Ron DeSantis announces election police force

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vowed on Wednesday to assemble an election police force tasked with investigating election crimes as part of a new spate of restrictive voting laws promoted by the Republican widely seen as a 2024 presidential hopeful.

DeSantis made the announcement at an event in West Palm Beach, where he unveiled the state’s plan to establish an “Office of Election Crimes and Security within the Department of State to investigate election crimes and fraud,” according to a Wednesday press conference. “We are excited to say that next legislative session we are proposing another package of election integrity reforms that will make Florida the number one state for elections,” the governor said in a statement. “I am excited that with this legislation, our state will be able to enforce election violations, combat voter fraud and make sure violators are held accountable. If potential violators know they will be held accountable, they will be much less likely to engage in improper conduct in the first place.”

The GOP-backed proposal also sets out to “prohibit unsecure, haphazard drop box locations,” require “timelines for supervisors of elections to clean the voter rolls of ineligible voters,” and outlaw ballot harvesting – the practice of using third-party volunteers to pick up and deliver ballots on behalf of voters.

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During his press conference, DeSantis suggested that Florida’s election system had been widely compromised in the 2020 election.

“There’ll be people, if you see someone ballot harvesting, you know, what do you do? If you call into the election office, a lot of times they don’t do anything,” he said, without citing evidence. “If you know that, there’s, you know, in Florida, it’s Constitutionally mandated, only citizens are allowed to vote in Florida, and yet you see examples of people, they’ll even check they’re not citizens, and they’ll still be given ballots.”

According to the Associated Press, DeSantis’ election police force will be tasked with both deterring crime and investigating it.

Earlier this year, Florida’s GOP-backed legislature approved a sweeping “election security” measure apparently designed to crack down on voter fraud amid Donald Trump’s erroneous conspiracy that the 2020 presidential election was marred by foul play at the ballots. The bill imposed stricter ID rules for voter registration, prevented voters who fail to request ballots from automatically receiving them, restricted ballot box usage to early voting hours, and more. DeSantis called it one of the “strongest election integrity measures in the country.”

But Democrats and law experts widely criticized the measure as an attempt to suppress youth, eldery, and minority voters.

“The legislation has a deliberate and disproportionate impact on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students and communities of color,” Patricia Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, told AP News at the time. “It’s a despicable attempt by a one party ruled legislature to choose who can vote in our state and who cannot. It’s undemocratic, unconstitutional, and un-American.”

North Carolina Democrats walk out after Republicans swear-in Jan. 6 participant into the legislature

A majority of North Carolina House Democrats left Monday night’s session just before Donnie Loftis, a Republican who participated in the the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, was sworn in as the chamber’s newest member.

Loftis, a 30 year-old veteran and former Gaston County commissioner, was selected by the Republican party to finish the term of Rep. Dana Bumgardner, who died while in office in October. Loftis’ active participation in the insurrection has caused frustration and disappointment among the Democrats, according to reporting by WRAL.

“Today marks a new low for General Assembly Republicans, because instead of condemning those actions and rejecting the rhetoric that incites violence, they are welcoming a Capitol insurrection participant with open arms,” wrote North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Bobbie Richardson in a statement.

In a series of social media posts that have since been deleted, Loftis detailed his experience at the Capitol.

According to the posts, Loftis was “gassed three times and was at the entrance when they breached the door.” He claimed to have spoken to other service members who were present, and concluded that they “had no other choice.”

“My Oath of Enlistment has the phrase ‘both foreign and domestic,'” he wrote in a Facebook comment in January. “We didn’t think it would actually be domestic.”

When asked about his involvement in late October, however, Loftis said it was purely peaceful and that he was “surprised and disappointed” that others behaved inappropriately, reported WRAL.

“I had absolutely zero involvement in the rioting and categorically condemn the storming of our Capitol building that day,” he said in the interview.

Following Monday’s session, House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican, commented that he has known Loftis for 20 years and that he is a “good man.” He also noted that if Loftis had committed any crime during the riots, then the FBI surely would have found something and “we would have heard it by now.”

Richardson, however, sees Moore’s attitudes towards the riots and his endorsement of Loftis as a step in the wrong direction.

“Tim Moore has repeatedly dodged questions by reporters who want to know if he supports his members’ actions on January 6th,” she wrote in a statement. “The Republican Party hand-picked Loftis to join their ranks, further demonstrating how trending towards extremism is the future of the North Carolina Republican Party.”

This is not the first time Loftis has stirred controversy. Last May, he resigned from the CaroMont Health Board – a position he held for eight years – following questioning by The Charlotte Observer over Facebook posts complaining about “tyrannical” stay-at-home and posting coronavirus conspiracies. Loftis told WRAL News that he resigned to avoid controversy. “I regret that CaroMont Health was disparaged,” he said at the time. “I do not regret standing up and saying your personal freedoms are important.”

Climate change is coming for the supermarket

Imagine a world in which supermarket shelves were void of corn-based products like corn flakes and polenta, while grains like rice and barley were pricier and the selection smaller. Such a future could be just around the corner due to climate change, which stands to make some crops scarcer and others unexpectedly abundant — meaning the human diet, and your own personal food consumption habits, stand to drastically change.

That is the conclusion of a recent study published in the scientific journal Nature Food. More than three dozen researchers from a number of universities concluded that — based on the latest climate projections and state-of-the-art crop models — changing rainfall patterns, rising temperatures and increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air will cause agricultural production to be drastically disrupted worldwide. The question is not “if,” but “how much” and “when.”

“Generally speaking, climate change will have largest negative impacts on regions situated at lower latitudes, tropical and subtropical countries as higher temperatures will push crops closer or beyond their temperature thresholds,” Jonas Jaegermeyr, lead author and a crop modeler and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Salon by email. “In higher latitudes — say Canada, northern Europe, and Russia — higher temperatures can be beneficial for crop growth, especially for wheat, which is mostly grown in these regions.”

He added by way of example, “Maize in general faces much larger losses than wheat. One aspect is that it is currently grown in lower latitudes than wheat. The other important factor is it cannot benefit as much from higher CO₂ concentrations as wheat can.”

Unsurprisingly, the study also found that people from less affluent countries will suffer more than those in more affluent nations. Agricultural sectors in poorer countries seem likely to experience the most significant declines in their staple crops — based on the current models — compared to their wealthier counterparts. This means that people in those countries are more likely to suffer from food insecurity as a result of climate change. Similarly, the study anticipates that farmers with smaller amounts of land will be more vulnerable to food insecurity once climate change is under way.

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None of this should come as news to those who work in agriculture. In fact, some say such shifts are already apparent.

“We are already experiencing the adverse impact of climate change on agriculture in general and food production in particular,” Shahram Azhar, assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University, wrote to Salon. “The central issue of concern from the humanitarian standpoint is the relationship between crop yields and caloric consumption. This deals with the impact of climate change on starvation and hunger via its impact on agricultural output. Frankly, the evidence is pretty dismal on that front.”

Azhar pointed to a 2019 study led by researchers at the University of Minnesota on the yields of the world’s main ten crops in terms of caloric intake (“barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat”) and found that climate change leads to consistently lower food yields over time. Overall, climate change is causing the number of available food calories to fall by roughly one percent for each year. In addition to poorer countries, disadvantages individuals in wealthier nations are also likely to be impacted.

“Moreover, the rate of climate-change-induced food calories losses may accelerate in upcoming decades,” Azhar explained. “To see this, we need to understand the empirical evidence that compares two inter-related but conceptually different trends: 1) the growing food demand (due to population pressures) and 2) the shrinking yields (due to climate change) of food crops.”

This will prove true even if the specific estimates provided in the new model don’t prove to be absolutely correct. According to Christa Court, an assistant professor of regional economics at the University of Florida, these models are by their very nature going to be imprecise — but their underlying point is valid.

“I think what is important to keep in mind for all of the work that this group is doing, as well as the work that I do, that models provide data and insights for decision-making,” Court told Salon. “Everything that we are doing is trying to model a complex human or natural behavior, and we’re not going to get it exactly right with the data and the computational power that we have.”

Court added “that doesn’t mean that it’s not useful. I think the one thing that’s important to keep in mind is that we’re often not trying to very precisely and very accurately predict the future.”

* * *

The statistics are ominous, for obvious reasons — namely, if available food calories are falling by roughly one percent for each year, does that mean that humanity risks starvation? Yet the authors of the paper argue that policymakers can take steps to address this problem in advance.

“There are important measures available for the farmers to adapt to the new climate realities and in follow-up studies we will quantitatively study some of them, including shifting planting dates, using new crop cultivars better adapted to warmer conditions, switching to new crops, expanding irrigation, etc,” Jaegermeyr explained. “But this study highlights that the level and extent of climate change impacts are so substantial that targeted adaptation policies become critical for global agriculture within the coming decade.”

Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an associate professor of applied economics at Cornell University, wrote to Salon that scientists also need to start planning for agricultural needs in a world that will be ravaged by climate change — and accept that the old world will never return.

“Farmers are doing the best given the technologies they have access to,” Ortiz-Bobea wrote. “What is important to recognize is that agricultural innovation, the creation of new seed varieties, machineries, processes to produce more food with fewer inputs, is largely done ‘off-farm’ in private companies or in labs of universities and international organizations. Also investments in research and development today will bear fruits many years later.”

How Democrats can win the critical race theory war: Call out the Christian right behind the movement

After Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won Virginia’s gubernatorial race Tuesday, the GOP appears eager to take his bigotry-infused “education” strategy nationwide. “The Republican swings in Virginia and New Jersey show the efficacy of a new model of conservative politics: appealing to suburban voters by promising greater parental control of schools,” the Washington Post reports Thursday morning. It’s a clever strategy.

If the public knew what the GOP demands actually were — banning classic books like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood — most parents would not be on board. Few people want to be a Nazi book burner! But the GOP is repackaging this deeply fascist love of censorship in a friendlier frame of “parental rights.” They got lucky that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, blundered in the campaign’s closing weeks when he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” instead of mounting a robust defense of free speech and teaching the truth about slavery and segregation in history classes.

So what, exactly, are kids learning?

Republicans use scare terms like “critical race theory,” and liberals try to draw attention to the lists of books Republicans are trying to ban, mainly for suggesting racism is bad or that LGBTQ people exist. It’s extremely important for the left to focus on how this supposed fight over “education” is really a proxy fight over the right’s rejection of equality for LGBTQ people and people of color.

But there’s another aspect to this fight that has been less discussed: How the GOP war on schools is instigated, organized, and funded by right-wing religious groups whose true agenda is opposing the rights of children.

Conservatives, especially the Christian right, have long taken a dim view of raising kids who can think for themselves. Their view is children should be “trained” to be obedient and submissive. Under the guise of “parents’ rights,” the Christian right is mainstreaming their hostility to the very idea that children have a right to an education. In this case, the right of a child to have a proper education that teaches critical thinking and intellectual curiosity.

As journalist Talia Lavin writes in her recent deep dive into the history of corporal punishment in evangelical circles, the movement of “biblical parenting” started in 1970, when Christian right activist James Dobson published his book “Dare to Discipline,” which advanced a belief in “the enforced submission of children to absolute authority.” Soon there was a cottage industry of similar books, all of which promoted “the complete subjection of the child’s will,” usually through relentlessly beating kids (which is minimized through the cutesy word “spanking”). Children, in the Christian right view, are not to be educated — they are to be “trained.” This philosophy of child-rearing was accompanied by a movement to impose their anti-child ideology on society and government. Unfortunately, this particular political goal of the Christian right gets far less coverage than their war on reproductive rights, their anti-LGBTQ activism, or their white supremacy. This lack of attention may, in fact, be a reason they’ve been wildly successful. As Lavin notes, hitting children “is outlawed completely in 63 countries,” but “legal in all fifty states.” Laws allowing parents to take kids out of school to be “home schooled” are notoriously lax, and there’s been a great deal of headway in redirecting kids out of schools and into religious “charter schools” that embrace the training-not-education approach. Donald Trump’s Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, a far-right fundamentalist who has spent decades trying to destroy the public education system. It’s why the U.S. is the only country in the world that hasn’t ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It should be unsurprising, then, that the religious right groups who have long opposed children’s rights are behind this newly sprung nationwide attack on public schools.

Religious right stalwarts like the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation have been central to planning and unhatching this scheme to use the scare term “critical race theory” to stir up outrage at schools for teaching the truth about racism in history and literature classes. Also central to the effort, as reported by NBC News, is the International Organization for the Family, which has, like the Family Research Council, been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Under its original name, the World Congress of Families, the International Organization for the Family promoted not just a deeply authoritarian and patriarchal view of the family, but also white nationalism. As explained at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Through its ideology of the so-called “natural family,” WCF promotes a strict view of family, one based exclusively on the marriage of one heterosexual man to one heterosexual woman and their biological children, to the exclusion of many different types of families. Closely tied to this ideology is an adherence to strict binary gender roles, in which men serve as the heads of households and women as their helpmates and the bearer of children. Only this type of family, they contend, can quell the “demographic winter,” the idea that European populations, especially, are in decline because of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, women in the workplace, and a variety of other things that deviate from the “natural family.”

There’s no way to really untangle all these different far-right views from each other. Forcing children into submission and preventing them from developing critical thinking skills is seen as crucial for raising them to be compliant adults who will unquestioningly adopt this patriarchal and racist view of family formation and purpose. One can see why schools teaching the book “Beloved” was flagged by far-right activists as a threat. Not only does the book humanize the victims of white supremacy, it also raises important questions about the rights of children and the meaning of self-determination. Indeed, even the concept of “raising questions” alarms the Christian right. In their view, children are not to think for themselves but to passively accept the instructions of elders.

Unfortunately, one reason the Christian right has a lot of success smuggling their radical views into mainstream politics is they, as happened in Virginia, often reframe it as a matter of “parental rights.”

Most parents reject the religious right’s extremist views on extinguishing a child’s autonomy, to be clear. But most parents believe that they should have some control over their child’s life, including over their education, health care, and disciplinary matters. They aren’t even really wrong about this. Children’s rights are always in contention with the need to keep children safe and to socialize them properly. Knowing the exact right mix of autonomy and discipline is a nuanced and tough question. The problem, however, is the reframing this as a matter of “parents’ rights” distracts from the real issue, which is the war being waged on children’s rights.

Children have a right to learn the truth about American history and to learn critical thinking skills. Children have a right to be exposed to great works of literature and art, and to expand their horizons. Children have a right to a robust health education, which includes information about sexuality and sexual orientation so that they can grow into healthy adults, instead of being hobbled with shame for having normal human impulses. All this chitter-chatter about “parents’ rights” — by design — is hiding the fact that many of these rights of children are under very real threat right now.

Failure to understand the deeply radical nature of the Christian right ideology fueling this school board movement leaves Democrats unequipped to fight back. We saw this with the McAuliffe campaign, which fumbled early on with the “parents’ rights” framing, and only too late in the campaign realized they could reframe the matter — correctly, mind you — as a deeply racist attempt to censor books. Democrats need to highlight how profoundly anti-child the GOP attack on school boards is and defend both the right of children to learn and the right of educators to teach.

Most people don’t want kids to grow up without learning to think for themselves. Democrats can win this fight — but first, they must understand what they’re truly up against.

A 3-ingredient, no measuring cake that tastes like autumn in Copenhagen

In my imagination, I am the kind of person who grows things and picks things and takes long walks in the woods. In reality, I am the kind of person who runs out of things and waits on long lines at the supermarket.

That does not stop me, however, from appreciating the leisurely pleasures of Mikkel Karstad’s sumptuous “Nordic Family Kitchen: Seasonal Home Cooking.”

Karstad, a chef, former culinary advisor to the legendary Noma team and father of four, knows that not all of us can raise our own chickens or have easy access to sea buckthorn. But in his book, he shows a path for working with what you’ve got, locally, seasonally and simply. “I hope that the book can inspire,” he says during a recent chat from his home in Denmark, “because I know it’s not possible for everybody to go to the forest or to the beach every weekend, but to maybe sometimes don’t just go to the supermarket, and try and go to your local farmer’s market.”

That titular word “family” is a big component of his philosophy. “I wanted to make it a book to show that in your everyday life, you can cook something really simple with your kids and with your children,” he says. “And then in the weekend, you can actually maybe spend some more time on doing that.” I know that even in my most frantic moments, my happiest memories tend to be, like Mikkel, puttering around in the kitchen making fresh pasta with my family. And cakes.

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Reading the book, I was immediately drawn to Karstad’s rustic rhubarb marzipan cake. Sugary, almondy marzipan is, in my opinion, a genius ingredient that deserves so much more appreciation than its weird cake topper reputation has given it. Because we are a long way from rhubarb season, “That recipe you can use all year round,” says Karstad. “Just change the fruit in it with something there’s in season. I would do that with apples now.”

I’ve made the “Nordic Family Kitchen” recipe on random a weeknight and can attest that it is absurdly easy and outrageously chic, a dessert that pairs beautifully with short days and sweater weather. It’s also the sort of addictive delight that just quietly disappears, slice by slice, from your fridge as the other members of your household keeping cutting off slices to snack on.

But if you want to lower the effort bar even further, Baking for Happiness has a marzipan cake you can throw together with just two ingredients and all of three minutes in a blender. While it’s not as rich as Karstad’s version (no butter), it is extremely good and happens to be gluten-free. Add some cut up apples, and blammo, you’ve got a Scandinavian autumn on a plate, in zero time.

***

Fall apple and almond cake
Inspired by Nordic Family Kitchen and Baking for Happiness
Makes 8 portions

Ingredients:

1 tube of marzipan, cut into small pieces and softened (a few seconds in the microwave in a microwave safe bowl helps here)
4 medium eggs
1 small apple, very thinly sliced or peeled and cut up
Optional: White or Demerara sugar, for sprinkling

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 350°F.
Generously butter a 9-inch springform pan. Sprinkle all around with sugar, to make a crunchy exterior for the cake. (If you don’t have a springform pan, line a 9-inch cake pan with parchment, then butter and coat with sugar. You can also butter and coat a small bundt pan.)
In a blender, whip your eggs for at least one minute until they are foamy and light in color. If you don’t have a blender, you can use a mixer, or do some very vigorous beating with a whisk.
Add your marzipan a few pieces at a time, until the mixture is smooth and fully incorporated.
If you’re feeling fancy, add a few thin apple slices to the bottom of your pan in a decorative pattern.
Pour batter into your cake pan and then drop the rest of your apple pieces in.
Bake about approximately 35 minutes, until golden. (Start checking at around 30 minutes.) Remove from oven and cool thoroughly before serving.

Serve with a dusting of confectioner’s sugar or a big dollop of mascarpone.

More Quick and Dirty:

After defeat in Virginia, Democrats — and America — face a dangerous inflection point

Those screams you hear resembling a wailing banshee are coming from Democrats. They’re convinced the world has come to an end after Terry McAuliffe lost the governor’s race in Virginia.

The snickers you hear are from the fascists who believe the Virginia election signals they are on their way to recapturing the former democracy of the United States in the name of their demented overlord, Donald Trump.

As Mary Trump said recently on my podcast “Just Ask the Question,” the GOP is working hard to ensure that the minority rules, the rulebooks have all been thrown out and the world will be safe for fascism, courtesy of her uncle Donald. “That party needs to be burned to the ground,” she told me.

Frankly, it looks like Donald has already done that and instituted a new party dedicated to voter suppression, misogyny, racism and fascism.

In Virginia, that has also led to a Republican party, according to state legislator Danica Roem, populated by those who say the major issue facing voters is a bunch of “undocumented, transgender teenagers hanging out in bathrooms teaching each other critical race theory while they earn sharia law degrees.”

Of course, no one was happier with the election results than Trump, who — unable to tweet his brain droppings on a whim — now issues “Press Statements” about them. Few media outlets bother to publish his meandering, mind-numbing baloney, thus sparing the world considerable dyspepsia, tremors and death-metal rage. Trump, meanwhile, is as giddy as an eight-year-old huffing nitrous oxide as he sees his grand plan falling in place.

This grand plan includes winning state and local races, purging the GOP of Trump non-believers and instituting laws, rules and procedures that will enable Trump, or any other Republican, to win elections in 2022 and 2024, whether or not they actually get a majority of the vote.

“They have a limited window of opportunity,” Mary Trump explained. “They know they’re the minority party and they’re desperate to hold on to power.” If Republicans can rig the game, they’re almost certain to pull off the feat. If they can’t, then they won’t.

But we are definitely at an inflection point in this country, and the Democrats have a narrow window to stop the Republicans from destroying what’s left of our democracy. And it isn’t just our country that will suffer if our democracy ceases to exist. That will lead to a downward spiral for the entire world.

The Democrats’ wailing comes from the fact that they see Terry McAuliffe’s loss as a harbinger of the apocalypse. “Usually we say that if we get the vote out, then we win, because there are more of us than them,” Roem explained. “That didn’t happen and we had a large voter turnout.”

Virginia turned out more than 50 percent of the vote, but that still means a minority of registered voters elected their governor. It is anathema to democracy that we consider a voter turnout of 50 to 60 percent as terrific.

Anyway, McAuliffe’s loss only portends disaster if the Democrats continue to run races the way McAuliffe did — very poorly. He was never the best Democratic candidate for governor, as former Gov. Doug Wilder said in 2020. High-ranking Democrats told me the same thing this week. “He sucked. He stunk,” one prominent Virginia office-holder explained to me. “That’s what doomed his campaign.” Imagine how bad he had to be to lose to an accused racist and sexist.

The problem is that on a national scale, most Democrats from the top to the bottom are as ineffective as McAuliffe. “I have the best ideas and the other guy is a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” means little in a world where truth often takes a backseat to fear-mongering, character assassination and conspiracy theories. The Democrats often don’t hit us where we live, but hit us for not living where they think we should.

Roem found a different path. I’ve known her for a long time and once hired her as a city editor for a newspaper I ran. She not only won re-election as a Democrat, she won precincts that Terry McAuliffe lost.

She says that when she talked to some of those Northern Virginia voters who returned her to the House of Delegates, they said they thought the Democratic Party was filled with Satan-loving communists, but added, “They haven’t got to Roem yet.” Right-wing voters and swing voters who turned against the Democrat at the top of the ticket voted down-ticket for a liberal, thrash-metal-loving, transgender female musician, giving her a third term in Richmond.

That probably prompted Robert E. Lee to spin in his grave — which would be the most productive thing he ever did for his country, living or dead.

Roem got re-elected doing something too many Democrats (and Republicans) have conveniently forgotten; she works for her constituents. Roem first won election against a far-right Republican who denigrated her gender identity and ignored the issues. Roem didn’t make a big deal out of who she was, but campaigned on what she could do, promising to take care of a traffic problem that has plagued Northern Virginia for years, and her predecessor had done nothing about.

She campaigned on public service and she won. She’s won re-election as the state’s first transgender female legislator by providing needed services. Her constituents have thought enough of her efforts to keep her in office — even if some of them don’t like her.

That’s the key to survival on a national scale for Democrats. The Republicans do not serve the public good. They prey upon the public with faux culture wars to retain power, while providing little to no service for the people they supposedly represent.

We suffered through four years of “Infrastructure Week” at the White House under Trump in which nothing was done. The GOP continues to try and thwart Biden’s attempts to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Health care, parental leave — all those things that an overwhelming majority of Americans support, the Republicans block. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly said that his goal is to make a Democratic president fail. The GOP over the years has stood against social security, civil rights and every single progressive idea we now take for granted and value as Americans.

The GOP simply cannot govern. It gave up any pretense of governing to secure autocratic, fascist control in order to serve its billionaire overlords. Republicans preach that we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but conveniently forget to mention that they often relied on student loans and government assistance to get where they are. Mary Trump is right about what needs to happen to that political party of fascists.

But the Democrats also continue to misunderstand the American people. You can call out the Republicans for their hatred and bigotry and that will appeal to your faithful — but if you truly want to convert voters, then be a Danica.

Tip O’Neill, the political heavyweight former speaker of the House, famously said, “All politics is local.” So what can the national Democrats learn from a local legislative race in Northern Virginia?

Public service. The Democrats have to quit arguing about their righteousness and start hammering home their service to everyone — even the people who hate them. That makes a difference.

Yes, the McAuliffe defeat in Virginia is a wake-up call for the Democrats. But they shouldn’t misinterpret what it really means. Mary Trump tweeted Wednesday, “We need to get angry” and followed it with “And CHANNEL our anger.”

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said Wednesday, “As someone who used to actively practice in all this culture war stuff and understands it intimately, I think maybe I’ll become a Democrat to help Democrats learn how to fight back against Republican fear mongering and thereby win the culture wars by actually persuading voters.”

Exactly. Anger without action is pointless, and poor messaging is killing the Democrats. To succeed, they should stop telling us how righteous they are and start telling us what they’ve done, and what they intend to do. Don’t just say it once: Beat that drum loudly, consistently and with renewed vigor and you can beat the Republicans. Every time they engage in character assassination, keep them on target. Democrats always end up playing the game by Republican rules, and they’re bad at it. Furthermore, as Donald Trump has shown us, you can throw out the damn playbook and claim to be victim and victor in one breath — while never serving the American public and running a huge con on them the whole time.

This leads to frustration, confusion and voter malaise. There’s no way to argue with an idiot who will drag you down into the gutter and beat you to death with their stupidity. Stay out of that fight. It leads to voters screaming that critical race theory is the key issue in voting, while confessing they don’t actually know what critical race theory is.

You want to reach voters? “What have you done for me lately?” is the ultimate cry of the voters. The GOP cannot answer that question, so they convince their voters it’s a culture war, or it’s about conspiracy, victimization, immigration, socialism and destroying the American way of life — which is exactly what they’re doing.

The Democrats fall on their own swords waging this idiotic culture war without realizing what they do better than the Republicans: It’s about public service, stupid.

What climate denial? Oil executives play dumb at major congressional hearing

Four of the fossil fuel industry’s head honchos appeared before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday to testify about their companies’ history of climate denial. The CEOs of Exxon, BP America, and Chevron and the president of Shell’s U.S. subsidiary were present, along with the presidents of two top lobbying groups: the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It was a landmark moment — the first time that the executives addressed Congress about their “long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming,” as an announcement from Democratic Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Ro Khanna put it.

The executives’ testimony was predictably opaque. By the end of the hearing, they had not, as many activists had hoped, admitted culpability for deceiving the public about the risks of climate change, or for obstructing climate action through third-party lobbying groups.

“As science has evolved and developed, our understanding of the science has evolved and developed,” said Darren Woods, ExxonMobil’s CEO. It was a similar story throughout the day, as pointed question after pointed question from Democrats received cryptic non-answers. Climate change “is one of the biggest challenges of our time,” Chevron’s Mike Wirth said. “We believe the future of energy is lower-carbon.”

Geoffrey Supran, a research associate in the history of science at Harvard University who has studied the industry’s disinformation campaigns, said the executives’ behavior was predictable. “It wasn’t a surprise that they dug in their heels and didn’t break down with a mea culpa,” he told Grist. “They were well-trained and well-rehearsed in these questions.”

Meanwhile, Republicans on the committee acted as a cheering section for the executives. “I think it’s shameful how the other side wants to demonize our oil and gas industry,” Representative Bob Gibbs of Ohio, a Republican, said. Byron Donalds, a Republican representative from Florida, addressed the fossil fuel executives directly. “I’m sorry for you, and I’m sorry for the people in our country who have to witness shenanigans like this,” he said.

Indeed, much of the hearing saw the four company heads stuck in a push and pull between Republicans and Democrats on the committee, with Democrats trying to eke new climate-related pledges out of the witnesses and Republicans trying to shield said witnesses from Democrats.

“Some of us have to actually live the future that you are setting on fire for us,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, reminded the witnesses toward the end of the hearing, after her colleagues had tried and failed to get the executives to support a pause on oil and gas leasing on federal lands, reveal their anti-climate lobbying activity, and admit to using third-party groups to lobby against climate change initiatives in multiple states.

The hearing had been widely anticipated by environmental advocates, who have spent years calling for a federal investigation into the oil and gas industry — first and foremost for having deceived the public about the reality of climate change. Documents uncovered in 2015 by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that ExxonMobil knew as early as 1977 that fossil fuels would have dangerous consequences for the planet’s climate. In fact, the documents showed, Exxon’s in-house climate scientists were so good that in 1982, they correctly predicted that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would rise to roughly 415 parts per million by the year 2019. They warned that the impacts could be “catastrophic.”

InsideClimateNews’ reporting was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize and gave rise to the hashtag #ExxonKnew. But more recent reporting has shown that other oil companies knew too, including Shell, BP, and the corporate entities that later became Chevron — all of the companies represented at the House Oversight Committee hearing. Rather than using their extensive climate knowledge to warn the world of an urgent need to decarbonize, the companies launched a multifaceted disinformation campaign meant to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. They ran advertisements to stress “uncertainty” in climate science. In some cases, they highlighted the potential benefits of climate change.

“Their argument that their positions have always been in line with science is demonstrably false,” Supran said. But rather than confirm what is evident in publicly available documents, the executives “punted.”

None of the fossil fuel company executives present on Thursday denied the science of climate change; their companies dropped outright climate denial years ago. In fact, all of them said that they support some sort of climate policy, and the two firms headquartered in Europe — Shell and BP — have announced plans to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. (Chevron said this month that it has an “aspiration” of hitting net-zero by 2050, but only for its operational emissions, not the emissions from the oil it sells.)

But the Oversight Committee’s Democratic members were skeptical of their about-face on climate action. “They are obviously lying,” Maloney said at one point. “Our witnesses today would like you to think that their actions” to obstruct climate action “are ancient history, but they are not.” She cited a Greenpeace U.K. sting operation conducted earlier this year, in which an undercover reporter recorded a top ExxonMobil lobbyist saying that the company’s support for a carbon tax was largely performative. Exxon backed it as a “talking point,” the lobbyist said, but didn’t believe it would ever be enacted.

The lobbyist also spoke candidly about the company’s influence strategy, saying that ExxonMobil funded “shadow groups” to spread doubt about climate science.

Maloney played the clip during the hearing and turned to the oil executives. “I want each of you to affirm that your organization will not spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change,” she told them. No one took the pledge, either staying silent or listing off their companies’ talking points. BP’s executive hedged by inventing a different, unrelated pledge to “advocate for low-carbon policies.”

ExxonMobil and other oil and gas majors have recently come under fire for funding lobbying groups — including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute — that oppose the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar reconciliation package. Even though it’s been watered down from its original proposal, the $1.85 trillion framework as it currently stands would still funnel $555 billion toward fighting the climate crisis and would represent the most significant piece of climate legislation ever passed in the U.S.

The Chamber of Commerce has vociferously opposed the bill as an “everything but the kitchen sink collection of bad policies,” and vowed to do “everything we can” to defeat it. The American Petroleum Institute similarly said it was “using every tool at our disposal” to work against it, including by spending at least $423,000 on Facebook ads that have been viewed more than 20 million times.

By the time the hearing wrapped up, it was obvious that the historic day had not yielded any groundbreaking revelations. Democrats on the committee hit the witnesses with every tool in their arsenal — visual aids in the form of bags of rice and M&Ms, sheafs of evidence that oil companies used front groups to kill climate action up and down ballots across the country, even some vaguely therapeutic and possibly counterproductive yelling.

But House Democrats have stressed that the hearing was only the beginning of a longer-term strategy to hold the fossil fuel executives accountable for past and present climate obstruction. An obvious next step is to force the companies to comply with document requests that were made weeks ago by Maloney and Khanna. Internal documents could help shed new light on the companies’ awareness of climate science and bolster ongoing litigation against them.

In concluding the meeting, Maloney said she intended to subpoena the fossil fuel companies. “We are at ‘code red’ for climate, and I am committed to doing everything I can to help rescue this planet and save it for our children,” she said. “We need to get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign, and with these subpoenas, we will.”

Book review: Steven Pinker on the power of the rational mind

In December 2016, a North Carolina man armed with a rifle entered a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., in order to halt what he believed was a child sex-trafficking network run by Hillary Clinton and prominent Democrats. There is, of course, no such network, and scholars have expended a great deal of energy trying to explain why some people (some of whom moved on to become supporters on QAnon) believed there was. As Steven Pinker puts it in his latest book, “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,” we’re left wondering “why humanity appears to be losing its mind.”

It’s not just conspiracy theorists who hold non-evidence-based beliefs. Pinker points out that 55 percent of Americans believe in psychic healing, and 41 percent believe in extrasensory perception, according to a 2005 Gallup survey. In fact, 37 percent of us believe in haunted houses while only 32 percent believe in ghosts — which means, as Pinker notes, “that some people believe in houses haunted by ghosts without believing in ghosts.”

Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist and linguist known for a string of popular science books, believes the world would be a better place if we could learn to be more rational. Toward the end of his new book, he suggests rationality should be taught in schools as the “fourth R,” alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. In fact, the book’s early chapters can be read as a kind of rationality primer, focusing on deductive and inductive logic, rational choice theory, and various branches of statistics.

Many of us, including scientists and other STEM professionals, are apparently in need of such a primer. Consider this problem, which many people bungle: Suppose that 1 percent of women have breast cancer. Now suppose that a test for breast cancer has a sensitivity of 90 percent (meaning that for a patient who really does have cancer, the test gives a positive result 90 percent of the time.) Now suppose a woman tests positive. What is the probability that she in fact has the disease? Pinker notes that most people — in fact, most doctors — guess somewhere between 80 and 90 percent. The right answer — you need to use something called “Bayes’s rule” to work it out — is 9 percent. As Pinker puts it, “the professionals whom we entrust with our lives flub the basic task of interpreting a medical test, and not by a little bit,” overestimating the chances that the woman has cancer by almost a factor of 10.

If “Rationality” was just a guide to probability, statistics, and general numeracy, we wouldn’t need Pinker to write it; there are plenty of good books along these lines out there already — Jeff Rosenthal’s “Struck by Lightning” comes to mind, as does Kit Yates’s “The Math of Life and Death” (reviewed by Undark last year). Similarly, the wish for a more rational world was the driving force behind Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” and Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things.” But even if some of the subject matter is familiar, Pinker’s breezy-yet-authoritative style sets his books apart. (There’s also a good dose of humor in the book, including a number of old Jewish jokes, some of them quite funny.)

But Pinker’s concerns go beyond mere math. The way we talk about numbers is crucial, too. Often, we pay too much attention to one sort of statistic and too little to another. That’s why, following a headline-grabbing plane crash, many people choose to drive rather than fly — resulting in more deaths, because cars are far more deadly than airliners in terms of passenger-miles.

In a similar vein, Pinker asserts that nuclear power is “the safest form of energy humanity has ever used,” and yet the public perceives of nuclear power as being extremely dangerous. The opposition, Pinker writes, is driven largely “by memories of three accidents: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed one worker years later (the other deaths were caused by the tsunami and from a panicked evacuation); and the Soviet-bungled Chernobyl in 1986, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day” (Pinker’s italics).

And then there’s terrorism, which, in a typical year, kills fewer people in the U.S. than either bee stings or lightning — but the particularly horrific 9/11 attacks, which killed some 3,000 people, cemented themselves in the nation’s memory, leading “to the creation of a new federal department, massive surveillance of citizens and hardening of public facilities, and two wars which killed more than twice as many Americans as the number who died in 2001, together with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.”

Such reactions — or irrational overreactions, as Pinker might argue — are a favored target for the author. For example, he notes that school shootings kill a minuscule number of Americans compared to the overall number of homicides — and yet the nation’s schools “have implemented billions of dollars of dubious safety measures, like installing bulletproof whiteboards and arming teachers with pepperball guns, while traumatizing children with terrifying active-shooter drills.”

Maybe so. But Pinker’s insistence that we examine the data — a worthy enterprise in policymaking — doesn’t always compel him to provide all of the relevant data when he mounts a critique of his own. On the 2020 killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a White Minneapolis police officer, Pinker says that Floyd’s murder “led to massive protests and the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory, by universities, newspapers, and corporations.” While the protests that swept the nation are inarguable, what of the adoption of Critical Race Theory? Such broad claims would seem to require careful attribution, but on this front Pinker falls short: The book has plenty of end-notes, including citations for the numbers associated with police shootings, for example — but nothing that helps the reader understand which newspapers or corporations have adopted Critical Race Theory, or how they might have done so.

Pinker also argues that, as with terrorism and school shootings, the response to Floyd’s death was an overreaction, “driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police.” He continues: “A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of 1 percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.”

Here, Pinker’s penchant for numbers is likely to be used against him: The reader might object that the relevant figure is not the percentage of homicides among Black Americans in which the perpetrator was a police officer, but rather, of Americans killed by police, the percentage that are Black — and here we can do the math ourselves: 23 divided by 65 is about 35 percent, even though Black people make up only about 14 percent of the nation’s population. (Pinker does discuss this alternative way of framing the issue, but not until about 20 pages later.)

Pinker’s harshest words are reserved for his fellow academics and the institutions that employ them. Universities, he argues, ought to be bastions of rationality – instead, he says, they’ve “turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense” while nurturing a “suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation.” Pinker’s concern is that people won’t take academics seriously when they warn about the dangers of, say, climate change, if they spend the rest of their time (in his view) spouting woke dogma.

How a reader responds to assertions of this sort may very well depend on their politics. When Pinker sticks to the science, he’s on much firmer ground — though, inevitably, his arguments involve a degree of speculation. For example: If rationality is so great — if it can save lives — why do we so often behave irrationally? He frames the answer in evolutionary terms. Yes, we often spin poorly reasoned arguments, but doing so has primed us to notice when someone else is pulling a fast one on us. As Pinker puts it: “We evolved not as intuitive scientists but as intuitive lawyers. While people often try to get away with lame arguments for their own positions, they are quick to spot fallacies in other people’s arguments.”

The end result is that a group of people can reason far better than any one individual within the group — and this, Pinker argues, increases the group’s chances of survival. Pinker takes a similar approach to the question of why we believe far-out conspiracy theories. “Whether they are literally ‘true’ or ‘false’ is the wrong question,” Pinker writes. “The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose.”

Some of Pinker’s arguments are more convincing than others, and many readers will probably find something to disagree with as they make their way through “Rationality.” But few, I think, would object to his overarching goal of creating a more rational world — even if achieving it, as Pinker readily admits, is likely to involve a great deal of hard work.

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This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

In the coming second American Civil War, which side are you on?

If there is a second American Civil War, which side would you choose? It may be wise to make that decision now, in the spirit of planning for the worst while hoping for the best.

A recent public opinion poll by the University of Virginia Center for Politics finds that a majority of Trump voters want to secede from the Union. Alarmingly, nearly as many Biden voters, 41 percent, also feel it may be “time to split the country.” This is part of a larger pattern; other polls and research have come to similar conclusions.

It’s important to resist false equivalence and superficial analysis here. It may be true that a large percentage of both Democrats and Republicans are willing to consider seceding from the United States, but their reasons and motivations are very different.

Today’s Republican Party has, in practice, largely surrendered to neofascism and white supremacy — currents that were not far below its surface for many years. It has embraced and condoned the violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and has come very close to directly endorsing terrorism against its perceived political enemies.

For Republicans, America’s multiracial democracy is anathema to their values and must be destroyed. Public opinion research has shown that tens of millions of white Republicans, especially Trump supporters, view Joe Biden as an illegitimate president who should be removed from power by whatever means necessary.

For decades the right-wing propaganda machine has used stochastic terrorism to radicalize its public toward ever more extreme views. In the Age of Trump, that has devolved into overt and direct appeals to violence in defense of an imagined “real” America. In practice, this has led to hate crimes and other acts of violence against nonwhite people, immigrants and other targeted groups.

This was to be expected: History shows that fascism in its various forms is inherently violent and destructive, both toward its opponents and members of its own movement.

When Democrats or progressives report a desire to secede from the country, they are seeking refuge and self-preservation. To suggest any equivalence between that desire and the overtly violent yearnings of the Republican-fascist movement is intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt.

The prospect of a second American Civil War may seem wildly unlikely, or not even logistically feasible. But if it were to happen, such an outcome would not be based on empirical facts, reality or the complexities and nuances of public opinion polls.

A large percentage of Republicans and the larger white right actually believe that they are in an existential struggle for survival against Black and brown people and “illegal aliens” who want to “replace them,” sinister “secularists” who want to outlaw Christianity, “critical race theory” aimed at brainwashing their children, a “liberal media” that deliberately lies to them, and a cabal of “elites” and “socialists” who are treasonous and determined to destroy the “real” America.

These right-wing white-identity fever dreams show no signs of breaking; if anything, the collective pathology is getting worse. Law enforcement and terrorism experts continue to warn that the country is at great risk of a violent right-wing insurgency inspired by the events of Jan. 6 and the Trump-Republican “Big Lie” about the 2020 election.

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Wars begin for a wide range of reasons — often because of some miscalculation by one or more of the leaders and groups involved. Wars and other violent conflicts also happen because political leaders and other elites have talked themselves into a corner, leaving bloodshed as the only way out. Very often, civil war and sectarian violence have seemed impossible — until circumstances radically changed.

In an essay for Foreign Policy, Monica Toft explains how civil wars tend to happen, explaining that various factors are involved, including a history of previous internal conflict, “deepening cleavages” in society and a third element, “a shift from tribalism to sectarianism”:

With tribalism, people begin to seriously doubt whether other groups in their country have the larger community’s best interests at heart. In sectarian environments though, economic, social, and political elites and those they represent come to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is evil and actively working to destroy the community. Enemies of the state come to displace the loyal opposition, with those having been inside another tribe seen as the most disloyal. It’s akin to how some religions treat apostates and infidels. Often, it is apostates, the former adherents of the faith, that are targeted more readily over infidels, those who had always been on the outside. It is hard not to see echoes of this dynamic at play as Republicans condemn other Republicans over their loyalty (or lack thereof) to former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Indeed, the United States now displays all three core elements that can lead to civil breakdown. If one described them — fractured elites with competing narratives, deep-seated identity cleavages, and a politically polarized citizenry — without identifying the United States by name, most scholars of civil war would say, “Hey, that country is on the brink of a civil war.”

In a powerful essay published on Substack, Salon columnist Lucian K. Truscott IV offers a scenario for America’s second Civil War, observing that the opposing forces “will not be conveniently costumed in blue and gray as they were in the 19th Century … making it difficult to tell who is actually on which side”:

There also won’t be a discernible front line or front lines, making it hard to tell which side is holding what territory. This, along with the absence of uniforms, means that a whole lot of people will be killed by mistake. It’s probably likely that the MAGA side will dress itself in various camo costumes as many of them did when the mob assaulted the Capitol in January, but Trump followers aren’t the only people in this country with camouflage hunting clothing. So if you shoot someone wearing camo assuming he or she is on the MAGA side, you just might be shooting someone on your side. Combatants won’t be wearing “dog tags” marking them as on one side or the other, making the identification of dead bodies difficult. Is this guy one of ours, or one of theirs?

Truscott concludes with a series of terrifying possibilities:

Perhaps the grimmest prospect of all will be the sub-wars that break out within the bigger Civil War. Every prejudice will be indulged. Racist whites will target Black people. Fundamentalist Christians might target “heathens” like Muslims and Jews and non-fundamentalist Christians. Ethnic divisions will exist within the greater sides that face-off. …

A 21st Century American Civil War would make the struggles we are currently suffering over elections and distribution of wealth and between races and ethnicities seem like the good old days when we all got along. An American Civil War will mean that we don’t merely disagree with one another or dislike each other. It will mean we kill each other.

None of us, and I mean none of us, has an inkling about how horrible it would be. But if we are to have a future of any kind whatsoever, we’d better get more of a clue than the woman in the MAGA hat in Iowa who seemed to so casually look forward to a Civil War between her side and the side she was told to hate. Who you hated and why will be hard to remember when death comes to your door.

What role would Donald Trump play in such a conflagration? In a recent essay for TomDispatch, historian Alfred McCoy offers these observations:

Whether it’s a poor country like the Philippines or a superpower like the United States, democracy is a surprisingly fragile construct. Its worst enemy is often an ousted ex-president, angry over his humiliation and perfectly willing to destroy the constitutional order to regain power.

No matter how angry such an ex-president might be, however, his urge for a political coup can’t succeed without the help of raw force, whether from a mob, a disgruntled military, or some combination of the two….

So, in 2024, as the continuing erosion of America’s global power creates a crisis of confidence among ordinary Americans, expect Donald Trump to be back, not as the slightly outrageous candidate of 2016 or even as the former president eager to occupy the White House again, but as a militant demagogue with thundering racialist rhetoric, backed by a revanchist Republican Party ready, with absolute moral certainty, to bar voters from the polls, toss ballots out, and litigate any loss until hell freezes over.

And if all that fails, the muscle will be ready for another violent march on Washington. Be prepared, the America we know is worsening by the month.

There are many expert voices who are sounding the alarm about the potential of a second American Civil War, and marshaling reasonably evidence why it likely will not happen.

But even the fact that so many public voices, and so many ordinary Americans, find themselves in a moment where such an eventuality must be seriously considered indicates how dire the country’s democracy crisis really is.

At its core, these discussions of a possible second American Civil War reveal that the rise of Trumpism, and the full-on embrace of fascism by the “conservative” movement reflect a nation in existential crisis.

The distinction between “nation” and “country” is critical here. A country is an agreed-upon set of laws and governing institutions, but a nation is the symbols, ideas, stories, shared values and beliefs and other intangibles that give a people a sense of community and shared destiny that is distinct and different from other people in other places.

Trump World and the MAGAverse, and those fellow travelers who have pledged loyalty to the Republican-fascist movement, have a fundamentally different conception of the nation than do other Americans. Who “owns” the country? Who are its rightful heirs? Do some Americans have a special and privileged birthright status as compared to other Americans?

If America succumbs to a second civil war or other widespread political violence, the answers to those questions will become the dividing line. As the truism goes, no one hates like family. The American people — that is, our American family, which has endured, with considerable difficulty, for close to 250 years — may soon be reminded of that truth on a brutal massive scale.

More from Salon (if you aren’t scared already) on the prospect of Civil War 2.0:

Key figure in secretive right-wing Christian group makes a pitch for Elon Musk’s money

One of a series about the Fellowship Foundation, the secretive religious group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and is popularly known as The Family. This series is based on Family documents obtained by TYT, including lists of breakfast guests and who invited them.

Last Sunday on Twitter, the head of the world’s biggest relief organization asked the world’s richest man for $6 billion. Forty-two million lives were at stake. It was Halloween night.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he’d “sell Tesla stock right now” and fund $6 billion worth of food aid — if the charity provided full transparency.

If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2021

Musk was responding to David Beasley, the former South Carolina governor who runs the UN World Food Programme (WFP), which won the Nobel Peace Prize under his leadership. It’s hard to imagine a better public image.

But while assuring Musk of transparency, Beasley didn’t mention the role he has played outside the public eye as a leader inside The Family, a purposely opaque organization with a history of smuggling evangelical Protestantism, including homophobia and misogyny, in charitable packages. The Family also serves as a networking hub for right-wing activists working to roll back LGBTQ and reproductive rights.

In fact, as recently as a few months prior to joining the WFP, Beasley was said to be actively involved in building international movements of right-wing evangelicals. The men involved in these movements overseas also have ties to The Family.

Internal documents from the National Prayer Breakfast, which is run by The Family, show that Beasley, a Family board member from 2011 through 2013, submitted on his own, or with others, the names of 52 people to attend in 2016. Only five individuals got to invite more guests. Several of Beasley’s guests were anti-LGBTQ leaders.

Although Beasley assured Musk that WFP has “systems in place for transparency,” the WFP is not transparent about Beasley’s past and current work on The Family’s behalf. For months, the WFP has not responded to multiple questions from TYT concerning Beasley, including new ones emailed to WFP officials Monday afternoon. (Tesla also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Family documents — and some public records — do shed some light on Beasley’s activities and associations in The Family’s orbit.

Beasley himself has a history of activity adjacent to anti-LGBTQ organizations. And although he handed off his Family duties after President Trump named him to run the WFP, his personal ties to The Family remain intact. He still participates in the National Prayer Breakfast and related events, and his daughter has worked on projects connected to The Family.

Beasley’s National Prayer Breakfast guests in 2016 included:

Dale Brantner, who has worked for the right-wing Christian family that controls Hobby Lobby;
Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family
Yakubu Dogara, a Nigerian politician who supports criminalizing homosexuality
Jeffrey Grant Kersey, a pastor who considers “homosexuality … incompatible with Christian teaching,” and
Johnnie Moore, who said “homosexual experimentation” was “an epidemic” and later got a Trump UN nomination.

Beasley also has a history of participating in events involving the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM). This summer, the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights warned that ECPM is part of a broader right-wing movement funded by American conservatives including evangelical leader Franklin Graham, the only financial donor supporting the National Prayer Breakfast.

ECPM has been involved with prayer breakfasts and the annual “Gathering” throughout Europe, including events attended by Beasley.

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Most recently, Beasley was listed in congressional travel disclosure forms as attending the May 2021 Southeast European Prayer Gathering. It’s not clear whether Beasley was there in a personal capacity, but the list describes him as “WFP Exec. Director.” The forms don’t say so, but almost all the U.S. guests have ties to The Family. The politicians among them — whose travel has often been funded by The Family — are consistently anti-LGBTQ.

Last month, TYT reported that the Ukrainian National Prayer Breakfast — and its delegation to the 2016 breakfast in Washington — included numerous anti-LGBTQ guests. Although members of Congress, including Democrats, ostensibly invited the Ukrainians, it was actually Beasley and other Family insiders. Beasley has also attended the Ukrainian breakfast.

Two LGBTQ advocacy groups and one secular organization have warned this year that anti-LGBTQ leaders are using prayer breakfasts to network and to mainstream their positions. (TYT was able to identify only one Beasley invitee to the 2016 breakfast who was not from the right: AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, who died earlier this year.)

One LGBTQ group said a Democrat who attended the Ukraine event this year was “misled.” Two Democrats who lent their names to the U.S. breakfast in 2016 denied knowledge of who was on the guest list.

Beasley’s international work has gone beyond individual anti-LGBTQ breakfast hosts or guests. In a 2015 video produced by a religious group tied to The Family, Beasley talks about helping to start a Guatemalan version of the National Prayer Breakfast. He praises its diversity, but in reality, the Guatemalans involved are, like The Family, disproportionately socially conservative evangelicals.

In Germany, less than a year before Beasley took charge at the WFP, parliamentary member Axel Knoerig described Beasley as working to create an international network. Knoerig doesn’t explain what kind of network Beasley is building, but Knoerig is an opponent of same-sex marriage and says that he and Beasley “share common Christian values.”

Knoerig said in October 2020 that he and Beasley had met multiple times, including at last year’s National Prayer Breakfast. It’s not clear what became of their discussions about network-building after Beasley joined WFP.

Despite holding no public office at the time, in 2015 Beasley traveled to the Philippines. His host, Francisco Ashley Acedillo, was at the time an elected official there — who has supported prison time for adultery. In his post about the meeting, Acedillo thanks “our NPB International friends for their generosity.” (The Family also goes by the name the International Foundation.)

Joining Acedillo and Beasley for their 2015 meeting was a Pennsylvania real-estate developer named Todd Hendricks, who is one of The Family’s key men in the Philippines. He was also an early figure in The Family’s radicalization of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

(Lindell’s nonprofits ended up paying at least two Family insiders to work for them, while shifting their philanthropic focus from addicts and veterans to evangelical causes.)

Two other Family insiders, a Texas couple, were also at Beasley’s Philippines meeting. As TYT has reported, Jonathan Frank has been publicly quoted in Philippines media as a breakfast spokesperson. His wife Margie, a prodigious GOP donor, teamed up with Hendricks to support evangelical actor Stephen Baldwin in his mission work.

One year later, in 2016, Beasley was a Trump supporter, vocally if not prominently. He invited only two residents of South Carolina, the state he formerly governed, to the National Prayer Breakfast. Both had ties to then-Gov. Nikki Haley.

One of Beasley’s guests was Kersey, Haley’s pastor. The other was a conservative Christian businessman who had given $2,000 to Haley’s campaign.

The next year, after Trump made Haley his ambassador to the UN, she sidelined the White House and State Department in landing Beasley the job of running the WFP. His résumé lacked the typical experience for the post, but his peripatetic work — carrying The Family’s portfolio — had made him a lot of international friends, a helpful thing for a global relief leader.

Beasley had also spent the previous five years ministering to members of Congress on Capitol Hill. And, after Trump was elected, Beasley’s Center for Global Strategies began listing humanitarian work alongside its trade initiatives.

Reportedly, though, Beasley’s main draw as WFP candidate was America’s wallet. Top UN officials told Foreign Policy they feared that giving WFP to anyone but Trump’s choice would prompt Republicans to slash the $2 billion in U.S. funding.

Not long after Beasley took over, critics began to note a lax approach to firewalling his charitable work from his religious beliefs. And Beasley brought at least two staffers with ties to The Family into the WFP: a former Family employee and the husband of a Family associate.

The Family has a history of mixing its faith with its charitable work; seeing Jesus as the answer to worldly problems means Jesus is part of the solutions they offer. So schools and relief programs feed their beneficiaries a steady diet of scripture along with material aid. That can include proselytizing against abortion, contraception, LGBTQ rights and more; subtly or openly, depending on the cultural space.

When Family insiders support orphanages, for instance, it’s typically those that rebuff potential LGBTQ adoptive families. Beasley’s Center for Global Strategies promotes the “first and only pro-life crisis pregnancy center in Macedonia.”

Nonprofit cash has also been an issue for Family-affiliated politicians.

Former Rep. Mark Siljander, R-Mich., went to prison for funneling alleged terrorist money through The Family (Trump pardoned him). TYT recently reported that Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., tried to conceal Family connections to a charity involved in illegally funding his campaign — and to conceal just how central that charity was to the scheme.

The Family’s operational style is explicitly relational. Its influence stems from the friendships its people make. And Beasley is pushing to meet Elon Musk personally. On Sunday, he told Musk, “I can be on the next flight to you.”

A source close to The Family said Beasley’s entreaty didn’t necessarily have anything to do with The Family. “That’s just David’s personality.”

Musk responded to Beasley, asking him to publish “current & proposed spending.” Adding, “Sunlight is a wonderful thing.”

Instead, Beasley on Monday followed up with another tweet, saying, “We can meet anywhere — Earth or space.” Beasley promised that if Musk would meet, he would provide full transparency on WFP’s plan to feed 42 million hungry people, saying, “I will bring the plan, and open books.” As of Wednesday, Musk had not responded.

.@elonmusk Instead of tweets, allow me to show you. We can meet anywhere—Earth or space—but I suggest in the field where you can see @WFP’s people, processes and yes, technology, at work. I will bring the plan, and open books.

— Cindy McCain (@WFPChief) November 1, 2021

More from TYT on “The Family” and the National Prayer Breakfast:

As COP26 convenes in Glasgow, can a “climate action army” in the streets save the world?

The current gathering in Glasgow marks the 26th time UN has assembled world leaders to try to tackle the climate crisis. But the United States is producing more oil and natural gas than ever; the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere and global temperatures are both still rising; and we are already experiencing the extreme weather and climate chaos scientists have warned us about for 40 years, and which will only get worse and worse without serious climate action.

And yet, the planet has so far only warmed 1.2° C. (2.2° F) since pre-industrial times. We already have the technology we need to convert our energy systems to clean, renewable energy, and doing so would create millions of good jobs for people all over the world. So, in practical terms, the steps we must take are clear, achievable and urgent.

The greatest obstacle to action that we face is our dysfunctional neoliberal political and economic system and its control by plutocratic and corporate interests, who are determined to keep profiting from fossil fuels even at the cost of destroying the Earth’s uniquely livable climate. The climate crisis has exposed this system’s structural inability to act in the real interests of humanity, even when our very future hangs in the balance.

So what is the answer? Can COP26 in Glasgow be different? What could make the difference between more slick political PR and decisive action? Counting on the same politicians and fossil fuel interests (yes, they are there, too) to do something different this time seems suicidal, but what is the alternative?

Since Barack Obama’s pied-piper leadership in Copenhagen and Paris produced a system in which individual countries set their own targets and decided how to meet them, most countries have made little progress toward the targets they set in Paris in 2015.

Now they have come to Glasgow with predetermined and inadequate pledges that, even if fulfilled, would still lead to a much hotter world by 2100. A succession of UN and civil society reports in the lead-up to COP26 have sounded the alarm with what UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called a “thundering wake-up call” and a “code red for humanity.” In Guterres’ opening speech at COP26 on Nov. 1, he said that “we are digging our own graves” by failing to solve this crisis.

Yet governments are still focusing on long-term goals like reaching “Net Zero” by 2050, 2060 or even 2070, so far in the future that they can keep postponing the radical steps needed to limit warming to 1.5° Celsius. Even if they somehow stopped pumping greenhouse gases into the air, the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere by 2050 would keep heating up the planet for generations. The more we load up the atmosphere with GHGs, the longer their effects will last and the hotter the Earth will keep growing.

The U.S. has set a shorter-term target of reducing its emissions by 50% from their peak 2005 level by 2030. But its present policies would only lead to a 17%-25% reduction by then.

The Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), which was part of the Build Back Better Act, could make up a lot of that gap by paying electric utilities to increase reliance on renewables by 4% year over year and penalizing utilities that don’t. But on the eve of COP26, Biden dropped the CEPP from the bill under pressure from Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and their fossil fuel puppet-masters.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military, the largest institutional emitter of GHGs on Earth, was exempted from any constraints whatsoever under the Paris Agreement. Peace activists in Glasgow are demanding that COP26 must fix this huge black hole in global climate policy by including the U.S. war machine’s GHG emissions, and those of other militaries, in national emissions reporting and reductions.

At the same time, every penny that governments around the world have spent to address the climate crisis amounts to a small fraction of what the United States alone has spent on its nation-destroying war machine during the same period.

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China now officially emits more CO2 than the U.S. But a large part of China’s emissions are driven by the rest of the world’s consumption of Chinese products, and its largest customer is the United States. An MIT study in 2014 estimated that exports account for 22% of China’s carbon emissions. On a per capita consumption basis, Americans still account for three times the GHG emissions of our Chinese peers, and double the emissions of Europeans.

Wealthy countries have also fallen short on the commitment they made in Copenhagen in 2009 to help poorer countries tackle climate change by providing financial aid that would grow to $100 billion per year by 2020. They have provided increasing amounts, reaching $79 billion in 2019, but the failure to deliver the full amount promised has eroded trust between rich and poor countries. A committee headed by Canada and Germany at COP26 is charged with resolving the shortfall and restoring trust.

When the world’s political leaders are failing so badly that they are destroying the natural world and the livable climate that sustains human civilization, it is urgent for people everywhere to get much more active, vocal and creative.

The appropriate public response to governments that are ready to squander the lives of millions of people, whether by war or by ecological mass suicide, is rebellion and revolution — and nonviolent forms of revolution have generally proven more effective and beneficial than violent ones.

People are rising up against this corrupt neoliberal political and economic system in countries all over the world, as its savage impacts affect their lives in different ways. But the climate crisis is a universal danger to all of humanity that requires a universal, global response.

One inspiring civil society group on the streets in Glasgow during COP26 is Extinction Rebellion, which proclaims, “We accuse world leaders of failure, and with a daring vision of hope, we demand the impossible.… We will sing and dance and lock arms against despair and remind the world there is so much worth rebelling for.”

Extinction Rebellion and other climate groups at COP26 are calling for Net Zero by 2025, not 2050, as the only way to meet the 1.5° goal agreed to in Paris.

Greenpeace is calling for an immediate global moratorium on new fossil fuel projects and a quick phase-out of coal-burning power plants. Even the new coalition government in Germany, which includes the Green Party and has more ambitious goals than other large wealthy countries, has only moved up the final deadline on Germany’s coal phaseout from 2038 to 2030.

The Indigenous Environmental Network is bringing indigenous people from the Global South to Glasgow to tell their stories at the conference. They are calling on the northern industrialized countries to declare a climate emergency, to keep fossil fuels in the ground and end subsidies of fossil fuels globally.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) has published a new report titled “Nature-Based Solutions: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” as a focus for its work at COP26. It exposes a new trend in corporate greenwashing involving industrial-scale tree plantations in poor countries, which corporations plan to claim as “offsets” for continued fossil fuel production.

The U.K. government, which is hosting the conference in Glasgow, has endorsed these schemes as part of the program at COP26. FOE is highlighting the effect of these massive land-grabs on local and indigenous communities and calls them “a dangerous deception and distraction from the real solutions to the climate crisis.” If this is what governments mean by “Net Zero,” it would just be one more step in the financialization of the Earth and all its resources, not a real solution.

Because it is hard for activists from around the world to get to Glasgow for COP26 during a pandemic, activist groups are simultaneously organizing around the world to put pressure on governments in their own countries. Hundreds of climate activists and indigenous people have been arrested in protests at the White House in Washington, and five young Sunrise Movement activists began a hunger strike there on Oct. 19.

U.S. climate groups also support the “Green New Deal” bill, H.R. 332, that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced in Congress, which specifically calls for policies to keep global warming below 1.5° C., and currently has 103 cosponsors. The bill sets ambitious targets for 2030, but only calls for Net Zero by 2050.

The environmental and climate groups converging on Glasgow agree that we need a real global program of energy conversion now, as a practical matter, not as the aspirational goal of an endlessly ineffective, hopelessly corrupt political process.

At COP25 in Madrid in 2019, Extinction Rebellion dumped a pile of horse manure outside the conference hall with the message, “The horseshit stops here.” Of course that didn’t stop it, but it made the point that empty talk must rapidly be eclipsed by real action. Greta Thunberg has hit the nail on the head, slamming world leaders for covering up their failures with “blah, blah, blah,” instead of taking real action.

Like Greta’s School Strike for the Climate, the climate movement in the streets of Glasgow is informed by the recognition that the science is clear and solutions to the climate crisis are readily available. It is only political will that is lacking. This must be supplied by ordinary people, from all walks of life, through creative, dramatic action and mass mobilization, to demand the political and economic transformation we so desperately need.

The usually mild-mannered Secretary-General Guterres made it clear that “street heat” will be key to saving humanity. “The climate action army — led by young people — is unstoppable,” he told world leaders in Glasgow. “They are larger. They are louder. And, I assure you, they are not going away.”

More Salon coverage of the greatest existential threat to our planet’s survival:

These billionaires received taxpayer-funded stimulus checks during the pandemic

In March 2020, as the first wave of coronavirus infections all but shut down the U.S. economy, Congress responded with rare speed, passing a $2.2 trillion relief package called the CARES Act. The centerpiece of the law was an emergency payment to over 150 million American households that needed help.

Congress used a simple filter to determine who was eligible for assistance: The full $1,200 was limited to single taxpayers who’d reported $75,000 a year or less in income on their previous tax return. Married couples got $2,400 if they had reported less than $150,000 in income. Money was sent automatically to those who qualified.

Ira Rennert, worth $3.7 billion according to Forbes, did not appear to need the cash infusion offered by the CARES Act. After all, his 62,000-square-foot Hamptons home is one of the largest in the country, so he was unlikely to get cabin fever during lockdown, let alone have trouble buying food. Nevertheless, Rennert, who made his fortune as a corporate raider in the ’80s and ’90s, got a $2,400 check from the government.

George Soros, the prominent hedge fund manager and philanthropist who’s worth $8.6 billion, didn’t need the CARES cash, either. Neither did his son, Robert, himself worth hundreds of millions. But they, too, both got checks. (Both returned the checks, according to their representatives.)

ProPublica, using its trove of IRS records, identified at least 18 billionaires who received stimulus payments, which were funded by U.S. taxpayers, in the spring of 2020. Hundreds of other ultrawealthy taxpayers also got checks.

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The wealthy taxpayers who received the stimulus checks got them because they came in under the government’s income threshold. In fact, they reported way less taxable income than that — even hundreds of millions less — after they used business write-offs to wipe out their gains.

ProPublica found 270 taxpayers who collectively disclosed $5.7 billion in income, according to their previous tax return, but who were able to deploy deductions at such a massive scale that they qualified for stimulus checks. All listed negative net incomes on tax returns.

Consider two stimulus recipients with similarly huge incomes in 2018. Timothy Headington is an oil mogul, real estate developer and executive producer of such films as “Argo” and “World War Z,” and he’s worth $1.4 billion. He had $62 million in income in 2018, but after $342 million in write-offs, his final result was negative $280 million. The same was true of Rennert, whose $64 million in income that year was erased by $355 million in deductions, for a final total of negative $291 million.

Figures like these reveal a basic truth about the U.S. income tax system. Most people earn the overwhelming majority of their income via wages and take deductions where they can. But the income of the ultrawealthy as revealed on their taxes tells, at best, a partial story. As ProPublica reported earlier this year, the wealthiest taxpayers often have great flexibility in when and how they take taxable income, allowing them to pay a minuscule portion of their wealth growth in taxes. For the ultrawealthy, wages are to be avoided, carrying as they do the burden of not only income tax but also of payroll taxes.

Wages rarely made up a significant portion of income for the 270 wealthy stimulus check recipients identified by ProPublica. In total, only $82 million, or 1.4%, of the $5.7 billion in income taken in by the group came in the form of wages.

The ultrawealthy have other tax advantages. Many can tap a particularly generous vein of deductions: businesses they own. These can wipe out all of their income, even for years to come, unlike other deductions, like those for charitable giving. Certain industries, like real estate or oil and gas, are a well-known source of tax benefits that can generate paper losses even for a successful business.

The amount of stimulus aid that went to ultrawealthy taxpayers was a negligible piece of the trillions spent via the CARES Act. But the fact that billionaires were able to qualify shows that when legislators rely on income tax returns to determine eligibility for aid, there can be surprising results. Asked what he thought about billionaires receiving stimulus checks, Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., responded, “The tax code is simply not equipped to tax billionaires fairly, or even ensure they pay anything at all.”

ProPublica reached out to every stimulus-check recipient mentioned in this article. Rennert and Headington did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for George Soros, who has advocated for higher taxes for the wealthy, said, “George returned his stimulus check. He certainly didn’t request one!” Robert Soros did the same, a spokesperson said. (The Soros-funded Open Society Foundations have donated to ProPublica.)

Billionaires often reap sizable tax deductions from owning sports teams, as a ProPublica story this year detailed. A number of sports team owners were among the recipients of stimulus payments. Terrence Pegula, who is worth $5.7 billion and owns both the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, was one. Also getting a check was Glen Taylor, worth $2.8 billion, who earlier this year struck a deal to sell Minnesota’s NBA and WNBA teams for $1.5 billion. Pegula and Taylor did not respond to requests for comment.

Some taxpayers had enough in deductions to wipe out even hundreds of millions in income. Robert Dart is a scion of the Dart family, which owns Dart Container Corp., the maker of the iconic red Solo cup. In 2018, he reported income exceeding $300 million, but deductions left him with a final result of negative $39 million.

Dart and his brother renounced their U.S. citizenship decades ago to take advantage of a then-existing tax break available for expatriates. Dart filed his U.S. tax return from an address in the Cayman Islands, but got a stimulus payment just the same. (The IRS declined to comment.)

In response to questions, the general counsel for Dart Container wrote, “Mr. Dart believes that people in his position should not have received COVID stimulus funds. Mr. Dart did not request any COVID stimulus funds. Instead, those funds were directly deposited into his account by the U.S. Treasury without his consent as Congress determined that taxpayers with resident alien status were eligible for such payments. Mr. Dart has returned the COVID stimulus funds he received to the U.S. Treasury pursuant to instructions provided by the IRS.”

Some of the ultrawealthy have received government benefits on more than one occasion. Take Joseph DiMenna, a partner in Zweig-DiMenna, a pioneering hedge fund. An art collector and polo aficionado, he owns a club that holds charity polo matches for anti-poverty causes. In 2017, he received a special payout from his fund of $1.1 billion. But in 2018, without such a massive payout, business deductions swung his income back to where it had been in the years before his big payday: less than $0. That entitled him to a stimulus check. In both 2015 and 2016, DiMenna’s negative income also entitled him to $2,000 in refundable child tax credits, meant to support middle-class families with child care expenses. DiMenna did not respond to a request seeking comment.

Others among the superrich also received stimulus payments the last time Congress offered them when millions of Americans were struggling. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offered a $400 tax credit for individuals and $800 for married couples. It was called “Making Work Pay.”

Forrest Preston, the founder of Life Care Centers of America, one of the largest long-term care companies in the U.S., is worth $1.2 billion. In 2009, he got his $400 boost. The next year, he posted an income of $112 million. By 2018, however, his income had gone negative again, entitling him to a $1,200 payment in 2020.

The same year he received his stimulus check, Preston’s company successfully lobbied to win a tax break for the nursing home industry. Preston did not respond to a request for comment.

Taylor, the Minnesota Timberwolves owner, is another two-time stimulus recipient, in 2009 and again in 2020. So was Woodley Hunt, the senior chairman of Hunt Companies, a family-owned firm that is one of the country’s largest owners of multifamily properties. Hunt did not respond to a request seeking comment.

For former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, a big salary was a key part of the $400 million he earned in the five years before the firm’s historic collapse in 2008. But in recent years, he’s been running a company called Matrix Investment Partners that he set up to invest his own money. The tax losses generated by that company were one reason he got a stimulus check. Reached by phone and asked whether he wanted to comment, Fuld said, “I’m not interested. Thank you.”

Another CARES Act beneficiary was Erik Prince, who, before deductions, had $5.3 million in income in 2018. Prince founded Blackwater, a private military company that received hundreds of millions in government contracts. He has denounced excess government spending, saying we are being “bled dry by debt.” Prince didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A proposal in the Democrats’ (once $3.5 trillion, now under $2 trillion) Build Back Better legislation, currently the subject of fevered negotiations, would curb the ability of wealthy taxpayers to report negative income. It would do so by restricting the ability to use business losses to wipe out other types of income, like capital gains or dividends. Instead, business deductions would only offset business income.

The idea, which builds on a provision of the 2017 Trump tax bill, is one of the few tax provisions to have survived the recent negotiations — at least, for now. First proposed by House Democrats in September, it was then projected to produce $167 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. The provision was also included in a version of the legislation released on Oct. 28.

Not included in last week’s draft was a provision that would have directly affected the ability of billionaires to manipulate their incomes. A number of the billionaires who received stimulus checks were able to report negative incomes to the IRS despite getting richer. A “billionaire income tax” proposed by Wyden, would tax increases in wealth. Under the current system, gains are taxed only when they are “realized,” such as when someone sells stock.

Trump pleads with judge to “slow down” Jan. 6 probe

Former president Trump is asking a federal judge to conduct a document-by-document review of White House records sought by the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol insurrection.

Trump “is pleading with a federal judge in Washington to slow down” the House Select Committee’s efforts to obtain more than 700 pages of records from his presidency, Politico reported Tuesday night, adding that such a review “could take months.”

In a 33-page filing Tuesday, Trump lawyer Jesse Binnall also falsely claimed that “both the FBI and Senate have confirmed that there was no coordinated effort, including at the White House, to overturn the election on January 6,” according to Politico.

“Reuters reported in August that the FBI had so far found ‘scant’ evidence that there was a broader conspiracy beyond small pockets of militia groups, and Binnall cited that report, sourced to ‘four current and former law enforcement officials’ as evidence of his claim,” the site reported. “But the FBI has not affirmed this conclusion, and the Jan. 6 committee explicitly rejected this contention.”

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U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has scheduled a hearing for Thursday in a lawsuit brought by Trump alleging that the documents are shielded by executive privilege. Binnall’s reply brief filed Tuesday is the last scheduled written argument in the case prior to the hearing, according to CNN.

“Trump’s lawyers also attempt to make a political slam against Biden, for the Justice Department defending the (National Archives and Records Administration’s) decision that the Trump records should be turned over to the House this month,” CNN reported.

Binnall wrote: “It is curious that Department of Justice has submitted a brief in this case on behalf of the Archivist and NARA when those parties ostensibly have no interest in whether the records at issue here are disclosed or not. One can only assume that President Biden has endorsed the naked politicization of the Justice Department in the service of his own political ends.”

But according to CNN: “Trump, however, had named the Archives as a defendant in his lawsuit, necessitating that it respond in court, represented by the Justice Department.”

More like this:

Trump’s defense in jeopardy after Fox’s Judge Jeanine arranged “command center” campaign payments

When former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and ex-New York City Police Chief Bernie Kerik found themselves out thousands of dollars on hotel rooms and travel costs for their efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s election loss, one person came to their rescue: Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.

The longtime cable news staple arranged for the Trump campaign to reimburse Kerik and Giuliani, payments that may jeopardize the former president’s claim to executive privilege, according to a new report in the Washington Post.

In all, more than $225,000 in campaign cash went to both men — including close to $50,000 for suites at the tony Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., which Trump’s inner circle took to calling the “command center,” according to previous reports.

Before Pirro intervened, the Post reports that both men became increasingly concerned that Trump might stiff them.

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“How do I know I’m gonna get my money back?” Kerik told the paper he thought at the time.

Pirro, who remains a favorite of the former president after years of watching the conservative network, was able to secure the payments by calling Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who suggested that Kerik and Giuliani get the campaign to cover their expenses.

The Fox News host denied, through a Fox News spokesperson, that she acted on behalf of Giuliani or Kerik.

But experts say the payments imperil Trump’s assertion of executive privilege in withholding hundreds of “command center” documents from the House select committee investigating the attempted Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection — a defense which typically does not apply to campaign activity.

“If he acts as a president, he gets these things we talk about — executive privilege and immunity,” said attorney John Yoo, who served in the George W. Bush Justice Department as legal counsel. “But if he’s acting as a candidate, he’s deprived of all of those protections.”

Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, agreed with that assessment, calling Trump’s defense “wildly broad.”

“[This] further undermines a wildly broad assertion of executive privilege,” Ben-Veniste told the Post. “Executive privilege is typically limited to the protection of communications involving a president’s official duties — not to those relating to personal or political campaign matters.”

“Squid Game” fans harass a gamer whose name is causing confusion with Netflix’s hit show

This Halloween, Netflix’s “Squid Game” inspired some of the most popular costumes for the young and old; whether it was as a guard or a player, devotees of the series were out in full force.

Online however, the fans are less loving.

Twitch streamer Lydia Ellery from the U.K., who has over 42,000 followers and has been active on the platform for 11 years, has recently been inundated with hate comments on her social media accounts from “Squid Game” fans.

The reason? Her handle is @SquidGame.

In an interview with the BBC, Ellery explained, “For me it was was just a silly name I thought up on the spot. My friends called me ‘squid’ because it rhymes with ‘lid,’ and my name is Lydia.”

Deprived of @SquidGame proper, Netflix promotes the show through its own official account, which has caused confusion for fans looking for the show’s unique social handles. Instead, they found Ellery. “Because the show doesn’t have an official Instagram account, I was flooded with people tagging me or sending me messages thinking I was the show.”

The messages have also turned hateful from fans who think that Ellery stole the handle from the show and has been cybersquatting. With the extra attention on her account name now, Ellery has been kicked out of her accounts multiple times by hackers trying to get the handle.

Ellery’s income is at risk as well: brands and sponsors have told her that they’re not working with her because of the confusion caused by her handle, with Ellery herself writing on Twitter that she lost “2 amazing presenting opportunities” due to the association.

https://twitter.com/SquidGaming/status/1455502240446390283

Now, Ellery is considering changing the name she’s used to create her brand for over a decade, but it doesn’t feel like much of a choice, explaining on Twitter that she’s been sent abuse, banned, and now is losing work.

Other fan communities on Twitch have been just as vitriolic to mainly female streamers, including targeted harassment campaigns, doxxing, and hacking that became known as “Gamergate” in 2014 and 2015. Platforms still have a long way to go to protect all creators, including female-presenting ones, from targeted attacks such as the one Ellery is facing.

Phil Murphy ekes out win in New Jersey gubernatorial race following surprise Republican challenge

The New Jersey gubernatorial election remained too close to call for nearly a full day after Tuesday’s election, with the Associated Press finally calling the race for Democratic incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy over Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli late Wednesday afternoon.

“We’re all sorry that tonight could not yet be the celebration that we wanted it to be,” said Murphy on Wednesday, around 12:30am. “But as I said: When every vote is counted — and every vote will be counted — we hope to have a celebration again.”

Last week, polls forecasted that Murphy boasts an 11% lead over Ciattarelli. However, the current vote counts appear to suggest a different story.

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“We’re a liberal state, but reserve the right to change our mind,” said Professor John Farmer Jr., director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, told NBC10.

New Jersey is home to 1.1 million more registered Democrats than Republicans, indicating a potential sea change in the state’s electorate.

Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive, was first elected to office back in 2017. He is now the first Democrat to win re-election as governor in the Garden State since 1977.

During his administration, Murphy raised the state tax on millionaires and top-earning businesses. He also expanded childhood educational programs and committed to providing universal pre-K for New Jersey residents.

During the campaign trail, Murphy touted his legalization of marijuana earlier this year as well as his minimum wage hikes, according to The Wall Street Journal. On the whole, Murphy has earned strong marks for his handling of the pandemic. In September, 62% of the state’s residents supported his COVID-19 policies. Although the virus hit New Jersey hard in the first months of the pandemic, Murphy swiftly guided the state out of further chaos by aggressively testing and implementing common sense public health measures.

Ciattarelli, a Republican businessman and former assemblyman, has largely campaigned against Murphy’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, critiquing his enforcement of mask and vaccine mandates. A Donald Trump supporter, Ciattarelli has also dipped his toe in the culture war, saying that LBGTQ+ school curriculum and critical race theory should be banned from classrooms.

“We are not going to teach our children to feel guilty,” he said.

Back in July, Ciattarelli was scorned over remarks in which he called LGBTQ+ relations “sodomy.”

“You won’t have to deal with it when I’m governor, but we’re not teaching gender ID and sexual orientation to kindergartners,” Ciattarelli said of LGBTQ+ curriculum. “We’re not teaching sodomy in sixth grade. And we’re going to roll back the LGBTQ curriculum. It goes too far.”

Though Ciattarelli and Murphy are currently locked in a dead heat, experts have noted that the election might be Murphy’s to lose, given President Biden’s approval rating.

“There’s a drag from Joe Biden’s low approval ratings,” Ben Dworkin, director of the Rowan University Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship, told The Journal. “And the craziness that’s gone on in Washington has depressed Democratic enthusiasm and energized Republicans.”

George Orwell stopped and smelled the roses, and Rebecca Solnit wants modern people to do the same

In the first few weeks after Donald Trump got elected, George Orwell — an author who died in 1950, when Trump was still a child — saw his books rocket to the top of bestseller lists. The gaslighting of an authoritarian figure like Trump renewed the public’s interests in Orwell’s writings, especially his novel “1984,” as a spotlight into the tactics that fascists and other far-right figures use to crush the human spirit.

Unfortunately, this revisiting also ended up reinforcing the standard view of Orwell as a stern socialist, too busy fighting the forces of totalitarianism to enjoy the finer things in life. It’s this view that author Rebecca Solnit pushes back against in “Orwell’s Roses,” her unconventional new biography of the author of “1984” and “Animal Farm.” Solnit uses Orwell’s lifelong love of gardening to ask deeper questions about the value of pleasure in our politics, the human relationship to the natural world, and what the modern left could learn from Orwell and his love of roses.

Solnit spoke with me on “Salon Talks” about her book and why it’s good for humans, as they say on the internet, to touch grass once in awhile. Or, as Orwell did, to plant roses. Read or watch my conversation below.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca, I want to start with talking about George Orwell who is a person who has had a surge of interest after the election of Trump. I think readers have been buying up his book, “1984,” in huge numbers. Why do you think it is that he’s the author that so many people have turned to in our troubled times?

He, more than anyone, nailed what it looks like to live in a world of national gaslighting, of propaganda, of how much authoritarianism is not just authoritarianism over the economy, the law, human rights, but over consciousness, culture, language, representation. And so he became very relevant when a would be authoritarian who is also a compulsive liar, suddenly takes power in an illegitimate election.

Is that why you were drawn to writing about him during this time, or was it something else?

No, Orwell’s been important to me since I was really young. He’s one of the handful of non-fiction writers who really kind of gave me a template for what I wanted to do as a writer before I knew what it was and what the words for it were. And I’d gone to him in a lot of other eras. He was certainly very relevant in the early 2000s, in the Bush era, when we even had a website called The Memory Hole for all the lies and facts being kind of slung around in the name of the global war on terror and Bush’s hegemonic moment. And he’d been a huge influence on me as a writer as well.

No, it really was, as I recount in the book, that I was on an errand looking for the fruit trees Orwell planted for my dear friend, Sam Green, and found that they had been cut down, but that the roses he planted allegedly were still growing. And it just raised the question for me, “What did this great prophet of totalitarianism, this person renowned for facing unpleasant facts, what the hell was he doing planting roses?” It felt like it allowed me to think about a lot of things beyond Orwell himself, about pleasure, meaning, joy, as they relate to politics, aesthetics versus ethics, those things we need to do that may look trivial, or bourgeois, luxurious that might be essential to doing the really important work we’re here to do.

And in a lot of related questions . . . And it was also in Orwell who was deeply engaged with the natural world, which in a time when the natural world was the site of our central climate crisis, made him seem relevant in a different way, and also made him seem like a really different writer than I’d been told. I think everyone has this impression of Orwell as this very grim, stern, pessimistic, austere guy, and to just find out how much he enjoyed himself, how passionately he gardened, how much pleasure he took in his chickens and goats and roses and crops, and grazing those goats on the public common, really gave me a different Orwell than the one I always been told was who he was. And that led me to look at his writing again. The writing had shown that all along, but we hadn’t seen it.

As you say, there’s this of image of Orwell as this austere socialist, and obviously in “1984,” which is his most famous book, it really focuses on Big Brother. Most of the discourse focuses on the Big Brother aspects of his writing, and coinage of terms like double speak and double think, his insights into the constant surveillance. But as you write, “Orwell did believe devoutly in moments of delight and that he included this fascination in ‘1984’.” So tell me more about that and why you think this kind of interest and delight, which the roses represent, it was so crucial to making that book a classic.

I don’t think it – I think it went kind of undetected. And I’ve read “1984” many times, starting with when I was a teenager. I had read it not that long ago in the Bush era and focused on other things. In light of what I learned from Orwell’s letters and diaries and the essays, including the one that prompted me to visit the cottage where he planted the roses and the food trees, found traces of this other Orwell who actually enjoyed himself immensely, the kind of “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” carpe diem sensibility.

And so when I went back to read “1984,” it felt like a new book, because how does Winston Smith rebel against the regime of big brother? And he does want to topple the regime. He doesn’t have a lot of capacity to do it, though he does try to join what he hopes will be the rebellion, but he breaks all the rules. He has a passionate love affair. He wanders off by himself in places he’s not supposed to go. He does things, hiding from the omnipresent surveillance of Big Brother. He cultivates memory, emotion, a sense of history, an attempt to establish facts independently.

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So as to create – there’s a wonderful line I quote by Hannah Arendt that the ideal subject of totalitarianism is someone for whom the difference between truth and falsehood no longer matters, and I’m paraphrasing roughly. And so someone for whom it does matter a great deal, which is what we should all strive to be and what I think we as nonfiction writers, you and I, try to help people be, is to make a self that can resist, a self that can think independently, a self that’s not so manipulable. And so we see Winston doing that. And that’s one of the things that’s really striking, is that the world of sensory perception is a kind of immediate, empirical reality that can counter the reality of propaganda and lies.

So it actually matters, as well as potentially gives a huge amount of pleasure, and you see that in the book. But what struck me is that the very first thing that happens is Winston Smith pulls out this beautiful book with luscious creamy paper. He bought it at a junk shop in the proletarian district, a junk shop that will become very important, and he starts writing on it. And the sheer pleasure of the texture of the paper, the act of writing, the ink, the subject of introspective, independent thought are all really important. And so this tiny act is essential and a pleasurable act, as well as an act of rebellious, independent, introspective thought. And that’s really where the book begins and it’s off and running from there, and it describes the golden country that he’s dreamed of. And then in a way that reminds us this is not a realist novel, he comes to a real golden country that exactly matches up the ones that he’s dreamed of and a woman who actually does this great free central gesture of pulling her clothes off that he’s also dreamed of.

And we realized that beauty and nature, and sex and pleasure, and bodily life, and love are all acts of resistance in a sense. And that all brings us to what I think is the climax of the book, the third time Winston looks out the window of that junk shop, where he’s renting the bedroom above the shop to continue the love affair, and he sees this stout middle-age proletarian woman singing in a beautiful voice, hanging out diapers. And here comes someone up the stairs, this might be the landlord, but I’ll continue for a moment. And I love that moment. First of all, Winston has the sudden realization that the woman is beautiful, and it feels like Orwell himself is seeing women in a way that he and most straight men who write novels usually don’t.

Secondly, the whole thing that drives it is a rose metaphor. He thinks why should the rose hip be less beautiful than the rose? And I love it. In the very heart of “1984,”,you find a rose metaphor, which is something which reminds me of something I’ve been harping on for years and in many books, which is that the natural world, the organic world, the animal world, the vegetable world, the spatial world gives us our metaphors, which is how we understand the world, how we relate things by analogy. And so it’s this remarkable moment, and Winston has thought over and over, if there’s hope, it lies with the proles. A very standard interpretation of “1984” is that because Winston himself is captured, tortured, brainwashed, destroyed psychically, then there is no hope. But if hope lies with the proles, and that extraordinary example of the proles, is this woman singing a song about lost love and memory and yearning while hanging out diapers.

She’s committed to the past through the lyrics of the song. She’s committed to beauty through being this extraordinary singer, cockney accent, but also exquisite voice. And she’s committed to the future with these diapers she’s hanging out. And he describes her as a kind of goddess, that she could have been there for a thousand years, just this tremendous sense of power. And to find that at the heart of the book was really exciting and not at all how I had ever interpreted the book before or how I’d ever interpreted myself before.

So yeah, so “1984” changed shape thanks to “Orwell’s Roses,” which I should add is not only a book in which roses give me some new ways of thinking about Orwell, but Orwell gives me some new ways of thinking about roses, and by extension, flowers, plants, and the natural world. And so it’s very much a book about climate change, plants and carbon fixing and carbon sequestering, botany, agriculture, bread and roses, wheat, and lots of scientific discourses and political controversies, and the rest. And yet mysteriously, I think it all fits together.

I think a lot of people who aren’t writers have this image of writers as people who live in their heads, especially kind of political writers like Orwell, very in the clouds, not with feet on the ground. But in my experience, I’m a writer, I know a lot of writers like what we do, and they do – they’re often foodies, they’re often gardeners, they’re often people who have hobbies with their hands, like Orwell and his gardening. Why do you think that is, that writers are so – I think they’re disproportionately drawn to wanting to do things with their hands when they’re not working.

I’m an avid cook and joke that if I didn’t have friends and family, I’d have to pull in strangers off the street for dinner. And I love the farmer’s market. One of my idyllic experiences over the last 30 something years has been listening to KPFA’s country music on the radio on the weekend while preparing food for people who haven’t yet arrived. And for me, cooking is the exact opposite of writing. It engages all the senses, it’s visual it has flavor, smell, texture, it’s hands-on, but also, you know exactly what you’re doing. The souffle collapsed, the pie had perfect flaky crust, the soup needed more salt or was delicious. People respond to it immediately, hopefully by eating it, and then you’re done.

Whereas you write a book, you don’t know what you did. The only people who will get back to you usually are cranky people who disagree with you, want to pick a fight and a few reviewers. It will just float out there in the world like a message in the bottle. And sometimes, almost by accident or someone will take the effort to communicate with you, you’ll find out that it had some wonderful impact, but mostly, you don’t. And it happens,I wrote this book last year. It’s coming out a year after I finished the first, more than a year after I finished the first draft. And maybe in 10 years, it will have some interesting impact on someone that I’ll never know. So I think that just the tangible, the direct, the sensory.

Also, I think a lot of writers, and I cannot pronounce the name of the great Japanese novelist who wrote “What We Talk About When We Talk About Running,” but I’m a runner. I actually just came in from running on the beach where I got sea birds and a dead shark and a dead cormorant, and the little patterns the wind makes on the sand, and I think that we all need a certain amount of, just ordinary human beings, all human beings, not just writers need some grounding, and writers are not exceptional. But what also interested me with Orwell is, in a way, this book is written against the left, which is something he was doing a lot with his own writing. There’s a sense in the left, which I’m often around, grew up among, that every pleasure is somehow an indulgence and needs justification, or is maybe just unjustifiable, that you should be 24/7 fighting for the revolution, and we shouldn’t have any nice things until after the revolution or when anybody else is suffering.

And there will always be somebody suffering after the revolution is a fictional space, so it basically says don’t enjoy yourself. And I also think a lot of people on the left think somehow their miserable, austere suffering is what they’re offering up. And I just don’t think anyone starving to death, or in a refugee camp, or being tortured, or under threat from a death squad is like, “Yeah, but some Americans are sitting around being really miserable in solidarity, and that makes me feel awesome.” All I really want is for us to actually work for their rights and safety and well-being.

And it’s okay if we bake a cake, or go on a nice run, or plant a garden. And Orwell did all that stuff, and it was not just compatible, I think, necessary.

I think that tendency on the left got worse during the pandemic where there was a real sense that any kind of pleasure was somehow not in solidarity with the misery we were all sort of sharing under this pandemic.

God knows I have been chastised for my minor pleasures. I got chastised by some complete stranger in the UK for mentioning buying a pretty shirt in June of 2020, and then going to a George Floyd protest. And she was like, “You’re trivializing it.” And I was like, “Lady, I was at the Rodney King uprisings. I was at – I’ve been going to protest my whole life. I will probably be going to anti-racist protests my whole life. Every now and again, I’m also going to buy a shirt, and sometimes, those things will coincide.” It’s not like the world stopped because there is racism, and that those things can coexist. And then Orwell was such an impeccable example, because he is treated as Mr. manly, austere, committed, et cetera, and there’s this funny – Actually, to Sam, I said, “I felt like I was pelting Orwell with sissy flowers.” So I felt like if Orwell can do it, we’ve all got covered.

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The only sugar-rimmed margarita worth drinking

There’s not much left to say about the margarita, is there? One of the great classic cocktails traditionally comprising tequila, triple sec orange liqueur and lime juice, it probably originated as a tequila-based take on the daisy, a drink category dating back to Victorian times that’s made from citrus juice sweetened with syrup or liqueur and fortified with a base spirit, according to Difford’s Guide. (“Margarita” is Spanish for daisy, after all.)

My personal margarita history reads like many others, I’m sure: some prescriptively good ones and many more mediocre, concocted from bottled mixes and dispensed by the pitcher. Among the handful of truly standout margs I’ve had, one peculiar version looms large. This margarita, which originated at The Matchbox bar in Chicago, drinks rich and frothy like a sour and is rimmed not with salt but rather a thick coating of powdered sugar.

Yes, you read that right.

A choice I’d normally consider a red flag in a cocktail, this marg’s confectioner’s sugar rim coats your lips, softening the bracing tequila and unapologetic dose of fresh citrus — whose aromas are supercharged with a fat lemon peel garnish. With each sip, your fingers get a little stickier.

“All credit for the powdered-sugar rim goes to the previous owners,” said co-owner Gregg Weinstein, who bought The Matchbox about a year and a half ago with his partner Kevin Killerman from David and Jackie Gervercer. “We’ll take credit for keeping it going.”

The Gervercers purchased the bar in 1995 from original owner Israel Segal, who ran it for more than 60 years. Jackie Gervercer tended bar and oversaw the cocktail menu, meaning she likely contrived the sugared rim and the addition of egg whites, which writer Chuck Sudo unriddled back in 2012 for the Chicagoist. Yet I wouldn’t dream of recreating this cocktail at home, because a big part of what makes drinking it special is the bar itself.

A close-up of The Matchbox’s sugar-rimmed margarita. (Photo courtesy of Maggie Hennessy)

This tiny, wedge-shaped joint, which anchors the northwest corner of Ogden, Milwaukee and Chicago Aves. in the River West neighborhood, aptly self-describes on its facade as Chicago’s most intimate bar. Enclosed in brick walls on one side and huge windows on the other beneath a tin-print ceiling, the space is illuminated by oversized chandeliers, bands of twinkle lights and a red-lit back bar. Against a cluttered backdrop of scrawled notes and photos, bartenders shake and stir all manner of superb classic cocktails, from gimlets and daiquiris to cosmos and Manhattans — many of which arrive with an equally delightful throwback: the sidecar (as in, the shaker remains in a little glass jug).

Before the pandemic, I’d often pop by for an after-work margarita — arriving as close to opening time as possible to snag one of only 15 timeworn barstools lining the lipped wood bar. If they were all occupied, I’d happily prop my elbow on the ledge along the windows, tucking in my sipping arm whenever someone squeezed by. Trips to the restroom — located at the back and narrowest part of the bar — were, naturally, delayed as long as physically possible. I’d drain my cocktail for courage, then inch back through the wall of standers on the right and seated drinkers on the left — the path narrowing a little with each step. Winter always presented the added challenge of puffy coats sprouting into the precarious walkway. But like all good regulars, I’d claim this small oddity proudly; this is, after all, my bar.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I stopped by for an after-work marg on The Matchbox’s sprawling sidewalk patio set beneath an extended canopy — two necessary expansions when the highly contagious COVID-19 rendered the bar’s interior temporarily obsolete.

The author sips on a sugar-rimmed margarita at The Matchbox. (Photo courtesy of Maggie Hennessy)

“The pandemic made us three times as big,” Weinstein told me.

He and I had been chatting for maybe 10 minutes when I demanded to know why my very large coupe filled to the brim was missing its trademark sidecar.

“Believe me, you’re not the first to ask,” he sighed, reassuring me that I was still getting the same amount. “We shifted it to a bigger coupe. A few drinks still come with sidecars, but there’s just no room back there for all that glassware.”

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These count among the more innocuous changes required to keep this old bar going and up to code. Weinstein and Killerman, who own several bars throughout the city, including Star Bar in Ukrainian Village, Rex Tavern in Jefferson Park and Hubbard Inn in River North, addressed several mechanical issues, including a leaky roof. They replaced the windows, added new barstools and moved the furnace to increase and space out interior seating. They also installed a dishwasher and draft line.

The Matchbox’s interior is open again and still recognizable, though all but one of the familiar faces mixing drinks have left since the pandemic. You can’t stand two or three people deep anymore either, but Weinstein and Killerman have plans to expand indoor seating to the old train car next door, which formerly housed the dining room for the Silver Palm restaurant — which they also purchased.

“I didn’t want to see this place turn into a bank or condos,” said Weinstein, a Chicago native. “We want to keep as much as we can the same; we’re part of the family now.”

Deep down, I know this is the only way to keep some semblance of these beloved old joints alive. Bar owner Ed Warm faced a similar challenge when he bought Carol’s, Chicago’s last honky-tonk bar in Uptown, though I’d argue that he kept the bar’s soul intact. Similarly, when Andrew Pillman bought the German-themed Huettenbar in Lincoln Square, he gutted the charming but severely lapsed interior. For now, it resembles a nondescript sports bar, though Pillman is coordinating with the neighborhood’s German American cultural center to decorate the bar, as Block Club Chicago reported.

Indeed, you might call change the sole constant of big cities — an inevitability with little sympathy for those of us bent on lamenting the bygone, good old days. I, for one, will settle for pausing time till I reach the bottom of my margarita coupe.

One more round, you say? I’m in . . .

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Democrats in Congress double down on Biden’s agenda after bitter Virginia loss

Democrats are doubling down on President Joe Biden’s agenda, rallying around voting rights and paid parental leave one day after a bitter upset in the Virginia gubernatorial race, seen by many as a bellwether for the national body politic.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats made a bid to advance the John Lewis Voting Act, a landmark bill designed to strengthen the core elements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allow the Justice Department to regulate state-level election changes that may violate the Constitution. The bill was filibustered by Senate Republicans, however, failing to garner the 60-vote supermajority needed to overcome the filibuster and reach a floor debate.

According to USA Today, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was the only Republican to support its approval, albeit she expressed some “reservations” around the legislation. Murkowski and a number of other senators, including Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have expressed an intent to craft a more “bipartisan” proposal that is liable to hallow the measure out.

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Two weeks ago, Democrats attempted a similar voting rights maneuver with the Freedom to Vote Act, which seeks to protect the election system from voter suppression, gerrymandering, and dark money. However, Republicans again shot the bill down, prompting calls for the filibuster to be reformed or scrapped altogether in order to prevent GOP minoritarian rule.

Aside from voting rights, Democrats also set their eyes on returning a four-week paid parental leave provision to the negotiations after Tuesday’s loss, stressing that such a benefit must be included in their new $1.75 trillion social spending bill. In a Wednesday press release, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., asked the Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Sen. Richard Neal, D-Mass., to include the subject of paid family leave in the committee’s morning hearing.

“The Ways and Means Committee crafted a policy that will finally give workers and their families the peace of mind of knowing that when disaster strikes, they can rely on paid leave to avoid total crisis. We do this responsibly, fully paying for the means-tested program,” said Neal, according to POLITICO.

Democrats, Pelosi added, are currently discussing “the substance of the changes of the legislation” with the Congressional Budget Office.

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has joined the duo in their fight to push parental leave past the finish line, telling reporters: “I’m going to pull out all the stops for paid family leave, because I think it is a disgrace that we are essentially the only western industrialized nation that hasn’t figured it out.”

The effort is likely to be met with substantial Republican pushback, however.

Manchin, for his part, has said that he’d support Pelosi’s proposal if it’s bankrolled by both employers and employees (in the form of a payroll tax).

“I think that basically employers and employees should participate,” Manchin told Insider. “We have states around this country doing it now. We have countries around the world doing it and it seems to work very well and does not put a burden on anybody.”

According to Insider, mild payroll taxes for parental leave were outlined in a previous iteration of the social policy framework proffered by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Sen. Kyrsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. However, experts have warned such a provision might come at too high of a cost for workers.

Republicans have new idea to fix labor shortage: Loosen child labor laws

Republican-controlled legislatures in several states have come up with a novel way to stem the effects of an ongoing labor shortage: loosen child labor laws governing the number of hours and times that teenagers are allowed to work.

It’s not exactly a new strategy. Businesses hiring minimum-wage employees across the country have advertised their use of teenagers to plug the holes in their workforce for months, especially fast-food chains like Chipotle, Burger King and McDonalds, among others. Seasonal work in tourism-heavy industries like amusement parks have also doubled-down on the strategy.

But at least two states, Wisconsin and Ohio, are now pushing for new laws that would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work longer hours — the most brazen attempts to expand American businesses’ use of teenage labor in decades.

In Ohio, the Republican-controlled state legislature took up a measure last month to allow businesses to keep teenagers under the age of 16 at work until 9 p.m., with a parent’s permission. Previously, they had only been allowed to work until 7 p.m. The bill was introduced by two Republicans and one Democrat.

Likewise, the Wisconsin Senate last month also passed a bill which would allow businesses to hire 14- and 15-year-olds to work from 6 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weeknights or 11 p.m. on weekends. The measure would only apply to businesses which run less than $500,000 in sales annually and aren’t governed by a federal statute known as the Fair Labor Standards Act.

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If approved by the state Assembly, which appears likely, its fate will lie with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. It remains unclear whether he will veto the measure or not.

It’s just the latest attempt in a long line of Republican-led changes to the state’s child labor code over the last decade, according to an analysis in The Guardian. In 2011, Wisconsin eliminated limits on the number of hours — and days — that minors aged 16-17 could work, and even replaced the phrase “child labor” in state law with “employment of minors” in 2017.

The most recent changes have attracted support from a number of powerful service-industry lobbies, such as the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, who say it will help to solve businesses’ staffing issues and teach teenagers a healthy work ethic.

On the other side, the measure has attracted ire from the AFL-CIO and a number of the state’s high-profile Democrats, who uniformly appear to oppose the bill.

“It’s a nice workaround,” state Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, told WISN-TV last month. “I think in reality if those employers are looking for workers, what frankly the market should dictate is they should be raising wages, offering additional benefits.”

A number of high-profile progressives have echoed those sentiments — with some even pushing back against the mainstream narrative that a widespread worker shortage exists in the first place. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said on her Instagram recently that what America is confronting isn’t a labor shortage, but a “dignified job shortage.”

Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, told Salon that the larger issue at play is why kids would have to work in the first place.

“A lot of families are in such dire economic conditions that they might agree to send their kids to work because of necessity.” she said. “But that’s the problem. If you get up and go to work every day, you shouldn’t be living in poverty, you shouldn’t be living in such dire situations.”

The increasing reliance on American teenagers to work more hours is also leading to a number of negative outcomes for children who are forced into the labor market at younger ages — including increasing rates of substance abuse and high school dropouts, research shows.

In an op-ed for the Bucks County Courier Times, a local Pennsylvania newspaper, high school junior Darcy Leight wrote that she and her peers were experiencing burnout at much higher rates due to the increasing pressure to work longer hours in recent months.

“A job I intended to work strictly during the summer has somehow found its way into my fall schedule and has become almost equivalent to academics on my priority list. And I don’t even know how it happened,” she wrote. “The coupling of a job anywhere from five to 35 hours a week along with being a student is extremely stressful.

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Who gets to play who on screen? The queer question of Julianna Margulies on “The Morning show”

Among the many surprises of the second season of Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show” is Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson exploring her fluid sexuality with another woman. Julianna Margulies’ Laura Peterson is an out-and-proud lesbian journalist at the fictional UBA network who lost her job shortly after being outed in the ’90s.

Laura manages to rise through the ranks at UBA over the years anyway, and her budding romance with Bradley is a bright spot in a chaotic season that follows the fictional morning show in disarray over much publicized revelations about endemic sexual misconduct and toxic workplace culture.

Since joining the star-studded cast of “The Morning Show,” Margulies has already drawn significant praise and attention. But more recently, in an interview with “CBS Mornings“, Margulies faced a tough question about whether an LGBTQ actress would have been able to better represent Laura on the show.

“I can understand that,” Margulies said of the criticism. “My response would also be: We’re all making assumptions as to who I am, and what my past is and what all of our pasts are.”

Margulies continued and said she understands “I can’t play a different race,” but argued there should be fluidity and nuance in how we approach casting when it comes to other roles and identities.

“I am an actress, and I am supposed to embody another character. Whatever their sexuality is doesn’t matter to me, the same way watching a gay person play a straight person,” she said. “Are you telling me that because I’m a mother that I can never play a woman who has never had a child? Or, if you’ve never been married that you can’t play a married woman?

“You have to be careful on where you’re drawing the line there. We’re actors. We’re supposed to embody a character regardless of their sexuality. When it comes to race and gender, that’s a whole different story, and I 100 percent agree with that.”

Casting and identity

Margulies’ answer is part of a much larger conversation that’s increasingly arisen in recent years, amid growing backlash against white actors playing characters of color or more privileged actors taking roles from marginalized actors in general. In 2018, Scarlett Johansson, a cisgender woman, accepted the role of a trans man before stepping down amid widespread criticism. Before that, Johansson had accepted the role of a character – who is an Asian woman in the original anime – for the 2017 adaptation “Ghost in the Shell” to similar backlash.

As much as we’d like to think of whitewashing and other identity-based blindspots in casting as a relic of the past, casting decisions like this continue to be made on a regular basis. Notably, just earlier this year, Sarah Paulson faced criticism for accepting the role of Linda Tripp in “Impeachment: American Crime Story.” As Tripp, Paulson dons prosthetics and a fat suit to play a part that could have gone to a fat actress with fewer opportunities than Paulson has.

As demands for accurate representation, inclusive storytelling, and more roles for actors who aren’t thin, cis, straight or white grow, we find the conversation increasingly returning to who can play who, and who can and can’t reflect which experiences without taking away opportunities from those with less privilege.

Disability and marginalization

It’s not a new controversy or conversation, though more and more voices are chiming in.

Back in 1988, Tom Cruise’s classic buddy-road trip movie “Rain Man,” which follows Cruise as a car dealer whose brother Raymond, an autistic savant portrayed by the notably not autistic actor Dustin Hoffman, is gifted with a powerful eidetic memory that makes gambling easy. Since 1988, the movie has been criticized for neglecting to cast an autistic actor to portray Raymond, considering how sparse roles for actors with disabilities are. This also called into question about how accurate the portrayal was or whether it was just a performance of how neurotypical people see those on the spectrum.

Unfortunately, “Rain Man” wasn’t just a product of its time in the 1980s. ABC medical drama “The Good Doctor” stars Freddie Highmore, who is neurotypical, as the brilliant autistic surgeon named Shaun Murphy. “The Good Doctor” continues to run today, and has received mixed reception from autistic critics, with some celebrating positive and accurate aspects of its representation of autistic people’s experiences. But the fact remains that Highmore isn’t autistic, and his role could have gone to someone who is.

Similarly, the 2019 movie “Sound of Metal” follows the life of a heavy metal drummer Ruben Stone, who begins to lose his hearing. The Oscar-nominated film cast deaf talent like actress Lauren Ridloff, but Riz Ahmed, who played Ruben, notably isn’t deaf and prepared himself for the role by using hearing aids that play white noise to simulate deaf people’s experiences, he told the New York Times.

Despite the research and effort Ahmed put in to do justice by the role, the fact remains that it’s a role that could and should have gone to a deaf actor, or an actor with hearing loss struggles. When actors without disabilities play characters with disabilities, no matter how thoughtful or well researched their performance is, on some level, it will always be a sort of caricature of a marginalized experience. It is also perpetuating the practice of hiring able performers over those with disabilities in the industry.

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The queer question

Meanwhile, Margulies isn’t the only actor who’s had to face questions and criticisms for accepting the role of a queer character. In 2004, Benedict Cumberbach played a gay man in “Imitation Game,” and recently faced a question for accepting the role of another gay character in the upcoming movie “Power of the Dog.”

“It wasn’t done without thought. I also feel slightly like, is this a thing where our dance card has to be public?” Cumberbach said, answering the question with a question of his own. “Do we have to explain all our private moments in our sexual history? I don’t think so.”

Chloë Grace-Moretz, a vocal LGBTQ ally, faced a similar question in 2018, about her playing a gay teenager who’s sent to gay conversion therapy camp in “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.” She echoed Cumberbach’s sentiments, telling The Independent that “across the board, don’t assume,” when it comes to any actor’s sexuality.

Last year, Kristen Stewart, an openly queer “Twilight” saga alum who plays Princess Diana Spencer in the forthcoming movie, “Spencer,” weighed in about similar conversations surrounding the queer holiday flick, “Happiest Season.”

“I would never want to tell a story that really should be told by somebody who’s lived that experience,” Stewart told Variety, unequivocally. “Having said that, it’s a slippery slope conversation because that means I could never play another straight character if I’m going to hold everyone to the letter of this particular law. I think it’s such a gray area.”

Taking a stand for proper representation

Stewart and other stars and Hollywood A-listers who have weighed in on the matter are right that casting is a complex process that can certainly open the door for “gray areas” and “slippery slopes,” when we sweepingly say that actors should only play characters they can fully represent from their own experiences. But we can’t navigate these situations without addressing the long history of unequal opportunities, representation and power in the entertainment industry.

In 2017, Ed Skrein, a white actor, modeled the appropriate way to handle being cast for a character with an underrepresented experience. Upon learning that the character he had been cast for in a new installment of the “Hellboy” franchise actually had Asian heritage, Skrein stepped down “so the role can be cast appropriately.” Whitewashing and greater issues of on-screen misrepresentation are endemic issues in Hollywood that are certainly perpetuated by casting directors, but also by actors with more privilege who take opportunities from marginalized actors.

Trans actors, actors of color, plus-size actors, and actors with disabilities will never have the same opportunities as white, cis, thin actors without disabilities. When more privileged actors take roles for characters who have these identities, they’re often taking away from the limited opportunities available to people with less privilege. Like Margulies and other actors have noted, no one can possibly be expected to represent all of the identities and experiences of characters they play — that’s not the issue. The real problem is when they take opportunities away from more marginalized actors. And in certain instances – as with whitewashing – it is taking away a chance to normalize the presence of those marginalized people on our screens and in our world.

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“PEN15” returns with more suffering, dancing and … boyfriends?! Watch the trailer

The angst of Hulu’s “PEN15” is finally back in time for the holiday season.

It’s been over a year since the first chunk of Season 2 was released, so here’s a little refresher. Last we saw Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine’s dorky middle school alter egos, they had just finished their school play in triumph. Maya had made up (and maybe hinted at a mutual flirtation) with guy best friend Sam (Taj Cross), and Anna had to decide which of her parents she wanted to live with. Then, they drove off into the night in Anna’s dad’s new convertible, with even more questions about what comes next for our favorite adults being kids.

It wrapped up a season in which the girls reckoned with their own friendship being tested, increasing animosity between Anna’s parents, Maya’s flirtationship with her play’s costar, Anna’s flirtationship with theater techie Steve (Chau Long) . . . and witchcraft. As one does in middle school.

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If you’re feeling a bit antsy, Hulu did drop a bonus animated episode this past August that acts as a bridge between the two halves of the season. In the special one-off, the girls have escaped to Florida, where they come to grips with their insecurities and drink for the first time.

But now it’s back to reality. In the new trailer released Wednesday, we see it’s full of ups and downs. Anna has a little luck in the boyfriend department, while her parents’ divorce continues to create havoc at home. Meanwhile, Maya really wants a cell phone, may have some dating drama of her own and even considers running away from home.

The new “PEN15” episodes premiere Friday Dec. 3 on Hulu. Watch the trailer below via Youtube.

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Trump’s social media company is prepared for a presidential run — or his conviction

Former President Donald Trump’s new social media company is preparing for the event that he becomes a convicted felon.

Forbes reports that the merger agreement that’s needed for Trump’s TRUTH Social platform to get off the ground contains a clause dealing with Trump’s ownership of the company should a “material disruptive event” occur, which it specifically defines as either Trump running for the presidency or Trump getting convicted of a felony.

While there are few details in the document about how Trump would retain ownership of the company should such an event occur, Forbes notes that owning a public company would be very challenging for Trump even if he weren’t sent to prison.

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“Trump previously led such a business, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts,” the publication writes. “Shareholders sued after he used the publicly traded company to buy a casino he personally owned at a suspiciously high valuation. Trump fought the allegations for a half decade, then settled around 2002 without admitting wrongdoing.”

Michael Klausner, a business and law professor at Stanford, tells Forbes that taking the helm of a public company is a landmine for Trump.

“I expect he will be on the wrong end of a securities-fraud suit before long,” he said. “I can’t imagine him being any more truthful about his business than he is about anything else. Especially when it comes to size—the company, his following on the platform, crowds or other size-related facts—he just makes it up.”

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Socialist candidate India Walton defeated by write-in candidate for Buffalo mayor

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown declared victory on Tuesday against socialist candidate India Walton in the New York town’s mayoral race. Brown waged a hail-mary write-in campaign to win his sixth term.

Considered “politically dead” following his primary defeat by Walton back in June, according to The Buffalo News, Brown received 59% of the Buffalo electorate’s support on Tuesday. By contrast, Walton won roughly 41% of the write-in votes.

From the outset of the race, Brown refused to take part in the nominating contest or even debate with Walton, instead asking the city’s voters to “Write Down Byron Brown.”

“At the very beginning, they said we can’t win, that it was impossible to win as a write-in,” Brown said in a speech this week. “But you know, you can never count a Buffalonian out. “The people chose four more years of the Brown administration. The people chose one of the greatest comeback stories in our history.”

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Walton, a first-time candidate for public office, conceded on Wednesday afternoon.

My statement on last night’s election results, threaded below for accessibility. pic.twitter.com/4FNeBxHSkE

— The Hood 411 (@Indiawaltonbflo) November 3, 2021

“I knew that this was going to be an uphill battle since the beginning,” Walton said ahead of the vote, acknowledging the tough road her campaign faced.

Brown, a Democratic former New York State senator, was elected as Buffalo’s first Black mayor back in 2005. During his first term, he narrowed his focus on crime reduction, though his policies yielded mixed results. Brown has historically represented a “more centrist faction of the New York state party,” according to The New York Times, often heeding the special interests of real estate lobbies, which have directed significant contributions his way.

Walton, a former nurse with support from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., campaigned on a progressive policy platform, which called for a $7.5 million budget cut for the Buffalo Police Department in the wake of the George Floyd protests.

Brown, for his part, has also expressed the need to expand protections for Buffalo tenants. But during the campaign, Brown repeatedly took Walton to task for her self-described label as a socialist.

“I don’t see Ms. Walton as a Democrat,” Brown said in a debate last week. “I think her ideas for the city of Buffalo are bad at best, and unworkable.”

Walton has meanwhile suggested that Brown ran a bad-faith campaign.

“Every ad that he comes out with is an attack on me and making people feel afraid of me or attempting to do so,” Walton told CNN before early voting began. “An honorable campaign would be him sharing the plans that he has for the future of Buffalo. An honorable plan would be him owning up to the fact that he disrespected Buffalo voters by not running a primary contest.”