We are going into an intense election cycle. Congressional seats will be in play, Senate seats will be in play and, of course, the chief executive seat of the country is in play. As such, political PACs and other groups are beginning to unfurl their ad campaigns across the country, and big money donors (billionaires) want their PACs run the way they run their other business interests: shoddily and with very little accountability at the very top.
Republican super PAC American Action Network has a new series of commercials it is sending around to various local seats, in places like New York and New Jersey and New Mexico and Pennsylvania and Iowa and Nevada and Utah and Virginia and Maine. The 30-second spots show a blond woman, identified as “Stacy: Mom, Wife, Teacher.” Stacy is pissed that some incumbent local Democratic official is upholding the Constitution when he should be fixing the opioid crisis and securing the border—two things the Trump administration and the Republican majority seems to have forgotten to fix when they were busy handing out welfare tax cuts to corporations and the rich.
Listen, Stacy has every right to her local opinion. I may not agree with Stacy, but she knows her community and she’s a teacher. And she is a wife. And she is a mom. And, according to the American Action Network’s series of ads, she lives a teaching mom wife’s life in at least eight different states of the Union. Stacy is what we call in the business, a superhero. This woman is not simply a Wife, a Teacher, and a Mom, she’s eight times more than all of that. She’s like your mom but she has secret families and professions across the country!
Here’s the ad copy:
STACY: Around here we focus on what matters. Like taking care of our families. But Washington gets so focused on the wrong things, like impeachment. [Insert Democratic incumbent you are attacking’s name] said he would be different, but voted for impeachment. Why not fix the opioid crisis? Or secure the border? There’s so many issues they should be working on. it’s so disappointing. I just wish [insert Democratic incumbent’s name] would let us decide the election and get to work on the issues that matter.
Stacy turns to go, clearly in her local kitchen, with a bowl of apples behind her. She probably needs to make apple pie (one for her family and one to leave on the window sill for a hobo with a bindle to take and eat with his legs dangling out of a train’s boxcar). Plus, you know the saying, an apple a day keeps that doctor away and you need to keep the doctor away when you cannot afford insurance! That’s my guess anyway.
You can watch one of the myriad commercials below the fold.
The group Republicans for the Rule of Law, a group you may remember produced a video of former conservative prosecutors explaining how and why Donald Trump needed to be impeached for breaking the law, has released another video. This time, in the wake of the news that former President Clinton investigator Ken Starr is joining Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team, Republicans for the Rule of Law seems to want to remind Ken Starr of his own legal positions on obstruction of justice.
They have been releasing excerpts of video from Starr’s 1998 testimony to Congress, where he outlined his belief that then President Bill Clinton had obstructed justice as Starr investigated Clinton’s extramarital affair.
In one of the clips, Starr explains that the “invocation of privileges” by the Clinton White House was indicative of its unwillingness to comply with the legal investigation being conducted. In the clip, with a younger, beer-loving future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sitting behind him, independent counsel Starr tells members of Congress that he considers unmeritorious, frivolous uses of presidential privilege to be “abuses” of the power of the office. But seemingly the only job of the Trump White House the past couple of years is stopping people from testifying or talking with investigators.
— Republicans for the Rule of Law (@ForTheRuleOfLaw) January 17, 2020
The second clip is even more on the nose. In it Starr tells Congress that the Clinton White House has misused its powers of privilege to impede his investigation, and in so doing had “delayed and impeded the investigation.”
At least AZ knows what it'll be voting for. Hopefully they'll pull their head out of their ass for once.
McSally at a Trump rally in October 2018, weeks before she lost a US Senate contest to Kyrsten Sinema. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
It seemed like an outburst. It was actually an elaborate fundraising ploy.
Sen. Martha McSally’s (R-AZ) remarkable attack on a CNN reporter in the halls of Congress on Thursday seemed to be an unusual outburst, but it now appears to be part of a calculated strategy to hang onto her Senate seat by hitching her wagon to the president.
On Thursday, the former member of Congress unloaded on CNN’s Manu Raju when he asked her an innocuous question about the Senate impeachment trial.
“Senator McSally, should the Senate consider new evidence as part of the impeachment trial?” Raju asked.
The question is an important one. McSally has sent somewhat mixed messages about how seriously she’s taking the inquiry and was identified by my colleague Li Zhou as one of eight Republican senators to watch on impeachment. But instead of answering, McSally made things personal.
“Manu, you’re a liberal hack. I’m not talking to you. You’re a liberal hack,” McSally replied, blowing past Raju and walking into a Capitol Hill meeting room.
Watch:
Q: Senator McSally, should the Senate consider new evidence as part of the impeachment trial?
McSally: You’re a liberal hack I’m not talking to you
Manu- You’re not going to comment about this? McSally: You're a liberal hack. pic.twitter.com/IW5pCfZ6Oa
But there was an upside. McSally’s stunt received praise from the MAGA media, including Fox News staple Mark Levin (“Kudos to Martha McSally! Love this!”) and Breitbart, who wrote that McSally “slammed a CNN reporter to his face — and it was glorious.”
McSally, for her part, leaned into the incident by posting video of it on her Twitter page. Within a couple hours of when it happened, the Trump campaign Twitter account rewarded her with a laudatory tweet (“THIS is how you handle FAKE NEWS @CNN”) that also included a link to her fundraising page.
— Trump War Room --- Text FIGHT to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) January 16, 2020
That tweet seemed to give the game away. But if any doubt remained, it was resolved on Friday when Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that McSally registered the domain name “LiberalHack.com” shortly after the incident with Raju.
A little insight into how calculated this was.
McSally attacked Manu in the 10am hour. She had registered the domain name "https://t.co/YQW3ySFPna" by the 11am hour.
The irony of McSally going full MAGA is Trump may have contributed to her loss to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema in a race for a US Senate seat in Arizona in 2018. Strategists working on her behalf put together an exit memo that blamed her loss in part on Trump’s unpopularity in the state, and in particular on his lack of appeal to women — even though Trump won the state by more than three points over Hillary Clinton.
“A significant segment of the AZ GOP was hostile to the President,” it says. “In internal polling during the primary, President Trump never broke 80% favorability among Republican voters. A certain segment of AZ Republicans was outright hostile to President Trump and was against the Kavanaugh appointment. This segment of moderate Republicans, especially woman [sic], proved very difficult to bring home to a Republican candidate that supported President Trump and the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh.”
In December 2018, Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey appointed McSally to the Senate seat vacated by the late Sen. John McCain. And despite what her strategists may have concluded, she’s apparently come around to the idea that her best chance at holding on to the seat is to embrace Trump, whose approval rating is slightly underwater in the state but holds his own in hypothetical matchups against the Democraticfrontrunners.
In a Republican party that has been purged of just about everyone who isn’t a Trump loyalist, McSally likely sees the writing on the wall: She can either embrace the president and maintain hope of winning in November, or keep her distance and have no shot at all. Her antics on Thursday indicate she’s chosen the former.
McSally still isn’t answering the question
Somewhat lost in the kerfuffle over McSally’s attack on Raju was the fact that she never answered his question about the impeachment trial for which she’ll be part of the jury: Does she think it should feature witness testimony or not?
You’d think she’d have a position. But during an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show hours after the Raju incident, McSally still couldn’t provide a straight answer.
“What about Manu Raju’s question — do you want witnesses?” Ingraham asked her.
“I want a fair trial,” McSally replied, dodging.
“You’re not going to play the game with me. You can call me a conservative hack, but do you want witnesses, yes or not?” Ingraham pressed. “Why aren’t you telling us?”
“I’m not going to tell everybody what all my votes are going to be,” McSally replied.
“It’s kind of an easy question, don’t you think, senator?” Ingraham replied. But McSally never answered.
"It's kind of an easy question, don't you think Senator?" -- hours after she insulted @mkraju instead of answering his Q about if she wants witnesses at the impeachment trial, @SenMcSallyAZ somehow still didn't have an answer for that very basic query on Laura Ingraham's show pic.twitter.com/ufZvNzC0x3
Then again, for all intents and purposes, McSally answered the question in the hours leading up to that interview. For better or worse, she’s once again rolling with Trump, and she’s hoping that the result this time will be different from 2018’s.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is taking extraordinary steps to keep what's sure to be a sticky impeachment trial for GOP senators out of the public eye. He's already roped off certain areas to pen up reporters so they can't wander the halls and ask the very questions GOP senators are loath to answer. Journalists will also pass through a newly added metal detector before taking their media seats in the chamber in case they try to "bug the chamber with surveillance equipment," reports the Washington Post. It's all under the guise of "security" that's supposedly intended to protect senators, but credentialed reporters have effectively been designated a security threat.
Naturally, no digital devices such as cell phones or computers or cameras will be allowed in the Senate chamber to record the historical spectacle in real-time. That's standard practice in both the upper and lower chambers, but the House suspended the rule during the impeachment proceedings so journalists could better capture the moment.
But McConnell and his caucus could also simply kill the only camera allowed in the chamber during some of the most important parts of the trial. As the New York Times writes, "Lawmakers could pull the C-Span plug and go into closed session at critical moments of debate over the conduct of the trial and the fate of the president."
It's a procedure that was sometimes employed during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, but the circumstances of that trial were quite different. While Senate Republicans controlled the chamber, they weren't in any position to abuse their power or further anger the public as Clinton's approval had already soared and the GOP was taking a political beating. In addition, Republicans didn’t gain anything by shielding Clinton from the negative publicity that would naturally arise from a trial they were constitutionally required to hold in the view of many legal scholars.
This time around, Republicans have every incentive to use the mechanism to limit public view of a trial that could easily become a stain on the GOP caucus heading into November.
Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team got several additions Friday morning and there is SO MUCH to say. Let’s start with the new names: Pam Bondi, Alan Dershowitz, Jane Raskin, Robert Ray, Ken Starr. A few of these stand out, to say the least.
Bondi is the former Florida attorney general who took a $25,000 contribution from Trump shortly before she decided not to pursue a case against the fraudulent Trump University. She was also photographed with Lev Parnas multiple times. Bondi has been a prominent Trump defender on television.
Ken Starr is obviously most famous from spending the 1990s turning an investigation into a real estate transaction into impeaching Bill Clinton for a sexual relationship. As CNN’s Elie Honig tweeted, “Now House Managers can point across the well and say: ‘There’s the same guy who interviewed @MonicaLewinsky’s ex-boyfriends, WH window washers and Kathleen Willey’s dentist. Now he doesn’t want us to hear from Bolton and Mulvaney.’”
During that time, Trump had some strong feelings about Starr, telling Matt Lauer that “I think Ken Starr's a lunatic. I really think that Ken Starr is a disaster.” But Starr has been … wait for it … a prominent Trump defender on television.
True story: Starr was also one of sex predator Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers. Oh, and he lost his job as president of Baylor University after accusations that he mishandled sexual assault allegations against football players.
Robert Ray followed Starr as independent counsel and has been, yes, a frequent Trump defender on television. In 2006 he was charged with stalking his ex-girlfriend. Jane Raskin was on Trump’s defense team during the Mueller investigation.
Twitter has had some thoughts about this team.
x
this is definitely an “are you fucking kidding me?†kinda day.
Ken Starr defending one of the most impeachable offenses in history after prosecuting one of the least with zero self-reflection and no sense of irony really encapsulates the GOP’s part over country ethos.
Meghan Markle visits Cardiff Castle in January 2018 in Cardiff, Wales. Markle has faced racist attacks from the press since joining the royal family. | Ben Birchall-WPA Pool/Getty Images
The UK press’s continued denial of racism just shows how entrenched these attitudes are.
Not agreeing with the concept of a hereditary monarchy in a country where it’s celebrated is an odd place to be. Stranger still is spending your time defending particular members of the royal family after coverage of them turns hostile. But this is where I’ve found myself this past week.
Part of my job as an academic is to examine how racism functions in the UK. Ever since Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, and Prince Harry announced they were stepping back from their “roles” as senior royals, there’s been a debate in British media about whether the coverage of Markle has been racist. A debate that has — in a sad but predictable turn of irony — reproduced racism while denying it is prevalent.
The royal family is historically a white institution. And so when Markle, a biracial woman, became a member, some heralded it as “progress.” But in late 2016, the same year it was announced she and Prince Harry were dating, the prince put out a statement condemning the “wave of abuse and harassment” Markle had already been subjected to. That included “the racial undertones of comment pieces” and “the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.” Three years later, Markle talked about the difficulty of dealing with tabloid coverage more broadly, saying it had been “hard,” and that adopting “this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip” was difficult.
For example, the press has talked about her “exotic DNA”; described her as “(almost) straight outta Compton”; attacked her for the very things that Kate Middleton, Prince William’s white wife, has been praised for; and compared the couple’s son to a chimpanzee. But in TV studios around the country, commentators seem to havepeculiarly missed all of this. The coverage of Markle has been welcoming and warm, they say. And when confronted with the evidence that shows that certainly hasn’t always been the tone of reporting, they ask: Is it really racism, though?
Not all racism is overt. Much of it is subtle, quietly shaping the way people are seen, talked about, and treated. Some, like Piers Morgan, have argued it’s not racist to talk about Markle’s DNA as “exotic,” but this term has colonial roots, long working as a form of othering. Acknowledging this would mean really grappling with the insidious ways racism operates in the UK, undermining the notion that it is fundamentally a “tolerant” and “progressive” country.
In the days following the Sussexes’ announcement that they would be “leaving” the royal family, the racist — not to mention, sexist — attacks continued. One poll suggested a significant proportion of people thought it was Markle’s decision, not one made jointly or by Prince Harry. We don’t know, and might never discover, all the ins and outs of what prompted their departure from their frontline “duties.” But in this telling, Prince Harry’s previous admission that he didn’t want to be a “traditional royal” disappears, and all the power, responsibility, and blame seems to lie with Markle.
Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty ImagesAFP via Getty Images
Front-page headlines on the news that the Sussexes plan to step back as “senior” members of the royal family, on January 9, 2020.
This was best encapsulated when one radio host launched into a tirade against her post-announcement. Although he’d never met Markle, he admitted, he thought her “awful, woke, weak, manipulative, spoilt and irritating…I look at her and I think, ‘I don’t think I would like you in real life.’”
Black British rapper Stormzy pinpointed in a characteristically salient way why someone would have this kind of unencumbered hatred for a person they’ve never met and who, for the most part, has done little that can really be considered offensive: “she’s just black.”
So much of the reaction to Markle and the couple’s decision reads as a belief that she should be grateful for what she gets. That women of color — in particular black women — should know their place. Because really, so much of the comment around the Harry and Meghan saga isn’t about them at all. It’s about how poorly racism is understood, and how even beginning to grapple with it is deprioritized and ignored.
This lack of interest in combating, or even challenging, racism has obvious political implications. The UK’s current prime minister, Boris Johnson, has compared Muslim women wearing burqas to letterboxes and described black people as “picanninies” with “watermelon smiles.” Diane Abbott, the UK’s first black woman MP, receives more abuse than any other politician in the UK. And in the wake of the referendum vote on the UK leaving the European Union, there was a spike in hate crimes.
These forms of aggression don’t even get us to the insidious structural racism that produces material inequality, which risks being overlooked in all this talk of the royals. Studies have shown that to get a job interview, people with African- or Asian-sounding surnames have to send in twice as many CVs as those with white British-sounding surnames — even where they have the same qualifications. While homelessness has risen across the UK over the past 10 years, ethnic minorities have been disproportionately impacted. And since the 1980s, unemployment rates among women of color have been consistently higher than for white women.
Still, we debate: Is racism a problem in the UK? The coverage of Meghan Markle and the recent fallout is just another reminder that it certainly is.
Maya Goodfellow is an academic and writer. She holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, and she is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats.
Of course it is. This is what the GOP stands for: blatant bigotry and cruelty to anyone other than their retrograde base.
Hundreds of LGBTQ+ advocates convened in Washington, DC, in October 2019 for a national day of action. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Judge Kyle Duncan was a prominent anti-LGBTQ lawyer before joining the bench.
Federal appeals courts hear cases that impact the rights of millions. They decide matters with billions of dollars at stake. They sometimes hear cases where thousands of lives hang in the balance.
United States v. Varner is not oneof those cases. The main thing at stake in Varner is whether three judges will treat a woman with courtesy or with needless cruelty.
Two of them chose the latter option.
The case involves Kathrine Nicole Jett, a trans woman who is incarcerated in a federal prison. (Jett does not appear to use the name “Varner,” butfor the sake of clarity, this piece will refer to her case as United States v. Varner because that is the only name the courts have assigned to it.) Jett made a couple of requests from the federal judiciary relating to her transition from male to female. She asked that her name be changed on certain court documents from “Norman Keith Varner” to “Kathrine Nicole Jett,” and that judges hearing her case refer to her as a woman and use feminine pronouns.
The name change request was denied on procedural grounds (although the judges hearing the case disagree about why this request should be denied, no judge suggested it should be granted). But the question of how individual judges should refer to a transgender person does not appear to be answered by any law. All three judges hearing the Varner case appear to agree that this decision is entirely up to their discretion.
Unfortunately for Jett, she drew a panel of judges dominated by two unusually conservative Republicans. The author of the Court’s opinion in Varner, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, spent part of his career as general counsel to a leading Christian right law firm and litigated multiple cases seeking to restrict LBGTQ rights.
Among several other cases, Duncan defended the state of Alabama’s failed attempt to strip a lesbian mother of parental rights over her adopted child. He filed a brief arguing against marriage equality in the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) case. And he represented a school district seeking to bar a trans student from using the bathroom that aligns with his gender identity.
Judge Duncan’s opinion in Varner confirms these groups’ fears. The thrust of Duncan’s opinion is that even though he could use female pronouns and refer to Jett as a woman as a matter of courtesy, no one can make him. So he won’t.
There are no broader legal stakes here — only the question of whether Duncan and his fellow Republican colleague, Judge Jerry Smith, will afford Jett a modicum of dignity. Duncan and Smith opted for cruelty.
Moreover, while Duncan’s opinion on this issue has little legal significance, it sends a pretty clear message about whether transgender litigants can get a fair hearing in the Fifth Circuit. Few lawyers have done as much anti-LGBTQ legal work as Kyle Duncan. But Duncan is hardly an ideological outlier on a court that’s dominated by Republican appointees.
If the court’s judges are so contemptuous of trans people that they will take swipes at them when the stakes deal only with an individual, imagine what they will do when fundamental questions about the rights of transgender Americans come before their court.
Nothing prevents judges from treating transgender litigants with courtesy
All three of the judges who heard this case — Duncan, Smith, and dissenting Judge James Dennis — agree on one thing: Judges have discretion to decide how they want to refer to transgender litigants. Duncan acknowledges that “federal courts sometimes choose to refer to gender-dysphoric parties by their preferred pronouns.” And he notes that “on this issue, our court has gone both ways.”
Duncan cites nine federal court decisions where judges agreed to requests from trans litigants like the one Jett made. As Dennis notes in hisdissent, though “no law compels” a judge to refer to a trans litigant by the correct pronouns, “many courts and judges adhere to such requests out of respect for the litigant’s dignity.”
The decision of whether to misgender a litigant appears to be entirely up to each judge.
Nevertheless, Duncan chooses not to grant Jett’s request. He justifies this decision through a combination of tactics — exaggerating the nature of the relief that Jett requested, selectively applying judicial ethics, and warning that some future judge may have to refer to a future litigant by a nontraditional gender-neutral pronoun such as “xe” or “hir.”
Much of Duncan’s opinion rests on a claim that “no authority supports the proposition that we may require litigants, judges, court personnel, or anyone else to refer to gender-dysphoric litigants with pronouns matching their subjective gender identity.” Perhaps Duncan is right about this claim. But, as Dennis points out in dissent, Jett did not seek a broad order requiring “litigants, judges, court personnel, or anyone else” to refer to her as a woman.
Instead, here is the text of her motion:
Motion to Use Female Pronouns When Addressing Appellant
I am a woman and not referring to me as such leads me to feel that I am being discriminated against based on my gender identity. I am a woman—can I not be referred to as one?
Thus, as Dennis writes, Jett “is simply requesting that this court, in this proceeding, refer to [her] using her preferred gender pronouns.”
Similarly, Duncan argues that “if a court were to compel the use of particular pronouns at the invitation of litigants, it could raise delicate questions about judicial impartiality.” He notes that “federal courts today are asked to decide cases that turn on hotly-debated issues of sex and gender identity.” And he cites a provision of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges that requires judges to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”
That provision does, indeed, exist. But another provision states that “a judge should be patient, dignified, respectful, and courteous to litigants, jurors, witnesses, lawyers, and others with whom the judge deals in an official capacity.” Duncan offers no explanation for why the provision he relies on should trump another.
In any event, Duncan’s claim to impartiality fails on its own terms. Duncan is correct that “federal courts today are asked to decide cases that turn on hotly-debated issues of sex and gender identity.” By pointedly choosing to refer to Jett as a man, and then explaining his decision to do so in a published opinion, Duncan does not convey that he is an impartial judge with no view on trans rights. To the contrary, he rather emphatically conveys that he has chosen a side — and it’s not the side of LGBTQ rights.
If Duncan wished to avoid appearing to take sides on whether Jett is a man or a woman, he could have, as Judge Dennis suggests in dissent, simply avoided using pronouns altogether in the court’s opinion.
The silver lining for transgender litigants is that Duncan neither claims he is resolving a pressing legal dispute over trans rights nor claims that other judges cannot treat trans litigants with courtesy. His decision to misgender Jett is not binding on lower courts. Indeed, Duncan’s decision appears to serve only one goal.
The party of Freedom...as long as it's the freedom to be a white straight heterosexual male. Anyone else can fuck right off.
A Republican Missouri state lawmaker wants to eradicate Drag Queen Story Hours in the state by fining or jailing librarians who allow minors to access “age-inappropriate sexual materials.”
Last week, Rep. Ben Baker filed House Bill 2044, which he is calling the “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act.”
“In some places — St. Louis, Kansas City and I think St. (Joseph) — they’ve had these drag queen story hours and that’s something that I take objection to and I think a lot of parents do,” Baker told the Kansas City Star. “That’s where in a public space, our kids could be exposed to something that’s age-inappropriate. That’s what I’m trying to tackle.
“Some of those events are open from ages 1 to teen years,” Baker added. “I don’t think a 2-, 3-, 4-year-old is prepared to grapple with those ideas and I don’t think they should be subjected to that just by walking through the library.”
According to the Star, “Baker took it one step further by alleging the story hours to be a public safety issue, saying they have ‘drawn child predators, pedophiles’ in the past.”
Here’s how Baker’s bill defines “age-inappropriate sexual material”:
Baker’s proposal would require Missouri’s public libraries to establish parental review boards, which would hold public hearings before determining “whether any sexual material provided to the public … is age-inappropriate sexual material.”
The boards could then order that “age-inappropriate sexual material” be made inaccessible to minors. Any library staff member who violated such an order would face misdemeanor charges and up to one year in jail. And public libraries that run afoul of the law would lose state funding.
Hemant Mehta at the Friendly Atheist notes that the ramifications of Baker’s bill would likely go beyond Drag Queen Story Hour:
In theory, then, a heavily Christian community could elect a board that says books featuring LGBTQ characters are “inappropriate.” And then if librarians allow kids to check out Heather Has Two Mommies or I Am Jazz — books meant to help kids understand LGBTQ identities — they would be severely punished for it. All because a group of conservative parents with sticks up their asses decide to play censor instead of letting kids follow their own curiosity or deferring to the wisdom and expertise of professional librarians.
This could also backfire. Can you imagine the outcry if a progressive community elects a group of parents who decide to ban child checkouts of all Christian books — including the Bible itself — because the text is full of incest and rape?
James Tager, PEN America’s deputy director of free expression research and policy, told the Washington Post that Baker’s bill is an attempt “a shockingly transparent attempt to legalize book banning in the state of Missouri.”
“This act is clearly aimed at empowering small groups of parents to appoint themselves as censors over their state’s public libraries,” Tager said. “Books wrestling with sexual themes, books uplifting LGBTQIA+ characters, books addressing issues such as sexual assault — all of these books are potentially on the chopping block if this bill is passed.”
Tager added that “every reader and writer in the country should be horrified, absolutely horrified, at this bill.”
The US just blatantly lies now. Can't trust anything they say.
Shorly after Iran’s Jan. 8 missile strikes on military bases in Iraq that housed U.S. troops, President Donald Trump tweeted that “all is well.”
“I’m pleased to inform you the American people should be extremely grateful and happy,” Trump said later in a live address to the nation. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime.”
BREAKING: In address to the nation, President Trump says no Americans were harmed in Iran's missile attack, and Iran now appears to be standing down. https://t.co/sP6WH7pm7Rpic.twitter.com/CxlNSkgnJV
Eight days later, U.S. officials confirmed that 11 U.S. service members suffered traumatic brain injuries in the strikes, which came in retaliation for Trump’s decision to kill Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
“While no U.S. service members were killed in the Jan. 8 Iranian attack on Al Asad Air base, several were treated for concussion symptoms from the blast and are still being assessed,” Capt. Bill Urban, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said in a statement. “As a standard procedure, all personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injury, and if deemed appropriate are transported to a higher level of care.”
Although it is true that concussion symptoms can emerge days later, the Pentagon reportedly declined to disclose or even confirm the injuries until they were reported by the media.
From ABC News: Eleven service members were flown out of Iraq in the last 24 to 36 hours, an official told ABC News. Eight were taken to Landstuhl, Germany, while another three were taken to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. … Because of HIPPA laws, a U.S. official couldn’t provide many details of the injuries — only saying the service members’ TBI symptoms had worsened enough to warrant evacuation out of Iraq.
More from CNN: Following the attack the Pentagon said that no casualties had resulted from the 16 missiles fired by Iran. The US military defines a casualty as either an injury or fatality involving personnel. Asked about the apparent discrepancy, a Defense official told CNN, “That was the commander’s assessment at the time. Symptoms emerged days after the fact, and they were treated out of an abundance of caution.”
Enlarge / This is the exact moment in the goop lab's third episode in which Gwyneth Paltrow admits she doesn't know the difference between a vagina and a vulva. She's making a hand gesture to say what she thought the "vagina" was. (credit: Netflix)
With the goop lab hitting Netflix today, January 24th, we've resurfaced this review (originally published January 17th). And as we originally said, this review contains detailed information about the Netflix series with Gwyneth Paltrow. If you plan to watch the show (please, don't) and do not wish to know details in advance, this is not the review for you. Normally, we would refer to such information as "spoilers," but in our editorial opinion, nothing in this series is spoil-able.
In the third episode of Goop's Netflix series, a female guest remarks that we women are seen as "very dangerous when we're knowledgeable." [Ep. 3, 33:35]
"Tell me about it," Gwyneth Paltrow knowingly replies amid "mm-hmms"—as if she has a first-hand understanding of this.
On Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump swore up and down that he doesn’t know Lev Parnas, the indicted Rudy Giuliani associate who has emerged as a key figure in the impeachment investigation:
Trump denies knowing Lev Parnas 9 different times in 2 minutes:
Roman Nasirov, seen in this video with Lev Parnas and Trump at Mar-a-Lago, was arrested for embezzling millions in case linked to fugitive ex Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko – who in 2006 bought the rights to Miss Ukraine from Trump HT @StacyJannishttps://t.co/wTbjsdO3sL
"don't make us testify under oath and reveal Trump to be a liar." "no".
This is unbelievable—and yet not. United States intelligence officials are "quietly" asking the House and Senate to cancel public hearings on this year's World Wide Threats Assessment, the report outlining the major risks to United States security as identified by the nation's intelligence community, so as to avoid angering Donald Trump.
The problem, reports CNN, is Trump's furious reaction last year when top members of the intelligence community gave testimony to Congress during last year's hearings that conflicted with Donald Trump's own public claims. In particular, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who was forced out of his position soon afterward, and CIA director Gina Haspel testified that there was no evidence Iran was attempting to build nuclear weapons; this was met by sputtering tweets from Trump calling them "wrong" and telling them to "go back to school!"
So U.S. intelligence officials are asking that hearings on the top national security issues not take place so that they will not anger Donald Trump by disputing his own evidence conspiracy theories.
Profiles in courage this ain't. But it is yet another step down into authoritarian territory, in which the government of a nation begins to sweep facts that may counter Dear Leader's own personal, possibly entirely made-up whims out of public view. Trump's Twitter proclamations, many of which are not only brazen lies but tinged with paranoia and conspiracy, are now being elevated over the analyses of the nation's collected intelligence infrastructure because nobody in his administration dares publicly contradict him when he's lying to the American people.
This is insanity. This is authoritarianism by way of rank institutional cowardice. If this were happening in any other nation, our press would not hesitate to call the leader a despot, or corrupt, or unstable, or all of the above. At every tested point, our systems are failing around us. It is not that Trump himself is breaking them; his party has been working with absolute precision to ensure each limb snaps.
Hopefully this will release his iron grip on some of the material and lead to better products in middle earth
Christopher Tolkien, the son of Lord Of The Rings author JRR Tolkien who was responsible for editing and publishing much of his father's work, has died aged 95. The Tolkien Society released a short statement on Twitter to confirm the news. The Guardian reports: Tolkien, who was born in Leeds in 1924, was the third and youngest son of the revered fantasy author and his wife Edith. He grew up listening to his fathers tales of Bilbo Baggins, which later became the children's fantasy novel, The Hobbit. He drew many of the original maps detailing the world of Middle Earth for his father's The Lord of the Rings when the series was first published between 1954 and 55. He also edited much of his father's posthumously published work following his death in 1973. Since 1975 he had lived in France with Baillie.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2012, Christopher's son Simon described the enormity of the task after his grandfather died with so much material still unpublished. Simon said: "He had produced this huge output that covered everything from the history of the gods to the history of the people he called the Silmarils -- that was his great work but it had never seen the light of day despite his best efforts to get it published." His son was left to sift through the files and notebooks and over the two decades after his father's death, he published The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Beren And Luthien and The History of Middle-earth, which fleshed out the complex world of elves and dwarves created by his father.
You mean at risk populations will take rational precautions? Stop the presses.
Significant progress on HIV! But it’s important to note:
The 73% is in gay/bi men New diagnoses increased in some groups in 2018 43% of people still diagnosed late #PrEP access remains capped in England We can’t be complacent to reach #ZeroHIVhttps://t.co/3NrLzgYOdv
HIV infections have declined a whopping 71 percent among gay and bisexual men in the United Kingdom since 2014, according to new figures from Public Health England.
Health officials believe the decline is due largely to the introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). However, the drug is still not freely available in England, where 15 people have tested positive for HIV while awaiting a trial.
The BBC reports: Phil Samba, of advocacy group Prepster, told BBC News that while the new data was incredibly promising, the lack of commitment from the government to making Prep widely available in England remained troubling. … Terrence Higgins Trust head of policy Debbie Laycock said a focus beyond communities stereotypically associated with HIV was now needed. “The fact we are still seeing 43% of all new HIV diagnoses at a late stage, in particular among heterosexual men and the over-50s, is evidence of the urgent need to engage these groups around HIV and regular testing.”
On Thursday morning, CNN senior correspondent Manu Raju attempted to ask Arizona Republican Sen. Martha McSally whether she would consider new evidence as part of President Donald Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial.
Rather than answering the question, McSally— who is in a tough re-election race against Democrat Mark Kelly — lashed out at Raju.
“Manu, you’re a liberal hack, I’m not talking to you,” McSally said.
“You’re not going to answer the question?” Raju responded.
“You’re a liberal hack,” McSally repeated, before ducking into a hearing room.
A short time later, McSally doubled down by posting the video to Twitter herself:
Keep giving to Mark Kelly. He’s taking on Martha McSally. She was handed this senate seat by her Governor after she lost her Senate race. Mark will make a great Senator! https://t.co/zIxqnlQsw4
McSally is understandably frustrated. She was the first Republican to lose to a Democrat for Senate in Arizona in 30 years and she's on pace to do it again — this time without an empty seat for the governor to place her in afterward https://t.co/6cf97pSP2F
Martha McSally just shit her pants publicly when asked a simple question on impeachment by CNN. Here is an ad running on TV in Arizona. Retweet. pic.twitter.com/ly2VfTrbRL
1) McSally is a complete fool for answering legitimate question like this. Key voters she needs this November in order not to lose Arizona (again) won’t like this.
2) It’s hard to find a more fair, objective, non-partisan reporter than Manu Raju. https://t.co/JsmN31eNts
The White House budget office violated the law when it froze U.S. military aid to Ukraine, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a new report.
President Donald Trump ordered the hold on the critical security assistance in July, a slew of senior White House officials testified to House impeachment investigators late last year. Itwas a move that coincided with an effort by the president and his allies to pressure Ukraine to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals.
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the president to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the GAO wrote in an eight-page report released on Thursday.
Trump’s decision to withhold nearly $400 million in military aid, which he reversed in September after House investigators began probing the move, is at the heart of the articles of impeachment the House passed last month, and it will be a central focus in the Senate’s impeachment trial that begins laterThursday.
The report undercuts an oft-stated defense of Trump’s decision to hold the aid back: that it was a lawful exercise of the president’s authority.
“I have never seen such a damning report in my life,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I mean, this is a nonpartisan thing. I read it twice. ... To have something saying this is such a total disrespect of the law. It’s unprecedented.”
Leahy said the conclusion “screams” for the need to force impeachment testimony from White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also said it “reinforces, again, the need for documents and eye witnesses in the Senate. You see this more and more and more in all of this — this tangled web to deceive that the administration is engaged in.”
But Republicans were unmoved by the findings, either claiming that they haven’t read GAO’s analysis or that it doesn’t mean much for the Senate impeachment trial.
“I wouldn’t think that a GAO opinion, per se, would change anything,” said Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “But we’ll listen to it, we’ll look at it and we’ll evaluate it.“
“I don’t think they should be deciding who broke the law,” he added.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the report “identifies OMB, not the president. And it identifies policy reasons, not political reasons. I think we’re going to hear some more about it, but I don’t think that changes anything.“
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the House Labor-HHS-Education spending panel, conceded that OMB’s action might deserve some scrutiny. But it doesn’t hurt the president, he said.
“Look, I have a lot of respect for GAO,” he said. “I look at it this way. The aid got there within the fiscal year … There are no investigations in the Ukraine. So if the process wasn’t handled as well as it should have been, then fair enough and we should look at that and make sure it is handled appropriately. Do I think this has any impact on impeachment? No I don’t.“
GAO, an independent nonpartisan government watchdog that responds to congressional requests, said the White House attempted to justify its decision not to notify Congress of the hold by claiming it was simply a “programmatic delay.” But GAO rejected that claim, saying Trump’s decision, carried out by the budget office, was a violation of the Impoundment Control Act, which requires notification to Congress of any such delay in an appropriation of funds.
“OMB’s assertions have no basis in law,” the GAO argues, referring to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
OMB spokeswoman Rachel Semmel pushed back on GAO’s conclusions.
“We disagree with GAO’s opinion,” Semmel said. “OMB uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent consistent with the president’s priorities and with the law.”
The GAO report also states that OMB and the State Department “failed” to provide all of the information that was necessary for its investigation. That decision will likely fuel Democrats’ arguments in the Senate trial that Trump has attempted to obstruct Congress’ ability to investigate the Ukraine matter, and that he has been engaged in a “cover-up.” The second impeachment article alleges that Trump obstructed Congress when he ordered senior officials to refuse requests and subpoenas seeking testimony and documents.
“The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has confirmed what congressional Democrats have understood all along: President Trump abused his power and broke the law by withholding security assistance to Ukraine,” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) requested GAO’s opinion in a letter last month, noting that several administration officials have raised concerns about whether the president’s decision violated federal budget law. The move prompted two White House budget officials to resign in part out of frustration.Senior officials at the Pentagon and State Department sought an explanation for the hold, but were ultimately unsuccessful.
Van Hollen sent the letter one week after the House voted to impeach Trump on Dec. 18, charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress for allegedly using his office and federal resources to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals — and then resisting the House’s investigation.
At issue in GAO’s legal opinion is how the Ukraine aid pause gels with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a law that sharply curbs the executive branch’s authority to alter congressionally appropriated funds.
Mark Sandy, a senior OMB civil servant, told House impeachment investigators last year that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s office informed OMB on July 12 that Trump planned to halt Ukraine’s aid without providing an explanation.
The administration released its hold on Sept. 11, just hours after a whistleblower complaint about the matter was circulating around the government, and after House committees began investigating Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his efforts in Ukraine to spur Trump’s desired investigations.
The funds were set to expire at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, and while the administration un-paused the money, millions of dollars never made it to Ukraine by the deadline.
House Democrats have said the Ukraine aid pause was part of a broader “pattern of abuse” by OMB, which has disregarded federal budget law and congressional spending authority.
House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) is now drafting a bill aimed at keeping OMB in check, and Lowey is expected to sign on as a co-sponsor. Yarmuth said he expects to release the measure in mid-March.
John Bresnahan, Heather Caygle and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this story.
Perhaps emboldened by President Donald Trump, Republican state lawmakers in Florida have unleashed a hateful barrage of anti-LGBTQ legislation as the 2020 session gets under way in Tallahassee.
NBC News reports: “Seven Republican lawmakers in Florida filed anti-LGBTQ bills late Monday, just hours before the deadline to file new bills for the coming legislative session. If passed, the bills would ban gender-affirming health care for transgender children, repeal municipal and county ordinances protecting LGBTQ workers, and legalize so-called gay conversion therapy in places that had banned the medically debunked practice.”
Here’s a breakdown of the bills from Equality Florida, which is calling it “the most overtly anti-LGBTQ agenda from the Florida legislature in recent memory”:
• House Bill 1365 (Rep. Anthony Sabatini) / Senate Bill 1864 (Sen. Dennis Baxley) makes providing best practice medical care to transgender youth a second degree felony.
• House Bill 305 (Rep. Bob Rommel) / Senate Bill 1126 (Sen. Joe Gruters) repeals employment protections that currently cover 13 million Floridians. The legislation threatens city and county nondiscrimination ordinances that ensure Floridians aren’t discriminated against in employment based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (Scheduled for House Workforce Development & Tourism Subcommittee on January 15, 2020.)
• House Bill 3 (Rep. Michael Grant) / Senate Bill 1336 (Sen. Keith Perry) repeals 22 existing local ordinances protecting vulnerable LGBTQ youth from so-called “conversion therapy” that seeks to change a persons sexual orientation or gender identity and bans any local governments from establishing conversion therapy bans in the future. (Scheduled for House Business & Professions Subcommittee on January 15, 2020.)
• House Bill 537 (Rep. Byron Donalds) / Senate Bill 778 (Sen. Keith Perry) as written rolls back critical protections for LGBTQ youth by enabling conversion therapy even where cities and counties have already instituted protections, as long as the therapy occurs in a home. Conversion therapy is no less fraudulent or dangerous because it is practiced in a home setting.
Given Florida’s status as a swing state, the anti-LGBTQ bills could seriously backfire if they drive more Democrats to the polls in November. Here’s how one of Florida’s openly LGBTQ lawmakers, Democratic state Rep. Carlos G. Smith, reacted:
It's hard to believe that this is a legislature where three LGBTQ members are proudly and openly serving, but it is. THIS is what it feels like to be kicked in the gut by your colleagues. I am so utterly offended and disappointed.https://t.co/BUboY2vJUP
The Ukraine has opened a criminal investigation, but not the one President Donald Trump wanted — at all.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry has announced it is investigating alleged surveillance of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine.
Earlier this week, text messages released by House investigators revealed that Yovanovitch appears to have been under surveillance by Rudy Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Robert Hyde.
Back in November, Yovanovitch testified that she was forced out of her job because she was getting in the way of the extortion plot to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation of Trump’s political rivals.
“Ukraine’s position is to not interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States,” an Interior Ministry official said. “However, the published records contain the fact of a possible violation of the legislation of Ukraine and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which protects the rights of a diplomat on the territory of another country.
“Ukraine cannot ignore such illegal activities on its territory.”
Parnas said in interviews Wednesday that Trump was aware of his activities.
MSNBC reports that the investigation will also include the alleged hacking of Burisma Holdings, the natural gas company at the center of the Trump impeachment, by Russian spies.
BREAKING: Ukraine's Interior Ministry announces criminal probe into alleged illegal surveillance of former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch after text messages released by House investigators showed Robert F. Hyde and Lev Parnas discussing her being tracked in Kyiv.
The State Department hasn't replied to multiple questions about the possibility Marie Yovanotich was under surveillance. They aren't commenting on whether they'll cooperate with Ukraine's investigation, whether they'll open their own investigation, or even addressing it at all.
Funny that they only make the requests in high profile cases where the public will identify the figures involved. Sure looks like they're using gruesome facts as a way to try to pry open encryption, despite the fact that (somehow) they have ways to crack things already. Apple needs to seal up those holes.
New questions have been raised about the FBI's latest request that Apple break its iPhone encryption, after Forbes uncovered a search warrant strongly indicating that federal agents already have tools that can access data on Apple's latest iPhone models.
The report says that FBI investigators in Ohio recently used the GrayKey hardware box to unlock an iPhone 11 Pro Max. The iPhone belonged to Baris Ali Koch, who was accused of helping his convicted brother flee the country by providing him with his own ID documents and lying to the police. He has now entered a plea agreement and is awaiting sentencing.
Koch's lawyer confirmed to Forbes that the iPhone was locked with a passcode when it got in the hands of the FBI and that the code was never revealed to law enforcement, nor was the defendant forced to use his face to unlock the phone via Face ID.
Created by a company named Grayshift, GrayKey is a portable gray box that has previously been used by law enforcement to crack the passcode on iPhones. Complete details on how the latest GrayKey works are not known, although Apple continually works to fix the kinds of exploits used by such devices.
Ohio FBI search warrant Forbes has previously revealed a GrayKey brochure that showed it worked on older devices, and the two iPhones acquired by the FBI in the most recent Pensacola case are an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 7, which strongly suggests that investigators are already capable of unlocking them.
President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr have also weighed in on the latest iPhone encryption stalemate between Apple and the FBI, with both urging the tech giant to assist in unlocking the iPhones used by the Pensacola shooter.
Justice department officials claim to need access to the iPhones to see messages from encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp to find out if the shooter discussed his plans or had help. Apple says it has already provided law enforcement officials with information from the shooter's iCloud account, which amounts to all the data in its possession.
Statements by Apple suggest it is gearing up for a battle similar to the one it faced in 2016 in the San Bernardino shooter case, indicating the company has no plans to create a backdoor in its software, regardless of the U.S. government's motives. Apple has previously said that doing so would create "new and dangerous weaknesses" and that weakening security "makes no sense."
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Less than a day after Microsoft disclosed one of the most critical Windows vulnerabilities ever, a security researcher has demonstrated how attackers can exploit it to cryptographically impersonate any website or server on the Internet.
Researcher Saleem Rashid on Wednesday tweeted images of the video "Never Gonna Give You Up," by 1980s heart-throb Rick Astley, playing on Github.com and NSA.gov. The digital sleight of hand is known as Rickrolling and is often used as a humorous and benign way to demonstrate serious security flaws. In this case, Rashid's exploit causes both the Edge and Chrome browsers to spoof the HTTPS verified websites of Github and the National Security Agency. Brave and other Chrome derivatives, as well as Internet Explorer, are also likely to fall to the same trick. (There's no indication Firefox is affected.)
Rashid's simulated attack exploits CVE-2020-0601, the critical vulnerability that Microsoft patched on Tuesday after receiving a private tipoff from the NSA. As Ars reported, the flaw can completely break certificate validation for websites, software updates, VPNs, and other security-critical computer uses. It affects Windows 10 systems, including server versions Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019. Other versions of Windows are unaffected.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee released a statement on Tuesday saying he will be signing a new measure into law that allows faith-based foster care and adoption agencies to exclude LGBTQ families, and whoever else they want to discriminate against based on their religious beliefs. NBC News says that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the two-page bill during its first 2020 day in session.
The Tennessean reports that the bill’s proponents championed the legislation for its religious “freedom,” while its detractors argued that it is simply bad policy that will lead to further discrimination against LGBTQ Americans. A few Republicans reportedly argued against passing the bill, though only Sen. Steve Dickerson of Nashville voted against it, saying it was “bad public policy” and would lead to boycotts and the financial and economic losses that come with such obviously discriminatory policies. Dickerson specifically cited tourism, sports teams, and similar fallout experienced by states with discriminatory legislation, like Indiana.
Tennessee joins other similar anti-LGBTQ movements in Kansas and Buffalo, where religious organizations argue that their “freedom” to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation outweighs their fitness as a potential loving caretaker. As with all backward and bad ideas, the Trump administration has also been weighing similar federal moves to screw LGBTQ families out of basic rights afforded to Americans.
President Donald Trump speaks before he and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed “phase one” of a trade deal between the US and China on January 15, 2020. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
A new book by Washington Post reporters has the disturbing revelation.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump grumbled to his secretary of state about a decades-old US law that bars American companies from bribing foreign officials and pledged to repeal it — which, incidentally, would make it easier for his company to get lucrative contracts abroad.
The most jarring is a scene from spring 2017, when Trump and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tussled over the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. That law, according to the Justice Department, makes it “unlawful for certain classes of persons and entities to make payments to foreign government officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business.”
Trump, the Post reports, bristled at that restriction.
“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump reportedly told Tillerson. “We’re going to change that.” Per the authors, the president expressed frustration “ostensibly because [the law] restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign governments in faraway lands.”
“Ostensibly” is an important modifier here: It’s unclear whether Trump was explicit in his anger that his company couldn’t bribe foreigners, or if that is just the authors’ interpretation of his comments. Given his desire to make US companies more competitive in the global market, it’s certainly possible Trump had that in mind more than his personal fortune.
Either way, it says a lot about the president that he spent any amount of time in power advocating for more corruption and bribery, not less — particularly since he’s been trying to convince the American people that he’s an anti-corruption crusader as part of his impeachment defense.
That defense was always a bit hard to swallow for anyone who has been paying attention to Trump since, well, basically forever, but this anecdote just further illustrates how little Trump cares about fighting corruption in foreign countries. If anything, he seems to want more corruption.
This revelation on its own is explosive, but there are others worth noting in the book.
Trump’s ignorance hurts US foreign policy
Trump’s infatuation with Russian President Vladimir Putin is well chronicled, but Rucker and Leonnig’s work shows Trump was champing at the bit to meet the dictator even before he officially took over the White House:
“During the transition he interrupt[ed] an interview with one of his secretary of state candidates,” Rucker and Leonnig write. He cut in to ask: “When can I meet Putin? Can I meet with him before the inaugural ceremony?”
Trump finally got the chance to meet with Putin at the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg. After their talk, the authors write, the president considered himself a newly minted Russia expert — more so than Tillerson, who spent years doing business in Russia and interacting with Putin during his decades at ExxonMobil.
“I have had a two-hour meeting with Putin,” Trump reportedly told Tillerson. “That’s all I need to know. ... I’ve sized it all up. I’ve got it.”
And during an undated meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Trump made clear he was not brushed up on geography, telling the leader that the threat from China isn’t so bad since “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”
The problem is that India does, in fact, have China on its border.
According to one Trump aide who spoke to the reporters for the book, Modi was likely left gobsmacked by that meeting. “This is not a serious man. I cannot count on this man as a partner,” the aide characterized Modi as thinking. The aide noted that afterward, “the Indians took a step back” in their relationship with the US.
Put together, these excerpts paint a picture of a selfish, impetuous, astoundingly uninformed president potentially willing to commit crimes to get ahead. If all of this is true, it bolsters the case that Trump is a truly unfit president.
I really really liked the conclusion of s04. It was really well done and the entire back half of the series was beautiful.
Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) goes looking for something — probably a way to resurrect Quentin. | Eric Milner/SYFY
The apocalypse and grief aren’t so different, after all.
The concept of the end of the world comes up frequently on The Magicians, Syfy’s gloriously wild fantasy TV series about depressed 20something magicians, based on Lev Grossman’s best-selling book trilogy. But the show’s upcoming fifth season — which debuts Wednesday, January 15 — really feels like it might be staring down the End Of The World, on both a textual and metatextual level.
“It’s traditional that season five is the apocalypse season,” Magicians co-creator and executive producer Sera Gamble said at a press event the show held in December. “It just happens on shows like this, where each season the Big Bad gets a little bit bigger. ... The fear is always that the plot and the stakes get so big that the intimate moments between characters are lost because you don’t have time to do it. A shark is about to eat your face.”
In the world of The Magicians, there’s always a metaphorical shark about to eat somebody’s metaphorical face. But as the show launches its fifth season, the shark is now about to eat the show’s face, if you’ll let me stretch this metaphor to its absolute breaking point.
The Magicians’ season four finale was controversial — to put it mildly — among the show’s passionate cult fanbase. To this day, mentioning The Magicians offhand on Twitter often invites discussion of just what happened in that finale, some of it angry. I’m going to spoil what happened in a moment; for now, let’s say an incredibly important character died. (You can read more from me on this topic right here.)
But The Magicians has an ace up its sleeve — if season five tends to be the apocalypse season on genre shows, it’s also often the grief season. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy fought a god and grieved the death of her mom. On The X-Files, Mulder and Scully nearly lost each other and tried futilely to stop the alien conspiracy from invading the Earth. On Supernatural, where Gamble cut her teeth, the Winchester brothers kinda sorta lost everything on their way to the actual apocalypse with God and the Devil and all that jazz.
And when I asked Gamble if maybe it was intentional to line up the apocalypse with the grief The Magicians’ characters feel over season four’s big death, she simply grinned.
How grief unites the characters of this often scattered show
In The Magicians’ season four finale, the series killed Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), who had been its protagonist and the audience’s window into the world of magic since its debut. Quentin’s main function in the story was to knit everything together. If you had two characters who didn’t seem to have a connection, Quentin was often the shortest possible route between them because he knew everybody.
So the irony is that, from a purely logistical standpoint, Quentin’s death ended up helping the writing team craft a more cohesive start to season five than the show had in season four. (That season dawdled quite a bit before the halfway point kicked the story into gear.) Now, every character has something immediate to react to, and the show’s habit of scattering those characters across dimensions, timelines, and universes (sometimes four or five at a time) has a thematic throughline that cuts across the distance.
“There was a fear of, without Quentin, the show splinters off into six different tiny shows that don’t really relate to each other. But it actually did the exact opposite, I think,” said executive producer Henry Alonso Myers. “His death, in the same way that a death in real life brings a family together because they haven’t seen each other for a while, his death really centered the show, especially in the beginning [of the new season] because all our characters were feeling the same thing in completely different ways. But they have a singular touchstone.”
Eric Milner/SYFY
Can Julia save the world? Let’s find out.
And at the same time, the characters realize they’re facing the end of the world — and maybe the ends of the world. In true Magicians fashion, the season will feature multiple apocalyptic scenarios, which could feel over the top but for the fact that in reality, the 24-hour news cycle achieves roughly the same effect every day.
The quest for the season, such as it is, begins when a strange creature approaches Julia (Stella Maeve) — the character who’s closest to being the show’s protagonist at this point in its run — and tells her the world must be saved. But the creature would rather have someone who, y’know, looks like a protagonist pull off this task.
The Magicians has always cheekily leaned into the idea that heroes in fantasy stories too often look like Quentin — which is to say white, male, and conventionally attractive. But most of the show’s characters other than Quentin haven’t fit that paradigm, and arguably Quentin himself, who was bisexual, didn’t either. So killing off Quentin also functions as a kind of meta-commentary on The Magicians’ earnest attempts to transcend both its genre and its source material, in which Quentin remains alive through the end. (The show’s producers consulted with Grossman when they first considered killing Quentin, and he gave them his blessing.)
As audacious as it was, the choice to kill Quentin caused at least some of the show’s audience to rebel. Quentin might have been just another white guy protagonist — but he also had rich storylines about his struggles with depression and a complicated romantic history with his friend Eliot (Hale Appelbaum). As one of the few characters with mental illness and one of the few bisexual men on television, Quentin meant a lot to a lot of viewers, and in 2020, when a show can be kept alive single-handedly by a particularly passionate fanbase, alienating any portion of that fanbase is dangerous.
“I think our job is to be really strict with ourselves when we’re writing something like [Quentin’s death],” Gamble said. “You can’t just toss off something like that. We didn’t do any of that lightly. Shows have to pick a lane. We’ve picked like six or eight lanes on this show, but we do know what those lanes are, and that’s important because you have to know what to be able to prioritize. In a world where you can make choices to keep safer or take more risks with your story and you know that your story needs risk to live, knowing why you make the show, knowing the most important kind of stories that you want to tell — that really is our North Star.”
How grief can feel like the apocalypse (and vice versa)
And yet the fans’ passionate outcry after Quentin died ultimately worked its way into the show.
“We started working on the new season right when the end of the previous season was airing. We were working on the outlines for season five, episodes one and two, at the craziest moment in terms of the reaction from the fans,” said executive producer David Reed. “So you can’t help but have that in your head and in your heart when you’re working on something that’s creative. There’s some of that in the way that we chose to have the characters deal with their grief.”
I hadn’t seen any episodes of the new season when I talked to The Magicians’ creative team about what to expect, but now, I’ve seen the first three. They’re real and raw, but they’re also funny and frantic. They’re very recognizably part of this show I’ve loved for several seasons now — while also adding new shades to the characters, shades informed by their grief.
Which brings me back to the idea of the grief season being the apocalypse season. After all, when you’re grieving, doesn’t it feel like the end of the world? If you’ve lost someone you love, going outside and seeing people who aren’t wrecked by sadness can feel slightly surreal, as if everybody else is watching one show but somebody changed the channel on you. “Changing the channel” is The Magicians’ default state, so grounding that frenetic energy in a feeling as palpable as grief just heightens the show’s powers.
“We made a decision, a chance to be really truthful in a way that we knew would lose people. It upset us. But what we weren’t doing was bullshitting people about what life is. It’s fragile, and even the most charismatic, wonderful, vivacious people get sick and/or die,” said co-creator and executive producer John McNamara. “You can grieve, and see a great movie and laugh. The two are not mutually exclusive. They’re only mutually exclusive in bad movies and bad TV and bad plays. But life is so layered.”
Will this gambit to make The Magicians reflect the devastation some of its viewers feel help the show win those viewers back? It’s hard to say, but the early episodes of season five are an impressive example of a series sticking to its guns even as its fans threaten to abandon ship. In an age when showrunners increasingly seem scared of their audiences, The Magicians is daring its fans to bring their own sadness to its biggest apocalyptic story yet.
“The idea of stopping the apocalypse in itself comes into question,” Gamble said. “And [the characters] realize that they maybe have to do some destroying to create.”
The Magicians season fivedebuts Wednesday, January 15, at 10 pm Eastern on Syfy. The first four seasons are on Netflix.
McSally at a Trump rally in October 2018, weeks before she lost a US Senate contest to Kyrsten Sinema. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Meghan Markle visits Cardiff Castle in January 2018 in Cardiff, Wales. Markle has faced racist attacks from the press since joining the royal family. | Ben Birchall-WPA Pool/Getty Images
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Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP via Getty ImagesAFP via Getty Images
Hundreds of LGBTQ+ advocates convened in Washington, DC, in October 2019 for a national day of action. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks before he and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed “phase one” of a trade deal between the US and China on January 15, 2020. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) goes looking for something — probably a way to resurrect Quentin. | Eric Milner/SYFY
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Eric Milner/SYFY