Vice

WASHINGTON — Dick Cheney was the public face of the George W. Bush administration’s boundary-pushing approach to surveillance and intelligence collection in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

An unabashed proponent of broad executive power in the name of national security, Cheney placed himself at the center of a polarizing public debate over detention, interrogation and spying that endures two decades later.

“I do think the security state that we have today is very much a product of our reactions to Sept. 11, and obviously Vice President Cheney was right smack-dab in the middle of how that reaction was operationalized from the White House,” said Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor.

Prominent booster of the Patriot Act

Cheney was arguably the administration’s most prominent booster of the Patriot Act, the law enacted nearly unanimously after 9/11 that granted the U.S. government sweeping surveillance powers.

He also championed a National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program aimed at intercepting international communications of suspected terrorists in the U.S., despite concerns over its legality from some administration figures.

If such an authority had been in place before Sept. 11, Cheney once asserted, it could have led the U.S. “to pick up on two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon.”

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies still retain key tools to confront potential terrorists and spies that came into prominence after the attacks, including national security letters that permit the FBI to order companies to turn over information about customers.

But courts also have questioned the legal justification of the government’s surveillance apparatus, and a Republican Party that once solidly stood behind Cheney’s national security worldview has grown significantly more fractured.

The bipartisan consensus on expanded surveillance powers after Sept. 11 has given way to increased skepticism, especially among some Republicans who believe spy agencies used those powers to undermine President Trump while investigating ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign.

Congress in 2020 let expire three provisions of the Patriot Act that the FBI and Justice Department had said were essential for national security, including one that permits investigators to surveil subjects without establishing that they’re acting on behalf of an international terror organization.

A program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence, was reauthorized last year — but only after significant negotiations.

“I think for someone like Vice President Cheney, expanding those authorities wasn’t an incidental objective — it was a core objective,” Vladeck said. “And I think the Republican Party today does not view those kinds of issues — counterterrorism policy, government surveillance authorities — as anywhere near the kind of political issues that the Bush administration did.”

As an architect of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney pushed spy agencies to find evidence to justify military action.

Along with others in the administration, Cheney claimed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al-Qaida. They used that to sell the war to members of Congress and the American people, though it was later debunked.

The faulty intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq is held up as a significant failure by America’s spy services and a demonstration of what can happen when leaders use intelligence for political ends.

The government’s arguments for war fueled a distrust among many Americans that still resonates with some in Trump’s administration.

“For decades, our foreign policy has been trapped in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation building,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the Office of National Intelligence, said in the Middle East last week.

Many lawmakers who voted to support using force in 2003 say they have come to regret it.

“It was a mistake to rely upon the Bush administration for telling the truth,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said on the invasion’s 20th anniversary.

Expanded war powers

Trump has long criticized Cheney, but he’s relying on a legal doctrine popularized during Cheney’s time in office to justify deadly strikes on alleged drug-running boats in Latin America.

The Trump administration says the U.S. is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and has declared them unlawful combatants.

“These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Oct. 28 on social media. ”We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”

After 9/11, the Bush-Cheney administration authorized the U.S. military to attack enemy combatants acting on behalf of terror organizations. That prompted questions about the legality of killing or detaining people without prosecution.

Cheney’s involvement in boosting executive power and surveillance and “cooking the books of the raw intelligence” has echoes in today’s strikes, said Jim Ludes, a former national security analyst who directs the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University.

“You think about his legacy and some of it is very troubling. Some of it is maybe what the moment demanded,” Ludes said. “But it’s a complicated legacy.“

Vladeck noted an enduring legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration was “to blur if not entirely collapse lines between civilian reactions to threats and military ones.”

He pointed to designating foreign terrorist organizations, a tool that predated the Sept. 11 attacks but became more prevalent in the years that followed. Trump has used the label for several drug cartels.

Contemporary conflicts inside the government

Protecting the homeland from espionage, terrorism and other threats is a complicated endeavor spread across the government. When Cheney was vice president, for instance, agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, were established.

As was the case then, the division of labor can still be disputed, with a recent crack surfacing between Director Kash Patel’s FBI and the intelligence community led by Gabbard.

The FBI said in a letter to lawmakers that it “vigorously disagrees” with a legislative proposal that it said would remove the bureau as the government’s lead counterintelligence agency and replace it with a counterintelligence center under ODNI.

“The cumulative effect,” the FBI warned in the letter obtained by The Associated Press, “would be putting decision-making with employees who aren’t actively involved in CI operations, knowledgeable of the intricacies of CI threats, or positioned to develop coherent and tailored mitigation strategies.”

That would be to the detriment of national security, the FBI said.

Spokespeople for the agencies later issued a statement saying they are working together with Congress to strengthen counterintelligence efforts.

Tucker and Klepper write for the Associated Press.

Richard B. Cheney, the former vice president of the United States who was the architect of the nation’s longest war as he plotted President George W. Bush’s thunderous global response to the 9/11 terror attacks, has died.

Vexed by heart trouble for much of his adult life, Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, according to a statement from his family. He was 84.

“For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement said. “Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”

To supporters and detractors alike, Cheney was widely viewed as the engine that drove the Bush White House. His two-term tenure capped a lifetime of public service, both in Congress and on behalf of four Republican presidents.

It often fell to Cheney, not President Bush, to make an assertive, unapologetic case for the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for the controversial antiterrorism measures such as the Guantánamo Bay prison. And after the election of President Obama, it was once again Cheney, not Bush, who stood among the new president’s fiercest critics on national security.

In an October 2009 speech — one emblematic of the role he embraced after leaving the White House — Cheney blasted the Obama administration for opening a probe of “enhanced” interrogations of suspected terrorists conducted during the Bush years.

“We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys,” he said. The rhetoric was textbook Cheney: blunt, unvarnished, delivered with authority.

While Cheney at the time was attempting to occupy the leadership vacuum in the GOP in the age of Obama, there was little doubt that he also was motivated to preserve a legacy that appears to be as much his as former President Bush‘s. For eight years, Cheney redrew the lines that defined the vice presidency in a way no predecessor had. His office enjoyed greater autonomy than others before it, while working to keep much of his influence from plain sight. That way of operating led to a challenge before the Supreme Court as well as a criminal investigation over a leak of classified information.

Moreover, the image of a powerful backroom operator managing the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” combined with his service as Defense secretary during the Persian Gulf War and his stint as a chairman of defense contracting giant Halliburton, made Cheney a towering bête noire to liberals worldwide. To them, he embodied a dangerous fusion of politics and the military-industrial complex — and they viewed his every move with deep suspicion.

To his champions, however, he was the firm-jawed, hulking, resolute defender of American interests.

Standing with the administration was more than a duty to Cheney; it was an article of faith. The invasion of Iraq “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it over again, we’d do exactly the same thing,” Cheney said in a 2006 interview, even as the nation slowly learned that U.S. intelligence suggesting Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction was simply not true.

Three years earlier, Cheney had pledged that the U.S. would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators” — a comment that haunted him as insurgents in the country gained strength, killed thousands of allied troops and extended the conflict for years. The war in Afghanistan would drag on for 20 years, ending in 2021 as it had begun, with the Taliban back in control.

While Cheney will largely be remembered for his leading role in the response to the 9/11 terror attacks, he had long worked the corridors of power in Washington. He was a White House aide to President Nixon and later chief of staff to President Ford. As a member of the House from Wyoming, he rose quickly to become part of the Republican leadership during the 1980s. In the early ’90s, he ran the Pentagon during the Gulf War.

Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney was born in Lincoln, Neb., on Jan. 30, 1941, and spent much of his teenage years in Casper, Wyo. His father worked for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service.

As a young man, he was more interested in hunting, fishing and sports than in academics, and a stint at Yale University was short-lived. He eventually obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Wyoming and studied toward a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1964, he married Lynne Ann Vincent, who became a lifelong political partner while strongly influencing Cheney’s conservatism. Daughter Elizabeth, who was elected to Congress in 2017, was born in 1966 and her sister, Mary, arrived three years later. The sisters became embittered years later when Elizabeth — who preferred Liz — took a stance opposing same-sex marriage, which seemed a slap to Mary and her wife. Cheney, however, offered his support for such unions, an early GOP voice for same-sex marriage. Years later, he came to Liz’s defense when she broke with fellow Republicans and voted to impeach President Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In addition to his wife and daughters, Cheney is survived by seven grandchildren.

A fellowship sent Cheney to Washington, where he soon began working for a politically shrewd House member who also was a lifetime influence, Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld joined the Nixon administration, Cheney followed.

After Ford succeeded Nixon in the wake of Watergate, Rumsfeld served as chief of staff, with Cheney at his side. Ford eventually appointed Rumsfeld secretary of Defense, and Cheney, at 34, ran the White House. Even then, his calm reserve was a hallmark.

Although nearly everyone working for him was older, “He was very self-assured,” James Cannon, a member of Ford’s White House team, said years later. “It didn’t faze him a bit to be chief of staff.”

Ford lost a narrow election to Jimmy Carter in 1976, but Cheney’s Washington career was just getting underway. He headed back to Casper and in little more than a year was running for Congress.

His health, though, already was a factor. In 1978, at age 37 and in the midst of a primary election campaign, he had a heart attack, the first of several. He would undergo multiple surgeries, including a quadruple bypass, two angioplasties, installation of a heart pump and — in 2012 — a transplant. His frequent trips to the hospital and seeming indestructibility provided fodder for late-night talk show hosts during Cheney’s vice presidency.

With the help of television ads reminding voters that Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson had served full White House terms despite having had heart attacks, he narrowly won the Republican nomination and, in November 1978, secured election to the House of Representatives from Wyoming’s single district.

In Congress, he was known as a listener more interested in problem-solving than conservative demagoguery, even as he quietly built a voting record that left no doubt about where he stood on the political spectrum. He quickly moved into the ranks of GOP leadership.

Cheney stepped into the public spotlight after he was named Defense secretary by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. As the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War cooled, Cheney was charged with overseeing a Pentagon that was more fractious than usual. In a test of political and managerial will, he oversaw major reductions in the Defense budget, a profound downsizing of forces and the closing of obsolete military bases. He helped implement the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to oust the country’s leader, Manuel Noriega, for drug trafficking and racketeering.

But Cheney — along with his hand-picked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell — made his mark in the American response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Cheney played a key role in persuading the Saudi royal family to allow American troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia to defend against a looming attack from Hussein’s forces.

The Cheney-led Pentagon then shifted to offense in 1991, amassing an enormous American force that totaled more than 500,000 soldiers, nearly twice the number employed in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The U.S. military, with help from allied countries, overwhelmed the Iraqi forces in Kuwait in only 43 days and easily entered Iraq.

Characteristically, Cheney would defend the then-controversial decision to halt the U.S. advance toward Baghdad, which left Hussein in power. “I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country,” he said in a 1992 speech. “We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.”

Cheney’s efforts to station U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, considered critical to the push to repel Iraq, would have unforeseen ramifications. The military presence there helped radicalize young Islamic militants such as Osama bin Laden.

After President Clinton’s victory in 1992, Cheney left government service. Three years later, he assumed the helm of Halliburton, one of the world’s leading oil field companies and a prominent military contractor. The company thrived under Cheney’s leadership: Its relationship with the Pentagon flourished, its international operations expanded and Cheney grew wealthy.

In 2000, then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president, asked Cheney to head up the search for his running mate, then ultimately chose Cheney for the job instead. He brought to the ticket an element of maturity and Washington gravitas that the inexperienced Bush did not possess.

Cheney’s lack of design on the presidency, and his willingness to return to government 10 days shy of his 60th birthday, seemingly gave Bush the benefit of his experience and earned Cheney a measure of trust — and thus authority — commanded by few presidential advisors.

Once in office, Cheney, mindful of lessons learned in the Ford White House, sought to revitalize an executive office he believed had become too hemmed in by Congress and the courts. He termed it a “restoration.”

“After Watergate, President Ford said there was an imperiled president, not an imperial presidency,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek. Cheney, he said, felt “he badly needed to expand the powers of the presidency to assure the national security.”

In office barely a week, Cheney created a national energy policy task force in response to rising gasoline prices. A series of meetings with top officials from the oil, natural gas, electricity and nuclear industries were closed to the public, and Cheney refused to reveal the names of the participants. Cheney would exert similar influence over environmental policy and, with an office on Capitol Hill, forcefully advance the president’s legislative agenda.

A lawsuit seeking information about the task force made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the vice president’s favor in 2004. One of the justices in the majority was Antonin Scalia, who was a friend and, it was later revealed, had recently gone duck hunting with the vice president.

Another hunting trip gone awry earned Cheney embarrassing headlines in 2006 when he accidentally shot and wounded a member of the party with a round of birdshot while quail hunting on a Texas ranch.

More troubling to Cheney was a federal criminal probe in connection with the 2003 leak of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. The investigation resulted in the conviction four years later of Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby was later pardoned by President Trump.

Cheney, however, will be largely remembered for his unwavering belief that the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — especially the latter — were essential, a stance he maintained even as the missions in both theaters evolved from rooting out suspected terrorists to nation-building, and even as the casualties skyrocketed and it became clear the 20-year mission was doomed.

When U.S. troops and civilians were pulled out of Afghanistan in a fraught and fatal departure in 2021, it was Cheney’s daughter who spoke up.

“We’ve now created a situation where as we get to the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we are surrendering Afghanistan to the very terrorist organization that housed al Qaeda when they plotted and planned the attacks against us,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R.-Wyo.) said.

The former vice president’s steely resolve was captured years later in “Vice,” a 2018 biographical drama in which Christian Bale portrayed Cheney as a brainy yet uncompromisingly uncharismatic leader.

It was Cheney who insisted early on that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us,” Cheney said in August 2002. The U.S. eventually determined that Iraq had no such weapons.

He argued forcefully that Hussein was linked to the 2001 terror attacks. When other administration officials fell silent, Cheney continued to make the connections even though no shred of proof was ever found. In a 2005 speech, he called the Democrats who accused the administration of manipulating intelligence to justify the war “opportunists” who peddled “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” to gain political advantage.

Cheney also frequently defended the use of so-called extreme interrogation methods, such as waterboarding, on al Qaeda operatives. He did so in the final months of the Bush administration, as both the president’s and Cheney’s public approval ratings plunged.

“It’s a good thing we had them in custody and it’s a good thing we found out what they knew,” he said in a 2008 speech to a friendly crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“I’ve been proud to stand by him, the decisions he made,” Cheney said of Bush. “And would I support those same decisions today? You’re damn right I would.”

Oliphant and Gerstenzang are former Times staff writers.

Staff writer Steve Marble contributed to this story.

All over Los Angeles, Zachary Asdourian hunted for the music of an Iran that could have been.

The co-founder of the L.A. record label Discotchari scoured for dust-caked Persian pop records at Jordan Market in Woodland Hills; scanned the fliers for shows at Cabaret Tehran in Encino, and combed shops in Glendale looking for Farsi-language tapes cut in L.A. studios in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Most of the songs he and his label partner, Anaïs Gyulbudaghyan, sought were long-forgotten dance tracks, culturally-specific twists to the era’s disco boom. They’re poignant reminders of a time in L.A.’s Westwood “Tehrangeles” neighborhood when, in the years just after the 1979 Iranian revolution, immigrants here made music while their homeland roiled with ascendant theocracy.

Discotchari’s new crate-digger compilation “Tehrangles Vice” collects some of the best of them. Its 12 tracks were made in L.A. and circulated within the Iranian diaspora, then smuggled back into Iran on dubbed tapes and satellite broadcasts. They’re largely lost to time here, but fondly recalled there as bombastic dispatches from a cosmopolitan yet heartbroken immigrant community in L.A.

The music has lessons for artists watching the revanchist conservatism creeping over the United States today.

“These songs were supposed to represent the next step in Iranian music,” Asdourian said. “These artists were geniuses at shaking up what was happening in the ‘80s and ‘90s to produce an Iranian version of it. This music was meant to be heard at a party while dancing and drinking in Tehrangeles, but it also provided solace during the Islamic revolution, the Iraq war and the Iran-Contra affair. For citizens of Iran, this was giving hope as bombs were literally falling.”

The music scene this compilation documents came after a period of more stable relationships between the U.S. and Iran. Thousands of Iranian students immigrated to L.A. in the ‘60s and ‘70s and stayed, some opening restaurants and nightclubs in Westwood, Glendale and the San Fernando Valley where they could hear Iranian music.

“A lot of these clubs in L.A. pre-dated the revolution. Artists like Googoosh were already coming in from Iran to perform. Many musicians who were in U.S. when the revolution happened thought they were having a little sojourn and intended to go back someday,” said Farzaneh Hemmasi, a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto who wrote the book “Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California’s Iranian Pop Music” and contributed the liner notes for “Tehrangeles Vice.”

An insert from a cassette tape that Farokh “Elton” Ahi previously worked on.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

“But after the 1979 revolution, musicians in Los Angeles were told by family in Iran not to go back, that they were rounding up artists, that people associated with westernization and immorality will be targeted,” Hemmasi said. “So they stayed and worked.”

One of them was Farokh “Elton” Ahi, who came to L.A. at 17 to study architecture at USC, but left that career to produce for Casablanca Records, the premier disco label of the era. He DJ’ed at Studio 54 in NYC and elite nightclubs in L.A., and produced for the likes of Donna Summer and Elton John at his Hollywood studio, Rusk (Ahi got his nickname from an interviewer who called him “Elton Joon,” a Farsi-language term of endearment).

Even in the decadent disco era, he felt an obligation to champion Iranian music in L.A.

“We wanted kids to enjoy the link between our culture and western culture,” Ahi said. “But we were also trying to bring what was happening in Iran to people’s attention with our music, which was one reason I could never go back there. Kids who had come from Iran loved Prince and Michael Jackson and were becoming super American, so we had to do something to keep them engaged in our music as well.”

During the 1979 hostage crisis, Anglo nightclubs and radio in L.A. were not keen on Persian pop music, to say the least. Ahi led a double life as an Americanized disco producer, while also writing for his immigrant community.

“Those days, because of the hostage crisis, it wasn’t fun and games having Iranian music in the club. People were against Iranians and it wasn’t a happy time,” Ahi said. “But we were making quality music with limited resources. There were not many musicians here who could play Iranian instruments, so I had to learn a bunch of them. I felt a duty to keep our music alive.”

Two ‘80s-era tracks he produced, Susan Roshan’s “Nazanin” and Leila Forouhar’s “Hamsafar,” appear on “Tehrangeles Vice,” which brims with the only-in-L.A. cultural collusion of mournful Persian melodies and lyrics about exile, paired with new wave grit and ‘80s synth-disco pulses. Aldoush’s “Vay Az in Del” has sample-blasted horns right out of the ‘80s TV show that gives the compilation its name. There’s even a strong Latin percussive element on tracks like Shahram Shabpareh and Shohreh Solati’s “Ghesmat,” which showed how Iranian artists dipped into the global crossroads of Los Angeles.

Even if this music didn’t make an impact on the charts here, it found its way back to post-revolution Iran clandestinely, on tapes and music video satellite broadcasts. Club-friendly pop music made in L.A. took on new potency abroad.

“The official culture in Iran in the ‘80s was very sorrowful because of the war, and Shiite Islam was very oriented towards mourning. Ramadan was a sad time with no music,” Hemmasi said. “But in L.A., you’ve got Iranians dancing and singing, which was not happening within the country where people needed to sing and dance even more. This music had a contraband quality that was underground in Iran itself.”

“A lot of Iranian artists wouldn’t like this comparison, but this music was really punk at its core,” Asdourian agreed. “You’d have people standing on street corners in trench coats selling cassettes. People had illegal satellite hookups to hear news and ideology from the diaspora that contradicted what they were being fed. This music was a means to restore values they felt were lost in the revolution.”

Top to bottom, Farokh “Elton” Ahi with record label Discotchari founders Zachary Asdourian and Anais Gyulbudaghyan in Los Angeles.

(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)

As contemporary Angelenos rallying for this era of Iranian music, Asdourian and Gyulbudaghyan of Discotchari will stop at nothing to ship murkily-sourced tapes from Iran, western Asia and the Caucasus for their label. “In January, we went to Armenia and met a guy who knew a guy at a restaurant in Yerevan who had someone drive tapes in from Tabriz in Iran,” Asdourian said. “They sent us GPS coordinates to pick them up, and we ended up in this abandoned former Soviet manufacturing district getting chased by a guard dog. But he had 30 cassettes, all still sealed in their boxes.”

Yet some of the acts on “Tehrangeles Vice” are still active, living and working in California. After a long hiatus, Roshan recently released new music inspired by Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom Movement, and Ahi is a sound engineer and mixer for film (he worked on “Last of the Mohicans,” which won an Oscar for sound mixing). He recently contributed to a remix of Ed Sheeran’s “Azizam,” which sprinkles Farsi phrasing into upbeat pop and became a global hit. “Ed reached out and asked me to write some melodies that matched Googoosh’s singing to make it more international, we put our minds together and I’m so proud of it,” Ahi said.

As the United States now reckons with its own powerful right-wing religious movement in government, one eager to clamp down on cultural dissent, “Tehrangeles Vice” has lessons for musicians in the wake of a backlash. The compilation is both a specific document of a proud music culture clamping down at home and flowering abroad. But it’s also a reminder that, whether made in exile or played under attack, art is a well of possibility for imagining another life.

“Even if the geographical location isn’t same, for Iranians, L.A. represents this exiled piece of history, an Iran that could have been,” Hemmasi said. “It’s a message in a bottle from another time.”

Kimberly Hébert Gregory, who was best known as the brash principal in HBO’s “Vice Principals,” has died. She was 52.

A cause of death was not immediately reported.

Gregory’s former husband, Chester Gregory, confirmed her death in an Instagram post.

“You Were Brilliance Embodied, A Black Woman Whose Mind Lit Every Room, Whose Presence Carried Both Fire And Grace,” he wrote. “So Much More Than Ex-Wife, You Were My Friend. Our Son, The Song We Wrote Together, Is The Living Echo Of Your Light.”

Walton Goggins, the “White Lotus” breakout who co-starred with Gregory in “Vice Principals,” the HBO series which premiered in 2016 and lasted for two seasons, was among several performers who paid tribute on social media.

“We lost one of the best yesterday… one of the best I’ve ever worked with,” Goggins wrote in his Instagram post. “I had the honor… the good fortune of getting to know, getting to spend months working with this Queen on Vice Principals.”

Others who remembered Gregory included Kym Whitley, Leslie Odom Jr. and Jason Ritter

Gregory’s character on “Vice Principals,” Dr. Belinda Brown, butted heads with rival high school vice principals Neal Gamby (show co-creator Danny McBride) and Lee Russell (Goggins).

In his review of “Vice Principals,” Los Angeles Times’ Robert Lloyd wrote, “[Gregory’s] character is an invitation to political incorrectness — when told she graduated from Berkeley, Neal responds, ‘I’m pretty affirmative how she got in’ — but that attitude is more a side dish here than an entree; despite their conniving, these characters are lunkheads at worst.”

Her other credits included TV’s “The Chi” and “All Rise.”

LONDON — British Foreign Secretary David Lammy went fishing with U.S. Vice President JD Vance earlier this month and the closest thing he came to catching was a whopping fine.

Lammy was given a written warning for fishing without a license, an Environment Agency spokesperson said Friday.

As far as breaking the law goes, it was pretty small fry but could have netted him a fine of up to 2,500 pounds ($3,380) for the offense.

Lammy, whose spokesperson described it all as an “administrative oversight,” purchased a license after-the-fact and reported himself to the agency.

Lammy hosted Vance and his family, who were vacationing in England, at his country estate south of London on Aug. 8. The two men smiled and laughed as Vance provided what Lammy called Kentucky-style fishing tips.

Apparently, the pointers didn’t help Lammy land a fish.

“The one strain on the special relationship is that all of my kids caught fish, but the foreign secretary did not,” Vance later said.

The Environment Agency would not comment on whether Vance had a license, citing data protection rules. The vice president’s spokesperson did not immediately reply to an email from the Associated Press seeking comment.

The agency said it confirmed that Lammy was given a warning because he had publicized it. In England and Wales, anyone over 13 needs a license for freshwater fishing, the agency said.

In most cases, inexperienced anglers caught without a permit are given warnings — so in that sense, Lammy apparently had some beginner’s luck.

Bringing prominent White House support to the streets of Washington, DC, US Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have visited with National Guard troops at the city’s main train station.

“We brought some law and order back,” the vice president asserted as protesters chanted “free DC” during the latest tense interlude from President Donald Trump’s crackdown in the nation’s capital on Wednesday.

“We appreciate everything you’re doing,” Vance said as he presented burgers to the troops. Citing the protesters whose shouts echoed through the station, Vance said, “They appear to hate the idea that Americans can enjoy their communities.”

Vance’s and Hegseth’s appearance, which also included White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, was a striking scene that illustrated the Republican administration’s intense focus on the situation in Washington and its willingness to promote an initiative that has polarised the Democratic-led city.

On August 8, federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), began patrolling parts of Washington, DC. Days later, on August 11, President Trump declared a “crime emergency” under Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which temporarily placed the city’s Metropolitan Police under federal authority.

An estimated 1,900 troops are being deployed in DC. More than half are coming from Republican-led states. Besides Union Station, they’ve mostly been spotted around downtown areas, including the National Mall and DC Metro stops.

National Guard armoured vehicle crash

The intersection of life in the city and a military presence produced another striking scene early on Wednesday when an armoured vehicle collided with a civilian car less than a mile (1.6km) from the US Capitol. One person was trapped inside the car after the accident and had to be extricated by emergency responders, according to DC Fire Department spokesman Vito Maggiolo. The person was transported to a hospital with minor injuries.

It was not immediately clear what caused the crash. A video posted online showed the aftermath of the collision, with a tan-coloured armoured vehicle twice the height of a civilian car with a crushed side.

“You come to our city and this is what you do? Seriously?” a woman yelled at the troops in the video.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi said more than 550 people have been arrested so far, and the US Marshals Service is offering $500 rewards for information leading to additional arrests. “Together, we will make DC safe again!” Bondi wrote on social media.

Navigating the situation

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, trying to balance the constituency that elected her and the reality in front of her, acknowledged the changing situation in the city as she attended a back-to-school event with teachers and staff.

“This is not the same time, is it, that we experienced in opening school last year,” she said. Bowser said she would focus on the politics and told school employees that “your job is to love on the kids, teach them and make sure that they are prepared and to trust that I’m going to do the right thing for all of us”.

Despite the militarised backdrop, Bowser said it’s important that children “have joy when they approach this school year”. Public schools around Washington reconvene Monday for the fall semester.

The city’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) arrested an average of 61 adults and juveniles per day in 2024, according to city statistics. The Trump administration has not specified whether the arrest totals it has cited include those made by MPD officers or only consist of those made by federal agents.

DC crime rates have remained largely unchanged from a year ago, according to the police department’s weekly statistics.

As of Tuesday, the city’s overall crime rate is down 7 percent year over year, the same percentage as before the crackdown. DC has also experienced the same declines in violent crime and property crime as it did beforehand, according to the data.

Trump has defended his decision to deploy soldiers in the US capital as necessary to stem a wave of violent crime. City officials have rejected that assertion, pointing to federal and city statistics that show violent crime has declined significantly since a spike in 2023.

The president has said, without providing evidence, that the crime data is fraudulent. The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether the numbers were manipulated, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

Shotguns and rifles

The White House has touted the number of guns that law enforcement has seized since Trump began surging federal agents into the city. In a social media post on Wednesday, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the operation had taken 76 illegal guns off the streets, along with the more than 500 arrests.

However, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that federal prosecutors in DC will no longer seek charges against people who violate a local law prohibiting individuals from carrying rifles or shotguns in the nation’s capital.

The decision, which represents a break from the office’s prior policy, comes amid what Trump has described as a crime crackdown in Washington.

The president has deployed hundreds of National Guard troops and federal agents to the city’s streets to combat what he says is rampant crime, in an extraordinary exercise of presidential power.

66 arrests yesterday and 8 illegal firearms seized. One arrest was a warrant on a juvenile for armed robbery in Washington DC.

Thank you to our K9, Red, and all the men and women who continue to work hard so that Americans can feel safe in the nation’s capital! pic.twitter.com/jpcWfTvRhp

— Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi) August 20, 2025

In a statement provided to Reuters, US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said the new policy will not preclude prosecutors from charging people with other illegal firearms crimes, such as a convicted felon found in possession of a gun.

“We will continue to seize all illegal and unlicensed firearms,” she said.

The DC code in question bars anyone from carrying a rifle or shotgun with narrow exceptions. Pirro, a close Trump ally, argued in a statement to the Washington Post that the law violates two US Supreme Court decisions expanding gun rights.

In 2008, the court struck down a separate DC law banning handguns and ruled that individuals have the right to keep firearms in their homes for self-defence. In 2022, the court ruled that any gun-control law must be rooted in the country’s historical traditions to be valid.

Unlike US attorneys in all 50 states, who only prosecute federal offences, the US attorney in Washington prosecutes local crimes as well.

CANTON, Ohio — Vice President JD Vance used a speech in his home state on Monday to promote the GOP’s sweeping tax-and-border bill as a small group of protesters outside a northeast Ohio steel plant brandished signs critical of the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Vance spoke to a crowd of steel workers in neon green, orange, yellow and red hard hats and safety glasses gathered inside a rolling mill at Metallus Inc. in Canton, about 60 miles from Cleveland. It was his second trip this month as chief promoter of the hodgepodge of conservative priorities that Republicans have dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Echoing themes expressed at an industrial machine shop in West Pittston, Pa., Vance said American workers should be able to keep more of their pay in their pockets and U.S. companies should be rewarded when they grow. He highlighted the law’s new tax deductions on overtime and its breaks on tipped income.

Vance decried Democrats — including U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes, whose competitive House district he was visiting — for opposing the bill that keeps the current tax rates, which would have otherwise expired later this year.

The legislation cleared the GOP-controlled Congress by the narrowest of margins, with Vance breaking a tie vote in the Senate for the package that also sets aside hundreds of billions of dollars for Trump’s immigration agenda while slashing Medicaid and food stamps.

The vice president is also stepping up his public relations blitz on the bill as the White House tries to deflect attention from the growing controversy over Jeffrey Epstein.

The disgraced financier killed himself, authorities say, in a New York jail cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. Trump and his top allies stoked conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death before Trump returned to the White House and are now reckoning with the consequences of a Justice Department announcement earlier this month that Epstein did indeed die by suicide and that no further documents about the case would be released.

Vance insisted that the administration of President Trump isn’t trying to cover up information from the investigation that’s in the public interest.

Vance said Trump asked Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to release all “credible information” but that the process “takes time.” The Justice Department has asked for grand jury transcripts to be made public, but a judge in Florida has rejected that bid while requests remain pending in New York.

Vance said Trump, who was an acquaintance of Epstein before they had a falling out, wants “full transparency” in the case and alleged that prior administrations went “easy on this guy.” A few heads could be seen nodding amid the crowd.

Questions about the case continued to dog Trump in Scotland, where he on Sunday announced a framework trade deal with the European Union.

Asked about the timing of the trade announcement and the Epstein case and whether it was correlated, Trump responded: “You got to be kidding with that.”

“No, had nothing to do with it,” Trump told the reporter. “Only you would think that.”

The White House sees the new law as a political boon, sending Vance to promote it in swing congressional districts that will determine whether Republicans retain their House majority next year.

In a navy jacket and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, Vance leaned into folksy word choices and characterized the administration’s immigration crackdown as an effort to keep gangs trafficking deadly fentanyl out of the country.

Vance’s decision to visit Sykes’ district comes as the National Republican Congressional Committee has named her narrowly split district as a top target this cycle. His northeastern Pennsylvania stop was in the district represented by Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan, a first-term lawmaker who knocked off a six-time Democratic incumbent last fall.

A spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called his visit “another desperate attempt to lie to Ohioans about the devastating impact the Big, Ugly Law will have on working families,” in a statement.

In the statement, Katie Smith said Sykes “fought tooth and nail against this disastrous law.”

Polls before the bill’s passage showed that it largely remained unpopular, although the public approves of some individual provisions such as increasing the child tax credit and allowing workers to deduct more of their tips on taxes.

Smyth and Kim write for the Associated Press.

Southern Californians, we have not been betrayed. In-N-Out Burger is not moving its headquarters to another state, despite all the panic and performative outrage over recent comments by the fast food chain’s owner and chief executive, Lynsi Snyder.

Last week, on the “Relatable” podcast, Snyder told conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey that she’s leaving the Golden State for Tennessee. “There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here,” said Snyder, who became president of the family-run chain in 2010 at age 27, making her one of the country’s youngest billionaires.

It must be rough.

Her comments set off a disinformation blitz, launching the Double-Double into the middle of a red-state/blue-state culture war where, clearly, nothing is sacred. Anti-Cali factions incorrectly posted, podcast and crowed about yet another business fleeing the West Coast. More proof that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “failing” state sucks! It appeared that In-N-Out was following Tesla and Charles Schwab, companies that cited regulatory challenges and operational costs among their reasons for relocating. Chevron also fled. Perhaps it was the high gas prices.

Many Californians, particularly those in SoCal, felt abandoned and disrespected. They, after all, propped up the chain for 76 years, only to be told by its owner that the place that made her family’s business — their home — is no longer to her liking. On X, Oracle Park Seagull posted “‘Not easy for In N Out to do business in California…’ Said the person who became a billionaire doing business almost exclusively in California. So much so, it was a point of pride for the chain. Gotcha.”

Snyder’s grandparents opened their first In-N-Out in Baldwin Park in 1948, and for decades, the chain was renowned for serving a magical burger that could only be found in Southern California. Locals felt, and still feel, a sense of pride and ownership in the successful, homegrown business. It’s a symbol of West Coast entrepreneurship, its cups and packaging decorated with images of palm trees. And if we’re honest, the mere suggestion of In-N-Out leaving the state triggered a primal fear among Angelenos. Where else were we going to sit in a milelong drive-thru line at midnight waiting for a delicious burger and debatable fries?

Newsom even chimed in, starting his X post with, “For those interested in the facts, rather than fiction, In-N-Out is expanding East — creating a second HQ in Tennessee.” In SoCal, the company is shutting down its office in Irvine, consolidating its corporate operations to Baldwin Park. Today, In-N-Out operates in more than 400 locations across eight states.

Snyder responded Monday to the kerfuffle in an Instagram post: “Where I raise my family has nothing to do with my love and appreciation for our customers in California.”

It’s not the first time In-N-Out has made its stance clear on polarizing issues and politics. The company made news in 2021 when it pushed back against Newsom and California’s COVID-era proof-of-vaccination mandates.

In-N-Out’s packaging also includes Bible verses, a practice started in the late ’80s by Snyder’s uncle, co-founder Rich Snyder. John 3:16 can be found on the bottom of the In-N-Out soda cup. The milkshake cup features Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” On your next visit, you can check for a verse in your fries container. That is, if there is a next time. Instead of the memory of a tasty burger, many lifetime In-N-Out loyalists have been left with a bitter taste in their mouths.

Former Vice President Kamala hasn’t decided whether she will run for California governor next year, but a new poll released Wednesday shows that she would be a favorite of voters if she does.

Though many voters were undecided, Harris was the choice of 41% of survey respondents, compared to 29% who opted for an unnamed Republican candidate, according to a poll by the University of California Irvine. She also had the greatest favorability ratings and is most well known compared to all of the candidates who have announced.

“The path to governor seems well-paved for Vice President Harris if she decides to run,” said Jon Gould, dean of UCI’s School of Social Ecology, in a statement. “Although she lacks majority support at the moment, people know her better than the other candidates and generally view her favorably.”

Only 5% of Californians had never heard of Harris, while every other announced candidate was unknown by a far larger number of respondents, including those who had run for statewide office previously. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who ran for governor in 2018, was unknown by 47% of survey respondents; 48% were unfamiliar with former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, who ran for U.S. Senate in 2024.

When tested against candidates who have announced, Harris was the choice of 24% of voters, the only candidate to crack double digits, according to the poll. However, 40% of respondents were undecided, according to the poll.

Among Democrats, who account for 47% of the state’s voters as of February, Harris had the support of nearly half, while every announced candidate had single-digit support. Harris led among Californians in every region and in every racial group, according to the poll.

Billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2022 and is reportedly debating whether to run for mayor again or governor, was the favored choice of GOP voters, with the backing of 27% of survey respondents.

Harris, whose representatives did not respond to a request for comment, is expected to decide whether she enters the race by the end of the summer, a delay that has prompted criticism from several candidates in the crowded field of candidates who have already announced their bids.

The statewide poll of 4,143 Californians was conducted online in two separate polls, one between May 27 and June 2, and another between May 29 and June 4. The margin of error in either direction varies between 2.9% and 3.6%, according to UCI.

June 26 (UPI) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk has fired the carmaker’s vice president of manufacturing and operations following a falloff in auto sales in the nation’s largest markets this year.

Omead Afshar oversaw more than a half dozen upper-level employees in the company, including Troy Jones, Tesla’s vice president of sales in North America, and Joe Ward, vice president of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

The firing was first reported by Bloomberg News.

Afshar is the second high-level employee to leave the company recently. His termination follows the resignation of Milan Kovac, who was the company’s head of its Optimus humanoid robotics program.

Kovac said in a post on X that he was leaving Tesla to spend more time with his family. Musk later thanked Kovac publicly for his time with the company.

In 2022, Afshar was the subject of an internal investigation at Tesla that focused on his involvement in trying to secure construction materials for a secret project for Musk that included hard-to-get glass.

Prior to his job as Tesla vice president, Afshar worked for SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company. Afshar’s X account, which had not been updated, said he still works for Tesla, and he praised Musk for his leadership and work ethic following the launch of the company’s Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas.

“Thank you, Elon, for pushing us all,” Afshar wrote.

Tesla’s stock price has dropped 19% this year, and took an especially hard hit following Musk’s association with President Donald Trump, who appointed Musk to oversee the Department of Government Efficiency.

DOGE took a broad and aggressive approach to eliminating federal employees, downsizing federal agencies and ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs at some of the nation’s largest companies and universities.

The company sold fewer cars in 2024 than it did in 2023, the first time sales dropped since Tesla began mass producing EVs. Its profits fell 71% in the first quarter of 2025. European sales dropped 28%, and dropped for a fifth straight month in May.

The European Automobile Manufacturers Association said buyers are shifting to cheaper Chinese models.

Vice President JD Vance on Friday castigated Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, arguing that the elected leaders are endangering the lives of law enforcement officers because of their opposition to federal immigration raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities.

Vance, while meeting with federal, state and local officials in Los Angeles Friday afternoon, justified President Trump’s decision to seize control of California National Guard troops from Newsom and deploy them in Los Angeles, a decision that triggered a legal battle between state and federal officials.

“What happened here was a tragedy,” Vance told reporters. “You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law, and you had rioters, egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job.”

Although Newsom and Bass have criticized the immigration raids, which led to protests and sporadic violent attacks against law enforcement officials, both have repeatedly urged demonstrators to remain peaceful.

Bass, who did not meet with Vance, dismissed his description of what has unfolded in Los Angeles over the last two weeks.

“Unfortunately, the vice president did not take time to learn about our city and understand that our city is a city of immigrants from every country and continent on the planet,” Bass said at a news conference Friday evening. “But then again, he did need to justify the hundreds of millions of wasted taxpayer dollars that were wasted in the performance of a stunt.

“How dare you say that city officials encourage violence,” Bass said. “We kept the peace.”

Newsom weighed in repeatedly on the social media platform X, notably about Vance calling Sen. Alex Padilla “Jose” during his remarks.

Padilla was dragged to the ground by federal law enforcement officers and briefly detained when he attempted to ask U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a press conference earlier this week.

“I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question, but unfortunately I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn’t a theater, and that’s all it is,” Vance said.

A spokesperson for Padilla responded that Vance, as a former colleague of Padilla in the U.S. Senate, “knows better.”

“He should be more focused on demilitarizing our city than taking cheap shots,” spokesperson Tess Oswald posted on X. “Another unserious comment from an unserious administration.”

Vance’s visit to Los Angeles was unexpected but is reportedly coinciding with a political fundraiser at the Republican National Committee’s annual summer retreat taking place in Beverly Hills. Tickets cost up to $445,000, according to NOTUS, a nonprofit news group.

Vance landed at LAX around 1:35 p.m. and toured the Federal Building Command Center, an FBI Mobile Command Center that is currently being used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He was briefed by officials from the Department of Defense, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Los Angeles Police Department and the California Highway Patrol.

Reporters traveling with the vice president were told they not allowed to cover Vance’s meetings with officials there because the facility contained classified information. Vance was also scheduled to meet with Marines during his visit.

During his visit with federal officials, Vance called Newsom and Bass’ actions during the protests “disgraceful,” referred to the actions as “riots” and said that was why Trump decided to deploy troops from the California National Guard.

“We have to remember that the day that the riots started, before there was ever a single national guardsman, before the president of the United States had sent in additional resources, you had law enforcement officers that were being captured and beaten by a violent mob, egged on by Gavin Newsom and other officials,” Vance said. “It was necessary to send in the National Guard to stop that process to bring some order back to this great city.”

Newsom criticized the federal raids, saying they violated Trump’s vow to target violent, criminal immigrants, but also urged Californians protesting the actions to do so peacefully and said those who engaged in lawlessness would be arrested.

During protests in downtown Los Angeles, federal agents stood guard around federal buildings that were the focus of protesters. Los Angeles police officers, as well as officers from other local police agencies and the California Highway Patrol, responded in large numbers and repeatedly moved demonstrators away from National Guard troops, pushing the crowds to undulate across downtown’s civic center.

Standing next to U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, Bill A. Essayli, and FBI Assistant Director Akil Davis, Vance defended the deployment of Marines and National Guard troops in Los Angeles.

“That’s why we’re here, that’s why these guys are standing beside me,” Vance said. “That’s why we have close to 5,000 soldiers and Marines from the Department of Defense. It’s because we’ve got to enforce the law.”

The visit comes as California and federal officials battle in court over control of the California National Guard. Trump federalized the troops over the objections of Newsom and sent them to L.A. after immigration raids sparked protests.

On Thursday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals kept control of the troops in Trump’s hands while the issue is litigated in federal court. On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco asked attorneys for the federal and state governments to submit briefs by noon on Monday about the Posse Comitatus Act, which largely prohibits the use of federal military forces in civilian law enforcement, and the length of time the California National Guard is under control of the federal government.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta has vowed to continue fighting the Trump administration over the decision.

The clash has left Newsom and officials in the Trump administration trading barbs in interviews and social media. Vance appears unlikely to meet with the highest elected official of the country’s most populous state.

“We’re always open to working together — which makes it all the more disappointing that the White House chose not to engage with us directly ahead of the visit,” a statement from the governor’s office read. “We’ve yet to receive any official notice of the Vice President’s trip — which, from what we understand, is focused on a high-dollar fundraiser.”

Newsom later released a video on X, addressing Vance directly and urging the vice president to meet with victims of the Palisades and Altadena fires.

“It’s been months now since some of the most devastating wildfires in U.S. history occurred — tens of thousands of lives completely torn asunder,” Newsom said in the video. “I hope you have an opportunity to spend some quality time with some of the victims of the families in the Palisades and also spend some time in Altadena, which is incredibly important.”

Newsom also urged Vance to speak with Trump about comments the president made earlier this week, suggesting he would cut disaster relief for the fires because of the ongoing feud with Newsom.

“It’s honestly important as well, and I honestly mean this, that you sit down with the president of the United States, who just a couple of days ago suggested that these American citizens may not get the support that other citizens get all across this country in terms of disaster relief,” Newsom said. “I hope we get that back on track. We’re counting on you, Mr. Vice President.”

Times staff writer Julia Wick and Dave Zahniser contributed to this report.

June 12 (UPI) — Democratic National Committee Vice Chair David Hogg announced that he won’t be running for re-election for his role after DNC members voted to redo his election.

Hogg announced on X Wednesday that he would not run in the election so the Democratic party “can focus on what really matters,” adding he would focus on work with Leaders We Deserve a grassroots organization focused on electing young progressives to U.S. and state legislatures.

“I’m thankful to everyone who has supported me in this role. I’m proud to have travelled to 10 states to do 30+ events, raising money for state parties, organizing with young Democrats and getting out the vote for special elections in Wisconsin and Florida,” Hogg wrote. “I have nothing but admiration and respect for my fellow officers. Even though we have disagreements, we all are here to build the strongest party possible.”

DNC members voted 294-99 Wednesday to redo the election of both Hogg’s and Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta’s vice chair roles after Oklahoma DNC member Kalyn Free challenged how the vice chair election was conducted in February.

Free alleged the election provided an unfair advantage for the male candidates over the female candidates.

The DNC will hold elections for a new male vice chair from Thursday through Saturday, while a vote on a second vice chair of any gender will run from Sunday through Tuesday.

Hogg’s decision not to seek re-election after his work with Leades We Deserve to primary “ineffective” Democratic incumbents left members of the party, including DNC Chair Ken Martin, displeased.

“I came into this role to play a positive role in creating the change our party needs,” Hogg wrote. “It is clear that there is a fundamental disagreement about the role of a vice chair — and it’s OK to have disagreements. What isn’t OK is allowing this to remain our fucus when there is so much mroe we need to be focused on.”

Martin, who believed Hogg shouldn’t have focused on the primary efforts as an officer of the national party and his frustration was expressed in leaked audio of a Zoom call with DNC officers that was published over the weekend, leading some members to reconsider their votes.

However, Martin commended Hogg in a statement Wednesday “for his years of activism, organizing, and fighting for his generation.”

“While I continue to believe he is a powerful voice for this party, I respect his decision to step back from his post as vice chair,” he said.

Kenyatta, who is now running unopposed for the male DNC vice chair role wished Hogg “the best” in a post on social media.

“I’m grateful to the overwhelming support I’ve received in this re-election from DNC members and I look forward to getting back to work electing Democrats up and down the ballot,” he said.

WASHINGTON — President Bush, reaffirming his support for the anti-abortion movement, told an estimated 200,000 abortion foes gathered under a hot, cloudless sky in the nation’s capital Saturday that their mission “must be to help more and more Americans make the right choice–the choice for life.”

In a brief telephone address broadcast to the crowd over loudspeakers, Bush predicted that “one day, your life-saving message will have reached and influenced every American.” The President urged abortion opponents to “continue to work for the day when respect for human life is sacrosanct and beyond question.”

He added: “I know from your devotion and selflessness that this day cannot be far away.”

With the temperature hovering near 90 degrees, demonstrators spread blankets on the grass, sunbathed and ate picnic lunches in the shadow of the Washington Monument while waiting to hear Bush and to catch a glimpse of Vice President Dan Quayle, who spoke to them in person.

Many wore anti-abortion T-shirts and carried placards reading: “Stop Abortion Now,” “Let My People Grow,” and “Killing Should Never Be a Personal Choice.”

Their numbers far exceeded the estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people who came for the 17th annual March for Life last January, and for a time threatened to rival the 300,000 who attended an abortion rights rally here last year.

Officials from the National Right to Life Committee, which sponsored the rally, said the event was intended to show the strength of their cause, despite a series of recent setbacks suffered at the state level.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could impose restrictions on abortion. The decision, Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, galvanized the abortion rights movement to work on behalf of candidates who share their views and to defeat attempts by state legislatures to curtail abortion.

The latest blow to the anti-abortion movement came Friday, when the Connecticut state Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill to ensure a woman’s right to an abortion even if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns its 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision guaranteeing that right. The Connecticut House already has passed the measure, and Gov. William A. O’Neill has promised to sign it.

Bush spoke to the demonstrators from the White House after returning from a five-hour fishing expedition on the Potomac River, where he caught several largemouth bass.

The President made no mention of proposals favored by many abortion foes to add a “human life” amendment to the Constitution. Nor did he refer to the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning its Roe vs. Wade ruling.

The Administration, confronted with a growing division within the Republican Party over its position on abortion, has emphasized its willingness in recent months to accommodate all points of view on the issue.

“In January of this year, I addressed the March for Life on this very issue,” Bush said. “And I said then, and reaffirm now, that your presence on the Mall today reminds all of us in government that Americans from all walks of life are committed to preserving the sanctity and dignity of human life.”

He called the widespread availability of abortion “a tragedy, not only in terms of lives destroyed, but because it so fundamentally contradicts the values that we as a nation hold dear. And when I look at adopted children, I give thanks that their parents chose life.”

Quayle, too, called the prevalence of abortion a “national tragedy.” But he seemed to take a less hard-line approach than he has in the past.

Quayle said that a majority of Americans oppose abortion on demand. “They may disagree about how best to turn the situation around, but almost all stand together against the terrible reality of unlimited abortion on demand,” he said.

Quayle said that “none of us, woman or man, can presume to judge those faced with a problem pregnancy.” But, he added, “the loss of some 25 million children in total to abortion since 1973 has been unspeakable.”

“It is as if we were shooting out the stars, one by one, preparing for ourselves an unending night of the most fearful darkness,” he continued. “You have been voices against the night . . . “

Referring to the growing dispute within GOP ranks–in which some Republican officials have said the GOP “tent” is large enough to include all views on abortion–Quayle said that abortion opponents make up “the largest coalition–I might add, the biggest tent–in American politics.”

Quayle said that Saturday’s demonstration could “begin a healing of the terrible wound which, for almost two decades, has torn at our country’s heart.”

Saying the anti-abortion movement was “more important than partisanship, and surely more important than personal advancement,” Quayle described it as “ the humanitarian movement of our time.”

He added: “Will the American people continue to accept the notion that unborn children are disposable?”

To shouts of “No” from the crowd, he responded: “Our answer is: Not in this country. Not now. Not ever.”

Olivia Gans, the rally director, told the demonstrators that the anti-abortion movement was not faltering, but gaining momentum.

“We are not losing,” she said. “We are winning. We are winning throughout the United States, despite what we hear and what we read. We are winning despite what (National Organization for Women president) Molly Yard has to say. And who listens to Molly Yard anyway?”

Meanwhile, in Portland, Ore., Yard spoke to a rally of about 2,000 people who had gathered to express their opposition to two proposed state laws that would restrict abortion rights. She reiterated that the anti-abortion movement was losing force across the country.

“(They) have lost in virtually every state legislature and they are losing in the elections across the country, and we expect them to lose heavily” in the November, 1990, elections, she said.

Many of the demonstrators in Washington said they traveled by bus, car and airplane from all over the country to show their support for an end to abortion.

“There’s really more people here than I could have imagined,” said James Davis, a paint factory production planner who drove 10 hours nonstop from Lancaster, Ky., with his wife and two children.

“Our prayers are being answered,” added his wife, Dora Sue.

Roger Bus, a lawyer from Kalamazoo, Mich., called the anti-abortion movement “more powerful than it’s ever been.”

And Carol Kraft, a bakery clerk from Emporia, Kan., said this was the first time she had attended an anti-abortion rally in Washington.

“I came because I want to take a stand for life,” she said. “I love life.”

In Southern California, a crowd of abortion opponents estimated by police at 8,300 made a human chain in the form of a cross along the streets of Van Nuys to coincide with the Washington demonstration. Police characterized the two-hour demonstration as peaceful.

“We wanted to send a clear message to politicians that there are many, many people out there who are opposed to abortion,” said Laura Gillen, an organizer of the event.

Organizers included Operation Rescue, the Right to Life League and more than 200 churches from San Diego to Bakersfield.

Participants, who formed the cross along Sherman Way and Van Nuys Boulevard, waved blue-and-white signs in English and Spanish reading “Abortion Kills Children.”

A small group of abortion rights activists carrying their own signs briefly disrupted the demonstration. Barri Falk, coordinator of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the National Organization for Women, waved a sign that said “Honk for Choice.”

“We’re out here to show our support for life, too,” Falk said. “They want to oppress both men and women.”

Staff writer Mayerene Barker in Van Nuys contributed to this story.

Praise follows conflict of interest concerns after Trump launches his own coin and hosts a dinner for his investors.

United States Vice President JD Vance has urged the domestic cryptocurrency industry to remain involved in US politics, highlighting the close ties of President Donald Trump’s administration to a deep-pocketed industry.

Speaking at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Wednesday, Vance urged cryptocurrency executives and enthusiasts to keep pressure on the US Congress to pass pro-crypto legislation supported by the White House

“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to unleash innovation and use it to improve the lives of countless American citizens,” Vance said in his address. “But if we fail to create regulatory clarity now, we risk chasing this $3 trillion industry offshore in search of a friendly jurisdiction.”

Vance made the speech after Trump promised to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet” when he addressed the same Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, last year in the middle of the presidential campaign. The crypto industry, which felt unfairly attacked by former President Joe Biden’s administration, spent heavily to help Trump and pro-cryptocurrency lawmakers win election.

Vance praised how quickly the crypto industry was able to organise and influence US politics during last year’s elections, giving special credit to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the billionaire founders of the crypto exchange Gemini.

“You chose to speak up, and you chose to get involved, and I believe you changed the direct trajectory of our country because of it,” Vance told the crowd gathered at the Venetian Hotel.

Vance hailed cryptocurrencies as a hedge that can help conservative populists protect themselves against what he called bad politicians, overly aggressive regulators and unethical elites. He predicted continued assimilation of the digital currencies into the financial mainstream and said it was strategically important for the US to be a world leader in the industry, noting that the Chinese government is hostile to crypto.

As president, Trump has established a Bitcoin reserve for the federal government and pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a black market website that was key to the early growth of Bitcoin.

Trump has also put outspoken crypto backers in his administration, which has undone or paused several enforcement actions taken against large cryptocurrency companies

Several other Trump officials are speakers at the Bitcoin conference, as are his sons Don Jr and Eric.

Conflict of interest

The president and his family’s use of cryptocurrencies as a platform to make money has drawn criticism from Democrats and even crypto enthusiasts as corrupt and unseemly.

The Trump family holds about a 60 percent stake in a crypto project called World Liberty Financial, which recently launched its own stablecoin, a fast-growing form of cryptocurrency whose value is often tied to the US dollar. This month, the US Senate advanced legislation that would create a federal framework to regulate stablecoins, a bill that Vance said the Trump administration wants passed into law quickly.

Trump’s media company announced on Tuesday that it was raising $2.5bn to buy Bitcoin, the world’s oldest and most popular cryptocurrency.

The president and first lady Melania Trump have also launched their own meme coins. Last week, Donald Trump rewarded investors in his coin. About 220 of the biggest investors in the $TRUMP were invited to Trump’s luxury golf club in northern Virginia.

WASHINGTON — In the wake of the Murphy Brown uproar, Vice President Dan Quayle has delivered another double-barreled commotion. First, in the past 10 days, he has made two more fire-breathing speeches on family values, one to a convention of Southern Baptists and the other to a National Right to Life gathering. Second, he has demonstrated he does not know how to spell potato .

My West Coast sources say politically aware people in the entertainment industry have made up their minds about the vice president’s “values” theme: It will not play in Peoria. Quayle’s distasteful traditionalist fervor, in this view, simply does not reflect the ethics or concerns of most Americans. Besides, how can you take a man seriously who doesn’t know the names of his vegetables?

But Quayle’s critics are kidding themselves, trying to suppress the message by deriding the messenger. They may think the vice president’s misspelling marks him as an irredeemable jerk, but many of his fellow citizens are not so sensitive, and some will even sympathize with him. (Pop quiz: Is it potatos or potatoes ?)

The same critics are surely right in seeing considerable daylight between most Americans’ general moral posture and the pungency of some of Quayle’s stronger words. Nonetheless, the “values” card might not only help the Bush-Quayle reelection effort, it may even play a moderating role in the campaign.

In his speeches, Quayle again criticized the “cultural elite” that “flees from the consequences of its self-indulgence.” But he also expanded on the idea of this elite as an alien force in American life. The country is made up, he said, of “the cultural elite, and the rest of us.” The elite “mock us in the newsrooms, sitcom studios and faculty lounges,” but “we Americans” must “stand up for our values, stand up for America.” The American people are “playing David to the Goliath of the dominant cultural elite,” he exhorted, “but remember the final outcome” of that battle: “The Philistines fled.”

This is unattractive stuff. It says only the people on Quayle’s side of the argument can lay legitimate claim to the label “American.” One of our worst national characteristics in politics is the tendency to read our opponents out of the rolls of American citizenship–and parts of the Quayle speeches serve as fair examples of this nasty habit.

But the recent Quayle sorties, despite the rough language, are not the beginning of a crusade–which would fail–to Puritanize American life. Instead, speeches like his accomplish two other things.

First, such talk shores up the Bush Administration’s base among social conservatives. They are not a majority in America, but they constitute a Peoria in which the vice president’s ideas will play to standing-room-only crowds. Solidifying a core constituency is a prudent thing to do for an electorally weak Administration facing a three-way presidential race. In olden times, national politicians could do this type of cheerleading in obscurity, with their most inflammatory words heard only by the special groups they were addressing. But now, because of modern communications, we are constantly eavesdropping on each other’s private political conversations.

Second, Quayle’s theme promises benefits for the Administration’s campaign even among many who do not share his moral fervor but do share a general unease with TV, movies and a popular culture that seems out of control. Often these are the same people now lured, to the Administration’s discomfort, by the siren song of Ross Perot.

Perot, it is becoming clear, is a strange man. He has displayed an authoritarian temperament in his business and public life and in the preemptory ways he proposes to deal with problems ranging from entitlements to the cost of U.S. troops abroad. He is cavalier about constitutionally rooted civil liberties and about institutions with which the Constitution says a President must share power. The different versions he gives of his own life are starting to make Ronald Reagan’s lapses in this area look trivial and benign.

In short, Perot is dangerous. Moreover, his attitudes do not reflect the considered views of the electorate: Americans of all kinds remain massively attached to the basic features of the American system. Yet Perot maintains his political strength because he has succeeded in presenting himself as the ultimate outsider to a citizenry that has been brought to mistrust all insiders.

We know today’s citizens are increasingly alienated from their government and public officials. Many Americans have come to see today’s politics and government as one vast sinkhole of incompetence and corruption. Even with the large problems our nation faces, this despair is out of proportion.

There is more than one reason for this mistrust, which has been building for a quarter-century. But the “cultural elite” cannot deny having had a hand in shaping it. If popular culture has shaken tradition regarding sexual morality, parts of the elite have also mounted a challenge in the arena of conventional politics.

To take the largest example, the national press, since Watergate, has given news consumers an unending stream of political scandal. Yet national politics is, by most measures, far cleaner than it was 25 years ago. But there is no way that newspaper readers and TV viewers absorbing this reportage can escape thinking that today’s politicians are incorrigibly dirty.

The view we get from movies that deal with politics is even darker, ranging from simple corruption to grand conspiracies to steal the presidency from the American people. “The “faculty lounges” that Quayle cited are, like the sitcoms, a mixed bag, but some major university campuses have been seedbeds for critiques of the profound structural racism, sexism and imperialism said to infest our conventional social and political institutions.

Those who have purveyed this radical political disaffection may have hoped it would lead to a more just America. Instead, what they begot was Perot, and they should recognize him as their child.

By pounding away at the theme of the cultural elite vs. America’s traditional values, Quayle is asserting that the Administration should be seen not as a bunch of political insiders but as the champion of all those cultural outsiders who feel denigrated and ignored by the media and popular culture. In other words, he argued that voters should exempt him and President George Bush from the “insider” curse of 1992.

More important, in appealing to traditional values, Quayle took the quickest and most powerful route to generally delegitimizing what have been called the “chattering classes” and casting grave doubt on whatever comes out of their collective mouths. Once people are reminded of how little they trust the “cultural elite,” they can be persuaded to exercise this mistrust in other areas. If members of the elite are insensitive to issues of family values, there is no reason to think them trustworthy on general politics. If they say American politics stinks, they should not be believed any more than they should be trusted on the issue of sex.

But if American politics does not stink in the way Hollywood says it does, then Perot should not get credit for being the outsider who champions the people against the Establishment. To the contrary: Perot can be portrayed as a creature of the cultural elite and its cynical view of American political life. His contempt for other politicians and his insistence on his unique ability to save us are perhaps messages not from the majority of Americans, but from an elitist fringe. Quayle has actually started in on this idea, chiding Perot for not showing sufficient respect for the Constitution.

If this strategy works, the “family values” issue will have tapped into some of the same anti-Establishment voter anger to which Perot appeals and will shake Perot loose from his position as the embodiment of average people’s sentiments. Even for those who do not like some of Quayle’s recent speeches, this is probably a good trade.