Month: January 2018

“Glee” star Mark Salling, who faced sentencing in March on child pornography charges, was found dead Tuesday in Los Angeles, his attorney confirmed to HuffPost. He was 35.

“I can confirm that Mark Salling passed away early this morning,” attorney Michael Procter said in a statement. “Mark was a gentle and loving person, a person of great creativity, who was doing his best to atone for some serious mistakes and errors of judgment. He is survived by his mother and father, and his brother. The Salling family appreciates the support they have been receiving and asks for their privacy to be respected.”

A Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson told HuffPost that authorities responded to a reported death in the 11900 block of Big Tujunga Canyon Road at 8:50 a.m. Tuesday, but wouldn’t identify the person. TMZ, citing unnamed law enforcement officials, was first to report Salling’s death as a suicide. 

Salling, who played Noah “Puck” Puckerman on “Glee,” faced up to seven years in prison after pleading guilty in October to possessing child pornography involving prepubescent minors. A plea deal required him to register as a sex offender, enter a treatment program and pay $50,000 to each victim who requested compensation. He was also forbidden from contacting anyone under 18 without a parent or guardian present, and was barred from going within 100 feet of public parks and schoolyards. 

Salling’s sentencing hearing was set for March 7.  

In December 2015, the actor was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of underage girls, along with two videos, on his personal computer. Authorities found tens of thousands of images depicting children as young as 2, according to court documents. 

Salling also faced legal conflicts over sexual assault accusations. A former girlfriend, Roxanne Gorzela, sued the actor in 2013 for allegedly forcing her into unprotected sex, according to documents obtained first by the New York Daily News and confirmed by People. She also alleged that he pushed her to the ground in an argument over the incident. Salling settled with Gorzela for around $2.7 million in 2015. 

Another woman said the actor forced her into sex in 2012 after she revoked her consent. She contacted police in 2016, but the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges, citing insufficient evidence.

Born in Denver on Aug. 17, 1982, Salling found a unique outlet for his lifelong interest in music on “Glee,” a musical comedy series following the members of a high-school glee club that ran for six seasons, concluding in 2015. 

“I’ve been doing the whole music thing my whole life ― piano lessons, writing songs, singing and performing,” Salling told talk-show host Wendy Williams in 2009, explaining how he landed the role of Puck, best friend of quarterback Finn Hudson.

“It’s pretty natural,” Salling added. 

Finn was played by Corey Monteith, who died in 2013 from a mix of alcohol and heroin. 

“Today we lost another Glee cast member,” “Glee” vocal arranger Tim Davis wrote on Twitter, where a debate had brewed over the response to Salling’s death. 

“Let me be clear. Having compassion for Mark Salling in no way minimizes his crimes, nor does it minimize the pain and devastation of the victims of those crimes. I’m just saying stop adding to his family’s pain. This was their son. If you’re without sin, feel free to cast stones,” Davis continued.

His comment was reshared by Jane Lynch, who played antagonistic cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester. Approached  by TMZ, Lynch called the death “tragic.”

“Oh Mark,” wrote Iqbal Theba, who played the show’s Principal Figgins.

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HELLO to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the Crisis Text Line. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.

This article has been updated with additional details about Salling’s legal issues.

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump claimed to be calling for Americans to come together on the issue of immigration in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. 

But he couldn’t resist painting immigration as an “us vs. them” struggle. Them: Immigrants, many of them violent gang members or terrorists. Us: native-born American citizens ― pointedly referred to using the same term often used for undocumented young people who came to the U.S. as children.

“Americans are dreamers too,” Trump said.

He didn’t refer to any foreign nations as “shithole countries” in his speech, say Mexican immigrants were rapists, or claim that other countries were sending their ”worst people” through a diversity visa lottery. But Trump’s framing of the state of U.S. immigration was as bleak and marked by falsehoods as ever. As he pitched immigration policy changes, Trump stayed on the morbid script he set when he launched his candidacy.

“For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities,” Trump said. “They have allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans. Most tragically, they have caused the loss of many innocent lives.”

Trump is currently negotiating an immigration deal with Congress to avert a situation he caused: the imminent threat of nearly 700,000 undocumented young people losing deportation relief because he ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. He made a fairly dramatic, albeit politically popular, shift when he came out in support for a path to citizenship for about 1.8 million so-called Dreamers, who consider themselves American in every way but on paper. But he’s demanding conditions that could sink a deal. Dreamers can get relief, Trump says, so long as he can more easily deport other undocumented people, build a border wall and slash legal immigration.

In service of those policy changes, Trump highlighted immigrant stories solely in negative terms. He discussed the murder of two teenage girls, whose family members were guests at the speech, allegedly at the hands of MS-13 gang members. He also highlighted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who has worked to arrest members of the gang. Later, Trump mentioned two terror suspects who legally immigrated to the country.

No one denies that bad actors exist within the immigrant population, but there’s no evidence to support Trump’s arguments that immigrants bring in more crime, or that immigrants who enter through the diversity visa lottery or through family-based visas are more likely to be terrorists.

Still, Trump’s policies are based on convincing Americans that both are true. He wants to end the diversity visa lottery, which provides green cards to people from countries with low immigration levels, many of them in Africa ― some of which he reportedly called “shithole countries.” (He denied making that remark.)

Trump also wants to end types of family-based immigrant visas, which he refers to derisively as “chain migration.” The president wants to allow Americans and legal permanent residents to sponsor only spouses and minor children for green cards ― a move that would cut legal immigration dramatically. He claimed that as of now, “a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives,” which isn’t true; in reality, U.S. citizens can sponsor only their spouses, children, parents and siblings. These desired changes would most heavily affect Hispanic and black immigrants.

In addition to those legal immigration changes, Trump wants to increase border security efforts, something Democrats broadly support as well. Some even said they were open to giving him his “wall,” which he has already acknowledged is a term for wall, fence or nothing at all.

But Trump made closing “loopholes” another piece of his border security pitch, both in his demands to Congress and in his State of the Union address. The “loopholes,” according to Trump, are policies that ensure unaccompanied immigrant children detained at the border are not deported without getting a chance to state their case for getting relief to stay in the U.S., that kids are not detained indefinitely, and that asylum-seekers are not turned away.

All of Trump’s immigration demands have hit resistance from Congress ― even with Republicans, many of whom disagree with his desire to cut legal immigration levels. With only a week to go until another must-pass government funding bill and a bit over a month until DACA recipients begin losing protections in greater numbers, there’s still no deal in sight.

The president gave ground on one thing, legal status for some Dreamers, and expects massive concessions on multiple facets of immigration in return. Or, as he called it during the speech, “a down-the-middle compromise.”

“For over 30 years, Washington has tried and failed to solve this problem,” Trump said. “This Congress can be the one that finally makes it happen.”

Trump’s immigration remarks got a positive reception from former Ku Klux Klan honcho David Duke. 

They were less well-received by Democratic lawmakers, about 30 of whom brought Dreamers as their guests to the State of the Union.

In the official Democratic response to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-Mass.) denounced the Trump administration’s policies for “turning American life into a zero-sum game” in which the well-being of some Americans must come at the expense of others.

Speaking to an audience in the auto body shop of a vocational high school in Fall River, Massachusetts, the third-term congressman described the proposition Trump has offered the country as one in which “we can guarantee America’s safety if we slash our safety net” and “we can take care of sick kids if we sacrifice Dreamers.”

“As if the mechanic in Pittsburgh and the teacher in Tulsa and the day-care worker in Birmingham are somehow bitter rivals rather than mutual casualties of a system forcefully rigged for those at the top,” Kennedy said.

Democrats offer a more inclusive vision in which one ordinary American’s fortunes do not need to fall in order to make another’s rise, he declared.

“We choose both. We fight for both,” Kennedy said. “Because the strongest, richest, greatest nation in the world shouldn’t leave anyone behind.”

Democratic policies that exemplify those values, according to Kennedy, include a “living wage, paid leave and affordable child care”; a health care system that “offers mercy”; and an “economy strong enough to boast record stock prices and brave enough to admit that top CEOs making 300 times the average worker is not right.”

Switching briefly to Spanish, Kennedy addressed Dreamers, as undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children are commonly known.

“You are part of our history. We are going to fight for you, and we are not going away,” he said.

For the millions of Americans whose primary language is Spanish, however, the Democratic Party offered a separate response. Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman, a new progressive state lawmaker and immigrant from Peru, delivered a Spanish-language response at the same time as Kennedy on Spanish-language television.

Kennedy, a 37-year-old former prosecutor and grandson of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who was assassinated in 1968, is frequently discussed as one of the party’s rising stars. He drew particular acclaim for passionate speeches denouncing Republican policies, including an indignant response to the claim by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that repealing the Affordable Care Act was “an act of mercy.”

In selecting Kennedy to deliver the speech, Democratic congressional leaders tapped someone with mainstream liberal credentials who has stopped short of the most ambitious progressive positions and economic populist rhetoric. Kennedy has not signed on to single-payer health care legislation that has the support of a majority of the House Democratic Caucus, and he opposes the legalization of marijuana.

Kennedy’s speech reflected the Democratic Party’s effort to at once capitalize on Trump’s unpopularity and focus on pocketbook issues that it believes will appeal to a broad array of voters.

By attacking Trump for pitting American workers against one another, Kennedy managed to present a progressive economic message that Democrats might deliver under any Republican president.

Still, he made sure to channel the shock of liberals who believe that Trump is a break from American traditions of civility that has given comfort to white supremacists and other extreme groups.

Listing especially upsetting developments during Trump’s tenure, Kennedy was sure to include “hatred and supremacy proudly marching in our streets” ― a reference to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that Trump refused to condemn unequivocally.

Many Americans, he concluded, have “that nagging, sinking feeling, no matter your political beliefs: This is not right. This is not who we are.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address was competently delivered and — for him — relatively inoffensive. The mainstream media and the television pundits will surely deem it to be a presidential moment, representative of yet another pivot to the center.

But one speech does not erase Trump’s record. The speech’s banality — its embrace of optimism and platitude — is a mask. Do not be fooled: Political extremism, divisive rhetoric and bizarre behavior have characterized the first year of Trump’s presidency and underlie many of the harmless-sounding proposals he talked about Tuesday night.

This is the president, recall, who rose to political power on the racist lie that his predecessor was born in Kenya, and he ran for president while calling to ban all Muslims from the country and deriding Mexican immigrants as rapists. He was slow to denounce white nationalists, who have looked to him as a leader and marched openly in the streets of this country. And since last summer, this president has launched an all-out war on the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election — a war that continued to rage this week.

 Trump mentioned none of those facts in his State of the Union address. Indeed, the speech was most notable for all of the policies and initiatives of his administration that he downplayed or left out entirely.

On immigration, his signature issue, the president called for compromise on the status of undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. But he failed to mention that the crisis that has beset these immigrants, known as Dreamers, is one of his own making. Last year, Trump canceled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which granted Dreamers renewable two-year deportation protections and work permits. Thousands of them have already lost their protections. Trump also didn’t talk about his unilateral cancellation of protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans and Sudanese — people who have lived in the U.S. for years and will now have to leave. And he didn’t mention his three attempts to ban people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S, the third attempt of which is due for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling later this year.

On the economy, Trump bragged about job growth and the Republican tax cut bill, but he didn’t mention that those tax cuts were overwhelmingly tilted toward the wealthy and corporations. He argued that the country is undergoing a “new American moment” under his presidency, promising, “There has never been a better time to start living the American dream.” He talked about bonuses and wage gains, but he certainly didn’t mention that the richest 5 percent of taxpayers would see the largest percentage increase in after-tax income under the law.

On defense, Trump bragged about U.S. success in the war against ISIS. But he didn’t mention that if he gets his way, transgender members of the military won’t be able to serve openly.

On North Korea, Trump described his policy against the hermit kingdom as “waging a campaign of maximum pressure” to prevent Kim Jong Un’s regime from acquiring nuclear weapons. That sounds like a reasonable — even presidential — thing to say. But it obscures the fact that Trump’s actual policy toward North Korea has been erratic and ineffective. Last year, North Korea tested a missile capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. Instead of pushing for nuclear negotiations, the Trump administration is reportedly considering a preemptive strike against North Korea — which nonproliferation experts say would do little to deter the rogue state’s nuclear ambitions and would put millions in South Korea at risk of a retaliatory attack. Hours before Trump’s speech, The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had dropped Victor Cha, a former White House official, from consideration to become the U.S. ambassador to South Korea because he had warned of the risks of a so-called “bloody nose” attack on North Korea.

On Iran, Trump asked Congress to “address the fundamental flaws in the terrible Iran deal.” Left unsaid was the fact that Washington’s European allies have already said they will not cooperate with an effort to unilaterally rewrite the terms of the Iran deal. The best-case scenario is that the U.S. ends up isolated as Iran, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia continue abiding by the nuclear deal. The worst-case scenario is that Iran points to a U.S. violation of the agreement as an excuse to scrap the deal entirely and resumes production of weapons-grade nuclear material. And although Trump praised protesters in Iran “who rose up against the crimes of their corrupt dictatorship” and congratulated himself for voicing his support for the movement, he didn’t mention that he has spent months fighting in court to ban Iranians — protesters or otherwise — from entering the U.S. at all.

On nuclear weapons, the president suggested that “someday in the future there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together and eliminate their nuclear weapons.” But privately Trump has expressed a desire for a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, NBC reported last year. His administration is now pursuing the development of new low-yield nuclear weapons, according to a leaked copy of the Nuclear Posture Review obtained by HuffPost.

On Guantanamo Bay, Trump actually described his policy: an executive order that effectively reverses his predecessor’s commitment to closing the offshore prison. But he managed to avoid threatening to send American citizens to the prison where an ad-hoc judicial system has replaced what most Americans would consider due process. And he made no mention of his past threat to restart a now-defunct torture program.

On social issues, Trump said hardly anything. His administration is no longer standing behind transgender students who want to use the restroom of their choosing, but you wouldn’t know from listening to his speech. He didn’t mention his support for a ban on all abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation or his decision to reinstate the Reagan-era global ban on funding organizations that offer abortion as a family planning option or Republicans’ multiple attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. He touted “faith and family” as the “center of the American life” but faces sexual misconduct allegations from a number of women — and he backed a Senate candidate who had been accused of sexually pursuing teenage girls.

The mood in the chamber ― at least on the GOP side ― resembled a monster truck rally. Republicans said they loved the speech. They enthusiastically cheered the many applause lines. They hooted. They hollered. They chanted “U-S-A,” with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) pumping his fist to the rhythm of the cheer and Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) holding up a red “Make America great again” hat.

But on the Democratic side, many sat when Trump entered the chamber. Many others spent a considerable amount of time on their phones as the speech became the third-longest State of the Union ever delivered, at one hour, 20 minutes and 34 seconds.

Democrats hissed during some of Trump’s claims. One line that will likely stick in memory will be his assertion that “a single immigrant” could bring in “virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives” through family reunification. And the only reason it will be remembered is because it is so brazenly dishonest in a speech that contained a number of misleading claims, such as the GOP tax cut being the largest of all time. (It’s not.)

Hanging over the whole speech, but never acknowledged, was special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and what role Trump and his associates played in any sort of collusion.

Trump mentioned Russia briefly, only once, as a “rival” that challenges U.S. interests. But during the election, Trump’s campaign saw Russia as a potential ally. At campaign events, he repeatedly praised President Vladimir Putin and said he longed for a U.S. president who acted more like the strongman.

The Russia investigation is a constant in the White House. Mueller has already indicted four people connected to Trump, and the probe gets closer and closer to the president and whether he tried to obstruct justice by firing the FBI director. And it continues to shape, and undermine, the other actions Trump takes as president.

Trump said a lot — his speech was one of the longest State of the Union addresses ever. But what he didn’t say tells you everything.

Jenavieve Hatch contributed reporting