James.galbraith

In a bizarre press briefing, White House physician Dr. Sean Conley today defended Donald Trump's decision to leave Walter Reed despite his continued COVID-19 treatment. Once again, the briefing featured detailed medical statistics when those statistics appeared favorable to Trump—such as heart rate, ambulatory oxygen levels, and other metrics—peppered with absolute refusals, from Conley, to disclose other critical information.

Most notably, Conley refused once again to disclose when Trump last tested negative for the virus, which would allow those exposed to Trump in the days before his hospitalization to know whether he was infectious when he met with them. Conley and the White House are steadfastly refusing to disclose whether Trump was known to be infected on Tuesday when he debated Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, speaking loudly in an enclosed space in front of Biden and the assembled crowd—one of the precise situations known to most easily transmit the airborne virus.

That seems an unforgivable game to play, whether from a doctor or not. But it's becoming more and more evident that that's likely what's going on here.

Conley also refused to discuss Trump's lung condition, only willing to acknowledge that tests were done. From this we can presume Trump indeed has the pneumonia seen in serious COVID-19 cases, and that there remains the possibility of permanent lung damage. (Conley and the assembled doctors were quick to disclose test results favorable to Trump, so we can easily infer which test results were not favorable.) Conley also refused to discuss Trump's continued use of the powerful and mood-altering steroid dexamethasone. At one point, Conley weirdly refused to answer a question, citing HIPAA, "for his own safety and health and reasons." What does that even mean?

While Trump himself claims, while on a mood-altering substance, to feel better then he did "20 years ago," we know from the hundreds of thousands of worldwide COVID-19 deaths that the disease can be unpredictable, escalating rapidly even after patients believe they are recovering. Conley assured the press that the White House medical team would be watching Trump's condition closely, and acknowledged that (according to the White House timeline) Trump was not yet through the seven- to 10-day period when symptoms could become the most dire.

It all seems as bizarre and baffling as everything else during Team Trump's tenure. We can't tell if they're lying about intentionally exposing people to a deadly disease. We can't tell if they're confident Trump's own illness is under control, or if Trump's raging narcissism is overriding doctors' advice, or if Conley pressured Walter Reed doctors to pump Trump full of multiple experimental treatments in a throw-everything-and-see-what-sticks approach. The condition of the current president of the United States remains a mystery.

We do know Trump might have a sudden relapse, and that the White House will have to be prepared for that possibility. And we know that the White House is absolutely insisting on hiding when Trump was last known not to be infected. Maybe that's because the White House has been too incompetent to conduct daily testing, but it seems just as likely that Trump knew or suspected he was infected on Tuesday, before the debate, but could not tolerate the “optics” of not showing up.

With a new supermajority in hand, conservatives might sidestep the highest-profile issues while still remaking the law.

Senate Democrats have a decision to make and not a long time to make it. The Senate is scheduled to come in at 4:30 ET Monday afternoon, at which time Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will move to adjourn the Senate for two weeks. Well, for purposes of votes on things like COVID-19 relief. He intends for the Judiciary Committee to just go on ahead with remote confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, center of the Rose Garden Massacre, the superspreader event that's crippling the White House.

The first thing Senate Democrats need to do it is to use committee rules and refuse to show up in the Judiciary Committee. Don't give Lindsey Graham a quorum to do anything. Right now, three Republican members on the committee are in quarantine—two because they're infected, one because he's been exposed. (Three more should be because of exposure, but haven't announced they're self-isolating.) A majority of committee members have to be "actually present" to advance a nomination, which means 12 members. Graham's now working with just nine available. We don't know what the next two weeks will bring, but it's worth gambling on at least a few Republicans being out.

The next thing Democrats need to do is deny McConnell's unanimous consent request to adjourn on Monday. Because once that adjournment is granted, it can't be revoked. McConnell wants it—don't give it to him. That's not to say adjournment can't happen in the next few days, but Democrats can buy some time to see what they can extract. Notably, they shouldn't adjourn while negotiations on a possible COVID-19 relief bill continue between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin. Even from his sick bed, Trump 'roid rage tweeted that Congress has to "GET IT DONE," so, hell, Democrats can use that as a wedge to get Republicans further fractured.

If that doesn't work for them, Democrats could negotiate on adjournment: agree to adjourn when he acts to delay a floor vote on Barrett until after the election. After Oct. 19, or whatever adjournment end they decide on, then Schumer and fellow Democrats can throw the procedural book at McConnell, using every delaying tactic at their disposal should he renege on the deal. Because, face it, he'll renege on any deal. He's McConnell.

Making the case to the traditional media and the people—who are voting right now in record-breaking early polling numbers—that this nomination needs to wait until the people have spoken shouldn't be hard. Hell, the Republicans used it for almost an entire year in 2016 and got away with it.

Which highlights the final point: Democrats need to play hardball, just like McConnell would if the situation were reversed. There's a lot they can do in the minority, especially when he's down five members because of COVID-19 quarantine. It's not all on Schumer; the fighting progressive wing of the party—like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley and Brian Schatz—needs to be making noise, pushing Schumer to do the right thing and backing him up when he does.

At the very, very least, they should not give McConnell an adjournment today. Not without extracting something in return.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

It's been 142 days since the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act, which Mitch McConnell has refused to take up. Meanwhile, the Senate Majority is plotting how to keep the Senate from doing anything before the election other than confirm Trump's controversial and unqualified Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. You know, the nominee who was at the center of the Rose Garden superspreader event.

McConnell spent the weekend going around Kentucky, refusing to say if he'd been tested for coronavirus following his participation in that same event. In the meantime, he's trying to forge ahead with a plan that adjourns the full Senate until October 19, but lets the Judiciary Committee move ahead with Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett starting October 12. So no COVID-19 relief votes, but a Supreme Court nominee who will vote to overturn the Affordable Care Act and take away everyone's healthcare protections.

It's about saving the country, even these idiots. Simple as that. Donate now to help bring it back to the White House and Senate.

There are three committee Republicans who have either tested positive or are in quarantine because of exposure to COVID-19—Sens. Mike Lee (UT) and Thom Tillis (NC) are infected, Ben Sasse (NE) is sidelined. Unbelievably, three other Republicans on the committee—Josh Hawley (MO),  Marsha Blackburn (TN), and Mike Crapo (ID)—were exposed at the event but have not said that they are quarantining. They've tested negative, but are still subject to the CDC guidelines to self-isolate after exposure. Or would be in a normal world not controlled by Trump and McConnell.

That's a red flag for Democrats, who are weighing options to delay the hearings for Barrett. “Moving forward with the committee process when three senators have recently tested positive for COVID-19 is irresponsible and dangerous, but doing so without requiring all members to be tested before a hearing in accordance with CDC best practices would be intentionally reckless,” Schumer said in the statement to The Post. "If Chairman Graham doesn't require testing, it may make some wonder if he just doesn't want to know the results." The third senator he's referring to is Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson, who is not on the Judiciary Committee but who participated in a number of conference meetings and events breathing his germs on people.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham is with McConnell on the full-steam ahead approach with having hearings while the Senate is officially out. Barrett, who reportedly had a case of COVID-19 over the summer and may or may not have some immunity because of that, will appear in person, but the plan is to have senators able to participate remotely. Democrats, who have been abiding by all the rules from the beginning and even have been having virtual party lunches to keep everyone safe—are opposing that because this is the Supreme Court. On a Supreme Court confirmation, "you want to be able to go back and forth with this nominee," in the actual room Democrat Amy Klobuchar said Sunday. All ten Democrats on the committee issued a statement rejecting a virtual hearing, arguing it was "not an adequate substitute" because "questioning nominees by video is ineffective."

Republicans clearly don't have the same concerns, for anybody. Like their leader Trump in his coronavirus-filled limo, they don't care who they expose. Even if that means, in the words of Arkansas plague Tom Cotton, deploying "a long tradition of […] ill or medically infirm senators being wheeled in to cast critical votes on the Senate floor."

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a Denial of Cert on the opening day of its term Monday, declining to hear the appeal of a case involving Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. The SCOTUS decision allows a lawsuit against Davis to move forward.

Reuters reports: “Davis had argued that a legal doctrine called qualified immunity protected her from being sued for damages by couples David Ermold and David Moore as well as James Yates and Will Smith. Their case will now move forward.”

In the court’s statement, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito empathized with Davis’s case and suggested that the marriage equality case Obergefell vs. Hodges must be overturned in order to protect religious freedom.

The AP reports: “Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas wrote for himself and Justice Samuel Alito that while he agreed with the decision not to hear the case, it was a ‘stark reminder of the consequences’ of the court’s 2015 decision in the same-sex marriage case. Because of that case, he wrote, ‘those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society without running afoul’ of the case ‘and its effect on other antidiscrimination laws.'”

The Supreme Court turned away Kim Davis' case, but Thomas (joined by Alito) wrote a jaw-dropping rant taking direct aim at Obergefell and suggesting that SCOTUS must overturn the right to marriage equality in order to protect free exercise. https://t.co/qES8IZkw0U pic.twitter.com/F0zrYdBaeH

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 5, 2020

"Since Obergefell, parties have continually attempted to label people of good will as bigots merely for refusing to alter their religious beliefs in the wake of prevailing orthodoxy." -Thomas

Two Supreme Court justices have essentially said that Kim Davis is a modern-day martyr.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 5, 2020

“This petition provides a stark reminder of the consequences of Obergefell.”

Republicans and the Supreme Court are gleefully coming for marriage equality, and they think that Trump's SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett gives them the opportunity to do it. https://t.co/CucLoabV4H

— Lambda Legal (@LambdaLegal) October 5, 2020

#SCOTUS orders list: Justice Thomas and Alito write long opinion criticizing Obergefell & marriage equality, and the ending (to me) seems to call for the Court to overturn it.

HAPPY FIRST MONDAY OF OCTOBER & START OF THE NEW SCOTUS TERM, EVERYBODY!https://t.co/nCfhJwEPKd pic.twitter.com/LsjSK2tNlO

— Leah Litman (@LeahLitman) October 5, 2020

First day of the SCOTUS term and Alito & Thomas call for the overturning of Obergefell. pic.twitter.com/IwejJL6dGX

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) October 5, 2020

The post Justices Thomas And Alito Defend Kim Davis, Suggest SCOTUS Must Overturn Marriage Equality Ruling to Protect Religious Freedom appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

If you enjoy this work, and if you can afford to do so, please consider helping me keep it sustainable in this no good, very bad year and beyond, by joining Sparky’s List!

Also: my new book, LIFE IN THE STUPIDVERSE, is now shipping!

“Panel for panel,  no comic strip captures the toxic depravity of the Trump Administration quite like This Modern World. It can’t be easy to satirize self-parody, but Tom Tomorrow does so with a deadpan glee that’s simultaneously hilarious, insightful and tragic. #PulitzerWorthy” — Mark Hamill

John Mandt Jr, a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, resigned on Sunday after a number of conversations containing homophobic and anti-Muslim slurs appeared on social media. Mandt’s remarks were made in a private online group called “The ‘Right’ Stuff.”

I very rarely call out a fellow member of the legislature in this way, but his homophobia needs called OUT. I offer Republican Delegate John Mandt – 16th Cabell to say these words to my face. I will wait. Say them! #homophobic #wvpol #Johnmandt #sayit #gayandproud pic.twitter.com/KawoUg8jKJ

— Delegate Cody Thompson (@ThompsonWVHouse) October 3, 2020

Was going to go to bed. Saw something upsetting.

I know a lot of Catholics think that homophobia isnt real. I have to tell you it is. It's so real and it scares me

The "John" in these messages is John Mandt, a local state representative. This is what I see all around me. pic.twitter.com/s13tFSPMgr

— Rachel! (@RachelEnders3) October 3, 2020

The Register Herald reports: “Mandt has denied their authenticity and said they’re fabricated. ‘Everything electronic can be fabricated. It’s by design, my family, my business are being attacked,’ Mandt wrote in the deleted Facebook post, in which he said he received threats. In a statement issued by the House of Delegates on Saturday night, Mandt said that after talking with Hanshaw, ‘Right now, my focus and priority needs to be on my family and business, and feel it is best at this time to terminate my campaign and make room (for) other individuals to serve the state.’ The group message thread shows bigoted comments against gay people and Muslims. At one point, Mandt allegedly used a homophobic slur. According to the civil rights advocacy group Fairness West Virginia, Mandt also disparaged other Republican state lawmakers who supported LGBTQ legislation.”

The post West Virginia Lawmaker Resigns After Homophobic Slurs Surface on Social Media appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Sean Conley, physician to President Donald Trump, gives an update on the president’s health as he is treated for a Covid-19 infection at Walter Reed Medical Center, October 4, 2020, in Bethesda, Maryland. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Trump was given dexamethasone, a steroid typically used in some severely ill Covid-19 patients.

Sunday’s press conference on President Donald Trump’s status as a Covid-19 patient raised just as many new questions as answers, leaving many medical experts concerned that the public still isn’t getting a complete or accurate picture of the commander-in-chief’s health.

At the briefing at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where the president is being treated, his doctors said Trump is “doing very well” and had improved so much he could be discharged as soon as Monday.

Yet the optimistic report on the president’s prognosis also came with an admission by his physician, Sean Conley, that Trump had needed supplemental oxygen on Friday and that his blood oxygen saturation had dropped to worrisome levels twice in the past three days. Conley said he’d withheld details about this at Saturday’s press briefing because he wanted to “reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president” has had about the course of Trump’s illness.

The president’s medical team also reported that Trump on Saturday started yet another drug to fight Covid-19: dexamethasone. The steroid has been shown in clinical trials to improve outcomes — but is only recommended for patients with severe or critical Covid-19. It’s also the third Covid-19 drug to be administered to the president, following an experimental monoclonal antibody treatment given Friday and an ongoing, five-day course of the antiviral remdesivir.

But dexamethasone can also have serious psychiatric side effects, and the decision to use it so early in the president’s infection sparked a new round of speculation about the severity of his illness.

Vox spoke to five infectious disease and intensive care doctors about the news to try to make sense of it. They said either Trump is sicker than the White House is saying, or his doctors are over-treating their high-risk, 74-year-old VIP patient.

“I can tell you how I would approach the treatment of a patient or family member — it would be different,” said intensive care doctor Lakshman Swamy, who works with the Cambridge Health Alliance. “The challenge is that when you are a VIP patient, it doesn’t always you mean you get better care — it just means you get more care.”

One thing everyone agreed on: Trump’s health status today, whatever it is, doesn’t say anything about how he’ll be doing a week from now, given the unpredictability of this disease.

What we know about Trump’s health

If we go by the official reports from the White House, Trump has been improving and was doing just fine as of Sunday morning — but he had a bad Friday. That was when he experienced a fever and his oxygen levels dropped for the first time.

Conley said Trump’s “oxygen saturation transiently dipped below 94 percent. ... And after about a minute with only two liters, [it was] back over 95 percent.” After an hour, Trump was off the oxygen, Conley added. On Saturday, Trump’s blood oxygen saturation level again dropped to 93 percent for a short period — but Conley wouldn’t confirm whether the president required oxygen then, too.

Instead, since then, Trump’s health has improved so much, his doctors said, he may head back to the White House as soon as Monday. His doctors also said he hasn’t had a fever since Friday morning, his vitals are stable, and he’s not experiencing any shortness of breath any longer.

Conley did not provide details about the results of the president’s chest CT scan, prompting Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, to wonder if they’d found signs of pneumonia, other manifestations of Covid-19 lung involvement, or inflammation.

Meanwhile, Trump has been given at least three new drugs — that are all still being tested — to treat Covid-19 and its symptoms.

Trump’s treatment protocol, explained

On Friday, Trump’s doctors say they started administering the intravenous antiviral remdesivir and a cocktail of experimental monoclonal antibodies — medicines that are supposed to stop the virus from replicating and progressing into cells.

We learned Sunday he also started taking dexamethasone — a steroid that reduces inflammation associated with Covid-19. (He had also been taking zinc, vitamin D, famotidine, melatonin, and daily aspirin — though it’s not clear whether those drugs are for Covid-19 specifically, since there’s no conclusive evidence to back their use for the novel coronavirus.)

Of the three Covid-19 drugs, dexamethasone has the strongest evidence behind it. “It’s the only drug to show improvement — overall improvement — in Covid-19,” said Joshua Barocas, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University and infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center.

Barocas referred to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It showed randomly chosen patients who received dexamethasone experienced a reduced risk of death versus those who didn’t get the drug — but only when they were either intubated or receiving supplemental oxygen.

In patients who aren’t on oxygen, the risks associated with the drug’s use may outweigh the harms. Among the particularly worrisome side effects: confusion, delirium, mania, and a higher risk of other infections. The drug can even complicate a patient’s recovery by suppressing the immune system’s virus-fighting response. The Covid-19 treatment guidelines only call for dexamethasone in seriously ill patients.

“I wouldn’t be giving it to someone who is not on oxygen,” Swamy said.

“It’s not a completely benign choice of medication,” Jen Manne-Goehler, an infectious disease doctor at Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General hospitals, added.

“It’s either over-treatment or he’s much more ill that [the White House] said,” said Clemens Wendtner, a professor of medicine in Munich, Germany, who treated the country’s first Covid-19 patients.

Trump is also on a five-day course of remdesivir — an antiviral developed by Gilead Sciences that’s supposed to stop the virus from replicating.

There is published evidence for the use of remdesivir — in hospitalized patients, it shortened their recovery time compared to the placebo group — but it’s not yet fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration and no one knows what happens when patients get the medication with the others Trump is taking.

As for the experimental cocktail of monoclonal antibodies: In theory, the treatment is supposed to work by neutralizing the coronavirus. But monoclonal antibodies for Covid-19 have not even been fully tested in humans. (We’ve only got published studies on hamsters and monkeys, and unpublished efficacy data from an ongoing human trial, according to Science magazine.)

“What’s confusing or surprising is [why] you would use something so early ... with no efficacy data out there,” said Manne-Goehler of the monoclonal antibodies. From a scientific standpoint, she reasoned, starting on the drug early might make sense if you’re trying to prevent the virus from entering cells. “But what’s odd is as a clinical doctor, I don’t jump to [prescribing] things I have little real-life efficacy data [on] in a person who is not super sick.”

Even if the experimental drug looks promising in early research, Swamy noted, “people said the same thing about hydroxychloroquine,” a drug now known to be ineffective for Covid-19. He added: “We don’t know enough about it.”

So one could read the use of unapproved drugs typically given in severe cases as a sign that Trump is sicker than the White House is acknowledging. Or maybe it’s just because the patient is the president, said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

“You know he’s got risk factors. He’s starting to get sick. Has had a fever and an oxygen requirement. The question is what do you do?” Hotez said. “If something were to happen to the president — whether he becomes incapacitated or worse — that’s a huge national security threat.”

All the doctors said it was difficult from the limited information being released from the White House to know what’s truly going on. What is clear: Trump’s doctors were veering far from the Covid-19 guidelines, with the multiple therapies — some unproven — being administered in combination.

The bottom line: It’s too soon to tell if Trump is on the road to recovery

Trump’s health status now — even if he’s discharged from Walter Reed Medical Center on Monday — tells us little about how he’ll fare over the next week.

Patients “can be doing fine, requiring a little bit of supplemental oxygen, and then very rapidly deteriorate to mechanical ventilation — that’s one of the scariest things about this virus,” Barocas said.

Manne-Goehler agreed: “What makes Covid scary is that who falls off a cliff — and who doesn’t — still can be difficult to predict.”

She recently cared for a patient who was similar to Trump in terms of his age and underlying health risks, Manne-Goehler said. “He looked pretty bad, he got to the edge of the cliff and got better. But there are people who just blow through anything we try to do [for them] and do terribly. That script — even with what we understand about risk factors — is part of what scares the medical community.”

Trump’s doctors have also gone off script for his treatments, which makes applying what we know about how patients fare to the president even more challenging.

Overall, though, people with Covid-19 are generally doing better now than they did mere months ago, because doctors have refined their approach to treating the disease. And while Trump has an elevated risk of complications and death — because of his age, sex and underlying medical conditions — the odds of survival are in his favor.

But the public will have to wait until at least 10 days after his symptoms began for a clearer picture. That’s when patients — if they are doing well — are usually thought to be in the clear. If we assume the White House’s Friday timeline is accurate, that brings us to October 11. Until then, Manne-Goehler said, the disease is “a roller coaster.”

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

White House physician Dr. Sean Conley and members of Donald Trump's Walter Reed-based medical team held another press conference today to describe Trump's medical condition and, once again, it was anything but informative. Conley did attempt to explain his refusal yesterday to admit that Trump has had episodes in which he was given oxygen—implausibly suggesting he "didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction."

No, that doesn't make any sense.

Actual information in Sunday's briefing was likewise hard to come by. Conley said there have been two times when Trump has had oxygen administered, after blood oxygen levels dipped to 94% or 93%. Trump is now taking dexamethasone—a steroid normally given only to severely ill patients, and one that itself can have severe side effects. A doctor also assured that Trump's heart, liver, and kidney functions were in a "normal or improving" range—which implies that some of them are not currently normal.

Despite these suggestions that Trump remains seriously ill, Conley attempted to paint a far rosier picture of Trump's health, claiming Trump is improving enough that he could possibly be released "tomorrow." This seems either improbable or outright reckless: According to our have-to-be-guessed-at timelines, Trump has not yet entered the 7-10 day period when lung function in COVID-19 patients often dips to lower levels. If he is sick enough to require numerous treatments only given to the severely ill, such as dexamethasone, it seems unfathomable that Walter Reed doctors would release him before that 7-10 period has passed.

If Conley isn't simply lying about a possible release—which is likely—it would push back the onset of Trump's illness by many days. He would have been positive during debate preparations, and during the debate itself. The White House has refused to answer questions about when Trump last tested negative.

Because of the White House's incessant lying, Trump's condition therefore remains unknown. We know from images that he is able to sit upright—but because the pictures were clearly staged, including Trump signing his name to a sheet of paper that on inspection is otherwise clearly blank, we know only that. We can guess from the treatment plan being described that he is "seriously" ill—or that his doctors are using him as an experimental guinea pig, throwing every known treatment plan at the disease to see what sticks.

We can infer from doctors that Trump is in no immediate danger of dying. But we can also infer that he's far sicker than Conley, in particular, is letting on.

Sean Conley, White House doctor, held one heck of a press conference Saturday morning. Surrounded by a gaggle of masked doctors and nurses, perfectly placed in front of Walter Reed Medical Center, Dr. Conley spoke from written remarks, and named the medical professionals behind him, even letting two of them speak. He then fielded questions, carefully dodging certain ones.  It was a brief event, and left reporters and Americans confused by two big things: Dr. Conley mentioned that Donald Trump was 72 hours into his diagnosis, while pulmonary specialist Brian Garibaldi noted that Trump had received experimental antibody therapy 48 hours earlier, as well as Remdesivir antiviral treatment on Friday evening. The former statement placed Trump’s first positive COVID-19 test at sometime Wednesday morning, while the latter placed his initial round of treatment on Thursday morning. The story the White House has presented places Trump’s initial COVID-19 diagnosis at around 1:00 AM Friday morning. Trump himself told his buddy Sean Hannity that he’d “just” been tested and was awaiting results late Thursday evening. The doctors made it clear Team Trump was lying. After press and everyday citizens demanded to know when Trump actually was diagnosed with the deadly virus, and when he actually began treatment, White House Chief Liar Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany released a “clarification,” purportedly written by Dr. Conley. It doesn’t pass the smell test.

Here’s the letter.

Entitled “Timeline Clarification,” the unsigned letter reads as follows.

This morning while summarizing the President’ s health, I incorrectly used the term “seventy two hours” instead of “day three” and “forty eight hours” instead of “day two” with regards to his diagnosis and the administration of the polyclonal antibody therapy.  The President was first diagnosed with COVID-19 on the evening of Thursday, October 1st and had received Regeron’s antibody cocktail on Friday, October 2nd.

Well, then. It didn’t take long before folks here at Daily Kos, on the major news networks, and on Twitter began to doubt that the “clarification” came from Dr. Conley. Why? Let me count the ways. Firstly, it’s REGENERON, not “Regeron.” Secondly, two doctors spoke to the timeline. Dr. Conley is correcting Dr. Garibaldi’s words, but claiming them as his own.

Thirdly, the doctors seemed pretty damn clear on their timelines.

Fourthly, nobody calls it “polyclonal.”

So here’s the big question: Did McEnany write this? Did Mark Meadows? Did Trump himself? We may never know. But it sure doesn’t seem like Dr. Conley wrote it, does it?  

It was a crazy 24 hours in North Carolina's Senate race: Just a few hours after Republican Sen. Thom Tillis reported a positive coronavirus diagnosis on Friday evening, his Democratic opponent Cal Cunningham admitted to sending romantic texts to a woman who is not his wife.

The events have upended what's seen as a must-win race for Senate control. Cunningham said he would not drop out of the race after the text messages were revealed on Friday evening, while Tillis had to close his campaign headquarters and quarantine ahead of confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court vacancy.

That's not all. Cunningham has to get tested now, after he had shared the debate stage with Tillis on Thursday night. Cunningham went into that debate riding high after reporting a state record $28.3 million in fundraising in the third quarter of this year, evidence of how firmly the Democratic Party is behind him in the most expensive contest on the Senate map. But by late Friday night the entire race had been scrambled.

In a statement on Saturday morning, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee indicated it was sticking with Cunningham.

“North Carolinians are supporting Cal because he will protect health care coverage for pre-existing conditions, fight to bring down the costs of prescription drugs, and help our country recover from this crisis. We are confident that he will bring the same courage and determination to the Senate as he has while serving our country in uniform," said Lauren Passalacqua, a spokesperson for the DSCC.

Jesse Hunt, a spokesperson for the Senate Republican campaign arm, suggested more bad news could drop on Cunningham down the stretch.

"These are very troubling allegations, and Cal needs to be fully transparent with the voters of North Carolina. We know there is more to this story, Cal knows there is more to this story, and he needs to come clean with voters so they can make the appropriate judgment on whether he’s fit for office," Hunt said.

The stakes couldn't be higher for Senate control. Democrats need to net at least three seats to win back the majority, and North Carolina has been seen as a potential tipping point state by both parties. It's unclear how Cunningham's text messages or Tillis's positive diagnosis might affect the polls, which have narrowly favored Cunningham.

Cunningham sent several text messages to a woman in which the two discussed kissing and hypothetically spending the night together, according to screenshots of the messages that were posted online Thursday. The messages were originally posted by the right-wing website NationalFile.com and confirmed by the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., late Friday.

Cunningham's campaign also confirmed the authenticity of the text messages to POLITICO.

"Would make my day to roll over and kiss you right now," Cunningham wrote in one of the messages. Dates were not included in the screenshots. The woman sent a separate text message asking when she could see him, writing, "I want to kiss you," and later, "I want a night with you," according to the screenshots.

Cunningham, an Army veteran and former state senator, is running against Tillis in one of the most expensive and competitive Senate races in the country. Cunningham has led in the polls consistently in recent weeks, and absentee voting in the state started last month.

Cunningham apologized in a statement and said he did not intend to exit the race.

"I have hurt my family, disappointed my friends, and am deeply sorry," Cunningham said in the statement. "The first step in repairing those relationships is taking complete responsibility, which I do. I ask that my family’s privacy be respected in this personal matter.

"I remain grateful and humbled by the ongoing support that North Carolinians have extended in this campaign, and in the remaining weeks before this election I will continue to work to earn the opportunity to fight for the people of our state."

After Tillis tested positive for Covid-19, his campaign said it would shut down his campaign headquarters, cease in-person events and isolate for ten days.

"While we were surprised to read the news about Cal Cunningham in the News and Observer last night, our campaign is focused on the health of Sen. Tillis and our staff," Tillis spokesman Andrew Romeo said in a statement Saturday. "As we adapt our campaign in light of the senator's positive test, all questions on Cunningham should be directed to his campaign."

As of Thursday, more than 319,000 votes had already been cast in North Carolina, according to the state board of elections website.

Ronny Jackson, the former physician to the president, on Friday defended the White House's coronavirus safety protocols in the wake of Donald Trump testing positive for Covid-19.

"I believe they do everything they can to keep him safe, certainly at the White House," Jackson, a retired Navy rear admiral who served as the personal doctor for Trump and President Barack Obama, told "Fox & Friends" in an interview.

"I continue to go up there pretty frequently. The testing at the White House is aggressive," Jackson said. "And that's part of the reason that this gets picked up so quickly. And I suspect that this got picked up very quickly in the course of this illness for the president."

The president announced early Friday that he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for Covid-19 — hours after news broke that Hope Hicks, one of his closest aides, also had tested positive.

Trump's current White House physician, Sean Conley, said in a memo that the president and the first lady were "both well," and that Trump would "continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering."

Jackson, who is now a Republican congressional candidate in Texas and an ardent defender of the president, also suggested Friday that Trump's positive Covid-19 test was a result of him "leading by example" amid the pandemic.

"The president, he's led by example. And part of leading by example is he's had to get out and he's had to interact with folks," Jackson said, insisting the White House has "been doing a good job" protecting Trump.

"He's had to continue being president," Jackson said. "And he hasn't been boxed up or, you know, cooped up in the White House and campaigning from, you know, from within White House. And I think that, you know, that's been necessary." 

In recent months, Jackson has issued dubious public health advice related to the pandemic that often breaks with the guidance put forth by experts within Trump's own administration.

Jackson revealed in July that he does not "wear a mask all that often" and called mask-wearing a "personal choice." Those remarks undermined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, who had mandated that most of his state's residents wear a mask in public.

The president's former physician came to public prominence in 2018 when Trump tapped him to become secretary of Veterans Affairs. But his nomination was derailed by controversy after Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) released allegations that Jackson had overprescribed pills and drank on the job.

The White House eventually withdrew its nomination, even as Trump continued his forceful defense of the doctor, and Jackson later departed the White House medical unit.

The hashtag “#staged” trended on Twitter Sunday morning after the White House released photos of Trump “working” at the hospital.

The photos released by the WH tonight of the president working at Walter Reed were taken 10 minutes apart at 5:25:59 pm and 5:35:40 pm ET Saturday, according to the EXIF data embedded in both @AP wire postings that were shared by the White House this evening. pic.twitter.com/EzeqIkGdf7

— Jon Ostrower (@jonostrower) October 4, 2020

Examination of the EXIF data of the photos by one journalist showed that the two photos, which were shot in separate locations, one with jacket on and one with jacket off, were taken 20 minutes apart.

A closer examination of the photos showed that he was merely signing his name on a blank piece of paper.

He’s writing his name on a blank piece of paper. #Staged pic.twitter.com/DOByQB40QA

— TwistedPhilly (@Twisted_Philly) October 4, 2020

Picture 1, from the video he sent from Walter Reed. Picture 2, supposedly also from Walter Reed. Two different rooms in a hospital, both with big wooden conference tables? I don’t think so. Picture 2 was in the White House. #staged pic.twitter.com/dNt7OO3Zbi

— Fi (@AsenathMagic) October 4, 2020

Ivanka described him as “RELENTLESS!” for signing the blank piece of paper.

Nothing can stop him from working for the American people. RELENTLESS! pic.twitter.com/2ZSat782qe

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) October 4, 2020

Trump also released a new video:

pic.twitter.com/gvIPuYtTZG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2020

The post ‘#Staged’ Trends on Twitter as WH Releases Photos of Trump Signing Blank Piece of Paper in Hospital appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
If you go back 100,000 years, being able to launch a wooden dinghy is pretty much the best you can hope for.

Today's News:

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts walks out of the Senate Chamber following a vote in the to acquit President Trump on impeachment charges on February 5. | Xinhua/Ting Shen via Getty Images

And Republicans are about to gain a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear two consolidated cases that could eviscerate the right to be free from racial discrimination in voting. And the Court agreed to hear these cases just weeks before the Senate is likely to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, giving a Republican Party that is often hostile to voting rights a 6-3 majority on the nation’s highest court.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the stakes in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Arizona Republican Party v. Democratic National Committee.

The cases involve two Arizona laws restricting the right to vote. One law requires ballots cast in the wrong location to be tossed out, while the other prevents individuals from delivering another person’s absentee ballot to the elections office. But as these cases arise under the Voting Rights Act — a seminal law preventing racist voting laws that the Supreme Court has already weakened considerably — they provide a conservative-majority Supreme Court the opportunity to dismantle what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

Early Friday morning, the White House revealed that President Trump tested positive for Covid-19. But that news will, at most, impact just one presidential election. The Court’s decision in the Democratic National Committee cases, by contrast, could fundamentally reshape all elections moving forward. It could allow racist voter discrimination to run rampant throughout American democracy. And it potentially endangers the ability of the Democratic Party, with its multiracial coalition, to compete in all future elections, at least at the national level.

We cannot know yet what the Supreme Court will do in this case. Perhaps two Republican justices will get cold feet and agree to save the Voting Rights Act. Or perhaps Democrats will win a landslide victory in the upcoming election and pack the Supreme Court with additional justices — stripping the GOP of its Supreme Court majority in the process.

Barring such events, however, American democracy is in terrible danger. The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Democratic National Committee cases could threaten the fairness of American elections for years to come.

The two cases concern Arizona laws that make it harder to vote

The specific issue in the Democratic National Committee cases concerns two Arizona laws that require certain ballots to be discarded. One law requires voting officials to discard in their entirety ballots cast by voters who vote in the wrong precinct (rather than simply not counting votes for local candidates that the voter should not have been able to vote for).

The other law prohibits “ballot collection” (or “ballot harvesting”) where a voter gives their absentee ballot to a third party, who delivers that ballot to the election office. (Arizona is one of many states that impose at least some restrictions on ballot collection.)

Both of these laws disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. As a federal appeals court explained in an opinion striking down the two laws, “uncontested evidence in the district court established that minority voters in Arizona cast [out of precinct] ballots at twice the rate of white voters.” And Hispanic and Native American voters are especially likely to rely on a third party to ensure that their ballot is cast.

One reason for this disparity is that some parts of the state require voters to cast their ballot in counterintuitive locations. Some Maricopa County voters, for example, were required to “travel 15 minutes by car (according to [G]oogle maps) to vote” in their assigned polling location, “passing four other polling places along the way,” according to an expert witness.

In addition, according to the appeals court, many Arizona voters of color lack easy access to the mail and are unable to easily travel on their own to cast a ballot. As the appeals court explained, “in urban areas of heavily Hispanic counties, many apartment buildings lack outgoing mail services,” and only 18 percent of Native American registered voters have home mail service.

Meanwhile, Black, Native, and Hispanic voters are “significantly less likely than non-minorities to own a vehicle” and more likely to have “inflexible work schedules.” Thus, their ability to vote might depend on their ability to give their ballot to a friend or an activist who will take that ballot to the polls for them.

The legal rules implementing the Voting Rights Act are complicated. And the specific legal rules governing these cases are impossible to summarize in a concise way. Courts have to consider myriad factors, including “the extent of any history of official discrimination” in a state accused of violating the Voting Rights Act, and “the extent to which voting in the elections of the state or political subdivision is racially polarized.”

In any event, a majority of the appeals court judges who considered Arizona’s two laws determined that they violate the Voting Rights Act.

The Court could deal a fatal blow to an already ailing Voting Rights Act

Much of the Voting Rights Act no longer functions due to conservative decisions weakening that law. But at least one important prong of the law remains intact and continues to provide a meaningful shield against racist voting laws. The Democratic National Committee cases endanger this remaining shield.

Less than a decade ago, the Voting Rights Act provided three protections against racist voter discrimination. Section 5 of the law required states with a history of racist voting practices to “preclear” new election rules with officials in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provides two separate protections against voter discrimination. It prohibits election laws enacted with racially discriminatory intent, and it also prohibits any state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

But the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively deactivated Section 5’s preclearance regime. And the Court’s decision in Abbott v. Perez (2018) held that lawmakers enjoy such a strong presumption of racial innocence that it is now extremely difficult to prove that those lawmakers acted with racist intent — so difficult that it may be impossible except in the most egregious cases.

The two Democratic National Committee cases involve the third prong of the Voting Rights Act: the so-called “results test” that prohibits many election laws that disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.

As a young lawyer working in the Reagan administration, Chief Justice John Roberts unsuccessfully fought to convince President Reagan to veto the law establishing this results test; some of his memos from that era even suggest that the results test is unconstitutional. And Roberts is, if anything, the most moderate member of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.

Now that these cases are before the Supreme Court, in other words, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority could potentially dismantle the results test. At the very least, it could water down that test to such a degree that it no longer provides a meaningful check on racism in elections.

Simply put, the right of voters of color to cast a ballot is now in greater peril than at almost any point since the Jim Crow era. Cases like Shelby County and Perez already stripped the Voting Rights Act of much of its force; the Democratic National Committee cases could finish that job.

These cases, moreover, are not just a historic threat to the right to vote. They are potentially a historic threat to the Democratic Party’s ability to compete in US elections.

Because voters of color in general, and Black voters in particular, are especially likely to vote for Democrats, Republican lawmakers can use race as a proxy to identify communities with large numbers of Democratic voters. They can then enact election laws targeting those communities, confident that the law will mainly disenfranchise Democrats.

The Court’s decision to take these cases, in other words, puts the debate over whether Democrats should add additional seats to the Supreme Court in order to dilute its Republican majority into stark relief. If the Democratic National Committee cases end badly for the Voting Rights Act — and if Democrats control Congress and the White House when these cases are handed down — Democrats may have to choose between radical steps like packing the Court or being permanently exiled to the political wilderness.

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

President Trump returns to the White House following a campaign event in New Jersey on October 1. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The diagnosis is another reminder of his administration’s failure on Covid-19.

Many questions remain about how and when President Donald Trump was exposed to the coronavirus and if his symptoms will worsen.

But one thing is clear: Trump’s illness is a massive policy failure. Trump and his administration not only failed to protect more than 7 million Americans from the coronavirus, they also failed to protect the president himself. As Brown University School of Public Health dean Ashish Jha tweeted, “I can’t believe he was infected. This is a total failure by [White House] team to protect the President.”

This isn’t just a failure of White House protocols. The failure is emblematic of Trump and his administration’s broader failures on the coronavirus. Over the past few weeks, despite the advice of public health experts, Trump has attended massive rallies as part of his reelection bid, and he’s often refused to wear a mask. He’s also ridiculed his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, for cutting back campaign events in response to Covid-19 and frequently wearing a mask.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s laissez-faire attitude toward Covid-19 continued even after his team found out that his close aide, Hope Hicks, was potentially infected: “After White House officials learned of Hicks’ symptoms, Trump and his entourage flew to New Jersey, where he attended a fundraiser and delivered a speech. Trump was in close contact with dozens of other people, including campaign supporters at a roundtable event.”

He has, in other words, practiced what he’s told the whole country to do: Go about normal life as if nothing is happening.

From the start of the pandemic, Trump has deliberately downplayed the coronavirus, demanded states reopen too quickly, punted problems with testing and tracing down to local and state governments with more limited resources than the federal government, mocked masks, and tried to politicize public health institutions instead of letting science lead the response.

This was contrary to the advice of public health experts. They called for an aggressive testing and tracing system, one that was used in countries like Germany, New Zealand, and South Korea to quickly isolate the infected, quarantine their contacts, and contain the virus overall.

Embracing the growing evidence for masks, experts also called for the general public to wear masks, and for the country’s leaders to do so to set an example. They called for slow and phased reopenings that prioritized more socially valuable spaces — schools over bars and restaurants — and gave officials enough time to see how things were going, carefully calibrating how much could open and how quickly.

Time and time again, Trump rejected this. He called on states to “LIBERATE” themselves by opening far too early, contributing to surges of Covid-19 across the US over the summer. He questioned the value of masks, suggesting that people wear them to spite him. He called for less testing in the US, arguing that more tests picked up more cases and therefore made the US look bad — leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily recommend less testing in its guidelines, before abruptly pulling back the change after public criticism.

It’s these failures, according to experts, that help explain America’s massive coronavirus epidemic. The US surpassed more than 200,000 Covid-19 deaths — more than any other country. When controlling for population, the US hasn’t had the highest death rate for Covid-19, but it’s among the top 20 percent of developed nations, and has seven times the death rate of the median developed country. If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as, say, Canada, more than 120,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

But Trump didn’t just say and do all of this in an abstract policy sense. He lived it — through his rallies that experts warned against, through his fundraisers and other campaign events, and through his refusal to wear a mask.

The result is the president of the United States has now tested positive for the coronavirus. It’s for similar reasons that millions of Americans have contracted the virus and hundreds of thousands have died of it. It’s yet another failure of Trump and the federal government to protect us — even the president himself — from the disease.

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

A protester supporting Black trans lives during a march in Los Angeles, California, on June 14. | SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

From pronouns to sports to puberty blockers, here are answers to the most common questions about trans issues.

In 2014, Time declared American culture had hit “The Transgender Tipping Point.” The magazine featured trans actress Laverne Cox on the cover, with an article that trumpeted that trans people were “emerging from the margins to fight for an equal place in society.” Perhaps just as radical was the article itself. Many in the US were just getting familiar with trans people — those whose internal sense of their gender doesn’t match their assigned sex at birth — and mainstream media was taking note.

Then came Caitlyn Jenner’s very public coming-out the following year, which made pronouns (Caitlyn was now “she” and “her”) and deadnaming (do not call her by her old name) national talking points. The public saw her on reality TV, and watched other shows, such as Cox’s Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, Pose, and, more recently, AMC’s Dispatches From Elsewhere, where trans people were portrayed with inner lives and some nuance. By 2016, 33 percent of people said they personally knew a trans person, up from 9 percent in 2013.

But while awareness of trans people has grown in recent years, trans people have existed since the dawn of time. “Third genders,” as they’re sometimes called, were accepted in Indigenous societies in North and South America, Africa, India, and Polynesia, among others.

Monica Schipper/WireImage via Getty Images

So has more visibility and a vocabulary lesson led to greater equality in recent years? Many trans people would say no — especially since they are still fighting against run-of-the-mill transphobia. While a Supreme Court ruling in June declared discrimination against trans people in employment decisions illegal under federal civil rights law, discrimination still happens in other areas of everyday life, including in housing, health care, and public accommodations.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 29 percent of US trans people live in poverty, and one in five trans people in the US will be homeless at some point in their lifetime. The numbers are even starker for Black trans people: A 2015 report by two leading think tanks found that 34 percent of Black trans people live in extreme poverty, compared to 9 percent of Black cis people.

Visibility also has a downside. Social conservatives who had largely moved on from fighting against gay rights have turned their attention to undermining the advancements of trans people. Propaganda by far-right conservatives and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (sometimes called TERFs or “gender critical” feminists) has sought to build animus toward trans people, portraying them as predators and accusing them of “recruiting children.”

These as well as other less flagrant misconceptions are still commonly held in society, and are commonly exploited by right-wing and anti-trans political actors — resulting in the sudden calls for “bathroom laws” and a ban against transgender soldiers.

To help break it all down, here are nine questions that get at the heart of what trans people are fighting for — and against — every day:

1) What does it mean to be trans?

A trans person is someone who feels that their internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth. Most people are familiar with binary trans people: trans women, who were assigned male at birth and later came to understand their gender to be female (Cox, Jenner); and trans men, who were assigned female at birth and later came to understand their gender to be male (Chaz Bono).

But “transgender” is also an umbrella term to describe a diverse set of communities of people whose gender doesn’t match their assigned sex, including those who occasionally don the clothes of a different sex but don’t take steps to medically transition and those don’t feel their gender can be categorized.

This includes nonbinary people who don’t subscribe to the binary notions of gender — i.e., that humans should be organized into either male or female categories, with prescriptive roles and identities based on external genitalia. That’s not to say being nonbinary means placing your gender identity somewhere in between male and female; there’s no one single way to be nonbinary.

“People are most familiar with the canonical trans person who spent a lot of their life knowing they were a girl or a boy, and to varying extents maybe tried to make that work or maybe it didn’t work at all, and they eventually transitioned,” trans feminist activist, writer, and biologist Julia Serano told Vox. “A lot of people might not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, but they might not know for sure whether they fit into the so-called other gender. As a result, a lot of us who are trans do a lot of questioning of gender with regards to society and how we categorize people.”

Trans identities only seem new or “different” in relation to Western notions of gender. The gender binary is a concept that largely, but not exclusively, grew out of Christian society to benefit the agrarian and military needs of developing nation-states: Western societies used manpower to supply armies and farms, while women were made responsible for tending to the home and creating more people — more men for manpower and more women for people-creating.

However, Indigenous societies in the Pacific Islands, the Americas, and India have long had gender systems that aren’t strictly binary.

“For thousands and thousands of years in North America, the social experience of Indigenous peoples was of inclusivity and accepting what creation had made,” said Albert McLeod, a longtime LGBTQ activist and co-director of Two-Spirited People of Manitoba, a Canadian two-spirit advocacy group.

According to McLeod, researchers and anthropologists who have studied Native history have discovered more than 150 words by Native tribes to describe queer and trans identities, such as agookwe, which means “hidden woman” in the Ojibwe language, or winkte, “halfman-halfwoman,” in Dakota.

“There was a place for everyone,” McLeod said. “With trans people, the family or the community adapted to that reality, which is very different than Western society.”

That language was lost when the US and Canadian governments forced Indigenous people to abandon their native tongues in English-only schools. “Those ethics [of trans inclusion] were embedded in the language,” said McLeod. “The language had to be prohibited in order to impose this binary worldview onto Indigenous peoples.”

People who are upset by trans people’s existence, one could argue, are threatened by the disruption of gender roles and the status quo. They are bothered by a person’s presentation. “Anti-trans activists are trying to defend a worldview that suggests your biology is your destiny,” Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson at the National Women’s Law Center, told Vox. “When they make an issue over somebody with a Y chromosome using she/her pronouns, what they’re upset by is that pronoun’s name, clothing — all of this is not encoded into what is often referred to as your biological sex.”

This translates into mockery of trans people — and often so much worse. Conservatives and anti-trans feminists have tapped into the dangerous “man in a dress” stereotypes (seen throughout popular culture in movies like Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and Dressed to Kill) to create fear around trans people and sway public opinion. In reality, trans people are just trying to live their lives, which is made harder by having to face such social exclusion.

2) Why should I care about trans issues?

At one time, nearly every major politician opposed marriage equality. Even Barack Obama did not support the issue during his first campaign for president in 2008.

But what transformed the marriage equality fight was personal contact with gay people who were willing to speak about their marginalized experiences in society. While “love is love” became the tagline of the marriage equality fight, it was also about access to spousal benefits like insurance and medical care, inheritance, tax breaks, and parental rights that came along with legal recognition. That strategy worked largely because roughly 3.5 percent of US adults are gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and a great many cisgender heterosexual people had at least one gay friend or family member who could personalize the issue. Over time, visibility and empathy led to a change in public opinion, which led to policy change.

But that strategy largely doesn’t work for trans people, who make up only about 0.6 percent of the adult population. While the percentage of people who know someone trans is higher now than it has ever been — several polls put the number of Americans who know someone who is trans at around 30 percent — there still tends to be an empathy gap when cis people discuss trans people. Trans experiences are often easily bundled into discussions by cisgender people — among academics, on social media, in op-eds on conservative websites — over the meaning of sex and gender. The humanity of trans people, meanwhile, is often missing from these discussions.

That’s because trans people are rarely employed in positions of power in academia, government, or media, and ultimately have very little institutional power to influence debates that cisgender people have about trans lives. So when cis academics who have no experience with being trans debate whether trans people exist or deserve basic respect under the law, the debate is missing the most relevant perspective and experience of all: a trans person’s.

There’s a long history of excluding trans people from careers and spaces that cis people often take for granted. This could contribute to the fact that trans people experience elevated levels of suicide and violence. With more social acceptance and access to critical services, trans communities will be safer.

Also, trans issues don’t just affect trans people. As Vox reported in July, the Trump administration is proposing a rule that attempts to link certain physical traits, like height, facial hair, and the presence of an “Adam’s apple,” to detecting a homeless person’s “biological sex” for placement in a housing shelter. Under the rule, anyone that a shelter’s staff believes may be trans can be separated out and asked for further proof of their assigned sex at birth. The rule would very obviously fall hardest on trans women, but cis women with some of those same masculine traits would also be subject to potential humiliation.

Trans people have challenged the gender binary in ways that previous generations haven’t been able to, to the benefit of everyone in society. “Unless there’s a very small minority of people who are completely masculine men and completely feminine women, if you don’t fall into these categories, then you have a stake in the idea of making our concept of gender more flexible and more inclusive of everybody,” said Serano.

Michael Noble Jr./Getty Images

3) What about the pronouns thing?

We all have pronouns — cis people have pronouns, trans people have pronouns, even ships can have pronouns. And if you don’t know a trans person’s pronouns, it’s fine to ask! It’s even okay to stumble and apologize. Don’t make it a big deal, just don’t misgender trans people on purpose.

An individual’s gender is typically a deeply held part of their internal sense of their identity, and pronouns are inextricably linked to that identity. To trans people, using someone’s stated pronouns is a matter of respect, not debate.

As Serano puts it, “How would you feel if Monday, everyone just started calling you the wrong pronouns, and if you complained about it, they still did it anyway? You would probably feel pretty crappy about that.”

Trans people have also pushed for more regular acknowledgment of nonconventional gender pronouns, and mainstream culture is being more receptive: Last year, the singular “they” was named Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s word of the year. As Vox’s Anna North reported, when people use “they” and “them” pronouns, it’s a way of reclaiming a history of the English language in which “they” has long been used in a gender-neutral way; as a singular pronoun, it can be traced back to the late 1300s.

But beyond she, he, and they is a whole world of neo-pronouns, or nontraditional pronouns, which can denote all kinds of gender identities, like zir, fae, and xe.

For Newton Brophy, a 25-year-old gender-nonconforming trans man from Tampa, Florida, finding the right pronoun, sé/é (pronounced shay/ay), was a deeply personal process. “I found if I use they/them, people assume I’m non-binary, and from there, give themselves license to slip into she/her pronouns, or to treat me like a cis woman,” sé told Vox. He/him didn’t quite feel right either; then sé found out the Irish language’s masculine pronouns were sé/é and loved the sound of it. “I feel like a guy who is a she. But you can’t really explain that to most people.”

4) What issues are trans people fighting for?

The policy changes trans people are asking for now — legal protections against discrimination in employment, housing, health care, and public accommodations — are also the same legal protections women, people of color, and LGB Americans have had to fight for in the past, and continue to fight for.

Trans people disproportionately live in poverty in large part because of familial rejection and discrimination. Across large swaths of the US, trans people have no legal protections against discrimination in housing and public accommodations. In 26 states, a trans person can be evicted if their landlord finds out they’re trans. Trans people can be harassed and kicked out of public bathrooms in 27 states.

While a June Supreme Court decision decreed that firing a trans person for being trans is illegal under existing civil rights law, trans people can still be skipped over during the job application process as long as the employer doesn’t get caught, in part because discrimination can be hard to prove.

According to a 2017 survey by New York City’s Anti-Violence Project, transgender New Yorkers were more likely to have a college degree than the general population, but just 45 percent had full-time jobs. Overall, transgender workers are more likely to be unemployed compared to their cisgender counterparts.

Because of a cycle of discrimination and poverty, trans people are more likely to turn to dangerous or illegal means, like sex work, in order to survive. Police, meanwhile, are often trained to look for Black and Latinx trans women on the street to pick up on suspicion of being a sex worker.

Last year, an NYPD officer testified at a deposition that he would drive around looking for women with “Adam’s apples” to stop on suspicion of solicitation. Under the law in New York and many other states, discovery of a condom in a purse is sufficient evidence to arrest a trans woman on prostitution charges. A Black trans activist in Arizona was infamously arrested in this fashion in 2014, while another Black trans woman traveling through Iowa was arrested after hotel staff, suspecting that she was a sex worker, called the police.

It’s not surprising, then, that 21 percent of Black trans women will face incarceration at least once in their lifetime, a rate significantly higher than the general population. Additionally, there have been reports of police sexually assaulting trans women going back decades.

Essentially, discrimination — from housing to employment — leads to the odds of trans people falling into a cycle of poverty, incarceration, and homelessness that’s disproportionate to cisgender people in society. Breaking the cycle begins with creating policies that ban discrimination and put trans people on equal footing with everyone else.

5) Why are we always talking about trans issues?

The same arguments around trans issues have been happening for decades, but it’s only since the American religious right has invested effort and money in targeting trans people in recent years that the rest of society has taken notice.

That effort kicked off in earnest in 2015, mere months after Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover and the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell ruling, in a Houston referendum over the city’s LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinance. Focusing on the law’s public accommodation protections allowing trans people to use bathrooms according to their lived gender, conservatives seized on a narrative that trans women are really just creepy men who didn’t belong in women’s restrooms.

“The right has worked to make it an electoral issue. We see this across the board — they try to posture trans rights as extreme and a danger particularly to children,” Brennan Suen, LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, told Vox. This is why, he said, conservatives have focused so much on legislation regarding transition care for trans minors, bathrooms, and trans athletes in sports. “They are able to reach those voters who might not know a trans person and give them misinformation and bigoted information that honestly scares them.”

It’s part and parcel of the modern conservative electoral strategy, which often leans into demonizing vulnerable communities on issues such as immigration, criminal justice, and reproductive rights.

“The right often seizes power by targeting marginalized people,” Suen said. “And as trans people have really been more visible in the media ... we’ve seen the right really ramp up their attacks.”

Suen pointed to last year’s governor’s race in Kentucky as an example. As then-incumbent Republican Gov. Matt Bevin fell behind in a race against Democratic challenger Andy Beshear, political groups supporting the governor leaned into transphobia to try to eke out a win.

An out-of-state-based group called Campaign for American Principles Kentucky aired an ad attacking Beshear for allegedly supporting trans girls in girls’ high school sports (a similar ad from the same group geared toward the presidential election was recently blocked by Facebook). Though Bevins lost in the end, some conservatives think the trans attack ads helped win over undecided voters. “It really is this strategy of ‘Get people out to vote or your way of life is going to be threatened,’” said Suen.

As the right wing has become more obsessed with the issue, matters have only gotten worse for trans people. According to a 2020 Media Matters report of 225 trans-related articles shared on Facebook — about anything from trans athletes to trans kids — 65.7 percent of the 66 million Facebook interactions generated by those articles came from those put out by right-wing sources.

Seeing how trans issues rile up the far right, the Trump administration has leaned into targeting trans people to feed its base. Almost immediately after President Trump took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. Then that July, Trump announced that he would order the military to ban trans people from serving. The administration went after trans prisoners as well in May 2018, deciding that in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth. That’s in addition to the homeless shelter rule proposed this summer.

Perhaps most critical was the administration’s attack on LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections in the Affordable Care Act, finalized in a new rule on June 12 that has since been blocked by two federal courts. The rule would let doctors and health care companies deny care and coverage to trans people.

In less than four years, Trump has essentially wiped out a decade of policy progress for the trans community.

6) What’s the deal with bathrooms?

For a while, the most common issue associated with trans people was bathrooms. In 2016, North Carolina passed a bathroom bill declaring that trans people must use the bathroom conforming with the sex on their original birth certificate in all state-owned properties. Conservatives said this was meant to protect cisgender women. The idea, however, that some trans women are predators looking to access women’s spaces has largely proven to be an unfounded myth.

After an overwhelming backlash, North Carolina repealed the bill, at least partially. And while several conservative states proposed their own bathroom bills between 2016 and 2018, all were shot down. The anti-trans bathroom movement in the US seems to have since died out.

Yet due to conservative narrative, the bathroom predator trope prevails, and many trans people still fear going to public restrooms, afraid they’ll be accosted or attacked. According to the 2015 US Transgender Survey, 59 percent of trans people in the US reported that they had avoided using a public bathroom in the last year, 31 percent said they avoided eating or drinking for fear of having to use a public bathroom, and 8 percent reported having a kidney or urinary tract infection from avoiding the bathroom.

Confrontations in bathrooms over someone’s perceived gender can be awkward at best, or dangerous in the most extreme cases. And it’s not just trans and nonbinary people who have been accosted for being in the “wrong” bathroom. There have been several instances of butch women getting hassled or thrown out of women’s bathrooms.

“Nobody really likes using public bathrooms,” said Nahid, a trans woman from Austin, Texas. “You want to go in there, you want to do your business, you want to get out as soon as possible. You don’t want to hassle people. Trans people want all these things, too.”

7) What’s with the panic over trans women with penises and trans men who menstruate?

A recent YouGov poll of British attitudes toward trans people showed a dramatic split between support for trans-related policies when it came to trans women who had kept their penises versus not. Support was significantly lower for several key issues — like locker room access and toilets — when the question specifically asked about trans people’s anatomy.

Trans women who have their original genitalia tend to be the proverbial elephant in the room for cis people. For years, Hollywood has portrayed trans women as either sexually deviant threats or as the butt of the joke. The “penis reveal” movie trope has also helped form social opinion about so-called “devious” trans women, as was so brilliantly detailed in the Netflix documentary Disclosure, which recounts how movies from The Crying Game to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective have trained audiences to act with revulsion toward a woman with a penis.

In Western society, the penis is a symbol of virility and power. And for many feminists, the penis can be both the symbolic and quite literal source of female pain and oppression. To be a woman and to have a penis are simply two opposing possibilities for a large segment of society.

That conditioning starts very early in life, according to Serano. “When [kids] are first learning, they view [gender] as kind of a surface feature. They likely will interpret gender in terms of like what your hairline says or what clothes you’re wearing,” she said. Children also learn the fallacy of gender constancy — the idea that a person’s gender never changes — and to associate gender with the physical body and genitalia, Serano said.

These beliefs, for most people, hold into adulthood. So when a trans woman comes along who still has a penis, that can be a really difficult thing for the average person to accept.

But regardless of how society at large feels about trans women with penises, getting rid of one is no simple matter. Surgeries are expensive, even when they are covered by insurance. And some trans women have complicating health risks that make surgeries impossible, while still others are either too risk-averse or don’t have any dysphoria about their genitals.

Regardless of a trans woman’s personal feelings about her junk, you can’t tell who has had the surgery just by looking at them. So policies against trans women with penises accessing women’s spaces are really just policies against anyone who looks remotely trans.

The same goes for trans men who still menstruate. Not all trans men have had gender-affirming surgeries, nor do they necessarily want to, so some still get their periods. Testosterone therapy for transmasculine people stops periods in most but not all, and trans men can still get pregnant or have health issues related to their reproductive anatomy.

When trans men pop up in the discourse — which is much less often than trans women — it’s usually relating to their reproductive health. Sensational headlines about “pregnant men” have run in tabloids for years. And yet trans men and nonbinary people who were assigned female at birth are also frequently erased and marginalized from the reproductive health care they need because of an assumption that this kind of care doesn’t apply to men.

That’s why advocates say it’s important to use inclusive language like “people who menstruate” or “pregnant people.” “As a trans guy who still, frustratingly, occasionally has periods, I support those terms,” said Wilson, a 36-year-old trans man from Baltimore. “They actually originated among trans men and were intended to support trans men.”

But since trans men are often more “invisible” than trans women, Wilson said those terms have become “erroneously associated with trans women” and a way to mock them. For example, in a tweet from June, best-selling children’s author and recently outspoken anti-trans activist J.K. Rowling poked at reproductive health language meant to include trans men, implying that all people who menstruate are women.

Ultimately, society tends to police male gender nonconformity more than female gender nonconformity, Wilson said, which goes back to the misogynistic notions of women being inferior or a joke. “There’s a normalization of masculine traits in women that doesn’t have a corollary in men — men with feminine traits are seen in a much more negative light. Pre- or early-transition trans men are often seen as just being particularly butch women by those who don’t know them, and it doesn’t arouse any particular ‘suspicion’ about their gender.”

8) But what about trans women playing women’s sports?

Much has been made over the past two years about the prospect of trans women playing — and dominating — women’s sports. Two years ago, Rachel McKinnon, who now goes by the name Veronica Ivy, won the Master’s Track Cycling World Championship in the 200-meter match sprint. The following year, she repeated, kicking off debate over the issue. CeCe Telfer, meanwhile, won the 2019 Div. 2 NCAA national championship in the women’s 400-meter hurdles. In Connecticut, two high school trans girls have dominated girls’ indoor and outdoor track sprinting.

Rudy Gonzalez/NCAA Photos via Getty Images

The successes of these handful of trans women has prompted worldwide outrage — and lawsuits — seeking to ban all trans women and girls from women’s sports.

At the heart of the issue is a perceived tension between access and fairness. Trans people point to the fact that trans women are still largely underrepresented in sporting participation numbers, and to the social and physical benefits that playing sports has long offered to their cisgender counterparts. On the opposite side are those who are concerned that trans women — and their “male biology” — are more naturally athletic and could soon end up dominating women’s sports.

But the science behind trans women athletes is still largely unsettled, and almost entirely filled with conjecture rather than actual, usable data.

Individual sporting administrators are responsible for making their own trans inclusion policies, but the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee both allow trans women to compete with women as long as they suppress their testosterone levels down to cis woman levels for at least a year before competing.

Estrogen is much less efficient at building and maintaining muscle than testosterone, and early research indicates that trans women lose significant strength through their transition-related hormone replacement therapy regimen.

So for trans women athletes, that means they need to take longer to recover between workouts than they did before transition, causing muscle loss. This alone makes them unlikely to be able to compete in a men’s category against cis men.

There are physical traits that cannot be changed through hormone replacement, such as height, which is critical in many sports such as basketball and volleyball. But human bodies aren’t cleanly split into two distinct body types, like store mannequins. In my own social circle, I know a 5-foot trans woman and a 6-foot-4 genderqueer person who was assigned female at birth. It would be odd to ban trans women on the basis of height while not holding unusually tall cis women to the same standard.

Part of the problem on the anti-trans side is that they’re starting from the base assumption that trans women are men, and substitute cis male physical traits when discussing whether trans women may have competitive advantages. They’ll argue that men have bigger hearts and more lung capacity, or produce more red blood cells on average than cis women, and then assume trans women’s bodies would be the same.

But initial scientific findings don’t necessarily support that, according to Loughborough University PhD student Joanna Harper, who has spent the past decade researching trans athletes. Harper noted that a trans athlete she previously studied at Arizona State University saw the ejection fraction rate from her heart drop significantly after HRT, meaning less blood was pumped with each beat. “The heart itself might be the same, but the muscles may not work as well,” she told Vox. “And if the ejection fraction goes down, who cares about the size of the heart. It’s how much blood you can pump that matters.”

According to Harper, there are myriad physical traits that may impact a trans woman’s athletic ability, but we don’t know enough specific science about trans women’s bodies yet to draw broad policy conclusions for trans athletes.

“Cis people see a lot of the instantaneous results of the coming-out process, so they assume it’s just a snap decision,” said Canadian sportswriter A.J. Andrews, a trans woman. “They don’t see the years of hormone therapy and the changes it does to a body, they just see the moment of public change and fear some giant bodybuilder is going to do the same thing.”

It’s easy to look at the likes of Ivy or Telfer for outrage fuel in this debate, but neither has competed at the very highest levels of their sport. Ivy won a master’s championship, which is an age-restricted category, meaning she was only competing against women in their late 30s. She is not a world elite rider and is not a likely competitor to make an Olympic appearance.

Ironically, it’s a trans man who may be the best American trans athlete competing according to their gender identity. In 2015, Chris Mosier became the first openly trans athlete to make a US national team in the gender they identify with.

His career alone pushes back on the idea that trans women are really men who have an unfair advantage versus women, while trans men are seemingly powerless to compete against cis men.

Ultimately, the trans athlete debate rubs against the sexist social belief that men are born physically superior to women. Undoing that attitude will take a lot more time.

9) I’m fine with trans adults, but what about trans kids?

While many cis people say they’re fine with an adult transitioning their gender, a large number of people feel more squeamish about trans adolescents doing the same. A 2019 PRRI poll reported that 63 percent of Americans would be very or somewhat comfortable if a friend told them they were transgender; however, just 48 percent said the same if their child told them they were.

Trans kids have always existed, and they’ve been studied for at least the past 50 years. Over time, treatment has evolved significantly. Until 2013, being trans as a child was considered a psychological disorder, called gender identity disorder, and early scientists initially recommended “conversion therapy” for gender dysphoric children.

As time went on, however, conversion therapy became less socially accepted (it’s now banned in 20 states and the District of Columbia), and scientists in the early 2010s sometimes sought softer forms of manipulation to dissuade kids from expressing an alternative gender identity — such as isolating kids from opposite-sex friends and banning gender nonconforming toys or clothes from a household. Overall, none of these “treatments” worked.

“In the past, doctors thought that gender diversity was a pathology, something that needed to be fixed,” said Jack Turban, a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches the mental health of transgender youth, in an email to Vox. “They would try to push kids to be cisgender. A recent study from our group found that transgender people exposed to attempts to make them cisgender had greater odds of attempting suicide.”

Nowadays, doctors recommend taking a humane and affirming approach when a child expresses that their gender may not match their assigned sex at birth. This affirmation includes allowing trans kids to socially transition (i.e., use whichever name, pronouns, and clothing make them comfortable); medical interventions — like puberty suppression or gender-affirming hormones like estrogen or testosterone — are only recommended for adolescents who have been insistent, persistent, and consistent in their gender identity over long periods.

The affirming model has been recommended by nearly every major American medical association, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and many others.

While the affirming model is often willfully misconstrued as instructing parents to accept a child’s gender identity and rush them off into medical interventions, it’s really more about creating a space for trans kids to explore their own gender expression and more thoroughly understand their dysphoria before deciding on whether to transition or not. Allowing a trans adolescent to go on puberty blockers is a decision most parents don’t take lightly. Transitioning is a slow, deliberative process for minors.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

“For young people, disclosing that they are transgender can be horrifying. Some may have read stories of parents kicking their transgender children out of the home and be afraid that will happen to them,” Turban told Vox. “It’s important to listen to young people when they express their gender identity and to keep an open mind. Create a nonjudgmental space. The most important thing is to not instill shame. That shame can lead to serious problems down the line with anxiety and depression.”

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

On Monday long-time Slashdot reader TorinEdge wrote that Microsoft "appears to have botched an internal Office365 cloud services rollout today, with outages confirmed up and down the West Coast of North America. Confirmed roll backs were good early omens, but in the end did not appear to be successful... Symptoms may include: All 365-related services flaking out, borking, alternately approving logins and confirming they definitely do not exist." CRN reported service was impacted for five hours. But on Thursday some users were now intermittently unable to access Microsoft Exchange from 12:52 a.m. until 10:50 p.m., "according to a Microsoft email update to Office 365 administrators..." "Some partners believe the tech giant is grappling with a DevOps crisis." "It looks like they are pushing out software updates that are causing the outages," said a channel source impacted by one of the outages. "They have so much going on right now, rolling Teams out at a breakneck pace. I think they are running into an issue where code tested out fine but there is a configuration problem when they deploy it." DevOps is a set of practices that, according to the Wikipedia definition, shortens the systems development life cycle and provides continuous delivery of code with high software quality... A senior executive for one of Microsoft's top partners, who did not want to be identified, said he sees both recent outages as clearly DevOps-related... "Microsoft is a development first company, well known in general for DevOps, so the question is: why is this happening?" said the executive. "I love Microsoft but why is a company that paid $7.5 billion for Github, the leading source code repository company in the world, getting taken down by code that is not being well tested or has a single point of failure. That is ridiculous. If we caused this kind of production outage for a customer we would be fired and possibly blacklisted from the ecosystem. We have to bat 1,000 as a partner." The lesson from the outages may well be that a company's DevOps is only as "good as the humans who configure it and execute upon it," said the executive. The executive said the outages will definitely have a ripple effect in the channel. "I bet the Google G Suite sales reps threw a party when they saw this," he said. "No cloud vendor is immune to downtime," Microsoft says in a statement quoted by CRN. "Our number one priority is to get to resolution as quickly as possible and ensure our customers stay updated along the way, as was the case here. "We continuously invest in the resilience of our platform and focus on learning from these incidents to ultimately reduce the impact of inevitable outages..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Grindr, one of the world's largest dating and social networking apps for gay, bi, trans, and queer people, has fixed a security vulnerability that allowed anyone to hijack and take control of any user's account using only their email address. TechCrunch reports: Wassime Bouimadaghene, a French security researcher, found the vulnerability and reported the issue to Grindr. When he didn't hear back, Bouimadaghene shared details of the vulnerability with security expert Troy Hunt to help. The vulnerability was fixed a short time later. Bouimadaghene found the vulnerability in how the app handles account password resets. To reset a password, Grindr sends the user an email with a clickable link containing an account password reset token. Once clicked, the user can change their password and is allowed back into their account. But Bouimadaghene found that Grindr's password reset page was leaking password reset tokens to the browser. That meant anyone could trigger the password reset who had knowledge of a user's registered email address, and collect the password reset token from the browser if they knew where to look. The clickable link that Grindr generates for a password reset is formatted the same way, meaning a malicious user could easily craft their own clickable password reset link -- the same link that was sent to the user's inbox -- using the leaked password reset token from the browser. With that crafted link, the malicious user can reset the account owner's password and gain access to their account and the personal data stored within, including account photos, messages, sexual orientation and HIV status and last test date.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Remember way back to the Before Times in February, when a big chunk—$150,000—of mysterious dark money showed up in a super PAC set up for Sen. Susan Collins? It was from the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers LLC based out of Hawaii, an entity that further investigation found doesn’t actually exist … and was created by the owners, officers, and family members of the owners and officers of Navatek, a defense contractor for which Collins has secured million of dollars in contracts. That story was sketchy enough, but it just got a lot thornier for Collins.

Martin Koa, the owner of Navatek and major donor to Collins, was arrested Wednesday and charged with bank fraud and money laundering. That part isn't great for Collins. This part is very, very bad: "According to a 37-page criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, Kao is suspected of lying on two applications to receive funds under the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses, part of the CARES Act passed by Congress in late March to address the pandemic. Maine Sen. Susan Collins was a co-author of the act." (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Kao is accused of overstating his company's need for the relief, lying about the number of his employees so he could qualify, and using a second company to apply for two loans. He is also suspected of transferring $2 million of taxpayer funded Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans to his personal bank account. But there's more.

Your $3 contribution will help Sara Gideon get Collins out of the Senate!

He apparently also told the bank handling his application that he had connections with "multiple unnamed U.S. senators" to get the loans. He also allegedly told the bank "some senators or their staff had advised him on the application process." Gee, I wonder which senator and/or staff might have been in that group? Maybe the senator who wrote the PPP into existence? This looks so bad. In an email sent to a bank executive on April 7, he wrote that he had been in telephone contact with a U.S. senator and member of Congress who "were very adamant about stepping in, if our application was getting stalled."

Collins' spokesperson, Annie Clark, said in a statement Thursday: "Neither Senator Collins nor her office have had any contact with Mr. Kao or anyone else at Navatek regarding the Paycheck Protection Program." That's entirely possible. It could have been Sen. Brian Schatz from Hawaii, who has also received donations from Kao. He doesn't seem to have a Kao super PAC dedicated to his reelection, but Schatz's office might have been involved. There's no indication that any senator did anything underhanded to help secure these loans. But it smells. A lot.

Kenji Price, the U.S. attorney for the district of Hawaii, said in a press conference announcing the charges against Kao: "These investigations unfortunately reveal what experience teaches. When the federal government distributes money there is generally a fraudster out there who tries to get his or her hands on it illegally." That's particularly true when there's a Trump administration willing to overlook fraud, and a Congress that passes bill that doesn't have the necessary protections written in to stop it. Like the bill Collins wrote with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Is every member of Congress responsible for the lawbreaking that their big donors commit? No. But when the fraud costs American taxpayers millions of dollars—millions of dollars intended to keep small businesses afloat and to keep their employees on payroll—the very least a lawmaker should do is return all that campaign cash. Or donate it to any one of the nonprofits trying to keep struggling Americans from going hungry or becoming homeless during this pandemic.

If you saw a coal miner at a Donald Trump rally in 2016, it was a safe bet that miner came from a single company: Murray Energy. Murray not only gave their workers time off to take part in Trump events, they turned their workers into props that Trump could use again and again to prove he “digs coal.” It’s almost as safe to bet that you won’t see these Murray miners at 2020 events. Or any other coal miners. That’s because, far from “bringing back coal” as he promised in 2016, coal mining jobs have plummeted. In fact, jobs related to coal mining are down by 13% since Trump took office. In the meantime, coal-fired power plants have continued to close and not a single coal plant of any sort is either planned or under construction anywhere in the country. This is an industry that is dying, and Murray Energy is leading the way … because noted squirrel lover Bob Murray led his company into bankruptcy in 2019. More than half of those employed by Murray when Trump took office have since been laid off.

But just because his company is dead doesn’t mean that Bob Murray is going to let irony die with it. After decades of fighting workplace safety rules, warning workers to lie about conditions in his mines, and lobbying to reduce black lung benefits, former CEO Bob Murray has, predictably, filed for black lung benefits.

Black lung, or coal worker's pneumoconiosis, is a horrible disease resulting from long-term exposure to coal dust, particularly in underground mines. No one deserves it, not even Murray. (Note: Both my father-in-law and my grandfather suffered from black lung, as do several people I worked with in over 30 years working with coal. My home town in Kentucky now hosts a black lung clinic for the hundreds of miners in the area who are still suffering the effects. So there is definitely a personal connection to this story.)

In 2003, as Murray was charged with attempting to both deceive mine inspectors and lobby for weaker safety regulations, he made it clear to regulators that he was not someone to be trifled with. He and his company were already major contributors to Republican candidates. Murray was personally among the top 10 Republican contributors overall in both the 1996 and 2000 elections, and he was not afraid to pull the strings of power. Even though his mines had mysteriously received only a fraction of the citations of other operations, Murray threatened inspectors who wanted to write the company up for a serious safety violation.

“I will have your jobs,” said Murray. “They are gone. The clock is ticking. … Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and last I checked, he was sleeping with your boss.”

Murray was referring to McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who was then serving as secretary of labor. He had a good foundation on which to make that threat. Under Chao, mine inspections plummeted and both citations and fines decreased drastically. Prior to Chao, most underground mines could count on several surprise inspections a year. In 2006, only one underground mine in seven received even a single inspection.

Despite that disgustingly low rate of inspection, Murray’s Crandall Canyon mine in Utah picked up a number of citations, including concerns over the use of “retreat mining” where pillars of coal that held up the roof were being pulled as the operation retreated from the largely played out mine. In 2007, one of the remaining pillars burst under the stress, but Murray never reported the event to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), despite legal requirements. Months later, the mine collapsed, trapping and killing six workers over three miles from the entrance. Murray blamed the disaster on an earthquake. 

Murray’s efforts in supporting Trump did not go unrewarded. The Trump tax bill drastically reduced excise taxes and royalties that coal companies had to pay—including those that went to providing payments to miners with black lung. This happened even as officials were reporting a surge in new black lung cases, which are likely related to the reduced safety regulations under Bush. The benefits to coal companies were so great that Arch Coal (which falls into second place between No. 3 Murray Energy and the largest coal company, Peabody Energy) announced in 2018 that their tax rate was effectively zero.

Because Murray Energy had chronically underfunded its black lung fund, the company’s bankruptcy meant that many miners were placed in a terrible position. The company owed those miners $155 million. Its offer in bankruptcy court is currently $1.1 million. That may seem shocking … actually, it is shocking. But considering that Murray left his company with $8 billion in debts, it’s not that surprising.

It was examples such as this one that resulted in Democrats joining with Republicans in 2019 to support increased federal payments to shore up black lung funds that had been bled dry, even though these payments largely let coal companies off the hook for the damage. And if there is anything to celebrate in 2020, it’s that McConnell’s efforts to extend cuts to the coal excise tax and royalty payments have failed in every bill where he has inserted them.

But, as West Virginia Public Broadcasting reports, none of this has stopped Bob Murray from putting out his hand and asking for black lung payments. Murray, who is 80, states that the disease has made him too ill to lead his company through bankruptcy. Murray has been at events using an oxygen mask for over a year. Still, it seems very odd considering that Murray had an annual salary of $12 million right up until the company filed for bankruptcy. The Department of Labor sets the monthly benefits for black lung at just $686.70. 

No one will ever say that Bob Murray went out without grubbing for the last possible dollar.

When young right-wing scumbag Jacob Wohl isn’t allegedly trying to cook up false sexual assault charges against public health officials, he’s planning other dubious and immoral scams. Recently a series of robocalls targeting voters in “urban” areas like Detroit in order to spread misinformation in a clear attempt to scare them off voting were connected to Wohl and his partner in crapitude, Jack Burkman.

Well, looky here! On Thursday, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced charges against Wohl, who is 22, and Burkman, who is 54. And they are for-real charges. Felony charges. Specifically four charges:

• One count of violating election law by intimidating voters, a five-year felony;
• One count of conspiracy to commit an election law violation, a five-year felony;
• One count of using a computer to commit the crime of violating election law—intimidating voters, a seven-year felony; and
• Using a computer to commit the crime of conspiracy, a seven-year felony.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson released a statement saying: "I have zero tolerance for anyone who would seek to deceive citizens about their right to vote. I am grateful to the Attorney General for her swift and thorough investigation, putting anyone else who would seek to undermine citizens’ fundamental rights on notice that we will use every tool at our disposal to dispel false rhetoric and seek justice on behalf of every voter who is targeted and harmed by any attempt to suppress their vote.”

Wohl has been involved with quite a few obvious scams over the past couple of years and the only real difference between him and the Trump administration that he supports is their power and wealth. Wohl is the sort of low-level white supremacist scumbag hustler that wants to be at the big kids’ table with old-timey scumbag hucksters like Trump.

The Trump administration will never disavow white supremacy because it would then require disavowing itself. CNN reports that the needs-to-be-defunded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is apparently thinking about plastering “immigration violators” across billboards, a propaganda campaign that’s clear purpose is to aid impeached president Donald Trump’s reelection.

“It's unclear what the billboards will look like and at what cost. If the plan proceeds, it seems intended to single out sanctuary jurisdictions and stoke fear within those communities,” CNN reports. The evil historical connection is very clear however, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted: “A reminder that the Nazis would publish lists of ‘Criminal Jews’ as part of their attempts to smear entire population groups as evil and worthy of state oppression.”

The Trump administration, under the watch of White House aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller, has already ventured into this territory. In the first weeks of the administration, Miller and former Department of Homeland Security Sec. John Kelly rolled out the “VOICE” office, another taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet also intended to demonize undocumented immigrants as dangerous criminals. That too had connections to Nazi tactics.

“This strategy—one designed to single out a particular group of people, suggesting that there's something particularly sinister about how they behave—was employed to great effect by Adolf Hitler and his allies,” Amanda Erickson wrote in The Washington Post in 2017. “To spread these ideas, there were books (like the pamphlet pictured above) and films that portrayed Jews as subhuman.” Reichlin-Melnick shared the pamphlet referenced by Erickson: 

For the millionth time, data has thoroughly debunked the administration’s racist nonsense about immigrants and criminality: immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born Americans to commit crime. “In fact, data shows that immigration is associated with lower crime rates,” Immigration Impact said in 2016. I mean, if Trump were this terrified about undocumented immigrants, he wouldn’t have them working as his personal housekeepers at his golf resorts.

There are few other details about ICE’s reported plan, which comes as the Trump administration is also reportedly preparing to launch raids terrorizing immigrant communities in a number of blue areas across the nation. Like these proposed billboards and the VOICE office, it’s a plainly political move that the administration is fully admitting to: “[t]wo officials with knowledge of plans for the sanctuary op described it as more of a political messaging campaign than a major ICE operation,” The Washington Post reported.

The news also comes as ICE marks its deadliest year since 2005. CNN reported that 21 immigrants died while in the custody of the out-of-control agency during the 2020 fiscal year, more than one-third of them after testing positive for COVID-19. “But advocates said the novel coronavirus isn't the only factor to blame for the growing number of deaths in ICE custody,” CNN continued. It’s also ICE’s intentional negligence that’s led to completely preventable in-custody deaths. But we’re guessing those responsible for deaths under their watch won’t get their photos plastered anywhere.

Even for the greatest scammer of all, this scam might finally fail.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee nomination hearing on May 5, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images

Definitely maybe.

It sure looks like the guy who’s in charge of the entire US intelligence community is selectively declassifying unverified intelligence to make Democrats look bad ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Even worse: The intelligence, at least in the minds of some critics, may actually be Russian disinformation.

In a letter sent on Tuesday to Sen. Lindsey Graham, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe — a former Republican congressman from Texas and a staunch ally of the president — declassified information relating to the FBI’s probe into possible collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Here’s the core of the disclosure:

In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.

Let’s be clear about what this says: America obtained information that Russian spies believed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign fabricated ties between Trump and the Kremlin, but the US intelligence community couldn’t confirm whether that was true because Moscow may have just made it up.

In other words, Ratcliffe acknowledged he released material that would likely be harmful to Clinton and the Democrats — and helpful to Trump — without knowing its veracity.

But it gets worse: Recent news reports have revealed that Ratcliffe declassified the intelligence against the advice of nonpolitical, career US intelligence officials who feared his doing so “would give credibility to Kremlin-backed material,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

As DNI, Ratcliffe doesn’t have to listen to his subordinates, of course. But the reporting further suggests that Ratcliffe, who fiercely defended Trump during the impeachment hearings as a then-member of Congress, prioritized Trump’s political interests over the interests of, well, the entire country.

The letter went public mere hours before Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden squared off in the first 2020 presidential debate. And, intentionally or not, the disclosure had an immediate impact: During the debate, the president mentioned what Ratcliffe released. “You saw what happened today with Hillary Clinton, where it was a whole big con job,” he said.

All of this is deeply troubling and threatens to politicize the intelligence community at a time when untainted, clear information is at a premium. “He has declassified information for patently partisan reasons, and he has done so in an underhanded manner,” said John Sipher, who ran the CIA’s Russia operations during a 28-year career in the agency’s National Clandestine Service.

In one fell swoop, then, Ratcliffe may have tainted the reputation America’s spy agencies try so hard to build. “The damage to US intelligence will be difficult to undo for years,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, DC.

“Among the worst sins of a professional intelligence officer”

Perceptions of the intelligence community as a whole are positive only when it’s seen as an apolitical entity offering unbiased, fact-based information to policymakers.

That information is typically presented only when America’s intelligence agencies have verified and placed it within a broader context to help government officials — from the president on down — make informed decisions.

Trump’s intelligence chief, who took the job after the impeachment hearings, broke that cardinal rule.

“Ratcliffe’s actions are among the worst sins of a professional intelligence officer,” Sipher told me. “They know that a single piece of information is meaningless without having the necessary context. To release one piece of information without providing context is unprofessional and damages the reputation of our intelligence community.”

To understand why that’s the case, it’s apt to use the metaphor of a puzzle here.

It’s hard to see the full picture by looking at just one of thousands of puzzle pieces. Once they’re mostly in place, the final image becomes clear and evident to all. The same, roughly speaking, goes for intelligence. One piece is good, but more pieces are better. And if spies can show a policymaker the entirety of the puzzle image, it’s easier for them to make informed decisions.

That’s why many experts were surprised by Ratcliffe’s decision. It’s the job of intelligence officials to present as full a picture as possible to their intended customers, not just hand over a single piece and say, “Here you go, make of it what you will.”

Let’s go a step further: What if that singular puzzle piece isn’t from the set at all? What if someone purposefully slipped in a piece that looks like it fits but doesn’t? Well, the earlier that piece can be discounted and discarded as not being part of the actual puzzle you’re trying to put together, the better.

That’s what Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee did. The Clinton-related nugget Ratcliffe declassified didn’t feature at all in the panel’s five-part report on how Russia interfered in the 2016 election. That’s not to say the committee was unaware of the tidbit or dismissed it entirely, but it clearly didn’t fit into the overall picture.

This is partly why the administration’s critics immediately seized on Ratcliffe’s decision.

“It’s very disturbing to me that 35 days before an election, a director of national intelligence would release unverified” information coming from Russia, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the New York Times.

After all, it’s entirely possible Russia wanted the US to “find” that puzzle piece to mislead American spies. Russian hackers aimed to sow discord in the US during the 2016 election, and few things would ratchet up tensions more than having the government believe Clinton created an explosive conspiracy theory to beat Trump.

Ratcliffe defended his decision hours after releasing the letter, saying in a statement the intelligence he declassified “is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by the intelligence community.” He then provided a briefing on the sources behind the snippet just for Graham — and no Democrats — on Tuesday night, the Times reported.

Even if Ratcliffe is telling the truth about the intelligence, declassifying it obscured more than illuminated and clearly provided Trump and his allies a weapon ahead of the biggest event in the 2020 election season so far. And he did so even as multiple US agencies say Russia is once again interfering to aid the president’s reelection chances.

That’s not the work of an impartial intelligence chief. That’s the work of a crony.

---

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

Kayleigh McEnany began Thursday’s press briefing by lying. She gave a biography of Trump’s religious zealot nominee for the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, in which she explained that Barrett “also is a Rhodes scholar.” She wasn’t. She isn’t. She will never be one. It’s a strange boast, but that comes with the general lack of thoroughness and sloppy lying that has been the trademark of this administration. When McEnany was told that Barrett had received a BA from Rhodes College in Tennessee, and she was not a “Rhodes scholar,” McEnany said: “My bad,” and “that’s what I have here.” Such a lazy bit of lying. The two things are only connected by the word “Rhodes.”

Anyway, that was the least of the bonkers things coming from the Trump administration’s sociopathic-seeming mouthpiece on Thursday. It was one of quite a few moments that left all of us watching while slowly and sadly shaking our heads.

Remember how during the debate, Donald Trump said some strange thing about mail-in ballots being found in “wastepaper” baskets and “thrown in a river?” Yeah, that was weird. Want to see something just as weird? Here’s McEnany using a phrase we will hear time and time again from this administration: “forest from the trees.” The highlight of the below exchange is McEnany saying that the press has no “journalistic curiosity” about the very thing Fox News’ Jon Decker is asking her about, and she is not answering.

The origin of this bit of b.s. is a “highly unusual” announcement by United States Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania David Freed, a Republican, that he was opening an investigation into nine military absentee ballots with “potential issues” in Pennsylvania that were maybe discarded.

Then there was Fox News reporter John Roberts asking whether or not McEnany would “denounce,” on behalf of Trump, white supremacy. Enjoy the fireworks.

That led to Roberts reporting back to his outlet in such frustration that his Fox News colleague was sort of speechless.

Then there was McEnany’s responses to why Trump was insisting, over the protests of state and local health officials, on holding rallies in Wisconsin. “People can choose whether or not to come.” Just an aside: This is what con men say when they are busted for conning people.

And the banality of evil present in this clip about Barrett’s education, you know: “Rhodes scholar,” “Rhodes College”—you say tomato, I say potato, pajamas ...

When CNN followed up with questions about Trump’s gross “stand by” statement about the Proud Boys, McEnany attempted to attack CNN for being fake news, at which point the reporter asking the question pointed out that answering this question is very specifically the No. 1 job McEnany has.