Too bad. Some may say "God" is punishing her for being on a shit show...

Fox News' Brit McHenry reveals she has a brain tumor

BY CHRISTOPHER BRITO

Britt McHenry, a commentator on Fox News and former ESPN reporter, revealed in a tweet on Thursday that she has a brain tumor. McHenry, 33, said surgery is imminent.

McHenry said she was trying to keep the news private after undergoing an MRI on her back and neck a few days ago, but ultimately chose to share her diagnosis on Twitter.

"I was trying to keep this relatively private," she wrote. "But as usual, things are being said without my consent. I have a brain tumor. I'm with an amazing medical team and surgery is imminent. Thank you for continued support and understanding at this time."

"The View" co-host Meghan McCain, whose father -- former U.S. Senator John McCain -- died after a bout with brain cancer, extended her good wishes to McHenry. "Sending love and strength Brit. Please let me know if there's anything we can do," she tweeted.

McHenry currently works for Fox News' 24/7 streaming service, Fox Nation. In December, she sued her employer and her former co-host, alleging that he sent her sexually explicit text messages. McHenry claimed that Fox News retaliated after she complained of sexual harassment by shunning her and excluding her from company events and shows. It seeks unspecified damages.

Previously, she worked for ESPN as a correspondent for several shows, including Sportscenter, Outside the Lines and NFL Live. She was let go from ESPN in 2017.

A withdrawal agreement......

What Trump's 'peace' agreement with Taliban really means

Opinion by Peter Bergen

The Trump administration is close to signing a "peace" agreement with the Taliban, but let's not kid ourselves; this is really a withdrawal agreement in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election season. Such an agreement with the Taliban will allow Trump to point to a campaign promise kept: getting the United States out of its longest war.

As a confidence-building measure, since last Saturday the Taliban have agreed to implement a "reduction in violence" in Afghanistan that will help pave the way for the signing of the formal US-Taliban deal slated for February 29.

But there is a lot less to this reduction in violence than meets the eye, since the month of February in Afghanistan is typically a time of much-reduced fighting because of the brutal Afghan winter. The Taliban agreeing to reduce violence right now is akin to the residents of Chicago agreeing not to use their air conditioning this month.

According to The Military Times, there have only been a "handful" of attacks across Afghanistan during the past several days, which means that the formal signing agreement between the US and the Taliban will very likely go ahead as planned on Saturday.

The agreement stipulates that the US will draw down to 8,600 soldiers from the current 12,000 or so stationed in Afghanistan now.

Towards the end of his second term, former President Barack Obama had seriously considered completely withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan. After a discussion with his war cabinet about the risks that would entail, including the possibility of the Taliban taking over much of the country and hosting multiple jihadist terrorist groups, he changed his mind.

As he left office, Obama authorized 8,400 troops remain in Afghanistan. This is pretty much exactly the same position that the Trump administration now finds itself in today, more than three years later.

In the agreement scheduled to be signed Saturday, the Taliban for their part will have to guarantee that they will not host al-Qaeda or other jihadist groups on their territory. (The Taliban have actually been fighting the local affiliate of ISIS in Afghanistan.)

Next month the Taliban will also likely enter into direct talks with representatives of the Afghan government, which hitherto has been excluded from the US-Taliban negotiations, an odd position for an elected government to be in since it is the Afghan government and people who will have to live with whatever the final shape of some kind of peace deal with the Taliban might be.

If there are further reductions in violence the US-Taliban agreement entertains the notion that the US could withdraw all its forces, which has long been the key demand of the Taliban. The deputy leader of the Taliban writing in the New York Times last week said that this was the goal of the agreement.

The likelihood of going to a zero US military presence in Afghanistan, however, is actually low because if there are no American soldiers in the country, forces from other NATO countries will also withdraw. That would mean that international funding for the heavily aid-dependent Afghan state would simply dry up, which, according to US officials I have spoken to, even some in the Taliban leadership recognize would not be a good thing.

Also, there is agreement among Republicans and more moderate Democratic politicians about the need for some kind of persistent US counterterrorism and intelligence presence in Afghanistan to prevent recurrence of what happened on 9/11 when al-Qaeda hijackers trained in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan killed almost 3,000 Americans.

Without getting into any details, President Trump said Tuesday at a news conference in New Delhi that there would be some kind of persistent US presence in Afghanistan. Trump said, "We'll always have intelligence; we'll have other things there."

And what if Trump loses the presidential election -- what then for Afghanistan?

The Democratic party is split on what to do. On the left, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want to get out totally, while moderate Democratic contenders such as Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg both want to retain some kind of counterterrorism presence there.

And that can only be achieved by leaving a number of US troops -- in the low thousands -- in Afghanistan.

For the moment Trump seems to understand that the only thing worse than staying in Afghanistan is leaving it completely. But he is also consistently inconsistent when it comes to foreign policy, and he could just as easily pull the plug entirely. After all, it was Trump in September -- following an attack that killed a US serviceman in Afghanistan -- who abruptly ended talks with the Taliban that were supposed to culminate in some kind of signing ceremony at Camp David.

33 Turkish soldiers killed

At least 33 Turkish soldiers killed in an air attack by Syrian regime, Turkish governor says

By Gul Tuysuz and Isil Sariyuce

At least 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in Syria's Idlib province on Thursday in an aerial attack by Russian-backed Syrian regime forces, Turkish officials said, raising the specter of full-blown conflict.

Thirty-five soldiers were injured in the attack and have been evacuated to hospitals in Turkey, according to officials.

The attack comes days before a Turkish deadline on Syrian government troops to withdraw from areas recaptured in recent months from rebels in northwest Syria.

Turkey, which backs some Syrian anti-government fighters, condemned the Syrian attack as a "nefarious attack against heroic soldiers in Idlib who were there to ensure our national security."

Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said the attack happened "despite coordination with the officials of the Russian Federation who were on the ground when this attack happened." Akar said ambulances were hit during the strikes.

The Syrian government has not commented on the Turkish claim. The Russian Defense Ministry denied that its air force carried out strikes in the area of Idlib where the Turkish soldiers were located. Moscow said Turkish forces were "located near the areas where terrorist groups were situated" and then "came under fire from Syrian forces."

The European Union High Representative for Security Policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, warned of "a risk of sliding in a major open international military confrontation," in a tweet on Friday.

"Ongoing escalation around needs to stop urgently," Fontelles said.

The North Atlantic Council (NATO) will meet Friday over the attack, after Turkey, a member state, requested consultations.

Turkey has retaliated in an effort to "revenge our martyred heroic soldiers," a Turkish government statement said.

A spokesperson for the State Department said the United States is "very concerned."

"We are in contact with Turkish authorities to confirm these developments and to have more clarity on the current situation on the ground," the spokesperson said.

"We stand by our NATO Ally Turkey and continue to call for an immediate end to this despicable offensive by the Assad regime, Russia and Iranian-backed forces."

Turkish soldiers are in the last rebel-held area of Syria as part of a 2018 de-escalation agreement between Ankara and Moscow. The Syrian government, backed by Russia, has mounted an aggressive air campaign against rebels in Idlib in recent weeks. Russia has rejected calls for a ceasefire.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the last opposition-held territory in Syria in the last two months, per United Nations figures, in the wake of an air campaign and swift ground offensive by the Syrian regime and its Russian backers.

Syrian government forces have targeted multiple schools, converted into shelters, and hospitals in recent days, according to activist reports and videos.

"We think we are safe and then the warplanes come and take everything from us," said one media activist, Hiba, in a social media video from one of the damaged schools.

Tens of thousands are still on the move, and nearly 700,000 of the displaced are women and children, the UN said.

Seeks a 'miracle'.......

Trump seeks a 'miracle' as virus fears mount

Analysis by Stephen Collinson

President Donald Trump is hoping for a "miracle" that will make the coronavirus disappear but tanking stock markets and signs the disease is stalking America are delivering their verdict on his scattershot management of the crisis.

A historic Wall Street sell off, the first case on US soil that could not be traced to travel to countries battling the virus, and news of drug shortages outpaced White House efforts to show everything was under control.

"It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," Trump said at the White House Thursday as the virus marched across Asia and Europe after US officials said the US should brace for severe disruption to everyday life.

The President also warned that things could "get worse before it gets better," but he added it could "maybe go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows."

The President's comments, which seemed divorced from the gravity of the situation, followed CNN reporting that raised new questions about Trump's capacity to handle the crisis.

For weeks, aides and allies have tried to impress upon him the seriousness of the coronavirus situation, warning him of the threat to the global economy and -- by proxy -- his own reelection prospects, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Devastating losses in Wall Street that finally convinced him to put a face on the crisis on Wednesday. But his erratic news conference only fanned the impression of a leadership vacuum.

Much at stake

There are also signs that the White House is more concerned with its political plight than the burgeoning crisis.

An order for public health officials to clear all television appearances with the White House meanwhile raised the question of whether Trump will prioritize science as the threat from coronavirus rises or his own political standing.

In a shocking report, The Washington Post revealed that health officials met Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the disease without proper training or protective gear, according to a whistleblower account.

News that California is monitoring 8,400 people for the virus and an announcement that state has already confirmed its first case of community transmission further shook public confidence.

Alarming headlines tested the credibility of a message of confidence and optimism delivered by Vice President Mike Pence, amid doubts over his credentials to lead the anti-virus effort.

"President Trump has no higher priority than the health, safety and well-being of Americans," Pence said at a conservative political conference outside Washington. "While the risk to the American public remains low, like the President said yesterday, we're ready. We're ready for anything."

Pence, a day after being named to a job by the President that will require him to work closely with adversaries on Capitol Hill, then launched a prolonged attack on "socialist" Democrats. He later had to clear up confusion over his role -- confirming that he, and not Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, was in charge of the anti-virus task force.

As television news channels devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the coronavirus, government public health officials were nowhere to be seen. Sources told CNN that all media appearances have to now be cleared with Pence's office. The move could deprive Americans of sober, science-based advice from some of the best public health experts in the world.

CNN has reported that Trump has been angered that government health experts have contradicted his attempts to downplay the threat from the virus by saying it is all but "inevitable" the US will be affected and there will be severe disruption.

The revelation will do little to quell suspicions that Trump is trying to suppress damaging information to pacify the markets and protect himself politically and gets to the fundamental issue of the administration's squandering of public trust. His acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, acknowledged to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday that potential disruptions to everyday life, such as school closures and impacts on public transportation, are likely. But his advice to people worried about the market reaction to the outbreak was to "tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours."

If Trump is hoping to placate investors who have driven stocks to historic highs that he sees as an election-year boon, he is failing badly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,191 points or 4.4% in its worst points loss in history. Stocks are on track for their worst week since the financial crisis.

The third day of steep loses followed a flurry of warnings that the coronavirus could spark a global recession, including from former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen.

Reelection on the horizon

Such a scenario could spell political disaster for the President as he runs for reelection. One of the few areas in which he enjoys majority voter approval is over his management of the economy. A double whammy of a downturn and a botched virus response could endanger the President's hopes of a second term.

Anxiety over coronavirus spiked after Wednesday's announcement of the first case of the disease, in California, in a patient who had no travel or close proximity links with sufferers brought home to the US from Japan or China.

The Obama administration's former Ebola czar Ron Klain accused the Trump team of not taking sufficient steps to examine whether the virus was already here.

"We haven't tested extensively and don't know how widespread it is," said Klain told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead." "If you don't test, you're not going to find it. However many cases there are now, there's going to be more."

It is not unusual for an administration to find itself racing to catch up after a sudden crisis breaks. The question becomes how quickly a President can master the situation and put in place personnel and plans take control.

Administrations that manage that can win public plaudits and avoid political damage.

Those that fail -- like President George W. Bush's team, for instance, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 -- sometimes never recover.

The US Food and Drug Administration on Thursday gave another sign of a building crisis, warning that an unnamed drug had recently been added to the FDA Drug Shortages list. Since many generic and brand name drugs are manufactured in China, there are fears that the hangover from the Asian giant's weeks long coronavirus shortage could reverberate in America.

Republicans on Capitol Hill did their best to push back against criticism of Trump's response in an uneven press conference on Wednesday in which his sunny forecasts that the coronavirus may not reach the US were contradicted by top officials.

"I think they are doing a good job," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN's Lauren Fox.

But Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had personally raised her concerns about Pence's qualifications to lead the virus response task force with the vice president.

"We have always had a very candid relationship and I expressed to him a concern that I had of his being in this position," Pelosi said.

After Pence was put in charge of the coronavirus effort on Wednesday, critics disputed the President's comment that he had "a certain talent for health matters."

Pence was in charge of a previous health emergency -- an HIV outbreak -- when he was governor of Indiana. His moral objection and delays to initiating a needle exchange program were blamed by health experts for exacerbating the issue.

Nothing good.

What Mike Pence’s public health record says about his ability to lead on coronavirus

Nothing good.

By Anna North

In 2011, a Congress member from Indiana helped pass federal legislation to strip funding from Planned Parenthood.

Two years later, the last Planned Parenthood affiliate in Scott County, Indiana, closed its doors because of budget cuts. It was also the last HIV testing center in the county. By 2015, an HIV outbreak was brewing in the state. At the peak of the outbreak, 20 new cases were being diagnosed per week, with a total of nearly 200 cases eventually reported, according to HuffPost.

But that Congress member, who became Indiana’s governor, didn’t want to authorize a needle-exchange program to stop the spread of the virus.

“I don’t believe effective anti-drug policy involves handing out drug paraphernalia,” he said.

That Indiana governor was, of course, Mike Pence. Now he’s the vice president, and on Wednesday, President Trump put him in charge of fighting coronavirus in the US.

“He’s got a certain talent for this,” Trump said.

But others say the opposite is true. In Indiana, cuts to Planned Parenthood meant that “when the state experienced an HIV outbreak, they were unprepared to respond to it,” Mary Alice Carter, a senior adviser at Equity Forward, a reproductive-health watchdog group, told Vox. Pence’s role in cutting Planned Parenthood funding showed a “short-sightedness” that makes Trump’s decision to put him in charge of coronavirus response concerning, Carter said. (The White House has not responded to a request for comment from Vox on the selection of Pence for the position.)

Moreover, Pence and his history are part of a bigger problem in the Trump administration, Carter and others say. In general, the administration has sought to restrict funding to Planned Parenthood and other groups, reproductive health advocates say, without regard to the public health implications. The administration’s policies have already made it harder for low-income Americans to get screening for conditions like breast and cervical cancer. And some fear that, especially with Pence in charge, the administration could put politics over science when it comes to coronavirus response too.

“The ongoing concern is whether you let science and medicine lead an effort or whether you let ideology run your policy,” Carter said.

Pence was among the first Republicans to advocate cutting funds to Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood has long been a target for anti-abortion groups because some of its affiliates offer the procedure, but for years, it has also functioned as a safety-net health care provider for millions of Americans, offering STI testing, cervical cancer screening, and other services at low or no cost. In order to do this, the group has received public funding from a number of state and federal sources.

Cutting that funding has been a Republican priority for years. The Hyde Amendment already bans federal funding for nearly all abortions, but for many years, Planned Parenthood was still able to use federal funds for other health services. Getting rid of that funding, abortion opponents argued, would indirectly make it harder for the group to perform abortions.

Pence was essentially the architect of this strategy, as Sarah Kliff reported at Vox in 2016. In Congress, he proposed bills to cut funding to the group repeatedly beginning in 2007, and one finally passed the House in 2011.

“If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions,” Pence told Kliff. “As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.”

The 2011 legislation did not make it through the Senate. But states also joined in the effort, with Indiana chief among them. In 2005, Planned Parenthood got $3.3 million from the state of Indiana; in 2014, it got just $1.9 million, according to Indy100.

Those cuts started before Pence became governor, but they continued under his administration. Indeed, during his governorship, overall funding for public health in the state decreased, Beth Meyerson, co-director of the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention at the Indiana University School of Public Health, told Vox.

In 2013, Pence’s first year as governor, the only Planned Parenthood in Scott County closed, leaving 24,000 people without an HIV testing center.

By 2015, health officials were seeing HIV infections linked to intravenous drug use in Scott County, Erin Schumaker reported at HuffPost: “Scott County residents were sharing needles to inject their opioids, and nobody was getting tested.”

Public health experts called for a needle-exchange program to make sure people got clean needles, but Pence refused, Meryl Kornfield reports at the Washington Post. He said he would veto any bill for such a program.

Finally, over two months after the HIV outbreak was reported, Pence said he would pray on the issue, according to the New York Times. Two days later, he issued an executive order for syringes to be distributed in Scott County.

The distribution helped stop the epidemic, according to the Times. But Pence didn’t actually allocate new money for the program, or for fighting the epidemic generally, forcing state officials to cut other health programs, Meyerson said: “overall, his governorship showed that he did not commit to an adequately funded public health infrastructure.”

Then, in 2016, Pence was elected vice president. And the effort to cut funding to Planned Parenthood that he had championed for nearly a decade became a priority for the Trump administration.

Last year, the administration issued a rule barring Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform or refer for abortions from getting federal funding through Title X, a program aimed at providing family planning services to low-income Americans. As a result, nearly 1,000 health centers around the country have lost funding, making it harder for many Americans to get necessary services like cancer screening or HIV tests.

The move was doubly concerning because for many people, Title-X-funded clinics “are really the first line of defense in public health,” Carter said. For many low-income patients, their health-care provider at such a clinic may be the only provider they see all year.

“You may go in for birth control and come out knowing you need to get a flu shot,” Carter said, and family planning clinics can also help patients sign up for Medicaid and other services.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood has played a crucial role in previous public health crises, doing outreach around prevention of the Zika virus and offering water filters in Michigan during the Flint water crisis.

The Trump administration’s record on public health raises concerns about its handling of coronavirus

Today, the Trump administration is tasked with responding to coronavirus, with Pence, one of Planned Parenthood’s most long-standing opponents, at the head of that effort. It’s not clear yet how the group will be involved, if at all, in fighting coronavirus. But its leadership has already expressed concern over the selection of Pence to lead the government’s response.

“Pence has long been obsessed with defunding Planned Parenthood, even when Planned Parenthood closures in the state affected one of Indiana’s worst public health crises,” said Jacqueline Ayers, vice president of government relations and public policy at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, in a statement on Thursday. “There’s no evidence he has learned any lessons since then.”

Carter also noted the administration’s attitude to Planned Parenthood raises questions about how it will respond to coronavirus. For example, she asked, would it ship a virus testing kit to a Planned Parenthood facility?

More broadly, the administration and its officials have a record of disregarding medical evidence or the advice of experts, Carter and others say. Pence, for example, went against the guidance of public health officials when he opposed a needle-exchange program. (And in 2000, he claimed in an op-ed that “smoking does not kill.”) Later, when the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups asked the Trump administration not to bar Planned Parenthood and other groups from getting Title X funds, arguing that the move would harm public health, the administration did it anyway.

The issue goes beyond Planned Parenthood. In 2017, the Trump administration reinstated and expanded the “global gag rule,” which bars health care providers abroad that receive US government aid from providing, referring for, or discussing abortion.

Experts have long said the rule, enacted by previous Republican presidents but broadened by Trump to apply restrictions to a larger share of government funds, would not reduce abortions but would instead jeopardize providers’ ability to offer cancer screenings, contraception, and prenatal care. Indeed, a 2019 study found that access to HIV testing and screening for breast and cervical cancers, among other services, had been reduced across several countries as a result of the rule.

Also in 2017, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS resigned in protest, with one writing in Newsweek that “the Trump administration has no strategy to address the ongoing H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, seeks zero input from experts to formulate H.I.V. policy, and — most concerning — pushes legislation that will harm people living with H.I.V. and halt or reverse important gains made in the fight against this disease.”

Then, in 2019, the Trump administration cut funding for fetal-tissue research, despite long-standing arguments by scientific and medical experts that such research is crucial for developing vaccines and treatments for diseases. Research into AIDS and other conditions has already suffered as a result, Carter said.

The failure to listen to experts in the past raises questions about the administration’s coronavirus response today, Carter said. For example, “are we going to see immigration policies put in place, or travel restrictions put in place, that are scientifically based or based on race or country of origin?”

Moreover, the research on coronavirus is constantly evolving, and Americans need someone in charge of the response who can sift through it with a focus on data, not ideology, Meyerson said.

“We need a strong, clear, transparent, public health evidence-based communicator who will coordinate among agencies and who will manage upward in our current draconian administration,” she explained. When it comes to Pence, “there’s no evidence that he will handle that job and do it in the way the American people need.”

Incredibly Stupid.

4Chan Trolls Have a Plan to Mess With the Democratic Primary. It Is Incredibly Stupid.

When you’re stealing ideas from Rush Limbaugh…

ALI BRELAND

In 2008, Rush Limbaugh hatched a plan. By March, John McCain had locked down the Republican’s nomination, and while Barack Obama held a lead in delegates, he and Hillary Clinton were still duking it out in the Democratic primaries. If their fight could be prolonged, surely the winner would be too bloodied to pose as much of a threat to McCain in November, Limbaugh surmised. Dubbing his plan “Operation Chaos,” the conservative radio host urged his listeners to show up in open primary states, most notably Indiana, and vote for Clinton in an effort to lengthen the race.

For the last several weeks, right-wingers on the message board 4chan and in r/The_Donald, a subsection of Reddit made up of some of the president’s most toxic online supporters, have talked about encouraging their members to take part in a new operation chaos, starting in South Carolina, the first open primary of the 2020 election cycle. While there have been dozens of posts discussing the prospect, no singular coordinated effort seems to have taken hold, and it is unlikely that even an organized campaign to troll the Democratic primaries would have much effect.

“The Left is totally devouring itself and it’s a Glorious sight to see. Gulag Bernie Bros have so much hate for Pocahontas.. we should Vote for Warren in any open primaries and keep her going,” one Trump fan on Reddit wrote in a post that picked up over 1,000 upvotes, likely making it to the large subreddit’s homepage.

“I’m voting Bloomberg in the dem primaries. I think all republicans should vote in them for the weakest or most moderate D candidate,” a poster wrote in 4chan’s /pol/ board, the site’s politics focused board that has long been a nest of alt-right trolling. “My state has an open primary, so I will vote for Yang just to fuck with the DNC,” another wrote prior to Andrew Yang dropping out of the race.

Other boards on 4chan have encouraged people to vote for Sanders, reasoning that he is the candidate most likely to bring about a collapse of the United States’ current order and political systems. (Other users have accused anonymous posters advocating for this accelerationist approach as disingenuous pro-Bernie shills.) Some have encouraged voting for weaker performing candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg to help sustain their campaigns and drag out the competitive primary season.

While Limbaugh initially called his 2008 campaign a success, when he has touted it recently he has done so in less certain terms. “Actually, it may have worked in Indiana,” Limbaugh said on his show in January, before saying that the plot’s real value was how it got inside Democrats’ heads—a claim that’s virtually impossible to measure. “At any rate, the Democrats were made paranoid by it,” he claimed last month. “They’ve never gotten over it.”

Clinton did win Indiana over Obama, but her victory was in with what polls at the time suggested how that primary would play out and with results in other states with similar demographics. Democrats and other political observers were skeptical Limbaugh’s sabotage plan made a difference, and academic research since has found that his efforts were a wash.

In separate studies, Frank Stephenson, an economics professor at Barry College, and Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University, both concluded that Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” in 2008 had little to no impact on the race.

“Analysis of exit poll data from 38 states suggests that Republicans may have been voting strategically in Democratic primaries, but there is little evidence that March 4th was unusual in the scope of strategic behavior,” Donovan explains in the abstract of his paper. Stephenson, who looked at voting in four states, reached a similar conclusion.

Getting voters to turn out for candidates they actually like is already a difficult proposition. Getting voters to do it for candidates they don’t like, even as an act of sabotage, is even harder.

“There’s a collective action problem,” Stephenson told Mother Jones. “People like to talk about monkeying around in other parties’ elections, but it usually doesn’t translate into anything in the real world. Many people don’t even show up to vote for candidates that they already support.”

According to Donovan, there’s a fundamental problem for tricksters like Limbaugh who push such plots. Even if they were to lengthen the contest, evidence suggests that longer, drawn-out primaries don’t hurt winning candidates when November comes. “Studies have looked into if a contested, long nomination process has an effect on general. The conclusions are that it doesn’t,” Donovan said.

In a 2015 paper, Robert Hogan of Louisiana State University found that if combative primaries did have an effect, it was one in “the opposite direction than anticipated” by observers who assume they leave the winner weakened.

“Greater divisiveness in a candidate’s primary leads to a higher vote share in the general election,” Hogan concluded. “The presence of a primary challenge is found to exert a substantial positive influence for a candidate in the general election, particularly in open seat contests.”

Hogan chalks this up to the fact that primaries can help expose voters to far more information about the winning candidate than they would get in a shorter election. The finding suggests that even in cutthroat races, almost any exposure becomes good exposure by the time of the general election. In this way, Hogan’s analysis suggests that even if Limbaugh’s intervention had the effect he sought, it would have backfired.

If Limbaugh, one of the right’s largest media figures who has a cult of personality and a near-fanatical base of millions of listeners, failed to have a measurable effect in 2008, its hard to believe that an informal piece-mealed plot launched on fringe internet communities will make a dent this year.

But 2020 is not 2008, and there’s a chance key differences could make such trolling easier and more effective.

As Donovan noted, unlike in 2008, Republicans don’t have a competitive election to vote in, potentially giving them more time and energy to raid Democratic elections. But he said he was still skeptical this would actually happen. (South Carolina Republicans canceled their presidential  primary this year–primaries for lower offices won’t take place until June.)

Stephenson also pointed out that political movements are formed and shaped differently now than in 2008, with the proliferation of social media. Groups can raise and activate campaigns in diffuse and often little-noticed ways that were only just starting to take shape over a decade ago.

“If there’s a change, if this year is going to be different somehow, it could happen because of it being a social media environment,” he said. “Instead of Limbaugh instigating it, people on social media might do it. At the end of the day though, people still have to show up to vote—which is hard.”

Place an Impossible Burden

The Supreme Court Could Place an Impossible Burden on Women Fighting for Abortion Rights

A procedural change would force individuals to take on costly and difficult legal battles.

BECCA ANDREWS and JESSICA WASHINGTON

In 1973, Jane Roe, whose real name was Norma McCorvey, won a landmark victory at the Supreme Court: She and every woman in the United States were guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion. But this didn’t actually resolve the problem that led McCorvey to file her suit three years earlier; she gave birth while Roe v. Wade was being litigated. The case also threw McCorvey into a harsh spotlight she never wanted. She later became an anti-abortion crusader, but she was forever forced to carry the burden of being the plaintiff in the case that became shorthand for abortion rights.

In the years that followed Roe, subsequent court rulings enshrined a slew of other abortion protections, including one that would protect other pregnant people from those types of burdens. Nearly 50 years ago, a lesser-known but critical case, Singleton v. Wulff, gave abortion providers the power to sue for their patients’ well-being, known as third-party standing. That ruling shifted the legal burden from individual women to clinics with greater resources.

But that safeguard is now at risk of disappearing. If it were to be eliminated, the consequences could be vast—upending abortion law and litigation at a time when the basic right to the procedure is already vulnerable.

The Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo next week. The case centers on a 2014 Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. But in a counter-petition, Russo v. June Medical Services, the state of Louisiana is questioning the entire basis of the case, specifically the right of abortion providers to file lawsuits that challenge abortion restrictions. If the justices decide that abortion providers do not, in fact, have third-party standing, pregnant plaintiffs will likely be required to file suit themselves, almost certainly resulting in fewer abortion-related lawsuits. That, in turn, would take the pressure off states that are unconstitutionally regulating the procedure.

Advocates would be forced to fight against an onslaught of abortion bans, like many of those seen in 2019, under great personal and financial strain. And given how long these cases take, it’s likely they’d end up in the same position as McCorvey: fighting a long legal battle that no longer has anything to do with their individual ability to get an abortion.

“It’s almost impossible to imagine that an individual patient…would divert the resources required to litigate the case away from the challenges of her own personal life, to vindicate the rights of other women in order to prevent the law from going into effect,” says TJ Tu, a lawyer representing June Medical, the Louisiana abortion provider, on behalf of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs eight abortion clinics across the country, has firsthand experience leading the legal fight against abortion restrictions. In 2015, she sued Texas over an anti-abortion law nearly identical to Louisiana’s. She describes the process of being the plaintiff in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law in 2016, as a trauma that she’ll never forget, and not just because she was forced to close clinics and turn away women who needed abortion care. She vividly recalls the opposing attorneys raking through Whole Woman’s Health’s emails in the discovery process and the vitriol that she and her colleagues received as a result of being the faces of a high-profile case.

“If a pregnant person had to bring a lawsuit on behalf of themselves, and undertake what we have gone through, it’s not only ridiculous, it’s actually cruel,” Hagstrom Miller says. “I’ve been through depositions, I’ve been in the witness stand myself. And even if I was [anonymous], how disruptive that is, and the discovery and the process and the time it takes to even go through the preparation for a deposition or being a witness, it’s really, really difficult. So just saying, ‘Oh, well, that’s the only path to justice that a patient could have,’ it’s scary and it’s also just extreme.”

It would be riskier for an individual to bring a suit today than it was for McCorvey in the 1970s. The inescapable gaze of the internet brings risks of harassment and doxxing. “To think that somebody has to bring a lawsuit in order to assert their rights and sacrifice their confidentiality, sacrifice their family’s well-being…,” Hagstrom Miller says, trailing off.

In states like Louisiana, which last year passed one of the most restrictive early gestational abortion bans in the country, it’s difficult to imagine a pregnant plaintiff bringing a suit while surmounting a whole host of other restrictions. The average person seeking an abortion in the state is a low-income woman living with a child or children of her own, miles away from the nearest clinic. She often has to find child care, money for the procedure, and transportation. She has to return to the clinic, because Louisiana has a mandatory 24-hour waiting period between a consultation and an abortion, which means more travel and child care costs.

If women are forced to file the lawsuits individually, they would face all of those obstacles while simultaneously having to marshal the resources to fight a drawn-out legal battle against powerful state entities, potentially over the course of years. In addition, they would be required to delay access to a medical service they have already decided they need because they would have to be pregnant and seeking an abortion when the lawsuit was filed.

Ultimately, abortion providers are best suited to argue these cases, says Marc Hearron, senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights. They see the wider landscape—how restrictions impact a slew of different patients—and also how individuals can suffer. The providers can articulate the lack of medical basis for an admitting-privileges requirement and explain why these privileges are next to impossible to get, in ways that individual patients are unlikely to understand. “Any patient who is seeking an abortion doesn’t necessarily have access to all of those facts and may not even understand why it is that she is unable to access an abortion,” says Hearron. “All she knows is that the clinic has shut down.”

Attacking third-party standing is a particularly shrewd strategy on the part of anti-abortion opponents. Mary Ziegler, a professor at Florida State University who studies the history of abortion law, explains that the approach calls into question the intentions of abortion providers. “The general argument is that abortion providers don’t have patients’ best interests in mind,” Ziegler says. “If the court accepts that argument, it will say a lot about the court’s willingness to buy arguments that abortion is bad for patients or bad for women.”

It also will say a lot about who gets to decide what, exactly, is in the best interest of women who seek abortion care. 

Next week, the lawyers for June Medical will argue that there is no difference between the Texas law that was at the heart of Whole Woman’s Health and the 2014 Louisiana law. But since that ruling, two new anti-abortion justices have been confirmed to the court, and earlier this year, the Trump administration filed a brief that proposes eliminating third-party standing for providers. Additionally, in the 2016 Whole Woman’s Health case, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas made a direct argument against third-party standing for abortion providers in his dissent.

If the court does dismantle third-party standing all-together, the impact could sweep the entire judiciary system, as many of the cases currently being fought in the courts by clinics—in Alabama, Missouri, Georgia, and elsewhere—may become moot or have to be refiled, says Stephen Wermiel, a constitutional law professor at American University Washington College of Law. While their exact futures would depend on how narrow or broad the court makes its final ruling, there would, without a doubt, be a “destabilizing effect,” says Tu.

If the court eliminates third-party standing for abortion providers, many women and abortion rights supporters may not even know there’s been a change. Dismantling abortion rights by attacking an obscure legal principle could result in less pushback than has occurred in states that are passing outright bans on early-term abortions. “Once [abortion opponents] passed the six-week bans, the public really turned against them,” says Leila Abolfazli, who leads the reproductive rights program at the National Women’s Law Center. “People were protesting in the middle of the street in Alabama, in the middle of the week. [Anti-abortion advocates] get that.”

Even if the legal principle at issue is opaque, the stakes of the case are high. “It is almost as much of a threat to the right to abortion,” says Tu, “as reversing Roe v. Wade.”

Pushing an Outrageous Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory

Trump and His Allies Are Pushing an Outrageous Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory

The president’s persecution complex takes center stage amid a global health crisis.

INAE OH

As the world scrambles to contain the deadly coronavirus outbreak—which as of Friday has infected at least 83,000 people in 53 countries—President Donald Trump and his allies are busy pushing the conspiratorial narrative that press coverage of the epidemic is aimed at destroying him. The apparent attempt to politicize the global health crisis is likely to fuel investors’ concerns that the Trump administration is woefully underprepared to tackle the rising threat of coronavirus in the United States.

The effort first started Monday when Trump—without evidence—accused the media and Democrats of hyping the coronavirus in order to make the situation look “as bad as possible” and tank the stock market. Since that tweet, Trump’s allies and conservative news personalities have followed suit.

Grabbing the baton the next morning, Pete Hegseth echoed the message on Fox & Friends, though he insisted he was doing so only reluctantly.

“I don’t want to say this, I don’t relish the reality, but you start to feel—watch the Democrats, watch the media—like they’re rooting for coronavirus to spread,” Hegseth said on Friday. “I don’t say that flippantly, but they’re rooting for it to grow, they’re rooting for the problem to get worse, they’re rooting for mysteries, unknown cases, quarantines, towns, for it to become an absolute national crisis for one reason and one reason alone.”

But the conspiracy theory extends well beyond the walls of Fox News. On Friday, during an appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney accused the media of exploiting the virus to hurt Trump.

“The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think, ‘This is going to be what brings down the president.’ That’s what this is all about,” he told the audience. Mulvaney also repeated Trump’s efforts to downplay the threat. “It’s not a death sentence, it’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.”

Explosion...

Record-breaking Explosion by Black Hole Spotted

The biggest explosion seen in the universe has been found. This record-breaking, gargantuan eruption came from a black hole in a distant galaxy cluster hundreds of millions of light years away.

"In some ways, this blast is similar to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain," said Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and lead author of the study. "A key difference is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."

Astronomers made this discovery using X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, and radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.

The unrivaled outburst was detected in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is about 390 million light years from Earth. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity, containing thousands of individual galaxies, dark matter, and hot gas.

In the center of the Ophiuchus cluster, there is a large galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole. Researchers think that the source of the gigantic eruption is this black hole.

Although black holes are famous for pulling material toward them, they often expel prodigious amounts of material and energy. This happens when matter falling toward the black hole is redirected into jets, or beams, that blast outward into space and slam into any surrounding material.

Chandra observations reported in 2016 first revealed hints of the giant explosion in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Norbert Werner and colleagues reported the discovery of an unusual curved edge in the Chandra image of the cluster. They considered whether this represented part of the wall of a cavity in the hot gas created by jets from the supermassive black hole. However, they discounted this possibility, in part because a huge amount of energy would have been required for the black hole to create a cavity this large.

The latest study by Giacintucci and her colleagues show that an enormous explosion did, in fact, occur. First, they showed that the curved edge is also detected by XMM-Newton, thus confirming the Chandra observation. Their crucial advance was the use of new radio data from the MWA and data from the GMRT archives to show the curved edge is indeed part of the wall of a cavity, because it borders a region filled with radio emission. This emission is from electrons accelerated to nearly the speed of light. The acceleration likely originated from the supermassive black hole.

"The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove," said co-author Maxim Markevitch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here."

The amount of energy required to create the cavity in Ophiuchus is about five times greater than the previous record holder, MS 0735+74, and hundreds and thousands of times greater than typical clusters.

The black hole eruption must have finished because the researchers do not see any evidence for current jets in the radio data. This shutdown can be explained by the Chandra data, which show that the densest and coolest gas seen in X-rays is currently located at a different position from the central galaxy. If this gas shifted away from the galaxy it will have deprived the black hole of fuel for its growth, turning off the jets.

This gas displacement is likely caused by "sloshing" of the gas around the middle of the cluster, like wine sloshing around in a glass. Usually the merger of two galaxy clusters triggers such sloshing, but here it could have been set off by the eruption.

One puzzle is that only one giant region of radio emission is seen, as these systems usually contain two on opposite sides of the black hole. It is possible that the gas on the other side of the cluster from the cavity is less dense so the radio emission there faded more quickly.

"As is often the case in astrophysics we really need multiwavelength observations to truly understand the physical processes at work," said Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, a co-author from International Centre for Radio Astronomy in Australia. "Having the combined information from X-ray and radio telescopes has revealed this extraordinary source, but more data will be needed to answer the many remaining questions this object poses."

A paper describing these results appears in the February 27th issue of The Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is available here. In addition to Giacintucci, Markevitch, and Johnston-Hollitt, the authors are Daniel Wik (University of Utah), Qian Wang (University of Utah), and Tracy Clarke (Naval Research Laboratory). The 2016 paper by Norbert Werner was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Chandra X-ray Center controls science and flight operations from Cambridge and Burlington, Massachusetts.

Void guilty verdict.....

Court won't let Trump pardon void guilty verdict against Arpaio

But sheriff's lawyers declare victory over ruling that criminal contempt finding has 'no legal consequences.'

By JOSH GERSTEIN

A federal appeals court has rejected former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's bid to wipe out a judge's guilty finding that preceded President Donald Trump's pardon of Arpaio in 2017.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that Arpaio is not entitled to have the guilty verdict on a misdemeanor contempt-of-court charge vacated because it has no legal significance in the wake of Trump's pardon.

"The final judgment entered in this case was a dismissal with prejudice, and the district court’s findings of fact and conclusions of law played no role in that dismissal," Judge Jay Bybee wrote in a 15-page opinion joined by Judges Randy Smith and Daniel Collins.

In July, 2017, a federal judge found the longtime Maricopa County, Ariz. sheriff and immigration hard-liner guilty of contempt for defying another judge's ruling aimed at halting racial and ethnic profiling by Arpaio's department.

The following month, before Arpaio was scheduled to be sentenced, Trump pardoned him. The president cited Arpaio's age at the time, 85, and his long record of "selfless public service." Echoing one of Trump's favorite phrases, Arpaio declared himself the victim of a "witch hunt."

The pardon meant Arpaio would never be sent to jail, but when he asked U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton to withdraw the guilty verdict in the case, she declined. The pardon could not rewrite history, she declared.

Arpaio appealed the ruling, arguing that the pardon entitled him to have the guilty verdict formally vacated. The three-judge appeals court panel, all of whom are Republican appointees, turned down that request. But Arpaio's attorneys declared victory anyway because the court opinion emphasized that the guilty finding has no legal consequences.

"The Court gave us exactly what we asked for, which is a finding that the judge’s guilty verdict is legally meaningless," Arpaio lawyer Jack Wilenchik said in a statement. "The judge had found the opposite in her final order; she said that the guilty verdict may, or even should, be considered in future proceedings."

Arpaio's lawyers said the guilty finding could impact some future criminal or civil case, but the appeals court said it would not.

The appeal sparked an internal battle at the 9th Circuit in 2018 after a three-judge panel appointed a special prosecutor to defend the judge's ruling refusing to wipe out the guilty verdict. Justice Department prosecutors had agreed with Arpaio and urged the judge to vacate that finding.

The court's move to appoint a special prosecutor irked some conservative judges, who said it could fuel more demands for court-appointed special counsels. A total of five 9th Circuit judges resisted the move, but a majority of the court declined to disturb the appointment of former prosecutor Christopher Caldwell to argue in the case.

Arpaio took that special-prosecutor issue all the way to the Supreme Court, but the justices declined to take it up.

Bybee and Smith were appointed by President George W. Bush. Collins is a Trump appointee.

Coronavirus conspiracy.. The insanity......

Trump backers see a coronavirus conspiracy

CDC official who raised fears turns out to be Rod Rosenstein’s sister, setting off MAGA-world alarms.

By BEN SCHRECKINGER and ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN

Some supporters of President Donald Trump see a threat bigger than the spread of a highly contagious novel coronavirus: a conspiracy by deep state actors to use the virus against the president.

One key piece of evidence fueling their theory: An official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention making public statements on the outbreak is the sister of Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who oversaw the Mueller probe and, according to a disputed report, once discussed removing Trump from office.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, head of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases — who got a shoutout from her brother for attending his 2017 confirmation hearing — warned Americans in a Tuesday media briefing that an outbreak in the U.S. is inevitable.

Messonnier’s comments got widespread attention, sparking calls for further actions by the administration, which had long struck a more reassuring note. The furor appeared to catch Trump flat-footed while en route back from his summit with the Indian prime minister, during which he had declared the outbreak "very well under control."

The likes of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and Jim Hoft, publisher of the Gateway Pundit, a conspiratorial, pro-Trump site, have seized on the sibling connection, as have a large number of anonymous Twitter accounts.

“Rod Rosenstein as we all know definitely worked to undermine the Trump administration, which is oddly exactly what his sister is doing by undermining the more logical and calm message the president’s team has issued on the virus,” conservative pundit Wayne Dupree charged in a Wednesday blog post.

Global financial markets have been sliding for several days over concerns about the fallout from the virus, a trend that threatens Trump’s rosy economic message as well as his political future.

Yet there is no evidence that federal health authorities are overstating the threat of coronavirus to prosecute a political vendetta against Trump, and some conservatives — even as they praised the administration’s response — rushed to defend Messonnier.

"I've heard people jumping on Nancy Messonnier because she told us the truth: that it's not a matter of if but when,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told reporters on Wednesday. “Isn't that what you want to hear instead of some pie in the sky?"

Trump — who rose to political prominence by promoting the false idea that Barack Obama was not born in the United States — has aired suspicions that mainstream media outlets are sensationalizing the virus and contributing to a plunging stock market. “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible,” he tweeted on Wednesday morning.

The tweet came after Limbaugh aired fears that the virus is being “weaponized” against Trump on his Monday radio program. He accused the “Drive-By Media” of overhyping the threat posed by the virus to tank financial markets.

“There’s nothing unusual about the coronavirus,” opined Limbaugh, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump earlier this month. Limbaugh, who also compared the virus to the "common cold," followed up on Tuesday by seizing on the Messonnier-Rosenstein connection.

Other Trump supporters, meanwhile, have seized on the crisis to deflect blame to some of the president’s favorite targets: foreign governments and powerful global organizations.

In a Jan. 29 blog post, America First Policies, a pro-Trump nonprofit co-founded by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, criticized the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization for not doing enough to raise the alarm about the outbreak.

"The World Health Organization,” the group wrote, “is a case study of how the Chinese Communist Party infects supposedly apolitical institutions.”

U.S. stocks plummet

U.S. stocks plummet and health experts warn against Trump's claims: The latest on coronavirus

Trump’s alternately combative and light-hearted press conference on the government’s coronavirus response did little to calm escalating global concerns about the epidemic.

By POLITICO STAFF

The White House announced Thursday that they had named a coronavirus 'coordinator' to lead response to the health crisis. Ambassador Debbie Birx, who serves as the U.S. government's leader for combatting HIV/AIDS globally, will report to Vice President Mike Pence, the administration's point person for the response. She will also join the White House's coronavirus task force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

Here's what you need to know

• Pence led his first task force meeting amid questions about who's really leading the response efforts.
• Public health experts warned that some of Trump's claims could be dangerously misleading.
• Just 40 of more than 100 public health labs in the U.S. are able to diagnose the coronavirus.
• California doesn't have enough test kits as officials monitor 8,400 people.
• The U.S. is suspending some travel for DOD personnel to and within the Middle East.

Pence defends actions as governor during HIV outbreak in Indiana

Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday defended his actions as governor of Indiana during an HIV outbreak, having faced scrutiny for his handling of epidemics after being named President Donald Trump’s coronavirus chief.

Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Pence said he took the necessary action to fight off an epidemic of HIV in Indiana by lifting a ban on sterile needle-exchange programs in the affected locale. Pence said he still did not support needle exchanges but did what was necessary at the time.

Nearly 200 people in Scott County were infected with HIV from 2011-2014 as a result of sharing dirty needles, and Pence faced fierce criticism for dragging his feet on lifting the ban on needle exchanges.

Pence’s handling of the outbreak was seen as a window into his potential handling of health crises ahead of the 2016 presidential election and after his appointment as the White House coronavirus chief.

Trump bemoans criticisms of administration’s response

President Donald Trump on Thursday went after the “fake news” media for casting his response to coronavirus in what he characterized as a bad light.

“I think it’s an incredible achievement what our country’s done,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

He said his administration had been improperly critiqued for closing borders to foreign citizens coming from China, arguing that it was the proper measure at the time.

He claimed he was accused of being a “racist” by the media for limiting travel from Asia while leaving the borders open to other affected countries. Trump also complimented himself for Wednesday evening's news conference where he announced Vice President Mike Pence to head his coronavirus taskforce, saying it was "calming."

Trump also assured reporters that the coronavirus will disappear and the United States is closely collaborating with other countries to contain the situation.

Later in the evening, Trump used much more severe terms to disparage Democrats for focusing too much on his impeachment to act on the coronavirus outbreak.

"Do Nothing Democrats were busy wasting their time on the Impeachment Hoax, & anything they could do to make the Republican Party look bad, while I was busy calling early boarder & flight closings, putting us way ahead in our battle with the Coronavirus. Dems called it very wrong!" Trump tweeted.

Pence led his first task force meeting amid questions about who exactly is leading the response efforts.

Pence said he is leading the group of high level officials and health experts, but will rely on Azar as chairman.

“The President has every confidence in the secretary as I do. But the President wanted to make it clear to the American people that we're going to bring a whole of government approach to this,” Pence said.

He added that yesterday and today he spoke with Democratic and Republican leadership in Congress about the virus and the supplemental spending bill that will direct funds for prevention and treatment efforts.

The president’s vision is a “whole of government approach,” Pence said.

“The work we are doing here represents the most important work we are doing here today,” Pence said.

During his visit to HHS, Pence also made a stop at the Secretary’s Operations Center to say hello to government employees monitoring the outbreak. Employees sat at computers and took note of outbreak numbers around the world on large video screens at the front of the room.

Dow posts 1,000+ point loss amid worsening coronavirus fears

U.S. stocks plummeted Thursday despite the Trump administration’s efforts to calm markets and fears about the coronavirus outbreak. The Dow closed nearly 1,200 points in the red after a volatile day in the market.

The Dow tumbled more than 500 points just after the opening bell, and though it had made up much of its losses by midday, the market took another hit in the afternoon not long after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state was monitoring 8,400 for possible infections.

That news preceded another wave of selloffs, wiping out earlier gains. All three major indices in the New York Stock Exchange entered the day in correction territory, or down at least 10 percent from all-time highs.

— Caitlin Oprysko

Public health experts warned that some of the president's claims Wednesday night could be dangerously misleading.

The slow pace of screening for the virus is taking on new urgency after the CDC on Wednesday night confirmed the first coronavirus case in a U.S. patient who had not traveled to an infected area or come into contact with someone known to be infected.

Trump’s alternately combative and light-hearted press conference on the government’s coronavirus response did little to calm escalating global concerns about the epidemic, as U.S. markets continued to slide upon opening Thursday morning amid reports the virus continues to spread to more countries.

Trump insisted Wednesday night that health workers are “testing everybody that we need to test,” a statement one expert called “blatantly false.”

— Alice Miranda Ollstein and Sarah Owermohle

The latest U.S. coronavirus case highlights the country's still-limited ability to test patients for the virus.

Just 40 of more than 100 public health labs in the U.S. are currently able to diagnose the coronavirus because of problems with a test developed by the CDC, potentially slowing the response if the virus starts taking hold here. The faulty test has also delayed a plan to widely screen people with symptoms of respiratory illness who have tested negative for influenza to detect whether the coronavirus may be stealthily spreading.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar told lawmakers Thursday that HHS expects 93 labs around the country to be able to conduct their own coronavirus tests by Monday, using either the CDC’s diagnostic or a private-sector alternative that could be available as early as Friday.

The CDC has conducted more than 3,600 screenings so far, and there is currently no backlog. But the delayed rollout of tests to public health labs around the country has raised concerns that the coronavirus could be spreading undetected.

Without quick action, the chances increase that the virus could pass from person to person within the U.S. and build into a full-fledged outbreak.

Right now, only a narrow group of Americans is being tested: those who have recently traveled to China or have been in contact with someone confirmed to have the virus. That is too limited to detect potential problems before they grow larger.

— David Lim and Adam Cancryn

California's governor says the state doesn't have enough test kits as officials monitor 8,400 people.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday that the state is working with federal officials to expand its ability to evaluate people for the coronavirus, one day after it was revealed the first patient likely to have contracted it within a U.S. community was initially denied a test.

The governor said federal officials earlier Thursday assured that "testing protocols will be advanced with urgency." The state's 200 testing kits were a "simply inadequate" number, Newsom said, and he called it a top priority to conduct "point of contact" testing where patients are staying.

Late Wednesday, the California Department of Public Health revealed that a Solano County resident tested positive for COVID-19. That patient has been at the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento since Feb. 19 after being transferred from another Northern California hospital.

UCD leaders said their staff initially suspected coronavirus as a potential cause but were denied a test because the patient did not meet the CDC's criteria for testing. The CDC eventually granted a test on Sunday, and the patient was diagnosed as positive Wednesday.

CDC Director Robert Redfield told a congressional panel Thursday that the CDC has revised its screening rules to expand testing after learning of the California case.

— Victoria Colliver and Kevin Yamamura

A California woman potentially exposed dozens of people at a small hospital more than a week before she was diagnosed with coronavirus.

The woman, the first patient likely to have contracted coronavirus within a U.S. community, spent three days in the Vacaville hospital before being transferred to the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, where she was finally tested.

After learning the patient had been diagnosed Wednesday with the novel coronavirus strain, the hospital launched meticulous tracing of anyone in the Vacaville facility who may have had any contact with that patient, according to hospital and state health officials.

— Victoria Colliver

Appropriators are planning to work through the weekend to prep coronavirus bill for passage.

The total package is expected to be lower than the $8.5 billion Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed earlier this week, landing somewhere between $6 billion and $8 billion. Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) confirmed Thursday that the package will exceed the $4 billion House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has suggested.

The measure is likely to include orders requiring the Trump administration to replenish the $136 million it plans to transfer from various health accounts to pad out its coronavirus response.

The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Thursday that it is in the process of shifting $5 million from substance abuse and mental health programs, in addition to raiding $37 million from a program that helps low-income households pay their energy bills. The administration also wants to take $63 million from the National Institutes of Health, $4.8 million from Children and Families Services Programs, $4.2 million from Aging and Disability programs and $5.2 million from various CDC programs.

— Caitlin Emma

The U.S. is suspending some travel for military and civilian Defense Department personnel to and within the Middle East.

All leave and liberty travel with the Central Command theater is banned until further notice due to concerns over the coronavirus, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO. For example, personnel assigned to a unit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, cannot travel to the United Arab Emirates or Jeddah for the weekend.

The military took the extra step of also banning all non-essential travel specifically within Saudi Arabia, which includes “going to the mall, movies, other crowded venues or recreational facilities/establishments,” according to the memo.

The ban does not extend to “essential travel,” which includes transit between controlled access compounds and authorized hotels, grocery stores and medical appointments. The ban also does not apply to leave outside the theater, according to the memo.

— Lara Seligman

The top HELP Democrat called for Pence's removal from coronavirus response.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) on Thursday called on President Donald Trump to replace Vice President Mike Pence as head of the coronavirus response team, citing the vice president’s “lack of public health experience and record of putting ideology over science.”

The push from Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, came hours after Pence named Debbie Birx, the U.S. government’s leader for combatting HIV/AIDS globally, as the Trump administration’s coronavirus “coordinator.”

Murray’s letter to Trump delved into Pence’s history as Indiana governor, where the vice president faced the largest HIV outbreak in the state’s history. Murray said Pence’s “months of inaction led to costly results” in Indiana, and called for Trump to fill Pence’s coronavirus role with a public health leader experienced in infectious disease control.

“Vice President Pence’s leadership failure during the Indiana HIV outbreak is reason enough to question his ability to lead the federal government’s response to coronavirus at this time,” the letter said. “At a time when science and public health considerations should be driving all decision-making and the public is looking to the federal government for clear, fact-based communications, it is clear that Vice President Pence is neither a responsible nor a reliable selection to lead the coronavirus response.”

— Myah Ward

Congressional Democrats demanded that funding for the coronavirus response should be 'entirely new.'

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are insisting the money cannot be "stolen from other accounts" and must include stipulations to prevent Trump from transferring the funding to anything besides combating infectious diseases.

The Democratic leaders are also calling for any potential vaccine to be both affordable and widely available, that interest-free loans be made available for small businesses affected by the outbreak, and that state and local governments are reimbursed for helping the federal response to the virus.

Pelosi and Schumer said in a statement that they "stand ready to work in a bipartisan fashion in Congress and with the administration to achieve this necessary goal."

"Lives are at stake — this is not the time for name-calling or playing politics."

— Jennifer Scholtes

Betsy DeVos said that she’s set up a task force to coordinate the Education Department's response.

DeVos said during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing that she’s appointed her top deputy, Mick Zais, to lead the task force.

“We continue to work with the other agencies across government to ensure that we are prepared,” DeVos told lawmakers.

Federal public health officials have urged schools to brace for more cases of the virus in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that schools across the country develop contingency plans for school dismissals and closures, as well as the continuation of classes online.

President Donald Trump said during a news conference on Wednesday that “schools should be preparing and get ready, just in case.”

In Japan, The Japan Times reported that all schools have been asked to close for about a month, beginning Monday.

— Michael Stratford

Early missteps and a lack of a consistent message make the nation's disease-fighting agency a focus of criticism.

Robert Redfield was a well-known AIDS researcher and favorite of Christian conservatives when President Donald Trump picked him to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2018, where he has helped implement sweeping plans to fight HIV and opioids in the United States while pushing to tackle Ebola abroad.

But confronted by the increasingly global coronavirus outbreak, CDC and Redfield’s actions are now under intense scrutiny — both inside and outside the administration. Read more about how Trump’s CDC chief is facing increasingly harsh scrutiny.

— Dan Diamond

Not funny ever...

Fate of surveillance law

Rand Paul and Trump thrust fate of surveillance law into doubt

The Republican senator said the president made comments contradicting his attorney general.

By BURGESS EVERETT

President Donald Trump told Sen. Rand Paul that he does not support a clean extension of expiring surveillance authorities, throwing the future of the program into doubt ahead of a fast-approaching March 15 deadline to reup key features of the Patriot Act.

The Kentucky Republican told reporters that Trump made the comments to him on Wednesday, just a day after Attorney General William Barr told GOP senators that Congress should extend the expiring provisions regarding roving wire taps, lone wolf actors and the most controversial provision: call data collection.

Asked about the discrepancy between his conversation with Trump and Barr's remarks to senators, Paul said there was “misinformation that got out from some people in the administration” about the expiring surveillance authorities.

“The president was out of the country and somebody mischaracterized his positions. I’ll leave it up to y’all to figure that out,” Paul added.

Paul said Trump is “very supportive” of his amendment to prevent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from targeting Americans, a reflection of conservative unease over the way the Trump campaign was surveilled in 2016.

“FISA warrants should not be issued against Americans,” Paul said on Thursday afternoon. “Americans shouldn't be spied on by a secret court. I think he agrees completely with that and that’s the amendment that I’m going to insist on. I’m not letting anything go easy without a vote on my amendment.”

Paul’s conversation with Trump could blow up plans by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to extend those expiring authorities, which McConnell said was his preference on Tuesday. It also suggests a fresh schism between Barr and Trump after Trump weighed in on the sentencing of his longtime ally Roger Stone, a development that Barr said made his job “impossible.”

Most Senate Republicans want Barr to stay in his job and many of them agree with his position on the FISA courts. Paul voted against Barr’s confirmation as attorney general, the only Republican to do so.

Barr suggested to Republicans that he could make some of the changes sought by Republicans, including to blunt the ability of the FISA courts to target Americans, through new regulations. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he planned to talk about the matter on Friday and try and suggest a compromise.

“The best thing is for me to try and find out what happened and see if we need to do more than the attorney general’s done. So maybe an extension for a period of time that allows us to come back toward the end of the year, maybe would work," Graham said.

But that’s unlikely to satisfy Paul, who said he doesn’t care whether the provisions expire anyway since he opposes the Patriot Act to begin with.

Barr “wants to do just his own regulatory reforms, some of which are good but are not enough. We have to fix the law,” Paul said. “His tenure could be six months and then the next attorney general changes it. This is an inflection point where we should change the law.”

Lashes out in Florida

Roger Stone lashes out in Florida testimony

Days before Stone learned his prison sentence, the GOP operative gave a combative deposition in separate court cases, airing some anger.

By JOSH GERSTEIN

Roger Stone looked like a man on edge, under extreme stress and struggling to contain pent-up fury.

The GOP provocateur was just days away from finding out his fate from a criminal case that drew nationwide attention, that the president was openly complaining about. And to the world, Stone was largely silent, mostly gagged by the judge who handled his federal trial.

But in a South Florida court reporter’s office in mid-February, Stone was talking — a lot, testifying in a little-noticed deposition for a slate of a civil suits. He seemed largely unconcerned with maintaining the dapper, serene image he cultivated over the last year sweeping in and out of federal court in Washington, D.C., fighting charges he lied to investigators about his actions related to Russia’s 2016 election hack.

With no judge on hand, Stone was free to tear into his enemies as he did in an earlier era. He could be combative and hard-charging if he wanted. He could even spout vulgarities as he spared with his inquisitor.

And he did just that.

In five-and-a-half hours of video recorded over two days, Stone’s hands shake, he bares his teeth, his lips twitch and he repeatedly loses his temper in the face of goading from conservative lawyer Larry Klayman, who has several libel suits pending against Stone and his associates.

“If you want to keep insulting me, this will be over and you can run back to the judge like a little bitch,” Stone said during one particularly heated exchange.

“Did you just call me a bitch?” Klayman asked.

“You’re acting like one. ... You don’t have anything, my friend. You got nothing,” Stone replied, slapping his hand on the table for emphasis.

The heated rhetoric evoked Stone's much more high-profile trial in D.C. Stone’s language was a central topic at that trial as lawyers argued over whether Stone had intimidated a witness with barbed messages. The jury ultimately found him guilty on that charge, as well as six other felony counts.

Last week, the judge sentenced Stone to over three years in prison, in part because of his threatening language. President Donald Trump excoriated the decision and declared the whole trial was a miscarriage of justice, the product of a biased jury and judge.

Days before that sentencing, Stone had been ordered by Florida state court judge, Carol-Lisa Phillips, to sit for questioning after Klayman raised concerns that delaying the session could have led to Stone being sent away to prison before he could be deposed. He ended up testifying over two days, Feb. 12 and 13.

In all, Klayman referenced six different lawsuits at the start of the deposition, including a suit claiming that Stone falsely said Klayman had “never won a courtroom victory in his life,” that “he could be the single worst lawyer in America,” and that his IQ is below 70.

Clearly, both men aren’t fond of the other.

“Let’s go,” Stone said at one point, seeming to gesture at Klayman to come at him. “I don’t have to be badgered by this asshole.”

Stone made it only about an hour into the session before standing up, throwing down the microphone in anger, and telling Klayman: “F--- you!”

On several occasions, Stone’s mild-mannered attorney Robert Buschel stepped in to urge his client to “calm down.”

Stone’s penchant for indelicate language was a topic throughout his high-profile D.C. trial. Much of the dispute surrounding his sentencing length focused on the interpretation of one of his most pointed text messages to another Russia probe witness who was urging cooperation with investigators: “Lets get it on. Prepare to die cocksucker.”

Prosecutors said such threats triggered a higher sentencing guidelines range for cases involving violence or threats of violence, proposing seven to nine years behind bars. Defense lawyers said the comments were colorful bluster. Trump said the proposal was grossly unfair. Attorney General William Barr then overruled his prosecutors, ordering a lower sentencing request. His prosecutors quit in an apparent protest.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson ultimately agreed that the tougher guideline applied, but dialed back his sentence given the doubts about Stone’s intent.

The sight of Stone being raked over the coals by Klayman is sure to bring joy, or at least a degree of schadenfreude, to Democrats who recall being Klayman’s targets during the 1990s when the conservative lawyer used his watchdog group, Judicial Watch, to harangue members of the Clinton administration.

Many Clinton aides ran up thousands of dollars in legal bills responding to dozens of suits Klayman filed over a series of alleged scandals, including Travelgate, Filegate and the allocation of trade mission seats to Democratic donors.

Klayman’s questioning of Clinton administration officials at lengthy depositions was at times confrontational and at other times bizarre. No one would dispute it was legendary. The hit NBC series “West Wing” even created a fictional character based on Klayman’s shenanigans.

Harold Ickes, the deputy White House chief of staff, reportedly got asked about his cats. George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, fielded questions about his use of a pen on the set of the ABC News program he now hosts, “This Week.” After Klayman queried Stephanopoulos about the contents of a course he was teaching at Columbia University, the political strategist and his attorney walked out of the deposition, in a scene reminiscent of several from the Stone videos.

Klayman’s aggressive use of the legal system for political ends seems like the kind of tactic Stone, known for his bare-kunckled brand of politics, might have eagerly endorsed before he became an unwitting target.

How big a fan Stone was of Klayman’s anti-Clinton crusades is unclear, but the two men did work together briefly in 2003 and 2004 as Klayman mounted a longshot bid for the Republican nomination to replace retiring Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat. The brief collaboration doesn’t seem to have gone well.

During the deposition earlier this month, Stone complained that Klayman repeatedly lied to him about his ability to raise money for that race.

That prompted Klayman to shoot back: “Money is all that’s important to you, right?”

“Money is important in terms of getting you elected to the Senate, yes,” replied Stone.

“And it’s important to fill your pockets,” Klayman countered.

“You never paid me a dime,” Stone said.

While most of the deposition evoked schoolyard combat and Stone generally refused to discuss matters related to his criminal trial, Klayman did elicit one claim that Stone didn't make during his D.C. trial, at which he declined to testify. In the sworn questioning in the civil cases, Stone denied he ever talked to then-candidate Trump about WikiLeaks and its publication of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton supporters and the Democratic National Committee.

“I’ve never spoken to him about WikiLeaks,” Stone said. He added of his conversations with Trump: “None of them regard WikiLeaks. There was no evidence of that presented during the trial. It was an assertion by the government, but that does not make it true.”

Many of the most heated exchanges during the deposition came as the two combatants probed what they perceived as each other’s chief weaknesses.

Klayman repeatedly needled Stone over the guilty verdict in his D.C. trial, which stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The conservative lawyer also taunted Stone over an episode in 1996 when the National Enquirer got a hold of a swingers’ magazine that appeared to contain an ad taken out by Stone. That prompted Stone’s firing from Sen. Bob Dole’s presidential campaign.

Stone, in turn, regularly invoked Klayman’s long history of run-ins with judges and bar discipline authorities.

In 1997, a federal judge in Manhattan banished Klayman after finding the attorney conducted “abusive and obnoxious” questioning, gratuitously invoked the judge’s Chinese origins and pursued “preposterous” arguments.

In 2011, Klayman was formally reprimanded in Florida for taking a woman’s retainer fee and failing to return some of the payment after she demanded it back.

Two bar discipline cases are currently pending against Klayman in Washington, D.C. In one, a hearing committee recommended a 90-day suspension over conflict-of-interest claims involving suits against his former employer, Judicial Watch. In the other, a panel urged that Klayman be suspended from practicing law for nearly three years over his conduct towards a female client who spurned his romantic advances. Klayman is fighting the charges and contends he is the victim of a political vendetta.

At one point during the Fort Lauderdale deposition, Stone invoked an even more disturbing episode in Klayman’s past: a magistrate handling a custody dispute a decade ago found that Klayman engaged in “grossly inappropriate” touching of his own children. Klayman denied any sexual contact with the children and submitted a lie detector test he said backed up his claim.

Despite the alarming allegations Stone leveled at him, Klayman posted the full-length videos of the deposition online. He told POLITICO the recordings are unedited.

“He showed his true colors,” Klayman said of Stone. “A lot of the things he said are false.”

Klayman specifically denied claims of sexual harassment and molestation. “Those are false,” he said. “I didn’t sexually harass anybody. ... I’ve never been found to have molested anybody.”

Asked about the pending bar complaints, Klayman said: “There’s been no final decision and they’re on appeal. ... I’m confident of ultimately succeeding.”

Buschel, a lawyer for Stone, declined to comment on the contentious exchange.

In an email, Stone declined to comment on the deposition, instead attacking POLITICO's credibility.

"While commenting on these frivolous and baseless civil suits would not fall under my current gag order I have a firm policy of only responding to inquiries from legitimate news organizations of which POLITICO is no longer one," he wrote.

A look back at Klayman’s professional career indicates Stone’s claim that Klayman hadn’t ever won a case is an overstatement. But it is fair to say that in many cases winning seems to have taken a back seat to using the legal process to inflict maximum pain on his adversaries.

His highest-profile courtroom triumph proved to be short-lived. In 2013, a federal judge in Washington, acting on a suit brought by Klayman, ruled that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of details about American's telephone calls was likely unconstitutional.

The judge’s preliminary injunction against the controversial surveillance program triggered shock waves across Washington, but that order was never enforced and was ultimately overturned by an appeals court in 2015. Congress also passed a law that restructured the program and effectively mooted the lawsuit.

After leaving Judicial Watch in 2003, Klayman founded a new organization: Freedom Watch. He borrowed the name from a thinly-fictionalized version of Judicial Watch immortalized in “The West Wing.”

In the heated deposition that stretched over two days, the real-world characters Stone and Klayman duked it out over which of them would be felled first by the legal system.

After Stone said he was looking forward to turning the tables and deposing Klayman in the pending suits, Klayman shot back: “You may be in prison by then.”

“You’ll be disbarred by then,” Stone replied.

“They’ll let you out,” Klayman offered.

That prompted Stone to declare confidently: “The clock’s ticking faster on you than me, pal.”