James.galbraith

Chad Wolf, the Trump-appointed Acting Secretary of Homeland Security appeared to have no clue about the coronavirus or the U.S. response to it during a brutal grilling from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) on Tuesday.

Wolf could not tell Kennedy the extent of the infections the U.S. was anticipating or prepared for, if the country has enough respirators, and seemed stumped when Kennedy asked him how the virus was transferred.

When Wolf tried to refer Kennedy to the CDC and HHS, the senator responded: “I’m asking you questions as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. And you’re supposed to keep us safe. And you need to know the answers to these questions.”

KENNEDY: Do we have enough respirators?

WOLF: To my knowledge we do

K: We just heard testimony that we don't

W: Okay

K: You're supposed to keep us safe. You don't know the answer, do you?

W: You're asking me medical questions

K: The people deserve some straight answers pic.twitter.com/ORd74w0FH0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 25, 2020

Chad Wolf is a complete moron. I can’t believe he’s DHS Secretary. https://t.co/TjCFc1gYk8

— ash can i look yet or is it still happening (@ashtotheru) February 25, 2020

Having a "Heckuva job, Brownie" flashback.

Here's Trump on February 14 praising Chad Wolf for his handling of the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/G1cnWoMhhn

— Katie Cooper (@thekatiecoop) February 25, 2020

The post Under Brutal Grilling, Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf Appears to Have No Clue About Coronavirus or U.S. Response: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

There's another deplorable nominee on Mitch McConnell's conveyor belt: Stephen Schwartz, nominated to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and pending in the Judiciary Committee. This is impeached president Donald Trump's second go at having Schwartz appointed to this court, which hears claims against the federal government. Trump wants Schwartz there because he's argued that Social Security should be abolished because being elderly and disabled "is a natural aspect of the human condition" so those people shouldn't get any assistance.

Those are recent views from the too-young Schwartz, who wrote them 15 years ago in the student newspaper at Yale. When he was an undergraduate. He also "wrote that the departments of Transportation, Agriculture and Education lack a 'constitutional basis,' and that Social Security benefits were intended to prevent 'outright starvation' but had become a 'standard component of most retirement programs.'" Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you lollygagging 80 year olds.

Of course that's not all. Schwartz has also been in on legal efforts to disenfranchise African American voters in North Carolina and in Virginia's public bathroom wars, trying to make transgender students' bladders explode. As a pet attorney for the Koch network in its Cause of Action institute, he has sued the federal government multiple times. "There are lots of circumstances today in America where agencies of the federal government exercise their discretion in ways that are terrible for personal liberty, for economic freedoms," he said in an interview during one of those suits.

Because personal liberty and economic freedom mean having to find a job when you're in your 70s or 80s or 90s so you can eat. "Schwartz is another example of Trump's ideal nominee for the bench: a conservative ideologue who is determined to undermine civil rights and federal agencies," Vanita Gupta, who headed the Obama Justice Department's civil rights division, told The Washington Post.

Schwartz faced stiff opposition in 2017 from a variety of quarters, and his nomination eventually languished as the committee and Mitch McConnell focused on more critical seats. This appointment needs to be squelched again.

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Disney-owned Hotstar, India's largest on-demand video streaming service with more than 300 million users, has blocked the newest episode of HBO's "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From a report: The move has angered many of its customers ahead of Disney+'s launch in one of the world's largest entertainment markets next month. In the episode, aired hours before U.S. President Donald Trump's visit to India, Oliver talked about some of the questionable policies enforced by the ruling government in India and recent protests against "controversial figure" Modi's citizenship measures. The 19-minute news recap and commentary sourced its information from credible news outlets. The episode is available to stream in India through HBO's official channel on YouTube, where it has garnered more than 4 million views. Hotstar is the exclusive syndicating partner of HBO, Showtime and ABC in India.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tulsi Gabbard has apparently chosen to ignore a questionnaire on LGBTQ issues submitted to Democratic presidential candidates by the Human Rights Campaign.

Wrote HRC on a landing page for the responses: “The Human Rights Campaign sent our questionnaire to all Democratic presidential candidates earlier this year. Unfortunately, we did not receive responses from Tulsi Gabbard ahead of publication. Should she send a response, we will update the site accordingly. Deval Patrick and Andrew Yang sent responses but are not included because they have since suspended their campaigns.”

The lack of a response is notable because of Gabbard’s involvement with anti-LGBTQ groups in the past.

Gabbard released a video in January 2019 apologizing for her past views and statements about LGBTQ people, and work for anti-gay groups.

That month, a CNN investigation revealed Gabbard’s close ties with the anti-gay groups run by her father, when she was in her late teens: ‘Gabbard’s past positions can be traced back to the early 2000s, when she first sought public office.During her run for state legislature in 2002, Gabbard told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “Working with my father, Mike Gabbard, and others to pass a constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage, I learned that real leaders are willing to make personal sacrifices for the common good. I will bring that attitude of public service to the legislature.” The quote, which CNN’s KFile found during a review of Gabbard’s early career, shows how closely she aligned herself with her father’s mission at the time. Gabbard’s father ran The Alliance for Traditional Marriage, a political action committee aimed at opposing pro-gay lawmakers and legislation that organized and spent more than $100,000 to pass an amendment in 1998 that gave the Hawaii state legislature power to “reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples.” The amendment to the state’s constitution passed.’

CNN added, of Mike Gabbard: ‘Gabbard’s father Mike was a prominent anti-gay activist in Hawaii. He was also the director of Stop Promoting Homosexuality and also served on the steering committees of the National Campaign to Protect Marriage and the Hawaii-based coalition, Save Traditional Marriage. He also once hosted an anti-gay radio show, Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. The Alliance for Traditional Marriage called homosexuality “unhealthy, abnormal behavior that should not be promoted or accepted in society.”’

In 2013, Gabbard signed an amicus brief supporting Edie Windsor’s battle to defeat the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

In March 2019, Gabbard was asked by an audience member at a CNN town hall to explain her past views opposing gay rights, and her support of gay conversion therapy.

Gabbard said she never “personally never supported any kind of conversion therapy. I never advocated for conversion therapy. And frankly, I didn’t even know what conversion therapy was until just the last few years.”

“I was raised in a very socially conservative home,” she added. “My father is Catholic. He was a leading voice against gay marriage in Hawaii during that time. Again, I was very young, but these are the values and beliefs that I grew up around.”

Gabbard said that deploying to Middle East changed her views on gay rights because she “saw firsthand the negative impact of a government attempting to act as a moral arbiter for their people…It caused me to confront that contradiction…but also how that contradicted some of the values and beliefs that I grew up with.”

She added: “I also served with gay and lesbian and trans service members and we became very good friends and knew in the most deep and visceral way that I would give my life for any one of them, and that they would do the same for me. Race or religion or orientation — these were things that didn’t matter, because we were focused on our mission of serving.”

The post Tulsi Gabbard Ignores HRC Questionnaire on LGBTQ Issues appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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MIAMI — Bernie Sanders says he’s the Democrat best-equipped to defeat Donald Trump in November.

But Florida Democrats insist he‘s the worst-equipped after Sanders’ refusal Sunday night to thoroughly condemn the Cuban revolution. His comments on 60 Minutes sent shock waves through the nation’s biggest battleground state, where Democratic members of Congress, state legislators and party leaders warned that his nomination — and Sanders’ self-described “Democratic socialism” — will cost them the biggest battleground state of them all.

“Donald Trump wins Florida if Bernie is our nominee,” said state Rep. Javier Fernandez, a Democratic candidate in a majority-Hispanic state Senate district.

“If Bernie Sanders is atop the ticket, it’s going to make it tougher for all of us to win in Florida,” said Fernandez, who has endorsed Sanders’ rival Joe Biden. “No one really sees Sanders winning Florida and I don’t think his campaign does either.”

As a state with an influential cross-section of Latinos whose families fled leftist Latin American regimes and violence, Sanders embrace of far-left leaders and his past refusals to wholeheartedly condemn Latin American strongmen and the Soviet Union have long been seen as fatal flaws.

Sanders on Sunday did nothing to allay those concerns in a 60 Minutes interview in which he was asked about his 1985 comments stating that the Cuban people didn’t “rise up in rebellion against Fidel Castro” because “he educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed society.”

There was no mention of the firing squads, political purges and mass arrests that accompanied the 1959 revolution.

"We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know?" Sanders said Sunday when asked about the remarks. "When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?"

Sanders’ campaign dismisses concerns about socialism as modern-day “red-baiting” and points to polling, however, that shows he’s essentially tied with Trump in Florida, just like other Democrats like Biden.

But that could change under the kind of sustained assault that Trump’s campaign is waiting to unleash once he becomes the nominee — Florida is a must-win state for Trump.

And if it’s easier for him to defend the Sunshine State, he’ll be able to play offense in the Rust Belt states that Democrats unexpectedly lost to him in 2016.

As a swing state, Florida is traditionally more moderate than Sanders’ brand of progressivism. No major party candidate nominee here has ever called himself a socialist, nor has one been as critical of Israel, which could be problematic in the March 17 primary because 70 percent of Florida’s estimated 600,000 Jewish voters are Democrats.

In Florida, the concerns with Sanders are particularly acute in the Jewish- and Hispanic-heavy southeast, notably the Miami-area, a liberal bastion that a Democrat needs to carry by big margins to win the state. Top Florida elections are often decided by about a percent or less, making small shifts in the electorate loom large on election night.

Sanders’ positions on Latin America could be the most problematic in a general election. If it leads to defections to Trump or low Hispanic turnout, it could make a material difference in a state where Latinos account for more than 17 percent of the registered voters.

Florida doesn’t have a single Latino community. It has immigrants and exiles from multiple Latin American countries where “socialism” is a loaded term. When Sanders says he wants to lead a “revolution,” it sounds like “revolución!” to many in South Florida who fled Castro and other leftist regimes. Sanders’ supporters have even earned the nickname “Sandernistas,” a play on Sandinistas, the socialist guerillas who overthrew the right-wing Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979.

Sanders has a long history of making favorable statements about Cuba, remarks that have salience beyond the Cuban-American community, which is clustered in Miami.

Venezuelan exiles, whose country descended into poverty under Havana-backed dictator Nicolás Maduro, have increasingly found common cause with anti-communist Cubans. Venezuelans in Miami were outraged when Sanders last year initially refused to call Maduro a dictator.

Nicaraguans were also troubled by Sanders past praise of Nicaragua’s leftist leader Daniel Ortega, an ally of Castro’s. For those of Bolivian heritage, there’s the case of Evo Morales — who in November expressed solidarity with “mi hermano” Sanders. Morales was forced from power in what Sanders called a “coup,” which occurred after voting irregularities marred the strongman’s reelection from which he was constitutionally barred anyway.

Frontrunner Sanders is top of mind for opponents and president

All of these positions have made Sanders a hero of the far left, which for decades has opposed America’s military interventions in Latin America and support of right-wing regimes.

But in South Florida, the totality of Sanders’ record promises to be a drag on Democrats keeping and turning out Latinos, said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic consultant who specializes in Hispanic outreach.

Last year, Ulvert conducted a poll that showed 68 percent of the Hispanic-heavy Miami-Dade electorate overall — and 65 percent of Hispanics — in the county said they would be less likely to favor a candidate who is aligned with Sanders or his ally, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Only 13 percent of Hispanics and 28 percent of voters overall favored Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. However, 92 percent of self-identified progressives in the county said they would be more likely to support a candidate aligned with the two.

“I can’t even talk about Bernie Sanders around my family,” Ulvert, who isn’t backing another candidate, said. “My family was literally chased out of Nicaragua by Daniel Ortega. They think someone who embraces a thug who chased out democracy from Nicaragua is appalling, and that’s putting it lightly.”

Ulvert added that his husband, who was born in Venezuela, will vote for the first time as a U.S. citizen in a presidential election and views Sanders’ candidacy as “heart-wrenching because it represents what he fled from in Venezuela.”

There isn’t any public polling that specifically tests Sanders favorability rating and perceptions about socialism among Florida’s Latino voters, but a survey released earlier this month from the Democratic firm Equis Research showed how unique Florida is when it comes to Sanders and Latinos. The state was the only one of 10 it surveyed where Latino voters viewed Sanders less favorably than favorably. His net image rating was minus 6, the same as Trump in Florida.

Nationwide, a Telemundo poll showed Latinos would be less likely to vote for a socialist candidate by a 41-point margin.

Sanders’ campaign says Florida is more winnable than pundits think because the Vermont senator brings an enthusiastic base of grassroots supporters and an ability to bring out nontraditional and young voters.

“The Latino population in Florida is not monolithic. There is a large number of Puerto Ricans who have come to Florida who are very supportive of the role Sen. Sanders has played in trying to protect the people of Puerto Rico, whether it’s from the vagaries of Donald Trump or the weather or financial control boards,” Jeff Weaver, a top Sanders adviser, told POLITICO. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity for Sen. Sanders in Florida.”

Weaver said Sanders will succeed in Florida among Latino voters for the same reason he does elsewhere: He wins young voters.

“In some of those communities, there are generational divides,” Weaver said.

But younger voters turn out at lower rates and account for a smaller share of registered voters than those who are middle-aged and elderly, especially in Florida.

Among Florida Puerto Ricans, who haven’t had the same experience as other Latinos with leftist regimes, there’s a generational divide, said consultant Frederick Velez, who said he has heard older Boricuas tell him that “if Bernie’s the candidate, I won’t go vote because of the fears of socialism.”

“But I’ve also seen people with no intention of participating, who want to go out and vote for Bernie, and he’s the only reason they want to participate,” Velez said. “It’s the only candidate where I’ve seen that.”

One of Velez’s clients, Miami state House Democratic candidate Gabriela De Jesús, said she welcomes the energy Sanders brings and doesn’t think “socialism” is an issue people will care about. But she is concerned about Biden being the nominee.

“There’s no excitement for him,” she said.

Sanders defends Democratic socialism

For his part, Sanders has moderated some of his past positions on Latin America by recently expressing concerns about Ortega and, after being put on the spot on a debate stage, calling Maduro a dictator.

Still, Republicans are ready to frame Sanders as an “all-out Marxist”, honing a message from 2018 against Andrew Gillum, the progressive Democratic gubernatorial nominee who lost to Ron DeSantis by less than half a point amid low Hispanic turnout.

“Republicans thought ‘socialism’ was an argument that would just work with Cubans or Venezuelans. But then they saw it worked across sections of the electorate in the state,” said a top Florida Democrat involved with Gillum’s campaign. “It’s not just Cubans and Venezuelans. It’s not just Colombians or Nicaraguans. It’s non-Hispanic white people in Central Florida and Tampa Bay. So Republicans made it national. And I’m pissed because we didn’t shut it down and we gave them a national message against us.”

In DeSantis’ polling, shared with POLITICO by a top adviser, 55 percent of Florida voters who were unfamiliar with Gillum after his 2018 primary win said they would be “much less likely” to support the Democrat when told of Sanders’ endorsement. In Miami’s media market, the DeSantis adviser said, Trump’s endorsement of DeSantis was viewed more favorably than Sanders’ endorsement of Gillum by 48-36 percent, a statistically significant 12 points.

DeSantis on Monday said Sanders’ attempt to “whitewash the brutality of the Castro dictatorship is totally unacceptable.”

At Wednesday’s presidential candidate debate, candidate Mike Bloomberg swiped at Sanders for advocating “communism.” And last month at a pro-Israel rally in the Jewish-heavy South Florida city of Aventura, Bloomberg poked fun at Sanders as a collectivist.

“I’m not the only Jewish candidate running for president,” Bloomberg said. “But I am the only one who doesn’t want to turn America into a kibbutz.”

Sanders on Wednesday night gave one of his most full-throated defenses of Nordic-style socialism, as opposed to struggling Latin American socialist governments.

“We are living in many ways in a socialist society right now,” Sanders said at the debate. “The problem is, as Dr. Martin Luther King reminded us. We have socialism for the very rich. Rugged individualism for the poor.”

Applause rang out in the Las Vegas debate hall.

In Florida, Sanders’ reception has been far frostier, starting with the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in which Hillary Clinton walloped him by 64-33 percent.

Though he’s essentially tied with Trump in Florida polls now, Trump’s campaign says that will change amid a planned saturation ad campaign designed to boil the campaign down to a choice between a conservative and a socialist.

“We’re ready to dump it all on Bernie. But not yet,” said a top Trump campaign official, who was not authorized to discuss internal strategy publicly.

Polls show Bloomberg, prior to the Wednesday debate, was leading in Florida matchups against primary rivals as well as Trump. In the primary, Bloomberg led Biden 26-20 percent with Sanders at third with 13 percent, according to one survey of the primary by Ryan Tyson, the Republican pollster who conducted the new survey in Florida.

Sanders’ relatively low standing in Florida contrasts sharply with his top position in national polls and his results in the first three early states. And Sanders might not be so easy to beat as some forecast, Tyson said.

“The Republican Party was overtaken by populism in 2016, so it wouldn’t shock me to see the Democrat Party overtaken by a socialist this cycle,” Tyson said. “He’s got problems with Florida Hispanics but it’ll still be a close race here. It’s the nature of our state.”

In at least two South Florida congressional seats, Democrats are as concerned about a Sanders nomination as Republicans are rooting for it. Both Hispanic-heavy districts were won by Democrats in 2018 and now two Republicans are running to unseat them by making socialism a top messaging issue.

After the 60 Minutes interview, Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell wrote: “As the first South American immigrant member of Congress who proudly represents thousands of Cuban Americans, I find Senator Bernie Sanders’ comments on Castro’s Cuba absolutely unacceptable. ... The Castro regime murdered and jailed dissidents, and caused unspeakable harm to too many South Florida families. To this day, it remains an authoritarian regime that oppresses its people, subverts the free press, and stifles a free society.”

Last month, when asked about Sanders’ positions and statements about Latin America, Mucarsel-Powell, who is neutral in the primary, declined to comment.

Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala, who is neutral in the presidential primary, also made it clear that she sees Sanders as a problem if he leads the party ticket.

“A Sanders nomination would make it more difficult to win Florida,” Shalala said. “Could I still win with a Sanders nomination? Yes. Would it make it more complicated? Yes. ... The majority of voters in the district are not socialist, whether they’re Latino or they’re white.”

Rep. Ted Deutch, another South Florida Democrat, has endorsed Bloomberg. He said Sanders will struggle with Jewish voters in Florida.

“It’s not just socialism. When it comes to Israel, a lot of people are really uncomfortable with the thought of using critical assistance to Israel as some sort of bargaining chip, some withholding aid as a threat to Israel,” Deutch said. “For a candidate who runs in Florida and talks to the pro-Israel community, when they hear a candidate saying maybe we ought to ... withhold aid to Israel to make some sort of political statement, that’s something that’s going to concern a lot of people.”

Sanders has already drawn fire in Iowa and Nevada from a political group called Democratic Majority for Israel, and it’s eyeing Florida as well. The group’s strategist, prominent Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, wouldn’t discuss strategy but pointed out that Sanders got some of the smallest support among Jewish Democratic voters in a Pew poll last month. A new Siena College poll showed Trump doing better among Jewish New Yorkers than Sanders, who was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family.

As he has with discussing socialism, Sanders points out there’s a nuance in his position on Israel. At a Nevada town hall Tuesday, he said he opposes the government there, not the nation.

“To be for the Israeli people and to be for peace in the Middle East does not mean that we have to support right-wing, racist governments that currently exist in Israel,” Sanders said, winning loud applause from the audience.

Sanders’ adviser Weaver said Jewish voters will be attracted to Sanders as a historical figure.

“We would hope that they would want to come out and see the first Jewish president elected in the United States of America,” Weaver said, adding that voters of all kinds will reject the “smears” that Sanders is anti-Israel or a property-seizing communist.

“People aren’t going to fall for this,” he said. “It’s red-baiting.”

But to Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy, who represents a Central Florida battleground district, Sanders’ comments are “ill-informed & insulting to thousands of Floridians. Castro was a murderous dictator who oppressed his own people. His ‘literacy program’ wasn’t altruistic; it was a cynical effort to spread his dangerous philosophy & consolidate power.”

“Whether the subject is Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Israel or other foreign policy challenges,” Murphy, who backs Bloomberg, wrote on Twitter, “@SenSanders has consistently taken positions that are wrong on the merits and will alienate many Florida voters now and in the general election if he is nominated.”

The Supreme Court—Donald Trump’s Supreme Court, the one that Justice Sonia Sotomayor says is “putting a thumb on the scale” in Trump’s favor—is going to hear a case that could open the floodgates for bigotry and discrimination.

The court said it would hear a case brought by Catholic Social Services against Philadelphia after the city did not renew a contract with the charity because Catholic Social Services will not place foster children with same-sex couples. “The city respects and values CSS's religious freedom, and its rights to hold whatever beliefs it holds about same-sex marriage," the city told the Supreme Court as it considered whether to take the case. "But the city is lawfully permitted to include nondiscrimination requirements in its city-funded contracts for city services, and it did so here for legitimate secular reasons.”

The Catholic organization predictably argues that placing foster children with LGBTQ families would violate its religious beliefs, and that it should be allowed to violate anti-discrimination laws in service of those religious beliefs. Even in doing contract work for the city of Philadelphia, Catholic Social Services insists, it should be allowed to discriminate. Because faith.

But no.

”The care of abused and neglected children in Pennsylvania is a public function. If CSS wishes to voluntarily contract with the city to assist in the discharge of that public function, the city does not burden CSS's First Amendment rights by requiring it to comply with key requirements bearing directly and exclusively on the administration of the city's programs—including the city's rules for who receives these taxpayer-funded public services,” according to the city’s lawyers.

Philadelphia already won at the district and appellate court levels, with a 3rd Circuit panel ruling that “has failed to make a persuasive showing that the City targeted it for its religious beliefs, or is motivated by ill will against its religion, rather than sincere opposition to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.” As a result, “The City stands on firm ground in requiring its contractors to abide by its non-discrimination policies when administering public services.”

Now we’ll see how far Trump’s Supreme Court will go to enable discrimination.

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Joseph Maguire being sworn in for testimony before the House in September 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The White House wants you to believe Trump was required by law to dismiss Joseph Maguire. He wasn’t.

The talking point President Donald Trump and top administration officials are using to explain the abrupt dismissal of acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire — namely, that his dismissal was required by law — doesn’t add up.

Maguire was dismissed last week following a classified briefing to the House Intelligence Committee on February 13 in which one of his staffers, Shelby Pierson, reportedly told members of Congress that Russia is already interfering in the 2020 election, and again has “developed a preference” for Trump.

Trump was reportedly blindsided by the briefing, and responded the next day by unloading on Maguire during an Oval Office meeting in which the president expressed concern that “Democrats would use the information against him,” according to NBC.

A Trump loyalist with scant intelligence community qualifications, US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, was announced as Maguire’s replacement last Wednesday.

While there are legitimate concerns about the strength of the intelligence Pierson cited during the February 13 briefing, the timeline surrounding Maguire’s dismissal certainly gives the impression he was ousted for political reasons. But in hopes of pushing back against that perception, Trump administration officials offered an alternative explanation on Sunday.

During an interview on ABC’s This Week, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien claimed Maguire had to go because he couldn’t serve as acting director of national intelligence past March 11 due to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, a law governing acting appointments.

“Admiral Maguire’s time as the acting DNI was up in a week or two,” O’Brien said. “We were looking for someone who was Senate-confirmed under the Vacancy Act. We needed a Senate-confirmed official to come in and replace him. And so we went with a highly qualified person, Ambassador Grenell.”

O’Brien made comments suggesting the intelligence agencies are becoming increasingly politicized — “There are these reports that [Russia] wants Bernie Sanders to get elected. But that’s no surprise. He honeymooned in Moscow,” he said — and denied Trump was upset with Maguire over the House Intelligence Committee briefing.

O’Brien’s talking point was echoed on Meet the Press by Marc Short, chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence, who also insisted Maguire’s dismissal had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the fact he couldn’t stay in his role longer due to the Vacancies Act.

It is not the case, however, that Maguire couldn’t have served past March 11.

Eric Columbus, a former Obama administration Justice Department official, told Vox that Maguire could’ve stayed on as acting director of national intelligence indefinitely had Trump nominated someone to become Senate-confirmed before March 11.

And Columbus pointed out that Maguire was confirmed by the Senate in December 2018 for a role as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which means the concern O’Brien expressed about finding “someone who was Senate-confirmed under the Vacancy Act” wasn’t an issue in his case.

Also, if the Trump administration is really concerned about the March 11 cutoff, then appointing Grenell to the acting role won’t address it, as he now faces the same deadline that Maguire did before his dismissal. (The Trump administration has already announced that Grenell won’t be nominated for the role.)

So the talking point the Trump administration is using to dispel concerns that Maguire’s dismissal was politically motivated doesn’t carry water. Nonetheless, ahead of his departure for India, Trump pushed the same unsound explanation.

“His time came up. I think it was March 11 — his time comes up. He ran out of time,” Trump said. “So he had to leave on March 11.”

The real explanation for the timing of Maguire’s departure likely has more to do with what an unnamed senior White House official told my colleague Alex Ward last week.

“Anyone from here on out that opposed POTUS will get fired,” the official said, alluding to the House Intelligence Committee briefing.

Maguire’s ouster may be part of Trump’s broader effort to get rid of government officials he perceives as being insufficiently loyal. On Sunday, Jonathan Swan reported for Axios that the Trump administration has “assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.”

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

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It just now occurs to me that I left out a step where we use some rubbery polymer to bind together the skin of Earth. This'd be great for the polymer industry.

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The European Commission has told its staff to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications. From a report: The instruction appeared on internal messaging boards in early February, notifying employees that "Signal has been selected as the recommended application for public instant messaging." The app is favored by privacy activists because of its end-to-end encryption and open-source technology. "It's like Facebook's WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage but it's based on an encryption protocol that's very innovative," said Bart Preneel, cryptography expert at the University of Leuven. "Because it's open-source, you can check what's happening under the hood," he added. Signal was developed in 2013 by privacy activists. It is supported by a nonprofit foundation that has the backing of WhatsApp founder Brian Acton, who had left the company in 2017 after clashing with Facebook's leadership.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case brought by a Catholic foster care agency in Philadelphia threatened with losing a government contract because of its ban on same-sex parents.

CNN reports: “Catholic Social Services, the agency at the center of the case, argues that Philadelphia violated its free exercise rights when it froze its contract because the group cannot ‘make foster certifications inconsistent with its religious beliefs about sex and marriage.’ The city says that it is governed by the City’s Fair Practices Ordinance that precludes discrimination based on sexual orientation.”

The AP adds: “The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled the city did not target the agency because of its religious beliefs but acted only to enforce its own nondiscrimination policy in the face of what seemed to be a clear violation.”

BIG: #SCOTUS grants one new case, over whether Philadelphia can bar agencies from foster care program if the agency bars same-sex couples from participating.

Full orders: https://t.co/7IneCI6zhf

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) February 24, 2020

From Lambda Legal on the case:

In March of 2018, the City of Philadelphia (“the City”) learned that Catholic Social Services (“CSS”), a faith-based child placing agency contracted with the City of Philadelphia, would not certify same-sex couples as foster parents because of their religious beliefs, in violation of both CSS’s contract to provide foster care services and the City’s Fair Practice Ordinance. 

The City sent CSS a letter indicating that they would no longer make referrals to religious organizations that discriminated against LGBTQ foster parents. CSS did not agree to comply and the City stopped intake of new placements of children into CSS’s care.

CSS sued the City, together with Sharonell Fulton and other foster parents working with CSS, requesting that the court order the City to reopen intake to CSS. On July 13, 2018, a federal district court denied CSS’s motion, rejecting the argument that faith-based child welfare agencies have a right to discriminate. CSS appealed this ruling to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Allowing CSS to discriminate against LGBTQ people would send a government-endorsed stigmatic message to LGBTQ youth that they are not worthy to be parents or have a right to equal treatment in the provision of government services. Requiring nondiscrimination in foster care system is consistent with and, in fact, mandated by the City’s legal obligation to ensure the wellbeing of LGBTQ youth in the child welfare system.

The case will be argued this fall.

The case is Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. Read more about it here.

↓↓↓https://t.co/f7xfD6kows

— Lambda Legal (@LambdaLegal) February 24, 2020

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Donald Trump continues his march to autocracy, planning his largest purge of government officials yet. And he’s getting outside help in assembling his enemies list, with a conservative activist network headed by Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, providing a stream of memos detailing how some administration officials have been insufficiently loyal to Trump.

The pieces are being put in place. Trump is getting ready to push the purge with a new head of presidential personnel—his former body man, Johnny McEntee, who was fired by then-White House chief of staff John Kelly in 2018. And Groundswell, the Ginni Thomas group, helped push former national security adviser H.R. McMaster out of office, and is not remotely done, Axios reports.

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More recently, a memo targeted Jessie Liu, the former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who was nominated for a Treasury Department position only to have the nomination pulled. Liu’s offenses against Trump included signing off on a sentencing filing asking for jail time for former national security adviser Michael Flynn and not having former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe indicted—in other words, Liu dared to prosecute a former Trump official whom Trump didn’t want prosecuted and didn’t prosecute one whom Trump did want prosecuted.

That’s not the only such memo going after a specific Trump appointee—whether potential or already on the job—and pushing Trump to purge those who aren’t fully on board with Trump’s corruption and narcissism. 

Given that Trump’s moods change constantly and his actions offend anyone with even a teeny shred of integrity, that could leave a lot of jobs to fill. Never fear, though: Groundswell has another list of appropriately Trumpy potential appointees ready to go. That list includes former Sheriff David Clarke for a top Homeland Security job, and Fox News’ favorite former Secret Service officer, Dan Bongino, for something in Homeland Security or counterterrorism.

Donald Trump is personally corrupt and dedicated to abuse of power. But he’s not operating alone—if he was, Republicans would have put limits on him long ago. Groundswell—a group that, it cannot be emphasized enough, is headed by the wife of a Supreme Court justice—shows that Republicans aren’t just failing to rein Trump in; they’re encouraging him to make the government more ruthlessly partisan, to place loyalty above competence at every turn.

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Richard Grenell, the incompetent buffoon and erstwhile Twitter troll who Donald Trump selected this week to oversee our entire National Intelligence apparatus, previously worked as a paid consultant for a corrupt Moldovan oligarch, and authored multiple articles for mainstream rightwing media outlets the either defended that oligarch or placed him in a more favorable light. According to reporting by ProPublica, he did this without telling anyone about his work for that oligarch, in potential violation of a federal anti-corruption statute.

President Donald Trump’s new acting intelligence director, Richard Grenell, used to do consulting work on behalf of an Eastern European oligarch who is now a fugitive and was recently barred from entering the U.S. under anti-corruption sanctions imposed last month by the State Department.

In 2016, Grenell wrote several articles defending the oligarch, a Moldovan politician named Vladimir Plahotniuc, but did not disclose that he was being paid, according to records and interviews. Grenell also did not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which generally requires people to disclose work in the U.S. on behalf of foreign politicians.

For the record, FARA is the same statute that a certain federal prisoner named Paul Manafort was convicted of violating.

Ultimately, Mr. Plahotniuc was banned from entering the U.S. for his “involvement in significant corruption.”  Formerly Moldova’s richest oligarch, he is now a fugitive. According to this article in the Observer, Plahotniuc is also Moldova’s leading human trafficker. Grenell was also quoted in the Houston Chronicle as criticizing a resolution, proposed by Republican Rep. Randy Weber, that accused the same oligarch and his allies of corruption.

ProPublica determined from its sources that Grenell’s public affairs consulting firm, Capitol Media Partners, worked as a media consultant for former (now-deceased) Republican political consultant Art Finklestein, with clients in Eastern Europe, including Plahotniuc. The ProPublica article also explains how the positions taken by Grenell in his op-ed pieces aligned with Plahotniuc’s interests.

Just take a deep breath and chew on that for a moment. Now consider this: Richard Grenell is now being made privy to our most classified intelligence secrets—the kind of super-secret intelligence that goes into the President’s Daily Brief, for his eyes and the eyes of a few select Cabinet members only.

Stuff like “Bin Laden determined to attack U.S.”  That kind of stuff.

As Isaac Arnsdorf, writing for ProPublica, notes, it’s not clear whether Grenell’s pro-Plahotniuc articles were actually created and placed as part of his paid consulting work—but that doesn’t necessarily matter in terms of disclosure.

“Unpaid work could still require disclosures under FARA if it was directed by or primarily benefited a foreign politician, according to Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale who advises people on complying with FARA. FARA contains several exemptions, such as for lawyers and businesses, Sanderson said, but none appear to apply to Grenell’s op-eds about Plahotniuc.

(emphasis added)

Such disclosure is necessary is that it could leave Grenell open to blackmail, and the U.S. needs to know that. According to Sanderson, “This is exactly the type of circumstances I’d expect the Department of Justice to investigate further.”

Of course, maybe Grenell just decided to write his paeans to this corrupt oligarch out of the goodness of his heart. That’s basically what his lawyer said when asked by ProPublica for comment --that he wasn’t working for Plahotniuc or any foreign government, but that he was “advocating the ideal of a pro-western political party that was emerging.” And to be fair, I know when the creative muse moves my own prose, I always lean towards singling out corrupt oligarchs to defend in my work.

Arnsdorf points out that the established policy of the same federal Intelligence office into which Donald Trump has dropped Grenell requires disclosure of this type of prior contact, just to get a security clearance, let alone be placed in charge of filtering state intelligence secrets and recommendations to make them more palatable for Donald Trump’s re-election.

“That’s really easy, he should not have a clearance,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington-area lawyer specializing in security clearances. “If he were one of my clients and just a normal [federal employee], he would almost assuredly not have a clearance.”

In fact, McClanahan says, it’s not even clear how Grenell even got a clearance to be ambassador to Germany, his previous reward for his support of Donald Trump.

The irony is particularly rich here. Trump’s rationale for removing former Acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, is that a colleague from DNI briefed House Intelligence Committee members last week about Russian plans to infiltrate and interfere with the 2020 election on behalf of none other than Donald Trump. He appointed Grenell who, although totally unfit for the job, could be counted on to bury such inconvenient intelligence and keep the public from learning about it.

Just look at the first paragraph of one of the articles Grenell wrote, defending his oligarch friend (and apparent human trafficker) Plahotniuc.

Political insiders in Washington, D.C., have a long history of getting duped by foreigners pushing propaganda. The political agendas of these international players can range from largely innocent parochial issues to calls for U.S. military action to stop an injustice. Or in the case of Russian propagandists, to sway a national election that few people in the West are watching.

Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that captured and killed Osama Bin Laden, wrote an op-ed in Saturday’s Washington Post decrying Trump’s removal of Maguire, who himself served as a SEAL for 36 years, rising to the rank of rear admiral and Acting Director of National Intelligence—before Trump sacked him in favor of Grenell. The final paragraph in McRaven’s impassioned piece should be etched in stone and placed on the White House lawn.

As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.

No truer words have ever been written.

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Pete Buttigieg greets supporters at a town hall campaign event in Denver on February 22, 2020. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

The state’s entrance polls hint at how the two could do in South Carolina.

One key trend in the Nevada entrance polls could mean trouble for both former South Bend Mayor, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. According to data from the Washington Post, both candidates performed poorly with African American voters, who made up 11 percent of caucus voters in the state.

Buttigieg, per the early entrance polls, secured 2 percent support from African Americans, while Klobuchar secured 3 percent. That’s compared to the two candidates garnering 19 percent and 14 percent of support from white voters, and 10 percent and 4 percent from Latino voters, respectively.

Of course, these entrance polls only capture part of the story, which will be more clear as additional data comes in. Buttigieg’s campaign notes that their internal data — which includes 35 percent of precincts in the state — shows him picking up 11 percent of delegates in precincts that had high concentrations of African American voters.

While Buttigieg and Klobuchar both had strong finishes in New Hampshire’s primary, there have long been questions about their support among people of color. And ahead of the South Carolina primary, it appears those questions remain: A recent South Carolina poll from Winthrop University had Buttigieg receiving 1 percent of African Americans’ support while Klobuchar received too little to register in the results (the margin of error for the poll is 5.9 percent).

This dynamic — if it holds — could pose a major challenge for both candidates in South Carolina, the next early state, where the Democratic electorate is 60 percent African American. The state, which has its Democratic primary on Saturday, is the first major test of support from African American voters, and it could well signal that certain candidates aren’t resonating with this critical Democratic constituency, which makes up roughly 20 percent of the party’s voters overall.

Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Additionally, South Carolina has long been viewed as an important bellwether for other Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday and later in March that have a similar composition of voters. An underwhelming performance could stall candidates’ momentum as this series of races kicks off.

“For [any candidate], that almost is the death knell for their campaigns if they don’t do well in South Carolina,” Johnnie Cordero, the head of the state’s Democratic Black Caucus, previously told Vox.

The entrance polls for Buttigieg and Klobuchar mirror the candidates’ struggles to connect with voters of color.

Both have been called out for their records: Buttigieg’s relationship with African Americans in South Bend has been strained by his dismissal of the city’s first black police chief as well as the implementation of an initiative that tore down deteriorating homes. Klobuchar, too, has been pressed about how her work as a prosecutor in Minnesota affected communities of color there and, in recent weeks, has faced scrutiny over her role in a murder case involving a life sentence for a 16-year-old African American boy.

Whether Buttigieg and Klobuchar can overcome these questions about their records and find ways to build support among black voters remains an open question — but the outcome in Nevada offers a glimpse of how that could go.

The White House will soon ask Congress for emergency funds to fight the coronavirus outbreak, after weeks of hesitation by the administration to press for additional funding, said four individuals with knowledge of the pending request.

However, the amount could be significantly lower than some public health officials have argued is necessary — potentially as little as $1 billion, said two individuals, which could be rapidly exhausted by development of potential vaccines, widespread lab tests and numerous other investments.

A White House official told POLITICO that the pending request is still preliminary and the sum could change. A congressional aide said that lawmakers have been told to expect the request in the coming days.

The outbreak, which began about three months ago and has spread to 28 countries, has sickened more than 75,000 people in China and killed more than 2,200 there. While there are about three dozen confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, almost two-thirds are citizens who were flown home after contracting the virus abroad, including 18 who were evacuated from a cruise ship last week.

Scientists have warned that many aspects of the virus — which can be spread by people with no outward symptoms and appears to pose a significant risk to the elderly — remain largely unknown. For instance, the incubation period may last longer than the two-week quarantine that governments around the world have imposed on at-risk patients.

Congressional Democrats have been pressing the administration to request emergency coronavirus funds since the beginning of February. While HHS Secretary Alex Azar notified Congress on Feb. 2 that he was prepared to shift up to $136 million in already approved funds to fight the virus, administration officials took pains to emphasize that the funds might not need to be transferred. White House officials have been hesitant to press Congress for additional funding, with some hoping that the virus would burn itself out by the summer.

But officials have confronted the growing possibility that a coronavirus outbreak could hit the United States, squeezing public health resources — and threatening the U.S. economy and President Donald Trump's re-election prospects.

The Obama administration in 2014 requested $6 billion in emergency funding to fight the Ebola outbreak that ultimately sickened about a dozen U.S. citizens and killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa. Congress approved a $5.4 billion package.

Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters cheer in El Paso, Texas, just before he takes the stage after winning the Nevada caucus. | Cengiz Yar/Getty Images

Bernie Sanders looks like the strongest candidate, and the other Democrats still haven’t distinguished themselves.

Bernie Sanders won the 2020 Nevada caucuses, and in more ways than one.

His signature issue, Medicare-for-all, won in a face-off with the state’s most powerful union. And the race for second through fifth place was muddled, a recurring theme in this primary season, in which no clear center-left alternative to Sanders has emerged.

Sanders rode into Nevada with two popular-vote wins in Iowa and New Hampshire and a near tie in the delegate count with Pete Buttigieg. Nevada was his chance to break away from the pack in the only metric that actually matters: delegates to the Democratic National Convention this summer. A candidate needs a majority to win the nomination.

The Vermont senator was always looking like the favorite, having led the polls in Nevada ahead of the caucuses. The rest of the story was going to be who came in second.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Buttigieg shined in Iowa and New Hampshire, two overwhelmingly white states, but needed to prove he could contend in places with more Hispanic and black voters. Joe Biden has struggled in the first two states, but his campaign hoped a more diverse electorate in Nevada (and, looking ahead, in South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states) will fuel a comeback.

Elizabeth Warren also failed to make a splash in the first two states before a commanding debate performance Wednesday. And Amy Klobuchar was trying to build off her strong showing in Iowa and especially New Hampshire, where she relied on support from white voters for a surprise third-place finish, to show she can attract voters of color. (Mike Bloomberg is technically on the Nevada ballot, but he’s making his big bet on Super Tuesday, March 3, when nearly one-fourth of the DNC delegates are up for grabs.)

So coming out of Nevada, Sanders looks by far like the strongest candidate in the Democratic field, and the rest of the candidates still haven’t distinguished themselves as the best bet to topple him.

Those were the stakes headed into Saturday afternoon in Nevada. Here’s who won and who lost.

Winner: Bernie Sanders

He got the most votes and the most delegates. He won.

In Nevada, Sanders finally got the decisive victory he’d been lacking after effectively tying in Iowa and New Hampshire. His margin of victory over the other five candidates who see themselves as viable threats to the nomination was substantial.

And it comes in a state that has moved up the primary calendar because party leaders think it has the kind of voters — young, diverse — Democrats will need going forward. (Well, and because former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid played an outsize role getting Nevada third on the schedule.)

Sanders finally put a little distance between himself and Buttigieg. Going by numbers from earlier in the day in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, he is at this point really the only Democratic candidate with a good chance (39 percent) of winning a majority of DNC delegates and the nomination.

But he trails “no one” at this point, raising the possibility of a contested convention if nobody wins the nomination in the primary elections. For Sanders, as a party outsider, accumulating as many delegates as possible and making his nomination seem inevitable — whether he wins an outright majority or not — is incredibly important.

He’s gained some ground in that race, thanks to this strong win in Nevada.

Loser: The race for second place

With everybody anticipating a Sanders win, a lot of the pre-caucus speculation was about who would come in second. Would Buttigieg solidify his place as the Sanders alternative? Could Biden rebound ahead of South Carolina, his must-win state? What if Warren parlayed a strong debate into a surprise second-place finish?

Instead, the story out of Nevada is that Sanders is running away with the nomination and there is little clarity about the strongest opponent to challenge him.

Even before the caucuses, FiveThirtyEight gave Sanders 4-in-10 odds of winning the primary; Bloomberg, barely a blip in Nevada, was second at 1 in 12 on the strength of his national polling and a focus on the delegate-rich Super Tuesday states. A Biden nomination is considered a little less likely than Bloomberg’s. Nobody else had better than a 1-in-100 chance.

As the Republican establishment learned in 2016, you can’t just play for second against an insurgent frontrunner. Democrats are starting to learn the same lesson the hard way.

Winner: Ranked-choice voting

For the first time, Nevada let people “vote early” in the caucuses. What that actually meant (because of the way caucuses are run in real life; read more from Andrew Prokop) is those early voters used a ranked-choice ballot. It looked a lot like ranked-choice voting in Maine (the first state to authorize it in all elections), and several other states will use ranked-choice ballots in their upcoming primaries.

This year, Nevadans could go to an early-voting site and fill out a ballot with their preferences for the Democratic nominee, ranked first through fifth. It mirrors the caucus experience, where voters first congregate with their favorite candidate. But then for candidates who fail to clear 15 percent on that first vote, their supporters must move to a more viable camp.

Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images

The new wrinkle seems to have increased turnout in Nevada; upward of 75,000 early ballots were cast, nearly matching the total turnout at the 2016 Nevada caucuses. The only question is whether that decreases turnout on caucus day, but it seems assured overall turnout will be up from the last election.

For Nevada, ranked-choice voting was a way to replicate the caucus experience in absentia. In general, the argument for ranked choice is, in short, that it’s more democratic than relying on a plurality of support or a top-two runoff to declare a winner. As Vox’s Ella Nilsen previously explained:

Ranked-choice advocates say this is simply a more democratic system and less expensive than runoff elections, which have to be held separately and typically have very low turnout (case in point: the Texas runoff).

“We think compared to those other two, it means voters have more say and more reliable outcomes versus plurality,” said Rob Richie, executive director of the nonprofit organization FairVote. “We feel quite comfortable saying it works.”

And we haven’t seen the last of ranked-choice voting in the Democratic contest: Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming will use it for their 2020 primary elections.

Loser: Culinary Union Local 226

The powerful labor union, which represents 60,000 people in Nevada’s hospitality industry, didn’t technically endorse any candidate, and so it technically did not back a loser.

But the union’s leaders made their displeasure with Sanders’s Medicare-for-all plan — and his most zealous supporters — known. Their Nevada workers benefit from high-level health care, including their own clinic, and numerous reporters have talked to union members who are worried about losing that health care if their insurance plan is eliminated. (Overall, union members are more mixed on Medicare-for-all than Democrats generally.)

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Workers who caucused for Sanders said they liked their union insurance plan, according to BuzzFeed News. But they worried about relatives and friends who could lose their jobs:

Some workers who spoke to BuzzFeed News said they support Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal, even though they appreciate the union health care they have, because they have friends and relatives who don’t have union health care and worry about what would happen if they lost their jobs.

The way the union blasted Sanders’s plan while softening their language when describing Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare-for-all plan made pretty clear which way it wanted the primary to go. The union’s leaders picked the fight with Sanders quite publicly, with the news of their anti-M4A literature breaking on the night of Sanders’s New Hampshire win.

But Sanders won the state handily. Moreover, exit polls found that Democratic caucus-goers overwhelmingly support a single-payer program that eliminates private insurance: about 6 in 10, according to the Washington Post. It looked like Sanders was beating union leadership on their own turf.

Winner: Medicare-for-all

Again, 6 in 10 Nevada caucus-goers told pollsters they supported eliminating private insurance for good and replacing it with government health insurance. And the candidate who has married his brand to Medicare-for-all was winning caucuses in casinos with union workers, after that union’s leaders made their opposition to the plan abundantly clear.

It’s still an open question how Sanders, and Medicare-for-all, would fare in a general election against President Trump or how “electable” the candidate and his plan ultimately are. But the issue is not slowing Sanders down at all among Democratic primary voters.

Disinfection workers wearing protective gears and prepare to disinfect against the novel coronavirus in Daerim Central Market, a neighbourhood with one of the largest Chinese population on February 05, 2020 in Seoul, South Korea. | Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

One Covid-19 patient attended Shincheonji Church of Jesus services while she nursed a fever.

There’s been a rapid spike in coronavirus disease, or Covid-19, cases in South Korea, and about half of the 433 confirmed cases are linked to a secretive religious group often viewed with suspicion by more traditional religious sects.

At least 182 Covid-19 cases have come from the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in the city of Daegu, which is the fourth-largest in the country. The group itself is often considered a cult in South Korea by mainstream churches: it was founded in 1984 by Lee Man-hee, who claims he is the second coming of Jesus.

Lee teaches he is the only person who can interpret the Bible and promises to take 144,000 people to heaven with him on the Day of Judgement. Despite its unorthodox background, the church boasts at least 150,000 members.

There is growing concern the current number of confirmed cases in South Korea — already nearly eight times what it was early last week — will rise. Currently, 6,037 people being tested, and more than 1,250 church members have reported potential Covid-19 symptoms.

The church is at the center of scrutiny in large part because several of these confirmed cases can be traced back to one person: Patient no. 31, a 61-year-old woman who is a devout follower of Shincheonji.

The woman first checked in to a hospital following a small car accident. On the fourth day of her stay, she developed a fever, but refused to get checked for the virus because she hadn’t traveled abroad or been in contact with anyone contaminated. She was finally tested on Monday, and on Tuesday she received positive results. Up until that point, she had slipped out of the hospital at least four times to attend services that attracted up to 1,000 people.

Shincheonji’s method of worshipping during these services could have contributed to the spread of the virus among its congregation, according to the Korea Center for Disease Control. Members are expected to kneel in tight rows and aren’t allowed to cover their faces with items like glasses or face masks.

After patient no. 31’s case went public, church members reportedly received social media messages that encouraged them to continue evangelical work in small groups and to deny their affiliation to the church if public health officials asked.

The church, however, later denounced these messages, claiming they didn’t come from the group’s leadership and that the church member behind the messages had been punished. Church leaders also said that they’ve been fully cooperating with the government’s quarantine efforts, and have closed all of their 74 sanctuaries across the country, providing worship services online instead. In a message to his worshippers, Lee encouraged members to adhere to government instructions and avoid gathering in groups.

“This disease outbreak is the work of the devil, which is hellbent on stopping the rapid growth of the Shincheonji,” he wrote.

Despite these instructions, government officials have faced difficulty in discovering the whereabouts of about 700 Shincheonji members who have yet to be tested for the virus, according to The New York Times. Many members, the Times notes, work to keep their affiliation with the church secret due to negative connotations that surround the organization.

The government is also struggling to figure out how patient no. 31 contracted the virus, though KCDC Director Jung Eun-kyeong acknowledged that the church had invited Koreans from northeastern China to South Korea as part of their evangelical work. She said they were also looking into reports that the organization had opened a church in Wuhan — the epicenter of the disease — although the group has erased all references of it from their website.

The government is taking drastic measures in response to the surge in cases

The rapid rise of confirmed cases in the mere span of a week has led to deep concern among residents of Daegu: Public spaces, such as parks, movie theaters, and stores, are reportedly empty as people avoid them in fear of getting ill.

In response, the government has decided to close thousands of community centers and daycare facilities across the country. The government’s most drastic measure, however, might be the ban on political rallies outdoors — a surprising move considering how such rallies are a common part of daily life in Seoul. Prime Minister Chung Sye-Kyun also discouraged organized religious activities for the near future.

“In accordance with law and principles, the government will sternly deal with acts that interfere with quarantine efforts, illegal hoarding of medical goods and acts that spark uneasiness through massive rallies,” Chung said, according to Korea Times.

However, this public announcement hasn’t done much to stop large public gatherings. Several conservative groups continued to hold political rallies in Gwanghwamoon on Saturday — which is considered the center of all political activism in Seoul and has hosted demonstrations daily — to call for the resignation of President Moon Jae-in (although to be clear, these conservative groups have tried to push the liberal president out of the office even before the Covid-19 began to spread).

The demonstrations reflect scenes that health officials remain particularly worried about and that Chung’s announcement was meant to minimize: elderly people in close proximity together outdoors. Under city law, the organizers of rallies could be fined up to about $2,500.

The ban on public gatherings comes as the government works to limit the spread of Covid-19 among another population that lives in close quarters: There are currently at least three confirmed cases — one each from the army, marines, and air force — in the country’s 600,000-member military. All three servicepeople either recently visited or were stationed in Daegu.

In response, the military launched a mass quarantine of all soldiers who were in contact with the three sick troops, and has announced it will also shut down all vacations and visits indefinitely.

The effort is part of the government’s strategy for fighting Covid-19 on a new front, now that it’s rapidly spread throughout the nation Chung said: “Our efforts until now had been focused on blocking the illness from entering the country. ... But we will now shift the focus on preventing the illness from spreading further in local communities.”

Friday morning, impeached president Donald Trump tweeted out an ALL CAPS edict: "If our formally targeted farmers need additional aid until such time as the trade deals with China, Mexico, Canada and others fully kick in, that aid will be provided by the federal government, paid for out of the massive tariff money coming into the USA!" Except that it was, again, in all caps.

Problem number 1: he still doesn't understand how tariffs work. The massive tariff money isn't coming into the U.S., it is being paid by U.S. taxpayers in the form of higher prices for the things we are buying. Problem number 2: his Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has said, as recently as Thursday no new farmer subsidies. "I would not anticipate" another round of aid Perdue said at USDA's annual Agricultural Outlook Forum in Arlington, Virginia. He said that farmers have "got to farm for the market and what it's telling them and what their capabilities are from a production perspective."

Last month, Perdue said that Phase 1 of the China trade deal was set to kick in and that would mean more purchases of U.S. agricultural products by China soon. Thus, there would be no need for another round of aid to farmers. "If China is going to achieve that, and we believe they are, we think they have to buy earlier than the traditional export season from the United States," he told the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention. But that was before the coronavirus outbreak and the apparent economic hit China is taking as a result.

The government has already targeted $28 billion in aid to agriculture, more than the auto bailout under President Obama, to try to blunt the damage done by Trump's trade policies. The farm groups all expect to see more, but are somewhat surprised that he's trotting it out this early, and right on the heels of Perdue's denials. "Farmers are no dummies. They've seen this get rolled out the past two years, programs invented out of whole cloth," Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, told the Washington Post. "The president is going to do whatever he can to appease the farmers because it’s an election year. The only surprise here is the timing."

After two beloved gay teachers were apparently forced out of their jobs at a Catholic high school, a spokesman for the Seattle Archdiocese claimed that “no one requested their resignation — no one.”

Not only was the spokesman’s statement a lie, but it also reportedly violated the terms of a confidentiality agreement between the archdiocese and the teachers, freeing their attorney to reveal the truth.

And that is precisely what the attorney did, telling KUOW on Thursday that the archdiocese “wanted their keys and wanted them to be gone.”

The resignation of the teachers, Paul Danforth and Michelle Beattie, made national headlines, and sparked massive protests led by students at Kennedy Catholic High School in Burien, Wash. Both Danforth and Beattie had recently become engaged to their partners, which led to the archdiocese’s decision.

“Ultimately, this has been looming over them since November,” said their attorney, Shannon McMinimee. “So while it may have felt very abrupt to the students and staff at Kennedy, Paul and Michelle had been going to work every day for three months, not knowing if they’d be fired the next day.”

McMinimee added that “it was made clear to them from the beginning that once they were honest about being engaged and gay, that their employment was no longer compatible with Kennedy Catholic.”

In the wake of McMinimee’s comments, the archdiocese finally came clean.

“Those who teach in our schools are required to uphold our teaching in the classroom and to model it in their personal lives,” Archbishop Paul Etienne said in a statement. “We recognize and support the right of each individual to make choices. We also understand that some choices have particular consequences for those who represent the church in an official capacity.”

Mike Prato, president of Kennedy Catholic, also admitted to his role in the sinister plot.

“I wanted to make sure [Beattie and Danforth] felt supported, and so we discussed several options including the possibility of finishing out the school year,” Prato said. “We gave them the option to select the date they wanted to resign, and they indicated they wished to resign prior to the winter break in February. We worked with them to arrive at a mutually agreeable transition plan and financial package to assure they would be supported in their transition.”

McMinimee says Danforth and Beattie have no plans to take legal action.

“They hope that this sparks a greater discussion of change with respect to, how is the diocese going to enforce these provisions?” she said. “Are they only going to enforce them against people who are in same-sex relationships? Or are they going to consider other options, including having teaching contracts that are not the same as ministerial contracts?”

The post Catholic Bishop Admits to Forcing Out Beloved Gay Teachers, After Lying About It appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Impeached President Donald Trump is becoming increasingly Stalinesque in his purges of national security officials trying to stop Russia's election interference. He is being aided in this by House Republicans, who immediately informed Trump that Democratic House members had been told of those efforts, so he could try to shut that down.

Meanwhile, Moscow Mitch McConnell is still trotting out his minions to make sure that no election security bills passed by the House advance on the Senate floor. The threat is right there in front of us, and whatever the House Intelligence Committee was informed about last week was so incendiary that it set Trump off on his purge spree. What we do know is this: Moscow is interfering on Trump’s behalf again, and Senate Majority Leader McConnell will not do anything about it.

He's holding the nation hostage. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as majority leader.

How much more is known by Congress isn't clear, but Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has heard enough in the Senate Intelligence Committee to be horrified. "I'm not going to get into anything classified, but I'll tell your readers point-blank that as of today, what we will see in terms of foreign interference in 2020 is going to make 2016 look like small potatoes," he told Fast Company's Mark Sullivan. "This is a national security issue! If we were being attacked by the Russians or any other superpower, we wouldn't say, 'Let's send the county law enforcement folks,' even as we so appreciate them and think they're terrific."

Yet that's what McConnell is saying. Congress passed out some more money to state and local governments for election security, but McConnell is refusing legislation to make sure that they spend it in ways that will really lock down their systems. He’s refusing legislation that puts Russia on notice of sanctions for continuing to do it. He's refusing to acknowledge publicly that Russia IS interfering in the 2020 election.

It's hard to come to any conclusion other than McConnell is welcoming Russian interference because he's counting on it to keep the White House and Senate under Republican control.

Under intense pressure from Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic rivals, Michael Bloomberg announced Friday that he is willing to release women who’ve accused him of harassment from non-disclosure agreements.

Bloomberg LP has identified 3 NDAs signed over the past 30+ years with women to address complaints about comments they said I had made.

If any of them want to be released from their NDAs, they should contact the company and they'll be given a release. https://t.co/bO9JpvSx1T

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 21, 2020

“I’ve had the company go back over its record and they’ve identified 3 NDAs that we signed over the past 30-plus years with women to address complaints about comments they said I had made,” Bloomberg wrote in a statement. “If any of them want to be released from their NDA so that they can talk about those allegations, they should contact the company and they’ll be given a release. I’ve done a lot of reflecting on this issue over the past few days and I’ve decided that for as long as I’m running the company, we won’t offer confidentiality agreements to resolve claims of sexual harassment or misconduct going forward.

“I recognize that NDAs, particularly when they are used in the context of sexual harassment and sexual assault, promote a culture of silence in the workplace and contribute to a culture of women not feeling safe or supported. It is imperative that when problems occur, workplaces not only address the specific incidents, but the culture and practices that led to those incidents. And then leaders must act.”

"I used to teach contract law. And I thought I would make this easy."

Elizabeth Warren opened her #cnntownhall by reading aloud a document to release people from Michael Bloomberg's nondisclosure agreements https://t.co/j8nidJ0nTL pic.twitter.com/eHMBjI4qyM

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) February 21, 2020

During Wednesday’s Democratic debate and at a CNN Town Hall on Thursday, Warren slammed Bloomberg over the non-disclosure agreements. At the town hall, she even presented a proposed contract that Bloomberg could sign to allow the women to tell their stories.

.@ewarren annihilates Bloomberg over his NDAs for his own sexist comments #DemDebate #PresidentWarren pic.twitter.com/uYWibBpG3I

— Alexis Goldstein (@alexisgoldstein) February 20, 2020

“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians.’ And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg,” Warren said during the debate. “Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.

“This not just a question of the mayor’s character. This is also a question about electability,” Warren said. “We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who-knows-how-many nondisclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against. That’s not what we do as Democrats.”

Reactions from Twitter below.

Note that he is limiting this number and this release to NDAs specifically about “comments they said I had made.” This is not at all addressing his company’s use of NDAs more broadly relating to sexual harassment or gender discrimination or giving any idea of how many there are. https://t.co/K3gTrt947d

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) February 21, 2020

Bloomberg finds only 3 NDAs about Bloomberg from an internal review conducted by… Bloomberg LP https://t.co/le95tsAFc1

— Scott Stedman (@ScottMStedman) February 21, 2020

Over to you, @RealDonaldTrump! Will you and your Campaign do the same and release women like me who are forbidden from speaking and sued for millions? https://t.co/oZcdrIcHVo

— A.J. Delgado (@AJDelgado13) February 21, 2020

The post Bloomberg Offers to Release Three Women from Non-Disclosure Agreements appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Nah, we're not doing this.

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Given its traditional missions, which include subverting democracy around the world and providing U.S. leaders with unreliable intelligence analysis, it's understandable that the Central Intelligence Agency would be among our less transparent federal agencies. From a report: Now, though, it's gripping even more tightly to inconsequential information about what it gets up to than the ultra-secretive National Security Agency -- and for no evident reason. Last year, VICE filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for any Slack domains in use by the CIA. The NSA, responding to a similar request, admitted that it had records responsive to the request -- that the agency uses the demonic chat app, in other words -- but said it couldn't release them because they were a state secret. Recently, the CIA replied to our request by saying this: "CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is itself currently and properly classified." In its response to our request, the CIA cited broad provisions in federal law that allow it to keep all sorts of information from the public by claiming it has to do with "intelligence sources and methods," which can mean anything from the identity of a spy in a foreign leader's inner circle to the podcasts a random bureaucrat listens to while driving to work. The agency is within its rights to do this, but it's just another in a long list of examples of why federal classification laws should be changed to give more weight to the public's right to get answers to even stupid questions relative to the right of public employees to keep what they do and how they do it entirely secret.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced longtime Trump adviser and Nixon-era dirty trickster Roger Stone to 40 months in prison for his conviction on seven counts, including perjury and obstruction. However, Stone hasn’t gone directly to jail. Instead, he’s gone straight to appeal, where some other judge will have to review the overwhelming evidence—including Stone threatening to kill a witness’ dog.

The day ended with Stone strolling out with a sentence exactly half of what the Department of Justice had been recommending a month ago. That may have been inevitable, as Jackson made it clear that she regarded the sentencing guidelines for these white-collar crimes to be too high. But that didn’t stop several moments of the hearing from demonstrating just what it means when the Justice Department declares that it just doesn’t give a #$@! about justice.

Coming into the hearing, Jackson found herself in possession of two different sentencing proposals from the DOJ. One was the proposal that had been assembled by the team of U.S. attorneys who had prosecuted the cases from the beginning. That proposal looked at the 27 years maximum sentence that went with Stone’s charges, considered all the factors—including the way he had repeatedly lied to investigators and attempted to disrupt the court proceedings—and determined that an appropriate sentence was between seven and nine years.

The second proposal was undoubtedly the personal work of Attorney General William Barr, who inserted himself into the case specifically because it was “of interest” to Donald Trump. Which, if anything, should have been a sign that Barr should stay far away. However, Barr’s version of the proposal downplayed Stone’s crimes, ignored his actions since the start of the case as well as the repeat nature of his offenses, and ended up with no proposed sentence at all. Barr didn’t quite go to the point of agreeing with Stone’s proposals that he deserved no punishment at all, but it was the next best thing.

With the resignation of all four of the U.S. attorneys who wrote the first proposal, defending the government’s position at the sentencing hearing was left up to newly appointed prosecutor John Crabb. It was also Crabb whose signature was at the bottom of the second proposal, which only made it that much stranger that in Crabb’s appearance in the courtroom, he frequently pointed away from the proposal carrying his signature and told Jackson that she should really look at what the original attorneys had written. This was particularly true after Jackson went through part of the second version and declared that it “made no sense.” 

Crabb also pushed for several of the enhancements—additional years of potential sentence stemming from the circumstances of the offenses—even though those enhancements were not included in the draft proposal that he had signed. But when push came to shove at the end of the morning, Crabb didn’t defend the sentence put forward by the prosecution team. Instead, he fell back on the blandest possible view of the recommendation from Barr—that the Justice Department was simply throwing up its hands and leaving the decision to Jackson.

That led to genuinely bizarre exchanges as Jackson attempted to extract from Crabb why the Justice Department had changed its position to no position, and exactly who had authored those changes.

Jackson: You signed it. Did you write it?

Crabb: I’m not at liberty to discuss the internal deliberations in DOJ.

Jackson: Were you directed to write it by someone else?

Crabb: I can’t answer.

So a U.S. attorney stood in front of a federal judge to say that, even though his name was attached to a sentencing proposal in a high-profile case, he would not tell the judge who had actually authored that proposal. And he would not explain why changes had been made from the original proposal.

In another instance, reported by The Washington Post, Jackson seemed to give up on getting an actual answer from Crabb. And her commentary was blazing. Said the judge, “I fear that you know less about this case than possibly anybody else in the courtroom. What is the government’s position today?” Crabb bumbled through a not-at-all-reassuring explanation that there had been a “miscommunication” between the prosecution team and Barr over what was “appropriate” in the eyes of the attorney general.

“You know less about this case than possibly anybody else in the courtroom” is not exactly the kind of statement that a federal judge usually throws at a U.S. attorney. But then, Jackson’s disgust with the last-second antics of Barr—and the matching demands from Trump—was palpable.

When Jackson finished her announcement of the sentence by saying, “The truth still exists. The truth still matters,” she was doing more than simply upholding justice. Because she took those lines from the closing statement of the original prosecution team. It was another message to Barr and Trump that Judge Amy Berman Jackson was aware of exactly what they were doing—and how far it was from the truth.

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