James.galbraith

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Michael Bloomberg’s campaign headquarters in downtown Los Angeles was the wall of terrariums. For one brief second I wondered, staring at the multitude of tiny, meticulously groomed succulents clustered on a bookshelf that ran almost half the length of a cavernous, industrial-chic loft, if I had somehow misstepped and stumbled into an Anthropologie. But there was the former New York mayor — or at least, a cutout of him, propped up across from a huge white wall plastered with campaign signs.

It was still early in the morning, but the Bloomberg bus had already pulled up outside to drop off a group of gun safety advocates who had been touring the state and talking to local leaders. Staffers were setting up for a private roundtable with a local prosecutor and a LA city council member who had recently endorsed Bloomberg, placing a “Bloomberg 2020” screen in front of a giant mural of a pink-skinned woman in sunglasses with rainbow hair, spelling out “LA” with her fingers. Still stunned by the opulence of the space, I asked Lys Mendez, a spokesperson for the Bloomberg campaign, where they had found so many terrariums. “Oh, it came this way,” she said, shrugging. “We had to ramp up in California so quickly — we just took the office space we could find.”

It’s hard to avoid thinking of Bloomberg’s bid as a kind of political science experiment — a test of whether an elderly, extraordinarily wealthy ex-Republican can run a competitive campaign almost entirely on the basis of his own advertising and a big, generously paid staff. That experiment will play out across the country this week, when Bloomberg will finally appear on the ballot after a bizarre campaign in which he entered the race late, skipped the four early states and focused instead on winning the trove of delegates that await on Super Tuesday.

And California is, in many ways, the maximal test of Bloomberg’s strategy. He’s invested a lot in other big Super Tuesday states like Texas, but California is the state where his dollars should carry him the furthest, because its media markets are so expensive and the state’s large, diverse population makes it hard to set up an effective ground game.

His spending spree has certainly gotten him somewhere in California. Bloomberg is now polling around 13 percent in California, according to our average, up from 4 percent in January. But Californians also love to tell you about the self-funded candidates who have tried — and failed — to spend their way into public office. Take Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Michael Huffington or Al Checchi. After this Tuesday, we’ll know whether Bloomberg will join that inglorious pantheon or whether California’s unexpected contribution to the Democratic nomination process is the elevation of a self-funded billionaire’s candidacy.

Right now, it seems like Bloomberg will finish in third or fourth place even though he has spent tens of millions of dollars in the state. But after seeing Bloomberg’s swanky office, I wanted to find out how ordinary Californians were feeling about his campaign. After spending several days talking to voters across Los Angeles, one thing became clear: Bloomberg’s spending has bought him notoriety, but hasn’t translated into widespread enthusiasm.

It’s hard to find a Californian who’s not aware of Bloomberg’s run, thanks to his advertising blitz in the state over the past few months. Since the beginning of the year, he’s spent more than $36 million on television advertising alone. “I’d describe it as a bombardment,” said Khalid Maznavi, 39, who is supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “He’s there whenever I turn on the radio or watch TV. And it’s been like that for weeks.”

Bloomberg has dominated the airwaves in California

The estimated amount of money each active Democratic presidential candidate spent on broadcast TV ads from Jan. 1 to Feb. 27, 2020, in California-based media markets, and the number of times their ads aired

Candidate	Estimated Spending on TV Ads	Number of Airings
Michael Bloomberg	$36,270,860	49,506
Bernie Sanders	5,540,490	10,246

Source: Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group

Fueled by Bloomberg’s bottomless fortune, the campaign has also quickly assembled an enormous outreach machine to reach California voters. According to research by FiveThirtyEight contributor and political scientist Joshua Darr, Bloomberg now has the biggest footprint in the state, with 25 field offices scattered across California — just barely topping Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has 23 field offices.¹⁷

His rapidly expanding team is well-compensated for its time. As recently as last week, his campaign was “urgently hiring” for organizers who would be paid $18 per hour, well above the state’s minimum wage. Bloomberg has also amassed a wide network of high-profile local supporters and endorsers — like San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Michael Tubbs, the millennial mayor of Stockton — even though Bloomberg is relatively new to California, having only opened his first office in the state two months ago.

But on the ground in Los Angeles, Bloomberg fans were surprisingly hard to find. Some of the glitzy events sponsored by the campaign were relatively sparsely attended, despite the lure of free food and drinks and even a live band. In many cases, the people at the events seemed to have been drawn more by curiosity than passion for Bloomberg’s message. At an event at a restaurant in Chinatown, Ed Choi, 44, told me that he had “kind of lost track” of the presidential primary after his first choice, Andrew Yang, dropped out. He was impressed that Bloomberg had taken the time to hold an event in Chinatown. “It’s the first time I’ve been to one of those, so that counts for something,” he said. But he said he was there with an open mind. “I just need to know more about where he stands on the issues.”

Paul Chen, a CPA who was schmoozing with one of the hosts of the Chinatown event, said that he hadn’t made up his mind yet either, but if he had to choose a candidate on the spot, it would be Biden. He dismissed Sanders with a sentiment that was widespread among attendees, who were largely local businesspeople. “I don’t like the way he’s all about everything being free,” Chen told me. But he added that he wasn’t yet convinced by Bloomberg either. “He’s got the financial backing, but I’m not sure he’ll be accepted by mainstream Democrats. That could be an issue.”

Each time I set off in search of Bloomberg supporters at events across Los Angeles, his press staff warned me to make sure I wasn’t talking to a campaign employee. Only volunteers were permitted to share their opinions with journalists. It was often a struggle to find someone who wasn’t paid to be there and willing to talk about their perspective on the record. Bloomberg’s campaign has recently hired hundreds of paid influencers to get out the word about his campaign on social media and via text message. And although people at candidate rallies or events are normally happy to chat with journalists, a surprising number of people refused to talk to me or let me use their names. One man nearly ran away when I said I was a reporter, saying he would never hear the end of it from his Sanders-supporting friends if word got out that he was considering Bloomberg.

By the time I did stumble upon a diehard Bloomberg fan, waiting outside a Los Angeles soccer stadium for a get-out-the-vote event, it felt like I had sighted a rare bird in the wild. Fabio Sabzevari, 25, told me with great enthusiasm that he had been volunteering in the Northridge office for two weeks. “It’s simple. I believe that he’s the moderate candidate who can win against Trump,” Sabzevari said. “And he’s got the resources to fight Trump’s multibillion-dollar disinformation machine. Who else in this race can do that?”

But Bloomberg’s ability to pour millions into his presidential bid was not a selling point for everyone. “It is mind-boggling to me that someone purporting to be acting under progressive ideals would be wasting millions and millions of dollars basically trying to force people to vote for him,” said Rhiannon Wilson, 22, a Sanders supporter. Wilson told me that her aversion to Bloomberg went well beyond his political stances. She said she was “disgusted” that he was trying to buy the nomination.

That attitude was far from unusual among the Californians I talked to. Tessie Borden, 53, who is supporting Warren, physically recoiled when I brought up Bloomberg. “I would not vote for that man. I think he’s a Republican plant,” she said. I asked her what she would do if he won the nomination. She shook her head a little and said, “I would write in Warren.”

Even if Bloomberg does overperform in California, that sentiment is one he’s likely to face in other states as the primary contest moves forward. Bloomberg is gambling that Democrats will be drawn to him because of his claim that he’s a candidate who can win. His spending spree is part of that appeal for some voters, who look at President Trump and wonder if he can only be defeated by another billionaire. But Bloomberg’s cash-fueled strategy also seems to be earning him genuine animosity in other corners of the Democratic base. And if his candidacy survives past Super Tuesday, it won’t be easy to convince those voters that he can be trusted.

Nathaniel Rakich contributed research.

Pete Buttigieg pulled off a surprisingly successful presidential run. The 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, the fourth-largest city in Indiana, was unable to win the race for chair of the Democratic National Committee three years ago. In the 2020 Democratic primary, however, he not only outlasted prominent Democrats like Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, but Buttigieg also effectively tied for first in Iowa and finished a close second in New Hampshire. He won more support than Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another party heavyweight, in all four early caucuses and primaries. And his sharp attacks on Warren (and her proposal for Medicare for All) in October and November were arguably one of the most important moments of the primary, helping blunt Warren’s rise when it seemed like she could become the race’s front-runner.

But beating expectations and winning primaries and caucuses are different things. By this past weekend, Buttigieg appeared to have little chance of winning the nomination, and on Sunday news broke that Buttigieg will reportedly end his bid for the presidency. He finished far behind Sen. Bernie Sanders in Nevada and way, way behind former Vice President Joe Biden in South Carolina. He had stalled out at around 10 or 11 percent in national polls, and there was a good chance he would fail to reach 15 percent — typically the threshold to win delegates to the national convention — in any of the 14 states voting on Super Tuesday and in a ton of congressional districts. It just didn’t seem like Buttigieg had a path to start accumulating delegates.

Just as important as the losing itself was the way Buttigieg was losing. More than 30 percent of Democratic voters are black or Latino. And the Democratic Party thinks of itself as the party that represents people of color. But Buttigieg never gained much popularity with black or Latino voters, punctuated by him getting an estimated 3 percent of the black vote in South Carolina.

It was going to be hard for white Democrats, both party elites and voters, to mobilize behind a candidate with such weak support among people of color as the center-left alternative to Sanders.

So Buttigieg’s departure may have seemed sudden, but it’s likely that the former mayor was going to struggle on Super Tuesday and possibly run out of campaign funds. So this decision is a face-saving move for him.

That said, I don’t think Buttigieg’s departure is solely due to his struggles. Elite voices in the Democratic Party have been worried that the multiple center-left candidates in the race — Biden, Buttigieg, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, etc. — would divide the non-Sanders vote, potentially allowing the Vermont senator to amass a huge lead in delegates on Super Tuesday while his rivals finished below 15 percent in many states. South Carolina is only one state, but Biden’s resounding win there suggests that the former vice president can combine older, moderate voters, black and white, into a big coalition in a way that Buttigieg probably could not. So my view is that Buttigieg stepped aside in part to help the center-left bloc of the party consolidate around Biden. To some extent, he was being a team player.

Why would Buttigieg do that? The former mayor might genuinely think that Sanders would be a terrible nominee for the Democratic Party. But there is a potential upside for Buttigieg in making this decision too. At his age, Buttigieg has four decades to try to become president. In leaving the race now, he builds goodwill with Democratic Party officials broadly and Biden in particular. If Biden is elected president, it’s easy to imagine him putting Buttigieg in a top administration post that helps Buttigieg fill out his resume — think U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. And goodwill among party officials will help Buttigieg if, as I expect, he eventually runs for president again.

The Buttigieg departure, in fact, suggests that the Democratic Party establishment has learned some lessons from how GOP party elites allowed President Trump to win the Republican nomination over their objections four years ago. Perhaps Democratic elites are still organized and influential enough to affect party politics. In the time between the Nevada caucuses and today, you heard a bit of a freakout from Democrats concerned about nominating a democratic socialist to take on Trump. But that freakout resulted in some actions — prominent figures in the party urged some candidates to drop out and endorsed Biden. Buttigieg heard the message. If Biden is elected president, that will be a good outcome for the center-left wing of the Democratic Party — and probably for Pete Buttigieg as well.

In movies and television, epidemics always grow in the same way—a spreading space of red that creeps across the map of the country, a blob that gradually expands until it snuffs out the last clean white spaces. And until now, the 2019 novel coronavirus has sort of felt that way. China? Bad. Then South Korea. Then Italy. Then … everywhere but here. 

But that idea—safe here, unsafe over there—was never true. It’s always been a matter of relative safety. And that’s certainly the case now. There may be spots of blazing red out there on the maps, but everywhere else isn’t white. It’s pink. 

Monday, Mar 2, 2020 · 7:58:53 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

The count in the United States is now 96 cases and 6 deaths following a confirmation of additional cases in King Co, Washington and another four cases in Snohomish County. Total cases in Washington state are up to 18. Seven of these cases are currently listed as serious or critical.

Engage in your good habits now.

If you’ve been waiting for that special day when you would start doing all those things you’ve been told are a good idea … it’s that day. Actually, it’s been that day for a while, but if you haven’t begun to practice those good habits, including wash your hands for at least 20 seconds when you’ve been out in the world touching things; cleaning surfaces around your home that you touch frequently, such as doorknobs and countertops; and avoiding touching your face, please do so now. And yes, I know. That last one makes my nose itch, too.

Don't make fun of other people’s fear.

If you haven’t seen someone walking through your local airport, pharmacy, or supermarket wearing a face mask, you almost certainly will in the next couple of days. Don’t snicker at them. Don’t try to tell them that normal surgical masks or hardware store dust masks will not protect against the spread of viruses. Don’t chide them for their fear. Soon enough those masks may be protecting you from people who are genuinely showing symptoms of COVID-19, and that’s a good thing. However, if you see someone threatening to gargle with bleach, stop them.

Be a planner, not a hoarder, but don’t fight with the hoarders.

If civilization falls to the point where lives are traded over packs of Charmin, it probably will mean that a lot more than the coronavirus has gone wrong. But if stocking up on extra Cheetos and Purelling the heck out of everything makes someone feel better, let them. For yourself, continue to buy those few extra items on each trip. Have what you need on hand so when that relative risk is at its peak, you’re not forced to go out in a viral fog just to get some much-needed Nutella. You can be as disgusted as you want by toilet paper guy (see picture above) or the man who used a forklift to stack crates of bottled water into his pickup at my local grocery (really). It’s not worth fighting about. We are not Mad Maxing, no matter how strange the situation seems.

Think about whether you really need to make that trip, even inside the U.S.

That nationwide family reunion you have planned for next month should probably wait—even if you already have that reservation for a nice pavilion. Not so much because it represents a huge risk, but because it’s bound to make a lot of people really uncomfortable. The same may even apply to that drive you’ve been planning to spend a week in Florida around the first manned launch out of Kennedy Space Center in nine years … or that one may just be me. Also, if your business is forcing you to travel for a conference, do not be afraid to ask why that is still necessary. If you’re going across the country to perform heart surgery … go! If you’re going because your company always shoves everyone in a room each March for an annual sales team rah-rah, explain that this isn’t necessarily the right time. “We’re all terrified” is not exactly the feeling you are looking for in your company event.

Don’t let social pressure overcome common sense.

You may feel compelled to shake everyone’s hand. Don’t. You don’t have to land a real or faux kiss on your aunt’s cheek. You don’t have to even make a fist bump of friendship. If you don’t feel comfortable, don’t do it. If someone else doesn’t feel comfortable, don’t make them do it. If you’re going in for a job interview and your prospective new boss holds out her hand, take it. You can always wash later. Just understand that the normal social rituals—including the normal distance that people keep between themselves in social situations—is due for some revision at this time.

If you’re in a political campaign, make some damn adjustments.

We’re right in the middle of the primaries, and there’s a good chance that even if COVID-19 does wane over the summer, it will come roaring back in the fall. That flu epidemic of 1918? The really sucky (as in deadly) part came when it returned the next October. If you are a political candidate, or if you’re working on a political campaign, then now—right f’ing now—is the time to demonstrate some actual leadership by changing the way you do things. Rethink how you go door to door. Rethink bringing dozens of people into the same room just to have them make phone calls. Rethink town halls. Rethink rallies. Rethink how you handle those election night gatherings. People who are out to change the world, but insist that nothing about how they handle campaign events can change, deserve to be left in the political dust. Fix this and show us you’re really concerned about something beyond election night.

Okay, let’s check out the world.

The overall chart for Sunday shows the same trends that started a couple of days before—the overall number of recoveries continues to grow, because that blue area of the chart is now absorbing the big orange wedge of early cases in China. But the top number has begun to spike again, fueled by growing epicenters around the globe. That influx of new cases has already started to flatten out the top of the active case numbers. Expect those numbers to begin edging upward very soon.

I’m dropping the case status chart in here again after a few days’ absence, in part to show that the three big regional epicenters, South Korea, Italy, and Iran, have all outrun the former chart-topping Diamond Princess. There are actually a couple of interesting stories from this map: how well countries like Singapore and Japan have so far controlled the spread of COVID-19, and how South Korea has done much more to prevent spread outside its borders compared to Italy or Iran. Oh, and, as usual, Iran’s numbers are a fantasy. We just don’t have anything better.

Looking at those epicenters on the time sequence chart of the top 10 nations—which, despite the effort the darn thing took to make, is of limited value and will die soon—it’s clear that each of those second epicenters stands in a region that also includes some other nations in the top 10. Those nations in the Asia region haven’t really seen a big increase since South Korea began its steep climb. However, the increases in Italy and Iran can be directly mapped to regional outbreaks.

On Sunday, I talked about the need to bring the story closer to home for readers. That’s not just true for readers in the United States, but I’m starting there today as I fumble toward something that’s more useful in informing people about the situation in their area.

There has been an overall total of 88 COVID-19 cases reported in the United States as of Monday morning. With nine patients listed as having recovered, and two having died, that means there are 77 active cases. Those numbers also suggest that the U.S. isn’t going to find any magic bullet when it comes to severity of infections or the overall outcomes. Sorry. 

Many of the cases continue to be connected with travel (such as the first case in Rhode Island), associated with travelers returning from Italy or other areas where the disease has become epidemic. However, in several areas, particularly California and Washington, there are clear indications of community spread. That appears to extend to at least six cases in both locations. Also worth noting is that these early cases in both locations include healthcare workers. That’s a repeat of the pattern seen around the world as normal operations in emergency rooms and clinics do not protect against a novel infectious disease.

In addition to the King County, Washington, and Santa Clara County, California, clusters, there was a second positive test in Oregon. Florida also reported its first two cases, but it’s not clear if these represent community spread, returning travelers, or something in between. Florida certainly is an area where there are clusters of people that are at high risk.

For the moment, I’ve left off states such as Texas, where there are patients being treated in isolated conditions with no known spread to the community, but I have included states such as Rhode Island, where the single identified case came in from outside the country. This is arbitrary, but anywhere the line is drawn, it’s not going to be perfect.

I’ve given St. Louis a pin today because 20 people have been asked to self-isolate while testing is conducted after they displayed possible symptoms. But really, there’s nothing special about St. Louis except that I live there, so I heard this report on local news. Similar situations are happening across the country.

This map is … weak. However, I’ll look to improve it over the coming days and turn it into something that may provide you with value in evaluating the relative risk in your local area. But be clear—there is no clear black-and-white line on this map. Practice those good habits.

The CDC has now both begun issuing new tests and authorized additional regional and local labs to do testing. So do not be surprised if the numbers jump suddenly simply because cases now floating out there unidentified become numbers under expanded testing.

Don’t be embarrassed to be that person buying extra Cheetos (you can have mine, I don’t eat them anyway). And stop touching your face.

An administrator at Bellevue College in Washington state created a furor on the campus this week with the application of a little white out to local history.

The school’s vice president for institutional advancement altered the description, posted by the artist, of a mural representation of the old Japanese American community in Bellevue, there long before it became a mostly white suburb of Seattle. It was put up on campus earlier this month by the Asian Pacific Islanders Student Association for the annual Day of Remembrance, an anniversary observance of the executive order that led to the internment of 110,000 people in the United States during World War II.

The artist, Erin Shigaki, posted an explanation of the mural near its installation, titling it, “Day of Remembrance: #NeverAgainIsNow.” And it discussed how Japanese immigrants performed back-breaking labor to make Bellevue habitable. It also featured this text:

After decades of anti-Japanese agitation, led by Eastside businessman Miller Freeman and others, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans included the 60 families (300 individuals) who farmed Bellevue.

A vice president at the college, Gayle Colston Barge (who is African American), took it upon herself to white out this offending passage. She later explained she thought it appropriate as a way “to protect any member of the Freeman family.” She also posted a “corrected” version of the artist’s statement right below it, with the offending passage omitted.

As one might imagine, this created something of a furor on the campus. The artist, The Seattle Times’ Paige Cromwell reports, said she was “traumatized by what happened to my art—to my community’s art—on campus.”

“I feel the feelings associated with both sides of my family being forcibly removed from Seattle – erased, unimportant, disregarded, disrespected, shamed,” she added.

College President Jerry Weber sent a letter to students and staff Monday apologizing for the alteration. “It was a mistake to alter the artist’s work,” he said.  “Editing artistic works changes the message and meaning of the work.”

Barge was placed on leave late this week. Weber told reporters that Barge was apologetic and considered it a “stupid, impulsive act.”

It’s not clear to me why a vice president of institutional advancement would feel it necessary to defend the Freeman family, other than that Miller Freeman’s grandson, Kemper Freeman Jr., is one of Bellevue’s wealthiest and most powerful men. However, the sentence that was whited out—which has since been replaced with the original text pasted over the whited-out segment—was in fact perfectly accurate, if temperate, in its description of Miller Freeman, who was the father of modern Bellevue.

I know this because some of the furor revolves around my work. Most of what follows is the product of my research, mostly in the 1990s, for what was at first a five-part series for the newspaper where I was news editor, the Bellevue Journal American: an exploration of the fate of Bellevue’s prewar Japanese American community.

I interviewed over 20 members of the old Nikkei community, including the truly remarkable Tom Matsuoka, as the foundation of the piece. The series ran in May 1992, on the 50th anniversary of the event, and eventually won a regional Blethen Award for Best Series.

There were some raised eyebrows in Bellevue when it ran, but it contained relatively little about Freeman. However, I knew it was an important story, so I worked at turning it to a manuscript. I kept conducting interviews, and dove into archival research. One of those resources was the Miller Freeman archive at the University of Washington, which contains all of Freeman’s papers and correspondences. It was an eye-opening treasure trove that gave me a close view of the workings of white supremacy in the establishment.

The end result was my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community,” published in 2005 by Palgrave Macmillan. That book provided most of the public information about the prewar Bellevue Nikkei community, as well as the people who persecuted them relentlessly. Miller Freeman is a towering presence in that regard. (Note: much of what follows is an adaptation of text from the book for purposes of this post.)

Hardscrabble Lives

The book describes how Japanese immigrants first arrived on the Eastside—what’s now known as Seattle’s tech hub: Redmond, Bellevue, and Kirkland—in the early 1900s, almost entirely young men recruited to work on railroad lines from Japanese farmlands. After their two-year stints on the rail lines—which in the Northwest often meant working as lumbermen clearing the path—were over, many of them chose to try to remain in the U.S., often by returning to farming.

Bellevue, Redmond and the towns around them had all been founded as logging towns around 1870-1880, and over the ensuing years the old-growth timber surrounding the mills there had all been cut down. By 1900 it was mostly open stumplands. These stumplands were not much use to their white owners, especially because converting them to arable or habitable properties entailed such onerous work. Removing the old stumps usually required mattocks, horses, and dynamite.

So arriving Japanese immigrants were able to work out an arrangement with these property owners on the Eastside: In exchange for performing the chore of clearing the land, they would be permitted to farm the property under a lease for the next five to seven years. These usually involved tracts of between five and ten acres. Most of the Issei (first-generation Japanese) spent the first year or so clearing the land, and then intensively cultivated the acreages, producing fresh produce of a wide variety.

This was how, tract by tract, the Eastside became habitable land: farms popped up in Clyde Hill, in the Midlakes area, near Phantom Lake, and all along the north-south Bellevue Highway. When the tract petered out, families moved on to a fresh plot of ground. The resulting operations were called “truck farms,” because typically the farmers would load up their goods once a week and haul them to market—in this case, Seattle’s Pike Place Market—by truck.

Growing fresh produce had become something of a niche operation, because white American farmers had developed a taste for large acreages growing mass food products such as wheat, potatoes, and sugar beets. In this way, the immigrants were avoiding direct competition. Truck farms grew lettuce, peas, string beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and all kinds of fresh produce. But their most profitable crops by far—especially on the Eastside—were strawberries. Though they were purely seasonal, they were wildly popular too.

Bellevue first held a Strawberry Festival in June 1925, and these events—run by white locals—drew huge crowds who crossed Lake Washington on the ferries that would get them to Bellevue. At its peak it drew 15,000 people to what was then a town of 2,000. There were parades and beauty pageants. The annual Strawberry Queen contestants, however, were always white.

As it happened, 1925 was the same year that Miller Freeman took up residency on the Eastside, purchasing a mansion in Medina. For the Nikkei (Japanese) community, this meant their chief political nemesis was now their neighbor.

Freeman had made a fortune for himself as a publisher—first, of a popular trade magazine called Pacific Fisherman, and then expanded from there—and had made himself famous with his startling political pronouncements. Born in 1875 in Ogden, Utah, he was a slender, handsome man of medium height, with angular features and a piercing gaze. He came from true pioneer stock, and found himself as a young man learning the newspaper trade in Anacortes, Wash.

In 1897 he struck out on his own with a little farming newspaper and soon made a fortune by coming up with a publication for commercial and sport fishermen. Pacific Fisherman proved wildly popular, as did several trade publications that followed. By 1912 he had a parcel of trade publications to his name: The Town Crier, The Washington Farmer, Pacific Motor Boat, The Pacific Coast Dairyman, The Oregon Farmer.  It was from the pages of these papers that Freeman launched his crusade

It began with a fight over salmon. In 1904, Freeman—an ardent Republican and state committeeman—fired off a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt reporting that two Japanese schooners had been fishing in waters off Alaska.  Roosevelt responded by sending a Coast Guard cutter to Funter Bay, where the schooners were operating, seizing them and imprisoning and later deporting their crews. “There was no diplomatic note-writing, and no war,” Freeman later wrote.

According to Freeman, he then prevailed upon the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to establish regulations forbidding “aliens ineligible for citizenship”—in other words, all Asians, but specifically the Japanese—from fishing in Alaskan waters. Freeman apparently believed the incident played a role in inspiring Roosevelt to pursue the 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement”—in which Japan agreed to cease permitting any further immigration from its shores—two years later. As he later described it:

“I got on the warpath of wholesale immigration of Japanese to the Pacific Coast in 1907, and joined up with others in making such a rumpus about it that Theodore Roosevelt finally took it upon himself to notify Japan that colonization of our Pacific Coast areas would have to be stopped.”

There is nothing in the historical record that would indicate Freeman’s advocacy played any role in Roosevelt’s actions. But the die was cast. All his life, Freeman saw Japanese immigrants as a greater threat than any other: the “Yellow Peril.” Like many of his contemporaries, Freeman ardently adopted a conspiracy theory holding that the Japanese emperor intended to invade the Pacific Coast, and that he was sending these immigrants to American shores as shock troops to prepare the way for just such a military action.

Freeman frequently cited a 1909 book promoting this theory, Homer Lea’s “The Valor of Ignorance,” which detailed the invasion to come and its aftermath. It had mapped out the most likely landing spot as Grays Harbor County on the Washington coast.

Freeman saw the rising rivalry over Alaska’s salmon fishery as an early salvo in this coming war. He declared in the pages of Pacific Fisherman: “If we follow the false doctrines preached by the pro-Japanese press, we will soon be making Japan a present of the Pacific Coast in order to preserve our friendly relations and build up a large American-Japanese commerce for Nippon steamships to handle.”

Driven by fears of an invasion, Freeman’s career soon moved into a military phase. After reading a 1910 article in Harper’s Weekly calling for the formation of a Naval Militia in Puget Sound, he sprang into action. Freeman contacted the Secretary of the Navy and offered to spearhead the drive to form just such a body, comprised of ships provided by the Navy and a phalanx of yachting volunteers. He organized a meeting at the Seattle Yacht Club and lined up a muster roll.

In short order, the state Legislature made the naval militia an official entity, and Freeman was named its commander. The Navy provided the militia with an aging ship, and Freeman spent the next several years organizing drills, preparing for the Japanese invasion.

Such an event was nearly inevitable, in Freeman’s view. He warned his recruits that they should enter the naval militia fully expecting to see battle action. “I want to warn you all that a conflict of arms with Japan is highly probable,” he told the Seattle Times, adding: “The safety of the nation is in the people and the people must be aroused to action if our coast is to be saved from devastation by a foreign enemy.”  

Freeman sturdily denied that his campaign was driven by racial animus, saying that he “harbors no enmity toward the Japanese. They are a wonderfully bright people, frugal and industrious. But they are Orientals. We are Caucasians. Oil and water do not mix.”

Over the ensuing decades, that became Freeman’s motto. And the Japanese remained a consistent obsession, a lens through which nearly every political project he undertook was understood.

Freeman left the state Legislature in 1910, preoccupied with running the Naval Militia. He had continued making irregular warnings about the dire machinations of the Nipponese government in his trade publications.

An Obsession With Japan

The Gentlemen’s Agreement did slow the flow of Japanese to the West Coast considerably.  Immigration plummeted from a high of 10,000 workers in 1908 to about 1,700 per year in the years immediately following. However, the agreement contained a clause allowing the immigrants already in America to send for their wives from Japan. Most of these men were single, but were able to make Japanese-style arranged marriages through go-betweens back home. These new arrivals were called “picture brides” because most of them had only ever seen their new husbands by photograph—as had the men their new wives. By 1919, Japanese immigration had grown to 8,000 a year.

California nativists, eager to stanch the flow, applied Freeman’s “aliens ineligible for citizenship” language in devising the nation’s first “Alien Land Law” in 1913, making it illegal for the Issei to own land in the state. A statewide prohibition appealed immensely to Freeman, who founded the Anti-Japanese League of Washington in 1916 and began campaigning for an alien land law in the state. At first he met with little success, but in 1919, he found the opening he sought.

Freeman was appointed by Gov. Louis F. Hart in early 1919 to the state’s Veteran Welfare Commission, which was charged with reemploying returning veterans of the Great War. Though some economists noted at the time that the problem was a complex (but probably short-lived) one caused by slow-acting market forces, for Freeman it became abundantly clear that there was a singular cause: the Japanese, once again.

His opening salvo was a July speech before a group of 170 grocery, laundry and retail store owners that he titled, “This is a White Man’s Country.” In it, Freeman decried the steady stream of picture brides into the region since 1907. Freeman declared that Japanese mothers bore five times as many children as white women.  Soon, he warned, the entire Pacific Coast would be overrun completely.  He also claimed (falsely) that they owned and controlled large amounts of property in the state.

Freeman’s speech brought a pointed response from S.K. Arima, publisher of the Japanese North American Times: “The opinion of the commission is a great mistake. If there is, as the commission asserts, need to restrict Japanese immigration more severely than it is now, it must mean to restrict Japanese brides who come to America to live with their husbands. But not to allow young Japanese in this country to bring their brides to live with would be inhuman, unjust and un-Christian. Besides, Japanese women are never in competition with returning soldiers.”

Arima’s response appeared on the front page of the Seattle Star on July 25. The next day, Freeman’s campaign exploded on the paper’s front pages with an 84-point banner headline across the front page of the Seattle Star demanding: DEPORT JAPANESE

Beneath the lead-in was a small portrait of Miller Freeman, with a caption: “Sees Menace in Japanese Here.” The first paragraph laid out Freeman’s case: “That by getting control of 47 per cent of Seattle’s hotels, and by leasing land when forbidden to own it, Japanese violate the spirit of the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between the United States and Japan, was the charge made Friday by Miller Freeman, secretary of the veterans’ welfare commission.

The story went on to detail how the Japanese “controlled” 218 of the hotels in Seattle (it would later turn out that “control” included mere managerial status, not necessarily ownership), and worse yet, were taking over all the state’s prime farmland. “Practically all the best farming lands in the vicinity of Seattle are in the hands of the Japanese -- a condition true of nearly all of the farming land adjacent to all the cities of the Pacific Coast,” it read. “The law forbade foreigners to own land, and the spirit of the law is to prevent them from realizing the profits of our agricultural acreage. Yet these Japanese come here, lease the land, cultivate it, and take the cream. And the spirit of the law and the ‘gentleman’s agreement’ is violated.”

As a result of this travesty, Freeman claimed, World War I veterans returning home from Europe were being shut out of the labor market: “By gaining control of business, the Japanese is crowding our returning veterans out of a chance to get a new start.” And if the trend continued, he warned, the result would be inevitable: “In the face of the flow of Japanese to the Pacific Coast, white people are ceasing to move here from the East. Eventually the whites will be forced to go elsewhere to make a living. ... Thus, the Japanese will eventually hold the balance of power in politics on the Pacific Coast. They will vote solid, and will control political affairs. Japan retains control of her people everywhere, notwithstanding that they may be accepted as citizens by the countries of their adoption.”

Of course, very little of Freeman’s tirade was true, but that last assertion was flagrantly deceptive; thanks to the 1790 Immigration Act restricting citizenship to “free white persons,” naturalization was not an option available to the Japanese. The only means by which a person of Japanese ancestry could obtain citizenship was by being born on American soil; but then, as Freeman would make clear on numerous other occasions, even American-born Japanese were not racial equals and could never mix with white society.

Despite his later contentions that he had no prejudice against the Japanese, this racial separatism was a cornerstone of Freeman’s argument as he presented it in the pages of the Star. He voiced it largely by sprinkling his writing and speeches with popular aphorisms: “The Japanese cannot be assimilated. Once a Japanese, always a Japanese. Our mixed marriages -- failures all -- prove this. ‘East is East, and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet.’ Oil and water do not mix.”

And his conclusion became a political benchmark: “It is my personal view, as a citizen, that the time has arrived for plain speech on this question. I am for a white man’s Pacific coast. I am for the Japanese on their own side of the fence. I not only favor stopping all further immigration, but believe this government should approach Japan with the view to working out a gradual system of deportation of old Japanese now here.”

For the month following Miller Freeman’s initial outburst, the pages of the Seattle Star were headlined with stories relating the dire threat posed by Japanese immigrants. The campaign covered all the bases:

MORE REVELATIONS MADE IN JAP MENACE

JAPANESE PICTURE BRIDES ARE SWARMING HERE

ASK CIVIC PROBE OF JAP PROBLEM

SHALL WE DODGE JAP ISSUE!

The basic tenets of the stories were that neither the Japanese immigrants nor their citizen children could ever become “real Americans” -- “There is no hope now or in the future for their assimilation,” Freeman declared. On the crusade’s second day, an editorial beneath the headline asked: “Is This To Remain White Man’s Land?”:

The campaign attracted a congressional hearing in Seattle on the question, chaired by Republican Rep. Albert Johnson, a onetime newspaperman from Hoquiam, in Grays Harbor County. Freeman, whose influence in GOP circles was undiminished, was a chief mentor. Johnson had held one of the state’s five House seats since 1913, and had since become chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee. A parade of local civic leaders spoke, uniformly urging something be done about the tide of Japanese immigrants.

“This is the zero hour of Americanism,” declared the local leader of the American Legion, at the hearing, “and we should stand for 100 percent Americanism. The republic was founded for Americans, and not for Japanese, who are un-American.”

Johnson’s committee took no further action on the matter. The following summer, he began using the issue both on the stump and in Congress. He introduced a bill that year suspending all immigration for one year. It went nowhere, waylaid by a competing bill also intended to stop Japanese immigration.

So while campaigning in Tacoma, Johnson called for “local agitation” to force the issue, and said he planned to investigate “the growing menace of Japanese intrusion into the agricultural and commercial lines of business in the state.”

Simultaneously, Freeman and the Anti-Japanese League stepped up their campaign for a Washington version of the alien land laws. Freeman outlined his reasoning in a 1920 speech: “Certainly I did not start out with any prejudice against the Japanese,” he said. “And the more I observe of them, the more I admire their perseverance and efficiency. They are not inferior to us; in fact, they constantly demonstrate their ability to beat the white man at his own game in farming, fishing and business. They will work harder, deprive themselves of every comfort and luxury, make beasts of burden of their women and stick together, making a combination that Americans cannot defeat.”

This was a common refrain among white supremacists, who gladly accord Asians an advanced position in math, sciences and arts, but consider them as lacking a moral dimension that ultimately renders them an inferior race. As noted eugenicist Madison Grant put it: “These races vary intellectually and morally just as they do physically. Moral, intellectual, and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters, and are transmitted unchanged from generation to generation.”  

This lack of a moral sense inherent in the race made them potentially dangerous as economic or military competitors, according to this assessment, because they lacked the normal restraints that “decent” white folk took for granted as part of the fabric of a healthy society.

Freeman contended that the Japanese already had a leg up on establishing their hold in the Northwest. In an editorial in the Washington Farmer, he proclaimed: “Practically all the best farming lands in the vicinity of Seattle are in the hands of the Japanese. The free city market established by the city of Seattle for the benefit of all the people is controlled by the Japanese. They are establishing many commission houses and within a short time will have a virtual monopoly and sell all farm products.”

Soon Freeman’s refrain—that the Nikkei were outcompeting their white neighbors by accepting conditions that whites would find intolerable—became common. Layered around the racial animus, a strong economic motive was at work among most of these groups. Sometimes this was explicitly so; indeed, the two purposes were often expressed as identical.  

Thus, testifying before a Washington legislative committee, one fruit-store owner complained of being offered $5,000 for his business by a Japanese competitor. When he refused, the competitor told him he would spend $10,000 to drive him out, and then engaged in a price-cutting battle that eventually forced the white fruit seller to sell his business for half what he had originally been offered. The legislators were aghast. But none wondered whether the fruit seller’s concern would have been germane if his competition had been merely another Caucasian.

Gov. Hart, a Republican, campaigned in 1920 for his ultimately successful re-election on a promise to outlaw the leasing of any property by the Issei. One of his GOP primary opponents, John Stringer, took it a step further: “It is our duty to take every acre of land on Puget Sound away from the Japs and place it in the hands of our ex-soldiers.”

When the Legislature convened early in 1921, a flood of anti-Japanese bills awaited. The first proposal would have made it mandatory to post American citizens as guards at any Japanese-owned hotel. Another called for an official investigation of the Japanese immigrants. A third prohibited any “aliens and disloyal persons” from teaching in any public or private schools. All these faltered in the legislative process.

But the fourth and centerpiece bill, a basic Alien Land Law forbidding ownership or leasing of land by all “aliens ineligible for citizenship”—flew through both houses nearly unimpeded, passing the House 71-19 and the Senate 36-2. Hart signed it in short order.

Flush with political victory, Miller Freeman had the final say on the matter. In an article addressed to the Japanese community, he minced no words: “The people of this country never invited you here. You came into this country of your own responsibility, large numbers after our citizens supposed that Japanese immigration had been suppressed. You came notwithstanding you knew you were not welcome. You have created an abnormal situation in our midst for which you are to blame.”

The final blow came in 1924, when Albert Johnson, using his offices as chair of House Immigration and Naturalization Committee, introduced an immigration bill that would limit immigration to a two percent quota for each nationality. However, folded into the legislation was its chief feature—an Asian Exclusion Act, which prohibited any immigration by “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” More than the quota system, the exclusion became the focus of public discussion.

The bill easily passed the House. After Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge claimed a letter from the Japanese ambassador warning of “grave consequences” for the bill’s passage was a “veiled threat” against the United States, it also passed Senate and soon became law.

As it turned out, there were indeed grave consequences, but they were of the long-term variety. Passage of the 1924 Immigration Act sparked anti-American riots in the U.S. and is credited with destroying a then-nascent democratic movement in Japan. It also helped pave the ascent for final control of the Japanese government by hardline militarists who shortly adopted a bellicose anti-Americanism that finally became manifest on Dec. 7, 1941.

Transforming Bellevue

One year before that, the Eastside had been permanently transformed with the arrival of the Mercer Island Floating Bridge, which opened in 1940. The man responsible for its construction was none other than Miller Freeman.

Freeman not only took up residence in Medina in 1925, he began buying parcels of land around the Eastside—though, true to form, he evidently never leased them to Japanese farmers. He had bigger plans. Among the early visitors to his new property in Medina was Dr. Henry M. Suzzallo, president of the University of Washington and a longtime friend. He asked the publisher why he would choose to remove himself from the bustle of Seattle.

“I wanted to get away from the pressure of the city during the home hours,” Freeman replied. “I wanted a place for the boys to grow up off the city’s streets. … In short, I want to go rural, to put affairs of everything but family behind me when I leave the office.”

“Don’t kid me,” replied Suzzallo. “You will soon be sparking ideas all over Medina. … You will be into all kinds of projects. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if you got involved in a scheme to bridge the lake.”

Suzzallo was either prophetic or just knew his man too well. Indeed, Freeman envisioned a future for the Eastside built around a metropolitan Bellevue, and even drew up a map for a modern Bellevue that bears a striking resemblance to the city as it exists today.

In 1937, a state transportation engineer named Homer Hadley suggested building a floating bridge from Seattle’s Central District across the lake to Mercer Island. The idea had been previously discarded because of the windstorms common to that stretch of water. A typical floating wooden structure, which the lake’s considerable depth would have necessitated, would be chopped into driftwood by the first of those storms to come along.

Hadley proposed instead a bridge made of concrete. Hadley understood that floating pontoons could be constructed of concrete that were capable of remaining stable in fierce waves. Joined together and lashed to the lake bottom by cables, the pontoons could form a perfectly stable bridge.

But when local newspapermen caught wind of Hadley’s idea, they practically laughed him out of town. The Seattle Times ran derisive editorials. The Times’ cartoonist depicted Hadley’s concrete pontoons washing up on shore.

Miller Freeman, with perhaps other ends in mind, came to Hadley’s defense. In the pages of his Seattle newspaper holdings, including The Town Crier, Freeman called Hadley a visionary. Freeman also used his pull with Republican legislators to obtain funding for Hadley’s proposal in Olympia. Other newspapers joined in, including the Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Star. And the Bellevue American, to no one’s great surprise, pronounced Hadley’s plan a capital idea.

The primary motives, of course, for many of the bridge’s proponents were more than simply providing a boost to Bellevue’s fortunes. Naturally, a bridge meant improved access to the Eastside’s expanding agricultural wealth. More important, it offered shorter, more direct access to the Sunset Highway and Snoqualmie Pass, which provided Seattle’s vital land link to the east. Building the bridge simply made good sense.

Soon, no one in Seattle was laughing. Final plans were drawn up, and construction of the Mercer Island Floating Bridge began in 1938. It opened to great fanfare—and a widely despised 25-cent toll—in 1940. Drivers marveled at the bridge’s stability, and it quickly transformed the Eastside from a sleepy farming community to a significant residential and commercial center. Now, instead of an hour away, Bellevue was within 15 minutes’ drive of downtown Seattle.

The Bellevue Japanese farming community had in the ensuing years become fairly prosperous. Now their produce was not being just trucked out to the Seattle market, but was being shipped via rail all over the country. However, the city fathers and the land developers around them viewed the farms as a problem, because they were lands ripe for development into residential neighborhoods. Now that Bellevue was a short commute from Seattle, it seemed natural. Using them for farms seemed like a waste.

The opportunity to push the Japanese farmers off their lands finally came on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked American forces at Pearl Harbor.

A number of Nikkei civic leaders, including Tom Matsuoka, were arrested by the FBI within the first day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Confusion and fear reigned throughout the community. Then, Miller Freeman sprang into action. He called for and got a meeting of Japanese community leaders with the apparently self-appointed “Special Committee” whose work was announced in a front-page brief in the Bellevue American.

Among the people who were present at this meeting were three of my interviewees—Akira Aramaki, Tosh Ito, and Tokio Hirotaka. Another man featured in ‘Strawberry Days’—Masami Inatsu, a veteran of the 442nd Battalion—was there. Inatsu died in action in France.

Freeman was evidently quite proud of these meetings, because he had his secretary keep minutes from them that are preserved in the Miller Freeman archives at UW. Below is my rendition of the transcript of these minutes in ‘Strawberry Days’ (pp. 111-114).

He convened a meeting December 13 at the Camp Fire House with a delegation of white community leaders, including A.J. Whitney, editor of the local weekly, the Bellevue American -- whose paper dutifully reported on the sessions -- and five representatives from the Japanese community: three Nisei, including Tok Hirotaka, Akira Aramaki and Masami Inatsu; and two Issei, Kanji Hayashi and Komaji Takano.

Freeman opened the proceedings with a speech that outlined his intentions: “Our job is to see what can be done to face the practical problems before us. Naturally we are interested in the defense of this nation. Some of you are aliens and some are citizens. We want to deal with the problem with you people in an orderly way; in one that is considerate and thoughtful, but not through prejudice or emotion. We don't want things happening in this district. We want to deal with you frankly; don't want anybody's feelings hurt, but we are at war and we can't pussy-foot about it.

“There are some things that are going to be required of the Japanese in this district; some of which has already been imposed upon you, such as restrictions on finance and on travel, etc. War just having broke out, there are still a lot of details to be worked out. My own feeling is that it is possible to undertake in every way possible a joint consideration of these problems rather than to have something done that is a hardship on you people.

“If there is any injustice, we want to see that that is controlled. We want to protect you people, but do not want to let the situation drift.”

Freeman added that he would like to make a model in this district “of our relations with the Japanese who are here in justice and fairness, and which may be a model for the rest of the country wherever there are Japanese who are colonized.”

Akira Aramaki responded first. “American citizens and nationals are willing to do their part 100 percent,” he said, “but at the present time the young people, a lot of them are afraid to venture out on account of the hysteria at the present time. Last night we went to a JAL meeting, and they are 100 percent -- in all National Defense, Red Cross, etc. The older people were telling me to do everything we can for National Defense, and so I just go around now and start whatever we can locally. We would have enough to do here. We have been a little slow at it for fear of going out. We are told to stay in as much as possible.”

Another committeeman suggested that a good place for the Japanese to start showing their loyalty would be by turning in any “Fifth Column” spies in their midst or of an “un-American activities.” Freeman pursued the point further.

“I am coming now to certain recommendation I want to suggest to you for consideration, which in view of your own background and training you may at first find it difficult to accept or even clearly understand, but I think we should face these things frankly,” he said. “These are not suggestions of the committee, but of myself.

“1. You should sever all connections with the Japanese Government -- that includes disbanding any pro-Japanese organizations designed to promote the Imperial Japanese government interests. There can't be any half-and-half business -- must be 100 percent.

“2. Stop all relationships with Japanese consular representatives.

“3. Stop using the Japanese language.”

Kanji Hayashi, one of the only Issei at the meeting, interrupted, trying to explain to Freeman that he misunderstood the position of the Nisei. In halting pidgin, he told the gathering that “some people have the idea some of them are under obligation to the Japanese government, but that has never existed -- they have no relations with the Japanese Consul. The first generation cannot become citizens of this country and their country (government) must look after the welfare of those people. What they did was just to take care of them.”

“Let us put an end to all that,” declared Freeman.

(In fact, one of the facets of the “Yellow Peril” mythology was the notion that Japanese children born in the United States were automatically given dual citizenship in Japan, and that the Emperor considered all the Nisei to be his subjects. There was only a grain of truth to this; dual citizenship was indeed granted automatically until 1924, at which time the Japanese government altered its policy, allowing Nisei to gain such status only if their parents registered their names at a Japanese consulate within two weeks of their birth.)

Freeman then continued with the remainder of his points: “Now, I think that all Japanese language school should be stopped.”

“Already stopped,” Kanji Hayashi volunteered.

“You have had it up to now?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask now,” Freeman queried, “what was the purpose of running those schools and the older people requiring that the younger people go to the Japanese schools?”

“Just teach them the Japanese language, that is all,” Hayashi explained. “No other purpose, I think.”

“Our feeling is that they were propaganda schools to teach loyalty to the Japanese empire,” Freeman said. “I think we should stop all Japanese-language newspapers and publication in this United States of America. English is the language of this country. Use English and English papers.”

Tok Hirotaka piped up: “Because our parents couldn’t speak English, so they had to teach children something about Japanese.”

“I am going to suggest it was the business of older people to talk English rather than Japanese,” Freeman replied.

“I wish someone could have told them before, we couldn’t,” said an exasperated Hirotaka. “People like Mr. Hayashi -- his children never did go to Japanese school, but they (the old folks) don’t all understand English like he does; or Mr. Takano. My mother is 65 -- here 40 years, longer than she was in Japan, but she can't talk English very well. Rest of us all talk English at home, but to her I still talk Japanese.”

“I suggest that in the future no longer should older Japanese insist that these young students be raised and trained in the ways of the Japanese and their language,” Freeman said.

Hayashi tried to explain why the Issei found the language so hard: “Japanese language is entirely different from other nations’ and it is awfully hard for people to get mastery of it.”

“English language is not hard to learn,” replied Freeman.

“Italian or Swedish understand English better than Japanese,” said Hayashi.

Freeman moved on. “We have in this country a situation, not merely with the Japanese, but with Germans and Italians, of what we call dual citizenship. I think one of the ways young Japanese can show loyalty to us is to make a demonstration -- show that they have obtained release of citizenship from Japan, in other words, apply to the Japanese government to be expatriated. To what degree has that been done? How about you young fellows?”

Tok Hirotaka was firm: “I am an American citizen. I have never had dual citizenship.”

“It’s the only thing,” agreed Aramaki.

“Your standing would be so much better and I would like to see you young fellows get together and make a study of that, and reflect, and see what legal ways there are to get on record that you are free from any thoughtless conditions that are allowed to come up,” Freeman said. “It is not going to be easy, it is complicated. You can do your share by applying for it in the proper legal way.

“You fellows think you are Americans, you are loyal. Unless you try to get expatriation from Japan, they claim you are citizens regardless of whether you are or not.”

The Nisei were astonished: “I never knew that,” Aramaki said.

“Oh, no,” demurred Hayashi. All of them shook their heads.

“We might investigate further,” said Freeman, not so sure of himself now.

“Do you mean if we are American citizens, born here, we still have connection with Japanese government, regardless of whether we were born here?” asked Tok Hirotaka.

“That is correct, unless you could show positive proof of definite release,” Freeman said. “Every one of you fellows are subject to draft of Japan.”

“No,” said Aramaki.

“Oh, no,” said Hirotaka.

“Unless you get that release,” Freeman kept saying.

“As American citizens they don't take you in the army,” Aramaki said. “I am positive.” And he would have been; he had just accompanied Tom Matsuoka to Japan the year before and had observed the military’s behavior firsthand.

“If they registered at the Japanese consulate then they become Japanese citizens,” explained Hayashi. “If they did not register, he or she, born in this country -- Japan has never claimed their citizenship.”

“Are your children registered with Japanese consulate?” queried Freeman.

“No,” answered Hayashi. Komaji Takano, the other Issei at the meeting, also answered negatively.

“Is it desirable or practical to have a census taken in this community? Does your association have a census?” asked Freeman.

“Not all the children,” Takano replied. “Just old folks. ... It was about April or March I tried to see Japanese, if there are any dual citizens, and I found out there are no dual citizens.”

“Who did you ask?” Freeman said.

“All of the Japanese around here, so I don't think it.”

“It may be in spirit,” Freeman said. “Question is, I am asking you about the legal status.”

“You mean, you want action,” Aramaki said.

“I would like to suggest that you get rid of Japanese language newspapers. Instead of there being a lot of mystery and secrecy, let us all lay the cards on the table in good American fashion.”

“There is no Japanese paper published in Bellevue,” said Hayashi. “All cannot read or speak English so their news is just through Japanese papers.”

“I tell you you fellows can read these papers,” replied Freeman. “Japanese papers are like German papers -- carry propaganda, et cetera, threats.”

“The FBI stopped that right away,” Aramaki replied. “Japanese papers now come out with same thing as United States papers translated in Japanese.”

Speaking of the FBI, the Nisei inquired as to the whereabouts of Tom Matsuoka and Asaichi Tsushima. Freeman said the committee would look into it -- and on that note, called it a night.

Tosh Ito was also at the meeting, and he recalled the implied threat of Freeman’s message: that the Japanese were now at the mercy of their neighbors and had better not step out of line. “The thing that stuck in my mind was that he said, ‘You guys are going to have to learn to live with the shitty end of the stick,’ ” Ito says.

At its next meeting two weeks later at Freeman’s home, the only topic of discussion was a letter Freeman had received from R.P. Bonham, director of the Seattle District of the U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service. Bonham’s explanation corroborated Kanji Hayashi’s explanation in every detail: “In connection with the Japanese laws on the subject, it appears that prior to 1916 all children of Japanese parentage, wherever born, we considered the subjects of Japan, regardless of whether the birth was recorded at the Japanese consulate or otherwise. ... On December 1, 1924, the Japanese congress enacted a statute which provided in effect that children born outside of Japan to Japanese subjects would not be considered citizens of Japan unless the subjects' births were reported to the nearest Japanese consulate within two weeks after the date of the birth.”  

Freeman’s committee “recommended that the extent to which the children of Japanese parentage have been so registered with the nearest Japanese consulate be determined. It is believed that the present status of dual citizenship of Japanese born in this country should be thoroughly explored by the authorities of the state of Washington and by the federal government. It is recommended that a census be taken by the local branches of the Civilian Defense Councils, such census to be at one made in each zone where Japanese are present.”

The committee also recommended an investigation of Japanese schools: “... This Committee believes the real purpose of conducting these schools was as propaganda agencies to assure the loyalty of American-born Japanese to the Japanese government.”

Eight days later, on New Year’s Eve, Freeman called the members of the committee for yet another session. Not all the Caucasian board members were present -- Whitney was absent, though Freeman’s son Kemper was along -- but neither were all the Japanese who had been “invited.” Only Kanji Hayashi, Komaji Takano and Akira Aramaki showed. And that was a problem.

“Why are two other men of your committee not here?” demanded Freeman. “I want to make perfectly clear that when you are called to meeting here it is the United States Government!

“Now, as I told you before -- the aim of this committee to try to be cooperative with you Japanese in understanding your difficulties and to try to have an exchange of views and what may be done. The objects: first of all -- protecting you Japanese; but more than that, assuring your cooperation with this country in the war. We don't want any misunderstanding about it. Regarding the failure of these two men to appear immediately does this -- it puts you all, as a community, under suspicion.”

No one had a reply.

“You had notice yesterday -- why are they not here? We all here left our work to sit down and talk with you about your problems. The feeling is becoming much more serious all the time in this country. If it is going to be your disposition to cooperate with this Government, we want to know it and we don't want any fooling.

“There were two other men at the last meeting. Hirotaka -- did he go to Kent?”

“I told him but he didn't come,” Akira Aramaki answered. “Inatsu -- he has no telephone. I asked Hirotaka to tell him. I asked him to last meeting, and he did. I didn't go myself.”

“I want to be fair with you people,” Freeman said. “Don’t like business of calling a meeting with everybody notified and not all being here.”

There was nothing further to be said. Freeman, disgusted, called the meeting off in short order, saying the committee could reconvene when better Japanese representation could be had.

There is no evidence the committee ever met again.  Nor did it ever answer the question of Tom Matsuoka’s whereabouts.

Five weeks after Freeman’s meetings ceased, on Feb. 19, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the secretary of war to designate areas as military zones from which people could be excluded. It paved the way for the incarceration of 110,000 Americans. One of the intermediary steps involved congressional hearings held at cities affected by the presence of Japanese Americans along the Pacific Coast. Rep. John Tolan of California chaired these hearings.

At the Tolan hearing in Seattle in early March 1942, Miller Freeman took front and center stage. The headline the next morning in the Post-Intelligencer pretty much said it all: “Freeman Calls Japan Society ‘5th Column’.” His testimony favored immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry to the interior, where they could be kept under guard.

Freeman was joined by a chorus of other voices making similar proclamations and wrapping themselves in the jingo’s American flag, including a number of land-development interests. It was the same at other Tolan hearings on the Coast.

The hearings were a joke anyway, since the Nikkei communities’ fate had already been decided March 2 when the West Coast Army’s commanding general, Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, announced that everyone west of the Cascades was in a “military exclusion zone.” This meant that everyone of Japanese extraction was being ordered to “evacuate” by the military.

On March 24, the first such “evacuation”—of 227 Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island—took place. They were taken to Manzanar, Calif. By early May evacuation notices went up everywhere along the Pacific Coast. The Eastside community—60 or so families, over 300 people—were herded aboard a train in Kirkland on May 20 and shipped out of town. Most never returned.

The majority of Bellevue’s Nikkei community spent their first months in incarceration, first at an “assembly center” in Pinedale, Calif., near Fresno; then at a “relocation center” (euphemism for a concentration camp) in Tule Lake, Calif. Most relocated, about a year into the process, to the camp in Minidoka in southern Idaho, since that was where most of the Seattle community, with whom the Bellevue Nikkei had their closest social connections, had been “relocated.”

When the camps finally began closing in late 1944, and for good by early 1945, only a handful—12 of the 60 families—actually returned to Bellevue to resume farming. That was because only 15 of them owned their farms. The leased properties on which the majority of the Nikkei community had farmed were either already being developed into residential neighborhoods, or were in the process of becoming so. (One of the larger tracts of leased farmland became a private country-club golf course.)

Even some of those who owned their land did not come back. Tom Matsuoka, who had been a community leader in Bellevue, found his farmhouse had been burned down. He chose to remain in Montana, where he had relocated to work sugar beets during the war’s duration. In 1963, he was named Montana Farmer of the Year.

Miller Freeman enjoyed his final years as the grand old man of Republican politics on the Eastside. When the toll on the Mercer Island bridge expired in 1947, the event was celebrated in local media, with Freeman given the honor of paying the final toll.

By then, he had transformed Bellevue in other significant ways—primarily by founding, along with his son Kemper, the Eastside’s first real shopping center, Bellevue Square. When Miller died in 1955, Kemper was already in control of the empire. Kemper’s son Kemper Jr. now controls that empire, which is significant and includes a number of Bellevue’s major properties and high-rises. I’ve tried twice to interview Freeman about the history, and he declined both times.

Reading through Miller Freeman’s archives, it’s self-evident that he intended the future modern city of Bellevue to be primarily, if not solely, a white enclave. And indeed, when I worked there in the 1990s, it still largely was, thanks often to the legacy of old racial covenants.

In the intervening years, those demographics have shifted significantly, especially as the Eastside became a tech center, not just for Microsoft but also for Japanese companies such as Nintendo. Accordingly, many more Asians, as well as South Asians, live there now. Kemper Freeman Jr. has played a role in doing business with many of those companies, and it’s been obvious he has none of his grandfather’s antipathy to Asian people as unworthy of white society.

Any family, however, whose fortune is the founded by man like this probably needs to confront his legacy at some point. Miller Freeman was a dynamic, fascinating man who made modern Bellevue. He was also a frighteningly racist white supremacist.

Certainly the generation of Americans wrestling with race relations and the effects of white supremacy a century later deserve to know about how a singular character like Freeman, by virtue of their leadership, can create a tsunami of human misery.

(For anyone interested, we’ll be discussing this with members of the Asian Pacific Islanders Student Association on Wednesday, March 11, on the Bellevue College campus 12:30-2:30 p.m. at the Conference Lecture Hall (N201).)

Mike Pence talked coronavirus response on three Sunday morning talk shows yesterday, and boy, did CNN’s Jake Tapper and NBC’s Chuck Todd let him off the hook. (Obviously Fox News did the same.) Both Tapper and Todd were content, through most of their interviews, to sit back and let Pence trot out his talking points: Donald Trump is on top of things, Donald Trump has kept things from being much worse, testing kits are coming, masks are coming … to hear Pence tell it, the administration’s COVID-19 response is a well-oiled machine.

For that matter, to hear Pence tell it, there are just 22 cases of coronavirus transmission inside the U.S., with another 46 people having returned, under quarantine, from China or the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Which may have been true if the interviews were taped ahead of time, but as of Sunday morning, when they aired, Reuters reported “more than 75” confirmed cases, including the 46. By Monday morning it was 89—and that’s confirmed cases in a country that has lagged on testing for the disease. But the big lapse in these interviews didn’t come from failing to challenge Pence on that moving target.

Neither Tapper nor Todd got around to asking Pence even a single question about what qualifies him to head up the administration response to the epidemic. In particular, Pence should be answering some tough questions about his terrible public health record, which includes presiding over an HIV outbreak in Indiana that was made quantifiably worse by his actions. As a bonus, Pence should get questions about how it was that in the year 2000 he was still arguing, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill.”

But instead Pence got to brag, uninterrupted, that “after three days leading the president's effort on the coronavirus, I'm more confident than ever that we are bringing the whole-of-government approach. The president has directed the full resources of the federal government.” And, “We are going to continue to lean into this effort to protect the American people.” He got lightly pressed about when there will be more testing kits available and about the stockpile of masks, but emphasis on lightly pressed.

Both Tapper and Todd picked one issue to really challenge Pence on. In a telling moment for the media, they both picked the same issue, and it wasn't about public health; it was about politics. Donald Trump Jr. had accused Democrats of hoping that people will die in a pandemic for political reasons. Tapper asked, “That seems like very extreme rhetoric. I don't expect you to criticize the president's son, but you don't think that Democrats want people to contract this disease, do you?” From Todd, “None of this seems to match the facts. What facts are there that Democrats are doing this?”

They’re not wrong! But of course Pence dodged—heaven knows the man has plenty of experience justifying Trump family lies and attacks with a sober frown on his face—and viewers didn’t get any extra information about the COVID-19 response. Pence himself escaped without a challenge to his role in charge of that response.

Then again, it’s better than we get from Fox News.

This is not exactly encouraging.

Fox News on Friday morning interviewed Frank Wucinski, a Pennsylvania man who recently went through the quarantine process for coronavirus — but Wucinski couldn’t stop coughing.

Fox News just interviewed a Pennsylvania man who went through the coronavirus quarantine process — but he couldn't stop coughing during the interview pic.twitter.com/kzoIYQM8x6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 28, 2020

“As time goes forward, hopefully doctors and scientists will get a better handle on the whole situation,” Wucinski said, with his young daughter sitting in his lap.

“Fortunately, from what I understand [cough], it is contagious, but the death rate is pretty low [cough, cough],” he said. “So, I understand the fear.”

“We can see you still have a cough,” Fox News host Ed Henry responded. “What do the doctors say about your own condition moving forward?”

Wucinski then coughed again before grabbing a water bottle out of his daughter’s hand, saying “I need some of that,” taking a sip, and giving it back to her.

“They say I’m fine,” Wucinski said. “I got tested twice, negative both times. The cough is probably just nerves.”

“Fair enough,” Henry’s co-host Sandra Smith said, laughing.

As it turns out, Wucinski was evacuated from the virus epicenter of Wuhan, China, and his father recently died from the disease. Earlier this month, his 3-year-old daughter Annabel was readmitted to the hospital to undergo coronavirus testing for a second time, Fox News previously reported.

Fox News just interviewed a man released from quarantine – he was directly affected when his father-in-law died from the virus in China . He began coughing, took a water bottle from his daughter's mouth & drank from it, handed it back to her and she put it back in her mouth!?! https://t.co/TGmWgiQoVF

— Billie Trainer (@BillieTrainer) February 28, 2020

Fox News later on: THE LIBS LET THIS MAN GO AND WANT HIM TO KILL US ALL BY COUGHING OVER CABLE TV!!!!! https://t.co/kuZVKlQTO9

— Andrew King (@H2Omaker71) February 28, 2020

OMG https://t.co/EeszMXDBBj

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) February 28, 2020

Good news … everyone at Fox News will be coughing and quarantined tonight https://t.co/3xMzllfhIJ

— HowieHedge (@howardlindzon) February 28, 2020

Why is he coughing and then sharing the water with his daughter??? Jesus.
It's the end times and I just gotta laugh at it… smh Fox News brought Patient Zero to the studio https://t.co/Tr92eeKl1i

— Sailor Moon Krystle (@KrystleEmerald) February 28, 2020

If you watched the video of that dad being interviewed on Fox News coughing on then drinking from the same water bottle as his child… #coronavirus https://t.co/EUSwewisQD https://t.co/f8agnFvumS

— Yonathan Seleshi (@yonathanseleshi) February 28, 2020

He's visibly sick, coughing all over his kid, but is confident that he is clear because a test that is falsely negative 60 percent of the time, looking for a virus that plays hide and seek, told him he was fine.

Good news fox. https://t.co/AEyl2VZALX

— Lewis Carroll's Acid Trip (@kvghopper) February 28, 2020

The post Fox News Interviews Man Who Went Through Coronavirus Quarantine, And He Can’t Stop Coughing: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

On Thursday, State District Judge Jessie LeBlanc of Louisiana signed and sent letters of resignation. This comes after calls from the community for her resignation due to a slew of scandals rocked the Louisiana judge, and led to calls from numerous attorneys as well as Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards for her to step down.

The first scandal came out in January that Judge LeBlanc had had an affair with Assumption Parish Chief Deputy Bruce Prejean that is now over. This led to an announcement that a review of around 600 cases the judge and chief deputy were connected to would begin. At the time, Leblanc denied everything, but subsequently admitted to the affair. Prejean was demoted.

Then, Assumption Parish Sheriff Leland Falcon released text messages, reported on by WBRZ, between Judge LeBlanc and Chief Deputy Prejean, in December of 2018 when their relationship apparently soured. According to reports, while the two remained friends after their affair ended in 2016, LeBlanc seems to have received an “anonymous package” in December of 2018 with information that ended her and Prejean’s friendship.

In the angry text messages, LeBlanc goes on racist rants, dropping N-bombs while calling Assumption Deputy Erick Taylor “thug N***** Erick.” She also accuses Prejean of cheating on her with the law clerk—who is African American—of another judge, saying “At least I was never unfaithful to you with anyone — much less a N*****.” As a result of these new revelations, District Attorney Ricky Babin told WBRZ that his office would be informing “every single defendant,” who had appeared before LeBlanc since 2012.

LeBlanc then tried to say that these text messages were doctored. According to AP, the former Judge now admits to having written those texts: “I profusely apologize for that. I should have never said it.”

According to AP, LeBlanc’s resignation was filled with the apology-non-apology we have come to expect from self-absorbed racists, writing “My decision is one borne out of prayer and fully cognizant of what this ordeal has done to my family. I thank God for them every day. I believe, however, as much as I wish to fight the irresponsible and vicious attacks, it is in my family’s best interests and that of my 23rd JDC community, to stop the madness. We do not need another Judge being endlessly attacked and vilified at the expense of the integrity of our system of justice.”

We do not need racist judges. That’s the thing we do not need. We live in a racist country with a long racist history. As a result, the systems of justice in our country are rife with racism and racists. And Louisiana’s history of racism is very deep. This isn’t the first Louisiana judge outed by their own mouth for being racist. This will likely not be the last. It is, however, an important reminder that judges are people, and people are biased to various degrees in various ways. And most of our own biases and flaws come from the world around us.

LeBlanc oversaw cases from Ascension, Assumption, and St. James parishes. These parishes, according to census data, include around 165,000 people, over 25% of which are African American.

The co-leader of Scotland’s Green Party (also known as the Scottish Greens) has called upon the country’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to use an unexplained wealth order (UWO) to investigate Donald Trump’s private business activities in the country. The Scotsman reports that Patrick Harvie believes Trump’s multimillion dollar acquisition of lands in Scotland is suspicious enough to warrant the use of an UWO, telling news outlets that “Trump is a politically exposed person in terms of the law, and there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that he, or people he is connected with, have been involved in serious crime. Some of them have pleaded guilty.”

First Minister Sturgeon told The Scotsman that while she was not a supporter of Trump, she felt any criminal activity he may or may not be involved in should be handled by the Scottish police, not the country’s legislative body. Harvie disagrees, saying that it is foreign business interests like Donald Trump’s company that the law was created for.

The unexplained wealth order was introduced in 2018, as a power that would force suspected corrupt foreign officials or their families to disclose the “source for their riches,” allowing Scottish authorities to seize those properties if a court finds they have committed crimes.

The BBC reports that the Greens’ Harvie is citing evidence, brought up during the investigations into Trump’s organization and its ties to Russia, where suggestions were made that the golf courses Trump bought up between 2012 and 2014 “may have been used for money laundering.”

Trump and his family have denied these allegations in the past, and Eric Trump told the BBC that the claims had “no basis in fact.” Of course, this could be true, but Harvie and others would like to use their government’s autonomous right to execute its own legal decisions. On Thursday, speaking in front of the Scottish Parliament, Harvie explained that there are big questions as to where the orange white supremacist maybe-billionaire got all of the money he used to buy everything he bought in Scotland.

"Trump's known sources of income don't explain where the money came from for these huge cash transactions. There are reasonable grounds for suspecting that his lawfully obtained income was insufficient." Harvie also pointed out that Trump’s golf courses aren’t making any money. in fact, they are making the opposite of money.

According to Sturgeon’s spokesperson, a decision on whether or not to apply for an unexplained wealth order is made by the Civil Recovery Unit, which in turn reports to the Lord Advocate. A similar application was asked for and passed on to the Lord Advocate last year on behalf of people who campaigned for it.

The hard fact of the matter is that Scotland, like many western countries, is a bit at the mercy of Trump and the United States, as our business is so very important to them. The Scottish government has even tried to figure out ways to game this corrupt administration in to giving Scotland business by pointing out to U.S. military, in brochures for their airports, that Trump’s resorts are nearby.

This guy is a financial analyst, so maybe he knows something we don’t. But if things get as bad as he fears, wouldn’t people just loot his supplies? Then again, it is Texas, so it’s possible he has plenty of guns, too.

CBSDFW.com reports: Jesse Colombo doesn’t even like Spam, but it has the long shelf life he’s looking for. “What you’re seeing right here is about a year and a half’s worth,” Colombo said. He has six cases of it in his living room along with a dozen 20 pound bags of rice, large bags of uncooked beans, canned ham and other non-perishable foods. “Easily tens of thousands of dollars. It’s basically an insurance policy against chaos,” he said. The financial analyst from Irving calls himself a survivalist. He’s been that way since the 2008 financial collapse. “My immediate concern is not so much getting coronavirus, it’s more so economic collapse is caused by the coronavirus outbreak,” he said.

Watch the report below.

The post Texas Man Stockpiles 18 Months Worth of Food to Prepare for Coronavirus: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Remember Rep. John Ratcliffe, the conspiracy theory-spewing lackey that Donald Trump wanted to install as Director of National Intelligence? Except he couldn't because Ratcliffe's entire resume for the job was a lie? So Trump had to withdraw the offer? He’s back. Because nothing will quell fears of Trump gutting the entire national security team in order to install his own bootlickers like resurrecting this guy.

Trump tweeted last August that Ratcliffe was out of the running, so it's only appropriate that he now tweets that Ratcliffe is, once again, his nominee. "Would have completed process earlier, but John wanted to wait until after IG Report was finished," Trump says. "John is an outstanding man of great talent!" Yeah, his nomination was tanked last time because REPUBLICANS were opposed to him, including Richard Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and would be the one to shepherd the nomination. He warned Trump last time around not to tap Ratcliffe for the job because he was so blindingly partisan. But that all happened a whole six months ago; you couldn't really expect Trump to remember that far back.

In blocking Trump's "Remain in Mexico" policy, the court exposes a terrible truth.

Nearly all candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have made clear that they want to take big steps—a few of them really big steps—to deal with climate change. But while they’re coming up with various ideas for confronting the crisis, Donald Trump apparently wants to be master of ceremonies on a prime-time television program that challenges the scientific consensus regarding Earth’s changing climate. 

That, at least, is what climate science denier William Happer told reporter Scott Waldman of Climatewire Thursday. Happer was briefly one of Trump’s advisers last year, serving on the National Security Council. He believes that the more, the better when it comes to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and has said that scientific studies have treated CO2 the way Nazi propaganda talked about Jews. That’s not an exaggeration. In a 2014 interview, Happer said: “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.” He hasn’t yet compared the Green New Deal to the Holocaust. Trump, Happer said, also wants to go ahead with the hostile review of existing climate science that Happer wanted to carry out when he was first appointed White House adviser last February. But neither the television program nor the hostile review will happen this year, according to Happer, because Trump and his campaign advisers think they might hurt his chances for reelection. 

On a panel at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., this week, Happer criticized suburban Republican women who polls have shown are more concerned about climate change than rank-and-file Republicans overall, the vast majority of whom place climate as a low, if not the lowest priority for the federal government to be dealing with. 

Said Happer, "Let me say a little about Republican women and housewives: They've been brainwashed. [...] What are they supposed to believe? They've got Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore and other great scientists explaining this and Bill Nye the Science Guy, well, what else do you expect them to think, and so we've done this to ourselves." 

What else but this kind of condescension should be expected from this emeritus Princeton physics professor who was once chair of the George C. Marshall Institute, a right-wing disinformation outfit that disputes the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists not by exposing errors in their studies but by inventing lies and spreading smears.

Happer, who founded the CO2 Coalition to promote more fossil fuel consumption, was brought aboard by Trump, who calls climate change a “hoax,” with the idea that the professor would demolish the findings of the intelligence community that the climate crisis negatively affects national security, something the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and all the military service branches have been saying for years. 

The good news, if Happer is correct, is that all we must do to avoid having to watch Trump’s Climate Apprentice show next February is fire him this November. 

A bill that would effectively decriminalize polygamy in Utah cleared a key hurdle on Wednesday, when it was overwhelmingly approved by the state’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

Currently, polygamy is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Under the bill, it would become a minor infraction similar to a traffic ticket, punishable by a fine of up to $750 and community service.

The goal of the bill is to encourage victims of abuse in polygamous marriages to come forward without fear of prosecution. But not surprisingly, some right-wingers claim the measure is a direct result of the legalization of same-sex marriage — just as Chief Justice John Roberts predicted in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Makes perfect sense. Because Lawrence. Because Windsor. Because Obergefell. Scalia (and others) warned this would happen, but were denounced as alarmists. The Law of Merited Impossibility: “It’ll never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” https://t.co/zExhnnXLjA

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) February 13, 2020

“[F]rom the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world,” Roberts wrote.

Over at the Federalist, columnist David Marcus responded to the Utah bill with an article titled, “Gay Marriage Was Always Leading to Polygamy.”

“Just like the fallacious claims that tearing down Confederate monuments would not lead to attacks on George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the plain logic of gay marriage always pointed in the direction of polygamy,” Marcus wrote. “The reason polygamy became inevitable is that once untethered from the concept of man and wife, there is simply no basis for constraining marriage to two people.

If only there had been some of us sounding the alarm on the slippery slope…

Oh wait. https://t.co/aJnxsoVkWv

— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) February 19, 2020

“The slippery slopes are real,” he added. “They are not fabricated conspiracy theories spun by bigoted conservatives; they are the obvious fallout of decisions we make as a society and nation.”

Also at the Federalist, Katy Faust and Stacy Manning penned a piece titled, “Push To Legalize Polygamy Uses Same Arguments As Push For Same-Sex Marriage.”

“The pro-gay and pro-poly scripts are one and the same because both view marriage as adult-centric,” they wrote. “That’s because when marriage is simply a vehicle for adult fulfillment, as per the Obergefell ruling [legalizing gay marriage nationwide], marriage morphs into whatever assemblage makes adults happy.”

Once traditional Biblical marriage is redefined, there is no definition, and polygamy, polyamory and anything else becomes legitimate. Proponents of gay marriage denied it but it was inevitable. https://t.co/gBfe6r7D6E

— Todd Hudnall (@Todd_Hudnall) February 20, 2020

Meanwhile, at LifeSite News, Jonathon Van Maren invoked the slowly boiled frog fable.

“A few years ago, the best way to trigger an advocate for redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would be to note that once the gender of those involved in the marriage became arbitrary, there really was no reason, strictly speaking, that the number of partners involved should be limited, either,” Van Maren wrote. “It was ludicrous to claim that those who wished to redefine an institution that was thousands of years old would not stop with one radical change, they said, and anyone who said otherwise was simply a raging homophobe.

“Those were the good old days,” he added. “Since then, major newspapers and other media outlets have persistently produced glowing stories on all sorts of sexual arrangements, with headlines asking (speculatively, of course) whether or not “polyamory” might just be the next big thing. Never mind that there wasn’t going to be a big next thing—once the sexual revolutionaries achieve one objective, they move seamlessly on to the next one, totally ignoring their previous outrage at being accused of the very thing they are now doing. Outrage is a convenient tactic. Sincerity is not.”

As I’ve often said, once the culture supported Gay “Marriage,” this will open to door to where ultimately anything goes. Now it’s true that some people in the Bible committed polygamy, but the negative consequences are clearly shown to us. And we know…https://t.co/GBpnjbir2k

— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) February 18, 2020

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Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Will more tax cuts do anything to help with a possible pandemic or to reassure the markets that everything is okay? Absolutely not. But if impeached president Donald Trump thinks that maybe they'll keep his approval numbers from tanking, then the White House is going to float it. That's what the Washington Post is hearing from "five people with knowledge of the planning." Because it's all about the economy and his reelection for Trump. The lifesaving part simply seems not to have occurred to him.

In addition to "a targeted tax cut," the sources told the Post the White House team is looking at pushing the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, something the Fed has already said it is considering. This is what happens when the global pandemic response team includes Larry Kudlow, who says "I just don't think anybody ought to panic right now. We're going to stay the course on our policies." Which is pretty much the best reason for rational people to panic, considering policy for Trump means tax cuts. Oh, and budget cuts, including to the entire public health infrastructure which seems to continue to be the course the White House intends to stay.

This just reinforces the general ineptitude of the Trump team, which is woefully inadequate to begin with. The White House is sidelining the actual experts and trotting out the likes of Mick Mulvaney to downplay the threat. That's with Trump in the background doing his raging elephant routine. It was Trump's rage at how the crisis was being handled, CNN reports, that led to the absolute debacle of his incoherent press conference on Wednesday.

That was organized on the fly, CNN reports, and with no guidance from Trump. "By 4:30 pm, the jet-lagged President had only just come down to the Oval Office from the residence, and to the assembled officials who were there, it was still unclear what he intended to say at the news conference, which was just two hours away, said one senior Republican who was in the White House." That included who was going to lead up the response team, with Trump deciding on Pence "shortly before the news conference" which "came as a shock to [Health Secretary Alex] Azar, according to a senior Republican official."

That Trump is entirely focused on the economic impact and the stock market may not be entirely his fault, except that the people who he chooses to surround himself with have been trying "to impress upon him the seriousness of the coronavirus situation, warning him of the threat to the global economy and—by proxy—his reelection prospects, according to people familiar with the conversations." Meanwhile, the agency officials actually responsible for trying to save lives complain of chaos and indecision. That means scattered and cursory information sharing and "a breakdown in communication that has led to bursts of outrage by the President, who has complained he's been kept out of the loop on key decisions regarding potentially infected Americans returning to the US."

In other words, the situation is your worst nightmare of what a global pandemic would look like with Trump as president.  

Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s choice to head up the administration’s coronavirus response, has what you might call the reverse of public health expertise, but he could buckle down, work hard, and learn, right? Sure he could—but of course that’s not what Pence is doing.

On Thursday, Pence spoke at CPAC (where he was interrupted by a Trump impersonator). And on Friday, Pence is heading to Florida for a high-dollar fundraiser.

Pence will be in Longboat Key to raise money for the National Republican Congressional Committee. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $2,500 just to get in the door. It’s $5,000 for a picture with Pence and $25,000 for dinner.

So he’s not exactly studying up on public health and the best responses to a virus outbreak. On the other hand, Pence’s real role in the Trump administration’s coronavirus response appears to be throttling information, with actual government health experts ordered to go to Pence for permission to make public statements. And blocking information from the public is something Pence can do from Florida or anywhere else.

Meanwhile, coronavirus is spreading outside of China, and the U.S. has barely been testing for the disease, so we don’t even know if the 60 cases—not 15, as Trump has repeatedly insisted—confirmed so far in this country are anywhere close to an accurate reflection of the situation. And on Thursday Trump showed his concern and dedication to public health by … hanging out with Diamond and Silk and the D-list stars of a play about Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

African American supporters lay their hands on President Trump as they pray for him at the conclusion of a news conference and meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Thursday. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The president didn’t appreciate the reality check.

President Donald Trump lashed out on Friday at the network that normally covers him so favorably over a new national poll that shows him losing hypothetical head-to-head popular vote matchups against all six of the top Democratic presidential candidates.

“Worst Polls, just like in 2016 when they were so far off the mark, are the @FoxNews Polls,” Trump tweeted on Friday morning.

That tweet came 37 minutes after Fox News displayed a graphic on the air highlighting the results of a new network poll that shows Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Mike Bloomberg beating him handily, with Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar leading him by spreads that are within the margin of error.

Fox News

As is the case with most everything Fox News broadcasts, Trump was apparently watching. And he apparently didn’t appreciate the reminder about it not in fact being the case that a majority of the country loves him.

His attack on Fox News serves as a reminder that despite a rough-and-tumble and still-uncertain Democratic primary, he’s eminently beatable in November.

While it’s obviously possible for Trump to repeat what he did in 2016 and win the election even if he loses the popular vote, there’s almost no chance of him losing the popular vote by a deficit of this magnitude against Biden, Sanders, or Bloomberg and still prevailing in the Electoral College. (Some other polls have been more favorable to Trump’s odds.)

And considering the poll was conducted during the early part of a week that saw a historic stock market slide amid concerns about the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s capacity for dealing with it, there’s reason to believe the president’s standing isn’t improving anytime soon. Of course, we’re still months from the general election, and it’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton also had a healthy lead over Trump at this point in the 2016 election cycle.

Still, the poll is mostly bad news for Trump. But instead of doing some self-reflection, he’s doing what he’s in the habit of doing and attacking the messenger.

Despite what Trump would have you believe, Fox News polls are reliable

While Fox News’s on-air programming is known for its occasionally absurd pro-Trump spin, its polling is as reputable as it gets. Trump, however, hasn’t been shy about indicating that he thinks the network should be rigging polls to make him look better.

Trump’s suggestion that Fox News polling shouldn’t be taken seriously because they were off in 2016 is a mistaken one. The network’s final 2016 poll found Hillary Clinton leading Trump by a 4-point spread (48 percent to 44 percent) that was quite close to Clinton’s ultimately margin of victory in the popular vote (48 percent to 46 percent). This election cycle, Fox News has consistently found Trump trailing the top candidates vying for the Democratic nomination.

Who that nominee will be remains an open question. Fox News’s new poll is its first this election cycle that shows Biden slipping out of the national frontrunner spot, with Sanders taking the lead.

Fox News

While the poll shows Trump lagging behind each of the top Democratic candidates, it also shows that voters believe Trump will win a second term. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they think Trump will be reelected — a 12 percent increase from last October.

But what voters think will happen is less important than how they plan to vote. And while Trump may not want to believe it — especially coming as it does from a network from which he expects blind loyalty — the reality is that Fox News finds that a majority of registered voters (52 percent) are already saying they’ve either definitely (45 percent) or probably (7 percent) made up their minds to vote for someone else.

---

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Mike Pence at National Defense University at Fort McNair on October 23, 2018, in Washington, DC. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

Nothing good.

In 2011, a Congress member from Indiana helped pass federal legislation to strip funding from Planned Parenthood.

Two years later, the last Planned Parenthood affiliate in Scott County, Indiana, closed its doors because of budget cuts. It was also the last HIV testing center in the county. By 2015, an HIV outbreak was brewing in the state. At the peak of the outbreak, 20 new cases were being diagnosed per week, with a total of nearly 200 cases eventually reported, according to HuffPost.

But that Congress member, who became Indiana’s governor, didn’t want to authorize a needle-exchange program to stop the spread of the virus.

“I don’t believe effective anti-drug policy involves handing out drug paraphernalia,” he said.

That Indiana governor was, of course, Mike Pence. Now he’s the vice president, and on Wednesday, President Trump put him in charge of fighting coronavirus in the US.

“He’s got a certain talent for this,” Trump said.

But others say the opposite is true. In Indiana, cuts to Planned Parenthood meant that “when the state experienced an HIV outbreak, they were unprepared to respond to it,” Mary Alice Carter, a senior adviser at Equity Forward, a reproductive-health watchdog group, told Vox. Pence’s role in cutting Planned Parenthood funding showed a “short-sightedness” that makes Trump’s decision to put him in charge of coronavirus response concerning, Carter said. (The White House has not responded to a request for comment from Vox on the selection of Pence for the position.)

Moreover, Pence and his history are part of a bigger problem in the Trump administration, Carter and others say. In general, the administration has sought to restrict funding to Planned Parenthood and other groups, reproductive health advocates say, without regard to the public health implications. The administration’s policies have already made it harder for low-income Americans to get screening for conditions like breast and cervical cancer. And some fear that, especially with Pence in charge, the administration could put politics over science when it comes to coronavirus response too.

“The ongoing concern is whether you let science and medicine lead an effort or whether you let ideology run your policy,” Carter said.

Pence was among the first Republicans to advocate cutting funds to Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood has long been a target for anti-abortion groups because some of its affiliates offer the procedure, but for years, it has also functioned as a safety-net health care provider for millions of Americans, offering STI testing, cervical cancer screening, and other services at low or no cost. In order to do this, the group has received public funding from a number of state and federal sources.

Cutting that funding has been a Republican priority for years. The Hyde Amendment already bans federal funding for nearly all abortions, but for many years, Planned Parenthood was still able to use federal funds for other health services. Getting rid of that funding, abortion opponents argued, would indirectly make it harder for the group to perform abortions.

Pence was essentially the architect of this strategy, as Sarah Kliff reported at Vox in 2016. In Congress, he proposed bills to cut funding to the group repeatedly beginning in 2007, and one finally passed the House in 2011.

“If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions,” Pence told Kliff. “As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.”

The 2011 legislation did not make it through the Senate. But states also joined in the effort, with Indiana chief among them. In 2005, Planned Parenthood got $3.3 million from the state of Indiana; in 2014, it got just $1.9 million, according to Indy100.

Those cuts started before Pence became governor, but they continued under his administration. Indeed, during his governorship, overall funding for public health in the state decreased, Beth Meyerson, co-director of the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention at the Indiana University School of Public Health, told Vox.

In 2013, Pence’s first year as governor, the only Planned Parenthood in Scott County closed, leaving 24,000 people without an HIV testing center.

By 2015, health officials were seeing HIV infections linked to intravenous drug use in Scott County, Erin Schumaker reported at HuffPost: “Scott County residents were sharing needles to inject their opioids, and nobody was getting tested.”

Public health experts called for a needle-exchange program to make sure people got clean needles, but Pence refused, Meryl Kornfield reports at the Washington Post. He said he would veto any bill for such a program.

Finally, over two months after the HIV outbreak was reported, Pence said he would pray on the issue, according to the New York Times. Two days later, he issued an executive order for syringes to be distributed in Scott County.

The distribution helped stop the epidemic, according to the Times. But Pence didn’t actually allocate new money for the program, or for fighting the epidemic generally, forcing state officials to cut other health programs, Meyerson said: “overall, his governorship showed that he did not commit to an adequately funded public health infrastructure.”

Then, in 2016, Pence was elected vice president. And the effort to cut funding to Planned Parenthood that he had championed for nearly a decade became a priority for the Trump administration.

Last year, the administration issued a rule barring Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform or refer for abortions from getting federal funding through Title X, a program aimed at providing family planning services to low-income Americans. As a result, nearly 1,000 health centers around the country have lost funding, making it harder for many Americans to get necessary services like cancer screening or HIV tests.

The move was doubly concerning because for many people, Title-X-funded clinics “are really the first line of defense in public health,” Carter said. For many low-income patients, their health-care provider at such a clinic may be the only provider they see all year.

“You may go in for birth control and come out knowing you need to get a flu shot,” Carter said, and family planning clinics can also help patients sign up for Medicaid and other services.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood has played a crucial role in previous public health crises, doing outreach around prevention of the Zika virus and offering water filters in Michigan during the Flint water crisis.

The Trump administration’s record on public health raises concerns about its handling of coronavirus

Today, the Trump administration is tasked with responding to coronavirus, with Pence, one of Planned Parenthood’s most long-standing opponents, at the head of that effort. It’s not clear yet how the group will be involved, if at all, in fighting coronavirus. But its leadership has already expressed concern over the selection of Pence to lead the government’s response.

“Pence has long been obsessed with defunding Planned Parenthood, even when Planned Parenthood closures in the state affected one of Indiana’s worst public health crises,” said Jacqueline Ayers, vice president of government relations and public policy at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, in a statement on Thursday. “There’s no evidence he has learned any lessons since then.”

Carter also noted the administration’s attitude to Planned Parenthood raises questions about how it will respond to coronavirus. For example, she asked, would it ship a virus testing kit to a Planned Parenthood facility?

More broadly, the administration and its officials have a record of disregarding medical evidence or the advice of experts, Carter and others say. Pence, for example, went against the guidance of public health officials when he opposed a needle-exchange program. (And in 2000, he claimed in an op-ed that “smoking does not kill.”) Later, when the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups asked the Trump administration not to bar Planned Parenthood and other groups from getting Title X funds, arguing that the move would harm public health, the administration did it anyway.

The issue goes beyond Planned Parenthood. In 2017, the Trump administration reinstated and expanded the “global gag rule,” which bars health care providers abroad that receive US government aid from providing, referring for, or discussing abortion.

Experts have long said the rule, enacted by previous Republican presidents but broadened by Trump to apply restrictions to a larger share of government funds, would not reduce abortions but would instead jeopardize providers’ ability to offer cancer screenings, contraception, and prenatal care. Indeed, a 2019 study found that access to HIV testing and screening for breast and cervical cancers, among other services, had been reduced across several countries as a result of the rule.

Also in 2017, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS resigned in protest, with one writing in Newsweek that “the Trump administration has no strategy to address the ongoing H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, seeks zero input from experts to formulate H.I.V. policy, and — most concerning — pushes legislation that will harm people living with H.I.V. and halt or reverse important gains made in the fight against this disease.”

Then, in 2019, the Trump administration cut funding for fetal-tissue research, despite long-standing arguments by scientific and medical experts that such research is crucial for developing vaccines and treatments for diseases. Research into AIDS and other conditions has already suffered as a result, Carter said.

The failure to listen to experts in the past raises questions about the administration’s coronavirus response today, Carter said. For example, “are we going to see immigration policies put in place, or travel restrictions put in place, that are scientifically based or based on race or country of origin?”

Moreover, the research on coronavirus is constantly evolving, and Americans need someone in charge of the response who can sift through it with a focus on data, not ideology, Meyerson said.

“We need a strong, clear, transparent, public health evidence-based communicator who will coordinate among agencies and who will manage upward in our current draconian administration,” she explained. When it comes to Pence, “there’s no evidence that he will handle that job and do it in the way the American people need.”

Palestinian paramedics push a youth, who was injured during clashes near the border with Israel, as he lies on a gurney into a hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on July 20, 2018. | Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli forces have a pattern of not compensating Palestinian journalists they injure.

A Palestinian journalist shot in the leg by Israeli forces will receive no compensation for the injury, continuing a worrying trend of the Jewish state’s military facing no consequences for harming Palestinian reporters.

Freelance photographer and journalist Ahmad Tal’at was covering a protest in the West Bank in 2015 when he was shot in the leg — by, he claimed, an unknown member of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

972 Mag reports that, according to a lawsuit filed on his behalf, Tal’at at the time was wearing a vest with “PRESS” printed on it as well as a helmet, and was carrying three large professional cameras, which he said made him easily recognizable as reporter. He also claimed he was shot while standing on the side of the road, accompanied by other journalists.

The IDF had a different story. Its lawyers said Tal’at’s lawsuit was merely “another in a series of cases in which those who were among the rioters and those riling up the crowd to riot dare to file a lawsuit as if they are the victims,” according to 972 Mag.

IDF lawyers argued that Tal’at’s injury occurred after the protest had ended, and “that even if Tal’at was wounded that day, ‘it was in the context of attacks by the rioters that endangered the security forces there,’” 972 Mag reports.

The judge hearing the case at a top Israeli court sided with the IDF, ruling that Tal’at would not receive compensation for his injures. The reason, per the judge, is that he was shot during an “act of war,” and thus Israel is exempt from any liability. The IDF, therefore, doesn’t have to pay Tal’at for any damages. Tal’at was seeking 40,000 Israeli shekels (about $11,600) in recompense.

At first, this could seem like an isolated case. The problem is that Tal’at is the latest in a long line of Palestinian reporters that Israeli security forces have harmed or killed but failed to compensate. Security forces also rarely, if ever, face legal consequences for their actions.

Even more troubling, there’s no sign that this trend will end anytime soon.

Israel’s abuse of journalists is nothing new

Palestinian journalists frequently report abuse by Israeli security forces.

In April 2018, Ahmed Abu Hussein was shot in the abdomen while covering Gaza border protests, in which demonstrators demanded the right to return to their ancestral homes in Israel. Hussein died from his wounds two weeks later.

A day later, Yaser Murtaja was fatally shot in the abdomen by Israeli snipers while covering the same protest. He, like Tal’at, was wearing a vest marked clearly marked with “PRESS.” The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in Gaza said five more Palestinian journalists covering the event were wounded.

In November 2019, Muath Amarneh was blinded in one eye after Israeli Border Police opened fire to disperse protesters at a demonstration near the West Bank city of Hebron. Other journalists at the scene said Amarneh was hit by a bullet that ricocheted off a demonstrator. Again, Amarneh wore a clearly marked “PRESS” vest.

Two months later, Israeli troops fractured Abdul Mohsen Shalaldeh’s skull while he reported on demonstrations against President Donald Trump’s Israel-Palestine peace plan. He feels he was targeted “as a clear message to journalists that they had to leave the field,” he told AlAraby.

Clearly, there is a sustained pattern. But if Tal’at’s case is any indication, there is little hope for change or recourse.

“The ruling against Tal’at is a blow to the hopes for redress of Palestinian journalists who were injured or killed because it gives full impunity to members of the IDF ... whether or not their actions are in line with the IDF’s own regulations,” Ignacio Miguel Delgado Culebras, the Middle East and North Africa representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me.

He also noted that he’s unaware of any cases in which Palestinian journalists received compensation for their injuries. What’s more, in many of these cases, the IDF has failed to employ nonlethal methods to deal with demonstrators while ensuring the safety of journalists. In fact, Culebras said the IDF routinely delays any investigations into its misconduct.

Which means it’s more likely than not that the IDF will continue this behavior — and Palestinian reporters will continue to suffer.

Baldur's Gate 3 has been officially revealed this week at PAX East in Boston by developer Larian Studios. The sequel is almost 20 years in the making, with the last new BG game released in 2001 by Bioware. 

Announced only on PC and coming to Early Access this year, Baldur's Gate 3 looks like it's coming along nicely. The game will feature four player online co-op when released. Check below for the intro video, a recap of features, the full stream recap and finally two dozen screenshots. 

• Online multiplayer for up to four players allows you to combine your forces in combat and split your party to follow your own quests and agendas. Devise the perfect plan together… or introduce an element of chaos when your friends least expect it.

• Origin characters offer a hand-crafted experience, each with their own unique traits, agenda, and outlook on the world. Their stories intersect with the wider narrative, and your choices will determine whether those stories end in redemption, salvation, domination or other outcomes.

• Evolved turn-based combat based on the D&D 5E ruleset. Team-based initiative, advantage and disadvantage, and roll modifiers join combat cameras, expanded environmental interactions, and a new fluidity in combat that rewards strategy and foresight.

• Define the future of the Forgotten Realms through your choices and the roll of the dice. No matter who you play or what you roll, the world and its inhabitants will react to your story.

• Player-initiated turn-based mode allows you to pause the world around you at any time even outside of combat. See an opportunity for a tactical advantage before combat begins? Want to pull off a heist with pin-point precision? Need to escape a fiendish trap? Split your party, prepare ambushes, sneak in the darkness — and create your own luck!

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The Trump administration is siding with an anti-gay photographer in Kentucky who has compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and a “zombie-themed wedding” — but who would gladly participate in a ceremony between a homosexual man and a woman.

Chelsey Nelson filed a lawsuit last year challenging Louisville’s LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinance, saying the law puts her at risk of “limitless damages” if she even mentions her anti-gay views on her website. Although Nelson has not been asked to photograph a same-sex wedding, she apparently brought the suit out of an abundance of caution, as a “pre-enforcement challenge.” She is represented by — you guessed it — the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBT hate group.

NBC News reports: The DOJ’s “statement of interest,” filed this week in federal court, asserts that the photographer, Chelsey Nelson, is likely to succeed in her claim, because requiring her to photograph a “ceremony that violates her sincerely held religious beliefs” — in Nelson’s case, a same-sex wedding — “invades her First Amendment rights.” Nelson sued Louisville officials in November, arguing that the city’s ordinance violates her First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of religion. According to the lawsuit, her Christian views, which include the belief that “God created marriage to be an exclusive covenant between one man and one woman,” shape “every aspect of her life,” including “her business, her art, and her creativity.” “Chelsey would decline any request for wedding celebration services or boutique editing services for a same-sex wedding, polygamous wedding, or an open marriage wedding because creating artwork promoting these events would violate Chelsey’s religious and artistic beliefs,” the suit explains. … Nelson has not, according to court records, been forced to photograph a same-sex wedding. But while she is opposed to providing her services to two brides or two grooms, her lawsuit states that she would “happily work with and provide her wedding celebration services for a wedding between a homosexual man and a woman.”

Nelson defended her position in an op-ed published by USA Today in November.

“This means I wouldn’t be the best person to photograph every wedding,” Nelson wrote. “Of course, I serve everyone regardless of who they are. I just don’t photograph every wedding requested of me. For example, I can’t celebrate a wedding that devalues how seriously I take marriage — like a heavily themed Halloween or zombie-themed wedding.

“Yet, as I began expanding my business, I realized a Louisville, Kentucky, law threatens me with damages if I stay true to my beliefs about marriage,” she added. “Actually, the law won’t even let me explain some of my religious beliefs about marriage, whether on my studio’s website, social media or directly to couples who may want to work with me.”

The City of Louisville says Nelson has no cause to challenge the ordinance, and is seeking dismissal of her lawsuit. The ACLU filed a brief in support of the city.

“At its core, Nelson Photography’s objection is not to a particular message requested by any particular customer, but to providing a service to an entire class of customers who are not heterosexual,” the ACLU brief said. “Nelson Photography must know who a prospective customer is before deciding whether it will refuse to serve that person. That is identity-based discrimination, not an objection to the provision of a specific product.”

The post Trump Administration Sides with Anti-Gay Photographer Who Likens Same-Sex Marriage to Polygamy appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg apologized Thursday for calling transgender people “it” and “men in dresses.”

Bloomberg’s mea culpa for his disgusting remarks from 2016 and last year came during a private call with trans leaders, according to NewNowNext.

Queer supporters of Mike Bloomberg, how do you explain this to our transgender family and friends? Because they deserve a Democratic nominee that doesn’t refer to them as “it.” pic.twitter.com/HNwuxDZzhf

— H. Alan Scott (@HAlanScott) February 19, 2020

“It was a poor attempt to describe how some who oppose transgender equality think about this issue — and those words do not reflect my unwavering support for equality for transgender Americans,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “As mayor, I signed a sweeping transgender civil rights bill and, as president, will promote policies that advance equality for transgender Americans who have been attacked by the Trump administration over the past three years.”

Here’ Gov. Cuomo’s comments about Bloomberg and his role in same-sex marriage. Republicans today downplayed his role in the vote, though Bloomberg did meet with them at the time pic.twitter.com/UkUmcVdckG

— Nick Reisman (@NickReisman) February 27, 2020

In related news, Gov. Andrew Cuomo blasted Bloomberg on Thursday after the former New York City mayor took credit for bringing marriage equality to the Empire State.

“I went up to Albany, and I went to the Republicans, and I sat down with a bunch of them, and I convinced the Republicans — even though I was a very liberal New York City mayor — I convinced them to vote for gay marriage,” Bloomberg said during a CNN Town Hall on Wednesday.

During a news conference Thursday, Cuomo called Bloomberg’s claim “demonstrably false.”

“Mike Bloomberg had nothing to do with it,” Cuomo said. “They did it out of conscience. And his million dollars to Dean Skelos — Dean Skelos didn’t even vote for it.”

The post Bloomberg Apologizes for Calling Trans People ‘It,’ Lies About Bringing Marriage Equality to New York: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Just as his White House bid appeared to be sputtering to an ugly end, there are signs of life for Joe Biden still.

And perhaps more than that.

A second-place finish in Nevada, a major endorsement in South Carolina, a strong debate Tuesday and a pair of polls showing him with a staggering lead here have given new hope to his campaign. Money is flowing anew into his war chest, as well as to a super PAC supporting him.

Armed with those data points, the campaign and super PAC are telling donors that Biden — given his strength among African-American voters and momentum kicking in at the right time — is quickly emerging as the alternative to frontrunner Bernie Sanders.

“The debate was really a huge turning point,” said Amanda Loveday, a senior adviser with the PAC and former director of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Donors who had pulled back from Biden, wondering whether Mike Bloomberg would claim the moderate mantle, have started digging into their pockets again, she said. “That got them off their hands.”

And it got rank-and-file voters on their feet. For a campaign that regularly struggles to attract big and energetic crowds, Biden drew something rarely seen at his rally at Coastal Carolina University in Conway on Thursday: a long line of enthusiastic supporters.

On Thursday, Biden announced on social media that his campaign raised $1.2 million from nearly 30,000 donors the day after the debate, in which Biden turned in his strongest performance of the 10 encounters with his rivals.

Why is Biden still polling so well?

Unite the Country, the super PAC backing Biden, would not yet reveal the level of donations coming in but it did purchase digital ads in the six figures.

While that's a meager amount compared to how much rival campaigns are spending, Biden's surrogates are confident that a commanding win on Saturday will yield momentum and money.

“I feel confident that Joe Biden will win here by double digits. And he’s going to do well on Super Tuesday,” said Dick Harpootlian, a key South Carolina organizer for Biden. Harpootlian took it a step further. “Without Bloomberg in this race, he would sweep Super Tuesday and Bernie would be a distant memory.”

Cash-strapped, and with the campaign set to shift to an array of far-flung states, Biden has been more aggressive seeking out earned media. He's made a series of appearances on local and national TV recently, a noticeable shift from when he was the frontrunner and sitting on a bigger war chest.

The newest data point boosting Biden is a Monmouth poll showing he has a 20-point lead over Bernie Sanders in South Carolina, 36 percent to 16 percent. The poll, and others like it in South Carolina, was welcome news for a campaign buffeted by three straight losses in a row in the other early states. Those losses had insiders writing his campaign off for dead and Biden and his surrogates repeatedly insisting that he was in the midst of a comeback after last week’s second-place finish in Nevada.

A national poll from Fox News, however, was almost the inverse in showing Sanders with 31 percent support to Biden’s 18 percent.

But Biden’s campaign said that a big win in South Carolina will change the national polls. His campaign had always planned to use South Carolina as a springboard into the run of Super Tuesday states and beyond to make the case that he does better than any other Democrat with voters of color. But Sanders’s win in Nevada, where he racked up big margins with Latinos, challenged that narrative.

Biden’s campaign had always planned to use South Carolina as a springboard into the run of Super Tuesday states and beyond to make the case that he does better than any other Democrat with voters of color. But Sanders’s win in Nevada, where he racked up big margins with Latinos, challenged that narrative.

One of the architects of Sanders’ Nevada victory, senior adviser Chuck Rocha, said the Biden campaign’s focus on black voters came almost to the exclusion of Latinos. That gave Sanders an opening with Hispanics, who wield major influence in the two biggest states that vote in March, Texas and California. Rocha also said Colorado, with its mix of white progressives and Latinos, is favorable territory for the campaign on Super Tuesday.

“Bernie Sanders’ multi-racial coalition is very real and equips him the best to win the nomination and beat Trump,” Rocha said. “We listened to diverse communities, hired them and invested in them and they delivered.”

One of the biggest threats to Biden could be the existence of the two billionaires in the race, Tom Steyer and Bloomberg.

Steyer has spent huge sums in South Carolina and, though he’s polling a distant third to Biden, may sap away some of the former vice president’s support and thereby help Sanders, media reports and polling indicate. Polling also shows that Bloomberg in Texas has made the race a tie between Sanders and Biden, but without Steyer in the race, Biden would marginally lead in Texas.

“It’s quite an irony: Bernie’s two biggest benefactors are billionaires,” said Biden campaign pollster John Anzalone, pointing out that Sanders has built a campaign around demonizing billionaires.

A new memo from Unite the Country obtained by POLITICO made the pitch that Bloomberg was standing in Biden’s way.

Steve Schale, an adviser to Unite the Country, said the super PAC is focusing heavily on African-American turnout and persuasion in five Super Tuesday states: North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee.

More than 75 percent of the delegates in all of the states that vote in March hail from communities where at least 30 percent of the voters are from communities of color, Schale said.

“The biggest challenge facing Joe Biden and our goal of helping him to a big night on March 3rd isn’t Bernie Sanders, or any of the other candidates who have been on the debate stage” the memo reads. “Rather, his biggest challenge is the work Michael Bloomberg is doing to divide the moderate vote to the benefit of Bernie Sanders. In fact, today, it is fair to argue that the single best thing Bernie Sanders has going into Super Tuesday is Mayor Bloomberg.”

In an interview, Loveday underscored that point.

“A vote for anyone else is a vote for Bernie,” she said. “No one else has the trajectory to be the nominee. It will be Joe Biden or it will be Bernie Sanders.”

Judy Shelton’s nomination to the Federal Reserve isn’t dead yet. In fact, it’s showing new signs of life.

After absorbing a number of body blows at her confirmation hearing over her support for the gold standard and past writings, Shelton picked up the vote of Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.) this week and is on the verge of winning the support of Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), another potential skeptic.

Shelby said his starting point is that he would “like to help the administration.”

“If the committee wants the majority of the committee to support her, I would do it too. She wouldn’t be my No. 1 choice,” Shelby said on Thursday afternoon.

Asked if that meant he would vote for her, he responded cryptically.

“I could. But I haven’t said it yet,” Shelby said. “I never said I’d vote against her. I raised concerns about her and I think those were legitimate concerns, the question of whether she’s a mainstream economist or was she an outlier?”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) is also undecided and Republicans have only a one-seat advantage on the committee. But with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the committee running for president and generally on the road, Shelton could in theory pass through committee with even a Republican “no” vote and still maintain a favorable recommendation.

“I’m not going to give any predictions, but we’re making good progress,” said Senate Banking Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). “There have been some concerns raised and we’re working to address those concerns. And my expectation is that we will.”

That would put her on track for a floor vote after President Donald Trump’s disastrous attempts to nominate Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to the central bank. The White House denied reports that Shelton would be withdrawn several weeks ago. A second Fed nominee, Christopher Waller, is expected to be confirmed much more easily.

A committee vote could come in the next month, according to a Republican aide, although no final decision has been made. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) could also be on the campaign trail during the vote, giving the 53-seat GOP majority even more of a cushion.

That could offer a window of opportunity for Senate Republicans to confirm Shelton, who seems unlikely to get any Democratic votes. Nominees need only a simple majority to be confirmed on the Senate floor, meaning Republicans could lose a couple of their members and still be able to confirm Shelton.

It’s a stark contrast from the scene two weeks ago, when Shelton’s nomination appeared in danger of failing after a rocky hearing in front of the Senate Banking Committee.

“I was not real optimistic early on, but she seems to be picking up some speed,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.), who helps run the Senate floor with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “If she comes out of committee and she gets reported out, we’ll have to try and figure out how to process it on the floor.”

Congress has until March 15 to reauthorize, or not, four provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That was supposed to have happened back in December, but it kicked the can down the road by putting a temporary reauthorization in one of the continuing resolutions passed in the fall to keep the government from shutting down. The intervening weeks have done little to resolve the major issues many members of Congress have with FISA. Let's start with California Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren of the House Judiciary Committee. Frustrated that revisions to the bill were hashed out outside of committee between her chairman, Jerry Nadler, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff without a committee process of revisions and amendments, she insisted that amendments be considered before reauthorization was considered in a Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. That hearing ended up being postponed.

Lofgren wants common-sense civil liberties protections, including a "friend of the court" outside expert to review and critique the government's arguments when it applies to the FISA court for permission to wiretap an American. She would also ban a business records collection program that allows the government to obtain cellphone location and the web-searching and browsing history of targets. "I don't think I am an unreasonable person, but what was advanced, to me, was so pitiful that it is not even worth pursuing," Lofgren told The New York Times Wednesday. "We have the opportunity to reform the system. We should take that opportunity." Nadler agreed to work with her and Schiff on her amendments.

There's another problem in getting this done, though, and that is of course Donald Trump, who persists in the belief that his campaign was unfairly targeted by the FBI using tools under FISA, despite conclusive reports to the contrary. While the Times reported that "the Trump administration's official position is that Congress should extend the expiring laws without any changes—the kind of 'clean extension' that Attorney General William P. Barr urged [Republican] senators to back at a closed-door lunch on Tuesday," Trump was saying otherwise.

On Wednesday, he told his buddy Sen. Rand Paul that he is opposed to a "clean" extension. "FISA warrants should not be issued against Americans," Paul told Politico Thursday. "Americans shouldn't be spied on by a secret court. I think [Trump] agrees completely with that and that's the amendment that I'm going to insist on. I'm not letting anything go easy without a vote on my amendment." Once again, Trump and Paul are making life difficult for Mitch McConnell on this one—he wants that clean extension Barr promised. McConnell and Trump met Thursday, though it's unclear now if their discussion included the FISA problem or was limited to the coronavirus crisis.

Lofgren's amendments are smart and could possibly pull in bipartisan votes in the House and appeal to the libertarian wing of Senate Republicans, including Paul. She's right when she says, "This goes back decades" to the 2001 Patriot Act. "Many times we've had the chairmen, either Republican or Democratic chairmen, saying, 'we have to hold off, otherwise the [House Intelligence Committee] people blow this up.' And as a consequence of that, 20 years in, we haven't reformed it. I'm done with that."

Last week, U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger sent out a memo that included instructions to leaders of the corps around the world to remove “Confederate-related paraphernalia” from its installations. According to Military.com, the instructions were among “several forward-leaning initiatives” outlined in the memo that Berger wants started immediately. 

In a series of tweets, Berger outlined some of the memo’s instructions. Responses on Twitter summed up the majority of Americans’ feelings about Confederate symbols.

i know that some ppl will be mad about this but in fairness we had a whole war some years ago regarding what flag goes where and we decided this one goes in the fucking trash, so. pic.twitter.com/FPRQv3iCfb

— matthew. ðÂ�¦Â�ðÂ�Â�¨ (@iAmTheWarax) February 27, 2020

Earlier in February, Military Times published a survey that found a significant rise from the previous year in the number of troops who had seen “evidence of white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military.” That number included over 50% of enlisted people of color saying they had witnessed racist behavior in the corps. The poll also showed that the majority of troops asked thought that white nationalism was a “greater national security threat than both domestic terrorism with a connection to Islam, as well as immigration.”

Also included in the memo are instructions to top brass to find ways to move more women into combat roles in the Marine Corps. In 2016, the Department of Defense instituted a 12-week maternity leave policy covering active duty personnel. The new memo instructs Marine Corps leaders to look into a proposed one-year parental leave policy. Noted Military.com, Marine Corps spokesman Maj. Craig Thomas said, “The policy does not specifically use the terms 'same-sex couples,' rather it incorporates gender-neutral terms to ensure no Marine who rates parental leave is excluded."

Intuit -- the accounting, tax filing and financial planning software giant behind QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint, confirmed that it plans to acquire Credit Karma -- the fintech startup with more than 100 million registered users, which lets people check their credit scores, shop for credit cards and loans, file taxes and more. "By joining forces with Credit Karma, we can create a personalized financial assistant that will help consumers find the right financial products, put more money in their pockets and provide insights and advice," Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit's chief executive, said in a statement announcing the deal. TechCrunch reports: Intuit said it would pay $7.1 billion for Credit Karma, making this Intuit's biggest-ever acquisition to date, and one of the biggest in the category of privately-held fintech companies. Intuit also announced its quarterly earnings today in which it reported revenue growth of 13% on revenues of $1.7 billion, beating analyst estimates of $1.68 billion. However, it missed analysts' average expectations for earnings per share: it reported non-GAAP EPS of $1, while they were forecasting $1.03. Intuit plans to keep Credit Karma -- which makes more than $1 billion in revenues annually -- as a standalone operation, run by CEO Kenneth Lin, who cofounded the startup with Ryan Graciano and Nichole Mustard. The acquisition is an obvious fit for Intuit, where it will serve two purposes. Intuit can tap Credit Karma's customer base and range of services -- it partners with some 100 financial service providers in its marketplace -- to complement those it already offers, to help upsell those users to Intuit's premium, paid services. And Intuit can use it to grow its wider business by tapping a set of consumers -- typically younger users -- that Credit Karma has possibly been more successful in capturing than Intuit has.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If they spent as much time worrying about Americans' health as about Trump's political fortunes, we'd have less to fear.

Two days after Moscow Mitch McConnell wasted a day in the Senate on partisan politics with extreme anti-abortion bills that had no chance of passing either in the Senate or in the House, he is accusing Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of (checks notes) "political game-playing" over coronavirus.

Enough of this. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as majority leader.

Yes, McConnell is using the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic to attack Democrats—because of course, he is. Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have released their recommendation for funding to combat the potential epidemic and say that "we stand ready to work in a bipartisan fashion in Congress and with the administration to achieve this necessary goal. […] Lives are at stake—this is not the time for name-calling or playing politics."

Unless you're Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If you're McConnell, you say, "Everyone from his fellow Democrats to President Trump have seemed perplexed by the Democratic leader's political game-playing." That game playing he is referring to consists of Democrats insisting that our country’s health infrastructure is adequately funded. "It's not clear to anyone why he's prioritized fighting with the White House over simply letting the appropriators do their work," McConnell continued.

It's not clear how saying "we stand ready to work in a bipartisan fashion in Congress and with the administration" is fighting with the White House, either, but McConnell is not going to let anything like inconvenient truths get in the way of his own toxic partisanship. Not even when lives might be at stake.

For anyone who actually watched Donald Trump's yet-again-bizarre performance in yesterday's supposed COVID-19 press briefing, the takeaways were predictable—but unambiguous. Trump gave approximately zero actual information, other than announcing Mike Pence would be in charge of it all. If anything, and as usual, Trump un-informed the public about the spread of COVID by making bizarrely false claims about the borders and arbitrarily declaring there to be "15" infected patients in the United States, despite the actual known number being, at the time of his speech, at least 60. Everything else was generalities of the usual Trump sort when he has no actual information to convey, and has had no interest in collecting information that should be conveyed.

He bashed critics. He gave false assurances that were contradicted by the public health officials he introduced. He fidgeted in the background like a bored child as others talked. But mostly, when faced with a public health crisis that could swiftly reach pandemic proportions and kill millions in worst-case scenarios, he said nothing.

At Press Watch, Dan Froomkin runs down the list of big media responses to Wednesday's baffling Donald Trump presser about the emerging COVID-19 pandemic.

The problem, as Froomkin sees it: The press continues to cover up Trump's "terrifying incoherence" even now. They’re doing so even though Trump's obvious incoherence may be zero point zero hours away from killing people.

That Trump has nothing to say, even on this, is news, but reporters are by widespread media convention largely restrained from saying so. I don't quite agree with Froomkin that the press is "covering up" for Trump; it might be more accurate to say they are covering up for their own outlets, and for stylistic conventions which have at this point utterly failed them. The edicts of journalism insist on content "neutrality" to such an extent that reporters scrub vital public information from their stories if that vital public information might be considered "partisan."

There's not much that would raise shouts of "partisan" quite like the press writing down on paper what the rest of us watched on our own television screens, though: The sitting president seems unable to convey a coherent, accurate-to-the-facts summary of what the current danger even is, much less mount a response. It is partisan to believe your own eyes and ears.

America is now in yet another patch of familiar but unpleasant territory: A national emergency that requires the government to, at the very least, not be Incredibly Damn Stupid in its response. This is largely the only requirement of the White House at this juncture, or would be had the White House not previously cut from government the group of people devoted to handling new disease outbreaks to begin with.

Instead, let's look at what actually happened, when you strip out all of the indecipherables.

Donald Trump announced that Mike Pence would now be in charge of coordinating the national response to COVID-19. All fine and good, but we got next to no information about what that would entail. (As of today it seems to consist of a new firewall between the public and new information about the virus, requiring all new government interviews about the pandemic be cleared through Mike Pence's office.) Trump talked for a good long time, giving out false information and claiming that a vaccine would be coming "very soon"—a statement contradicted by other speakers who noted that there would be no available vaccine for at least 18 months.

No other information was conveyed. If anything, it was the last moments of the appearance that were most telling. As Trump was preparing to leave the room, he pointed a finger at Pence. "Wish him good luck," Trump said about Pence's new role leading the nation's response to a potential human health catastrophe. As Trump fielded a shouted question about whether he still had "confidence" in Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Azar himself quickly slid behind the now-vacant podium to very awkwardly say that the press was misunderstanding Trump. "I think you're not getting the point here of this," he admonished reporters. "I'm still chairman of the task force." Mike Pence, said Azar, was just there to give him "the biggest stick one could have in government" for helping him.

If it looked like members of Trump's coronavirus "task force" couldn't even get themselves out the briefing room door before contradicting each other, you may be right: Multiple media sources quickly confirmed that Azar was "blindsided" by Trump's announcement that Mike Pence was now supposedly in charge. Well, there’s a confidence builder.

"Top news organizations," says Froomkin in his piece, "rather than accurately representing Trump's alarming behavior, made it sound like nothing untoward happened at all." This is true. The point of Donald Trump's press conference was to stabilize the markets and calm public fears by showing that Donald Trump and his team were thoroughly in charge of things while presenting absolutely no evidence for it. The press has done him a small favor in that regard: If more of the public had actually watched Trump's presser, rather than merely read about it the next morning, the stock market might have fallen twice as far.