James.galbraith

Larry Ellison risks blowback from his employees at Oracle. | Phillip Faraone/Getty Images

It’s the most significant endorsement that Trump has gotten from a Silicon Valley leader.

Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world’s richest men, is throwing a fundraiser for Donald Trump — the most significant display of support from a major tech titan for the president, by far.

Ellison is hosting Trump at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley next week for a “Golf Outing and Reception,” according to a copy of the invitation obtained by The Desert Sun, a local newspaper. Tickets run as high as a quarter million dollars.

While Ellison has consistently backed Republicans in the past — he was a major donor to a super PAC backing Marco Rubio in 2016 — the fundraiser is sure to expose the flamboyant 75-year-old billionaire to a new wave of political and corporate scrutiny. Silicon Valley workforces are, in general, deeply oppositional to the Trump administration, and it will be revealing to see whether Ellison encounters any pushback or activism from Oracle’s 136,000 employees, who have already expressed frustration with even lesser ties from Oracle to the administration.

Oracle has not been known to have a particularly restless workforce, but tech workers are organizing in the age of Trump and have sought to minimize ties between their employers and the Trump administration. Companies like Google and Github have encountered employees who want the corporations to end their work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance.

Ellison though has long been one of Silicon Valley’s most eccentric and independent-minded leaders, and so he might care little about the blowback. Ellison is no longer Oracle’s CEO but is its chief technology officer and executive chairman.

Recode asked Ellison’s team this past September about whether he planned to back the president for reelection, but his spokespeople declined to comment. Ellison’s personal and Oracle spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

The event will be held at Ellison’s private estate in Rancho Mirage next Wednesday, according to a copy of the invitation, on a golf course where he once played with Barack Obama. Ellison — far more comfortable with displays of opulence than many other tech billionaires — is a prodigious acquirer of property in Southern California.

What he has not been, up until now, is a major Trump donor. The most significant tech billionaire to back Trump to date has been early Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel. Ellison has not made a political contribution of any type since the end of 2017, and he has never before donated to Trump or any Trump-backed group, according to federal records.

That makes this decision to host a major, high-profile event for Trump all the more unusual. But it’s also a major coup for the Trump team: Ellison is, after all, the country’s fifth richest person, with a net worth of almost $70 billion.

Following the Tuesday Night Massacre, which happened after last week's revenge binge from impeached president Donald Trump, intrepid CNN reporter Manu Raju caught up with Sen. Susan Collins to see what she's thinking about it all. She clearly did not appreciate the fact that Raju remembered what she said last week. The part about "I believe that the president has learned from this case," which she downgraded to "hopes" after Trump point blank said there was no lesson to be learned because "it was a perfect call."

Fast forward a week, and she really wants to be done talking about it. Asked by Raju if, after the actions Trump has taken, she still thinks there's "any lessons he heard from being impeached," she snapped. "I don't know what actions you're referring to. I've made very clear that I don't think anyone should be retaliated against." Then she launched into lecturing Raju: "That has nothing to do with the basis by which I voted to acquit the president, as I made very clear to you, Manu, on numerous occasions because his conduct, while wrong, did not meet the high bar established in the constitution for the immediate ouster of a duly elected president." Which had absolutely nothing to do with the question at all.

Collins has chosen her side, and Maine knows it. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial Senate races, but especially the one in Maine!

Because she doesn't want to answer the question. She didn't want to answer it later, either, when she continued to insist that she bore no responsibility at all for Trump being totally unfettered now. Her vote against impeaching Trump, she told reporters, "wasn't based on predicting his future behavior." Which is a hell of a cop-out for the person who once said impeaching him would be enough to make him curb his future behavior.

Collins is completely abdicating responsibility for both her past and her future failures to do her goddamned most essential job of being a check on the president. What she does think is her job is not obvious (besides granting defense contracts to companies that in turn contribute tens of thousands of dollars to her reelection campaign).

Watch: 

catch that chyron: "GOP Sen. Collins Won't Say If Trump Learned Any Lessons After Acquittal." of course, last week she excused her vote by saying he did learn from impeachment & would be more cautious.....#mesen #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/QMTKd7g2TJ

— Lauren Passalacqua (@laurenvpass) February 12, 2020

MR: In light of the president's actions, do you think there's any lessons he heard from being impeached?

SC: I don't know what actions you're referring to. I've made very clear that I don't think anyone should be retaliated against. That has nothing to do with the basis by which I voted to acquit the president, as I made very clear to you, Manu, on numerous occasions because his conduct, while wrong, did not meet the high bar established in the constitution for the immediate ouster of a duly elected president. And that was the rationale for my vote to acquit him. That is the reason why….

MR: Do you think he learned any lessons?

SC: … In all the years that … since George Washington was inaugurated as our first president that we have never removed a duly elected president from office. It's because the conduct alleged should be so dangerous to our country and so egregious and proven by the House managers that the person should not remain in office one moment more. That was the standard established by the House managers. It was the standard that I used in acquitting President Clinton and that's the reason for my vote and I don't know why you're equating the two.

MR: Well you said the president learned his lesson. Do you think he learned any lessons?

[Collins’ office door slams shut.]

The acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection says the agents who detained and questioned as many as 200 U.S. citizens and permanent residents of Iranian descent for as long as 12 hours just got a little carried away. No, really, that’s what he thinks. “In that one instance,” CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan said during a press conference on Tuesday, “leadership just got a little overzealous, and we corrected that right away.” 

First of all, you are leadership, and secondly, overzealous is quite the way to describe violating the rights of Americans by interrogating them on their political allegiances, in just one example. Others were questioned about social media accounts and even what high school they attended nearly 40 years ago. “My kids shouldn’t experience such things,” Negah Hekmati, an American detained with her family for five hours, told The New York Times. “They are U.S. citizens. This is not O.K.”

Border officials claimed there was no directive that led to the detention and questioning of these families at the U.S.-Canada border last month, but a memo leaked to a Washington immigration attorney and local outlet The Northern Light indicated otherwise. “In a bulletin issued by the tactical analytical unit (TAU) in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Seattle Field Office, officers were instructed to conduct vetting on all individuals who met certain criteria, including being Iranian nationals or having traveled to Iran,” The Northern Light reported. Or, just be overzealous, as Morgan might say.

“It is becoming increasingly clear from multiple conversations with travelers and CBP staff that there was, indeed, a directive from the Seattle Field Office to target Iranian Americans for secondary screening based on their country of origin and despite the fact that they were largely American citizens, legal permanent residents and legal visa holders,” Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapl told The Washington Post in response to the memo. Morgan confirmed the order, with The New York Times reporting, “Without mentioning anyone by name, Morgan told a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that officials in the region imposed additional security screening on people from Iran following the drone strike.”

Facing calls from leaders like Jayapal and Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties said last month that it would be opening an investigation into the detention and questioning of the families, a move welcomed by Jayapal as, “An important step forward thanks to the courage of those who spoke up to tell their story and our community’s collective ability to quickly draw attention to this. Let’s get answers and make sure it never happens again.”

But making sure this never happens again doesn’t sound like much of a serious matter to Morgan or to this administration, which is also seeking billions in its new “nativist horrors” budget to expand CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, versus getting the agents it currently has under control. House Democrats need to stop this budget proposal—and stop the abuses in federal immigration agencies. 

dcblogs writes: In the federal government, approximately 30% of the 2.1 million civilian employees have a master's degree or above. That's compared to about 15% at large firms in the private sector, according to the White House's 2021 budget. The federal workforce is also older than the private sector. The average age of federal workers is 46, versus 42 for all others. The age gap is most acute for the youngest workers, with only 7.3% of the federal workforce younger than age 30 compared to 23% of private sector workers. "Over-reliance on degrees can be a barrier to entry" to federal jobs, the White House argued. Others disagree and say that many government jobs, such as economists and attorneys, require advanced degrees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barely past the sham GOP-led impeachment trial of Donald Trump, U.S. senators on both sides of the aisle are already bracing for what they expect to be a shorter time period between this removal proceeding and the next one. But naturally, the goals of Republican and Democratic lawmakers are quite different, according to The New York Times.

Republicans hope to enact rules that would limit both the House’s ability to impeach a president and the scope of information that would be considered in a Senate trial. One GOP official is advocating for a way to block consideration of what they called "nuisance" impeachments sent over from the House, as if Donald Trump's attempt to rig U.S. elections with foreign help was just a pesky dust-up. To that end, Florida Sen. Rick Scott is pushing to raise the House threshold for impeachment to require three-fifths support in the lower chamber rather than a simple majority. 

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley also wants to thwart the House's control over when articles are officially transmitted by simply giving the Senate authority to initiate a trial within a certain period after the House impeaches. 

Democrats, on the other hand, want to expand Senate trials by mandating that new documentary evidence and testimony be considered. “I’d like to see witnesses and documents be required,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of the proposal from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley.

But at least some Republicans are pulling for a cooling-off period before any new rules are implemented. Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt noted that about a dozen years passed between the anticipated Nixon-era trial that ultimately never materialized and impeachment rule changes made in 1986. “They waited a dozen years before they said, ‘OK, now that things have totally settled down, nobody has an ax to grind, half the Congress that was here in 1972 isn’t here anymore, let’s look at the rules,’” Blunt said.

Not as much as you probably think.

Mobile World Congress, a major smartphone trade show event held each year in Barcelona, Spain, has been canceled in 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The Mobile World Congress event in Spain is a huge trade show that's important to the tech world because it's where many device manufacturers announce new smartphones and other hardware. Apple doesn't participate, but many other major brands make announcements at MWC.


Starting in early February, multiple vendors began pulling out of the event, citing concerns about the coronavirus and the potential for spreading it at such a large event. Intel, LG, Nokia, Vodafone, ZTE, Nvidia, Sony, Amazon, Cisco, Ericsson and other notable companies canceled press conferences and attendance plans.

Given the number of companies refusing to go to MWC, the GSM Association responsible for organizing the event today confirmed to Bloomberg that it's canceled. GSMA CEO John Hoffman said that the virus outbreak has made it "impossible" to hold the event.

The GSMA initially attempted to continue on with MWC, implementing disinfection measures, banning attendees from certain areas in China, and more, but too many companies exited the event. Canceling MWC is similar to canceling CES, as it is a huge deal for new product launches and partnerships.

The coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, has infected more than 42,000 people and more than 1,000 people have died, primarily in China.


This article, "Mobile World Congress 2020 Canceled Due to Coronavirus" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham has little interest in investigating the Justice Department’s abrupt reversal of a sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone — rebuffing a Democratic demand sparked by President Donald Trump’s attacks on the federal prosecutors in the case.

Graham, a staunch Trump ally, said Wednesday he did not intend to bring Attorney General William Barr in for testimony aside from the committee’s general oversight of the Justice Department. And while Senate Republicans broadly criticized Trump’s Twitter forays into the case, they said further investigation is unwarranted — dismissing Democrats’ calls for congressional action over allegations of politically motivated favoritism.

“I don’t think he should be commenting on cases in the system. I don’t think that’s appropriate,” Graham told reporters.

“You want to let the legal process to move forward in the way it’s intended to,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune added. “The president weighs in on a lot of things. He tweeted about it. I guess, so, people perceived that as him having weighed in. But in the end, the Justice Department and lawyers over there need to do what they need to do to make sure justice is being served.”

Trump appeared to confirm on Wednesday morning that Barr intervened in Stone’s case, tweeting: “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.”

Federal prosecutors initially recommended a prison sentence of seven to nine years for Stone, a former Trump political adviser who was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation, making false statements to investigators and tampering with witnesses. Hours after the sentencing recommendation was filed, Trump slammed the decision on Twitter as “horrible and very unfair”; and the following morning, the Justice Department overruled the proposal, prompting the four prosecutors to withdraw from the case or resign from the Justice Department altogether.

Democrats have called for Barr to testify about the reversal amid allegations of politically motivated interference from Trump. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to launch an investigation and on Wednesday urged Graham to convene an emergency Judiciary Committee hearing to conduct oversight.

Later Wednesday, the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee announced that Barr had agreed to testify on March 31. Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said the panel plans to press Barr on the Stone case as well as other recent controversies involving the Justice Department in the aftermath of Trump’s acquittal in the Senate’s impeachment trial.

A Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the decision to reverse the sentencing recommendation was made before Trump registered his displeasure.

Senate Republicans said they trusted U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over Stone’s case, to resolve the issue when she sentences Stone.

“I think the judge is going to take care of all of that. Nobody is going to question the judge’s decision,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman.

“Whatever the judge feels like you need to do with a 70-year-old guy, I trust her judgment,” Graham added.

Graham speaks to reporters on Stone sentencing and Col. Vindman

“The decision should be made by the judge, and I have confidence in the third branch of our government to act outside the world of politics and to do what is right,” Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said.

Other Judiciary Committee Republicans said there was no reason to further investigate the matter.

“There was a miscommunication between the frontline prosecutors and their supervisors. You can’t even indict a public figure without talking to upper-levels at Justice,” said Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, a Judiciary Committee member.

But Kennedy acknowledged Trump’s tweets “aggravated the situation.”

“I wish he’d tweet less, but that’s not going on happen,” Kennedy said.

Asked about Trump’s comments, Romney said: “I can’t begin to spend time discussing the president’s tweets. That would be a full-time job.”

At least one Republican, though, said it is worth talking with the four prosecutors who stepped down to learn more about the reversal.

“I think we need to ask them and let’s find out,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said.

Congressional Democrats have so far struggled to develop a unified response to Trump’s post-impeachment offensive against his political foes, including the firings of two key impeachment witnesses.

Republicans who criticized Trump for trying to pressure Ukraine into investigating his rivals said they hoped the president had learned a lesson from his impeachment. But those same Republicans acknowledged this week that that likely is not the case.

“He seems the same as he did two weeks ago,” quipped Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump has defanged Congress’ oversight authority. That became clear when the Senate acquitted the president of obstruction. But one conservative judge isn’t willing to let the executive branch steal power from his branch of government.

In a jaw-dropping opinion issued by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on January 23, Judge Frank Easterbrook—a longtime speaker for the conservative Federalist Society and someone whom the late Justice Antonin Scalia favored to replace him on the U.S. Supreme Court—rebuked Attorney General William Barr for declaring in a letter that the court’s decision in an immigration case was “incorrect” and thus dispensable. Barr’s letter was used as justification by the Board of Immigration Appeals (the federal agency that applies immigration laws) to ignore the court’s ruling not to deport a man who had applied for a visa to remain in the country.

As Washington reels from the surprise withdrawals of Roger Stone‘s prosecutors, apparently triggered by Trump’s intervention in the upcoming sentencing of his long-time adviser, the Easterbrook broadside offers another window into the way the Trump administration is violating the division of power between the executive and judicial branches.

The 7th Circuit case involved an undocumented immigrant, Jorge Baez-Sanchez, who was subject to removal from the United States after being convicted of a crime. Baez-Sanchez applied for a special visa allowing him to remain in the U.S. if he was also a victim of a crime. An immigration judge twice granted Baez-Sanchez a waiver. But the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed the immigration judge’s decision, claiming that only the attorney general personally could grant waivers—not immigration judges. Baez-Sanchez appealed to the 7th Circuit, which disagreed and remanded the case with a directive that the Department of Homeland Security comply with the immigration judge’s waiver. When it refused, Easterbrook, a 35-year veteran of the court, had had enough of the willful disregard for judicial authority.

“We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again,” Easterbrook wrote. “Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.”

Given Trump’s record of defiance, Barr’s maneuver is predictable—but it is a shocking break with more than 200 years of constitutional and legal precedent.

In 1803, the U.S. Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison established the bedrock principle that federal judges review the constitutionality of actions by the other branches of government. With few exceptions—such as Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to abide by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s decision that Lincoln’s 1861 suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional—presidents have adhered to Supreme Court rulings. President Richard M. Nixon famously turned over the Watergate tapes and effectively ended his presidency in dutiful compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling that he must adhere to a subpoena for the tapes.

Presidents have used their powers to shore up the authority of the federal courts, as well. President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed the National Guard to enforce the Supreme Court’s call for racial integration in public schools under Brown v. Board of Education, after the Arkansas governor’s refusal to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in the fall of 1957. A year later, in Cooper v. Aaron, the court halted the Arkansas School Board’s ploy to suspend its desegregation plan, noting that Marbury “declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.”

In defying the 7th Circuit, therefore, Attorney General Barr challenged the validity of Marbury v. Madison itself—and thus the federal judiciary’s authority to say what the law is and have it stick.

If Trump continues on the path of upending the authority of federal courts (as can be expected), Easterbrook’s contempt threat will necessarily become a reality. Federal judges will have to use their contempt powers to protect the constitutional prerogative of the judicial branch of government. But contempt against the government can be tricky. A judge can impose a monetary fine, but fines raise legal questions of sovereign immunity. A judge can alternatively put someone in prison. But imprisonment raises the question of who would go behind bars for defying a court order on behalf of the president. In normal times, an order declaring that the president’s staff is guilty of contempt could as a third option trigger enough shame to prompt compliance. But with Trump in the White House, we are not in normal times.

Hence, those who say “it could never happen in America” need only consider Easterbrook’s holding, which is so elementary that the very fact that he put it in writing underscores how dangerous Barr’s defiance is: “The Attorney General, the Secretary, and the Board ... are not free to disregard our mandate in the very case making the decision.”

The question looming over the presidency today is not what the law says, but what happens when the executive branch violates established law. As we saw with the impeachment debacle, without consequences, laws lose their force and become optional. In remanding the Baez-Sanchez case for a second time, Easterbrook insisted that the immigration judge’s waiver decision remains “in force,” and that “[t]he Executive Branch must honor that decision.”

What will happen, then, on the inevitable day that Trump’s administration refuses to honor a judicial decision? That scenario beggars belief, too. Courts enforce contempt through the U.S. Marshals Service, a team of federal police officers that is ultimately within the president’s chain of command. Will U.S. Marshals side with the judge over the president or vice versa? And if they get that choice wrong, what branch of government stands ready to hold them accountable to the people?

Trump and his ally in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are notably sanguine over the 187 appointments to the federal bench—including two Supreme Court justices—that they have managed to push through confirmation to date (four of them on the 7th Circuit). The expectation, no doubt, is that Trump appointees will uniformly implement a conservative agenda in lockstep with the whims and desires of Trump and his loyal base. That might well be the case when it comes to hot-button social issues like abortion and substantive immigration law. But federal judges serve for life, and—unlike members of Congress—do not have to worry about reelection. Easterbrook’s decision suggests that when push comes to shove, even conservative judges are unlikely to abdicate their Article III prerogative and destroy what’s left of the separation of powers just because Trump tells them to.

Trump at a rally in New Hampshire on February 10. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

President Trump’s interference with Roger Stone’s sentencing shows the real lesson he took from impeachment: that he has impunity.

“If American democracy were to collapse,” Cornell political scientist Tom Pepinsky recently wrote, “you almost certainly wouldn’t notice it.”

The past week has been a testament to just how right he was.

While much of the country was preoccupied with the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night, something remarkable happened: Every single prosecutor working on Roger Stone’s case resigned in protest. The apparent reason: Attorney General Bill Barr’s intervention in the case on behalf of the president leading the government to file a new sentencing recommendation, one that contradicted the seven- to nine-year prison sentence request for Donald Trump’s political ally that prosecutors had initially asked for.

The four prosecutors who resigned — Aaron Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed, and Michael Marando — are career officials, not political appointees. They had worked diligently to prove that Stone had made false statements, obstructed justice, and tampered with witnesses in relation to the Russia scandal and Robert Mueller’s investigation, and secured a conviction in November. Now Trump and Barr are trying to get Stone off easy.

This kind of presidential interference with the Justice Department is hardly normal; one former Justice Department official called it a “break-glass-in-case-of-fire moment.” Yet President Trump is publicly reveling in this brazen attack on DOJ independence, tweeting “congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr” on Wednesday morning “for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.”

This is not an isolated incident, but rather part of a new pattern of politicizing the federal bureaucracy. Since his acquittal in the impeachment trial last week, Trump and his staff have been on a personnel replacement tear — firing and threatening officials across the government they see as disloyal with almost no pretext. The examples that we’re currently aware of:

• The White House removed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified during the House Ukraine scandal hearings, from his post on the National Security Council. Trump called on the military to begin disciplinary hearings against Vindman and removed his brother from his NSC post.
• Trump outright fired EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, another key impeachment witness.
• Trump personally ordered that former US Attorney Jessie Liu’s nomination to be the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial crime be withdrawn. In her last posting, Liu had supervised the prosecution of Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort.
• A White House staffer told the New York Post that they’d be pulling the nomination of Elaine McCusker, a career Defense Department staffer who had challenged the administration’s block on aid to Ukraine, to be Pentagon comptroller. “This administration needs people who are committed to implementing the president’s agenda, specifically on foreign policy, and not trying to thwart it,” the staffer said. (McCusker’s nomination has yet to be formally withdrawn.)

Independently, any one of these actions would be troubling. Put together, the pattern is terrifying. Trump has emerged from the impeachment scandal with a belief in his impunity, and is currently attempting to bend the US government to his will — to punish officials who have allegedly crossed him and to protect his political allies who have broken the law.

During the impeachment trial, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) claimed after voting to acquit Trump that he had “learned his lesson.” It was risible then — and grotesque now. Trump has emerged from acquittal newly emboldened to pursue his own interests and vendettas, with a Republican Party fully willing to look away.

It’s been one week since his acquittal. Can our democracy withstand what’s to come?

The real illness of American democracy

One of the central pillars of democratic government is that the law remain as independent as possible from the political interests of those in power. What unites Trump’s actions of this past week is that they each represent an assault on this general principle.

If the president and his allies are above the law, attempts to punish their crimes undermined at the highest level, then he can engage in whatever lawbreaking he wants with impunity. If the staff of the government need to be loyal to this leader, or else risk job loss or even (in Lt. Col. Vindman’s case) threats of prosecution, then the state becomes a vehicle for advancing the president’s crass political interests rather than the good of the people.

This all may sound alarmist. And it’s true that democracy didn’t die in the past week. But this “everything is fine” objection misses the point in two ways.

First, Trump’s actions create a chilling effect. Federal prosecutors are now on notice that the attorney general is willing to interfere with their cases if they implicate the president’s friends, and thus they will be less inclined to risk it. Civil servants have been warned that speaking up against presidential lawbreaking or abuse of power will cost them their jobs.

If Trump suffers no consequences for this behavior — and the Republican-dominated Senate just showed why he almost certainly will not — then this will likely materially affect our ability to stop future Trumpian abuses. Trump’s cronies will feel freer to break the law, and nonpartisan civil servants less likely to blow the whistle when they do.

Second, democratic degradation doesn’t tend to happen all at once, these days.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

At this point, we’ve all gotten inured to this kind of authoritarian overreach by the president. We know who Trump is, we know what he’s going to do, and we’ve priced it into our understanding of what life in America today is like. It seems fanciful to imagine huge demonstrations in the streets in the way that, say, the 2017 Muslim ban galvanized thousands of Americans to storm the country’s airports shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

But this fatigue — the paradox that when everything is outrageous, nothing is — is exactly the mechanism that authoritarian attacks on democracy rely on. The slowness, the passage of time, dulls the public’s outrage. The authoritarian gets away with another abuse of power. This is how democracy has been dismantled in countries like Hungary and Venezuela.

“We would not look to the passage of a law, or necessarily even the outcome of an election, to determine if democracy had collapsed,” as Pepinsky puts it.

If a rogue president were to lay waste to the rule of law, Americans would like to think they’d be out in the streets to protest against it. And yet that is exactly what Trump has been doing these past few days — and it feels like a regular week. It wasn’t labeled the week when democracy died because there won’t be a week when democracy died. It just doesn’t work that way.

And that should make the stakes of the 2020 election clear: whether we as a nation are going to allow this anti-democratic rot to spread, or whether we put a stop to it with the democratic means at our disposal.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

When dividing and conquering goes wrong.

The food delivery company DoorDash made its delivery workers sign away their right to sue if a legal dispute arises between a worker and the company. Instead, disputes would be resolved by a privatized arbitration system that tends to favor corporate parties.

It’s a common tactic, often used by companies seeking to discourage workers from asserting their legal rights at all. And, if a decision handed down Monday by a federal district judge stands, the tactic backfired spectacularly for DoorDash.

Under Judge William Alsup’s order in Abernathy v. DoorDash, DoorDash must arbitrate over 5,000 individual disputes with various workers who claim that they were misclassified as independent contractors, when they should be treated as employees. It also must pay a $1,900 fee for each of these individual arbitration proceedings.

Though DoorDash might settle the various claims before it is hit with these fees, Alsup’s order means that if it doesn’t, the delivery company will face a bill of nearly $10 million before any of the individual proceedings are even resolved. Add in the cost of paying for lawyers to represent them in each proceeding, plus the amount the company will have to pay to the workers in each proceeding that it loses, and DoorDash is likely to wind up paying far more money than it would have if it hadn’t tried to strip away many of its workers’ rights.

Ordinarily, when thousands of workers at the same company all raise very similar legal claims against that same employer, those workers will join together in a class action lawsuit — a process that allows all of the disputes to be resolved in a single suit rather than in thousands of separate proceedings. But DoorDash required these delivery workers to sign away their right to bring a class action as well.

That decision also appears to have backfired.

Forced arbitration, explained

In 1925, Congress enacted the Federal Arbitration Act to, in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words, allow “merchants with relatively equal bargaining power” to resolve disputes through private arbitration. For such merchants, arbitration is often preferred to litigation because it can be quicker, less expensive, and because merchants can choose an arbitrator who is more familiar with their industry than a typical judge.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, the Supreme Court started to read the Arbitration Act to allow companies to require ordinary consumers and workers to agree to arbitration as a condition of doing business with that company. Some of these Supreme Court decisions rested on a defensible reading of the Arbitration Act’s text, but many of them distorted that text so severely that it is easy to suspect bad faith.

The Arbitration Act, for example, exempts “workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” Yet, in Circuit City v. Adams (2001), the Supreme Court held that most workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce may be forced into arbitration. Similarly, the Arbitration Act is silent on the subject of class actions, but in AT&T v. Concepcion (2011), the Court held that companies can insert a clause into arbitration contracts that ban class actions.

Most recently, in Epic Systems v. Lewis (2018), the Supreme Court merged these two prior holdings. Epic Systems conclusively established that a company can order its workers to give up their right to bring a class action and require those workers to arbitrate any future disputes — and immediately fire any worker who does not comply.

For employers, these decisions were largely a windfall. As the Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey explains, workers are less likely to prevail in arbitration than they are in litigation. And when workers to prevail in arbitration, they typically receive far less money than they would have if their case had been heard by a judge.

Economic Policy Institute

Class action bans, meanwhile, often allow employers to immunize themselves from liability altogether.

Consider the facts of Concepcion, the 2011 decision allowing companies to add class action bans to forced arbitration contracts. The plaintiffs in that case were cellphone customers who claimed that they were victims of deceptive advertising, and that they were overcharged by $30.22.

Virtually no one is going to file a lawsuit over a $30.22 charge. The cost of hiring a lawyer, filing a complaint, and litigating (or arbitrating) the case until the bitter end will vastly exceed the amount of money at issue. But, if a company cheats millions of customers out of tiny sums of money, the total value of their claim could be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

Class actions allow large groups with similar grievances to join together under a single lawsuit, and they allow that large group to hire excellent legal counsel who will litigate the case in return for a share of the money the group receives if they prevail.

But if class actions are banned, no lawsuit will ever be filed in the first place.

As one federal court of appeals decision explained in a case similar to Concepcion, “the realistic alternative to a class action is not 17 million individual suits, but zero individual suits, as only a lunatic or a fanatic sues for $30.”

Class action bans, moreover, give companies tremendous incentive to cheat their workers — so long as they only cheat each worker a little bit at a time. In the DoorDash case, for example, each of the more than 5,000 workers at the heart of that case had to pay a $300 filing fee before they could bring any claim at all against DoorDash. That means that DoorDash could theoretically have outright stolen as much as $299 from each worker, and it could have done so knowing that none of those workers had a plausible way to recoup that money.

How DoorDash’s workers beat a rigged system

Judge Alsup does not conceal his disdain for companies that use decisions like Concepcion and Epic Systems to strip away the rights of their workers. “For decades,” he writes in his DoorDash opinion, “the employer-side bar and their employer clients have forced arbitration clauses upon workers, thus taking away their right to go to court, and forced class-action waivers upon them too, thus taking away their ability to join collectively to vindicate common rights.”

What makes this recent case different, is that “the workers wish to enforce the very provisions forced on them by seeking, even if by the thousands, individual arbitrations.” When a company imposes a forced arbitration clause and a class action ban on its workers, it often bets that those workers will slink away quietly if the company breaks the law. It bets on the fact that “only a lunatic or a fanatic” sues over a relatively small amount of money.

But now a handful of plaintiffs’ law firms are calling these companies’ bluff by actually seeking to arbitrate thousands of cases at a time.

It’s a tactic that’s worked before. After Uber imposed forced arbitration and a class action ban on its drivers, more than 60,000 of those drivers sought to arbitrate claims against the company. Faced with legal costs of at least $600 million, Uber cried “uncle!” The company announced it settled the “large majority” of these claims last May.

Yet, while filing large amounts of arbitration claims may cause some companies to rethink forced arbitration, this tactic also carries considerable risk for plaintiffs’ lawyers. Actually arbitrating thousands of cases on behalf of workers with small claims is a terrible way for a lawyer to earn a living. It’s slow, work-intensive, and the payoff at the end is very small.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers are playing a game of chicken with employers like Uber and DoorDash, and it’s not at all clear that this tactic can be expanded into a broader attack on forced arbitration.

For an influential group of American Christians, support for Israel — and hatred of Iran — is based in a biblical prophecy.

When President Donald Trump authorized the drone strike that killed the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, he wasn’t just flexing America’s muscle in the Middle East.

He was also acting on the advice of a politically powerful group of evangelical Christians who believe the US and Israel are part of the Bible’s plan to bring about the second coming of Jesus.

Once considered a fringe element of the religious right, evangelical Christian Zionists are playing an increasingly visible role in Republican politics. Today, unprecedented access to the Trump administration has given them an opportunity to reshape the Middle East.

Watch the video above to learn more about how the Bible is influencing this politically powerful group of American Christians.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

Rush Limbaugh continued his homophobic fearmongering about Pete Buttigieg on his show Wednesday, asking viewers if they could see “Mr. Man” Donald Trump “having fun” with Buttigieg kissing his husband on stage, and theorizing that Democrats are wary of it too.

RECENTLY: Rush Limbaugh: How Do You Explain Pete Buttigieg Kissing His Husband to Your Children?

Said Limbaugh in a clip posted by Media Matters: “A gay guy, 37 years old, loves kissing his husband on debate stages. Can you see Trump have fun with that? …. They’re looking at Mayor Pete, 37-year-old gay guy, mayor of South Bend, loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage. And they’re saying, OK, how’s this going to look, 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband on stage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump? What’s going to happen there? And they got to be looking at that, and they’ve got to be saying, that despite all the great progress and despite all the great wokeness, and despite all the great ground that’s been covered, America’s still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband on the debate stage president. They have to be saying this, don’t they? Now, there may be some Democrats who think that is the ticket. There may be some Democrats who think that’s exactly what we need to do, Rush. Get a gay guy kissing his husband on stage, ram it down Trump’s throat, and beat him in the general election. Really. Having fun envisioning that.”

On Tuesday, Limbaugh asked listeners how they could people explain Mayor Pete kissing his husband to their children.

The post Rush Limbaugh Asks Listeners to Imagine ‘Gay Guy (Buttigieg) Kissing His Husband on Stage Next to Mr. Man Donald Trump’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Barr during a press conference on Monday. | Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

Trump’s tweet complaining about the politicization of Obama’s DOJ has not aged well.

Any questions over the sincerity of President Donald Trump’s concerns about what he has characterized as the politicization of the Justice Department during the Obama years were put to rest this week with the response his complaints about the trial of a friend appeared to elicit from DOJ leaders.

As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of his campaign gained steam in the summer of 2017, Trump tried to change the topic to alleged undue political influence on Obama’s Justice Department.

“A.G. Lynch made law enforcement decisions for political purposes...gave Hillary Clinton a free pass and protection. Totally illegal!” Trump tweeted on June 13, 2017, echoing an allegation he made repeatedly during the 2016 campaign about the Clintons allegedly having undue influence on Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Trump’s claim was a misrepresentation. The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton and her infamous private email server arguably helped cost her the presidency, so the idea that she got “a free pass” is false.

But beyond the specifics of the Clinton case, the events of this week make it clear that Trump never really had good-faith concerns about the politicization of the DOJ. In fact, he’s an outspoken supporter of it, so long as the people receiving “a free pass and protection” are among his associates.

The clearest illustration of this came on Wednesday morning, when Trump commended Attorney General Bill Barr for intervening in the case of Roger Stone, a longtime associate of his who was convicted of obstructing an investigation of the president’s campaign (among other charges) based on information brought to light by the Mueller investigation.

“Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” Trump tweeted. “Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!”

Trump’s comment about Barr “taking charge of a case” refers to an unusual move the DOJ made on Tuesday to reduce the sentencing recommendation for Stone. Prosecutors on the case recommended a seven- to nine-year prison sentence for Stone, but after Trump went on a Twitter tirade on Tuesday morning over a situation he characterized as “a horrible and very unfair situation” and a “miscarriage of justice,” the DOJ abruptly reversed course and recommended an unspecified lesser sentence for Stone.

That move prompted the entire prosecution team to step down from the case, and one prosecutor resigned from the DOJ entirely.

The DOJ tried to frame the abrupt about-face as one rooted in good-faith concerns about the severity of Stone’s sentencing recommendation, but Trump trampled on that talking point by posting tweets that made clear his motivations were political.

Then on Tuesday afternoon, Trump told reporters that while he hadn’t communicated with Barr or the DOJ about the Stone case, “I’d be able to do it if I wanted. I have the absolute right to do it.”

But that’s beside the point. Trump made his position clear on Twitter. Barr’s DOJ seemingly got the hint and acted accordingly. No direct communication was necessary for the president to get the DOJ to do his bidding by protecting one of his confidants — the exact thing he not so long ago criticized Obama’s attorney general for doing.

---

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

Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, speaks in Manchester, New Hampshire, on February 7, 2020. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Tom Perez and Harry Reid want the Democratic nomination process to reflect party diversity.

It appears Iowa’s days as the first-in-the-nation caucus may be numbered — particularly now that several high-profile Democrats, including Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have publicly criticized the current process for choosing a presidential nominee.

Perez — who has signaled support for reevaluating the caucus system in recent days — explicitly called for reform in an interview with CNN Wednesday morning. In particular, he expressed concern over the lack of racial diversity in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“I think the time is right for that conversation,” he said. “I want to make sure that we reflect the grand diversity of our party in everything we do.”

The early voting calendar has drawn criticism from Democrats who point out that though black voters make up the heart of the party’s voter base, Iowa and New Hampshire are both overwhelmingly white.

Perez reiterated that point Wednesday morning. “The candidate who is going to win this race ... is the candidate who does the best job bringing together this entire diverse coalition of the Democratic Party,” he said. “African American voters are the backbone of the Democratic Party.”

Which candidate can best rally Democrats of all backgrounds remains an open question. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary Tuesday and the popular vote in the Iowa caucuses, while former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg received the most state delegates in Iowa last week. But neither state provided a test of candidates’ backing among voters of color, something the upcoming Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary will do.

Because Iowa and New Hampshire provide the primary’s first contests, they carry an outsize influence on who ends up the party’s nominee, despite awarding just 65 of the 1,990 party convention delegates needed to win the nomination, as explained by Vox’s Dylan Matthews:

By putting Iowa and New Hampshire first, the Democratic and Republican parties are effectively saying that disproportionate power and influence should go to a small group of overwhelmingly white people in rural areas and small cities. That influence shouldn’t go to a state or region with a large Hispanic population. It shouldn’t go to a state or region with a large black population. It shouldn’t go to a state with large cities and a strong interest in urban issues. It should go to these people instead.

That does a profound disservice to the millions of Americans living in diverse, densely populated areas. Or, to put it more bluntly, it gives white people outsize power in determining nominees and disenfranchises black, Hispanic, Asian Americans, and Native Americans relatively speaking.

The size of the bias is truly staggering. Economists Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff estimated in 2011 that an Iowa or New Hampshire voter carried the same influence in determining her party’s ultimate nominee as five voters from Super Tuesday states put together.

While there have been calls for reforming the calendar before, several issues in this year’s cycle — particularly a delay in reporting the results of Iowa’s caucuses — have given added life to calls for reform. In the past, appeals to change the order of Democratic contests have come to naught, but things may be different this time, particularly given that Perez is not the only party leader calling for reform.

Reporting issues in Iowa have added pressure for reform

The Iowa Democratic Party struggled to report complete results for much of the past week after the state caucused last Monday. Precinct chairs reported having difficulties with an app they were supposed to use to report results and struggled to call in the caucus totals as well. Also, confusion over new rules may have led some errors to be introduced into the results. This led to delays in reporting vote totals, which weren’t officially finalized until Sunday.

Iowa’s issues renewed calls to reform the entire early caucus and primary system. And the latest Monmouth University 2020 poll, released Tuesday, revealed Democratic voters are highly dissatisfied with how the system currently works.

Just over 1 in 4 voters think the current system results in the best candidate being chosen for the nomination, and only 7 percent said New Hampshire and Iowa should continue to go first.

Perez has made it clear he believes the system should be reevaluated, and he has been joined in this by another powerful Democrat: Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

“Iowa has forfeited its chance to be number one. I don’t think that’ll happen anymore,” Reid told Vice News Tuesday.

In Iowa’s place, Reid suggested that his home state, Nevada, should have the first choice, pointing to the state’s Latinx population and racial diversity.

“Since the debacle in Iowa, [pundits] have been talking about Nevada should be the first state. Why? Because we’re a state that’s heavily diverse,” he said. “It’s really a state that represents what the country is all about. So I think that Iowa really was an embarrassment to everybody.”

About 28 percent of Nevada’s population (and 17 percent of its eligible voters) are Latinx, a far cry from the overwhelmingly white populations in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nevada has the next crack at the Democratic field, holding its caucuses on February 22.

Only time will tell if pressure to change the electoral calendar will endure as the 2020 Democratic primary churns toward Super Tuesday. Perez has previously said the DNC will address the issue once the primary is over. But if critics of the system, like Perez and Reid, get their way, there may well be a new calendar in place for the party’s presidential nomination race in 2024 or 2028.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Pete Buttigieg speaks to his supporters during a primary night rally in New Hampshire, on February 11, 2020. | Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

He’s declining to answer old foreign policy queries and not responding to some new ones.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is emerging as a Democratic frontrunner, which naturally will increase scrutiny on his domestic and foreign policy positions. But he’s creating a problem for himself on the latter: His campaign is no longer providing fresh answers to foreign policy questions from interested parties like the media.

A fixture of the presidential campaign cycle is that organizations — from interest groups to think tanks to news outlets — ask candidates questions, often via surveys, to better grasp where the candidates stand on key issues. This is particularly true on foreign policy, since a president has almost unilateral authority to run global affairs, and it’s good for voters to know how a candidate would wield such power.

But the Buttigieg campaign has a new stance: If it’s a question the candidate has answered before, anywhere, he’s not going to give a fresh response on a questionnaire. Instead, he’ll merely point back to a previous statement he’s made on the issue.

”Pete frequently talks about foreign policy and the challenges the next Commander-in-Chief will face at his events, in interviews and on the debate stage,” Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Sean Savett told me. “As Vox readers know, foreign policy challenges are complex. We’ve found that some questionnaires ask simple yes or no questions when nuance is required.”

“As a result, we recently stopped filling out new questionnaires if they involve something that Pete has already provided full answers to, and have directed outlets to speeches, questionnaires and interviews that Pete has already provided,” Savett continued.

This became evident with the New York Times’s recent foreign policy questionnaire, which was given to all the 2020 candidates.

Experts quickly noticed that many of the responses Buttigieg gave on questions like his strategies for Iran or North Korea merely referred back to answers he offered the Council on Foreign Relations think tank last year, or to his summertime foreign policy address.

In other cases, Buttigieg simply didn’t respond. (A few other candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, also did not answer certain questions.)

The reason? Apparently the Buttigieg campaign’s new stance, as expressed in an email they sent to the Times and shared with Vox.

“We actually looked through the questions and feel that Pete has addressed these issues on the campaign trail and in previous surveys,” a campaign spokesperson wrote to a Times reporter on December 23, about six hours after receiving the newspaper’s Google questionnaire with many yes-no questions. “We are declining and instead point you to his responses in this survey from the Council on Foreign Relations as well as his full remarks from his foreign policy speech in June.” The team included links to both.

“Thank you for the opportunity!” the email concluded.

It’s a surprising and disheartening decision for the former naval intelligence officer, who can reasonably claim to understand the intricacies of war and national security better than many of his fellow candidates. Voters in New Hampshire made clear in Washington Post exit polls Tuesday night that Buttigieg is a trusted Democratic candidate on foreign policy.

Frankly, then, it’s hard to comprehend why he won’t speak about global affairs more often. It’s especially puzzling when one realizes he hasn’t answered about one-third of the questions he’s been asked in foreign affairs questionnaires, based on my review of the surveys.

Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images

This means voters in the remaining 48 states will have to choose a candidate who now declines to expand on the worldview he laid out before, making it harder to decide who should be the next commander in chief.

“Whoever one supports in 2020, it’s time to stop pretending like it is ok to not be honest and upfront on the single policy area where President’s have the most control and most latitude,” Stephen Miles, the executive director of the Win Without War advocacy group, tweeted about Buttigieg’s newfound silence last week. “Foreign policy may not be where elections are fought, but it is what defines the Presidency.”

Buttigieg has become more guarded on his foreign policy views

Earlier in the campaign, Buttigieg was much more open about how he would handle global affairs.

Five organizations gave the former mayor a foreign policy questionnaire between June and September last year, and in all but one case, he answered everything asked. His answers were informative. For example, he told the Council on Foreign Relations he would rejoin the Iran nuclear deal if Tehran “resumes implementing its commitments,” and told the Washington Post he wouldn’t reopen diplomatic negotiations with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as long he holds on to power.

But Buttigieg simply didn’t respond to FiveThirtyEight’s questionnaire on foreign policy last August, which posed important questions to the candidates. As president, would Buttigieg meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, as Trump has, “without preconditions”? Or would he continue Trump’s flailing policy of pushing Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro out of power? Voters who trust that website above others may not know, though they could go elsewhere.

Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, the latter of whom has since dropped out the race, also didn’t respond to that survey. One explanation, of course, is that campaigns get very busy, and sometimes they just can’t muster up the staff power to respond to everything. It’s therefore possible that at the time Buttigieg’s team wanted to answer the questions but simply couldn’t do so before FiveThirtyEight decided to publish.

But this kind of silence soon became a bit of a trend for the mayor’s campaign.

Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images

The Council for a Liveable World, an anti-nuclear group, published a questionnaire last September in which Buttigieg didn’t respond to 9 of the 10 questions asked of him. The one he did answer was on whether he’d extend a nuclear treaty between the US and Russia, known as New START — he said he would, as long as Russia remained in compliance with it.

To be fair, Buttigieg wasn’t alone. Klobuchar, just-dropped-out entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and billionaire Tom Steyer also didn’t respond (neither did Trump, for that matter). But Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren did fully weigh in, clearly showing that top candidates had no issues offering their thoughts on nuclear weapons policy.

The lack of response by many of the candidates, including Buttigieg, troubled the group’s executive director John Tierney, a former nine-term Democratic member of Congress.

“If a candidate cannot answer basic questions about how they would deal with this existential challenge, then why should people trust them with an unchecked authority over the 4,000 nuclear weapons in our active arsenal?” he told me. “Americans deserve to know what their potential leader plans to do with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

In November, Buttigieg did respond to all of Military Times’s questions on how he would lead the armed forces. The mayor’s answers were insightful, including promising to make curbing the suicide rate among active-duty and veteran service members a “top priority.” The entire survey was Buttigieg at his best: nuanced, passionate, and clear on what he wanted to achieve. One surely hoped he’d continue that trend.

But then the mayor clammed up again with the New York Times questionnaire, where he didn’t answer 19 of the 36 questions.

Of the 109 foreign policy questions Buttigieg was asked in those eight surveys highlighted here, he chose not to answer 36 of them.

Buttigieg does occasionally talk about foreign policy — but not enough

It’s worth noting that Buttigieg has staked out important positions on the campaign trail, such as vowing to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan in his first year. He’s also openly called out Trump for minimizing the traumatic brain injuries sustained by US troops in last month’s attack by Iran in Iraq.

“Traumatic brain injury is life-threatening, not just at the time but for the rest of your life as well,” Buttigieg told CBS News on January 26. “It makes my blood boil, the president of the United States showing this level of disrespect.” He continues to speak on foreign policy when asked in person, even if on a previous subject, and speaks confidently about many global subjects on the debate stage.

And Doug Wilson, a lead adviser for Buttigieg on foreign policy, pushed back on criticism of the mayor’s reluctance to offer newer answers, saying his candidate had already laid out his global vision in last year’s address.

But other candidates — from Biden to Sanders to Warren to Klobuchar — have also given foreign policy addresses and answered the majority, if not all, of the questions in these surveys. Even in my own reporting, Buttigieg’s team failed to respond to pointed questions about US landmine policy and whether the US should have low-yield nuclear weapons on submarines. These were new questions, not ones he’d answered in previous surveys.

Buttigieg’s decision, then, is a disservice not only to him — since he’s seen as someone who could manage foreign policy well — but also to the voters who deserve to hear from him more on these issues.

Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts, talks with reporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, on November 14, 2019. | Nic Antaya/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Patrick was a late entry to the presidential race — now, he’s making an early exit.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has dropped out of the Democratic presidential race after failing to claim even 1 percent in the New Hampshire primary.

Patrick was a late entry to an already-crowded field, and he struggled to gain traction for his candidacy. He never topped 1 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, and in South Carolina, according to FiveThirtyEight, he was polling at one-tenth of a percent before ending his campaign.

A moderate, Patrick emphasized his extensive experience in government, as the two-term governor of Massachusetts, and in business, including with the private equity firm Bain Capital. He presented himself as an alternative to fellow candidates former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, but found little room to run in a crowded moderate lane.

Patrick also hoped his biography would distinguish him from the rest of the field. The former governor grew up in a low-income household on the South Side of Chicago and was the first in his family to attend college; he eventually earned a law degree from Harvard University.

Patrick announced that he was suspending his campaign in a statement to supporters Wednesday morning.

He said that his disappointing finish in New Hampshire was “not enough for us to create the practical wind at the campaign’s back to go on to the next round of voting.”

Patrick was once seen as a strong candidate but entered the race too late

Patrick considered entering the race as far back as August 2017; then, Edward-Isaac Dovere of Politico reported that “Barack Obama is nudging him to run” and referred to Patrick as “Obama world’s clear and away 2020 favorite.” However, his wife’s cancer diagnosis, among other factors, derailed any plans he might have had for an early entry into the race.

“I planned on announcing a year ago,” Patrick said in a recent campaign video, “but life had other ideas.”

It took him until November 14, 2019 — less than three months from the Iowa caucuses — to finally announce his candidacy.

Now cancer-free, Diane Patrick says she urged her husband to jump into the race. Because of his late entry, his campaign focused much of its energy on New Hampshire — which neighbors Patrick’s adopted home state of Massachusetts — and on South Carolina, rather than going all-in on Iowa like many of his rivals.

Patrick’s entry into the race may have been in part precipitated by concerns from the Democratic donor class: Politico reported in early November, days before Patrick announced, that “top Democratic donors became increasingly concerned with the field,” and particularly with Biden’s capacity to serve as the party’s moderate standard-bearer.

Nonetheless, many in the Democratic Party worried — perhaps rightly, following Patrick’s early exit from the race — that it was simply too late for a new face to join the field.

“I think Deval Patrick makes an excellent candidate,” South Carolina state Sen. Marlon Kimpson told the New York Times in November. “However, I am very, very concerned that he simply will not have enough time to make the case in the state of South Carolina.”

According to Patrick’s campaign manager Abe Rakov, Patrick hoped to overperform expectations in New Hampshire to gain momentum before the South Carolina primary later in the month; that momentum, however, never appeared.

An uncertain future

Patrick’s political future is unclear. Before entering the race, he was a managing director at Bain Capital. Now, though his candidacy never took off, his name could be in contention for vice president or for a Cabinet position.

The former Massachusetts governor hasn’t shown a strong affinity for the campaign trail, however, citing the “cruelty of our elections process” in his original decision not to enter the race, and he stepped away from politics for the better part of five years after his second term as governor — the only elected office he’s held — concluded in 2015.

“I believe that America is yearning for two things,” Patrick said in a statement announcing the end of his campaign. “Better outcomes and a better way.” But that belief wasn’t enough for him to catch on.

Patrick follows entrepreneur Andrew Yang and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet out of the race, both of whom suspended their campaigns Tuesday night. His departure leaves eight candidates in contention for the Democratic nomination for president.

Back in 2013 Andrew Garfield said he had spoken with Spider-Man producers about the possibility of making the web-slinging superhero a gay man. Now a new report suggests that after seven years his wish might be coming true.

According to We Got This Covered, Sony is developing a live-action version of Into the Spider-Verse which would unite current Spidey Tom Holland with his predecessors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.

Writes WGTC: “We’re also hearing that Sony is particularly keen on getting Garfield back, as they want to portray his version of the hero as bisexual and give him a boyfriend in the film.”

Said Garfield back in 2013: “What if (Mary Jane) is a dude? Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality?  It’s hardly even groundbreaking!…So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys? … I’ve been obsessed with Michael B. Jordan since The Wire. He’s so charismatic and talented. It’d be even better—we’d have interracial bisexuality!”

Garfield repeated his desires in 2015, saying, “I’m excited to get to the point where we don’t have to have this conversation, where we can have a pansexual Spider-Man. The beauty about Spider-Man, for me, is that he’s covered head to toe. That’s why everyone thinks it could be them in that suit. You don’t see skin color. You don’t see sexual orientation. You don’t see how old the person is, gender, the whole thing. I celebrate that. Anyone can be a hero in their own lives. … We’re scared of things that aren’t us. Love is love. Skin is skin. Flesh is flesh. We’re all wrapped in the same thing. I have no preference.”

The post Sony May Make Spider-Man Bisexual and Give Him a Boyfriend: REPORT appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

DoNotPay, the family of consumer advocacy services meant to protect people from corporate exploitation, is launching a new app aimed at helping end our long national nightmare surrounding robocalls by giving you a burner credit card to get their contact details then giving you a chatbot lawyer to automatically sue them. From a report: DoNotPay Founder and CEO Joshua Browder's Robo Revenge app is unique from every other app looking to protect you from robocalls in that it can get you cash while stopping them completely. "All of the big companies like AT&T and Apple have failed to protect consumers," Browder told Motherboard over the phone. "Consumers have to protect themselves. The only way the problem will end is if the robocallers start losing money every time they call someone." In the past, DoNot Pay has offered various apps to help consumers fight back. DoNotPay's Free Trial Card creates a virtual, one-time-use credit card to protect you from getting charged by "industrialized scams" like free trials. DoNotPay's original offering was a chatbot lawyer program that automatically disputed parking tickets in small claims court. Robo Revenge combines both features to automatically add you to the Do Not Call Registry, generate a virtual DoNotPay burner credit card to provide scammers when they illegally call you anyways, use the transaction information to get the scammer's contact information, then walk you through how to sue them for as much as $3,000 per call under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a law already on the books meant to protect consumers from calls that violate the Do Not Call Registry. The app also streamlines the litigation paperwork by automatically generating demand letters and court filing documents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keith Wildhaber, the out 22-year veteran of the St. Louis County police who was awarded $19 million in damages in October 2019 in a discrimination lawsuit against the department, has settled the case for $10.25 million.

The St. Louis Dispatch reports: “County officials said they did not know yet how much of the amount would be covered by insurance policies and how much would be borne by taxpayers. But they said it would not be paid out of revenues from the county’s Proposition P public safety tax, meaning other areas of county government will pay for the police department’s discriminatory acts.”

Wildhaber told the court he was “sickened” after being told by former St. Louis County Police Board of Commissioners member John Saracino that he needed to “tone down his gayness” if he wanted to be promoted to lieutenant, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported.

Wildhaber also said he was transferred to a precinct that tripled his commute and taken off of afternoon shifts and put on midnight shifts.

Wildhaber’s lawyers “depicted [Chief Jon] Belmar as having a penchant for promoting masculine men that dominates all promotional decisions and said that he will retaliate against anyone who questions them, as Wildhaber did by filing his lawsuit.”

Said Wildhaber: “The police department under Chief Belmar is big on high-testosterone, type A masculine personalities, and my method of policing doesn’t conform with that. This chief is very heavy on promoting the SWAT, masculine type of guys, and I wasn’t doing that.”

The post Cop Told to ‘Tone Down His Gayness’ if He Wanted a Promotion Settles for $10.25 Million appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Pete Buttigieg speaks during a meet-and-greet at Madhouse Coffee, in Las Vegas, Nevada, on April 8, 2019. | Ethan Miller/Getty Images

They’re more diverse than the states that already voted. That could be bad for Buttigieg and Klobuchar.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had surprisingly strong second- and third-place finishes in New Hampshire’s primary election on Tuesday. But if they hope to beat current frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders, they’re going to have to make a lot of headway in the next couple states that hold primary contests.

Nevada will be the next state to vote — technically, caucus — in the Democratic primary on Saturday, February 22. RealClearPolitics’ average of the polls in Nevada has former Vice President Joe Biden at first with 21 percent of the vote, Sanders at second with 17.5 percent, and Buttigieg and Klobuchar lagging far behind at 7 and 3 percent respectively.

In Nevada, all of that comes with a gigantic caveat: The last primary poll in the state was conducted more than a month ago. That’s likely a reflection of the fact that Nevada has, historically, been a very difficult state to poll well. But given that a lot has changed in the past month with Sanders becoming the frontrunner, Buttigieg and Klobuchar making surprisingly strong showings, and Biden collapsing in the early voting states, it likely means that the latest polls in Nevada are very outdated.

Still, the polls we do have are a red flag for Buttigieg and Klobuchar.

Preston Ehrler/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

It’s a similar story in South Carolina, which will vote one week after Nevada. There, the polls are much more recent. According to RealClearPolitics’ average of the polls in the state, Biden comfortably leads the state at 31 percent, followed by businessman Tom Steyer at 18.5 percent, Sanders at 17 percent, and Buttigieg and Klobuchar again lagging far behind at 5.5 and 2 percent respectively.

Again, bad news for Buttigieg and Klobuchar.

Part of this may reflect the fact that Nevada and South Carolina are much more diverse states. The only two states to vote in the primary so far — Iowa and New Hampshire — are each more than 90 percent white, which is much whiter than the rest of the country and especially the Democratic electorate. But Nevada has a sizable Latino population and South Carolina has a sizable black population.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar’s campaigns seem to hope that their impressive showings in Iowa (in Buttigieg’s case) and New Hampshire (in both Buttigieg and Klobuchar’s cases) will boost their support among black and brown voters, pushing them up in the next couple states. It’s happened before — Barack Obama trailed Hillary Clinton in 2008 in South Carolina until he won in Iowa. But we don’t really know if that’s going to happen this cycle — especially given that Buttigieg and Klobuchar have, based on national polling, relied largely on white voters to this point.

At the same time, Biden and, to a lesser degree, Sen. Elizabeth Warren are relying on Nevada and South Carolina to turn around their dismal New Hampshire showings — hoping that the more diverse states may give them a shot of momentum. Biden, for one, flew down to South Carolina before New Hampshire even finished voting.

The risk is that losing Iowa and New Hampshire could have wrecked Biden’s chances in Nevada and South Carolina, and a better-than-expected but little-covered Iowa showing overshadowed by a very weak New Hampshire result could have done the same to Warren. Voters in the next two states could come to believe that Biden and Warren no longer have a chance. If that happens, whether those voters go for Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or someone else entirely remains to be seen.

The campaigns, then, are all taking big gambles in the next few states, putting their bets on where voters of color in particular go. It’s fitting Nevada will be the first to show us whether those gambles paid out.

A former Justice Department inspector general sees an 'existential threat.'

Donald Trump congratulated Attorney General Bill Barr for intervening in the sentencing recommendation for indicted associate Roger Stone on Wednesday morning, after all four prosecutors from the Department of Justice quit the case. The DOJ issued a new memo after Trump shrieked on Twitter about the original 9-year sentencing recommendation which revised the recommendation to be “far less” than what was originally recommended.

Tweeted Trump: “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!”

Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2020

Trump said on Tuesday night that he has the “absolute right” to tell Barr what to do.

Asked about Roger Stone, Trump says he has an “absolute right” to tell the Justice Department what to do pic.twitter.com/AZRv9Aff7P

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 11, 2020

Axios reports: “The downgraded sentencing recommendation is sure to prompt allegations of political interference. All four prosecutors who tried Stone in November — Aaron Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed and Michael Marando — withdrew from the case on Tuesday afternoon. Zelinsky and Kravis resigned from their positions as special assistant U.S. attorney and assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., respectively. Trump tweeted early Tuesday that the recommendation is a ‘miscarriage of justice’ that he ‘cannot allow,’ claiming that the ‘real crimes were on the other side.’ He later told reporters that he didn’t speak to the Justice Department about the case, but that he would have ‘the absolute right’ to.”

On Tuesday night, Trump attacked those prosecutors.

Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people?) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam, and shouldn’t ever even have started? 13 Angry Democrats?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2020

Trump also suggested he might pardon Stone and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Prosecutorial Misconduct? https://t.co/ignPtwRQUG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2020

And attacked Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is in charge of the Stone case:

Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking! https://t.co/Fe7XkepJNN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2020

…And a swamp creature with “pull” was just sentenced to two months in jail for a similar thing that they want Stone to serve 9 years for. A phony Mueller Witch Hunt disgrace. Caught! https://t.co/6baxv3Lvuk

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2020

And this:

After last night's roaring success, I guess he figures he might as well tweet some other instructions to DOJ. https://t.co/OFdNVs5cNf

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) February 12, 2020

The post Trump Congratulates Bill Barr for Intervening in Roger Stone Sentencing After All 4 DOJ Prosecutors Withdraw from Case appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Apple Pay could account for 10 percent of global card transactions by 2025 and pose a serious challenge to rivals like PayPal, according to recent trend data compiled by research firm Bernstein.


Drawing from the data, Quartz reports that ‌Apple Pay‌ currently accounts for about 5 percent of global transactions. If that growth trend continues, it may well become a long-term competitive threat to PayPal – and could even end up competing with Visa and Mastercard if it chose to set up its own payments network much further down the line.

‌Apple Pay‌ probably won't pose a challenge to the card giants anytime soon. While the tech company could, in theory, create its own network that runs outside the card systems, Bernstein argues that Apple still needs the card networks, which are ubiquitous and trusted. Visa and MasterCard, meanwhile, are used to dealing with partners (traditionally large card-issuing banks) with the kind of scale that even ‌Apple Pay‌ could muster.

The same may not be true for other wallets. "‌Apple Pay‌ is indeed one of the long-term competitive threats to PayPal," Bernstein analysts wrote. For now, PayPal has a commanding lead in the world of online checkouts, and also benefits from network effects that have been building up since the turn of the century. But Apple and PayPal could end up competing for the same turf in the coming years.

Apple's advantage over other digital payments includes its pre-installed Wallet app for iPhone and its tight control over the NFC technology contained within the device that can process contactless payments.

However, that tight control could cause headaches for Apple if it is perceived as a way to block competition. Apple argues that its policies are strictly for security purposes, but it has already run into difficulties in Australia, where big banks want access to the iPhone's NFC function for a competitive level playing field.

The company has also faced a backlash in in Germany, where a parliamentary committee recently passed an amendment to an anti-money laundering law that could force Apple to open up the NFC chip in iPhones to competing mobile payment providers.

In November 2019, the European Union's competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager acknowledged that her department has received "many concerns" over ‌Apple Pay‌ and potential anticompetitive issues.


This article, "Apple Pay Could Account for 10 Percent of Global Card Transactions by 2025 and Even Rival PayPal" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Joe Biden limped away from New Hampshire with a devastating fifth-place finish, zero delegates and the viability of his campaign in question.

It’s a precipitous fall for the former vice president, who entered the 2020 race last year with a lead in nearly every national and state poll.

By Tuesday night, Biden was so diminished, he fled the first-in-the-nation primary state before the polls even closed. Instead, he attended a “launch party“ in South Carolina, the state long considered his firewall, desperate to signal to nervous donors and African American supporters that he was not planning to throw in the towel.

“There’s blood in the water,” said Quentin James, executive director of The Collective, a political action committee that backs African American candidates. “Black voters are starting to leave him now. … A big reason lots of black voters were with Biden is they thought he was the best person to beat Trump. And they thought one reason for that is that he had the support of white voters. Now they see he has done so poorly with white voters and he no longer looks like the electability candidate.”

The size and scope of the loss — he failed to crack double digits or win any sizable city or town — challenged the wisdom of Biden’s strategy of not competing hard in New Hampshire. Biden had downplayed expectations of doing well here, claiming New Hampshire favored politicians from neighboring states, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But two politicians from the Midwest, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, finished ahead of Biden, undercutting his talking point.

“This is horrendous. We’re all scared,” said a Biden adviser, speaking anonymously because the comments conflict with the brave public face the campaign is trying to broadcast. “I think we’re going to make it to South Carolina. I know we’re supposed to say we’re going to and we’re going to win. But I just don’t know.”

Biden’s fourth-place finish in Iowa further eroded his already tenuous foothold in the Granite State. In the final hours before the primary, the campaign concluded it was headed for another embarrassing defeat and recalibrated, moving the candidate to South Carolina for the forward-looking rally. Even before Tuesday, several Biden aides had predicted Biden could finish anywhere from third to fifth place in New Hampshire.

“It’s all about South Carolina,” said Dick Harpootlian, a former state South Carolina Democratic Party chair who is helping steer Biden’s efforts in that state.

At his campaign launch party in Columbia, S.C., both Biden and his wife, Jill, downplayed the former vice president’s lackluster performances in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“We just heard from the first two of 50 states. Two of them. Not all the nation, not half the nation, not a quarter of the nation, not 10 percent — two,” Biden said to a standing-room-only crowd made up mostly of African Americans. “Where I come from, that’s an opening bell.”

Biden told the crowd that 99.9 percent of African Americans and 99.8 percent of Latinos had not yet cast a primary vote. “It ain’t over, man,” Biden said. “We’re just getting started.”

However, polls are showing Biden’s African American support is already starting to slip.

The South Carolina event offered a stark contrast to what the Bidens left behind in New Hampshire. Here, the former vice president’s election night party was a somber event, marked by the absence of a candidate who left the state long before the race was called.

Scott Spradling, a top New Hampshire consultant and former top political reporter in the state, said he can't remember a major candidate not being in the state on election night. And Biden’s announcement that he would leave before the polls closed probably damaged his campaign in the state further.

"He's shooting himself in the foot in the last few hours at a time when he's already shot himself in the other foot," Spradling said. "New Hampshire is about being front and center. So, I think he could very well have hurt himself even more."

As N.H. votes, Biden makes stand in S. Carolina

Reporters and Biden staffers seemed to outnumber voters at the party in a half-empty ballroom of the Radisson Hotel in Nashua. The small crowd greeted Biden with muted applause when he addressed them via a webcast from Columbia, where he later addressed a local crowd.

“We’re not going to let them take this election away from you," Biden said.

This week, the Biden campaign insisted South Carolina would remain Biden’s firewall, regardless of his showing in New Hampshire.

“I don’t think people in South Carolina are going to change their allegiance or their vote based on what’s happening in [New Hampshire],” deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said. “There’s a real sense that the first four states are part of a process, part of a package. That they are intentionally the first four because they give an opportunity from different parts of the country and for diverse voices to be part of the process.”

But fundamental questions about the health of Biden's campaign persist. Biden's has long played catch-up with his online fundraising and the independent super PAC that supports him just plowed $6 million into a losing effort in Iowa.

A donor to Biden who also gave a substantial sum to the super PAC supporting Biden criticized the campaign for not being clear about how hard he would contest the state.

“The campaign didn’t let the super PAC know what to do,” said the donor, who didn’t want to go on record criticizing Biden. “So we spent $900,000 on TV in New Hampshire that we could have just saved for Nevada or South Carolina. And now that money is just gone.”

Trent Spiner contributed to this report.

National security adviser Robert O’Brien on Tuesday defended the dismissal of Lt. Cols. Alexander and Yevgeny Vindman from the National Security Council, suggesting that the officials were trying to undermine the president.

“We’re not a country where a bunch of lieutenant colonels can get together and decide what the policy is of the United States,” O’Brien said during an event at the Atlantic Council think tank. “We are not a banana republic.”

O’Brien also insisted that the twin brothers — one of whom, Alexander, was a crucial witness against President Donald Trump in the investigation that led to his impeachment on a charge of abuse of power — were “absolutely” not retaliated against.

But Trump tweeted on Saturday that Alexander Vindman was “OUT” because he was “insubordinate” and had reported the contents of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian president “incorrectly.” It also still isn’t clear why Yevgeny Vindman, an NSC ethics lawyer who was not involved in the impeachment process at all, was fired.

Trump says military will likely look at disciplinary action against Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

Two people close to the Vindmans told POLITICO on Monday that while Alexander Vindman was preparing to be fired after Trump’s acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, and even began taking his belongings home from the office in preparation, Yevgeny Vindman’s firing was “a complete shock” and he had still received “no explanation whatsoever” from the White House.

One of O’Brien’s top priorities since taking office in September has been a “rightsizing”, or downsizing, of the NSC staff. He suggested on Tuesday that more cuts were to come: The policy staff “will be down to” around 115-120 people “by the end of this week,” he said in his prepared remarks.

But the cuts will probably be viewed with greater suspicion after the Vindmans’ firing — their removal came hours after the president told reporters he was “not happy” with them, and Trump said on Tuesday that the military “will certainly, I imagine, take a look” at taking disciplinary action against Alexander Vindman. Both brothers have now gone back to the Army.

O’Brien disputed the notion that the Vindmans were fired, but said that because of the NSC’s small budget, “as we reduce the number of detailees, the percentage of political appointees will increase slightly.”

“None of the detailees that leave NSC are fired,” O’Brien said at the Atlantic Council event. “It’s a privilege to work at the White House, it’s not a right. … The Vindmans had served there for over a year. Their services were no longer needed.”

Alexander Vindman’s detail was not set to end until July. But O’Brien insisted that “the president has to have confidence in his NSC staff to ensure that they’re going to execute the agenda he was elected to deliver.”

Supporters of Pete Buttigieg watch primary results on a television screen at an election night event in in Nashua, New Hampshire, on February 11, 2020. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

Notice something missing?

Let’s give New Hampshire the tiniest bit of credit. Unlike the Iowa Democratic Party, New Hampshire appears capable of counting votes in a fair and expeditious manner, and the rules more or less make sense. No one involved in the New Hampshire primary ever needs to utter the words “state delegate equivalent.”

But there is one way in which New Hampshire very closely resembles Iowa, which brings us to this chart:

CNN’s exit polls were able to determine which candidates white voters in the Democratic primary preferred. But the state is so overwhelmingly white that CNN’s exit pollsters couldn’t even find enough black, Hispanic, or Asian voters to reach reasonable conclusions about those voters’ candidate preferences. Indeed, New Hampshire is even whiter than Iowa: Just under 91 percent of Iowans are white, as compared to more than 93 percent of people from New Hampshire.

New Hampshire also bears little resemblance to the nation as a whole in other important ways. There are no major cities in New Hampshire, for example. The largest city in the state, Manchester, has a population of about 113,000.

To put that number in perspective, there are more than 50 cities in California with more people than Manchester, New Hampshire — including such metropolises as Roseville, Thousand Oaks, and Visalia.

Iowa and New Hampshire’s special status, moreover, matters a great deal, as voters in early states are more likely to impact the race than people who vote later in the process. According to a study by economists Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, “an Iowa or New Hampshire voter had the same impact as five Super Tuesday voters put together.”

The purpose of a Democratic presidential primary, of course, is to choose a Democratic candidate for president. But the Democratic Party is increasingly a party of racial diversity and of urban voters. It makes no sense for the party to begin its nominating process with two states that bear little resemblance to Democrats nationwide.

Far-right “constitutionalist” theories—the kind claiming that the U.S. Constitution’s text places severe limits on the power of the federal government, handing supreme power to local authorities—have been around for decades, but their multifarious claims and arguments have never been acknowledged by any American court, nor has their legitimacy ever been recognized by any federal or state authority. Until now.

The Trump administration has been quietly empowering far-right extremist ideology on public lands in the West, two recent investigative reports inform us. Under a policy declared last November by Bureau of Land Management acting chief William Perry Pendley, the BLM now defers enforcing the law to local “constitutionalist” sheriffs, creating widespread chaos and environmental destruction.

Christopher Ketcham’s recent profile of Pendley in The New Republic laid bare the open hostility the man in charge of America’s largest portfolio of public lands has toward their very existence. The resulting policy, as another report from Type Investigations and Politico lays bare, has led the BLM to repeatedly ignore its own regulations, leading to “a culture of lawlessness” in the West.

Trump himself sent a clear signal fairly early on in his presidential tenure that he was sympathetic to “constitutionalist” claims when he issued a pardon for two Oregon ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond. The two men’s ongoing battle with the BLM had long been a focus of antigovernment groups’ recruitment efforts, culminating with the early 2016 standoff between federal authorities and a group of “constitutionalists” who led an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

A number of observers, including Rep. Raul Grijalva, worried at the time that the pardon would signal an open season on federal lands managers by far-right extremists, “writing a blank check to a dangerous ideology.” As these more recent reports make clear, Pendley’s appointment as BLM chief has ensured that those fears are becoming manifest.

Pendley, who for years has overseen former Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt’s old organization, the Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, ascended to the directorship of the BLM in July and August 2019. In the ensuing years, the MSLF has become even more extreme in its positions. At various times, Pendley has argued that the federal government has no right to own public lands, mirroring “constitutionalist” beliefs. He also has attacked the Endangered Species Act, claiming it seeks “to kill or prevent anybody from making a living on federal land.”

As Ketcham’s profile explores, Pendley’s appointment has not been approved by Congress (he is still officially the BLM’s acting director) and faces legal challenges from environmental groups, who see his tenure as “akin to naming a notorious arsonist as chief of the local fire department.”

Conceding the claims of “constitutionalist” sheriffs, as Ketcham explores, is extraordinarily worrisome in a very real sense:

“That stuff Pendley said about being subservient to sheriffs is downright dangerous,” John Freemuth, the Cecil Andrus endowed chair of Environment and Public Lands at Boise State University, told me. “When you’re a BLM ranger out there in the middle of nowhere, and you run into these crazy public lands people, like the followers of the Bundys, I wonder what’s going to happen when they say, ‘Your boss says you’re subservient, and I’m going to do whatever I want, and you’re not going to stop me.’ It’s one of the most irresponsible things I’ve seen in public lands management.”

The nexus of the law enforcement problem is the Constitutionalist Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a far-right group that has been steadily recruiting sheriffs, deputies, and other police officers into their “constitutionalist” belief system. The CSPOA contends, like all such “radical localism” ideologues, that the county sheriff, and not any federal agency, is the highest law-enforcement authority in the land.

These beliefs, as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s disturbing investigation of the CSPOA’s reach explained, originated with the Posse Comitatus, a profoundly racist and anti-Semitic organization of the 1970s and ‘80s whose ideas had a kind of underground currency in rural America for awhile. The Posse’s leaders preached that the Constitution limited the federal government’s powers to raising a military and conducting foreign policy. The intent, as always, was to restrict if not nullify the government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws, as well as gun control laws, land use, and a host of other policies. In the end, the Posse was urging its followers to ready themselves for acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

Later “Patriot” movement ideologues—notably far-right LDS Church figure W. Cleon Skousen, as well as such 1990s militia figures as the Militia of Montana and the Montana Freemen—sold a regurgitated form of Posse ideology that largely whitewashed away the underlying racism and anti-Semitism. It was this version of “constitutionalism” that CSPOA leader and founder Richard Mack, who led efforts to form “citizen militias” in the 1990s as a gun-control-resistance measure, adopted and sells to his followers and supporters including Cliven Bundy and former Fox News figure David Clarke.

Ketcham quotes Dennis McLane, a retired deputy chief of law enforcement at BLM, who explained that county sheriffs allied with the CSPOA would “serve as the local vanguard” for this national campaign to gut federal lands law enforcement. “In many western counties,” McLane said, “the sheriffs would use their newfound authority to just ignore the enforcement of federal resource laws.”

As Kethcam notes, this means “it would be a free-for-all of extractive interests engaging in lawless behavior for maximum profits—the vision of James Watt and the MSLF.”

The Politico/Type Investigations story explores how this reality is creating chaos on the ground in places like rural Nevada, where lithium and other mining projects are proceeding apace with full BLM approval despite multiple clear violation of federal regulations. It focused on a whistleblower in a Nevada BLM office who filed a complaint charging that “the laws of the United States are being disregarded for the professional expediency of his superiors and the benefit of private parties, and that a culture of lawlessness has been engendered.”

The centerpiece of the investigation is a lithium mine project that has become embroiled in multiple lawsuits by environmentalists frustrated by the BLM’s deliberate refusal to enforce federal laws. “This is the Wild West out here,” the whistleblower told reporter Adam Federman. “You can kind of do what you want. And these guys are doing it.”

“In this administration, we have seen the doors to our public lands be thrown wide open to industry by the BLM avoiding and subverting any environmental protections we have on the books,” an attorney for one of the environmental groups said. “Sometimes that is through sweeping secretarial orders upending management of public lands but sometimes it’s just guys at their job trying to make the boss happy.”

Senate Democrats tried again Tuesday morning three times to bring election security legislation to the floor. Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Oregon's Ron Wyden all tried to bring bills to the floor for unanimous consent. Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn was Moscow Mitch's henchwoman for this round.

It's time to end McConnell's destructive stranglehold on the republic. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as majority leader.

"America is 266 days away from the 2020 election, and Majority Leader McConnell has yet to take any concrete steps to protect our foreign elections from hacking or foreign interference," Wyden said. He added that refusing to take the simple step included in one of the bills of banning states from connecting their voting machines to the internet is like "stashing our ballots in the Kremlin." Blumenthal warned that after the Senate Republicans' acquittal of Trump, "There is no doubt that he will only be emboldened in his efforts to illegally enlist foreign governments in his reelection campaign." Warner and Blumenthal have legislation that would require campaigns to notify law enforcement when foreign nationals offer assistance. "The appropriate response is not to say thank you, the appropriate response is to call the FBI."

Blackburn, who apparently wants to make sure Putin knows that Republican doors are still open to him, didn't just object to the unanimous consent requests, she got nasty. "You would think that after spending weeks in this chamber litigating the finer points of their disagreements with the president's foreign policy that our friends in the minority would be weary of picking another partisan fight, but here we go again." Because keep foreign government out of our elections is now a partisan thing. To prove how virulently partisan she is in calling out partisanship, Blackburn then introduced her own bill to have the Government Accountability Office "look into the debacle in Iowa."

It's hard to come to any conclusion other than Republicans inviting interference from Russia or any other country they think will help them win. It's okay if their impeached president does it, so they must figure why the hell not.