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Friday, February 22, 2019

Trump news – LIVE: House resolution to overturn national emergency introduced as president tells African-Americans ‘look at the progress you’ve made’

House Democrats have filed their “resolution of disapproval” challenging Donald Trump‘s decision to call a national emergency in order to build a wall on the US southern border with Mexico. While the president has claimed there is a “crisis” of illegal immigration in the United States, Democrats have questioned his motives — and noted that Mr Trump himself has suggested that he did not need to declare the emergency. Meanwhile Ahmed Ali Muthana, the father of Alabama Isis bride Hoda Muthana, announced he is suing the administration for its “unlawful attempt” to rescind her citizenship and block a return to the US.

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-news-live-democrats-file-091626896.html
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Thursday, February 21, 2019

Cory Booker Points To Jussie Smollet’s Attack For Why Congress Must Pass Anti-Lynching Law

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New Jersey’s Democratic Sen. Cory Booker has pointed to the racist and homophobic attack on actor Jussie Smollet to show the necessity for Congress to finally pass an anti-lynching law, which cleared a key hurdle Thursday as it winds its way through the legislative process.

The U.S. Senate passed an anti-lynching bill on Thursday, which was announced Sen. Kamala Harris, one of the three senators who introduced the measure in 2018.

BREAKING: Our anti-lynching bill, which would make lynching a federal crime, just unanimously passed the Senate. Lynching is a dark, despicable part of our nation’s history and I’m hopeful this measure will swiftly pass the House.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) February 14, 2019

“Our anti-lynching bill, which would make lynching a federal crime, just unanimously passed the Senate. Lynching is a dark, despicable part of our nation’s history and I’m hopeful this measure will swiftly pass the House,” Harris tweeted.

In December, the Senate made history by passing the same bill. However, it had to be re-introduced in the Senate this year because the Republican-controlled House of Representative failed to bring it up for a vote before the year ended.

Now that the Democrats have a majority in the House, the anti-lynching bill that the Senate passed Thursday will likely sail through the House without any problems. The final stop will be President Trump’s desk for signature.

Booker dispelled any notion that there was no need for an anti-lynching law in the 21st century.

“The vicious attack on actor Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern-day lynching,” Booker tweeted in January.” I’m glad he’s safe. To those in Congress who don’t feel the urgency to pass our Anti-Lynching bill designating lynching as a federal hate crime– I urge you to pay attention.”

On Feb. 9, while walking to a Subway, two men reportedly yelled racial and homophobic slurs at Smollett after he exited the restaurant, investigators told The Hollywood Reporter. They allegedly punched and poured bleach on him while one of the suspects put a rope around his neck. As they fled the scene, Smollett told police they said, “This is MAGA country.”

Sen. Kamala Harris celebrates the Senate’s historic passage of an anti-lynching bill after nearly 200 failed attempts…https://t.co/igpiN4tAFi pic.twitter.com/lVxWionc0n

— NewsOne (@newsone) December 19, 2018

The Senate’s vote in December was historic because it was the first time that senators passed an anti-lynching bill after almost 200 failed attempts over more than a century. During that time, the House passed several anti-lynching bills only to have them die in the Senate.

The Senate’s three Black senators—Harris, Booker and Republican Sen. Tim Scott—introduced the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018 in June. It calls for a life prison sentence for those found guilty on federal anti-lynching charges.

The Senate bill underscores statistics — including that more than 4,700 people were lynched between the years 1882 and 1968 — supported by research compiled by Tuskegee University, according to NPR. About 75 percent of the victims were African-Americans while “99 percent of all perpetrators of lynching escaped from punishment by state or local officials.”

The New Lynching Memorial Remembers Black Women Who Were Also Killed By Lynch Mobs

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Source: https://newsone.com/3846357/anti-lynching-law-senate/
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M 5.1 – 82km SSE of Kirakira, Solomon Islands

4.5+ Magnitude Earthquake Reported: M 5.1 – 82km SSE of Kirakira, Solomon Islands

Time: 2019-02-21 10:50:48 UTC; 2019-02-21 21:50:48 +11:00 at epicenter
Location: 11.186°S 162.073°E
Depth: 40.08 km (24.90 mi)

Source: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us2000jl2z
Author: U.S. Geological Survey

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Wednesday, February 20, 2019

‘Sustained and ongoing’ disinformation assault targets Dem presidential candidates

A wide-ranging disinformation campaign aimed at Democratic 2020 candidates is already under way on social media, with signs that foreign state actors are driving at least some of the activity.

The main targets appear to be Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), four of the most prominent announced or prospective candidates for president.

A POLITICO review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms, as well as interviews with data scientists and digital campaign strategists, suggests that the goal of the coordinated barrage appears to be undermining the nascent candidacies through the dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation, and distortions of their positions. But the divisive nature of many of the posts also hint at a broader effort to sow discord and chaos within the Democratic presidential primary.

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.

Not all of the activity is organized. Much of it appears to be organic, a reflection of the politically polarizing nature of some of the candidates. But there are clear signs of a coordinated effort of undetermined size that shares similar characteristics with the computational propaganda attacks launched by online trolls at Russia’s Internet Research Agency in the 2016 presidential election, which special counsel Robert Mueller accused of aiming to undermine the political process and elevate Donald Trump.

“It looks like the 2020 presidential primary is going to be the next battleground to divide and confuse Americans,” said Brett Horvath, one of the founders of Guardians.ai, a tech company that works with a consortium of data scientists, academics and technologists to disrupt cyberattacks and protect pro-democracy groups from information warfare. “As it relates to information warfare in the 2020 cycle, we’re not on the verge of it — we’re already in the third inning.”

An analysis conducted for POLITICO by Guardians.ai found evidence that a relatively small cluster of accounts — and a broader group of accounts that amplify them — drove a disproportionate amount of the Twitter conversation about the four candidates over a recent 30-day period.

Using proprietary tools that measured the discussion surrounding the candidates in the Democratic field, Guardians.ai identified a cohort of roughly 200 accounts — which includes both unwitting real accounts and other ‘suspicious’ and automated accounts that coordinate to spread their messages — pumped out negative or extreme themes designed to damage the candidates.

This is the same core group of accounts the company first identified last year in a study as anchoring a wide scale influence campaign in the 2018 elections.

Since the turn of the year, those accounts began specifically directing their output at Harris, O’Rourke, Sanders and Warren, and were amplified by an even wider grouping of accounts. Over a recent 30-day period, between 2 and 15 percent of all Twitter mentions of the four candidates emanated in some way from within that cluster of accounts, according to the Guardians.ai findings. In that timeframe, all four candidates collectively had 6.8 million mentions on Twitter.

“We can conclusively state that a large group of suspicious accounts that were active in one of the largest influence operations of the 2018 cycle is now engaged in sustained and ongoing activity for the 2020 cycle,” Horvath said.

Amarnath Gupta, a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego who monitors social media activity, said he’s also seen a recent surge in Twitter activity negatively targeting three candidates — O’Rourke, Harris and Warren.

That increased activity includes a rise in the sheer volume of tweets, the rate at which they are being posted and the appearance of “cluster behavior” tied to the three candidates.

“I can say that from a very, very cursory look, a lot of the information is negatively biased with respect to sentiment analysis,” said Gupta, who partnered with Guardians.ai on a 2018 study.

According to the Guardians.ai analysis, Harris attracted the most overall Twitter activity among the 2020 candidates it looked at, with more than 2.5 million mentions over the 30-day period.

She was also among the most targeted. One widely seen tweet employed racist and sexist stereotypes in an attempt to sensationalize Harris’ relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. That tweet — and subsequent retweets and mentions tied to it — made 8.6 million “potential impressions” online, according to Guardians.ai, an upper limit calculation of the number of people who might have seen it based on the accounts the cluster follows, who follows accounts within the cluster and who has engaged with the tweet.

Another racially-charged tweet was directed at O’Rourke. The Twitter profile of the user where it originated indicates the account was created in May 2018, but it had authored just one tweet since then — in January, when the account announced it had breaking news about the former Texas congressman leaving a message using racist language on an answering machine in the 1990s. That tweet garnered 1.3 million potential impressions on the platform, according to Guardians.ai.

A separate Guardians.ai study that looked at the 200-account group’s focus on voter fraud and false and/or misleading narratives about election integrity — published just before the midterm elections and co-authored by Horvath, Zach Verdin and Alicia Serrani — reported that the accounts generated or were mentioned in more than 140 million tweets over the prior year.

That cluster of accounts was the driving force behind an effort to aggressively advance conspiracy theories in the 2018 midterms, ranging from misinformation about voter fraud to narratives involving a caravan coming to the United States, and even advocacy of violence.

Horvath asserts that the activity surrounding the cluster represents an evolution in misinformation and amplification tactics that began in mid-to-late 2018. The initial phase that began in 2016 was marked by the creation of thousands of accounts that were more easily detected as bots or as coordinated activity.

The new activity, however, centers on a refined group of core accounts — the very same accounts that surfaced in the group’s 2018 voter fraud study. Some of the accounts are believed to be highly sophisticated synthetic accounts operated by people attempting to influence conversations, while others are coordinated in some way by actors who have identified real individuals already tweeting out a desired message.

Tens of thousands of other accounts then work in concert to amplify the core group through mentions and retweets to drive what appears, on the surface, to be organic virality.

Operatives with digital firms, political campaigns and other social media monitoring groups also report seeing a recent surge in false narratives or negative memes against 2020 candidates.

A recent analysis from the social media intelligence firm Storyful detected spikes in misinformation activity over social media platforms and online comment boards in the days after each of the 2020 candidates launched their presidential bids, beginning with Warren’s announcement on Dec. 31.

Fringe news websites and fringe social media platforms, Storyful found, played a significant role in spreading anti-Warren sentiment in the days after she announced her candidacy on December 31. Using a variety of keyword searches for mentions of Warren, the firm reported evidence of “spam or bot-like” activity on Facebook and Twitter from some of the top posters.

Kelly Jones, a researcher with Storyful who tracked suspicious activity in the three days following the campaign announcements of Harris, Warren, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), said she’s seen a concerted push over separate online message boards to build false or derogatory narratives.

Among the fringe platforms Storyful identified were 4Chan and 8Chan, where messages appeared calling on commenters to quietly wreak havoc against Warren on social media or in the comments section under news stories.

“Point out that she used to be Republican but switched sides and is a spy for them now. Use this quote out of context: ‘I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets,’” wrote one poster on the 4Chan message board.

“We’re seeing a lot of that rhetoric for nearly each candidate that comes out,” Jones said. “There is a call to action on these fringe sites. The field is going to be so crowded that they say ‘OK: ‘Operation Divide the Left.’”

An official with the Harris campaign said they suspect bad actors pushing misinformation and false narratives about the California Democrat are trying to divide African Americans, or to get the media to pay outsized attention to criticism designed to foster divisions among the Democratic primary electorate.

Researchers and others interviewed for this story say they cannot conclusively point to the actors behind the coordinated activity. It’s unclear if they are rogue hackers, political activists or, as some contend, foreign state actors such as Russia, since it bears the hallmarks of past foreign attacks. One of the objectives of the activity, they say, is to divide the left by making the Democratic presidential primary as chaotic and toxic as possible.

Teddy Goff, who served as Obama for America’s digital director, broadly described the ongoing organized efforts as the work of “a hodgepodge. It’s a bit of an unholy alliance.”

“There are state supporters and funders of this stuff. Russia. North Korea is believed to be one, Iran is another,” he said. “In certain cases it appears coordinated, but whether coordinated or not, there are clearly actors attempting to influence the primary by exacerbating divisions within the party, painting more moderate candidates as unpalatable to progressives and more progressive candidates as unpalatable to more mainstream Dems.”

A high-ranking official in the Sanders campaign expressed “serious concerns” about the impact of misinformation on social media, calling it “a type of political cyber warfare that’s clearly having an impact on the democratic process.” The official said the Sanders campaign views the activity it’s already seeing as involving actors that are both foreign and domestic.

Both Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, have reported taking substantial measures since 2016 to identify and block foreign actors and others who violate platform rules.

While Twitter would not specifically respond to questions about the Guardians.ai findings, last year the company reported challenging millions of suspect accounts every month, including those exhibiting “spammy and automated behavior.” After attempts to authenticate the accounts through email or by phone, Twitter suspended 75 percent of the accounts it challenged from January to June 2018.

In January 2019, Twitter published an accounting of efforts to combat foreign interference over political conversations happening on the platform. Earlier efforts included releasing datasets of potential foreign information operations that have appeared on Twitter, which were comprised of 3,841 accounts affiliated with the IRA, that originated in Russia, and 770 other accounts that potentially originated in Iran.

“Our investigations are global and ongoing, but the datasets we recently released are ones we’re able to reliably attribute and are disclosing now,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO. “We’ll share more information if and when it’s available.”

Facebook says it has 30,000 people working on safety and security and that its increasingly blocking and removing fake accounts. The company also says it has brought an unprecedented level of transparency to political advertising on its platform.

At this early stage, the campaigns themselves appear ill-equipped to handle the online onslaught. Their digital operations are directed toward fundraising and organizing while their social media arms are designed to communicate positive messages and information. While some have employed monitoring practices, defensive measures typically take a backseat — especially since so much remains unknown about the sources and scale of the attacks.

One high-level operative for a top-tier 2020 candidate noted the monumental challenges facing individual campaigns — even the ones with the most sophisticated digital teams. The problem already appears much larger than the resources available to any candidate at the moment, the official said.

Alex Kellner, managing director with Bully Pulpit Interactive, the top digital firm for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, warns that campaigns that don’t have a serious infrastructure set up to combat misinformation and dictate their own online messaging will be the most vulnerable to attack in 2020.

“I think this is going to be a serious part of any successful campaign: monitoring this and working with the platforms to shut down bad behavior,” Kellner said.

Kellner said that even though platforms like Twitter and Facebook have ramped up internal efforts to mete out bad actors, the flow of fake news and misinformation attacks against 2020 candidates is already strong.

“All the infrastructure we’ve seen in 2016 and 2018 is already in full-force. And in 2020 it’s only going to get worse,” Kellner said, pointing to negative memes attacking Warren on her Native American heritage claims and memes surrounding Harris’ relationship with Brown.

The proliferation of fake news, rapidly changing techniques by malicious actors and an underprepared field of Democratic candidates could make for a highly volatile primary election season.

“Moderates and centrists and Democratic candidates still don’t understand what happened in 2016 and they didn’t realize, like Hillary Clinton, that she wasn’t just running a presidential campaign, she was involved in a global information war,” Horvath said. “Democratic candidates and presidential candidates in the center and on the right who don’t understand that aren’t just going to have a difficult campaign, they’re going to allow their campaign to be an unwitting amplifier of someone else’s attempts to further divide Americans.”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/20/2020-candidates-social-media-attack-1176018
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The Article Was Written/Published By: nkorecki@politico.com (Natasha Korecki)

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Tuesday, February 19, 2019

‘Tom who?’: Dems brush off Steyer’s impeachment push

House Democrats are rallying behind Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler as he faces growing pressure from the left flank to launch impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

Driving the campaign is billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer, who is spearheading a $40 million campaign to push key House Democratic chairs investigating Trump and his administration to begin holding impeachment hearings.

Steyer’s Need to Impeach PAC held a town hall in Nadler’s Manhattan district Tuesday evening, and the group is running a 30-second television ad powered by a six-figure digital buy encouraging Nadler’s constituents to press him to back immediate impeachment.

Nadler is also facing rumblings of a primary challenge after skating to reelection last year in one of the most liberal congressional districts in the country; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley last year was a wake-up call for Democrats, and Steyer himself has left the door open to wading into Democratic primaries.

When asked about Steyer’s efforts targeting Nadler, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a fellow New York Democrat and Judiciary Committee member who also has found himself under scrutiny from the left, quipped: “Tom who?”

It’s a sign that even as Steyer’s involvement is causing some headaches for Democrats, lawmakers are rallying behind Nadler and dismissing demands among the Democratic base to go after Trump sooner rather than later.

Democrats are particularly frustrated that Steyer refuses to rule out backing challengers in next year’s House primaries less than two months after Democrats took the majority in the first place. In addition to Nadler, Steyer’s initial targets include Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) and Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) — and the billionaire has vowed to take his campaign to rank-and-file Democrats’ districts, too.

“We should not be spending money now defending incumbents in primaries. It’s stupid,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Judiciary Committee member who has backed impeaching Trump and frequently skewers the president on Twitter. “I fully support the chairman, and to do a primary challenge against him is stupid.”

Nadler’s office declined to comment on the record for this story, but his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee — who uniformly backed the chairman’s reluctance to hold impeachment hearings until more evidence against the president emerges — remain in lockstep behind him as they dismiss the growing pressure campaign as irrelevant and counterproductive.

“His district, mostly the West Side of New York — there’s not hardly a more liberal place in New York,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a member of the Judiciary panel. “Tom Steyer can run some ads, but it doesn’t compare to what people in the delis would say to Jerry in the West Side of New York.”

Privately, Democrats — and their Republican counterparts — on Capitol Hill believe the committee eventually will hold impeachment proceedings against Trump. Those hearings would begin only when Democrats feel that they are on solid ground, based on facts and evidence that emerges, to do so.

But that’s not enough for Steyer. In an interview before his town hall on Tuesday night, Steyer said his effort is simply giving voice to the tens of thousands of Nadler’s constituents who signed his petition indicating their support for impeaching the president.

“He needs to know where they stand. This isn’t about me for one second,” Steyer said. “There is a split here between the elected officials inside the Beltway, and American citizens. We need these hearings to bring the truth to the American people.”

“They voted for Congressman Nadler because they want some action,” he added. “That’s why they turned out.”

When pressed about using his PAC’s resources to back challengers to Nadler or other House Democrats, Steyer wouldn’t rule it out.

“I’m assuming all of these Democrats are going to listen to their constituents and go, ‘Oh my gosh, we really need to get this show on the road,’” he said.

In multiple interviews, however, the Judiciary Committee’s Democratic members pushed back on Steyer and revealed a united front in favor of Nadler’s strategy on impeachment.

“It’s a lot easier to govern from the outside than it is from the inside,” said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), a former police detective who praised Nadler’s “strategic and methodical” approach.

“Everybody’s frustrated,” Demings said of Steyer’s efforts. “But frustration alone is never enough to lead any type of hearing or investigation.”

Still, Nadler is taking concrete steps to placate his left flank, lawmakers say.

He’s vowed to continue pressing now-former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker about his brief supervision of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, even threatening to subpoena him for a deposition. Earlier this month, Nadler hired Norm Eisen, a former White House attorney in the Obama administration, and Barry Berke, a criminal defense lawyer specializing in white-collar crimes, as legal consultants for the committee. Both have openly mused about Trump’s alleged crimes, including obstruction of justice. And later this month, Nadler is expected to spearhead a legislative effort to reverse the president’s use of a national emergency declaration to build a border wall.

“They know abuse of power, they know obstruction of justice,” Cohen said of Eisen and Berke. “You can’t say that Chairman Nadler is not proceeding in the right direction and doing it in any way but a scholarly, diligent method — and that’s what we need to be successful.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who counts Steyer as a constituent of her San Francisco district, said the billionaire’s efforts are a “waste of time and money” and suggested that Steyer should focus his efforts on defeating Republicans rather than undermining Democrats.

“The fact is, you are by definition as an advocate dissatisfied, relentless and persistent. Whatever the electeds are doing is a compromise, it’s not the purity of what we want,” Pelosi said in an interview recently. “I understand that, but they have to also understand that if you’re going to succeed on the path that you’re on, you have to do it right.”

Republicans, meanwhile, are giddy at the prospect that Democrats are grappling with an insurgency within their own party. Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said Nadler is already bowing to the pressure from donors like Steyer, citing the Eisen and Berke hirings as evidence.

“Tom Steyer was trying to impeach the president in November 2016 — I mean, let’s get a break here,” Collins said in an interview. “It’s sad that you’re taking a chairman who has just taken over the committee for the first time in eight years, and you’re forcing him to do stuff that he knows is not practical at this point. I think it’s affecting a lot of our committee. It’s just sad.”

Yet those close to Nadler on the committee say he’s not worried about the pressure campaign and doesn’t believe a credible primary challenger could emerge. But Democrats who have been down this road before warned that Steyer’s efforts could backfire.

Julian Epstein, who served as chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s Democrats during the fight to impeach President Bill linton, said if Nadler bends to pressure from Steyer, he risks mirroring Republicans’ unsuccessful playbook when they tried — and failed — to oust Clinton from office 20 years ago.

“You don’t get to impeachment by politicizing it and trying to strong-arm potential allies,” Epstein said. “That will only misserve the goal of impeachment by branding it as liberal billionaires’ pet project rather than a constitutional undertaking driven by facts and law.”

Heather Caygle contributed to this report.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/19/tom-steyer-impeach-trump-1176009
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Andrew Desiderio

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Wednesday, February 13, 2019

The Dark History of Anti-Gay Innuendo

In March 1953, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover prepared a secret report for Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff. The document concerned Charles “Chip” Bohlen, whom Eisenhower had nominated to succeed George F. Kennan as ambassador to the Soviet Union. A career diplomat, Bohlen had served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interpreter at the 1945 Yalta Conference, where the Allied powers ceded control of postwar Eastern Europe to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. Bohlen’s involvement at Yalta made him suspect in the eyes of some Republicans, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, who tried to paint him as not only soft on the Soviets but also gay.

Washington at the time was in the grips not only of the Red Scare, but a more destructive (and less-remembered) “Lavender Scare.” In the popular imagination, communist disloyalty was intertwined with sexual immorality; communists were more likely to be “sexual deviants” and vice-versa. “I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual,” Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry had warned in 1950. “But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.”

Hoover’s report on Bohlen was a farrago of gossip and innuendo. “There is a definite shading in his conversation and in his manner of speech which indicates effeminacy,” one source claimed of Bohlen, who also had a “habit of running his tongue over his lip in the manner utilized by a woman” and was “quite girlish.” While another source admitted to having no relationship with Bohlen, he nonetheless volunteered to the FBI that, “Bohlen walks, acts and talks like a homosexual.” Bohlen, (who was, in fact, straight) was eventually confirmed as ambassador to the Soviet Union, and went on to have a long and distinguished Foreign Service career. He was later immortalized as one of the postwar “Wise Men” of American diplomacy.

Moral disgust was not the only consideration that made being gay a disqualifying trait for government service at the time; gays, it was widely believed, were also uniquely vulnerable to blackmail. So reprehensible was being gay, the thinking went, that a gay person would rather betray his country than risk exposure of his shameful secret. The month after Hoover composed his report on Bohlen, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which permitted the federal government to fire those suspected of “sexual perversion,” a euphemism for being gay. Over the ensuing decades, far more people (estimates range into the thousands) would lose their jobs over (real or alleged) homosexuality than suspected communist sympathies; many thousands more were denied jobs in the first place.

Fast-forward over six decades to the present, and the same smear tactics are being employed, again in service of a dubious narrative involving supposed corruption of presumed gay people by a hostile foreign power. Except this time, the inquisitionists are not reactionary Republicans, but supposedly enlightened progressives.

Last month, newly elected Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar posted a tweet about Lindsey Graham in which she shared a 2015 video of the South Carolina Senator denouncing then-candidate Donald Trump. “They got to him, he is compromised!” she wrote, emphasizing the degree to which Graham’s public posture towards Trump has changed since the latter became president. Two days earlier, Jon Cooper, chairman of a Democratic Super PAC which purports to be “the nation’s largest grassroots Resistance organization,” tweeted that “a Republican” had told him “he doubts [Graham] is kowtowing to Trump (and indirectly Putin) because he’s being blackmailed over his sexual orientation (an open secret) or even financial corruption. Rather, he thinks it probably involves some pretty serious sexual kink.” And that same day, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle speculated, “It could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”

It’s not hard to see what comments like these are insinuating, although Omar later denied she was referring to Graham’s sexual orientation. (MSNBC declined to comment on the record about Ruhle’s intended meaning.) Wholly unsubstantiated speculation about Graham‘s sexual orientation—based on nothing more than his bachelor status—have circulated for years. In 2012, for instance, author John Heilemann referred to Graham as a “woman” on Morning Joe. Others have been even less subtle. Last January, after Graham had positive words for Trump following a meeting with senators at the White House, comedian Chelsea Handler tweeted the following missive to her 8.3 million followers: “Hey, @LindseyGrahamSC what kind of #$%&-sucking video do they have on you for you 2 be acting like this? Wouldn’t coming out be more honorable?” She followed that up in October with, “If you’re wondering why Republicans took a sick day today, it’s probably because it’s #NationalComingOutDay. Looking at you @LindseyGrahamSC.” And this week, the Washington Blade, the capital’s LGBT newspaper, put Graham’s smiling mug on the cover of its “50 Most Eligible Bachelors” issue.

Graham, who declined to comment for this story, has denied he’s gay. But that’s not the point. Even if he secretly were, the accusation that he is therefore susceptible to blackmail is historically groundless, predicated upon the same flawed assumption most people held about gays at the height of the Cold War: that they would commit treason in order to avoid being outed.

But of all the Americans who did betray their country by committing espionage for a foreign power, there is not a single example of a gay person blackmailed into doing so. A 1991 study found that in the 117 spy cases discovered since World War II, only six involved gays, and in none of these was sexual orientation a deciding factor. That same year, asked about the impending outing of his spokesman, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney referred to the blackmail rationale as “an old chestnut” used to bar gay people unfairly from serving in sensitive government positions. To claim today, baselessly, that a closeted gay person is being blackmailed into working against his country, retroactively validates the Cold War persecution of gays, who could be denied security clearances until a 1995 Executive Order by Bill Clinton reversed Eisenhower’s mandate.

The sad irony is that the only informing some gay men and women did during this time was under duress from their own government, which pressured them into identifying fellow gay people so that they, too, could be purged. One of the sources in Hoover’s secret report on Bohlen was a gay man who, thanks to a “sixth sense,” claimed he could “separate the ‘queer’ from the men.” Another such informant, a former Department of Commerce employee named Thomas Tattersall, identified dozens of men and women as “homosexuals” to federal investigators. As reported by historian David K. Johnson in his book The Lavender Scare, government agents once forced Tattersall to phone a friend at the Department of Commerce so they could monitor the conversation. “Various homosexual terms were used,” they later reported, and the “tone of the conversation and the tone of voice” of the Interior employee were “definitely homosexual.” Like those who gay-bait Lindsey Graham today, assertions about an individual’s sexual deviancy in the 1950s and 60s were often based upon little more than stereotypes and conjecture.

In one of the few cases where the Soviets did try to blackmail a closeted gay man, their plans backfired. When the virulently anti-communist newspaper columnist Joe Alsop visited Moscow on a reporting trip in 1957, the KGB lured him into a honey trap with an attractive young agent and took photographs of the ensuing sexual encounter. Confronting Alsop with the dirty pictures, the KGB men demanded that he work on their behalf back in Washington. Yet rather than cower and do the Soviets’ bidding, Alsop archly asked for copies of the photos depicting him in flagrante delicto, hurried straight to the U.S. Embassy and revealed everything that had happened, including his history of gay experiences. Over the rest of his long career, despite knowing that the Soviets could have exposed him at any moment (and they tried), Alsop not only never softened his strident anti-communist views, he became even more assertive in espousing them.

It seems never to have entered the fevered imaginations of Graham’s antagonists that the reason he has changed his tune about Trump is not to protect the secret of his scandalous peccadilloes, but because of something even grubbier: politics. Graham is, after all, a Republican from a deep red state where Trump is popular with the people Graham needs to win re-election. But such quotidian explanations do not suit our increasingly conspiratorial times. Two years into Trump’s presidency, a large segment of the American left has become utterly unhinged about Russia. Initially expressing justified suspicions about a president with an unseemly fondness for Vladimir Putin, some now indiscriminately charge anyone who does not share their hostility to the president, or buy into their increasingly deranged theories, with being a Russian agent. By stooping to gay baiting, the McCarthyism of the “Resistance” has come full circle.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/13/the-dark-history-of-anti-gay-innuendo-224930
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The Article Was Written/Published By: James Kirchick

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Sunday, February 10, 2019

M 4.6 – 132km NNE of Palue, Indonesia

4.5+ Magnitude Earthquake Reported: M 4.6 – 132km NNE of Palue, Indonesia

Time: 2019-02-10 22:54:37 UTC; 2019-02-11 06:54:37 +08:00 at epicenter
Location: 7.303°S 122.987°E
Depth: 573.90 km (356.60 mi)

Source: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us2000jg44
Author: U.S. Geological Survey

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Texas councilman in crossfire for calling Democratic star a ‘bimbo’

A councilman who called new Democratic US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “bimbo” on Twitter has unleashed a firestorm of criticism. Scott Dunn of Richardson, Texas also slammed Ocasio-Cortez, a social media savvy star of the Democratic Party’s left wing, saying she had “nothing between her ear (sic)” for criticizing President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech.

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/texas-councilman-crossfire-calling-democratic-star-bimbo-233627729.html
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Tuesday, February 5, 2019

M 4.5 – 26km SE of Elmali, Turkey

4.5+ Magnitude Earthquake Reported: M 4.5 – 26km SE of Elmali, Turkey

Time: 2019-02-05 15:11:51 UTC; 2019-02-05 17:11:51 +02:00 at epicenter
Location: 36.595°N 30.150°E
Depth: 10.00 km (6.21 mi)

Source: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us2000jdne
Author: U.S. Geological Survey

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M 4.6 – 36km S of Jarm, Afghanistan

4.5+ Magnitude Earthquake Reported: M 4.6 – 36km S of Jarm, Afghanistan

Time: 2019-02-05 12:21:54 UTC; 2019-02-05 16:51:54 +04:30 at epicenter
Location: 36.538°N 70.849°E
Depth: 180.84 km (112.37 mi)

Source: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us2000jdku
Author: U.S. Geological Survey

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M 4.8 – 25km ENE of Gualaceo, Ecuador

4.5+ Magnitude Earthquake Reported: M 4.8 – 25km ENE of Gualaceo, Ecuador

DYFI? – IV

Time: 2019-02-05 09:53:04 UTC; 2019-02-05 04:53:04 -05:00 at epicenter
Location: 2.810°S 78.576°W
Depth: 89.43 km (55.57 mi)

Source: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us2000jdjs
Author: U.S. Geological Survey

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Sunday, February 3, 2019

Trapped in shrinking Syria holdout, IS turns to human shields

On a rooftop near the front line with the Islamic State group’s collapsing caliphate in eastern Syria, a US-backed fighter and his comrades sip tea as they await orders to restart the battle. The Syrian Democratic Forces halted their ground assault on IS’s final shreds of territory last week, saying the jihadists are increasingly using civilians as human shields to block the advance. In the desert hamlet of Baghouz, held mostly by the SDF, 22-year-old Mohammed Ibrahim Mohammed points towards a dirt mound separating areas under their control and the jihadists.