Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON ― While U.S. intelligence has not yet concluded that Russia knew about Syria’s plan to gas civilians ahead of time, senior White House officials said Tuesday that Russia must be pushed on that question.

Officials noted the years of close cooperation between the two militaries and the presence of Russian troops at Syrian military bases ― particularly the Shayrat air base that officials said was used to launch the April 4 nerve gas attack that killed close to 100.

“We do think that it is a question worth asking the Russians,” said one official, who like the three others spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity. “How is it possible that their forces, who were co-located with the Syrian forces that planned, prepared and carried out this chemical weapons attack, at the same installation did not have foreknowledge?”

The White House held the briefing to refute claims being pushed by Russia, Syria and their surrogates in the media ― including such websites as Infowars ― that the attack was either a hoax or the result of a Syrian government airstrike on a chemical weapons store under the control of rebels and terrorists.

A second official said there was simply too much corroborating evidence available too quickly for it all to have been disinformation. “It’s just too massive for any intelligence organization to fabricate in that short a time,” the official said. “I think it’s clear the Russians are trying to cover up what happened there.”

A four-page memo released Tuesday by the White House, based on declassified intelligence reports, said that Russia’s response to the gas attack is part of a longstanding pattern in Syria. “The Syrian regime and its primary backer, Russia, have sought to confuse the world community about who is responsible for using chemical weapons against the Syrian people in this and earlier attacks,” the memo stated.

Officials at the briefing said the sarin gas attack was part of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s efforts to punish civilians in territory where rebel forces have been making progress and moving closer to government-held population centers and military bases.

Assad previously used sarin and other chemical agents in 2013, leading then-President Barack Obama to threaten military strikes against Assad. Obama backed away from that idea when Congress failed to support it and Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons program. Thousands of pounds of banned weapons were subsequently removed and destroyed under that agreement, which included Russian participation in rounding up the weapons.

The second official said Syria’s possession of sarin now calls into question how Russia performed that key role. “This is concerning since Russians were part of the deal where Syria was supposed to give up its chemical weapons. We do know Syria gave up a huge amount of its chemical weapons. Nevertheless, it is clear that Syria’s declaration was not complete,” the official said.

The April 4 attack dramatically changed the United States’ public position on Syria. Just days before the strike, both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley said that the United States was not concerned with Assad’s continued leadership and that it was up to the people of Syria to determine his fate. That posture reflected the views of President Donald Trump, who had campaigned on the idea of partnering with Russia and possibly Syria to fight the Islamic State terrorist group.

The day after the attack, though, Trump said his views about Assad had changed. On the next night, the U.S. Navy launched a cruise missile attack on the Shayrat air base. And the White House’s position became that Assad cannot be part of Syria’s future.

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White House press secretary Sean Spicer isn’t having a good day.

On Tuesday, Spicer insisted that Syrian President Bashar Assad was worse than German dictator Adolf Hitler, who, according to Spicer, “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

Yeah, you read that right. Most people know that Hitler actually did use chemical weapons on millions of people by funneling them into gas chambers to die. 

As of this writing, Spicer is getting dragged for his comment on Twitter. But before you join in on the slander, here’s a second-by-second breakdown of the video above, which captures what may be the most bizarre press briefing to happen thus far in President Donald Trump’s White House. 

0:01 ― “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

0:17 ― “You have to, if you’re Russia, ask yourself is this a country and a regime that you want to align yourself with.”

1:07 ― “When you come to sarin gas, there was no ― he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Ashad [sic] is doing.”

1:20 ― “There was not, he brought them into the Holocaust center…”

1:30 ― “I’m saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent into the middle of towns, it was brought ― so the use of it.”

Spicer finishes up by saying it was not his intent to say Hitler never used chemical weapons.

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For 25 years, Sam Sanfilippo hauled nets full of cod from the waters off New England’s coast. Like generations before him, he fished the Gulf of Maine, which stretches south from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts’ scenic eastern tip, an inlet once teeming with so many fish that European settlers named it Cape Cod.

But since 2014, when federal regulators cut the cod quota by about 95 percent, fishing jobs have disappeared.

“Here I am today, a recycler, a bike seller, a furniture maker. I’m 50 years old and I don’t know what the hell I am,” Sanfilippo says in “Sacred Cod,” a new hour-long documentary slated to air Thursday on Discovery Channel.

“I’m tired of dealing with Coast Guards, fish dealers, state police, environmental police,” he adds. “Everywhere you turn, you’re dealing with some sort of law enforcement agency and I don’t want to deal with it. I just want to make a living, an honest living.”

The film chronicles the three-year fight between fishermen and federal officials determined to protect the cod population, which has declined by 80 percent over the past decade. Scientists say a combination of overfishing and global warming has prevented the cod from replenishing their schools. Fishermen, by contrast, have accused regulators of relying on bunk science for years.

“This way of life that was so integral to our culture and our community is now essentially fading into history,” David Abel, one of the three filmmakers behind “Sacred Cod,” told The Huffington Post last week. “We are losing a whole industry and culture in some respect.”

Abel produced the film and served as story director alongside award-winning Time photographer Steve Liss and Andy Laub, who edited, wrote and selected the soundtrack. Discovery Channel bought the documentary last September.

The story centers on a familiar clash of interests: blue-collar workers feeling victimized by the decisions of federal bureaucrats, and questioning the science that informs regulations; the collapse of an industry steeped in regional heritage; the struggle to adapt to an economy where fewer and fewer workers spend their whole careers at one job; climate change, and the unwillingness of those whose livelihoods it puts at stake to accept the scientific consensus.

For years now, fishermen have accused federal regulators of relying on faulty readings of fish populations. At one point in “Sacred Cod,” a fisherman grabs a cod the size of a small dog from one of his nets. “According to the government, these fish don’t exist,” he says. “We could do this all day long, all year long.”

Last year, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) commissioned state scientists to perform their own survey. The state study included 10 times as many cod-detection stations as the earlier federal study, and it increased the time nets trawled the Gulf of Maine looking for cod by 50 percent. The scientists searched deeper waters and used actual fishing industry boats. They performed the survey once a month for a year, up from the federal researchers’ biannual schedule.

“The survey took into account all of the fishermen’s concerns,” Abel said.

The results, released this month, confirmed the federal finding that the cod population has shrunk by 80 percent over the past decade, reaching a historic low.

“The bottom line is that the outlook of Gulf of Maine cod is not good,” Micah Dean, a scientist who oversaw the survey for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, told Abel, who covered the findings for The Boston Globe, where he works. “What we’ve seen is a warning sign about the future of the fishery, and it’s a stark change from what we saw a decade ago.”

Overfishing is just part of the problem. Over the past decade, temperatures in the Gulf of Maine warmed faster than in 99 percent of the rest of the world’s oceans, according to a study released last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Under certain climate models, the water body could warm by between 5.4 degrees and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. In 2014, one publication declared the Gulf of Maine “the poster child for global warming.”

Faced with findings that back up federal estimates, fishermen have started questioning the very nature of the surveys themselves. Some have begun attacking the concept of random sampling ― the cornerstone technique behind most surveys ― insisting that a survey they themselves helped design was too fundamentally flawed to produce valid results.

When people’s livelihoods are put at risk because the world is changing around them, they look for someone to blame. It’s rarely that simple.
John Hocevar, Greenpeace

“They basically were saying it’s not legitimate because they weren’t sampling in the specific areas fishermen wanted them to sample,” Abel said. “An analogy that seems relevant to the basic idea is that if we lost 90 percent of the population of the U.S., but the remaining 10 percent was all in Boston. If you came to Boston looking for Americans, you’d say they’re all over the place.”

The fishermen in “Sacred Cod” aren’t the only ones applying tunnel vision to a grim economic picture. President Donald Trump, who has dismissed climate change as “a hoax” and moved to gut federal programs meant to cut greenhouse gas emissions, vowed to boost the U.S. economy by bringing fossil fuels roaring back. In particular, he vowed to revive coal, by far the dirtiest fossil fuel. The coal industry has suffered as cleaner-burning natural gas devoured the electricity market and Chinese demand for U.S. exports nosedived. Yet many, including Trump, blame as-yet-unimplemented regulations by the Obama administration to limit emissions from coal-fired power plants. This, coal executives and their political allies declared, amounted to a “war on coal.” To the extent there was any truth to that idea, industry defeated regulations last month when Trump signed an executive order rolling back a raft of Obama-era climate policies.

But even coal executives admit Trump’s policies won’t bring coal back. The advent of less-polluting energy sources, coupled with the depletion of coal seams in the places Trump claims his policies are meant to help, all but assure the fuel’s dimming prospects.

The “war on cod” might pan out differently.

“Fish populations replenish themselves if we don’t destroy their habitat or catch too many of them,” John Hocevar, who leads Greenpeace’s efforts on cod, told HuffPost. “Coal doesn’t grow back.”

Still, he noted that the plight of frustrated, out-of-work cod fishermen echoes that of the coal miners who became such a focus of the last presidential election.

“When people’s livelihoods are put at risk because the world is changing around them, they look for someone to blame,” Hocevar said. But “it’s rarely that simple.”

“Sacred Cod” airs Thursday, April 13, at 9 p.m. EST/PST on Discovery Channel. 

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Someone knows how to dress for excess.

A 25-year-old Connecticut man accused of driving under the influence on Monday was wearing an all-too ironic t-shirt for his mug shot.

The shirt read: “Hold My Beer And Watch This.”

Police said Harrison Wooten, of Woodstock, was wearing the shirt when he crashed his car into a wall in the early morning hours, according to the Hartford Courant.

State troopers who responded to the accident said Wooten was allegedly trying to flee the scene when they arrived, according to NBC Connecticut.

Officers say they then learned the car Wooten was driving was not registered or insured, and that the plates were assigned to another vehicle.

Wootton was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, failing to drive in the proper lane, failure to have insurance and misuse of plates, according to the Associated Press.

While in custody, he posed for a mugshot that a MassLive.com headline rightfully described as “the stuff that memes are made of.”

Wooten was released from custody on a $500 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on April 20, according to NBC Connecticut.

Wooten’s mug is the latest to feature an ironic t-shirt. On March 19, Elwood R. Gutshall of Newville, Pennsylvania, was arrested around 12:15 a.m. for DUI while wearing a green shirt reading “Drunk Lives Matter.”

You can see that mug and others in the gallery below.

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Katy Perry delivered a powerful speech at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual gala in Los Angeles last month, where she opened up about her sexuality and recalled her early years in a conservative Christian environment in which “homosexuality was synonymous with the word abomination.” 

Picking up HRC’s National Equality Award, the singer nodded to the real-life experience that inspired one of her biggest hits, noting, “I kissed a girl and I liked it. Truth be told, I did more than that.” At first, she attempted to “pray the gay away at my Jesus camps,” but eventually discovered that the LGBTQ community was made up of “the most free, strong, kind and inclusive people I have ever met.”

Perry’s candid remarks have drawn national praise, but one former Colorado legislator believes the singer’s speech is evidence that she is “ruled by Satan.”

Gordon Klingenschmitt, who was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in 2014 but failed in his state Senate bid last year, blasted Perry on the April 9 installment of his “Pray In Jesus Name” radio program, Right Wing Watch reported. 

“You don’t just need more of your Jesus camps, more of the Bible, more of what your parents told you,” Klingenschmitt said on his program, a clip of which can be viewed above. “You need to get the devil out of you.” He then offered a prayer for Perry, noting, “We pray that she will be saved, that she will be born again, that she will repent of her sin and stop promoting sin to young people.” 

As far as anti-LGBTQ statements are concerned, however, Klingenschmitt is a repeat offender. In December, he cited an inclusive Zales Jewelers holiday commercial as evidence of a “demonic spirit” who had inhabited the advertising executives who had created the ad. 

He also blasted the Boy Scouts of America for “thumbing their nose at God” in 2015 for promoting “homosexual men to mentoring and camping with your boys” after the scouting organization lifted a controversial ban on openly gay adult participants. 

Was Perry’s speech really worthy of this brouhaha? Watch an excerpt below and decide for yourself. 

For the latest in LGBTQ entertainment, check out the Queer Voices newsletter. 

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