James.galbraith

Impeached president Donald Trump has replaced the former acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire with another acting truly atrocious selection who will also only be in the job as an acting DNI. That's because he is so bad and so unqualified for the job that he couldn't be confirmed even by Mitch McConnell's Republicans. That and Trump just likes to have unqualified temps who are loyal only to him running things.

A Washington Post analysis highlights the churn in Trump's administration, and the fact that there hasn't been a permanent DNI in more than six months. According to the Post, "Trump has kept acting officials in charge of top agencies and departments so much that they've accounted for 1 out of every 9 days in those positions." That means that in the 22 cabinet-level jobs there have been so many acting officials that they've served a combined 2,736 days, which amounts to seven years. That means that in three years' time, Trump "has had acting officials serve more than three times as much as did [President] Obama" did in eight years.

That's without counting the Obama officials that held the jobs on a temporary basis at the beginning of Trump's term for the sake of continuity. There have been three acting directors of Homeland Security, for a combined 440 days. Trump hasn't designated a permanent nominee. At the Small Business Administration, there's been an acting director for 277 days. At the Environmental Protection Agency, 234 days. At the Department of Defense, there has been an acting director for 203 days. The DNI has been acting now for 188 days, and will continue in that capacity under the odious Richard Grenell for the foreseeable future.

In previous administrations, acting directors have just been in place while a confirmation process for a permanent administrator was completed, and people generally left office because of personal and professional reasons. Not because a would-be dictator declared "off with their heads." Trump has said "I like acting because I can move so quickly,. […] It gives me more flexibility." More like it keeps things chaotic, and it keeps the people working for him freaked out and, in his warped mind, loyal.

New revelations about Trump and Russian interference demand an aggressive response.

Trump mimics a choking motion during his rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Thursday. | Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

It was one of his pettiest displays yet.

President Donald Trump devoted an inordinate amount of time during his rally on Thursday in Colorado Springs to complaining about a Fox News segment that few of the attendees were likely to have seen, featuring commentary from a journalist most of them had probably never heard of.

The roughly 20-minute display was remarkably petty — and it wasn’t the only one of that sort Trump made in Colorado Springs. But it was also an illustration of the complete, blind loyalty that Trump expects from Fox News.

At issue was commentary made earlier in the day on Neil Cavuto’s show by A.B. Stoddard, who works as an associate editor at the political news and polling aggregation outlet RealClearPolitics. Stoddard panned Mike Bloomberg’s performance in Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate, but did so by taking a shot at Trump.

“I think that Donald Trump had disastrous debate performances. Many answers were so cringeworthy you just couldn’t even believe he was still standing on the stage — and he’s president,” she said — the implication being that despite Bloomberg’s rough night, his campaign isn’t over yet, just like Trump’s wasn’t after his bad showings.

Even though he’s traveling in Nevada, Arizona, and California this week, Trump apparently saw Stoddard’s comments and lashed out at everyone involved — including former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who now serves on Fox Corporation’s board.

“Could somebody at @foxnews please explain to Trump hater A.B. Stoddard (zero talent!) and @TeamCavuto, that I won every one of my debates, from beginning to end,” the president tweeted. “Check the polls taken immediately after the debates. The debates got me elected. Must be Fox Board Member Paul Ryan!”

Trump was still seething hours later. Minutes into his rally in Colorado Springs, he brought up Fox News and denigrated Cavuto, saying “nobody likes him.” He falsely claimed Cavuto has “taken” the place of former Fox News afternoon host Shepard Smith (though he seemed unable to remember Smith’s name), then alluded to the segment with Stoddard (though he couldn’t seem to remember her name either) and said, “wait a minute — I won every debate. It’s true.”

“I said, ‘Nobody’s allowed to do that. You can’t do that.’ We’re at enough of a disadvantage with the fake news. You know, they make up 90 percent of the stories,” continued Trump, as his fans took the cue to start booing the assembled media.

But that wasn’t all. Trump spent much of the next 15 minutes harping on the segment and trying to debunk Stoddard’s claim about him not doing well in the debates by reading off random polls from 2016.

“Look at this — ‘Trump 70 percent,’ next one is 18 percent, next one is 7, 4, 3, 3, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1,” Trump read off a sheet of paper, before tossing it away. “‘Trump didn’t do well in the debates!’ See — they’re fake news.”

By the end of his rant, Trump was conflating various conspiracy theories, blending a number of them into a single incoherent attack on his perceived enemies.

“They want to take you out. They want to change the results. They got caught spying — let’s say it like it is, right? — they got caught spying on our election, fake news. Hey, fake news: take your cameras for a change, and show them the room, and show them behind you,” Trump said.

The point Trump was trying to make was twofold: Polls indicate his debate performances were actually good (this is not true), and the highest-rated shows on Fox are ones that basically don’t allow hosts or guests to be critical of him.

But for someone who was unaware of the backstory, the president’s remarks must have sounded like nonsensical ramblings. Even for someone who was, the extended meltdown over a 30-second clip of commentary on a relatively obscure afternoon show was bizarre.

Trump attacked everything from Obama to the Oscars

The fight with Cavuto and Stoddard wasn’t the only one Trump picked with an unlikely target during his rally on Thursday. He also took umbrage at the fact that the movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars, Parasite, was produced in South Korea.

“By the way, how bad were the Academy Awards this year?” Trump asked, prompting his fans to (again) break out in boos. “And the winner is a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade, on top of that they give them the best movie of the year?”

“Let’s get Gone With the Wind. Can we get, like, Gone With the Wind back, please?” Trump continued. (Parasite’s US distributor, Neon, shot back at Trump’s comments with a tweet about the subtitled film, saying, “Understandable, he can’t read.”)

Trump then took aim at Brad Pitt for a quip he made at the Oscars criticizing Senate Republicans for their farcical approach to Trump’s impeachment trial.

“And then you have Brad Pitt — I was never a big fan of his — he got up, said a little wise guy statement,” Trump said. “Little wise guy. He’s a little wise guy.”

Trump followed that up by goading his fans into booing teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg because she was chosen above Trump as Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Trump called for Barack Obama to be impeached (“we should impeach him!”) while also taking credit for legislation Obama signed into law. And then he closed things out by highlighting that his following shares many characteristics with cults.

“CNN went up to a woman — ‘What does it take for you to leave the president?’ — ‘I’m not leaving him!’” Trump said, paraphrasing a conversation he saw on TV. “‘Would you stay if he shot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue?’ And the woman looks — ‘Well, it depends why he shot him!’”

Sometimes these rallies make you want to laugh. Sometimes they make you want to cry. Sometimes both.

Though much of what Trump said and did in Colorado Springs was hard to take seriously, some of it was hard not to.

Trump responded to “lock her up!” chants by suggesting Hillary Clinton would have been executed if she were a Republican. He sensationalized local crime stories to demonize undocumented immigrants. He joked about serving more than two terms in office, lied about his polling in Colorado, and once again displayed woeful ignorance about American history and renewable energy (among other topics).

The juxtaposition between Trump’s rally and the Democratic presidential debate that took place the night before brought the stakes of the 2020 election into stark relief. On one side is a group of politicians that, despite their flaws, seem to be at least willing to engage in discussions about the important issues affecting people. On the other side is an incumbent who devotes more emotional energy to policing Fox News’s coverage of him and getting aggrieved over slights from celebrities than he does to anything else.

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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.

The story has come out in pieces over the last two days, but those pieces are slotting into place with sickening clarity: Last week, a member of the intelligence community testified before the House Intelligence Committee that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to support Donald Trump. Republican representatives rushed to the White House in concern, not about the interference, but about the fact that Democrats knew about it. And Trump then responded by  purging the intelligence community of anyone who was trying to combat the interference.

The result is that not only is Russia known to be interfering in support of Trump, but Republicans are openly acting to support that interference. And the intelligence community is being flipped from an instrument meant to protect the nation into one that exists entirely to support Trump.

Hundreds of times, maybe thousands, Republicans, and even some Democrats, have sounded the same refrain when Trump removed some adviser, ambassador, official, U. S. attorney, or general. “Donald Trump deserves someone he can trust as his ...“ … whatever. In fact, Donald Trump Jr. made exactly that statement about incoming director of national intelligence Richard Grenell on Wednesday evening, after Trump had exiled the current acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, for the crime of telling Congress what it is legally required to know.

That formula, the one that starts with “Trump deserves …,” is a recipe for disaster. And that disaster has already arrived.

Within weeks of occupying the White House, Trump put those people he “deserved” in charge of the EPA and the Interior Department, in charge of Energy and ICE. Trump got exactly what he needed to please the crowds at his rallies. The nation got national monuments destroyed, public lands given away, and environmental protections slashed. It also got parents being taken away in front of their kids, an ugly and useless wall being erected along the border, the destruction of the immigration policies that have defined America, and children in cages. That is what it means when Trump gets what he “deserves” and America doesn’t.

It took Trump longer to overcome the judiciary. From the moment he sat down in the Oval Office, the justice system has been a thorn in his side. Whether it was judges ruling against his travel ban, U.S. attorneys stubbornly continuing to investigate crimes committed by Trump’s company and friends, or even Trump loyalist Jeff Sessions stepping aside from the Russia investigation, the whole judiciary seemed to represent a limit on his authority. Then Trump got the attorney general he deserved. And the hundreds of new federal judges he deserved. And America got laws that protected Trump from charges, or investigation, or even mention in any criminal affair. 

There should have been a roadblock at the legislature, but despite all the efforts made in the House, the narrow Republican majority in the Senate had already made it abundantly clear that it was the Senate he deserves. Trump got a big tax cut—not just for “billionaires” in the abstract, but a huge reward for himself of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump got the judges he deserves, the Cabinet officers he deserves, the support for bombing and murder that he deserves, the voter suppression he deserves. And of course he got the impeachment trial strangled in its crib, just as he deserves.

Fresh off that endorsement of everything he deserves, Trump launched into full-on purge mode, clearing out the remaining members of every agency that thought they were there for something other than what Trump deserves. The State Department and the NSA, a second pass through the DOJ … giving Trump what he deserves.

Now he’s got what he deserves. He’s got an attorney general willing to set aside the law for Trump. He’s got a Republican Congress that is protecting him even if that means openly acting against the nation. He’s got an incoming DNI who knows nothing about intelligence … but knows that he is exactly what Trump deserves.

One more visit with Masha Gessen:

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.

Of course, the United States has much stronger institutions than Germany did in the 1930s, or Russia does today. Both Clinton and Obama in their speeches stressed the importance and strength of these institutions. The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.

Elections are also an institution. Their free and fair execution is just as dependent on the “good faith of all actors,” and not on Donald Trump getting what he “deserves.”

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Observer: If you like to cook but not to shop or plan your own meals, and if you weren't too hungry, and if you didn't like cooking for too many friends, then Blue Apron -- the startup delivering precisely measured, prepackaged amounts of just enough salmon, green beans, butter and lemon for one meal, no leftovers -- was for you. Exactly who it was that was both upwardly mobile to pay for this service while also having a barren kitchen, nobody really knew -- but by the divine math of Silicon Valley gamblers, your existence made this an idea worth several billion dollars and potent enough to "disrupt" the grocery business. People actually believed this. Or they did until Jeff Bezos and Amazon went shopping and bought out Whole Foods. Or until HelloFresh launched. Or until Blue Apron spent millions on packaging and shipping, as well as marketing, literally gifting away boxes of neatly assorted ingredients to millennials who never ordered another box. All this conspired to, one-by-one, wreck Blue Apron's IPO, crater stock prices to all-time list lows, kick founders out of company leadership and now, at last, the seemingly undeniable, ultimate doom of the company. After losing another $23.7 million in the last three months of 2019, Blue Apron is laying off 240 workers and shutting down the shop at its Arlington, Texas warehouse location. Blue Apron will keep, for now, its California and New York assembly-and-distribution shops, while leaders ponder peddling what's left at a paltry $50 million price tag. Meanwhile, customers continue to desert Blue Apron, down to 351,000 in the last quarter of 2019, from 557,000 the year before. Selling off Blue Apron that low would mean a loss in the neighborhood of $143 million for Blue Apron's capital investors, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs. That hurts, but as usual, retail investors took the worst hit. Stock-market playing rubes, who bought in when Blue Apron went public at $11 a share, have lost more than 80% on their investment -- and that represents a recovery. Shares were trading for $3.60 at the close on Wednesday, up from 2018 when Blue Apron was worth less than a dollar. There's no other analysis than this: Blue Apron was one of the biggest-ever Silicon Valley catastrophes, a mix of hubris, unrealistic expectations, a misunderstanding of how people exist in the world -- and, Amazon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Imagine your kindergartner comes home in tears because a group of other kindergartners surrounded her, shouting horrible things like “Go back to Mexico!” and “Get ready to be deported.” Imagine your middle-schooler gets off the school bus in the afternoon and won’t speak to you or anyone else. Later, he tells you that kids he thought were his friends formed a “wall” in the hallway by linking their arms together and wouldn’t let him near his locker to get his books. Why? Because he wasn’t white, the boys said. Maybe your son, whom you proudly sent off to a new school that morning, all nervous but excited, discovered that nobody would sit beside him in class because you’d unwittingly moved to “Trump Country.” Imagine you’re a student forced to watch his own mother beaten unconscious by a 13-year-old who had told you, just the previous day, to “go back behind the wall.”

Then imagine what it must be like to realize that these foul acts were instigated by the president of the United States. The same president your next-door neighbors voted for. The same neighbors who wave to you as they blithely stroll down their driveway in the morning to pick up the paper.

A recent Washington Post investigation—artfully titled, “Trump’s words, bullied kids, scarred schools”—will make you cry, or make you furious. It’s no revelation that Donald Trump deals in race-baiting and demonization of people of color, immigrants, people of non-Christian faith, and more. The Post examined just how deeply Trump’s rhetoric—demonstrated most callously before crowds of baying supporters—has infected our nation’s schools. Since Trump-related bullying has never been specifically surveyed before, the Post relied on a review of publicly reported news stories. It found a systemic shift in the language that bullies now use to target children at school, noting “kids as young as six mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.” Since the start of the school year in 2016, the Post has found 300 reported instances in which “Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies, and even his last name” have been hurled by children at other children. The vast majority of these attacks were directed against Hispanic, African American, and Muslim children; a small proportion of children have also been attacked for supporting Trump.

The Post’s review revealed that, while children were being victimized because they support Donald Trump, the number of kids who’ve been bullied, beaten up and harassed by children influenced by Trump outnumber his supporters by a factor of seven to one. In an ideal world, no kid should be bullied. Ever. The reality? If someone wasn’t constantly, deliberately, and maliciously modeling racist and xenophobic behavior on the news on a near-daily basis, none of these kids would have suffered the torment that they are all being put through in this way. This dangerous trend is solely on Donald Trump, and no one else.

The many, many examples culled by the Post document the Trump-inspired transformation of even very young children into seething repositories of newly minted hate. They parrot Trump’s campaign rhetoric in the faces of their classmates. They chant racist slogans at school sporting events, cursing at, heckling, or singling out kids to be ostracized because of their skin color or ethnic background. One of the most tragic aspects of this—and there are a lot of tragic aspects—is that most if not all of these kids are too young to know exactly what they are doing and saying. Most are too young to have any inkling of the harm they are inflicting, both on their victims and, ultimately, on themselves.

One girl from rural Idaho took to Twitter to criticize what she saw as hypocritical Trump supporters who demonize Mexicans but choose to vacation in Mexican resorts such as Cancun. When she arrived at school the next day, Ashanty Bonilla, then 16, immediately found herself surrounded by boys she had known most of her childhood calling her a “fucking Mexican” and an “illegal.” Both African American and Mexican American, Bonilla had struggled for years to fit in in her 94% white hometown. After some of the same boys defaced her car, even tying it to another car with a rope, Bonilla stopped attending classes. She began to have migraines and panic attacks. Ultimately, she swallowed a bottle of painkillers and was rushed to a hospital in Spokane, over 100 miles away. She survived, but now sees a therapist to cope with the experience.

Bonilla understands why it happened. “It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected. They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it ... Why can’t they?”

Sporting events in particular provide fertile ground for Trump-inspired hate speech. The Post article documents numerous instances of slurs being chanted by groups of children and aimed at children of color on opposing teams—including one group of African American varsity volleyball players who were called “monkeys” and urged to “go back where [they] came from.” These slurs were delivered after Trump punched out one of his tweets attacking African American and Hispanic congresswomen in similar language.

The problem isn’t limited to students. Some teachers are channeling and justifying their own pathological insecurities through Trump as well. One day after Trump won the election, a Florida high school sophomore and two friends were told by a teacher that Trump would send them “back to Africa.“ Also shortly after the election, a physical education teacher threatened one of his students, saying Trump would soon deport him. In Texas, a school employee told a Latino student that Trump was “working on a law” to deport him, citing his “mom’s status.” The student was a U.S. citizen.

A Fort Worth, Texas, teacher, Georgia Clark, ordered her black and Latino students to sit in the back of her classroom and railed against immigrants and the supposed “violence” they bring to this country; Clark also said that she would call the FBI to deport them. She was ultimately fired for tweeting an appeal to Trump himself asking that he help her deport undocumented immigrants from Fort Worth schools. Clark is appealing the decision and was reinstated on what the school district called “procedural” grounds; as of December, the Fort Worth ISD planned to appeal her reinstatement. Meanwhile, at least one student was forced to switch schools after reporting Clark’s behavior.

American schools are now averaging two Trump-inspired hate incidents per week, again, based solely on public reporting. As the Post acknowledges, this likely represents only a tiny fraction of actual events. Unreported instances, it says, are far, far more numerous than that already-shocking number would indicate, because many kids don’t want to admit to being victimized, and many parents don’t want to publicize it. Instead, these students are forced to cope with the hate instigated by Trump and doubtlessly amplified by his Fox News-addicted supporters. Significantly, the Post article does not include the spread of slurs and racial epithets that kids are now spewing at people of color on a daily basis without mentioning the name of the president; for the most part, these incidents, which cannot be directly linked to Trump, are not publicized as much.

Those who attend Trump’s rallies and cheer and guffaw as he demonizes Muslims and people of color probably never consider (or care about) the influence this language has on children, particularly when repeated by parents or even teachers. Nor do these red-hatted rally attendees likely stop to think about how this coarse hate speech is imitated and then weaponized on social media, which is now used by the majority of school-age children.

Of course, these children are not learning to inflict this type of hate speech in a vacuum. It’s more than obvious that they are taking their cues not only from direct exposure to “presidential” rhetoric, but from their parents as well. The Post notes that efforts are being made at schools across the nation to impress upon children that Trumpian speech is not okay, that it’s not normal, and that all students are entitled to the same respect and decency that they would insist upon for themselves. For some schools, this has resulted in an opportunity to step up their diversity and inclusion efforts, even as they struggle to protect students from the new White House-inspired bullying and abuse.  Still, one school administrator describes the Trump hate speech as a something warranting nearly a ”crisis” response, as the corrosive bigotry inflicted by this abominable president continues to infect the most vulnerable and impressionable members of our society.

There is nothing quite as painful in life as being bullied as a child, and there is nothing more despicable than a president whose heedless rhetoric has made the agony of bullying even worse by validating hate. This kind of cruelty has no business in the Oval Office, but there may be a special place in hell reserved for such a monstrous person. And if there isn’t, there should be.

em1ly writes: Spin bike maker Flywheel lost a patent lawsuit to rival company Peloton, announcing yesterday that it's shutting down. Motherboard uncovered some wild corporate espionage in the court documents: "At some point before the launch of FLY Anywhere, according to Peloton's lawyers, Flywheel launched 'Project Magnum,' an attempt to 'obtain as MUCH secret intel on Peloton as we can,' according to an improperly redacted document Peloton filed in court. 'Project Magnum was not some extemporaneous side-project [...] but rather a concerted, widespread effort,' one of Peloton's filings adds. But Project Magnum was, apparently, more haphazard than spy operation. Flywheel created a Google Doc to 'create tabs with the functional areas of info so that the team know[s] to keep adding to it,' one of the documents reads. Much of the conspiracy seems to have taken place over email, judging by discovery that Peloton obtained. Someone at Flywheel named the project after the Magnum PI television series, one of the court documents adds, although the filing does not include the individual's name. The filings do not go into detail on how Flywheel apparently tried to obtain Peloton's secrets, but they do include contours of the project. In a message seemingly written by a former Flywheel CTO who now works at Facebook, he wrote 'Villency could be useful in providing insight related to Project Magnum.' Eric Villency, and his company Villency Design Group, designed the Peloton and SoulCycle stationary bikes..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The year was 2011 and Mayor Michael Bloomberg was speaking at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology conference when he explained his magic wand solution for public education. CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer reported that the billionaire thought cutting teaching staffs in half and paying that half more would be ideal.

“Education is very much, I’ve always thought, just like the real estate business. Real estate business, there are three things that matter: location, location, location is the old joke,” Bloomberg said. “Well in education, it is: quality of teacher, quality of teacher, quality of teacher. And I would, if I had the ability – which nobody does really – to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.”

As United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew pointed out, this would increase class sizes to around 70 kids in a New York City public school. Bloomberg also reportedly boasted of giving New York teachers a 105% raise since he took office—something that isn’t a real thing and did not happen.

But, not unlike his stop-and-frisk policy, Bloomberg continued to double down, and continued doubling down year after year declaring that New York public school teachers were getting almost 4% raises every year. As Chalkbeat explained, that “raise” was actually the increased annual costs New York City paid into teachers’ pensions and healthcare benefits. So, it’s not the kind of “raise” you see in your paycheck … because it isn’t a raise. Teachers in New York do see increases in their salary based on hard-fought union contracts with the city—something Bloomberg had nothing to do with.

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Now, Bloomberg’s position is one held by many charter school supporters as well as other business leaders. The idea is that teachers should be paid a lot more in order to attract the “best teachers,” and in order to do that, you need to get rid of most of the teachers because the reason our underfunded public school systems aren’t working as well as we want is because there are too many low quality teachers.

This is the worldview of people like Michael Bloomberg and Betsy DeVos. Scapegoating educators for systemic issues of inequality is a lot easier on their personal bottom lines than fixing real problems. To that end, Bloomberg famously stuck former publishing executive Cathie Black, who had zero background in education, into the top position atop the New York Board of Education. Black was known for running a “tight ship.” That’s business talk for getting a lot done with less money, which in turn is business talk for exploiting the people that work for you even more than usual. Black lasted about three months before her disaster of a tenure came to a close. Surprising, considering that famous education magazine Forbes said that if you read Black’s book Basic Black: Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life), you would know that she was perfect for the job.

Turns out, Forbes and Bloomberg understand how to run a school about as well as they understand the concept of living wages.

A Beyond Burger at a fast food restaurant in Berlin, Germany. | Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images

9 questions about meat alternatives you were too embarrassed to ask.

The last year has been an extraordinary one for a niche industry: alternative meats.

It started last spring. Impossible Foods announced partnerships with Burger King, Qdoba, and dozens of other restaurants and franchises. Their competitor Beyond Meat started selling at restaurants including Del Taco, Subway, and most recently KFC. Both companies started the year primarily selling burgers but have since launched new products — from Beyond’s ground beef to Impossible’s sausage to Beyond’s KFC chicken. In just one year, plant-based meat went from something very few Americans had heard of to something that 40% of us have tried.

These new deals have had the company’s valuations soaring. In May, Beyond Meat went public, initially selling its stock for $25. It’s presently trading around $120. Impossible Foods closed an additional $300 million in investor funding.

Meat alternatives are clearly having a moment — and it’s offering us a glimpse into a different future for meat. Every year, more than 9 billion animals in the US are raised and killed on factory farms. Our factory farm system has contributed to a range of problems, from increasing antibiotic resistance to the climate crisis. Proponents of meat alternatives say these meatless meats could help change that equation.

Let’s sort the hype from the reality. Here are nine questions you might have had about alternative meat products and their leap to the mainstream.

1) What are meat alternatives? Veggie burgers have been around for a while — are these new products any different?

Meat alternatives aren’t new. There have been veggie burgers available in grocery stores for a long time.

But the meatless meat products on the market today are different in one important way: An alternative meat, like a Beyond Meat burger or the Impossible Burger, is a product made from plants that is meant to taste like meat, be marketed to meat-eating customers, and replace some of those customers’ meat purchases. That’s what makes them different from veggie burgers, which have typically been aimed mostly at vegetarians.

There’s another kind of meat alternative on the horizon: so-called cell-based (or lab-grown, or cultured) meat products are made from real animal cells but are grown in a food production plant instead of taken from animals raised in captivity and slaughtered for consumption. These aren’t on the market yet — and some are skeptical that they’ll work out — but they are meat alternatives too, and they might be part of the big picture as we try to move away from relying on factory farming to supply the meat consumers want. (More on them below.)

Caroline Bushnell oversees retail research at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that works to promote meat alternatives. “Veggie burgers have been around for many decades,” she told me. “Plant-based meats are still just getting started. The next generation is really designed for meat eaters, so the stakes are higher for what the products need to deliver on. People really like the taste of meat. Instead of trying to convince them to eat a kale and quinoa bowl, why not try to make meat for them in a better way?”

The rise of meat alternatives was driven, researchers and marketing experts told me, by one realization: that alternative meats didn’t have to be a niche product just for vegans or vegetarians, who make up about 3 percent of the US population. There are lots of Americans who are meat eaters and always will be, but who are up for trying plant-based products as long as they’re tasty, cheap, and nutritious. Those consumers, not vegetarians and vegans, would be the target of the next generation of meat alternatives.

The teams behind meat alternatives work to ensure their products have the flavor, macronutrient balance, and cooking experience of meat. The Impossible Burger famously bleeds, thanks to a meat protein called heme, which the company produces from yeast.

The leading companies that produce meatless meat products have actually gone out of their way to make sure their products won’t be tarred as just for vegetarians. Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, for example, comes slathered in mayo — not vegan at all — and when I went to get an Impossible Burger at a San Francisco restaurant, nearly every selection paired it with bacon bits.

So that’s the big difference: Veggie burgers are a niche product targeted toward vegetarians. But the makers of meatless meat are betting they can find their way onto everyone’s plate.

2) Okay, but do they actually taste like meat?

Some of the leading meat alternatives on the market today are burgers, ground beef, and sausages from two companies: Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.

“Both companies have really led with taste,” Zak Weston, an analyst at the Good Food Institute, told me. Everyone agrees that taste will be the big make-or-break factor for these companies. Does their meat really, actually taste like meat?

Food reviewers have delivered mixed verdicts so far. Reviewers at Food & Wine loved the Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger, and were less impressed with more traditional veggie burgers. The Washington Post’s Tim Carman wrote, “the Impossible Whopper patty, all by itself, has more flavor than the meaty one,” though he noted that while you can’t tell the difference on the first bite, you can tell eventually.

Adam Rothbarth at Thrillist was less impressed, writing that his burger had been overcooked and as a result, “it’s very one-note in its flavor and texture ... the question shouldn’t be whether it tastes like a Whopper (it does), it should be whether it tastes good (not especially).”

It’s fair to say that we’re at the point where whether Beyond Meat or Impossible Meat taste like meat to a given person depends on that person, and the specifics they pay attention to in their food experience. It’s good enough for some, but not good enough for all — yet.

3) I’ve been hearing a lot about meatless meat lately. Why now?

Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have both grabbed a lot of headlines in the last year. Impossible scored a partnership with Burger King to offer meatless Whoppers. Burger King joined White Castle, which sells Impossible Foods sliders, and Carl’s Jr., which sells burgers from Impossible Foods’ competitor Beyond Meat. Del Taco announced it’ll offer Beyond Meat too. And Qdoba announced that it will offer the Impossible Bowl and the Impossible Taco at all its US locations.

The two companies have also gotten attention in the financial pages. Beyond Meat’s stock surged after its IPO in early May; in a volatile year since then, it rocketed as high as $235, before settling around $120 for the last few months. Impossible Foods raised $300 million in more funding and may be looking at an IPO itself.

What happened, and how did it happen so fast? Experts told me they see a virtuous cycle, where consumers — more concerned with health and sustainability than ever before — demand the products, which then feeds publicity, which then fuels more customer demand.

Ricardo San Martin, who studies meat alternatives at UC Berkeley, told me that many restaurants and food manufacturers had been waiting to see whether the popularity of plant-based meat was a fad. As consumer interest has grown, “companies have become more aware that this is here to stay” — and they’re placing their own orders. That generates more publicity, which makes more consumers interested in the products and convinces other companies that the trend is for real.

Michele Simon, the executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association, saw the same pattern — that publicity meant more consumers were aware of the products, which increased demand.

“It’s a combination of increased consumer interest in healthier eating in general, and then combined with innovation and an explosion of more great-tasting meat alternatives for consumers to choose from. With that has come the mainstreaming of these types of foods,” Simon told me.

Now the burst of publicity is “getting consumers more familiar and breaking down some of the myths around them, like that they won’t taste good, that you’re sacrificing something by giving up conventional meat.”

4) Is eating meatless meat healthier than eating actual meat?

In general, eating vegetables is good for you. So many people might think it’s obvious that plant-based meat is healthier than regular meat. But that’s not quite true.

Plant-based meat is absolutely safe — but it’s not a health food. While there’s a lot of uncertainty in nutrition science, and meatless meat may avoid the cancer risks of red meat, for the most part, it is probably about as good for you as the meat it’s imitating.

San Martin called the assumptions about health effects a major misconception about plant-based foods. “Plant-based means it’s of ingredients that come from plants,” he told me, but that doesn’t mean you’re eating a salad — “they are processed foods.” As a result, they’re likely less healthy than unprocessed veggies.

Moreover, most meat alternatives attempt to imitate meat as closely as possible, including in macronutrient profile and calorie content. That’s because meatless meat makers want consumers to know what they’re getting. If eating a Beyond Burger was not nearly as filling as eating a real burger, that would probably leave consumers dissatisfied (indeed, a Beyond Burger provides the same amount of protein as a beef burger). As a result, there’s only so much that meat alternatives can do to be healthier than animal-based meat products.

That’s not to say there are no health benefits at all. Some people report sensitivities to the growth hormones or antibiotics fed to cows that then make it into burgers and steaks, a problem that plant-based meats don’t have. Plant-based meat should be able to avoid worries about food poisoning from undercooking and mad cow disease entirely. But ultimately, if you’re ordering a Whopper at Burger King, it’s not going to be health food, even if it’s an Impossible Whopper.

Some people have raised health concerns specific to meatless meats — for example, worrying that the heme in Impossible Foods could somehow be harmful. There is no reason to worry on those grounds.

Beyond Meat doesn’t use GMOs and other ingredients that health-conscious consumers often fret about. (To be clear, there are no signs that GMOs are dangerous to consumers, but many of the health-conscious consumers Beyond Meat caters to may nonetheless be wary of it.) Beyond’s products are also soy-free and gluten-free, which similarly have no known health impacts for the typical person but are priorities for health-conscious consumers.

The Impossible Burger “bleeds” like meat because it uses heme, a protein found in red meat that Impossible Foods grows from yeast. Some analysts raised worries that the Impossible Burger might, due to the heme, have the same negative health effects — like elevated risk of cancer and heart attacks — sometimes associated with red meat. An exhaustive review of the nutrition literature by Business Insider last year found that there are no signs heme is the reason red meat has those effects.

So plant-based meat products are safe, and they are likely at least as healthy as the products they’re replacing. But if you’re hoping for a burger that’s as good for you as a salad, food science still has a long way to go. Of course, maybe that’s beside the point. “The real point of comparison is a meat burger, not a bowl of broccoli,” Weston told me. By that standard, meatless meat is perfectly fine.

5) Is meatless meat better for the environment than regular meat?

Yes — meatless meat can make a huge difference for the environment by almost every metric, including land use, water use, and fighting climate change. Right now, however, it’s too small a share of the market to significantly impact those problems.

A big driver of interest in meat alternatives is meat’s effect on the environment. Livestock cultivation is one of the most greenhouse gas-intensive activities out there.

This is the driving motivation of Pat Brown, the CEO of Impossible Foods. In an interview last fall with Business Insider, asked why he cares so much about replacing meat, he said, “We are now in the advanced stages of the biggest environmental catastrophe that our planet has ever faced, and overwhelmingly the largest driver of that is animal-based food technology.” (In fact, about 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are from livestock.)

Plant-based foods have the potential to have a vastly lower carbon footprint. In general, you have to feed an animal 10 calories of plants to get one calorie of meat, so you can expect plant-based foods to have about a tenth the carbon costs of animal-based foods.

That’s an extremely rough guideline, but it’s surprisingly close to the results you get from a much more careful calculation. An analysis of the Impossible Burger 2.0 found that its carbon footprint is 89 percent smaller than a burger made from a cow. It also uses 87 percent less water and 96 percent less land. That’s an improvement from the 1.0, and Impossible Foods hopes it can slice the carbon footprint even more as it scales its operations.

So there’s potential for meatless meat to make a huge difference for the environment. But the analysts I spoke to raised one major point of skepticism: scale.

Right now, the entire meatless meat industry makes up less than 1 percent of the product volume of the meat industry. Yes, it’s growing fast, and yes, it’s in the headlines, but nearly all meat sold in the US and worldwide is traditional meat. As long as meatless meat remains a niche industry, it simply can’t affect the climate because it’s too small to matter.

Christie Lagally, the CEO of Seattle Food Tech, which makes meatless chicken, told me, “If you’re going to make any impact on the amount of chicken in the world, and address all the health and environmental concerns, you have to be able to make chicken at scale.” Until then, all these restaurant announcements and all these taste tests won’t have the slightest effect on climate change. “One of the big concerns in the plant-based meat industry is that it really does have to scale,” Lagally told me. “Being able to redesign how manufacturing occurs for plant-based meat is what will make it work.”

Scale is the big challenge for Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat too. Both companies cited it as a motivation for their recent efforts to raise more money. “We had tough years both 2017 and 2018 because we weren’t able to keep in stock,” Seth Goldman, the executive chair of Beyond Meat, told me. “One of the reasons we raised this money” — that is, the hundreds of millions raised in Beyond Meat’s successful IPO — “was to address these problems.”

If they succeed, and if meatless meat becomes a significant share of the meat market, then the returns for climate change could be enormous. But the transition from novelty product to consumer staple isn’t easy, and there’s a lot that could still go wrong along the way.

6) What about “cell-based”/“lab-grown”/“cultured” meat? How is that the same, and different, from plant-based meat?

There’s another meatless meat idea that is even further from being realized, and that’s cell-based or lab-grown meat. (Producers are still trying to figure out which label accurately conveys what the product is without sounding too alien to customers.) While plant-based meat products try to imitate the overall taste and nutrition profile of meat using plants, cell-based meat uses actual animal cells, grown in a serum instead of as part of a cow or a chicken.

If it succeeds, it won’t just taste like meat — such products would actually be meat on a molecular level. But unlike plant-based meats, which are already workable, cell-based meat products are still a long way away.

“With the numbers we have today,” UC Berkeley’s San Martin told me, “we don’t see how [cell-based meat] can scale up and deliver products soon at a competitive price. Besides all of the technological hurdles, the scaling up can be very complex. So far, I haven’t seen a medium-sized operation cultivating these kinds of cells for this purpose. It’s very hard, and with what we know today, maybe it’s not the right approach.”

There are still a number of hurdles to overcome before cell-based meat makes it into stores. First, there’s a challenge called “scaffolding” — figuring out how to shape cultured cells into tissue. Right now, cell-based meat techniques can make a decent replacement for, say, ground beef. But to replace a steak, you need to grow the cells into the tissues they grow into in living animals. Researchers are still figuring out how to do that.

Once you have a product, there’s the question of scaling it. The hope for cell-based meat is that it can eventually meet all of the world’s demand for meat, which is steadily increasing as the world gets wealthier. To do that, it’s not enough to be able to make one steak — you need to be able to make steaks at the same incredible scale that factory farms do.

But investors are optimistic that with enough effort, funding, and researcher attention, the remaining technical challenges will prove to have a solution. Meat producers like Tyson Foods have invested in Memphis Meats, a leading cell-based meat company, and more new companies are joining the emerging field: There are at least nine in the US and more than 20 worldwide.

If cell-based meat can succeed, it will likely be able to win over some consumers who aren’t sold on anything made from plants, no matter how similar the taste.

7) Does all this progress on meat alternatives signal the end of meat?

In a word, no — not yet, anyway.

Demand for meat actually grew last year. And demand is projected to grow even further.

“As emerging economies grow and become wealthier,” Weston told me, “one of the first things that changes is that their diet becomes more like the Western diet.” That means more meat.

It’s a great thing that the rest of the world is becoming richer, and it isn’t surprising that they’d want the same luxuries that people in wealthy countries enjoy. But the increasing demand for meat poses a lot of challenges.

One is antibiotic resistance. Animals in factory farms are mass-fed antibiotics to limit the sicknesses that would otherwise sweep through animals in such close quarters. But that means that bacteria develop resistance to the antibiotics. This is a huge problem in the United States, and an even bigger problem in emerging economies like China, which haven’t agreed to US restrictions on antibiotics being fed to animals.

And then, of course, there’s climate change. Eating more meat is just one of the ways consumers in the developing world cause more greenhouse gas emissions as they become wealthier.

All of these are reasons why it would be a huge deal if we could meet the increasing demand for meat — or even just some of it — with meatless meat.

So far, prospects look pretty good. Surveys find consumers in India and China — two of the biggest markets in the world — eager to try cell-based meat products once those exist, and broadly enthusiastic about plant-based meat too. In fact, by one survey, they’re way more interested in plant-based meat than Americans are:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

It looks like there’s a large share of American consumers who refuse to purchase plant-based meat products, and there’s no similar contingent among consumers in India or China. There are more consumers who say they’re very likely or extremely likely to buy, too.

But it’s not all bad news in the U.S., either. Recent Gallup surveys have found that 40% of Americans have tried them, with interest from men and women and from people all over the country. Plant-based meat products might not be universal yet, but they’re not niche anymore either.

That suggests it might be possible for plant-based meat to absorb much of the increase in demand for meat. That’d make a huge difference all by itself. But replacing meat entirely doesn’t look like it’s on the horizon anytime soon.

8) Are there other ways to reduce meat consumption?

The rise of meatless meat has accompanied a lot of other interesting trends in vegan and vegetarian advocacy. For decades, advocates have tried to raise awareness of factory farming and convince people to go vegetarian or vegan. But rates of vegetarianism and veganism remain pretty low, surveys find that many vegetarians still eat meat sometimes, and advocates have begun looking at other ways to combat factory farming.

That’s the change in thinking that has driven the rise of Meatless Mondays, campaigns to serve meat-free meals once a week in schools and offices. The idea is that going meatless one day a week does a seventh as much good as going meatless full time — and if you can persuade seven times as many people to commit to it, then it’s a better bet.

The same idea is behind the rise of the awkwardly named “reducetarianism.” As Brian Kateman, founder and CEO of the Reducetarian Foundation, told Vox, we tend to see meat as an “all-or-nothing premise.” Either you’re a good vegetarian or you don’t think about meat in your diet. But if you eat a lot of meat, cutting back that quantity by half does a lot more for the environment — and a lot more to combat the harms of factory farming — than cutting that last favorite food out of a mostly vegetarian diet.

Another proposal to reduce meat consumption is taxing meat, which would allow us to accurately account for its effects on the environment but which would disproportionately affect low-income people. A more moderate version of the proposal is to just stop subsidizing meat. Currently, the US spends an estimated $20 billion a year on subsidizing agribusinesses, and much of that goes toward feed for animals. Commentators on both the left and the right have called for an end to this giveaway.

But there is, as you might have noticed, a common thread here. Many of these other approaches to reducing meat consumption work a lot better if there’s a good alternative right there for consumers to switch to. Increasing costs of beef will affect consumers less if there are cheap products nearly identical to beef. Voluntary diet change to stop climate change is a lot easier if people can replace favorite foods with options that are just as tasty.

“Consumers want to make healthier choices, they want to make sustainable choices, but the product has to taste great,” Bushnell told me.

Ultimately, all the ways of reducing meat consumption are much simpler to make progress on if there are good meat alternatives.

9) What should we be on the lookout for next?

So what’s next for meat alternatives?

There’s actually a lot to look forward to in the coming months. If you’re trying to get a sense of the destiny of the meatless meat movement, one place to look is agreements between Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and major chain restaurants. As discussed earlier, these agreements expose more consumers to the products, and if there are more such agreements over the next few months, that’d be a good sign that offering meatless meat continues to look to retailers like a smart business decision. For example, check out how Dennys and KFC trialed plant-based meat on a small scale before expanding their offerings. If that keeps happening, it’s a good sign.

Another thing to look out for is competition. Major meat companies, such as Tyson and Purdue Farms, are launching their own plant-based meat products. Those launches might be bad for Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, but they’re almost definitely great news for the industry. More competition keeps prices down and makes it likelier that the industry can scale up to meet the growing demand for meat.

Finally, the most important thing to look out for is one you can check for yourself at a Burger King, Qdoba, Del Taco, or grocery store near you. How does meatless meat measure up? How does it compete on taste? On price? On availability? Ultimately, it’s consumers who will decide whether meatless meat is up to the task in front of it.

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A lesbian couple in Michigan is speaking out after their teenage daughter was barred from writing about same-sex marriage for a class assignment.

Angela McDermitt-Jackson, who married her wife Chris Jackson in 2015, said she was deeply offended by the teacher’s decision, which she called “unacceptable.”

Destiny McDermitt, a junior at Hill McCloy High School in Montrose, had been assigned to write a “Take A Stand Speech” about an issue that’s important to her.

When McDermitt asked whether she could write about same-sex marriage, the teacher told her the topic might offend other students. When McDermitt sought to ask other students if they’d be offended, the teacher responded in front of her classmates, “No, we’re not going to do that. I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to read about it, and I’m the one who has to grade it.”

“She was so offended and upset that she got ahold of me while she was still at school in that teacher’s classroom,” McDermitt-Jackson told MLive.com. “I was very offended considering I’m gay. I’m married to a woman; she has two mothers. It’s not just a problem that it occurred with my daughter. It’s a problem all over the world.”

The school district investigated the incident and determined that the teacher, whom officials didn’t identify, “needed to be clearer about the parameters of her assignments.”

Destiny McDermitt wrote a letter of protest to the administration, and later opted to be moved to a different class. But her family is rallying around her.

“[The teacher] should have kept her biased opinion to herself instead of saying that out loud in the classroom where all her classmates had to hear it, and hurting her feelings the way she did,” said Tina Brown, Destiny’s grandmother. “Everybody has a right to an opinion, but she should have kept that opinion to herself.”

“A kid should always feel safe at school, to talk to their superiors there, and something like this just robs the students of that,” said Heather Jirik, Destiny’s aunt. “It’s not fair to the kids. It’s not fair to the families. … It’s just not right.”

Watch the report below.

The post Gay Couple Outraged After Teacher Bars Daughter from Writing Paper About Same-Sex Marriage: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

There's a bit more clarity now to the story of the briefing to the House Intelligence Committee that may or may not have contributed to acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire's departure from the Trump administration. According to The New York Times, the mysterious briefing that Republicans and impeached president Donald Trump so objected to was about Russia interfering in this election, the 2020 one.

Five people familiar with the matter told the Times that the Feb. 13 briefing included a warning to lawmakers that Russia was interfering to get Trump reelected, a "disclosure that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him," as opposed to using it to try to secure the election and prevent Russia from mucking about in it again. The Times reports that the next day, Trump "berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place" and the fact that Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, was present to hear it was "a particular irritant."

It's not too much of stretch to figure out who filled Trump in on all the details of the briefing, as a committee official said that " members of both parties attended, including Representative Devin Nunes of California, the top Republican on the committee" and that it was indeed about the "integrity of our upcoming elections." In what's really not good news for the upcoming election, the Times reports that "Some intelligence officials viewed the briefing as a tactical error, saying that had official who delivered the conclusion spoken less pointedly or left it out, they would have avoided angering the Republicans."

Not angering Republicans should not be the intelligence community's concern at all. Not when they have credible information saying that this election is in jeopardy of Russian interference on behalf of the man who has already been impeached for trying to get another country to do the same.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

By any measure, outgoing acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire did Donald Trump a huge favor. Confronted by a report from the intelligence community inspector general that a whistleblower had raised an urgent concern, according to regulations, Maguire had no choice but to take that information to Congress. He didn’t. Instead, Maguire took the whistleblower report to the White House and the Department of Justice, where he was promptly told that it was of no concern, please stay quiet, that’s all, thank you. 

But despite his contribution to burying the issue that led to Trump’s impeachment, Maguire isn’t going to get the chance to remove the “acting” from his title and be nominated for the post of DNI. Instead, he’s getting ready to head out the door, and will be replaced by the worst, least qualified, and most poorly suited candidate imaginable. And it seems that Maguire was on track to be the new DNI until only a week ago, when a single briefing turned the intelligence community upside down.

The whole decision to replace Maguire with the spectacularly awful and in no way qualified Richard Grenell seems to be based on something that’s just as bad as the incoming DNI … but also strangely interesting.

According to The Washington Post, everything pivoted around a classified briefing given to the House Intelligence Committee last Thursday. A briefing on the topic of election security. Specifically, the subject of the meeting was “election security and foreign interference in the run-up to the 2020 election.” The meeting was not exclusive to Democrats. Unlike some recent hearings where Republicans have put on a show of being absent, they were in the room for this closed-door briefing—including Devin Nunes. 

At that briefing, intelligence official Shelby Pierson said … something. Something that made Republicans on the committee run back to report to Trump. Whatever that something was, it apparently made Trump hugely angry that this information had reached House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, because, according to the Post, “the information would be helpful to Democrats if it were released publicly, the people familiar with the matter said.”

Trump was so angry that he dragged in Maguire and confronted him over what Pierson had said. After that, Trump dismissed Maguire, replacing him as acting DNI with belligerent neo-fascist Grenell. Even though Trump has been busy cleaning house of officials in the NSA, DOJ, Pentagon, and State Department that don’t have Trump’s logo tattooed on their foreheads, Maguire was definitely on the inside of Trump’s circle … until that briefing. 

To recap: An intelligence official gave a briefing on threats to election security and of foreign interference going into the 2020 election. Whatever was in that briefing, it frightened Republicans enough that they ran to tell Trump that Democrats had seen it. The information is considered so “damaging” if it were to reach the public that Trump replaced the DNI with a far-right troll who has no experience in or connections to intelligence, and whose specialty is attacking opponents while defending neo-fascist leaders around the world.

Let the speculation begin.

LAS VEGAS — Pete Buttigieg’s campaign set a goal of raising $13 million by Super Tuesday in an urgent new fundraising message, a sign of the financial pinch Buttigieg and other Democrats are feeling as they compete with billionaire Michael Bloomberg and online dynamo Bernie Sanders.

Buttigieg set himself up as an alternative to those candidates in an email going out to supporters Thursday afternoon, which was obtained first by POLITICO. "We are no longer just up against Bernie Sanders, the Washington politician who has been running for president for years," Buttigieg wrote in the email. "We are now also up against a billionaire who is throwing colossal sums of money on television instead of doing the work of campaigning."

"That’s not how we should choose a president," Buttigieg continued. "So today we’re being honest with the folks who’ve gotten us here: We need to raise a significant amount of money — about $13 million — before Super Tuesday on March 3rd in order to stay competitive."

It's an aggressive pace: Buttigieg would have to raise more than $1 million a day before Super Tuesday to hit the goal.

Buttigieg's campaign raised just over $6 million in January, but he spent more than $14 million in the same month, draining his campaign account to just $6.6 million in the bank by the start of February, according to campaign finance disclosures filed Thursday. In his campaign email, Buttigieg revealed that he has raised $11 million so far in February, after he finished in the top two in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

The fundraising plea is an acknowledgment of how sharply the last two months of the 2020 campaign have separated a few well-funded campaigns from others scraping to survive after emptying their campaign accounts in the first four states. But in two weeks, the race widens from small early states to a 14-state, coast-to-coast blowout on Super Tuesday.

Sanders, who raised $25 million in January, and especially billionaires Bloomberg and Tom Steyer are already pouring millions of dollars into advertising in expensive California and Texas, the biggest Super Tuesday prizes — but no other candidates have been able to join them on the airwaves there so far.

Amy Klobuchar’s campaign announced Thursday that it would begin a seven-figure ad buy across seven smaller Super Tuesday states, while Elizabeth Warren has aired ads in Colorado and Maine. But Buttigieg has yet to begin running TV spots in the Super Tuesday states, though he has put up digital ads in some of them.

This is not the first time Buttigieg — or other 2020 rivals — have set a public fundraising goal to gin up enthusiasm and pry open supporters’ wallets. But it’s the largest ask yet from Buttigieg, who didn't get to ride the traditional wave of momentum, following long-delayed results out of Iowa, that would have come from his top-two finish there. (The Iowa Democratic Party is now conducting a recount of the Feb. 3 caucus results, after a recanvass showed Buttigieg with a state delegate lead over Sanders amounting to less than a hundredth of a percentage point.)

Warren is also making explicit fundraising appeals drafting off of her strong debate performance in Las Vegas. Her campaign announced Thursday that it raised more than $5 million in the hours following Wednesday's debate.

Meanwhile, Buttigieg’s campaign released a memo Thursday morning, accusing Bloomberg of propelling Sanders toward the Democratic nomination.

"If Bloomberg remains in the race despite showing he can not offer a viable alternative to Bernie Sanders, he will propel Sanders to a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead siphoning votes away from Pete, the current leader in delegates," the memo reads.

Bloomberg's campaign released a memo of its own on Wednesday calling on other candidates, including Buttigieg, to drop out of the race in order to deny Sanders the nomination.

Heavy ad spending is paying off so far for Bloomberg, who climbed into contention in a range of Super Tuesday states in recent weeks, according to a series of public polls released this week. Buttigieg, meanwhile, often lands in fourth or fifth place, behind Sanders, Bloomberg and Joe Biden.

Since the start of the Democratic primary, Buttigieg has risen from a total unknown with a 24,000-person email list to a fundraising juggernaut who outraised several sitting governors and senators and other top-tier candidates. But Buttigieg spent more than $15 million on TV ads in the first four early states, requiring him to quickly replenish his coffers.

Buttigieg is sprinting through high-dollar fundraisers — at least 10 over the next two weeks — to pick up more checks, too. But that requires Buttigieg to step off the campaign trail, while Sanders and Bloomberg are stocking their schedules with campaign stops in Super Tuesday states in addition to stumping in Nevada.

In his email appeal, Buttigieg set out his campaign's stakes. "We are the best shot at defeating Donald Trump," Buttigieg writes in the email. "But the reality is, if we can’t raise $13 million before Super Tuesday, we might never get that shot.

Elizabeth Warren spent Wednesday night pummeling Mike Bloomberg on the debate stage. On Thursday morning, she swung even harder.

The Massachusetts senator expanded on her criticism of the billionaire former New York mayor, driving home her attacks on his past comments about women, record on law enforcement and his request that other candidates step aside so that he can take on Donald Trump in November.

“Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that everyone should drop out of the race except himself and Bernie Sanders, and they should decide who the nominee will be,” Warren said Thursday on “The View.” “Well, I take exception to that. I’ve been told to sit down and be quiet enough in my life. I’m ready to stay in this fight.”

The Massachusetts senator enjoyed the most talking time during Wednesday’s Las Vegas debate, followed by the other female candidate on the stage, Amy Klobuchar. Warren launched an early strike on Bloomberg over the unknown number of non-disclosure agreements he has with people who have accused him of harassment as well as allegations that he has called women “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians."

Bloomberg, who had been steadily climbing in the polls on the back of a multi-million dollar advertising blitz, stumbled badly under the barrage of criticism from Warren and others on stage. His campaign manager conceded Thursday that "Mike's got to get his legs under him."

Warren, who attacked Bloomberg on Wednesday for “muzzling” his accusers with non-disclosure agreements, continued kicking the former mayor on Thursday, saying the former mayor “just shoveled some of his money in to cover it up.”

Warren on Bloomberg post debate: Tired of billionaires 'who think that the rules don't apply to them'

“I hope you heard that part last night where he said, ‘Oh, all that I was ever accused of was telling a few bad jokes.' Really?” Warren said. “We cannot let him get away with that. Too many men have gotten away with that for far too long, and it stops now.”

Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheekey jumped to his defense Thursday morning, calling non-disclosure agreements “complicated.”

“Mike is running, not employees with grievances against other employees in the company,” Sheekey said on MSNBC. “We’re not putting them on trial. Elizabeth Warren wanted to put him on trial last night.”

Warren on Thursday jumped with ease from Bloomberg's alleged issues with women to his halting defense of the controversial stop-and-frisk policing practices he championed in New York. Warren called his apology for the city's stop-and-frisk policy, a practice that in 2013 a federal judge ruled as unconstitutional, “wholly wrong.”

“So to suddenly, years later, days before he announces that he wants to be president of the whole United States, he suddenly comes up with, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry that I had a plan that inadvertently hurt people,'” Warren said. “No, that is just simply not good enough.”

Warren continued: “It reveals his character. It reveals his understanding of race in America. Look, I am not a person of color. I have not lived with that. I have not been thrown across the hood of a car in my own neighborhood, but I try to learn from the people who have, and it is clear that what Mayor Bloomberg has learned so far is that he can hire enough ads, have enough money that he can insulate himself from any recognition of what his actions did to other human beings. And it was wrong and he has not accounted for it.”

Unlike Warren, Klobuchar spent Thursday morning lamenting that Wednesday's debate had grown too adversarial between candidates — despite her heated exchanges with South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg — and focused too little on President Donald Trump. But Klobuchar, too, found the opportunity to whack Bloomberg too appealing to pass up.

Bloomberg: 'The real winner of the debate last night was Donald Trump'

“I was actually one of the ones, maybe the only one, that kept saying he should be on the debate stage, because otherwise, he’s going to be beating us on the air waves,” Klobuchar said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." “And he needs to be on the debate stage because otherwise, all people see are glitzy, nice 30 second or 60 second ads. That’s not an even playing field, and it is no way for democracy to be decided.”

Bloomberg, who has largely avoided television interviews, didn’t change his strategy Thursday after being pummeled in his debate debut. The former mayor has remained relatively quiet as of Thursday morning, posting an edited debate clip on Twitter where he asks the other candidates, “I’m the only one here, I think, that’s ever started a business. Is that fair?”

The clip then flashes to the other candidates one by one, showing each with a dumbfounded expression and crickets playing in the background. It ends with Bloomberg responding to the edited silence, saying “OK.”

Bloomberg also took to Twitter after last night's performance, and instead of addressing the claims against him, posted that “the group of politicians” talked “because that’s what they’re good at.”

“They went on and on about what they could and should do,” the post said. “I have built. I have created actual change. I have gotten it done. That’s what I’ll do for America.”

Bloomberg's campaign confirmed Thursday that the former mayor will appear in next week's debate in South Carolina, an opportunity for the mayor to post a stronger showing ahead of Super Tuesday, where he has staked his campaign on performing well. Warren, on "The View," offered her prediction for Bloomberg's strategy between now and then.

“I’ll bet he’s reaching in his pocket and spending $100 million more on advertising to try and erase everyone’s memory of what happened last night,” she said.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Their deficit flip-flopping should no longer be treated seriously.

A Republican state House candidate in Kentucky continued practicing law despite having his license suspended for lying under oath about a letter in which he called a female attorney and her wife “pitiful, fat, ugly lesbians.”

Carroll Hubbard, who represented Kentucky in Congress as a Democrat from 1975 to 1993, later served two years in prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance charges in connection to the “Rubbergate” House banking scandal.

Hubbard is now running for Kentucky state House as a Republican.

WPSD-TV reports: In April, the Kentucky Supreme Court suspended the law license of Carroll Hubbard for 60 days after he sent a letter to a McCracken County attorney, calling her and her wife “pitiful, fat, ugly lesbians.” Hubbard then lied under oath about sending the message. In addition to the suspension, the Supreme Court ordered Hubbard to write apology letters and pay $1,062.65 in court costs. Hubbard served the suspension and fulfilled those orders. In October, Hubbard was representing a client in a drug case in Calloway County. But Commonwealth’s Attorney Dennis Foust confirmed through the Kentucky Bar Association that Hubbard’s law license was still suspended.

Hubbard said he was “shocked” to learn that his license was still suspended, and claims his attorney “forgot” to tell him about the requirements for having it reinstated.

Watch the report here.

The post GOP Candidate Kept Practicing Law Despite Suspension Over ‘Pitiful, Fat, Ugly Lesbians’ Letter appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, last prominently seen confessing to Donald Trump's quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine on national television, with the now infamous "get over it," has done it again. This time he made his confession overseas in a U.K. visit, so maybe he thought nobody would notice. It didn't work.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of Mulvaney at the Oxford Union, sounding an awful lot like a Daily Kos blogger. "My party is very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House," he said. "The worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president. Then Donald Trump became president, and we're a lot less interested as a party." Until it comes time to wield the deficit as a weapon to cut the safety net, of course.

He left that part out, but made another admission about why Republicans refuse to do anything about climate change, which he implicitly acknowledged as a real thing. "We take the position in my party that asking people to change their lifestyle dramatically, including by paying more taxes, is simply not something we are interested in doing." That answer got laughs in the student audience, The Post reports. One can only assume those laughs were derisive.

They never have a problem with asking poor people, senior citizens, communities of color or anyone who doesn't vote Republican to change their lifestyle dramatically by not having enough to eat, or a roof, or health care but they are absolutely not going to afflict the comfortable. Again, that's not news to anyone who has paid attention to the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, but the self-awareness from even a not-big-thinker like Mulvaney is a little surprising. Not that it will make any difference in the long run.

You know that in a second Trump term the deficit is going be used to cut Social Security, and Medicare, and deepen the cuts to Medicaid. It will be used to continue decimating food and housing assistance and every other program that helps everyone who doesn't count.

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In a late-night installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew assesses the candidates’ performances in the Nevada debate. The candidates were more adversarial than in past debates, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg struggled while fielding attacks from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

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

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Mormon church-owned Brigham Young University has quietly removed a ban on “homosexual behavior” from its honor code.

The announcement came on the same day that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a new handbook updating its stances on LGBT issues.

It is confirmed. Gay dating is okay, kissing and hand holding from the mouth of an HCO counselor. Featuring my first gay kiss @Kate_Foster14 pic.twitter.com/OK9gBIQVLZ

— Franchesca (@fremlo_) February 19, 2020

The Associated Press reports: Until now, the [BYU honor] code defined homosexual behavior as “all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings,” such as kissing, holding hands and sex. Any of those actions had violated BYU’s honor code, which students must follow on and off campus in order to graduate and take classes. “The Honor Code Office will handle questions that arise on a case by case basis,” the university said Wednesday. “For example, since dating means different things to different people, the Honor Code Office will work with students individually.” The previous policy said a student’s “stated same-gender attraction” was not an issue, but a BYU valedictorian made national headlines when he came out as gay during a graduation speech last year, and one student said other LGBTQ athletes stay closeted to avoid abuse. 

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that two female students, Franchesca Lopez and Kate Foster, celebrated the news by rushing to an iconic statue of Brigham Young on campus and sharing a kiss.

Lopez, who identifies as bisexual, later posted the image on Twitter with the caption “my first gay kiss.” She told the Tribune she thought the policy would never change.

“I just keep thinking maybe I imagined the whole thing,” she said.

While some details of the new policy are still unclear, LGBT students who called the Honor Code Office said they were told they can kiss and hold hands as long as they refrain from pre-marital sex.

From the Tribune: Lopez said she was told the same thing by a counselor at the office and was delighted. She posted the picture of her kiss on Twitter with the BYU namesake statue’s bronze eyes watching over the intimate moment. She then danced around the campus, she said, holding hands with other female students and singing the Katy Perry hit “I Kissed a Girl.”

Watch a report from Fox 13 below.

The post Students Celebrate ‘First Gay Kiss’ After BYU Removes ‘Homosexual Behavior’ Ban from Honor Code: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

It’s hard to say that Donald Trump has really excelled at anything. But on the topic of naming the worst possible person to the most sensitive role, he can be genuinely outstanding. Betsy DeVos at Education? Ben Carson at HUD? Rick Perry for Energy? All of these are mind-boggling achievements in you-must-be-kidding. But Trump’s latest choice throws shade on his earlier selections. Because selecting Richard Grenell to be director of national security isn’t just an incredible mismatch—it comes with a side order of hate, racism, xenophobia, and more hate. Just lots of hate.

What Grenell doesn’t bring to the job is one whit of experience with the intelligence community, or even the slightest hint that he can organize something larger than a poker night. He has no experience running any kind of organization, and no connection at all to intelligence—in any sense of the word. What Grenell has managed, in his current position as U.S. ambassador to Germany, is to demonstrate Trump’s utter disdain for America’s largest European ally—and, amazingly, Trump has found a way to make that even worse at the same time.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Grenell’s most famous attribute is hate. It’s not just that he hates Muslims, hates brown people, hates immigrants of all kinds. It’s also that he nurses personal hatreds. Even that is underselling it. He seeks out personal hatred—enough so that his Twitter feed consists almost entirely of Grenell spending his time going after each and every person who mentions him. Personally. It’s a demanding time sink of name-calling and threats that doesn’t leave a lot of time for actually acting as ambassador. But that’s fine—Grenell reserves plenty of his hate for the German government and its weak, Muslim-coddling, “open borders” polices that are flooding Europe with terrorist invaders.

Which makes it perfect that, at the same time that Trump has now named Grenell to a post for which he has not one possible qualification, he’s also holding on to the position of ambassador to Germany, even though he won’t be in Germany. This ability to spit in the face of the intelligence community while mooning a strategic ally shows the genuine genius behind Trump’s actions. 

It’s also a pretty clear indicator of his motivation: spite.

Trump has William Barr at the Justice Department systematically ripping apart the idea that there is any distance between the Oval Office and the DOJ. Barr is proving, step by step, that when all the ethical considerations are set aside, the criminal justice system can provide both carrot and stick, to coddle Trump’s friends and punish his enemies.

Now Grenell gets the opportunity to complete the destruction of the intelligence community. With the National Security Council having shed figures such as Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman, and the leadership of both the FBI and the CIA scrubbed of those Trump views as political opponents, Grenell is in a position to transform the director of national intelligence from a means of providing the nation with the information it needs to stay safe in a changing world into an instrument Trump can wield to destroy anyone, anywhere.

If Barr is charged with making the DOJ over in the mold of the Cheka, Grenell is there to put a KGB stamp on U.S. intelligence. And he’ll have no trouble getting advice from Vladimir Putin—he’s a big fan.

Grenell has already demonstrated a willingness to outright lie for Trump, even when the lies were obvious; to consistently attack free speech and the media; to champion neo-fascist leaders in Europe; and to chase down anyone who he believes has given him the slightest offense—even indirectly. So naturally Trump is giving Grenell the most powerful tool that anyone could possibly have in pursuing the personal destruction of his perceived enemies.

In the right hands, the intelligence community is an amazing set of interconnected organizations capable of informing decisions and helping to safeguard not just our nation, but the world. In the hands of Richard Grenell, it’s the entity that can gut anyone viewed as an enemy—figuratively and also literally. Like Twitter … but with black sites. And electrodes.

Of course, Grenell is not going to the be actual DNI. Trump is well aware that he couldn’t get this jack-booted jerkwad through even the most cowed, Trump-praising Republican Senate. So Grenell’s title will always include the term “acting.” Expect him to act.

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Today's News:

kimanaw shares a report: The Trump administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an appeal by Alphabet's Google, boosting Oracle's bid to collect more than $8 billion in royalties for Google's use of copyrighted programming code in the Android operating system. The administration weighed in on the high-stakes case on the same day that President Donald Trump attended a re-election campaign fundraiser in California hosted by Oracle's co-founder, billionaire Larry Ellison. Ellison hosted a golf outing and photos with Trump. The event cost a minimum of $100,000 per couple to attend, with a higher ticket price of $250,000 for those who wanted to participate in a policy roundtable with the president, the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported. Google is challenging an appeals court ruling that it violated Oracle copyrights when it included some Oracle-owned Java programming code in Android. The dispute has split Silicon Valley, pitting developers of software code against companies that use the code to create programs. Google's "verbatim copying" of Oracle's code into a competing product wasn't necessary to foster innovation, the U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said Wednesday in a filing with the court.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Warren's strong performance against Bloomberg hints at a way to take on the president.

LGBT groups are calling for a boycott of Staten Island’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade after they were barred from applying to march in the annual celebration.

“Any organization who has applied, rethink marching that day. Any organization who is thinking of applying, again, please rethink that decision,” said Carol Bullock, executive director of the Pride Center of Staten Island.

After years of boycotts and pressure, organizers of Manhattan’s iconic St. Patrick’s Day Parade finally began allowing LGBT groups to participate in 2015. And Staten Island is the only New York City borough with a St. Patrick’s Day parade that remains non-inclusive.

The Staten Island event is organized by the Ancient Order of Hiberians, an Irish Catholic fraternal order. Parade president Larry Cummings reportedly has said that allowing LGBT groups to march in St. Patrick’s Day parades “promotes the homosexual lifestyle” and “goes against the tenets of the Catholic Church.”

“Here’s the deal, it’s a non-sexual identification parade and that’s that. No, they are not marching,” Cummings told the Staten Island Advance this week.

Pressed about whether LGBT groups will be allowed to march in the future, Cummings said: “Don’t try to keep asking a million friggin’ questions, OK? The fact of the matter is that’s what it is, OK? And that’s that.”

When a contingent from the Pride Center arrived last weekend, they found a sign on the door saying parade signups had been moved “do [SIC] to the threat of a protest by the gay pride people/politicians/and minsters of other faiths on the holy grounds of Blessed Sacrament Church.”

They went to the alternate location, but were turned away by Cummings. In addition to the Pride Center, the Gay Officers Action League of New York (GOAL) was barred from applying.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and several other politicians have announced they will again skip the Staten Island parade in response to the LGBT ban. However, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York has declined to get involved, despite a plea from Bullock, saying such decisions are left up to local parade committees.

Watch a report from CBS New York below.

The post LGBT Groups Barred from Marching in St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Staten Island: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is shown on a screen during a debate watch party at the Brooklyn field office of Mike Bloomberg’s campaign on February 19, 2020. | Jeenah Moon/Getty Images

Bloomberg is proof that billionaires are right to worry about Warren.

Turns out Mike Bloomberg is exactly what Elizabeth Warren needed to break through in the 2020 Democratic primary. And he’s not just a foil for her on the campaign trail — this is something she believes in, and it shows.

Warren was quick to go after the billionaire at Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Nevada, noting his Trump-like history of calling women “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians.” And the Massachusetts Democrat did not relent. She went after his history on stop-and-frisk policing as New York City’s mayor. She called him out for refusing to release women who have worked for him and accused him and his company of harassment and discrimination from nondisclosure agreements. And broadly, it’s clear that whether or not it’s her who gets the Democratic nomination, she absolutely, positively does not want it to be Bloomberg.

“Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this,” Warren said on Wednesday. “Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”

Beyond the ins and outs of the jabs on the debate stage, Warren’s disdain for Bloomberg and others like him is very real. Warren, like Bernie Sanders, isn’t just a critic of the “billionaire class,” she is a critic of a very specific type of billionaire class: those who used the advantages of an overly complex system to get ahead while everyone else falls behind.

Bloomberg made his more than $50 billion with the Bloomberg terminal, a financial computer system that costs upward of $20,000 annually and gives the Wall Street crowd a crucial edge in playing the markets and amassing their wealth. It’s the place to be for traders, analysts, and executives, and if you want to make it in finance, it’s an exclusive way in.

Warren built the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government agency aimed at eliminating complexities in the financial system that make it next to impossible for American consumers to navigate many aspects of their economic lives. While she was setting up the CFPB, she’d look at loan forms and ask, “Could you please make this simpler?”

She highlighted this in a speech at an event hosted by the think tank the Roosevelt Institute in 2010, as Vox’s Ezra Klein noted in “The case for Elizabeth Warren.” The banking industry constructed a “complexity machine” to “make it all very complicated so only the experts can understand it,” she said. Types like Bloomberg helped build and perpetuate that system.

Billionaires should be worried about Warren. Bloomberg is proof of that.

As Warren’s poll numbers rose last summer and into the fall, so did the hysteria of rich guys worried about the prospect of her in the White House. Trump versus Warren would be the choice between “sickness and death,” one said. We don’t need someone who “vilifies successful people,” opined another. One hedge funder was brought to tears on national television over the idea of Warren winning.

As the Nevada debate showed, all these rich guys had reason to worry about Warren: She, um, really doesn’t like them. Case in point: her performance in the face of Bloomberg.

Warren has positioned herself as a folksy figure who has a plan for everything on the 2020 campaign trail, but as the primary goes on, OG Liz is coming out. It’s the Warren who called for “blood and teeth” on the floor in her fight to get the CFPB into the Dodd-Frank financial reform. The Warren who told Wells Fargo’s CEO he should be criminally investigated. The Warren who made so many enemies not only among Republicans but also within the Obama administration that she didn’t get the directorship of the agency she’d conceived of and fought for — and who then went into the 2012 Senate race in Massachusetts and won. She’s running for president to finish what she started when she got into government: root out the corruption she sees at the heart of so many of the country’s problems.

Bloomberg is the perfect foil for Warren — and a preview of a potential Warren versus Trump

Bloomberg, predictably, took a lot of heat at the Nevada debate. He’s spent upward of $400 million on ads to catapult himself to third place in the polls nationally, and much of his messaging up to now has largely been uncontested. All the candidates took aim at the former New York City mayor, but Warren got in some of the sharpest hits.

It makes sense: Warren isn’t just incensed that inequality exists in the United States; she also understands how the systems work to propel it.

For example, footage of Bloomberg discussing the elimination of the practice of redlining, where banks discriminated against racial minorities in making loans, and its role in the financial crisis emerged earlier this month. Warren, who after the financial crisis was the head of a congressional panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a $700 billion bank bailout, quickly called it out.

Warren has spent much of her career as an academic and in politics fighting against moneyed interests. She’s campaigning on a sweeping anti-corruption message, and one of her signature agenda items is a wealth tax on the ultrarich. Her campaign has been selling “Billionaire Tears” mugs for months and launched a billionaire calculator for people to tabulate how much they would owe under her “ultra-millionaire tax” proposal. Among the billionaires the site links to help them figure out how much they would owe is Bloomberg.

On the debate stage and in the 2020 primary, Bloomberg has emerged as a sort of proxy for Trump, even though he’s running against him: a billionaire New York businessman with a checkered record on race and gender. But Bloomberg has better credentials than Trump — he’s richer, has been more successful in business and philanthropy, and was the mayor of the country’s most populous city for 12 years. Warren’s ability to take on Bloomberg isn’t just a warning sign to their future run-ins, it’s also a warning to Trump: Warren is here for a fight, and she’s pretty good at it.

It was a lively Democratic debate in Nevada Wednesday night. Early on, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg decided to take on both Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg by taking a stance in between them. Buttigieg called Sanders “polarizing,” and that voting for Pete was a vote away from “one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out.” These were clear attacks on Bloomberg and Sanders.

Sanders was given a chance to speak to this attack, asked by the debate moderator whether or not he was “polarizing.” He was not having it.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: If speaking to the needs and the pain of a long neglected working class is polarizing, I think you got the wrong word. What we are trying finally to do is to give a voice to people who after 45 years of work are not making a nickel more than they did 45 years ago. We are giving a voice to people who are saying, we're sick and tired of billionaires like Mr. Bloomberg, seeing huge expansions of their wealth while a half a million people sleep out on the street tonight.

And then Bernie laid down the hammer.

SEN. SANDERS: So what we are saying, Pete, is that maybe it's time for the working class of this country to have a little bit of power in Washington, rather than your billionaire campaign contributors.

Hot damn!

YouTube Video

After being shorted on speaking time in the last debate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren jumped into the conversation early Wednesday night and came out swinging at former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in her first statement of the evening. 

"I'd like to talk about who we're running against," Warren said, "a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg."

"Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk.”

Warren said she would support whoever becomes the nominee, but added, “Understand this, Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another. This country has worked for the rich for a long time and left everyone else in the dirt. It is time to have a president who will be on the side of working families and be willing get out there and fight for them. That is why I am in this race and that is why I will beat Donald Trump." Warren came to play.

Watch it below.

Here's that early Warren haymaker. "I'd like to talk about who we're running against, a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse faced lesbians. I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg." pic.twitter.com/AS9XVbTthz

— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) February 20, 2020

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fox Business: Facebook is slated to begin a tax trial in a San Francisco court on Tuesday, as the Internal Revenue Service tries to convince a judge the world's largest social media company owes more than $9 billion linked to its decision to shift profits to Ireland. The trial, which Facebook expects will take three to four weeks, could see top executives including hardware chief Andrew Bosworth and Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer called to testify, according to a document the company filed in January. The witness list also includes Naomi Gleit and Javier Olivan, veterans of Facebook's aggressive growth team, and Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer. The IRS argues that Facebook understated the value of the intellectual property it sold to an Irish subsidiary in 2010 while building out global operations, a move common among U.S. multinationals. Ireland has lower corporate tax rates than the United States, so the move reduced the company's tax bill. Under the arrangement, Facebook's subsidiaries pay royalties to the U.S.-based parent for access to its trademark, users and platform technologies. From 2010 to 2016, Facebook Ireland paid Facebook U.S. more than $14 billion in royalties and cost-sharing payments, according to the court filing. The company said the low valuation reflected the risks associated with Facebook's international expansion, which took place in 2010 before its IPO and the development of its most lucrative digital advertising products.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.