James.galbraith

Elections officials in Kentucky are in a state of near panic over their elections system, saying local voting systems are "one emergency away from disaster." There's one person in the country who can help them fix it, one of their own—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And he's refusing to do so.

"There’s a lot of hand wringing over the Russians, there’s hand wringing from the far right about illegal immigrants voting and all that,” Don Blevins, Jr., clerk for Fayette County, told Mother Jones. He says he’s more worried "about Americans cheating than anybody." From hacking to bringing down voter registration servers to making bomb threats on Election Day, there's a lot that can be done to disrupt the election. While he says his county's systems are better secured than may in the state, he worries that the "smaller counties are in dire straits, and Kentucky for a combination of reasons. […] They are chronically underfunded for just basic government services, much less elections related expenses."

"For the last six or eight years, we have not taken in enough tax money to maintain anything," says Elliott County clerk Jennifer Carter. "If they get four or five miles of blacktop for this entire county in one year, we’re flying. That's how bad it is. So, yeah, election equipment or replacing machines? That's on the back, back burner." Carter says that even with a new occupational tax coming, "it would just not be possible for us to have the money to upgrade our voting machines. We're one emergency away from disaster." It's been over 16 years since the county purchased new equipment.

And McConnell is standing in the way of fixing it, stopping the federal funding that has passed in the House from advancing. "Mitch's inaction is directly harming his home state," Blevins said. "There's no question in my mind."  

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

State Board of Elections Executive Director Jared Dearing is also alarmed. The state has forced steep budget cuts and "Many counties are currently facing budgetary shortfalls that create uncertain and unstable funding for the county clerks and boards of elections," he wrote in a letter to the state legislature, protesting the cuts. "While at the same time election costs continue to grow. This included the need to replace outdated election equipment as well as secure against digital and cybersecurity threats that did not exist even a decade ago, much less in 1974" when a state law set a reimbursement rate of $225 per precinct from the state to counties. The budget shortfall this year cut that rate to $200.

There's $1 billion at the ready for states to secure their elections, passed by the House which McConnell won't allow. Carter would love to have McConnell come visit to talk elections. "I would show him one of our old machines. […] I'd say, 'Hey, this is where we're at, this is what we still have. If two machines break, we'd be doing paper ballots in a box.'" At least there would be a paper trail.

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The findings of a new survey highlight a generational and ideological divide among Republicans on climate change.

On Capitol Hill, there’s been no end this year to the gridlock that has blocked any serious bipartisan discussion or passage of new federal climate policy. Some Democrats have called climate change an existential threat and want sweeping, economy-wide changes based on the Green New Deal principles to address it. Most Republicans in office, meanwhile, scarcely acknowledge climate change at all.

But the American electorate, broadly, wants more government action on climate change, and tactics like deploying renewable energy remain popular across the political spectrum, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center.

The U.S. Public Views on Climate and Energy report published Monday shows that more than two-thirds of adults think leaders in Washington, DC, have to do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for impacts like rising sea levels.

The survey, conducted between October 1 and October 13, 2019, among 3,627 adults, showed a stark divide along party lines: 90 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning respondents think the federal government isn’t doing enough. Just 39 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning adults felt the same way.

But rank-and-file Republican voters are not a monolith, and when separated out by age or how conservative they are, the survey showed that a majority of some Republican groups want more government action to limit climate change.

Pew Research Center

Digging further into the Republican side of the poll, it’s clear there is an ideological rift. Just 24 percent of Republicans who identify as “conservative” thought the federal government is doing too little to combat climate change, while 65 percent of Republicans who identify as “moderate to liberal” thought so. This is an increase from 2018, when 22 percent of conservative Republicans and 53 percent of moderate-to-liberal Republicans said the federal government isn’t doing enough.

There’s a generational divide as well. Among the youngest Republicans — millennials and younger — 52 percent said that the federal government isn’t doing all the things it should be doing to limit global warming, compared to 41 percent of Republican Gen Xers and 31 percent of Republican boomers.

The Pew researchers behind the 2019 survey also took a slightly different approach in how they asked the questions compared to previous years. Rather than framing human contributions to climate change as a binary choice, they asked respondents about how much human activity contributes to the problem. The results showed that 96 percent of liberal Democrats thought human activity contributes greatly to climate change. Meanwhile, 14 percent of conservative Republicans thought humans contribute a great deal to climate change and another 39 percent said humans have “some” contribution.

Pew Research Center

“The new measures speak directly to the current debate over the degree to which human actions are responsible for global climate change and how best to reduce the effects of climate change,” said Cary Funk, director of science and society research at the Pew Research Center, in an email. How much a voter believes humans contribute to climate change relates to how aggressively they want the government to respond. But the fact that there is a debate at all is the result of a decades-long misinformation campaign from fossil fuel companies to sow doubt.

The findings in this new survey echo other polls that show mounting concern about climate change among all Americans as well as polls that show that among Republicans, the desire for more government climate action is highest among millennials.

The results also illustrate why the two parties have such divergent responses to climate change. In the race for the White House in 2020, almost every Democrat in the running has proposed a comprehensive strategy to combat climate change. Lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled House have introduced several climate-related bills ranging from rejoining the Paris agreement to building energy-efficient public housing. And several lawmakers have built their climate agenda within the Green New Deal, a sweeping economy-wide framework for limiting greenhouse gases through the lens of social justice.

To the extent that congressional Republican lawmakers have discussed climate change at all, most of their proposals have been focused on narrower measures like a carbon tax or centered on principles like innovation. And in the current Congress, it’s unlikely any climate-related legislation will pass with Republicans in control of the Senate and unwilling to give Democrats any concession that could be seen as a political win.

But with the Pew poll showing that the greatest concern about climate change is now among the youngest Republican voters, party leaders may face more pressure to counter Democrats with their own climate change agendas. And with so many Democratic presidential candidates devoting so much energy to the issue, Republicans will likely have to provide an answer in the general election campaign for how they intend to limit global warming.

President Trump participates in a listening session at the White House on November 22, 2019. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Trump claims support for impeachment is “down into the 20’s in some Polls.” But these polls do not seem to exist.

President Donald Trump has been working to defend himself against the ongoing impeachment inquiry by citing polling he says shows support for impeachment is on the decline. While some polling does in fact show a decrease in support for impeachment, it is not “dropping like a rock” as the president has claimed, nor have polls “turned very strongly against Impeachment.”

And it isn’t clear Trump is referencing numbers from any actual polls, like the data he cited Monday that he said shows support is “down into the 20’s in some Polls.”

In fact, polling suggests support for impeachment is holding fairly steady. It remains particularly strong among Democrats, with a mid-November Morning Consult poll finding 82 percent of Democrats supporting impeachment and a mid-November NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll finding 86 percent of Democrats in support. A FiveThirtyEight meta-analysis Monday finds an average of 80 percent of Democrats support impeachment.

Morning Consult’s findings are slightly down from early October, near the beginning of the impeachment inquiry, when its pollsters found 88 percent of Democrats supported impeachment. But they remain in line with polls taken ahead of the first public impeachment hearings, like an October 8 Quinnipiac University poll that found 85 percent of Democrats wanted to see Trump impeached and removed from the White House.

Similarly, polling among Republicans has not made any major shifts.

The November Morning Consult poll found 11 percent of Republicans supporting impeachment; the NPR/PBS/Marist poll saw 7 percent saying the same. FiveThirtyEight finds the average of pro-impeachment Republican sentiment to be around 12 percent. In early October, Morning Consult 12 found percent of Republicans supported impeachment, NPR/PBS/Marist 6 percent, and FiveThirtyEight found about 14 percent.

Overall, support seems to have slipped slightly; Morning Consult’s mid-November poll recorded it at 48 percent, NPR/PBS/Marist put it at 45 percent, and FiveThirtyEight’s analysis at 46 percent. Contrast this with the early October figures, when Morning Consult found 50 percent overall support for impeachment, NPR/PBS/Marist 49 percent, and FiveThirtyEight 48.8 percent.

Beyond slight declines in Democratic and Republican support, there has also been a decrease in support for impeachment among independent voters — something that the president has celebrated on Twitter, retweeting allies like Rep. Mark Meadows who have pointed out this trend.

Meadows cited a November poll from Emerson College that found 34 percent of independents in support of impeachment, down 14 percentage points from the level of support registered in the college’s October poll.

This poll is something of an outlier, however. Other polls have revealed shifts in support more in line with the changes recorded among Democratic and Republican voters: NPR/PBS/Marist found a 6 percentage point decrease (47 to 41 percent) from October to November and Morning Consult a 4 percentage point decrease (44 to 40 percent).

What none of these polls show is support for impeachment in the 20s, as Trump has claimed. It is possible that figure stems from a report from conservative firm Rasmussen — an organization’s whose polls have not always proved overly accurate, but that usually favor the president. A mid-November survey from that company found 18 percent of voters believe Trump will be impeached “before serving his full term in office.” This is not the number who support impeachment, but simply the number who think impeachment (and presumably removal from office) will happen.

It is also possible the president is simply misrepresenting available data, something he has done on Twitter before, most often when sharing his approval rating.

He said in September, for instance that polls showed his approval among Republicans was 94 percent; Saturday he claimed a 1 percentage point increase had been recorded and that his approval among Republicans is now at 95 percent. While his support among Republicans was high in September and is high now, it is not as high as the president has claimed.

Small reductions in support for impeachment don’t necessarily spell trouble for Democrats

While Trump’s reading of the polls does not appear to be accurate, it is fair to say that support is down slightly overall. In the weeks following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, support for impeachment was on the rise across all political affiliations, suggesting Democrats were wise to begin the inquiry.

Recent trends are not necessarily cause for alarm among Democratic leaders, particularly as it remains to be seen whether recent downturns last or are fleeting. Support for impeachment has fluctuated before, and it is important to note available polling was conducted toward the beginning and middle of public impeachment inquiry hearings, not following them.

During those hearings, witnesses gave sworn testimony painting a picture of a campaign led by the president that subverted US foreign policy in Ukraine into a mechanism for domestic political gain, and many of the witnesses who arguably had a greater degree of insight into Trump’s role in the scandal, like US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, testified toward the end.

House Democrats certainly hope that those hearings will increase public support for impeachment, giving them a clear mandate to continue the process, and they still may, meaning recent polls — real or imaginary — are not really something for the president to celebrate.

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A senior Joe Biden campaign staffer in charge of outreach to Latino, African-American and women’s groups has quit her post, telling two allies she was frustrated over her lack of input and with the presidential candidate’s immigration rhetoric.

Vanessa Cárdenas, the most senior Latina Biden staffer, had been serving as national coalitions director since the campaign formally announced its existence April 25. She resigned last week and has since changed her bio on Twitter to say she was “formerly with @joebiden.”

Cárdenas did not return a call or text message, but two friends familiar with her thinking told POLITICO that she felt the campaign wasn’t heeding her advice on immigration as she tried to reach out to Latino groups that have had longstanding concerns with the former vice president’s rhetoric and record stemming from the Obama administration.

“The campaign is just hyper-focused on whites in Iowa and African-Americans and it placed less value on Latino outreach,” an immigration activist and friend who spoke with her told POLITICO.

“Vanessa kept banging her head against the wall trying to get them to take the community more seriously,” the friend, who wasn’t authorized to speak on her behalf, said. “And Biden just really won’t change when it comes to the way he talks about immigration. It became too much.”

The resignation of Cárdenas, an activist who has never worked on a political campaign before, does not leave Biden without a Latino outreach team. Cristóbal Alex, former president of the influential Latino Victory Fund, remains Biden’s senior-most adviser for issues involving Hispanic voters. And, though Cárdenas worked with coalition groups, Biden has a Latinx outreach director, Laura Jiménez.

Cárdenas’ departure is the latest in a string of troubles Biden’s campaign has had with Latino and Hispanic leaders and groups, a tension partly rooted in the fact that the candidate has held firmly to formerly centrist Democratic party positions on immigration even as activists have grown more vocal and progressive.

But for all the criticism, Biden continues to lead among Latino voters in many national polls and surveys of states with heavy Hispanic populations. In other polls of Latinos, Biden is essentially tied with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Biden was criticized for skipping a Latino elected officials forum in June — at the time, a campaign surrogate held up Cárdenas’ role in the campaign as proof of Biden’s commitment to Latino voters. And in August, his campaign went into damage control after immigration activists grew upset with him over how he spoke about the issue at a debate. He also avoided a California Democratic event where he was aware the immigration issue could haunt him.

At a South Carolina event on Thursday, Biden ended up in a widely publicized clash with Carlos Rojas, an immigration activist with the group Movimiento Cosecha, who wanted the candidate to pledge to halt deportations.

"No. I will not stop all deportations. I will prioritize deportations, only people who have committed a felony or serious crime,” Biden told Rojas.

Rojas then told Biden that he had volunteered for the Obama-Biden campaign in 2008 but became disenchanted with the Obama administration because “over those 8 years, there were 3 million people that were deported and separated from their families.”

“You should vote for Trump,” Biden cut in.

The exchange, which occurred after Cárdenas had quit, underscored her concerns with the campaign, a second friend told POLITICO.

“What happened last week was a perfect example of what Vanessa was dealing with,” the friend, who was also not authorized to speak for her, told POLITICO. “Biden just refuses to talk about the issue in a compassionate way.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Energy Secretary Rick Perry gave an interview to FOX & Friends, parts of which aired over the weekend, including this nugget.

Said Perry: “God’s used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn’t perfect, Saul wasn’t perfect, Solomon wasn’t perfect. I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those old testament kings about a month ago. And I shared it with him and said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the chosen one, and I said, ‘You were.’ I said, ‘If you’re a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government.'”

Bad theology is bad for all of us. Here’s Energy Sec Rick Perry saying he reassured Trump as he faces impeachment that God chose him—and God has used imperfect ppl before.
We need a #RevolutionOfValues. pic.twitter.com/62pHQsmv72

— Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (@wilsonhartgrove) November 25, 2019

The post Rick Perry: Trump is the ‘Chosen One’ Sent by God to Rule Over Us — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

John Kennedy during his successful US Senate campaign in November 2016. | Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

John Kennedy and Roger Wicker’s comments are a taste of what’s to come during a Senate trial.

The consensus conclusion of the US intelligence community is that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election. This finding was affirmed by a bipartisan Senate investigation and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in painstaking detail laid out how Russian intelligence officers helped Trump not only through hacks, but also with the ensuing WikiLeaks anti-Clinton propaganda campaign featuring the emails stolen during those hacks.

Nonetheless, nearly three years after the US intelligence community first announced this consensus conclusion, Republicans senators are publicly trying to gaslight people about what happened in 2016 by insisting that purported — but in reality nonexistent — Ukrainian election interference is just as concerning as what Russia did. Their aim appears to be twofold: justifying the conspiracy theories Trump tried to leverage the Ukrainian government into investigating (and that are at the heart of the House’s impeachment inquiry), and drawing into question whether Trump actually benefitted from foreign interference.

“I’m saying that Ms. Hill is entitled to her opinion”

That Republican senators are choosing this moment to push unfounded Ukrainian interference conspiracy theories is particularly galling in light of Russia expert and former National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s testimony before impeachment investigators last Thursday.

Hill used her opening statement to attack Republicans for indulging in unfounded conspiracy theories. She described the Ukrainian interference notion as “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” adding, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

Nonetheless, the very next day, Trump called in to Fox & Friends and said “the word is” that “a lot of [the interference] had to do, they say, with Ukraine” — a claim that seemed to be a bit extreme even for the usually Trump-adoring hosts.

So, on the most recent edition of Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), “Who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC and Clinton campaign computers, their emails — was it Russia, or Ukraine?”

Kennedy responded with the equivalent of a verbal shrug, saying, “I don’t know. Nor do you. Nor do any of us.”

Wallace cut him off to note that “the entire intelligence community says it was Russia.” But Kennedy was undeterred.

“Right. But it could also be Ukraine,” he said. “I’m not saying that I know one way or the other. I’m saying that Ms. Hill is entitled to her opinion.”

Watch:

Hill’s position, of course, is more than an “opinion” — it’s in line with every major investigation of 2016 election interference, including one conducted by Kennedy’s Republican colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Beyond that, many Americans remember WikiLeaks’s anti-DNC and anti-Clinton propaganda campaigns in the summer and fall of 2016. But they don’t remember any equivalent anti-Trump campaign conducted by Ukrainian officials, because there wasn’t one. And yet Kennedy, echoing Trump, wants people to believe that Ukrainian officials played a role in framing up Russia for the election interference effort.

Kennedy wasn’t the only Republican to push this talking point on Sunday. On Meet the Press, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) did the same thing, telling host Chuck Todd that Hill “is correct that Russia tried to interfere in 2016, [but] also, Ukrainians themselves tried to interfere.”

“Isn’t there a big difference between the two?” Todd responded. “Look, I understand there’s individual Ukrainians who were upset that candidate Donald Trump wanted Crimea to stay with Russia. Is that the same as the Russian government and Putin ordering a full-fledged interference campaign?”

Wicker didn’t answer the question, but said, “I’m concerned about both.”

During her testimony, Hill addressed the specific false equivalency pushed by Wicker, noting that “there was little evidence of a top-down effort [to aid] Hillary Clinton by Ukraine ... a distinction between the Russian effort that was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Republicans pushing this unfounded conspiracy theory is a taste of what’s to come

As Greg Sergeant of the Washington Post details, Republicans are suddenly pushing the Ukrainian conspiracy theory in part because if Trump is impeached, it will likely be central to his defense during a Senate trial. As unfounded as it is, it will be used to make a case that Trump had good reason to try to leverage the Ukrainian government into investigating what role, if any, previous governments there played in the 2016 campaign.

But the fact of the matter is that 2016 election interference has already been extensively investigated by a wide range of American officials. Time and time again, they’ve found that Russia interfered to help Trump and damage Clinton. They have not found that there was any sort of pro-Clinton Ukrainian interference campaign of significance. And yet to defend their president, Republicans are now going to the extent of pretending that reality is unknowable.

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

Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh attend the State of the Union address at the Capitol on February 5, 2019, in Washington, DC.  | Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images

The Court is poised to fulfill the NRA’s Second Amendment fantasies.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, the biggest guns case to reach the Supreme Court in more than a decade, began with a tiny dispute.

New York City offers two kinds of licenses to gun owners. A “carry” license permits them to carry a handgun for “target practice, hunting, or self-defense.” The less permissive “premises” license, meanwhile, permits gun owners to “have and possess in his dwelling” a handgun. Under a now-repealed rule, premise license holders were only allowed to bring the gun out of their home for limited purposes, including to practice shooting at seven specific gun ranges.

The plaintiffs in New York State Rifle brought a narrow challenge to this framework. As a federal appeals court explained in an opinion upholding the city’s repealed rule, some of the plaintiffs “seek to transport their handguns to shooting ranges and competitions outside New York City.” One plaintiff also owns two homes, and he wants to be able to transport the same gun between these two homes.

That’s it. They sued for a small expansion of the rights afforded to people with premises licenses. And indeed, last July, the state acquiesced: It passed a law permitting people with premises licenses to do the very thing that these plaintiffs wish to do. That renders the case moot — or so one would think.

Yet the Supreme Court has so far refused to dismiss the case as moot. And if the plaintiffs have their way, the Court will wind up deciding a much bigger question than the one it originally agreed to hear.

Paul Clement, the prominent conservative lawyer representing the plaintiffs, submitted a brief that presents the case as a grand fight over “draconian restrictions on the possession and transport of handguns.” Even though his clients already won with New York City and State changing its laws to accommodate them, Clement wants to proceed. And he’s urging the Court to see this case as a much bigger challenge than the one his clients raised in the lower courts.

That’s a highly unusual move. The Supreme Court’s rules instruct lawyers that merits briefs “may not raise additional questions or change the substance of the questions” originally presented to the Court.

In any event, it’s not hard to guess why gun rights advocates hope that this case becomes larger. The case was first brought in 2013, with the relatively moderate Anthony Kennedy on the Court. In 2019, Kennedy is gone and the more conservative Brett Kavanaugh is in his place. New York State Rifle could significantly expand Second Amendment rights now that we have a more conservative Supreme Court.

The plaintiffs’ original modest ask, in other words, made sense when they probably thought they could only win incremental victories before a relatively moderate Court. But now they most likely have five votes for something much bigger. So why not ask for a revolution?

Kennedy’s retirement is likely to change everything about the Second Amendment

Months before his death earlier this year, retired Justice John Paul Stevens revealed some of the Court’s secret deliberations in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the landmark Supreme Court decision holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. In Heller, the Court divided 5-4 along ideological lines, and Kennedy joined his fellow conservatives in the majority.

Yet, in a 2018 interview with the New York Times’ Adam Liptak, Stevens revealed that Kennedy requested “some important changes” to the original draft of the Heller opinion. This language stated that Heller “should not be taken to cast doubt” on many existing gun laws.

The final Heller opinion states that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” Heller suggests that “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” are all valid, as are bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Thanks to Justice Stevens, we now know that such mitigating language probably would not have made it into the Heller opinion without Kennedy’s intervention.

Kavanaugh, to put it mildly, does not share Kennedy’s trepidation about an overly expansive Second Amendment. Shortly after the Supreme Court decided Heller, the District of Columbia passed a new law banning semi-automatic “assault weapons” and requiring gun owners to register those weapons. That law never reached the Supreme Court, but a lower appeals court did hear a challenge to this new law in a 2011 case called Heller v. District of Columbia (Dick Heller was a party in both Heller cases, hence the similar case names).

In this second Heller case, two judges — both of whom are Republican appointees — largely upheld the new law (though they did call for further proceedings on the District’s gun registration requirement). The third judge was Kavanaugh, and he argued in dissent that “both D.C.’s ban on semi-automatic rifles and its gun registration requirement are unconstitutional under Heller.”

Kavanaugh wants to significantly expand the scope of the Second Amendment

At least until now, the Supreme Court’s been reluctant to hear Second Amendment cases. The 2008 Heller decision was the first time in American history that the Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun. Since then, the Court’s heard just one significant Second Amendment case, McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), and that case only held that Heller applies with the same force to the federal government and to the states.

Prior to Heller, the Supreme Court rejected the thesis that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, holding instead that the “obvious purpose” of the amendment was “the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,”

Yet while the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence is underdeveloped, the lower courts have reached a consensus on how this amendment should be interpreted. At least 10 federal appeals courts follow what Judge Stephen Higginson described as a “two-step analytic framework.” Under this framework, “severe burdens on core Second Amendment rights” are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most skeptical level of constitutional review. “Less onerous laws, or laws that govern conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core’” face a more permissive test known as “intermediate scrutiny.”

But Kavanaugh rejects this consensus. In his 2011 dissent, he argued for an entirely different framework — “courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.”

One problem with Kavanaugh’s framework is that it is far from clear how it would work in practice. Strict scrutiny provides that a law will be struck down unless it advances a “compelling interest” and is “narrowly tailored” to advance that interest. Intermediate scrutiny provides that a law will be struck down unless it serves “important governmental objectives” and is “substantially related to achievement of those objectives.” These tests may seem vague, but they’ve been around for decades, have been fleshed out by hundreds of court decisions, and are part of the canon of constitutional law taught to first-year law students. Judges are very familiar with these tests, and they know how to apply them to individual cases.

Kavanaugh’s framework, by contrast, is novel. And its full implications are unclear. Nevertheless, it’s a safe bet that Kavanaugh’s “text, history, and tradition” framework would lead to a much more expansive Second Amendment than the consensus framework, since Kavanaugh dissented to the right of two of his Republican colleagues in the second Heller case.

Liberals best shot in New York State Rifle is to make this case go away

If the Supreme Court reaches the merits of the New York State Rifle case, it is very likely that there will be five votes to significantly expand the scope of the Second Amendment — even if there aren’t five votes to adopt Kavanaugh’s particular framework.

So there’s little doubt why New York City changed its gun rules — or why the state passed a law that effectively forbids the city from ever reinstating its old rules. New York is dominated by Democrats, and Democrats typically view the Second Amendment very differently than Justice Kavanaugh does. Their best chance to keep the Supreme Court from nuking many gun laws is to render New York State Rifle moot, and that’s exactly what they did.

New York City changed its rules to allow the New York State Rifle plaintiffs to do what they originally wanted to do. And New York State enacted a law providing that people with premises licenses may bring their gun to “another dwelling or place of business of the licensee where the licensee is authorized to have and possess such pistol or revolver,” to “an indoor or outdoor shooting range that is authorized by law to operate as such,” or to “a shooting competition at which the licensee may possess such pistol or revolver consistent with” the law.

Thus far, however, the Court has resisted the city’s efforts to have the case dismissed as moot. Last October, the Supreme Court considered whether to dismiss New York State Rifle because of its mootness problem. The justices decided instead to put off further discussion of mootness until the December 2 oral arguments.

Some amicus briefs argue that the case should not be dismissed because of a doctrine called “voluntary cessation.” As a general rule, this doctrine provides that a court may retain jurisdiction over a case after the defendant voluntarily quits their allegedly illegal behavior. It exists to prevent defendants from avoiding litigation by perpetually stopping their behavior, dismissing any lawsuits against them, and then resuming the same behavior.

Yet, as a brief submitted on behalf of a group of legal scholars argues, New York State Rifle is not a voluntary cessation case. Because the state passed a law forbidding New York City from reinstating its own rules, it’s not possible for the city to resume its allegedly illegal behavior if this case is dismissed.

That leaves Clement’s gambit — to simply assert a broader claim before the Supreme Court than the one his clients raised in the lower courts. If New York State Rifle is a grand showdown over whether New York may impose any restrictions on gun possession outside the home, then the case is not moot, and the Supreme Court may use it as a vehicle to expand the Second Amendment.

New York State Rifle, in other words, isn’t just a case about what the Second Amendment means. It’s a test of whether the Court’s Republican majority is so impatient to expand that amendment that they will ignore the ordinary rules governing Supreme Court litigation in order to determine the merits of this case.

Last year nearly 400 million people experienced Dengue fever, according to All Things Considered. (Just Brazil alone had more than 2 million cases.) But The World Mosquito Project is trying an interesting solution: Scientists are cultivating and releasing mosquitoes, except these mosquitoes are special: They've been infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia. Wolbachia occurs naturally in many insects, but not normally in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread dengue. It has to be introduced into the mosquitoes in the lab. But then the bacterium is passed down to future generations. The bacterium appears to block Aedes aegypti from transmitting arboviruses, which include dengue as well as chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika... "In Indonesia, we've [released Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in] a community of 50,000 people and compared it to a community that was left without Wolbachia," says Cameron Simmons, director of the impact assessment team for the World Mosquito Program. "We've seen a 75% reduction [of dengue cases] over the last 2 1/2 years in the Wolbachia-treated community...." The problem in the real world is that other people and other mosquitoes keep migrating into the areas being treated, messing up the experiments. But from a theoretical perspective Simmons sees Wolbachia as potentially a way to wipe out dengue entirely. "If you had a big island," he proposes, "[and] you stop people from moving in and out of that island, and you put Wolbachia across all the mosquitoes on that island, the science suggests that you'll eliminate dengue in that location." Some countries are trying to do just that. Australia started using Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes nearly a decade ago to control outbreaks of imported dengue in the state of Queensland. This year the government of Malaysia launched a campaign called "Wolbachia Malaysia" to attack dengue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(253): What's the weirdest place you've ever had sex?
(360): I don't think you're psychologically prepared for this conversation.

Lev Parnas, the Rudy Giuliani associate who helped set up a taxpayer-funded dirt-gathering trip by Rep. Devin Nunes, has reportedly turned over audio, video, and photographs to the House Intelligence Committee. 

ABC News reports that Parnas, who is under indictment for campaign finance violations, including using straw donors and funneling foreign money into U.S. elections, has turned in material that includes Giuliani and Donald Trump. No word yet on Nunes. Parnas’ lawyer said in a statement, “Mr. Parnas has vociferously and publicly asserted his wish to comply with his previously issued subpoena and to provide the House Intelligence Committee with truthful and important information that is in furtherance of justice, not to obstruct it.”

Even if we take his lawyer at his word, and Parnas really does want to turn in everything he has—not remotely a foregone conclusion even in an effort to save his own butt—Parnas wasn’t able to turn over all of the information House investigators wanted, though, because some of it is held by the Southern District of New York’s federal investigators.

It was revealed last week that ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, who has been a reliable disruption throughout that House impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump, had himself traveled to Vienna to meet with corrupt Ukrainian ex-prosecutor Victor Shokin. The trip was facilitated by the now-indicted Lev Parnas, Ukrainian partner of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and its purpose was to obtain "dirt" on potential Trump election rival Joe Biden—the same motive held by Trump, Giuliani, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo themselves when pressuring the Ukrainian government, the very act to precipitate the current impeachment investigation.

Rep. Nunes undisclosed personal involvement with the same allegedly criminal acts that will likely result in impeachment charges against Trump and criminal charges against Giuliani and, possibly, still more others, sheds light on his continued efforts to block House investigators seeking information about those acts. He did not disclose that he was in fact a fact witness to the very effort in question, and coordinating with several of the same individuals.

But there was one question remaining: Did Nunes make these Parnas-Shokin arrangements to uncover supposed "dirt" on a Republican opponent in a personal capacity, making him merely an idiot, or did he use taxpayer funds for the partisan, election-premised trip, a violation of campaign laws?

We now know the answer. Yes, he did it the criminal way. Of course he did.

Newsweek is now reporting that Nunes' congressional office spent $57,000 in taxpayer money to fly Nunes and three members of his congressional staff to Europe for secret meetings with Shokin and other Parnas-arranged "sources."

Rep. Nunes now faces a formal ethics complaint over his status as undisclosed witness, the resulting conflict of interest inherent to that act, and for his use of taxpayer funds for domestic political purposes. While past charges for unethical behavior and leaking classified information—also centered on defending Trump—were buried by a Republican then-majority on the Ethics Committee, the current Democratic-held committee is expected to treat these charges with the seriousness they are due.

Demonstrators unfurl a Transgender Pride Flag outside the US Supreme Court on October 8, 2019. | Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

It’s part of a bigger push around the country.

Trans children have been in the national spotlight in recent weeks, with the governor of Texas stepping in to try to stop a mother from allowing her child to transition. And on Wednesday, South Carolina legislators joined in with a bill that would ban a variety of medical treatments for trans children.

The bill, called the Youth Gender Reassignment Prevention Act, prohibits doctors from performing any “gender reassignment medical treatment” on a person under 18. Proposed by state Rep. Stewart Jones, a Republican, the bill isn’t just about surgery, which is uncommon for patients under 18 in any case. It would also ban hormones and puberty blockers, a reversible treatment that stops the physical changes associated with puberty. And it would prohibit doctors from performing “interventions to alleviate symptoms of clinically significant distress resulting from gender dysphoria,” or conflict between a person’s assigned gender and their gender identity.

The proposed legislation has an exception allowing mental health counseling. But the bill is so broad it could could ban “interventions” like allowing a child to dress in accordance with their gender identity, Colleen Condon, board president of the South Carolina LGBTQ rights group Alliance for Full Acceptance, told Vox. “It does seem to basically say you can’t be you,” she added.

Pre-filed during a recess in the South Carolina legislature, the bill won’t get a hearing until January at the earliest. But it’s part of a larger trend around the country, with lawmakers in Texas, Georgia, and Kentucky floating bans on medical care for trans youth, as Katelyn Burns reports at Vox. If passed, trans rights advocates say, such laws are likely to harm trans youth, who are already at high risk of suicide and depression, by cutting off access to the care they need.

Jones told Vox in an email that the bill was meant to help children, allowing “doctors to address the underlying psychological issues of minors suffering from gender dysphoria before altering hormones.” But Condon fears Jones’s efforts will have the opposite effect. “It feels like he’s trying to drive our trans teens to the grave,” she said.

The South Carolina bill would ban many types of medical care for trans youth

The Youth Gender Reassignment Prevention Act was pre-filed on November 20, which is also Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day honoring those who have died as a result of anti-trans violence.

But rather than addressing such violence, the bill would restrict what kind of medical care trans youth can receive.

Around the country, the care doctors recommend for trans children varies by age, as Burns reports. Before puberty, they typically perform no medical interventions at all. Rather, most major medical associations recommend the “affirming method” for young children who may be trans, allowing them to experiment with different pronouns or gender presentations as they wish.

If a child is entering puberty and has been consistent in their gender identity for several years, a doctor may prescribe puberty blockers to halt the onset of puberty until the patient can make a decision about more permanent treatment. Later, if their gender identity remains consistent, they may start cross-sex hormones to bring on puberty consistent with their identity.

The South Carolina bill would appear to ban both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And because it bans interventions “to alleviate symptoms of clinically significant distress resulting from gender dysphoria,” it could ban the affirming method as well, preventing doctors from, for example, recommending that parents allow a child to dress or wear their hair in a way consistent with their gender identity.

The bill has an exception allowing “behavioral health care services, such as mental health counseling” for gender dysphoria. However, the language of the bill is so wide-ranging that it could even ban medication for depression or other mental health conditions associated with dysphoria, Condon said.

Jones told Vox the bill “will not stop anyone from getting mental health services, counseling, and medication.” But Condon said until the language of the bill changes, the issue of medication remains a concern.

And overall, the ban could be very dangerous for trans young people, who are already at high risk of attempting suicide, Condon said. In one recent study, over 50 percent of trans male teens said they had tried to end their own lives, along with nearly 30 percent of trans female teens.

The bill “is essentially state sponsored deadly violence against trans kids,” Chase Strangio, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who recently argued a landmark LGBTQ rights case before the Supreme Court, said on Twitter.

Doctors who prescribe puberty blockers and other care in South Carolina are doing so to help alleviate gender dysphoria and save young people’s lives, Condon added. “Any treatment that occurs is limited, thoughtful, and medically appropriate,” she said. The bill, by contrast, would force doctors “to actually commit malpractice” by denying treatment they believe is necessary for children’s health.

And yet under the bill, doctors who provide the banned treatments could lose their medical licenses.

It’s part of a bigger movement around the country

South Carolina is behind many other states when it comes to trans rights, Condon said, with one of the most difficult processes for legal transition in the country and no state law allowing people to change their legal gender. (California, by contrast, allows trans people to change their legal gender if they submit an affidavit attesting to their gender identity.) At least five trans people have been killed in the state this year, including 24-year-old Pebbles LaDime Doe, who was fatally shot in August.

But the Youth Gender Reassignment Prevention Act is not unique. As Burns reports, Texas state Rep. Matt Krause has pledged to introduce a bill banning puberty blockers in his state, while fellow Texas Rep. Steve Toth promised to introduce a bill defining the “transitioning of a minor” as child abuse. Their pledges came in the midst of a media firestorm over Luna Younger, a 7-year-old trans girl whose father wants to stop her from presenting as a girl. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott even got involved, saying he would ask state child protective services to investigate the girl’s mother, who is supportive of Younger’s gender identity.

Younger’s case appears to have had an impact on Jones as well. “As a parent, it’s very upsetting to see what was going on in Texas recently, with a mother forcing gender confusion on a 7-year-old child and against the fathers wishes,” he said. “Forcing anyone to make these decisions (especially a child) is wrong.” (According to court records, Younger asked to be referred to as Luna, and has been consistent about identifying as a girl throughout her childhood, Burns reports.)

Meanwhile, legislators in other states, including Kentucky and Georgia, are also considering legislation to restrict medical care for trans kids.

The push for such restrictions is reminiscent of “bathroom” bills, legislation over the last several years that sought to prevent trans people from using bathrooms consistent with their gender identity, as María Méndez of the Dallas Morning News notes. For a time, the bills became “the center of the country’s culture wars,” Vox’s German Lopez reported, with Republicans supporting the restrictions and LGBTQ rights groups launching protests and boycotts of states that had such laws on the books.

Medical care restrictions could become a similar battleground, and Republicans may be using them to stoke controversy and energize their base going into a general election year. “I’m not even sure how much Rep. Jones cares about this,” Condon said of the South Carolina bill, “as much as creating something that is red meat to draw those who are not supportive to the polls.”

Whatever the intent, Condon says the impact on trans people could be even more severe than that of bathroom bills. And proposals like the one in South Carolina have an impact on the entire LGBTQ community in the state, she said.

At a ceremony on Thursday night to mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, “there was just such shock and depression in our community,” Condon said. The group was remembering the trans people murdered in South Carolina this year, as well as a trans teenager who died by suicide after being denied hormone treatment.

“We are trying to save children’s lives,” Condon said.

Update: This story has been updated to reflect comments by Rep. Stewart Jones received after press time, as well as additional comments by Colleen Condon.

Gordon Sondland, Ambassador to the European Union, arrives to testify before the impeachment inquiry of President Trump in Washington, D.C. on November 20, 2019. | Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

When compared to documents and other witness accounts, Sondland’s testimony is full of holes.

The most common interpretation of US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland’s impeachment testimony this week is that Sondland turned on the president, finally spilling what he knew about the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

And on the surface, Sondland’s testimony indeed looked bad for Trump. He confirmed the first quid pro quo (investigations for a White House meeting). He said he believed himself to be carrying out the president’s orders. And he gave new details implicating other top administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence.

Yet when it comes to a crucial topic — what President Trump actually told Sondland about all this — Sondland’s memory continues to fail him.

Sondland claims to have a clear recollection of only one phone call with Trump related to Ukraine, toward the end of this saga, on September 9, in which Trump said, he wanted “nothing” and wanted “no quid pro quo.” Trump himself seized on this Wednesday, writing out Sondland’s account of this call in block letters and shouting it out to the White House press corps, insisting it gets him off the hook.

However, other witnesses and documents suggest there were several other calls between Sondland and Trump prior to the September 9 call — including just days before the 9th, after news broke that Trump was blocking military aid to Ukraine. Those other calls have a very different takeaway, and one that’s far more damaging to Trump.

Bill Taylor claimed Sondland spoke of such a call with Trump on September 1, and Tim Morrison said Sondland spoke of a new call on September 7. Both said that, per Sondland, Trump was adamant the Ukrainians make the statement about investigations. That is: he very much wanted something, not nothing.

Sondland professed not to remember the details of this — and claims he can’t even remember whether those calls with Trump even happened. (He blames the White House’s failure to turn over call records for this.)

Regardless, there appear to be holes in his story — ones that raise the possibility that he is still crafting his testimony to protect President Trump.

Sondland’s goal Wednesday was clearly to get the heat off himself — he was widely viewed as the least credible of the closed-door witnesses, and some Democrats even said he may have perjured himself. He seems to have succeeded in that. But he seems to have done so by offering up new details implicating basically everyone except Trump.

Sondland denies knowing that Burisma meant Biden. That’s ... questionable.

Before getting to Sondland’s testimony about his contacts with the president, it’s worth examining a separate dubious claim he continues to insist on.

Sondland claims that, through most of this months-long saga, he was completely unaware that the gas company Burisma had any connection to the Biden family — and, therefore, that investigating Burisma could be interpreted as investigating the Bidens.

In his deposition, Sondland testified that he only learned “very much later” of the Biden-Burisma connection. And in his open testimony, Sondland reiterated that he “never heard” Vice President Joe Biden’s name come up, and he only realized Burisma meant Biden at some unspecified moment “very late in the game.”

“I can’t remember when the light bulb went on. It could have been when the transcript went out. It was always ‘Burisma’ to me,” Sondland said.

This claim always seemed hard to believe. For one, Rudy Giuliani had repeatedly mentioned the Burisma-Biden tie in media appearances and tweets that year — he talked about it constantly. Yet Sondland testified he had completely missed all of Giuliani’s media appearances, and that when he talked to Giuliani, only “Burisma” (not “Biden”) was discussed.

President Trump, too, we know, blatantly framed investigating Burisma as investigating the Bidens during his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky.

Sondland also was not on that call, so he wouldn’t have heard that. Yet Sondland phoned Trump the morning of the call (July 25), and the day after the call (July 26), to discuss it. (Sondland testified he couldn’t remember what he talked to Trump about on the first call, and that his memory of the second call was only jogged by another witness’s testimony.)

Sondland also met with Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak the day after the call. It would be rather strange if the word “Biden” never came up in any of these interactions.

Beyond that, two witnesses have testified that, in separate instances in July, they heard Sondland specifically mention investigating “Biden.”

• Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an NSC staffer, testified that after a White House meeting with Ukrainian officials on July 10, Sondland “emphasized the importance of Ukraine delivering the investigations into the 2016 election, the Bidens, and Burisma.” Vindman said he told Sondland this was inappropriate.
• David Holmes, a Kyiv-based State Department official, testified that when he was having lunch with Sondland at a restaurant on July 26, Sondland called Trump. Afterward, Holmes says he asked whether Trump cared about Ukraine, and Sondland said Trump only cared about “big stuff” that benefits him, ‘like the ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”

Finally, during her own testimony on Thursday, former NSC staffer Fiona Hill was asked whether Sondland could really have been ignorant of the Burisma-Biden connection. “It is not credible that he was oblivious,” she said.

The weight of evidence, other witness testimony, and simple common sense contradicts Sondland’s account here. And if he is still not being fully forthcoming on this topic — what else might he be continuing to hide?

Sondland can’t remember calls with Trump during the most important period of the scandal

In Sondland’s testimony, he openly confirmed that there was a “quid pro quo” offered to Ukraine: Zelensky would get the White House meeting he badly wanted, as long as the Ukrainians publicly announced investigations.

Yet that was only the first quid pro quo at the heart of this scandal. Sondland’s account of the second and even more scandalous quid pro quo — releasing hundreds of millions of dollars in blocked military aid for Ukraine, in exchange for Ukrainians — is far murkier.

It’s important to understand the timeline here. Trump ordered the aid blocked back in July. However, witnesses have suggested, and documents have corroborated, that through July and August, discussions with the Ukrainians did indeed focus on the White House meeting for Zelensky, and not yet the blocked aid.

That all changed on August 28, when news that Trump was blocking the aid became public. The Ukrainians panicked. “Need to talk to you,” Yermak wrote to US special representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker in a text message.

On September 1, Vice President Mike Pence met with Zelensky in Warsaw. Shortly after that meeting, Sondland now admits, he told Yermak that the military aid likely depended on whether the Ukrainians announced the investigations Trump wanted.

But why did Sondland do this? His latest testimony is that he simply “presumed,” on his own, that there was a linkage. That no one else, and certainly not President Trump, ever told him any such thing. (“I don’t recall President Trump ever talking to me about any security assistance. Ever,” Sondland testified.)

That same day, Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Kyiv, asked Sondland whether they are “now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?” And Sondland responded, “Call me.”

Now —with bolding for emphasis — this is Bill Taylor’s account of what Sondland then told him on that call.

During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling Ukrainian officials that only a White House meeting with Presidnet Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.

That is: Sondland claimed, according to Taylor’s account, that he was linking military aid to an investigation statement because of what President Trump told him. Not because of something he simply presumed.

Taylor isn’t the only witness to give an account like this. Fast forward a few days later to September 7. NSC staffer Tim Morrison testified that Sondland claimed to have spoken with President Trump again about this. This is from Morrison’s deposition, with bolding added for emphasis.

[In] the September 7th phone call, he told me he had just gotten off the phone with the President. I remember this because he actually made the comment that it was easier for him to get a hold of the President than to get a hold of me, which led me to respond, ‘Well, the President doesn’t work for Ambassador Bolton; I do,’ to which Ambassador Sondland responded, ‘Does Ambassador Bolton know that?’ But that’s why I have a vivid recollection of this. And he wanted to tell me what he had discussed with the President.

... He told me... that there was no quid pro quo, but President Zelensky must announce the opening of the investigations and he should want to do it.

Again: This isn’t “I want nothing!” It’s the opposite. It’s: “President Zelensky must announce the opening of the investigations.”

On the next day, September 8, Sondland texted Taylor and Volker, and again claimed to have spoken with Trump.

Gordon Sondland: Guys, multiple convos with Ze, Potus. Lets talk

Taylor testified that they did soon talk, and that Sondland described what sounds like the same Trump instruction that Sondland told Morrison about.

Ambassador Sondland and I spoke on the phone. He confirmed that he had talked to President Trump as I had suggested a week earlier, but that President Trump was adamant that President Zelensky, himself, had to ‘clear things up and do it in public.’ President Trump said it was not a ‘quid pro quo.’

...Ambassador Sondland also said that he had talked to President Zelensky and Mr. Yermak and had told them that, although this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelensky did not ‘clear things up’ in public, we would be at a ‘stalemate’ I understood a ‘stalemate’ to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance. Ambassador Sondland said that this conversation concluded with President Zelensky agreeing to make a public statement in an interview on CNN.

Again: Here, though Trump claims he’s not asking for a quid pro quo, he is not saying “I want nothing,” instead, he is “adamant” that Zelensky make the announcement.

But Sondland claims not to remember any of these conversations with Trump he claimed, at the time, to have had. Perhaps tellingly, though, he did include this bit in his “addendum,” updating his initial closed-door testimony:

Finally, as of this writing, I cannot specifically recall if I had one or two phone calls with President Trump in the September 6-9 time frame.

And as another reminder: Sondland testified that he doesn’t recall “President Trump ever talking to me about any security assistance.” His testimony is that even when, after the news of the aid holdup had leaked and the Ukrainians were desperate to get it lifted, the topic never even came up between him and Trump.

Sondland’s account of the one call with Trump he does claim to remember is very strange

Continuing in the timeline, it’s on September 9 — the day after Sondland texted Taylor about “multiple convos with Ze, Potus” and described a conversation with Trump — that Sondland finally remembers speaking to Trump.

This is the day Taylor sent the now-infamous text: “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign” — a text that took Sondland four-and-a-half hours to respond to.

After receiving that text, Sondland says, he called Trump. And this is his account of the conversation — the account Trump repeated with such relish on Wednesday:

I said, What do you want from Ukraine? I may have even used a four-letter word.

And he said I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. I just want Zelensky to do the right thing, what he ran on, or words to that effect

After this, Sondland texted Taylor:

Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind. The President is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign. I suggest we stop the back and forth by text. If you still have concerns, I recommend you give Lisa Kenna or S a call to discuss them directly. Thanks.

But does Sondland’s account of his call with Trump really make sense?

Remember — other documents and witnesses suggest Sondland had talked with Trump about this topic more than once in the days before this. Sondland even talked to President Zelensky about this. He was trying to close a deal.

So, why would Sondland open this call to Trump so late in the process with the broad question: “What do you want from Ukraine?” It’s ... strange. Especially when Taylor and Morrison claim that, days before this, Sondland claimed to be perfectly clear on what Trump wanted (that he was “adamant” on an announcement from the Ukrainians, that he wanted Zelensky “in a public box,” etc.)

But Sondland says he can only recall Trump saying, “I want nothing.” And, more vaguely, that he wants Zelensky to “do the right thing.”

Interestingly, while other administration officials have disputed aspects of Sondland’s testimony, Trump himself has refrained from attacking him too aggressively. Instead, he insisted that Sondland’s testimony was “fantastic” for him. And maybe there’s a reason for that.

Twitter says users will finally be able to disable SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) for their accounts, and use an alternative method only, such as a mobile one-time code (OTP) authenticator app or a hardware security key. Until this week, this was impossible. From a report: If users wanted to use 2FA for their Twitter account, they had to register a phone number and enable the SMS-based 2FA method, even if they wished it or not. Users who wanted to use an OTP mobile authenticator app or a hardware security key, had to enable the SMS-based 2FA first, and they couldn't disable it. Even if the user chose to use a security key, the SMS-based 2FA method was still active, and exposed the account to attacks known as SIM swaps. Hackers who knew a user's password would perform a SIM swap to temporarily hijack a user's phone number, bypass SMS-based 2FA, and then take over that user's account.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although Donald Trump is currently the target of an impeachment inquiry for tying U.S. military aid to Ukraine to a demand that the nation "investigate" his political opponents, he remains in control of U.S. foreign policy. That means he retains the ability to undo decades of international policy on a whim, an ability he continues to use with reckless abandon.

In the latest souring of relations between the United States and South Korea, the two nations have suspended diplomatic negotiations on how to share costs for the U.S. troop presence in South Korea after a Trump demand that the nation pay five times its current contribution going forward. And the negotiations appear to have been broken off on a sour note: Complaining that South Korean officials were "not responsive to our request," top U.S. negotiator James DeHart said in a statement that the U.S. had "cut short our participation in the talks today in order to give the Korea side time to reconsider."

The United States currently has nearly 30,000 soldiers in South Korea, a decades-long deterrence to potential North Korean attack, and conducts regular joint exercises with the South Korean military as precaution against such an attack. The North Korean dictatorship, on the other hand, has consistently demanded an end to those exercises and the withdrawal of U.S. troops as their own conditions for denuclearization.

Coincidentally or not, Trump's own impulses toward South Korea have mirrored those North Korean demands. As he has in Europe and elsewhere, Trump has repeatedly bristled at the cost of U.S. alliances, demanding allies pay more for what he has often described as U.S. "protection." And Trump has consistently signaled his own desire to end regular U.S.-South Korea joint exercises, both because of the price tag and as negotiated concession to the North Korean leadership.

While Trump's negotiation team walked out of South Korean talks to give one of our closest military allies "time to reconsider" their situation, South Korean officials appear to have done exactly that. Soon after the suspension of talks, South Korea signed a new defense agreement with China, agreeing to establish stronger military communications to boost "cooperation" between them.

Trump has been threatening to sharply reduce the U.S. presence in South Korea unless the nation agrees to his demands; South Korea appears to be taking that threat seriously, and preparing for that possibility.

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One of the most powerful moments of Dr. Hill's testimony today was her explanation of an increasingly "testy" relationship between herself and Ambassador Gordon Sondland, as Sondland began to take an increasingly large and curious role in Ukraine strategy revolving around investigations being sought by Donald Trump. Specifically, she had at one point become angry with him because he wasn't keeping her team appraised of his Ukrainian efforts, which were different from the official positions of the administration as Dr. Hill and other top officials understood them to be.

Her whole response is worth watching for Dr. Hill’s detailed, precise recounting of events.

HILL: I was actually, to be honest, angry with him. And, you know, I hate to say it but often when women show anger it's not fully appreciated, you know, it's often pushed off onto 'emotional issues', perhaps, or deflected onto other people. And what I was angry about was that he wasn't coordinating with us.

Now I actually realize, having listened to his deposition, that he was absolutely right. But he wasn't coordinating with us because we weren't doing the same thing that he was doing. So I was upset with him that he wasn't fully telling us about all of the meetings he was having, and he said to me: 'But I'm briefing the president. I'm briefing chief of staff Mulvaney. I'm briefing Secretary Pompeo, I've talked to Ambassador Bolton, who else do I have to deal with?'

And the point is we have a robust interagency process that deals with Ukraine. It includes Mr. Holmes, it includes Ambassador Taylor, it includes the chargé in Ukraine, it includes a whole load of other people. But it struck me, when yesterday, when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland's emails and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people that need to know, that he was absolutely right.

Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.

So he was correct. And I had not put my finger on it at that moment, but I was irritated with him that he wasn't fully coordinating, and I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up.

And here we are.

This would be among the last exchanges from Hill to be solicited from committee Republicans; after the close of the Republican counsel’s questioning, Republican members largely avoided asking her direct questions.

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In a gaslighting statement, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has responded through his lawyer to the House impeachment testimony of Dr. Fiona Hill that ties him directly to efforts to extort Ukrainian officials into providing politically premised "investigations" for the campaign benefit of Donald Trump.

Mulvaney's statement, which pointedly refuses to call Dr. Hill by her title but instead refers to her as "Ms." throughout, is egregiously dishonest. In fact, it's almost completely bunk.

Fiona Hill’s testimony is riddled with speculation and guesses about any role that Mr. Mulvaney played with anything related to Ukraine. She bases much of her testimony about him on things allegedly heard from unnamed staffers, guards in the West Wing, and “many people.” The fact is that Ms. Hill has never met Mr. Mulvaney other than in passing, and has never discussed anything with him regarding Ukraine. We have no idea why Ms. Hill believes Mr. Mulvaney was so heavily involved, especially in light of Ambassador Sondland’s contrary testimony that he only spoke very infrequently to Mr. Mulvaney and had zero substantive conversations with him about Ukraine. This inquiry continues to be a sham. No court in this country would give any weight to testimony about Mr. Mulvaney as speculative as Ms. Hill’s. Neither should Congress or the public.

But none of that is the charge actually leveled against Mulvaney. Dr. Hill explicitly testified that Ambassador Gordon Sondland told her he had an "arrangement" with Mulvaney that the Ukrainians would get an urgently sought White House meeting with Donald Trump "if specific investigations are put underway." This is a direct, and illegal, tying of a foreign policy act to an act of election assistance. It is a crime.

In this statement drafted by attorney Bob Driscoll (who previously represented now-deported Russian agent Maria Butina), Mulvaney does not dispute this blockbuster claim. In fact, he avoids all mention of it.

Mulvaney also does not dispute Dr. Hill's contention that it was absolutely implausible for Mulvaney to have not been aware that the so-called "Burisma" investigation was intended by both Trump and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to focus on the family of possible Trump election opponent Joe Biden.

Furthermore, Mulvaney has refused to testify about any of his claims under oath, even after confirming his own involvement in the Ukrainian pressure campaign in a televised press event.

So he's very clearly lying here, and not being even a little subtle about it. Dr. Hill asserts that Sondland told her directly that his authorization for trading an official government act—a White House meeting with the president—for campaign assistance came from White House chief of staff Mulvaney. If Mulvaney truly intended to dispute that, he could do so under oath.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) requested records from the State Department on Thursday related to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s efforts to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2016.

The letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo comes as Republicans seek to train scrutiny on Biden’s actions in Ukraine amid impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump over his own efforts to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate his would-be rival for the White House.

Graham is seeking records related to phone calls that occurred in February and March 2016 between Biden and Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, regarding U.S. demands that the country fire its top prosecutor. The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was unpopular with Western leaders, who viewed him as corrupt, and Biden was representing official U.S. policy and that of allied governments.

At the time, Biden’s son Hunter held a lucrative board position with Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company. Burisma, and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, had faced investigative scrutiny from Shokin’s office, presenting a potential conflict of interest for Biden.

Kurt Volker, a former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine called by House Republicans to testify at impeachment hearings, called allegations of corrupt intent by Biden “self-serving and non-credible.”

A former Shokin deputy has said investigations into Burisma were long dormant by the time he secured Shokin’s firing in late March 2016. On Thursday, a key witness in the impeachment probe, David Holmes, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, said the same during his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.

But in February 2016, Shokin’s office seized Zlochevsky’s property as part of a corruption investigation, according to a report at the time from the news service Interfax-Ukraine.

Graham’s letter notes that Hunter Biden became a Twitter follower of Tony Blinken, a longtime Biden aide then serving as deputy secretary of State, on the day of the Interfax report and suggests the two may have discussed Shokin’s investigations. Neither the State Department, Blinken nor the Biden campaign immediately responded to a request for comment.

The letter from Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeks all communications between Biden’s office and Poroshenko’s office between the news of the raid and Shokin’s March 29 firing.

It also seeks records related to a meeting between another Burisma board member, Devon Archer, and then-Secretary of State John Kerry on March 2, 2016.

Archer, a business partner of Hunter Biden, was also a close friend and business partner of Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz.

News of the Archer-Kerry meeting, as well as Hunter Biden’s Twitter follow of Blinken were first reported by the conservative journalist John Solomon based on State Department documents he obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Despite the letter and their partisan differences, Graham and Biden have a history of warm relations. Graham became visibly emotional when talking about his former Senate colleague in 2015.

“He’s the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in public life.” Graham said at the time. “He is as good a man as God ever created.”

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

President Donald Trump allegedly withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the Ukrainian government to push lawmakers to announce an investigation into the son of a potential political opponent and his work with a Ukrainian energy company. That much, at least, seems clear. As does the fact that Trump has an 89 percent approval rating with Republican voters.

That’s why most Republican lawmakers aren’t going to change their minds on the impeachment of President Trump. While some in Congress might privately think that Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to “do him a favor” and investigate former Vice President Joe Biden was a bad idea, they won’t say so in public.

Because, quite simply, Donald Trump is the president. Donald Trump is giving them what they want politically, the economy appears strong and, most critically, Donald Trump is far more popular and powerful than they are.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

Rather, together with constantly shifting responses to specific testimony, they appear to have developed three basic alternative defenses for Trump as House impeachment hearings continued: Donald Trump was “too inept” to have intended to do what he is being accused of doing; what Donald Trump did was actually good; and Trump’s actions were bad, but not impeachable.

But some Congressional Republicans and conservatives have begun saying the purest and perhaps most accurate defense of Trump out loud: Whatever he did, it doesn’t matter — not to “normal people” and not to the Republican Party.

1. “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

The first basic defense of Trump regarding Ukraine is the simplest: Trump lacked the intent and the basic competence to get a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine done. And without intent (legally defined as a conscious decision to commit an illegal act), some argue that what Trump did may have been bad and dumb, but not criminal — and thus, not a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

... it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most Presidents at some point or another in office.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham seemingly agreed, telling CBS News earlier this month that the administration appeared “incapable” of forming a quid pro quo, thus rendering the entire impeachment discussion null and void.

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro made similar arguments on his podcast, saying on October 7 that Trump would make a fantastic client for a defense attorney because “Trump doesn’t have requisite intent for anything. The man has the attention span of a gnat ... if you are his defense lawyer, his best defense to ‘he had a plan in Ukraine to go after Joe Biden’ is ‘dude doesn’t have plans.’” And on November 11, Shapiro argued, “I don’t think he’s had the level of intent necessary to eat a hamburger.” I reached out to Shapiro, but he was unable to comment on Wednesday.

And after all, military aid to Ukraine was eventually restored. So according to this argument, the actions for which Trump is facing impeachment (withholding aid for selfish reasons) never actually happened. Per National Review’s Rich Lowry, “The best defense Republicans can muster is that nothing came of it. An ally was discomfited and yanked around for a couple of months before, ultimately, getting its defense funding.”

And his magazine’s editorial board argued earlier this month, “It has to matter that, at the end of the day, the harm of this episode was minimal or nonexistent. The Ukrainians got their defense aid without making any statement committing themselves to the investigations.”

It’s true that intent matters — in criminal proceedings. I spoke with Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former US attorney, who told me, “Intent is very important in court, and for many of these crimes, from witness intimidation to bribery, prosecutors must prove corrupt intent. If we were in federal court, litigating criminal charges against the president, I think the “Trump is just Trump” defense would be colorable and tricky to overcome.

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

But White added two caveats. “First, that’s a matter of proof. A jury could still reject it and see corrupt intent. Second, this ain’t federal court.” Impeachment, after all, is a political process, not a legal one.

And as to the argument that funding to Ukraine was indeed restored, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy pointed out in October that an unsuccessful or “incompetent” attempt to commit an impeachable act doesn’t make it less impeachable:

The Nixon crew botched most of the schemes it undertook, from the Watergate caper to the attempt to audit the president’s political enemies. That didn’t save Richard Nixon from being driven from office via the impeachment process.

2. “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

Some of Trump’s defenders are taking an entirely different approach and stating that Donald Trump’s actions were not only defensible, but good. In the words of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) (who criticized Lt. Col. Vindman for having “opinions counter” to the president), “it’s perfectly within the purview of the president’s authority” to base military aid on the assurance of an investigation into corruption (or more accurately, the announcement of an investigation).

They argue that the government of Ukraine was corrupt and Trump was elected to fight corruption — ergo, of course he would resist sending aid to Ukraine. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put it this way: “Corruption is not just prevalent in Ukraine. It’s the system. Our president said time out, time out, let’s check out this new guy.”

As Washington Examiner writer Byron York wrote in a piece entitled “What if Trump was right about Ukraine?”, supporters of this line of logic argue that while perhaps Trump’s actions weren’t the best, he had real and genuine concerns about Ukraine’s government and its alleged efforts to collude with the Clinton campaign and influence the 2016 election.

Those efforts are based on allegations that Ukrainian officials, concerned about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian political party, attempted to assist the Clinton campaign and harm the Trump campaign. Right-leaning media outlets have focused serious attention on those allegations since 2017.

For example, the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued on Fox News in October of this year, “You have people who have already admitted that people affiliated with the Ukrainian government worked with the Democratic National Committee’s contractors to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign,” arguing that Ukraine and the DNC took part in actual collusion, unlike Russia and Trump’s campaign.

York writes that if the allegations were true, Trump’s actions make sense. “If [those concerns] were even mostly legitimate, then Trump defenders could say: “Look, he had a point. Even if one thinks he handled the issue inappropriately, the fact is, what was going on in Ukraine was worrisome enough for a United States president to take notice.” Quoting former US Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, York concluded, “The president said Ukraine ‘tried to take me down.’ He wasn’t wrong.” (It’s worth noting that other conservatives disagree.)

This was the argument that Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a writer at National Review who published “The Case for Trump” earlier this year, made to me, saying that it made sense for Trump to be suspicious of Ukraine. He asked that I quote him in full.

“Trump is a businessman and he does not want to give much military aid in general, and naturally not to corrupt governments who have in the past, according to Politico, tried to interfere in the 2016 election.”

“Trump naturally takes the past Ukrainian efforts, again according to the 2017 Politico report, to harm his election effort, as a personal affront given they reportedly sought to stop Trump from becoming president and yet wanted him to reverse the Obama policy of no military aid once he was elected (which he did).”

“Once more, we are left with a supposed thought crime of considering delaying aid in exchange for Ukrainian promises of investigating 2016 interference in an American election—which never happened, but was actually reified by earlier suspension of actual Ukrainian investigations in 2016 (and possibly of Hunter Biden) and refusal to arm the Ukrainians.”

But this argument has problems of its own. Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, both of whom served on Trump’s National Security Council, testified earlier this month that they had seen no evidence that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Hill added in testimony Thursday, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

The Politico piece to which Dr. Hanson referred during our conversation notes that while some Ukrainian officials supported Clinton, their efforts were “far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails,” which was a “top-down” effort. And according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, one of the main sources for allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election — including allegations that they, not Russia, hacked the DNC — was Manafort himself.

3. “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

But other conservatives have argued that Trump’s actions, even if tied to an “understandable and justifiable” desire to investigate allegations of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, were improper, inappropriate, or just plain bad.

As Townhall.com and Fox News commentator Guy Benson told me, those involved in the alleged quid pro quo “were up to something that stunk.” “They misused and abused their power,” he said. “It’s serious and it should be taken seriously.

But in his view, impeachment is a step too far. “My case against impeachment and removal is that it rises to a thermonuclear option that has never been detonated before. Doing so based on this, so close to an election, in a president’s first term, would do enormous damage.”

Rather, he favors censure, a “very rare tool” last used against President Andrew Jackson in 1834 that would, as he wrote in October, “represent a severe and formal condemnation from the people’s branch, and would constitute a stain on the president’s term in office.”

Daily Caller founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel have also argued that impeachment is too harsh a punishment for Trump. In an op-ed in October where they stipulated that “Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent,” they then wrote, “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy we have in our system of government.”

And they added:

The facts are out there for the American people to weigh as they make their decision. How about we let them sort all this out? There’s no need to come up with thin excuses for a purely partisan impeachment process when we have an election right around the corner.

I spoke to Patel, who told me, “Nancy Pelosi was right for all those months when she repeatedly said that to undo that election without bipartisan support based on clear criminal behavior would tear the country apart. We are on the eve of a new election where the American people can once again vote on Trump and this time they can weigh for themselves Trump’s behavior in this Ukraine affair. That’s a much better solution.”

4. “No one cares”

But an even simpler defense of the president is one being made by Carlson on his Fox News show and by others within the conservative movement, and it actually doesn’t require defending the president at all.

Instead, Republicans are arguing that the entire process is a “distraction.” Moreover, they’re arguing that it doesn’t matter what Trump did or didn’t do because the Senate won’t vote to impeach the president and the average American doesn’t care.

As Townhall.com writer Kurt Schlichter wrote earlier this week, “We’re too busy working, too focused on our 401(k)s going through the roof and on [Trump] flipping circuit courts like a boss, to care about the latest outrage to end all outrages.” I reached out to Schlichter and will update if and when I hear back.

On the November 15 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson argued, “normal people” — “someone with kids and a job and a marriage you care about” — aren’t thinking about impeachment and would rather “the buffoons on TV would stop yapping about Trump 24/7 and talk about something relevant.”

It’s an argument being made by Republicans both inside and outside of the administration. For example, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that instead of impeachment (which was “boring” and a “waste of time”), “Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more.”

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

But for the GOP, it is perhaps the most revealing. Not of the sentiment of the average American — 70 percent of whom believe Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine were “wrong” — but of the Republicans. Because they are well aware that within a slimmed-down Republican Party that has largely excised his enemies and detractors through retirements and election losses, Trump is the only available lodestar.

And so for them, it doesn’t actually matter what Trump did with regard to Ukrainian military aid: whether he intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential hopes, whether he was genuinely concerned about corruption, or whether he did something that constitutes an impeachable offense. Trump is all they’ve got.

Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, arrives to testify during the House Intelligence Committee hearing on November 21, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Republicans accidentally got Hill to decry the White House’s “political errand” in Ukraine.

The Ukraine scandal has a lot of complicated parts. During Thursday afternoon’s impeachment hearings, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill clearly laid out one of the most devastating: that the Trump administration systematically undermined the normal US diplomatic process to pursue a shadow foreign policy in service of what she described as a “domestic political errand.”

Steve Castor, the attorney for House Republicans, began the exchange (which he now probably regrets) by asking Hill about some unpleasant conversations she had with Gordon Sondland, Trump’s EU ambassador, about his involvement in Ukraine policy. Sondland was, as he testified Wednesday, deeply involved in Trump’s push to pressure the Ukrainians into investigating conspiracy theories around the 2016 election and Burisma (the Ukrainian gas company Hunter Biden sat on the board of).

Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images

Apparently, Hill had several confrontations with Sondland about his interference in her job working on more traditional US-Ukraine policy issues. Reflecting on one such confrontation and recalling seeing the emails about Ukraine that Sondland sent to Trump staff (including Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney), which were displayed during Sondland’s testimony, Hill says she connected the dots.

Her testimony skillfully outlined why Sondland’s behavior was so inappropriate: It perverted foreign policy by constructing a separate diplomatic architecture to serve the ends of Trump’s reelection campaign.

We have a robust interagency process that deals with Ukraine. ... It struck me yesterday when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland’s emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right. Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security [and] foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.

So he was correct, and I had not put my finger on that at the moment. But I was irritated with him and angry with him that he wasn’t fully coordinating. I did say to him, ‘Ambassador Sondland, Gordon, I fear this is all going to blow up.’ And here we are.

Per Hill, Sondland’s frustrating involvement in Ukraine policy was explicable because he was “carrying out something that he thought that he was instructed to carry out.” Though her job was to work on normal US foreign policy, his job was working on Trump’s personal foreign policy:

His feeling was that the National Security Council was trying to block him. And what we were trying to do is to block us from straying into domestic or personal politics. And that is precisely what was trying to do.

But Ambassador Sondland is not wrong that he had been given a different remit than we had been. And then it was at that moment that I realized that those things had diverged, and I realized that I was not being fair to Ambassador Sondland because he was carrying out something that he thought that he was instructed to carry out, and we were doing something that is perhaps more important — but it was not in the same channel.

Here’s video of the exchange, which you really ought to watch:

After Hill gave such a clarifying account of the administration’s wrongdoing, Rep. Devin Nunes took over questioning from Castor in an attempt to remedy the situation. His argument resembled an old defense of Richard Nixon during Watergate: that if the president ordered Sondland to do something, it must be a legitimate order.

“The president of the United States, the commander in chief, was concerned about the 2016 election and Burisma,” Nunes asked. “At the end of the day, isn’t it the commander in chief who makes those decisions?”

Hill’s response was quietly scathing:

My point, Mr. Nunes, is that we at the National Security Council were not told by the president directly or through Ambassador Bolton that we were to be focused on these issues as a matter of US policy toward Ukraine. So when you are talking about the Ukraine in 2016, I never personally heard the president say anything specific about 2016 and Ukraine. I have heard him say plenty of things publicly, but I was not given a directive. In fact, on the 10th, I was given a directive [by Bolton] to clearly state that I should stay out of politics.

This may sound like she’s immunizing Trump. She’s actually damning him.

Hill is testifying that Trump wasn’t pursuing the push for investigations through normal diplomatic channels. Instead, he had empowered his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to work with Sondland and others to pressure the Ukrainians in a shadow process meant to serve domestic political ends.

Hill highlighted exactly how shady and wrong this entire arrangement was, as well as the obviousness of Trump’s crassly political motivations. It was a succinct and damning statement.

Evangelist Franklin Graham said on Thursday that he called Chick-fil-A CEO and can assure everyone that the company’s anti-LGBTQ ways aren’t changing anytime soon. Earlier this week, a media report said that Christian-owned Chick-fil-A promised to stop giving to anti-LGBTQ charities, a vow it has made at least once before, and broken.

RELATED: Chick-fil-A is Already Hedging on the Report it Will Stop Donating to Anti-LGBTQ Charities: ‘No Organization Will Be Excluded’

Wrote Graham: “Has Chick-fil-A caved? Some are saying they’ve rolled over, that they’ve conceded to the LGBTQ protests because they released a statement about their charitable giving. They announced that in 2020 they’re giving to fight hunger and homelessness and support education. What’s wrong with that? I picked up the phone and called Dan Cathy. Dan was very clear that they have not bowed down to anyone’s demands, including the LGBTQ community. They will continue to support whoever they want to support. They haven’t changed who they are or what they believe. Chick-fil-A remains committed to Christian values. Dan Cathy assured me that this isn’t going to change. I hope all those who jumped to the wrong conclusion about them read this.”

“In my opinion, the gay movement wouldn’t ever be happy with Chick-fil-A unless they were open on Sunday, gave all of their charitable donations to LGBTQ organizations, and flew the rainbow flag over their stores!,” Graham added. Their hatred for Chick-fil-A is rooted in founder Truett Cathy’s strong stand for biblical “traditional” values and his desire to honor God. No fast food chain does a better job. I went through the drive-thru at Chick-fil-A yesterday morning, and I thought I might get dinner there—but a whole lot of other people had the same idea! A Chick-fil-A sandwich with waffle fries sounds really good right now!”

The post Franklin Graham: Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy Personally Assured Me Their Anti-LGBTQ Ways Will Continue appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Fiona Hill's testimony makes it clear how successful Putin has been.

Foreign service officer David Holmes testified in his opening statement in Thursday's impeachment hearing that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani's efforts undermined the U.S. State Department's efforts to support Ukraine. "Beginning in March 2019, the situation at the Embassy and in Ukraine changed dramatically," he testified in his opening statement.

"Specifically, the three priorities of security, economy and justice and our support for Ukrainian democratic resistance to Russian aggression became overshadowed by a political agenda promoted by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a cadre of officials working with the White House." That change began, he said, "with the emergence of press reports critical of Ambassador Yovanovitch and others to discredit her" and a concerted effort on the part of Giuliani and team to suggest that "Yovanovitch improperly used the embassy to advance the political interests of the Democratic Party." He said that the "allegations directed at Ambassador Yovanovitch, a career Ambassador, is unlike anything I have seen in my professional career."

He said it became clear that the "Three Amigos," consisting of Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Ambassador Kurt Volker, would "take the lead on coordinating our policy and engagement" with the new administration of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. He said that Sondland "made clear that he had direct and frequent access to President Trump and Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and portrayed himself as the conduit to the President and Mr. Mulvaney for the group."

He goes on to relate how it became clear that the Trump political team, which included ambassadors, was pushing the Burisma/Biden investigation as a "precondition for an Oval Office meeting" and security assistance. He testified that he learned from an Office of Management and Budget official that the order to withhold military aid "had come from the President and had been conveyed to OMB by Mr. Mulvaney."

In this opening statement, which included the infamous overheard phone conversation between Sondland and Trump on July 26, Holmes lays out the entire impeachment case against Trump. Watch the video below.

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Media Matters reports that Donald Trump has a new surrogate named Clarence Mason Weaver who believes that homosexuality is “evil” and “an abomination.” Weaver believes that there is nothing wrong with being homophobic, and has warned people to “worry about homosexual training” in schools. He has said he would not appear on a program with a gay host, and would have a problem with gay co-workers.

Weaver, a right-wing commentator was recently named to an advisory board position in Trump’s campaign.

Here’s a video Weaver posted about a Best Buy ad he saw which featured a lesbian which made him tell his daughter “homosexuality is a abomination. Not just a sin. It’s abomination.”

Added Weaver: “How can you find common ground with evil and sin? … I can work with homosexuals. I’ve worked with a lot of homosexuals. Worked with a lot of them. Political and social things. But I’m not going to stand there and pretend like that’s not a sin. Like you would not — I would not pretend like I don’t sin. I would not pretend, I’m not going to try to fool God to make you feel comfortable. I appear on programs all the time with homosexuals. I will not appear on a program with a homosexual host and pretend like that’s normal.”

Weaver continued: “It can be very difficult for you to tell me as a woman, ‘Hey, this is Betty, my wife.’ You’re not going to get a ‘congratulations.” No. I may say, ‘How you doing?” If you ask me what I think about you being married to that woman, you’re going to get your feelings hurt. You’re going to get your feelings hurt. Christians stand up for God, and when you stand up for God, you’re going to upset the ungodly.”

Media Matters adds: “Weaver has frequently pushed misogynistic rhetoric, including saying that women aren’t equal to men and that they damaged society when they won the ”right’ to leave the home and go to work’; claiming that women who report sexual misconduct at work are the reason ‘why we don’t want to be around you in a business’; and stating that women should carry themselves as ‘handmaidens’ and ‘be submissive.'”

Media Matters wrote earlier this week: “The Trump campaign recently launched its ‘Black Voices for Trump’ coalition, with President Donald Trump speaking at a rally in Atlanta, GA. The campaign also announced the members of its advisory board, which includes numerous right-wing media personalities such as radio host Herman Cain, Fox Nation hosts Diamond and Silk, and Fox News contributors Deneen Borelli and Alveda King. The campaign lists the involvement of Clarence Mason Weaver (who usually goes by Mason Weaver in media appearances and also lists his name as Clarence A. Mason on his website), a right-wing author and purported motivational speaker.”

The post New Trump Advisor Believes Homosexuality is an ‘Abomination’, Won’t Appear on a Show with a Gay Host ‘and Pretend Like That’s Normal’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Testimony from David Holmes and Fiona Hill will be devastating.

Apple is overhauling the way it develops and tests iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS in hopes that the new approach will improve the quality of each software platform over the long term, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.


The report claims the new strategy is already being applied to development of iOS 14 ahead of its release next year. The shift comes after the buggy release of iOS 13, which has already received eight updates with bug fixes and delayed features in the last two months, which is more than usual over that time.

The new process will see Apple implement "flags," allowing the company's software engineers to selectively enable or disable unfinished or buggy features in an isolated way to ensure that overall stability is not jeopardized. Flags are already commonly used by other tech companies like Google and Microsoft.

Apple has also considered delaying some iOS 14 features until 2021, according to the report, as part of its efforts to ensure the update is more stable. Apple is believed to have taken a similar approach with iOS 12, delaying some features until ‌iOS 13‌, which contributed to iOS 12 being a rather stable update.

The changes were reportedly announced at a recent meeting with employees led by Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi.

In the meantime, Apple continues to test iOS 13.3, with a third beta released this week.


This article, "Apple Reportedly Overhauling Its Software Development Process Following Buggy Release of iOS 13" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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The still-sprawling Democratic field of candidates spent much of Wednesday's debate night engaging in substantive policy debates and launching verbal attacks. But several rivals also managed to elicit laughter from the audience.

Here are some of the most memorable lines from the fifth Democratic debate:

Klobuchar boasts about her ex-boyfriend coalition

Sen. Amy Klobuchar touted her fundraising ability — including from her past flames. In a conversation about “dark” and “outside” money infiltrating politics, Klobuchar recounted her middle-class upbringing and poked fun at how she funded an early Senate run.

"My first Senate race, I literally called everyone I knew and I set what is still an all-time Senate record. I raised $17,000 from ex-boyfriends — and I'd like to point out it is not an expanding base."

Sanders reminds viewers who's responsible for Medicare for All

Sen. Bernie Sanders struggled to get a word in when the discussion first turned to Medicare for All, the single-payer health care policy he muscled into the political mainstream. And he was eager to remind viewers who drafted the legislation.

“Senator Sanders, I want to bring you into the conversation,” NBC’s Kristen Welker began, before quickly being cut off by Sanders.

“Thank you, I wrote the damn bill!” he exclaimed.

Teeing off on Trump’s golf habit

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg offered up a confession as he criticized the president for making lofty promises to middle-class Americans while also hitting the links.

"I don't talk a big game about helping the working class while helicoptering between golf courses with my name on them. I don't even golf."

Klobuchar gives Pelosi credit for whooping Trump

Klobuchar asserted that although women are held to a higher standard, anyone competent and smart has a fighting chance at the presidency — including a woman.

"I govern both with my head and my heart. And if you think a woman can't beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day."

Mayors — and Rhodes scholars — stick together

Sen. Cory Booker defended Buttigieg against attacks on his political experience (or lack thereof) during a riff on unity, noting the similarities in their resume while drawing attention to a prestigious honor linked more frequently to Buttigieg.

“When I was mayor of the largest city in my state, and this is where I agree with Mayor Pete: Mayoral experience is very important. And I happen to be the other Rhodes Scholar mayor on this stage,” he noted.

The brief mention caused a 450 percent spike in Google searches about the award.

Sorry not sorry

When entrepreneur Andrew Yang was asked what he would say in his first phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin, he used the opportunity to take a swipe at the Kremlin’s efforts in 2016 to boost Trump's campaign.

“Well, first I'd say, ‘I'm sorry I beat your guy,’” he responded, pausing for a beat before adding: “Or not sorry.”

Booker doles out a blunt attack

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Booker butted heads over their divergent views on whether marijuana should be legalized at the federal level. Booker objected in particular to Biden's assertion at a forum last week that he considers marijuana a "gateway drug" and would like to see more research on it before pushing legalization nationwide.

"This week I hear him literally say that I don't think we should legalize marijuana. I thought you might have been high when you said it," Booker said, arguing that "marijuana in our country is already legal for privileged people and ... the war on drugs has been a war on black and brown people."

Biden seems to blank that Harris exists

Biden drew swift corrections from the two African American senators on stage while touting his firm standing with black voters.

"If you notice I have more people supporting me in the black community that have announced for me because they know me, they know who I am," he boasted. "Three former chairs of the [Congressional] Black Caucus, the only African-American woman that’s ever been elected to the United States Senate—"

"No, that’s not true," a baffled looking Booker interjected.

"The other one is here," Sen. Kamala Harris added, gesturing at herself with a laugh.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine