Enlarge / The logo of Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile, seen at Mobile World Congress in February 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
The United States government approved the T-Mobile/Sprint merger without fully investigating whether the deal's anti-competitive harms can be offset by merger conditions, state attorneys general argued in a court filing.
The US Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission both found that the merger would harm consumers, a group of states that are trying to block the merger pointed out in a court filing last week. The DOJ and FCC approved the deal with conditions they claim will make the merger good for consumers, but the states say both US agencies failed to properly evaluate whether the conditions are likely to achieve that goal.
Trump returns to the White House after a rally in Ohio last Thursday. | Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The president’s latest health care tweet shows he’s either lying or hopelessly confused about his own positions.
Even amid an era of American politics rife with absurdities, President Donald Trump’s posturing as a champion for people with preexisting medical conditions stands out.
Alluding to the aforementioned lawsuit, Trump went on to write that “if Republicans win in court and take back the House of Represenatives [sic], your healthcare, that I have now brought to the best place in many years, will become the best ever, by far. I will always protect your Pre-Existing Conditions, the Dems will not!”
....and, if Republicans win in court and take back the House of Represenatives, your healthcare, that I have now brought to the best place in many years, will become the best ever, by far. I will always protect your Pre-Existing Conditions, the Dems will not!
Trump’s tweet is either a big lie, illustrates his profound confusion about health care policy, or some combination thereof.
As I’ve written before, when Trump has been asked basic questions about health care — such as “what is your health care plan, sir?” — he’s typically responded with lengthy, incoherent word salads. The possibility Trump knows so little about health care policy that he actually believes he saved protections for preexisting conditions can’t be ruled out.
But while Trump might be confused about health care, the Justice Department and Republican state attorneys general who are party to the lawsuit the president referred to — which seeks to strike down the ACA — seem to be seeing things more clearly.
As Katelyn Burns wrote for Vox, Republicans filed a brief on Friday asking a federal court court to not take up the ACA case until after the 2020 election. That move suggests Republicans are well aware that their unceasing push to take health care away from people is a political loser this year, just as it was during 2018’s blue wave election. (The Urban Institute estimates about 20 million people would lose coverage if the Republican lawsuit is successful.)
While Trump’s efforts to repeal the ACA have been unsuccessful, he has presided over a significant increase in the rate of uninsured people in the country. His health care proposals have consistently sought to strip legal protections and coverage from people. And yet he is refusing to let reality stop him from posturing as something he clearly isn’t — or making empty promises about what will happen if Republicans retake control of the House following this November’s elections.
Trump’s Monday morning tweets were in response to ads Bloomberg has been running hitting him on health care. Bloomberg, and Democrats more broadly, seem to realize that health care is an issue in which they can draw a clear contrast with Trump. The Republican brief that was filed on Friday came in response to Democratic attorneys general petitioning the court to take up the preexisting conditions case on an expedited basis.
As Burns wrote:
If the Supreme Court were to uphold the ACA, Democrats would be able to campaign as the party that defended Obamacare. If it were to be overturned, then Democrats would cast the GOP as the party that dumped 20 million people off their health insurance in an election year.
It is in Republicans’ best interests to avoid that lose-lose scenario, and therefore they have asked the court not to take up the case in the first place.
That any kids play football at all is astounding to me
Football’s concussion crisis has been part of the NFL for almost two decades. But the pros aren’t the only ones reevaluating their relationship with the game. Now, studies are finding that parents of younger children are increasingly concerned about the long-term impacts of playing football.
A national survey from 2015 found that 25 percent of parents do not let their kids play contact sports due to fear of concussions, while an Aspen Institute report recently found that participation in tackle football declined by 12 percent among children ages 6 to 12 between 2016 and 2017.
The research into the risks of youth football is still coming into shape, and there’s disagreement about just how universal and severe the risks are. Some researchers think football is dangerous for everybody; others are finding evidence that some kids might be more predisposed to health consequences than others.
No — football is not the only risk factor in developing symptoms of CTE. The same study that found an association between repetitive head impact and dementia in CTE also found that cardiovascular disease and dementia in CTE were correlated. And a separate study of some 10,000 people found no association between participation in contact sports and later cognitive decline or increase in symptoms of depression. “We don’t see this being a massive epidemic across a huge swath of the population,” said Adam Bohr, a researcher in integrative physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the co-authors of the study.
But that study isn’t bulletproof either, as it checked back in with former high school athletes in early adulthood — so it could still be too early to see cognitive decline.
And just to complicate things further, there is another study that tracked Wisconsin high school football players from the 1950s. Those former players, surveyed decades later in their 60s, did not have different cognitive or depression outcomes compared to nonplayers. Likewise, another recent survey of 35 retired NFL players over the age of 50 did not find a link between the number of concussions a player incurred and his cognitive decline.
It is difficult to parse the research, let alone conduct it: CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem. Unless scientists are looking at the actual brains of former players, argue researchers such as Dr. Lee Goldstein of Boston University School of Medicine’s CTE Center, they are not getting a complete picture.
Goldstein argues the case against football and other high-impact sports is open and shut. “Association is very clear. Risk increases with greater exposure, so if you don’t want to have this disease or any risk of it, you shouldn’t do it,” Goldstein said of playing football at any level.
Goldstein and colleagues published a paper in the journal Brain in 2018 in which they found that mice subjected to different kinds of hits showed early signs of CTE, even without signs of concussion, implying subconcussive hits could also start the progression of the disease.
C. Munro Cullum, a neuropsychologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, wants to understand what factors make some individuals more vulnerable to the negative outcomes of concussions. To do that, he and colleagues are partnering with youth football leagues in north Texas to collect data on concussions incurred during games. The project, called the Texas Sports Concussion Registry, aims to shed light on the connection between differences in how the sport is played and how that translates to concussion numbers and recovery.
Most people with a concussion get back to normal within days or weeks, but “there is this significant minority that may have ongoing symptoms,” Cullum said. Other researchers have found that a person’s prior history of anxiety may increase the risk of a prolonged concussion recovery, or a family history of migraines might make someone more susceptible to experience post-concussion headaches.
Others are analyzing how all hits, not just concussions, affect players. Elizabeth Davenport, a researcher with the UT Southwestern radiology department, and her colleagues outfitted helmets for 60 high school players to measure every hit in a game. They then separated players into high- and low-impact groups and conducted fMRI scans to see how the groups differed.
Those in the high-impact group saw an increased grey matter volume, which is not normal for that age group.
In the low-impact group of players — and in most normal teenage brains — grey matter volume is generally reduced or “pruned” throughout adolescence into the early 20s to make way for new synapses. “Your brain is forming more highways and less just general run-of-the-mill tissue,” Davenport said.
It may sound alarming that football players who receive more hits experience abnormal brain development, but Davenport cautions that researchers still don’t know what the changes mean or if they are long term. She would like to be able to know if it’s possible to draw the line at a certain number of head impacts before a player needs to recover. Similar measures already exist in baseball, for instance. Pitch counts help pitchers avoid rotator cuff injuries. Could football leagues eventually institute hit counts, after which players need to take a break? Would that break even allow the brain to heal?
But Goldstein doesn’t buy it. There are just too many factors involved in individual health to pinpoint a single safety threshold in hits.
“There’s not a universal threshold for the number of cigarettes, and if you cross that line then you have cancer. It doesn’t work like that,” he said.
Though parents are responding to that message — a study out of Arizona found a 17-point decrease in the percentage of parents willing to let their child play contact sports between 2019 and 2017 — football as an institution is not going anywhere. It’s unlikely to be sued or legislated out of existence, at any level. A judge recently dismissed a lawsuit against Pop Warner, the largest youth football organization in the country, brought by two families of deceased players who claimed the organization hid the risks of youth football. Because so many factors affect brain health, it’s hard to just pin something like a suicide, depression or erratic behavior on playing football.
So all the research leaves us more or less at this finding: Playing a sport where kids get hit over and over again affects their brain development. How much those brains are affected appears to depend on how long they play, how hard they play, and likely a multitude of other physiological, sociological and genetic factors that researchers are just beginning to analyze.
Some researchers say it’s too early in the concussion research to offer judgement calls on whether kids should play football.
“I would want more information, as a parent, to make a better-informed decision and that’s where these studies come into play,” Davenport said.
But in his work examining the brains of dead teenagers, Goldstein has seen enough.
“I don’t recommend it as a physician, I don’t recommend it as a father and I don’t recommend it as a scientist,” he said. “I can’t.”
Last Thursday, after a week of shifting explanations, Donald Trump declared that the decision to assassinate Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was made because “they were looking to blow up our embassy.” Never mind that no one, from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, to Trump’s own secretary of defense, could or would confirm this claim, Trump insisted the threat was real and it was imminent. Case closed.
President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani seven months ago if Iran's increased aggression resulted in the death of an American, according to five current and former senior administration officials.
The world is in chaos, and the only fact one can count on is that Donald Trump is a liar.
Today in gaslighting … as temperatures hit 54 degrees in Washington D.C., the White House tweeted out a photo celebrating the “first snow of the year.”
The tweet took place following a week in which the impeached president amped up tensions with Iran, ultimately leading to the deaths of 176 innocent civilians aboard a Ukraine International Airlines jet.
Of course, Twitter had a few things to say about it.
I'd like to take this moment to remind the US public to never accept the forecast products from the White House. Or, for that matter, even their weather observations. Now back to your regularly scheduled Sharpie Weather.
Trump said Soleimani was planning attacks on “four US embassies,” but Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he didn’t see” intelligence about such strikes.
The Trump administration has given ever-changing answers about its reasons for deciding to kill Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, first claiming that the leader posed an “imminent threat” to the US, before suggesting that maybe the threat wasn’t so imminent after all.
The rationale took a new turn Friday evening when President Donald Trump gave Fox News’ Laura Ingraham what has been perhaps the most definitive answer so far on what the threat was; according to the president, Soleimani was planning attacks on “four US embassies,” including the one in Baghdad, which faced violent protests on New Year’s Eve.
But the president’s assertion about the four embassies has already begun to unravel, in part due to efforts by his top defense officials Sunday to string together a consistent narrative justifying Soleimani’s killing.
On Meet the Press Sunday, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien suggested that there may not have been intelligence explicitly tying Soleimani to plans to attack embassies, saying Trump interpreted the US’ “exquisite intelligence” that stated “[Iranians] were looking at US facilities throughout the region and that they wanted to inflict casualties on US soldiers, sailors, and marines, as well as diplomats.”
O’Brien said Trump’s “interpretation” of the available intelligence — namely the conclusion four embassies were at immediate risk — was “consistent” with what the brief said.
WATCH: Nat’l Sec. Adviser O’Brien defends Trump’s claim an attack was imminent on embassies in Baghdad and 4 unnamed countries. #IfItsSunday@chucktodd: “What did you do for the other 3 embassies?”
On Fox News Sunday, O’Brien suggested the idea embassies would be attacked was an assumption.
“It’s always difficult even with the exquisite intelligence we have to know exactly what the targets are,” he said, adding, “It’s certainly consistent with the intelligence to assume they would have hit embassies in at least four countries.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper further muddied the issue Sunday morning on Face the Nation. Esper said that while he “believed” that there “probably, could have been attacks” that put Americans in the Middle East in immediate danger, he “didn’t see” specific intelligence indicating an imminent attack on multiple embassies, an odd statement given that, as secretary of defense, Esper ought to have seen such intelligence, if it exists.
And he refused to elaborate on the existence of intelligence showing four embassies at risk on CNN’s State of the Union, saying only, “There was intelligence that there was an intent to target the US embassy in Baghdad.”
Defense Secretary Mark Esper: "There was intelligence that there was an intent to target the US embassy in Baghdad. What the President said with regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well" #CNNSOTUpic.twitter.com/CNwo6PLK41
Complicating the administration’s narrative even further was a Washington Post report Friday from Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, and Seung Min Kim indicating that US embassy officials in Baghdad were not warned of a larger imminent threat.
“The embassy in Baghdad did not receive an alert commensurate to the threat Trump described, said a person familiar with the situation, who was not authorized to comment publicly,” read the Post report.
When asked why the embassy in Baghdad was not alerted, O’Brien told ABC’s This Week Sunday that the US isn’t “going to cut and run every time someone threatens us,” before saying that the US will not have another “Tehran 1979” or Benghazi.
When asked the same question on Meet the Press, O’Brien said “this was a very fast-moving situation” and said he couldn’t “get into the details” about what action — if any — was taken to protect the other embassies Trump said were in danger.
Pressed on why embassies allegedly targeted by Iran's Gen. Soleimani weren't alerted or evacuated, national security adviser Robert O'Brien: "We're not going to cut and run every time somebody threatens us...we're not going to have another Benghazi." https://t.co/A9mOySQrdmpic.twitter.com/EczuftS6kr
Without evidence establishing the “imminent threat” rationale, which could help bolster a self-defense case, experts say the government would struggle to legally justify greenlighting the operation in court.
And despite having now had over a week to provide that evidence to the public, officials from President Donald Trump on down have increasingly begun to talk about the operation as retribution for the killing of an American contractor in Iraq by members of an Iranian-backed militia and the storming of the US embassy in Baghdad in late December.
And as Ward reported, the administration has had trouble not just explaining the rationale behind the assassination to the public, but to Congress. Republican Sen. Mike Lee called a Wednesday congressional briefing in which the administration laid out its intelligence and reasoning for the strike “probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the US Senate.”
That briefing also became an issue Sunday, as O’Brien was asked to explain why a number of lawmakers said the administration failed to mention the supposed threats to the embassies.
In his Fox News Sunday interview, O’Brien again obfuscated, saying he was not present at the congressional briefing, and that perhaps the threat wasn’t mentioned because lawmakers didn’t ask the right questions.
“I wasn’t at the briefing,” O’Brien said. “I don’t know how the Q and A went back and forth — sometimes it depends on the questions that were asked, or how they were phrased.”
He added, “All I can tell you is that we’ve been clear from the start that there were very significant threats to American facilities in the region and to American military officials, officers and men and women and also to US diplomats and I think that’s consistent with what the president’s been saying now.”
Members of Congress say the Iranian threat to blow up multiple U.S. embassies was not mentioned in the intel briefing. But the President says there were threats to four embassies. Plus, is the Trump administration's strategy working? Robert O'Brien reacts. #FNSpic.twitter.com/hqIMScY2Tk
But none of the administration’s most statements offer any sort of proof that there was, in fact, a specific imminent threat killing Soleimani would prevent. Nor is it clear whether the threat to the embassies existed — Trump says it did, O’Brien says Trump assumed it did, and Esper says he never saw any intelligence explicitly stating the threat existed.
Instead, the official reasons behind Soleimani’s killing are as opaque as ever, and still require Americans to take the Trump administration at its word — something that is is difficult to do given the administration often lies.
President Donald Trump. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Lies about wars lead to more wars.
The Trump administration has maintained from the start that it ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in order to forestall an imminent threat to American lives.
It’s pretty clear this is not true, that the administration instead simply made a calculated decision to escalate American pushback on Iran as part of a larger series of back-and-forth actions that began with the US pullout from the Iran nuclear deal.
And though the deception involved has been fairly widely reported in the press, it hasn’t played a leading role in describing the cycle of tensions. That’s a mistake. By killing a foreign country’s key leader, the US put itself in the position of facing retaliation, as Iran did with rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq earlier this week. Those attacks, thankfully, didn’t kill any Americans. The Trump administration, thankfully, agreed not to retaliate further, for now.
But it’s clear that members of the Trump administration are not in complete agreement on Iran policy with some influential conservatives who have long pushed for a regime change in Tehran. For an administration that appears to want a war with Iran but lacks the public backing — or for a faction that wants a war but lacks the full support of the president — this is one good way to make the dream happen: provoke Iranian responses that, in turn, provoke new American responses.
A way to halt that cycle of escalation is to insist that people who want to take provocative steps give accurate information about what they are doing.
The imminent threat line looks very suspicious
There’s substantial evidence to doubt the administration’s imminent threat message.
For example, the Pentagon’s original press release about the Soleimani operation didn’t mention it, and the immediate US reaction was to order all American civilians out of Iraq for fear of retaliation — clearly, nobody was made safer in a direct, immediate sense.
Those actions are consistent with a scenario in which Soleimani was a dangerous person in general, and the decision to take him out was made by policymakers seeking long-term benefits at the short-term cost of elevated risk to American lives. That’s fine as far as it goes; sometimes in life you need short-term pain for long-term gain. But when someone asks you to suffer short-term pain, you normally ask them to explain what kind of gain they’re promising so you can consider whether it’s a fair deal.
The administration, instead, said it was heading off imminent attacks even as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo conceded that he couldn’t say where or when these attacks were supposed to happen.
Pompeo insists the ideas that Soleimani presented an "imminent" threat but the administration doesn't know when or where he planned to strike are "completely consistent thoughts." pic.twitter.com/7LDFR7zcVU
Then on Friday, John Hudson, Missy Ryan, and Josh Dawsey reported for the Washington Post that on the same day as the successful strike on Soleimani, there was a second, failed anti-Iranian operation. That operation, which the administration neglected to tell us about, targeted Abdul Reza Shahlai, described in the Post as “a financier and key commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force who has been active in Yemen.”
This is another nail in the coffin of the idea that the Soleimani strike was about disrupting an imminent threat as opposed to a broader shift in policy. That the administration kept this quiet, even as it went on a multi-day victory tour about killing Soleimani, is further confirmation that it is not leveling with us about its actions.
And that’s unacceptable.
Lying the country into war is really bad
Trump is notorious for lying about all kinds of things. And the national security sector, accustomed as it is to dealing in classified matters and state secrets, seems in some ways to be instinctively unbothered by deception. But in reality, this kind of lying is especially dangerous.
The public is highly motivated to protect American lives, as are members of Congress who are responsive to the public. They would be willing to go further in terms of killing foreigners to actually defend Americans in a specific way than they would to, say, advance Saudi Arabia’s regional ambitions with regard to Iran. And if Iran responds to American acts with new rounds of aggression that kill more Americans, the public is likely to support further escalation against Iran, and who knows where that will end.
This dynamic is already clearly in place in the larger question of the Iran nuclear deal, the specific elements of which Trump keeps lying about. Iran’s aggressive behavior against the US is clearly linked to Trump’s decision to abrogate the deal. Trump keeps saying he did so because Iran was cheating, which, if it were true, would be a good reason to abrogate the deal. But it wasn’t true.
Now, though, US-Iran relations have deteriorated to a point where Iran is refusing to abide by the limits in the agreement. If you lack the original context that the US pulled out of the deal despite Iranian compliance, Iran’s actions could be seen as justifying new anti-Iran moves from the US.
By the same token, killing Iranian officials could be a highly effective way of provoking Iranian retaliations that inflame American opinion and drive support for aggressive acts that the public wouldn’t otherwise get behind. The way to break the cycle is to demand that the American government give a clear, convincing, and honest account of what it is doing and why — and to stop treating its refusal to do so as a secondary plot, when in fact it’s at the heart of the story.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg holds a town hall meeting on Thursday, December 5, 2019, in Milford, New Hampshire. | Melina Mara/Washington Post/Getty Images
In the final stretch of the 2020 primary race, things are just getting started.
“I’m torn now; I wasn’t torn before,” New Hampshire voter Tina Craig of Albany, a Sen. ElizabethWarren supporter, told me after seeing Sen. Amy Klobuchar speak.
All the attention presidential candidates are lavishing on the early states breeds indecision.
“Getting any voter locked into a candidate is hard,” said Hanover voter Robert Cornell, who was leaning toward Warren after seeing her in person but also considering Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Being face to face, hearing her ideas went further with me.”
Some voters I’ve talked to across New Hampshire still have a long list of candidates they’re looking at, but most have narrowed it down to two or three people. Even though the national media likes to silo candidates into “progressive” and “moderate” lanes, voters don’t make decisions as neatly. Some voters like former Vice President JoeBiden and self-avowed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders; others are choosing between progressive Elizabeth Warren and more moderate candidates like Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
“[Warren] and Buttigieg are right there at the top,” said Concord voter Robert Fried. “I want to see which one will capture swing voters and Republican women.”
Even though we’re in the final stretch of the 2020 primary race, in some ways, it’s just getting started.
The big field is helping keep people undecided. But that’s also just the way Iowa and New Hampshire voters are.
Voters “have no reason to make up their mind early” with such a large and ideologically diverse field, University of New Hampshire pollster Andy Smith told me recently.
New Hampshire voters in particular are famous for deciding on a candidate at the last minute — sometimes right up until they go into the voting booth. And many of the dozens of voters I’ve spoken to at candidate events say that while they’re narrowing down to a few candidates, they still haven’t found The One yet.
That tracks in Iowa as well. The Hawkeye State holds caucuses on February 3 where voters literally have to sort themselves into groups based on the candidates they support. Voting happens out in the open, and candidate “viability” — or whether a candidate can reach a 15 percent threshold — matters hugely to their chances. This also increases the importance of people who support lower-tier candidates that won’t reach the viability threshold and have to throw their vote behind someone else.
“The second choices are going to matter more than they usually do because there’s going to be a lot of not viable candidates,” John Deeth, a longtime party activist and member of the Johnson County Democrats executive committee, told me recently.
Veteran Iowa pollster Ann Selzer told me it’s no surprise to her that just 31 percent of respondents said their minds were made up in the recent CBS/YouGov poll. That number went up slightly in the most recent Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa poll Selzer’s firm conducted, where 40 percent of likely caucusgoers said they had made their mind up about a candidate. Still, another 45 percent said they could be persuaded.
“What people don’t understand is the caucus is designed for people to keep an open mind,” Selzer said. “The process encourages that. There’s no advantage is there, to locking in on a candidate.”
With New Hampshire’s primary being held about a week after Iowa’s February 3 caucuses, a lot could change between now and primary day on February 11.
“Unlike a general election when there are numerous offices on the ballot, in the NH primary there’s only one decision a voter has to make, so they have the luxury of waiting until the last minute to make up their mind,” said former US Ambassador Terry Shumaker, a longtime New Hampshire politico supporting Biden. “That’s why the primary’s very difficult to predict, to poll.”
New Hampshire voters may still be undecided, but they want someone who can beat Trump
There’s a familiar refrain circulating around New Hampshire voters: “anyone but” President Donald Trump.
“I want that guy out so bad, I can’t even tell you. Getting Trump out, that’s number one,” Conway voter Mike Manson told me.
Beyond that, many voters haven’t decided who they’ll vote for. Manson himself wasn’t entirely sure which candidate was best to do that; he said Klobuchar was top of his list, but he was also considering Biden and Buttigieg.
“We have so much talent, it’s really hard to choose,” said voter Margaret Merrill of Madison, who was trying to decide between Biden and Klobuchar. Merrill added she’d “take the garbage collector” over Trump, and was eager for Democrats to select their nominee.
“The sooner we focus on a candidate, the sooner we can get working,” she said.
There have to be consequences for just flipping off Congress
The Washington Post reports that once again, ostensible Secretary of State Mike Pompeo looks to be dodging an invitation to Congress to explain administration positions on absolutely anything. He's been asked to testify to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the theoretical "imminent" danger posed by Iranian Maj. Gen. Soleimani, before being assassinated by the United States in an operation apparently pushed by Pompeo himself. It doesn't look like he'll be taking the opportunity.
"Right now it looks like he's not coming," Rep. Eliot Engel told the Post. "We haven't heard from him."
As the Post's Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman explain, this is becoming a significantly more important dodge, on Pompeo's part, with the news that Soleimani was one of two attempted assassinations of Iranian officials on the same day. The second attack, targeting another Quds commander, took place in Yemen on the same day. That makes the Soleimani attack less a target of opportunity or an assassination of a particular terrorist-sympathetic official; it instead appears to have been one prong of a larger U.S. military attack on the Quds Force itself.
While that operation seems to have been larger in scope than Trump's team was telling the public, however, the rationale for the attack, an alleged "imminent" danger to U.S. forces, has been getting softer by the day. A new Trump claim that four U.S. embassies were being targeted is, according to lawmakers, news to them; the claim wasn't part of last week's House and Senate briefings to lawmakers. It's also news to Trump's own Secretary of Defense, who was forced to admit on Face the Nation this morning that he "didn't see" any such evidence.
We know less, in other words, then we did before administration briefed the House and Senate on the justifications for the Soleimani assassination. And that's exactly the problem that the State Department, which has taken a dominant role on this despite military operations not generally being in their portfolio, might want to be clearing up.
It is likely that Pompeo's reluctance to further explaining the "imminence" of the danger posed by Soleimani stems directly from the White House's ever-changing stories. Whatever Trump is claiming in public, the forever self-serving Pompeo wants to dodge stepping in that, as the Secretary of Defense just did. Those that do not robustly defend Trump's oft-egregiously false claims do not stay in Trump's inner circle for long.
But Pompeo might have an even more self-serving reason for hiding from Congress. He doesn't want to testify about his role in the Ukrainian extortion scheme that has now led to impeachment charges against Trump and which as implicated multiple top administration members—something that is very, very likely to come up, when Democratic lawmakers have the opportunity to question him about State Department antics. Wanted criminals do not generally waltz into courthouses to pay their parking tickets; one of the three Trump officials who oversaw an extortion scheme that would have seen Trump exchange foreign military aid for a "probe" of his next possible election opponent does not want to put himself before the House Foreign Affairs Committee even to talk about the weather.
So Pompeo, for now, won't be "testifying" to Congress about any of his own actions. Not assassinations; not Ukraine policy. Nothing. The precariousness of Pompeo's position, both in furthering Trump's actions and in cover-up, means he is more likely to resign his post than willingly submit to questions about those acts, but the most likely eventual outcome is that he is forced to do both.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper admitted Sunday on the CBS show "Face the Nation" that he saw no specific evidence of the “imminent” threat President Donald Trump has used to defend an airstrike he ordered, killing Gen. Qassem Soleimani and sparking widescale fear of retaliation that might endanger U.S. troops and diplomats. "The president didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said was he believed," Esper said on the show. "I didn't see one, with regard to four embassies. What I'm saying is that I shared the president's view that probably—my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassy is the most prominent display of American presence in a country."
Esper's statement follows a Trump interview with Fox News Friday in which he said Iran planned attacks on four U.S. embassies. “We will tell you that probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad,” Trump said during the interview on “The Ingraham Angle.” The president, no advocate for the truth, also said: “I can reveal that I believe it probably would’ve been four embassies.”
In an attempt to back up the president’s lie, Esper continued to muddy the waters on CBS. "What the president said was he believed that it probably and could've been attacks against additional embassies," he said. "I shared that view. I know other members of the national security team shared that view. That's why I deployed thousands of American paratroopers to the Middle East to reinforce our embassy in Baghdad and other sites throughout the region."
”’Probably’ and ‘could have been,’ that sounds more like an assessment than a specific tangible threat with a decisive piece of intelligence,” journalist Margaret Brennan said during the interview. Esper responded: “Well, the president didn't say there was a tangible. He didn't cite a specific piece of evidence. What he said is he probably, he believed, could have been.” Brennan then, pressed again to finally get Esper to admit that the president embellished.
In a CNN interview, Esper started by dodging the question of specific intelligence related to the four embassies all together: “Well, let me say one thing up front first to your viewers, to the American people. The United States is safer today than we were just a few short weeks ago. Why? Because we eliminated the world’s foremost terrorist Qassem Soleimani who had the blood of hundreds of American service members on his hands.”
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On CNN, Mark Esper makes it absolutely clear that the Trump administration is making it up as they go when they claim Soleimani posed an imminent threat to 4 different US embassies pic.twitter.com/Cm16XkOrlo
“OK, what about the intelligence? Was there specific intellegence the Iranians were plotting to target four U.S. embassies,” CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed. Although Esper said “there was intelligence that there was an intent to target the U.S. embassy in Baghdad,” he could only offer the president’s belief that there “probably” and “could have been” targets against the embassies in the region.
Call me crazy, but that’s not exactly my idea of a hard and fast threat immediate enough to potentially trigger a war.
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Defense Secretary Epser: "I didn't see" specific evidence that showed Iran planned to strike four U.S. embassies. pic.twitter.com/4j2GgIIirL
Leaders of the far-right “Patriot” faction in Washington state are angrily lining up in defense of their leading voice in the Legislature, Rep. Matt Shea of Spokane Valley, who was denounced and disowned by Republican leadership in the wake of the recent report from an independent investigation that found he had participated in acts of “domestic terrorism.”
On Sunday, 3% of Washington—a “Patriot”/militia movement group based in rural Eatonville—held a rally downtown at Seattle City Hall titled “United Against Hate,” ostensibly organized to protest the antifascist factions that in fact showed up to oppose them with a counterprotest. (“An exercise on tolerance in Seattle! Seattle is known as the most politically intolerant city in our country, let's prove them wrong!” read the Facebook announcement.)
But the chief message of the day was really about standing up in defense of Shea. Joey Gibson, leader of the far-right street-brawling group Patriot Prayer, was the most outspoken of the day’s speakers about Shea. When Gibson asked the audience their opinion of GOP leadership’s handling of the matter, someone shouted loudly: “Traitors!!!!”
“That’s right, it’s treason,” declared Gibson. “When they throw Matt Shea under the bus, they throw each and every single one of us under the bus. You have to take that personal, what they did to him.”
Several other speakers, including 3% of Washington leader Matt Marshall, voiced their support for Shea, as well as their anger with the mainstream Republicans who have scrambled to distance themselves from the controversial legislator with a propensity for endorsing violent far-right rhetoric.
Marshall has also been outspoken in defense of Shea on Facebook, suggesting that the investigation was “done by Dems via the FBI” (in reality, the investigation was paid for by both parties under the auspices of the Washington House). He insists the investigation represents a violation of Shea’s right to the presumption of innocence, and that it was produced by “the Evergreen State Deep State.”
A counterprotester is arrested by Seattle police on Sunday.
The rally attracted only about fifty participants in front of City Hall. Across the street, a gathering of over a hundred counterprotesters chanted slogans, while some got into conflicts with police. Afterward, Seattle Police Department reported it had arrested four counterprotesters.
Even though 3% of Washington is a chapter of a larger national movement based on “Patriot”/militia ideology, and many of its members participate in paramilitary and arms training, Marshall insisted to the audience that “a militia” is among the many things his group is not. “We aren’t right, we aren’t left,” Marshall told the gathering. “What we follow is this,” he said, holding up a copy of the U.S. Constitution.
Matt Marshall addresses the gathering at Seattle City Hall on Sunday.
Marshall, who recently won election to the Eatonville School Board, nonetheless eagerly participates in Facebook discussions about a supposed “Second Civil War,” or “Boogaloo” as its proponents have named it, including a recent post suggesting that a United Nations job posting might inspire such a violent armed response. He also has posted memes suggesting that liberal attempts at passing gun-control legislation are likely to trigger similar violence.
There were hints Sunday that efforts to remove Matt Shea from his legislative seat would inspire similar threats. Once again, Joey Gibson was leading that charge, claiming that the attempts to demonize Shea were actually directed at people like those gathered for the rally.
“Matt Shea, he does things and he says things because he believes in it,” Gibson said.
“You can’t corrupt him, you can’t pay him out, right? There’s none of that. Matt Shea’s a symbol, he’s a voice, and that’s why they’re doing everything that they can to destroy him.
Joey Gibson at Sunday’s rally.
“What they want, is they want you guys to be extremists. You guys who show up. So they don’t want Rep. Matt Shea or other representatives to stand with you guys. If something like what happened down in Oregon ever happens again, they’re trying to send a message to every single elected official—either stand with the feds, or we’re going to label you a domestic terrorist. That’s what it is.
“So we have to do everything we can to support Matt Shea. … I think it’s an opportunity to get people more involved in what we’re doing in Olympia. And we’ve got to call out the Republican establishment in Washington state! Do you agree with me?”
The rallygoers cheered: “Yeah!”
Their contempt for mainstream-establishment Republicans—particularly House Minority Leader J.T. Wilcox of Puyallup, who announced that Shea had been kicked out of the state caucus the day the report was released—was undisguised.
“In my opinion, Matt Shea is a hero!” Gibson declared. “Think about this—We elect these people to protect us, to protect the Constitution, and especially the Second Amendment. And Matt Shea—a guy who obviously isn’t about talk—he’s willing to take his boots and put them on the ground. All the way into Idaho, and to protect a veteran’s Second Amendment rights. How beautiful is that? Instead of throwing Matt Shea under the bus, Wilcox should have been standing shoulder to shoulder with Shea,” he added, to further cheers.
Gibson announced that he would be leading a rally in defense of Shea in Olympia on Jan. 17.
Marshall also told the audience about a petition to recall state Attorney General Robert Ferguson, devised with the help of Yelm “constitutionalist” Scott Bannister, who has been involved in the far-right anti-gun-control scene for years.
Bannister spouted constitutionalist theories to Sunday’s crowd: “They are tyrants, and we need to remove them all,” he said. “They don’t think that we can do this. They think we’re barking up a tree. They don’t know that [the Revised Code of Washington] is for them, not us. Common Law is for the people.”
The militiamen and other “Patriots” are not alone in announcing their defense of Matt Shea. The Republican Central Committee in both Grays Harbor and Kitsap counties this week posted resolutions defending Shea. The Kitsap resolution admonished Wilcox and other House leaders for stripping Shea of his party positions and demanding they be restored.
The Grays Harbor resolution was a striking exercise in paranoia, claiming that one of the report’s authors is “a far left socialist Democrat contributor and Marxist with political bias,” and similarly demanded the restoration of Shea’s GOP caucus positions.
Immigration. Race. Demographic change. Political demagogy. That year’s presidential race had it all. What can it tell us about 2020?
These attacks played out across a deeply divided nation. Beyond the clash over slavery, a movement against immigration was reshaping politics. Native-born citizens voted out lawmakers sympathetic to foreigners and promoted conspiracy theories that the pope would use Irish Catholics to control the country. They led marches into immigrant neighborhoods, deliberately provoking violence. Some politicians saw anti-immigrant fervor as a perfect distraction, which they could use to unite proslavery and antislavery voters against a common foreign enemy. But slavery was too much for the hatred of outsiders to obscure.
In theory, new technology could have brought the country together. The recent invention of the telegraph miraculously sped communications, making it possible for newspapers across the country to print the same news almost simultaneously. In reality, voters were horrified by what they learned about one another.
The above is an amazing essay, give it a look.
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The president is a liar. His lies put us at risk. He lies to create a false justification for actions taken to benefit him personally, in this case politically. His action has put US interests & personnel at risk worldwide. His lie is once again cover for a gross abuse of power. https://t.co/pAq2uMWjDW
Sanders rises and Buttigieg falls, but no candidate has a clear edge in the first contest of the Democratic primary.
The poll shows plenty of potential for movement in the race’s final four weeks. Just 40% of voters said their minds are definitely made up on which candidate to support, while 45% said they could be persuaded to back another candidate and 13% haven’t settled on a first choice yet. (At the same point before the 2016 caucus, nearly 60% of voters had made up their minds.)
The last iteration of this poll was conducted in mid-November. Since then, Sanders has improved his position, jumping from 15% to 20%. Buttigieg has fallen after leading the field with 24% of the vote. Neither Warren nor Biden saw significant movement.
Selzer said she typically eschews the idea of political “lanes,” arguing that caucusgoers don’t approach their decisions that way.
“But you look at these data and you kind of go, ‘Well, these look like lanes,’ ” she said.
Sanders and Warren are battling for progressive caucusgoers, and Biden and Buttigieg are attracting a more moderate crowd.
Higher proportions of Biden and Buttigieg supporters — 75% and 72%, respectively — say choosing a candidate with the superior chance of defeating Republican President Donald Trump is extremely important to them, personally. It’s 54% among Sanders supporters and 53% among Warren supporters.
Seventy-eight percent of Biden's supporters and 84% of Buttigieg's supporters say that a candidate’s ability to unite the country is extremely important in their choice. That factor is extremely important for 65% of Sanders' supporters and 58% of Warren's.
And 64% of Biden supporters and 61% of Buttigieg supporters say having a candidate who can bring Republicans and independents on board is extremely important. Just 38% of Sanders' supporters and 46% of Warren's supporters feel that way.
Further, a plurality of Biden's supporters, 29%, say Buttigieg is their second choice; a plurality of Sanders' supporters, 44%, say Warren is theirs; and a plurality of Warren's supporters, 31%, say Sanders is their second choice. Buttigieg's supporters are split on their second choices, with 20% saying Warren and 18% saying Biden.
“This poll really displays the Sanders-Warren connection and the Biden-Buttigieg connection,” Selzer said.
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This is serious stuff. It looks like @SecPompeo is set to blow off a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing next week -- even as the rationale for the Soliemani hearing has collapsed, and news of a broader secret military operation is leaking out:https://t.co/OHh3GM3KpIpic.twitter.com/5AawGz7cLb
Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, who urged Trump to kill Qassem Soleimani, are ardent proponents of Christian Zionism.
Last Friday, a day after Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and nine others were killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, the Christian Zionist advocacy group Christians United for Israel emailed its millions of supporters to praise President Trump’s move. “This Decisive Action Will Save Countless Lives,” read the subject line, echoing the assessment delivered that morning by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Fox and Friends. The bombing showed that Trump would take “swift and decisive” action to protect Americans, Pompeo had told the president’s favorite morning news program. Vice President Mike Pence later claimed that Americans are “safer today.”
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Televangelist John Hagee launched CUFI in 2006, calling for military action against Iran, then led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom Hagee compared to Hitler. At the time, Hagee had been claiming that Iran would soon “have the nuclear capability to make a bomb, a suitcase bomb, a missile head, or anything they want to do with it.” That was untrue, given contemporaneous expert assessments of Iran’s projected nuclear advances. But for Hagee, a more militaristic approach was necessary in order to avert “an American Hiroshima.” He urged his supporters to take a stand, as they were meant to “for a time such as this,” a common evangelical reference to Queen Esther, celebrated on the Jewish holiday of Purim, who saved the Jews from extermination at the hands of Haman, the genocidal adviser to the Persian king.
In his 2006 book, Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee imagined an elaborate scenario in which a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran would trigger an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” Faced with scrutiny over his apocalyptic theology, he strained to create a discrete image for his new political organization, insisting that his extensive writings on biblical prophecy about the Rapture and Second Coming were distinct from CUFI’s lobbying agenda. But it was a rocky start for the organization. In 2008, while running for president, John McCain first accepted, then rejected, Hagee’s endorsement. The rebuff was seen as damaging to the political neophyte and a brave stance by McCain against fringe elements within the GOP’s evangelical base. At CUFI’s annual Washington Summit, held just two months later, only three members of Congress attended.
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Ms. Williamson went out of her way to openly, brazenly align herself with antiscience groups. She took pride on assaulting science/scientists. Certainly not the only figure to do this, but I'm glad that for now she's out of American public life. https://t.co/TweVYHPkV0
Incumbent presidents usually get more popular when they run for reelection. Will Trump?
Trump’s best-case scenario could be what happened to Barack Obama.
A second pattern is the one Trump wants to avoid: declining approval in the election year, leading to a loss. This befell both Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. But both dealt with recessions either in the election year or the year before. If a recession doesn’t come in 2020, Trump’s approval rating may not decline as theirs did.
The third pattern is the one Trump needs: increasing approval numbers throughout the election year. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton are the clearest examples. Nixon’s average monthly approval increased from 49 percent to 61 percent between January and October 1972. Clinton’s increased from 47 percent to 56 percent over the same period in 1996.
Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama experienced more modest increases, but increases nonetheless. Reagan’s approval had already increased significantly in 1983 as the country recovered from the punishing 1982 recession. But it increased about three more points in 1984 before he was easily reelected.
George W. Bush’s approval rating dropped a few points in the first part of 2004, but then edged up. It was enough for a narrow victory. Obama’s approval rating, which was also relatively stable despite the economic recovery, increased about five points while he was battling Mitt Romney.
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This is how to report on Trump’s use of reification, fear appeals, and infestation rhetoric: don’t quote his words, state his strategies. Quoting his words helps him, but describing the strategies doesn’t. https://t.co/RnJQ3g6uJ2
Seeing fatal flaws in every Democratic candidate for president? You’ve got Pundititis.
How, exactly, can anyone tell who the strongest candidate is before an election? The simple answer is, they can’t. Americans have a terrible track record when it comes to determining who is “electable.” Before Hillary Clinton entered the 2016 election, her approval rating rose to 66 percent while she was secretary of state. She was so “electable” that she nearly cleared the field.
Then she wasn’t elected.
The ensuing months were the perfect incubator for the Pundititis. Democrats spent hours watching cable news; listening to the endless yammer of “political analysts,” learning about exit polling and being haunted by talk of “invisible Trump voters.” The pundits had gotten 2016 all wrong, but instead of dying out, they multiplied.
As first reported by the Daily News, JBS USA received at least four similar contracts last year, making it the single biggest beneficiary of President Trump’s farm bailout program, which was drawn up to alleviate financial burdens of American agricultural producers struggling to make ends meet because of the administration’s tariff-heavy trade war with China.
Accounting for the latest contract, JBS USA has received at least $100.8 million in farm bailouts, according to a previously undisclosed Agriculture Department document reviewed by The News.
The taxpayer-funded bailout program — which Trump replenished with $16 billion in May after the first $8.6 billion ran out — is designed to buy up excess products that farmers aren’t able to sell because of the trade war and then distribute those goods to domestic food programs.
Members of Congress from both sides of aisle have shredded the administration’s payments to JBS, questioning how subsidizing a foreign-owned company helps American farmers.
Adding to such concerns, JBS SA remains, via a holding company, under the control of Wesley and Joesley Batista, a couple of notoriously corrupt Brazilian brothers who have spent time in jail and admitted to bribing hundreds of government officials in their home country. The Batistas’
Enlarge / Electricity pylons at sunset (credit: James O'Neill | Getty Images)
In the wake of the US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and the retaliatory missile strike that followed, Iran-watchers have warned that the country could deploy cyberattacks as well, perhaps even targeting US critical infrastructure like the electric grid. A new report lends some fresh details to the nature of that threat: by all appearances, Iranian hackers don't currently have the capability to start causing blackouts in the US. But they’ve been working to gain access to American electric utilities, long before tensions between the two countries came to a head.
On Thursday morning, industrial control system security firm Dragos detailed newly revealed hacking activity that it has tracked and attributed to a group of state-sponsored hackers it calls Magnallium. The same group is also known as APT33, Refined Kitten, or Elfin and has previously been linked to Iran. Dragos says it has observed Magnallium carrying out a broad campaign of so-called password-spraying attacks, which guess a set of common passwords for hundreds or even thousands of different accounts, targeting US electric utilities as well as oil and gas firms.
A related group that Dragos calls Parisite has worked in apparent cooperation with Magnallium, the security firm says, attempting to gain access to US electric utilities and oil and gas firms by exploiting vulnerabilities in virtual private networking software. The two groups' combined intrusion campaign ran through all of 2019 and continues today.
Insecure storage systems being used by hundreds of hospitals, medical offices and imaging centers are exposing over 1 billion medical images of patients across the world. "Yet despite warnings from security researchers who have spent weeks alerting hospitals and doctors' offices to the problem, many have ignored their warnings and continue to expose their patients' private health information," writes Zack Whittaker from TechCrunch. From the report: "It seems to get worse every day," said Dirk Schrader, who led the research at Germany-based security firm Greenbone Networks, which has been monitoring the number of exposed servers for the past year. The problem is well-documented. Greenbone found 24 million patient exams storing more than 720 million medical images in September, which first unearthed the scale of the problem as reported by ProPublica. Two months later, the number of exposed servers had increased by more than half, to 35 million patient exams, exposing 1.19 billion scans and representing a considerable violation of patient privacy.
A decades-old file format and industry standard known as DICOM was designed to make it easier for medical practitioners to store medical images in a single file and share them with other medical practices. DICOM images can be viewed using any of the free-to-use apps, as would any radiologist. DICOM images are typically stored in a picture archiving and communications system, known as a PACS server, allowing for easy storage and sharing. But many doctors' offices disregard security best practices and connect their PACS server directly to the internet without a password. These unprotected servers not only expose medical imaging but also patient personal health information. Many patient scans include cover sheets baked into the DICOM file, including the patient's name, date of birth and sensitive information about their diagnoses. In some cases, hospitals use a patient's Social Security number to identify patients in these systems.
“Approximately 100 percent” of the cost of tariffs from Donald Trump’s trade war with China is being paid by U.S. consumers and businesses, despite Trump’s repeated insistence that the U.S. is “taxing the hell out of China.” That verdict comes from a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper written by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Columbia University, and Princeton University.
”U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers,” according to the paper’s authors. On top of that, “We’re just not seeing foreigners bearing the cost, which to me is very surprising,” Columbia’s David Weinstein told The New York Times, and “The steel industry isn’t getting that much protection.”
Other research has yielded similar results. And really, when you consider Trump’s relationship to the truth, his claim that the U.S. is “taxing the hell out of China” is a virtual guarantee that the opposite is true.
President Donald Trump speaks about the situation with Iran at the White House on January 8, 2020. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
“They really need to get their story straight,” an expert said.
The Trump administration’s stated rationale for killing Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani — that he posed an “imminent threat” to Americans requiring the US to take him out — is looking more and more bogus.
Without evidence establishing the “imminent threat” rationale, which could help bolster a self-defense case, experts say the government would struggle to legally justify greenlighting the operation in court.
And despite having now had over a week to provide that evidence to the public, officials from President Donald Trump on down have increasingly begun to talk about the operation as retribution for the killing of an American contractor in Iraq by members of an Iranian-backed militia and the storming of the US embassy in Baghdad in late December.
This failure has turned what could’ve been a positive moment in Trump’s presidency — the removal of a deadly anti-American general during a standoff with Iran that may have deterred further lethal action — into an embarrassing botch.
“I’m surprised at how poorly they are making any credible public case for it,” says Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution. “I’m not sure if that’s arrogance or incompetence or some combination of both.”
The origins of the Trump administration’s “imminent threat” argument
After a US drone bombed a two-car convoy carrying Soleimani outside Baghdad’s airport on January 2, the Pentagon put out a statement that would serve as the backbone of the administration’s case for killing the military leader.
“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the statement read. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.”
That statement offers two justifications for the strike, then: 1) Soleimani had been planning to kill Americans and thus needed to be killed immediately to prevent that from happening; and 2) killing Soleimani would deter Iran from making future plans to attack Americans.
The next day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN that “there was, in fact, an imminent attack taking place. ... The American people should know that this was an intelligence-based assessment that drove this,” he added.
Put together, the Pentagon and Pompeo statements made it clear the administration was choosing to justify the legality of the strike by claiming it was in self-defense (rather than, say, arguing it was legal under the 2001 Congressional authorization to use force against the 9/11 attackers, or under the 2002 Congressional authorization for the Iraq War).
All Trump’s team needed to do was provide evidence that killing the Iranian general was truly an act of self-defense — as Article 51 of the UN Charter allows for in international law — and that killing him was the only way to prevent an imminent attack, and they’d be in the clear.
Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images
Protesters demonstrate outside the White House on January 7, 2020 in Washington, DC.
And that’s where everything seems to have started falling apart. The administration has yet to provide the public with any evidence that Soleimani was planning an imminent attack beyond vague and often conflicting statements about plots to blow up one or more embassies.
“Their justification has been completely crumbling,” Oona Hathaway, an international law expert at Yale Law School and former Pentagon lawyer, told me. “Each time they’ve been pressed to give facts for their ‘imminent’ case, they just can’t do it.”
While some Republican members of Congress have said the administration provided sufficient evidence of an imminent attack in a classified briefing with the House and Senate on Wednesday, other GOP members — along with most Democrats — had a different view: “This was probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the US Senate,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) told reporters after the Senate session.
Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who attended the briefing, told Vox’s Worldly podcast on Thursday the officials “just didn’t have” the requisite evidence of an imminent threat, adding, “This was a lot of bluster.”
From “imminent” to “days” to “you never know”
On Monday, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Pentagon reporters that the Soleimani intelligence the US got wasn’t overly specific. “Did it exactly say who, what, when, where? No,” he said. “But he was planning, coordinating, and synchronizing significant combat operations against US military forces in the region and it was imminent.”
On Tuesday, after having said just a few days before that the administration had made “an intelligence-based assessment” that there was “an imminent attack taking place,” Pompeo was asked by a reporter to provide more details about that imminent threat.
His response was to say that Soleimani deserved his fate for having American blood on his hands.
“We know what happened at the end of last year, in December, ultimately leading to the death of an American,” Pompeo said. “So, if you are looking for imminence, look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani.”
REPORTER: Can you be specific about the imminent threat that Soleimani posed?
POMPEO: "We know what happened at the end of last year & ultimately led to the death of an American. If you are looking for immanence, look no further than the days that led up to the strike." pic.twitter.com/yhqyNToZxd
That same day, Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked by a Pentagon reporter if the intelligence America had showed Soleimani’s attack would take place in days or weeks. “I think it’s more fair to say days, for sure,” the defense chief responded.
Esper also insisted the intelligence gathered by the US was “exquisite,” but whether it was worthy of the superlative remains an open question as he didn’t actually share any of it with the press.
National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien — who was one of the administration officials who briefed Congress this week — offered a few more details in an interview with NPR. He said the intelligence showed an attack was “imminent” in Iraq and perhaps Syria, but that “you never know the time and place of these things with perfect particularity.”
Pompeo gave a similar statement to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on Thursday night. “There were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani,” he said. “We don’t know precisely when, and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.”
Pompeo: “there were a series of imminent attacks, we don’t know when, we don’t know where.
On Wednesday, Kelly Craft, the US ambassador to the UN, quietly sent a letter to the president of the UN Security Council. It’s what’s known as an “Article 51 letter,” and as Hathaway, the Yale international law expert, explained on Twitter, it’s a document that a country “is required to file if it is claiming to have acted in self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.”
It stated, in part:
[T]he United States has undertaken certain actions in the exercise of its inherent right of self-defense. These actions were in response to an escalating series of armed attacks in recent months by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran-supported militias on U.S. forces and interests in the Middle East region, in order to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against the United States or U.S. interests, and to degrade the Islamic Republic of Iran and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force supported militias’ ability to conduct attacks. These actions include an operation on January 2, 2020, against leadership elements of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force on the territory of Iraq.
The January 2 operation referred to here is the Soleimani killing.
What the letter doesn’t list, however, is any evidence of an imminent attack being planned by Soleimani. Even some UN officials I spoke to were surprised Craft had sent that letter.
“The administration just pointed to general animosities between the US and Iran,” Hathaway says. “That animosity has been true for decades. So why kill Soleimani now?” The administration, she says, hasn’t come close to making a persuasive argument.
“It just doesn’t hold up. The law can’t make up for missing facts. They actually needed to have a factual predicate to allow them to take the action that they did.”
The administration’s stumbling, bumbling, fumbling imminence claims have left Iran experts like Maloney completely stunned. “They really need to get their story straight,” she told me. “The cover-up is always likely to get you into more trouble than the original crime.”
Last fall, voters in Virginia told pollsters in poll after poll that gun safety was their top issue. That played out in the election, in which Democrats took full control of the state's government. Now that they're governing, the big changes they promised are starting.
Out of the gate, the legislature’s Joint Rules Committee approved a ban on guns at the state Capitol complex in Richmond. That means no guns in the General Assembly offices or at the state Capitol as of midnight Friday, Jan. 10. "Our goal has got to be to keep everybody safe," said Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn. "And that's exactly why we're doing what we're doing."
There's a gun rights rally scheduled at the Capitol for Jan. 20, so keeping everyone in the vicinity safe is undoubtedly at the forefront of planning for the new legislature. There's already been one gun rally at the Capitol, calling itself the "God. Family. Guns" rally.
Despite the overwhelming vote by the people of the state for sane gun laws, or maybe because of it, gun rights activists have been getting loud and threatening. Dozens of localities in the state have voted to call themselves "Second Amendment sanctuaries." Activists took over a Virginia Beach City Council meeting last month, trying to get the city to declare itself a "sanctuary," an issue that was not on the agenda. Last May, 12 people were killed and four were injured in a mass shooting in that city. Nonetheless, the city council voted this week, 6-4, to declare itself a "Second Amendment Constitutional City," short of the "sanctuary" gun fanatics were clamoring for.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) holds a news conference in the US Capitol to discuss Syrian refugee legislation on Tuesday, December 8, 2015. | Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
It used to welcome more refugees than any other state.
Texas became the first state to refuse to take in refugees Friday under an executive order from President Donald Trump that allows state and local authorities to block refugees from settlingin their areas.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote a letter to the State Department Friday saying that while Texas has historically welcomed more refugees than any other state, it will not resettle any additional refugees in the 2020 fiscal year. The decision will not affect refugees who have already been resettled in the US.
So far, 42 out of 50 states with both Democratic and Republican governors have agreed to resettle refugees in 2020. But Texas’s move could embolden the remaining states to follow suit in refusing to do so — including Georgia, home to the city of Clarkston, which has been dubbed the “Ellis Island of the South,” attracting thousands of refugees.
The remaining states face a January 21 deadline to request funding from the State Department for resettling refugees.
Abbott’s decision overrides that of any one city in Texas, such as the historically refugee-friendly cities of Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth. He wrote Friday that his state has been hit the hardest by unauthorized migration stemming from an immigration system that Congress has “failed to fix” and must focus its resources on “those who are already here, including refugees, migrants and the homeless—indeed, all Texans.”
NEW: @GregAbbott_TX sends letter to @SecPompeo declining consent to initial refugee settlement for FY2020.
From October 2018 to October 2019, Texas took in 2,457, or about 8 percent, of the 30,000 total refugees resettled in the US, according to the US Refugee Admissions Program. By comparison, the three other states that resettle the highest number of refugees — California, New York, and Washington — resettled 1,841, 1,845 and 1,947 refugees respectively over that period.
Trump’s executive order allowed local governments that decide they do not have the resources to support refugees in becoming “self-sufficient and free from long-term dependence on public assistance” to turn them away.
The State Department is working with nongovernmental organizations already handling refugee resettlement to identify places that are able to absorb refugees, according to a senior administration official. But refugee advocates have expressed concern that the executive order creates inconsistent refugee policies across the country, making it next to impossible for the federal government to properly plan for refugee settlement.
Three major refugee resettlement agencies have asked a Maryland federal court to block the executive order, arguing that it violates federal law mandating that federal agencies take into consideration a detailed list of factors to determine where refugees should be resettled.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) — one of the refugee agencies challenging the executive order — said in a statement that Abbott’s decision was disappointing, but not surprising given Texas’s previous attempt to reject Syrian refugees.
In the wake of the Paris terror attacks in late 2015, Texas and 30 other states declared they no longer wanted to take in some of the 5.6 million Syrians who have been displaced since 2011 by the ongoing civil war. But at that time, states didn’t have the legal authority to simply refuse refugees; that was the prerogative of the federal government.
Heaven forbid people actually get to see the consequences of their votes.
The Trump administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to hold off on deciding a lawsuit that could gut the Affordable Care Act until after the November election.
Following a federal appeals court’s decision striking down the ACA’s individual mandate last month, Democrats defending the law asked the Supreme Court to fast-track the case so it could be decided before the election.
In response to the Democrats’ motion, the Trump administration and Republican attorneys general who are challenging the ACA argued Friday there is no pressing need for the high court to intervene.
“A high court intervention could elevate the lawsuit and its threat to guaranteed health coverage for people with chronic medical conditions to the forefront of the 2020 election,” Politico reports. “Democrats leveraged the lawsuit to secure huge gains in the 2018 midterms and ultimately retook the House majority.”
This is so evil. Trump admin has been working overtime to dismantle the ACA and strip millions of healthcare coverage. BUT they don't want to do it before Election Day 2020. https://t.co/bVsQH7jxG7
Former national security adviser John Bolton has offered to testify for Donald Trump’s impeachment trial if subpoenaed. The possibility that four Republican senators would break with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and call for Bolton to appear seems somewhat remote, though there is always the possibility that the House could renew its subpoena for Bolton and see if he would honor his commitment by speaking on the other end of Capitol Hill.
But no matter what Bolton decides, Donald Trump made it clear on Friday that he intends to clamp a tiny hand over Bolton’s mustachioed mouth. In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump explained again how anxious he is for the facts to really come out in his Senate trial, then pulled out his well-worn executive privilege card and declared he would stop Bolton from appearing. Trump announced that he wasn’t blocking Bolton’s potentially game-changing testimony because it might lead to defeat in 2020 or even an early moving van pulling up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead Trump said that he had to do it “for the sake of the office."
The Friday statement aligns with another Trump made on Thursday in which he said that “we have to protect presidential privilege," which is not a thing, and most tellingly … "When we start allowing national security advisers to just go up and say whatever they want to say, we can’t do that."
Actually, we can. Especially during impeachment hearings. Though Richard Nixon made an effort to hide the recordings made in the Oval Office after they were revealed during congressional hearings on Watergate, neither he nor Bill Clinton made any effort to stop witnesses from appearing at impeachment proceedings, and neither did either put any limits on what witnesses might say. On the other hand, Trump hasn’t just ordered White House staff not to cooperate and refused to hand over all documents, he has also taken an expansive view of privilege from the moment he moved into the White House, one that includes blocking access to individuals many steps removed from the White House and reaching back to protect members of his campaign and transition team.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against the kind of expansive claim of privilege that Trump is making. There is no new law to be decided here. If Trump was taken to court over blocking Bolton’s testimony, he would lose. Trump’s statements that he had to block Bolton’s testimony to protect the office are clearly nonsense, because in previous instances such testimony from top officials wasn’t just allowed, but assumed. Trump isn’t preserving anything—except himself.
What Trump’s statement illustrates is just how much he fears an actual trial in the Senate, one with witnesses and documents. And he’s not even trusting McConnell to bring the gavel down fast enough to save his orange skin.
The declaration that he wouldn’t allow Bolton to testify aligns with statements from Rudy Giuliani calling on the Supreme Court to cancel the whole impeachment, and legislation proposed by Republicans in the Senate who want to declare the trial over before it begins. What Republicans recognize at the moment is that if the impeachment goes forward with no witnesses and no testimony, Republicans can pretend that the evidence against Trump isn’t overwhelming — even though it is. Any testimony at all, even from a John Bolton freshly sated with Iranian blood, places Trump at a non-zero chance of removal.
That’s why the story out of both the White House and the Republican side of the Senate has been pared down to “we would love to have a trial, but can’t because of X” … where the nature of X doesn’t matter.
Republican Rep. Steve King is a racist. He’s bigoted against pretty much everyone who doesn’t share his personal belief system. He’s an all-around awful person and a true blight on the state of Iowa. On Friday, King was recognized for 30 minutes on the floor of the House, and he used that time to go on what can only be called the most Steve King-iest Steve King rant in recent memory. Covering everything from how he’s not a racist white supremacist asshat to how he’s really not a white supremacist racist prick, King did it all. He had charts, he had finger pointing, and he did everything a modern white Republican does these days—including figuratively nailing himself to a cross for the world to see.
REP. STEVE KING: What did the term “White Nationalism” mean in the year 2000, when it was virtually unused? Or in any year prior to that when it was also virtually unused? What did it mean in 2001, 2002, 2003, all the way up, you can see it's virtually unused, all the way up until it never even starts to move until 2015. This is a Lexus Nexus search of the term “white nationalism” or “white nationalist,” derivatives of this term.
That’s right. Why is everyone saying the negative words about me? How come being a racist means that people have more bad things to say about me than they used to say about me? Why have I been kicked off a ton of committees by my own political party as they try and distance themselves from my ugly personality? Let’s go on. Wait for it.
REP. KING: It jumped in 2016 to 10,000 times a year. Virtually unused and all of a sudden in 2016, there it goes. 10,000 times a year. 2017, 30,000 times, and 2018, it's still up there at 20,000 times. Now, how did it happen that a terminology that had been virtually unused all of a sudden became used in multiple times, up to 30,000 times a year, when 100 to 200 times a year is its virtually unused definition down here? And how did it happen that this is the word that gets tagged on me? Is that an accident? I don't think so.
CONSPIRACY!!!! But let’s understand how this works. Rep. Steve King was living his life, being a white supremacist asshole, and then suddenly, everyone started calling him a racist? No, my friends. There’s a deeper layer to this rotten onion of conspiracy against Steve.
REP. KING: Well, there was a circumstance that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. November 8, 2016. And when that happened there was already a gathering for the hierarchy of the Democratic Party to gather together at the Mandarin Occidental Hotel here in Washington, and their agenda was to best plan how they were going to utilize what they expected to be would be a Hillary Clinton presidency. They admitted that they had to change their agenda when they got the surprise of Donald Trump winning the election as opposed to Hillary. They did change their agenda. But at the hotel—by the way, led by George Soros, his face is on the front cover here of Politico’s article that tells about this, several other articles, Mr. Speaker, but George Soros led on this—and so there they planned how they were going to deal with a Trump presidency.
And the first thing they did? Go after Rep. Steve King for being unable to stop saying racist shit all of the time. So, why is Rep. Steve King whining and crying about this? Because he has a piece of legislation that will help America! Actually, it’s a piece of legislation to try and help Rep. Steve King out. It is a “resolution.”
REP. KING: This resolution, I've been waiting to drop it, dropping it, introducing it, on the anniversary of the misquote that got dropped on me one year ago today from The New York Times that allegedly launched this firestorm that brought about these things that I have talked about. This resolution makes the case clearly that the The New York Times could not be right and that I could not be wrong and the balance of this was people wanting it to be true and so they wrote it up so, this disproves the The New York Times quote and additionally, Mr. Speaker, I delivered that quote on the floor of the House of Representatives the following Tuesday in the fashion that -- I would have said it if I had actually said it. In other words, I would never tie together white nationalism, white supremacy, and western civilization.
“The New York Times could not be right and that I could not be wrong,” is arguably the most Steve King thing said in the history of Steve King things. This is a lot of Steve King hooey because King has been in trouble over his inability to even pretend he isn’t a bizarre old-timey racist. His campaign has had a lot of financial issues, as guys like King don’t stay in power through small-donor donations. They need that sweet Republican oligarch PAC money, and King has been alienating himself like Lee J. Cobb’s “Juror #3” in 12 Angry Men. Hopefully, Democratic candidate J.D. Scholten can relieve Iowa’s 4th Congressional district of Rep. King in 2020.
On Thursday, Donald Trump dropped the bombshell that he had taken out Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani because "they were looking to blow up our embassy.” Whoa. That's some explosive intel, dropped nearly seven days after the fact. Purportedly, the threat of an attack wasn't just "imminent," it was site specific. Too bad none of the Trump administration's congressional briefers—the heads of the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and White House national security adviser—bothered to mention it to lawmakers in their closed-door briefing a day earlier.
That stunning new detail was a lie, folks—a fanciful creation by Trump in the midst of a Trump-manufactured national crisis that brought us to the brink of war with Iran and for which we will certainly pay a price down the line through covert actions. But Trump didn't just drop it once, he repeated it Thursday night at an Ohio rally kicking off his reelection bid. In other words, Trump actually launched his 2020 campaign on a lie about the most decisive military action of his presidency. How perfect.
Early Friday morning Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got a chance to back up Trump's embassy assertion on Fox News and instead he destroyed it. "There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks that were being plotted by Qassem Soleimani. We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where, but it was real," Pompeo said.
Huh, don't know "where," you say. What about Trump's embassy claim, specifically? "Uhh, it was [Soleimani's] forces that penetrated our embassy just a handful of days before that. [...] I don't think there's any doubt that Soleimani had intentions not only to take actions against our forces, our diplomats in Iraq, but in other countries around the region as well."
So now the protests at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad days earlier are proof that Soleimani was going to "blow up" the joint? Just to be clear, Pompeo stuttered at the outset of that answer. How about a do-over for Pompeo in the White House briefing room a few hours later.
Q: This morning you said we didn't know precisely when and we didn't know precisely where—that's not the definition of imminent. [...] Do you have information about an imminent threat and did it have anything to do with our embassies?
Pompeo: "We had specific information on an imminent threat and those threats included attacks on U.S. embassies, period, full stop."
Well, there's the cleanup direct from the guy who did a round of Sunday talk shows a couple months ago lying about his presence on Trump's now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Just amazing that Pompeo was one of the briefers making the rounds this week with congressional lawmakers and failed to ever mention it.
Then again, it's been like this from the start. When the assassination took place last week Thursday, the administration didn't have any spokespeople prepared to do interviews. Trump officials then had the weekend to get their stories straight. Here's how that worked out.
Pompeo: "If you're an American in the region, days and weeks, this is not something that's relevant. We have to prepare, we have to be ready, and we took a bad guy off the battle field."
Q: Can you clarify, the attack Soleimani was planning, was that days or weeks away?
Esper: "I think it's more fair to say days, for sure. [...] It was clearly on the battlefield, he was conducting, preparing, planning military operations. He was a legitimate target and his time was due."
So at first, nothing specific, per se. Just a gut-level "awareness." Days, weeks? "Not relevant." Soleimani was a "bad guy." Except, it was "days, for sure." Totally "legitimate," trust us. Actually, on second thought, "We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where." But it was so "real." Indeed, so real, it was "the U.S. embassy." And actually, not just the one, it was "U.S. embassies [plural], period, full stop." Got that?
As former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC Thursday, "Just in these clips, we've gone from imminent threat to days, weeks, and 'you know what, he was a bad guy and he had it coming.' So we can no longer trust this White House—even when the consequences are as grave as potential war—to tell us anything approximating the truth."
Even when it comes to war, the Trump administration never lets the truth get in the way of a cascading series of lies.
Below are several clips from this week’s lie-fest.
x
Tapper: People haven't seen sufficient evidence of an imminent attackPompeo: Some of the intel is right in front of their eyes. We don't have to guess, we know what he did on Dec. 27th. We know what he's done for years. Tapper: Imminent in days, weeks?Pompeo: Not relevant pic.twitter.com/MkDxQKVAfJ
“There is no doubt that there were a series of imminent attacks that were being by plotted by Soleimani. We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where but this was real†pic.twitter.com/zu3lZ0IxYp
REPORTER: Why are you saying that Soleimani presented an imminent threat against embassies here but not to senators during this week's briefing?POMPEO: We did.REPORTER: So senators are lying?POMPEO: I won't talk about the details. pic.twitter.com/91NoZLoJ1G
"We've gone from imminent threat, to days, weeks, and 'you know what he was a bad guy and he had it coming'. We can no longer trust this White House even when the consequences are as grave as potential war" - @FrankFigliuzzi1 w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/Rfl1nvSulJ
And while Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite grabbed nominations in Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film and Director, it wasn’t a big shock that the stars of Bong’s searing film were left out in the cold.
Neglecting the cast of Parasite has been the status quo in Hollywood’s awards season.
Parasite has been lauded as a directorial masterpiece, thanks in large part to Bong’s directing and how seemingly each frame Bong creates is so detailed, so meticulous, that you need several watches to fully grasp every element that’s firing.
But Parasite is nothing without its leads. Its primary cast — Song Kang-Ho, Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-Shik, Park So-Dam — a family of anti-heroes, imbue the film with its emotional punch, conveying the humanity behind ideas of poverty and inequality and the sinister limits that people will take themselves to if a chance to evade the system presents itself.
They are the beating heart of Parasite, a collection of actors that confuse your moral instincts, making you root for them despite so many reasons not to.
Yet not one member of the Parasite cast was recognized by this year’s Oscars, Golden Globes or at the 2020 BAFTAs (which only recognized white actors). They fared slightly better as a group, garnering the Screen Actors Guild nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture (which will be awarded on January 19), and a nod for Best Movie Ensemble at the Independent Spirit Awards (February 8). But of the cast members individually, only Song Kang-Ho has come away with a major award nomination this season, winning Best Supporting Actor from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
The lack of hardware or even nominations for Parasite’s cast is curious in that the movie has been the best-reviewed movie of the last year. According to Metacritic’s analysis of 522 films and their reviews over 2019, Parasite’s composite score of 96 (based on scored reviews) edges out The Irishman’s 94, Marriage Story’s 93, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s 83 — barring stellar reviews of the acclaimedPortrait of a Lady on Fire, which hasn’t been widely screened for critics yet, Parasite will be the top-scoring film of 2019.
It rarely happens that a movie is up for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, categories where Parasite was honored, with no acting nods. Among the 544 films nominated for Best Picture over the last 91 years, only 11 have won Best Picture without receiving any acting nominations. And even if this incongruence does happen occasionally, it doesn’t often happen with movies that are as character-driven as Parasite.
While the Academy could’ve bucked the awards season trend of not recognizing the Parasite cast, the Oscars themselves don’t have a particularly good track record of nominating nonwhite actors, let alone giving an acting award to actors in foreign-language films.
So what gives?
Parasite is seen as a director’s movie above all else
Parasite
The Kim family in Parasite
The last time a movie was nominated for Best Picture without receiving any acting nods happened each in the last two years. In 2019, Black Panther was nominated for Best Picture, and was an anomaly in that it didn’t score any other nominations in the major awards — directing, writing, and the four acting categories.
But perhaps the best parallel for Parasite is 2018 Best Picture nominee, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Parasite and Dunkirk are disparately and disproportionately different movies, but they share one important quality: they’re seen as directorial achievements, first and foremost.
When Vox discussed Dunkirk’s Best Picture chances two years ago, our critics noted that Dunkirk snagged its Best Picture nod thanks to its massive scale, spectacle, visual composition, movement, sound, and visuals, which all came together to create an “experience” more than a traditional story. And Nolan, the maestro at the helm, was recognized for his work with not just a Best Picture nod, but also one for Best Director.
Parasite seems to be receiving a similar treatment.
Bong’s work in Parasite has been the most discussed part of the film in the awards conversation. It garnered him comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock, and has been lauded for treating each frame of his movie like its own piece of art.
“He likes to move the camera, sometimes just to nudge your attention from where you think it should be, but always in concert with his restlessly inventive staging,” the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis wrote in her glowing review of the film from October.
One of the most tantalizing stories surrounding the film, which will surely rise again during Oscar season, is that the movie’s primary setting, a gorgeous designer house worthy of a spread in a shelter magazine, was actually built from scratch to accommodate Bong’s meticulous camera work. The director needed to have every physical space conceived to match his vision, so that he could get the right angles, composition, and staging that the story required.
But outstanding directing is the end of the similarities between Dunkirk and Parasite, considering the latter’s dark, emotional heart. Parasite, after all, is a family drama deep down — much unlike the austere wartime action of Dunkirk.
The film focuses on Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-Ho), his wife Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), his son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-Shik), and his daughter Ki-jeong (Park So-Dam). The family of four lives in claustrophobic, suffocating poverty. When a rare opportunity lands in their laps, they devise a plan to wriggle their way into another, wealthier family’s life. The first half of the movie occupies the space between heist and comedy, before morphing into something more horrific and malevolent.
My favorite performance of the film belongs to Park So Dam’s Ki-jeong, who takes on the persona “Jessica from Illinois” to fool the family’s prey into believing she’s an art therapist with experience in the United States. Park’s essentially playing two different characters, with her body language sharpening into an authoritative figure as Jessica and relaxing, slouching, to become more observant as Kim Ki-Jeong. The two personas eventually crash into each other as the plan goes to literal shit, with Park giving Ki-jeong a desperate and haunting vulnerability that’s only heightened by how menacingly she plays Jessica.
The other standout performance is Cho Yeo-Jeong’s Park Yeon-kyo, the neurotic and wealthy mistress of the house. Cho unleashes her knack for comedy as a housewife that’s completely helpless at domesticity. In Cho’s talented hands, minuscule inconveniences balloon into disasters, making you fully believe that the only reason Cho’s Park has made it to this stage in her life is a trust fund and a bank account brimming with South Korean won.
Therein is the meaty, unexpected marrow of Parasite’s story: You’re rooting for the villains, the Kim family that worms its way into the affluent Parks’ lives, the entire time. Its perfect, beautifully intricate directing by Bong confuses our sense of morality and questions the value we place on perceived innocence. But each actor’s performance plays a role in conceiving these themes, as well — the film would not succeed as well as it does without them.
The Academy that doesn’t have a good track record of rewarding foreign-language films and actors
Parasite
Park So-Dam in Parasite
The last movie to win a Best Picture Oscar with no acting nominations was 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire. As Reuters pointed out, the cast of Slumdog — a movie set in India, starring a nonwhite cast — comprise relative unknowns; the acting nominees that year were instead dominated by mostly white A-Listers.
And 12 years later, the same scenario happened with Parasite.
The other reason Parasite’s cast was overlooked is that the Oscars have become predictably skewed toward domestic films with A-List actors, and has, over the past few years, come under fire for its reluctance to recognize nonwhite actors.
Coinciding with the notion that the Academy doesn’t like to hand out awards to relatively unknown actors, the Oscars hasn’t traditionally been great at honoring nonwhite actors (in 2015 and 2016, all 20 acting nominees were white), nor has it ever given a foreign language film the award for Best Picture. 2018’s Romawas just the 10th foreign language film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, and it eventually lost out to the much-maligned Green Book. And the last actor or actress in a foreign film to win an Academy Award was Marion Cotillard in 2007 for La Vie En Rose.
Parasite’s cast wasn’t able to buck the Academy’s stifling history. But its fate doesn’t have to be hollow — even if the cast doesn’t earn the accolades they deserve, perhaps Parasite can be the disruptor the film industry needs.
“Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” Bong Joon-ho said on Sunday’s Golden Globes, insisting that filmgoers, including the people that hand out awards, still have work to do and cinematic worlds to discover. That applies to performances, too.
Iraq wants the United States out of the country. With Donald Trump’s bone-headed, impulsive, and idiotic decision to assassinate Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, he has given Iran what it’s always wanted—the removal of American troops near its border.
The U.S. appeared willing to comply, but whether its “oops!” letter was a mistake, or whether it was vetoed by the administration, the Trump regime is digging in its heels. And it’s doing so in the most belligerent way possible, of course. Calling the U.S. presence “a force for good,” a State Department spokesperson said, “At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership – not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East."
Sorry, Iraq: You don’t get to decide for yourself what those foreign troops on your soil can or can’t do. They’re good, even when they’re assassinating foreign dignitaries!
Of course, there wouldn’t be a need to “recommit to our strategic partnership” if we didn’t have a regime intent on destroying every foreign alliance and relationship save the one with Russia’s Vladimir Putin—the only one that matters to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. But anything else?
Step aside, “strategic partner,” and meet your new hostile occupying force.
As tensions between the United States and Iran rise in the aftermath of the American drone strike that killed the country’s most powerful commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a new Morning Consult/Politico survey finds fewer than 3 in 10 registered voters can identify the Islamic republic on an unlabeled map.
The data is noisy, with selections in the ocean, and in the world view, with selections of the United States and Canada. So I’m not totally sure what to make of that, but it’s clear a lot of people don’t know where Iran is, which might be part of why Americans don’t have a clear opinion about the current affairs.
No republican will ever be deterred by pesky things like facts
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted Friday that Qassem Soleimani posed an "imminent threat" to U.S. interests in the Middle East, sparring with reporters who questioned him on the nature of the intelligence that prompted the killing of Tehran's chief military commander.
"We had specific information on an imminent threat, and those threats from him included attacks on U.S. embassies. Period. Full stop," Pompeo told reporters at a morning White House briefing.
The secretary's certainty before the press corps appeared to run counter to his remarks in a Fox News interview Thursday night, when he told host Laura Ingraham that Soleimani was plotting a "series of imminent attacks," but added, "We don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where, but it was real."
Pressed Friday on how he knew the Soleimani threat was "imminent" if he did not know when or where the Iranian general planned to attack, Pompeo insisted that his two sets of statements represented "completely consistent thoughts."
"I don't know exactly which minute. We don't know exactly which day it would have been executed, but it was very clear: Qassem Soleimani himself was plotting a broad, large-scale attack against American interests, and those attacks were imminent," Pompeo said.
Soleimani's targets included "American embassies, military bases [and] American facilities throughout the region," he said.
Later in the briefing, when Pompeo was asked to provide his definition of the word "imminent," he contended that administration officials "would have been culpably negligent had we not recommended to the president that he take this action" against Soleimani.
"This was going to happen, and American lives were at risk," he said.
At a campaign rally in Ohio on Thursday evening, President Donald Trump addressed his decision to kill Soleimani, the leader of Iran's elite paramilitary Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike last week near Baghdad's international airport.
"Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies, and not just the embassy in Baghdad," Trump said. "But we stopped him, and we stopped him quickly, and we stopped him cold."
The president elaborated on his claim in an interview with Fox News' Ingraham scheduled to air Friday. "I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies," he said of Soleimani's targets.
At the White House, Pompeo was questioned as to why he and Trump could publicly discuss the threats to the American embassies — at the secretary's news conference and at the president's rally — when congressional lawmakers had complained they were not told of such threats during a classified administration briefing.
"We did," Pompeo said, contradicting the lawmakers. "We told them about the imminent threat. All of the intelligence that we've briefed, that you've heard today, I assure you in an unclassified setting we've provided in the classified setting, as well."
But Pompeo offered a less definitive response when asked specifically if administration officials had informed the lawmakers that Soleimani planned to target the embassies.
"I'm not going to talk about the details of what we shared in the classified setting," he said. "But make no mistake about it: Those leaders, those members of Congress who want to go access this same intelligence can see that very same intelligence that will reflect what I described to you and what the president said last night, as well."
Hogan Gidley, the White House's principal deputy press secretary, also defended Trump's order in a tweet Friday, arguing that former President Barack Obama did not offer evidence of an imminent threat posed by Osama bin Laden when he authorized the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader in 2011.
"Soleimani was, in fact, planning 'imminent attacks,'" Gidley wrote. "While Democrats and the media quibble over its definition, quick point: When Obama killed bin Laden, al-Awlaki and Gaddafi, without Congressional approval, there were NO 'imminent attacks' and Democrats did not ask or care."
Tommy Vietor, the former National Security Council spokesman under Obama, replied to Gidley online, writing that bin Laden and Anwar Al-Awlaki "were senior, operational Al Qaeda leaders" and that "Congress authorized war against [Al Qaeda] back in 2001." Former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi "was killed by members of the [Libya's National Transitional Council] - not by US forces," he wrote.
"But [with respect to] imminence - you have agency here," Vietor added. "Release the intelligence. Prove it."
Immediately following the secretary's session with reporters, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) accused Pompeo of inaccurately characterizing the administration's congressional briefing on Iran.
"I can tell you, he wasn't at the same briefing I was. I did not — I did not — hear what he just said at that press conference," Menendez, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told MSNBC.
"I don't know what the secretary is talking about," he added. "I stayed for the entire briefing, including after I asked my questions. I stayed there even as he left because they abruptly ended the briefing. I didn't hear what he just said."
Several Democratic lawmakers previously challenged the administration Thursday after Trump said during a White House event that U.S. forces killed Soleimani to halt a plot "to blow up our embassy." Those lawmakers said a possible embassy bombing was not mentioned in their intelligence briefing Wednesday.
House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said that while he had "seen no evidence" of such an attack, "that doesn't mean that the evidence doesn't exist."
Still, he continued, "nobody that I've talked to in any setting — and I've talked to quite a few people in the White House — has said that."
Moreover, Smith said, he had been given the impression by administration officials that the U.S. was unaware of any "specific targets" threatened by Soleimani.
"It's news to me, in particular, because it has been communicated to me that there weren't specific targets — that the intel that we had did not cite specific targets. Just more of a broad thing," Smith said. "So if the president had evidence of the specific target, that has not been communicated to us."
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said Trump's assertion was "news to me" and that Soleimani "has always been trying to attack" the American embassy in Baghdad, which Moulton said "received much more regular attacks from Iraqi militias 10 years ago than they do today."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called the alleged plot described by the president "inconsistent" with the information presented to lawmakers Wednesday.
"The Trump Administration keeps Congress & the American people in the dark under the guise of 'classification' & then the President throws it away—making a claim inconsistent with the meager information provided at yesterday's Senate briefing," Blumenthal tweeted.
Trump returns to the White House after a rally in Ohio last Thursday. | Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
The Washington Post via Getty Im
President Donald Trump. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg holds a town hall meeting on Thursday, December 5, 2019, in Milford, New Hampshire. | Melina Mara/Washington Post/Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks about the situation with Iran at the White House on January 8, 2020. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
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Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) holds a news conference in the US Capitol to discuss Syrian refugee legislation on Tuesday, December 8, 2015. | Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
Park So-Dam in Parasite | Parasite
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