James.galbraith

Only days ago, Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence attended a rally in a Dallas, Texas, megachurch packed with over 2,000 people. A, let's say, "highlight" of the event was the megachurch's mega-choir: over 100 singers who sang unmasked during Pence's event despite 1) the Centers for Disease Control warnings to wear masks, 2) singing being a now-identified especially dangerous activity for COVID-19 transmission due to the deep breaths required for voice projection, and 3) pandemic cases soaring in Texas during Pence's visit.

Surprise: There's a fourth reason the event was a horrific idea. BuzzFeed News reports at least five members of the choir and orchestra at the venue had tested positive for COVID-19 in June. Also testing positive: one of the choir's music directors.

While none of those who had tested positive attended the event, the odds that five members of the choir tested positive but that everything was completely fine after that, no further transmissions, no worries are ... low. It also doesn't particularly matter from the White House's standpoint as both Donald Trump and Mike Pence have been at the epicenters of their own persistent disease clusters without, says the most dishonest White House in all of U.S. history, ever testing positive themselves.

Also on the doesn't-care-so-don't-bother-him side of the scale: hard-right evangelical grifter Robert Jeffress, the devoted Trump ally and Trump "Faith Initiative" member who gave his church over to Pence for the event despite the risks. We'll have to wait a few weeks to determine whether additional COVID-19 cases will be associated with Pence's latest stunt, and whether anyone will die. At some point Republicans are going to start caring, if for no other reason than that too many of their own voters dying off might begin to turn swing states a little less swingy.

Because the last one they picked to lead them worked out so well.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've likely noticed that just about every week brings a new headline about a once-reliably Republican demographic group that has now soured on Donald Trump. The catastrophic headlines just keep coming for Trump and GOP lawmakers partly because more voting blocs continue to defect from them and partly because new polling continues to confirm the initial trends being reported. 

It's been a little head spinning, but let's take a look at all the groups of voters who are starting to realize what a treasonous buffoon Trump is and have decided they simply cannot cosign another four ruinous years under his leadership.

Older white voters: We used Civiqs data back in late April to look at this trend, but the New York Times had a fresh look over the weekend.

White non-college educated women: Here's Civiqs data, and here's the Washington Post on the trend.

Suburban women: Actually not new, suburban women turning against Trump and Republicans in sizable numbers was the story of the 2018 midterms and nothing has changed since then.

Suburban everyone: What is new-ish is that Trump is repelling pretty much all suburban voters, white-collar voters. CNN, Politico, Post, U.S. News and World Report.

White voters: Post and NYT.

Swing voters: NYT and Axios.

Of course, none of this assures Democratic success in November, but it sure makes Trump's path to reelection nearly unimaginable at this point. Given that he won the Electoral College in 2016 with just 46% of the vote, once he loses a point here and a point there, the math becomes nearly impossible.

At this rate, Trump's going to be down to white supremacists and neo-Nazis by November and that's about it. That may be a deeply loyal coalition, but sorry, that's not a winning coalition.

A sharply divided Supreme Court stepped in on Thursday night to block a judge’s order requiring Alabama to allow some curbside voting and lift absentee-ballot witness requirements for the Republican Senate primary runoff set to take place on July 14.

The justices voted, 5-4, along ideological lines to block the lower-court ruling, allowing Alabama to carry out the election under its usual rules.

None of the justices issued any statement explaining the decision, so its import for future court rulings on judicially mandated voting changes because of the dangers of the coronavirus is murky.

Experts said the most likely explanation was a 2006 Supreme Court precedent viewed as discouraging late changes to voting procedures because of the possibility for voter confusion.

It’s also possible the ruling could signal a hostility from the high court’s Republican-appointed majority to any judge-ordered changes due to Covid-19. However, it’s not clear that all of those five justices would go that far, and a defection by any one of them might tip the balance of the court in favor of allowing such changes when an election is further away.

“Supreme Court majority is not siding with voters, even during (especially during) a pandemic. This is a big deal,” Rick Hasen, a University of California law professor, wrote on Twitter.

In the Alabama runoff set to take place later this month, former Sen. Jeff Sessions is facing Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn football coach.

President Donald Trump is supporting Tuberville over Sessions, who was an early Trump supporter and served as Trump’s first attorney general, but who has drawn the president’s unrelenting anger for recusing himself from decisions about the federal investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Acting on a lawsuit filed by civil rights groups citing coronavirus dangers, Birmingham-based U.S. District Court Judge Abdul Kallon issued an order on June 15 lifting what the groups said was in practice a statewide ban on curbside voting at polling places. The Obama-appointed judge said he‘d permit willing counties to allow drive-up voting, but he stopped short of requiring such an accommodation.

Because of the virus, Alabama officials are allowing any registered voter to cast an absentee ballot in the upcoming election without having to cite a valid reason. Absentee voters are also required by state law to submit a copy of a photo ID and to have their ballots signed off by two witnesses or a notary public, but Kallon set aside those requirements in the three counties that were the focus of the lawsuit.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday in the Alabama case appeared to echo its decision on a 5-4 vote in April to overturn a federal judge’s order requiring Wisconsin officials to count primary ballots received after Election Day.

In that case, the court’s majority declared: “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

The Republican-appointed justices insisted they were not taking a position on the merits of the Wisconsin ruling, but simply the timing. However, Democratic-appointed justices noted that because of the emergent nature of the pandemic, any such orders were likely to be issued fairly close to Election Day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new generation of reactors coming online in the next few years aims to make nuclear meltdowns a thing of the past. Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they'll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium individually wrapped in protective shells. It's called triso fuel, and it's like a radioactive gobstopper. Triso -- short for "tristructural isotropic" -- fuel is made from a mixture of low enriched uranium and oxygen, and it is surrounded by three alternating layers of graphite and a ceramic called silicon carbide. Each particle is smaller than a poppy seed, but its layered shell can protect the uranium inside from melting under even the most extreme conditions that could occur in a reactor. Paul Demkowicz is the director of the Advanced Gas Reactor Field Development and Qualification Program at Idaho National Laboratory, and a large part of his job is simulating worst-case scenarios for next-generation nuclear reactors. For the past few years, Demkowicz and his colleagues have been running qualification tests on triso fuel that involve putting them in a reactor and cranking the temperature. Most nuclear reactors today operate well below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and even the next generation high-temperature reactors will top out at about 2,000 degrees. But during the INL tests, Demkowicz demonstrated that triso could withstand reactor temperatures over 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Out of 300,000 particles, not a single triso coating failed during the two-week long test. "In the new reactor designs, it's basically impossible to exceed these temperatures, because the reactor kind of shuts down as it reaches these high temperatures," says Demkowicz. "So if you take these reactor designs and combine them with a fuel that can handle the heat, you essentially have an accident-proof reactor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jillian Wuestenberg, the 32-year-old white woman who threatened a Black family at gunpoint outside a Chipotle in Michigan on Wednesday, has been arrested and charged with felonious assault.

Wuestenberg’s husband, 42-year-old Eric Wuestenberg, also faces a charge of felonious assault for his role in the incident. And Oakland University, where Eric Wuestenberg served as coordinator for veterans’ support services, issued a statement saying he has been fired.

“We have seen the video and we deem his behavior unacceptable. The employee has been notified that his employment has been terminated by the university,” the statement said.

The Wuestenbergs threatened Takelia Hill and her 15-year-old daughter, Makayla Green, following a dispute outside the restaurant in Orion County. Makayla Green’s video of the incident has been viewed more than 13 million times.

Each of the Wuestenbergs possessed a loaded firearm and a CHL license, according to police. Hill and Makayla were unarmed.

The Detroit News reports: The couple was arraigned Thursday at 52-3 District Court in Rochester Hills. Both were given a $50,000 personal bond. “As part of the bond conditions, they must turn over all firearms, not engage in any assaultive behavior, and may not leave the state,” sheriff’s officials said. During a Thursday afternoon press conference at Oakland County Sheriff’s Office headquarters in Pontiac, the department played six 911 calls that came in around 6 p.m. Wednesday, one allegedly from Jillian Wuestenberg, saying she felt threatened and two females were damaging her car in the parking lot on the 4900 block of South Baldwin, near Interstate 75.

Watch a report from ABC Channel 7 below.

The post Gun-Wielding ‘Karen’ and Her Husband Face Felony Charges for Threatening Black Family at Chipotle: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Congressional Republicans are ready and eager to see the expanded unemployment insurance of the CARES Act expire at the end of July, and Senate Republicans are dragging their feet on the next coronavirus-related economic relief bill. Boy, is that ever the opposite of what voters want.

New polling from Data for Progress finds that a whopping 69% of voters say the CARES Act helped them or someone in their household. That includes 69% of Republicans, with just 19% saying it didn’t help anyone in their household. Even more voters—74%—support the CARES Act, including 64% of Republicans.

That’s not all. Large majorities of voters are concerned about the ongoing and possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including another wave of sickness causing more shutdowns, state and local budget problems causing layoffs, people being unable to pay essential bills, and more. 

With the continued worries about the effects of the pandemic comes support for Congress passing more relief. Data for Progress asked voters: “The ‘Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act’ or HEROES Act is a $3 trillion bill which includes increasing aid for state, local, and tribal governments to fund education and public services, extending pandemic unemployment insurance benefits through January 2021, protections for essential workers, food assistance, and provides more direct payments to Americans. Do you support or oppose the HEROES Act?” 

Sixty-six percent of voters said they supported the bill. Which, again, passed the House six weeks ago and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is sitting back and waiting.

Expanded unemployment benefits are keeping millions of people afloat, and continuing the extra $600 payments would support up to 5.1 million jobs, because unemployed people would still have money to spend. Just for starters. We need so much more. But Republicans will not have it—in direct opposition to the will of not just a majority of voters, but a majority of Republican voters.

The social network bills itself as a 'no censorship' bastion -- but it's already had to remind users what is and isn't allowed. From a report: In recent weeks, Donald Trump has started having his tweets factchecked and published with disclaimers when they contain misleading information. Katie Hopkins, the woman who once compared migrants to cockroaches and called for a "final solution" in relation to Muslims, has been banned from Twitter. And a subreddit called r/The_Donald has been banned after Reddit updated its hate speech guidelines -- Reddit said in a statement that "mocking people with physical disabilities" and "describing a racial minority as sub-human and inferior to the racial majority" will not be allowed. And so, naturally, people are asking where on earth they are supposed to go to get their daily dose of "free speech." Enter Parler, the new, supposedly unbiased free-speech social network that suggests, when you join, you follow people such as Rand Paul, Hopkins and Rudy Giuliani. Other rightwing politicians such as Ted Cruz and Devin Nunes are on it. So too are the much-overlooked members of the Trump family Eric and Lara, commentators such as Candace Owens, and Donald Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale. A glance at Parler might lead you to think that the platform is just a benign, more boring version of Twitter. Megyn Kelly is on Parler telling you she doesn't like Mary Trump's new book; Eric Trump is posting boring statements such as "Another great day for the market (amazing how the media and left have been very quiet about this incredible recovery)" -- which reminds you of why Don Jr is the more popular brother; the Daily Caller is retweeting (re-parlering?) a bunch of articles that look like they belong on the Onion. But since the platform's selling point is that it provides a safe space for people who want to use hate speech, the ugliness is there if you want to find it: Hopkins is equating Black Lives Matter protests with "thuggery" and posting comments such as "Our white girls pay the price. Every time" in a post about illegal immigration in Scotland. Andrew Torba -- who tried to make his own alternative free-speech network for those exiled from Twitter -- has called it a magnet for "Z-list Maga celebrities." His website, Gab, quickly became popular with extremists including antisemites and neo-Nazis -- including the Pittsburgh synagogue suspect Robert Bowers, who announced his intentions for mass murder on the platform. Torba's experience shows that regulating free speech on a platform that allows hate speech to run rampant is rife with its own challenges. After the attack in Pittsburgh, Gab was forced offline for a brief period after being dropped by its server, GoDaddy, who said that encouraging violence was in breach of its terms of service.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced has declared a state of emergency in Puerto Rico, and water will now be rationed on parts of the island, with some families getting water just every other day. This is taking place in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, when frequent hand-washing is particularly important. There is also a severe drought in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which has been completely ignored by mainland mainstream media.

Predictably, there has not been a word about any of this from the resident of the Oval Office, or from his Republican enablers in the Senate, some of whom claim to “care about Puerto Rico” when they want votes, but do nothing to alleviate the problems on the island, or to actually get the funds already allocated by Congress to the island.

The Los Angeles Times explains the new protocol in Puerto Rico.

Starting July 2, nearly 140,000 clients, including some in the capital of San Juan, will be without water for 24 hours every other day as part of strict rationing measures. Puerto Rico’s utilities company urged people to not excessively stockpile water because it would worsen the situation, and officials asked that everyone use masks and maintain social distancing if they seek water from one of 23 water trucks set up across the island. [...]

More than 26% of the island is experiencing a severe drought and another 60% is under a moderate drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Water rationing measures affecting more than 16,000 clients were imposed this month in some communities in the island’s northeast region.

Gov. Wanda Vázquez said 21 of 78 municipalities are affected by severe drought while another 29 by moderate drought. An additional 12 municipalities face abnormally dry conditions. The worst of the drought is concentrated in Puerto Rico’s southern region, which continues to be affected by aftershocks following a magnitude 6.0 earthquake that hit in early January and caused millions of dollars in damage.

Dánica Coto dives deeper into the restrictions, writing for the Associated Press.

An administrative order signed Monday prohibits certain activities in most municipalities including watering gardens during daylight hours, filling pools and using a hose or non-recycled water to wash cars. Those caught face fines ranging from $250 for residents to $2,500 for industries for a first violation.

Vázquez’s announcement comes amid criticism of her administration for not dredging reservoirs, which would eliminate sediment and avoid excess loss of water. Pagán said the utilities company has been in conversation with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency since Hurricane Maria about a $300 million dredging investment. She blamed the lengthy process on the number of studies and analysis needed and that require FEMA’s approval.

The upcoming water rationing measures will affect clients who are connected to the Carraízo reservoir, one of 11 that Puerto Rico’s government operates. Pagán said that reservoir was last dredged in the late 1990s. Five other reservoirs are under a state of observation. Officials have already taken other measures, including activating water wells and transferring more than 30,000 clients from Carraízo to another reservoir.

Here’s an interesting, if disturbing, bit of information.

I doubt seriously that most people on the island can afford to buy from water trucks, however the trucks may find customers among the big hotels and tourism businesses.  

While there has been some mainstream coverage of the Vázquez announcement, what is disturbing for me is the lack of news on the U.S. Virgin Islands, except from Caribbean sources—including from Caribbean Climate Hub, which currently has only 885 Twitter followers.

I just had a conversation about the glaring omission.

As a young person, I used to spend part of my summers visiting a cousin in St. Thomas. Though the big hotels could afford to buy water shipped in on barges from Puerto Rico, most islanders depended on rain water captured by cisterns, which are now mandated by law. There now are also ”reverse osmosis desalinization plants.”

In the Virgin Islands more than 90% of the population utilize rainwater harvesting. This practice involves collecting rain from rooftops and storing it in cisterns, usually built into the house foundation. During times of heavy rainfall the cisterns may overflow and run-off. On the other hand, in times of low water levels residents may need to purchase water from private vendors, which can be costly and difficult for those living in hard to reach areas…

As climate change continues to impact the Caribbean region, annual precipitation is expected to decrease by 10% by 2050. This can exacerbate issues of water scarcity and can have negative impacts on agriculture and society.

St. Thomas Source notes that this drought is historic.

The territory has battled various droughts over the decade, some years more severe than others, but even after significant rainfall over the last couple weeks the territory is now considered to be in a severe drought according to the United States Drought Monitor Map.

Director of the Green Caribbean Center at the University of the Virgin Islands Greg Guannel said the territory will be breaking a record this year, with the past few months the driest ever reported.

Non-voting Democratic Rep. Stacy Plaskett just spoke out about the need for aid to the USVI.

The droughts currently affecting both territories need to be addressed, given that future droughts will more than likely be worse. It isn’t like this wasn’t predicted—just read Alexander Kaufman’s in-depth story in HuffPost from November 2019 which notes that “lax regulation, austerity and climate change are setting the stage for another catastrophe.”

This is a disaster that predates the 2017 hurricanes that exposed both the island’s deteriorating living standards and the lethal fragility of its water systems. For decades, this farming region turned industrial hub has tapped the aquifer that stretches more than 50 miles along the southern coast here. But stresses on the once-mighty South Coast basin are mounting. Real estate developers are paving over land that once absorbed rain and recharged the groundwater below. Pollution is contaminating the dwindling supply of freshwater. Agribusiness giants operate with near impunity as austerity renders overextended regulators ineffective.

All the while the planet is getting hotter, propelling Puerto Rico toward more catastrophic droughts and rising seas that gush saltwater into coastal aquifers. “Where there is rain deficit, there is saline intrusion, especially in a coastal aquifer,” said José M. Rodríguez, a retired U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who studied the aquifer for 31 years. “The problem of climate change will worsen the situation.”

Lax regulation, decaying public infrastructure and an ongoing debt crisis have left the troubled U.S. possession incapable of reliably delivering water to all its 3.2 million residents. Less than half the water the public utility treats makes it to ratepayers, and nearly all of that which does is of dubious quality, compelling only the most desperate Puerto Ricans to drink what flows from the tap. The most obvious solution is a total overhaul. But the colonial government, hounded by Wall Street creditors and in a state of chaotic quasi-bankruptcy, can barely keep the lights on, stoking fears that profiteers looking to buy up the indebted public power company may target water services next.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Thomas Jonathan Jackson was a deeply disturbed weirdo who liked to suck on lemons while holding one hand in the air to “balance his blood.” He was a religious fanatic who liked to kill people on Sundays because he believed it showed he had God’s blessing. He was a vicious butcher who, in the words of one of the soldiers who served under him, “Would have a man shot at the drop of a hat—and he would drop it himself.” He was a heartless bastard who purposely directed artillery fire into a crowd of civilians. Above all, he was an avowed traitor and unrepentant slave-owner whose death came at the hands of his own men.

No character in the Civil War may have benefited from as much dedicated publicity as T. J. “Stonewall” Jackson. His successes early in the war made him the darling of the Confederate press and his conveniently being dead after 1863 allowed Confederacy fans to get an early start on constructing a multi-layered hagiography that is well-represented in Jackson’s fawning Wikipedia entry. The wholly undeserved sainthood and “brilliance” attributed to this bastard was showcased by the statue erected to him in Richmond, Virginia, in 1919. And now that statue is down. That deserves a cheer.

If there’s any myth more beloved in the South than the whole “Lost Cause,” it’s that of Stonewall Jackson as the indispensable man. If only Jackson hadn’t been shot. If only Jackson had stayed with Lee. If only Jackson had been on hand at Gettysburg he would have … it’s endless.

Was Thomas Jackson a brilliant military strategist? No. He was a moderately competent commander with some field experience in an era where the bar for “brilliance” was set so low it would not have allowed the passage of a snail. If you check the astounding tongue-bath that passes for Jackson’s entry on Wikipedia, you’ll be informed that “his tactics are still studied today.” Yes, so are those of innumerable dead losers—as history.

That Wikipedia entry (warning: not recommended unless you have a strong stomach and something nearby that you don’t mind punching) provides some perfect examples of how this charmless rat bastard was turned into the first man of the Confederacy. In the section describing Jackson’s relation to slavery, there’s this lovely little line from Jackson’s wife, offered as an example of how well he just loved Black people: “He preferred that my labors should be given to the colored children, believing that it was more important and useful to put the strong hand of the Gospel under the ignorant African race, to lift them up.” Well, bless his f’ing heart. Possibly worse is this line: “Jackson was revered by many of the African Americans in town, both slaves and free blacks.” It’s worse because it’s authored by a modern day editor at Wikipedia, without citation and certainly without justification.

That section is heavily dependent on the ass-polishing given to Jackson in the 1997 book by James Robertson, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend—which, you can tell from just the title, is going to be some first class-third class hokum. Even with those low expectations, you might be surprised to know that Jackson’s slaves—and oh yes, he owned slaves—asked him to buy them. That’s right. Jackson was so beloved, that a woman once asked him to buy her. At a slave auction. Where Jackson was probably just, you know, passing by. Another man asked Jackson to buy him “so he could earn his freedom” (spoiler alert: Jackson never freed him). Because he was just that beloved.

People started making up this crap about Jackson before he was dead, and they have not stopped. The unfettered, unending attempts to dip this hardboiled sack of blue-eyed bullshit in some kind of saintly rose water are sickening in any century. This is a man whose own sister disowned him and said she, "would rather know that he was dead than to have him a leader in the rebel army." When Jackson was shot by his own men on May 2, 1863, there were rumors right from the start that it was not an “accident,” that it was done on purpose by men who almost universally hated the man. But the forces of Saint Stonewall revisionism were busy even then, decorating this event with everything from tearful troops to tragic last words.

And … oh yeah. The statue. Unfortunately, there are a lot of statues of the traitor other traitors love the most, including one that stands above the bones of his bloody horse (The horse’s hide is in a museum. It is that bad.) But this particular statue, looming over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, finally came down on Wednesday on orders from Mayor Levar Stoney and with the approval of Governor Ralph Northam.

Mayor Stoney said that it was past time for the statue to come down. That’s certainly true. Unfortunately, it will take a lot more time to knock down the image that’s been generated for this murdering slave owner whose best quality is being long dead.

Sometimes, democracy means you lose. And that can't be fair, can it?

In general, the Republican Party gets between 5 and 10 percent of the Black vote and less than a third of the Hispanic vote nationally. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Clare Malone discusses the series of choices the GOP made, spanning decades, that made it an overwhelmingly white party. At key moments in history, Republicans considered greater outreach to minority voters but ultimately didn’t take that path.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast publishes Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Following 13 months of stalling by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Democrats on Wednesday attempted to advance House-passed legislation putting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients onto a path to citizenship, just one of the items legislators worked to pass through unanimous consent (UC) that day. Senate Democrats were successful in passing a loan program extension, but one Republican senator blocked the dreams of young immigrants on the other legislation.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois “spoke eloquently, as he has done on many occasions over many years, about immigrant heroes, including Cinthya Ramirez, a Dreamer and health care professional with DACA,” advocacy group America’s Voice said. “She would be able to remain in America permanently if the Dream and Promise Act was approved.” But: “Immediately following Sen. Durbin’s remarks, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas came to the floor to object to Sen. Durbin’s motion, blocking a vote on the Dream and Promise Act for now.”

Houston Chronicle reports Cruz used his time on the floor to condemn the Supreme Court’s historic decision ruling the Trump administration illegally ended the DACA program as a “particularly disgraceful opinion,” launch into a gross attack about immigrants and crime, and say that the Senate should instead be focused on other priorities, like the novel coronavirus disaster.

Ted, we also wish that the Senate would be more focused on the pandemic and pass the HEROES Act to help everyday families who are still struggling after getting one single $1,200 check weeks and weeks ago (if they were fortunate enough to get one at all). But that bill, also passed by the House, is still languishing on McConnell’s desk. Cruz is instead saving his trademark theatrical bloviating for the C-SPAN cameras and his Twitter followers, and not to help the over 100,000 DACA recipients who call his state home. 

He also escalated attacks on the DACA program itself, calling it illegal even though the Supreme Court decided no such thing. Again, what the court said was that the president that Cruz defends unlawfully acted in his attempt to separate hundreds of thousands of young people from their families and communities. “Cruz also said DACA led to a wave of unaccompanied children arriving at the border and has encouraged human trafficking—claims that have been debunked,” the Chronicle continued.

“It’s worth noting who didn’t get sent to the floor to trash immigrants and thwart Dreamers and TPS holders,” America’s Voice founder and executive director Frank Sharry said. “Senators John Cornyn (R-TX), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Martha McSally (R-AZ) and David Perdue (R-GA) were nowhere to be found. They face reelection in diverse states and dehumanizing immigrants a la Donald Trump and Ted Cruz may not play very well outside of the shrinking cul-de-sac that is Trump’s core of white grievance voters.”

“Ted Cruz should be ashamed—where is the junior Texas Senator’s empathy for over 100,000 Dreamers working in Texas, the only place they have ever called home?” Texas representative and Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Joaquin Castro said, according to the Chronicle. “Today’s obstruction is yet another example of unfounded animosity towards DACA recipients who are hardworking, outstanding members of our American family.”

A customer staged an apparent sit-in at a Costco store recently after refusing to put on her mask.

Video of the incident posted online begins with a very patient Costco employee explaining to the woman, whose mask is hanging around her ear, that she needs to wear it in order to be in the building.

“I will not,” the woman tells the employee, adding that the mask requirement is “your problem.”

The woman, who is apparently attempting to return an item, admits she doesn’t have a medical exemption to the mask requirement, and at one point declares she is “a United States citizen.”

After the employee tries to escort the woman outside to wait for a manager, she sits down near the front of the store, partially blocking the exit — before moving to a another location in front of a kiosk.

After the manager comes out, the woman declares “I’m an American. I have constitutional rights.”

Watch two versions of the video below.

New ‘Costco Karen’ Sighting —throws 3-yr-old type tantrum— sits on the floor and won’t leave because “this is America..” —tries to lie about medical condition then changes her mind pic.twitter.com/GLDmPDnGar

— ONLY iN LVNV ➐ (@OnlyInLVNV) July 2, 2020

Karen had enough. She performed a sit in at Costco after refusing to wear a mask. #costco

Sidenote: these Costco employees have the patience of a saints. pic.twitter.com/9W7GlpIpim

— Jonah (@BookofJonah) July 2, 2020

The post Costco Karen Stages Sit-In After Refusing to Wear Mask: ‘I’m an American. I Have Constitutional Rights.’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Trump will likely continue lying about vote-by-mail with impunity.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth on Thursday announced she'll hold up the confirmation of more than 1,000 military promotions until Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirms that the promotion of impeachment witness Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman won't be blocked.

Duckworth, a retired Army officer who lost both legs because of injuries sustained in the Iraq war, said she intends to block 1,123 promotions until Esper "confirms in writing that he did not, or will not, block the expected and deserved promotion" of Vindman to colonel.

The move by the Illinois Democrat raises the stakes amid reports that the White House could nix Vindman's promotion from a list of officers set to move up the ranks.

"Our military is supposed to be the ultimate meritocracy," Duckworth said. "It is simply unprecedented and wrong for any Commander in Chief to meddle in routine military matters at all, whether or not he has a personal vendetta against a Soldier who did his patriotic duty and told the truth — a Soldier who has been recommended for promotion by his superiors because of his performance. I won’t just sit by and let it happen, and neither should any of my colleagues."

"This goes far beyond any single military officer, it is about protecting a merit-based system from political corruption and unlawful retaliation," she added.

Duckworth said her blockade on senior nominees would exempt Army Gen. Gustave Perna, whom Trump nominated to help lead the administration's effort to develop and produce a coronavirus vaccine. Perna was confirmed to the post Thursday afternoon.

"It is disappointing that Senator Duckworth would willingly impede the careers of more than a thousand deserving Army officers, many of whom are deployed overseas defending our country," a Pentagon official said. "In addition, among those officers is the nominated next Chief of the National Guard Bureau, who, if confirmed, would be responsible for leading tens of thousands of Guardsmen deployed around the country helping local communities fight Covid-19."

Vindman, who served on the National Security Council staff, listened to President Donald Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019 and later testified in public before the House impeachment inquiry.

Trump has publicly attacked Vindman, and the officer was ousted from his job at the NSC after the Senate acquitted Trump of charges that he abused his power by withholding security assistance to Ukraine for his political gain.

In the wake of his acquittal, Trump and his allies have also ousted other members of the administration viewed as disloyal.

The White House pulled the nomination of Elaine McCusker to be Pentagon comptroller this year. McCusker did not testify in the House probe, but was revealed in emails to have questioned the legality of the White House budget office's freeze on Ukraine funding. She has since resigned as the acting Pentagon budget chief.

In addition, Gordon Sondland, who testified in the impeachment probe, was recalled from his post as ambassador to the European Union.

Rep. Andy Biggs, chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, on Thursday called on the White House to shutter its coronavirus task force, claiming the nation’s top public health experts were undermining President Donald Trump.

“As our economy is restored, it is imperative that President Trump is not undermined in his mission to return our economy to greatness,” the Arizona Republican said in a statement released after the Labor Department reported the U.S. economy had added 4.8 million jobs in June and the unemployment rate had fallen to 11.1 percent.

Biggs went on to assert that Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “continue to contradict many of President Trump’s stated goals and actions for returning to normalcy as we know more about” the highly infectious outbreak.

“This is causing panic that compromises our economic recovery,” Biggs said. “We can protect our most vulnerable from the COVID-19 outbreak while still protecting lives and livelihoods of the rest of the population. It’s time for the COVID-19 task force to be disbanded so that President Trump’s message is not mitigated or distorted.”

The demand from a leading Republican lawmaker and fierce ally of the president comes after the U.S. reported a record number of new Covid-19 infections Wednesday, surpassing 50,000 cases for the first time.

Biggs’ own home state of Arizona is among those across the South and West contributing to the precipitous climbs in caseloads. The Arizona Department of Health Services logged record numbers of daily coronavirus cases and additional deaths Wednesday, and the three most populous states — California, Florida and Texas — have also seen spikes.

And although Biggs echoed the president in touting Thursday’s jobs numbers, the Labor Department’s mid-month survey did not account for the latest wave of shutdowns ordered by governors now halting their states’ reopening plans. Americans filed 1.4 million new applications for unemployment benefits last week, the department reported.

Still, Biggs insisted the U.S. economy “is roaring back as we predicted,” arguing the “pro-growth foundation that President Trump set over the past 3+ years is paying dividends in one of our nation’s most-uncertain times.”

In the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s top health official is focused on showing his face in states that President Donald Trump needs to win for reelection.

Since late April, HHS Secretary Alex Azar has made 11 trips to states — including nine to key battlegrounds in the 2020 campaign: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Maine and North Carolina, as well as two trips apiece to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. One of the other two trips was a visit to Buffalo, N.Y., the hometown of a top aide who recently joined the department at Trump’s request and personally arranged Azar’s visit to the city. The other was to Boston, the media market for yet another battleground state, New Hampshire.

The health secretary’s agenda at these stops included visiting hospitals, announcing awards and pushing on a message that the president was steadily managing the crisis. Some of the trips were part of Azar’s “health vs. health” messaging campaign, where he argued that an overriding focus to contain the coronavirus was creating other risks to mental health and well-being.

"We’ve got so much testing capacity here in the country now thanks to the president building this unprecedented, historically unprecedented testing system," Azar said in a trip to Florida on May 22, which followed months of criticism that the Trump administration was unprepared to roll out widespread coronavirus testing.

“What we’re seeing in places like Georgia or other parts around the country is as we reopen, people can get back connected to work, school, to summer camp to health care in ways that are safe,” Azar told a local Atlanta TV station on June 16 during his trip to the state, praising Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for their response. In the interview, the health secretary also dismissed recent coronavirus spikes around the nation as the product of more testing, the station reported, a claim that public health experts have subsequently debunked.

Some of Azar’s trips were conducted jointly with the White House or closely scheduled, like Azar’s visit to Wisconsin health facilities last week that preceded Trump’s visit to the swing state the next day. Azar also accompanied Trump on a May 14 trip to Pennsylvania and a June 5 trip to Maine, and he joined Vice President Mike Pence for a trip to Wisconsin on April 21, as part of a series of trips where White House officials toured factories making coronavirus-related supplies.

Azar’s trips come amid plunging poll numbers for Trump over his handling of the virus, even in once-reliable Republican strongholds like Georgia. A survey conducted by left-leaning Public Policy Polling, also released on June 16, found that Democratic challenger Joe Biden had a narrow lead over Trump in the state. Trump also is behind Biden by five or more points in states like Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll released on Wednesday.

Azar’s frequent visits to swing states — and his consistent promotion of Trump — struck current and former HHS officials as unusually political for a Cabinet secretary, particularly during an outbreak that Azar’s department has struggled to manage.

Several Obama administration veterans noted that the swing states visited by Azar were not, with a few exceptions, where the outbreak was most serious, suggesting that the health chief was prioritizing politics over helping the states that were most affected.

“This shows the president’s priorities,” said Andy Slavitt, who ran the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration. “I’d like to see the members of the task force dutifully working on and reporting on this crisis or if they travel, going to hospitals in Arizona, Texas, and Florida rather than Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”

Leslie Dach, senior counselor to former HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, said, “That kind of travel was not considered or talked about in the time I was there.” He added that Burwell was "tethered to her desk" during public-health crises like Ebola and Zika.

The Biden campaign also argued that the Trump administration was prioritizing politics over public health. “It's absolutely shameful that Secretary Azar is hitting the campaign trail on the taxpayer's dime even as COVID-19 cases spike across the country,” said Biden spokesperson Michael Gwin.

In a statement, HHS said questions about Azar’s travel priorities were “wrong and insulting.” The department listed off examples of the health secretary visiting states to gauge reopening efforts, such as Azar’s May 21 trip to North Carolina, where Azar met with local health leaders and discussed efforts to protect NASCAR drivers and attendees of the scheduled Republican National Convention.

“Secretary Azar and President Trump believe that every single American voice deserves to be heard and that’s why we’re traveling around his country to learn and inform the response,” said Michael Caputo, the department’s top spokesperson. “We’re committed to getting the message directly to the American people about the Trump Administration’s actions to keep Americans healthy and safe instead of filtering the message through biased reporters in Washington with an anti-Trump agenda.”

Caputo, a Trump loyalist who was installed at HHS by the president in April, helped arrange Azar’s trip to Buffalo, N.Y., after speaking with an old friend who was working on a hospital project there, according to a Buffalo News article last month that Caputo promoted on his Twitter feed.

Asked about arranging the trip, Caputo confirmed his involvement and said that the goal of the New York trip was to highlight the need to resume local cancer screenings, which had dramatically declined, and other health procedures.

“Buffalo General was having difficulty getting a waiver from Governor [Andrew] Cuomo to reopen for elective procedures, but when the governor heard that Secretary Azar was coming, the hospital was granted a waiver that same day,” Caputo said. “Today, cancer screenings are returning to normal and Buffalo General Hospital is resuming elective procedures apace. You’re welcome.”

In recent weeks, Azar has been working to get back into the president’s good graces after a series of controversies.

Late in the spring, senior White House officials weighed replacing Azar after a series of widely publicized internal battles between the secretary and other top officials, including Medicaid chief Seema Verma and then-domestic policy chief Joe Grogan. The White House also grew frustrated with how Azar was managing the coronavirus response, leading to Trump abruptly replacing Azar with Pence as head of the White House coronavirus task force on Feb. 26.

Meanwhile, Azar has struggled to deliver on Trump’s ambitious plan of lowering drug prices, with the administration having abandoned many of the provisions that Azar initially laid out as part of a 2018 drug-pricing blueprint. Drug makers boosted the prices of nearly 500 prescription drugs at the start of this year, according to health care research firm 3 Axis Advisors, and drug price hikes remain “relentless,” according to a March 3 editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But the secretary has been assured that his status is secure through the election, barring any major controversies, four officials with knowledge of internal deliberations said.

Caputo, the HHS spokesperson, disputed reports about Azar’s standing, saying “I can tell you that the American people want information they can use to fight the coronavirus, not palace intrigue still circulating months after it’s been debunked.”

But inside the health agency, some officials said Azar’s trips to battleground states — where he has relentlessly promoted Trump’s work in interviews with local media — reflected his growing rapprochement with the White House as well as a desire to stake out his own lane, even as Azar deputies like Verma, Surgeon General Jerome Adams and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn have seen their own profiles grow during the crisis.

“There is a figurehead responsibility that goes along with that role” as secretary, said a senior HHS official. “He has been searching for his role ever since he chaired the coronavirus task force and was dethroned.”

The official then pointed to Azar’s key role in the Operation Warp Speed vaccine project as well as his renewed high-profile on TV programs like “Meet the Press” this past weekend and at White House briefings, after a monthslong period when the health secretary was publicly sidelined. “These things, taken in totality paint a very different picture than the guy who was embattled,” the official said.

In media appearances that accompanied his trips, Azar also consistently touted an optimistic view of the coronavirus crisis, including for his recent visit to health facilities in Massachusetts — whose TV and radio stations broadcast into the populous Boston suburbs of southern New Hampshire, another battleground state.

“That’s why I’m coming up to Boston, and I’m traveling around the country, is to get the message out that thanks to President Trump’s historic response to this crisis and work with our governors, we need to reopen,” Azar said in an appearance on a conservative talk radio host Howie Carr’s program on June 11— “the woke mob is coming for Paw Patrol” episode — ahead of his visit to Massachusetts the next day. “We have the tools to do it.”

Over 100 House Democrats are calling on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to reopen the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to new applicants, who have been shut out of applying for protections following the Trump administration’s rescission in 2017 but should now be eligible following the Supreme Court historic ruling earlier this month.

Tuesday in fact marks two weeks since the justices in a 5-4 decision ruled the administration illegally ended the program, but for two weeks, the administration has not budged. “We should not need to tell you that under our Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court, not the administration, determines whether the rescission of DACA was lawful,” members wrote. “USCIS and the administration must faithfully administer our nation’s immigration laws by providing clear guidance implementing the court’s order.”

The 110 House Democrats note that immediately following the Supreme Court’s ruling, USCIS—mind you, historically a paper-pushing agency that processes naturalization applications, in just one example—sent out an unhinged statement “implying that they will defy the U.S. Supreme Court on their decision,” United We Dream Florida state coordinator Thomas Kennedy tweeted at the time. The USCIS statement also called DACA “illegal” when the Supreme Court ruled no such thing. 

“The Supreme Court’s decision was also a moral victory for the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers across our country, for their families and communities, and for our core values as a nation of immigrants,” members told acting Homeland Security Deputy Sec. Ken Cuccinelli (who himself was unlawfully appointed to USCIS, another court found earlier this year). “We were extremely disappointed to see administration officials ignore their mandate and use USCIS’s public platform to make a political attack undermining the rule of law and Dreamers.”

”We ask that you not only remove the statement,” they continue, “but also provide clear guidance to the public and USCIS employees that you will immediately begin accepting new DACA applications and will resume accepting and adjudicating applications for advance parole for DACA recipients.”

Nearly the entire Senate Democratic caucus also recently called on the the administration to reopen the program to tens of thousands of undocumented teens who have now become old enough to apply, if Trump would just let them. But, there’s also so much uncertainty even if they’re able to apply, because USCIS is near broke and in need of congressional assistance soon.

“As the Supreme Court has recognized, it is well within your executive authority to protect Dreamers,” legislators led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois tell Trump. “Only Congress can provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, but it is up to you whether to use your administration’s authority to allow these young immigrants who have benefitted America in countless ways to continue contributing to our nation, or to continue your efforts to deport them.” 

“Within hours of the ruling from the Supreme Court, Trump signaled that he would try again to end the DACA,” United We Dream advocacy director Sanaa Abrar said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “Trump must stop attacking DACA, and instead follow the Supreme Court ruling and instruct USCIS to start accepting new DACA applications and continue allowing current DACA recipients to renew their work permits and protections from deportation.”

Eleven Films released a powerful new anti-Trump ad on Thursday, featuring footage from recent protests calling for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

“In November, we have one last chance to save America. #VoteForOurLives,” Eleven Films wrote above the ad on Twitter, where it quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

Titled “The Dangerous Ones”, the two-minute, 29-second ad is set to the song of the same name, performed by Kasey Anderson. It was funded by the Resistance.

“We’re almost there,” a title screen reads near the end of the ad. “We’ve been through hell. We must vote.”

Watch it below.

BREAKING: The Dangerous Ones

In November, we have one last chance to save America. #VoteForOurLives pic.twitter.com/QbZa7YXDQs

— Eleven Films (@Eleven_Films) July 2, 2020

The post ‘We Have One Last Chance to Save America’: This Powerful New Anti-Trump Ad Will Bring Tears to Your Eyes (WATCH) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The Reclaim Pride Coalition took to the streets of Manhattan for the second annual Queer Liberation March on June 28, 2020. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

The proposed rule would allow shelters to ignore a trans person’s gender identity and house them according to their birth-assigned sex.

The Housing and Urban Development Agency announced a proposed rule Wednesday that would allow homeless shelters that receive federal funding to discriminate against transgender people.

Though the text of the proposed rule is not yet available and the rule has not been posted on the Federal Register, the agency issued a press release announcing it, explaining that while shelters are barred from excluding people based on their transgender status, they are also allowed to ignore a person’s gender identity and house them according to their assigned sex at birth or their legal sex. In other words, a trans woman can’t be turned away from a shelter for being trans, but she can be forced to house in a men’s shelter.

Dylan Waguespack, a spokesperson for True Colors United, an advocacy group that focuses on supporting LGBTQ homeless youth, said that HUD Secretary Ben Carson is “talking out of both sides of his mouth.”

“They are trying to put forward this narrative in which transgender people are protected from discrimination, but in fact, when you read the proposal itself, it does the exact opposite,” he told Vox. “It creates unsafe conditions and unsafe barriers to housing and services for trans people in the midst of a global pandemic.”

The rule, if finalized, would not overrule state and local laws, but it would go into effect in the 38 states that do not already have housing protections for transgender people.

It’s the latest in a long line of anti-trans policies rolled out by the Trump administration. Almost immediately after he took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo for schools to fairly treat trans students. Then in July of that year, Trump announced he would be ordering the military to ban trans people from serving. The administration went after trans prisoners as well in May 2018, deciding that in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth.

“This is a continual angle for the administration to try to do anything to just harm my community,” LaLa Zannell, trans justice campaign manager for the ACLU, told Vox. “With a pandemic going on, the Department of Housing and Urban Development could be focusing on making sure that [trans] people are staying in the houses that they already have, and that they’re in safe and stable housing. They should not invest in resources that could crack down on homelessness for more trans people.”

The rule will allow shelters in most states to ignore a trans person’s gender identity when making housing policies

As Waguespack noted, the text of HUD’s release is confusing. Here’s how it could affect trans people looking for shelter.

“The new rule allows shelter providers that lawfully operate as single-sex or sex-segregated facilities to voluntarily establish a policy that will govern admissions determinations for situations when an individual’s gender identity does not match their biological sex,” the agency said in a statement.

This means that the rule allows shelters to completely ignore a trans person’s gender identity and can instead choose to house them according to their assigned sex at birth, which goes against the 2016 Equal Access Rule established by the Obama administration.

The statement continues: “Each shelter’s policy is required to be consistent with state and local law, must not discriminate based on sexual orientation or transgender status, and may incorporate practical considerations of shelter providers that often operate in difficult conditions.”

What the agency is seemingly trying to do with the rule is define discrimination against trans people as based on their transgender status rather than their gender identity — but for trans people, the two are intertwined. In other words, a shelter provider cannot simply disallow all trans people from utilizing their services, but they can, for example, house trans women in men’s shelters.

There are two main problems with forcing trans homeless people into spaces that correspond with their birth-assigned gender rather than their gender identity. The first is that such a policy exposes trans people, especially trans women, to potential violence and sexual assault inside those spaces. And as a result, trans people are more likely to choose sleeping in the streets rather than risk going to a shelter.

Because of a cycle of discrimination and poverty, trans people are more likely than their cisgender peers to experience homelessness. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 29 percent of trans people live in poverty, and one in five trans people in the US will be homeless at some point in their lifetimes. The numbers are even starker for Black trans people: A 2015 report indicated that 34 percent of Black trans people live in extreme poverty, compared to 9 percent of Black cis people.

Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) has been an outspoken critic of HUD’s rule change ever since the department first said it was pursuing a change last May. “Requiring trans people to be housed according to their birth gender rather than their gender identity is a recipe for harassment and sexual or physical assault,” she told Vox. “This population is already under enough attack. We can’t have them avoid staying shelters.”

Wexton recalled asking Carson during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee in May 2019 whether he had any intention of changing the Equal Access Rule. “He said he had no plans to do so. And the very next day, [HUD] announced their intention to gut the equal access rule. So they are not being honest.”

The rule’s timing, about two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination against transgender people constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex, caught the eye of both Wexton and LGBTQ advocates.

According to a letter obtained by Vox from Wexton and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) to Carson and dated June 29, HUD’s proposed rule was in process before the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County.

“The release of a potentially applicable Supreme Court decision during the period of our regulatory review is unique and raises concerns about the applicability and implementation of the proposed rule,” reads Wexton and Waters’s letter, which asked Carson to reconsider publishing the proposed rule before conducting additional legal analysis.

The proposed rule now enters a 60-day public comment period before it can be finalized. “They’re rushing to get it through before they may not be in control anymore,” said Wexton. “It’s disappointing but not surprising that they’re rushing it through in this way, especially given the broad implications of Bostock.”

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Herman Cain, the former GOP presidential candidate who now co-chairs Black Voices for Trump, is hospitalized with COVID-19.

We are sorry to announce that Herman Cain has tested positive for COVID-19, and is currently receiving treatment in an Atlanta-area hospital.

Please keep him, and all who are battling this virus, in your prayers.

Our full statement appears below. Updates to follow. pic.twitter.com/lDRW7Rla4e

— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) July 2, 2020

The above statement was posted on Cain’s Twitter account 12 days after the former Godfather’s Pizza executive attended President Donald Trump’s June 20 MAGA rally in Tulsa.

CNN reports: Cain, a contributor for conservative media outlet Newsmax, was hospitalized Wednesday “after he had development symptoms serious enough that he required hospitalization” and was informed Monday that he tested positive for the virus. “Mr. Cain did not require a respirator, and he is awake and alert,” according to the statement released Thursday. “We honestly have no idea where he contracted it. I realize people will speculate about the Tulsa rally, but Herman did a lot of traveling the past week, including to Arizona where cases are spiking. I don’t think there’s any way to trace this to the one specific contact that caused him to be infected. We’ll never know,” Dan Calabrese, who has been editor of HermanCain.com since 2012, said Thursday in a post on Cain’s website.

Cain, a 74-year-old cancer survivor, posted a photo of himself (below) at the Tulsa rally in which he and others appeared to be ignoring CDC social-distancing guidelines.

Here’s just a few of the #BlackVoicesForTrump at tonight’s rally! Having a fantastic time!#TulsaRally2020 #Trumptulsa #TulsaTrumprally #MAGA #Trump2020 #Trump2020Landslide pic.twitter.com/27mUzkg7kL

— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) June 20, 2020

In another tweet on Wednesday, Cain shared a story about South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem saying there will be no social distancing at Trump’s upcoming Independence Day celebration at Mount Rushmore.

“Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!” Cain wrote.

Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!https://t.co/Oykdz4xThD

— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) July 1, 2020

The post Trump Surrogate Herman Cain Hospitalized with COVID-19 After Ignoring CDC Guidelines at Tulsa Rally appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Breonna Taylor in an undated family photo. She was fatally shot in her apartment by Louisville police on March 13. | Justice for Breonna

Demands for justice are widespread and only continue to grow.

It has been more than 100 days since Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky. Thousands of protesters have chanted her name across the country, demanding justice for the EMT, who would have turned 27 on June 5.

As the country is reckoning with its history of racist police violence, many advocates want to know why charges still haven’t been filed against the officers who shot her dead. Meanwhile, those who want to abolish the carceral state are rethinking what justice in the Taylor case should actually look like.

Most advocates agree that another Black woman is dead because of a lack of police accountability — and something needs to change.

On March 13, three officers with a no-knock warrant entered Taylor’s apartment looking for two people suspected of selling drugs, neither of whom was Taylor. The officers fired more than 20 rounds into the apartment, hitting Taylor at least eight times.

After months of investigation, the Louisville Police Department (LMPD) fired officer Brett Hankison on June 23; the other two officers remain on administrative assignment. A special Kentucky prosecutor is leading an investigation into both the shooting and the department’s handling of the shooting to determine whether to charge the three officers who fired their weapons; the FBI is leading its own investigation. On June 29, the Louisville Metro Council also announced a resolution to investigate the actions of Mayor Greg Fischer and his administration surrounding Taylor’s death. The council hopes to create greater transparency around who made what decisions in the Taylor case, according to a news release.

Taylor’s death took place amid a slate of high-profile killings of unarmed Black people — it was just three weeks after Ahmaud Arbery was killed by white vigilantes while jogging and about 10 weeks before the fatal arrest of George Floyd. The suspects involved in Arbery’s case were arrested and charged two weeks after video of the incident went viral. The four officers involved in the killing of George Floyd were fired four days after Floyd’s death, with the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck charged with murder.

By contrast, not much has happened in Taylor’s case.

In the meantime, Taylor’s family, alleging excessive force and gross negligence in her death, filed a lawsuit on April 27 against the officers involved in the shooting. In a court filing submitted on July 5, the family alleges that Taylor received no emergency medical aid as she lay dying. The document also claims that the raid on Taylor’s apartment was part of the mayor’s scheme to clear out a block in the neighborhood for redevelopment.

“I want justice for her,” Tamika Palmer, Taylor’s mother, told the 19th in May. “I want them to say her name. There’s no reason Breonna should be dead at all.”

Police came looking for a drug suspect. Breonna Taylor ended up dead instead.

On the night of March 13, Louisville police had a warrant to enter Taylor’s apartment because they believed that a suspect in a narcotics investigation was storing drugs or money or receiving packages at her home, according to USA Today.

However, according to the suit filed by Taylor’s family, the man police were searching for, Jamarcus Glover, did not live in her apartment complex and had already been detained by the time officers showed up. Taylor had dated Glover two years ago, according to a family attorney, and did not maintain an active friendship with him.

Police said that the three officers knocked on the door to announce themselves. But multiple neighbors say the officers neither knocked nor identified themselves, according to the family’s lawsuit. It was later uncovered that the police had been granted a no-knock warrant by a judge, which allowed them to enter Taylor’s apartment without announcing themselves. They also weren’t wearing body cams.

When police arrived, Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, 27, says he woke up and believed someone was trying to break into the apartment. There was banging on the door, he says, but police never announced themselves. He reached for his licensed handgun after he and Taylor asked who it was and got no response, NBC reported. He fired one shot, hitting an officer in the leg.

Police then fired more than 20 rounds into the apartment. Taylor died at the scene. Walker was arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer and aggravated assault.

Police found no drugs in the apartment, and both Taylor and Walker have no criminal history.

On May 22, Kentucky prosecutors announced that they had dismissed all charges against Walker, who said he fired a shot in self-defense when he believed he and Taylor were under attack.

On June 11, police released an incident report for the night Taylor was killed, but it was largely blank. Though Taylor was fatally shot, the four-page report listed her injuries as “none.” The report also stated there was no forced entry, though witnesses say the police used a battering ram to enter the apartment, according to CBS News.

The Taylor family’s 31-page July 5 court filing adds two new (and since contested) allegations to the narrative: that Taylor received no medical aid as she lay dying and that the nighttime raid was part of Mayor Fischer’s plan to redevelop a city block in western Louisville.

Taylor’s family said there is no evidence that suggests that Taylor was given medical attention in the six minutes between when she was shot and when she died. However, the coroner who performed Taylor’s autopsy said that her injuries from the shooting were so extreme that she would’ve died in “less than a minute” and that the recorded time of death on the report is “an estimate.”

The family’s filing also alleges that police went after Glover because of political pressure from the mayor’s office due to a redevelopment project valued at more than $30 million, according to the New York Times. Glover was reportedly using a row of abandoned houses to sell drugs in the area that needed to be cleared for development.

“People needed to be removed and homes needed to be vacated so that a high-dollar, legacy-creating real estate development could move forward,” attorneys for the family wrote in the court filing. The city has called the allegations “outrageous.”

Meanwhile, it came to light that the officer who shot Taylor, Hankison, had a history of misconduct allegations. He was already facing an ongoing federal lawsuit at the time of Taylor’s death in which Kendrick Wilson accused Hankison of “harassing suspects with unnecessary arrests and planting drugs on them,” according to USA Today. Wilson alleges that Hankison targeted him and arrested him three times in a two-year period.

After Taylor’s death, claims of sexual assault surfaced, too, with at least two women coming forward in early June to allege that Hankison assaulted them. In both allegations, which are similar to one another, Hankison offered the women rides home after they had been drinking at local bars. In one case, Hankison allegedly followed the woman into her home and assaulted her while she was unconscious. In the other case, Hankison reportedly made sexual advances toward the woman while she sat in his unmarked car, including rubbing her thighs and kissing her face.

On June 23, he was fired. LMPD posted Hankison’s termination letter on Twitter, which stated Hankison “displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life when you wantonly and blindly fired ten (10) rounds into the apartment of Breonna Taylor…” The letter also stated Hankison violated the department’s protocol on use of deadly force when he shot through a patio door and window that was covered. This prevented him from determining whether there was an immediate threat or innocent people present; some of the bullets even traveled to a neighbor’s apartment where three people were endangered, according to the letter. Hankison has appealed his termination.

The other two officers who fired rounds that night, John Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, remain on the force and have been placed on administrative reassignment. The case is still under independent investigation with Kentucky’s Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, who has said he will not provide additional details or a timeline for the investigation.

Protests are ongoing, and calls for justice in the investigation continue

In May, Benjamin Crump, the Taylor family’s attorney, argued that the killings of Black women have tended to receive less media attention than the deaths of Black men.

“They’re killing our sisters just like they’re killing our brothers, but for whatever reason, we have not given our sisters the same attention that we have given to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Stephon Clark, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald,” he told the 19th. “Breonna’s name should be known by everybody in America who said those other names, because she was in her own home, doing absolutely nothing wrong.”

Protests where the crowds chant, “Say her name, Breonna Taylor,” have attempted to reverse the lack of attention. In 2015, activists around the country demonstrated and used the hashtag #SayHerName to draw attention to women who had lost their lives, including Gabriella Nevarez, Michelle Cusseaux, and Alexia Christian, as Jenée Desmond-Harris reported for Vox at the time. The death of Sandra Bland in jail after she was arrested during a traffic stop also drew national attention to the impact of police brutality and racism on Black women’s lives.

Around the country, activists organized marches and signed petitions on Taylor’s June 5 birthday, saying she should’ve been alive to see the day. In Louisville, protesters have gathered in Breonna Taylor’s name to protest police brutality in a number of demonstrations since May. After a protest-imposed curfew on May 31, law enforcement shot and killed David McAtee, 53, a local restaurant owner. Following his death, Louisville Police Chief Steve Conrad was fired, though it is still unclear exactly who shot McAtee, Vox’s Anna North reported.

While there have been other changes in the police department since Taylor’s death — on June 11 the Louisville Metro Council voted unanimously to ban no-knock warrants — advocates, activists, and celebrities are asking why the three officers involved in Taylor’s killing haven’t been arrested. On June 14, Beyoncé wrote an open letter to Kentucky’s attorney general, demanding that criminal charges be brought against the three officers to “show the value of a Black woman’s life.” She also asked that the office bring greater transparency to the investigation.

At a June 18 press conference, Cameron — the first Black attorney general in Kentucky and a former legal counsel for Sen. Mitch McConnell — emphasized that the investigation is ongoing, without giving any specific details.

“To all those involved in this case, you have my commitment that our office is undertaking a thorough and fair investigation,” he said. “This is also a commitment that I’m making to the Louisville community, which has suffered tremendously in the days since March 13.”

Cameron was also the first Republican attorney general elected in the state, according to the New York Times, on a platform that backed Trump and some of the president’s signature efforts, like building a border wall. He has criticized some of protesters’ demands, including the call to defund the police.

“Radical rhetoric and calls to ‘defund the police’ threaten public safety and only serve to divide us further, rather than bringing us together,” he said in a press release on June 24.

Wake Forest Law professor Ronald Wright, who specializes in the work of criminal prosecutors, told Vox that Cameron’s comments regarding defunding the police are worth watching because they are relevant to how Cameron handles the case. “If he starts to sound like an advocate for law enforcement, voicing broad support for police officers and defending them in general terms, that would make me wonder if he can evaluate charges fairly in this case,” Wright said. “It is tough to convince the public that you will hold the police accountable for their wrongdoing if you never find anything to criticize in their work.”

Why there haven’t been arrests in the case so far

Wright told Vox in May that in officer-involved shooting cases like Taylor’s, the length of time the prosecutor takes to bring forth charges should not necessarily be the issue. Rather, people should question and examine what the prosecutor does during their investigation.

“I don’t really fault prosecutors for taking their time, gathering the facts, being thorough. The timing doesn’t really bother me as much as the amount of effort. If what you’re doing is you’re not doing anything and you’re stalling, and you don’t really intend to press the case as hard as you would press any shooting in your district, then that’s a problem,” Wright told Vox.

Since these cases are especially difficult to win at trial, Wright pointed out, prosecutors must take the time to build a really strong case. “The delay could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether they are putting in the effort into building a great case,” he said.

In the high-profile Baltimore police custody death of Freddie Gray, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby arrested the three officers involved just days after Gray’s death and charged them with offenses including second-degree “depraved heart” murder and manslaughter. All three officers in the case were acquitted. “It may have been that it would have been better to go a little slower and get more evidence for charges after some delay,” Wright told Vox.

Many advocates, however, point to the speed at which arrests came in the Arbery and Floyd cases — and the fact that years-long delays in Eric Garner’s case still didn’t lead to justice. Garner died in July 2014 after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a banned chokehold. One day before the five-year anniversary of Garner’s death in July 2019, federal prosecutors announced they would not bring charges against Pantaleo. The NYPD fired Pantaleo in August 2019, more than five years after Garner’s death.

And in the three cases above there were videos of the incidents. Wright said that even with footage, cases against police officers are difficult to prosecute. Videos do represent extra proof — a form of evidence Taylor’s case lacks.

The influence of police unions, which have come under criticism from activists and protesters during the unrest, may also contribute to delays. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews reported, police unions have become engrossed in preventing the discipline of officers who kill unarmed Black people:

In local cases, this attitude has translated to a defense of officers who kill or wound innocent civilians. The Louisville Metro Police Department [had first] been limited to just announcing its “intention” to fire Brett Hankison, a detective who shot his gun 10 times during the raid that killed Breonna Taylor, rather than actually firing him outright. This limitation is largely because of the city’s contract with the police union, which gives Hankison multiple opportunities to appeal. He is first allowed a “pretermination hearing” with counsel, and then, once terminated, an appeal to the police merit board, of which Hankison himself is a member.

In May, the Louisville police union also demanded an apology from Louisville council member Jessica Green, who called Taylor’s boyfriend a hero after he was charged with shooting Mattingly the night Taylor was killed. “Calling someone that shot an on-duty police officer, in the performance of official duties, a hero is a slap in the face,” said Ryan Nichols, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 614. Green said she would not apologize.

But Wright said that Hankison’s firing does offer a clue to how a criminal case could swing. That the LMPD found that he showed “extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he “wantonly and blindly” fired 10 rounds into the apartment means there’s a chance for a conviction if a jury were to find the same conclusion. “If a jury in a criminal trial were to reach the same conclusions after hearing the facts, they could properly convict him of a lesser version of homicide,” Wright told Vox.

At the recent press conference, Cameron refused to discuss any potential roadblocks, stating that “an investigation of this magnitude, when done correctly, requires time and patience.” He added, “To those across the country we have heard from with cards, emails, and letters, and calls, who are asking us to complete the investigation as soon as possible — we hear you and we are working around the clock to follow the law to the truth.”

Defunding the Louisville police and its ties to justice for Taylor

Amid a growing call to “defund” or “abolish the police,” there are others advocating for justice who view the calls to arrest officers as taking away from the larger goal of dismantling the system.

According to anti-criminalization organizer Mariame Kaba, director of the anti youth incarceration grassroots organization Project NIA, celebrating charges for officers signals our dependence on a criminal justice system that was created to uphold white supremacy. “To transform a death-making system, our expectations have to be much higher,” she wrote last month in the New York Times. “Celebrating charges is like celebrating bread crumbs. ... I understand why people do it, but I think according great significance to charges misses the point and it also freezes people in place. It has the effect of demobilizing collective action.”

Kaba explained that justice is not just closing down police departments but making them obsolete. “The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers,” she wrote.

But on June 25, the Louisville Metro Council approved a budget that wouldn’t even begin to defund LMPD. The new spending plan will merely “require police to put the money toward recruiting a more diverse force, additional training and exploring co-responder models that could send behavioral health professionals on calls with officers,” according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Funding will also be directed to a civilian review board that will oversee LMPD, following the 24-1 vote. Black Lives Matter demanded that more money be shifted to community services.

On the same day the budget was approved, a crowd of more than 500 demonstrators, including activists, community members, and celebrities, gathered on the steps of the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort for a #JusticeForBreonnaTaylor rally, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Activist Tamika Mallory emphasized the need to keep calling for justice and accountability in Taylor’s case. “I’m sure we all understand that Breonna Taylor is everywhere,” she said. “The issue of Black women being killed and our voices being too low is a problem.”

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Earlier this week, the Republican’s legislative merchant of death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, engaged in some surprise loser talk—attacking Democrats for wanting to eliminate the legislative filibuster. It was an odd rant; why go after Democrats on a rule change that could only happen if Republicans lost the majority? And what would McConnell care if Democrats killed the filibuster if Donald Trump (with his veto pen) was still president? 

In one fell swoop, McConnell betrayed that 1) he expects Democrats to take the majority, and 2) he expects Trump to lose the White House. And those fears were out in full force today, once again. In fact, it was an all-out freakout.

The whole idea of the filibuster is ridiculous—that 60% of senators must vote for something to pass. This undemocratic precept isn’t a Constitutional one. It was a botched rule change in the early 1900s that morphed into an obstructing tactic. There’s nothing special or magical about it. 

That’s why Democrats got rid of it for Supreme Court confirmations in 2013, and McConnell got rid of it for all judicial confirmations when Trump took the White House. So this makes McConnell’s hyperventilating all the more ridiculous.  

“Vandalize the rules,” says the guy who has made a mockery of Senate rules to pass whatever he wants, whenever he wants.

To repeat: McConnell eliminated the filibuster for judicial confirmations just three years ago! Not sure why suddenly the legislative one is so much worse than the one that doesn’t need House approval, and secures lifetime appointments!

“Ill-gotten power”? So confirming lifetime judges is well-gotten power. Passing legislation that must then pass the House, and must then be signed by the president—just as the Constitution intended—is ill-gotten?  That guy is legit a piece of shit. 

But, again, this rant doesn’t exist if he thinks Republicans hold the Senate and/or the White House. He sees the writing on the wall, and it’s a unified Democratic trifecta. And in that nightmare scenario for Republicans, the only leverage they would have, anywhere, would be with a Senate filibuster. He’s desperate to hold on to power as the national electorate looks poised to strip it away. 

And yes, Washington, D.C. is a big part of their panic. All we need to induct Washington, D.C. (Douglass District) as a state is a simple law. Republicans would obviously filibuster any such effort—the last thing they want or need is a more fair Senate. The one they have, in which Wyoming has two senate seats despite having a smaller population than 116 counties in 33 states, works great for them. And sure, let’s split the Dakotas (combined population 1.6 million) in half, so they can have four senators—more than California or Texas or Florida or New York or any state with actual residents. 

The Senate is a fundamentally broken, undemocratic institution. There’s no reason to break it even more with the filibuster, and adding states like Washington, D.C. and maybe Puerto Rico, if its residents vote for it, would help mitigate a non-representative governing chamber too heavily biased toward small, rural, white, and old states. 

Yes, Democrats used a tool that was at their disposal. Once they vote to eliminate that tool, it will no longer be available to be used at their disposal. That’s how this stuff works. 

In any case, it’s a stupid rule. Had the Senate passed their police “reform” bill, it would’ve died in the House anyway. The only value in it is when the voters have stripped you of power in the House, Senate, and the White House. And in that case, a rump minority—no matter the party—shouldn’t be able to stop legislation from happening. 

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had fun responding: 

Joan Marcus

The movie underlines what makes the musical radical.

I listened to the Hamilton cast album hundreds of times before I saw the live show. Full-blown Hamilton fever was just starting to hit the internet in early 2016, six months after its Broadway debut. With an assignment in hand to write about Lin-Manuel’s Miranda retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton, I bought tickets in seemingly the final week that someone in my income bracket could pull off that feat. I tucked into my cramped perch in the last row of the balcony one March evening, already knowing the show inside and out. Or so I thought.

This week, watching the filmed version of the musical being released on Disney+, I was reminded of that night and of how finally seeing the show made me realize what I’d missed: that the person who “tells the story” of Hamilton is not its namesake, but its villain, Aaron Burr (played by Leslie Odom Jr.).

Yes, Alexander Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda) is the protagonist, the title character. The show focuses on Hamilton’s life, and on how and why it ended in an infamous duel. But Burr lived on, and it’s Burr who tells Hamilton’s story, at least on this stage. Burr is our guide.

Disney

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s version of the lives of Hamilton and his cohort necessarily compresses and elides details, but a battery of wild Aaron Burr facts demands a brief detour: The grandson of Princeton president and archetypal “fire-and-brimstone preacher” Jonathan Edwards, Burr actually killed Hamilton while he was serving as Thomas Jefferson’s vice president. He finished his term without further incident. But there is a satisfying literary symmetry to his life: After working as a land speculator, becoming a defendant in a Supreme Court trial in which Jefferson accused him of treason, and spending a self-imposed exile bouncing around Europe, he returned to America and married a woman named Eliza Jumel, who divorced him after four months. Her lawyer? Alexander Hamilton Jr., the second son of Alexander Sr. and Eliza. Burr died the day the divorce was finalized.

That Burr is Hamilton’s narrator would have been obvious if I’d paid closer attention to the cast recording. He opens each section of the musical by asking a series of questions about his nemesis — the recurring stanzas that start How did a bastard orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman ... — and then trying to answer them as we watch the events of Hamilton’s life unfold. Hamilton is gone by the end of the show, when Burr, having just killed him in a duel, sings with anguish from some point in the future: He should have known the world was wide enough for both of them. Burr is the one who introduces Hamilton’s political rivals, Jefferson and James Madison, as they ruefully admit in the musical’s final number that Hamilton’s financial system turned out to be a success, at least in their lifetimes.

Onstage — and thus in the film — this structure is even clearer. Odom is commanding, a tall and elegant stage presence, especially compared to the scrappier Miranda. As Burr, he can swing from charming and smooth to tortured to obsequious with just the shape of his smile and the lift of his head. He is trying to please us and then, as time goes on, complaining to us about the unfairness of the universe. He was born to power and class. He is the one who has a family legacy to protect. He should, by rights, be president.

Hamilton insists that Burr and he are the same, because they’re both orphans, but it’s obvious from the jump that there’s nothing similar about them. Burr’s sense of entitlement is what keeps him from believing in anything too firmly (“talk less, smile more / don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for”), and it’s why the combative Hamilton drives him up the wall. You can see it in his eyes.

Burr doesn’t get the final word, though. In the final number, after he sings “When you’re gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?”, his voice drops out completely. It is Hamilton’s widow Eliza (Pippa Soo) who finishes the show, who inserts herself “back into the narrative” and explains that she spent the last half-century of her life extending her husband’s legacy and creating one of her own. She is the reason, it is strongly suggested, that anyone remembers Alexander at all.

Disney

It’s difficult, from just listening to the album, to fully grasp how moving this final song is. By the end, having reclaimed her voice, published her husband’s work, fought for his legacy, raised funds to build the Washington Monument, and founded a private orphanage for kids like Alexander, Eliza stands in the center of the stage. In the shadows, softly singing, are the people she loved who are “on the other side” — George Washington, her sister Angelica, her son Philip, Alexander himself. In the last moment, she looks up at the light and gasps at her first glimpse of eternity.

And it’s clear then that it’s not Burr who controlled Hamilton’s story after all, though he tried. It’s Eliza.

Hamilton’s performances add new dimensions to the music

Taking a cue from his show, Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to instinctively understand that controlling any narrative requires constant interaction with those who love it. Though he was already known to Broadway fans from his hit 2008 musical In the Heights, Miranda’s more widespread fame grew in tandem with Hamilton’s explosive popularity, which really got cranking when the cast album was released in 2015.

Hamilton’s music is extremely catchy, and Miranda and his cast did everything they could to connect with fans who wouldn’t get to see the show due to cost and geographic access. They performed web-only exclusives with casts from other Broadway shows, remixed and reimagined their own performances, and actively promoted fan videos, like “Batlexander Manilton” and the full-length, very “early 2016”-era Jeb!

So it’s only natural, when listening to the album, to imagine Miranda as the star. Certainly, Miranda richly deserves accolades for having written Hamilton’s zealously intricate lyrics and music, which manage to reference everything from hip-hop to gospel to Gilbert and Sullivan. But seeing the original cast perform, whether onstage or in the film, also reinforces how much this musical isn’t a story about one guy, one star. It doesn’t prop up the “great man” theory of history at all. Instead, Hamilton positions its namesake as a piece in a grander puzzle, to show how his conflicts and congress with others, his failures and successes, combine with others’ strengths and weaknesses to move history along.

That approach is backed up by the casting. Miranda is a solid and charismatic performer, but he’s physically smaller than a lot of his fellow actors, with less vocal power.

Compare Miranda’s stage presence to that of the others: Chris Jackson’s both warm and chill-inducing entrance as George Washington; Jonathan Groff’s literally unhinged, spit-spraying performance as King George (you may think you know him from the songs, but out of all of Hamilton’s characters, King George may gain the most from viewers seeing Groff’s on-screen performance); Daveed Diggs’s wiry, electrifying turn as Thomas Jefferson; Okieriete Onaodowan’s bang-on Biggie energy as swaggering revolutionary Hercules Mulligan; Renee Elise Goldsberry’s rapid-fire flow as Angelica Schuyler, mixed with her sideways glances and obvious pain in longing for Alexander — emotions you can see in the film far better than you can from the back row of the Richard Rodgers Theatre, by the way.

Watching actors bring the story alive drives home how much this tale belongs to everyone, not just Alexander Hamilton, who frequently recedes into the background. And of course it does: This is Hamilton, in which the Founding Fathers and Mothers, so long passed into legend for so many of us, are incarnated in Black and brown bodies. It’s a choice that (while presenting issues of its own) is still baldly radical. Hamilton both respects history and confronts it. All of these high-minded promises and big plans for freedom and equality, it says, are supposed to be for everyone. So why has the promise failed over and over again?

Disney

Can you get all of that audacity from listening to a disembodied recording? You can get some of it, sure. But watching people perform is different from listening to them sing. Even mediated by a screen, the joyous pulse is palpable. You go to a theater to be in the room where it’s happening, and if you don’t feel any discomfort or thrill, you’re probably doing it wrong.

The world might have gotten too comfortable with Hamilton

That so many people got so comfortable with Hamilton may have been the downside of its worldwide popularity. Launching at the end of the Obama presidency, Hamilton could feel self-congratulatory, in a manner that often shows up in Hollywood, too. Good job, America! We solved racism!

In the intervening years, fictional characters who quote Hamilton approvingly have been deployed as shorthand for clueless and complacent white liberalism, as in 2017’s Get Out or 2019’s Knives Out. And the show’s cultural pervasiveness has only spread. Mike Pence went to see the show soon after the 2016 election, prompting the cast to deliver a message directly to him from the stage and light the internet on fire. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton, for goodness’ sake — nobody has ever accused Bolton of being a liberal — named his book The Room Where It Happened.

After the Pence incident, a Facebook acquaintance insisted to me that while they didn’t vote for Trump (a preamble that has since become ubiquitous), they thought the cast’s message for Pence was unconscionable, that “everyone should feel safe in the theater.” It’s a silly statement, because nobody should feel (metaphorically) safe in the theater. At its best, the theater has always been a place for audiences to be challenged, confronted in a live setting with stories about humanity performed by real human bodies. You have to give yourself over to it.

Disney

Despite the admirable efforts made by Miranda and his colleagues to give Hamilton fans a taste of the live performance aspects of the show, getting beyond the cast album remained basically inaccessible to most people in the years after the show debuted. Live theater is inherently exclusive — it’s meant to be experienced in person, so you have to be there — on top of being extremely expensive to produce. Those two factors served (as they have with other productions in the past) to isolate Hamilton largely as an artwork for people who could afford to see it, even once it opened in other cities and went on tour. (One notable exception: audience members who were recipients of some of the production’s outreach initiatives, such as students from underserved communities.)

That means the show’s theatrical audiences since 2015 have skewed well-off and urbane. The Disney+ release of the film won’t be available to anyone who can’t subscribe to Disney+, but it will make the show far more readily accessible to those who previously may have only listened to it.

Watching Hamilton now, the revolutionary overtones are clear

And new Hamilton viewers will be watching in 2020, not 2016. When I saw it in the spring of 2016, the show made me think about the current president and the upcoming election, in which it seemed like a will to power unmoored from commitments to public service was clearly winning out.

In mid-2020, watching Hamilton at home in the middle of a pandemic, during nationwide uprisings and protests against police brutality and racism, with the president tweeting that he is “THE LONE WARRIOR!”, I found myself struck by the way Hamilton positions the underdog, impoverished immigrant Alexander — who married up but was always a striver haunted by the memory of his past — against comfortable and well-off guys like Jefferson or Burr. It shoves away the idea that playing nice is better than causing change; it expressly repudiates those who “would have voted for Obama for a third term” and then figured things would sort themselves out.

In Hamilton, a handful of young, scrappy dreamers get things started, hoping that tomorrow there will be more of them, and their story will be told.

I wonder if the revolutionary undertones of Hamilton will sing in a new way for those who watch it at home now. You can’t ignore who was left out of “all men are created equal” while watching Hamilton — unless you want to. You can’t forget how often Broadway, and entertainment more broadly, has largely excluded people of color from major roles when confronted by casting like this — unless forgetting it makes you more comfortable. You can’t quite miss the consequences of complacency, unless you choose to be complacent. Art alone doesn’t change the world; it just plows the soil.

Hamilton is a show about revolution, and a show about the trouble with revolution: After you’ve turned the world upside-down, you have to figure out what comes next. You have to figure out your laws, your economy, your foreign policy. You also have to figure out who matters, who makes the rules, and — maybe most importantly — who tells the story. Every culture war is about who gets to define the terms and control the narrative, and that’s no different now than it was in 2016 or 1812 or 1776.

Hamilton begins streaming on Disney+ on July 3.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

President Donald Trump staged a White House briefing Thursday morning to tout a new report showing the U.S. added 4.8 million jobs in June.

Trump also downplayed what is an out-of-control coronavirus pandemic, with massive spikes forcing several states to slow down or reverse reopening plans. On Wednesday, the number of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. topped 50,000 for the first time.

Nevertheless, Trump claimed the “horrible China virus” is “getting under control.”

Despite record new US case numbers, Trump claims the coronavirus is “getting under control,” then goes on a weird rant about how the virus has “got a life, and we’re putting out that life, because that’s a bad life that we’re talking about.” pic.twitter.com/gf4VMsxgn3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 2, 2020

“Some areas that were very hard hit are now doing very well,” Trump said. “Some were doing very well, and we thought they may be gone, and they flare up, and we’re putting out the fires. But other places were long before us, and they’re now — it’s got a life, and we’re putting out that life, because that’s a bad life that we’re talking about.”

Trump left without taking questions. Watch the full briefing, and check out a few reactions, below.

Oral diarrhea

— diane brown (@tigrizz901) July 2, 2020

Such a way with words

— Suki2 (@Labradoodle4me) July 2, 2020

I just tried putting that through Google translator and my computer crashed.

— Freezy Writer (@FreezyWriter) July 2, 2020

Biden accidentally says "million" when he meant to say "thousand"—and immediately corrects himself—and the Trump campaign accused him for days of losing his mind.

And then we have Trump…

— Pé (@4everNeverTrump) July 2, 2020

Is he drunk? High? Thousands of Americans are dying every day while he does nothing, and we pretend this is normal? If I gave a public speech and spoke this way, I’d be drug tested or given a sobriety test. He’s the POTUS! Shouldn’t he be held to some kind of standard?!

— Cheryl Watkins (@CherylWWatkins) July 2, 2020

The post Trump Downplays COVID-19 Resurgence: ‘It’s Got a Life, And We’re Putting Out That Life, Because That’s a Bad Life’: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Weeks after Facebook removed Donald Trump re-election ads that appeared to include a Nazi symbol, critics on social media say the president’s campaign is at it again.

This time, a T-shirt being sold by the campaign features an image that’s eerily similar to the national insignia of Adolf Hitler’s Germany. However, the campaign is dismissing those allegations as “moronic.”

Trump's new logo looks almost looks familiar. Where else have i seen that eagle style standing on a circle? pic.twitter.com/2H8xrVd6Hs

— P A C E (@pesachlattin) July 1, 2020

Newsweek reports: Twitter users say that the position of the eagle is uncomfortably close to the national insignia of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler ordered a stylized eagle combined with the Nazi swastika to become the national emblem, which can be referred to as the Reichsadler or the Nazi eagle. It features the bird looking to its right with its wings spread, and its talons holding a wreath with a Nazi swastika inside. After World War Two, the imagery was adopted by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists worldwide, according to the Anti Defamation League. The eagle has been an American symbol for more than two centuries but the version designed in 1782 has an olive branch in its right talon representing peace and a scroll in its beak with the motto E Pluribus Unum, meaning “one out of many.”

Trump & Pence are proudly displaying a Nazi-inspired shirt on their official campaign website.

They are promoting genocidal imagery yet again — just days after President Trump retweeted a video of a supporter chanting “white power.”

Link: https://t.co/U57Hfx6jwy pic.twitter.com/bt9N7Hb8Zb

— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) July 1, 2020

More from the Daily Caller: The Trump campaign dismissed the allegations as “moronic” in a statement to the Daily Caller and pointed to a long American legacy of using the bald eagle to represent the country. Bend the Arc: Jewish Action circulated the images Wednesday morning, writing “The President of the United States is campaigning for reelection with a Nazi symbol. Again. On the left: an official Trump/Pence ‘America First’ tee. On the right; the Iron Eagle, the official symbol of the Nazi party.” … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) lists the Nazi Eagle as a hate symbol based off the German coat of arms, but later “appropriated by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists worldwide” after World War II. ADL writes that “the symbol originally featured an eagle clutching a swastika, but many variations replace the swastika with some other hate symbol, such as SS bolts or a Celtic Cross. Occasionally, extremists will leave the circle blank where the swastika normally would appear; this seems to be more common in countries where the swastika is prohibited.”

Come. On. pic.twitter.com/VtfgrM8hIW

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 2, 2020

The post Trump T-Shirt Logo Resembles Nazi Emblem, But Campaign Dismisses Complaints as ‘Moronic’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

In yet another disturbing “Karen” incident, a white woman pointed a gun at a black woman and her 15-year-old daughter following a disagreement outside a Chipotle restaurant in Michigan on Wednesday.

“Before I could walk into Chipotle, this woman was coming out and I had moved out the way so she can walk out,” 15-year-old Makayla Green told the Detroit News. “She bumped me and I said, ‘Excuse you.’ And then she started cussing me out and saying things like I was invading her personal space.”

Makayla’s mother, Takelia Hill, added: “I walked up on the woman yelling at my daughter. She couldn’t see me because her back was to me, but she was in my daughter’s face.”

A video of the incident begins with Hill and her daughter arguing with the woman outside the restaurant, as they demand an apology, before an older white man helps her into an SUV.

“Who the fuck do you think you guys are?” the man says to Hill and Makayla at one point.

The woman then rolls down the passenger window. “You cannot just walk around calling white people racist,” she tells Hill and Makayla.

Hill said she thought the driver was going to run over her as he backed out, so she hit the rear window of the SUV. That’s when the the woman jumps out of the passenger seat with a gun.

“Get the fuck back!” the woman screams as she cocks the pistol and points it at Hill and Makayla, before eventually getting back in the SUV.

This happened today in Auburn Hills,MI
Another Karen .. pic.twitter.com/lWksZwXITD

— Makay (@makaysmith10) July 2, 2020

More from the Detroit News: The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office was called after the gun was drawn, Hill said. The Sheriff’s Office was not available for comment, but the video shows an officer, with some type of weapon drawn, approaching the woman, who is on her hands and knees on the ground near her SUV. The officer continues to move toward the woman, eventually getting near enough to pick up a gun on the ground. Moments later, as the woman kneeling on the ground puts her hands behind her back, another officer places handcuffs on her. Hill said the incident left her and her other daughters, who were in family’s vehicle, traumatized. 

Hill wrote later on Facebook: “So this is America….I’ve never in my life had a gun pulled out on me let alone two and while I had my three daughters I’ve never felt so helpless in my life I’m so shaken up.”

The post Gun-Wielding ‘Karen’ Threatens Black Family Outside Michigan Chipotle: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

They'll both spend record amounts of money, and the race won't change one bit.