Correct Envelope, Please: The Academy Awards ended in chaos last night when the musical La La Land was incorrectly named Best Picture instead of Moonlight. Acceptance speeches were already underway when La La Land’s producer announced that there had been a mistake. “This is not a joke,” he repeated.

The casts and crews traded places with the crowd from “Moonlight” taking the stage. Presenter Warren Beatty returned and explained that he and Faye Dunaway had been given a duplicate card for winner of Best Actress, which had been Emma Stone in La La Land.

Casey Affleck won Best Actor for Manchester by the Sea … that’s questionable … and Viola Davis, winner of Best Supporting Actress, wins the award for most artificially-emotional self-indulgent acceptance speech.

Duke Nuke’em: President Trump is expected to order federal agencies to prepare a budget that brings vast increases in defense spending while cutting deeply at other agencies. The NY Times quotes four sources who say the president wants tens of billions of dollars in cuts from the EPA and the State Department. See story about Steve Bannon below.

Fake President: Without having done anything, President Trump is claiming credit for the dropping national debt, which was falling for years under President Obama. Trump whined over Twitter, “The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo.” He fails to note that during Obama’s first month the US economy was dangling on the precipice of a depression.

Joke’s on Him: President Trump announced via Twitter yesterday that he will not attend the White House Correspondent’s dinner this spring, saving a lot of discomfort all around. He didn’t give an explanation, but the jokes are likely to be more vicious without him in the room.

The dinner, known as “The Nerd Prom,” is supposed to be a scholarship fundraiser, but has become a star-studded celebrity event in which the Washington press corps celebrates itself. Presidents in recent years have gone along with a good-natured roasting, but Trump is the first to call the press the enemy of the people. And he has no sense of humor.

Deconstruction: We’ve missed so many editions in the last 10 days we need to get in the record here that some of the most important news of the past week came in the words of Trump political adviser Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Bannon, who does not speak publicly often, put into a few simple phrases the goals of the Trump administration that could never be so succinctly stated by the president himself. Bannon described three “lines of work for the Trump administration. “The first is kind of national security and sovereignty. … The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism,” Bannon said.

He went on, “The third, broadly, line of work is deconstruction of the administrative state. … If you look at these cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason and that is the deconstruction.”

Bannon is obsessed with national security and, by extension, immigration. He has developed a philosophy that calls for walls both literal and figurative around America.

His third item clearly describes the goal of the Trump Administration to dismantle and deregulate much of the governmental apparatus it has inherited. Bannon has a nearly post-apocalyptic view of what should be left of government when they are done.

The Obit Page: The likable actor Bill Paxton has died at age 61 of complications from surgery, his family reports. Paxton starred opposite Helen Hunt in Twister in which he did a lot of silly running away from special effects, and was the treasure hunter searching the ruins of the lost cruise liner in Titanic. He played the Mormon husband with three wives in the HBO series Big Love.

He was a good actor. If you’ve never seen his smaller movies, One False Move and A Simple Plan, look them up.

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