James.galbraith

Elizabeth Neumann spent March 13 and 14 of 2019 at a conference in the picturesque Spanish port city of Málaga. The topic: terrorism. Western leaders were deeply worried about the dangers foreign terrorist fighters traveling back from places like Iraq, Libya and Syria would pose to their home countries. And that’s what Neumann expected to dominate the two-day event.

Neumann was DHS’s assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the time, handling counterterrorism work from the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters. In Málaga, a history-drenched resort town on Spain’s Costa del Sol that once marked the fault line between the Muslim and Christian worlds, she and her counterparts from scores of countries spent long hours talking about the terrorism threats that concerned them most. After a while, she began to see a pattern: Though concerns about instability in the Middle East dominated most public discussions on counterterrorism, about 80 percent of the leaders at the conference ranked far-right extremism among their top concerns.

The next morning, when Neumann woke up early to catch a cab to the airport, her phone started lighting up with news alerts. A gunman had murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Prosecutors would later say the killer planned the attack to maximize casualties and terrify the Muslim community and non-European immigrants. Five months later, an American terrorist would cite him as an inspiration.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh — it’s happening now,’” Neumann recalled in an interview.

For Neumann, her nightmare scenario of globalized white supremacist terrorism was coming to life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was doing far too little about its own homegrown extremists — often "lone wolves" radicalized online by white supremacist websites and fueled by hostility toward immigrants and minorities. But White House officials didn’t want to talk about the rising domestic extremist threat or even use the phrase “domestic terrorism.” The administration’s relentless, single-minded focus on immigration enforcement — coupled with nonstop turnover on the National Security Council — constantly pulled senior DHS leadership away from everything else. And her ultimate boss, President Donald Trump, was part of the problem.

This story is based on background and on-record interviews with current and former law enforcement officials, inside and outside DHS. It includes, for the first time, detailed comments from two top former political appointees in the department who tried to tackle the problem before giving up on the Trump administration. Frustrated by the president’s failure to act, they are actively supporting his opponent.

“At least in this administration,” Neumann said, “there’s not going to be anything substantive done on domestic terrorism.”

‘People were excited’

The Department of Homeland Security is one of the federal government’s biggest, newest and unhappiest departments. It was created amid the ashes of the Sept. 11 terror attacks as part of the government’s efforts to — as its name suggests — secure the U.S. homeland. It became something of the Island of Lost Agencies, holding everything from the Secret Service to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Coast Guard under its massive umbrella. Only the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have more employees. And the 230,000 employees at DHS consistently report miserable morale.

In the agency’s misery, Donald Trump saw opportunity. During the 2016 campaign, he touted the support of unions representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents. And after his inauguration, DHS was one of his first stops. He gave a major speech at its sprawling headquarters in northwest D.C. just five days into his administration, highlighting his focus on the department’s immigration and border security missions.

“It was hot as hell in the gym because there were so many people,” a former DHS official recalled. “People were excited. There was a moment of, DHS isn’t going to be the last on the list.”

But being at the top of Trump’s list also brought immense challenges for DHS leaders: namely, trying to amp up immigration enforcement enough to keep the White House happy while also managing the department’s panoply of other missions.

Just a few weeks into the new administration, DHS leaders noticed an alarming trend: a burst of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and University City, Mo.

“We were all scratching our heads saying, ‘What is this?’” Neumann said. “You could sense that something about the threat was changing and morphing, but we couldn’t quite put our fingers on it until Charlottesville.”

On Aug. 11, 2017, scores of young white men carrying tiki torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter,” in a public display of white supremacist mobilization that shocked and sickened the country. The next day, counterprotesters thronged the streets of Charlottesville to push back. And a white supremacist drove a car through that crowd, injuring 19 people and killing a woman named Heather Heyer.

Trump’s infamous response to the weekend: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

It could have been a moment of action from the federal government, Neumann said — a chance for a systematic White House review of the threat’s scope and causes. But it wasn’t.

“Sadly, the president botched his response, and it became much more about what the president said and how he botched it than it was about what just happened,” Neumann lamented. “This is not the America we know. We all had this collective, ‘What in the world? How is this happening in 2017?’”

John Kelly, a gruff four-star general, was leading the department at the time. Three months later, and just six months into his presidency, Trump fired Reince Priebus as chief of staff and replaced him with Kelly. Elaine Duke, then the department’s second-in-command, stepped in as acting DHS chief for a few months, and then the Senate confirmed Kirstjen Nielsen. As the senior leadership merry-go-round played out, the president’s demands for more deportations and fewer illegal border crossings stayed as high as ever.

Trump often expressed irritation when he saw the DHS secretary anywhere other than the border. Miles Taylor, who was Nielsen’s chief of staff, told POLITICO Trump used to lambaste her if she didn’t physically spend enough of her time there.

“Verbatim the president said, ‘Get your ass to the border, why are you not down there?’” Taylor said.

Another former DHS official, who requested anonymity to discuss the president’s comments, said Trump once fumed when he learned Nielsen was in Europe working on cybersecurity issues — even though cybersecurity is one of DHS’s many core missions.

“Why isn’t she on the border?” the official recalled Trump saying.

Senior DHS officials said they dealt with two constants from the White House: constant pressure to deliver on immigration, and constant chaos.

“When you are spending all of your energy preventing him from doing something illegal, you can’t then also run your State Department or your Defense Department or your DHS,” Neumann said, highlighting the challenges Trump presented to Cabinet secretaries. “So you’re heavily relying on the people underneath you: ‘Try to do your jobs as well as possible while we protect you from the chaos.’ But everyone in the system is experiencing the same thing.”

For instance, the Senate-confirmed general counsel for DHS, John Mitnick, reportedly warned the White House in February 2019 that a proposal to release undocumented immigrants into so-called sanctuary cities could get DHS sued for due process violations.

In a 2019 town hall meeting with a group of DHS lawyers, according to a source present, one attendee asked Mitnick what his biggest challenge was. His answer: finding time to work on anything other than immigration and border security. During the same event, Mitnick told attendees that they should inform their supervisors immediately if anyone ever pressured them to greenlight an illegal action or policy, and he promised to support them. Later that year, Mitnick was fired.

‘Bullshit’

Early in Nielsen’s tenure as secretary, she and Taylor discussed the domestic terror threat at length. In the months before her confirmation, a far-right extremist named Jeremy Christian had murdered two men on a train after harassing two Black teenage girls. One of the girls wore a hijab, according to news reports, and Christian yelled “fuck Muslims” at them. Just days after Nielsen was confirmed, a man with a swastika marking on his leg murdered two students at a high school in New Mexico before killing himself.

“I said, ‘Look this is a pretty big deal right now, it’s getting serious, a lot of it’s racially motivated,’” Taylor recalled telling Nielsen. “‘I don’t think we are well positioned against it. We’ve got to do more, but it’s really got to start with the president.’”

At the time, then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster was overseeing the drafting of a new national counterterrorism strategy. The document would lay out priorities for using resources from across the U.S. government to combat terrorism.

Taylor wrote a “dream draft” emphasizing everything DHS would want from the strategy document — including a focus on domestic terrorist threats, along with threats from radical Islamist terrorism and other foreign actors. Four months after Nielsen started as DHS secretary, Trump replaced McMaster with John Bolton. The process of drafting the counterterrorism strategy continued under Bolton’s leadership.

“What ended up getting significantly dropped was all the stuff we talked about on domestic terrorism,” Taylor said. “We got a draft back from John Bolton that barely referenced domestic terrorism.”

Nielsen wasn’t happy, according to Taylor.

“She was like, ‘What gives?’” Taylor said. “He was like, ‘We’re doing more drafts, we’re doing more turns on it, just stay tuned, we’ll work on this. And she said, ‘It’s very important to me that we emphasize domestic terrorism here. This has got to be an administration priority.’”

The final document, released on Oct. 4, 2018, contained just two short paragraphs on domestic terrorism. One noted that the U.S. faced internal threats from “racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism.” A second promised that the government would “investigate ties between domestic terrorists not motivated by radical Islamist ideologies and their overseas counterparts to more fully understand them.”

It was brief.

“They said, ‘We’ll come up with a separate domestic terrorism strategy,” Taylor said. “Bullshit. They never did. It just got lost.”

Bolton declined to comment on this reporting. Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, said the Trump administration takes the domestic terrorism threat seriously.

“Our country is constantly facing dynamic threats ranging from domestic, to cyber, to international, to financial crimes,” she said in a statement to POLITICO. “Our brave federal law enforcement, national security, and Intelligence officials work around the clock to monitor every range of threats facing our nation, including domestic terror. This sounds more like a case of Miles Taylor being ineffective at his job, than an indictment of the brave men and women in security officials [sic], FBI, and federal law enforcement who work every day to protect our country from threats foreign and domestic.”

Three weeks after the strategy’s release on Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman named Robert Bowers murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Before the massacre, he posted a message on the social networking site Gab about a Jewish nonprofit that helps refugees settle in the U.S.

“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in.”

‘We’re just going to focus on the solutions’

From her perch at DHS, meanwhile, Neumann pushed for the department to do more to prevent domestic terror attacks — a concept national security hands refer to as “left of boom,” as in, before an explosion hits.

The FBI is the lead law enforcement agency for investigating domestic terror. But DHS’s close work with state and local law enforcement agencies around the country — as well as private sector and community partners — means it can also play a role. For instance, advisers from DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency provided a security training that Tree of Life members participated in before the shooting. A top CISA official later told Congress that members of the synagogue said that training saved lives.

So starting in February 2019, Neumann pushed to get new funding for the new Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention. And in May 2019, Neumann said, acting DHS head Kevin McAleenan made a series of phone calls to the Hill ringing alarm bells that DHS’s work on domestic terrorism was severely underfunded and urging members to fund the effort. After an extensive effort that initially circumvented the White House budgeting process, Congress gave DHS $17 million in new funding for the office and for grants.

The concept was to have DHS help state, local, and nongovernment leaders work in their communities to prevent and reverse violent extremism. Neumann compared it with the role DHS plays in firefighting: The department doesn’t send personnel with hoses and helicopters to put out wildfires. But it does help set standards, provide training and send out grant money. The goal — both when it comes to firefighting and to domestic terrorism — is to help communities protect themselves. It grew out of the Obama-era Office of Community Partnerships. That office had focused on helping communities counter violent extremism, and the Trump team had frozen its funding in the early days after the election to review its efforts.

George Selim, who oversees the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism and was the first director of the Office of Community Partnerships, said the Trump administration let the office stagnate.

“You can’t snap your fingers and create an office in a Cabinet-level agency,” he said. “The previous administration did all the work, found the director, hired a career staff, got a budget, got a home, gave it legal authority, went out and got grant money for it. And then the Trump administration comes in and effectively does nothing with it, and it stagnates for two years plus, three years almost.”

Taylor said the White House wasn’t initially all that interested in DHS’s efforts to turn the old office into a new one focused on terrorism and targeted violence.

“We were pushing the White House: ‘Make this a priority, talk about this, fight for money on Capitol Hill for this,’” he said. “It was on deaf ears. You could not have seen a White House less interested in this.”

Neumann said she wished DHS and the White House had both moved faster. There were National Security Council staff who wanted to strengthen the administration’s response to the growing threat, she said. But the dizzying cycle of leadership changes in the upper echelons of Trump’s national security team didn’t make it easy.

“There was no NSC structure that was systematically working on issues like that,” she said. “It’s not to say that they weren’t doing things; it’s just that when you have chaos all around you, it’s really hard to do process stuff.”

On Aug. 3, 2019, a gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. He told investigators that he liked the Christchurch killer’s manifesto, according to The Wall Street Journal, and posted a manifesto of his own saying he wanted to kill as many Hispanics as he could.

On Aug. 4, a gunman killed nine people at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Earlier this month, per CNN, the FBI said its investigation into the killer’s motives is ongoing.

After the weekend of massacres, White House officials became more interested in Neumann’s project. Officials told her they could point to her work to show they took the problem seriously. She briefed multiple officials on domestic terrorism issues and what the government could do to prevent attacks. One challenge was particularly thorny, however: The officials, who Neumann declined to name, didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism.”

“They very clearly were looking at it through the lens of, ‘We have a violence problem,’” Neumann recalled. “And they did not want to talk about the ideological threat.”

“It makes me sad that in every other circumstance where you’re trying to lay out a strategy to go after a threat, you always start by articulating what the threat is,” she continued. “But in this particular case, we were told, ‘We’re just going to focus on the solutions.’”

Despite that tension, Trump’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal sought $80 million for DHS’s work to prevent domestic terrorism and targeted violence, along with an additional $20 million in grant money for DHS to disburse. The House greenlit that new funding. But it’s unlikely the bill will go anywhere in an election year.

A White House document touting the work was titled “Combating Targeted Violence.”

“At DHS, your budget is always in competition for [border] wall money,” Neumann said. “So it’s not insignificant to have gotten that support.”

“That’s the good news story,” she added.

Neumann’s successful efforts to shave a little money off the wall budget for domestic terrorism prevention have not won her fame and fortune. But the work isn’t unnoticed. Russ Travers, who helmed the National Counterterrorism Center until this March, put it this way: “I consider her a national patriot.”

The office is now working to hire regional coordinators and disburse grant money.

“Obviously, this is a very new undertaking for us,” said DHS’s current second-in-command, Ken Cuccinelli, in an interview with POLITICO. “It’s somewhat untested. But that’s OK. We’ll test it. We’ll see. The challenge for even that if we go down the road five years and look backwards, is going to be the eternal challenge of understanding what you prevented. Things that don’t happen are hard to measure. But that’s OK.”

The month after the El Paso and Dayton shootings, on Sept. 20, 2019, acting DHS Secretary McAleenan signed off on a strategic framework on terrorism and targeted violence. Neumann helmed the work drafting the document. McAleenan had previously ordered an immediate review of the department’s domestic terrorism efforts when he became its acting chief, and had tasked its Homeland Security Advisory Council with specifically looking into protecting houses of worship. He recognized domestic terror was a significant emerging threat and that the department needed to shift to respond to it, former DHS official Andrew Meehan said.

“White supremacist violent extremism, one type of racially- and ethnically-motivated violent extremism, is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism,” the McAleenan framework document read.

The new strategic framework also promised that DHS would begin releasing a yearly State of the Homeland Threat Assessment document. Eleven months later, the first such briefing has yet to materialize.

Two months after releasing the document that discussed the white supremacist threat, McAleenan resigned from DHS. A new acting secretary, Chad Wolf, took his place. On Jan. 17, 2020, Wolf gave a speech that discussed McAleenan’s document and terror threats.

“We’re working aggressively to develop the implementation plan, which will be ready in the coming weeks,” he said.

No such plan is public.

John Cohen, the department’s former counterterrorism coordinator, said DHS could bring tremendous expertise and capabilities to the effort to fight domestic terror.

“The challenge is bringing those resources together in a cohesive, coordinated, and comprehensive way,” he added.

And, he said, the president isn’t making it easy.

“Law enforcement officials are concerned that the political rhetoric used by the president to inspire his political base has been viewed by some violent white supremacists as a call to violent action, and has been viewed by a number of mentally unwell, violence-prone individuals as permission to engage in acts of violence,” he added.

‘Interrogate the shit out of every single one of them’

By May 2020, the administration’s hesitancy to use the term “domestic terrorism” had evaporated — at least as far as actors from the left were concerned. After weeks of protests and property damage in Portland, Ore., President Trump tweeted that he would designate antifa, a loose agglomeration of left-wing ‘anti-fascist’ activists, as a terrorist organization — a legal impossibility. Attorney General William Barr then made a statement using the phrase that so many Trump administration officials have been loath to use.

“The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly,” he said.

Critics said it showed a new, broad enthusiasm to talk about domestic terrorism when the left could be blamed for it. Cuccinelli told POLITICO he rejects that criticism.

“I think it’s B.S.,” he said. “I think it’s people that want to downplay the work we’ve done in the white supremacy area. But let’s face it, what is in the news every day for the last three months? It is left-wing, organized violence.”

Cuccinelli also said the department sees white supremacist domestic terrorism as a serious threat.

“Obviously we’ve got white supremacist-type people we’ve got to deal with, and what we find with them is that you see smaller numbers, smaller groups, you don’t see large gatherings of them, but that when they act, the level of their lethality is higher,” he said.

Senior department officials have shown a significant interest in combating the left-wing violence Cuccinelli described, both publicly and privately. On a DHS leadership call in the early days of the department’s response, Mark Morgan––the often-bombastic and always outspoken acting head of Customs and Border Protection — showed particular appetite for an aggressive federal response.

“We ought to detain and interrogate the shit out of every single one of them,” he said, according to two administration officials familiar with the call.

It wasn’t clear who specifically Morgan was referring to. Asked about this comment, a CBP spokesperson declined to comment.

Earlier in his tenure as acting CBP chief, Morgan also concerned officials there by floating the idea of moving a key CBP counterterrorism office under the umbrella of its Office of Intelligence. The office in question, called the National Targeting Center, plays a major role in protecting aviation from terrorism. CBP’s Office of Intelligence, meanwhile, focuses on border security. According to two sources familiar with the matter, CBP officials worried that Morgan’s interest in moving the NTC pointed to an effort to move resources away from counterterrorism and toward border security. A CBP spokesperson also declined to comment on this reporting.

One state law enforcement official, who requested anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the intelligence products DHS sends to its state and local partners emphasize the threat from left-wing extremists significantly more than the threat from right-wing extremists––and disproportionately so. Left-wing extremists have caused numerous problems and hurt police, the state official continued. “But none of them have been killed,” the official said. “But when we look at the far right, we’ve seen numerous attacks where cops have been killed.”

“I would expect at least a balanced production between far left and far right extremists,” the official continued.

The official also said he got much more helpful information on threats from the far right from the Anti-Defamation League than from DHS — particularly its material on Boogaloo, a coterie of extremists trying to incite a race war.

“They only have a handful of analysts at the ADL, and their handful of analysts put together a better product that the entire DHS,” the official said.

Earlier in the Trump administration, DHS’s intelligence arm disbanded a group of analysts focused on domestic terrorism.

Selim, of the ADL, said DHS’s sparse material for state and local partners on far-right threats and Boogaloo was concerning.

“It’s problematic,” he said. “The DHS’s mission and mandate is to protect against all threats both foreign and domestic.”

‘The Deep State’

Neumann said she isn’t satisfied with the progress she made and has called for an independent commission to work on how the federal government can manage the domestic terror threat.

The tendency to downplay that threat has existed in prior administrations, she noted, but the Trump team has taken that tendency to an extreme. “Anything domestic-related is kind of seen as the JV of the national security team,” she said.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies — a centrist Washington think tank known for its focus on international affairs and defense technology — released a briefing in June of this year concluding that the most significant terror threat to the U.S. appears to come from white supremacists. Right-wing extremists were responsible for two-thirds of terror attacks and plots in the U.S. last year, it found, and for 90 percent in the first four months of 2020.

Neumann left the department in April. Last week, she endorsed Joe Biden for president. Taylor and Mitnick have endorsed Biden as well.

“The good news is, the people who have been given the charge to protect the country — even the career officials who folks think are the deep state — they passionately care about their jobs and are going to do whatever it takes to protect the country,” she said.

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.

Louis DeJoy, postmaster general and Trump lackey, sat in front of the House Committee on Oversight and the American people on Monday and actually said this: "There are many inaccuracies about my actions that I wish to again correct," DeJoy said. "First, I did not direct the removal of blue collection boxes or the removal of mail processing equipment. Second, I did not direct the cutback on hours at any of our postal offices, and finally I did not direct the elimination or any cutback in overtime. I did, however, suspend these practices to remove any misperceptions about our commitment to delivering the nation's election mail."

DeJoy reiterated his claim from his Friday hearing in the Senate that he's only responsible for making sure that the trucks leave the offices on time. Even when those trucks are going across country completely empty. "Trucks leave empty," Joe Jolley, a postal employee with the postal workers union, told News Channel 5 in Nashville. "They leave completely empty. We pay a truck to travel to Memphis, a 53-foot truck with no mail on it."

Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee confronted DeJoy with that report Monday. “Mail trucks are being forced to leave on schedule, even when completely empty,” Cooper said. “Imagine 53-foot trucks forced to travel hundreds of miles completely empty, due to your so-called reforms.” He had the truck records from that report, holding them up and hopefully putting them in the congressional record. “That’s not efficiency. That’s insanity.” He continued, “Do your mail delays fit Trump’s campaign goal of hurting the post office, as stated in his tweets? Are your mail delays implicit campaign contributions?” That gave DeJoy the opening, unfortunately, to refuse to answer. “I’m not going to answer these types of questions,” DeJoy responded. “I’m here to represent the postal service―there’s nothing to do with, all my actions have to do with improving the postal service.”

DeJoy was combative and hostile throughout the course of the hearing, refusing to take responsibility for the disaster that his operational changes have wrought. He refused to offer any kind of plan to ensure that the USPS will process ballots on time, saying "Uhh, I need to get back to you [ …] I can probably give you some type of summarized objectives that we can try to fulfill." Probably. DeJoy also flatly refused, again, to restore any of the hundreds of mail sorting machines that have been taken away in states nationwide.

These exchanges are just one of many that requires investigative follow up from the House, with subpoenas and with more witnesses. One of those witnesses has to be Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

First lady Melania Trump speaks during the Republican National Convention from the White House Rose Garden. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Winners: nepotism and a Trump scion. Losers: the immigrants Trump didn’t naturalize on TV.

Night two of the Republican National Convention began with an unexpected cancellation — Mary Ann Mendoza, whose son was killed in 2014 in a head-on collision with an unauthorized immigrant, was pulled from the RNC program after tweeting a bizarrely anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

But much of the rest of the evening was a tribute to swing-state voters, and to a version of Donald Trump meant to appeal to independent voters (with some red meat thrown in on abortion and “cancel culture” to keep the base involved).

President Donald Trump has denounced both legal and undocumented immigrants and attempted to restrict asylum seekers from entering the country. But the Donald Trump on display at the Republican National Convention officiated a naturalization ceremony in the White House (to the ire of immigration restrictionists). President Donald Trump champions a very specific version of “law and order,” but the Trump of the Republican National Convention pardoned an ex-offender.

It’s a version of Trump made palatable not for dedicated #KAG (Keep America Great) voters, populists, or immigration restrictionists, but for the middle: swing-state voters, including suburban independents who voted for Trump in 2016 (or didn’t vote at all) but then voted for Democrats in 2018.

If night one of the convention was meant to play to the base, night two was for the undecided or wavering voter, turned off by four years of Trump but wary of Democrats.

Here are the people (and ideas) that came out ahead, and those that didn’t, over the course of the evening.

Loser: Ethics in government

Trump spent much of Tuesday’s convention flaunting the powers of the presidency for political gain. He opened the day’s events by pardoning Jon Ponder, a one-time bank robber who started a nonprofit that provides job training to people leaving jail. And, in a particularly ghoulish display for a president who built his political brand around harsh immigration policies, Trump hosted a ceremony where several immigrants were sworn in on TV as United States citizens.

The ceremony was officiated by Chad Wolf, a homeland security undersecretary who the Government Accountability Office says has been illegally serving as the acting department secretary. (Trump announced Tuesday that he was nominating Wolf to be DHS secretary.)

In February, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo approved a State Department memo providing that “Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees may not even attend a political party convention or convention-related event.” And yet, Pompeo did not simply attend the RNC, he was a featured speaker on night two — violating a longstanding norm against mixing partisan politics with American diplomacy.

Republican National Committee/Getty Images

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

And then there was first lady Melania Trump’s speech — a speech very visibly attended by her husband and by Vice President Mike Pence — which took place in the White House Rose Garden. The Hatch Act of 1939 prohibits federal civilian employees from using their “official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election,” and it outright forbids some federal workers from participating in political campaigns.

President Trump, who also plans to deliver an RNC speech on the White House grounds, claims that using the White House in a glorified political infomercial is lawful because the Hatch Act “doesn’t pertain to the president.” But, as UC Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky writes, “White House staffers will have to be involved in the logistics for setting up and delivering the speech.”

Add it all up and the RNC has so far been a staggering display of this administration’s willingness to break with longstanding norms, and to politicize symbols of American government and power for partisan purposes.

—Ian Millhiser

Losers: The immigrants Trump didn’t naturalize

The winners were the five new American citizens naturalized Tuesday.

The president paraded out the immigrants for a White House ceremony in an apparent attempt to demonstrate his commitment to legal immigration, despite his efforts to dramatically slash the number of immigrants admitted to the US in his first term.

“You followed the rules, you obeyed the laws,” he said. “You learned your history, embraced our values and proved yourselves to be men and women of the highest integrity. It’s not so easy. You went through a lot and we appreciate you being here with us today.”

Republican National Committee/Getty Images

Trump hasn’t made it easy to immigrate to the US, even for those seeking to do so legally.

Trump’s travel ban, first introduced in 2017 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018, now covers citizens of 13 countries. He has built impediments in Central America, at the border, in detention centers, and in the immigration courts that have made obtaining asylum nearly impossible for people fleeing violence in their home countries, who are legally entitled to humanitarian protections.

For would-be migrants trying to obtain visas from abroad, he has imposed a wealth test that is currently facing legal challenges, nearly doubled the cost of naturalization and created the first-ever fee on US asylum applications. He has cut the total number of refugees the US accepts annually to just 18,000, the fewest in history, down from a cap of 110,000 when he took office. And during the pandemic, he has temporarily blocked the entry of foreign workers coming to the US on certain visas, including the sought-after H-1B visa for skilled workers.

Trump is also laying the groundwork to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed more than 700,000 young immigrants to live and work in the US without fear of deportation.

In pursuing these policies, Trump has given a platform to immigration restrictionists who have long waited for the opportunity to enact their wishlist, including those at the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, groups founded by the white nationalist John Tanton who advocated for maintaining a European-American majority population.

And it’s caused a shift in his own party: Even business-minded Republicans who have historically advocated for an expansion of legal immigration have bowed to their party’s anti-immigration wing, offering weak opposition to even the president’s most extreme immigration policies, including the travel ban.

—Nicole Narea

Winner: Eric Trump

Normally stuck in the shadow of his older brother Donald Jr., Eric Trump stepped up to the podium to emerge as perhaps the most effective orator of the evening. His speech did not break major new ground intellectually, and it contained a few whoppers, like the assertion that under his father’s administration “never-ending wars were finally ended” (they are, in fact, still all ongoing).

But broadly speaking, Eric did what relatively few Republicans do: He actually ran down the list of policy areas the Trump administration has tackled, from building more imposing border barriers to assassinating Qassem Soleimani to promoting school choice to moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. The Trump administration really has done a bunch of stuff.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Of course, Eric couldn’t mount a convincing defense of Trump’s shambolic response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But unlike several other of Tuesday night’s speakers, he at least had the dignity to mostly ignore it, rather than speak of it as if it were in the past tense.

And on a tonal level, he struck an excellent balance between Melania’s snooze-inducing keynote later on and his brother’s panicked address Monday evening. In a family characterized first and foremost by a love of being on television, Eric and his beard came across as the most comfortable, most natural, and most persuasive Trump of the week.

—Matthew Yglesias

Winner: Nepotism

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi gave a speech railing against Joe Biden and his nepotistic ways. “At the Democrat convention, we were told to look at Joe Biden as a model of integrity,” Bondi said. “You look at his 47-year career in politics, the people who benefited are his family members, not the American people.”

Bondi, who has shady links to Trump money, accused Biden of abusing his powers to favor his family before an on-air Trump family reunion.

Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are high-level White House advisers. Eric and Donald Jr. still have Trump Organization business roles and continue to generate enormous sums (and legal inquiries) for the family business with their father in the White House. The degree to which the Trump family has turned the presidency into a money-making machine is truly staggering.

At the Democratic National Convention, Joe Biden’s kids appeared in a short video introducing his speech on the last night. At the RNC, three different Trump children — Donald Jr., Eric, and Tiffany — have given full addresses so far, with Ivanka Trump speaking on Thursday.

Susan Walsh/AP

It is normal to feature the families of a candidate during the convention. But the attack on Biden’s alleged nepotism — which isn’t a new one from Republicans — only underscored the hypocrisy of an administration that has treated the presidency like an extension of the family business.

—Zack Beauchamp

Loser: RNC vetting

Republicans have spent the first two days of their convention railing against “cancel culture,” but before Tuesday night’s events even began, they had to cancel a longtime Republican activist.

Mary Ann Mendoza, a woman whose son was killed by an intoxicated driver who was an unauthorized immigrant, was originally slated to speak on Tuesday night. But the GOP removed her from the schedule after she promoted an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory involving Queen Elizabeth II, former President Obama, and the wealthy Jewish Rothschild family on Twitter. (Mendoza later disavowed her endorsement of this conspiracy, claiming that she had not read it closely enough.)

Other speakers included Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist who accused Planned Parenthood of having “racist roots.” Yet, in a YouTube video posted earlier this year, Johnson claimed that police would be “smart” to racially profile her biracial son because “statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”

Johnson has also promoted something called “household voting,” where each household would receive only one vote. Johnson also claimed that “godly” households would give the final power to decide how this vote was cast to the “husband.”

The task of attacking Democratic nominee Joe Biden for the alleged sins of his son Hunter fell to Pam Bondi. That’s an odd choice because she is accused of backing off a fraud lawsuit against President Trump after Trump’s foundation donated to a political action committee formed to support Bondi in 2014.

You can see how vetting can become a challenge, as the party itself is increasingly captured by fringe figures with few qualifications for public office. Donald Trump, after all, is the leader of the Republican Party. And Trump has also promoted supporters of truly bizarre conspiracy theories such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congressional candidate and acolyte of the QAnon conspiracy theory — which alleges that a group of Satanic pedophiles secretly operates a “deep state” within the US government.

Speakers like Mendoza and Johnson, in other words, have been normalized within the GOP — even though, on this night at least, one of them was too embarrassing for the party to parade in front of a national audience.

—Ian Millhiser

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US National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow speaks during the Republican National Convention. | Getty Images

Larry Kudlow and company are pretending the coronavirus pandemic is a thing of the past.

More than 1,100 American deaths from Covid-19 were reported on Tuesday, but you wouldn’t know that from watching the Republican National Convention.

Speakers during Tuesday’s portion of the RNC repeatedly referred to the coronavirus pandemic in the past tense, as though it’s something the US has already overcome thanks to President Donald Trump’s leadership. In reality, the virus continues to ravage the country, and Trump hasn’t developed a plan to get things under control beyond blustering and buck-passing.

The worst offender was White House economics adviser Larry Kudlow, whose speech on Tuesday made it sound like the coronavirus was over.

“It was awful,” Kudlow said. “Health and economic impacts were tragic. Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere. But presidential leadership came swiftly and effectively with an extraordinary rescue for health and safety to successfully fight the Covid virus.”

In reality, while daily new Covid-19 cases have trended downward over the past month or so, there were still 36,679 of them in the US on Tuesday according to the Covid Tracking Project. On Monday, the US had more new cases than all other countries with the exception of Brazil and India.

And while Trump wants people to believe the economic recovery from Covid-19 is already largely complete, the unemployment rate remains over 10 percent and weekly jobless claims have actually started to tick upward.

Kudlow wasn’t the only offender. The main purpose of Cissie Graham Lynch’s speech was to demonize abortion, but she referred to Covid-19 in the past tense. (“Even during the pandemic, we saw how quickly life can change.”) And Melania Trump described the coronavirus as something that “swept across the country,” though she did go on to extend her “deepest sympathy ... to everyone who has lost a loved one, and my prayers are with those who are ill or suffering” — comments that stood out because so many speakers simply pretended the pandemic isn’t happening.

All this came a day after the RNC went to painstaking lengths to portray Trump as a visionary leader who helped the US triumph over the coronavirus, as opposed to “Democrats, the media, and the World Health Organization,” all of whom “got coronavirus wrong.”

But as my colleague Ian Millhiser detailed, all one has to do is look at a chart of new daily cases in the US compared to other developed countries that more effectively contained the virus to understand how brazenly that argument turns reality on its head.

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A bipartisan pair of congressmen on Tuesday introduced a resolution condemning the fringe conspiracy theory QAnon, less than a week after President Donald Trump said he “appreciates” QAnon adherents’ support.

“Conspiracy theories that falsely blame secret cabals and marginalized groups for the problems of society have long fueled prejudice, violence and terrorism” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) said in a statement. “It’s time for us to come together across party lines to say that QAnon has no place in our nation’s political discourse.”

Virginia Rep. Denver Riggleman, the Republican co-sponsor of the resolution, called QAnon’s beliefs “a danger and a threat that has no place in our country's politics.” Riggleman, who was ousted by a far-right candidate in a district convention this summer after he officiated a gay wedding, has previously referred to QAnon as the "mental gonorrhea of conspiracy theories."

The unfounded theory, which has grown in popularity among Trump’s base, claims there is a deep-state cabal of Satanist pedophiles in the U.S. government that Trump is working to defeat with the help of an anonymous figure within the government. The initial premise of the group has expanded since 2017 to embrace virtually every popular conspiracy theory of the past several decades, Malinowski and Riggleman’s resolution states.

The FBI has labeled QAnon a potential domestic terrorism threat, while the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point argues that the group is “no longer simply a fringe conspiracy theory but an ideology that has demonstrated its capacity to radicalize to violence individuals at an alarming speed.”

The resolution points to half a dozen instances in which adherents of the conspiracy theory have been implicated in potentially deadly crimes they say were inspired by their QAnon beliefs, a list that doesn’t include the 2016 incident in which a North Carolina man opened fire inside of a D.C. restaurant that he falsely claimed was a front for a child sex trafficking ring.

“QAnon adherents have been harming legitimate efforts to combat child exploitation and sex trafficking, including by overwhelming anti-trafficking hotlines with false reports,” the resolution notes. It adds that “the conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon undermine trust in America’s democratic institutions, encourage rejection of objective reality, and deepen our nation’s political polarization.”

The effort to formally reject QAnon comes as supporters of the theory prepare to come to the halls of Congress.

Over the summer, at least seven QAnon adherents have come out on top in Republican congressional primaries including one, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is favored to end up in the House.

Trump, who rose to political prominence on the back of the false birtherism conspiracy theory against former President Barack Obama, has often flirted with conspiracy theories while in office. But over the past few weeks, he has gone his farthest yet toward embracing QAnon, calling Greene a future GOP star and suggesting he doesn’t see the harm in the group. White House officials quickly attempted to walk back his comments.

The disinformation espoused by QAnon has spread on social media, while platforms like Facebook and Instagram have rushed to clamp down on thousands of groups and accounts spreading its theories.

Malinowski and Riggleman’s resolution also urges “all Americans, regardless of our beliefs or partisan affiliation, to seek information from authoritative sources, and to engage in political debate from a common factual foundation.”

Are you tired of the looking glass-level of revisionism going on during the Republican National Convention? Does your head hurt thinking about the myriad fascistic transgressions White House officials are willing to openly practice? There’s a new website for the “RNC,” with a lot more honesty applied than what we are seeing in the general media landscape right now.

Bend the Arc, a Jewish activist group that fights against white nationalism, has created the perfect website for this week’s RNC. Head on over to the Republican Nationalist Convention 2020 website and learn more about the Grand Old Party, its members, and its mission. The splash front page of the site features an image of prominent Republican dirtbags like Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, and Paul Gosar, with the title: “Building a country just for us: We’ve always stood for white wealth and power. We just couldn’t say so out loud. But now? We’re ok with it!”

Diving into the site, one can find out all kinds of important information!

Scrolling down, readers will be delighted to learn about some “Featured Republican Nationalists,” including Rep. Matt Gaetz, Rep. Jim Hagedorn, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and everyone’s favorite QAnon-believing Republican primary winner Marjorie Taylor Greene. But you can jump in and learn about the “whole gang” as well, with profiles on everyone from Donald Trump to Rep. Steve Scalise.

There are also faux promises of help to burgeoning fascists who want to be a part of the Nationalist convention. Articles with titles like “Conquering Stage Fright To Spew Hate Speech” were clearly read by Donald Trump Jr., and I’m sure there will be a long line at the “Dog-Whistling Workshop with Matt Gaetz.”  

The final RNC slogan would be funnier if it didn’t seem 100% accurate:

RED states.

WHITE people.

BLUE lives.

Enjoy.

The police in Portland, Oregon, always seem to come up with handy excuses for failing to protect the citizens of the city from violent far-right thugs—but when it comes to whacking and arresting leftist protesters, they’re regular Johnnies-on-the-spot, replete with readily recited but factually dubious (if not utterly groundless) excuses for making arrests. Just ask Demetria Hester.

After a weekend in which violent Proud Boys—the vast majority of whom live elsewhere—descended on Portland’s downtown once again and, for the umpteenth time, provoked large violent brawls while police stood by and watched, it’s quite clear: The long-established Portland Police Bureau ethos of defending far-right extremists and victimizing their opponents remains fully intact.

On Saturday, an anti-Black Lives Matter “Back the Blue” rally—which, as has been consistently the case, was only peripherally dedicated to its ostensible cause, but really designed to create opportunities for violence against left-wing activists—became the scene of another violent clash between far-right “Proud Boys” from out of town and counterprotesters comprised almost entirely of Portland citizens.

The Proud Boys maced and beat counterprotesters, and at one point began shooting into the crowd opposing them with paintball guns. The two sides threw rocks, fireworks, and bottles, and at one point a notorious Proud Boy provocateur named Alan Swinney pulled out his revolver and threatened protesters with it.

Metal rods and batons were also heavily in use. Journalist Robert Evans of Bellingcat was attacked by a Proud Boy with a baton who broke his hand in the process.

During the entirety of the assaults, Portland police did nothing to intervene—even though protests by Black Lives Matter during the past 80-plus days of protests in the city have been declared “riots” on the pretext of minor violence and subsequently shut down. The Proud Boys and “Patriots” present continued to attack protesters and journalists for nearly two hours before they summarily packed their bags and left.

Afterward, Portland police claimed that it chose not to declare the far-right event a riot because it had limited numbers of police on the scene. Also, they told Katie Shepherd of The Washington Post, they were tired after having to work a much smaller, less volatile protest against police brutality held the night before.

“While the activity in the group met the definition of a riot, PPB did not declare one because there were not adequate police resources available to address such a declaration,” read the PPB’s statement.

After the Proud Boys departed the scene, the remaining counterprotesters gathered at Terry Schrunk Plaza across the street from the federal courthouse, the scene of numerous protests over the past two months and more. Roughly half an hour later, federal police declared the gathering “an unlawful assembly” and ordered everyone out of the area. Some people were removed by force.

Among the collected Proud Boys and other street brawling groups (such as American Guard) present Saturday, one familiar face stood out: Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, the large Samoan man who has been the center of multiple incidents of violence at far-right “Patriot Prayer” and Proud Boy protests in Portland and elsewhere the past few years. Toese was most recently spotted assaulting a man near the fringes of Seattle’s CHOP zone in June—for which an arrest warrant was later issued against Toese on a probation-violation count.

Indeed, as Willamette Week’s Nigel Jaquiss noted, Toese’s warrant was still active Saturday, and he strolled past multiple Portland police officers, none of whom arrested him. His presence is a direct violation of a judge’s orders that he not attend any protests for the next two years.

But then, Portland police have a history of dealing with Toese with kid gloves. When journalists obtained texts and emails between police liaisons and Patriot Prayer organizers, they found in one instance that Toese was being advised how to avoid arrest by city police on a different outstanding warrant: “I don't see a need to arrest on the warrant unless there is a reason,” the PPB officer advised.

The far right in Idaho—which seemingly now includes its state Legislature—has a rule: Free speech for me, none for thee. Protesters from the right are welcome with open arms, but protesters from the left get thrown in jail.

That became manifest Monday in Boise when a horde of anti-COVID-19 restriction activists led by antigovernment figure Ammon Bundy broke into the chambers of the Statehouse, shoving their way past state troopers, pounding on doors, shouting and breaking doors and windows along the way, and then invading committee hearing rooms. But not only was no one arrested, state officials decided to accommodate them. It starkly contrasted with the scene a few years ago, when peaceful protesters seeking equal rights for LGBTQ people were arrested en masse for standing silently in the halls of the building.

Monday marked the opening day of the special legislative session called by Gov. Brad Little to deal with complications created by the pandemic—mainly civil liability issues and concerns raised by county clerks about absentee ballots and a lack of polling workers. However, those were picayune affairs compared to the agenda of the protesters, who demanded an end to the state of emergency declared by Little in March.

Bundy—who has been the primary figure in the far-right resistance in Idaho to pandemic-related measures—led the crowd of entirely maskless protesters at the Statehouse steps, who began chanting “Let us in!” after access to the gallery seating in both Senate and House chambers was restricted to half-capacity and seats quickly filled up. First they shoved their way past Idaho State Police troopers standing guard, then they banged on doors and windows demanding entry past the gallery doors on the fourth floor. One of the men, according to the Associated Press, was carrying an assault-style rifle.

Rather than enforce the rules and eject the protesters, Republican House Speaker Scott Bedke chose to allow the gallery to fully open. Lawmakers on the floor pleaded with the protesters to stop the chants and be respectful. Eventually, the crowd quieted down after all the seats had filled to capacity.

“I want to always try to avoid violence,” Bedke told the Associated Press later. “My initial reaction of course was to clear the fourth floor. But we had room for at least some more.”

That was hardly the end of it. As NPR’s James Dawson reported, the protesters eventually made their way into committee rooms, where they similarly ignored distancing rules and filled the rooms to capacity. They defaced signs designating empty seats, and mocked a Democratic legislator who chose to leave the meeting because of the violations.  

No citations were issued by Idaho State Police, nor are any arrest warrants planned for the property destruction and vandalism.

Gov. Little tweeted out his thanks to the State Patrol, Boise Police, and Capitol security forces afterward “for their efforts in preserving a safe and productive special legislative session.”

Back in 2014, activists tried to get the Idaho Legislature to add the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the state’s anti-discrimination statute, and organized several protests at the Statehouse in Boise, all of which were peaceful. Over 150 people were arrested over the course the next several weeks at “Add the Words” protests, including a former state senator for whom the Senate voted to change its rules just so she could be arrested. Most were arrested while standing silently in the halls.

Idaho is currently experiencing an ongoing wave of COVID-19 infections, and currently has one of the highest rates of infections per capita, though it has been declining recently.

Bundy boasted on Facebook afterwards: “They would not let us in to attend the legislative session. So we did what all people must do. We pushed our way in!”

How do you assemble a banana and peanut butter sandwich that maximizes the number of bites with the perfect ratio of bread, peanut butter, and banana? Ethan Rosenthal, in a quest to work on something truly meaningless, solved the problem over several months with a truly roundabout solution:

So, how do we make optimal peanut butter and banana sandwiches? It’s really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and “slice” the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread “box” into a 2D nesting algorithm.

Best.

Tags: deep learning, optimization, sandwich

Abby Johnson has made a name for herself in the forced-birther movement as a former director at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, who left her post to fight against pro-choice rights. Since that time, Johnson has become one of the white Christian conservative women the right loves to put up in some attempt at dampening down the generally sexist and misogynistic policies of the Republican Party. She is slated to speak on Tuesday night as one of the many talking (mostly) white faces at the RNC lies and terror extravaganza.

In the wake of the George Floyd killing by Minnesota police, thousands of protests kicked off across the country. At the very top of the list of issues Black people face when interacting with law enforcement in our country, it’s the police’s disproportionately aggressive response. Johnson decided to go to her YouTube account and post a video to explain her feelings, as a white lady, with four white male children and one Black child she and her husband adopted. In the video, Johnson—wearing a T-shirt with a quote from the famously problematic Vanilla Ice rap song, “Ice Ice Baby”—takes a few dramatic sighing breaths and begins.

“I haven’t known if I should talk about this or not.” She explains, that as the viewer can see, Johnson is “very white.” Second, as “a white, conservative, ‘non-woke’ person, when I speak on racial issues, ah, my voice isn’t wanted.” In this case, Johnson seems to have nailed the general sentiment about … Abby Johnson. Unfortunately, staying silent when talking about shit she doesn’t know about, and more importantly, about controlling other people’s bodies based on her personal feelings is the Abby Johnson brand.

This video was made private by Abby Johnson, but Vice News got their hands on the video and reposted it so everyone could get Johnson’s pro-life stance on Black Lives Mattering … a little differently than white lives. Johnson first explains that “she doesn’t know what to say.” This, of course, does not stop her from continuing forward into a riff on how she has “many Black friends who love Candace Owens, and I have just as many Black friends that hate her.”

I’m going to say, if this is a true statement, Johnson may know two Black adults she calls “friends,” one of whom might not know Abby’s name. Then Abby moves on to discuss her biracial son, Jude. “In my opinion he is just the most adorable little brown boy you will ever see in your life. He looks like he has a perpetual tan. He has the most gorgeous hair on the planet, and he love, love, loves his brown skin. He talks about it all the time.”

That’s fantastic. Abby Johnson then goes on to explain that she has five boys, four of which are white. And she says she “realizes” that she will have to have a “different conversation with Jude,” than with the white children. Let’s be honest, only Jude will get to “have” a “conversation” about race and law enforcement with Johnson. In the conservative mind, law enforcement works just fine for white folks, it’s people of color that don’t know how to act around law enforcement, making police shoot them and beat them up.

What’s the conversation Johnson needs to have? “Right now, Jude is an adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy. But one day, he’s going to grow up and he’s going to be a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking-maybe brown man. And my other boys are probably gonna look like nerdy white guys.” But this weird racist reality doesn’t make Johnson angry. “Because I look at statistics over emotion.” (This is me staring into the middle-distance.)

She then explains that Black men are in prison at higher rates and have higher rates of violent crime convictions. That’s what she explains. Her “adorable” son will grow up to be more likely to commit a crime. “So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road—as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road—because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”

Forget about the fact that “white nerdy” men seem to make up the number one profile descriptor of serial killers like Harold Shipman, Ed Gein, Joseph DeAngelo, and Jeffrey Dahmer. The disproportionate number of Black men in prison is an issue of systemic racism, not because Black men are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes. Little Jude might just grow up to be a violent criminal. That’s just statistics. Don’t give me any of your liberal emotions!

Also, listen, Johnson doesn’t want a cop to beat up her adorable, theoretically intimidating grown-up Black son. But she knows only smart police officers target Black kids. “If he’s on more high alert with my brown son than he is with my white son, that doesn’t make me angry, because that’s just smart, because of statistics, okay? Now if he acts in an unjust manner toward my brown son than my white son, that makes me angry. But statistically if he’s on more high alert, I’m not angry about that.”

She then goes on to explain that the conversation she will have with her “brown son” will be one where she tells him how to “behave” around law enforcement and maybe be extra careful not to spook them. First part of that conversation might be something about how while Johnson likes to more accurately portray her son as “brown,” law enforcement will likely just see him as an intimidating “Black” man. 

Johnson proceeds to explain that the real problem is that “70 percent” of Black men “are walking out on their babies.” She doubles and then triples down on this completely not true statistic.

Data from a 2013 CDC report also challenges Johnson’s claim that Black men aren’t parenting their kids. Black men who live with their children were found to be deeply involved in their lives: 70% of those fathers, for example, had “bathed, dressed, diapered, or helped their children use the toilet every day,” compared to 60% of white fathers. Josh Levs, author of the book “All In,” has also found that CDC data reveals most Black fathers live with their children.

But, according to Johnson, the reason that cops have to be on “high alert,” around Black men is because of “bad dads.” And so Johnson’s theoretical conversation with her brown son will include things about bad Black men not being fathers and in so doing, making law enforcement more likely to harass, terrorize, hurt, and kill little Jude when he gets older. Now say your prayers and go to bed!

The fact that Johnson’s completely racist, uninformed, and ultimately hypocritical stance on Black Lives Mattering is based in the abject lie that she believes in “statistics over emotion” is just the Trumponian icing on the cake. A woman who has dedicated her bank account to the the forced-birther movement over the last decade, telling people about statistics, isn’t simply laughable, it almost feels criminal. One of the great tragedies of the forced-birther movement is that if they really wanted to rid the world of abortion, they would actually look at statistics and analyze what exactly leads people to choose abortions less than other options.

As investigative reporter Nate Blakeslee found, in a piece about Johnson from 2010, her conversion story, away from Planned Parenthood and into the controlling arms of the forced-birther movement, is … sketchy. As Blakeslee discovered, the big conversion story that viewers will hear tonight has really evolved over time, and grown in graphic nature. Johnson herself has said and written tons of conflicting things during her celebrity tour over the past 10 years. More recently, Johnson’s story was turned into a relatively successful movie Unplanned, that has done well in the Christian market. Blakeslee did follow up his report on Johnson that calls into question whether or not the abortion she says she experienced even happened in the first place.

She will fit right into this parade of lies the RNC is promoting this week. Sadly, when little Jude grows up he might not fit as well into his mother’s belief system. Listen, don’t get emotional, it’s just statistics.

For months, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's foremost demand in coronavirus relief, one of his hostage demands, has been lifting the threat of liability for schools and businesses when they put people in danger of coronavirus infection. It's also been clear for months that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had this at the top of their wish list.

It turns out they didn't just tell McConnell what they wanted, they handed him the draft bill for it. The Washington Post is reporting that the Chamber's "Institute for Legal Reform wrote draft legislation designed to shield companies from liability related to the pandemic and distributed it to state and federal lawmakers, according to a top executive." That top executive is Matthew Webb, senior vice president for legal reform policy at the Chamber, reported this on a Zoom teleconference with the Texas Chamber of Commerce that was recorded and uploaded June 1 on the Texas Chamber's YouTube page. "What we're concerned about, and advocating for with Congress, is you don't want to wait until all the cases are filed […] you have to deal with this beforehand," a statement that undoubtedly inspired McConnell's rhetoric that there will be an "epidemic of lawsuits" in the wake of the pandemic, an assertion that so far has no basis in reality.

On the broadcast teleconference, Webb boasts that they have worked "very closely" with McConnell and with Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn to draft the legislation, and "what [liability] reforms look like in their package." He told the Texas Chamber that the two were "putting their touches on it, as well, which I don't expect to be anything that would be of concern from the U.S. Chamber's perspective." Of course not, because the Chamber gave them their marching orders.

Cornyn's team isn't very pleased with the Chamber taking credit for what they say is his work, the Post reports. "Drew Brandewie, a spokesman for Cornyn, said his office distributed a first draft of its own on May 6 and started working on coronavirus liability issues 'two months before the Chamber claims to have written our bill.'" McConnell's staff declined to respond directly to the Post's questions about the Chamber's involvement, instead pointing the reporters to one of McConnell's statements on liability.

Given that Webb had this call weeks before the Republicans introduced their version of coronavirus relief, the inadequate HEALS Act, and in the call described "detailed policy proposals that eventually were included in the Republican-sponsored legislation," Cornyn and McConnell's protestations ring pretty darned empty.

McConnell has made the liability reforms the single thing he refuses to negotiate. No bill, he has said numerous times, will reach the Senate floor without it. That might be because the Chamber has coughed up more than $31,000 so far to McConnell's reelection campaign, through its employees, members, and affiliated political action groups. That's the largest contribution they've made this year, "and the most the group has given in recent years to a single candidate not running for president," the Post reports. Cornyn's received $10,000. Clearly keeping McConnell around is their highest priority.

The last-minute miracle happened. BuzzFeed News reports U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has canceled plans to furlough nearly 70% of the immigration agency’s staff on Aug. 30, a last-minute decision that comes just days after the House of Representatives passed urgent legislation aiming to stop the impending furloughs.

However, Hamed Aleaziz reports that acting (because of course he is) USCIS Director Joseph Edlow “said in his staff email that while the financial outlook for the agency had ‘temporarily improved’ due to an increase in revenue, they would still need a long term fix from Congress.”

USCIS had been scheduled to furlough more than 13,000 of the agency’s 20,000 employees in a matter of days, a move that would have left the self-funded agency with a “skeleton crew” and forced the nation’s legal immigration system “to a halt,” one former Obama adviser told Forbes.

“This bill is not a complete solution to USCIS’s current fiscal challenges,” Immigration and Citizenship Subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren said in a statement in announcing bipartisan legislation aiming to stop the furloughs. “But it will provide the agency with quick access to additional revenue that will eliminate the need for immediate furloughs.”

While that bill passed the House over the weekend, its future in the Senate had been more uncertain. There is bipartisan support in avoiding these mass USCIS furloughs, but then there’s also Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard. At least for now, the agency is not shutting down.

“Breaking—appears USCIS has pulled back from furloughs that were looming by end of week,” tweeted Gregory Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “This should have come sooner, since it's clear USCIS has funds to carry it for several more months and should not have risked its personnel. But better late than never.” But this agency also needs urgent stability, for the sake of applicants and staff. 

"People are just completely exhausted by the back and forth of it," an unnamed USCIS employee told CBS News. "By the constant uncertainty. By the fact that the letter also indicates this is really just another stay. Execution still may come. The feeling that this was a fake furlough threat held over us as a bargaining chip and that we're merely pawns."

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

What if Kirk and Spock were lovers? What if Trump was a caring man who defeated the pandemic? Indulge your imagination.

Last October, Microsoft unveiled a transcription feature -- Transcribe in Word -- that is designed to let users leverage the power of the cloud to transcribe audio. After nearly a year in development, Transcribe in Word is now generally available in U.S. English at no cost to existing Microsoft 365 subscribers. It will come to Android and iOS later this year. From a report: You could say Microsoft is late to the party -- speech-to-text is hardly novel, after all. But Microsoft project manager Dan Parish says the company is "uniquely positioned" to provide a one-stop shop for transcription. "You don't have to worry about fussing around with different Windows apps," he said during a briefing with reporters. "What we're trying to do with all of our investments in the natural user interface space -- whether they have touch or voice, you name it -- is enable everyone to work in the way that's best for them so that they can be more effective, they can spend less time and energy creating the best work, and they can really focus on what matters most." Microsoft 365 subscribers using Edge or Chrome will now see a Dictate menu under the Home tab when they create a new Word document from Office.com. Selecting Transcribe will start a recording, which can be paused at any time, while hitting the "Save and transcribe now" button will send the recording to the Azure cloud for transcription. Prerecorded files in .wav, .mp4, .m4a, and .mp3 formats can be uploaded via the new Upload audio option.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just one week ago, the results of the first large-scale study on the use of convalescent blood plasma as a treatment for COVID-19 were decidedly confusing. So confusing, in fact, that a team of experts—including Dr. Anthony Fauci—recommended that the FDA place a hold on issuing an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that would have made it easier for doctors and hospitals to use plasma in treating patients. Then, just days later, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn was standing with Donald Trump at a Sunday night press conference to support claims that plasma was a “breakthrough” treatment for COVID-19, and that its use could save over a third of all patients. It was an amazing thing to say, not just because it was counter to the recommendations of the experts, but because there seemed to be nothing in the study that actually supported the numbers that Hahn was claiming. Hahn overruled recommendations and went ahead with the EUA.

But on Tuesday, Hahn was singing a different tune. “I have been criticized for remarks I made Sunday night about the benefits of convalescent plasma,” tweeted Hahn. “The criticism is entirely justified.”

Hahn admitted what was obvious to anyone who even glanced at the original study—or any article on that study—that it was impossible to tell how much benefit is generated through the use of convalescent plasma because the study had no control group for comparison. The study did indicate that giving patients plasma early appeared to be better than giving it to them later, but this was just a small relative difference. 

The pre-print of the study indicates that patients who got a plasma infusion after four days had a seven-day mortality rate of 11.9%. Patients who got an infusion within their first three days had a seven-day mortality rate of 8.9%. That’s all it showed. It says nothing about long-term survival, nothing about any other consequences, and absolutely nothing about how patients receiving plasma compare with those getting standard of care without plasma. In any case, the numbers—which come from a selected group of patients that was in no sense random—don’t show that plasma saves over a third of patients. There is no way to get to what Hahn said from what the report provides.

Still, Hahn’s Tuesday admission comes at the end of a long thread responding to criticism of the FDA providing an EUA for plasma after experts specifically recommended placing a hold on such action. Hahn repeatedly states in this thread that the “decision was made by FDA scientists” and that the FDA “[does] not permit politics” to be involved in these decisions.

Not explained in Hahn’s thread is why the FDA chose to go against the hold recommended by director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, and clinical director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Clifford Lane. 

However, there is an explanation. On Saturday, one day before Hahn joined Trump to announce the EUA for plasma, Trump tweeted: "The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd.”

The data to show how much plasma helps as a treatment for COVID-19 remains unclear. Unfortunately, how Hahn reached the decision to issue the EUA despite recommendations for a hold is way too clear.

The sorry, sad state of the morally bankrupt Republican Party: 

By double-digit margins, Republicans think 175,000 Covid-related deaths (and counting) are “acceptable.” These are the same Republicans who now think that Russian meddling in our politics is okay, that “family values” was a cynical joke on our moral discourse, that “law and order” was something that mattered, that no one stood above the law, that leading the world in pursuit of shared democratic ideals is best replaced by boyish fandom of murderous despots, and that the entire purpose of the Republican Party is nothing more than the singular worship of their idiotic man-boy president. 

Oh, and the response to anything is whine, whine, whine:

Republicans literally are okay with people suffering during this pandemic because they—like their dear leader—are utterly devoid of empathy for their fellow neighbors. It’s the reason so many still resist wearing face masks, putting everyone around them at risk. It’s the reason Republicans continue to support their president despite knowing what they know now, which is exactly what they knew then:

Nothing about Donald Trump has been a surprise. Everything that has happened was predictable. We didn’t know we’d suffer a global pandemic, but we knew Trump would be tested during his first term—every president is—and that he would fail spectacularly. 

What wasn’t predictable was how quickly his whole party would become as sociopathic as Trump himself, how quickly they’d acquiesce to his rampant lawlessness. The party that once went into hysterics because former President Bill Clinton had a quick chat on an airport runway with Attorney General Loretta Lynch is now silent as the curent attorney general acts as Trump’s private lawyer. The same party that went into hysterics and filed multiple lawsuits over former President Barack Obama’s executive orders now turns the other way as Trump escalates the same practice. 

And a whole party that once declared fealty to “law and order” is totally mum as Trump literally thumbs his nose at the Supreme Court. What army do they have, anyway? 

There is a single constitutional remedy for such defiance of our nation’s laws: impeachment. But Republicans decided that they were okay with Trump’s lawlessness, and he’s returned the favor by making an even greater mockery of the very institutions that make our democracy work. 

It turns out they're quite fragile, indeed. All it takes is one despot and an enabling party to watch those institutions crumble. Turns out, the only thing keeping them in place was a belief in our democratic system. Republicans don’t care for our system. Or democracy.

The “party of life” never was, but at least now everyone can stop pretending. Their opposition to abortion has nothing to do with “life,” and everything to do with controlling women. 

The “party of national security” is a laughable joke. Russia strongman Vladimir Putin pulls the strings. 

The party of “law and order”? Trump has literally argued that as president, he is above the law, and Republicans have been happy to play along. 

Tax cuts is all that’s left of what Republicanism was all about. The rich and powerful still get their payday. They always do. Nothing like global economic devastation to redistribute even more wealth to the top 0.01%. 

But the stuff that was supposed to trickle down to the masses? All of that is shredded, in tatters, as the Republican Party devolves into an outright cult of personality and Q-inspired conspiracy mongering. 

The sheer totalizing effect of all the Trump worship is deeply unsettling.

If you are able, please consider joining the Sorensen Subscription Service!

Follow me on Twitter at @JenSorensen

President Donald Trump puts his hand on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s shoulder during his ceremonial swearing-in in the East Room of the White House, October 8, 2018. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Supreme Court has rejected some of the GOP’s sloppiest and most presumptuous arguments. It won’t anymore if Republicans grow their majority.

In 2019, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a gathering of the conservative Federalist Society that President Trump owes his broad support among Republican voters to one issue. “The single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump,” McConnell claimed, “just like nine out of 10 voted for Mitt Romney, was the Supreme Court.”

McConnell’s “nine out of 10” estimate is almost certainly an exaggeration, but there’s no question that Republicans view filling the judiciary with Federalist Society stalwarts as one of their highest priorities, if not the highest priority.

The GOP-controlled Senate passes little legislation. It rarely even considers bills that arise from a Democratic House. But McConnell has transformed the Senate into a virtual factory that kicks out judicial confirmations almost as fast as Trump can nominate conservative lawyers for the bench.

If Trump prevails in November, he is likely to remake the courts — and, specifically, the Supreme Court — in his image. Two members of the Court’s liberal minority, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are in their 80s. And Ginsburg began a course of chemotherapy earlier this year. If Trump wins, Republicans could gain a 7-2 majority on the nation’s highest Court by the end of his second term.

The stakes, if a vacancy does open up on the Supreme Court while Trump is still president, are enormous. Though Chief Justice John Roberts, frequently the median vote on the current Supreme Court, is very conservative, he is both less partisan and less aligned with movement conservatism than his fellow Republican justices. He sometimes rejects conservative legal arguments that are poorly reasoned or transparently partisan, or that ask him to move the law to the right faster than he is willing to go.

If Trump gets to replace a liberal justice, however, this check on Republican power is likely to disappear. Trump spent the past three and a half years filling federal appellate courts with staunch conservatives, often with the guidance of conservative organizations such as the Federalist Society. That gives him a deep bench of potential Supreme Court nominees who are unlikely to disappoint the GOP in the future.

The Court has already moved significantly to the right since it handed down some decisions protecting LGBTQ rights, limiting police surveillance, and preserving most of Obamacare, among many other things. If Trump fills a seat currently held by a liberal justice, those decisions are potentially in grave danger.

To be sure, there’s always some amount of unpredictability in the Supreme Court. Sometimes, a conservative justice is torn between competing ideological commitments, some of which lead them to form occasional alliances with their liberal colleagues. And it’s always possible that several conservative justices could be forced to leave the Court shortly after a Democratic president takes office.

But realistically, if Republicans gain a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, they are likely to hold that majority for a long time. And with six votes, Republicans could afford to have one of those six cast an occasional, futile vote for a liberal outcome.

Roberts is less tolerant than his fellow Republican justices of bad lawyering by conservatives

The Supreme Court completed its most recent term a little more than a week ago, a term that featured several high-profile — if narrow — losses for conservative causes. Notably, Roberts broke with his fellow Republicans in two cases where conservative advocates presented unusually weak arguments to his Court.

Roberts typically votes to limit abortion rights, and his recent opinion in June Medical Services v. Russo spends several pages criticizing the Court’s decisions protecting those rights. Nevertheless, Roberts reluctantly voted with his four liberal colleagues to strike down a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital — a credential that is very difficult for these doctors to obtain, and that does little or nothing to improve health outcomes in abortion clinics.

The reason for Roberts’s vote was simple: The Louisiana law at issue in June Medical was, in all relevant respects, identical to a Texas law the Supreme Court struck down four years earlier in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). “I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided,” Roberts wrote in his June Medical opinion. But he concluded that the principle of stare decisis — the doctrine that courts should generally be bound by their prior decisions — compelled him to strike down Louisiana’s law.

A similar dynamic played out in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, where Roberts joined his four liberal colleagues in holding that the Trump administration didn’t complete the proper paperwork when it decided to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States.

The striking thing about Regents is the utter pointlessness of the Trump administration’s decision to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court. If the administration wanted to end DACA, it should have corrected its paperwork error instead of spending years unsuccessfully trying to convince the courts to excuse this error.

In many cases, Roberts’s insistence on legal and procedural regularity will only delay conservative outcomes — Roberts, for example, is still overwhelmingly likely to dismantle the constitutional right to an abortion once abortion opponents bring him a better case. But Roberts’s formalism also places significant constraints on the Court’s Republican majority, and on the Republican Party’s ability to set policy through litigation.

As Justice Scalia wrote in 1989:

when, in writing for the majority of the Court, I adopt a general rule, and say, “This is the basis of our decision,” I not only constrain lower courts, I constrain myself as well. If the next case should have such different facts that my political or policy preferences regarding the outcome are quite the opposite, I will be unable to indulge those preferences; I have committed myself to the governing principle.

Roberts appears somewhat committed to this same principle that procedural rules and inconvenient precedents cannot simply be tossed aside because they stand in the way of a conservative outcome. The other four Republicans appear far less committed to this principle, given their willingness to cast aside principles like stare decisis in cases like June Medical.

And, if Trump gets to fill another seat currently held by a liberal justice, then Roberts will no longer be the swing vote. It is likely that a majority of the Supreme Court will ignore many of the constraints that, as Scalia wrote a generation ago, prevent judges from ruling by fiat.

America becomes even less democratic if Trump gets to fill another Supreme Court seat

The United States is hardly a paragon of democracy. Americans have a president who received nearly 3 million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent in 2016 and a Senate where, thanks to malapportionment, the Republican “majority” represents 15 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.” Both of Trump’s justices were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the nation.

Meanwhile, the Court’s Republican majority has been a disaster for democracy. In this past term alone, the Court handed down several significant orders limiting voting rights in a pandemic — including a Texas order that effectively allows the state to make it very easy for older voters (who tend to favor Republicans) to obtain absentee ballots, while making it impossible for most younger voters to do the same.

Under Roberts’s leadership, the Supreme Court dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act. It’s neutered most of the nation’s campaign finance laws. And it’s permitted laws that serve no purpose other than voter suppression.

But it can get worse.

“There are already five conservative votes on the Supreme Court to dismantle campaign finance reforms,” according to Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University and an expert on money in politics. In this sense, Torres-Spelliscy told me, a third Trump justice would only provide a “superfluous 6th vote” for the Court’s decisions undermining these laws.

But there is one area of campaign finance law where the current Supreme Court has stayed its hand: disclosure laws. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court’s landmark decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that his Court should have also tossed out many laws requiring many donors to disclose their donations.

At the time, Thomas was the only justice who took this position, but the Court has changed significantly in the decade since Citizens United was handed down. Justice Neil Gorsuch frequently provides a second vote for Thomas’s most radical opinions.

Similarly, as an aide to then-President George W. Bush, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2002 email that there are “constitutional problems” with laws imposing limits on how much donors can give directly to candidates — one of the few campaign finance laws left untouched by decisions like Citizens United. That suggests that Kavanaugh could join Thomas in striking down more campaign finance laws.

And then there’s Justice Samuel Alito. Though Alito did not join Thomas’s opinion in Citizens United, he is arguably the most reliable Republican partisan on the Supreme Court. As Adam Feldman, a lawyer and political scientist who runs the website Empirical SCOTUS, told me, Alito “is the sole conservative justice on the Court not to join the liberals in a 5-4 decision” — meaning that he has never once cast the deciding vote for a liberal outcome. (The one plausible exception to this trend is Alito’s brief opinion in Gundy v. United States (2019). But, in Gundy, Alito endorsed a conservative deregulatory project that is rejected by all four of the Court’s liberals.)

It is unlikely, in other words, that Alito would cast a liberal vote in a campaign finance case if four other justices already support a conservative outcome.

A third Trump justice could also erect new barriers before the right to vote. Although the Roberts Court has already dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act, the primary law preventing racial voter discrimination, it has thus far left in place the law’s “results test,” which prohibits any law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

Thus, while the Act is much weaker than it was just a decade ago, it still retains some vibrancy. Many state laws that disenfranchise voters of color remain illegal.

But Roberts is a longtime opponent of this safeguard against racism in elections. According to the voting rights journalist Ari Berman, Roberts was the Reagan Justice Department’s point person in a failed effort to scuttle the results test. As a young lawyer, Roberts “wrote upwards of 25 memos opposing” such a test, according to Berman.

Roberts may have the votes right now to effectively dismantle what remains of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court has not heard a major Voting Rights Act case since the relatively moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by the hardline conservative Justice Kavanaugh, so we don’t know how far the current Court is willing to go in dismantling what remains of the Voting Rights Act.

At the very least, however, every Republican added to the Supreme Court increases the likelihood that the remainder of the Voting Rights Act will fall.

20 million Americans could lose health coverage in the middle of a pandemic if Trump appoints another justice

Chief Justice Roberts famously broke with his fellow Republicans in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), a decision upholding most of the Affordable Care Act. Three years later, in King v. Burwell (2015) Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy broke with their fellow Republicans again to reject a new attack on Obamacare.

But Kennedy is no longer on the Court. And if one of the four liberal justices is replaced by Trump, it’s far from clear that there will still be five votes to preserve the landmark legislation that provides health coverage to approximately 20 million people.

And, if Trump does get to fill an additional Supreme Court seat, Obamacare could fall quite rapidly. The Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments in California v. Texas, the latest case seeking to repeal Obamacare by judicial decree, in the fall.

The plaintiffs’ arguments in Texas are, frankly, outlandish. They rest on the assumption that, when Congress repealed a single provision of the Affordable Care Act in 2017, that requires the courts to dismantle the entire law. But the fact that these arguments are widely viewed as ridiculous — even by many conservative legal scholars — won’t necessarily deter most of the Supreme Court’s Republicans from voting to strike down Obamacare.

On the eve of oral arguments in NFIB, the first Obamacare decision, the plaintiffs’ arguments in that case were also widely viewed as misguided. An American Bar Association poll of Supreme Court experts found that 85 percent believed the Affordable Care Act would be upheld, and another 9 percent believed the Court would dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction.

That didn’t prevent four justices from voting to repeal the entire law. And, if Trump gets to fill another seat on the Supreme Court, that four could become five.

LGBTQ Americans could be stripped of their constitutional rights

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that federal civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination against LGBTQ workers, is probably safe. That decision was 6-3, with both Roberts and Gorsuch voting with the majority.

But the Court’s constitutional decisions protecting LGBTQ rights stand on far more precarious ground. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court landmark decision establishing that same-sex couples enjoy the same marriage rights as opposite-sex couples, was a 5-4 decision with Kennedy in the majority. Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which placed strict limits on the government’s ability to prohibit sexual activity between consenting adults, and Romer v. Evans (1996), which held that the government may not pass laws solely to express “animus” against gay people, were both 6-3 decisions with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Kennedy in the majority.

O’Connor and Kennedy were replaced with hardline conservatives.

It’s possible, in other words, that all three of these decisions could fall even if no vacancy opens up on the Supreme Court — although, for that to happen, a state would likely have to pass a law that violates Obergefell, Lawrence, or Romer to test whether the Supreme Court would strike that law down. If Trump gets to fill another seat, it is even less clear that the Court’s new majority will value stare decisis more than it values a conservative approach to LGBTQ rights.

It’s also possible that the Court could leave decisions like Obergefell nominally in place, but allow states to deny many rights to LGBTQ Americans. The Court, according to Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, “might permit states to undermine Obergefell by treating married same-sex couples differently in some ways — for example, by permitting states to favor straight couples in adoption or family benefits or even in the definition of who is a legal parent.”

Minter’s view was echoed by Josh Block, a lawyer with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. While Block said he does not think a newly constituted Court “would vote to overrule Obergefell completely and allow states to ban marriage outright,” he fears that the Court’s new majority “could allow states to treat those marriages differently.”

Indeed, that’s more or less the approach that Gorsuch took in Pavan v. Smith (2017). Obergefell held that the Constitution protects same-sex couples’ right to marry “on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.” In Pavan, a majority of the Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas law that treated married same-sex couples differently than married opposite-sex couples with respect to which names appear on a birth certificate.

Gorsuch dissented, in an opinion joined by Thomas and Alito. His opinion suggested that states may be able to discriminate against same-sex couples so long as they argue that “rational reasons exist” for the discrimination.

The EPA could become a hollow husk

As a general rule, Congress may legislate in two different ways. The simplest way is to enact a law commanding certain individuals or businesses to behave in a certain way. Thus, for example, if Congress wishes to limit pollution, it can pass a law commanding power plants to install a particular device that reduces emissions.

But Congress may also lay down a broad policy and instruct a federal agency to issue relatively easily updatable regulations implementing that policy. The Clean Air Act, for example, provides that certain power plants must use “the best system of emission reduction” that currently exists, while also taking into account factors such as cost. It also gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to issue binding regulations instructing energy companies on which systems they must use to limit emissions.

That way, the regulations can adapt as technology evolves. Congress still sets the overarching policy — the impacted power plants must use the “best system of emission reduction” — but EPA determines what that “best system” is at any given moment in time.

In Gundy v. United States (2019), however, Gorsuch called for vague new limits on Congress’s power to delegate regulatory power to agencies. And, while Gorsuch’s opinion in Gundy was technically a dissent, all five members of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority have since signaled that they are supportive of Gorsuch’s approach.

Current precedents typically require courts to defer to Congress’s decision to delegate regulatory power to an agency. Gorsuch would replace these precedents with a new standard providing that a federal law permitting agencies to regulate must be “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain’ whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”

Under Gorsuch’s approach, judges — and ultimately, Supreme Court justices — would get to decide which federal laws delegating power to an agency are “sufficiently definite and precise,” and which ones should be struck down.

So it will matter a great deal who sits on the Supreme Court. In a post-Gundy world, courts will have far more power to make discretionary calls about which regulations they wish to uphold and which ones they wish to strike down. That means that a more conservative Court will tend to strike down more regulations favored by Democrats.

Police could gain far more power to engage in surveillance

The current Supreme Court is arguably more friendly to criminal defendants than it was 20 years ago. For many years, the Court was dominated by conservatives incubated in the “tough on crime” rhetoric preferred by presidents like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The current Court, by contrast, is more likely to see criminal justice cases through a libertarian lens.

A big reason for this libertarian turn is that individual conservative justices hold defendant-friendly views on certain criminal justice issues. Roberts often votes with his liberal colleagues in cases where police use new technology to conduct intrusive searches. Gorsuch wrote the lead opinion in a case holding that criminal defendants may only be convicted by a unanimous jury. Kavanaugh is a longstanding opponent of racial jury discrimination.

While it’s important that justices like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh sometimes take a broad view of the rights of criminal defendants at trial, Roberts’s support for limits on police conduct is likely to prove more consequential — because the overwhelming majority of criminal suspects never receive a trial to determine their guilt.

“97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence,” according to a 2012 analysis by the New York Times. So Supreme Court decisions protecting trial rights only impact a small minority of defendants.

The gap between Roberts and his fellow Republicans was most on display in Carpenter v. United States (2018), where Roberts voted with his four liberal colleagues, and held that police “must generally obtain a warrant supported by probable cause” before obtaining cellphone records that can be used to track an individual’s movement.

Carpenter was a significant case because, as Justice Kennedy wrote in dissent, the Court has typically held that “individuals have no Fourth Amendment interests in business records which are possessed, owned, and controlled by a third party.”

But Roberts recognized that, as police gain more and more technologically sophisticated methods of tracking criminal suspects, the Constitution must recognize new limits on these methods. It’s one thing to say that police can track every number dialed on a particular phone, but it’s another thing altogether to say that police can turn each individual’s cellphone into a homing device that monitors their every movement.

If Roberts is no longer the swing vote, Carpenter could potentially fall. At the very least, the Court is likely to grow less skeptical of police overreach, and less fearful of the awesome surveillance power given to police by new technology.

---

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Donald Trump Jr. gave a taped speech at the first night of the Republican National Convention, which CNN called a “parade of dishonesty”: “While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn’t have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans’ convention.”

But after Donald Trump Jr’s speech, viewers were not talking about its content (which was filled with so many lies it’s not worth sharing in full), they were talking about drugs. “Coked” was still trending on Twitter early Tuesday morning.

Stephen Colbert, who responded immediately to the convention in a hilarious live monologue, said, “It was his keynote address, in that he looked like he had snorted a key. So before I tell you what he said, can we zoom in on Junior’s sweaty face and wet, bloodshot eyes? Either he’s high or that’s what happens when you live in the splash zone of Screamin’ Guilfoyle. Just bring a poncho!”

Here are a few more reactions:

WOW. @DonaldJTrumpJr you should have held back a little there. And one word: Visine. #DonnieDrugs https://t.co/hC5mgkbVHv

— Debra Messing (@DebraMessing) August 25, 2020

I don’t think that’s why we’re still talking about it #coked pic.twitter.com/YSJKxY43fV

— MLE @ (@MLEco2h2o) August 25, 2020

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND……COCAINE!

-Donald Trump Jr#PutinsGOPConvention #RNCConvention2020 #KidVicious

pic.twitter.com/WrZhfVtrNc

— kirk acevedo (@kirkacevedo) August 25, 2020

“Many people” are saying Junior was coked up when he gave his taped speech for his daddy at the RNC.

— Barbara Malmet (@B52Malmet) August 25, 2020

An alternative theory of Don Jr. to the popular "this guy was coked up" theory. https://t.co/NbWjTuNQgo

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 25, 2020

I saw #cocaine was trending and I watched the Carrot Jr's speech. Now, I've taken my fair share of cocaine, some might say unfair, so I know intimately from whence I speak. That dude was coked out of his fucking gourd. Think I'm wrong? Just count the blinks…

— Jason DeFillippo (@jpdef) August 25, 2020

I'll meet you back in the green room for another line! Dude you ruined the whole night being coked out! pic.twitter.com/EZZ0cQlq5j

— Frankinhtown (@frankinhtown16) August 25, 2020

I’m not saying the Trump family had a bad night, but “adderall” and “coked up” are both now trending.

— Palmer Report (@PalmerReport) August 25, 2020

And before the speech, gay former ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell gave him a bedazzled clutch.

The ol’ holding cans of Red Bull to distract us from the lines of cocaine trick. @DonaldJTrumpJr #cocaineeyes #coked
pic.twitter.com/k4zZ9pY2DZ

— Jar of Ghosts (@Jar0fGhosts) August 25, 2020

It was so 'strong' that Cocaine, Don Jr, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Fidel Castro, Erdogan, Coked, and Loch Ness were all trending and Faux Spews cut away from it.

Not sure that's the 'uplifiting, positive' message you were going for. pic.twitter.com/vMgHW0KqH9

— D Villella (@dvillella) August 25, 2020

Last night on our @tlrd Twitter feed, Susie Bright was live-tweeting, and Jon Bailiff was doing illustrations. They’ll be doing it each night of the RNC. Here’s their take on Don Jr.

#HighAsFuck#DontCryDonny #DadHatesMe @DonaldJTrumpJr pic.twitter.com/22ZUDLnNnS

— Towleroad (@tlrd) August 25, 2020

The post ‘Coked’ Trends After Donald Trump Jr’s Lie-Filled, Glassy, Red-Eyed RNC Speech: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Kimberly Guilfoyle speaks during the Republican National Convention. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Loudly.

Trump surrogate Kimberly Guilfoyle might no longer be a Fox News host, but you’d be forgiven for thinking she still was, given her speech at the Republican National Convention Monday evening.

Speaking grandly to an empty auditorium, Guilfoyle delivered a speech more fit for an arena full of screaming supporters than the eerily empty venues of the Covid-19 era. But one of her central themes — and a common one on Fox News — was a familiar one: accusing Democrats of being “socialists” and fear-mongering over how electing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would lead to the downfall of the country.

“If you want to see the socialist Biden-Harris future for our country, just take a look at California,” said Guilfoyle, who is dating Donald Trump Jr., another speaker Monday night. “It is a place of immense wealth. Immeasurable innovation and an immaculate environment. And the Democrats turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes.”

From the carefully coiffed waves in her hair to the backdrop of flags, her speech typified the Fox Newsiness of the first night of the RNC. It celebrated America and touched on a range of favorite conservative media talking points, from cancel culture to calling Democratic leaders “cosmopolitan elites” to warnings about the US Southern border.

“They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she said. “They want to enslave you to the weak dependent liberal victim. They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom.”

The only way to stop it, according to Guilfoyle, would be by reelecting President Donald Trump. She listed several of Trump’s accomplishments since taking office, mentioning tax cuts, taking on ISIS, and renegotiating trade deals.

“Don’t let the Democrats take you for granted,” she said. “Don’t let them step on you. Don’t let them destroy your families, your lives, and your future. Don’t let them kill future generations because they told you and brainwashed you and fed you lies that you weren’t good enough.”

Toward the end of her speech, Guilfoyle was essentially shouting into the podium mic at the government-owned Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC. At the center of her speech — and the rest of the evening — weren’t conservative policies or a political party’s vision for the country, it was just one man and one mission: getting Donald Trump reelected.

“President Trump is the leader who will rebuild the promise of America and ensure that every citizen can realize their American dream!” she exclaimed. “Ladies and gentlemen, leaders and fighters fought freedom and liberty and the American dream, the best is yet to come!”

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A supporter photographs President Trump as he speaks during the first day of the Republican National Convention. | Travis Dove/New York Times via AP

The United States has had one of the world’s worst responses to Covid-19. Trump wants you to believe the opposite.

If you spent the last five months living in a cave, then learned about the outside world solely through a livestream of the 2020 Republican National Convention, you would think Donald Trump was a visionary leader who saw what no one else saw — and who has led his nation to triumph against a deadly plague as a result.

“From the very beginning,” starts an RNC video misrepresenting Trump’s record on Covid-19, “Democrats, the media, and the World Health Organization got coronavirus wrong.” As heroic music plays over an image of Trump surrounded by American flags, the video claims, “one leader took decisive action to save lives: President Donald Trump.“

The video even features a clip ridiculing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) for saying — way back in early March — that he didn’t think that the coronavirus pandemic was “going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”

The reality is that, under President Trump’s leadership, the United States has one of the highest rates of coronavirus in the world — far higher than our peer nations. Indeed, Trump’s entire argument can be refuted in a single chart. This one:

Christina Animashaun/Vox

The data in this chart represents the number of cases per one million people in the United States and several other nations — and, as you can see, the number of cases in the United States vastly outstrips the prevalence of coronavirus in these other nations.

Nearly 180,000 Americans are dead because of the Covid-19 pandemic. As Vox’s German Lopez wrote:

The virus rages on, affecting every aspect of American life, from the economy to education to entertainment. ... Schools are closing down again after botched attempts to reopen, with outbreaks in universities and K-12 settings. America now has one of the worst ongoing epidemics in the world, with the most daily new cases and deaths, after controlling for population, among the developed countries.

In Europe, schools are reopening — and in some nations they never closed — while American parents struggle to balance their jobs with serving as surrogate teachers to children who can only see their regular teachers over Zoom.

In Taiwan and South Korea, cheering fans gather in stadiums to watch their favorite baseball team — over 10,000 fans watched a game in Taichung, Taiwan.

In Germany, restaurants are thriving, and dine-in reservations have spiked, while many American states are imposing new restrictions on our bars and restaurants because it simply is not safe for them to host indoor dining.

There are, in other words, world leaders who did take decisive action to save lives. Donald Trump isn’t one of them.

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to deliver remarks to the Republican National Convention this week is a break from all sorts of norms and precedents designed to keep America’s chief diplomat out of the partisan fray.

It may also be violating State Department policy he himself approved, according to an email sent by his deputy.

On Feb. 18, 2020, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun sent State Department employees an email, obtained Monday by POLITICO, that urged them to look at a handful of legal memos that laid out an updated set of limitations on the political activity of U.S. diplomats and other State staffers.

The legal memos, obtained by POLITICO, include an instruction that says: “Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees may not even attend a political party convention or convention-related event.” That sentence is one of the few to be bolded in one of the memos.

Pompeo is a Senate-confirmed presidential appointee, and the rules do not appear to make an exception for him. The rules also don’t appear to say that such appointees may attend a convention in their personal capacity.

In fact, in his email, Biegun notes, “In my case, as a Senate confirmed Department official, I will be sitting on the sidelines of the political process this year, and will not be attending any political events, to include the national conventions.”

In addition, the rules appear to be more restrictive for U.S. diplomats outside the United States than those on American soil.

If they are in the United States, the legal memo says, political appointees “other than a Senate confirmed presidential appointee” are permitted to attend outside of work “a partisan political rally, fundraising function, election party, meet-the-candidate event, or other political gathering as a spectator.”

Also permitted outside of work only when in the United States: “Attending a political party convention or convention-related event as a spectator, if you are a political appointee other than a Senate-confirmed Presidential appointee.”

Not only is Pompeo a Senate-confirmed appointee, his appearance will take place Tuesday night, while he is on travel to the Middle East.

Unnamed department officials have told other news organizations, such as McClatchy, that multiple legal teams have signed off on Pompeo’s appearance.

One potential loophole may be how the lawyers are defining the word “attend.”

CNN, citing an unnamed source, said Pompeo’s appearance will be “pre-recorded” and delivered from a rooftop in Jerusalem. Whether that qualifies as “attending” the event could be up for debate.

In July, Pompeo’s office sent out a memo to all diplomatic and consular posts reiterating the need to adhere to State Department policies governing political activity and laws such as the Hatch Act, which places restrictions on the political activities of federal employees.

The July note refers to Biegun‘s Feb. 18 missive and the legal memos to which it linked. The July note also points out: “Presidential and political appointees ... are subject to significant restrictions on their political activity; they may not engage in any partisan political activity in concert with a partisan campaign, political party, or partisan political group, even on personal time and outside of the federal workplace.“

After this story was published, a State Department spokesperson responded to POLITICO’s requests for comment with the following statement: “Secretary Pompeo will address the convention in his personal capacity. No State Department resources will be used. Staff are not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeo's appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.”

In response to POLITICO‘s questions about how that would cover State Department employees who are regularly with Pompeo, such as those providing him security, the spokesperson said: “For over 50 years, the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service has provided 24-hours a day, 7-days a week protection for the secretary of State, in the United States and abroad, to maintain safety and security at all times.”

Lawyers familiar with federal and State Department ethics guidelines said it was difficult to understand the reasoning of the attorneys who signed off on Pompeo’s address to the Republican convention. Some noted, however, that State Department guidelines and policies don’t necessarily have the force of law. Pompeo could simply demand that such rules be adjusted for him.

“Policy can always be changed, even if long-standing,” said John Bellinger, a former State Department legal adviser.

Traditionally, secretaries of State in both Republican and Democratic administrations have sought to avoid commenting on or being involved in partisan issues during their time at Foggy Bottom. The idea is that politics should be left behind so that American can speak with one voice to other countries.

But Pompeo has pushed the envelope on partisanship during his tenure. He has spoken at Republican-oriented events such as the Values Voter Summit and the Conservative Political Action Conference. He’s also spoken to a number of Christian organizations about the role Christianity plays in his life, moves that have unsettled many U.S. diplomats who worry about how this is perceived abroad.

Pompeo, a former GOP congressman from Kansas, is believed to be eyeing a future presidential run. He has engaged in an unusual number of trips within the United States, including to Kansas, where he flirted with the idea of running for Senate, and Iowa, a key stop on the presidential trail.

Pompeo has dismissed criticisms that he is politicizing his office, pointing to a watchdog report clearing him of violating regulations when it came to his travel to Kansas. Instead, he has defended many of these events as a way to educate Americans about the work of the State Department, especially promoting such causes as religious freedom abroad.

The secretary of State’s appearance at the Republican convention also comes as he faces an ongoing inspector general’s investigation into whether he and his wife, Susan, have improperly used State Department resources for personal purposes.

Pompeo’s successful move to engineer the firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick amid this still-ongoing probe has led to more scrutiny about his role as secretary from Democratic lawmakers.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Monday exaggerated the efficacy of blood plasma as a coronavirus treatment, urging Americans to disregard any skepticism of the controversial therapy.

The remarks from Navarro — who has previously promoted dubious coronavirus treatments, including hydroxychloroquine — came after the Food and Drug Administration on Sunday issued an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19 patients.

“There should absolutely be no controversy about convalescent plasma,” Navarro told reporters outside the White House. “The odds of it hurting you are close to zero. The odds of it helping you are close to 100 percent. The only issue is how much it can help.”

“For me, this convalescent plasma debate is, in some sense, a litmus test,” he added. “If you see anybody on CNN or MSNBC or in the Democratic Party question the FDA decision in any way, all they are doing is politicizing this issue — and at a cost of American lives.”

Navarro went on to argue that scrutiny of the agency’s authorization is “like going after Bambi,” and insisted that the use of plasma to treat the coronavirus is “proven, safe and effective.”

FDA officials, however, have warned that more rigorous study is needed to prove whether the treatment, while safe, is in fact effective.

Janet Woodcock, the head of the agency’s drug division, told POLITICO on Friday that plasma has not been “proven as an effective treatment.”

And in its statement Sunday, the FDA said plasma “does not yet represent a new standard of care based on the current available evidence.”

Most patients who have received the plasma treatment have done so through expanded-access programs, rather than clinical trials.

Studies of those patients are encouraging but not conclusive, because there is no way to compare the outcomes of people who received plasma against a control group that did not — the ultimate test of the therapy’s effectiveness.

The agency’s announcement over the weekend came after President Donald Trump accused government scientists of slow-walking their approval of plasma as a coronavirus treatment for political reasons.

“You have a lot of people over there that don’t want to rush things. They want to do it after November 3,” Trump said at a White House news briefing last Wednesday.

Speaking at another news briefing Sunday after the FDA issued its emergency use authorization, the president returned to those claims.

“We broke the logjam over the last week,” he said. “I think there are people in the FDA and actually in [the Health and Human Services] Department that can see things being held up.”

Trump also oversold the FDA’s assessment of plasma’s efficacy, saying the agency had found the coronavirus treatment “safe and very effective.”

Jerry Falwell Jr, who took an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty University after photos and videos of the Evangelical Trump-supporting zealot partying on a luxury yacht with men and women in various states of undress spread across social media earlier this month, said in a lengthy statement on Sunday that he has been in a state of depression because his wife had an affair with their pool boy who then tried to extort them.

UPDATE: Pool Boy Says Jerry Falwell Jr. ‘Enjoyed Watching’ Me Have Sex with His Wife

The “pool boy” has been previously identified as Giancarlo Granda in news stories about racy photographs of Granda, his wife, and Falwell and their imbroglio.

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, reportedly helped evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. get rid of the racy photos according to a recorded conversation obtained by Reuters in May 2019. Soon after Cohen disappeared the photos, Falwell endorsed Trump, just before the Iowa caucuses.

Wrote Falwell in his statement about the “fatal attraction”-like scenario: “During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school. We encouraged him to pursue an education and a career and we were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity. My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family.”

“Shortly thereafter, Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved – it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about,” Falwell Jr. added. “After I learned this, I lost 80 pounds and people who saw me regularly thought that I was physically unwell, when in reality I was just balancing how to be most supportive of Becki, who I love, while also reflecting and praying about whether there were ways I could have been more supportive of her and given her proper attention.”

“While we tried to distance ourselves from him over time, he unfortunately became increasingly angry and aggressive. Eventually, he began threatening to publicly reveal this secret relationship with Becki and to deliberately embarrass my wife, family, and Liberty University unless we agreed to pay him substantial monies,” Falwell Jr. continued. “Even years after the improper relationship had ended, this person continued to be aggressive with Becki and me in a variety of ways. We finally decided that we had to further withdraw completely from him, which resulted in him stepping up his threats to share more outrageous and fabricate claims about us (under the guise of that business entity). He clearly moved forward with this plan through a specific member of the media who has continued to badger us, as well as other members of the media, regarding the false claims about the nature of the relationship based on the individual’s misrepresentations. Over the course of the last few months this person’s behavior has reached a level that we have decided the only way to stop this predatory behavior is to go public.”

Read the full statement here.

Folks, let's be clear.

Jerry Falwell Jr. was having sex with a man and his wife.

And it looks like he did it with other men and his wife — their personal trainer at Liberty too.

And he has shown photos to other men of his wife.

And he condemns homosexuality and adultery.

— Michelangelo Signorile, subscribe to my newsletter (@MSignorile) August 24, 2020

Wrote SiriusXM radio host and author Michelangelo Signorile in early August: “Falwell likes taking photos of his wife in sexually explicit poses and costumes and enjoys showing them to other men — including men with whom the two have developed close relationships. And perhaps Falwell also enjoys having sexual threeways with his wife and other men. Nothing wrong with any of that — unless you’re running a university that condemns people who don’t lead a monogamous heterosexual lifestyle. … It just seems like too much of a coincidence to many of us that Falwell and his wife met a handsome young pool boy in Miami Beach and then invested in a hostel with him that just happened to be welcoming of non-heterosexual, non-traditional sexual goings-on. Sometimes things are exactly as they appear — or something close to it.”

The post Jerry Falwell Jr. Says Wife Had Affair with ‘Angry and Aggressive’ Pool Boy Who is Targeting Them in ‘Fatal Attraction’ Extortion appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The US Food and Drug Administration this week granted emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a treatment for Covid-19. | Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images

The White House is leaning on regulators to authorize treatments for Covid-19 before the election.

The Food and Drug Administration whipped up a fierce controversy Sunday when it decided to grant an Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA, for convalescent plasma to be used as a treatment for Covid-19. The decision came after many experts, including Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had warned the agency there wasn’t enough evidence to fast-track approval for the novel treatment.

In a statement, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn said, “We’re encouraged by the early promising data that we’ve seen about convalescent plasma. The data from studies conducted this year shows that plasma from patients who’ve recovered from Covid-19 has the potential to help treat those who are suffering from the effects of getting this terrible virus.”

President Trump, meanwhile, described the treatment as a “breakthrough.”

Convalescent plasma is already being used in dire cases of Covid-19 and is being studied by several research groups. But many scientists and doctors say there isn’t yet sufficient evidence to warrant an EUA.

“The evidence [the FDA is] drawing on is not ready for primetime,” said Jeremy Faust, an attending physician in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

The authorization comes after President Trump publicly pressured federal agencies to approve drugs and vaccines for Covid-19 ahead of the November election, raising alarm that the FDA is bowing to political pressure to greenlight unproven treatments.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made it clear that Trump is leaning on the FDA. “If they don’t see the light, they need to feel the heat because the American people are suffering,” he told ABC on Sunday. “This president knows it, and he’s going to put it on wherever — the FDA or NIH or anybody else — to make sure that we deliver on behalf of the American people.”

Such pressure has moved the FDA before; for instance, it rushed an EUA in March for the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine after President Trump repeatedly touted the drug as a “game changer” despite flimsy evidence for its effectiveness. The EUA was then revoked in June after the agency said the drug was “unlikely to be effective” and could cause serious side effects like heart arrhythmias.

With more than 170,000 people across the United States dead from Covid-19, there’s an urgent need to find effective treatments. But the appearance of political pressure could undermine confidence in government agencies and their support for other treatments and vaccines, adding to the long list of public health missteps and confusion around the pandemic.

The FDA is playing up weak evidence to justify its EUA for convalescent plasma

Plasma is the liquid part of the blood that includes proteins used for clotting (as opposed to serum, which is the liquid part of blood leftover after blood clots). With convalescent plasma therapy, doctors harvest plasma from people who have recovered from Covid-19 and transfuse it to people who are currently suffering from an infection.

The idea is that the plasma from people who have successfully withstood the virus contains antibodies, which can interfere with how a pathogen works or mark it as a target for elimination. That can then keep the disease in check or help the immune system eradicate it. It’s an approach that’s been used with varying degrees of success for other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS.

But Covid-19 is a markedly different disease, and so far, no randomized control trials, the gold standard of evidence, on convalescent plasma have been completed.

The FDA memo outlining the EUA for convalescent plasma cites just two randomized controlled trials, both of which were stopped early — one because it failed to recruit enough participants and the other because they found that the patients that were receiving plasma already had high levels of antibodies. Both found little to no benefit from the treatment, but they remain some of the best-constructed studies.

The memo also cites a handful of observational and retrospective studies as the basis for its decision. It was one of these retrospective studies that served as the basis for the White House’s boldest claim about the effectiveness of convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19.

During Sunday’s press conference, Hahn reported that convalescent plasma would yield a 35 percent improvement in the survival rate of Covid-19 patients.

“A 35 percent improvement in survival is a pretty substantial clinical benefit,” said Hahn during a Sunday press conference. “What that means is, if the data continue to pan out, if 100 people are sick with Covid-19, 35 would have been saved with the administration of plasma.”

But researchers said that Hahn’s 35 percent improvement in survival claim is misleading. It comes from a retrospective preprint study that hasn’t undergone peer review, so some of the methods and findings may have flaws that would ordinarily be caught in the review process.

The study doesn’t compare patients who received convalescent plasma to patients who received a placebo, either. Rather, it compares patients who received plasma early versus those who received it later in their course of treatment.

Even with that comparison, the results showed that the seven-day mortality rate was 11.9 percent in patients who received plasma four days or more after they were diagnosed with Covid-19, while those who received plasma three days after diagnosis had a mortality rate of 8.7 percent. In other words, getting plasma to Covid-19 patients one day earlier reduced the absolute mortality by 3.2 percent.

And when the researchers compared the doses of convalescent plasma, they found that those that received the low dose had a seven-day mortality rate of 13.7 percent while those that received the high dose had a rate of 8.9 percent. That’s a 4.8 percent improvement in absolute terms, but a 35 percent change in relative terms.

Faust pointed out that this retrospective study only sampled patients who were sick enough to go to the hospital. Out of those, the patients studied were only the ones who received convalescent plasma, were under the age of 80, and who did not receive mechanical ventilation.

“This big ‘breakthrough’ that they say is a 35 percent reduction in mortality, this is a subset of a subset of a subset in a retrospective study which has not been confirmed with a trial,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with the study itself for what it is; what’s wrong is to rely on it to say that there’s been a breakthrough.”

Let’s be clear: Convalescent plasma could be a viable treatment for Covid-19. However, the vast majority of people infected with the virus get better on their own. Determining whether a treatment can actually hasten recovery from the illness requires controlled clinical trials. This means randomly sorting people into two groups — one that receives the treatment and one that receives a placebo — and then monitoring their progress with the disease. And that data is still lacking for convalescent plasma.

This treatment also carries risks. Plasma transfusions can lead to complications like acute lung injury and severe allergic reactions leading to anaphylactic shock. These are not common outcomes, but the risk isn’t zero. For people who are sick with Covid-19, it may be worth accepting some of these risks if there is a clear benefit. But if there isn’t, it becomes much harder to tolerate.

“You’re essentially asking people to play roulette with a treatment that may not work,” Faust said.

Another issue is that with the EUA, ongoing clinical trials can become more difficult. It becomes harder to recruit patients into clinical trials where they may receive a placebo if they know that they could get the actual treatment from their doctor.

All this means that it’s crucial to establish that convalescent plasma carries benefits that outweigh its risks before clearing it for widespread use.

The FDA is undermining its own credibility at a critical time

National and international health agencies have made a number of missteps during the Covid-19 pandemic, from how the World Health Organization reversed course on whether the virus could be spread person to person to the back and forth in the US about wearing masks.

But the political pressure mounting on the FDA from the White House could end up being the most consequential erosion of credibility since it could undermine the public’s trust in treatments for Covid-19 as well as an eventual vaccine. With the perception that drugs are being issued to meet the president’s demands, patients may be reluctant to take them.

That’s why some health advocates are so distressed by the FDA’s authorization of convalescent plasma, which serves as yet another example of politics getting its way over science.

“Make no mistake, the FDA’s decision to grant an emergency use authorization for COVID-19 convalescent plasma on the eve of the Republican National Convention represents the most blatant politicization of FDA decision-making in history,” said Michael Carome, director of the Health Research Group at the watchdog group Public Citizen, in a statement. “Such action seriously damages the FDA’s credibility during the greatest public health crisis in 100 years.”

And if a vaccine for Covid-19 were to gain approval before the November election — before phase 3 trials are complete — there will be concerns that it too was rushed. Fewer people might be inclined to get vaccinated, out of safety fears, making it harder to control the disease. That will have tremendous impacts on the lives of millions of people as they cope with the spread of the virus.

Building trust in public health agencies is therefore necessary for ending the Covid-19 pandemic, but it will take time. Hyping weak results or unproven drugs does more harm than good.

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US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifies at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on August 24, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.  | Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty Images

How much does it cost to send a postcard? Don’t ask the guy in charge of the mail.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before the House Oversight Committee Monday that he came to the United States Postal Service to apply his experience in logistics to help the USPS “grow and evolve in the path of sustainability.”

But during the hearing, he revealed that he’s still a tad unfamiliar with the agency he is set to reform.

That came out in questioning from Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who used her time to quiz DeJoy about postal service basics. She started out by asking DeJoy what the price of a first-class stamp is. DeJoy responded, correctly, that the cost is 55 cents.

But Porter kept going. “What about to mail a postcard?” she asked.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” DeJoy replied. He also missed a question on greeting cards.

“I’ll submit that I know very little about postage stamps,” DeJoy said.

Porter asked about packages (DeJoy went 1 for 2) and then got to voting: “Within a million or so, can you tell me how many people voted by mail in the last presidential election?” Porter asked.

“No, I cannot,” DeJoy responded. Porter asked then if he could estimate it to the nearest 10 million.

“I would be guessing, and I don’t want to guess,” DeJoy answered.

“So, Mr. DeJoy, I’m concerned,” Porter replied. “I’m glad you know the price of a stamp, but I’m concerned about your understanding of this agency. And I’m particularly concerned about it because you started taking very decisive action when you became postmaster general.” Porter noted the unplugging of mail-sorting machines, changing employee procedures, and locking collection boxes.

Porter then asked DeJoy if he had analyzed the major overhaul plans before they took effect. DeJoy responded that he “did not order major overhaul plans” and that they were in effect before he arrived.

So Porter asked if DeJoy could say who did put those plans in place. “If you did not order these actions to be taken, please tell the committee the name of who did.”

“I do not know,” DeJoy responded.

When Porter asked if he would commit to reversing the changes, DeJoy replied that he would not.

Porter’s direct questioning helped get at two of the central questions that are still unclear about DeJoy’s tenure at the USPS: whether he knew the recent changes would cause delays in delivering the mail, and how seriously lawmakers should take his assurances that these delays will be temporary and not affect mail-in voting.

As in his Friday testimony before a Senate committee, DeJoy on Monday acknowledged delays had occurred but distanced himself from some of the cost-cutting measures — including taking sorting machines offline, changing overtime policy, and removing blue boxes. He said he’d since suspended those measures in response to the public outcry and perceptions of what it meant for the upcoming November elections, in which a record number of Americans are expected to vote by mail because of the pandemic.

DeJoy said the only changes he directly implemented were stricter transportation schedules for mail trucks and a management reorganization. But even as he said he had nothing to do with other measures, he also said he’s not reversing any of the changes that have already taken place, such as putting the decommissioned sorting machines back online.

Yet he still promised that the USPS is “fully capable and committed to delivering the nation’s ballots securely and on time. This sacred duty is my number one priority between now and Election Day.”

Despite DeJoy’s assurances, he has not yet given Congress a detailed plan on how he’ll make sure that happens. And Porter’s questions reinforced DeJoy’s contradictions: He’s not responsible for many of the cost-cutting measures, but he was able to suspend them. He didn’t analyze the potential fallout from those changes because they went into effect before his tenure started, but he isn’t going to reverse them.

DeJoy, a Trump ally, again denied any political motivations for messing with the mail, even as Democrats questioned him on potential conflicts of interest (something the inspector general at USPS is currently reviewing). But Porter’s questioning showed why there’s still cause for concern about what’s going on at the Postal Service, and how decisions are being made.

House Democrats have tried to remedy this with legislation, passing a bill on Saturday that would give $25 billion to the post office and prevent changes in service until at least the end of the year. But Republicans are largely opposed, citing DeJoy’s own statements that the USPS has enough money, and so is the White House.

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