Mitch McConnell is trying to troll Democrats — but the debt limit fight will blow back on the GOP

There are many inane rituals that take place in the U.S. Capitol, but none that rival the tiresome conventions around the annual funding of the government known as “raising of the debt ceiling.”

It’s like Groundhog Day, with Republicans balking at participating and everyone else running around in circles trying to cajole them into getting onboard so the United States doesn’t crash the world economy. It is no way to run a country. This year the issues are more acute than usual because the Democratic majority is concurrently trying to pass two very large programs — the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill that contains the vital human infrastructure program that Joe Biden and the party ran on in 2020. It’s all coming to a head at the same time.

The progressives in both chambers of Congress are standing firm in their demand that Congress pass the agenda that they and Joe Biden both ran on. But sadly, there is a small handful of so-called moderate Democratic House members who have decided to be divas and are threatening to blow up Biden’s program unless it is stripped of much of the funding that makes the rest of it possible, while certain so-called moderate Democratic senators are strutting around insisting the price tag is too high without bothering to name any specific cuts. D.C. is full of demands to meet meaningless and arbitrary deadlines, constantly moving targets and endless tedious posturing these days.

This dynamic is anything but unprecedented (there are always a few who just have to gum up the works) but with margins as narrow as they are in this polarized body, and with the presidency on the line, you would think these moderates could stay unified with the majority just this once. If they succeed in destroying the president’s signature initiative, they are effectively Republicans. I hope they look good in red MAGA hats.

It’s nice that a handful of Republicans in the Senate managed to vote for the physical infrastructure bill (although the GOP House leadership is now whipping against it) but no one expected that the Republicans would vote for the big infrastructure bill that directly benefits actual humans and addresses climate change. They have no interest in such things. The Democrats are happy to put that bill through the reconciliation process which only requires 50 votes, although corralling all 50 is predictably difficult for the reasons outlined above. But funding the government and raising the debt ceiling should basically be pro-forma votes and the fact that it is pulling teeth every single time is one of the most pathetic annual displays of dysfunction in our government.

It didn’t use to be that way.

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Government shutdowns were never even thought of until the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It’s happened 21 times since then.

Haggling through the budget process didn’t necessitate actually furloughing workers — until the Reagan Justice Department issued a set of opinions saying that if there is a period when Congress doesn’t allocate funds for some reason, the government must partially or fully shutdown until it comes to an agreement. The longest shutdown came in 2019 when President Trump had a tantrum over his border wall which the Democratic majority refused to fund.

It might happen again this year and it would be particularly destructive. We are still in the middle of a major crisis, a deadly pandemic that is being exacerbated by so many Republicans refusing to get themselves vaccinated. Meanwhile, the need to lift the debt ceiling looms.

The law states that the Treasury Department must come to Congress and get permission to raise the debt ceiling and, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, that time is upon us. If Congress fails to lift it by mid-October, the United States will default on its debt and all hell will break loose.

So it’s important to look at how this came to pass. After all, the idea that the U.S. should pay its bills is a no-brainer. And throughout most of our history, that’s exactly how it was treated. In fact, until 1917 it was just done automatically when Congress instituted the rule because federal agencies were spending willy nilly without congressional approval. And mostly it continued to be done automatically without much fanfare. At one point the House instituted what they called the Gephardt Rule (after former Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt), which simply “deems” the debt ceiling lifted when a budget resolution is passed and it is an excellent idea.

However, the modern GOP’s original bad seed, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, saw the opportunity to turn the debt ceiling into another Republican weapon and it’s now pulled out whenever they want to yank the Democrats’ chains. In 1995, in a speech before the Public Securities Association, Ginrich raised the specter of default as if it was a serious option in order to force a budget on radical GOP terms. The demands were not met, but the brinkmanship became an annual GOP custom that’s still playing out today.

This time there’s a new twist, however. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t even negotiating. He says that Republicans will not vote to raise the debt ceiling because it isn’t their responsibility. And that’s that. Sure, several Democrats just voted to raise it during Trump’s term but that’s their thing. Republicans are now all simply refusing to participate. Except, of course, they are. They are filibustering the budget resolution and the debt ceiling hike making it necessary to get 60 votes, which don’t appear to exist.

McConnell and company insist that Democrats can just raise the debt ceiling in reconciliation which only requires 50 votes. Of course, that also means opening up another round of “vote-o-rama” and that takes time. They also seem to think that somehow voting for the debt ceiling in a party-line reconciliation bill will really hurt the Democrats in 2022. Seems a bit far-fetched to me. Republicans are already going to attack Democrats mercilessly as tax-and-spend liberals no matter what, so it’s hard to see why this would make much difference.

Obviously, McConnell also believes that this gumming up of the works may prevent them from passing their two big infrastructure bills although it looks like Democrats may do that dirty work for him. But you have to wonder why Republicans keep going down these roads. Every government shutdown since Gingrich’s time has blown back on the GOP because everyone knows that they are the ones who are obstructing the normal process. It’s their brand!

Ultimately, they are just obstructing for the sake of obstructing. Will Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia ever wake up and realize that their “principled” stand protecting the filibuster has simply made them pawns in Mitch McConnell’s obnoxious trolling strategy? I don’t know, but if they ever plan to do it, now would be an excellent time.

The Dixie Fire disaster and me

GREENVILLE, CA — At 10 a.m. on July 22nd, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview to an online transcription service, walked down the steps of my second-floor office and a block to the Greenville post office, where I mailed a check to California Fair Plan for homeowners’ fire insurance. I then drove 25 miles to a dental appointment. I was lucky to make it home before burning debris closed the roads.

That night I became a climate refugee, evacuated from my house thanks to the Dixie Fire. Since then, it’s scorched a landscape nearly the size of Delaware, destroyed 678 houses and decimated several communities in Indian Valley, where I’ve been for 46 years. One of them was Greenville, California, a town founded in the Gold Rush era of the nineteenth century, where I happen to live. I never imagined myself among the 55 million people worldwide whose lives have already been upended by climate change. Maybe no one does until it happens, even though we’re obviously the future for significant parts of humanity. Those of us who acknowledge the climate disaster — especially those who write about it — may be the last to picture ourselves fleeing the catastrophes scientists have been predicting.

Climate change should come as no surprise to any of us, even in Greenville, one of four communities in rural Plumas County tucked into the mountains of the northern Sierra Nevada range, 230 miles northeast of San Francisco. No one would call most of us progressive. We’re a social mishmash of loggers, miners, and ranchers, many of whom strongly supported Donald Trump (despite a disparate population of aging hippies living among us). We squabble over water ditches and whose insurance should cover which parade. We picked to death a solar-power project and took five years to decide on a design for a community building. The town has been in decline since I moved there nearly half a century ago, slowly sinking into its dirt foundations.

Despite Greenville’s insularity, we’ve had some inkling that the world is changing around us. Old-timers talk about the winters when so much snow fell that they had to shovel from second-story windows to get out of their houses. Last winter, we got less than three feet of snow. In the 1980s, a warm March storm flooded Indian Valley with melted snow that floated stacks of newly sawn lumber away from a local sawmill into a just-created lake. We all cheered as brazen cowboys lassoed bundles of two-by-fours and hauled them off in their pickup trucks.

In a megadrought-ridden West, precipitation currently is half the normal amount, making it prospectively the driest year since 1894. Today, such modest clues to a changing climate seem quaint indeed in the face of the evidence now bombarding California and the rest of the West. As in recent years, this summer’s fires began breaking out here far earlier than the norm. Already 647 wildfires have burned 4.9 million acres of the West, an area three times the size of Rhode Island. In California, 31 new fires started on August 30th alone — and any significant rain or snow is undoubtedly still months away.

For me, as for the rest of us in Plumas County, the Dixie Fire delivered the reality of climate change in a raging fury that has forever changed our lives. It started July 13th in the Feather River Canyon, a 5,000-foot gorge that carries water to more than 25 million Californians through the State Water Project. Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) has built a series of power stations here that dammed the former trophy-trout stream and converted its cascading energy into electricity, generatingaround 15% of California’s hydropower. At approximately seven o’clock that Tuesday morning, a hydroelectric facility lost power at Cresta in the lower Feather River Canyon. Officials later reported a “healthy green tree” leaning perilously against a conductor on a pole with a fire burning on the ground near the base of that tree. By evening, that micro-blaze had exploded to 1,000 acres.

Over the next 14 days what came to be known as the Dixie Fire whipped up one side canyon and down another, driving residents out of the town of Indian Falls and incinerating their homes. It demolished Canyon Dam at the southern end of Lake Almanor. The inhabitants of the towns of Crescent Mills, then Greenville, and soon after Taylorsville fled. Some of us returned for a night or two, only to heed the sirens blaring from our cell phones mandating another evacuation. Believe me, we left in a panic: pizza parlors with dough still rising; beauty salons with hair littering the floor; offices with phones ringing. We fled on whatever roads remained open to wherever we could find housing or friends willing to take us in.

On August 4th, we watched from our separate hells as a 40,000-foot cloud the color of bruised flesh collapsed over the ridge west of Greenville. It was soon hurling flaming branches and red-hot embers down the mountainside, torching trees as it roared into town. We were transfixed by horror, snatching previously unimaginable images from Facebook, chasing down Twitter links, and trying to make sense of the devastation evolving on infrared maps.

We were witnessing Greenville’s near-obliteration. The Dixie Fire would thunder right down Main Street with its Western false fronts and tarnished Gold Rush charm. The 150-year-old warehouse converted to a museum years ago flamed up in a blaze of black-and-white photos, historic logging tools, and the genealogy of generations of the Mountain Maidu, the local Native American tribe. Fire gutted the brick-walled Masonic Lodge and the Way Station, our only local watering hole. Much of the town we had fled burned to the ground.

Hotter and Drier

The old-timers didn’t tell us about fires like this. I witnessed nothing remotely as turbulent during a long-ago season as a fire lookout on Dyer Mountain near Lake Almanor. Even firefighters (and my husband used to be one of them) hardened by a decade of recent experience say that this fire is behaving unlike anything they were trained to confront or have ever seen. It has them bamboozled as it circles back toward landscapes it’s already burned, storming through magic forests of old-growth red fir and stately stands of sugar pines, their foot-long cones just beginning to mature.

Dixie is roaring through forests transformed by a changing climate. The planet is simply hotter than it used to be. Worldwide temperatures have increased 2.04 degrees Fahrenheit since 1901. The United States has been warming even faster, adding 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. In the Sierra Nevada, the 450-mile-long tilted block of granite that lies on California’s border with Nevada, a recent study by climate scientists at UCLA suggested that temperatures could rise a phenomenal 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. All that heat is grilling brush and small trees practically to the point of spontaneous combustion, priming them for the smallest spark. Scientists say that the number of days when Sierra forests are likely to burn has increased by 5% since the 1970s.

Nighttime temperatures are also rising, further confounding the efforts of firefighters to control such blazes. They count on cooler air and higher humidity after dark to help them in aggressive attacks. According to researchers at the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, California’s overnight lows are now running about 2 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the 1981-2010 period that climate scientists use as a benchmark. Robbed of their after-dark advantages, firefighters report seeing flames torching off the crowns of trees in the middle of the night, something they’re not faintly used to.

The Sierra air is drier, too. We used to brag about our low humidity, mocking our East Coast friends dripping sweat on a 90-degree day while we basked in dry heat. Now, that’s a liability. Decreasing relative humidity has helped boost the number of days each year when forests are vulnerable to wildfire. It also accelerates evaporation from leaves, brush, and even dead trees, heightening the risk of intense fires and so exacerbating the challenge for firefighters.

Then there’s the wind. Once upon a time, on hot Sierra summer days, we welcomed the breezes that stirred the air and cooled us. This summer, the least stirring of leaves instills fear. Dixie’s erratic winds have, in fact, blown flames right back into previously burned areas, circling around the lines firefighters have built to try to control the fire.

Climate change doesn’t start wildfires. The vast majority are caused by human activity. But by drying out trees, chaparral, and other vegetation, it creates a warmer, more arid world, one ever more susceptible to extreme fire behavior. PG&E, which owns more than 130,000 acres of California, has reported an increase in fire vulnerability in the area it serves from 15% in 2019 to 50% by 2021.

The utility company has all but admitted responsibility for starting the Dixie Fire. If that proves true it would be the fourth such wildfire linked to it, a record that reeks of blatant neglect of fundamental power-line maintenance. PG&E officials have touted their routine inspections of the two power poles located where the fire started. They found nothing wrong, they reported to the California Public Utilities Commission. But the company also considers the span of power line near where the fire started to be among the top 20% of its distribution lines most likely to ignite a wildfire by tree contact. Keep in mind that the Dixie Fire started less than a mile from where PG&E’s power lines started the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and burned 18,804 buildings.

Will corporate executives be held accountable for the Dixie Fire? Will they lose any sleep over the burly backhoe operator weeping publicly about the loss of his home with its newly remodeled kitchen? Will they spare a thought for the weary family of seven wandering through Safeway wondering how, as exiles, they’ll even pay for their groceries?

Climate Refugees

All of us who live in the mountainous West have come to expect wildfires. We don’t pack up at the first puff of smoke. During the early days after Dixie had started 50 miles down the Feather River Canyon from Greenville, I felt safe. Even when burning trees were visible from my office window as I grabbed photos and notebooks to evacuate, I still felt confident that I would return to my books and 40 years of journalism files, pieces ranging from local murders to ones on refugees from the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan, and forest fires burning in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in the Ukraine.

It took two more days before the winds shifted, blowing flames down North Canyon toward the town, overwhelming our firefighters. Today, all that’s left in Greenville’s downtown commercial area is devastation. The places I knew for so long are now gone, including Hunter Hardware, the business that welcomed us when my husband and I moved to Indian Valley, two blond toddlers in tow; Sterling Sage, where I bought jewelry for my granddaughter from the town’s most dapper businessman; and Village Drug, where our Plumas County supervisor took calls from constituents while dispensing medicines and school supplies. That was, in fact, Greenville’s oldest building and housed the office I shared with a poet/playwright and a corporate administrator with a passion for knitting that we liked to call Fiber, Fact, and Fiction. Now, it’s all ash.

How do you weigh the loss of such businesses against the hundreds of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances whose homes have been destroyed? Most of us waited days for some kind of confirmation about whether ours had made it or not, hanging on every word from state fire officials who described the advancing flames in twice-daily video meetings. We searched the Internet for shards of information and poured over maps with tiny red heat dots that might spell out our futures.

I danced for joy when I learned that my house had indeed survived, along with the timber-frame barn my husband had built from our own hand-milled timber. My ebullience plummeted into mourning for the sweet recluse who lost his beloved books and the widow whose family photos were all gone. Along Main Street in the town’s historic residential area, not a house remains, not even a single standing wall among brick walkways and charred garden plots.

Those 678 homeless neighbors of ours join millions around the world fleeing cyclones, hurricanes, fires, and floods, among other weather events brought to a boil by a changing climate. Like the majority of them, the fire that forced us to leave our homes was local and, given the size of this planet, relatively small-scale. It dominated the news cycle for a week or two before being displaced (without being faintly extinguished) by those fleeing hurricane Ida in Louisiana and political refugees trying to escape Afghanistan.

Greenville has plenty of experience with privation. As the county’s least affluent town we’ve rallied to keep our high school open when county officials planned to close it. We’ve rallied to install sidewalks and retain a health clinic after our only hospital closed. We may disagree about everything from who should be fire chief to the value of Covid vaccinations, but bully Greenville with an outside threat and we’re as one. The enemies of our enemies become our friends.

Today, we are facing a threat like no other. How do you rebuild a community with no post office, no library, and where, in the absence of public transportation, the closest gas station is now a 50-mile round trip? Who will step forward for those too broken to restore themselves?

Greenville and Indian Valley are now poised between devastation and possibility. Even as smoke still rises from the ashes, there are faint signs of hope. The generation that left for far-flung parts of the world has organized online donations and relief sites offering food, laptops, vehicles, and cash to the newly homeless. There are plans to expand the community garden from a concept and empty raised beds to a future bounty of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. After a century of genocide and abuse, the Mountain Maidu, the area’s first residents, have energized us with their vision of land and species restoration as they assume stewardship of around 3,000 acres of their ancestral territories. Some of us want to mount the works of local artists as four-by-four posters beautifying the fences designed to protect us from the toxic waste of burned-out buildings. Others are planning to stage local musical events on the lawn of the high school that somehow miraculously survived.

It’s a long, tough climb from incineration to inspiration for a community that’s physically scattered and emotionally shattered. Many of us remain in mind-numbing limbo, still awaiting word from some anonymous official that will allow us to return to homes, if we have them. Those of us allowed back, as my husband and I have been, are halted by National Guard troops and required to show paperwork proving that we belong here. We have little prospect of Internet or landline telephone service any time soon and we no longer expect consistent electricity from PG&E.

What may save us is the very reputation for defiance that has often been our undoing. We don’t accept defeat easily, not even against an adversary as daunting as climate change. As long as the odds are stacked against us, the independent and ornery will respond. If the soul of a community is its resilience, Greenville will revive. Still, we’re just a hint of what’s to come in this country and on this planet if all of us don’t change things in major ways. Remember, you could become a climate refugee, too.

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Fascism is a mind-killer — and Trump’s version is destroying Americans’ grasp of reality

Years ago in a high school anatomy class, I saw film footage of a man — perhaps a prison inmate or a patient at a mental hospital — who “volunteered” for a heinous medical experiment. His brain was bisected, meaning the left and right spheres were surgically split from one another. He survived the procedure, but his left and right hands now behaved as if they belonged to two different people. The man was told to use his right hand, the one over which he still had conscious control, to seize control of the left hand. The left hand continually escaped, and the two hands essentially began fighting with each other. He begged the doctors for help, but they were too busy obsessively noting every detail of the “subject’s” behavior. Our teacher told us the film came from her “private collection.”

That has stuck with me ever since, and it now seems a perfect metaphor for America in the Age of Trump, plagued by a fascist movement and so many other pathologies and signs of moral and political rot. We are like that unfortunate man, a psychically split nation whose hands are fighting with one another.

A new CNN public opinion poll reports that most Americans “feel democracy is under attack in this country,” with 51% of respondents saying “it is likely that elected officials in the U.S. will successfully overturn the results of a future election because their party did not win.” Nearly all those surveyed said that democracy in America was either “under attack” (56%) or “being tested” (37%), with only 6%, barely over one person in 20, saying that “American democracy is in no danger.”

But there are important differences:

Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say that democracy is under attack, and that view is most prevalent among those who support former President Donald Trump. All told, 75% of Republicans say democracy is under attack, compared with 46% of Democrats. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, those who say Trump ought to be the leader of the party are much likelier to see democracy as under threat: 79% in that group vs. 51% among those who say Trump should not be the party’s leader. …

Among Republicans, 78% say that Biden did not win and 54% believe there is solid evidence of that, despite the fact that no such evidence exists. That view is also deeply connected to support for Trump. Among Republicans who say Trump should be the leader of the party, 88% believe Biden lost — including 64% who say there is solid evidence that he did not win — while among those Republicans who do not want Trump to lead the Party, 57% say Biden won legitimately.

Furthermore, Democrats and Republicans polled hold very different views on whether voting rules “make it too hard to vote” or “aren’t strict enough to prevent illegal votes.” Among Republicans, 83% take the latter position, while 66% of Democrats believe voting rules are overly restrictive.

These polls and others show the depth of America’s democracy crisis goes well beyond reasonable differences of opinion about mutually agreed-upon facts. Instead, America’s democracy crisis reflects a battle over the nature of reality itself.

Agreement on basic facts and a shared reality itself are necessary for a functioning, healthy society. These shared beliefs are especially critical in a democracy because of the role citizens play in collective decision-making. To that end, attacking truth and reality is one of the primary weapons used by fascist leaders and movements.

Democracy can eventually be exhausted by these attacks before succumbing to disorientation and confusion where fascism is normalized as a type of “solution” — a way to restore order and address the very social and political problems it has both created and made worse.

This week, during an interview on the podcast SmartLess, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns described America in this moment of extreme crisis, saying, “It’s really serious. There are three great crises before this: the Civil War, the Depression, and World War II. This is equal to it.”

In a new essay, legendary CBS News anchor Dan Rather sounds a similar note of alarm and concern: and alarm about America’s democracy crisis.

What is happening now in our nation’s capital, and radiating throughout the country, is enough to put even the most cynical of politicians of past eras to shame.

I fear that we don’t have an adequate framework to make complete sense of the depravity and disingenuousness of what is taking place. Basically, we have one political party at the national level, the Republicans, who have long since ceded any pretense of actually doing the work of government, namely making policies to solve problems. Instead, it is raw power for power’s sake, and that has turned Congress into what is in essence largely a troll farm on their side of the aisle.

CNN’s new findings offer further proof of the Orwellian power that the Republican Party and fascist movement have over their followers. In practice this power involves creating an alternate reality through the manipulation of language and the use of disinformation, outright lies, moral inversion and other tactics.

In the Republican alternate reality, democracy itself has been redefined to mean a condition under which Republicans and Trumpists win every election. If they somehow lose, then by definition the result was not “democratic” and is therefore deemed illegitimate. Such elections must be overturned or reworked or reverse-engineered until the “correct” result is achieved.

Free and fair elections where the public will is respected, minority rights are guaranteed and leaders are held accountable to the voters and the rule of law — although inevitably imperfect — are the most basic criteria for a democracy.

The Republican Party and its nearly coterminous neofascist movement has mutated those norms as part of a plan to create a form of “managed democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism,” under which chosen candidates are guaranteed to win but the superficial norms of democracy are observed and opposition is tolerated (up to a point).

Today’s Trump-controlled Republican Party and the larger white right have become obsessed with “election fraud” and “securing” the votes. In their version of Orwell’s Newspeak, “fraud” refers to the alarming possibility that votes cast by Black and brown people might be counted on an equal basis with those of white Republicans in affluent exurbs and “red states.”

Through that same logic, “securing” the vote ultimately means that nonwhite people and other core Democratic constituencies should have their voting rights severely restricted. Voting is to be understood as a privilege granted to the “right kinds of people.”

Projection is also a powerful weapon in the neofascist assault on American democracy and society, which often employs Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ famous dictum: “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.”

Perhaps most troubling, Trump and his neofascist movement’s “Big Lie” strategy about the 2020 election is gaining momentum: Now more than three-quarters of Republican voters (and increase since the events of Jan. 6) endorse it. The Big Lie is now a proxy for supporting Donald Trump, a signal that you are a loyal member of his personality cult.

In the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” therapist Elizabeth Mika warns of fascism’s alluring and seductive power:

Tyranny feeds on the irrationality of narcissistic myths and magical thinking, even though its ideology may be disguised as hyper-rationalism, as it was the case with Communism. In this, it very much resembles the narcissistically psychopathic character of the tyrant himself: solipsistic, withdrawn from reality, full of grandiose and paranoid beliefs impervious to the corrective influences of objective facts.

In his essay “The Politics of Disimagination and the Pathologies of Power,” philosopher and education professor Henry Giroux argues that American society is experiencing such extreme and rapid decline that engaged and responsible citizenship — which offers robust protection against the allure of fascism and other anti-human movements and beliefs — has become increasingly uncommon:

Civic illiteracy is the modus operandi for creating depoliticized subjects who believe that consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship, who privilege opinions over reasoned arguments, and who are led to believe that ignorance is a virtue rather than a political and civic liability….

The politics and machinery of disimagination and its production of ever-deepening ignorance dominates American society because it produces, to a large degree, uninformed customers, hapless clients, depoliticized subjects and illiterate citizens incapable of holding corporate and political power accountable. At stake here is more than the dangerous concentration of economic, political and cultural power in the hands of the ultrarich, megacorporations and elite financial services industries. Also at issue is the widespread perversion of the social, critical education, the public good, and democracy itself.

Those who choose to live inside TrumpWorld and the MAGAverse are lost souls, they are the Lost Americans.

There is little if anything that can be done to return them to normal society and empirical reality. What such people have found in those imaginary realms is too compelling, too exciting and answers too many of their needs and existential questions. The poison they have found there soothes their pain, even as it destroys them. It is foolish to hope or believe that the Trumpites and other neofascists will ever willingly abandon their safe space.

Fascism is governed by the passions, soul and spirit. It is the enemy of intellect and reason, which is why the uninitiated are so confounded by it. Fascism is the mind-killer. The alternate reality it has now created within American society is in danger of conquering and absorbing the other reality — the real one, where most of us still live.

8 earthy, cozy kitchen trends we’re seeing for fall

As we prepare to round out 2021 in the coming months, one thing is for sure — the kitchen remains key. “We’ve spent so much time in the kitchen over the past 18 months, so people are really being mindful of how kitchen design is so essential and has a major impact on how people inhabit their homes,” interior designer, Peti Lau, explains.

When it comes to fall 2021 kitchen trends, what can we expect to see, well, everywhere? We spoke with eight design experts who weighed in with their predictions.

1. Dining tables in the kitchen

https://www.instagram.com/p/CSwUvgqKOlT/

2. Islands as furniture pieces

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Those who do choose to opt for islands are taking a different design approach, Claire Staszak says. “We also particularly love the trend of islands looking more like furniture pieces or tables and less like big cabinet blocks.” Prep tables are also on the rise, Katherine Thewlis notes. “These tables usually have legs as opposed to closed sides,” she explains. “This exposes more of the flooring, making the room feel much larger. It’s a more rustic, utilitarian look which can provide balance to a modern kitchen.”

3. Custom storage solutions

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We’ll be seeing more upgrades “that make your kitchen work harder for you while maximizing every square inch of storage,” Kestenbaum says. What features, exactly, may be rising in popularity? “Produce drawers, in-drawer knife storage, under-sink drawers, and integrated cutting boards,” Kestenbaum notes. We wouldn’t be at all surprised if this largely stems from spending more time cooking at home and really utilizing our cooking spaces over the past year and a half.

4. Work from home solutions

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And on the note of spending more time at home, Dominique Fluker says we can expect our kitchens to continue to serve double duty and function as makeshift offices. “Be prepared to see many flexible open kitchen models, as people are still working from home and need alternative workspaces,” she comments. “Modular kitchens highlight smart shelves, space-saving features, and maximized corners. Additionally, we may see an insurgence of kitchen nooks, as they are a cozy work-from-home option.”

5. Darker tones

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Wood tones in the kitchen will “become darker and richer,” Meg McSherry believes. Emily Whiteagrees. “Rather than the flawless, white kitchens we know and love, people are taking a much more ‘lived-in’ approach with dark color palettes, beautifully stained wood cabinetry, and organic countertop materials, like marble and quartzite, with lots of depth and movement,” she comments. Lau predicts the same — “Instead of blue, grey, and white kitchens, the new kitchen trends are more warm, calm, and earthy tones.”

Jessica Brigham believes that autumnal hues in particular will reign when it pertains to cabinets. “The moodiness of burgundys, magentas, and even deep blues bring in such a fabulous pop of color and beckon the chillier, crisper autumnal days ahead,” she notes.

Note that the resurgence of upper cabinets themselves is also a key trend. Says Thewlis, “Cabinet doors are going to have a moment again with impressive hardware and cut-out details on the door fronts.”

6. Terracotta tiles

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And on the tile front, cozy touches are having a moment. “Backsplashes in hand made tile will still be in favor since they invoke feelings of comfort and coziness, which we all are attracted to right now,” McSherry adds. “I suspect we will be seeing terracotta tiles coming onto the scene — especially on the kitchen floor.”

7. Quartzite

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Quartzite, which White mentioned above, is also a popular choice for kitchen countertops and backsplashes, Staszak says. Lau is also a fan of the durable material, which she says is easy to maintain but still extremely chic.

8. Shaker-style peg rails

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQqbuWntYlP/

Everywhere you look, there seems to be a new installation of a peg rail. While they’re extremely practical for entryway or mudroom spaces (hanging up jackets and bags) they’re also expanding into kitchens. They’re just as functional there, too, for hanging decor, tote bags, fruit, and leaning pictures on top.

American militarism is even worse than you think — it’s had a toxic effect on climate policy

President Biden addressed the UN General Assembly on Sept. 21, issuing a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing, with the power of our example,” he said.

But the U.S. is not a leader when it comes to saving our planet. Yahoo News recently published a report titled “Why the U.S. Lags Behind Europe on Climate Goals by 10 or 15 years.” The article was a rare acknowledgment in the U.S. corporate media that the United States has not only failed to lead the world on the climate crisis, but has actually been the main culprit blocking timely collective action to head off a global existential crisis.

The anniversary of Sept. 11 and the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan should be ringing alarm bells inside the head of every American, warning us that we have allowed our government to spend trillions of dollars waging war, chasing shadows, selling arms and fueling conflict all over the world, while ignoring existential dangers to our civilization and all of humanity.

The world’s youth are dismayed by their parents’ failures to tackle the climate crisis. A new survey of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in 10 countries around the world found that many of them think humanity is doomed and that they have no future.

Three-quarters of the young people surveyed said they are afraid of what the future will bring, and 40% say the crisis makes them hesitant to have children. They are also frightened, confused and angered by the failure of governments to respond to the crisis. As the BBC reported, “They feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults.”

Young people in the U.S. have even more reason to feel betrayed than their European counterparts. America lags far behind Europe on renewable energy. European countries started fulfilling their climate commitments under the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and now get 40% of their electricity from renewable sources, while renewables provide only 20% of electric power in America.

Since 1990, the baseline year for emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, Europe has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 24%, while the United States has failed to cut them at all, spewing out 2% more than it did in 1990. In 2019, before the COVID pandemic, the United States produced more oil and more natural gas than ever before in its history.

NATO, our politicians and the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic promote the idea that the United States and Europe share a common “Western” culture and values. But our very different lifestyles, priorities and responses to this climate crisis tell a tale of two very different, even divergent economic and political systems.

The idea that human activity is responsible for climate change was understood decades ago and is not controversial in Europe. But in America, politicians and news media have blindly or cynically parroted fraudulent, self-serving disinformation campaigns by ExxonMobil and other vested interests.

While the Democrats have been better at “listening to the scientists,” let’s not forget that while Europe was replacing fossil fuels and nuclear plants with renewable energy, the Obama administration was unleashing a fracking boom to switch from coal-fired power plants to new plants running on fracked gas.

Why is the U.S. so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming? Why do only 60% of Europeans own cars, compared with 90% of Americans? And why does each American car owner clock double the mileage that European drivers do? Why does the United States not have modern, energy-efficient and widely accessible public transportation, as Europe does?

We can ask similar questions about other stark differences between the United States and Europe. On poverty, inequality, health care, education and social insurance, why is the United States an outlier from what are considered societal norms in other wealthy countries?

One answer is the enormous amount of money the U.S. spends on militarism. Since 2001, the United States has allocated $15 trillion (in fiscal-year 2022 dollars) to its military budget, outspending its 20 closest military competitors combined.

The U.S. spends far more of its GDP (the total value of goods produced and services) on the military than any of the other 29 NATO countries — 3.7% in 2020 compared to 1.77%. And while the U.S. has been putting intense pressure on NATO countries to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, only a0 of them have done so. Unlike in the U.S., the military establishment in Europe must contend with significant opposition from liberal politicians and a more educated and mobilized public.

From the lack of universal health care to levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in other wealthy countries, our government’s under-investment in everything else is the inevitable result of these skewed priorities, which leave America struggling to get by on what is left over after the U.S. military bureaucracy has raked off the lion’s share — or should we say the “generals’ share”? — of available resources.

Federal infrastructure and “social” spending in 2021 amount to only about 30% of the money spent on militarism. The infrastructure package that Congress is debating is desperately needed, but the $3.5 trillion is spread over 10 years and is not enough.

On climate change, the infrastructure bill includes only $10 billion per year for conversion to green energy, an important but small step that will not reverse our current course toward a catastrophic future. Investments in a Green New Deal must be bookended by corresponding reductions in the military budget, if we are to correct our government’s perverted and destructive priorities in any lasting way. This means standing up to the weapons industry and military contractors, which the Biden administration has so far failed to do.

The reality of America’s 20-year arms race with itself makes complete nonsense of the administration’s claims that the recent arms buildup by China requires the U.S. to spend even more. China spends only a third of what the U.S. spends, and that nation’s increased military spending is driven by a perceived need to defend itself against the ever-growing U.S. war machine that has been “pivoting” to the waters, skies and islands surrounding its shores since the Obama administration.

Biden told the UN General Assembly that “as we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But his exclusive new military alliance with the U.K. and Australia, and his request for a further increase in military spending to escalate a dangerous arms race with China — one that the U.S. started in the first place — reveal just how far Biden has to go to live up to his own rhetoric, on diplomacy as well as on climate change.

The United States must go to the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow in November ready to sign on to the kind of radical steps that the UN and less developed countries are calling for. It must make a real commitment to leaving fossil fuels in the ground; converting to a net-zero renewable energy economy and helping developing countries to do the same. As UN Secretary General António Guterres says, the summit in Glasgow “must be the turning point” in the climate crisis.

That will require the U.S. to seriously reduce the military budget and commit to peaceful, practical diplomacy with China and Russia. Genuinely moving on from our self-inflicted military failures and the militarism that led to them would free up this nation to enact programs that address the real existential crisis our planet faces — a crisis against which warships, bombs and missiles are worse than useless.

More Trump associates to get Jan. 6 committee subpoenas, Adam Schiff vows: “No one is off the table”

On Thursday’s edition of CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) elaborated on what happens next now that the January 6 committee has issued subpoenas against four prominent Trump allies.

“These are four important witnesses and they’re all very close to the former president and some were in direct communication with him on January 5th, on January 6th, and they are reportedly in communication about how to overturn their results of the election,” said Schiff. “Mark Meadows, for example, involved with the Justice Department trying to get the Justice Department to put pressure on Georgia, to decertify the results of the election.”

“What does it tell us, though, about the direction of the inquiry, and how Trump-centered is your focus?” asked Chris Cuomo.

“Well, I think it tells you this,” said Schiff. “No one is off the table. We’ll determine what went wrong in the lead-up to January 6th and we’re going to find out who was involved and who was knowledgeable and what roles they played in the planning, what expectation they had of violence, and what the former president was doing. Among the biggest unknowns is what was going on within the White House on January 5th and 6th at that critical time when our democracy was being threatened with a violent insurrection? So we’re not wasting time … we’ve made a lot of strides in requiring documents that we need for the investigation.”

“Do you anticipate one or more of these men saying, I can’t testify, I have immunity?” asked Cuomo.

“If past is prologue, we can certainly anticipate that some may seek to thwart our investigation, and certainly the former president has been talking along those lines, and if you look at all of the obstruction and all of the stonewalling of the subpoenas by some of these same people in the prior administration … we experienced that kind of stonewalling before,” said Schiff. “But unlike the last four years, these witnesses are not going to be able to count on the former president to protect them if they essentially thwart the law, and I would hope that we can move expeditiously to enforce the subpoenas. If that’s necessary, I hope it won’t be, but if it is, but also that the Justice Department would be open to considering potential criminal contempt charges against anyone who ignores the law.”

Watch below:

Trump’s Arizona “audit” ends in second humiliating defeat: report

Maricopa County celebrated on Thursday evening after claiming vindication in the controversial audit of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county.

“A monthslong hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote confirmed that President Joe Biden won and the election was not “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, according to early versions of a report prepared for the Arizona Senate,” The Arizona Republic reported Thursday evening, one day before the findings were scheduled to be released.

“The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results,” the newspaper noted. “The hand count shows Trump received 45,469 fewer votes than Biden. The county results showed he lost by 45,109.”

The leak of the report came the same day Trump pressured Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to pursue something similar to the Cyber Ninjas audit in Texas.

The county announced the findings on Twitter, but warned 110-page report “is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.”

Tim Steller, a columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, says the findings should still be discounted even though they confirmed the official outcome.

Jan. 6 committee slaps four ex-Trump officials with first Capitol riot subpoenas

Four former Trump administration officials have been hit with subpoenas by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the United States Capitol building.

The first four officials receiving subpoenas are former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former political strategist Steve Bannon, former social media director Dan Scavino, and former defense official Kash Patel.

The group as a whole has until Oct. 7 to respond to the subpoenas. Bannon and Patel are being ordered to appear before the committee on Oct. 14, with Meadows and Scavino slated to appear before the committee a day later.

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In its letter announcing the subpoenas, the committee singled out Scavino for using social media to heavily promote the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot. Patel, meanwhile, was cited for being “involved with discussions among senior Pentagon officials prior to and on January 6th.”

Although the subpoenas have been issued, it’s no guarantee they will show up when scheduled, as Trump officials were notorious for defying Democratic subpoenas after Democrats took back the House of Representatives in 2018.

The committee’s work has taken on new urgency after reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa revealed that Trump attorney John Eastman drafted a six-point plan to have former Vice President Mike Pence refuse to certify the results of the 2020 election.

Read the full announcement below:

Jan 6th committee: subpoenas issued for depositions from Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Kash Patel and Steve Bannon pic.twitter.com/57YKcK7HK3

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) September 23, 2021

Rupert Murdoch “privately acknowledged” climate change — while Fox News hosts denied it even existed

Fox News and Fox Business, both created by Rupert Murdoch, have never been shy about promoting extreme or ludicrous ideas in the hope of driving ratings. But what far-right opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity claim and what Fox News executives actually believe can be two different things, and an article published by Vice on September 23 stresses that Murdoch’s actions show that he takes climate change seriously.

It’s important to pay close attention to what Fox News does as well as what it says. Fox News has been full of anti-vaxxer hysteria; yet more than 90% of Fox Corporation employees, according to The Guardian, have been vaccinated for COVID-19. Fox Corporation, CNN reports, has “quietly implemented the concept of a vaccine passport.”

Many of Fox News’ opinion hosts have been relentlessly supportive of former President Donald Trump. But according to author Michael Wolff, the 90-year-old Murdoch detests Trump.

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Fox News has been full of climate change denial. But Vice’s Geoff Dembicki emphasizes that Murdoch’s actions certainly aren’t those of a climate change denier.

In 2006, Dembicki reports, “Murdoch’s News Corporation actually thought carbon pricing was a good idea. News Corp has meticulously documented its own carbon footprint since 2006 and sought to ‘take a leadership role on the issue of climate change’ by reducing it, according to hundreds of pages of publicly available documents reviewed by Vice News.”

Dembicki goes on to say that in 2010, “News Corp was advocating ‘market-based mechanisms to support carbon reductions’ in the U.S. and other places.”

“This is according to documents submitted to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit group that has, for two decades, catalogued and rated environmental reporting from more than 300 companies, including Apple, Coca-Cola and Ford Motors,” Dembicki explains. “No one forced News Corp to make disclosures to the CDP, which the group publishes in a database on its website. And far from altruism, News Corp’s disclosures are cast as corporate self-interest. In 2010, for example, a filing explained that doing so would give the company ‘valuable expertise when responding to mandated reporting requirements’ under a potential carbon pricing system, should any country implement one.”

Dembicki goes on to say that “News Corp has submitted yearly reports on its environmental progress to CDP since 2006, often receiving ‘A’ grades for its efforts from the organization.” Ateli Iyalla, North American managing director of the CDP, told Vice that News Corp has “strong understanding of climate issues and climate risk.”

“Vice News reviewed more than a decade’s worth of those submissions, and the documents show a company that’s taking steps to protect its operations and thousands of employees from a climate emergency it knows is getting worse, while giving a massive media platform to people who say the emergency isn’t real,” Dembicki reports. “The documents show that News Corp privately acknowledged climate change is making hurricanes worse.”

Bleak as it seems, geoengineering may be the only way to save Earth from climate change

Considering that Gernot Wagner is the founding executive director of Harvard University’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, you might imagine him as an archetypal detached scientist. Engineers, after all, are a notoriously antisocial group, and one would hardly imagine that tendency to soften when they hail from an Ivy League school.

This could not be further from the truth. Speaking to Wagner about his upcoming book “Geoengineering: The Gamble,” it is evident from his tone that he is speaking not just as a scholar, but as a passionately concerned citizen of Earth. The book reflects the real man’s attitude: Human beings have passed the point of no return when it comes to climate change. We are not going to be able to stave off all of the apocalyptic conditions brought on by a warming planet (extreme weather events, droughts, heat waves, wildfires) without removing some greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

This is a fact, Wagner argues. As a consequence, we need to look into technology that can solve the problem for us — for instance, projects which could reflect sunlight back into space. The idea is controversial, however, with critics fearing that it is merely a stopgap that doesn’t solve the real problem of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thus misleads the public into thinking we can “reverse” climate change. They also point out that it wouldn’t fix other problems related to greenhouse gas emissions, like ocean acidification, and that such a large-scale engineering project would require costly regular maintenance. Plus, given the complexity of our climate, it is almost certain that there would be drastic unforeseen consequences in any solar geoengineering project, from which groups of people are most impacted to flora and fauna that may suffer due to changes in solar energy levels on the ground.

Yet what kinds of geoengineering projects would even be plausible? What would they look like? That is where his book — and this interview, which has been edited for clarity — comes into play.

Basically the thesis of geoengineering is that we may reach a point where we have to use this kind of technology, but that there are pros and cons. Does that sound about accurate?

In the broadest possible terms. I will immediately add a couple more bits to this. For carbon removal, we have basically crossed that threshold already. We cannot achieve climate goals — like limiting global average warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade — without sucking CO2 back out. For certain technologies we’ve crossed the threshold.

For solar geoengineering — which in many ways is the most controversial, but also the most interesting and potentially most impactful geoengineering technology — no, we haven’t crossed that threshold yet. I would go a step further and say that certain properties of solar geoengineering — that it’s fast and cheap, but imperfect — all of them push us in the direction of: it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.

What are the implications of this inevitability in terms of what we as a society need to do? How do we need to prepare?

If you want the sort of highfalutin version, the sort of “ideally we ought to,” the best possible way to put this is we need to get ready — and by “we” I mean the global climate-focused community — ought to be ready to put governance provisions in place, or for that matter to simply have the governance conversation.

“Governance” is one of these loaded terms that means a lot of things to different people. I would say governance in this case simply means having the right people at the table to have these conversations in the first place. Most people don’t know what solar geoengineering is. Some of the most tuned-in and most astute climate policy leaders, or sort of political leaders writ large… they don’t know what it is. They really don’t, most of them. So baby steps toward having the conversations, or educating ourselves to be able to have the conversations, at every possible level. The UN security council, the general assembly, the UN environment assembly, whatever it might be. And then of course at the national level, state level and wherever else to have semi-rational conversations about what potential future scenarios could happen around a potential, I would say inevitable, but still potential deployment of solar geoengineering technologies.

Can you be a little specific about what these technologies would be?

The general principle of solar geoengineering is basically the general principle of why you and I have black winter coats, and why we wear white between Memorial Day and Labor Day. White reflects heat and lighter colors reflect heat, and cool what is underneath. Darker absorbs heat and warms what is underneath…

Solar geoengineering is to look at this phenomenon and deliberately attempt to make the planet more reflective. The most prominent and in many ways most powerful potential technology out there is stratospheric aerosols. They deliberately introduce sulfate aerosols or similar substances — tiny reflective particles — into the lower stratosphere, not unlike volcanoes have been doing in many ways forever. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, in 1992 the global average temperatures fell approximately half a degree centigrade, or around one degree Fahrenheit, lower than they would have been without this volcanic eruption. Solar geoengineering through stratospheric aerosols attempts to use this insight, use this fact that small reflective particles in the stratosphere do cool the planet —nobody doubts that this is the case, that the global average temperatures will decrease — it uses this fact. In this case, of course, it’s only modeling studies, but in some sense models what would happen if society and the global community were to get together and decide to deliberately put aerosols into the stratosphere.

How expensive would this be?

That’s where it gets interesting. It’s very, very cheap. To those deliberately doing the solar geoengineering — the narrow engineering costs that one can calculate like how many newly designed planes does it take, basically with large fuselage and the enormous wingspan and the sort of engines that are able to fly that plane into the lower stratosphere — when you do that calculation, you come up with something like single digit billions of dollars. And let’s say that’s an underestimate and let’s call it $10 billion. The first 10 years or so of a program like this with some sense of a deliberate, slow ramp up would be somewhere around those along the lines of $10 billion or so per year globally. [Wagner emphasized that these projections only refer to the narrow engineering costs.]

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There is often talk about how billionaires can do this. Well, no, they can’t. Take the richest billionaire out there; even $200 billion in wealth would not allow you to essentially have a sustained global program like this. But it is very much in the purview of several dozen individual countries to basically do enough of this deployment to have a global impact. And that’s what makes this essentially unique among any other climate policy interventions. On the mitigation front — on the side of cutting CO2 emissions — the name of the game is to climb up the learning curve and slide down the cost curve, and basically get anyone and everyone interested into deploying these technologies and to spend the trillions of dollars necessary, which would still essentially pay for themselves. Because from an economic perspective, the worst thing you can do is not cut CO2.

My last question — and it’s a bleak one, but I think it’s also important to ask — is what kind of future are we looking at if we stay on the current path that we have embarked on as a species?

I think you said it. That’s a bleak one, right? I guess I’m naturally an optimist. You sort of have to be when you work on climate.

I’m a journalist, which means I have to be a pessimist.

Fair enough. I’ll tell you that it’s too late to put pessimism on the climate front. It is so late in the game that in some sense, if you don’t think that there is some Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos/Bill Gates or whatever invention, some sort of some miracle thing, unless you believe in that miracle essentially, then it’s very, very hard to see how we can turn this around…

What we know is bad enough. What we don’t is potentially much, much worse. There are lots of unknowns. There are lots of unquantified costs here and the vast, vast majority — I might even go as far as to say every one of these matters — points in one and only one direction. And that means, s**t is hitting the fan…

I’m not a journalist myself, but I guess I play a columnist every once in a while. There is certainly some pessimism there too. And that then leads to — more or less directly, not inevitably, but more or less directly — to the unfortunate conclusion that it is so late in the climate technology, low carbon technology climate policy game that no, we cannot, must not be giving up on rapid deployment of either carbon removal technology on the one hand or investment in this ‘nuclear option’ of research into solar geoengineering on the other.

Matt Gaetz’ sex trafficking allegations leaked to Dilbert cartoonist before becoming public: report

The legal saga of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., just keeps getting stranger — even by Florida standards.

Just three days before news broke publicly of a federal probe into the Congressman’s alleged child sex trafficking, Scott Adams — the Trump acolyte and creator of the popular newspaper cartoon “Dilbert” — was apparently discussing “inside knowledge” of the investigation with an employee of the Israeli consulate in New York City, according to a new report from POLITICO.

Jake Novak, who the publication identifies as the director of broadcast media at the Consulate General of Israel, and Adams were reportedly friendly on social media and spoke sometimes. But during this conversation, Novak apparently indicated that he was involved in a plot to convince Gaetz’ father, a longtime Florida politico himself, to give $25 million as part of a plan to free a U.S. hostage in Iran.

“Scoop I can’t report: Rep. Gaetz is the subject of a sex with minor…. I trust the source. Charges/accusations apparently ‘very credible’,” Novak wrote to Adams, according to text messages first reported by the American Conservative. After the news became public several days later, Novak followed up with another message: “told ya.”

There was no indication Novak believed the scheme to be a crime, POLITICO reported — though another man, the Florida real estate developer Stephen Alford, was indicted late last month for attempting to defraud Gaetz’ father. Court documents allege that Alford claimed he could broker a presidential pardon for Gaetz in exchange for freeing the hostage, named Bob Levinson, who most intelligence officials believe to be dead.

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The Israeli consulate told the outlet that neither it nor the state of Israel were involved in the plot.

“Jake Novak is a staffer at the Israeli Consulate in New York, and is not serving in any official diplomatic capacity. His correspondence mentioned in this story was not in any way, shape or form a part of his role at the consulate,” Itay Milner, a spokesperson for the consulate, told POLITICO. “After this matter was brought to our attention, it was made clear to Mr. Novak that this is not acceptable by the consulate general, he must never be involved in such matters again and that he must cut immediately all his connections to the issue.”

Gaetz has been accused of participating in drug-fueled orgies and paying for sex with an underage girl — as well as funding a trip for that underage girl across state lines. Many of the allegations were corroborated by a series of confession letters penned by Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg, an ex-Florida tax collector, and obtained by The Daily Beast.

The salacious details of the case have enraptured Washington, D.C. and beyond — with Law and Order even featuring an episode Thursday night with a Congressman storyline eerily similar to the Gaetz saga.

Adams, a cartoonist best known for creating the office comedy strip Dilbert, likely entered the story because of his connections to Trumpworld.

“People with connections to Israel had a high interest in me during the Trump days. Presumably to influence me,” Adams told POLITICO. “Jake and I shared an interest in the mechanics of persuasion, and in interesting business/political stories in general. Most often the stuff with a persuasion or Israel angle. That was our initial connection … people often tell me their scoops before they hit the news just to build credibility. Might have been that.”

After the text messages between the two parties became public, Adams also added that he did not know how reporters had gotten the information.

“We have not communicated since,” Adams told POLITICO. “I’m just as confused as you about why Jake had any involvement and why he thought he needed to tell me.”

Special envoy to Haiti resigns in protest of Biden’s continuation of Trump immigration policy

The U.S. special envoy to Haiti resigned on Thursday over the Biden administration’s “inhumane” expulsion of thousands of Haitian migrants using an immigration policy first implemented by top Trump aide Stephen Miller.

“I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life,” Special Envoy Daniel Foote penned in a missive to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed,” he added, “and my policy recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own.”

His resignation, first reported by PBS, comes in the wake of recently surfaced images of border patrol agents aggressively corralling some of the 15,000 Haitian migrants making their way across the border last week. Addressing the viral pictures on Tuesday, President Joe Biden told reporters, “We’ll get it under control,” according to NBC News. White House Press Secretary likewise said the U.S. would discontinue using horses.

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State Department Spokesperson Ned Price pushed back on Foote’s claims, suggesting that the former envoy’s input was taken into account.

“It is unfortunate that, instead of participating in a solutions-oriented policy process, Special Envoy Foote has both resigned and mischaracterized the circumstances of his resignation,” Price said in a statement.

Psaki echoed Price, claiming that Foote “never once” brought concerns about the administration’s migration policies prior to his stepping down.

“I would note that Special Envoy Foote had ample opportunity to raise concerns about migration during his tenure,” she said in a press briefing. “His purview was, of course, being the special envoy on the ground. His positions were and his views were put forward. They were valued. They were heard. Different policy decisions were made in some circumstances.”

CNN reported that 1,401 Haitians have been deported back to Haiti as of Sunday, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with under 5,000 migrants still in the Del Rio sector. The DHS said that it intends to increase its deportations to seven return flights a day. Meanwhile, 3,200 Haitians have been placed into the custody of Customs and Border Protection.

The development comes as conditions in Haiti – still grappling with the consequences of a devastating earthquake from 2010 – remain unstable, according to CNN. In recent months, Haiti has been rocked by the COVID-19 crisis; the assassination of its late president, President Jovenel Moise; and another earthquake in August, which left over 2,000 dead. To boot, criminal violence has also spurred significant displacement of the nation’s residents, fueling attempted migration into the U.S.

“People still have yet to get drinking water and medical care,” Nicole Phillips, the legal director for Haitian Bridge Alliance, told CNN. “So what needs to happen is to stop the deportation flights to Haiti effective immediately and instead welcome Haitians to screen them for asylum … so they don’t have to return to where they fled.”

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas jetted to Del Rio to address the situation, claiming migrants falsely believed they’d be admitted into the U.S. as part of Biden’s Temporary Protected Status policy – which allows Haitians to remain in the U.S. for an unspecified period of time, according to NBC News.

Kayleigh McEnany tries to blame Biden for spike in murders — but quickly realizes it was under Trump

Former White House press secretary-turned-Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany attempted to slam President Joe Biden on Twitter Thursday using a graphic that showed a significant uptick in the U.S. murder rate during the 2020 calendar year.

There was only one problem — Donald Trump was president for that entire time.

In the initial tweet sent out early Thursday morning by McEnany, she quote-tweeted Axios reporter Lachlan Markay, who had featured a New York Times graphic depicting a 20%-plus increase to the number of murders in the United States in 2020.

Despite the obvious time discrepancy, she wrote: “The U.S. murder rate under Joe Biden…”

Shortly after numerous Twitter users pointed out her error, the tweet was deleted.

What do you even say here? This covers the period when she was the spokesman for Donald Trump, who was president last year. pic.twitter.com/i7goYTL439

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) September 23, 2021

The data in question originates from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which outlines the uptick in the number of murders in the United States, highlighting a significant surge in 2020.

The New York Times reports:

The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960, according to data gathered by the F.B.I. for its annual report on crime.

The Uniform Crime Report will stand as the official word on an unusually grim year, detailing a rise in murder of around 29 percent. The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. The national rate — murders per 100,000 — still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.

The data is scheduled to be released on Monday along with a news release, but it was published early on the F.B.I.’s Crime Data Explorer website.

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On Thursday afternoon, McEnany tried again, quote-tweeting the graphic and shifting the blame more generally onto Democrats, some of whom are proponents of reallocating resources away from police departments.

From the White House podium in August 2020, I warned Defund would result in rising crime.

Sadly, I was right.

Biden you enabled this.

Defund, Democrat mayors, you own this!

The receipts ⬇️ https://t.co/bRiBZ8nqUp pic.twitter.com/iRtjBfgTiM

— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) September 23, 2021

“From the White House podium in August 2020, I warned Defund would result in rising crime. Sadly, I was right. Biden you enabled this,” she wrote. “Defund, Democrat mayors, you own this!”

Gabrielle Union on why women can stop chasing after balance: It’s “fictitious BS that doesn’t exist”

Have you seen that perfectly chiseled couple on social media, with their big veneer smiles and perfectly cuffed jeans enjoying perfectly plated food and perfectly poured craft cocktails on a perfect summer day? Then you zoom in only to see that they look even more perfect than you first thought, with hundreds — maybe thousands — of comments that all read #goals or #RelationshipGoals? Yeah, I see those annoying people too.

“Relationship goals” is a term that should annoy us all. It means that a couple has completed everything needed to project that idea of having a perfect relationship, as if such a thing exists. And when I say everything I mean that they checked all of the appropriate Instagram boxes, from beautiful vacations and matching sneakers to perfect date nights —all perfectly documented under the most perfect lighting. And let’s not forget the festive Thanksgiving and Christmas posts, complemented by a snappy Drake lyric for the caption next to whatever the couple’s corny hashtag is that season.

These couples have mastered promoting the impossible loop of never-ending happiness. “Goals” people can be fun to look at online at times, but everyone in a real relationship knows that’s not real. All romantic relationships are expected to have great moments, but even the most successful couples have bad moments, too. Gabrielle Union, who has been called “goals” for years, joked about this with me during our conversation on “Salon Talks” about her new book, “You Got Anything Stronger?” In her hilarious way, Union writes about the serious problem with being considered perfect.

“You Got Anything Stronger?” is the follow up to Union’s 2017 New York Times bestselling essay collection, “We’re Going to Need More Wine.” Many know Union as a celebrated actress with dozens of titles under her belt, including “Being Mary Jane,” “Bad Boys II” and “Deliver Us from Eva,” but her prose, analysis and the sharp cultural critiques match the star power she has earned on screen. Union’s essays will make you laugh, cry and feel OK if your relationship hasn’t reached the alleged status of “goals.” Union gets so real about her marriage to Dwyane Wade — down to feeling like a failure and declaring “f**k balance” when it comes to roles. “It’s the bullsh*t that they shove on women, that they never ask men for,” she said during our conversation. And the amazing thing is, Union also describes how she works hard on their relationship every single day.

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Gabrielle Union here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about why Union is so candid about her “ugly” fertility journey, what her stepdaughter Zaya has taught her, the challenges she faces as a Black women in Hollywood, and how becoming a mother has forever changed her.

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

How have you been managing family and work life and all of these things, in this brand new era of COVID, this new thing we’ve going through?

We have an incredibly large village, and without the village, we couldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t be half the mother that I am, I wouldn’t be half the friend, the wife. We rely heavily on a number of people to keep us afloat and allow us to do all of the things that we’re out here doing, with our different jobs and businesses, and endorsements, and all that stuff. It’s the village mentality.

Let’s get into this book, “You Got Anything Stronger?” If I had a glass, I would be sitting here pouring with you right now. I truly feel like the writing is brilliant. I don’t throw that word around. It’s warm. It’s funny. It’s extremely personal. I was excited for it because after reading your first book, of just the stories and the little screws, and the yogurt, and the cranberry juice. I was like, yo, I have to start off just by asking was there any backlash from that first book, and things that you considered when walking into the journey of creating the next?

No, not backlash in the sense that I faced any sort of weird consequences in that way. It was more of like, I have to think about what stories that involve more than just me; other people’s perspectives, and think about boundaries and fairness. So, I thought about that going into this book. I have to always make clear when I’m joking. I joke all the time and people are like, “Oh my gosh, she’s serious. She did XYZ.” And especially when I’m on a press tour, talking about certain things, I’m going to be joking. Seeing where blogs might take a chapter, or you know that there’s going to be people who are just searching for a mistake, or for something for clickbait; but they’re going to turn it into something that it’s not. If you read the book, it’s clear that that’s not what it is.

Just kind of going into it, knowing that your words will be misconstrued, there will be attempts to turn people against you on some BS, but as long as you tell your truth, and you stand in it, you have the courage of conviction, you let the chips fall where they may. The truth is the truth, and how you receive it is on you.

Do you ever think about doing stand-up?

I got that last night. No, that is a skill, and a whole other occupation that I am not talented at, nor do I wish to invest the time to be talented in.

You telling the strip club story, the Magic City story on stage … I don’t know; that’s a skill. And I do feel like you maintain the same level of humor in this book that you did in your first book. I think there’s an amazing balance between tragedy, and then having the ability to grow and laugh about it and talk about it. For our viewers and readers who haven’t yet had a chance to read any of your writing, can you just take them through some of the things that you cover in “You Got Anything Stronger?”

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The first chapter I wanted to pack the biggest punch. I wanted you to start this book on, “Oh. OK. OK. OK. She’s going there.” It’s the longest chapter in the book and about my surrogacy journey and my fertility journey, and how that has had an impact on my marriage, and on my psyche, and on my soul. Usually when you hear celebrities talk about their birth story or their surrogacy journey, it’s like, “Me and my husband desperately wanted a baby; found out we couldn’t have it. An angel on earth came, that was gracious enough to birth our baby. And now everything’s great.” Right? “Yeah. Now we have our angel.” And that’s it. And that’s not it, at all.

Those stories, and those truncated truths, make people feel a lot more comfortable about receiving your news. But the reality is that’s not the full story; it’s not even close to the full story. I felt that I needed to be radically transparent about my journey, so people don’t feel like they’re losing it or less than, or bad, because they might’ve had a different journey than the ones that they’re reading about in the magazines. I wanted to be real and honest, that it was complicated, it was messy, it was ugly, it was heartbreaking. It took a toll on every aspect of my life; every area of my life was touched by this journey. And it wasn’t all moonlight and roses. In fact, there’s still challenges.

I still wonder if she would have loved me more if I was able to give birth to her. I wonder, “Would my husband love me more, if I was able to give birth?” All of these things; you’re never going to really have an answer. No one’s going to be like, “It’s true. Listen. There’s a cap to my love. Because we used a surrogate, I can only love you about this much.” You’re never really going to know. But I want it to be honest about those feelings because they’re messier than the usual birth stories; but we don’t tend to share those.

When people talk about “celebrity memoir,” this is not “celebrity memoir.” This is heavy. This is real. Even when you talk about that experience, I think it was really brave of you to use the word failure. Even though these are the things that we can’t control: You can’t control your emotions, and how you feel about certain situations. One of the things that came to my mind is, when my wife was pregnant — you write about it, how pregnant people can do no wrong. People will be like, “Oh, she gets a pass.” And I think your language being so strong, and you being so rigorously honest in a way that is heavy, I think you’re going to help a whole lot of people who are going through the same situation. Did you think about that when you were writing?

That was all I thought about. I know my truth, but for a lot of people… It’s whispered. It’s, “Did you ever feel like this? Well, what about this? Am I a bad person for feeling this way?” But these are whispered, secret conversations that we never have publicly. And because we don’t have them publicly, there’s a lot of other people wondering the same thing. By giving it voice, by giving it a much bigger platform, it frees us up to build community and share resources and information, and help us save ourselves. All I thought about was how to help other people with my pain, basically.

You talk about your own relationship, and the kind of strain that that causes. I think a lot of people, when you’re looking at Instagram, or when you’re looking at people displaying their relationships, they act like the perfect relationship is that you meet, and you get to the destination, and it’s there. They don’t really understand that perfect relationships are something that you work on every day. Some days are beautiful and some days are ugly. It’s not a constant. It’s something that continues to evolve throughout the years, as we take on different jobs, and throughout our careers. These things constantly have to be worked on. I think you did a great job talking about that. It kind of punched me in the chest, when you said, “The me of today would not have stayed with him. But would I be who I am now, without the pain?” I don’t even go to church like that, but that’s church.

And it’s true. And it’s true. And it’s not the “goals,” all that stuff that people put on us. You know what I mean?

The goals, right. Yeah.

We always say, “We are perfectly imperfect.” There is no such thing as a perfect relationship. It could be perfect in moments; not perfect, but real, amazing moments. But when the goal is perfection, you’ll always feel like a failure. But if the goal is, “Today, I choose you. I’m in this fight with you. I’m in these trenches with you, and I am loving you. And the things that I don’t love about myself, that I’m projecting onto you, I am committing to work on, and vice versa. We have to figure out how to make all of these moving parts that are messy and complicated, but true, work.”

And there’s a commitment every day. And there’s a lot of joy, and a lot of love, and a lot of adventures and antics, and this and that. But there’s a lot of mess in there too. And to be fair, you kind of got to talk about the mess because you can’t just always present this idea of perfection. It doesn’t actually exist.

It’s popular right now. My publisher’s on my back right now because she’s like, “You need to have more joy. Where’s the joy? You get dark. And then when you go light, you kind of go darker again.” And I’m like, “Yo. I earned these scars.” How come we always have to act like we’re living in this constant state of joy, when we all have pain? And that’s something that connects us all.

Yeah, that’s unfair. I hope your editor is listening now because the reality of being Black in America is a roller coaster. You could be at the pinnacle of success. You can’t imagine the kind of joy you are feeling; and something happens, and it shatters it. And now you’re not even at normal; you are below, you’re on the ground. You are trying to pull yourself up off the ground.

To not talk about that reality is to A) lie and B) you do a such a disservice to yourself and everyone else who is on the roller coaster. It’s like, “Well, how the hell is he just so freaking joyous all the f**king time? How? Give me the secret sauce.” And you’re like, “Oh, that’s actually not true. It’s an editor’s note.” Like, “What the f**k is so joyous? We’re all struggling. We’re all drowning. What is going on?” So, I always challenge us to stay on the side of truth and radical transparency, and whatever that means. And that’s where the nuggets come. That’s where the evolution comes. That’s where the change comes, just being true to your journey.

Zaya is becoming an icon in her own right. I really, really, really admire the way that you write about how your family had dealt with the attacks, and the narrow-minded points of view, and people who don’t really understand. I think it’s so beautiful that you almost don’t want to give it praise because it should be normal. This is how we should put it for our people; we should show love. We should fight people who try to come against us as a family, and as a unit. What do you think it’s going to take for society to get to a place where we understand that the world is different now and we need to embrace everybody, and show love, and not be judgmental and not be narrow-minded, and not try to attack other families?

They say “hurt people hurt people.” I don’t know what kind of collective, global healing needs to happen because we’re not that ignorant. You know what I’m saying? We’re not toddlers. You reach a certain age, and you have access to information. If you opt to stay ignorant, that is a choice. I don’t know how to help someone who chooses to be ignorant. And there’s a lot of people who choose to be like, “Two plus two is three. I don’t care what you say.” I don’t know what to do with that.

For those people who are like, “I’m struggling with accepting and loving someone that is different than me.” OK. I can work with that, because you’re being honest. OK. “What about that difference is causing you fear and anxiety, and having you lash out in this way? Can you go a little deeper?” Especially when it comes to communities of color, we have been conditioned for the last 400 years that you have to constantly be shape-shifting and minimizing, and centering white comfort, white gaze, and white validation, to make sure our children are safe, and that they’re not separated from us; that they’re not sold away, that they are happy, and have opportunities, and are protected and are valued.

The reality is, they had value and they were worthy from birth; and we don’t have to keep shape-shifting. We become the same oppressors that we’re trying to escape; and home should be the sanctuary. So we get to the root of what causes so many of us to reject our own, for a sense of self-preservation that is a residue from slavery. The world is going to be the world.

Absolutely.

But in your home, you know better; and you can provide the sanctuary for your children and for your loved ones in your own home. There is a refuge against whatever else is out there. But we got to get to the root of what is causing this reaction. What is that? “Baby, no one’s coming to hurt you. You know what I mean? No, one’s coming to hurt you. No one’s coming to harm you; and your reaction doesn’t match. And it’s illogical, and it’s… Let’s go a little deeper. Let’s ask some follow-up questions, and let’s figure out a plan of action to get you on the right side of yourself.”

You and Dwyane are definitely leading the way. You guys are setting an amazing example for us to all move forward, and it’s extremely valuable. And I want to say on a personal tip, your chapter, “F**k Balance,” is going to make me a better husband. I do feel like if I wash the dishes before I put them in the dishwasher, if they make it into the dishwasher, sometimes I’m like, “Yo, where’s my Nobel Peace Prize?” But I do feel like we can all step it up; we can all step it up.

Yeah.

Do you feel like you’ve redefined what that balance is, in your own life?

Well, yeah, because it doesn’t exist. I don’t even search for it. I search now for grace. I have to be comfortable receiving it, which wasn’t comfortable. It felt like some weird kind of charity. And I have to be comfortable with giving it. When you acknowledge a loss, it’s not loss. Nothing’s being taken from you in offering grace. It’s just grace. It’s free, and it’s the best gift you can give yourself, and the best gift you can give other people. When you’re trying to find that elusive balance, and you’re like, “I just can’t seem to find it.” It kind of doesn’t exist. And it’s the bullsh*t that they shove on women, that they never ask men for. And it’s supposed to keep us so off-kilter, that we’re always chasing after some fictitious bullsh*t that doesn’t exist, to make us feel bad about our jobs, or our passions, or our bodies or our output in our households.

We’re just people; we’re not superheroes. And the fact that men get let off the hook, you know what I mean, is bullsh*t. And that’s really when people tell on themselves. My husband had full custody of his kid, as a single NBA player. He had a number of businesses; not one question about, “How do you balance it all, Dwyane?” Because they assume that when that check cleared, that’s enough balance for everybody. And I have a check that clears, too. How come that’s not enough balance for me? How come you got to ask, “What recipes are you…” “No recipes, motherf**ker. I don’t cook like that.” I’m like, “What? How come you’re not asking Dwyane about his meatloaf recipe?”

I couldn’t let you leave without talking about being a Black woman in Hollywood, and how have you learned how to navigate, and asking you if it got better since you first started out in the industry?

I can’t say better. It’s just morphs into different challenges. So maybe better, in the sense that there are more jobs, because of streaming and all the new cable channels, and they have to have programming to fill all those channels and stuff. But if you talked about pay, you talked about respect, you talk about opportunities to really build a meaningful career. Do you love the work? What is your experience like on set? What is your experience like in pre-production, and how hard is it to sell projects? Who’s really at the top of the food chain in every micro-industry within the Hollywood organism? Not really; no. But then you have moments like the other night at the Met Ball; and all the young girls, all the young Black women and girls who were in attendance; and you could kind of see people feeling like they didn’t… Like maybe this wasn’t the right room for them.

And I grabbed them. I’m like, “Don’t you shrink in this, b*tch. We are the culture. Culture does not exist without us. This doesn’t exist without us. You take up all the space in this room, and you are your full-ass self. Don’t put on that weird voice for these people. They need us more than we need them. Enjoy this. Take up space. Meet whoever you want to meet, but don’t feel like they’ve bestowed something on you. You were a queen when you walked in this, b*tch; and you’ll be a queen when you walk out of here. Enjoy it. This is your sh*t, too.”

And that’s that OG role, we slide into easily, because we had Regina King and Tisha Campbell, Tichina Arnold, Jenifer Lewis — all these amazing actresses who’ve been in the business for so long — who are not interested nor invested in watching us fail. We were able to bloom. We’re doing the same for the next generation.

Please tell everyone where they can get your amazing book.

Please shop local. Yes, there’s all the usual spots: Target, Barnes and Noble, Amazon; but our local bookstores need us more than ever. So, if you are lucky enough to have a local bookstore in your community, please shop local, and request the book if they don’t have it from your local bookstore.

Vallery Lomas’s hushpuppies will cure your fear of frying

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making us afraid to fry at home.

Fried chicken from a chicken shack is an exquisite treat. Fresh french fries, served beside a burger, are inevitable. Donuts? Come on. But those are all somehow regarded as foods that happen outside one’s own kitchen. Heating up a big bucket of oil and dropping stuff into it oneself seems intimidating, not to mention messy.

But you already know that fried stuff is delicious. What if I told you it was also pretty easy? There is so much to adore about Foodie in New York Vallery Lomas’s debut cookbook “Life Is What You Bake It” that it would be impossible to pick just one great recipe or story. But the fact that she devotes an entire chapter to approachable, enticing “Doughnuts and Other Fried Things” is right up there on the list of the book’s charms.

When she competed on — and won — “The Great American Baking Show” in 2017, her season was abruptly scrapped because of sexual harassment allegations against one of its judges. Her groundbreaking victory never aired. In her book, Lomas describes the experience in the baking terms of being “punched down and rising again.” She carried on, leaving her career as an attorney for her first love. “Life Is What You Bake It” is a culinary homage to her Louisiana roots, her time in Los Angeles, London, Paris and New York. It’s clafoutis, bagels and banoffee, and the unapologetically deep fried southern delights of beignets and hushpuppies.

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In conversation, Lomas is as sunny as the things she bakes. “Oh my gosh, talk about hitting the spot!” she says with a laugh, describing her crisp recipe that has the added bonus that “You don’t have to fuss around with pie crust.” Because Lomas wants to encourage bakers of all skill levels, she mixes her more complicated recipes with decadent, easy dishes like twice baked almond croissants made from bakery pastries, “for the people who really are like, ‘I am afraid to bake.'” And for those really afraid to fry, there are hushpuppies.

Golden, crunchy cornmeal hushpuppies are so unexpected for a home cooked dinner, they’re an instant home run. When I made them recently to serve with a pork tenderloin, my family gobbled the entire plate like they feared they’d never eat them again. Don’t worry, folks, you will. “Those are actually wonderfully quick to make,” says Lomas. “I know there’s a whole lot of hesitancy with frying. But they’re really easy to make, and you literally just carefully drop them in oil.” They’re also as close as a few staples you probably already have on hand.

I’ve tweaked Lomas’s recipe ever so slightly here to minimize the ingredients. I’ve also cut the quantities in half, so you can get everything fried in two batches, eat delicious hushpuppies with dinner and not be burdened with leftovers. If you somehow inexplicably do have any left, just reheat in the oven to crisp up. Double the quantities if you’re cooking for a bigger group.

***

Hushpuppies

Inspired by Vallery Lomas’s “Life Is What You Bake It: Recipes, Stories, and Inspiration to Bake Your Way to the Top: A Baking Book”

Makes about a dozen hushpuppies

Ingredients:

1 cup yellow cornmeal
1⁄4 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup of buttermilk (or 1/2 cup of whole milk with 1/2 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar added, left to set for 5 minutes)
1 egg
2 scallions, chopped
24 ounces of vegetable oil

Directions:

In a large bowl, whisk together your dry ingredients.
Add buttermilk and egg and stir until thoroughly combined. Let the mixture stand while you heat the oil.
In a heavy bottomed dutch oven or pot, heat oil over a high flame to 375*, or until a pinched bit of your batter sizzles and fries up when you add it. Be patient — dropping batter in insufficiently heated oil leads to crushing disappointment.
Line a big plate or cookie sheet with paper towels.
Use a spoon or small cookie scoop to drop your batter in one spoonful at a time. Do not overcrowd the pot, and be careful of splatters.
Fry each hushpuppy roughly one minute on each side, then flip to get golden all over. Scoop out with a slotted spoon or better yet a frying spider and put on your paper towels. Eat as soon as possible.

Serve with hot sauce, spicy mayo, or butter. These are traditionally served with fried fish, but there is nothing they’re not good with.

More Quick & Dirty:

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Experts say the now-waning delta surge may be the last major COVID-19 wave

Has the latest COVID-19 surge, fueled by the ultra-infectious delta variant, finally peaked in the United States?

On Wednesday, the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, a group of researchers who have been studying and following the trajectory of the pandemic, announced a new prediction stating that the worst of the delta surge is likely behind us. Through combining nine different mathematical models, the researchers forecast that cases will finally start to fall again throughout the next few months and that the U.S. will avoid another winter surge like last year.

“Any of us who have been following this closely, given what happened with delta, are going to be really cautious about too much optimism,” Justin Lessler at the University of North Carolina, who helps run the hub, told NPR. “But I do think that the trajectory is towards improvement for most of the country.”

Indeed, the U.S. is already starting to see this happen in real-time. As a whole, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are declining (once again) across the country and even the world. According to the World Health Organization’s most recent report, the number of new COVID-19 cases fell to 3.6 million new cases globally, down from 4 million new infections the previous week. In parts of the U.S. where delta hit the hardest, like Florida and Texas, cases and hospitalizations have declined over the last week, too. Of course, this trend doesn’t track everywhere across the country. In Ohio, some hospitals are at or reaching peak capacity, as the delta variant just now takes hold in various communities.

“I think in general, with delta, we’re peaking as a country, but there are going to be some states where they’re on a different timescale and those states are less populous so they probably won’t wouldn’t affect the overall U.S. numbers,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center. “But it may get difficult in some of those states if there are high-risk individuals getting infected as we’ve seen, for example in Idaho, where they’re worried about the ability to care for patients.”

The country, Adalja emphasized, is pretty “heterogeneous” and even if U.S. numbers as a whole fall, that doesn’t mean the delta surge is over for everyone. Still, a trend of cases and hospitalizations falling is a positive one.

For Americans who recall over a year of surges in case numbers followed by declines followed by another inevitable surge, this prediction might induce deja vu. The delta variant surge has been dubbed the fourth officially COVID-19 wave since the pandemic began, and it certainly threw the pandemic on a different track. Unlike previous surges from 2020 and early 2021, vaccines were widely available for most people who were eligible during delta variant’s rise.

Now, as this wave crests, more people who previously were ineligible for vaccines will be able to obtain vaccinations. The two-shot Pfizer vaccine is expected to be approved in the coming weeks for children between the ages of five and 11; previously, the youngest vaccine-eligible age was 12.

While there have not been official lockdowns during the delta surge in the U.S. (unlike previous surges), some parts of the country tightened pandemic restrictions because of the delta variant. These generally included rules about wearing masks indoors, regardless of vaccination status, or denying entry to businesses if patrons lacked vaccine cards. Indeed, the delta variant delayed society’s timeline for returning to any semblance of normalcy.

Unlike previous surges, experts like Adalja and those at the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub do not believe another “surge” is in our future.

“I think you have to also define what it means by surge — are we going to see an acceleration of cases when it gets colder, less sunny, less humid and people have to go indoors? Yes, that’s just based on the biology of the virus,” Adalja said. “There will be more cases during those periods of time, but will they be deadly? That’s really a function of who’s getting infected and how protected the high-risk populations are.”

Adalja added that after this wave, he does believe that many people will be protected by either the vaccines or natural immunity.

“I do think there’s going to be a significant amount of immunity when you combine natural immunity plus vaccine induced immunity plus people who are now dead and not susceptible because they’re dead,” Adalja said.

Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, said it is likely a lot of vaccinated people have been exposed to the delta variant and don’t even know it.

“The thing about delta to remember is that we are not getting away from it — it’s really transmissible, and we did not lock down our society. We tried to do masks in some places, but we didn’t even do capacity limits and we opened schools at the same time,” Gandhi said. “So what does this mean? It means a lot of people have been exposed to delta, and for the vaccinated, many of them don’t know it.”

If they did, they likely had a mild breakthrough case.

If doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity, then it’s reasonable for expectations to need to be managed during yet another wind-down from yet another wave. While this fall might not be as relaxed and celebratory as life felt before delta happened, when cases were falling and vaccinations rates were rising, there is room to be optimistic. But does this mean the pandemic is finally nearing an end? That is a little more difficult to answer, Gandhi said.

“No one’s defined an endpoint,” Gandhi said. “I have really concluded that the endpoint is when everyone qualifies for a vaccine, including children; that’s when there will be a relaxation that will be when we’ll stop having articles that say, in the Washington Post, ‘living with an unvaccinated child is like living through a fire alarm every day.'”

Similar to how the delta variant has affected different states and cities across the country, a sense of normalcy depends on where one is located, too. Blue states like California have more pandemic restrictions, like mask mandates indoors, compared to red states like Florida that have politicians who keep refusing to implement mask mandates. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a set of recommendations for when the vaccinated should wear masks indoors, which includes wearing a mask indoors in public if a person is in an area of substantial or high transmission. Unvaccinated people are expected to wear masks regardless of transmission rates inside, which is partly why local jurisdictions reverted back to universal masking. Adalja said as COVID-19 cases fall, it’s possible that some local governments will ease indoor masking restrictions.

“If you’re in a place where those have fallen, then the CDC recommendations would not necessarily be applicable,” Adalja said. “Some states or some counties may have gone beyond the CDC recommendations, but I think most of them would probably phase those out if they’ve fallen below the CDC threshold; I think you would see those types of things, not be enforced because transmission goes down.”

Certainly getting more people vaccinated is the best way to slow transmission though, but at least for now gone are the days when symptoms of a cold — even for the vaccinated — could be easily brushed off. But as Gandhi noted, how the next phase of the pandemic looks in regards to masking and gatherings is largely a “blue state question”— as many red states didn’t follow CDC recommendations at all once delta hit. Regardless of politics, both Adalja and Gandhi said we are moving to a phase of the pandemic where people have to learn to live with COVID-19 as an endemic disease.

“What does endemic mean? It means that you have to accept the highly transmissible respiratory variant,” Gandhi said. “Whether you want to accept it or not, we have to accept the reality of endemicity.”

What is “Boom Boom Lemon drink” from Netflix’s “Kate”?

If you’ve been cooling off with Netflix recently, you may have come across the recently-released film “Kate,” starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the titular assassin with 24 hours to live, and an unquenchable thirst for revenge — and Boom Boom Lemon drink. The refreshing citrus beverage naturally proves difficult for Kate to find, but it does manage to inspire an unlikely friendship between her and Ani (Miku Martineau), who just want to get their hands on their favorite soda.

If you found yourself watching “Kate” and fantasizing about a sip of the lemon soda yourself, you’re definitely not alone. Twitter was abuzz with fans not only rooting for Winstead to take a sip before the credits rolled, but also hoping to score some Boom Boom Lemon drink themselves. Unfortunately for viewers, Boom Boom Lemon is not — at least for now — a real product. The good news is that there at least seems to be a Japanese equivalent that’s close enough. That would be C.C. Lemon, which parent company Suntory (who you may recall from Lost In Translation) describes as “the No.1 lemon-flavoured carbonated drink in Japan for over 20 years.” Its popularity may or may not have something to do with the fact that characters from “The Simpsons” have appeared in quite a few of C.C. Lemon commercials over the years, arguably making them more recognizable in Japan from the ads than the show itself.

If there’s one non-Simpsons tidbit to know about C.C. Lemon, it’s that the drink is chock-full of vitamin C. So much, in fact, that a 350 mL can (about 12 ounces) contains 50 lemons worth of vitamin C. Hard to say if that would help if you’re slowly being poisoned over 24 hours like Kate’s main character, but it’ll surely help you fend off scurvy for a while should you decide to order some online from retailers like Amazon.

So how did the lemony drink make its way into the latest Netflix original movie? You may want to take this with a grain of salt (which would probably pair better with lime), but a Twitter user alleges that “Kate” director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan used to drink C.C. Lemon quite often while he was living in Japan in the 90’s, making it the supposed reference point for Boom Boom Lemon drink.

At least one other Twitter user points to Boom energy drink’s lemon and lime-flavored energy shot as a potential point of reference. Makes sense that you’d probably want to be as caffeinated as possible if you were being poisoned and had one day to live earth like Kate, but the connection otherwise might be a bit dubious.

The fact that Boom Boom Lemon is not a real soda means there’s no official recipe, but that hasn’t stopped YouTube channel No Menu Cooking from putting forth one of their own. Wondering how to make a DIY-version of Boom Boom Lemon drink? You’ll need a mason jar, lemons, carbonated water, and a whole lot of sugar. Combine the lemons and sugar in a sealed mason jar long enough to pull out the lemons’ juice (at which point you won’t be able to press the lid down anymore). Mix the resulting juice with some plain seltzer and you’ve got easier access to Boom Boom Lemon than Kate had.

While Boom Boom Lemon drink itself may not be real, a pretty close facsimile may be more attainable than you’d think. There’s no guarantee you’ll love it as much as Kate, but at least it’s not poisonous.

COVID is changing Trump country: Alabama’s population shrinks for the first time in history

Alabama’s population is dwindling for the first time in state’s history as a result of COVID-19’s deadly spread throughout its residents.

“Our state literally shrunk in 2020, based on the numbers that we have managed to put together, and actually by quite a bit,” State Health Officer Scott Harris said in a Friday press conference, according to The Guardian. “2020 is going to be the first year that we know of in the history of our state where we actually had more deaths than births.”

Harris said that the state saw 64,714 deaths in 2020, which significantly outnumbered Alabama’s 57,641 births that same year.

“We have data going back to the first decade of the 20th century – so, more than 100 years – and that’s never happened before, nor has it ever even been close before,” Harris added.

The health crisis in Alabama is just one among many throughout various parts of the South.

In Mississippi, one out of every 320 residents has died due to COVID-19, Rolling Stone reported. Over the past two months, the state has seen a staggering spike in daily cases, which at one point reached roughly 3,600.

However, on Monday, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, failed to name anything he’d do differently, instead citing President Biden’s apparent federal overreaches.

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“It is a very difficult situation that we as Mississippians and we as Americans find ourselves in,” Reeves told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “But we also have to understand as we look forward: if this president has the ability to mandate vaccines, what powers do we not grant this president? What does he not have the ability to do?”

“I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle about Covid… and why does it seem like folks in Mississippi and maybe in the Mid-South are a little less scared, shall we say,” the conservative added. “When you believe in eternal life — when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things.”

Other states disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 include West Virginia, Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee – where hospitalizations have reached a record high, according to The Intelligencer. This past week, Idaho announced “crisis standards of care” due to severe overcrowding in the state’s hospital network, meaning that resources may have to be rationed toward patients with the highest chance of survival.

“The situation is dire,” Dave Jeppesen, the director of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, told The New York Times. “We don’t have enough resources to adequately treat the patients in our hospitals, whether you are there for Covid-19 or a heart attack or because of a car accident.”

Total COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. is racing toward 700,000, with about 6% occurring over the last month, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center. Meanwhile, CNN recently reported that roughly one in every 500 Americans have passed as result of the virus.

A large swath of scientific evidence suggests that more conservative – and incidentally Donald Trump-supporting – areas throughout America may be driving the spread of the disease.

In Florida, COVID-19 deaths since late June have proven about nine times higher in the reddest counties than the bluest countries. According to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of California, “counties that voted heavily for Trump have seen higher death rates than their bluer counterparts since vaccines became widely available in June — a shift from the period before, when Democratic-leaning counties had higher death rates.”

Utah State University last week observed a similar pattern when it comes to infection rates across the U.S., finding that higher concentrations of Donald Trump voters correlated with elevated infection rates per capita. The salience of political views in COVID-19 death was particularly pronounced in rural areas throughout the state, where the spread of the virus has been less studied.

“This is super illegal”: Lauren Boebert used campaign cash to pay her rent, FEC filing shows

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., used thousands of dollars from donors to pay for rent and utility bills in violation of campaign finance laws, according to a new Federal Election Commission filing.

Boebert, who has a track record of failing to follow FEC disclosure rules, came under the agency’s scrutiny last month after filing a campaign finance report listing more than $6,000 in Venmo payments in May and June with the description “personal expense of Lauren Boebert billed to campaign account in error. Expense has been reimbursed.” The FEC sent a letter to the campaign asking for further explanation.

The campaign on Tuesday submitted an amended filing for the quarter listing two $2,000 payments as “Rent billed to campaign via Venmo in error” and two $1,325 payments for “rent/utilities.” The campaign also added payments with the same amount, dates and descriptions to John Pacheco, whose listed address is the same as Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado, the restaurant Boebert owns.

The FEC warned in August that Boebert could potentially face punitive action over the payments.

“If it is determined that the disbursement(s) constitutes the personal use of campaign funds, the Commission may consider taking further legal action,” the letter said. “However, prompt action to obtain reimbursement of the funds in question will be taken into consideration.”

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The campaign said in a letter on Tuesday that the funds have already been reimbursed and will appear on the next quarter’s report, which is due next month.

Former Democratic congressional aide Colin Strother said that Boebert is still likely to face an FEC investigation even if she reimbursed the money. “This is super illegal,” he wrote on Twitter. “Her chief of staff should have known this.” Capitol Hill reporter Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News agreed that Boebert’s actions were “very, very problematic.” Former Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., pleaded guilty in 2019 to using campaign funds for personal expenses, though he did not reimburse the campaign and falsified FEC records to hide the expenses.

Boebert’s campaign finance filings have repeatedly raised red flags since she ran for office last year. Accountable.US, a progressive government watchdog group, last year filed a formal complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics, and the nonprofit government watchdog group Campaign for Accountability filed an FEC complaint, after Boebert paid herself more than $21,000 in mileage reimbursements from her campaign account. An analysis by the Denver Post found that Boebert would have had to drive 38,712 miles (more than the circumference of the planet) and in fact she held no campaign events in March, April or July and only one in May, during a period of the pandemic when travel was limited. The campaign later filed an amended report claiming that the reimbursement included mileage, travel expenses and hotel rooms, though it still listed $17,280 in mileage reimbursements.

A separate analysis by Colorado Public Radio found that it was possible Boebert could have driven about 30,000 miles to 129 campaign events. The campaign told the outlet that Boebert had “traveled to every nook and cranny of the district to speak with and hear from the people about their concerns.”

During her campaign for Congress, Boebert paid off nearly $19,000 in state tax liens that her restaurant had accrued since 2016 for unpaid unemployment insurance premiums, making the final payments just days before her election.

“Rep. Boebert’s mileage claim doesn’t pass the smell test,” Michelle Kuppersmith, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, told HuffPost. “It’s also quite a coincidence that the amount she reimbursed herself is just a little more than the $19,000 in liens she repaid in October 2020.”

Boebert, who sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, also failed to disclose that her husband earned more than $900,000 between 2019 and 2020 working for an energy firm, the Associated Press reported last month. The first-term congresswoman did not report the earnings during her campaign but ultimately included them on a financial disclosure form filed in August.

Former Democratic state Rep. Bri Buentello filed a formal complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics alleging that the payments may amount to bribery because the salary was “inconsistent” with her husband’s qualifications and standard compensation, citing data showing that oil and gas workers in similar positions earn less than $174,000. Buentello questioned whether “this compensation was made in exchange for actions taken by Rep. Lauren Boebert since being sworn into Congress in January,” including her bill aiming to reverse President Joe Biden’s temporary ban on oil and gas leasing on federal land and the revocation of the Keystone XL pipeline, “which would have materially benefited” the firm her husband worked for.

Boebert spokesman Jake Settle dismissed the complaint as a “waste of everyone’s time” and said the congresswoman “exceeded her FEC disclosure requirements in the name of full transparency and to avoid any semblance of impropriety.”

“She has been clear since the day she announced a run for Congress that both she and her husband have worked in the oil and natural gas industry and were supportive of efforts to increase production and expand pipeline development,” he told Colorado Politics. “The constant string of left wing attacks from political hacks are without merit.”

The FEC previously said that Boebert also failed to report her fundraising ties to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. FEC records reviewed by Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo last month showed that Boebert’s campaign spent $2.6 million last election cycle but only made 147 payments to 32 recipients, 40 of those payments for Uber rides around the time that Boebert attended a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C.

Boebert in February pushed back on the criticism about her campaign disclosures after the mileage reimbursements were first reported.

“They want to come against me for legitimate expenses, go ahead,” she told the Colorado Times Recorder. “I am doing the work of the people. I had to make those connections. And really, I under-reported a lot of stuff.”

Trump lashes out at GOP senators, blames Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee for his failed coup attempt

Donald Trump blasted Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, on Wednesday, telling the Republican lawmakers they should be “ashamed” of not showing him enough fealty during his ceaseless campaign to overturn President Biden’s 2020 election win.

“I spent virtually no time with Senators Mike Lee of Utah, or Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, talking about the 2020 Presidential Election Scam or, as it is viewed by many, the ‘Crime of the Century,'” Trump wrote in an email blast. “Lindsey and Mike should be ashamed of themselves for not putting up the fight necessary to win,” the former president continued.

“Look at the facts that are coming out in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other States,” Trump implored without citing any facts.

His latest rant comes amid news from this week that the two senators “personally vetted” Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, according to The Washington Post, which excerpted “Peril,” a forthcoming book from Post reporters Bob Costa and Bob Woodward detailing the matter. Both senators apparently involved their senior staff in efforts to probe the results of the election.

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Back in late November of last year, Graham personally called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” enough ballots to turn the tide for Trump, potentially violating federal law. Additionally, Graham and his lawyer, Lee Holmes, met multiple times with ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to discuss Trump’s allegations of fraud, with Giuliani distributing the senator multiple memos on the matter.

Meanwhile, Lee reportedly investigated the legal ability of former Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block Biden’s certification. The Post reported that the senator made “phone call after phone call” to various state officials, though they, by and large, refused to assign alternate state electors to the election. At the time, many Trump allies told Lee the opposite – that state electors were, in fact, gearing up to be reassigned in Trump’s favor.

But Lee recalled seeing things differently.

“As we got closer and closer to Jan. 6, I became concerned because I wasn’t seeing any of these developments occur but I was continuing to hear this narrative,” he said at the town hall, according to Deseret News.

Ultimately, after exploring a number of different avenues for challenging the election results, both lawmakers were reportedly “unpersuaded.”

“Holmes found the sloppiness, the overbearing tone of certainty, and the inconsistencies disqualifying,” the authors of “Peril” wrote. “The memos,” Holmes concluded, “added up to nothing.”

Two senators told The Hill on Tuesday that Graham this past weekend was attempting to play the role of “peacemaker” between Trump and Senate Minority Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has as of late fallen out of Trump’s good graces. Graham was reportedly able to have Trump concede that McConnell helped him during his presidency.

“Lindsey was with the president this last weekend. From what I understand Trump said something complimentary about Mitch,” one GOP senator told The Hill.

In the past, Graham and Lee have in many ways shown great loyalty to Trump.

Last year, Lee compared the former president Captain Moroni, a prophetic figure in the Book of Mormon. Graham likewise said that the GOP “can’t grow” without Trump. But by January, after months of probing Trump’s election conspiracies, both Republicans voted to certify the election results in Biden’s favor.

Exactly a year ago, Donald Trump told us exactly who he was and how far he would go

At first, I couldn’t believe what the president said.

My question was quite simple — and I anticipated a simple answer. I sought reassurance that whatever else, a peaceful transfer of power after an election — one of the cornerstones of the American experience that has made us unique, a fundamental example of why other nations look up to us — was not up for debate.

Since George Washington gave up the reins of power and retired to his farm, like an American Cincinnatus, the peaceful transfer of power from president to president has been an example the rest of the world respects and has emulated.

We have taken this for granted. Donald Trump treated this tradition as personal toilet paper.

Whatever else happened during the four years that Donald Trump was president, I expected him and the GOP to uphold this American tradition. Hence, one year ago, on Sept. 23, 2020, I asked Donald Trump whether, come “win, lose or draw,” he would accept a peaceful transfer of power. Until he came along, I would never have thought to ask a president such a question. I might as well have asked if they intended to continue breathing.

But Trump was different. The time was different. That briefing, in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House, came during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The White House press corps had voluntarily reduced our numbers to just 14, in a room that routinely had hosted as many as 110 reporters during Trump’s tenure in the White House. Trump, through his press secretary, had routinely skirted this mandate by inviting “guests” from favored news organizations to stand at the back of the room and ask questions. I routinely showed up to counter-program the Trump lackeys.

On the day in question last year, someone with an assigned seat didn’t show up for the presidential briefing and rather than allowing a Trump acolyte to take the open seat — which was the last seat in the last row — I took it myself.

Mind you, I did not believe Trump would call on me. He and I had a past. I had sued him to keep my press pass. He’d called me “fake news” and “that Playboy guy,” and had told me to sit down and shut up on several occasions. Once he threatened to walk out of a news conference in the Rose Garden if I didn’t shut up. I didn’t, and he didn’t walk out. He took the question while complaining the whole time.

On Sept. 23, 2020, he surprised me again. Not only did he take my question, but he picked me first and I did not hesitate. The only issue on the minds of millions of Americans then was whether or not Trump would respect the results of the upcoming election. What Trump said to me and told the nation that day was the match that lit the fire leading to the “Big Lie,” an insurrection, one dead rioter, dead and beaten Capitol Police officers, and a nation that is still divided, sore and angry. More importantly, Trump has never admitted that he lost the election and he threatens our democracy daily.

No one should be surprised.

Everyone should be outraged.

But some, including high-ranking members of the Republican Party, continue to defend Trump and millions of Americans still believe him — no matter what they saw on television, no matter what they were told in news reports and no matter what the reality is.

Kellyanne Conway described this phenomenon as “alternative facts” and that is where millions of Americans, courtesy of a consummate con man, dwell today — in the gray nether regions of a constructed fiction where Trump and his minions believe he won; where taking a de-worming drug designed by scientists for horses is preferable to taking a vaccine designed by scientists for humans and where Trump is universally respected and/or feared by the leaders of the rest of the world — and where only he can save us.

Trump came closer than most of us know to staging a coup, even after he warned us about that last September. Recent news reports and a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa highlight a six-point plan for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results.

Other news reports show that Trump and his team knew shortly after the election that there was no basis for challenging its results, and that Sen. Lindsey Graham apparently thought the arguments proposed to challenge the election results amounted to the logic of a “third grader.” Still they lied to us.

Now we know what Trump meant when I asked him last year if he would “commit to a peaceful transferal of power after the election.” This is what he said:

“We’re going to have to see what happens. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster. . . get rid of the ballots . . . and there won’t be a transfer, frankly, they’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it . . .”

“No I don’t,” I replied.

Trump’s traitorous, convoluted and muddy thinking, his flash over substance, his obfuscation of facts and his total disregard for the truth and decency was horrifying then and has largely overwhelmed American politics now.

There are those so convinced that Trump got screwed in the 2020 election that they’ll defend the treasonous actions of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6, while at the same time denying that Trump whipped them into a frenzy or that they were in a frenzy at all. With the same breath, there are those who will say the insurrection was a peaceful protest, an FBI, Black Lives Matter or antifa violent action, that it did not occur or was justified or — shudder — was even patriotic. The actions of that day were the actions of domestic terrorists. I was there. I witnessed it.

Look where we are now.

Division. Denial of facts. It was all there in the statement Trump made. He provided the roadmap to an insurrection on Sept. 23, 2020. People followed it. People died.

A year later, the United States looks even more lost than it was a year ago.

Donald Trump doesn’t care. He wants to bring it all down and is trying to run a shadow presidency as he ridicules everything Joe Biden does.

Make no mistake. Biden has his faults. His handling of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Haitian problem on the border and the alliance with Australia and the U.K., which has created major friction with France, are all wounds that have been self-inflicted and damaging.

But Biden respects the Constitution, and anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see he is trying to work for all of us, not just himself. He has rallied to get Congress and the country to unify — working hard to get a bipartisan infrastructure package passed and constantly urging Americans to come together as he pushes hard for voting rights and increased taxes on the rich.

Trump never did that and never could. A year after he fanned the flame of insurrection in a White House briefing, we can clearly see the consequences of those actions. The threat of a coup was real — spurred by Trump’s disregard for truth, an obsession with being branded a loser and a narcissistic view of the universe that boils down to this: For Donald Trump, we don’t matter. Only his own desires matter.

As Kurt Bardella wrote recently in USA Today, “We cannot let our guard down. … Today’s GOP has patterned itself after extreme and radical factions. Despots who are intent on normalizing violence to achieve their political objectives.”

These actions in the GOP are rooted in Donald Trump’s words. After he became president, Trump found levers to pull that sated his twisted needs for self-glory and adulation. He is addicted to that. His putrid, warped sense of self cannot permit him to let go and he continues to try and pull us down into the toilet with him.

In the 1993 western “Tombstone,” Doc Holliday (played by Val Kilmer) is asked what makes a man like Johnny Ringo, the film’s villain. “A man like Ringo has got a great big hole right in the middle of him,” he says. “He can never kill enough or steal enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.”

Like Johnny Ringo, Donald Trump seeks revenge — for being born.

A year after he told us, in response to my question about the election, how he would bend reality to suit his needs, he still tries. Since he has had some success in retaining his base (and more importantly for him, in raising money), there are other Republicans following his act.

United we stand. Divided we fall. Trump is the king of division. For the rest of us to stand he must fall. He must be prosecuted. He must be culled from the body politic.

Only then can we possibly hope to address “Trumpism.”

Trump showed us his hand a year ago. Time is long overdue to show him the back of ours.

Biden’s pandemic plan overlooks mask mandates and vulnerable populations

President Joseph Biden on Sept. 9, 2021, unveiled his revamped strategy to confront the pandemic, outlining an approach that focuses heavily on attempting to reduce the number of unvaccinated Americans.

The new plan comes at a crucial time. The delta variant continues to spread in states across America. The virus is currently taking more than 1,500 lives each day, and new hospital admissions of children are higher now than at any other point during the pandemic. Concern is especially high in states with low vaccination rates. High transmission is also harming economic recovery as people stay home to avoid the virus.

As such, policies aimed at getting people vaccinated make sense – vaccination is a proven way to protect populations from hospitalizations and death from coronavirus infection.

To encourage vaccination, the president is mandating that employees at companies with more than 100 workers are either vaccinated or test for the virus every week. His new plan also includes enhanced production of rapid tests and making them available either free to Medicaid recipients or at cost via retailers such as Walmart and Amazon.

As leaders of a team of health policy researchers that track policy responses to COVID-19, we know there is no perfect approach to preventing the virus. It is certainly encouraging that the administration has acknowledged that more needed to be done – and the measures outlined by the president are likely to encourage vaccinations. But we believe they would work better if supplemented by further actions – be it at a federal or state level – that would protect vulnerable people through stronger mask mandates and improved vaccine delivery.

We are also concerned that the headline policy – mandating workplace vaccinations – may have only a limited impact in low-income communities where many workers are independent contractors like gig workers and agricultural workers. Analyses show unvaccinated rates tend to be higher in such communities.

No federal mask policies

Biden’s plan would continue to require the use of masks on interstate transit and federal property and doubles the fine for failure to comply. But it fell short of calling for universal mask policies.

This is despite internal documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in which scientists made clear that “universal masking is essential to reduce transmission.”

Stronger mask policies would be especially helpful for immediately reducing the transmission of the delta variant, especially in higher-risk indoor spaces and among children who are not eligible for vaccines. Hospitalizations in the U.S. of children went from record lows to record highs – and climbing – in a span of just four weeks.

Mask mandates can reduce community transmission, allowing more time to intensify vaccine delivery efforts and messaging.

A data-driven approach to mask mandates would supplement the measures Biden has laid out in his path out of the pandemic. Such a policy has been put to good use in Nevada, where mask mandates come into effect in counties with high numbers of infections and are then removed when cases fall below a certain level.

Vaccine mandates may still miss population groups

The administration’s plan includes a vaccine mandate for federal employees and health care workers at Medicaid and Medicare serving hospitals. The administration also asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to develop a rule that would require these employers to provide paid time off for vaccination and recovery.

While many federal employees, health care workers and higher-income workers are already vaccinated, even modest increases could make a difference, especially in regions with low vaccination rates.

The new vaccine mandates are less likely to reach low-income workers, many of whom are considered independent contractors or who work in small restaurants or other businesses and as such will not be covered.

Research has shown that vaccination rates tend to be lower in lower-income communities. This may be because lower-paid workers are focused on meeting other needs like food, housing and child care for their families, have less time because they are working more than one job or cannot afford unpaid time off work to get a shot.

The delta variant continues to spread rapidly through the U.S. State leaders can play an important role in speeding up vaccine delivery efforts at schools, neighborhoods and workplaces. Efforts that are directed toward low-income communities and workers where vaccination rates remain lowest are more likely to yield greater results. And mask policies could slow the spread of COVID-19 until more adults and children can be vaccinated.

Julia Raifman, Assistant Professor of Health Law, Policy and Management, Boston University and Alexandra Skinner, Research Fellow of Health Law, Policy and Management, Boston University

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

Campaigners to Biden: stop acting like a big pharma “puppet” and help vaccinate the world

Public health campaigners on Monday pressed President Joe Biden to do far more to help poor countries vaccinate their populations against COVID-19, including by investing heavily in global manufacturing, pushing harder for a suspension of patents, and facilitating the transfer of key technology.

While applauding as “admirable” Biden’s effort to ensure that 70% of the world’s population is vaccinated within the next year, more than 60 advocacy organizations warned in a new letter that such an objective will remain out of reach unless he takes ambitious action to “ensure equitable vaccine distribution.”

“We cannot ‘donate’ our way to safety,” the letter reads. “The massive global shortage of highly effective vaccines can only be addressed by increasing production. As of this week, just over 3% of people in low-income countries, many of whom are also facing devastating surges from deadly variants, have received any dose of COVID-19 vaccine.”

Signatories to the letter include Public Citizen, Health GAP, National Nurses United, the Africa Faith and Justice Network, the Bangladesh Krishok Federation, Médecins Sans Frontières USA, and dozens of others.

Several of the organizations involved in the letter took part in a protest Monday near the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, where campaigners blocked intersections and urged Biden to advocate more aggressively for a vaccine patent waiver that would allow manufacturers around the world to replicate existing vaccines without threat of legal action.

The Biden administration endorsed the patent waiver in May but has since come under fire for taking a backseat to the process as U.S. allies continue to stonewall the proposal.

#UNGA vaccine apartheid protest — lot of intersection blocking, now 43rd & 2nd pic.twitter.com/CHTQQwRxWJ

— Ryan Heath (@ryanheathAI) September 20, 2021

In their letter on Monday, the diverse coalition of advocacy groups specifically called on Biden to:

Support the inclusion of $25 billion for global vaccine manufacturing in Democrats’ emerging budget reconciliation package;
Use the Defense Production Act to force U.S.-based vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer and Moderna to share vaccine technology and know-how with low-income countries;
Quickly redistribute excess vaccine doses to poor and middle-income nations; and
Actively pushing U.S. allies such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada to support a temporary suspension of intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics.

“Short of such action,” the groups warned, “the pandemic will continue its devastation, driven by a lack of political will to truly engage in a global, collective effort to protect everyone, everywhere.”

60+ orgs including @Public_Citizen, @MSF_USA, @hrw, @drsforamerica, @uaem, @AMSANational, @HealthGAP, @SSWorks & others call on @POTUS ahead of #UNGA76 & global #COVID19 vaccine summit to immediately deliver on key policies to realize global #VaccinEquity. https://t.co/8684PUHDGo

— Reshma Ramachandran (@reshmagar) September 20, 2021

The coalition’s demands came as the U.N. General Assembly kicked off in New York City. On Wednesday, Biden is set to host a virtual COVID-19 summit on the sidelines of the event, where he is expected to outline his plan to bolster global vaccination efforts and urge other world leaders to commit to stronger action as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc.

“Biden’s summit will be doomed to failure absent a fundamental reset in the United States’ approach.”

But experts have warned that Biden’s strategy — which focuses heavily on vaccine donations that have been slow to reach their destinations — falls well short of what’s needed to address global shortages and bring the deadly pandemic to an end. The World Health Organization said last week that Africa is set to receive 470 million fewer coronavirus vaccine doses than expected in 2021, a shortfall that officials blamed in part on vaccine hoarding by rich countries.

According to one recent analysis, wealthy nations could have in their possession 1.2 billion surplus doses by the end of the year, millions of which are likely to expire.

The Biden administration is reportedly in talks with Pfizer to buy another 500 million doses of the company’s coronavirus vaccine to donate to low-income countries, in addition to the 140 million doses the U.S. has already delivered overseas.

“This is a great thing, right? No, it’s a travesty,” “The American Prospect’s” Robert Kuttner wrote last week. “The total global need is at least 13 billion doses. Back in May, President Biden did something worth celebrating. He authorized U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to reverse the longstanding U.S. opposition to waiving the patent, copyright, and trademark protections of the WTO treaty known as TRIPS, to which the U.S. is a party.”

“With that waiver, countries with vaccine manufacturing capacity, such as India, could produce the Pfizer vaccine at cost, at adequate quantities, and deliver it worldwide,” Kuttner noted. “But since that brave gesture, career U.S. trade officials based at WTO headquarters in Geneva have slow-rolled the TRIPS waiver, and there has been no progress at getting vaccines actually produced in quantity.”

In a scathing statement on Monday, Health GAP executive director Asia Russell said that Biden’s response to the coronavirus pandemic thus far has been “characterized by unquestioning faith in pharmaceutical companies to fix the current crisis of artificial supply scarcity, unaffordable prices, and inequitable distribution.”

“Status quo protection of the intellectual property rights of profiteering pharmaceutical companies will not save us from this pandemic,” Russell added. “Biden has the power to mandate the transfer of technology in order to scale up manufacturing capacity in the Global South. Instead of using this power, he is acting like a puppet of Big Pharma. Biden’s summit will be doomed to failure absent a fundamental reset in the United States’ approach.”

Big Pharma, medical firms donated $750K to Kyrsten Sinema — then she opposed drug bill

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the controversial Arizona Democrat who threatens to derail President Biden’s legislative agenda, received more than $750,000 in donations from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. After that, she announced her opposition to a Democratic plan to lower prescription drug costs.

Sinema told White House officials that she opposes House and Senate bills that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug costs, sources told Politico this week. Democrats estimate these bills would save $450 billion over the next decade and thereby pay for a large portion of President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan. The budget bill would expand child care, health care and paid family leave and would fund programs to combat climate change, among other measures. Three House Democrats have also balked at the plan, although they have offered a “centrist” alternative that would drastically limit which drugs are subject to Medicare negotiation. Sinema reportedly opposes that proposal as well. During her successful 2018 Senate campaign, Sinema repeatedly vowed to lower prescription drug prices and drug costs for seniors.

Sinema is a longtime favorite of the pharmaceutical industry and now appears ready to undermine Biden’s entire agenda as Big Pharma wages a lobbying blitz in hopes of torpedoing the bill, which nearly 90% of voters support. Sinema and several House Democrats who oppose the drug pricing plan have received major financial support from the industry. Given a 50-50 Senate and a narrow House majority of 220 to 212 (with three seats currently vacant), their opposition could sink the proposal or even the entire budget bill.

Sinema has received $519,988 from PACs and individuals in the pharmaceutical industry throughout her political career, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. She brought in more than $120,000 in pharma contributions between 2019 and 2020 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Sinema has also received $190,161 from donors in the pharmaceutical manufacturing space and $62,797 from the medical supplies industry.

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Sinema’s office is led by a former lobbyist whose firm worked on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. The senator’s chief of staff, Meg Joseph, was a registered lobbyist and principal at Clark & Weinstock, where her clients included the health insurer Health Net. During her tenure, the company also lobbied on behalf of numerous pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, drug distributor AmerisourceBergen Corp., and the biotech firm Genzyme Corp. It also lobbied on behalf of Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and AdvaMed, two major industry trade groups.

Sinema did not respond to questions from Salon. Her spokesman Josh LaBombard told Politico that she is committed to “working directly in good faith with her colleagues and President Biden on the proposed budget reconciliation package.”

He continued, “Given the size and scope of the proposal, while those discussions are ongoing we are not offering detailed comment on any one proposed piece of the package.”

Sinema got major backing from the industry before her threat to derail the Democrats’ drug bill. Center Forward, a Washington nonprofit that has received at least $4.5 million from PhRMA, has run TV and digital ads praising Sinema for the past two weeks, according to The Daily Poster, and sent out pro-Sinema mailers urging recipients to thank the senator for “fighting as an independent voice.” The group’s board includes at least two PhRMA lobbyists who work on drug pricing issues and represent numerous pharmaceutical companies.

Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called out Big Pharma’s campaign to defeat the drug pricing legislation during a speech on Tuesday in front of PhRMA’s headquarters in Washington.

“The overriding motivation of the pharmaceutical industry is greed,” he said. “Their overriding goal is to make as much money as they can by squeezing as much as they possibly can out of the sick, out of the elderly and out of the desperate.”

Sinema isn’t the only Democrat who vowed to fight for lower drug costs before rejecting a plan that would do just that. Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., in 2019 praised the drug pricing plan but after receiving nearly $230,000 in the 2020 election cycle from the industry, as Salon’s Jon Skolnik reported, had an otherwise-unexplained change of heart. Earlier this year, he led a group of 10 House Democrats in opposing the bill in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “If you institute it, you won’t have cures because you’ll dry up all the private investment that does that research,” he told Roll Call after the reversal.

“That’s absolutely not true,” David Mitchell, founder of the independent nonprofit Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, said in an interview with Salon.

The claim that the bill would hinder development is a Big Pharma “lie” and “scare tactic,” said Mitchell, who suffers from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer treated with a combination of drugs that he said carry a price tag of more than $900,000 per year. “For me, as a patient with incurable cancer, it sounds very much like extortion, like the gun is at your head, ‘pay whatever we tell you, Mr. Mitchell, or you are going to die,'” he said. “It’s bullshit.”

Large pharmaceutical companies see profit margins that are much higher than other industries. A recent analysis by the nonprofit West Health Policy Center and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that Big Pharma firms could lose $1 trillion in sales over the next decade and still maintain their current research investments. A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Democrats’ bill would reduce the number of new drugs developed by about two per year over the next two decades.

“You’re talking about a tiny impact on new drug development,” Mitchell said. “We can compensate for that by sending more money” to the National Institutes of Health, he continued, “because NIH is the engine of innovative new drug development. It’s the single largest biomedical research agency in the world. All 356 drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 are based on research, basic science from the NIH.”

Peters was one of three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to vote against the Democrats’ drug pricing bill, along with Reps. Kurt Schrader of Oregon and Kathleen Rice of New York. A different committee later advanced the bill but the opposition appears to have enough votes to sink the measure — and the entire spending plan with it.

“I get that the pharmaceutical industry owns the Republican Party and that no Republican voted for this bill,” Sanders tweeted after the vote, “but there is no excuse for every Democrat not supporting it.”

Peters has received $860,465 from pharmaceutical PACs and employees, according to CRP data, the second most of any industry. He has already received $88,550 from the industry this election cycle, the most of any House member. On the day he sent the letter to Pelosi, Peters received big donations from the CEOs of Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb, as well as from lobbyists at PhRMA.

Schrader, who also signed Peters’ letter, has also received extensive financial backing from the industry. He has received $24,500 from pharma PACs and employees this cycle, the second most of any industry, and got $144,252 in 2020, the most of any industry. Throughout his career, Schrader, whose grandfather was an executive at Pfizer, has received $614,830 from the industry, according to CRP data. His former aide left earlier this year and quickly began lobbying for PhRMA, according to The Daily Poster.

Peters and Schrader did not respond to questions from Salon but they have introduced a supposed centrist alternative that would drastically limit the number of drugs whose prices Medicare could negotiate.

“It’s masquerading as a Medicare negotiation” bill,” Mitchell said, noting that it would exclude Medicare Part D drugs, which make up 83% of Medicare drug spending. The bill would only allow the agency to negotiate a “tiny, tiny sliver” of drugs covered under Part B that are administered by doctors and hospitals, he said, but would exclude drugs that are still in their period of exclusivity, which can last up to 12 years. “To call it Medicare negotiation is a fraud,” Mitchell said.

Kathleen Rice’s opposition to the bill is less easily explained, since she has not been one of the industry’s biggest recipients, collecting a relatively modest $84,000 in campaign contributions from Big Pharma sources, according to CRP data. Furthermore, Rice had twice previously voted for earlier versions of the plan and campaigned on lowering drug prices. In a letter to a constituent who expressed disappointment with her vote, Rice said that she supports “the goals” of the bill and “allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices” but that she opposed the bill because it is being used “as a tool to offset the cost of a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.”

Rice cited opposition from Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., over the bill’s price tag to justify her vote.

“That bill has no chance to become law, as Democrats in the Senate have stated that a bill with such a price tag will not have the votes to pass in their chamber,” she said in the letter, which was obtained by the American Prospect. That’s a strange and striking argument, considering that Rice voted for many other pieces of legislation that will go into a bill she says “has no chance to become law.”

“Rep. Rice believes the House should produce a reconciliation bill that can realistically become law,” Rice spokesman Stuart Malec said in a statement to Salon. “She supports Medicare negotiation, but the H.R. 3 drug pricing language in its current form does not have the support to pass the Senate. And Rep. Rice does not support advancing provisions that will jeopardize the bill’s final passage in the Senate.”

These large donations are only a portion of the pharmaceutical industry’s political spending aimed at defeating drug pricing legislation. Pharmaceutical companies have spent more than any industry on federal lobbying this year, shelling out $171 million so far in 2021, according to CRP, more than twice as much as the next biggest spending industry. Pharmaceutical companies spent $309 million on lobbying last year, the most ever. PhRMA alone has spent more than $15 million on lobbying and last week launched a seven-figure ad campaign to oppose the drug pricing plan.

“They’re pulling out all the stops to block this,” Mitchell said. “What they’re fighting to maintain is unilateral power to dictate the prices of brand name drugs to the people of the United States. They have the power to tell us what we’re going to pay and we just have to say yes. For them, it’s the ability to dictate the prices of drugs to patients like me.”

Patient advocates like Mitchell and advocacy groups like the AARP, Protect Our Care and Social Security Works are pushing back through lobbying and ad campaigns of their own.

“Pharma thinks this is just like every other time they have bent D.C. to their will with money, but it isn’t,” Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, said in a statement to Salon, noting that grassroots groups have spent years building a broad coalition of support among voters of all political persuasions. “And as for the Dems carrying water for Big Pharma, we are showing them the consequences of that. Their phones are ringing off the hook, there’s daily protests at their offices, and their local media is full of stories about their cozy relationships with Big Pharma.”

Lawson expressed optimism that Biden and Pelosi can get the legislation passed, given the widespread public support for this issue.

“Big Pharma is used to winning,” he said. “They’ve never gone up against a movement this powerful.”

Patients for Affordable Drugs Now has also launched an ad campaign targeting Peters’ and Rice’s districts, highlighting members of Congress for “choosing Big Pharma over patients.”

“We have the best opportunity that we’ve had in two decades to actually enact reforms that will meaningfully lower the prices of prescription drugs to the American people and stop subjecting us to the power of multinational corporations,” Mitchell said. “It’s an uphill fight all the way because we know who we’re up against. I think we have a really good shot of getting it done.”