James.galbraith

Over 80 House members have now called for the resignation of White House aide Stephen Miller following publication of a massive trove of emails—many of them sent from a government account during his time working for then-Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—documenting his white supremacist views. “He should resign,” said California Rep. Mark Takano, “and if he doesn’t, he should be fired.”

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Several of the 80 House members so far—all of them Democrats—had previously called for Miller’s resignation but re-upped that demand following a series of reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch revealing Miller shared white nationalist propaganda in nearly 1,000 emails, had a close relationship with at least one anti-immigrant hate group, and used his influence to urge Breitbart News editors to publish racist, anti-immigrant propaganda.

In just one example, Miller used his government account to urge Breitbart to connect undocumented immigrants to child sex crimes. This disgusting thinking was the norm, not an outlier, in Miller’s communications: “In all 900 emails, SPLC reporter Michael Hayden noted he was ‘unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born,’” HuffPost reported. 

Let’s be frank here, only 80 House members calling on Miller to resign is much too low, but the fact that not one single Republican has joined that group is also an indictment of their party. “Unfortunately, we know that President Trump, who said that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, welcomes his racist views to help sow hate and division in America,” Takano continued.

But that doesn’t mean legislators shouldn’t continue to speak out and condemn this radical. “Each day we allow a white nationalist to be in charge of US immigration policy is a day where thousands of children and families lives are in danger,” tweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “This year alone, under Miller’s direction, the US has put almost 70,000 children in custody.” That number spanning 2019, researchers said, is “unprecedented.”

Miller needs to go. “I feel pretty secure in my belief that flaming white nationalists should have no place in the White House, the halls of Congress or anywhere, for that matter,” said Rep. Ted Lieu, whip for the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. In a separate statement last week, that caucus’ chair, Judy Chu, issued a joint statement with the chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, and Congressional Hispanic Caucus also calling for Miller’s resignation.

”As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Stephen Miller has embedded himself in white nationalist doctrine for years, including promoting racist propaganda from fringe sites like VDARE and InfoWars,” they said. “We feel like it is up to us to point out the obvious—someone who writes, talks, and governs like a white nationalist is in fact a white nationalist.”

Tim Morrison, the former National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs arrives for testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on November 19, 2019. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

This may be the biggest moment in the impeachment hearings so far.

A former top White House official just outlined a quid pro more clearly than any other witness in the public impeachment hearings so far — and it’s devastating to Republicans’ defense of President Donald Trump.

Under questioning from Democrats, Tim Morrison, the former top National Security Council official for Russia and European affairs, was asked to recall a September 1 conversation between US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland and Ukraine official Andriy Yermak. That discussion has become central to the question of whether US military assistance to Kyiv was conditioned upon Ukraine opening investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden’s family and other Democrats.

According to Morrison, it clearly was.

“What did Ambassador Sondland tell you that he told Mr. Yermak?” Democratic counsel Daniel Goldman asked Morrison. Morrison replied, “That the Ukrainians would have to have the prosecutor general make a statement with respect to the investigations as a condition of having the aid lifted.”

In other words, there was a quid pro quo. To get roughly $400 million in aid to help fend off a Russian invasion, Ukraine needed to assist Trump in his 2020 presidential ambitions by opening a probe into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden — Joe’s son — sat. Not only that, the government in Kyiv would have to announce the opening of the investigation.

This isn’t entirely new. Previous testimony by witnesses in closed-door depositions — including by Morrison himself — confirmed this general story. Those revelations led Sondland, who will testify on Wednesday in an open session, to revise his previous statements that there was no quid pro quo.

But it’s one thing to have this in closed-door testimony, and another for Morrison to say it on national TV. It’s a soundbite that confirms the entire thrust of what Democrats are after, and it’s very hurtful to the Republican case that the administration wasn’t trying to pressure Kyiv to help the president politically — even though Morrison says he doesn’t think the president did anything illegal.

Just because the electoral college means their votes are the only ones that matter doesn't mean we have to act like that's okay.

Two senators are asking Facebook to "respect" users' decisions to keep their location data from the company. From a report: In a letter sent Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to respond to questions about how the company collects location data through the new operating systems for Apple's iPhones and Google's Android. Both Google and Apple updated their operating systems earlier this year to give users more control and insight into which apps can access their location data. Anticipating those changes, Facebook released a blog post in September explaining that even if users opt out of letting Facebook collect their data, it could still determine users' locations in other ways, like through check-ins and users' internet connections. "If a user has decided to limit Facebook's access to his or her location, Facebook should respect these privacy choices," the senators, members of the Judiciary Committee, wrote in the letter to Zuckerberg. "The language in the blog post, however, indicates that Facebook may continue to collect location data despite user preferences, even if the user is not engaging with the app, and Facebook is simply deducing the user's location from information about his or her internet connection. Given that most mobile devices are connected to the internet nearly all the time, whether through a cellular network or a Wi-Fi connection, this practice would allow Facebook to collect user location data almost constantly, irrespective of the user's privacy preferences. Users who have selected a restrictive location services option could reasonably be under the misimpression that their selection limits all of Facebook's efforts to extract location information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As Democrats press forward with the first phase of their impeachment inquiry, they must try to convince a deeply divided American public that President Trump committed impeachable offenses. And according to our impeachment polling tracker, they might be up against tough odds. Overall support for impeachment has been remarkably steady since October, and Americans’ appetite for impeaching and removing Trump may have even started to plateau.

So we wanted to go one step deeper and understand the state of public opinion beneath those top-line numbers — is there a group of persuadable Americans who are still on the fence about impeachment? And will Americans’ views about what constitutes an impeachable offense shift as Democrats present their case against Trump?

To answer this and more, we’re partnering with Ipsos on a panel survey that, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, will follow the same group of respondents over the next few months, checking in with them at regular intervals to see if their perspective on impeachment has changed. Our first wave of the survey went out last week, as Democrats’ first public hearings unfolded. It revealed that most Americans think Trump has committed an impeachable offense — but Democrats still have some work to do to get the public on board with their case against Trump.

Despite majority support, party splits persist

The initial wave of our survey found that even before articles of impeachment against Trump have been drafted, 56 percent of Americans agree that he has committed an impeachable offense. (We didn’t ask whether respondents believe he should be impeached or removed from office as a result.)

Few Republicans see an impeachable offense

Share of respondents in an Ipsos/FiveThirtyEight poll who said they think Trump has committed an impeachable offense, by party

All	56.2%	–
Democrats	88.7	–
Republicans	18.8	–

From a poll with 2,088 respondents, conducted from Nov. 13 to Nov. 18

Unsurprisingly, though, there’s an enormous gulf between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats are nearly unanimous in their belief that Trump has committed an impeachable offense, whereas 4 out of 5 Republicans believe that he hasn’t.³¹

That doesn’t mean, though, that there isn’t room for public opinion to shift as the hearings move forward. The survey also indicated, crucially, that a significant chunk of Americans are still persuadable when it comes to impeachment. While 42 percent of respondents say they are absolutely certain about their position on impeachment, about a quarter still say they’re either “somewhat” or “not at all certain” about whether Trump committed an impeachable offense.

Within this narrower universe of people who haven’t fully made up their mind, respondents who said they currently don’t believe Trump’s behavior is impeachable were especially likely to say they’re not at all certain about their position. It’s important not to read too much into this, since we’re talking about a relatively small slice of the public³² but it suggests that there’s still room for movement among at least some people who aren’t yet on Democrats’ side.

The public remains divided about crucial facts

In building their case against Trump, Democrats are using a set of key questions that are likely to serve as the foundation for articles of impeachment. In broad strokes, they are:

1. Did Trump ask Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter?
2. Did Trump withhold military aid to pressure the Ukrainians into opening an investigation into the Bidens?
3. Did the Trump administration try to cover up Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine?

According to our poll with Ipsos, a majority of Americans agree that all three of these things happened and that they’re inappropriate behaviors for a president. But there’s less consensus about whether they’re impeachable offenses. Republicans, in particular, seem unconvinced that any of the three prongs in Democrats’ case against Trump are impeachable offenses.

Partisans disagree on the facts and what they mean

Share of respondents in a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll who believe Trump took certain actions relating to Ukraine and whether, if they did happen, those actions would be impeachable or inappropriate

Trump asked the government of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son
			If it happened, it would be …
party	believe it happened		inappropriate		impeachable
All	77.3%	–	63.5%	–	44.4%	–
Democrats	91.4	–	89.0	–	71.5	–
Republicans	64.0	–	36.1	–	13.8	–
Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine unless it agreed to investigate the Bidens
			If it happened, it would be …
party	believe it happened		inappropriate		impeachable
All	56.4%	–	79.6%	–	57.9%	–
Democrats	84.1	–	93.0	–	85.3	–
Republicans	25.8	–	67.1	–	27.4	–
Trump and his administration attempted to cover up his actions regarding Ukraine
			If it happened, it would be …
party	believe it happened		inappropriate		impeachable
All	59.4%	–	86.9%	–	58.0%	–
Democrats	88.5	–	94.7	–	84.3	–
Republicans	26.7	–	81.0	–	28.8	–

From a poll with 2,088 respondents, conducted from Nov. 13 to Nov. 18

But the differences in these responses suggests that while the public mostly views Trump’s conduct as serious, it might still be difficult for Democrats to build a broad public consensus around their articles of impeachment. As the table above shows, respondents were more likely to agree that Trump asked Ukraine to investigate the Bidens than to believe that Trump held up security aid over the investigations, or tried to cover up his actions. That makes sense — the White House’s own summary of Trump’s July call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems to confirm as much. But while most thought all three of those actions would be inappropriate, a bare majority (51 percent) said that Trump asking Ukraine’s government to investigate the Bidens would not be an impeachable offense.

This pattern is especially noticeable among Republicans. They agree, for the most part, that Trump did ask Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. But they mostly don’t think it’s inappropriate or impeachable for Trump to have done so. And while majorities of Republicans think that it would be inappropriate for Trump to have withheld military aid over the investigations or tried to hide information from Congress, they are much less convinced that either of those things actually happened.

But people with doubts aren’t following closely

This could change as the televised hearings wrap up, but right now, the proceedings are getting a lot of attention. Over half (57 percent) of Americans in our survey said they’re following the impeachment proceedings somewhat or very closely, with Democrats a bit more likely to say they’re following closely.

The problem for Democrats is that the people who haven’t fully made up their minds about impeachment — regardless of their political orientation — don’t seem to be very engaged with the process. Only about 34 percent of respondents who aren’t as certain about their stance on impeachment are following the process somewhat or very closely, compared to 66 percent of respondents who are more certain. So while there are people out there who could still be convinced by the Democrats’ case against Trump, they’re also less likely to be paying attention.

Methodology: All the data presented here come from polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. population. For this study, the same group of respondents is contacted for an interview six times — roughly every two weeks for three months — to track whether and how their answers changed; this is the initial wave of this panel survey, conducted from Nov. 13 to Nov. 18 among a general population sample of adults with an oversample of independents, garnering 2,088 respondents. The study weighting included an adjustment for party identification so that results reflect the general population of U.S. adults. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points.

Heliogen’s demonstration tower in Lancaster, California. | Heliogen

Making high-temperature industrial heat from sunlight.

It’s pretty clear how we can reduce and eventually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from some sectors of the economy. Electricity, transportation, and buildings, three of the biggest emitters, have a pathway to zero. It won’t be easy, and progress is too slow, but we have a handle on what to do.

But there are still big chunks of the economy that don’t have a clear line of sight to zero. They don’t yet have the tools they need at competitive prices. They are still waiting on innovation.

Many of them, including cement and steel, rely on large amounts of continuous high-temperature heat, and as I described in this post, there are very few viable low-carbon sources of such heat. Collectively, these industrial processes represent around 20 percent of global carbon emissions. It is one of the thorniest dilemmas in climate policy.

It’s not often that I write about a carbon policy dilemma only to have a clever new solution arrive in my inbox mere days later, but that’s what happened. A new company called Heliogen, which came out of stealth mode on Tuesday, has developed a brand new, zero-carbon way of generating high-temperature heat. It’s backed by an experienced team, boasts Bill Gates as an investor, and seems to have pulled off the rare trick of creating something new in the cleantech world.

Let’s take a look at how they do it.

Adapting concentrating-solar technology for a new purpose

Heliogen’s technology is based on concentrating solar power (CSP). That’s where hundreds of mirrors in a field are all angled to reflect sunlight onto a tower, inside of which is a steam turbine. The heat from the sunlight turns fluid (usually water) to steam, which runs the turbine, which generates power.

Visually, it’s probably the most striking and beautiful of all power generation technologies. Here’s a CSP plant in Seville, Spain:

Shutterstock

CSP is a good idea, and it works well, but it stalled out in the 2010s, for the simple reason that solar photovoltaic (PV) panels won. PV got so cheap, so fast, that it undercut CSP. Now CSP is something of a niche product. (Except in Spain, where it’s big.)

Among the CSP startups that didn’t make it was eSolar, a company founded by entrepreneur Bill Gross and his well-known incubator Idealab. (I wrote about eSolar way back in 2008.) Rather than assembling large, complicated, curved heliostats (mirrors) on site, eSolar used small, flat, prefabricated heliostats of only about a square meter. They were cheaper, faster and easier to set up, more modular, and easier to replace.

Gross’s key insight was that he could replace a lot of the material and labor involved in CSP with computing power. (Or, he could replace stuff with intelligence.) Rather than make bigger, more complicated mirrors, he made small, simple ones and controlled them with software, so they stayed aligned more precisely and produced more power. As Gross realized, material and labor generally get more expensive over time, while computing power is always getting cheaper. Anything that substitutes the latter for the former saves money.

eSolar ultimately couldn’t overcome PV’s price advantage, but Gross’s insight remains useful. And with the launch of his new company Heliogen, it seems the technology could make a comeback.

What Gross and his team of scientists and engineers at Heliogen have developed, in a nutshell, is a way to use even more computing power to keep the mirrors even more precisely aligned, thus generating even more heat.

Heliogen

The team had to figure out how to monitor the mirrors in real time, to keep them all aimed at the exact same spot, Gross told me. It’s not enough to calibrate them once, as most CSP plants do. The ground subsides, the wind blows, the mirrors warp, and things slowly drift out of alignment. It may only be by centimeters, but those centimeters add up.

Obviously, a camera can’t be pointed directly at the mirror from the spot where the light is supposed to hit. The camera would melt.

Heliogen solved this problem by perching four super-powerful cameras around the top of the tower. Rather than directly measuring the intensity of light coming off a given mirror, they focus on four points equidistant around it. If the halo of light coming off the mirror is equally intense in each of the four quadrants, then the mirror is precisely aligned. (I find this delightfully resourceful.)

The four cameras are watching all the mirrors all the time, and the exact proper alignment of each mirror is being calculated all the time. As the image-analysis software calculates, it sends constant signals to the mirrors, which result in constant micromovements as the mirrors keep themselves perfectly focused on a single point, about 50 centimeters across.

It’s a “closed loop” system that monitors and adjusts itself, and it requires enormous computing power — more, Gross says, than was available even five years ago.

Heliogen

What is the point of this precise concentrating of light? Heat!

Conventional CSP towers can only get to about 560 degrees Celsius — enough to boil fluid and run a turbine, but not much else. Heliogen’s towers have reached just over 1,000° C and the company believes with further improvements it can hit 1,500° C. That would be a whole new ball game.

High-temperature heat opens up enormous markets for concentrating solar

There are lots of industrial processes that can use 1,000° C heat, like steam reforming of methane. And as that heat creeps higher, it becomes useful for more and more processes, from cement to steel.

When the temperature hits 1,500° C, it opens up something of a holy grail: direct, thermochemical generation of liquid fuels that can substitute for any hydrocarbon fuel.

Huh? Let me explain, as this is a relatively new engineering development, being perfected by Swedish researchers as we speak. It goes like this: a new, state-of-the-art material called ceria (CeO2) is heated to about 1,500° C, at which point it releases a pure stream of oxygen. Then, at about 1,000° C, water and carbon dioxide are introduced. The ceria wants its oxygen back, so it breaks the water and carbon dioxide up into hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and oxygen, and absorbs the oxygen. What’s left is a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, otherwise known as “syngas.”

Basically, you start with H2O + CO2 and you end up with a mix of H + CO. As it happens, every hydrocarbon (fossil) fuel in the world, from kerosene to gasoline, from boat fuel to jet fuel, is built around some combination of H and CO, which means synfuel can be refined into any fuel, for any purpose. If the CO2 that feeds into the process is drawn from the ambient air via direct air capture (DAC), which is still a big if for now, then the resulting fuels can be said to be carbon-neutral, a huge improvement on the carbon-intensive fuels now in use.

Cumulatively, these markets for carbon-free industrial heat — steam reforming of methane, cement, steel, synthetic liquid fuels, and more — are enormous, up to a trillion dollars globally, and represent around a fifth of global GHG emissions. They include almost all the most difficult-to-decarbonize sectors.

Heliogen may or may not succeed, but it has a genuine innovation

Obviously, Heliogen’s technology can’t work with every industrial facility. For one thing, Gross estimates that only about half of them worldwide have the land necessary to build a solar-heat facility on site. Facilities would have to integrate what is effectively an airborne oven into their process flow. And every facility would still need backup sources of heat, since the sun is only out for about eight hours a day.

Until the technology is proven in a commercial setting, it’s difficult to say much about the real-world performance and costs, so there’s no way to know whether or how much Heliogen may succeed. Though it is stocked with talent and well-funded — Bill Gates said he is “pleased to be an early backer” of what he called “a promising development in the quest to one day replace fossil fuel” — it faces the same difficult hurdles as any startup. Most of them die.

Still, whatever its fate, Heliogen is something fairly rare in the world of technology: a genuine innovation. And it’s a great application of Gross’s insight, for which I have become something of an evangelist, namely that the clean-energy transition is going to proceed in large part by substituting computing power for material and labor, i.e., intelligence for stuff.

The ongoing explosion in computing power — AI, machine learning, ubiquitous real-time sensing, and all the rest of it — is going to enable innovations in energy that we can’t begin to predict. It will make our renewable energy technologies more responsive to real-time variations in sun and wind, more able to continuously adapt. It will make our cars and buildings smarter, more able to exchange energy. It will enable the electricity system to decentralize and maximize local resources. And the computing power we have today will look primitive by 2030.

That’s one reason the clean-energy transition is going to happen faster than energy transitions of the past: It will be aided and accelerated by computing power, an extension of our imaginations and inventive powers that is new in all of history.

This secondhand anecdote from Capitol Hill has a resounding ring of truth:

x

In a closed-door meeting of House Democrats, @SpeakerPelosi said @senatemajldr told her recently, “I’m not going to do anything that President Trump doesn’t want me to do,” according to two sources familiar with Pelosi’s comments.

— Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) November 19, 2019

Of course Moscow Mitch has said that in private. He says a variation of that in public all the time. He’s taken that line repeatedly when it comes to gun safety legislation—he won’t have anything come to the floor if he doesn’t have Trump’s approval. If it can’t get Trump’s signature, the Senate won’t act. Because that whole “coequal branches of government” thing the founders came up with doesn’t count when the White House is held by Republicans.

Whether it’s gun safety bills, election protection assistance to the states, oversight of the executive branch, or, finally, impeachment, McConnell isn’t going to do anything Trump won’t allow.

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

If they succeed, our government will become less efficient and more corrupt.

President Donald Trump's call to the cell phone of a U.S. ambassador — a call that included a discussion of "investigations" Trump was asking Ukraine to launch into his Democratic rivals — was at risk of being monitored by Russia, a State Department official told House impeachment investigators.

David Holmes was in a restaurant in Kyiv with U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland on July 26, when Sondland called Trump to discuss the probes. Holmes told members of the House Intelligence Committee that he "vividly" recalled the conversation because Trump's voice was so loud and discernible, and the two spoke so openly about the investigations.

Holmes, the political counselor at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, said it immediately made him nervous because two of the three mobile networks in Ukraine are Russian-owned.

"We generally assume that mobile communications in Ukraine are being monitored," Holmes said, according to a transcript of his Nov. 15 closed-door testimony, released late Monday.

In fact, Holmes said former Ambassador Victoria Nuland, a senior envoy to Ukraine under President Barack Obama, had seen her communications monitored and disseminated "for political effect," Holmes recalled.

Holmes said Trump's voice was so loud that it caused Sondland to wince and hold the phone away from his ear. He said heard Trump say "So he's going to do the investigation." And Sondland replied, "Oh yeah, he's going to do it."

"I've never seen anything like this, someone calling the president from a mobile phone at a restaurant, and then having a conversation of this level of candor, colorful language," Holmes recalled. "There's just so much about the call that was so remarkable that I remember it vividly."

The exchange is a crucial piece of firsthand evidence of Trump's effort — aided by a shadow diplomacy campaign led by his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani — to pressure Ukraine to launch an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democrats. That effort is at the center of Democrats' impeachment inquiry, along with questions about whether Trump withheld $400 million in military assistance and a White House visit from Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in order to force Ukraine to do his bidding.

Holmes said after the exchange he reported the call to his supervisor, Kristina Kvien. He also noted that two other officials, whose names were redacted from the transcript, were at the lunch with him. Under questioning from Republicans, Holmes said he wasn't sure whether the other two participants heard the president's voice or were focused on the call when it happened.

Holmes said he recognized the significance of the call part way through and began taking notes, but the Ukraine portion was brief, so his notes only reflected the latter part of the call, in which Trump and Sondland discussed efforts to free A$AP Rocky from criminal charges in Sweden.

The release of Holmes' transcript — just three days after he testified — is a reflection of Democrats' attempt to keep their impeachment inquiry moving apace. They scheduled Holmes for public testimony on Thursday alongside former Trump adviser Fiona Hill, who handled Russia policy on the National Security Council until her departure in July.

Like Holmes, Hill worried that Sondland presented a "counterintelligence risk" in part because of his frequent cell phone use in sensitive settings.

"Ambassador Sondland was using his own personal cell phone at all times, as well as his government-issued cell phone, I became extremely concerned that his communications were not going to be secure," Hill said, also raising concerns that Sondland had given out her personal cell phone number and interacted with Ukrainians on sensitive matters even though they might be Russian targets.

The Intelligence Committee also released testimony Monday from David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, who described failed efforts to issue a statement of support for Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump removed as ambassador to Ukraine amid a smear campaign led by Giuliani and several allies and associates.

Hale said there were discussions about issuing a statement of support for Yovanovitch at the highest levels of the State Department but ultimately they decided against it. Among the considerations was that a statement might provoke those spreading the smears to ratchet up their attacks. But Hale said there was another argument against the statement as well.

"I mean, one point of view was that it might even provoke a public reaction from the president himself about the ambassador," he said.

Yovanovitch testified on Friday, at the same time Holmes was behind closed doors, and in fact was on the receiving end of a Twitter attack from Trump, who criticized her three-decade career.

Hale said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, at one point, called Fox News host Sean Hannity to emphasize that there was no validity to the accusations that Yovanovitch, a widely respected career diplomat, had spoken in a derogatory way about Trump.

Hale also described his offer to Yovanovitch to extend her tour in Ukraine, which came just weeks before the smear campaign erupted to an untenable degree. Hale recalled saying that Yovanovitch was “doing a very good job," but soon the atmosphere had changed, driven in part by Giuliani's efforts.

“Well it just became more and more obvious that this was an unusual set of things that were happening and that the mayor was involved,” he said. “Over time, it became much more confusing to me what was happening.”

Hale said Giuliani’s offensive against Yovanovitch implied a “roundabout way” for Trump to get rid of the ambassador through a “smear campaign.” But the State Department’s final decision not to publicly support Yovanovitch “most likely” rested with Pompeo, Hale said.

Hale also weighed in on the unexpected hold on military aid to Ukraine, which he said he first heard rumblings about on June 21, weeks earlier than the word had spread through much of the administration.

Hale said he “advocated strongly for resuming that assistance” but didn’t have confidence that would happen: The OMB “had guidance from the President and from Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney to freeze the assistance," he said.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

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Former Vice President and 2020 hopeful Joe Biden said he’s against legalizing marijuana on the federal level because, in his words, it could be a “gateway drug.” What could change his mind? As he explained during a town hall in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Saturday, Nov. 17, he wants to see more research before legalizing the substance nationwide.

"The truth of the matter is, there's not nearly been enough evidence that has been acquired as to whether or not it is a gateway drug," Biden stated. "It's a debate, and I want a lot more before I legalize it nationally. I want to make sure we know a lot more about the science behind it."

Compared to other 2020 front-runners, Biden is pretty isolated on this take. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have both promised to legalize marijuana on the federal level by executive action if they become president. Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former HUD secretary Julián Castro have also said they support legalization.

What does Biden want? Biden noted he believes “states should be able to make a judgment to legalize marijuana” in terms of recreational use. He also stressed that he does support medical marijuana, as well as decriminalizing possession of the drug.

Right now, under federal law marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 substance, right up there beside LSD and heroin. The Drug Enforcement Administration categorizes marijuana as a drug “with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

In the past, Biden has suggested he wants to classify marijuana as a Schedule II drug in order to study its impacts, so his argument lines up—it’s just not evolving at the rate of his peers. And as Mother Jones dug deep into, his views on marijuana haven’t changed much in decades.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about Biden’s take.

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Marijuana should be legalized, and drug consumption should be decriminalized.These are matters of public health.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 18, 2019

Recreational marijuana is legal in 11 states plus D.C. Thirty-three states recognize marijuana for medical use and 15 states have decriminalized it. Whether or not someone personally uses marijuana, legalization has long been established as a racial justice issue. Hundreds and thousands of people—particularly low-income black and Latino people—have been incarcerated because of marijuana. And lest you think people are punished “fairly” for their drug use (or selling, or growing, or so on), studies show again and again that people in the United States both sell and use marijuana at about the same rate, regardless of race. And studies also show that a black person is nearly four times more likely than a white person to be arrested for possessing marijuana.

The current federal status of marijuana also has a negative impact on some of the most vulnerable people in the nation. For example, as previously covered at Daily Kos, people who live in federally funded public housing risk eviction for possessing or using marijuana, even if it’s for a medical need. 

“It is not irrational to do more scientific investigation to determine, which we have not done significantly enough, whether or not there are any things that relate to whether it’s a gateway drug or not,” Biden continued at the town hall. Compared to other candidates in the race, like Sen. Harris, who have enormously evolved on marijuana, Biden’s take isn’t irrational, per se, but it’s not particularly progressive, either. 

And on a lighter note, watch this classic piece of propaganda. The jury is out on whether or not this scared anyone away from trying pot:

x x YouTube Video

Approximately 1,000 days and 13,500 documented faleshoods into his presidency, Donald Trump paid a two-hour visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Saturday afternoon under unusual, unprecedented circumstances.

Trump’s exam was not on his public schedule and no advance notice of the event had been given, unlike his two previous physicals; the exam fell on a Saturday rather than a weekday; and according to CNN, Walter Reed medical staff did not get its usual staffwide notice of Trump’s visit. Reportedly, the local police got no advance warning of the Trump motorcade’s arrival, and reporters were directed not to report his trip until he arrived at Walter Reed.

This touched off a weekend flurry of speculation in Washington about what was actually going on, and Twitter erupted with inventive theories of why a 73-year-old man might suddenly visit a hospital. With a private citizen, that kind of speculation would have been wildly inappropriate. With this White House, it's almost a national obligation.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued a statement claiming Trump was taking advantage of a “free weekend here in Washington” to begin parts of his annual physical exam—even though his last “annual” physical came in February 2019. While it’s not inconceivable that Trump would motorcade 11 miles to suburban Maryland on the spur of the moment on a Saturday afternoon to get a jump on his February physical, it’s not how things are normally done with the U.S. president. White House facilities are equipped to perform many routine lab tests. Trump seconded his press secretary’s explanation shortly after midnight on Sunday, tweeting that this was “phase one” of his yearly physical. “Everything very good (great!). Will complete next year,” Trump continued.

But Trump and Grisham’s rationalizations for his spur-of-the-moment visit just don’t add up. Given what we know about Trump’s medical health—he’s obese and was judged in 2018 of being at moderate risk of having a heart attack in the next three to five years—we have every reason to question the Trump-Grisham account. That Trump has proven himself a liar several thousand times over during his presidency and his long-running caginess about his medical state contribute to the doubt.

One of the earliest soundings on Trump’s health arrived in a December 2015 letter from his personal doctor, gastroenterologist Harold Bornstein, stating that if elected president, Trump would be “the healthiest individual” ever to take office. Medical experts laughed out loud at the letter’s hyperbolic language and laughed harder still in 2018 when Dr. Bornstein admitted that Trump “dictated” the comically over-the-top testimonial (“His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary.”). Bornstein also disclosed that Trump personnel had “raided“ his office in February 2017, perhaps illegally, and walked out with Trump’s medical records.

We know our president’s health is not optimal. By his own doctor’s assessment, he’s obese—at a reported weight of 243 pounds and 6 feet, 3 inches tall, giving him a body mass index of 30.4. His 2018 coronary calcium CT scan rendered a score of 133, which means he has a common form of heart disease and is at moderate risk of having a heart attack in the next three to five years, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta reported. Other doctors told the New York Times that Trump’s elevated LDL levels indicate poor cardiofitness. The fact that the only serious exercise Trump gets is stepping out his golf cart to swing a club further encourages us to worry.

One could argue that the president’s pattern of exaggerating his good health is even more dangerous than, let’s say, the many alleged lies Trump has told in attempting to roll back the Ukraine scandal. When a president portrays himself as the picture of fitness when he’s not really 100 percent, he puts the nation at peril should a security crisis envelop his administration. Lord knows that with impeachment hanging over his head, Trump is stressed beyond all imagining. More than ever, the White House job requires someone who is physically up to the task. If Trump is not that man, he needs to let us know so that, at the very least, he exit the 2020 contest—or at the most extreme—let the officials around him activate the 25th Amendment.

Even more trustworthy presidents have a murky record when it comes to transparency about their own health.

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff attempted to cover up his first-term heart attack by calling it “a digestive upset during the night.” John F. Kennedy suffered constant pain from degenerative bone disease and was heavily medicated when president. “Steroids for his Addison’s disease,” historian Robert Dallek wrote in 2013, “pain-killers for his back, antispasmodics for his colitis, [and] antibiotics for urinary-tract infections.”

Some people believe it’s unfair to speculate on a politician’s health without gaining access to the politician’s complete medicals. But Trump is not one of those people. During the 2016 campaign, he diagnosed his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, from afar and all but pronounced her medically unfit. “She could be crazy. She could actually be crazy,” Trump said, adding that she lacked the “stamina” to be president and proceeded to imitate Clinton stumbling while stepping into her car after an event. A Trump campaign television ad reprised the theme, using the stumbling video and a voice-over—”Hillary Clinton doesn’t have the fortitude, strength or stamina to lead in our world”—to make the same point.

You don’t have to think that Trump was lying about his Saturday Walter Reed visit to insist that his health—and the health of the other candidates, especially his fellow septuagenarians Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders—should be a foundational issue in the 2020 campaign. Getting honest answers out of a politician about his or her health begins with asking the right questions. The right question to ask Trump is this: “What explains your unusual visit to Walter Reed?”

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Send your medical records, if they’re spicy, via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts are on painkillers, my Twitter feed takes steroids, and my RSS feed, which is still out of commission, is in the loony bin.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Never mind the damning and damaging last week Donald Trump had during the first public round of impeachment hearings: Soon-to-be juror Moscow Mitch McConnell is guaranteeing an acquittal.

"I can't imagine a scenario under which President Trump would be removed from office with 67 votes in the Senate," he said Monday, doubling down on his statement from two weeks ago, when he said, "I'm pretty sure how it's likely to end: If it were today I don't think there's any question it would not lead to a removal." Now he's even more sure—he can't imagine anything that Trump could have done that will lead Senate Republicans to convict him and remove him from office.

Not a single scenario. Maybe he's a Russian asset? Well, Moscow Mitch knows how handy being in Putin's pocket can be around election time. Trump endangers national security in every conceivable way with his huge, loud mouth on unsecured phone lines? Well, it cuts out the middle man, makes it easier for Putin to know what's going on.

Trump shoots someone on Fifth Avenue? Fine by Mitch.

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

Emails exchanged between Donald Trump's point man on negotiations with Ukraine and two top Trump officials show they were kept apprised of efforts to convince Ukraine to launch the politically advantageous investigations Trump sought. On July 19 specifically, Trump charge and Ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland sent emails to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and other Trump officials informing them that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was ready to assure Trump by phone that he would open the investigations and "turn over every stone," according to The Wall Street Journal.  

Mulvaney replied that he had asked the National Security Council (NSC) to schedule the phone call "for tomorrow," though it wouldn't actually happen until several days later. Mulvaney was reportedly responsible for giving the White House budget office the order to withhold aid from Ukraine.

Sondland also emailed NSC official Tim Morrison on July 13 to push him to schedule the phone call with Trump before Ukraine's parliamentary elections on July 21, timing that was important to President Zelensky. Sondland wrote to Morrison that the "sole purpose is for Zelensky to give Potus assurances of ‘new sheriff’ in town. Corruption ending, unbundling moving forward and any hampered investigations will be allowed to move forward transparently." Morrison simply responded that he was "tracking" the situation. 

What the emails demonstrate was that Sondland appeared to be very much the point man on getting Zelensky to agree to investigations in order to nail down a phone call between him and Trump, which ultimately took place on July 25 and became the source of the whistleblower complaint. In the process, Sondland kept a number of Trump officials in the loop, including Mulvaney and Perry (who have both refused to testify) and Morrison (who has privately testified and is scheduled to give public testimony Tuesday).

Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, speaks at CPAC 2019 in February. | Ricky Carioti/Washington Post/Getty Images

Trump expressed hope that the Senate would confirm one of his nominees. Days later, the RNC came calling for cash.

Wealthy donors being rewarded with cushy ambassador gigs is not a new development in American politics, nor is it a uniquely Republican form of pay-to-play. But as with many things pertaining to the current occupant of the White House, President Donald Trump and his Republican backers have taken things in this realm to a whole new level of unseemliness.

According to a new CBS investigation, while Trump’s nomination of San Diego billionaire/campaign donor Doug Manchester to be the ambassador to the Bahamas was held up in the Senate in early September, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel sent Manchester an email that alluded to what seems to be a corrupt quid pro quo.

“Would you consider putting together $500,000 worth of contributions from your family to ensure we hit our ambitious fundraising goal?” McDaniel wrote.

McDaniel’s plea for cash came just three days after Trump expressed hope on Twitter that the Senate could confirm Manchester’s nomination. (Manchester owns a home in the Bahamas and assisted with the Hurricane Dorian relief effort.)

An RNC spokesperson told CBS that McDaniel “did not suggest to Mr. Manchester in any way that it would more quickly advance his confirmation if members of his family made a political contribution.” But the timing of her personalized email pitch to Manchester — coming as it did just days after Trump expressed hope that he would be approved as ambassador to the Bahamas — is a terrible look at best, and appallingly corrupt at worse. And suffice it to say that Manchester’s response did not help matters.

In an email sent to McDaniel that also copied staffers working for two Republican senators who sit on the Foreign Relations Committee that controlled his nomination — Rand Paul (KY) and Jim Risch (ID) — Manchester replied to McDaniel by saying his wife was donating $100,000 immediately, and he promised more if approved for the ambassadorship.

“As you know I am not supposed to do any, but my wife is sending a contribution for $100,000. Assuming I get voted out of the [Foreign Relations Committee] on Wednesday to the floor we need you to have the majority leader bring it to a majority vote … Once confirmed, I our [sic] family will respond!” he wrote, according to emails obtained by CBS. (The RNC spokesperson told CBS that Manchester’s “decision to link future contributions to an official action was totally inappropriate” and claimed the donation made by his wife was returned.)

Alas, Manchester’s nomination did not make it out of committee. According to CBS, the Risch staffer who was copied on Manchester’s email alerted the White House about the apparent pay-to-play scheme. Manchester, perhaps feeling pressure to do so, officially said he was no longer interested in becoming ambassador to the Bahamas last month.

Given that the whole episode unfolded in writing, both Manchester and the White House may have felt like there was little choice but to pull the plug. Not only is the sort of pay-to-play outlined in the emails unethical, but it’s also arguably illegal, as soliciting or receiving payments for public offices violates federal law.

Manchester isn’t the first wealthy Trump donor to land himself in hot water after donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Gordon Sondland, who became Trump ambassador to the European Union after donating the same amount, has become a key witness in the impeachment inquiry about Trump’s dealings in Ukraine. Sondland even put himself at risk of perjury by revising his original testimony to congressional impeachment investigators in a manner that suggests he had been trying to protect the president until testimony from other witnesses made his position untenable.

Sondland made his fortune as a hotel magnate. Manchester made his in real estate. Neither had any diplomatic experience before they were nominated to ambassador positions by Trump. Both now find themselves at the center of scandals. It’s no wonder that Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made no longer allowing campaign donors to become ambassadors a centerpiece of her plan to revamp the State Department.

But the Manchester scandal isn’t just one about pay-to-play gone wrong — it’s also one about the ongoing shadiness of the RNC. Already this year the committee has come under fire for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from casino mogul Steve Wynn, who last year resigned from his position as finance chairman of the RNC amid a string of allegations of sexual misconduct. That McDaniel was willing to brazenly hit up Manchester for half a million bucks while his ambassadorial nomination hung in the balance indicates that for her committee, the ends continue to justify the means.

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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.

The Republican Party is sending out what passes for its top bootlicking officials to try and spin around in circles, as every day brings a new set of defenses for their corrupt president’s actions. Historically, one of the easier gigs for Republicans like Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana has been to go on Fox News and let whichever host lob softballs with little to no resistance. Fox News is predominantly a fact-free zone and so Rep. Scalise must have known that things were going to be a little rougher than usual when Fox host Chris Wallace began lightly pushing back during an interview over the weekend.

After Scalise bumbled about how the earmarked money that President Trump was holding back from Ukraine has requirements of anti-corruption—something the Trump administration has been trying to cut the budget for these last few years—Wallace did a good job of redirecting some of the facts of the case.

CHRIS WALLACE: But both in the April and July phone calls, President Trump never mentions the word “corruption.” What he talks about is investigations; investigations of the Democrats, possible interference in 2016, investigations into the Bidens and Burisma, and the phone call that David Holmes overheard on July 26, he says what the president asked was, is he going to do the investigations.

Rep. Scalise moves over to Republican fabrication of facts number two: this is all “secondhand, thirdhand,” evidence. At this time, Republican talking points on Ukraine are: All of these people are lying, Ukraine ended up getting the money after three months, Ukraine President Zelensky released a hostage video saying Donald Trump is supreme leader masculine best friend to Ukraine.

But, surprisingly, after Rep. Scalise attempted to belittle the first week of impeachment testimony, Wallace stopped him short.

WALLACE: Well, first of all, a dozen people listened in on the phone call, and a number of them were immediately upset because what the president said about Burisma.

REP. STEVE SCALISE: Well, those were Schiff's witnesses.

WALLACE: No, sir, they're career foreign service officers, and these are people who work in the—

REP. SCALISE: —Schiff's witnesses. There are other witnesses.

WALLACE: You had a woman yesterday—wait a minute—Sir, you had a woman yesterday who was on Vice President Pence's staff. She said it was inappropriate. You had Tim Morrison, who was on the NSC staff, who said that he, alarm bells immediately went off for him. Alexander Vindman immediately went to see—you say they're Schiff's witnesses, they all were working in the Trump administration. But let me get back to—

Scalise cannot let it ride, because he’s an idiot and has been taught to just keep lying out loud.

REP. SCALISE: —They were not all Trump administration folks.

WALLACE: Are you saying that the person working, Alexander Vindman wasn't—

Scalise then changes tactics and begins talking about the witnesses that Republicans want called. Wallace tries to remind Scalise that they are talking about people who already testified.

WALLACE: But I'm asking you about these people who worked in the Trump administration, who work for the Trump national security council or work for the vice president's office.

Wallace attempts to bring things back to a more neutral topic where Rep. Scalise can lie away about whatever he likes such as the upcoming Ambassador Sondland testimony, slated for Wednesday.

Unfortunately, Rep. Scalise, as we have reported over the years, is an imbecile who spends most of his time counting NRA donor money, and he could not leave well enough alone. He began to argue that the witnesses who testified publicly during the first week of impeachment hearings had testified that Trump did nothing wrong. Yes. He actually said that.

If this had been Sean Hannity, there’s a good chance his head would have been so far up Donald Trump’s ass that he might not have heard this gaslighting. Wallace is still playing at being a real journalist, and could not let that slide.

WALLACE: Sir, with all due respect, that very badly mischaracterizes what they said. They were asked, William Taylor, for instance, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, was asked whether or not these were impeachable offenses. He said I'm there as a fact witness, I'm not there to pass judgment. But he made it clear what he thought about what the president was doing.

Yes, he did. Scalise attempts to go back to the dumb ploy that Trump did release the aid to Ukraine, at which point Wallace reminds him that Trump released that aid two days after the whistleblower’s complaint surfaced in the public. Jump ahead to the five-minute mark to see the real fireworks start. x x YouTube Video

Donald Trump called off joint military exercises with South Korea to move diplomacy along with North Korea, but that wasn’t enough to get North Korea to agree to another in-person meeting with Trump.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted, “You should act quickly, get the deal done. See you soon!” to Kim Jong Un. But North Korean official Kim Kye Gwan responded, “We are no longer interested in such talks that bring nothing to us. As we have got nothing in return, we will no longer gift the U.S. president with something he can boast of, but get compensation for the successes that President Trump is proud of as his administrative achievement.”

Got it? Trump gives North Korea something in the form of calling off military exercises, then practically begs for a meeting with Kim Jong Un, only to be met with “We are no longer interested in such talks that bring nothing to us. As we have got nothing in return, we will no longer gift the U.S. president with something he can boast of.” In other words, North Korea has Trump’s measure: He’s weak and he’s desperate.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may have said publicly that he never felt pressured by Donald Trump to investigate the Bidens, but privately he was fretting over it and U.S. officials learned of his anxiety early on. New reporting from the Associated Press adds a another element to the outlet's previous revelation that Zelensky and his top aides met in early May to strategize about how to handle Trump's push. Now the AP writes that U.S. diplomats learned of that meeting around the time it took place. Then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and other U.S. embassy staff received a briefing on the session from an American who attended it. Amos Hochstein, who sits on the board of Ukraine's state-owned gas company Naftogaz, informed Yovanovitch of the meeting shortly after it took place. He separately told two U.S. Embassy officials, Suriya Jayanti and Joseph Pennington, of Zelensky's unease surrounding inserting Ukraine in a matter that might affect the 2020 U.S. elections.  Pennington and Jayanti—who in a separate matter reportedly overheard a key cell conversation between Ambassador Gordon Sondland and Trump—both took notes on the briefing from Hockstein. 

The contemporaneous notes taken by Jayanti and Pennington were also viewed by other officials within the State Department. Zelensky apparently attempted to disguise the focus of the May 7 meeting where he sought advice on Trump's ask by billing it as a strategy session on energy concerns.

The notes by U.S. officials completely blunt the argument by Trump and his Republican allies that Zelensky didn't feel pressured to open the investigations into the Bidens. In fact, quite the opposite. Zelensky knew exactly what Trump wanted before he was even sworn into office on May 20 and he was already grappling with how to please Trump without getting Ukraine involved in the partisanship currently dominating U.S. politics. 

Rudy Giuliani and his associates are facing new scrutiny around their actions in Ukraine as investigators are now speaking with executives at Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state-owned oil and gas company. It seems U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch wasn’t the only anticorruption advocate in Ukraine that Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Igor Fruman wanted out of the way. They were also seeking to oust Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolyev. 

CNN has the damning details:

An American energy consultant who operates in Ukraine, Dale Perry, described the efforts to oust Naftogaz's CEO, Andriy Kobolyev, who is known for his anti-corruption reforms at the company. At an energy conference in Houston last April, Parnas and Fruman asked a senior Naftogaz executive Andrew Favorov if he would go along with their plan to oust the company's current CEO and become its head, according to Perry, who is Favorov's former business partner. "(Parnas and Fruman) basically just flat out said to him, hey, to do the deals we want to do, we were not able to get through to your CEO, and we think that the business needs a new CEO," Perry told CNN.

Isn’t it strange that Giuliani and his men were putting all their energy into getting these anticorruption folks out of the way in Ukraine? Dale Perry also told CNN that Parnas and Fruman were bragging about getting Ambassador Yovanovitch removed from her position, with the blessing of the “highest levels of US government.” 

Perry also mentioned the ties between Giuliani’s gang and Russian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is currently wanted on bribery and racketeering charges in the U.S.

Perry believes Parnas and Fruman, who have no prior experience in the gas business, may have had assistance from indicted [Ukrainian] oligarch Dmitri Firtash, who made his fortune being the intermediary between Naftogaz and Gazprom, Russia's state-owned energy corporation. The two men mentioned Firtash in their meeting with Favorov, according to Perry, saying Firtash believed Naftogaz owed him money. 

Paraphrasing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, all roads lead to Russia with this crew, specifically the Russian mob, of which Firtash is reportedly a senior member. Firtash’s fingerprints appear to be all over this scandal, as are Victoria Toensing’s and Joe diGenova’s. Both D.C.-based lawyers, Toensing and diGenova are a married couple who represent a key cast of characters in this corruption scandal.

Here’s how these Fox News regulars, who have made around 100 appearances this year alone on the network to push their paid agenda, have been involved:

They represent Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Toensing and diGenova reportedly secured an unusual (and inappropriate) in-person meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr to discuss the Firtash corruption case. Firtash reportedly paid Toensing and diGenova $1 million to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. They represent John Solomon, a former reporter for The Hill, whose reporting in March was the central basis for the smear campaign against Ambassador Yovanovitch. According to The Hill’s executive editor, Bob Cusack, Solomon’s work is now under new scrutiny and review.  They hired Lev Parnas as an “interpreter” for Firtash. Parnas bragged to colleagues about the money flowing from Firtash, saying, "I'm the best-paid interpreter in the world."

All of these people working overtime, to what end? In the words of Deep Throat in All the President’s Men, “Follow the money.” Always follow the money.

Republicans are shifting their anti-impeachment arguments ever more toward the Sideshow Bob defense: Wrongdoing doesn’t count if you didn’t succeed. In this version of the cartoon clown defense, Donald Trump’s attempts to extort Ukraine didn’t happen because the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid he was withholding was released without President Volodymyr Zelensky going on television and announcing investigations against Trump’s political opponents.

Never mind that the aid was only released after the whistleblower’s report about the July 25 call in which Trump pressured Zelensky and after House Democrats started to investigate. Never mind that Zelensky was apparently poised to make an announcement of exactly what Trump wanted. It all fell apart at the last minute, so no harm, no foul.

“The Ukrainians did nothing to—as far as investigations goes—to get the aid released,” Rep. Jim Jordan said on CBS’ Face the Nation. “So there was never this quid pro quo that the Democrats all promise existed.”

”The president’s defense is that those things didn’t happen,” Rep. Steve Scalise, the number two House Republican said on Fox News. “The real bottom line is he got the money. Ukraine got the money.” 

This is a defense Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have put forward repeatedly during questioning of witnesses, and based on the Sunday talk shows, it’s what they’re going with. But, of course, Trump did withhold the aid, even if it eventually went through after attention focused on the issue. Trump did tell Zelensky “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” Trump’s flunkies did repeatedly press Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials to announce investigations into the Bidens and CrowdStrike. The failure to competently execute the plan doesn’t mean there was nothing wrong with the attempt.

As Sideshow Bob put it, “Convicted of a crime I didn’t even commit. Hah! Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry? Do they?”

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

There are a lot of shootings in America.

Last week, a shooter at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, killed two people and injured three others. Over the weekend, a shooter at a party in Fresno, California, killed four and wounded six more. Today, a shooting at a Walmart in Duncan, Oklahoma, reportedly killed three people — including, potentially, the gunman.

It’s moments like these that can make it seem as though America is going through a momentary spike in gun violence, even above the usual rates. But this level of shootings is, in reality, pretty typical for the US.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 370 mass shootings in the US so far in 2019, with mass shooting being defined as any incident in which four or more people, not including the shooter, were shot but not necessarily killed. That’s an average of about eight mass shootings a week.

That’s still only a fraction of all US gun deaths, with mass shootings responsible for less than 2 percent of gun deaths in America in a typical year. In 2017, there were nearly 40,000 gun deaths, an average of almost 109 gun deaths a day and more than four an hour. Around 60 percent of those gun deaths are suicides.

This really is America.

Although this is typical for the US, it’s nowhere close to normal in the rest of the developed world. A 2018 study in JAMA found that the US’s civilian gun-death rate is nearly four times that of Switzerland, five times that of Canada, 35 times that of the UK, and 53 times that of Japan. There are, on average, more than 100 gun deaths in the US every day.

Americans are in many ways desensitized to this. Last week, a gunman in San Diego killed his estranged wife and three of his children. That shooting drew little national attention, especially compared to the Saugus High School shooting. In contrast, a similar murder-suicide in 2018 in Osmington, Australia, drew international attention because it was so rare.

So why is this the case in the US? It’s the guns. No other country in the world has as many guns as America, and other developed countries have significantly stricter gun laws. That’s the issue.

America’s gun problem, briefly explained

It comes down to two basic problems.

First, America has uniquely weak gun laws. Other developed nations at the very least require one or more background checks and almost always something more rigorous beyond that to get a gun, from specific training courses to rules for locking up firearms to more arduous licensing requirements to specific justifications, besides self-defense, for owning a gun.

In the US, even a background check isn’t an absolute requirement; the current federal law is riddled with loopholes and hampered by poor enforcement, so there are many ways around even a basic background check. And if a state enacts stricter measures than federal laws, someone can simply cross state lines to buy guns in a jurisdiction with looser rules. There are simply very few barriers, if any, to getting a gun in the US.

Second, the US has a ton of guns. It has far more than not just other developed nations but any other country, period. In 2017, the estimated number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.

Small Arms Survey

Both of these factors come together to make it uniquely easy for someone with violent intent to find a firearm, allowing them to carry out a horrific shooting.

This is borne out in the statistics, which show America has far more gun violence than other developed nations. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data for 2012 compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are one reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than the rest of the developed world.)

Javier Zarracina/Vox

If having so many guns around actually made the US safer, as the National Rifle Association and pro-gun politicians claim, America would have one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world. But the statistics suggest that, in fact, the opposite is true.

The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is also pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides but also with suicides (which in recent years were around 60 percent of US gun deaths), domestic violence, violence against police, and mass shootings.

As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:

Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”

This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. Every country has extremists and other hateful individuals. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone who’s angry or hateful will be able to pull out a gun and kill someone, because there are so many guns around and few barriers to getting the weapons.

Researchers have found that stricter gun laws could help. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives. A review of the US evidence by RAND also linked some gun control measures, including background checks, to reduced injuries and deaths. A growing body of evidence, from Johns Hopkins researchers, also supports laws that require a license to buy and own guns.

That doesn’t mean that bigots and extremists will never be able to carry out a shooting in places with stricter gun laws. Even the strictest gun laws can’t prevent every shooting.

Guns are also not the only contributor to violence. Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and the strength of criminal justice systems.

But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and again that America’s loose access to guns is a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.

So America, with its lax laws and abundance of firearms, makes it uniquely easy for people to commit horrific gun violence. Until the US confronts that issue, it will continue to see mass shooting after mass shooting.

For more on America’s gun problem, read Vox’s explainer.

A demonstrator vapes during a rally outside of the White House to protest the proposed vaping flavor ban in Washington DC on November 9, 2019. | Photo by JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP via Getty Images

Angry vapers and vaping companies convinced the president to kill his flavored vape ban.

Back in September, the White House organized a press conference in which President Donald Trump announced he was planning to swiftly pull flavored e-cigarettes from the market — a reaction to both a youth vaping epidemic that had escalated, and an ongoing outbreak of severe vaping-related lung disease.

Now it appears the ban — which was was supposed to prohibit sales of flavored e-cigarettes, including products featuring bubble gum, creme brûlée, fruit, menthol, and mint — is dead.

On November 4, the night before a planned news conference, Trump refused to sign off on the ban — reportedly over fears that it could cause people to lose their jobs, and cost him votes among supporters who use e-cigarettes, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story.

Trump was also swayed by protests against the ban and a social media movement — #IVapeIVote — in which e-cigarette advocates argued the ban could boost smoking rates and harm businesses. Meanwhile, pressure from tobacco and vaping industry lobbyists didn’t help, including a poll commissioned by none other than the vaping industry showing repercussions at the polls for Trump in battleground states, the New York Times reported.

It’s possible the president could change his mind again, and proceed with the ban, or come back with a carve out that protects vape shops, excluding them from the flavor ban. He might even attempt other avenues of legislation to make it harder for young people to access e-cigarettes, like raising the minimum age for buying from from 18 to 21, the Post said.

Or the ban may be another instance of a Trumpian promise unkept, one where politics got in the way of an important policy debate, as the Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out on Twitter:

And some public health advocates expressed dismay over Trump’s reversal:

“Public health decisions should be made based on science and not polling data,” Michael Eriksen, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health, told Vox.

But it’s important to remember that the ban was always controversial — and not everyone in the public health community was convinced that it’d fix America’s tobacco problem.

Why the flavor ban was controversial

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death, killing nearly half a million people in the US every year, and vaping is the most common method of smoking cessation. Though the best evidence suggests vaping’s no panacea, it is helpful for some — though the role flavors play in helping people quit smoking that isn’t clear.

“When I talk to the smokers we treat here, I hear compelling testimonials from people who tried to quit smoking many times and nothing worked until they tried vaping,” Andrew Hyland, chair of the department of health behavior at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, told Vox in September. “Flavored e-cigarettes may help some cigarette smokers quit.”

An op-ed in the Atlantic cited the record low in smoking prevalence among adults, and survey evidence (albeit from a study funded by the vaping industry) showing adult vapers enjoy fruit and dessert flavors. “It is virtually inevitable that banning flavors to make e-cigarettes less appealing to teenagers will simultaneously jeopardize adults who vape in place of smoking,” the article’s author, Sally Satel, wrote.

“[It] may reduce rates of vaping among kids, and it may also have negative impact on those ex-smokers who quit smoking as they may relapse to smoking,” Maciej Goniewicz, a leading e-cigarette researcher, also based at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, summed up when news of the ban broke. “[The ban] looks like double-edge sword.”

As the White House figures out what to do with vaping flavors, public health experts have told Vox that it might also consider looking at flavored cigarettes and cigars.

Researchers have long known menthol cigarettes are more attractive to youth and harder to quit than regular cigarettes. They’ve also been heavily marketed at — and are especially popular among — black smokers.

As combustible products, they’re more dangerous than e-cigarettes. Yet menthol cigarettes, along with flavored cigars, have been allowed to remain on the market.

So instead of just banning flavors in e-cigarettes, the FDA could also prohibit menthol in regular cigarettes, or limit the amount of nicotine in cigarettes to non-addictive levels, said Michael Eriksen, who is also the founding dean of the Georgia State University School of Public Health. “We need to move forward with a focus on smokers,” he added, “make combustible cigarettes less appealing and addictive, and properly regulate innovation and possibly less harmful technologies. This plan has been complicated by the teen vaping problem and the lung disease outbreak, but neither should distract from the original goal of helping smokers quit using combustible products.”

In a Saturday Night Live sketch that aired over the weekend, Harry Styles played the gay Instagram manager for bakery manufacturer Sara Lee, who was reprimanded after leaving raunchy remarks like “wreck me daddy” on the Instagram accounts of famous male celebs like Nick Jonas and Shawn Mendes. Check the sketch out HERE if you missed it.

Since the sketch aired, Instagram users have flocked to Sara Lee’s real-life Instagram account and left similar remarks.

LEAVE SARA LEE BREAD ALONE I CANT BREATHEEZJSKSHS pic.twitter.com/9SLweq3nfJ

— becca 25 (@guccibesitos) November 17, 2019

SNL actor Bowen Yang, who appeared in the sketch, accused Sara Lee of deleting some of the remarks.

Sara Lee disabling and deleting IG comments wow they really could have been THE bread for f*gs.

— Bowen Yang 杨伯文 (@bowenyang) November 17, 2019

But it appears the company is now taking a different tack. They released a statement that they had not realized the comments were coming because of an SNL sketch: “We didn’t know about or participate in the creation of the skit so as you can imagine, waking up to all those comments threw us for a bit of a loop. We didn’t delete any comments but did temporarily hide them until we could read through and understand what happened. All comments are now visible and we will be monitoring for any that violate Instagram standards. While the explicit jokes in the skit do not align with Sara Lee Bread’s brand, we know SNL pushes the envelope for laughs and are taking it all in stride.”

The post Sara Lee’s Instagram Inundated with Raunchy Gay Comments After Harry Styles SNL Sketch Airs appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Trump during an event at the White House on Friday. | Getty Images

The White House’s credibility crisis fueled speculation about Trump’s seemingly unplanned trip to the hospital.

President Donald Trump made a trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, as White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham put it, to “begin portions of his routine annual physical exam” on Saturday. But there are indications the trip wasn’t as routine as the White House would have the public believe.

To be clear, there’s no hard evidence that Trump’s trip to the hospital was anything more more than a 73-year-old man being proactive about his health. But the White House’s complete lack of credibility on issues from crowd size to foreign affairs makes it disconcertingly easy to disbelieve what officials say.

While there would likely be fewer questions surrounding Trump’s health if the White House hadn’t long established a reputation for lying about everything, there are a number of indicators that something out of the norm went down on Saturday afternoon.

For one, in a break from precedent, Trump’s trip to the hospital wasn’t acknowledged ahead of time on any White House schedule. Secondly and similarly unusual, CNN reported that medical staff at Walter Reed weren’t notified of Trump’s visit in advance. White House pool reporters said they were told Trump’s movements on Saturday “were strictly unreportable” until he arrived at the hospital at 2:47 pm.

It smells fishy, and an unnamed “source familiar with the situation” acknowledged to CNN that the situation was “unusual” and did not follow protocol. Adding to suspicions, on Sunday, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell posted a video of Trump being hustled into an SUV on his way to Walter Reed by a White House physician — a visual seemingly belying the notion that everything was fine and normal.

Nonetheless, the White House wants people to believe there’s nothing to see here. In a statement released shortly after Trump went to Walter Reed, Grisham claimed that Trump was merely “taking advantage of a free weekend here in Washington” to start his physical because he’s “anticipating a very busy 2020.”

But the notion that the famously doctor-adverse Trump — who in 2018 made headlines when it was revealed he personally dictated a glowing letter of health released by his personal physician during the presidential campaign — would use a sunny Saturday afternoon of the sort he’s often spent golfing to start his second physical in nine months seems unlikely.

For now, however, the public is left taking Grisham’s word for it — that the president is the picture of health. Upon Trump’s return to the White House on Saturday, she released another statement saying Trump “remains healthy and energetic without complaints, as demonstrated by his repeated vigorous rally performances in front of thousands of Americans several times a week.” But she provided no details about what tests Trump underwent at Walter Reed, other than to say they included “a quick exam and labs.”

Adding to the mystery, Trump has not been seen by a White House pool reporter since leaving the hospital, and he’s not expected to make an appearance in public on Monday either.

Trump, however, was very active on Twitter on Sunday, including a tweet in which he acknowledged his trip to Walter Reed, claiming “everything very good (great!),” and adding that his physical will be completed next year.

The White House has no credibility when it comes to Trump’s dealings with doctors

People would be more willing to take the White House’s story about Trump’s Walter Reed trip at face value if officials hadn’t burned their credibility by snowing the public about topics ranging from unsubstantiated allegations of large-scale voter fraud to the president’s Twitter typos. And the administration already has a well-documented history of pushing dubious-at-best claims about Trump’s dealings with doctors.

Perhaps most memorably, after Trump underwent his annual physical in early 2018, presidential physician Ronny Jackson held a press conference in which he brushed off questions about Trump’s unhealthy diet and lifestyle and deadpanned that “if he had a healthier diet over the last years he might live to be 200 years old ... he has incredible genes.”

Trump nominated Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs four months later, but that crashed and burned when Jackson was hit with a string of allegations of “overprescribing pills, drinking on the job and creating a hostile work environment,” as Politico put it. Early this year, however, Trump appointed Jackson to be his chief medical adviser and assistant to the president.

The same sort of hyperbole employed by Jackson during his infamous news conference was on display Saturday night, when Grisham went on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show for an interview in which the president was alternately described as having “more energy than almost anybody else in the White House” and “almost superhuman.”

After his most recent physical in February, physician to the president Sean Conley announced that Trump is in “very good health overall,” despite having health issues including clinical obesity and high cholesterol. We have no good reason to believe things have changed in the nine months since. But the unusual circumstances surrounding Trump’s trip to Walter Reed, combined with the White House’s broader crisis of credibility, have left people wondering.

In yet another statement about Trump’s Walter Reed trip released on Sunday, Grisham seemed to tacitly acknowledge the White House’s credibility problem by pointing out that there are occasions in which she hasn’t lied — the implication being that this is one of them.

“I’ve given plenty of on the record statements that were truthful and accurate — actively trying to find and report conspiracy theories really needs to stop,” she said, according to CNN’s Jeremy Diamond.

---

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

Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, and Sven in Frozen 2. | Walt Disney Animation Studios

How dresses of velvet and ice are animated. Plus, Anna gets a new hairstyle.

When Brittney Lee first signed on to do animated work for Disney’s Frozen more than six years ago, our Queen of Arendelle sported a very different look. “Elsa was blue and had black spiky short hair,” Lee says. The character went through many iterations before landing on her final beauty look of a thick white-blonde side braid, white skin, and an impressive purple smoky eye. Her wardrobe went through just as many changes. What started out as a coat made out of living weasels was eventually turned into a glistening gown that millions of little girls around the world would go on to wear.

Lee and her colleague Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay are part of the visual development team at Disney. This means they’re animated artists responsible for designing everything from the characters to the environment to the props. And, yes, the costumes. Both worked on designing the outfits for Anna and Elsa on Frozen 2, which Sastrawinata-Lemay notes might be the most intricate of any animated movie in history due to advancements in 3D and computer generated imagery technology. It’s an upgrade that’s made her and Lee’s jobs both more exciting — “because it helps to enhance the storytelling” — and more challenging, “because there are so many more details to consider.” For example, as Lee explains, many of the costumes in the first Frozen involved embroidery, but the technique wasn’t nearly as involved as it is now. “On this film, we could really be elaborate and add a lot of extra bead work or sequins that wouldn’t have been possible to do on the first film,” she explains. “We really tried to meet technologies’ needs in creating more art work and more design where appropriate.”

Then there comes enhancements to the fabric. Lee and her team use a C.G.I. tailoring program called Marvelous Designer that allows them to see how certain materials would drape on an animated character in the same way that it would drape on a person. “Something that is meant to be a velvet shouldn’t be moving as if it was tulle or if it was cotton,” Lee explains. “We run a whole bunch of tests until we can get it moving in a way that is believable and that is also hopefully true to the fabric that we’re trying to represent.”

Disney

The way a fabric behaves in motion is important in this particular film because both Elsa and Anna spend a big chunk of it on the move, traveling through forest and ocean. As Lee explains, the simulation team at Disney has a process of testing different settings on the digital fabric to predict how it will react to certain elements. For one scene that Elsa spends in the water, Lee says, “we could see the way her dress looked when she was walking in the water, we could see it soaking wet, and we could see it floating underwater before we ever signed off on the final approved design that she’s wearing.” Lee and her team also pulled a lot of underwater photography and videos for reference “so that [the animated dress] can be built and perform the way that everyone’s anticipating it to perform.” She continues: “We try to do as much leg work as we can in the design phase.”

When it comes to the costume design direction for Frozen 2, Sastrawinata-Lemay says they were told three things about the film beforehand: it takes place in the fall, Anna and Elsa will be three years older, and there’s going to be an epic journey. “Everything else is being worked out at the same time as we’re designing,” she says. Thankfully, since this is a sequel, they already had a good idea of who the sisters are style wise. “We didn’t have to ask the question of ‘oh, would she or would she not wear this,’” Lee says. “It was always more of ‘well, what’s right for this girl at this moment in time?’”

Anna’s style draws inspiration from traditional Norwegian folk wear known as the bunad, a dress typically made out of wool and adorned with embroidery, and silhouettes like the cinched waist and full, A-line skirt from Christian Dior’s “New Look.” Her looks tend to be grounded in the fabrics and materials of the place and time period (the 1840s-1850s, according to Lee), which means she wears heavier materials like wool and velvet and her color palette skews on the warmer side. The focus for this film centered around upgrading her wardrobe to something that felt more mature than the “bubbly younger effervescent sister,” Lee says. One instance is the shape line of Anna’s dress which, before, always included a rounded scalloped shape. “We really squared those shapes off, so she’s just a little bit more linear and a little less playful,” Lee says. After 122 iterations, the team ended up with a classic A-shape dress with a bell skirt and a deep purple travel cloak.

Disney

For Elsa, the focus wasn’t to make her seem older, since “she’s always been a little more stoic and reserved,” Lee says. “She’s the older sister and so we sort of played that into her from the beginning.” But rather the challenge lay in how to design a costume that was going to endure high amounts of action. Elsa’s outfits draw inspiration from designers like Alexander McQueen and Elie Saab “just in their mystic grand silhouettes and bold statements,” Lee says. And everything the team had created for her up until the second film included long trains and floor length hemlines which would prove cumbersome. So the question then became: “How do we cut her hemline so that it’s not floor length, but still makes her feel like Elsa?”

Lee and her team managed to do this by creating a tailored coat paired with a double paneled cape, which allowed Elsa to “retain that snow queen dress quality that she had in ‘Let It Go,’” Then, for strength, they added snowflake encrusted shoulders that are meant to look like militaristic epaulettes. “We wanted to make sure we were illustrating that she’s the Queen of Arendelle,” Lee says. “There should be some sort of authority in the costume that she’s wearing for the bulk of the film.” As far as fabric and color go, tulle and cool shades are reserved for our frosty protagonist, who is creating these materials herself out of ice.

To add even more practicality to both Anna and Elsa’s wardrobes, they wear pants underneath their dresses. “We didn’t want [the pants] to be the element that you’re looking at, but we wanted them to function and help them be able to move through everything that they needed to move through,” Lee says. Elsa’s outfit is topped off with a pair of snowflake-adorned ice boots.

Disney

Along with the costumes, Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay also received a directive to upgrade the sister’s hairstyles. “The big thing for Anna on the first film is that she really owned pigtail braids,” Lee says. “But anytime that we tried to put her in the pigtail braids for this film, particularly in her travel costume, she just felt too young. It felt like she was still a school girl.” With the suggestion from director Jennifer Lee, they ended up pulling half of her hair down and adding a crown braid that runs across the back of her head.

This is another case when the technological advancements proved to make things tricky. The program used for grooming was intended to build things like grass; meaning, the hair looked almost too much like hair. “At Disney, we like to stylize and we like to caricature things and make them feel very appealing and very approachable,” Lee says. “So we can’t necessarily go straight to completely realistic hair because then that fights with what our characters look like.” The team then had to find a balance of being somewhat realistic and somewhat caricature like. “That might mean that the hair follicles are a little bit larger than what they would be on a normal human or smaller and it might mean that there’s just more of this magic hair spray in Elsa’s hair,” Lee says. “There’s always things that we’ve gotta consider that are different than real life.”

Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay are designing for what would be best for the characters and for the film, but they eventually have to grapple with whether or not people will want to wear their designs in real life. (They will; Disney reported that more than three million Anna and Elsa dresses were sold in North America in 2014 alone.) The duo try not to think about that when they’re in the thick of working though. “At the time, it’s more like solving a puzzle piece than designing for a consumer product,” Sastrawinata-Lemay says. Eventually they have to pass off what they refer to as “call outs” to their design team so that they can manifest their creations into physical costumes.

Disney

The timeline of the process goes something like this: Once an outfit is approved and while Lee and Sastrawinata-Lemay are finalizing how the garment is constructed, where the seams are, and what specific fabrics they’re going to use, they simultaneously put together a diagram made up of call outs for the team that’s designing the physical costumes. “It’s like a bible on how to make the dress,’ Sastrawinata-Lemay says. “It’s really detailed, down to what direction the embroidery thread would go and how big or how small it is.”

It takes many iterations to get right, a relative idea since very rarely is there a one-to-one translation from film costume to consumer product, especially when it comes to the fabrics. Sastrawinata-Lemay says that, if somebody were going to make an exact replica of their designs, down to the materials used, “it would definitely be more of an haute couture gown outfit that would cost so much money.” The pair doesn’t have control over what the alternative materials are, but they understand the need to use affordable fabrics for items being mass produced. “It is no more expensive for us to put a very luxurious velvet cape on Anna than it would be for a much cheaper material,” Lee says, noting that this isn’t the case for product designers.

For the past two years that they’ve worked on Anna and Elsa, the animators have been immersed in the Disney universe, where the real world rules and restrictions don’t apply. “You’re designing for a princess so we kind of go all out,” Sastrawinata-Lemay says. “Because, well, why not?”

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Republicans now say the extortion plot never came to fruition, so it's no biggie.

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John Oliver ripped GOP attempts to excuse Trump’s impeachable offenses on last night’s Last Week Tonight on HBO, specifically targeting FOX News host Laura Ingraham, who clucked, “attempted bribery isn’t in the constitution!”

Replied Oliver: “Crime doesn’t stop being a crime if it doesn’t work. If you tried to blow up an airliner and your vest doesn’t go off, you don’t get to go ‘welp, no harm no foul,’ and then sit there watching Detective Pikachu for the rest of the flight. Also, Ukraine only got its aid after the House started asking questions. And the Ukrainian president was days away from publicly announcing investigations, but canceled his announcement at the last minute after this story started breaking. So, the nothing to see here defense’ is pretty shaky.”

Oliver also destroyed the “hearsay” argument pushed by loudmouth Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), adding: “Multiple people have gone on record saying the President was pressuring Zelensky for his own political gain, including his own chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who did so on camera. So yes, the fact that there was quid pro quo is all ‘hearsay,’ in that you hear people say it all the f**king time.”

The post John Oliver Destroys Laura Ingraham and Jim Jordan’s Arguments About Trump’s Innocence: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A report from the U.K. Parliament's intelligence committee concludes that "Russian interference may have had an impact on the Brexit referendum," reports the Times of London, adding that "the effect was 'unquantifiable.'" The Associated Press reports: The committee said British intelligence services failed to devote enough resources to counter the threat and highlighted the impact of articles posted by Russian new sites that were widely disseminated on social media, the newspaper reported... [Conservative Prime Minister Boris] Johnson's government has said it needs more time to review the security implications of the report, but it will be released after the election. Critics have alleged the report is being withheld because it shows Russians have made large donations to the Conservative Party, which is seeking to win a majority that would allow Johnson to push his Brexit deal through Parliament.... The House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee began its investigation following allegations of Russian interference in both the 2016 U.S. election and the Brexit referendum earlier that year. The committee sent its report to Johnson for review on Oct. 17, saying it expected to "publish the report imminently." Committee Chairman Dominic Grieve has criticized Johnson's government for failing to release the document amid media reports it has already been cleared by British security services. The debate comes amid growing concerns about the security of elections fought in an increasingly digital world. Britain's election laws were written for a time when campaigns pushed mass-produced leaflets through mail slots, rather than flooding Facebook and Twitter accounts with individually targeted messages.

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