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Our favorite vegan cookie recipes to bake right now

Vegan baking doesn’t need to mean buying tons of hard-to-find, expensive ingredients from health food stores. It’s come a long way, and if you’re armed with some basic pantry staples like coconut oil, dairy-free milk (anything from almond to soy to coconut will do), and almond butter, you’re already in good shape. Our top 10 vegan cookies range from classics like sugar and gingerbread cookies to sweet variations on chocolate chip cookies. In one recipe, we added maple syrup and olive oil, and another calls for a sprinkling of flaky sea salt on top of each dough ball.

For years, dairy-free baked goods like vegan cookies and cakes got a bad rap for being dense, not sweet enough, not fluffy enough, and all-around not good enough. We guarantee that these recipes will prove the haters wrong and give them something satisfying to snack on. So, grab a baking sheet, a spatula, a couple of bowls, and let’s get baking!

1. Vegan Sugar Cookies

There are no eggs, butter, or any other dairy products in these delicious vegan cookies. Instead, use dairy-free baking staples like Earth Balance’s buttery baking sticks, which you can buy on Instacart, and Ener-G egg replacer for sugar cookies that are crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, just the way we like it.

2. Stress-Free Vegan Holiday Gingerbread Cookies

There’s a lot of stress around the holidays. A lot. Between shopping, hosting or attending numerous parties, and decorating, it’s enough to send anyone into a frenzy. The one thing you don’t have to worry about this holiday season is baking with this easy, peasy vegan gingerbread cookie recipe. Melted coconut oil, which is easily found on Instacart, and almond milk are the only vegan ingredients you need to make these perfectly spiced cut-out cookies.

3. Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies with Maple and Olive Oil

Offset the sweetness of chocolate chips and maple syrup with a hint of olive oil. The fruity richness of the oil is a lovely contrast to these healthier dairy-free cookies, and the best part is that they’re totally and completely vegan.

4. Vegan Dark Chocolate Gingerbread Thumbprint Cookies

Chocolate and gingerbread is a highly, highly underrated combination. There’s just something about the rich chocolate and warm spices that gives us all the cozy feelings and makes us want winter to last all year long (you know, until the blizzards strike). Bonus: They’re gluten-free! A duo of almond flour and oat flour are used as the base for these cookies.

5. Ovenly’s Secretly Vegan Salted Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hailing from the beloved Brooklyn bakery, this vegan cookie recipe calls for flaky sea salt, which is sprinkled on top of each cookie just before baking. The genius bakers at Ovenly recommend that home bakers chill the dough in a large bowl in the refrigerator, which will make the final product extra tender.

6. Chewy Vanilla Spice Cookies with Chocolate Chunks

“I wanted a cookie that merged the benefits of a chewy chocolate chip cookie with the fragrance of a holiday spice cookie,” says recipe developer and Food52’s co-founder Amanda Hesser of this vegan cookie recipe. The result is a vanilla-forward, chocolatey, spicy cookie that will disappear in a flash at a holiday party (or really, anytime of the year).

7. Vegan Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Flaky Sea Salt

A duo of regular all-purpose flour and oat flour makes this vegan chocolate chip cookie a little nutty. Our other secret? Almond butter, which is used in place of regular butter and is mixed with a combination of sugars to create a cookie with an extra-chewy center.

8. Vegan Peanut Butter Skillet Cookie Sundae

Every dinner party starts with great recipes. And your vegan friends will especially love sitting around the dining room table digging into this rich and fudgy crowd-friendly cookie.

9. Vegan Oatmeal Cookies

Upgrade a batch of oatmeal cookies by folding in dried blueberries, dried cranberries, and chopped almonds instead of the usual raisins. They introduce new colors, new flavors, and new textures to this classic cookie that all of your vegan (and non-vegan!) friends will love. Plus, the cookies will be on the table in 30 minutes — just don’t forget to serve it with a generous swirl of coconut milk whipped cream or a scoop of dairy-free vanilla ice cream.

10. Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

We’re calling this the perfect soft and chewy chocolate chip cookie recipe. To make it vegan, use coconut oil instead of butter and combine that with cane sugar and brown sugar for the ultimate dairy-free cookie base

Birth of a nation: Jim Crow Republicans seek to repeat America’s dark history

“Birth of a Nation” is one of the most important films in cinematic history. D.W. Griffith’s masterwork is considered by many film scholars and critics to be the first “modern” film: Its cinematography, narrative techniques, and technical innovations set the standard for what would come afterward.

There’s a lesson here: A work of art can be extremely important, even groundbreaking, while also embodying — and seeking to legitimize — thoroughly reprehensible social and political values.

“Birth of a Nation” is one such example. The film is a white supremacist fantasy, and fable about the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Instead of depicting the truth about how Black people created during Reconstruction “a nation under their feet” by fighting for their freedom, participating in democracy — as elected officials, voters, and organizers — creating civil society organizations and developing government programs that uplifted both Black people and poor whites, “Birth of a Nation” shows Black freedom, multiracial democracy and equality across the color line as something grotesque.

In Griffith’s racist fable, Black people are childlike and ignorant, not suitable for self-government and democracy. Black men are animalistic rapists, obsessed with defiling “virtuous” white women, or violent drunks who are elected to government but then act irresponsibly. Infamously, Griffith depicts the Ku Klux Klan — America’s and the world’s largest white terrorist organization — as heroic and valorous. The power and influence of “Birth of a Nation” was so great that it contributed to a national climate in which thousands of Black people were lynched across the United States. It also helped resuscitate the KKK and turn it into a national organization.

In a letter to the president of the NAACP in 1921, scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “Birth of a Nation” was created “to slander and vilify a race.” He considered the movie to be “a public menace … not art, but vicious propaganda.” The NAACP would lead protests against the film.

In historical reality, Reconstruction was one of the great experiments in American democracy — until it was sabotaged by white supremacists who worked tirelessly to take away Black people’s freedom and impose a new form of slavery.

Woodrow Wilson, one of America’s most overtly racist presidents, famously described “Birth of a Nation” as like “writing history with lightning.” There was no true history in “Birth of a Nation,” but Wilson was correct about the lightning: A hundred years later, “Birth of a Nation’s” white fantasies and white lies still carry a type of electrical power and impact across space and time.

The Jim Crow Republicans of 2021 are once again trying to take away Black people’s voting rights and civil rights in order to create a new American apartheid. They and their allies are using much the same logic and tactics — and in many cases the same language — as were used from the birth of Jim Crow in the 19th century through to its (temporary) defeat in the 1960s by the civil rights movement and Black Freedom Struggle.

These attacks on multiracial democracy include white supremacist terrorism, as seen during Donald Trump’s coup attempt and the lethal attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In the war on Black and brown people’s civil and human rights, “Birth of a Nation” now functions as a handbook, as well as a prologue, justification of and insight into the collective mind of the Jim Crow Republican Party and white right.

New polling from CBS/YouGov shows how racist and white supremacist attitudes about Black people’s civic responsibility, citizenship, trustworthiness and right to vote are being used to justify Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 presidential election and the Republican Party’s war on multiracial democracy. In the aggregate, these anti-Black attitudes and sentiments constitute what political scientists and others describe as “modern” or “symbolic racism”.

CBS News begins its analysis by noting that most Americans “don’t think there was widespread fraud in 2020,” but most Republicans still say there was, and perceive “making voting easier” as giving Democrats an unfair advantage:

A closer look at why some still endorse the fraud claim and what specifically Republicans claim happened — despite the absence of actual evidence — shows a strong link to partisan politics. Republicans say fraud predominantly took place in cities and communities that vote Democratic, but much less so in the suburban and rural areas where many Republicans live. They also say it stemmed from mail ballots, which former President Trump long railed against, and which favored Democrats in many places. Meanwhile, most say ballots were counted properly in the states Mr. Trump won.

The CBS analysis continues by noting that those who perceive widespread election fraud “attribute more of it to Black communities” than to predominantly white areas.

Views on voter fraud also differ with regard to how ballots were cast, not just where they were cast. More than three in four of those who believe in widespread fraud attribute a lot of it to ballots cast by mail, a method used disproportionately by voters of color and criticized repeatedly by former President Trump. Among our validated voters in 2020, for instance, voters of color are over 10 points likelier than White voters to have cast their ballot by mail.

These white supremacist fears echo the paranoia felt by many white Americans in earlier centuries about the imaginary threat of “Negro domination.” 

The CBS/YouGov poll also fits within a much larger context of white racism, racial animus, racial resentment and racial authoritarianism, all of which drive support for the white supremacist agenda of the current Republican Party, and for Trump and his neofascist movement more specifically.

Social scientists and others have shown that hostility toward nonwhites is a key determinant of support for Trump. Republicans are also more likely to be racist and hold other anti-Black and anti-brown sentiments than are Democrats. Fueled by hostility to the civil rights movement and other societal changes that attempted to give equal rights to Black and brown people, the Republican Party has now fully embraced white supremacy and white identity politics as its dominant strategy for winning and keeping power.

On these connections between the past and present, Jamelle Bouie explained in his New York Times column that the infamous Jim Crow laws which disenfranchised Black people in the South never specifically said they were doing that:

I raise this because of a debate among politicians and partisans on whether Georgia’s new election law — rushed through last month by the state’s Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican — is a throwback to the Jim Crow restrictions of the 20th century.

Democrats say yes. “This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end,” President Biden said in a statement. Republicans and conservative media personalities say no. “You know what voter suppression is?” Ben Shapiro said on his very popular podcast. “Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”

The problem with the “no” argument here is that it mistakes both the nature and the operation of Jim Crow voting laws. There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. 

One of the lessons of the South after Reconstruction is that democratic life can flourish and then erode, expand and then contract. Democracy is not a solid state, and we should be wary of politicians who would undermine any part of it for partisan advantage.

It took three decades of struggle, and violence, before Southern elites could reclaim dominance over Southern politics. No particular restriction was decisive. The process was halting, contingent and contested, consolidating in different places at different times. It was only when the final pieces fell into place that the full picture of what took place was clear.

Put a little differently, the thing about Jim Crow is that it wasn’t “Jim Crow” until, one day, it was.

Today’s Republican Party, with its “Birth of a Nation” fantasies, represent a collective effort to whitewash Black America’s history of resistance to white supremacy and American neofascism. In the Age of Trump and beyond, the worst parts of America’s past have been reimagined as something ideal and aspirational.

In his 1905 book “The Aftermath of Slavery,” William Sinclair wrote:

Here is the kernel of a great truth. The white people of the South have voted persistently and solidly against every measure of great national benefit for forty years. The colored people have voted as persistently and as solidly, wherever permitted to do so, in favor of such measures; so that while the white vote of the South has been inimical to the great interests of the country, these have been saved by the colored vote.

Thus the colored vote has proved a veritable godsend to the nation. Without this vote the most important and fruitful national policies would have been impossible of inauguration. The negro vote is a failure only when it is suppressed by the intimidation, fraud, and shot-guns of the whites.

As the Jim Crow Republicans and the white right continue their assault on American democracy, Sinclair’s words offer both caution and inspiration.

In a recent interview with Salon, historian Annette Gordon-Reed explained: 

African Americans have from the very beginning been the people who tried to make the promise of America real. They believed in the words of the Declaration of Independence. African Americans have tried to uphold those words, in the face of other people who did not seem to take those words and the values as seriously as they did. African Americans have long tried to uphold the values of the Declaration and the notion of equality in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which brought Black people into citizenship and represent the idea that people should be treated as equal citizens. Yet there are people right now here in the United States who do not take those parts of the Constitution seriously. They are imagined as “true” Americans, and are given the benefit of the doubt when, for example, they attack the Capitol building.

If the American people as a group had listened to Black folks’ warnings — and in particular Black women’s warnings — about the danger represented by Donald Trump, he would never have been elected president in the first place. If the mainstream news media and other prominent public voices had listened to Black and brown folks’ warnings about ascendant fascism and white supremacy, the Jan. 6 coup attempt and lethal attack on the Capitol would not have taken place.

Black and brown folks are now trying to warn the Democrats and Joe Biden that American democracy has been imperiled to such an extreme that the 2022 midterms may be the last “free and fair elections” in the United States — and even that is an optimistic prediction.

Black people are demanding the “urgency of now” to save the country’s democracy. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s leadership have instead chosen to celebrate “infrastructure” and “bipartisanship” while refusing to end the filibuster.

If America had listened to Black people’s wisdom and warnings across the centuries, it would be a safer, more secure, more prosperous and more free nation today. America’s future depends on heeding that wisdom now. There is no time to lose.

Josh Hawley’s deranged “Love America Act” is a testament to racist hatred

Sen, Josh Hawley, of the former slave state of Missouri, doesn’t want America’s white children to be exposed to the simple reality that slavery was not only legal at the founding of our country but was, in several places, written into our Constitution. 

And that the rest of America subsidized the slave-owners’ states and continues to subsidize them to this day.

Hawley, of course, is the guy who gave a fist-salute to the armed white supremacist traitors who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to assassinate Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi. He hopes to ride his white supremacy shtick to the White House.

Doubling down on the GOP notion that America is a nation exclusively of, by and for white people, Hawley has now proposed a law he calls “The Love America Act of 2021.” The bill is only three and a half pages long. There’s a bit of legalese to make it into legislation, defining what “school” means, etc., but this is what it says: 

RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — …[N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism,

That’s it. That’s the gist of the entire bill. 

In other words, public schools that teach the actual history of our Constitution lose all their federal funds — our tax dollars — and essentially go out of business. It’s really just that simple: White supremacist Republicans like Hawley don’t want your kids to know the true history of America. 

Black children, they say, are old and tough enough to experience racism, but white children are just waaay too young and fragile to learn about it. 

Hawley’s protests notwithstanding, racism and white supremacy were very much a part of our founding documents. Consider “Father of the Constitution” (and slaveholder) James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. 

It was the third week of August and the issue of America taxing “property” (a code word for slaves) got tied to the debate about how many representatives each state should have in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

The five slave states wanted all their enslaved people counted toward representation — even though they couldn’t vote or enjoy any of the rights of citizenship — but didn’t want to pay any “property tax” on them. The eight “free” states vehemently objected both to counting enslaved people to increase the slave states’ representation in Congress and to subsidizing them via tax law. 

It produced one of the great speeches at the Constitutional Convention, which Madison dutifully transcribed.

Gouverneur Morris (“Gouverneur” was his first name, not his title) represented Pennsylvania, and single-handedly wrote the preamble to the Constitution. He was 35 years old, a lawyer and a graduate of Kings College (what we now call Columbia University). And he was an ardent abolitionist.

“He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery,” Madison wrote, summarizing Morris’ speech. “It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.”

Warming to his topic, Morris began an extended rant about how destructive slavery was to the new nation they were birthing. It illustrates how wrong Hawley is in saying that racism and white supremacy had nothing to do with writing the Constitution. 

“Compare the [slave]-free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people,” Morris said, “with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other states having slaves. Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery.”

Morris said the enslavement of people was a curse on America that was visible to anybody who simply looked. The free North was prosperous; the South, where people were enslaved, was poor. 

“The moment you leave the Eastern [slave] States,” he said, “and enter New York, the effects of the institution become visible. Passing through the Jerseys, and entering Pennsylvania, every criterion of superior improvement witnesses the change. Proceed southwardly, and every step you take, through the great regions of slaves, presents a desert increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings.” 

But the white supremacist slaveholders representing the slave states in the Convention wanted more power in Congress and lower taxes in their own states, much like today’s Republicans. The key to that, they believed, was having some or all of their states’ enslaved Black people counted toward representation in Congress, even though they were in chains and unable to vote.  

In an echo of this very argument last month, the white supremacists of the Georgia legislature passed, and Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law in front of a painting of a slave plantation, legislation that would give Georgia’s Republicans the ability to simply toss out the votes of people in largely Black districts with the excuse that they “suspect,” with or without evidence, that “fraud” happened.  

Georgia has already begun to purge local voting officials in Black districts, replacing them with safe white Republicans who will make sure elections produce the “right” outcome.

It’s such a radical law that the CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, Nsé Ufot, bluntly told Politico that unless the law is overturned by ending the filibuster and passing the For the People Act, “we’re fucked.” 

As if we’re torn in half through some weird time machine, Madison continued with his transcription of Gouverneur Morris’ speech.

“Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation?” Morris demanded of his colleagues. “Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is no other property included [in determining representation]? The houses in this city (Philadelphia) are worth more than all the wretched slaves who cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.”

And then Morris nailed down precisely how and why racism and white supremacy were written into the Constitution with the so-called “three-fifths compromise” (among other places) that gave Southern states more members in the House of Representatives than their white population would justify.

“The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this, — that the [white] inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina, who go to the coast of Africa, and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow-creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes … than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, who views, with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.”

It was all about using racism and white supremacy to increase the power of white people in the South, and then force the rest of the country to subsidize them.

Keep in mind that Democrats in the U.S. Senate today represent 41 million more people than do the Senate’s Republicans. And, echoing 1787, Georgia and 17 other Republican-controlled mostly-former-slave-states have now put into law the power for them to deny the vote to Black people or simply refuse to count their votes. 

But back to 1787: Morris paused to gather his thoughts, and then, Madison noted, continued, this time calling out the Southern oligarchs who flaunted their riches made possible by slave labor while asking the Northern states to pay for their defense and otherwise subsidize them with Northern tax dollars. 

“He would add,” Madison wrote, “that domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution. The vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of aristocracy.”

Morris was probably shouting at this point; such language is rarely found in our founding documents and may help explain why Madison kept his “notes” secret until his death nearly 50 years later. Morris pointed out how the South was essentially demanding that the North subsidize them financially, something that continues to this day. 

“And what is the proposed compensation to the Northern States,” Morris demanded, “for a sacrifice of every principle of right, of every impulse of humanity? … The … tea used by a northern freeman will pay more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable slave….” 

Morris lost the argument and the Southern slave states got extra representation in Congress along with no federal taxation of their “property.” But the GOP sure doesn’t want you or your kids to know that.

If Hawley’s bill were to become law, any public school that taught Morris’ anti-slavery speech would lose all federal funding. This is how white supremacy works today and, indeed, has worked in this nation since our founding. 

Their strategy is straightforward: Control history (from Texas editing Martin Luther King Jr. out of its textbooks to generations of statues of Confederate generals), suppress the political power of Black people while subsidizing red states, and do it all with a thin patina of legalese.

Northern states generally make it easy for all people to vote while former slave states do everything they can to suppress the Black vote (along with the votes of young people and older Social Security voters). 

Former slave states like Hawley’s Missouri represent the overwhelming majority of states to have passed voter suppression legislation. And they’re still hustling tax dollars from the rest of us, just as Morris complained about in 1787.

Northern states get back a fraction of every dollar they send to Washington, while former slave states get as much as $2 for every tax dollar they send the federal government. 

As the AP noted in 2017:

Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07, Kentucky got $1.90 and South Carolina got $1.71.

Meanwhile, New Jersey received 74 cents in federal spending for tax every dollar the state sent to Washington. New York received 81 cents, Connecticut received 82 cents and Massachusetts received 83 cents.

White supremacy, racism and the rest of America subsidizing red states weren’t just realities in 1787: They’re alive and well today. 

Hawley and his white supremacist buddies in the GOP want to keep it that way, and their hateful “Love America Act” is just the latest disgusting part of their strategy. We’ve been tolerating and subsidizing these losers since 1787 and it’s time to stop.

Facing disbarment, Texas AG Ken Paxton backs away from Trump’s fraud claims

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an ardent Trump supporter who was the lead plaintiff in a last-ditch Supreme Court case aimed at overturning the 2020 election, appears to be backing away from his past claims of widespread election fraud. Facing discipline or even potential disbarment in Texas, Paxton now merely alleges that there were “irregularities” in battleground states, while still suggesting those could somehow have affected the overall result

Paxton’s apparent retreat came earlier this month in response to an array of grievances filed by several members of the Texas bar: retired lawyer Neil Cohen; Kevin Moran, president of the Galveston Island Democrats; former Texas Court of Appeals Chief Justice David Chew; and Dr. Brynne VanHettinga. In their initial complaint, the group argued that Paxton should face professional discipline over his bid to undermine the 2020 presidential election, saying that Paxton’s December petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that President Biden’s victory should be set aside, was both frivolous and unethical.

In Paxton’s response to their grievances, which was provided to Salon, the attorney general argued that “Texas’s filings were not frivolous” because “the 2020 election suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities in the Defendant States.” Paxton further claimed that, by this logic, he and his office “did not violate the disciplinary rules.” 

Paxton’s response is a clear departure from his previous rhetoric, much of which explicitly supported former President Trump’s grandiose conspiracy theories about systemic election fraud. Earlier this month, Paxton told a Dallas crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his “fight” for election security “is not done.”

“When people tell you there is no election fraud, let me just tell you my office right now has 511 counts in court because of COVID waiting to be heard,” Paxton continued. “We have another 386 that we’re investigating. If you add those together, that’s more election fraud than my office has prosecuted since it started investigating election fraud years and years ago.”

Paxton is notably less bombastic in his response to the Texas bar, but mentions the same “irregularities” that his original Texas suit claimed had tainted the elections in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Effectively all of those supposed “irregularities” were changes in voting rules made in response to the COVID-19 crisis, which created significant challenges for both in-person and absentee voting.

Paxton claimed, for instance, that the Pennsylvania secretary of state “abrogated the mandatory signature verification requirement for absentee or mail-in ballots” by not rejecting ballots with mismatched signatures. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court had already found back in December that no such rule existed in Pennsylvania’s election code, which “does not authorize county election boards to reject mail-in ballots based on an analysis of a voter’s signature.”

Paxton also alleges that the “Georgia Secretary of State unilaterally, without legislative approval, changed a statutory requirement prohibiting the opening of absentee ballots before Election Day.” But these kinds of regulatory adjustments are ultimately “minor procedural changes,” as Neil Cohen, one of the Texas complainants, told Salon by email. He continued, “In all these cases, the Georgia election board adopted these regulations, which are consistent with the statute, through the powers it had been granted by the state legislature.”

Other “irregularities,” according to Paxton, included Michigan’s delivery of absentee ballots to every resident and Wisconsin’s decision to allow “absentee ballots to be placed in hundreds of unstaffed drop boxes.” He offered no evidence that either of these practices made any difference in the electoral outcome, much less amounted to widespread election fraud. 

In an evident attempt to ward off the threat of disbarment, Paxton’s response seeks to explain why the suit had any legal basis or “standing.” He argues, somewhat confusingly: “Texas’s assertion that it had standing in Texas v. Pennsylvania could not have been frivolous. There are no Supreme Court cases contrary to its position that it had standing.”

But Paxton indirectly admits, in Cohen’s view, that he had no real evidence of fraud, and apparently “hoped to develop the evidence during discovery.” In other words, his entire case could be interpreted as a fishing expedition, or just an attempt to rile up the Trump base with unsupported allegations. “That’s in contrast to his behavior for the month after filing the lawsuit,” Cohen said, “when he repeatedly claimed the election was stolen and urged people to take action.”

Earlier this month, Law.com reported that another group — this one composed entirely of attorneys, including four past presidents of the Texas bar — filed a different complaint against Paxton, claiming that his unfounded legal actions on Trump’s behalf have brought “dishonor” to the legal profession. Bar authorities have been investigating Paxton since early June.

Madison Cawthorn is fundraising to bail out mask rule-breakers — but the money goes to his campaign

Right-wing Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) is asking for donations so that he can pay for the fines for Congressional members and their staff who refuse to wear a mask in the Capitol. But when clicking the link to donate, it takes you to his campaign page.

Typical members of Congress are paid $174,000 annually, so it’s unclear why they would need donations to cover their own rule-breaking. Staffers certainly make much less, however, Washington, D.C. has mandated face masks in public places again. So, they would be in violation of the Capitol rules as well as D.C. rules. It’s unclear if their Republican members would be willing to pay their fees themselves if the staffer follows their boss’s lead.

While the Capitol has instituted fines, the Capitol Police released a statement that seemed like a veiled threat to those anti-maskers refusing to follow the rules.

“Regarding the House mask rule, there is no reason it should ever come to someone being arrested. Anyone who does not follow the rule will be asked to wear a mask or leave the premises. The Department’s requirement for officers to wear masks is for their health and safety,” said the statement.

See Cawthorn’s fundraising tweet below:

The two-shot COVID vaccines require two shots for a good reason: study

In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that millions of Americans who received one shot of the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines never returned for their second jab. Patients gave explanations ranging from patients mistakenly believing they only needed one dose and being wary after their initial inoculation led to side effects to having suppliers who ran out of what they needed. Either way, a new study makes it clear that getting only one shot of a two-dose vaccine is a pretty bad idea.

“This is the first time RNA vaccines have ever been given to humans,” said Dr. Bali Pulendran, who described the two mRNA vaccines’ “95% protection against COVID-19” as remarkable. Pulendran is a professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, who co-authored a study in the journal Nature about the effectiveness of Pfizer’s two-shot vaccine after only one jab. 

“Despite their outstanding efficacy, little is known about how exactly RNA vaccines work,” he noted. And although the new vaccines have so far seemed to work remarkably well — and are incredibly safe — the data does not suggest that one shot of two will protect one from COVID-19. 

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The scientists behind the study found, among other things, that while the first shot does boost SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody levels, getting a second dose boosts antibody levels to a far greater degree. Indeed, compared to the first shot, it is striking that the second one “stimulated a manifold increase in antibody levels, a terrific T-cell response that was absent after the first shot alone, and a strikingly enhanced innate immune response,” Pulendran explained.

They also found that patients who received the Pfizer vaccine had an increase amount of a type of monocyte (a type of cell that includes a lot of antiviral genes) in their blood. The second dose in particular would stimulate a massive mobilization of this newly-discovered group of cells, which increase their presence in our blood from being only 0.01% of all circulating blood cells to constituting a full 1% of all blood cells after the second Pfizer shot.

“The extraordinary increase in the frequency of these cells, just a day following booster immunization, is surprising,” Pulendran explained. “It’s possible that these cells may be able to mount a holding action against not only SARS-CoV-2 but against other viruses as well.”

Both Pfizer and Moderna use a novel vaccine technology that makes it much more difficult to anticipate their long-term performance than other vaccines. While other vaccines use all or part of a pathogen (disease-causing microorganism) to train the immune system how to recognize and defeat specific threats, Pfizer and Moderna insert a synthesized RNA molecule that trains cells how to produce proteins identical to those on the specific pathogen — in other words, using the body’s own machinery to create a vaccine within, without ever being exposed to a dead or weakened version of said pathogen.

“The storm is coming”: Kevin McCarthy uses QAnon reference during press conference

“The storm” is a term that the far-right conspiracy theorists of QAnon are fond of using, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy used that term during a July 29 press conference when he was criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s support of a mask mandate for the U.S. House of Representatives.

The mandate came from Capitol physician Brian Monahan, and Pelosi has said that she will “honor it.” But McCarthy, obviously pandering to anti-masker extremists and coronavirus deniers in the MAGA movement, is vehemently opposed to the mandate. Monahan is calling for the House mask mandate in response to the COVID-19 surge that has been attacking the United States, especially in red states with low vaccination rates.

McCarthy, during his July 29 speech, was standing near Rep. Elise Stefanik — who chairs the House Republican Conference — when he said, “If you are vaccinated and you get the variant, there’s .003% you’d go to the hospital. There’s a greater chance you’d get hit by lighting. For some reason, Pelosi thinks the storm is coming.”

The fact that McCarthy used a QAnon term was not lost on Vox’s Aaron Rupar, who tweeted:

Pelosi expressed her frustration with McCarthy’s anti-mask views when she told reporters Wednesday, “He’s such a moron.”

Mike Lindell says he’s pulling MyPillow ads from Fox News after they ignored his “cyber symposium”

MyPillow CEO and fervent Donald Trump supporter Mike Lindell says he’s pulling all of his advertisements from Fox News after the network refused to run a spot for his “cyber symposium,” which he claims will provide enough proof of industrial-scale election fraud to propel the former president back into office.

The pillow maven told Salon the news Thursday evening while heading back from a day at the ocean with his family.

“I am pulling everything!” Lindell said. “Fox [News] denied the [cyber symposium] ad, and they based it on ‘pending litigation.'” 

The pillow maven told Salon exclusively last week that he planned to get back at the conservative network for their failure to promote — or cover, or even mention, for that matter — the “cyber symposium,” which is set to overtake Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Aug. 10-12. Fox spurning the event apparently launched the idea for Lindell to run custom ads geared towards drumming up support among conservatives ahead of the gathering.

Asked when the advertising boycott will start, Lindell said the decision was effective “immediately.” 

“Shame on you, Fox News,” he added. “Shame on them!” 

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A Fox News spokesperson said that Lindell’s decision was “unfortunate.”

“It’s unfortunate Mr. Lindell has chosen to pause his commercial time on FOX News given the level of success he’s experienced in building his brand through advertising on the number one cable news network,” the spokesperson told Salon. 

MyPillow commercials have been a staple on Fox News for years — indeed, the company was one of the network’s largest sponsors last year, according to advertising data from market research firm iSpot.tv. 

Lindell told the Wall Street Journal that MyPillow spent nearly $50 million on Fox News spots in 2020, and has spent roughly $19 million so far in 2021.

That money is also used to prop up Fox provocateur Tucker Carlson, with MyPillow making up at least 20% of the advertising on Carlson’s primetime show — more than 10 times the next-largest spender.

On Wednesday evening, Lindell told Salon that Fox News was “stalling” and “reluctant” to accept his ad buy on the network to advertise for his “cyber symposium” event — though he said that Newsmax and OAN have both agreed to run the symposium ads.

You can watch the ad below, via Salon: 

HBO Max’s cheeky and addictive “FBoy Island” is calling out reality dating shows

On Thursday, the same day “FBoy Island” makes its HBO Max debut, Grindr plugged the Outfest premiere of its first foray into original series content, “Bridesman.”

From the description on the press release, its plotline lifts from the 1997 rom com classic “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” replacing Julia Roberts’ adorable heterosexual saboteur with a guy named Terry, described as “gay and awful.”

“FBoy Island” would appear to have little in common with “Bridesman,” which is entirely scripted, consists of episodes ranging from six to 10 minutes long, and is designed to appeal to quick-hit content consumers. I haven’t seen “Bridesman” and therefore cannot tell you whether that’s true.

What’s plain as day is that “FBoy Island” flaunts its identity as the messy, issues-burdened lovechild of dating app culture as brightly as a neon wristband. You might not be able to tell that from the advertising, which makes it look like a weird stew of every other romance reality show you’ve ever seen: “The Bachelor” and its spinoff “Bachelor in Paradise” are its main inspirations, but it also incorporates the tongue-in-cheekiness of “Love Island,” (obviously) “Temptation Island,” (again, duh) and “Too Hot to Handle.”

Why aspire to mimic one show when you can be all the shows, tossing in a few teaspoons of “I’ve Got a Secret” and “To Tell the Truth” with a shot of “Joe Millionaire” and, here’s a deep cut for you, “The Joe Schmo Show”?

Nearly everything in popular culture cycles back to something else, eventually. This is neither a penalty nor the sole point of congruity “FBoy Island” shares with Grindr and the general outlook of dating app consumers, or even what makes the HBO Max series extraordinary.

For that, I tip my hat to another common trait shared by the app and the show: both are incredible feats of social engineering that refuse to cloak the transactional nature of electronically enabled modern matchmaking in the trappings of “love,” use of quotes intentional.

Most would-be suitors who audition for “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” aren’t really searching for love, regardless of whatever noise they make about journeys or being there for “the right reasons.” The main prize they’re trying to land is massive media exposure.  That a few Final Rose recipients have gone on to have real-world relationships and marriage is pure luck . . . and perhaps another career-boosting strategy.

Meeting the “FBoy Island” girl group that is Nakia Renee, CJ Franco and Sarah Emig more than confirms this. Nakia is a singer songwriter and stylist. Sarah is a social media manager and branding consultant. CJ is a model and “content creator.”

Out of the three Franco is the greatest drama amplifier. Relatedly, she also has the largest Instagram following, with more than 514,000 fans and counting. She displays a uniquely performative level of camera awareness, especially when a guy goes in for a kiss only to find himself nose to nose with a kaleidoscope of pornographic facial expressions.

Comedian Nikki Glaser, the show’s host, doesn’t introduce her or the others as influencers, but she doesn’t put them out there as princesses looking for their prince, either. The show is up front about being a game above all else.

The trio’s mission in this sandy paradise is to see how sharp their bulls**t detectors are, because out of the 24 men placed before them for sorting, 12 are self-described “Nice Guys” and the remaining dozen are “FBoys.” The ladies mix with the males of the species and only find out who is which after the men have been eliminated.

If they happen to find a relationship out of this mess, big ups to them. But that’s not the point for the men. The last men standing have a chance to win $100,000, presumably extra incentive for an FBoy to hoodwink one of the women into thinking he’s a nice guy.

That ruthlessness is a selling point, no doubt, and one of the reasons “FBoy Island” stands to lure viewers who wouldn’t ordinarily watch a show like this. Glaser’s participation should be a draw as well, especially among those familiar with her sex-positive comedy. When she’s at her best, her humor relies less on pure raunch than a pointed wryness about the many miscommunications between men and women in moments of intimacy.

In “FBoy” she’s as much of a curious observer about what’s happening as she is jaded about the entire sideshow nature of it all, dismissing the Nice Guys with only slightly less vinegar than the FBoys.

As the season progresses, however, Glaser slowly transforms from non-partisan witness into an administrator of tough love and a harsh judge. In some instances she’s as unforgiving to the ladies as she is to the men doing them wrong, but that’s rare. Her standard approach is to drive home to the guys that they’re not the ones who matter. Sometimes she metes out twists that are so harsh, but justified, that the person on the receiving end of one asks if Ashton Kutcher is about to come out and tell him he’s on “Punk’d.” (The answer is no.)

Although the show tags the FBoys as the main peril, many of the pickles Nakia, CJ and Sarah find themselves in are results of unwise decisions that would only fly on a TV show like this. Knowing a guy is nice doesn’t necessarily give him an edge if the women don’t think they look hot enough together to be featured in Maxim.  

That’s not an attempt at cleverness on my part. One of the contestants says this out loud as a selling point. There are as many such utterances over the course of the 10 episodes of “FBoy Island” as there are passages where behind-the-scenes machinations are apparent, calling attention to the unrealness (and “UnREAL”-ness) of the entire enterprise. Nobody in the show wants to be rejected, but even more importantly, none of them want to lose.

But that only makes the show honest in its artificiality, thereby absolving viewers of any shred of guilt about judging its participants, and ourselves for being taken in by supposed nice guys who end up being jerks. Some reveal their true misogyny through their actions . . . and the women shrug it off anyway, confident that they can change their pursuers’ womanizing ways. Which totally happens, like, all the time!

The entire modern reality genre proliferates from TV “experiments,” starting with “An American Family” and later, MTV’s “The Real World” and CBS’ “Survivor.” All of these series invite audiences to view the observer effect in action, noticing the subjects’ behavior changing before our very eyes to suit the perceived requirement that we be entertained.

“FBoy Island” reduces this concept to a strange candy. It’s for people raised by shows like this in a world full of cameras observing them. But it also validates every critique of these shows along with the gamified pursuit of romance or hooking up based purely on image and the shallowest of connections.

It’s a longform study of bad human decision-making while drunk on an emotional craft cocktail that might as well be named “I Can Fix Him.” And for anyone who has shunned the whole “Bachelor Nation” discourse, it’s something you may never have expected to discover in this TV genre: a good match.

The first three episodes of “FBoy Island” are currently streaming HBO Max, with new episodes arriving on Thursdays.

Vincent Pastore has made a career of playing wise guys, but is he tired of it? Fuhgeddaboudit!

When you played a popular character on “The Sopranos” for years, movie and TV lovers knew you as “Big Pussy” – and many of them still do. Actor Vincent Pastore isn’t annoyed by it all these years later, though. He knew early on that he would primarily be cast in these roles.

His first teacher at HB Studios, a famous acting school in New York, told him, “Vinnie, you’re always going to play wise guys, because that’s how the industry will see you.” Pastore didn’t care – he was happy to be working in film, because he didn’t start out acting. He ran nightclubs for 25 years, began to get caught up in the drug scene, and saw acting as an escape. After answering an ad in Backstage Magazine while moving furniture for a living, he booked his first role in a tiny horror film. 

Pastore was in his 40s when he emerged in Hollywood. Now in his 70s, he jokes that he’s working too much, but shared that he was grateful he could leave a legacy for his daughter and granddaughter. His daughter watched him go to screenings of his early films like “Awakenings,” and “True Love,” and sometimes his part would get cut. “She gets it,” he smiled. “She knew what I wanted, and if God forbid something were to happen to me today, I’m happy, I’ve got a pretty decent legacy.”

“The Birthday Cake,” his new film, tells the story of an incident that happened years ago, and is at its core a revenge tale featuring actors like Lorraine Bracco, Ewan McGregor and Val Kilmer.  “My manager, Bob McGowan, called me up and said, “Do you want to do a movie with Val Kilmer?” And I said “Yeah, I want to do a movie with Val!'” Pastore recalled. “He’s a legend.”

A Bronx renaissance man, Pastore has so little free time because he’s dabbled in food ventures and still plays in his live rock band, The Gangster Squad, weekly all over the tri-state area, and hosts his podcast “Fuhgeddaboudit with Vincent Pastore.”  Between gigging, recording and memorizing lines, which, he said, becomes harder as you age, Pastore seems as energetic as his days on “The Sopranos.”

You can watch the “Salon Talks” interview with Pastore here or read a transcript of the interview below.

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

Have you been to a movie theater in who knows, maybe over a year?

I have a pass from Regal, but I’m going to probably go back maybe, I’m thinking next week or the week after. I love the movies. I grew up in the movies.

What did you like to watch when you were a kid?

I grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and there were actually three movie theaters. I remember going to Town Theater with my wife at the time and we saw “Rocky,” and Stallone inspired me. I swear to God, he inspired me. I was doing community theater to lose weight and go after this role that I was trying to do in “South Pacific.” So, when you talk about going to the movies, I think about “Rocky,” I think about seeing “The Godfather” for the first time, and then I think about the earlier years when I used to go with my brother, Johnny, we used to go see cowboy movies and stuff. So, growing up was great because we have three movie theaters in my hometown.

New Rochelle is the hometown. So, we can jump right into your start in the nightclub business there, I understand?

In New Rochelle, yeah.

And you were working in the club business until your, I think, late 30s and then you decided to become an actor?

Forty-two. I started acting professionally at 42. I ran clubs for 25 years. That ties into this movie I’m doing now. I’m doing a movie about the disco time.

I love it. Can you tell us anything about it?

Yeah, Casablanca Records. Tim Bogart, he formed because of Casablanca Records. He discovered Donna Summer and that’s the movie I’m working on now and when I talked to Tim Bogart, the director, author, I said, “I lived that life.” Because I was a club owner. And that club owner life is like no other. I mean, I used to go to nightclubs and at one point served drinks in a night club. It’s like your night starts at nine o’clock, and then you can go to bed at dawn. And then when do you do the books and everything? Well, sometimes they don’t do the books. That’s when you lose your business.

So, you went into acting. Why?

I wrote a play called “Crazy Horse.” It’s an autobiography of me in the club days, and it’s a dark story because it’s like this movie I’m doing now. I don’t want to talk too much about it. I want to talk about “The Birthday Cake,” but this movie I’m doing now, those days were dark days because of drugs. It was in every club possible. You people talking about Studio 54, but it was even in the smaller clubs. The ’70s and ’80s was the peak of that time and it was a happy time, it was a rock ‘n’ roll time, but it was a destructive time. I was talking to Dr. Drew Pinsky, who was on my podcast the other day and I said, “I was lucky. I got out of that.” He said, “What did you do?” I said, “I became an actor.” And we talked about that. I said, “Was that my escape?” He says, “Well, a lot of people who have some kind of addiction, they go to the arts, and the arts is their substitute and the release, whatever.” But that helped me out. I started acting at 42.

You remember your first audition at 42? What was it?

Wow, that’s funny. Driving furniture for Richie, I found something backstage. I don’t know if I auditioned, but I remember saying to Richie, “I can’t come to work tomorrow. I got to go film a horror movie in the Bronx.” And he says, “You’re either working for me or you’re going to be an actor.” And I just said, “I quit.” And I didn’t have a job, and I remembered working on that horror movie. I didn’t have a job, so then I went back to Richie, I said, “Well, can I work a little part time?” So, he had me doing deliveries and stuff. When you drive a cab or you wait tables, bartender, limousines, those are the kind of jobs that actors should have because they go up to their boss and say, “I can’t work tomorrow. I’m working on ‘Law & Order,'” and they don’t freak out. So, I started driving the limo as a supplement. It was funny. I was working with Jon Favreau on “Sopranos” and Jon said to me, “Vinnie, I’m doing a movie with Vince [Vaughn] called ‘Made,’ can you drive a limo?” I said, “Yeah, I could drive a limo.”

That’s good, right? So, does that fall into the Method space?

You couldn’t get any more Method than that because they even had me driving when they normally let somebody else drive the long exterior shots. I said, “No, I’ll drive.” They said, “Yeah, well, we may see you.” And it was cool because I was driving P. Diddy around and Vince Vaughn. And actually J. Lo came to the set one night, she was running lines with P. Diddy. It was a good time. It’s still a good time.

So, like most things that are hard to do you, you make it sound smooth. You were in the nightclub business. You decided to audition for something and you obviously are tremendously committed and successful. It takes a lot of hard work and discipline and dedication and for most people, some training. So, of all your training, what do you think was the most important for you?

Well, I started to study at HB Studio on Bank Street and I’m a teacher there now. I’m on the faculty, so that’s full circle. But I had met an actor singer, Tommy Waits, he was an American Buffalo. I met him at Kenny’s Castaway. He just worked with Al Pacino next door, and Tommy became my mentor. He taught me his style. So, we would have private sessions and then we formed a group and we worked and while I was working on “Sopranos,” I called Tommy up. I said, “Tommy, are you in New York?” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “Can I hire you for the week?” And Tommy stayed at my house, so we went to the set. And I needed him. I needed Tommy to go say, “What’s my line? Where is what moment?” And Jimmy had people working with him. When you have a lot of texts and you have an episode like I had at “Fun House,” you don’t need them, but it’s good to have them in your corner, to have your coaches with you.

So much of your work is in this mob genre, right? That’s reasonable to say. Was that something you envisioned or you just fell into it?

You talk about when I was studying, my first acting teacher, Michael Beckett, great guy, he’s still there, down at HB. He said, “Vinnie, you’re always going to play wise guys.” He said, “But that’s the business, how they’re going to see you.” And I said, “I don’t care.” But do I regret it now? No, it put me on the map. But if you said to me, “Vinnie, I got this new script and I want you to play a regular guy.” I would say, “Send it to me. Let’s see it.” Because you’re looking for new stuff to do. And the only way you’re going to stretch is, like, I have a company with Maureen van Zandt and we could stretch within ourselves. But when you go and they say, “Jimmy and Raul, Vinnie, you want to play this spot?” They know I can do it. And that happened on “The Birthday Cake.” It was happening on this Casablanca movie, they write me more lines. And I said, “Okay, good, I can handle it.” Like, “The Birthday Cake,” all those lines, those were Val [Kilmer]’s lines. Those were all Val’s lines and Val said, “Give them to Vinnie.”

Tell us quickly about “The Birthday Cake.” Give us a little sense of the plot without too many spoilers and what drew you to the role?

Well, what drew me to the role is when my manager, Bob McGowan, called me up, he said, “Do you want to do a movie with Val Kilmer?” No brainer. “Yeah, I want to work with Val. No brainer.” “Okay, go see Jimmy and Raul.” And I had a meeting with them and then they talked about making my part bigger and I said, “Okay.” And then we dove into that. But the first day on the set, when I met Val, I was totally impressed. He’s a legend. “Top Gun.” Lorraine Bronco makes a cake every year, she brings it to the family. She gives it to the kid. On the way over from point A to point B, he goes through like an odyssey because from the script, and that’s when he meets Guzman and all these different characters. And then he gets to the party. When he gets to the party, then the story comes to what’s the purpose of the cake. That’s all I can really say.

So, I understand you did like to cook, you’re not in that at the moment, but you are in a band and you said you’re so busy and your band is called the Gangster Squad, is that right?

Yeah, the Gangster Squad. Vinnie Pastore’s Gangster Squad. When I was back in my club days, my club was the rock ‘n’ roll club and these are the same musicians that are playing with me and we have a lot of fun. It developed from a jam session we used to have back then and we went around, and I don’t always have the same guys, but basically people like my friend Timmy was here yesterday, Timmy Curtain, who used to play with Howard Stern’s band, Pink Vomit. And Tim was here because we’re doing a concert in the park, and the music is great because one, we’re bringing people out. We just did a show in Wildwood, New Jersey, and we brought people out, and people want to get out. They want to dance. 

Are you guys doing covers or are they all original?

I redo all classic rock.

I love it. And what do you play? You buried the lead. What’s your instrument?

I play the tambourine. I shake the maracas and I sing a couple of songs. It’s a variety show. I don’t do 12 songs, I do four songs. Everybody sings. I would let you sing if you wanted to sing with us. That’s what we do, we bring people up.

“The Birthday Cake” is available on demand and on Blu-ray.

Thanks to a gravitational trick, astronomers observed light from behind a black hole

Stanford astrophysicist Dan Wilkins and his colleagues were studying a supermassive black hole when something caught their attention—​​ a series of bright flares of X-rays. The emission of such high-energy photons from a black hole was intriguing, but not necessarily unprecedented. Yet it was interesting enough for Wilkins to take a closer look. 

When he did, Wilkins noticed additional, smaller, flashes of X-rays that were different “colors” than the bright flares. They also appeared to be delayed. This was strange, Wilkins said, as they expected the smaller flashes to be an “echo” of the first flashes.

They set about measuring the color of these X-rays, and the delay between them and the initial X-ray flash.

“We realized that these must be the echo coming from a bit of gas that should be hidden behind the black holes, so the gas on the other side of the black hole to us, ” Wilkins said. It was as if they were seeing something on the “far side of the black hole we shouldn’t be able to see — because anything that goes into the black hole can’t come out,” he added. “If something’s on the other side of the black hole from us, the light shouldn’t be able to get through the black hole towards us.”

But black holes do not eclipse light the way a moon or a planet might. Because of their intense mass, light bends and curves around them, like cars driving on a straight street suddenly swerving around a pothole. 

It turns out that what Wilkins and his team observed is the black hole warping space, and bending light around itself. (The research is detailed in a paper published July 28 in Nature). Though predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, it has never been confirmed on such an extreme scale — in this case, astronomers detecting light [in the X-ray spectrum] being bent from the opposite side of a black hole.

“This means that these echoes of X-rays from the far side of the black hole don’t have to travel through the black hole for us to see them,” Wilkins said. “They can actually get bent around the black hole, which is why we can see them.”

X-rays are typically observed when gas falls into black holes. Yet in those cases, the X-ray emissions are not from the black hole itself (from which light cannot escape) but from matter interactions near the event horizon, where particles can be accelerated to relativistic speeds and, in collisions, spew tremendous amounts of high-energy particles in all different directions. Typically, astronomers only observe these directly — they had never observed them as they were bent from the opposite side of a black hole, the researchers say. 

“Fifty years ago, when astrophysicists starting speculating about how the magnetic field might behave close to a black hole, they had no idea that one day we might have the techniques to observe this directly and see Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action,” said Roger Blandford, a co-author of the paper and a Stanford professor of physics, in a news release.

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Avi Loeb, the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011-2020) and founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, told Salon via email the paper is “interesting,” though he questioned whether such an event had been observed previously in 2019.

“It finds that short flashes of light from behind the black hole are bent around the black hole and magnified by the strong gravitational field,” Loeb said. “Observing light bent around the black hole confirms a key prediction of general relativity.”

Loeb added that this was confirmed previously when the Event Horizon Telescope “obtained an image of the ring of light around the silhouette of the giant black hole in the galaxy M87.” That image was famous for being the first direct image of a black hole, and was painstakingly produced after years of study and data analysis.

“That ring was also produced through bending of light by gravity near the black hole,” Loeb noted.

Whether or not you are a stickler about the precise definition of “behind a black hole,” the new study is historic in that there have been few such observations in astronomy history. Indeed, there is much to learn from a direct observation of black holes bending light, as black holes emit some of the most intense gravitational and electromagnetic fields of anything in the universe.

“By studying this, we can begin to understand how the brightest light sources in our whole universe work,” Wilkins said. “But it’s also an important piece of the puzzle to learn about how the galaxies formed and how the galaxy that we live in, the universe that we live in, really came into being.”

But is there any way this incredible observation could have been a fluke? Wilkins doesn’t think so.

“When we analyze the data, we try to rule out every other possibility, so we think about any other theories or any explanations that could mimic the same result,” Wilkins said. “This bending of light around the black hole is the only thing we know off in the laws of science as we understand that’s able to explain this.”

Gawker’s return has conservatives wondering: Could Peter Thiel have aided right-wing media more?

The infamous news and gossip site Gawker is back. 

Yet the blog’s stealthy Wednesday relaunch has right-wing pundits wondering if there was more PayPal founder and billionaire Peter Thiel could’ve done to advance conservative media after kneecapping the publication through his backing of Hulk Hogan’s sex tape lawsuit.

On Wednesday night, right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool took numerous swipes at Thiel, who has already donated millions to Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterms, including Ohio Senate hopeful J.D. Vance. 

“I don’t think Peter Thiel is paying attention all that much,” Pool said on his “Timcast IRL” program. “But I mean, I’m talking about the culture war, and what’s happening with kids and critical race applied principles. Like, the dude could snap his fingers and create a functioning news outlet.”

“He nukes Gawker, and now there’s,” Pool continued, before his guest, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, interjected, “and now Gawker is back.”

Pool argued that the billionaire GOP mega-donor could’ve done a lot more to advance right-wing media after garnering a successful judgment against Gawker. 

“He’s the guy, man, he went after Gawker, he was like ‘we’re not going to play this fake news game.’ He could snap his fingers and create ten new independent outlets that did real journalism,” Pool said, while adding that he’s surprised that wealthy conservatives he knows aren’t funding right-wing media ventures.

Thiel didn’t respond to a Salon request for comment about Pool’s remarks or Gawker’s relaunch. 

Other conservatives on the internet largely dismissed Gawker’s return. A few mocked the outlet, which had been a consistent lightning rod for conservative ire in the pre-Trump era. 

Right-wing writer Ian Miles Cheong wrote, “Go away,” while other conservatives poked fun at the site. NewsBuster’s Dan Gainor responded to Gawker’s “we’re back” tweet with the jab, “just like Covid.” Countless other Twitter users tagged Hogan and Thiel, pointing out that the site had returned to the wild west of the internet.

Gawker made its return after being scooped up by Bustle Digital Group in 2018 at a bankruptcy auction. In 2016, Gawker Media Group was sued into insolvency by Hulk Hogan after the outlet posted his sex tape. Theil backed the lawsuit to the tune of $10 million, in large part due to a longstanding beef with the site after it outed him as gay in 2007.

Gawker’s newly appointed editor-in-chief Leah Finnegan told readers that the publication’s mission going forward would “honor the past and embrace the present.”

“We are here to make you laugh, I hope, and think, and do a spit-take or furrow your brow, or maybe go ‘huh!’ or ‘wow!’ or ‘damn!’ or ‘what the f*ck?’ or ‘I’m glad someone finally said it!'” she added in a letter posted to the site Wednesday morning. 

Scarlett Johansson sues over “Black Widow,” while Disney calls out her “callous disregard” for COVID

Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney for releasing her recent Marvel Studios hit, “Black Widow,” on its streaming service, rather than exclusively in theaters, Buzzfeed News reports. Sources close to Johansson, who plays the titular Black Widow, say that the inclusion of “Black Widow” on Disney’s streaming service cost the actor an estimated $50 million.

According to Johansson’s lawsuit, which was submitted to Los Angeles County Superior Court on Thursday, the actor seeks unspecified monetary and punitive damages, and claims she was promised an exclusive release in theaters. Per this previous agreement, her compensation for “Black Widow” would “be based largely on box office receipts. The film was originally slated for a 2020 release, but was delayed due to COVID. When it finally debuted on July 9, it was simultaneously released in theaters and on Disney+ via Premier Access, which includes a fee.

Johansson’s lawyer John Berlinski said in a statement to Buzzfeed that Disney’s choice to release “Black Widow” on Disney+ is part of an effort to “increase subscribers and thereby boost the company’s stock price,” and that Disney is “hiding behind COVID-19 as a pretext to do so.”

“Ignoring the contracts of the artists responsible for the success of its films in furtherance of this short-sighted strategy violates their rights and we look forward to proving as much in court,” Berlinski said.

Disney has since responded with a statement, reading, “There is no merit whatsoever to [Johansson’s] filing,” and claims the company complied with Johansson’s contract. “The lawsuit is especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the studio says.

Disney also claims “the release of Black Widow on Disney+ with Premier Access has significantly enhanced her ability to earn additional compensation on top of the $20M she has received.” But as Variety points out, the company hasn’t specified whether it renegotiated with Johansson to ensure she could share in the streaming rental revenue for her movie.

Over the course of the pandemic, several movies that would have otherwise been box office hits delayed their releases, pivoted to streaming instead, or, especially as of this summer, released in both theaters and on streaming platforms, like “Black Widow.” “Wonder Woman 1984,” which released in December on HBO Max, involved a deal between Warner Bros. and agents for director Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot, which saw both paid millions to compensate for lost box office earnings. 

In contrast, Johansson’s legal complaint alleges Disney repeatedly declined to negotiate or come to an alternative “understanding” with her team, as her movie’s release was repeatedly delayed, and released immediately to streaming platforms despite an established agreement between Johansson and Disney. 

Since the lawsuit became public knowledge Thursday, the internet has had a mixed reaction. Some have pointed out that we’re still very much in the throes of a deadly pandemic, and an exclusive theater release might not have been in the best interest of public health. Simultaneously, if the claims of Johansson’s legal team are true, it’s ironic to watch the lead actress of a movie about women’s empowerment and liberation denied the financial compensation that she claims she was promised — especially when the pay gap in the entertainment industry and nearly all workplaces remains so persistent. 

Johansson, who was the highest paid actress of 2019, has long carried the MCU on her shoulders with her iconic performance of Natasha Romanoff, but somehow only received her one, singular solo movie in 2021. Now, if the claims in her legal complaint are true, she faces an uphill battle to get paid what she says she was promised for a movie that frankly should have been made a long time ago.

As the pandemic persists and streaming services become increasingly dominant, Johansson’s lawsuit could have major implications for the future of cinema.

Jamie Lee Curtis feels “wonder and pride” for trans daughter

In the latest issue of AARP Magazine, “Knives Out” actor Jamie Lee Curtis opens up about her 25-year-old, recently out transgender daughter, Ruby. 

As part of the intimate profile, Curtis describes her life as a constant “metamorphosis,” letting go of “old ideas” and embracing change. Thus, she describes watching with her husband Christopher Guest “in wonder and pride as our son became our daughter Ruby.” Curtis told the magazine Ruby is a computer gaming editor who will be marrying her fiance next year, and that Curtis will officiate the wedding.

Curtis’ comfort and celebration of her daughter Ruby’s transgender identity should obviously be standard for parents, who shouldn’t be lauded for the bare minimum of loving their children as they are. Curtis’ openness about her child’s experience coming out — with her permission — also comes at a time of increasing visibility for trans actors and public figures, from Elliot Page of “The Umbrella Academy,” to Mj Rodriguez, fresh off her Emmy nominations for “Pose.”

Curtis herself is one of several parents who have publicly celebrated and supported their trans and LGBTQ children, from former NBA star Dwyane Wade and model Gabrielle Union and their daughter Zaya, to “Sex and the City” star and former New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon and her son Samuel Joseph Mozes.

Both of Curtis’ children, Ruby and Annie, 34, a dance instructor, lead relatively private lives compared with their mother. Curtis didn’t have too much to say about either of her children other than the excitement around Ruby’s forthcoming wedding, but she did express “hope” for grandchildren.

Other fun takeaways from the actor’s profile include the recounting of her love story with her husband, Guest, which includes a chance encounter at a restaurant shortly after Curtis’ amicable breakup with her ex. They went on their first date in July 1984, and Curtis told the magazine “by August 8, when he left to tape a year of ‘Saturday Night Live’ in New York City, we’d fallen in love.”

At the time of Curtis’ interview with AARP Magazine, she was just about to leave to film “Borderlands,” which wrapped filming last month but remains without a release date. She’ll star alongside Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart in the screenplay adaptation of the popular video game set on the fictional planet of Pandora.

Gaetz, MTG turned away from jail during visit to Jan. 6 “political prisoners”

A group of GOP lawmakers, including Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, were turned away from a Washington, D.C.-area jail Thursday while attempting to visit a number of Jan. 6 rioters at the facility, reports said. 

Multiple Congresspeople reported being “locked out” from the building after being warned that they were trespassing. Some even live-tweeted the encounter for their millions of followers.

“What are they hiding?” Gaetz tweeted after the stunt.

“We absolutely are not trespassing and if that attitude is any indication of how they’re treating their prisoners inside I have great concerns,” Greene told reporters at the facility after being turned away.

It was the latest attempt by Republicans in Congress to recast the insurrectionists — who were arrested on legitimate charges, as Politifact noted in a fact-check this week — as “political prisoners.” The publication deemed the claim that those being held for their role in the Capitol attack were “political prisoners” or “non-violent trespassers” as false.

Multiple defendants have levied accusations of mistreatment at the facility, including 23-hour days in solitary confinement and beatings, though the allegations notably haven’t been accompanied by much evidence. The D.C. Department of Corrections denies these claims, and, as other news organizations have noted, the vast majority of Jan. 6 defendants have already been sentenced or released from custody.

The prisoners’ turn as a conservative cause célèbre peaked earlier this week when a group of Congressional Republicans sent a letter calling for Attorney General Merrick Garland to answer questions on the subject. They followed up the letter with a short-lived press conference Wednesday featuring Gaetz and Greene, along with Reps. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.

The ostensibly pro-Jan. 6 event was intended to draw attention away from the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol building, which was meeting at the same time to hear testimony from the police officers who were attacked by rioters that day.

Several of the Congresspeople even read letters from the defendants intended to burnish their reputation.

“We are just regular freedom loving Americans, with a tendency towards humorous shenanigans,” one such letter read.

They were chased off by protesters, including a literal whistleblower and throngs of sign-bearers with messages like, “Traitors + Rapists: Sit Down,” “Pedophiles for Trump,” “Jan. 6 Was an Inside Job” and similar messages.

The same group of Republicans found a new boogeyman to agitate against Thursday in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol mask mandate. Several representatives headed over from their normal digs in the House side of the building to the Senate chamber — which does not have an accompanying mask mandate.

Multiple outlets also reported that Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., threw a mask back at a staffer who offered her one upon entrance to the House chamber. A spokesperson for the Congresswoman disputed that characterization, and said she “returned it with a quick slide” across a table.

“Rep. Boebert refuses to comply with Speaker Pelosi’s anti-science, totalitarian mask mandate,” a spokesperson for Boebert told CNN. “When offered a mask, she returned it with a quick slide across the table.”

How to make a Jungle Bird, a tiki bar fixture known for its balance of sour and spice

Ask anyone fortunate to live long enough to see their personal style come back into vogue as fashion trends cycle around: It is possible to be both behind and ahead of the times at different points in your life. So you might as well follow your own vision for long-term satisfaction, even if it means being temporarily out of step with the zeitgeist. 

Consider the Jungle Bird. Several years ago, this rum and Campari drink began popping up on craft cocktail and tiki bar menus across the country like it had been a classic all along. But you won’t find it in the tiki canon alongside drinks like the Zombie, Pearl Diver or Mai Tai. The New York Times credits tiki historian Jeff Berry for pulling this drink out of obscurity for his 2002 book “Intoxica!” from which it slowly gained steam until it achieved staying power. 

But when it originally debuted at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton in 1978, it didn’t make much of a wider dent. The cocktail world was between tiki phases; the original wave had fallen out of favor in the 1970s, giving way to sweeter Jimmy Buffett-ish tropical drinks like Sex on the Beach before making a comeback in the new millennium alongside the classic cocktails renaissance.

And so the Jungle Bird, with its ostentatious garnish and balance of sour and spice, hatched a bit out of time — just a bit late for the classic wave, and too early for the resurgence. What did it do? It waited; it did its own thing under the radar. Eventually, it caught the right expert eye at the right time, and now it’s hard to imagine a cocktail landscape without it. 

For the home cocktail enthusiast, the Jungle Bird is much easier to make than many of its tiki sisters. You can pull together a basic version with home bar staples. But it still packs a complex flavor: the mixture of lime with pineapple for a hit of sour, the bitterness of the Campari to balance the dark rum. The classic is made with a dark Jamaican rum, though some versions call for blackstrap. As always, go with your taste and what you have on hand.   

Ingredients:

Serving size: one beverage

  • 1 1/2 oz. dark rum
  • 3/4 oz. Campari
  • 1 1/2 oz. pineapple juice
  • 1/2 oz. fresh lime juice 
  • 1/2 oz. simple syrup (add 1 cup of sugar to 1 cup boiling water, simmer until dissolved, cool)
  • Ice for shaking, plus one large cube for serving

Garnish (optional, but fun):

  • Pineapple (the whole fruit including leaves or just a wedge)
  • Cocktail cherries (Luxardo, preferably)
  • Cocktail picks

Gear:

You don’t need any specialty equipment to mix a simple cocktail. Improvise with what you have — a Mason jar with a lid makes a fine shaker in a pinch. But here’s what I keep at hand:

Instructions:

Add rum, Campari, simple syrup, pineapple and lime juices to a shaker with ice, then shake vigorously for 30 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass or short tiki mug over a large block of ice. 

A word on the garnish: A wedge of pineapple and a cocktail cherry speared on a cocktail pick will do the trick. But for occasions when restraint won’t do, make your very own Jungle Bird to perch on its drink. Take a whole pineapple, and trim three or four leaves off the top. Then slice a ring of pineapple about an inch thick, and cut a wedge from that, leaving the rind intact. Spear onto the cocktail pick, in this order: a cocktail cherry for the bird’s head; the leaves, arranged like feathers; then the pineapple wedge — rind first, point side down.   

Variations:

My go-to variation is to use cardamom-infused simple syrup for an extra layer of spice. Using a mortar and pestle, grind up 1 tablespoon of cardamom pods. Boil with 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water until the sugar is dissolved, then simmer for another 15 minutes. Remove from heat and steep for 30 minutes, then strain into a jar and cool. 

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Nadiya Hussain’s bread pudding will have you baking with ice cream

Among my favorite television moments, the one I replay the most in my mind is Nadiya Hussain’s 2015 victory lap on “The Great British Baking Show” (or as it’s known in the UK “The Great British Bake-Off”).  At the time, Hussain was a “a full-time mum” and self-taught cook who’d practice her bakes after her family went to bed, “until about two or three in the morning.” As she won, she tearfully declared, “I am never, ever going to put boundaries on myself ever again. I’m never going to say I can’t do it. I’m never going to say maybe. I’m never going to say, ‘I don’t think I can.’ I can. And I will.” That speech gets me through the tough days, the maybe days.

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In the years since Hussain’s “Bake Off” triumph, she has lived up to her vow to never put boundaries on herself. She has hosted her own cooking shows, launched a line of home goods, published a children’s book and a memoir, and of course, authored numerous cookbooks. Her latest, “Nadiya Bakes,” is full of sweet and savory recipes for home bakers of all levels of skill and ambition. It’s a book that’s perfect for the person who doesn’t fall for all the intimidating hype around baking, who knows it’s not really as ruthlessly precise and scary as it’s often made out to be. Anything that gives you dessert at the end of the process should be fun. And these recipes are fun.

While I have been ogling nearly every page of “Nadiya Bakes” in the same way I obsessed over her Netflix series of the same name, the recipe that first called to my lazy, exhausted heart was her croissant bread pudding.

Bread pudding, a dish with its roots in thrifty home cooking around the world, is to my mind one of the greatest examples of simple ingredients elevated to stratospheric deliciousness. In Hussain’s twist on the classic, she figures that ice cream “seems like the perfect shortcut” for the traditional — and fussier — custard. She is right in the best way; devising a dessert that has four ingredients, takes no time and tastes insane.

Because I do not share or even understand the English obsession for introducing orange into everything chocolate, I have omitted Hussain’s suggested inclusion of marmalade here. And while she bakes her pudding with vanilla ice cream, I couldn’t resist going all out and using Talenti double dark chocolate instead. Feel free to use your own favorite flavor here. And while I’m sure this would be quite good with day-old croissants from the bakery, I made my pudding with the cheapo minis from my local supermarket, and it was glorious. You could easily swap in challah or brioche here as well.

***

Ice Cream Croissant Pudding
Inspired by Nadiya Hussain’s “Nadiya Bakes”
Serves 8

Ingredients:

  • 4 large croissants or 8 – 12 miniature ones
  • 12 – 13 ounces ice cream, softened
  • 2 – 4 oz dark chocolate chips or roughly chopped chocolate
  • Butter, softened

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Generously butter a small roasting pan or pie plate.
  2. Slice the croissants lengthwise, then spread a thin layer of butter on each half.
  3. Place the buttered croissants in the dish. (I placed mine in a spiral, but honestly, you can just dump them in.)
  4. Dot spoonfuls of ice cream over the croissants, and let the mixture melt about ten minutes, to just soften.
  5. Sprinkle the chopped chocolate over the top.
  6. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Let cool just a few minutes before serving warm.

Top with whipped cream or eat exactly as is. Obviously, this makes a damn fine breakfast.

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Republican Rep. Mo Brooks reveals he wore body armor to Trump’s Jan. 6 rally after receiving a tip

On Wednesday evening Slate political writer Jim Newell reported that Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., recently revealed to him that he was wearing body armor under his clothes during a speech he delivered at Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6.

During his notorious speech leading up to the attack on the Capitol, Brooks told the crowd that “today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!”

Newell wrote that he encountered Brooks on Wednesday outside the House chamber. During their conversation, Brooks attempted to trash House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the House select committee hearing. “The purpose of that committee is not to discern the truth. The purpose is to create political propaganda that may be used in the elections in 2022 and perhaps 2024.”

Then Brooks continued to complain to Newell that Pelosi’s office wasn’t “doing a better job with respect to the Capitol Police and their level of preparation.”

“To prove his point about preparation,” wrote Newell, “he revealed a new detail to me: that because of a tip he’d received about potential violence, he’d been wearing body armor at the very same Ellipse speech.”

“I was warned on Monday that there might be risks associated with the next few days,” Brooks said to Newell. “And as a consequence of those warnings, I did not go to my condo. Instead, I slept on the floor of my office. And when I gave my speech at the Ellipse, I was wearing body armor.”

“That’s why I was wearing that nice little windbreaker,” he went on. “To cover up the body armor.”

Brooks did not reveal who tipped him off or what “risk” he had been warned about. 

Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill is already on the fast track to becoming his pyrrhic victory

On Wednesday night, the Beltway press was abuzz with excitement at the announcement of a $1 trillion infrastructure deal made by Senate Democrats, Joe Biden’s White House, and a handful of Senate Republicans. No, not because it’s a well overdue investment in American infrastructure that has been crumbling from decades of neglect. The political press cannot be bothered with mundane concerns as “what Americans actually need” and “the continuing economic health of the nation.” The main reason for all the elation was that the bill is bipartisan. (Cue gates of heaven opening, a chorus of angels singing.) When Democrats are in charge, bipartisanship is not only the singular obsession of the Beltway media but seen as exclusively the duty of Democrats to uphold. 

“Biden ignores the ‘shiny objects’ and nears a bipartisan win,” gushed Politico’s headline. In the article, the bill is described as “the type of bipartisan win he’s dreamed about since launching his campaign for the presidency.” Other Democratic leaders are portrayed as optimistic that the bill can “fulfill Biden’s campaign promise that he could work with GOP leaders even as they vowed to kill his agenda.”

The whole thing is surreal, and not just because it comes the very day after grim hearings in the House about the January 6 insurrection incited by Donald Trump, a man who those GOP leaders Biden is so keen on working with continue to support. It’s that this is all happening against a backdrop of impending doom for not just the Democratic party’s future, but for democracy itself. Republicans in state legislatures continue to quietly line things up so that Donald Trump can steal the 2024 election from Biden, through a combination of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and changing election laws so that Republicans can simply void out election results they don’t like.

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Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are standing by and letting it all happen.

Democrats could, if all their Senate members wanted, pass bills that block all the movement in state legislatures to grease the wheels for Trump to steal the 2024 election. Bills like the For the People Act would kneecap most, if not all, of the slow-moving coup that Republicans are arranging for the 2022 and 2024 cycles. But those bills keep getting filibustered by Republicans, who don’t want small things like “voting rights” and “free and fair elections” to get in the way of their plans for permanent one-party minority rule. Senate Democrats could, in theory, overturn the filibuster and start passing bills to protect democracy. Unfortunately, some centrist Democrats — most notably, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — refuse to provide the votes necessary to end the filibuster. Their reason? That familiar belief in “bipartisanship” and an apparently bottomless faith that they’re one happy hour with Republicans away from hammering out a deal that will make Republicans suddenly start caring about preserving democracy. 

More sensible Democrats on Capitol Hill have been pressuring Manchin and Sinema to wake up and see that “bipartisanship” is a joke. Republicans not only block everything they can, but the GOP, under Trump’s leadership, is becoming increasingly anti-democracy. Efforts are being mounted to get these two to embrace some kind of filibuster reform that would, at least, make it harder for Republicans to stop voting rights bills. 

But the passage of this bipartisan infrastructure package is likely the last nail in the coffin of any hope that Manchin or Sinema would seriously consider filibuster reform.

Both Manchin and Sinema have been at the center of negotiations for this bill, and no doubt their already massive egos are quadrupling in size, fueled by the belief that they are proving their critics wrong and that “bipartisanship” is totally a real thing that they are totally capable of achieving. 

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There’s been some wonder in the Beltway press at the fact that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is the architect of the Republican strategy of using the filibuster to obstruct every piece of meaningful Democratic legislation, not only allowed this deal to go forward but even voted himself to allow debate. But it really should be no surprise, as this deal is all upside for McConnell.

For a mere $1 trillion, he gets insurance against Manchin and Sinema ever changing their minds about the filibuster. By tricking Manchin and Sinema into believing that the filibuster needs to stay put, he blocks any future possibility of meaningful voting rights legislation, ensures that voter suppression and gerrymandering will squeeze Democrats out of power on what may be a permanent basis, and helps pave the way for Trump 2024. Plus, McConnell gets some roads and bridges that Trump can start taking credit for starting in 2025 — just after he’s inaugurated.

Already, the illusion that Republicans are people who can be worked with is paying off dividends for the right. Sinema is already making noises about how she can’t back the larger $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that Democrats have been planning to pass through a party-line budget reconciliation vote, which is their rare chance at skipping a GOP filibuster altogether. McConnell is ecstatic at how much he has Sinema in his pocket, flattering her as “very courageous,” no doubt so she will continue to do his bidding by obstructing progress in the name of “bipartisanship.”

Yet plenty of Democrats are full of praise for Biden’s supposed wizardry at the bipartisan negotiation thing.

“Maybe professional politicians are actually good at politics,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii told Politico, gushing over Biden. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “it turns out that decades’ worth of expertise and relationships and pattern recognition are really helpful to getting a big result like this done.” 

But the pattern that is not being recognized is how Republicans are singularly focused on amassing as much power as possible without having to answer to voters. By letting this one bill get through, and propping up the illusion that “bipartisanship” is real, Republicans just bought themselves assurance that more important bills, such as the For the People Act, will never pass.

Let’s be real: The person who really showed his experience and chops here is Mitch McConnell, who once again outmaneuvered Democrats and got his party closer to their long-term goal of permanent power without having to win free and fair elections. 

Trump tried to handpick the winner of a Texas House race. He failed miserably

Although former President Donald Trump didn’t perform as well in Texas in the 2020 election as he did in some other red states — Trump defeated now-President Joe Biden by 6% in Texas compared to 43% in Wyoming, 34% in North Dakota and 30% in Idaho — he has maintained a strong influence on the Texas Republican Party. Yet in a special U.S. House election in North Texas on Tuesday, July 27, Republican voters didn’t choose the candidate who Trump endorsed.

Texas State Rep. Jake Ellzey and Susan Wright were competing in Texas’ 6th Congressional District for the seat once held by Wright’s late husband, Rep. Ron Wright, who died of COVID-19 in February. Trump’s endorsement of Susan Wright, however, did not prevent Ellzey from defeating her.

Washington Post reporter David Weigel explains, “Although Ellzey did not criticize Trump during the campaign, his allies suggested that the former president made a mistake by endorsing a first-time candidate who struggled to raise money and held few campaign events…. (Ellzey) told supporters that voters had wanted ‘a positive outlook, a Reagan Republican outlook for the future of our country’ despite a blizzard of negative ads.”

On July 26, the day before the election, Wright continued to stress that Trump had endorsed her. And the Club for Growth aired ads supporting her. But in the end, North Texas Republicans chose Ellzey instead.

Weigel explains, “Wright and Ellzey had no significant policy differences, which helped turn Trump’s endorsement into the race’s defining issue. The Club for Growth, which had spent heavily against Ellzey during his 2018 run, blitzed voters with TV and mail advertisements, while Ellzey was often in Austin for special sessions, scheduling campaign events around them.”

The morning after the election, Kyle Kondik — managing editor for Sabato’s Crystal Ball — tweeted:

The right way to store cucumbers (so they don’t turn to mush)

Cucumbers are easy to find year-round, but they’re really at their peak come summer (May through August). Once you get home from stocking up on them at the farm stand, grocery store, or even a grocery delivery service like Instacart, which you can shop here, it’s important to know how to store cucumbers. If you take care of these green gems properly, they should last up to a week. Ahead, we’re sharing our top tips for storing cucumbers the right way.

Shopping for cucumbers

Before you grab any cukes off the shelves (we’re close enough that we can give them a nickname, right?), choose carefully. The best cucumbers will be pure green (not yellow) and have no soft spots. Any signs of wrinkles, shrinkage, or dimples signal that the cucumber is overripe. Overripe or rotten cucumbers will have a sour taste and funky smell, so, unlike overripe bananas or apples, which are great for baking, pass on past-peak cucumbers.

How to store cucumbers 

According to the Hmong American Farmers Association, your average supermarket cold cucumbers are generally coated with a food-grade wax that makes them safe to store in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator for up to one week, uncut. Unwaxed cucumbers, which are the kind that you’d pick in your own garden, are best when used within three days.

Store the cucumbers away from avocados, bananas, tomatoes, or melons, as the cucumbers are more likely to yellow quickly due to the exposure of ethylene gas. Although not harmful, ethylene is a gas that is released from fruits and vegetables that causes produce to ripen more quickly. Produce experts recommend that produce like cucumbers should not be stored in plastic bags, like the kind you would pick up in the grocery store, as this will cause them to ripen more quickly. (Though if you’re trying to move an avocado along faster, or ripen bananas for a quick bread, then storing them at room temperature on the kitchen counter in a bag is perfect.)

Using plastic wrap 

One trick for keeping cucumbers fresh is wrapping them in plastic wrap. Storing them this way will help to slow down their ripening. According to Cook’s Illustrated, wrapped cucumbers lasted longer than cucumbers stored loose or in a Ziploc bag: “The plastic wrap formed an airtight second skin, keeping moisture from leaving the fruit and nearly preventing moisture loss from occurring.”

Once the cucumbers are tightly wrapped in plastic, store them in an airtight storage container in your refrigerator. Groundbreaking? No. But a surefire way to prevent mushy cukes? Yes.

How to store cut cucumbers 

If you’ve pre-cut or sliced cucumbers for snacking or a salad but have some left over, don’t just throw them out or put them in a plastic bag. The best way to store cut cucumbers is to wrap them in a damp paper towel and place them in an airtight storage container. The tight, locking seal on the cover of the container will help to keep them extra fresh. Place the container in your refrigerator or in the crisper drawer and use the cut cukes within five days.

Capitol police officer claps back at Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham: “The facts are the facts”

Capitol Officer Michael Fanone slammed Fox News’ prime-time personalities, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, for their coverage on Tuesday of day one of the House Select Committee’s hearing on the Capitol riot.

On his Fox News program, Carlson smirked and laughed at a clip of Fanone explaining the post-traumatic stress disorder he experienced after the riot. Carlson later went on to say that the violence was just a “political protest that got out of hand.”

Ingraham responded to the harrowing testimony with a spoof awards ceremony, giving the “best performance in an action role” award to Fanone, who during his testimony said he felt like he “went to hell and back” to protect lawmakers on Jan. 6. “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” he finished.

“There was certainly a lot of violence that day, but it was not a terrorist attack,” said Ingraham. “It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to America. It wasn’t an insurrection.”

Appearing on CNN’s “New Day” Wednesday morning, host John Berman asked Fanone what it was like to watch the Fox News hosts joke and make fun of his testimony before Congress.

“The facts are the facts,” Fanone said. “They were supported by hundreds of hours of videotape, evidence, eyewitness testimony, they’re undisputable,” before clapping back at the Fox News hosts, saying “so if they want to disparage me or call me a member of Antifa or talk about my neck tattoos, I couldn’t care less.”

“What does concern me is the fact that those entertainers have an audience, and that audience takes their words and the rhetoric that they use as more than just entertainment,” Fanone explained. “They think it’s real.”

He then connected the right-wing “entertainment” often described as news or news analysis as having tragic consequences. 

“That thought process has real-life consequences,” he said of the audience listening to Carlson and Ingraham’s shows. “And we saw the result of that on January 6th.”

Many tweeted in support of Fanone, calling Carlson and Ingraham’s commentaries “disgusting.”

Missouri health director says he was assaulted by an “angry” anti-mask mob in St. Louis

The acting director of the St. Louis County Department of Public Health alleged that he was verbally and physically assaulted at a Tuesday City Council meeting after encouraging the council’s members to enact a mask mandate. 

“I have worked to improve public health around the world, working in Australia, Vietnam, Pakistan, South Africa, the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe, Botswana and the United States (West Virginia, Massachusetts and Missouri),” Dr. Faisal Khan wrote in a Wednesday letter to the council’s chairwoman. “In all that time and in all those places,” he continued, “I have never been subjected to the racist, xenophobic, and threatening behavior that greeted me in the County Council meeting last night.”

In his letter, the health official described being subjected to racist dog whistles by two councilmen after floating a coronavirus mask mandate amid the recent surge of Delta variant cases in Missouri. The Republican councilman “said he wanted to emphasize for the assembled crowd that [Khan] was not from this country,” Khan claimed, adding that the crowd “appeared to be from the “MAGA” movement, as evidenced by their ‘Trump 2024’ chants.” After Khan’s presentation, a different councilman posted on social media that masks are “un-American,” indirectly reminding the council that Khan is not originally from the U.S. 

Later, members of the crowd themselves began to mock Khan, doing impressions of the Simpsons regular Apu – a character whose stereotypical portrayal of Indians was an element of the show that voice actor Hank Azaria recently apologized for. 

During the commotion, Khan claimed that he asked Council Chairwoman Rita Heard Days to intervene, but she apparently brushed him off despite having expressed sensitivity to issues of race in the past. 

Later, as he was attempting to leave the chamber, Khan said he was “confronted” and “surrounded” by a “crowd in close quarters, where members of the crowd yelled at [him], calling [him] a ‘fat brown cunt’ and a ‘brown bastard.'”

“After being physically assaulted, called racist slurs, and surrounded by an angry mob,” he wrote, “I expressed my displeasure by using my middle finger toward an individual who had physically threatened me and called me racist slurs.”

He capped off: “I have to say, however, that when faced with the racist vitriol that Councilman Fitch has been privately and publicly stoking against me since my appointment, I cannot say I am sorry.”

One of the councilmen in question, Tim Fitch, called Khan’s letter a “desperate attempt at deflection and diversion by Sam Page,” the county executive who originally called for the mask mandate. “Dr. Khan knew he was in trouble for (giving the middle finger) and this was an opportunity to put that on someone else,” Fitch told the St. Lois Post-Dispatch. 

Days, the council chairwoman, conceded to the Post-Dispatch that the crowd’s treatment of Khan was “unfortunate,” but added that the Khan “threw in a little threat” of his own toward her for not keeping the peace. 

On Tuesday, the council voted 5-2 against a mask mandate, after which Page held a briefing announcing that the mandate would nevertheless remain in place. 

“There is currently a lawsuit challenging that mandate, until that’s resolved, masks are required in all indoor public spaces,” he said. “The virus is simply spreading faster than we are getting people vaccinated. Masks slow down the spread while we continue our aggressive efforts to make the vaccine available for everyone.”

That wrenching Jan. 6 testimony — and why the forces of fascism must deny it

During Tuesday’s House select committee hearing on the events of Jan. 6, four police officers shared what it was like to battle Donald Trump’s attack force on that dreadful day.

Here is the big picture. In the most documented crime in human history, thousands of Trump’s followers overran the Capitol. They assaulted police officers and other law enforcement agents, beating them with clubs, crushing them with doors (and their own riot shields), broke their bones, electrocuted them and verbally abused them, in some cases with racist epithets. 

One officer who was there described Jan. 6 as akin to a medieval battle with hand-to-hand combat. Trump’s attack force was possessed by bloodlust, acting like the ghouls in George Romero’s cult classic film “The Crazies.” Through the use of stochastic terrorism, as well as open calls for violence Trump and his allies ordered the attack on the Capitol. Believing themselves to be “patriots,” Trump’s followers enthusiastically obeyed. Some were Christian fascists who convinced themselves that they were doing God’s work as members of what some observers have called “Vanilla ISIS.”

Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers gave their best full measure to stop Trump’s attack force. It was not enough, as the Trumpists eventually overran the Capitol building’s defenses. Once inside, they hoped to find Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other leading Democrats deemed to be the “enemy.” The apparent goal was to abduct or murder them in order to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

If Trump’s attack force had come with firearms or explosives, it’s conceivable that many members of Congress would have been killed or incapacitated, making a congressional quorum impossible. In the ultimate nightmare scenario, gubernatorial appointments or special elections would would have been necessary for Congress to conduct its business. While that played out, the federal government would have been virtually paralyzed, and Joe Biden could not have been certified or inaugurated as president. Donald Trump could then have invoked the Insurrection Act and declared martial law, in hopes of remaining in power indefinitely.

At the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne Jr. summarized this: “What happened on January 6 was monstrous, the product of a dangerous, anti-democratic sickness haunting parts of the American right. This is the sort of event that a free nation must come to terms with, not ignore; investigate, not sweep under the rug; and understand, not dismiss as a one-off display of violence. That’s why this committee’s work is so important”.

And here is the smaller, more personal picture. As he fought to defend the Capitol and the people inside, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone was repeatedly electrocuted with a taser and beaten into unconsciousness. He suffered a heart attack, a traumatic brain injury, a concussion and other lifelong debilitating injuries, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Fanone told the committee, “Although I regularly deal with risky situations on the job, nowhere in my wildest imagination did I ever expect to be in that situation, or sitting here before you talking about it. … What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens, including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend, are downplaying or outright denying what happened. … I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room. But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist or that hell actually wasn’t that bad. … The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.”

Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell testified that he confronted death on Jan. 6 and was thinking, “This is how I’m going to die, defending this entrance.” He told the committee, “We fought hand-to-hand and inch-by-inch to prevent an invasion of the Capitol by a violent mob intent on subverting our democratic process.” When he returned home, he said, “I had to push away my wife from me because she wanted to hug me. And I told her ‘no’ because of all the chemicals [on] my uniform. I couldn’t sleep because the chemicals reactivated after I took a shower, and my skin was still burning.”

D.C. Metro Officer Daniel Hodges told the committee how he was crushed between two doors and could not breathe. He was in such severe respiratory distress that he began to foam at the mouth while insurrectionists beat him in the head with his own weapon. Hodges testified he had “no doubt” that the Trump attack force would kill members of Congress if they had an opportunity to do so. He also said that Trumpists told him and other law enforcement officers, “You will die on your knees”.

Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn reported battling Trump attackers inside the building, where he tried to prevent them from breaching the House chamber. Dunn, who is Black, testified that several members of Trump’s attack force called him racial slurs: “One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled, ‘You hear that, guys, this n***er voted for Joe Biden!’ Then the crowd, perhaps around 20 people, joined in, screaming ‘Boo! Fucking n***er!’ No one had ever —ever — called me a ‘n***er’ while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police officer.” 

Dunn, Fanone, Gonell and Hodges are heroes and role models, both because of the courage and selflessness they showed on Jan. 6 and for the humility and personal bravery they exemplified during Tuesday’s committee hearing.

On Twitter, I wrote something like this: “I hope that the people watching the January 6 testimony by these 4 police officers realize that they are witnessing greatness. Poise. Humility. Bravery. Dignity. That is the type of heroism I respect. Please explain this to your children. These men are real role-models.”

Predictably, denizens of TrumpWorld and the MAGAverse do not see these men and the other officers who battled the Trumpists on Jan. 6 in the same light. Instead, Trump’s propagandists have shamelessly attacked these officers’ reputations, sense of duty and heroic sacrifice. The right-wing echo chamber even continues to circulate the blatant lie that Trump’s attack force comprised of “tourists,” that Jan. 6 was just a “normal day” and that the violent attack against democracy has been exaggerated.

The right-wing disinformation machine also makes contradictory claims — often an effective propaganda strategy — simultaneously arguing that the dreadful events of Jan. 6 did not happen in the manner we all perceived them, and also that the police officers who testified before the House select committee are “crisis actors” who were being overly “dramatic.”

Of course, Donald Trump and his mouthpieces want his followers to believe that Jan. 6 was some kind of love-fest, rather than a fascist attack on the country’s democracy and the rule of law.

These TrumpWorld and MAGAverse fantasies are utterly predictable and unsurprising. Fascism is a belief system in which social and political deviance is normalized. Truth and reality become functions of the Great Leader’s will and his changing needs. A depraved indifference to human life becomes part of the broader embrace of antisocial behavior and other pathologies, including mass violence and other forms of destruction.

Fascist movements also involve the surrender of the self to the collective. The members and leaders swept up in such movements lose the ability to discern right from wrong, good from evil, reality from delusion. All these attributes are now visible in the Trumpist movement, today’s Republican Party and the white right more generally.

Trumpists and other neofascists literally cannot perceive the heroism of Dunn, Fanone, Gonell, Hodges and the other police who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 because empirical reality and moral clarity have been made secondary to Donald Trump’s perceived needs and desires.

But these officers’ testimony before Congress is more than an account of what happened on Jan. 6. It is also a type of time machine, a portal to a probable future. Law enforcement and other experts warn that right-wing terrorism remains the country’s greatest domestic security threat, up to and including the possibility of a sustained insurgency or perhaps a second American civil war.

When another right-wing coup attempt occurs (along with other acts of domestic terrorism), the police and other members of law enforcement who tried to defend democracy will be interviewed. They will say much the same things as the officers did before Congress on Tuesday. As with the public reaction to mass shootings, our outrage at right-wing terrorism will gradually fade into the background, just another current of discordant noise in American culture. That may be literally how the fascists win.