James.galbraith

Much of America just learned what I have known for many years: The senior leadership of the National Rifle Association is thoroughly corrupt.

Last week, New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced her intent to legally terminate the NRA. The 169-page complaint alleges flamboyantly extravagant travel, double-dipping by high-ranking insiders, egregiously bloated salaries for the executive elite and recurring and abusive violations of NRA’s own bylaws by members of the board of directors.

Twelve years ago, I wrote a book called Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, in which I questioned some of these same transgressions. During my time lobbying for the NRA, which overlapped the early rise of Wayne LaPierre I had watched as his business buddies and pet consultants took control of decision-making at the upper echelons of the organization. Though I’m not entirely surprised by the detailed specifics James laid out in her lawsuit, I was taken aback by the sheer quantity. As a life member of the NRA I am disappointed by the feckless senior leadership of my beloved organization whose stated goals I still fervently support.

But I am outraged by James’ attempt to deprive millions of middle-class, dues-paying gun owners of their rights to organize, collectively communicate, advocate, petition their government and mutually support candidates of their choosing. James, a Democrat, made clear her hatred of the NRA while running for office two years ago. In July 2018, she promised to investigate the NRA’s “legitimacy” as a nonprofit organization. Later, she called it “a terrorist organization.”

Did she mean the leadership are terrorists or the millions of loyal, patriotic citizens (350,000 plus from New York state alone) who are members? If James can “dissolve” one of the largest and most powerful political organizations in America because of the corruption of a few scammers at the helm, she will have the power to disenfranchise millions of Americans of their First Amendment rights simply because she disagrees with their policy. That overreach is a political gift to conservatives; the fundraising letters from NRA headquarters are landing in mailboxes as I write. “This is nothing more than a disgusting, brazen attempt by gun-ban politicians to shackle freedom and leave regular, law-abiding Americans defenseless,” reads one.

Of course, these aggrieved letters from LaPierre make no mention of the fact that he and other NRA execs allegedly squandered as much as $64 million over just three years on personal travel for their families. LaPierre alone took eight trips to the Bahamas and safaris to Africa. My fellow NRA members, roughly 5 million of them, should be repulsed when they digest the specifics of the greedy con game LaPierre’s minions have perpetrated with their hard-earned contributions. But I fear that they will be more incensed by James’ anti-gun rights agenda and reflexively rally to protect a cancerous core at NRA headquarters.

As much as I object to James’ efforts to take down the NRA entirely, it does offer an opportunity for reform. And I would encourage the group to undertake the reform itself before a judge does it for them. The millions of NRA members deserve an NRA that operates to benefit them, not the gun industry, not lucrative sweetheart deals for vendors and certainly not eye-bulging salaries for senior staff coupled with private jets, yachts and Caribbean getaways.

First, LaPierre needs to go. Nothing can happen until the face of the corruption changes.

Second, the unwieldy 76-member board of directors should be removed and replaced with one that is a third the size and whose members are elected for three-year terms. A smaller, engaged board can provide the missing oversight into the activities of the organization and prevent wholesale abuses before they become business as usual.

But the boldest move of all, the one that could truly rescue this beleaguered organization would be to hire a well-known pro-gun Democrat as the executive director of the NRA’s lobbying arm—the Institute for Legislative Action. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. That breed of Democrat, which used to be common in Congress (Reps. John Dingell, of Michigan andJack Brooks, of Texas; and Idaho Sen. Frank Church, all sadly deceased, come to mind). But their ideological descendants are numerous, even if they’re no longer in Congress. There are former Reps. Bill Brewster and Dan Boren of Oklahoma, Mike Ross of Arkansas or Heath Shuler of North Carolina.

It would signal a return to a more bipartisan approach to advocacy. The very thing that made the NRA the envy of every other organization in the 1980s and 90s was that it was a grass-roots organization, representing different perspectives and disciplines within the vast shooting sports community. The NRA must face the fact that it has become the National Republican Association, and this is not in the interests of millions of Democrats, independents or even moderate Republicans who own guns or support the right to do so. An overt appeal to a more bipartisan approach would detoxify the NRA’s hyperpartisan culture-war approach and begin the process of making headway on sound legislation that targets the misuse of firearms without interfering with legitimate, constitutionally protected enjoyment and defensive use of guns. Indeed, done correctly, it would enhance our Second Amendment rights.

Moreover, by detaching itself from its exclusive branding relationship with the Republican party, the NRA could reverse its sliding membership base by actually appealing to a wider pool of potential members. And if all that happens, it will mean more money to protect pro-gun gains, promulgate pro-gun policies and far less money in the pockets of people like LaPierre.

Officials from the Massachusetts Democratic Party, including both the chairman and the executive director, reportedly helped coordinate a recent attack on gay congressional Alex Morse, involving unsubstantiated allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior.

In its latest bombshell story about the matter, published Friday, the Intercept reported it is “undeniable … that the state Democratic party was behind the emergence of the allegations,” citing five sources within the state party and connected to the College Democrats of Massachusetts (CDMA), a review of messages between party leadership and the leadership of the CDMA, and call records obtained by reporters. 

“The documents show that the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s executive director Veronica Martinez and chair Gus Bickford connected the students with attorneys, among them, the powerful state party figure and attorney Jim Roosevelt, who worked with the college group on a letter alleging Morse behaved inappropriately,” the Intercept reported. “A [Democratic State Committee] member told The Intercept that in their view, the different roles Martinez, Bickford, and Roosevelt played in the development and release of the CDMA letter—as well as the ensuing attempts to cover up their involvement after the fact—make the state party’s hostility to Morse, a young gay man, hard to ignore. ‘As a DSC member, it’s pretty angering that party resources and party staff were put into an effort to attack a gay candidate,’ the member said. ‘I don’t know how we can have any trust with the LGTBQ community going forward.'”

Roosevelt, the attorney, has twice contributed money to the campaign of Morse’s opponent, longtime Democratic Congressman Richard Neal. Roosevelt has also fought back against the progressive wing of the party, and Morse is challenging Neal from the left.

Previously, the Intercept reported that the former president of the College Democrats chapter at UMass Amherst vowed last year to “sink” Morse’s campaign so he could get a job working for Neal.

Neal has denied any involvement in the allegations against Morse. However, a senior Neal staffer said privately earlier this year that the congressman wasn’t worried about the primary challenge from Morse “because the young mayor was known to have slept with college students and that information would emerge at the right time,” according to the Intercept.

As we noted Thursday, party chair Bickford reportedly said he plans an investigation into the conduct of the students behind the allegations. However, it now appears that any investigation should be independent, given that party officials including Bickford were involved.

On Thursday, the president of the College Democrats of Massachusetts, Hayley Fleming, said the group’s letter setting forth the anonymous, inflammatory allegations against Morse was written “on the advice of legal counsel” — but Fleming didn’t name names.

Update from CDMA to its members on the Alex Morse story pic.twitter.com/yJ0EFxlkTr

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) August 13, 2020

“We condemn all homophobic attacks that have followed the article,” Fleming wrote in a message to members, referring to The Daily Collegian’s initial report about the letter. “While we believe that the concerns expressed by students were genuine, those concerns have been used to paint Morse in a way that plays into inappropriate stereotypes. That is unacceptable, and we want to make clear that we in no way condone that narrative or those attacks. I sincerely apologize for the harm that these homophobic responses have caused Morse and the greater LGBTQ+ community, and I apologize for the role we played in that harm.”

Meanwhile, Morse’s campaign announced Friday it had its best fundraising week ever in the wake of the allegations.

“Like many, I believe it’s highly suspicious that this story emerged three weeks before the primary election, as we’re on the verge of defeating one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington,” Morse said during a virtual news conference on Thursday. “I think the larger question is why three weeks out from the election, I’m in the position to talk about my personal life and my personal sex life rather than the issues that we got into this fight to begin with last July.”

Morse and Neal are scheduled to debate on Monday.

The post Mass. Democratic Party Officials Helped Coordinate Attack Against Gay Congressional Candidate Alex Morse: Report appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Using the Treasury Department’s forfeiture data, a new report by the Institute for Justice analyzes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) ability over the past 15 years to separate travelers to our country from their cash. According to the report, while local law enforcement agencies have made bucketloads of cash using civil forfeiture laws between 2000 and 2016, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Coast Guard have taken over $2 billion from people arriving from abroad.

According to the study, the top reason given for taking this money is that people brought in more money than they reported bringing. At the same time, the “available data do not indicate a strong link between airport currency seizures and criminal activity.” That’s a nice way of saying that people visiting the United States risk the same kind of corruption Americans always warn one another about in other countries. To this end, in forfeiture cases at the airport only 10% involved an arrest for any real legal violation.

It’s important to note that the idea behind being allowed to seize large sums of money—regardless of whether the person being robbed is an American citizen or a tourist—is that law enforcement is supposedly trying to stop drug and human trafficking. However, as the report notes, at least half of the cases reported by the DHS are due to “reporting violations.” 

Civil asset forfeiture reform is one of only a handful of subjects that frequently receive bipartisan support these days. However, after small steps to curb this constitution-violating practice of theft, our newest administration has very pointedly rolled back any positive steps that have been made.

Over the last few years, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport has been one of the top spots for federal agencies to wet their beaks with other people’s money, making up almost a quarter of all seizures between 2014 and 2016. Also highlighted in the report are places like New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK), which saw currency seizures out of proportion to the percentage of air travelers. For example, in 2016, the percentage of federal agents conducting JFK’s currency seizures were twice as many as the airport’s actual share of air travelers.

And to be clear: This practice ruins people’s lives. The report gives example after example of both American citizens and those visiting our country who have brought their life savings with them, whether it’s to start a clinic or program abroad or to try and buy a retirement home in their home country. Having all of your money taken from you by DHS doesn’t result in happy endings. If you get your money back, it comes after signing away rights, paying for lawyers, and long stretches of time where you are out of the resources that have been stolen from you.

There's no one left who says the outcome doesn't matter. Thank goodness.

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Today's News:

Ten months before leveling anonymous, unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct against gay Massachusetts congressional candidate Alex Morse, the president of a Democratic student group reportedly vowed to “sink” the Holyoke mayor’s campaign in order to win a job working for his opponent.

In a letter last week, the College Democrats of Massachusetts accused Morse, a progressive who’s challenging longtime Democratic Congressman Richard Neal in the Sept. 1 primary, of using “his position of power for romantic or sexual gain.” The group alleged that Morse, the four-term Holyoke mayor who is a former adjunct professor at UMass Amherst, had sexual relations with college students in the state, and made some of its members feel uncomfortable by matching with them on dating apps and messaging them on Instagram.

Morse, 31, responded to the allegations by admitting to having consensual sexual relations with college students in the past. But he denied any wrongdoing, and said the attack was rooted in “age-old gay stereotypes.”

The College Democrats presented no specific evidence to back up their allegations, which were not reported to the UMass Amherst administration prior to their letter, raising questions about their motives three weeks before a hotly contested primary. Then, on Wednesday, the Intercept reported that it obtained chat messages in which leaders of the College Democrats at UMass Amherst discussed an effort to smear Morse last October.

From the publication’s report: “Timothy Ennis, the chief strategist for the UMass Amherst College Democrats, admitted in the chats that he was a ‘Neal Stan’ and said he felt conflicted about involving the chapter of the College Democrats in a future attack on Morse. ‘But I need a job,’ concluded Ennis. ‘Neal will give me an internship.’ At the time, Ennis was president of the chapter, a post he held from April 2019 to April 2020, when he was term-limited out. Leaders of the College Democrats group went beyond merely plans to leak. They also explicitly discussed how they could find Morse’s dating profiles and then lead him into saying something incriminating that would then damage his campaign. … Ultimately, the College Democrats did not release any chats or any other specific claims against Morse, opting instead to level broader charges that he behaved inappropriately.” 

As it turns out, Ennis and others were unable to come up with any dirt on Morse beyond a rather innocent Instagram conversation he had with Andrew Abramson, who now serves as president of the UMass Amherst College Democrats, as well as evidence that Morse once maintained a Tinder profile. Nevertheless, they contacted a Politico reporter in an effort to get the allegations published. After his campaign was contacted by the reporter, Morse reached out to Abramson and apologized if he had made him feel uncomfortable — at which point Abramson blocked him. When Politico didn’t initially publish a story, leaders of the Student Democrats reportedly fired off their inflammatory letter without the knowledge of rank-and-file members — and their allegations made national headlines.

Ennis reportedly hoped to launch his political career by going to work for Neal, the 15-term incumbent. Neal also teaches at UMass Amherst, and Ennis was enrolled in the congressman’s journalism class.

Neal’s campaign has denied any involvement in the apparent smear campaign against Morse. While a few of Morse’s supporters have withdrawn their endorsements in response to the allegations, others have stood behind him, including former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, the LGBTQ Victory Fund and gay Massachusetts state Sen. Julian Cyr. Meanwhile, one city council member in Holyoke launched a recall campaign against Mayor Morse, accusing him of “sexual activities with teenagers.”

Cyr said in a statement: “As an ‘out’ queer elected official who knows the sex lives of LGBTQ people are too often sensationalized in politics and in media, I find it extremely disappointing that vague and anonymous allegations have been levied against Holyoke Mayor and Congressional candidate Alex Morse without any on-the-record sourcing. It’s alarming that these claims have attracted this level of attention with a swiftness I fear they would have not received if Alex were straight.”

More from Twitter below.

It takes a lot to run for public office especially when you’re #LGBTQ. Vague and unsourced allegations that traffic in dangerous stereotypes have a chilling effect on the willingness of queer candidates to run and serve. My statement below. @AlexBMorse @RepRichardNeal pic.twitter.com/8xmZP2ijrJ

— Julian Cyr (@JulianCyr) August 12, 2020

Let’s go Alex! As excited as ever for your race. https://t.co/lcmyPT1IUd

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) August 10, 2020

it's disturbing that the various tracys flick behind the Alex Morse honeypot scheme realized all they needed to prove is that the guy seemed to desire sex with consenting adults to destroy him

it is heartening that plenty of people rejected the effort right off the bat

— Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig) August 13, 2020

A bunch of credulous liberals spent the past few days tweeting shit like "um this ain't it" to people who were rightly unmoved by the hitjob on Alex Morse. Today, we learned this. Will there be any mea culpas from the puritanical sex police? pic.twitter.com/vIfIBnDnTe

— jordan (@JordanUhl) August 13, 2020

how does anyone want to intern on the hill this badly https://t.co/ble2wzUV28

— Steadman (@AsteadWesley) August 12, 2020

Alex Morse is owed an apology from quite a few people & groups https://t.co/YTek7IQN3n

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) August 12, 2020

The post Student Dems Leader Vowed to ‘Sink’ Gay Congressional Candidate So He Could Get Job with Opponent: Report appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

WELP

President Donald Trump and his allies might well succeed in undermining the United States Postal Service’s ability to handle an expected surge in mail-in ballots this fall. But the biggest immediate threat to voting by mail isn’t blocked funding.

Trump acknowledged yesterday that he opposes a major stimulus deal with Democrats in part because he wants to stop an infusion of $25 billion to the Postal Service ahead of the election. “They need that money in order for the Post Office to work, to take in these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. But the president doesn’t want more voting by mail, and he doesn’t want the Postal Service to have any more money to help with it. “If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. That means they can’t have it.”

Democrats see the president’s comments as slam-dunk evidence of what they have been charging for weeks: that Trump is sabotaging the November election by purposely degrading the ostensibly independent Postal Service. They have assailed the appointment as postmaster general of a Trump donor, Louis DeJoy, who has moved rapidly to reorganize the Postal Service’s leadership and institute cost-cutting measures that have already resulted in slower mail delivery. Those service changes, rather than the congressional fight over funding, are what alarm advocates for mail-in voting the most. At stake is nothing less than the integrity of the election itself, which to a large degree rests on whether tens of millions of ballots can get into mailboxes and then back to their precincts in time to count.

“This is a different form of massive voter suppression occurring in front of our eyes,” Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, told me.

The president’s claims about the Postal Service’s existing capabilities are off base, according both to the agency itself and to outside analysts and voting experts. The Postal Service has been preparing for expanded vote-by-mail for months, before the coronavirus pandemic cast doubt on the safety of in-person voting and long before DeJoy took office as the nation’s 75th postmaster general in June. The agency began its outreach to 11,500 election administrators in March, and hundreds of regional election-mail coordinators regularly consult with state and county officials on everything from the dates they plan to send out ballots to the design of the envelopes themselves.

Despite the Postal Service’s shaky finances, which have been deteriorating for years, by its own accounting the agency has both the money and the capacity to handle a presidential election likely to shatter records for mail-in voting. “The Postal Service’s financial condition is not going to impact our ability to process and deliver election and political mail,” a spokesperson, Martha Johnson, told me. “The Postal Service has ample capacity to adjust our nationwide processing and delivery network to meet projected election and political mail volume, including any additional volume that may result as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

[Read: Trump is hobbling the mail the old-fashioned way]

From a sheer numbers perspective, none of the experts I spoke with doubted that the Postal Service could handle a vote-by-mail election, even if every one of the nation’s more than 150 million registered voters stuck their ballot in a mailbox. As one noted to me, a presidential election might be a big deal, but in postal terms, it’s no Christmas. The Postal Service processes nearly 500 million pieces of mail every day, and it annually handles more than 3 billion pieces in the week before Christmas alone. “I don’t worry about their capacity,” Amber McReynolds, the former director of elections in Denver, who now runs the National Vote at Home Institute, a mail-balloting advocacy group, told me.

People like McReynolds are instead preoccupied by the changes DeJoy introduced within weeks of taking over the agency, and the cautionary letters the Postal Service has sent to election administrators in certain states. According to a memo published by The Washington Post, whose authenticity was verified by the American Postal Workers Union, postal employees are now instructed to leave mail behind at the post office rather than make extra trips or wait for a delayed truck—a directive that amounts to a sea change for men and women trained, in the words of one union official, that “when the mail comes in, the mail goes out.” The agency is also cutting back overtime, even though as many as 40,000 postal workers have been quarantined or out sick because of the coronavirus. The changes have already led to complaints about delayed deliveries across the country, and the potential effects on the collection and delivery of ballots in the days before the election is obvious.

“If carriers are being told that, at the end of your shift, you need to be back at the office even if you haven’t collected all the mail that day, there could be ballots in those mailboxes,” says Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund Voice and a former Obama appointee to the Commission on Election Administration, a panel created in 2013 to identify best practices in running elections. “If the truck drivers are being told, ‘You leave the post office to take that day’s mail to the processing plant at your scheduled time to leave, even if all the carriers aren’t back in yet with that day’s mail,’ that can have an impact.”

The Postal Service has not widely publicized or even confirmed the operational changes. The agency declined to make any of its leaders available for an interview, instead responding to questions in writing. “Our network is designed to handle increases in volume and deliver that mail in a timely manner,” Johnson said. She said DeJoy did not distribute the memo the Post published, but she did not deny the operational changes it described.

The advocates I spoke with weren’t sure whether those changes are tied to the upcoming election or simply represented an oddly timed pivot aimed at solidifying the agency’s financial footing. “The jury is out on all of this stuff,” Arthur B. Sackler, the manager of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, a business group composed of large companies and trade associations that is pushing Congress to strengthen the agency. “These are big changes, and how are they going to be absorbed during the peak of a national crisis and with the peak of the election season on the horizon?”

Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, told me the changes were “demoralizing” for his members. He’s heard reports from postal workers who say Monday mail isn’t going out until Wednesday and that in some jurisdictions on some days, mail isn’t going out at all. “They’re ordering workers to leave mail for another day,” he said. “That goes against our DNA.”

As for the cost-saving rationale for the moves, Dimondstein added: “It’s not called the United States Postal Business. It’s called the United States Postal Service.”

The Postal Service is an independent agency that gets no appropriations from Congress. Trump did not even directly appoint DeJoy, a former logistics executive, although he did appoint the members of the USPS Board of Governors who hired him. DeJoy has said he does not take direction from the president, and in remarks to the Board of Governors last week, he said that he and the Postal Service were “fully committed to fulfilling our role in the electoral process.”

“Despite any assertions to the contrary, we are not slowing down election mail or any other mail,” DeJoy said. “Instead, we continue to employ a robust and proven process to ensure proper handling of all election mail.”

But Democrats argue that the new postmaster general is doing the bidding of a president who has for years tried to jawbone the Postal Service into raising rates in a way that would hurt one of Trump’s perceived enemies, Jeff Bezos. CNN reported Wednesday that DeJoy’s financial-disclosure forms revealed that he had major investments in a USPS competitor, along with other potential conflicts of interest.

“From my point of view, this is happening right in front of your face,” Representative Connolly said. “So are you going to trust what you’re seeing, or are you going to hope for the best?”

[Read: The Republicans telling their voters to ignore Trump]

Tammy Patrick sees other troubling signs at the Postal Service. For years, the agency has allowed some states, particularly those in the West that have already adopted universal vote-by-mail, to send out ballots using a lower rate for bulk mailings, rather than paying the more expensive first-class rate. The Postal Service has always expedited ballot deliveries as if they were first-class mail, as part of a general effort to “move mountains,” as Patrick puts it, to make sure they get delivered on time. But this year, the agency is signaling that it may not. Late last month, the Postal Service sent letters to election administrators in certain states, including Washington, Pennsylvania, and Florida, warning them that their deadlines for requesting and returning mail ballots “may be incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.”

“This mismatch creates a risk that some ballots may not be returned by mail in time to be counted by your laws as we understand them,” the letter to Washington’s secretary of state, Kim Wyman, read, according to a copy obtained by The Atlantic. The Postal Service generally advises voters to request a ballot at least 15 days before an election and to mail it back a week before, but many states allow voters to request ballots much closer to Election Day.

“I’ve never seen the Postal Service throw anyone under the bus before, and they’re preemptively blaming election officials if anything goes wrong,” Patrick told me. “The tone is very different this year.” Amber McReynolds told me the letter “looks to be very CYA to me.”

How smoothly mail-balloting goes this fall will depend on more than just Postal Service policies. Many state and local election administrators will be ramping up expanded vote-by-mail for the first time, and it’ll be up to them to engage their local postal coordinators, McReynolds told me. And post offices may not follow directives from Washington, D.C., if they believe doing so will tamper with the election. Postal workers are voters too, and for years they’ve been trained to prioritize ballots at election time. “To some degree, they’ll be able to mitigate and prevent the majority of issues,” Patrick said. “But that’s not to say they’ll be able to protect against all issues.”

With less than two months before early voting begins in many states, the turmoil at the Postal Service has left Democrats in an awkward position. They are demanding money for the USPS in stimulus talks, even though they contend that the agency can handle the surge in voting by mail this year without more cash. (The agency isn’t projected to run out of money until 2021.) Connolly told me the $25 billion would “take away the argument” that DeJoy’s cost-cutting moves are necessary.

More significantly, however, Democrats have urged voters for months to cast ballots by mail as a way to participate safely during the pandemic. Now they’re saying that Trump is sabotaging the Postal Service—questioning whether the mail can still be trusted.

Can it? I asked Connolly. Yes, he replied. “It’s really important that we not fall into the Trump trap that you can’t trust the Postal Service to handle your ballot. That’s a false narrative,” he said. “There’s no reason to believe that. There are complications because of what DeJoy is doing.”

If there is a cause for optimism, Patrick noted that the solution to the Postal Service uncertainty is largely in voters’ hands. Because of the pandemic, most states now allow voters to request their ballots well in advance and send them in weeks before November 3. “You don’t want to wait,” Patrick said. She added, with a laugh: “Leave nothing to chance!”

Kamala Harris at a coronavirus briefing with Joe Biden and health experts on August 13 in Wilmington, Delaware. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The Trump campaign wasted no time suggesting the first Black and Asian American woman on a major-party ticket is ineligible to serve.

If you thought Trumpworld moved past birtherism, think again.

Hours after presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden formally introduced Kamala Harris as his presidential running mate on Wednesday, the Trump campaign got busy trying to revive racist conspiracy theories of the sort Donald Trump rode to political prominence back in 2011.

Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis retweeted an op-ed written by law professor John Eastman in which he argues Harris is “not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood,” citing a fringe legal theory holding that children of temporary visitors to the country are not conferred citizenship even if they are born here.

Ellis is clearly trying to gin up controversy about whether Harris, a Black woman who is a natural-born citizen to immigrant parents from India and Jamaica, is actually an American citizen, and therefore eligible to serve as vice president.

Asked for comment by ABC’s Will Steakin, Ellis did not back down, saying Harris’s eligibility is “an open question.”

In reality, Harris’s eligibility is not up for debate. But Trump himself gave voice to this attack on Harris’s citizenship during a news conference on Thursday, when he said of her that “I just heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements” to be vice president.

Then, in a quintessentially Trumpian moment, immediately after amplifying the unfounded idea that Harris isn’t actually an American citizen, Trump tried to distance himself from it, saying, “I have no idea if that’s right.”

Kamala Harris is a “natural born citizen” under the Constitution

Sen. Harris was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, California. That fact alone makes her a “natural born citizen,” and thus eligible to serve as either president or vice president.

Under the 14th Amendment, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Thus, with a narrow exception for individuals not subject to the “jurisdiction” of the United States — that is, people who are not subject to US law — anyone born in this country is automatically a citizen.

The Supreme Court explained the narrow scope of this “jurisdiction” exception in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), a case holding that a Chinese American man born in San Francisco was a US citizen. Certain Native Americans, who historically were exempt from US taxation and primarily subject to tribal law, were not considered citizens even if they were born within US borders. Similarly, the children of foreign diplomats (who enjoy diplomatic immunity from US law), and “the children of alien enemies, born during and within their hostile occupation” are also not citizens by birth.

But Harris’s parents were not foreign diplomats, and they certainly weren’t part of an invading army. That makes her a natural-born citizen.

Nevertheless, in the Newsweek opinion piece promoted by Ellis, Chapman University law professor John Eastman attempts to lay out a case for Kamala Harris birtherism. Eastman’s primary argument is that there is a missing word in the 14th Amendment’s declaration that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens.

The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” Eastman claims, means “subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States (whether lawfully or unlawfully).” Thus, Eastman suggests, Harris is not a citizen if her parents were not “lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth.”

This argument that the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” actually mean “subject to the complete jurisdiction” is not a new one — in fact, it is very old. In Wong Kim Ark, the two dissenting justices made a similar claim. “Born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” according to Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s dissent in Wong Kim Ark, means born “under such circumstances as to be completely subject to that jurisdiction.”

Fuller took an even stingier view of citizenship than Eastman — Fuller’s dissent suggests that only the children of US citizens are entitled to birthright citizenship. But the fact that the Wong Kim Ark dissent and Eastman both read the word “complete” into an amendment that does not use that word deeply undercuts Eastman’s argument. It should go without saying that a dissenting opinion is not the law.

There are also good reasons to believe that the Wong Kim Ark majority opinion is correct and that the dissent misread the 14th Amendment.

The Wong Kim Ark majority produced an unusually scholarly opinion, which traced the history of birthright citizenship back to the English common law that existed prior to US independence. “The fundamental principle of the common law with regard to English nationality was birth within the allegiance,” Wong Kim Ark explains. This rule of citizenship was “not restricted to natural-born subjects and naturalized subjects, or to those who had taken an oath of allegiance; but were predicable of aliens in amity, so long as they were within the kingdom.”

This English common law rule, Wong Kim Ark continues, “was in force in all the English Colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established.” Indeed, the principle that “all children, born within the dominion of the United States, of foreign parents holding no diplomatic office, became citizens at the time of their birth, does not appear to have been contested or doubted until more than fifty years after the adoption of the Constitution.”

There was one very significant early American departure from the rule of birthright citizenship. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), an infamous pro-slavery decision, the Court held that Black people are “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations” — and thus not entitled to the rights of citizenship.

But one of the primary purposes of the 14th Amendment was to overturn Dred Scott. As the Wong Kim Ark majority explained, the amendment sought to “establish the citizenship of free negroes, which had been denied in the opinion delivered by Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott.”

This history, in other words, suggests that birthright citizenship was the American rule long before the 14th Amendment was ratified. This general rule inevitably came into conflict with chattel slavery — which could only exist in a nation that denied enslaved people the full rights of citizenship — but the nation chose birthright citizenship over slavery as part of the settlement that ended the Civil War.

And that settlement was written into the Constitution itself when the 14th Amendment was ratified.

There is simply no basis, in other words, to deny that the child of immigrants — someone like Kamala Harris — is a natural-born citizen.

Once a birther, always a birther

It’s not a shock that the Trump campaign would so quickly resort to pushing conspiracy theories of this sort about the first Black and Indian American woman to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket. Trump has a long and sordid history of doing the same about America’s first Black president.

During the runup to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, Trump endeared himself to the far right by pushing conspiracy theories about Obama’s place of birth. For instance, during an April 2011 appearance on CNN, Trump said, “he could have been born in Kenya and gone over to the United States. Everybody wants to be a US citizen, and his grandparents put an ad in saying he was born in the United States because of all the benefits you get from being born in the United States.”

Obama responded that same month by releasing copies of his long-form birth certificate. But even then, Trump wouldn’t admit he was wrong, and in the months that followed, he repeatedly claimed Obama’s birth certificate was fake.

When then-Republican presidential nominee Trump finally addressed his history of birtherism during a September 2016 press conference, he went as far as to suggest he deserved praise for raising the issue, saying unapologetically, “I finished it. President Obama was born in the United States — period.’’

But there are indications that Trump’s interest in birtherism persisted into the White House. In November 2017, the New York Times reported that Trump “used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.”

One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as he recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

Reached for comment on Thursday afternoon, Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates said Trump “was the national leader of the grotesque, racist birther movement with respect to President Obama and has sought to fuel racism and tear our nation apart on every single day of his presidency.

“So it’s unsurprising, but no less abhorrent, that as Trump makes a fool of himself straining to distract the American people from the horrific toll of his failed coronavirus response that his campaign and their allies would resort to wretched, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic desperation,” Bates added.

The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry about whether Ellis’s comments reflect the official position of the campaign.

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Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.

The relationship between Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn is at the center of the animated series Harley Quinn. | DC Universe

Watch the show, now on HBO Max, for its snarky jokes. Stay for its overtly queer romance.

One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.

Harley Quinn is one of those characters I always feel like I should appreciate more than I do. The Joker’s former psychiatrist-turned-girlfriend is certainly a lot of fun at her best. She whiplashes her way through moods like she’s on a particularly unstable carnival ride, and she has an acidic sense of humor. But too often, writers have struggled to capture the balance between laughter and chaos that makes Harley work. (Arguably, nobody has quite done it since Paul Dini and Bruce Timm invented the character for Batman: The Animated Series in 1992.)

In 2016’s Suicide Squad, Harley’s chaotic energy is turned all the way up, but that movie’s slipshod filmmaking results in a character who has no core. She’s all wild-child energy and occasional wisecracks, with a healthy dose of the camera ogling Margot Robbie, who plays her. In 2020’s Birds of Prey — a much better film — Harley moves to the center of the story in a way that’s fun but also a bit of a headache. She keeps interrupting the story’s momentum to rewind time and show us what really happened. And neither of these films capture her skill with a snarky one-liner.

So where do I turn to become a Harley Quinn fan like so many others are? The animated Harley Quinn series — which debuted on the DC Universe platform in 2019 and now has both its current seasons available on HBO Max — feels like a great start. It skews far more toward comedy than chaos, but that’s just as well. If there’s going to be a character who rips the pages of DC Comics to shreds and reassembles them into a papier-maché sculpture of herself, it’s likely Harley.

What’s perhaps most surprising about Harley Quinn is that the shows it bears the most resemblance to aren’t other superhero shows but, rather, single gals in the big city shows, particularly The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In the series’ first episode, Harley and Joker finally break up, and while she keeps trying to win him back, she soon realizes (with the help of Poison Ivy, her very own Rhoda Morgenstern) that she’s gonna make it after all. Soon, she’s recruiting a crew of low-level supervillains and getting involved in elaborate schemes and heists.

DC Universe

The real fun, however, is in the way Harley and her crew interact with each other. King Shark — a man-sized shark who walks around on land — might be able to bite off people’s heads, but he’s also a social media maven. Clayface is a method actor who keeps developing new characters to turn himself into, a skill that Harley only cares about insofar as it can get her access to places where there’s stuff she might steal.

The series also takes place in a goofily skewed version of the DC Expanded Universe, full of superheroes, their arch-nemeses, and lots and lots of side characters taken just seriously enough to make great comedic targets. (Condiment King and Kite Man have far larger presences than you might expect, given how ridiculous their names are.) Everything about it reflects a deep understanding of both comics lore and sitcom lore, and watching it reminds me of a 10-year-old idly watching TV Land and reading comics at the same time. (Do kids still do this?)

The “deep understanding of both comics lore and sitcom lore” piece of the show has its roots in the team that developed it: sitcom vets Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker, and Dean Lorey. Halpern and Schumacker, in particular, have been funny writers waiting for the right vehicle for a bit. Both have bounced around a series of shows that almost worked but either got canceled or never quite pulled it together (such as the short-lived “regular office workers in a world of superheroes” series Powerless). Harley Quinn captures their strength at crafting great jokes and endlessly flinging them at you. But they have also created a series that has a surprising amount of heart.

See, Harley Quinn is sneakily one of TV’s queerest shows. It’s heavily implied that Batman and the Joker won’t kill each other because they just might be in love with each other, while the relationship between Harley and Ivy at first nods toward the romantic chemistry fans have long read into the two characters, then falls headfirst into it. I won’t tell you how this all resolves, but the will-they/won’t-they between Harley and Ivy in the show’s second season is one of my favorites in a long while. It’s impressive for how their storyline immediately understands that, yeah, Harley and Ivy would kind of be into each other, and that doesn’t have to be salacious or out of the ordinary. They just are.

And, look, there are only 26 episodes of Harley Quinn (so far, hopefully), and they’re all a little over 20 minutes long. Watching all of them won’t take you that long, and if you just want to skip to the show’s second season (when it gets more overtly queer), you won’t have to do a lot of research to figure out what’s happening. It turns out the only thing I needed to truly love Harley Quinn was to see that she, too, could be another single gal in the city, getting over a bad breakup, trying to have it all. Who knew?

Harley Quinn’s two seasons are streaming on HBO Max. You can also watch them on DC Universe, but given recent layoffs at WarnerMedia, that service doesn’t seem long for this world.

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Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.

Facebook is rolling out a voting information hub to try to register 4 million Americans to vote | Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images

But the company still won’t fact check President Trump’s misleading posts about voting by mail.

Facebook is launching a tool on Thursday to help register at least 4 million Americans to vote ahead of the 2020 election.

The company’s new Voter Information Center is a hub on both Facebook and Instagram that will give you an easy way to check if you’re registered to vote. If you’re not, Facebook will prompt you to click a link where you can register in your state.

The Voter Information Center will include information about how to vote — including how to vote by mail, if it’s an option where you live. Facebook is also using the initiative to ask users to sign up as poll workers, who are in short supply due to Covid-19. Facebook’s efforts are in part a response to the pandemic, during which more people than ever are expected to vote using mail-in ballots, rather than voting in person. Lately, there’s been a lot of confusion and anxiety about that process, perpetuated in part by President Trump and other politicians making false statements about the accuracy of mail-in voting on Facebook and other social media platforms.

Facebook’s new voting center is an attempt to set the facts straight about voting, and the company said that it’s using politically neutral sources like the Bipartisan Policy Center to do so. But Facebook has stopped short of actually fact-checking or removing the misleading information that President Trump has shared on its platform about mail-in voting, something it has been sharply criticized for. Last month, Facebook started adding links to voter information underneath politicians’ posts about voting, and says it will apply that label to all users’ posts about voting going forward. But these links don’t correct misinformation when politicians post it.

Here’s what the new Voting Information Center will look like:

In addition to the voting information hub, the company says it’s releasing a “Voting Alerts” feature to let state and local election authorities send notifications to users in their jurisdiction about voting updates, including “potential late-breaking changes” to the voting process.

For months, Democratic politicians, civil rights advocates, and some of Facebook’s own employees have been criticizing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not taking action on Trump’s misleading posts about voting-by-mail. Trump has falsely asserted on the platform that the state of California will send mail-in ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there” (in fact, California only sends ballots to registered voters) and that this would lead to “a Rigged Election.” While Facebook left Trump’s post up as-is, Facebook’s competitor Twitter labeled an identical post on its platform as containing “potentially misleading information.”

In a previous announcement in June about the Voter Information Center, Zuckerberg framed the company’s efforts as a better way of ensuring a healthy election than policing politicians’ speech.

Zuckerberg wrote at the time, “Ultimately, I believe the best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting, and I believe we should trust voters to make judgments for themselves.”

Today’s launch of the Voter Information Center is Zuckerberg showing he’s serious about his commitment to encourage people to vote, but it remains unclear if that will be enough to counterbalance the politicians who use the platform to spread messages that encourage the very opposite to the 190 million Facebook users in the US.

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Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.

On Wednesday, Newsweek ran a legally unsupportable and thoroughly racist editorial insisting that Sen. Kamala Harris is not a valid candidate for vice president because of her immigrant parents. That attack, which Newsweek went on to defend with the editorial equivalent of “many people are saying,” served its two-fold purpose well: It provided that site with trollish clickbait, and it provided a new round of birthers with a link they could use to push at people who don’t understand that this Newsweek is a long, long way from the magazine they remember.

Newsweek’s use of arguments against birthright citizenship as an attack on Harris are racist because arguments against birthright citizenship are intrinsically racist when used against anyone. That they’re now being applied to a Oakland-born senator whose parents happened to be born in Jamaica and India is just the latest use of arguments entirely born of the effort to redefine who is a “real” American in a way that excludes not just immigrants, but the children of immigrants. Claiming that arguments against birthright citizenship are being applied to Harris in a way that’s not racist is ridiculous, because these are arguments that were created to defend racism. So it should be no surprise that Donald Trump has now joined in this new birtherism, or that the media is giving it far too much credence. 

Donald Trump wasn’t a causal participant in the birther conspiracy theory against President Barack Obama. Republicans began generating conspiracy theories around Obama’s birth well before the 2008 election. Despite Daily Kos being the first to publish a copy of Obama’s certificate of live birth, provided to this site by the Obama campaign six months before the election, Trump only increased his use of those conspiracy theories after the election. That included claiming that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake, to claim that Hawaii issued back-dated birth certificates to noncitizens, and to accuse Obama of murdering an official who knew the “truth” about his certificate. 

In addition to dozens of tweets on the topic, Trump was a constant fixture on television where he reliably spouted birtherism conspiracies—and not just on Fox News. In an April 2011 appearance on Today, he claimed that he had “sent investigators” to Hawaii. At various points over the next five years, Trump insisted that these investigators had found evidence to support his racist claims, including this statement: "I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding. ... You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. Right now, I have real doubts." In 2016, as he was dealing with a stack of other scandals in the runup to the election, Trump made a “major statement” on his birther claims—which consisted of blaming it on Hillary Clinton. Trump’s Hawaii investigators apparently never checked in. In fact, there are good reasons to believe these investigators never existed in the first place.

Trump wasn’t a follower in the Obama birther movement—he was a leader. The leader. So naturally he has latched onto the new round of birtherism aimed at Harris. Referring to the Newsweek article, Trump told reporters on Thursday that “I just heard it today that she doesn't meet the requirements and by the way the lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.”

The lawyer in question being a Federalist society chairman and member of the extensive Republican “think tank” network that exists only to churn out conspiracy theories that Republicans can then use to claim to have the support of lawyers/researchers/academics. The author of the Harris hit piece, John Eastman, is the moral equivalent of a tobacco company doctor: He only exists to generate lies dressed up as legal theory.

On Thursday evening, the Biden campaign provided an email response to Trump’s statements: "Donald Trump was the national leader of the grotesque, racist birther movement with respect to President Obama and has sought to fuel racism and tear our nation apart on every single day of his presidency. So it's unsurprising, but no less abhorrent, that as Trump makes a fool of himself straining to distract the American people from the horrific toll of his failed coronavirus response that his campaign and their allies would resort to wretched, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic desperation."

The whole birther movement was never seriously about removing Barack Obama from office. It was about delegitimizing his actions as president. About reminding people that he was “other.” About reminding people that he was the Black son of an immigrant father. The new birtherism is about the very same thing.

No one really doubts that Harris is qualified to be vice president. Those qualifications are blazingly clear, simple, and she meets all of them. Trump isn’t trying to get Harris off the ticket. He just wants her delegitimized and othered. 

This is a BFD: The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that both of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) unconfirmed and out-of-control leaders were unlawfully appointed to their positions. “GAO, which is an independent watchdog agency that reports to Congress, said that Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and his deputy Kenneth Cuccinelli are serving under an invalid order of succession under the Vacancies Reform Act,” The Washington Post reports.

While experts note this finding doesn’t boot the unconfirmed officials out of office, it may have significant implications in litigation against the administration. "This is massive," tweeted American Immigration Council Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “The administration is likely to ignore the GAO's decision, but this is a potentially HUGE blow to the legality of every single thing that done at DHS since [former acting DHS Sec.] Kevin McAleenan took control in April 2019, and everything that both Wolf and Cuccinelli have done as well."

“Those two appointments violated the act, GAO said, because of the sequence of events following the resignation of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in April of last year,” The Washington Post report continued. “The official who assumed the title of acting secretary at that time, Kevin McAleenan, had not been designated in the order of succession, GAO said.”

A federal court had already previously ruled that the truly very strange Cuccinelli had been unlawfully appointed to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Reichlin-Melnick said the administration has since dropped its appeal, yet still “letting him go to work every day.” Meanwhile, unconfirmed Chad signed a memo slashing protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, and stated that the administration would reject all new applicants, in defiance of court orders to fully reopen the program.

Congressional leaders immediately began to call on both Wolf and Cuccinelli to resign. Late last year, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) had called on the GAO to conduct an emergency review into the two’s unconfirmed appointments, writing at the time that “[t]he CHC is gravely concerned that DHS’s top officials may be serving in violation of the law.” In a tweet Friday, the CHC said that “we were right. Wolff [sic] & Cuccinelli must resign in disgrace—a major loss for Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda & a win for the rule of law.”

In another tweet, Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar also demanded Wolf and Cuccinelli’s resignations:

Escobar was among the Congressional leaders targeted in a racist and violent Facebook group that counted current and former Customs and Border Protection agents among its members. But even though she was personally targeted, the agency has blocked Congressional leaders from key investigation findings, including the names of the lone four agents who were ultimately fired for their gross conduct. It’s lawlessness on top of lawlessness at DHS—and that includes the very people at the top. They both need to fucking go.

In a memo to United States Postal Service employees this week obtained by CNN, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy admitted that there have been "unintended consequences" from the procedural changes he's enacted. He also declared that they are necessary. DeJoy, who has no postal service experience and presumably got the job because he donated big to the Trump campaign and has no moral objections to being a tool put in place to destroy one of the nation's most vital and cherished institutions, wrote that "this transformative initiative has had unintended consequences that impacted our overall service levels."

But, he said, it wasn't just his sabotage to blame. "However, recent changes are not the only contributing factors. Over the years we have grown undisciplined in our mail and package processing schedules, causing an increase in delayed mail between processing facilities and delivery units." He insisted that the financial situation for the USPS is "dire" and that critics of his actions " are quick to point to our finance, yet they offer no solutions." The Democratic House passed emergency coronavirus stimulus legislation in May, which Mitch McConnell has ignored for 91 days, that included $25 billion in funding for the USPS, something that DeJoy's employees will be very well aware of.

They'll also be aware that their boss has been meeting regularly with Republican leaders as well as reshuffling USPS leadership in an apparent bid to get people who would resist his efforts out of the way. They also can't miss the fact that they're losing equipment, from sorting machines to the actual shelving they use to sort mail manually.

And if it wasn't clear enough to postal workers that all of this was extremely political, Trump told them so directly this week. "They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots," said Trump. "But if they don't get those two items that means you can't have universal mail-in voting because they're not equipped to have it.”

DeJoy's ham-handed response is as transparent as Trump's. He just lies. Last week he said that the USPS is "not slowing down election mail or any other mail" and has "ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on time." He also said that while he has a "good relationship" with Trump, "the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the President or anyone else in the administration is wholly off-base." Don't believe your lying eyes, believe another Trump lackey.

He lies about the efforts of Democrats to fund the USPS. He lies about his own motivations and his fealty to Trump. He lies about the delays he is creating in mail delivery. At the same time that his own agency is warning that in Pennsylvania, there's "a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted under your laws as we understand them."

It doesn't get more transparent than that. Trump doesn't care how many people he kills or how many institutions he destroys—including the very foundations of democracy in this country—to stay in power. And the Republican Party is aiding and abetting him.

Months into facing the novel coronavirus pandemic, many religious leaders and organizations in the United States have moved to virtual services, advised their parishioners to wear masks, and followed state and city guidelines in general. Some churches, however, have taken to defying state orders. For example, while megachurch Grace Community Church, located in Los Angeles, California, did indeed close in mid-March to adhere to COVID-19 restrictions, since reopening for in-person services in late July thousands of people have come to services, as reported by CNN. How many thousands? According to Pastor John MacArthur, six or seven thousand.

Mind you, that county is reporting more than 1,000 new coronavirus cases each day, and the nation as a whole continues to face the pandemic without consistent support, guidance, or strategy. Making matters even more concerning, as a Facebook live stream from service this past Sunday suggests, few masks were visible, and the church was seemingly packed with people.

In Los Angeles County, houses of worship can have in-person, indoor meetings according to a state order from the end of July; however, these indoor gatherings must be limited to either 25% of the building’s capacity or up to 100 people—the lower number wins out. As MacArthur told CNN, however, people have gradually returned to service since late July when restrictions eased, and since then, “kept coming until there were six or seven thousand." He stressed that people “came back on their own volition because this is the most essential thing in their life.

“We don't orchestrate this. This is a church,” MacArthur told CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “We don't ask people to make a reservation to come to church.” He added that they put up a tent area in a parking lot as well as a screen on a patio divider, but ultimately they did open the doors and let people come inside as the sections outside were becoming packed. 

“We opened the doors because that's what we are, we're a church,” he stated. “And we’re going to trust those people to make adult decisions about the reality of their physical and spiritual health and how that balance works for each one of them.” He added: “Nobody’s forcing anything.” The pastor also suggested that life is being “restricted” in a way that is “burdensome.” 

As Daily Kos has covered, a number of churches have defied orders and continued holding in-person services amid the pandemic. One pastor in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana area, for example, actually was arrested after continuing to violate the governor’s order, which included a limit on how many people could gather inside.

Also in California, Destiny Christian Church briefly got national media attention for holding in-person services in spite of the governor’s ban; interestingly, this same church went viral a second time as The Sacramento Bee reported that the church received a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan of between $350,000 and $1 million in April. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.)

As Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine put it, one churchgoer can inadvertently spread the virus “like wildfire.” In that case, one man who had COVID-19 attended a church service in mid-June. Thanks to contact tracing, we know that 53 other people who attended that service became sick, and a total of 91 people became sick. We also know that singing in groups (as is often part of religious meetings) can be particularly worrisome when it comes to spreading the virus. 

The occupier of the Oval Office has made it crystal clear: The main reason he's blown up further coronavirus relief negotiations with Democrats is because they want to secure the Postal Service and the November election. He's not having that: “Now they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. […] if they don't get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.”

“They need that money in order to make the post office work.“ Trump is dedicated to making sure the Postal Service does not work, and so far no one is telling him he can't. Particularly not the only people who have any hope of influencing him: Senate Republicans. Which is ironic since it's their constituents who are most likely to be seriously harmed—like life-and-death harmed—without a functioning Postal Service. Because it's rural voters who regularly send Republicans to the Senate who rely most on the institution for critical things like medications and paying their bills. The U.S. Postal Service provides the last-mile delivery in rural America for FedEx and UPS, which don't have the resources to deliver to these areas because it's not profitable for them to operate there.

Senate Republicans are sitting by while Trump destroys everything, even the Postal Service. We have to get them out. Help here with your $5.

There’s a typical racist method here too, of course. Because many of the areas that are particularly reliant on the Postal Service are also communities of color and are economically disadvantaged—all the people Republicans don’t want to be able to vote. Twyla Baker of the Mandan-Hidatsa tribe in North Dakota told Vox that shutting down the Postal Service “would just be kind of a continuation of these structures in the US that already dispossessed people of color, black and indigenous people of color, and people below the poverty line. […] USPS isn’t just a public service,” she said. “It’s a lifeline.”

More than 14 million people in rural areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission, don't have internet access. They have to conduct their finances and pay their bills by mail. (In fact, 18% of all Americans pay their bills by mail.) The National Community Pharmacists Association found in a survey that 20% of people over age 40 get their prescriptions for chronic conditions through the mail.

The Department of Veterans Affairs provides 80% of all its outpatient prescriptions by mail. More than 330,000 veterans every day get their prescription medicines by mail. Or at least, before Trump's sabotage, that happened every day. Now? "What used to take days now takes weeks," one veteran told Radio.com. "I received my life-saving medication 20 days late," another reported. "I ordered five weeks early, expecting delays," yet another veteran told the outlet. "My meds were still late." Another vet stressed: "We depend on these medications. […] This could be devastating. I can't go without."

Then there are the elections. In Minnesota alone, 130,000 people can only vote by mail because they live in communities that are too small to open up polling locations. That's definitely what Trump wants to shut down. But what about Republican senators in all these states?

For instance, Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, who is up for reelection this year. More than one-third of her constituents live in rural areas. Trump's toady, Louis DeJoy, who now in charge of the Postal Service, has been removing sorting equipment from Iowa post offices to sabotage delivery service. Ernst is defending just one of the 23 seats Republicans are defending in November, and nearly every single one has significant rural populations.

What are they saying about Trump's destruction of this vital institution? Nary a peep from any of them.

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Looking for our Election Changes section? You'll now find it toward the bottom of the Morning Digest.

Leading Off

● GA-14: Wealthy businesswoman Marjorie Greene, a defender of the notorious pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon who has her own litany of racist, Islamaphobic, and anti-Semitic rantings, decisively beat neurosurgeon John Cowan 57-43 in Tuesday's Republican primary runoff for Georgia's 14th Congressional District. This seat, which is located in the northwestern part of the state, backed Donald Trump 75-22, and Greene will have no trouble winning the general election to succeed retiring GOP Rep. Tom Graves.

Campaign Action

National and state Republican leaders wasted no time welcoming Greene to the fold following her victory. Donald Trump tweeted that Greene was "strong on everything and never gives up - a real WINNER!"

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose office said back in June that he found Greene's words "appalling," also made it clear that she'd be welcomed to the GOP caucus when she takes her seat in January and given committee assignments. Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins, who are running against each other in the November all-party primary for Senate, each congratulated Greene on her win as well.

Greene began running for office last year in a very different seat than the one she prevailed in this week. Greene, who was based in Alpharetta in Atlanta's affluent northwestern suburbs, entered the race to challenge freshman Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath in the 6th District. Greene self-funded $500,000 for that campaign, and she threatened to force former Rep. Karen Handel, who was the national GOP's choice to take on McBath, to spend valuable time and money in the primary.

It soon became clear, though, that Greene would be an awful GOP nominee in a competitive seat like the 6th District. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last summer that in early October of 2017, four days after a lone terrorist named Stephen Paddock murdered 58 people at a concert in the deadliest mass-shooting in American history, Greene put out a video where she wondered if the attack was part of a government plot to try to pass anti-gun laws.

Greene kept this up five months later when she shared a post on her Facebook page that accused the FBI of taking part in a cover-up and added, "Every American knows we have been lied to." Greene told the AJC in July of 2019 that she now accepted the official version of events and was satisfied that Paddock acted alone, and she insisted she just "had questions and demanded answers." However, Greene's old Facebook post still remained up by the time the paper's article was published on what is now her own campaign's fan page, though it was removed sometime over the following months.

Around that same time, the paper reported that Greene was quite the fan of QAnon. She had used her social media account to issue several tweets defending the conspiracy theory, and Greene even implored her followers to send her any questions about it so she could "walk you through the whole thing." And in a video that would surface later, Greene said that it offered "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out."

We'll never got to find out how much trouble the well-funded Greene could have given Handel because in December, Graves unexpectedly announced that he would retire from the 14th District. Greene soon started expressing interest in running there instead, saying that she'd been encouraged to make the switch by prominent members of the nihilist House Freedom Caucus, including Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan. Greene announced a short time later that she would indeed run to succeed Graves even though her Alpharetta community was located about 20 miles from the nearest community in the 14th District, a rural and more working-class district.

Greene's district hopping, though, was soon overshadowed by her own words and associates. In May, the AJC reported that Greene had posed for a photo earlier that year with longtime white supremacist Chester Doles. Greene's campaign didn't show the slightest bit of contrition, and it instead dismissed the paper's questions as "silly and the same type of sleazy attacks the Fake News Media levels against President Trump." Doles, for his part, called Greene "part of the Q movement" and a "[g]ood friend to have."

Just before the first round of the primary in June, Greene ran a commercial where she held an assault rifle and told the audience that "antifa terrorists have declared war on America." She then casually threw out some antisemitic talking points by declaring, "George Soros, Hollywood elites, and Joe Biden's staff are funding antifa." Facebook later removed the ad from its platform, saying it "advocates the use of deadly weapons against a clearly defined group of people."

Voters didn't seem remotely bothered by any of this, though. Greene took first place in the nine-way primary with 40% of the vote, while Cowan was a distant second with 19%. Days later, Politico unearthed hours of self-narrated videos Greene posted to Facebook: In those videos, Greene compared Black Lives Matter activists to the Nazis who marched on Charlottesville in 2017; dubbed "white males" the "most mistreated group of people in the United States today"; called Holocaust survivor George Soros a "piece of crap," repeating the lie that Soros was a Nazi collaborator; and declared that "[t]here is an Islamic invasion into our government offices right now."

In response to a request for comment from Politico, Greene's campaign manager did not dispute the authenticity of the videos but instead said, "Thank[s] for the reminder about Soros. We forgot to put him in our newest ad. We're fixing that now."

McCarthy's office soon put out a statement saying that he had "no tolerance" for Greene's rhetoric, but neither he nor NRCC chair Tom Emmer backed Cowan or took any real action to stop her. Indeed, as Politico would later report, there was never any serious outside spending against Greene or for Cowan over the following two months. Greene also maintained the support of White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who is a former Freedom Caucus leader.

Greene herself only doubled down on the strategy that had gotten her this far. She issued more racist and antisemitic tweets labeling Cowan "a "globalist Never Trumper who wants even more money for the Chinese-controlled WHO," and claimed that the same GOP establishment that had opposed Trump was trying to sink her. Greene also ran a commercial where she praised Garrett Rolfe, the former Atlanta police officer who faces murder charges for killing Rayshard Brooks.

Cowan, for his part, tried to position himself as an alternative to Greene with the slogan, "All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment." But, perhaps sensing that this wasn't an effective argument among Republican primary voters, Cowan focused his ads instead on allegations that Greene's construction company didn't take part in a federal program meant to screen out undocumented immigrants.

Cowan released a few polls showing a close race, but national Republican leaders seemed to sense where things were going. Just before Election Day, McCarthy's team said that he remained neutral and that he now had "a good and productive relationship with both" candidates.

Greene ultimately pulled off a convincing win against Cowan, and she didn't waste any time demonstrating that she wouldn't change now that that primary was over. On election night, Greene said of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "She's a hypocrite. She's anti-American. And we're going to kick that bitch out of Congress." Republican leaders, including Trump, continued to congratulate Greene for her victory.

Netroots Nation

● Netroots Nation: Netroots Nation is going virtual this year, and so is our elections Q&A panel! If you'll be attending Netroots Nation this year, please join the Daily Kos Elections team on Thursday at 12 PM ET for our annual event: We dispense with the PowerPoints and proceed directly to questions from the audience about the races they're most interested in. A recording will also be made publicly available after the conference.

This panel will be moderated by Jeff Singer and feature Matt Booker, Carolyn Fiddler, and Stephen Wolf from Daily Kos along with Sister District co-founder and Director of Engagement & Partnerships Lala Wu. We hope you'll join us for our Q&A as we take stock of this historic election cycle!

Senate

● KS-Sen: SurveyUSA has released a poll crowdfunded by election enthusiasts on Twitter (the firm lists its client as "Elections Twitter"), and it finds Republican Roger Marshall leading Democrat Barbara Bollier just 46-44. The sample also shows Donald Trump ahead 48-41 in a state he took 56-36 four years ago; this would be by far the closest presidential contest in Kansas since 1992, when George H.W. Bush beat Bill Clinton 39-34.

A recent Public Policy Polling survey for Bollier's allies at EMILY's List found Marshall and Trump ahead 43-42 and 50-43, respectively, which is very similar to what SurveyUSA has. The last poll we saw before that was an early June poll from the Democratic firm Civiqs conducted on behalf of Daily Kos, which showed Marshall up 42-41 while Trump led by a stronger 52-40 spread.

● ME-Sen: The conservative group One Nation has launched a new TV ad praising Republican Sen. Susan Collins for "fighting to help children with pre-existing conditions." However, National Journal's Zach Cohen points out that the Collins bill cited in the ad, the Ending Diagnostic Odyssey Act, doesn't even mention "pre-existing conditions" or "insurance" and instead allows state Medicaid programs to cover genome sequencing to help children with undiagnosed conditions.

● SC-Sen: The gun safety group Giffords Courage, which supports Democrat Jaime Harrison, has publicized a survey from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling that shows Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham up just 47-44. The release did not include presidential numbers.

● Polls: The Democratic firm Change Research has released a trio of new Senate polls for CNBC:

• AZ-Sen: Mark Kelly (D): 49, Martha McSally (R-inc): 43 (45-44 Biden) (July: 47-45 Kelly)
• MI-Sen: Gary Peters (D-inc): 48, John James (R): 45 (48-43 Biden) (July: 48-44 Peters)
• NC-Sen: Cal Cunningham (D): 48, Thom Tillis (R-inc): 43 (48-47 Trump) (July: 52-40 Cunningham)

While most pollsters have found Democratic Sen. Gary Peters well ahead in Michigan, Change Research has often been considerably more bearish about his prospects. However, no survey has shown Republican John James in the lead since early March, when the Republican firms 0ptimus and Firehouse Strategies had him up 41-40.

House

● IN-05: In her opening TV spot for the general election that runs at a full minute in length, Democrat Christina Hale talks about her humble origins and work improving the lives of children locally and at home.

● MA-01: The Justice Democrats, the most prominent progressive group supporting Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse's bid for Congress, has released a statement saying it was "disappointed by Alex Morse's poor judgment" and would "continue to gather more information and evaluate our involvement based on Alex's response this week." However, the organization insisted it would also "continue to forcefully raise awareness about Richard Neal's long record standing against working families," referring to the incumbent Morse is challenging in next month's primary.

Three local groups of campus Democrats accused Morse last week of "taking advantage of his position of power for romantic or sexual gain, specifically toward young students." Morse acknowledged having relationships with college students and said they had all been consensual, but when directly asked in a new interview whether he'd been involved with students at UMass Amherst, where he taught political science from 2014 to 2019, he refused to answer.

Instead, Morse said he believed that Neal's campaign was behind the public release of the College Democrats' allegations, which were first published by the UMass student newspaper, adding, "I think this is what happens when you go against power." Previously, Morse criticized the accusations against him as invoking "age-old anti-gay stereotypes."

Neal's allies, meanwhile, are continuing to attack Morse on the airwaves. A labor-backed super PAC called American Working Families is running a new ad criticizing Morse's record on education as mayor, backed by a $128,000 buy. So far, the group has spent $311,000 in total to thwart Morse.

● MA-04: Former Wall Street regulator Ihssane Leckey has unveiled a survey from Frederick Polls of the crowded Sept. 1 Democratic primary:

Newton City Councilor Becky Walker Grossman: 19

Newton City Councilor Jake Auchincloss: 16

Former Wall Street regulator Ihssane Leckey: 11

Former Alliance for Business Leadership head Jesse Mermell: 10

Former assistant state attorney general Dave Cavell: 7

City Year co-founder Alan Khazei: 6

Public health expert Natalia Linos: 4

Attorney Ben Sigel: 2

Businessman Chris Zannetos: 1

While this poll shows Leckey in third place, the memo argues that she's made large gains since late June, when an unreleased survey had her at just 3%.

● MA-08: Physician Robbie Goldstein has unveiled a poll from Lincoln Park Strategies that argues he can upset veteran Rep. Stephen Lynch in the Sept. 1 Democratic primary for this seat based in Boston's southern suburbs. The survey gives Lynch a 39-32 edge over Goldstein, who is challenging the incumbent from the left in a contest that hasn't attracted much outside attention yet.

● MN-07: On Wednesday, one day after former Lt. Gov. Michelle Fischbach won the GOP primary, the conservative super PAC Congressional Leadership Fund released a poll from the Tarrance Group giving Fischbach a 52-42 lead over longtime Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson. As usual, the CLF did not include any presidential results, even though there's little question that Donald Trump will once again carry a seat he took 62-31 four years ago. This is the first survey we've seen of the race for this rural western Minnesota district.

● MT-AL: Democrat Kathleen Williams begins her first general election TV commercial, "The Washington playbook says I shouldn't tell you I voted for Reagan when I'm running as a Democrat." She's later shown target shooting as she talks about how she's both a gun owner and a supporter of background checks. The commercial ends with Williams at a bar saying, "And I bet they think I shouldn't have a beer in my ad either."  

● NC-11: Madison Cawthorn has looked like a sure bet to win the general election for this conservative seat in Appalachian North Carolina ever since he claimed the Republican nomination in a late June upset, but Democrats released a pair of surveys on Wednesday showing a potentially competitive race.

DCCC Analytics first unveiled an early August internal that found Cawthorn beating Democrat Moe Davis just 46-41. The sample also gives Donald Trump only a 48-46 edge in a district he took 57-40 in 2016. Later in the day, Davis' team publicized a month-old EMC Research survey that showed Cawthorn ahead by a small 42-40 margin, but this release did not include presidential numbers.

Davis, who won the Democratic nod in early March, ended June with a $268,000 to $164,000 cash-on-hand lead over Cawthorn.

● PA-10: The Democratic firm DFM Research once again is polling on behalf of the transportation workers union SMART as part of a survey on rail issues, and it also has horserace numbers from this Harrisburg-based seat. DFM shows Democrat Eugene DePasquale leading Republican Scott Perry 46-44, while Joe Biden is up 48-46 in a district that backed Donald Trump 52-43 in 2016; SMART does not appear to have taken sides in the congressional contest. The only poll we've seen here was a late June internal for DePasquale from GBAO that gave Perry a 50-47 edge, while Biden was ahead 48-47 here.

Both sides are preparing for an expensive contest here. DePasquale outraised Perry $648,000 to $467,000 during the second quarter, while Perry ended June with a small $991,000 to $985,000 cash-on-hand lead. Major Democratic groups have also reserved $2 million in ad time in the Harrisburg market, which covers the entire seat, while Perry's allies have booked $1.2 million.

● TX-23: Republican Tony Gonzales has released a survey from Public Opinion Strategies showing him trailing 2018 Democratic nominee Gina Ortiz Jones by 41-40. Unlike a number of other recent GOP internal polls, this survey actually released presidential numbers showing Joe Biden up just 48-45 in a seat Clinton won by 50-46, a finding that appears at odds with Biden's significantly improved standing statewide in many other polls of the Lone Star State.

This is the first poll we've seen here in months and the first at all that comes after the July 14 primary runoff, which left Gonzales with a slim 45-vote lead over GOP primary rival Raul Reyes. However, Reyes is seeking a recount, which the GOP recently confirmed would begin on Tuesday this week.

● Polls: U.S. Term Limits has released another three House polls from RMG Group, though this time, none of them include presidential numbers:

• MI-06: Jon Hoadley (D): 40, Fred Upton (R-inc): 36
• NY-24: John Katko (R-inc): 40, Dana Balter (D): 37
• TX-10: Michael McCaul (R-inc): 46, Mike Siegel (D): 39

The group says that each of these Republican incumbents opposes their congressional term limits pledge and insists that the Democratic candidates would be doing far better if only they would sign on.

Election Changes

● Minnesota: A Minnesota state court has rejected a request by the NAACP that it order election officials to send absentee ballots to all voters, ruling that the right to vote does not come with "a corresponding constitutional right to receive an absentee ballot."

● New Hampshire: The American Federation of Teachers has filed a lawsuit in state court asking that New Hampshire election officials be required to count absentee ballots so long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received "within a reasonable period of time after Election Day." Currently, ballots must be received by 5 PM local time on Election Day to be valid, which is two hours before polls close in most of the state.

The plaintiffs are also asking that several other voting laws be eased, including various requirements for witnesses and documentation related to registering to vote by mail. In addition, they want the state to prepay return postage for absentee ballots.

● New Mexico: Ten New Mexico counties that cover a majority of the state, including its four largest, have informed Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver that they will send absentee ballot applications to all voters for the November general election, while five say they will not do so; the remaining 18 have yet to announce their plans. County clerks are now able to send ballot applications to their voters after the state's Democratic-run legislature passed a bill allowing them to do so in June.

● South Carolina: Two voters, who are represented by an attorney from the South Carolina Democratic Party, have filed a suit before the state Supreme Court asking that the justices order officials to make a broad swath of changes to their procedures for carrying out the November general election.

In particular, the plaintiffs want the state to allow voters to cast absentee ballots without an excuse; the ability to request absentee ballots online; the elimination of the requirement that ballots be witnessed; the establishment of an early voting period; and drop boxes and curbside voting options.

Primary Result Recaps

● GA-09: Gun store owner Andrew Clyde won the Republican primary runoff by defeating state Rep. Matt Gurtler 56-44. Clyde will have no trouble winning the general election to succeed Rep. Doug Collins, who is leaving to run for the Senate, in this 78-19 Trump seat in the northeastern part of the state.

Gurtler, who developed a hostile relationship with state party leaders during his two terms in the legislature, benefited from $1.3 million in outside spending from two groups, the well-known Club for Growth and the completely unknown Concerned American Voters, while Clyde had no major outside support. Clyde, though, had the backing of many establishment politicians who wanted to see Gurtler defeated. Clyde also emphasized his military career and his successful battle against the IRS after it seized close to $1 million from him in 2013.

● Fulton County, GA District Attorney: Former judge Fani Willis defeated 24-year incumbent Paul Howard in a 73-27 landslide in Tuesday's Democratic primary runoff. No Republicans are running in the general election in this very blue county, which is home to most of the city of Atlanta (the balance is in neighboring DeKalb County) and some of its suburbs. Willis would be the first woman to hold this office.

Willis, unlike many candidates challenging incumbent district attorneys this cycle, didn't campaign as a criminal justice reformer, and she even had the backing of the Atlanta Police Union. Instead, Willis focused on sexual harassment and workplace discrimination allegations against Howard and argued, "It's unfortunate that we aren't talking about public safety but instead the conduct of the county's chief law enforcement officer."

● MN-05: Freshman Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar defeated attorney Antone Melton-Meaux 57-39 to win renomination in this safely blue Minneapolis district. Omar was on the receiving end of millions of negative ads from Melton-Meaux and a PAC called Americans for Tomorrow's Future. However, she had the backing of several prominent Minnesota Democrats, including Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, who held this seat for six terms prior to Omar's victory in 2018.

● VT-Gov: Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman defeated former state Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe 51-40 in the Democratic primary to face Republican Gov. Phil Scott.

Scott himself won renomination 73-22 against attorney John Klar, a conservative who filed to run as an independent the day before the primary. Vermont requires independent candidates turn in their paperwork before the primary, and Klar said at the time that, while he hadn't decided on a general election campaign, he wanted to make sure he'd still have that option. Seven Days reports that independents have 10 days after the primary to withdraw from the general election ballot.

Scott, though, looks like the clear favorite no matter what Klar decides to do. While Vermont is solidly Democratic at the federal level, voters in the Green Mountain State have long backed moderate Republicans like Scott for governor. Scott won re-election 55-40 during the 2018 Democratic wave, and polls have given him strong approval ratings since then. Daily Kos Elections rates this contest as Likely Republican.

P.S. Vermont has an unusual law that requires the state legislature to pick a winner in gubernatorial races where no one earns a majority of the vote, which is exactly what happened after the 2002, 2010, and 2014 elections. Team Blue is assured to keep control of both chambers this fall, and while the Democratic-led legislature awarded Republican Jim Douglas the governorship after he won a 45-42 plurality in 2002, there's no guarantee the same thing would happen if Klar unexpectedly prevents Scott from taking a majority this year.

● Special Elections: Democrat Spencer Wetmore flipped South Carolina's House District 115 in Tuesday's special election by defeating Republican Josh Stokes by a wide 59-39 margin. Once Wetmore is seated, the GOP will enjoy a smaller, though still substantial, 78-45 majority. (One other GOP-held seat remains vacant.) Wetmore and Stokes will have a rematch in November for a full two-year term.

This suburban Charleston seat started the decade as safely red turf, and Mitt Romney carried it by a commanding 57-41 spread in 2012. The district only backed Donald Trump 48-45 four years later, though, and Republican state Rep. Peter McCoy prevailed just 51-49 in 2018 against the same opponent he'd beaten in a landslide back in 2012. McCoy resigned earlier this year to become interim U.S. attorney, which set off the special election that Wetmore won.

There's one other important thing to note about this contest. All of HD-115 is located in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, and this is exactly the sort of area where Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham is counting on a good performance.

There was far less drama in the all-GOP runoff for Georgia's 4th Senate District, where Billy Hickman beat Scott Bohlke 56-44. Once Hickman takes office, the GOP will again hold a 35-21 majority.

Ad Roundup

• GA-Sen-A: Senate Leadership Fund - anti-Jon Ossoff (D)
• IA-Sen: NRSC - anti-Theresa Greenfield (D); Senate Leadership Fund - anti-Theresa Greenfield (D)  
• ME-Sen: 1820 PAC - anti-Sara Gideon (D)
• MT-Sen: Senate Leadership Fund - anti-Steve Bullock (D)
• CA-39: Gil Cisneros (D-inc)
• NE-01: Jeff Fortenberry (R-inc)

The New York Times has a long look questioning whether Food and Drug Administration head Stephen Hahn is being forced into giving the nation subpar advice on the demand of the anti-science, anti-reality narcissistic idiot manchild posing as the current president. It is full of the usual back and forth, both-siding quotes while laying out reams of evidence that actually this is not a question at all. The plain history shows that Dr. Hahn has absolutely been mealymouthing FDA pandemic advice to dodge contradicting Donald Trump's most egregiously ignorant and magic-minded proclamations. It's the sort of piece where you get the subject, Hahn, assuring the reporter that he is absolutely not feeling "squeezed" before the reporter casually throws in:

"On the line as he spoke was Michael Caputo, a deputy to Dr. Hahn’s boss, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. [...] Dr. Hahn is not allowed to speak to the press without Mr. Caputo or another official on the phone."

There you go, America. Question answered. The head of the Food and Drug Administration is forbidden from talking to the press about the pandemic, period, unless an administration minder is present.

Another of global authoritarianism's most consistent policies gets plunked down into the federal government, and we learn of it in a piece questioning whether everything is fine or is maybe something odd and disturbing going on here.

While the FDA gives rush approval to a supposed Trump miracle drug, sans evidence, only to have to warn later that oops it may turn out that the drug not only doesn't work but may result in the dangerous side effects already known and printed on the packaging.

Oh, and we also learn that Hahn was discouraged from reaching out to private companies to develop COVID-19 tests back in January, according to four administration sources. That was back when the Trump administration, meaning Donald, was absolutely determined to ignore the pandemic away from the United States and absolutely did not want health officials giving dire warnings or taking drastic actions to actually prepare for the pandemic when it arrived.

Don't worry, though. Trump's Health and Human Services head Alex Azar said that never happened. Those other four sources must have imagined it.

We really are just unimaginably slow on the draw, here. There are 160,000 Americans dead, and it's going to be next to impossible to limit it to anything else than a quarter million dead by the end of the year. And the most aggressive action to date by the Trump clan is to make sure minders are minding any federal expert whose expertise might publicly contradict whatever Typhoid Hitler's fevered brain has pushed out his mouth on any particular morning. Is this unusual? Yeah, it's pretty damn unusual. Is this damaging the nation's response to a pandemic? Look around the planet: It's the defining feature of our nation's response to the pandemic.

We are supposed to feel sympathy for Dr. Hahn, because if he wants to retain his position he is absolutely forbidden from getting on Donald Trump's bad side—and contradicting Donald Trump under any circumstances will immediately put him on Trump's bad side. We are supposed to be begrudgingly grateful that Dr. Hahn and others are doing their best to dodge massive, murderous incompetence to keep more Americans alive than Trump's core team have shown interest in, because if they resigned their posts in disgust Trump, Kushner, Meadows and the rest would simply ignore whatever laws were necessary to put a loyalist in with no such moral qualms.

We have to phrase all of this delicately, with a touch of both sides do it and a large dose of yes, this is all unusual in the extreme but far be it from us to say this is any better or worse than the old way of running the country, because doing otherwise would send Americans into a panic. It would cause politicians supporting the New Way to get very, very angry.

It may be brazenly obvious that Trump's incompetence is killing people and his staff is primarily devoted to making sure nobody in the federal government suggests anything better, but there are still no editorial pages demanding he step down. None asking that the 25th Amendment be invoked despite his obvious forays into delusion.

Nothing about this is normal. A great deal of it was previously presumed to be illegal. There is an overwhelming push to normalize it down to mere partisan controversy, though, so nobody has to too deeply consider the underlying implications.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media has asked three of its outlets to return more than $3 million they were allocated to help people in countries like China and Iran access impartial online news without their government’s knowledge, according to an agency official familiar with the matter.

The official said Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe, were told to return the so-called internet freedom money to USAGM. In Radio Free Asia’s case, that money was supposed to go to the Open Technology Fund, a digital rights non-profit financed by taxpayers.

It’s the latest example of how the Trump administration is trying to revamp the agency, which oversees taxpayer-funded media properties, and which the administration says has strayed too far from its mission of representing the U.S. abroad. New CEO Michael Pack has tried to dramatically reshape the agency by firing outlet heads and other senior agency officials.

The official and others spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the media.

What the outlets did: In response to the agency’s demands, Middle East Broadcasting Networks provided a paper check of $500,000, and Radio Free Asia provided a check worth $2.9 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. Until last year, the OTF was a program of Radio Free Asia. It’s unclear how Radio Free Europe responded to the order.

The plans: USAGM wants to reallocate the money to other internet freedom projects, and according to a separate agency employee, USAGM officials have been in touch in recent months with the maker of Ultrasurf, software that provides internet firewall circumvention code and which was developed by a member of the Falun Gong, a persecuted Chinese religious minority.

For the last several years, USAGM had refused to provide money for Ultrasurf because they haven’t allowed their software to be subjected to a thorough audit of the code, and USAGM and OTF prefer to fund open source technologies, in part to prevent the insertion of back doors into the code.

USAGM said in a statement that its Office of Internet Freedom, which has existed longer than OTF, is capable of providing the same type of funding and that it works more efficiently.

“OIF and USAGM intend to continue the work of advancing human rights and freedom of expression for those living in closed regimes, and that is despite OTF leadership’s attempts to line its own pockets with U.S. taxpayer dollars while insisting upon no oversight,” USAGM said.

In late July, the Open Technology Fund said it had been forced to issue “stop-work orders” to more than 80 percent of its active internet freedom projects because it’s being starved of cash by the U.S. government.

What’s next: Pack is testifying in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sept. 24 and will likely be asked about the internet freedom funding issues and the OTF battle. Pack also selected James Miles to lead OTF, but he has not been able to take the post amid a court battle over control of the fund. (Miles, a former South Carolina secretary of state, has no technology expertise but has been linked in the past to multilevel marketing companies.) In late July, three federal judges said that Pack appeared to lack the statutory authority to control the fund, like he does with other federally funded international news organizations, although a final ruling has not been made.

President Donald Trump said Thursday he opposes funding for the U.S. Postal Service and election security grants in an effort to stymie mail-in voting for the upcoming presidential election.

Democrats "want 3½ billion dollars for something that will turn out to be fraudulent, that's election money, basically. They want 3½ billion dollars for the mail-in votes, OK, universal mail-in ballots,” Trump told Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo, in response to a question on talks on the next coronavirus relief package. “They want 25 billion dollars — billion — for the Post Office."

“Now they need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he continued. “By the way, those are just two items, but if they don't get those two items that means you can't have universal mail-in voting."

Trump’s pronouncement marks the latest escalation in his war on mail-in voting. He has, without evidence, claimed that mail-in voting is ripe for fraud and will lead to a “rigged” election.

Election security experts say cases of electoral fraud are exceedingly rare in the United States. Most acknowledge that mail-in voting has a slightly higher risk of fraud, but it isn’t widespread.

“Saying that voter fraud and election crimes are rare is not to say they’re nonexistent,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine, said in an interview in early July. “When election crimes do occur, absentee balloting is a more common way it occurs” than through in-person voting, he said, but “it seems to be a very rare problem.”

“It is really hard to try to swing a local election by tampering with absentee ballots. Because such a scheme easily comes to the attention of voters whose ballots are missing or recorded as voting and it potentially involves a scheme among many people,” Hasen said. “It is that much harder to do so with a larger election.”

Trump’s funding numbers are a reference to the HEROES Act, House Democrats’ opening offer for the next round of coronavirus relief that passed out of the chamber on a largely party-line vote in mid-May. The bill was dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, and talks on the next round of coronavirus relief have stalled.

The House bill contained myriad funding streams, including $3.6 billion in “election resilience grants,” which election administrators across the country could use “for contingency planning, preparation, and resilience of elections.” The money could be used on everything from preparing for the influx of mail-in ballots, to protecting in-person voting and buying personal protective equipment for poll workers.

The HEROES Act also included a $25 billion payment to the USPS “for revenue forgone due to coronavirus.”

The bill also contained provisions that would amount to a sweeping overhaul of the American electoral system, including mandating that voters be sent ballots during times of emergency or disaster (including this November), requiring in-person early voting and effectively eliminating voter ID laws by allowing voters to submit sworn statements in lieu of an ID in most cases.

As of late, Trump has sought to draw a distinction between absentee voting and mail-in voting. Election experts often use the term interchangeably, but there is a difference between universal mail-in voting — where voters are automatically mailed a ballot, whether they requested one or not — and most states’ systems.

"Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure," Trump tweeted earlier this month, encouraging supporters to vote-by-mail in the state.

During a White House press briefing on Thursday, Trump dismissed reports that he's attempting to suppress the vote in November, but said Americans would have to vote in person if a bill with funding for the USPS and universal mail-in voting isn't passed by Congress.

"I want them to vote," Trump said. "But that would mean that they'd have to go to a voting booth like they used to and vote."

When pressed on how the government would ensure voters' safety if they head to the polls in person, the president didn't provide specific actions that would be taken.

"They’re gonna have to feel safe — and they will be safe. And we will make sure that they’re safe," Trump said. "Again, absentee good, universal mail-in very bad."

Despite the president’s fixation on it, universal vote-by-mail systems are not widely used across the country.

Five states do it as a regular course: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Three states — California, Nevada and Vermont — along with the District of Columbia, plan on mailing voters ballots in response to the pandemic.

Montana has also left that decision up to individual counties for November. Every county in the state opted to mail ballots to voters for Montana's June primary.

Most states do allow for no-excuse absentee voting, meaning any voter can request an absentee ballot, regardless of health status, age or other factors.

Just eight states — Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — require voters to have a valid excuse to request an absentee ballot for November. The New York Times estimates that 76 percent of voters live in states where, at a minimum, there is no-excuse absentee voting.

The president’s comments also come as Democrats and election security experts sound the alarm over changes at the USPS. Trump recently installed Louis DeJoy, a deep-pocketed supporter of the president, as postmaster general. DeJoy has overseen a shakeup of the the Postal Service’s top echelon of staffers.

"The President of the United States is sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon, cutting a critical lifeline for rural economies and for delivery of medicines, because he wants to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to vote safely during the most catastrophic public health crisis in over 100 years," Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for Joe Biden's campaign, said in a statement reacting to Trump's comments.

The USPS’ general counsel also recently sent a letter to some state election officials that caused concern among voting rights groups and some election administrators. The letter, first reported by The Spokesman-Review in Washington state, recommended that election officials use first-class mail to send election materials, warning that the bulk rate that some election administrators use may result in untimely delivery of election materials.

Such a shift in how mail-in ballots are sent would amount to a major change for many local election officials. Derek Brenchley, deputy director of elections in the Utah’s lieutenant governor’s office, recently told POLITICO in an email that his office had received a similar letter and that most local officials in the state have used the lower bulk rate in the past. Switching all mailings from the bulk rate to first-class rate would amount to more than doubling of election offices' postal budgets.

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican widely considered an expert on mail-in voting, told POLITICO that she met with USPS officials earlier in the week to discuss the letter, and that some of her initial concerns were alleviated.

“They assured us that they were still going to treat election mail with the highest priority. And they were going to try to make good on that commitment and that history,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “We're comfortable that we're going to be able to do the nonprofit bulk for the first mailing” of ballots.

But later ballots may still require more expensive postage, which could present a challenge for cash-strapped election administrators across the country. Wyman also stressed Washington’s long relationship with the USPS, a benefit other states may not have.

DeJoy is scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee in mid-September to address lawmakers’ questions. Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.), who chairs the House Oversight Government Operations Subcommittee, said he had hoped to secure DeJoy's testimony sooner, since several states will have begun early voting by the time the postmaster general appears, but he said DeJoy cited scheduling conflicts until then.

In the meantime, Connolly said he's working to advance legislation that would undo a series of policy changes DeJoy implemented until the coronavirus emergency is lifted, as well as a bill that would require the Postal Service to prioritize mail-in ballots.

He said Trump is engaged in a "psychological game" to convince Americans that mail-in voting isn't safe even though it is. "He's trying to get in people's heads that the mail is unreliable, that 'They don't have the money and I'm going to make sure they don't get it, and therefore you're going to take your chances with a mail-in ballot,’" Connolly said in an interview.

Connolly said he's weighing additional hearings in advance of DeJoy's and has considered calling DeJoy's predecessor, Megan Brennan, who delayed her planned retirement to steer the Postal Service through the early days of the pandemic, as well as her former deputy.

Democrats in both chambers of Congress sent letters to DeJoy on Wednesday demanding answers on the changes he is making at the post office, including on postal rates for election mailings.

“If any changes are made to long-standing practices of moving election mail just months ahead of the 2020 general election, it will cause further delays to election mail that will disenfranchise voters and put significant financial pressure on election jurisdictions,” a letter from Senate Democrats read. House Democrats sent a letter raising similar concerns.

Kyle Cheney, Max Cohen and Evan Semones contributed to this report.

Just before the election is a perfect time to float a capital gains tax cut.

A symbol of America's increasing diversity has the right on edge, while their party is captured by loons.

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Intel on Thursday disclosed a new method for making transistors on semiconductors that its chief architect said could boost the performance Intel's next round of processors by as much as 20%. From a report: The Santa Clara, California-based company is one of the few remaining in the world that both designs and manufactures its own chips. But its manufacturing operations have become a concern among investors after Intel last month said that its next-generation chip-making process, called its 7-nanometer process node, would be delayed. Analysts believe the delays could cement the lead that rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co have gained in making smaller, more power efficient chips. Intel's shares have fallen nearly 20% since the delays were disclosed. On Thursday, Intel sought to buck the notion that the single-number names given to each generation of chip process node tell the entire story by disclosing improvements on its existing 10-nanonmeter process node. It announced a new way of making what it now calls "SuperFin" transistors, which, along with a new material being used to improve the capacitors on chips, is expected to boost the performance of Intel's forthcoming processors, despite their still being made on 10-nanometer manufacturing lines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said President Donald Trump's executive orders against TikTok and WeChat could be "broader" than just those two apps. From a report: Pompeo did not elaborate, but his comments could be hinting at action against other Chinese apps or even TikTok's parent company ByteDance, or WeChat owner Tencent. "So when President Trump made his announcement about not only TikTok, but about WeChat -- and if you read it, it's broader even still than that -- is that we're going to make sure that American data not end up in the hands of an adversary like the Chinese Communist Party, for whom we have seen data uses in Western China that rival the greatest human rights violations in the history of mankind," Pompeo said in a speech in Prague, Czech Republic. The orders name both Tencent and ByteDance. One of the executive orders prohibits âoeany transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with ByteDance Ltd. ... Beijing, China, or its subsidiaries, in which any such company has any interest" as identified by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Another executive order prohibits "any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. ... Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A top DHS official is seeking to reassure Senate Democrats that specially trained ICE agents who may be deployed to supplement Justice Department officers in Chicago — part of a surge of enforcement personnel that the Trump administration has sent into U.S. cities amid rising crime — pose no risk to efforts by local police.

In a five-page letter to Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin, both Illinois Democrats, Assistant Department of Homeland Security Secretary Beth Spivey said any concerns that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, part of the agency's Homeland Security Investigations arm, would be unprepared to supplement law enforcement efforts are "completely misplaced."

The Homeland Security Investigations agents, she said, undergo a 56-day "Criminal Investigator Training Program" that teaches "basic" techniques, followed by a 71-day "Special Agent Training" program that provides in-depth teaching on investigations such as cybercrime, child exploitation, national security investigations, firearms and tactical building entries.

"The special agent-trainees are assessed through written exams, practical exercises, and arduous physical fitness training," Spivey wrote. "Only after fulfilling these requirements are the HSI special agent-trainees bestowed with the appropriate credentials."

In addition, the agents are statutorily empowered to investigate a wide range of crimes — from money laundering to commercial fraud to art theft to narcotics and child exploitation, she wrote.

The response to Duckworth and Durbin comes amid growing anger among Democrats who have accused the Trump administration of deploying federal resources to boost Trump politically, rather than in a genuine effort to combat crime.

Democratic lawmakers have raised particular alarms about the presence of ICE agents and other Homeland Security personnel in support of these efforts, arguing they're not properly trained to support local law enforcement efforts. Duckworth and Durbin wrote to DHS Secretary Chad Wolf on Aug. 5 specifically worrying about reports that ICE was preparing to send HSI agents to Chicago and were not up to the job.

But Spivey said DHS "generally" works closely with state and local police, including in Chicago.

"[W]ere circumstances to evolve and an increase in DHS law enforcement presence become warranted, we would coordinate that increase with local and state leaders in Chicago and the State of Illinois, respectively," she wrote.

Spivey also addressed questions about DHS' presence in Portland, where officers were deployed to confront violent protests outside a federal courthouse, but raised similar alarms among Democrats that they had overstepped their mission and were cracking down violently on peaceful protesters as well. As of Aug. 8, Spivey wrote, DHS officers sustained more than 300 injuries, including 113 eye injuries resulting from high-powered "laser pins."

Other injuries, she said, included 96 hearing injuries, 72 injuries resulting from thrown objects, fireworks and other projectiles, nine knee injuries, four sprains, two lacerations, two back injuries, two toe injuries, one foot fracture resulting from nails placed outside the courthouse, one shoulder injury, one groin injury and one thumb injury.

A maskless Tennessee cop angrily approached a man filming a pair of state troopers who had pulled over a motorist, threatened to arrest him, got in the man’s face, and then ripped off the man’s face mask. He also had his hand on his gun in a threatening manner.

615-251-5228. Just spoke with Arlene. Lovely and patient. Said an investigation into this incident with Officer Harvey Briggs, Tennessee Highway Patrol, was opened yesterday. Declined to say if he’s on desk duty pending outcome of report. https://t.co/QeDFcsJwQV

— Pamela Popeil (@pamelapopeil) August 12, 2020

TMZ reports: “Andrew Golden says this went down Monday near the Tennessee State Capitol building as he was recording state troopers who had pulled over a motorist. He says he kept a safe distance away on a public sidewalk before State Trooper Harvey Briggs — who was not involved in the traffic stop — threw a fit. … Golden claims Briggs then stepped on his foot — all without wearing a mask, mind you — and then, suddenly, ripped Golden’s mask off his face. He immediately called out Briggs for it … and you hear Briggs deny it as he walked away saying, ‘I’m tired of you people making stuff up.'”

The post Maskless Tennessee Cop on Power Trip Rips Face Mask Off Man Filming State Troopers: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Aang, the hero of Avatar: The Last Airbender | Nickelodeon

The beloved fantasy franchise has enjoyed a banner year on Netflix — until now.

In a rare public fallout for Netflix, the creators of the platform’s highly anticipated, live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the acclaimed Nickelodeon cartoon, have walked away from the project.

Avatar: The Last Airbender’s full run became available on Netflix this past June, attracting a huge audience and reigniting the 2000s cartoon’s popularity. But in separate posts published to their respective blogs and Instagrams, Avatar franchise creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko said they were no longer involved with the previously announced Netflix remake, due to prolonged creative differences.

“When Netflix brought me on board to run this series alongside Mike two years ago,” Konietzko wrote in his Instagram post, “they made a very public promise to support our vision. Unfortunately, there was no follow-through on that promise. ... [T]he general handling of the project created what I felt was a negative and unsupportive environment.”

“I realized I couldn’t control the creative direction of the series, but I could control how I responded,” DiMartino added on his own website. “So, I chose to leave the project.”

Netflix responded in an emailed statement, noting that the production would continue with Nickelodeon still attached. “We have complete respect and admiration for Michael and Bryan and the story that they created in the Avatar animated series. Although they have chosen to depart the live action project, we are confident in the creative team and their adaptation.”

Both creators described the move as “a difficult decision” but stated they’d lost confidence that Netflix would honor their vision for the show. This comes almost two years after Netflix announced the live-action reboot of the series, eliciting a huge response. Despite its brief run, which ended more than a decade ago, Avatar fans remain loyal — and that Netflix had gotten the series’ creators involved seemed to give them confidence in the project.

That may no longer be the case. It’s rare for Netflix to have such a public breakup with the creators of one of their high-profile productions, let alone creators whose names are synonymous with the beloved, well-established franchise the project is part of. More surprising is that Netflix has been enjoying tremendous success with the Avatar community this year. The recent release of Airbender on the platform — making it more accessible to viewers than it has been in years — saw the show trending in the Netflix Top 10 list for weeks. The Netflix debut has seemingly affirmed the show’s popularity while introducing it to wide swaths of new fans.

Airbender’s follow-up, Legend of Korra, also arrives on the platform later this week. That timing makes the announcement of DiMartino and Konietzko’s departure from the live-action series all the more curious — despite Netflix offering a home for the franchise, Airbender’s future with the streaming platform is now under new scrutiny.

It also leaves the fate of the live-action series upended in a way that’s distressingly familiar to Avatar fans. It’s certainly not the first time the franchise has found itself in a precarious position when live-action is involved.

Over its beloved three-season run, Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–08) became a true game-changer. Set in a fantasy world mainly based on Asian cultures, Airbender was acclaimed for its sensitive multicultural storytelling, which revolved around a team of “benders” — people who can manipulate the four elements — using their powers to stop an aggressive, militarized nation from its violent conquest of neighboring countries. In addition to carefully avoiding harmful Orientalist tropes, the show took pains to depict its various cultural allegories as distinct. And with a pre-planned, three-season story arc, it got to deeply invest in both its world-building and characters over time, allowing it to evolve organically to a deeply satisfying conclusion.

People who love Airbender really, really love Airbender. But over the years, the Peabody award-winning show has had its setbacks. The most infamous of these is Paramount’s disastrous live-action film adaptation. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, the film had one of the most toxic, embattled, and notorious productions in recent memory. Fans staged protests lasting well over a year due to the film’s muddying of the careful cultural origins of the show’s original world-building and its casting of white actors in ethnic roles — a practice that became known as racebending.

When it was released in June of 2010, Shyamalan’s finished product turned out to be a giant artistic embarrassment, a critically panned and high-profile flop that significantly tarnished the director’s career. It also left a stain on Airbender’s legacy, turning off newcomers and longtime fans alike.

The fate of the film might have decisively ended any attempts to turn the animated Airbender into a live-action anything. But when Netflix announced the live-action series adaptation in 2018, many fans were curious and excited to see what a faithful adaptation of the show could accomplish — especially with the creators’ involvement, unlike the hands-off approach DiMartino and Konietzko took with Shyamalan’s film.

The news has dismayed fans, many of whom are now questioning whether they even want another attempt at a live-action interpretation of the show without the creators at the helm. After all, the movie already showed us that Konietzko and DiMartino’s original vision — an anime-influenced story with sophisticated themes and slow, satisfying character arcs — could be jettisoned completely if the project fell into the wrong hands. Capturing the spirit of Airbender appears to require a sensitive touch; from the sounds of the creators’ posts, it doesn’t sound like Netflix quite has that.

Fans have been eager for the show to overcome the ignominy of the terrible movie, and 2020 has indeed felt like a major revival for the franchise. The Legend of Korra is a much more divisive follow-up, but it, too, is poised for a cultural resurgence once it debuts on Netflix on August 14. With Airbender back in the spotlight, the timing was right for a reappraisal of Korra — but now Korra’s Netflix debut may be overshadowed by its creators’ own exit from the live-action series.

Still, DiMartino and Konietzko stressed that this isn’t the end of the franchise or their involvement in it. And the Netflix live-action adaptation still seems to be happening. And as strange as it is for Netflix to be parting ways with such high-profile creators, it’s not like Netflix doesn’t have a proven track record when it comes to reimagining popular franchises from other media — just look at its wildly popular live-action adaptation of The Witcher, or the recent reboot of The Babysitter’s Club. Plus, whenever a deeply beloved series is adapted, remade, or rebooted, it’s bound to put off at least some hardcore fans, regardless of quality.

“And who knows? Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Avatar has the potential to be good. It might turn out to be a show many of you end up enjoying,” DiMartino wrote. “But what I can be certain about is that whatever version ends up on-screen, it will not be what Bryan and I had envisioned or intended to make.”

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