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Donald Trump is done pretending. He is now openly celebrating the Capitol riot

To anyone who was watching the events of January 6 unfold live on television, one thing was quite clear: Donald Trump was excited and proud about the violence he incited.

As the timeline of his actions that day shows, he was so wound up tweeting invective at Congress and his vice president, Mike Pence, that he barely slept the night before. Once the riot was underway, Trump spent hours resisting the pressure to call off his dogs, instead tweeting more invective and ass-covering calls to “stay peaceful” that the crowd knew not to take seriously. He was also reportedly gleefully entranced by the footage of the insurrection. After three hours of rioting, he finally told the crowd to “go home” — but only after it was clear that the riot wasn’t going to overturn the election.

The blood was still being mopped off the floors when the great GOP gaslighting began. Republicans fell in line behind this narrative that the riot was not incited by Trump, but that it was an entirely self-directed action of a few thousand kooks and that it was only a wild coincidence it started after Trump’s incendiary speech. Trump has always clearly chafed at the expectation that he go along with this narrative, wanted to instead publicly gloat about this demonstration of the power he has over people. Now, a year after the riot, Trump appears to be done with pretending to disapprove of the riot. He’s circling back to his initial instinct, which was to celebrate it as the glorious MAGA revolution he always wanted it to be. 

RELATED: Donald Trump’s having an awful week — and it’s only Wednesday

This was most obvious in Trump’s promise over the weekend to consider pardoning the January 6 rioters if he regains the White House in 2024. Politico soon reported that this was hardly some new urge of Trump’s. He spent the two weeks between the riot and Joe Biden’s inauguration asking advisors if he could issue a blanket pardon for everyone involved. He was waved off the idea, because it conflicted with the GOP’s strategy of denying Trump’s role. Trump, forever the coward, went along with the demands, even though it meant not getting to take the credit for the mayhem he unleashed. But, by making this promise of pardons — to a cheering crowd of thousands of supporters — he is sending a strong signal that he’s done pretending to feel anything but beaming pride over inciting an insurrection. 

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Which isn’t to say that Trump is no longer torn between wanting to celebrate the insurrection openly and worried about the legal jeopardy that might flow from that stance.

Over the weekend, he released an unhinged statement in which he outright said that he had wanted to “overturn” the election. But when members of the January 6 committee pointed out that was tantamount to a confession, Trump tried to walk it back with another statement about how he meant to say he just wanted to send “back the votes for recertification or approval.” 

RELATED: Donald Trump’s lackeys failed him — and saved democracy

The pardon promise also could create legal problems for Trump. As January 6 committee member Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told MSNBC Wednesday night, the rally speech is “very important evidence as to his intent” that Trump desired and condoned the violence. No doubt Trump’s lawyers are advising him of the same danger. And yet, he can’t or won’t stop trying to publicly recast the insurrectionists as heroes. In a Newsmax interview this week, Trump falsely insisted “nobody died on Jan. 6” except Ashli Babbitt, who he described as “one young, fine woman.” Making a martyr of Babbitt, who was shot because she was trying to lead a charge to run down fleeing members of Congress, is central to the pro-insurrection narrative. 

Trump may feel hemmed in by legal concerns, but his political instincts clearly tell him that recasting the Capitol insurrection as a glorious revolution is the right move. Certainly, the cheers he got for promising pardons underscores that the base is with him. But many other Republican leaders aren’t so sure, and really want to stick with the B.S. story that the riot was just a random thing that happened and Trump had nothing to do with it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been surprisingly outspoken about this, telling reporters that the riot was “an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power” and insisting that people who participated should be punished. Even Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex. — who is always trying to be on the vanguard of right-wing nuttery — has been queasy about celebrating the riot itself, preferring to hide behind conspiracy theories blaming the violence on the FBI instead. 

But Trump’s instinct to simply come out in favor of the storming of the Capitol sadly makes a lot of sense, politically, if not legally. The current GOP position, which amounts to disapproving of the rioters while supporting their larger anti-democratic aims, is incoherent. The vast majority of Republicans, both voters and leaders, have decided to embrace the Big Lie, largely because it creates the pretext to pass a bunch of laws and seize electoral offices in such a way that the next coup, in 2024, is successful. Trying to be for the Big Lie, but against the violence that flows from it, is too delicate a needle to thread. It’s easier and simpler to stand for the whole kaboodle — the Big Lie, the insurrection, the ongoing coup. And Trump understands better than anyone that “easy” and “simple” are huge advantages in political messaging. 

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Plus, as Heather “Digby” Parton has been arguing at Salon, Trump is clearly worried that the walls are closing in and that it will be impossible to successfully hide the evidence that he was both attempting to overturn the election and that he deliberately called on a violent mob in order to make that happen. This is a fairly standard Trump strategy when he realizes he can’t cover up a crime. Instead, he simply owns it, says it was a good thing, and dares anyone to do anything about it. So far, that’s worked beautifully for him, and the continued inability of Attorney General Merrick Garland to arrest Trump for one of his many public crimes suggests it will continue to work for Trump. 

The only question is how long it will take for the rest of the GOP to fall in line?

They also have a pattern when it comes to Trump’s crimes, from his admitted sexual assault to his efforts to steal the election: First, there is resistance and disapproval, but soon they give in and either excuse or, in most cases, outright defend Trump’s behavior. There’s growing political pressure within the Republican ranks to go along with the “January 6 was good, actually” narrative. A proposal to formally kick Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois out of the party has 50 Republican House co-sponsors already. It’s not because these two support free and fair elections, as they are fully on board with the voter suppression efforts going on at the state level. It’s just that they sit on the January 6 committee and are appalled with the violence of the riot that has put them at odds with their party. Kicking them out amounts to a symbolic vote of confidence for the the insurrection itself. 

For most Republicans, it would probably be easier to “move on” from the insurrection, which is to say talk about anything else while quietly supporting legislative efforts to make the next coup stick. But Trump isn’t going to let them. As long as the January 6 committee and media keeps pushing out evidence of how deeply involved Trump was and how extensive the coup efforts were, Trump is going to keep circling back to the idea that every action he took, no matter how violent or criminal, was justified and noble. As long as he does that, Republicans are going to be forced to choose between pandering to the Trump base and trying to distance themselves from the violence that turns off moderate voters. But we always know how this story ends. Republicans always cave to Trump. And so it will be when it comes to the story of whether the riot was bad or good. It’s just a matter of time. 

How climate change is hurting this new Mexican coffee

In the sunny state of New Mexico, a handful of adventurous coffee roasters add piñons, small pine nuts that grow in the Southwest U.S., to give their coffee a local flavor, balancing coffee beans’ bitterness with piñons’ rich and buttery notes.

Indigenous communities in the Southwest discovered and ate piñon nuts from the Pinus edulis tree many years before Europeans arrived, as evidenced by cracked nutshells found at archaeological sites. Like other pine nuts (you may know the European variety from classic basil pesto), piñons are protein-rich and a good source of essential vitamins and minerals, plus they have a sweet, buttery taste. Native American tribes ground the nuts with a stone, sometimes turning them to a nutritious mush. Today, piñon nuts might be used in many other ways in cooking, such as sprinkled over salads, used to make desserts, or simply eaten as snacks. But now, climate change threatens to make this already scarce crop even harder to get hold of.

“Getting a lot of piñons is pretty difficult,” said Brandon Campanella of Bosque Coffee Roasters in Los Lunas, New Mexico. He explained that he took over the business with his wife shortly before the pandemic, after building a relationship with the previous owners. “We buy piñons from local pickers. When we have time, we go out and try to spend a few weekends and pick some ourselves.” Campanella explained that once the piñons are shelled, they get roasted separately from the coffee, since they need to be roasted at a different temperature. Once the nuts are ready, he adds a palmful of piñons into each bag of coffee, around 6 to 12 piñons per pound.

Piñon nuts ripen slowly, and the cones take two years to mature. In some cases, several years can pass between decent crops. “2020 was a good year,” Campanella said. “The people we buy from said it was better than it has been the last few years.” The unpredictability of the crop means that producers who rely on it need to get creative. Fortunately, Campanella said he can store them for up to nine months. “I keep my unshelled, unroasted nuts in a dry cool space where they can breathe. Nuts that have been roasted and shelled, I put in a container and sometimes freezer.”

But the days of getting hold of enough piñons could be limited for Campanella and other foragers. Rising temperatures and droughts are threatening the trees, and a research study found that between 40 and 80% of Pinus edulis trees died between 2002 and 2003 at study sites in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. And while some strong monsoon seasons helped the remaining trees to recover, the Southwest is expected to become both hotter and drier in years to come. This is likely to spell trouble for the trees, which can notice even a 1°F temperature shift.

Using a foraged ingredient, rather than one from tended orchards, also has challenges beyond scarcity related to climate change, as the state’s largest coffee roaster, New Mexico Piñon Coffee, discovered when they began to expand their business. “There isn’t a way for us to prove that the nuts came from any particular place or were grown in any particular way,” said Drake Miller, director of marketing at the New Mexico Piñon Coffee Group. He explains that as the company has branched into new markets, this issue has led to challenges with the FDA. So much so that the business had to make the difficult decision to no longer include the actual nuts in their coffee, due to increasing pressure related to regulations on food traceability. Now, the company uses all Arabica coffee beans and a custom-created, all-natural piñon flavoring.

For Campanella, continuing to use real, local nuts remains a priority, even though he is already finding that the nuts that make his coffee special are becoming harder to come by. “The crop is less than what it used to be, as far as how many piñons are on each tree.” Plus, he said, there are more people going out to pick overall, including private individuals foraging for their own consumption, which also contributes to the nuts becoming scarcer. And although he said that the business will consider using an alternative nut from another state, such as Nevada pine nuts, if absolutely necessary, he would prefer to keep the regional flavor in his coffee. “We really want to stay with New Mexico piñons,” he said. “It makes a big difference to the taste.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene floats a presidential run to Alex Jones

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., known for her extensive literacy in right-wing conspiracy theories, rattled off a litany of her most famously offensive alternative facts during a Wednesday interview with Infowars host Alex Jones, who, to no great surprise, received just about all of them with immense satisfaction, going so far as to hype the freshman representative for a White House run. 

During the deranged exchange, Greene, a former Crossfit instructor, spoke in great detail about the science behind COVID-19, comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed experiments on concentration camp victims during the Holocaust. 

“I think it’s a fair comparison,” Greene said. “It’s basically been a big human experiment, right? That’s what Covid-19 vaccines have been. That’s what COVID-19 has been.”

Greene’s comments came just weeks after Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent turned Fox Nation host, was dropped by her talent agency after making just the same analogy during a Fox News interview. 

It isn’t the first time Greene compared certain COVID-19 policies to those enacted by Nazi Germany. Back in May, the lawmaker equated Capitol Hill’s mask mandate to “a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star” – an apparent reference to the identifying yellow badges Jews were compelled to wear during the Nazi occupation of Europe of the 1930s and ’40s. The Republican later apologized for those remarks in front of the D.C. Holocaust Museum. Shortly after that apology, in July, Greene tarred the officials handling President Joe Biden’s vaccine rollout as “medical brown shirt,” a reference to the violent paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. No apology was made after those comments. 

RELATED: Why Fox News lets Lara Logan call Dr. Fauci a Nazi — and get away with it

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Speaking with Jones on Wednesday, Greene also condemned all of the scientists and doctors who have disputed the clinical value of drugs like ivermectin, an anti-parasitic that’s been baselessly touted as a COVID-19 wonder drug in right-wing circles – and not to mention by Donald Trump himself. 

“It’s Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and anyone at the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] or anyone involved that stopped life-saving treatments and therapies and people died, well, I think they’re guilty of murder,” Greene told Jones. 

There is, however, little to no evidence that ivermectin is effective in treating the disease. 

RELATED: Republicans are barring medical boards from punishing doctors who prescribe ivermectin: report

At one point, Jones, seemingly enraptured by the Georgia Republican, asked Greene to run for president, saying: “Can we get you to run for president in the next few years?”

“In the future we will definitely see what happens,” Greene replied. “I’ll see what the people think about something like that.”

Goodbye single-use plastic, hello eco-friendly packaging

You might be wondering what kinds of eco-friendly packaging materials there are out there — whether you’re shipping gifts, own a small business, or just brushing up on how your favorite brands are doing in the carbon footprint game — we’re here to help.

As you may know, “eco-friendly” is not a scientific term, but merely a catch-all for brands, products, and practices that are generally more sustainable in nature than their traditional counterparts. For example, reusing glass storage containers is more “eco-friendly” than single-use plastic baggies, but glass requires energy to manufacture, and is difficult to recycle. This is to say: these products have manifold pros and cons, and by no means is this an exhaustive list of eco-friendly packaging products, just some of our go-tos.

And with that, read on for our favorite eco-friendly packaging ideas!

1. Compostable Packaging

Compostable materials are ones that are able to naturally decompose back into the earth, just like the organic matter you keep in a compost bin. These products are usually plant-based, and typically made from corn, sugarcane, or bamboo because they’re fast-growing resources. Different conditions can affect composting rates, so it’s important to read up on the product, as it should be able to break down in home compost bins within 180 days, or and 90 days in commercial composting conditions.

2. Post-Consumer Recycled Packaging

Recycled packaging refers to packing made from materials like paper or plastic (yes, plastic isn’t great, but it’s better when it’s post-consumer) that have already been in circulation, thereby giving these materials a second life. A quick search will pull up many different kinds of recycled packaging options, from mailer envelopes to standard boxes, just be sure to check what percentage of the materials are recycled — the more, the better.

3. The Humble Cardboard Box

Surprisingly, [corrugated boxes are actually one of the most recovered and recycled materials](https://turbofuture.com/misc/recycled-materials-list-examples in the US. What’s more, most corrugated boxes in circulation are made from 50% recycled material, and nearly all recycled boxes are used to make more paper products. Think about it: when was the last time you threw away all your cardboard boxes into the trash? It’s much more likely that you squirreled them away for returns or shipping things to people, or you broke them down and sent them off to recycle. Corrugated cardboard can actually be recycled a whopping seven times before the material is no longer suitable for use.

4. Cellulose “Plastic”

Plastic is a difficult material to replicate because of its durability, flexibility, and general ability to be molded into just about anything. Naturally, the hunt for a more sustainable alternative has been ongoing for some time, and cellulose is getting close. It’s usually made from natural materials like hemp, wood, and cotton, so it’s biodegradable and compostable as well. It’s also relatively durable and moisture-resistant, making it great for food packaging.

5. Cornstarch

Cornstarch is perhaps one of the sexiest (yes, I said it) eco-friendly packaging materials since many iterations can easily break down with just water. Corn is cheap, easy to grow, and when fermented, breaks down into polylactic acid — aka, the material that makes up many to-go containers. Oh, and gone (well, we wish) are the styrofoam packing peanuts of yore — they’re being increasingly replaced with cornstarch peanuts that you can simply empty into the sink or tub, and give them a quick shower until they break down. If you’re concerned about your sensitive pipes, they can be composted in warm climates, or, even better, used for your next care package.

6. Kraft Paper

Regular paper only uses certain bits of wood, but kraft paper uses all types of wood including resinous pine, which is typically left out when creating regular paper products. Much like corrugated cardboard, kraft paper can also be made from recycled paper, as well as wood pulp. And, of course, it’s highly recyclable, especially when compared to regular gift wrap, which likely isn’t recyclable if it has glitter, foil, or lamination.

7. Reusable Materials

In terms of packaging things yourself, using reusable materials like scarves, tea towels, and tote bags is a great way make use of an item that can be repurposed for years to come and be an additional gift that your loved one can keep or pass along.

The whisper campaign against Joe Biden won’t stop — unless he can change the narrative

The “whispers” began before Joe Biden was elected.

Some, of course, shouted them. Whether it was his Republican opponent calling him “Sleepy Joe” or members of his own party questioning his commitment to progressive policies and wondering if he was intellectually adroit enough to walk through the metaphorical minefields of historically divisive and nasty national politics, there were many who thought Biden wasn’t the best Democrat to meet the presidential challenge.

But in the end, the fact that a majority of voters felt he was the only one who could stitch together the different Democratic factions and attract enough swing voters to beat Trump gave him the nomination and helped propel him into the White House. Joe Biden didn’t represent change. With his patriarchal manner and his depth of government experience, he represented a return to societal norms.

And for a while, it was the fear of Donald Trump — and fear of the dissolution of the Union that has so long endured — that kept the criticisms of Biden to mere whispers, the kind that remind everyone why D.C. politics more often than not resembles a public high school cafeteria study hall.

But since D.C. politics is exactly like that, those whispers picked up speed and volume as Biden’s communication department fumbled the president’s message in his first year and as the former president — banned from Twitter — refused to go gentle into that good night. Our nation, for the last year, has been overwhelmed by the politics of two aging septuagenarians — one a con man and grifting narcissist and the other a centrist who believes in “possibilities.”

The susurrus surrounding Biden now includes many of the Democratic faithful who have gone back to wondering whether he is up to the challenge. “We don’t know — when he shows up, are we going to get someone barely there, or someone who’s on his game?” an influential Democratic activist said to me this week. Biden recently held a two-hour news conference to begin the New Year, and his performance in that marathon session helped quiet some of the more outlandish concerns. But reports over the weekend that Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison is “frustrated, isolated and trapped” in his job have helped renew the whisper campaign. Harrison fired back against the critics, while an NBC article reported “deep frustration among Democrats that the White House’s political operation has failed to communicate a coherent message to state parties.”

RELATED: Signs of life in Bidenland: President seizes the pulpit at last — will it change anything?

Biden has remained relatively tight-lipped since that press conference. He’s taken a few questions here and there at events, and in some cases snapped at reporters, as he did in this exchange:

Q: Sir, can you say declaratively the election this fall will be legitimate?

Q: Why are you waiting on Putin to make the first move, sir?

Biden: (Laughs.) what a stupid question.

Biden also called Fox News reporter Peter Doocy “a stupid son of a bitch” on a live microphone recently, after Doocy asked him if inflation was a political liability.

Some cheered or laughed at that, while others cringed and protested that no president had ever treated the press so poorly — prompting disbelieving stares from those of us who had to fight the previous president in court to keep our press passes.

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But the criticisms about Biden from his own party merit a deeper dive.

The president recently staged an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building auditorium during which he and others announced a major push to manufacture semiconductor chips in the United States. “A brand new $20 billion campus outside of Columbus, Ohio. Seven thousand construction jobs. Three thousand full-time jobs,” he told us.

Afterward Biden said he wouldn’t take questions, because he was sure all we wanted to talk about was Russia. I didn’t. Most semiconductors are made in China because most of the raw materials come from there. So why would we bother to do this, I wondered, if we don’t have the right stuff?

Me: I have a question about this, if you could.  How are we going to guarantee the raw materials will be available, since many of them come from without the United States, including some countries like Afghanistan that are in turmoil?
 
Biden: Well, we’re working on that. There’s a lot not in Afghanistan. There’s a lot of — we’ve been finding out and moving on directions to find where the raw materials are. We’re making contracts to make sure we have access to them. And we are doing things that — we’re finding out here in the United States, we some — have assets we didn’t know we had, in terms of raw materials.

That answer made no sense, and he took no follow-up questions. He walked away. That’s part of his problem.  Many members of the press have long complained about the lack of communication from the president, vice president and other high-ranking members of the administration. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, has received more than his fair share of blame for this lack of communication and seeming elitist mentality. The criticism regarding the administration’s communication with its own party in Congress is no different. 

This criticism has increased as the fear of authoritarianism has dissipated among members of the press, at least to the point that the frustration of trying to get answers out of the current administration has taken center stage, now that Trump is no longer pacing about the West Wing like a caged Neanderthal.

RELATED: Aloof, silent and disengaged: Why the Biden White House is in crisis

But the looming problem of a potential fascist overthrow of our government continues. When you have a former president involved in trying to seize voting machines, and telling fans at a rally that he’d pardon insurrectionists, you have bigger fish to fry than expressing consternation over the nuance of a $20 billion plan to build semiconductor chips.

To many, including some reporters, it seems like a binary situation. You must choose whom to support and whom to question. If one is evil, then the other must be good. But every president deserves criticism — and Joe Biden must be held accountable for those things he does in the name of the nation. The trick for us in the press corps is framing the narrative. While Biden deserves criticism, it isn’t on the same level as the outright outrage leveled against the former president, who remains the driving force behind an effort to overthrow our government.

Recently a reader wrote to me: “How’s your new pal Biden doing? Makes you miss Trump doesn’t it? You may hate the man, but as president he was all about the USA.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The former president was, and is, all about the grift — and if you can’t see that, then you’re the mark.

But Biden faces serious problems, and the whispers around Washington reflect legitimate concerns about his ability to face those problems. For example, on the semiconductor issue: The chip shortage has caused shift cuts at a Ford auto plant in Kansas and a General Motors plant in Brazil, has put a premium price on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X video game systems, and has even forced Samsung to cancel its latest version of the Galaxy Note smartphone.

Having to spend more for cars and electronics, or having to wait a considerable amount of time to get them, is one thing. But there is a bigger picture. The collapse of the semiconductor supply chain, along with the increasing demand for cars and electronics, is exacerbating the trade war between the U.S. and China. And here’s where it gets serious: Semiconductors are vital for the military, aerospace industry, telecommunications and AI industries.

Afghanistan is reportedly sitting on a $1 trillion deposit of rare earth materials used in high-capacity batteries, as well as copper, used in microchips and lithium.

China leads the world in silicon production, producing 10 times the amount produced in Russia, which is No. 2. China produces 5.4 million metric tons annually, 20 times the amount produced domestically.

While these things merit consideration, nothing on that scale is as frightening as an ex-president claiming that if he’s re-elected he’ll pardon those who rioted at the nation’s Capitol while openly courting a civil war supporting racism and fascism.

As noted by Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the continuing existence of the former president has helped spawn a particular virulent strain of H.L. Mencken’s “Boobus Americanus,”  including but not limited to “the woman in her Trump 2024 hat expounding that the ‘Joe Biden’ currently in the White House is fake and that the real one was assassinated at Gitmo in March 2019, another woman peddling a book containing all of Trump’s tweets before he was banned from Twitter, and the guy peddling doses of the quack COVID-19 cure ivermectin while lashing out at anyone wearing a mask for trying to ‘save Grandma.'”

Remember, there are people in the U.S. who believe that JFK Jr. and Trump will run together in 2024, and that the lizards who run our government are eating children and drinking their blood in a human trafficking operation being run out of the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor (which doesn’t have a basement).

So the whispering about Joe Biden strikes a discordant note when comparing him to Trump and his minions. It seems almost perverse to criticize the current president for anything, compared to the batshit craziness of those on the other side of the aisle.

RELATED: Joe Biden still believes — but in the face of deepening cynicism, is that enough?

But the Democrats have a big tent and have for years. They regularly eat their own and continue to do so today. The many small camps of voters that roughly align themselves with the Democratic Party will continue to fight amongst themselves, allowing plenty of room for a minority of highly motivated, rabid-batshit voters and candidates who support insurrection and overthrowing the American government — making the coming midterm elections potentially earth-shattering.

Reporters who get blamed for the division will continue reporting — trying to juggle the need to report the warts-and-all of the Biden administration while reminding everyone that warts are nothing compared to the cancerous boils of the Trumpers.

And the whispers in study hall will continue.

Colleges struggle to recruit therapists for students in crisis

Early in his first quarter at the University of California-Davis, Ryan Manriquez realized he needed help. A combination of pressures — avoiding covid-19, enduring a breakup, dealing with a disability, trying to keep up with a tough slate of classes — hit him hard.

“I felt the impact right away,” said Manriquez, 21.

After learning of UC-Davis’ free counseling services, Manriquez showed up at the student health center and lined up an emergency Zoom session the same day. He was referred to other resources within days and eventually settled into weekly group therapy.

That was September 2020. Manriquez, now president of the student union, considers himself lucky. It can take up to a month to get a counseling appointment, he said, and that’s “at a school that’s trying really hard to make services available.”

Across the country, college students are seeking mental health therapy on campus in droves, part of a 15-year upswing that has spiked during the pandemic. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in December issued a rare public health advisory noting the increasing number of suicide attempts by young people.

Colleges and universities are struggling to keep up with the demand for mental health services. Amid a nationwide shortage of mental health professionals, they are competing with hospital systems, private practices, and the burgeoning telehealth industry to recruit and retain counselors. Too often, campus officials say, they lose.

At UC-Davis, Dr. Cory Vu, an associate vice chancellor, said the campus is competing with eight other UC system universities, 23 California State universities, and multiple other health systems and practices as it tries to add 10 counselors to its roster of 34.

“Every college campus is looking for counselors, but so is every other health entity, public and private,” he said.

According to data compiled by KFF, more than 129 million Americans live in areas with a documented shortage of mental health care professionals. Roughly 25,000 psychiatrists were working in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The KFF data indicates that more than 6,500 additional psychiatrists are needed to eliminate the shortfall.

On campuses, years of public awareness campaigns have led to more students examining their mental health and trying to access school services. “That’s a very good thing,” said Jamie Davidson, associate vice president for student wellness at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The problem is “we don’t have enough staff to deal with everyone who needs help.”

About three years ago, administrators at the University of Southern California decided to respond aggressively to the skyrocketing demand for student mental health services. Since then, “we’ve gone from 30 mental health counselors to 65,” said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, the university’s chief medical officer for student health.

The result? “We’re still overwhelmed,” Van Orman said.

Van Orman, past president of the American College Health Association, said the severity of college students’ distress is rising. More and more students come in with “active suicidal ideation, who are in crisis, with such severe distress that they are not functioning,” Van Orman said. For counselors, “this is like working in a psychiatric ER.”

As a result, wait times routinely stretch into weeks for students with nonemergency needs like help dealing with class-related stress or the transition to college. Professionals at campus counseling centers, meanwhile, have seen both their workloads and the serious nature of individual cases rise dramatically, prompting some to seek employment elsewhere.

“This is an epidemic in its own right,” Van Orman said, “and it has exploded over the last two years to the point that it is not manageable for many of our campuses — and, ultimately, our students.”

The pandemic has exacerbated the challenges students face, said UNLV’s Davidson. Lockdown measures leave them feeling isolated and disconnected, unable to establish crucial relationships and develop the sense of self that normally comes with campus life. They also lose out on professional opportunities like internships and fall behind on self-care like going to the gym.

A study by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University found that among 43,000 students who sought help last fall at 137 campus counseling centers, 72% said the pandemic had negatively affected their mental health. An online survey of 33,000 students last fall found that half of them “screened positive for depression and/or anxiety,” according to Boston University researcher Sarah Ketchen Lipson.

Even before the pandemic, university counseling center staff members were overwhelmed, Northwestern University staff psychiatrist Bettina Bohle-Frankel wrote in a recent letter to The New York Times. “Now, overburdened, underpaid and burned out, many therapists are leaving college counseling centers for less stressful work and better pay. Many are doing so to protect their own mental health.”

On average, a counselor position at UC-Davis requiring a master’s or doctorate degree pays $150,000 a year in salary and benefits, but compensation can vary widely based on experience, Vu said. Even at that rate, Vu said, “we sometimes cannot compete with Kaiser [Permanente], other hospital settings, or private practice.”

Tatyana Foltz, a licensed clinical social worker in San Jose, California, spent three years as a mental health services case manager at Santa Clara University. “I absolutely enjoyed working with the college students — they’re intelligent, dynamic, and complex, and they are working things out,” Foltz said. But she left the university a few years ago, lured by the flexibility of private practice and frustrated by a campus system that Foltz felt did not reflect the diverse needs of its students.

Foltz returned to campus in December to support Santa Clara students as they protested what they said were inadequate services on campus, including insufficient numbers of diverse counselors representing Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ communities and other people of color. The protests followed the deaths of three students during the fall quarter, two by suicide.

“It should not be taking student deaths to get us better mental health resources,” said junior Megan Wu, one of the rally’s organizers. After the rally, the chair of Santa Clara’s board of trustees pledged several million dollars in new funding for campus counseling.

Replacing therapists who leave universities is difficult, Davidson said. UNLV currently has funding for eight new counselors, but the salaries it can offer are limiting in a competitive hiring market.

Universities are getting creative in their attempts to spread mental health resources around on their campuses, however. UC-Davis embeds counselors in student-utilized groups like the Cross-Cultural Center and the LGBTQIA Resource Center. Stanford University’s Bridge Peer Counseling Center offers anonymous counseling 24/7 to students who are more comfortable speaking with a trained fellow student.

Mental health services that can be accessed online or by phone, which many schools did not offer before the pandemic, may become a lifeline for colleges and universities. Students often prefer remote to on-site counseling, Davidson said, and campuses likely will begin offering their counselors the option to work remotely as well — something that private practices and some medical systems have done for years.

“You have to work hard and also smart,” Foltz said. “You need numbers, but you also need the right mix of counselors. There is a constant need to have culturally competent staff members on a university campus.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Trump’s race-war fantasies continue to escalate — while the media pretends not to notice

Every day, Donald Trump becomes more his horrible true self. He commands the loyalty of tens of millions of people. He does not even pretend to be a statesman who loves America. He is a political cult leader, a sociopath and a model of antisocial and dangerous behavior. As psychologists and other public health experts have warned, Trump has “infected” many of his most loyal followers with the same mental pathologies.

Trump has an erotic attachment to violence, as do many of his followers. They are tied together by the Big Lie and other sadistic, and anti-human fictions. TrumpWorld is a malignant and vile alternate universe — one that longs to devour and consume the world as it actually exists.

Nearly every day we learn more evidence about Donald Trump and his cabal’s attempted coup attempt. In the face of the Justice Department’s flaccid approach to those crimes (at least to this point), Trump and his agents continue to attack American democracy, the rule of law and the Constitution, now in plain sight.   

Last Saturday at a rally in Conroe, Texas, Trump communicated his clear intent to cause mass mayhem and destruction in the United States — in essence, his willingness to burn it all down — should he ever face punishment for the crimes he committed as president. 

RELATED: Donald Trump calls for racial violence: White supremacists are listening, but the media laughs

Trump told his followers: “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington. D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

He repeatedly described the prosecutors investigating him in New York, Washington and Atlanta as “racist.” (All four are Black.) He also attacked them as being “mentally sick” and said they were committing “prosecutorial misconduct at the highest level.”

Trump also told the crowd in Conroe that “in 2024, we are going to take back that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white, that is so magnificent and that we all love. We are going to take back the White House.” All these remarks were read off a teleprompter, rather than improvised. 

Trump is a master performer who knows his audience very well. In no way were they uncomfortable with his white supremacist invective and implicit invitations to violence. They applauded. This should not be surprising: Public opinion research has repeatedly shown that Trump’s voters are motivated by a sense of white victimology and racial grievance politics, and by a belief that white people like them should remain dominant in our increasingly diverse country.

During his Conroe speech, Trump acted as a political crime boss and dictator in waiting, promising (preemptive) pardons for his followers who engage in political violence and other criminal or terrorist acts on his behalf.

“If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he said. “We will treat them fairly. … And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”

This fits into a larger pattern. At his rally in Arizona several weeks earlier, Trump made false claims about the pandemic and health care that were framed in explicitly racial terms: 

The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating — just, denigrating — white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. It’s unbelievable to think this. And nobody wants this. Black people don’t want it, white people don’t want it, nobody wants it. … In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health — think of it, if you’re white you go right to the back of the line. … This race-based medicine is not only anti-American, it’s government tyranny in the truest sense of the word.

Trump’s statements are more than stochastic terrorism or other implied threats. These are direct instructions to his followers about who their enemies are. Trump has recently focused his attention on Black people, even more than usual. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch suggests that we should “drill down on arguably the most important and alarming word in Trump’s statement: racist”:

At first blush, it seems to come out of left field, in the sense of what could be racist about looking into a white man’s role in an attempted coup or his cooked financial books? Except that it happens that three of the key prosecutors investigating Trump — the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and new Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg — as well as the chair of the House committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, are all Black.

Thus, it’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult. In tying skin color into his call for mobs in Atlanta or New York, Trump is seeking to start a race war — no different, really, from Dylann Roof. Roof used a .45-caliber Glock handgun, while Trump uses a podium and the services of fawning right-wing cable-TV networks. Sadly, the latter method could prove more effective.

Trump’s threats against Willis and James carry particular resonance at this moment, given that President Biden has announced his historic intention to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court.

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Donald Trump is an entrepreneur of racial and ethnic violence. In that sense, he is not dissimilar to leaders in places like Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, who used fear, lies, stereotypes and other dehumanizing and eliminationist rhetoric and threats of violence to encourage ethnic genocide. Trump has made it clear that he wants a “race war”, where black and brown people are targeted for widescale violence by white people. There may be thousands, or tens of thousands (or even more) of white people willing to follow his orders. The danger is extreme.

The thousands of Trump’s followers who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, represent a deeper and broader group in American society who are becoming more radicalized and less restrained. While some of Trump’s attack force may face incarceration, many have not been deterred in the least, and are only becoming more resolute and determined.

Fascist intimidation and threats of violence are being normalized across American society. Right-wing paramilitaries and street thugs are attempting to claim public space through marches, “protests” and other actions designed to signal their growing power and influence — and, most importantly, to intimidate those Americans who believe in pluralism and democracy.

Trump’s fantasies of race war are only one part of a larger strategy aimed at turning America into a 21st-century apartheid state. Republicans intend to make it almost impossible for a Democratic candidate to win the presidential election — and many state and local elections as well. They are using the moral panic around “critical race theory” and other culture-war issues to impose an Orwellian reshaping of America’s schools, where it will be illegal to tell the truth about American history or to discuss subject matter deemed to be “unpatriotic” or somehow “uncomfortable” for white people.

In Florida and other states, Republicans are using state authority and resources to silence dissent and protest. This includes laws that encourage right-wing vigilante violence, and the creation of “election police” intended to intimidate and harass Black and brown people as well as liberals, progressives and other “enemies” of “real America”.

What should the American people do? Who is going to save democracy? Not the Department of Justice. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has limited powers to hold Trump and his cabal responsible. The Democratic Party has repeatedly shown that it lacks even a basic understanding of how to explain or address the existential dangers posed by Trump and the Republican fascists.

The mainstream media has continued to fail in its primary task as guardians of democracy. Instead of clearly, consistently and forcefully telling the truth about Donald Trump and the neofascist movement, the news media remains addicted to horserace journalism, “both-sides-ism” and other forms of false equivalency.

Writing at Media Matters, Eric Kleefeld summarized these failures:

Mainstream media outlets should be treating all of this as a five-alarm fire for American democracy and the U.S. Constitution. But instead, Politico’s Playbook on Sunday pondered how Trump’s declarations might affect Republican messaging and prospects for the midterm election….

The New York Times positioned Trump’s comments in terms of supposed Republican infighting and messaging: “The statement signifies an increase in the intensity of the former president’s push to litigate the 2020 election and comes days after Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, issued a public warning to Republican candidates to ‘respect the results of our democratic process’ during an interview with CNN.” (The alleged conflict among Republicans is also exaggerated by mainstream media outlets.)

The Washington Post ran a piece Sunday evening, titled “Trump’s Texas trip illustrates his upsides and downsides for Republicans and their midterm hopes.” Immediately after the paragraph detailing Trump’s offer of pardons to January 6 rioters, along with his incitement of new demonstrations against district attorneys, the article proceeded to discuss what this might mean for Republican candidates in primary and general elections …

And in a separate but also consequential example of missing the real message, The Associated Press said that Trump’s “offer represents an attempt by Trump to further minimize the most significant attack on the seat of government since the War of 1812.”

Trump didn’t just “minimize” what happened, he is actively trying to seed more of it.

Pro-democracy Americans will need to organize across society with the goal of pressuring the Democratic Party, major corporations and other elites into pushing back forcefully against the Republican fascist movement’s attacks on American democracy and freedom. Pro-democracy Americans will also need to organize on the local level to resist, survive and defeat the rising fascist tide. 

In the end, it will be the American people, through direct action and mass mobilization — strikes, boycotts, direct action and other types of corporeal politics — who must save American democracy.

On his eponymous TV show, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Fred Rogers told children (and the many adults who were watching as well) that if they were in trouble they should “look for the helpers.” America needs Fred Rogers’ wisdom now. The helpers are our neighbors and other members of the community who are willing to struggle and suffer to protect America’s multiracial democracy and to create a more humane society. The helpers are those who have been sounding the alarm, sometimes at great personal risk, about the dangers of Trump’s regime. But in the end we are adults, not children. The most essential helpers are looking back at us in the mirror. 

Read more on Donald Trump and racism:

As Big Pharma jacks up prices, Dems worry their failure will cost seats this fall

Dozens of vulnerable House Democrats are worried that the party’s stalled spending negotiations with Joe Manchin will cost them seats in the midterms — and hand Congress to the Republicans

Democrats planned to include legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, fulfilling a campaign promise that helped them win control of the House in the “blue wave” of 2018, as part of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. The plan ran into an expensive lobbying blitz from the pharmaceutical industry, prompting Democrats to significantly water down the bill to limit the number of drugs Medicare could negotiate amid pushback from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and other industry-aligned Democrats –– and that was before Manchin blew up the Build Back Better package entirely.

“We cannot overstate the paramount urgency of fulfilling the promise of lowering drug prices now for the American people,” a group of 40 House Democrats, led by Rep. Susan Wild, D-Pa., said in a letter to party leaders on Monday.

The letter came after pharmaceutical companies hiked prices on hundreds of medications to start the year. A recent report from the patient advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs found that drug companies have increased prices on more than 550 drugs, including 183 drugs whose prices were raised by $100 or more, and 118 drugs that now cost more than $5,000. Pfizer alone raised prices on 125 drugs, more than any company, even as it shattered profit records thanks to $36 billion in sales from its widely-used COVID vaccine.

“Even as we enter the third year of a pandemic, Big Pharma continues its practice of targeting American patients and consumers with price increases, completely undeterred by the financial and health challenges facing American families,” David Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, said in a statement.

“Drug corporations can do this because we let them — unlike other nations that use their purchasing power to get a better deal,” said Mitchell, who suffers from an incurable blood cancer that is treated with a cocktail of drugs carrying a list price of more than $900,000 per year. The original drug-pricing agreement in the Build Back Better Act, he said, “would curb rising drug prices for millions of patients and halt abusive annual price hikes by limiting increases to the rate of inflation, which is projected to return to 2.3 percent in 2023.”

RELATED: Report debunks Joe Manchin’s inflation argument against Build Back Better

Election forecasts generally suggest that Democrats will lose control of the House in the midterms, making the popular drug legislation a key priority, especially after Manchin and Sinema effectively killed off several other popular Democratic proposals, including la rollback of the Trump-era tax cuts, an extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit, and paid family leave.

A Data for Progress poll last fall found that likely voters support the Medicare legislation by a 55-point margin, including 83% of Democrats, 71% of independents, and 65% of Republicans.

“Taking action on prescription drugs is one of the most popular political issues Democrats can pursue — it’s overwhelmingly supported by a bipartisan majority of voters,” Sean McElwee, the founder and executive director of Data for Progress, said in an email. “Democrats need to take every opportunity to lower costs for voters and deliver popular legislation that visibly improves their lives this November.”

Manchin, who walked away from Build Back Better negotiations in December after the White House called him out by name in a statement over the bill’s delay, said on Tuesday that the Build Back Better bill is “dead” and any negotiations on potential spending programs would have to start from scratch. Biden has said that he hopes to include “chunks” of the original bill in a potential compromise package with Manchin.

Last year, Manchin said he supported the drug-price legislation, calling it the “one thing that should be done for sure.” But the West Virginia senator appears to be prioritizing bipartisan negotiations to reform the Electoral Count Act over any would-be spending bill, leaving a key Democratic campaign promise in limbo.

“President Biden supports this plan. We support this plan,” the House Democratic group said in their letter. “Every Democratic member of the U.S. Senate supports this plan. And most importantly, the American people support this plan. It is time to enact it into law. Already this year, drug corporations have raised prices on more than 400 drugs. Action can’t happen soon enough to make medicines more affordable for the millions who need them.”

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The price increases came after the pharmaceutical lobby shattered its own record for lobbying spending as it rallied around the cause of defeating Biden’s legislation. Democrats like Sinema and Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., two of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma donations, led an effort to cut the number of drugs that could be negotiated by Medicare. Even so, the compromise legislation would save taxpayers an estimated $80 billion while capping price increases on certain medications, capping out-of-pocket costs for seniors, and capping the cost of insulin at $35 for people on Medicare and on private plans.

Medicare is the only government agency that is barred from negotiating bulk pricing discounts — the result of an infamous scheme hatched by Big Pharma lobbyists and a Republican leader who rammed the provision into a bill that required Medicare to cover the cost of prescription drugs, shortly before he left Congress and became  the top lobbyist for the industry. A three-year investigation by the House Oversight and Reform Committee last month found that pharmaceutical companies exploit the Medicare program to boost revenues, noting that taxpayers could have saved more than $25 billion over five years if Medicare was allowed to negotiate the cost of just seven popular drugs such as Humira and Lyrica.

The investigation also found that drug companies “aggressively raise prices” to hit revenue targets and incentives for executives and have targeted the U.S. market for higher prices while keeping costs lower overseas.  The report also concluded that drug companies “abuse the patent system” to suppress competition and maintain monopoly pricing. Drug companies contend that their huge profits are necessary to fund research and development, but the investigation found that the 14 leading drug companies spent $577 billion on stock buybacks and dividends over just five years, $56 billion more than they spent on research and development over that same period.

The limited Medicare negotiation bill approved by the House last year would allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of 20 popular drugs and dozens of insulin products used by 8.5 million Medicare beneficiaries, according to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, although many of the drugs with the highest Medicare spending would be exempt.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which pushed for a more expansive bill that would have saved taxpayers an estimated $450 billion over 10 years but ultimately agreed to back the scaled-down version, set a target date of March 1 to pass the revised spending plan ahead of Biden’s State of the Union address.

“This is both achievable and necessary,” CPC Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said in a statement, noting that in the weeks since negotiations had stalled out, “the case for this legislation has only become more urgent.”

Read more on Big Pharma and the drug-price battle:

We can stop the white-collar insurrectionists from doing it again: Here’s how

With the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks now behind us, perhaps the most important question facing our nation is whether our systems of accountability are capable of punishing those who sought to overthrow our constitutional democracy — and preventing them from doing it again. 

I am not talking about the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol building or assaulted police officers. Many of them already have faced, or soon will face, the justice they deserve. I’m talking about the people who tried, using legal theories, public and private pressure and official powers, to overturn an election — the powerful people who inspired the violent insurrectionists at the Capitol that day. We can call this group, which includes former President Donald Trump and his cadre of congressional enablers, “white-collar insurrectionists.” 

It’s time for us to get serious about protecting our democracy from the people who sought to overturn the votes of the American people in a presidential election. Fortunately, the Constitution gives us a good way to do this.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment offers us an opportunity to hold those who tried to steal the 2020 election and keep Trump in office accountable. Ratified in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Section 3 bars any official from holding elected office who, “having previously taken an oath . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

RELATED: The “Guarantee Clause”: Could this one weird trick save American democracy?

Some may argue that President Trump, Rep. Paul Gosar, Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. Ted Cruz and others did not engage in insurrection or rebellion because they did not personally use violence to try to deny Joe Biden the presidency. But a close look at the text, history and function of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment makes clear that these white-collar insurrectionists should be banned from holding future office just as much as anyone who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Section 3 disqualifies an oath taker who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” — meaning the Constitution — or has given “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” It is noteworthy that the terms “insurrection and rebellion” are not used in the abstract; rather it is “insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution” that is disqualifying. 

That phrasing matters. The Constitution is a set of rules establishing a democratic system of government that only endures because of our collective, mutual agreement to adhere to those rules. Insurrection against the Constitution cannot possibly be limited only to acts of violence. It must include efforts to undermine or undo the process by which it assigns power. 

The history of the Civil War supports this view. While physical violence did not begin until April 1861 at Fort Sumter, the insurrection against the Constitution preceded it by several months. In response to Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union on Dec. 20, 1860. Over the next two months, six more states followed, and they collectively formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861. Their secession and creation of the Confederate States of America were just as much acts of insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution as the shots that were fired when the war came. 

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Applying the 14th Amendment to white-collar insurrectionists makes sense from a functional standpoint too. There is no reason to exalt physical threats to our government over existential legalistic ones. In both 1861 and 2021, the proto-legal attempts to undermine the Constitution served as the rallying cry and justification for subsequent acts of violence. The Civil War could not have happened without the refusal by Confederate States to acknowledge that Lincoln was their president-elect. Jan. 6, 2021, could not have happened without Trump and his congressional allies’ refusal to acknowledge that Biden was the president-elect. 

A white-collar insurrectionist is still an insurrectionist. In fact, the chasm between these insurrectionists and those who violently attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 is minimal.One analysis found that the “demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists,” including a significant percentage of business owners and white-collar professionals. The fact that elected representatives exploited weaknesses in our election-result confirmation process, rather than weaknesses in the physical security of the Capitol, does not make their betrayal of our Constitution any less serious. 

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment can and should be used to bar from future office anyone who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after having sworn to defend it. This provision will not enforce itself. We need secretaries of state to preclude Donald Trump and other white-collar insurrectionists from appearing on a ballot. We need members of Congress to support resolutions finding their colleagues or other officials in violation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. We need to stop those who violated the most sacred principles of our Constitution from doing it again. 

This is one of the few avenues we have left for preserving our Constitution from Trump and his supporters as they redouble their efforts to overturn our democracy. The former president is endorsing candidates for secretary of state and other positions who are promising to overturn election results. State legislatures controlled by Republicans have enacted laws making it easier to overturn the will of voters across America. Those efforts come on top of tactics that have long undermined American democracy, such as the gerrymandering of political districts and new restrictions on the freedom of Americans to vote. 

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is a valid constitutional mechanism by which we can hold Trump and his fellow white-collar insurrectionists accountable. If we fail to do so, we risk losing forever our system of government of, by and for the people.

More on the struggle for the Constitution:

Lawmakers who backed Trump’s fake AZ electors advised by scholar with ties to conservative group

When Republican lawmakers in Arizona convened in December 2020 to forward an alternate slate of electors to Congress in a bid to overturn the election of Joe Biden, they had received advice from a little known conservative constitutional scholar with ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, and the Federalist Society.

The role played by Rob Natelson, a former University of Montana law professor and Federalist Society member who serves on ALEC’s board of scholars, in guiding the development of the alternate electoral slate in Arizona has been previously reported, but has received little attention to date. In an email to Raw Story, Natelson denied any role in the scheme.

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol recently issued subpoenas to alternate electors in seven states, including Nancy Cottle and Lorraine B. Pellegrino, two of the 11 electors from Arizona. The subpoenas compel Cottle and Pellegrino to produce documents relevant to the investigation by Feb. 11 and to appear for deposition on Feb. 16. Signed by the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the subpoenas notified Cottle and Pellegrino that the committee is “seeking information about your role and participation in the purported slate of electors casting votes for Donald Trump and, to the extent relevant, your role in the events of January 6, 2021.”

Cottle and Pellegrino are retirees, and they said in a statement released by their attorney on Tuesday that they were not present at the US Capitol on Jan. 6. “Those who would call this a crime demonstrate that they do not understand the basic principles on which this country is based,” the Davillier Law Group in Phoenix said on their behalf. “Make no mistake: It is for exercising their fundamental rights as Americans that Nancy and Loraine have now been targeted by the United States Congress.”

Two state attorneys general have referred the alternate electoral slates to the US Justice Department for prosecution. After evaluating whether to the bring state charges against the alternate electors in her state, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said she referred the matter to the US Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Michigan on Jan. 13.

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“This is part of a much bigger conspiracy, and our hope is that the federal authorities at the Department of Justice and United States Attorney General Merrick Garland will take this in coordination with all the other information they’ve received and make an evaluation as to what charges these individuals might face,” Nessel told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “I can think of forgery of a public record for the purpose of defrauding the United States or conspiracy to commit an offense to defraud the United States.”

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas has also reportedly referred the matter to federal prosecutors.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed that the US Justice Department is reviewing what she termed the “fraudulent elector certifications” during a Jan. 25 interview with CNN.

“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” she said.

Chairman Thompson said in a formal statement accompanying the subpoenas that the Select Committee “is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives. We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.”

Kelly Townsend, then a state senator-elect and now a candidate for Congress, described Rob Natelson’s role in advising the Arizona lawmakers on their powers over the outcome of the presidential election in an interview with Trump-friendly podcaster JD Rucker on Dec. 17, 2020.

“You have a plan that you’ve initiated to be able to take Arizona’s electors — the alternate electors, the GOP electors — and have them count,” Rucker said, introducing Townsend. “Is that a fair assessment of what you’ve initiated?”

Claiming that the Arizona election was in “dispute” and that there were “some serious allegations that need to be looked at,” Townsend told Rucker that 21 sitting lawmakers and eight incoming lawmakers had “signed on to a resolution stating that we wish Congress to support the alternate slate and to not award any electors until all of these irregularities and accusations are investigated and resolved.”

Later in the podcast, Townsend said, “I want to mention — I want to give a shoutout to attorney and scholar and professor Rob Natels [sic].” She added, “When he tells us that we have the ability to do this, I think that’s who I’m going to listen to, as far as what we can and cannot do. He advised on the language of the resolutions, so we’re very happy to have that.”

Since initial publication of this story, Natelson has acknowledged communicating with the state lawmakers through Zoom. But in an email to Raw Story and Salon, he said, “I never, ever advised sending an unauthorized slate of electors to Congress — to this group or any other. I was summarizing options the entire legislature had, acting as a legislature, up to and not after the December 14 deadline.”

Natelson told Raw Story that he wouldn’t dispute Townsend’s “bona fides.”

“The way to reconcile both our recollections, I think, is to conclude that I reviewed it as a resolution for the entire legislature, but that a minority of that legislature later adapted it to another purpose — that is, accompanying the unauthorized alternative slate of electors. But that is speculation, because the fact remains that I don’t have any such a resolution in my records.”

Natelson’s advice to the Republican lawmakers has also been confirmed by Bret Roberts, who was serving in the Arizona House of Representatives at the time. Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller reported in a column originally published on Dec. 9, 2020 that Roberts told him that the state lawmakers communicated with Natelson. Steller’s reporting — based on Roberts’ account — indicates that Natelson advised the Republican lawmakers that they had the power to call themselves into session to deliberate on an election question, and also to overturn Arizona’s system for assigning electors — both by a simple majority.

Townsend appears to have backed up Roberts’ account on the first count.

“So, some really smart people — way smarter than I am — have told us that we are not under the Arizona constitution and that we can bring ourselves in with a simple majority,” she told Rucker during the Dec. 17, 2020 interview, just before citing and praising Natelson.

Natelson made the same points during an interview with Mitch Kokai, a political analyst with the conservative John Locke Foundation in North Carolina, on Nov. 16, 2020.

State legislatures are granted “significant powers” by the US Constitution, he said.

“When they exercise those powers, such as deciding how electors are chosen, they get their powers directly from the Constitution — the US Constitution; they don’t get it from the state constitution,” Natelson said.

He continued: “The legislature can literally call itself into session and then choose the electors itself.”

Natelson’s role in advising the Arizona Republican lawmakers was also previously reported by the Colorado Times Recorder, which cited a Telegram post by Townsend in the summer of 2021, while she was promoting the bogus Arizona audit.

“I wanted to give a shoutout to Rob Natelson, our country’s premiere Constitutional scholar who educated the Legislators in Arizona on the plenary power we possess in elections, our ability to do the audit, and our responsibility to finding the truth, all at no cost,” Townsend wrote.

In a response to the Colorado Times Recorder last June, Natelson acknowledged communicating with the Arizona lawmakers, but suggested the guidance he provided was far more constrained than what Townsend and Roberts described in their accounts of the discussions.

“My communications with the [Arizona] legislature were limited to clarifying issues of constitutional law,” Natelson said, according to the newspaper. “I informed lawmakers that… the Constitution grants the state legislature power to determine the method of choosing presidential electors. I said that they should take action only if they thought there were irregularities and if they thought those irregularities might have changed the election result. I don’t recall suggesting any particular course of action.”

Walter Holton, a former federal prosecutor appointed by President Clinton, said the participants who are most directly implicated in the alternate electors scheme are likely those who signed their names to the false electoral certificates submitted to the Vice President Mike Pence, as acting president of the US Senate; the archivist of the United States; the state secretaries of state; and chief judges in US district courts. The 11 electors in Arizona, which include Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward and state Rep. Jake Hoffman, voted for Donald Trump while attesting that they were “the duly elected and qualified electors” from the state of Arizona.

State lawmakers who promoted the scheme are also likely culpable, albeit to a lesser degree, Holton said.

“The individuals who signed the documents, are they knowingly attempting to commit a fraud against the United States?” Holton said. “They can come up with whatever excuse they want. [They can say], ‘I didn’t realize. I didn’t know.’ That’s why you have trials.

“If there are legislators or others who are knowing aiding and abetting this conspiracy, then they are culpable,” Holton added. “They’re a minor player. They are going to get a reduction, but the crime’s the same. Which is a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

As for those who played an advisory role, Holton said culpability largely depends on whether they crossed the line into actually directing the activity.

“I don’t think think the person giving the advice has any culpability unless he directed them,” Holton said. “If they call him up, and he says, ‘Do this, this or this.’ If you advise someone to commit what turns out to be a criminal activity, it doesn’t matter — it’s what the judge says.” He added, “There’s no law against being stupid.”

According to reporting by the Washington Post and CNN, Rudy Giuliani, who peddled a number of outlandish claims of election fraud as Trump’s campaign lawyer, coordinated a plan to assemble rival slates of electors in states narrowly won by Joe Biden.

Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, appears to have also been aware of the scheme. A resolution recommending contempt for refusing to cooperate with the Select Committee states that Meadows “received emails regarding apparent efforts to encourage Republican legislators in certain states to send alternate electors to Congress, a plan which one member of Congress acknowledged was ‘highly controversial’ and to which Mr. Meadows responded, ‘I love it.'” According to the contempt resolution, Meadows responded to two different emails regarding the alternate electors scheme by saying variously, “We are,” and, “Yes. Have a team on it.”

It remains unclear whether Natelson communicated with anyone from Trump’s team while advising the Arizona lawmakers. But in comments to the “Talk Back” show on KGVO radio in Missoula, Mont. on Dec. 7, 2020, Natelson seemed to criticize Trump’s campaign legal team.

An article recapping Natelson’s remarks paraphrased him as saying “the president’s legal team has been making claims they cannot fulfill,” while directly quoted him as saying, “What they’ve been doing is kind of over-promising.”

Natelson’s support for the principle that presidential electors are not bound by the popular vote in their respective states predates the 2020 election. In a 2018 blog post, Natelson wrote that the record of the Constitutional ratification debates in Philadelphia in 1787 “suggests that the ratifiers and the voting public understood presidential electors were to exercise their own judgment when voting.”

Soon after the 2020 election, Natelson began publicizing his novel views on state legislatures’ powers to remedy what he described as an election “disaster” based on his aversion to “mail-in voting extending over weeks.”

“If a legislature becomes convinced its returns are hopelessly muddled or corrupt, it may arrange a new way of choosing the presidential electors,” Natelson wrote in a column for the Epoch Times on Nov. 8, 2020. Under such a circumstance, Natelson opined that state legislatures have two options. One would be to “call a new statewide presidential election for a single day,” while the other would be for state legislatures to “choose the electors by legislative vote on a single day.”

Speaking with Mitch Kokai at the John Locke Foundation on Nov. 16, Natelson argued that state legislatures in six states narrowly carried by Joe Biden — almost all of them Republican-controlled — were duty bound to act.

Natelson told Kokai said that the Constitution provides “that if, for some reason, you don’t have firm results, nobody’s really selected on November third, then the state legislature can decide how to choose the candidate.

“The state legislatures have to stand up and determine how serious the confusion is in their states,” he continued. “If it is serious enough so that we don’t know who’s been elected in that state, then the state legislature has to deal with it.”

CORRECTIONS: The headline of this story originally reflected the original publisher Raw Story’s headline, “Trump’s fake Arizona electors got the green light from a scholar with ties to a major conservative groups.” The Raw Story headline was revised on Feb. 9 at 11:07 a.m. to more accurately reflect the reporting in the story.

Raw Story updated their original publication of this story on Feb. 3, 2022 at 12:23 p.m. to include a response from Nancy Cottle and Loraine Pellegrino in response to the subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Salon has updated this syndicated copy to reflect Raw Story’s changes. Their story was updated a second time on Feb. 9 at 8:32 p.m. to include a response from Rob Natelson.

Fear of “furries” in schools grips conservative parents fooled by absurd Facebook rumors

Not content with panicking about the teaching of critical race theory, conservative parents throughout America have now been gripped with fear about their schools trying to accommodate students who dress up in animal costumes.

The Daily Beast reports that in “Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan, and Iowa in recent months, school board meetings have been disrupted by allegations that educators are giving special treatment to furry students.”

The first notable instance of furry panic occurred when right-wing activists pushed a false claim about schools in Michigan placing litter boxes in bathrooms to allow furry students to use them, and the bogus rumors about furry infiltration into the public education system have only grown from there.

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In York County, Pennsylvania, for example, Facebook rumors began swirling around among conservative locals warning that furries “could be in your child’s classroom hissing at your child and licking themselves.”

Patch O’Furr, proprietor of the furry news site Dogpatch Press, tells The Daily Beast that many of the same people spreading bogus furry rumors are the same people agitating to ban books they don’t like.

“It’s culture war, it’s control, and it’s not about protecting kids,” O’Furr explains. “If you actually look at who’s doing this, at some of the political groups getting involved, they’re all far right.”

Kanye West refuses to hop on the NFT metaverse bandwagon: “Do not ask me”

Kanye West has made it clear that he’s adamantly anti-blockchain — at least for now.

The rapper and fashion designer, who goes by the simple moniker Ye, took to Instagram on Monday to share a handwritten note, stating, in all caps, “Do not ask me to do a f**king NFT.” Instead, Ye said he’s focusing on “building real products in the real world,” which includes food, clothes and shelter.

“For now I’m not on that wave I make music and products in the real work,” he asserted in his caption, also written in all caps.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZacZWcPQzP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

RELATED: Kanye West and the smug cruelty of the anti-“cancel culture” movement

In 2021, the NFT — or non-fungible token — market took the art world by storm as celebrities and internet personalities rushed to partake in various NFT schemes, including the Bored Ape Yacht Club hype. Digital artist Michael Joseph Winkelmann — commonly known as Beeple — made headlines after selling a NFT of his work for $69 million. Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Grimes and more began throwing big bucks to acquire and launch their own collections of simian images that comprise “a limited NFT collection where the token itself doubles as your membership to a swamp club for apes.”

Despite refusing to, um, ape that success, don’t be surprised if he has a change of heart and decides to create some Ye digital originals. Coachella, for which West is a headliner, recently joined the crypto craze on Monday. The company will sell three collections of NFTs on Feb. 4 via their newly launched NFT marketplace, per The Verge. According to Coachella’s official website, an NFT purchase also comes with lifetime festival passes, art prints, photo books, digital collectibles, and plenty more incentives.  

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Ye headlines this year’s Coachella alongside Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and Swedish House Mafia this April. 

Although Ye’s post established his stance against NFTs, he also made it clear that the venture isn’t quite off the table.

“Ask me later,” Ye signed off. 

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Rita Moreno reveals the seriousness of Marlon Brando’s abuse: “He was a bad guy”

During her chat with actor Jessica Chastain on Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Rita Moreno delved into the abuse she endured from actor Marlon Brando throughout their relationship.  

“He and I had had a relationship for almost eight years. Ultimately, it was exciting to be with Marlon. Oh, my God, it was exciting,” Moreno shared after Chastain mentioned “The Godfather” star. “He was extraordinary in many, many ways, but he was a bad guy. He was a bad guy when it came to women. I was such a different person then. I had all the makings of a doormat.”

RELATED: Rita Moreno reflects on tenacity, her career and Latinx representation: “Where is our ‘Moonlight’?” 

The “West Side Story” actor entered an on-and-off affair with Brando in 1954, when she was just 22 years old. In her 2011 book “Rita Moreno: A Memoir,” she wrote about the botched abortion Brando made her get after she became pregnant with his child. The abortion along with Brando’s frequent infidelity ultimately prompted her to attempt to take her own life.

“I could read him like a book, and that’s why he loved me, and that’s why he mistreated me in so many ways. I tried to end my life with pills in his house,” Moreno said. “That’s how I tried to do it. I didn’t understand that if I was going to kill this pathetic, sad, trod-upon Rita, the rest of Rita was also going to go with me. I really didn’t seem to understand that. But that’s what the attempt was. It was an attempt.”

The pair called it quits in 1962 but reunited years later on the set of “The Night of the Following Day.” According to Moreno, Brando wanted to get back together but she declined his proposal. At that time, Moreno was married to Leonard Gordon, had a daughter, Fernanda Luisa Gordon, and was overall in a better place. 

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“He lost a big part of himself, I think. The good part of him, the good Marlon that Rita loved,” she said. “It was very complicated. Really, really complicated.

“I seem to feel on a very primitive level that anybody who is always ready with a quip, who’s really genuinely witty and funny, can take care of me,” Moreno continued. “They can look after me. That’s how I see humor in a man. I mean, that’s so cuckoo. Isn’t that cuckoo?”

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“Evil” Josh Hawley hit with bipartisan pushback after call to drop U.S. support for Ukraine NATO bid

The White House accused Sen. Josh Hawley of “parroting” Russian propaganda after the Missouri Republican called for the United States to drop its longstanding support for Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). 

Press secretary Jen Psaki made the statement Wednesday evening after Hawley sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calling for the changes. He claims that a pledge to defend Ukraine — which would become effective if the country were to join the military alliance — would distract the United States from China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Hawley reportedly wrote “it is not clear that Ukraine’s accession would serve U.S. interests.”

“If you are digesting Russian misinformation and parroting Russian talking points, you are not aligned with long-standing bipartisan American values, which is to stand up for the sovereignty of countries, like Ukraine,” Psaki told reporters.

“That applies to Senator Hawley, but it also applies to others who may be parroting the talking points of Russian propagandist leaders,” she added, a not-so-veiled reference to Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other conservative thought leaders who have in recent weeks questioned U.S. support for Ukraine and other beleaguered former Soviet countries.

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Hawley’s position puts him at odds with most prominent Republicans — after all, it was the administration of then-President George W. Bush that in 2008 agreed Ukraine and Georgia “will become” NATO members (though no definitive timetable was given). But, driven by Carlson and other conservative commentators, it appears the GOP base — as well as a roster of insurgent hardline candidates — is warming up to an increasingly anti-interventionist view of American foreign policy. 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and one of just 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the attempted insurrection, blasted Hawley in a particularly fiery statement — calling him “one of the worst human beings.”

“I hate to be so personal, but Hawley is one of the worst human beings, and a self egrandizing [sic] con artist” Kinzinger wrote in a tweet Wednesday night. “When Trump goes down I certainly hope this evil will be layed in the open for all to see, and be ashamed of.”

When asked by Insider about Kinzinger’s outburst, Hawley simply said, “weird.”

RELATED: Trump is feeling the heat from investigations — and wants his mob to save him

“It is weird,” Kinzinger responded in a subsequent tweet. “We are in weird times. Like having a Senator more interested in pleasing Tucker and playing to worst instincts than leading. Denying Jan 6th truth despite fomenting it, among other things.”

Others pointed out Hawley’s past foreign policy inconsistencies — such as his initial support for a speedy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and subsequent about-face, in which he loudly criticized the administration for doing exactly that.

“This is reminiscent of Hawley’s posturing on Afghanistan,” Daniel Larison, an editor at the anti-interventionist site AntiWar.com wrote on Twitter. “There was no consistency or principle involved, it was whatever let him bash Biden. So when Biden delayed withdrawal, he said withdrawal was too slow, and then when it happened he denounced it.”

“So it is easy to imagine a scenario where Biden rules out NATO membership for Ukraine and Hawley rends his clothes and laments that Biden has betrayed Ukraine,” he added.

In the near term, both the House and Senate are holding briefings on the situation in Ukraine Thursday — with Hawley requesting greater “clarity” on how Ukraine’s involvement in NATO would serve U.S. interests.  

“Pam & Tommy” is the greatest, hugest love story ever told about an unauthorized celebrity sex tape

The people behind Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy” have an inkling of how you probably feel about their subjects. As for those who have no opinion – either because “Baywatch” and Mötley Crüe were before their time, or because somehow all the tabloid headlines the pair inspired flew right by them – the first episode provides a succinct and handily prejudicial summary.

At first it leads you to believe that Pamela Anderson (Lily James) and Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) had it coming to them – “it” being the worldwide exposure of the most intimate moments of their honeymoon by way of a stolen video cassette being leaked onto the Internet.

This is the doing of Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), a carpenter and pushover of whom Lee takes advantage. We meet him first in “Pam & Tommy” while the eponymous couple is loudly humping in a nearby room, and he has to pretend to ignore their screams and moans as he drives nails into the custom built-in bed frame he’s creating for the newlywed’s sex palace.

RELATED: Meghan McCain and Pamela Anderson spar over Julian Assange

Lee, the drummer for Mötley Crüe, is one of the biggest names in rock and roll. Anderson, who starred in “Baywatch” as lifeguard C.J. Parker, hoped to parlay her fame into more serious acting roles, proving she was capable of more than jiggling in a bathing suit.

But to Gauthier in 1995, she’s little more than spank bank material, while Lee is just another impossible to please dirtbag who keeps changing his mind about the job without paying his workers.

Eventually Lee fires Gauthier’s crew and stiffs them, leading Gauthier to take his revenge by absconding with a safe from Lee’s garage.

This is how the first viral celebrity sex tape was thrust into the public sphere. Whether that comeuppance was deserved is one question this wild story grapples with as it also dissects who really pays the price in acts of revenge.

“Pam & Tommy” is a funny piece of work in every sense of that description. It commits to its comedic peaks with the same gritty energy it devotes to emotional lows, inviting us to ride the couple’s champagne and ecstasy-driven hedonism as it portrays their love, however hastily realized, as genuine.

Like several rear-viewing examinations of events and people whose downfalls played as salacious diversions in their time, the sex tape brouhaha receives a second look as one of the earliest tests of the Internet as a proliferating force and a pioneering privacy rights case.

But where other ripped-from-near-history works like “Impeachment” fall short in fully connecting with the humanity of those involved, the soul of “Pam & Tommy” overflows with vulnerability and pathos. Their sex tape became a phenomenon for crucial reasons besides its easy availability, the writers posit.

“I guess it should be disgusting – rich, debauched, famous people just f**king on a boat,” says Gauthier’s ex-wife Erica, played by Taylor Schilling, “but it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s, like . . . super wholesome. It’s . . . romantic.”

This is precisely the selling point that Gauthier’s distribution partner Uncle Miltie (Nick Offerman at his oily finest) sees as well. “This is so . . . private. It’s like we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to be seeing,” he says,” . . . which is kind of what makes it so f**king hot.”

Although it initially freights our empathy scale to favor Gauthier’s side, the story humanizes all parties as it progresses. Gauthier, unsurprisingly, is a natural fit for Rogen, an actor who’s made a career of compassionately playing misguided misfits, and who developed this series alongside his producing partner Evan Goldberg.

He realizes Gauthier as an amiable, naïve spiritualist who sees a get rich opportunity within his rash action. But he doesn’t foresee how quickly the appeal and evolving technology will move proprietary control of the tape beyond his reach, and become more liability than boon once the mob shark (Andrew Dice Clay) who lends Gauthier and Miltie the cash to get up and running tightens his leash.

Stan does some heavy lifting to move the needle on Lee from rock star caricature to a man rendered powerless by the circumstances that have befallen him, even if they are of his own creation.

Appropriately, though, the person who commands the most sympathy in all of this is Anderson, whose career was effectively extinguished by the right-left hook combo of the sex tape and her star-turn in the 1996 action bomb “Barb Wire.”

James’ portrayal is undeniably delicate and compassionate, defying the common ’90s portraiture of Anderson making her out to be a libidinous twit. The script takes an alternate view, showing how “Baywatch” producers sold Anderson short by refusing her a chance to act, preferring to pay her to jiggle her way through the surf as she ran.

Once the sex tape circulates more broadly that anyone could have anticipated, she’s the one who points out that while her husband will only benefit from having his prodigious member exposed to the world, her image would only be further devalued. But none of the men get it – Tommy least of all. “I’m on that tape too!” he insists each time she demands a bit more understanding than he’s willing to cede.

These scenes makes one wonder whether the discourse that sprouted from our re-examination of Britney Spears and Janet Jackson finds its way to Anderson.

Even if it doesn’t, “Pam & Tommy” drums up a lot of emotions, including hysteria and shock – simultaneously, at one point, thanks to a scene showing Lee having a long conversation with, shall we say, Mötley Crüe’s unsung fifth member (immaculately voiced by Jason Mantzoukas).

The fact that Stan plays this scene mostly straight amplifies the astonishment of watching it play out in front of us, creating a bizarre emotional combination of disbelief and appreciation. I can honestly say I never expected a show would go as far as this does. At the same time, that scene is entirely in tune with our concept of a guy who draws immense pride from having rock and roll’s hugest hog.

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Stan and James deserve all the credit for their persuasive performances, and not simply due to the makeup and wardrobe magic that makes them doppelgangers of Lee and Anderson in their prime. Certainly the accessories help. But the finest wigs and tattoos can only take the audience so far in viewing Lee, a man dripping with sleaze, as a short-fused dolt who is honestly and obviously in love with his wife.

Stan and James’ chemistry is white hot, and in a story like this that’s a non-negotiable requirement. The real Pam and Tommy were a volatile spectacle from the start, beginning with their marriage after a four-day drug propelled courtship and winding through legal troubles that include charges of spousal abuse to which Lee pleaded no contest. But they also reunited for a short time after their 1998 divorce, proof that what they had together was real regardless of how short it lasted.

Perhaps the strangest legacy of this whole business involves the realization of how much popular culture and social media owes to the realm of celebrity sex tapes. If not for Paris Hilton’s, would anyone have cared about “The Simple Life,” the show that made her a household name? Would the Kardashian name have any cachet without her brush with X-rated infamy?

Now think of all the trends that originated with those two: the selfie, purse dogs, contouring, thong heels, public awareness of and/or emotional investment in Kylie and Caitlyn Jenner, to name a few.

This is not to imply that having their most intimate moments made public without their consent is a good thing; regardless of how shrewdly their PR teams and momagers spun these incidents, it was still a violation of their privacy. (There’s also another bizarre connection, thanks to Anderson’s link with Rick Solomon, the man who leaked Hilton’s tape, and who she married and divorced twice.)

Still, they are examples of why nobody ever wants to be the first of a type – even if, as one porn producer points out, compromising photos and sex films starring the famous have been around since Hollywood was founded. The difference, “Pam & Tommy” argues through an incensed Lee, is “it’s our f**king love on that tape.” That’s what makes it so difficult to look away – not that you’ll want to.

The first three episodes of “Pam & Tommy” are currently available on Hulu. New episodes premiere on Wednesdays. Watch a trailer for the series below, via YouTube.

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Joe Rogan can’t stop pushing ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Experts are tired of debunking him

This week, podcaster Joe Rogan tweeted and then deleted a misleading story about ivermectin. The tremendously popular podcaster employed by streaming service Spotify has been in the news recently for touting misinformation regarding COVID-19 treatments; previously, he said he had taken ivermectin, which is an anti-parasitic drug, when he was diagnosed with COVID-19. 

The gloating tweet appeared mere weeks after hundreds of medical experts urged Spotify to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation, specifically calling out the dangers of Rogan’s podcast. Rogan’s now-deleted tweet said “Well, lookie here,” and linked to a report on a press release suggesting that ivermectin — an off-label anti-parasite drug used for the treatment of some parasitic worms in people and animals — was “effective” against the omicron variant in a phase 3 clinical trial. Reuters originally reported on the press release on Monday, but quickly made a correction.

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“CORRECTION: Japan’s Kowa said anti-parasite drug ivermectin showed an ‘antiviral effect’ against Omicron and other variants of coronavirus in joint non-clinical research,” Reuters tweeted. “The @WHO has warned against its use. We will delete a tweet with a misleading headline.”

Before the correction was made, many people — like Rogan — Laura Ingraham, and Charlie Kirk, the head of the right-wing campus organization Turning Point USA — shared the misleading article. Curiously, the conspiracy theory that ivermectin is an efficacious COVID-19 treatment, despite little evidence, has become a point of contention within culture wars — with right-wing talking heads promoting the drug.  

But science, ostensibly free from the culture wars, should operate without regard for the cultural storm that ivermectin has become enmeshed in. And despite Reuters’ “misleading” headline regarding the Japenese study, little attention was paid to the actual study itself, and what it said — and whether it actually did show anything new about ivermectin in treating COVID-19. 

The Reuters article was based on a press release from Kowa Co. Ltd., a Japanese pharmaceutical company; at the moment, there is no peer-reviewed study attached to it. The news simply said that in a test-tube study, ivermectin showed “antiviral” capabilities against omicron. However, the company does plan on conducting Phase III human trials; should those show Ivermectin is effective in a way it was not against previous variants, that would merit new news regarding the anti-parasitic drug. 

As Salon has previously reported in interviews with scientists, in vitro or test tube studies are limited in what they can reveal. Many different substances kill viruses in test tubes, including chlorine bleach and gasoline; this does not mean that they would do the same in the human body, nor that such substances could or should be injected or ingested to the point that they might eliminate viruses from one’s body. 

Related: Is there any evidence ivermectin can treat COVID-19? We analyzed the prominent scientific studies

Such in vitro studies “raise eyebrows” to a virologist, Dr. Benhur Lee, a Professor of Microbiology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, previously told Salon. “I can increase the concentration of sodium chloride (table salt) by 50% to my tissue culture cells and show inhibition of most viruses,” Lee said. “But I don’t go asking people to eat as much salty food as possible to combat virus infections, much less SARS-CoV-2.”

As Salon has reported, ivermectin is Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved and it can be prescribed by any U.S.-based physician, usually to those with intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis — two conditions caused by parasitic worms. However, the drug has been co-opted by those with an anti-vaccine agenda trying to keep people from getting vaccinated. Unlike ivermectin, there is sound scientific evidence that the existing COVID-19 vaccines prevent people from getting hospitalized or dying from COVID-19.

Without a prescription, the only way for a layperson to obtain ivermectin would be at a feed store or farm supply store, which sell the drug as a horse dewormer. As Salon previously reported last summer, some tractor supply stores around the country posted signs reminding their customers that the ivermectin they sell is only for animal consumption. Crucially, the FDA has not recommended ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. In fact, the public health agency warns against it. While there have been some studies that have had mild positive results around ivermectin and treating COVID-19, scientists have repeatedly told Salon that these studies, due to their small size or lack of being tested in humans, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Edward Mills of McMaster is a principal investigator of the Together Trial, which consists of more than 5,000 participants, and is the largest Phase 3 randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trial. That trial found that ivermectin showed no effect in treating COVID-19. Mills explained to Salon via email that the press release Rogan cited refers to “a test-tube study and has the same strengths and limitations as any test tube study.”

“It doesn’t provide any evidence on the role of IVM [ivermectin] on clinical use,” Mills said. “It really should have not received a press release and no legitimate news source should have reported on it.”

A second ivermectin-related study that was recently published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases could be misleading, too. The study states that a five-day course of ivermectin could reduce the duration of COVID-19 symptoms.

“The second study in Bangladesh was actually one of the earliest studies of IVM when people were still very open to repurposed medicines,” Mills explained, referring to the latter study. “It is just that it is being published 18 months after it was conducted.”

Mills added: “It is by a very well respected group from Bangladesh, but was small and they were doing this without resources.”

Mills concluded that there was a time when many scientists were open to evaluating ivermectin from smaller, early studies. But as the science continued with larger, randomized trials, those findings weren’t compelling enough to continue.

“But as more and more higher quality forms of evidence, usually large randomized trials, have been completed, they did not find compelling enough findings,” Mills said. “It’s important to note that NIH and Oxford continue to do large randomized trials, as there remains some uncertainty.”

Read more on the omicron variant:

Bomb threats at Black colleges linked to neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, police say

Over a dozen historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) reported bomb threats on Tuesday, marking the third wave of such threats in recent weeks. Earlier last month, at least eight HBCUs were targeted, then followed by another wave of threats on Monday. On Wednesday, police told reporters that the threats appear to be linked to someone claiming affiliation with the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division.

Among the schools targeted include Bowie State, Southern, Bethune-Cookman, Albany State, Howard, Delaware State, Mississippi Valley State; Fort Valley State, Morgan State, and Kentucky State universities. Many of them have imposed campus-wide closures to allow law enforcement to sweep the school premises. 

While no bombs have been found, the threats have nevertheless instilled an air of anxiety for many students, faculty, and staff.

“I’m uneasy,” Calvert White, a junior at Jackson State University, told CNN. “HBCUs have a long history of physical threats just because of our existence. I think that the threats aren’t individual or coincidental – that it’s a clear attack on Black students who choose to go to Black schools.”

Jamera Forbes, student body president of Morgan State, told The Washington Post that her “main concern is my students’ mental health.” 

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“As college students, we already have so much mentally to deal with,” said Forbes. “We’ve tried to push through and overcome so much with covid over the years, and we’re just trying to get back to a norm.”

“It makes me realize how there are still these terrorists that are trying to stop minorities from advancing or just getting a simple education from a predominantly Black institution,” Saigan Boyd, a 19-year-old Spelman College undergrad told CNN. “I’m just ultimately tired of dealing with this level of unsolicited hatred.”

RELATED: Trump walks back bizarre comments on funding black colleges — but this administration’s racism is no mistake

This past week, the string of threats continued into Black History Month, which officially commenced on Tuesday. 

Both the FBI has said that it is working with law enforcement officials to assess the threats’ credulity, and on Wednesday, the agency reportedly identified six “tech savvy” individuals in connection with the threats.  

“We take these threats incredibly seriously,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday. “Let me just reiterate that we condemn these disturbing threats and our thoughts are with the students, faculty and staff at these historic institutions.”

“The threats against HBCUs today demand a response,” echoed Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla. “As a former law enforcement officer I’ll keep working to make sure our institutions and law enforcement have the resources they need to keep all of our students and communities safe.”

RELATED: The critics were right: “Critical race theory” panic is just a cover for silencing educators

Daytona Beach Police Chief Jakari Young said on Wednesday that in a 20-minute phone call on Monday, a caller said bombs containing C-4 explosives would be detonated and a gunman would open fire at lunchtime Bethune-Cookman University in Florida. The caller, Young said, claimed to be affiliated with the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division. Leaders of the far-right hate group were federally sentenced last month for a plot to intimate journalists reporting on their anti-semitism. 

“Does that fit the Atomwaffen bill? It does. In other ways, it could be people who have no affiliation with Atomwaffen but are using it because they know it will create shock value,” Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told the Associated Press. “I just think it’s too early to tell.” 

Dr. Steven Newton, a professor of history and political science at Delaware State, told Salon that the threats offer a “teachable moment” about the “America’s difficult, ongoing, multi-sensory conversation about race.”

“You have to exist and work on an HBCU campus – where I’ve been over the last 30 years – to realize that you will not run into a young person of color who does not have a very deeply felt anecdote about an interaction with law enforcement, an interaction with people who made them feel unwelcome, or who were threatening for them. I think that’s one of the things we sanitized out of the narrative that’s very much still a reality.”

The threats come amid much broader racial tensions, which have recently manifested through issues related to schooling. In particular, conservative politicians and parents have railed against the use of “critical race theory” in classrooms, arguing that educators at both collegiate and pre-collegiate levels are teaching students to adopt an overly negative view of the country’s racial history. This GOP-led push has ushered in dozens of state-level bills designed to crack down “wokeness” in schools, some of which have been signed into law.

Bombshell report claims Trump nearly pardoned all Jan. 6 attackers before leaving office

Former President Donald Trump nearly presented a blanket pardon to Capitol attackers from Jan. 6 before he left office later that month.

According to Politico, two people with direct knowledge revealed that in the weeks before he was kicked out of the White House, he called three times, asking an adviser about the idea.

“Do you think I should pardon them? Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think I have the power to do it?” Trump said to the adviser.

In another call to an adviser, Trump asked several questions about how the attackers could be charged and what he could do to issue a uniform pardon to protect them.

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“Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol?” was Trump’s question. He wondered who could be pardoned.

“He said, ‘Some people think I should pardon them.’ He thought if he could do it, these people would never have to testify or be deposed,” the adviser recalled Trump saying.

The conversation has resurfaced this week after Trump told a Saturday rally crowd in Texas that if he’s reelected in 2024 that he “might” pardon the insurrectionists. At least one lawyer for Jan. 6 attackers said that the former president is putting his finger on the scales of justice. By promising a pardon, there is less of an incentive to cooperate with prosecutors.

RELATED: Trump is feeling the heat from investigations — and wants his mob to save him

Members of the House Select Committee on the Capitol attack have called Trump’s Saturday comments an example of “witness tampering.”

Read the full report at Politico.

Alexander Vindman sues Rudy Giuliani, Don Jr. over alleged witness intimidation campaign

One of the key witnesses in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial is suing Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani and several other White House officials over what he alleges was an intimidation campaign meant to smear him as “disloyal to the United States” and a “spy for a foreign country.”

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman became a star of the so-called “resistance” movement after reporting to House investigators that he thought a 2019 phone call between then-President Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was “improper” and “inappropriate.” On the call in question, Trump pushed Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden family’s involvement in Ukraine, particularly his son Hunter Biden’s seat on the board of Ukranian energy company Burisma. 

As a result of his testimony, Vindman alleges that Trump allies in and outside the White House designed an intimidation campaign “to inflict maximum damage by creating and spreading disinformation” that would spread via Fox News and other right-wing publications. Vindman also claims this campaign irreparably hurt his career, ultimately leading to his departure from the U.S. military. 

He was immediately fired from his White House post after Trump was acquitted in a Senate trial — and soon after the Trump administration sought to block a routine military promotion for Vindman. He eventually retired after enduring the continuing “bullying” of Trump and his allies, the suit says.

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Also included as defendants are White House social media director Dan Scavino and deputy White House communications director Julia Hahn. And while the suit does not name the former president as a defendant, his name is mentioned multiple times — claiming Trump was nonetheless part of a “coordinated campaign” to target Vindman.

Notably absent from the suit, NBC News reports, are any examples of meetings that took place or specific examples of coordination between the defendants — though the suit does claim “it is implausible that there would not be a high degree of coordination by the White House and close allies responding to a presidential impeachment.”

RELATED: Trump is feeling the heat from investigations — and wants his mob to save him

Vindman also argues in the suit that his treatment had larger repercussions for other witnesses who may wish to speak up against the former president.

“The actions taken by Defendants against Lt. Col. Vindman sent a message to other potential witnesses as well: cooperate and tell the truth at your own peril. The message reverberates to this day, as witnesses subpoenaed by Congress in connection with its investigation into the events of January 6, 2021, continue to heed former President Trump’s instructions to defy those subpoenas,” the suit reads.

6 things we can learn from Ina Garten about date night cooking

At some point as a “Food Network“-loving tween, I transitioned from daydreaming about finding my Prince Charming to finding my Jeffrey — just like Ina Garten did. Through season after season of “The Barefoot Contessa,” Ina has made it clear how much joy she has derived from making meals to share with her husband of 50 years. 

Now, in celebration of her birthday and in anticipation of Valentine’s Day, let’s take a look back at what Ina has taught us about date night cooking. Here are six tips gleaned from her show, cookbooks and interviews:

1 Make a menu

One of my favorite parts of a “Barefoot Contessa” episode is when Ina lays out what she’s planning to make that day — from cocktails, to the main course and sides, to dessert. While it can be tempting to fly to the supermarket guided by nothing other than the wings of love, special event meals tend to pull together a little more seamlessly with a game plan. Take a cue from Ina: Plot out what you’re making, as well as what ingredients you’ll need to pull it off. Nothing wrecks the mood like scrambling out of the kitchen mid-prep because you realize you forgot the pasta sauce. (Trust me, I’ve been there.)

If you’re low on inspiration, the Barefoot Contessa website has a whole list of example menus. Take a close look at the “Date Night” and “Jeffrey and Ina’s Valentine’s Day” menus. 

2 Set the mood

In terms of what Ina is most known for, her “engagement chicken” and penchant for extra-full cocktails probably spring to mind first. Trailing just behind those, however, is her love of a good tablescape, typically made possible through the hard work of the folks at Bridgehampton Florist. Do as Ina does: Stop by your local florist for a beautiful bouquet to liven up your kitchen or coffee table. 

If you’re on a budget, a few of those $2 Trader Joe’s bouquets can go a long way — here’s a guide to making the most of them. Beyond that, light some candles, dim the lights and pop on some music. If you’re looking for the perfect playlist, consider this one called “Ina’s Favorite Love Songs.” 

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3 Put your phones away

Once the playlist gets rolling, put your phones away. As Ina Garten told The Kitchn in an interview around the time “Cooking for Jeffrey” debuted, making a meal for someone is a gift. “I think just making dinner takes a real effort — to shop and cook and clean up afterwards — it’s a real gift to someone you care about,” she said. “By definition, it’s date night.”

As such, it feels right to be fully present in the moment.

4 Keep it classic

“You really connect over a really nice, simple dinner rather than a fancy dinner that’s meant to impress people,” Ina said in her interview with “The Kitchn.” “The key is to make something so when you’re done with dinner, you can still be present for the people who are there — that’s what makes them feel special.”

There can be a lot of pressure to make a special occasion meal — whether that’s an anniversary dinner, Valentine’s Day or date night — feel absolutely perfect, and that can lead to wanting to whip out the most complicated recipes in your repertoire. 

And, hey, if you want to try navigating making Beef Wellington, whipping up miniature chocolate soufflés and baking your own sourdough loaf to serve with butter, be my guest. But also, keeping it classic and simple is a solid path forward, too. Roast a chicken with some sheet pan vegetables, try Salon’s Mary Elizabeth William’s two-ingredient nutella brownies, stir up a rye old-fashioned and call it a night. 

5 Store-bought is fine (really!)

Borrowing from Ina’s now-famous saying, store-bought really is fine! Give yourself permission to offload some of the responsibility for the meal’s success to a local shop or restaurant. Not great at whipping up cocktails at home? Grab a to-go kit from your favorite bar. Can’t follow a baking recipe to save your soul? Grab a few slices of cake from the good bakery down the street. Part of putting together a good meal is knowing when to outsource certain tasks or courses so you can focus on what you’re best at — and, most importantly, focus on the person sitting across the table from you.

6 Have fun with it!

Ina’s approach to entertaining, and life, is really all about having fun. This is evident from the types of parties she throws — my favorite “Barefoot Contessa” episode shows her hosting a dog birthday party for a very good boy named Theo — and from her recent exchange with Reese Witherspoon about “healthy daily habits.” So, mix up a big Cosmo and get into the kitchen. Here’s hoping you find your Jeffrey to share date night with!

A brief list of Barefoot Contessa-approved recipes: 

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. Salon has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

Hype or hope? Viral studies suggest cannabis could help treat COVID-19

When the story first broke that researchers believed marijuana could help treat COVID-19, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel cracked a joke that summed up the appeal of — and, from the perspective of scientific literacy, the problem with — the public’s reaction to the news.

“You know, it’s funny — all these crazy cures, I’m like ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous.’ Ivermectin, the horse dewormer; bleach,” Kimmel mused. “And then somebody says marijuana prevents Covid, I’m like ‘Oh, really? Do tell.'”

For as long as marijuana has been consumed for recreation, those same casual users have insisted that the plant actually has medicinal value — although those claims have not always been grounded in reliable science. Yet the two recent studies which have asserted marijuana could help treat COVID-19 do not come from activists or crackpots, but prestigious universities and publications: A paper in the journal Science Advances suggests that cannabidiol (CBD), an active ingredient in the cannabis plant, could block COVID-19 infections, while research released in the Journal of Natural Products indicates that cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid, two compounds found in cannabis, “prevented infection of human epithelial cells” and “prevented entry of live SARS-CoV-2 into cells.”

“Importantly, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid were equally effective against the SARS-CoV-2 alpha variant B.1.1.7 and the beta variant B.1.351,” the study’s abstract concludes. “Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2.”

The authors stressed that these products should not be considered as a substitute for vaccinations and public health precautions, but as a potential supplement to them. (Salon reached out with questions about the study to Dr. Richard Van Breemen, a professor at Oregon State University and both the lead and corresponding author on the paper, and has not heard back at the time of this writing.)

RELATED: Condiments with some chill: CBD enters the world of sauces

As for the paper on CBD, Salon spoke with Dr. Marsha Rosner, who took the lead with this study and was one of the senior authors, and additionally is a professor at the University of Chicago.

“We don’t know yet if CBD can prevent COVID, but we think our results provide a strong case for a clinical trial — such as those that have been done for vaccines — to determine whether CBD is effective either for prevention or potentially for decreasing COVID infection in people,” Rosner told Salon. That said, there are some caveats. First, as with the authors of the Science Advances study, Rosner emphasized that no marijuana products are a substitute for vaccination. For another thing, the drug would need to have such a high purity that the products at your local dispensary or other commercial location would almost certainly not be enough, and even then would have to be stored in such a way that it does not break down. In the current market, “there really is no quality control.”

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Rosner also argued that “to date, CBD is the only cannabis compound that should be seriously considered as a potential drug to fight COVID” and mentioned that in the Science Advances paper they found special CBD formulations inhibited SARS-CoV-2 replication in cultured cells at doses that are also found in human blood; that CBD can decrease SARS-CoV-2 amounts in mouse lung and nasal passages; and that they had a lower incidence of positive COVID results among patients who took a prescribed, FDA-approved CBD formulation. “Our results do NOT mean that CBD will work as an anti-viral agent,” Rosner explained. “Instead, they provide strong support for a clinical trial to definitively determine whether pure CBD, taken with the appropriate dose and formulation, is effective at preventing or decreasing SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Dr. Russell Medford, chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, told Salon by email that people should exercise caution before reading too much into the results.

“It is important to manage expectations regarding these very early laboratory and animal studies demonstrating an effect of CBD on SARS-CoV-2,” Medford explained. “These findings should not be used to assume that CBD will work to curb COVID-19 in patients. As is the case for any potential therapeutic that shows efficacy in the laboratory or animal models, this will require extensive additional laboratory, animal and eventually clinical studies.”

Medford added, “It is important to note the many other potential COVID treatments, such as hydroxychloroquine to name just one, showed promise in the laboratory but failed to show any benefit in clinical trials of patients.”

Dr. Peter Lurie, a former associate commissioner at Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and President of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, echoed Medford’s observation.

“What you have are studies that are interesting and might suggest pathways for future research, but they are not sufficient to convince a regulatory agency of the product’s effectiveness or, in my mind, enough to justify prescribing to patients,” Lurie told Salon. He later specified that “the FDA would not accept these two studies as adequate evidence of effectiveness. I cannot imagine them doing so.” Like Medford, he mentioned the hype about hydroxychloroquine as an example of a potential medicine that “looked promising in epidemiological studies” but proved ineffective in later studies.

Update: This article was updated with an additional quote from Dr. Marsha Rosner since its initial publication.

Read more on cannabis and science:

Scientists believe the Great Barrier Reef is about to suffer another mass bleaching

Following the hottest December on record over the Great Barrier Reef, U.S. government scientists predict the world’s largest coral reef system could experience a mass coral bleaching event later in the southern hemisphere’s summer. Such an incident would be catastrophic to the fragile marine habitat, which thus far has survived five mass bleaching events — three in the last seven years alone.

If extensive damage occurs as a result of high temperatures leading into the bleaching season, 2022 would become the second year with mass bleaching during La Niña. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research scientists, in a report awaiting peer review before publication in Faculty 1000, raises alarm bells about the potential impact of the extreme heat wave. Associated monsoonal conditions of La Niña years of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation would typically create a cooling effect over the southern Pacific, including the 135,000 square mile reef system.

Coral bleaching is a process that occurs when coral, stressed by changing water temperatures, expel the algae from their porous tissues and turn bone-white. Though coral bleaching does not immediately kill corals, they become far more susceptible to disease and death after bleaching events. Because coral reefs are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the ocean, bleaching events threaten vast numbers of aquatic species; though coral reefs make up a tiny percentage of the ocean by area, 25 percent of marine life relies on coral reefs to survive.

One of the key findings of the report is that the minimum sea surface temperatures over the Great Barrier Reef from Nov. 16 to Dec. 14 were overwhelmingly warmer than any on record. In fact, 87 percent of the Great Barrier Reef had minimum sea surface temperatures greater than any maximum temperature recorded from 1985 to 2020 during that same time period.

Dr. Derek P. Manzello, marine ecosystems and climate branch coordinator for NOAA Coral Reef Watch, a coauthor on the report, says that this year’s La Niña climate pattern, which leads to cooler ocean temperatures, offers reason for optimism. Storms may still quell the threat of intense heat with cloud cover, rain, and high winds.

“At this point in time, it’s not clear if it’s gonna be a localized minor event or if it could get worse,” Dr. Manzella said.

There is bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef right now, but it is currently limited to the far northern part, a relatively small portion of the reef according to Dr. Manzella. In a Jan. 28 update, Chief Scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Park Authority Dr. David Wachenfeld coral bleaching across the park has been limited. He also emphasized that reported bleaching so far has not been severe.

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“Not surprisingly we have seen growing reports of coral bleaching from different parts of the park, but I want to stress that all of these are low-impact bleaching at this stage, which is good news,” he said.

Coral bleaching itself is not uncommon, nor is it necessarily deadly for coral. Environmental stress causes the coral to expel or break down symbiotic algae, dinoflagellate. Under normal circumstances, the algae give the coral its color, nutrients, and disease resistance in exchange for a habitat. This mutually beneficial relationship dissolves under the stress of extreme heat, which leads to toxicity for coral as a result of overactive photosynthesis on the part of the algae. Although corals can recover from bleaching, extreme or prolonged environmental stress will cause the death of corals, which depends on the symbiosis with algae to sustain themselves. 

“The trend we’re seeing nowadays is that heat stress events, marine heat waves, are becoming greater in magnitude in terms of how hot it is — is the thermal anomaly one degree, two degree, three degree — the magnitude is increasing with heat waves and as is the duration of the heat wave,” Manzella noted.

Even if this year does not result in a mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, successive bleaching events weaken the viability of reef systems to recover, and these are likely to continue to be more prevalent as the Pacific Ocean continues to warm.

RELATED: How the U.S. Navy is killing the world’s whales

“What ends up happening to those corals that survive is they end up being susceptible to disease for at least two to three years, sometimes longer,” Manzella continued. “Their growth rates go down for at least two to three years. Sometimes upwards of 10 years they’ll have depressed growth from that bleaching stress, and also corals can essentially become sterile for four to five years after they bleach.”

On the scale of an entire reef system, coral bleaching poses not only a threat of widespread coral mortality but also to the ability of the coral to effectively regenerate.

“The real issue, globally — not just for the Great Barrier Reef — for every coral on the planet is when we start piling on these heat stress events, you end up killing off all the sensitive corals,” he said. “Then it becomes death by a thousand cuts for the corals that are able to recover because, even though they can hang on there and survive a bleaching event, they have to deal with disease and they’re not growing fast enough, they’re not reproducing and making babies. Then it’s basically survival; it’s hanging-on-for-dear-life survival.”

According to the Park Authority, further bleaching is expected given forecasts from NOAA and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology that warmer than average temperatures will prevail into February.

“Obviously that is of concern, but this is balanced by the forecast from the bureau that there will be tropical monsoonal activity strengthening and widespread rain over many parts of northern Australia in the coming weeks,” Wachenfeld said. “This will also come with the development of several tropical lows over northern Australia and obviously the cloud and the rain and the wind associated with these systems will bring a cooling effect to the great barrier reef.”

Read more on Earth’s oceans:

GOP senator thinks Biden’s “woke” SCOTUS pick won’t know “law book from a J.Crew catalog”

Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., joined a growing chorus of Republicans bashing President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee — well before the president has picked anyone — even as Republican leaders try to avoid a losing fight ahead of the midterms.

Republican Senate leaders worry that picking a fight over Biden’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, when they lack enough votes to block the nomination, would be “counterproductive” and could “backfire” by distracting from key election issues, according to Wednesday’s edition of Politico Playbook. (Judicial nominations cannot be blocked through a Senate filibuster, a change introduced by Republicans when they held the majority.) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told members on Tuesday that replacing a liberal justice with another liberal would not affect the balance of the court, especially after the party packed the court with conservatives under former President Donald Trump.

But some Republican senators have repeatedly attacked Biden for vowing to nominate a Black woman to the court, even though Trump and former President Ronald Reagan similarly vowed to nominate women to diversify a court that has been dominated by white men for generations.

“No. 1, I want a nominee who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog,” Kennedy told Politico Tuesday after meeting with the GOP leaders. “No. 2, I want a nominee who’s not going to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.'”

RELATED: Fox News melts down over Biden Supreme Court pick — before he’s nominated anyone

Kennedy, an Oxford-educated lawyer and career politician, rebranded himself as a folksy Republican after a long stint as a Democrat. Louisiana publications have likened his one-liners to Foghorn Leghorn but people who knew him before he became a prominent Republican told BuzzFeed News last year that it’s all an act (which he denies).

“John Kennedy is not folksy — he’s just offensive,” MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tweeted in response to Kennedy’s comment to Politico.

“Kennedy manages to squeeze in sexism, racism, and his fake down home Foghorn Leghorn bit all in about 15 words,” wrote Fred Wellman, the former executive director of the Lincoln Project. “Enough is enough with this con artist.”

Kennedy rejected GOP leaders’ pleas to tone down the rhetoric on Biden’s nomination.

“I think some members of leadership think they can control what people want to talk about,” he told Politico. “I don’t agree with that proposition. I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about, and if they don’t like that, they can call somebody who cares.”

Kennedy has frequently used the puzzling J.Crew quip in response to a range of issues.

“Anyone who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog does not take this charge seriously,” he declared during Trump’s first impeachment.

“Anyone who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog knows that Democrats’ attempt to add D.C. as a state is unconstitutional,” he said in a Fox News interview last year.

“Nobody knows what he even means by ‘a law book,'” tweeted attorney Max Kennerly. “A casebook? Only students use those. The Federal Reporter? No one calls that a ‘book.’ A John Grisham novel?”

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Other Republican senators have also attacked Biden for vowing to nominate a Black woman.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., suggested last week that Biden’s nominee would be a “beneficiary” of affirmative action policies.

The White House fired back by citing Wicker’s very different response to Trump’s promise to nominate a woman.

“When the previous president followed through on his own promise to place a woman on the Supreme Court, Sen. Wicker said, ‘I have five granddaughters, the oldest one is 10. I think Justice Amy Coney Barrett will prove to be an inspiration to these five granddaughters and to my grown daughters,'” White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN. “We hope Sen. Wicker will give President Biden’s nominee the same consideration he gave to then-Judge Barrett.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said over the weekend that it would be “offensive” and “insulting” to select a Black woman because Black women only make up 6% of the population.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted on Tuesday that Cruz “had no objection to Donald Trump promising he’d nominate a woman in 2020” and had praised Barrett as a “role model for little girls.”

“There is no outcry around that,” Psaki said. “The president’s view is that after 230 years of the Supreme Court being in existence, the fact that not a single Black woman has served on the Supreme Court is a failure in the process.”

That sentiment was echoed by Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Graham is backing the same potential nominee as Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., that being South Carolina District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs.

“Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America. You know, we make a real effort as Republicans to recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America,” Graham told CBS News on Sunday. “Affirmative action is picking somebody not as well qualified for past wrongs. Michelle Childs is incredibly qualified. There’s no affirmative action component if you pick her. I can’t think of a better person for President Biden to consider for the Supreme Court than Michelle Childs.”

Biden is also reportedly considering D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review who clerked for three federal judges, including retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, a former editor of the Yale Law Journal who argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court while serving in the Justice Department under Barack Obama, is also in the running.

Republicans’ attacks have little to do with the candidates’ qualifications, and even less to do with the makeup of the court, given that 108 of 115 Supreme Court justices in U.S. history have been white men.

The attacks are intended to “reiterate the narrative that liberals elevate unqualified Black Americans at the expense of others who are truly deserving” to reinforce the messages that “advocacy for equal rights is turning white conservatives into an oppressed class,” wrote The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. “If the Republicans seeking to stoke resentment over this appointment can successfully turn the story of the first Black woman on the Supreme Court into another example of Black people getting free stuff they haven’t earned, they will be perfectly satisfied, even if she is confirmed,” he wrote. “The important battles over the future of the Court have already taken place, and the right has already won them.”

Read more on Biden’s upcoming Supreme Court pick:

Jeff Zucker out as CNN head after failing to reveal relationship with former Cuomo aide

Jeff Zucker, the longtime president of CNN, abruptly resigned on Wednesday after revealing that he failed to disclose “a consensual relationship” with his “closest colleague” during the network’s probe into former host Chris Cuomo. 

“As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years,” Zucker said in a company memo. “I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.”

“I certainly wish my tenure here had ended differently,” the media giant added. “But it was an amazing run. And I loved every minute.”

RELATED: CNN hires failed gimmick king

Zucker, 56, is no doubt one of the most powerful fixtures in the American media landscape, having served as the network’s leading light for nine years. The executive’s departure comes amid the network’s merger between its parent company, AT&T, and Discovery. Previously, Zucker said that his tenure would last until the merger was finalized, potentially throwing the deal into flux. 

Zucker’s swift exit follows that of ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who was fired in December for his role helping his brother, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, counter a sexual harassment scandal involving eleven different women. Back in May, when allegations came to light that Chris Cuomo had advised his brother’s aides on how to craft a public relations response to the scandal, Zucker said the anchor “made a mistake” and allowed him to remain on air. In December, Zucker eventually dropped his support of Chris Cuomo after it was revealed that the anchor used his media contacts to give Gov. Cuomo advance notice of then-impending allegations. 

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Though his memo omits this detail, Zucker is reportedly in a relationship with Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Zucker and Gollust divorced their separate spouses back in 2018. Prior to her role at CNN, Gollust served as Andrew Cuomo’s communications director. 

“Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years,” Gollust told Times on Wednesday. “Recently, our relationship changed during Covid. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time. I’m incredibly proud of my time at CNN and look forward to continuing the great work we do everyday.”

RELATED: Chris Cuomo’s unethical blunder isn’t solely his to own. It’s CNN’s “Epic News Bro” fail also

Zucker, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, joined CNN in 2013. During Donald Trump’s presidency, CNN repeatedly came under fire by the former president, who claimed that the network produced “fake news.” Zucker and Trump reportedly had a more amicable relationship during Zucker’s tenure at NBCUniversal, during the networks’ taping of “The Apprentice,” Trump’s signature foray into reality television.