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Kirby defends Biden tweet on high gas prices after Bezos criticism

John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, on Sunday pushed back on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s tweet the prior day bashing President Biden for calling on “companies running gas stations” to lower their prices.

“Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product,” Biden tweeted on Saturday. “And do it now.”

“Ouch,” Bezos responded. “Inflation is far too important a problem for the White House to keep making statements like this. It’s either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.”

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” with guest host Mike Emanuel, Kirby argued that “it’s neither.”

“Anybody that knows President Biden knows he’s plain-spoken and he tells exactly what he’s thinking in terms that everybody can understand,” Kirby said. “So, I think, we obviously take great exception of the idea that this is somehow misdirection.”

Biden in recent weeks has bashed major oil companies that raked in large profits while raising prices.

His administration has also looked to stem rising gas prices by releasing millions of oil barrels from the nation’s strategic reserve and supporting a federal gas tax holiday.

At last week’s summit with the Group of Seven countries, the leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies moved closer to implementing a price cap on Russian oil, although the details of such a plan are yet to be seen.

Meanwhile, the average price for a gallon of gas has decreased slightly to $4.81 as of Sunday after briefly surpassing $5 in recent days, according to AAA.

“He knows that that’s not going to solve all the problems but it will help,” Kirby said on Sunday of the Biden administration’s recent moves. “If everybody cooperates on this, we can bring the price down at least by a dollar a gallon.”

When asked about Biden’s stop later this month in Saudi Arabia as part of a broader trip to the Middle East, Kirby declined to say if he was worried that countries may not be willing to increase oil production.

“We’ll see what happens as a result of this meeting and where things go,” he said.

Source: TEST FEED1

Climate science just lost a visionary pioneer: Larry Gates

There are famous people who love the limelight. They live for it. Others shun the public eye; they are well-known in a small circle of their peers, but unknown outside that circle.

Professor W.L. “Larry” Gates was in the latter category. He passed away in Hamburg, Germany on June 27 at the age of 93. He was one of the most accomplished climate scientists on the planet. If you have never heard of him, you’re not alone. Few of today’s young climate scientists know who he was and what he did. It’s time to remedy that.

Gates was a pioneer in the computer modeling of Earth’s climate system. He was part of a generation of scientists who attempted to capture, in many thousands of lines of code, the complex patterns of the atmosphere’s circulation. Their challenge was to simulate real-world features like trade winds, jet streams, the polar vortex, as well as high- and low-pressure systems. To capture convection, cloud formation and other important physical processes. To accurately represent the cycling of water — the endless circle of evaporation, rainfall and runoff.

Later, Gates and other climate modelers took on the ocean and tried to represent its general circulation in numerical form. They studied the interplay between atmosphere and ocean — the way they dance together, always restless, always in motion, always communicating with each other, winds driving currents, currents transferring heat and changing temperature gradients, temperature gradients driving winds.

What a grand scientific endeavor!

With his colleagues at the Rand Corporation, UCLA and Oregon State University, Gates developed and applied computer models to probe the inner workings of the present-day climate system. He used the same models to study the causes of past Ice Ages, and to project Earth’s likely climatic future if fossil fuel burning keeps ratcheting up atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. In his intellectual life, Gates lived simultaneously in the past, present, and future. Computer models were his vehicle for time travel.

Forty years ago, concerns about human-caused climate change began to amplify in the scientific community. Then and today, computer models were the best scientific tools we had for trying to understand and forecast the climatic consequences of fossil fuel burning. But how good were these tools? How useful were they for reliably projecting future changes in temperature, sea level, rainfall and extreme weather events?

Scientists were not the only ones seeking answers to these key questions. Politicians, journalists, corporations and the public also wanted answers. Climate models would soon be put under the microscope. The scientific community had to be ready for that microscope.

They were not ready. In the 1970s and 1980s, the evaluation of computer models of the climate system was relatively unstructured and unsystematic, often involving simple visual comparison of model output with observed maps of temperature, rainfall and pressure. Nationally and internationally, individual climate modeling groups performed their own simulations with their own computer models. The simulations differed in important ways. They often assumed different levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The solar constant — a measure of the sun’s energy output — could vary from model to model.

Because of these and other differences in “boundary conditions,” it was tough to make apples-to-apples comparisons of the climate responses of different computer models. Let’s say you wanted to compare results from an experiment in which climate modelers doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Were the different temperature increases in Models A, B and C mainly due to differences in the structure and physics of the climate models? Or were the different temperature changes largely related to different experimental conditions, like the solar constant and preindustrial CO2 levels?

Enter Larry Gates. He recognized that it was critical to answer these questions and to subject models to more rigorous scrutiny. To do so, the scientific community had to get serious about the evaluation of models. They needed standard “benchmark” simulations, in which every group performed the same simulation with identical boundary conditions. Such benchmarking made it much easier to interpret results across a large collection of models.

Gates was one of the first strong advocates for systematic benchmarking of models through what would become known as model intercomparison projects (MIPs). It was difficult to persuade the international scientific community that these activities were valuable. Some regarded them as nothing more than the scientific equivalent of beauty contests, with potentially serious consequences (like possible funding cuts) if your model did not rank highly.

But when Gates spoke, people listened. His scientific stature in the climate modeling community, coupled with his impeccable diplomacy skills, persuaded his peers and funding organization that benchmarking and MIPs were the future.

History proved him right. The first MIP focused on atmospheric models. The Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) required that all participating models had standard boundary conditions and performed the same simulation. By comparing AMIP results with observations, analysts could identify problems common to all models, like systematic errors in rainfall patterns and upper-air temperatures. They could try to identify the causes of these problems. They could periodically revisit the benchmarking with newer versions of the models, to see whether newer models were better than the older ones.

The success of AMIP led to a rapid proliferation of other MIPs. Climate scientists performed MIPs not just with atmospheric models, but also with coupled models of the fully interacting atmosphere and ocean. This was the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). In CMIP, scientists increased CO2 levels by 1 percent per year, or according to our best estimates of historical increases in CO2. They developed different scenarios of 21st-century changes in greenhouse gases and then ran models with these different “storylines.”

Such work provided valuable information on something we really care about — the uncertainties in climate change projections. How large are these uncertainties for global-mean temperature, rainfall and sea-level changes? How much “projection uncertainty” arises from differences in the structure and physics of the models themselves? How much is due to uncertainty in humanity’s 21st-century greenhouse gas emissions — whether we choose the green road or the fossil fuel development highway?

With CMIP and other model intercomparison projects, these questions were answerable. The results from MIPs — and the knowledge gained from them — made enormous scientific contributions to national and international assessments of climate science.

MIPs showed that models had become more skillful in representing key features of today’s climate. They revealed that the face of human-caused climate change had clearly emerged from the shadowland of natural climate variability. Human effects on climate were now “unequivocal.” MIPs provided hard evidence that even in the presence of uncertainties in models and emissions scenarios, significant and impactful 21st-century increases in temperature and sea level were virtually certain.

These advances in science are part of the legacy of Gates.

In the climate model world, it is possible to perform what scientists call “counterfactuals.” One example of a counterfactual is a “world without us” simulation, in which computer models are run without human-caused changes in greenhouse gases or particulate pollution. This counterfactual is then compared to a “world with us” simulation, in which human activities change the levels of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Comparison of the two worlds help us to gauge the size and properties of human-caused global warming.

In our real lives, however, and in human history, we cannot run counterfactuals. There is no world in which Gates never lived. But it’s pretty clear that scientific understanding of the reality and seriousness of climate change would rest on a much weaker foundation in “a world without Larry.” He was a decent, kind, brilliant and honorable man, a true “gentleman and a scholar” — and his science forever changed our world.   

Ben Santer is a climate scientist, a visiting researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow. He was the lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has been a contributor to all six IPCC reports.

Source: TEST FEED1

Wonder Women: Jan. 6 hearings highlighting strong women with courage and integrity

One persistent theme now runs through all of the House Select Committee’s Jan. 6 hearings. Forget Hollywood studios, forget the Marvel universe — taken together, these hearings are the most compelling television series in years about the power of women.

Several important figures have been presented so far, but few equal the bravery of Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and committee vice-chair Liz Cheney.

Edwards kicked off the series with its opening primetime event on June 9. Her testimony quickly set the standard for what the committee hoped to demonstrate: that a few good people stood in the way of constitutional disaster. Edwards, in stolid and professional testimony, described how she was beaten, dragged to the ground, and knocked out — only to recover, get on her feet and dive back into the fray in front of the Capitol.

She described the battle scene this way: “I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage, it was chaos.” Edwards’s testimony signaled how the committee meant to re-capture the word “patriot.”

Hutchinson’s testimony this past week took the House’s effort to a different level. Just 25 years old, the former West Wing aide sat under the heat of TV klieg lights, with a scrum of photographers and camera crews crouched between her and the committee bench. She’d already been deposed on video several times, but then choose to testify live.

Hutchinson was not beaten; she didn’t slip in blood — but her testimony was another kind of courage. A committed conservative who still spoke of “the good things” Trump had done for the country, she could’ve played it safe – but stepped forward anyway.

“As an American, I was disgusted,” she said about a tweet Trump sent out as the Jan. 6 attack unfolded. “It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. You were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”

Like Edwards, Hutchinson displayed poise and confidence, two qualities television cameras love. You can hide who you are on TV for a little bit — through an evening news soundbite or a round-table appearance on a Sunday talk show — but it’s nearly impossible to face the camera for hours and not reveal who you truly are.

Which leads to Liz Cheney.

From the beginning, Cheney came across like the anchor of an important national newscast or investigative report — confident, credible, in control of facts and context. In each televised episode, she’s called on to set the scene for video and testimony to come, and then sum up what it means for the investigation and the nation. As the hearings increasingly center on actions inside the West Wing, the stakes for Cheney — for her career and her safety — only increase. But she doesn’t seem to hesitate. Instead, she names names.

There has been, of course, forceful testimony from several men as well. Former Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers, for one, appeared to walk into the hearing room straight out of a Clint Eastwood movie. He memorably testified to the committee that Rudy Giuliani told him, “We’ve got lots of (stolen election) theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”

But many other men have not stepped in front of the glare of a national audience.

Mark Meadows, Trump’s Chief of Staff and Hutchinson’s boss, is now tied up in court for defying a committee subpoena. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone spoke to investigators but won’t sit for a formal deposition. Michael Flynn, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Roger Stone and Alex Jones have all taken the Fifth — even in response to questions as seemingly uncontroversial as “Do you believe in the peaceful transfer of power?” 

Several others, inside the White House and Congress, asked for or inquired about pre-emptive pardons from Trump in the days after Jan. 6.

Many women in this country suffered a blow more than a week ago, when the Supreme Court overturned the five-decade right they had to choose whether or not to have an abortion. Some said they felt utterly powerless.

Working for change may take a long time. But for now, women can turn away from the depressing spectacle of the Supreme Court and look over to Capitol Hill. There, a profound television documentary is unfolding in real time. It details a dark moment still threatening democracy — and it’s highlighting the power and courage of bold American women refusing to let that happen.

Joe Ferullo is an award-winning media executive, producer and journalist and former executive vice president of programming for CBS Television Distribution. He was a news executive for NBC, a writer-producer for “Dateline NBC” and worked for ABC News. Follow him on Twitter @ironworker1.

Source: TEST FEED1

DHS secretary: Roe reversal 'heightened the threat environment'

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Sunday that federal authorities have seen a “heightened threat environment” during the past several months that has only increased with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

“We are very mindful that the Supreme Court’s decision in reversing and overturning Roe v. Wade has really heightened the threat environment, and we have deployed resources to ensure the safety and security of the Supreme Court and the justices,” Mayorkas told CBS “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan.

The court’s decision late last month sparked mass protests in Washington, D.C. and other cities across the country. But protests against many of the justices were already abundant after a draft opinion in the case leaked to Politico in May.

A California resident was charged last month with attempted murder after he allegedly told officials he wanted to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and was arrested near Kavanaugh’s residence prior to the final ruling. He later pleaded not guilty.

Kavanaugh and the other justices are traditionally provided security, but the recent threats reinvigorated a debate in Congress over expanding security details beyond the jurists themselves. President Biden signed a bipartisan bill last month extending around-the-clock protection for families of the justices and any officer of the court if deemed necessary.  

“We do not condone violence and law enforcement will and has responded to acts of violence when people do not honor their freedom to protest peacefully,” Mayorkas told CBS on Sunday.

When also asked by Brennan how concerned he is about a white supremacist march in Boston on Saturday reportedly organized by members of the far-right group Patriot Front, Mayorkas said his department is responding to violent individuals spurred by “ideologies of hate.”

“Domestic violent extremism is one of the greatest terrorism-related threats that we face in the homeland today,” Mayorkas said.

Source: TEST FEED1

The Supreme Court and the new religious aristocracy

The Supreme Court has effectively authorized schoolteachers to pressure their students to pray.

Kennedy v. Bremerton held that football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to engage in what Justice Neil Gorsuch called a “short, private, personal prayer” on the 50-yard line after games. The court held that forbidding that prayer improperly discriminated on the basis of religion, because employees were allowed to do other personal things with their free time after games. There was no “record evidence that students felt pressured to participate in these prayers” and no evidence that the prayers disrupted the school. 

The actual facts are very different.

For years, Kennedy led his players in prayers. When the Bremerton School District learned of this, it told him that he could pray after games, but must do so silently and alone. It was concerned about pressure on the players. The coach has unlimited discretion to decide who plays. Students who don’t play won’t get football scholarships. 

The trial judge, whose findings of fact Gorsuch was obligated to accept unless he deemed it clearly erroneous (which he did not), wrote: “Players (sometimes via parents) reported feeling compelled to join Kennedy in prayer to stay connected with the team or ensure playing time, and there is no evidence of athletes praying in Kennedy’s absence. Kennedy himself testified that, ‘[o]ver time, the number of players who gathered near [him] after the game grew to include the majority of the team.’ . . . This slow accumulation of players joining Kennedy suggests exactly the type of vulnerability to social pressure that makes the Establishment Clause vital in the high school context.”  Nice starting position you have. Too bad if anything should happen to it.

Gorsuch places great weight on the school’s concession that there was “no evidence that students [were] directly coerced to pray with Kennedy.” That sentence has a crucial legal implication: henceforth, only direct coercion will count. Gorsuch wrote that “the possibility that students might choose, unprompted, to participate in Mr. Kennedy’s prayers [does not] necessarily prove them coercive.”   

But for many years, notably in the cases involving official school prayers, the court recognized that the pressure to conform, (as it put it in 1992) “though subtle and indirect, can be as real as any overt compulsion.” The problem is the result, not the method. A poisoner cannot defend himself from prosecution by pointing out that he never touched his victim. 

In his final communication to school officials before he was suspended, Kennedy declared that he would continue to pray and would not “flee the scene if stu­dents voluntarily [came] to the same area” where he was praying. He would not “discourage” students from joining him. No students joined him the three times he prayed on the field after his letter, but the school reasonably did not want to wait for the slow accumulation of players to begin again. 

Kennedy also publicized the dispute, attracting hostile crowds to games and hate mail that prompted several officials to resign because they feared for their safety. When he prayed, crowds swarmed the field around him. Private prayer this wasn’t.

The Establishment Clause is based in large part on the idea that state involvement can corrupt religion by turning it into a hypocritical sham. That idea has a long history. Jesus of Nazareth, for example: “do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. . . . But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.” 

He thought that external inducements – and intentionally or not, that is what the coach was creating – make prayer worthless. Individual school staff are of course entitled to think that Jesus didn’t understand real religion. But they shouldn’t be able to force that view on students.

The decision hamstrings schools that seek to prevent this kind of intimidation, as Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle observe. The court requires proof of coercion, which might ultimately require testimony in open court from students courageous enough to face community opprobrium. The court has been making religious people a kind of aristocracy, free to disregard rules everyone else must follow. This case goes far beyond that, letting them take over parts of government in defiance of elected officials, and deploy state power for their own ends.

Suppose that a teacher decides to pray before the bell rings, telling students they may join him if they like. Part of the pre-1955 Good Friday Mass, which some Catholics still think appropriate (here disagreeing with the Vatican), reads:  “Let us pray also for the faithless Jews . . . hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness.” Suppose, in a community with a history of anti-Semitic vandalism and violence, a teacher recites that, and growing numbers of students join him. Does the school district have the power to stop him? After this decision, dare they risk trying?

Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed” (St. Martin’s Press, forthcoming). Follow him on Twitter @AndrewKoppelman.

Source: TEST FEED1

Advocates warn US at risk of losing control on monkeypox

Infectious disease experts and public health advocates are warning that the Biden administration has been too slow to respond to the monkeypox outbreak and that the U.S. is at risk of losing control of the disease. 

The response to monkeypox is mirroring the worst parts of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, they say, with severely limited testing and a sluggish rollout of vaccines leading to a virus that’s spreading undetected.

“Where we have lagged is streamlining testing, making vaccines available, streamlining access to the best therapeutics. All three areas have been bureaucratic and slow, and that means we haven’t contained this outbreak,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors (NCSD).

Unlike COVID-19, monkeypox is not a novel virus, and the strategies to reduce the spread are well known. Biden administration officials said they are confident in their approach.

“We as a global community have known about it for decades. We know how it spreads. We have tests that help identify people who are infected. We have vaccines that are highly effective against it,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha said during a recent briefing.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are 460 cases in 30 states, Puerto Rico and D.C., though experts say that number is almost certainly an undercount, as many people who may be infected don’t yet have access to widespread testing.

The administration is ramping up its response by expanding testing capacity and broadening access to vaccinations, though critics say the efforts may be coming too late.

“We’ve been sort of screaming for a month about how bad the diagnostic situation is for monkeypox. And that really was a clear error, preventable, and it’s very clear that this administration has not learned lessons from early COVID,” said James Krellenstein, co-founder of the HIV treatment advocacy group Prep4All. 

Jon Andrus, an adjunct professor of global health at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, said the U.S. is lucky that monkeypox is not as contagious as COVID-19, or as deadly, because the public health system is underfunded and overly fractured.

“I think we’ll continue to repeat these mistakes because that’s been our track record. That’s been our track record. We’ve had, what, more than five or six waves of COVID, and we seem every time to be a little bit caught off guard,” Andrus said. “Stopping transmission requires that we’re all reading from the same page. We all have the same road map.”

The administration expanded testing to commercial labs in late June, so providers will soon be able to order tests directly from the labs where they have established relationships and can jump through fewer hoops.

But it took more than a month for that move to happen, which increased testing capacity from about 8,000 tests a week to 10,000 across the entire system. 

Demand is also not evenly spread across the public health laboratory networks; it is concentrated in urban areas such as New York City, leading to backlogs and frustrated patients who wait days for test results.  

Biden administration health officials this week touted efforts to expand testing.

“I strongly encourage all health care providers to have a high clinical suspicion for monkeypox among their patients,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a call with reporters. “Patients presenting with a suspicious rash should be tested.”

Testing for monkeypox is a relatively simple process that involves swabbing a skin lesion. Unlike with COVID-19, the CDC already had a previously developed test, but patients were limited to a narrow set of specific criteria in order to qualify for testing. 

“We already had testing available. We already had vaccines available. We should have really been much more aggressive with testing … and I think this speaks to some of the bureaucracy of both FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and CDC,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and editor-at-large for public health at Kaiser Health News.

“Getting the commercial labs on board they could have done sooner. Getting academic medical centers to do testing, hospital labs to develop their own PCR tests. I mean, that’s not a very difficult thing to do,” Gounder said.

The White House is also working to scale up its vaccination program and announced a plan to immediately send out tens of thousands of doses of Jynneos, the only FDA-approved vaccine specifically for monkeypox. 

More than a million doses will be made available throughout the year. The CDC is also broadening the eligibility criteria so individuals with confirmed monkeypox exposures and presumed exposures can be vaccinated, rather than only those who have a confirmed case.

But activists and experts say the administration moved too slowly and that the updated vaccination strategy is not nearly sufficient.

“We believe this outbreak is already out of control. So, we have not contained it. Vaccines are not going to contain it at this point. Because we don’t have enough. Getting them into arms is an expensive and intense process,” said NCSD’s Harvey.

New York City and Washington, D.C., began offering the vaccines to men who have sex with other men or may have been exposed to the virus. But both cities ran through their supplies less than a day after launching their local immunization initiatives. D.C. Health had to shut access about 10 minutes after making shots available. 

There are about 56,000 Jynneos doses in the Strategic National Stockpile that will be allocated immediately, officials said, and the administration plans to allocate 296,000 doses over the coming weeks.

The U.S. has tens of millions of doses of the smallpox vaccine ACAM2000, but that shot has more dangerous and severe side effects.

According to a spokesman for Jynneos’s Denmark-based manufacturer Bavarian Nordic, 300,000 doses have already been delivered or will be arriving over the next few days.

An additional 1.1 million filled doses are still being inspected by the FDA, which should finish in the next couple weeks.  

The government also owns bulk materials totaling as many as 15 million doses, but they are still frozen, and the administration has not told the company how it wants those doses filled. 

“American taxpayers spent money buying and manufacturing these doses precisely so they can be used rapidly in the event of an outbreak,” said Krellenstein of Prep4All. 

“Here we have an outbreak, and my friends are literally being turned away from being vaccinated because the Biden administration can’t figure out how to get a million doses out of a freezer in Denmark into the United States,” Krellenstein added.

Source: TEST FEED1

Potential political star running for Maryland governor

Maryland Democrats, seeking to regain the governorship after an eight-year hiatus, have an exceptionally well credentialed field: two former Obama cabinet members, one who was chair of the of the Democratic Party, the state’s current comptroller and a former attorney general. 

The most striking resume, however, belongs to a candidate who has never run for political office: a Rhodes scholar and White House fellow, who with the 82nd Airborne division led troops in Afghanistan, a best-selling author who has financial experience and was CEO of a big antipoverty foundation. This is Wes Moore, one of the front runners in the July 19 primary.

If Moore wins the primary and general election —Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is retiring — he would become a national political figure, rare for a Maryland politician. He would be only the third Black to win a gubernatorial election in America.

To run, he resigned as CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, which pours lots of resources into fighting poverty in New York. Much of this money comes from hedge fund and private equity billionaires, but the foundation does a lot of good.

“He’s the real deal,” says legendary television anchorman Tom Brokaw, who has known Moore for years and was on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation. “He’s smart, charming and careful about not overstepping his opportunity.” 

I first encountered Moore at his 2001 graduation from Johns Hopkins; he was notable as a student, when — working with Baltimore’s public defender’s office — he started a mentoring program for middle school kids in the juvenile justice system.

Eight years later, after Barack Obama was elected president, former Defense Secretary and U.S. Senator Bill Cohen told me about someone talented: Wes Moore.

A measured man, Cohen’s enthusiasm is off the charts: “I have yet to meet a person who has more leadership skills, scholarship achievement, patriotic commitment, heart and humanity to bring to public service at the highest level of government than Wes Moore. He’s the man I would want next to me on a battlefield, on the athletic field or at a boardroom.” 

Still, Moore has never navigated the challenges of governing; even with a heavily Democratic legislature, there are lots of competing claims and tradeoffs awaiting the next governor.

He’s running as a typical progressive Democrat, with little daylight between his positions and his top opponent, Tom Perez, the highly regarded former U.S. Labor Secretary and Democratic chair. One interesting Moore idea is to offer all high school graduates in the state a one-year public service option; they’d also get job training and other support programs.

He walks a careful line on crime, a big issue in Maryland and elsewhere. He dismisses “defund the police” as a slogan, says there’s a need for more police in some communities and better trained and more accountable police in all. His standard line is to call for a police force with “appropriate intensity and absolute integrity.”

Moore acknowledges that race is an issue: “Race always plays a factor in everything,” he says in an interview at Baltimore’s Reggie Lewis museum, where he’s speaking to a diverse crowd of almost 200.

He contends he has the ability to “energize the base and not alienate others.”

Although a newcomer, he has raised more money than all the other candidates and has won a more impressive array of endorsements. This includes: members of the Maryland congressional delegation, Kweisi Mfume, a past President of the NAACP who represents inner city Baltimore, and House Majority leader Steny Hoyer, a moderate representing a suburban Washington district; the two top state legislative leaders; the executive of voter-rich Prince Georges County, and the politically potent Maryland Teachers Association.

There have been a few controversies. Moore’s book, “The Other Wes Moore,” was about a young man with the same name who is serving a life sentence for murder, contrasting the different support systems that led to such dramatically different outcomes. But he implied — and allowed others misleadingly to claim — that both grew up in Baltimore. He was born in another part of Maryland, moved to the Bronx and came to Baltimore for college.

It was unnecessary, as the story is compelling wherever they were born.

He also is under some criticism for not correcting interviewers who said that he won a Bronze Star in Afghanistan. This is petty, as he was awarded other medals and recognition for his combat service. Try to think of other graduates of elite universities and Rhodes scholars who volunteered for the wartime military.

Polls — public and private — show a close contest between Peter Franchot, the longtime and forgettable comptroller, Perez and Moore.

The Washington Post, while praising Moore, endorsed Perez for his unmatched “track record or command of governing.”

Perez would be a good Maryland Governor. Moore has that potential too — and potential to be a lot more.

Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.

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Kinzinger calls Cheney primary challengers 'a bunch of armpit farters'

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) primary challengers are “lying to their constituents” when asked on Sunday about his earlier tweet calling them “armpit farters.”

Kinzinger, who along with Cheney has drawn ire from their fellow Republicans for serving on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 riot by former President Trump’s supporters at the U.S. Capitol, had criticized Cheney’s opponents in multiple tweets after a primary debate last week. 

“You had a colorful reaction to that debate using a term that I think my 11-year-old son would like,” said CNN “State of the Union” co-anchor Dana Bash on Sunday. “You said her opponents are ‘a bunch of armpit farters.’ But realistically, one of them could very well win in November.”

“You see her opponents spreading conspiracy,” Kinzinger said replied to Bash. “You know, her main opponent was a big supporter of Liz Cheney, until she found out that maybe she could run against Liz Cheney. And so they are lying to their constituents.”

Cheney faces multiple opponents in the Aug. 16 primary, and recent polls have shown Harriet Hageman, who is backed by former President Trump, leading Cheney.

Cheney had touted her work on the Jan. 6 House committee during last week’s debate, but Hageman has cast Cheney as a “RINO” or “Republican In Name Only.”

Trump stumped for Hageman at a rally in May that also included video addresses by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who became chairwoman of the House Republican Conference after Cheney was ousted from the role. Wyoming’s Republican Party chairman is also supporting Hageman.

Kinzinger on Sunday said the race shows the “political system is failing America,” adding that Cheney “is taking a stand” to protect democracy.

“I think she can win,” Kinzinger said, referring to Cheney. “But I hope this serves as a lesson to every American. Let’s fix this system, because the bribery system is failing.”

Source: TEST FEED1

How will the FBI respond to threats of violence by abortion supporters?

The question shouldn’t have to be asked, but half the country — let’s call it the red half — includes many who suspect that the FBI is biased against those on the right and tolerant of those on the left. There is a disappointing expectation that abortion advocates currently threatening violence won’t be as vigorously investigated as those who hold conservative views have been.  

This spells trouble for the FBI. The reality is likely much less daunting than the perception — it always is — but citizens aren’t privy to details of investigations that might mitigate concerns of double standards. They are left instead with what is reported in the public domain and amplified by politically aligned media outlets. 

These damning perceptions were kick-started by the FBI’s Comey-era legacy that made up a politically motivated investigation into a president and immeasurably damaged trust in the FBI within a wide swath of the country. The FBI executives involved in that affair are long gone, and yet we’re still seeing a parade of FBI-led searches and arrests that unfortunately have perpetuated the perception that subjects of investigations are treated differently depending on their political affiliations.  

They include high-profile, very public early-morning SWAT arrests or searches of former Republican presidential advisers and staffers; searches of Republican election officials who have questioned election results; searches of conservative activists’ homes suspected of possessing a stolen diary worth maybe 20 bucks that happens to belong to a Democratic president’s daughter — and, just last week, an early-morning search of a former Justice Department attorney at the same time he is being scrutinized by the House Jan. 6 special committee.    

Juxtapose these aggressive tactics against the treatment afforded to the three individuals charged and indicted so far by John Durham for their roles in perpetuating the false Trump/Russia collusion. Only one, Igor Danchenko, was arrested, not publicly, and any supporting documents were quietly acquired. There was no public spectacle, no early-morning door-banging. This is the way it is normally done in these types of investigations.

If there were solid reasons justifying the more aggressive tactics against those aligned on the right — and perhaps there were — they are not visible to Americans. That is how perceptions grow. The FBI should be alert to and wary of how these actions appear in the court of public opinion. The FBI’s first responsibility is to enforce the law evenly, thereby maintaining the trust of all citizens. Yes, investigative tactics can and should be tailored to avoid negative perceptions in order to protect that trust, particularly in politically charged matters.  

The FBI has an opportunity to rebuild some of its traditional credibility by doing what it does best. The threat intelligence rebounding off the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade is vibrating like a Richter-scale needle. Law enforcement cannot claim, after any outbreak of violence by abortion supporters, that they didn’t see it coming.  

Abortion advocates are promoting “rage.” Politicians are fanning flames with carefully worded but unmistakable exhortations to confrontation. Pregnancy crisis centers that do not perform abortions are being firebombed and vandalized and told “you are not safe.” Churches are being desecrated and subjected to sacrilegious attacks on services. An assassination attempt on a Supreme Court justice was interdicted.

The intelligence is there, as well as the opportunity for the FBI to act decisively. The threat of violence could be acute over the next few weeks. The large threat intelligence fusion and sharing apparatus that was created and well-funded over the past two decades since 9/11, in the hope of preventing politically motivated violence, should be well-positioned to help provide information on which law enforcement can act to stop violence before it occurs.  

That is the hope. This intelligence apparatus in which the country has invested did not perform well leading up to the shocking breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Intelligence collection, prudent analysis and efficient sharing in our stove-piped agency environment remains a challenge. Even when it’s done well, those who receive the intelligence and are charged with protecting us don’t always make the best decisions. The Capitol was left largely unprotected despite intelligence that forecasted the incursion weeks before it happened.  

So now we find ourselves at another key national-threat moment where the air is crackling with violent rhetoric and attacks in reaction to a monumental Supreme Court decision that a significant number of individuals, some unknown number of whom see violence as an option, are not happy with.  

The FBI and the rest of the nation’s law enforcement community will be challenged to show that they are properly invested in stopping those who want to do harm at this tenderized moment in history. FBI agents know how to dismantle violent movements no matter what the underlying, motivating political factors might be. Doing so now will not just help to protect people and property but will work to repair damaged trust as well.     

Kevin R. Brock is a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He independently consults with private companies and public-safety agencies on strategic mission technologies.

Source: TEST FEED1