James.galbraith

The Trump administration has moved or promoted at least 11 white men to senior positions at the Pentagon in the past three months, even as Defense Secretary Mark Esper has pledged to increase diversity at the department.

Since the George Floyd protests in early June brought the issue of race and police brutality to the forefront, Esper has initiated a series of efforts designed to increase diversity and inclusion in the Pentagon, including banning the use of photos in promotion review boards, effectively banning the Confederate flag on military installations, and convening an internal board and an external advisory committee on the issue.

Yet on Esper’s watch, the White House continues to install loyalists who are overwhelmingly white and male in senior Pentagon positions, as Trump and his team continue their post-impeachment campaign to root out people deemed disloyal to the president.

Ted Johnson, a speechwriter for the Joint Chiefs from 2014 to 2016 and retired Navy commander, criticized the lack of diversity in the Trump administration broadly, noting that “the rhetoric that often accompanies the conversation around this administration makes it clear that if you are a minority serving in it, you're going to have to contend with a level of discomfort that you would not have had to face in a previous administration.”

The Pentagon declined multiple requests to provide a breakdown of its senior civilian ranks by race, but publicly available data reveals a department run overwhelmingly by white men. Esper and his deputy, David Norquist, are white. Six out of seven members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are white men; new Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown is only the second Black man ever to serve on the Joint Chiefs.

The lower ranks of DoD senior leadership are only slightly more diverse. Out of six undersecretaries of defense, all are white and five are male. Out of 60 presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed positions, all but three are men. By comparison, at the end of the Obama administration in 2016, 11 were women.

At the Pentagon’s policy shop, nearly all the top positions are filled by men, including all five assistant secretaries of defense, four out of five principal deputies, and 19 out of 22 deputies, and all but two are white. At the end of the Obama administration, nine positions in the policy shop were held by women.

When it comes to national security, diversity of thought is particularly crucial, said Aaron Hughes, who served as the deputy assistant for cyber policy at DoD until 2017.

“If we have just a homogeneous population that thinks one way, that's just putting us to [a] disadvantage when it comes to understanding world dynamics,” he said.

“Actions speak louder than words,” said Risa Brooks, a professor of political science at Marquette University who specializes in civil-military relations, of Esper’s promise to increase diversity at the Pentagon. “Is this just hand-waving?”

Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell said while the Pentagon is “proud to be well-regarded as the largest, most diverse meritocracy in the world,” the department recognizes that there is still “work to be done on diversity and inclusion.”

In keeping with Esper’s diversity push, the policy shop has recently launched initiatives aimed at recruiting a more diverse group of junior and mid-level career employees, including outreach to historically black academic institutions, and is also creating a diversity council, Campbell said.

“As we continue to build on our efforts to cultivate a diverse and inclusive workforce for all who serve, we will draw upon the widest possible set of backgrounds, talents, and skills to increase the overall readiness and effectiveness of the department,” Campbell said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Both the Obama and Trump administrations struggled when it comes to the overall workforce for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In September 2019, the last time the Office of Personnel Management published data on the subject, 360 of the 1,842 OSD employees were minorities. The breakdown was similar in the Obama administration: In September 2016, 383 employees were minorities out of 2,032 total employees.

Aside from the diversity issue, experts say that such a high number of senior DoD appointments is unusual for the end of a presidential term, which is a natural point for officials to leave the government to seek new opportunities or in expectation of a transition.

At this point in a presidential term, “the flow is usually out, not in,” said Jim Townsend, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy from 2009 to 2017.

“By now, no matter what the odds are whether they win or lose, people who have been there for a while, this is when they start to leave,” Townsend said.

But the Trump White House has never held back in breaking from precedent. Officials are “confident for a second term,” and seizing the opportunity to install a new operation at the Pentagon, said one defense official, who requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive personnel moves. Out of the 11 recent appointees, six are acting in a temporary capacity.

Installing loyalists at DoD and other U.S. government agencies is nothing new for the Trump administration. Early this year, the White House began a campaign to root out Pentagon employees seen as disloyal and replace them with Trump acolytes. The administration has effectively skirted the Senate confirmation process by sending over people to fill open spots in an acting capacity, as opposed to the more traditional method of tapping people within the Pentagon.

Experts and Democratic lawmakers alike have blasted the campaign. A climate that values loyalty over expertise, they say, makes it harder to recruit the best people for the job, and undermines the military’s efforts to stay above politics.

In recent weeks, the White House has moved five officials from the White House to senior positions at DoD: Michael Cutrone, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence, recently took charge of international security policy; Michael Kratsios, the 33-year-old White House chief technology officer, now oversees DoD’s research arm; Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an aide to former national security adviser Michael Flynn, is now responsible for special operations and low-intensity conflict; Joseph Francescon, who worked on counterterrorism and threat networks at the NSC until June, is now a deputy in the special operations shop; and Thomas Williams returned in mid-June from a two-year stint on the NSC to a position working on strategies, plans and capabilities for DoD.

Meanwhile, Donald Loren moved over from the Department of Veterans Affairs in July to start a position as the deputy for plans.

In the group’s most notable appointment, in August, retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata was designated as the official “performing the duties of” the No. 2 policy official after his nomination to run the policy shop was upended amid opposition from the Senate. Tata, an author and TV commentator who has frequently defended Trump’s policies, has come under fire in recent months for derogatory statements about Muslims and prominent Democratic politicians.

The department has also promoted several officials internally in recent weeks: Matt Bush was appointed as Francescon’s principal director on Aug. 9; Joe McMenamin is now the acting deputy for counternarcotics and global threats; Dennis Bartow, who previously worked on small business programs in DoD, began a position as deputy for African affairs on Sept. 8; and Justin Johnson, formerly Esper’s deputy chief of staff, was recently appointed acting deputy in charge of space policy.

Last week, Trump nominated two more white men to top positions: Matthew Shipley, currently a deputy at DoD and former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz, to be in charge of readiness; and retired Rear Adm. Jon Kreitz, most recently the deputy director for operations of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs. Both must still be confirmed by the Senate.

Brooks urged Esper to push back on the appointments of white men to senior positions at DoD, noting “his role as a civilian is to look out for the interests of the department and he is not safeguarding those interests.”

“Institutions don’t change unless there is somebody really advocating for it and there doesn’t seem to be any interest on the White House’s part to encourage diversity,” Brooks said.

Pro-Trump Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has been under fire for hobbling the US Postal Service ahead of the November election, apparently bought his position.

RELATED: Top GOP Lawmakers Who Received Donations from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Have Been Silent on US Postal Service Sabotage

Bloomberg reports: “DeJoy, who now holds the position, gave President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee more than $600,000 over eight weeks after the opening was announced, Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, which investigates the influence of money on public policy, said in written testimony submitted to a panel of the House Oversight Committee in advance of a hearing Monday. In the 2019-2020 cycle, DeJoy has given more than $1.5 million to GOP candidates and campaigns, the bulk of which has gone to aid Trump’s 2020 election strategy, Graves said. The sum includes nearly $80,000 to aid GOP Senate races since last December, when the former Postmaster General announced she would resign.”

RELATED: GOP-Majority USPS Board Says it is ‘Thrilled’ with Louis DeJoy’s Performance as News Emerges That 711 Sorting Machines Were Decommissioned

More from Yahoo News: “Over the weekend, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold sued DeJoy for intending to send a mailer that could foster confusion over how to properly vote by mail in that state. The mailer ‘provides false statements about voting in Colorado,’ the lawsuit charges, and “will disenfranchise Colorado voters.” On Monday, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in the wake of a Washington Post report that described how DeJoy reimbursed employees at his company, New Breed, for making political donations to Republicans.”

The post Louis DeJoy Gave $600K to Trump and GOP After Postmaster Job Was Announced appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

President Donald Trump looks on as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a rally in November 2019. | Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Republicans won two important court victories that could potentially shape the outcome of this year’s elections.

We are now less than two months from Election Day, and the next several weeks are likely to bring a rush of court decisions determining who is actually able to vote.

Both sides are gearing up for litigation. Last May, Republicans announced they have a $20 million legal war chest. Democrats have assembled a small army of hundreds of lawyers — including two former US solicitors general and a former US attorney general — hoping to counter the GOP’s legal team in fights over how ballots will be cast and who will be counted.

If last week is any indication, the right to vote is unlikely to fare well in a judiciary that is increasingly dominated by Republicans: Voting rights cases out of Florida and Texas handed important victories to the GOP. At least one of those victories is likely to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters altogether. (In Wisconsin, Democrats fared better this week in a ballot-printing case.)

The Florida case involves a long-standing dispute over individuals with felony convictions. In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment intended to restore felons’ voting rights. But the state’s Republican-controlled legislature almost immediately enacted legislation seeking to prevent most of these individuals from actually being able to vote.

On Friday, in a party-line vote on Jones v. Governor of Florida, the Republican-controlled United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit backed the state legislature’s play — effectively disenfranchising most of the people Floridians voted to reinfranchise.

One day earlier, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit handed down its decision in Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott. That case involves an unusual Texas law that allows voters over the age of 65 to obtain an absentee ballot upon request — thus avoid voting in-person in the middle of a pandemic — but prevents most younger voters from voting absentee.

This kind of age discrimination is highly dubious under the 26th Amendment, which provides that “the right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.” Nevertheless, a majority of the Fifth Circuit panel upheld Texas’s law in Texas Democratic Party.

The Florida case

Jones involves a 2018 state constitutional amendment intended to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions. Prior to that amendment, Florida residents with felony convictions effectively had to beg the state governor to restore their right to vote.

But the 2018 amendment was poorly drafted. It provides that “any disqualification from voting arising from a felony conviction shall terminate and voting rights shall be restored upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.” Shortly after it took effect, the GOP-controlled state legislature enacted a law interpreting the words “upon completion of all terms of sentence” to require payment of all fines, fees, or costs contained in the original sentencing document.

As an expert witness explained during the trial phase of the Jones case, of the more than 1 million people who would otherwise have their rights restored due to the 2018 amendment, 77.4 percent owe at least some money. Many of these individuals are indigent and cannot afford to pay these costs.

Worse, the state’s record-keeping system for these fines and fees is so disorganized that many individuals who can afford to pay can’t even figure out how much money they owe.

Often, the only record of how much money an individual owes the state is the original sentencing document from a trial that may have occurred decades ago. Many counties charge a fee for a copy of this judgment, thus forcing individuals to pay a fee just to learn how much money they owe. And some of these documents are so old that they’ve been lost — meaning that it may be impossible for some people with felony convictions to discover how much money they owe.

Meanwhile, even if an individual is able to obtain a copy of the judgment against them, it’s often unclear which fees they must pay in order to regain their voting rights. A Florida resident convicted of one felony and two misdemeanors, for example, might receive a judgment informing them that they owe $5,000 in fines for all three offenses combined. But, because the judgment does not itemize which portion of this $5,000 arises from the felony, they cannot know how much of it they must pay in order to restore their rights.

And then there are problems within the state’s own accounting system. As Judge Adalberto Jordan explains in a dissenting opinion in Jones, “Florida has no record of restitution payments at all, except in the smaller number of cases when restitution is payable to or through the Clerk of Courts or the Department of Corrections” (“restitution” means payments directly to the victim of a crime). Thus, many individuals who have already paid restitution have no way to confirm that they’ve done so.

The state, meanwhile, is supposed to have a process that screens individuals with felony convictions and tells them whether they’ve met their obligations, but that process is so slow that it’s practically nonexistent. As Judge Jordan writes, the state “has processed 0 out of 85,000 pending registrations of felons (that’s not a misprint—it really is 0), and has come up with conflicting (and uncodified) methods for determining how ... payments by felons should be credited.”

Given these facts, Florida residents who are unable to even determine how much they owe presented a very strong argument that they were denied constitutionally required due process. As the Supreme Court held in Chicago v. Morales (1999), a criminal law may be unconstitutionally vague for two reasons. It “may fail to provide the kind of notice that will enable ordinary people to understand what conduct it prohibits” or it “may authorize and even encourage arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.”

A law that forces voters to guess whether they have complied with the law — and then potentially subjects those voters to criminal penalties if they guess wrong — rather obviously is likely to lead to arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement. How is a voter supposed to defend themselves if a prosecutor accuses them of voting illegally when no one knows if that voter has met their legal obligations in the first place?

Nevertheless, the 11th Circuit’s Republican majority, in an opinion by Judge William Pryor, held that Florida’s law is not unconstitutionally vague. The plaintiffs’ concerns, Pryor wrote, “arise not from a vague law but from factual circumstances that sometimes make it difficult to determine whether an incriminating fact exists.”

And that, according to Pryor and the five Trump appointees who joined his opinion, is sufficient reason to disenfranchise a huge swath of Florida voters. The 85,000 new voters who’ve already registered are likely to be reluctant to cast a ballot for fear they may be prosecuted later for failing to pay a hidden fee. And many thousands of other voters likely haven’t even bothered to register due to uncertainty about whether they may lawfully vote.

The Texas case

Most states permit all lawful voters to obtain an absentee ballot. Texas is one of a handful of outlier states that only allows people to vote absentee if they provide a valid “excuse,” such as a claim that they will be away from their home county on Election Day.

In Texas, any voter over the age of 65 has a valid “excuse” permitting them to vote absentee, but most younger voters must vote in person. Texas Democratic Party challenges this age discrimination, citing the 26th Amendment’s statement that the right of citizens over the age of 18 “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.”

A majority of the Fifth Circuit panel rejected this argument — somewhat surprisingly in an opinion joined by Judge Carolyn Dineen King, a left-leaning Carter appointee.

The majority opinion in Texas Democratic Party focuses largely on the two verbs in the 26th Amendment’s text — “denied” and “abridged.” Texas’s law does not “deny” voting rights to younger voters because they still have the option of voting in person. More controversially, the majority defines the word “abridged” very narrowly.

“We hold that an election law abridges a person’s right to vote for the purposes of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment only if it makes voting more difficult for that person than it was before the law was enacted or enforced,” Judge Leslie Southwick writes for the Fifth Circuit.

The upshot of this holding is that Texas’s discriminatory law is constitutional because it did not take anything away from younger voters. Prior to 1975, the state treated older and younger voters the same. In that year, the state enacted a law allowing voters over the age of 65 to vote absentee, while leaving younger voters in the same position they were in before.

Such a move, according to the Fifth Circuit, is fine. The decision in Texas Democratic Party effectively holds that age discrimination is acceptable under the 26th Amendment, just so long as a state doesn’t enact a law that makes younger voters worse off than they were before the law was enacted.

The partisan implications of this decision could be profound. In recent elections, older voters have tended to prefer Republicans to Democrats — although recent polls show Democrat Joe Biden performing well among older voters. If past trends hold, however, a law making it easier for older voters to cast their ballots is likely to benefit Republicans.

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Actor Chris Evans broke his silence late Monday after accidentally sharing a photo of his or someone else’s dick in a video on Instagram. The photo caused Evans to trend for several days on Twitter.

Evans’ first statement on the topic, accompanied by a facepalm emoji: “Now that I have your attention. VOTE Nov 3rd!!!”

Now that I have your attention
….

VOTE Nov 3rd!!!

— Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) September 15, 2020

Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred alongside Evans in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, clapped back, “My boy! Proud of him. Got MY attention!”

My boy! Proud of him. Got MY attention!

— Jamie Lee Curtis (@jamieleecurtis) September 15, 2020

The post Chris Evans Breaks Silence After Leaking D Pic on Instagram appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Donald Trump sat down with officials in McClellan Park, California for a briefing on the wildfires that are devastating the state on Monday, and pushed back when Wade Crowfoot, secretary of California’s Natural Resources Agency, told him the science needed to be looked at.

“We want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests. And actually work together with that science. If we ignore that science and really put our head in the sand and think it’s just about vegetation management we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.

Trump didn’t like that.

“It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch,” he replied.

“I wish science agreed with you,” Crowfoot replied.

“I don’t think science knows actually,” Trump replied.

Trump had blamed the wildfires on “explosive trees.”

The post Trump Denies Climate Change in Sharp Exchange with California Official at Wildfire Briefing: ‘I Don’t Think Science Knows’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

It turns out Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been scamming the United States Postal Service for decades, almost making it seem like sabotaging the institution has become his life's work. A 20-year-old audit of contracts for mail equipment transport unearthed by NBC News shows that his old company was awarded multiple contracts in noncompetitive bids. Those contracts cost taxpayers as much as $53 million more than would have been paid out if the contracts had been bid competitively.

DeJoy's New Breed Logistics, which was bought out by XPO Logistics in 2015, had contracts going back to 1992. DeJoy had a friend on the inside, apparently, who arranged the noncompetitive contracts which "did not fully meet Postal Service requirements" and "potentially exposed the Postal Service to cost and performance risks," according to the audit. Since the contracts were awarded outside of a bidding process, it raises questions about whether DeJoy was overbilling the USPS, gouging taxpayers. It also adds more questions about the background and qualifications of DeJoy himself, who is now under scrutiny not just for the operational changes he's made to the USPS which resulted in massive mail delays during the summer, but for alleged campaign finance violations at those same companies when he became a major Republican donor.

DeJoy didn't respond to the story, but a spokesperson released a statement saying, "There was no finding in the review that the company did not fulfill the terms and conditions of the contract." Whether the company fulfilled the contract seemed not to have been the point of the review; rather, it was how DeJoy got the gigs for his company without having to compete for them. "It's puzzling why it was not referred for investigation," said former Postal Service Inspector General Dave Williams, who served from 2003 to 2016. Yes. It is. Williams served on the USPS board of governors from 2018 until May of this year, when he quit just before DeJoy was appointed. He's been critical of DeJoy, questioning his qualifications (he has never served within the USPS) and the changes in service he's made.

Williams says that this audit underscores the problems with DeJoy's appointment and one of the reasons he quit: The board of governors didn't conduct a full background check of Joy when he was nominated. "I don't understand how an offer could have been extended before a background check was completed," Williams said. William J. Henderson, who was postmaster general during the timeframe of the audit, told NBC News he didn't recall having seen this specific audit. "We had tons of logistics partners while I was in the Postal Service, and I really didn't get into selecting particular partners or reviewing those sorts of things since they were done by purchasing."

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, questioned DeJoy about the lack of a background check in last month's hearing. "One of the reasons that we have background checks," he said, "is that we identify patterns of misconduct or potential conflicts of interest that are out there." DeJoy responded, "Sir, I have no patterns of misconduct." There are now two good rebuttals to that assertion: the campaign finance illegality alleged by DeJoy's former employees, and this audit.

Joe Biden continues to lead among Latinos in the battleground of Arizona. But Donald Trump is showing signs of marginal support with younger Latinos, specifically men, a new poll finds.

Biden received 62 percent of Latino support compared with Trump’s 29 percent — 1 percentage point ahead of Hillary Clinton’s showing in 2016 exit polls with the voting bloc — according to a poll conducted for Equis Research, a Democratic Latino research firm.

Biden leads among Latinos of all ages, but where Trump has made the most inroads is with young Latino men, receiving 42 percent. By comparison, Biden tops Trump with young Latinas 69-16 percent, older Latinas 67-25 percent and older men 64-34 percent. A total of 64 percent of Latinos in the state disapprove of Trump.

Arizona’s growing Latino population, which is overwhelmingly of Mexican descent, is a key reason the state could swing to Democrats in the presidential race for the first time since 1996. Shifting attitudes of white college-educated voters in the suburbs of Maricopa County, and Trump himself, have also contributed to the state’s changing political landscape.

“There's room for Joe Biden to grow his support among Latinos in Arizona in this last 50 days,” said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of Equis Research, which hired GBAO Strategies to conduct the poll. “There's a lot of room for him to continue to make his case to these younger Hispanic men who may be intrigued by Trump but aren't totally sold on voting for him yet.”

Trump's support increased by 8 points among Latinos in Arizona compared with the president’s 2019 average in four waves of Equis polling. After weekend events in Nevada, Trump held a Latino roundtable in Phoenix on Monday.

Valencia attributed the shift to “Trump intrigue” around the president’s business personality. Latino men under the age of 50 represented the greatest statistical bump for Trump since an Equis’ poll from May. The boost for Trump among young Latino men could be a product of a smaller subsample, Valencia said. But even if the true change were half the size, she said, “we would come to the same conclusion: young men have been increasingly moving toward Trump.”

“While more than 40 percent say they are supporting Trump today,” Valencia added. “Only 26 percent rate themselves very likely to support him at the end of the day.”

As the election nears, Biden’s campaign has rushed to shore up more Latino support, particularly in the battleground of Florida where he appears to be underperforming Clinton among Latinos in the state. Biden is heading to Florida on Tuesday for a Hispanic heritage event and a veterans' roundtable.

In Arizona, Biden’s team is aiming to win at least 70 percent of the Latino vote — the same share of Latinos Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won in her 2018 race when she became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Arizona since the 1980s. Latinos will be one of the crucial blocs to determine who wins the pivotal Maricopa County and can help in the Democratic-leaning Pima County.

“The path to victory here in Arizona, and in some other states, runs through the Latino community,” Jessica Mejía, Biden’s Arizona state director, told POLITICO earlier this month.

Arizona Latinos preferred Biden on every issue polled, leading Trump by 44 points on who voters thought would best handle health care issues. When asked who would do a better job of handling the coronavirus, 67 percent of voters preferred Biden, compared with 25 percent for Trump. On immigration, Biden led 67-27 percent. He also led on the economy, with 57 percent compared with Trump's 35 percent.

Valencia said that when Latinos are given more details about Biden's platform, his favorability rises because the former vice president is still undefined among the group. The poll also found that Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly, who has steadily led Republican Sen. Martha McSally in polls, is outperforming Biden with Latinos in the state.

Arizona Latinos favor Kelly over McSally 65 percent to 27 percent. The poll surveyed 600 registered Latino voters in English and Spanish across Arizona from Aug. 20-Sept. 2, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

Seventy-one percent of Latinos in Arizona said they’re “very motivated” to vote.

Biden’s statewide lead in Arizona, where he is ahead of Trump by an average of 5 points, is also boosted by his numbers with white voters. Biden is ahead of Trump by 22 points with white college-educated voters in the state, according to a monthly tracking poll by Phoenix-based OH Predictive Insights. Trump won that same group by 6 points in 2016. The shift among college-educated white voters has materialized in the suburbs of other battlegrounds as well. But Valencia cautioned Democrats against overconfidence in the Grand Canyon State.

"If the election were held today, Biden would probably win in a place like Arizona based on where he's sitting with white support,” she said. Still, Valencia said, Biden faces a challenge if there's any fluctuation in white voter support — even if it's just a couple of points.

"If Democrats have not done the work to increase support among Latinos to close that gap then that is when there will be trouble," Valencia said.

A digital ad released by a fundraising arm of the Trump campaign on Sept. 11 calling on people to “support our troops” uses a stock photo of Russian-made fighter jets and Russian models dressed as soldiers.

The ad, which was made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, features silhouettes of three soldiers walking as a fighter jet flies over them. The ad first appeared on Sept. 8 and ran until Sept. 12.

“That’s definitely a MiG-29,” said Pierre Sprey, who helped design both the F-16 and A-10 planes for the U.S. Air Force. “I’m glad to see it’s supporting our troops.”

He noted the angle of the aircraft’s tail, the way the tail is swept far back, and the spacing of the engines, along with the tunnel between them.

Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, confirmed that the planes are Russian MiG-29s, and also said the soldier on the far right in the ad carries an AK-74 assault rifle.

The Trump Make America Great Again Committee is run by both the Republican National Committee and the campaign. Most of the low-dollar and digital donations raised by the committee goes to the campaign.

The image in the ad is a stock photo available on Shutterstock.com with the title “Military silhouettes of soldiers and airforce against the backdrop of sunset sky.” The creator of the image, named “BPTU,” says they are based in Andorra, but did not respond to a Facebook message.

After this story was published, the creator of the image, Arthur Zakirov, confirmed in a Facebook message that it shows a 3D model of a MiG-29, and that the soldiers were Russian models. He said it was a composite photo created five years ago and taken in three different countries showing Russian sky, Greek mountains and French ground.

“This is a completely recreated scene from various photographs of mine,” said Zakirov, a 34-year-old oil company analyst and hobbyist photographer based in the Russian city of Perm, about 700 miles east of Moscow.

“Today you hear about the Kremlin’s hand in U.S. politics. Tomorrow you are this hand,” he joked, saying he found the fact that his photo ended up in a Trump fundraising ad “pretty funny.”

“Everything happened through inattention,” he said, adding that the campaign had “bad fact-checking.”

The MiG-29, a twin-engine fighter jet designed in the Soviet Union that first flew in 1977, is the Russians’ mainstay fighter jet and has been sold all over the world. It was developed during the Cold War specifically to counter American F-15 and F-16s, and the U.S. even obtained a few to play the adversary in war games. The planes have recently been spotted at a Russian air base in Syria and also Libya.

Russia has also exported them to a number of countries, including North Korea, Syria, India and Uzbekistan. Iran also acquired 68 of the MiG-29s at the end of the Soviet Union. In 1997, the U.S. even bought 21 “nuclear-capable” MiG-29 planes from Moldova to keep them from getting in the hands of adversaries such as Iran.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. The RNC declined to comment.

Politicians have gotten in trouble in the past for running ads or creating content that featured Russian or other countries’ military equipment. Last October, Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) tweeted a picture of the Russian battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy with the comment: “Happy birthday to the US Navy. To the men and women who serve to keep our waters safe, we thank you.” His office later took the tweet down.

Marc Caputo contributed to this report.

As colleges across the country open only to close amid the novel coronavirus pandemic due to outbreaks on campus, schools nationwide are blaming students for being irresponsible. The actions of some students who are not taking the virus seriously have affected students across the country. At the Miami University in Ohio, more than 1,000 students have tested positive for COVID-19 since August; despite this, a group of students was caught partying over Labor Day weekend on Sept. 5. A majority of those partying, including the hosts, had tested positive for coronavirus and were violating quarantine rules, CBS News reported.

Officers came to know this after running a student’s ID and noting the student had tested positive for COVID-19 one week earlier. “But you have other people here, and you’re positive for COVID? You see the problem?” the officer said. When asked how many others had COVID-19, the student replied, “they all do,” according to bodycam footage. Police fined six men, five who lived in the house and one visitor, $500 each, a civil penalty with no criminal charges. According to the student in conversation with the officer, everyone at the party “has COVID, as do the students who live across the street.” The student apparently did not understand that partying with people who also had COVID was against quarantine efforts.

"This particular case is egregious, but I think for the most part, by in large, the students have been very well behaved," Lt. Lara Fening from the Oxford Police Department told CBS News affiliate WKRC. "Some residents came over from across the street that were reportedly COVID-positive as well," Fening said. "We do not know if anybody else at that party was aware of the COVID-positive residents because some of them left while the officer was there." Fening suggested that anyone who attended the party should get tested.

Police from the Oxford Police Department arrived at the scene to break up the party that was violating city capacity rules limiting gatherings to no more than 10 people. Several students were reportedly sitting on the porch of the house, unmasked, and drinking. Bodycam footage shows the officer explaining the violation of having 20 people in their home to the students before running an ID.

While the school said it could not comment on the case due to federal privacy laws, it told news outlets that any student in violation of quarantine orders, including hosting large parties, would face disciplinary action under the Code of Student Conduct. "We take these matters most seriously, and students can face suspension or dismissal for these types of violations," a spokesperson for the university told CBS News on Friday.

Despite the number of cases increasing on and off-campus nationwide, the school announced its plans to resume in-person classes beginning Sept. 21 on Tuesday. According to the announcement, in addition to masks being required for all school activities, all students returning to campus must be tested for COVID-19 before moving into dorms. "This decision was made after many lengthy discussions and consultation with public health experts," Miami University President Gregory Crawford said in the announcement. "The health and safety of our students, faculty, and staff, as well as the Oxford community, is our top priority."

According to WCPO, over Labor Day weekend alone the university reported 159 new student cases of COVID-19. Campus parties continue across the country despite reports of coronavirus outbreaks  in more than 30 states across the country. Despite allegedly having a plan for the pandemic in place, large universities have seen an increase in cases since opening with many students partying on and off-campus, The New York Times reported. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a prime example of this with students continuing to party despite a surge in cases. “If you know you are positive and you go to a party, that’s not just a bad act,” Ahmed E. Elbanna, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the university, told the Times. “That’s very, very dangerous.”

While most schools have shifted online or taken to a hybrid model amid the pandemic, some are persistent to continue in-person classes. Since March, colleges nationwide have reported more than 26,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in at least 750 schools, The New York Times reported. Until both schools and students take responsibility and acknowledge the severity of this virus, an increase in cases on campuses is inevitable.

A new whistleblower complaint, which can be read here, has been filed against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency charging "jarring medical neglect" inside the Irwin County Detention Center, in Georgia. The facility is a private prison, run by LaSalle Corrections.

The whistleblower complaint charges facility management with refusing to test detained immigrants for COVID-19 infection, with hiding COVID-19 infections from detainees and from staff, and with other patterns of neglect, but the most shocking claim is of "high rates" of medical sterilizations of detained women. According to the complaint, ICDC nurses report "high rates of hysterectomies done to immigrant women," from "a particular gynecologist outside the facility."

From a nurse and whistleblower at the facility: "Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody. [...] We've questioned among ourselves like goodness he's taking everybody's stuff out. ... That's his specialty, he's the uterus collector. [...] Everybody he sees, he's taking all their uteruses out or he's taken their tubes out. What in the world."

The complaint charges that the immigrant women are not fully informed of the procedures before they are performed, with non-Spanish speaking staff "googling Spanish" to try to convey what will be done or giving conflicting justifications for it. One detainee was reportedly given three separate, conflicting explanations for what procedure was to be done, from draining a cyst to "scraping tissue" to falsely claiming the woman was suffering from "heavy bleeding"—though the women herself told them she was not.

The reasons for the "high rates" of hysterectomies are not speculated on, but the sterilization of prisoners without their informed consent has a notorious history, both in this nation and in others. Whether the procedures are being done through faulty or "neglectful" diagnosis, or in an attempt to inflate medical billing, or for racial motives is not known.

The whistleblower complaint was filed with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General by Project South and other civil rights organizations. The complaint also notes that another LaSalle Corrections facility, the Richwood Correctional Center, was previously accused of similar neglect of COVID-19 safety practices, and urges a "prompt and thorough investigation into these practices" at "all other LaSalle operated facilities as these complaints suggest a more systemic problem."

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Trump speaks in Henderson, Nevada, on Sunday. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images

He’s not waiting for the facts to come in.

President Donald Trump is campaigning on “law and order,” but a string of comments he made over the weekend showed how he’s steering the country toward violent lawlessness.

During an interview with Jeanine Pirro that aired on Fox News Saturday evening and then during political rallies he held in Nevada on Saturday and Sunday, Trump lauded law enforcement officials for killing antifa supporter Michael Reinoehl. Reinoehl was wanted on suspicion of killing a supporter of a right-wing group called Patriot Prayer named Aaron Danielson during confrontations between a caravan of Trump supporters and counterprotesters in Portland, Oregon, on August 28.

Officers said Reinoehl pulled a gun on them before his fatal September 3 shooting in Lacey, Washington, and two witnesses told the Olympian they saw Reinoehl fire a weapon at officers. But one witness told the Oregonian that officers opened fire unprompted. (US marshals were present during the raid that killed Reinoehl, but local officials reportedly fired the fatal shots.)

“Officers shot multiple rapid-fire rounds at Reinoehl before issuing a brief ‘stop’ command, quickly followed by more rapid-fire shooting by additional officers,” the eyewitness, an ordained minister named Nathaniel Dingess, said, according to a statement released by his lawyer.

While public knowledge about the circumstances surrounding Reinoehl’s death remains scant, if officers shot Reinoehl without justification, it’d be tantamount to murder. But Trump made abundantly clear that he’s not waiting for the facts to come in before he draws conclusions.

“Now we sent in the US marshals for the killer, the man that killed the young man in the street,” Trump told Judge Jeanine. “Two and a half days went by, and I put out [on Twitter], ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the US marshals went in to get in, and in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the US marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”

During his rally on Saturday night in Minden, Nevada, Trump alluded to Reinoehl’s killing and lauded US marshals for doing a “great job,” adding, darkly, “you know what I mean.”

Then, on Sunday night in Henderson, Trump brought up the incident again and said, “as you know, in Portland the other day, we had to send in the US Marshals. A man, who’s a bad guy, bad guy, shot somebody right in the middle of the street, who they say was a very fine young man. Shot him, killed him. Just shot him like, it was on television. Two and a half days, nothing happened, I said, ‘What’s going on?’ We sent in the US marshals, it was taken care of in 15 minutes, okay?”

It’s bad enough that the president is more or less endorsing extrajudicial killings before all the relevant facts are known, and despite an eyewitness saying it was unjustified. But it’s even worse viewed in light of how Trump is politicizing street violence.

What we know about the killing of Michael Reinoehl

Reinoehl was a self-proclaimed “100% antifa” supporter who participated in protests in Portland that started after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops in late May. On August 29, he was involved in a confrontation that ended in Danielson’s death. Police identified him as a suspect using surveillance and social media videos.

Just hours before he was tracked down in Washington state, Reinoehl did an interview with Vice News in which he claimed he shot Danielson in self-defense. But he was charged with second-degree murder and unlawful use of a weapon.

Eyewitnesses agree that about 25 to 50 shots were fired in the moments leading up to Reinoehl being fatally shot. But as mentioned earlier, eyewitness accounts differ. A lawyer representing Dingess, the witness who described Reinoehl’s killing as tantamount to an execution, called for an independent investigation in a statement.

“Given the political sentiment of the deceased, and the national climate regarding police shootings, the investigation ought to be handled by an outside organization without ties to law enforcement, if it can really be considered fair and neutral,” the lawyer, Luke Laughlin, said. “The law requires, and Reinoehl’s family and the public deserve, transparency and accountability. At a time when public outcry over police killings is at its peak in this country, it is imperative that the circumstances of Reinoehl’s death not be swept aside.”

The “law and order” guy is actually lawless

Trump’s comments suggesting that Reinoehl’s killing was justified stands in contrast to his silence regarding the killing of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last month. Those protesters, who took to the streets following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, were allegedly gunned down by a 17-year-old Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse who has since been charged with first-degree murder.

But instead of condemning Rittenhouse, Trump suggested his actions were justified during a news conference on August 31.

“That was an interesting situation. You saw the same tape that I saw, and he was trying to get away [from protesters], I guess, it looks like, and he fell, and then they very violently attacked him,” Trump said. “I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would’ve been killed.”

During that same news conference, Trump made an evidence-free accusation that left-wing protesters have “killed a lot of people,” and announced that the departments of Homeland Security and Justice are forming a joint operations center to “investigate violent left-wing civil unrest.” He refused to condemn supporters of his who were filmed shooting paintball guns and macing people in Portland on the night Danielson was killed, saying “that was a peaceful protest” and “paint is not bullets.”

So while the president pays lip service to law and order, his pattern of excusing deadly acts against his enemies while condoning it when they’re committed by his supporters tells a very different story.

---

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A senior health official envisions an armed insurrection against the president.

President Donald Trump holds a campaign event in Henderson, Nevada, on September 13, 2020. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Trump has undermined the government entity tasked with protecting us from a pandemic.

President Donald Trump and his administration are actively trying to undermine and corrupt the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s premier public health agency, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The CDC is supposed the be the country’s top agency in the fight against diseases — it’s in the organization’s name. But as news reports have made clear over the past several months, the Trump administration has repeatedly interfered with the CDC’s work, hindering its ability to respond to the ongoing pandemic.

The latest news comes from Dan Diamond at Politico, confirmed by the New York Times: A vocal Trump ally and spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services, Michael Caputo, and a scientific adviser he hired, Paul Alexander, are pushing the CDC to alter or halt reports that are unflattering to the president and his administration’s response to Covid-19.

The efforts don’t seem to have yet led to “sweeping changes” for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, which are highly regarded public health bulletins published for professionals and scientists. But, according to Diamond, they’ve led to delays with a few reports, and there are general concerns about political interference at the agency, whose public health mission is supposed to be independent of politics.

In a recent example, the CDC held a report on hydroxychloroquine, which Trump hyped up as a treatment for Covid-19, for a month. The report concluded that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.” Caputo’s team suggested — without any publicly provided evidence — that the report’s authors had political leanings against Trump.

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are highly regarded in the public health world. In 1981, one of the reports was the first to document what turned out to be HIV/AIDS among five gay men. For decades, the reports have provided rigorous evidence on various medical and scientific developments, from tuberculosis to the opioid epidemic to Covid-19.

The Trump administration, however, began to take issue with the CDC reports after officials interpreted one released in May as critical of the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19 — noting, among other issues, the US’s “limited testing.”

CDC officials believed, Diamond reported, that the report “was merely recounting the state of affairs and not rendering judgment on the response.”

Since then, the administration has demanded to see the reports early and pushed to make changes, including to reports that were already published. While the CDC hasn’t reportedly agreed to major alterations, officials and researchers have sometimes compromised on wording.

This is just the latest example of the Trump administration attempting to meddle in the CDC’s work. Between getting the CDC to effectively recommend less testing for Covid-19 (which Trump said he wants), forcing the agency to change other guidelines, and muzzling officials’ public appearances, Trump has tried to bend the traditionally apolitical agency to his will.

Among all these stories is a concerted attempt by Trump and his people to mask the true scope of the epidemic. Whether it’s empirical evidence that Trump’s response to Covid-19 was slow or testing revealing more cases than the president would like, the “problem” isn’t that the CDC is doing anything wrong but that the truth the CDC has helped expose shows the Trump administration has failed in its response to the coronavirus.

The reality is the US has suffered one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the world, and America still reports more daily new deaths due to the disease than all other developed nations. No amount of meddling in the CDC’s work will change that.

The Trump administration has repeatedly interfered with the CDC’s work

Last month, the CDC changed its testing guidelines to no longer recommend testing for people who have no Covid-19 symptoms but have come into close contact with a person known to be infected. It was effectively a recommendation to test fewer people, soon after Trump said he had asked his people to “slow the testing down, please,” because, he claimed, more tests revealed more coronavirus cases and made the US look bad.

The changes were reportedly pushed by the White House’s coronavirus task force — while Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and an opponent of the changes, was under anesthesia for surgery.

Experts called the changes misguided and dangerous. When paired with contact tracing, testing is crucial to stopping the spread of Covid-19. It allows officials to not only track the scope of an outbreak but get people and their close contacts to isolate if they’re confirmed to be infected, halting the spread of the virus. For the coronavirus, that necessitates testing even people without symptoms because research shows the infected can still transmit the virus without displaying any symptoms. Aggressive testing and tracing have helped other countries, such as Germany and South Korea, control their Covid-19 outbreaks.

Trump has also repeatedly undermined the agency’s other guidelines. After the agency recommended that the public use masks, Trump claimed it was a personal choice, refused to wear a mask himself, and said people wear masks to spite him. While the CDC released careful, rigorous guidelines on how places should reopen, Trump demanded that states “LIBERATE” themselves and open prematurely. At one point, Trump went after the CDC’s school reopening guidelines — leading the agency to update the guidelines to be more favorable to opening schools.

Previously, the Trump administration had already sidelined the CDC in the public spotlight.

Those efforts began early on in the pandemic. On February 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that Americans should prepare for community spread of the coronavirus, social distancing, and the possibility that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.”

In retrospect, the warning was correct. But soon after the briefing, Messonnier was pushed out of the spotlight — though she’s still on the job, her press appearances have been limited — reportedly because her negative outlook angered Trump.

It wasn’t just Messonnier. The CDC is supposed to play the leading role in America’s fight against pandemics, but it’s been largely invisible in press briefings led by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, involving advisers and health officials, such as Fauci and Deborah Birx, who aren’t part of the agency. CDC Director Robert Redfield acknowledged as much: “You may see [the CDC] as invisible on the nightly news, but it’s sure not invisible in terms of operationalizing this response.”

As University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel told me, the US has “benched one of the greatest fighting forces against infectious diseases ever created.”

The CDC’s response to the pandemic hasn’t been faultless. Under Redfield, the agency took weeks to fix botched Covid-19 tests it sent out to labs across the country. The slowdown in testing, also caused by the Food and Drug Administration’s initial resistance to approving more testing from private and other independent labs, led to what’s now considered a “lost month” in February as the US should have ramped up its testing capacity to prepare for the coronavirus.

But the Trump administration’s concerns about the agency don’t seem to be so much about its efficacy but that the facts on Covid-19 — including those the CDC reports on — make the president look bad.

Hiding the truth won’t stop the virus

At the core of Trump and his administration’s complaints about the CDC seems to be a concerted effort to make it appear as though America is quickly returning to normal before the November election. That effort was on display at August’s Republican convention, which was seemingly designed to downplay America’s Covid-19 epidemic.

Trump even admitted to this in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward: “I wanted to always play [the coronavirus] down,” Trump said on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

This is, of course, a terrible way to approach a pandemic. Viruses don’t care about politics, and they’ll spread as long as people and their governments don’t take action to stop them.

We’ve seen that time and time again as Trump has meddled with the CDC. Although he and his staff muzzled Messonnier, it turns out she was right — Covid-19 has disrupted day-to-day life significantly. After Trump suggested states reopen faster than the CDC recommended, the US saw a resurgence of Covid-19 cases, from California to Arizona to Texas to Florida, as it turned out states had opened prematurely. After Trump pushed schools to reject the CDC guidelines and open quickly, there have been outbreaks in universities and K-12 settings.

Meanwhile, the US continues suffering a terrible epidemic. The US hasn’t seen the most Covid-19 deaths of all wealthy nations, but it’s in the bottom 20 percent for deaths since the pandemic began, and reports seven times the deaths as the median developed country. If America had the same Covid-19 death rate as, say, Canada, 100,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

Overall, Covid-19 cases in the US are now declining after the country’s recent surge. But that’s in large part because people have ignored much of what Trump has said: The public, as well as many cities, counties, and states, have embraced social distancing, particularly indoors, and masking — likely driving new infections down.

At the same time, the US’s number of cases and deaths remains unacceptably high; over the past week, more than 700 Americans died each day, on average, from Covid-19. Some US outbreaks continue to pop up too, with states in the Midwest and South recently hit hard.

The CDC is merely reporting on and acting on that reality, as the agency is tasked with doing. To the extent the Trump administration succeeds in interfering with the CDC’s work, the US will likely continue to suffer more than it has to during the pandemic.

---

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Right-wing activists rally at Cox Park in Louisville, Kentucky, in preparation for a march to the Louisville Metro Hall on September 5, 2020. | Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Counterprotester clashes are detracting from one of the largest social justice movements in history.

Saturday, September 5, was supposed to be the day Louisville reveled in one of its most celebrated traditions — the Kentucky Derby — the coronavirus notwithstanding.

Instead, much of the attention on the city that day was directed to just outside the dirt track at Churchill Downs, where the Louisville Metro Police Department and the National Guard assembled tall barricades in anticipation of protesters calling for results in the Breonna Taylor case, which has seen little movement in the seven months since the about-to-be-27-year-old was fatally shot by police in her home. Protesters showed up — and so did armed militia.

While there were no spectators in the stands (fans were all virtual), hundreds of armed members of NFAC — the Not Fucking Around Coalition — positioned themselves on the grass outside the complex hours before the event. The group of Black men and women assembled with weapons and announced themselves to the police as “the response not the threat.”

“We had hoped to come back to Louisville to celebrate a victory with these people. We had hoped that [the Taylor case] would have been closed,” the group’s leader, John “Grandmaster Jay” Johnson, said at Saturday’s event. Some in the Black community had previously urged Churchill Downs to cancel the Kentucky Derby to show solidarity with the fight for racial justice.

But the group dispersed before the Derby even began when a white militia group appeared. Though Johnson told reporters he had an agreement with local police departments about NFAC’s presence, he said the agreement was breached when that other armed collective — who said they were there to protect the city against NFAC — was allowed in the same space.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in downtown Louisville, Black Lives Matter protesters clashed with members of the far-right armed militia group American Patriots USA earlier in the day. Protesters carried Black Lives Matter flags and chanted “Breonna Taylor” as the counterprotesters carried Trump Keep America Great flags and chanted “USA” and “Back the Blue,” referring to police.

Protests against police violence and for racial justice have been happening around the country since May, when video of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd went viral. While counterprotesters have been showing up in cities for just as long, in recent weeks, tensions have gotten more heated and violence at the hands of extremists has turned fatal.

That same Labor Day weekend, protesters and armed militia gathered in the streets of other cities in the wake of other deadly clashes. On Labor Day, more than 1,000 supporters of Trump, including Patriot Prayer supporters, QAnon conspiracy theory supporters, and members of the Proud Boys, gathered in northwest Oregon to express support for the president and Aaron Danielson, a Patriot Prayer supporter who was killed in a clash the previous weekend in Portland by Michael Rienoehl, who considered himself an antifa supporter.

Protesters also clashed with police and counterprotesters in Rochester over the previous police killing of Daniel Prude, leading to the resignation of top law enforcement officials.

“We first went out thinking it would be a peaceful protest, but things turned on the first night,” said Danielle Ponder, a public defender based in Rochester who has protested every night since the video of Prude’s killing was released on September 2. “We were met with pepper spray completely unprovoked. It was like war, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We can’t stop now, and I hope this empowers people to demand more.”

The intensity and frequency of these clashes makes it apparent that there will be more to come as summer draws to a close, and with two months until Election Day. And protesters have made it clear that they will not stop until justice is delivered. Far-right counterprotesters, on the other hand, are feeling greater pressure to maintain the status quo of a Trump presidency. Add local and federal officials calling in more police or the National Guard as a solution, and tensions only rise. The chaos could result in more division and deaths, taking the focus off one of the largest civil rights movement in history and its mission to seek justice for Black lives.

Why clashes are on the rise and in the headlines

A new report from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, in collaboration with Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative, identified 7,750 Black Lives Matter protests from May 26 through August 22 at 2,400 locations across the US. An examination of these events found that 93 percent of them remained peaceful while protests at about 220 locations turned “violent” — defined as the destruction of property, and including clashes between protesters and police and counterprotesters. The report also found that in these places the violence was restricted to specific blocks of the city and not widespread.

Yet, despite the fact that protests remained largely peaceful over the course of about four months, the report warned that a hyper-polarized environment spurred by state forces that take “a more heavy-handed approach to dissent” will only make non-state actors “more active and assertive,” and that counterdemonstrators will “resolve their political disputes in the street” ahead of the election.

“Without significant mitigation efforts, these risks will continue to intensify in the lead-up to the vote,” the authors wrote.

The report also noted the National Guard had been deployed across the country at least 55 times since the killing of George Floyd in late May, which has only inflamed tensions. It also found that government forces disproportionately used force — fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray, or beat protesters with batons — when intervening in Black Lives Matter protests, relative to other kinds of demonstrations.

In Portland, for example, federal agents were sent to ostensibly keep the peace in July, but instead used excessive force and detained people in unmarked vehicles, only reescalating tensions. After the deployment of Department of Homeland Security agents in Portland, “the percentage of violent demonstrations has risen from under 17% to over 42%, suggesting that the federal response has only aggravated unrest,” the report states.

Counterprotest activity is also on the rise, a trend that can quickly escalate the number of violent clashes, according to the report:

Between 24 May and 22 August, over 360 counter-protests were recorded around the country, accounting for nearly 5% of all demonstrations. Of these, 43 — nearly 12% — turned violent, with clashes between pro-police demonstrators and demonstrators associated with the BLM movement, for example. In July alone, ACLED records over 160 counter-protests, or more than 8% of all demonstrations. Of these, 18 turned violent.

In the nights following the police shooting of Jacob Blake on August 23 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, armed counterprotesters visited the city to purportedly protect it from looting and vandalism. One such vigilante, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, fatally shot two people and injured another, and was later charged with first-degree intentional homicide. This unrest would give rise to more unrest in Portland where Trump supporters clashed with antifa members — both groups separate from peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters — resulting in the death of Danielson.

Clashes will only continue to increase if police and state and federal officials continue their heavy-handed approach to demonstrators. “The current administration seems to thrive in the context of disorder, so you can imagine that there’s going to be more, which is just going to spin off confrontations,” University of Michigan political scientist Christian Davenport told Vox.

The recent clashes have historical precedent, rooted in the urban disturbances of the 1960s and ’70s. Beginning in 1964, tensions between Black demonstrators and law enforcement caused riots across cities like Rochester, Philadelphia, and Newark. By 1967, hundreds of cities had experienced long, hot summers marked by urban rebellion and unrest.

Ponder, too, sees the resemblance to the civil rights movement. “State troopers were out there with tanks and dogs!” she said of the current Rochester protests. “I’m out there wearing a T-shirt and jeans and we are being met by people flanked in complete military uniforms and officers in riot gear. It felt like a complete war zone. At one point we ran into a church. And I just kept thinking, ‘We’re hiding from our government in a church.’ They even pepper sprayed the outside of the church!”

Because of these historical connections, there are dueling performances, Davenport said. “To what extent can protesters stay seemingly nonviolent but persistent?”

While the Black Lives Matter protesters are there to draw attention to systemic oppression, the presence of the far-right counterprotesters represents a desire to resist social change. “These people aren’t upset. They believe they are protecting that which they see as the natural order. They see these other people as the heretics and the threat,” Davenport said.

And the increased presence of other non-state actors, like antifa and the NFAC, serves to “openly intimidate perceived ‘enemies,’” like the counterprotesters, according to the report. Though violence has not erupted every time these groups are present, tensions can escalate quickly.

In the end, counterprotest dynamics tend to squeeze out middle-of-the-road protesters. “We then have a race, not to the middle, but to the extremes,” Davenport said.

Making things more complicated and further compromising peaceful protesters is that right-wing counterprotesters and the government have overlapping interests. Some are there with guns, touting a need for law and order like the president does and chanting “Back the Blue” to signal their support for the work of law enforcement.

In one video from Labor Day weekend, a counterprotester told a Black Lives Matter supporter that they were there to support the police but not the “bad eggs” in the police force. “We’re not out here defending the actions of them fucking bad cops. At all. They need justice. But at the same time, we can’t blame the actions of just a few on everybody.” Flying next to the counterprotester was a large Trump 2020 flag.

“You have an ill-informed group that’s already hostile and a group that has way too much information about their lives and they’re frustrated about what’s going on and you stick these people out in the street with a lackadaisical police effort, this does not bode well,” Davenport said.

Why activists will keep organizing ahead of the election and after it

Through all this, Black Lives Matter protesters have never shied away from their demands: The desire to completely rethink how criminal justice and law enforcement systems function in America.

Ponder says their demands are clear in Rochester. Protesters are calling for the resignation of Mayor Lovely Warren and Deputy Mayor James Smith. They’re asking that the officers involved in Prude’s killing be prosecuted — Prude, who had a clinical history of mental illness, died after officers put a mesh “spit hood” over his head — and that the city enact “Daniel’s Law,” which would prohibit officers from responding to mental health calls for help.

They’re also asking for the immediate demilitarization of the police, since 86 percent of all adult arrests in Rochester are misdemeanors. Last, activists are calling for the defunding of the Rochester Police Department, which receives about $100 million per year. The school district’s budget was recently cut by about 20 percent while the police department only received a 5 percent cut, Ponder said.

And they will continue to be out in the streets, much like 93 percent of peaceful demonstrations across the country, until their demands are met. The election has little bearing on this.

While the election is often thought of as a nice end point used to facilitate mobilization, the difficulty with thinking about Black Lives Matter only in the context of the election is losing “the deeper narrative that folks are generationally upset,” Davenport said. “It’s not every four years. It’s several decades worth of stuff that led us to this point that Democrats and Republicans are responsible for.”

Whether Black Lives Matter activists will choose to shift strategy in an effort to position themselves away from right-wing agents provocateurs, particularly ahead of the election, is still left to be seen, but questions about the connections between clashes and the election may take away from the deeper goals of the movement.

“What would this turn into if Black Lives Matter and associates could say, ‘Let’s shift the nature of our confrontation with violence-generating agents in a way that allows us to put forward pressure but doesn’t allow our behavior or presence to be manipulated in a manner that could potentially lead to something that facilitates this other narrative. Let’s not participate in what has become the anti-performance of our grievance. We’re not going to be fodder for this war machine,’” Davenport said.

Ponder, meanwhile, is thinking about change that needs to start locally in Rochester — “There are thousands of people who could have been Daniel Prude because our officers continue to dehumanize the Black community” — but also hopes the movement will continue to uplift and inspire young people, despite the repeated clashes with law enforcement and counterprotesters.

“I have never seen such a Black movement. I have never seen so many young Black people in the street protesting,” she said. “I hope this empowers them to demand more from their elected officials. And I hope they become the elected officials to really shift the paradigm and transform our system of policing and criminal justice.”

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Two years ago, Microsoft sank a data centre off the coast of Orkney in a wild experiment. That data centre has now been retrieved from the ocean floor, and Microsoft researchers are assessing how it has performed, and what they can learn from it about energy efficiency. From a report: Their first conclusion is that the cylinder packed with servers had a lower failure rate than a conventional data centre. When the container was hauled off the seabed around half a mile offshore after being placed there in May 2018, just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed. That compares very well with a conventional data centre. "Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land," says Ben Cutler, who has led what Microsoft calls Project Natick. The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection proudly announced in a press release on Friday a seizure of 2,000 boxes of "counterfeit" Apple AirPods, said to be worth about $400,000, from a shipment at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. But the photos in the press release appear to show boxes of OnePlus Buds, the wireless earphones made by smartphone maker OnePlus, and not Apple AirPods as CBP had claimed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said on Sunday that, while he believes it’s safe to fly now, he doesn't see air travel returning to prepandemic levels until a coronavirus vaccine is developed and widely distributed.

“Our view is, demand is not coming back, people are not going to get back and travel like they did before until there is a vaccine that’s been widely distributed and available to a large portion of the population,” Kirby said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I hope that happens sooner, but our guess is that's the end of next year.”

Airlines have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, which has decimated demand for both leisure and business travel amid safety concerns and as other countries bar American travelers. Specifically, Kirby touted United’s partnership with cleaning products firm Clorox and studies the company is conducting on air filtration in its airliner cabins.

Some sectors of the economy may be able to bounce back before a coronavirus vaccine is widely distributed, Kirby said, but the aviation industry is not one of them. Without an extension of funds for airlines in March’s CARES Act by Oct. 1, Kirby predicted about 16,000 layoffs at his company.

The airline chief said international travel, which represents half of United’s revenue, is still badly lagging and that business travel is almost nonexistent.

“In a business like ours, demand is not going to come back until people feel safe being around other people, and that's going to take a vaccine,” Kirby said.

Appearing separately Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, asked to explain recent comments by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci that Americans would need to “hunker down” in the coming months, predicted it would take months of vaccine distribution to have a meaningful effect on the American population.

“When the vaccine does become available, it won't be in any meaningful way until the beginning of next year, and then it's still going to take us months to vaccinate the population of just this country,” said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“We really have another 12 to 14 months of a really hard road ahead of us,” he added.

Donald Trump packed in the fans for an indoor rally at a Henderson, Nevada manufacturing company facility on Saturday night, but he’s not worried about the spread of COVID-19. To himself, anyway.

“I’m on a stage and it’s very far away,” Trump told a Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter. “And so I’m not at all concerned.”

People in the crowd were not very far away from each other—actually, they were right next to each other, and many weren’t wearing masks. But screw the little people, Donald Trump himself is safe.

Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died just over a month after attending Trump’s last indoor rally in Tulsa, and Tulsa experienced a surge in COVID-19 cases three weeks after the rally. But all that matters to Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

But hey, many of Trump’s supporters aren’t worried about their own health either, even though they are shoulder to shoulder in an indoor crowd. “This is our First Amendment, it's my right to choose," a 60-year-old Trump supporter told CNN. "This is not a dictatorship, this is a republic. And we have a right to be who we are and take whatever risks we so desire.” (Note: This is false, as many laws about vehicle safety remind us.)

Screw anyone else who comes into contact with Trump supporters who rallied indoors because, as another said, “if I catch Covid, that's the consequences of my actions, so I'm willing to take that risk and have a good time today.” Screw the entire state of Nevada, which currently has an 8.5% positive test rate. Trump and his supporters are going to have their fun, and they don’t care about anyone else.

Trump also attacked Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak at length in his Review-Journal interview, continuing to lie about Sisolak having personally intervened to block him from holding rallies at some locations. 

Fox News seems to be the only propaganda outlet getting access to one-on-one style interviews with Donald Trump. This is most likely because Fox News is the propaganda wing of this current administration and many of its least impressive television personalities are virtual White House advisers. And while speaking with right-wing sycophants like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs would seem like the safest bet for a blunderbuss of a mind like Trump, he cannot help but reveal what a petty and cruel little dictator of a man he is no matter the handling.

On Saturday, Donald Trump sat down, outside the White house somewhere, to speak with one of the Fox News team’s stable of Renfields, Jeanine Pirro, to discuss everything he would normally yell at a rally. First, Trump addressed the Woodward audio tapes where Donald Trump admits to purposefully misleading the American public about the true nature of the oncoming coronavirus pandemic. It turns out that the new spin now is that Trump was doing “a good thing” when, in February, having been briefed on the COVID-19 virus’ ability to spread through the air, Trump denied it was a problem publicly and even called it “the new Democratic hoax.” He also says it’s Woodward’s fault. This was the first minute of the interview with Pirro. Trump only got more dangerous from there.

When Pirro isn’t hosting her Fox News show spewing lies and acting out bizarre hypocritical performance art pieces, she’s frequently pushing pro-racist, authoritarian takes on our country.  So she is right at home asking Trump what he will do if Americans revolt on Election Day—if Trump wins.

TRUMP: We’ll put them down very quickly. It’s called “Insurrection.” We just send in and we do it very easy.

Trump proceeds to boast about sending the National Guard into Minneapolis to quell Black Lives Matter protests. Trump then explains how law enforcement across the country supports him. In fact, he has seen “15 or 20” police chiefs resign.* He then goes on to explain that “before China sent us the plague we had the best crime numbers in history.”

Trump and Pirro, like two old gremlins, then begin commiserating about protesters stealing steaks from elderly couples—yes, that’s a literal thing they talk about—before Pirro begins pushing for Trump to implement Martial law before the elections, saying “Right now you are waiting to be asked [to send federal troops into American cities]. In fact, no one is asking Trump, they, in fact, have been telling him not to send troops into their localities.

But Pirro isn’t done. She wants the Reich now. “When does that change? When do you cross the Rubicon?” This is an extraordinary thing to say. In all honesty, I don’t think Pirro is smart enough to realize how on the nose she is. I think she knows the term “crossing the Rubicon,” the way most people do: a general term meaning point of no return—crossing the proverbial “line in the sand.” Of course, the term is based on the moment Julius Caesar brought his army across the river Rubicon and in essence, began a civil war that ended in him becoming the dictator of Rome.

But maybe she does. Like most Fox News personalities, Pirro is a corrupt and wretched person. Trump moves onto discussing the death of Michael Reinoehl, who was shot to death by police in Lacey, Washington. Reinoehl was wanted for the death of Aaron Danielson—a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer. Reinoehl had admitted to shooting Danielson, saying it was in self-defense. Video of the shooting did not contradict Reinoehl’s assertions but it was a court and jury that was supposed to decide that. Instead, Reinoehl was shot and killed by multiple officers firing multiple rounds at him during their “apprehension” of him as a suspect. 

Witnesses have offered conflicting accounts of what happened between law enforcement and Reinoehl, some saying Reinoehl fired shots, while others saying he wasn’t even holding a gun at the time and that police in unmarked vehicles opened fire on him without announcing their presence. Police have not confirmed much of their initial story. But these facts don’t seem to matter to Trump, as he told Pirro and the Fox audience that it wasn’t until the Donald pushed for action that U.S. Marshalls finally went to “get” Reinoehl and that Reinoehl was a “violent criminal” who engaged the officers in a “gunfight.”

TRUMP: I will tell you something. That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.

Still waiting on those Jade Helm conspiracy theorists with their guns and their pretend Constitutions to chime in on our very anti-Democracy and civil rights president.

*The number is around 17, and includes police chiefs being forced to resign or fired.

While much of the media this week has been focused (appropriately) on the revelations in Bob Woodward’s interviews with Donald Trump that deliberately downplayed the virulence and lethality of the COVID-19 pandemic, the second damning disclosure this week—a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower’s complaint that intelligence assessments had been altered or shelved in order to protect Trump politically—is horrifying for much of the same reason: It revealed that Trump will manipulate information to the public allowing a plague to be unleashed on the public for his own political gain.

The report, from demoted intelligence-division chief Brian Murphy, claims that DHS chief Chad Wolf and others in the department attempted to manipulate official DHS intelligence by downplaying concerns about Russian interference in the 2020 election—but even more disturbingly, by ordering threat assessments to dilute concerns about white nationalism while playing up the right’s concocted bogeyman, ‘antifa.’

The spread of toxic white nationalism and its always-attendant violence has become, as Renée Graham at the Boston Globe observes, another kind of pandemic that Trump has downplayed and allowed to spread. Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.

Trump’s response all along has been to dance a tango in which, after sending out a signal of encouragement (such as his “very fine people on both sides” comments after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017), he follows up with an anodyne disavowal of far-right extremists that is believed by no one, least of all white nationalists. Whenever queried about whether white nationalists pose a threat—as he was after a right-wing terrorist’s lethal attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, answering: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”—Trump has consistently downplayed the threat.

The whistleblower’s complaint reveals the depth of the rot that Trump has inflicted on the law-enforcement agencies tasked with dealing with the threat in his administration. It claims that Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, DHS’s second-highest-ranking official, ordered Murphy to modify intelligence assessments in order to make the white-supremacist threat “appear less severe.” He also wanted the assessments to include information on “left-wing” groups and antifa.

The complaint also claims that Cuccinelli and Wolf blocked the release of a March threat assessment of future dangers to the nation that highlighted white-supremacist violence and Russian election interference, saying it was blocked because of the way it might “reflect upon President Trump.”

“Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on white supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups,” the complaint says.

When Murphy made another push for the report’s release in early July, the complaint says, Wolf reiterated Cuccinelli’s complaints and asked for it to include “information on the unrest in Portland, Ore.” Murphy noted that he believed such information would undermine the gathered intelligence.

Michael German, a national-security analyst for the Brennan Center for Justice and an expert on domestic terrorism, noted that this kind of manipulation of intelligence at top federal levels has profound consequences for all levels of law enforcement nationally.

“The whistleblower's allegations document how explicit bias infects the top echelons of law enforcement and undermines the veracity and reliability of terrorism intelligence that goes out to state and local police,” German told Daily Kos in an email. “If police are misinformed about threats facing their communities from the top, we can't be surprised when those same biases affect their street-level work.”

Former DHS terrorism analyst Daryl Johnson noted that Murphy was later demoted within the agency after it emerged that he had overseen the collection of data on journalists involved in publishing leaked data about the Portland protests and the use of DHS agents against activists there. It seems likely that his complaint is at least partially a product of having been punished for following his superiors’ emphasis on leftist activists after having previously been asked to undermine intelligence assessments with specious information about them.

For Johnson—who authored the now-infamous 2009 DHS bulletin warning of increasing far-right organizing and recruitment, including returning war veterans, that set off a right-wing media reaction resulting in the gutting of the DHS section responsible for monitoring far-right terrorism—this is all too familiar. “It’s the same thing that was going on there ten years ago—just being overly sensitive to people’s civil rights and holding up something in which nobody’s rights are being violated or anything like that,” he told Daily Kos.

“This is a government bureaucracy,” he added. “It’s a department that is gunshy because of what’s happened in the past, and it’s also people in the department who I guess are reluctant to acknowledge that threat and do something about it. So they’re still dragging their feet.”

This recalcitrance manifests itself in the data on domestic terrorism during the Trump years, which shows that—while a misplaced emphasis on Islamist terrorism diluted and occluded the response of law enforcement to far-right violence during the Obama administration—a similarly wrongheaded focus on a virtually nonexistent antifa and leftist threat had taken its place in more recent years, even as far-right terrorism has both grown significantly in numbers and risen in lethality.

“The positive thing is that there are people higher in the department at higher levels who see that it’s a problem, that white supremacy is an issue and a national-security concern,” Johnson observed. “But they’re being offset by these people that don’t want that to happen.”

Some of those people, however, are also leaving the agency. Earlier this month, the former assistant secretary of DHS’ counterterrorism and threat-prevention unit who resigned in April, Elizabeth Neumann, gave a series of media interviews describing how Trump is “pouring fuel on the fire” of far-right extremism.

“A very common refrain that I was asked was, ‘Does the president’s rhetoric make your job harder?’ And the answer is yes,” she said in an ad for Republican Voters Against Trump. “The president’s actions and his language are, in fact, racist. … And I do think that the president’s divisive language is indirectly tied to some of the attacks that we have seen in the last two years.”

She told NPR’s Steve Inskeep that a responsible national leader would recognize the threat and speak up prominently about it: 

If you had a very clear voice at the top, from the president, from other senior leaders in the Republican Party, denouncing this and warning conservatives — warning Republicans — that these groups are trying to recruit you based on things that might sound like a typical conservative belief, but behind it is this insidious, ugly, evil thing, if we had more clear voices talking about it — it would somewhat inoculate people from that recruitment and that radicalization. But instead, we have the opposite effect. We have the president not only pretty much refusing to condemn, but throwing fuel on the fire, creating opportunities for more recruitment through his rhetoric.

Johnson noted that a central concern of responsible officials within the agency such as Neumann is that Trump is using the department for political purposes—namely, to come down on the left. “He used a DHS agency, Customs and Border Protection and their Border Patrol Tactical Unit, to go after the leftist protesters in Portland, and was quick to label them terrorists, but yet he doesn’t say anything about white supremacy or even the militias,” Johnson said. “And he just kind of encourages them.”

German said the whistleblower’s complaint “also highlights how willing law enforcement leaders are to punish internal dissent, which is deadly to objective analysis of intelligence. Everyone in the system learns to ‘go along and get along,’ which became a mantra in the FBI. Law enforcement intelligence becomes an echo-chamber of erroneous and biased information as a result,” he told Daily Kos.

The result, he says, is a police culture at all levels—federal, state, and local—that is innately biased and thus ill-equipped to serve diverse communities. “Training police to treat dissent as dangerous then alters their relationship with the communities they serve, opening a rift between law enforcement and the public, which we're now seeing play out in the streets every night,” he said.

“One of the reforms we recommended is to strengthen whistleblower protections in law enforcement because those on the inside can see the problem every day and need to be encouraged to root it out,” German added. “We also need to hire law enforcement leaders who welcome internal dissent and reward officials who report the racist behavior within the ranks.”

Neumann notes that this kind of culture actively misleads law enforcement during periods of civil unrest such as the current one. “If you look at the people that have been arrested for that, by and large, I mean, it's the Boogaloo movement or it's an association with QAnon. It's the right side of the spectrum. It is not antifa,” she told NPR. "The threat of domestic terrorism is not from antifa. It is from these right-wing movements."

Johnson believes that the ongoing blind spot within law enforcement leaves it ill-equipped to deal with the violence he believes is going to be unleashed in the coming year.

“I’m expecting things to escalate not just up to the election, but beyond the election and into next year, because I don’t think this election’s going to be finalized until weeks after because of mail-in ballots and everything, and I also think there are going to be lawsuits filed by each political party to prolong vote counts or contest them,” he said. “So that, plus the pandemic plus the civil unrest, suggests we’re going to have increasing confrontation and violence.”

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The city of Minot, North Dakota raised an LGBTQ Pride flag last week as part of a proclamation recognizing June as Pride Month. The flag-raising was delayed until September because of the COVID pandemic.

It also ticked off a lot of angry homophobes who brought their complaints to the Minot City Council. But one bigot didn’t expect to come up against Councilwoman Carrie Evans, who let the citizen have it.

Said Evans: “So Mr. Walker, if you’re not aware, and I think a lot of people in this room are not aware, and have come here just because this is a gay issue, I am proudly the first openly elected lesbian in North Dakota. So that is why I am not paying any heed to your crap!”

The Dickinson Press reported that Evans’ sexual orientation was not previously known to the public.

“We, the people. I’m the people. I live in Minot. I am a taxpayer,” Evans added, on a tear. “I am a person. I get to see myself represented on that flagpole just as much as the people who got the Juneteenth flag last month, as much as the POW/MIA will get later this month.”

Evans continued: “Every single person is entitled to see themselves represented. We are not some group of people who live in San Francisco or Seattle. We are HERE. We are your elected officials. We are your brothers. we are your sisters, and don’t tell me you’re not hatred or anger. That’s all I feel. I’ve had to listen to it for days now, as has the mayor and many of my colleagues. It is unacceptable!”

“This city is big enough for all of us,” Evans said, dropping the mic. “Me having a flag flying does not take away anything from your rights. But you know what it does for me? It shows me I live in a city that appreciates and embraces me, and my community. And I can live here and feel safe. That’s what it does. I’m sorry that it doesn’t make you feel comfortable, but we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going away!”

Check it out:

The post City Councilwoman Comes Out as Gay While Handing a Homophobic Bigot His Ass: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Days after putting out a “free speech” policy penalizing colleges and universities if they don’t apply Trumpian First Amendment standards, the Department of Education also announced an internal ban on the wrong kind of conversation about race and racism by department employees.

And by “the wrong kind of conversation,” I of course mean “acknowledging the reality of systemic racism.” Department officials plan to go so far as to look at internal book clubs, because apparently even weighing the merits of books about racism is unacceptable under Donald Trump.

The department’s guidance bans material “that teaches, trains or suggests the following: (1) virtually all White people contribute to racism or benefit from racism (2) critical race theory (3) white privilege (4) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country (5) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil (6) Anti-American propaganda.”

That’s … extremely broad, and wipes out basically any reputable recent academic work on race and racism in the United States of America. Which is surely part of the intent: to virtually require the Education Department to focus its internal discussion of race on right-wing propaganda.

And it’s so sloppy, too! Take item No. 4, “that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country.” Inherently racist and evil are two very different things. Evil is a moral judgment. Racist is a factual one, and the fact of the matter is that large parts of the United States were founded on slavery, that the nation’s wealth was built through slavery, that segregation remained the law well into the lifetimes of many of the people who today run the government and the economy, and that if we look at virtually any aspect of the structures of the U.S. today we can see how racism is threaded throughout. 

Now, we can argue that there is a moral dimension to charges of racism, but it’s not purely a moral judgment as “evil” is. There are facts here, and the Education Department is insisting those facts be erased from what its own employees can incorporate in their work. Similarly, there are facts behind the claim that virtually all white people benefit from racism. The facts are actually very strong on that one, from centuries of policy made by politicians elected during times when most Black people were barred, often violently, from voting, to white people building wealth over generations of homeownership while redlining prevented Black people doing the same. We can go through so many other aspects of U.S. history but not just of history—of current policy and of the ways that history shapes our current economy and society and laws—and concretely, factually show that yes, the United States is a country shaped by racism.

And these guidelines implicitly admit that, by grouping “Anti-American propaganda” together with discussion of racism. Racism is so central to these people that they think fighting it should be lumped in a category with anti-American propaganda.

The new Education Department guidance echoes that of the Office of Management and Budget, which last week sent a memo to federal agencies saying, “The President has directed me to ensure that federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions” on diversity and inclusion.

This move also comes as Donald Trump is threatening federal education funding to schools that teach The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a baldly illegal threat but one that sure does show Trump’s commitment to eliminating education on U.S. racism—and one that, circling back to the paragraph right at the top of this page, speaks volumes about Trump’s commitment to free speech.

There’s supposed to be a rule that the Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn’t make announcements concerning anyone involved in an election within 60 days of the election—a rule that James Comey absolutely disregarded with his last minute theatrics in the 2016 election. Considering the closeness of that election, there’s little doubt that Comey’s action, and the media coverage of it, was a deciding factor in handing Trump the White House. And William Barr has made it absolutely clear that he’s all in favor of smashing that rule again to keep Trump in place.

But Barr’s intention of releasing the report by his lieutenant, John Durham, got slightly harder on Friday. Because acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut Nora Dannehy, who has acted as Durham’s top aide during his attempt to follow up on Trump’s claims about the “deep state coup” behind the Russia investigation, has resigned not just her position helping Durham, but from the entire Justice Department. And the reason is directly related to Barr’s attempts to rush the report out as an “October surprise.”

As the Hartford Courant reports, Dannehy was recruited to help Durham in his round-the-world quest to convince allies to join in the conspiracy theory and claim that the entire Russia investigation was set up long before Trump was elected. That includes tracking down claims that the CIA planted a college professor in London years earlier so George Papadopoulos could eventually be lured into trying to arrange a hook up between Trump and Putin. It also includes chasing down the same claims about a nonexistent server in Ukraine that were involved in Trump’s impeachment.

The investigation of the investigation has been underway for over a year and a half, and has so far managed to snag one charge against one person, with former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleading guilty to having edited an email. Compare this to the Mueller investigation, which netted 199 criminal charges, 37 indictments or guilty pleas, and five prison sentences … so far. 

Oddly enough, despite an investigation that’s now just a few months short of the entire length of the Mueller investigation, there appear to be no tweets from Trump or other Republicans complaining about the length, scope, or cost of the Durham investigation. Somehow, when Mueller was involved in his much more productive investigation, both Trump and his leading minions in the House found time to constantly complain about the budget of the investigations and to scoff at the “minor nature” of convictions. Funny. That’s not happening this time.

Dannehy has worked with Durham for decades. She was recruited back from private practice specifically to work on this investigation. But on Thursday evening she sent an email to the office in New Haven to announce that she was leaving, and the reason appears to be because she is worried about pressure from Barr to hand over a report before the election. Insiders say that Dannehy has been pondering leaving for weeks, but stayed this long out of her personal loyalty to Durham. 

According to the Courant, Dannehy said the investigation was going to last “six months to a year” when she agreed to return to the DOJ. But it’s taken much longer, and without producing any obvious signs of progress.

Still, even the departure of Durham’s top assistant is unlikely to prevent Barr from putting out something in the days immediately before the election. After all, as he did with the Mueller report, Barr can always give a completely false “summary” of the investigation and leave the truth to come out long after the spotlight has turned away.