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Trump’s coup plot was worse than anyone knew

It seemed odd last December when then-Attorney General Bill Barr resigned before the end of President Trump’s term. Barr had been such a loyal soldier throughout, defending Trump’s misdeeds and corrupting the Department of Justice (DOJ) on his behalf over and over again. Barr had broken DOJ protocols repeatedly as well, most recently ordering the department to investigate claims of voter fraud before any suit or legal proceedings had been initiated. But it all fell apart when Barr said in an interview that he had not actually seen any evidence of such fraud. The president was very displeased. Barr later told him to his face that the claims were “nonsense” and a major rift developed between the two.

Nonetheless, Barr apparently still tried to appease Trump and later told the U.S. Attorney in Georgia to look into Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani’s wild claims and make it a priority. But within a few days, Trump announced that Barr would be leaving his post and he was gone by the end of the month, replaced by his deputy Jeffrey Rosen.

I don’t think we know the full scope of what was going on with Barr and Trump during this period despite Barr’s self-serving recitations to several authors of books on the final days. But it’s clear that he knew that Trump was out of control and he decided to jump off the sinking ship before it went under.

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On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released an interim Senate Judiciary Committee Report covering the testimony of various high-level Department of Justice officials during that period between the election and the insurrection and it is a blockbuster. It’s titled “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election,” which pretty much says it all.

We knew quite a bit of this already. There was earlier reporting about how Trump had called Acting Attorney General Rosen to instruct him to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” And we knew that an obscure Justice Department lawyer in the civil division by the name of Jeffrey Clark had somehow found his way into Trump’s inner circle and was pushing some corrupt schemes to overturn the election which Trump liked very much. But until this report we didn’t know the scale of this plotting to get the DOJ to step in and use its muscle to carry out Trump’s coup.

Trump worked hard to twist Rosen’s arm. He had Clark calling him with threats that he was going to replace him and demanding that he send a letter to Georgia and other states to advise them of “serious irregularities” in their elections, telling them to call special sessions of their legislatures and deal with the electoral votes however they chose. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was haranguing him as well demanding that he look into Giuliani’s crazy conspiracy theories, as well as odd lawyers involved in Trump lawsuits around the country, one of whom told Rosen “you’re going to force me to call the President and tell him you’re recalcitrant,” as if that would frighten him into compliance.

Trump himself inappropriately called Rosen and his deputy nine times, and met with him personally several more, the final denouement coming just days before the January 6th insurrection in which he literally said, “one thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.” As usual, he said the quiet part out loud.

The report is damning. The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup.

The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, R-Ia, issued a GOP rebuttal to the report. It is truly mind boggling and makes you wonder if the Republicans even bothered to read it. It suggests that Trump was right to be skeptical of Rosen and Donohue because of Carter Page and the FBI and some other irrelevant nonsense from the Russia investigation. This was pure red meat for their base, of course. But this line is so fatuous you have to wonder if they were just trolling for laughs:

“The available evidence shows that President Trump did what we’d expect a president to do on an issue of this importance: He listened to his senior advisers and followed their advice and recommendations,”

Yes, we expect our presidents to refuse to admit they lost elections and plot a coup to stay in power. It’s perfectly normal. And yes, he did back down on firing Rosen and replacing him with his lackey — only once his White House counsel’s office and the entire top level of the Department of Justice said they would quit en masse if he did it. I guess you can call that “advice and recommendations” but Trump’s White House counsel had another term for it: “a murder-suicide pact.”

And anyway, once that part of the plot was foiled, he just switched to plan B — the right-wing lawyer John Eastman’s plot to have Pence refuse to count the electoral votes. At the same time, he had his crack legal team of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani all over the country filing half-baked, embarrassing lawsuits and was egging on activists to come to the Capitol on January 6th saying it was going to be “wild.” He was juggling several coup plots at the same time. And he’s still at it today, calling for “forensic audits” even in states he won! This deranged plot is still unfolding even though he’s been out of office for nine months.

That Senate Republicans would actually defend these actions is outrageous. It’s also chilling.

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It’s quite clear that that brief moment after January 6th when the Republicans seemed shaken by Trump’s incitement of a violent insurrection passed very quickly and they have comfortably settled back into rationalizing their complicity by saying that it’s no harm no foul if the president tries to extort foreign leaders to help him sabotage a rival’s campaign or plan a coup to overturn an election if he doesn’t manage to pull it off.

Grassley is appearing with the former president at a rally this weekend where Trump will no doubt insist that he actually won the election. Grassley won’t blink an eye, apparently believing that if Trump gets back in power, it will be perfectly fine if he behaves exactly the same way as he did during those insane final weeks of his term. This is how pathetically corrupt and compromised the GOP’s moral reasoning has become. According to one of the major political parties in the country, attempted coups are now normal politics in America.  And as a result we can be quite sure this isn’t the last time that will happen. The only question is whether they can corral enough accomplices to actually succeed next time. 

Extinction: 23 gone, countless more to save

Many journalists have difficult beats — the specialized topics they cover exclusively or repeatedly. Some write about homicides, some cover local politics, others specialize in investigating sexual assault.

For the past 15-plus years, I’ve been on the extinction beat. I catalog the dead and the dying.

It’s important to me, but it’s not an easy assignment. It’s hard work, it’s emotional, it’s seemingly endless, and it doesn’t make me much fun at parties (well, the parties I still attended before the pandemic). My wife worries about me.

September 29 was a particularly difficult day.

That was the day the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared its intention to remove 23 long-unseen species — including the ivory-billed woodpecker and a mussel called the flat pigtoe — from the protection of the Endangered Species Act. The agency did this not because those species have recovered, but because they never will.

You can’t keep protecting what’s probably extinct.

These species haven’t been seen in decades, and most of their habitats have been damaged or destroyed. Sure, some dedicated people will probably continue to look for several of these species, especially the woodpecker, but the odds aren’t in their favor.

Lost species do turn up from time to time, even after they’ve been declared extinct, but in all likelihood these 23 are long gone. Many disappeared while waiting to be added to the endangered species list. Others were so rare by the time they were protected that their chances of recovery hovered somewhere between slim and none.

As they disappeared, as their habitats suffered, so did pieces of our culture, our interconnected environmental web, our safety nets, our souls.

I spent most of September 29 wrapped in a melancholy shroud.

September 30 was different.

I got up. I stretched. I took several deep breaths. And I got to work to see what species could still be saved.

That’s the hidden truth of working the extinction beat. I report on the dying and the dead, sure, but I also spend my days talking to the scientists, conservationists, activists, politicians and average citizens working hard to make sure that as few species as possible go the way of the flat pigtoe, the Molokai creeper, the Scioto madtom, the Little Mariana fruit bat, or any of the other 19 species the Fish and Wildlife Service just proposed as extinct.

Writing about extinction and endangered species is an intrinsically positivebeat, because the lessons we gain from loss help to prevent further grief in the future.

Because everyday heroes are out there making a difference.

Because the more we learn, the better we can adapt.

Because the more we fight, the better off we’ll all be in the long run.

Those lessons aren’t always easy to get out there. Most extinction announcements sink like a stone in black water, disappearing without making a ripple. I’ve reported on hundreds of at-risk species and extinctions that no other journalists have covered. It’s hard to get people to care about rarely seen mussels, snails, insects, plants and faraway mammals when they’ve got daily struggles with work, childcare, aging parents, political strife and the pandemic.

But this time, I’ll admit, was different. Perhaps it was the iconic ivory-billed woodpecker; perhaps it was the fact that Fish and Wildlife presented a bulk list of extinctions. But reporters, editors and the public took notice. The story of the 23 presumably gone species appeared on the front pages of almost every major newspaper. The nightly news programs and 24-hour cable TV stations covered the loss. For a brief, shining moment, it even trended on Twitter.

And most of the coverage did a good job. The media discussed the causes of the extinction crisis, and what it costs both us and the planet. They dug up evocative old photos and videos. They spoke to scientists who choked up with emotion during interviews. They conveyed the pain of loss.

Hopefully they’ll do that the next time, too. Because there will be next times.

But let’s keep talking about the present. Did you see those news stories and feel that pain? Did you experience a sense of loss? Did the news, or the broader the extinction crisis, make you sad and angry?

Good — it should.

Use that pain.

Embrace that grief.

Be angry.

Commit.

Refuse to accept further declines.

Take a deep breath, stretch, talk to someone about the work they’re doing, and find out how you can support it. Act.

We can come away from this — the same way I do every time I write a species’ obituary — and promise to do better.

Otherwise, these 23 species died in vain. And that would be the ultimate tragedy.

The 23 species proposed for delisting due to their presumed extinction: 

  • Bachman’s warbler
  • Bridled white-eye
  • Flat pigtoe mussel
  • Green-blossom pearly mussel
  • Ivory-billed woodpecker
  • Kauai akialoa
  • Kauai nukupuu
  • Kauaʻi ʻōʻō
  • Large Kauai thrush
  • Little Mariana fruit bat
  • Maui ākepa
  • Maui nukupuʻu
  • Molokai creeper
  • Phyllostegia glabra var. lanaiensis 
  • Po`ouli
  • San Marcos gambusia
  • Scioto madtom
  • Southern acornshell mussel
  • Stirrupshell mussel
  • Tubercled-blossom pearly mussel
  • Turgid-blossom pearly mussel
  • Upland combshell mussel
  • Yellow-blossom pearly mussel

Racism a strong factor in Black women’s high rate of premature births, study finds

The tipping point for Dr. Paula Braveman came when a longtime patient of hers at a community clinic in San Francisco’s Mission District slipped past the front desk and knocked on her office door to say goodbye. He wouldn’t be coming to the clinic anymore, he told her, because he could no longer afford it.

It was a decisive moment for Braveman, who decided she wanted not only to heal ailing patients but also to advocate for policies that would help them be healthier when they arrived at her clinic. In the nearly four decades since, Braveman has dedicated herself to studying the “social determinants of health” — how the spaces where we live, work, play and learn, and the relationships we have in those places, influence how healthy we are.

As director of the Center on Social Disparities in Health at the University of California-San Francisco, Braveman has studied the link between neighborhood wealth and children’s health, and how access to insurance influences prenatal care. A longtime advocate of translating research into policy, she has collaborated on major health initiatives with the health department in San Francisco, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

Braveman has a particular interest in maternal and infant health. Her latest research reviews what’s known about the persistent gap in preterm birth rates between Black and white women in the United States. Black women are about 1.6 times as likely as whites to give birth more than three weeks before the due date. That statistic bears alarming and costly health consequences, as infants born prematurely are at higher risk for breathing, heart and brain abnormalities, among other complications.

Braveman co-authored the review with a group of experts convened by the March of Dimes that included geneticists, clinicians, epidemiologists, biomedical experts and neurologists. They examined more than two dozen suspected causes of preterm births — including quality of prenatal care, environmental toxics, chronic stress, poverty and obesity — and determined that racism, directly or indirectly, best explained the racial disparities in preterm birth rates.

(Note: In the review, the authors make extensive use of the terms “upstream” and “downstream” to describe what determines people’s health. A downstream risk is the condition or factor most directly responsible for a health outcome, while an upstream factor is what causes or fuels the downstream risk — and often what needs to change to prevent someone from becoming sick. For example, a person living near drinking water polluted with toxic chemicals might get sick from drinking the water. The downstream fix would be telling individuals to use filters. The upstream solution would be to stop the dumping of toxic chemicals.)

KHN spoke with Braveman about the study and its findings. The excerpts have been edited for length and style.

Q: You have been studying the issue of preterm birth and racial disparities for so long. Were there any findings from this review that surprised you?

The process of systematically going through all of the risk factors that are written about in the literature and then seeing how the story of racism was an upstream determinant for virtually all of them. That was kind of astounding.

The other thing that was very impressive: When we looked at the idea that genetic factors could be the cause of the Black-white disparity in preterm birth. The genetics experts in the group, and there were three or four of them, concluded from the evidence that genetic factors might influence the disparity in preterm birth, but at most the effect would be very small, very small indeed. This could not account for the greater rate of preterm birth among Black women compared to white women.

Q: You were looking to identify not just what causes preterm birth, but also to explain racial differences in rates of preterm birth. Are there examples of factors that can influence preterm birth that don’t explain racial disparities?

It does look like there are genetic components to preterm birth, but they don’t explain the Black-white disparity in preterm birth. Another example is having an early elective C-section. That’s one of the problems contributing to avoidable preterm birth, but it doesn’t look like that’s really contributing to the Black-white disparity in preterm birth.

Q: You and your colleagues listed exactly one upstream cause of preterm birth: racism. How would you characterize the certainty that racism is a decisive upstream cause of higher rates of preterm birth among Black women?

It makes me think of this saying: A randomized clinical trial wouldn’t be necessary to give certainty about the importance of having a parachute on if you jump from a plane. To me, at this point, it is close to that.

Going through that paper — and we worked on that paper over a three- or four-year period, and so there was a lot of time to think about it — I don’t see how the evidence that we have could be explained otherwise.

Q: What did you learn about how a mother’s broader lifetime experience of racism might affect birth outcomes versus what she experienced within the medical establishment during pregnancy?

There were many ways that experiencing racial discrimination would affect a woman’s pregnancy, but one major way would be through pathways and biological mechanisms involved in stress, and stress physiology. In neuroscience, what’s been clear is that a chronic stressor seems to be more damaging to health than an acute stressor.

So it doesn’t make much sense to be looking only during pregnancy. But that’s where most of that research has been done: stress during pregnancy and racial discrimination, and its role in birth outcomes. Very few studies have looked at experiences of racial discrimination across the life course.

My colleagues and I have published a paper where we asked African American women about their experiences of racism and we didn’t even define what we meant. Women did not talk a lot about the experiences of racism during pregnancy from their medical providers; they talked about the lifetime experience, and particularly experiences going back to childhood. And they talked about having to worry, and constant vigilance, so that even if they’re not experiencing an incident, their antennae have to be out to be prepared in case an incident does occur.

Putting all of it together with what we know about stress physiology, I would put my money on the lifetime experiences being so much more important than experiences during pregnancy. There isn’t enough known about preterm birth, but from what is known, inflammation is involved, immune dysfunction, and that’s what stress leads to. The neuroscientists have shown us that chronic stress produces inflammation and immune system dysfunction.

Q: What policies do you think are most important at this stage for reducing preterm birth for Black women?

I wish I could just say one policy or two policies, but I think it does get back to the need to dismantle racism in our society. In all of its manifestations. That’s unfortunate, not to be able to say, “Oh, here, I have this magic bullet. And if you just go with that, that will solve the problem.”

If you take the conclusions of this study seriously, you say, well, policies to just go after these downstream factors are not going to work. It’s up to the upstream investment in trying to achieve a more equitable and less racist society. Ultimately, I think that’s the take-home, and it’s a tall, tall order.

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

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

Will Republicans really try to impeach Biden? Sure — he’s wounded, and they smell blood

Several weeks ago, I warned that the Republicans will impeach Joe Biden after they likely regain control of the House of Representatives next year. This is an obvious conclusion based on what leading Republicans, Donald Trump himself and the right-wing propaganda machine have been saying in public since Biden’s election last year.

Impeaching Biden is one tactic in a larger plan to delegitimize any election that Republican do not win. The ultimate goal is to replace America’s nascent multiracial democracy with an unofficial apartheid system under which nonwhite people and other targeted groups are effectively second-class citizens. The Democratic Party would be rendered practically irrelevant, and the country would be a type of fake democracy ruled under a system of “competitive authoritarianism.”

Predictably, the reaction to what is a basic and unsurprising claim about Biden’s probable impeachment was one of rage. This is somewhat understandable: Many Democrats and other Biden supporters are still in a state of shock and denial over the Trump-fascist movement’s escalating assault on democracy and society. Biden’s presidency has done little to heal the trauma.

Moreover, the Trump movement’s power — as demonstrated in the nationwide campaign to severely restrict voting rights — is re-traumatizing many Americans who have clung to the delusional belief that the Trump nightmare was finally over after the 2020 election. In fact, the events of Jan. 6 and its aftermath have made clear that the country’s fascist nightmare is just beginning.

To tell Democrats and other Biden supporters that in all likelihood he will face impeachment in the not-too-distant future, and that salvation is not at hand, is to inflict an emotional and psychological injury. For many people, the truth about America’s crisis of democracy is unbearable.

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe this scenario won’t play out. During a recent interview with Newsmax TV, Sen. Lindsey Graham continued his demands that Joe Biden be impeached for “dereliction of duty” because of conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Graham told Newsmax host Eric Bolling, “I think the guy deserves to be impeached for this,” citing an “invasion” by migrants and immigrants from Latin America and Haiti.

Last month, Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced articles of impeachment against Biden and other senior members of his administration. Those articles were co-sponsored by several other members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, including Reps. Andy Biggs, Jeff Duncan, Ralph Norman, Louie Gohmert and Jody Hice. Their purported subject was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, with Boebert demanding the removal of not just Biden but also Vice President Kamala Harris, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Boebert was incorrect that Blinken is next after Pelosi in the presidential line of succession — that would actually be Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Senate president pro tempore.)

It is tempting to mock Boebert and her allies as fringe characters untethered to reality. In fact, that’s a grave mistake.

Boebert, Hawley, Gohmert, Greene, and other Trump-Republican neofascists are the future-present of the Republican Party. In that way, they are a type of bellwether and the standard-bearers for the Republican fascist party and larger anti-democracy movement.

Even setting aside the prospect of impeachment, Biden’s presidency faces other serious challenges as well. Painful as this is for Democrats, a new poll suggests that Biden and Trump are now roughly even in terms of favorability. The Hill offers details:

Forty-eight percent of respondents say they have a positive view of Trump compared to 46 percent who say they have a favorable opinion of his successor. Biden’s favorability is slightly underwater, however: 49 percent of those surveyed said they have an unfavorable view of the current president, while slightly less — 47 percent — report an unfavorable opinion of Trump. 

The findings are a remarkable shift for Biden, who repeatedly outperformed Trump’s favorability numbers throughout the early months of his presidency.

But multiple crises, including a surge in new COVID-19 infections in recent months and the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, have bruised public perceptions of Biden. 

Fifty-one percent of respondents now say Trump was a better president than Biden, while 49 percent prefer the White House’s current occupant, the poll shows.

Of course, polls represent only a snapshot in time. But in combination with a Republican-fascist movement that is gaining momentum and increasingly willing to endorse or condone political violence as a way of getting and keeping political power, there is ample reason for concern. 

As I wrote in my earlier essay on Biden’s impeachment:

Donald Trump will either be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee or play the role of kingmaker. Impeaching Joe Biden will be a way of further weakening the Democratic Party by forcing it to fight on multiple fronts, making it easier prey for Republicans and the larger neofascist movement. Moreover, a Biden impeachment will excite Donald Trump’s worst impulses, and those of his followers, who will likely engage in more acts of political violence against their perceived enemies. In the end, the events of Jan. 6 may merely have been a preview for what lies ahead.

If Democrats — and all Americans who still support democracy — open their ears and listen carefully, they can hear the sound of a not-so-distant train barreling towards them. But they are still sitting on the tracks and have done almost nothing to save themselves. Inaction is not an option and compromise is not possible: Fascists and authoritarians are only encouraged by such behavior.

The window of opportunity for action is closing quickly. But before Americans bestir themselves to act, they must come to understand that the threat is real and the danger is here.

Democrats extend Trump drug policy that widened racial disparities — now Biden wants to keep it

Congress quietly used last week’s government funding bill to extend a Trump-era drug policy that is widely perceived as deepening racial disparities in criminal sentencing. Criminal justice groups say the policy will worsen mass incarceration and lead to increased numbers of overdoses — but for unclear reasons, the Biden administration is pushing to make the policy permanent.

In 2018, the Drug Enforcement Agency under former President Trump used its emergency authority to preemptively criminalize an unknown number of substances it considered “fentanyl-related,” but without any health analysis by government agencies to determine each substance’s potential for abuse and lack of therapeutic potential. The DEA classified all these variants of fentanyl as Schedule I drugs — the same class as heroin and cocaine — even if they have no realistic potential for abuse. 

This was especially noteworthy given that fentanyl itself — a powerful synthetic opioid that is used as pain medication and is also widely available on the black market — is a Schedule II drug, meaning it has potential for abuse but also medical value. Congress has codified and extended the policy multiple times since, including a three-month extension that was quietly added to the bill to avert a government shutdown last week. The move applied decades-old mandatory minimum sentences for this newly invented class of fentanyl-related substances.

“It’s a totally novel approach — to criminalize something before it’s even determined to be harmful,” Laura Pitter, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s US Program, said in an interview with Salon. “There’s concern that they’re going to try to apply this to other types of substances going forward as well,” she said.

Human Rights Watch was one of more than 140 advocacy groups that called on Congress and the Biden administration to allow the policy to expire. Congress extended it anyway.

“As we approach the 50-year milestone of President Nixon’s announcement of the War on Drugs, there is ample evidence that these unscientific policies destroy communities, entrench racial disparities, and do nothing to reduce drug supply or demand,” the coalition said in a letter to congressional leaders.

The coalition sounded the alarm on the rise of overdoses from fentanyl analogs but says “drug interdiction does not address the root cause of these overdoses,” pointing instead to factors like economic instability, alcohol use, and mental health challenges.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is described as 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin, is available legally by prescription and is used in hospitals to treat severe pain. Most fentanyl and fentanyl analogs found in recreational drugs are manufactured in illegal laboratories. Some of these fentanyl analogs can be far more potent than the prescription drug, but most have not been extensively researched and in some cases are essentially “biologically inactive.” Fentanyl and its analogs are sometimes added to other street drugs, including heroin and cocaine, and users are often unaware their drugs are laced with a fentanyl-related substance. Nonetheless, prosecutors can seek mandatory 20-year sentences if a user is found with just a trace amount of a fentanyl analog in a mixture of fewer than 10 grams.

“When there’s such a broad classification of anything that’s chemically similar, I think it really opens up this opportunity for substances that don’t have any impact on the body or brain to land as a drug that can be deeply criminalized,” said Ellen Glover, campaign director for drug policy, harm reduction and criminal justice at the grassroots network People’s Action, in an interview with Salon.

As a result of the class-wide scheduling, fentanyl analogs now involve higher penalties than many other drugs. Pitter said there are “huge racial disparities in the way these prosecutions are carried out and the impact they have on Black and brown communities in particular.”

Indeed, an analysis released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission earlier this year found that nearly 70% of those sentenced for fentanyl analogs in the year after the policy was enacted were Black or Latino.

Proponents of the policy have argued that it helps law enforcement target illegal manufacturers and get ahead of black-market chemists who tweak the chemical structure of drugs to evade regulation. But data shows that only about 10% of prosecutions have targeted the most serious offenders like importers, distributors and leaders.

“They’re not going after the factory. The largest percentage of these prosecutions are low-level, they’re not kingpins,” Pitter said. “The people who are really going to be harmed by this continued over-criminalization are going to be the people at the lowest level of the drug food chain, the ones who are the users.”

In fact, existing laws already allowed prosecutors to charge people found in possession of fentanyl analogs and much of the fentanyl panic has been “fueled by misinformation,” according to a study published by the National Institutes of Health. This situation has made it more difficult to treat drug users while encouraging “hyper-punitive criminal laws,” the study concluded.

“The more we criminalize substances, the more it pushes people who use drugs into the shadows, where they are less inclined to access support or care because they’re afraid of the criminalization impacts,” Glover said, pointing to the “skyrocketing overdose death rate.”

The number of overdose deaths from synthetic opioids hit a record high in 2019 and continued to rise in 2020 amid the COVID pandemic.

Since the class-wide scheduling of fentanyl analogs went into effect, “overdose rates have skyrocketed, so criminalization is not an effective approach to trying to curb overdose deaths,” Glover said. “We want to save lives, we want to stop them from overdosing. We know that science and evidence show us that we need to invest in public health solutions like treatment and harm reduction. There’s lots of evidence to support that.”

Pitter said she worries that the crackdown on fentanyl and its analogs could mirror the infamous increase in mass incarceration caused by the nationwide crackdown on crack cocaine in the 1980s and ’90s.

“It’s a continuation of the same policies and a failure to learn from the mistakes of the past,” she said.

The DEA has lobbied Congress for years to make this policy permanent. Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have sponsored the FIGHT Fentanyl Act, which would classify fentanyl analogs as schedule I drugs indefinitely while removing some mandatory minimums.

A spokesperson for Portman told Salon that his bill addresses concerns about mandatory minimums while empowering law enforcement.

“Sen. Portman addresses both concerns through his FIGHT Fentanyl Act, which he introduced this year — the only bipartisan proposal that would permanently schedule fentanyl analogs,” the spokesperson said, claiming that “we took into account feedback from the criminal justice reform community to ensure that mandatory minimum sentences are not automatically applied,” while also sending “a message to the makers of these deadly drugs that we are serious about addressing this problem by giving law enforcement the tools it needs to keep these substances from coming across our borders.”

The Biden administration has similarly proposed making the class-wide scheduling permanent while removing all quantity-based mandatory minimums. This proposal would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to remove or reschedule individual fentanyl analogs that are found not to possess a high potential for abuse.

“By acting on these recommendations, Congress can take decisive action against the fastest growing driver of overdoses in the country, while protecting civil rights and encouraging scientific research,” Regina LaBelle, the acting director of National Drug Control Policy, said in a statement.

Glover said the proposed changes have not addressed concerns raised by People’s Action “at all.”

“The truth of the matter is that criminalization does nothing to save lives,” she said. “If the goal is to end overdose deaths, then this is not the solution.”

Pitter said the proposal addresses “some” of the concerns raised by advocacy groups but “it’s not just mandatory minimums that are the problem, it’s prosecution. It’s still criminalizing possession and putting people through the system.”

Pitter noted that the Biden administration’s proposal would create a complex mechanism for people who are wrongly prosecuted under the scheduling policy to have their prosecutions reversed retroactively if it is later found that the substance they possessed should not have been criminalized in the first place.

That byzantine loophole amounts to an “acknowledgment that overcriminalization is going to happen and people are going to be prosecuted wrongly for this,” Pitter said. “Undertaking an initiative like that is incredibly time-consuming and you’ve already put somebody through the entire process of prosecution. And they’ve already lost everything. Their job, their lives.”

Advocates have increasingly called for drug decriminalization, pointing to successes in countries like Portugal, which has seen drug overdose deaths drop by more than 80% since it decriminalized drugs like heroin in 2000.

“Use and possession of drugs should not be criminalized to begin with,” Pitter said. “There should be a health-based approach to drug policy and it should be grounded in providing people with the treatment that they need, not arresting their way out of this crisis.

“They should be focused on providing treatment and testing kits that allow people to test for the presence of these types of harmful substances in their drugs,” she said, adding that such “health-based approaches” were not even included in Biden’s proposed policy.

Despite the absence of such public health strategies, were not included in the proposal but LaBelle of the National Drug Control Policy has urged Congress to fund Biden’s budget request, saying it “includes $10.7 billion to expand access to substance use prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery support services.”

Other advocates say that’s not enough. People’s Action is instead backing the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act, which would expand access to medication-assisted drug treatment, and the Support Treatment and Overdose Prevention (STOP) of Fentanyl Act, which would invest in harm reduction policies like overdose prevention and expanded access to treatment.

“I hope and expect that Congress has learned its lesson from 50 years of failed drug policies,” Glover said, “and that we’ll follow a new path forward that supports public health solutions.”

This liberal activist poses as a MAGA devotee and gets prominent GOPers to say “revealing things”

What MAGA Republicans say during their Fox News appearances and what they’re actually thinking can be two different things. Lauren Windsor, a liberal activist and executive director of American Family Voices, has been doing a type of undercover work by acting like a MAGA Republican and getting prominent Republicans to tell her what they’re really thinking — and according to New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel, she can be quite convincing.

Gabriel, in an article published on October 7, explains, “Posing as a true believer — in (President Donald) Trump or a stolen 2020 election — Ms. Windsor approaches Republican leaders at party gatherings and tries to coax them into revealing things that they might wish to keep in the GOP family.”

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Windsorm has been able to convince MAGA Republicans that she is one of them and has, according to Gabriel, “turned a hidden camera, a Tennessee drawl and a knack for disarming her targets with words of sympathetic conservatism into a loaded political weapon.”

“Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio confided in her that Donald J. Trump would soon announce he was running again for president in 2024,” Gabriel reports. “Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, revealed to her that he could not publicly press his anti-abortion agenda for fear of losing independent voters…. Her encounter in December 2020 with Tommy Tuberville, then a senator-elect from Alabama, elicited the first real evidence that some Republicans in the Senate would reject the Electoral College votes certifying Mr. Biden’s victory — a move based on groundless claims of fraud.”

Windsor, according to Gabriel, hasn’t been shy about saying outrageous things she doesn’t actually believe in the hope that Republicans will agree with them. For example, she once told far-right Republican Cecil Bell, Jr. — who serves in the Texas House of Representatives — “This is a Christian state, and Democrats are not Christian.” Bell wasn’t the least bit offended:

Gabriel notes that Windsor describes herself as an “advocacy journalist,” adding that “her methods fall beyond the pale of mainstream journalism, where reporters generally shy away from assuming false identities and secretly recording conversations.” And Windsor, according to Gabriel, “says her stings are justified by Republicans’ efforts to spread disinformation about the election and to weaken the nation’s democratic underpinnings through restrictive new voting laws and measures taking greater control over how elections are run.”

Windsor told the Times, “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures…. Acting like you’re one of them — you’re going to elicit different answers than if you have a reporter in somebody’s face and they know you’re a journalist.”

Here are 6 key findings from Senate Judiciary’s report on Trump election interference

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has released a sweeping report detailing how former President Donald Trump and a former high-ranking lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The Democratic-led committee’s 394-page document contains intricate details about the former president’s actions in the days after the presidential election was called for President Joe Biden. A number of bombshell claims were revealed in the report and ⁠— here are six key takeaways from it.

1. “President Trump repeatedly asked DOJ leadership to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to assist his efforts to overturn the election results.”

The report reveals Trump asked the Justice Department for assistance in overturning the election a total of nine times. The call history includes details about who Trump spoke with along with dates those calls took place.

  • December 15, 2020 – Oval Office meeting including incoming Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue (both men assumed office when William Barr left on Dec. 23)
  • December 23, 2020 – Trump-Rosen Call
  • December 24, 2020 – Trump-Rosen Call
  • December 27, 2020 – Trump-Rosen-Donoghue Call
  • December 28, 2020 – Trump-Donoghue Call
  • December 30, 2020 – Trump-Rosen Call
  • December 31, 2020 – Oval Office meeting including Rosen and Donoghue
  • January 3, 2021 – Oval Office meeting including Rosen and Donoghue
  • January 3, 2021 – Trump-Donoghue Call

2. “White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Acting Attorney General Rosen to initiate election fraud investigations on multiple occasions, violating longstanding restrictions on White House-DOJ communications about specific law enforcement matters.”

Between December 29 and January 1, Meadows pushed for Rosen to open an investigation into “at least four categories of false election fraud claims” being circulated by Trump, his campaign team, legal team and other allies. At the time, no substantial evidence of election fraud had been produced to support any of the claims. The report also breaks down the four key categories Meadows pressed Rosen about:

  • “Investigate various discredited claims of election fraud in Georgia that the Trump campaign was simultaneously advancing in a lawsuit that the Georgia Supreme Court had refused to hear on an expedited basis;
  • Investigate false claims of ‘signature match anomalies’ in Fulton County, Georgia, even though Republican state elections officials had made clear “there has been no evidence presented of any issues with the signature matching process.”
  • Investigate a theory known as ‘Italygate,’ which was promoted by an ally of the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and which held that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes. Meadows also asked DOJ to meet with Giuliani on Italygate and other election fraud claims.
  • Investigate a series of claims of election fraud in New Mexico that had been widely refuted and in some cases rejected by the courts, including a claim that Dominion Voting Systems machines caused late-night ‘vote dumps’ for Democratic candidates.”

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The report also notes that Meadows’ actions are in violation of policies that place limitations on communication between White House and DOJ officials in regards to certain law enforcement matters. This policy was put in place after the Watergate scandal.

3. “After personally meeting with Trump, Jeffrey Bossert Clark [former Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division] pushed Rosen and Donoghue to assist Trump’s election subversion scheme — and told Rosen he would decline Trump’s potential offer to install him as Acting Attorney General if Rosen agreed to aid that scheme.”

After having private conversations with Trump, Clark pressed Rosen and Donoghue to announce an investigation into election fraud and have legislatures in key swing states appoint alternate election officials. The report highlights a draft letter Clark sent to Rosen and Donoghue on December 28. The letter, which was addressed to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), the General Assembly Speaker, and Senate President Pro Tempore, included a number of recommended directives, many of which violated election laws.

In fact, Clark’s proposed action, which would have had the DOJ override an already-certified popular vote, was described as “a stunning distortion of DOJ’s authority,” according to the report:

“The letter was titled “Georgia Proof of Concept” and Clark suggested replicating it in “each relevant state.” The letter would have informed state officials that DOJ had “taken notice” of election irregularities in their state and recommended calling a special legislative session to evaluate these irregularities, determine who “won the most legal votes,” and consider appointing a new slate of Electors. Clark’s proposal to wield DOJ’s power to override the already-certified popular vote reflected a stunning distortion of DOJ’s authority: DOJ protects ballot access and ballot integrity, but has no role in determining which candidate won a particular election.”

4. “Trump allies with links to the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ.”

The report included a brief list of the Trump allies who have been accused of pressuring DOJ officials to do the former president’s bidding. Those individuals also had ties to the former president’s “Stop the Steal” movement and the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol that followed Trump’s rally on January 6.

They are:

  • Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.): The report indicates that the Republican lawmaker spoke directly to Donoghue about baseless claims of election fraud in his state.
  • Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano (R): As an avid Trump ally, Mastriano reportedly “spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account to provide transportation for Trump supporters to attend the ‘Save America Rally’ on January 6.” The report also indicates that he “was present on the Capitol grounds as the insurrection unfolded.” Like Perry, Mastriano also spoke with Donoghue in reference to unfounded claims of election fraud in Pennsylvania.
  • Trump campaign legal advisor Cleta Mitchell: Described as one of the earliest advocates for Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, the Senate report also notes Mitchell was a “participant in the January 2, 2021 call where Trump 5 pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ‘find 11,780 votes.'”

5. “Trump forced the resignation of U.S. Attorney Byung Jin (‘BJay’) Pak, whom he believed was not doing enough to address false claims of election fraud in Georgia. Trump then went outside the line of succession when naming an Acting U.S. Attorney, bypassing First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine and instead, appointing Bobby Christine because he believed Christine would ‘do something’ about his election fraud claims.”

When former U.S. Attorney General Pak’s investigative results did not align with the outcome Trump was hoping for, the outraged former president publicly berated him and described him as “a “Never Trumper.” The former president also bulldozed over protocol and the proper line of succession to appoint someone he believed would produce favorable results to help him overturn the presidential election.

6. “By pursuing false claims of election fraud before votes were certified, DOJ deviated from longstanding practice meant to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election.”

On November 9, 2020 the former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr released a memo that “directed prosecutors not to wait until after certification to investigate allegations of voting irregularities that ‘could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.'”

In doing this, the report emphasizes Barr “weakened” the DOJ’s policy to “avoid taking overt steps in election fraud investigations until after votes were certified, in order to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election.” His actions before and after the election disregarded the DOJ’s longstanding practice.

Senate votes to raise debt ceiling, with 11 Republicans joining Dems to break filibuster

The United States Senate passed a procedural motion that sets up a short-term extension of the debt limit.

The vote passed 61-38, with one vote in excess of the 60 votes required under Senate rules. The margin means that no single Republican can be declared the deciding vote by political opponents.

Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) announced on Thursday afternoon that there was a deal that would delay the prospective default until the first week in December.

Republicans and Trump allies blasted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for agreeing to the short-term extension.

Shortly before the vote, Trump put out a statement urging Republicans to block the deal.

“Republican Senators, do not vote for this terrible deal being pushed by folding Mitch McConnell. Stand strong for our Country. The American people are with you!” Trump said.

QAnon followers allege photo of Biden’s White House “set” proves Trump is still in charge

“QAnon John” whipped other followers of the conspiracy theory into a frenzy this week, when he shared a photo of the virtual White House set used by President Joe Biden on the social media app Telegram.

“In case you needed any more proof you are definitely watching a movie with a fake ‘president,'” John Sabol, who has 69,630 followers on Telegram, wrote Wednesday alongside a photo of the stage in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is frequently used for photo ops.

“Look no further. I challenge you to find me one picture like this while Trump was at the White House…I’ll wait,” Sabol wrote.

Newsweek notes that Trump made use of the same stage while in office, including on July 24, 2020, when he signed a series of executive orders aimed at lowering prescription drug prices.

According to Newsweek, “QAnon John” Sabol’s post had been viewed 17,800 times by Thursday afternoon, with many agreeing that the photo of Biden proves Trump is still in charge.

“But, several others queried why positions unpopular to Republicans and Libertarians, such as vaccine mandates, would be passed if Trump was somehow still in power,” Newsweek reported. “Many QAnon followers have believed President Biden is not actually in control of the country and have desperately looked for any clues to back up their unfounded claims. In June, a number of QAnon followers claimed they could see former President Trump in a reflection of a window in a photo posted on the POTUS Instagram page that showed President Biden in the Oval Office.”

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Stephen Miller, who served as one of Trump’s top advisers, also shared a photo of Biden’s virtual set on Wednesday, calling it “bizarre.”

“The reason Biden uses this bizarre virtual set for televised meetings—and not an actual room like East Room, Cabinet, Oval, Roosevelt, Sit Room, etc.—is because it allows him to read a script directly from a face-on monitor (& w/out teleprompter glass that can be seen on camera),” Miller wrote.

White House reporter Andrew Feinberg responded to Miller’s tweet with a photo of Trump reading from a teleprompter.

“Like this?” Feinberg wrote.

Major film and TV crew unions authorize nationwide strike

For the last year and change, the movie and TV industry has been struggling with the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although a lot of studios and streamers seem to have gotten that at least somewhat under control, there’s a new issue on the horizon: a potential nationwide strike from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), whose 60,000 members work on film and TV sets across the country.

For a while, IATSE president  Matthew Loeb has been negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a couple of contracts representing 36 unions at all, according to Deadline. “Throughout the bargaining process,” the union has said, “the AMPTP has failed to work with us on addressing the most grievous problems in their workplaces, including:

  • Excessively unsafe and harmful working hours.
  • Unlivable wages for the lowest paid crafts.
  • Consistent failure to provide reasonable rest during meal breaks, between workdays, and on weekends.
  • Workers on certain ‘new media’ streaming projects get paid less, even on productions with budgets that rival or exceed those of traditionally released blockbusters.”

The other day, the IATSE announced that an overwhelming majority of its members had voted to authorize a nationwide strike, with a huge percentage of the members turning out to vote. That’s a lot of bargaining power.

“The members have spoken loud and clear,” Loeb said in a statement. “This vote is about the quality of life as well as the health and safety of those who work in the film and television industry. Our people have basic human needs like time for meal breaks, adequate sleep, and a weekend. For those at the bottom of the pay scale, they deserve nothing less than a living wage.”

I hope that the studios will see and understand the resolve of our members. The ball is in their court. If they want to avoid a strike, they will return to the bargaining table and make us a reasonable offer.

The IATSE has never held a nationwide strike before. Per Deadline, they have the support of 100s of members of Congress, Hollywood’s other unions, and “top tier Tinseltown stars.”

Studios and streamers take polite tone in talking about negotiation

On the flip side of things, reps from the AMPTP said that the organization “remains committed to reaching an agreement that will keep the industry working.”

We deeply value our IATSE crew members and are committed to working with them to avoid shutting down the industry at such a pivotal time, particularly since the industry is still recovering from the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. A deal can be made at the bargaining table, but it will require both parties working together in good faith with a willingness to compromise and to explore new solutions to resolve the open issues.

Are we in for another shutdown of film and TV? Let’s see.

Meet the Christian climate scientist who wants to de-politicize the climate crisis conversation

How does a climate scientist get someone — particularly someone on the right — to care about climate change? When I met Katharine Hayhoe, my first impression was that she would make a really good host of a children’s science show. Hayhoe’s bright tone, energy and ability to speak about complex scientific concepts suggests this. So it may not surprise you that she is both the host of the PBS kids series “Global Weirding” on YouTube and a climate scientist who has been called “one of the nation’s most effective communicators on climate change” by The New York Times. 

Hayhoe, who stopped by “Salon Talks” to speak with me about her new book “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case of Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” is chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, and one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. The climate scientist was inspired to pursue a career in science by her science teacher father and happens to be an Evangelical Christian from Texas.

It’s always been important to Hayhoe to make the conversation around our climate crisis a fluid discussion, rather than a dirty subject. “I had no idea that science was something that ‘girls didn’t do’ until I signed up for grade 11 physics,” she says. Hayhoe soon learned that very few girls were studying astrophysics, and was hooked. Hayhoe’s early college studies taught her a lot about environmental issues, and opened her mind to the fact that climate change is not only an environmental issue: it is a health issue, a food issue, an economic issue, a national security issue and a humanitarian issue that she says affects the people “who’ve done the least to contribute to it.”

Hayhoe calls climate change the most divisive issue of our time. She suggests that the way to talk to people you don’t agree with is to first find common ground on something before you approach the topic.

“I care about climate change because it’s who I am,” she notes. Later on, Hayhoe writes: “to care about climate change, you only have to be a human living on this planet, not change yourself.”

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

As always, the following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Before we get into climate science and where it is today, could you take us back to girlhood, Katharine, and why you chose this career path?

I grew up with a science teacher dad, who thought and taught us that science is the coolest, most interesting thing that anyone could possibly study. I had no idea that science was something that girls didn’t do until I remember I signed up for grade 11 physics. And my friends were like, “physics? You’re taking physics. Why are you taking physics?” I was like, “why not? It explains how the world works.” So I ended up studying astrophysics as an undergraduate student and absolutely loving the fact that we can study the outer reaches of the universe using nothing more than the brains and the instruments we can build here on planet Earth. But what changed my life was the breadth requirement that I took to finish my degree. I needed an extra class. And so I looked around and there was this brand new course on climate science over in the geography department, and I thought, that looks interesting. 

I had learned about climate change and biodiversity loss and deforestation and other environmental issues growing up. And I thought, well, there are environmental issues that environmentalist take care of and the rest of us wish them well. And I didn’t really think of myself as an environmentalist, but I took that class. And that’s where I learned that climate change is not only an environmental issue. It is a health issue, a food issue, an economic issue, a national security issue, and most of all, it is a humanitarian issue. Because climate change disproportionately affects the poorest and most marginalized, the most vulnerable people right here in the U.S., as well as on the other side of the world. It is profoundly unfair. And so I thought to myself, here’s this global problem that is affecting the people most who’ve done the least to contribute to it. How can I not do everything I can to help?

That is a high ideal and really admirable. In your new book, you teach readers how to have conversations that build genuine relationships and communities, and in so doing, making climate change accessible to all. Why do you feel this is an effective and accessible approach?

For the last decade or more, climate change has topped the list of the most politically polarized issues in the US. Today, what we think about climate change is not a factor of how educated we are, how smart we are, how much we know about science. It is simply where we fall in the political spectrum. But of course, the thermometer doesn’t give us a different answer if we’re Democrat or Republican. And a hurricane doesn’t knock on your door and ask you who you voted for in the last election before it destroys your house. Climate change affects every single one of us. To care about it we don’t have to be a certain type of person or vote a certain way.

I’m a scientist. I don’t want to be too extreme or anything, but I think most of us are humans living on planet Earth, so if we can come together on climate change, the most divisive issue in the country, what else might we be able to fix along the way? And while scientists are certainly trusted messengers when it comes to talking about climate change, the number one most trusted messenger is someone who you know. A friend, a family member, somebody you work with, somebody whose values, you share somebody who you trust. My goal is not for everybody to hear me talking about climate change. My goal is for everybody to hear somebody they know talking about climate change, not the science, but rather why it matters, what we can do to fix it and how every single one of us has a role to play.

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Well, absolutely. That approach makes a lot of sense.  In anything it’s not who you know, it’s who they know, and it’s how you talk to people and, and what the trust factor is. How do you think the idea of climate change became so polarizing? You mentioned how Democrats and Republicans have historically had a shared understanding—at least years ago. But that is certainly not the case today.

They absolutely did way back when, so what happened? It was deliberately polarized. It was no accident. Why? Because those who hold the balance of power and wealth in this world, and 90 companies are responsible for two thirds of heat trapping gas emissions since the dawn of the industrial era. And many of those biggest companies are also in the list of the richest companies in the world by revenue. 

When they realized that climate action was imminent, that record breaking heat waves, that NASA scientists testifying to Congress, that the United Nations was starting to write reports about this, back in the late eighties, early nineties, when these companies realized their bottom dollar was on the line, they decided we are going to invest, literally invest in muddying the waters in confusing people on the science, on convincing politicians to reject the science and vote against climate action.

And there’s another incredible book called “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway that actually explains how they went out and they literally hired fake experts, merchants of doubt, to confuse us about this issue and to delay action as long as possible. That’s why we’re so divided. It was not an accident it was done to us deliberately.

Right now, there is an overlap of people who don’t believe in getting the COVID-19 vaccine and also deny climate change. What is the shared ideology there?

Climate denial rarely occurs as a standalone issue. Rather, it’s almost always part of this toxic stew of issues. And before I block someone on social media, for example, where I get attacked, literally every single day, I — yes, I click on their profile because I want to know who wakes up and says, “Oh, I’m going to just pour a vitriol over the head of some woman I’ve never met before because she’s a scientist telling us about what the science says.” I want to know who these people are.

And not just nine times out of ten, but more like 99 times out of a 100, their profile, their timeline is all about the issues of today. They’re anti-mask. They are anti-vax. Trump won the election. They don’t like immigrants. It’s this toxic stew. 

We see this not just in the US. We see this in Canada where they hate the prime minister. They love oil and gas. And they’re very patriotic. We see this in the UK where almost everybody who is pro-Brexit, also denies climate change. We see it in Australia. It is a symptom of the polarization that divides us, not the cause.

A large part of your breakdown of teaching people to understand and engage with climate science goes back to your own belief system. That’s a huge tenet of your book and your philosophy, more broadly. You open up about being a Christian and why you want people to know that about you.

The reason why I care about climate change is because of who I am. Too often, we feel like we’re told that if we don’t care enough about climate change, if we aren’t doing enough about climate change, it’s because who we are, what we believe, our priorities are wrong. And then underneath that is a sense of judgment. “You’re wrong. You’re a bad person. You need to change to be more like me or this person in order to do the right thing.” And I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t really motivate me to change.

I recommend to people start with sort of an inventory of who you are. My inventory starts with the fact that I’m a Christian, and that’s actually why I became a climate scientist instead of an astrophysicist — because climate change is so profoundly unfair, and it affects the poorest and most marginalized people most. I’m also a mom. I’m doing this because of my son. And I’m part of a great group called Science Moms, where it’s all about moms and parents. I’m pretty sure there’s a few dads who snuck in too. Any mom who wants to know more about climate change and wants to act on climate change, that’s what Science Moms is for. 

I live in Texas, which is one of the most vulnerable states in the U.S. to climate impact and also has the greatest potential for clean energy. I’m from Canada, which is being impacted tremendously by wildfires and floods. I love outdoor sports and I love skiing. And I want snow in the winter. These are the things that I love. These are the things that I am, and these are the ways that I can start conversations with people who share those interests or values. I’ve even had conversations over knitting. 

You’re different and everybody else is different. We need to find the things that we care about, the things that make us us, and connect with other people who share those values, those experiences, those passions. And show how whoever we are, whether we could be somebody in the military. We could be somebody who plays tennis. We could be a birder. We could be a young person. Whoever we are, we are already the perfect person to care about climate change.

Let’s talk a little bit about the actual science. Everywhere you turn today in America, we’re facing natural forces that affect our lives in great and really challenging ways. I’m in North Central New Jersey. We had the tail end of Ida come here and had worst flooding with some deaths than anybody has seen in 50 years. There are devastating heat waves, hurricanes, floods, wildfires. Can you explain why the intensity of hurricanes and wildfires is greater than ever?

First of all, we know that we’ve always had heat waves and floods and hurricanes and wildfires. But often people are like, “Oh, well, it’s been bad before, so why are you saying it’s worse today?” But what climate change is doing as a threat multiplier is it’s making them worse. It’s as if wherever we live, we already have two sixes on our dice. We have a chance of throwing that double six, that heat wave, that wildfire, that hurricane. But as the world warms, decade by decade it’s as if it’s sneaking in and taking another number and turning it into a six then another one, and then a seven. And all of a sudden, we’re rolling double six after double six and then instead double sevens. And we’re saying, “what is this? What is wrong?”

Here’s the actual mechanisms at work. As it gets hotter and dryer out West, wildfires are burning greater area. And the wildfire season is longer. Most wildfires out West are the results of accidental human ignition. Only 7% are deliberate arson. And then there’s a few that are started by lightning. But here’s the difference. Imagine that you accidentally drop a match into a pile of green wet wood. What happens. Not much. And then imagine you drop that match accidentally into a pile of bone, dry kindling, with a lot of twigs and dry leaves. I mean, it just goes off. That’s the difference that climate change makes. 

With hurricanes, or cyclones or typhoons like they’re called different parts of the world, they’re really unique storms that are literally powered by warm ocean water. It’s as if they’re plugged into the ocean. Well, 93% of the extra heat being trapped inside the climate system, by this blanket of heat trapping gases, that we are wrapping around the planet when we did up and burn fossil fuels, 93% of that heat is going into the ocean where it’s powering stronger storms. We don’t see that hurricanes are getting more frequent, but after they formed, there’s so much more energy there that they are intensifying faster, they’re getting bigger, they’re slowing down a bit, they’re getting stronger and they have a lot more rainfall associated with them than they would have had 50 or a hundred years ago.

What’s crazy is we scientists are even starting to be able to put numbers on how much worse climate change made this. So the crazy heat wave that they had out West — it was 118 degrees in Portland and that poor Canadian town broke the all-time high temperature record, not one, not two but three days in a row. Scientists have found that that heat wave was virtually impossible without climate change. 

A crazy wildfire season that we had in Canada three or four years ago, they showed that climate change increased the area burned by a factor of 7 to 11 times more area burned. Hurricane Harvey that caused over a hundred billion dollars worth of damage, it’s estimated that about 40% of the rain that fell during that event, and three quarters of the economic costs were because of climate change, making it bigger with a lot more rain. We can put dollar signs on just how much worse climate change is making it. And those dollar signs are not good.

I’m a believer that with the environment that nature always wins. I teach my kids to never turn their back on the ocean because nature always takes over, eventually. But we are doing a terrible job of impeding her. What are actionable steps on small, medium and large scales?

The first, most actionable step might surprise us. I’m not going to say our diet. I’m not going to say solar panels or our car. The first most important step we can do is the thing that we’re not doing. We are not talking about this issue. Two-thirds of us across the U.S don’t even hear somebody else talking about it even occasionally. And here’s the connection. If we don’t talk about something, why would anyone care? Why would they know we care? And why would they ever want to do anything to fix it? So having those conversations, not about the science, but about why it matters what’s happening where we live and about solutions that are happening, that we are doing ourselves in our personal lives or that others are doing, or that, “Hey, like a school like ours, they’re doing this. Why isn’t our school doing this?” Another town about the same size as us, “they’re doing this? Why isn’t our town doing this”, their company, maybe one of our competitors, “they’re doing this. Why aren’t we doing that too?” Using our voices to advocate for change in the spheres where we’re embedded is so important. That is literally the only thing that has changed the world before. 

But of course, a lot of what I talk about is not just what other schools or cities or businesses are doing. I talk about what I do myself too. So looking for a carbon calculator, there’s a great one that the University of California Berkeley has called the cool calculator. Step on the carbon scales, figure out where your carbon emissions come from and then figure out, “Hey, food is a big part of my emissions. So I’m going to change the way I grocery shop.” I don’t load up the freezer with all these things that end up going bad that I never use, or wow, we eat a lot of meat. We did not need to be doing that. Let’s look at some plant-based recipes we can use to sort of eat lower down the food chain. 

For me personally, I did this about 10 years ago and I was really surprised to find out that the biggest part of my personal footprint was my travel. And I’m not talking about vacations. I’m talking about to scientific meetings and to tell people about climate change. I made a conscious decision pre-COVID to transition 80% of the talks I gave to virtual talks — and this is back when people weren’t doing virtual talks.

And when I travel, I bundle things. So I’m going somewhere to do multiple events at the same time. Sometimes as many as 20 events and just four or five days in one place. I’m maximizing both my time and the carbon I produce. But I don’t just do it. I talk about it. I post on my website whenever anybody asks me to give a talk, I share my policy with them. I talk about it in interviews. I encourage my colleagues to do the same. Some of the places I’ve given talks, they’ve been like, “Wow, we’ve never done this before. And it worked out great. We’re going to do this more”. So the influence is not just me. The influence is that other people are making that change. And how do people make that change when we use our voice to talk about it?

Especially in COVID times with people working remote, I was hoping that companies would change their policies on required travel to save on airline emissions and costs. But that being said, we can only do what we can do in our everyday lives. You mention in the book that when you do speeches you don’t mention “climate” and “change” together when you’re talking to certain audiences. So how do you reach these audiences and get through to people who are skeptical?

Well, you begin your conversation with something that matters to them. And not something that they disagree on, but something that you agree with them. If you don’t know what that is, then begin with questions rather than statements. Find out what makes them tick, find out what they’re passionate about. If I’m asked to speak to a certain group and I don’t know what they’re about, I ask them things.

One time, I was asked to give a talk at a big fundraising dinner for a women and children’s shelter. And obviously that’s something that’s very near and dear to my own heart, but I was kind of curious, why did they invite a climate scientist to give this talk to a woman and children’s shelter and to their supporters?

I spent the day with the director Sherry, and she took me around the city introducing me to a lot of the people they work with and a lot of the facilities they have and sharing stories about how when the heat wave comes it’s women and children who are homeless, who are on the streets, who are impacted by that heat. When it floods, they’re the ones who depend on public transportation to get to work or get to essential doctor’s appointments. And if they miss a doctor’s appointment, if they miss work, they can’t feed their family or often they fall off their treatment program. She talked about how when hurricanes hit, imagine people living homeless on the street when hurricanes hit. I learned so much just from listening to her. I took my presentation and I completely changed it to talk specifically about what’s happening there and how that’s affecting the people they care for.

I’ll never forget at the beginning of my presentation, one of their biggest sponsors came up to me and politely shook my hand, but I could read his mind. I knew he was like, “Why on earth did they invite her? What does she have to say to us that is relevant?” And at the end of the presentation, after I connected the dots between everything Sherry had told me and how climate change is affecting women and children and homeless people in that city, literally today, that same man came back up. And he’s like, “I have to be honest with you. I didn’t know why they invited you”. I was like, “Yeah, I can kind of see that.” And he’s like, “But now I understand climate change is making it worse. It’s the hole in the bucket. We can’t fix all the problems we have here today. If we don’t fix climate change too.” And I was like, “Yes, that’s exactly it”.

How did you react when Trump announced he’d be withdrawing United States for the Paris Agreement? Fast forward to now, how do you feel things are within the current administration on climate? Are we making progress? 

I remember when that announcement was made and it was frustrating and it was discouraging because he had such a chance to be a leader. He had an incredible chance to stand up and say, look, “I’m as conservative as all of you, but this is something that we’re just going to do, because it makes sense. I’m a shrewd businessman.” And it just makes sense from a business perspective. And absolutely it does make sense from a business perspective. He had a chance and he blew it. I was frustrated and I was discouraged, but I was also reminded that it’s not up to presidents to save us. 

You can have a president who does everything he can, but it still isn’t enough. It is up to every single one of us too. So under the Trump administration, there were cities, there were states, there were corporations, there were tribal nations who banded together. I think ultimately by the end of his administration, they represented 60% of U.S. carbon emissions. And they were still in on the Paris Agreement. It included cities like Houston, the center of oil and gas production in the US. They were still in, because it isn’t just up to the president. It’s up to every single one of us. 

Even though the US now has a president who is taking significant action on infrastructure and climate justice and a clean energy future, it still isn’t just up to the president. It’s up to us at, again, our place of work, our place of worship, the cities and towns that we’re in, the places where we make decisions every day. Those conversations need to be happening everywhere. And it’s certainly helpful to have the president moving in the right direction, but again, it’s not just up to him, it’s up to all of us to save ourselves.
 

Disney+ wanted Agatha all along – “WandaVision” spinoff starring Kathryn Hahn is in the works

Since the revelation that it was, in fact, “Agatha all along,” Marvel Studios’ limited series “WandaVision” has remained arguably the most popular Disney+ show in the MCU so far. And the arc for at least one major character from the series looks like it will be continuing: Kathryn Hahn, who played the fan favorite Agnes-turned-Agatha-Harkness, is currently working with Disney+ on a spinoff series of “WandaVision,” Variety reports.

News of the spinoff series follows the tremendous success of “WandaVision” in racking up a staggering 23 Emmy nominations — including best supporting actress in a limited or anthology series for Hahn as Agatha — ultimately taking home three of the awards in the craft categories.

“WandaVision” picks up shortly after the events of “Avengers: Endgame,” finding Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) so devastated by loss that she’s inadvertently created something of an alternate universe to cope. We eventually learn all of the residents of the town in her universe are being held against their will under mind control, making Wanda either the show’s protagonist or antagonist pending how you look at it.

The early episodes of “WandaVision” depict her idyllic family life with a mysterious, reincarnated version of Vision (Paul Bettany), her semi-human, android lover, and their two children who materialize almost out of nowhere. Hahn as her nosy neighbor Agnes serves as comic relief for much of the series, until it’s ultimately revealed that Agnes is Agatha, a powerful witch set on destroying Wanda and stealing her immense, chaos magic powers.

Wanda ultimately defeats Agatha by being true to herself, or something like that, and traps her under mind control as Agnes in West View, New Jersey in the limited series’ finale. At that point, it looked like Agatha’s story in the MCU was over — but it seems Marvel and Disney have noted her tremendous popularity among MCU fans, and have decided there may be more to her story to tell.

Hahn, who received an Emmy nomination for best supporting actress in a limited or anthology series, will be returning as Agatha to the dark comedy, and “WandaVision” head writer Jac Schaeffer will return to write the script. It’s unclear whether the spinoff will pick up where “WandaVision” left off, or perhaps function as a prequel giving us Agatha’s backstory as a witch who survived the Salem trials. In any case, as the MCU rapidly expands, introducing new heroes, villains and universes throughout Phase 4, why not just let Agatha tag along for the ride? 

Hahn’s “WandaVision” spinoff will join a rapidly expanding catalog of Marvel shows streaming on Disney+. Following “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and “Loki,” which will have a second season, “Hawkeye,” “Ms. Marvel,” “She-Hulk,” and other shows are set to stream on Disney+ in the near future.

Ted Cruz threatens to filibuster Democrats’ debt ceiling hike, throwing wrench into McConnell’s plan

As Republicans and Democrats slowly inch toward a temporary compromise on suspending the nation’s debt ceiling, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., signaled on Thursday that he plans to throw a wrench into the entire effort, suggesting that he won’t allow Democrats to avoid a Republican filibuster. 

“Democrats have the full ability to raise the debt ceiling as a part of reconciliation,” Cruz told POLITICO on Thursday. “They want political cover.”

“They have 100 percent control and ability to raise the debt ceiling on reconciliation. And the only reason they wouldn’t do so is to play political games,” the conservative added.

The development centers on the now months-long legislative standstill over the U.S. debt limit, a number that is set by Congress and has become a perennial issue in recent years. Economists have warned it will need to be lifted soon to avert a federal default. 

Over the past several months, Republicans and Democrats have played a game of political brinkmanship with respect to the debt ceiling, each prodding the other to make the first move. While Democrats have pushed for a bipartisan debt ceiling hike, Republicans have urged their colleagues across the aisle to execute the move via budget reconciliation – an arduous process with an uncertain time frame. Reconciliation would allow Democrats to avoid a Republican filibuster — but with a potential default looming, Democrats have begun to consider more seriously the idea of scrapping the filibuster altogether, at least temporarily. 

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In a Thursday detente, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., agreed to support a short-term debt extension, giving Democrats ample time to properly undertake the process of reconciliation. However, the deal will still need to garner a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, meaning that McConnell will need to get ten Senate Republicans onboard – a task that may prove challenging, given the current political climate among Republicans. 

“As you might expect, it’s not an easy one to whip,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., put it to POLITICO Thursday, adding that the task is a “difficult birthing process.”

Over the past several weeks, Republicans have pushed the specious notion that Democrats are largely to blame for the nation’s debt, which has climbed from $5 trillion in 2000 to about $27 trillion in 2021. But according to a ProPublica report, Donald Trump ran up the nation’s debt by nearly $8 trillion over the course of his presidency. 

Cruz has said that the Democrats want to “shift political blame” onto Republicans by asking the GOP to back a debt ceiling hike. 

“They basically want us to be aiders and abettors to their reckless spending and tax policies, and we just aren’t going to do it,” echoed Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., to The Washington Post this week.

But Democrats have argued that there is blame on both sides.

“Neither party can wash its hands of responsibility to pay the bills,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “Leader McConnell keeps talking about the new spending that Democrats have done. That’s not this debt.”

The Senate needs to reach an agreement before roughly Oct. 18 in order to avoid default, which could send the nation into a significant recession.

Top Senate Democrat calls for probe into DOJ lawyer following report on Trump’s pressure campaign

Senate Judiciary chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is calling on the D.C. Bar to probe whether Jeffrey Clark, the head of the Justice Department’s civil division during the Trump administration, attempted to “enlist” the agency in the former president’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results.  

“I respectfully request that the office of Disciplinary Counsel open an investigation to determine whether Mr. Clark, who is a member of the D.C. Bar, violated applicable D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct and should be subject to disciplinary action,” Durbin wrote in a Thursday missive. 

The letter comes on the heels of a Thursday report released by the Senate Judiciary Committee detailing Trump’s varied efforts to weaponize the Justice Department against then-President-elect Joe Biden. According to the report, Trump called upon the House Freedom Caucus, a coterie of hardline pro-Trump Republicans, as well as Rep. Scott Perry, a low-profile Pennsylvania conservative in his election coup attempt.

At Trump’s behest, Perry reportedly arranged a December call with Richard Donoghue, then the Justice Department’s second-in-command, asking Donoghue to look into the “things going on in Pennsylvania” with respect to ballot-counting. 

According to POLITICO, Perry also recommended to Donoghue that the then-acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, be replaced with Clark, who was seen as more sympathetic to Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. Back in December, Clark circulated a letter, obtained by ABC News, encouraging the Georgia legislature to convene a special session to probe allegations of election fraud. 

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“The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia,” Clark wrote at the time, massively overstating the department’s findings, which entailed no election-altering evidence of fraud. 

But Clark’s letter needed the approval of Rosen and Donoghue – and Donoghue shot the letter down, saying there was “no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this.”

Frustrated by the obstacles posed by Rosen and Donoghue, Trump at one point threatened to replace Rosen with Clark, but the plan disintegrated when it became clear that the entirety of the department’s top leadership would resign en masse if the replacement was made. 

Durbin is alleging that Clark, in his capacity as a DOJ official, violated “at least four” prohibitions in the D.C. Bar’s code of conduct.

“Lawyers admitted to the D.C. Bar swear an oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States,'” Durbin wrote. “It should go without saying that attempts to subvert a free and fair election do not support the Constitution.” 

Durbin’s isn’t the first request asking a state bar to investigate the apparent misconduct of Trump’s past and present allies. 

On Wednesday, a coalition of two dozen high-power attorneys asked the California Bar to investigate the activities of John Eastman, a right-wing attorney that reportedly drafted a six-point plan – now dubbed the “Eastman memo” – to undermine Biden’s win at Trump’s behest. The memo called for former Vice President Mike Pence to replace a number of electors in battleground states with Trump-appointed officials in order to turn the electoral count in Trump’s favor.

Texas tried — and failed — to rebrand Jim Crow tactics

The new Texas law that bans most abortions uses a method employed by Texas and other states to enforce racist Jim Crow laws in the 19th and 20th centuries that aimed to disenfranchise African Americans.

Rather than giving state officials, such as the police, the power to enforce the law, the Texas law instead allows enforcement by “any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state.” This enforcement mechanism relies solely on citizens, rather than on government officials, to enforce the law.

This approach to enforcement is a legal end-run that privatizes a state’s enforcement of the law. By using this method of enforcement, state officials are shielded from being sued for violating the Constitution, and the law is made, at least for a time, more durable.

The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the state on the grounds the law violated a woman’s constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability. In its suit, the Justice Department specifically cites one of the cases that was brought over a Texas Jim Crow law that excluded Blacks from participating in primaries, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1944.

Privatizing discrimination

Following Reconstruction in the South, Texas banned African Americans from voting in party primaries in a law adopted in 1923. This was an example of Jim Crow, a system of laws and customs that institutionalized anti-Black discrimination in the U.S.

When this state law was challenged before the Supreme Court and struck down in Nixon v. Herndon in 1927, the Texas Legislature responded in 1928 with a tricky maneuver much like the current Texas abortion law. Texas repealed the offending statute and enacted legislation that specifically delegated to political parties the power to determine “qualifications of voters in primary elections,” thus seeking to take the state out of the equation.

By putting that power in the hands of private parties, allowing them to discriminate against and prevent African Americans from voting, the state sought to avoid legal rules, based on the Constitution, that required “state action” before a law could be struck down. Essentially, the state contracted out the dirty work of denying Black Texans the right to vote.

In the landmark 1944 ruling in Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court “looked behind the law and ferreted out the trickery,” as expressed by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case at the court. The court ruled that no matter how “uninvolved” the state of Texas attempted to be, primary elections involved state action sufficient for purposes of a successful lawsuit under the 14th Amendment.

The court concluded that the constitutional right to vote “is not to be nullified by a state through casting its electoral process in a form which permits a private organization to practice racial discrimination in the election.”

Not giving up

Democratic Party members in Texas, bent on prohibiting African Americans from voting, turned to yet another privatization strategy to accomplish their objectives.

Since 1889, the “Jaybird Association” in Fort Bend County, a Democratic political organization that was made up exclusively of qualified white county voters, ran its own “pre-primary” to vet and select Democratic candidates for office. Blacks were excluded from these privately run contests. This selection process determined who would run in and likely win the Democratic primaries, which effectively meant only whites would gain those offices.

Blacks in the county sued. Yet again, in the 1953 ruling in Terry v. Adams, the Supreme Court invalidated this privately run primary process as a violation of the Constitution. As the court pointed out, the “Jaybird primary has become an integral part, indeed the only effective part, of the elective process that determines who shall rule and govern in the county.”

The court’s ruling invalidated similar privately enforced discrimination in voting in other states, such as South Carolina.

Resurrecting Jim Crow

The new law, formally called the Texas Heartbeat Act, constitutes a similar attempt by the state to privatize enforcement of state policy – all in an effort to prevent legal moves that would stop it from going into effect.

Texas has resurrected a decades-old technique that it used during the Jim Crow era to insulate its discriminatory laws from constitutional review in the courts. And by delegating enforcement authority to private individuals, Texas has transformed its population into a cadre of private law enforcers. Now that the federal government has sued the state over the law, the courts will be in a position to review the constitutionality of the statute.

Nevertheless, the statute raises grave issues about how states go about enforcing their policies. Will Texas voters appreciate that the state has resurrected a Jim Crow-era mechanism to avoid legal responsibility for its policies?

[Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Stefanie Lindquist, Foundation Professor of Law and Political Science, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Malaria, known to humans for millennia, finally has a vaccine. Here’s why it was so hard to develop

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended a broad rollout for a malaria vaccine after a pilot test showed that it was safe and could be effectively deployed in rural settings. Their historic announcement marks a turning point in the fight against malaria, as the first vaccine to exist for the disease that killed an estimated 400,000 people in 2019 (the most recent year for which updated data is available). Most deaths from malaria occur in sub-Saharan Africa; more than half of those deaths in 2019 were children under the age of 5.

The vaccine, dubbed RTS,S/AS01 (RTS,S) and also named Mosquirix, was made by GlaxoSmithKline. According to the pilot study’s results, the vaccine is 30 percent effective in reducing the risk of severe malaria, and 40 percent effective in reducing the risk of contracting malaria.

“This is a historic moment. The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control,” said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Using this vaccine on top of existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year.”

The vaccine is administered as a series of four shots when a baby is between five to six months old. The first three are given each a month apart. Then a fourth is administered nearly a year later when the child is nearly two. To date, more than 2 million shots have been administered in the vaccine’s pilot program to more than 800,000 children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi; very few serious side effects have been reported.

Notably, WHO’s stamp of approval doesn’t mean widespread vaccine access. The next step, WHO says, “will include funding decisions from the global health community for broader rollout, and country decision-making on whether to adopt the vaccine as part of national malaria control strategies.” The vaccine costs about $5 a dose.

“For centuries, malaria has stalked sub-Saharan Africa, causing immense personal suffering,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. “We have long hoped for an effective malaria vaccine and now for the first time ever, we have such a vaccine recommended for widespread use. Today’s recommendation offers a glimmer of hope for the continent which shoulders the heaviest burden of the disease and we expect many more African children to be protected from malaria and grow into healthy adults.”

The announcement comes at a time when vaccines are clearly on the public’s mind amid a global pandemic for a different disease, COVID-19. Yet unlike the COVID-19 vaccine, which was created in little more than a year after discovery of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, malaria has been known to humans since the dawn of recorded history; it is mentioned in texts from India’s Vedic Period (1500–800 BCE) and in Homer’s “Illiad” (~750 BCE). 

Given how long humans have been studying malaria, it is reasonable to ask why has it been so difficult to develop a vaccine for malaria — and why, in contrast, the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 was developed at such a fast pace. 

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Part of the answer lies in the nature of the diseases. Malaria is a parasite, not a virus like SARS-CoV-2, or influenza. Unlike a virus, parasites are far more complex.

“The malaria parasite is a complex eukaryotic organism; it has 5,000 genes, and the coronavirus has less than 10 genes,” Dyann Wirth, who chairs WHO’s Malaria Policy Advisory Group and is a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, explained to Salon. “In the case of malaria, the organism has 5,000 genes, so just to give you a sense, that’s as many genes as, say, a yeast organism.” Wirth noted that the malaria parasite is “a full independent living organism, with all the bits that it needs — whereas viruses invade a cell, and can’t actually replicate on their own.”

In other words, viruses like SARS-CoV-2 don’t live independently; they replicate only vis-a-vis the host’s cells. But in the case of malaria, the organism is alive on its own. (Most biologists don’t consider viruses to be “alive” in the technical definition of the word.)

“Parasites are sort of an adaptation of eukaryotic organisms where they have that same complexity, but they’ve evolved where they actually interact with the host and take some benefit from the host . . . they have all of their own machinery to replicate and to make proteins, and to make themselves available for transmission and so forth,” Wirth said.”So they need the host, but not in the in the same way that a virus does.” Wirth said this in part accounts for their increased complexity compared to viruses. 

On top of this, Wirth said, the malaria parasite has been able to evolve for millennia and has become both advanced and smart. Malaria is caused by the Plasmodium parasite, which is injected into a human when an infected female Anopheles mosquito bites a person. The parasite migrates to the liver, replicates itself and infects the blood. This can cause a fever, chills and flu-like symptoms. While children can die from this due to their weaker immune systems, healthy adults usually recover. But in the case of developing a vaccine, the protein is hidden from the immune system until it gets to the liver.

“There’s kind of what I would say, a shield strategy,” Wirth said. “And if you take and compare malaria parasites, you’ll find dozens of genes that are different, even between parasites that are circulating the same at the same time and in the same part of the world, and this antigenic diversity allows the organism to escape the human immune system as a population, not as an individual parasite.”

Unlike many viruses, malaria can infect a human host more than once. Once it gets to the liver, it expresses a whole new set of proteins, creating essentially a new infection.

This, in part, is why the efficacy of the new malaria vaccine is low compared to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

“Unlike a viral vaccine, where the vaccine gets lots of shots on goal or the immune system gets lots of shots on goal, for malaria, for the invading stage, there’s only one shot,” Wirth said. “It’s a binary thing, the infection is either prevented or it’s not.”

Plus, Wirth said, with the COVID-19 vaccines, billions of dollars and hundreds of people were working tirelessly on development.

“There were 135 [COVID-19] vaccine candidates, in the entire history of malaria vaccine research there’s maybe been five or so, or maybe 10, but there hasn’t been that same kind of investment,” Wirth said. “Would it have been successful? Hard to say, but certainly trying everything that you can imagine, all at once, did have an accelerating effect on the field.”

So, how does that malaria vaccine work? Rather than target the parasite itself, the vaccine targets the sporozoite protein that helps the parasite find the liver.

“The vaccine induces an antibody which prevents the sporozoite from invading the liver,” Wirth explained. “So it’s very much like the coronavirus vaccine or the flu vaccine, because it’s an antibody to a protein that’s found on the surface of the organism, which just prevents it from interacting with its host receptor.”

Wirth said she hopes the success of these vaccines will guide the scientific community into a new era of vaccine development.

“I hope it will unleash what will be a renaissance of thinking,” Wirth said.

Days before Jan. 6, Trump pushed “murder-suicide pact” in desperate bid to subvert election results

A report from the Senate Judiciary Committee reveals new details about former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

During an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 3, Trump pushed to install a loyalist as acting attorney general who would conduct additional investigations into his false claims of widespread election fraud, according to the New York Times.

In response, several top Department of Justice officials threatened to resign en masse if Trump went through with the plan. White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone also threatened to resign and said his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would step down, too.

“Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a ‘murder-suicide pact,’ one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat,” the Times reports.

The Senate committee’s report provides the “most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators,” according to the Times.

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“The interim report, expected to be released publicly this week, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off a series of events during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command,” the Times reports.

Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin, who chairs the committee, issued a statement saying the report suggests Trump would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”

“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Durbin said. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”

Read more here.

The Rochester garbage plate gloriously lives up to its name

Few dishes live up to their name the way the garbage plate does. I mean this as the highest possible praise.

The garbage plate is a beautifully American invention, pioneered in the region of our nation that also claims Susan B. Anthony, Kodak, Mormonism and the one true religion, Wegman’s. This legendary product of Rochester’s Nick Tahou Hots is a delicacy that perhaps could only have come out of a college town — a seemingly random assortment of low effort comfort foods layered like a carb trifle. And while it has been a while since I’ve been hungover, I still appreciate the garbage plate as one of my favorite types of cuisine — drunk food. If you can picture yourself shoveling it down on a curb somewhere at 3 in the morning, I promise I will eat it.

The garbage plate began its life as a classic meat and potatoes diner dish, a stick the ribs meal meant for a region that gets a hundred inches of snow every winter. Eventually, as What’s Cooking America reports, “College students asked Nick Tahou for a dish with ‘all the garbage’ on it. He concocted his original combo plate with two hamburger patties and a choice of two sides — usually some combination of home fries, macaroni salad, and beans.”  

A true garbage plate features something called Rochester hot sauce, which can best be described as a cross between bolognese and a sloppy joe, atop a cheeseburger or two. But it is also a dish forged in the fires of innovation, crafted from the leftovers of last night’s party. Got a few hot dogs on hand? The remnants of a bucket of chicken? Hate macaroni salad? Skip it! This is not exactly an haute cuisine process here, feel free to improvise. Anecdotally, I found one recipe for the garbage plate that suggests a case of Genesee as a side dish, but that one’s your call.

For my garbage plate, I use tater tots, because I love them best, and hold the burger. I use green onion, because this is a dish you might make when you’re feeling fragile and don’t want to deal with white onions. My portion size would not feed an entire football team, I know. Most radically, I eat mine in a bowl, not because this is a goddamn Sweetgreen but because it just seems like a more efficient vehicle for a mound of food. However you create yours, I promise it’ll be so good, you won’t even need a high blood alcohol level content to appreciate it.

 

***

Recipe: Rochester garbage plate

Inspired by The Spruce Eats and Savory Experiments

Serves 1, hungover or not

Ingredients:

  • 1 handful of frozen tater tots, French fries, or hash browns OR 1/2 cup of whatever leftover potatoes situation you have in the fridge (or more, because your judgment is questionable)
  • Macaroni salad
  • 1/2 cup or so of your preferred ground meat
  • 1 tablespoon of tomato paste (No tomato paste? Use a few spoonfuls of tomato sauce.)
  • Pinches of cumin and paprika if you’ve got them
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 scallion, chopped
  • Neutral oil for the pan
  • Hot sauce, yellow mustard, ketchup to taste
  • 1 slice of white bread

Directions:

  1. Preheat your oven and cook your frozen taters to package directions. It will probably take about 20 minutes.
  2. Meanwhile, heat the pan over medium heat and add your oil.
  3. Turn up the heat and add the meat, breaking it up and browning it.
  4. Add your tomato paste and stir into the meat mixture. You will likely need to add a splash of water to loosen it. Add your spices. Saute until everything looks cooked through and achieves your desired level of chunkiness. Keep over low heat while you plate up your garbage.
  5. When they’re ready, remove your potatoes from the oven and scrape into a bowl.
  6. Top potatoes with a big scoop of  macaroni salad. Add your meat either straight on top or adjacent. Top with your scallion and liberal squirts of your favorite condiments. Serve with a slice of supermarket white bread and possibly a few Tylenols.

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Republicans thought the Supreme Court could stealthily ban abortion. They were wrong

Late Wednesday night, there was finally the first snippet of good news this year in the never-ending abortion wars. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman temporarily blocked Texas’ near-total ban on abortions. The injunction was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Texas. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the ban on all abortions two weeks after a missed period — which are 9 out of 10 cases — “clearly unconstitutional.” 

Signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, Texas’ abortion ban sets up a bounty hunter system that allows any random stranger to claim sovereignty over a woman’s body and sue anyone who helped her abort a pregnancy. In his 113-page decision —  a searing and angry breath of fresh air for those Americans who believe women are people — Judge Pitman called the law an “unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.” 

This decision wasn’t just a rebuke to the misogynist Texas legislators who passed this law, but to the Supreme Court that upheld it.

Without hearing arguments, the highest court in the nation allowed Texas’ ban to go into effect through an unsigned “shadow docket” decision short enough to be written on a postcard. So Pitman put in the work that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court wouldn’t do. He listened to arguments, he examined the evidence, and he wrote a decision painstakingly explaining his reasoning. It turns out that banning abortion through the back door is not as easy as Republicans and the partisan hacks they installed on the Supreme Court thought it would be. 

And yes, conservatives clearly thought they could quietly overturn Roe v. Wade without the public noticing.

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The entire Texas abortion ban was built on a cloak-and-daggers strategy. The law itself was an effort to get around the problem of the news coverage that flows from clinics and reproductive rights suing the state for passing abortion bans. The “shadow docket” move was more of the same, allowing the Supreme Court to overturn Roe without coming right out and saying that’s what they did. As soon as the non-decision decision came down, the conservative propagandists fanned out, insisting that the Supreme Court ruling wasn’t really a Roe overturn but merely a “procedural ruling” that causes “no harm.”

But as Pitman’s decision demonstrates, that’s a flat-out lie.

His ruling cites numerous examples of harm that the Supreme Court ignored in issuing its paragraph-length decision, including to “a Texas minor who had been raped by a family member” and had to drive eight hours for care, and “another woman from Texas who had been raped” and struggled “to take extra time off from work to make the trip to Oklahoma, as well as find childcare for her children.” 

In one sense, this nonsense about how this is merely a “procedural” decision — as if people weren’t going to notice that 90% of abortions were banned in Texas — worked. Every time I tune into a cable news show discussion about abortion and the courts, the discussion is over “if” the Supreme Court will overturn Roe in the “future,” with little acknowledgment that they already did it through the back door. While the Supreme Court is hearing a more formal case in December — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — that will allow them to legalize abortion bans nationwide, the damage has already been done. And let’s face it, even when they do issue a more extensive ruling, they’re going to be deceptive about it and try to find some legal reasoning that allows abortion to be banned without coming right out and saying they’re overturning Roe. 

The reason conservatives want so much camouflage for their Roe overturn is not mysterious. Abortion rights are very popular, and there’s a real chance this could hurt Republicans electorally. Sexism and still-lingering American puritanism may cause all sorts of chaos in polling people’s moral judgments on abortion, but when people are asked point-blank about the right to get one, around three-quarters want it to stay put. Even 40% of people who call themselves “pro-life” want the right to abortion, because even they know, on some level, that being against abortion is easy until you need one. 

So really, it should be no surprise that approval of the Supreme Court has plummeted to a new low of 40%, down from 58% a mere year ago. Even more detailed polling shows that skepticism of the court has dramatically increased, with more Americans agreeing that Congress should do something to rein the court in — or abolish it altogether. Somehow, however, conservatives seem to be shocked that their efforts to ban abortion under the cover of darkness have not gone unnoticed.

The conservative justices behind the shadow docket abortion ban, for instance, have become incredibly whiny in the face of all the completely earned accusations that they are sleazy fundamentalists who are too cowardly to own their rejection of law and custom in their frenzied efforts to turn the U.S. into Gilead. In the past month alone, Amy Coney Barrett gave a protest-too-much speech denying she and other conservative justices are “partisan hacks,” Samuel Alito blamed the media and not his own actions for people disliking him, and Clarence Thomas accused people of wanting to destroy “our institutions because they don’t give us what we want, when we want it,” seemingly talking to a bunch of toddlers wanting candy, rather than citizens demanding basic human rights. 

Even the Texas anti-choice activists behind this ban seem to be caught flat-footed. As Jill Filipovic writes in the Atlantic, “abortion opponents are claiming to be surprised that the law is being used as written—and are perhaps realizing, belatedly, that their vigilante strategy comes with more than a few perils.”

It appears that the people behind this law thought the mere threat of a lawsuit would cause abortion providers to shut down and that actual enforcement — which would end up pitting the kind of repugnant people who would be abortion bounty hunters against sympathetic figures like doctors  — wouldn’t be necessary. At first, that seemed likely, as clinics across the state shut down services and sent patients out of state for help. But then a San Antonio-based physician, Dr. Alan Braid, performed an abortion and wrote a Washington Post op-ed about it, daring anti-choicers to sue him. And sure enough, the situation turned into a circus, with two disbarred attorneys from out of state — neither of whom actually oppose abortion rights — suing Dr. Braid. 

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John Seago, an anti-choice activist who helped pass this law, clearly recognizes the optics are bad here, whining to the New York Times that the lawsuits aren’t “valid attempts to save innocent human lives” and instead are “self-serving legal stunts.”

But here’s the thing: There is no other way this law could be enforced but through repulsive people filing lawsuits. Despite all the self-flattery about being “pro-life,” anti-choice activists are clearly motivated by misogyny, and don’t care about “life.” That’s been demonstrated in a million ways, most recently in the embrace of anti-vaccine/pro-COVID-19 policies by Republicans. So anyone who would sue, declaring sovereignty over a woman’s body and announcing his right to force childbirth on her, is going to be an unpleasant character. Seago knows this, I’m sure. He certainly sees the people who protest abortion clinics and how they don’t generally do the best job of concealing how much hate and sexual resentment fuels their politics. 

In a certain light, it makes a rough sense that conservatives thought they could get away with banning abortion through subterfuge. Americans have a long history of discomfort with the topic, and with talking about sex generally. Pro-choice activists are mostly women, making it easy for the right, in the past, to convince most Americans that threats to abortion rights are being overblown by hysterical feminists. And while abortion is common in one sense — 18% of pregnancies end in abortion, about 1 in 4 women will have one at some point — it’s not something most people deal with on a daily basis. It’s why the anti-choice movement has been so successful at gradually making abortion much harder to get without most people noticing. It’s just not something most people think about until they or a loved one needs access. 

But what conservatives are swiftly learning is Americans aren’t the prudes and sexist they thought we were. Attitudes about sex are rapidly liberalizing. For instance, 73% of Americans are fine with sex outside of marriage now, up from 53% twenty years ago. (And those who disapprove are hypocrites, as 95% of Americans reported having had premarital sex in 2006, a number that’s surely gone up since then.) And a majority of Americans agree that women have a long way to go to achieve equality, which is a good stand-in measure for whether or not people think sexism is wrong.

In light of these changes, it’s not a surprise that people are both outraged about the Texas abortion ban and unafraid to say so publicly. The fight to end abortion rights is, politically at least, going to be much harder than Republicans were clearly betting it would be. 

Sanders accuses Manchin of “sabotage” over demand to drop family, child care, Medicare provisions

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is pushing to drop many of the Democrats’ key priorities from President Biden’s Build Back Better plan — but has drawn a harsh rebuke from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for playing coy about what provisions he would actually support.

Manchin is pushing Democrats to pick just one of their three major proposed policies to help families, which include an extension of the enhanced Child Tax Credit, paid family medical leave, and subsidies for child care, according to Axios.

Democrats are scrambling to find a compromise between Manchin’s $1.5 trillion counteroffer and Biden’s $3.5 trillion BBB plan. Manchin and centrists in the House want to cut the number of programs included in the bill while progressives are looking to include as many of their priorities as possible, but are willing to shorten the timespan of programs in order to reduce the overall cost. Biden is seeking a compromise at around $2 trillion.

Manchin has also balked at the Democrats’ proposal to expand Medicare coverage to hearing, dental and vision, arguing that Congress first needs to “stabilize” the existing Medicare program. Manchin, who holds a large investment in a coal company and is a top recipient of campaign donations from energy firms, has also pushed back on Democrats’ proposals to combat climate change.

But months into these tense negotiations, other Democrats are getting restless at Manchin’s apparent refusal to say exactly what he would support.

“The time is long overdue for him to tell us with specificity, not generalities, we’re beyond generalities, with specificity what he wants and what he does not want,” Sanders said at a news conference on Wednesday. “And to explain that to the people of West Virginia and America.”

Sanders had similar criticism for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who has refused to talk to the press or her constituents about what she would accept but has ruled out supporting the $3.5 trillion price tag. Sinema, a top recipient of donations from pharmaceutical companies and industry groups lobbying to kill the bill, reportedly opposes the Democrats’ proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, and also opposes tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. Manchin has also expressed concerns about proposed tax hikes, but has signaled a willingness to reverse some Trump-era corporate tax cuts and supports the prescription drug bill, which could further complicate negotiations.

“Sen. Sinema’s position is that she doesn’t quote-unquote negotiate publicly,” Sanders said Wednesday. “I don’t know what that means. We don’t know where she’s coming from. Tell us what you want.”

Sanders this week declined to support a joint Democratic statement condemning last week’s protests against Sinema in her home state, where she was heckled during her class at Arizona State University and later confronted in a restroom. Sanders refused to sign the statement because it did not also include a “rebuke of her political views,” according to Axios.

During his own press conference, Manchin denied that he has been “vague” about his position.

“My number has been $1.5 trillion. I’ve been very clear,”  he told reporters, adding that he and Sanders “share very different policy and political beliefs” and suggesting that Democrats who back the larger Biden bill want to “turn our society into an entitlement society.”

Sanders accused Manchin and Sinema of trying to undermine their entire party’s agenda.

“Two people do not have the right to sabotage what 48 want, what the president of the United States wants,” he said.

Sanders further questioned whether Manchin considers protections for working families and measures to cut childhood poverty as examples of “entitlement.”

“Does Sen. Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to digest their food, and that they’re not entitled to hear and see properly?” he said. “Is that really too much to ask in the richest country on Earth — that elderly people have teeth in their mouth and can see and can hear?”

Sanders also observed that he could withhold support for the larger Build Back Better plan because it doesn’t include many of his most important priorities, such as Medicare for All. “But I’m not going to do that,” he said, because it “would be irresponsible.”

Mitch McConnell slammed by both Trump and Senate Democrats following debt ceiling standoff

Donald Trump accused Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., of “folding” in the current debt ceiling standoff after the legislator signaled that he would support a short-term extension, allowing the federal government to avoid default for the time being. 

“Looks like Mitch McConnell is folding to the Democrats, again,” Trump said in a Wednesday statement. “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand. Don’t let them destroy our country!”

For the past several months, Democrats and Republicans have been at a standstill in negotiating a new limit for the nation’s debt ceiling, which has skyrocketed from roughly $5 trillion in 2000 to about $27 trillion today. Democrats have argued for a bipartisan plan to raise the ceiling by October 18, when the country is expected to default if Congress fails to act. But McConnell has repeatedly encouraged the Democrats to do so on their own via budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation would avoid the inevitable filibuster Republicans would use to impede a Democratic-backed debt ceiling hike, but reconciliation would have been an arduous process with no guarantee of completion before the default deadline. 

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Trump, for his part, has been adamantly opposed to negotiating a debt deal with the Democrats, often chiding Republicans from the sidelines – even with the nation’s economy on the brink of collapse. 

“The way I look at it, what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country,” Trump said in a September statement. “Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.”

On Wednesday, McConnell offered a slight legislative detente, agreeing to let the Democrats suspend the debt ceiling until December. This will give the caucus more time to employ a budgetary tactic that would allow them to raise the ceiling without any Republican support. 

Democrats have widely heralded the move as a sign of McConnell finally backing down.

twitter.com/SenWhitehouse/status/1445852403023155204

“McConnell caved,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told a gaggled of reporters late Wednesday. “And now we’re going to spend our time doing child care, health care, and fighting climate change.” 

It’s possible that McConnell ultimately backed down because Democrats were threatening to “nuke” the filibuster in order to approve a debt ceiling suspension, as POLITICO noted. In fact, President Biden – who previously stressed the need to preserve the filibuster – recently said that scrapping it was becoming a “real possibility.”

“The filibuster is McConnell’s instrument of obstruction,” one Democratic senator told POLITICO. “He wants to protect that at all costs. He was at real risk of overplaying his hand as he faced the growing prospect that we would have 51 votes to waive it for the purpose of dealing with debt.”

Biden vs. Trump 2024: Even weirder and uglier the second time around

Time to dial it up to 11, as Nigel Tufnel would say.

If my fellow Louisvillian Dr. Hunter S. Thompson were still among us, this is when he’d drop multiple hits of acid, snort up enough marching powder to keep his shirts stiff for several months, drink copious amounts of Wild Turkey sufficient to numb or knock out the average human being — and then show up at a White House briefing in shorts, drenched and babbling like a ferret on Benzedrine.

Hunter actually did show up, according to his Playboy Interview, for a press briefing in nearly such a state, but today no one does. Hell, Hunter was the only one who ever did.

There are plenty of reasons to do so today. The debt ceiling. Infrastructure. Build Back Better. Not to mention that video surfaced this week of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham being booed by his own supporters for suggesting they get the COVID-19 vaccine. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and others from the alternative-facts coalition continue to undermine the government they serve. And the United States as I know it, according to a growing number of pundits and analysts, continues to slouch into oblivion; merely weeks or months away from death.

The world’s in trouble. There’s no communication, as Joan Jett told us. 

Perdition isn’t a done deal, no matter what you may see on television or the internet, or hear in your secret meetings with the odd handshakes. But the rending of hair and gnashing of teeth among the members of a Democratic Party that seems intent on duplicating Christopher Walken’s self-destruction in “The Deer Hunter” is enough to lead soulless members of the Republican Party to guffaw in hearty laughter, never realizing they’re laughing at their own demise.

Meanwhile President Biden continues to preach about getting people to work together, with very little return for his efforts — even according to his loyalists.

Compounding those problems is the coming census-mandated congressional redistricting. First Amendment attorney and activist Nora Benavidez is among many who believe redistricting is one of the most important and least-covered current news issues. “It is a direct threat to majority rule,” she told me. 

If the GOP can gerrymander enough districts in key states, they can quite likely situate themselves to take back the House, the Senate and ultimately the presidency — without a majority of popular votes, if necessary (as often seems to be the case recently with Republicans). 

We know the election wasn’t stolen in 2020 and we also know Trump is setting up to try and steal it in 2024. Whether or not he runs for office is irrelevant. If the Republican Party is successful at manipulating congressional districts, and continues to replace election workers with flunkeys who will do whatever Trump wants, then Trump will have the mechanism in place by which he can reclaim the presidency. 

Whether he will opt to be king or the king’s puppeteer will then be a far easier decision for him to make. Considering that many people who know Trump, like his longtime former fixer Michael Cohen, believe he won’t run for a second term, it’s easy to see how he could still take advantage of the situation without having to expose himself again to the pressures of the presidency. Never mind that some, like former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham, believe Trump isn’t healthy enough for another run.   

Trump keeps the rest of the world busy dealing with other issues by throwing shade while his loyalists continue to lay the groundwork for authoritarian rule. As late as Tuesday in Michigan, President Biden had to reinforce the fact that he was a capitalist and that he won the election last year. He’s fighting the Big Lie nine months into his presidency and seems mired in the past because he can’t get ahead of the news curve. Trump plays the media like a fiddle to create the news.

But you can’t just blame the press. We cover it because it’s money for us — and it’s only money for us because it’s of interest to the general public. Trust me, if as many Americans tuned into a chess match, a jazz concert, local theater or a talking polar bear reading Socrates out loud in a Fran Drescher accent, we’d air that. Because whatever sells, baby — that’s what corporate journalism is all about.

When Biden isn’t addressing the withering accusations tossed at him by the Trump crowd, he’s  endeavoring to see if he can sell us his vision of America. Tuesday, on the stump in Michigan, he implored us to “Invest in resilience.” 

Hey, It’s almost like he gets it. He’s not going to go Hunter Thompson or Nigel Tufnel on us, but Biden certainly recognizes the nation is at a serious crossroads. Or, as he put it, “We’re at an inflection point. . . . We risk losing our edge as a nation. Our infrastructure used to be the best in the world . . .”

It’s not even close today. Our ranking as a developed nation for students seeking post-high school education led the president to say, “We’re at the bottom of the heap.”

Biden also proposes expanded access to community college, Pell grants and other expanded educational opportunities. It’s hard to see where a working-class family would disagree with the federal assistance Biden proposes giving them by redistributing a small portion of the wealth of the richest Americans into the pockets of the poorest Americans so we can achieve something greater together.

Despite the “inflection point” Biden claims we’ve reached, he remained decidedly even-keeled and optimistic in Michigan, making what amounts to his latest stump speech. He avoided dialing it up emotionally, calmly reiterating that no one making less than $400,000 a year would pay more taxes — and saying that’s  why he won’t back an increase in the gas tax, because people in the middle or working classes spend a much greater proportion of their income on gasoline than the wealthy do. 

Biden’s demeanor was calm, but his pitch dialed it up several notches. He again proposed the end to 40 years of supply-side economics that have created an immense gulf between the richest and poorest American citizens. Biden’s appeal is to every working-class person across the country, but some of those people continue to roar against the Lion in Winter. Biden’s sane detractors question his policy decisions while the insane continue hypocritical personal attacks or claim that Biden is one of the Illuminati, or is merely a skin-suit worn over a lizard body.  

The bottom line is that Trump and his minions have been very successful in politicizing and contaminating every aspect of life in the United States. Music. Cinema. Arts. Food. Sports. Science. All of it. This has made it increasingly difficult to get anything passed in Congress. It threatens to make it prohibitive to deal with the basic needs of society. Those who are stirring up the storm want you to forget the reality of what Biden is trying to do — and to ignore the power grab the GOP is trying to make.

No great civilization can stand without addressing its infrastructure. Biden not only acknowledges that but takes it a step further, saying that the world of tomorrow is about economic competition, and we have to wake up to the fact that we must work together to survive and thrive. Authoritarian regimes believe democracies are too weak because we respond more slowly to stimuli than do autocratic governments that can turn on a dime through the will of a single head of state.

Biden, the eternal optimist, sees the U.S. not only competing with the world but once again leading it, while simultaneously closing the gap between the rich and the poor and providing better education to all Americans. At least that’s the sales pitch. It is worth noting that Biden describes and envisions a world 10 years down the road, not a world that changes every 10 minutes according to what television show you’ve been on or watched. He is trying to chart a future he may not live to see.

A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit, the Greek proverb tells us. The Bible tells us wise men plan for the future.

We should at least listen to someone who has a vision of the future that isn’t a dystopia plucked from the recesses of Hell — and not dismiss his proposals as politics as usual. Because there’s nothing usual about today’s politics.

You can’t dust for vomit and life isn’t a reality show, but we do need to dial it up to 11.

Opinion: Government food aid programs need a digital facelift

America’s hunger problem is worsening. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, more than 35 million people in the country experienced hunger in 2019. In a report published in March 2021, the nonprofit hunger-relief organization Feeding America projected that around 42 million people — or one in eight Americans — could face food insecurity this year, a rise largely attributable to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The problem is especially acute in minority communities: Black and Latino or Hispanic households experience food insecurity at roughly twice the rate of White households. Though recent data is limited, between 2000 and 2010, one out of every four American Indian or Alaskan Native households was food insecure. In some areas, the pandemic has only made the problem more dire. Not to mention, as schools shifted to remote learning, children who rely on school meals faced an even greater risk of food insecurity.

But whereas the pandemic has in many ways exacerbated food insecurity, it may have also provided a roadmap for mitigating the problem. The public health emergency spurred the growth of a vast online marketplace for food and grocery delivery — a marketplace that can, and should, be tapped to modernize government nutrition assistance.

Even before the pandemic, the prevailing paradigm of food insecurity was shifting. For decades, policymakers had dubbed “food deserts” — a shorthand for areas with little geographical access to healthy food options — as the primary reason for food insecurity in America. But a 2015 analysis of the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey found that the average American household does not shop for food at the retailer closest to their home. Instead, most bypass it for a preferred store further away. And a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that opening a grocery store in a food desert has only a small effect on what people purchase. In other words, people who were eating unhealthy foods before a grocery store came to their neighborhood will continue eating unhealthy foods afterward.

If brick-and-mortar stores can’t mend our nation’s deep-rooted nutrition inequities, perhaps digital ones can.

In 2019, the USDA launched a two-year online purchasing pilot program in New York State that allowed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants to select and buy groceries from authorized online retailers, including Walmart and Amazon. In January 2020, the pilot expanded to Washington, followed by Alabama, Iowa, and Oregon in March. On April 1, 2020, it became available in Nebraska.

The online purchasing program grew as the pandemic swept across the country, part of the USDA’s COVID-19 response. It now operates in 47 states and the District of Columbia through dozens of grocery store chains and independent grocers.

SNAP’s foray into online retail has allowed families to shop for food while avoiding unnecessary health risks associated with the coronavirus pandemic. But this new digital approach to food assistance should remain even after pandemic precautions wane.

For one, it has the potential to reduce the stigma and misconceptions associated with using federal food assistance. SNAP participants typically pay for groceries using often recognizable Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. (Prior to that, SNAP currency took the form of paper coupons known as food stamps.) But many EBT card users report feeling judged by grocery store cashier clerks and the people waiting behind them in line. Older adults, who are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity, have the lowest SNAP participation rate despite their eligibility and are one of the demographics that express feeling the most shame about enrolling. Online ordering eliminates the face-to-face interactions that can lead to some of this shame and anxiety. Online food delivery also makes getting groceries easier for the elderly, people with disabilities, and those living in areas with limited transportation.

But a shift to online food ordering might also influence the kinds of food participants consume. One small pilot study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that people who shopped for groceries online made healthier food selections. And multiple studies suggest that smartphone apps can promote positive changes in healthy food consumption. A digital approach to food assistance could be designed to both improve the administration of food benefits and nudge participants toward healthier lifestyles.

Of course, to make online purchasing truly accessible, it will be important to allow flexible payment methods and, ideally, waive delivery fees for SNAP-eligible families. Instacart initially waived the delivery and pickup fees for a SNAP customer’s first three orders to encourage online ordering, but participants in the pilot program were generally expected to cover delivery fees, service fees, and tips. Also, online delivery requires users to have digital literacy and reliable broadband internet access. During the pandemic, the Federal Communications Commission began providing discounts toward phone and broadband services for many low-income consumers, and SNAP recipients automatically qualify.

Online delivery and purchasing would have smaller effects in rural areas, where popular online delivery services like Instacart are less prevalent. But in urban areas, it’s promising. In the eight states that participated in the USDA’s initial pilot, online grocery delivery was available to over 90 percent of SNAP households within urban food desert census tracts.

For all its horrors, the pandemic has catapulted our food culture into the modern era, with platforms like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Instacart changing how we buy food. Our federal food assistance programs need a similar digital overhaul. In an era when fresh food can be delivered to virtually any doorstep, there’s no reason anyone should languish in a food desert.

Mia Jackson is an MSc student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, studying the effects of urban design decisions on health and educational outcomes.

Americans are in a mental health crisis — especially African-Americans. Can churches help?

Centuries of systemic racism and everyday discrimination in the U.S. have left a major mental health burden on African American communities, and the past few years have dealt especially heavy blows.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that Black Americans are twice as likely to die of COVID-19, compared with white Americans. Their communities have also been hit disproportionately by job losses, food insecurity and homelessness as a result of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, racial injustice and high-profile police killings of Black men have amplified stress. During the summer of 2020, amid both the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, a CDC survey found that 15% of Black respondents had “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days,” compared with 8% of white respondents.

For a variety of reasons, many African Americans face barriers to mental health care. But as a sociologist who focuses on community-based organizations, I find that strengthening relationships between churches and mental health providers can be one way to increase access to needed services. In research with my collaborators Eunice Wong and Kathryn Derose, I analyzed data on the prevalence of mental health care provision among religious congregations and found that many African American congregations offer such programs.

Need versus access

Roughly 1 in 5 Americans experience mental illness in a given year. Yet fewer than half of adults with a mental health condition receive mental health services.

African Americans utilize mental health services at about one-half the rate of white Americans. In part, this underuse may stem from African Americans’ often fraught relationship with medical establishments in the U.S., given their histories of racial bias and malpractice against people of color. Part of the reason may also derive from stigma among some African Americans perceiving mental illness and seeking help as signs of weakness. Treatment “deserts” where mental health providers are scarce may also be a factor.

Care at church

One often overlooked resource for mental health care, however, are churches. For the past decade, the National Congregations Study has documented the prevalence of mental health care provision among places of worship in the U.S. Based on data from the NCS’ 2018 survey, 26% of congregations provide mental health programming, and 37% of people who attend religious services attend one of these congregations. Such programming can include support groups, meetings and classes focused on addressing mental health concerns.

Previously, my co-researchers and I analyzed 2012 NCS data to better understand mental health resources within religious congregations. One of our goals was to identify factors that contribute to a congregation offering mental health care. These factors include having more members, employing staff for social service programs and providing health-focused programs. Other significant predictors include conducting community needs assessments, hosting speakers from social service organizations and being located in a predominantly African American community.

Based on the new 2018 survey, 45% percent of African American congregations offer some form of mental health service and nearly half of all African American churchgoers attend a congregation with such programs. These rates show an increase since 2012, and are roughly 50% greater than those among predominantly white congregations.

This research supports longstanding observations about African American congregations as critical sources of spiritual, emotional and social support for their communities. Many religious people see their spiritual health and mental health as intertwined, and research indicates that spiritual practices, such as prayer and meditation, can also support mental health.

Strengthening support

Our research suggests that building collaborations between African American congregations and the mental health sector is a promising strategy to increase access to needed services. Given that 61% of African Americans say they attend worship services at least a few times a year, congregations may provide an accessible resource.

At times, pairing religion and mental health may prove harmful. Some congregations see mental health problems as a product of personal sin, for example, and stigmatize people suffering from mental illness.

But congregations can also be helpful environments. When clinical treatment is supplemented with social support, the likelihood of successful outcomes is greater, and houses of worship often provide built-in social networks. People participating in a congregation-led grief recovery group, for example, can be involved in the congregation beyond their weekly meeting. In addition, some mental health professionals provide pro bono services for congregation-based programs.

Social worker Victor Armstrong, the director of North Carolina’s Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services, asserts that African American faith leaders can play a “pivotal role” in mental wellness. He suggests shifting language to focus on “wellness” rather than “illness” in order to decrease stigma, among other recommendations.

Greater collaboration between congregations and mental health providers could help stem the growing mental health crisis, particularly within African American communities.

Brad R. Fulton, Associate Professor, Indiana University