LGBTQ advocacy groups told ThinkProgress that they know exactly what ideas they want to hear discussed at the town hall set for Oct. 10, which is National Coming Out Day. Many said that first and foremost, they want candidates to acknowledge the struggles of the most marginalized in the community, including LGBTQ people of color, and put forward policies to respond to anti-LGBTQ bias in the criminal justice system.

“LGBTQ people are more likely to come into contact with the police due to discriminatory policing, be incarcerated, and experience violence while locked up than non-LGBTQ people. Black and Latinx LGBTQ people are most impacted,” Tyrone Hanley, senior policy counsel for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told ThinkProgress.

Hanley said that aspirants to the White House must put criminal justice reform as one of the issues topping their list. “Candidates must demonstrate an understanding that anti-LGBTQ discrimination and violence is impacted by issues of race, gender, and class just as they are for other communities,” he said.

The town hall comes at a critical time, as the Trump administration has rolled back health-care protections for transgender people and protections for transgender students, implemented a ban on transgender people in the military, and proposed a rule that allows broad religious exemptions for businesses with federal contracts.

Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA); former Vice President Joe Biden; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro have accepted the invitation to the town hall, and others may yet join them.

HRC invited candidates who reach at least 2% in four national polls chosen by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and who have met the DNC’s threshold of 130,000 unique donors.

The candidates will answer questions from CNN journalists and the members of the audience at back-to-back town halls over the course of the evening. LGBTQ advocates have a broad range of issues on their list of topics they want to see discussed.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said he’d like to see how each candidate stands on reversing the president’s ban on military service by transgender troops. Minter said he would like the candidates to acknowledge that health care, poverty, and food insecurity are all LGBTQ issues.

And, he added, the candidates should also demonstrate how they would carry on the progress of the Obama administration when it comes to tackling the issue of conversion therapy, programs in which young people are told they can and should change their sexual orientation and in some cases, their gender. The American Medical Association has said conversion therapy, especially in youth, may cause significant psychological distress.

“While regulating that issue falls primarily to the states, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a groundbreaking report on the harms caused to minors by conversion therapy in 2015 that has played a key role in supporting state legislation,” Minter said.

“We would very much like to see candidates pledge to continue and expand such educational efforts. The president’s voice is powerful, and we urgently need national leadership on this issue, which poses such a severe threat to the health and well-being of LGBTQ youth.”

Stacey Long Simmons, director of advocacy and action for the National LGBTQ Task Force, echoed the views of others in saying that the presidential candidates should focus on the community’s most vulnerable populations.

“When we are having conversations with policymakers, we typically ask about issues affecting members of our community who are most deeply marginalized and in particular thinking about people who may have multiple marginalized identities,” Long Simmons said.

“They may be undocumented or transgender or gender-nonconforming. They may be racial minorities or religious minorities. All of those things are things we tend to highlight when we’re in conversations with people,” she said.

She added that candidates have to understand how all issues connect to the LGBTQ community and roll back many of the anti-LGBTQ policies of the Trump administration, which have undone much of the work of the Obama administration to bolster LGBTQ rights.

“There’s not an issue out there that is being discussed that doesn’t directly impact members of our community,” she said.

“We would want to be involved in as many ways possible to shape policy because we know that, given the way society is structured, whether it’s climate change or healthcare policy or criminal justice policy, all of the things decision-makers put out affect our community and so we want to make sure they don’t worsen some of the conditions we’re currently grappling with.”

In a statement to ThinkProgress, Sharon McGowan, chief strategy officer and legal director at Lambda Legal, said that candidates need to explain how they would use “all of the tools at their disposal,” including the bully pulpit, executive powers, and legislative acton where possible to address and reverse the policies of the Trump administration.

McGowan said of these policies, “These harms include this administration’s weaponization of religion as an enemy of civil rights protections for LGBTQ people (among others), and the ways in which this administration has taken aim at the most vulnerable in our community, including transgender people, young people, and LGBTQ people of color.”

She said Lambda Legal would also like to see the candidates “discuss the damage that has been done to the federal judiciary by the appointment of scores of anti-LGBTQ ideologues to lifetime positions on the federal bench, and how they intend to address this crisis.”

As other organizations have said, McGowan said candidates need to understand that all policy issues, whether they be safe schools, police misconduct, and treatment in government custody, are all LGBTQ issues.

In his statement announcing the town hall, HRC President Alphonso David said that despite enormous gains in the past decade, there remain a number of areas where LGBTQ people face discrimination and disadvantages “because of who we are.”

“Today, in 30 states, LGBTQ people remain at risk of being fired, evicted, or denied services because of who we are. Thirty-five states have yet to ban the dangerous and debunked practice of ‘conversion therapy,’ which is harming our young people. Hate crimes are rising, and more than 100 transgender people — most of whom are transgender women of color — have been killed in the United States in the last five years,” David said.

Many Democratic candidates acknowledged the LGBTQ community during the first presidential debate in June. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said that violence against transgender people of color was a serious issue that the country needs to address. At least 16 transgender people have been killed this year, according to HRC, and the overwhelming majority of these murders were of black trans women. Last year, there were at least 26 killings of transgender people.

Castro called for making health care inclusive to trans people, although he misspoke about which trans people should be considered when he talked about reproductive justice. Warren used inclusive language to discuss how the economy isn’t working for Latinx people. Klobuchar also mentioned shifting attitudes in marriage equality.

Several candidates for the Democratic nomination have released plans in the past few months on how they plan to tackle policy issues that affect the LGBTQ community.

Warren released proposals and policies designed to advance LGBTQ rights. Her ideas included supporting the Equality Act, reversing President Donald Trump’s military trans ban, a vow to “protect civil rights for transgender people,” outlawing conversion therapy, reversing the State Department’s denial of family visas to same-sex domestic partners of diplomats, and ending discrimination against queer men who are currently barred from donating blood.

Warren tweeted in August about a trans woman of color who died in isolation at Rikers Island, “Let’s be clear: Layleen Cubilette-Polanco should still be alive. Solitary confinement is cruel and inhumane. We must end this practice, enforce strict standards for medical care, and provide extra layers of protection for LGBTQ+ people.”

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) has released his plan to fight for LGBTQ rights, which included reversing the trans military ban, directing the Justice Department to investigate crimes against transgender people, specifically trans women of color, and making sure that LGBTQ people are included in federal data collection efforts.

Last month, some of the candidates spoke about the needs of transgender Americans with the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) Action Fund for its Transform the White House initiative.

Booker and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spoke at length about their approach to advancing transgender equality. They spoke on issues such as rolling back Trump administration policies that undid much of the progress of the Obama administration on transgender equality, violence against transgender people and the criminal justice system, and economic policies that would improve trans people’s lives.

In later interviews, Castro and Klobuchar spoke with the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund. Castro mentioned discrimination against transgender people in housing, the large share of homeless youth who are LGBTQ, and the detainment of transgender immigrants.

Klobuchar said she would reverse the trans military ban in her first 100 days and touted her support of national nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people over the years.

Two of the main issues where candidates staked out wildly different stances were nuclear power and abolishing the filibuster. They also differed on fracking, the process of extracting natural gas to be used for energy.

Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden took heat over a controversial fundraiser scheduled for Thursday night and hosted by an oil executive. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) criticized the forum’s focus on personal sacrifices — like giving up eating meat or using plastic straws — arguing instead for accountability from the fossil fuel industry.

In back-to-back segments beginning at 5 p.m. Eastern time and stretching late into the night, candidates laid out their climate plans and responded to questions from moderators and selected audience members.

Climate change has emerged as a leading issue for Democratic voters and, in many ways, the candidates closely align. Leading up to the forum, all of the candidates had released their own sweeping climate plans.

Most have also expressed some level of support for the Green New Deal, a proposal to rapidly decarbonize the economy while ensuring mass job creation. They also back remaining in the Paris climate agreement, which President Donald Trump has threatened to exit. And Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) — who based his entire campaign around addressing global warming — loomed large over the event, despite dropping out of the presidential race last month.

On Wednesday night, candidates like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and former Housing Secretary Julián Castro warmly praised Inslee, and Warren went so far as to embrace his detailed climate policy proposals.

“He said, ‘Have at them,’ ” she joked. “They’re open-sourced.”

But the forum allowed space for presidential hopefuls to flesh out key differences between their approaches to climate action. Early in the evening, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said she would eliminate the filibuster in order to ensure climate action (the Senate procedural rule calls for 60 votes, rather than a simple majority).

If lawmakers “fail to act [on climate change], as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” Harris said.

Abolishing the filibuster would require buy-in from the Senate itself, making the process complicated, but many activists and lawmakers alike have argued that major climate action will not pass while the filibuster remains. Warren has called for ending the filibuster and numerous other candidates have said they are open to the possibility.

However, not everyone is on board. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) balked at the idea during his round of questioning.

“What I have said is we need major filibuster reform. Budget reconciliation is the method we will use,” Sanders said, arguing that his $16.3 trillion climate plan could pass without abolishing the procedure.

Nuclear power also emerged as a divisive topic. Sanders supports ending nuclear power in around a decade, arguing that it “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to add more dangerous waste to this country.”

But Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and entrepreneur Andrew Yang both embraced nuclear energy, asserting that the energy source, which currently produces 20% of the nation’s electricity, remains critical to achieving net-zero emissions.

Warren struck a middle tone, laying out temporary support for nuclear power while endorsing no new nuclear plants. She said she supports easing away from nuclear reliance with a phase-out complete by 2035 at the latest.

Some candidates also staked out their positions on fracking. Just prior to the forum, Sanders called for all 2020 Democrats to back a federal fracking ban. Warren’s campaign has said she would support such a ban. And on Wednesday night, Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) made similar calls.

Klobuchar and Biden, by contrast, punted on the issue, with Klobuchar going so far as to tout natural gas as a “transitional fuel” bridging the move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.

While candidates disagreed over elements of policy, one person took direct hits over an upcoming fundraiser. Biden had scheduled a Thursday event with Andrew Goldman, co-founder of Western LNG, a fossil fuel company. Like many 2020 contenders, Biden has taken the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, which swears off donations from fossil fuel companies and executives.

When CNN host Anderson Cooper confronted Biden about the fundraiser after an audience member raised the issue, the former vice president argued that Goldman is “not a fossil fuel executive” per his financial disclosures. Biden then said he would need to do more research about Goldman’s business dealings, while one of his senior advisers, Symone Sanders, tweeted in defense of the candidate.

“Andrew Goldman isn’t a fossil fuel executive. He’s not involved in the day to day operation,” she wrote. “He’s not on the board of the company, nor the board of the portfolio company.” Goldman is listed second under the “Leadership” section on Western LNG’s website.

Biden has previously weathered criticism over his climate bonafides, with opponents like Sanders accusing him of a “middle of the road” approach to combatting the crisis. It was unclear on Thursday morning whether Biden might still be attending his scheduled evening fundraiser.

Voters in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District will vote Tuesday in their latest attempt to elect a U.S. Representative. The 2018 midterm election result was thrown out due to election fraud by the then-Republican nominee’s campaign and the seat has been vacant since January. Experts say the race is a toss-up, despite the district being one Trump carried by 11 points in 2016.

On Thursday, Bishop went on Fox News and was asked about a new bipartisan poll that showed him trailing Democratic nominee Dan McCready by a 46 to 42 margin.

“My opponent has been running for 27, 28 months,” he answered, “and he has been funded by $12 million, tons of money from outside the district. A lot from California, New York and New Jersey. A lot of it from hard-left sources.”

But most of the money in support of Bishop in the race has also come from outside of the Ninth District and the Tar Heel state.

Last month, the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics reported that while McCready has outraised Bishop in the race, outside spending by super PACs, party committees, and dark money groups has significantly favored the Republican nominee.

The report noted that the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republicans’ campaign arm, had already spent $1.1 million on the race and had reportedly reserved a total of $2.6 million in air time for commercials. “Two conservative super PACs — the Congressional Leadership Fund and Club for Growth Action — have also thrown their support behind Bishop, spending a combined $1.3 million on the race.”

And a ThinkProgress review of Bishop’s own campaign finance filings found that he had taken tens of thousands of dollars from out of state Republican politicians including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Doug LaMalfa (both of California) and Rep. Lee Zeldin (of New York).

Bishop was asked about Trump’s planned campaign visit to the district prior to Tuesday’s special election and whether it was needed for him to win.

“Absolutely,” Bishop admitted. “The president is going to come down and communicate to the people who love Donald Trump and support him as president and want him to accomplish the things he set out to do. They need to hear from him and so we’re delighted he is coming.”

Bishop is currently a state senator. He is best known for spearheading passage of the state’s anti-LGBTQ HB2 in 2016 — a law that cost the state’s economy billions. He was also an early investor in Gab, an online platform popular among white nationalists.

The Pentagon is diverting billions of dollars from already funded projects at military bases around the world in order to rush fence construction along the U.S.-Mexico border, Defense Department (DOD) officials announced Wednesday.

The department indicated the shunting of money away from military child care offerings was not DOD’s idea. “A Pentagon official said in a briefing that the department was given a ‘lawful order’ by Trump to divert the funds,” Reuters reported Wednesday.

The department also stressed that the day care and other projects being defunded were scheduled to break ground next fiscal year, suggesting that they are not stopping work on active construction to yank money to the border.

The delayed projects related to quality-of-life for families on bases include a new elementary school tied to a U.S. military facility in Germany, a day care center at the Maryland base where the primary crews responsible for servicing and operating Air Force One are stationed, and a new fire station at a Marine Corps facility in South Carolina. Housing construction for troops and families on bases is being held harmless in the fund diversion, the Pentagon said.

The department has also deferred various projects tied to training and readiness for troops themselves, according to the New York Times. A pistol range in Oklahoma, a cyber-defense facility in Virginia, various unspecified flight simulators, scheduled repairs at ports, and firing range facilities will all be mothballed to build the fencing, according to the Times.

A total of $3.6 billion in already-appropriated DOD funds is being shifted to Trump’s fencing projects, according to a department letter reported Tuesday by The Daily Beast. The word “wall” appears zero times in the letter, the site noted, but it lists locations and structural details for 140 total miles of new fence. Much of that length will replace or augment existing structures.

More than a third of the total cost and mileage goes to the 52 miles of Rio Grande riverfront stretching north from Laredo, Texas. The bulk of the other projects, however, either replace existing pedestrian and vehicle barriers with newer versions, or add additional layers to existing fence lines.

Much of the U.S.-Mexico border is already fenced from previous administrations’ own lower-profile efforts at enhancing security. Those projects have left scars in border communities, where property owners subjected to eminent domain frequently received low-ball compensation offers and misleading pitches about how the new barriers would affect their ability to utilize the land they still own after the feds are done building.

Lawsuits and massive settlements followed those prior waves of construction, adding to the up-front cost of the projects. The big takeaway from government reviews of what had gone wrong was that rushing into these sorts of projects creates preventable waste and generates violations of landowners’ rights.

When the people done wrong by hurried government appraisers and lawyers are rich, they can afford to sue and hold out for something approximating just compensation. It’s the little guys — families living on modest tracts, and medium-large ranching and agricultural operations that look rich on paper but actually trade in razor-fine profit margins — who end up screwed for good.

Part of the problem for such people, as South Texas locals told ThinkProgress in the spring, is that the engineers who design the fences often don’t want to cling tightly to the river itself.

Norie Garza has been building a small vacation home on seven riverfront acres for most of the past decade. In 2018, the feds showed up to let her know that new fencing would be coming in behind her land. The engineers were sympathetic, she said, but still shoved legal papers on her.

“Basically you sign it or you spend thousands of dollars [fighting] and at the end of the day you still have to allow them to come in,” she said.

Sugarcane farmer and rancher Sam Sparks III broadly supports the idea of cracking down on drug traffickers in his area, but said the idea you can both secure those areas and keep them productive for the families who’ve invested years of sweat and millions of dollars into them is a fiction.

The engineers offer to put in security gates and distribute passcodes so people like Sparks — who had about half his family’s 2,000-acre holdings cut off by fencing — can prevent their southern acreage turning fallow. But that’s no solution.

“[Traffickers] are gonna target those people that have that code, without a doubt,” Sparks said. Even if he were the type to arm himself and keep working acreage the fencing might isolate, he said, he’d never be able to hire workers to do it with him.

“When you stretch a wall across that property, then for sure nobody will want to work down there in that 900 acres, because then you’re trapped. If you get in danger, there’s no getting away,” he said. “We need the protection. We’ve gotta stop this, because it’s gotten out of hand. But at the same time, what are we willing to sacrifice in the name of doing so?”

His “plan” to keep a no-deal Brexit on the cards (which Johnson insists is necessary despite the catastrophic economic damage it could cause) was defeated twice in the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday. Shortly after, Johnson was defeated by Parliament in his attempt to call a general election.

There is also mounting anger within the Conservative Party on Johnson’s decision to expel 21 Conservative Members of Parliament (MP) from the party, who were all opposed to letting Britain leave the European Union without a deal.

But, according to President Donald Trump, Johnson is, in fact, doing a superb job. “Boris is a friend of mine and he’s going at it, there’s no question about it,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday afternoon. “He knows how to win, Boris knows how to win. Don’t worry about him he’s going to be OK.”

Then, on Thursday Johnson — who once said that Trump had a “quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of the president of the United States” — suffered yet another defeat. And this one was much more personal: Jo Johnson, Boris’ younger brother and a Conservative MP, resigned from Parliament.

“In recent weeks I’ve been torn between family loyalty and the national interest,” Jo Johnson tweeted. “It’s an unsolvable tension and time for others to take on my roles as MP & Minister.”

The fact that Johnson’s own brother has resigned from his government, barely a month-and-a-half into his tenure as prime minister, highlights the intractable Conservative civil war at the heart of the Brexit debate, which has completely fractured the party.

This is further emphasized by the prominence of a few of the MPs expelled by Johnson earlier this week, which includes former chancellor of the Exchequer (the second-most important position in British politics) Phillip Hammond, as well as Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill about whom, ironically enough, Johnson previously wrote a biography.

Trump, for his part, previously promised that “We’re going to do a very big trade deal — bigger than we’ve ever had with the U.K.” But whether that would actually happen is, as with everything Brexit-related, very much an open question. Such a trade deal would inevitably anger the United States’ trading partners within the European Union (both the individual countries and the block as a whole).

What’s more, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned that Congress would block any legislation if it undermines the Good Friday peace agreement concerning Northern Ireland. The key debate is over the border separating the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.

European officials are desperate to preserve the “backstop” (i.e. a seamless border between Northern Ireland and the Republic) which was one of the key provisions of the Good Friday Agreement. Johnson, however, has been repeatedly pushing for a hard border between the two countries.

“Whatever form it takes, Brexit cannot be allowed to imperil the Good Friday agreement, including the seamless border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, especially now, as the first generation born into the hope of Good Friday 21 years ago comes into adulthood,” Pelosi said earlier in August. “We cannot go back.”

On Thursday, Trump’s dear friends on Fox & Friends finally admitted what has been obvious for years: this was an empty claim, a broken promise, and a huge failure on the part of Trump.

The show’s famously pro-Trump hosts made the admission that Mexico is never paying for the wall in a segment highlighting the administration’s plan to unilaterally divert $3.6 billion in funds from 127 defense programs to begin major construction.

Noting that the wall was Trump’s “most prominent campaign promise,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt observed that the administration faces a choice between military projects and building up to 500 miles of the wall — far less than what Trump promised to build as a candidate.

Co-host Brian Kilmeade slammed “sensationalist headlines” but, when addressing one noting that Trump’s new plan “lets Mexico off the hook” for paying, he conceded: “He’s right. The president never should have said Mexico was gonna pay for the wall.”

Co-host Steve Doocy then attempted to defend Trump, suggesting that perhaps the president thought he would get Mexico to pay for the wall but was just mistaken.

“I think he thought he would find a way for Mexico to pay for it, but as we know that did not work.”

Earhardt then noted that the money for Trump’s wall would now come from money that would have gone to things including a middle school at Fort Campbell, child development centers at Joint Base Andrews, and a fire station in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Doocy then suggested that if Congress decides to appropriate more money to go to those previously funded and now raided programs, they could save the projects. In other words, rather than cut spending, the co-host thinks the solution is for them to appropriate the same $3.6 billion to the same programs twice.

In February 2016, Trump said that Mexico would be “very happy about” paying for the wall. “I’ll talk to them. They’re going to be thrilled to be paying for the wall. We’re going to be the smart people. We’re not going to be the people that get pushed around all over the place, we’re going to be the smart people.”

In April 2016, Trump vowed the wall would be done by now: “I would say it’ll be complete within two years from the time we start. We’ll start quickly. We’ll start quickly. And it’ll be a real wall. It’ll be a real wall.”

On another occasion, he said: “We’ll build a wall, I promise. I promise, we will build a wall. If there’s ever a second term, you’ll say, man, he got that wall built fast, we’re going to put him up. So we’ll see. We’ll build the wall.”

Though little to no progress has been made in building a new wall over the first three years of Trump’s administration, he has repeatedly lied claiming it was already well underway.

One in every twelve people who receives food stamps nationwide will lose them under the policy — some 3.6 million people, according to new analysis by Mathematica, the private policy analysis firm the Department of Agriculture (USDA) has relied upon for the past 40 years.

“I was surprised by the extent of the impact in some of the southern states, such as Texas,” Mathematica senior research programmer Sarah Lauffer said. The impact was always going to be severe in states that apply the current rules in the most generous fashion, but southern states have generally not extended their eligibility lines quite as far. Despite that, Lauffer said, her team found “34% of elderly Texans receiving benefits will lose them through this rule.”

Almost 400,000 people in Texas currently receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits would lose them. Another 328,000 in Florida, 200,000 in New York, 97,000 in Georgia, and 176,000 in Washington state face cuts, to name just a few standouts.

Almost one in five Wisconsin households currently getting help with their groceries will lose the benefit, as well as 16% of such households in Oregon, Nevada, Iowa, and Delaware. Two of every 13 SNAP households in Minnesota and Texas will have to find food money elsewhere.

The administration plans to slash benefits by ending a popular, bipartisan policy known as broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE). That policy protects low-wage workers from a quirk of poverty-assistance law known as the “benefits cliff,” whereby earning or saving slightly too much money can trigger a low-income family’s eviction from public assistance programs.

Ending the expanded eligibility system for SNAP will also boot roughly half a million kids out of free school meal programs nationwide. The administration has insisted those kids could all hop right back in by filling out application forms currently mooted by the BBCE system, but experts have warned it doesn’t necessarily work that way.

The administration forecasts a $10 billion total draw-down in SNAP spending over the next five years once the policy is enacted. It didn’t estimate the long-term costs of making families hungrier and more desperate.

“Allowing families whose gross income is a little over the poverty level to receive food assistance helps make sure that both the kids and adults in the family are able to eat,” said Lisa Davis, Senior Vice President at the poverty policy center No Kid Hungry. “Children that don’t get the nutrition that they need end up with worse health-care outcomes, worse physical and cognitive development, they have poorer outcomes in school, they find it harder to concentrate, they don’t do as well on tests, there are more behavioral issues.”

The administration has always known it would be yanking food assistance away from millions. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials said as much when they announced the new regulations in August.

“It doesn’t make any sense to us,” Food Research Action Center’s Ellen Vollinger said. “Taking food away from people is just going to make their food security situation worse, make them hungrier. It will have a negative effect on the economy at a time when some economists are warning us we would be in for another downturn.”

Non-profit groups across the country are dutifully filing public comments criticizing the rule and pointing out all the ways the USDA appears to have ignored evidence, congressional intent, and practical facts in issuing its proposal. The 60-day window for such comments closes later in the fall, and the administration will likely face legal challenges if it attempts to handle the objections with a pro-forma sweep of the hand.

But USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue has been determined to kill BBCE for months, ever since Congress decided to retain the policy in last year’s Farm Bill. There’s a strong chance the cut – in some form – will have kicked in by this time next year.

These families earn a little more than the statutory maximum income for SNAP eligibility. But that doesn’t mean they can afford to see even the modest food assistance they currently receive disappear from their monthly budgets.

“They’re making trade-offs between what bills to pay. Do they pay the rent, or get a car fixed so they can keep going to work, or keep the lights on?” Davis said. “We see those families cut back on food first. [BBCE] helps make sure that both the kids and adults in the family are able to eat.”

Trump’s policies hit barely-red states hardest

As Thursday’s state-level figures suggest, the categorical eligibility smackdown is going to hit especially hard in four states where very narrow Trump wins in 2016 tilted the electoral college irrevocably in his favor.

Trump won Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes last time. He’ll have dumped 118,000 Wisconsin residents off of food stamps by Election Day if the rule goes through as planned.

One in every nine people currently benefiting from SNAP in Michigan will be booted under the rule – roughly 165,000 men, women, and children in total. Trump won the state by just 10,704 votes last go round.

In Pennsylvania, which Trump carried by just under 47,000 votes, his food stamps cut will dump more than five times that many people off the food-aid rolls.

The potential economic and electoral self-sabotage is particularly striking given that bipartisan majorities in Congress have repeatedly rejected this precise policy, as recently as last year. The right-wing crusade against broad-based categorical eligibility has never won a majority of Republican hearts and minds. Like the vast majority of voters who oppose cutting food stamps, the rump of GOP elected understand that BBCE is an effective investment in children’s long-term futures, local economies’ short-term health, and working families’ progress up the income ladder.

“For the most part the attacks on SNAP in recent years have not been successful. Congress has decided not to weaken snap in the 2018 farm bill, rejected multiple crazy assaults on it,” Vollinger said.

“We’re hopeful that there will be enough comment and insight brought to bear during this comment period that the administration would reconsider.”

Hunger’s ripple effect

It’s not just SNAP recipients who will feel the impact: The suffering the administration plans to inflict on working-poor families will likely also be felt in higher-income households, too, in the form of a broader economic slowdown. Consumer spending drives the whole economy. Cutting SNAP benefits means consumers have less to spend.

USDA staff issued updated estimates on the economic multiplier effects of SNAP spending earlier this summer. Though the Trump administration team’s official guesstimate is slightly lower than past multipliers, the report includes a variety of models. Each additional dollar of SNAP benefit paid out generates between $1.50 and $1.80 in total economic activity when the economy is struggling, their tables show.

The agency also broke the economic impacts out by sector, with some surprising results. The trade and transportation industry takes the largest hit from SNAP cuts. But across nine major industrial sectors the agency analyzed, the level of cuts to be imposed by the new eligibility restrictions stand to kill between 27,000 and 32,000 jobs per year over the next half-decade.

Forecasters who make their livings predicting what the economy will do next are already starting to worry that a nationwide recession looms. Multiple states have experienced recessions within their own borders in the past two years, and at least two appear to be on the brink of entering new contractions based on sudden jumps in local unemployment rates.

The national economy is still growing, but at a slower pace over the past two quarters than previously. The investor class is souring on long-term U.S. government bonds, producing the dreaded yet tediously named a “yield-curve inversion” – a phenomenon that does not guarantee a recession, but which has occurred prior to every U.S. recession in the last half-century.

The country’s manufacturing sector had been expanding for three straight years, but in August, it contracted – again, not a surefire sign of an overall downturn, but certainly an unhealthy indicator.

Presidents almost always get too much credit for good economies and too much blame for bad ones, as the financier and policy expert Barry Ritholtz noted in a recent column.

But Trump is doing more to actively poke the markets in the eye than your average president. And while the economist and investor classes grow alarmed about the sorts of sophisticated technical indicators that make the business pages, the administration is also planning to jab the working poor with a sharp stick.

Whether the SNAP cuts Trump seeks would help tip the country into a recession or not, they are certain to make life harder for people ill-positioned to absorb such a pinch. Presidents seeking re-election generally rise or fall with the health of the economy they’re credited – fairly or unfairly – with creating.

Stewart has said publicly she does not identify as bisexual or lesbian, and doesn’t want to choose a label for her sexuality. In the same interview she added, “I was informed by an old school mentality, which is — you want to preserve your career and your success and your productivity, and there are people in the world who don’t like you, and they don’t like that you date girls, and they don’t like that you don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘lesbian’, but you also don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘heterosexual’. And people like to know stuff, so what the fuck are you?’”

Although it may, at times, appear as though LGBTQ representation and participation in Hollywood has achieved some semblance of parity, Stewart’s experience is far from unique. Several young, openly LGBTQ actors such as Ellen Page and Ezra Miller have talked about how their gender and sexuality have affected how people talk to them about their careers.

Ellen Page, star of Inception, Juno, and Tallulah, came out as gay in 2014. “I was distinctly told, by people in the industry, when I started to become known: ‘People cannot know you’re gay.’,” she said to Porter Edit earlier this year. “And I was pressured — forced, in many cases — to always wear dresses and heels for events and photo shoots. As if lesbians don’t wear dresses and heels. But I will never let anyone put me in anything I feel uncomfortable in ever again.”

Ezra Miller, who has starred in Justice League, Madame Bovary, and the most recent Harry Potter franchise Fantastic Beasts, came out as queer in 2012 to Out, and told GQ in 2018 that their gender is fluid.

“I’m comfortable with all the pronouns. I let he/his/him ride, and that’s fine,” Miller said.

But Miller said they were told not to be open about their sexuality and gender by a number of people who thought it would damage their acting career.

In 2017, Miller said, “I won’t specify [who told me not to come out.] Folks in the industry, folks outside the industry. People I’ve never spoken to. They said there’s a reason so many gay, queer, gender-fluid people in Hollywood conceal their sexual identity, or their gender identity in their public image. I was told I had done a ‘silly’ thing in…thwarting my own potential to be a leading man.”

Sarah Paulson, who also chooses not to label her sexual identity, told Porter Edit in 2017 said that she was told that her relationship with Holland Taylor could be a liability for her career.

“Early on, when people found out I was with Holland, some said: ‘I think you have to be careful, I’m afraid it’s going to affect your career negatively,'” the Ocean’s 8 actor said.

One of the most notorious examples of Hollywood reacting negatively to an actor’s sexuality was Rupert Everett, star of My Best Friend’s Wedding and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who said that he stopped getting offers for roles in 2007. He has since focused on writing scripts and roles that he could play, such as poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

He said in 2010, to BBC’s Radio 4, that Hollywood is “an extremely conservative world” that “pretends to be a liberal world.”

Although LGBTQ character diversity in films is increasing in some respects, Hollywood has a lot of progress to make on LGBTQ inclusion. According to GLAAD’s 2019 Studio Responsibility Index, LGBTQ characters had more screen time than in previous years — of the 20 LGBTQ-inclusive films released last year, 10 featured more than 10 minutes of screen-time for an LGBTQ character. When looking at each of the 45 LGBTQ characters GLAAD counted, 26 had less than three minutes of screen time and 16 had less than one minute of screen time. Transgender characters were absent from the 110 major studio releases for the second year in a row.

And there is often tremendous buzz around movies’ supposed LGBTQ representation, only to ultimately fail to deliver anything meaningful in terms of screen time or actual representation of a queer relationship.

Often there is only a hint of a relationship, or a wink and a nod, rather than representation in line with relationships between straight people. Beauty and the Beast’s live action remake was applauded for featuring a gay LeFou, but he was only very briefly shown dancing with a man in drag during a ballroom scene, largely for comedic effect. Finding Dory briefly showed two women together in a park, which some audience members interpreted as a lesbian couple and others didn’t, and they were only shown in a speechless reaction shot. When questioned about the women, the movie’s co-director Andrew Stanton said, “They can be whatever you want them to be. There’s no right or wrong answer.” Most recently, Marvel’s Avengers Endgame tossed in a quick throwaway line alluding to a gay relationship, a scene Disney pumped up as the first openly gay character in the largest box office franchise in cinematic history.

Some LGBTQ viewers were upset with the representation of Harry Potter character Albus Dumblemore in Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald, who J.K. Rowling said had a relationship of a “sexual dimension” with Gellert Grindelwald. But when it came time to show that relationship onscreen and address Dumbledore’s sexuality in general, the director, David Yates, said those things would not be explicit in the film. Similarly, in Thor: Ragnarok, the character Valkyrie — portrayed by out actress Tessa Thompson — had a scene which made her sexuality explicit but was ultimately cut from the film. Some of that representation may improve soon, however — In Thor: Love and Thunder, the next sequel in the same franchise, Valkyrie will reportedly get more explicit representation of a relationship with a woman, according to i09. Marvel Studios confirmed a romantic storyline of Valkyrie seeking a new queen.

But, on yet another day of high Parliament drama over the seemingly-endless saga of Brexit, the Conservative (Tory) MP thrust himself into the spotlight by publicly defecting to the opposition, figuratively and quite literally joining the Liberal Democrats seated in the chamber. In doing so, Lee left the government of Boris Johnson without a working majority, thereby severely damaging his attempts to pass through his preferred form of Brexit.

“The Conservative government is aggressively pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways. It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk unnecessarily and it is wantonly endangering the integrity of the United Kingdom,” Lee said in a statement. “It is using political manipulation, bullying, and lies. And it is doing these things in a deliberate and considered way.”

In a later interview, Lee revealed that he decided to defect after he listened to a radio discussion on LBC between a doctor and arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. Rees-Mogg, a Conservative MP, said that the doctor’s concern that some patients could die due to medicine shortages after a potential no-deal Brexit was “deeply irresponsible” and accused him of trying to “spread fear across the country.”

Rees-Mogg, for his part, woke up on Wednesday to discover that he’d become a global meme, as an image emerged of him slouched on the benches inside the House of Commons looking like a Victorian aristocrat in an opium den.

Lee’s defection, and his very public snipe at Rees-Mogg, highlights the Conservative Party’s civil war at the heart of the torturous, never-ending Brexit debate.

The Tories have always been deeply fractured as to whether Britain would be better off in or outside the European Union. Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, called the Brexit referendum in 2016 in an attempt to unite his party’s warring factions. Theresa May, the prime minister who preceded Johnson and who spent much of her tenure glumly trying to get Parliament to agree on a Brexit deal, also supported Cameron’s line that Britain would be better off in the E.U.

But, like a bunch of dithering college undergrads confronted with a term paper, the looming October 31st deadline for crashing out of the E.U. has led to a last-minute scramble among both pro- and anti-Brexit factions within the Conservative Party to get what they want. Last week, Johnson suspended Parliament for five weeks in an attempt to reduce the amount of time MPs had to block a no-deal scenario.

On Tuesday night, Johnson doubled down again by expelling 21 MPs from the Conservative Party, all of whom had adamantly refused to allow Johnson to leave the E.U. without a deal. In a sign of just how bitter the civil war has become, the expulsion included Phillip Hammond, former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Theresa May (the second-most important position in the British government) and Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill.

But on Wednesday the rebels struck back, inflicting a humiliating 328 to 301 defeat where a cross-party section of lawmakers voted to control the Parliamentary agenda, meaning they can move forward with a plan to prevent a no-deal Brexit. A second reading of the bill on Wednesday passed by 329 votes to 300.

Johnson has vehemently opposed such a move, arguing that it gives the E.U. more negotiating power. In response, Johnson said that he’d have no choice but to call an early general election.

This may sound good from an outside perspective, but there is absolutely no guarantee that an election would bring about the defeat of Johnson and the stopping of Brexit. As ThinkProgress has previously pointed out, Johnson could use the election to essentially re-litigate the 2016 referendum, painting himself as the only politician who can deliver the supposed “will of the people.”

Bearing in mind the divisions in the Labour Party over Brexit, and the rise of the Brexit Party, it is entirely possible that Brexiteers rally around Johnson and deliver him a general election victory, which would, in turn, allow him to potentially push through a no-deal Brexit, as well as give him another four years of governing.

To make matters even more complicated, there’s no guarantee that Parliament will vote to authorize a general election. Johnson needs the support of two thirds of Parliament to allow a general election to take place, and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has made it clear that he will only allow a general election if the rebels are allowed to enact their law guarding against no-deal.

As ever with Brexit, no one has a clear idea of precisely what will happen next. The only thing for certain is that the Houses of Parliament are likely to see unprecedented levels of drama over the next two weeks.

According to some estimates, Dorian may be the slowest-moving Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean in history.

Dorian’s slow crawl is similar to other major hurricanes in recent years, and seems to be an increasingly common trend for these devastating storms. Scientists worry climate change is playing a role, allowing hurricanes to become more destructive as they slow down due to warming temperatures. When they stall, hurricanes are able to do far more damage than when they move quickly.

As of Wednesday morning, Dorian was moving towards the Southeastern United States after decimating several Bahamian islands. Forecasts indicate that Florida and Georgia could largely be spared the worst of the storm, even as images of mass-destruction in the Bahamas begin to emerge.

The storm has weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 2, lowering its deadly windspeed but expanding in size, thereby widening the area in its path.

As #HurricaneDorian spins less than 100 miles east-northeast of #DaytonaBeach, #Florida this morning, NOAA’s #GOES16 satellite is using its 1-km visible band to track where #Dorian is going next. Get the latest here NHC_Atlantic. #flwx #gawx #scwx #ncwx pic.twitter.com/JZKZWKs5cq

— NOAA Satellites PA (@NOAASatellitePA) September 4, 2019

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued a warning in advance of the storm, forecasting “very heavy rainfall totals of up 15 inches” in parts of the Carolinas, with flash flooding also a significant possibility. The wider Southeast is bracing for impacts into the end of the week, including storm surges and high winds.

It is likely, however, that the worst of Dorian’s damages have already happened in the Bahamas. After destroying much of Great Abaco, a 10-mile-wide island, on Sunday, for eight and a half hours, Dorian headed toward Grand Bahama. There, the storm sat for 40 hours, moving at a snail’s pace of just over one mile per hour, sometimes becoming completely stationary.

During that time, the storm did unprecedented damage. The death toll in the islands now stands at seven, but officials have said many people remain unaccounted for, and they expect the number of casualties to rise. Around 70% of homes in impacted areas are also reportedly underwater.

Prime Minister Hubert Minnis called the event “one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history” and said that more would be known in coming days as the country seeks to recover.

Hurricanes are naturally occurring phenomena, and it is common for them to stall, especially over land. But they typically move at a much faster pace, which can help mitigate the colossal damage they cause.

But that hasn’t been the case with Dorian, or with other recent memorable hurricanes.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey slammed into the Texas Gulf Coast, hovering over Houston for days and unleashing a mountain of water, claiming dozens of lives and racking up over $100 billion in damages. One year later, Hurricane Florence similarly devastated the Carolinas as it stalled over land, dumping so much rain it turned one town into a temporary island. Florence was only a Category 1 storm when it made landfall in the United States, but due to its glacial pace and its heavy rains, the hurricane’s damages were catastrophic.

A study published in June by federal scientists found that hurricane speed in the North Atlantic Ocean decreased 17% between 1944 and 2017. While it is hard to connect any one disaster to climate change, scientists have linked the stalling pace of hurricanes to slowing global winds, which in turn seem to be impacted by ice melt in the Arctic.

That trend means that there could be more storms like Dorian in the future, and occurring more often, especially if recent years are an indicator. There have only been 35 Atlantic hurricanes with Category 5 speed winds in reordered history. Of those, five have been in the last four years.