James.galbraith

America, or at least the American media, is finally taking a moment to shine a spotlight on Attorney General Bill Barr's existence as a blight on justice in this country. The breaking point occurred when four federal prosecutors withdrew from the Roger Stone case earlier this week after their superiors intervened to overrule their original sentencing recommendations of 7-9 years. One of those four federal prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Zelinsky, also resigned from the Justice Department entirely rather than continue to take part in Barr's degradation of the agency. 

Now a growing number of House Democrats want the four prosecutors to have an opportunity to testify about Barr's almost unprecedented interference in the case of Trump’s confidant Stone, which included replacing the Senate-approved U.S. attorney handling the case with a loyalist from his own office. According to The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, “numerous” Democratic members hope to secure to that testimony well in advance of Barr's appearance before the Judiciary Committee on March 31. 

“Time is of the essence, since this scandal gets worse by the hour,” one senior Democratic aide said, adding that it's important to create “a record of what happened before Barr gets to set the narrative.”

Meanwhile, Barr is rushing to obscure his record of repeatedly using the full weight of the Justice Department to do Trump's bidding. In a newly released ABC interview, Barr went so far as to complain that Trump was making it "impossible" for him to do his job without being perceived as the partisan hatchet man he is. Barr also claimed he wouldn't be “bullied or influenced by anybody.” Poor Barr. Trump is making all his efforts to subvert justice so obvious. Indeed, Barr's malfeasance is so undeniable that the media's finally giving it enough attention to force Barr into damage-control mode. 

So far, the idea of such a hearing is still in a discussion phase, and no concrete steps have been taken. Any such hearing would have to get the blessing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and she apparently hasn't weighed in yet. 

But this should be a no-brainer for Democrats, especially with Barr on defense and Trump continuing to claim his "legal right" to interfere in Justice Department matters. Giving the federal prosecutors an opportunity to explain the unprecedented nature of Barr's interventions and perhaps offer new details about them is crucial to the American public's understanding of just how corrosive both Trump's and Barr's actions have been to the rule of law in this country. 

Walter Shaub speaks at a Nobody Is Above the Law rally in Washington, DC on November 8, 2018. | Larry French/Getty Images for MoveOn

“What I didn’t expect is how badly the system would fail to stop him,” Walter Shaub says.

On Thursday — just eight days after his impeachment acquittal — President Donald Trump made a spectacle out of the very type of conduct that got him impeached in the first place.

Trump implicitly linked the possible end of punitive travel restrictions the federal government took against citizens of New York with the state’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) doing favors for him, including ending investigations of his finances. In short, he attempted an extortionate quid pro quo, right out in public.

“I’m seeing Governor Cuomo today at The White House. He must understand that National Security far exceeds politics. New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment [sic], start cleaning itself up, and lowering taxes,” Trump tweeted, before closing with a gratuitous shot at Cuomo’s brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo. “Build relationships, but don’t bring Fredo!”

For some, this may have just seemed like one among many regrettable tweets the president posts during the course of any given week. But for Walter Shaub, who headed the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) before quitting in July 2017 over objections to Trump’s failure to divest from his businesses and other concerns, that particular tweet and the public’s relatively muted reaction to it marked a dangerous marker along the road to authoritarianism.

So Shaub, who now serves as a senior adviser for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), an independent good government watchdog group, decided to use his large Twitter platform to not only sound the alarm about the president feeling emboldened to make extortionate demands in public, but also to keep reminding people that this sort of thing should not become normal.

“It is Ukraine all over again. Only now it is one of these United States being extorted,” Shaub wrote on Thursday afternoon. “Holy cow, people. It’s happening in plain sight this time. Have we reached the point where a quid pro quo doesn’t even make a ripple? Is that the degree of submission to corruption? Wake up!”

Shaub has since posted regular tweets reminding people that Trump “attempted quid pro quo extortion on Twitter,” and urging them to “Pay attention.”

On Friday, Vox connected with Shaub to get his insight into why Trump’s public quid pro quo demand is especially alarming, and about what he thinks it says about where the Trump presidency is headed.

A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and brevity, follows.

Aaron Rupar

Obviously Trump posts a lot of objectionable tweets and says a lot of objectionable things. So I’m wondering what specifically alarmed you about the one he posted yesterday linking these actions he’s taken punishing New York to essentially the state doing political favors for him.

Walter Shaub

It’s important to remember the context in which all of this is unfolding. This week, we’ve learned that the extent to which the president has politicized the Department of Justice may be a lot worse than any of us feared. And then on the heels of that discovery he tweets out this extortionate demand that New York drop its lawsuits against him.

He made the link to this outrageous Global Entry decision that the government made with regard to New York. He was careful not to say the exact phrase, ‘as a quid pro quo, give me this relief from your lawsuits and I will give you relief from my administration’s Global Entry decision,’ but this is the issue we confronted during the impeachment hearing. The criminals never say, ‘This is a quid pro quo.’ They link things and then try to steer your behavior with the linkage, and either give or withhold something in exchange for it.

It’s important to remember that the president is exempt from a lot of criminal conflict of interest statutes, but he’s not exempt from 18 U.S. Code §201 — linking an official action to a thing of value given by another party. So telling them to drop lawsuits against him personally is a thing of value, and making a decision on the Global Entry would be an official act.

I’m not accusing him necessarily of committing a crime, but this is the exact type of behavior that was implicated in the impeachment hearing where he tried to strongarm Ukraine into taking an action against one of his political rivals, and he took an official action of withholding hundreds of millions of dollars of needed aid from a country that has been invaded by Russia.

One of the things that’s so alarming about what he’s done is it’s so closely related to what he did with Ukraine, and so open, that one of the dangers is he’s sending a message to the world: ‘I not only can but will do the very thing that I was impeached for because the Senate has blessed my use of governmental authority for my personal gain.’

It doesn’t matter whether it succeeds. It matters what message it sends and what it tells us about what he’s going to do next. And I wasn’t nearly as alarmed before the media and the public failed to react to it. And frankly, the relative silence in response to this conduct, which is on par with the Ukraine conduct, is the most terrifying thing that’s happened in the three-plus years that he’s been in power.

Aaron Rupar

What do you think Trump putting this quid pro quo with New York state out there publicly says about what he’s trying to do to the federal government in the runup to the election this November — and possibly beyond that if he wins another term?

Walter Shaub

There was a really instructive interview that [MSNBC host] Nicole Wallace did with Robert Costa of the Washington Post yesterday in which he explained to her that [Trump’s] closest advisers are telling people like Costa that Trump now feels the rule of law is done, and he can do whatever he wants because the Senate will back him.

I think what this shows is two things. One, there is no limit on what he’ll do if he’s allowed to get away with it. And two, doing things like this in the open, in plain sight, is a way of testing whether the public has been properly primed for even worse coercive or corrupt acts. And so the danger these things have is they can become just a joke if the public reacts strongly, or they can become an ambiguous tweet that was misinterpreted if the public responds strongly. But if the public doesn’t respond, then the behavior escalates because these testings of the boundaries will continue until he hits a boundary that he can’t cross. And then he’ll test elsewhere — just like a hacker testing a computer system’s safety mechanisms to find a port of entry.

This guy has made clear he’s no longer content to be president. How far he takes it is up to the Senate and the American people, but we’re in a new danger zone. And I think there’s a widespread understanding that he’s been unleashed by impeachment. But what is not well understood is how quickly he’s going to escalate. I think people are a couple steps behind him. That fear is especially confirmed for me when people don’t react when he does things like this.

I think, even though we get tired of saying it and doing this exercise, it’s worth stepping back and thinking, “What would have happened if Obama had issued that same tweet while Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate?” The tweet Trump posted about New York and the lawsuits against him would certainly have gotten President Obama impeached and removed from office. But now we’re in a zone where the president can commit acts that would’ve been impeachable and led to removal from office in the past in plain sight, and people shrug it off and cast a side-eye at the person who’s sounding the alarm.

We have to stay grounded in the place where this country was before this authoritarian took over or we will lose perspective on what is dangerous and what is inappropriate. And so we have to view this through the lens of President Obama doing this with a Republican Congress or President Bush doing it with a Democratic Congress. If we do that exercise, even though we get tired of doing it and we get frustrated because we can’t make it happen, we begin to understand how unbelievably dangerous [Trump’s] comment is.

This is the situation I found myself in in 2017 when I was still leading the Office of Government Ethics. I told the staff, “We are going to treat them exactly the same as we treated both the Bush and Obama administration. We are gonna hold them to the same standards. Which means we’re not gonna be harder on them than we were on Obama and Bush, but we’re not gonna be easier on them either. We have to stay grounded as though we are still in 2006 or 2016.”

It’s not the people doing that who have changed, it’s the world that has changed, because Trump has shifted the ground and everybody is way down the road with Trump. Some of us have to stay back where America was when there was a rule of law and say, “Wait a minute, this is the thing that would’ve ended a presidency.”

And I guarantee that tweet this week would’ve ended a past presidency because it was different than other obnoxious tweets that he’s done in that it connected an official action to a demand for a thing of value. That’s different in nature than his silly stupid tweets about name-calling, but you see endless coverage of him calling one candidate short and making fun of another candidate’s name. People are getting distracted by this silly noise.

Aaron Rupar

When you left government in the summer of 2017, did you foresee the first term of Trump’s presidency going down this road that we’re on now? Has it in some ways been worse than you expected?

Walter Shaub

I gave a speech at the Brookings Institution on January 11, 2017. It was something I never thought I would do and never thought I would have to do, condemning the plan he had announced that day for divesting. And I tried to warn America that if a president can get away with not divesting, everything is fair game for him to do in service of his personal interest.

That is the consistent theme. He’s not all over the place. Every single action he has taken has advanced his personal interest, starting with the monetizing of the presidency and the ignoring of conflicts of interest — perhaps even relishing conflicts of interest. Then the attempted coercion of Ukraine was again his personal interest in retaining power, and in this case his personal interest in getting rid of lawsuits from a state.

So I have to say, I feel like I knew he was certainly going to try these things, and I tried to warn the world about it. But what I didn’t expect is how badly the system would fail to stop him. At the time, I had real faith in some Republican senators, like Chuck Grassley and others, who had been champions of whistleblowers and congressional witnesses and the norms that hold government together. I didn’t agree with all their policies or everything they did, but I thought these were principled individuals who would uphold the rule of law. And just this week [we have] Chuck Grassley abandoning a lifetime of defending whistleblowers and congressional witnesses to say that it was fine for President Trump to retaliate against Alexander Vindman.

I absolutely predicted this is where he would try to go. What I didn’t predict is how badly the system would fail because of his coopting of partisans in the Senate.

Aaron Rupar

You posted another tweet this morning linking the tweet about New York that Trump posted yesterday with the one he posted this morning basically asserting a right to order the Justice Department around.

Can you flesh out the connection between those two tweets?

Walter Shaub

They are in a straight line pointing from democracy to authoritarianism. This is a president declaring himself above the law, without regard for laws like the anti-bribery statute in one case, or the traditions of the country in a non-politicized justice system. I see them as exactly the same, because it is now a full-court press to push the boundaries in all directions.

If you envision it, it’s not that he’s focused on one issue and pushing it in one direction. It’s like a balloon expanding. And so the outer edges of the expanding balloon are going to touch on different issues, but they are consistent in being part of the expanding of executive power beyond the bounds of anything democracy can tolerate.

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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.

Wendy Williams is apologizing after saying on her show Thursday that gay men should “stop wearing our skirts and heels.”

“I’ll start by saying I apologize, I did not mean to offend my LGBTQ+ community on yesterday’s show,” Williams said in a message posted to YouTube on Friday, adding that she didn’t realize that her comments were offensive until she watched a broadcast of the show later.

“One thing I can tell you right now is that I never do the show [from] a place of malice,” she said. “I understand my platform with the community, from first grade to intermediate school to high school to college to radio and now to TV.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings,” she added. “I’m just having a conversation. If you know me long enough, then you know … I live and let live every day. Life is too short. I’m 55 years old, and maybe I sounded like your auntie, your mother, your big sister, or somebody out of touch. I’m not out of touch, except for perhaps yesterday by saying what I said, so I deeply apologize, and I deeply appreciate the support that I get from the community. I will do better. I appreciate you supporting me. Thank you.”

Williams’ anti-LGBT comments came during a “Hot Topics” segment of the show, when she asked who in the audience would be celebrating Galentine’s Day, the Feb. 13 holiday of “ladies celebrating ladies” spawned by an episode of Parks and Recreation.

Never a dull moment on the Wendy Williams show! This week, Wendy took aim at gay men, saying they will never go through menstruation like we women do, and to stop wearing our high heels and skirts! Oh my Wendy! pic.twitter.com/xYfVR0lCKA

— Shawnasaurus Rex (@ShawnG927) February 14, 2020

“Well, first of all, if you’re a man and you’re clapping, you’re not even a part of this,” Williams said. “You don’t even understand the rules of the day. It’s women going out and getting saucy and then going back home. You’re not a part.

“I don’t care if you’re gay,” Williams said, adding that gay men don’t menstruate every 28 days. “You can do a lot that we do, but I get offended by the idea that we go through something you will never go through.

“And stop wearing our skirts and our heels. Just sayin’ girls, what do we have for ourselves?”

Williams’ comments drew heavy criticism from the online LGBT community, with Queer Eye star Tan France even launching a #GayHeelsForWendy hashtag.

View this post on Instagram

#GayHeelsForWendy # Uuuugh, Wendy Williams hashtag GayHeelsForWendy, so I/she can see your FABULOUS pics in heels!!

A post shared by T A N . F R A N C E (@tanfrance) on Feb 13, 2020 at 4:52pm PST

The post Wendy Williams Issues Tearful Apology After Telling Gay Men to ‘Stop Wearing Our Skirts and Heels’: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously Friday against the Trump administration's efforts to attach work requirements to Medicaid in a case brought against Arkansas' efforts to do so. It's a pretty decisive blow, with the decision written by very conservative Reagan appointee Judge David B. Sentelle, who in upholding a decision by a lower court wrote, "The district court is indisputably correct that the principal objective of Medicaid is providing health care coverage."

He goes on to cite the Medicaid statute and the program’s purpose of providing medical assistance to families with dependent children and to senior and disabled individuals. Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act added to that cohort, and Sentelle agreed with the lower courts that the "expansion of health care coverage to a larger group of Americans is consistent with Medicaid's general purpose of furnishing health care coverage." Furthermore, he quotes the 1st and 6th Circuits’ conclusion that "[the] primary purpose of Medicaid is to enable states to provide medical services to those whose 'income and resources are insufficient to meet the costs of necessary medical services.'" He returns again to the fundamental fact that "statute and case law demonstrate that the primary objective of Medicaid is to provide access to medical care."

Sentelle, writing for the court, rejects outright the administration's claimed alternative objectives in approving work requirement waivers of influencing or incentivizing beneficiaries to "achieve better health outcomes." Medicaid, statute and case law say, is intended for different aims—the one objective of the law is to ensure access to medical care. He concludes: "Because the Secretary's approval of Arkansas Works was arbitrary and capricious, we affirm the district court's judgment vacating the Secretary's approval."

The case was originally consolidated with a challenge to Kentucky's work requirements, which has since been removed because there's a Democratic governor in Kentucky now, and he axed the requirements. Arkansas had removed more 18,000 people from the program based on work requirements reporting before it was invalidated by a federal judge. The Trump work requirements waiver requests are pending in eight states, and have been approved but not implemented in Arizona, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin. This decision will likely keep those states from moving forward. It has been implemented in Indiana and Michigan, and both states have been sued.

This decision could create another thorny issue for the Supreme Court and the Trump administration in this election year. Arkansas' Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson is itching for a fight in the Supreme Court, and so will pressure the administration to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Whether the administration or the Supreme Court wants to have another high-profile fight over health care—the 5th Circuit ruling essentially striking down the whole of the ACA is still out there—is a very big question.

“Win” may be Donald Trump’s favorite word. He likes to win. Win. Win. Winnity win. So much win.

But is it really a win if you don’t get to revel in it? Okay, sure, so Donald Trump already had a celebration in which every network inexplicably stayed with him while he basked in the glow of his hand-selected crew, an event at which he discussed how being shot had made Steve Scalise better-looking, pondered the idea that a wife might show concern about her husband, and wandered away into 1960s baseball. Only … it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

The real win for Trump can only come by spelling out just how he tricked everyone, how he got away with it, how he proved that he’s the smartest guy in the room. So that’s exactly what Trump did on Thursday when he explained how he sent Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine. To extort it. For Trump’s personal political gain.

Trump’s moment of not-at-all-guilty reveling happened, of all places, on a podcast hosted by Geraldo Rivera. (Warning: Do not listen if you’re capable of listening.) 

In this interview/private confessional space, Rivera asked Trump if it was “strange” to send Rudy Giuliani off to Ukraine, considering that Giuliani is his personal lawyer and not a public official. Before Trump could respond, Rivera followed this up by asking Trump if he was “sorry” about sending Giuliani, apparently forgetting that he was in conversation with a man who publicly stated that he’s never had to ask for forgiveness about anything.

Of course Trump responded by denying he had any doubt about sending Giuliani. As “the best mayor” and “the best prosecutor” and “a great crime fighter,” Giuliani was the perfect person to send to Ukraine for Trump’s purposes. And those purposes were? To go to Ukraine and dig up political dirt on his opponents.

In the past, Trump has denied sending Giuliani to Ukraine, or directing him to do anything there. Which never made any sense, considering that Trump mentioned Giuliani directly in his phone call to the Ukrainian president and instructed both the State Department and members of his Cabinet to “Get with Rudy” to understand what Trump wanted from Ukraine.

But he had to do it, says Trump. Faced with the certain knowledge that Joe Biden had been up to corrupt stuff, Trump had only bad choices. "Here's my choice,” said Trump. “Either I deal with the Comeys of the world, or I deal with Rudy." 

That is, Trump could have either tried to determine the truth of the situation by asking the people in the FBI and the State Department who already had the answer, or he could have sent Giuliani to Ukraine to drink thick coffee and chat with the people so corrupt they’d been run out of a notoriously corrupt government; with the assistance of attorneys and guides provided by an exiled oligarch hiding from an extradition order for crimes against the United States.

The trouble with going the FBI route is that Trump already knew what it would say: that Joe Biden asked for the removal of a corrupt prosecutor because that was standing U.S. policy, backed up by requests from the U.K., the International Monetary Fund, and a list of Republican senators. There is no crime to investigate. In fact, given a second round of confessional time, the nation might learn that Trump already went to the FBI before sending his personal attorney.

Because there’s nothing wrong with having a personal attorney who tells government officials what to do. “Other presidents had them,” said Trump. “FDR had a lawyer who was practically, you know, he was totally involved with government. Eisenhower had a lawyer. They all had lawyers." There may be a difference between having a lawyer and launching that lawyer on missions of extortion and slander, but Trump doesn’t see it. What’s a Roy Cohn for in the first place?

Zaya, third from right, with her family after her father Dwyane Wade’s final career home game in Miami on April 9, 2019. | Michael Reaves/Getty Images

Black trans kids desperately need public support. Wade’s moment on Ellen DeGeneres’s show is only the beginning.

When former NBA star Dwyane Wade opened up on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Tuesday about his 12-year-old daughter coming out as transgender, I was blown away by the honesty and care shown on my TV screen.

“We are proud parents of a child in the LGBTQ+ community and we’re proud allies as well. And we take our roles and our responsibilities as parents very seriously,” Wade told Ellen. “Zion, born as a boy, came home and said, ‘Hey, so I want to talk to you guys. I think going forward I am ready to live my truth. I want to be referenced as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ I would love for you guys to call me Zaya.’” In response, Wade said it’s their job as parents to get information so their child can be “her best self.”

As a black trans woman and author, I found the moment nothing short of groundbreaking. Black athletes don’t have the best track record with LGBTQ acceptance, and a stigma still persists in the black community around queerness and transness, especially among older generations. Many black trans people like myself have long hoped for the day when black athletes, with their platform and influence on the black community, can openly date a trans woman and openly accept their trans child.

Watching Wade, I couldn’t help but think about my father, who has accepted my trans identity and sexuality since I was a teenager, and how I have been very lucky. He defended me once when I was misgendered at a YMCA. I was wearing makeup and feminine clothing, and a woman at the front desk looked at me confused. Then she turned to my father and asked if I was his son. My father quickly responded, “This is my daughter!” To have my father in my corner made me feel not only loved but safe. He’s since told me that accepting me as I am “is just the right thing to do because I love you.”

Not every trans black person can say they have a father like mine, or like Wade. It’s unfortunately rare. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s 2019 Black and African American LGBTQ Youth Report, 77 percent of black youth said they have heard family members say negative things about LGBTQ people, 47 percent have been taunted or mocked by family for being LGBTQ, and only 19 percent can “definitely” be themselves at home. Sixty-seven percent of black trans youth specifically say their families make them feel bad because of their trans identity. As a result, 80 percent say they feel depressed or down because of the lack of acceptance. According to the LGBTQ Task Force, nearly half of black transgender people have attempted suicide.

To make matters worse, many state legislatures continue to introduce bills that would harm trans children. In Kentucky, for example, three anti-trans bills are slated for this year’s session: one that bars trans students from using shared bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender; one that would prohibit trans girls from joining women’s sports teams; and one that would make it a felony for medical professionals to prescribe medicine and perform surgeries for trans minors that would help them with transition. With at least 10 other states trying to push similar anti-trans bills, showing support for trans children in schools, in the home, and in public platforms can be a matter of life or death.

Accepting black families are out there, of course, but we just don’t see them often in the media. The most prominent example that comes to mind is Magic Johnson, who supported his queer son EJ when he came out publicly in 2013. But for black trans kids, there aren’t many examples of accepting fathers, nor are there enough black trans adults to look up to as a source of inspiration, guidance, and reassurance.

But it wasn’t just Wade opening up about Zaya that made his moment on Ellen important for families, trans or not, to witness — it was the action behind it.

Wade said on Ellen that he told Zaya, “You are our leader, and this is our opportunity to allow you to be a voice.” Wade not only listened to his daughter, he uplifted her. He didn’t question or doubt her; he accepted and believed her. It also touched me when Wade said that his wife, actress Gabrielle Union, looked to the cast of Pose for some guidance. Not only was that a testament to the power of the show itself — a drama about New York City’s African American and Latino ballroom scene that features the largest cast of transgender actors ever to appear on television — but also in the power of asking for help in better understanding girls like us.

What’s perhaps most important is that Wade and Union seem committed to showing continued public support for their daughter and speaking out about trans acceptance. Last year, in an interview on Showtime’s All the Smoke podcast, Wade used she/her pronouns to talk about Zaya, without having to describe or disclose a specific gender-identity label for her. Wade also showed his support by sharing on Instagram a photo of her at Miami Beach Pride.

On the day the Ellen episode aired, Union also posted a video on Twitter that read: “Meet Zaya. She’s compassionate, loving, whip smart and we are so proud of her. It’s Ok to listen to, love & respect your children exactly as they are.” In the video, we see Zaya sitting beside her father, speaking about being “true to yourself” and asking, “What’s the point in being on this earth if you’re going to try to be someone you’re not?”

With a high-profile black family such as Wade and Union’s accepting their trans child in the public eye, we can only hope that more families follow suit — and do their best to learn and center their child’s experience.

Vanessa Clark is a transgender, queer author whose debut novel, The Man on Top of the World, was a Bisexual Book Awards finalist. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Some Democrats are advocating for a much more aggressive response.

Attorney General William Barr intervened to reduce the sentencing recommendation for Donald Trump’s friend Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative. But the very same week he did that, he attacked progressive prosecutors around the country for not being punitive enough toward poor people and people of color. A group of those elected prosecutors pushed back against Barr’s “dangerous and failed” approach with a group statement.

“Critics such as Attorney General William P. Barr seek to bring us back to a time when crime was high, success was measured by how harsh the punishment was, and a fear-driven narrative prevailed,” 39 prosecutors said in the statement.

Barr’s push for harsher sentences—at least for people without money and connections—comes from the idea that the way to stop crime is to lock more people up for longer. But, progressive prosecutors and justice system reformers point out, the facts aren’t with those policies. “My fellow reform-minded prosecutors and I don’t resort to fear, we deal in facts,” said Ramsey County, Minnesota, prosecutor John Choi. 

Progressive prosecutors deal in facts, such as the fact that a cash bail system has left nearly half a million unconvicted people in jail at any given time simply because they couldn’t pull together a few thousand dollars to get out—meaning that middle-class and rich people don’t suffer this aspect of the justice system, and the poor people who do often lose their jobs and even their homes because of the time they spend in jail waiting for weeks, months, or even years to even get their day in court. 

They deal in facts, such as the fact that, from 2001 to 2010, nearly half of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, and black people were 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, even though white people were as likely to actually use marijuana. 

But Barr and his fellow tough-on-crime (except crime committed by rich white guys) types don’t care to deal in those facts. They deal in fear and division, and they are fully on board with racial disparities. Happily, in recent years, there’s been pushback on that, with reform-oriented prosecutors elected in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and more. Those prosecutors are beginning to move parts of the U.S. to a more just form of justice.

“We know policies based on fear don’t work; they simply deepen divides and promote a false narrative,” the letter from the 39 prosecutors says. “For too long communities were told that locking up poor people for crimes like shoplifting and drug possession would make them safer, when time and time again all it resulted in was the fracturing of families, intergenerational cycles of incarceration, a destabilization of communities and a growing distrust of law enforcement.”

Natural gas producers in front of a biodigester. | Shutterstock

It’s no substitute for shifting to clean electricity.

This piece was originally published on February 14 and has been updated to include a comment from SoCalGas.

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To stay in line with the targets laid out in the Paris climate agreement, the US needs to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, known as “deep decarbonization.” Virtually every credible study on deep decarbonization agrees on the basics of a strategy to get there.

The heart of the strategy is cleaning up the power grid, which is currently responsible for 28 percent of US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It must be rapidly transitioned to zero-carbon sources like renewables, hydro, and nuclear.

Concurrently, two of the biggest sources of GHGs, transportation and buildings, must switch over to run on that zero-carbon power. The transportation system (29 percent of US emissions) is almost entirely powered by gasoline and diesel; it must transition to electric vehicles to the extent possible. And buildings (also 29 percent of US emissions) are now frequently heated and cooled by oil or, more commonly, by natural gas; they must transition to electric heating and cooling to the extent possible.

This strategy — for which I use the shorthand “electrify everything!” — is beginning to catch on, especially in California, which is always something of a preview of broader trends to come. In a relatively short span of time, a robust “all-electric movement” has emerged, as dozens of towns and cities take steps to encourage all-electric construction in new buildings.

Natural gas utilities do not like this movement one bit. The more all-electric buildings there are, the fewer natural gas ratepayers there are. An all-electric future inevitably involves the obsolescence, or at least the substantial diminution, of natural gas utilities. Naturally, they are fighting back furiously, with astroturf groups, PR campaigns, and lobbying at the local level.

Their main argument — playing out with particular intensity in California — has to do with “renewable natural gas” (RNG), an industry term for methane captured from biogenic (organic) waste at landfills, livestock operations, farms, and sewage treatment facilities. (It is sometimes called “biogas” or “biomethane.”)

Shutterstock

RNG can, depending on feedstock and circumstances, be low or even zero-carbon.

Utilities like SoCalGas argue that ramping up the production of RNG and blending it with normal natural gas in pipelines can reduce GHGs faster and cheaper than electrifying buildings. According to Southern California Gas Company spokeswoman Christine Detz, “A growing number of experts and industrialized nations recognize the need to include renewable gases as part of a sustainable energy mix.”

By pursuing electrification, they say, regulators are pushing unnecessary cost hikes onto consumers.

It would be nice for the utilities if this were true. But it’s not. RNG is not as low-carbon as the industry claims and its local air and water impacts are concentrated in vulnerable communities. Even if it were low-carbon and equitable, there simply isn’t enough of it to substitute for more than a small fraction of natural gas. And even if it were low-carbon, equitable, and abundant, it still wouldn’t be an excuse to expand natural gas infrastructure or slow electrification.

It isn’t a close call. The research is clear: Especially in a temperate climate like California, RNG is not a viable alternative for decarbonizing buildings. It is a desperate bid by natural gas utilities to delay their inevitable decline. Policymakers would be foolish to fall for it.

That’s the short version. Now let’s look at how the battle is playing out, with an emphasis on California, which is one of the country’s top natural gas-consuming states — and a state with a goal of going net-carbon-zero by 2050.

Electrification is gaining serious momentum in California

The expert chorus supporting electrification has been getting louder.

Energy efficiency and electrification are recommended for the building sector in the United States Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization, developed under the Obama administration. They are recommended throughout the work of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) on various countries, including the US. (DDPP also did a pathways analysis for my home state of Washington, at Gov. Jay Inslee’s behest; it contains the same recommendations.)

The California Energy Commission (CEC) has done a report on deep decarbonization and a (recently updated) extensive report on the future of the state’s natural gas network. In both reports, it finds that electrification is the cheapest option for decarbonizing buildings.

In response to this chorus, 26 California cities have now either passed an ordinance phasing out natural gas in new building construction or updated building codes to encourage all-electric construction. Dozens more cities are expected to follow suit this year. Across the state, builders and real estate developers are being pressured by their investors about “carbon risk,” the possibility of building fossil fuel-reliant assets that will be unable to find buyers.

Perhaps most significantly, in January, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) announced a new proceeding to begin the process of weaning the state off of natural gas, including consideration of a just transition to avoid safety issues and stranded costs.

CARB

Natural gas utilities are freaking out and getting shady

All this momentum has thoroughly freaked out the Southern California Gas Company, the nation’s largest gas utility, serving 5.7 million customers in Southern and Central California. SoCalGas makes more yearly revenue than any other utility in the nation, and of its $2.9 billion in revenue in 2018, $2.25 billion, almost 80 percent, came from residential customers. All-electric residential construction would crush it.

Monopoly natural gas utilities run the same way monopoly electricity utilities do. They don’t make money on the sale of gas. Rather, they charge a rate for gas that is meant to cover their costs, the costs of new investments in natural gas infrastructure, and a healthy fixed rate of return on those investments. In other words, they make profits by building stuff. Naturally, they want to build more stuff.

But what they are facing is a steady loss of demand, as more and more customers opt out of the natural gas system in favor of the grid. That will leave fewer and fewer customers paying higher and higher rates just to maintain the existing pipeline infrastructure, with little room left for new investments.

This is a disaster in the offing for SoCalGas and its owner, Sempra Energy. A few years ago, a new nonprofit was born: Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions (C4Bes). It began running ads opposing a natural gas phaseout and lobbying local lawmakers across the state, using apocalyptic messaging about the cost to consumers, recruiting local signatories for petitions against electrification. In March 2017, it had the unbridled chutzpah to ask the CPUC to make it an official party in the proceeding regarding the future of natural gas in the state.

That prompted the Sierra Club to point out, in a filing to the CPUC (replete with backing documents and leaked emails), that C4Bes is an astroturf group, a lobbying effort masquerading as a nonprofit. It’s a creation of SoCalGas, using talking points written by SoCalGas to organize opposition to municipal efforts that would negatively impact SoCalGas. It should not be posing as an independent party in a regulatory proceeding.

Finally, after months of parrying and delaying regulators, rather than face discovery, which would open up its books, C4Bes elected in January 2019 to withdraw from the proceeding. In May 2019, the Public Advocates Office, a consumer watchdog within the CPUC, determined that SoCalGas had been using sleazy tactics, including, reports KQED, “lying to regulators, undermining efficiency codes and standards, and ‘astroturfing’: funding a seemingly independent advocacy group with ratepayer money.” It recommended that CPUC sanction the utility.

Michael Boccadoro, head of Dairy Cares, an advocacy group for animal agriculture in California, was originally on the board of C4Bes until he saw their tactics up close — telling homeowners that government agents would be ripping out their gas stoves soon, crematoria that would no longer be able to cremate bodies, and Asian restaurants that have to give up their woks. “It’s pretty misleading what they’re trying to do,” he says, “and the story they’re out there telling. It seems like a desperate action.” He resigned from the board last year.

(For more on this, see scathing stories from Susie Cagle at the Guardian and Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times, along with an LA Times editorial.)

Brawley

C4Bes withdrew from the proceeding, but it is still active, still out telling municipal officials horror stories about electrification. And it is not alone. In the Pacific Northwest, a coalition of gas utilities has launched a $1 million PR effort to push back against electrification in the region. “Partners for Energy Progress” will use much of the same messaging that C4Bes is using.

That means two things: raising fears about the costs of a transition (despite a broad consensus that electrification will save consumers money, as we will see later) and stressing consumer “choice.” They know from their research that they can’t get away with simply opposing decarbonization. They need an “all of the above” message, one that offers consumers a choice of different decarbonization pathways.

That’s the role RNG is playing in this debate: The natural gas industry is proposing it as a choice, an alternate route to decarbonization.

Is it?

There isn’t enough RNG to go around

The main question facing RNG is simple: Is there enough of it to decarbonize existing uses of natural gas, like buildings? Several states have looked into this closely. The answer, in a word, is no.

In its deep decarbonization pathways study, the CEC concluded that, if California had access to its population-weighted share of total US bioenergy output, “there appears to be insufficient biomethane to displace the necessary amount of building and industry fossil natural gas consumption to meet the state’s long-term climate goals.”

UC Davis also did a study on the potential of RNG in California. It found that, all told, about 82 billion cubic feet a year (bcf/y) of biomethane sources are “attractive for investment,” taking into account state and federal incentives. By way of comparison, in 2017, California consumed about 2,110 bcf/y of natural gas. So under the most optimistic assumptions, RNG could replace 4.1 percent of California’s gas demand (1.6 percent on the low end of estimates).

What about RNG for transportation, another idea that the natural gas industry has long supported? A 2017 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists showed that it would require almost the entire country’s RNG potential to replace diesel fuel alone in California.

In 2013, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) concluded that the total potential for biogas in the US (excluding energy crops) is about 431 trillion BTUs. In 2015, California used about 1.6 quadrillion BTUs in its buildings. So if the entire country’s biogas potential were devoted to California buildings and nothing else, it would replace about a quarter of the gas used.

Long story short: There literally isn’t enough RNG in the US to decarbonize California buildings.

A Washington State University study done for the Washington Department of Commerce found something similar for that state: “adequate opportunities exist for RNG production equivalent to 3 percent to 5 percent of current natural gas consumption in Washington.”

A study by the Oregon Department of Energy found that if the state maximized its domestic resources, it could replace between 10 and 20 percent of its natural gas use with RNG.

Finally, a more optimistic study by the gas industry itself found that, if RNG is combined with synthetic natural gas (SNG) made from electrolyzed hydrogen and captured carbon, it could replace 6 to 13 percent of the US demand for pipeline gas by 2040.

There is no credible study anywhere claiming that RNG can fully decarbonize the natural gas system, by California’s 2045 deadline or ever.

RNG is extremely costly compared to alternatives

Gas utilities are proposing to increase RNG in their pipelines and to charge their customers for the extra expense through rate hikes. SoCalGas has pledged 20 percent RNG by 2030 (it proposes to raise rates 30 percent between 2018 and 2022).

“As California charts its path toward carbon neutrality some have suggested that electrification is the silver bullet to get us there,” SoCalGas’s Detz told Vox. “But the science is clear, electrification alone is not a pathway for getting to carbon neutral.

“SoCalGas is committed to becoming the cleanest gas utility in North America,” she added.

In the Pacific Northwest, NW Natural, a large gas utility in Oregon, has pledged 30 percent emissions reductions from 2015 levels by 2035 (it proposes to hike rates by $2.50 to $3 a month per customer).

While RNG is a promising development and may be useful in some sectors (see below), there is no justification for blending it in pipelines as a way to decarbonize the building sector. For buildings, electric alternatives are available and cheaper.

Shutterstock

Before demonstrating that, it’s worth addressing a particular study that gas utilities and their allies like to cite. It was done by research consultancy Navigant at the behest of SoCalGas. It selects the highest possible estimates of electrification costs and the lowest possible estimates of RNG costs, ignores pipeline leaks, ignores local health and equity impacts, and ignores the sustainability of RNG feedstocks.

But more importantly, it compares the total GHG reductions of RNG blended in the natural gas supply (which would marginally reduce the emissions of all natural gas uses in all sectors) with reductions through electrification in the building sector alone. That’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. The question is not the best way to get a third of the way to zero by 2030, as the study does; it’s the best way to get all the way to zero.

As we’ve seen, while natural gas supply might be partially decarbonized with RNG (say, 15 percent, being maximally generous), there is not enough RNG to get it to net zero, which is the ultimate destination. There’s no point going down a pathway that ends in a cul de sac in a few years; there’s no time.

Other, less biased studies look worse for RNG.

A deep decarbonization study for California done by Energy & Environmental Economics (E3) found that electrification was the most predictable and cost-effective way to decarbonize buildings, given limits on RNG supply.

In a 2017 report examining California’s program of supportive tariffs for bioenergy (from landfills, ag operations, and forest wastes), the CPUC observed that the cost of the tariffs is “disproportionately high compared with other renewable procurement options” and that there is “no indication of market transformation” that might bring costs down in the future.

“Digesters are steel and cement, and some plastic,” says Boccadoro. “Those are not going to come down [in price]; they’re going to continue to increase.” What’s more, the easiest and most suitable sites for biomethane capture are developed first, which means projects become more difficult and expensive as time progresses — the opposite of economies of scale.

Another E3 study on the future of natural gas distribution in California found that, even with “aggressive technology learning,” the RNG needed to decarbonize the state’s natural gas system would be both wildly expensive and insufficient. It would have to be supplemented by heroic amounts of hydrogen and synthetic natural gas from out of state.

E3

If RNG (or SNG) comes from out of state, then it is out of state where the emission reduction occurs. “We keep claiming [RNG] is going to ‘decarbonize’ the gas system,” Boccadoro says, “but it doesn’t really decarbonize the gas that’s being burned. There’s some offset occurring somewhere else, and when that offset occurs outside of California, it doesn’t help reduce our emissions here in California.”

What’s more, shifting to RNG (and SNG) would radically drive up gas costs. No policymaker or regulator in their right mind is going to ask a shrinking group of natural gas ratepayers to pay these exorbitant costs. “I represent some of the largest gas users in the state,” Boccadoro says. “We can’t afford to pay seven times what our competition is paying for natural gas.”

Notably, the study also found that in all scenarios, high and low electrification, total gas “throughput” declined. There is no decarbonization scenario where natural gas use increases.

Another more recent E3 study looked at the economics of residential building electrification in California and found that it would represent a savings, not a cost, relative to the status quo. For new construction, an all-electric home saves between $130 and $540 a year relative to one that burns gas. Single-family homes that retrofit from natural gas to all-electric save between $10 and $60 a month on energy bills. And those savings increase over time as electricity gets cheaper and cleaner and natural gas rates continue rising.

A Synapse Energy study found that even though electric heat pumps still cost more than natural gas furnaces, for new construction, opting for a heat pump saves $1,500 up front, thanks to the avoided costs of plumbing the property for gas.

The Rocky Mountain Institute did a report on the economics of all-electric, zero-net-energy homes, which are already far more favorable than widely understood. In San Francisco, such homes pay their extra upfront costs back within eight years.

To summarize: decarbonizing buildings with electrification saves homeowners and developers money, with savings rising over time; decarbonizing buildings with RNG costs ratepayers money, with costs rising over time.

And that’s just costs. There are other impacts of RNG to consider.

RNG exacerbates air pollution problems

Once it is captured from organic sources and injected into pipelines, RNG is chemically identical to natural gas. Methane is methane. It has all the same effects when leaked or combusted.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas — 28 to 36 times more potent than CO2 over 100 years — and represents 9 percent of California’s total GHG emissions. It is also a local air pollutant.

Among other things, it pollutes indoor air when used for cooking. A 2017 CARB study found that “cooking emissions, especially from gas stoves, have been associated with increased respiratory disease.” A raft of peer-reviewed research (see here and here) shows that cooking with gas elevates risk for those in the home, especially for vulnerable populations like children. As many as 12 million Californians are exposed.

The natural gas industry has pushed for RNG to be used in heavy trucks in place of diesel, but a 2012 study found that, if the leakage rate in natural gas pipelines is any greater than 1.4 percent, the climate benefits of switching from diesel to RNG are negated. A recent literature review found that the leakage rate in California is somewhere between 2.4 and 4.3 percent.

Even if there were no leakage, the combustion of methane in a vehicle emits carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides.

RNG is also produced by sources that are themselves big polluters. Despite what the rosy term “renewable” might suggest, the CEC found that the state’s two biggest sources of biogas are landfills and manure from factory farms.

It’s better to capture some of the gas from landfills and factory farms than to let it escape into the atmosphere. (Boccadoro says manure methane emissions in California have declined by 25 percent in the last four years.) But it’s odd to think of those polluting sources as “renewable.” Many people hope they will decline over time, as Americans generate less food waste and eat a healthier diet with less red meat and dairy.

Small farms, with pasture-grazed cows, generate no appreciable methane. It’s the big, industrial dairy farms that are responsible for 55 percent of the state’s methane emissions. As the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has handed out subsidies for biodigesters, the average herd size of a recipient is 7,430 head. By way of comparison, average herd size in Wisconsin, the second-largest dairy state, is 134 head. These are huge operations. And they must be, to justify capturing methane; a 2018 study found that 3,000 head is the minimum herd size needed to make anaerobic digestion economic.

Anaerobic digesters also leak methane, at a rate of between 2 and 3 percent, adding to their lifecycle GHGs in a way that is rarely captured in models.

For now at least, to the extent that decarbonization is linked to RNG, it is reliant on a steady supply of landfills and factory farms, which produce the very sort of pollution that electrification eliminates. A study last year in Environmental Science & Technology summed up the difference for California:

Compared with business-as-usual levels, a decarbonization pathway that focuses on electrification and clean renewable energy is estimated to reduce concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by 18–37% in major metropolitan areas of California and subsequently avoid about 12,100 (9,600–14,600) premature deaths. In contrast, only a quarter of such health cobenefits, i.e., 2,800 (2,300–3,400) avoided deaths, can be achieved through a pathway focusing more on combustible renewable fuels.

The sun and wind are healthier sources of energy than trash and shit.

Wikimedia

RNG impacts are concentrated in vulnerable communities

The industrial dairy farms that produce RNG are mostly located in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the poorest areas of the state, where African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans make up the majority of the population. It is home to the nation’s worst air pollution, the highest rate of asthma in children, and nitrate-laced drinking water.

Livestock operations are the top source of ozone-causing pollutants in the area, a major source of nitrate pollution, and a major source of ammonia emissions, which cause eutrophication of surface water and fine particulate pollution. They also release persistent odors that cause headaches.

Residents of the area have been pushing the state government to stop subsidizing harmful agriculture and livestock management and start subsidizing regenerative and other climate-friendly agricultural practices. But the state still devotes a far smaller amount to those practices than to dairy digesters — $21.6 million versus $72.4 million.

California’s pioneering law SB 1383 requires that the state reduce methane pollution from organic waste 40 percent by 2030; it does not require that it capture 40 percent of methane. It can just as easily, often less expensively, reduce the waste streams that produce the methane. But if RNG is made into a valuable commodity, it will bias the industry (and the lawmakers it lobbies) to seek expanded dairy operations.

Residents of the San Joaquin Valley reasonably worry that a major new source of revenue for industrial dairy farms will help support an otherwise economically marginal industry, perhaps even encourage its growth, and that their children will pay the hidden costs.

RNG is worth pursuing, but not as an alternative to electrification

None of the above should be taken as arguing against RNG, provided that protections for vulnerable communities are built in. As long as there are landfills, giant manure ponds, agriculture and forestry waste, and sewage treatment plants off-gassing methane into the atmosphere, it makes sense to capture as much of that methane as possible and use it. It’s better than fracking it out of the ground.

And there are plenty of good ways to put RNG to use.

I’ve mostly focused on California in this post, but it’s worth pointing out that in other, less temperate states, the electricity system faces higher seasonal peaks, as everyone turns on heaters or air conditioners at once. Adding both cars and all remaining buildings to already congested grids could threaten their reliability. Many states, like the densely populated states of the Northeast US, will need much longer than California to prepare, to build their grids out and learn how to manage all that new electricity demand. Until then, RNG could work in the background to lower the carbon intensity of natural gas.

And it may be that there are some sectors of the economy that resist electrification and still need combustible liquid fuels even through 2050 — so-called “harder-to-abate” sectors like shipping, aviation, or heavy industry. It’s better for those sectors to burn RNG (and SNG) than to burn fracked gas.

There are also lots of vehicles already in circulation that could benefit from RNG. Recently, UPS bought a bunch of RNG to reduce the climate impact of its existing fleet of natural-gas trucks. But even UPS is realistic:

Liquid fuels will probably be needed for various subsectors and niche applications for a long while, so it’s worth pursuing every promising carbon-neutral or carbon-negative fuel.

But there are two key points to emphasize here. First, there is no scenario in which RNG is an alternative to electrification. At best, it is a complement. Electrification should move full speed ahead no matter what happens with RNG.

Second, California buildings are not one of those harder-to-abate sectors that need liquid fuels. A study last year in the journal Atmosphere specifically compared various pathways to decarbonizing space and water heating in California buildings, including “solar thermal, biogas, synthetic natural gas, and electrification.” It found that electrification is the only alternative that can serve all heating loads in the state (others cover between 2 and 70 percent). What’s more, it is the least cost pathway, coming in at 25 to 90+ percent cheaper than the alternatives.

The study concludes: “[E]nergy efficiency with electrification of heating is the most likely path to achieve the large carbon emission reduction needed from this sector.”

RNG cannot delay the inevitable decline of natural gas

Make no mistake, the natural gas industry opposes electrification because it wants to expand pipeline infrastructure. At an American Gas Association meeting in 2018, one industry leader, discussing RNG, tasked the audience to “consider how technologies to decarbonize the pipeline can serve as a conduit to environmental organizations, thereby seeking to mitigate the opposition’s fervor against infrastructure expansion.”

But the development of RNG, while worth pursuing, does not mean what SoCalGas and other natural gas utilities want it to mean. It is no reason to expand gas infrastructure; the fervor is as warranted as ever.

A recent report from E3G examined the role of natural gas in the EU’s decarbonized future. It found that in all its scenarios, even the most generous to decarbonized gas, the total amount of natural gas “throughput” in the system declined. It concluded that RNG should be pursued, but because it is so expensive, it should be targeted at harder-to-abate sectors where it has the highest social value. Above all, “the future prospect of renewable and decarbonised gases is no reason to slow down electrification or efficiency at this stage.”

The same is true in the US, as virtually every study agrees. Deep decarbonization means the decline of the natural gas industry, no matter what happens with RNG or SNG.

As the CEC has concluded, allowing the decline of natural gas to unfold organically threatens to be an unnecessarily long and messy process, leaving the growing costs of maintaining natural gas infrastructure piled on the shoulders of a shrinking group of ratepayers, largely those who can’t afford to escape the system. The only responsible course of action at this point is the one the CPUC appears to be taking: planning for a deliberate phaseout of natural gas, with costs shared equitably.

RNG is an interesting development at the margins, for some energy applications. But it is no bigger than a blip in the larger story of natural gas, which is one of inexorable and inevitable fading away to the margins.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It comes as no surprise that the guidance computers aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft were impossibly primitive compared to the pocket computers we all carry around 50 years later. But on his website, an Apple developer analyzed the tech specs even further and found that even something as simple as a modern USB charger is packed with more processing power. Forrest Heller, a software developer who formerly worked on Occipital's Structure 3D scanner accessory for mobile devices, but who now works for Apple, broke down the numbers when it comes to the processing power, memory, and storage capacity of Google's 18W Pixel charger, Huawei's 40W SuperCharge, the Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 charger, and the Apollo 11 guidance computer, also referred to as the AGC. It's not easy to directly compare those modern devices with the 50-year-old AGC, which was custom developed by NASA for controlling and automating the guidance and navigation systems aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft. In a time when computers were the size of giant rooms, the AGC was contained in a box just a few feet in length because it was one of the first computers to be made with integrated circuits. Instead of plopping in an off the shelf processor, NASA's engineers designed and built the AGC with somewhere around 5,600 electronic gates that were capable of performing nearly 40,000 simple mathematical calculations every second. While we measure processor speeds in gigahertz these days, the AGC chugged along at 1.024 MHz. By comparison, the Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 USB-C charger includes a Cypress CYPD4225 processor running at 48 MHz with the twice the RAM of the AGC, and almost twice the storage space for software instructions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday evening, Attorney General Bill Barr sat down with NBC News to explain just how darn frustrated he is with Donald Trump. That Trump guy, it seems, simply will not let Barr do his job, what with the tweeting that Barr needs to investigate this political rival, and the tweeting that Barr needs to go soft on that political pal, and the tweeting that Barr needs to get rid of these traitors in his midst.

Tweet, tweet, tweet. The guy will never shut up! Which is absolutely wrecking Barr’s totally independent efforts to investigate Trump’s political rivals, go soft on Trump’s pals, and remove everyone Trump finds objectionable. Any questions, America?

In short, the idea that Bill Barr is “pushing back” against Donald Trump is just plain … Barrsh#t.

The Washington Post is one of … possibly all … newspapers in the nation this morning running with the line that Barr’s statements represent some kind of declaration of independence of the judiciary. But this “remarkable public rebuke” of Trump is nothing of the sort.

Barr has already admitted that he personally intervened to soften the sentencing recommendation for Trump confidant Roger Stone. Which was exactly what Trump requested in the tweets that Barr says are making it “impossible” to do his job.

Barr swapped the prosecutors on Michael Flynn so that lying to the FBI and backing out of an agreement to testify is just no big deal. Which is surely something that will be of so much help to every other member of the DOJ trying to do their job regarding members of the mob or terrorist groups.

Bill Barr’s job is doing what Trump tells him to do. That’s not just an observation: Barr himself made that absolutely clear even before he was approved by the Senate. He believes in a unitary executive to the nth degree, meaning that the Justice Department is simply another tool available to Trump, no matter how he wields it.

That brings up a little point hidden way, way, way down in that Post article. It’s there, 29 paragraphs into the article, that one learns that, in addition to his overtly political work in coddling Trump’s own criminal cohorts, Barr created an unnecessary and redundant investigation into his own department, headed up by U.S. Attorney John Durham. Not only has Barr been personally escorting Durham around the world to investigate the same kind of baseless conspiracy theories that Rudy Giuliani has been pushing in Ukraine—including those same already-debunked theories—but this is all happening for the same reason that Giuliani is doing his thing. The Post reports, “Trump has become more insistent that Durham finish his work soon, according to people familiar with the discussions. Trump, these people said, wants to be able to use whatever Durham finds as a cudgel in his reelection campaign.”

William Barr has created an investigation headed by John Durham that is openly designed to generate political dirt Trump can used as a cudgel in the upcoming election. That is the kind of job that Barr is doing. And that is why the whole idea that he’s making any kind of stand against Trump is so ridiculous. The only conflict between Barr and Trump is just how the firing squads should be organized.

And if anyone needed any reminding, Trump was back on the Twitterhorn Friday morning to make it clear that Barr is his pawn, and nothing more. In that overnight interview, Barr stated that Trump “has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.” Which is, of course, a lie that requires looking no further back that Trump’s tweets condemning the judge, prosecutors, and even jury members in Stone’s case. And if that’s not clear enough, ”This doesn’t mean that I do not have, as President, the legal right to do so,” tweeted Trump. “I do, but I have so far chosen not to!”

That’s Trump’s way of telling you that so far he’s been subtle, dammit. When he orders Bill Barr to round up his enemies, he’ll give that order loud and clear. Because that Article II means he can do anything.

A Michigan wedding venue that was investigated for turning away a same-sex couple is now attempting to legalize LGBT discrimination statewide.

The owners of Rouch World, a 300-acre park and wedding venue in Sturgis, are suing the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.

The department launched an investigation into Rouch World after the owners, brothers Jayme and Ben Rouch, turned away a lesbian couple based on their “Christian beliefs.”

Although Michigan law doesn’t explicitly prohibit LGBT discrimination, the Department of Civil Rights has interpreted the state’s ban on “sex”-related bias to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The department launched its investigation in response to a complaint from the couple, Natalie Johnson and Megan Oswalt.

“Rouch World is asking the court to grant a declaratory judgment saying sexual orientation and gender identity are not covered by the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act and to grant injunctions stopping the investigation into Rouch World and future investigations of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,” MLive.com reports.

The Rouch brothers are represented David Kallman of Kallman Legal Group, who says his clients were subject to “onerous documentation requests” as part of the investigation.

“Our defense is pretty simple,” Kallman said. “Our Michigan law at least as it currently stands… does not include sexual orientation or gender identity as protected categories.”

The Department of Civil Rights says the state will defend its position.

“We’ve long expected this action and have said since the time of the Commission’s vote that the courts are the right place to ultimately decide the question,” a department spokesperson said in a statement. “We obviously hold a different legal opinion than the individuals who filed suit. The Michigan Attorney General’s office will defend our position in court and we continue to believe the courts will decide in our favor.”

The post Anti-Gay Wedding Venue Sues to Legalize LGBT Discrimination Throughout Michigan appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

When Donald Trump handed down the demand that military assistance to Ukraine go into the freezer until he got the Biden-dirt he was demanding from the U.S. ally, someone had to carry out that order. That person was Mick Mulvaney. In his double role as acting chief of staff and director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney both is right there to catch whatever Trump is pitching and has the government’s checkbook in hand.

So Trump told Mulvaney, who told the OMB staff, who told the Department of Defense to stop sending Ukraine the materials it needed to survive. And they also told the DOD to shut up about it, because all this stuff was illegal as hell. Of course, those OMB officials all refused to testify before Congress, and Mulvaney, after bragging about the whole thing in front of every television network in America, then walked it back on Twitter. So it never happened. 

Then the emails started coming out.

Over at the website Just Security, they’ve been combing through the emails that have been obtained over the last two months since hearings ended in the House. Most of those emails have been released through Freedom of Information Act requests filed by various media and nonprofit sites. However, those official FOIA versions of the emails have been redacted so heavily that Sharpie stock probably got a bump. The fragments that survive certainly tell a story: a story of criminals criming, and covering it up.

But what’s even better is that Just Security managed to find sources for some of those same emails without their heavy coat of black paint. Those emails confirm that both the DOD and the OMB were completely aware that what they were doing was a violation of the Impoundment Control Act. Pentagon officials repeatedly complain and point this out. OMB officials acknowledge this fact … then go back to telling the folks at the Pentagon to clam up.

Simultaneously, the letters reveal that the OMB was taking a different tack when it came to concerns expressed by the Government Accountability Office. With the GAO, the OMB officials mostly played dumb and pretended that everything was on track. That sometimes required just misleading the GAO. Sometimes it meant outright lies.

Just Security’s glimpse at the unredacted emails also reveals something else: The redactions made to the official versions were not made because they touch on information that is classified or protected by some form of executive privilege. Instead, the site notes, the redactions show that “OMB is continuing its efforts to keep its knowledge of the Pentagon’s legal worries a secret, blacking out the portions of the emails where DoD officials voiced their concerns and where OMB staffers acknowledged them.” The redactions made to these documents were not made casually. According to The Washington Post, they were reviewed by OMB attorney Mark Paoletta, who “signed off on the delay of security assistance to Ukraine” and overruled career officials. 

As Adam Schiff has noted, many of these are the same emails that the House Intelligence Committee attempted to obtain through a subpoena—but the White House is still refusing to honor that subpoena. And since Republicans in the Senate have endorsed the cover-up, it’s unclear that the OMB will ever hand over what appears to be crystal-clear evidence.

They knew they were involved in a crime. The debated various excuses for their action. They told Pentagon officials to help them in the cover-up. That cover-up continues in the redactions made in response to FOIA requests.

At this point it’s hard to even say that the House should subpoena Paoletta and OMB official Michael Duffey. It should just go on to contempt … for the contemptible. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray showed the agency’s commitment to both-sidesing domestic terrorism when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee last week. According to Wray, one domestic terrorist threat comes from “abortion violent extremism”—and that doesn’t just mean clinic bombings or doctor assassinations. No, Wray described it as including “people on either side of that issue who commit violence on behalf of different views on that topic.”

Challenged by Rep. Karen Bass, Wray insisted, “Well, we've actually had a variety of kinds of violence under that, believe it or not.” Actually … don’t believe it. It’s not true.

Wray’s testimony isn’t the first time the FBI has tried to pass off abortion violent extremism as something both sides do, The Daily Beast reports. A 2017 counterterrorism guide, it reported, “claimed that these extremists ‘believe it is their moral duty to protect those who provide or receive abortion services’—though even this document noted that only one ‘pro-choice extremist’ had ever been prosecuted.” That single prosecution was not for a killing or bombing. It was for an online threat.

By contrast, there’s a long list of anti-abortion violence that includes multiple murders—most recently, three people killed and several more injured in Colorado Springs in 2015—attempted murders, bombings, acts of arson, and vandalism. But according to the FBI, both sides do it. Just as, according to Donald Trump, there were “very fine people on both sides” when neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville.

Speaking of Charlottesville, Wray did say that the top form of domestic terrorism is racially or ethnically motivated, and that it’s a high priority. “We elevated to the top-level priority racially motivated violent extremism so it's on the same footing in terms of our national threat banding as ISIS and homegrown violent extremism,” he said.

A worker holds tampons in a production hall of Ontex Hygieneartikel Deutschland GmbH in Germany. | Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance via Getty Images

“That is what our elected representatives think of us,” one menstrual equity advocate says.

A debate erupted this week in the Tennessee state legislature over the danger of women buying too many tampons.

The concern came up during a hearing Tuesday about taxation of the products. Specifically, Democratic lawmakers in the state have proposed a bill to include tampons and other menstrual products in Tennessee’s yearly sales tax holiday, a three-day weekend when residents can buy things tax-free.

But state Sen. Joey Hensley, a Republican, worried that this might lead to out-of-control tampon-buying.

“I would think since it’s a sales tax holiday, there’s really no limit on the number of items anybody can purchase,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “I don’t know how you would limit the number of items someone could purchase.”

Hensley’s remarks have gotten nationwide coverage, with some questioning his grasp of the human menstrual cycle. Associated Press reporter Kimberlee Kruesi noted that his comment reminded her of “the time NASA thought a woman needed 100 tampons for a week in space.”

The lawmaker told Vox in an email that he is not actually against adding tampons to his state’s tax holiday, and that his concern was merely “getting the facts regarding the cost of the bill.”

Whatever happens in Tennessee, the hearing was also part of a bigger debate around the cost of tampons and menstrual pads, which can put them out of reach for low-income people. When someone can’t afford menstrual supplies, they are sometimes forced to miss work or school — as Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, author of the book Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity, puts it, “would you be able to walk down the street if you didn’t have a pad or a tampon?”

Lawmakers around the country have tried to make tampons more affordable by lifting sales taxes on the products, noting that many other necessities, like bandages, are already tax-exempt. Others have gone further by providing the products for free in places like schools, homeless shelters, and jails.

But Tennessee is not yet part of this movement. A measure to lift the sales tax on tampons entirely in the state failed in the legislature last year, even though the state already exempts proceeds from gun shows, fees for private gyms, and admission to county fairs, Weiss-Wolf said.

“This is not a question of affordability, it’s a question of priority,” Brandon Puttbrese, a spokesperson for Tennessee state Sen. Sara Kyle, who sponsored the tax holiday bill, told Vox in an email, noting that last year, the state legislature gave tax breaks to sports agents, architects, and accountants, among other groups.

The controversy over Kyle’s measure shows that even though more than half of Americans will have a period at some point in their lives, the need for affordable menstrual products is sometimes poorly understood. Hensley’s comments were a reminder of “what it means and feels like to not be fully represented in the halls of governance,” Weiss-Wolf said.

A new bill would make tampons part of Tennessee’s yearly sales tax holiday

Tennessee’s annual sales tax holiday lets residents buy items from clothing to computers without paying the usual 7 percent sales tax, Kruesi reports. Held at the end of July, it’s often a time when families do back-to-school shopping.

This year, Kyle, a Democrat, introduced a bill to include tampons and menstrual pads in the list of items Tennesseans can buy tax-free during the holiday. It’s especially important to include these products in a holiday aimed at back-to-school buying, Weiss-Wolf said, since “they’re what people need to be productive and present in school,” just as much as notebooks or pencils.

But in the hearing Tuesday, the bill faced pushback from Republicans, including Hensley. “I understand the importance of these products for women,” the legislator from Hohenwald, Tennessee, told Vox. But, he said, he wants more information on the cost of the bill.

According to the AP, Tennesseans who use tampons and other menstrual products spend about $120 a year on them, and the cost of the bill to the state would be about $132,700 annually.

Of course, it’s possible that people would choose to buy more than a year’s supply of tampons, but it’s not clear why that would be a greater concern than, for example, residents buying more than a year’s supply of clothes or computers.

Hensley’s comments were an example of “disrespect and outright misogyny, to sort of just assume the worst about women,” Weiss-Wolf said, leaving her with “disappointment and disgust that that is what our elected representatives think of us.”

Advocates are pushing for menstrual equity around the country — but they’re also facing pushback

The Tennessee measure is part of a bigger movement around the country toward “menstrual equity,” or making tampons and other period products affordable and accessible to all. It’s a recognition that people simply can’t go about their daily lives, or participate in the economy or society, if they don’t have reliable access to menstrual products, Weiss-Wolf said.

In recent years, nine states, including New York and Nevada, have taken steps toward menstrual equity by eliminating the so-called “tampon tax,” or sales tax on tampons and pads. Others, like Virginia, are working on measures to do so.

Five states, including New York and California, have passed legislation requiring that tampons and pads be provided free in public schools, a recognition that students need reliable access to the products in order to attend and participate fully in class. Additionally, several states have passed bills requiring that the products be made available free to people who are incarcerated.

Advocates of repealing the “tampon tax” argue that the taxes aren’t just detrimental to the health and well-being of those who menstruate — they’re also unconstitutional. The group Period Equity, which Weiss-Wolf co-founded, helped launch an initiative last year to push more states to repeal tampon taxes, arguing that they constitute illegal discrimination against people who menstruate.

Tennessee, however, is one of 31 states that still impose sales tax on tampons and pads. A measure to repeal it failed last year amid questions about how the state would make up the resulting loss in revenue. But in fact, Tennessee ended the year with a budget surplus, Weiss-Wolf said — and chose to use it to give residents a tax break on ammunition.

Overall, she and others say, questions about the cost of repealing tampon taxes miss the point that menstrual products are basic necessities for millions of Americans. New York City Council member Julissa Ferreras-Copeland, who sponsored a measure to make the products free in city schools, shelters, and jails, made this point in 2016 by comparing tampons to a product whose cost lawmakers don’t often worry about. “They’re as necessary as toilet paper,” Ferreras-Copeland said, “so they ought to be just as freely accessible.”

The former White House chief of staff knows Trump is guilty, just as we all do.

By a near-party-line vote of 232-183, the House of Representatives today passed a resolution removing the deadline for ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment barring discrimination based on a citizen's sex. Republicans were against it, and in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to toss the resolution into his garbage can, as he has with nearly everything else the House has sent him since Democrats won a majority in the lower chamber in 2018.

The intent of the resolution was to nullify one of the key current claims against final ratification of the ERA, after Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the would-be constitutional amendment nearly 50 years after its 1971 introduction. Even liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was dubious that the Virginia ratification, passed "long after the deadline passed," would allow the amendment to go forward, noting that other states have rescinded their support in the intervening years.

If the Senate were willing to pass the House resolution, then, it would remove one of the major roadblocks to ratification, but not the other. Current hard-right states such as Idaho and the increasingly theocratic Tennessee would insist that their deratifications be taken into account, and the Supreme Court would still have to take up that half of the question. Given that the court itself is now hard-right, the ruling on that would be preordained.

If the Equal Rights Amendment is ever to become law, the effort likely needs to start from scratch. That is not a bad plan, in fact: Remove the mewling "process" excuses hard-right conservative lawmakers have staked their opposition on and make the question plainer again: Will you vote for an amendment granting equal protections to women, or will you not? The founders clearly did not overlook such rights, but excluded them purposefully. Is it time, in the 21st century, to formally reject that exclusion?

The most common conservative complaint is that, like every other declaration of civil rights before it, an Equal Rights Amendment is not necessary because here in Real-Life America, equality is already self-evident. While the thought is lovely, in other words, putting it on paper is simply too wasteful to be bothered with.

The more direct Republican opposition, however, comes from exact opposite calculation: An Equal Rights Amendment would almost certainly take a wrecking ball to Republican anti-abortion laws across the country, laws intentionally written to strip rights from half the population.

That seems like a public fight worth having yet again. Put it on the ballot in every state and let's see where we stand. For the record: The House originally passed the Equal Rights Amendment by a bipartisan 254-to-23 vote, back in 1971. The Republican venom toward equal rights for America's women is something that’s developed more recently.

When the Department of Homeland Security announced on Feb. 7 that residents of New York would no longer be allowed to participate in programs such as Global Entry that speed passengers through airport security, it seemed like an act of petty vengeance. But then … petty vengeance is Donald Trump’s middle name. He just spells it with a J. So the idea that Trump would make a move designed to irritate millions of New Yorkers because their state passed laws supporting immigrants seemed absolutely believable.

But as it turns out, Trump wasn’t acting out of pure retaliation. Not at all. On Thursday Trump fired off a tweet making it clear that the real purpose behind making New Yorkers go to the back of the line was extortion—to force the state into leaving his taxes, his company, and his friends alone.

After all, it worked so well in Ukraine.

The original announcement seemed to be a follow-up to threats Trump delivered in one of the red-meat segments of the State of the Union speech that he slipped in between the fake game show segments. In that speech, Trump threatened sanctuary cities and states while making the usual gross distortion of what sanctuary laws are about or how they’re intended to improve public safety for everyone. 

But on Thursday, Trump tweeted that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was on his way to the White House. Cuomo, said Trump, needed to make New York “stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment [sic],” making the real reason Trump was leaning on the state where he used to claim residence even more transparent than the reason he took such an interest in Ukrainian prosecutors.

Among those who gave this threat the eye roll it deserved was New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted her disgust at Trump’s “corrupt, illegal, and authoritarian” action in holding New Yorkers “hostage in exchange for dropping lawsuits against him and his family’s lawbreaking behavior.”

But AOC wasn’t the only person who noted this obvious attempt at a quid pro quo. New York Attorney General Letitia James also had no doubt about what Trump was doing. 

When you stop violating the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, we will stand down. Until then, we have a duty and responsibility to defend the Constitution and the rule of law. BTW, I file the lawsuits, not the Governor. https://t.co/tsOLeEgiQp

— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) February 13, 2020

The rule of law is the very virtue that separates a democracy from a dictatorship. Though one’s ability to vote is a feature of democracy, elections are meaningless without a functional legal apparatus to safeguard them. People are allowed to cast votes in virtual dictatorships all the time, but their collective will is ultimately crushed by leaders who rig the outcomes. Without the rule of law America is doomed as a democracy, and the sanctity of the legal system is exactly what Donald Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, are working to dismantle in real time by turning the Department of Justice into a tool of the State.

Trump is reportedly seething after enduring three years of investigations for which he is constitutionally incapable of taking any responsibility. Sure, he called for Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016, and Russia followed suit almost immediately by hacking the Democratic National Committee. Sure, he asked the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and withheld desperately needed funding and political backing to pressure him into doing so. But Trump is never wrong, can never be questioned, and surely has never been held accountable in his life. And now that he will carry the stain of impeachment to his grave, there’s going to be hell to pay and the nation’s top law enforcement officer has proven eager to help wherever possible.

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But this goes way beyond the interference Barr ran last year on public release of the Mueller report, which otherwise would have been devastating to Trump. Barr is now intervening in the administration of justice on multiple cases, weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump’s political enemies, and shielding Trump’s allies from the full force of the law.

The list of interventions is simply staggering. In brief, they include a relentless effort to find wrongdoing by the officials at the FBI and CIA involved with launching the Russia investigation in 2016, taking specific aim at former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (who was already denied his pension benefits by Barr’s predecessor after decades of service at that bureau).

And on the leniency side, Barr has moved in recent weeks to lighten the punishment for two Trump loyalists and former campaign advisers, Mike Flynn and Roger Stone. In service of that goal, Barr removed the Senate-approved U.S. attorney in D.C. and replaced her in the interim with a close ally from his office, Timothy Shea, who has gladly done Barr’s bidding. Shea is the guy who earlier this week signed off on overruling the sentencing recommendations made by the four federal prosecutors on Stone’s case who have all since resigned in protest. While all these actions are indefensible, Barr’s interference with the sentencing recommendations of a Trump ally was so unprecedented that it has elicited an outcry from a groundswell of former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials.

“I’ve never seen so many prosecutors, including those who aren’t political or those who haven’t been following this situation closely, go to red alert so quickly,” Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. Attorney in the Obama administration, told the Washington Post. “The reason is this: If a president can meddle in a criminal case to help a friend, then there’s nothing that keeps him from meddling to harm someone he thinks is his enemy. That means that a president is fully above the law in the most dangerous kind of way. This is how democracies die.”

Vance’s prognosis isn’t hyperbole. America is teetering on the edge and Republican lawmakers have proven to be nothing but a herd of sycophantic lemmings. Unfortunately, House Democrats, who do have some agency, haven’t exactly been robust in their response. Barr has agreed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee for a hearing but not until March 31. 

At her weekly press conference Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Barr “a sad disappointment,” saying he had “deeply damaged the rule of law by withdrawing the Department of Justice sentencing recommendations” in the Stone case, among other things.

But frankly, Democrats should be jumping up and down about this in order to shine a public spotlight on the Justice Department’s turn toward becoming nothing short of an instrument of authoritarianism. How about a bicameral press conference? How about burying the Justice Department in subpoenas just to make a point? How about a speedier timeline for Barr’s hearing? Some actual outrage spiraling into public spectacle would be useful here. We need leadership to meet the moment so American voters will understand the stakes here and be fully operational when they hit the polls in November. 

They beat us at chess and trivia, supplant jobs by the thousands, and are about to be let loose on highways and roads as chauffeurs and couriers. Now, fresh signs of robot supremacy are emerging on Wall Street in the form of machine stock analysts that make more profitable investment choices than humans. From a report: At least, that's the upshot of one of the first studies of the subject, whose preliminary results were released in January. Buy recommendations peddled by robo-analysts, which supposedly mimic what traditional equity research departments do but faster and at lower costs, outperform their flesh-and-blood counterparts over the long run, according to Indiana University professors. "Using this type of technology to make investment recommendations or to conduct investment analyses is going to become increasingly important," Kenneth Merkley, an associate professor of accounting and one of the authors, said by phone. Whether getting stock calls right is a critical mission of human analysts is debatable. Wall Street research departments serve a variety of functions, among them connecting investors with company executives and gathering earnings and other corporate data. While their buy, sell and hold recommendations still garner attention and can move stocks, the number of clients premising investment decisions off them is probably limited. The study looked at a small and still largely experimental branch of fintech, firms founded on the premise that digital technology does a better job than humans in making equity recommendations. While all analysts use computers, a handful of start-ups has been seeing if programs can handle every aspect of the stock-picking process.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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No, we’re not kidding.

An Iowa House panel advanced a measure this week that would prohibit school districts from allowing “instruction of any kind” related to sexual orientation or gender identity, without first notifying parents and giving them an opportunity to opt out their children.

One of the 13 Republican co-sponsors of House File 2201 acknowledged that, as written, the proposal could bar a teacher in a government class from mentioning Democratic presidential frontrunner Pete Buttigieg‘s sexuality. Coincidentally, Buttigieg won the Iowa Democratic caucus last week.

The bill applies to “any program, curriculum, material, test, survey, questionnaire, activity, announcement, promotion or instruction of any kind” related to sexual orientation or gender identity.

Iowa already allows parents to opt their children out of instruction in human growth and development, but HF 2201 would apply to all courses.

“It assumes children can turn gay by suggestion,” said Lorilei Baker, an Urbandale mental health professional, according to NBC Channel 13.

GOP Rep. Randy Salmon, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told the Des Moines Register it is needed because, “Not all students, parents or families agree with the viewpoint held by many schools regarding sexual orientation or gender identity issues. And they should be allowed to opt out of instruction that contains that.”

Emily Piper of the Iowa Association of School Boards, which opposes the bill, raised the example of Buttigieg’s candidacy.

“What if we’re having a discussion on current events and there’s a presidential candidate who is gay? Can we not have that conversation in the government class?” Piper said.

According to Channel 13, Salmon said merely discussing Buttigieg’s candidacy in class “wouldn’t trigger notifying parents, but discussing his sexual orientation might.”

Salmon acknowledged that the language in the bill needs to be refined, according to the Register. “She told reporters that her intention is not to have a simple mention of a historical figure in history class to necessarily require notification.”

Salmon was one of two Republicans who voted Monday to advance the measure to the full House Education Committee. Democratic Rep. Art Staed cast the lone dissenting vote.

“We have a system for that with local school boards,” Staed said. “To say that there’s no parent input right now, I think, is ridiculous. I just retired from teaching two years ago. I can tell you, parent input is always part of the process of everything that we do.”

Earlier this year, an Arizona Republican lawmaker introduced a bill that would have banned any discussion of homosexuality in schools. But she later withdrew the measure in response to national outrage.

According to One Iowa, HF 2201 is among at least 13 anti-LGBT bills introduced in the current legislative session.

5 more anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in the last 24 hours. Email your legislators now and demand they stop this extreme, divisive agenda and focus on things that really matter to Iowans. https://t.co/VSAauzDitu

— One Iowa Action (@OneIowaAction) February 7, 2020

The post Iowa Bill Could Bar Teachers from Mentioning that Pete Buttigieg is Gay: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

In the past 24 hours, Bernie Sanders’ top supporters from leading left-wing groups Justice Democrats and Chapo Trap House have launched sexist attacks on Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, in the case of the former, and homophobic attacks on Pete Buttigieg from the latter.

The smears are part of a larger pattern of abusive behavior from Sanders supporters, recently documented by CNN, that are now reportedly costing Sanders support, including the all-important Culinary Union in Nevada, that blasted Sanders yesterday for his supporters’ vicious attacks.

First came the tweet yesterday from Justice Democrats co-founder Kyle Kulinski, who has endorsed Sanders in the Democratic primary, which many took to be sexist, in part because it boils down Elizabeth Warren’s entire campaign to the notion that she expects to be elected simply for her gender, and that, as a woman, her substance is non-existent. And in the case of Klobuchar, she’s little more than an angry women.

Justice Democrats was formed out of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, and is closely aligned with freshmen member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC), who has also endorsed Sanders and campaigns with him.

As one woman explained to me, the use of the term “female” instead of “woman” is a “big giant red flag.” “A plant can be female,” she told me. “A horse, a dog. Only a human is referred to as a woman. It’s dehumanizing. I think a lot of women I know and follow would take issue with the word choice. And it is a choice. A very specific one. Never meant to revere the person they’re referring to. Those people are called ‘women.'”

This comes on the heels of scores of Sanders supporters sharing images of snakes on social media over the past few weeks to suggest that Elizabeth Warren is a snake. The same happened when Warren tweeted last night in defense of the Culinary Union, here is a sample:

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Adding to Sanders’ woes, yesterday an employee of socialist podcast Chapo Trap House — which earns over $160,000 per month from subscribers, and on whose show Bernie Sanders and his top staffers David Sirota and Briahna Joy Gray have appeared (Joy Gray, who bragged in 2017 that she voted for Jill Stein in the presidential election the year before, went on Chapo only a few weeks ago) — tweeted what appears to be a homophobic attack against Pete Buttigieg. The image from a movie, below, shows a group of seemingly naked young men, surrounding another nude young man, who is on his knees while his mouth is forced open and a white substance is put on his tongue.

As if that image weren’t enough, the clip is from a movie called “120 Days of Sodom.” Get it? Sodom. Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodomy. Gay. Oh but it gets even better. It’s a scene where a young man is forced to eat feces. That just happens to be another longtime religious right anti-gay slur: They claim that during sex, gay people end up eating eachother’s feces. Yep, nothing homophobic at all about that choice of clip.

In addition to Sanders, Sirota and Joy Gray have appeared on Chapo’s podcast in recent months. And according to an old tweet of Sirota’s found on Google — he has since deleted his tweets — it appears Sirota was a paid subscriber to the podcast. It would be interesting to know if any Sanders’ staffers are still contributing financially to Chapo, and what Sanders plans to do about it.

Buttigieg, along with Warren and Klobuchar, is a regular target of the pro-Sanders far-left, who have taken to changing their Twitter handles to attack the gay candidate.

It remains to be seen if Bernie Sanders will repudiate his most extreme supporters. To date, Sanders has refused to distance himself from comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, whose endorsement Sanders welcomed even though Rogan, according to Forbes, has a “history of giving a platform to conspiracy theories and making comments criticized as racist or bigoted towards transgender people.”

Sanders ran into the same problem with his recent endorsement of congressional candidate Cenk Uygur, a co-founder of both Young Turks video channel and Justice Democrats. Sanders was forced to withdraw his endorsement of Uygur due to Uygur’s history of “making offensive comments about women, Jews, Muslims and other groups.”

More on Uygur’s comments from the Daily Beast:

Among those remarks, many of which were initially uncovered by The Wrap, include complaints in 2000 that the women of Miami didn’t want to sleep with him because “obviously, the genes of women are flawed. They are poorly designed creatures who do not want to have sex nearly as often as needed for the human race to get along peaceably and fruitfully.”

Under an entry outlining the supposed “Rules of Dating,” Uygur said that “if I haven’t felt your tits” by the third date, “things are not about to last much longer. In fact, if you don’t get back on track by the fourth date, you’re done.”

Another blog entry, posted in 2004 by The Young Turks senior vice president of operations David Koller, described a road trip with Uygur in which Koller describes three underage teenage girls he encountered as “whores in training.”

The Young Turks have also been sued for racial discrimination by a black former employee.

Justice Democrats, to its credit, forced Uygur out of its organization in 2017, after his previous comments objectifying women came to light. Bernie Sanders, however, apparently did not feel the earlier sexist comments precluded his endorsement of Uygur until it caused Sanders bad press.

And Chapo Trap House has also faced accusations of insensitive behavior. More from the Daily Beast:

The gonzo, acerbic style practiced by the eXile lives on today in the “Dirtbag left,” a loose assortment of thirtysomethings grouped around the popular “Chapo Trap House” podcast and sympathetic toward the newly resurgent Democratic Socialists of America. As is usually the case with the far left, the Dirtbags’ main enemies are not conservatives but mainstream liberals, whom they view as too moderate and civil for the coming revolution. On Twitter, two of the podcast’s mostly male cast recently posed around Bill Cosby’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star under the caption, “Hey libs try taking THIS statue down,” while another host mocked a rape victim. Frequent Chapo guest Sam Kriss, a British communist and prominent supporter of hard left Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, was recently suspended from the party and fired from his job as a columnist at Vice following accusations of sexual harassment.

Finally, Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign recently faced its own accusations of sexual harassment. When asked about the accusations on CNN, Sanders said: “I certainly apologize to any woman who felt she was not treated appropriately, and of course if I run we will do better the next time,” he said. When asked if he knew about the women’s complaints, Sanders replied: “I was a little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case.”

Sanders has been accused in the past of not being as interested in civil rights (be they LGBT, race, or gender -based) as he is economic rights. And it’s a complaint that old-school socialists often face, that they have a dogged focus on money to the exclusion of all else. And certainly with regards to Sanders’ endorsements and adherents, he seems to often show an indifference to intolerance, if not an outright tolerance of it.

Sanders again has the chance to show Democratic voters that his movement is about more than anger. Will he finally rise to the occasion?

The post When will Bernie Sanders call out the sexism and homophobia of his top supporters? appeared first on AMERICAblog News.

The dogged reporting by the Washington Post's David Fahrenthold into impeached president Donald Trump's finances and the degree to which the Trump Organization continues to obscenely exploit the office for profit has triggered another House investigation. Last week Fahrenthold reported that the Secret Service has been paying as much as $650 per night for rooms at Trump properties, leading the House Oversight Committee to demand a full accounting of those payments from the Secret Service.

Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and Rep. Jackie Speier have asked the Secret Service for complete records of the agency's payments to the Trump organization as well as copies of the contracts the agency has with Trump. "The payment of rates far above government rates and the Trump Administration's lack of transparency raise serious concerns about the use of taxpayer dollars and raise questions about government spending at other Trump properties," they wrote to the Secret Service. "These concerns are heightened since President Trump has spent a third of his presidency at his private clubs and hotels [zing], and his Treasury Secretary has attempted to shield Secret Service expenses from public scrutiny."

Eric Trump, who is now supposedly in charge of his dad's company, has said that government officials, including Secret Service are at most charged the cost of housekeeping, but basically stay for free, estimating the charge per room per night at "50 bucks." The Trump Organization released a statement to the Post saying only "We charge the U.S. Government simple cost and make zero profit." But hotel industry experts tell Fahrenthold that the most any luxury resort could charge for cost is $80 per night, maybe $100 if they really stretched for the very most expensive shampoos and soaps and such. All the experts in the industry agreed that it is impossible that servicing one hotel room one time could cost as much as $650. "No. That's not possible," Diego Bufquin, a professor at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management told Fahrenthold.

Maloney and Speier have asked for the records by February 25. They point out that the agency is legally required to report its spending on protecting presidential residences to Congress every six months, but thus far in the Trump administration, it's only sent three reports. They also remind the agency that the committee is currently investigating "taxpayer spending at the President's businesses, including the Department of Defense's expenditure of nearly $200,000 at President Trump's Turnberry resort in Scotland between August 2017 and July 2019."

There doesn’t appear to be a shortage of past racist statements from Michael Bloomberg. As the former New York City mayor buys his way up the Democratic primary polling, these statements keep coming out—and no wonder, because Bloomberg didn’t spend the first 15 years of the 2000s saying racist stuff in private; he spent those years saying racist stuff in public, under the guise of serious policy discussion.

Following his horrific comments about stop and frisk, we now learn Bloomberg’s deep (racist) thoughts on redlining, the practice whereby lenders would not give mortgages, or would only offer extremely expensive ones, to people buying homes in “hazardous,” aka black, neighborhoods. Though the policy was officially abandoned decades ago, it continues to cause harm. But to Bloomberg, the problem came with the end of redlining—and that caused the 2008 economic collapse.

“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas,’” Bloomberg said in September 2008. ”And then Congress got involved—local elected officials, as well—and said, ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”

This is not what happened. What happened was that, as one racial and economic justice advocate told the Associated Press, “the 2008 crash was caused by unethical, predatory lending that deliberately targeted communities of color. People of color were sold trick loans with exploding interest rates designed to push them into foreclosure. Our communities of color and low income communities were the victims of the crash, not the cause.”

What happened was that banks pushed subprime loans on black families that could have afforded safer, lower-interest prime loans. Bloomberg’s explanation that the end of redlining meant that people with poor credit got loans they shouldn’t have been able to get absolves the entire U.S. financial system of responsibility for first creating massive wealth disparities through redlining and then targeting black people with subprime loans for greater profit. 

Bloomberg’s campaign is now trying to spin this. “He’s saying that something bad—the financial crisis—followed something good, which is the fight against redlining that he was part of as Mayor,” according to a spokesperson. Uh huh. Just sort of coincidentally followed. He wasn’t saying there was a problem, just, you know … stuff happened.

As a Democratic presidential candidate, Bloomberg now has a plan to “help a million more Black families buy a house, and counteract the effects of redlining and the subprime mortgage crisis,” according to his spokesperson. He also needs to have a clear statement that it was banks that started the financial crisis and that everything we’re looking at here is the legacy of racist policies that targeted black families and prevented them from amassing the wealth that white families were helped into.

Bloomberg’s campaign might also want to try to get ahead of whatever highly public racist statement he made not so very long ago that some reporter is probably right this minute digging up.

President Trump speaks during a meeting with first lady Melania Trump, the President of the Republic of Ecuador Lenín Moreno, and Mrs. Rocío González de Moreno in the Oval Office on February 12, 2020. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The president is shamelessly trying to have it both ways.

President Donald Trump wants you to believe the American economy “is the best it has ever been” — but he also wants you to believe that “serious economy conditions affecting the general welfare” justify his proposal to cut a scheduled pay raise for federal workers.

The juxtaposition illustrates both how nothing Trumpworld says can be taken at face value, as well as the disdain the administration has for non-military government workers.

Trump made the aforementioned claim about the economy being “the best it has ever been” during his State of the Union speech on February 4. He reiterated it on Tuesday.

During congressional testimony on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin echoed Trump’s theme, telling senators that the president’s “economic freedom agenda is working” and that “American families are earning more each year ... growth [will] reduce our debt and deficits over time.”

But at the same time as Trump and administration officials are painting this rosy picture, the president quietly sent a letter to Congress on Monday announcing that as part of his 2021 budget proposal, he wants a scheduled pay raise for civilian federal workers cut from 2.5 percent to just 1 percent. The letter cites a “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare” and claims federal agencies “cannot sustain such increases.”

From the letter, which was first reported on by Slate:

Title 5, United States Code, authorizes me to implement alternative plans for pay adjustments for civilian Federal employees covered by the General Schedule and certain other pay systems if, because of “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare,” I view the increases that would otherwise take effect as inappropriate.

Under current law, locality pay increases averaging 20.67 percent, costing $21 billion in the first year alone, would go into effect in January 2021, in addition to a 2.5 percent across-the-board increase for the base General Schedule.

We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course; Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases. Accordingly, I have determined that it is appropriate to exercise my authority to set alternative pay adjustments for 2021 pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 5303(b) and 5 U.S.C. 5304a.

One thing that has negatively affected the “sustainability” of the federal budget is the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Though that package resulted in tax cuts for most Americans, it mostly benefited rich people and corporations, creating a massive spending gap while only modestly stimulating the economy. Trump’s 2021 budget proposal cut entitlement programs while making those tax cuts permanent.

And while the American economy is strong, it is not the best in history. As the Washington Post notes, Trump “has never achieved an annual growth rate above 3 percent, but in 1997, 1998 and 1999, the gross domestic product grew 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively.” The unemployment rate, while low, is not the lowest in history, and Trump’s job creation record lags behind Obama’s. Still, the notion that the government can afford to spend $738 billion on defense but not a modest raise for federal workers is hard to buy.

The stock market is hitting all-time highs and corporate profits have hit unprecedented levels. But this is cold comfort to federal workers who, according to one recent study, make 27 percent less than their private-sector counterparts.

Alluding to the disconnect between the haves and have-nots in Trump’s economy, Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement that “[f]or an administration that has added $3 trillion to the federal debt, gouging federal employee pay and benefits in the name of deficit reduction is ridiculous.”

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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.

CNN host Jim Sciutto shut down a conservative commentator on Thursday for defending Rush Limbaugh’s recent anti-gay attacks on Pete Buttigieg.

On his radio show Wednesday, Limbaugh questioned how it will look when Buttigieg, whom he calls “booty judge,” kisses his husband on stage after a debate against “Mr. Man Donald Trump.”

Conservative commentator Ben Ferguson appeared on CNN on Thursday morning to defend Limbaugh’s remarks, saying he believes many Democrats fear Buttigieg’s sexuality could become an issue in the general election.

“Is anyone going to look masculine next to Donald Trump on stage?” Ferguson said. “I think the only Democrat out there would be Joe Biden.”

Ferguson added that he addressed the topic on his own radio show recently, with numerous Democrats calling in.

“There was a surprising number of Democratic voters who said it was an issue for them, the same way we saw that lady try to take back her vote in Iowa after she voted and found out that Mayor Pete was gay,” Ferguson said. “[Limbaugh is] saying, there are Democrats who are sitting there worried that this is going to be a bigger issue, just like we saw in California when gay marriage was overturned by voters in a liberal state.”

Sciutto had the perfect response.

“Let me take issue with your premise,” Sciutto said. “What’s more manly, volunteering for military service, as Pete Buttigieg did, or avoiding it?”

“Look, I’m talking about appearance here,” Ferguson responded. “I was with the president last week in the Oval [Office] and I promise you he looked more masculine next to me than I did, and I consider myself to be a pretty masculine guy.”

Sciutto then repeated his question.

“You said the president appears more manly, for I don’t know what reason,” Sciutto said. “I’m citing an issue of the record. Buttigieg volunteered for military service. The president took great pains to avoid it. Which is more manly?”

Ferguson said while Buttigieg could challenge Trump on the issue of military service, “If you asked 100 Democratic voters which candidate looked more masculine, Joe Biden or Mayor Pete, I think they would probably say Joe Biden.”

“It seems to me you’re justifying bigotry here,” Sciutto told Ferguson. “Consultants might have said it’s a negative to be a person of color. This is the year 2020. I’m just curious what you’re justifying here.”

Watch it below.

The post CNN Host Destroys Limbaugh’s Anti-Gay Attack on Buttigieg: ‘What’s More Manly, Volunteering for Military Service or Avoiding It?’ (WATCH) appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Will GOP senators punt on yet another effort to constrain Trump?

Apple plans to release its first iPhone and iPad Pro models with 5G connectivity in the second half of 2020, according to a pair of reports today from Taiwanese industry publication DigiTimes.

The first report claims that the devices will be equipped with 5nm-based A14 chips — likely A14X for the iPad Pro — and support a combination of mmWave and sub-6GHz. Qualcomm is expected to supply its Snapdragon X55 modem for the iPhones, but the report does not specify which modem the iPads will use.


mmWave or millimeter wave is a set of 5G frequencies that promise ultra-fast speeds at short distances, making it best suited for dense urban areas. By comparison, sub-6GHz 5G is generally slower than mmWave, but the signals travel further, better serving suburban and rural areas.

DigiTimes believes that both the iPhone and iPad Pro models will likely be announced in September. Apple typically makes iPad announcements in October, but it has used its iPhone event in September to make a few iPad announcements before, including the original iPad Pro in 2015 and the 10.2-inch iPad in 2019.

From the first report:

Based on its 5G product roadmaps, Apple is expected to launch new iOS devices, including iPhones and iPads, incorporating both sub-6GHz and mmWave specs probably in September, which will significantly drive up demand for 5nm A14, the sources said.

A14 can be applied to diverse iOS mobile devices for different 5G frequency bands as long as corresponding modem chips and AiP modules are adopted, the sources indicated, adding that Qualcomm will provide 5G Snapdragon X55 modem chipsets for new iPhone devices in 2020.

The second report provides a more vague timeframe of the second half of 2020, so an October announcement is not ruled out:

Win Semi reportedly will be the sole fabricator of VCSEL components for ToF (time of flight) AR and depth-of-field (DoF) photography applications, as its US IDM clients have also captured orders from Apple. The ToF camera modules are expected to be incorporated into 5G iPhones and iPads to be released in the second half of 2020, the sources said.

Key Takeaway

Rumors suggest that Apple plans to update its iPad Pro lineup in March, with key new features expected to include a triple-lens rear camera system and 3D sensing for augmented reality. This would make sense from a timing perspective, as the iPad Pro has been updated on roughly an 18-month cycle since 2015, and it will have been 18 months since the iPad Pro was last updated in October 2018.

This would pave the way for the first 5G iPad Pro models with an A14X chip to launch in the fall, with other hardware changes likely being few to none. The new 5G models would likely simply be additional SKUs at the high end of the lineup.


This article, "DigiTimes: 5G iPad Pro Models With A14 Series Chip to Launch in Fall 2020" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Tennessee has an annual sales tax-free holiday weekend that begins on the last Friday of July. Part of the push is that certain items, including computers and clothing, can be purchased throughout the Volunteer State free of sales tax, which promotes consumerism while helping out families purchasing items for kids who are about to go back to school. The Charlotte Observer reports that a proposal to include feminine hygiene products among sales tax-free items has been receiving big-time pushback from Republicans.

Republican state Sen. Joey Hensley explained that he was worried about … how many tampons women might buy. While debating against the bill in the state legislature, he said, “I would think since it’s a sales tax holiday, there’s really no limit on the number of items anybody can purchase.” He went on to say he didn’t know of a way to limit how many feminine hygiene products someone could buy.

The fight to rid our culture of the stigmas surrounding woman’s menstruation has been going on for decades. One obstacle that seems especially frivolous is sales taxes on feminine hygiene products, like tampons. States have taxed the sale of items like tampons the same way one would tax luxury items like a necklace or a flatscreen television. This means that the government does not classify items like tampons and sanitary pads as necessities.

Groups like the American Medical Association have tried to pressure state legislatures into eliminating taxes on feminine hygiene products. Activists have made headway in recent years on this front, including getting states like Georgia to invest in providing financial assistance to low-income people in need of feminine hygiene products. In some cases, activists have succeeded in getting states to eliminate the tax on hygiene products. Nevada became the 10th state to do this in 2018. 

A reminder: The bill that Republicans in Tennessee are trying to quash would make these hygiene products tax-free for THREE DAYS, once a year!!!! The bill’s fiscal impact to the state of Tennessee is estimated at around $132,700 per year. Of course, Republicans like state Sen. Hensley seem to fear that Tennesseans looking to make a life-size replica of the Titanic out of tampons might break the state’s bank.