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Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app, New York Times reported Friday, citing a person with knowledge of the discussions, as President Trump said on Friday that he was considering taking steps that would effectively ban the app from the United States. From a report: It's unclear how advanced the talks between Microsoft and TikTok are, but any deal could help alter TikTok's ownership, said the person with knowledge of the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet company that is valued at $100 billion. That has raised scrutiny of the app, with Trump administration officials saying that they have been concerned that TikTok poses a threat to national security. The Trump administration has been weighing whether to order ByteDance to divest from American assets it acquired in 2017, which were later merged into TikTok. Bloomberg reported Friday that the president was poised to announce an order that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok's U.S. operations. The Trump administration has also been weighing other potential actions against the company, including adding ByteDance to a so-called "entity list," which prevents foreign companies from purchasing American products and services without a special license, according to people familiar with the matter.

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A police academy graduation ceremony held in Madison Square Garden in New York City, on April 18, 2018. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The fatal mismatch at the heart of American policing.

Richard Nixon called police forces “the real front-line soldiers in the war on crime.” Bill Clinton, in his signing ceremony for the 1994 crime bill, called them “the brave men and women who put their lives on the line for us every day.” In 2018, Donald Trump described their job as follows: “Every day, our police officers race into darkened allies and deserted streets, and onto the doorsteps of the most hardened criminals … the worst of humanity.”

For decades, the warrior cop has been the popular image of police in America, reinforced by TV shows, movies, media, police recruitment videos, police leaders, and public officials.

This image is largely misleading. Police do fight crime, to be sure — but they are mainly called upon to be social workers, conflict mediators, traffic directors, mental health counselors, detailed report writers, neighborhood patrollers, and low-level law enforcers, sometimes all in the span of a single shift. In fact, the overwhelming majority of officers spend only a small fraction of their time responding to violent crime.

However, the institution of policing in America does not reflect that reality. We prepare police officers for a job we imagine them to have rather than the role they actually perform. Police are hired disproportionately from the military, trained in military-style academies that focus largely on the deployment of force and law, and equipped with lethal weapons at all times, and they operate within a culture that takes pride in warriorship, combat, and violence.

Eze Amos/Getty Images

This mismatch can have troubling — even fatal — consequences. Situations that begin with civilians selling loose cigarettes, attempting to use possibly counterfeit currency, sleeping intoxicated in their cars, recreationally selling or using low-level drugs, violating minor traffic laws, or calling the police themselves because they are experiencing a mental health crisis end with those same civilians, disproportionately Black Americans, unnecessarily killed at the hands of a police force primed for violent encounters and ill-equipped for interventions that demand mediation, deescalation, and social work.

“Cops are very equipped to be the hammer and enforce the law,” says Arthur Rizer, a former police officer and 21-year veteran of the US Army who heads the criminal justice program at the center-right R Street Institute. “They know how to use those tools forcefully and effectively; for everything else, they are lacking. Of course that’s going to end badly.”

There is considerable disagreement about the best way to change policing. But as my colleague Aaron Ross Coleman points out, a cross-factional coalition is emerging, centered on the idea that America relies far too heavily on police to address problems that have nothing to do with what they are trained, hired, and equipped to handle.

“The spectrum of skill sets we are currently asking police to embody is simply not realistic,” says Christy E. Lopez, a legal scholar at Georgetown Law who litigated police misconduct as an attorney for the Obama administration’s Justice Department. “It’s not realistic to ask any profession to do that much.”

In recent weeks, I’ve spoken to a dozen current and former police officers, police reformers, legal scholars, and criminologists to better understand this fatal mismatch at the heart of American policing — and what it would take to fix it.

How police officers spend their time on the job

The best information on how police officers spend their time comes from “calls for service” data made publicly available by individual police agencies. These are often defined as calls to emergency operators, 911 calls, alarms, and police radio and non-emergency calls. Most calls for service are initiated by citizens, but the data I draw on here captures the officer’s final categorization of the incident.

The data overwhelmingly finds that police officers in aggregate spend the vast majority of their time responding to non-criminal calls, traffic-related incidents, and low-level crimes — and only a tiny fraction on violent crimes.

My favorite visualization of this data comes from former UK police officer and Temple University criminologist Jerry Ratcliffe, who used 2015 data from Philadelphia, a city with relatively high crime rates, to construct this graphic. The area of each box represents the proportion of reported incidents within that category:

Jerry Ratcliffe, Intelligence-Led Policing

If you squint a bit, you can see that violent crimes like rape, homicide, and aggravated assault are tucked away in the bottom right-hand corner. Less serious crimes like petty theft, drug use, and vandalism take up slightly more space but not all that much. The vast majority of calls have nothing to do with crime. Instead, they involve disorderly crowds, domestic disputes, traffic accidents, minor disturbances, and a whole array of “unfounded” calls where the officer arrived on the scene only to discover nothing was happening.

Of course, the exact incident breakdown will vary by place, but this general picture holds for a number of police departments in major cities. In a June article for the New York Times, crime analysts Jeff Asher and Ben Horwitz dug through the call data for the 10 police agencies that had made such data available, including in places with relatively high violent crime rates like Baltimore and New Orleans. They found that incidents that met the FBI Uniform Crime Report definition of violent crime made up only around 1 percent of calls for service.

Then, for the handful of police agencies that also provided data on when a given call for service was first reported and when that incident was closed, Asher and Horowitz used the difference between those two numbers to gauge the time officers actually spent on different types of policing activities.

Across these departments, the biggest category of time spent by police was on “responding to noncriminal calls,” which took up around a third or more of total on-call time. The next biggest categories were “traffic” (mostly car accidents) and “other crime” (low-level crimes like drug use, truancy, disorderly conduct, etc.). Almost 10 percent of police time was spent on “medical” calls, which involve non-crime-related physical emergencies. Meanwhile, police spent only around 4 percent of their time responding to violent crime and even less time (closer to 0.1 percent) on homicides.

“When I was an officer, I got calls about dead animals, ungovernable children who refused to go to school, people who hadn’t gotten their welfare checks, adults who hadn’t heard from their elderly relatives, families who needed to be informed of a death, broken-down cars, you name it,” says Seth Stoughton, a legal scholar at the University of South Carolina and former Tallahassee police officer. “Everything that isn’t dealt with by some other institution automatically defaults to the police to take care of.”

Calls for service data do not include what police often refer to as “unassigned” time — the hours police officers spend between calls patrolling neighborhoods, taking a meal break, or filling out paperwork. Observational studies of patrol officers have found that anywhere from 46 percent to 81 percent of their time is spent on unassigned activities. That means the total percentage of time police spend responding to crime could well be far less than even the call data indicate (the main exception being members of specialized units in major departments like homicide and SWAT whose activities aren’t captured by observational studies).

Numerous academic studies confirm these basic patterns in the data. They find that patrol officers — even in suburban and rural communities for which public data is often lacking — spend the overwhelming majority of their time writing reports, driving around neighborhoods, and responding to non-criminal calls.

“The job is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer panic,” says Matthew Bostrom, a criminologist at the University of Oxford who spent more than 30 years as a police officer, commander, and sheriff in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Most of what you deal with is fairly routine.”

In his recent paper “Disaggregating the Policing Function,” Barry Friedman, the director of the Policing Project at New York University’s School of Law, breaks down this dizzying array of tasks and responsibilities into a handful of distinct roles:

• The traffic cop: The majority of police-civilian interactions take place on the road. Police help stranded motorists with broken-down cars, take reports in car accidents, direct traffic around serious incidents in which other responders are needed, set and staff speed “traps,” and issue citations. And when police are off-call, they spend much of their time performing routine street patrol.
• The mediator cop: A huge number of calls to the police involve relatively minor interpersonal disputes: disputes over noise levels, trespassing, misbehaving pets, or rowdiness; disputes between spouses, family members, roommates, or neighbors. In these situations, police are called to calm things down, deescalate, and act as counsel.
• The social worker cop: Police work often involves populations like the homeless, intoxicated people, people with substance use issues, or those with mental illness. This role isn’t often captured well in the aggregate data, but police spend a huge chunk of their time on these functions.
• The first responder: In most jurisdictions, the only government entities that respond to problems 24 hours a day, seven days per week are police, fire, and emergency medical services. That means for the vast majority of social problems, police are often the default institution for people to call. This is how cops get stuck chasing runaway dogs, tracking down welfare checks, dealing with noise complaints, and a whole host of other issues that appear to have nothing to do with policing.
• The crime-fighting, law enforcement cop: There is something to be said for rapid response by force- and law-trained individuals to situations involving serious criminal activity. However, studies find that this time is mostly spent interviewing witnesses, gathering evidence, advising victims, and writing reports. “Often cops are just there to pick up the pieces after the fact,” says Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer and criminologist at John Jay College. “By the time you arrive, the crime is usually no longer in progress.”

The time a given officer spends on each of these roles varies greatly. In bigger cities, police work tends to involve dealing with a lot of substance abuse, mental illness, and homelessness. In suburban areas, domestic and other interpersonal disputes take up a larger portion of police time. In rural communities, police deal with a huge number of unique, one-off tasks.

What remains true in each of these cases is that police officers aren’t primarily crime fighters and law enforcers; instead, they fill a huge range of other social functions — often ones that other social services and institutions don’t have the ability to respond to quickly, or at all.

“As a society we’ve decided to sweep these problems aside rather than to deal with them,” Friedman tells me. “And the police are the broom. They don’t want to be the broom, but that’s exactly what they are.”

The job we prepare police for

This all adds up to a fundamental problem with policing in America: We prepare police for a role vastly different from the one they actually play in society.

A 2016 national study of the training of 135,000 recruits across 664 local police academies found that, on average, officers each received 168 hours of training in firearm skills, self-defense, and use of force out of 840 total hours. Another 42 hours were spent on criminal investigations, 38 on operating an emergency vehicle, 86 on legal education aimed primarily at force amendment law, and hundreds more on basic operations and self-improvement. Topics like domestic violence (13 hours), mental illness (10 hours), and mediation and conflict management (9 hours) received a fraction of trainee time. Others, like homelessness and substance abuse, were so rare they didn’t make the data set.

Those averages mask an even more worrying reality. Almost half of American police academies utilize what is called the “military model” of instruction — a high-stress, physically and psychologically excruciating approach traditionally used to train soldiers for battle. Another third use a hybrid approach that draws heavily on the military model.

Brent Stirton/Getty Images

In many major-city police departments where this military model is prevalent, training is even more skewed toward force and law enforcement. At Nashville’s police academy, for instance, officers spent two-thirds of their training time on law enforcement and use of force and less than 10 percent of their time on “social work/mediation” issues like interpersonal communication and human relations.

“The amount of firearms and use of force training in our academies is completely at odds with the problem we most often ask police to deal with,” says Ratcliffe, the former UK police officer turned Temple criminologist. “Police training is simply not reflective of the role of police in our society.”

In the field, this trend continues. Despite the fact that American police deal with a vast array of different situations, they are equipped with the exact same tools for each one: handcuffs and a firearm. Increasingly, that tool basket also includes assault rifles, camouflage, and armored vehicles, even for routine tasks.

The structure of police agencies, too, reflects a commitment to force. Glance at the organization chart of any major police department and you’ll see specialized departments like SWAT, bomb squad, narcotics, vice, street crimes, gang unit, criminal intelligence, and counterterrorism. What you won’t see, with a handful of exceptions, are departments focused on conflict mediation or social work.

The emphasis on force, law, and crime fighting is undergirded by a powerful ideological ecosystem. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp writes, “The ideology [of policing] holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect.” That ideology is baked into the culture of policing at all levels.

Crime fighting and deployment of force are also culturally valorized. Take the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s “Police Officer of the Year” award, which “symbolizes the highest level of achievement among police officers,” and selects those who can stand as models for the profession — it’s a big deal in the policing world. In the 30-year period from 1986 to 2015, 25 recipients of the award were honored for actions they took in combat conditions while under attack.

Or just look up any police department recruitment video, where you’re likely to see police officers battering down doors, firing assault rifles, engaging in high-speed freeway chases, and running after suspects through alleyways — sometimes with a few brief shots of community outreach sprinkled in.

As for in-person recruiting efforts, police agencies concentrate primarily on military bases and, to a lesser degree, sports facilities and private security companies. The result is that military veterans — who are more likely to generate excessive force complaints and be involved in unjustified police shootings than non-military cops — represent almost 20 percent of police officers despite being just six percent of the US population. Men more generally make up almost 90 percent of all police officers; they are considerably more likely to use force and aggressive tactics than female officers.

“What excites police is action, and that means ultimately applying violence,” says Rizer. “The people attracted to police work want that type of action — they are giddy about it. The people who don’t want that type of action either never make it in the first place or are ridiculed for it if they do.”

A mismatch with devastating consequences

Police officers are functionally generalists responsible for dealing with a vast array of our society’s most sensitive situations; yet we’ve recruited, hired, trained, equipped, and deployed them to be specialists in force. And we’ve done it all using an often disproportionately white police force with a well-documented racial bias problem entering Black and brown communities that historically distrust the police.

Would it surprise anyone if this occasionally resulted in unnecessary violence?

“Often what these situations require is someone to calm things down, cool things off, and deescalate,” says Tom Tyler, a legal scholar at Yale Law School and a founding director of Yale’s Justice Collaboratory. “But police tend to manage all the problems they face through the threat or use of coercive force. This amplifies the level of emotion and anger in a given situation and can create a spiral of conflict that ends tragically.”

Take the case of Rayshard Brooks. On June 12, Atlanta police officers were sent to respond to a complaint that Brooks was sleeping in his vehicle in a Wendy’s drive-through. Video evidence shows the interaction starts out calm. Brooks repeatedly asks the arresting officer, Garrett Rolfe, if he can leave his car parked and walk to his sister’s home, which he says is nearby. But Rolfe insists Brooks take a field sobriety test, which reveals that Brooks had a blood alcohol level slightly above the legal limit. Rolfe attempts to handcuff Brooks, Brooks resists, and a struggle ensues. Brooks grabs Rolfe’s Taser, begins running away, and turns to fire it. Rolfe shoots Brooks three times.

Brooks died in the hospital.

There are numerous points at which this interaction could have gone differently. If Atlanta had delegated certain responsibilities to non-police agencies, they could have sent an unarmed civilian to drive Brooks home. If the officers on the scene had the mindset of solving a problem without the use of force, they probably wouldn’t have escalated the situation by trying to forcefully handcuff Brooks. If the arresting officer didn’t have a Taser, Brooks would never have taken control of his weapon. If that same officer weren’t armed — or perhaps had stricter use of force requirements — he wouldn’t have shot and killed someone holding a less lethal weapon.

You can do the same kind of analysis for the deaths of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Euree Martin, Tony Timpa, Erik Salgado, and countless others. In each situation, the mismatch is crystal clear: Officers trained primarily in the deployment of force and law, armed with lethal weapons, and told to think of themselves as warriors were the chosen first responders to situations that demand anything but. And each situation ended with someone killed at the hands of the people ostensibly tasked to protect and serve them.

Patrick Smith/Getty Images

Police killings of unarmed civilians in the United States are magnitudes higher than those in peer countries. Using 2015 data, Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley criminologist and author of When Police Kill, calculates that the chance of an unarmed civilian being killed by police in the US is three times higher than the chance of any civilian, armed or unarmed, being killed by police in Germany and more than 10 times higher than in the UK (and that’s using a very conservative estimate of unarmed shootings in the US). A separate analysis found that in almost half of police killings of unarmed civilians in the US, the person killed was revealed to be or suspected of experiencing either a mental health crisis or narcotic intoxication.

Even when civilians are armed, that doesn’t necessarily mean police killings are justified. Upon extensively analyzing the 1,100 total fatal police killings in the US in 2015, Zimring concluded that “almost half the cases ... were confrontations where the police were not at objective risk of a deadly attack.” And, of course, it is impossible to quantify how many of those confrontations would not have escalated to the point of potential violence in the first place if not for police presence and tactics.

The unnecessary use of deadly force isn’t the only, or even the most likely, consequence of this mismatch. It also leads routinely to the overcriminalization of issues like drug use, mental illness, and homelessness; it causes predominantly Black and brown communities to live in constant fear of their own police departments; it destroys trust between police officers and the people they are supposed to protect; and it places a major financial burden on local government budgets (armed police officers are an expensive way to address social problems) that leads to the underfunding of key social services. All the while, it fails to solve the underlying problems that lead to police being called in the first place.

“The definition of failure is that what we’re doing isn’t solving the problem and is actually causing harm in the process,” says Friedman, the Policing Project director. “That basically describes the state of policing today.”

Reimagining public safety

When it comes to addressing the mismatch between the nature of our police forces and the roles we ask them to perform, there are two broad paths that stand out.

The first is to transform our police forces — to change how officers are recruited, hired, trained, and equipped to meet the actual demands of their role.

Hiring and recruiting practices can be reformed to increase the diversity of police forces in terms of gender, race, and non-military backgrounds. Training can be refocused to include a stronger emphasis on procedural justice principles, conflict deescalation, and crisis intervention. Use of force policies can be made much stricter. Tactics like chokeholds, shooting at moving vehicles, and shooting without warning can be banned, as many departments have already done. Military-grade weapons can be taken off the streets. Legal protections like qualified immunity can be revoked.

On a structural level, police agencies can create an entire department focused on crisis response with specialized units focused on homeless outreach, mental illness, substance abuse, and conflict mediation (as some progressive departments have already done). Those officers can be recruited from fields like social work and psychology, hired based on their capacity to calmly handle highly stressful situations, trained primarily in crisis response, and rewarded not for arrests or stops but for peaceably resolving issues and handing them over to the appropriate social services institution.

The challenges associated with this approach aren’t difficult to imagine. Reform would have to take place on numerous levels: training, hiring, recruitment, agency structure, weaponry. You’d have to get buy-in not only from state and local public officials and police chiefs but from rank-and-file officers. You’d have to fight police unions for even an inch of reform. And even if you fixed one or two of these areas (which could take years or decades), sending armed officers to deal with social problems will always leave open the possibility of unnecessary violence. Cities like Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Tucson — all of which have experienced high-profile police killings recently despite reform efforts — have learned that lesson the hard way.

“It’s impossible to point to one specific problem and say, ‘That’s it — that’s the issue,’” says Tracey Meares, a legal scholar and founding director of Yale University’s Justice Collaboratory. “This is about the system of policing itself. Our communities lack the resources to deal with their social problems. And our response has been to deploy armed first responders to address the issue way down the chain from the source.”

That leads us to a second approach: to transform how we address public safety such that police play a smaller, more targeted role altogether. This would involve communities designating a certain subset of current police duties that don’t require armed police response, delegating those responsibilities — along with requisite funding — to an institution that could better handle the issue, and designing systems for service delivery (like a 911 call diversion program) and coordination (like a silent alert system that unarmed first responders could use to quickly summon police backup).

Byron Smith/Getty Images

Models for this approach have been implemented successfully in some places in the US and across the globe. In the UK, certain traffic functions have been designated to unarmed, non-police public servants. In cities across the US, “violence interruption” programs run by community nonprofits have been largely successful in mediating conflict and reducing violence. The much-applauded Cahoots program in Eugene, Oregon, sends a team of unarmed crisis specialists to address many non-criminal 911 calls without having to involve police.

There’s public support for such an approach — a recent poll found that 68 percent of voters support the creation of a “new agency of first responders” (although just a quarter of Americans say they support “reducing funding” for police departments).

The challenge is that designing an entirely new approach to public safety, rather than merely reforming an existing one, means stepping into relatively uncharted territory.

“There is no single, definitive answer to what will work in a given place,” Megan Quattlebaum, director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center, tells me. “Anything we do is going to be in the space of experimentation with different models.”

That means things are bound to go wrong. Some programs might not scale. Others will not receive adequate funding. Crime may temporarily increase in some places. Occasionally, a violence interrupter or mobile crisis worker will be seriously injured or killed. And when those things happen, it will take an incredible amount of political will and community solidarity to persist.

These two approaches are not mutually exclusive. There is general agreement that armed officers should still respond to violent crimes, like an active shooter, and definitively non-criminal, nonviolent activity should be delegated to alternative institutions. There are also a handful of hybrid solutions that combine the approaches — for instance, collaborative models between police and other agencies or nonprofits that co-respond to issues like homelessness or mental health. Or the “civilianization” of police departments: hiring unarmed professionals without arrest powers to fulfill certain police responsibilities, as many European countries have done.

But once you get into the details, difficult trade-offs emerge. There are plenty of cases where there is legitimate ambiguity about whether a situation will escalate to violence: like when a 911 caller isn’t sure whether what she is seeing is a man at a playground with a lethal weapon or a young teenager playing with a toy gun — or a woman experiencing a severe mental health crisis is threatening others with a knife. In cases like those, do we send unarmed first responders and risk putting them, and others, in harm’s way? Or do we send armed police officers and risk the use of unnecessary state force against civilians?

“This is a conversation that needs to be had with communities,” says Tracie L. Keesee, a former Denver police officer and the co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “Where do you want police and where do you not want them? Who would you rather have show up? What kinds of qualities would you like your police officers to have?”

Reimagining the role police play in our society is far from being anti-police. Plenty of police officers recognize that our current one-size-fits-all approach to public safety is fundamentally broken. They lament the fact that we ask police to solve far too many of our social problems and don’t give them the training or resources they need to do so — and then point the finger at them when they inevitably come up short.

“The reason I think we need to rethink policing is because I care about police,” says Rizer, the former officer and R Street researcher. “I want to make policing prestigious again — not the prestige of power, but the prestige of respect. But in order to do that, we need to stop underfunding everything else and leaving the police holding a bag of shit.”

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Vice President Mike Pence has been touring around with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in recent weeks in the hopes of promoting the Trump administration’s rush to reopen the country, using children and teachers as the guinea pigs for this process. On Wednesday, the two traveled for a set of photo ops in North Carolina, where they visited Thales Academy in Apex.

According to the New Observer, the two wore masks as they exited their plane, and they wore masks as they entered the private school. However, once inside, both DeVos and Pence decided the best health practice was to expose an entire fourth grade class to their terrible breath and potentially virus-infected faces and mouths. They took their masks off to tell the children how excited they were to blah blah blah and … take some photos.

Unlike most schools in the country, Thales Academy reopened in July for in-person classes, and Pence and DeVos hope to push both the privatization of our public education system and prove it’s A-OK to ignore the current public health crisis. So this was a match made in whatever it is Pence considers heaven. Considering that day after day reveals positive COVID-19 tests for people who have come into close contact with the administration, the students at this elementary school—who, along with their teacher, were wearing masks—probably should be tested for the virus after this photo op.

DeVos, who is particularly uninspiring and scientifically deficient of mind, has previously offered up “good hygiene” as the solution to our country’s pandemic, all in order to justify the premature reopening of U.S. schools.

Again, the teacher in the classroom wore a mask, as did the students. It was only the two religious zealots with fancy titles who decided to take everyone else’s lives and well-being into their own hands.

Republican State Rep. Will Dismukes of Alabama is making more being-a-racist news. On Thursday, Dismukes announced he would be stepping down as pastor of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Prattville. This comes after days and weeks of controversy surrounding the legislator and his relationship to race and racist organizations in the state. 

The most recent controversy comes after Dismukes attended and then gave the invocation at the annual birthday party for first grand wizard of the KKK and Confederate general and traitor Nathan Bedford Forrest on July 25 in Selma. The event coincided with ceremonies honoring the late U.S. representative and civil rights activist John Lewis’ passing. Rep. Dismukes posted about the event on his Facebook page the following day, writing: “Had a great time at Fort Dixie speaking and giving the invocation for Nathan Bedford Forrest annual birthday celebration. Always a great time and some sure enough good eating!!”

Very quickly, Alabama Baptist officials distanced themselves from Dismukes’ attendance of the event. Rick Lance, executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, told Alabama Baptist Media: “We are saddened and grieved to learn of the recent Facebook post by state Rep. Will Dismukes. … In the wake of tremendous controversy we reaffirm our opposition to any kind of racism.” Subsequently Dismukes was contacted by other Baptist officials in the state, with whom he met and decided to resign from his post as pastor. According to the Montgomery Advertiser, Dismukes says he has no plans to leave his position in state government.

Back in June, Dismukes came under fire for his support of state funding for a Confederate memorial park in Alabama, as well as his membership in a local Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter in Prattville. At the time, Rep. Dismukes told reporters that he didn’t support “slavery in any fashion,” but just “because I want to protect our history doesn’t mean I’m all of a sudden glorifying the days of slavery or anything of that nature.”

Dismukes’ Facebook page is filled with the kind of thinking about race and activism and flags that you might expect from someone who believes speaking at the birthday celebration for the founder of the KKK is patriotic and godly in some fashion. It’s a lot of the reasoning behind why people are kneeling during the national anthem, and criticisms of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and questioning the need to wear masks. 

Ready to hand Trump—and every Republican—a humiliating defeat? Sign up with Vote Forward to write personalized letters to infrequent, but Democratic-leaning, voters in swing states. Help us wash Trump out of office with a big blue wave of record-breaking turnout.

Democrat Albert Chester, who’s challenging Florida Congressman Al Lawson in the Aug. 18 primary, is apologizing after supporters unearthed several disgusting anti-gay social media posts.

FloridaPolitics.com reports: Chester made a number of comments that have been unearthed, including a 2013 statement in which he said he was starting to “not be an Obama supporter anymore” because of the President’s position on LGBT rights. … Also in 2013, Chester issued a denunciation of the gay rights movement as “the devil,” calling it a “proud stand for unnatural lusts and desires.” In 2014, Chester said he was “coming out too,” launching into a denunciation of an NFL player who declared his sexuality before the draft. “Bottom line what in the hell do you expect to receive for announcing that you’re a man who likes men,” Chester continued. “These parades, flags, and all this bull.”

Chester posted his mea culpa to Twitter on Wednesday night.

pic.twitter.com/iQzFVQaNu9

— Albert Chester (@AlbertChester21) July 30, 2020

“My past is not an indication of who I am today,” he said in a statement. “Since that time, I have become more knowledgeable about the issues you face. I am fully committed to an inclusive platform that promotes gender equality and strengthens human rights.”

Lawson slammed his opponent for the posts: “Albert Chester’s homophobic and bigoted comments are unacceptable. His hateful rhetoric has no place here — not just in Florida’s Fifth District, but across our nation. This is about fundamental decency. LGBTQ Americans face discrimination in employment, housing and other areas of life daily. They need representation by a candidate who will fight to bring our nation closer to equality for all, not one who is detrimental to the progress we have made. These public statements show that he doesn’t understand the role the federal government must play in creating safe spaces for our most vulnerable. This type of language incites violence and further divides our communities.”

More from the USA Today Network: The posts were unearthed by a group of Tallahassee progressives after they had endorsed Chester in his challenge to Lawson. … The Tallahassee progressives say the attempt to hold Chester accountable for his social media postings has gotten them booted from the local party. Chelsea Rimert, Jack Mills, Nicole Ordonez, Sierra Bush Rester and Bobby Johnson, said they are no longer allowed to speak at Leon Democratic Executive Committee meetings and have been removed from the group’s Facebook discussion group of local politics. … Johnson and the others are members of Florida for Bernie and are now working to have the statewide network that supported Sanders’ presidential campaign rescind its endorsement of Chester.

Check out a few of Chester’s posts below.

The post Florida Congressional Candidate Sorry for Saying ‘Lucifer’ Gave Gay People ‘Unnatural Lusts’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Former President Barack Obama speaks during the funeral of late civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) on July 30, 2020, at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta. | Alyssa Pointer/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

It’s looking more and more like Democrats will abolish the filibuster if they win back the Senate.

Former President Barack Obama delivered a passionate and deeply political tribute to the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) at Lewis’s funeral service on Thursday. Lewis was one of the nation’s foremost civil rights leaders beginning in the 1960s, and Obama spoke of how even as a very young man, Lewis endured beatings and other violence to advance the cause of voting rights for Black Americans.

Obama called for legislation restoring the Voting Rights Act, much of which was gutted by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Abbott v. Perez (2018). He also endorsed other democratic reforms, including an end to partisan gerrymandering, extending statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, and making Election Day a national holiday.

And then he called upon the Senate to remove an obstacle that has consistently stood in the way of civil rights legislation throughout American history.

“If all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do,” said Obama.

The filibuster typically allows a bloc of 41 senators to prevent legislation from passing, and Republican filibusters stymied much of Obama’s policy agenda during his presidency.

A common metric used to measure how frequently filibusters occur is the number of “cloture” motions filed by the majority in order to break a filibuster. The number of such cloture motions more than doubled after Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) became the Senate Republican leader in 2007, and McConnell continued to use the filibuster aggressively after Obama took office two years later.

Obama has criticized the widespread use of the filibuster in the past. He told Vox’s Ezra Klein in 2015 that the Senate should eliminate “the routine use of the filibuster in the Senate,” for example. But Obama’s remarks at Lewis’s funeral — in which he didn’t just oppose the filibuster but also noted the role it played in preserving Jim Crow — is probably his strongest statement in opposition to the filibuster to date.

The filibuster is a historical accident that became a tool of white supremacy

The filibuster itself predates Jim Crow and was created entirely by accident. In 1805, shortly after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Vice President Aaron Burr returned to the Senate to deliver a farewell speech and suggested that the Senate make changes to its rules. Burr proposed eliminating the “previous question motion,” a process that was rarely used prior to his speech, and the Senate followed Burr’s advice in 1806.

But the previous question motion was hardly superfluous. Indeed, this motion was the only process allowing the Senate to cut off debate among members. No one recognized Burr’s error for 35 years — until 1841, when the first filibuster occurred. Without a way to end debate, rogue senators could delay Senate action indefinitely by insisting on “debating” a proposal forever.

Since then, the Senate has changed the rules many times to make it easier to break a filibuster, but most legislation still cannot pass over a filibuster unless 60 senators join together to invoke cloture. That means that unless Democrats win an absolutely crushing majority in November — they would have to gain 13 seats in the Senate, a nearly impossible feat — Republicans will be able to block nearly any voting rights bill through the filibuster.

Unless, of course, the filibuster is eliminated, something the Senate could do at any time with just 51 votes.

If Republicans were to use the filibuster to stop legislation expanding voting rights, they would join a long and inglorious tradition of illiberal senators filibustering civil rights legislation. From 1875 until 1957, Congress did not enact a single civil rights bill, even as Jim Crow flourished in the South.

Congress could not even pass civil rights legislation that enjoyed majority support. Between the end of World War II and 1957, when a modest bill finally became law, the House passed five civil rights bills. But white supremacist senators were able to block each of these five bills using the filibuster.

Democrats appear to be turning sharply against the filibuster

It took Democrats more than four agonizing years to realize just how severely the filibuster had hobbled their ability to govern while Obama was president, and even then they made only modest reforms to the filibuster — allowing most presidential nominees to be confirmed with just 51 votes but leaving the legislative filibuster largely intact.

Indeed, just a few years ago, much of the Democratic caucus appeared committed to maintaining the filibuster. In April 2017, Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) organized a letter calling on Senate leadership to “preserve existing rules, practices, and traditions” that allow senators to filibuster legislation. More than two dozen Democrats joined this letter, and a total of 61 senators signed it.

And yet, even Coons — once one of the Senate’s most outspoken opponents of eliminating the filibuster — is now singing a different tune. “I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,” Coons told Politico in June. “I am gonna try really hard to find a path forward that doesn’t require removing what’s left of the structural guardrails, but if there’s a Biden administration, it will be inheriting a mess, at home and abroad. It requires urgent and effective action.”

Likewise, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recently signaled support for eliminating the filibuster if Senate Republicans are too “obstreperous.”

There is a very real chance, in other words, that the incoming Senate will have 51 votes to eliminate the filibuster — or to at least pare it back sufficiently to allow voting rights legislation to become law. If Democrats do win control of the federal government, the chances of such law becoming a reality will almost certainly hinge on whether Senate Democrats are willing to target the filibuster.

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Former President Barack Obama delivered a eulogy today honoring Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who died July 17 after a decades-long career in the House of Representatives. Lewis, a civil-rights icon who led the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and spoke at the March on Washington, spent his congressional years advocating for voting rights and equality for Black Americans. Known as the moral “conscience” of the Congress, Lewis lay in state for two days in the Capitol this week.

Below, the full text of Obama’s remarks as delivered.

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James wrote to the believers, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.” It is a great honor to be back in Ebenezer Baptist Church in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple. An American whose faith was tested again and again, to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance: John Robert Lewis.

To those who have spoken, to Presidents Bush and Clinton, Madame Speaker, Reverend Warnock, Reverend King, John’s family, friends, his beloved staff, Mayor Bottoms, I’ve come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom.

You know, this country is a constant work in progress. We’re born with instructions: to form a more perfect union. Explicit in those words is the idea that we’re imperfect. That what gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than any might have thought possible. John Lewis, first of the Freedom Riders; head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; youngest speaker at the March on Washington; leader of the march from Selma to Montgomery; member of Congress, representing the people of this state and this district for 33 years; mentor to young people—including me at the time—until his final day on this Earth, he not only embraced that responsibility, but he made it his life’s work. Which isn’t bad for a boy from Troy.

John was born into modest means—that means he was poor. In the heart of the Jim Crow South to parents who picked somebody else’s cotton. Apparently he didn’t take to farm work. On days when he was supposed to help his brothers and sisters with their labor, he’d hide under the porch and make a break for the school bus when it showed up. His mother, Willie May Lewis, nurtured that curiosity in this shy, serious child. “Once you learn something,” she told her son, “once you get something inside your head, no one can take it away from you.” As a boy, John listened through the door after bedtime as his father’s friends complained about the Klan. One Sunday as a teenager, he heard Dr. King preach on the radio. As a college student in Tennessee, he signed up for Jim Lawson’s workshops on the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience. John Lewis was getting something inside his head. An idea he couldn’t shake. It took hold of him. That nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience were the means to change laws but also change hearts and change minds and change nations and change the world.

So he helped organize the Nashville campaign in 1960. He and other young men and women sat at a segregated lunch counter, well dressed, straight back, refusing to let a milkshake poured on their heads or a cigarette extinguished on their backs or a foot aimed at their ribs—refuse to let that dent their dignity and their sense of purpose. And after a few months, the Nashville campaign achieved the first successful desegregation of public facilities of any major city in the South. John got a taste of jail for the first, second, third—well, several times. But he also got a taste of victory, and it consumed him with righteous purpose and he took the battle deeper into the South.

That same year, just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of interstate bus facilities was unconstitutional, John and Bernard Lafayette bought two tickets, climbed aboard a Greyhound, sat up front, and refused to move. This was months before the first official Freedom Rides. He was doing a test. Trip was unsanctioned. Few knew what they were up to. And at every stop through the night, apparently, the angry driver stormed out of the bus and into the bus station. And John and Bernard had no idea what he might come back with. Or who he might come back with. Nobody was there to protect them. There were no camera crews to record events. We—you know, sometimes, Rev—we read about this and we kind of take it for granted. Or at least we, we act as if it was inevitable.

Imagine the courage of two people Malia’s age—younger than my oldest daughter. On their own. To challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression. John was only 20 years old. But he pushed all 20 of those years to the center of the table, betting everything, all of it, that his example could challenge centuries of convention and generations of brutal violence and countless daily indignities suffered by African Americans. Like John the Baptist preparing the way, like those Old Testament prophets speaking truth to kings.

John Lewis did not hesitate, and he kept on, getting onboard buses and sitting at lunch counters, got his mug shot taken again and again. Marched again and again on a mission to change America. Spoke to a quarter of a million people at the March on Washington when he was just 23. Helped organize the Freedom Summer in Mississippi when he was just 24. At the ripe old age of 25, John was asked to lead the march from Selma to Montgomery. He was warned that Governor Wallace had ordered troopers to use violence. But he and Hosea Williams and others led them across that bridge anyway. And we’ve all seen the film and the footage and the photographs. President Clinton mentioned the trench coat, the knapsack, the book to read, the apple to eat, the toothbrush. Apparently, jails weren’t big on such creature comforts. And you look at those pictures, and John looked so young and he’s small in stature. Looking every bit that shy, serious child that his mother had raised, and yet, he’s full of purpose. God put perseverance in him.

And we know what happened to the marchers that day. Their bones were cracked by billy clubs. Their eyes and lungs choked with tear gas. They knelt to pray, which made their heads easier targets. And John was struck in the skull. And he thought he was going to die, surrounded by the sight of young Americans gagging and bleeding and trampled. Victims in their own country of state-sponsored violence.

And the thing is, I imagine initially that day the troopers thought they’d won the battle. You can imagine the conversations they had afterwards. You can imagine them saying, “Yeah, we showed them.” They figured they’d turn the protesters back over the bridge. That they’d kept, they’d preserved a system that denied the basic humanity of their fellow citizens. Except this time there were some cameras there. This time the world saw what happened, bore witness to Black Americans, who were asking for nothing more than to be treated like other Americans, who were not asking for special treatment, just equal treatment, promised to them a century before, and almost another century before that. And when John woke up and checked himself out of the hospital, he would make sure the world saw a movement that was, in the words of scripture, “hard pressed on every side but not crushed. Perplexed, but not in despair. Persecuted but not Abandoned. Struck down but not destroyed.” They returned to Brown Chapel, a battered prophet, bandages around his head, and he said, “More marchers will come now.” And the people came. And the troopers parted. And the marchers reached Montgomery. And their words reached the White House. And Lyndon Johnson, son of the South, said, “We shall overcome.” And the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

The life of John Lewis was, in so many ways, exceptional. It vindicated the faith in our founding. Redeemed that faith. That most American of ideas, the idea that any of us, ordinary people without rank or wealth or title or fame, can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation and come together and challenge the status quo. And decide that it is in our power to remake this country, that we love, until it more closely aligns with our highest ideals. What a radical idea. What a revolutionary notion. This idea that any of us ordinary people, a young kid from Troy, can stand up to the powers and principalities and say, “No, this isn’t right; this isn’t true; this isn’t just. We can do better.” On the battlefield of justice, Americans like John, Americans like Lowery and C. T. Vivian, two other patriots we lost this year, liberated all of us. That many Americans came to take for granted. America was built by people like them. America was built by John Lewises. He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals. And someday when we do finish that long journey towards freedom, when we do form a more perfect union, whether it’s years from now or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries, John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.

[Adam Serwer: John Lewis was an American founder]

And yet, as exceptional as John was, here’s the thing: John never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country can do. I mentioned in the statement the day John passed, the thing about John was how gentle and humble he was. And despite this storied, remarkable career, he treated everyone with kindness and respect because it was innate to him, this idea that any of us can do what he did—if we’re willing to persevere. He believed that in all of us there exists the capacity for great courage. That in all of us, there’s a longing to do what’s right. That in all of us there’s a willingness to love all people, and extend to them their God-given rights. So many of us lose that sense. It’s taught out of us. We start feeling as if, in fact, we can’t afford to extend kindness or decency to other people. That we’re better off if we’re above other people and looking down on them, and so often that’s encouraged in our culture. But John always said he always saw the best in us, and he never gave up and never stopped speaking out because he saw the best in us. He believed in us even when we didn’t believe in ourselves.

And as a congressman, he didn’t rest. He kept getting himself arrested. As an old man, he didn’t sit out any fight, sat in all night long on the floor of the United States Capitol. I know his staff was stressed. But the testing of his faith produced perseverance. He knew that the march is not over. That the race is not yet won. That we have not yet reached that blessed destination, where we are judged by the content of our character. He knew from his own life that progress is fragile, that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history. Of our own history. Where there are whirlpools of violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again. Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.

We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.

I know this is a celebration of John’s life. There are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things. But that’s why I’m talking about it. John Lewis devoted his time on this Earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America that we’re seeing circulate right now. He knew that every single one of us has a God-given power and that the faith of this democracy depends on how we use it. That democracy isn’t automatic. It has to be nurtured. It has to be tended to. We have to work at it. It’s hard. And so he knew that it depends on whether we summoned a measure, just a measure of John’s moral courage, to question what’s right and what’s wrong. And call things as they are. He said that as long as he had a breath in his body, he would do everything he could to preserve this democracy, and as long as we have breath in our bodies, we had to continue his cause.

If we want our children to grow up in a democracy, not just with elections, but a true democracy, a representative democracy, and a big-hearted tolerant, vibrant, inclusive America of perpetual self-creation, then we’re going to have to be more like John. We don’t have to do all the things he had to do, because he did them for us. But we got to do something. As the Lord instructed Paul, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaketh. Do not be silent. For I am with you and no one will attack you to harm you for I have many in this city who are my people.” It’s just, everybody’s got to come out and vote. We got all those people in the city, but they can’t do nothing. Like John, we’ve got to keep getting into that good trouble. He knew that nonviolent protest is patriotic, a way to raise public awareness and put a spotlight on injustice and make the powers that be uncomfortable. Like John, we don’t have to choose between protests and politics. It’s not an either/or situation. It’s a both/and situation. We have to engage in protests where that’s effective, but we also have to translate our passion and our causes into laws. Institutional practices. That’s why John ran for Congress 34 years ago. Like John, we’ve got to fight even harder for the most powerful tool that we have, which is the right to vote.

The Voting Rights Act is one of the crowning achievements of our democracy. It’s why John crossed that bridge, why he spilled that blood. And by the way, it was the result of Democrat and Republican efforts. President Bush, who spoke here earlier, and his father, signed its renewal when they were in office. President Clinton didn’t have to because it was the law when he arrived. So instead, he made a law to make it easier for people to register to vote. But once the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, some state legislators unleashed a flood of laws designed specifically to make voting harder, especially, by the way, state legislators where there’s a lot of minority turnout and population growth. That’s not necessarily a mystery or an accident. It was an attack on what John fought for. It was an attack on our democratic freedoms, and we should treat it as such. If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy and work of all the congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldn’t want us to stop there. Just trying to get back to where we already were.

Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better by making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance. By adding polling places and expanding early voting and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are somebody who’s working in a factory or you’re a single mom, who’s got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot. By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C., and in Puerto Rico. They’re Americans. By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering, so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around. And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.

[David Litt: The Senate filibuster is another monument to white supremacy]

Now, even if we do all this, even if every bogus voter-suppression law is struck off the books today, we’ve got to be honest with ourselves that too many of us choose not to exercise the franchise. Too many of our citizens believe their vote won’t make a difference, or they buy into the cynicism that, by the way, is the central strategy of voter suppression, to make you discouraged, to stop believing in your own power. So, we’re also going to have to remember what John said. If you don’t do everything you can do to change things, then they will remain the same. You only pass this way once. You have to give it all you have. As long as young people are protesting in the streets hoping real change takes hold, I’m hopeful, but we can’t casually abandon them at the ballot box. Not when few elections have been as urgent on so many levels as this one. We can’t treat voting as an errand to run if we have some time. We have to treat it as the most important action we can take on behalf of democracy, and like John, we have to give it all we have.

I was proud that John Lewis was a friend of mine. I met him when I was in law school. He came to speak. And I went up and I said, “Mr. Lewis, you are one of my heroes. What inspired me more than anything as a young man was to see what you and Reverend Lawson and Bob Moses and Diane Nash and others did.” And he got that kind of “Aw shucks, thank you very much.” Next time I saw him, I’d been elected to the United States Senate. And I told him, “John, I’m here because of you.” And on Inauguration Day in 2008-2009, he was one of the first people I greeted and hugged on that stand. And I told him, “This is your day too.”

He was a good and kind and gentle man. And he believed in us. Even when we don’t believe in ourselves. And it’s fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was on Zoom. And I’m pretty sure neither he nor I set up the Zoom call because we didn’t know how to work it. It was a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists, who had been helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. And afterward, I spoke to John privately. And he could not have been prouder to see this new generation of activists standing up for freedom and equality. A new generation that was intent on voting and protecting the right to vote. In some cases, a new generation running for political office. And I told him all those young people, John, of every race and every religion, from every background and gender and sexual orientation—John, those are your children. They learned from your example, even if they didn’t always know it. They had understood through him what American citizenship requires, even if they’d only heard about his courage through the history books.

By the thousands, faceless, anonymous young people, Black and white, have taken our nation “back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” Dr. King said that in the 1960s. And it came true again this summer. We see it outside our windows in big cities and rural towns. In men and women; young and old; straight Americans and LGBTQ Americans; Blacks, who long for equal treatment, and whites, who can no longer accept freedom for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of their fellow Americans. We see it in everybody doing the hard work of overcoming complacency, of overcoming our own fears and our own prejudices, our own hatreds. You see it in people trying to be better, truer versions of ourselves.

And that’s what John Lewis teaches us. That’s where real courage comes from, not from turning on each other, but by turning towards one another. Not by sowing hatred and division, but by spreading love and truth. Not by avoiding our responsibilities to create a better America and a better world, but by embracing those responsibilities with joy and perseverance and discovering that, in our beloved community, we do not walk alone.

What a gift John Lewis was. We are all so lucky to have had him walk with us for a while and show us the way. God bless you all. God bless America. God bless this gentle soul who pulled it closer to its promise. Thank you very much.

Yesterday, Rep. Louie Gohmert tested positive for COVID-19. While Gohmert, long celebrated around these parts and elsewhere as assuredly America's Dumbest Congressman, bizarrely tried to blame his infection on "wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so," reporters quickly began to receive reports from angry-but-anonymous Republican staffers complaining about their Republican bosses mocking masks and ordering offices to remain staffed despite the virus' known presence in the Capitol.

Politico reports that "people who work in the building" are "furious" at Congress' lack of precautions. "Our office has been required to be fully staffed" since June, reported one Republican staffer. "Ridiculing people for wearing masks is also not uncommon," said another. Republican staffers are frustrated that they're not being allowed to take basic precautions for ideological reasons. You know what? Good.

Politico's writeup is full of Republican staffers anonymously angry that their bosses are hostile to mask wearing, are demanding full office staffing, and that taking precautions or "saying anything critical" could lead to "retaliation."

This is absolute self-serving bullshit. These are staffers who have been openly assisting their Republican bosses in inflicting exactly those conditions on everyone else in the country. But they're angry that they are finding themselves in the same boat?

Seriously? These jackasses aren't joking? Piss off.

While Republican staff members are being ordered in to work, the lawmakers they work for are demanding that businesses be fully immunized from liability if they expose workers to COVID-19 due to their own lack of precaution. The demand is that employers be allowed to force employees to work, allowed to fire them if they do not comply, and allowed to ignore pandemic dangers and protocols as desired; the rhetoric is that states not "reopening" quickly enough are doing so for partisan reasons and are violating Our Freedoms.

While Republican staff members are complaining that they cannot wear masks in their offices because their lawmaker bosses will mock them or retaliate against them for going against the party's preferred pandemic stance, those same Republicans have intentionally made mask-wearing a partisan choice throughout America, and for no better reason than to support the egregiously stupid Donald Trump and his plan of ignoring the virus out of existence.

While Republican staff members are complaining that they cannot get tested despite being exposed to, for example, Louie Gohmert, their Republican bosses are standing with Trump to dismiss the need for expansive nationwide testing, to support Trump's decision to wash federal government hands of testing efforts, and in mockingly suggesting that the same massive testing protocols successfully used in other nations could not possibly be accomplished by this one.

This is the Republican Party pandemic platform. Masks are partisan; it's time to "reopen" regardless of virus exposures; testing is unnecessary. Republican staffers have spent the past six months helping their individual lawmakers inflict these catastrophic notions on all of America, but are annoyed that they themselves are facing the consequences of their own broadcasted ideology?

Sympathy is in low supply these days. It seems unwise to waste any here.

The same day Rep. Gohmert announced that he tested positive for the potentially deadly virus, possibly due to wearing masks "so much," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi instituted a new masks-required policy on the House floor. Republican staffers and lawmakers will be required to wear masks or face removal. That will not, however, prevent Republican lawmakers from discouraging mask usage in their own offices.

If Republican staffers have a problem with that, they need to non-anonymously take it up with the lawmakers currently demanding employers be allowed to kill off all the rest of us.

The Microsoft store is seen on April 30, 2020 in New York City. | Photo by Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEWpress via Getty Images

The company plans to wipe out all of its carbon emissions — and keep going.

You could be forgiven for missing it, given the surplus of news, but the last few years have seen a profusion of climate change commitments from big tech companies. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple have all promised to shrink their climate footprints, each attempting to outdo the others.

Climate advocates are naturally leery of these commitments. Those who lived through the faddish interest in climate in the mid-2000s, around the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, will recall the endless torrent of breathless corporate announcements. NBC had a “green week,” big corporations bought cheap offsets to become “carbon neutral,” automakers sold SUVs with vegan leather seats, and dozens of companies sold “sustainable” coffee cups, T-shirts, and tchotchkes. It was a greenwashing parade.

But times really have changed. The steps tech companies are taking these days represent a sea change in engagement. Climate change has moved out of the public relations department, into the C-suite, and down to the shop floor.

To explore the strength of recent corporate climate commitments (and their limits), I want to focus in on Microsoft, a widely acknowledged leader in the field. Earlier this year, it committed not just to reducing its emissions, but to going carbon negative, wiping out all the carbon the company and its suppliers have emitted since its founding in 1975. In recent weeks, Microsoft has released a flurry of announcements updating its progress, so now seems like a propitious time to take a close look.

Brian Smale/MSFT

Over the last week, I’ve been talking to corporate sustainability experts and people who have worked with, and at, Microsoft. I tried to piece together how big a deal its work on climate is — how seriously to take it, what influence it may have, and where it might fall short.

To spoil the ending: It is a big deal. The company is setting new standards, especially in the rigor and transparency it is applying to the effort, and it is deliberately attempting to bring other companies, both suppliers and competitors, along with it into a world of shared metrics and data. There is more it could do, but it is earning its good climate reputation.

I’ll dig in to what Microsoft is doing and what makes it unusual. But first, some background.

A quick note on kinds of emissions

In the carbon world, the emissions of a company (or person, city, or country) can be divided into three buckets:

• Scope 1 emissions come directly from resources the business owns or controls, like furnaces or delivery vehicles;
• Scope 2 emissions come from the power plants that generate the electricity the business uses;
• Scope 3 emissions are indirect, “embedded” in the materials and services the business uses, representing the emissions of the full supply chain. (Business travel is a common example — there are carbon emissions embedded in every plane ticket.)

In the early days of corporate climate engagement, companies typically measured and reduced only their direct energy emissions (scope 1 and 2). But in the last several years, in part thanks to the example set by companies like Dow, Unilever, Apple, and Microsoft, measuring and taking responsibility for scope 3 emissions has become the new norm.

This is significant, because for most companies, including Microsoft, scope 3 emissions are substantially larger than scope 1 and 2 combined.

“At Microsoft, we expect to emit 16 million metric tons of carbon this year,” president Brad Smith wrote in a January blog post. “Of this total, about 100,000 are scope 1 emissions and about 4 million are scope 2 emissions. The remaining 12 million tons all fall into scope 3. Given the wide range of scope 3 activities, this higher percentage of the total is probably typical for most organizations.”

Microsoft has a recent history as a sustainability leader

On Monday, Microsoft announced it has completed the largest-ever test running data-center servers on hydrogen fuel cells, which can be powered by zero-carbon hydrogen generated from renewable energy. Currently, even if they run entirely on renewables, data centers have diesel generators on site for long-term backup in case of an outage.

Power Innovations

With 160 data centers worldwide and multiple generators per data center, that adds up to a lot of diesel generators. The company has pledged to phase them all out by 2030. That’s why it is testing fuel cells as backup power.

It is the latest in a string of climate initiatives that go back almost a decade. The company has been 100 percent carbon neutral, through the purchase of carbon offsets, since 2012. In 2013, it implemented an internal carbon tax on the scope 1 and 2 emissions of all divisions, with the revenue going toward sustainability improvements. It created a business unit focused on climate solutions, which produces things like AI for Earth. It recently succeeded in buying enough renewable energy to account for all US domestic operations.

Its latest sustainability report recounts all these efforts and more, including substantial efficiency upgrades at its campuses. In 2016, it won a climate leadership award from EPA.

“We’ve seen them as a leader since 2013,” says Nicolette Bartlett, climate change director at the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a global clearinghouse of corporate sustainability data. The CDP has a scorecard, which takes into account hundreds of sustainability and transparency metrics, and Microsoft has consistently gotten an A. “It really matters to them,” Bartlett says.

In recent years, thanks to the IPCC report and pressure from investors and employees, concern over climate change has risen to the highest levels of the company. Josh Henretig, who spent 12 years on the company’s global sustainability team, rising to Senior Director before leaving in February, says he witnessed the shift from his team pushing to his team being pulled. “We started to almost stumble under the full weight and examination that the executive team imposed on us around the question: what’s really required?” he says.

“At this stage,” says Verena Radulovic, director of corporate engagement at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “Microsoft has enough experience with reducing its own emissions, and support from its leadership to keep doing so, that it is able to take its climate commitment to a more ambitious level.”

And that’s what it did in January.

Microsoft will go carbon negative and wipe out all the carbon it has ever emitted

In January, Microsoft made a startling announcement: Not only will it reduce its scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 55 percent, it will continue beyond that and go carbon-negative, drawing down more carbon than it emits, by 2030. By 2050, it will draw down enough carbon to account for all the company’s emissions since its founding in 1975.

“It set a new bar for what is considered climate leadership,” says Radulovic.

As you can see on the graph below, the target represents a radical acceleration of Microsoft’s carbon reduction efforts.

Microsoft

The January announcement, which came from the company’s president Brad Smith, backed by CFO Amy Hood and CEO Satya Nadella, laid out a set of principles that would guide the company’s approach:

1. Grounding in science and math.
2. Taking responsibility for our carbon footprint.
3. Investing for new carbon reduction and removal technology.
4. Empowering customers around the world.
5. Ensuring effective transparency.
6. Using our voice on carbon-related public policy issues.
7. Enlisting our employees.

The post goes into detail on each. I’ll just hit some highlights.

Nos. 1 and 2 are about proper measurement, scope 1-3 emissions, and historical emissions. “While we at Microsoft have worked hard to be ‘carbon neutral’ since 2012,” Smith writes, “our recent work has led us to conclude that this is an area where we’re far better served by humility than pride.”

“We had some very heartwarming, but also uncomfortable, conversations,” says Henretig.

Through these discussions, the company concluded that voluntary offsets are insufficient. It is now moving to a model where it directly contracts with renewable projects through power purchase agreements, (PPAs) — it is aiming to hit net-zero for its scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2025 — and will compensate for what it can’t directly reduce with negative emissions.

In this area, especially, Microsoft is showing real leadership.

As for No. 3, the company announced it will establish an investment fund that will target early-stage clean-energy technologies, aiming to spend $1 billion over the next four years.

Some critics have argued that the venture-capital model, built around big bets with potentially big returns, is a narrow way to approach the needs of the energy sector. Just recently, for instance, the International Energy Agency argued that crucial early-stage technologies need enabling infrastructure to continue developing.

“I think it’s a missed opportunity,” says consultant and former corporate social responsibility (CSR) executive Lindsay Baker. “There are opportunities to invest in infrastructure and other types of projects that have a market rate of return, more in line with just getting your money back — I would really like to see corporations making more of those kinds of investments.”

Baker also notes that there are “plenty of opportunities for charitable giving that will help move the needle on climate,” including in lab-stage research or companies still in product development. A company like Microsoft, with well over $100 billion in the bank, could put some money toward these other areas as well, or at least divert a portion of its $1 billion to them.

Nonetheless, a billion dollars in VC money is nothing to sneeze at. Nor is the signal Microsoft has sent to other companies by committing to a goal it admits it does not yet have the technology to achieve. It says going carbon negative will require “negative emission technologies (NET) potentially including afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and direct air capture (DAC).”

Some of those technologies don’t exist at meaningful scale yet, and Microsoft is making a concerted effort to accelerate them. Especially if it can inspire other companies to make similar investments — Amazon announced a $2 billion climate fund in June — the spillover effects will help boost the entire sector.

“While much of Microsoft’s focus is on technologies that will help it reduce its own footprint,” says Radulovic, “the hope and vision is that these technologies will scale and others can use them.”

No. 4 is about products and services Microsoft will design that will enable its clients to reduce their own emissions. We will return to No. 4 in a bit, since some of the biggest controversies reside here.

No. 5, transparency, is another area where the company is showing leadership. Every year, Microsoft will publish a sustainability report, breaking down its emissions and progress against its goals. It has had its targets verified by the Science Based Targets Initiative as being in line with a pathway to limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C. In reporting its emissions, it is following the World Resources Institute’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol. And it is sharing its data with the CDP. In short, it is modeling best practices in transparency.

MSFT

No. 6 is also interesting, but we’ll come back to that later as well.

The company just announced its first concrete steps toward its target

This month, Microsoft Chief Environmental Officer Lucas Joppa published an update on Microsoft’s progress, with several new announcements.

First, Microsoft is joining with nine other large companies — A.P. Moller-Maersk, Danone, Mercedes-Benz, AG, Natura & Co, NIKE, Starbucks, Unilever, and Wipro, along with the Environmental Defense Fund — in Transform to Net Zero, “a cross-sector initiative to accelerate the transition to a net zero global economy.” It will run on much the same principles that Microsoft laid out for itself, including science-based measurement and transparency, with a commitment to knowledge sharing and norm-setting.

“When you look at the reach of these initial eight companies, as well as the supply and value chains of those companies, you start to get a pretty big market share,” says Jenn Crider, senior director of communications at Microsoft. It will exert a pull on other companies to use “a common and standardized approach to the math, the language, and the accounting,” she says.

Second, Microsoft debuted a sustainability calculator that will help its cloud clients calculate and reduce their carbon footprint. Third, it pledged to be completely free of diesel fuel and diesel generators by 2030. Fourth, it raised its internal carbon tax and broadened it to encompass scope 3 emissions. Fifth, it updated its Supplier Code of Conduct to require suppliers to calculate and report their full emissions.

Sixth and perhaps most intriguingly, it has issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking, for this fiscal year, a million metric tons of “carbon removal from a range of nature- and technology-based solutions that are net negative and verified to a high degree of scientific integrity.” It recognizes that these technologies are not fully developed, acknowledges that it will make mistakes, and says it is explicitly “using this RFP to harvest and share best available science and market intelligence on carbon removal,” to make things easier for other companies that want to follow suit.

“Someday, CO2 removal will be fully commoditized,” says Julio Friedmann, a carbon researcher at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who has helped advise Microsoft on its RFP. “These actions help put us on that course.”

It will be extremely interesting to see which and what type of carbon-removal projects Microsoft ends up choosing through its RFP.

Carbon Engineering

Seventh, Microsoft announced the first investment from its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund: $50 million will go to Energy Impact Partners, “a leading venture capital firm focused on decarbonized, decentralized energy industry transition that shares learnings among partners and facilitates collaboration.”

Eighth and finally, the company is taking action on environmental justice, partnering with renewables developer Sol Systems on 500 megawatts of distributed solar energy projects “in under-resourced communities, working with local leaders and prioritizing minority and women-owned businesses.” Given that the average residential rooftop solar system is a bit over 5 kW and commercial solar rooftop systems around 100 kW, that’s a lot of solar projects, representing the “single largest renewable energy portfolio investment Microsoft has ever made.”

Alongside those projects, the company will provide $50 million in “community-led grants and investments that support educational programs, job and career training, habitat restoration and programs that support access to clean energy and energy efficiency.”

So that’s one big target, seven principles, and eight initiatives. What should we make of it?

Microsoft is earning kudos for its climate efforts

I’ve talked with numerous experts in corporate sustainability to wrap my head around how to judge Microsoft’s efforts. Without exception, they praised Microsoft as a leader on climate change. Its commitment to good science, shared metrics, transparent reporting, and full carbon responsibility (not relying on offsets) is already setting a good example.

“In Microsoft being among the first large companies to set such an ambitious target,” says Radulovic, “it allowed others, especially in non-tech sectors with more risk averse or less innovative cultures, a safe space to do the same.”

It is difficult to trace direct causal lines between Microsoft’s announcements those of other companies. Major corporate initiatives take years to develop. Their true effects will be measured by how many companies they pull into their wake in years to come. This was a common theme from experts in the field: Microsoft will have its biggest impact through the partnerships and collaborations it forms to spread its tools and ambitions.

Another notable feature of Microsoft’s efforts is the clear support from the top of the company. “All the big environmental announcements come from the CEO himself, which means there’s C-suite buy-in for everything they are doing,” says Jen Boynton, who works in corporate social responsibility at Cisco. “He’s making the commitment, he’s accountable, and there is financial and investor skin in the game.”

You could think of this as the evolution of corporate climate engagement, both within individual companies and across sectors: It begins in public relations, moves to the “environmental department,” and then gets taken up by top leadership, who look to their engineers to figure it out.

“The sustainability guys tend to think inside of a box,” says Bartlett, “but as soon as the shop floor gets hold of it, it becomes part of the DNA of the organization.”

Brian Janous, general manager of energy and sustainability at Microsoft, recalls the effect at the company when carbon reporting was expanded from scope 1 and 2 (energy) to scope 3 (supply chain, materials, and everything else): “Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodwork. ‘Oh, we have to solve this, we have to solve that. We have to think about the amount of electricity being used to manufacture Xboxes. We have to think about the electricity being consumed by the people that use Xboxes.’”

It brought designers and engineers from every division to the task, people whose lives revolve around solving problems within resource parameters. Microsoft has made carbon a parameter for every team of engineers in the company now, and they are going to work on it.

And there’s one other feature worth celebrating. “The thing about Microsoft’s work that I love, love, love is the investment in climate equity and environmental justice,” says Alison Murphy, who has directed sustainability and social impact work at companies like Lime and Lululemon. “This has been missing from the corporate dialogue. More companies should take this kind of intersectional lens.”

As much as Microsoft is doing, though, this is climate change, which means it’s never enough. Climate advocates and activists are not going to stop pushing for more. What would more look like?

As I’ve asked around, the areas where Microsoft’s efforts could be critiqued fall into roughly four buckets.

Microsoft could go even further by requiring suppliers to reduce emissions

The same day Microsoft published its updates on progress, Apple announced that it would aim to be “carbon neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030,” an astonishing goal for a company that manufactures, ships, and disposes of so many devices.

“Apple has said their suppliers will all run on renewable energy,” says Bartlett. “It set targets for them.”

Apple

So far, Microsoft — which deals more in software and thus has a smaller scope 3 footprint — has only said that its suppliers must measure and report their full emissions. “Right now I read it to say, ‘we’re working with suppliers to find efficiencies’,” says Elizabeth Jardim, a corporate campaigner at Greenpeace USA. “And efficiency is important. But it only gets you so far.”

Apple will not simply cut off suppliers, Bartlett says, but will work with them to build their capacity to reduce emissions. “It’s not going to be every company in your supply chain” that needs special attention, she says. “It’s the 80/20 rule — go for the big ones first.”

There are signs Microsoft is heading in the same direction. In its commitments thus far, “you see a forecasting of where we’re going,” says Crider. “The first step is reporting requirements; the next steps will be reduction. You can make the assumption that there will be requirements on that reduction over time.”

For now, Apple is setting the bar on supply chain reductions, but it’s a close race.

It could stop selling products to companies that use them to dig up fossil fuels

Microsoft says it will develop products and services that will help its clients reduce their emissions, which is laudable. But there remains the question of how its other products are used.

In particular, attention has recently focused on contracts for cloud and AI services between big tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. Journalist Brian Merchant had a great exposé on this at Gizmodo last year. The services in question “are explicitly aimed at streamlining, improving, and rendering oil and gas extraction operations more profitable,” he wrote.

In May, Greenpeace issued a report looking closer at “how tech companies are helping big oil profit from climate destruction.” It found, among other things, that “Microsoft’s contract with ExxonMobil alone could lead to emissions greater than 20% of Microsoft’s annual carbon footprint.”

“Right now, the emissions from those contracts are not included in [Microsoft’s] carbon footprint,” says Jardim. “They’re not even tracking it.”

In response to the Greenpeace report (which followed on the heels of years of criticism from tech workers, investors, and politicians), Google announced that it will no longer “build custom [artificial intelligence or machine learning] algorithms to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry.”

In Microsoft’s January announcement, Smith writes that the company is “committed to continuing to work with all our customers, including those in the oil and gas business.” Because a prosperous future will require more energy, he says, “it’s imperative that we enable energy companies to transition.” (The company issued a response to the Greenpeace report which says much the same thing.)

“Another acceptable path forward would be to show us how Microsoft’s machine learning technology is actually scaling up renewables or scaling down fossil fuel production,” says Jardim. “Right now their contracts are not doing that.” Improving fossil fuel extraction projects doesn’t do much to help fossil fuel companies transition away from fossil fuel extraction.

The oil company contracts are “a revolving debate within the company right now,” Henretig says. “It’s one of the areas a lot of employees are feeling conflicted about.”

If they want to stay ahead of the pack, Microsoft and Amazon should listen to their employees and follow Google’s lead.

It could throw some elbows on public policy

Microsoft says that it will use its voice to advocate for public policy in four areas: more public research, “the removal of regulatory barriers” to clean energy, market-based mechanisms, and universal standards for measuring the carbon content of consumer goods.

That is, relative to the breadth and specificity of its other commitments, fairly weak tea. It sounds like a devotion to incremental, bipartisan policy, which is not only inadequate, but has proven nearly impossible to achieve in practice.

In its defense, the company has spoken up on some important issues. It pushed for more renewables in Virginia, supported the carbon-tax initiative in Washington, and opposed the rollback of Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Hannah Letinich, Yes On 1631

“It’s great to see Microsoft and others stepping up in ways that clearly acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis,” says Bill Wiehl, founder of ClimateVoice, a nonprofit working to organize tech workers behind climate ambition. “Now we need them to step up their lobbying for a broad range of public policies to address climate change, everywhere they operate.”

Microsoft could speak up for clean energy money in the next stimulus bill, call out denialist politicians, push back on state-level conservative efforts to block electric vehicles or prop up coal plants, or help push a national clean electricity standard or tightened fuel economy standards. There’s a whole lot of policy needed to get where Microsoft says the world needs to go.

Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft is still a part of the US Chamber of Commerce, a conservative trade group that relentlessly lobbies against clean energy. Will Microsoft leave the Chamber (as Apple did in 2009) or at least step off its boards and lobby within it for a new direction (as Nike did in 2009)? Microsoft said they won’t participate in Chamber climate initiatives, but that’s it so far. (Read my story on a trio of Senators going after the Chamber on climate.)

Microsoft isn’t fully throwing around its weight. “We do have a PAC, the PAC does make investments,” says Crider, “but not at a level that sways an election in one direction or the other.”

A more vigorous form of power politics is called for in an age of climate crisis.

It could clearly pledge to eliminate its own emissions

Microsoft aims to reduce its full emissions by 55 percent by 2030, with negative emissions technology soaking up the rest. While it has said it will draw down enough carbon to account for all its historic emissions, it has not said how fast, or even whether, its own emissions will reach zero after 2030.

While carbon-negative is an admirable and standard-setting target, it is, in the end, a way of buying time. Every sector and business that possibly can hit true zero — run on 100 percent carbon-free energy — must ultimately do so. Pushing for negative emissions is not a license to ease up on the broader goal.

Microsoft should make clear that true zero emissions, as fast as possible, is still its long-term target. “Its voice saying that we need to get to zero is really powerful,” Bartlett says. “Ultimately, you need a business model that will flourish in a zero world, right?”

True zero emissions is a bit of a moonshot for Microsoft, but if Apple can do it, Microsoft can too. And there are reasons to think it will try.

“Obviously, the first thing we want to do is reduce emissions,” says Janous. “The goal is, get our scope 3 emissions down to as close as possible to zero. The commitment we made, 55 percent reduction — I think we’re going to do better than that.”

Zhou You/VCG via Getty Images

Microsoft is doing what it can within the bounds of capitalism

Most of Microsoft’s emissions are from energy and will ultimately be eliminated by a cleaner, more robust electricity grid. Janous says the company is experimenting with using its data centers to provide backup and other ancillary services to grids, in pursuit of a “holistic solution” to grid issues, but to get there, “markets need to evolve to create more opportunities for flexibility.”

While Microsoft is working on a better energy grid, its peers will be approaching the problem from other angles. “It’s not like we’re all going to solve electricity, right?” says Janous. “Amazon’s going to work on transportation; Apple is going to work on materials and inputs. I’m excited about the breadth of impact we’re going to have as an industry, because we are all going to attack this thing a little bit differently.”

It is difficult to predict anything in today’s world, but there’s every reason to expect that large, well-established companies like Microsoft, Dow, Apple, Unilever, and Amazon committing to net zero will reverberate.

It’s not just that the target could become the expected norm in the business world (though that appears to be happening faster than anyone expected). It’s that all the people working in those companies, and all the people who interact with those companies, will see that reducing emissions produces a torrent of innovation. They will see that the process draws top talent to these companies and gives their young, diverse workforces focus and motivation.

They will see that common purpose brings out the best in people and that decarbonization is not a hair shirt or a sacrifice, but a chance to design and build a better world. They will take what they’ve seen to the voting booth.

It is the nature of climate change that virtually nothing that is possible today amounts to enough, and that’s true of Microsoft’s climate efforts. Within the conventional boundaries of US consumer capitalism, the company is unquestionably a leader, but if climate is a crisis, it may call for pushing at those boundaries: throwing some political elbows, cutting off some clients, perhaps even questioning the imperative for continuous growth.

Microsoft has shown what can happen when engineers get ahold of the carbon problem. Now its leaders should trust its engineers and move farther, faster.

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Rod Bliss, a white filmmaker from Los Angeles, recently traveled to Harrison, Arkansas — home to the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan — to hold up a “Black Lives Matter” sign.

The results were shocking yet somehow unsurprising and, above all, deeply disturbing.

At the start of his viral video posted this week, Bliss is shown holding the Black Lives Matter sign in front of a “White Pride Radio” billboard in what he calls “America’s most racist town.” Bliss’ video has been viewed more than 1 million times on Twitter and YouTube alone.

“Have a little pride in your race, brother!” one motorist yells at Bliss from the window of a minivan. “White pride worldwide!”

“I wouldn’t stay after dark, man,” a pedestrian tells Bliss.

“About 10 minutes, I’m going to be back,” another motorist says. “You better be f—king gone.”

Passing motorists also make obscene hand gestures and call bliss the n-word, a “kike,” a “mother—ker,” a “dumbass,” a “Marxist,” a “communist” and a “domestic terrorist.”

“Explain to me why a coon’s life matters,” one man yells.

“Fuck black lives! And I have black friends,” one woman says.

Bliss’ video also shows reactions to the sign in front of a local Walmart. One shopper calls the Black Lives Matter movement “the biggest hoax that ever was.”

“It’s the next thing to ISIS,” another man says.

Bliss is eventually asked to leave, despite showing a store employee a statement from Walmart corporate in support of Black Lives Matter. Walmart later issued a statement about the incident saying, “The individual represented in this video was asked to leave the premises because we have a policy prohibiting solicitation and demonstrations on Walmart property for both individuals and organizations.”

Harrison Mayor Jerry Jackson and Chamber of Commerce CEO Bob Largent also issued a statement: “The video does not represent Boone County nor the City of Harrison. While we cannot excuse the reprehensible behavior and words of individuals recorded in the video, we know for certain that they do not reflect the views of the majority of the good people of our communities. It is obvious there is still work to be done in our area and across the nation. We must constantly strive to do better, and we pledge our continued efforts in that regard.”

In a hopeful scene at the end of the video, a young white person walks over and hands Bliss a note. “Ignore the haters,” the note said, according to Bliss’ video. “You’re being peaceful. What you’re doing is good. Just a friendly reminder. Don’t give up hope.”

Bliss said he’s received legal threats over the video and launched a GoFundMe page seeking donations to retain an attorney to defend it.

Watch it below.

Holding a #BlackLivesMatter sign in America's most racist town, headquarters of the KKK- Harrison, Arkansas. pic.twitter.com/2jUrCv14fV

— Rob Bliss (@robblissgr) July 27, 2020

The post ‘I Wouldn’t Stay After Dark’: Racist Residents Threaten Filmmaker Over Black Lives Matter Sign in KKK’s Hometown (WATCH) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The stimulus plan in the works on Capitol Hill will come too late for the start of the school year in much of the nation, adding to the chaos in an education system already thrown into disarray by the global pandemic.

Lawmakers are still haggling over the details of the package that would deliver a historic sum for education, as districts throughout the country prepare to kick off the school year. Education leaders are already spending money on stockpiles of face masks, computers kids can use to connect to classes at home and training for educators still learning how to make the most of teaching from afar.

But districts have no certainty from Congress about how much cash they can expect to rain down from a final stimulus deal or what rules will be attached to that money.

“It's too late to get resources to people or schools that are starting in August,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a union that called this week for its 1.7 million members to consider “safety strikes” as “a last resort” if negotiations over reopening schools don’t meet their demands.

In many public school districts, the fall semester starts in less than two weeks. Classes are already underway in others.

Dithering politicians are to blame, Weingarten said, for schools that will begin with no in-person learning despite improving trends in the spread of coronavirus in some parts of the country. “So when people keep saying that they need to go on ‘remote,’ initially, it's not just because of safety concerns — it’s because of resources,” she said.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who chairs the Senate committee that writes education policy, said “the whole purpose” of the stimulus funding congressional leaders are trying to negotiate is to ensure “schools can open safely with as many children physically present as possible.”

“So the sooner the better,” said Alexander, pointing out that many schools in the South are “beginning right away” with in-person learning and no delay in starting the fall semester.

No matter the final total, the stimulus in the works is on track to shower U.S. schools and colleges with the biggest chunk of cash the federal government has ever spent on education, far surpassing the $73 billion the Education Department is allotted each year for its entire budget.

In the House’s initial offer in May, nearly $101 billion was included for education under the Heroes Act. Going even bigger, the plan Senate Republicans unveiled this week would provide $105 billion for K-12 schools and colleges. Democrats, not to be outdone in upping the ante, now say no less than $345 billion is needed to shore up U.S. education amid the pandemic.

However the deal shakes out, schools are expected to get reimbursed later for money they spend now on things like teacher training, virtual learning technology and supplies, as well as increased staffing to abide new limits on how many people can be in each classroom and school building. Education groups want Congress to backdate the funding so it can cover expenses from March of this year until at least September 2021.

Federal leaders have already provided billions of dollars in extra aid this year to help schools amid the pandemic, however. It has been more than four months since President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act, which delivered almost $31 billion in education assistance. But so far, of the $13 billion the Education Department laid out in an emergency relief fund for K-12 schools, only 2 percent has been drawn down.

"There’s no excuse for schools not to be planning to go back to school, except union politics aimed at helping [Joe] Biden in the fall,” said one Republican congressional aide, noting the billions of dollars that remain unspent.

Noelle Ellerson Ng, who leads legislative and advocacy efforts at The School Superintendents Association, said some school districts have been cautious not to blow all of their new funding to prepare for the start of the school year amid uncertainty about how the virus’ spread could change their plans in the coming months.

Until the last few weeks, it was also unclear whether Congress would even be issuing another round of education funding.

“The reality is, we're still two weeks out from the school year starting, and depending on how hotspots flare up, communities might again pivot to doing more fully online,” Ellerson Ng said. “It is responsible and prudent for school districts to say: Well, we're not going to spend every single dollar on a fully in-person scenario, even though that's what we want.”

Some school districts are too broke to foot the bill for the costs of reopening, even with the expectation that the federal government will backfill the cash. Especially now that state and local tax revenue has dropped off during the pandemic, many school districts will need to use federal funding to cover budget shortfalls, said Bob Farrace, a spokesperson for the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

While school districts throughout the country are bracing for a 10 to 15 percent cut due to the virus’ effect on local economies, the stimulus plan Senate Republicans laid out this week would require states to maintain their funding for education at the same levels as last year, or higher, to qualify for a windfall in grant funding under the proposal.

Farrace said the GOP offer, with $70 billion for K-12 schools, falls short of the cash needed to fill the revenue hole states are facing, not to mention professional development to help teachers retool their skills, protective equipment and cleaning supplies.

Without more flexibility for using the federal funding and lead time before the start of the school year, local leaders could be forced to make hasty and dangerous decisions about reopening schools where the coronavirus is still spreading aggressively, Farrace said, noting that the GOP plan would send two-thirds of the emergency education funds to schools that open for in-person instruction.

“It’s extortion …” he said. “If you put them in desperate enough circumstances — where you know that you have to continue educating and this is the only way to continue that education, by doing something that you know to be unsafe — I fear that the decision made under duress could go the wrong way.”

Vulnerable Senate Republicans up for reelection were quick to dodge questions about Donald Trump's Thursday morning suggestion that perhaps the country should "[d]elay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???"

Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, who's fighting tooth and nail to keep her seat, curtly responded: "not answering any questions."

Majority "Leader" Mitch McConnell jilted reporters entirely with a nonresponse.

South Carolina senator and avid Trump bootlicker Lindsey Graham managed to squeeze out some weak-kneed opposition, saying: “I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea.”

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina dodged the question several times before finally surrendering to reporter inquires. “After twice telling me to ‘talk to [his] staff’, then saying he had not read the tweet, @SenThomTillis finally addressed @realDonaldTrump comment this morning on election delay, & told me ‘the election is not going to be delayed,’” tweeted MSNBC reporter Garrett Haake. Now there’s bravery, for ya.

We are on the slide to fascism, folks, and any Republican who can't take a decisive stand against Trump's suggestion is a traitor to American ideals, democracy, and the country. 

Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado, Susan Collins of Maine, Martha McSally of Arizona, and David Perdue of Georgia are all likely in a bunker somewhere drawing straws over who has to exit first when the provisions run out. 

But Senate Republicans will most likely bifurcate into two groups: those who are desperately trying to save their seats this cycle, and those who can already taste a future without Trump standing in the way of their personal ambitions. This is already happening on the relief package, where Senate Republicans are dividing down along lines of those who don't dare anger Trump and those who are already eyeing their presidential bid in 2024. Republicans have never liked Trump—not a one. They've just bent to his every wish to protect their own hides until they could get rid of him. 

Take Florida Sen. Rick Scott, for instance, whose spokesman responded with a simple "no" when asked if delaying the election was a good idea.

Trump's unfailing incompetence ensured that the coronavirus would rage through the country for months on end. Nonetheless, he insisted on reopening before it had abated, pouring gasoline on the fire. He's presently insisting on opening schools because no one—not even America's children—will escape sacrifice in Trump's bid to reboot the economy and secure reelection.

Then, when the country got news that the economy shrank at the fastest rate on record in the second quarter, Trump suddenly takes an interest in safety solely related to one thing: voting.

Nope. No way, Trump. You inherited everything from Obama and still managed create total wreckage on your watch. You don't get more time. Not one millisecond longer. 

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.

Leading Off

● TX-22: The Congressional Leadership Fund has once again released an internal poll of a competitive House race showing the Republican candidate leading but—somehow, mysteriously—has failed to include any information on the presidential contest.

Okay, it's obviously not a mystery at all: Donald Trump's numbers must simply suck, even though CLF's latest survey, from Meeting Street Insights, finds Republican Troy Nehls ahead of Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni 44-32 in Texas' open 22nd Congressional District, the first poll we've seen of the contest. Even those results, with so many undecideds and Nehls well below 50, aren't necessarily all that great for the GOP, which is trying to hold this seat, but the hide-the-ball stunt on the presidential side is getting really egregious at this point: CLF, which is the largest Republican player in House races, has now done the same thing in four polls in just the last week-and-a-half.

Campaign Action

Pretty much every recent House poll from Democrats, by contrast, has trumpeted leads for Joe Biden, even in districts Trump won four years ago. For the Congressional Leadership Fund, however, the prospect of embarrassing Dear Leader with fugly polling data is one that must be avoided at all costs. In fact, that overriding directive is so strong, it’s possible that CLF isn't hiding anything: Republican operative Liam Donovan insists that some GOP pollsters really aren't testing presidential matchups when they go into the field, saying, "You don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to."

The claim is entirely believable. Last year, ProPublica reported that the RNC had stopped providing crucial "voter scores" on Trump to candidates, both to "discourage candidates from distancing themselves" from Trump and to prevent any leaks of humiliating statistics. More recently, Daily Beast described the great lengths to which Trump's own aides have gone to massage and conceal the truth about his dire standing in the polls.

Simply not asking about Trump's standing at all is the next logical step. But while it might be a great way to keep Trump from getting pissed, burying your head in the sand is also a great way to lose elections.

ELECTION CHANGES

Please bookmark our litigation tracker for a complete summary of the latest developments in every lawsuit regarding changes to elections and voting procedures as a result of the coronavirus.

● Connecticut: Connecticut's Democratic-run state legislature has passed a bill to allow all voters to request an absentee ballot for the November general election due to the coronavirus pandemic. Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont, who has expressed support for the legislation, has reportedly "promised to quickly sign the measure," according to the CT Mirror.

● Texas: A federal judge has rejected Republican Secretary of State Ruth Hughs' motion to dismiss a case brought by several Texas voters and civil rights organizations seeking to expand access to absentee voting for the November general election.

Plaintiffs are asking the court to order the state to prepay the cost of postage; require officials to count ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within a few days afterward (currently, they must be received by the day after the election); prevent the state from using arbitrary standards to reject absentee ballots for allegedly non-matching signatures without giving voters a chance to fix any problems; and allow third parties to collect and turn in completed absentee ballots.

Based on a schedule the judge previously set out, a ruling on plaintiffs' requests is not likely until after Labor Day.

Senate

● AK-Sen, ME-Sen, MT-Sen: The Lincoln Project, a group formed by several prominent Republican operatives seeking to defeat Trump and his enablers, is spending $4 million on ads opposing Republican senators in Alaska, Maine, and Montana. Their Alaska ad touts Democratic-backed independent Al Gross as a lifelong Alaskan, highlighting his biography and asserting that he'll be an independent voice for the state. Their Montana ad praises Democrat Steve Bullock's tenure as governor and attacks "do-nothing" GOP Sen. Steve Daines, but that commercial is notably missing any specifics in contrast to the Alaska ad.

The group is also spending $1 million in Maine to air a minute-long ad that plays up Maine's history of supposedly independent-minded politicians and contrasts them with GOP Sen. Susan Collins, whom they argue "never stands up to Donald Trump." The narrator blasts Collins as a "fraud" controlled by Mitch McConnell and Trump, whose corruption and abuses of power she enables.

● GA-Sen-A, GA-Sen-B: Monmouth University's first poll of the general election tested both of Georgia's Senate races, and they find competitive contests this fall but also risks for Democrats due to the way Georgia's electoral system works. In the regular Senate election, GOP Sen. David Perdue leads Democrat Jon Ossoff 49-43, which is just shy of the majority needed for Perdue to avoid a Jan. 5 runoff. However, there's still cause for optimism in this poll since it has the presidential race tied 47-47, meaning Ossoff's standing could improve if undecided voters are disproportionately Democratic-leaning.

In the all-party special election, Monmouth has surprisingly good news for embattled GOP incumbent Kelly Loeffler, who leads Republican Rep. Doug Collins 26-20; together, they would snag both spots in an all-but-certain January runoff for Republicans. Among the Democrats, businessman Matt Lieberman takes 14%, DSCC-backed pastor Raphael Warnock takes 9%, and former U.S. Attorney Ed Tarver earns 5%.

National Democrats are firmly united behind Warnock, and he has trounced his intraparty rivals in fundraising. However, a number of surveys have shown that Democratic voters have not yet gotten that memo, likely due to Warnock's relatively low name recognition.

● ME-Sen: Republican Sen. Susan Collins' latest TV ad is an unusual minute-long spot where the senator speaks directly to the camera for most of it. Collins repeats some of the attacks against her—that she's changed over the years and that she's changed her votes in exchange for campaign contributions—in an effort to dispute them, but it could just as easily remind viewers of the negatives against her. The second half of the ad focuses more on Collins' career of supposedly working on behalf of Mainers, and she emphasizes having never missed a roll call vote in the Senate.

● NH-Sen, NH-Gov: The University of New Hampshire's latest poll finds both Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Gov. Chris Sununu far ahead in their respective races for re-election. In the Senate race, Shaheen beats both her prospective Republican opponents, attorney Corky Messner and retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, by identical 54-35 margins. Meanwhile, Sununu doubles up on Democratic state Senate Majority Leader Dan Feltes by 59-28 and Democratic Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky by 58-29. Both Shaheen and Sununu have consistently posted wide leads in the polls. UNH did not release presidential results with this poll.

● Senate: Change Research for CNBC:

• AZ-Sen: Mark Kelly (D): 47, Martha McSally (R-inc): 45 (Biden 47-45) (July: 52-45 Kelly)
• MI-Sen: Gary Peters (D-inc): 48, John James (R): 44 (Biden 46-42) (July: 50-43 Peters)
• NC-Sen: Cal Cunningham (D): 52, Thom Tillis (R-inc): 40 (Biden 49-46) (July: 49-42 Cunningham)

House

● FL-15: State Rep. Adam Hattersley has released what appears to be his first TV ad ahead of the Aug. 18 Democratic primary, and it's a biographical spot narrated by his wife, Christie Hattersley. The spot highlights his military service as an Iraq veteran who was awarded a Bronze Star, and it touts Hattersley's  efforts in the state legislature to stop offshore drilling and pollution and vows he will "take on insurance and pharmaceutical companies" to provide affordable health care for everyone if he's elected to Congress.

● MI-03: With the Aug. 4 GOP primary quickly approaching, Army veteran Peter Meijer and state Rep. Lynn Afendoulis have been battling it out on the airwaves this month. Meijer is running two ads (here and here) that claim Afendoulis broke a promise not to raise taxes, is a "Never Trumper," and is also a "liberal" who stands with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; Meijer's ads spend limited time touting himself as a candidate.

Meanwhile, Afendoulis is also trying to tie her opponent to Whitmer, claiming western Michigan got "Whitmered" and that Meijer is the next Whitmer. She argues that he's the one who's really a Never Trumper and is "pro-China" in contrast to Afendoulis, who pitches herself as a Trump ally.

● MN-02: Republican nominee Tyler Kistner has released a survey from Harper Polling, but it's unclear what exactly Kistner's campaign thinks it's conveying, since the poll finds him trailing Democratic Rep. Angie Craig by a substantial 45-36 margin. Like many recent GOP internal poll releases, this survey didn't disclose any presidential numbers in this swingy suburban district, suggesting that they were quite bad for Trump, which would make it difficult for Kistner to convince voters to fire the first-term Democratic incumbent if they're simultaneously backing the party for president by a comfortable margin.

This poll is the first we've seen of the general election, and it comes after Kistner finally saw a substantial increase in fundraising, having brought in $741,000 in the second quarter. That was enough for Kistner to narrowly outpace Craig, who raised $720,000, but the incumbent has a wide lead in cash-on-hand with $2.5 million in the bank compared to $512,000 for Kistner.

● MN-05: Rep. Ilhan Omar has launched her first TV ad ahead of next month's Democratic primary. Omar narrates the ad and laments our broken housing, economic, and justice systems while scenes depicting poverty and recent protest activism play on screen. Omar contends that she has been leading the fight for justice in Congress and implores viewers to vote on Aug. 11.

● NY-12: Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney issued a statement on Tuesday evening saying she'd amassed "a decisive winning margin of over 3,700 votes" over challenger Suraj Patel, but the New York City Board of Elections still has not released any results from last month's primary, which took place over five weeks ago. Patel's campaign responded by saying "we accept the result" but would not concede because Patel is a plaintiff in a pending lawsuit seeking to have officials count absentee ballots that were never postmarked by the postal service.

It's not clear what the actual vote totals are at the moment, though Patel said 95,000 votes had been tallied, leaving Maloney up "by less than 4%." That would represent an increase from Maloney's lead on election night, when she finished ahead of Patel 41.7 to 40.0 in the in-person vote, which totaled 39,500 for all candidates.

● NY-24: The DCCC has begun airing its first TV ads of the general election, and notably, the committee is doing so in a race where Democrats are on offense: upstate New York's 24th Congressional District, one of just three seats carried by Hillary Clinton four years ago that Republican incumbents are defending this fall.

The D-Trip's ad attacks Republican Rep. John Katko for taking "over $2 million from special interests" in campaign funds, from "big banks, drug companies, and the insurance industry." As a result, the spot argues, Katko has voted "for corporate tax cuts and against holding drug companies accountable." So far, the committee has put $175,000 behind the spot in two separate installments (see here and here) that each look to be for one-week buys, and what appears to be another $40,000 to run the ad on digital platforms.

The NRCC responded by launching a coordinated buy with Katko to air an ad accusing Democrat Dana Balter of not telling the truth about about wanting to raise taxes, using clips of Balter that Republicans also highlighted when she first ran for this seat two years ago. According to the FEC, such coordinated efforts limit party committees to spending $51,000 in House races, as opposed to the unlimited sums they can spend on independent expenditures.

The NRCC/Katko joint spot also features a clip of a recent Balter ad in which she pushed back against a recent Katko ad that attacked her over one of her earlier ads that itself took aim at Katko's first ad of the cycle. (You with us?)

Mercifully, Balter has broken this cycle of back-and-forth with a brand-new positive spot in which she talks about paying her way through college by working as a waitress. She says she lived paycheck to paycheck and describes "how scary it was when I got sick and almost went bankrupt because of health care costs." Balter concludes by promising to "fight for an economic recovery that lifts up people who work hard for a living and makes health care more affordable."

● House: House Majority PAC, the largest super PAC backing Democrats in House races nationally, has announced another $2.3 million in TV ad reservations across eight media markets for the fall. HMP only disclosed the media markets where they're reserving ad time, so we made our best guesses as to which districts they may be targeting with this latest round, almost all of which are held by Democrats already.

Ad Roundup

• AZ-Sen: Mark Kelly (D)
• CO-Sen: Giffords PAC - anti-Cory Gardner (R-inc); John Hickenlooper (D)
• GA-Sen-A: NRSC - anti-Jon Ossoff (D)
• IA-Sen: Joni Ernst (R-inc); Theresa Greenfield (D)
• KS-Sen: Bob Hamilton (R) (primary)
• MT-Sen: Steve Bullock (D); Steve Daines (R-inc)
• TN-Sen: America One - anti-Manny Sethi (R) (primary)
• MO-01: Justice Democrats- pro-Cori Bush (D) (primary)
• NY-11: Max Rose (D-inc)

President Donald Trump is pining for support in the suburbs, and pushing out low-income housing is playing a part in his bid to get it.

In a set of tweets and in remarks in Texas on Wednesday, Trump bragged about his administration’s rescinding an Obama-era fair housing rule that was meant to combat housing discrimination. He characterized low-income housing as a detriment to the suburbs and claimed that Democrats were out to uproot and destroy suburbia — a cultural sphere that he equated to the American dream.

“You know the suburbs, people fight all of their lives to get into the suburbs and have a beautiful home,” Trump said during a talk in Midland, Texas. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs. … It’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.”

His comments were an echo of his tweets earlier in the day, in which he said suburbanites would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”

The division between urban and suburban America is closely tied to the country’s history of racial segregation. Even long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, numerous studies and reports have revealed a long line of policies that have kept Black people out of white suburbs, as well as other forms of housing discrimination.

The connection between Trump’s aspersion on low-income housing in suburbs and racial segregation was not lost on his critics.

“Oh my. I mean, it’s not even a dog whistle anymore,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter. “Our President is now a proud, vocal segregationist.”

Adrianne Todman, CEO of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, said Trump’s remarks were a deep insult to those who live in, work in and build low-income housing. She stressed that those who live in low-income housing offer valuable contributions to all communities.

“If you are a person of modest means, know that your value is not derived by how much money you make, but by who you are,” Todman said in a statement to POLITICO on Wednesday.

The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule that the Trump administration dismantled required local governments to proactively ensure fair housing in order to receive federal housing funding. It was designed to give more teeth to the Fair Housing Act in combating segregation, and was praised by civil rights groups at the time. Conservative critics and the Trump administration opposed the parameters, saying they were unnecessarily laborious.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a replacement policy last week that essentially leaves localities to self-certify that housing is affordable and free of discrimination — a significant scale-down of the Obama-era rule.

“After reviewing thousands of comments on the proposed changes to the [AFFH] regulation, we found it to be unworkable and ultimately a waste of time for localities to comply with, too often resulting in funds being steered away from communities that need them most,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said last week.

The administration justified the move at the time as alleviating undue burdens on local governments. But Trump’s comments on Wednesday made it clear that he was motivated by a drive to keep poor people out of suburban areas. He tweeted that rescinding the rule would mean “housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down.”

Supporters of the Obama-era rule found that the new HUD guidelines leave practically no incentive to combat housing segregation. Former Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro, who served as HUD secretary under Obama when the 2015 AFFH rule was created, shot back at Trump, tweeting: “Just because people are poor doesn’t mean they’re bad. That’s obvious to most, but not to bigots like” Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump’s remarks “disgusting,” saying the president is “actively working to gut fair housing laws and legalize housing discrimination.”

“EVERY American deserves access to the American dream. We will fight this,” Schumer wrote on Twitter.

Trump’s attention on the suburbs has been growing ahead of the November presidential election, portraying his opponent, Joe Biden, and other Democrats as out to “abolish” suburbs. Trump tweeted on Thursday to “The Suburban Housewives of America” that “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!”

Still, Trump’s call-out toward suburbanites doesn’t appear to be driving up his appeal. Polls have Trump trailing Biden in the suburbs by large margins, and suburban areas largely carried Democrats to a majority in the House in 2018.

The co-founder of conservative student group Turning Point USA, Bill Montgomery, has died from complications of the coronavirus, according to two friends of his.

Montgomery, who started it in 2012 with young conservative star Charlie Kirk, died at the age of 80 on Tuesday from Covid-19, according to pro-Trump conservative strategist Caleb Hull, who posted about the death on Twitter and his personal Facebook page, and Chicago-based citizen journalist Vic Maggio.

“I really wish people would just stop politicizing this pandemic and grow up while innocent people around us are dying,” Hull also said. “You have no idea how painful it is to be forced to sit at home while your loved one dies alone in a hospital.”

In a statement memorializing Montgomery, Turning Point USA praised his role in elevating Kirk and the organization, calling him the group’s “first believer and senior advisor,” although Montgomery often described himself as a co-founder.

Charlie Kirk said in an additional statement to POLITICO: “I can’t put into words how saddened I am by the death of my dear friend Bill Montgomery.”

Before starting Turning Point with Kirk, Montgomery, who lived in Illinois, worked in marketing, publishing, restaurants and was a business development consultant.

A 2015 National Journal story recounted how Montgomery met Kirk when he was 18 and urged him not to go to college but told him instead after a speech at Benedictine University: “I don't know you, but you need to start an organization to reach out to young people with your message.” So the next month, the two launched Turning Point together.

“It was Bill and Charlie’s chance encounter in 2012, along with Bill’s generosity and willingness to invest in an 18-year-old with no experience and no connections that gave birth to the dream that would one day become Turning Point USA,” Turning Point said.

In Maggio’s video, he said that one of Montgomery’s goals was to get Kirk, a close ally of Donald Trump Jr., elected president one day. Maggio called Montgomery “a conservative through and through” who “wore it as a badge of honor.”

Montgomery is survived by his widow Edie, a son and a daughter.

Over the course of the pandemic, Turning Point USA representatives have downplayed the impact of the coronavirus on public life.

In two previous episodes of his podcast, March 16 and April 23, Kirk stated that he believed that the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions should self-quarantine. Outside of that, however, he has questioned the vast majority of public health proposals to limit community spread. On the Sunday edition of his podcast, Kirk said: “Do not force me to wear a mask, it’s that simple. I’m not gonna do it, I’m not.”

“[E]very single time I go into one of these grocery stores, ‘Where’s your mask?’ I say, well first of all, the science around masks is very questionable, very questionable,” he said. “In fact some people, some doctors think that masks actually make you sicker and have you less likely to be able to get oxygen and more likely to infect yourself, and less likely to be able to fight the virus, and actually more likely to be able to die sooner.

“A lot of people believe that. I’ve met many doctors that hold that view,” Kirk added. “Secondly, we have a huge civil liberty issue here. Why do you have the authority to tell me what I can and cannot do with my body? I thought it was ‘my body, my choice.’”

The latest guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control state that wearing cloth face masks have proven effective for preventing someone infected with Covid-19 from passing the disease to others, and have consequently resulted in less community spread. Several states and cities have passed mask ordinances as a result.

Kirk was banned for a brief time from Twitter in late March for falsely claiming that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was “100% effective” in treating the coronavirus. He has also pushed to quickly reopen the nation’s economy, although in March he said that young people were at risk from the virus and that they should be careful by avoiding large gatherings.

In late June, Trump spoke to a packed audience of young Turning Point supporters at a megachurch in Phoenix where he was introduced by Kirk. Few people in the audience practiced social distancing or wore masks, although the organization gave masks to everyone who wanted one and provided socially distanced seating in the upper tier of the church.

In a statement in response to questions about Kirk’s remarks on masks, a spokesman for him said: “Charlie has long said that if you are in high risk cohorts, namely the elderly and those with comorbidities or underlying health issues — of which Bill was a part of both cohorts, both groups, -- then you should take every possible precaution. Had they discussed Charlie would have recommended he self-quarantine. Charlie has questioned the efficacy of masks for low risk groups, including school aged children, those under 60 that are in good health.

“The mainstream media wants to censor dissident voices and a robust debate and that’s really what Charlie’s advocating for, for a robust debate. Because so many lives and really the entire country is implicated, we need that debate more than ever.”

A new mandatory Pentagon training course aimed at preventing leaks refers to protesters and journalists as "adversaries" in a fictional scenario designed to teach Defense Department personnel how to better protect sensitive information.

The new course was recently launched as part of Defense Secretary Mark Esper's effort to improve "operational security," or OPSEC, and clamp down on leaks. The training materials are public and include a video message from Esper, as well as a July 20 memo outlining his concerns about operational security and directing all DoD personnel — military, civilian and on-site contractors — to take the course within the next 60 days.

“Unfortunately, poor OPSEC practices within DoD in the past have resulted in the unauthorized disclosure or 'leaks,'" Esper writes in the memo. “The Department of Defense (DoD) remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust. [However] unauthorized disclosures jeopardize our DoD personnel, operations, strategies and policies to the benefit of our adversaries.”

The training comes amid worsening relations between the federal government and protesters. President Donald Trump in June threatened to deploy active-duty troops in U.S. cities to tamp down protests against police brutality, and more recently, federal agents wearing military-style uniforms have cracked down on vandalism and demonstrations in Portland, Ore. And while Trump has repeatedly labeled news outlets as "the enemy of the people," the Defense Department has been careful to avoid doing the same.

Lt. Col. Uriah Orland, a Pentagon spokesperson, defended the use of the term "adversaries" in the training.

"An adversary — a common generic term for a person or group that opposes ones tactical goals — is acting counter to our information security objectives and therefore personnel must understand that threat," Orland said in a statement. "Attempting to read more into the use of the term obfuscates the clear purpose of the training: to prevent information from falling into unauthorized hands regardless of its potential use."

George Little, who was a Pentagon press secretary and CIA spokesperson in the Obama administration, called the characterization "appalling and dangerous."

"It brings to mind the same tin ear Secretary Esper recently demonstrated when he used the military term battlespace to describe America's city streets," Little said. "The Pentagon and the press have a long history over working alongside each other in service of the American people. Even when they don't see eye to eye on the issues, there's been a long history of respect for their common mission, and it's unfortunate that the current Pentagon leadership has largely abandoned it."

In one section of the course, trainees are given a fictional scenario in which news of a secret military exercise gets out, and TV cameras and hundreds of "anti-government protesters" show up. The exercise and the protest end up as the lead story on the evening news.

In such a scenario, the course instructs trainees to identify the "adversaries," who it says are driven to exploit "vulnerabilities" for their own gain. In the particular scenario in the course material, the exercise organizers aimed to keep the event unnoticed, a goal that was contrary to the aims of reporters and protesters, Orland explained.

“The protest group was an adversary, not because of its political beliefs, but because its intentions were contrary to the success of the training mission," the narrator says. "Reporters also had contrary intentions and capabilities. They wanted to capture exercise activities and on video and report them on the evening news. In this instance, the reporters are adversaries.”

In the scenario, the protest group "clearly exploited one or more vulnerabilities," the narrator states.

In another section of the course on insider threats, the media is labeled an adversary, and DoD personnel are instructed to report any contact with the press to their "information security office."

Orland noted that the training highlights that media personnel are not typically considered a threat, however "their actions of collecting and reporting classified/proprietary information can be just as damaging.”

Price Floyd, who served as acting assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in the Obama administration and director of media relations at the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, also criticized DoD's new policy on operational security and response to leaks.

“I think this administration confuses leaks with stories that are written that they don’t like,” Floyd said. “Because this administration, of course, gives out information to the press without attribution all the time. In other words, they’re leaking. They want the stories the way they want them.”

He also took issue with how the training course is framed, arguing that in his experience it inaccurately portrays the overall relationship between the military and the media.

“If for some reason a reporter got wind of something that was classified or secret, all it would take is a conversation with public affairs and someone to say, ‘look this is classified, it is secret, talking about it right now puts lives in danger.’”

"I think this witch hunt by Esper is just a way to try to clamp down on what they view as fake news,” he added, “when in fact all the media is doing is reporting the facts.”

Mick Mulroy, an ABC News analyst who served as the Pentagon's Middle East policy official in the Trump administration, said he does not believe DoD intended to label all protesters and journalists as threats, but called the language in the training materials "poor word choice."

"'Adversary' is a loaded term, we use it to define Russia, for example," Mulroy said, drawing a distinction between protesters and journalists appropriately exercising their constitutional rights with "protesters that use violence against the military or service members that leak classified information."

"However, in this climate of labeling the media being a threat to the people and protesters all being lumped together (both violent and nonviolent) the military will want to ensure that they are not adding to the problem with this type of terminology," he said. "I don't believe they intended to do that with this choice of terms, but it should be adjusted."

The new OPSEC effort was launched just weeks after Esper told lawmakers in a hearing that he had begun an investigation to go after leaks, following a New York Times report about intelligence that Russia was paying militants to target American forces in Afghanistan.

Leaks "hurt our nation's security, they undermine our troops, their safety, they affect our relations with other countries, they undermine our national policy," Esper told lawmakers this month. "It's something we need to get control of. It's bad and it's unlawful and it needs to stop."

A separate memo released around the same time as the first laid out new guidelines for the force when interacting with members of the news media.

Bryan Bender contributed to this report.

When a customer gets refunded for an app they purchased, Apple doesn't refund the 30% cut they took from the developer, says developer Simeon Saens of Two Lives Left. While [online] payment processors generally don't refund fees on refunded payments, "the App Store doesn't position itself as a payments processor the way Stripe does, so it sounds really weird that they would act like one," writes HN user chadlavi. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says in a tweet: This is a critical consideration in these 30% store fees. They come off the top, before funding any developer costs. As a result, Apple and Google make more profit from most developers' games than the developers themselves. That is terribly unfair and exploitative. "If the app store took a 3% chunk and never refunded it regardless of the ongoing status of the transaction, that would put them right in line with other payment processors," adds chadlavi. "It would also still net them billions of dollars, I think!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump's campaign strategy in Michigan has been a thing to behold. His months-long assault on the state included insulting nearly every female state official, mocking its iconic companies, and repeatedly threatening to shortchange it in the middle of a global pandemic. 

It appears that unique approach has not paid off—unless you consider not needing to direct any advertising dollars there a cost savings for the campaign. Then it was aces.

In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has quietly pulled all its ads from the airwaves in the Great Lakes State, according to the New York Times. Instead, the campaign has poured more resources into states like Iowa and Nevada, which are worth a combined 12 electoral votes compared to Michigan's 16. Not to the mention the fact that Iowa is a normally reliable red state that Trump won handily in 2016. 

In terms of spending, the Times calls the Biden campaign's edge there the "most lopsided" of any swing state, adding that Trump hasn't run any local ads in the state's largest media market, Detroit, since July 3. That doesn't include national buys that happened to appear there.

Trump is reportedly taking a beating from three key demographics—people of color who enthusiastically want to oust him, suburban voters who are running the other direction, and even less educated white voters whose support for Trump is sagging. He’s trailed Joe Biden in nearly every reputable poll this month. 

All that being said, the Trump campaign is still doing grassroots work there while pushing digital advertising on platforms like Facebook. It also continues to hold more than $11 million in reserved TV ad space starting in September, but ad reservations aren't a lock either as priorities shift.

Still, Michigan Democrats aren't taking anything for granted. “The biggest danger for us is to be overconfident,” Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell told the Times.

While some pro-Trump super PACs continue to advertise in the state, the biggest among them, America First Action, also exited in early July, diverting funds to Arizona and North Carolina instead. None of that bodes well for Trump, but we wouldn’t mind if he hurled a few more insults at Michigan, just for good measure.

Want a safe, effective way to get out the vote this fall? Set up an account with Vote Forward, and start writing personalized letters to infrequent, but Democratic-leaning, swing state voters.

By Amanda Mannen  Published: July 29th, 2020 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies virtually before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law on Online Platforms and Market Power in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2020. | Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

At a historic antitrust hearing, many conservatives focused on political drama instead of asking big tech CEOs questions about their market power.

Wednesday’s congressional antitrust hearing was a historic occasion, offering Congress a chance to grill four of the most powerful men in the world, who control four companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google — each so massive that they rival nation-states in their power. Observers have grown increasingly concerned about the unprecedented and outsized impact of these companies on the economy, the millions of American citizens who use their products, and the thousands of smaller businesses that try, often unsuccessfully, to compete with them.

But the Republican members of the hearing instead primarily focused on one specific thing: unfounded claims that tech companies are biased against conservatives.

“I will just cut to the chase. Big tech is out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion, that’s not a hunch, that’s a fact,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who from the onset of the hearing led Republicans on the committee in questions about anti-conservative bias. At one point, he repeatedly yelled at a Democratic colleague, Rep. Mary Scanlon, interrupting her allotted questioning time because he took offense to her implication that his focus on anti-conservative bias was promoting “fringe conspiracy theories.”

It’s not surprising that many Republican committee members chose to focus on supposed tech bias. But it is a significant distraction from what really matters: whether tech companies have used their power to crush their competition and exploit users’ online behavior and data in a manner that hurts Americans of all political persuasions.

Allegations that social media platforms have an anti-conservative bias has for years been a rallying cry of President Trump and the Republican party. And leading up to Wednesday, Republicans attacked the focus of the Democrat-run House Judiciary subcommittee hearing — calling on it to focus more on anti-conservative bias and for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear. Twitter is a small company compared to, say, Facebook, but it has recently taken measures to moderate President Trump’s posts for violating policies around misinformation and hate speech, enraging Republicans.

Democrats, meanwhile, tried to steer the conversation back to issues more directly relevant to antitrust, like if and how these companies intimidate their competition, such as when Facebook acquired its then-rival Instagram in 2012; or whether these companies exploit their users’ privacy, like how Google tracks individuals’ online browsing across the web with cookies; or if Apple is shutting out its competitors by taking an unreasonable cut of profits coming in from independent app developers in its App Store.

What really matters here is whether these companies’ business practices are ultimately harming consumers, most of whom have no choice but to use Big Tech in one way or another if they want to do basic things online like search the web, order goods, or stay in touch with their friends.

In an earlier era, Republicans and Democrats on the committee might have come together to try to focus on what’s been seen as an area of relative bipartisan agreement: protecting the free market. That didn’t happen at today’s hearing. Instead, it was a display of partisan divides.

While it’s true that many rank-and-file corporate employees at Facebook, Google, and Apple — who tend to be college-educated individuals living in major metropolitan areas — identify as politically liberal, like many others in their demographic, there’s no definitive proof that Facebook, YouTube, Google, or any other major tech platform discriminates against conservative content.

In their testimony, Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing cited investigations from right-wing news outlets and groups, like Project Veritas and Breitbart News, but at most, these sources seem to indicate that many Big Tech employees hold liberal political beliefs — a phenomenon that is neither illegal nor inherently conspiratorial.

Historically, the types of content and pages that consistently perform well on Facebook are often right-leaning news and pundit pages, like Breitbart News and Ben Shapiro. And as my colleague Peter Kafka wrote this spring, these same tech companies often face criticism from Democrats over how their platforms incentivize users to post polarizing and politically extreme content because their algorithms prioritize engagement — and polarizing content is good at getting users to engage with it.

After Jordan used his initial allotted round of time for questioning Google CEO Sundar Pichai about alleged anti-conservative bias (based on leaked emails from a former Google marketing executive which said the company used its products to reach Latinos with voting information in the 2016 presidential election), he twice interrupted Democratic colleague Rep. Mary Scanlon (D-PA) to yell at her across the floor — initiating a screaming match with Democratic subcommittee chairman David Cicilline, who tried to maintain order.

Jordan reacted this way after Scanlon said she would like to focus her questioning back on antitrust issues instead of what she called “fringe conspiracy theories.” After Cicilline’s repeated calls for order — and after another person on the congressional floor, unidentifiable from the livestream, yelled at Jordan to “put your mask on!” — Jordan let up and let Scanlon continue questioning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with her allotted time.

The entire debacle was another reminder that today’s hearing is mostly a political spectacle, a moment primed for soundbites, and many Republicans at the hearing chose to use their time with these powerful company leaders to promote their own political agendas. Congressional hearings like this one aren’t expected to directly lead to antitrust action, but they can help set the stage for that when politicians strategically use their time to extract answers from leaders with pointed — and unified — lines of questioning.

Ranking Republican James Sensenbrenner did offer a narrow window of measured optimism for bipartisan cooperation toward the end of the hearing. He said that antitrust probes hold a meaningful and historic place in American government but that, in the case of tech, regulators need to revisit old decisions and step up enforcement of existing laws rather than write a whole new set of rules.

But largely, Sensenbrenner’s Republican colleagues were uninterested in discussing antitrust issues, under new or existing laws alike. As one Democratic congressional staffer told Recode, Republicans seemed more interested in creating explosive confrontations by decrying alleged “liberal bias” that are made-for-replay on conservative cable TV (indeed, Jordan’s clips have already been a subject of discussion on Fox News). Today’s hearing was a sign that in the current hyper-polarized political climate, it’s unlikely Congress will lead any real, meaningful, bipartisan legislative effort to rein in Big Tech anytime soon.

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A Nevada library received a very petulant letter from Douglas County Sheriff Dan Coverley after the library released a diversity statement that included the line: “We support #BlackLivesMatter.” Coverley wrote a letter on the Douglas County government website that argued there was no racism or bias in the law enforcement system. His statement ended with Coverley threatening the library, saying: “Due to your support of Black Lives Matter and the obvious lack of support or trust with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, please do not feel the need to call 911 for help. I wish you good luck with disturbances and lewd behavior, since those are just some of the recent calls my office has assisted you with in the past.”

This is quite a bananas coco puffs thing to say. The news of this strange threat against a public library by a county’s law enforcement head made quick news. This prompted Coverley to follow up that statement by telling news outlets: “My response to the Library’s proposed agenda item was to provide public comment about their proposed diversity statement and to further provide open commentary about how this could affect our local law enforcement profession.”

At the time, Library Director Amy Dodson told The Nevada Independent that she was surprised by the response. “We help everyone and serve everyone equally. And so that's really all that the statement was meant to communicate, but that one sentence [about the Black Lives Matter movement] touched off a bit of a firestorm in social media.”

Coverley’s defensiveness may come from the fact that Douglas County is over 91% white, with a population of Black lives making up around 1%, according to Census.gov. The less Black people there are, the less chance Coverley likely believes there is any racism in his ranks. It’s sort of a hear-no-evil-see-no-evil proposition. Of course, according to the ACLU, while there are very few Black people in Douglas County, Nevada, they are 21.91 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts. Weird, right?

On Tuesday, Dodson reportedly met with Coverley to talk about Coverley’s ouchy tushy. Dodson released a statement after the meeting that read: “Sheriff Coverley and I had a very candid conversation about the statement and we both expressed our opinions regarding the intent of our exchanged correspondence. We agreed that we both support the people of Douglas County and this may have been an unfortunate circumstance of misunderstanding. The library respects and supports the work of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and appreciates everything they do to keep our community safe.”

The original statement that the board of library trustees was set to vote on on Tuesday evening was a diversity mission statement that included this paragraph:

The Douglas County Public Library denounces all acts of violence, racism, and disregard for human rights. We support #Black Lives Matter. We resolutely assert and believe that all forms of racism, hatred, inequality, and injustice don’t belong in our society.

It’s telling that Coverley felt so attacked by such an inclusive statement about justice and a society based in fairness. However, a person like Coverley isn’t the most creative mind when it comes to critical thinking. As the Independent pointed out, Coverley’s statement was mostly plagiarized from conservative attorney generals and the Western States Sheriffs Association statement sent to congressional leaders in June.

After the uproar that a city official telling citizens he won’t do his job brings, Coverley released a statement that some outlets generously described as “walking back” his previous dumb statement. “I am passionate about and proud of the work the Sheriff’s Office does for all members of this community. This has been a difficult time to be a law enforcement professional and can be disheartening when we perceive that our office may be under attack. My response was rooted in my belief that these issues need to be openly discussed in a way that values diversity and law enforcement.” Not really an apology, nor is it “walking back “anything.

Coverley’s statement brought up some of the facts of the matter. For one, Coverley himself was accused of excessive force back in 2001, a video of which you can watch below, where he held a man by his throat and lifted him off the ground. This Is Reno reports that Coverley received a one-day suspension for that incident and told the Record Courier: “At the time that I was disciplined and suspended for one day for using an improper lifting technique. The incident was investigated for excessive use of force, and I was cleared.” Douglas County settled with the citizen whose rights were violated out of court, and now Coverley is the sheriff! U-S-A!

However, this hasn’t been a victory for diversity as much as it has illuminated how small the crevices are in our society where racism and bigotry and fear live. The diversity statement was removed from the library’s Facebook page after county officials reportedly said that “it violated a policy on using government websites to promote a political agenda.” As county spokesperson Melissa Blosser told the Reno Gazette Journal: "We had them take it down. We cannot use public owned media to propagate a political agenda."

Black Lives Matter is apparently a “political” agenda. And here most of us thought it was an organizing cry under which lots of different groups have been working to bring racial, social, and economic justice to hundreds of millions of Americans.

The unidentified Customs and Border Protection (CBP) special tactical agents who’ve kidnapped at least two demonstrators right off the street in Portland, Oregon, are wholly untrained in how to properly deal with large demonstrations and a former senior Border Patrol agent turned whistleblower calls the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, among “the most violent and racist in all law enforcement”.

“Racism has plagued the institution for decades,” The Guardian reports. “Jenn Budd recalled that when she signed up for service in 1995 her Spanish instructor blithely informed her that Latino migrants were referenced within the agency as ‘tonks’ and ‘wetbacks.’” It’s not an isolated incident at CBP, or a dated one: As recently as 2019, agents have pleaded guilty to assaulting migrants while on duty. One agent called migrants “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling for a fire” in the weeks before he hit a Guatemalan man with his truck and then lied about it.

“Local officials and other critics say the tactical unit, which is trained for high-risk missions and usually conducts operations along the border targeting smugglers and criminal organizations, shouldn’t be responding to a matter of civil dissent in a major city far from any national border,” BuzzFeed News reported last week. 

But it’s not just that sending BORTAC to cities is inappropriate, it’s that unconfirmed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf and the Trump administration are siccing dangerous and unleashed agents on U.S. cities in an authoritarian power flex whose sole purpose is not to protect U.S. cities (from what exactly?), but to help the impeached president stay in office. Budd tells The Guardian that BORTAC is more than happy to do it, because like the impeached president, the unit’s agents view themselves as above the law—and act like it.

“That strain of extra-judicial aggression runs through everything Bortac does, Budd said,” the report continued. She told The Guardian that “[t]hey view people they encounter in the military sense as enemy combatants, meaning they have virtually no rights.” She continues: “They don’t do normal vehicle stops. They will rip drivers from their seat, throw him against the side, put him in handcuffs —the same tactics you are now seeing Bortac agents use in Portland.”

This wouldn’t be the first time this year that the Trump administration has used BORTAC as part of a political and self-serving stunt. In February, BORTAC was requested to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in sweeping up immigrants and separate families in a number of immigration raids across major cities, a move slammed by legislators including Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren.

"The BORTAC deployment to Boston and other cities is unnecessary, unwelcome, and dangerous,” Markey and Warren said at the time. “But the specter of heavily armed, military-like personnel in our cities will accomplish one thing: provoke fear.” Of course, that’s the point—to cause fear, and to win at any cost.

Budd has written that Border Patrol in particular “has spent decades waiting quietly in the wings, stocking up on weapons and nearly tripling in size since 2001. Waiting for that moment when a president would see them for the heroes they believe themselves to be. Waiting for that moment when a president would fully activate these extraordinary powers to do his/her bidding. That moment is here.”

But so are we. It’s time to get DHS, ICE, and CBP under control now. “The federal agents who descended on the city, uninvited and unwelcome, in unmarked vehicles, disappearing people with little to no regard for civil liberties, come from the Department of Homeland Security,” Marisa Franco, director of advocacy group Mijente, said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “This agency is bloated, overfunded, and it operates with impunity. At Mijente, we've been sounding the alarm for years.”

“The difference here is, this time they implemented their tactics openly and under the protection of an authoritarian president,” she continued. “If this is what they do to mostly white U.S. citizens in front of the media, imagine what they are doing to people in their custody, to people who are seeking refuge in isolated parts of the border. Trump must be defeated in November. Trumpism must be defeated as well. That means dismantling agencies like DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol."

To say that in 2019 America produced less coal than it has in any year since 1978 is telling only part of the story. Because in 1978 coal mines across the country were engaged in a national miner’s strike—one in which the President Jimmy Carter was definitely on the wrong side of history in attempting to force miners back on the job through the courts. Ultimately, though the miners technically won in terms of getting what they wanted, they lost because the strike accelerated the focus of mining companies into western coal fields where they would eventually break the union by shutting out union miners from large new surface mines while idling smaller mines in the east. 

But there was no miner’s strike in 2019. There was also no coronavirus pandemic, because that didn’t become a problem until after the first of the year. What the latest numbers from the Energy Information Administration show is an industry in rapid decline. A minor increase in 2017 has proven to be unsustainable, despite Donald Trump throwing the industry every possible assistance. Coal production declined 7% in 2019. And the data available so far shows that 2020 will be even worse for an industry that’s vanishing faster than anyone would have believed possible a decade ago. Electricity generated by coal in the U.S. fell to a 42-year low in 2019, decreasing over 15% in a single year. Since then it has fallen an amazing 34% in the last five months. That’s not 34% total, it’s 34% on top of the 15% decline last year.

The Powder River Basin in Wyoming continues to be the nation’s largest source of coal, producing almost 40% of the nation’s product. In Wyoming, a pair of huge mines there—one from Arch, the other from Peabody—together making up the majority of the state’s production. But the fact that those two companies, the nation’s largest coal companies and long-time fierce competitors, had to team up in the last year in an effort to reduce costs and retain control of a shrinking market shows how tenuous the industry has become. Production in Wyoming was down by 9% in 2019. What was once a steady stream of coal trains coming out of the Powder River Basin has become an increasingly ragged flow; one that is threatening to fall to a trickle in 2020.

Meanwhile, the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission has voted to close the last coal-powered generating facility in the whole Four Corners region. The decision is an easy one, because even though replacing the coal plant with 100% renewable power will require a $1 billion investment, it will actually save ratepayers in the region more than $6 per month, while creating 1,000 construction jobs. That’s because at this point building new solar and wind facilities is actually cheaper than simply maintaining existing coal plants. That kind of economics is why New Mexico isn’t alone actually being ahead of targets to move to renewable power.

The New Mexico decision follows just months after Arizona closed the Navajo Generating Station at Page, Arizona. That plant was the last coal-fired plant in the state, and it was fed by the state’s last coal mine. Now both are gone. Instead, visitors to the Navajo Nation will find a huge new solar facility that produces power for 13,000 homes.

Even in states long associated with coal production, the plants are closing. At what was once the largest coal powered generating plant in the world, Paradise Steam Plant in western Kentucky, the last of three huge turbines has made the switch to natural gas. That switch means that Paradise will still produce greenhouse gases, but it will no longer generate millions of tons of coal ash for the surrounding communities, or throw out a plume of both mercury and uranium that reaches a thousand miles to the sea.

The declining cost of renewables also means that what coal companies once viewed as the industry’s savior—exported coal—is also in decline. Coal exports were actually down 29% in the first five months of 2020. Companies have actually dropped several of the efforts to build export facilities as overseas markets evaporate even faster than those in the United States.

The industry crash also means that the efforts to save coal through “next generation” plants has completely crumbled. It’s been almost three years since what was supposed to be the nation’s first “clean coal” plant announced that it would not burn coal at all, ending a $6 billion experiment in failure. And on Tuesday, the only remaining commercial scale clean coal project in the United States was cancelled. As Oilprice.com reports, Petra Nova, which was supposed to capture carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant near Houston, has been “mothballed.” There is another project out there—North Dakota’s “Project Tundra”—but it exists only on paper and is unlikely to ever move forward.

As with many industries, coal mining employment has fallen sharply during the pandemic, but even before COVID-19 made the news, mining jobs were already in a steep decline. 

Back in 2017, as he was signing an order scrapping regulations and allowing coal companies to openly bribe foreign governments, The Washington Post reported on his ecstatic support for coal. “We’re bringing back jobs, big league,” said Trump. “We’re bringing them back at the plant level. We’re bringing them back at the mine level. The energy jobs are coming back.”

None of that happened. The plants are gone. The mines are gone. The industry is going. Despite everything he did to make coal profitable and everything he’s done to stand in the way of renewable energy, Donald Trump has utterly failed. And this is one failure we should all be applauding.

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As the House GOP dons their rosy shades and prattles on publicly about a potential 17-seat pick up, they are privately stressing over a worst-case scenario: that as many as 20 GOP seats could be on the chopping block, according to Politico.

Frankly, that would be catastrophic given that House Republicans are already at a 34-seat deficit, 232-198. A 20-seat Democratic pickup would put the House GOP back in 2009 territory, when Barack Obama started his presidency with a House Democratic majority of 257-178.

But that could actually prove to be far worse for House Republicans if the Trump-inspired realignment in the suburbs gets some long-term traction. Digging out from under that deficit might be far more difficult for the GOP minority than it was in the 2010 midterms, for instance. 

Politico reports that internal Democratic polls suggest their candidates are competitive in historically Republican-leaning districts in Indiana, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and Montana—all districts that easily went Trump in 2016.

Worse yet, House Republicans are facing a cash crunch as Democrats crush their fundraising while the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee withhold help. Last quarter, more than 30 House GOP incumbents trailed their Democratic challengers in fundraising. It's pretty hard to go on offense when you're suddenly playing defense in roughly as many seats or more.

The dicey environment and scarce resources have left vulnerable GOP incumbents competing for help with House leadership. “The DCCC's candidates are printing money, and the president's falling poll numbers are devastating to Republicans across the map," a GOP member in a competitive district told Politico. "That's why McCarthy and the NRCC need to hold the line and focus on saving incumbents first."

Among the more surprising data: Democrat Kathleen Williams tied Republican Matt Rosendale in a race for Montana's open at-large seat, where Trump won by 20 points; Democrat Christina Hale was up 6 points in an open Indianapolis district that Trump carried by 12 in 2016; and Democrat Wendy Davis trailed Roy by just 1 point in a central Texas district Trump carried by 10 points.

Additionally, three Texas seats that weren't even on the Democrats’ radar have recently emerged as potential pickups: GOP Reps. Van Taylor, Ron Wright, and Roger Williams. That's on top of the state’s three open seats where Democrats lodged near misses in 2018.

The news hasn't been all bad for Republicans, with some recent polls showing a half dozen of their candidates in striking distance of picking off Democratic incumbents. But much of House Republicans' fate, particularly in the suburban districts that proved fertile ground for Democrats in 2018, will come down to whether Trump continues to tank or engineers some sort of turnaround.

Unfortunately for the GOP, Trump touting the medical advice of science deniers like the “demon sperm” doc isn't likely to do the trick.

[The Covid pandemic strengthens the case for abolishing a requirement that should never have been imposed in the first place.]

By now, almost everyone recognizes that large gatherings in confined, indoor spaces risk spreading the Coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, 23 states are currently conducting or planning to soon conduct in-person bar exams for new applicants for licenses to practice law. Even with precautions, putting hundreds of people in indoor spaces together for many hours at a time creates serious risks of exacerbating the pandemic.

Admittedly, the danger is smaller because most bar exam takers are young and healthy. However, there are still some older bar applicants, such as lawyers moving from one state to another, who need to be licensed in their new homes. And, of course, some young exam takers have health conditions or weakened immune systems, that make them especially vulnerable, as well. In addition, exam takers could potentially spread the disease to others, including some who are older or otherwise more vulnerable to Covid.

I am not one to say that all seriously risky activities should be avoided so long as the pandemic continues. There is, I think, a strong case for moving forward with those that create enormous benefits that cannot be achieved in another way. That, however, is not true of the bar exam, where there is the obvious alternative of "diploma privilege"—giving bar cards to anyone who has graduated from an accredited law school. Four states –Utah, Washington, Oregon, and Louisiana, have adopted this approach in various forms, joining the state of Wisconsin, which has had it for in-state law schools for years. Other states should follow this example.

The standard argument against diploma privilege is that the bar exam requirement is needed to protect consumers from incompetent lawyers. But there is no evidence that bar exams actually achieve that goal, as opposed to serving as a barrier to entry that protects incumbents in the profession from competition. The quality of legal services in Wisconsin has not suffered from its longstanding diploma privilege policy. Bar records indicate that attorneys in that state have disciplinary records similar to those in other states.

Such results are not surprising. The truth is that the bar exam is a test of arcane memorization, not a test of whether the applicant is likely to be a good attorney. That's why, as my co-blogger Orin Kerr puts it, "when it [the exam] is over you can forget everything you just learned."

For that reason, I have long advocated the abolition of bar exams, most recently here:

The reason why you can "forget everything" immediately after the exam is that very little of the material on the exam is actually needed to practice law. It's a massive memorization test that functions as a barrier to entry, not a genuine test of professional competence. That strengthens the case for my view that the bar exam should simply be abolished….

My general view on bar exams is that they should be abolished, or at least that you should not be required to pass one in order to practice law. If passing the exam really is an indication of superior or at least adequate legal skills, then clients will choose to hire lawyers who have passed the exam even if passage isn't required to be a member of the bar. Even if a mandatory bar exam really is necessary, it certainly should not be administered by state bar associations, which have an obvious interest in reducing the number of people who are allowed to join the profession, so as to minimize competition for their existing members.

Defenders of bar exams argue that consumers would otherwise have little or no way to tell whether a given lawyer is competent or not. But, in reality, there are many other signals to determine that. Often, clients hire not a specific lawyer, but a firm. In that event, the firm's reputation is a signal of quality, and firms have an incentive to protect that reputation by avoiding the hiring of incompetents. Even with solo practitioners, quality can be discerned by consulting past clients, and a variety of other mechanisms.

Legal scholar Gillian Hadfield has an excellent article making the case that barriers to information can be further reduced by eliminating prohibitions on the corporate practice of law. If corporations were allowed to provide basic legal services—as they currently do with many other professional services, such as accounting—that would reduce cost and also make it easier to signal quality. When you hire H&R Block to do your taxes, you are relying on the overall reputation of the firm, not on that of the specific person who handles your case. Legal services can work similarly.

These methods are not perfect. But they are likely to be far better than relying on bar exam passage as a signal of quality, since the latter is really just a test of memorization.

One possible alternative to "diploma privilege" is simply postponing bar exams, as some states have done. But that prevents thousands of recent law graduates from earning an income in the meantime—and blocks clients from using their services. If states are unwilling to forego the bar exam entirely, they should at least provide temporary diploma privilege for a period of, say, three years, by which time the pandemic is likely to be over, and bar exams can be safely administered.

Online bar exams are another possible solution. The obvious objection to them is that it is extremely difficult to prevent cheating on an online "closed book" exam. It may well be impossible to ensure that a test-taker doesn't have study guides or reference books with her as she takes the exam. That doesn't bother me too much, because I believe bar exams are a sham credential in any case. But even I recognize there is some unfairness in a format that rewards those most willing to cheat. In addition, not everyone has access to software and internet connections that are likely to be reliable through many hours of exam taking.

On balance, online exams seem preferable to in-person ones, or to keeping law school graduates in limbo until in-person exams become safer. But diploma privilege is a better approach than either.

For those states that stubbornly insist on holding in-person exams during a pandemic, I am tempted to revive my "modest proposal" for bar exam reform (first developed many years ago):

Members of bar exam boards… and presidents and other high officials of state bar associations should be required to take and pass the bar exam every year by getting the same passing score that they require of ordinary test takers. Any who fail to pass should be immediately dismissed from their positions…. And they should be barred from ever holding those positions again until—you guessed it—they take and pass the exam.

After all, if the bar exam covers material that any practicing lawyer should know, then surely the lawyers who lead the state bar and administer the bar exam system itself should be required to know it. If they don't, how can they possibly be qualified for the offices they hold? Surely it's no excuse to say that they knew it back when they themselves took the test, but have since forgotten. How could any client rely on a lawyer who is ignorant of basic professional knowledge, even if he may have known it years ago?

Of course, few if any bar exam officials or state bar leaders could pass the bar exam without extensive additional study (some might fail even with it)…. This material isn't on the exam because you can't be a competent lawyer if you don't know it. It's there so as to make it more difficult to pass, thereby diminishing competition for current bar association members…..

My proposed reform wouldn't fully solve this problem. But it could greatly diminish it. If bar exam board members and bar association leaders were required to take and pass the exam every year, they would have strong incentives to reduce the amount of petty trivia that is tested. After all, anything they include on the exam is something they themselves will have to memorize! As prominent practicing lawyers, however, they presumably are already familiar with those laws that are so basic that any attorney has to know them; by limiting the exam to those rules, they can minimize their own preparation time. In this way, the material tested on bar exams might be limited to the relatively narrow range of legal rules that the average practicing lawyer really does need to know.

If the knowledge tested on bar exams is so important that we must ensure all practicing lawyers know it—even at the risk of exacerbating a deadly pandemic—then surely that principle applies with extra force to prominent leaders of the legal profession, particularly those responsible for setting professional standards for others. By this reasoning, they should have to take the exam on the same terms as they impose on new bar applicants. If that means taking an in-person exam during a pandemic, then so be it!

On balance, however, I will not insist on this idea, so long as the pandemic continues. I recognize that many bar association leaders are likely to be at special risk, due to age and health conditions. The "modest proposal" might be a useful reform under normal conditions. But it would be wrong to impose it now.

We should not require bar leaders to risk their lives and health for no good reason. But they, in turn, should not impose such risks on others.

Finally, critics may argue that, as a law professor, I have a self-interest in promoting "diploma privilege." My brief response is that I have also long advocated abolishing or at least reducing the requirement that all lawyers attend ABA-accredited law schools, as well. I have also long advocated a variety of other reforms that would have the effect of reducing the demand for law school education and legal services generally—most notably reducing the number and complexity of laws.  I don't claim diploma privilege is the optimal regulatory regime, merely that it's superior to system under which lawyers are required to both have a diploma and pass a worthless bar exam.

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In this coronavirus briefing on Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump once again spoke about how, when a vaccine is available, it will be rushed to the American public by the military. “Logistically we’re using our military, our great military group of people,” said Trump. “Their whole life is based around logistics and bringing things to and from locations, and they’ll be able to take care of this locationally and bringing it where it has to go very, very quickly. They’re all mobilized. It’s been fully set up. A very, very talented general is in charge.”

This wasn’t the first time Trump has announced this plan to use the military to distribute vaccine around the nation. It wasn’t even the second. Trump has spoken about this at least four times just in his less-than-regular briefings on the COVID-19 crisis. And there’s just one problem with his big military distribution plan—it doesn’t exist.

As McClatchy reports, not only does the military not have a plan for distributing vaccines, they haven’t even been asked to come up with such a plan. That’s true for both the regular military and the National Guard. No one has been told to plan. No one has started to prepare. In fact, according to officials from both the Defense Department and the White House, it is “unlikely the military will be involved” in any phase of distributing vaccine.

While some officials did note that the military could assist with distribution—it does, after all, have a few planes and trucks at its disposal—this would be an unusual process. The military doesn’t have either the information on regional healthcare requirements or the contacts that would make them the best means of making this distribution, which officials called “highly unusual.” 

In fact, the Department of Health and Human Services has made the Pentagon aware that HHS may need assistance in reaching “remote sites”—which could include getting vaccine to military bases and outposts outside the country. But even this is a supplemental role, where the military may not be needed at all.

This is 180-degrees from the way Trump is presenting the distribution of vaccine. Not only has Trump repeatedly said that the military is in charge of that distribution, but he has also repeatedly claimed that the whole process has already been planned out. ”They’re all mobilized,” said Trump. “It’s been fully set up.” They’re not mobilized. It’s not been set up. 

With Donald Trump still promoting a drug that does more harm than good and undercutting the use of masks to slow the spread of the virus, this whole “A very, very talented general is in charge,” story may seem like a sideshow. But it also illustrates how Trump cannot be honest about anything. This lie doesn’t gain him anything. It’s just another lie for the sake of lying. 

In Trump’s mind, his “it’s been fully set up” lie shows him as a guy who is ready to slice through the red tape to rush that vaccine to every door. What it actually shows is a man who is so enamored with his own BS that he can’t be trusted to be truthful on a single issue.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro engaged in a combative debate with CNN New Day host John Berman about the unproven and potentially lethal drug hydroxychloroquine, and the quack doctor retweeted by Donald Trump who pushed for its use in a video removed by social networks on Tuesday for spreading false information.

Said Berman of Dr. Stella Immanuel: “She says alien DNA is used in medical treatment. Gynecological issues caused by sex with witches and demons in dreams. Scientists creating vaccine to prevent people from being religious.”

“I know you’re having fun with this,” Navarro protested.

Replied Berman: “Oh God, I’m not having fun with this. I’m deadly serious. My question is … Why lean on Stella Immanuel to make a medical point? … [Trump] talked about Stella Immanuel. He talked about this doctor who promotes demon seed.”

“I have absolutely nothing to say about that,” said Navarro. “I know nothing about her. And if you want to use me as a prop to play her clips…”

When Berman failed to get a response, the conversation turned to the anti-Malarial drug.

“I stand by it,” said Navarro of hydroxychloroquine. “I’m sitting on millions of doses of it.”

Navarro went on to argue that if people listened to a study done by the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and used hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, half of the people who died in the U.S. on Tuesday would still be alive.

Berman then pointed out that the study had limitations and was not randomized, “the people who took hydroxychloroquine were assigned and chosen by the researchers” and were also “twice as likely” to have been given steroids, an effective proven treatment.

Peter Navarro says he's "sitting on millions of doses" of hydroxychloroquine.

THIS is why the administration can't let it go. They bought so much of this shit, they don't know what to do with it.

It must be humiliating to be this dumb.pic.twitter.com/pSMlvkqKyN

— Holly Figueroa O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) July 29, 2020

The post Trump Adviser Says He’s ‘Sitting on Millions of Doses’ of Hydroxychloroquine, Has ‘Nothing to Say’ About President’s Quack ‘Demon Seed’ Doc: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.