#oromagi

• Let's agree that voting sucks and debate outcomes mostly determined by a small, overburdened group of voters.
  
• Forfeit=auto-loss would compel greater alertness in  DARTists of good will.
  
• Quickly processing the less than serious efforts allows active voters to focus on those debates deemed worthy of completion by both participants.
  
• High drama unintentional forfeitures would likely make the debate rankings more competitive.
  
• Far fewer depressing forfeitures overall would also make for a decidedly more active queue.
  

• Has the most medals of any debater.
  
• Most medals wins
  
• holder of the rank of top debater
  
• most prolific debater
  
• Is responsible for maybe one out of every six debates
  
• most well-rounded debateartist- debates, forums, games, religion forum, intersite politics and intrigue
  
• most prolific non-mod voter
• Therefore, best able to represent the multiple facets of interests on this site
  
• Pls. vote RationalMadman to be our first DebateArt President

DART Presidential Election

Greetings DART!

The presidential process will begin starting Dec 27th.

From December 27th to January 16th, any user may nominate themselves. From that time, users may campaign for themselves following the regulation set.

On January 17th, the preliminary voting stage will begin, where the top three candidates move on to the general election

On January 20th, the final voting stage will begin, where a simple majority vote decides the president

On January 21st, the president is inaugurated

For more info on campaign rules, please read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PIsh9UDic938MMM3YX-H1nn15H7OriOvfOSFigXXsX0/edit

Hope everyone has a safe and happy holidays

Godspeed, SupaDudz

Dr. Deborah Birx, who helped run the coronavirus pandemic response for former President Donald J. Trump, told congressional investigators earlier this month that Mr. Trump’s White House failed to take steps that could have prevented tens of thousands of deaths.

In closed-door testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, Dr. Birx said that tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented after the initial phase of the pandemic if Mr. Trump had pushed mask-wearing, social distancing and other efforts to slow the spread of the virus.

“I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range,” Dr. Birx testified, according to excerpts provided by the committee.

The committee’s interview with Dr. Birx was conducted on Oct. 12 and 13. In her testimony, she also lashed out at Dr. Scott Atlas, a former Stanford neuroradiologist who became an adviser to Mr. Trump and advocated for allowing the virus to spread through much of the population in order to let otherwise healthy people build up immunity against it.

She told the committee that Dr. Atlas had relied on incomplete information to draw dangerous conclusions that she felt could have long-term consequences for people who were infected with the virus and got sick.

“I was constantly raising the alert in the doctors’ meetings of the depth of my concern about Dr. Atlas’ position, Dr. Atlas’ access, Dr. Atlas’ theories and hypothesis, and the depths and breadths of my concern,” she said, referring to a group of doctors involved in the White House response who gathered regularly.

Dr. Atlas did not immediately respond to an email sent Tuesday morning. But in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last December, he continued to argue against lockdowns and other measures for containing the virus.

“Lockdown policies had baleful effects on local economies, families and children, and the virus spread anyway,” he wrote.

During her testimony, Dr. Birx said she repeatedly pushed Mr. Trump and others in the White House to do more to embrace efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus, especially in the fall of 2020. That was a period when Dr. Atlas was at the White House and Dr. Birx spent most of her time on the road, traveling from state to state to urge them to embrace prevention measures.

Asked whether Mr. Trump did everything he should have to counter the pandemic, she said: “No. And I’ve said that to the White House in general, and I believe I was very clear to the president in specifics of what I needed him to do.”

Police killings in America have been undercounted by more than half over the past four decades, according to a new study that raises pointed questions about racial bias among medical examiners and highlights the lack of reliable national record keeping on what has become a major public health and civil rights issue.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Washington and published on Thursday in The Lancet, a major British medical journal, amounts to one of the most comprehensive looks at the scope of police violence in America, and the disproportionate impact on Black people.

Researchers compared information from a federal database known as the National Vital Statistics System, which collects death certificates, with recent data from three organizations that track police killings through news reports and public records requests. When extrapolating and modeling that data back decades, they identified a startling discrepancy: About 55 percent of fatal encounters with the police between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death.

The findings reflect both the contentious role of medical examiners and coroners in obscuring the real extent of police violence, and the lack of centralized national data on an issue that has caused enormous upheaval. Private nonprofits and journalists have filled the gap by mining news reports and social media.

“I think the big takeaway is that most people in public health tend to take vital statistics for the U.S. and other countries as the absolute truth, and it turns out, as we show, the vital statistics are missing more than half of the police violence deaths,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which conducted the study.

He continued: “You have to look for why those deaths that are being picked up by the open-source investigations, looking in the media and elsewhere, aren’t showing up in the official statistics. That does point to the system of medical examiners and the incentives that may exist for them to want to not classify a death as related to police violence.”

Researchers estimated that over the time period they studied, which roughly tracks the era of the war on drugs and the rise of mass incarceration, nearly 31,000 Americans were killed by the police, with more than 17,000 of them going unaccounted for in the official statistics. The study also documented a stark racial gap: Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as white Americans were. Data on Asian Americans was not included in the study, but Latinos and Native Americans also suffered higher rates of fatal police violence than white people.

The annual number of deaths in police custody has generally gone upward since 1980, even as crime — notwithstanding a rise in homicides last year amid the dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic — has declined from its peak in the early 1990s.

The states with the highest rates of police killings were Oklahoma, Arizona and Alaska, as well as the District of Columbia, while the states with the lowest rates were Massachusetts, Connecticut and Minnesota, according to the study.

Researchers estimated that about 20 times as many men as women were killed by the police over the past several decades; more American men died in 2019 during police encounters than from Hodgkin lymphoma or testicular cancer.]

Unexplained or violent deaths in the United States are investigated by coroners or medical examiners, who use autopsies, toxicology tests and evidence like body camera footage to determine the cause and manner of death. The death certificate does not specifically ask whether the police were involved — which may contribute to the undercount identified by the study — but many medical examiners are trained to include that information.

The system has long been criticized for fostering a cozy relationship with law enforcement — forensic pathologists regularly consult with detectives and prosecutors and in some jurisdictions they are directly employed by police agencies.

Yet pathologists have also complained on occasion that law enforcement does not provide them with all relevant information, that they have been pressured to change their opinions, or that coroners, who are usually elected and are not always required to have a medical degree, can and do overrule their findings.

The researchers found that some of the misclassified deaths occurred because medical examiners failed to mention law enforcement’s involvement on the death certificate, while others were improperly coded in the national database.

While The Lancet study did not mention specific cases, there have been recent examples where the initial findings of coroners or medical examiners downplayed or omitted the role of the police when a Black man was killed: Ronald Greene’s death in Louisiana, for instance, was attributed by the coroner to cardiac arrest and classified as accidental before video emerged of him being stunned, beaten and dragged by state troopers.

In Aurora, Colo., the manner of Elijah McClain’s death was ruled undetermined after the police put him in a chokehold and paramedics injected him with ketamine, a powerful sedative. Almost two years later, three officers and two paramedics were indicted.

Even in the case of George Floyd, whose agonizing last breaths under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee were captured on bystander video, the police and the county medical examiner first pointed to drug use and underlying health conditions.

The National Association of Medical Examiners encourages the classification of deaths caused by law enforcement as homicides, in part to reduce the appearance of a cover-up (a homicide may still be deemed justified). But classification guidelines differ from office to office, and there are no national standards.

Roger Mitchell Jr., a former chief medical examiner of Washington, D.C., and an expert on investigating deaths in custody, has long said that death certificates should include a checkbox indicating whether a death occurred in custody, including arrest-related deaths as well as those in jails and prisons.

As long as medical examiners are not specifically asked to include that information, he said, he would not jump to conclusions about why they do not do so: “If it’s a function of training, a function of bias, a function of institutional and structural racism — all the things we can assume — we can identify that once we have a uniform system.”

A federal law passed in 2014 requiring law enforcement agencies to report deaths in custody has yet to produce any public data.

The paper’s top-line findings are similar to the results of a more narrow study conducted at Harvard in 2017 that examined one year — 2015 — and compared official death statistics in the United States with data on police killings compiled by The Guardian.

“It’s highlighting the persistent problem of undercounting of killings by police in official data sources, one of those being mortality data,” said Justin Feldman, a research fellow at Harvard who conducted the 2017 study and was a peer reviewer on the paper published on Thursday in The Lancet.

“This is an ongoing issue that we are still, after all these years, not doing a very good of keeping track of people killed by police,” he added.

The study lands at a time when America has grappled with one high-profile police killing of a Black man after another. But, as the study showed, there are tens of thousands of other deaths that remain in the shadows.

Rulings on the cause and manner of death strongly influence whether criminal charges are brought or whether families receive a civil settlement. The death of Mr. Floyd was classified as a homicide and the death certificate cited law enforcement restraint, but the medical examiner still faced criticism after prosecutors made public his preliminary findings that underlying health conditions and drug use had contributed.

The former chief medical examiner of Maryland, Dr. David Fowler, was also criticized after he testified on behalf of the Minneapolis police officer, saying Mr. Floyd’s death was caused by several factors and was not a homicide.

After an open letter by Dr. Mitchell said that Dr. Fowler’s testimony revealed “obvious bias,” Maryland’s attorney general began a review of in-custody deaths that were handled under Dr. Fowler’s tenure.

Dr. Murray of the University of Washington said that one of the starkest findings was that racial disparities in police shootings have widened since 2000.

The trend contrasts, he said, with other health outcomes, such as heart disease, in which the racial gap has narrowed in recent years.

The study, he and other researchers said, points to the need for a centralized clearinghouse for data on police violence, as well as more scrutiny of coroners and medical examiners.

“There’s been an attempt to limit the reality of what is,” said Edwin G. Lindo, a scholar of critical race theory and professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who examined the findings of the study but was not involved in putting it together. “And what I would suggest is, when we don’t have good data we can’t actually make good policy decisions, and I don’t know if that’s an accident for it to be so greatly underreported.”

Donald Trump denied ever enjoying "golden showers" during a posh Thursday event with Republican donors, defending himself against years-old allegations that he hired two Moscow prostitutes to urinate on a bed together. 

"I'm not into golden showers," Trump said at a National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) retreat, which hosted sitting senators. "You know the great thing, our great first lady – 'That one,' she said, 'I don't believe that one.'"

Trump's remarks, first reported by The Washington Post, are a clear reference to allegations first floated in 2016 when British spy Christopher Steele released a dossier probing Trump's alleged collusion with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy in the 2016 election. Steele's dossier reportedly contained a video – now colloquially known as the "pee tape" – that shows Trump instructing two prostitutes at Moscow's Ritz-Carlton Hotel to urinate on a bed that President Obama had previously slept on. The video was allegedly taped as part of surveillance done by FSB, Russia's main state security agency, and had been lightly corroborated by a number of Steele's sources who had second-hand knowledge of the dossier, according to The New Yorker. 

Ex-FBI Director James Comey, who in 2017 testified about the Trump campaign's alleged relationship with Russia, wrote in his book that the former president was fixated on the rumor, dead set on dispelling it from the national discourse.

"I'm a germaphobe," Trump reportedly told Comey, per the book. "There's no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way."

In 2018, Comey told ABC News back that he couldn't be sure whether the rumor was true. "I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don't know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013," the ex-FBI director said. "It's possible, but I don't know."

Besides dredging up old rumors unprompted, Trump reportedly cast himself as the "GOP's savior" during Thursday's event, stressing that he has held the party together over the past several years. "It was a dying party, I'll be honest," he said, according to the Post. "Now we have a very lively party." 

The former president also castigated a number of his Republican detractors, including Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Ben Sasse, R-Neb, stressing that the party needs to "stick together" rather than splinter off into pro and anti-Trump factions. 

Later, Trump reportedly reiterated his equally baseless conspiracy that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" by President Biden, telling the crowd that Democrats "cheat like hell."

"It's a terrible thing what they did in Georgia and other states," he said. "You look at Texas, you look at a lot of states — they are correcting all the ways we were all abused over the last election ... last two elections if you think about it."

There continues to be no significant evidence that the 2020 election was marred by outcome-altering fraud.

• We should note that the small vanguard Babbitt was in had an opportunity to threaten House members because AZ -R Paul Gosar continued speaking for 15 minutes after lockdown was called.  Gosar was one of the original organizers of the "Stop the Steal" movement and has been accused by multiple House members of orchestrating the attack.  Gosar is also the first politician to start demanding the name of the officer who killed Ashli Babbitt, which is strange because almost nobody on Earth is in a better position to know that individual's identity than Gosar.
  
• Gosar was one of the last to leave the chamber so unlike us, he can see the identity of the officer on the far side of the door, protecting Gosar's escape.
  
• We can see from the video that the man holding the gun is wearing a suit and probably black.
  
• Metropolitan police confirmed that the shooter was a plainclothes Capitol Police officer.
  
• Given Gosar's proximity  to the shooter and the fact that there can't have been many extra officers hanging around 90 minutes after the violence began I think its very likely that the shooter is the security officer seen advising the House to don masks at 26:09.  That's the back of Gosar's head in the foreground.
  
• The Congressional Record only list the speaker as "a security officer" but its seems hard to believe that Gosar couldn't id a guy he works in the same room with all day or at least look him up in the congressional directory
  
• Further, it's public knowledge that the officer has not returned back to work.  I might not be able to figure out who shot Babbitt from a list of black plainclothes floor security officers who haven't been to work for 6 months but I assume that's a simple task for Gosar.
  
• I see no reason not to conclude that Gosar's (and by extention, Trump's) supposed ignorance is all pantomime.
  
• Nevertheless, I think the shooter's name should be released.  I understand this information exposes an officer who has already sacrificed much in service to our Legislature to increased vitriol and harm but I can't see how the public can maintain oversight of police violence without public access to individual names and records.  Trump's reasons are entirely scummy but we should release the name anyway.
  

BARTIROMO:....And I know that you have had some time to reflect on what took place on that day, January 6.

Talk to us about what you're thinking about as you reflect. What happened that day, from your standpoint?

TRUMP: So, there was a big rally called. And, actually, when I say big, who knew? But there was a rally called.

And a tremendous number of people, the largest one I have ever spoken before, is called by people, by patriots. And they asked me if I'd speak. And I did. And it was a very mild-mannered speech, as I think has been -- in fact, they just came out with a report in Congress, and they didn't mention my name, literally.

But what they were complaining about and the reason, in my opinion, you had over a million people there, which the press doesn't like to report at all,

because it shows too much -- too much activity, too much -- too much spirit and faith and love. There was such love at that rally.

You had over a million people there. They were there for one reason, the rigged election. They felt the election was rigged. That's why they were there. And they were peaceful people. These were great people.

The crowd was unbelievable. And I mentioned the word love. The love -- the love in the air, I have never seen anything like it.

And that's why they went to Washington.

BARTIROMO: You know, Mr...

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: And, by the way, I can tell you that I thought -- because I was hearing from a lot of people there are going to be a lot of people coming there, much bigger than anybody ever anticipated by many times.

And I had suggested to the secretary of defense, perhaps we should have 10,000 National Guardsmen standing by. And he reported that, as you know, but I -- we should have -- and he was turned down. I said, it's subject to Congress. They run it. Nancy Pelosi runs it. So, it would be subject to the Capitol Police and the other things, whatever they need.

But I said, perhaps you need 10,000, because I think the crowd is going to be very large. Who knows? Maybe two people will show up. But I think it's going to be very large.

Anyway, he had that. He went to them. They said it won't be necessary. They were the ones that were responsible. They were the ones. And this came out very loudly in the report.

BARTIROMO: Yes, that report showed FBI operatives potentially aware.

But there are unanswered questions here. What did the FBI know? Why weren't your Cabinet secretaries briefed? What did Speaker Pelosi know, Chuck Schumer, McConnell?

Do you have any answers to that? They continue to call this an armed insurrection.

TRUMP: Oh, I think they knew plenty.

BARTIROMO: And yet no guns were seized, Mr. President.

TRUMP: Right. There were no guns whatsoever.

And yet Antifa, which went into Portland and went into so many other places, Seattle -- they took over a big part of Seattle. People died. And there were plenty of guns there, by the way -- and in Minnesota, in Minneapolis. They got -- there was no repercussions for them. And yet they have people still in jail. There were no guns. There were no guns.

And, by the way, while you're at it, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Why are they keeping that secret? Who is the person that shot...

BARTIROMO: Well...

TRUMP: ... an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman, right in the head? And there's no repercussions.

If that were on the other side, it would be the biggest story in this country. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? People want to know, and why.

BARTIROMO: Well, that's right.

And I want to talk about that, because Ashli Babbitt, a wonderful woman, fatally shot on January 6 as she tried to climb out of a broken window.

Her family has spoken out. Her family has been on "Tucker Carlson." And they want answers as far as why this wonderful woman, young woman who went to peaceful protests was shot.

Do you have any information? There is speculation that this was a security detail in a leading member of Congress' security detail, a Democrat.

(CROSSTALK)

BARTIROMO: What can you tell us in terms of who shot Ashli Babbitt? What do you know, Mr. President?

TRUMP: So -- so, I have heard that.

I will tell you they know who shot Ashli Babbitt. They're protecting that person. I have heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official, a Democrat.

And we will see, because it's going to come out. It's going to come out.

PHOENIX (AP) — A Republican-backed review of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona’s largest county ended Friday without producing proof to support former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

After six months of searching for evidence of fraud, the firm hired by Republican lawmakers issued a report that experts described as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, even that partisan review came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden won by 360 more votes than the official results certified last year.

The finding was an embarrassing end to a widely criticized, and at times bizarre, quest to prove allegations that election officials and courts have rejected. It has no bearing on the final, certified results. Previous reviews of the 2.1 million ballots by nonpartisan professionals that followed state law have found no significant problem with the vote count in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. Biden won the county by 45,000 votes, key to his 10,500-vote win of Arizona.

For many critics the conclusions, presented at a hearing Friday by the firm Cyber Ninjas, underscored the dangerous futility of the exercise, which has helped fuel skepticism about the validity of the 2020 election and spawned copycat audits nationwide.

“We haven’t learned anything new,” said Matt Masterson, a top U.S. election security official in the Trump administration. “What we have learned from all this is that the Ninjas were paid millions of dollars, politicians raised millions of dollars and Americans’ trust in democracy is lower.”

Cyber Ninjas acknowledged in its report that there were “no substantial differences” between the group’s hand count of ballots and the official count. But the report also made a series of other disputed claims the auditors say should cast doubt on the accuracy and warrant more investigation.

Trump issued statements Friday falsely claiming the review found widespread fraud. He urged Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican vying for his party’s U.S. Senate nomination, to open an investigation.

Brnovich, who has been criticized by Trump supporters for not adequately backing the review, did not commit: “I will take all necessary actions that are supported by the evidence and where I have legal authority,” he said in a statement before the report was made public.

Republicans in the state Senate ordered the review under pressure from Trump and his allies, subpoenaing the election records from Maricopa County and selected the inexperienced, pro-Trump auditors. It took months longer than expected and was widely pilloried by experts.

Still, the Arizona review has become a model that Trump supporters are pushing to replicate in other swing states where Biden won. Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general sued Thursday to block a GOP-issued subpoena for a wide array of election materials. In Wisconsin, a retired conservative state Supreme Court justice is leading a Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 election, and this week threatened to subpoena election officials who don’t comply. Backers also called for additional election reviews in Arizona on Friday.
None of the reviews can change Biden’s victory, which was certified by officials in each of the swing states he won and by Congress on Jan. 6 — after Trump’s supporters, fueled by the same false charges that generated the audits, stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent certification of his loss.

The Arizona report claims a number of shortcomings in election procedures and suggested the final tally still could not be relied upon. Several were challenged by election experts, while members of the Republican-led county Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections, disputed claims on Twitter.

“Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election,” county officials tweeted.

Election officials say that’s because the review team is biased, ignored the detailed vote-counting procedures in Arizona law and had no experience in the complex field of election audits.
Two of the report’s recommendations stood out because they showed its authors misunderstood election procedures — that there should be paper ballot backups and that voting machines should not be connected to the internet. All Maricopa ballots are already paper, with machines only used to tabulate the votes, and those tabulators are not connected to the internet.

The review also checked the names of voters against a commercial database, finding 23,344 reported moving before ballots went out in October. While the review suggests something improper, election officials note that voters like college students, those who own vacation homes or military members can move to temporary locations while still legally voting at the address where they are registered.

“A competent reviewer of an election would not make a claim like that,” said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.

The election review was run by Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, whose firm has never conducted an election audit before. Logan previously worked with attorneys and Trump supporters trying to overturn the 2020 election and appeared in a film questioning the results of the contest while the ballot review was ongoing.

Logan and others involved with the review presented their findings to two Arizona senators Friday. It kicked off with Shiva Ayyadurai, a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic who claims to have invented email, presenting an analysis relying on “pattern recognition” that flagged purported anomalies in the way mail ballots were processed at the end of the election.
Maricopa County tweeted that the pattern was simply the election office following state law.

“‘Anomaly’ seems to be another way of saying the Senate’s contractors don’t understand election processes,” the county posted during the testimony.

Logan followed up by acknowledging “the ballots that were provided for us to count ... very accurately correlated with the official canvass.” He then continued to flag statistical discrepancies — including the voters who moved — that he said merited further investigation.

The review has a history of exploring outlandish conspiracy theories, dedicating time to checking for bamboo fibers on ballots to see if they were secretly shipped in from Asia. It’s also served as a content-generation machine for Trump’s effort to sow skepticism about his loss, pumping out misleading and out-of-context information that the former president circulates long after it’s been debunked.

In July, for example, Logan laid out a series of claims stemming from his misunderstanding of the election data he was analyzing, including that 74,000 mail ballots were recorded as received but not sent. Trump repeatedly amplified the claims. Logan had compared two databases that track different things.

Arizona’s Senate agreed to spend $150,000 on the review, plus security and facility costs. That pales in comparison to the nearly $5.7 million contributed as of late July by Trump allies.
Maricopa County’s official vote count was conducted in front of bipartisan observers, as were legally required audits meant to ensure voting machines work properly. A partial hand-count spot check found a perfect match.

Two extra post-election reviews by federally certified election experts also found no evidence that voting machines switched votes or were connected to the internet. The county Board of Supervisors commissioned the extraordinary reviews in an effort to prove to Trump backers that there were no problems.

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors on Monday unsealed criminal charges against two longtime Republican Party operatives, accusing them of illegally funneling a foreign campaign contribution to former President Donald Trump in 2016.

According to an indictment unsealed in federal court in the District of Columbia, Jesse Benton and Doug Wead "conspired to illegally funnel thousands of dollars of foreign money from a Russian foreign national into an election for the Office of President of the United States of America."

U.S. law bans foreign nationals from donating money to presidential campaigns.

According to the indictment, Benton and Wead helped a Russian national get a ticket to a fundraiser with Trump in Pennsylvania in September 2016.

The Russian, who was not identified in the indictment, donated $25,000 to political action committees associated with Trump in order to attend the event, according to prosecutors.

But the true source of the donation was concealed from the Trump campaign, the indictment said, because the payment was secretly funneled through Benton, who acted as a "straw donor."

Benton, 43, previously managed campaigns for Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky before he was convicted for his role in a political endorsement scheme. Benton avoided jail time and received a presidential pardon in December 2020 from Trump.

Wead, 75, worked as a senior adviser on multiple presidential campaigns and ran for Congress as a Republican in 1992.

It was not yet clear if the two had engaged legal counsel.

Bachmann had narrowly defeated Paul to win the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011, an early measure of support in the state. 

A top aide in the 2008 Ron Paul presidential bid, Dennis Fusaro, provided several emails to OpenSecrets.org. According to the address fields in the emails, Fusaro was copied on the messages, which all date from late 2011.

Five days before the caucus, in late 2011, Sorenson abruptly switched his support from Bachmann to Paul, and the Bachmann campaign at the time charged that he had done so for money.

• Three TEXAS HOUSE DEMOCRATS who TRAVELED to WASHINGTON, D.C., TEST POSITIVE for CORONAVIRUS
  
• All three lawmakers, whom the Texas House Democratic Caucus did not identify, are fully vaccinated, which helps protect against severe illness
  
• YANKEE's COVID-19 OUTBREAK: AARON JUDGE AMONG six YANKEES to TEST POSITIVE; RED SOX GAME FRIDAY will be PLAYED
  
• The rival clubs will play Friday following New York's six COVID-19 positives
  
• MAY 18th- 9 VACCINATED YANKEES PLAYERS and STAFF TESTED POSTIVE for COVID— HERE's HOW that HAPPENS
  
• POSITIVE COVID-19 TESTS KNOCKED NC STATE BASEBALL out of the CWS. WHAT about VANDERBILT?
  

• The massive scale of the event places an unreasonable burden on the host city to build facilities- often single use facilities that are demolished or else decay through underutilization.  
  
• Such overbuilding is hugely inefficient. The same amount of money could represent valuable infrastructure investments if spread around to many metropolises in need of new or improved facilities.
  
• The burden to build too much infrastructure on a 12-year deadline seems to regularly promote corrupt overcharging by builders as well as corrupt bribing of Olympic officials to bring all that wasteful new construction to town- money that is never re-couped by the events themselves.  Some argue that hosting the Olympics improves a host cities reputation but I don't think that claim can be quantified so I'm skeptical.
  
• Spreading new construction money around would allow more efficient use of existing infrastructures and smaller-scale targeted improvement might also substantially reduce Olympic corruption.
  
• Because many different events must be crammed into one metropolis, many sporting events must suffer non-optimal or even totally inappropriate conditions-too warm or too cold, artificial ice, or sand, or grass, or water, etc.  Spreading out the Olympics geographically would allow a better match of sport to geography and allow some cities that could never possibly host the whole gamut of events to shine geographically or specialize in a reputation for one kind of sport.
  
• The Olympiad (4 year cycle) model is based on the ancient Greek calendar which included one leap day per year for a 1461-day base cycle.  That ancient model does not reflect our global sense of seasonality anymore and puts a lot of pressure on athletes.
  
• Many athletes in many different sports hit their peak athleticism for a much shorter window than 4 years and never get a chance to show off their best on the biggest athletic stage by misfortune of birthdate or an injury that occludes their one shot at greatness.
  
• Making many sports annual events would allow many more athletes an opportunity to shine internationally and more accurately reflect the athletic body by eliminating the pressure of happenstance injury or off-peak performances.
  
• It seems a shame that we may never learn the names of the best athletes in a sport because a single fault of timing or circumstance.
  
• Some athletes might have less such peak consideration (team sailing, perhaps or ) and could be free to determine the best time cycle to promote their sport.
  
• Furthermore, many sports only get an international audience at the Olympics and the four-year gap severely discourages continued interest.
  
• Annual events should increase audience interest and allow more narrative to emerge in less-watched sports.
  
• The time pressure to run so many sports simultaneously means that many  smaller events get occluded by more popular events and never get a real shot at increasing interest in their events.  Spreading events out across the year would give smaller events a better chance to be the most interesting sporting event on tv.
  

"The sense of safety that law enforcement is meant to provide can instead be threatening, and at times dangerous, to those in our community who are most often targeted with excessive force and/or without reason. NYC Pride is unwilling to contribute in any way to creating an atmosphere of fear or harm for members of the community. The steps being taken by the organization challenge law enforcement to acknowledge their harm and to correct course moving forward, in hopes of making an impactful change.

"Effective immediately, NYC Pride will ban corrections and law enforcement exhibitors at NYC Pride events until 2025. At that time their participation will be reviewed by the Community Relations and Diversity, Accessibility, and Inclusion committees, as well as the Executive Board. In the meantime, NYC Pride will transition to providing increased community-based security and first responders, while simultaneously taking steps to reduce NYPD presence at events."

• I question the honesty of any person who pretends to be traumatized or afraid of harm from police marching in a pride parade.  I am a person who has been harmed and harried by police just for being gay but I have absolutely no difficulty separating those bad cops from the manifest good of cops marching as proud queer police or marching in solidarity with the gay community.  It takes no education to understand that the cops with anti-gay agendas don't participate in pro-gay celebrations.  NYC Pride is punishing uniformed queers and allies, who deserve better than most to be proud of the difficult work they do and the nasty prejudices they overcome to do it, for the faults of uniformed homophobes who'd never recognize the honor in marching.  NYC Pride is guilty of ignorant and self-defeating prejudice at best and active harm against unpopular minorities within the gay community at worst.
  
• NYC Pride commemorates a battle between the gay community and the police fought 52 years ago on the very streets of this weekend's parade route.  The fact that uniformed queers march openly at pride is a demonstration of the victory of the gay rights movement.  The fact that straight police march openly in solidarity with the gay community is another important victory.  That NYC Pride can't recognize the value and importance of such triumphs suggests that NYC Pride has dropped its eyes from the Prize.
  
• NYC Pride also suggests that they intend to privatize as much of the security and public safety functions as the city will allow, at substantially increased expense.  Less security at a higher price for an obvious and frequent target of political terrorism is a dangerous price to pay for a little misbegotten virtue signaled.  Naturally, the police will still be counted on the save marchers in the event of any real emergency, which ultimately demonstrates which community is remaining more faithful to peace and harmony and which is breaking that trust.
  
• I'd encourage police everywhere to tell NYC Pride to go fuck themselves with a 20 inch rainbow sparkle dildo and march anyway in full uniform, in pride and solidarity.  After all, who the hell is going to stop them?   The people who know what  it means to fight for civil rights also know how to tell good cops from bad cops and will always have the good cops' back.
  

During the award ceremony in the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, Peru where Berry was awarded the gold medal for the hammer throw, she raised her fist at the end of the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in protest against injustice in America "and a president who's making it worse."   Berry's protests led the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to issue new guidelines in order to allow peaceful expressions of protest "in support of racial and social justice for all human beings." Berry has stated: "I'm here to represent those who died [due] to this systemic racism."

Berry was reprimanded by the International Olympic Committee, who placed her on probation for 12 months, prohibiting her from any form of protest for a year. Her act cost her sponsorships, and she estimated that she lost $50,000.

In June 2021, during the U.S. Olympic track and field trials for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Berry turned away from the U.S. flag during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner".  She said of the national anthem's timing that "I feel like it was a set-up".  According to a spokesperson for USA Track and Field who stated, "The national anthem is played every day according to a previously published schedule", the anthem was scheduled to be played at 5:20 p.m., though on this occasion the music started at 5:25 p.m.  Berry claims an official told her the anthem would play prior to her arrival on the podium.  Berry has accused critics of her protest of favoring "patriotism over basic morality,"  although her activism has been alleged to be performative.