darthfabulous42069

The White House condemned Fox News on Tuesday over remarks made by one of its top hosts about the holocaust, denouncing the comments as a “horrid, dangerous, and extreme lie” that “insults the memory of the millions of people who suffered from the evils” committed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

The comments, made by prime time host Greg Gutfeld, came during a discussion Monday on “The Five” about Florida’s new Black history standards that requires instruction for students include “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Jessica Tarlov, a liberal-leaning co-host on “The Five,” expressed disapproval of the new history standards and questioned whether arguments used to defend them would ever be made in regard to the Holocaust.

“I’m not Black, but I’m Jewish,” Tarlov said. “Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews? That while they were hanging out in concentration camps, they learned a strong work ethic? That maybe you learned a new skill.”

Gutfeld replied, asking if Tarlov had read the “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a bestselling book written by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who was imprisoned during the Holocaust and described the atrocities committed in concentration camps. In his book, Frankl detailed how people can cope with suffering and find meaning in the most horrific of circumstances.

“Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful,” Gutfeld told Tarlov. “Utility! Utility kept you alive!”

Gutfeld’s assertion immediately ignited criticism, including from the Auschwitz Memorial, which said in a statement, “Being skilled or useful did not spare [Jewish people] from the horrors of the gas chambers.”

On Tuesday, the White House weighed in, blasting the right-wing channel over its silence on Gutfeld’s comments.

“What Fox News allowed to be said on their air yesterday — and has so far failed to condemn — is an obscenity,” Andrew Bates, deputy White House press secretary, said in a statement to CNN.

“In defending a horrid, dangerous, extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of Americans who suffered from the evil of enslavement, a Fox News host told another horrid, dangerous and extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of people who suffered from the evils of the Holocaust,” Bates continued.

“Let’s get something straight that the American people understand full well and that is not complicated: there was nothing good about slavery; there was nothing good about the Holocaust. Full stop,” Bates added. “Americans deserve to be brought together, not torn apart with poison. And they deserve the truth and the freedom to learn, not book bans and lies.”

A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

Fox News has faced criticism in recent years for giving air to extreme rhetoric. The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly — and sharply — criticized the network for mainstreaming “fringe” rhetoric. During the presidency of Donald Trump, the network trafficked in right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theories — including giving air to dangerous lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Fox News debuted its revamped prime time lineup just last week, after inexplicably firing Tucker Carlson earlier this year. The new lineup, featuring a bloc of pro-Trump hosts, features Gutfeld helming the 10 p.m. ET hour.

A Republican-backed spending bill threatens to end national access to mail-order abortion pills and cut billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) that provides low-income families with food benefits.

The legislation is part of a spate of appropriations bills that lawmakers will debate this month, and which Congress must reach a decision on by the end of September in order to pass a budget for the 2024 fiscal year and avoid a federal shutdown. It was already approved by a House appropriations subcommittee in May, while being condemned by Democrats and causing internal rifts among Republicans. Republicans have added several provisions to the bill that would have wide-ranging effects on reproductive rights, health policy and benefits. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, at the Capitol in May.

The food and agriculture spending bill is the latest front in the rightwing campaign against reproductive rights. In the year since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Republicans have passed bills in more than a dozen states that ban or severely restrict abortion access. Ending access to mail-order pills that induce abortions would complicate and limit efforts from abortion rights groups and physicians to provide care for people in states with abortion bans.

Specifically, the bill would reverse a 2021 Food and Drug Administration policy that allowed people to get the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone – which can be used up to 10 weeks after conception – through the mail rather than via in-person visits to providers. The FDA had temporarily lifted restrictions on the drug during the Covid-19 pandemic, before later making those changes permanent. But the drug, which is widely used for abortion and can also be used for managing miscarriages, has been the center of legal challenges and rightwing attempts to prevent its use ever since.

House Republicans’ messaging on the bill claims that their provision “reins in wasteful Washington spending” and “protects the lives of unborn children”. The bill would also decrease the Snap benefit program – formerly known as food stamps – by $32bn compared with 2023 levels, as well as prevent the health and human services department from putting limits on the maximum amount of nicotine in cigarettes.

The approaching fight over spending bills has echoes of the standoff over debt ceiling negotiations earlier this year, when Democrats accused Republicans of holding the government hostage in an attempt to exact sweeping cuts to federal programs. Hardline Republicans similarly pushed to shift their party towards far-right policies during those negotiations as well.

Democrats are eager to prevent a government shutdown such as the one in 2018 during the Trump administration that left about 800,000 government workers without pay and lasted longer than any previous closure in US history. But some have called for establishing red lines around what compromises they are willing to make, with a number of House Democrats such as the Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern pushing back against attempts to cut Snap funding and other conservative provisions in recent legislation. House Democrats previously tried to add two amendments to the food and agriculture spending bill that would have eliminated the anti-abortion provision, but both failed.

Several Republicans have also spoken out against the food and agriculture bill, including the New York representative Marc Molinaro, who told Politico he will vote against the legislation if it comes to the floor. Molinaro, along with another New York Republican lawmaker, previously denounced a conservative Texas judge’s ruling that threatened to remove FDA approval of mifepristone.

Molinaro’s opposition to the bill highlights a rift within the Republican party over just how far to push an anti-abortion agenda that has proven nationally unpopular and contributed to electoral losses in many states. skip past newsletter promotion

Start the day with the top stories from the US, plus the day’s must-reads from across the Guardian Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Abortion policy has divided the GOP as hard-right Republicans, as well as powerful Christian conservative activist groups, have demanded far-reaching bans on abortion access. Others, such as the South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace, have warned that Republicans need to “read the room” on abortion or face defeat in elections.

The Republican speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, has meanwhile been left scrambling to manage the different factions of his party as votes on must-pass appropriations bills loom. In addition to limiting abortion access and benefits, far-right Republicans have sought to use spending bills to greatly reduce military aid to Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll from earlier this year saw that support for abortion access was at an all-time high, and included a finding that about one-third of Republicans also broadly back the right to abortion access.

A vital ocean current system that helps regulate the Northern Hemisphere's climate could collapse anytime from 2025 and unleash climate chaos, a controversial new study warns.

The Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, governs the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south.

But researchers now say the AMOC may be veering toward total breakdown between 2025 and 2095, causing temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world. However, some scientists have cautioned that the new research comes with some big caveats.

The AMOC can exist in two stable states: a stronger, faster one that we rely upon today, and another that is much slower and weaker. Previous estimates predicted that the current would probably switch to its weaker mode sometime in the next century.

Related: Gulf Stream could be veering toward irreversible collapse, a new analysis warns

But human-caused climate change may push the AMOC to a critical tipping point sooner rather than later, researchers predicted in a new study, published Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.

"The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected," co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science.

"It was not a result where we said: 'Oh, yeah, here we have it'. We were actually bewildered."

A vital ocean current system that helps regulate the Northern Hemisphere's climate could collapse anytime from 2025 and unleash climate chaos, a controversial new study warns.

The Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, governs the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south.

But researchers now say the AMOC may be veering toward total breakdown between 2025 and 2095, causing temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world. However, some scientists have cautioned that the new research comes with some big caveats.

The AMOC can exist in two stable states: a stronger, faster one that we rely upon today, and another that is much slower and weaker. Previous estimates predicted that the current would probably switch to its weaker mode sometime in the next century.

Related: Gulf Stream could be veering toward irreversible collapse, a new analysis warns

But human-caused climate change may push the AMOC to a critical tipping point sooner rather than later, researchers predicted in a new study, published Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.

"The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected," co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science.

"It was not a result where we said: 'Oh, yeah, here we have it'. We were actually bewildered."

Rightwing organizations in Ohio are trying their best to tank the abortion rights constitutional amendment that’s on the ballot in November. Their latest tactic? Link the language of the referendum, which would protect abortion rights, to the conservative boogeyman du jour: demonizing trans people.

The “how” here is a bit confusing, though. There are two upcoming elections in Ohio. In November, citizens will vote on enshrining (or not) abortion rights in the state constitution. Earlier this month, advocates turned in more than 700,000 signatures (more than double the requirement!) to get the amendment on the ballot.

But first, in August, citizens will vote on amending the state constitution amendment process, a ballot initiative called Issue 1. Currently, like most reasonable places, only a majority of voters need to approve a state constitutional amendment. But conservatives want to raise that threshold to 60 percent, which would have the immediate impact of making it harder to add abortion protections to the constitution. It’s the August election is where anti-abortion nut jobs and transphobes are united in an attempt to tank the success election of a massively popular social issue.

Protect Women Ohio, a conservative coalition of “concerned family and life leaders, parents, health and medical experts, and faith leaders in Ohio,” are releasing a series of ads telling parents to vote in the August election in order to help sink the November amendment, which by its interpretation, will “allow minors to get sex changes without parental consent.” Caught (:60)

In the last four months, the group has launched a number of ads as part of a $5 million ad buy, but it’s only in the past two months that PWO has really leaned into the transphobic angle.

And, like all other anti-trans activists, they’re not telling the full truth. The November amendment that seeks to protect abortion rights at the state level—a winning tactic around the country after the Supreme Court gutted Roe v. Wade—is limited to reproductive healthcare. It reads: “Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.”

Gender-affirming care is not mentioned at all. Jonathan Entin, a professor emeritus at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve School of Law, told NBC News that it’s “a big stretch” to include gender-affirming care in the amendment’s purvey. “Opponents have latched on to the ‘but not limited to’ language to say that this could provide a constitutional right to, among other things, gender-affirming care rights. That’s not a legally persuasive argument,” Entin told NBC News.

While it might not be a “legally persuasive argument,” the attempt to link a popular issue (abortion access) to the latest conservative boogeyman is transparent. The right to abortion is familiar and easy to understand and now, voters have gone through more than a year of horror stories about what happens when you take away that bodily autonomy.

Being anti-abortion means being a political loser. Anti-abortion candidates for federal office, like Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz, flamed out. Anti-abortion referendums lost last year in ruby-red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana.

Because not gonna lie, that was my favorite of the Civ games, if it counts as one.

A Republican LGBTQ group has blasted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over an ad released by his presidential campaign that the organization called “homophobic.”

Log Cabin Republicans, the largest GOP organization representing LGBTQ individuals, said in a tweet that DeSantis’s message for his presidential campaign is “divisive and desperate” and is alienating swing-state and younger voters.

“Conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women’s sports, safeguard women’s spaces and strengthen parental rights, but Ron DeSantis’ extreme rhetoric goes has just ventured into homophobic territory,” the group said.

The DeSantis campaign released the ad on Friday, the last day of Pride Month, attacking former President Trump for statements he has made in support of the LGBTQ community. The post accompanying the video states that Trump “did more than any other Republican to celebrate” Pride.

The ad features clips of Trump saying he would “do everything in my power” to protect LGBTQ citizens and expressing support for transgender individuals to use the facilities they choose.

It then shows a series of headlines discussing policies DeSantis has passed as governor of Florida concerning the LGBTQ community, including a ban on transgender individuals using the bathroom that is in line with their gender identity and restrictions on access to gender-affirming care.

The ad also features various figures and headlines attacking DeSantis for his actions, calling the policies “Draconian” and DeSantis “dangerous.”

Log Cabin Republicans argued that DeSantis’s rhetoric will cause the party to lose “hard-fought” gains it has made.

“This old playbook has been tried in the past and has failed – repeatedly,” the group said.

“Ron DeSantis and his team can’t tell the difference between commonsense gays and the radical Left gays. He, sadly, sees them all the same. His naive policy positions are dangerous and politically stupid,” it concluded.

So here's a table of the legal status of LGBTQ+ Americans, by state and by what kind of law each state has. It's... not looking good out there right now, but as long as we all have each other, we can make it.