, Wheeler said he believed the planet could actually be moving through a cooling cycle (it wasn’t, and isn’t):

And actually, going back to the ice core samples and different sea samples and even further back than that, but the question is whether or not it is warming or cooling. If you paid attention to the scientists in the 70s we were cooling. If you paid attention to them now we’re warming. The fact is that the climate changes regularly and what we need to make sure is that we aren’t confusing the regular cyclical movements of the climate for some extrapolation of a specific rise in temperatures or lowering. That everything works in cycles. And we have to make sure that we understand what the impact is of man-made emissions on those cycles.

Wheeler is also a former aide to the snowball-wielding climate denier extraordinaire Senator Jim Inhofe, as are at least a half a dozen other people recently hired into top spots at the EPA and the White House.

In terms of environmental regulation, it looks like Wheeler’s ideology would pair nicely with that of Pruitt, the EPA administrator. Like Pruitt, Wheeler has said he doesn’t believe the federal government should regulate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. “I think the only reason it’s important to reduce greenhouse gases is to increase efficiency,” he said in 2004. Asked on Friday to clarify or update his position on climate change, Wheeler did not respond.

The American president and the German chancellor met today. It was always bound to be a bit awkward, given Trump’s antipathy to NATO, the EU, and open immigration policies. But they ended up participating in one of the most cringe-inducing staged events in political history. Studiously avoiding talking to or even looking at each other, both world leaders strongly suggested they couldn’t wait to stop being in each other’s company. “Send a good picture back to Germany,” Trump muttered to the press. Asked by a reporter if they talked about NATO, Trump responded that the conversation was about “many things.” When Merkel asked if Trump wanted to shake hands, he ignored her.

It could be that she was speaking too softly, although he also paid no heed to the photographers echoing her requests. Whether out of inadvertence or deliberate rudeness, with perhaps a tinge of sexism in the mix, Trump finished his encounter with Merkel on a note of disdain.

The former prime minister of the United Kingdom is setting up a new think tank called The Institute for Global Change to promote centrist politics in an age in which, he argues, both the left and right are moving to the extreme. As he explains in the prospectus for the Institute:

The Conservative Party in the UK is now the party of Hard Brexit. The leadership of the Labour Party has been captured by the Hard Left. The parties in France have shown similar tendencies. There is every possibility of the politics of the USA moving in the same direction.

In fact, all over the Western world the political landscape is changing. New parties are being formed—left, right, and center. But the center ground, if marginalized in the mainstream traditional parties, finds it harder to get traction.

What is strikingly lacking in this credo is any self-awareness on Blair’s part of his own role in creating this situation. After all, if the Labour Party has moved to the “Hard Left” that is because party members were disgusted by the failures of Blair’s previous iteration of centrism, the Third Way. Blair’s support of the disastrous military intervention in Iraq has permanently discredited him in the eyes of many Labour voters.

There may or may not be a need for a new centrist politics but there is certainly no need for Blair to make himself the face of it. In fact, he’s the worst person to sell a centrist revival.

Speaking to Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, Donald Trump defended his insane “wiretapping” tweets by saying that they weren’t really about wiretapping—wiretapping was a metaphor, or something. “Wiretap covers a lot of different things,” Trump told Carlson, speaking about the topic for the first time since he made the claim that Barack Obama had ordered a tap on his phones. “I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”

At Thursday’s press briefing White House Press Secretary/despised field trip chaperone Sean Spicer spent seven minutes reading news stories that seemed to fit the broad profile of “interesting things that aren’t about wiretapping but are sort of about wiretapping if you use ‘wiretapping’ as a broad stand-in for ‘surveillance.’” For the most part, these were hilarious own goals, as the stories Spicer read were mostly about the Trump campaign’s strange and close relationship with Russian intelligence. They were stories about why Trump would be surveilled, which by their nature did not make the president look particularly good—but Spicer serves a deranged audience of one, and that seems to have been what Trump wanted.

One of the stories Spicer read was by Fox News’s Andrew Napolitano—sorry, Judge Andrew Napolitano—who alleged that Obama used the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters to spy on Trump so it wouldn’t have “American fingerprints on it.” This understandably infuriated the U.K., America’s closest ally. “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense,” read a statement released by GCHQ. “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

And on Friday, the Telegraph reported that the United States—specifically National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Spicer himself—made a formal apology to the U.K.

Fifty-plus days in and the Trump administration still seems to not have realized that words have consequences. The wiretapping allegation, which has no basis anywhere outside of Trump’s paranoid mind, damaged the United States’s relationship with an ally for absolutely no reason. This won’t be the last formal apology that Sean Spicer, or that the Trump administration, makes to a friend.

Update: The Trump administration insists, to quote Mitt Romney, that there was no apology.

Trump’s budget proposal is very good for his rich friends and very bad for poor people. It is the job of Mulvaney, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, to argue otherwise. Alas, he proved this afternoon that his festive shamrock pocket square cannot compensate for his soullessness:

The sole objective of Meals on Wheels is to feed elderly people and keep them alive.

The benefit of such programs is that the kids are fed and remain alive. (Also, studies indicate free school breakfast indeed correlates to improvements in academic performance.)

We’re starting to see a pattern here. A lot of people will die when their cities fall into the sea and wildfires engulf their homes and pollution gives them cancer.

That’s right. If poor Americans don’t deserve to eat, then neither do poor people anywhere else! That’s the America First promise.

Everything’s ok though.

We are through the looking glass.

Amid news that President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would cut the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent and eliminate 3,200 agency employees—or 19 percent of the current workforce—California wants the agency’s employees to know they’re welcome in the Golden State.

A current EPA employee who requested anonymity told me that officials with the California Public Utilities Commission this morning were standing atop a staircase at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., handing out flyers that read, “Fight climate change. Work for California.” At the bottom, the flyer says that the PUC, Air Resources Board, and Energy Commissions are hiring, and directs interested parties to a website with the job listings. A tweet from the state’s official PUC account today appears to confirm their presence.

Their timing is right. EPA employees were despondent even before Trump released his budget. At a rally on Wednesday to oppose Trump’s plans for EPA, Nate James, the local president of American Federation of Government Employees, told me he’s spoken to countless distressed employees. “They’re concerned about the future of their ability to carry out their jobs,” he said. “And I have no answers for them.” Judith Enck, the former Region 2 EPA administrator under President Barack Obama, told me she has several friends at the agency who have reached out to her in search of a new job. “They’re so demoralized,” she said. “A whole bunch want to leave, but they can’t find jobs to pay a living wage.”

While Trump pledges to take a sledgehammer to the EPA and dismantle federal climate change programs, California has been doubling down on its aggressive climate and environmental agenda. The state’s governor, Jerry Brown, has pledged war with Trump if he cuts climate research funding. “If Trump turns off the satellites,” he said in December, “California will launch its own damn satellite!” If EPA employees are looking for jobs that help protect human health and the environment, California would certainly be the best place to look.

The budget, released Thursday, calls for eliminating hundreds of millions of dollars for scientific research programs. If Trump gets his way, the budget at the National Institutes of Health—one of the world’s most renowned medical research centers—will be slashed from $31 billion to $25.9 billion. Earth science at NASA will be cut by $200 million, and the development of four Earth-monitoring satellites will be killed. Climate change research will be completely dropped from the Environmental Protection Agency, as will clean energy research at the Department of Energy.

Michael Mann, a Penn State University climate scientist known for being politically outspoken, said the budget makes clear that Trump is “doing the bidding of ExxonMobil, Koch Brothers, and other fossil fuel interests in attempting to curtail scientific research into human-caused climate change.” In the climate science community, he said, “Our worst fears are now being realized.”

The American Association for the Advancement of Science—the world’s largest scientific society, which contains scientists from all types of disciplines—also swiftly rebuked Trump’s budget. In a statement, AAAS president Rush Holt said it would “cripple the scientific and technology enterprise through short-sighted cuts to discovery science programs and critical mission agencies alike.” The Union of Concerned Scientists also chimed in, saying cuts to scientific agency satellite programs would “undermine our nation’s ability to forecast weather, prepare for and recover from disasters, and safeguard national security.”

Non-scientists are joining the chorus of rebukes. Jonathan Levy, the former deputy chief of staff to former DOE Administrator Ernest Moniz, said cutting clean energy research “is bad for science, bad for American innovation, and bad for American workers.” Economic reporters are also perplexed: