Thursday, 21 November 2019

Nearly ¾ of transgender people slain since 2017 killed with guns

Nearly ¾ of transgender people slain since 2017 killed with guns"Transgender violence is a gun violence issue," says Everytown for Gun Safety researcher




Pot stocks soar as U.S. House committee clears bill on federal weed legalization

Pete Buttigieg is the darling of the donor class. The debate was a reminder why

Pete Buttigieg is the darling of the donor class. The debate was a reminder whyThe South Bend mayor was in his typical form in the Democratic debate: heavy on rhetoric and light on specifics‘His statements, like his affect, seemed to have been designed by an algorithm to make no commitments and risk no offense.’ Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty ImagesOn Wednesday afternoon, the Biden campaign made a mistake: it prematurely sent out an email meant for later in the evening, after the Democratic presidential debate. “I’m leaving the fifth Democratic debate now,” the email opened, referring to an event that had not yet begun. “I hope I made you proud.” The email alluded to potential attacks on Warren, with the pointed line: “We need more than plans.”Those attacks from Biden never materialized. In fact, his performance was clumsy, light on substance, and studded with unforced errors much like that of his campaign’s misspent email. In the most memorable and upsetting moment of the night, Biden responded to a question about the MeToo movement and male violence against women by saying: “We need to keep punching at it, and punching at it, and punching at it.” The comment embraced the logic of violence as a means of dominance and control while pretending to condemn that same pattern. The audience laughed uncomfortably, and Biden did not seem to understand why. “I’m serious,” he said.The night may have been the worst in a series of embarrassing debate performances for Biden, and though he remains the frontrunner in many national polls, it is difficult to imagine these moments propelling him to the nomination, let alone the White House. Instead, the surging candidate of the moment is Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a non-committal moderate who has pulled ahead in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.Last month, when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was newly in the lead, that month’s debate featured strenuous attacks on her from the left and right, and many observers, including me, predicted that Buttigieg would face similar scrutiny this time around. But he did not: the other contenders pulled their punches and for most of the debate made only oblique references to his inexperience and dismal poll performance among the crucial demographic bloc of black voters.It is not clear why Buttigieg was not subject to the attacks that Warren was, but it is hard not to suspect that the other candidates were more comfortable attacking the progressive and outspoken Warren, a woman who has defined the terms of the ideological debate in the primary thus far and shifted the party decidedly to the left, than they were attacking the soft-spoken male polyglot from South Bend.For his part, Buttigieg was in his typical form, seeming to adapt to his new role in the top tier of early state candidates as if he has been expecting to be president since childhood. His answer to every question was plotted and delivered in a slow, emotionless recitation, as if he had practiced his sentences before, in a mirror. He was heavy on rhetoric and light on specifics, as befits the darling of the donor class. He pledged to bring the country together but did not explain how. His statements, like his affect, seemed to have been designed by an algorithm to make no commitments and risk no offense.Buttigieg did, however, manage to punch left, with a strange claim that programs such as Medicare for All, student debt forgiveness and free college are divisive, despite the huge numbers of Americans they would benefit. To bring people together, he reasoned, Democrats need to adopt lesser agendas that would leave many people behind. The left-punching mantle was taken up by his fellow moderate Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota, who claimed, falsely, that free college proposals like Warren’s have no financing plan. The trend was not new to the debates, but is symptomatic of a broader phenomenon of the Democratic party: the base has made increasingly loud demands that Democratic candidates follow them left, and the progressive wing of the party is following them there, to the establishment’s great chagrin.But the base was not neglected by everyone on stage. In one of the night’s biggest applause lines from the Atlanta audience, Kamala Harris emphasized the importance of black women to the Democratic electoral strategy, and lamented that these voters have been largely ignored. It was a subtle dig at Buttigieg, who has virtually no black support and who faces bleak electoral prospects in the early, majority-black primary contest in South Carolina. But the statement from Harris was also a moral reminder to Democrats to remember, acknowledge and work for black women, the voting constituency that most consistently drives them into office and is most consistently ignored or taken for granted in their policymaking.It was one of a few moments of moral reckoning over race and gender injustice on the stage. In a moment enabled by the uncommonly deft and conscientious intervention of the evenings’ four moderators, Warren brought the humanitarian crisis at the border into vivid relief. Klobuchar and Harris made appeals to women, with Klobuchar pointing out the double standards for women’s performance in professional settings and Harris emphasizing the injustice of women’s disproportionate responsibility for childcare and eldercare alike, often without access to any help from the state at all. The candidates were asked about the imperiled state of abortion rights in the country, with Warren emphasizing that abortion rights are human rights and economic rights. A question about MeToo yielded only that embarrassingly tone-deaf comment from Biden, but the mere fact that it was asked was a reminder that that party’s base is largely female.It will be women who decide who will become the Democratic nominee, and women who will propel that nominee into the White House. * Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist




Rudy Giuliani is now demanding an apology from the Republican counsel

Rudy Giuliani is now demanding an apology from the Republican counselPresident Trump's personal lawyer and fixer, Rudy Giuliani, found himself at the heart of the impeachment hearing on Wednesday after the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, implicated him in allegedly setting up a quid pro quo between the White House and Ukraine. Giuliani, needless to say, was not having it, going as far as to demand an apology from the GOP's own attorney.Republicans had attempted to dismiss Giuliani's activities in Ukraine as nothing but self-interested meddling, as to distance Trump from the possible scheme to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens. That was the line of questioning the GOP counsel, Steve Castor, pursued on Wednesday: "Granted, Mr. Giuliani had business interests in Ukraine," Castor suggested, prompting Sondland to answer "now I understand he did; I didn't know that at the time."> GOP counsel Steve Castor now advances the argument that Giuliani was acting on his own, and invokes his two indicted associates. Of course, throughout all of this Giuliani was Trump's lawyer and clearly acting on his behalf. pic.twitter.com/YMj1eTEPJi> > -- Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 20, 2019Giuliani hit back on Twitter: "Republican lawyer doesn't do his own research and preparation, and is instead picking up Democrat lies, shame," he tweeted. "Allow me to inform him: I have NO financial interests in Ukraine, NONE! I would appreciate his apology."Giuliani spent the day on the defensive on social media, tweeting earlier that "I never met with [Sondland]" and that there was "no quid pro quo." He later deleted that tweet. Read more about Giuliani's alleged interests in Ukraine here.More stories from theweek.com Trump tries to discredit diplomat's impeachment testimony moments before it begins Republicans are throwing Rudy Giuliani under the bus Ken Starr on the Sondland testimony: 'It's over'




Wat Misaka, First Nonwhite in Modern Pro Basketball, Dies at 95


By BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/2Oby50p

Woman fights charges after stepkids see her topless at home

Woman fights charges after stepkids see her topless at homeA Utah woman charged with a crime after her stepchildren saw her topless in her own home is fighting the case that could force her to register as a sex offender, pointing to a court ruling that overturned a topless ban in Colorado and helped fuel a movement. Tilli Buchanan’s attorneys argue that Utah’s law on lewdness involving a child is unfair because it treats men and women differently for baring their chests. Buchanan, 27, said she and her husband had taken off their shirts to keep their clothes from getting dusty while they hung drywall in their garage in a Salt Lake City suburb in late 2017 or early 2018.




Notes on the November Democratic Debate Dud

Notes on the November Democratic Debate DudOne thing lacking from the November Democratic presidential-primary debate was much debate. There were no fireworks — no truly memorable clashes between the candidates — and what didn’t happen was more notable than what did.On impeachment, the Democratic candidates didn’t strongly prosecute the case against Trump last night. The very first question went to Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who was asked whether she would work to persuade her Republican Senate colleagues to vote to convict Trump and, if so, how. “Of course I will,” Warren said. “And the obvious answer is to say, first, read the Mueller Report, all 442 pages of it, that showed how the president tried to obstruct justice, and when Congress failed to act at that moment, and that the president felt free to break the law again and again and again. And that's what's happened with Ukraine.”So, after four days of public televised hearings about the Ukraine scandal, Warren provided no actual explanation of what happened and what the hearings revealed. For the rest of her answer, she railed against giving ambassadorships to wealthy donors, a longstanding, bipartisan problem that she herself has enabled through Senate confirmation votes.Nevertheless, Warren probably did what she needed to do at Wednesday’s debate: She didn’t let her equivocations about Medicare for All destroy her campaign the way Kamala Harris’s equivocations destroyed hers. Warren’s campaign has stalled since the October Democratic debate, when South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg attacked her for wanting to force 160 million Americans off of private insurance and for having no realistic plan to pay for a single-payer health-insurance system. Warren responded by releasing a widely panned plan to raise $20 trillion in taxes for the $30 trillion program. She then announced that she would likely push for Medicare for All only after a three-year transitional phase, suggesting she wasn’t that committed to the plan.Warren survived last night not so much by the strength of her arguments, but because Buttigieg declined to press his advantage against her — he glancingly hit her plan early on but didn’t follow through — and Bernie Sanders declined to attack her from the left.Former vice president Joe Biden ended up making the strongest case against Medicare for All: He pointed out that it couldn’t pass even the Democratic House, much less a Democratic Senate. “Nancy Pelosi is one of those people who doesn't think it makes sense,” he said, before making the pitch for a public option. “I trust the American people to make a judgment what they believe is in their interest.” Compared to earlier debates, Biden put in a relatively lucid performance. He still committed at least one cringe-worthy gaffe: When he was touting the support of African-American leaders, he claimed that he was endorsed by the “only” female African-American senator in history, Carol Moseley Braun, with Harris, a female African-American senator, standing a few feet away. (He later claimed that he said “first.”)Finally, perhaps the most noteworthy non-event of the evening was the fact that Pete Buttigieg, who is surging in Iowa, escaped unscathed. No one hammered him for being a McKinsey consultant. It wasn’t until late in the debate that Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard went after his willingness “to send our troops to Mexico to fight the cartels.”“We've been doing security cooperation with Mexico for years, with law-enforcement cooperation and a military relationship that could continue to be developed with training relationships, for example,” Buttigieg replied. “Do you seriously think anybody on this stage is proposing invading Mexico?” Gabbard’s attack likely did more to endear her to isolationists on the right than to Democratic primary voters.All in all, it was a dull debate, and it did little to clarify the Democratic presidential primary, which is going to be eclipsed in the news for the next couple months by an impeachment vote in the House and a trial in the Senate that Democratic presidential candidates — including the senators whom it will take off the campaign trail — don’t want to talk about.