James.galbraith

American soldiers stand during a homecoming ceremony in Fort Knox in 2014 after a nine-month combat deployment in Afghanistan. | Luke Sharrett/Getty Images

Democrats and Republicans alike demand answers from an administration that’s long been soft on Russia.

President Donald Trump is denying knowledge of an arrangement in which Russian military officials reportedly offered to secretly pay Taliban fighters for killing American troops in Afghanistan.

A pair of explosive reports from the New York Times indicates that United States officials learned months ago of a Russian intelligence unit secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for killing US and other coalition forces in Afghanistan, as peace talks to end the war continue. American spies and commandos reportedly told their superiors about the plot as early as January, after discovering a Taliban outpost rife with US cash.

The reports come amid ongoing efforts to pull American troops out of Afghanistan following a peace deal reached earlier this year, which would bolster the president’s reelection campaign. The situation has now sparked questions from both Democrats and Trump allies.

According to the Times, American intelligence officials told the president about the findings in March and offered a number of options for reprimanding Russia, including escalating sanctions or issuing diplomatic complaints. But Trump didn’t choose to retaliate at all, instead apparently ignoring what intelligence suggested was an unprecedented Russian attack on US troops — and a significant escalation of the country’s support for the Taliban.

Twenty Americans were killed in Afghanistan in 2019 and four others were killed in early 2020, though the Taliban has not attacked any American bases since February. It’s unclear which killings may be connected to the Russian plot or whether any bounties were actually paid.

National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe denied that the president had been briefed on the issue on Saturday, though he didn’t dispute the veracity of the Russian bounty plot. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also issued a statement Saturday saying Trump did not receive a briefing but that “does not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence.”

Trump followed suit on Sunday morning, tweeting that nobody briefed him, Vice President Mike Pence or Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the scheme. The Russian embassy and the Taliban have also denied the Times report.

Trump added, “Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump Administration.”

However, while some of Trump’s advisers have pushed for more stringent policies toward Russia, Trump has consistently been more amenable to the country’s authoritarian leadership.

Trump has indicated that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that the country did not interfere in the 2016 US elections, questioning his own intelligence officials who have said otherwise. He has reportedly suggested multiple times that the US should pull out of NATO, which would be a massive win for Russia and a significant blow to US allies in Europe. And in 2017 when Congress passed new sanctions on Russia related to its election interference with a veto-proof majority, Trump reluctantly signed the bill and implied it was unconstitutional.

If Trump was briefed in March, the timing was not good for him. He was reportedly told about the plot just as the coronavirus was beginning to explode throughout the country, and the president — facing reelection in November — hopes to complete the peace deal with the Taliban in order to put an end to the war in Afghanistan.

Top Democrats condemn Trump’s denial, Republicans question what’s next, and intelligence officials are mixed

Despite Trump’s assertion that “everybody” is denying the Times’s reporting, intelligence experts’ responses varied over the weekend.

Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence, wrote a series of tweets Sunday arguing that the reporting is false. “No one would be fine with this if it were true,” he wrote.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton told NBC that it would be “disturbing” if officials hadn’t told the president about the issue if the intelligence was reliable. “If there’s any accuracy to it,” Bolton said, “that is a very, very serious matter.”

Democrats, meanwhile, expressed outrage over the findings. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, derided Trump at a campaign event for not punishing Russia.

“His entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale,” Biden said during a virtual town hall Saturday. “It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation, to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told ABC’s This Week that she was not aware of the intelligence reports on the Russian plan, despite being one of the “Gang of Eight” congressional leaders who are regularly briefed on intelligence matters. However, she said, “it’s totally outrageous” that the president did not respond to news of the scheme.

“I don’t know what the Russians have on the president politically, personally, financially, whatever it is,” Pelosi said. “The president wants to ignore any allegation against Russia.”

Other Democrats questioned the likelihood that the president wouldn’t be looped in on a matter of such severity. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, said Trump was “cozying up to Putin,” while his administration knew of the Russian scheme. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted that Ratcliffe “is lying (which is a massive problem) or the DNI withheld earthshaking information from President Trump,” which is also a problem.

The Times reported earlier this year that it’s difficult for intelligence officials to keep Trump’s attention when briefings are provided. Ten current and former intelligence officials who spoke with the Times said he is easily distracted, veers off on tangents, and rarely reads the reports, instead relying on conservative media or friends for information.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a reliable supporter of the president’s, said on Twitter that he expects the administration “to take such allegations seriously.” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), chair of the House Republican Conference, wrote that Trump “must explain” why he wasn’t briefed, who did know and when, and “what has been done in response.”

Now that Trump does know about the alleged plot, it’s unclear whether he will choose to take action, but some of his supporters are looking for answers. The president has long had a soft spot for Putin — one of the reasons Democrats and other critics are eyeing his denial with suspicion. It remains to be seen whether Trump will choose to act against the Russian leader he has often praised.

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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.

"Starting in 2015 Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook rewrote their rules in order to not sanction then-candidate Donald Trump," writes Rick Zeman (Slashdot reader #15,628) — citing a new investigation by the Washington Post. (Also available here.) After Trump's infamous "the shooting starts" post, Facebook deputies contacted the White House "with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it," the article reveals, after which Trump himself called Mark Zuckerberg. (The article later notes that historically Facebook makes a "newsworthiness exception" for some posts which it refuses to remove, "determined on a case-by-case basis, with the most controversial calls made by Zuckerberg.") And in the end, Facebook also decided not to delete that post — and says now that even Friday's newly-announced policy changes still would not have disqualified the post: The frenzied push-pull was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency. Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015... The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world's information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization. And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees... Facebook is also facing a slow-burning crisis of morale, with more than 5,000 employees denouncing the company's decision to leave Trump's post that said, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," up... The political speech carveout ended up setting the stage for how the company would handle not only Trump, but populist leaders around the world who have posted content that test these boundaries, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India... "The value of being in favor with people in power outweighs almost every other concern for Facebook," said David Thiel, a Facebook security engineer who resigned in March after his colleagues refused to remove a post he believed constituted "dehumanizing speech" by Brazil's president.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What if a single injection could lower blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides — for a lifetime?" asks the New York Times. "In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease." (Alternate source here.) Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed. "This could be the cure for heart disease," said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come. The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published... Both genes are active in the liver, which is where cholesterol and triglycerides are produced. People who inherit mutations that destroyed the genes' function do not get heart disease.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Donald Trump retweeted a video on Sunday morning of a group of his supporters in the senior citizen community of The Villages, Florida, having a golf cart parade in his honor. One of his supporters is heard yelling “white power” at a group of senior protesters.

Trump praised them on Twitter, calling them “great people.”

Tweeted Trump: “Thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!”

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1277204969561755649

UPDATE. Trump removed the tweet but here’s the video he retweeted.

Trump retweeted this video of his supporters in The Villages yelling "white power!"

He's upgraded his dog whistle to an air raid siren. pic.twitter.com/zyKJOkt9By

— Nick Jack Pappas (@Pappiness) June 28, 2020

Asked about Trump retweeting a video in which one of his supporters can be heard yelling "white power," Alex Azar absurdly claims "neither the president, his administration, nor I would do anything to be supportive of white supremacy." (He just did it!) pic.twitter.com/nc3abpOlhS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 28, 2020

The post Trump Thanks Supporters Yelling ‘White Power’ During Golf Cart Parade in His Honor, Calls Them ‘Great People’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A disguised Sacha Baron Cohen crashed a white supremacist right-wing militia event in Olympia, Washington on Saturday and sang racist songs (video below) to the crowd for at least 8 minutes, getting the crowd to sing along with him before the jig was up.

The event was the ‘March for Our Rights 3’ rally sponsored by the Washington Three Percenters and the Borat comic reportedly booked the gig through a last-minute big donor. Cohen reportedly arrived with a large security detail which blocked organizers from turning off generators that powered the speakers and from mounting the stage to remove Cohen once he had started. When he could no longer hold off organizers, Cohen and crew reportedly fled in a waiting ambulance.

Cohen’s song contained these lyrics: “Dr. Fauci, what we gonna do? Inject him with the Wuhan flu… Hillary Clinton, what we gonna do? Lock her up like we used to do. WHO, what we gotta do? Chop ’em up like the Saudis do!”

This post is by a city council member in Yelm, Washington. Earlier this afternoon, Sacha Baron Cohen crashed the event of Washington 3% – a right-wing group of armed insurrectionists and white supremacists – in Olympia.

I look forward to the video… pic.twitter.com/zilUA2zJQU

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) June 28, 2020

A councilman from Yelm City, James Blair, reported on the event afterwards: “He came on stage disguised as the lead singer of the last band, singing a bunch of racist, hateful, disgusting sh*t. His security blocked event organizers from getting him off the stage, or pulling power from the generator.”

Said Matt Marshall, a 3 Percenters in Washington founder, in a video posted to Twitter: “…They wanted to bring in some bands, have some music, give us a nice stage, set it up, amp it better. It felt a little weird but then started paying for stuff like port-a-potties, stage rentals, [and] barriers. Well, the second band started playing their set and about halfway into a set, or where I’d expect for them to be about done, they started into a an incredibly racist song. At that moment, we realized that our organizers were nowhere to be found… as one of the organizers, we tried to pull the plug. They had four armed security on the generator, so we couldn’t even cut the power. We tried to get on the stage to kick the band off. They had all the security around the stage, was then blocking us from getting to the stage… All the security turned on us. We bum-rushed them, got through security, unplugged the mic, got the guy off the stage, and they jumped into an ambulance with lights and sirens on to get out of here.”

@SachaBaronCohen was just here to demonize Patriots at the #MarchForOurRights Rally in Olympia WA. Here's the truth about the matter from @Matt4_Liberty pic.twitter.com/ufays0E90y

— J (@AvengerOfTruth) June 27, 2020

Holy shit

Sacha Baron Cohen infiltrated the Washington 3% (local rightwing militia) event in Olympia a few minutes ago. A last-minute big donor paid to sponsor the event, and hire security… And then that security kept the organizers from getting on stage to stop Cohen. pic.twitter.com/mllLkKBcpZ

— Spek (@spekulation) June 27, 2020

The Daily Beast reports: “According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, ‘The reference to 3 percent stems from the dubious historical claim that only 3 percent of American colonists fought against the British during the War of Independence.’ Baron Cohen, who may have pulled the stunt for a possible second season of his Showtime series Who Is America?, was dressed in overalls and a fake beard as he sang about injecting Obama, Fauci, the World Health Organization, CNN and anyone who was wearing a mask with the ‘Wuhan flu’ or alternatively chopping them up ‘like the Saudis do.'” 

Baron reportedly came back for the interviews about what happened.

SACHA BARON COHEN CAME BACK IN A DIFFERENT DISGUISE FOR THE INTERVIEWS OF THE ORGANIZERS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HAPPENED. pic.twitter.com/o6Ywhsiuct

— Jan Hofdijk (@JanHofdijk) June 28, 2020

The post Sacha Baron Cohen Crashes Far-Right Militia Event, Engages Willing Crowd in ‘Racist, Hateful, Disgusting’ Songs: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Patrons eat outdoors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. | Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

Pew Research Center found a growing share of Americans — and most Republicans — believe the US has already been through the worst of Covid-19.

A growing number of Americans of both political parties believe the worst of the coronavirus pandemic is over, even as the number of daily new cases is rapidly increasing nationwide.

A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of Americans now believe the worst of Covid-19 is in the past, up from 26 percent in early April. That number includes the majority of Republicans, 61 percent of whom said the country has already suffered the worst of the pandemic.

Overall, the survey — taken June 16 to 22, featuring 4,708 American adults and a 1.8 percentage point margin of error — found a strikingly deep ideological divide between how Republicans and Democrats think about the continued threat of the virus.

Democrats were much more likely to say they’re worried they may get Covid-19 and need to be hospitalized; that they might spread the virus to other people; and that they’re uncomfortable going to salons, restaurants, sporting events, or social gatherings. For instance, the study found 65 percent of Republicans are now comfortable eating in a restaurant, compared to 28 percent of Democrats.

This divide is one that is reflected in the clear difference in public officials’ response to the coronavirus. President Donald Trump has long downplayed the threat posed by Covid-19, and has pushed states to reopen nonessential businesses. That push was — until recently — widely embraced by his allies at the state level. Some states with Republican governors, however, like Texas and Florida, have begun to scale back those reopenings amid increasing case counts.

Many Democrats, on the other hand, have argued for a more cautious reopening, with some, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, arguing for mandating the wearing of masks in public.

Beyond partisan leanings, the study also found a racial divide in current attitudes on Covid-19, with Black and Latinx Americans more likely to fear infection than white Americans.

Sixty-three and 73 percent of Black and Latinx Americans, respectively, said they were at least somewhat concerned they would become infected and require hospitalization; 43 percent of white Americans said they had the same fear. Asymptomatic spread was also of greater concern to Black and Latinx respondents; 72 percent of Black Americans and 79 percent of Latinx Americans were found to be at least somewhat concerned about being asymptomatic carriers, compared to 56 percent of white Americans with the same concern.

These findings reflect the work of multiple other studies showing that people’s political beliefs are one of the largest indicators of how they respond to the pandemic — as well as data and analyses that show Americans of color are more likely to be infected and die of Covid-19 than white Americans.

The study also revealed that Americans are increasingly united in one thing: They’re less scared now than they were in April.

Coronavirus cases are actually surging nationwide

Americans still have a lot of cause for concern, however. After nearly two months of declining coronavirus cases across the US, cases have skyrocketed again over the last two weeks. Between June 22 and 26, the country went from having fewer than 25,000 new cases per day to more than 45,000. Friday, the US recorded its greatest one-day increase in confirmed cases, documenting 45,498 new cases, according to the New York Times.

German Lopez/Vox

States like Arizona, Florida, and Texas and others throughout the South have been among the hardest hit. Texas, one of the first states to begin reopening nonessential businesses, and Florida have already begun reversing their economic reopenings in response to the increase in cases. On Friday, when Florida saw nearly 9,000 new cases and Texas nearly 6,000, both states ordered bars shuttered.

As Vox’s German Lopez has explained, many states never actually controlled their outbreaks before reopening sectors of their economy: The public was sent back into offices, restaurants, bars, and salons nationwide as the coronavirus was still circulating in their communities, leading to rising cases.

“It’s a situation that didn’t have to be,” Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told Lopez, adding that states failed to “be proactive with respect to mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic and to help normalize culture to adopt practices that would stem the tide of transmissions as well as the development of Covid-19 complications.”

Not all states have begun to see a spike in new infections — many of the states hit the hardest in the beginning of the pandemic, such as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, have been spared the increases. While this could be attributed to a number of factors, epidemiologists believe these states have avoided large new caseloads by implementing strict social distancing policies and by promoting the wearing of masks.

As Lopez reports, what’s most important, experts say, is taking reopenings slowly. Because of the way the coronavirus manifests in humans, it can take two weeks — if not longer — to see the impact of any one change in policy. Many experts recommend states be prepared to rapidly reintroduce restrictions when they see cases spike.

Lauren Meyers, a mathematical biologist at the University of Texas Austin, told Lopez: “Relax things bit by bit, and see if it’s working. If we relax a few measures, we watch the data for a few weeks; if it’s not going up, maybe we can relax a bit more.”

For now, however, the figures suggest it is not yet time to relax, and that the worst is not behind the US.

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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.

Sen. Chuck Grassley laid blame on Fox News — and President Donald Trump — on Saturday over failing to articulate what his administration’s second term priorities would be during a recent interview with the news organization.

The Iowa Republican tweeted that Trump got “off point” when asked by Fox’s Sean Hannity what his goals would be if re-elected, but appeared vexed at Hannity for helping the president “digress” instead of helping Trump form a more intelligible answer.

“Does FOXNews want Trump Re-elected?” Grassley wrote.

Trump was widely criticized for his meandering answer to the softball question, in which he promoted his experience and attacked former national security adviser John Bolton instead of focusing on initiatives and policies he’d promote if given another four years in office.

“You make some mistakes. Like, you know, an idiot like Bolton,” Trump said during the interview. “All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.”

And on Saturday morning, Trump tweeted a defense of his Fox News interview, saying Hannity “dominated T.V. with my interview on Thursday night.”

Grassley, calling it the most important question of the interview, said Trump should have communicated to voters his desire for continuing to “DRAIN THE SWAMP” and appoint more conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

The criticism from Grassley comes a day after he encouraged Trump to heed the advice of a scathing Wall Street Journal editorial that warned Trump could only serve one term.

“Will somebody w access to the Oval Office read the WSJ editorial ‘The Trump Referendum’ to President Trump,” Grassley wrote in a tweet on Friday. “We won’t hv more good scotus justices or the best economy in 50 years like we hv had if he doesn’t follow that advice.”

In Florida, where Miami beaches are set to close again because of a surge in new coronavirus cases, a man in St. Lucie Countyis going viral after calling the county commission “pieces of crap” in an explosive diatribe.

“I will not be muzzled like a mad dog,” said the man. “We are being lied to, our freedoms are being taken forever. … And I will not have my health destroyed because you idiots can’t figure, can’t read truth. You go along with the lies that the people who are trying to take down our freedoms and destroy our country. This is sick! You ought to be ashamed of yourself for being a part of this, and I will not be muzzled, and it’s time for us to stand up for our freedoms.”

“If we stand back and let these pieces of crap handle our freedoms,” he added, pointing at the city council, “we will have nothing left. In fact we will be dead.”

WATCH: "I will not be muzzled like a mad dog;" face mask debate turns fierce in St. Lucie County. https://t.co/QgY6V16xvg pic.twitter.com/XeLsrSVRGQ

— WPEC CBS12 News (@CBS12) June 26, 2020

The post Florida Man Explodes at County Commission Over Face Mask Mandate: ‘I Will Not Be Muzzled Like a Mad Dog’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

On the last day of February, the United States signed a preliminary agreement with the Taliban that was intended to bring to an end to two decades of conflict and U. S. military occupation in Afghanistan. However, despite an extended round of chest-thumping by Donald Trump,  it took only two days for that agreement to prove the weakest of weak tea, as violence resumed and the Taliban ordered its fighters right back into the fray. Since then, there has been attempts to negotiate a series of interim agreements that would build toward an actual working agreement, but the negotiations haven’t even seriously begun. Officially, the blame for that failure has been on COVID-19 and the pandemic that’s spread around the globe. But on Friday, The New York Times reported another reason why things might not be settling down: Russia paid bounties for militants to attack American forces.

Now The Washington Post has confirmed that story and provided additional details. That includes how Moscow’s bounties on American troops are intended to “muddy the negotiations on Afghanistan” and keep the United States involved in this long, costly, and distracting effort. Which leaves Russia free to attack Ukraine, romp through the Middle East, and generally have its way around the world—all while Donald Trump defends their actions and makes regular phone calls to Vladimir Putin.

As the earlier story made clear, Trump has known about Russia’s contract killing of American soldiers since at least March. That hasn’t prevented Trump from launching into an argument that Russia deserves to be re-admitted to the G7 and that Putin should be invited to the next meeting of the economic organization. Trump was on the phone with the Russian autocrat earlier this month to renew that invitation over the objections of both Canada and the U. K. 

As has become all too typical, the White House provided no details on the call. However, the Kremlin did provide a readout to say that: Trump initiated the call, they talked about COVID-19 and some ventilators sent to Russia from the U. S., they talked about the oil market and their mutual desire to see higher prices, and they talked about Russia continuing to act as source of flights for the U. S. space program. What’s notably not on that list is any mention of Russia paying for the death of U. S. forces, or any warnings of retaliation, or even a request to stop.

The topic also didn’t seem to come up on previous phone calls. Like back in May, when Trump called Putin to gloat about the William Barr Justice Department trying to withdraw charges against Michael Flynn. There was supposedly some discussion of arms control that day, but the focus seemed to be on getting rid of treaties that prevent development of next-generation nuclear awfulness. Again, there was no mention of Russia’s program of paying out cash bonuses for people who murder American soldiers. Trump definitely knew about it. He just didn’t complain.

Trump is also not complaining about how the Russian cash-for-corpses program extended to other members of the NATO coalition that have worked with the United States in Afghanistan. Which is certain to have an effect on the enthusiasm that the leaders of those nations have for helping the United States the next time there is a crisis — as well as their enthusiasm about meeting with Putin at one of Trump’s country clubs.

A medical professional administers a coronavirus test at a drive-through testing site run by George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC, on May 26. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

America could have prevented another surge in coronavirus cases. It’s now clear it didn’t.

The past week gave America an ugly reminder that the threat of the coronavirus pandemic is far from over. Cases are rapidly rising again. The nation on Wednesday hit a new record for daily new infections, and then hit a new record again and again over the next two days.

There’s some debate about whether this is the “second wave” of infections, or whether it’s a continuation of the first wave that began in early 2020 and never really ended. But what’s clear is the US is now suffering from a rapid rise in coronavirus cases. So far, that’s yet to translate to a rising death toll, possibly because rises and falls in deaths tend to lag behind rises and falls in overall cases.

But between Monday and Friday, the US went from more than 30,000 reported cases in one day to more than 45,000. Arizona, Florida, Texas, and several other states in the South and West are among the hardest hit.

German Lopez/Vox

President Donald Trump and his allies have suggested that the increase is due to a spike in testing, but the data doesn’t bear that out. The number of cases has increased more quickly than the number of tests, with the percentage of tests coming back positive — an indicator of the seriousness of an outbreak — rising above 10, 15, and even 20 percent in some states. (The recommended positive rate is below 5 percent.)

It’s a significant shift from much of May and June, when testing increased, cases plateaued nationwide, the positive rate fell across the country, and it finally looked like restrictions and social distancing measures were working to constrain the growth of the coronavirus.

So what went wrong? The simple answer is states started to relax their restrictions and reopen their economies — giving employers, employees, and patrons a chance to go back out into the world and interact, fueling new cases.

It’s possible to lift restrictions slowly and safely, and a few states are meeting the benchmarks that experts recommend to do that. But most never fully controlled their outbreaks, instead forging ahead with reopening.

A mix of carelessness and partisanship is to blame. Under Trump, the federal government and some states appeared to prioritize the economy over public health, voicing discontent with the restrictions. Trump called to “LIBERATE” states from shutdowns. Some Americans took up that messaging, reopening their businesses and going back out. Mask-wearing became a politicized issue, and segments of the population rejected face coverings and other precautions against Covid-19.

The effects were sadly predictable. Citing research on the 1918 flu pandemic and newer studies, experts pointed out that lockdowns worked to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and ending the restrictions would lead to a spike in cases as long as other preventive measures weren’t put in place. But experts’ warnings were not heeded.

“It’s a situation that didn’t have to be,” Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “For almost three months, you had opportunities to be proactive with respect to mitigating the Covid-19 pandemic and to help normalize culture to adopt practices that would stem the tide of transmissions as well as the development of Covid-19 complications. … It was not prioritized over the economy.”

The result: America is now in the middle of a predictable, preventable wave of Covid-19 cases — worsening what was already the most widespread coronavirus crisis in the world.

Different states are suffering this time around

In the first wave of Covid-19 cases, the New York City region was the hardest hit, with New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut leading the country in Covid-19 cases and deaths. There were also significant outbreaks in other parts of the Northeast, Michigan, and Louisiana.

The more recent wave has hit the South and West, with cases rising in Arizona (a 125 percent increase in daily new cases over two weeks), Florida (250 percent), and Texas (177 percent), but also alarming increases in cases in Alabama (20 percent), California (74 percent), Georgia (112 percent), Mississippi (74 percent), Nevada (103 percent), North Carolina (15 percent), Oklahoma (212 percent), and South Carolina (107 percent). Most of these states have seen their test positive rates increase, indicating the rise in cases isn’t just a result of more testing.

German Lopez/Vox

In most of these states, it’s not quite right to say they’re going through second waves — because many of them never really got their first wave under control. Instead, they have seen a steady rise in coronavirus cases, culminating in the exponential growth of the past few days and weeks.

Many states “never got to flat,” Pia MacDonald, an epidemiologist at the research institute RTI International, told me. “That means the states didn’t get to very good compliance with the public health interventions that we all need to take to make sure the outbreak doesn’t continue to grow.”

Arizona, for example, saw a steady increase in coronavirus cases for months before the most recent exponential spike. There was never a sustained decline, as this chart shows:

German Lopez/Vox

While coronavirus outbreaks can be concentrated locally, the current ones appear to cover whole states — with a majority of counties reporting a high number of cases in many states, especially across the South.

This was not inevitable. Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, for example, all managed to suppress their coronavirus case numbers after suffering the worst of the pandemic, and have all kept their cases down. Others, like Maryland and Rhode Island, have managed to keep their coronavirus case counts suppressed as well.

The difference is that the states seeing the biggest increases were some of the slowest to close down their economies in response to the outbreak and some of the quickest to open back up again. Texas’s stay-at-home order, for example, was one of the shortest in the US — lasting less than a month, according to the New York Times. As those orders have ended, people have trickled out, interacted, and spread the coronavirus. (Since the incubation period can last up to two weeks, there’s a lag between when the virus starts spreading and when cases are reported.)

The increases in Covid-19 cases coincide with the Black Lives Matter protests, but the research and data so far suggest the protests didn’t cause a significant spike in coronavirus spread. Experts argue that may be a result of the demonstrations mostly taking place outside and protesters embracing steps, such as wearing masks, that mitigate the risk of transmission.

In some places, the rise in cases appears to be hitting a younger demographic. Some Texas and Florida counties, for example, reported that people under 30 made up a growing share — and even a majority — of coronavirus cases.

That’s likely a result of young people being the most willing to go out and about as social distancing ends, perhaps because they perceive themselves as being at lower risk. While young people are at lower risk, and that could lead to a lower death toll from the current wave of cases, there are still plenty of examples of younger patients getting sick, experiencing longer-term complications, and dying.

Relaxed social distancing is likely to blame

Across the board, experts were pretty clear on why states are seeing increases in Covid-19 cases: relaxed restrictions that enforced social distancing.

“The economies are opening up. People are starting to venture out. They’re interacting with others more,” Slaughter-Acey said. “That creates opportunities for transmission.”

The research increasingly shows social distancing measures worked to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. One study in Health Affairs concluded:

Adoption of government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the daily growth rate by 5.4 percentage points after 1–5 days, 6.8 after 6–10 days, 8.2 after 11–15 days, and 9.1 after 16–20 days. Holding the amount of voluntary social distancing constant, these results imply 10 times greater spread by April 27 without [shelter-in-place orders] (10 million cases) and more than 35 times greater spread without any of the four measures (35 million).

The reverse, then, is likely true: Without social distancing measures, places are more likely to see a rise in Covid-19 cases.

That’s what the epidemiological evidence from past disease outbreaks suggests. Several studies of the 1918 flu pandemic found places that took quicker and more aggressive steps to enforce social distancing saved lives. But this research also shows the consequences of pulling back restrictions too early: A 2007 study in JAMA found that when St. Louis — widely praised for its response to the 1918 pandemic — eased its school closures, public gathering ban, and other restrictions, it saw a rise in deaths.

Here’s how that looks in chart form, with the line chart representing excess flu deaths and the black and gray bars below showing when social distancing measures were in place. The highest peak comes after social distancing measures were lifted, with the death rate falling only after they were reinstated.

JAMA

This did not just happen in St. Louis. Analyzing data from 43 cities, the JAMA study found this pattern repeatedly across the country. Howard Markel, an author of the study and the director of the University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine, described the results as a bunch of “double-humped epi curves” — officials instituted social distancing measures, saw flu cases fall, then pulled back the measures and saw flu cases rise again.

As a whole, the US is essentially experiencing that second hump in the epi curve: After states managed to suppress the growth of coronavirus cases with social distancing measures, they eased up, and now cases are on the rise again.

This doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be shut down again. When the pandemic first hit the US, many states were quick to close down as many public places as possible because there was little understanding of which places were at greatest risk for coronavirus transmission. Now, we have a better — although still far from perfect — understanding of how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus works.

For example, outdoor spaces seem to be much safer, with the open air making it harder for respiratory droplets to float from person to person, and the warmer weather, humidity, and UV light also potentially playing a role. That suggests that states could probably keep parks, beaches, and other outdoor venues open — as long as people follow recommended safety practices, like wearing a mask and keeping 6 feet from others.

Along those lines, personal precautions seem to be more effective than initially expected. Several recent studies have found masks alone reduce transmission. Some experts hypothesize — and early research suggests — that masks played a significant role in containing Covid-19 outbreaks in several Asian countries where their use is widespread, like South Korea and Japan.

All of that is to suggest that some places, especially those outside, could safely reopen or stay open with the proper precautions.

The key, experts said, is to take the process slowly. States should open things up bit by bit through various phases to see what leads to an unmanageable spike in coronavirus cases and what doesn’t, while building up a public health surveillance system — through testing and contact tracing — that can pick up those increases. Over time, that approach can strike a balance between public health needs and reclaiming some sense of normalcy.

“Since this is new and we don’t have data and experience to guide us, it makes sense to take things slowly,” Lauren Ancel Meyers, a mathematical biologist at the University of Texas Austin, told me. “Relax things bit by bit, and see if it’s working. If we relax a few measures, we watch the data for a few weeks; if it’s not going up, maybe we can relax a bit more.”

A key element of this — and one in which states have generally failed — is having a plan to pull back the reopening should things go badly again. “One of the most important parts of this whole reopening experiment is knowing when to slow down reopening based on public health criteria,” Abraar Karan, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard, told me. “It’s why it’s so important to have a public health surveillance system.”

And if things spiral out of control again, a community really might have to shut everything down again to get things under control. “What we want to do is to avoid a situation where the only measure that’s going to turn things around is a full-blown shelter-in-place order,” Meyers said. “However, if we are throwing caution to the wind, and we’re not taking these small steps to protect ourselves, we may find ourselves in a situation where that is the only thing we can do to prevent overwhelming surges in hospitalizations and alarming numbers of deaths.”

It’s not clear what states will do now

At this point, it’s not clear if local and state officials will take the precautions that experts recommend.

The federal government could encourage stronger action. But the Trump administration has largely been absent in recent weeks — stopping daily coronavirus briefings, denying there’s a new spike in Covid-19 cases at all, and generally commenting little on the recent trends. White House guidances have also suggested that the Trump administration wants to leave the bulk of the problem to states, local governments, and private actors.

In some cases, the administration has encouraged the opposite of what experts have called for. Trump has repeatedly pushed states to reopen their economies — in what now very clearly was a premature move. He has also taken bizarre stances, like his remarks that the US should slow down testing and that masks may do more harm than good.

The problem for local and state officials is many of Trump’s supporters and Republicans in general take what Trump says seriously. When Trump downplays the threat of Covid-19 and the benefits of masks, his followers listen — and that likely makes his backers more resistant to their local and state leaders taking aggressive action against new coronavirus outbreaks. In that context, it’s not a coincidence that most of the states suffering the worst now are led by Republican governors.

Then there’s the economy. Although research suggests that getting a disease outbreak under control is ultimately better for the economy in the long term, closing places down now does mean short- or medium-term economic pain. Local and state leaders have to balance those tensions.

Still, things may eventually get so bad that officials feel compelled to act regardless. Following reports of some hospitals in Texas nearing capacity due to a surge in Covid-19 cases, Gov. Greg Abbott moved to slow down his state’s reopening, keeping some businesses at reduced capacity or shut down entirely and closing down bars. (This came after months of Abbott pushing the state to reopen, overruling local governments that tried to stay closed.)

Aside from government action, perhaps people will act on their own. Even after state and local governments moved to reopen, people were at times slow to embrace a rosy view of the situation with Covid-19 and chose to stay home anyway. As people see the effects of the coronavirus firsthand in their communities, they might be driven to strictly social distance again regardless of what their political leaders tell them to do.

How all of these factors could come together, from individual decisions to government actions, will decide just how bad and long-lasting this new spike in coronavirus cases is. But some of the surge, experts said, is already baked in — it’s likely going to take weeks for new measures, should they come, to take effect and start leading to a drop in Covid-19 cases.

“We have to start putting on the brakes long before we get to hospital capacity,” Meyers said. “New York threw on the brakes in mid-March. It wasn’t really until early or mid-April that deaths finally reached their peak and started subsiding. You can put on the brakes today, but you won’t see the impact until several weeks out.”

That’s why it was important to act before the situation got to this point, and why it was so dangerous for officials to relax social distancing measures before Covid-19 cases began to fall. Several states are now seeing — and will continue to suffer from — the consequences.

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Donald Trump has known since late March that Russia offered secret bounties to Taliban-linked militants if they killed American troops in Afghanistan, but has taken no action, according to a blockbuster report in the New York Times.

The NYT reports: “The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.”

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hammered Trump on Friday night: “This is kind of sickening news. … Vladimir Putin is offering bounties for the scalps of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Not only offering, but some of the bounties that have been offered have been collected.”

“Not only does the president know … there was that unexpected and friendly conversation he had with Putin. According to the Kremlin what they discussed on that call was how much Russia would like to be allowed back into the G7. President Trump then got off that call with Putin and immediately began calling for Russia to be allowed back into the G7. … That’s how Trump is standing up for Americans being killed for rubles paid by Putin’s government.”

It is a shame that you, @realDonaldTrump, supposedly the president of the United States, learned MONTHS AGO that your friends, the Russians, were paying the Taliban to murder American soldiers and YOU’VE DONE NOTHING ABOUT IT. https://t.co/Id4UI9yTLN

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 27, 2020

The post Trump Knew Russia Was Paying Taliban ‘Bounties for the Scalps’ of American Troops in Afghanistan, and Did Nothing: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A Senate committee is re-engaging former Obama administration officials as part of an investigation targeting Joe Biden’s son, demanding transcribed interviews and documents for the Republican-led probe.

The renewed scrutiny from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee comes amid intensifying efforts by President Donald Trump to target Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, over what the president and his allies portray as a corruption scandal that disqualifies the former vice president.

The panel, chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), reached out this week to former Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken; former Special Envoy for International Energy Amos Hochstein (though the letter referred to him by an informal title, as a former senior adviser on international energy affairs to Biden); former senior State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Catherine Novelli; and David Wade, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry, a spokesperson for the committee confirmed.

The request this week — a follow-up from December, when the panel asked the same former officials for documents and testimony during the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s Ukraine dealings — followed the Tuesday release of former national security adviser John Bolton’s memoir, in which he confirmed that Trump withheld military assistance aid to Ukraine last year in exchange for the promise of an investigation targeting the Bidens.

And on Monday, Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, an associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani with links to Russian intelligence, held a press conference to announce the release of new recordings he says he obtained of then-Vice President Biden speaking to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. It was the second such press conference he has held in just over a month. Derkach has long made unsubstantiated corruption accusations against Biden and his son, and the release of the tapes has echoes of Russia’s hacking-and-dumping operation in 2016 in an effort to tip the election to Trump.

The committee said the requests were part of an investigation into “whether certain officials within the Obama administration had actual or apparent conflicts of interest, or whether there was any other wrongdoing, because of Hunter Biden’s role in Rosemont Seneca and related entities, and as a board member of Burisma Holdings,” according to letters the panel’s chief counsel sent at the time.

Last month, the committee on a party-line vote authorized Johnson to issue a subpoena to Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic public-affairs firm, as part of the investigation. Johnson has zeroed in on allegations that the firm sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s position on the board of Burisma in order to influence matters at the Obama-era State Department.

Democrats uniformly oppose the GOP-led investigation, dubbing it an effort to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Others have gone further in their criticisms, saying the probe itself jeopardizes U.S. national security and contributes to Russian disinformation campaigns. The former GOP chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr, privately warned Johnson that the investigation could aid the Kremlin’s efforts to sow chaos and distrust in the U.S. political system.

Johnson’s investigations have fueled raw partisan tensions in public committee meetings as well as behind closed doors. In March, senators got into heated arguments during a classified election-security briefing as Democrats asserted that Johnson was participating in Russia’s interference in U.S. elections.

Trump has openly encouraged the Senate’s investigations, including similar efforts to probe the origins of the Russia investigation and the actions of the Obama administration during the presidential transition period in late 2016 and early 2017. Johnson’s panel and the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), secured authorizations from Republican senators earlier this month to issue subpoenas as part of those probes to a slew of former Obama administration officials, many of whom have drawn Trump’s ire in recent years.

Democrats initiated impeachment proceedings last year over the effort to spur Ukraine-led investigations that would benefit the president politically, during which Trump’s legal team focused on Biden’s son Hunter and his role on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma while his father was vice president and in charge of Ukraine matters.

Trump's team presented no evidence that Biden used his role as vice president to benefit his son, nor alleged anything improper other than the “appearance of a conflict,” and allegations of wrongdoing have been widely discredited.

But Senate Republicans appear to be reviving the issue less than five months before election day — and Johnson has said he intends to release an interim report on the Biden probe over the summer, thrusting the issue back into the spotlight as the 2020 campaign kicks into high gear.

Johnson has insisted that the investigations have nothing to do with the election, though Trump’s reelection campaign has touted many of the revelations from Johnson, including a list of Obama White House officials who might have been involved in efforts that “unmasked” former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s name from intelligence intercepts. Biden’s name was on the list, but there is no evidence that he acted improperly, as Trump and his campaign have claimed.

US President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel join other G-7 leaders on August 25, 2019 in Biarritz, France. | Andrew Parsons/Pool/Getty Images

The European Union is trying to reopen — but not to many US visitors.

The European Union will reportedly block most Americans from traveling to the bloc even as those countries reopen to other travelers, a policy that reflects the United States’s failure to fully control the coronavirus pandemic.

The European Union restricted nonessential travel to most of its member-states under rules in effect until at least June 30. But starting July 1, European countries are loosening some of those measures and allowing travel again from more than a dozen countries — including China (if Beijing allows EU travelers too) — that meet certain criteria, including their ability to contain the coronavirus.

Right now, the United States doesn’t make the cut.

This is not altogether surprising. Europe was once the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, with Italy, Spain, and France some of the hardest hit countries in the bloc. Aggressive lockdown measures drove down cases, and many European countries have slowly reopened. And while there have been spikes across the continent, overall, Europe’s cases have declined.

The US had long since overtaken Europe as the epicenter of the crisis. And, unlike its allies overseas, America is now seeing a massive surge in cases in some states. As of June 26, the US has confirmed more than 2.4 million coronavirus cases and recorded more than 124,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. On Friday, the US confirmed a record 40,000 new coronavirus cases nationwide.

The New York Times’s Matina Stevis-Gridneff first reported Friday that EU officials had finalized the list of acceptable countries Friday after what she described as “tortuous negotiations”:

The list was backed in principle by most E.U. ambassadors and does not require unanimous support, but still needs to be formalized in member states’ capitals as well as in the central European Union bureaucracy before taking effect July 1. Diplomats did not expect the list to change.

The US is not alone in being excluded, and travelers from other countries, including Russia, are also barred from visiting.

Still, this is a dramatic decision from some of America’s closest allies, and it has serious implications for trade and travel, especially as both the US and Europe seek to rebuild their economies in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The EU ban should be a wake-up call for the US. But will it be?

On March 11, as the number of coronavirus cases began to tick up in the US, President Donald Trump announced a travel ban on anyone arriving from the 26 Schengen zone countries of the European Union. (The ban was expanded a few days later to include Ireland and the United Kingdom.)

Trump touted the decision as a way to protect Americans, though some doubted its effectiveness in really slowing the spread of the virus, which was already circulating in communities around the US.

The abrupt policy change also caused confusion about who could and couldn’t return to the US, leading to chaos at airports and potentially backfiring as a rush of people returned to US airports.

The announcement also caught European leaders by surprise. They condemned the unilateral decision, adding yet another strain to the US’s transatlantic partnerships under Trump.

But, on March 17, EU states agreed to bar nonessential travel on its external borders, which included the US. That has since been extended to the end of June. Tensions also existed within the European Union, as some member-states temporarily sealed off their borders to other EU members in an attempt to contain the virus. A hallmark of the Schengen zone is free and frictionless travel, and countries turning inward presented a real test for the EU during this crisis.

Since then, the EU has somewhat regrouped, including with a major pandemic recovery plan. And unified travel rules would also help; though individual EU countries can make their own rules on who can and can’t visit, embracing a consistent policy across member-states would eliminate the need for internal controls as the continent reopens for businesses and tourism.

Travel restrictions will be reevaluated every two weeks based on specific science and epidemiological criteria, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the possibility of a US ban earlier this week.

Even so, the EU extending a ban on American travel is a remarkable development. The expectation in a global pandemic would be to see allies like the US and Europe working together; instead, the coronavirus crisis has shown just how deeply the partnership has deteriorated — and how Trump’s “America First” foreign policy has diminished US standing.

Since the start of his administration, Trump has picked fights with European leaders on trade, NATO, the Iran deal, and random other things. That has worn on the friendship, and an unprecedented global crisis has damaged it even more. The US recently declined to participate in a global vaccine summit, a glaring absence as leaders from around the world pledged cooperation to find a vaccine. European leaders have also criticized Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the World Health Organization.

The US was supposed to host the G-7 summit at the end of June; Trump postponed it for obvious pandemic reasons but then tried to reschedule it in June as a sign of the US’s reopening. German Chancellor Angela Merkel swiftly rejected the invitation, and Trump had to postpone again until September.

Once seen as a leader, rallying other countries to respond and coordinate on virus outbreaks, the US took a backseat internationally during the coronavirus and floundered at home. That damaged the US’s reputation as a superpower. It also revealed a global leadership vacuum; this is what happens when the United States looks inward. Both have damaged the US’s global reputation.

And this will have real consequences for the United States. Business travel to Europe has all but fizzled, and it will be difficult to resume with a ban — which could have consequences as the US and Europe seek to rebuild their economies. And while Europeans might be enjoying American-tourist-free zones, the decline of international travel has already hit countries like Italy and France quite hard. Travel restrictions could make that recovery even harder. And the US’s spiraling coronavirus outbreak will also hurt US tourism, as Europeans, and pretty much anyone else, will be unlikely to visit, presuming Trump lifts the current travel bans and they’re allowed to.

Trump has embraced travel bans since he took office, which he has justified as a way to defend the country and protect national security. Now, after its embarrassing coronavirus response, the US is on the receiving end, experiencing what it’s like for everyone else to try to keep Americans out.

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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.

Donald Trump's disapproval rating is hitting some of its highest marks of his entire tenure—including its absolute highest mark in one poll.

In the NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Friday, 58% of voters disapproved of the job Trump is doing, an all-time high for the poll. Plus, most of those who disapprove of Trump do so with a white-hot rage. Fully 49% of voters said they "strongly disapprove" of Trump, a number that jumped 8 points since mid-March when 41% strongly disapproved of him. The two groups where that disapproval grew most was among independents, whose strong disapproval spiked by 10 points since March to 43%, and nonwhite voters, whose strong disapproval jumped 16 points to 57%.

But the NPR/PBS poll is no outlier. Trump's disapprovals are also surging in FiveThirtyEight's aggregate, which on Friday recorded the highest disapproval rating for Trump in over two years at 56.1%. That number represents even more disenchantment with Trump now than during his shutdown debacle of early 2019.

On top of Trump's epic disapprovals, we continue to see evidence that groups that once voted for Trump, and Republicans more generally, are turning against him. In the NPR/PBS poll, Biden had a dominant 25-point lead on Trump in the suburbs, 60% - 35%, while Trump actually won the suburbs by 4 points in 2016, 49% to 45%.

All of this new information just adds to a week in which Trump got slaughtered in national and battleground state polling alike. Not only is Biden ahead in six battleground states that Trump captured in 2016 (MI, WI, PA, FL, AZ, NC), states that nearly everyone considered to be firmly in Trump's column continue to look shaky for him, including Ohio (tied, per Quinnipiac), Georgia (47% Biden, 45% Trump, per Fox) and Texas (45% Biden, 44% Trump, per Fox).

Yowza, folks, and Happy Friday!

Donald Trump put in a call to Vladimir Putin earlier this month to talk about the upcoming G7 summit, and how much he wants to invite Russia. But it’s a pretty good bet that while they were chatting about money, Trump and Putin didn’t talk about the rubles Russia has been paying out to entice militants linked to the Taliban into killing members of the American military.

As The New York Times reports, Russian military intelligence has been offering “bounties” for the killing of American forces stationed in Afghanistan. Those bounties were still on offer during the peace talks being conducted to supposedly end the decades-old conflict in that country. It’s not clear how many of the 20 Americans who were killed in Afghanistan during 2019 resulted in a payday from Moscow, but militants “are believed to have collected some bounty money.” And as Trump continues to talk up his friend Putin, it’s not like any of this is a surprise—because Trump has known about it since March.

Of course, anything that lands on Trump’s desk and is more than a few stick figures could not have been read, but in this case Trump wasn’t just sent the briefing. It was the subject of a meeting of the White House’s National Security Council in late March. Intelligence officials suggested to Trump a “menu” of possible responses, starting with a complaint to Putin and going up from there through sanctions and other actions. But Trump did nothing. 

Actually, that’s not true. Trump found out that Vladimir Putin had put bounties on the heads of American soldiers and that those bounties had been paid out … and he invited Putin to come for a visit at one of his properties. So that’s something. In fact, that’s really something.

The Russian action represents a deliberate attempt to both generate the death of American troops, and to interfere in negotiations. This wouldn’t just be a first for Afghanistan—it would be the first time Russia is known to have solicited hits on Western troops. As the Times points out, this effort fits in neatly with Russia’s “hybrid war against the United States” that involves using cyberattacks, spreading conspiracy theories, and interfering in elections.

But putting down cash for killing American soldiers definitely takes this to a new level. It’s the kind of action a Russian leader would only take if he believed his counterpart in Washington was exceptionally weak, or completely under his control. Maybe Putin can explain it … when Trump invites him over in the fall.

A Lyft passenger went on a racist, homophobic rant — and threatened to crush his driver’s skull — after being asked to wear a face covering.

Dash-cam video of the incident in Reno, Nevada, shows the driver, named Edgar, picking up the passenger, a white man named Richard. Edgar is wearing a mask but Richard is not.

Edgar asks if Richard has a face mask. When Richard replies that he doesn’t, Edgar asks his passenger to put his shirt over his face.

“You believe in that shit?” Richard says.

“Yes, I do because I have family who are sick from that,” Edgar says, referring to the coronavirus.

After Richard says he doesn’t trust the government, Edgar responds: “It’s not the government. It’s the people who are getting sick. … It’s because we are really close right here in the car.”

Richard then objects to Edgar’s route, saying he should have turned left instead of following directions from the Lyft driver app toward a freeway.

“I don’t like you,” Richard says.

“You don’t like me? You want to get out?” Edgar responds.

“No, I want you to take my ass home so I can give you a shitty review.” Richard says.

That’s when Edgar pulls over and tells Richard he can get out. Richard refuses, saying he has “a contract” with the driver that can’t be canceled.

“You represent Lyft, you little candy-ass faggot in your white glasses. I should just fucking crush your f–king skull right now,” Richard says.

As they proceed to argue over the terms of the trip cancellation, Edgar explains to Richard that the entire ride is on video, and threatens to call police if he doesn’t get out.

Richard responds by mocking Edgar’s accent and repeatedly calling him “boy.”

“You’re a fucking wetback,” Richard says at one point. “I’m an American, motherf–ker. I fought … three times in a goddamn war.

“Why are you [charging] me for a full ride when you only gave me 100 yards of ride?” Richard adds. “How is that considered to be fair? Is that considered fair in your country?”

“Yes, because this is my country, too,” Edgar responds, before Richard finally gets out.

A representative from Lyft responded to the video: “The behavior shown by the rider in this video is despicable and has no place on the Lyft platform. Lyft is committed to maintaining an inclusive and welcoming community, and discrimination is not tolerated.”

Watch it below.

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The sheriff’s deputy who has been identified as the officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Andres Guardado outside an auto body shop in Los Angeles last week has so far refused to speak with investigators and has faced previous accusations of misconduct, including “making false statements in an investigation,” the Los Angeles Times reports. 

The report said that the officer, Miguel Vega, faced the false statement accusation when he worked at a men’s jail in 2017. “Capt. John Burcher, Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s chief of staff, said investigators determined the false statements allegation to be unfounded,” the report said. But then Vega reportedly faced another three complaints after being transferred to Compton station the next year, where he’s continued to work until now.

“Burcher said that three complaints have been lodged against Vega while he was assigned to Compton station, including one for using unreasonable force that was determined to have been reasonable,” the report continued. “The two other complaints alleged that he was discourteous. In one, officials determined his conduct ‘could’ve been better,’ and the second remains pending.”

Guardado’s advocates have remained outraged over the lack of answers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over the young man’s death. There have been no adequate explanations from the department yet about why deputies spoke to him as he was outside the auto body shop where he worked as a security guard, why they chased him, or what exactly led to the deadly shooting.

Police have claimed Guardado "produced a handgun,” but his family said he wasn’t known to have one. Casting more doubt on police’s story is that Vega has faced further accusations in the past involving guns, including one allegation that he’d loaded the empty gun of a man he’d pulled over. “The man, who was in lawful possession of the weapon, said he was arrested on suspicion of carrying a loaded firearm in public, but the charges against him were dismissed, according to his attorney,” the report said.

Legislators, including Reps. Maxine Waters and Nanette Diaz Barragán of California, have called on the state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, to open an immediate investigation into the killing. They write: “Far too often, young Brown and Black men are caught up in a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ scenario with police officers.” The LA Times reported that while the sheriff’s department did on Monday ask Becerra’s office to monitor its investigation, it “also blocked the public from learning the results of an autopsy the coroner was scheduled to perform on” Guardado.

According to the report, “L.A. County coroner’s spokeswoman Sarah Ardalani said the Sheriff’s Department put a ‘security hold’ on the case of Guardado, who was to be examined on Monday. She said the coroner’s office could not release the results of the autopsy—which would reveal how many times Guardado was struck by gunfire and where—until the hold was lifted.”

Waters and Diaz Barragán had said in their statement that Guardado was shot in the back. There are far too many questions that are remaining unanswered because the officers weren’t wearing body cams, which is yet another failing by police: “The deputies were not wearing body cameras because the Sheriff’s Department has not distributed them to the force,” the LA Times report continued.

“What happened to Andres was not only a tragedy, it was an outright crime,” Unión del Barrio member Ron Gochez told the LA Times. He’s one of the many outraged community members who has taken to the streets to demand justice for Guardado, George Floyd, and countless other Black and Latino Americans killed by police. “This is just one more of so many people who have been killed by the L.A. County sheriffs and the police [...] this is the unity between the Black and brown community saying we are tired of this.”

Multiple factors are converging to make it more likely that health care reform could pass next year.

On Friday, June 19, Attorney General William Barr lied to the world and said that U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman had resigned. He hadn’t. The man investigating Donald Trump’s friends and allies (and possibly Trump himself) for myriad crimes was fired by Trump and Barr. It remains one of the more brazen abuses of power in a presidential tenure that includes almost nothing but corruption and abuses of power.

The Trump administration wants to replace Berman with Jay Clayton, the current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. During a hearing held by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Financial Services on Thursday, Democrats asked Clayton questions about how he might be as a prosecutor. Clayton took a page from people like Mick Mulvaney, telling the lawmakers that he wasn’t going to give up his job but he was also not going to withdraw his nomination to help the Trump administration squash investigations into their possible dirty dealings.

Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of California has made something of a name for herself in committee hearings the past couple of years. She has stood up to banking CEOs and feckless Trump administration stooges, and she has exposed their incompetences and hypocrisies every time. Her questioning of Clayton was no different. Rep. Porter began by asking Clayton about bipartisanship—specifically, if he truly believed he would be able to show the kind of objective integrity a U.S. attorney is required to have. Clayton, of course, said that he totally would be able to do that. In fact, Clayton said he already did do that as the chairman of the SEC.

One of Rep. Porter’s great strengths is her reliance on facts and not the gaslighting bullcaca most Republican operatives peddle in these days. Porter decided to take Mr. Clayton at his word and asked him to provide a single example of a regulation or deregulation passed by the SEC under Clayton that had bipartisan support. Clayton couldn’t come up with one because there are none. Clayton couldn’t come up with one because he’s a tool. Clayton couldn’t come up with one because to last this long in this administration, one must embody the soulless hackery of an absolute sociopath.

Rep. Porter, realizing that Clayton had nothing to add, decided to bring things down to a more pedestrian level of understanding. According to reports, one of the reasons Trump tapped Clayton for this incongruously different position in the government was their golfing relationship. Rep. Porter decided to ask: “Based on your experience, do you think independence from the president is possible if you and the president are golfing buddies?”

Clayton said he totally could be objective and that his record at the SEC—the one that Porter exposed as being complete hack partisanship—proved this. 

Rep. Porter responded with a follow up: “How many times have you and president Trump golfed together?” After Clayton feigned an indignant response while hemming and hawing at the question, Rep. Porter calmly asked: “Is it a large number and you have trouble recalling it?” Clayton responded that he had played golf with Trump “a handful of times.”

Sounds about right. Only the best people—willing to pretend to lose to Trump in golf—get to manipulate our country’s purse strings.

A man has been fired from his job after blocking a Latino resident from entering an apartment parking garage in San Francisco, then assaulting a bystander who tried to intervene, in an incident caught on video.

Watch it in two parts:

The racist yt Karen subspecies then got physically violent and started beating one of the individuals. This screams yt supremacy and enslaver mentality.
Cops did come and get police report. No charges yet. All he got were 1st names – William and Ellie. 2/2 pic.twitter.com/ZeoVM1btUg

— Your Favorite Scientist From The Hood (@RichmondLyfe) June 24, 2020

ABC 7 reports: Michael Barajas, a Berkeley graduate and community educator for a biopharmaceutical company, says he used his remote to open the garage door to the SOMA Residences where he lives on Tuesday evening after coming home from buying fruit. A white SUV with Florida plates pulled in ahead of him and, instead of proceeding forward, stopped at the entrance of one of the building’s garages and stopped Michael from going inside. “His immediate reaction was ‘hey you f**king criminal, you’re not coming in here.'” Michael says he was clad in black and his tattoos were showing. He thinks perhaps when he leaned his head out of the window to see what was the matter, the driver and passenger, identified as William Beasley, decided he was a threat based off of his appearance.

More from KRON-TV: The Hispanic man repeated several times that he did live there and was just trying to get into the garage and park. But the white man still said he called the cops. “If you have a key card you can get in yourself, you’re not coming in the f–king garage,” he said. “I called the cops so you got about five minutes to get out of here.” “That’s fine. Call the cops,” the Hispanic man responded. “What’re you calling the cops about, Karen?” A second video posted to Twitter shows the altercation turn physical. The white man got out of his car and allegedly started beating another man who was defending the Hispanic man.

“Why are you attacking me?” This is the response from the man who some are calling “racist” after he yelled at a Latino man and tried to keep him from entering his own #SanFrancisco apartment. https://t.co/jCGDd26IAq pic.twitter.com/gM4g00SoS3

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) June 26, 2020

ABC 7 reports that APEX Systems, where Beasley was employed, issued a statement saying they conducted an internal review and “made the decision to terminate the employee” and that they will not “tolerate violent or racist behavior.”

“I’ve always been from a really poor, poor immigrant family, so I think what happened just struck very hard for me. I felt, for me, that I do not belong here,” Barajas told the station. “Had that happened to someone who is undocumented and didn’t know how to handle the situation and had been violent in return, what would’ve happened?”

Watch ABC 7’s report below.

The post ‘What Are You Calling the Cops About, Karen?’: Man Fired After Blocking Latino Resident from Parking Garage (WATCH) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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House Democrats recently unveiled their Moving Forward Act, which includes $25 billion in funding for the US Postal Service. | Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Cleaner, quieter, cheaper Postal Service vehicles — if Mitch McConnell allows them.

For months, Democrats in Congress have focused on immediate recovery from the coronavirus, saying they would turn to long-term stimulus when the time is right.

The time is apparently right. This week, House Democrats unveiled their Moving Forward Act, a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It is capacious: $300 billion for repair of existing infrastructure, $100 billion for public transit, $100 billion for affordable housing infrastructure, $100 billion for broadband, $100 billion for high-poverty schools, $70 billion for upgrades to the electricity grid, and many, many smaller items.

The bill contains multitudes, but it is just an opening bid. It will eventually make its way to the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is certain to bargain it down and try to strip out anything he sees as “green,” if he brings it to a vote at all.

If it does come to a vote, there will be more to discuss. For now, I just want to focus on one tiny gem in the bill that has made me — and the dozens (?) of other people obsessed with this issue — very happy.

To wit: The Moving Forward Act contains money to electrify mail trucks!

Making the US Postal Service a vanguard for electric vehicles

Back in April, I wrote an in-depth post on why replacing the US Postal Service’s fleet of delivery trucks with electric vehicles is a good idea, why now is the perfect time to do it, and where the process stands within the USPS.

To summarize: USPS trucks are old and janky. They get poor gas mileage, have no air conditioning, regularly burst into flames, and are imposing huge and rising fuel and maintenance costs on the already-struggling agency. Replacing them with electric delivery trucks would radically reduce those costs, improve driver health and performance, and reduce air and noise pollution in districts across the US.

Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images

The USPS says it needs about $6 billion to replace its vehicles and about $25 billion overall to save itself from financial ruin. Well, if you scroll way, way down in the Moving Forward Act to Division I, Sec. 50001, you find this:

Authorizes $25 billion in funding for the Postal Service for the modernization of postal infrastructure and operations, including through capital expenditures to purchase delivery vehicles, processing equipment, and other goods. The section reserves $6 billion for the purchase of new vehicles.

Then Sec. 50002 gets more specific about how the $6 billion for vehicles must be used:

Requires the Postal Service to use any of the authorized funds to purchase electric or zero-emission vehicles to replace its current right-hand-drive vehicles to the maximum extent practicable. However, at least 75 percent of the new fleet must be such vehicles. The section would also require that the fleet of medium and heavy-duty trucks consist of at least 30 percent of electric vehicles by 2030 and that any vehicle purchased after 2040 be electric or zero-emission.

A minimum of 75 percent electric vehicles: that’s awesome. Beyond the immediate health benefits and the long-term savings for the USPS, this would be an incredible marketing coup for electric vehicles generally.

The Postal Service is the US public’s favorite government agency. It is a friendly, reliable presence in every community in the nation. If the familiar, boxy mail trucks were replaced with electric trucks, every American who interacts with a postal carrier — which is nearly every American — would have a chance to see an electric vehicle with their own eyes, in a workaday, non-political context.

It would do more to raise awareness of electric vehicles than any conceivable amount of marketing. And there’s evidence that electric vehicles, much like solar panels, are “contagious,” meaning that people who see them in their own community are more likely to buy them. The Moving Forward Act would spread EVs like a contagion across the country (a good contagion for once).

Using post offices to kickstart electric vehicle charging infrastructure

Speaking of acting as a vanguard, there is one other intriguing provision in Sec. 50002: “The section would require the Postal Service to provide at least one charging station at each publicly accessible facility it owns or leases by 2026 and ensure that it has adequate charging facilities to keep its fleet operating.”

Every analyst agrees that one of the major challenges facing electric vehicles is the lack of charging infrastructure. It creates a perpetual chicken-and-egg problem: the infrastructure doesn’t make sense without the cars; the cars don’t make sense without the infrastructure.

The research consultancy Brattle Group put out a report this week projecting that EVs in the US will grow from today’s 1.5 million to between 10 and 35 million by 2030. Part of what will enable (or constrain) that growth is charging infrastructure. Out of the $75 to $125 billion in investments in the electricity system Brattle estimates will be needed to support EV growth, about $30 to $50 billion need to go to charging infrastructure.

Brattle

Nothing would do more to increase consumer confidence in EV charging infrastructure than having an EV charger publicly available at every post office. It could finally break the chicken-and-egg stalemate: It would make EV chargers a familiar part of public infrastructure, prompting more consumers to choose EVs, prompting more investment in chargers.

Given the amount of federal spending needed to pull the US economy out of a nosedive, $25 billion for the USPS isn’t much, and $6 billion for electric postal trucks is peanuts. But it’s a smart investment that would return itself many times over in health, economic, and social benefits.

“This provision is a win all the way around,” California Rep. Jared Huffman told me. “We can slash emissions from one of the largest vehicle fleets in the world, boost clean vehicle manufacturing in this country, build out EV charging infrastructure, and help the USPS save money on wasted fuel and maintenance costs for an aging fleet.”

The provision was drawn from Huffman’s Federal Leadership in Energy Efficient Transportation (FLEET) Act, for which he has been fighting a lonely battle since 2014. He is cautiously optimistic about its chances.

“Good legislation has a tendency to die at Mitch McConnell’s hand,” he says, “but I hope he’s smart enough to see how much this will benefit the country and doesn’t leave it on the cutting room floor.”

---

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President Donald Trump holds a Bible outside of St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020, in Washington, DC, after the area was cleared of people protesting the death of George Floyd. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Trump is falling in the polls because he’s failing the country.

On Wednesday, the New York Times and Siena College released their first national poll of the 2020 election season. Their survey, which is put together with particular care, was unusually accurate in both 2016 and 2018, so there was some anticipation built for its release. Even so, the numbers were shocking: Joe Biden led Donald Trump by 14 points.

The Times/Siena poll is only a slight outlier for Biden, who is ahead by 10 points in the Real Clear Politics polling average and 9.5 points in the FiveThirtyEight average. In these ranges, the Electoral College’s Republican lean means little for Trump. The Economist, which recently released its presidential forecasting model, gives Biden an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver calculates that Pennsylvania is likeliest to be the state that swings the election and notes that Biden is leading in recent polls by an average of 8.1 points.

Hillary Clinton led the polls in 2016, too, only to watch the map turn crimson on election night. Though she never led by nearly this much, the trauma of that reversal lingers, and Democrats experience good survey data as borderline triggering. “Ignore the polls,” Biden tweeted on Wednesday. “Register to vote.”

There’s something to that attitude. Polling, at this point, should be taken as information, not as prediction. But the information it offers is real: Trump’s political position is collapsing. Biden has doubled his lead since the beginning of February, and it’s not because he’s been dominating the airwaves. It’s because Trump has betrayed the first commandment of running for reelection: First, govern well.

“Imagine you took every statement they made about Hunter Biden and made it about Covid-19, and imagine they took action on it,” says Stuart Stevens, who served as Mitt Romney’s chief campaign strategist in 2012 and is author of the forthcoming It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. “Where would they be right now? A lot better off. And a lot of people would be alive.”

The chaos of reality is matching the chaos of Trump’s presidency

In 2016, Trump ran as an outsider because he was an outsider. He had never been a mayor, a member of Congress, or a governor; there was no record of governance for him to defend. He experienced politics as many Americans do — as televised entertainment — and brought the skills of a television reality star to the campaign. It was enough.

Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images

But Trump never changed his approach. He has continued to treat the presidency as a media spectacle, the work of governance as a dull distraction from the glitter of celebrity. He obsesses over cable news and Twitter conflict and neglects the job Americans hired him to do. And so now he does have a record: More than 120,000 dead from Covid-19 — and counting. An economy in shambles. Coronavirus cases in America exploding, even as they fall across the European Union.

“Governing has been so little on the mind of this administration from the very beginning that it’s created a bizarre, extraordinary situation,” says Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The president thinks so much about what he’s doing in terms of the show he’s putting on that there’s been very little attention paid to how the government is functioning.”

Trump has spent the past three years and 158 days playing president on TV and social media. But he has not spent that time doing the job of the president. A strong economy that carried over from Barack Obama’s presidency hid Trump’s dereliction of duties. But then a crisis came, and presidential leadership was needed, and the American people saw there was no plan, and functionally no president.

Every insider account of Trump’s presidency — from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to Bob Woodward’s Fear to Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s A Very Stable Genius to Anonymous’s A Warning to Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged to John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened — has painted fundamentally the same picture: a chaotic, lawless administration orbiting around a reckless, distractible, corrupt, overmatched, and disinterested chief executive.

There is no secret being revealed here. These insider accounts match what is on display, daily, for the public. On Wednesday, for instance, the United States passed a new high in confirmed coronavirus cases: more than 37,000 in a single day. Thursday morning found Trump tweeting angrily at Fox News personality Ed Henry, who said Trump held a Bible upside down after gassing protesters in Lafayette Park. “It wasn’t upside down,” Trump insisted. Later, he took aim at former GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina who “lost so badly to me, twice in one campaign, that she should be voting for Joe.” After that, Trump tweeted “The Obama/Biden Administration is the most CORRUPT in HISTORY!” Later, he simply shouted into the digital ether, with no context, “LAW & ORDER!”

That the president’s Twitter feed sounds like Abe Simpson after a Fox News binge is old news. What is remarkable is that Trump is watching his poll numbers collapse and US coronavirus cases rise, all the while acting like he has no agency over the situation. A glance at the polling increases enjoyed by other world leaders and most US governors would reveal, instantly, the optimal political strategy for this situation: Demonstrate empathy and competence at a time when the American people are desperate for reassurance.

“In 2016, he was the outsider coming to shake up Washington,” says Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA. “The people who weren’t sure about the Democratic Party could say, ‘I’m going to give this guy a try.’ But now, he’s the incumbent and he’s responsible for the fix. Making everything us-versus-them is not a growth strategy.”

Instead, Trump is holding rallies maskless and settling old scores on social media. It is, to put it generously, a strategy against self-interest. And it suggests that what Trump did in 2016 was not a strategy at all: It was his sole way of being in the world, a mode that happened to match that moment, even as it’s failing him in this one.

“What does the dog do when it catches the car?” asks Levin. “Turns out the dog just keeps running and barking. I had this thought in the Lafayette Square madness. Trump puts on this show. And then he gets there and has nothing to do. He’s just standing there. His whole presidency is like that.”

In the American political system, of course, governance is not solely the job of the executive. But Trump’s congressional allies are mirroring his approach.

The collapse of the Republican Party

Even if the Republican Party was looking at reelection purely cynically, the calculus would be clear: Do everything possible — bear any burden, spend any amount — to contain the virus and pump up the economy. Trump’s negative interest in governing is not a positive interest in vetoing legislation. He will sign whatever congressional Republicans send him. And House Democrats, to their credit, have proven themselves willing to betray short-term political interests and spend trillions to keep state and local governments from collapsing, to make sure the jobless can keep paying their bills, to make sure hospitals have the money to handle the coming coronavirus surge.

But Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, have refused to even debate the most recent coronavirus bill passed by the House. Nor have they offered an alternative of their own. Where Trump does nothing amid a manic frenzy of communication, they are doing nothing more quietly and genteelly. But they are still doing nothing, even as the virus roars back and the stock market plummets.

“The Republican Party is not a serious governing organization on the national level,” says Stevens, who in addition to working on Romney’s presidential campaign has worked for more than a dozen GOP gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns. “Look who they’re bringing in to testify as experts: Diamonds and Silk. To me, the only thing remotely like it is the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, because the dissonance between what the party was and what it said it was was just so great.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images

This is, again, something stranger than cynicism. Even if you believe Republicans devoid of governing principles, few believe that McConnell lacks a hunger to hold the majority. Yet Republican chances of keeping the Senate are weakening alongside Trump’s prospects: That same Times/Siena poll showed Democrats leading in Senate races in Arizona, North Carolina, and Michigan. In mirroring Trump’s lackadaisical approach to governance, Senate Republicans are imperiling their own power, their own jobs.

Both Trump and congressional Republicans are treating the condition of the country as something that has been done to them. In part, this is simply an extension of a strategy that showed some chance of working six months ago: Ride the economic expansion that began under Obama to victory in 2020. It wasn’t clear it would be enough — Trump trailed Biden then, too — but it was plausible.

Then, however, the tide turned, and so the posture of taking credit became a reality of absorbing blame. That a serious, determined approach to governance could’ve won public support — as has proven true for Republican and Democratic governors alike — seems not to have dawned on Trump. For all Trump’s strongman pretensions, he and his national allies are afflicted by a passivity that’s proving lethal, both for their constituents and their careers.

“How can you be a governing party if one of your principles is being against government?” asks Stevens. “It’s that line of Ronald Reagan’s: The most dangerous words are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ This was a time we needed the federal government to save people’s lives, and it just imploded.”

This is the problem Trump faces in 2020, and it will not be solved by tweets or Facebook strategy. He is falling in the polls because he is failing the country.

---

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.

On Thursday, TikTOk planned a daylong event to mark Pride Month and “celebrate the diverse and incredible LGBT+ creator community.”

But the popular video-sharing platform was forced to cancel the virtual celebration after only five minutes when trolls Zoombombed it with racist and homophobic slurs, as well as other offensive content.

Today’s #MyPride event was meant to be a celebration of our community & of authenticity, self-love, & inclusivity. Unfortunately, some bad actors – who were not invited to the Zoom event – interrupted the start of the celebratory event with extremely hurtful, harmful comments.

— tiktokcreators (@tiktokcreators) June 25, 2020

“Today’s #MyPride event was meant to be a celebration of our community & of authenticity, self-love, & inclusivity. Unfortunately, some bad actors – who were not invited to the Zoom event – interrupted the start of the celebratory event with extremely hurtful, harmful comments,” TikTok wrote later on Twitter. “We want to express our heartfelt apologies to those who took the time to join this special community event before it was sabotaged. This inappropriate incident in no way reflects our support for you and should have no reflection on the spirit and uplifting nature of Pride. We encourage each of you to continue celebrating #MyPride in your own way. We are inspired by our LGBTQ+ community and excited to celebrate you, today and every day.”

More from Business Insider: In a transcript of the Zoom call’s text chat sent to Business Insider, trolls almost immediately flooded the chat with messages about “Straight Pride,” Donald Trump, and Chick-fil-A, the food chain that donated millions of dollars to anti-LGBTQ organizations. Some Zoombombers, with usernames like “GayNotOkay,” repeatedly posted slurs for Black people and queer individuals in the chat. … Several LGBTQ creators told Business Insider that while they were shocked by the behavior of the trolls, they were disappointed that TikTok failed to adequately secure the call and take precautionary measures for Zoom, a platform that has come under fire for its handling of privacy and security issues. Some in attendance told Business Insider that they were losing confidence in TikTok’s commitment to the LGBTQ community, and were reminded of TikTok’s past actions of suppressing videos that featured LGBTQ content. 

this idiot posted a link for everyone to hack @tiktok_us pride event zoom call. block his entire account pls pic.twitter.com/ZKKqY644f9

— dennis (@cristiandennis_) June 25, 2020

people kept hacking the video with this shit, scribbling over the speakers faces, etc. so much for making a “safe environment for lgbt members.” pic.twitter.com/8QnlOESGih

— kai.kai slider ︎ (@broadway_kai) June 25, 2020

The post Trump Supporters Zoombomb Gay Pride Event on TikTok With Racist, Homophobic Slurs, Shutting It Down appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Do si do

President Donald Trump claimed on Thursday that if the U.S. halted testing for coronavirus, there would be no more cases of the disease.

Trump offers some appallingly ignorant commentary on coronavirus: “If we didn’t wanna test, or if we didn’t test, we wouldn’t have cases. But we have cases because we test.”

This is false. Covid cases would exist even if we didn’t test for them, they would just be misdiagnosed. pic.twitter.com/YajvA6oZlL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 25, 2020

“We have the greatest testing program in the world, we’ve developed it over a period of time, and we’re up to almost 30 million tests,” Trump said during a speech at Fincantieri Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin. “That means we’re going to have more cases. If we didn’t test, we wouldn’t have cases. But we have cases because we test. Deaths are down. We have one of the lowest mortality rates.”

The comment follows Trump’s shocking admission during a rally in Tulsa last week that he asked staff to slow down testing to reduce the number of coronavirus cases. On Wednesday, Trump appeared to follow through on the threat, when his administration announced it will end funding for drive-thru coronavirus testing sites.

Reactions from Twitter below.

Yes and when I close my eyes, I disappear and you can’t see me.

— MyBleedingInk is social distancing (@MyBleedingInk) June 25, 2020

TRUMP: “If we didn’t test we wouldn’t have cases. But we have cases because we test. Deaths are down. We have one of the lowest mortality rates.”

Of the 20 countries most affected by covid-19, the US has the 3rd-highest mortality rate per 100,000 people.https://t.co/Sw00NvGwOU pic.twitter.com/teJ3SA5DcM

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) June 25, 2020

I’m not in debt if I don’t check my statements.

— Mike Yarbrough (@mchlyrbrgh) June 25, 2020

I think he’s confusing coronavirus with a tree that falls in the forest when no one’s around to hear it.

— Candy Parker (@CParker1313) June 25, 2020

I only became pregnant because I took a pregnancy test….! #TrumpLogic

— daisy day (@daisydaisydon) June 25, 2020

Based on this logic…I think I’ve worked out the cure for cancer.

Nobel Peace Prize folks can DM me to work out mailing my check. https://t.co/tgLQ7OOq8a

— Rodericka Applewhaite (@Rodericka) June 25, 2020

120,000+ families have buried loved ones who died horribly, often alone, and the White House occupant jerks us around with batshit nonsense about testing or not testing.

This is no different than defecating on their graves & Senate Republicans stay silent.

— Eric Applebaum (@applebaum_eric) June 25, 2020

The post ‘The Dullest Tool in the Shed’: Trump Mocked for Saying Coronavirus Would Disappear If We Stopped Testing: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Have you noticed that the Once-ler never has to make a political contribution in order to get logging rights

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(850): He’s perfect! He listens to Genesis during sex and has a VW bus!
(407): You really are from the panhandle, aren’t you?

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday morning eviscerated his Republican counterpart in Florida, Ron Desantis, as well as other GOP chief executives in states where COVID-19 is now surging.

Cuomo, a Democrat, appeared on CNN’s New Day to discuss the mandatory 14-day quarantine for people traveling to New York from Florida, Arizona, Texas and other virus hotspots.

After playing a clip of DeSantis gloating about the quarantine he imposed on visitors from New York back in March, host Alisyn Camerota asked Cuomo what he would say to the Florida governor now. On Wednesday, Florida reported 5,508 new coronavirus cases, shattering the state’s previous daily high for the second time in a week.

JUST NOW: "I say to them all, look at the numbers. You played politics with this virus and you lost. "@NYGovCuomo to Florida @GovRonDeSantis and others on rising cases in some states in U.S.@NewDaypic.twitter.com/HjL7JP8Mj7

— John Berman (@JohnBerman) June 25, 2020

“I say to them all: Look at the numbers,” Cuomo said. “You played politics with this virus and you lost. You told the people of your state, and you told the people of this country, White House, ‘Don’t worry about it. Just open up, go about your business, this is all Democratic hyperbole.’ Oh, really? Now you see 27 states with the numbers going up. You see the death projections going up. You see the economy going down. It was never politics. It was always science. And they were in denial, and denial is not a life strategy.

“Now they’re saying, ‘Well, don’t worry, it’s not really that the virus is going up, just the testing numbers are going up.’ I don’t even know what that means mathematically. And forget that, your hospital beds are filling up. You know what that means when your hospital beds fill up? It means more people are getting sick. That’s what’s happening,” Cuomo said, adding that New York now has its lowest hospitalization rate since the pandemic began.

“This is after three months, Alisyn, of everyone working hard and doing the right thing and taking this seriously,” he said. “I got lambasted by everyone saying: ‘Just open up the economy, you’re overreacting, don’t listen to all these scientists who are saying the virus could go up. That’s just fear mongering.’ It wasn’t. They were facts, and facts are facts, even in this crazy political environment, even at this crazy political time. And the people who played politics now are causing this nation great havoc. You’re seeing it all across the country. You’re seeing the death numbers go up. We’ll lose tens of thousands more Americans. It’s a real American tragedy that we’re living through right now.”

More of the interview below.

New York will follow up with travelers from states with a high Covid-19 infection rate to ensure they're quarantining, @NYGovCuomo says. "If you're not, then you're in violation of the law, and you'll have a mandatory quarantine and you'll be fined."https://t.co/xJWMyH5hvV pic.twitter.com/RvOTE7Fsbo

— New Day (@NewDay) June 25, 2020

.@NYGovCuomo criticized the approach of political leaders across the country who rushed to reopen.
“Now you see 27 states with the numbers going up….You see the economy going down. It was never politics. It was always science.”https://t.co/XQLwwbb9DO pic.twitter.com/icB90IzkZM

— New Day (@NewDay) June 25, 2020

The post Cuomo Drops Mic On Red-State Governors Seeing COVID-19 Surges: ‘You Played Politics With This Virus And You Lost’ (WATCH) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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