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causeiwanttoandican · 4 years ago

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It’s all coming out...

The Times

Royal aides reveal Meghan bullying claim before Oprah interview

Valentine Low

The sources approached The Times because they felt that only a partial version had emerged of Meghan’s two years as a working member of the royal family and they wished to tell their side, concerned about how such matters are handled by the palace. The complaint claimed that she drove two personal assistants out of the household and was undermining the confidence of a third staff member.

The Times was approached by sources who stated that they wanted to give their account of the turmoil within the royal household from Meghan’s arrival as Harry’s girlfriend in 2017 to the couple’s decision to stand down as working royals last year.

A spokesman for the Sussexes said they were the victims of a calculated smear campaign based on misleading and harmful misinformation. They said the duchess was “saddened by this latest attack on her character, particularly as someone who has been the target of bullying herself and is deeply committed to supporting those who have experienced pain and trauma”.

Knauf sent an email to Simon Case, then the Duke of Cambridge’s private secretary and now the cabinet secretary, after conversations with Samantha Carruthers, the head of HR. Case then forwarded it to Carruthers, who was based at Clarence House.

In his email Knauf said Carruthers “agreed with me on all counts that the situation was very serious”. He added: “I remain concerned that nothing will be done.”

Sources say they were concerned that nothing was done at the time to investigate the situation, and nothing done since to protect staff against the possibility of bullying by a member of the royal family. Aides also insist that behind the scenes they did more to welcome Meghan and help her to find a role than has been publicly acknowledged.

They believe the public should have insight into their side of the story before watching the couple’s much-publicised interview with Winfrey, due to be televised in the United States on Sunday.

The couple’s lawyers told The Times that this newspaper is “being used by Buckingham Palace to peddle a wholly false narrative” before the interview.

However, The Times understands that the palace establishment is highly concerned that the allegations have emerged.

The sources have revealed a febrile atmosphere within Kensington Palace, where Meghan and Harry lived alongside the Cambridges after their wedding until the split between the two households at the beginning of 2019. Staff would on occasion be reduced to tears; one aide, anticipating a confrontation with Meghan, told a colleague: “I can’t stop shaking.”

Two senior members of staff have claimed that they were bullied by the duchess. Another former employee told The Times they had been personally “humiliated” by her and claimed that two members of staff had been bullied.

Another aide claimed it felt “more like emotional cruelty and manipulation, which I guess could also be called bullying”.

The duchess denies bullying and her lawyers stated that one individual left after findings of misconduct. The Times was not able to corroborate that claim.

The Times can also reveal that the duchess wore earrings to a formal dinner in Fiji in 2018 that were a wedding gift from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is said by US intelligence agencies to have approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The dinner took place three weeks after the killing.

At the time it was reported that the earrings were borrowed. The duchess does not deny this was what she said, despite being aware of their provenance.

On the same tour sources said the main reason that the duchess cut short an engagement in Fiji was because of her reservations about the organisation UN Women. It is not clear why she is said to have felt so strongly about its presence. The duchess denies the sources’ claims about the event.

Knauf wrote in his email: “I am very concerned that the Duchess was able to bully two PAs out of the household in the past year. The treatment of X* was totally unacceptable.”

He added: “The Duchess seems intent on always having someone in her sights. She is bullying Y and seeking to undermine her confidence. We have had report after report from people who have witnessed unacceptable behaviour towards Y.”

The email, which also expressed concern about the stress being experienced by Samantha Cohen, the couple’s private secretary, concluded: “I questioned if the Household policy on bullying and harassment applies to principals.”

The complaint was sent to the HR department. However, one source said: “I think the problem is, not much happened with it. It was, ‘How can we make this go away?’, rather than addressing it.”

After Harry was told about the complaint a source insists he had a meeting with Knauf in which he begged him not to pursue it. Lawyers for the duke and duchess deny that any meeting took place or that the duke would have interfered with any staff matter.

Another source claimed: “Senior people in the household, Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, knew that they had a situation where members of staff, particularly young women, were being bullied to the point of tears.

“The institution just protected Meghan constantly. All the men in grey suits who she hates have a lot to answer for, because they did absolutely nothing to protect people.”

Knauf‘s complaint never progressed. Two of the people named in his email are are said to feel that nothing has been done to investigate the bullying claim. The following month Knauf handed in his notice.

When the households split the following March he took up a job as an adviser to the Duke of Cambridge. He is now chief executive of the Cambridges’ Royal Foundation.

After a newspaper revealed that a PA had left after only six months, it is understood that the duchess became extremely concerned about the number of stories in the press about staff leaving. Her lawyers state that she did not read the press.

The tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga was a difficult one for staff, sources told The Times. When the duchess wore the earrings in Fiji given by the crown prince she told aides who were preparing to brief the media about her outfit for the state dinner that they had been “borrowed” from a jeweller, a source said, an explanation that was widely reported. This was three weeks after the murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Lawyers for the duchess said she may have stated they were borrowed but did not say they were borrowed from a jeweller and denied that she had misled anyone about their provenance.

Although Case had no managerial responsibility for the staff mentioned in Knauf’s complaint, he is understood to have taken it seriously. He made sure it was sent to HR, and took a close interest in the welfare of the staff member still employed there.

The issue of staff — their treatment, and the fact that they were shared between William and Harry — became so pressing that William and Case accelerated the process of splitting the two households. “What was a long-term plan became an immediate plan,” a source said.

The spokesman for the Sussexes said in a statement: “Let’s just call this what it is — a calculated smear campaign based on misleading and harmful misinformation. We are disappointed to see this defamatory portrayal of The Duchess of Sussex given credibility by a media outlet. It’s no coincidence that distorted several-year-old accusations aimed at undermining The Duchess are being briefed to the British media shortly before she and The Duke are due to speak openly and honestly about their experience of recent years.

“In a detailed legal letter of rebuttal to The Times, we have addressed these defamatory claims in full, including spurious allegations regarding the use of gifts loaned to The Duchess by The Crown.

“The Duchess is saddened by this latest attack on her character, particularly as someone who has been the target of bullying herself and is deeply committed to supporting those who have experienced pain and trauma. She is determined to continue her work building compassion around the world and will keep striving to set an example for doing what is right and doing what is good.”

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

*Names withheld by The Times

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fyeahhozier · 5 years ago

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The Irishman is deeper and darker than he's maybe been given credit for... but the geniality and swoon factor remain high.

Variety: Hozier Proves He’s a Career Artist in Gratifying Greek Show

At Hozier’s sold-out show at L.A.’s Greek Friday night, one of the first things you couldn’t help noticing on stage —because it’s still an anomaly — was that his eight-piece lineup was half-male, half-female. Knowing his penchant for socially conscious songs, his decrial of “the anthems of rape culture” in his lyrics, and a general female-friendliness to his appeal, it’s easy to figure this gender parity is a conscious one and think: That is soooo Hozier. Which it is … and so effective, too, like just about every choice he’s made so far in his short, charmed career. On the most practical level, if you can bring in that much female harmony while also getting ace players in the bargain, why wouldn’t you? But it also makes for a good visual emblem of some of the other dual energies Hozier is playing with in his music: darkness and enlightenment; romantic hero and cad; raw blues dude and slick pop hero. He’s got a lot more going on than just being an earnest do-gooder. (Although he does do good, earnestly.)

During Friday’s hour-and-three-quarters set, Hozier focused largely on material from this year’s sophomore album, “Wasteland, Baby!,” which sounded good enough on record but almost uniformly improved in the live experience. Sometimes the upgrade came from making full use of the multi-instrumentalists on hand. The first album’s “Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene” now had Hozier on guitar facing off against violinist Emily Kohavi, trading solos — and if it’s hard to hear an electric guitar/fiddle duel without automatically thinking “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” it was one of many welcome moments making use of the MVP skills of Kohavi, the newest addition to the band. Other times, the improvements on the album versions just had to do with Hozier allowing himself louder and gutsier guitar tones. He’s a bit like Prince, in that way — someone you’d happily listen to playing a very nasty-sounding six-string all night, although he has so many other stylistic fish to fry, which in this case means a still slightly greater emphasis on acoustic finger-picking.

For somebody who made his name on as forlorn but powerful an anthem as his 2014 breakout smash “Take Me to Church,” and who can milk that melodrama for all it’s worth, Hozier has a lot of other modes he can default to. He treads very lightly into the area of soul with songs like “Almost (Sweet Music),” the lyrics of which consist of either name-checking or alluding to some of the great jazz vocal classics of the 20th century, in an idiom that’s not so much jazzy itself as folk-R&B. You could almost cite it as the subtle kind of Memphis-swing thing Justin Timberlake should aspire to, if the tricky polyrhythm and oddly chopped up meters Hozier adds as wrinkles weren’t so un-replicable. Bringing up Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” as the night’s sole cover also established that early ‘70s era and sound as an influences he’d like to make perfectly clear. At the other extreme, this son of a blues musician can hard back to those roots so well, in noisy numbers like “Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)” and the brand new “Jack Boot Jump,” that he could give the Black Keys a run for their money.

“Jack Boot Jump,” which is scheduled to go on an EP of completely fresh material that Hozier said he plans to put out before Christmas, was possibly the highlight of the night, even though — or because — it stripped his excellent band down to just him and longtime drummer Rory Doyle. Having earlier played the current album’s “Nina Cried Power,” which is maybe more of a tribute to other historic protest songs than one of its own, Hozier gave a lengthy introduction to “Jack Boot” indicating that he’s aware of the traps that come with the territory. “I do have some reservations about the words ‘protest song’ and ‘protest music,’” he admitted. “But if you’re familiar with an artist called Woody Guthrie, he wrote the evergreen anthem ‘Tear the Fascists’ down. I was kind of looking into songs in that sort of tradition, that singing out, and I was worried that this is 2019; it’s a very unsubtle way to approach songwriting.” But, he added, “it was a funny few weeks, with 70 people shot in Hong Kong and arrests obviously in Moscow; Chile now at the moment also. And I was thinking, forget about subtle art — what is not subtle is this murder of protesters, and what is not subtle is the jack boot coming down in Orwell’s picture of the future: ‘If you want to imagine the future, imagine a jack boot stomping on a human face forever,’ that chilling quote from ‘1984.’ Anyway, I was just thinking, yeah, f— it, it’s not subtle, but let’s do it.” His electric guitar proceeded to be a machine that kills fascists, and also just slayed as maybe the most rock ‘n’ roll thing he’s written. (Evidence of the new song on the web is scant, or should be, anyway, since he begged the audience “in good faith” not to film it.)

If there’s a knock people have on Hozier, it tends to be the sincerity thing. He’s a nice guy who’s finishing first, which doesn’t necessarily help him become an indie-rock darling or Pitchfork favorite. (Predictably, “Wasteland, Baby!” got a 4.8 rating there — that’s out of 10, not 5.) At the Greek, there was an almost wholesome feeling that would’ve been an immediate turnoff to anyone who insists on having their rock rough, starting with his graciousness in repeatedly naming the band members and repeatedly thanking his opening act (Madison Ryann Ward, a fetchingly husky-voiced Oklahoman filling in on this part of the tour for a laryngitis-stricken Freya Ridings). That extended to a sense of uplift in many of the songs that doesn’t always match the themes of the material. But then, there was the impossible good cheer and attractiveness of the young players, to match Hozier’s own; this is a group where everyone looks as if they could be in Taylor Swift’s band or actually looks like Taylor Swift. The swoon factor in Hozier’s appeal is undeniably high, and it’s safe to say no one left Griffith Park less smitten.

But ladies (and gentlemen), do be aware that Hozier has some dark-side moments that can almost make Leonard Cohen look like Stephen Bishop. The only time he really overtly accentuated that in concert was in introducing and playing the new album’s “No Plan,” a love song that is also an amiable statement of atheism in which Hozier reminds his beloved that the universe is going to collapse upon itself someday. This may be rather like the gambit in which the ‘50s boy gets the girl to make out with him in a fallout shelter, but in any case, Hozier didn’t stint on the end-of-all-things aspect of it, even putting up on screen behind the band a statement from astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack pointing out humankind’s and the galaxy’s ultimate fate. (“Honestly I never really imagined I’d end up being name-checked in a song for talking about how the universe is eventually going to fade out and die so this is all very exciting for me,” Mack tweeted in replay earlier in the year.) Suffice it to say that with that soulful a vintage ‘70s groove and that fuzz-tastic a guitar line, many babies will be conceived to the tune of “No Plan,” whether it foresees generational lines ending in a godless black hole or not.

Other Hozier songs reveal darker gets more estimable the more you dig into it. With its bird talk, “Shrike” sounds sweet enough, till you realize that a shrike is a kind of bird that impales its prey on thorns, which does add a rather bloody metaphoric undertone to what sounds like a reasonably pacifist breakup song. “Dinner & Diatribes,” meanwhile, is just deeply horny, not thorny. The most brooding song of the set, “Talk,” has verses where Hozier sings in lofty, literary terms about the romantic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, only to reveal in the chorus that he’s talking to this woman in such high-minded terms because he just wants to charm her into the sack. As a piece of writing, it’s hilarious, establishing a devilish side of Hozier it’s good to hear. As a piece of performance, it’s just sexy.

But as enriching as it is to realize Hozier has a healthy sense of humor in his writing, bad-boy wit is never going to be what you’re going to come away from a Hozier album or show with. The main part of Friday’s concert ended, as expected, with “Take Me to Church,” his outraged take on abuse and homophobia in the scandalized Catholic church — which just happens to be easily taken as a lusty hymn to sexuality. Following that, the large band returned to a stage that had now been decked out in some kind of ivy, as Hozier talked about his love for the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney (whose last words he has tattooed on his arm) and, “since I’ve come this far,” went ahead and recited his poem “Mint,” sharing his hero’s affection for the plant and its “tenacity for life.”

Tenacity is likely to be a buzzword, too, for Hozier, given his leaps and gains as a writer-performer and seeming level head atop his tree-top shoulders. Taller still of voice, musical dexterity and good will — and still just 29 —�� he’s somebody the swooners and even some cynics should feel good about settling in with for a very long Irish ride.

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squidbatts · 5 years ago

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all that you have left to lose

Just on a medical note, folks, Peter does regrow his parts, so you Runners don’t need to return any bits you find lying around

Or: an incomplete list of things that runners have returned to Peter Lynne, local disaster

((keeping with my “at least one fic about peter a month” streak for 2020, have a silly little thing about peter being able to regenerate and runners returning his body parts to him anyway. spoilers to... lazarus (s5m30) i think? the fic exists Technically sometime in early s6 but it doesn’t include any of late s5/s6′s plot points so! you should be good. please enjoy!))

{ao3}

1. Ear (Right, torn)

Nadia drops the ear in front of Peter at the mess hall, which is less than ideal for a variety of reasons. A bit because it makes Peter want to eat his mystery soup a little less, but mostly because it causes Reggie from the kitchen to glare over at them.

"What did I say about dismembered limbs in my mess hall?"

"Not allowed unless they're going in your food," Peter dutifully recites. "Though, can I just say, that's majorly creepy. Am I supposed to take that as 'If Abel had a food shortage, you'd become our very own renewable meat source'? Because that's how I've taken it."

Reggie doesn't respond except to narrow their eyes further, which isn't exactly inspiring.

Peter turns back to Nadia. "Good afternoon, Nadia! To what do I owe the honor?"

"Someone gave this to Veronica but she said that it wasn't a 'good enough sample,'" Nadia says, with the look of an indulgent older sibling who's been given a mudpie. "I figured you might want it back."

Peter is never sure where he stands with Nadia; she didn't know him, before, and hasn't really shown any interest in getting to know him now, beyond awkward small talk when he goes to Veronica's labs. Still, as her hand's twitch against the wheels of her chair, he recognizes her bravado, as well as the devotion to someone who's just a bit crazy. He smiles at her, puts his spoon down, and picks up the ear. He doesn't want it, not really, but it was nice of her to bring it.

2. Finger (Left pinky, cut just above the palm)

Peter supposes that it’s his fault, walking up to another runner without loudly announcing his presence beforehand. Still, it's not like he knew Jody was sharpening her knife.

"Peter, oh my god, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to!" Jody gasps, dropping out of her defensive stance as easily as she'd moved into it. Between them on the soft grass of the quad, Peter's finger lays forlornly.

"Since when do you use knives anyway?" Peter hisses, voice muffled by how he's shoved his hand into his mouth in a reflexive attempt to stop the pain. He knows that his body is working to fix it, that in a few hours he'll have a full hand again, but still.

"Tom gave it to me," Jody replies, more starry-eyed than the statement would've called for half a decade ago. Really, Peter should've expected the answer; De Lucas like it best when everyone is nice and well-armed.

"Why are you sharpening it, then? I'd say it's sharp enough already, obviously." Peter wiggles his pinky-less hand pointedly, though there's a significant part of him that's thankful that he only caught her after the knife was sharp enough to make a clean cut: a half-dull blade would've hurt more. Jody scowls, though her eyes still have an apologetic sheen to them.

"Well, what are you doing skulking around like that? You nearly gave me a heart attack!"

"I was going to ask if you wanted to join me on a book exchange run because I heard a rumor that Fort Canton had the fifth Percy Jackson book," Peter huffs, "But now I think I should just go alone."

"Oh, don't be like that," Jody says. She picks up Peter's still bleeding finger from the ground and tosses it to him as she bends to tie her sneakers tighter.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Peter asks, making a face. The wound on his hand has closed up, overactive cells already starting to grow him a new pinky, but he puts the old one up to the spot for a moment anyway, pulling it away like a macabre mimicry of a fake finger magic trick.

"I dunno, that's none of my business, is it?" Jody snarks, "Now, let's go, before someone else gets that novel."

3. Kidney (Look, it’s been a hard week)

"Damn it, Peter," Louise Bailey hisses, and something hits Peter's back, fast enough that he knows she threw it, "I slipped on your intestines!"

"Sorry! Next time someone's slicing through me with a machete, I'll be sure to keep all my organs inside so I don't hurt you," Peter snarks back as she catches up with him. She didn't actually slip on his intestines, Peter knows, because his intestines are definitely still inside of his body, despite the large torso-spanning slash that he's weakly pressing his hands against -- it used to be hard for him to tell what he'd lost or what hurts, but he's become something of an expert at it since he's rejoined Abel. He's still not sure if that's a good thing. Still, Louise probably did trip on something of his, since whatever she threw at his back was too fleshy and soft to be anything but organic, and he's certain that a few of his less than vital organs spilled out. "You know, this is why I hate missions where I have to deal with people."

"Because you lose your organs?" Louise asks, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Yes, because I lose my organs! Zombies bite and scratch, but they don't throw knives or slice me up. I may be immortal but I can still feel pain," Peter says. Louise is quiet for a moment before she turns around. Peter slows down, nervously looking back towards her and, unfortunately, the direction that their pursuers are coming from. "Oi! What are you doing?"

Louise bends to pick something up and doubles back, cradling a fist-sized, burgundy thing in her hands. She tosses it and Peter catches it on reflex. "Here, it's yours anyway."

The kidney is a bit misshapen and smushed, probably from where Louise stepped on it, but it's still warm in his hands. Louise looks at him out the side of her eye like she's expecting him to just pull open his cut and pop it back in. He slides it into his backpack instead, already anticipating a lecture from Maxine about getting bio-goo on Township supplies. "Thanks, appreciate it."

4. Three toes, as well as one and a half loose phalanges (Big and index of right, big of left, god knows where those phalanges came from)

Paula frowns at Peter's feet. Peter frowns at the roof of the building that he still calls the Med Tent in his head.

"Well, doctor?" He asks, "What's the verdict?"

Paula moves her scrutiny to Peter's face. "I don't know how you managed to crush your feet like this-"

"I was carrying a supply crate and I tripped, alright, it's not like I did it on purpose," Peter defends. Paula continues as though he hadn't spoken.

"But, usually, I'd do an X-ray and maybe some surgery to re-set, then wrap the toes up for a few weeks. For you, I can tell that at least two of these have set wrong already, so I'll have to re-break them. Though I guess, I could always just amputate."

Peter considers this. "Which one will be faster?"

"The amputation, but you'd be off-balance while things grew back."

"I'd be off-balance with the wrap too," Peter waves her concern off like he's swatting a bug, "No, no, better the quick solution. Can I get anesthetic?"

"Can you get- Of course you can Peter, what kind of doctor do you think I am?" Paula shakes her head at him. "Sometimes, I wonder what's going on in that head of yours."

Peter grins at her, unrepentant and a little self-deprecating. "You and me both, Doc."

Later, after Peter's enjoyed some of the best pain-numbing that Abel can spare and has been given a blindfold because "If you don't stop looking down here and flinching, I'm going to have to cut even more and neither of us wants that," Paula hands Peter a biohazard bag.

Peter shakes it experimentally and scrunches his nose at the sound of flesh bouncing around inside. "Are these my toes?"

"Yes. Bring them over to Veronica for me, would you? She's been trying to convince Maxine that it would be ethical to cut off one of your limbs for nearly a month now, anyway, might as well give her some actually ethically-sourced Peter parts."

"What am I, a mailman?" Peter asks, peeking into the bag and wincing with phantom pain. Paula frowns at him.

"Do you need a blindfold to wear on the way over to Veronica's as well?"

"Why, Doctor Cohen, I didn't think you were into that sort of thing," Peter leers, breaking into laughter when Paula throws a roll of bandages at him. "Alright, alright, I'm going!"

"And be careful of that foot!"

5. A rather large bone (???)

"That is not mine."

Tom stares at Peter, unblinking. Peter likes Tom, he did even when Tom was more liability than friend, but god if he isn't creepy sometimes.

"Are you sure?" Tom asks, looking from the bone, a massive thing that's clearly longer than Peter's forearm, to Peter.

"I'm quite sure. I don't know who's out there missing a bone, but I like to think that I would've noticed losing a leg bone."

Tom hums, consideringly. He picks up the bone and swings it once, as though he's testing the heft and balance. Peter suddenly has a horrible vision of Tom, just as dangerous and De Luca-ish as he is right now, but also armed with a bone sword. He doesn't think that Janine would ever forgive him if he let that happen.

"Actually, you know what?" Peter says, reaching forward and taking the bone from Tom, "I think this might be mine. Thank you for returning it, I'll just, uh, add it to the collection, as it were."

"You collect your own bones?" Tom asks. Peter, who is already too far in, just smiles back at him.

"We all have our little hobbies," He offers. Tom raises his eyebrows but nods. Still, Peter makes a mental note to tell Jody to be on the lookout for any weird new quirks; Tom had seemed much too interested in the concept of a bone collection.

+ 1. Nothing

Five clears their throat as they enter Peter's curtained-off corner of the Med Tent. "Rare that you're trapped in here," They sign.

"Unfortunately, even I need some time and doctor assistance to fix spinal trauma," Peter says, putting down the knitting that Jody gave him; he appreciates the gesture but knitting when one of your hands is pins-and-needles numb and you can only use the other if you hold your arm in a very particular position while your nerves knit themselves back together is more effort than it's worth. "Nice of you to come visit, though."

Five makes a face, their classic I'm not sorry but manners tell me that I should be face, and signs, "Sam told me that I should come visit you. He says I shouldn't keep your things without asking."

"My things?" Peter asks, brow furrowed. "What do you have of mine? I didn't you'd be much for theft, Five. Well, theft among friends, that is."

"I'm not, it's just-" They cut themselves off and reach into their pocket with a heavy sigh. What they pull out is small, white, and clean. Peter's confused for a moment, wondering why in the world Sam thinks it's his, and then Five moves it in their hand and he gets a better idea of the shape and- huh.

"That's one of my vertebrae." He says, though it sounds more accusing than he'd wanted. Five scowls.

"I found it, fair and square. You just left it on the ground, obviously you didn't care about it."

"Five, my dearest, darling head of runners," Peter starts, desperately wishing that his hands were working enough that he could steeple them for emphasis. "I passed out from blood loss."

"That's not any of my business!" Five signs emphatically.

Sometimes, Peter forgets that Five is like this; sometimes, in his head, Five is a big soft puppy that loves sports bras and Sam. The real Five, unfortunately, is a gremlin who does things like drink shampoo to win a bet and picks up garbage off the ground during runs just because they can. "Whatever, it's fine. I don't want it anyway."

Five looks at him suspiciously but puts the bone away. "Are you sure?"

"Very. I've already regrown most of the damaged pathways, I'm sure the bones are nearly back as well."

"I wasn't really worried about you taking this one back," They say, finally coming closer to settle into the chair next to Peter's bed. "But it would've been okay if you did; I have three more."

"Three more?" Peter asks, "Are they all vertebrae or- Actually, nevermind, I don't want to know and I don't want them back."

"Good," Five grins, sharp as a wolf, "I wouldn't have given them to you anyway."

#zombies run #peter lynne #zr #zrs5 spoilers #one shot

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srandhawa21ahsgov · 4 years ago

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Election 2020 Presidential Candidates Assessment

Hawkins/Walker (Green):

The Green Party candidates Howie Hawkins and Angela Nicole Walker do not state their exact position about Criminal Justice Reform but the website does provide the American people with what the Green Party is going to do in order to ensure change within our criminal justice system. The Green Party wants to “monitor and prosecute White Racist terrorists, provide federal investigations of local police misconduct, have community control of the police, end mass incarceration, decriminalize personal possession of hard drugs, provide drug treatment on demand, decriminalize sex work, fight corporate crime, end warantless mass surveillance, and pardon whistleblowers and political prisoners”. I disagree with a few of the Green party’s positions. For example, they want to legalize Marijuana but isn’t it already legal? Another position I don’t understand is decriminalzing sex work. Personally, I do not think this should be okay. To make sex work legal also means that abortions, HIV’s, STD’s, infections, and even Aids would still go on. Why would we pass a bill that would basically state that rape, abotion, and all the infections that I listed would be okay. Even if they did pass a bill with safety regulations while decriminalizing sex work there would be nothing to guarantee those safety guidelines. I think that they should still criminalize sex work BUT provide these people with better, high-quality jobs that aren’t so risky and dangerous. Other than that I agree with all other positions stated for this political party. I agree that we need to monitor our police system to ensure that they are providing safety and NOT danger to the community. I also agree that American citizens that are detained because of a non-violent drug addiction should be hospitalized and forced into rehabilitation. If we compare the candidate stance to the party platform stance, we can identify that there are way more things that the Green party platform wants to do in order to reform the criminal justice system. While their views are quite similar and supporting to the candidates, the Green Party platform goes more in depth about their positions. They want to abolish the death penalty, repeal three strikes laws, incororparte mental health social services to bail agreements, and even provde community team policing. These are just a few specific things that the Party platform wants to do ensure changes within the criminal justice reform. The platform compared to the candidates state more of what they specifically want to do whereas the candidates put their positions into short terms.

Donald J. Trump/Michael R. Pence (Republican):

Donald Trump and Mike Pence have provided the American people with their plan to reform the United States law and justice system. Trump has given the Department of justice $98 million to hire 802 full-time enforcement officers. He also signed an executive order to restore state and local law enforcement access to surplus equipment such as armored vehicles. This was not Trump’s idea but it was on his Law and Justice page but the Department of Justice created the National Public SAfety Partnership, which would reduce violent crimes in cities. Trump’s administration expanded Project safe Neighborhoods in order to work with communities and cities to develop customized crime reduction strategies. The department of Justice returned to their old standard policy because they want federal prosecutors to charge criminals with the most serious, readily provable offense. Now those prosecutors were directed by the Department of Justice to focus on taking illegal guns off our streets. Trump has made many decisions on how to confront street criminals like gangs and criminal cartels. For example, he signed a three executive order that focused on international criminal organizations that prevented violence against law enforcement officers. The Department of Justice has designed a priority for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in order to allow federal law enforcement to utilize an expanded toolkit in its efforts to dismantle the organization. Trump’s version of reshaping the American courts include him appointing conservative Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. He also has appointed more than 50 circuit or appeals court judges, along with appointing 80 district court judges. Now, here is my position on all of this. First of all, hiring new police officers may or may not make a difference and it might enforce better more equal police officers within our nation but don’t you think that $98 million dollars could go to a better cause. A better cause could be giving police officers across the nation a lesson or some type of training to make sure that no one is brutally hurt while being detained or to make sure that a police procedure is done fairly with equal rights set on the table. I think that it was a smart idea from Trump to expand the project Safe Neighborhoods because it is a way for communities to come together to reduce crime. While it was good that Trump signed a three executive order that protected officers more, I think there needs to be an order that protects American citizens from police officers. In all, I don’t think that with Trump with Trump being President we are going to reform much of our justice system. Based on his views and what he wants to do he is looking out more for the officers which is great but as a leader of the United States we need someone that will be looking out for everyone as a whole. He needs to set laws where we are guaranteed an equal justice system for all people of color, race and ethnicity. The candidate stance is a lot different compared to the party platform because the party platform goes more in depth about what republicans actually want to do to reform our systems. Whereas from the candidates stance he just talks more about protecting Law enforcement rather than American citizens. I think their position supports the party platform but not in a way that is shown. In addition, I think that Trump supports police more because that is how he is going to get their vote. He does it for a voting tactic. Personally, our law enforcement needs new training and they need to learn how to keep our American citizens safe. I am half Indian and even I worry about the police looking at me in a different way because of my darker skin tone. I couldn’t even imagine being African American and dealing with everything that is going on.

Gloria La Riva/Sunil Freeman (Peace and Freedom):

Gloria La Riva and Sunlil Freeman seem to be educated about what they want to do with their decisions when it comes to reforming the justice system. They know that police brutality is hurting the lives of African Americans and they also take into consideration that we need to give back to those communities who lost loved ones. These candidates say that “reparations must be paid to the African Americans and Native communities”. With their knowledge they know that 2.2 million people are behind bars in the biggest prison and they want to change that to end mass incarceration. Luckily, they want reform by punishing law enforcement when police brutality and violence are performed from cops. “Free Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners”. These candidates' goals are to end racism, end mass incarceration, and create equality. The party platform is very similar to the candidate stance because they both want to do different things to create change and they are both very set on what they do. Their ideas are very similar for example they both want to end mass incarceration, end torture from police bruality especially in prisoners, but the party platform wants to do more specifics like abolishing the death penalty, prove rehabilitation for drug offenders, and repeal the three strikes law. I agree with these candidates! I think that their positions and plans define a future for a more reformed justice system. They want to keep our Americans citizens safe and give opportunity and a chance for those who are in trouble with the law. Providing rehab, and treating every individual like they are all equal when in difficult situations makes everyone feel equal!

Roque De La Fuente “Rocky” Guerra/Kanye Omari West (American Independent):

Email sent to Candidates -

Dear Roque De La Fuente Guerra and Kanye Omari West,

The issue I am concerned about is reform within the justice system. I am concerned about this issue because it appears to be a major problem that is happening in our world right now. We have mass incarceration rates and people are being treated poorly within our justice system. I am currently a senior at Acalanes High School and I am researching this issue for my senior Government Class. Please clarify your stance on this issue. Thank you so much for your time and good luck!

Sincerely,

Sonali Randhawa

[email protected]

O Jorgenson/Jeremy “Spike” Cohen (Libertarian):

These candidates really point out exactly what they want to do in order to reform the justice system. Many statements from their website start with “As your president” which means that it is specifically coming from the president so we understand what their positions and exact plans are. Their plan is to “decriminalize all drugs and encourage states to do the same '' and they state that they will work with congress to make history of the failed and unjust War on Drugs. They want to deal with substance abuse issues in a way that salvages lives, instead of throwing them away and detaining them for a long period of time. In order to see if an actual criminal act is taking place nameless, faceless SWAT teams that have been imported to our streets. Their mission is to go after drug offenders who have harmed no one and have taken scores of innocent peoples lives in violent confrontations. The president says that “I will defund federal involvement in policing. I will defund the DEA and keep federal agencies out of local police matters unless called upon by state authorities. No Knock raids will be performed because many times it ends up in killing innocent bystanders like Breona Taylor. They state that their goal is to get the government out of the way of AMericans lives to end the harm which the government itself has created. The candidate stance is a huge comparison to the party platform. The candidate stance does not support the Liberatraian party Platform. The difference is the party platform supports the constitution and they only talk about their view on crime and certain consequences that need to be done to the offender. But the candidate stance does. From the candidates stance, they have a lot of positions in place and they want to create change for the people that are capable of changing with drug offenders. NON-VIOLENT OFFENDERS are the people that we need to be changing in order to create a more united country. I agree with the candidate's stance. Mass incarceration needs to end so we can have our American citizens be reunited with family. We need to end mass incineration and provide help and rehab to prove that we actually do care about our U.S citizens.

Joseph R. Biden/Kamala D Harris (Democratic)

Email Sent to Candidiates -

Dear Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris,

The issue I am concerned about is reforming the juvenile justice system. I am concerned about this issue because it appears to be a massive worldwide problem that is making our country even more divided by the day. We have mass incarceration rates and people are being treated poorly within our justice system. I am currently a senior at Acalanes High School and I am researching this issue for my senior Government Class. Please clarify your stance on this issue. Thank you so much for your time and good luck!

Sincerely,

Sonali Randhawa

[email protected]

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makistar2018 · 5 years ago

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Why Taylor Swift Has No Problem Defending Herself—No Matter the Cost

by BILLY NILLES Jul. 2, 2019

As Taylor Swift approaches her upcoming 30th birthday, happening on December 13 of this year, she's begun taking stock of the things she's learned over the course of her first three decades on the planet. In March, she let fans in on a handful of them—30 of them, to be exact—via a self-penned piece in Elle and near the very top, perhaps belying its importance to the superstar, is the following:

"Being sweet to everyone all the time can get you into a lot of trouble. While it may be born from having been raised to be a polite young lady, this can contribute to some of your life's worst regrets if someone takes advantage of this trait in you. Grow a backbone, trust your gut, and know when to strike back. Be like a snake—only bite if someone steps on you."

As the last few years have proven, Swift has certainly grown unafraid to bite as a means of defending herself and the things she believes in. Not bad for someone whose so-called silence invited accusations of standing for nothing from critics.

Take this weekend's response to the news that celebrity music manager Scooter Braun, whose list of past and present clientele includes Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Kanye West and Demi Lovato, was the new owner of her entire music catalogue, thanks to his media holding company Ithaca Holdings LLC. reaching a "finalized" contract" with Big Machine Label Group, Swift's former record label, to acquire the company. The deal, made for a reported $300 million, includes Big Machine Music, which means that Braun retain ownership of the master recordings of each of the six albums she's released to date, as well as music from other artists such as Reba McEntire, Sheryl Crow and Lady Antebellum. And, as Swift admitted in an incendiary Tumblr post, it left her feeling "sad and grossed out."

After explaining that she'd hoped to own her work prior to departing Big Machine for Universal Music Group (Big Machine's distributor) in November of last year, only to be offered a deal to "'earn' one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in," as she wrote, she walked away from her past so that her future wouldn't be tied to a company that founder Scott Borchetta was clearly intent on selling to the highest bidder.

Jun Sato/TAS18/Getty Images

"Some fun facts about today's news: I learned about Scooter Braun's purchase of my masters as it was announced to the world," she wrote. "All I could think about was the incessant, manipulative bullying I've received at his hands for years."

As she explained in her post, she felt that Scooter's fingerprints were all over West and wife Kim Kardashian West's attempts to assassinate her character in the aftermath of the "Famous" lyrics debacle, which infamously find the rapper claiming that he "made that bitch famous," appearing in a screenshot of a FaceTime call between Bieber and West that the former shared with the since-deleted caption "Taylor swift what up" that she believes was intended to "bully [her] online about it" and allowing then-client West to release "a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked."

"Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it. This is my worst case scenario. This is what happens when you sign a deal at 15 to someone for whom the term 'loyalty' is clearly just a contractual concept. And when that man says, 'Music has value,' he means its value is beholden to men who had no part in creating it," she continued. "When I left my masters in Scott's hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter. Any time Scott Borchetta has heard the words 'Scooter Braun' escape my lips, it was when I was either crying or trying not to. He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn't want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever."

Taylor's move to take the two men involved in the deal to task has, predictably, drawn a line in the sand in the music industry, with folks like Brendon Urie, Halsey, Iggy Azalea, BFF Todrick Hall and other BFF Selena Gomezs mom Mandy Teefey publicly supporting Swift, while Bieber, Lovato, and Scooter's wife Yael Cohen Braun, who accused Swift of bullying her husband by going public with her beef, thereby sending her fan base his way, coming out in support of him.

While the minutiae of the deal and who knew about what when remains unclear, with Borchetta and Cohen Braun both furnishing receipts of some sort in their rebuttals to Swift that challenge her timeline, what is clear is that Swift is speaking up not just to shine a light on an injustice she's experiencing, but also to prevent other impressionable artistic youth from falling prey to the same sort of contract she willingly signed back in her early teens.

"Thankfully, I left my past in Scott's hands and not my future," she wrote. "And hopefully, young artists or kids with musical dreams will read this and learn about how to better protect themselves in a negotiation. You deserve to own the art you make."

It's hardly the first time that Swift has vociferously defended herself while also trying to move the needle forward for those less fortunate than her, be they artists or women in general.

Back in 2013, Swift informed bosses at Denver's KYGO-FM that morning show personality David Mueller had sexually assaulted her, groping her at a meet-and-greet event as they posed for a photo alongside Mueller's then-girlfriend Shannon Melchor. "When we were posing for the photo, he stuck his hand up my dress and grabbed onto my ass cheek," she explained to TIME in 2017. "I squirmed and lurched sideways to get away from him, but he wouldn't let go. At the time, I was headlining a major arena tour and there were a number of people in the room that saw this plus a photo of it happening. I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances and high stakes, imagine what he might do to a vulnerable, young artist if given the chance. It was important to report the incident to his radio station because I felt like they needed to know. The radio station conducted its own investigation and fired him."

Two years after the radio host saw his employment status at the station go from "current" to "former," he filed suit against Swift, accusing her of lying and suing him for making him lose his job. He wanted $3 million in damages. As result, she brought a countersuit against Mueller for assault and battery, taking him to trial.

AP Photo/Jeff Kandyba

By 2017, she was on the stand, showing an unflappable, steely determination to defend herself in the face of a man who'd wronged her and a legal team intent on discrediting her. When asked why the photos of the incident didn't show the front of her skirt wrinkled as evidence of any wrongdoing, she answered plainly, "Because my ass is located at the back of my body." When she was asked if she felt guilty about Mueller losing his job, she responded, "I'm not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I'm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine."

In the end, the jury threw out Mueller's unfair dismissal case, ruling in Swift's favor, awarding the singer the symbolic $1 dollar she'd asked for. In a statement released after the verdict was rendered, she said, "I acknowledge the privilege that I benefit from in life, in society and in my ability to shoulder the enormous cost of defending myself in a trial like this. My hope is to help those whose voices should also be heard. Therefore, I will be making donations in the near future to multiple organizations that help sexual assault victims defend themselves."

A year later, Swift spoke to fans during a Tampa, Fla. stop on her Reputation Stadium Tour about the incident, thanking them for sticking by her during a "really, really horrible" time in her life. "I just think about all the people that weren't believed, or the people who haven't been believed, or the people who are afraid to speak up because they don't think they will be believed," Swift said. "And I just want to say that I'm sorry to everyone who ever wasn't believed because I don't know what turn my life would have taken if people hadn't believed in me when I said that something happened."

Over the years, Swift has also used her superstar muscle to advocate for what she believes she and all other artists deserve during this streaming revolution. In 2014, after penning an article for the Wall Street Journal in which she argued that "music should not be free" and that artists shouldn't "underestimate themselves or undervalue their art," she pulled her entire discography from Spotify.

"Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment," Swift told Yahoo that November, defending her position. "And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."

Instagram

The following June, she penned an open letter to fans, explaining why they wouldn't be able to find her latest album, 1989, wouldn't be made available on Apple Music once the service launched. As she explained, her issue lay with Apple Music's decision not to pay artists during its free three-month trial for users to sign up. "I'm not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company," she wrote, adding that she was speaking on behalf of fellow musicians who had some hesitation at speaking out against the tech company.

"These are not the complaints of a spoiled, petulant child. These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much. We simply do not respect this particular call," she added. "We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation."

A day later, Apple announced that it would, indeed, be paying artists during the free trial period."When I woke up this morning and saw what Taylor had written, it really solidified that we needed a change," Apple's senior vice president of internet services and software Eddy Cue told Billboard in an interview after tweeting that the company was changing course. "And so that's why we decide we will now pay artists during the trial period."

By 2017, in time to celebrate 1989 selling over 10 million albums worldwide and, maybe, to tweak then-frenemy Katy Perry's launch of new album Witness, Swift's music was back on Spotify and added to Amazon Music and Google Play as well.

At every turn, Swift has revealed herself to be someone who has certainly found that backbone she wrote about in Elle. After West claimed he made her famous, he accepted Album of the Year at the 58th Grammy Awards with a speech that didn't mention the rapper by name, but spoke to him just the same. "As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I wanna say to all the young women out there: There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success, or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame," she said. "But if you just focus on the work and you don't let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you're going, you'll look around and you'll know that it was you and the people who love you that put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world."

When Kardashian West branded her a snake as she shared the questionably-recorded audio of a phone call between Swift and West as he was crafting "Famous," she took the animal iconography on as a central motif in her next album and tour, which became the highest-grossing domestic tour by a woman ever.

"A few years ago, someone started an online hate campaign by calling me a snake on the internet," Swift wrote in Elle. "The fact that so many people jumped on board with it led me to feeling lower than I've ever felt in my life, but I can't tell you how hard I had to keep from laughing every time my 63-foot inflatable cobra named Karyn appeared onstage in front of 60,000 screaming fans. It's the Stadium Tour equivalent of responding to a troll's hateful Instagram comment with 'lol.'"

When speaking with a German news outlet to promote new single "ME!" in May, she was asked if her 30th birthday meant she was going to settle down, get married and have kids soon. She shut that s--t down, saying, "I really do not think men are asked that question when they turn 30. So I'm not going to answer that."

As she's become more politically active, endorsing progressive candidates in her adopted home state of Tennessee, emphatically calling out President Trump, and advocating on behalf of the LGBTQIA community during this most recent Pride Month, after years of being criticized for sitting silently on the sidelines, she's opened herself up to criticism from those who wish their pop stars would shut up—unless they're spouting views identical to their own, of course. But it's no different to the criticism she faced when she was silent, or when she dared to demand fair compensation for her art, or when she simply wanted to be believed as a victim of sexual assault. All of which she's learned to look past.

"I learned to block some of the noise," she wrote in Elle. "Social media can be great, but it can also inundate your brain with images of what you aren't, how you're failing, or who is in a cooler locale than you at any given moment. One thing I do to lessen this weird insecurity laser beam is to turn off comments...I'm also blocking out anyone who might feel the need to tell me to 'go die in a hole ho' while I'm having my coffee at nine in the morning. I think it's healthy for your self-esteem to need less internet praise to appease it, especially when three comments down you could unwittingly see someone telling you that you look like a weasel that got hit by a truck and stitched back together by a drunk taxidermist. An actual comment I received once."

As for those in real life who are bringing her strife—like, say, Braun and Borchetta, currently—she's got a plan for dealing with that, as well.

"Banish the drama. You only have so much room in your life and so much energy to give to those in it," she wrote. "Be discerning. If someone in your life is hurting you, draining you, or causing you pain in a way that feels unresolvable, blocking their number isn't cruel. It's just a simple setting on your phone that will eliminate drama if you so choose to use it."

In other words, put quite simply, she's learned how to shake it off.

E! News

#taylor swift #2019.07.02 #scooter braun is a piece of shit

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kfs1001 · 6 years ago

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Arrow star Colton Haynes has opened up about his struggle to come out publicly as gay.

The 28-year-old, who came out a year ago, had been in the closet for much of his career.

He told Huffington Post: “I’ve been told by so many people that you cannot be out and have a career.

“The craziest thing was my career actually became the best it’s ever been once I actually was true to myself.

“That happened, and it was the most amazing experience.

“I was in Paris the day that the EW article dropped, and I cried for three days straight.”

He added: “It was amazing. Good cry, yeah. I was happy at the outpouring.”

He also revealed that Hollywood bosses forced him to date women to disguise his sexuality.

The actor told Andy Cohen’s radio show that he was originally forced to act heterosexual.

“I was literally told from the day that I moved to Los Angeles that I could not be gay because I wouldn’t work,” Colton told Sirius XM radio.

“The I was with my management team and team of people that just literally told me I couldn’t be this way.”

“They tried to set me up with girls. I was rumoured to date Lauren Conrad for six months because they were kind of angling a story.”

Haynes, who is now engaged to celebrity florist Jeff Leatham, revealed that he lost his virginity to “a boy and a girl”.

“I’ve never said that before,” Haynes said during the Andy Cohen Live interview.

“The girl was two years older than me, and the guy was, I would say, around 16.

“Everyone participated. It was a real first time. It was exciting.”

However the experiences were on separate occasions, not at the same time, he revealed.

Haynes did not elaborate on which came first, but did reveal he has slept with four women in his life.

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Colton Haynes is not only eager to start a new chapter in his career, but the actor is also ready to let us in on more of his personal story.

The Arrow star, who recently walked away from the hit TV show and Teen Wolf, has come out as gay. During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Haynes touched on a previous social media post that put his sexuality in question.

A Tumblr post in January regarding old racy modeling photos sparked speculation after a fan commented on Haynes' "secret gay past." Haynes coyly responded to the media frenzy with, "Was it a secret?"

His response was taken as his confirmation of being gay, however that wasn't case. At least, not at the time. "It was a complete shock. I wasn't ready to be back in the headlines," he said.

"I should have made a comment or a statement, but I just wasn't ready. I didn't feel like I owed anyone anything. I think in due time, everyone has to make those decisions when they're ready, and I wasn't yet. But I felt like I was letting people down by not coming forward with the rest of what I should have said."

Following the reports, the 27-year-old star checked into rehab for anxiety and returned to the hospital frequently over the next three months.

According to the interview, Haynes had never publicly addressed his sexuality, but has been out for most of his life. Those closest to the actor, from his family and friends to his cast members and Hollywood bosses, already knew.

It wasn't until now that Haynes felt ready and willing to talk about sexuality with the general public. "I'd go home and I was still acting," he admitted. "People who are so judgmental about those who are gay or different don't realize that acting 24 hours a day is the most exhausting thing in the world."

Regardless, the path Colton took ultimately brought him here, and here is a much better place for the young star. "I'm happier than I've ever been, and healthier than I've ever been, and that's what I care about."

Haynes tweeted the article and told fans, "I believe in livin life to the fullest & takin control of your life story. More to come."

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Colton Haynes has said coming out as gay "changed [his] life for the better."

The 28-year-old actor - who is currently engaged to celebrity florist Jeff Leatham - made the confession during an interview in May 2016, and has said that whilst it took him a while to be "comfortable enough" to speak about his sexuality, he admits he's now "proud" of who he is.

During a Q&A session on Entertainment Weekly's Tumblr account, Colton was asked by a fan what advice he could give to others who are struggling with their sexuality, and he wrote: "I can honestly say that it takes time to be comfortable enough to come out...it has to be on your own time but when i did...it changed my life for the better! It opened up so many doors for me and i dont have to feel like the elephant in the room anymore. Theres so much support i never knew was available for me and i am so proud to say that i am gay and it hasnt done anything to hurt what i love to do in life. Times are thankfully changing (sic)"

But it wasn't smooth sailing for the 'Teen Wolf' actor, as he also admitted he went through an "intense struggle" and even suffered a "breakdown" before he could come to terms with his sexuality.

When one fan asked if it was a challenge to come out, and Colton wrote: "It was an intense struggle for years. All the self shame lead me to have a breakdown and i had to quite for a while. Once i came out it all went away. I got multiple offers for work and honestly havent felt better. It changes your life and if someone isnt going to hire me for being born the way that i am...they dont deserve my time or energy. (sic)"

And when the 'Arrow' star was asked where he would see himself in 10 years time, he admitted he wants to have "at least three kids" with Jeff.

He replied: "HMMMMMM, I will be married. have at least 3 kids. Will still dye my greys. Will own a 69 corvette stingray. Will hopefully have at least one ab. And will still be trying to be the head writer of the Taco Bell sauce packets (sic)"

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quarantineroulette · 6 years ago

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Minor Disappointments’ Least Disappointing Releases of 2018

Preamble: I had a bit of a low (not Low, although that would’ve been preferable) period in 2018 that went on for several months. I didn’t really listen to music during that time, and so I missed out on a lot of things. I’m kind of too scatterbrained from holiday hysteria to really take in anything new. So these lists probably don’t designate “the best”, but they’re decent documents of what I wasn’t too distracted or down to take serious notice of.

Secondly, my own band released an album this year, and that occupied a large amount of time normally reserved for listening to other bands. I won’t rank it because I don’t want to be that conceited...but if you want to check it out for yourself, the highlights for me are “For the Rest to Rest”; “Open Up the Ways”; “Screen Test”; and “Suspend Disbelief”. One of my favorite reviews of it described our sound as being a “unique blend of post-punk, brit-pop, indie, and a little post-rock too.” and said we’re “one of the smartest bands to come out of Brooklyn in a very long time.” This is both why people should listen to it and also why they might not.

Thirdly, one of the things I listened to the most this year was Protomartyr’s Consolation EP, but I’m refraining from listing it as it’s not a full-length. That said, I think it’s as good as nearly anything I’ve heard this year, Protomartyr are the best and both of their live sets I caught were my favorite gigs of 2018. TLDR: Protomartyr = good. Most other things on this list = equally good but not Protomartyr. Let’s get started shall we?

10 Songs That Were Good:

10) Neko Case & Mark Lanegan - Cures of the I-5 Corridor. How has a Neko Case / Mark Lanegan duet not existed until 2018?? No matter the year, something this gorgeous and heartbreaking is always worthy of making the cut.

9) Lana Del Rey - Mariners Apartment Complex . I remember Spencer Krug tweeting something kind of snarky about “Venice Bitch” a few months back, then deleting it, and damn well he should’ve because both that and “Mariners Apartment Complex” are blinders. “Venice” may be the most low-key epic ever, but the way “Mariners” takes hints of Leonard Cohen and Lee Hazlewood / Nancy Sinatra and places them in a pop context is perhaps even more admirable. It’s truly inspiring to hear mainstream music this nuanced.

8) Parquet Courts - Tenderness . I love the jaunty piano, and how Andrew Savage’s vocal take is simultaneously forceful and lax. But most of all I love how all its elements converge to create a sense of hard-won optimism.

7) Iceage - Thieves Like Us . Iceage do a swamp cabaret song and I just can’t love it enough.

6) MGMT - Me and Michael . Yes, it’s ridiculously ‘80s, but you would have to be a very dour person to not smile whenever that opening synth riff kicks in.

5) Shame - One Rizla . Riff of the year. Hands down.

4) Bodega - Jack in Titanic . One of the great things about 2018 was witnessing Bodega’s success. To me, they’ve always been one of the few up-and-coming indie bands with the charisma to be actual stars, and it’s been a joy seeing the rest of the world take note of this. From the moment I heard “Jack in Titanic”, I just knew it was destined to show up on a BBC Radio 6 A-or-B list at some point in the near future (and it did!). And yeah, they’re my good friends, but even if they were strangers I’d appreciate the smartness, melodic hooks, and sexiness all the same:

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3) Preoccupations - Disarray . Click on that link because the song is really good, but be warned -- the vocal melody is never, ever going to leave you.

2) Protomartyr - Wheel of Fortune . This song has everything: a nerve-wracking stop and start guitar part, an at-once badass and terrifying refrain, Kelly Deal, and the exact sense of urgency that’s needed right now. Powerful, timely, and a rare example of a song that puts its guest star to highly effective use.

1) Janelle Monae - Make Me Feel . This song combines about five different Prince songs but Janelle Monae’s personality is so strong that the end result is something wholly her own. And if the song weren’t a blast on its own, the technicolor video is almost lethally fun:

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10 Albums That I Loved A Lot:

10) Arctic Monkeys - Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino . I really loved this album but I’m ranking it as 10 just because it’s the Arctic Monkeys and I can’t believe I enjoyed anything they’ve produced *this* much -- especially a lounge album about a casino on the moon. I find Alex Turner overrated as a lyricist and cosplaying a Bad Seed isn’t endearing to me, but he obviously loves Scott Walker a lot so I guess he gets some sort of pass.

9) Moonface - This One’s of the Dancer and This One’s for the Dancer’s Bouquet . The only reason this isn’t ranked higher is because I haven’t been able to give it the attention it deserves. This is a concept album where some songs are sung from the pov of the Minotaur and others from Spencer Krug, and both these creatures are enigmatic are too enigmatic to be given mere surface reads. This all said, I’ve listened enough to glean that, as always, Spencer’s lyrics are awe-inspiring, the marimba is implemented well, the alternate version of “Heartbreaking Bravery” is excellent, and comparing and contrasting its themes with those found on Wolf Parade’s 2017 release Cry Cry Cry is a fun past time if you’re me or seven other people. Looking forward to delving deeper in 2019.

8) Janelle Monae - Dirty Computer . To be honest, I *was* a little disappointed in this. It’s not as cinematic or stylistically adventurous as Monae’s previous full-lengths, but I think Monae herself is extremely talented and I wish she was a much bigger star. Furthermore, when considered against the drek of the general pop landscape, this is still a bold, unpredictable, and intelligent pop record from a true enigma.

7) Luke Haines - I Sometimes Dream of Glue . Like “Kubla Khan” if it had been written after huffing a river full of glue, but instead of Xanadu it’s an English village full of miniature people having a orgy:

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6) Parquet Courts - Wide Awake! . No other song better captures the frustrations and anxieties of living in NY in 2018 than “Almost Had to Start a Fight / In and Out of Patience”, and for that alone this album would make the year-end cut. But it also happens to be brilliant start to finish, with the two closing statements, in the form of “Death Will Bring Change” and “Tenderness” respectively, being among PC’s best.

5) Low - Double Negative . Mimi Parker’s voice emerging from a sonic cocoon on “Fly” is one of the most gripping moments of Low’s fantastic career. This album challenged me the most in 2018, but it’s also one I frequently returned to, determined to crack its code.

4) Preoccupations - New Material . I suppose some would dismiss this as too trad. post-punk, but holy hell - these trad. post-punk songs have got some hooks! And there isn’t quite another singer like Matt Flegel, who somehow manages to channel Bowie and Mark Lanegan at the same time. I’ve listened to this so much that New Material already feels like a well-loved classic.

3) Gazelle Twin - Pastoral . I would argue that Pastoral is the closest anyone’s come to making something comparable to PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake. An electro-pagan examination of Britain’s heritage and history (and the whole Brexit thing) that manages to feel thorough despite only being 37 minutes long, Pastoral moves beyond being just “a record” and becomes something closer to contemporary art. Elizabeth Bernholz’s vocals, whether warped or unconstrained by processing, are remarkable throughout. A mash-up of folk traditions and modern beats that somehow works shockingly well:

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2) Idles - Joy as an Act of Resistance . Boyfriend / bandmate James and I have discussed this album more than any other this year, and it’s been a pleasure hearing his love for it and forming my own appreciation of it in the process. What sealed it for me was James’ description of “Idles” as pagan, and how the band’s use of repetition and simple melodies (as well as their bacchanalian stage presence) created an air of ritualism. In their primalness, they even remind me of The Birthday Party - a “woke” Birthday Party, but a Birthday Party all the same. My favorite musical moment of the year may very well be Joe Talbot’s first shout of “UNITY!” in “Danny Nedelko”, primordial, raw, unpretentious, and completely punk. We *need* these guys right now:

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1) Suede - The Blue Hour . There is a joke in the TV show 30 Rock in which Jack Donaghy -- Alec Baldwin’s network head character -- says he attended Harvard Business School, where he was voted “Most”. The Blue Hour could be considered “Most” -- it’s meant to be taken as one piece, it’s insanely grandiose and, like its predecessor Night Thoughts, listening to it makes everything in my life seem 18 times more dramatic and tragic. I don’t know how, but this bizarre mashup of Kate Bush, Jacques Brel, Pink Floyd, Scott Walk, Gregorian chanting, classic Suede, spell books and (of course) David Bowie somehow seems bizarrely in step with 2018. Seeing as this top three consists of albums that are arguably “pagan”, and folk horror’s representation in popular 2018 films like Hereditary, The Blue Hour feels accidentally on trend. It’s crazy to think that a band whose first release happened 25 years ago could still be relevant in 2018, but Suede somehow are so please give these dads a hand and then listen to The Blue Hour’s glorious closing trio of songs a lot, because boy are they “Most”.

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shihtzuman · 6 years ago

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The Double Damage of the President’s Trump Tower Admission

His tweet about the purpose of the June 2016 meeting contradicts his earlier denials and could spell trouble for his son and him.

Brian Haskins originally shared:

THE DOUBLE DAMAGE OF TRUMP'S TRUMP TOWER ADMISSION

His tweet about the purpose of the June 2016 meeting contradicts his earlier denials and could spell trouble for his son and him.

DAVID A. GRAHAM

AUGUST 6, 2018

In an attempt to defend his son Donald Trump Jr. on Sunday, President Donald Trump may instead have incriminated him—and himself.

Responding to a _Washington Post_ report that he is increasingly concerned about his eldest son’s legal exposure, the president denied that claim in a tweet Sunday morning:

"Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics - and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!" ~Donald Trump

Both Trump Sr. and Trump Jr. have at times in the past denied that the purpose of the June 9, 2016, meeting was to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but the Trump Sr. has now flatly acknowledged it. Despite the limitations of the medium, Trump packed a great deal of potential trouble into less than 280 characters. First, he seems to proceed from the assumption that by declaring the purpose legal, that makes it so, when in fact the acknowledgement points to the ways the meeting may have broken federal laws.

Second, by contradicting his earlier claims, Trump again underscores his prior dishonesty. This is not just a matter of public trust: The changing accounts also get at accusations that the president obstructed justice.

Finally, the tweet is riddled with internal contradictions. If Trump is unconcerned about his son, why is he tweeting angrily about the story? And if what happened was entirely legal, why is he so quick to deny that he knew about the meeting?

When The New York Times first reported on the existence of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, in July of last year, Trump Jr. issued a statement insisting it had been focused only on Russian adoptions. Faced with emails that showed Trump Jr. had been told to expect dirt on Clinton, he was forced to concede that that was not true.

Trump Sr. scrambled to adjust. On July 13, during a press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, he said, “I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting. It’s called opposition research, or even research into your opponent.” Four days later, he tweeted, “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”

Sunday’s tweet is the most direct statement yet that the purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to get damaging information from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has deep ties to the Kremlin. Trump Jr. had also been told in an email ahead of the meeting that the government of President Vladimir Putin supported his father’s candidacy. But declaring the meeting legal does not make it so. Over the last week, the president and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have focused on the claim that “collusion” with the Russians, or anyone else, is not a crime per se.

That may be true, but as Bob Bauer explains in Lawfare, accepting anything of value from Russians could easily fall afoul of laws that ban accepting electoral assistance from foreign nationals. Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya have both insisted that there was no actual “dirt” exchanged, but Trump Sr. has tweeted out an apparent admission that his son intended to break campaign-finance laws.

Sunday’s tweet connects with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, too. Roughly three weeks after the Times initially revealed the June 2016 meeting, the Post reported that the president had dictated his son’s initial, false denial while flying home from Europe on Air Force One. That lie has created a cascading series of problems. At the time, the Trump attorney Jay Sekulow denied that Trump had any role in the statement. Speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, he acknowledged that that was not true. “I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement,” Sekulow said. His flip-flop raises further questions about whether he intended to misdirect investigators.

More broadly, Trump's repeated dishonesty about the June 2016 meeting undermines the credibility of every statement he makes about the meeting. Although the president and his son—the latter under penalty of perjury—have both said that Trump only learned of the June 2016 meeting last year, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen last week claimed that the president was aware of the meeting before it happened. Why should anyone give Trump the benefit of the doubt now?

It’s not just that Trump has misled the public. Sekulow’s lament about “bad information” is a euphemism: The implication is that the president wasn’t even honest with his attorneys about his role in dictating the statement. Has Trump withheld any other damaging information from his attorneys? Meanwhile, even as Mueller is reportedly poring over Trump’s Twitter feed as part of the obstruction inquiry, the president continues to provide new fodder. Tweets like Sunday’s seem intended to dig out of a hole, but in practice they threaten to dig deeper.

Trump's admission about the Trump Tower meeting comes at a moment of high tension, even by the standards of this administration. As he spends much of August away from Washington, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump has been tweeting prolifically and angrily, especially about the Mueller investigation. He has also held several campaign rallies, and although the ostensible purpose of these rallies is to boost Republican candidates ahead of November’s midterm elections, the president tends to speak more about himself, and his feeling of persecution by the press, than about any GOP hopefuls.

Trump’s public appearances and utterances give an impression of a man who is increasingly agitated and concerned about the Mueller inquiry. And for good reason: Several of Trump’s legal troubles are converging at the moment. The trial of Paul Manafort continues this week in northern Virginia. Mueller has charged Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, with laundering tens of million of dollars, although the alleged crimes mostly occurred outside the auspices of the presidential campaign.

Cohen’s legal troubles threaten Trump as well. The former aide has not been charged with any crimes, but he’s embroiled in controversy over payments to two women who allegedly had affairs with Trump. Not only has Cohen signaled a willingness to offer damaging information about Trump, but prosecutors in New York have also subpoenaed the longtime Trump Organization moneyman Allen Weisselberg. Trump has proven extremely combative whenever questions are raised about his business empire. In the midst of all this came Trump’s disastrous meeting with Putin in Helsinki.

For Trump to even address the threat to his “wonderful son” is an unusual show of vulnerability for a man who tries to project unstinting strength. Yet whenever he has tried to shield Trump Jr., it has only caused grief. The statement the president dictated aboard Air Force One has become a piece of the obstruction investigation, while Sunday’s tweet could incriminate Trump Jr. It’s said that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client. A son who allows Donald Trump to be his advocate may be in even worse shape.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-tower-meeting-russia/566840

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didanawisgi · 4 years ago

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The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center

By Bob Moser (2019)

“In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.

The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.” It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.

During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.”

“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?”

“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”

In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”

Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed. “I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a fucking monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.

For the many former staffers who have come and gone through the center’s doors—I left in 2004—the queasy feelings came rushing back last week, when the news broke that Dees, now eighty-two, had been fired. The official statement sent by Cohen, who took control of the S.P.L.C. in 2003, didn’t specify why Dees had been dismissed, but it contained some broad hints. “We’re committed to ensuring that our workplace embodies the values we espouse—truth, justice, equity, and inclusion,” Cohen wrote. “When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” Dees’s profile was immediately erased from the S.P.L.C.’s Web site—amazing, considering that he had remained, to the end, the main face and voice of the center, his signature on most of the direct-mail appeals that didn’t come from celebrity supporters, such as the author Toni Morrison.

While right-wingers tweeted gleefully about the demise of a figure they’d long vilified—“Hate group founder has been fired by his hate group,” the alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich chirped—S.P.L.C. alums immediately reconnected with one another, buzzing about what might have happened and puzzling over the timing, sixteen years after Dees handed the reins to Cohen and went into semi-retirement. “I guess there’s nothing like a funeral to bring families back together,” another former writer at the center said, speculating about what might have prompted the move. “It could be racial, sexual, financial—that place was a virtual buffet of injustices,” she said. Why would they fire him now?

One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)

The staffers wrote that Dees’s firing was welcome but insufficient: their larger concern, they emphasized, was a widespread pattern of racial and gender discrimination by the center’s current leadership, stretching back many years. (The S.P.L.C. has since appointed Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff for Michelle Obama, to conduct a review of its workplace environment.) If Cohen and other senior leaders thought that they could shunt the blame, the riled-up staffers seem determined to prove them wrong. One of my former female colleagues told me that she didn’t want to go into details of her harassment for this story, because she believes the focus should be on the S.P.L.C.’s current leadership. “I just gotta hope your piece helps keep the momentum for change going,” she said. Stephen Bright, a Yale professor and longtime S.P.L.C. critic, told me, “These chickens took a very long flight before they came home to roost.” The question, for current and former staffers alike, is how many chickens will come to justice before this long-overdue reckoning is complete.

The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple, which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars. The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is more than the total assets of the American Civil Liberties Union, and it now employs an all-time high of around three hundred and fifty staffers. But none of that has slackened its constant drive for more money. “If you’re outraged about the path President Trump is taking, I urge you to join us in the fight against the mainstreaming of hate,” a direct-mail appeal signed by Dees last year read. “Please join our fight today with a gift of $25, $35, or $100 to help us. Working together, we can push back against these bigots.”

In 1971, when the center opened, Dees was already a colorful and controversial figure in Alabama. While studying law at the University of Alabama, in the late nineteen-fifties, “Dees sold holly wreaths and birthday cakes, published a student telephone directory, dabbled in real estate,” Egerton wrote. He also worked for George Wallace’s first, unsuccessful bid for governor, in 1958. Upon graduating, in 1960, Dees teamed up with another ambitious student, Millard Fuller, who’d go on to found Habitat for Humanity. They opened a direct-mail business in Montgomery, selling doormats, tractor-seat cushions, and cookbooks. “Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,” Fuller would later recall. “We were not particular about how we did it.” While running their business, the two also practiced law. In 1961, they defended one of the men charged with beating up Freedom Riders at a bus terminal in Montgomery. According to Fuller, “Our fee was paid by the Klan and the White Citizens’ Council.”

In the late sixties, Dees sold the direct-mail operation to the Times Mirror Company, of Los Angeles, reportedly for between six and seven million dollars. But he soon sniffed out a new avenue for his marketing genius. In 1969, he successfully sued to integrate the local Y.M.C.A., after two black children were turned away from summer camp. Two years later, he co-founded the Law Center, with another Montgomery attorney, Joe Levin, Jr. He volunteered to raise money for George McGovern’s Presidential campaign, and, with McGovern’s blessing, used its donor list of seven hundred thousand people to help launch the S.P.L.C.’s direct-mail operations. The center won some big cases early on, including a lawsuit that forced the Alabama legislature to divide into single-member districts, insuring the election of the state’s first African-American lawmakers since Reconstruction. In 1975, the S.P.L.C. started a defense fund for Joan Little, a black prisoner in North Carolina who’d stabbed to death a jailer who attempted to rape her; the case became a national sensation and drew attention to the intrepid little operation in Montgomery. Dees, of course, had already positioned the Law Center to capitalize on the positive press.

A decade or so later, the center began to abandon poverty law—representing death-row defendants and others who lacked the means to hire proper representation—to focus on taking down the Ku Klux Klan. This was a seemingly odd mission, given that the Klan, which had millions of members in the nineteen-twenties, was mostly a spent force by the mid-eighties, with only an estimated ten thousand members scattered across the country. But “Dees saw the Klan as a perfect target,” Egerton wrote. For millions of Americans, the K.K.K. still personified violent white supremacy in America, and Dees “perceived chinks in the Klan’s armor: poverty and poor education in its ranks, competitive squabbling among the leaders, scattered and disunited factions, undisciplined behavior, limited funds, few if any good lawyers.” Along with legal challenges to what was left of the Klan, the center launched Klanwatch, which monitored the group’s activities. Klanwatch was the seed for what became the broader-based Intelligence Project, which tracks extremists and produces the S.P.L.C.’s annual hate-group list.

The only thing easier than beating the Klan in court—“like shooting fish in a barrel,” one of Dees’s associates told Egerton—was raising money off Klan-fighting from liberals up north, who still had fresh visions of the violent confrontations of the sixties in their heads. The S.P.L.C. got a huge publicity boost in July, 1983, when three Klansmen firebombed its headquarters. A melted clock from the burned-down building, stuck at 3:47 a.m., is featured in the main lobby of the Montgomery office today. In 1987, the center won a landmark seven-million-dollar damage judgment against the Klan; a decade later, in 1998, it scored a thirty-eight-million-dollar judgment against Klansmen who burned down a black church in South Carolina. With those victories, Dees claimed the right to boast into perpetuity that the S.P.L.C. had effectively “shut down” the K.K.K.

By the time I touched down in Montgomery, the center had increased its staff and branched out considerably—adding an educational component called Teaching Tolerance and expanding its legal and intelligence operations to target a broad range of right-wing groups and injustices—but the basic formula perfected in the eighties remained the same. The annual hate-group list, which in 2018 included a thousand and twenty organizations, both small and large, remains a valuable resource for journalists and a masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents; every year, when the center publishes it, mainstream outlets write about the “rising tide of hate” discovered by the S.P.L.C.’s researchers, and reporters frequently refer to the list when they write about the groups. As critics have long pointed out, however, the hate-group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by decrying the S.P.L.C.’s “attacks.”

In recent years, the center has broadened its legal work, returning to some poverty law; around eighty attorneys now work in five Southern states, challenging, among other things, penal juvenile-justice systems and draconian anti-immigration laws. But the center continues to take in far more than it spends. And it still tends to emphasize splashy cases that are sure to draw national attention. The most notable, when I was there, was a lawsuit to remove a Ten Commandments monument that was brazenly placed in the main lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building, just across the street from S.P.L.C. headquarters, by Roy Moore, who was then the state’s chief justice. Like the S.P.L.C.’s well-publicized 2017 lawsuit against Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi publisher of the Daily Stormer, it was a vintage example of the center’s central strategy: taking on cases guaranteed to make headlines and inflame the far right while demonstrating to potential donors that the center has not only all the right enemies but also the grit and know-how to take them down.

These days, whenever I tell people in New York or Washington, D.C., that I used to work at the Southern Poverty Law Center, their eyes tend to light up. “Oh, wow, what was that like?” they’ll ask. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I’ll regale them with stories about the reporting I did there—exposing anti-immigration extremists on the Arizona-Mexico border, tracking down a wave of anti-transgender hate crimes, writing a comprehensive history of the religious right’s war on gays. But then, considering whether to explain what an unsettling experience it could be, I’ll add, “It’s complicated, though,” and try to change the subject.

For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.

Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, “hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say.

It wasn’t funny then. At this moment, it seems even grimmer. The firing of Dees has flushed up all the uncomfortable questions again. Were we complicit, by taking our paychecks and staying silent, in ripping off donors on behalf of an organization that never lived up to the values it espoused? Did we enable racial discrimination and sexual harassment by failing to speak out? “Of course we did,” a former colleague told me, as we parsed the news over the phone. “It’s shameful, but when you’re there you kind of end up accepting things. I never even considered speaking out when things happened to me! It doesn’t feel good to recognize that. I was so into the work, and so motivated by it, I kind of shrugged off what was going on.” A couple of days later, she texted me: “I’m having SPLC nightmares.” Aren’t we all, I thought.”

Bob Moser is the author of “Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority.”

#southern poverty law center #hate groups #politics #democrats #controversy #SPLC #debate 2020 #Joe Biden #Donald Trump #proud boys #antifa

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intothenoise · 5 years ago

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Neither Anti-Semitism, nor Anti-Palestinian Bigotry Belong in the Church – Or Society

(This post was originally published as part of IMES’ Regional Brief for March 2019, written by Jesse Wheeler)

News

In Western discourses surrounding Palestine and Israel, it has become increasingly common to equate criticism of the Israeli state with antisemitism. As measures are taken to enshrine such associations in policy, dissenting voices are often rebuked as antisemitic. For instance, the British Labor Party has been rocked by such accusations in recent years under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. In response, and against Corbyn’s attempt to provide clarifying statements, Labor’s newly adopted definition of antisemitism now explicitly equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s government has been making moves to criminalize “anti-Zionism” as a form of antisemitism, while organizations in Germany have had their assets frozen.

“In the US,” writes journalist Jonathan Cook, “some 26 states have enacted laws to punish or sanction individuals and organizations that support a boycott [of Israel]. Similar legislation is pending in a further 13 states.” This has already resulted in people having been terminated from their jobs and was the catalyst for the US Senate passing the “Combating BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] Act” by a 77-23 margin in support of such laws. This was the environment in which freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar spoke out against what she perceives as undue influence in congress by AIPAC [The American Israel Public Affairs Committee], and for which she was roundly condemned by Democratic Party leadership for trading in “antisemitic tropes and prejudicial accusations.” Just this week, Omar has been condemned again for additional comments challenging what she sees as one-sided support for Israel in Congress. As of this writing Omar is facing possible censure from her colleagues in congress.

Analysis

It must be affirmed in no uncertain terms that antisemitism is real. It is dangerous. And, it has been an ongoing stain within the Western cultural inheritance for millennia. It is on the rise. And, it must be condemned wherever it is found. Discussions surrounding Israel and Palestine have unfortunately often been tainted by antisemitic rhetoric. It must also be affirmed, however, that anti-Palestinian bigotry is itself an almost unacknowledged force of its own. It exists within the halls of power and it too must be brought to light and condemned, especially as it is the Palestinians who are daily suffering under military occupation, in the squalor of refugee camps (in Lebanon more so than anywhere else), or in the limbo of exile.

What I see underlying this discourse is a conflict of definitions. For this reason, it is of critical importance to clarify definitions in discussions about Israel/Palestine. Otherwise, that which one intends to say will not be read as such by another. Key to this discussion is the definition of antisemitism as it relates to anti-Zionism. While Western leaders are increasingly defining criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitic, other groups have denounced in Zionism what they see as an inherently racist and supremacist ideology. Cook, in differentiating between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, writes,

Antisemitism refers to the hatred of Jews. It is bigotry, plain and simple.

Anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is opposition to the political ideology of Zionism, a movement that has insisted in all its political guises on prioritising the rights of Jews to a homeland over those, the Palestinians, who were already living there.

Anti-Zionism is not racism against Jews; it is opposition to racism by Zionist Jews.

Of course, an anti-Zionist may also be antisemitic, but it is more likely that an anti-Zionist holds his or her position for entirely rational and ethical reasons.

In fact, post-Zionist[1] Jewish activists are oftentimes those most vocal in their opposition to Israeli treatment of Palestinians, as seen in the examples of Mondoweiss, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, the writings of Mark Ellis, Rabbi Brant Rosen, and others.

Yet, whose definition counts?

Jewish pain is real, and it must be acknowledged and accounted for. Palestinians, of course, deny historical responsibility for such pain, seeing it as a European sin for which they have been forced to burden the consequences as a colonized people. They are often desperate for their story to be told and their own ongoing suffering acknowledged. For to relay the history of manifest destiny without including the Native American perspective, the “white man’s burden” without the perspective of the non-white man (or woman), or the mission civilisatrice without the perspective of those having had “civilization” forced upon them, one cannot, paraphrasing writer and analyst Robert Cohen, speak of Zionism without considering the Palestinian perspective. That is unless you have a priori assumed the illegitimacy of the Palestinian perspective as one worthy of consideration. “If we want to be serious, rather than tribal, about a fair definition of Zionism,” writes Cohen, “we need to ask the Palestinian people what they think and believe and feel about it. And if they tell us ‘Zionism is a racist endeavor’ we’d better pay attention.”

Theological Reflections and Missiological Implications

To reiterate: Anti-Semitism is real, dangerous and on the rise. And, it must be condemned wherever it is found. At the same time, anti-Palestinian bigotry is itself powerful force that too must be condemned in no uncertain terms.

What must be acknowledged is that the same people who for the same reasons would and should decry anti-Semitism wherever it is found, are the same people who would and should decry anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bigotry, as an affront to our common humanity as image bearers of the divine, as an affront to our common viceregency, an affront to our common commitment to universal human rights, and/or an affront to intersectional solidarity with all facing oppression – however one prefers to frame the discourse.

To assert the rights of one group, whilst simultaneously denying those of another is an affront to the monotheist vision, the existence of a single, universally sovereign God. There exists either liberty and justice for all, or liberty and justice for none. In the immortal words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.,

Injustice everywhere is a threat to injustice anywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

My rights do not negate the rights of another, nor can I pursue my rights at the expense of another. For my liberation is inextricably bound with that of the other, to paraphrase aboriginal activist Lilla Watson.

What, then, can the Church do about this? The first step, and I speak here as a Western Christian living in the East, is repentance and confession, the second, restitution. We are complicit. Our hands are bloody. Our prejudices, buttressed often by our theologies, have resulted both directly and indirectly, actively and passively, in the deaths of millions through our pogroms and our colonial conquests alike. Jew and Palestinian alike.

We must return to our better selves, to the teachings of our king for whom both empathy and justice walk hand in hand. The pain of the other must become our own, as we give of ourselves in working towards a world without walls where all might one day experience the divine peace of God’s Kingdom.

____________________

[1] A term I first heard as an undergraduate student of MENA History at UC Berkeley in the Winter/Spring of 2003.

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newagesispage · 7 years ago

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JULY 2017

*****Kathy Griffin lost her CNN NY gig over her Scary Clown 45 severed head gag. Word is that Anderson Cooper wants to replace her with Andy Cohen. Last I heard, he had not talked to her directly either. Jim Carrey wonders about all that The President says and he still has his job. He commented that he has a dream about golfing with Trump and just holding that club and then he wakes up.

*****Chance the Rapper and a few others are calling for Bill Maher to be fired after his comment about working the fields.

*****A federal court upheld a ruling that could free Brendan Dassey. The court said the investigators led the confession and Dassey’s story was involuntary. Wisconsin has 90 days to retry.

*****Better call Saul had its season finale and OMG!! If Michael McKean does not get an Emmy, the world is just wrong!! Actually the show and the whole cast is amazing but come on!!

*****Elon Musk , David Rank and others have resigned from the Trump administration after America was taken out of the Paris climate agreement. The deal took years of negotiation and compromise and clean energy is the economics of the future. Scary Clown said that he represents Pittsburgh, not Paris and seems to see the agreement as a threat to his isolation America first ideas. The mayor of Pittsburgh tells us, “What Trump did was not only bad for the economy but also weakened America in the world.” It will take 4 years before the U.S. can actually quit the deal. Luckily, so many companies in this country are so against Trump that we’ll probably hit our goals anyway.** The mayors of Paris and Pittsburgh have since made their own climate deal.** Others have resigned over the lack of interest the Trump administration is showing AIDS.

*****The Eagles will use Vince Gill and Glenn Frey’s son, Deacon for some NY and LA shows.

*****Word is that the American Idol reboot wanted Randy Jackson for the host gig but he turned it down.

*****Wal Mart insurer, Ohio Casualty is in a dispute against Tracy Morgan who refuses to testify. The company claims he exaggerated his injuries after being hit by the Wal Mart truck. Morgan’s camp say that the 90 million they claim to have paid him is the exaggeration.

*****Do you notice all the home security ads on the ID channel? I guess the true crime scares you into getting more protection.

***** After many of Trump’s minions have tried to convince us that what they have done is not a travel ban, the man himself says it is. They originally claimed that this would only be for 90 days and they would have new things in place and it has been over 90 days. The President tells us that they are extreme vetting anyway so why does he want to take this to the Supreme Court?**The supreme court is letting them do it now!!** His rabid supporters and GOP cohorts are just enablers at this point.

*****The Cosby trial ended in a mistrial. I was at the Red Cross the other day and some employees were watching a news report about the trial. The pig of a man in the group piped when they put up a shot of Cosby’s accuser. “Ooh, she is not a pretty woman. I’d have to drug MYSELF to do her,” he laughed.** Cosby is now going to do a town hall type tour.

*****Anne Rice says that she has been blocked from trump’s twitter site.

*****Trump lawyer, Jay Sekulow is so blatant about using donations from his Christian non profit to fund his personal life. Please read the article in the Guardian because the history of this is so far reaching that I can’t even go into it all here. Perhaps these givers don’t care and want to support this guy but they should know where there money is going.

*****The buzz about American crime story is starting even though it won’t be out until 2018. Next up is a look at Versace then hurricane Katrina and the Lewinsky scandal.

*****George and Amal had twins, Alex and Ella.

*****Megyn Kelly didn’t do much hard hitting on her Putin interview. She sure seems to like interviewing the hate mongers.

*****Alice Cooper is coming out with a new album.

*****Jay-Z is upset with the Prince estate. He is quoted as saying, “This guy had ‘slave’ on his face. You think he wanted the masters with his masters?”

*****Elvis Costello is working on a Broadway musical about A Face in the crowd. Hooray! He is also heading out on tour.

*****Forbes is doing its part to expose the Trump’s. They did an in depth story about how Eric Trump’s charity money for kids with cancer was funneled back into the business. There is now an investigation into this claim.

*****Thank you Chicago for the 10 story mural by Eduardo Kobra. The Muddy Waters mural was unveiled on June 8 at 17 N. State Street for the Chicago blues fest. The Muddy Waters legacy gave a free concert.

*****The HBO doc,’ If you’re not in the obit, eat breakfast’ is so inspirational and adorable. Dick Van Dyke is still a sexy beast and who knew that Carl Reiner’s oldest friend is an army buddy known as the greatest harmonica player.

*****Reality Winner has been charged with leaking classified info.

*****The infrastructure plan that Trump told us was” largely complete”, isn’t done at all. He now signed a proposal that is not binding so it means nothing. WTF are they doing?

*****Days alert: Oh, I was so hoping that they would find Tony Dimera on that Island, even though Anna carries around his ashes. It is a soap, everybody comes back. Speaking of that, Chandler Massey, who played the first ‘out’ Will Horton, is returning in September. Rory’s back!!** Where is Paul’s Mom since he is fighting for his life? ** So.. Chloe gives up the baby to Nicole and the court takes it away. Maggie is allowed to see the baby, why wouldn’t she just try to get custody of her grandson and Holly would still be in the house?? ** Thank goodness we are seeing more of Andre!

*****Chris Rock was on the cover of Rolling Stone and is on tour to make money after his divorce. He “jokes” that he had multiple affairs. Many claim that the famous affair he mentioned was with Kerry Washington.

*****The President wants to give 110 billion to Saudi Arabia for weapons.

*****Chris Wray has been nominated for FBI director.

*****Beyonce and Jay Z had twins.

*****Paul McCartney got the companion of honour in the UK.

*****Thank you CBS all access for topping off your latest ad with Matthew Gray Gubler! YES!!

*****Panama is breaking ties with Taiwan and shifting allegiance to China.

*****The director of health and human services in Michigan, Nick Lyon has been charged with involuntary manslaughter over the contaminated water.

*****Congrads to Jill Brummel and Keith and baby Wagner!

*****Check out Blood Orange for some great tunes!!

*****Woodstock has joined the National register of historic places.

*****Intel chiefs like Dan Coates refused to answer questions from their oversight committee in the probe. Rogers, Rubenstein and McCabe all seem to have trouble talking. This cover up is so much worse than Watergate. Former US director of National intelligence, James Clapper says, “Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting.”** The opening statement of James Comey was released the day before his big day. He confirms that Trump wanted him to drop the Flynn stuff and talked about the cloud of the Russian stuff. He transcribed the conversations with the President as soon as they were over.**Ya know, I was mad at Comey for the Hillary crap that he now tells us went public because he did not like the Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch meeting. Most that have worked with him seem to call him an honorable man. I was trying to believe he would do the right thing in the Trump administration investigations. After he was fired, Trump mentioned he may have tapes and Comey had a friend release his version even though some say the leaks were first. The Trump tweet was May 12 and the first news of leaks were May 16. Now, I still try to believe that Comey is an honest man but he sometimes acts like a child (someone does something so he immediately seems to say, ok, well take that!!). But we have to notice that Scary Clown’s stories always change, Comey’s does not. As far as who called who, there must be records.**As Comey was testifying, the house repealed Dodd Frank. C’mon Press, let’s get ALL the news out there!** BTW, there are no tapes, that was just more scary clown BS.** It seems that 38% of this country is trying to run the show and those 38% don’t give a shit about the rest of us.

*****Investigators have found a direct link that puts Putin at the center of the election disruption. The plan was to help Trump and hurt Hillary. Word is that the Obama administration did not take action because they thought Putin might escalate his cyber meddling. John Kerry tried hard to get some action but the White house thought they would be accused of trying to sway things for Hillary. It’s sad but true because the Trump camp would have went nuts. The instability and doubt may have changed this country forever. It seems many do not care as long as they have their guy in power now. **Power outages in the Ukraine have also been linked to Russia. It looks like they are now gunning for us. The centralized system in the Ukraine is not as hard to set right as ours would be. Our power system is more complicated and would be harder to tamper with but also harder to straighten out. Russia appears to have an adaptable and reusable software.** Fox’s Brit Hume says that even if the Trump campaign did collude with Russia, “it’s not a crime.” They all say ‘America first’ but I am beginning to think they would all be happier in Russia.** Over 2000 pages of financial documents have been turned over to the investigation.

*****And WTF is up with John McCain? He was like a dog with a bone about bringing up the Hillary stuff again. And he does not seem to like women asking questions because he keeps interrupting. It is time to retire.** Did you see Sen. Martin Heinrich??

*****Rep. Al Green of Texas and Brad Sherman of California are drafting articles of impeachment because Trump obstructed justice when he fired Comey. Just as this is in the works, Melania and Baron finally move into the White house.** Pence and even Trumps lawyer have hired attorneys.**After 8 years of class and pride, this country sure has taken a big step into the gutter.

*****The Generals seem to have their problems with the new President. A quote from Trump says,” The Lieutenants, the captain, their majors, the colonels- they’re professionals. They love doing it. So I authorized the generals to do the fighting.” I thought he said he knew more than them but now he gives no direction so his hands don’t get dirty. He has no strategy and there are so many vacant positions that there are not enough experts to go around. Using U.S. money to follow his family around while they make business deals instead of the government being properly staffed does not seem very safe for the rest of us.

*****Did ya’ll see those relaxed pics of Obama and Trudeau and their wine in Montreal? Wow.. It all seems so wonderfully normal.

*****Turkey has banned Wikipedia, calling it a national security threat.

*****Kevin Spacey did a great job hosting the Tony’s. His opening number included Whoopi and Stephen Colbert. Spacey later did his Carson and said “admit it, you missed me”. I suddenly felt so sad because I realized I really do miss him. Richard Thomas and Danny Devito were both nominated for The Little Foxes but both lost to Michael Aronov. Foxes did get a win for Jane Greenwood for costume design and featured actress, Cynthia Nixon. Nixon gave a fabulous speech about the people of this nation that do not take what is happening in Washington lying down. James Earl Jones won the lifetime achievement but only got a snippet of time on air. Laurie Metcalf won for leading actress in a play for A Doll’s house part 2. Bette Midler looked great and won but would not shut up.** Best Dressed was Sarah Paulson and worst was Carolyn Murphy.

*****Patricia Krenwinkel was denied parole again.

*****Oliver Stone interviewed Putin over 20 hours in 4 visits. Putin drove him around and seemed to convince Stone that he is a pretty great guy. He seemed to take Putin’s word about meddling in the election. Some say it is a love letter to Putin and I see shades of Barbara Walters and Fidel Castro.

*****There was some voter fraud in Alton, Il. An 88 year old election judge pleaded guilty to voting for Trump for her dead husband. She claims he would have wanted her to.

*****Summer Camp 2017 in Chillicothe, Il. had some great artists this year with Claypool Lennon delirium, the Wood brothers and Gov’t. Mule. A few people were taken away after the sudden storm but other than that fun was had by all.

*****Phil Collins had to postpone a London gig after a fall.

*****Dick Gregory is out again making appearances and I wanna go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****Theresa May misjudged her public when she called for an election in the UK. Her conservative party has lost some of its power.

*****The UK has acquired Feud: Bette and Joan to play later this year.

*****OMG: TLC SYTTD UK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****John Oliver is being sued by a great friend of Trump’s, Robert Murray. Murray, the CEO of Murray energy warned him not to do a story on him but he did it anyway. Go John!! Look it up, it’s a story worth seeing.

*****Diedrick Bader just gets hotter

*****The Downton Abbey movie will start production in 2018!

*****An inconvenient sequel, which is out July 28, has added a bit after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord.

*****Ivanka is being ordered to give a deposition in a lawsuit about copying a shoe design. The Italian company that sued is Aquazzura but she claims that she had nothing to do with any of it. Her claim is that she can’t give the deposition because it would be a distraction from her WH duties. Her Fox and friends interview sound bite was :”I try to stay out of politics.”

*****Leslie Jones hosted the BET awards and earned good reviews but she later tweeted about the hotel she stayed in. She suggested that people not stay at the Ritz Carlton because, “they don’t like black people.”

*****Farm Aid is being held in Burgettstown, Pa. with Willie, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and the Avett Brothers among others.

*****Fox news will no longer use the line, “fair and balanced.”

*****Daniel Day Lewis has retired from acting.

*****Tony Bennett is given the Library of congress Gershwin prize.

*****Judd Apatow is making a doc bout Garry Shandling. Can’t wait!!

***** Sean Spicer is interviewing his own replacement including Fox news and Daily mail employees.

*****The U.S. spent 28 mil on uniforms for the Afghan military. They were not field tested and did not work out. An official wanted a specific lush forest motif while most of the landscape is desert. WTF?

*****O.J. is up for parole.

*****The secret health care bill came out and many protested at Mitch Mcconnell’s office. Police were sent in to drag them out, wheelchairs and all. It seems we have not been this divided since the civil war. What is more important than health care for all, than equality? Is a wall more important? Are tax cuts for the rich more important? In the end, the haters always lose but not without hurting so many along the way. It always comes down to equality. It is always about some trying to keep down others and that is never right. It always has to lose in the end. ** The vote has now been delayed. **Good old Mitch who was given treatment for his polio, as a child, because of the kindness of the March of Dimes now refuses to talk to them. They disagree with the health care plan.**More health care insurance providers are bowing out of coverage. The companies blame the uncertainty of Washington. This is just another reason to blame Obama for the senate and house’s own doing. Keep things in chaos and blame the other guy while the rest of the country suffers. ** The Pres now says that the ACA should just be repealed, new plan or not.

*****It is being reported that the CIA health professionals did not just torture detainees during the Bush administration, they performed experiments.. This is like right out of the Nazi playbook.

***** We don’t hear enough about men who are straight and mostly dress masculine but like a little makeup. I find that adorable and they need to be represented

*****Wow!! The NY senate after a decade, still did not vote on the child victims act. The Catholic Church and the Boy scouts lobby so hard because they think it will bankrupt them. The bill would let survivors bring civil cases until they are 50 years old, felonies until 28, and give a 1 year window for both public and private institutions instead of 90 days. Republican majority leader John Flanagan will not even put it up for a vote.

*****Illinois has its fair share of problems right now with the budget crisis, Chicago and Peoria shootings and the Belleville shooter, James T. Hodgkinson.

*****Why do the View and the Tonight show play all these stupid games with their guests? Does the audience enjoy this? It is often so awkward.

*****Jess Session says that Trump has not been in a single briefing about North Korea. I am sure the new South Korean president is reassured by that as he came for a visit. The shuffling of reporters and questions about the idiot in chiefs twitter made him feel welcome too.

*****And now the airwaves explode with the latest scary clown 45 twitter directed at the Morning Joe team. Why do we have to talk endlessly about this crap every time the baby has a tantrum? Unless we find some real evidence or this impeachment march does some real good, we better get used to the fact that our President has no fucking class!

*****Neil Young is reminding us to stand up for what we believe and resist this 4th with a new video.

*****The Presidents team is trying to get personal info on voters like social security numbers and voting history which could lead to voter intimidation.

*****The Frye fest head Billy McFarland has been arrested for wire fraud.

*****Adele has cancelled the rest of her tour because of damage to her vocal chords. It is especially sad for she has hinted that this could be her last tour.

***** If you haven’t seen the 2014 doc ‘ Starring Adam West’, check it out. The Kickstarter film is so honest and a great tribute to a man who will be missed. He also has some hot sons!!

*****R.I.P. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Manuel Noriega, Jimmy Piersall, Roger Smith, Peter Sallis, Modd Deep, Stephen Furst, Rosalie Sorrels, Glenne Headly, Simone Veil, Adam West and Anita Pallenberg.

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96thdayofrage · 8 years ago

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An irony of the escalating hysteria about the Trump camp’s contacts with Russians is that one presidential campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that political campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an electoral advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump’s; it was Hillary Clinton’s.

And, awareness of this activity doesn’t require you to spin conspiracy theories about what may or may not have been said during some seemingly innocuous conversation. In this case, you have open admissions about how these Russian/Kremlin claims were used.

Indeed, you have the words of Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, in his opening statement at last week’s public hearing on so-called “Russia-gate.” Schiff’s seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged collaboration with Russia followed the script prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele who was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump.

Steele, who had worked for Britain’s MI-6 in Russia, said he tapped into ex-colleagues and unnamed sources inside Russia, including leadership figures in the Kremlin, to piece together a series of sensational reports that became the basis of the current congressional and FBI investigations into Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.

Since he was not able to go to Russia himself, Steele based his reports mostly on multiple hearsay from anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their government contacts before passing it on to Steele’s associates who then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into “raw” intelligence reports.

Lewd Allegations

Besides the anonymous sourcing and the sources’ financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele’s reports had numerous other problems, including the inability of a variety of investigators to confirm key elements, such as the salacious claim that several years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

That tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele’s opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton’s mysterious benefactors who were financing Steele’s dirt digging and who have kept their identities (and the amounts paid) hidden. Also in that first report were the basic outlines of what has become the scandal that is now threatening the survival of Trump’s embattled presidency.

But Steele’s June report also reflected the telephone-tag aspects of these allegations: “Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for a least 5 years.

“Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. … In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years. …

“The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.”

Besides the anonymous and hearsay quality of the allegations, there are obvious logical problems, especially the point that five years ago, you could have gotten astronomical odds about Trump’s chances to win the U.S. presidency, although perhaps there is more an astrological explanation. Maybe the seemingly logical Putin went to some stargazing soothsayer to see the future.

There also may have been a more mundane reason why Trump’s hotel deal fell through. A source familiar with those negotiations told me that Trump had hoped to get a half interest in the $2 billion project but that Russian-Israeli investor Mikhail Fridman, a founder of Russia’s Alfa Bank, balked because Trump was unwilling to commit a significant investment beyond the branding value of the Trump name.

Yet, one would assume that if the supposedly all-powerful Putin wanted to give a $1 billion or so payoff to his golden boy, Donald Trump, whom Putin just knew would become President in five years, the deal would have happened.

Whetting the Appetite

Despite the dubious quality of Steele’s second- and third-hand information, the June report appears to have won the breathless attention of Team Clinton. And once the bait was taken, Steele continued to produce his conspiracy-laden reports, totaling at least 17 through Dec. 13, 2016.

The reports not only captivated the Clinton political operatives but influenced the assessments of Obama’s appointees in the U.S. intelligence community. In the last weeks of the Obama administration, I was told that the outgoing intelligence chiefs had found no evidence to verify Steele’s claims but nevertheless believed them to be true.

Still, a careful analysis of Steele’s reports would have discovered not only apparent factual inaccuracies, such as putting Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague (when Cohen says he’s never been to Prague), but also the sort of broad conspiracy-mongering that the mainstream U.S. news media usually loves to ridicule.

For instance, Steele’s reports pin a range of U.S. political attitudes on Russian manipulation rather than the notion that Americans can reach reasonable conclusions on their own. In one report dated Sept. 14, 2016, Steele claimed that an unnamed senior official in President Vladimir Putin’s Presidential Administration (or PA) explained how Putin used the alleged Russian influence operation to generate opposition to Obama’s Pacific trade deals.

Steele wrote that Putin’s intention was “pushing candidate CLINTON away from President OBAMA’s policies. The best example of this was that both candidates [Clinton and Trump] now openly opposed the draft trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, which were assessed by Moscow as detrimental to Russian interests.”

In other words, the Russians supposedly intervened in the U.S. presidential campaign to turn the leading candidates against Obama’s trade deals. But how credible is that? Are we to believe that American politicians – running the gamut from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Donald Trump – have all been tricked by the Kremlin to oppose those controversial trade deals, which are also broadly unpopular with the American people who are sick and tired of trade agreements that cost them jobs?

Steele’s investigative dossier suggests that we can’t really think for ourselves. We are all Putin’s puppets.

Greater Skepticism?

Normally, such a ludicrous claim – along with the haziness of the sourcing – would demand greater skepticism about the rest of Steele’s feverish charges, but a curious aspect of the investigations into Russia’s alleged “meddling” in Election 2016 is that neither Steele nor the “oppo research” company, Fusion GPS, that hired him – reportedly with funding from Clinton allies – has been summoned to testify.

Usually, official investigations begin with testimony from the people who are making the allegations, so their credibility and motives can be tested in an adversarial setting. Plus, some baseline information should be established: Who, for instance, paid for the contract? How much was the total and how much went to Steele? How much did Steele then pay his Russian contacts and did they, in turn, pay the alleged Russian insiders for information? Or are we supposed to believe that these “insiders” risked being identified as spies out of a commitment to the truth?

None of these answers would necessarily discredit the information, but they could provide important context as to whether this “oppo” team had a financial motive to sex-up the reports to keep Clinton’s friends coming back for more. Arguably the funders of this “oppo” research should be called to testify as well regarding whether they would have kept ponying up more money if Steele’s reports had concluded that there were no meaningful contacts between Trump’s people and the Russians. Were they seeking the truth or just dirt to help Hillary Clinton win?

Since last November’s election, Steele has ducked public inquiries and Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal journalist who heads Fusion GPS, has refused to divulge who hired his firm or answer other relevant questions. That means we still don’t know which Clinton friends paid for the dirt and how much money was given to subcontractors like Steele and his Russian associates. (One source told me it may have totaled around $1 million.)

According to various press reports, Fusion GPS first worked for a Republican opponent of Trump’s, but then switched over to the Clinton side after Trump won the Republican race. With Steele generating his reports every few days or every few weeks, people close to Clinton’s campaign saw the Russia allegations as a potential game-changer. They reached out to reporters to persuade them to publish Steele’s allegations even if they could not be verified.

Before the election, a longtime Clinton operative briefed me on aspects of Steele’s investigation, including the “golden shower” allegations, and urged me to at least publish the accusations as a rumor citing the fact that some major news organizations were looking into the charges, an offer that I declined.

In a different setting – when Gov. Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency and Republican “oppo” researchers were pushing various wild and salacious allegations about him – the Clinton team dismissed such claims and the motivations of the people behind them as “cash for trash.”

Following the Storyline

Yet, Schiff’s opening statement at the hearing on March 20 relied heavily on Steele’s narrative and the supposed credibility of the ex-British spy and his anonymous Russian sources, even to the point of naming Americans who presumably joined in a scheme to collaborate with the Russians to help rig the U.S. election, an act that some commenters have compared to treason.

The California Democrat said, “Russian sources tell [Steele] that [Carter] Page [a Trump foreign policy adviser who made a public trip to Russia in early July 2016] also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft. … According to Steele’s Russian sources, Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company.”

These “Russian sources” also tell Steele, according to Schiff, that “the Trump campaign is offered documents damaging to Hillary Clinton, which the Russians would publish through an outlet that gives them deniability, like Wikileaks. The hacked documents would be in exchange for a Trump Administration policy that de-emphasizes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and instead focuses on criticizing NATO countries for not paying their fare share.”

Schiff continued: “Is it a coincidence that the Russian gas company Rosneft sold a 19 percent share after former British Intelligence Officer Steele was told by Russian sources that Carter Page was offered fees on a deal of just that size? Is it a coincidence that Steele’s Russian sources also affirmed that Russia had stolen documents hurtful to Secretary Clinton that it would utilize in exchange for pro-Russian policies that would later come to pass?”

However, is it also not possible that Steele and his profit-making colleagues made their reports conform to details that already were known or that they had reason to believe would occur, in other words, to match up their claims with independently known facts to give them greater credibility? That is a classic way for conmen to establish “credibility” with marks who are either gullible or simply want to believe.

Also, clever prosecutors in presenting a “circumstantial case” – as Schiff was doing on March 20 – can make innocent coincidences look suspicious. For instance, though Trump’s resistance to escalating tensions with Russia was well known through the primary campaign, Schiff made a big deal out of the fact that Trump’s people opposed a plank in the Republican platform that called for shipping lethal military supplies to Ukraine for the government’s war against ethnic Russian rebels in the east. Schiff presents that as the quo for the quid of the Russians supplying purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks (although WikiLeaks denies getting the emails from the Russians).

In his opening statement, Schiff said: “In the middle of July, Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager and someone who was long on the payroll of pro-Russian Ukrainian interests, attends the Republican Party convention. Carter Page, back from [a business meeting in] Moscow, also attends the convention.

“According to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests. [Russian] Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak, who presides over a Russian embassy in which diplomatic personnel would later be expelled as likely spies, also attends the Republican Party convention and meets with Carter Page and additional Trump Advisors J.D. Gordon and Walid Phares. It was J.D. Gordon who approved Page’s trip to Moscow.

“Ambassador Kislyak also meets with Trump campaign national security chair and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions would later deny meeting with Russian officials during his Senate confirmation hearing. Just prior to the convention, the Republican Party platform is changed, removing a section that supports the provision of ‘lethal defensive weapons’ to Ukraine, an action that would be contrary to Russian interests.

“Manafort categorically denies involvement by the Trump campaign in altering the platform. But the Republican Party delegate who offered the language in support of providing defensive weapons to Ukraine states that it was removed at the insistence of the Trump campaign. Later, J.D. Gordon admits opposing the inclusion of the provision at the time it was being debated and prior to its being removed.”

Problems with the Conspiracy

So, not only is Schiff relying on Steele to provide key links in the conspiracy chain but Schiff ignores the surrounding reality that Trump had long opposed the idea of escalating the confrontation with Russia in Ukraine – as, by the way, did President Obama who resisted pressure to send lethal military hardware to Ukraine.

Plus, Schiff ignores other logical points, including that party platforms are essentially meaningless and that the savvy Putin would not likely take the huge risk of offending the odds-on winner of the presidential race, Hillary Clinton, for something as pointless as a word change in the GOP platform.

There is also the point that if Trump were a true “Manchurian candidate,” he would have taken the more politically popular position of bashing Russia during the campaign and only reverse course after he got into the White House. That’s how the scheme is supposed to work. (And, of course, all embassies including American ones have spies assigned to them, so there is nothing unusual about Ambassador Kislyak presiding at an embassy with spies.)

Other independent-minded journalists have noted various chronological problems with Steele’s narrative, such as Marcy Wheeler at her emptywheel.net Web site.

In other words, there are huge holes in both the evidence and the logic of Schiff’s conspiracy theory. But you wouldn’t know that from watching and reading the fawning commentary about Schiff’s presentation in the mainstream U.S. news media, which has been almost universally hostile to Trump (which is not to say that there aren’t sound reasons to consider the narcissistic, poorly prepared Trump to be unfit to serve as President of the United States).

The journalistic problem is that everyone deserves to get a fair shot from reporters who are supposed to be objective and fair regardless of a person’s popularity or notoriety or what the reporter may personally feel. That standard should apply to everyone, whether you’re a foreign leader despised by the U.S. government or a politician detested for your obnoxious behavior.

There is no professional justification for journalists joining in a TV-and-print lynch mob. We also have seen too often where such wrongheaded attitudes lead, such as to the groupthink that Iraq’s hated dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs, or in an earlier time to the McCarthyism that destroyed the lives of Americans who were smeared as unpatriotic because of their dissident political views.

So, yes, even Donald Trump deserves not to be railroaded by a mainstream media that wants desperately – along with other powerful forces in Official Washington – to see him run out of town on a rail and will use any pretext to do so, even if it means escalating the risks of a nuclear war with Russia.

And, if mainstream media commentators truly want a thorough and independent investigation, they should be demanding that it start by summoning the people who first made the allegations.

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male-model-confessions · 8 years ago

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Year in Review It is time for the Year in Review again. I want to start out by thanking all my followers. It has been a long year and I have not been on top of things like I should. I finished my MBA and have been looking for a job. I am sorry this year in review is late. I had trouble deciding how to begin. This year has been filled with so many tragedies and deaths. It seems to me, that there are way more deaths this year than I can include in this post. Everyone in the media is subjected to scrutiny and can influence the world of fashion. I have decided that I will provide a list of the names of the people that passed away.

January 10 David Bowie, 69, Rock icon January 14 Alan Rickman, 69, Actor January 18 Glenn Frey, 67, Eagles rocker January 23 Jimmy Bain, 68, Rainbow rock star January 30 Frank Finlay, 89, Acting great January 31 Terry Wogan, 77, TV & radio legend February 3 Maurice White, 74, Earth Wind & Fire star

February 4 Katie May, 34, female model February 19 Harper Lee, 89, To Kill A Mockingbird author February 28 George Kennedy, 91, Movie great March 8 George Martin, 90, Beatles producer March 11 Keith Emerson, 71, ELP rock legend March 15 Sylvia Anderson, 88, Lady Penelope March 16 Frank Sinatra Junior, 72, Sinatra’s singer son March 17 Paul Daniels, 77, Comedy magician March 29 Patty Duke, 69, Child star March 31 Ronnie Corbett, 85, Comedy legend March 31 Denise Robertson, 83, TV agony aunt April 6 Merle Haggard, 79, Country legend April 12 David Gest, 62, TV personality April 20 Victoria Wood, 62, Comedian April 20 Joanie “Chyna” Laurer, 46, WWE wrestling legend April 21 Lonnie Mack, 74, Blues guitar great April 21 Prince, 57, Pop icon April 21 Guy Hamilton, 93, Bond director April 24 Billy Paul, 80, Chart star May 17 Guy Clark, 74, Country legend May 19 John Berry, 52, Beastie Boys star May 19 Alan Young, 96, Mister Ed TV star May 21 Nick Menza, 51, Megadeth drummer May 24 Burt Kwouk, 85, Pink Panther star May 31 Carla Lane, 87, Liver Birds writer June 3 Muhammad Ali, 74, Boxing legend June 14 Henry McCullough, 72, Wings guitarist June 19 Anton Yelchin, 27, Star Trek’s Chekov June 24 Bernie Worrell, 72, Funkadelic star

June 25 Billy Cunningham, 87, Fashion photographer June 28 Scotty Moore, 84, Elvis’s guitarist July 2 Caroline Aherne, 52, Comedy actress July 16 Alan Vega, 78, Suicide punk pioneer August 13 Kenny Baker, 81, Star Wars’ R2-D2 August 29 Gene Wilder, 83, Comic genius September 11 Alexis Arquette, 47, Transgender actress September 17 Charmian Carr, 73, Sound of Music’s Liesl September 25 Arnold Palmer, 87, Golfing legend October 14 Jean Alexander, 90, Corrie’s Hilda Ogden October 23 Pete Burns, 57, Dead or Alive chart star October 24 Bobby Vee, 73, 1960s teen idol November 7 Leonard Cohen, 82, Iconic singer & writer November 11 Robert Vaughn, 83, Veteran actor November 13 Leon Russell, 74, US rock legend November 24 Colonel Abrams, 67, 80s chart star November 25 Florence Henderson, 82, Brady Bunch star November 26 Ron Glass, 71, US TV star December 1 Andrew Sachs, 86, Fawlty Towers star December 6 Peter Vaughan, 93, Game of Thrones star December 8 John Glenn, 95, First to orbit Earth December 8 Greg Lake, 69, ELP legend December 13 Alan thicke, 69,Actor, composer, television host December 18 Zsa Zsa Gabor, 99, Actress December 24 Rick Parfitt, 68, Quo Rocker December 25 George Michael, 53, Singer December 26 George Irving, 94, Actor December 27 Richard Adams, 96, Author December 27 Carrie Fisher, 60, Actress

December 28 Debbie Renyolds, 84, Actress and mother.

December 31 William Christopher, 84, Actor

Of course, not everything is about death. Some good things happened this year. I’m going to stick to the fashion world, in this one.

• More insight and awareness was achieved in the struggles and pressure male actors Cover Girl hired James Charles, the first male model to advertise make up. This is a big step in normalizing the use of make up, by men.

• Several models, including Jaden Smith, stood up against gender norms and began advertising skirts and dresses

.• Colton Hayes received the visibility award from the Human Rights Campaign. This year has been amazing at highlighting gender issues and destroying gender stereotypes.

Top five favorites confessions:

1. I think it is important to raise awareness on this matter. It is usually easy to dismiss the idea that men do not suffer from sexism but here is the unglamorous truth and the problem with the social constructs of masculinity. [I think it is important that we address this issue. Sexism is not excluded to female models.]

2. I just saw the BBC report on modelling agencies demanding to end gender pay gap in modelling. The argument is actually very fair, but in the long run male models and their agencies will never see it, because as Ty Ogunkoya (featured in the report) said; nobody wants to speak out because they will lose modelling jobs, and male models are just happy that they’re given the opportunity. [I like this one because It sheds light on a major problem in the fashion industry.]

3. I hate what that person said about Marc Schulze’s girlfriend. She’s super pretty and just because someone’s SUPER attractive (Marc) doesn’t mean that they aren’t allowed to like people who are less attractive. Which I don’t even think she is less attractive. [I love that someone stood up for a model’s girlfriend, rather than tearing them down.]

4. It’s pretty damn sad to see people say “oh it’d be sad if” or ‘what a waste if “ Ben Allen is gay. People - it’s not a 'waste’ or 'sad’ if someone isn’t heterosexual and you are. That’s you being selfish and talking about a person as if they are 'property’ you could potentially own, and you dismissing their worth based on your personal preferences. Rude! [I agree with this statement on so many levels. It is not sad that these people have a life outside of modeling.]

5. Felix Gesnouin is not ugly at all, i like the fact that he is not dating a model…(like most of male models nowdays) and he is really a funny guy,i worked with him once in London. [I seriously love when people right in and defend the models.]

5 of my least favorite confessions:

1. No thanks. CoverGirl used James Charles as a token. Not groundbreaking…[I disagree. This was a groundbreaking move for CoverGirl.]

2. Ben Allen is so gross, honestly. I was at a small party that he was at and everyone was so uncomfortable around him and no one wanted to talk to him because he was saying some ridiculous shit and acting real fucking cocky. He is hot garbage. [I hate when people completely tear into the models.]

3. I’m so happy RJ King finally came out! I mean, it felt like everyone already knew except him. There were already so many rumors circulating back then. Much love to them both! [I love the positivity in this post, but I don’t like outing anyone.]

4. French model Paul Hameline comes off as over-sexed and lustful, but in a good way that makes you want to rip his pants off without shame. His Instagram is full of nearly naked men, sometimes engaging in sex! I think he has a fling with Jonas Gloer. [His Instagram seriously disturbed me, but I thought this confession was too judgmental on the man’s sexuality.]

5. This is a photo of Kristof Kralik taken by Nicolas Hagius (another male model) that pretty much show how pigs and misogynist some male models can actually. The “funny” thing is right after this Kristof and Nicolas stopped working for some time in the big markets, upto some time ago (Kristof walked Versace A/W 2016). I’ve always wondered what is the real reason why guys become male models, they always say because of traveling and meeting new people, it seems like some of them want to be a douchebag in as many different countries as they can be. [I think the picture was taken out of context. You cannot always judge a picture at face value.]

Well, that is another year in review. I wish everyone a Happy New Year.

#year in review #male model confessions #fashion #opinion

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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In Aftermath of Zoom Dick Fiasco, Believer Staffers Say, Bosses Used Public Records Law Against Them

Long before Joshua Wolf Shenk reportedly stepped out of his bathtub and into infamy as the latest media figure to expose his penis to colleagues via Zoom, there were already issues at The Believer, the prestigious literary magazine where he served as editor-in-chief. And months after his departure, the fallout is still affecting staffers there, one of whom has resigned in protest. Staffers at both The Believer and the Black Mountain Institute—an affiliated institution that is, like the magazine, part of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—say that records requests from Motherboard seeking documents about how UNLV handled both the bathtub incident and previous complaints about Shenk were improperly used to intimidate staffers.

The situation is both highly unusual and deeply rancorous: Maxwell Neely-Cohen, the staffer who resigned in protest, for instance, was involved in fundraising, and told UNLV that its handling of the records requests cost the university “millions of dollars” in donations, in a resignation letter obtained by Motherboard. It’s just the latest dramatic turn in the strange saga of an uncomfortable relationship between a respected literary magazine and the academic institution that houses it.

“As UNLV’s leadership goes, I never have any idea where incompetence ends and nefariousness begins,” Neely-Cohen, who was editor-at-large at The Believer for three years before his resigning in protest this week, told Motherboard. “I just don’t know.”

In late April, a Los Angeles Times story broke the news of the Zoom dick incident and of Shenk's resignation from his roles as EIC and as director of the Black Mountain Institute (BMI). The version of events presented to the paper by Ira Silverberg, a famed literary personality acting as an advisor for Shenk, was that Shenk had, while wearing a mesh shirt, taken a bath during a February staff meeting to ease pain from his fibromyalgia, and inadvertently displayed his penis to Believer staffers when he stepped out of the tub. The article, which touted Shenk's many achievements but didn't manage to quote any of his colleagues, portrayed the incident as a ludicrous and regrettable but isolated one-off.

Subsequently, an anonymous open letter from staffers at The Believer and BMI, a statement from former BMI staffer Joseph Langdon describing open mutiny against Shenk over his conduct, a Defector article by Believer features editor Camille Bromley, and an article by writer Brittany Bronson, who formerly taught in UNLV's English department, in the Nevada Independent significantly complicated the picture. The issue, they made clear, was not that the staff was too fragile or ungenerous to countenance having been inadvertently flashed, but what they said was a long, frustrating history of mismanagement.

"Our experience of Shenk," staffers wrote in the open letter, "is that he was an inattentive and negligent boss who created a fractured workplace rife with pay and labor inequalities, and whose behavior on the Zoom call matched a pattern of callousness and abusive disregard for the staffers who worked under him." Langdon wrote that Shenk, upon beginning his roles at BMI and The Believer, had “only the vaguest understanding of our programs and publications and little interest in learning about them” (Silverberg told Motherboard, "This is office politics intensified by the academic culture," and urged Motherboard to speak to “persecuted writers” whom Shenk had “brought to town and supported." The particular writers he recommended we speak to couldn’t be reached for comment.)

"This is office politics intensified by the academic culture," Shank’s adviser said.

As Bromley wrote, Shenk remained on paid leave for two months following the incident. She also wrote that the bathtub incident wasn't precisely an isolated one, but to be viewed within the context of “a whisper network warning workers and students about Shenk’s behavior [that] stretches back years at UNLV.” The anonymous open letter published on Medium on May 3, written by staffers at The Believer and BMI, fleshed out some details of what that whisper network was about. The letter’s authors stated that Shenk had a reputation both in and out of the office for “making women uncomfortable” and that employees felt pressured to have “casual personal relationships with him.” Langdon's statement said, "Shenk turned a vibrant institution into one in which female students hid in their offices in the dark to avoid him."

Two female Believer staffers—who, like other current staffers who spoke for this article, were granted anonymity because they fear for their jobs—independently told Motherboard that they had been warned about Shenk's conduct before or early on in their tenures. He made female staffers deeply uncomfortable, according to the accounts of four current staffers, though none said he had sexually harassed them. “He doesn’t seem to be aware of his body or of other people’s comfort or reality,” one staffer said, dryly.

Do you work at a literary magazine or in an academic institution and know something you think the public should be aware of? We would love to hear from you. Contact the reporters at [email protected] or [email protected], or via Signal at 267-713-9832.

A staffer who said she didn’t write the letter told us, “I was told by someone in management that if I wanted Josh to take my concerns seriously, I needed to be warmer with him and be more emotionally open with him” making him feel “like a friend.” Shenk would insist they have dinner or hang out as opposed to having a normal work meeting, something she found frustrating, particularly at a time when many people on staff were contractors, being paid very little, and asked on top of that to perform a pantomime of befriending their boss, who was, according to public documents, earning over $200,000 in base pay.

Shenk agreed to answer a few specific questions, though most were answered by Silverberg, his adviser. On the accusation of making women uncomfortable, Shenk told Motherboard via email, “I’m often awkward around folks regardless of their gender, and I own that. In imaginative spaces, you’ve got to balance deep appreciation for people’s boundaries with openness and creative risks. For any times I got that balance wrong, though, I want to learn from them and make amends.”

The authors of the open letter also wrote that Shenk’s tenure at the magazine and BMI was “marked by breathtaking pay inequity and tokenism.” They said, too, that a Title IX investigation into the bathtub incident was set to begin until Shenk resigned.

Current BMI and Believer staffers described Shenk's management as chaotic and ineffective, with a particularly troubling pattern of underpaying staffers of color. One person said that at one point, every person employed as a full staffer with benefits was white, while everyone who was a person of color was on contract.

“He had a clear pattern of tokenizing in the most literal sense,” one person told Motherboard.

“His criticisms were always over the top. And he mentioned many times to me that he prided himself in running these institutions like startups.”

Silverberg, in response, said that Shenk had created 6.5 salaried positions, with benefits, for women of color and had a pending full-time offer to another woman of color out at the time he left. "These numbers represent a commitment to DEIA principles," he wrote. "They exist in all aspects of BMI/The Believer’s work.”

Everyone interviewed who worked at the magazine described Shenk as a basically absentee editor-in-chief who poured his energy into other aspects of BMI: a radio show connected to The Believer, for instance, and fundraising. He nonetheless managed to make people who worked underneath him miserable, they said.

“There were never firm expectations and it was always communicated to me that I was failing in certain areas,” one person said, describing working closely with him. “His criticisms were always over the top. And he mentioned many times to me that he prided himself in running these institutions like startups. We were under the same working conditions.”

Silverberg told Motherboard that Shenk doesn’t precisely dispute a characterization of the BMI/Believer work environment as “toxic.”

“That’s a fair statement,” Silverberg wrote. “It was a tough situation. The toxicity came from an institutional crisis, which was an intensified version of what all institutions face when there’s new leadership."

Believer and BMI staffers also expressed deep frustration over UNLV's handling of complaints, including what multiple people with direct knowledge described as a previous Title IX complaint filed against Shenk in 2018 or 2019. (Silverberg and Shenk declined to say whether or not Shenk had been the subject of a Title IX complaint, telling us we would have to ask UNLV. The university, to which Motherboard has filed records requests related to Title IX incidents, said it does not comment on personnel matters.)

The most recent action causing stress and panic among Believer and BMI staff was, ironically and unintentionally, an open records request filed by the authors of this piece.

On May 4, Motherboard filed a request with UNLV under Nevada's Public Records Act seeking documents mentioning several keywords dated from February 1 and created by staff at UNLV's College of Liberal Arts or media relations office, the office of UNLV's president, Black Mountain Institute, or The Believer. Two weeks later, on May 20, the university asked Motherboard to clarify whether it was seeking documents containing all or any of the keywords it had provided. "Additionally," the university wrote, "please define whose correspondence you are requesting when you state 'staff' at the College of Liberal Arts, the Black Mountain Institute, and the Believer Magazine." That same day, Motherboard responded, clarifying the request to state that it was seeking documents sent to or from five specific UNLV staffers, only one of whom works at The Believer, and also filed a second, distinct request.

Curiously, while this second request was received and processed on May 20, internal records provided to Motherboard by UNLV show that the clarification of the first request was only received on May 26, several hours after Motherboard reached out to the university's public affairs office for comment on this article.

(Michael Morisy of Muckrock, the platform Motherboard used to submit these public-records requests, said that per his team's communications with the vendor that handles the portal used to communicate with UNLV, things appear to have been "buggy." Screenshots of text messages reviewed by Motherboard, though, show that the clarification was in the possession of UNLV staff on May 25, even as public affairs staff was asking Believer staffers for records Motherboard had made clear it was not seeking.)

Joshua Wolf Shenk sinks his teeth into a pastrami sandwich during the first day of business at the newly re-opened 2nd Ave. Deli. The famed noshery moved from its original location on Second Ave. and E. 10th St., where it had been since opening in 1954, to its current space at E. 33rd St. between Lexington and Third Aves., after a rent dispute in January 2006. (Photo by Susan Watts/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

While Motherboard and UNLV were going back and forth on these records requests, the university was seeking—overzealously, in the view of staff—to fulfill them. In a May 19 email to Believer staff, a public affairs official told staff, including people who were not employees of the magazine or UNLV, like contractors and contributors, that under state law Motherboard's initial request required them to turn over private texts and emails. The public affairs official attached a .pdf file to the email of a 2018 Las Vegas Review-Journal story on a decision by the Supreme Court of Nevada stating that public employees' personal devices are not exempt from disclosure.

Experts in Nevada public records law agreed that while that law is a robust one that covers public business done on private devices, UNLV's demands that Believer staff turn over personal communications raised issues.

Patrick C. File is an assistant professor of media law at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno and the president of the Nevada Open Government Coalition. He told Motherboard that emails and other communications from the Believer staff would be subject to state public records laws whether or not they were on a government-owned device or account, because the 2018 state Supreme Court ruling "prevents government entities and officials from avoiding public scrutiny by using private devices or accounts for public business." This would only apply, though, if the communications pertain to “a service rendered in the public interest”—which it's not clear that, say, a Believer staffer's personal text messages to a friend complaining about Shenk would.

(Magie McLetchie, an attorney in Nevada who litigates public records matters and a transparency advocate, told Motherboard in an email that "In keeping with the broad nature of the [Nevada Public Records Act] and its important purpose, even if personal cell phones or devices are used to conduct the people’s business, those records are public records. However, that does not mean that a governmental entity can use a public records request as an opportunity to flush out whistle blowers or get access to private communications such an employee’s private communication to his or her friend complaining about inappropriate work conditions.")

Further, File, said, he is “less clear on whether the state entity can compel someone who is not a public employee to hand over public records; I’m not sure whether Nevada courts have addressed that.”

In any event, on May 20, faced with demands for communications he viewed as private from the university, and finding them egregiously invasive and questioning their legality, Maxwell Neely-Cohen resigned, in a letter he subsequently provided to Motherboard:

Having spoken to my legal team, there is united disagreement with the interpretation that the statute applies to me in my capacity with The Believer. If UNLV disagrees, we happily and eagerly look forward to seeing you in court. When being brought onto The Believer, I was specifically and repeatedly told, including in writing, that I would not be a UNLV employee or state employee. The idea an email address magically makes me one in direct contradiction to what was agreed and signed between us is a laughable interpretation of the definition of employment.

You are absolutely welcome to look through and access all communications on the [email protected] account (password [redacted]), an account which I never sent a single message from.

I hereby resign my position at The Believer effective immediately. I have no interest in being affiliated with an organization that is using a ruling aimed at elected officials to bully mere literary magazine employees and contributors into disclosing their private communications. While my personal status may be unique, what you are doing to my colleagues, who unlike me may be state employees, is needless in addition to being wrong. An institution with any integrity would be supporting their workers by challenging the hilariously specious standards under which such a standard could apply.

You can inform the development team that the institutional funders I was lining up, the donation from my foundation that was to occur in 2022, and the future bequests in my estate, are canceled. And on a personal note, this is really not the best way to communicate with someone who is in the process of raising and personally contributing tens of millions of dollars to UNLV.

Four days after that—which was also four days after Motherboard had sent a clarification of its initial records request and filed its second one—Believer staffers and volunteers received a cryptic communication reminding them that "the UNLV Office of Public Affairs is the only office authorized to handle public records requests on behalf of the university. To ensure the integrity of our process, staff members should not contact that individual or organization that made the public records request."

What prompted this email is unclear; UNLV did not directly answer when asked. It’s also unclear precisely why UNLV was pushing so hard for private communications—staffers were given to understand they could be fired for failing to comply, and told that doing so would constitute insubordination and a violation of state law—or what the institution planned to do with them.

Staffers were divided on how to treat the records request. “A few of us have sought legal counsel,” one person told us. “The lawyers we’ve spoken to agree the interpretation that UNLV is taking is completely ridiculous.” Some staffers didn’t respond by the deadline, while others made a good faith effort to release what they thought were responsive communications, even as they worried about providing private and sometimes sensitive information to the school.

“I felt nauseous when I sent that email in.”

“There’s no explanation of how the review process works when we submit our records,” a staffer told us. One hypothetical scenario people worried about was whether a survivor's discussions of rape, using the requested terms, would be subject to release.

“We’re not worried about the requesters, about you guys,” the same person said. “We’re worried about what university officials are going to be reading our private correspondence, much of which is critical of the university. “

“I felt nauseous,” another person told us, about turning over their responsive communications, “when I sent that email in.”

It appears that the situation abruptly resolved itself. On May 26, soon after Motherboard contacted UNLV’s media relations office with a request for comment about the communications they were instructing BMI and Believer staffers to turn over and other matters covered in this article, UNLV reversed course. In an email, the university told people subject to the request that they’d received the clarifications to our initial request that day. (Motherboard had in fact sent those clarifications in six days prior, alongside another request that was, somehow, received and promptly processed.)

“Your affidavits and/or records are no longer required and they will not be retained by Public Affairs,” the email to staffers added.

UNLV did not respond to Motherboard's questions about the ways it interpreted the request or the demands placed on Believer and BMI staff to produce private communications. Staffers, though, continue to consider the episode overreach aimed at silencing them—something they say they have experienced ever since the Zoom incident.

Shenk is not without his defenders. Silverberg recommended Motherboard reach out to several people who would speak to Shenk’s character, including Rory Reid, the CEO of the Rogers Foundation, a large charitable trust in the state.

“I think Josh Shenk was a gamechanger for the cultural scene in Las Vegas,” Reid told Motherboard. “He was a creative type, unlike what we’re used to getting the benefit of in our town. Because of his experience in the literary world, he made the Black Mountain Institute better and we appreciated his work.”

Reid “understood why [Shenk] resigned,” he said. “He made, as he’d say, an awful mistake and he regrets it. So I was saddened for him and for everyone that was involved in the unfortunate incident. But I don’t think we should forget all the good things he did. That mistake shouldn’t overshadow all the good he did for Black Mountain Institute, for the city of Las Vegas. I hope that people remember the good and not just the last scene of his Vegas experience.”

Another person responded to us on the condition of anonymity; they’re a member of the Las Vegas literary scene familiar with Shenk’s work. They told us, “Nobody can speak to you because one way or another they could lose their jobs and they’re terrified by the Twitter storm, etc… Everybody’s sick about it, but the prospect of legal action is a mighty one. I’m not sure what UNLV’s reach is, or if this is true at other universities, but it does appear draconian.” They added, “The situation has been very harmful for the good people who run BMI/The Believer, and they’re all suffering as much by the stress of the bad publicity as by watching a quirky friend, who changed our community for the better—and lifted up his accusers—go down."

The same person suggested that the backlash against Shenk hadn’t been proportional to the violations he was accused of.

“Those who have brought charges against Shenk, contacted the media, and written the Medium letter destroyed a man's life, his reputation, and cultural institutions that we were proud of. To me, that's just wrong,” they wrote in an email. “If he'd been running around raping and torturing people, yeah—get him! But for asking a staff member to go out to eat? When he'd been coached to reach out to staff members? What really astonishes me are those who jumped on the bandwagon, pointing their fingers, without direct knowledge of the original incident or a relationship with Shenk."

According to staffers, though, in some ways, the Zoom incident, as offensive as they found it, was not a surprise. Everyone we spoke to said the work culture Shenk created was deeply troubled from the start. “It was an environment of distrust and chaos and sometimes fear,” Neely-Cohen said. (Silverberg said, “Clearly, Josh had his limits as a manager, especially as BMI grew under his leadership. He repeatedly asked his bosses at UNLV to support a new position to help manage the staff day to day. He offered to cut his own salary to support a new senior position. This was refused. He later asked to cut his pay to boost staff salaries.”)

One puzzling thing—which speaks to the concerns of staffers that their voices haven't been heard—is that while the Los Angeles Times story, relying on Silverberg's account, presented Shenk as having been in the bathtub, exposing himself by mistake when he stood up, no one who was actually on the call and who spoke to Motherboard found that to be a credible version of events. One person said that Shenk had told different stories to multiple people: that he’d been on the toilet with a towel covering him, for instance, or that he’d sought to keep his relevant parts under wraps with a robe.

“It never crossed my mind that he was in water,” one person said. Nor was he wearing a “mesh shirt.”

“It never crossed my mind that he was in water,” one person told us, saying they never heard splashing sounds, for instance, during the duration of the 90-minute meeting. Nor was he wearing a “mesh shirt,” as Silverberg was quoted as having told the Times. Instead, Shenk was wearing an ordinary white t-shirt and had a BMI Zoom background in place, a black backdrop dotted with colorful planet-like spheres. (These descriptions of how Shenk appeared on the call were corroborated by screenshots showing him from the shoulders up which were provided to Motherboard; images of him showing his penis were neither sought nor provided, and no one said they’d taken a screenshot of the incident.)

Silverberg believes the description of Shenk having worn a mesh shirt originated with his having told a Times reporter that Shenk was wearing a shimmel shirt, a cropped athletic shirt sometimes worn by football players. For his part, Shenk said via email: “After the shock receded, I told the true (and embarrassing) story of the tub mishap to tons of friends and colleagues, and it never varied. But over my vehement protests, UNLV forbade me from telling the simple truth to the people affected, the BMI staff. So I get why there might be confusion and frustration over this.”

The flashing incident happened in the “last 30 seconds of the meeting,” a staffer told us. “He was like wrapping up, thanking us all for being there, and then it seemed to me that he stood up. It could’ve also been that the camera moved down. It was so fast. One of my other coworkers was the host and ended it as soon as it came into frame.”

Almost immediately, staffers started texting each other in bafflement. “It was so bizarre,” one staffer said.

“I wasn’t surprised in the sense that it seemed like something that would happen,” one person said of the dick incident. “Like, of course there would be this. I don't think it’s fair to categorize him as someone who’s predatory, but you can categorize him as someone who just didn’t care. He didn’t have any respect for boundaries or comfort or what his coworkers deserved from him in terms of attention or time or decency.” It was, the same person added, “sort of the culmination of a very long time of like negligence and being self-centered. It seemed like the natural last step in a very long process."

In May, after the Times story was published, Shenk’s exposing himself to staffers generated a vigorous round of discussion on Twitter, focused on whether staffers had been too “sensitive” in objecting to seeing their boss’s dick over Zoom. Staffers were in fact sensitive to the fact that Shenk appeared to live with chronic pain, they told Motherboard.

“When he interviewed me, I was like, 'OK, this is someone who’s living with a lot of pain and has a lot of things set up to make him comfortable in his space,'” one person told us. “Maybe he’s going through a lot. I have a lot of empathy for that.” But Shenk’s lack of awareness of his own body, and the discomfort he caused others, was harder to stomach, the staffers said.

Neely-Cohen said that in his understanding, staffers at the magazine experienced Shenk as a particularly ineffective boss. “He was the worst leader i’ve ever interacted with,” he said. “He’d start ideas and never finish them. He didn’t seem to understand how to get the best out of people. And he was just all over the place all the time. It was insane. There was no continuity and no real focus and you’d be asked to work on something or go over an idea and it would disappear.” This was, as the anonymous letter writers outlined, particularly galling given the salary disparity between him and other staffers underneath him. (Silverberg said, "This was a start-up environment. Many new ideas were ventured, and not all came to fruition. The biggest was to make a literary magazine that could be entwined with an under-served but amazingly rich local culture like Las Vegas. They did. This is extraordinary in a University setting.”)

Neely-Cohen’s work involved fundraising, and he found basic structural issues there. A central one, he said, was that the Black Mountain Institute didn’t necessarily have the same interests as the magazine. (Many people we spoke to said that the relationship between UNLV and The Believer was distant at best before Shenk's departure and the consequent fallout; all the Believer staffers work remotely, while BMI and UNLV staff live in Las Vegas. “I don’t think they understand us or the position we have within media,” one person told us. “They’re looking at us as a partially university-funded program.”)

The relationship between BMI and The Believer was "vampiric," Neely-Cohen said, using a nationally recognized brand name to gain status and influence without giving it the resources it needed to exist on its own terms.

“We’ve done excellent work. We know how our workplace should function. We don’t need anonymous, ill-informed university overlords to make decisions for us.”

Several Believer staffers told us that the Zoom incident could have, and should have, forced a larger discussion about how dysfunctional and fractured the workplace was—the ways that BMI and Believer staff, for instance, were siloed from each other. And one staffer expressed a hope that going forward, The Believer wouldn’t have an editor-in-chief any longer, as it didn’t when the magazine was founded in 2003. “A horizontal leadership would be great and would function well,” they said, pointing out that this would not be a new arrangement, given what they said was Shenk’s absenteeism. “That’s practically how we function currently.”

Going forward, the same staffer said, they’re holding out some hope that UNLV and BMI will allow the staff to self-govern to some degree, and that they won’t be held to the whims of another unpredictable or unclothed EIC. “We’ve done excellent work,” they said. “We know how our workplace should function. We don’t need anonymous, ill-informed university overlords to make decisions for us—especially not ones that affect our daily professional lives and the quality of work.”

In Aftermath of Zoom Dick Fiasco, Believer Staffers Say, Bosses Used Public Records Law Against Them syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years ago

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Jay Clayton, Low-Profile Regulator, Is Catapulted Into a Political Fight

After three years at the helm of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton had made it known to colleagues, friends and the Trump administration that he was itching to go back to New York.

The longtime and highly-paid corporate lawyer, who had spent his career at Sullivan & Cromwell representing some of the world’s biggest financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, wanted to be closer to his family.

In a private discussion with Attorney General William P. Barr, Mr. Clayton, 53, expressed interest in becoming the top prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, according to a Justice Department official. After a lifetime of practicing securities law and prepping companies for initial public offerings, Mr. Clayton told friends he saw the job as a way to establish his litigation credentials, according to people who know him.

Mr. Barr did not object — the two lawyers have known each other for years — and Mr. Clayton has a good relationship with President Trump. The two played golf together last Saturday at the president’s club in Bedminster, N.J., according to people familiar with the matter, and he has golfed with the president several times in the past.

In recent days, talks about Mr. Clayton succeeding Geoffrey S. Berman, the current United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, picked up, according to a person briefed on the matter.

On Friday night, Mr. Clayton appeared close to getting the job he wanted. But within an hour, that dream job had morphed into a nightmare as Mr. Clayton found himself embroiled in a huge political fight after Mr. Berman refused to resign and the administration was accused of trying to force out a prosecutor whose office has been at the forefront of corruption inquiries into Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Barr told Mr. Berman in a letter that Mr. Trump had fired him and that he had named the deputy U.S. attorney, Audrey Strauss, as acting head.

Even before the firing, Republicans suggested that confirming Mr. Clayton would not be easy. Democrats called on him to withdraw his name or face reputational ruin.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a close Trump ally, indicated that he would allow New York’s two Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, to block Mr. Clayton’s nomination through a procedural maneuver known as a blue slip.

Both Mr. Schumer and Ms. Gillibrand said Mr. Clayton should drop out of contention and said not doing so was akin to allowing the administration to muzzle an independent prosecutor.

“Jay Clayton can allow himself to be used in the brazen Trump-Barr scheme to interfere in investigations by the U.S. Attorney for SDNY, or he can stand up to this corruption, withdraw his name from consideration, and save his own reputation from overnight ruin,” Mr. Schumer said on Twitter.

It is unclear whether Mr. Clayton was aware of the controversy that his nomination was going to elicit. Those that know Mr. Clayton said they found it hard to believe that he would have agreed to be nominated had he known Mr. Berman was not planning to step down. Mr. Berman said on Friday night that he only learned that he was “stepping down” from a Justice Department news release. Mr. Clayton and Mr. Berman know each other professionally and have established a good working relationship, according to people familiar with the matter.

While Mr. Clayton has golfed with Mr. Trump, he is not viewed as a political acolyte or someone who courts controversy in the way the president seems to relish. He did not contribute to the president’s 2016 campaign but has given money to candidates of both parties over the years. Mr. Clayton is not a registered Republican or Democrat.

His tenure at the S.E.C. has been fairly muted and Mr. Clayton has not played a high-profile role within the administration. But public scrutiny of Mr. Clayton is likely to increase with his nomination, particularly if he intends to see it through.

Mr. Clayton “will surely find himself under considerable pressure from his professional circle not to become a pawn in what will likely be a serious fight,” said Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor and Columbia Law School professor.

Rebecca Roiphe, a New York Law School professor of ethics, put it more simply: “I think he should withdraw his name,” she said. “The process has become politicized and the public would have little faith in him at this point, especially because he doesn’t have the traditional experience and profile of most people who have had the job in the past.”

Mr. Clayton has said little since the Friday night uproar. The only statement he has made was an email he sent, just after midnight on early Saturday, to all S.E.C. employees in which he said “pending confirmation, I will remain fully committed to the work of the Commission and the supportive community we have built,” according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times.

Just a day earlier, Mr. Clayton had emailed his staff to say that, while they were continuing to work remotely for the summer months, he looked forward to seeing them again in person, offering no indication that he was planning to leave the agency, according to a person briefed on the email.

Even without the controversy, Mr. Clayton was facing a tough path to confirmation. He is not a litigator or a former prosecutor — often prerequisites to being named as a U.S. attorney, particularly for a prestigious office like the Southern District, which is known for its independence, policing Wall Street and going after major corporate fraud cases. It has aggressively pursued cases involving insider trading and Ponzi schemes, including prosecuting Bernard L. Madoff, Steven A. Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors (known now as Point72 Asset Management) and Representative Chris Collins of New York.

Before being named S.E.C. chair, Mr. Clayton was a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, where he did work for banks, hedge funds and big corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Alibaba. Within the firm he had a reputation as being a well-placed but cautious person not known for his political views.

His pick was seen as evidence that the Trump administration wanted someone in the position with strong ties to corporate America who might be inclined to take a lighter touch to enforcing securities laws and punishing corporate wrongdoers.

In many ways he was the classic Republican pick. At the time, he said he would divest himself of 175 investment funds and stock holdings that either he or his wife, who then worked at Goldman Sachs, held. The disclosure form listed Mr. Clayton and his family’s wealth at around $50 million.

One of the few whiffs of intrigue surrounding his nomination was that billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn, a one-time unpaid special adviser to Mr. Trump, had met with Mr. Clayton before his confirmation hearing before the Senate.

In joining the S.E.C., he took with him another Sullivan & Cromwell partner, Steven Peikin, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and longtime defense lawyer. Mr. Peikin was an assistant prosecutor in Manhattan during the time that James B. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I. who was fired by Mr. Trump, served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District.

The S.E.C. under Mr. Clayton has been aggressive in cracking down on fraudulent offerings of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In his first speech as S.E.C. chairman, Mr. Clayton said his No. 1 concern was looking out for the “long-term interests of the Main Street investor.” In the speech before the Economic Club of New York, he peppered his talk with folksy language, referring to ordinary investors as “Mr. and Ms. 401(k).”

Mr. Clayton’s focus on mom-and-pop investors was seen just a few days ago when the S.E.C. raised serious questions about a plan by Hertz to raise up to $500 million in cash by selling stock to investors amid its bankruptcy case. In a bankruptcy proceeding, shares of a company are often wiped out and worthless so the stock offering raised considerable eyebrows on Wall Street.

On Thursday, the car rental company said it was withdrawing the planned stock sale in light of the S.E.C. inquiry.

But the commission’s actions sometimes appeared at odds with Mr. Clayton’s stated focus on ordinary investors.

The S.E.C. has proposed changes in auditor independence rules that some feared could relax standards meant to prevent conflicts of interest. And last summer the commission adopted a so-called best interest rule governing the conduct of stockbrokers that consumer advocates said actually did little to protect investors. Critics said the rule did not go far enough in defining what it means for a broker to act in a customer’s best interest.

There have also been few high-profile corporate enforcement actions during Mr. Clayton’s tenure. Many of the billions of dollars of fines that the S.E.C. has taken in have come from cracking down on Ponzi schemes. Last year, the commission imposed a $1 billion penalty on the Woodbridge Group of Companies and its former owner, which securities regulators contend had run a real estate scheme that defrauded 8,400 retail investors.

A review by The New York Times in 2018 found a significant decline in the size of penalties imposed by the S.E.C. on corporate wrongdoers under the Trump administration than in the final 20 months of the Obama administration.

His tenure, however, may be best remembered for sanctions the S.E.C. brought against Elon Musk to step aside as chairman of Tesla for three years and pay a $20 million fine because of misleading information he posted on Twitter about a potential buyout of the electric car company.

In that case, the S.E.C. moved far faster than it usually does — filing a civil fraud action against Mr. Musk just weeks after his post set off a firestorm. But some critics felt the settlement that regulators struck with Mr. Musk did not go far enough to punish the voluble entrepreneur.

The post Jay Clayton, Low-Profile Regulator, Is Catapulted Into a Political Fight appeared first on Sansaar Times.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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A Great Big Gift Not on Trump’s Disclosure Form: Giuliani’s Legal Advice https://nyti.ms/2YMQZOS

It Was a Great Day for Trump, Except for That ‘Scam’

The president expressed delight in a “wild week” of deal making, but his frustration over impeachment was never far from the surface.

By Katie Roger's | Published Dec. 13, 2019 Updated 5:41 PM ET | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — President Trump had plenty of good news to talk about on Friday, beginning with the news from across the Atlantic that a close ally, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, had just seen his party win a decisive majority in Parliament. There were also his accomplishments at home to promote: finishing the first phase of a trade deal with China, averting a government shutdown and moving forward with House Democrats on his signature North American trade pact.

“This has been a wild week,” Mr. Trump said, stating the obvious to reporters in the Oval Office as he praised Mr. Johnson and hailed the China accord as a “phenomenal deal.”

On any other day, the session with reporters would have been an unqualified victory lap for Mr. Trump, a leader who has long felt he does not receive enough credit for his policy accomplishments, and who on Friday had several such wins to crow about. Except that earlier in the morning, the House Judiciary Committee had voted to advance two articles of impeachment against him, prompting an all-but-certain impeachment vote and Senate trial.

Nothing about the vote was a surprise, but Mr. Trump’s private frustration and embarrassment over most likely becoming the third president in American history to be impeached bubbled again to the surface, at least momentarily, dashing the hopes of advisers who have been encouraging him to keep focused on “presidenting.”

“I think it’s a horrible thing to be using the tool of impeachment, which is supposed to be used in an emergency,” Mr. Trump said, scowling as he sat next to President Mario Abdo Benítez of Paraguay. “It’s a scam. It’s something that shouldn’t be allowed. And it’s a very bad thing for our country.”

The timing and mechanics of an impeachment trial in the Republican-controlled Senate remain in flux, but Mr. Trump said he would support a lengthy proceeding, an idea his aides have long said he favors. He added that it would give him a chance to learn more about a whistle-blower whose account of Mr. Trump’s July call with the Ukrainian president formed the basis of the impeachment inquiry.

The president’s support for a more drawn-out process was at odds with a plan set forth by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who has tried to persuade the president to support an abbreviated trial.

“I’ll do whatever they want to do,” Mr. Trump said, before adding, “I wouldn’t mind a long process because I’d like to see the whistle-blower, who is a fraud.”

Mr. Trump’s extensive comments on impeachment seemed at least momentarily to conflict with the operative stance at the White House of emphasizing what the president was getting done for the American people — similar to the approach aides to President Bill Clinton took when he was impeached. But while Mr. Clinton seethed and obsessed over the proceedings in private, Mr. Trump’s use of his preferred pressure release valve — Twitter — hit a new peak this week.

“How do you get Impeached when you have done NOTHING wrong (a perfect call), have created the best economy in the history of our Country, rebuilt our Military, fixed the V.A. (Choice!), cut Taxes & Regs, protected your 2nd A, created Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, and soooo much more? Crazy!” Mr. Trump wrote Friday morning.

Mr. Trump was in a meeting in the White House residence and not watching television as the Judiciary Committee vote began, but he kept his aides close throughout morning. That group included two in-house strategists focused on impeachment messaging: Tony Sayegh, a former Treasury Department spokesman, and Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general. Other advisers described the president, who has publicly and privately marveled over the unity he sees in the Republican Party around impeachment, as in good spirits.

Another ally in the mix was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer whose work to dredge up unflattering information on Mr. Trump’s political opponents landed him at the center of the Democratic-led impeachment effort.

Mr. Giuliani was ushered into the White House moments before the vote, and one senior administration official said he was there, in part, to talk about a trip he had taken to interview Ukrainians in Budapest and Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, for an anti-impeachment documentary.

Last month, Mr. Giuliani told an associate that Mr. Trump had approved of his participation in the documentary when he briefed the president about it during a meeting at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

By the time the Paraguayan president arrived at the White House just before noon, Mr. Trump was flanked by several additional advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, his national security adviser.

“It’s a very sad thing for our country but it seems to be very good for me politically,” Mr. Trump said. “The polls have gone through the roof for Trump.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers firmly believe they are winning the public opinion battle around impeachment. His advisers are leaning on polls they say show shifting fortunes in politically crucial swing states, and they are closely watching the behavior of House Democrats they believe are in vulnerable districts.

Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican pollster, offered a different assessment: Public opinion has remained polarized and static as impeachment moves forward, even with a strong economy and several trade accords in the making. “When taken together it’s a political home run,” Mr. Luntz said.

At least, it should be.

“The president never gets the credit he deserves because there’s always something ugly under the surface,” Mr. Luntz added. “Any other president would be in the 60th percentile after a week like this.”

The president’s approval rating continues to hover around 41 percent, according to national polls.

______

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.

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Supreme Court to Rule on Release of Trump’s Financial Records

The court’s ruling, expected by June, could release information the president has tried to protect. Or the justices could rule that his financial affairs are not legitimate subjects of inquiry so long as he remains in office.

By Adam Liptak | Published Dec.13, 2019 Updated 5:47 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether President Trump can block the release of his financial records, setting the stage for a blockbuster ruling on the power of presidents to resist demands for information from prosecutors and Congress.

The court’s ruling, expected by June, could require disclosure of information the president has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect. Or the justices could rule that Mr. Trump’s financial affairs are not legitimate subjects of inquiry so long as he remains in office.

Either way, the court is now poised to produce a once-in-a-generation statement on presidential accountability.

The case will test the independence of the court, which is dominated by Republican appointees, including two named by Mr. Trump. In earlier Supreme Court cases in which presidents sought to avoid providing evidence, the rulings did not break along partisan lines.

To the contrary, the court was unanimous in ruling against Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton in such cases, with Nixon and Clinton appointees voting against the presidents who had placed them on the court. The Nixon case led to his resignation in the face of mounting calls for his impeachment. The Clinton case led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment, though he survived a Senate vote on his removal.

Mr. Trump asked the court to block three sets of subpoenas, and the justices agreed to decide his appeals in all three. The court said that arguments would be held over two hours in late March or early April, but it did not specify the date.

All of the subpoenas sought information from Mr. Trump’s accountants or bankers, not from Mr. Trump himself, and the firms have indicated that they will comply with the court’s ruling. Had the subpoenas sought evidence from Mr. Trump himself, there was at least a possibility that he would try to defy a ruling against him, prompting a constitutional crisis.

One of the cases concerned a subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, from the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat. It sought eight years of business and personal tax records in connection with an investigation of the role that Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization played in hush-money payments made in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Both Mr. Trump and his company reimbursed the president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, for payments made to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed that she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen was also involved in payments to Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who had also claimed she had a relationship with Mr. Trump. The president has denied the relationships.

Mr. Trump sued to stop his accounting firm from turning over the records, but lower courts ruled against him. In a unanimous ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, said state prosecutors may require third parties to turn over a sitting president’s financial records for use in a grand jury investigation.

In a footnote to the decision, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann, wrote that the information sought was in a sense unexceptional.

“We note that the past six presidents, dating back to President Carter, all voluntarily released their tax returns to the public,” Judge Katzmann wrote. “While we do not place dispositive weight on this fact, it reinforces our conclusion that the disclosure of personal financial information, standing alone, is unlikely to impair the president in performing the duties of his office.”

In their petition urging the Supreme Court to hear their appeal, Trump v. Vance, No. 19-635, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that he was immune from all criminal proceedings and investigations so long as he remained in office. But even if some federal investigations may be proper, the petition said, the Supreme Court should rule that state and local prosecutors may not seek information about a sitting president’s conduct.

“That the Constitution would empower thousands of state and local prosecutors to embroil the president in criminal proceedings is unimaginable,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote.

Mr. Vance responded that the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Nixon in 1974 essentially decided the central issue in Mr. Trump’s appeal. “This court has long recognized,” Mr. Vance wrote, “that a sitting president may be subject to a subpoena in a criminal proceeding.”

That the subpoena in the Nixon case came from a federal court rather than a state grand jury made no difference, Mr. Vance wrote. “The states’ strong interests in operating a fair and just criminal judicial process should be respected no less than the federal government’s parallel interests recognized in Nixon,” he wrote.

The Justice Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to hear Mr. Trump’s appeal seeking to keep his financial records private. The brief did not adopt the broad position taken by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers — that he is immune from criminal investigation while he remains in office. Rather, the department’s brief said that courts should require prosecutors to meet a demanding standard before they are allowed to obtain the information.

The second subpoena, also directed to the accounting firm, came from the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the hush-money payments and whether Mr. Trump inflated and deflated descriptions of his assets on financial statements to obtain loans and reduce his taxes.

When Mr. Trump’s lawyers went to court to try to block the subpoena, they argued that the committee was powerless to obtain his records because it had no legislative need for them. They said the panel was engaged in an improper criminal inquiry and was not seeking information to help it enact legislation.

In October, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to block the subpoena.

“Having considered the weighty interests at stake in this case, we conclude that the subpoena issued by the committee to Mazars is valid and enforceable,” Judge David S. Tatel, who was appointed by President Clinton, wrote for the majority. Judge Patricia A. Millett, appointed by President Barack Obama, joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Judge Neomi J. Rao, appointed by Mr. Trump, wrote that “allegations of illegal conduct against the president cannot be investigated by Congress except through impeachment.”

In a brief urging the Supreme Court to deny review in the case, Trump v. Mazars USA, No. 19-715, lawyers for the committee argued that they had a legitimate need for the information they sought.

“The election of a president who has decided to maintain his ties to a broad array of business ventures raises questions about the adequacy of existing legislation concerning financial disclosures, government contracts with federal officeholders and government ethics,” the brief said. “Whether new legislation on these subjects is needed is a natural subject of congressional inquiry.”

The third set of subpoenas came from the House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees and were addressed to two financial institutions that did business with Mr. Trump, Deutsche Bank and Capital One. They sought an array of financial records related to the president, his companies and his family.

A different three-judge panel of the Second Circuit ordered most of the requested materials to be disclosed. It made an exception for sensitive personal information unrelated to the committee’s investigations.

“The committees’ interests in pursuing their constitutional legislative function is a far more significant public interest than whatever public interest inheres in avoiding the risk of a chief executive’s distraction arising from disclosure of documents reflecting his private financial transactions,” Judge Jon O. Newman wrote for the majority.

In urging the Supreme Court to block the Second Circuit’s ruling while the justices decided how to proceed in the case, Trump v. Deutsche Bank AG, No. 19A640, Mr. Trump wrote that “these ‘dragnet’ subpoena look nothing like a legislative inquiry.”

The committees responded that they need the information to address interference in American elections.

“Legislative efforts to secure the financial system from abuse have obvious importance,” lawyers for the committee told the justices. “And nothing is more urgent than efforts to guard against foreign influence in our systems for electing officials, particularly given the upcoming 2020 elections.”

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A Great Big Gift Not on Trump’s Disclosure Form: Giuliani’s Legal Advice

By Jim Dwyer and Eric Lipton | Published Dec. 13, 2019, 4:39 PM ET | New York Times | Posted Dec.13, 2019 |

For the past 20 months, President Trump has received free personal legal services from one of America’s highest-paid lawyers, who has traveled around the country and across the ocean to defend him in the special counsel’s inquiry and press Ukraine to investigate a political rival and unfounded conspiracy theories.

The lawyer, of course, is Rudolph W. Giuliani, but Mr. Trump did not mention Mr. Giuliani or his unpaid labor on the annual financial disclosure he filed in May, which requires that the value and source of gifts — including free legal work — be publicly listed.

That requirement is cut and dried, said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She cited guidance from the Office of Government Ethics, issued in November 2017, that states federal officials must disclose “gifts of legal defenses — in kind or by payment of the fees.”

“The purpose is to ensure the public has an opportunity to see whether there is any kind of corrupting influence,” said Ms. Clark, who has written on ethics issues involving government employees in need of lawyers.

During the presidency of Bill Clinton, for example, congressional Republicans and others suggested that some donors to Mr. Clinton’s legal defense funds were currying favor. The names of the donors and the amounts of their gifts were disclosed.

For his paying clients, Mr. Giuliani has been able to provide access to senior officials across the Trump administration.

Elizabeth Horton, a spokeswoman for the Office of Government Ethics, said she could not discuss whether Mr. Giuliani’s pro bono services should have been included in Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure. But in the past, when the agency has received complaints suggesting that information is missing, it has typically followed up with the office where the person works — in this case, the White House.

Scott F. Gast, the top White House ethics lawyer, did not respond to requests to discuss the matter; neither did Mr. Giuliani and his lawyer. Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, also declined to comment.

Mr. Giuliani, who is at the center of events that have led to the impeachment process now underway, began representing the president around April 2018, during the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. “Based on a 30-year relationship with Mr. Trump, he was asked to serve in his capacity without compensation,” Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Faith Miller, said during divorce proceedings last year.

The economic value of his services to the president could be considerable. Mr. Giuliani has said that at the height of the Mueller inquiry, representing Mr. Trump amounted to a full-time job. Partners at major law firms can bill their clients as much as $1,500 an hour. To serve as Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Mr. Giuliani left a firm where he was making $6 million a year.

“I knew when I took it on that it would reduce my income,” he said in September.

Late last year, Mr. Giuliani, who has described the president as being treated “very, very unfairly,” pursued leads on debunked conspiracy theories involving Ukraine’s meddling in the 2016 election that he said might show the special counsel investigation was built on a faulty premise.

And though the special counsel finished his work in March, Mr. Giuliani has continued to act on the president’s behalf by pressuring officials in Ukraine to announce an inquiry into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., one of the Democratic front-runners to oppose Mr. Trump in 2020.

These actions were “100 percent in my role as the defense lawyer of the president,” Mr. Giuliani said in October. He traveled extensively, paying his own expenses, he said, or piggybacking them onto work for other clients.

Throughout the Trump presidency, Mr. Giuliani has enjoyed a robust business serving wealthy clients by providing advice and extraordinary access to the highest level of government.

On behalf of a Turkish money launderer, Mr. Giuliani brought his case directly to the president and secretary of state in the Oval Office; for a Venezuelan oil oligarch, he met with senior officials at the Justice Department in Washington. He escorted a former penny-stock trader seeking Ukrainian energy deals to the state funeral of former President George Bush.

In 2017, Mr. Trump failed to disclose that he owed more than $100,000 to a previous personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, who had paid hush money on the president’s behalf to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels. After omitting it from his 2017 form, he listed it in a footnote the following year.

The president’s annual financial disclosure is required under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, adopted after the Watergate scandal to “promote the integrity of public officials and institutions.” The purpose is to let the public know about businesses or property that top government officials have a stake in, or other financial ties that could create a conflict of interest.

Unlike other federal employees, presidents and vice presidents are allowed to accept gifts with few limitations. They face one major requirement: They must list the value and source of any goods or services, currently above a threshold of $390, on their annual forms.

There remains one possible loophole that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump could turn to as an explanation.

Under federal campaign finance law, if an individual lawyer provides legal advice to a candidate without compensation, “the work is considered personal volunteer activity,” the Federal Election Commission says.

But the law limits any unpaid travel expenses associated with the free legal services — meaning a trip to Europe by Mr. Giuliani as part of this work would turn into an illegal contribution to Mr. Trump, unless the expense was reimbursed by the campaign.

“It kind of puts him in a box,” said Matthew T. Sanderson, a campaign finance lawyer who has advised several Republican presidential hopefuls, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor and energy secretary.

Mr. Giuliani, other campaign finance lawyers said, might have a hard time defending the assertion that all of his legal advice to Mr. Trump relates to his status as a candidate, given that much of the effort involves actions Mr. Trump has taken while serving as president. It also would add weight to the argument that the work Mr. Giuliani was doing on Ukraine was related to Mr. Trump’s re-election effort, two of the lawyers said

“If what he is doing for the president is for the campaign, how does he argue that the Ukraine corruption issue is not about the election?” asked Larry Noble, the F.E.C.’s former general counsel. “They are inconsistent arguments.”

In late November, a liberal watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asked the Justice Department and the Office of Government Ethics to investigate the nondisclosure, saying it “seemingly violates federal law and undermines the integrity of the public financial disclosure program.”

“We’re not saying that President Trump can’t accept the free legal work,” said Virginia Canter, a lawyer for the group, which frequently sues the Trump administration. “What he does have to do is disclose the value and nature of any pro bono services.”

Mr. Clinton, who was under investigation by Congress and a special counsel for much of his time in office, raised more than $10 million through two funds to pay legal bills. Donations were capped at $1,000 in the first of the funds, and at $10,000 in the second.

During the his presidency, a conservative watchdog, Judicial Watch, claimed in a lawsuit that Mr. Clinton’s personal insurer was bending its coverage rules to pay some of his legal bills, saying it was trying to win “gratitude and favor” to create an agreeable “regulatory environment.” The suit did not succeed.

Ms. Clark, the law professor, said that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Trump were in parallel situations, in that both relied on donations to meet substantial legal costs, but reiterated that donations to the Clinton fund were capped at $10,000 a year. The value of a single day of Mr. Giuliani’s donated services would far exceed that. “There is no comparison in the size of the individual gifts,” she said.

______

Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.

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