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September 30, 2020 ,

North Dakota tries ad campaign, not mask rule, to stem virusExecutives at a Bismarck marketing agency hired to help stem the tide of rising virus cases in central North Dakota say that's the mindset facing them with their campaign in the hot spot of a state that for weeks has been among the nation's leaders in the number of new virus cases per capita, according to The COVID Tracking Project. Agency MABU was hired by a governor's task force in Burleigh and Morton counties that is nearly six weeks into its effort and frustrated by the lack of progress in an area that includes the cities of Bismarck and Mandan. The state will soon follow with a nearly $2 million campaign of its own that dwarfs MABU's $76,800 media budget.




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September 30, 2020 ,

Who won the debate? Early polls say Joe Biden.Early polls show that Democratic nominee Joe Biden was the runaway winner of the first presidential debate, with CNN's survey showing a full 60 percent of Americans believe he won the night, compared to 28 percent who believe President Trump did — a two-to-one margin.> CNN instant poll of debate watcher: 60% say Biden won, 28% say Trump won. pic.twitter.com/5qIhkFQrwe> > — Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 30, 2020Other polls were a little tighter, with a CBS News poll of battleground states finding that 48 percent of debate watchers believed Biden won, compared to 41 percent who thought Trump did and 10 percent who thought it was a tie. "There was no winner, certainly not the United States," wrote Nate Cohn of The New York Times. "And that makes Biden the winner. He's the frontrunner. It's Trump who needed the win, and I think most anyone would agree, as Chris Wallace said, that the president was largely responsible for the debate." Trump trails Biden in RealClearPolitics' average of polls by 6.1 percent.More stories from theweek.com 3 reasons the stakes for the NBA Finals are extra high GOP Sen. Tim Scott calls for Trump to correct his Proud Boys comments: 'If he doesn't correct it, I guess he didn't misspeak' Trump pummels Biden — and America




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September 30, 2020 ,

Vatican Accuses Team Trump of Trying to Exploit Pope FrancisROME—U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not having a very good Roman holiday. His 30-plus car motorcade glided over the cobblestone streets of the uncharacteristically dreary, overcast Italian capital Wednesday morning for his second visit in a year. But rather than receiving a hero’s welcome, as he did last time—complete with a private audience with Pope Francis and a visit to his ancestral home outside of Rome, he was accused of trying to exploit the pope on President Trump’s behalf.The trilateral meeting between the U.S., Italy, and the Holy See should have been a pre-election opportunity to show that U.S. relations with Rome are stronger than ever. Instead, it was overshadowed by Italian headlines mocking Trump’s debate debacle in Ohio Tuesday night, topped off by an icy cold shoulder from Pope Francis, who refused to meet Pompeo this time around.Pompeo instead headlined an event called, “Advancing and Defending International Religious Freedom through Diplomacy,” put on by U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Callista Gingrich in a socially distanced conference room at the posh Excelsior Hotel on the Via Veneto near the U.S. embassy. Bishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican's Secretary for Relations with States, gave an address after Pompeo spoke, but the most he could give by way of papal blessing was to say, “His holiness is aware of this meeting.”When pressed earlier in the week about why the pontiff was seemingly snubbing Pompeo after having so warmly welcomed him just one year ago, the Vatican press office said the pope doesn't like to hold audiences with high ranking government officials so close to important elections. Immediately after speaking, ANSA news agency asked Gallagher to confirm if the reason “amounted to exploitation of the pope in the final stages of the U.S. presidential campaign.” Gallagher answered affirmatively, “Yes, that is precisely why the pope will not meet American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.”The pope was also said to be upset by Pompeo’s comments regarding the Holy See’s growing warmth with China and the renewal of a 2018 agreement that aims to bring Chinese Catholics into the fold by legitimizing the Beijing-mandated Chinese Catholic Church.Pompeo wasted no time on Gingrich’s stage in calling out such a move. “Nowhere is religious freedom under assault more than it is inside of China today,” Pompeo said. “As with all communist regimes, the Chinese Communist Party deems itself the ultimate moral authority.”Pompeo reportedly angered the pontiff earlier this month by pressuring the Vatican to abandon the agreement in the conservative Catholic magazine First Things. “The Holy See has a unique capacity and duty to focus the world’s attention on human rights violations, especially those perpetrated by totalitarian regimes like Beijing’s,” he wrote. “What the church teaches the world about religious freedom and solidarity should now be forcefully and persistently conveyed by the Vatican in the face of the Chinese Communist party’s relentless efforts to bend all religious communities to the will of the party and its totalitarian program.”The Chinese Catholic Church has been a priority for Francis since his election in 2013 and it would seem no amount of pressure from abroad will in any way deter the pope’s desire to give Chinese Catholics an opportunity to be blessed by the Vatican.Pompeo’s Roman itinerary also includes meetings with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, a member of the Five Star Movement, which has just called for many of their parliamentarians to isolate after a small COVID cluster seemed to be spreading among the party members. He will also get a private tour of the Borghese Gallery before being hosted at the ambassador’s residence for a small but glitzy dinner Wednesday night. Thursday, Pompeo will visit a Catholic charity that deals with Syrian refugees and meet privately with the Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, where China relations will top the agenda.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.




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September 30, 2020 ,

Seagram's heir faces sentencing in branded sex slave caseA wealthy benefactor of Keith Raniere, the disgraced leader of a self-improvement group in upstate New York convicted of turning women into sex slaves who were branded with his initials, faces sentencing Wednesday in the federal conspiracy case. Seagram’s liquor fortune heir Clare Bronfman is due to appear in federal court in Brooklyn. Bronfman, 41, admitted in a guilty plea last year that she harbored someone who was living in the U.S. illegally for unpaid “labor and services” and that she committed credit card fraud on behalf of Raniere, leader of the group called NXIVM.




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September 30, 2020 ,

Coronavirus antibody cocktail shortens recovery time, new data showsNew data on Regeneron's coronavirus monoclonal antibody cocktail shows the drug is "moving in the right direction," Stat News reports.A high dose of the cocktail led viral levels to decrease more quickly in non-hospitalized patients. The drug also appeared to have a bigger effect in COVID-19 patients who had not created high levels of antibodies on their own, shortening their recovery time, even at a lower dose.Regeneron's chief scientific officer George Yancopoulos said "we are highly encouraged by the robust and consistent nature of these initial data," adding that the company is discussing its findings with regulatory authorities while trials continue.Non-affiliated observers like Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Translation Institute, meanwhile, told Stat that the data looks good so far, but "you just can't say much about how transformative this is going to be." Topol doesn't believe the treatment is ready for any sort of emergency authorization.Still, the data comes on the heels of other promising results from Eli Lilly's monoclonal antibody candidate, adding to the hope that they could play a significant role in combating the virus. Read more at Stat News.More stories from theweek.com 3 reasons the stakes for the NBA Finals are extra high GOP Sen. Tim Scott calls for Trump to correct his Proud Boys comments: 'If he doesn't correct it, I guess he didn't misspeak' Trump pummels Biden — and America




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September 30, 2020 ,

Sonic boom heard in Paris and suburbs caused by fighter jet breaking sound barrierA loud blast heard throughout Paris on Wednesday briefly caused panic as edgy residents feared a bombing five days after a terrorist attack outside the former offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The noise was caused by a sonic boom as a military jet broke the speed of sound, police said. Pierre Duclos, who was in a café around the corner from the site of the attack on Friday when the explosion-like noise was heard, said: “Everyone looked at each other and a few people got up and went outside. For a while, we thought another terrorist attack was coming and we were all shocked. Some people asked the café owner to close and lock the door. I was here on Friday and frankly I was really worried again today.




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September 30, 2020 ,

‘Fox & Friends’ Hosts Look On in Horror as Rudy Giuliani Blurts Out Biden Dementia Conspiracy TheoryEveryone knows that live television isn’t easy. Anything can go wrong—from a faulty connection, a verbal slip-up, or, as was the case on Tuesday morning’s Fox & Friends, Rudy Giuliani bellowing insane conspiracy theories at the nation with no obvious way to stop him.It’s always a risk to allow Giuliani to share his wildly unpredictable stream of consciousness live. The man who was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2001 has long since been reduced to sharing the latest Trumpist conspiracy theories on any cable news channel that has the budget to cover any possible subsequent defamation lawsuits.This time, his F&F hosts looked on with visible horror in their eyes as Giuliani shared his completely baseless belief that Joe Biden is suffering from dementia. If you have the time, it’s worth watching the clip at least three times so you can see each of the hosts panicking in their own unique way as the former New York City mayor rambles on and on.> On Fox & Friends, Rudy Giuliani says Joe Biden "has dementia. There's no doubt about it. I've talked to doctors. ... The president's quite right to say maybe he's taken adderall." The hosts get visibly uncomfortable. pic.twitter.com/2Ma7DKNBpS> > — Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 29, 2020With a mischievous cackle, Giuliani began: “The man [Biden] has dementia. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve talked to doctors. I’ve had them look at a hundred different tapes of his five years ago and today.” Trying his very best to shut Giuliani down, host Steve Doocy interjected that Biden’s team has said the Democrat has no serious medical problems.Giuliani then made an extraordinary noise at Doocy that can best be typed as “Oowughawughawugh,” before continuing: “He can’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance and he’s fine? He was in the Senate for 160 years? I mean, he can’t do the prologue to the... to the... con... to the... uh... Constitution of the United States or the Declaration of Independence, any of them.”Getting louder and increasingly excited about his armchair diagnosis, Giuliani went on: “He can’t do NUMBERS. Wow, are the numbers screwed up. He actually displays symptoms that two gerontologists told me are classic symptoms of middle level dementia.” Doocy and co-host Ainsley Earhardt both responded to that claim by softly saying, “Right.” The third host, Brian Kilmeade, can just be seen blinking rapidly.Fox News Lobotomizes Its ‘Brain Room,’ Cuts Fact-Based JournalismNevertheless, Giuliani persisted. “That’s when [Biden] does that ‘I pledge allegiance to the United States... uh... uh... um... I think,’ he’s done that twice,” said the ex mayor. “That’s a classic symptom in the DSM-V, it’s the fifth symptom, of dementia, he’s got eight of the 10.”Then, seemingly remembering that he was on the show to talk about tonight’s presidential debate, he went on: “Look, that isn’t the debate. He can get through it. I think the president is quite right to say maybe he’s taken Adderall or some kind of attention deficit disorder thing.”As Giuliani began pulling prescription medicine brands out of the air, Doocy had finally had enough and told him firmly, “None of us are doctors, that is your opinion.” Giuliani fought back, saying it was actually the opinion of some very professional-sounding doctors that he knows.But the game was up. Kilmeade, in his first verbal interjection of the entire exchange, said with exasperation, “We can stay away from that.” Earhardt then moved on to pick Giuliani’s brain on the Supreme Court.This particular line of attack is one that Giuliani—whose work as President Trump’s lawyer and top dirt-digger on Hunter and Joe Biden kicked off a chain of events that got his client impeached last year—has enthusiastically embraced as one of his primary functions now for Team Trump.Shortly before midnight on Monday night, Giuliani started texting The Daily Beast to say that Trump did “great” in recent White House debate prep (for which the president said on Sunday that Giuliani and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie took part), and to rail against Biden as a “senile,” “broken down old crook” who’s supposedly suffering from “dementia” and needs “ADD drugs” to get through the Tuesday debate. The Trump attorney also claimed that someone had told him how stupid Biden was in law school.Giuliani also mentioned late Monday evening that he’d be flying with Trump on Air Force One on Tuesday and would be at the Cleveland debate. Asked about what kinds of questions he peppered the president with during the prep, the former New York City mayor replied, “It really doesn’t work like that with him. It’s much more of a discussion rather than a rehearsal. Plus you are dealing with a very smart, very alert human being, not a senile old man.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.




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September 30, 2020 ,

White House says there's no need to clarify Trump's response to white supremacists debate questionPresident Trump's team doesn't think he did anything wrong at Tuesday's night's debate, especially when it came to denouncing white supremacists.Trump's refusal to denounce far-right extremists led even Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade to declare the president blew "the biggest layup in the history of debates" and ask Trump to "clear it up." But when Fox News tried to do just that with White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah on Wednesday morning, Farah said "I don't think that there's anything to clarify. He told them to stand back."> Sandra Smith: "The president saying, 'Proud Boys, stand back and stand by', does the White House or the president want to clarify or explain what he meant by that, because they're celebrating it, the group."> > WH Comms director: "I don't think that there's anything to clarify." pic.twitter.com/Qome1VjVmY> > — Lis Power (@LisPower1) September 30, 2020Trump campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley also didn't think there was anything wrong with Trump telling the far-right Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." "He wants them to get out of the way," Gidley said.> “He wants [Proud Boys] to get out of the way. He wants them to not do the things they say they want to do. This is a reprehensible group,” says the Trump campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley on what Trump meant during the debate when he asked the far-right group to “stand by.” pic.twitter.com/J3sHZ0LRJb> > — New Day (@NewDay) September 30, 2020But Proud Boy members didn't take it that way. As NBC News reports, the group's chat rooms and social media accounts lit up with praise for Trump after his refusal to denounce them, and some even turned Trump's words into a meme and rallying cry, calling Trump the "general of the Proud Boys."More stories from theweek.com 3 reasons the stakes for the NBA Finals are extra high GOP Sen. Tim Scott calls for Trump to correct his Proud Boys comments: 'If he doesn't correct it, I guess he didn't misspeak' Trump pummels Biden — and America




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September 30, 2020 ,

Shepard Smith: Fox News’ Chris Wallace Won’t Tolerate Lies at Presidential DebateShepard Smith’s new CNBC show is called simply The News. And with that in mind, the former Fox News anchor is trying his best to play everything right down the middle.Ahead of his premiere this Wednesday, Smith appeared on his new network colleague Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, where he offered up a series of non-committal, both-sides takes on the biggest news events of the week.Smith got in one joke about Donald Trump writing off $70,000 in hairstyling expenses but otherwise said he didn’t expect the bombshell report on the president’s tax returns to change any voters’ minds. He similarly had little to say about the coming Supreme Court fight, telling Fallon, “Whether it’ll affect the election or not, it probably will, you just don’t know which way it’s going to play.”“Will conservatives be so happy about it that they come out and vote for more?” he asked. “Or will Democrats and people on the left say we can’t let this happen again and come out and vote in bigger numbers? I don’t think we’ll know until we know.”The anchor said definitively that there is no evidence of widespread fraud in vote-by-mail, but couldn’t bring himself to criticize Trump for refusing to agree to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose, only saying, “I’m not exactly sure what it is he is trying to accomplish.”Smith’s strongest convictions seemed to come when Fallon asked about Tuesday’s night debate, which will be moderated by his former Fox colleague Chris Wallace. Stephen Colbert Unloads on ‘Fake Billionaire’ Trump for Massive Tax Grift“I expect Chris Wallace to be prepared,” Smith said. “Nobody who has watched Chris Wallace thinks [anything] other than that he is a very tough, very thoroughly prepared journalist. And he has said repeatedly over the years, to me and publicly, ‘My job is to stay out of the way and be unnoticed as much as possible.’”“But he’s not one to let a falsehood or a misrepresentation or a ‘look over here’ kind of shiny object thing just slide by the way,” he continued. “He will hold them [accountable]. Both of them. He’s not a partisan guy. He’s searching for truth. He’s trying to speak truth to power. And trying to get information to the public. That’s what all journalists want to do.”It’s the same thing Smith is trying to do at CNBC after spending 23 long years at Fox News. “We’re not going to have pundits, we’re not going to have opinion,” he said. “We’ll bring you facts. The facts, the truth, the news.”Ex-Fox News Anchor Shepard Smith Vows to Fight Disinformation With New CNBC Show“Sometimes people live in a world of just lies,” he added. “And when that’s happening and it rises to the public discourse, we’ll point it out.” Drawing an implicit contrast with Fox, Smith said, “We want to be a source of truth and honesty and we’ll hold truth to power because that is our job.”“The Founding Fathers didn’t only put journalism in the Constitution for no reason,” he said. “They put it there because it is important and journalists have a responsibility to get it right and tell it straight and that’s what we’re going to do.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.




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September 29, 2020 ,

Fighting rages in Nagorno-Karabakh as Erdogan calls for Armenia to end 'occupation'Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has told Armenia to end its "occupation" of the flashpoint region of Nagorno-Karabakh amid a second day of fighting that claimed 21 more lives. Armenian forces have been in fierce clashes with Azerbaijan's troops in the region since Sunday, in the most severe flare-up of violence there for decades. On Monday, Mr Erdogan said the time has come to end the long-running crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, which broke away from Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally, in the 1990s after a bloody separatist war. "The time has come for the crisis in the region that started with the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh to be put to an end," Mr Erdogan said. "Once Armenia immediately leaves the territory it is occupying, the region will return to peace and harmony." Meanwhile, the president of Armenia, Armen Sarkissian, claimed that Ankara had provided F-16 fighter jets to support its ally. There were competing claims about fighting on the ground from both sides as forces from the two ex-Soviet neighbours pounded each other with rockets and artillery in the fiercest explosion of the conflict in more than a quarter of a century. In Nagorno-Karabakh said residents had taken cover in bomb shelters and constant shelling could be heard. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the ceasefire to the war in the 1990s," said Olesya Vartanyan, senior analyst for the South Caucasus region at Crisis Group, told Reuters. "The fighting is taking place along all sections of the front line.” Armenian officials said that another 15 of their soldiers had died, on top of 16 killed when hostilities first broke on Sunday. They added that "fights of various intensity” were “raging on", and that four Azerbaijani helicopters and 36 Azerbaijani tanks and APCs had been destroyed. Azerbaijan said that only one helicopter had been downed and that Armenian air defence systems had been heavily bombed. Both sides also accused each other of sending mercenaries who had fought in Syria into the conflict. Armenia's ambassador to Russia claimed that Turkey had sent 4,000 Syrian fighters that it had previously sponsored to fight against Syria's president Bashar-al Assad. Meanwhile, an Azerbaijani military spokesman, Colonel Vagif Dargahli, said that "mercenaries of Armenian origin from Syria" had been killed during the fighting. Neither Turkey nor Azerbaijan have so far offered any evidence to support their claims about the hired guns, although Turkey is widely believed to have sent Syrian mercenaries to back its allies in the Turkish-supported government in Libya. The clashes have led to fears that the conflict - effectively "frozen" for nearly 30 years - could now return to the full-blown hostilities of the 1990s, when 30,000 lives were lost. Although Nagorno-Karabakh has been under effective Armenian control since then, the territory is still regarded internationally as part of Azerbaijan, which wants to reclaim it.




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September 29, 2020 ,

Wisconsin justices weigh removal of 130K from voter rollsThe Wisconsin Supreme Court weighed Tuesday whether to go along with conservatives who argue that 130,000 voters should be removed from the rolls in the hotly contested presidential battleground state, while the Democratic attorney general defended not purging them. The Wisconsin case is one of several lawsuits across the country, many in battleground states, that seek to purge voters from registration rolls. It is being closely watched because President Donald Trump won the swing state by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016.




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September 29, 2020 ,

We want our shark tooth back, Malta tells Prince GeorgeIt was the sort of kind, grandfatherly gesture that brings a bit of light and joy to these dark, worrying times. When David Attenborough gave an ancient shark’s tooth to Prince George at the weekend, the little boy’s face lit up with delight. The seven-year-old was thrilled to be told the tooth once belonged to a megalodon, an extinct species of giant shark that could grow to a length of more than 50ft. He was given the tooth when Sir David attended a private viewing of his latest documentary, A Life On Our Planet, with members of the royal family. As any parent knows, tantrums and tears await anyone who has the temerity to try to take back such a precious gift. But that’s exactly what Malta apparently plans to do.




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September 29, 2020 ,

Charges still uncertain for Trump aide Parscale. It may depend on what his wife decides.Two days after police seized 10 guns and hospitalized demoted former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale following a confrontation with police at his waterfront home in Fort Lauderdale, it remained unclear if the analytics guru will face any criminal charges.




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September 29, 2020 ,

Virus sows dread in India's festival season as infections cross six millionIndia reported on Monday that novel coronavirus infections had topped 6 million, nowhere near the number required for herd immunity in country of 1.3 billion people, and raising anxiety going into the peak period for Hindu religious festivals. India added a million cases in just 11 days, according to a Reuters tally of government data, and it has the second-highest number of infections, behind the United States which crossed 7 million last week. India's festival season, which climaxes in October and November with the popular Hindu celebrations of Dussehra and Diwali, poses additional challenges, as officials try to dampen the usual large public celebrations and cross-country travel.




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September 29, 2020 ,

The Democrats’ Frivolous Three-Pronged Attack on Judge BarrettDoing some commentary over the weekend about President Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I was struck by not just the emptiness but the outright deceptiveness of the three main Democratic lines of attack against her. These are early days, so perhaps Barrett’s opposition will find something of substance that gains some traction. For now, the main salvos against her are frivolous:(1) President Trump has a litmus test for nominees, who must take predetermined positions that support his policy agenda; (2) Relatedly, Judge Barrett will “destroy” the Affordable Care Act, consideration of which comes up on the Supreme Court’s oral-argument docket the week after Election Day; and (3) Barrett, a devout Catholic, is on a crusade to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973).I will take these in order.*    *    *1\. Litmus TestThere is no evidence that President Trump has imposed a litmus test on judges whom he would nominate to the Supreme Court. That Democrats say there is a litmus test, tirelessly, on every media platform available to them, is not proof of anything other than a campaign to drive a fact-free political narrative into the public’s consciousness. Specifically, there is no evidence that Judge Barrett, in order to be nominated, had to agree to take the Trump administration’s position of staunch opposition to Obamacare and abortion. As I noted on the Corner earlier today, it is not unusual for Trump-appointed judges to rule against the administration.Nor is there any indication that Judge Barrett would be amenable to a litmus test. Consistent with her personal character, scholarship, and jurisprudence, as well as the example of her mentor, Justice Scalia, Barrett emphatically rejects the premise that it is the judge’s role to impose policy preferences — whether the judge’s or anyone else’s — on the nation. She has demonstrated that she believes the judge’s task is to decide issues that arise in litigation based on the applicable law as it was understood at the time of its adoption, guided by the law’s text and judicial precedent. If Barrett is confirmed, she will confine herself, as she has done on the Seventh Circuit, to resolving the cases that come before her in such a manner. That is a hard enough job to do faithfully without looking for dragons to slay.2\. Eradicating ObamacareThe notion that Judge Barrett, or for that matter the other Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, are on the warpath against the Affordable Care Act is laughable. The ACA issue is being contorted into a convenient political talking point in the stretch-run of a presidential campaign because President Trump, foolishly and reportedly against the advice of Attorney General Barr, has supported a weak legal challenge to the law. The case is California v. Texas, and the justices are scheduled to hear arguments about it on November 10.In my view, this is a rare case of conservative judicial activism, which itself is very unconservative. That is, Texas federal district judge Reed O’Connor, who is a fine judge, erred in this case by doing what conservatives properly fault liberal judges for doing: He imposed a policy preference, rather than deciding the case in accordance with the law and leaving policymaking to Congress.In 2017, with Republicans controlling the House and Senate and with President Trump’s support, Congress zeroed out the penalty for non-compliance with the Obamacare individual mandate. Notwithstanding scores of proposals to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Congress did not do so; lawmakers left the remainder of the complex legislative scheme in place.Even so, 18 attorneys general from red states, aping the destructive practice of their blue state counterparts, filed a lawsuit theorizing that Congress had implicitly done what it had actually declined to do, namely, repeal the ACA. Essentially, the red-state AGs (a) pointed out that the Supreme Court (thanks to the legerdemain of Chief Justice Roberts) had upheld the ACA as a tax in the 2012 case of National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius (NFIB); (b) asserted that this rationale for upholding the ACA is no longer valid because Congress’s 2017 zeroing out of the penalty (in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) means the mandate cannot be a tax, there being no tax without a penalty; and (c) therefore argued that, since the mandate was so central to the ACA, the entire ACA must fall. For standing purposes, the 18 states were joined by two individuals alleging concrete harm, and were supported by the Trump Justice Department (under then-attorney general Jeff Sessions).In late 2018, Judge O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, agreed with the Republican AGs that the mandate could no longer be construed as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power. Thus, he reasoned, since the tax construction was what saved the ACA from constitutional infirmity in NFIB, and since that construction is no longer justifiable after the 2017 legislation, the mandate is perforce unconstitutional. Moreover, because the mandate is inextricably tied to key components of Obamacare (including coverage of people with preexisting conditions), O’Connor deduced that it is not severable from the rest of the ACA, meaning the ACA is unconstitutional in toto.Subsequently, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed Judge O’Connor’s decision that the mandate is unconstitutional. But the appellate court did not uphold O’Connor’s inseverability finding, reasoning that the issue called for a more “granular” analysis. It therefore remanded the case to O’Connor for a more exacting inquiry. California — leading a coalition of 19 states plus the District of Columbia that support the ACA — pressed for an immediate Supreme Court review, arguing that the implications for public health care were too important to abide further doubt and delay. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.It takes more effort to provide that description of the litigation than to tackle the bottom line. To my mind, the only question about the Supreme Court’s resolution of California v. Texas is whether a single justice will vote to hold the whole of the ACA unconstitutional. I doubt it.Indeed, I am skeptical that a majority of the Court will even agree with Judge O’Connor and the Fifth Circuit that the mere zeroing out of a tax is the functional equivalent of repealing it, such that the mandate, technically, is no longer a tax. Regardless, though, the Court is not going to hold that the mandate is inseverable from the rest of Obamacare. You can take that to the bank.We can be confident that there are at least five, and probably six, solid votes for severability. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh emphatically endorsed the presumption in favor of severability just last term (here and here). Justice Alito agreed with them, as did the three liberal justices remaining on the Court after Justice Ginsburg’s death — Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan — who will surely vote to preserve as much of the ACA as possible. Furthermore, I suspect Justices Thomas and Gorsuch will side with this majority — and if they don’t, their position is apt to be even more deferential to Congress. They have each suggested that the Court get out of the business of analyzing severability and simply refuse to uphold any portions of a statute found to be invalid, leaving the rest up to lawmakers. In addition, they would be very stingy about who has standing to challenge statutes based on alleged harms.Contrary to the claim that there is a Trump litmus test that requires killing Obamacare, there is actually no reason to assume that the Trump appointees already on the Supreme Court (Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) are going to vote to invalidate the ACA. The best bet on what a Justice Barrett would do is that she would either (a) agree to follow the presumption in favor of severability that the Court has recently reaffirmed; or (b) question whether the plaintiffs challenging the ACA have standing and whether the Court should do any severability analysis relating to parts of the ACA that are not properly before the Court.Of course, I could be wrong. Judge Barrett is very smart, and she could have an analysis that none of us Court-watchers have thought of. Still, there is no basis to believe that she is on a mission to eradicate the ACA. This is an unfounded political talking point.Politically speaking, President Trump shot himself in the foot by ordering the Justice Department to support the red-state lawsuit. It has little or no chance of prevailing, and it makes him vulnerable to the false charge that he favors eliminating coverage for pre-existing conditions at a time when COVID-19 and high unemployment have intensified voter concerns about access to health insurance. Naturally, since one of the Democrats’ main campaign themes is that Trump is bent on eliminating Obamacare, they are telling people that getting Judge Barrett on the Court is part of that plan.To the contrary, Barrett does not believe it is the federal judiciary’s role to make health-care policy. There is scant reason to presume that she would invalidate the ACA, and every reason to suspect she’d point out that doing so is up to Congress, which could have repealed it but opted not to.3\. Overruling Roe v. WadeNo Supreme Court appointment by a Republican president would be complete without the Left’s obligatory hysteria about the purportedly imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, that indefensible exercise in judicial lawlessness whose atrocious consequences include the deaths of millions of unborn children. Once again, it’s a political narrative with little foothold in the real world.As I pointed out when then-judge Kavanaugh was nominated, the Roe argument is ill-founded. For over a quarter-century, we have been under the sway not of Roe but of Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Casey gutted Roe’s reasoning, but left the judicially manufactured right to abortion intact. It also dramatically altered the arc of abortion litigation by acknowledging the interest of states in protecting public health and unborn life. Consequently, the legal fights over abortion now tend to center on regulation — i.e., does a regulation of abortion that a state enacts further the state’s legitimate interests, and does it so interfere with the availability of abortion that the woman’s right of access to the procedure is rendered illusory? The core “right” posited by Roe is not threatened by such challenges.If a state were to try to ban abortion, that would immediately prompt a federal lawsuit challenging the law. The federal district court, being bound to apply Roe regardless of the judge’s own moral or legal views on the subject, would instantly invalidate the state provision (contrary to liberal caricature, conservative judges do not refuse to apply binding precedent, regardless of their personal feelings about it). If there were an appeal, the relevant federal appellate court would uphold Roe, and the Supreme Court would almost certainly decline to review the case. This is not a sure thing, but I suspect it is close to sure, much as I personally wish it were not.On the other hand, in the more likely event that a state enacted a regulation that made abortion access more difficult, there would quickly be a federal lawsuit challenging the provision under Casey, not Roe. The Supreme Court decided such a case this past term, prioritizing access to abortion over state public-health regulation. Even if one assumed that a Justice Barrett would look sympathetically on state regulation of abortion, as Justice Scalia did, that would not eradicate the Roe abortion right.Finally, let’s explore what the Left never mentions. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake and against all indicia to the contrary, the unlikely event that the Supreme Court went out of its way to overturn Roe, after nearly half a century and despite its recent emphasis on the supposed centrality of stare decisis (the doctrine of adhering to precedent). Doing so would not criminalize, much less end, abortion in the United States.As Justice Scalia repeatedly explained, “The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand, but the Constitution does not require them to do so.” If Roe were overturned, the matter would be returned to the states, where it should have been in the first place — and would have been had the justices not presumptuously intervened in 1973, to the great detriment of the Court’s reputation as a non-political judicial institution and of the judicial-confirmation process.If Roe were overruled, some very left-leaning states, such as New York and California, would enact a regime of abortion-on-demand. Some very conservative states, such as Alabama and Mississippi, would enact significant limitations on abortion or perhaps even ban it outright. But access to abortion, while more limited in some places, would not cease to exist. Would the increased burden seem intolerable to pro-abortion activists? Of course it would. Just as for those of us on the other side, who believe that abortion is the taking of innocent human life, the continued availability of abortion would seem intolerable. That is how democracy in a federalist republic is supposed to work.*    *    *There is no Trump litmus test for Supreme Court appointees. The Court is not poised to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, with or without Judge Barrett. Roe survived 30 years of searing dissents by Justice Scalia; it will likely survive a Justice Amy Coney Barrett. And regrettably, abortion will survive no matter what happens.




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September 29, 2020 ,

Why Trump voters just don't care about his taxesThe revelation, per Sunday's New York Times report, that President Trump paid little to no federal income tax in recent years will redirect the conversation at Tuesday night's general election debate. But will it redirect any meaningful number of votes?I suspect not, not even among the president's most reluctant supporters.In broad strokes, there are two reasons to vote for Trump in 2020: liking who he is or liking what (you think) he'll do. This is an artificial separation of two rationales that often overlap, but let's call them the personality voter and the transactional voter.The personality voter likes how crude and cunning Trump is. She proudly brands herself "a deplorable" in reference to Hillary Clinton's infamous 2016 remark. She thinks it's funny when Trump riles his enemies, who, not coincidentally, are her enemies, too. This strain of Trump support tends to have a strong populist flavor, where supporting Trump gives "a collective middle finger" to political and cultural elites this voter despises and whom she believes despise her in turn.For the personality voter, Trump's ability to avoid paying income taxes is untroubling. It's far from the first violation of establishment norms she has vicariously enjoyed through her candidate. If anything, she agrees, as he said at a 2016 debate with Clinton, that successful tax avoidance "makes [him] smart." The populist hypocrisy Trump's critics see here won't register.Personality isn't necessarily relevant for the transactional voter, our second type. In some cases, Trump's personality helps him deliver on his side of the transaction. If the thing a voter wants from Trump is to own the libs, for example, his personality is an asset. But if the thing desired involves a policy or program, Trump's personality might be immaterial or actually detrimental. Many purely transactional voters would willingly — maybe far more willingly — vote for any candidate who would do what they want Trump to do. Their vote isn't for Trump qua Trump but for Trump qua the candidate they think is most likely to provide what they want."I voted for the Supreme Court. I didn't want to vote for Trump," an archetypal transactional Trump voter named Jim George told The Washington Post in 2017. "With Trump, you just hold your nose."A transactional Trump voter in 2020 is already holding his nose too firmly to catch a whiff of these tax returns. If he's decided everything Trump has said and done over the past four years does not tip the scales against whatever good he believes will come from re-electing the president, the tax story won't do it, either. It definitely won't turn him into a Joe Biden voter, and I'm skeptical that it could even keep him home, because Trump's personal life is irrelevant to his provision of whatever benefit(s) is anticipated.The transactional voter is already under contract. He's had ample time to inspect Trump, and he didn't find anything that made him want to back out of the deal.There is one scenario in which that arrangement might fall through, and that's if Trump's personal financial circumstances rendered him unable to hold up his end of the imagined bargain. But how would that happen? Or rather, how would the transactional voter become convinced it had happened were he satisfied with Trump's performance to date?The Times reported Trump has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt for which he is personally liable coming due over the next four years, possibly including around $100 million owed to the IRS should the agency decide a large tax rebate was improperly obtained. These are staggering numbers for us little people to contemplate, but if he holds onto the presidency, Trump is expected simply to obtain extensions on his loans and use his office however he can to mitigate his personal financial catastrophe. It would be an enormous debacle, very possibly leading to another impeachment or special counsel investigation and distracting the president from whatever his part of the transaction is supposed to be.Well, so what? Trump's first four years have had an enormous debacle every week, and an impeachment and special counsel investigation, too. Trump accomplished relatively little of his policy promises, certainly none of the headlines. The wall is not built; the swamp is not drained; not a single one of the "endless wars" is ended; the American steel industry did not come roaring back to life. Trump's most significant fulfilled promise — nominating conservative justices to the Supreme Court — was the one over which he arguably had the least influence: He could not know whether or when there would be a vacancy, and he was undoubtedly responsible for few, if any, of the names on his shortlist.If this level of distraction and failure is acceptable to the transactional voter, a second-term Trump fighting foreclosure and the IRS is too.More stories from theweek.com 'Sully' Sullenberger savages Trump's 'lethal lies and incompetence' in new Lincoln Project ad Disney will lay off 28,000 theme park employees after months of coronavirus furloughs Trump reportedly made tens of millions in the Great Recession by partnering with multilevel marketing companies




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September 29, 2020 ,

Justice Ginsburg buried at Arlington in private ceremonySupreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was buried Tuesday in a private ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, laid to rest beside her husband and near some of her former colleagues on the court. Washington last week honored the 87-year-old Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18, with two days where the public could view her casket at the top of the Supreme Court's steps and pay their respects. On Friday, the women's rights trailblazer and second woman to join the high court lay in state at the U.S. Capitol, the first woman to do so.




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September 28, 2020 ,

S. Korea's Moon apologizes over handling of killing by NorthSouth Korean President Moon Jae-in apologized for the first time Monday for the death of a man who was shot by North Korean troops last week, saying his government failed in its responsibility to safeguard a citizen. The shooting triggered outrage and criticism that Seoul apparently wasted hours to rescue the South Korean official who was found adrift in North Korean waters before his death last Tuesday. While the shooting drew a rare apology from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North has largely passed the blame to the man who was killed, saying that he refused to answer questions and attempted to flee before North Korean troops fired at him.




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September 28, 2020 ,

Turkey Sends ISIS Warlord to Azerbaijan to Face-Off Against Putin’s Armenian AlliesISTANBUL, Turkey—On Sunday afternoon, a video depicting a large convoy of Islamist Syrian rebel fighters yelling enthusiastically as they drove off to war circulated widely on Arabic social media. Fighters in the packed trucks, driving quickly past the group of children filming with their phones, could be heard yelling “Allahu Akbar!” and, “our leader, till’ the end of time, is our master, Muhammad!”However what shocked those watching the video weren’t the shouts of the Syrian fighters but rather those of the children filming, who yelled back at the soldiers in a language unfamiliar to most Syrians following their country’s nine-year war. “That’s not Kurdish, right?” said one user in an online group where the video emerged. “If they were Kurds you think they’d be cheering them on?” responded another with a laugh out loud emoji.After several hours rumors swirled that the video was shot in Azerbaijan, a small Turkic speaking nation nudged between Iran and Russia and that the Syrian rebel fighters had been sent there to prop up the Azeri government in its a war against it’s neighbor Armenia that had begun that day. According to high-ranking Syrian rebel sources that spoke to The Daily Beast, these rumors are true. The fighters that appeared in the circulated video were part of a group of 1,000 Syrian rebel soldiers sent in two batches from Turkey on 22 and 24 September 2020.“500 Hamza Brigade fighters were flown last Tuesday from southern Turkey to the Azeri airbase at Sumqayit [30 kilometers north of the Azeri capital of Baku]”, according to a source within the Syrian National Army (SNA) rebel outfit who requested anonymity. “Two days later, on Thursday, another 500 fighters from the Sultan Murad brigades rebel faction were similarly flown out to Azerbaijan”.These claims were echoed by the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Syrian opposition body that monitors human rights violations in the country whose sources suggested more batches of Syrian rebel fighters were preparing to be deployed to Azerbaijan.The Hamza and Sultan Murad brigades are known within Syrian rebel circles as factions that enjoy especially close relations with Turkey, the last remaining patron of the Syrian opposition. Sayf Balud, commander of the Hamza brigades, however, is also known for his checkered past, in particular, as a former commander within the radical jihadist group ISIS.An ethnic Syrian Turkman from the town of Biza’a in Aleppo city’s northern countryside, Balud originally joined the Abu Bakr Sadiq brigades, a moderate rebel faction near his hometown that received widespread support from Gulf states in the early years of the conflict. However hailing from a small, relatively unknown family, Balud failed to climb up the ranks of Syria’s rebel movement as quickly as he would have liked and as others from more prominent backgrounds regularly did. By early 2013, Balud joined ISIS, whose ranks were mostly staffed by foreigners and cared less about the social status of their Syrian recruits.In July 2013, Balud appeared in an ISIS propaganda video shot in the border town of Tal Abyad after the group successfully captured the city from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). In the video, Sayf appears next to an Egyptian foreign fighter addressing a room full of two dozen captured YPG soldiers, who were assembled before an ISIS camera crew to officially repent for having joined an armed faction that ISIS’ leadership described as being “at war with God”.Over the next several years, Balud’s star continued to rise, as the commander attained a level of status within ISIS that would have been unattainable within other rebel groups. Despite the large-scale defeat of ISIS across northern Syria at the hands of the YPG in 2016 and 2017, the cunning commander was able to leverage his history of fighting against Kurds to re-invent himself as a valuable client for another foreign patron: Turkey.By January 2018, when Turkish backed rebel forces launched “Operation Olive Branch” to take over the Kurdish canton of Afrin located in Syria’s uppermost northwest corner, Balud regularly appeared in the group’s propaganda videos as the official commander of the newly formed Hamza brigades. His status as an ethnic Turkman, a small minority within Syria whose likeness to their Turkish kinsmen across the border has pushed Ankara to grant many coveted privileges such as Turkish citizenship and sensitive leadership positions, further endeared Balud to his new patrons.According to SNA sources, Syrian rebel units now being sent to Azerbaijan by Turkey are almost exclusively led ethnic Syrian Turkmen. “Sayf Balud is a Turkman. The Sultan Murad brigade’s commander, Fahim Aissa, is a Syrian Turkman, like Balud. Turkey only trusts factions led by Syrian Turkman to carry out these missions. These are sensitive for Turkey politically and they don’t trust Syrian Arabs to lead them”.Turkey’s intervention in Azerbaijan is indeed sensitive. After a four-year lull in fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, fighting between both countries erupted on Sunday leading to the death of two-dozen fighters from both sides.Though internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, in 1991 Armenian factions within the Nagorno-Karabakh region declared themselves independent. Three years of war over the disputed territory ended in 1994 with a Russian brokered ceasefire. The newly declared Nagorno-Karabakh republic was shortly after occupied by Armenia which has maintained de-facto control of the area since. With the exception of four days of fighting in April 2016, Sunday’s clashes were the first major instance of renewed combat between both countries over the status of the area. Both sides accuse the other of having initiated fighting on Sunday that sparked clashes that led to the death of dozens of soldiers.As the Daily Beast went to press clashes continued between both sides with dozens more casualties reported. Fighting alongside the Azeri regular forces were 1,000 Syrian rebel fighters, among them former jihadists led by ex-ISIS commander Sayf Balud. All About the OilTurkey's move to send Syrian rebels to face-off against Armenia, a longtime rival of Turkey, is just the latest in a long string of neo-Ottoman foreign adventures undertaken by President Erdoğan over the last 6 months. Ankara has deployed both its armed forces and Syrian proxies to crack down on Kurdish PKK and YPG forces in northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan throughout 2020.Turkey has also intervened in western Libya and waters throughout the eastern Mediterranean where its navy has threatened NATO allies France and Greece in an attempt to strongarm both countries and lay claim to gas reserves located within Greece's maritime borders.In Azerbaijan, Turkey is looking to demonstrate loyalty and prop up an oil-rich regime with whom it has maintained close military ties since the 1994 ceasefire. Since 2005, they have launched numerous lucrative oil and gas initiatives including a pipeline that exports 1.2 million barrels of Azeri oil per day to the European Union (EU), earning Turkey upwards of $200m in annual transit fees. In 2006, this cooperation expanded following the announcement of the launch of the South Caucuses gas pipeline that annually exports 8.8 billion cubic meters of much needed Azeri gas to the Turkish market, a net importer of energy.In 2011, Turkey began work to construct a new expanded network known collectively as the Trans Anatolian Pipeline which is expected to export 31 billion cubic meters of Azeri gas to the EU by 2026, with further expansion to come. Turkish shareholders, who own a 30% stake in the project, stand to make huge profits.Turkey’s push to transform Azerbaijan into a lucrative oil and gas export hub is also motivated by Ankara’s desire to come out from under Russia’s shadow. Turkey is dependent on Russia for 40% of its fossil fuels, a reliance that has forced Ankara to treat Russia as a friendly nation despite the fact that the two countries share almost no common interests.The “Southern Gas Corridor,” a term used to refer to the various pipelines emerging out of Azerbaijan, has also been heavily cheered on by the EU, which also wants to break its dependence on Russian gas. It should come as no surprise, perhaps, that Russia is therefore on the other side in the ongoing dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.Nagorno-Karabakh is now the third theater where Russia and Turkey find themselves supporting opposite sides of an active Middle East conflict zone. In Syria, Russian support for dictator Bashar al-Assad and Turkey’s support for the country’s rebels such as Sayf Bulad and others led to direct conflict between both countries’ armies earlier this year that resulted in the death of dozens of Turkish soldiers. In Libya, the situation is reversed, with Turkey supporting Libya’s government and Russia supporting Khalifa Haftar, a renegade general and rebel leader who has sought to seize control of Libya’s lucrative oil sector and capture the capital of Tripoli.In both conflicts, Sayf Bulad and the Hamza brigades have proven extremely useful to Turkey. Thousands of the group’s fighters, including Sayf Bulad himself, were deployed to Libya last summer and helped repel a major assault launched by Russian-backed Khalifa Haftar and take back significant territory captured by the general in previous years. The Turkish backed authority in Tripoli is now safely guarded against external threats, while Turkish companies are set to gain lucrative contracts in Libya’s oil and gas and reconstruction sectors.Within this context of great power struggles, Syria's rebels, once idealistic and seeking to liberate their country from dictator Bashar al-Assad, have found themselves reduced to pawns compelled to serve as mercenaries and shock troops used by Turkey to advance its foreign policy in a world where Ankara finds itself increasingly isolated. In doing so, they find themselves led by and mixed in with fighters from the most vicious jihadist group the world has ever seen.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.




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