James.galbraith

Joe Biden’s “No Malarkey”-emblazoned presidential campaign bus. | Biden campaign

Boldly unafraid to be uncool.

If you are looking for a candidate who tolerates, embraces, or indulges in malarkey, then former Vice President Joe Biden is not for you.

His anti-malarkey stance is emblazoned clearly on the bus he’s using for an early December tour of Iowa, complemented by a #NoMalarkey hashtag, a Twitter video, and all the other accoutrements of a modern political campaign.

Biden, who was never been popular with a social media crowd that tilts younger, better-educated, and more left-wing than his base is naturally getting roasted online for his fuddy-duddy slogan.

And it is in many ways an incredibly bad slogan, conveying essentially nothing in the way of information or themes while reminding everyone of one of the candidate’s main weaknesses — he is very old.

But it does have a few things going for it. “No malarkey!” is distinctive and memorable — there’s no confusion about who is against malarkey and no forgetting about it once you hear it. It sort of connects with Biden’s base of older and unfashionable Democrats. And perhaps most of all, it works to own the elusive quality of “authenticity,” especially in fending off potential rivals for moderate votes like South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Biden says “malarkey” more than most people

Before launching the bus tour, Biden’s most famous malarkey moment came as a rejoinder to then-House Speaker Paul Ryan during the 2012 vice presidential debate. Ryan critiqued the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack and then launched into a larger criticism of Obama’s foreign policy, which he alleged was excessively weak. Biden characterized that as “a bunch of malarkey” because “not a single thing he said is accurate.”

Watching the exchange, it’s hardly a dominating Biden moment. He’s simply not a dynamo of charisma and the rejoinder to Ryan doesn’t feature any particularly eloquent turns of phrase. Elaborating on the malarkey charge, Biden stumbles over his words at several points — reinforcing the notion that his tendency to do this reflects his longstanding efforts to overcome a stutter more than the influence of aging — but he liked the word enough that he went back to it a second time during a later exchange.

Here, Biden initially calls Ryan’s claims “a bunch of stuff” prompting moderator Martha Raddatz to ask “what does that mean?” and Ryan to chime in that “it’s Irish.” Rather than elaborate that he’s saying it’s BS — i.e., bullshit — Biden says “we Irish call it ‘malarkey.’”

Back in 2015, Jamie Fuller conducted an exhaustive investigation for the Washington Post and concluded, citing Sunlight Foundation data, that Biden has said the word malarkey on the floor of Congress more than anyone since the 19th century.

“Malarkey,” then, is a legitimate Biden signature term. And as displayed at the debate it’s in many ways a useful one. Critically, it allows him to call Ryan a liar without literally doing so, while being much harsher than something like “you’re being misleading.”

And while linguists say the notion of an Irish origin for the term is seemingly inaccurate, it suits Biden’s persona as an old Irish American guy pretty well. But most important for its usage as a bus theme that was surely workshopped by a dozen campaign staffers, as a debate line it looks genuinely spontaneous — the word that popped to mind as Biden sought to avoid profanity. And there’s little campaigns work harder to achieve than the appearance of authenticity.

Joe Biden is old, and he knows it

The downside to running around using a word that was current in the 1920s is that it underscores the idea that Biden is extremely old.

What’s more, Biden isn’t Sen. Bernie Sanders — an old guy whose supporters are mostly young, and thus are inclined to see his old man mannerisms as charming. Biden is an old guy whose supporters are mostly old, so his old man mannerisms just reinforce the idea that he’s old and you, a cool young person, should not like him.

At the moment, however, Biden has the luxury of not caring about this. He is currently leading the polls without much in the way of youth support. Uniquely among the candidates in the field, he can afford to focus on pleasing his base rather than expanding it. The mockability of “No Malarkey” ensures it will get attention, and youngsters making fun of Biden for being old probably doesn’t hurt him with the older people he is counting on to power him to victory.

A larger strategic problem for Biden is that if he does become the nominee he, like any Democrat, will be faced with the need to try to work on mobilizing younger voters — a cohort that’s strongly anti-Trump but also sporadic in its participation in the electoral process. Running and winning in the primary on old guy identity politics will complicate that task. But for now, the job is to win the nomination.

“Authenticity” is a precious thing

Politics is inherently a performance and the idea of doing it “authentically” is as nonsensical as it is ubiquitous.

But a reputation for authenticity is a valuable thing in politics. In part it’s valuable simply because it tends to be admired on its own terms. But beyond that, it’s valuable because it helps you with one of the most inherently difficult problems in political life — the fact that to win elections you need the support of millions of people who disagree with you about some things.

There are simply too many issues and too many people in the country to assemble a winning coalition composed entirely of people who agree with you across the board. But you need people to agree that you’re a good person who’s worth supporting anyway. That’s much harder to achieve if people suspect your disagreements are driven by malice or corruption. If you’re seen as an “authentic” person, then disagreement is likely to be seen as itself authentic — reflecting a sincere good-faith disagreement about the best path forward rather than something nefarious — and therefore forgivable.

And “malarkey” is extremely authentic. It’s an odd word to use, but one that Biden has long been a frequent idiosyncratic fan of — including but not limited to high-profile occasions. Although it marks Biden as old and desperately uncool, he really is old and uncool — and at least he’s not faking it.

We don't need to speculate on what might happen if, because of sabotage or simple malfunction, the electronic voting machines now ubiquitous throughout the nation were to simply not work on a vitally important Election Day, altering the votes, tossing others, and possibly throwing entire elections to a candidate who hasn’t actually won. We already have examples. Less than a month ago, a Pennsylvania county's new top-of-the-line voting machines did exactly that.

From The New York Times:

Vote totals in a Northampton County judge’s race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate’s zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.

That something was, it soon proved, the Election Systems & Software-manufactured voting system, ExpressVoteXL, reporting wildly inaccurate vote totals: A recount of the paper backup ballots produced by the machines showed that the Democrat did not get 164 votes in the election, but 26,142. Officials don't yet know why the machines returned invalid results; we also don't know, of course, whether results in other elections in other counties and states had similar but less severe problems that were not so improbable as to spur officials to recount. It's entirely possible that elections were thrown, just in the last few years, by software error.

The ES&S spokesperson is of course full of bluster in that Times story, noting that because the malfunctioning machines also had "voter-verified" paper backup ballots to be recounted, everything turned out fine with "fair, accurate and legal election results." Others seem similarly relieved that there was, in this case, a paper trail to fall back on—even if programming errors (we hope) did render the actual touchscreen-voting electronic devices absolutely useless for their intended purpose. In the case of the lavish and expensive ExpressVoteXL, a human-readable paper ballot is printed behind a transparent panel for the voter to verify; once approved, it is dumped into a secure bin under the machine.

Which, assuming each and every voter checks that the paper ballot produced matches what they intended to press on the screen, is definitely better than having nothing. And is infinitely better than the absurdity of an encoded, human-unreadable paper record, a ridiculous premise that only doubles the likelihood that a machine malfunction will be made official regardless of each voter's actual intent. So ... hooray?

Pennsylvania, along with about a dozen other states, is scurrying to replace voting machines that do not generate paper trails before next year's elections; the state has been having problems with touch-screen voting for over a decade.

Again, then: We can assume with near-absolute certainty that errors similar to these have happened on machines that do not have paper backup ballots, that those errors went undetected, and that other election outcomes were thrown to a losing candidate. And none of this, absolutely none of it, even contemplates what would happen if a sophisticated state-sponsored attack on the machines inserted malware that was designed not to alter vote totals, but simply to impede and delay voting in some counties and districts but not others.

Which, going into a second national election in which a hostile foreign power is barely attempting to hide efforts to sabotage American democracy for the sake of doing so, seems a bit of a concern.

Marvel fans got a treat Tuesday morning as the studio dropped the first movie in the MCU’s Phase Four featuring Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff and her alter ego Black Widow.

Writes Screen Rant: “Fans have been clamoring for a dedicated Black Widow movie ever since Scarlett Johansson made her MCU debut as Natasha Romanoff in 2010’s Iron Man 2. But the timing of this film seems more than a little strange, given Black Widow was one of the Avengers who died in Avengers: Endgame, sacrificing herself in order to get the Soul Stone to the Avengers. Marvel has teased that Black Widow will explain just why Natasha had to die.”

Said Johansson to EW: “Where we find Natasha in her life at this point is very specific. She really is in a dark place where she’s got no one to call and nowhere to go. She’s really grappling with her own self. When something huge explodes and all the pieces are landing, you have that moment of stillness where you don’t know what to do next — that’s the moment that she’s in. In that moment, you actually have to face yourself.”

Black Widow also stars Florence Pugh as Yelena, David Harbour as Alexei aka The Red Guardian, and Rachel Weisz plays Melina.

The post The First Teaser for Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Black Widow’ Has Dropped In: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The formal GOP defense of Trump isn't just laughable. It's self-undermining.

Sinai Torrejon, program services coordinator at Girls Inc., leads a class discussion on gender and sexuality at Western High School in Anaheim, California, on September 20, 2019. | Arlene Mejorado for Vox

Even in liberal California, families are pushing back against lessons on gender identity. The battles could be a blueprint for the rest of the country.

ANAHEIM, California — It’s the second meeting of the Informed and In Charge program at Western High School, and today’s activity is called the “sexuality wall.”

The gist is pretty straightforward: At one end of the classroom is a big sheet of paper with “Sexuality?” written in blue marker. “Write down as many different terms regarding sexuality, regarding identity, regarding gender, as you may have heard,” the instructor, Sinai Torrejon, asks the class.

A mix of around 20 students from different grade levels — wearing tank tops and wide-legged pants, ripped jeans and hoodies, false eyelashes and no makeup — grab markers and get to work. They chat among themselves. “I wrote pan — pansexual,” one says. “Asexual means you don’t like nothing, you don’t have those feelings,” explains another.

The students seem calm and comfortable. Though they take the activity seriously, they’re also having fun with it: One of them uses several different markers to write “bisexual” and “lesbian” in letters that look three-dimensional, like they’re popping off the paper.

In fact, the whole classroom has a relaxed feel. The students sit on plastic chairs, not traditional desks. A table at the front holds prizes the teens can win in icebreaker games, like makeup brushes and stickers. One girl casually eats from a container of instant ramen. This is Southern California after all, where open-mindedness and chill are branded exports.

When they’re finished, Torrejon helps the students — all part of a dropout prevention program at Western called the Independent Learning Center — define the terms on the wall. LGBTQ+, she explains, “is a term that is trying to be inclusive of all the other identities and sexualities that there are.” Queer, she says, “can be used as a slur or as a derogatory term,” but now some in the LGBTQ+ community are “taking ownership of that word.”

Next, they move into a discussion of the differences between gender identity, gender expression, and sex.

“Can someone else tell you what your gender identity is?” Torrejon asks.

“No,” several students say.

“Is it okay to not be 100 percent sure yet?”

“Yes!” is the enthusiastic response from the class.

A bit later, Torrejon tells the class, “You are your own person. You are unique. You are perfect the way you are.”

Welcome to the future of sex education in America. California wants to lead the way.

But even in one of the bluest of blue states, where just about 32 percent of voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump in 2016, programs like the one at Western are getting backlash. In 2016, the state passed a law requiring that schools offer LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed with lessons on gender identity and expression as well as materials on HIV prevention and healthy relationships. Last year, the state released draft guidelines aimed at helping schools put the law into practice, and since then, parents have been pushing back — with some even taking their kids out of public schools so they don’t receive the new sex ed.

The day before Torrejon gave her lesson about gender and sexuality, parents, advocates, and even students protested outside their legislators’ offices around the state, demanding a repeal of the law. One parent, Shanda Ellsworth-Lobatos, called it “a cognitive behavior modification program to sexualize and groom your children” at a protest not far from Western.

What’s happening in California is a version of a conflict that’s likely to ramp up around the country in coming years. What some parents and conservative groups call “indoctrination,” sex education advocates call changing the world: teaching students to respect each other’s identities and autonomy in ways they hope will lead to less sexual assault, harassment, and homophobia in society at large.

As Jennifer Driver, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at the nonprofit SIECUS (until recently known as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States), told me: “We like to frame sex education as a vehicle for social change.”

The movement toward an education based on acceptance over abstinence

For many people in their 30s and older, the phrase “sex education” probably conjures up images of an awkward assembly in a high school gym, if it conjures up any images at all. Picture Kevin Arnold on The Wonder Years, watching his gym teacher trying to draw a diagram of the female reproductive system, but instead scrawling something that looks like a cow.

In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic inspired states to get more serious about sex ed, and by the 1990s, most states required some form of HIV/AIDS education. But conservatives almost immediately pushed back, calling for sex education to focus on abstinence, and the messages students got about sex could be confusing — even in California.

As a high school student in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I remember getting a classroom visit from a man living with HIV who helped demystify the virus and talked about prevention. I also attended an assembly led by a woman who said that every time you have sex, it’s like putting a piece of tape on your arm and ripping it off, until the tape — which represents you — is covered in hair, disgusting and useless. This, I later learned, is a common abstinence-based lesson.

Today, 39 states and the District of Columbia require some form of sex or HIV education. But only 17 require it to be medically accurate — meaning educators can teach that condoms don’t work or that innate gender differences govern everything from how people look at their fingernails to how they carry their books. And abstinence-based education (now sometimes described as “sexual risk avoidance education”) has become more common, not less, since I was in high school, thanks to support from Republican administrations. By 2014, half of middle schools and a three-quarters of high schools focused on abstinence. The Trump administration has also been a strong backer of the abstinence-only approach — in 2018, it issued new funding rules favoring abstinence-based programs.

One big problem with abstinence-only, though, is there’s no evidence that it works. As Aaron E. Carroll reported at the New York Times in 2017, several studies have found no effect of such an approach on teen sexual activity. It also doesn’t teach students what they need to know about contraception and sexual health if they do decide to have sex.

That’s why sexual health advocates around the country have backed comprehensive sex education for years. Truly comprehensive sex ed should include information on abstinence, but also on sexually transmitted infections and contraception, Driver told me. Lessons should be inclusive of all sexual orientations and gender identities. And it’s not just about avoiding pregnancy and STIs — comprehensive sex ed, Driver said, should also include lessons on healthy relationships, consent, and decision-making, as well as analysis of cultural norms and values around sex and sexuality.

Sex education can be a “powerful vehicle to change societal norms,” Driver said (SIECUS recently made this concept part of its name, rebranding as SIECUS: Sex Ed For Social Change). For example, the rise of the Me Too movement has sparked “a lot of conversations about consent,” she said. But “very few people can articulate what consent looks like.”

By contrast, “what would a world look like if everyone had comprehensive sex education?” Driver asks. “How would the Me Too movement look very differently?”

California might be about to find out. The state has been on the forefront of the movement toward more comprehensive sex education for years. In 2003, the state passed a law requiring that HIV prevention be taught in public schools, and that all sex education materials “be appropriate for use with pupils of all races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and pupils with disabilities.”

But critics said the law was too vague, and in 2016, the state implemented the California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), which requires that students get sex education that includes information on HIV and pregnancy prevention, healthy relationships, gender identity, and more — including abstinence — at least once in junior high and once in high school. All course materials must be medically accurate, and discussions of relationships must be inclusive of same-sex couples.

Since then, school districts around the state have been updating their curricula to comply with the law. For example, Anaheim Union High School District, which includes Western High School and about 16 other junior high and high schools, added lessons on human trafficking and gender identity expression to its high school health curriculum to comply with the law, said Patty Hatcher, a health curriculum specialist with the district.

In many districts, like Anaheim Union, California students get sex education from their health teachers. But some districts also bring in visiting teachers from groups like Planned Parenthood and Girls Inc., a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to fostering the health and education of girls. In many cases, the visitors supplement what the district is already doing. But when there’s no one trained on staff, the outside groups may provide all the sex education required by the state.

Over the course of about 12 class periods, the Girls Inc. program teaches students about menstruation, birth control, STI prevention, sexual harassment, consent, dating violence, and more. Classes are open to anyone who identifies as a girl, no questions asked, according to Jessica Hubbard, director of program services for the Orange County branch of Girls Inc. The organization doesn’t offer an equivalent program for boys, but at Western Independent Learning Center, where most classes are online, students of all genders may also take an online health class that includes sex education.

About 25 miles away in Irvine, also part of Orange County, the district adopted Teen Talk, a research-based curriculum for students of all genders that covers anatomy, STIs, pregnancy prevention, and body image, among other topics. It also includes one lesson specifically devoted to sexual orientation and gender identity, which “does a great job in dispelling myths and stereotypes” like the idea that being gay is a choice, Kelli Bourne, who is in her 14th year of teaching health science at Lakeside Middle School, told Vox. But it also uses language throughout that’s inclusive of all orientations and identities: “Teen Talk does not favor one type of relationship over another,” she said.

Overall, the goal of Teen Talk is to “drive home to kids that there is a range of values” when it comes to sex, Bourne said. And values — whether something is okay or not okay — are at the root of a lot of questions students ask in class, she said.

When it comes to sex and sexuality, Bourne explains to students, some people believe one thing, and others believe something else. Ultimately, “it’s up to you to decide what you believe,” she said, “with input from your parents and your family.”

Conservative pushback is mostly about LGBTQ inclusivity

About a month into the school year, around 20 people gather outside Assembly member Tom Daly’s office, about 10 miles from Western High School. These are the families in Orange County who feel that, despite what programs like Teen Talk say, they’re not getting enough input. They feel their kids are learning values at odds with their own.

At the latest of several “Sex Ed Sit Outs” to protest the law, parents hoist handmade signs with messages like “education not indoctrinate” and “no gender ID ideology.” Some have brought their kids, who play on the grassy median strip next to the sidewalk. A few older students take a more active role.

One first-year high schooler, for example, holds a cardboard sign reading, “AB 329 is a sexual grooming program.” He is here with his mom, but he tells me he also believes that the sex education law violates freedom of religion. “It’s either you’re a girl or you’re a boy,” he says. “That’s what I agree with.”

Meanwhile, many parents say CHYA violates their parental rights. “This law doesn’t respect our beliefs and rights as parents to teach our children how they should behave and live,” one mom, Ofelia Garcia, tells me.

“Even if I didn’t have any grandchildren or children, I would be doing this,” Garcia says. “As a daughter of God, this is to speak for my faith.”

Garcia says she’s against “the gender ideology” put forth by CHYA, and that she hopes the law will be revoked because “because otherwise our children are going to be against us.”

The fear that sex education will pull kids away from their parents is a common theme. So is a concern about lessons involving gender identity.

Shanda Ellsworth-Lobatos, for example, tells me she started homeschooling her son, a third-grader, after she found out his Anaheim elementary school was planning a Diversity Week but had not notified parents of content involving LGBTQ or gender-nonconforming people.

Students were going to read Jacob’s New Dress, a children’s book about a boy who wants to wear a dress to school, she said. “They had a whole series of things that they were going to do with the children but they were not going to disclose to the parents.”

Ellsworth-Lobatos also said teachers had been told “if a child is struggling with gender identity, not to notify the parents.” On the whole, she said, the school was “lack of transparency” and “parent alienation.”

The Anaheim Elementary School District (separate from Anaheim Union, which includes only junior high and high schools), however, says alienating children from their parents is the opposite of what it intends. “Clear communication with our families is paramount,” Elsa Covarrubias, the district’s director of communications, told me. She said it was absolutely not district policy to keep parents in the dark about children’s gender identity. “We are in contact with parents regarding anything that impacts their children,” she said.

Girls Inc. says it encourages students to talk to their parents about what they learn, and the group hosts evening events where parents can be more informed about the program. Also, CHYA requires that sex education in California encourage each student “to communicate with his or her parents, guardians, and other trusted adults about human sexuality.” And the law allows parents to opt their children out of sex education if they choose.

But parent protests have continued, heating up last year with the release of a state document called the Health Education Framework. The framework isn’t law or a required curriculum — instead, it is intended as guidance to help school districts develop curricula in line with CHYA. But parents soon began protesting My Princess Boy, a picture book about a boy who wears dresses and a tiara, and S.E.X: The All You Need to Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties, a book by the founder of the popular sexual health information site Scarleteen. Parents said the material was too explicit, and objected to teaching younger children about gender identity.

In May, the state removed six books, including My Princess Boy and S.E.X., from the framework, a final version of which is slated to be released early next year. But some parents were unsatisfied, and with the start of a new school year, protests began again.

California’s Orange County, where Anaheim is the largest city, has been one of the biggest hubs of pushback against CHYA (other counties in the blue state where parents have protested include Santa Clara, just south of San Francisco). The county is historically Republican territory. Ronald Reagan launched his political career with a speech in Anaheim in 1965, and Richard Nixon’s presidential library is in the nearby city of Yorba Linda, where he was born. A majority of residents voted for John McCain for president in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

However, Orange County is changing — the county went for Hillary Clinton in 2016; in 2018, Democrats flipped four congressional seats there, turning the county entirely blue. But in some ways, Anaheim feels more like middle America than like Los Angeles, less than 30 miles to the northwest. Near Assembly member Daly’s office, a Hooter’s restaurant advertised “Military Mondays.” And as protesters against the sex ed program lined the sidewalk, more than a few passing drivers honked in approval.

Orange County has always a specific brand of conservatism, though: It’s not the type of place where overtly anti-LGBTQ messages are always spoken out loud. Residents are used to having to curb their language for surrounding progressives. And Republicans in California aren’t known for holding particularly socially conservative views — residents sometimes use the term “California conservative” to refer to someone who’s liberal on social issues but favors low taxes and small government.

All that is to say that some of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric espoused by Republicans around the country — like former Virginia attorney general and recent Trump appointee Ken Cuccinelli, who has said that acts of homosexual sex are “against nature and are harmful to society” — are less common here. Aggressiveness is not the norm.

For example, most of the parents on the sidewalk on this September day say their opposition to CHYA is not about homophobia or transphobia, but about their desire to choose what their kids learn. “It’s not about hate or disliking or anything like that,” Ellsworth-Lobatos says. “It’s about my parental rights and what I want to teach my child.”

Then again, there is a minority that imparts a more direct message. At a forum on CHYA held by the Anaheim Republican Assembly the night before the protest, Arthur Schaper, an activist with the “pro-family” group MassResistance, referred to the law as the “California Unhealthy Perversion Act.”

“There has to be a culture shift in this state,” he told the crowd of a few dozen at a German restaurant not far from Daly’s office. “Being gay is not okay. Yes, I just said that. If I can’t say that in Anaheim, we’ve got a problem.”

The benefits of comprehensive sex education are well-documented

What proponents of laws like CHYA have on their side is research and numbers. In California, a large majority of parents have historically supported comprehensive sex education — 89 percent, according to one 2006 survey. Nationally, most parents also support comprehensive sex education.

According to one 2017 study, more than 93 percent of American parents think it’s important to teach sex education in middle school and high school. Meanwhile, 92 percent of Democratic parents and 75 percent of Republican parents said high school sex education should include discussion of sexual orientation.

Unlike the abstinence-only approach, education like the kind students at Western and Lakeside get is also supported by research. Comprehensive sex education programs have been shown to reduce sexually transmitted infections and increase use of contraception — as well as reducing sexual activity, the goal of abstinence-only programs, Carroll reports at the Times.

And the benefits go beyond those typical markers of sexual health. “We know that comprehensive sex ed can help people develop healthier relationships” as well as helping them have “honest conversations with their parents about values,” Driver said.

There’s also evidence that sex education can help reduce sexual assault. One 2018 study found that students who received sex ed that included discussion of how to say no to unwanted sex were significantly less likely to experience penetrative sexual assault once they got to college. Abstinence-only sex education did not have the same effect.

While anti-sexual harassment advocates often emphasize teaching people not to commit harassment and assault, rather than teaching people to avoid it, there’s evidence that education can help in this way too. A 2015 study found that a middle-school program that taught communication and emotion management reduced instances of sexual harassment and homophobic name-calling at school.

Sex ed can also help to dismantle gender stereotypes. “With comprehensive sex ed, young people are able to reject or unlearn the harmful stereotype that depicts boys as constantly working to ‘score’ by having sex with girls and, conversely, depicts girls as non-sexual beings who are responsible for managing the behaviors of boys,” SIECUS communications manager Zach Eisenstein told me in an email. Some abstinence-only programs, he said, reinforce these stereotypes by comparing girls to Crock Pots (because they supposedly take a long time to “heat up”) and boys to microwaves (which heat up quickly).

When students learn that there are a variety of gender identities and expressions, they “are better suited to identify, question, and reject feeding into harmful gender stereotypes from the start,” Eisenstein said.

After the students at Western wrote terms on the sexuality wall, the class moved on to a discussion of the idea that girls like dolls and boys like action figures, or that girls should be pretty and boys should be strong.

“That language really does have an effect on us,” Torrejon told the class. “We absorb that and we internalize that, and then as we get older we kind of put those stereotypes on other people.”

Inclusive sex education can be especially protective for LGBTQ young people, Driver said. Research shows that when a school has an LGBTQ-inclusive sex education program in place, LGBTQ students are less likely to experience depression, drug or alcohol abuse, and bullying, she added.

Such education has benefits for all students, Driver said, including those who don’t identify as LGBTQ. “Students learn to value other people’s perspectives,” she explained. “They learn to value and have empathy for people who are different from them.”

For proponents of inclusive sex ed, this is the goal: for students to learn not just to protect themselves from STIs and unintended pregnancy, but to treat each other — and themselves — with care and respect. And if they get education like this now, the thinking goes, maybe when these kids become parents, they will be more accepting of their children’s identities and help them make informed choices. Homophobic views like those expressed by Schaper will be less common in the future.

While most parents are in favor of comprehensive sex ed, change is slow.

Despite the research supporting it, and the parents who want it, comprehensive sex ed still isn’t the norm in many places around the country. In part, that’s because education in America isn’t federally controlled. Even with a more supportive president than Trump, the White House only has so much influence over what goes on at the state and local levels. And at those levels, there are enough parents opposed to sex education — and enough conservative groups to back them up — to block a lot of attempts at change.

In other words, implementing comprehensive sex ed remains an uphill battle, but one a growing number of states feel is worth fighting.

If history is any guide, California has often helped lead the way on progressive legislation, from a law loosening abortion restrictions in 1967 to one legalizing medical marijuana use in 1996. And with state legislatures turning increasingly Democratic in 2018, some see a coming “blue wave” that could bring with it more socially liberal reforms around the country.

Then again, if California has taken years to fully implement its 2016 law, change elsewhere in the nation is likely to move even more slowly. For example, when an Arizona school district considered implementing a comprehensive sex education curriculum called Rights, Respect, Responsibility in 2018, the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel sent the district a cease and desist letter. The group said the school district was in violation of an Arizona law banning HIV/AIDS education that “promotes a homosexual lifestyle.” The state repealed that law earlier this year, but such restrictions are still on the books in several states.

Because schools tend to be locally controlled, “there’s so much variation among what young people will receive” not just from state to state but from district to district, Driver said. In California, for example, while Anaheim has been on board with CHYA from the beginning, other nearby Orange County School districts delayed implementation, according to EdSource. And while Girls Inc. used to teach sex education across the county, districts started dropping the program when protests against CHYA started heating up. Now Anaheim is the only one left.

For opponents of CHYA and of LGBTQ-inclusive sex education more generally, these delays are a good thing. Education about sexual orientation and gender identity “should be done in the privacy of your home,” Ellsworth-Lobatos said.

But supporters of inclusive sex education say they’re not teaching kids ideology. They’re just respecting who their students are: nonbinary, male, female, gay, straight, asexual, or any of a variety of the above and beyond.

Sometimes sex education is a two-way street. During the class I visited at Western, students taught Torrejon the meanings of several terms, including “demi girl” and “demi boy,” which refer to people who are nonbinary but with some identification with the female or male gender. People who identify that way “use she/they pronouns or he/they pronouns,” a student explained to the class.

Torrejon says she sees the impact of the Girls Inc. program on the students she teaches: “They’re just so much more confident and comfortable within themselves” after the program, she said.

Like Bourne’s class, the program includes an anonymous question box, but students sometimes leave positive feedback instead. “Just hearing how appreciative they are for being able to learn all this, when they know the stigma on it otherwise, is the best feeling ever,” Torrejon said.

After the September class, I asked a few students what they’d learned. “I learned different types of sexualities and different pronouns,” one told me. “I didn’t really know that there [were] that many.”

Another student, a 17-year-old senior, told me he’d done a lot of online research about gender and sexuality in previous years because for a time, “I wanted to be male.” Today, he uses he/him pronouns but says, “I don’t label myself right now.”

Talking about sex and gender identity always makes him nervous, he told me. After class, he was still “a little bit” nervous, he said — “but a lot less.”

AmiMoJo quotes a report from The Guardian: The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time U.S. companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd's of London and Asian insurers as the "last resort" for fossil fuels, according to a new report. The report, which rates the world's 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal -- the biggest single contributor to climate change -- "is on the way to becoming uninsurable" as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance. Ten firms moved to restrict the insurance cover they offer to companies that build or operate coal power plants in 2019, taking the global total to 17, said the Unfriend Coal campaign, which includes 13 environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Client Earth and Urgewald, a German NGO. The report will be launched at an insurance and climate risk conference in London on Monday, as the UN climate summit gets underway in Madrid. The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two U.S. insurers -- Chubb and Axis Capital -- and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects. At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9 trillion, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry's global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6 trillion in assets were divesting from fossil fuels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Politico is reporting on the Donald Trump campaign's planned usage of Vice President and master bootlicker Mike Pence as the 2020 presidential race heats up. The short version is that the campaign intends to put distance between Trump and Pence as much as possible. "For Pence to be an effective surrogate in 2020, campaign officials say his reputation must be preserved," says the outlet, and "someone has to be the nice guy" in contrast to Trump's, you know, overpowering repulsiveness in every possible way and venue.

The plan is that Donald will have his massive, shouting, hate-filled rallies, while Mike Pence will go to battleground states and counties and attempt to reel in "suburban women" and "swing-state residents suffering from Trump fatigue."

That is, as can be expected in a piece that relies heavily on the Trump campaign itself for its descriptions, putting the most charitable face possible on it. The more accurate take is that Mike Pence will act as the Malevolent Hypocrite magnet, attempting to placate his usual base of The Worst Churchgoing People You Know and Folksy Diner-Goers Who Keep Blurting Out Racist Things To Visiting National Reporters. You know the type: People who very much like the Trump administration's brutal treatment of refugees, caging of children, cuts to food assistance, and attempted entry bans on anyone from "Muslim" countries, but who are turned off by Trump being, in public, a disgusting, boorish, blasphemous, perverted freak.

Relax, Mike Pence is there to say. I am as holy as Jeebus Himself, and if I can put up with all Trump's criminal acts, grotesque public behavior, and lifetime of treating anyone and everyone with open, seething contempt, then you can swallow the jagged shards of your folksy pride, put on your best brown shirt, and vote for Team Asshole. He's rude, but he's racist. What more do you people want?

It's the same dynamic that Pence has tried to cultivate throughout his association with Donald Trump. People have done crimes around him, from Flynn to Manafort to Cohen to Giuliani to, it seems, a good chunk of the Cabinet, but Mike Pence has been absolutely unaware of any of it, even when his staff testifies that they sent him a memo about the crimes in his daily briefing materials. Donald Trump is, in action, everything the supposedly saintly Pence pretends to abhor, an alleged sexual assaulter and a liar who takes apparent pride in harming those around him, but Mike Pence sees not a thing.

That's the voter Mike Pence is going for. People like Mike Pence: people who go to church on Sundays, praise Jesus and America, and spend every smiling hour being mean, spiteful, racist, misogynistic stains looking to hurt anyone in America who isn't them, and willing to excuse any behavior by any ally who will help them do it.

There's a lot of them, so it's not a bad strategy. Mike Pences are a dime a dozen, in the swing states and everywhere else.

But there's another, rather more obvious reason that the Trump campaign is keeping Mike Pence at a distance during this campaign ramp-up. It is true that "campaign officials say his reputation must be preserved" in order to woo disillusioned Trump voters back to Team Asshole, but, more pointedly, Pence needs to give a wide, wide berth to the crimes that have landed Donald Trump in impeachment hearings. There is a slim but measurable chance that Donald—especially as the pressure seems to be getting to him of late—will still be revealed to be involved with crimes so ostentatious that even members of his own crime-denying party will yet turn on him, and somebody has to be Plan B.

That would be Pence. He's been there the whole time, but didn't see a thing and didn't know about any of the, you know, unpleasantness. He's spent the entire administration polishing himself as Plan B, should Plan B ever become needed.

President Donald Trump is winning at least one trade war: The one with his own party.

Free-trading Republicans have feuded with the president for years now, and his decision on Monday to reimpose tariffs on Brazil and Argentina brought new criticism from GOP senators — right as he needs them to fend off the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.

Yet despite the complaints from Senate Republicans that Trump is eroding his party’s free trade bona fides, the GOP seemingly can’t — or won’t — rally the votes to handcuff the president. Competing proposals that would give Congress more sway over certain tariffs have been languishing in the Senate Finance Committee, leaving more establishment-minded Republicans little option but to sit back and gripe and wonder what just hit them.

“I’m not a tariff person and he knows that,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). “If we can arrive at a good [trade] deal, that’s great, but I really, I hate the tariffs."

Trump’s move to deploy tariffs on the aluminum and steel imports for national security reasons is particularly galling for some.

"This provision is exclusively meant for national security threats. Yet, the president has acknowledged that the real purpose of this action is to combat currency manipulation — which does not pose a national security threat," said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). "Even if this action were legitimate, the statutory window for imposing these tariffs has closed."

The conflict between Trump and the Republican Party is very real, perhaps the most persistent disagreement between the president and the senators who typically serve as his allies. Yet time and again the Senate GOP has shied away from direct combat with Trump. Any talk of sanctioning Turkey, reforming the National Emergencies Act or restricting Trump’s tariffs has all been quickly sidelined. And no one on Capitol Hill thinks the GOP frustration on trade will dim support for Trump on impeachment.

Toomey and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) proposed separate bills that gave Congress more sway on national security-based tariffs, with Toomey’s even requiring Congress to approve of them. But with an impeachment trial looming and Republicans focused on securing a new North American trade deal, the idea that the GOP might stop Trump from imposing these tariffs is slipping.

Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that until the new North American trade agreement is dealt with, his committee has “put it off.” He also endorsed the latest tariffs, which Trump said was were imposed to crack down on devalued currencies in Argentina and Brazil.

“Normally I don’t like tariffs but if it’s a tool to make people live by the rules of international trade, I’ll support them,” Grassley said.

“I’m not a tariff man, but on the other hand if they’re manipulating currency?” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)

Other Republicans were left befuddled, with some privately seeing Trump’s latest move as retaliation for the South American countries selling soybean to China. Absent more information, senators said they couldn’t really explain Trump’s latest move.

“It doesn’t look like national security. But I can’t tell what it is yet or what they’re trying to accomplish,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). He said in the long term, Congress has to look at taking back some of its authority but acknowledged action to tie Trump’s hands won’t happen: “In the short term? No.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and many of his members reason that more can be gained in private communications with the president than in outright legislative warfare with him. They believe that their work to stop the president from imposing broad tariffs on Mexico earlier this year or imposing tariffs on foreign autos did far more good than confrontation with the president.

Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) disagreed, opposing Trump’s judicial nominees in his final term in hopes of driving a debate on tariffs. But Flake is gone and few in the party seem to want to take any similar stand against the president at this time.

“It’s somewhat controversial,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) of Trump’s view that imported steel poses risks to national security. Congress “gives much broader powers to the chief executive than we contemplated but … absent a presidential signature, it’s hard to claw that authority back once it’s given.”

The mood on the Republican side was mostly resignation — and Trump seems to know it. He gave no heads up to most members of his own party before hitting send on his tweet announcing the tariffs, prompting Lankford to begin reading up on the issue and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to seek more information about whether it would affect companies in his home state.

“Brazil and Argentina have been presiding over a massive devaluation of their currencies. which is not good for our farmers,” Trump tweeted, arguing that the economy has surged since he began his tariff regime.

But Johnson gave an audible sigh when asked about the latest round of levies.

Johnson has called bailouts to farmers part of a “Soviet-type economy,” has warned trade uncertainty could hurt the U.S. economy and worked to shield his state from the effects of previously threatened tariffs against the two countries.

And once again, he was going to have to deal with the fallout from Trump’s trade policies.

“We fought hard for an exemption, finally got it and now they’re throwing this,” Johnson said. “So we’re concerned. I’m concerned.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

This is what Republican Sen. Joni Ernst saw last week back in Iowa on Thanksgiving recess, courtesy of the organization Social Security Works:

x

Sen. @joniernst (R-IA) says that “A lot of changes need to be made" to Social Security "behind closed doors."We've got a message outside her Des Moines office today to make sure Iowans know that by "changes" Ernst means huge cuts to earned benefits! pic.twitter.com/CQ5JacjTSm

— SocialSecurityWorks (@SSWorks) November 27, 2019

It parked the billboard in front of her office and plans to have it travel around the state this month. "When Joni Ernst says she wants to address Social Security behind closed doors, she is speaking in code to Wall Street donors," said Linda Benesch, Social Security Works communications director, in an email. "The only reason to act in secret is to overthrow the will of the American people by cutting earned benefits. Our mobile billboard exposes Ernst's real plans."

The reference is to comments Ernst made back in September at a town meeting. Ernst said that lawmakers need to "fix" Social Security "behind closed doors," where they can "just have an open and honest conversation about what are some of the ideas that we have for maintaining Social Security in the future."

Right: open and honest, but with the American people shut out of the conversation. Which is how all Republicans want to destroy the program—behind closed doors, with no one person’s fingerprints on the weapon.By the way, the implement being deployed by Ernst in that billboard is her infamous hog castrator.

We need fighters for Social Security in the Senate. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats.

 

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Montana Governor Steve Bullock and former Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak have dropped out of the 2020 presidential race.

Bullock announced his exit in a post on Medium: “Today, I announced that I’m suspending my campaign for President. While there were many obstacles we could not have anticipated when entering into this race, it has become clear that in this moment, I won’t be able to break through to the top tier of this still-crowded field of candidates.”

A Bullock aide told the New York Times that he won’t run for U.S. Senate as some had hoped: “The governor, however, has repeatedly said that he has no desire to do so. His spokeswoman, Galia Slayen, said Monday that Mr. Bullock would complete his term as governor and would not seek to challenge Mr. Daines. ‘While he plans to work hard to elect Democrats in the state and across the country in 2020, it will be in his capacity as a governor and a senior voice in the Democratic Party — not as a candidate for U.S. Senate,’ Ms. Slayen said.”

Said Sestak in a statement: “I want to thank you for the honor of running for President of the United States of America. It has been an endeavor filled with immeasurable wisdom, passions, humor and insights to, and from, the people of America.”

Thank you for this opportunity! pic.twitter.com/mW5Qdi3bhT

— Joe Sestak (@JoeSestak) December 1, 2019

The post Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak Drop Out of 2020 Presidential Race appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter will plead guilty in federal court on Tuesday after denying for more than a year that he illegally misused campaign funds.

Hunter told TV station KUSI in San Diego that "Tomorrow, on Tuesday, I'm going to change my plea to guilty."

Hunter said he wanted to avoid a trial "for my kids. I think it would be really tough for them."

The California Republican didn't say definitively that he was resigning, but the former Marine officer did mention that "It's been a privilege to serve in Congress. I think we've done a lot of great things for the nation."

The Hunters have been a dynasty in southern California politics for decades. Hunter or his father, Duncan Hunter, Sr., have held that San Diego seat since 1980. The elder Hunter, a hardline military hawk, even ran briefly for president in 2008 before withdrawing.

When asked what would happen to his congressional seat, Hunter added: "I'm confident the transition will be a good one."

Margaret Hunter, the congressman's wife, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misuse campaign funds back in June, a move that put enormous pressure on him to find a deal with federal prosecutors.

A source close to the case said Hunter's plea agreement will be "virtually identical" to Margaret Hunter's deal.

Recommended federal sentencing ranges for this felony charge range from 8 to 14 months, although Hunter's lawyers will argue for a drastically lower term of incarceration, citing his military and public service records.

A hearing notice was posted Monday morning on the federal court docket in San Diego announcing Hunter's change of plea. An attorney for the California Republican could not be immediately reached for comment. Justice Department officials declined to formally comment on Hunter's interview.

Hunter's trial was initially scheduled to take place this fall, but the proceedings had been pushed back until Jan. 22. Hunter had also filed a case in a federal appeals court seeking to dismiss the charges. Both these legal actions will end with the plea deal.

The House Ethics Committee, which has also announced that it intended to investigate Hunter, would drop its case against him as well.

Federal prosecutors described the Hunters as so mired in debt that they had less than $1,000 in their bank account from 2009 to 2017, and owed money to stores like Macy's and Home Depot. The Hunters had begun falling behind on their children's school tuition and missed numerous mortgage payments.

"It explains why he himself used campaign funds to buy everything from cigarettes to gadgets to groceries to getaways — things he wanted but could not afford to buy with his own money,” prosecutors alleged in one filing.

Hunter — who has developed a reputation on Capitol Hill for drinking heavily and carousing — was also accused of routinely using campaign cash to finance numerous extra-marital affairs.

In one episode in 2010, Hunter allegedly took a lobbyist on a "double date” road trip to Virginia Beach with a fellow congressman and then charged his campaign for the hotel room and bar tab.

In another 2015 incident, Hunter allegedly took a House leadership aide out for cocktails and then took an Uber back to his office after they spent the night together. Both expenses were charged to his campaign account, prosecutors say.

Hunter, who narrowly won reelection last fall despite his indictment, has long claimed that he was the subject of a political witch hunt. Hunter alleged that the prosecutors were biased against him because they supported former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and he was an early endorser of President Donald Trump.

Prosecutors accused Hunter of improperly using campaign funds to pursue numerous romantic affairs with congressional aides and lobbyists.

Prosecutors urged the judge in Hunter's case to "admonish" the lawmaker to stop attacking them as politically biased. Hunter, they said, had attempted to connect his case to Trump's claims of an FBI "witch hunt" against him.

After Hunter was indicted, GOP leaders stripped him of his committee assignments but stopped short of calling on him to resign.

Former Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), who was indicted on insider trading chargers last summer and also initially denied the charges, ended up pleading guilty this fall and resigned from Congress. But Collins and Hunter both won reelection despite their indictments, which marked the first time since the 1980s that multiple members facing prison time were able to convince voters to return them to office.

The legal cloud hovering over Hunter has propelled other Republicans to seek his solidly conservative district. Both former San Diego councilman Carl DeMaio and former Rep. Darrell Issa are running for the seat, and Issa said on Monday he jumped into the race under the assumption that Hunter would not be on the ballot next November.

Issa told POLITICO that “it doesn’t surprise me” that Hunter would seek to spare his family a messy trial. And in a sign of how Hunter’s departure will reshape the race, Issa sought to lay claim to the slice of the electorate that remains loyal to Hunter in polls.

In a sign of Hunter’s precarious political standing, Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar came within a few points of unseating the Republican incumbent last cycle. Campa-Najjar, who is running again, told POLITICO that “the writing was on the wall” in regards to Hunter’s fates

“My hope is we can collectively as a district move on from this period of the Hunter scandal,” Campa-Najjar said.

Jeremy White contributed to this story.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Let’s face it—we’re all a little bit of a mess in our own ways—especially in the kitchen, which is why you can never have too many kitchen towels. Having a thick stack on hand will ensure you’re always ready to sop up messes, wipe down counters, and dry hands, dishes, and produce. We’ve wiped up gallons of spills and dried countless dishes with 25 towels since 2014, and the Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towel is our favorite. It’s absorbent, durable, affordable, and available in a rainbow of colors.

Apple will release four new iPhone models during its fall update cycle, all of which will support 5G connectivity, according to JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee (via CNBC).

Based on channel checks, Chatterjee believes Apple will release a 5.4-inch ‌iPhone‌, two 6.1-inch iPhones, and one 6.7-inch ‌iPhone‌.


Chatterjee's prediction is a bit of a deviation from current rumors, which have suggested we'll see a lineup similar to the 2019 lineup with 5.4 and 6.7-inch higher-end iPhones and a lower-cost 6.1-inch device.

Apple could, however, be planning to release two higher-end devices in 6.1 and 6.7-inch screen sizes, and two lower-end devices in 5.4 and 6.1-inch screen sizes as Chatterjee suggests, though it's not clear yet if this is the company's plan. Regardless of how many iPhones are released, the entire ‌iPhone‌ lineup is expected to use OLED displays and 5G technology.

"The 2H20 lineup will include all OLED phones, with screen sizes of 5.4″ (one model), 6.1″ (two), and 6.7″ (one), broadening the screen size range from 5.8″ to 6.5″ in 2019. We expect the two higher end models (one 6.1″, one 6.7″) to include mmWave support, triple camera and World facing 3D sensing, while the lower-end models (one 6.1″, one 5.4″) will include support for only sub-6 GHz and dual camera (no World-facing 3D sensing)."

Two of the higher-end iPhones will be equipped with new rear camera technology with "world-facing" 3D sensing for improved augmented reality capabilities, while the others will use dual-lens setups similar to the iPhone 11.

There could also be a split between the type of 5G connectivity offered by each ‌iPhone‌. The two higher-end iPhones could offer support for the fastest 5G technology, mmWave, while the two lower-end iPhones may be limited to the sub-6GHz spectrum, which is not as speedy but has a wider range.

mmWave 5G technology will likely be limited to major cities and dense urban areas because of its short range, while 5G networks in rural and suburban areas will use the slower sub-6GHz technology, such as the 600MHz network T-Mobile is rolling out.

Rumors have suggested Apple is going to use Qualcomm's X55 modems in all of its 2020 iPhones, and while those modems do support both mmWave and sub-6GHz spectrum, an additional mmWave antenna is needed for mmWave support.

To make the lower-end iPhones more affordable, Apple could potentially limit the mmWave antenna to higher-end models, though prior rumors have suggested Apple's aim with its 2020 iPhones is to match the technology in more affordable 5G Android smartphones, which do support mmWave.

Starting in 2021, Chatterjee believes Apple will make some significant changes to its ‌iPhone‌ release cycles. "Based on our supply chain checks, we are expecting a strategic change in the launch cadence with the release of two new ‌iPhone‌ models in 1H21 followed by another two in 2H21, which will serve to smooth seasonality around the launch," he wrote.

Releasing two iPhones during the first half of 2021 and two iPhones during the second half of 2021 could allow Apple to better compete with rival smartphone companies that introduce new devices throughout the year and limit "product cycle missteps" by allowing for designs to be altered more quickly in response to market feedback.

Apple has been launching new iPhones in the fall since 2011, and the note from Chatterjee provides little additional information on the potential split if Apple does pursue a new launch timeline.

Apple could release lower-end devices earlier in the year and then save its higher-end launches for the fall, but Chatterjee's current prediction would see Apple releasing four iPhones in September 2020 and then two additional iPhones in the first half of 2021, for a total of six iPhones within six months, which seems like a bit of a stretch.


This article, "Analyst: Apple to Release Four iPhones in Fall 2020 With 5G Connectivity and OLED Displays" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Donald Trump is refusing to send lawyers to upcoming impeachment hearings after weeks of claiming the impeachment process is unfair because he's not getting his say. One Republican Judiciary Committee member says the White House needs to show up.

Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California appeared on ABC's This Week Sunday and said that acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton should testify. That's whether or not federal courts rule that the White House can't squelch subpoenas and they are compelled to testify. "And in fact, yeah," McClintock said, "it would be to the President's advantage to have them testify now."

As if suddenly aware that he might have stepped in it big time with the White House, he added, "But of course he has to weigh that against the enormous catastrophic damage that would do to the doctrine of executive privilege that assures that when policy is being developed within the administration, those discussions are unfettered, are candid, are thinking outside of the box. […] That’s why the doctrine of executive privilege exists." Uh huh. Attempting to recover, he went on: "I think more information is better than less in every aspect of an inquiry and the adversarial process is very important to test what's true and what's not."

As if his—or any other Republican’s—vote in committee is uncertain; as if he's going to actually consider the evidence presented.

The best revenge is taking even more seats from Trump. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these House races!

President Donald Trump at the G20 summit in June 2019, with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The president announced steel and aluminum tariffs on Monday.

President Donald Trump returned from the long Thanksgiving weekend ready to open up a new front in his trade war.

On Monday, Trump announced on Twitter that the US would impose steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina in response to what the president described as the countries’ “massive devaluation of their currencies, which is not good for our farmers.”

“Therefore, effective immediately, I will restore the Tariffs on all Steel & Aluminum that is shipped into the U.S. from those countries,” Trump said, adding that he wished the US Federal Reserve should act so “that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies.”

Though the self-proclaimed “Tariff Man” favors protectionist policies, the president’s decision to ramp up his trade feud is somewhat unexpected. In the spring of 2018, the Trump administration placed tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum on a slew of trading partners, including the European Union, Mexico, and Canada. (They’ve since been removed on Canada and Mexico as part of the USMCA deal.)

Initially, the Trump administration had also threatened other trading partners — including Brazil and Argentina — with those same tariffs, but ultimately struck a last-minute deal to avoid those duties. The administration limited steel and aluminum imports through quotas instead.

Still, according to CNN, after Canada, Brazil supplied the most steel to the US in the beginning of 2019. Last year, Brazilian steel exports to the US added up to $2.6 billion. Argentina isn’t as big a supplier, with just $700 million, per the Washington Post.

But now Trump wants to revisit tariffs, though his reasoning is confusing — and the push seems to have caught the new recipients of Trump’s trade ire off guard.

Trump wants to put tariffs on Brazil and Argentina. But why now?

Trump in his tweet accused Brazil and Argentina of a “massive devaluation” of their currencies.

But both Brazil and Argentina are dealing with their own economic woes. In Argentina, the right-leaning (and soon to be outgoing) Mauricio Macri administration has battled a financial crisis, including struggling to control the falling peso.

Brazil’s own currency has suffered recently, and what’s going in Argentina is partly to blame. At least according to Trump’s own Treasury Department, as of May, neither Brazil nor Argentina are on the watch list of countries requiring closer attention to their currency practices. Which means Trump’s tariffs could put more pressure on those South American economies, and their currencies.

Brazil and Argentina have both been sort of winners in Trump’s trade war with China. Brazil is now the top soybean supplier to China. Argentina also struck a deal to export soymeal (basically, animal feed) to China. But given the volatility of the China-US negotiations, and the pressure it’s putting on the global economy, it’s not clear how deep or long term such gains will end up being for either country.

Meanwhile, the politics of Trump’s announcement are a bit strange. Brazil’s new right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro has strengthened the country’s relationship with the like-minded Trump administration, and Trump had previously talked up a possible US-Brazil free trade deal. Just last week, Brazil’s economy minister, Paul Guedes, had a bunch of meetings with US trade officials, including Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. Ahead of those meetings, Guedes said Washington liked the right-wing Bolsonaro administration’s economic policies.

Responding to Trump’s tweet Monday, Bolsonaro said had an “open channel” with Trump and that he’d call him to talk it out.

“I’m going to call him so that he doesn’t penalize us,” Bolsonaro said Monday, according to Reuters.

“Our economy basically comes from commodities, it’s what we’ve got,” the Brazilian president added. “I hope that he understands and that he doesn’t penalize us with this, and I’m almost certain he’ll listen to us.”

Argentina, meanwhile, is currently undergoing a political transition; its right-leaning President Macri is leaving office, to be replaced by the left-leaning Alberto Fernández on December 10.

So Trump’s announcement definitely arrives at a bad time for both Brazil’s relatively new president — especially since Bolsonaro touted closer ties with the US as a selling point — and Argentina’s incoming administration.

It also comes at an odd time for Trump himself, as the president is trying to resolve the long-running trade dispute with China.

The US and China said they’d reached “phase one” of a trade deal in October, but the terms are still fuzzy and the agreement still hasn’t been formally inked. It’s not even clear if it will happen before the end of the year, and the Hong Kong protests may have recently strained relations even more.

Specifically, Trump signed a Hong Kong human rights legislation that overwhelmingly passed Congress, and Beijing is really angry about it. President Xi Jinping sees Hong Kong as an internal matter (Chinese propaganda has blamed the CIA and other Western institutions for fomenting the unrest), and Washington’s move as meddling in the country’s internal affairs. In response, the Chinese government has banned US military visits to Hong Kong and has sanctioned some US-based non-profits in the United States, which it accuses of fomenting the Hong Kong uprising.

The US is set to put an additional $156 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods on December 15, which would mean basically anything coming from China will be taxed. Trump said Monday that he’s “very happy where we are and frankly I could be other places that I could do all by myself and be even happier … but the Chinese want to make a deal.” Whatever that means, it doesn’t shed all that much light on where Chinese-US trade talks stand.

But Trump’s trade war with China has hurt some US manufacturers and farmers. More broadly, the US-China spat has rattled the entire global economy. And, of course, Trump is still waging a trade battle with the EU (though some of the tariffs were approved by the World Trade Organization). He has yet to get his revised NAFTA deal through Congress, though there’s still hope there. And now, Trump is entering the 2020 election year adding even more volatility to America’s trade situation by targeting Brazil and Argentina.

Cry "Unfair!" like a 5-year-old, and refuse to participate.

The first round of hearings is over. More than a dozen closed-door depositions are out in the open. The impeachment inquiry is headed into its next phase.

After weeks of laying out their evidence, Democrats will now decide which potential charges to level against against President Trump. Unless additional public testimony is scheduled, that means the center of gravity in the impeachment process will soon shift to the House Judiciary Committee, which is holding its first hearing on impeachment on Wednesday. That committee is expected to draft articles of impeachment based on a forthcoming report from the House Intelligence Committee.

At various points, Democrats have said that they already have the “smoking gun” evidence needed to convince the public that Trump’s conduct was serious enough to warrant his removal from office. And throughout the impeachment process, Democrats have laid out a detailed timeline they say implicates Trump and his allies in a scheme to pressure Ukraine to pursue investigations of the president’s political rival. But while the House seems likely to vote on impeachment, the impact of the case against Trump may ultimately depend on what the American public — not the House Democrats — regards as the “smoking guns.” As we await the release of the Democrats’ report and the next round of hearings, it’s a good moment to take stock of the “smoking guns” they have — and don’t have.

There is, at present, no single piece of evidence that conclusively links Trump to the Ukraine scandal like the tape transcript of President Nixon ordering the Watergate cover-up. That particular piece of evidence was such a decisive “smoking gun” that its release forced Nixon’s resignation within a matter of days. Democrats’ case against Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t have that one key piece of evidence directly linking Trump to a quid pro quo. So a question moving forward is whether Democrats have enough of a “smoking gun” to persuade voters that Trump committed impeachable offenses — or if the missing evidence will turn out to be a lifeline for Trump.

In broad strokes, Democrats laid out three questions at the beginning of the public phase of the inquiry, which they said would serve as the foundation for their investigation (and perhaps also the articles of impeachment). Those questions are:

1. Did Trump request an investigation that would personally benefit his political interests?
2. Did Trump and his allies pressure Ukraine into committing to an investigation, including threatening to withhold a White House meeting or military aid?
3. Did the White House then try to suppress or conceal information about Trump’s actions with regard to Ukraine?

Democrats’ evidence for the first question — that he asked a foreign leader for an investigation of his political rival — is particularly strong. They don’t just have a single smoking gun regarding whether Trump or the people close to him asked the Ukrainian president and other high-level officials to open an investigation into the Bidens — they have a whole smoldering arsenal.

Particularly key is the summary of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, which was actually released before Democrats even began interviewing witnesses. (The White House released the summary a month after a whistleblower filed a complaint about the call.) In the now-infamous conversation, Trump asked Zelensky to “do us a favor” and open investigations into 2016 election interference and the Bidens. While Trump has denied that he did anything wrong on the call, that summary is proof that Trump mentioned investigations to Zelensky, and makes it pretty hard to argue that Trump didn’t want Ukraine to open them.

That’s important because over the course of the public testimony, the Democrats have also tried to establish that this wasn’t just a one-off request. According to Gordon Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union and an integral figure in pushing for the investigations, he and others were just following the president’s orders, something which he testified that Trump had made clear on several different occasions. That testimony was underscored by an account from a second witness, diplomat David Holmes, who said he overheard a call between Sondland and Trump on July 26, where Trump reportedly asked Sondland about whether Zelensky was going to commit to the investigations. Sondland disputed a few of Holmes’s details in his testimony, like whether he mentioned the name “Biden.” But he largely agreed with the substance of what Holmes said, adding to the Democrats’ evidence that Trump himself was asking about investigations.

Whether Democrats have a smoking gun for their third question — if there was an effort to cover up or suppress information about Trump’s actions on Ukraine — is more debatable. They don’t, for example, have much evidence from the hearings of an internal effort to cover up the July 25 call. Several witnesses were questioned about why the July 25 call record was moved onto a secure server, or why a few words and phrases seemed to be missing from the call summary. But none of them were willing to say they saw a concerted effort to conceal information.

An obstruction charge is still on the table, though, as Democrats have indicated they could instead draft a narrower article of impeachment around obstruction or contempt of Congress, focusing on the White House’s blanket refusal to cooperate with the inquiry. Democrats like Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have already said that this is an impeachable offense. Whether the public will agree remains to be seen, since this has been the Trump administration’s attitude toward all congressional investigations since Democrats took control of the House.

But of course, the Democrats are still missing perhaps the most essential piece of the puzzle — a smoking gun for their second question of whether Trump ordered that military aid and/or a White House meeting be conditioned on the investigations.

To be sure, Democrats do have a wide array of evidence strongly suggesting that the people involved in pushing for the investigations — including the Ukrainians — understood that a White House meeting and nearly $400 million in military aid hung in the balance. Multiple witnesses testified over the course of the public hearings that it was clear to them that there was a quid pro quo. But as Republicans pointed out repeatedly over the course of the hearings, none of these witnesses ever talked to Trump directly. Even Sondland, the one witness who did communicate with Trump directly about the investigations, said he only “presumed” there was a connection and had never heard Trump say it.

There are other witnesses who could help fill in the blanks. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who witnesses say delivered Trump’s order to freeze the aid, seems like he’s in a position to shed light on at least some of this mystery. And Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, would also presumably be able to offer crucial input about his involvement in the pressure campaign, too — since witness after witness described him as the person tasked with carrying out Trump’s orders. Of course, the rub is neither seems likely to comply with the Democrats’ subpoena to testify, so Democrats have said they’ll press ahead with the impeachment process rather than try to force Mulvaney and others to testify through what would almost certainly be a lengthy court battle. Democrats did score a win in court last week in case involving another recalcitrant witness, former White House counsel Don McGahn, when a judge ruled that White House officials can’t ignore congressional subpoenas — but that ruling is under appeal, and it’s not clear how it would affect other impeachment witnesses.

It’s possible, too, that this particular “smoking gun” — that is, direct evidence that Trump ordered a quid pro quo — might not exist. It could be that Trump truly didn’t make the connection or as Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified earlier this year, it could because Trump frequently speaks in “code,” rather than giving direct orders. That doesn’t mean that the connection between the investigations, the aid, and the White House meeting wasn’t apparent to everyone involved. But it does potentially deprive Democrats of a smoking gun as dramatic and decisive as the tape that ended Nixon’s presidency. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see just how much of a barrier that turns out to be.

Dancing with the Stars dancer Louis van Amstel’s 11-year-old son was given a heartbreaking introduction to homophobia last week after telling his substitute teacher that he’s thankful he’s being adopted by his two gay dads.

The incident took place at Deerfield Elementary School in Cedar Hills, south of Salt Lake City, during a pre-Thanksgiving exercise in which the teacher asked the fifth grade class what they are thankful for.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports: “Some of the kids had said turkey and mashed potatoes. One girl mentioned her dog. Another student joked about not having to go to school over the holiday. The boy’s response was a bit more serious. ‘I’m thankful that I’m finally going to be adopted by my two dads,’ he answered.”

The teacher snapped, “Why on earth would you be happy about that?” For the next 10 minutes she ranted to the classroom that “homosexuality is wrong” and “two men living together is a sin” according to students accounts, the paper reported. She also told the son, “That’s nothing to be thankful for.”

Three girls stepped up to report the incident as Van Amstel’s son was too frightened. They left the classroom to do so.

Van Amstel posted an irate message on Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

| PLEASE READ THIS | this story is too important and hits too close to home not to write about. When our son Daniel answered the substitute teachers question ‘What are you thankful for with: I’m thankful for finally being adopted by my two dads’. The teacher went onto sharing her own views on Homosexuality and that it’s wrong. three girls asked her multiple times to stop. When she didn’t they went to the principles office to complain. I’m proud of the three girls and school for standing up for our family against this bully. Im disgusted that the bully is the teacher in a public school #equalrights #allfamilies #allfamiliesmatter

A post shared by Louis van Amstel (@louisvanamstel) on Nov 22, 2019 at 1:38pm PST

Wrote Van Amstel on Instagram: “This story is too important and hits too close to home not to write about. When our son Daniel answered the substitute teachers question ‘What are you thankful for with: I’m thankful for finally being adopted by my two dads’. The teacher went onto sharing her own views on Homosexuality and that it’s wrong. three girls asked her multiple times to stop. When she didn’t they went to the principles office to complain. I’m proud of the three girls and school for standing up for our family against this bully. Im disgusted that the bully is the teacher in a public school.”

The post ‘DWTS’ Dancer’s Son Told ‘Homosexuality is Wrong’ After Telling Teacher He’s Thankful for Being Adopted by His Gay Dads: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Shelley Morrison, who played Rosario on the NBC sitcom Will & Grace, has died at 83.

The AP reports: “Morrison died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from heart failure after a brief illness, publicist Lori DeWaal told The Associated Press.”

Variety adds: “Rosario, who hailed from El Salvador, was originally written to appear in just one episode of the hit NBC series, but her dynamic with Megan Mullally’s Karen resonated so well with audiences that the character went on to appear in 68 episodes over eight seasons of the original series. According to co-creator Max Mutchnick, Morrison was asked to reprise her role for the revival of ‘Will & Grace,’ but had decided to retire from acting completely.”

The show’s stars Debra Messing, Eric McCormack, Megan Mullally, and Sean Hayes reacted to Morrison’s death on social media:

View this post on Instagram

Such sad news. Our beloved Shelley Morrison passed away today. She was absolutely hilarious and had the biggest heart. She was a part of our Will and Grace family and will be greatly missed. My heart goes out to her entire family.

A post shared by Sean Hayes (@seanhayes) on Dec 1, 2019 at 6:37pm PST

View this post on Instagram

Oh, Shelley… what a loss. Our dear Rosario has passed on. Shelley had a career that spanned decades, but she will always be our dear Rosie. She was a kind soul with a huge heart and always had a smile on her face. All my love to Walter and the entire family. #shelleymorrison

A post shared by Debra Messing (@therealdebramessing) on Dec 1, 2019 at 7:32pm PST

Shelley was a beautiful soul & a wonderful actor. Her work as Rosario, season after season, was as nuanced and real as it was hysterical. She will be missed by everyone at #WillandGrace, she’s a huge part of it. Sending so much love to Walter and Shelley’s whole family. #Rosario https://t.co/C1vkDTU6Qk

— Eric McCormack (@EricMcCormack) December 2, 2019

just got a bulletin on my phone that shelley morrison has passed. my heart is heavy. putting shelley, her beloved husband walter & their children in the light. thank you for your friendship & partnership, shell. you accomplished wonderful things in this world. you will be missed. pic.twitter.com/WeLGrWlRye

— Megan Mullally (@MeganMullally) December 2, 2019

The post ‘Will & Grace’ Stars React to Death of Actress Shelley Morrison appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Amanda Northrop/Vox

A big tax cut, unprecedented environmental degradation, Wall Street unleashed, and a whole lot of judges.

The scandals, the leaks, the outrages, and the bizarre tweets of the last three years can distract from an important fact about President Donald Trump: He has changed policy in ways that affect the lives of millions of Americans.

Some of the Trump agenda is standard for a Republican president. White-collar criminal prosecutions have hit a 33-year low. The Justice Department defends state laws that could kick thousands off the voting rolls. The National Labor Relations Board is now more sympathetic to employers than unions. And military spending is on track to reach the same levels as during the height of the Iraq War.

But he’s gone further. While the media, understandably, focuses on Trump’s many scandals, his administration has quietly enacted a far more aggressive agenda than his Republican predecessors. Big boosts to fossil fuel production have come at the expense of an unprecedented deterioration in air quality. Tens of thousands of people have lost health insurance by administrative fiat, and millions are in the process of losing their nutritional assistance through the same mechanism. He’s remade the judiciary, installing conservative judges at twice Obama’s pace, and he’s consolidated a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that may endure for decades.

Tax changes were Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishment, creating a huge windfall for wealthy shareholders and small gains for the middle class — with revenue losses much larger than initially forecast. He’s also undertaken significant but little-noticed alternations in supervision of Wall Street that increase the riskiness of the banking system, plus drastic changes to immigration policy that go far beyond wall construction.

The immigration changes align with Trump’s main campaign themes, even if they don’t line up in detail with what he promised. But much of this amounts to delivering for big business and the wealthy in a much more dramatic way than his “populist” positioning would indicate. Promises to voters to protect clean air, provide better health care, crack down on banks, and tax the rich have fallen entirely by the wayside.

As 2020 approaches, Trump’s achievements are a reminder that Trump and his team are doing real things that have real impacts on real lives. His successes explain why the conservative movement is solidly behind him, despite its considerable doubts from four years ago. Regardless of what Trump tweets or says or does during the election, it’s worth remembering there’s more to him than the Trump Show.

More oil and gas production, less environmental regulation

A major trend of Trump-era policymaking has been to roll back environmental regulation. This involves going through the process of promulgating new rules that are far more lax than those they replace. The New York Times has identified 53 separate rules that have completed the rollback process and 32 more that are still in the works.

It’s not unusual for Republican administrations to take a more skeptical view of environmental regulation, but the Trump administration really has been more uniformly aggressive on this front than its predecessors, as seen by criticism of the Trump Environmental Protection Agency by several of the agency’s Reagan- and Bush-era chiefs.

This reflects the growing polarization of environmental policy issues, which used to be less strictly aligned with larger left-right policy disputes. But it also reflects one of the key themes of Trump-era policymaking in general: a tendency toward recklessness with regard to politics and public opinion obscured in part by the large volume of coverage dedicated to Trump scandals and Trump’s personal behavior.

As a candidate, Trump was vocally skeptical of climate change regulations but specifically vowed “to promote clean air and water,” which are overwhelmingly popular causes. But Trump has moved to roll back dozens of rules on these subjects without the changes ever becoming a focus of sustained public debate.

Most of these rollbacks’ impacts will be felt primarily in the long term, but already, particulate pollution is getting worse, reversing years of progress. A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimates that 9,700 more Americans died due to air pollution in 2018 than in 2016, in part due to regulatory changes. But the Trump administration is moving to restrict the range of evidence used to demonstrate air pollution’s harms, hoping to forestall the promulgation of new standards that would lead to stricter regulation.

In tandem with the regulatory rollback, Trump’s goal of boosting America’s natural resource extraction industries has been largely successful. There is no broad-based revival of the coal industry, but employment in coal mining has stabilized and is rising slightly in a reversal of recent trends. American oil output has soared to the point where net imports of crude oil and petroleum products are at their lowest level in generations and the country is likely to become a net exporter in the near future. Natural gas output, meanwhile, has soared to record highs, continuing a rapid growth pattern that began during the Obama presidency.

The reasons are more technological than regulatory, but policy has made a difference at the margins. Trump values boosting extractive industries over environmental protection, and energy production has increased substantially while the air gets dirtier and carbon dioxide emissions rise.

Paring back the welfare state

Trump speaks frequently, albeit somewhat vaguely, about his business deregulation activities.

But there’s a sphere of regulatory activism he speaks about much less: the paring back of the social safety net. Efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed in Congress, and while House Republicans briefly tried to mobilize around a program for cuts in a broad array of non-health safety net programs, their Senate colleagues weren’t interested in taking it up. More recently, however, a more modest version of this agenda has been pursued through regulation.

That starts with allowing states to impose work requirements on their Medicaid programs. Arkansas was the first state to take this step, and nearly 20,000 people lost insurance as a result before a federal district court judge put the waivers on hold. Kentucky also received a work requirements waiver, but Andy Bevin’s election as governor means his state will reverse course. Despite the district court ruling against the administration, it is likely to prevail at the higher levels of a judicial system that is increasingly dominated by GOP appointees.

Beyond the specifics of the Medicaid waiver fight, the uninsurance rate has risen steadily under Trump despite an improving labor market — seemingly because of the administration’s lack of interest in vigorous implementation of the Affordable Care Act. He’s also acted to re-legalize skimpy insurance plans that don’t cover prescription drugs or maternity benefits.

The Trump administration has also launched a three-pronged rulemaking effort to limit federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That started with tougher work requirements that could cost 755,000 people their benefits and was followed up by rule changes that would make about 3 million beneficiaries of a different anti-poverty program ineligible for SNAP. Most recently, the administration proposed some technical changes to how utility costs are calculated that will generate slightly higher benefits for 13 percent of SNAP recipients and larger benefit cuts to about 16 percent of SNAP recipients.

The scale of these changes is tiny compared to the massive cuts to the safety net once envisioned by former House Speaker Paul Ryan (to say nothing of Ryan’s vision of cutting federal spending on the elderly), but the impact on the lives of several million people is substantial — and striking in light of the fact that reducing federal spending or narrowing the deficit don’t appear to be goals the administration is seriously pursuing.

Trump reshaped the tax code

The Trump administration has only one really big legislative accomplishment to its name, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which initiated a range of changes in both individual and business taxation in the United States.

Republicans both in the administration and on Capitol Hill insisted that the tax cuts would pay for themselves through faster economic growth, which (predictably) hasn’t happened. What’s not as well known is that corporate tax revenue actually fell by more than anticipated in 2018 and has only marginally rebounded in 2019. In part as a result, the budget deficit has been rising faster than the Congressional Budget Office thought it would, even though lower-than-anticipated interest rates have helped the government save money. The big issue is that the investment boom boosters promised didn't come to fruition, any more than Republicans delivered on the promise of a tax code simple enough that you can file on a postcard.

At the same time, while many Democrats fumed about the huge increase in the deficit TCJA was sure to set off, it’s very difficult to find any evidence that the increase in public borrowing has been a problem. Not only do the government’s borrowing costs remain low, global macroeconomic conditions have been weak enough that the Federal Reserve ended up reversing course this year and slightly cutting interest rates. Under the circumstances, fiscal stimulus delivered by Trump (in the form not only of tax cuts, but also higher spending on both military and non-military categories) has been economically useful, whether or not you think his specific fiscal ideas make sense.

Beyond cutting rates, Trump has also reshaped the tax code in important ways. By substantially increasing the standard deduction, TCJA has reduced the number of families who itemize tax deductions and thus, in effect, made all deductions less valuable and economically important. Pairing this with a reduction in the amount of home mortgage interest that is eligible for tax deductibility has, in particular, narrowed the scope of the mortgage interest tax deduction — long seen as a sacred cow of the tax code — and done so without notably disrupting the real estate market.

TCJA also famously capped the deductibility of state and local taxes, a change that’s unfavorable to blue states and has sparked some half-hearted efforts by congressional Democrats to restore full deductibility. Reverting to the pre-Trump treatment of state and local taxes would, however, be a big tax cut for the rich — and it’s noteworthy that none of the Democratic presidential candidates have embraced this rollback.

Taxes are always changing, and if Democrats do well in 2020, it’s predictable that taxes will go up — especially on the rich — reversing much of the fiscal and economic impact of Trump’s bill. But the reshaping of the deductions landscape is likely to be a somewhat enduring, and arguably progressive, part of his legacy.

A bonanza for banks

As a candidate and at times in the early days of his administration, Trump espoused the idea of bringing back Glass-Steagall regulations that would have required the breakup of large financial services companies. That kind of talk evaporated quickly, however, and in office one of Trump’s most significant areas of policymaking has been a big step back from the more stringent financial regulations enacted in the wake of the financial crisis.

The clearest manifestation of that trend was a 2018 bill authored by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) and backed by many moderate Democrats. There were a bunch of moving parts to this bill, but its key provision was raising the threshold for the highest level of regulatory scrutiny from banks with at least $50 billion in assets to banks with at least $250 billion in assets.

But legislative action is just the beginning of a much broader push. Trump’s Federal Reserve appointees promulgated a more “tailored” version of the Obama-era supplementary leverage rule, allowing the biggest banks to take on more debt and more risk. The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought 40 percent fewer regulatory actions. His Financial Stability Oversight Council has removed the Obama administration’s designation of non-bank financial institutions as “systemically significant” and subject to stricter regulatory oversight.

Dodd-Frank requires large banks to maintain updated “living wills” that detail a plan to safely wind down operations in the event of a failure. Trump has relaxed the rule, allowing banks to update their plans once every four years rather than annually — sparing banks some hassle but raising the risk that outdated plans could blow up the banking system. The law also requires banks to submit to “stress tests” that simulate their stability in the event of economic problems. Trump’s appointees have made the tests less frequent and also easier to pass.

The upshot of all this has been to make banks more profitable, which in turn has contributed to strong Trump-era stock market performance. And unlike in the pollution case, nothing bad necessarily happens when bank regulation becomes more lax — financial crises are inherently rare.

But, in a quiet behind-the-scenes way, a banking system that was made safer after the crisis is getting riskier again.

Trump has reshaped immigration

Immigration has been at the heart of Trump’s politics from the moment he descended the elevator at Trump Tower and announced he was running for office. And once he took office, he immediately set about changing immigration policy with the first version of his travel ban. But outside of the losing skirmish over funding for a border wall, there have barely been any efforts to get congressional action on immigration.

Despite the brief surge of attention to the family separation policy, the bulk of these changes have taken place with relatively little debate — though the cancellation of DACA, currently under review by the courts, will doubtless attract considerable attention if it does ultimately get approved by the Supreme Court.

As Vox’s Nicole Narea has detailed, for example, the Trump administration “built up, layer by layer, a series of impediments in Central America, at the border, in detention centers, and in the immigration courts that have made obtaining asylum nearly impossible.”

But many of Trump’s changes have involved legal immigration rather than the hot-button topic of illegal immigration or the gray area of asylum-seeking. Trump has cut refugee resettlements by over 80 percent. He’s made it more difficult to get H-1B visas for skilled technology workers and is in the process of stripping their spouses of work permits.

Most recently, he is proposing new regulations that, according to the Migration Policy Institute, could bar hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants per year from the country by denying visas to would-be immigrants who cannot “prove to a consular officer that they will obtain health insurance within 30 days of their arrival in the US.” This has been put on hold by a district court, but like the Medicaid waivers issue, the decision will ultimately be made by higher courts that are stacked with Republican appointees.

A remade judiciary

Trump speaks frequently about his judicial appointments, in part because he has genuinely had a large impact here and in part because so much of the rest of his policy impact is inherently tied up with the courts.

With relatively little legislation under his belt, Trump’s policymaking has largely consisted of aggressive use of executive discretion. That’s what Obama did during his second term, and conservatives found a means to counter it by identifying friendly jurisdictions to sue in and getting district courts to stay Obama’s actions pending further litigation. Democrats have responded in kind under Trump, and consequently many of his biggest regulatory changes have not yet fully taken effect.

The difference is that from day one Trump has enjoyed a GOP Senate majority and the new rules whereby judicial nominees cannot be filibustered by the minority. Consequently, Trump has seen federal judges appointed and confirmed at a record rate. He’s put 46 Circuit Court judges on the bench in three years compared to 55 across eight years of Obama, meaning a bit over a quarter of appeals court judges are now Trump appointees. If these judges ultimately rule in his favor, the short-term consequences for both immigration and the safety net will be large — over and above the obvious longer-term impact of the judiciary.

But the extent to which judicial nominations loom large in Trump’s policy résumé underscores how thin it is. The Senate has had ample floor time to consider his nominees because members simply haven’t done much legislating. That’s left Trump with executive actions that have certainly been consequential in spots — especially in his key areas of rhetorical focus around energy and immigration — but still a considerably smaller impact than his recent predecessors who all signed several major pieces of legislation.

Intel today announced it has completed the sale of the majority of its smartphone modem business to Apple for $1 billion following regulatory approval. The transaction was first announced in July and includes intellectual property, equipment, and approximately 2,200 Intel employees joining Apple.


The deal sees Apple acquire a large portfolio of wireless patents from Intel. Apple now holds over 17,000 wireless technology patents, ranging from protocols for cellular standards to modem architecture and modem operation.

Intel will retain the ability to develop modems for non-smartphone applications, such as PCs, internet-of-things devices, and autonomous vehicles.

Last week, Intel admitted that it sold its smartphone modem business to Apple at "a multi-billion dollar loss," according to court documents unearthed by Reuters. Intel added that rival chipmaker Qualcomm's patent licensing practices "strangled competition" and effectively forced it to exit the market.

Apple is expected to use Qualcomm modems for its first 5G-enabled iPhones next year, as part of a six-year licensing agreement between the companies. Farther down the road, multiple reports have claimed that Apple plans to develop its own modems for iPhones by 2022-23, and this Intel deal would certainly help those efforts.


This article, "Apple's Acquisition of Intel's Smartphone Modem Business Completed, Intel Admits 'Multi-Billion Dollar Loss'" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat - an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work. From a report: The metal, found in 2017, contradicts something called the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which basically states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionally good conductors of heat, which is why things like motors and appliances get so hot when you use them regularly. But a team in the US showed this isn't the case for metallic vanadium dioxide (VO2) - a material that's already well known for its strange ability to switch from a see-through insulator to a conductive metal at the temperature of 67 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit). "This was a totally unexpected finding," said lead researcher Junqiao Wu from Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division back in January 2017. "It shows a drastic breakdown of a textbook law that has been known to be robust for conventional conductors. This discovery is of fundamental importance for understanding the basic electronic behaviour of novel conductors." Not only does this unexpected property change what we know about conductors, it could also be incredibly useful - the metal could one day be used to convert wasted heat from engines and appliances back into electricity, or even create better window coverings that keep buildings cool.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In every election cycle since Donald Trump became president, turnout has soared across the board and almost always to the detriment of Republicans. During the 2018 midterms, it was up 45% over 2014, with 115.1 million votes cast for candidates in the House of Representatives in 2018 versus the 79.2 million votes cast in 2014, according to the Brookings Institute. That increase, of course, turned out considerably better for Democrats, with a 70% surge in votes for Democratic House candidates over 2014 compared to a 27% bump for GOP candidates. 

Turnout has also spiked in all four contests this year over that of 2015, rising by 66% in Virginia state Senate races, 48% in Kentucky's gubernatorial race, 20% in Mississippi's gubernatorial election, and 31% in Louisiana's. As a result, Virginia has now gone entirely blue in both legislative chambers and the executive. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates in all three gubernatorial contests greatly outperformed results from four years earlier, with two of them managing to prevail in Kentucky and Louisiana. 

While some pundits were quick to chalk up the GOP's loss in Kentucky to the extreme unpopularity of incumbent Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, it was harder to explain away the successful reelection of Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in Louisiana, especially after Donald Trump dedicated three trips to the state to boost Edwards' GOP rival Eddie Rispone.

And while turnout grew everywhere in Louisiana, it wasn't spread evenly throughout. The New York Times reports that it increased only modestly in rural regions but "jumped by 29 percent in New Orleans and 25 percent in the parish that includes Shreveport, and it was nearly as high in Baton Rouge and in the largest New Orleans suburbs." The biggest turnout spikes clearly benefitted Edwards more, likely because Trump motivated both Democratic base voters and conservative leaning suburban voters to the polls—both demographics that favored Edwards.

“If you had any doubt that Trump was a human repellent spray for suburban voters who have a conservative disposition, Republicans getting wiped out in the suburbs of New Orleans, Louisville and Lexington should remove it,” GOP strategist Tim Miller, a Trump critic, told the Times.

But Trump's appearances in Louisiana also motivated African Americans voters.

The former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile, a native of the New Orleans area, said the only other time she had been able to nudge her entire extended family to go to the polls was to support former President Barack Obama in 2008.

”Donald Trump just has the same effect of pushing people out the door when they would prefer to stay home,” said Ms. Brazile. “I’ve never seen folks more unified.”

And 2020 will almost surely be another record-setting year in terms of turnout. According to Brookings, the average turnout gain from a midterm to the next general election is 18 points. Since turnout in 2018 was 50%, an "average gain from 2018 to 2020 would put turnout near 70%, a level we haven’t seen in more than a century."

The conventional wisdom continues to be that the Electoral College gives Trump a fighting chance at winning reelection he wouldn't otherwise have and perhaps even benefits him. But part of what cost Democrats in 2016 in key swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin was depressed turnout in Democratic strongholds. There's almost no universe in which decreased turnout will hamstring Democrats in 2020 the way it did four years earlier. In fact, if anything, voter trends over the last several years suggest that Democrats stand to benefit more than Republicans from record setting turnout next year.

Daily Kos has been granted permission to publish selected excerpts from A Warrning: Please Somebody Do Something About Our Idiot President by Anonymous, the senior administration official who stepped forward last year to assure the public that Donald Trump's most dangerous impulses were being thwarted by themselves and other patriotic Republican staffers. We thank the author for their anonymous generosity.

On child internment camps

My editor said I needed a chapter in here dealing with family separation and child prisons. I don't quite understand? Taking a maximally cruel approach to discourage nonwhite people from coming to America has been a cornerstone of the Republican Party for my entire adult lifetime, and was one of the reasons each of us was willing to take on our current administration roles.

The point of this book is that Donald Trump is stupid, incurious, deranged, and dangerous and needs to be removed from office before he kills us all. I don't see how bringing his affinity for putting refugee children in camps applies to any of those things. We all debated the new family separation policy when it was first proposed and all agreed it was completely in line with Republican Party thinking.

My editor also wanted me to spend a little time writing about Stephen Miller. Again, I'm not sure where this was supposed to go. Am I supposed to say "Oh, look, it turns out a member of a Republican White House is a raging white nationalist?" As opposed to what, half of the Republican speechwriters, strategists and pundits of the modern era? It's like nobody even remembers William F. Buckley these days.

Not a single member of this White House ever resigned because they didn't want to work with Stephen Miller or didn't want to put immigrant children in detention camps. This is a non-issue and only detracts from my important point that Donald Trump himself is crazy and dangerous, not for white nationalism or child detention camps but for being stupid and unstable while promoting those perfectly reasonable party policies. Please stop conflating the two things.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (C), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) (R) and Representative Steny Hoyer, walk out of the White House after meeting with US President Donald Trump in Washington, DC on October 16, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Legislative paralysis gripped Capitol Hill well before impeachment started.

There’s a pervasive sense of legislative paralysis gripping Capitol Hill. And it’s been there long before the impeachment inquiry began.

For months, President Donald Trump has fired off tweet missives accusing House Democrats of “getting nothing done in Congress,” and being consumed with impeachment.

Trump may want to look to the Republican-controlled Senate instead. Democrats in the House have been passing bills at a rapid clip; as of November 15, the House has passed nearly 400 bills, not including resolutions. But the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee estimates 80 percent of those bill have hit a snag in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is prioritizing confirming judges over passing bills.

Congress has passed just 70 bills into law this year. Granted, it still has one more year in its term, but the number pales in comparison to recent past sessions of Congress, which typically see 300-500 bills passed in two years (and that is even a diminished number from the 700-800 bills passed in the 1970s and 1980s).

Ten of those 70 bills this year have been renaming federal post offices or Veterans Affairs facilities, and many others are related to appropriations or extending programs like the National Flood Insurance Program or the 9/11 victim compensation fund.

This has led to House Democrats decrying McConnell’s so-called “legislative graveyard,” a moniker the Senate majority leader has proudly adopted. McConnell calls himself the “grim reaper” of Democratic legislation he derides as socialist, but many of the bills that never see the Senate floor are bipartisan issues, like a universal background check bill, net neutrality, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

“From raising the minimum wage to ensuring equal pay, we have passed legislation to raise wages. And we have passed legislation to protect and expand health coverage and bring down prescription drug prices,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a statement to Vox. “We continue to urge Senator McConnell to take up our bills, many of which are bipartisan.”

McConnell is focused on transforming the federal judiciary instead, with the Senate confirming over 150 of Trump’s nominees to the federal bench. And he has refused to bring Democratic bills to the Senate floor in part to protect vulnerable Republican senators from having to take tough votes that could divide the GOP ahead of the 2020 election. Still, some Senate Republicans fear inaction could make them just as vulnerable.

“I’m very eager to turn from nominations to legislation,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) recently told the New York Times’s Carl Hulse. “There are important issues that are pending, and I think we could produce some terrific bills that would be signed into law.”

Trump is accusing Democrats of doing nothing as he refuses to work with them

Lately, Republicans and Trump are accusing Democrats of single-mindedly pursuing impeachment at the detriment of passing bills.

Again, the more accurate picture is that Democrats have been passing a lot of bills in addition to investigating the president. But split control of government and Trump’s fury at being investigated by Democratic committees paralyzed Washington’s legislative functions well before impeachment proceedings began in the fall.

Back in May, Trump was blasting Democrats for not making enough progress on infrastructure, health care, and veterans issues. His complaints intensified after an explosive White House meeting on infrastructure between Trump and Democrats the day before, which the president walked out of.

“Their heart is not into Infrastructure, lower drug prices, pre-existing conditions and our great Vets,” Trump tweeted. “All they are geared up to do, six committees, is squander time, day after day, trying to find anything which will be bad for me.”

Months later, the president’s complaints remain the same. He recently tweeted, “Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, AOC and the rest of the Democrats are not getting important legislation done, hence, the Do Nothing Democrats.”

Trump isn’t the only one with a perception that very little is happening in Congress. Congress’s approval rating is a dismal 24 percent, with 72 percent disapproval, according to Gallup.

During the Republican-controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018, the two major legislative accomplishments of McConnell, Trump, and House Speaker Paul Ryan were a massive GOP tax cut and a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill in 2018. The very end of Ryan’s time as speaker also saw Trump drive a government shutdown that continued into Pelosi’s tenure in 2019.

Since Democrats took control of the House, the few things they’ve been able to agree with Senate Republicans on include a bill to reopen the federal government after a three-week shutdown, a resolution to end US involvement in the war in Yemen (which was vetoed by Trump), and a disaster aid agreement. But other big-ticket items Democrats hoped to achieve, like an infrastructure package and a prescription drug bill, have yet to be passed.

As we near the end of the year, much of the media focus will continue to be on impeachment. House Democrats will also be focused on a vote on a major bill to lower prescription drug costs (something Trump has said is a priority for him), the Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the National Defense Authorization Act.

Just because impeachment is the main story in Washington doesn’t mean policy work isn’t happening. It just means it isn’t getting talked about as much, and that the president — a figure who could apply pressure on McConnell to take up some of the bipartisan legislation currently gathering dust — has other priorities.

Given the Senate could soon be consumed by an impeachment trial, the remaining weeks of 2019 could be the final opportunity for lawmakers in the upper chamber to advance legislation. However, there are no signals that Republican Senate leaders will seize that opportunity.

Here’s a list of major bills the House has passed since January

House Democrats have passed a wide range of bills since they came to power in January, ranging from a sweeping anti-corruption and pro-democracy reform known as H.R.1, to bills to save net neutrality, pass universal background checks for guns, and reenter the United States into the Paris climate accords.

They have also put a large emphasis on health care, a defining issue of the 2018 election after Trump and Senate Republicans attempted to pass a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Democrats have focused on bills to lower prescription drug costs, protect preexisting conditions, and condemning the Trump administration’s legal battle to strike down the ACA in the courts. And although Medicare-for-all is driving the conversation in the 2020 presidential primary, it has not gotten a vote in the House.

Much of this agenda is sitting in the Senate. There have been a few things House Democrats and Senate Republicans have agreed on: disaster relief aid, reopening the government after the shutdown, the resolution to end US involvement in the Yemen war, a bill to protect public lands, and a resolution disapproving of Trump’s use of emergency powers.

But on major policy issues — like health care and infrastructure, or even bipartisan ones like net neutrality, the Equal Pay Act, or even a simple reauthorization of the longstanding Violence Against Women Act — Democrats’ bills are continuing to languish in the Senate. House Democrats are expecting to take up House Resolution 3, a major health care bill to lower the cost of prescription drugs, before the Christmas break. Although we’re not going to list all 400 bills for brevity’s sake, here’s a list of major bills and resolutions the House has passed so far.

Health care

• House Resolution 259 — Medicaid Extenders Act of 2019
• H.R. 271 — Condemning the Trump Administration’s Legal Campaign to Take Away Americans’ Health Care
• H.R. 986 — Protecting Americans with Preexisting Conditions Act of 2019
• H.R. 987 — Strengthening Health Care and Lowering Prescription Drug Costs Act
• H.R. 1520, the Purple Book Continuity Act (bill aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs)
• H.R. 1503, the Orange Book Transparency Act of 2019 (bill aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs)

Civil rights

• H.R. 1 — For the People Act of 2019
• H.R. 5 — Equality Act
• H.R. 6 — American Dream and Promise Act
• H.R. 7 — Paycheck Fairness Act
• H.R. 124 — Expressing opposition to banning service in the Armed Forces by openly transgender individuals

Gun control

• H.R. 8 — Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019
• H.R. 1112 — Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2019

Environment

• H.R. 9 — Climate Action Now Act
• H.R. 1331 — Local Water Protection Act
• S. 47 — National Resources Management Act
• H.R. 2578 — National Flood Insurance Program Extension Act of 2019
• H.R. 205, 1146, 1941 — Banning Offshore Drilling on Atlantic, Pacific, Eastern Gulf and ANWR Coasts

Military/foreign affairs

• H.R. 840 — Veterans’ Access to Child Care Act
• H.J. Res. 37 — Directing the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress
• S.J. Res. 7 — To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress
• H.R. 31 — Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019
• H.J. Res. 30 — Disapproving the President’s proposal to take an action relating to the application of certain sanctions with respect to the Russian Federation
• H.R. 4695 — Protect Against Conflict by Turkey Act
• H.R. 676 — NATO Support Act
• H.R. 549 — Venezuela TPS Act

Mueller report

• H. Con. Res. 24 — Expressing the sense of Congress that the report of Special Counsel Mueller should be made available to the public and to Congress

Other major legislation

• H.R. 1585 — Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2019
• H.R. 987 — Raise the Wage Act
• H.R. 1500 — Consumers First Act
• H.R. 1994 — SECURE Act/Gold Star Family Tax Relief Act
• H.R. 2722 — Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE) Act
• H.R. 4617 — Stopping Harmful Interference in Elections for a Lasting Democracy (SHIELD) Act
• H.R. 1644 — Save the Internet Act of 2019
• H.R. 2157 — Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2019
• H.R. 397 — Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act (The Butch Lewis Act)
• H.R. 2513 — The Corporate Transparency Act
• H.R. 269 — Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act of 2019
• H.R. 251 — Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Program Extension Act
• S.24 — Government Employee Fair Treatment Act of 2019
• H.R. 430 — TANF Extension Act of 2019
• Concurring in the Senate Amendments to HR 251 — Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standard Program Extension Act
• H.R. 790 — Federal Civilian Workforce Pay Raise Fairness Act of 2019
• HJ Res. 46 — Relating to a national emergency declared by the President on February 15, 2019
• H Res. 183 — Condemning anti-Semitism as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values and aspirations that define the people of the United States and condemning anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against minorities as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contrary to the values and aspirations of the United States, as amended
• H Res. 194 — Rule Providing for Consideration of H.R. 1644 and H.R. 2021
• H.R. 2480 — Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act
• H.R. 375 — To amend the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 to reaffirm the authority of the Secretary of the Interior to take land into trust for Indian Tribes (also known as the “Carcieri Fix”)

It may be the day before Thanksgiving, but that didn't mean a break from new impeachment-related news. All of it, as usual, is bad for Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the other conspirators in the Ukrainian extortion scheme that has now landed Trump in a House impeachment inquiry.

A brief summary of today's new revelations, machinations and general goings-on:

• Place your bets as to when Trump personal "lawyer" Rudy Giuliani will be arrested in an attempt to flee the country: Every day brings new revelations of Giuliani apparently looking to profit off his cozy relationship with Trump by hiring himself out to a series of international oligarchs and money launderers who need "favors" from the Trump administration and, most pointedly, Attorney General William Barr's Justice Department. Giuliani lobbied the Justice Department for favorable treatment of a wealthy Venezuelan energy executive named as an uncharged co-conspirator in a billion-dollar Florida money laundering case. That executive, Alejandro Betancourt López, hosted Giuliani's Madrid meeting with Andriy Yermak, top aide to Ukrainian President Zelensky, during which Giuliani pressed Yermak to open the two investigations now central to the impeachment case against Trump.

• Selling access to Trump and to the Justice Department may turn out to be a major source of Giuliani's income: The Washington Post reports that Giuliani had prepared a $200,000 draft agreement to represent Ukrainian official Yuri Lutsenko, and that Giuliani had assured Lutsenko he could arrange a meeting with Attorney General William Barr. Lutsenko worked with Giuliani in the ultimately successful effort to oust the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.

• Seeing a pattern yet? After previous adamant denials, Giuliani now acknowledges he met with a lawyer for disgraced Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, currently fighting extradition to the United States, during his pursuit of Biden "dirt."

• Smarting from the new public presumption that Giuliani may be indicted any moment now, Trump began pre-distancing himself from his "lawyer": "I don't know" what Giuliani was doing in Ukraine, claimed Trump. "I didn't direct him" to dig up dirt on Biden. (Note that the faux-"transcript" of Trump's call with the Ukrainian president specifically directs Zelensky to work with Giuliani to investigate Biden.) This puts Giuliani in a precarious, but possibly familiar, spot.

• Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who admitted during his public impeachment testimony that he directly pressured Ukrainian officials for Trump's demanded investigations but insisted he did not realize the corrupt intentions behind those demands, has now been accused by three women of sexual assault.

• A federal judge temporarily stayed her ruling compelling former White House counsel Don McGahn to honor a congressional subpoena for testimony and documents. Attorney General Barr now has seven days to prepare an expected appeal.

• Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an ex-House Republican described by witnesses as using his office to further the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine scheme, continues to suggest merit to the pro-Russian Trump conspiracy theory suggesting Ukraine, rather than Russia, was the real culprit behind 2016 election hacking. This theory, promoted in large part by Russia itself, is known to be manifestly false.

• While the House Judiciary Committee has politely invited Trump or his counsel to attend the first impeachment hearing scheduled by the committee, a December 4 hearing on the process and history of impeachment, it is vanishingly unlikely Trump will take them up on the offer.

• Trump's curious hostility towards Ukraine, including repetition of Russian rhetoric against the country, extends far beyond the demand for two politically favorable "investigations."

• Republicans have been using Trump's similar unilateral hold of congressionally authorized aid to Lebanon as evidence that the Ukrainian hold was, for this White House, a standard practice. This likely backfired, as the unexplained (and apparently illegal) refusal to deliver mandated Lebanon aid is now coming under increased scrutiny itself.

Daniel Craig, Lakeith Stanfield, and Noah Segan in Knives Out. | Claire Folger

Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, and more star in the latest caper from Rian Johnson.

Whodunnits in the vein of Agatha Christie — like Knives Out, a romping delight from genre-bending Last Jedi auteur Rian Johnson — require a degree of prejudice in the reader in order to work properly. Characters are slotted into a type, usually owing to their occupation, nationality, or social standing, and then the fun of the story comes from how people act against (or within) type, subverting our guesses.

Christie, of course, was working in England a century ago; Johnson’s story is set in contemporary, richly autumnal patrician Massachusetts, in the home of a hugely successful mystery writer who has, unfortunately, turned up dead. And because this is America in 2019, the prejudices and privileges displayed by the family vying for his money are uniquely American, too.

But Knives Out, being a whodunnit, is best if you go in knowing as little as possible. The twists aren’t aids to telling the story, they are the story. It’s the most finely tuned version of a murder mystery you could hope for, with joyous performances and style in spades. So if you don’t want a hint of a spoiler, stop here. If you don’t mind a bit of background, carry on.

Knives Out is mostly just fun, but it lodges some barbs, too

Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) built his fortune on the mystery novels he wrote, so he’s clearly a man of great imagination, but his family is not quite as bright. There’s business-minded daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Richard (Don Johnson), and their mean, terrible son Ransom (Chris Evans). There’s Harlan’s son Walt (Michael Shannon), who runs the family publishing company, and Joni (Toni Colette), the widowed daughter-in-law, who enthusiastically shows how compassionate she is toward people the rest of the family sniffs at, but also is happy to take the family’s money. Two more grandkids — priggish alt-right shitposter Jacob (Jaeden Martell) and self-righteous Meg (Katherine Langford) round out the pack. Everybody, to a one, sucks.

Harlan died under mysterious circumstances, which only his longtime nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) knows anything about, and a trio of men arrive to investigate: two police detectives (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) and one private detective (Daniel Craig, sporting, as one character puts it, a Foghorn Leghorn accent). They try to dig into the story but it keeps slipping out of their grasp.

As it does for the audience, too. If Knives Out moved even 3 percent more slowly than it does, there’s a good chance it would be easier to anticipate what’s going to happen next — a few times I felt like I was on the verge of discovery, but as fast as you can start to fit the pieces together, a new gap appears. It’s confident and exciting, with performances that suggest a cast having the time of their lives on set. (It’s always nice to see Daniel Craig spring into antic electricity outside the confines of his brooding James Bond; as for Chris Evans, his post-Captain America life seems to suit him nicely.)

Knives Out is primarily splendid revelry rather than satire; it’s not particularly sophisticated social critique to suggest that sometimes the scions of the very wealthy are also ungrateful wretches with delusions of grandeur. (That’s been going on in literature for a very long time.)

But that doesn’t keep the movie from lodging a few barbs between the ribs for rueful laughs, as much at the performatively woke as the hatefully racist. The whole family proclaims their love for Marta but nobody manages to remember which South American country she’s from, and when things start to get serious they’re more than willing to turn on her. The Thrombley crew includes people who can pivot from complaining about immigrants to quoting Hamilton on a dime — a version of the sort of clueless liberalism that Bradley Whitford’s “I would have voted for Obama a third time” Get Out line immortalized. It also includes a kid someone describes as a “literal Nazi.”

In this way, Knives Out bears some striking similarities to Ready or Not, which came out in August 2019, only weeks before Knives Out’s Toronto premiere. That one’s a horror film, but it concerns a young woman, an outsider, who’s drawn into a greedy family’s sprawling estate, only to discover that those who perform kindness can turn on her in an instant.

But while Ready or Not posits wealth and privilege as a violent horror show, Knives Out paints it as farce. The Thrombley family’s own mythos about itself and its “ancestral home” is silly; its members are worthy of ridicule, not because they’re wealthy, but because they refuse to admit their wealth comes from anything but their own merit. Their parroting of talking points that only benefit them, their belief in their own superiority, their self-delusional arrogance — that’s what’s ridiculous. They’ve willingly slotted themselves into caricatures that are all too familiar today, and the movie plays on those gleefully.

So, couching their story in a rambling, romping murder mystery turns them into entertainment for us rather than us into cogs in the wheel for them. In this case, it’s their blind prejudices, not ours, that lead them astray.

And it’s all done with such a light touch that you can’t help thinking Knives Out is really an adaptation of one of Harlan’s mysteries, which, it turns out, it sort of is. It’s a worthy tribute to Agatha Christie, a light but pointed rebuke, and a delectable time at the movies, too.

Knives Out premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. It opens in theaters on November 27.

A migrant from Mexico places flowers next to the border fence where he and members of the Coalicion Pro Defensa del Migrante (Pro Defense of the Migrant Coalition) painted a graph showing statistics of dead migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, on November 2, 2019. | Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images

Mexico is now sending more migrants to the southern border than any other country.

The crisis at the southern United States border appears to be changing now that Mexico is sending more migrants to the US than any other country.

For 18 months, the crisis could have been described as primarily one of families and unaccompanied children from Central America’s Northern Triangle region of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala arriving at the border in unprecedented numbers. The Trump administration consequently rolled out several policies designed to keep those migrants out.

Under its “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), the administration has sent more than 60,000 migrants back to Mexico to await decisions on their asylum applications.

The administration has also brokered agreements with the Northern Triangle countries, allowing the US to deport migrants both to the countries they came from and passed through on their way to the US — though only the agreement with Guatemala has gone into effect so far.

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a separate rule preventing migrants from being granted asylum if they passed through any country other than their own before arriving in the US, which means that asylum seekers from any country but Mexico are ineligible for asylum.

Together, these policies have been effective in achieving President Trump’s goal of driving down the overall number of migrants showing up at the border, which has dropped about 70 percent since its peak in May. None of the policies, however, apply to Mexican citizens, who cannot be legally sent back to their home country if they would likely face persecution there.

That has left the administration unprepared to deal with the changing demographics of those arriving at the border: In October, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported that more migrants from Mexico arrived at the southern border than those from the Northern Triangle countries. In response — even though it doesn’t yet have an official policy under which it can turn away Mexicans — the administration has begun experimenting with ways to prevent Mexican asylum seekers from entering the US.

In early October, the administration launched a secretive pilot program in El Paso specifically designed to decide Mexicans’ asylum cases quickly while they’re still in CBP custody.

In September, CBP also started subjecting more Mexicans to its practice of “metering,” under which it limits the number of migrants processed at ports of entry each day.

Those initiatives have proved effective: Mexicans who were previously being processed at the ports are now turned away and forced to wait in the migrant camps on the Mexican side of the border, where migrant shelters are at capacity due to the metering that has affected immigrants from other nations. The largest camps are in Matamoros, which is directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, which is adjacent to El Paso.

“There’s an intent on the part of CBP to not have anybody come into the United States to request asylum,” Jodi Goodwin, an attorney representing migrants in Matamoros, said. “Because they can’t subject Mexicans to MPP, they’ve subjected them to metering in an effort to wear them out so they won’t apply for asylum. That’s an intentional policy that they’re using to make it so that Mexicans don’t apply.”

Turning Mexicans away at ports might not be legal, but CBP is doing it anyway

Trump administration officials typically encourage migrants to get in line at the ports of entry along the border so that they can seek to enter the US legally — but that has become all but impossible due to CBP’s metering policy, which started in mid-2018. Typically, CBP might process no more than half a dozen families on a given day, creating a bottleneck of asylum seekers who are waiting on the Mexican side of the border.

Mexican immigration authorities and the migrants themselves keep lists of those who are waiting and handpick those allowed into the port for processing each day. The number of names on those lists exceeded 26,000 in August and there’s no telling how much longer immigrants will have to wait before they are processed at the port.

CBP has maintained that Mexicans were exempt from metering, likely because federal law and international treaties prohibit sending asylum seekers back to places where their “life or freedom would be threatened” on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or membership in a “particular social group,” such as a tribe or ethnic group. On the other hand, the US government has argued that Central Americans can be subject to metering because they are “safe” from persecution in Mexico (though advocates have also argued that isn’t true).

“CBP does not have a policy to ‘meter’ Mexican nationals,” a CBP spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday. “We queue undocumented aliens based on operational capacity.”

Mexicans claiming asylum are typically victims of cartel violence and extortion or have been targeted based their indigenous heritage, Goodwin said. The most recent waves of Mexican asylum seekers have come from the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán, where cartel violence has spiked in recent months.

But Mexicans who claim they are facing those kinds of threats in their home country — and in some cases, those who have proof of those threats — are now being turned away when they present themselves at the border.

As of September, CBP stopped processing Mexicans in El Paso unless they put their names on the metering lists. Officials have been summarily rejecting anyone who lacks entry documents, typically telling them “we’re full” and that they should come back at another time, Shaw Drake, an attorney with the ACLU, told Vox.

“CBP is systematically violating U.S. and international law by turning Mexican nationals back into the very country and dangers from which they have attempted to flee,” the ACLU wrote in a November 14 complaint to the US Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General.

In other parts of the border, attorneys said that CBP officials have been metering Mexicans all along, despite what officials have claimed. About 11,000 Mexicans, or more than half of those affected by the policy, have been turned away at the border as of this month, according to a study by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The ACLU has documented more than a dozen examples of Mexican citizens who have been sent back to Mexico at ports of entry in El Paso and Brownsville.

One woman had approached CBP officials at the port in El Paso on three occasions identifying herself as a Mexican asylum seeker, but was turned away. She has a strong asylum case: Cartel members kidnapped her son and told her they would send her his severed head in a cooler if she didn’t pay an extortion fee. They eventually released him after she paid, but Mexican police declined to investigate the case.

Goodwin said that, even when she has escorted Mexican nationals in Matamoros to the port and advocated on their behalf, officials have tried to turn them away. Only after she has waited for hours and demanded to see supervisor after supervisor have officials finally agreed to process the migrants.

“I show them the law, but it falls on deaf ears,” she said.

A lawsuit brought by Al Otro Lado, one of the few legal aid organizations serving migrants in Mexico, argues that the metering policy deprives migrants of access to the US asylum system and is in violation of federal immigration law and their constitutional due process rights. Al Otro Lado has asked a federal court in California to block the policy, but in the meantime, it remains in effect. And Mexican asylum seekers will likely continue to be put at risk, Drake said.

“Not only are they at particular risk because the people they’re fleeing from are in the very country they are forced to remain in, they are easy targets for organized crime,” he said. “These US policies have created an entire new industry for kidnapping and extortion. They’re sitting prey.”

The administration is secretly fast-tracking deportations of Mexicans

The Trump administration has long used El Paso as its testing ground for immigration policies — it was where it first started separating immigrant families in 2017. More recently, the administration has quietly piloted a program in El Paso designed to speed up deportations of Mexican asylum seekers.

Little is known about the program, even among attorneys on the ground. Mexican asylum seekers are detained in CBP holding facilities and given no more than 48 hours to prepare for an interview in which an asylum officer determines whether they can proceed in pursuing their asylum claims, Hamed Aleaziz of BuzzFeed News reported.

If they pass, they would be permitted to apply for asylum before an immigration judge in what is usually a lengthy process: As of June, migrants with active immigration cases have been waiting an average of almost two years for a decision. If not, they can then appeal an asylum officer’s decision to an immigration judge over the phone, or face deportation.

Attorneys said that the program is functionally the same as the “Prompt Asylum Case Review” program, which processes Central Americans at the El Paso CBP station, as first reported by the Washington Post’s Robert Moore. Attorneys have also expressed concerns about how that program does not provide migrants with a full and fair process, giving them little time to prepare or contact an attorney.

Drake, the ACLU attorney, said that not only are the asylum seekers being held in facilities that are “notorious for abusive conditions” under the program, but they are given extremely limited ability to contact their relatives or attorneys to assist them in the fast-tracked proceedings. Attorneys want to offer migrants affected by the program legal counsel — but they have no way of identifying migrants, unless they’ve come into contact with them in Mexico already.

For most, that means a positive outcome is likely out of reach. Studies have found that detained immigrants with access to legal counsel were twice as likely to obtain the protections they sought as compared to those without counsel.

Taylor Levy, an immigration attorney representing migrants in Ciudad Juárez, said that appealing to an immigration judge over the phone might also hamper migrants’ ability to adequately argue their cases. Some of her clients who brought printed proof of the death threats against them were not able to show them to the judge because their proceedings were conducted telephonically — and their asylum claims were subsequently rejected.

“These are possibly life or death decisions about their future,” Drake said. “The agency will go as far as possible toward the goal of bringing immigration at the border to zero.”

Betsy DeVos testifies during a Senate budget hearing on March 28, 2019, in Washington, DC. | Zach Gibson/Getty Images

Some fear the rules, soon to be finalized, will essentially destroy the process of campus Title IX hearings.

The Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos last year proposed new rules around campus sexual assault that had advocates on alert: Many feared that the regulations would discourage survivors from reporting assault and put them at a disadvantage if they did.

Since then, the Education Department has been reviewing public comments on the proposal, the Washington Post reported on Monday. And now, they’re getting close to releasing the final rules — and they will preserve the aspects of the proposal that had anti-assault advocates most concerned.

The final rules, expected to be released before the end of the year, are likely to include a controversial provision requiring schools to allow in-person cross-examination of students who report assault and harassment, as well as accused students. Many activists, as well as school administrators, say cross-examination is traumatic for a survivor of sexual violence; Jordan Draper, assistant vice president for student affairs at the College of New Jersey, called it “completely terrifying” in an interview with Vox earlier this year. She and others say their schools may have to scrap formal sexual assault hearings entirely if cross-examination is required.

The final rules will include one change that survivors’ advocates have pushed for, according to the Post: Universities may be responsible for investigating allegations of sexual misconduct at off-campus events like frat parties. But people familiar with the rules told the Post they would include most of the other provisions that stirred controversy last year, including a narrowed definition of sexual harassment and permission for schools to use a standard of evidence more favorable to the accused.

The result, many anti-assault advocates say, will be a system in which survivors are afraid to seek justice and schools have little incentive to provide it. Some, including the group Know Your IX, are considering lawsuits. And at some colleges and universities, administrators are working on alternative processes for addressing sexual assault and harassment claims, with the knowledge that when the new rules are final, the existing processes may become untenable.

The Education Department proposed changes to Obama-era sexual assault guidelines last year. Many advocates were concerned.

The rules proposed last year govern the implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex in educational settings. Over the years, courts have ruled that sexual harassment and assault are forms of gender discrimination prohibited by Title IX. In 2011, the Obama administration released what is now known as the “Dear Colleague” letter, explaining how it would enforce Title IX.

The letter was not a new law — rather, it was guidance explaining how schools should comply with existing law. Among its core tenets was the statement that in order to comply with Title IX, schools had to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard when deciding sexual harassment cases, meaning that the accused would be found responsible if the evidence showed it was more likely than not that a violation occurred. Prior to the letter’s release, some schools had used a higher “clear and convincing” evidence standard, which put a greater burden on accusers to show that the accused had committed misconduct.

Many anti-sexual assault advocates say that, while not perfect, the 2011 letter signaled a new seriousness about sexual assault at the federal level. In the years that followed, the issue got massive public attention, with many students holding their schools legally accountable for failing to keep them safe.

But accused students and groups advocating on their behalf have long argued that the Obama-era guidance is unfair to them. DeVos has apparently been sympathetic to this criticism, meeting in July 2017 with the groups Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE) and Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE), which advocate for the rights of the accused, and the National Coalition for Men (NCFM), a men’s rights group.

Then, in September 2017, DeVos rescinded the 2011 Obama guidance. The move was part of a larger push by the Trump administration — and the Education Department in particular — to roll back Obama-era anti-discrimination protections, as Jeannie Suk Gersen noted at the New Yorker. Under DeVos, the department also got rid of guidelines recommending that schools allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, as well as guidance supporting affirmative action and detailing disabled students’ rights.

In the case of sexual assault, the Education Department in November 2018 released proposed rules to replace the Obama administration guidance. The new rules made several key changes:

They required schools to allow direct cross-examination of both parties at Title IX sexual harassment hearings. The 2011 guidance discouraged direct cross-examination, as “allowing an alleged perpetrator to question an alleged victim directly may be traumatic or intimidating, thereby possibly escalating or perpetuating a hostile environment.” Instead, some schools, like the College of New Jersey, allow accused students to pose questions to a neutral hearing administrator, who can relay them to the reporting student. Under the new rules, however, a lawyer or other representative of the accused student would be allowed to directly cross-examine the reporting student in person.

They changed the evidentiary standard for sexual harassment proceedings. Under the new rules, schools may use either the preponderance standard or the “clear and convincing” standard in sexual harassment cases. The rules, like the 2011 Obama administration guidance, use the term “sexual harassment” to encompass both harassment and assault.

They raised the bar for what counts as sexual harassment under Title IX. The 2011 guidelines defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.” But the new rules set a stricter standard for what constitutes harassment, defining it as “unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that is so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive that it denies a person access to the school’s education program or activity.” Anti-sexual assault advocates say this means students would not have grounds for a complaint until they were already essentially being driven out of a class or school because of harassment. “I would certainly look at that standard, and if I was a student who was being sexually harassed, wonder what would make my administration take it seriously,” Jess Davidson, executive director of the group End Rape on Campus, told Vox last year.

They made it harder to find schools legally responsible for failing to address harassment. Under the 2011 rules, schools could be held responsible for failing to act if they knew about or “reasonably should” have known about an episode of harassment or assault. Under the new guidelines, the school must have “actual knowledge” of the episode in order to be held responsible. Also, schools can only be held responsible for incidents that happen on school property or at school-sponsored events, not at private, off-campus residences.

The Department of Education received more than 100,000 comments on the proposed rules, including many concerns. Officials there have spent the last year examining them and working with lawyers, Laura Meckler reports at the Washington Post. Now, they’re nearly finished and the final rules are likely to be released before the end of this year, if they aren’t pushed into January.

The final rules will look a lot like the proposed rules, sources say

Despite the year of examination, the final rules look a lot like the old rules, sources told Meckler. They will still narrow the definition of sexual harassment and allow the “clear and convincing” standard. And they will still require schools to allow direct cross-examination of students reporting harassment or assault.

One change, according to Meckler, is that schools may be held responsible for some incidents that happen off-campus. Some sources called this a major alteration of the proposed version of the rules, while others said it was more of a clarification.

But in general, the final version of the rules will keep all the provisions that most concerned advocates in the proposal, at least according to Meckler’s sources. The provision regarding cross-examination, in particular, has long worried activists and campus officials alike.

“I think that it would be really hard for college administrators who are looking out for the safety of all students to recommend a process where there’s going to be cross-examination,” Draper, the College of New Jersey assistant vice president, told Vox earlier this year.

For many school officials, a provision requiring direct cross-examination in Title IX hearings could mean the end of Title IX hearings, as the prospect simply becomes too traumatic for students reporting misconduct.

Because of this, the College of New Jersey and some other colleges and universities are looking at alternatives to formal hearings, including processes based on the concept of restorative justice, an approach that focuses on repairing the harm done to a survivor rather than on assigning punishment to a perpetrator. At Rutgers University, for example, the reporting student can choose to meet with school officials to decide what actions by the accused — such as attending a workshop on toxic masculinity or completing community service — would help repair the harm.

Meanwhile, anti-sexual assault groups are considering suing the education department over the new rules once they are final. Sage Carson, manager of the group Know Your IX, says the many public comments against the regulations could help their case. “We hope it will give us grounds to really fight the rule through litigation,” Carson told the Post.

Regardless of what happens, one thing is clear: Much of the increased attention to the problem of campus sexual assault in recent years has come thanks to the advocacy work of students themselves. And that advocacy will continue no matter what the Education Department does.