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Trump is starting his own social media platform called “TRUTH Social”

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Former President Donald Trump announced his plans to launch a new media company Wednesday night, in an attempt to “fight back against Big Tech,” according to a statement posted to Twitter by the ex-commander-in-chief’s spokesperson, Liz Harrington. 

The new venture’s first project will apparently be a social media network called “TRUTH Social.”

The goal is to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium” that has “used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America,” according to the statement.

It’s unclear what form the platform will ultimately take, but Trump did announce that a beta version of the social network is available for pre-order on Apple’s “App Store,” and that it will go live next month for “invited guests” before opening its doors to the public in 2022.

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Trump himself will serve as chairman of the venture’s parent company, called “Trump Media & Technology Group.” It also appears Trump also plans to take it public via a special purpose acquisition company — or SPAC.

The strategy, which has become popular in recent years as a way to sidestep the typically onerous regulatory process of taking a company public, typically occurs when a non-public company merges with a shell company that is already public — in this case, Digital World Acquisition Corp.

It’s unclear who is behind DWAC, the SPAC that Trump is using to take his company public.

TMTG also teased twin broadcast ventures, including streaming video service TMTG+ and a news network called TMTG News, according to a pitch deck for the company obtained by Salon. “The American public is seeking ‘non-woke’ entertainment,” one slide reads. “TMTG+ … will provide news, big-tent entertainment, exciting documentaries, sports programming and more.”

Trump also made it clear that his ongoing ban from Twitter — a favorite platform and key communication tool during his time in office — played a big part in his decision to create his own social network.

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” he said in the statement. “Everyone asks me, why doesn’t anyone stand up to Big Tech. Well, we will be soon!”

You can read Trump’s full statement below via Twitter:

Joe Manchin says rumors he plans to leave Democratic party are “bulls***”

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., had some choice words after reports surfaced of his plans to leave the Democratic party Wednesday, saying the rumors were “bulls***.”

He also told reporters at the U.S. Capitol, “I have no controls over rumors.”

The comments come following a report in Mother Jones, which cited associates close to Manchin who had spoken with the moderate senator about his plans to exit the party and become an independent over disagreements on a massive $3.5 trillion budget bill that would expand a number of social programs and climate change initiatives, among other things. 

The idea Manchin reportedly discussed with these people was that he would first resign from his party leadership post, and then register as an independent — though he only planned on going through with it if Democrats did not scale back their budget bill beyond the $3.5 trillion compromise that had already been made on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ initial $6 trillion bill. 

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It remains unclear whether Manchin, if he were to ultimately leave the party, would continue to caucus with the Democrats or take his vote across the aisle, effectively handing control over the evenly divided chamber to Republicans, Mother Jones reported.

The rumors also come on the heels of news that Congressional progressives are indeed willing to play ball and significantly scale back their budget bill to appease Manchin. Top Democrats, including President Biden himself, have expressed willingness to cut the bill nearly in half, down to somewhere in the ballpark of $2 trillion.

RELATED: What do “centrists” want? Cutting back Biden’s agenda isn’t moderate — it’s reckless

In particular Manchin has clashed with Biden and the rest of his colleagues over several climate provisions — which it appears will likely be cut from the final bill at Manchin’s behest. 

Critics have pointed out in recent days that Manchin is currently the No. 1 recipient of fossil fuel industry donations in Congress and that he earns well over triple his congressional salary in payouts from investments in his son’s coal company.

How to dig out of your next salad rut (plus, a panzanella recipe fit for a hearty lunch)

No matter how many salad epiphanies one experiences, the next rut never seems very far off. Inevitably, you find yourself shoveling in oiled-and-vinegared lettuce with the same insolence you felt as a child shoveling down steamed broccoli so you could move on to dessert. 

I find that the quickest way out of the salad doldrums is to alter one element of an existing recipe — say, the dressing or a main vegetable — then see what other changes it inspires based on whatever else may be languishing in your pantry or fridge. 

Here are some examples: 

  • Instead of mincing raw shallots into my go-to lemon vinaigrette for a leafy green salad, I’ll perhaps slice and fry the shallots in neutral oil to use as a garnish. Maybe I’ll add a bit of yogurt and curry powder to the dressing while I’m at it.
  • What if I made a Greek village salad (cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet peppers, olives and feta), but I blistered the sweet peppers instead of serving them raw? That could tempt me to also swap out the feta for halloumi, which I may sear in a pan to add another caramelized element. 
  • How about I make a simple mustardy vinaigrette (Dijon, white wine vinegar, olive oil, S+P), but instead of tossing it with lettuce like usual, I’ll add a mess of thinly shaved crunchy veggies like carrots, fennel, radishes and red onions? Then I’ll dot the whole thing with blue cheese crumbles and quick-candied walnut pieces for salty creaminess and sugary crunch, respectively.
  • Why don’t I thin out my standard basil pesto recipe with extra lemon juice and olive oil in the food processor to make it more dressing-like? I’ll add a handful of mint leaves and half a serrano pepper to the mix, blitz it and boom — zhoug vinaigrette! I bet that would taste heavenly tossed with cooked farro, white beans and arugula or roasted (and cooled) sweet potatoes and frisée.
  • Maybe instead of slicing up crisp romaine leaves, I’ll quarter and grill a head of radicchio, then toss it into my favorite caesar dressing. Would a little thinly-sliced, raw kale go nicely in there, too? No doubt. 
  • Israeli couscous salad with cucumbers in garlicky tahini dressing, but this time, cut the cucumber into long slabs and sear it in a pan. 

. . . you get the idea. 

Even within this sample size of salad-free association, you perhaps noticed a theme of mixing raw and cooked ingredients — aka my secret weapon for digging out of your next salad rut. Combining raw veggies with grilled, fried, roasted or seared ones creates wonderful variations in texture and lends depth and caramelized sweetness. Sure, the combinations sometimes don’t work, but even within those occasional salad fails, I’ll discover a combination I hadn’t thought of or a new-to-me way to serve an ingredient.

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Indeed, this very approach inspired the wintry panzanella I’m sharing below. Normally, a summery affair of tomatoes, cukes and fresh croutons in sherry vinaigrette, this retooled version stars celery, radicchio, parsley, boiled potatoes and — of course — fresh croutons. I tossed it in tangy caper-mustard dressing and added hard-boiled eggs to make it substantial enough for a hearty lunch or light dinner.   

***

I created this filling salad to use up leftover celery. It’s essentially a glorified potato salad, plus croutons (because who doesn’t love panzanella?). I must also warn you that it’s a multi-stage recipe — meaning you’ll dirty a few more pots than I typically like — but, oh, will you be rewarded! You can hard-boil the eggs up to two days in advance if you’d like, and keep them unpeeled in the fridge until ready to serve. 

***

Recipe: Wintry Panzanella

Serves 2-3

Ingredients:

  • 2 eggs 
  • Kosher salt, as needed
  • 2 medium potatoes, 1/2-inch diced (I like red or Yukon gold potatoes here)
  • Olive oil, as needed
  • 1 large garlic clove, still in its jacket
  • 2 slices sourdough bread
  • 1 small shallot, peeled and minced
  • 1 Tbsp drained capers (chopped cornichons work in a pinch)
  • 1 tsp Dijon mustard
  • 1 Tbsp white wine vinegar
  • 3 large ribs celery, sliced on a bias
  • 1/2 small head radicchio, thinly sliced
  • 1/2 cup Italian parsley leaves

Directions: 

Make perfect hard-cooked eggs: I use a slight variation on chef Nancy Silverton’s method. Bring a small saucepan of water to a boil over high heat. Add 1 tsp. kosher salt. (The salt is to help the whites quickly solidify if there’s a crack in one of the eggs — it doesn’t season the egg.) Carefully add the whole eggs, lower the heat and simmer the eggs for exactly 5 minutes. 

Turn off the heat, and let the eggs sit in the hot water for 5 minutes. Remove with a spider strainer, and run them under cold water for 30 seconds. Set the eggs on the counter to finish cooling. Once cool, carefully peel them, and place the peeled eggs on the paper towels to dry while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. 

Boil the potatoes: Place the potatoes in a large saucepan. Add enough cold water to cover, plus a good pinch of salt. Cover and bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to medium high and cook until the potatoes are fork tender (about 8-10 minutes). Drain and let cool uncovered in the pot. 

Make the croutons: Heat a medium skillet over medium heat with a few tablespoons of olive oil and the unpeeled garlic clove. Once the garlic starts sputtering, slide in the bread. Press it down for 15-20 seconds with a spatula to get as much surface area touching the pan as possible. Cook until golden on one side, then flip and repeat with side two, lowering the heat if it starts browning too fast. Add a bit more oil if the pan seems dry. Take care to also occasionally turn the garlic while you cook the bread so it browns evenly. When the bread is golden all over, remove it from the pan. Set on a paper towel-lined plate to drain. Remove the garlic clove, and place it on the same plate. Repeat with the second piece. Once the garlic is cool enough to handle, slip it out of its jacket, and rub its flesh all over both slices of bread. Stack the bread slices, and cut them into 1/2 cubes. Set aside.  

Make the dressing: In the bottom of a large mixing bowl, combine the minced shallot, capers, mustard, white wine vinegar, about 1 tsp each salt and freshly ground black pepper. Slowly stream in about 1/4 cup olive oil, whisking constantly. Taste for seasoning and adjust as needed with salt and pepper. 

Assemble: Add the cooled potatoes, croutons, sliced celery, radicchio and parsley to the same bowl in which you made the dressing. Toss well to combine everything, drizzling in a bit more oil and/or vinegar if it seems dry. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper if needed.

Quarter the eggs, and sprinkle with a pinch of salt and a few grinds of fresh pepper. Arrange the slices over the top of each salad and serve.

Chef’s note: This would make an ideal side dish to a seared piece of fish finished with a spritz of lemon and a few fried capers. 

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More of our favorite salad recipes: 

Anthony Michael Hall on joining “Halloween Kills” & remembering John Hughes: “I genuinely miss him”

You know Anthony Michael Hall from classic movies like “Vacation,” “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club,” “Edward Scissorhands” and “The Dark Knight.” Now, he’s just stepped into  the role of Tommy Doyle in the blockbuster “Halloween Kills.”

Recently appearing on an episode of “Salon Talks,” the veteran actor discussed joining a legendary franchise, what he learned from John Hughes, and what the phrase “Brat Pack” really meant to him. You can watch “Halloween Kills” now in theaters, or streaming on Peacock.

Watch our “Salon Talks” episode here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

What brought you to this iconic film series?

I got a call from my management, Untitled, about the project. I was really excited about it. I requested a meeting with [director] David Gordon Green, and he was really nice to comply. We met in LA, and we had a great chat. This was about in August 2019. I wanted to get a sense from him of his objectives with the new film and how he liked to work.

We had a great talk and then I screentested after that about a week later, and just was over the moon. With the exception of “The Dark Knight,” I haven’t been a part of a big franchise. I think the best part is just knowing we have a great film that’s action-packed and will really service the audience. That there’s such a huge audience for the film, that anticipation is great too.

RELATED: The top 10 underrated horror films

Your character has been played before by two other actors, including Paul Rudd. Tell me who your Tommy is. He is at an interesting point in his life, and he has become an interesting man.

In the original, Kyle Richards’ character was Lindsey Wallace, and Tommy Doyle was played by an actor named Brian Andrews. They were two kids that Jamie watched. What’s interesting to note too is that his character was bullied by Lonnie. As a kid in the original film, he says, “You can’t kill the boogeyman.” The young actor who played my part kind of unleashed that mythology on the world in the original film.

Once I met with David and we had some good talks and when I got to the set particularly, he gave me the sense that he wanted Tommy to be very much a hero character. In fairness to all the other actors, that’s really the arc that David and [cowriters] Danny McBride and Scott Teems gave us all.

At the beginning of the film, it’s a pickup from the 2018 version. It’s still Halloween night. All the locals and the townspeople, friends and family alike, are gathered in this bar, and they’re commiserating about having been victims and being survivors. Then there’s a real turn. It’s a heroic turn, because everybody decides to unite and to fight back. That’s really the energy that propels the first act of the film and keeps it going. And it just takes off from there.

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One of the things that I just can’t get over watching this movie is there’s so much comedic talent in this film, both behind the camera and also from people like you, people like Judy Greer. Yet this is a straight-up horror movie. What does that comedy background bring to a movie that is this intense and this scary?

It gives them a certain flexibility. I’m a huge fan of David and Danny’s work, even before I’d got this part. Danny was around for the first week or so and then he had to go back to South Carolina. To your question, I think it gives them a certain latitude and flexibility. That was one of the things I loved about working with David. He’s very fluid in his process, very inclusive, very collaborative.

He’ll take ideas from anybody on the crew, anybody next to him, any of the actors. In that regard, he reminded me of John Hughes, a natural writer, a gifted screenwriter and filmmaker, and certainly an auteur. You can put him in that category. At the same time, I think real intelligence is the humility with which he works, and he’s just very flexible and fluid about it.

He’s willing to dismiss ideas if they’re clunky, if it’s a piece of dialogue or something that’s not working, or change something or incorporate something new. I’ve found that to be very impressive, really cool. I think that comes probably from their comedy background, kind of testing things to see how it works.

You talk about John Hughes, a person you are so deeply associated with. I want to ask you about him and about the impact that he had on you as an actor, because he came into your life when you were so young. What did he give you as a performer that you’re still hanging onto all these years later?

Confidence is the first thing that came to mind, because he was so loving. He felt like a big older brother that had already taken care of the party. He set everything up. He was such a great guy; he had so much heart. He really worked with a sense of joy, he was always laughing. I see this in David as well, the confidence to trust yourself and to try things. In a very similar way, he’s willing to work things through and see how it pans out or make adjustments if necessary.

It’s also interesting too, because in a way, it was destined, because he wrote “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” When I was a kid, that was my first big film before I met John, and then I did the trilogy films with him. When I look back, I genuinely miss him. I really do, all these years later. I loved him as a family member. I was often at the Hughes’ residence on the weekends. He had two young sons at the time, and I felt like their adopted third son. He was a great guy, loved music, loved to laugh, and like David, was always very fluid in discussing the project, working things out, trying new ideas.

When I think about those John Hughes movies, I also think about a phrase, “Brat Pack.” I’m wondering what it was like for you when you were a teen actor and that phrase was being used, and what you think that means now?

First of all, I think the Rat Pack is very interesting, which is from another era, and that’s where the term was coined from, obviously. I felt it was a little bit of a ploy on behalf of the magazine that I don’t have to name that did that years ago. I think the situation at that time was about setting those guys up in a way, to be very honest, to kind of get them out and cavorting and having drinks and then doing an interview in that context.

Truth is, I wasn’t there at that interview. Then the term itself, it’s never really bothered me. I think it’s just a way to identify our generation of actors, and so I’ve always kind of just smiled at it. It doesn’t really bother me, but I love the Rat Pack.

Those guys are pretty cool.

But there’s some good ones in the Brat Pack too, I guess.

Which brings us now to this franchise that we keep returning to again and again. You shot this movie in the fall of 2019. Watching the movie now, there is a lot about it that hits a little differently. This movie takes on this idea of groupthink for better or worse, banding together in a way to defeat the enemy, but also maybe banding together in a way that is not good and potentially really harmful. What does this movie say to you now?

It’s a very interesting point. I have heard Jamie speak to this as well in recent weeks. I think it was that very unique circumstance of life imitating art in a way, because a lot of the issues that we’ve been through as a country and internationally in the last two years — societal issues, the pandemic and a lot of this political climate that we’ve seen in our country — it reminds people to some degree of some themes and things that they see in this film. It really was kind of happenstance, obviously, because we were two years ahead of that curve. It’s a very interesting twist of fate that hopefully it’s worth noting, but it really was kind of that thing of art imitating life in this case, because we didn’t plan that.

Certainly from my standpoint, I looked at it like, Tommy’s a hero. He’s really fighting for good, he’s fighting for his loved ones. Jamie Lee’s character of Laurie is almost like a surrogate mother to him. The idea of the town deciding to unite and to create some change and to stand up and fight I think is a good idea at it’s core. But like any good piece of art or film, it’s up for interpretation too how people perceive it.

It’s taking on the boogeyman, and we all have our own experience with that now in a different way.

One of the things I heard David Gordon Green say in one of his interviews was there’s actually very little in terms of mythology of Myers. We don’t know much about him.He was hospitalized, institutionalized, and then he’s been running amok for 43 years ever since, kind of reincarnating with every return of the franchise. It’s just this idea of playing in this classic themes, which you see in literature, obviously in film, westerns, all the way up to Marvel, which is good versus evil. That juxtaposition is rich ground to play in, and I really enjoyed that. That’s how I looked at it. I felt like my character was fighting for good, along with Jamie and everybody else in the town.

It’s a very interesting full circle arc all these years later, but I just hit the ground running and I went with my conversations with David. For example, when he gives me the bat in the film, that was something that came to him when we were about a week into production. When I got to the set, I came with this buzzcut that I’ve been wearing for the last couple years. He even cut his hair like me. He was like, “Oh, I love that haircut.” so David shaved his head too.

Without giving anything away, we know there’s still going to be another “Halloween.” We know you are moving forward in your career in the other projects that you’re doing, you just wrapped up something else. I want to ask you about “Trigger Warning,” that you just filmed. What is it like now for you as a performer going back out there into the fray and what does it feel like performing again?

It feels great.The truth is I’ve never had a break. I’ve had a 45-year career. I just think people most associate me with the John Hughes films, because thank God they’ve had such a life on television and other areas, other platforms. But I’ve never stopped. I’ve been at this a long time. I’ve often made my career in television, making a living doing that, but when a great film comes along, it’s very special.

I remember I had this feeling when I did “The Dark Knight.” I had a much smaller role, but that sense of excitement is great. It’s not lost on the crew when you’re making the film, and then there’s an added fun bonus of you know there’s an audience waiting, that there’s a real hunger and anticipation for the film. All those things combined, I’m getting goosebumps now, I really am, because I’m so excited for people to see this film.

I texted David when he was in Venice a couple weeks back, and he was with Jamie Lee, and he used the perfect turn of phrase. He said, “I can’t wait to unleash this movie on the world.” So, I feel the same way, I really do. I’m excited.

You mention that your character is the one who calls Michael Myers, also known as The Shape, the boogeyman. He’s had different origin stories throughout the history of the franchise. For you going into this just as a film watcher, as a fan, what is Mike Myers’ deal? Why is he so hard to put down?

That’s a tough question. All I know is I’d like to use it for Tommy Doyle. I’d like to say, “Well, if Myers can come back 12 times, maybe there’s hope for Tommy. You never know.” It’s incredible. He’s the human embodiment of evil. He also I think embodies fear, which is obviously a real driver. Fear has one thousand faces in life. That combination of things, maybe not knowing that much about him or the fact that he’s always lurking, this kind of stalker, predator. He was always referred to, even on the call sheet, as The Shape. It was never Myers.

“Halloween Kills” is now in theaters and streaming on Peacock. Watch the trailer below on YouTube.

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Cheney’s Jan. 6 plea to GOP falls on deaf ears as Trump derides her as “smug fool”

Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, went in on her Republican colleagues Wednesday during a House Rules Committee meeting over their obstruction of an investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Cheney, who was booted from her party leadership position earlier this year for repeatedly criticizing former President Donald Trump, specifically took Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to task for pressuring lawmakers to stifle the Democratic-led House select committee’s attempts to interview key Trumpworld figures about the events of that day. 

Tuesday night the Jan. 6 committee voted unanimously to hold former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt for ignoring a subpoena it had issued — the discussion in Wednesday’s House Rules Committee was a procedural stop before the measure goes in front of the full House of Representatives for a vote Thursday.

In her remarks, Cheney implored her fellow Republicans to vote in favor of charging Bannon, saying the longtime right-wing activist’s actions put Congress’ authority “at significant risk.” If Bannon can ignore their subpoenas, she said, then everyone will think they can do the same.

“I’ve heard from a number of my colleagues in the last several days who say they, quote, ‘Just don’t want this target on their back.'” Cheney said. “They’re just trying to keep their heads down, they don’t want to anger Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, who has been especially active in attempting to block the investigation of events of Jan. 6, despite the fact that he clearly called for such a commission.”

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“I urge you to do what you know is right, to think of the long arc of history.” She continued, “We are told that it bends towards justice. But it does so only because of the actions of men and women in positions of public trust. … Will you be able to say you did everything possible to ensure Americans got the truth about those events, or did you look away? Did you make partisan excuses and accept the unacceptable?”

Though Democrats control the House and the measure is likely to pass, it does not appear that Republicans were swayed by Cheney’s high-minded speech. 

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., jumped on Cheney in an interview following Wednesday’s committee meeting, calling the effort to investigate Jan. 6 a “pathetic joke.”
“She hates Trump. Who cares? Nobody cares about Liz Cheney. I mean, I think that’s the biggest story,” she said. “Nobody cares about Liz Cheney or their stupid committee.”

Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican called Cheney’s comments at the hearing “ridiculous,” arguing the Capitol rioters are under investigation by the FBI so any probe into Trump’s actions or extremist groups who planned the insurrection is redundant.

“I’m not trying to whitewash anything.” he continued, “Republicans have been consistent; we’ve condemned violence every stinking time it happened.”

Trump himself also weighed in, calling Cheney a “smug fool,” adding that “people absolutely cannot stand her as she fights for the people that have decimated her and her father for many years” 

“The great State of Wyoming, together with the Republican Party, fully understands her act. To look at her is to despise her.” 
It wasn’t the first time Trump harshly criticized Cheney — he previously said she was “not the brightest” and a “psycho.”

The Rules Committee ultimately sent Bannon’s contempt charges forward by a vote of 9-4. The full House is scheduled to vote on the measure Thursday.

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Lauren Boebert slammed as a “hateful bigot” by colleague after mocking first trans four-star admiral

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., called Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., a “hateful bigot” on Tuesday after the conservative lawmaker decried the swearing in of Dr. Rachel Levine, now the first transgender four-star officer in the nation’s history.

“Welcome to woke medicine, America,” Boebert tweeted, posting a picture of Levine during her ceremony.

Just an hour later, Beyer responded: “Dr. Levine is an accomplished pediatrician, a graduate of Harvard and Tulane, a former fellow at one of America’s top teaching hospitals, a professor who created medical programs at Penn State to help young people, and PA’s former Physician General.”

“You are just a hateful bigot,” he added. 

On Tuesday, Levine, who was appointed by President Biden as the U.S. assistant secretary for health and confirmed by the senate in March, was officially made the four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (PHSCC), an agency of 6,000 federal health workers tasked with managing future health crises, including the nation’s ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The PHSCC is one of eight federal uniformed services. 

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement that Levine’s newfound title is not only historic but well-deserved. 

“She is a highly accomplished pediatrician who helps drive our agency’s agenda to boost health access and equity and to strengthen behavioral health,” Becerra said. “She is a cherished and critical partner in our work to build a healthier America.

Political appointees are routinely granted admiral status, The Washington Post noted. During the Trump administration, Brett Giroir, Levine’s predecessor, was similarly made four-star admiral following his Senate confirmation in 2018.

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But that hasn’t stopped top brass conservatives from railing against her ceremony as an appeal to “wokeness.”

Tom Fitton, president of the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, wrote on Facebook that Biden was “playing quota politics with public health service,” suggesting that Levine does not deserve her new rank.  

Others outright challenged her identity as a transgender women. 

“The Biden Administration called “Rachel” Levine a female,” tweeted conservative commentator Matt Walsh. “Not woman. Female. Notice how the whole “sex and gender are different things” shtick has been entirely abandoned by the Left. They now demand that we accept males as biological females.

“The Biden administration announces that Rachel Levine, a biological man, is now the ‘first-ever female four-star admiral” in the public health corp.”

“Upon being sworn in, Admiral Rachel Levine said, ‘I will follow the science.’ Maybe Rachel should start by recognizing that there are only 2 genders,” Rep. Boebert echoed in a separate tweet. 

Levine, the former Pennsylvania Physician General and later the state’s health secretary, is the PHSCC’s sixth four-star general.

Why madeleines are making a comeback in Paris

With its fluted shell shape and rich, buttery flavor, the madeleine is the prototypical French gâteau de voyage, or “traveling cake.” Compared to flaky croissants or delicate entremets that can barely survive the trip from the pastry shop to the kitchen table, madeleines are a relatively sturdy and unassuming confection whose simple appearance belies their deliciousness. A well-made madeleine is light and airy, with a distinctive buttery aroma. Glazed, filled, or plain, the madeleine is a standard of the childhood “quatre-heures” — four o’clock snack. But for a long time, until recently, the madeleine was perceptibly absent from French bakery shelves.

When French newspaper Le Figaro first noted this dearth back in 2014, it posited a link to the omnipresence of another similar cake, the financier, invented in Paris’ Bourse district as a treat for stockbrokers who feared smudging their important documents with chocolate or cream. The newspaper also highlighted the then-newfound popularity of English-style baked goods like scones and muffins that, Le Figaro quipped, “surfed on the fashion of teatime” and eclipsed this more native treat. But despite a decline in fashionability, the madeleine’s history is long and illustrious.

The cake originally hails from the Lorraine region, where it was invented, depending on whom you ask, by nuns at the local convent of Mary Magdalene or by a servant girl named Madeleine Paulmier, who shared the recipe with Stanislaus I, the deposed king of Poland and father-in-law of King Louis XV, when his pastry chef was pushed to the brink by his court jester. The latter story is preferred by the tourism office of the city of Commercy, home to not only the castle where Stanislaus ostensibly discovered the cake, but also now to some of the most famous madeleines in the country.

But while madeleines have been long beloved in Lorraine, according to Lorraine Actu, they didn’t begin to gain renown elsewhere in France until the Paris-Strasbourg rail line was inaugurated in 1852, at which point Anne-Marie Caussin, marquise of Carcano, began sharing the local cakes with her guests. Twenty years later, a special dispensation paved the way for the sale of the little cakes on railway platforms, and in the 1920s, both Commercy and nearby Liverdun — a lesser-known but still popular cradle of the cake since the 19th century — saw artisanal factories opening to keep up with the demand.

Pastry Chef Gilles Marchal was one of the first modern Parisians to focus on the cake, just seven years ago: His Montmartre shop boasts a madeleine logo, business card, and even door handle. This clear focus comes down to his roots: After all, Marchal was born and raised in Lorraine.

“My grandmother made madeleines; my mother made madeleines,” he recalled. “And my father, who went often to Commercy and Liverdun, would bring us madeleines when we were children. I’ve always had madeleines in my heart and in my thoughts.”

His evocation of memory is not incidental, when it comes to this little cake. After all, author Marcel Proust’s 1913 novel “Swann’s Way” offered many their first brush with the tiny cake. In the novel, the memory of a madeleine dipped in tea paves the way for the narrator’s senses to be “invaded” by “an exquisite pleasure,” a passage so well-known among the French that a “madeleine de Proust” has colloquially become shorthand for one’s most nostalgic and visceral food memories.

Madeleines are not Bresse-born pastry chef François Perret’s madeleine de Proust; that honor goes to his grandmother’s mousseline cake or his father’s crème anglaise. But upon his arrival at the Ritz in 2015, Perret was inspired by the luxury hotel’s Salon de Proust to create a madeleine of his own design: doused in a small amount of milk scented with lemon, designed to be eaten off a spoon in a single mouthful.

“The idea,” he said, “was to create an experience, to create a moment.”

The madeleine quickly became the chef’s signature, and he would explore it again and again: at the Bar Vendôme, it took the form of a trompe l’oeil entremets made of Savoy biscuit, toasted almonds, and a chestnut honey center. The dessert “looks like a madeleine,” he said, “but as soon as you put your spoon to it, you realize it’s not a madeleine.” At the recently opened Ritz Le Comptoir pastry shop, meanwhile, Perret brings his madeleine story back to its roots, with little cakes available in seven different flavors, each glazed and filled with jam, chocolate, or, Perret’s favorite, chestnut honey, which boasts “a lovely bitterness that allows you to counterbalance the sugar content.”

“I wanted people to be able to make their own gift boxes,” he said of the madeleines, which are shelf-stable for up to five days. “And above all, I wanted them to be transportable.”

At Marchal’s eponymous shop, 70 flavors — sweet and savory — rotate through the pastry case, according to the seasons. On any given day, somewhere between 12 and 15 madeleines are on offer, from fig to praline, Sicilian pistachio to salted butter caramel, black truffle to Parmesan-balsamic.

Such artisanal approaches to the madeleine are ever more essential, Marchal said, given the steady march of industrialization. The formerly artisanal production of the madeleines de Commercy of his youth was replaced by industrial producer Saint-Michel in 1986, and many people — even in France — associate madeleines not with a homemade cake or a pastry-window treat, but with a supermarket staple individually packaged in plastic.

“Sometimes I ask myself,” said Perret, “if the fact of seeing so many industrial ones didn’t make people want to eat real ones. Real, good madeleines.”

That’s exactly what happened to Marie Alicia DeGross, culinary tour guide and founder of Mille Mercis Marie. The American native recalls first discovering madeleines “embarrassingly” via the industrial Bonne Maman brand as a Sorbonne student in 2007. But her “obsession,” she said, didn’t actually begin until tasting the still-warm iteration from chef Romain Thibault’s Restaurant Jouvence.

Thibault, too, recalls industrial madeleines as a staple of his childhood, dubbing them “stodgy” and “not terribly interesting.” When he decided to put a hot madeleine on his menu five years ago after tasting one fresh out of a baker friend’s oven, he sought to highlight above all the ideal texture of a madeleine cooked à la minute.

“It’s not the benchmark madeleine — far from it,” he said. “It’s just the madeleine the way I like it, and that’s the most important thing.”

Since tasting Thibault’s madeleine, DeGross said she’s become “the Crazy Madeleine Lady” in Paris.

“My Instagram account has an entire theme devoted to my all-time favorite French cake,” she said, and she notably asked one of her favorite chefs, Rémi Poulain of Restaurant Le Christine, to put his own spin on her favorite treat. When he did, he dubbed the resulting dessert “Marie Madeleine” — a reference to DeGross herself (and to Mary Magdalene, for whom the cakes may well be named).

A dolled-up restaurant or pâtisserie iteration of the madeleine is all well and good, but these days, they are also emerging — demure, inexpensive, and simple — in corner bakeries, taking an unassuming spot not only alongside croissants and pains au chocolat but also other relative newcomers to the capital, like Breton kouign amann and gâteau basque. Indeed, these formerly regional delicacies are “coming back into fashion,” according to Marchal. “It’s become a bit trendy to say, ‘Let’s highlight cakes from our terroir.'”

This, he says, stems in large part from migration away from France’s villages and thus from the close-knit, multigenerational families of yore. “Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer family gatherings than there used to be,” said Marchal. “I’m 50; I was lucky enough to have that.”

In cities, he said, the presence of these local delicacies “reminds us of our childhood.”

“It’s very regressive,” he continued. “And when you talk to someone from Lorraine who’s in Paris, who comes from where I come from, and who suddenly sees pretzels and madeleines in Paris, he’s proud. He’s proud to say, ‘Oh, wow. The madeleine de Lorraine has been highlighted in Paris.'”

But even for someone who has no Proustian memory associated with the madeleine, when made properly, the simple butter cake is pure bliss.

“We cook them fresh every morning,” said Marchal, “and when they come out of the oven, people can smell them right in the shop.”

Some claim that the madeleine may well be the next big thing, and while Marchal “wouldn’t presume that the madeleine could dethrone the macaron,” he does note that people are beginning to understand it as a “great product of French terroir.”

“Some are starting to see that, at the end of the day, a fresh madeleine baked daily — and that’s important! — is to die for,” he said. “It’s something truly extraordinary.”

Trump’s New York golf club faces criminal probe over potential tax dodging: report

The beleaguered Trump Organization, already charged with one criminal conspiracy, is facing a new probe: this time, focused on one the company’s New York golf courses. 

Former President Donald Trump’s sprawling business empire was already served with an indictment in Manhattan for allegedly dodging taxes on millions in employee perks — and is now facing new allegations that it misled local officials in Westchester County about the value of its golf club in order to reduce its tax liability, according to The New York Times.

Both the Trump National Golf Club Westchester and the nearby town of Ossining have fielded subpoenas from the County’s district attorney’s office. The paper acknowledged that it could not determine the full scope of the investigation, though it spoke with several people who confirmed that Westchester DA Mimi E. Rocah is looking into the company’s tax practices and valuation.

The New York Times also reported that the Trump Organization’s repeated challenges to property assessments on its Westchester golf club have prompted an outcry among locals. ” In 2017, demonstrators from the town marched to the club and chanted “Pay your share.” That year, assessors valued the property’s value at $15 million dollars, while lawyers for the club cited their own estimate that the club was worth less than a tenth of that amount — just $1.4 million. Trump himself declared that the property was worth more than $50 million earlier this year on a financial disclosure form.

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Rocah, a Democrat, has been a critic of Trump in the past, telling the Westchester Journal News in 2019 that “we have a criminal in the White House” during a discussion of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and his possible impeachment.  

On Wednesday the Trump Organization released a statement to The Hill, saying “the suggestion that anything was inappropriate is completely false and incredibly irresponsible. The witch hunt continues,”

RELATED: Trump’s Scottish golf courses may soon be at center of their own “McMafia Law” investigation

This isn’t the first time Trump’s golf courses have been the subject of legal investigation, either In August of this year, activists pushed for a “McMafia” legal order that would have required Trump to disclose the financial origin of his “all-cash purchases and development of his two Scottish golf resorts.”

Trump is also the subject of an investigation in Manhattan and by state Attorney General Letita James for potential financial and tax improprieties, including failing to pay taxes on employee perks like cars and apartments. Trump attacked the Attorney General this May for assisting in the Manhattan case, saying in a blog post that “There is nothing more corrupt than an investigation that is in desperate search of a crime.” His attempts to overturn election results in Georgia last year are also under criminal investigation.

The 4 best substitutes for ginger

I grew up with a steady supply of fresh ginger in my kitchen. While some kids woke up to the smell of pancakes or eggs and bacon, I rose to the sweet and slightly spicy scent of my mother’s ginger tea, a cup of which warmed me up on cold winter mornings and settled my stomach for the breakfast I’d prepare for myself before school (I was a very picky eater). Nowadays, my mornings begin with a strong cup of coffee, but I always have some fresh ginger on hand in case I’m feeling tea or am cooking something that could use a little extra oomph. But once in a while I reach into the crisper of my fridge to find that I’ve forgotten to replenish my stash: All that’s left behind is a shriveled up and slightly moldy knob that’s headed straight for the trash.

If you find yourself there, too, there’s still hope! When it comes to the best ginger substitutes, it’s certainly easier with some recipes than others. For example, apple pie cookies would be fine with a substitute, but in something like gingery spice cake (or my mom’s tea!), where ginger plays a main role, you might just need to head to the store. Regardless, there are likely a few items knocking around your pantry that can do the trick.

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4 substitutes for ginger

1. Ground ginger

If a recipe calls for fresh ginger, the easiest swap is ground ginger, as it’s the same ingredient in a different form. Still, it’s important to remember that ground ginger is much more potent. If you swap it 1:1, your dish might have more heat and earthiness than expected. Instead, for every 1 tablespoon of fresh ginger called for, use ¼ to ½ teaspoon of ground ginger.

2. Crystallized ginger

Crystallized ginger is fresh ginger that’s been boiled in a mixture of sugar and water, then rolled in sugar. It’s best used as a substitute for ground or fresh ginger in sweet dishes. For added texture and a bit of ginger with every bite, keep the pieces a little larger. Otherwise, very finely chop it. Be sure to separate pieces that might stick together in the batter by tossing them in with the dry ingredients first.

3. Galangal

Both galangal and ginger are rhizomes, plants with stems that spread underground and let off shoots that become new rootstalks. Ginger and galangal are quite similar in overall flavor, so if you can get it at your grocery store, the two can be swapped 1:1. The same goes for ground galangal and ground ginger. But be aware that galangal has piney and citrusy notes that ginger does not; if the recipe you’re substituting it in includes citrus or lemongrass as well as ginger, galangal is a great option.

4. Allspice, turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, or mace

Of course, none of these spices really tastes like ginger. Instead, think of them as alternatives rather than direct substitutes: In a recipe that calls for ground ginger, you can substitute the same amount of any of these spices — or a mixture of them. This method will work best in quick breads and other baked goods.

Allspice is a great option if you need a substitute for ginger is a hearty stew, like Jamaican beef stew. It will supply the sweet spice that the ginger would have added. Turmeric, cardamom, and ginger all belong to the Zingiberaceae family of flowering plants. The difference is that we eat the pods and seeds of cardamom rather than the root, like we do with ginger and turmeric. Cardamom will add sweet, spicy, and citrusy flavor to cakes, curries, and drinks like mulled wine. Warm and earthy turmeric is a great addition to rice dishes, soups, and smoothies. Cinnamon and nutmeg are sweet and woody, making them fine swaps for ginger especially in custards, cakes, and pies like this pear ginger galette. Because nutmeg’s intense flavor includes notes of clove, it can add a welcome pepperiness in place of ginger’s spice. Maybe you need a substitute for the substitute? Mace is the skin found around a nutmeg seed, just slightly muted in flavor and without nutmeg’s subtle sweetness.

In Netflix’s “Found,” three girls examine their identity as adoptees: “We continue to shed our skin”

The estimated number of Chinese babies adopted overseas is approximately 150,000. The “one child policy” forced parents to give their babies up for adoption — not because the parents do not love them, but because they could not afford to keep additional children. (Families in China were assessed fees for having more than one child.) The moving documentary, “Found,” directed by Amanda Lipitz, and premiering Oct. 20 on Netflix, chronicles the efforts of three Chinese American young women searching for their identity and history. Chloe is raised in a Jewish family; Sadie is living in Nashville; and Lily is in Oklahoma City. Through 23andMe, they discover they are cousins, and through the assistance of Liu Hao, a genealogist and family researcher in Beijing, they attempt to locate their birth families.

Lipitz asks profound questions such as, what it would be like to be raised in a different family? And, what was it like for Chinese parents to give up their children? Both the adoptive children and the parents who give their children up are grieving about what has been lost. In addition, the film asks questions about identity. Chloe does not feel connected to her adoptive Jewish family’s roots. Lily has jaw surgery to correct a genetic condition. There are issues of race and class, as well as guilt and shame and forgiveness. The film is particularly emotional when the three families travel to China to see where they were abandoned and meet their potential biological parents.

Lipitz, who is Chloe’s aunt, chatted with Salon about her engaging documentary.

What was it about your niece’s story that prompted you to make this documentary?

When my big brother told me that he was adopting a little girl from China, I was so excited for our family and for their family, and I couldn’t wait to meet her. I flew out about a week after she came home and I remember walking her in her stroller and looking up at the sky and thinking, how would she ever know her past? I pride myself on my role as aunt. I became an aunt when I was 13, so it has been a big part of my life for a long time before I had my own children. Chloe and I are very close, and I have watched her be hesitant to explore her past. But when Chloe found her cousin — the first blood relative that she had ever known — I watched it awaken this dormant curiosity in her, and I watched it in all the girls.

What were the risks of embarking on this journey? We see the emotional devastation that some of the participants experience. How prepared were the film’s subjects to be put through the emotional wringer?

We weren’t focused on finding birth parents, it was more a journey of self-discovery and the courage to find out who you really are. We always put the girls’ emotional well-being above any filmmaking. We were constantly checking in with the parents and the young women. In fact, there were moments when we’d ask, “Are you sure you want to keep going here?” They were the ones who gave us courage to keep going, so that was a big part of the filmmaking and why the girls felt so safe. 

Yes, the scenes in China are interesting because we get more than just tracking down the possible birth parents. Can you talk about that part of the film?

The families were looking for someone who could take us on a journey to discover China and immerse the girls in this culture. It was not solely focused on the adoption portion of the story. We were fascinated by Liu Hao’s work. What you see is what I saw — the process where you try to find someone’s “lost history,” which is how she describes it — and that is exactly what she did.

We are really proud that this film is not just about being adopted from China, it’s about what makes a family, and that human connection, and what’s inside your heart. There is an ancient Chinese proverb about the red string that ties all of us together. It is tied around our ankles. It may stretch, it may tangle, but it will never break; we are all connected by this invisible red thread. I hope that’s what people take away from the film. It’s a much bigger message of what a family can be, and what makes a family. 

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Likewise, I appreciate that you show both the nannies who raised the girls in the orphanage in China as well as stories of both the American and the potential Chinese parents and siblings to examine the guilt and shame they feel in this situation. There is love and connection, but also conflicted emotions. Can you talk about that and your focus not just on the adopted kids but their families? 

The parents are absolutely incredible and the unsung heroes. They let their daughters take the lead. They don’t put any of their own personal feelings or judgments on it. It is all about what the girls want at every step of the way and just being there to support them. Knowing when the girls needed to go and do something on their own, and when they needed a hug. I have three kids, and as a parent, I learned so much about how they truly cradled their daughters in this love. That gives the girls the strength and security to keep going and be so brave.

The nannies! I love when Liu Hao says that they are the “frontline warriors,” and I love it when Chloe says, “How can they remember me out of all these babies?” But the truth is, you take care of a baby for 15 months every single day; you know that baby. I don’t care how many other babies you’re taking care of. I love when the nanny says, “We villagers don’t have dreams,” this is their way of being a hero, and filling this huge hole in the culture of China. These women came in and they were the front line warriors. The whole film is a love connection between all of the people that are connected in so many different ways, but we watch the girls fall in love, too, which is the best thing that could have happened. 

I think one of the biggest questions the film asks is the what-if question? These young women grew up adopted in America. Do you think, having had that experience, they would have traded it to live in a farm in rural China with their birth family?

I can’t answer that for the girls, but one of the most beautiful moments for an American audience is when [potential birth parent] Mr. Chen’s daughter says, “I feel guilty because I got to grow up with my parents and I feel lucky.” It’s all relative. It’s about where you are coming from and what your life experience is. It is where that young woman is coming from. She grew up in China on a farm, and she feels lucky because she’s been surrounded by this love. 

I can’t answer what they would do if their life had been different, but anyone who is adopted or a has a question mark in a parent situation, always thinks how life would be different. Chloe says in the beginning, “How would my life be different if I had grown up with a different family?”

There are questions of identity and race. Yet all three young women try to balance their interest in Chinese culture (like learning Mandarin) with their American experiences. What are your thoughts, even from watching your niece, about how they manage this and the conflict it causes them?

It goes back to dormant curiosity. As you grow, those questions get louder and louder. When Chloe insisted that she go to a school that teaches Mandarin, I don’t think she was actually in her mind connecting it to her adoption. It was just something she wanted to do. When you are young, you find ways to express the things that you want. All those these girls, their expression came out through writing, and learning, through curiosity and reaching out and making connections online. There have been other things in life that immerse them in Chinese culture, but truly, meeting each other was the most meaningful to them. 

The issue of gender is significant for these adoptees; they were given up because they were female. Liu Hao also has a horrific story of her father dismissing her because she was female. How do you think these women were empowered by these experiences of discrimination? 

That they were given up because they were girls is at the surface of it, but when you meet Mr. Chen, and you hear his story — that no matter what baby it was, or what gender it was, they were going to give this baby away because of the cost to keep it. It depended on the circumstance. These three women, in particular, have grown up treasured daughters and they feel that very strongly, and that gives them confidence walking through this life. Liu Hao has had her own experiences growing up, and they have empowered her. 

Given that you are not adopted, have you done a 23andMe test, or have you explored issues related to your identity? What and why? 

I have done the 23andMe test and have explored issues related to my identity. I find that mine is pretty straightforward, so I really like to tell stories that amplify voices and stories we may not have heard. I’m always drawn to those stories where people are finding out who they are — especially female stories, where they are shedding that skin over and over again. As women, we continue to shed our skin and change ourselves. For me, every film I make, every creative project I go into, I am looking for how will I be transformed by this, and how can I change somebody’s mind?

“Found” is now streaming on Netflix.

Meghan McCain fumes over her “Princess of Arizona” SNL portrayal: “Laughing stock of the country”

Meghan McCain discussed how she hated being ridiculed by “Saturday Night Live” in a new interview with “best friend” S.E. Cupp that was published by Rolling Stone.

“Why do people have this princess impression of you?” Cupp asked.

“I’m very aware of this, like, spoiled, entitled queen of nepotism persona that is out there. Some of it I think is, I didn’t always react my best on air on ‘The View.’ To my defense, neither did anyone else, everybody’s just watching me react badly the most and making the most of it,” McCain replied.

“I think partly Saturday Night Live parodies have this way of becoming reality,” she said.

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“People really loved it when SNL dunked on me, and it was not flattering or kind. And, by the way, they were pretty nice to the rest of the [‘View’] cast, just not great to me,” McCain said.

“I feel like I have a pretty healthy sense of humor. But I think if people knew what it has done to me mentally, emotionally, the toll it’s taken on me, the depression that has followed … just the dark spirals. I felt like for a while that I was just the laughing stock of the country,” she said.

In 2019, “Saturday Night Live” depicted “The View” in a sketch.

“Can I just say something as the princess of Arizona?” Aidy Bryant’s McCain asked. “There is a crisis at the border, and the border is right up in my Arizona, which was founded on sunburnt women selling turquoise jewelry, not rando Mexicans. And that’s not racist because my makeup artist is gay.”

At the time, McCain said being made fun of by the show was “a huge cultural honor” and embraced the “princess of Arizona” label.

RELATED: Meghan McCain reveals “toxic” Joy Behar spat pushed her to quit “The View”

Meghan McCain isn’t the champion of pregnant people her book claims she is

Sex and the City” author blasts show as “not very feminist” and defends Kim Cattrall leaving reboot

Astronomers observe a distant solar system that looks a lot like ours will after the sun explodes

Stars, much like humans, go through different stages of life, from birth through middle age through senescence. At the moment, our solar system’s sun is in its yellow dwarf stage of life — essentially middle age for a star of its class.

But that won’t always be the case. Earth’s sun is about 4.5 billion years old, but in another five billion years, the sun will eventually run low on hydrogen fuel. After that happens, it will expand into a red giant and engulf many of the inner planets, and perhaps mess up the orbits of outer ones. (Scientific models conflict on exactly which planets will be engulfed and how orbits might be adjusted.) After expansion, the sun will contract until it becomes a white dwarf, at which point it will no longer produce any heat of its own, and rather will slowly cool for all eternity. Nothing in the universe lives forever.

While humans on Earth won’t be around to see what happens at the end of the sun’s life, other star systems in the universe can theoretically provide glimpses of our solar system’s future — if only we could find one that was similar enough to ours. 

Now, it seems, astronomers have. In a ​new study published in the journal Nature last week, astronomers observed the first planetary system that resembles the future trajectory of our own solar system. What they found is that even after the sun’s death, there might be some surviving planets that stick around.

Using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers observed a Jupiter-like planet that is revolving around a white dwarf near the center of the Milky Way. The planet in question is an estimated 40 times more massive than Jupiter.

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“This evidence confirms that planets orbiting at a large enough distance can continue to exist after their star’s death,” said lead author of the study, Joshua Blackman, a researcher at the University of Tasmania in Australia, in a news release. “Given that this system is an analog to our own solar system, it suggests that Jupiter and Saturn might survive the Sun’s red giant phase, when it runs out of nuclear fuel and self-destructs.”

This is a pretty remarkable discovery considering the violence that coincides with the death of a yellow dwarf star like our sun. When a yellow dwarf burns off all the hydrogen in its core, it balloons into a red giant star. From there, it collapses into a very faint white dwarf. The small size of white dwarfs is partly why it has been so difficult to detect a planetary system orbiting a white dwarf until now.

But while this might be good news for the outer gas giants, does this mean that Earth could survive the sun’s death? 

“Earth’s future may not be so rosy because it is much closer to the Sun,” said co-author David Bennett, a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “If humankind wanted to move to a moon of Jupiter or Saturn before the Sun fried the Earth during its red supergiant phase, we’d still remain in orbit around the Sun, although we would not be able to rely on heat from the Sun as a white dwarf for very long.”

The team of scientists used a technique called gravitational microlensing to confirm their observations. In his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein predicted that objects of large mass, things like black holes or stars, would distort space-time around them. Hence, light bends and distorts around these massive objects. Occasionally this is to the advantage of astronomers, as objects that are generally too distant or dim to observe directly can be briefly magnified by passing massive astrophysical bodies from the perspective of us on Earth. Such observations are known as gravitational microlensing events. It is not a common means of observing exoplanets, or planets in other solar systems; as Salon has previously reported, only 2% of discovered exoplanets have been found via microlensing.

In this case, astronomers tried to look for the planet’s host star, and were surprised to discover that its starlight was not bright enough to constitute an ordinary, main sequence star. This helped rule out the possibility of the host star being anything besides a white dwarf.

“We have also been able to rule out the possibility of a neutron star or a black hole host. This means that the planet is orbiting a dead star, a white dwarf,” said co author Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, an astrophysics professor at the University of Tasmania. “It offers a glimpse into what our solar system will look like after the disappearance of the Earth, whipped out in the cataclysmic demise of our Sun.”

What do “centrists” want? Cutting back Biden’s agenda isn’t moderate — it’s reckless

It appears that some version of President Joe Biden’s jobs-and-infrastructure plan is still alive and could very well be passed soon, despite the strenuous efforts of some of the shadier Democrats in Congress to kill it. The Washington Post reports that Biden is agreeing to scale back the bill from the original $3.5 trillion price tag to $1.9 trillion, largely to placate Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two centrist holdouts who have been vocal about their belief that the original bill is simply too big. 

The Post describes Biden’s new number as a possible “truce among Democrats’ warring left-leaning and moderate factions.” This language is misleading, however, for two major reasons. First, the vast majority of Democrats — 96%, to be exact, a group that encompasses both progressive and moderates— support passing Biden’s original bill. The holdouts are just a handful of problem children, whose motivations are often more about ego and corruption than ideology. But just as importantly, such framing falsely implies that this is a clash between spendthrift progressives and the more fiscally restrained moderates.

In reality, however, Manchin and Sinema (and their buddies in the House) are the ones being financially irresponsible.

Their demands are short-sighted and often self-serving. They will only end up costing the country far more money, both in the short and long run, than would be spent if this bill were simply passed as-is. Biden’s bill is about investing in climate, social, and health care infrastructure the country needs to prosper in the longer term. And without those investments, Americans are going to be facing serious problems that cost way more money to solve. 

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This isn’t just a long term issue, either.

As Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo pointed out on a podcast last week, one way the original bill was going to “bring in a lot of money” was by allowing Medicare to negotiate on drug prices, bringing down the overall price tag of the bill. But Sinema has been blocking this provision, clearly more interested in pleasing her drug industry donors than saving the taxpayers money. This is in line with her opposition to raising corporate taxes to reduce the burden on ordinary taxpayers. None of this is the behavior of a “moderate” who is simply trying to be fiscally responsible. This is the behavior of a corporate sellout who is focused on funneling cash from ordinary people’s wallets into the pockets of the already wealthy. 

As Axios reports, the price gouging of the drug industry is completely out of control. For instance, Indocin, a common drug used to treat arthritis, cost $198 in 2008. The price has since ballooned to $10,350 a box. This is largely due to the fact that Medicare is blocked from aggressive drug price negotiation, allowing drug companies to charge whatever they want, and bill it to the taxpayer. This is corrupt, exploitative and basically theft — and it’s what Sinema is protecting. There’s nothing fiscally responsible about that. 

Manchin’s opposition to provisions to help ease the country off fossil fuels and towards cleaner energy follows the same pattern.

As Rebecca Leber of Vox writes, “There is nothing moderate or debatable about the catastrophic changes that global emissions are wreaking on the climate.” The uptick in hurricanes, floods, wildfires and other catastrophic weather events brought by climate change don’t just cause immense human suffering. They’re incredibly expensive. As CNBC reported in January, the costs from extreme weather events cost $210 billion in 2020 alone, and, by all measures, the situation is rapidly getting worse. Contrast that with the $150 billion over 10 years proposed in the Build Back Better plan to encourage utility companies to switch to renewable energy — money that Manchin opposes spending. 

This is clearly not about saving the taxpayers money, especially not in Manchin’s home state, where the costs from flooding are sky high and expected to get even worse. The people who stand to profit from inaction are Manchin himself and his buddies in the dirty energy industry. Manchin is heavily invested in coal and has become a millionaire from it. And his campaign coffers are heavily filled by the fossil fuel industry, including donors who are typically more associated with the GOP than the Democrats.

As with Sinema and Big Pharma, Manchin’s interests aren’t really about fiscal responsibility. It’s about enriching the already wealthy at the expense of people who live paycheck to paycheck. Worse, he’s sacrificing the future of American children for short term profit. 

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That’s not the only way Manchin, who is 74 years old, is abandoning the futures of the youngest Americans. Manchin is demanding a drastic rollback of proposals meant to help parents afford to raise their children in a healthy manner, from affordable childcare to the child tax credit. Again, the excuse for this is cost, but, as Katrina vanden Heuvel points out in the Washington Post, spending money on kids when they’re young ends up saving taxpayers money while also improving prosperity for all. 

When we underinvest in children, we pay the price for the rest of their lives, through higher spending on remedial education, reactive health care and criminal justice. Meanwhile, multiple studies have found that universal pre-K programs, for example, result in higher college attendance rates, lower arrest rates, lower welfare usage and lower unemployment — while subsidized child care can lead to improved health as adults and keep parents in the workforce.

True fiscal responsibility requires understanding the importance of smart investment. Money spent on infrastructure, child development and health care now can save Americans from having to face exponentially bigger bills down the road. This is basic common sense, and it’s unlikely that Manchin and Sinema are so ignorant as to have never heard the phrase “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.” They just prefer forcing American taxpayers to forgo that ounce of prevention because they and their wealthy benefactors profit more from the pound of cure.

Giving into the demands of these two lobbyist addicts may be the only way for Biden to pass his bill, but it should serve as a reminder that corruption in D.C. is not a fringe concern. It’s a financial drain on everyone but the wealthiest Americans who can afford to buy themselves a senator or two. 

Why a second high-profile Republican in Oklahoma just left the GOP

A second Oklahoma GOP gubernatorial candidate has switched party affiliations over the GOP’s opposition to COVID-19 health precautions, inviting other “like-minded Republicans” to join him in the Democratic Party. 

Dr. Ervin Yen, a former state senator and Oklahoma City anesthesiologist, told The Oklahoman on Tuesday that he “vehemently disagrees” with the state GOP’s rejection of mask and vaccine mandates as well as its insistence that the 2020 presidential election was marred by election fraud.

“I vehemently disagree with these views and that is why I have withdrawn my Republican voter registration,” Yen said. “I have not changed, the party has.”

The doctor explained: “I absolutely believe in temporary mask mandates, when needed, to fight this current Covid pandemic. If the state had instituted a state-wide mask mandate in June of 2020, we could have avoided 70% of the Covid deaths that we have suffered since then.”

As a state senator, Yen served as the chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee and the vice chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. 

Yen’s defection follows that of once-Republican State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister, who earlier this month announced her bid for governor amid unrest over school mask mandates, which Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, still opposes. 

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Over the past two years, Yen has been a critic of Stitt’s pandemic response and announced his November candidacy for governor by citing Stitt’s failure to contain COVID-19 with common sense health precautions. 

“Every day I see the new deaths and my anger just increases. If this is allowed to continue, we could still be in this pandemic on election day 2022,” Yen said at the time.

In recent months, Oklahoma has had particular difficulty in managing the outbreak. 

Back in mid-September, Oklahoma saw a 7-day average high of 3,406 coronavirus cases, according to The New York Times. Just under 50% of the state’s population is currently vaccinated, and this week the state reported just over 400 new cases per day. On Monday, the CDC announced that it would be adding 1,000 more deaths to Oklahoma’s aggregate death toll, which has surpassed 11,000, compared to the 9,402 reported by the state, according to KUTL.  

When it comes to pandemic policies, Stitt has repeatedly refused to implement statewide mask or vaccine mandates, though the Republican governor has allowed private employers to enforce their own internal rules. The Oklahoma Watch found that Stitt did the least out of any governor in surrounding states to promote the vaccination via social media from March to July of this year, with just over 1% of his tweets supporting the practice. On Facebook, the outlet likewise found that the governor hadn’t posted about vaccination at all. 

A Stitt spokesperson told AP News that the governor is seen by the state’s residents as a political outsider “fighting for individual liberties and fiscal responsibility.”

“Oklahomans support Stitt because he is delivering results and staying true to his campaign commitments,” they added. 

Yen said that he thinks Republicans like Stitt are moving the state “backward,” adding: “I invite like-minded Republicans across the state to do what I have done.”

“Is there no justice?”: Trump complains GOP ally was indicted for “telling some lies” to the FBI

The Justice Department on Tuesday charged Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., with lying to the FBI in a campaign finance investigation.

Fortenberry was charged with two counts of making false statements and one count of falsifying and concealing material facts. Federal prosecutors have accused him of twice lying to the FBI about whether he was aware that he had received tens of thousands in campaign contributions from a foreign billionaire. Under House Republican rules, he will have to step down from his position as the top Republican on the House appropriations agriculture subcommittee, according to the Washington Post.

The indictment came hours after Fortenberry posted a video online predicting he would be indicted. Fortenberry said that FBI agents came to his home two years earlier to question him about illegal foreign donations.

“I let them in my house. I answered their questions. Later we went back and answered further questions. I told them what I knew and what I understood. They have accused me of lying to them and are charging me with this,” he said in a video filmed in a pickup truck with his wife and his dog.

Former President Donald Trump jumped to his Republican ally’s defense after the indictment.

“Isn’t it terrible that a Republican Congressman from Nebraska just got indicted for possibly telling some lies to investigators about campaign contributions, when half of the United States Congress lied about made up scams,” he said in a statement, complaining that his political foes were not charged for “lying” about his ties to Russia. “Is there no justice in our Country?” he questioned.

Fortenberry’s indictment stems from an FBI investigation into Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury, who admitted earlier this year that he donated $180,000 to four candidates between 2012 and 2016, using intermediaries such as Washington lobbyist Toufic Joseph Baaklini to conceal his contributions. It is illegal for foreign citizens to contribute to American campaigns.

Prosecutors said that Chagoury had selected “politicians from less-populous states because the contribution would be more noticeable to the politician and thereby would promote increased donor access.”

Fortenberry, who has served in Congress since 2005, said he was unaware at the time that he was one of the candidates.

“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” he said in the video. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

Prosecutors say Fortenberry lied when he was questioned about the donations. The DOJ says one of the congressman’s fundraisers informed him in 2018 that he funneled $30,000 donated by Baaklini to a campaign event and that the cash “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.” The indictment says the unnamed fundraiser, who is identified only as Individual H, was cooperating with investigators when he discussed the donation with Fortenberry.

Chagoury admitted to the donations in 2019 and charges against him were dropped after he agreed to cooperate with investigators and pay a $1.8 million fine. Baaklini also admitted to funneling Chagoury’s money and agreed to pay a $90,000 fine.

Despite learning of the potentially illegal donation, prosecutors say Fortenberry failed to file an amended report to the Federal Election Commission and did not return the money until he was questioned by investigators in 2019.

Fortenberry told agents at the time that all donors to the event were disclosed to the FEC and that he did not know of any foreign contributions, according to the court filing. When he was questioned again at his lawyer’s office, prosecutors say Fortenberry “falsely stated that he had not been told by Individual H during the 2018 call that Baaklini had given Individual H $30,000 cash” for his campaign and that “he was not aware of any illicit donation.” The DOJ said the fundraiser “repeatedly and explicitly” discussed an illegal foreign contribution with the congressman in 2018.

Fortenberry in Tuesday’s video vowed to “fight these charges.” The Republican weeks earlier used his legal troubles to raise money for a legal defense fund, according to Axios. “Biden’s FBI is using its unlimited power to prosecute me on a bogus charge,” the fundraising page said before it was taken down. Axios also reported that Fortenberry’s campaign paid a white-collar criminal defense firm $25,000 in June.

Fortenberry and his wife said in a written statement that that “at every step the agents and prosecutors assured and reassured” them that he was not the target of the investigation but “was in fact a victim of that crime.”

“We’re shocked. We’re stunned. I feel so personally betrayed. I thought we were trying to help,” Fortenberry said in the video. “To be accused of this is extremely painful and we are suffering greatly.”

It’s unclear which other candidates received illegal donations from Chagoury. Politico has reported that donations linked to the billionaire match those to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, along with congressional campaigns of Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and former Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb.

Ivanka Trump’s food aid pet project was used for political gain, investigators find

A $6 billion federal program created to provide fresh produce to families affected by the pandemic was mismanaged and used by the Trump administration for political gain, a new congressional report has found.

As a ProPublica investigation revealed last spring and as the new report further details, the Farmers to Families Food Box program gave contracts to companies that had no relevant experience and often lacked necessary licenses. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released its report last week, found that former President Donald Trump’s administration did not adequately screen contractor applications or identify red flags in bid proposals.

One company that received a $39 million contract was CRE8AD8 LLC (pronounced “Create a Date”), a wedding and event planning firm. The owner compared the contract to his usual work of “putting tchotchkes in a bag.”

In response to the report, the firm’s CEO said in a statement, “We delivered far more boxes/pounds than many other contractors and as a for-profit company, we’re allowed to make a profit.”

The congressional report also highlighted the application of an avocado grower who was initially awarded a $40 million contract before it was canceled after a review. Under the section of the application that required applicants to list references, the farmer wrote, “I don’t have any.”

The Food to Families program was created by the Department of Agriculture in the early days of the pandemic to give away produce that might have otherwise gone to waste as a result of disruptions in distribution chains. The boxes included produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats — and many also included a signed letter from then-President Trump.

The program was unveiled in May 2020 by Ivanka Trump. “I’m not shy about asking people to step up to the plate,” the president’s older daughter said in an interview to promote the initiative.

According to congressional investigators, Ivanka Trump was involved in getting the letter from her father added to the boxes. The USDA told contractors that including the letter was mandatory. Food bank operators told the investigators the letter concerned them because it didn’t appear to be politically neutral.

On the first day of the Republican National Convention in August 2020, President Trump and his daughter headlined a nearby event to announce an additional $1 billion for the food box program. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also spoke at the event and encouraged attendees to reelect the president.

A federal ethics office later found that Perdue’s speech violated a federal law that prohibits officials from using their office for campaign purposes. The USDA at the time disputed the notion that Perdue was electioneering, saying that Perdue’s comments merely “predicted future behavior based on the president’s focus on helping ‘forgotten people.'”

The yearlong congressional investigation also identified problems with the deliveries themselves, including food safety issues, failed deliveries and uneven food distribution. Some contractors also forced recipient organizations to accept more food than they could distribute or store.

Committee chair Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a statement that the mismanagement of the program is another example of the previous administration’s failures.

“The Program was marred by a structure that prioritized industry over families, by contracting practices that prioritized cutting corners over competence, and by decisions that prioritized politics over the public good,” he said.

ProPublica also found that the Trump administration hired a lobbyist to counter the criticism that contracts were going to unqualified contractors.

President Joe Biden ended the program in May.

Representatives of the former president did not respond to a request for comment.

Police reform by another name: COVID mandates causing cops to complain — and quit

One of the only federal legislative initiatives that had any hope for bipartisan agreement in the last few years was the police reform bill that was being negotiated by Senators Corey Booker, D-N.J., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., along with Rep. Karen Bass of California. Although it always seemed like a difficult lift considering the acrimony on both sides surrounding the issue, it seemed for a while that they were actually making some progress. Unfortunately, those talks finally fell apart and now don’t seem to have any chance of revival.

Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, dishonestly said that he refused to agree to the Democrats’ insistence on “defunding” the police — which they were not doing. Booker explained that he finally pulled the plug when Scott backed out of the agreement to codify Donald Trump’s executive order. No doubt Scott knew he would be all alone in the GOP if he signed on and simply decided he’d be better off politically if he just abandoned ship altogether.

One of the major sticking points in the legislation was the question of qualified immunity, the judicial doctrine which holds that police cannot be held liable for civil rights violations unless a court has previously found that a similar case which would make it a “clearly established right.” Over the years, it’s become progressively more absurd. Time Magazine featured a couple of predictably fatuous results in this piece examining the doctrine. Here’s one of them:

The bar for what counts as similar can be extremely high. One famous example is Baxter v. Bracey, in which a Nashville officer released a police dog on a man, Alexander Baxter, who had surrendered and was sitting with his hands in the air. Baxter was bitten and sued the officer. Though a court in the same circuit had ruled a prior incident was unconstitutional, in which an officer released a dog on someone who had surrendered lying down, the Sixth Circuit ruled in 2018 that the factual distinctions were enough for the officer to retain his qualified immunity. (The case was appealed up to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it in 2020.)

In 2020, Justice Sonja Sotomayor, in a dissent from the majority in one of these cases, said the doctrine essentially means that “police can shoot first and think later,” which pretty much says it all.

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There has been a legal consensus that in order to provide public safety, police must be allowed to exercise their own professional judgment in the course of their jobs. They are given much greater leeway than in any other employment and are legally protected from most civil liability. And as we have unfortunately seen in too many cases, expecting the criminal code to protect the public from police is a long shot.

Today we are witnessing an unusual situation which reveals that for all the protestations that cops have such a dangerous job that they must be allowed plenty of room to make decisions that they believe will save their own lives and protect the citizens, there are members of police departments who clearly just believe they should be above the law.

The New York Times reported last week that COVID-19 was the leading cause of death among police officers last year, nearly five times the number who died as a result of firearms. Nobody knows how many have fallen ill from the disease but departments across the country have reported large outbreaks. And yet they are having a very difficult time getting some officers to take the vaccine. Now that many cities are mandating the shots the Police Unions are in an uproar and officers are quitting rather than adhere to the law.

And it’s not just the vaccine mandates they are refusing to follow. They don’t believe they should have to wear masks either. This week in New York City, cops threw a man out of the subway for asking them to wear a mask — as is required of everyone who uses mass transit, including police.

The Times quoted one officer’s muddled thinking about what constitutes public safety as he argues against the vaccine mandate:

If you decide to move forward with mandating this vaccine, the loss of officers is on you,” Josh Carter, an officer in Leesburg, Va., said at a recent meeting where Town Council members considered a vaccine mandate for municipal workers (and decided not to vote on it that day). “I’m going to come back and ask what your plan is to keep my family and my neighbors safe with little to no officers patrolling our streets or our schools,” Mr. Carter told the Council.

I guess this fellow doesn’t understand that the streets aren’t safe with COVID ravaged police departments with maskless, unvaccinated cops breathing all over the public. But it seems to be a common problem, and if I had to guess it’s because these particular officers generally get their (dis)information from right-wing media and see mask-wearing and vaccines as some kind of liberal plot. Now they have jumped on the grievance train, martyring themselves for the cause:

In a way, this is clarifying. Police demand that the public must rely on their judgment to determine when they are in mortal danger and allow them to deploy deadly force with impunity. And yet all over the country some number of them will not accept that COVID-19 is a lethal threat to the public even though there are over 700,000 people dead!

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Police reform may be a dead letter in the U.S. Congress but these foolish cops are doing some of the job anyway.

Complaining cops are inadvertently revealing themselves to be among the problem officers in their department  — and if they don’t quit they should be fired. This lack of logic and poor judgment render them unqualified and they cannot be allowed to carry lethal weapons and operate with impunity among the public. After all, they can’t even be trusted to keep themselves and their own families safe, much less the community. These departments are much better off without them.

Eric Trump tries to slam Biden for trip, gets schooled on dad’s travel history instead

Eric Trump, son of former President Donald Trump, is facing backlash for criticizing President Joe Biden’s time away from the White House. Twitter users quickly jumped at the opportunity to remind him of his own father’s excessive traveling and overuse of the Secret Service for those trips on American taxpayers’ dime. 

On Monday, October 18, Eric appeared on Fox News with host Sean Hannity where he offered his take on the president spending time at his personal property. He also accused others in the Biden administration of leaving Washington D.C., during the Afghanistan withdrawal instead of “getting to work” to resolve key issues.

“The other thing that really bothers me, Sean, about this situation is, where is everybody during this crisis?” he asked host Sean Hannity. “Every crisis that Biden has and every single day there’s another one, whether it be Afghanistan or the border, right, the leaders leave.”

“So Pete Buttigieg during this whole crisis is nowhere to be found,” Eric Trump said. “He’s on paternity leave, right, but then you add Kamala Harris when you have this massive border crisis and where does she go? She goes nowhere near the border in fact she goes to South America to not solve that problem and she goes overseas to Asia to again not work on that problem.”

Vox reporter Aaron Rupar tweeted, “Eric Trump criticizes Joe Biden for spending time at his personal property instead of the White House. Irony is deader than dead.”

Another user wrote, “Eric has successfully demonstrated that the human body can successfully survive without a brain.”

 

Hygienists brace for pitched battles with dentists in fights over practice laws

This year, the Illinois legislature was considering measures to expand oral health treatment in a state where millions of people live in dental care deserts.

But when the Illinois State Dental Society met with key lawmakers virtually for its annual lobbying day in the spring, the proposals to allow dental hygienists to clean the teeth of certain underprivileged patients without a dentist seemed doomed.

State Sen. Dave Syverson, a Republican legislative leader, warned against the bills even if they sounded minor. “It’s just getting the camel’s nose under the tent,” he said in an audio recording of the meeting obtained by KHN. “We’ll have, before long, hygienists doing the work that, if they wanted to do, they should have gone to dental school for.”

The senator added that he missed “the reception and the dinners that you guys host” and the “nice softball questions that I usually get” from the dental society’s past president, who happens to be his first cousin.

The bills never made it out of committee.

The situation in Illinois is indicative of the types of legislative dynamics that play out when lower-level health care providers such as dental hygienists, nurse practitioners and optometrists try to gain greater autonomy and access to patients. And the fate of those Illinois bills illustrates the power that lobbying groups such as the Illinois dental society have in shaping policies on where health professionals can practice and who keeps the profits.

“There’s always a struggle,” said Margaret Langelier, a researcher for the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the University of Albany in New York. “We have orthopedists fighting podiatrists over who can take care of the ankle. We have psychiatrists fighting with clinical psychologists about who can prescribe and what they can prescribe. We have nurses fighting pharmacists over injections and vaccinations. It’s the turf battles.”

In 2015, the Illinois Dental Practice Act was revised to let hygienists treat low-income patients on Medicaid or without insurance in “public health settings” — such as schools, safety-net clinics and programs for mothers and children — without a dentist examining them or being on-site. Besides doing cleanings, the hygienists can take X-rays, place sealants and apply fluoride.

This year, lawmakers proposed bills that would have expanded those settings to include nursing homes, prisons and mobile dental vans.

The state dental society, in a memo to members, wrote that the fact it took years for hygienists to develop their public health training program shows “they have no real interest in providing access to care to needy patients.”

As it is, Illinois trails many other states in allowing dental hygienists unsupervised contact with patients. In Colorado, on the extreme end, hygienists can own practices.

“It’s just the nature of the beast politically in Illinois. The dental lobby isn’t as strong in those other states,” noted Margaret Vaughn, executive director of the Illinois Rural Health Association. “The Illinois State Dental Society is much more powerful, and they’re much more organized than the hygienists are politically.”

From 2015 to 2019, the dental society spent more than $55,000 on lobbying, for its annual gathering and meals for lawmakers, typically hosted at a swanky Italian spot near the state Capitol in Springfield, according to public disclosures. In the same period, the Illinois Dental Hygienists Association reported spending nothing in its lobbying reports. (Neither group has listed any expenditures since the beginning of 2020.)

The dental society has two exclusive lobbyists and four lobbying firms on contract, state records show. The hygienist group, meanwhile, employs no lobbyists and contracts with just one firm.

The dental society donates generously to both Republicans and Democrats. Its political action committee had nearly $742,000 in cash on hand as of June 30, according to Reform for Illinois’ Sunshine Database. While the PAC has given $4,050 since 2014 to support the campaigns of state Sen. Melinda Bush, a Democrat who sponsored the nursing home bill, the database shows it has contributed far more to help elect Syverson, the senator who spoke at the conference. It has given more than $123,000 to his campaigns since 1999, with bigger annual gifts than to Bush.

“I receive contributions from many groups on both sides of issues,” Syverson emailed KHN. “They are not contributing to influence my vote on a particular bill. In fact, if a PAC sent a check while we were negotiating or voting on an issue they are involved with, I would not accept it.”

The hygienists’ PAC gave $1,100 to the campaign committee of Bush, according to the database, but nothing to Syverson. Bush did not respond to requests for comment.

“The bottom line is, if you don’t have a healthy mouth, you don’t have a healthy body,” said Ann Lynch, director of advocacy and education for the American Dental Hygienists Association. “It only makes sense that we would remove any barriers that do not allow a licensed health care provider to practice at the top of their scope.”

But Dave Marsh, a lobbyist for the Illinois dental society, said it would be dangerous for hygienists to treat nursing home residents, who are often elderly and sick.

“I just don’t feel anybody with a two-year associate’s degree is medically qualified to correct your health,” Marsh added. “They’re trained to clean teeth. They take a sharp little instrument and scrape your teeth. That’s what they do. That’s all they do.”

He said the problem is not a shortage of dental professionals but, rather, a lack of dentists who can afford to accept Medicaid patients — and “nobody wants to raise taxes to actually be able to reimburse” dentists at higher rates.

He also pointed to the scarcity of research on the benefits of dental hygienists having more professional freedom.

Langelier acknowledged that little academic literature exists on this topic, in part because of inadequate data collection on oral health. But in 2016, a study she co-authored in Health Affairs found that, as dental hygienists gained more autonomy, fewer people had teeth removed because of decay or disease. And she said Medicaid data shows more children had dental visits as hygienists expanded their practice.

“I don’t want this to be acrimonious,” said Laura Scully, chair of the access-to-care committee of the state hygienists association. “I would like it to be more of a collaboration, because truly that’s what this is about: getting together so we can help more people.”

Karen Webster works as a dental hygienist for the Tri City Health Partnership, a free clinic in St. Charles, Illinois, about 40 miles west of Chicago. In the past, she could only briefly screen patients before scheduling them with one of the center’s volunteer dentists, often months out.

“Imagine if you had a toothache and the doctor couldn’t see you that day,” she said, noting that her patients have low incomes. “They can’t afford the services. They wait till something hurts.”

But since becoming a public health dental hygienist, Webster now does immediate cleanings, takes X-rays she sends to teledentists for exams, and applies a solution called silver diamine fluoride that can halt tooth decay.

“The whole thing, start to finish, it’s just a lot more efficient,” she said.

# # #

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Las Vegas just hosted a climate denier conference and it makes perfect sense

The Heartland Institute’s 14th International Conference on Climate Change, which took place this past weekend at Las Vegas’ comically opulent Caesars Palace, is named to mislead the casual observer into thinking it’s a legitimate event. But in reality, events during the conference included jaw-droppers such as a discussion of “the supposed justification for a rapid transition to expensive and unreliable ‘green’ energy,” a session on “how to oppose woke capital, activist investors, and financial regulators [sic] efforts to cancel traditional energy,” and what promises to be a rousing interrogation into “the scientific method, and how the United Nations’ reports repeatedly violate it.”

The idea of these conversations happening alongside rows of Buffalo Gold Revolution slot machines brings to mind feminist artist Barbara Kruger’s famous and oft-repeated epithet, “a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.” It is really too easy to ridicule people who are so cynically and wilfully blind to reality that they can look around at the burning West and flooding South and say, “Nothing has to change here!” Climate denial, stated that blatantly, reads more like malice in 2021. But when it is expressed more quietly, through the ways we live and the things we want, it is seldom mocked. 

If you look at the climate crisis and want to know how we got to this mind-boggling place in history, Las Vegas is not a bad entry point. The strip is full of things to gawk at. It was designed that way: to provoke awe at just how big and tacky and loud a man-made place can be. Which makes it an all-too-appropriate destination for a three-day gathering of the world’s biggest, tackiest, loudest deniers of man-made climate change. 

The fact that this gathering takes place at the iconic casino explicitly built to recreate the sumptuousness of the Roman Empire is a little too perfect. Since its 1966 opening, Caesars Palace’s motto has been a series of variations on the idea that “every guest should feel like a Caesar.” That is to say, every person to cross its doors is entitled to the most lavish extravagances imaginable. 

Generally speaking, there’s a direct relationship between emissions and excess. While a climate-compatible lifestyle doesn’t have to be oppressively ascetic, it’s probably not one that includes a 1.2-mile strip of luxury stores (even if it did give us the timeless “it’s Ver-SAYCE” line from Showgirls) and “the largest order of Ukrainian caviar ever placed.”

In her book Ancient Rome and Modern America, Margaret Malamud, a historian of ancient societies at New Mexico State University, wrote: “In Las Vegas’ recreation of the Roman Forum [at Caesars Palace], the ostentatious wealth and power of corporate raiders and entrepreneurs like Donald Trump are held up as desirable and obtainable, and consumption and consumerism are presented as historically and culturally valued ways of fulfilling desire.” 

The entire point of the Caesars Palace business — and the Las Vegas strip writ large — is to fuel consumption for its own sake. And excessive consumption for its own sake, as most people who are serious about the science, ethics, or politics of climate change will tell you, is pretty much the first thing that has to go, societally speaking. 

But it’s an American value with staying power — and that’s due in no small part to the fact that there’s a powerful contingent of people whose wealth is dependent on Americans’ desire to consume things that have harmful consequences, be it for our own health or for that of the environment. And these are the people and companies who have historically funded the Heartland Institute: the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris, ExxonMobil, the Walton family, the Koch family. 

But, at least with the Heartland Institute’s particular form of climate denial, there are signs of waning popularity. As Alexander Kaufman reported for HuffPost last year, the organization is “broke” and its dwindling funders have veered further and further right. It’s a sign that the position that the climate change that we’re seeing today — and that scientists predict will only worsen in years to come — is the result of the Earth’s natural changes, and demands no major societal and economic changes, is now the provenance of extremists.

And yet the growth of Las Vegas itself, a city of excessive tastes carved into the desert, is something of an exercise in climate denial. The population of Nevada’s Clark County, which contains Las Vegas, has grown by 20 percent over the past decade and is projected to grow another 20 more in the coming one. The region, like much of the West, is in a record-breaking drought, and it’s warming faster than any other metro area in the country. No one who lives in Las Vegas deserves to have to play host to a cohort of people who have fought tooth and nail against their own right to protect and strengthen themselves against hotter, drier days to come.

Although the selection of Caesars Palace as the Heartland venue may very well have come down to competitive pricing (the venue did not respond to a request for comment), it’s hard not to read into the poetry of it. The historian Kyle Harper attributes the fall of the Roman Empire — which wasn’t a sudden event, but prolonged over a couple of centuries — to two major forces: microbial plagues and climate change, which probably sounds uncomfortably on the nose. 

Harper has emphasized in his work that the anthropogenic climate change we’re facing now is of a very different variety than what the Romans dealt with, which was the kind of geologically normal variations influenced by natural Earth cycles and the occasional major volcanic eruption. The carbon emissions-driven greenhouse effect we have now is a force that’s warming the climate at a faster rate than ever before, with both more extreme and longer-lasting effects than we’ve seen in human history.

It is easy to be smug about stubborn people and their backward beliefs, and the attendees of the Heartland conference certainly deserve little to no warmth of empathy. But it is less easy to see — and to ridicule — the ways that denial permeates our own still-uninterrupted desires for luxury, excess, and escape. 

Rome had its own Las Vegas, just up the coast from modern-day Naples, called Baia. It’s where the empire’s wealthy would vacation to go, in modern parlance, buckwild. But if you want to visit Baia today, you will find it difficult. The city, due to an unfortunate combination of seismic rumbles and the soft earth on which it was built, now sleeps under the waves of the Mediterranean.

“Trump World” is no joke — and it wants to devour American democracy

“Trump World” is not a joke, if it ever really was. That’s no longer the term exclusively applied to Donald Trump’s orbit by media observers or political opponents. It’s now how Trump World describes itself. 

When longtime Trump loyalist Corey Lewandowski lost his job leading the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Action, after facing accusations of sexual misconduct, Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich tweeted that Lewandowski “will no longer be associated with Trump World.” (He was replaced by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is very much still associated with Trump World.)

Yes, it may be amusing to hear Donald Trump’s agents and apparatchiks referring to the Great Leader’s inner circle with a term formerly used by detractors. But only if you still believe that liberal schadenfreude and mockery offer an effective defense against the rise of neofascism.

Yes, Trump World has interesting and bizarre characters: a mattress salesman, a former mayor of America’s largest city who has hair-dye issues, a Nosferatu-like white supremacist, a drunken would-be Renaissance man and various other hucksters, henchmen and rejects from the Republican Party’s “land of broken toys” who are now Trump’s agents of chaos and perfidy.

Yes, Donald Trump himself only seems to exist as a simulacrum, a TV or film character come to life, who exemplifies the worst aspects of the human condition. That is not a bug but a feature: As a man and a figurehead, Donald Trump is irresistible to his cult members precisely because of those attributes.

In essence, Donald Trump the man is identical to “Donald Trump” the character, who is so ridiculous that he could not possibly exist. Yet he does.

Some have even speculated that there is no Donald Trump — it’s really the late legendary comedian Andy Kaufman, playing Tony Clifton, who in turn is playing “Donald Trump”. We may never know the answer. 

But one should not forget that fascists, authoritarians and autocrats more generally can often be funny, both in terms of style and personality. Such individuals and their followers are often mocked by “serious” leaders and intellectuals, as well as by the larger political class and other respectable types. That mockery and humor all too often turns into existential terror, recrimination, pleas for mercy and other desperate apologies.

In fact, a certain leader universally viewed as one of the greatest villains in human history, who brought the world to the brink of disaster, was frequently described by the American and European news media and other observers as a ridiculous buffoon who posed no real threat.

In the famous description by biographer Joachim Fest, said world leader “always appeared foolish to sage political minds, and for years — indeed, virtually to the moment of his final victory — arrogant conventional wisdom did not take him seriously. The widespread mockery heaped upon him has been justified by his appearance, his unhinged rhetorical flights and the theatrical atmosphere he deliberately created around himself. Yet in a manner almost impossible to describe, he has always stood above or outside his banal and dull-witted persona.” Does any of that sound familiar?

Ultimately, Donald Trump and his movement — in other words, Trump World — offer a lesson and warning that they and people like them are capable of anything in their war on American democracy and society. 

To wit: Politico recently reported on Trump’s obsession with “challenging and changing election laws,” which he hopes to convert into “legislative action” if he ever regains the presidency:

Trump is expected to mount another bid for president in 2024. And as talk of such a campaign has grown more concrete, so too has speculation over what type of agenda he’d actually pursue.

Some answers can be found in the work being done by America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank stacked with former Trump administration officials. Among the group’s 20 main policy priorities, which include trade, immigration and education, is promoting more comprehensive voter restrictions in the name of election integrity. Officials describe it as a priority.

“One hundred percent yes,” AFPI President and former Trump White House Domestic Policy Council Director Brooke Rollins said of having legislation on a set of issues ready to go should Trump prevail in a 2024 election. “If we do our job right we will have a package of model legislation for the federal government and the state governments where they align.”

Joe Biden may be president, but Republican fascists and their movement are still in the ascendant. Trump World’s war on democracy and the ongoing coup continue. What will America be like if Trump World emerges victorious?

Trump World is a fascist and authoritarian cult oriented around pathological, antisocial and anti-human behavior. Its leader is to be worshipped as a civil-religious prophet, savior and living God.

Trump World is also a type of “life world” that provides meaning through narratives, values, identity and an entire culture, at least for its true believers. 

There is no objective empirical truth or reality in Trump World. Such concepts are bent and twisted to serve the agenda of the Great Leader and his or her fantasies, edicts and desires. Trump World is a closed episteme, whose logic is self-sustaining and self-justifying. 

Trump World is a type of “democracy” — albeit a fake democracy where only the votes of “real Americans” count. The leaders and ruling party of Trump World reserve the right to reject any votes they deemed “fraudulent” and to control the results of elections such that the “correct” decision is reached.

Likewise, the Trump World regime also controls the courts and legal system. If “erroneous” legal decisions are made, the leaders and ruling party reserve the right to “correct” them.  

Trump World is an apartheid society, a Christian nationalist theocracy and a plutocratic oligarchy. It worships death, violence and sacrifice for “the cause.” Martyrs are to be revered, celebrated and thus given eternal life. Trump World is sadomasochistic.

Only right-wing political correctness is allowed in Trump World. Thoughtcrimes are to be immediately punished because they are “divisive” and undermine “unity” and “patriotism.” Silence is deemed to be consent and agreement.

Trump World is terrified of genuine human freedom. As such, women’s reproductive rights and freedoms are to be extinguished. The civil rights of nonwhites and other marginalized individuals and groups will not be protected. The natural environment is to be exploited by rapacious capitalism. Labor unions and other attempts by working people to fight for decent wages and better living conditions will be illegal.

Trump World is a realm of “white freedom,” which in practice means the ability of white people — especially rich white men and “Christians” — to impose their will without restraint on other human beings deemed to be inferior.

In a recent conversation with Salon, historian Timothy Snyder described what such “freedom” actually looks like in practice: “The other side’s idea of freedom is so impoverished that it does not exist anymore: it is a cliché with no real content. Freedom for them just means being rolled by the waves. Freedom for them just means their impulses or whatever they’re feeling right now in the moment.”

Trump World will come very close to devouring American society if Trump and the Republican Party (and the larger American fascist movement) “win” the 2022 midterms and then the 2024 presidential election.

In his newsletter, journalist Judd Legum recently explained how close America is to such a nightmarish outcome:

In 2020, Trump’s strategy to overturn the election relied on Rudy Giuliani and a ragtag group of conspiracy theorists. It didn’t work out. In Iowa, Trump made clear that his strategy in 2024 is to install unwavering Trump loyalists throughout the state and federal government. “The election was a fraud and if we want to save our country and make America great again, we have only one choice. We must elect strong and unyielding American Republicans at every level,” Trump said.

This would facilitate a much more sophisticated effort to seize power in the next presidential election, regardless of the actual vote total….

Part 1: Put Trump loyalists in charge of election administration in key states…

Part 2: Elect Trump loyalists as governor in key states…

Part 3: Put Trump loyalists in charge of Congress

The third part of the plan is more straightforward: restore the Republican majorities in Congress. On January 6, 2021, about two-thirds of the Republican caucus objected to the certification of the Electoral College in an effort to reverse the outcome of the election. Some of the Republicans who did not object to the certification are retiring or facing primary challengers. A majority might be all that’s needed to rubber-stamp efforts in the states to swing the election to Trump.

In a recent essay, Thom Hartmann offers this warning from history about America’s crisis of democracy and how close we are to Trump World’s final victory:

In addition to amplifying the usual barriers to voters in mostly Democratic neighborhoods (long lines, harsh ID requirements, short hours, limiting mail-in voting, etc.), Republicans are now putting open advocates for a Trump Oligarchy into positions to determine which votes to count and which to reject.

Trump and the Republicans going along with him (which is almost all of them now) are playing an old game. Instead of voters selecting their politicians, these Republican politicians are selecting their voters.

Boris Bazhanov was Joseph Stalin’s personal secretary from 1923 to 1928, and later served as secretary of the Soviet Political Bureau. In his memoirs published in 1980, he recounts something Stalin told him about voting.

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how,” Stalin said. “But what is extremely important is this — who will count the votes, and how.” …

And now Republicans are setting things up so when they flip elections, à la Stalin, it’ll just seem like a normal part of politics. They tried it last year and it failed by a whisker, so now they’re setting things up to pull it off in 2024.

Trump World is not an alternate reality or a different dimension of the multiverse. It is not a metaphor, a Jungian shadow or an archetype. It is not part of some thought experiment or counterfactual.

Trump World is the here and the now; it is not America’s “undiscovered country.”

The American people have two years, at most, to save themselves and their democracy. Tomorrow is not an option. Procrastination and denial will make matters worse. Only the “urgency of now” has the potential to save American democracy from Trump World. Do the American people, or those among them who still support democracy, have the energy, courage and strength to defeat Trump World? Or, have they already decided to surrender and assimilate into it? 

Right-wing media outlets are literally killing people — with dreadful advice

It happened three times yesterday, and I only watched or half-watched a few hours of TV news. It happens every day, it seems. Somebody wonders out loud (yesterday’s most prominent was Alex Witt with Dr. Anthony Fauci) why over 60 million Americans who are eligible to be vaccinated are still refusing — including hospital workers in some parts of the country.

Everybody treats it like a confounding question with no easy answer. The actual answer, though, is pretty straightforward: The psychopaths running the right-wing media ecosystem dominated by Fox “News” and social media, and echoed by 1,500 radio stations across the country, have decided that people dying and being disabled is both profitable and politically advantageous to them.

When Joe Biden was elected president, the Republican Party and their joined-at-the-hip right-wing media did a sudden about-face from praising Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” to encouraging their followers to remain unvaccinated so President Biden would struggle to get the economy back on sound footing. 

That, they figured, was their best bet to take back Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, and they’ve stayed on-message ever since Biden took office on Jan. 20. As I noted in considerable detail back in July, death is their political strategy. 

And now, as if to put a punctuation point on it, the headline at Raw Story warns: “Fox News host uses Colin Powell’s death to launch anti-vax rant: “Fully-vaccinated are dying of Covid.“

Almost 750,000 Americans have died of COVID, and recent research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that at as many as half of the 45 million Americans who’ve been diagnosed with the disease will suffer long-term consequences, the main ones being dementia, exhaustion and damage to the heart and kidneys.

It used to be in American business that you knew where the psychopaths were: Big Tobacco. It’s an industry producing a product that, when used as directed, kills around a half-million Americans every year.  

Being able to comfortably fall asleep every night knowing that the product of your workday had killed another 1,300 people is a rare competence that typically requires the mental illness of psychopathy.

About 1% of Americans are psychopaths, although such people tend to be concentrated in some areas: As many as 12% of major corporate CEOs are believed to be psychopaths, and about 15% of people in prison.

A psychopath, for all practical purposes, believes that he’s quite literally the only “true human being” on planet Earth. 

Everybody else is an actor of some sort, a prop, in the grand play of the psychopath’s life. Everybody else is here to make him happy and meet his needs, and he doesn’t have to worry about hurting them or not meeting their needs because they are not “real people” like he is.

The clinical terminology is that psychopaths “lack the ability to feel empathy.” Weirdly, this lack of empathy can make them more successful in big business and politics, as well as in criminal and prison environments.

Thus, the CEO of Fox “News” — the network that daily spreads vaccine misinformation leading to deaths that are tearing apart American families — tells the Hollywood Reporter that she sleeps “well at night.” Just like the tobacco CEOs. 

Meanwhile, people who watch Fox and all its imitators across various media are taking the implicit advice of Fox’s primetime hosts and avoiding vaccination … and getting sick and in some cases dying.

They’re embracing quack cures promoted on the network and across right-wing media, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, giving their viewers the false sense of security that if they get sick with this awful disease there’s a ready cure at hand … so there’s no need to get vaccinated.

Even worse, consumers of this media are doing their best to disrupt rational public health efforts like mask and vaccine mandates by harassing public health officials, school boards and elected representatives across the country — all leading to even more disease and deaths.

When Americans realized, mostly as the result of massive lawsuits in the 1990s, that the CEOs of the tobacco industry were knowingly killing people (and even reaching out to addict children) we took action. 

We limited access to this death-dealing product, from outlawing television advertising to limiting placement of cigarette vending machines and strict enforcement of age-limited retail sales. We also required that the product be honestly labeled: “Tobacco kills.”

This isn’t an option for media, and rightly so, because of our First Amendment protections of the press (including this article).  And nobody wants to take those freedoms and protections away.

But the most important and effective campaign our nation embarked on to cut tobacco use was the nationwide campaign to educate people about the dangers of tobacco use. We taught adults and schoolchildren alike how the industry was trying to addict them, and showed them the consequences of using that deadly product.

Now that right-wing media has arguably caused more Americans to die in the past year than has tobacco, it’s time to consider a similar strategy to balance the lies and misinformation streaming out of them every day.

If we can’t rely on the news and social media industries’ content producers or executives to stop spreading death-dealing misinformation, we can at least wake people up to the dangers of their products.

Feds step in to investigate allegations of widespread abuse at Texas’ state-run juvenile facilities

The federal government opened an investigation Wednesday into Texas’ long-troubled juvenile lockups, which currently detain nearly 700 teens who often are found to need heightened supervision or have committed violent crimes.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would examine whether children detained in the Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s five lockups are reasonably protected “from physical and sexual abuse by staff and other residents, excessive use of chemical restraints and excessive use of isolation.”

The announcement comes days after the agency reported the latest arrest of a former staffer accused of improper sexual activity with a person in custody. Devin King, 29, was arrested Friday for allegedly touching the breast of an 18-year-old detainee while he worked as a detention officer. The incident was first reported in July, the agency said.

For more than a decade, TJJD has been slammed for reports of repeated sexual and physical abuse, as well as a lack of control. Last year, advocacy groups called for the federal government to step in, saying in a complaint that the department allowed “grievous violations of children’s constitutional rights.”

“Too often children held in juvenile detention facilities are subject to abuse and mistreatment, and deprived of their constitutional rights,” U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in the DOJ’s release. “State officials have a constitutional obligation to ensure reasonable safety for children in these institutions.”

​In a statement, TJJD’s executive director said the agency will cooperate fully with the probe.

“We all share the same goals for the youth in our care: providing for their safety, their effective rehabilitation, and the best chance for them to lead productive, fulfilling lives,” said Camille Cain. “That has been the agency’s mission since I joined TJJD, and it remains our constant focus.”

The agency’s board put Cain at the helm in 2018, when the department was under fire over its latest scandal. In 2017, The Dallas Morning News reported on agency reports that revealed guards at the Gainesville State School in North Texas were allegedly sexually abusing committed youth. Youth advocates called for the state to close its five juvenile lockups, state senators cried the agency was in need of a “total shakedown” and Gov. Greg Abbott sent in the Texas Rangers, prompting numerous arrests.

Cain said last year that TJJD was building “a system that allows us to work with youth in lower population settings and with sustainable staffing levels with salaries for direct-care staff that match the skills the job requires.” She noted that reform “does not happen quickly.”

Reports of sexual and physical abuse have continued, as have arrests. The advocacy groups’ complaint to the DOJ last year alleged staffing shortages led to unchecked gang activity throughout the lockups. An independent investigator reported that a lack of supervision of the youth led to an increase in tattooing.

This summer, Abbott again sent in the Texas Rangers to investigate. In a statement Wednesday, a spokesperson for Abbott reiterated Cain’s promise of cooperation and said the governor “has always prioritized the safety and well-being of all Texas children, including those in the state’s care.”

On Wednesday, the director of youth justice at Texas Appleseed, one of the advocacy groups that filed the complaint, said she was encouraged by the DOJ investigation and was eager to see what comes next. Brett Merfish, the director, said the investigation could lead to agreed changes or a lawsuit.

“We really need to be making real change, and we need to abandon these five state facilities and … move them into facilities that are meant to meet their needs and really focus on rehabilitation,” Merfish said.

In August, fewer than 700 juveniles were detained at TJJD’s five secure facilities, according to a state budget report. That number has dropped significantly over the last decade. ​​

In 2007, an abuse scandal similar to the one in 2017 prompted the Legislature to implement several reforms, and more county judges began opting out of committing youth to state-run facilities. At the time, the state had 12 juvenile lockups and around 5,000 youth in state custody, state reports detailed.

Merfish and other youth advocates have called for Texas to eliminate the state lockups entirely, instead keeping children in their home communities. They have cited a report that found children released from statewide facilities were more likely to commit new crimes than those kept near their homes.

“We’re not helping them,” Merfish said. “We’re hurting them more by putting them in these facilities.”

Disclosure: Texas Appleseed has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/13/federal-investigation-texas-lockups/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Michael Cohen responds to ABC’s Christopher Steele interview

In the wake of an ABC News interview with Christopher Steele, Michael Cohen released a special episode of his podcast, “Mea Culpa,” where he addressed some of the allegations against him and some claims made against Trump. He was joined on the podcast with Daily Beast editor Molly Jong Fast.

Cohen recalled that last week, Trump told major political donors, unprompted, that he doesn’t like to be urinated on. The former lawyer wondered why Trump is so obsessed with this story, that even years later he can’t stop talking about it.

“She knows, I don’t like to be peed on,” Trump told the crowd, pointing to his wife.

“If that in itself doesn’t prove that something is psychologically wrong with him, I don’t know what does,” Cohen said on the podcast. In previous comments, Cohen said that he looked extensively for the tape and he doesn’t believe it actually exists. Steele told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos that he believes it does. In fact, Steele said that he stood by his dossier, despite the fact that he doesn’t think his entire work is accurate.

“Do you think it hurts your credibility at all that you won’t accept the findings of the FBI in this particular case?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100 percent accurate,” Steele said. “I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them.”

Cohen released a statement responding to Steele, claiming that some claims about him are absurd, as did Barry Meier, author of “Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies.”

“Christopher Steele is free to believe whatever he wants, but if Christopher Steele wants other people to believe that he’s believable, he needs to show us what evidence he has to support his beliefs,” said Meier.

Cohen said that he can’t understand why his former boss would walk back into a scandal that bothers him so much. Daily Beast editor Molly Jong Fast, who was also on Cohen’s podcast, passed off Trump’s obsession as a kind of compulsion, which Cohen questioned.

“What compulsion?” asked Cohen. “What could possibly be the underlying motive? And you’re right, I know him better than anybody — I, myself, cannot understand what the f*ck this idiot was thinking when he decided in the middle of a donor meeting to turn around and say to people, ‘By the way, I want you all to know, I’m not into golden showers. I’m not into being peed on.’ What point are you trying to make here?”

Jong Fast changed the subject, recalling that the next comments out of Trump’s mouth were what she found interesting, that he “saved the Republican Party.” She noted that she doesn’t think the donors believe he saved the GOP, “I think they’re hostages to him. So, the idea that he thinks that these people are going to applaud him, while he’s taken them hostage?”

Jong Fast asked who cares what Steele says, and that Cohen and those around him know the truth and that what others think doesn’t matter. Cohen, who continues to fight to correct the record on many of the accusations against him and make amends, explained that it matters to him. He’s willing to confess to any wrongdoing, but won’t admit to anything that he says isn’t real.

You can listen to the full Cohen podcast at his website here.