James.galbraith

Remember the Iran deal? None of this has to be happening.

An activist’s tweet about queer identity has apparently hit home with a lot of people. The tweet, by Alexander Leon, an Australia-based writer and activist who works at the LGBTQ rights organization Kaleidoscope Trust, went viral on Twitter Tuesday, with more than 42,000 retweets as of this posting. If you haven’t yet seen it, we’re sharing it with you.

It's massive and existential and difficult. But I'm convinced that being confronted with the need for profound self-discovery so explicitly (and often early in life!) is a gift in disguise. We come out the other end wiser & truer to ourselves. Some cis/het people never get there.

— Alexander Leon (@alexand_erleon) January 7, 2020

This has blown up unexpectedly and I'm very humbled If this meant something to you & you are able I'd really appreciate any donations to help families affected by the Australian bushfires. I am Australian and seeing my country burn is heartbreaking.https://t.co/AWeUgit7Jl

— Alexander Leon (@alexand_erleon) January 7, 2020

Wrote Leon: “Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we’ve created to protect us.”

“It’s massive and existential and difficult,” he continued. “But I’m convinced that being confronted with the need for profound self-discovery so explicitly (and often early in life!) is a gift in disguise. We come out the other end wiser & truer to ourselves. Some cis/het people never get there.”

“All of this is to say – be kind to yourself,” he added. “Discovering who you really are is an enormous task it doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it happen without some hiccups along the way. Be patient, be compassionate, be vulnerable and exist loudly. And most of all – be proud!”

After the post went viral, Leon added a plea for Australia: “This has blown up unexpectedly and I’m very humbled. If this meant something to you & you are able I’d really appreciate any donations to help families affected by the Australian bushfires. I am Australian and seeing my country burn is heartbreaking. I have to leave Sydney tomorrow & I am so conflicted about leaving. My family home is <50km from fire affected areas. I am certain they will be safe but many families are not. Plz consider donating to the Red Cross if you are able. Even a RT help”

Leon added this link to the Red Cross.

He later added: “My tweets went viral overnight & beyond it being extraordinarily humbling (& overwhelming), I am so emboldened by the response. I adapted the tweets from an essay I thought too personal/niche to attempt to get published. I think I need to believe in my voice and message more. All I’ve ever wanted to do in any of my work is for queer people (& particularly QPOC) to feel seen, heard & understood. I can’t open this app at the moment without ugly crying because y’all are showing me that in my own small way, I’m achieving what I set out to do. Thank you.”

My tweets went viral overnight & beyond it being extraordinarily humbling (& overwhelming), I am so emboldened by the response. I adapted the tweets from an essay I thought too personal/niche to attempt to get published.

I think I need to believe in my voice and message more.

— Alexander Leon (@alexand_erleon) January 7, 2020

All I've ever wanted to do in any of my work is for queer people (& particularly QPOC) to feel seen, heard & understood. I can't open this app at the moment without ugly crying because y'all are showing me that in my own small way, I'm achieving what I set out to do. Thank you

— Alexander Leon (@alexand_erleon) January 8, 2020

The post This Activist’s Insightful Tweet About Queer Identity is Taking Social Media by Storm appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Follow me on Twitter at @MattBors or on my Facebook page.

Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona’s 4th congressional district is back in the news again. No, not for being publicly disowned by his seven siblings for his racism and anti-Semitism. No, not for saying he can tell when people are lying because he’s a dentist. No, not because his entire family made a brutal video endorsing his opponent. No, Rep. Gosar is getting lambasted for spreading literal “fake news” in the form of a photoshopped image of former President Barack Obama taking a photo with recently assassinated Iranian leader Qassem Soleimani. Of course, besides the image not being real, Gosar is so fucking stupid that he also mistakes Soleimani for the current Iranian President Iran Hassan Rouhani—and still, the photo is fake.

x

GOP Rep. Paul Gosar tweeted a photoshopped image of Obama with Rouhani, apparently believing Rouhani is actually Soleimani.The actual image is of Obama and Indian PM Manmohan Singh. pic.twitter.com/CfO8AhyBq0

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) January 6, 2020

Now, Paul Gosar is defending himself by saying he knew all of this and it was everybody else that didn’t.

x

1. To the dim witted reporters like @dmedin11: no one said this wasn’t photoshopped. No one said the president of Iran was dead. No one said Obama met with Rouhani in person. The tweet says: “the world is a better place without either of them in power”. https://t.co/zwLPPXniQh

— Paul Gosar (@DrPaulGosar) January 6, 2020

Of course, “the world is a better place without ...” means not that. As some people pointed out, even if this wasn’t entirely fake, it would still be excruciatingly hypocritical.

x

Here's a real one for you. He loves Kim. pic.twitter.com/1Swf9SScMf

— Paiyslee 🐝 (@Paiyslee) January 6, 2020

And then the Twitterverse had more points to make.

x

- MAGA elected official- tweet that makes no sense- but Obama- clearly bad Photoshop- person of color mis-identified pic.twitter.com/no7DBIy4yU

— Steve Fenn (@StatHunting) January 6, 2020

x

In other words, "I never said I was telling the truth!!!"You truly are a greenhorn at this.

— Zach Bigalke (@zbigalke) January 6, 2020

And just to understand the logic at work here:

x

If you knew this was photo was doctored and that the meeting never happened, then you Tweeted it without correction to deliberately mislead.

— Chris Saeger (@chrissaeger) January 6, 2020

I have to say, this image—the veracity of which has yet to be determined—is pretty damning.

x

It’s ok. I saved it: pic.twitter.com/RAk3sIxuGE

— Mr. Fun Guy (@Mister_Fun_Guy) January 6, 2020

Wow. All three of those guys and Rep. Gosar. This one I find strangely satisfying.

x

Rouhani is still in power dimwit and about to take over Iraq. pic.twitter.com/tGgSVN6i2c

— Dave Lister (@DaveListerD) January 6, 2020

An anonymous reader shares a blog post from Kevin Rooke, investment specialist and co-founder of blockchain marketing agency agency0x: Imagine a startup with $12 billion of revenue, 125%+ YoY revenue growth (two years in a row), and Apple-esque gross margins (30-50%). Without knowing anything else about the business, what would you value it at? $50 billion? $100 billion? More? That's Apple's AirPods business, the fastest-growing segment of the world's most valuable company. Though Apple doesn't share sales numbers for AirPods, industry analysts have converged on estimated sales numbers for each of the last 3 years. In 2017, Apple sold an estimated 15 million devices, each priced at $150. That gave Apple a $2.25 billion revenue boost, only a 1% boost to Apple's $215 billion iPhone revenue. But in 2018, AirPods sales began to quiet Apple bears. 35 million pairs were sold, still priced at $150. That gave Apple an additional $5.25 billion in revenue, then representing 2.4% of iPhone revenue. And in 2019, Apple has pulled off yet another incredible year of AirPods sales. Apple sold an estimated 60 million units, but in 2019 the prices increased too. Apple's second generation AirPods launched at $200, and their newest variation, the AirPods Pro sell for $250. Assuming an even split of sales between Gen 1, Gen 2, and AirPods Pro, Airpods revenue was $12 billion in 2019. That's 4.5% of Apple's iPhone revenue. Investors are paying attention now. AirPods make as much money as Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify combined. And considering their triple-digit growth two years in a row, I would be shocked if AirPods didn't earn more money than Uber in 2020.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe Biden, at an Iowa town hall on Saturday, was confronted by a voter. "I'm with you 90% of the way" he said, but was still hesitant to vote for him because "you were for the second Gulf War, which was a mess." Biden responded that he opposed the war “from the very moment” it began. 

Biden said the same thing back in September, and his campaign was forced to state that he “misspoke” at the time. And here is Biden again, pulling a Trump, repeating the easily fact-checked lie. 

And this one isn’t even close, as the CNN fact check linked above makes clear. But there are plenty of other examples, such as a speech at Brookings in 2003, when Biden said, “Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today. It was a right vote then, and it'll be a correct vote today."

It’s even worse than that, however. Democrats were in charge in the Senate during the war vote, and any such force authorization had to go through the Foreign Relations Committee. And guess who was in charge of that committee? 

Yup. Joe Biden.

He was literally in charge of giving George W. Bush his war powers in the Senate. He says he “trusted” Bush, which is in itself disqualifying. If you want the complete comprehensive blow-by-blow, this piece is good. But ultimately, it comes down to whether we nominate someone who is a clear break from the past hypermilitaristic and interventionist foreign policy school of thought from which Biden emerges, or whether we forge a new post-Trump path that respects the world and lessens demands for needlessly surrendering our blood and treasure in unnecessary overseas adventures. 

A captain at a for-profit private prison in Nevada that jails people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement was a vocal member of a now-closed neo-Nazi website and at one time tried to set up a chapter of a white nationalist group that played a key part in the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017, a VICE investigation has found. 

Travis Frey, a captain at private prison profiteer CoreCivic’s Nevada Southern Detention Center, reportedly posted on neo-Nazi site Iron March at least a dozen times from 2016 to 2017, self-identifying as a fascist and writing, “Deep down no one really gives a shit about racism.” In other postings, Frey made inquiries about creating an Indiana chapter of the Traditionalist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi group “that advocates for racially pure nations and communities and blames Jews for many of the world’s problems,” the Southern Poverty Law Center said.

The employee, who served in the Marines for a few years, posted to the neo-Nazi site at the same time that he was working at a CoreCivic facility in Indiana. Following the report and public outcry in response to it, VICE reported, CoreCivic placed Frey “on administrative leave pending an investigation.” ICE, meanwhile, distanced itself from Frey, telling VICE, “The incident in question does not involve a federal employee.”

But ICE sure has no problem with contracting immigration detention to private prison profiteers like CoreCivic and employees like Frey. Along with GEO Group, “the two companies account for 85 percent of the U.S. private prison market, and a majority of their revenue comes from housing immigrants,” VICE also reported in 2017. Abuses of immigrants have been rampant in facilities operated by both companies, and in CoreCivic’s case, they have been implicated in the death of at least one child.

In testimony to Congress last summer, asylum-seeker Yazmin Juárez described “no effort” by staffers at CoreCivic’s Dilley, Texas, migrant jail to separate sick kids from healthy. Her 19-month-old daughter Mariee was cleared as healthy when they arrived, but then became sick. They were released only when Mariee’s condition had deteriorated, and she died in a hospital several weeks after their release. Juárez subsequently filed a $40 million claim against CoreCivic.

“In Nevada, an ICE Detention Center Captain was on neo-Nazi site and was actively working to start a white supremacist group in his area,” United We Dream tweeted. “People like him are attracted to ICE because it allows them to get paid to enact racial violence and their ideals.” The fact that CoreCivic employed a self-identified fascist who perused a neo-Nazi site like it was the Sunday paper, but has yet to fire him, is terrifying. So is the thought of how many are still out there that we don’t know about, and will tomorrow clock in and wield immense power and authority over immigrants.

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran struck back at the United States for the killing of a top Iranian general early Wednesday, firing a series of surface-to-surface missiles at two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops and warning the United States and its allies in the region not to retaliate.

U.S. officials confirmed the strikes, though Iran only initially acknowledged targeting one base. There was no immediate word on injuries.

Iranian state TV said the attack was in revenge for the killing of Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whose funeral procession Tuesday in his hometown of Kerman prompted angry calls to avenge his death, which drastically raised tensions in the Middle East.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned the U.S. and its regional allies against retaliating over the missile attack against the Ain Assad air base in Iraq’s western Anbar province. The Guard issued the warning via a statement carried by Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency.

“We are warning all American allies, who gave their bases to its terrorist army, that any territory that is the starting point of aggressive acts against Iran will be targeted,” The Guard said. It also threatened Israel.

Ain Assad air base is in Iraq’s western Anbar province. It was first used by American forces after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, and later saw American troops stationed there amid the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. It houses about 1,500 U.S. and coalition forces.

State TV said the operation’s name was “Martyr Soleimani.” It said the Guard’s aerospace division that controls Iran’s missile program launched the attack. Iran said it would release more information later.

The U.S. also acknowledged another missile attack on a base in Irbil in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region.

A spokesperson for the Norwegian Armed Forces told AP in a phone interview that about 70 Norwegian troops were on the airbase, but no injuries have been reported, Brynjar Stordal, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Armed Forces told AP in a phone interview.”

Wednesday’s revenge attack came a mere few hours after crowds in Iran mourned Soleimani and as the U.S. continued to reinforce its own positions in the region and warned of an unspecified threat to shipping from Iran in the region’s waterways, crucial routes for global energy supplies. U.S. embassies and consulates from Asia to Africa and Europe issued security alerts for Americans. The U.S. Air Force launched a drill with 52 fighter jets in Utah, just days after President Donald Trump threatened to hit 52 sites in Iran.

A stampede broke out Tuesday at Soleimani’s funeral for a top Iranian general slain in a U.S. airstrike, and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured as thousands thronged the procession, Iranian news reports said.

Tuesday’s deadly stampede took place in Soleimani’s hometown of Kerman as his coffin was being borne through the city in southeastern Iran, said Pirhossein Koulivand, head of Iran’s emergency medical services.

There was no information about what set off the crush in the packed streets, and online videos showed only its aftermath: people lying apparently lifeless, their faces covered by clothing, emergency crews performing CPR on the fallen, and onlookers wailing and crying out to God.

“Unfortunately as a result of the stampede, some of our compatriots have been injured and some have been killed during the funeral processions,” Koulivand said, and state TV quoted him as saying that 56 had died and 213 had been injured.

Soleimani’s burial was delayed, with no new time given, because of concerns about the huge crowd at the cemetery, the semi-official ISNA news agency said.

A procession in Tehran on Monday drew over 1 million people in the Iranian capital, crowding both main avenues and side streets in Tehran. Such mass crowds can prove dangerous. A smaller stampede at the 1989 funeral for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini killed at least eight people and injured hundreds.

Hossein Salami, Soleimani’s successor as leader of the Revolutionary Guard, addressed a crowd of supporters gathered at the coffin in a central square in Kernan. He vowed to avenge Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike Friday near Baghdad’s airport.

“We tell our enemies that we will retaliate but if they take another action we will set ablaze the places that they like and are passionate about,” Salami said.

“Death to Israel!” the crowd shouted in response, referring to one of Iran’s longtime regional foes.

Salami praised Soleimani’s work, describing him as essential to backing Palestinian groups, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. As a martyr, Soleimani represented an even greater threat to Iran’s enemies, Salami said.

Soleimani will ultimately be laid to rest between the graves of Enayatollah Talebizadeh and Mohammad Hossein Yousef Elahi, two former Guard comrades killed in Iran’s 1980s war with Iraq. They died in Operation Dawn 8, in which Soleimani also took part. It was a 1986 amphibious assault that cut Iraq off from the Persian Gulf and led to the end of the war that killed 1 million.

The funeral processions in major cities over three days have been an unprecedented honor for Soleimani, seen by Iranians as a national hero for his work leading the Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force.

The U.S. blames him for killing U.S. troops in Iraq and accused him of plotting new attacks just before he was killed. Soleimani also led forces supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad in that country’s civil war, and he also served as the point man for Iranian proxies in countries like Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Assad in Syria on Tuesday amid the tensions between Washington and Tehran.

Soleimani’s slaying already has led Tehran to abandon the remaining limits of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers as his successor and others vow to take revenge.

In Iraq, pro-Iranian factions in parliament have pushed to oust American troops from Iraqi soil following Soleimani’s killing. Germany and Canada announced plans to move some of their soldiers in Iraq to neighboring countries.

According to a report on Tuesday by the semi-official Tasnim news agency, Iran has worked up 13 sets of plans to avenge Soleimani’s death. The report quoted Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, as saying that even the weakest among them would be a “historic nightmare” for the U.S. He declined to elaborate,

“If the U.S. troops do not leave our region voluntarily and upright, we will do something to carry their bodies horizontally out,” Shamkhani said.

The state-run IRNA news agency later published a statement from the Supreme National Security Council denying Shamkhani made the comment.

The U.S. Maritime Administration warned ships across the Mideast, citing the rising threats. “The Iranian response to this action, if any, is unknown, but there remains the possibility of Iranian action against U.S. maritime interests in the region,” it said.

Oil tankers were targeted in mine attacks last year that the U.S. blamed on Iran. Tehran denied responsibility, although it did seize oil tankers around the crucial Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world’s crude oil travels.

The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet said it would work with shippers in the region to minimize any possible threat.

The 5th Fleet “has and will continue to provide advice to merchant shipping as appropriate regarding recommended security precautions in light of the heightened tensions and threats in the region,” 5th Fleet spokesman Cmdr. Joshua Frey told The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, Iranian Gen. Alireza Tabgsiri, the chief of the Guard’s navy, issued his own warning.

“Our message to the enemies is to leave the region,” Tabgsiri said, according to ISNA. The Guard routinely has tense encounters with the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf.

Separately, Iran summoned the British ambassador over comments by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the British defense minister about Soleimani’s killing, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

Iran’s parliament, meanwhile, has passed an urgent bill declaring the U.S. military’s command at the Pentagon and those acting on its behalf in Soleimani’s killing as “terrorists,” subject to Iranian sanctions. The measure appears to be in response to a decision by Trump in April to declare the Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist organization.”

The U.S. Defense Department used that terror designation to support the strike that killed Soleimani. The action by Iran’s parliament was done by a special procedure to speed it into law and also saw the lawmakers approve funding for the Quds Force with an additional 200 million euros, or about $224 million.

Also Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the U.S. had declined to issue him a visa to travel to New York for meetings at the United Nations. As the host of the U.N. headquarters, the U.S. is supposed to allow foreign officials to attend such meetings.

“This is because they fear someone will go there and tell the truth to the American people,” Zarif said. “But they are mistaken. The world is not limited to New York. You can speak with American people from Tehran too and we will do that.”

Asked about Zarif, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told journalists America would comply with its obligations under U.N. rules to grant visas. He then referred to the Iranian diplomat as “a propagandist of the first order.”

A U.S. official who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record said the application couldn’t be processed in time for Zarif’s travel although it wasn’t clear if his request had been formally denied. A formal rejection would trigger legal technicalities that could affect future visa applications and could violate the host country agreement the U.S. has with the U.N.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

On Tuesday afternoon, Defense Secretary Mark Esper took his turn at spinning chaos as if it were an intentional strategy. According to Esper, the United States is not withdrawing its forces from Iraq. Instead, it will just conduct a little “reposition” of U.S. troops. And, of course, Esper delivered the requisite number of threats that the U.S. would respond in force if Iran responded in force to the U.S. responding in force, etc.

While Esper denies that the U.S. is preparing to pull out of Iraq, and the Pentagon makes it officially clear that the letter it sent to Iraqi officials to tell them the U.S. was moving toward the exits was a mistake, the Iraqi prime minister has made it clear that he’s treating that letter seriously. According to The Washington Post,  Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi is considering the letter a withdrawal announcement, no matter what the Pentagon is saying now. 

And the other thing that the Iraqi prime minster said makes the claims of “mistake” seem like a massive understatement. According to the Abdul-Mahdi’s office, the letter from the Department of Defense to the Iraqi government was actually sent twice. After it was sent the first time, Abdul-Mahdi noted that the attached Arabic translation didn’t completely match the English version of the document. He returned the letter, and then the DOD sent it again. The idea that this was a “draft letter” that was only circulated around Washington for comment seems indefensible, no matter what department was involved. 

The truth is that Trump’s actions have put the United States in an absolutely untenable position in Iraq. Many, if not most Americans would eagerly welcome the news that the United States was winding down operations in Iraq and withdrawing its remaining troops. But Trump has put American forces in the position of withdrawing from Iraq in the face of crumbling relations with a government that on Tuesday officially labelled U.S. forces in the country terrorists.

For years, support for Iran within Iraq has been falling sharply. With a majority of Iraqis—and even a majority of Iraqi Shiites—calling for a decreased Iranian presence, it seemed that Iraq was on the brink of genuinely positioning itself as an opposing Shiite-majority state that could have stood as a barrier to Iran’s genuine expansionist ambitions. But Donald Trump’s actions in attacking Shiite militia inside Iraq immediately flipped the concern of protesters away from Tehran and toward Washington. The assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani only put additional speed behind moves to expel U.S. troops from Iraq.

There has definitely been a mistake. But it wasn’t the withdrawal letter. And unless the U.S. wants to fight the Iraqi army that it trained and equipped, we are leaving.

CNN’s Jake Tapper says he thinks often of the Bush administration’s much-discredited admonition, “We can’t wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Washington Post editor Marty Baron says flatly, "Most of the press wasn’t aggressive enough in questioning the premise for the Iraq War."

John Walcott, the onetime Knight-Ridder bureau chief credited for ordering skeptical coverage of U.S. claims of Iraqi WMD programs, says he believes the media has finally learned the lessons of 2003.

But even if memories of the run-up to the Iraq War have led to heightened vigilance in some newsrooms, it’s unclear whether the media’s efforts to fact-check the Trump administration’s claim that an “imminent threat” justified its decision to order the killing of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani are making an impact. A lot has changed since 2003. The government’s power to frame the public debate has only been strengthened by the advent of social media and the rise of ideological outlets, while the media’s ability to control and sustain a narrative has diminished accordingly.

Officials’ claims are often amplified in headlines and cable chyrons — “Pompeo: Soleimani Was Not In Baghdad On A Peace Mission,” read a Tuesday Fox News graphic — even if they are challenged later in greater detail. The president’s message was splashed across MSNBC hours later — “Trump: We Saved Lives By Killing Soleimani,” read a chryon — during a segment where an analyst expressed fears about the U.S. being led to war.

And Trump can also circumvent any questioning from the White House press corps, which hasn't had a formal briefing with the press secretary in more than 300 days.

The president defended the killing to millions on Monday on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and has wielded his Twitter megaphone to his nearly 70 million followers to make additional unchecked claims about Iran and further threats. “Without Twitter I think we’d be lost,” Trump told Limbaugh. “We wouldn’t be able to get the truth out.”

The president’s ability to shape public opinion without offering any evidence of an “imminent threat” so angered New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that he urged the media to dismiss Trump’s claims entirely until he provides more facts.

“The media and the public are far less gullible now than they were [in 2003], but even now there’s a tendency to take administration claims at face value, or at least semi-seriously,” Krugman wrote in his newsletter. “Don’t do this. Lies don’t stop at the water’s edge. Administrations that are dishonest about domestic policy tend to be dishonest about foreign policy too. And while the Bush administration lied a lot, Trump and company lie about everything.”

The fact that the administration has argued that it has intelligence to back up its assertions – but just hasn’t shared it with the public – is one clear parallel with 2003. That means that even if news organizations are quick to point to the lack of evidence, they still feel obliged to give voice to the administration’s claims.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered confident assurances of the strength of Trump’s argument that the attack on Soleimani was defensive in nature – not an “assassination,” as some reporters and analysts argue – while appearing on six networks on Sunday, barely flinching under often-critical questioning. Both the Times and the Post have run stories quoting White House sources as suggesting the evidence of the threat posed by Soleimani was, in the words of a tweet by the Times’s Rukmini Callimachi, “razor thin.”

But their reporters continue to quote the official line, as well.

In a quadruple-bylined story leading Sunday’s paper, the Times reported that “some officials voiced private skepticism about the rationale for a strike on General Soleimani, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops over the years.” One U.S. official told the paper that the Trump administration’s new intelligence was essentially “business as usual” for Soleimani and didn’t suggest an imminent threat.

That deeply reported follow-up story, however, appeared to receive less Facebook interactions than two of the Times’ initial accounts on the killing, according to statistics provided by social media monitoring service NewsWhip.

Several of the biggest stories on Facebook since the killing have focused on troop deployments, while a story from British outlet The Mirror about an “unidentified eulogist” at Soleimani’s funeral putting an $80 million bounty on Trump’s head had the most interactions. (Fact-checking site Snopes notes that the bounty “is not yet known to have been authorized by, or represent the official position of, Iranian authorities.”)

Despite the signs of faltering attention by readers, news leaders insist they will continue to pursue the truth about the alleged “imminent threat” and will not shift focus as events unfold, as they say happened in 2003.

“With a few rare exceptions,” Tapper said ruefully in a POLITICO interview, “the media drank the Kool-Aid in the build-up to the war in Iraq and too many people didn’t do their jobs.”

In case anyone wondered if there were any red-rimmed Dixie cups in the CNN newsroom this time around, the network highlighted Pompeo’s lack of specifics Tuesday morning with a chyron: “Pompeo Defends Soliemani Killing; Trump Admin Yet To Offer Evidence of ‘Imminent Threat.’”

Baron, in a statement to POLITICO said, "Throughout the history of this country, there has been vigorous public debate about our foreign policy, especially our involvement in wars. That’s what a democracy looks like . . . The highest responsibility of the press is to report thoroughly, vigorously and probingly when this country’s leaders take actions that can put the lives of American troops and others at risk."

And Walcott, whose former Knight Ridder team was lionized in the 2018 film “Shock and Awe,” believes he’s detected a shift in the right direction.

“I think that although that was nearly two decades ago, a lot of reporters at the Times, the Post and elsewhere now recognize that our job as reporters is not to accept what the government says about matters of war and peace — or anything else — at face value,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO.

Indeed, governments of both parties have misled the public during wartime, as the ”Pentagon Papers” revealed during the Vietnam War or as the “Afghanistan Papers” reiterated just last month. The Iran crisis presents a unique dilemma in terms of trusting information from the government as the president has made more than 15,000 false or misleading claims in office.

Since the killing of Soleimani, there has been a push in the news media “to find out if there’s any credible intelligence to support the Trump administration’s claim that another, larger attack on Americans in Iraq was ‘imminent,’” said Walcott, now a contributing editor at Time, “as well as the extensive examinations of whether escalating tensions with Iran will make Americans and others safer or less safe.”

In a quadruple-bylined story of its own Sunday night, The Post reported that Pompeo urged Trump last summer to strike Iran, which the president opted not to do, and more specifically spoke to him about killing Soleimani several months ago. “Some defense officials said Pompeo’s claims of an imminent and direct threat were overstated,” according to the Post, “and they would prefer that he make the case based on the killing of the American contractor and previous Iranian provocations.”

Pompeo did mention the killing of the contractor, which has been blamed on an Iranian-backed militia, on the Sunday shows, while also asserting that Soleimani posed an imminent threat, a contention that hosts drilled down on.

“When will the American people know why President Trump decided to do what he did?” asked CBS “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan.

On “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked, “Don't the American people have the right to some understanding of what it was, why it was so urgent to take out Soleimani now?”

“When you say the attacks were imminent, how imminent were they?” Tapper asked Pompeo on “State of the Union.” “Are we talking about days? Are we talking about weeks?”

Tapper acknowledged the next day that “it’s not fun when people insinuate you don’t love your country because your job is to question our leaders, but that’s the job.”

While journalists are pressing the government for answers, James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who notably clashed with his former editors at the New York Times in trying to get more skeptical pre-Iraq reporting in the paper, said he still worries that the Trump administration is setting the agenda.

“You can see it already when Trump and the people around him kept saying there was an imminent threat and that’s why they had to go after Soleimani,” Risen said in an interview. “That’s the kind of thing that they kept saying before the war in Iraq. It’s always difficult to fight back against that.”

Risen — who is currently a senior national correspondent at The Intercept, where he and others recently revealed secret files showing Iran’s strong influence in Iraq — said the broader issue for the news media to grapple with is why the U.S. government “is murdering a foreign government official at a time when there’s still an assassination ban on the books.”

Some news organizations, like The Associated Press, acknowledged mostly refraining from describing the killing of Soleimani as an “assassination because it would require that the news service decide that the act was a murder, and because the term is politically freighted.”

Risen said avoiding that word is “cowardly” and likened it to news organizations using descriptions like “enhanced” or “harsh” interrogation when covering Bush-era torture techniques.

“It’s a silly debate,” Risen said. “It’s an assassination."

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

MojoKid writes: Yesterday, AMD launched its new Ryzen 4000 Series mobile processors for laptops at CES 2020, along with a monstrous 64-core/128-thread third-generation Ryzen Threadripper workstation desktop CPU. In addition to the new processors, on the graphics front the oft-leaked Radeon RX 5600 XT that target's 1080p gamers in the sweet spot of the GPU market was also made official. In CPU news, AMD claims Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors offer 20% lower SOC power, 2X perf-per-watt, 5X faster power state switching, and significantly improved iGPU performance versus its previous-gen mobile Ryzen 3000 products. AMD's U-Series flagship, the Ryzen 7 4800U, is an 8-core/16-thread processor with a max turbo frequency of 4.2GHz and integrated Vega-derived 8-core GPU. Along with architectural enhancements and the frequency benefits of producing the chips at 7nm, AMD is underscoring up to 59% improved performance per graphics core as well. AMD is also claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current Intel-processors and significantly better multi-threaded performance. The initial Ryzen 4000 U-Series line-up consists of five processors, starting with the 4-core/4-thread Ryzen 5 4300U, and topping off with the aforementioned Ryzen 7 4800U. On the other end of the spectrum, AMD revealed some new information regarding its 64-core/128-thread Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor. The beast chip will have a base clock of 2.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.3GHz with a whopping 288MB of cache. The chip will drop into existing TRX40 motherboards and be available on February 7th for $3990. AMD showcased the chip versus a dual socket Intel Xeon Platinum in the VRAY 3D rendering benchmark beating the Xeon system by almost 30 minutes in a 90-minute workload, though the Intel system retails for around $20K.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An air-raid shelter turned memorial in Baghdad, Iraq. February 7, 2003. | Sovfoto/Universal Images Group

Some of the biggest backers of the Iraq War sure have a lot of opinions on Iran.

On March 19, 2003, a “coalition of the willing” led by the United States invaded Iraq, starting a war that killed thousands of American soldiers and roughly 600,000 Iraqi civilians (though exact numbers are very hard to come by).

The war enjoyed broad (and bipartisan) support in 2003, with 72 percent of Americans polled by Gallup saying that they supported the war against Iraq in May of that year (and despite his more recent protestations, that number included Donald Trump.) But nearly 17 years later, a majority of Americans think that the United States made a mistake sending troops to Iraq, a perspective that has played an increasingly large role in our politics.

The situation in Iran — where President Donald Trump’s decision to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani after months of tensions has raised fears of another war in the region — is not an exact replica of the lead-up to the war in Iraq. And let’s be clear: Being wrong about the war in Iraq doesn’t mean that those calling for action with the Iranian regime will be found equally wanting by the passage of time.

But it’s concerning, to say the least, to see some of the biggest backers of the Iraq War — an abject failure that, coupled with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, has cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of lives — are publicly (and in some instances, gleefully) opining about the potential impact of war with Iran, in some cases even using the same rhetorical stylings to do so.

“This is going to be a catalyst inside Iran”

On January 2 on Fox News, two George W. Bush administration stalwarts — former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and former Senior Adviser Karl Rove — joined Fox News host Sean Hannity (another prominent booster of the 2003 invasion) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) to react to Gen. Qassem Soleimani’s death.

“I think it’s entirely possible this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani and puts pressure on the Iranian government to stop the terrorism, stop supporting all of the various terrorist movements it has around the world.”

What Fox News didn’t mention is that both Fleischer and Rove played major roles in the buildup to the Iraq War two decades ago, a buildup that included a months-long campaign to build support for the invasion of Iraq among the American public by connecting Iraq to the September 11 attacks and to weapons of mass destruction. Both men were key parts of the White House Iraq Group, a group of high-level administration officials charged with “educat[ing] the public” about the danger posed to the United States by Saddam Hussein.

As my colleague Matthew Yglesias has noted, the origins of the Iraq War were steeped in falsehoods shared by Fleischer and other members of the Bush administration, taking at absolute best what a former Bush administration official called “literary license” with the facts. I’ve reached out to Fleischer and will update if and when I hear back. In response to a request for comment, an assistant for Karl Rove told me that he is currently moving and would be unable to answer my questions.

It’s important to detail Fleischer’s role in the Bush administration’s push toward war in Iraq. Because those promises of US action being “celebrated”? It’s not the first time Fleischer’s made them.

2003 redux

On April 10, 2003, during a press briefing he gave as press secretary regarding the invasion of Iraq, Fleischer made an eerily similar claim.

“The president’s view is that the celebrations in the streets of Baghdad are the sights of freedom,” Fleischer said in response to a question about how images of the invasion were being received in the Arab World. “And freedom is a message that should be welcomed everywhere.”

There were some celebrations in Baghdad back in 2003, as Iraqi civilians commemorated the end of Hussein’s violent and controlling regime and the arrival of Allied troops. And Fleischer wasn’t alone in his beliefs. As my colleague Ezra Klein wrote back in 2014, the primary purported impetus for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq wasn’t just Iraq’s alleged (and nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s (negligible) links to al-Qaeda, but the idea that Iraq could be, as Fleischer is now saying about Iran, a “catalyst” for the region.

David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a prominent supporter of the Iraq War, concurred, writing in May 2019:

... the goal in 2003 was bigger than denuclearization. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was both oppressing his own subjects and menacing his neighbors. By replacing Saddam’s regime with a more humane and peaceful successor, the U.S. could set the Arab Middle East on a path to a better future — contributing to America’s own security after 9/11.

Suffice it to say, that’s not what happened. As Frum concluded:

We were ignorant, arrogant, and unprepared, and we unleashed human suffering that did no good for anyone: not for Americans, not for Iraqis, not for the region. Almost two decades later, the damage to America’s standing in the world from the Iraq War has still not been repaired, let alone that war’s economic and human costs to the United States and the Middle East.

In fact, a 2010 study by the RAND Corporation performed for the United States Air Force found that the Iraq War may have decreased the popularity of democratization efforts.

In several instances, the war appears to have increased toleration and even the support of Arab publics for unpopular rulers who, whatever their faults, are still preferable to the unknown. Some of this may stem from the declining cachet of democratization, given its image as a “U.S. project” whose forcible implementation in Iraq was widely blamed for sowing the seeds of the country’s descent into sectarian violence

But Fleischer appears to have not yet arrived at a similar conclusion. No, Iran is not Iraq — and yet the linguistic flourishes of 2003 remain the same, raising concerns that the failures of 2003 do, too.

“There’s every reason to believe a war itself is going to be short”

But it wasn’t just Fox News. Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, argued in the pages of the New York Times in favor of the strike on Gen. Soleimani, writing that such an action was essential “if [the United States] seeks to stay in the Middle East.”

The world to which we wake up today, rid of its most accomplished and deadly terrorist, is a better place. Nowhere is this insight more evident than throughout the Middle East, where individuals are posting joyous videos to social media, celebrating the death of the author of so much of their misery. We should all — even those among us who don’t particularly care for Mr. Trump — join them in their good cheer, and continue to repeal Mr. Suleimani’s murderous anti-American legacy.

It’s worth noting that American attitudes on the nation’s military presence in the Middle East are complex, as recent polling has shown a difference between the desire of Americans to stay engaged in the region and their willingness to get involved in specific conflicts.

And back in January 2003 (two years before joining the Bush administration), Doran was arguing in the pages of Foreign Affairs (and the New York Times) in favor of a war against Iraq, writing that victory could help achieve peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and induce other Middle Eastern countries to look to the United States as “their partner in the quest for a better life.”

The first order of business for the United States must therefore be to demonstrate forcefully that challenges to its authority in the region will be defeated. Its near enemies can be met in no other way, since their opposition to the present order is deep-rooted and total. Unless America is prepared to abandon its position and pull back from the region, as the British did three and a half decades ago, it must carry its struggle against al Qaeda and Saddam to the finish, putting an end to all doubt regarding its resolve. Thwarting Saddam’s ambitions and continuing to root out bin Laden’s henchmen and associates, moreover, will do more than take care of immediate menaces.

He furthered his argument in favor of war in the Princeton Alumni Weekly on February 26, 2003, arguing that taking out Hussein was essential because “the U.S. position in the Gulf and in the region in general is being undermined by our attempt to contain him and Iran simultaneously.”

And he added:

Hopefully, there’s every reason to believe a war itself is going to be short. If 1991 is anything to go by, there’s not going to be a lot of fight in the Iraqi army. And we’re much stronger than we were in 1991, so the combination of a weaker Iraqi army and a stronger U.S. means it should be fast. My gut feeling is that it’s going to go down like a house of cards. Because we’re much stronger than we were in 1991, and he’s much weaker, and you saw how everyone gave up. But that doesn’t mean we should plan for it to be a house of cards. I mean there’s all kinds of bad scenarios that one could think of. I suspect that once we show real resolve, the regime is going to go down rather easily.

Though the Iraqi regime collapsed quickly (Baghdad fell within three weeks of the initial invasion), the war itself has dragged on even after the end of official action in 2011. An American contractor was killed and several American soldiers were hurt by a rocket attack in northern Iraq in December 2019 — 16 years after Doran asserted that the war would reshape the region for the better.

I reached out to Doran and will update if and when I hear back.

They can't decide why they assassinated an Iranian general, and they have no idea what to do next.

The great Senate anticlimax will soon be upon us, if you haven’t heard—an impeachment trial that will acquit President Donald Trump just as predictably as the Democratic-led House voted to charge him last month.

It’s an outcome so widely assumed that, given Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s delay in formally sending articles of impeachment over to the Senate, the public may be wondering whether there’s going to be a trial at all.

Yet while it is indeed nearly impossible to foresee 67 senators voting to remove Trump from office 10 months before a presidential election, there remains a lot more intrigue and uncertainty in the Senate than there was in the House, where not a single Republican broke with the president to back impeachment.

Trump’s fate will rest largely with the 53 Senate Republicans. At least 20 GOP senators would have to vote to convict the president, and there’s virtually no way that many will turn against a man who has tightened his viselike grip on their party. But a bipartisan rebuke is still possible. The range of votes for removal could go as high as the low 50s, if a handful of Republicans break with Trump, or it could fall much lower if the president secures total support from the GOP and picks off red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Doug Jones of Alabama, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. And the trial itself could be a relatively dry rehash of the House hearings, or it could feature dramatic new testimony from high-ranking administration officials who refused to cooperate with the House inquiry. That includes John Bolton, the former national security adviser, who yesterday announced that he would comply if the Senate votes to subpoena him.

The defection of just four Republicans—in combination with a unanimous Democratic vote—would mean that a majority of the Senate and a majority of the entire Congress had found that the president committed high crimes and misdemeanors in his dealings with Ukraine and his obstruction of the House’s impeachment investigation. A majority vote would also distinguish the Trump impeachment from that of former President Bill Clinton, whom most senators voted to acquit in 1999.

While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made no secret of his support for Trump, a sizable portion of his conference has kept much quieter about their views. Although many Senate Republicans have criticized House Democrats for rushing the impeachment process, several have also declined to take a position on the charges against Trump in deference to their role as likely “jurors” in the trial.

Their silence leaves open the possibility—albeit a slim one—that testimony from Bolton and others could alter the dynamic within the Senate GOP. The resulting vote might not be sufficient to remove Trump, but a bipartisan condemnation of the president months before his reelection bid might be the most his opponents can now realistically hope to achieve.

Here is a guide to some of the key groups of Senate Republicans to watch as the trial gets under way, from those firmly in Trump’s corner to those who might end up deserting him.

---

The Loyalists

Lindsey Graham, South Carolina

Rand Paul, Kentucky

Ted Cruz, Texas

Mike Lee, Utah

Josh Hawley, Missouri

The list of Trump’s most fervent defenders in the Senate is certainly longer than these five, but they are the ones you’re most likely to see on TV before and after the trial’s sessions, deploying the same over-the-top rhetoric—“a sham!” “fake impeachment”—that the president has used to denigrate the process. Graham, Paul, and Cruz have all gone from denouncing Trump during their rivalry in the 2016 GOP primary to standing between him and the Democratic efforts to kick him out of the White House. Graham has used his position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter—exactly what Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do in their July phone call. Cruz has said he’d support a bid by the president’s lawyers to subpoena the Bidens to testify in a Senate trial.

Lee, another onetime Trump critic on the right, has emerged as one of his staunchest allies behind the scenes, and, in contrast to some of his colleagues, he has said that the president “has done nothing wrong” in his dealings with Zelensky. Hawley is new to the Senate, but he’s tried to make a name for himself by attacking Democrats for their handling of impeachment. The Missouri freshman has introduced a motion that would allow the Senate to dismiss the charges against Trump without even holding a trial if Pelosi continues to delay formally sending the articles of impeachment across the Capitol. Ten Republican senators have signed on to the measure, including Cruz.

---

The Vulnerables

Joni Ernst, Iowa

Martha McSally, Arizona

Thom Tillis, North Carolina

Cory Gardner, Colorado

Dan Sullivan, Alaska

Democrats may have hoped that the handful of first-term Republicans facing competitive reelection bids this year might find it in their political interest to break with the president.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

Apparently feeling they need the support of Trump’s conservative base, Ernst, McSally, and Tillis have rallied behind the president and largely refrained from criticizing his actions on Ukraine at all. They’ve criticized House Democrats for their handling of the impeachment inquiry and appear locks to vote for acquittal. McSally may be taking the biggest risk: She was appointed to her seat only after losing a Senate race to Sinema in 2018 and is facing a serious challenge in November from Democrat Mark Kelly, the astronaut and husband of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Gardner and Sullivan have stayed more neutral. Gardner, who is considered the more vulnerable of the two, has mostly dodged questions about impeachment, although he did refer to the inquiry as a “political circus” and criticized Pelosi for her handling of it in October. Sullivan defeated Democratic Senator Mark Begich in 2014 and has kept a low profile during his first term. He told the Alaska Daily News last month that he might have avoided mentioning Biden specifically to the Ukrainian president if he were Trump, but he questioned whether the president’s actions rose to the level of an impeachable offense. “That’s the real question, and I think that’s a pretty high bar,” he said.

---

The Retirees

Lamar Alexander, Tennessee

Pat Roberts, Kansas

Mike Enzi, Wyoming

These are the true Senate wild cards—three aging institutionalists with no built-in ties to Trump whose decision not to seek reelection this fall conceivably frees them from a ballot-box confrontation with the president’s voters if they go against him. None of the three has given definitive indications of how they might vote, relying on the “I’ll be a juror” defense to avoid weighing in substantively on the charges. Still, what little they have said should give some comfort to Trump. Alexander, while calling the president’s call with Zelensky “inappropriate,” said in October that impeachment would be “a mistake” and later signed on to a resolution criticizing the House process before public hearings began. Roberts, meanwhile, has referred to impeachment as “political theater” and suggested that it’s a distraction from more important work Congress should be doing.

---

The Quiet Ones

Jim Risch, Idaho

Richard Burr, North Carolina

Risch and Burr, the chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, respectively, have said so little about the substance of the impeachment inquiry that there is at least a tiny bit of doubt about where they’ll come down. “I’m going to keep an open mind,” Risch told a local television station around Christmas. Burr, who worked closely with Democratic Senator Mark Warner on the Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is also not likely to face voters again, having said he’ll retire when his second Senate term ends in early 2023.

---

The Critics

Mitt Romney, Utah

Ben Sasse, Nebraska

Lisa Murkowski, Alaska

Susan Collins, Maine

If there are any Republican votes to convict Trump, they are most likely to come from this group. And in the unlikelier event that a Senate majority votes against the president, this is the gang that would make it happen. Romney and Sasse were the sharpest GOP critics of Trump after the White House released a summary of the president’s call with Zelensky last fall. Romney said it was “troubling in the extreme,” while Sasse warned Republicans not to “circle the wagons” around Trump and said there were “some really troubling things here.” Yet both have been quieter about the impeachment charges in the months since.

Murkowski and Collins have long been the GOP senators likeliest to buck Trump; both joined with the late Senator John McCain of Arizona to kill the party’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, and Murkowski was the lone Republican to oppose Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Collins is facing the added pressure of a formidable Democratic challenge to her reelection in 2020. Though she has withheld judgment on the articles of impeachment, Collins strongly criticized Trump for publicly asking China to investigate the Bidens in October, after he’d made the same request of Ukraine. She and Murkowski have also distanced themselves from McConnell’s acknowledgment last month that he was coordinating with the White House on how to structure the Senate trial. “When I heard that, I was disturbed,” Murkowski told an Alaska television station. “We have to take that step back from being hand in glove with the defense.”

So far, these four Republicans have all backed McConnell’s push to defer key decisions about issuing subpoenas until after a trial begins. But long before a final vote, Democrats will look to these senators—and perhaps others mentioned above—for support in calling witnesses, like Bolton, who they hope can bolster the case for impeachment. Whether Republicans go along with that request will likely be the biggest sign of just how persuadable they really are.

Christian Paz contributed reporting.

Bluetooth will soon roll out some of its technology's biggest improvements in its nearly 20-year history. From a report: The new Bluetooth standard will be known as LE Audio and one of the biggest improvements it will include will be a feature called Multi-Stream Audio. Bluetooth is currently limited to streaming audio to just a single device. That's fine for portable speakers and headphones where both sides are connected with a wire, but for wireless earbuds, such as Apple's AirPods, your smartphone can actually only connect to one side. That earbud then has to forward the audio stream onto the one in your other ear, which requires some clever software tricks to ensure everything remains in sync. Multi-Stream Audio will solve that, as it will allow a single device, such as a smartphone, to stream flawlessly synced audio to multiple audio devices at the same time. The most obvious benefit is that it will be much easier to make wireless earbuds work more reliably, without any audio lag issues. But the feature promises to also benefit those who want to use their wireless headphones with multiple devices at the same time, such as a tablet, phone, and a laptop, streamlining the process of switching between each audio source without having to go through an annoying disconnect/reconnect process each time. Bluetooth LE Audio will also make sharing a music stream with others possible. Users should be able to easily share audio from their smartphone with friends, as multiple sets of wireless headphones can be connected to a single source device at once, and each should receive the exact same audio stream in perfect sync with all the others. Further expanding on that idea is another new feature known as Broadcast Audio which allows a single audio source device to broadcast several audio streams to an unlimited number of wireless headphones, without any private pairing required.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Help sustain these comics — join the Sorensen Subscription Service!

Follow me on Twitter at @JenSorensen

Despite John Bolton’s willingness to testify about the Ukraine scandal, the GOP-controlled Senate has no immediate plans to subpoena him in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial — a win for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the White House.

While Democrats have called for testimony from Trump’s former national security adviser, so far there’s no sign that they will secure support from four Republicans they would need to follow through on their demand.

In their bid for a “fair trial,” Democrats were hoping moderate Republicans like Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah will endorse their efforts to bring in Bolton and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to testify at the trial. They also want to subpoena documents related to the Ukraine scandal.

But on Monday, Collins and Murkowski both signaled they wanted to begin the trial first. “I believe that the Senate should follow the precedent that was established in the trial of President Clinton,” Collins said, echoing McConnell’s argument. “I think that we will decide at that stage who we need to hear from.”

Murkowski, when asked about a potential Bolton subpoena, said: “We’ve got to get to the first place first.”

Romney said he was open to hearing testimony from Bolton, but he stopped short of saying he would vote with Democrats to subpoena him. Romney acknowledged Bolton “has firsthand information” on the Ukraine scandal, and “assuming that articles of impeachment reach the Senate, I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

Even vulnerable Republicans, such as Cory Gardner of Colorado, who faces a competitive reelection race in 2020, expressed no interest in hearing from Bolton.

“Is Nancy going to send the articles over? She doesn’t seem to care?” said Gardner, referring to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "You guys want to have a trial by Twitter but until she has the articles sent over there is no trial.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are losing patience with Pelosi and are accusing her of trying to dictate the terms of the Senate trial by withholding the articles of impeachment. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a staunch Trump ally, reiterated Monday he would move to change Senate rules to allow the chamber to move forward on its own authority if Pelosi refuses to transmit the articles soon.

“From my view, I think we should urge the speaker to send over the articles [of impeachment]. If she doesn’t, we should change the rules,” Graham told reporters on Monday. “You can’t let her use the rules against us. She has a duty to transmit them.”

“I don’t want to turn the Senate over to Nancy Pelosi,” Graham added.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also introduced his own resolution Monday that would allow the Senate to dismiss the articles of impeachment “for lack of prosecution.”

"My view is that the majority leader's made a very generous offer to Democrats, which is: Let's use the Clinton rules and start this trial. And we can decide witnesses and so forth later,” Hawley said. “Now, I don't know why we would call witnesses on the Democrat side. They've had their chance."

Hawley and other Republicans have argued that they should rely on the same information the House used to impeach the president. In their view, if the House could impeach Trump based on the information presented to the chamber, the Senate can make its decisions based on the same evidence.

The House voted in December to impeach Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, after he pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate his political rivals in exchange for military aid.

McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sparred again about the terms of the Senate impeachment trial on the floor Monday. McConnell is insisting the Senate use the same format as President Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial, when the Senate decided unanimously to initially hear arguments and then call witnesses.

“The Senate has a unanimous bipartisan precedent for when to handle midtrial questions such as witnesses: In the middle of the trial,” McConnell said Monday. “The Senate said, 100 to nothing, that was good enough for President Clinton. So it ought to be good enough for President Trump. Fair is fair.”

But Schumer has rejected that argument, noting the Clinton impeachment trial had sworn testimony from witnesses.

“Leader McConnell’s view of the trial is an Alice-in-Wonderland view,” Schumer said. “When Leader McConnell proposes that we follow the 1999 precedent, he is essentially arguing that we should conduct the entire impeachment trial first, and then once it’s over, decide on whether we need witnesses and documents.”

Andrew Desiderio, Burgess Everett and Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Just before Christmas, major tech conference CES, organized by the Consumer Technology Association, announced that of all people, Ivanka Trump would be appearing on the keynote stage with CES CEO Gary Shapiro at the 2020 CES expo. Shapiro was quoted in the press release as saying, “As a business leader and entrepreneur, Ivanka Trump is an advocate for creating family-sustaining jobs through workforce development, education and skills training.” And while none of those words are true when strung together into that sentence, the real issue that people across the technology industry had was: Why Ivanka Trump? She’s barely qualified to speak at a dinner party.

Tech commentator Rachel Sklar wrote on Twitter that, “This is a terrible choice on so many levels but also - what an insult to the YEARS AND YEARS of protesting how few women were invited to keynote & being told it was a pipeline problem while similarly-situated men were elevated. There are so many great, qualified women. Shame.” #BoycotCES began to trend and Shapiro and the CES began doing damage control.

Shapiro defended his organization’s decision in an interview with the BBC, saying that the CES has always gone out to White House administrations looking for people to come and talk at the trade show, pointing out that Ivanka Trump “co-chairs the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, whose members include companies like Apple, Walmart and IBM.” Of course, in that same interview, Shapiro wouldn’t explain the details of how Ivanka was chosen, or how Trump’s transportation secretary—and wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—Ellen Chao came to be two of the only women to receive these highly sought-after platforms in the tech industry’s largest trade show.

As Cindy Chin—founder of Women on the Block, a female tech industry empowerment organization—told the Guardian, “There needs to be more systematic representation of speakers across the board and not just for keynotes. It would be better if the background of the keynote speaker actually fit the industry it is serving and inspirational rather than talking heads and political.”

Shapiro will interview Ivanka Trump on Jan. 7, where she will share more of the famous Trump family wisdom that amounts to a two-word mantra: be corrupt.

At least they're not gripped by a cowardly fear like they were 17 years ago.

Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues have developed a battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. From a report: The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles, and a smartphone-sized version would be able to keep a phone charged for five days. To date, the problem with lithium-sulphur batteries has been that the capacity of the sulphur electrode is so large that it breaks apart over cycles of charging and discharging, and the energy advantage rapidly disappears, says Shaibani. "The electrode will fall apart, and then the battery dies fast." That happens because the sulphur electrode expands and contracts as it cycles, with a volume change of about 78 per cent. Volume change also occurs in electrodes in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars and smartphones, but is about eight times smaller. To prevent the electrode disintegrating in their lithium-sulphur battery, the researchers gave the sulphur particles more space to expand and contract. Usually, lithium-sulphur batteries have materials added that bind the particles together inside so the battery doesn't crack as it expands. Shaibani and her team used a smaller amount of a polymer binding material in their electrode, and created more spaced-out structures between the sulphur particles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive at the White House, on January 05, 2020. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The president capped off a weekend of tweeting with one that threatens to violate multiple laws.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump put a bookend on a weekend of remarkably dangerous and unhinged tweeting with a tweet that he seems to think satisfies his obligations under the War Powers Act to notify Congress about possible military strikes in Iran.

Tweeting three days after US forces killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s paramilitary forces, in an airstrike in Iraq at his direction, Trump indicated that he plans to escalate hostilities with Iran should the country retaliate. He also thumbed his nose at the idea that federal lawmakers represent any check on his powers as commander-in-chief.

“These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner,” Trump wrote. “Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!”

There are a number of profound legal problems with Trump’s tweet.

For one, as Yale law school professor Oona Hathaway pointed out, a tweet is not sufficient to satisfy the War Powers Act’s requirement that the president notify Congress within 48 hours of any military action “in writing, setting forth … the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place, and the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement.”

Secondly, Trump’s threat that he will hit Iran “perhaps in a disproportionate manner,” coming as it did a day after he threatened to destroy cultural sites in the country, suggests that Trump is prepared to commit war crimes. And third, Trump’s insistence that legal notice to Congress about military strikes “is not required” flatly contradicts the War Powers Act, which, as previously noted, requires presidential notification.

Alluding to these issues, the House Foreign Affairs Committee responded to Trump’s tweet by reminding him that “you’re not a dictator.”

But beyond specific legal problems pertaining to the War Powers Act and prohibitions in international law against disproportionate military strikes, Trump’s tweet illustrated his broader disregard for any sort of legal check on his power. He may not be a dictator, but he certainly seems to view himself as akin to one — and as willing to flaunt international law.

For instance, Trump’s Sunday tweet came a day after he posted a thread threatening to strike cultural sites in Iran if the country retaliates for the Soleimani assassination.

“Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have ... targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD,” Trump wrote.

But military strikes of that sort are prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, which ban “any acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples ... to use such objects in support of the military effort ... [and] to make such objects the object of reprisals.”

This threat led to Iranian leaders comparing Trump to a rogue power that made the destruction of cultural sites a key part of its policy: ISIS. (Notably, Fox News on Monday reported on Trump’s tweets as though they are totally normal presidential statements.)

Trump, however, wasted little time demonstrating that not only does he not feel constrained by international law, but he doesn’t particularly care about domestic ones, either. And since the president has faced few consequences thus far for his abuses of power and involvement in federal crimes, it’s unlikely that the prospect of violating them will deter him from doing what he wants.

---

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

We have a chicken-and-egg problem. Only in this case, the chicken is Trump’s desire to wag the dog to distract attention from his impeachment by ramping up hostilities in the Middle East. The egg is … interesting. The egg is the long-standing desire of two of those most entangled in the Ukraine scandal to launch a war with Iran. This time, we know the egg came first.

Both former national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are deeply involved in Trump’s efforts to extort political favors from Ukraine—so much so that Bolton is one of the four men sought by Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a witness for the Senate trial.

As the scandal unfolded, it was Bolton who was the boss of both Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Dr. Fiona Hill. He was there for the meetings in which Ambassador Gordon Sondland made clear the connections between Trump’s demands and assistance to Ukraine. It was Bolton who both sent Vindman to see the National Security Council lead attorney and described events in Ukraine as a “drug deal.”

Meanwhile, it was Mike Pompeo who was the actual boss of not just Sondland but also Ambassador Kurt Volker—two out of “three amigos.” It was Pompeo who stood aside when Rudy Giuliani smeared Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. It was Pompeo who turned a deaf ear to warnings from Ambassador William Taylor. It was Pompeo who repeatedly undermined his own department to support the extortion scheme.

Truthful testimony from either man is the one thing that could easily turn Trump’s Senate hearing from a test of how quickly Mitch McConnell can fling down a gavel to a genuine threat of removal from office. In fact, either Bolton or Pompeo could call a press conference at any time and utterly sink Trump by simply filling in the very narrow blanks in what the public already knows about Trump’s Ukraine scheme. That means that they, along with acting chief of staff and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, have tremendous power over Trump.

Bolton and Pompeo have long agreed on one thing: They want a war with Iran. In giving them that war, was Trump reaching for the only distraction he knew would be big enough to keep anyone from looking too closely at the ever-strengthening case for his removal, or was everything that’s happened in Iraq over the last week the payoff for the silence of men who have Trump under their thumb? Was it both?

As The Washington Post pointed out on Monday, Pompeo has been beating the war drum on Iran for years, and he was still beating that drum even as Trump prepared to let the missiles fly. Pompeo had already pushed for Trump to launch attacks against Iran and Shiite militia groups in the summer of 2019, following the downing of a U.S. drone. That time it didn’t work.

But this time Trump was willing to launch a war because a single contractor had been killed. That’s despite the fact that there are an unknown number of contractors in Iraq and at least 1,569 had been killed prior to the death on Dec. 27. Despite the fact that there are thousands of contractors still in Iraq, a fact that’s often used to disguise the real scale of ongoing U.S. involvement when officials talk about “only 5,000” military personnel. 

What made this contractor the last straw? What could possibly have happened in the last six months of 2019 that made Trump so much more willing to go into a conflict with Iran? Well … impeachment happened. The testimony of multiple witnesses describing Trump’s scheme and his use of Rudy Giuliani to drive a campaign of corruption. That happened. 

More recently, what happened is that a number of emails appeared showing that Trump was continuously involved in withholding assistance to Ukraine. In fact, sources have made some of this information available in an unredacted form that makes it clear that Trump acted directly and repeatedly, over objections that what he was doing violated laws concerning the distribution of congressionally approved funding.

There’s no doubt that Trump needed a distraction. Based on Trump’s willingness to engage in similar distractions in the past, and the fact that his Twitter account is littered with many, many pieces of evidence that Trump believed starting a war with Iran would be a boost for a politician seeking re-election, there may not be a need for any other reason—if it can be called reason—for his actions.

Except … Bolton and Pompeo. It’s quite a damned coincidence that the people in a position to squeeze Trump got just what they wanted, just at the moment that best serves Trump.

Trump’s stated reasons for launching a series of attacks against Shiite militia bases in Iraq and Syria was that an American contractor had been killed and four American soldiers injured. Injured “badly,” according to Trump. However, two days after the event, all four of the soldiers were back on duty, and two weeks later the public knows absolutely nothing about the contractor. It might be understandable that a name wasn’t released … but who was this person? Were they a doctor providing flu shots to Iraqi kids? Were they a planner helping with the local water supply? Or were they a Blackwater mercenary on site as “security”? It seems more than just odd that we don’t have that answer. That we, in fact, know almost nothing about the attack which supposedly formed the raison d'être for everything that has happened over the last two weeks.

Trump’s stated reason for killing Iranian general Soleimani was an “imminent threat” generated by a plan in progress. Except, said Trump, “we caught him.” But that idea seemed little short of ludicrous from the beginning, and as Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi made clear over the last two days, the “imminent threat” idea didn’t fit with either what Trump was telling him or what was actually happening on the ground in Iraq, where Soleimani seemed to be part of negotiations to actively de-escalate the cycle Trump fueled with the air strikes on Dec. 29. Faced with Abdul-Mahdi’s statements, even Pompeo seems to have dropped the idea that the strike against Soleimani thwarted some immediate threat, falling back on multiple variations of the idea that the general was simply a bad guy who had done bad things in the past and deserved to be killed.

The excuses Trump has made for his actions don’t begin to hold water. But there are more genuine reasons for bringing the world to the brink of war than just a distraction.

So which came first? Was it wagging the dog, or silencing the witnesses?

Former Housing Secretary Julián Castro, who dropped out of the 2020 presidential race last week, has endorsed Elizabeth Warren in a video posted to Twitter.

Thank you, @JulianCastro! You’ve been a powerful voice for bold, progressive change and I’m honored to have your support. Together, we'll fight to make sure every single family in America has a path to opportunity. https://t.co/uHs7DP4DcU

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 6, 2020

Said Castro in the video: “There’s one candidate I see who’s unafraid to fight like hell to make sure America’s promise will be there for everyone. Who will make sure that no matter where you live in America or where your family came from in the world, you have a path to opportunity too. That’s why I’m proud to endorse Elizabeth Warren for President.”

Castro will be with Warren at her Brooklyn campaign event Tuesday night, according to CNN. Could a Warren-Castro ticket be on the horizon?

The post Julián Castro Endorses Elizabeth Warren for President, Will Appear at Campaign Event: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Reports of Iranians and Iranian-Americans being detained for questioning upon entering the U.S. kicked off a furor on Sunday from Washington state to Washington, D.C., marking a new domestic blowback to the Trump administration’s targeted killing of a key Iranian leader.

The Washington state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a prominent Muslim civil liberties group, said on Sunday that more than 60 people of Iranian descent, including American citizens, were held for hourslong periods of questioning over the weekend at the Peace Arch checkpoint in Blaine, Wash., along the border with Canada. CAIR noted that many Iranian-Americans would continue to approach the port of entry over the weekend as some return to the U.S. after attending an Iranian pop concert Saturday in Vancouver.

The initial reports and the backlash they triggered — with references to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II — highlighted the potential risks inside the U.S. even before the fierce retaliation promised by the Iranian government for the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite paramilitary forces, by a U.S. military drone on Thursday.

CAIR said in its statement that a source at U.S. Customs and Border Protection had reported that the agency received a national directive from the Department of Homeland Security to “‘report’ and detain anyone with Iranian heritage entering the country who is deemed potentially suspicious or ‘adversarial,’ regardless of citizenship status.”

“We are working to verify reports of a broad nationwide directive to detain Iranian-Americans at ports of entry so that we can provide community members with accurate travel guidance,” Masih Fouladi, executive director of CAIR’s Washington chapter, said in a statement.

Len Saunders, an immigration attorney in Blaine, said his contacts through CBP indicated that headquarters in Washington had ordered new vetting procedures, which appear to be directed toward people born in Iran, that require port directors to sign off on admitting anyone held for questioning.

A CBP spokesperson denied that DHS or the agency had issued any such directive.

“Social media posts that CBP is detaining Iranian-Americans and refusing their entry into the U.S. because of their country of origin are false,” the spokesperson said.

The agency says it often adjusts operations and staffing to balance security needs with lawful travel and trade. Processing times at the Blaine port of entry reached an average of two hours Saturday evening, though CBP said some travelers waited up to four hours to cross.

Sam Sadr, who lives in North Vancouver, said he was held for nearly nine hours at the Peace Arch border crossing on Saturday after the birthplace printed on his Canadian passport caught the attention of the U.S. customs officer.

Sadr, who was born in Tehran, told POLITICO he was on his way to Seattle for the day with his family. The officer, he said, asked him to pull over and go into the border office to provide more information.

Sadr recalled arriving at the border at 11:07 a.m. Pacific time. He and his family were finally allowed to enter the U.S. around 7:45 p.m.

In between those times, the officers took their passports and asked lots of questions, he said. After a couple of hours, the officers asked the same questions again.

They wanted to know where they were coming from, where they went to school, whether they had military backgrounds and whether they had firearms licences, Sadr said.

“Why me? Why my parents? Why my sisters, brothers? I don’t know,” said Sadr, a professional photographer who received his Canadian citizenship two years ago.

“We are innocent. … This completely discriminates.”

While he was waiting, he said, he saw many other people of Iranian descent also held up at the border crossing. He said some people, including officers, appeared to be frustrated with the situation.

Sadr, who left Iran more than 12 years ago, said he and his family stayed in the U.S. for only about an hour since it was so late and the stores had closed.

Asked for comment on Sadr’s story and to explain the discrepancy between the “four hours” figure in CBP’s statement and Sadr’s nearly nine hour ordeal, a CBP spokesperson said the agency stood by their earlier statement.

Attorneys monitoring the situation at the border in Washington state said they had not seen any evidence that American citizens with Iranian ties were denied entry to the U.S. Those being held for questioning are now being processed more quickly — within 30 to 60 minutes, rather than upwards of 10 hours as some experienced on Saturday, said Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project’s Seattle office.

“It doesn’t make any sense, because these are individuals who are U.S. citizens and don’t have any individualized suspicion associated with them, other than the fact that they’re Iranian or of Iranian heritage,” he said. “What’s clear is that they are being targeted for the secondary inspection because of their Iranian background, and there must be some kind of directive” to CBP officers to pull them over, he added.

Attorneys in Washington state said CBP officers’ questions focused on travelers’ family members and where they went to school or worked, as well as whether they or a relative had any ties to the Iranian military.

The questioning of Iranians and Iranian-Americans wasn’t unique to Washington state.

John Ghazvinian, an Iranian-American historian and U.S. citizen, said he was subject to additional questioning on Sunday when he flew back on Air France from a trip to Egypt.

“Well, just landed at JFK and — no surprise — got taken to the special side room and got asked (among other things) how I feel about the situation with Iran,” he wrote in a tweet that went viral. “I wanted to be like: my book comes out in September, preorder now on amazon.”

In an interview, he said that the first CBP officer flipped through his passport and asked him, “When was the last time you were in Libya?”, to which he replied, “I’ve never been to Libya.” The officer quickly corrected himself to say "Iran," to which Ghazvinian told him that he had last been there in 2009. He then was asked more questions in a private secondary screening, he said, the first time he’s ever been held up when returning to the U.S.

Asked whether he felt he was pulled aside because he was Iranian-American, he said he didn’t “want to speculate on another person’s private thoughts or motivations, but [the officer’s] first question was about the last time I had been to Iran.”

Ghazvinian, the interim director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the officers told him they had flagged him for extra scrutiny because it looked as though he had bought a one-way ticket to the U.S., when in fact he hadn’t. The female CBP officer, whom he described as “very friendly,” also asked him in the secondary screening whether he had family members in Iran and what they thought of what is going on. He told them he hadn’t talked to them about the situation.

Then she asked him what he thought of the tensions between the U.S. and Iran, to which he responded by saying he didn’t think the question was relevant. “She said, ‘We are just curious about what people think about these things,’ and I said, ‘It feels a little political,’ and then she dropped it,” he recalled.

The events, which he called “inherently a stressful experience” and “nerve-wracking,” involved a five- to 10-minute wait and around three minutes of questioning, he said.

Soon after he cleared immigration and customs, he sent out the tweet and said he was “surprised by the attention it got. … It was not my intention to paint myself as some type of victim here. I don’t feel that way.”

“To be honest, I thought it was just funny and so I just sent out what I thought was a lighthearted tweet,” he said.

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said the accounts made public thus far were “very disturbing” and were stoking fear among a population already sensitive to border issues, given the Trump administration’s travel restrictions on Iranian nationals.

“The government has a legitimate interest in verifying identity, citizenship or legal status at the border, but it has no business infringing on the constitutional rights of citizens and legal permanent residents by detaining and invasively questioning them about their associations, religious or political beliefs or practices,” Shamsi said.

Reps. Adam Smith and Pramila Jayapal, both Seattle-area Democrats, tweeted Sunday that they were trying to gather more information on the detentions at the border with British Columbia.

“Let me be clear: Instituting xenophobic, shameful and unconstitutional policies that discriminate against innocent people, trample over basic civil rights, and put fear in the hearts of millions do not make us safer,” Jayapal said in a statement.

Rep. Suzan DelBene, a Democrat whose district includes Blaine, said she was also investigating the reports.

Parmida Esmaeilpour, a director with the Civic Association of Iranian Canadians in Vancouver, said concerns related to crossing the U.S. border had been building in her community for several days.

“It’s my understanding that [authorities] said that they would be detaining or questioning people who may have some sort of suspicious ties to the [Iranian] government,” said Esmaeilpour, whose association works to encourage Iranian-Canadians to engage more in Canada’s political process. “But in practice we’re seeing that it’s actually being applied much more indiscriminately to anyone of Iranian background who’s trying to cross the border.”

A Canada Border Services Agency spokesperson directed inquiries to DHS.

One former DHS official said he was worried that in the future, as part of a tit-for-tat with Iran, CBP could tighten its screening of potential visitors to the U.S. even more “to take a harder look and a longer view of somebody‘s travel history,” which would lead CBP port-of-entry directors and officers to “err on the side of caution absent any formal guidance.“

Saunders, the immigration lawyer, said two of his clients, both Persian-Canadians and one of whom is an American citizen, encountered hours of questioning at two different ports of entry in Washington state on Saturday.

“Why were 50 to 100 Persians sitting inside the Peace Arch port of entry yesterday for hours upon hours?” he said Sunday. “They were being singled out. I saw it myself.”

Andy Blatchford reported from Ottawa. Nahal Toosi and Connor O'Brien contributed reporting from Washington.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Chris Rowe, the chair of Delaware’s New Castle County Republican Committee resigned on Friday after using an anti-gay slur on Facebook. “Faggots cannot handle reality,” said Rowe in response to a follower’s comment.

The AP reports: “New Castle County Republican Party Chairman Chris Rowe said he agreed to resign after GOP chairwoman Jane Brady called him Wednesday and asked him to step down from the appointed position. Rowe told The Associated Press that he made the decision ‘begrudgingly and only under duress.'”

Rowe’s comment:

@GOP I know you all think like this, but the chair of the New Castle County (Delaware) is blatant in his homophobia. pic.twitter.com/z0wErpXrRi

— ukexpat (@ukexpat) January 1, 2020

Rowe tried to explain his way out of it in a post on the New Castle GOP Facebook page, writing: “My friend asked me why I used that specific word. He said, ‘Dude, I know you have many friends who are gay or lesbian, so why choose this word?’ I told him I have been using that word since before it ever meant what people are offended by today. In this context I used it for it’s impact & it was between close friends. … It was locker room talk between 2 men.” You can read his full remarks below.

The post Delaware GOP Chair Resigns After Facebook Comment That ‘Faggots Cannot Handle Reality’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Just about nobody in Washington wants to defend Qassem Soleimani—even if they condemn his killing. He was a terrorist kingpin; he destroyed the lives of countless people across an entire region for more than a decade; he had Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Lebanese, and American blood on his hands. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy slammed what he called an assassination as he tweeted, “Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question.” Representative Eliot Engel, the Democratic chair of House Foreign Affairs Committee, decried the lack of consultation with Congress; he also called Soleimani “the mastermind of immense violence, suffering, and instability.” Much of the litany of Soleimani’s crimes through two presidential administrations prior to Donald Trump’s is well-known.

So why kill him now?

George W. Bush did not target him during the height of the Iraq War, when Iranian-supplied roadside bombs and Iran-backed militias were killing hundreds of American troops. By 2011, that toll had reached more than 600 and Barack Obama was the president; he too declined to hit the general. But at some point Trump, who came into office vowing to pull the United States out from Middle Eastern wars, decided to cross a line two war-president predecessors feared breaching.

This fear wasn’t because of America’s long-standing prohibition of “assassination,” forged during the Cold War to check the excesses of the CIA. Successive administrations since September 11 have interpreted this ban narrowly, arguing that singling out an individual for death on the battlefield doesn’t really count. The ban arose in response to covert CIA plots to, for example, kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar during peacetime—essentially, attempting to kill because of political differences, not in wartime self-defense, said Matthew Waxman, who directs the National Security Law Program at Columbia University and served in the Bush administration. The Obama administration used the term targeted killing for strikes on terrorist leaders in overseas battlefields—arguing that they fell under a right to self-defense in an ongoing war against al-Qaeda.

Not everyone is convinced. “These killings cannot be distinguished from unlawful assassination,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, told me.

[Andrew Exum: Iran loses its indispensable man]

The Soleimani killing would be no more or less legal in this context than that of a nonstate leader just because he worked as a top general, in uniform, for a state. If you subscribe to the idea that targeting an individual combatant in self-defense isn’t the same as an assassination, then Soleimani is fair game—provided you credit Trump’s claim that Soleimani was plotting “imminent and sinister” attacks against Americans. A State Department official on a phone call with reporters noted, “Assassinations are not allowed under law.” But the official argued that this wasn’t one. “The criteria is: Do you have overwhelming evidence that somebody is going to launch a military or terrorist attack against you? Check that box. The second one is: Do you have some legal means to, like, have this guy arrested by the Belgian authorities or something? Check that box, because there’s no way anybody was going to stop Qassem Soleimani in the places he was running around—Damascus, Beirut. And so you take lethal action against him.”

If you believe targeted killings is a sanitized term for assassinations, which have become normalized in the drone-war era but are no less illegal, then targeting Soleimani is a war crime, especially since there’s no formal state of war between the United States and Iran. “Preemptive self-defense is never a legal justification for assassination,” O’Connell said. “Nothing is. The relevant law is the United Nations Charter, which defines self-defense as a right to respond to an actual and significant armed attack.”

Two administrations sidestepped this debate when it came to Soleimani, not as much for legal or moral reasons as for strategic ones. The two sides of this conflict have opted for other forms of confrontation, from proxy fights to sabotage to cyberattacks to sanctions, but they didn’t kill each other’s generals. Now that barrier has been shattered, leaving the world to await Iran’s next move in a game with suddenly higher stakes. From the Iranian perspective, it doesn’t much matter whether the U.S. administration considers Soleimani’s death an assassination or not. He’s still a dead general.

Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic representative and former CIA analyst focused on Shia militias, said in a statement that she’d seen friends and colleagues killed or hurt by Iranian weapons under Soleimani’s guidance when she served in Iraq. She said she was involved in discussions during both the Bush and Obama administrations about how to respond to his violence. Neither opted for assassination.

“What always kept both Democratic and Republican presidents from targeting Soleimani himself was the simple question: Was the strike worth the likely retaliation, and the potential to pull us into protracted conflict?” she said. “The two administrations I worked for both determined that the ultimate ends didn’t justify the means. The Trump Administration has made a different calculation.”

[Read: The Soleimani assassination is America’s most consequential strike this century]

Trump-administration officials have so far declined to specify what exactly prompted that calculation, though Trump said Soleimani was planning to attack American diplomats and military personnel. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told some reporters that “the risk of inaction exceeded the risk of action,” according to The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe.

The risks of action in other cases have restrained the U.S. from targeting military leaders—for instance, to hold on to the possibility of negotiations, or out of the belief, in Murphy’s words, that “such action will get more, not less, Americans killed.” But action is not unprecedented. “We have [in the past] gone after very, very senior military leaders; usually that would be kind of in the course of an ongoing war,” Waxman told me. During the Iraq War, a congressionally authorized state-on-state conflict, U.S. troops had a “deck of cards” of top most-wanted figures, including senior leaders in Saddam Hussein’s armed forces. During World War II, the U.S. killed the Japanese admiral who plotted the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But in both of those cases, the United States was in a formal state of armed conflict. More recently, as the U.S. has focused on fighting nonstate terrorist organizations, it has also gone after the leadership of those groups. Though Iran has since May staged a series of violent attacks against U.S. allies and interests in the region—culminating, in the past two months, in rocket attacks against U.S. or allied bases in Iraq and the death of an American contractor—no formal war has been declared. And when Soleimani was killed, he died on the soil of a U.S.-allied country, whose government then condemned the attack.

The State Department official conceded the risks in the background call with reporters. “We cannot promise that we have broken the circle of violence,” the official said. But without Soleimani, the official said, “if we do see an increase in violence, it probably will not be as devilishly ingenious.”

President Donald Trump speaks at a religious event on following the killing of Qassem Soleimani. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Trump said the US would attack 52 sites in Iran should the country retaliate for the killing of Qassem Soleimani.

President Donald Trump threatened to attack multiple Iranian sites if the Middle Eastern nation strikes any American people or assets in a series of tweets Saturday, as Iran mourns the loss of a top leader, General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US airstrike in Iraq on Friday.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei promised “harsh revenge” for Soleimani’s death, who was considered the second-most powerful Iranian official after a three day mourning period.

If Iran follows through on that promise, the US will target 52 sites within the country “some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” Trump wrote. “Those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!”

The Trump administration already faces questions about the legality of its attack on Soleimani, and Sunday, Iranian officials accused Trump of threatening to carry out war crimes against the country.

“Having committed grave breaches of int’l law in Friday’s cowardly assassinations, [Trump] threatens to commit again new breaches of JUS COGENS,” Javad Zarif tweeted, with “jus cogens” referring to the norms of international law. “Targeting cultural sites is a WAR CRIME.”

Zarif went on to compare Trump to ISIS, which also targeted cultural sites during its offensive in Syria and Iraq, a comparison that was echoed by Iran’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi, who tweeted Sunday, “Like ISIS, Like Hitler, Like Genghis! They all hate cultures. Trump is a terrorist in a suit.”

On CNN’s State of the Union, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended Trump’s threats of strike on cultural targets, calling them “consistent with the rule of law” and promising that the Trump administration will “do the things that are right.” He did not specify how attacking cultural or civilian targets would be consistent with international law.

Ahead of Pompeo’s television appearance, Trump doubled down on his threats on Twitter, writing that the US military is the “biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way...and without hesitation!” He also said that if Iran retaliates as promised, “we will hit them harder than they have ever been hit before!”

According to a CNN interview with Khamenei’s military adviser, Maj. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, Iran does, in fact, plan to attack US military installations in retaliation for the assassination of Soleimani. Dehghan also said that Iran will work to strike when US leaders least expect it, saying, “Our reaction will be wise, well considered and in time, with decisive deterrent effect.”

Further escalations in the US-Iran conflict could have devastating effects

Soleimani’s killing was a game-changer in a longstanding escalation of tensions between the US and Iran that began with Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and continued with a series of crippling sanctions over the country’s missile program and support for terrorism.

As Vox’s Dylan Scott has explained, Iran has met each of these US actions with increasingly bold responses:

Iran has responded with a series of provocative acts, from attacking container ships in the Persian Gulf to drone strikes on Saudi oil facilities. Through its proxy militias, it has also struck directly at American assets, last week killing a US contractor near the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, which in turn lead to US strikes on Iranian militias and then violent protests at the US embassy in Baghdad led by those Iranian-backed militias.

These increasing tensions, further heightened by the killing of Soleimani, Trump’s recent threats, and Iran’s promises of revenge, mean the US and Iran have taken another major step towards a conflict that national security expert Ilan Goldenberg told Vox’s Alex Ward would be “so much worse than Iraq.”

Fortunately, experts have said that all-out warfare is unlikely (though still possible) given that neither country is likely to be eager to jump into armed conflict. But Iranian officials have deemed Soleimani a “martyr” whose death requires retaliation.

And Soleimani’s death has united Iranians across the political spectrum as they undergo three days of national mourning to commemorate the leader deemed a hero. State news outlets allotted their entire broadcasts Friday to commemorate him and comedy films and concerts were postponed, Al Jazeera reported.

Tens of thousands of mourners filled the streets of Ahvaz and Mashhad Sunday, where Soleimai’s remains were transported for public processions.

Mourners in Baghdad Saturday chanted “Death to America” and “We will take our revenge,” according to the Associated Press.

And beyond tit-for-tat actions between Iran and the US, Soleimani’s killing seems poised to have other, far-reaching repercussions.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Sunday morning the death has Iranian officials planning an even larger retreat from the broken nuclear deal than originally planned. The country has already begun stockpiling uranium and exceeding enrichment limits imposed by the agreement, and Sunday afternoon Iranian officials said the country will no longer abide by any of the commitments outlined in the deal.

In Iraq too, where Soleimani’s death took place, leaders hope to make radical changes to the current state of affairs. That country’s prime minister recommended Parliament order US troops to leave the country over concerns the US violated Iraqi sovereignty in its assassination. Sunday, lawmakers quickly voted for a resolution to do just that, in a move that could completely alter the US-Iraqi relationship and fundamentally change the fight against ISIS.

Even before the vote and Iran’s announcement on its nuclear plans, experts agreed the escalating tensions would cause further instability in the Middle East. Just days after Soleimani was killed, that instability seems all the more certain.

A new leak of more than 100,000 documents from Cambridge Analytica's work in 68 different countries "will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on 'an industrial scale,'" writes the Guardian. Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed shares their report: The release of documents began on New Year's Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links to material on elections in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. The documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoenaed by Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Kaiser, who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary The Great Hack, decided to go public after last month's election in Britain. "It's so abundantly clear our electoral systems are wide open to abuse," she said. "I'm very fearful about what is going to happen in the US election later this year, and I think one of the few ways of protecting ourselves is to get as much information out there as possible." The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a "breadth and depth of the work" that went "way beyond what people think they know about 'the Cambridge Analytica scandal....'" Kaiser said the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation that worked with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns to manipulate and influence people, and that raised huge national security implications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s state television reported that the country will no longer abide by any of the limits of its 2015 nuclear deal.

The announcement came Sunday night after another Iranian official said it would consider taking even-harsher steps over the U.S. killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani on Friday in Baghdad. State TV cited a statement by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s administration saying the country will not observe limitations on its enrichment, the amount of stockpiled enriched uranium as well as research and development in its nuclear activities.

It did not elaborate on what levels it would immediately reach in its program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations watchdog observing Iran’s program, could not be immediately reach for comment.

Hundreds of thousands flooded streets Sunday in Iran to walk alongside a casket carrying the general’s remains.

Mourners beat their chests, wept and cried out carrying posters bearing the image of Soleimani, the leader of its expeditionary Quds Force that organizes Tehran’s proxy forces in the wider Mideast.

The leader of one such proxy, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, said Soleimani’s killing made U.S. military bases, warships and service members spread across the region fair targets for attacks. A former Revolutionary Guard leader suggested the Israeli city of Haifa and “centers” like Tel Aviv could be targeted.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s parliament voted in favor of a resolution calling for an end of the foreign military presence in their nation, an effort aimed at expelling the 5,000 U.S. troops stationed there over the war against the Islamic State group.

Soleimani’s killing Friday escalated the crisis between Tehran and Washington after months of trading attacks and threats that have put the wider Middle East on edge. The conflict is rooted in Trump pulling out of Iran’s atomic accord and imposing sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy.

Iran has promised “harsh revenge” for the U.S. attack, which shocked Iranians across all political lines. Many saw Soleimani as a pillar of the Islamic Republic at a moment when it is beset by U.S. sanctions and recent anti-government protests.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Thumbs up, said U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken in a Friday order clearing the way for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani to start sharing information with the House Intelligence Committee. 

Lev Parnas, a close sidekick of Giuliani who is charged with violating federal campaign finance laws, had sought permission from the courts earlier this week to begin turning over evidence to Congress that had been seized during the FBI's investigation into him. The House Intelligence panel subpoenaed the materials, which include documents and the contents of a seized iPhone, back in October. However, the information could still prove relevant to the impeachment investigation of Trump since Parnas was in regular contact with Giuliani, Trump’s point man on the Ukraine scheme for which he has been impeached.

It's just one more potential bombshell that could drop as Senate Republicans desperately continue their quest to avoid a real trial with actual witnesses and evidence.