James.galbraith

Mr. Gay Canada 2019 Josh Rimer and his fiancé Heath wanted to have their wedding at the Sheraton Buganvilias Resort & Convention Center in the popular Mexican LGBTQ resort destination of Puerto Vallarta but the hotel told them that it won’t host a same-sex wedding.

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One year later we returned to the same place where Heath proposed to me. We’re still engaged and still planning our wedding, but in the meantime enjoying being fiancés. • • • • #calgarypride #pride2019 #pride #gaypride #gaycalgary #loveislove #husbands #gayhusbands #gaylove #lovewins #gaycouple #gayrelationship #gayhusband #gayboyfriend #gayboyfriends #gayfiance #gayfiances #engaged #gayproposal #gayisok #gaymale #gayisokay #gaylife #gayinsta

A post shared by Josh Rimer (Mr. Gay Canada) (@joshrimer) on Sep 3, 2019 at 9:35am PDT

Rimer described the complex, frustrating, and homophobic experience he had trying to book the hotel for the wedding in a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday.

“This is probably the most homophobic experience I’ve ever encountered personally in my entire life. … It’s not like I’m trying to book a wedding in Uganda! This is Puerto Vallarta! It should not be an issue.”

Rimer said the manager at the hotel told him “we don’t specialize in same-sex weddings” and suggested other hotels that do in “this very, long, weird, rambling answer.”

Rimer later received an email from the manager that read, in part: “I am infinitely grateful that you have thought of Sheraton for your big day., however, our hotel and our staff is not specialized to carry out an equal wedding and we would not like to take your wedding as a trial and error as our service could be poor compared to what characterized Sheraton, because we know and we are aware that is your special day for you and your fiancé, and do not want that by our non-specialized service some conflict can be generated on your big day.”

Wrote Rimer: “I still can’t believe this happened today and is even a thing we need to worry about in 2019. I guess moving forward we’ll have to be sure to be upfront with the fact that we’re both men when it comes to anything we want to book that has to do with our wedding, which is pretty sad and just another example of how we still have a ways to go toward equality.”

UPDATE: Jeff Flaherty, a Marriott spokesperson with their Global Communications & Public Affairs office, provided the following statement to Out & About Puerto Vallarta:

“We are troubled and greatly concerned about the experience reported by Mr. Rimer.  Marriott has long been committed to providing an environment where all are welcome including our LGBTQ guests and their loved ones. We have contacted Mr. Rimer and expressed our sincerest apologies for his experience.  In addition, we are looking further into the matter to better understand what happened and do what we can to prevent hurtful experiences like this from happening again.”

The post Puerto Vallarta Sheraton Tells ‘Mr. Gay Canada’ Josh Rimer and His Fiancé it Won’t Host a Wedding Between Two Men: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Unfortunately, the breeding population of Mars was entirely sysadmins, resulting in dangerous founder effects. On the plus side, their revolution against Earth will be entirely passive-aggressive.

Today's News:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Just five metropolitan areas -- Boston; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and San Jose, Calif. -- accounted for 90% of all U.S. high-tech job growth between 2005 to 2017 (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), according to the research (PDF) by think-tank scholars Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The nation's 377 other metro areas accounted for 10% of the 256,063 jobs created during that period in 13 high-tech industries such as software publishing, pharmaceutical manufacturing and semiconductor production. Among the smaller cities that gained tech jobs were Madison, Wis.; Albany, N.Y.; Provo, Utah; and Pittsburgh. Some prominent cities -- including New York and Austin -- lagged in tech job creation, according to the study. The result is increased concentration of high-tech resources in just a few places and a strengthening of economic forces that are dividing the nation. Tech industries find they are most productive when they have resources clustered in few places. Such clustering -- which economists call "agglomeration" -- allows for the fast spread of new ideas and a concentrated talent pool from which businesses recruit. The forces of agglomeration, economists say, run counter to the idea that technology might allow people to work from anywhere, even in remote places. The trend is creating problems for the cities that have these concentrations of workers and for those places that don't. High-tech cities like San Francisco and Boston are becoming increasingly unaffordable as home prices soar, while cities outside of these high-tech hubs are missing out on the dynamism that technology creates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Several people were killed, including at least one officer, with many others injured, on Tuesday afternoon in Jersey City, New Jersey, Mayor Steven Fulop said, but did not provide further information. According to officials, two gunmen are barricaded inside a store after opening fire with at least one gun resulting in a firefight involving dozens of law enforcement officers, The New York Times reported.

“We need a lot of prayers right now for Jersey City officers,” tweeted the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association. “Keep all those involved in your thoughts.”

For over an hour, loud exchanges of gunfire were heard through the city’s Greenville neighborhood. All public schools in the area have reportedly been placed under lockdown, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); the FBI; and the New York Police Department Bomb Squad responding to the situation. Helicopters are circling overhead with paramedics on the scene.

A spokesman for the ATF said the agency was treating the incident as an “active shooter” situation.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the men and women of the Jersey City Police Department, especially with the officers shot during this standoff, and with the residents and schoolchildren currently under lockdown, Gov. Philip D. Murphy said in a statement.

According to CNN, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal is working closely with local, county, state, and federal officials to make sure everybody is safe. The president has also been alerted of the situation. "Please keep the officers of the Jersey City Police Department in your thoughts and prayers as they work to resolve the situation," Grewal said in a statement. "We remain, as always, extraordinarily grateful for their service and their sacrifice."

This is a developing story that will be updated.

US Attorney General Bill Barr | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In a new interview, Barr said it’s bad when the government tries to affect “the outcome of the election.” Yes, seriously.

It’s often said that Donald Trump’s superpower is his lack of shame. It appears that Attorney General Bill Barr has been bitten by the same politically radioactive spider, at least if his Tuesday interview with NBC is any indication.

The interview with host Pete Williams focused on the Department of Justice’s inspector general report on the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Barr said a number of questionable things in the interview, including contradicting one of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s core findings: that there was legitimate reason to investigate links between the Trump campaign and Russia. He also tried to spin the Trump team’s contacts with Russia as something that “most campaigns” do.

But the most unbelievable line came when Barr attempted to cast the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign staff in 2016 as “the greatest danger to our free system” — because in his mind, that constituted the government abusing its powers to influence an election. Yes, really:

From a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government used the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.

This is just not an accurate description of what happened in 2016. There is no credible evidence that the FBI investigation was an attempt to intervene in the election, which is a conspiracy theory that doesn’t even pass the most basic smell test. The existence of the Trump-Russia investigation wasn’t officially confirmed until March 2017 — and the most prominent leak during the campaign was pro-Trump, resulting in an iconically false New York Times headline: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” Why would the FBI keep its evidence against Trump secret until after the election, if it was trying to influence the outcome?

But setting aside the falsehoods, the sheer chutzpah of Barr’s comments is staggering. Again, according to Barr, “The greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government use the apparatus of the state ... in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.”

What president might be doing something like that, right now, and getting impeached for it?

In all seriousness, though, Barr’s move here is disturbingly Orwellian. He correctly identified the abuse of power to influence elections as a threat to American democracy, but then argued that the people who investigated Trump are the ones who are actually guilty of it. The criminal becomes the victim, the authoritarian the guarantor of our freedoms. You heard a similar refrain from Republicans during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing on Monday, when they repeatedly accused the Democrats of being the real threat to democracy.

Barr’s embrace of this kind of truth-annihilating strategy is particularly interesting. He’s an establishment Republican with long credentials in the party, but one who has emerged as one of the most capable and willing defenders of Trump and the ideology for which he stands. Barr’s reasons for this, as my colleague Ezra Klein explained, stem from a deep sense of persecution, a belief that conservatives and Christians are under siege from ruthless progressives, an existential battle that must be waged if America as we know it is to be preserved.

Under these circumstances, a lot becomes justifiable — even the kind of assaults on the idea of truth more commonly seen in various types of authoritarian regimes (North Korea’s formal name, for example, is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). It’s a way of emptying words of their content, of transmuting ideas like “democratic” to mean “in the interests of the ruling faction.”

In today’s Republican Party, this has been a go-to move at the highest levels, part of the acceptable toolbox for fighting back against what the GOP sees as a “progressive holy war” (as Barr put it in a recent speech). The party has been enabled by a pliant media ecosystem, one that actively separates Republican partisans from sources of criticism and comfortably reassures their voters that up is, in fact, down. And Republicans will continue to do it until, somehow, they’re made to suffer the consequences.

Ahead of the release of the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR, Apple gave several of the machines to prominent tech YouTubers to test out, and their first impressions, overviews, and unboxings of the ‌Mac Pro‌ are now available.

MKBHD, iJustine, and Jonathan Morrison were each able to spend a couple of weeks with the ‌Mac Pro‌ and Pro Display XDR, using the setup for video editing workflows. YouTubers were provided with higher-end machines featuring the 28-core Intel Xeon W processors, 384GB RAM, 4TB SSD, an Afterburner Card, and two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II GPUs.


MKBHD had a few interesting ‌Mac Pro‌ tidbits to share, including details on the inclusion of a new memory management interface that shows an overview of memory management with how the memory is arranged, along with an overview of PCI slots.

He said that he has two main takeaways after using the ‌Mac Pro‌ for a few weeks: "It's really quiet and it's really fast." In a rendering test, the ‌Mac Pro‌ did in four minutes what it took the 16-inch MacBook Pro 20 minutes to do and the iMac Pro 12 minutes to do.


iJustine focused on the new accessories that come with the ‌Mac Pro‌, including a black Magic Mouse, a black Magic Trackpad, and a black and silver Magic Keyboard.

iJustine also provided an interesting visual comparison between the old ‌Mac Pro‌ tower and the new ‌Mac Pro‌ machine, which have quite a few design similarities.


Morrison said that the Pro Display XDR with its nano coating technology is a "game changer," though you need to see the display in person to really appreciate it. He too highlighted the ‌Mac Pro‌'s quiet operation, saying that it was near silent even with "every core lit up."

The ‌Mac Pro‌ is "far beyond what most of us need" according to Morrison.


Additional hands on experiences, benchmarks, and reviews should be forthcoming now that the ‌Mac Pro‌ is available to order. The first machines purchased today will be arriving to customers starting next week.


This article, "Tech YouTubers Share First Impressions of New Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Late in the day on Monday, New York State Attorney General Letitia James issued a new subpoena in her investigation of the National Rifle Association. This is the latest turn in a months-long investigation of the nonprofit Second Amendment organization. The New York Times reports that sources who have “knowledge of the document” say that it covers areas of investigation ranging from the NRA’s tax compliance, the use of their charities to move money about, campaign financing, and monies paid out to NRA board members.

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According to the Times, the charity funding and potential non-reporting of funding, is one of the main focuses of the new subpoena. The state attorney general is also looking into whether or not the NRA circumvented campaign finance laws by paying millions to political consulting firms Starboard Strategic and OnMessage, “as a way to direct money to Republican candidates advised by OnMessage, circumventing laws restricting how much groups like the N.R.A. can donate to political campaigns.”

The internal power battle between the NRA’s CEO Wayne LaPierre and others represented by the public relations firm Ackerman McQueen, has provided an insight into the luxurious spending, easy-money, and lifestyle of the LaPierre clan. The trickle that became a deluge of accusations between the two businesses has brought about investigative reports into the NRA, and led some experts to openly question the NRA’s tax-exempt, nonprofit status.

The past year has been a monumental one for the gun carrying warmongering organization. They’ve been directly linked to Russian espionage, and have come off a year of amazing financial loss. They have weathered all of this while continuing to promote their special brand of incoherent bloody-handed apologist politics. But while there are still tons of conservative politicians knee deep in NRA blood money, the political results for the Second Amendment cheerleaders have been less impressive. While this all goes on, Wayne LaPierre has been able to continue living in the same luxurious manner as he’s become accustomed to.

Thoughts and prayers.

Avast, the multibillion-dollar Czech security company, doesn't just make money from protecting its 400 million users' information. It also profits in part because of sales of users' Web browsing habits and has been doing so since at least 2013. From a report: That's led to some labelling its tools "spyware," the very thing Avast is supposed to be protecting users from. Both Mozilla and Opera were concerned enough to remove some Avast tools from their add-on stores earlier this month, though the anti-virus provider says it's working with Mozilla to get its products back online. But recently appointed chief executive Ondrej Vlcek tells Forbes there's no privacy scandal here. All that user information that it sells cannot be traced back to individual users, he asserts. Here's how it works, according to Vlcek: Avast users have their Web activity harvested by the company's browser extensions. But before it lands on Avast servers, the data is stripped of anything that might expose an individual's identity, such as a name in the URL, as when a Facebook user is logged in. All that data is analysed by Jumpshot, a company that's 65%-owned by Avast, before being sold on as "insights" to customers. Those customers might be investors or brand managers. What do those customers get? Vlcek says Jumpshot, which was initially acquired in 2013, provides "insights on how cohorts of users on the internet use the web." For instance, it could show a percentage of visitors who went from one website to another. That could be useful to anyone monitoring an advertising campaign. "Typical customers would be, for example, investors, who would be interested in how online companies are doing in terms of their new campaigns," the new Avast chief explains. Say Amazon launches a new product -- Jumpshot could determine how much interest it's getting online.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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It can be hard to know what to say. Just show compassion.

Science supports what we intuitively understand: Strong relationships enhance the quality of our lives. We have all felt our outlook brighten after a meaningful conversation and our mood sour after conflict. We have all had a bad day turn around after an afternoon of laughter and story-swapping with good friends. That’s because having social support not only boosts our mental health, research has found, it also softens the impact of stress.

Our desire to belong is so universal that psychologists have labeled it a fundamental motivational drive. Social isolation is linked to a variety of problems, including attempting suicide and premature death. Loneliness, in other words, is finally being recognized as a public health issue.

As a clinical psychologist, I provide therapy to people who have been through heart-wrenching experiences that can leave them feeling deeply alone — the death of a family member, sexual assault, domestic violence, unemployment, and other hardships. One of my top priorities as a therapist is working with patients to increase their sources of social support. Many have loved ones who are eager to help. The problem is, they may not know how to.

When we are not equipped to support loved ones through a hard time, our discomfort can compel us to point out a bright side or offer a simple solution, which may come across as dismissive. Sometimes, my patients say they walk away feeling judged or burdensome. While putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and treating people how we want to be treated are generally useful principles, they are not always the most effective ways to cultivate compassion. It is hard to imagine being in a situation that you have not actually been in, and people differ in what they find comforting.

Through years of working with therapy patients and conducting mental health research, I have found some useful approaches for comforting people in pain. These are the most effective:

Ask them how they are feeling. Then, listen non-judgmentally to their response.

The simple act of asking someone how they’re doing, with an open-ended question, shows that you care. Listen attentively rather than interrupting or offering your opinion. Ask simple follow-up questions like, “What does that feel like?” or “What has been on your mind as you’re going through this?” This communicates that you genuinely want to know how they’re doing and feel comfortable hearing the truth.

Show them that you want to understand and express sympathy.

For example, if someone is struggling with a new medical diagnosis, you can say, “It sounds like you’re most worried about the side effects of the treatment. Is that right?” If you’re speaking in person, nonverbal communication, like a concerned facial expression, is a powerful way to convey support. You can also express kindness and validation through statements such as, “I’m sad that you’re in so much pain right now,” or “You’re in such a tough situation.”

Ask how you can support them and resist jumping in to problem-solve.

As a therapist, I help patients assert their requests for emotional support to friends and family members. You can’t be expected to mindread and know what will comfort every person in every situation. Acknowledging that and asking, “How can I support you?” or “What can I do to help?” expresses a desire to assist without presuming you know what is best for them.

Check in to see if they are suicidal.

Emotional pain can feel unbearable at times, especially for people lacking support and resources. Sometimes, this leads to suicidal thoughts. If someone you care about is going through a hard time, especially if they’ve had suicidal thoughts in the past, ask them directly if they are thinking about hurting or killing themselves. You may feel uncomfortable bringing it up, but research shows that asking about suicide is unlikely to harm people and may benefit them. It opens opportunities to share mental health resources, like the Crisis Text Line or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. It’s also helpful to talk about a plan for safety, including reducing access to firearms and other lethal means.

Reassure them, realistically.

Statements like “Everything will be fine,” “It could be worse,” or “You just need to stop thinking that way,” often lead people to feel ashamed for expressing pain, and rarely set them on a better path. Instead, try saying things like, “There’s help available; we’ll find it together,” “A lot of people love you. You don’t have to get through this alone,” or “I’ve seen you get through extremely challenging times in the past, I believe in you.”

There’s no perfect thing to say in the most difficult situations, but we can support each other by opening dialogue, expressing compassion, and listening with the goal of understanding. Though sometimes hard to initiate, these conversations are the ones that strengthen our relationships. They make us feel we have a place to turn the next time the world feels lonely and dark.

Kathryn Gordon, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist living in North Dakota. She is writing The Suicidal Thoughts Workbook: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Skills to Reduce Emotional Pain, Increase Hope, and Prevent Suicide for New Harbinger. You can follow her on Twitter.

For months, even as special counsel Robert Mueller was finishing up his report, and evidence of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign’s over 100 contacts with Russian operatives was spilling out, Republicans had an answer: Just wait. Just wait for Michael Horowitz. Every piece of evidence of wrongdoing by Trump or any member of his team was met by immediate claims that a FISA warrant against former Trump adviser Carter Page was issued illegally, that the contacts between former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos and Russia were the result of an FBI plant, and that the FBI was riddled by deep-state “Never Trumpers” who were determined to mount a coup … even if at least one of them was “lovely.”

Only weeks after he took office, Donald Trump accused President Barack Obama of “taping” his phone lines. Rep. Devin Nunes claimed that there was widespread corruption inside the FBI, and that the agency had engaged in repeated surveillance abuses during the 2016 campaign. Attorney General William Barr accused the FBI of spying on the Trump campaign in testimony before Congress. 

All they had to do was wait for Department of Justice inspector general Horowitz. The inspector general’s report was going to pull back the curtain, reveal the truth, and explain that the whole Russia investigation could genuinely be dismissed as an illegal witch hunt. The report was going to provide Trump with hard evidence against James Comey, against Andrew McCabe, against Peter Strzok, against everyone who had ever had the gall to actually investigate Trump’s open, public outreach to Vladimir Putin.

Except it didn’t. Instead. the inspector general found that the FBI had had more than adequate reason to open the investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. It found that all of the people who have populated thousands of Trump tweets over the last years—Comey, McCabe, and agents up and down the line—acted without political intent, out of concern over national security. Horowitz’s report didn’t just fail to find any of the conspiracies that Trump and Barr had been touting; it also laid to rest any idea that there is anything, anything, behind those claims.

So Republicans have now decided to take a two-pronged approach, the first part of which is to simply ignore what the report says and pretend that it backs up their claims. After all, it’s not as if the American public is going to read the report, and it’s not as if the media is going to call them on their lies. That was the big takeaway from the Mueller report: It doesn’t matter what the report says. It only matters what they say it says. 

And then there’s the Republicans’ second argument: Wait for Durham.

All the way back in July, it was thought that the Horowitz report was all but complete. However, after William Barr got his first look at what the inspector general had found, it was immediately obvious that he wasn’t happy. He scouted around the DOJ and fingered U.S. attorney John Durham to conduct a second investigation of the investigation, one that would not just overlap the investigation already undertaken by Horowitz, but do so with the right spin on the approach.

Demonstrating his absolute lack of belief that Durham could be trusted to follow up on his own, Barr then toured him around the world—visiting Australia, Rome, and London—to hammer intelligence agencies everywhere for one thing: evidence that could be used to harm U.S. intelligence. So far, it appears that allied agencies have been either unwilling or unable to provide Barr and Durham with any evidence of the deep-state conspiracy of right-wing dreams. But that’s unlikely to stop them.

And of course … they can just make it up. Just as they are now making up their own versions of the results of the Horowitz report. The real, genuine words of the Horowitz report are devastating to the conspiracy theories that are the foundation of Trump’s claims about President Obama and Hillary Clinton and are directly connected to Trump’s actions in Ukraine. That was enough to earn an unprecedented action from Barr himself and from his apprentice, attacking their own inspector general on the day of the report’s release.

Trump and other Republicans, such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, aren’t bothering with that step. They’re just moving straight on to pretending that the Horowitz report says what they always claimed it would say. Because … why not? There’s no penalty for lying, no check on corruption, and their statements are assured a supportive platform on every form of media.

The Horowitz report also includes information actually showing that Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s father really did shoot John F. Kennedy. No, that’s not true. But it’s at least as true as everything Kevin McCarthy said when talking about the report at a Tuesday morning press conference.

The Republicans took a powerful lesson away from the special counsel report, and it had nothing to do with Trump’s more than 100 contacts with Russian operatives or the times when he directly ordered his attorney to lie to Congress. What they learned is that they could characterize the findings of an official government report in any way that they wanted, even if that characterization was exactly the opposite of what was actually on the pages of the report. And they’ll keep right on doing so until John Durham finally delivers them a report that indulges every conspiracy theory and relishes every smear.

Then they’ll lie about that one to make it sound even worse.

On Tuesday morning, House leadership announced that the Judiciary Committee will be considering two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump: one count of abuse of office and one count of obstruction of Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the proceedings, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler read the charges. But it was House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff who put the real punch behind the proceedings. In a very brief speech, Schiff summed up the gravity of Trump’s actions in a way that explained precisely why the House had to move forward with impeachment and absolutely demolished the “Why not wait?” argument.

Schiff: Why don’t you just wait until you get the documents the White House refuses to turn over? People should understand what that argument really means. It has taken us eight months to get a lower court ruling that Don McGahn has no absolute immunity to defy Congress. Eight months. For one court decision. If it takes us another eight months to get a second court or maybe a Supreme Court decision, people need to understand that is not the end of the process. It comes back to us and then we ask questions because he no longer has absolute immunity … and then he claims something else, that his answers are privileged, and then we have to go back to court for another eight months or 16 months. 

The argument “Why don’t you just wait?” amounts to this: Why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election? Why not let him cheat just one more time? Why not let him have foreign help just one more time?

That is what that argument amounts to.

Throughout his statement, Schiff made clear that Trump’s actions were an assault on both national security and the integrity of our elections. Failure to move forward on impeachment, and failure to do so immediately, would be an invitation for Trump to repeat and expand on his actions in 2016. The case against Trump and the need for immediate action were never more clear than they were in this speech lasting less than five minutes.

The reason that Republicans are so determined to attack Adam Schiff, to undermine his credibility, and to paint him as a purely partisan figure whose words can be discounted was also never more clear than it was on Tuesday morning. They need to make him smaller because he towers over everyone on the Republican side of the aisle.

x

President Trump abused the power of his office, undermined our national security and jeopardized the next election.He has shown no remorse and is at it still, trying even now to get foreign help in his re-election.No one is above the law.Donald J. Trump must be impeached. pic.twitter.com/TJv6hKVL3j

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) December 10, 2019

Investigations continue by both Saudi and U.S. authorities of a shooting at a Florida naval base. A member of the Royal Saudi Air Force fatally shot three people and injured eight Friday.

The investigation into the incident has officially been characterized as a terrorism inquiry as new details continue to emerge. FBI special agent in charge Rachel Rojas said investigators are working with "the presumption that this was an act of terrorism,” as they do with most similar cases in order to use certain investigative techniques. 

Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani has been identified as the sole shooter. Alshamrani used a Glock handgun to open fire in a classroom at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida before being shot dead by authorities. Six other Saudi nationals, including friends of Alshamrani, were detained for questioning. No arrests have been made in the case, and a motive is still unknown, Rojas said Sunday.

Agents collected surveillance videos and videos taken by bystanders as part of the investigation. Bystander videos depicted footage after the attack had begun and when first responders had arrived, FBI Public Affairs Officer Amanda Wordford said in a news release. The videos are being analyzed for clues.

According to The New York Times, a report emerged that the Saudi trainee had filed a formal complaint earlier this year against one of his instructors, who had left him “infuriated” in a class by tagging him with a derogatory nickname. The instructor supposedly referred to Alshamrani as “Porn Stash” (as it was spelled in the complaint) in front of 10 other aviation students.

While investigators are still trying to determine the motive for the attack, investigative interviews have found that Alshamrani had shown videos of mass shootings at a dinner party the night before the attack. This has led the FBI to investigate possible political, religious, or other motives.

President Donald Trump spoke with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about the shooting Sunday. “The Crown Prince reiterated Saudi Arabia’s commitment to working with the United States to prevent a horrific attack like the Pensacola shooting from ever happening again,” the White House said in a statement. “The President thanked the Crown Prince for Saudi Arabia’s assistance with the investigation and continued partnership.”

Trump also announced that the king will be taking care of the victims and their families—as if money is the solution to everything. “The king will be involved in taking care of families and loved ones,” Trump said following his phone call. “He feels very strongly. He’s very, very devastated by what happened and what took place. Likewise the Crown Prince.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rep. Matt Gaetz, both allies of the president, have directed harsh words at Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the shooting. The governor said Friday that he told Trump that the Saudi government is “going to owe a debt here given that this was one of their individuals,” CNN reported.

I hope that, when this year is over, they take a break from making more of them.

Looking for holiday presents for your loved ones and enemies? Search no further. Behold: a gift shop full of excellent presents made by yours truly. Help support my comics and show off your excellent taste with a purchase using money from my store!

Another effort by Barr to spin an independent report to fit Trump's false narrative.

The impeachment inquiry is just about “eight lines in a call transcript,” the House Republican counsel claimed Monday morning. This is a lie. While there are eight deeply problematic lines in the White House summary of the July 25 call between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, they are a small part of the overall case for impeachment.

Trump told Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation”; and, “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

Witness after witness told the House Intelligence Committee about the many episodes of pressure from Trump administration officials that took place before and after that call. Republicans objected that most of these were hearsay because the officials hadn’t spoken to Trump and heard directly from him that he was holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine in order to pressure it to launch public investigations into Trump’s political opponents—but those eight lines fill in that blank about Trump’s intentions.

And, as The Washington Post details, Castor’s claim that this is all about eight lines is simply false. “Zelensky never vocalized any discomfort or pressure on the call,” Castor said. But Zelensky did make clear that he understood what he was being pressured to do, saying, “I also wanted to thank you for your invitation to visit the United States, specifically Washington DC. On the other hand, I also wanted (to) ensure you that we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation.” And plenty of text messages between U.S. and Ukrainian officials show that Zelensky knew the pressure existed.

Castor also claimed, “At the time of the July 25 call, senior officials in Kyiv did not know that the security assistance was temporarily paused. They did not learn that it was paused until the pause was reported publicly in U.S. media on August 28”—but testimony has made clear that Ukrainian officials did know something was up with the security assistance.

”Finally, President Zelensky met with President Trump and the U.S. security assistance flowed to Ukraine—both without Ukraine ever taking actions on investigations,” Castor claimed. Except for the part where Ukraine did try to find a way to negotiate an investigation pledge with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and Zelensky agreed to a CNN interview that was only abandoned when the pressure campaign came to light.

Castor is a Republican lawyer. It’s his job to lie. But, sadly for him, the facts are shouting out against him.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has asked the Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to expand its investigation into the Customs and Border Protection death of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez this past May—and refer any findings to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution if needed. “Surveillance video footage demonstrates CBP failed to care for Carlos, and lied about the circumstances around his death,” a statement said.

ProPublica last week released surveillance footage not only showing that border officials’ claim that an agent found Carlos’ body was a lie, but that the indigenous child was likely ignored by staff in his final hours of life. “Per an activity log maintained by the Border Patrol, an agent checked on him three times during the early morning, but reported nothing disturbing about Carlos—despite the fact that he was lying on the floor near the toilet,” legislators write in their letter to the inspector general. “Agents could have only missed Carlos’ emergency if they were not looking.”

Carlos died alone. In the video, he can be seen collapsing next to a bench before stumbling to the toilet, where he later dies. His sleeping cellmate—not an agent—is who later found his body, and only when that teen alerts staff does an agent finally appear on video. “Furthermore, the video surveillance obtained by ProPublica via the Weslaco Police Department is missing four hours of footage that includes the hours when an agent reported doing welfare checks on Carlos and his cellmate,” the legislators continue. “The misrepresentation of how a minor died in U.S. custody and the suppression of video surveillance that holds the truth is a grave offense. DHS OIG must resolve whether CBP deliberately lied to the American people regarding the circumstances surrounding Carlos’ death and whether the agency did so to conceal negligence.”

The caucus said that “If the investigation finds that personnel deliberately lied to the American people, they should be held immediately accountable to the highest degree and if necessary referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution if criminally liable.”

The federal government has in fact already been secretive around the deaths of migrant children under its watch. When Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle died from a heart condition under Health and Human Services watch last September, the administration didn’t publicly disclose her death for eight months, revealing it only after two other kids, including Carlos, died in May after being taken into U.S. custody. "How many children are there that we don't know about?” Families Belong Together chair Jess Morales Rocketto asked at the time.

Carlos—and all these children—need justice. Rep. Bennie Thompson, House Homeland Security Committee chair, has also called on the inspector general to review the ProPublica video, while Rep. Karen Bass said she thought that the circumstances around Carlos’ death are “negligent homicide. Someone needs to be held to account. It is completely unacceptable for a 16-year-old child to die of the flu … that was state-sponsored child abuse.”

DC Entertainment

Gal Gadot and Chris Pine return in Wonder Woman 1984, and they’ll face some new villains.

It’s time for wonder again: The first trailer for next year’s Wonder Woman 1984 has dropped.

The trailer features Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince telling us that everyone, including Wonder Woman herself, has some secrets. Set in the 1980s, it’s now 70 or so years since Wonder Woman’s adventures in her first film, and everything is glitzy, golden, and perfect.

Enter Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) a man of many promises who might be connected to Steve Trevor’s (Chris Pine) mysterious return. Also in the mix is Barbara Minerva, who seems to be Diana’s good friend, but who will later turn out to be Cheetah, one of Wonder Woman’s most storied foes. There’s also plenty of bullet-deflecting, lasso-ing, and prime Amazonian butt-kicking, but the true highlight is Wonder Woman swinging from lightning bolts.

With Patty Jenkins returning to direct and Gadot reprising her role as the Amazon-turned-superhero Diana Prince, Wonder Woman 1984 looks to capitalize on the bold success of the original movie.

Prior to Wonder Woman’s release in 2017, movies about women superheroes were few and far between. Those that were released often did poorly, like 2004’s Catwoman and 2005’s Elektra. This convinced Hollywood executives that audiences didn’t want to see a woman commanding her own comic book blockbuster. There was even chatter that Wonder Woman herself was too tricky of a character to ever bring onto the big screen, despite numerous appearances on TV and a close relationship with Batman, Superman, and other well-known comic heroes.

But Wonder Woman resonated with audiences, overachieved at the box office ($821 million worldwide on a reported $100 million budget), and has now become the flagship superhero for Warner Bros., while actors like Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck have stepped away from their roles as Superman and Batman.

And Wonder Woman 1984 looks to continue writing the character’s legacy.

Wonder Woman 1984 will be released in theaters on June 5, 2020.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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You can categorize countries by how many derivatives you need to take before you can feel good about yourself.

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The Department of Housing and Urban Development, under Ben Carson, had a legally required deadline back in September to make desperately needed hurricane relief funding available to the suffering American island. The housing agency was supposed to issue funding notices to 18 states and territories affected by hurricanes on Sept. 4. They did so with one exception: Puerto Rico.

Donald Trump and Ben Carson are refusing to release the aid in direct opposition to the congressional mandate. HUD officials even told the House Appropriations subcomittee that they just won’t do it. Not only did HUD officials admit that they are willfully defying the law, but they also admitted that they have “no statutory authority” to miss such a deadline. 

So why are they doing it? Because laws don’t matter in Trumpland, and Trump hates Puerto Rico.

Just as Trump does with California, another place he hates, where in the past two years raging wildfires have killed 87 people and burned more than 2.15 million acres. Trump is now threatening to withhold federal aid for firefighters for no other reason than his animosity towards the state and its people. The official reason Trump gives is that they wouldn’t listen to his brilliant idea of  “raking the forests,” which is along the same lines of his idea of nuking hurricanes. It’s a stupid idea from an uneducated man. Yet the real reason is hatred.

HUD officials are parroting Trump’s ignorant claim that Puerto Rico is too corrupt to receive federal aid. Carson even had the unmitigated gall to claim that HUD isn’t releasing the funds because Puerto Rico is incapable of managing the funds.  Yeah, the same guy who spent more than $31,000 of HUD money to buy a dining room table for his office:

The purchase of the custom hardwood table, chairs and hutch came a month after a top agency staff member filed a whistle-blower complaint charging Mr. Carson’s wife, Candy Carson, with pressuring department officials to find money for the expensive redecoration of his offices, even if it meant circumventing the law.

I don’t know what is more outrageous, that a dining room table can cost tens of thousands of dollars or why the f*** anyone needs a “dining table” in their office. Unlike Ben Carson, Trump’s own inspector general report cleared Puerto Rico of corruption charges. He found no evidence of widespread corruption within Puerto Rico’s housing agency. Trump has no legitimate reason to withhold the money, and certainly no legal standing to do so. Yet he’s doing it anyway because screw you.

Trump’s contempt for Puerto Rico is well known. He has mocked the survivors, made fun of their accents, completely lied about relief efforts, and back in March said he didn’t want “another single dollar going to the island.” Unfortunately, congressional Democrats have taken little action. They could threaten to withhold agency funds, or take Trump to court. Instead, they’ve essentially just pleaded with Trump to do the right thing:

These are Americans down on the island. Over 3.1, 3.2 million people who every day face the same indignation from your inaction, your anger against the island. It’s time to finally be Presidential and do the right thing for my brothers and sisters on the island.

—Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL)

If Democrats haven’t learned by now, they never will: Trump cannot be shamed into doing the right thing.

We are talking about a man who has no trouble taking brown children from their parents and putting them in cages. He holds Puerto Rico beneath contempt, and that indifference won’t change unless and until the island gets real political power. Democrats need to be focused on getting Puerto Rico statehood. Without political power, the island colony will continue to suffer at the whims of a bigoted president. 

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The Puerto Rico Statehood Admission Act places us on the path towards the political equality we deserve. By requiring a Statehood Yes-or-No vote on the Island, this legislation follows the same precedent established for Alaska and Hawaii.  #PR51st pic.twitter.com/YJ0teeCSsQ

— Jenniffer González (@RepJenniffer) October 29, 2019

When you can't beat 'em, get a little help from your friends. If it worked for George W. Bush in 2000, why not Mississippi GOP State Rep. Ashley Henley in 2019. Just like Bush appealed to a conservative-leaning Supreme Court to help him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, Henley is now looking to the Republican-led Mississippi House for the same type of assist in overturning an election she lost by 14 votes—results already certified by the Republican secretary of state.

In an election challenge filed Wednesday, Henley says her examination of the results revealed a failure "to adhere to proper election procedures to insure a fair and legitimate election." In conclusion, Henley writes, "Petitioner prayerfully requests Mississippi's House of Representatives' Special Committee to report a resolution recommending to declare the office of representative for Mississippi's State Representative for District 40 as vacant." One sentence later, Henley writes, "Petitioner prays a vote in the majority" by the state's GOP-led House will officially declare the seat vacant. 

That's a whole lot of praying that just might pay off considering the GOP-led Mississippi state House in 2016 voted to ignore chamber rules and seat a Republican candidate who lost to a Democratic incumbent in a straw-drawing tiebreaker. Seating Republican Mark Tullos in that election gave the GOP a three-fifths supermajority in the House that continues to this day.

Democrat Hester Jackson-McCray, who would be the first African American woman to hold the seat, said Henley was challenging the results of an election entirely run by her own party. 

"I just beat you fair and square. Hard work just beat you this time," Jackson-McCray said. "She has the right to go through the technicalities, but I think if people read this notice she’s putting out, it looks like she’s arguing that her own party didn’t manage the election right. The election was run by Republicans. The DeSoto County election commissioners are Republicans. The Secretary of State is a Republican.”

State law allows the House to vacate the seat, hold another election, or simply seat one of the candidates, according to Mississippi Today.

“President Trump has never considered L.G.B.T. Americans second-class citizens,” White House spokesperson Judd Deere claimed to The New York Times in response to an article on the Trump administration’s record on transgender Americans, “and has opposed discrimination of any kind against them.”

What a fucking joke. Throughout numerous federal agencies, the Trump administration has stomped on numerous protections for trans Americans, some based on gross, right-wing tropes. Some months after moving to reverse protections for trans people in homeless shelters, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson reportedly “repeated concerns from advocates who expressed worry in September that ‘big, hairy men’ pretending to be women would try to get into women’s shelters, The Washington Post reported.”

These are tired tropes that give permission for violence. Just as anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy has led to anti-immigrant attacks, violence committed against trans people has also ticked up compared to last year. The New York Times reports that “At least 22 transgender people have been fatally shot or killed in 2019, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Nearly all of them were black women,” like Dana Martin, Jazzaline Ware, and Ashanti Carmon.

The administration’s moves and proposals aren’t just reversal of policy, they’ve also been an express effort to erase trans people out of existence. The trans people they can’t erase they quite literally force out: Under the inhumane Migrant Protection Protocols policy, the administration has been wrongfully forcing vulnerable trans asylum-seekers to areas of Mexico where they may be at increased risk of violence. Within the U.S., federal immigration officials have jailed a record number of trans people.

When it comes to actually supporting LGBTQ Americans, the Trump administration could certainly support the historic Equality Act, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and passed the House in May. Instead, the administration expressed its opposition to it—and it certainly helps Trump not have to sign it into law when his buddy in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, won’t let any progressive legislation pass in the chamber.

ProPublica names nearly three dozen further instances where Trump “has systematically undone recent gains” in the rights and protections of trans Americans. That list is something to keep handy the next time a defender of the president claims he’s pro-LGBTQ just because he hugged a Pride flag.

Sen. Joni Ernst, Republican from Iowa, has been using an outside dark-money group for fundraising and has potentially been illegally coordinating with it, the AP reports. The group, called Iowa Values, was co-founded in 2017 by an Ernst consultant, Jon Kohan. Her personal campaign fundraiser, Claire Holloway Avella, also works for Iowa Values. Finally, another former aide who was recently hired by the group owns a condo that is used as Iowa Values’ address, and was used as the group’s address while he was still working on Ernst’s Senate staff.

Dark-money groups like Iowa Values are supposed to operate separately from candidates. They are also supposed to function as nonprofit educational or issue groups that have activities beyond promoting individual candidates. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, but there’s always some fudging. In Ernst’s case, it appears to go well beyond fudging. The AP found a request from Holloway Avella for $50,000 to an individual Ernst had just met with and referred. 

Holloway Avella emailed the potential donor, writing, “As you may have seen, an outside group on the left ... recently launched a six-figure ad buy in media markets across the state attacking Senator Ernst on her vote to repeal Obamacare.” She added, “The purpose of our group, Iowa Values, is to push back against these type of negative attacks.”

“It seems like pretty strong evidence” that the $50,000 request was for an “illegal donation,” while it’s “clear that the goal of Iowa Values is to reelect Joni Ernst, which may violate its tax-exempt status,” said a campaign finance attorney, Brendan Fischer, with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington. “This is a striking example of how secret campaign money operates. The big donors that bankroll a dark money group like Iowa Values remain hidden from the public, but the politician that benefits knows where the money is coming from.”

This is very, very stinky. But Ernst doesn’t have to worry about it too much. Her boss, Moscow Mitch McConnell, has ensured that the Federal Election Commission has no teeth to do anything about these kinds of violations. It doesn’t have a quorum of commissioners to act now because he hasn’t allowed votes for new ones.

This has to end. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats end McConnell's career as Senate majority leader.

When Republicans don’t have have control of Congress and the White House, they’re aces at giving speeches about the horrors of government spending. When they’re in charge, they’re even better at doing that spending by the trillions, mostly by giving bucketloads to those who already have billions. It’s fully expected that as soon as Democrats retake the Senate and White House, Republicans will rediscover their horror of the government parting with a dime, but, as it turns out, there’s actually something that can make Republicans climb back onto the austerity train early.

As The San Diego Tribune reports, former Chair of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa put out the call for Donald Trump to grant clemency to his sadly humiliated pal Rep. Duncan Hunter just hours after Hunter pleaded guilty to a bevy of crimes, including misuse of campaign funds. The penalty for Hunter’s laundry list of misdeeds hasn’t even been tallied, but it’s the reason Issa gives for this act of insta-mercy that’s really just the best.

“Are we better off spending $60,000 a year to put him behind bars,” said Issa, “or are we better off with him doing community service and going on with his life with the likelihood of him committing a crime in the future being pretty low?” It’s safe to say that there are a number of nonviolent first-time offenders going to jail in Hunter’s district who are not getting this concern from Issa. But then, Issa isn’t just any observer. He’s not just any Republican ex-representative. He’s a candidate for Hunter’s seat—which makes this request not just convenient, but hugely self-serving.

Still, Duncan Hunter is exactly the sort of guy that Trump loves to pardon. After all, the Marine Corps has a restraining order against Hunter over misusing its name and logo. He’s repeatedly called for giving the Medal of Honor to war criminals. During his campaign, he attacked his Christian opponent as an “Islamist” trying to “infiltrate Congress” because his father was born in Palestine. He called for nuking Iran. Best of all, Hunter inherited his ruby-red House seat from his father. So really … exactly Trump’s kind of guy. 

And setting a precedent for pardoning people convicted of campaign finance violations? How could that be a bad thing?

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Bloomberg speaks during an event to introduce his gun safety policy agenda at the Heritage Christian Center in Aurora, Colorado, on December 5, 2019. | Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

Bloomberg’s controversial remarks about race and stop-and-frisk won’t do him any favors with the left.

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg finally sat down for his first television interview since announcing his run for the White House — and it did not go smoothly.

In an interview with CBS This Morning broadcast on Friday, Bloomberg struggled to respond to criticism that he was buying the election, invoked a troubling trope while referring to African American Democratic candidate Sen. Cory Booker as “well-spoken,” and falsely stated that he had never been criticized about his controversial stop-and-frisk program before running for president.

The missteps and false statements are likely to intensify progressive criticism of the billionaire Democratic candidate as out of touch with the direction of the party, and cement concerns that his late entry into the race has only been viable due to his deep pockets.

Since launching his campaign in late November, Bloomberg has managed to very quickly garner a modest amount of attention. He’s polling at about 4 percent in national polls, according to the Real Clear Politics average, which puts him fifth in the race, and means he leapfrogged prominent candidates like Booker and former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro in a matter of weeks.

But skeptics say that a lot of the early interest can be attributed to Bloomberg’s ability to spend tremendous amounts of money and capitalize on name recognition as a prominent businessman with an eponymous media outlet. He has invested a staggering $57 million in television advertising so far. The initial ad buy he made in the very first days after his announcement was larger than every other candidate had spent on advertising the entire year, with the exception of Tom Steyer — the other billionaire running for the Democratic nomination.

Bloomberg’s cagey interview with CBS — in which he casually quips that every other candidate had the opportunity to become rich like he did and seemed irked by questions about diversity in the race — reflects the challenges he’ll face if he continues to gain prominence. His comments provide ammunition for progressive candidates like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the liberal base of the party, and will test whether or not there’s real appetite for a moderate billionaire among Democratic voters.

Bloomberg doesn’t think his money is that big a deal

In the interview, CBS’s Gayle King repeatedly pressed Bloomberg to respond to criticism that he’s buying the election. Bloomberg sounded irritated by the accusation and pointed out that he gives away most of his money for good causes.

But instead of going the usual route for former businessman candidates wherein they point out how their business acumen prepared them for leading the country, he chose to highlight his rags-to-riches story and almost seemed to imply the other candidates’ public service was a missed opportunity to become a billionaire.

“They had a chance to go out and make a lot of money. And how much of their own money do they put into their campaigns?” Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg also argued that since everyone relies on lots of money to run for president, he wasn’t all that different from his rivals.

“I’m doing exactly the same thing they’re doing, except that I am using my own money,” he said. “They’re using somebody else’s money and those other people expect something from them.”

It’s worth noting Donald Trump claimed that his fortune would allow him to self-fund but that he did ultimately rely on plenty of outside donations for his 2016 presidential campaign.

Bloomberg’s arguments could appeal to moderates or business-centric Democrats. But in a populist political climate in which prominent candidates like Sanders and Warren are advocating for wealth taxes and arguing that taxing the rich is an essential policy for accelerating economic growth, Bloomberg’s blasé attitude about his wealth may not serve him well.

Bloomberg’s comments on race were ... out of touch

Bloomberg also ran into an awkward spot when talking about racial inclusion. When asked about Booker’s complaint that there are “more billionaires than black people who’ve made the December debate stage,” Bloomberg fired back with a strange comment.

“Cory Booker endorsed me a number of times, and I endorsed Cory Booker a number of times,” Bloomberg said. “He’s very well-spoken; he’s got some very good ideas.”

Bloomberg’s description of Booker as “well-spoken” echoed Joe Biden’s reference to Barack Obama in 2007 as “articulate and bright and clean”: it’s a classic racialized trope that implicitly suggests that black people by default are not well-spoken.

Booker said in response to the comment, which got skewered on social media as condescending: “It’s sort of stunning at times that we are still revisiting these sort of tired tropes.”

Bloomberg also suggested that the solution for anyone who is concerned about lack of diversity in the presidential field should have entered themselves.

“Lots of people can enter,” he said. “If you wanted to enter and run for president of the United States, you could have done that. But don’t complain to me that you’re not in the race. It’s up to you.”

The flippant comment about how easy it is for anyone to enter the primary is likely to intensify criticism that Bloomberg has a blind spot on race and concerns that he faces an uphill battle among black voters.

Bloomberg’s statement on stop-and-frisk was dishonest

When asked about his recent apology regarding his controversial stop-and-frisk police program — which was struck down in court after his last term as mayor because it was considered in violation of the Constitution for its systematization of racial profiling — Bloomberg replied, “Nobody asked me about it until I started running for president, so, c’mon.”

That’s false. Bloomberg was criticized and questioned over the program on many occasions during his time as mayor and after. He unapologetically defended the program as recently as January as an effective deterrent against crime.

In private, he was apparently also defensive of the program. Former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien tweeted on Friday that at a mutual friend’s cocktail party around 2014, he defended the program and argued that “that MORE black and brown people should have been stopped.”

The fact that Bloomberg’s comments are so easy to demonstrate as false suggests he either wasn’t prepared to handle the question or that he doesn’t care about the truth. Either way, it will not serve him well among progressives pushing for criminal justice reform.

Giuliani speaks to the Organization of Iranian American Communities during their march to urge “recognition of the Iranian people’s right for regime change,” outside the United Nations Headquarters in New York on September 24, 2019. | Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

Posting from somewhere in Ukraine, Trump’s lawyer tweets the quid pro quo.

President Donald Trump and his Republican defenders in the House continue to argue there was no “quid pro quo” with Ukraine (despite a White House call summary and testimony from numerous Trump officials indicating otherwise).

It took Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, all of two tweets to blast that talking point to smithereens.

On Thursday, Giuliani — apparently posting from somewhtere in Kyiv, where he’s currently traveling as part of his ongoing international effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens — posted tweets explicitly acknowledging a link between ongoing US assistance to Ukraine and investigations into the Biden family.

“The conversation about corruption in Ukraine was based on compelling evidence of criminal conduct by then VP Biden, in 2016, that has not been resolved and until it is will be a major obstacle ... to the US assisting Ukraine with its anti-corruption reforms,” Giuliani claimed, despite the fact that no such evidence has emerged.

In short, Giuliani tweeted the quid pro quo.

Trump and his Republican supporters in Congress have sought to portray the efforts of the president and Giuliani to cajole the Ukrainian government into announcing investigations into the Bidens as being rooted in the president’s good-faith concerns about “corruption,” rather than his own political self-interests.

But Giuliani’s tweet reveals the hollowness of that talking point. “Corruption” is just a stand-in word for “Biden.” He doesn’t even try to hide it.

Even though Giuliani’s tweet gives up the game, White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley appeared on Fox News on Friday, still claiming that Trump “didn’t press [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky on anything other than getting to the bottom of corruption in his country. We know that.”

But if Giuliani’s tweet isn’t enough to convince you otherwise, consider that the word “corruption” doesn’t appear even once in the summaries of the Trump-Zelensky calls released by the White House.

Of course, the notion that arguably the most personally corrupt president in American history ever had good-faith concerns about corruption abroad was hard to believe from the get-go — some might say as hard to believe as Attorney General William Barr’s claim that he couldn’t find an available room in the Washington, DC, area for his $30,000 holiday party anywhere other than the Trump International Hotel just blocks from the White House.

Yet that event is scheduled to take place this Sunday, even as Trump and his backers continue to insist that the president is, in fact, an anti-corruption crusader.

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

Brad Parscale at a Trump rally in New Hampshire in August. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

45 percent of voters in a red Oklahoma district supporting impeachment isn’t as awesome for Trump as his campaign thinks.

Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale wants you to believe that impeachment polling in vulnerable Democratic-controlled congressional districts looks bad for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hopes of keeping the chamber blue. There are some worrying signs for Democrats. But the out-of-context way Parscale is making his case actually reflects how weak Trump’s position is.

On Thursday, Parscale tweeted out polling from Fabrizio, Lee, and Associates — a firm formerly associated with Paul Manafort that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign — indicating that a majority of voters in Oklahoma’s Fifth Congressional District oppose impeachment (52-45), and that a narrow plurality favor the GOP candidate on a generic ballot (49-42). The district is in central Oklahoma and includes Oklahoma City.

“Nancy Pelosi is marching members of her caucus off the plank and into the abyss,” Parscale wrote. “Impeachment is killing her freshman members and polling proves it.”

Parscale added: “Here’s data on Rep. Kendra Horn (OK-5) ... More to come on other members soon ... Say goodbye to your majority, Nancy!”

In a vacuum, those numbers might not look great for Horn, a first-time Congress member who prevailed over two-term Republican incumbent Steve Russell last year by less than a percentage point (50.7-49.3). But Parscale’s tweet leaves out a lot of important context.

For one, Horn is the first Democrat to represent OK-5 since 1975, back when Gerald Ford was president. And until last year, the district had been deep red. Russell won by more than 20 points in 2016 and Trump carried the district by 14 points. Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by 19 points in 2012. In fact, before Trump won 53 percent of the vote in 2016, no Republican presidential candidate had received less than 59 percent in an election this century.

But Horn took the seat as part of a 2018 blue wave that claimed 40 House seats and gave Democrats control of the chamber. So the fact that the seat’s even in play next year reflects Trump’s weakness, not his strength.

As Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post noted, instead of being worried about Parscale’s polling, Democratic strategists are more likely to feel encouraged about it indicating that 45 percent of voters in a district that was deep red until he came on the scene support impeachment.

Horn avoided directly criticizing Trump during the 2016 race, but did campaign on what the HuffPost describes as a “broadly left-wing platform” focused on “gun control, more funding for education, tighter campaign finance controls and opposition to private prison.”

She has hedged her bets on impeachment. After Pelosi announced on Thursday that Democrats are moving forward with articles on impeachment, Horn released a statement saying she’s “reserving judgement until I have all the facts and until I have reviewed any articles to be brought before the House of Representatives for a vote.”

National polls show a narrow plurality of voters support impeaching Trump. On Friday, Morning Consult came out with new polling showing Trump’s approval rating significantly underwater in some key swing states. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly cited polls of dubious origin on Twitter to suggest that impeachment has actually strengthened his position.

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