Sananda Maitreya on being “spiritually awakened” by the Beatles, and the genius of George Harrison

Multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer Sananda Maitreya joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about his new album “Pandora’s PlayHouse,” how the Beatles were “ordained by God” and much more on “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.

Maitreya (formerly known by the stage name Terence Trent D’Arby) had a string of hits in the late ’80s from his album “Introducing the Hardline,” including “Sign Your Name” and “Wishing Well.” But as he tells Ken Womack, his musical journey actually began much earlier. As the son of singer Frances Howard, he was initially only allowed to listen to gospel music — that is, until the Beatles arrived in the U.S. in 1964.

“Songs like ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ were so ubiquitous,” he says. “I was spiritually awakened. I wanted to be a Beatle.” He also explains to Womack that one of the reasons he wanted to guest on “Everything Fab Four” was to “unburden my great debt to them. I’m very, very grateful they showed up.”

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The first instrument Maitreya played was the drums at age two, moving on to keyboards by six and acoustic guitar at eight. As he says, “the Beatles made playing guitar look like something that was essential to one’s being.” And in particular, he calls George Harrison “a seminal influence,” describing his playing as “perfectly suiting the needs of the song as opposed to the ego of the guitarist. George never ‘outsmarted’ the music – he was a very tasteful player. I was heavily, heavily influenced by him.”

Maitreya also relays a story of a chance meeting with Harrison at a cocktail party (where Don Henley, Tom Petty and more were also in attendance), and a mystical moment they shared that night. “George was not just a masterful musician. He was something of another order.”

But as for all the Beatles, he says, “there was a humanity, a soul about them. They used their talent to bless and enlighten those around them.” Maitreya aims to do the same with his latest album, “Pandora’s PlayHouse,” which includes a tribute to the late Prince, as well as songs such as “Don’t Break My Balls” and “One Horse Town”:

He says he regularly “petitions” his heroes and idols when making music, but nobody comes close to the Beatles for him. “They were constantly moving, constantly expanding, constantly pushing. Part of the mission of the Beatles was to spawn more Beatles. That was their job,” he explains. “That’s what saints always do.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Sananda Maitreya on “Everything Fab Four” and subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.”

Imperfect conception: From “Friends” to “Trying,” what TV gets right (and wrong) about infertility

The very first episode of the AppleTV+ series “Trying” makes it immediately apparent that Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall) really want a baby. Enough so that when Nikki realizes her ovulation window is closing while they’re riding an almost empty late-night bus through London, she unzips her partner’s pants and straddles his lap with about as much sensuality as this “SNL” sketch in which Cecily Strong attempted to conceive with her scooter-riding nonagenarian husband (Bill Hader).

It’s a moment that’s meant to be funny, but more than anything it underscores the couple’s desperation to get pregnant — buoyed by the hope that surely will be the time that gets it done.

Quick-cut to the interior of a medical examination room, where the doctor has delivered devastating news: Nikki and Jason have already exhausted their National Health Service-sponsored IVF rounds and, because of complications, it’s unlikely they’ll ever be able to conceive, no matter how much they keep trying.

“Let me get you another leaflet,” the doctor says, matter-of-factly waving them to the door.

Infertility is staggeringly common — according to the National Institute of Health, on this side of the Atlantic about 9% of men and 11% of women of reproductive age in the United States have experienced fertility problems — but Nikki and Jason feel completely alone, especially as they move on into navigating the notoriously unwieldy adoption process. As the second season, which premiered Thursday, opens, they’ve just been approved to start on the long road toward matching with a child.

“Trying” isn’t always a hit. Some of the humor falls a little flat and the ways Nikki and Jason’s respective neuroses play out in their relationship — she’s paranoid about superficial aesthetics, while he has a dubious habit of flirting behind her back — occasionally makes it tough to root for them with a full heart.

But this is still one of the more emotionally honest series when it comes to the trials and tribulations associated with desperately wanting to start a family when, for whatever reason, life and biology won’t cooperate. It’s not a one-episode arc: there’s enough material there for multiple seasons (and in fact “Trying” was just approved for a third season).

It’s also a very clear example of how far pop culture has come in its depictions of infertility — although there’s still work to be done.

The first infertility plot points most viewers of mainstream American TV encountered came at the hands of “Friends,” beginning in the 2003 episode aptly titled “The One With the Fertility Test.”

As the story goes, Monica (Courteney Cox) and Chandler (Matthew Perry) have been trying to have a baby for a year with no success. They go to a fertility clinic and are informed that due to the “low motility” of Chandler’s sperm and Monica’s “inhospitable environment,” they are unlikely to ever conceive. Or, as Chandler jokingly explains it, his guys won’t get off the Barcalounger, and if they do, Monica’s uterus wants to kill them.

In the next episode, “The One With the Donor,” they quickly decide, without any tears or expression of their fears, that they’ll simply adopt a child instead. “Friends” writers treated Monica and Chandler’s struggles with infertility as a plot point to resolve — pairing it with Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) becoming a surrogate mom for her brother and his wife — an approach criticized by Suzy Evans in a 2003 piece for the Los Angeles Times.

“Despite the high laugh potential, writers of the series would do well to remember that infertility is not simply a temporary inconvenience,” Evans wrote. “It is a serious, and sometimes permanent, disease of the reproductive system that impairs the body’s ability to perform the basic function of reproduction. And it is no doubt a source of great sadness and despair for many ‘Friends’ viewers.”

Evans wrote that she had personally experienced infertility, eventually going on to conceive her daughter through artificial intrauterine insemination, and said the handling of it in “Friends” felt more like a punch than a punchline.

Four years later, in the latter half of the “Sex and the City” movie, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) finally becomes pregnant. Longtime viewers of the HBO series, which originally premiered in 1998, knew Charlotte had struggled with fertility.

Here was the character who had her perfect life planned out, to the point of having names picked out for her future children (including the name Shayla, which a bizarre ex-friend “stole” in the first season). As we might expect, her plans are derailed by reality. Instead of becoming a WASPy SAHM, Charlotte ends up converting to Judaism in order to marry her divorce attorney, Harry Goldenblatt. She hadn’t been able to conceive with her first husband, Trey, whose impotence was played for laughs, and faces similar struggles with Harry.

She tries everything, from different positions in bed to different doctors. Along the way, Charlotte also has to face the people in her life who’ve already gotten pregnant, including Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), whose pregnancy was the unplanned result of a one-night stand with her eventual husband, Steve (David Eigenberg). It’s heartbreaking for Charlotte to see Miranda seemingly luck into what seems out of reach for her, and the friends eventually have to confront that pain, as well as Miranda’s anxieties about being pregnant, together.

That was especially true following Charlotte’s final-season miscarriage, an absolutely gutting injection of harsh realism.

Charlotte’s infertility storyline isn’t perfectly handled, by any means: The first “Sex and the City” movie shows her getting pregnant after adopting her daughter, Lily. The apparent implication is that she was able to do that because she had become more relaxed, a damaging platitude often leveled at women who struggle to conceive. But it’s infinitely more thorough and nuanced than what “Friends” was able to do in a couple of largely pat half-hour sitcom episodes.

Since then, numerous series have tackled the topic of infertility with varying levels of success. Perennial tearjerker “This Is Us” showed Kate (Chrissy Metz) navigating a trio of health factors — obesity, polycystic ovarian syndrome and a higher maternal age — that impacted her chances of conceiving (though she did get pregnant after a single round of IVF). “Parenthood” showed the difficulties of secondary infertility, while “The Mindy Project” took a dive into the process of egg-freezing.

Even the adult animated series “BoJack Horseman” had a surprisingly tender storyline about Princess’ pregnancy loss.

What television is missing so far, however, are more diverse stories about infertility and pregnancy loss. Most of the characters who have been centered in these TV narratives are white and middle to upper-middle class. In fact, recent studies suggest that Black women may be twice as likely as white women to have fertility problems, but are far less likely to seek or receive assistance.

While “Trying” attempts to grapple with issues of class — Nikki, in particular, feels inferior to other parents going through the adoption process who are college-educated and don’t work in service jobs — at the end of the day, Nikki and Jason are able to afford to rent a multi-bedroom flat in the heart of London.

That said, infertility is an isolating experience that for too long was only spoken about in hushed tones, if at all. The conversation made its way into pop culture almost 30 years ago, and it’s improved significantly since then in terms of scope and nuance. Let’s keep it going.

The N-Word: a volcano kept active by the flickering embers of racism

Many years ago, talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey had actor Don Cheadle and a couple of other guests on her TV programme to debate racism, including the unresolved question of the N-word. Arguably, by the end of the show, there was no resolution of the status of the word in American society, the country where it has caused so much anguish and turmoil.

“Negro,” under slave conditions, quite apart from being a neutral racial category, became a term of absolute dehumanisation. Africans stolen by the millions and transported to the New World had to be divested of their humanity, individuality and variety.

A word had to be invested with the powers of dehumanisation, on the one hand, and absolve the racist oppressor of culpability, on the other. Since the period of US plantation slavery from the 1600s to the 1800s, the word of terror – invested with so much vitriol, hate and revulsion – wended its venomous way through the veins of the black community, polluting the entire body politic.

A word is as delicate as an egg and had to be treated so accordingly.

A state of white supremacy

After the defeat of slavery, the end of the American Civil War, systemic lynching, Jim Crow segregation of the early 1900s, and the successes of the civil rights movement, the terrible word was still loose in American society, evoking dusky trauma and spectres of toxins. It was a word that was not dead and buried. It had acquired a life of its own and had become as complex as the deceit and illusions of the ongoing age of mass incarceration.

American authors Richard Wright in “Native Son” (1940) and Ralph Ellison in “The Invisible Man” (1952) evoke the terror and soul destroying anonymity through which blackness had to exist under white supremacy. The reality of blackness entailed a continual recoil into nameless shadows, opprobrium and silence. Finally, it entailed a state of enforced non-being even if it was artificially constructed.

Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian cultural critic and literary theorist, popularised the notion of the carnivalesque – a concept that became well-known in his country in the 1960s and much later in the West. It has been subsequently adopted as a means of deconstructing figures and institutions of tyrannical power by ordinary people.

Power, in arbitrary and irresponsible forms, is not often to be confronted head on. Instead, it is more judicious to puncture its bombastic façade using the weapons of humour, evasion and other similar sleights of hand. And thus the sheer terror of unaccountable power is defanged by the instrumentality of humour and the carnivalesque. In that manner, we are able to laugh at the state of abjectness that power imposes upon us in order to endure yet another day.

The N-word lives within the black community like a volcano, ready to erupt at any time, fed constantly by the bitter flares of history, humiliation and dehumanisation. But it also has to be appeased, detoxified and inverted for black folk to remain human and resilient.

Taking venom from a snake

And just as black folk have been able to create astounding works of beauty out of unbearable abjection – think of 1940s bebop music from the brothels and after hours clubs of the American Chitlin’ circuit and hip hop from the derelict precincts of the Bronx – the odious, life-crushing word was made to undergo a rebirth, a reinvention and was as such infused with new music and sinuousness.

In this way, the victims and descendants of racial oppression wouldn’t have to live with tainted shadows, befouled blood and nightmares every moment of their lives. They had to perform an act similar to daredevilry, which is, to extract and detoxify venom from a snake without being bitten.

When Tupac raps, “I’d ratha be your N.I.G.G.A” and makes it cool to do so, it is easy to gloss over the tribulations, bloodshed and heartbreaks it took to reach this stage of supposedly post-racial, post-Martin Luther King casual hipness.

Yet this seemingly benign scenario has to be juxtaposed with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement – including its contradictions and disenchantments. It rose due to the alarming cases of police brutality aimed at often unarmed black men and the apparent inaction of the political establishment in curbing these new forms of racial discrimination and injustice.

Rivers of blood

The word of abjection – regardless of its sordid and tortuous past itinerary – had to be appeased with endless rivers of blood. It would be a demonstration of a lack of empathy for a non-black person to throw the epithet around casually.

In this case, “non-blacks” are those who do not possess a direct or ancestral link to the transatlantic slave trade as primary victims. In the case of South Africa, non-blacks would apply to those who benefited most directly from the apartheid regime of racial stratification.

It is necessary to take into cognisance the multitude of crushed bones, shredded bodies and defeated spirits – in short, the genocidal ordeal – it took for the word to become hip and cool within only black communities.

In other words, it took horrifying crucibles for it to become a specific term of endearment, invariably, a consequence of astronomical costs. It is the inadequate recognition of this excruciating history by non-black persons that rankles the black community.

We need to be constantly reminded that social transformation isn’t complete as long as blacks are vilified, oppressed and murdered simply because of the colour of their skin. Recent cases in point, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

It’s not helpful to adopt a trivialisation of the essence of racial rainbowism without its accompanying historical realities. What precisely are we to achieve by flippantly discarding the humanism we have been nurtured by to acquire a stunted, uncertain version of something that continually seems to elude us? What is the benefit of the new if it fosters a form of ahistorical barbarism?

Hands off the word

So the N-word, regardless of its current chic hip hop-speak, is perennially a double-edged sword, thoroughly Manichean, with Jekyll and Hyde properties. Non-blacks would do well to appreciate this ever-shifting duality and are perhaps better off eschewing it.

It took black folk unimaginable resources of creativity, humanity, humour and generosity to detoxify it for their own collective sanity. Nonetheless a non-black de-contextualised appropriation of it remains, as always, a seismic volcano. A volcano kept active by the flickering embers of racism.

Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) and On a Sad Weather-Beaten Couch (2015).

Sanya Osha, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town

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

How Stanford College Republicans worked with right-wing media to get an AP reporter fired

Former Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired from the international media company late Thursday following a pressure campaign by right-wing media, including publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon working in tandem with the Standford College Republicans. Wilder was “canceled,” if you will, for pro-Palestinian activism during her years in college — not at the AP.

The campaign to have Wilder fired started on Monday with the Stanford College Republicans taking to Twitter to bill the reporter’s past pro-Palestine demonstrating as controversial, coming to the verdict that she would never be able to be impartial while covering national news.

While at Stanford from 2016-2020, Wilder was a leader in Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization with ties to Hamas affiliates, and which is notorious for inflicting acts of intimidation and violence against pro-Israel students.

— Stanford College Republicans (@Stanford_GOP) May 18, 2021

“Recently, we discovered that the Associated Press has hired former Stanford anti-Israel agitator, Emily Wilder, who referred to the late Sheldon Adelson as a ‘naked mole rat’ as one of their ‘journalists,'” the college Republican organization tweeted. The series of tweets from the Standford Republican chapter went onto claim that the reporter, who is Jewish, during her college years belonged to a “Students for Justice in Palestine,” on-campus group. The college Republicans — who appear to have their own questionable Twitter activity — also took offense to Wilder calling right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro a “little turd” and Sheldon Adelson a “naked mole-rat.”

From there, the right-wing outrage machine got ahold of the story, including The Federalist, The Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News, which billed the reporter as being “anti-Israel.” Notably, the Free Beacon ran their hit-piece with no attached byline and didn’t return Salon’s request for comment as to why.

On Thursday, an all-staff email from AP News director Peter Prengaman to employees read: “A note to say that news associate Emily Wilder is no longer with the AP.

Associated Press staff received a memo this morning that @vv1lder is no longer with the company, after conservatives rallied to get her fired because she was part of Students for Justice in Palestine in college https://t.co/vgYdZOcRKo pic.twitter.com/zcmmXn4fk0

— suhauna hussain (@suhaunah) May 20, 2021

But the Associated Press claims it wasn’t her activism in college. “While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder’s comments on Thursday that she was dismissed for violations of AP’s social media policy during her time at AP,” an AP spokesperson told The Wrap.

“Amazing how quickly a talented young reporter’s career can be snuffed out by a Twitter mob that decided to feign outrage over some college tweets. And if @vv1lder somehow violated @AP’s social media rules, the solution is to offer guidance, not termination, to a new reporter,” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote on Twitter following the ouster.

Amazing how quickly a talented young reporter’s career can be snuffed out by a Twitter mob that decided to feign outrage over some college tweets. And if @vv1lder somehow violated @AP‘s social-media rules, the solution is to offer guidance, not termination, to a new reporter. pic.twitter.com/PuGAwN0Aot

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 20, 2021

Responding to her firing, Wilder told SFGATE that her firing was nothing more than a right-wing outrage mob that reportedly disdains “cancel culture,” doing what they claim to resent.

“There’s no question I was just canceled,” told SFGATE reporter Eric Ting on Thursday following the news of her firing. “This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around ‘cancel culture.’ To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it’s always the same side.”

In her interview with SFGATE, Wilder noted an “onslaught of absolutely vile messages” she received after right-wing media began running with the story. Wilder didn’t immediately return a request for comment from Salon.

While The Associated Press might have folded to the demands of the right-wing mob, many journalists on Twitter voiced their support for the young journalist. “Shame on @AP @peterprengaman. I stand with Emily. Her reporting at our newspaper was excellent. Reverse your decision NOW,” The Arizona Republic’s reporter Rebekah Sanders wrote. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel responded: “‘Hire @vv1lder’ is something more and more people are saying.”

“Every journalist should be outraged about @AP firing [Wilder] over college activism in favor of freedom for Palestinians. The industry is rife with clear double-standards on this,” Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek commented on the firing. The Daily Beast’s senior politics reporter Will Sommer replied, “It’s crazy that editors are still falling for these bad-faith campaigns from right-wing media.”

The decision to out Wilder comes on the heels of right-wing pundits cheering the Israeli airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza on Saturday, housing several international news outlets, including The Associated Press.

The curious case of Dr. B, the startup that hoped to help millions find leftover vaccines

In January 2021, when the COVID-19 vaccine was still in short supply, reports began to surface that thousands of the coveted doses were being tossed in the garbage.

“They’re a precious commodity, so why are some COVID-19 vaccines going to waste?” NPR asked. “Thousands of COVID-19 vaccines wind up in garbage because of fed, state guidelines,” NBC News reported.

The news was at odds with the pandemic’s toll, just as a holiday surge in gatherings led to a record surge of U.S. COVID-19 deaths in January. It turned out that vaccine doses were being thrown away for a variety of reasons — including patients missing appointments and a lack of infrastructure for distributing leftover doses when already-opened vials had more doses than expected.

Then there were the logistical issues. Local governments had their own regulations on how physicians could distribute the vaccines, including fluctuating eligibility requirements. In Texas, one doctor who gave away vaccine doses that would expire within hours was fired from his job . Then were also problems with shelf life and storage, in that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines must be stored at sub-zero temperatures — and, once thawed, have only a five- to six-hour life.

In other words, efficient distribution of leftover doses was an urgent issue that needed to be solved. It was also the exact kind of a logistics problem that appeals to the magical thinkers of Silicon Valley — people like tech entrepreneur Cyrus Massoumi, previously the founder of physician database and telehealth platform ZocDoc. The company he started to “fix” the problem of wasted vaccines was called, simply, Dr. B — named after Massoumi’s grandfather, nicknamed Dr. Bubba, who became a doctor during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Here’s how Dr. B was supposed to work: Users provide the website with personal data — namely, their home phone number, zip code, date of birth, and, optionally, underlying health conditions. Dr. B then adds them to a “standby list” that connects patients needing the COVID-19 vaccine with healthcare providers who have leftover doses and need to administer them before they expire. Users then get a text immediately when there’s an opening, and must respond within a short span of time to be able to get the leftover vaccine. The whole system was free.

The concept sounds simple, but the execution is more complicated than it looks. And notably, Dr. B sought to solve a logistics problem (efficient vaccine distribution) by creating a second logistics problem: calling thousands of vaccine providers around the country to sell them on using Dr. B’s system to distribute leftover doses.

In any case, Massoumi wasn’t the only one who had this idea. A competitor with a more intuitive name, VaxStandby, was created around the same time — yet it quickly “joined forces” with Dr. B, which proceeded to gain tons of media attention in early March from outlets ranging from The New York Times to The Verge. By March 10, Dr. B had an estimated 1,110,822 subscribers, who had given their personal information over to the site.

The list continued to grow. But as time passed, some of the website’s user base became increasingly suspicious: on social media, many users wondered if the site was a scam. A handful of Facebook users asked the same thing in vaccine hunter Facebook groups nationwide. “Seems like they did a better job of marketing themselves than of connecting with vaccine providers,” one user wrote. On Reddit, too, many suspected they had been “scammed,” and used that verbiage. “Where is the stat for how many received a vaccine through the service?” asked one Reddit user seeking clarity over whether the site was legit.

Meanwhile, Dr. B’s business model — offering a free service in which the users pay no money — raised eyebrows. After all, as the old Silicon Valley maxim goes, if the service is free, you are the product. And Dr. B provided little information on how many of its million-plus users had actually received a vaccine through the site. That raised questions for many: How many vaccination sites were actually using Dr. B? What was the long-term goal for the site? And what happened to all the user data it was given?

To date, after contacting dozens of state vaccine providers across the country, only a couple of vaccination sites were able to confirm to Salon that they use the waitlist. Despite repeated requests for specific providers, spokespeople for Dr. B haven’t been able to direct Salon to specific vaccination sites.

On April 7, a spokesperson for Curative — a company that launched in January 2020 to test for sepsis, but pivoted to COVID-19 tests — told Salon via email that the Berkeley site had been using the app for three weeks, and that it would start to use it soon in Sacramento. However, at the Berkeley site, the spokesperson said they only use the website for a maximum of five people per day. “If we had to open a vial for the last appointment, then using Dr. B to finish the rest of the doses from that vial, for example,” the spokesperson said.

After posting in several vaccine hunter Facebook groups, Salon has also yet to find someone who was successfully vaccinated through the app. Some reported finally receiving notifications, but only after they were vaccinated in late April and early May. On April 9, Massoumi told Salon in a video interview that he didn’t know how many people had been vaccinated through his website.

“To put it in context, we didn’t exist two and a half months ago and everything that we’ve been doing is to make sure that we’re getting vaccines in arms,” Massoumi said. “We actually don’t yet have a data warehouse, it’s just not where we prioritize engineering; it’s not needed to get vaccines in arms, it’s needed for entering questions like you’re asking.”

Massoumi said that the number of vaccine sites using the app was growing “very quickly,” and that it numbered over 150 by April 9 — including in New York, Alabama, California, and Arkansas. More recently, the company’s PR spokesperson claims to have over 600 sites in more than 38 states. When Salon contacted the New York State Department, Erin Silk of the New York State Department of Health press office said “New York State-run vaccine sites do not use Dr. B.” Private providers, Silk said, might.

A spokesperson for Dr. B denied the claim that New York state-run providers don’t use the waitlist. In a follow-up, Silk confirmed that New York state sites aren’t using the waitlist. “Perhaps the vendor is confusing us with county-run sites,” Silk said in an email.

Arrol Sheehan, a public information office for Alabama’s Department of Health, told Salon via email that Alabama county health departments weren’t using the standby list either, but said “we cannot speak to what the other providers are doing.” In Arkansas, John Vinson, CEO of the Arkansas Pharmacist Association, told Salon there were at least three sites in Central Arkansas that are using it. However, by early April the association forecast little need for the service in the future as demand for the vaccine declined in Arkansas.

Despite its limited areas of operation, users who sign up for Dr. B have no way of knowing if the website is operating in their local jurisdiction or not upon sign-up. On March 9, 2021, an article published in Time reported that there were two sites in New York and Arkansas piloting the website, but on the website itself there was little information to communicate that this was still in a piloting phase. Still today, on the website’s FAQ page, one question asks “Where is the service available?” to which the company responds “Currently, we are only operating in the United States.”

* * *

The operational logistics of Dr. B seem expensive, particularly for a free service: it costs money to run servers, to hire people to call thousands of vaccine distributors, to build a website and a database to track vaccinations. In interviews with the CEO and other members of the Dr. B PR team, Salon was unable to gain a clear picture of the business model for Dr. B; many aspects of the company’s finances — who is funding it (and why), as well as what they expect to get in return for their investment — are unclear.

It’s not uncommon for tech startups to begin their days by offering a free product. If they can show venture capitalists that their product will be popular later, seed funding is justified after the fact. Facebook, YouTube and their ilk began this way, offering a free product in order to attract a huge user base. Now, they make hefty profits selling their consumers’ data to better target advertisements, or in some cases offering consumers premium services.

But in the case of Dr. B, both the eventual financial windfall and the case for seed funding are unclear. The pandemic will end eventually — already in many regions, vaccine supply outweighs demand. These conditions supersede the need for a service like Dr. B provides.

The company states it is a “public benefit corporation,” a type of for-profit organization with a social mission. “Public benefit corporations were introduced to enable you to be a private company which would be a for-profit business, but you have your mission and your charter so you can very much align with what the end goal is,” Massoumi said.

When asked about the revenue model, Massoumi said “Dr. B makes no money . . . it’s free for patients, it’s free for providers.”

When Salon asked Massoumi how he paid for 40 consultants, which he said he hired, Massoumi replied he paid them out of pocket. In a follow-up with a new PR agency for the company, a spokesperson said that the company later raised funds from private individuals and organizations. No further details on the investors were provided.

“Our mission is to improve efficiency and the equity of healthcare,” Massoumi said. “As of now, we’re just trying to get as many people to the vaccine as possible.”

As of May 13, Dr. B has a huge cache of users’ personal data — including phone numbers, names, emails, zip codes, dates of birth, professions, and in many cases specified health conditions — for over 2.4 million people. Massoumi emphasized that the data is safe, and a spokesperson for the company said Dr. B has “the best healthcare engineers” with “years of experience dealing with privacy, security, and patient needs.”

“Patient data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and is stored in a secure database in an isolated network, not accessible from the outside world,” a spokesperson said.

And yet, in its privacy agreement, the company states that it can’t guarantee a person’s data will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. When asked why, a spokesperson said: “We leverage our team’s expertise to do everything we can to protect patient data. Like other technology companies, we cannot guarantee that bad agents will not attempt to breach our security system.”

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who specializes in the tech industry, said when a website like Dr. B has such a large amount of data it is difficult to protect it from a potential hack. As Goldman explained, it can be a challenge for “smaller apps” to be “prepared for the malefactors to come at them.”

“You can never prevent the bad guys from getting in,” he said, mentioning criminal hackers and state sponsored hackers as examples. “And those people can overwhelm a small site like. Dr. B. There’s just no way to have industrial grade security against determined adversaries like that.”

Goldman clarified that this was not a criticism of Dr. B specifically, but instead of the “whole model” exemplified by tech companies that collect massive troves of user data.

“When you create a honey product of 2.4 million plus records with health information, everyone wants a piece of it,” Goldman said.

Dr. Richard Forno, assistant director at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Center for Cybersecurity, told Salon in an interview that there is great value to personal medical information.

“That’s useful information if you’re a bad guy, especially during the pandemic,” Forno said. “A criminal group, whomever, could parse that data, and they could use that to target people with phishing attacks or social engineering attacks — to get them to maybe fork over additional information or maybe give a credit card number to reserve their spot in line or prepay their vaccine shot.”

Forno emphasized that phishing concerns aren’t specific to Dr. B, but to many websites that have collected data during the pandemic.

“There are so many different ways that medical data PII [personally identifiable information] like this can get out there these days,” Forno said. He noted that there’s been an “increase in popularity and value” of medical data to criminals. “I think the pandemic really put it into overdrive,” he added.

In March 2020, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called on California Governor Gavin Newsom to put in place basic privacy guardrails on any contact-tracing program run by or in conjunction with the state, as new organizations, like the coronavirus testing website Verily, started popping up collecting data for purposes shaped by the pandemic. The rise of Verily, a sister company to Google under the Alphabet umbrella, also raised privacy and data use concerns.

As part of the EFF’s proposed requirements, they asked for companies to purge data from such programs when it is no longer useful. When asked if Dr. B had a plan to purge data when it’s no longer useful, a spokesperson said “people can choose to unsubscribe or delete their data at any time.”

Forno reviewed Dr. B’s privacy agreement and said there were no “showstoppers” in terms of red flags, but agreed there is a trend throughout the agreement that places the onus on the user; for example, the mere fact that the company apparently has no plan to purge the data when it’s no longer useful. Forno said he believes it’s “absolutely” the company’s responsibility to purge PII when it’s no longer needed.

“If you set this up as a short-term thing, and you know, the pandemic is over in six months or whatever, and you decide we’re going to shut the site down, then absolutely it’s Dr. B’s responsibility to purge the data in a safe and secure manner,” Forno said.

In regards to social media chatter suggesting the website is a “scam,” Massoumi told Salon, “I guess I would ask you, are those people that are in the highest priority criteria, and are they in areas where the vaccine providers have come on?”

“We told people from the very beginning, this is intended to be a plan B,” Massoumi said. “Dr. B is not the plan A — this is the backup option. People should still go to their vaccine locations, they should go to their public health officials, whatever their local governments tell them to do they should go do.”

Massoumi emphasized, “We have been very clear to the whole world” that people would not be eligible through the app because of local eligibility requirements or because sites weren’t available in their jurisdictions. Some users who signed up to join the waitlist might disagree — though many of those who signed up never heard from the app.

While not disclosing the limitations of a business’s service may not quite be illegal, it does seem to approach some ethical guardrails.

“We call that ‘false advertising by omission’ — it’s not what they said was wrong, but it’s incomplete in a way that might create a false impression among the consumers,” Goldman said. “Omission cases are really tough, because we know that the businesses can’t tell us everything that might be relevant to any particular consumer — they have to pick and choose what information they expose.”

Since Salon interviewed Massoumi, vaccine eligibility has expanded to everyone over the age of 12 across the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has advised vaccine providers not to forgo an opportunity to vaccinate someone who wants the shot — even if that means opening a new vial, which includes multiple doses, for one person. In other words, there are few waitlists for vaccines. The logistics problem has shifted from one of scarcity to one of excess.

In a follow-up with the company’s PR firm, Goldin Solutions, Salon asked about the strategy moving forward. Is there still a purpose for Dr. B’s waitlist?

“Dr. B was created during the height of the COVID-19 crisis with the clear mission to save lives by rapidly getting vaccines into as many arms as possible because too many vaccines go to waste,” a spokesperson said via email. “We are proud to have helped nearly 2.5 million people sign up for notifications about immediately available vaccines through hundreds of providers nationwide; as the vaccination effort in the U.S. moves forward, we are working with a number of partners, community organizations and healthcare providers to remove the barriers that are continuing to prevent people from getting vaccinated.”

In a final follow-up, a spokesperson did not provide a number for how many people had actually been vaccinated through Dr. B.

Liz Cheney’s GOP primary challenger admits to impregnating 14-year-old when he was 18

One of Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-WY) primary challengers has confessed to impregnating a 14-year-old girl when he was younger.

Blaming the girl, saying “girls get pregnant,” Republican Anthony Bouchard said he wanted to get out ahead of what he knew would become a controversy in his campaign,” reported the Casper Star-Tribune.

The Facebook video he released, called “Senator Bouchard takes on the fake news media,” claimed “I was young” and “you’ve heard those stories before. She was a little younger than me, so it’s like the Romeo and Juliet story,” he said, neglecting several glaring differences like the Shakespearean characters were fictional and neither was running for Congress in the so-called “family values” party.

Bouchard and the girl married and three years later, when the girl was of legal age, she divorced him.

“A lot of pressure. Pressure to abort a baby. I got to tell you. I wasn’t going to do it, and neither was she,” he said. “And there was pressure to have her banished from their family. Just pressure. Pressure to go hide somewhere. And the only thing I could see as the right thing to do was to get married and take care of him.”

The mother of their child then committed suicide when she was 20 years old. Bouchard claimed it wasn’t related to him or their son.

“Sadly, he’s made some wrong choices in his life,” Bouchard said of his first child. “He’s almost become my estranged son. Some of the things that he’s got going on his life, I certainly don’t approve of them. But I’m not going to abandon him. I still love him. Just like when he was born.”

Yahoo News listed Bouchard as the “long-shot” opponent in the race with “tough odds” against Cheney.

“Liz Cheney’s long-time opposition to President Trump and her most recent vote for impeachment shows just how out-of-touch she is with Wyoming,” Bouchard said in a statement on his website. Cheney had more than a 92 percent voting record with Trump.

Read the full report from The Casper Star-Tribune here.

Watch the video below:

Nothing is sacred to Republicans — except Donald Trump. It’s all on the line now

They’ve been after the right to abortion for decades. The next thing they did was go after the Voting Rights Act. And just watch: They’ll go after Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act next.

Nothing is sacred to Republicans anymore. Not the right to vote. Not the right to be free of search and seizure in your own home. Not the right to be free of religion if you so choose. Not the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, creed or national origin. The only “right” they respect in this day and age is the right to follow Donald Trump, and they are in the process of turning that right, at least within their own Republican Party, into an obligation. To have rights, such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, is a founding principle of democracy. To impose obligations, as in the obligation to adhere unquestioningly to a leader, is a principle of authoritarianism.

The Republican Party has turned against democracy. They will not let anything stand in their way. This week, the Supreme Court, with six justices appointed by Republican presidents, agreed to hear a case arising from a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Just yesterday, the governor of the state of Texas signed a law banning all abortions the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected, about six weeks after a woman becomes pregnant — and before most women realize that they are, in fact, pregnant. A similar bill was signed into law in South Carolina in February. The state of Tennessee passed a fetal heartbeat law last year. Now the Volunteer State has a bill under consideration that would allow the father of an unborn child, even if that father is a rapist who caused the pregnancy, to get a court order stopping the mother from getting an abortion. The veto power of the father over the abortion rights of the mother would be absolute, putting men, even criminals, in overall control of women’s bodies. According to NARAL Pro Choice America, more than 60 bills have been introduced or passed in state legislatures this year to restrict abortion.

The defenestration of the Voting Rights Act is all the evidence you need that the Republican Party is refighting the Civil War with words. Chief Justice John Roberts relied on the principle of so-called “equal sovereignty” to justify overturning Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required nine states, mostly in the Deep South, to get pre-clearance from the Department of Justice before changing their voting laws. Congress included the pre-clearance provision in the law because the states of the Deep South had a long history of restricting the voting rights of Black citizens. Justice Roberts found in his decision that treating states “unequally” by requiring certain states to get pre-clearance while not requiring the same of others was unconstitutional. He went on to say that the instances of Southern states discriminating against their Black citizens’ voting rights were 40 years old and could therefore be dismissed as relics of another era.

In a previous decision in 2007, Roberts had written that “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” which is like saying “the way to stop getting wet is to come in out of the rain,” ignoring that you might be wet because someone is pouring water on you.

That’s what was happening with Black people voting in the Deep South, of course. Black people were not voting because they were not being permitted to vote. Using Roberts’ reasoning, the way to allow Black people to vote was to allow Black people to vote. But that’s not the way it worked. States passed requirements for voter registration that they knew Black citizens would not be able to meet, thus Black citizens were prevented from voting.

The year after the Voting Rights Act was passed, one Southern state passed a law requiring prospective voters to produce an ID to register. The Department of Justice, in its pre-clearance process, found that the law discriminated on the basis of race because the Black citizens of the state were far less likely to have IDs such as driver’s licenses, because many Black people in the mid-1960s in the South didn’t own cars and thus didn’t have occasion to drive.

Within 24 hours of the Shelby County decision in 2013, the state of Texas announced that it would implement a strict voter ID law that had already been passed and then overturned by a federal court decision. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, began to enforce voter ID laws that had been barred under the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. Two months after Shelby County, North Carolina passed a particularly harsh voter suppression bill that included a strict voter ID requirement.

Within five years of the Supreme Court decision, more than 1,000 polling places had been closed, many of them in predominantly Black counties in Southern states. Other states had passed laws allowing the purging of voter rolls and restricting early voting and voting by mail.

In other words, the states that had previously been covered by the pre-clearance clause of the Voting Rights Act jumped with joy over their new freedom to restrict the voting rights of minority voters. The shackles of the Voting Rights Act were off, and they’re still off. Three hundred and sixty-one bills restricting voting rights are under consideration by state legislatures controlled by Republicans around the country. It’s an anti-democratic free for all out there.

What’s going on is a full-on attack on two of the three amendments passed after the Civil War. The 13th Amendment ended slavery. The 14th Amendment extended full citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” and went on to mandate that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The 15th Amendment said that neither the United States nor “any state” could deny or abridge the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

You would think those words are easy to understand and uncomplicated. Reading the Shelby County decision by Justice Roberts proves that you would be dead wrong. The Supreme Court and Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country are finding new ways to get around the simple, straightforward words of the 14th and 15th amendments every day.

Not only Roe v. Wade, but Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act are in danger. In 1954, the Supreme Court found in a 9-0 decision that segregated schools were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate in public accommodations such as restaurants, hotels and public transportation on the basis of race. Roe v. Wade made abortion legal up to the point of viability, when a fetus, if given birth, would likely survive outside the womb.

I am increasingly afraid that we citizens of the United States have built a house of cards out of laws and the plain text of Supreme Court decisions and that house is coming down around us. The Republican Party has already fomented a violent physical assault on the house of our government, the Capitol, and they are assaulting daily the house of laws which have protected our most sacred democratic principles of equality based on sex, race and creed. Nothing is safe. Justice Roberts and his “brethren” have already told us that they believe states should be treated equally, but that people need not be. Through that door lie segregated schools, the end of birthright citizenship and restricted access to public accommodations. If it’s unfair to forbid some states to discriminate on the basis of race in voting, shouldn’t it be unfair to forbid some states from discriminating in other ways?

Folks, we are right back where we started. The words “equal sovereignty” are just a fancy way to say “states’ rights.” We are in a new Civil War. The only question left is when the other side will stop using words to attack our laws and pick up their guns.

Can “vaccinated” breast milk protect kids? The science is hazy

“Antibodies!” shouts Elliot, a boisterous almost 5-year-old with a mop of light brown hair, sliding into his spot at the kitchen island in the Missoula, Montana kitchen of Katy-Robin Garton. Garton has just appeared with freshly-pumped breast milk and Elliot waits eagerly beside his little sister Emi, 2, for a mixture of chocolate almond milk, chocolate syrup, and human milk, which he slurps vigorously through a metal straw.

Garton, a documentary filmmaker, sighs as she sets the breast pump parts in the sink. She had mostly put them away for good and was ready to give the pump away to someone else, as Emi was nursing only for comfort once a day. Then her husband Doug, an emergency room physician, suggested she might start pumping again after she received her vaccine shot earlier this year. They’d both started hearing the idea that breast milk — which could hold antibodies that help ward off infection — may provide some protection for kids against Covid-19.

“I said to him, if you’re serious about this and you really think it’s worth it, do the research and let me know and if you say it’s worth it, I’ll do it.” Otherwise, she didn’t want to. “I hate pumping,” Garton says. She also sat down with Elliot and talked about what antibodies could do in his body. When she asked if he’d drink her milk, Garton recalls, “he said, ‘Yeah, cause I’ll be protected.'”

Garton and her family aren’t alone in their hopes. As studies began to show Covid-neutralizing antibodies were present in the milk of vaccinated women, interest has swelled in lactation’s golden nectar. One study, for instance, published in April in the Journal of the American Medical Association, confirmed what earlier research had hinted at: Two types of antibodies that battle Covid-19 — IgA and IgG — do appear in breast milk, though IgG represents a small amount of milk antibodies. Two weeks after 84 lactating parents got their first doses of vaccine, 61 percent of milk samples contained IgA antibodies; one week after the second dose, it rose to 86 percent. And IgG antibodies were found in 97 percent of the samples after six weeks of vaccination. While studies have found that antibodies from women who have had Covid-19 can neutralize SARS-CoV-2 in a test tube, Kirsi Jarvinen-Seppo, a doctor and immunologist at the University of Rochester who studies breast milk and infant immune systems, says “this has not been shown yet for the antibodies in human milk from a vaccinated individual.”

Despite the limited data, across the country, interest in what some are calling “vaccinated milk,” bought on the black market, has risen in recent months. Some are reportedly advertising it on Craigslist for $3.50 an ounce — more than 10 times the price of gasoline. (This, to be clear, isn’t a great idea: Research has shown that untested milk can have all kinds of bacteria and one small 2015 study found that about 10 percent of samples advertised as human breast milk online contained milk from a cow.) Some adults are getting in on the action, too: Christie Denham, the founder of milk-selling site Happy Bellies Happy Babies, told Yahoo News that she has noticed an increase in requests from men looking for breast milk as a way to protect themselves from coronavirus.

Even for those who are feeding their own milk to their children, it’s not evident that there will be a protective shield — especially for older kids who aren’t getting much breast milk. Previous research on vaccines against other diseases suggests that the best clinical protection is only for exclusively breastfed, young babies. Still, the new interest in the science of human milk is helping the field move from the sidelines to centerstage, and even reshaping vaccine design.

Garton says her family simply hopes that her milk might be an extra layer of protection as they cautiously reopen their circle this summer, sending their son to camp or their daughter to a playdate. Their hope is that it’s a cushion of security for things they want to do. If there is an exposure at nature camp, for example, they wouldn’t feel as worried about their son.

But does it work? The short answer is, we don’t know, says Jarvinen-Seppo. “None of this is known.”

* * *

When a lactating parent mounts an immune defense against a virus or bacteria, their immune system produces antibodies in breast milk, mostly in the form of a protein called secretory immunoglobulin A, or IgA. When a baby drinks breast milk, the IgA antibodies coat the mucus membranes of a baby’s nose, lungs, and throat — the same places that a virus or bacteria would enter the body. While it doesn’t necessarily offer complete protection, IgA blocks pathogens from entering by literally blanketing these surfaces. It’s a genius system, says Rebecca Powell, a human milk immunologist at New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, because it creates custom protection for the environment of the baby and lactating parent.

The secretory IgA antibody is enveloped in another protein that protects it, for the most part, from breaking down, or from acidic environments like the baby’s stomach. “That class of antibody is ideally what you want because it is durable in the baby’s mouth, meaning it’s not getting degraded quickly,” says Powell.

Vaccines aren’t designed with breastfeeding in mind, but they do have an effect on the whole body. When a lactating parent gets a vaccine shot into a muscle, they mount a slightly different immune response, mainly though a different antibody protein in the blood known as IgG, which is more of a systemically-protective antibody, not focused on mucus membranes. IgA is also present, though less than in someone who recovered after a Covid-19 infection. Although IgG is found in breast milk, it’s not clear to what extent IgG acts on the mucosal linings.

Around 65 percent of the secretory IgA survives the trip through the stomach, Powell says, while less IgG survives the stomach. Then, whatever is left over would then be coating the small intestinal area.

At a certain point those tough, protective antibodies are going to break down and find their way into the baby’s diaper — though it’s not clear how long they would stick around in different parts of the body. In some cases the antibodies could be stuck to the cells of the digestive tract so maybe they are not all expelled immediately, says Powell, but it’s still a passive and temporary protection. “If you feed your baby at 8 a.m. and the rest of the day they don’t have any breast milk, it’s all going to go away,” she adds. “It’s highly dependent on what else the baby is eating or drinking.”

To the question of whether families should change their habits to pursue breast milk, Powell says it doesn’t do any harm. “Anything you can do that helps you feel like you’re protecting your children in a pandemic is worthwhile,” she says. “If we’re talking about giving very little milk in a day to a kid who is eating a lot of other stuff, even with the milk, the effect — I don’t know. It’s not the same as mixing medication with ice cream and expecting an effect to last for eight hours. We need to be realistic.”

The research on breast milk immunology at large is still developing, and the researchers Undark spoke to hope to have many more answers soon. They are encouraged by the fact that the antibodies seem to last for a long time — Powell’s research shows that antibodies remain in milk 10 months after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. She says the response after vaccination in milk will likely mirror what happens in blood, but “may not be identical.”

But to fully understand the clinical benefit of vaccination, researchers must design bigger studies and test the rates of coronavirus infection in babies with vaccinated and unvaccinated parents, and in children who are getting some dose of breast milk alongside their normal diet, says Christina Chambers, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego. It’s challenging to design these types of trials, she adds, because babies with Covid-19 often have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.

Previous research on vaccines and breast milk is challenging to parse, the experts told Undark. Some research on pertussis and tetanus exists, although it is more descriptive than data driven. Influenza has had the most relevant research, including looking at flu vaccinations and breast milk in larger clinical settings, but even out of those studies, “none of them are perfect,” says Jarvinen-Seppo.

Some of the studies suggest that there seems to be some protection. “Infants who are born to vaccinated mothers seem to have a lower rate of febrile upper respiratory infections in the first six months of life, typically,” Jarvinen-Seppo says. “They typically don’t look at after that time point, so we’re really focusing on young, young infants.”

In one study of 340 pregnant women in Bangladesh, researchers found the children of the women who had received a flu vaccine who got the strongest protective effect were exclusively breastfed and under six months old. Jarvinen-Seppo says this makes sense: “I tend to think that maybe the biggest benefit would be for a small individual, an infant who is exclusively breastfed and therefore is getting a significant amount of this antibody, as opposed to an older individual who’s probably not exclusively breastfed anymore.”

Powell agrees that the best effect is for an exclusively breastfed baby who is being fed every couple of hours, and anything less frequent than that would have a smaller impact. “It doesn’t mean it’s not going to be effective,” she says, “but the likelihood will reduce.”

* * *

Historically, breast milk immunology hasn’t been explored in depth, at least in part because this and other areas of women’s health tend to get far less funding than men’s health, says Powell. But the pandemic has actually opened a door for intensive study of human milk.

The level of deep research going on highlights the whole idea of human milk as a tissue, says Chambers. There is increased interest in treating milk in a way similar to blood — not as food, but as a life-saving liquid tissue. “It’s such an amazing fluid that is so understudied and has not been explored to the extent that it could be,” she adds.

Chambers points to a funding announcement, posted in February, from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development on “Human Milk as a Biological System.” “The public health community has come to appreciate that a deeper understanding of the biology of human milk is essential to address ongoing and emerging questions about infant feeding practices,” the announcement reads, adding that it will begin to examine breast milk as a biological system. Chambers says it’s hard to say the new initiative was spurred by the pandemic, but the increased spotlight on breastfeeding didn’t hurt.

But even within the umbrella of women’s health, lactation science lags behind pregnancy and vaccination. While vaccine manufacturers left pregnant and lactating people out of initial trials, they are now conducting trials in pregnant people who are in their second or third trimesters. No such trials are being mounted for lactating women, Chambers says — evidence of a second-tier status. “When you think of it, at any one point in time in the U.S., we have 4 million pregnancies per year,” she adds. “You have far more than that, women who are breastfeeding, so it affects a lot of people.”

The concept of breast milk as medicine could also change the course of future pandemics. Vaccines could be designed to initiate a secretory antibody response, Powell says, which would most likely involve improved targeting of vaccines to stimulate the mucosal immune system — particularly in the gut, which make the secretory antibodies in milk. “The pandemic has definitely pushed the field of milk immunology forward,” she adds, “because there’s much more interest in it.”

Back in Montana, Garton would like to get her milk supply back up, with the hopes that she can continue giving milk to both her kids until vaccines are authorized for children under 12. Her plan was to pump like crazy, get a supply in the freezer and be done, but it’s been slow so far. She’s also considering giving some to her nephew, who is 1 1/2 years old. “Do I save it for Elliot to get us through to the vaccine or do I share it? she wonders aloud.

“The thing is that we just don’t know,” Doug says.

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

Meet the Republican congressman cashing in on cryptocurrency

Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., made history last month as the first congressman to cash in on the cryptocurrency Dogecoin’s wild ride — making two purchases between $1,000 and $15,000 each, according to public disclosure forms.

The investments added to Green’s already hefty crypto portfolio, which contains Basic Attention Token, CELO, EOS, Etherium, and Stellar Lumens, according to an analysis compiled by Unusual Whales, a market research startup. He’s one of only three U.S. representatives known to have invested in the burgeoning technology.

Given the fact that discussions over industry regulation are currently ongoing, such an investment by a sitting member of Congress is “entirely inappropriate,” says Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney under President George W. Bush and University of Minnesota law professor.

“It boggles my mind that this is allowed,” Painter told Salon. “We have conflict of interest laws that govern executive branch officials in charge of regulation. Why is it that legislators are treated any differently?”

Green’s office declined to comment for this report.

The stalwart conservative began his career as an Army physician, and he was known during his time in the Tennessee Legislature for helping end the state’s income tax program and pushing the well debunked theory that vaccines were causing widespread autism in American children. Green’s recent cause célèbre has been opposition to “critical race theory,” introducing a bill this month to ban diversity training and antiracist lessons from being taught in military service academies.

Since his first Dogecoin purchase on April 1, when it was sitting near $0.06, the dog-themed digital currency has gone on an incredible ascent, doubling in value to $0.12 by the time Green made his second acquisition two weeks later on April 14.

Dogecoin, which was initially created in 2013 as a joke, was trading for as low as $0.01 earlier this year before a renaissance fueled by high-profile endorsements from the likes of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Food Network star Guy Fieri, fitness guru Jillian Michaels, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and KISS frontman Gene Simmons, among many others. Doge traded for as much as 0.72 cents on May 7.

It also appears Green cashed out at least some of his investment at the right time, offloading $1,000 to $15,000 on May 11 — just days after Musk’s appearance on SNL reportedly sent the cryptocurrency crashing. At the time Green sold, Doge was trading for about $0.50 — a whopping 733% increase from his first purchase on April 1.

Since then, Dogecoin has continued to fall, and was sitting near $0.34 as of Friday afternoon.

Green’s crypto obsession is relatively recent, beginning with two purchases of $1,000 to $15,000 each in Basic Attention Token and CELO in March, disclosure documents show. He also purchased another $1,000 to $15,000 each in EOS, Etherium, and Stellar on April 13.

It remains unclear whether the congressman still holds the investments today — though no sales have been reported.

The purchases come as Congress and other federal regulatory agencies weigh how to go about oversight of the relatively new industry, which has been plagued from its inception by volatility, criminal connections and even outright manipulation, experts say.

“This has been something that’s begging for some oversight,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chair of the Intelligence Committee, told Bloomberg this week.

The efforts have been plagued by older legislators, who by their own admission don’t know much about the technology.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R.-Wyo., and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R.-Va., have both disclosed investments in Bitcoin, perhaps the best known cryptocurrency. Lummis, who took office earlier this year, told Fox News that one of her first priorities was to explain Bitcoin to her colleagues — though even she admits an uphill battle.

“I’m still in learning mode,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said of the technology in an interview with Bloomberg recently. “As we all are.”

Republican foes of Biden’s tax proposal could face big capital gains bills if it passes

Some of the most outspoken Republican critics of President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan could face a steep tax increase on their commercial real estate investments if Congress approves the $1.8 trillion proposal.

Biden’s American Families and Jobs Plans would be partially funded by rolling back the 2017 Republican tax cuts, including a tax break for commercial real estate investors. Republicans have roundly opposed the proposals, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declaring that undoing any part of the 2017 tax cuts the GOP’s “red line.” Senate Republicans are instead pushing a much smaller standalone infrastructure proposal that would only provide $189 billion in new funding while replacing the proposed tax increases with user fees like gas and mileage taxes that would disproportionately be paid by workers.

Though Republicans have long opposed tax increases, their newfound appetite to shift the tax burden to the middle class has surprised some economists. Some of the biggest opponents of Biden’s tax proposal would personally save hundreds of thousands in taxes if the plan is defeated, according to an analysis by Invest in America Action, a progressive advocacy group backing Biden’s proposal.

“Follow the money and you’ll see that some of the loudest opponents of President Biden’s American Jobs and Families Plan are the ones with the most to lose,” Maddy McDaniel, a spokesperson for the group, said in a statement to Salon. “They’d rather sell out their middle-class constituents than pay their fair share in capital gains taxes.”

The 2017 Republican tax bill made the “like-kind” exchange or 1031 tax exemption exclusive for real estate investments, which allow investors to avoid capital gains taxes on a property by exchanging it for another one, effectively enabling them to “permanently avoid gains taxes.” Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said the exemption allows the wealthy to “shelter their income” to avoid taxation. MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, a longtime former financial executive, described the break as a “legal real estate development grift.”

Many of the Republican senators who backed the 2017 tax cuts realized big tax savings from the real estate tax breaks. At least 29 of the 47 Republican members of the committees that worked on the tax bill held interests in real estate, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

The American Families Plan would roll back that “like-kind” exchange exemption. The proposal would “end the special real estate tax break — that allows real estate investors to defer taxation when they exchange property — for gains greater than $500,000,” the White House said last month.

Some Republican senators stand to get hit the hardest by the rollback.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, this month claimed that “the economy was roaring back to life before Biden became president” and decried Biden’s proposals as “reckless, out of control spending,” arguing that the tax increases would “hurt American workers, businesses & families.” Johnson, who was instrumental in inserting a tax break for real estate investors in the 2017 bill, reported owning a commercial real estate asset worth between $5 million and $25 million on his 2019 financial disclosure. By opposing Biden’s tax plan, he could avoid at least an estimated $103,565 in capital gains taxes on his property in a like-kind exchange, according to the Invest in America Action analysis.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who has railed against Biden’s “disastrous tax and spend agenda,” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who has criticized Biden for “forcing the largest tax increase in a generation,” and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who claimed the tax increase would “kill jobs,” each reported owning a real estate commercial asset valued between $1 million and $5 million. They could avoid more than $100,000 in estimated capital gains taxes in a like-kind exchange, according to the analysis.

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., who claimed that Biden’s “massive tax hikes create a direct threat to our prosperity and economic growth,” reported owning four commercial real estate assets worth between $1 million and $5 million. He stands to save an estimated $414,260 in capital gains taxes, according to the analysis.

Commercial real estate groups have also decried the proposed rollback of the “like-kind” exchange exemption, arguing that taxing real estate profits would hamper new investment. Dozens of organizations have registered to lobby against the changes, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the exemption will save investors $41.4 billion in taxes between 2020 and 2024. About 12% of all real estate sales between 2016 and 2019 were part of a “like-kind” exchange, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Some groups have argued that the change could have unintended consequences for middle-class homeowners in coastal states like New York and California where home prices are high. But sellers whose profit is less than $500,000 will still be able to benefit from the tax break.

“Some have speculated that this will hit middle-class home sellers who sell a home in an expensive market and have more than $1 million of capital gains from real estate, but this is very rare,” Taylor Marr, the senior economist at real-estate brokerage Redfin, told MarketWatch. “Even in markets where home prices are over $1 million, most of that is still serviced by debt, not all equity.”

The criticisms echo those made by opponents of Biden’s proposal to increase the capital gains tax rate from 20% to 39.6% on those earning more than $1 million a year.

“Why would you treat an investment in a building differently than an investment in a stock or bond?” Chuck Marr, senior director of federal tax policy at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told The Wall Street Journal.

The Biden administration has said that exemption is one of many loopholes that disproportionately allow the wealthy to avoid taxes.

“Without these changes, billions in capital income would continue to escape taxation entirely,” the administration said in a fact sheet detailing the proposal.

“The President’s tax agenda will not only reverse the biggest 2017 tax law giveaways, but reform the tax code so that the wealthy have to play by the same rules as everyone else,” the White House said last month. “Importantly, these reforms will also rein in the ways that the tax code widens racial disparities in income and wealth.”

The tax revenues would be used to fund universal pre-K, free community college tuition, child care, paid family and medical leave and expanded food assistance, and would extend the expanded Child Tax Credit and provide additional health insurance subsidies, among other measures.

But the proposal has stalled amid negotiations between Biden, Republicans and Senate Democrats. Some centrist Democrats have echoed Republican talking points in support of user fees, despite Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000, and have expressed concerns about his proposed tax increases.

“User fees have to be part of the mix,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., told Axios last week. “I am generally supportive of what the president is trying to do, but I think his initial unwillingness to include user fees makes it really hard.”

Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have also discussed adding user fees to the proposal, according to the report.

But even Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who has been a roadblock to numerous Democratic proposals in the early days of Biden’s presidency, has criticized user fees as a tax on workers.

“Hell no, don’t raise them,” he warned last month.

Manchin, however, has pushed Biden to lower his proposed corporate tax increase. Biden’s plan does not fully roll back the 2017 Republican tax cut, which drastically slashed the 35% corporate tax rate, but would raise the rate from 21% to 28% — the same rate that Manchin previously supported.

Manchin is not alone. Warner, Sinema and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, have expressed concerns about Biden’s corporate tax hike, according to Axios. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, has also publicly criticized the proposed capital gains increase as too high.

A growing number of House Democrats have pushed back on the Senate negotiations, decrying the proposed user fees as a tax on the working class and urging Biden to end his attempt to negotiate with Republicans.

A group of 59 Democrats led by Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter last week to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warning that “the pursuit of Republican votes cannot come at the expense of limiting the scope of popular investments.”

The lawmakers called for a package more in line with the Build Back Better proposal Biden pushed on the campaign trail, which would cost about $7 trillion and include larger investments in climate-focused infrastructure.

“The widespread climate denial among Republican lawmakers poses a threat to the bold, necessary action on climate,” they wrote. “Trump’s massive tax giveaway — 80 percent of which accrued to the wealthy and large corporations … will likely remain a major obstacle.”

Biden’s Jobs and Families Plans are expected to cost about $4.5 trillion. While Democrats are much more likely to go smaller than bigger, they could use the budget reconciliation process they used to pass Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March with a simple majority in the Senate. If the president can get enough votes from his own party, that is.

Is the federal courts’ new “judicial integrity officer” even a licensed attorney?

Earlier this month Salon reported some of the controversial history of Michael Henry, who was formerly either the legal affairs director or the chief investigator for the U.S. Center for SafeSport — effectively the U.S. Olympic Committee’s sexual abuse policing agency — and this year became overseer of abuse complaints in the federal courts under the title of “judicial integrity officer.”

More recently, multiple sources — including one inside the SafeSport office in Denver — have told Salon they don’t believe Henry is even a licensed attorney. This reporter has attempted due diligence to corroborate the suggestion that Henry has not passed the bar exam in any state and should not be allowed to practice law. Of course, these efforts have included reaching out to Henry himself. He has not responded to this point.

Henry’s murky credentials have been viewed as a laughingstock within SafeSport and the U.S. Olympic movement. The possibility that the chief of integrity for the federal court system has a fraudulent CV could well be a major embarrassment for the judicial branch of government as well. Henry succeeded Jill Langley, who created the Office of Judicial Integrity in 2018 following reports that now-retired Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California had sexually harassed a number of female law clerks. According to public records Henry’s salary in the position is between $176,799 and $196,443.

Henry has both an undergraduate and a law school degree from Texas Tech University. The law school’s assistant dean of academic services and registrar, Janessa Walls, verified that there was “a student by the name of Michael C. Henry that graduated on May 19, 2012.” According to Henry’s LinkedIn profile, he then became Texas Tech’s “Director/Lead Title IX Investigator” and then “Director/Deputy Title IX Coordinator,” between 2014 and 2016.

But Henry does not appear in the searchable online listings for the State Bar of Texas, the most obvious state where he might be licensed. The organization’s public information director, Amy Starnes, did not respond to an email requesting clarification.

The current Texas Tech Title IX coordinator, Kimberly Simón, referred the question to the campus human resources office. The human resources office referred it to the general counsel.

After the publication of Salon’s May 11 article, SafeSport spokesperson Dan Hill asserted in an email that “Michael Henry was never the Center’s chief legal counsel.” That may be so, but SafeSport does not publish the names or titles of its staff members. In 2018, Henry called himself “Director of Legal Affairs” in his LinkedIn profile before the publication of critical pieces both at my website, Concussion Inc., and at Deadspin. After those articles appeared, Henry changed his LinkedIn entry to describe himself as “Director, Investigations & Outcomes.” He was the highest-paid employee at SafeSport in 2019, his final year there, with an annual salary of $218,924.

Furthermore, a SafeSport complainant has shown me emails from Henry bearing a signature block calling himself “Legal Affairs Director.”

Given SafeSport’s location in Denver, the Colorado Bar Association would seem the second most likely state bar to have licensed Henry. Colorado’s online attorney and disciplinary history search tool — which notes, “An attorney must have a status of ‘active’ and in good standing in order to practice law within the state of Colorado” — turns up no Michael Henry.

Between leaving SafeSport last fall and being hired by the federal court system this January, Henry was a partner at TNG, a risk management consulting firm in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. TNG’s board chair Brett A. Sokolow and CEO Martha E.M. Kopacz did not return emails requesting comment on Henry’s standing as an attorney.

The web page of the federal courts’ Office of Judicial Integrity lists an email address for complaints. Multiple queries submitted for Henry’s attention were not returned. The office is supervised by Roslynn R. Mauskopf, a judge in the Eastern District of New York. Attempts to reach Mauskopf through email inquiries to the Eastern District were not successful.

The entire federal court system falls under Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. There was no response to multiple emails and one voice message directed to the Supreme Court’s public information office. This week Salon forwarded the question about Henry to Justice Roberts by express mail.

“QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley to undergo mental health exam after attorney’s autism claims

Days after the attorney for Jacob Chansley, also known as the “QAnon Shaman,” questioned his own client’s mental health, the federal judge overseeing his trial has reportedly ordered him to undergo a mental health evaluation.

“Court has just ordered psychiatric examination of Jan 6 US Capitol riot defendant Jacob Chansley…. also known as the ‘Q-Anon Shaman.’ This case now faces delays. Chansley remains in jail, pending trial,” NBC’s Scott MacFarlane tweeted this Friday.

POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney shared a court document showing the judge found “reasonable cause” to question his mental competency.

INBOX: Judge orders a psychological exam for 1/6 defendant Jacob ‘Q Shaman’ Chansley, finding “reasonable cause” to question his competency. pic.twitter.com/IjG9u4Qq7V

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) May 21, 2021

“Army of the Dead” is what happens when desperation meets a thrilling zombie conflagration

Every zombie fable boils down to insatiable hunger, both as it pertains to the undead and the forms it takes among the living. That part is where each story diverges. In George A. Romero’s 1978 masterpiece “Dawn of the Dead,” survivors took refuge in a mall, but they also hoarded its supplies.

Zack Snyder’s contribution to the genre accentuates desperation. In his 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead” the zombies are sprinting, roaring killing machines that consume America before the opening credits roll. In their wake aftermath, hopelessness proves to be the slow, shambling, inescapable inevitability that does in everyone else.

His latest, “Army of the Dead,” is not that film’s sequel. It could have been, since the main hero is a veteran of the so-called “zombie wars.” But the desperation evoked here is different, and relatable to everyone on the losing side of America’s expanding wealth gap.

That describes almost everyone, including sidelined mercenary Scott Ward (Dave Bautista). With his friends Maria Cruz (played by Ana de la Reguera) and fellow soldier-for-hire Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), collectively known as Las Vengeance, he earned some notoriety for saving the Secretary of Defense from zombie hordes that overwhelmed Las Vegas.

Extraordinary heroics gained Ward a medal and little else; some unspecified amount of time later he’s making ends meet by flipping burgers. Cruz is a mechanic, and Vanderohe works at a retirement home. All hold honest jobs, but the pay is low enough that it is hard for them to refuse an unethical job offer from billionaire casino owner Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada).

Having walled in Las Vegas shortly after it was lost, the government decides to nuke the place from a distance, just to be sure. On the eve of this fire festival, Tanaka decides he really wants the $200 million in the safe beneath his establishment back in his hands. He doesn’t need it, he just wants it. For Ward’s trouble he and Las Vengeance will receive a cut of $50 million to divide as they see fit.

Zombies can symbolize any number of societal ills, but in “Army of the Dead,” Snyder — who directed, produced and co-wrote the script — makes economic uncertainty the real killer. Regardless of what happens in Vegas, and to it, the billionaires will keep getting richer while the unluckiest of struggle in a quarantine camp on the outskirts of the city, lorded over by a dictatorial and abusive guard (Theo Rossi). This also happens to be the place where Ward’s estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) volunteers.

All of this makes “Army of the Dead” sound more serious than it is. In reality, Snyder and his screenwriting partner Shay Hatten have created a piece that is fundamentally a temple to popcorn cinema — or an adrenalized, ballistic bacchanal. Our mercs and its zombie masses are mere sacrifices to that end.

In the same way Las Vegas is a tribute to excess, “Army of the Dead” does an outstanding job of rewarding people who love movies, especially the ones swimming in oceans of bullets and carnage.

Some homages are obvious to the point of imagining them in the concept pitch: What if you shoved the impossible heist of “Oceans 11” inside of “Aliens,” and replaced the xenomorphs with down-to-Earth, all-American zombies? What if you borrowed the concept of “Escape From New York,” except you’re fleeing, like, New York, New York from the Strip? Pay close attention to appreciate the artful genuflection to classics like “Excalibur.” Also, did we mention there’s hundreds of zombies?

You’ll know whether this movie is for you in the same way “Godzilla vs. Kong” either had you at hello or repelled you straightaway. All you need to do is read the title. But that clash of the monsters takes its story very seriously, whereas this one revels in overkill and lumbers into ridiculousness in every way imaginable from the start.

Setting aside the explosions and bloodlust, watching Bautista tap into a kind of softness and vulnerability makes him consistently watchable. He looks physically imposing as ever, but he emphasizes endearing Ward to the audience where other actors would be content to run and gun the role. You’ll want him to make it and more to the point, to truly live if he does.

The late addition of Tig Notaro’s helicopter pilot Marianne Peters is similarly inspired. Every action movie needs a touch of comedy to lighten the mood, but Notaro’s desert dry personality is what wins this role.

(Notaro’s inclusion is also a technical achievement: she was brought in late to replace disgraced comedian Chris D’Elia after he was accused by multiple women, some of them underaged, of sexual misconduct. Her part was filmed separately, but you’d never know she wasn’t there with the rest of the cast.)

Most action film directors and writers don’t bother explaining why hard cases like Ward, Cruz and Vanderohe would wager their lives against overwhelming odds. But Snyder and Hatten write Peters to seem a lot more like the average Jane, to the point that when Ward and Cruz approach her she’s such an existential funk that she doesn’t bother asking about the possible dangers.

“Why would I want to know the risks?” she asks. “Two million dollars? That’s a lot of cash. Listen… I hate my life so deeply. If I had two million dollars, my life would change drastically. Yeah. Thank you. Yes.” Notaro’s wry delivery here is a mere amuse bouche to some of the background work she does later. But even better than making us laugh, she enables us to understand why anyone would board this mission.

Joining Notaro’s pilot is German safecracker Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer, a close second behind Notaro in the contest for the best reason to watch this) and a couple of gun-loving social media influencers (Raul Castillo and Samantha Win). Tanaka’s security head Martin (Garret Dillahunt) tags along too, enlisting the help of a French guide and fellow gunslinger called Lily (Nora Arnezeder).

Staging the madness in Las Vegas only jacks up the maximal feel of it all; it’s no coincidence that the impersonator shown in the moments before Sin City falls isn’t Elvis, but Liberace – the man who famously declared that too much of a good thing can be wonderful. Yes, “Army of the Dead” shouts, it sure is.

Everything Snyder’s done since “Dawn of the Dead” – from “300” to “Watchmen,” or on the lower end of the quality scale, “Sucker Punch” or 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” – is an exercise in overdoing it. That’s not necessarily a criticism; “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” was a lengthy haul, but a consistently engaging one as well.

“Army of the Dead” is many miles lighter and goofier than the Snyder Cut, starting with the nature of Las Vegas’ downfall by way of horny newlyweds crashing into a military convoy carrying, would you believe, a super zombie (Richard Cetrone). He’s fast, athletic and demonstrates organizational skills – like Caesar from “Planet of the Apes,” except the living dead version, with a cape! He also has a zombie queen and makes a zombie out of one of Siegfried and Roy’s tigers. Like I said: ridiculous.

But maybe that’s just what we need. Oscar contenders may not have fared well in the streaming age but bombastic spectacles like this have performed swimmingly, especially as pandemic restrictions have relaxed and people are starting to return to theaters. Netflix is also counting on this story being the start of something, not the end; an animated spinoff and a series prequel are both in the works.

Death comes for us all, and if we’re fortunate, it’s a very slow walker. Enjoying “Army of the Dead” doesn’t require much more than appreciating that. Our collective starvation for thrills and wonder probably sauces its appeal even more. The pandemic isn’t over but we can at least perceive its end; we’ve also long accepted the fact that we’re stupid and contagious, but also bored and antsy and hankering for excitement. In that respect this movie is a solid gamble, one that may leave you saying, “Yeah. Thank you. Yes.” That’s probably all we need to know.

“Army of the Dead” makes its streaming debut Friday, May 21 on Netflix.

Matt Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend is cooperating with prosecutors: report

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has to be wondering what his ex-girlfriend is telling federal investigators, according to a new report by CNN.

“Federal authorities investigating alleged sex trafficking by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz have secured the cooperation of the congressman’s ex-girlfriend, according to people familiar with the matter,” CNN reported. “The woman, a former Capitol Hill staffer, is seen as a critical witness, as she has been linked to Gaetz as far back as the summer of 2017, a period of time that has emerged as a key window of scrutiny for investigators. She can also help investigators understand the relevance of hundreds of transactions they have obtained records of, including those involving alleged payments for sex, the sources said.”

The woman’s reported cooperation comes only days after Gaetz wingman Joel Greenberg pleaded guilty and promised to cooperate in future prosecutions.

“Information from Greenberg in the lead-up to his plea agreement has already helped investigators further their scrutiny of the congressman. As he worked towards a plea deal with federal prosecutors in recent months, Greenberg told investigators that Gaetz and at least two other men had sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl, CNN has learned. Gaetz has repeatedly denied he ever had sex with a minor or paid for sex,” CNN reported. “There are new signs of investigative activity too, after sources had recently told CNN the FBI was mostly done gathering evidence.”

Federal authorities investigating alleged sex trafficking by GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz have secured the cooperation of his ex-girlfriend, sources say https://t.co/YTEPFiUSmq

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) May 21, 2021

Trump still charging taxpayers for Secret Service room at Mar-a-Lago: report

Former President Donald Trump has charged the Secret Service more than $40,000 for his own protective detail to rent a single room at his Mar-a-Lago resort, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Federal spending records released by the Secret Service show that Mar-a-Lago has billed taxpayers $396.15 per night every day since Trump left office through at least April 30, totaling at least $40,011.15. The rate is nearly twice as high as the $205 federal daily lodging spending limit for most government employees, though the Secret Service is allowed to spend more if their protective mission requires it. The charges covered the cost of a single room that Trump’s protective detail uses as a workspace, a source told the outlet. Most Secret Service agents on Trump’s detail typically stay elsewhere, according to the report.

Trump moved to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House and has since relocated to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for the summer. It’s unclear whether he has continued to charge for rooms but his properties billed taxpayers for more than $2.5 million for Secret Service agents and other government officials and staff while he was in office. During Trump’s presidency, the Bedminster club charged Secret Service $567 per night to rent a four-room cottage on the property.

While former presidents are entitled to Secret Service protection for life, historians “could not find another example of a president charging the Secret Service rent on this scale,” according to the Post. Some historians told the outlet they were “surprised” Trump was still charging taxpayers for his own Secret Service agents’ stays, since he also gets a paid staff and receives a substantial pension.

Though Trump donated his presidential salary to charity, he has been collecting his federal pension since leaving office, according to Insider. The General Services Administration told the outlet that Trump has received $65,600 in pension funds as of May 14. He is entitled to collect $219,000 per year, though the pension is optional.

Trump is also entitled to a paid post-presidential transition staff, which has allowed many of his former White House aides to continue to collect a taxpayer-funded salary. Insider reported that Trump adviser Stephen Miller, the architect of some of Trump’s most divisive policies, is one of 17 aides on the staff, which will receive about $1.3 million in compensation until the transition period ends in July. Ten of the aides are employed at Mar-a-Lago while another seven are based in Arlington, Virginia.

Miller is earning an annualized salary of $160,000, according to GSA documents obtained by the outlet. Dan Scavino, the former White House deputy chief of staff largely responsible for Trump’s social media feeds, is the highest-paid aide with an annualized salary of $172,500.

After the transition period ends, Trump will still be entitled to continue receiving $150,000 for staff compensation for an additional 30 months, after which the taxpayer-funded staff compensation drops to $96,000 per year, according to CNN.

Former first lady Melania Trump has also continued to use taxpayer funds to employ a “handful of staffers,” according to CNN. Former adviser Marcia Kelly is earning an annual salary of $150,000 while her former chief of staff Hayley D’Antuono is earning an annualized salary of $160,000. “It was not immediately clear if the Trumps themselves are also supplementing their staff members’ salaries with private funds, which they are permitted to do,” the outlet reported.

Trump’s children have also continued to rack up big travel bills after Trump extended their Secret Service protection through July before leaving office, costing taxpayers more than $140,000 just in the first 30 days after he left office, according to the report. That sum includes more than $50,000 in transportation, including for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s vacation to Salt Lake City, and $88,678 for hotel bills for their Secret Service protection.

“The general feeling is there probably won’t be a lot of sadness when the six months is up,” a source told CNN of the general sentiment of Trump’s children’s Secret Service detail.

The hefty payments for staff and travel raised questions about why Trump is charging taxpayers for his own Secret Service protection. The self-professed billionaire this week touted a $1.2 billion refinancing of a San Francisco office building in which his company holds a 30% share. Forbes also estimates that Trump is a billionaire, though his estimated net worth has plummeted from $3.5 billion to $2.4 billion since he took office in 2017. Trump has falling out of Forbes’ list of the top 1,000 richest billionaires, and now sits at No. 1,299.

“It’s tacky,” Jeffrey A. Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, told the Washington Post of the Mar-a-Lago bills. “Just because you can make a buck doesn’t mean you should make a buck. And especially when you have a situation where you’re an ex-president. You’re not going to starve.”

Scientists discover a new coronavirus that crossed over from dogs to humans

Scientists have discovered a new coronavirus that appears to have originated in dogs before jumping to humans. If confirmed, it would mark the first canine coronavirus.

While there is no reason to believe it is a serious threat to humans at this moment, scientists say the discovery emphasizes the need to more proactively search for and understand viruses that can originate in animals and jump to humans. Indeed, the virus that caused the current pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, has signs in its DNA indicating that it festered in bats and pangolins before making the jump to humans.

“We are likely missing important animal viruses that are beginning to adapt to humans,” said Gregory C. Gray, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases of the Duke University School of Medicine, in a news release. “We need to conduct such virus discovery work among people with pneumonia and also among people who have intense exposure to animals so that we get early warning of a new virus which may become a future pandemic virus.”

Coronaviruses are a large category of viruses with similar appearance yet radically different infectivity and host characteristics. Prior to the advent of the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, previous coronaviruses that infected humans included SARS and MERS, or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus. The latter originated in camels before jumping to humans, although it had low infectivity between human hosts.

The news of the dog coronavirus comes from a study published on Thursday in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in which researchers explain how a possible canine coronavirus was discovered in eight people, seven of whom were children, who were hospitalized with pneumonia in Malaysia in 2018. It’s unclear whether the coronavirus, which scientists named CCoV-HuPn-2018, led to the hospitalization.

In the study, researchers described their findings based on a completed genetic analysis, including characteristics which suggest that it jumped from infecting dogs to infecting people. According to the analysis, about half of the genetic makeup is similar to that of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

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“At this point, we don’t see any reasons to expect another pandemic from this virus, but I can’t say that’s never going to be a concern in the future,” said Anastasia Vlasova, an assistant professor in The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES), in a news release about the study. “We don’t really have evidence right now that this virus can cause severe illness in adults.”

The researchers plan to further study the CCoV-HuPn-2018 virus to determine how harmful it is – or could become – to humans. It’s unknown if the virus can be passed from person to person, or how well the human immune system can fight it off.

“I cannot rule out the possibility that at some point this new coronavirus will become a prevalent human pathogen. Once a coronavirus is able to infect a human, all bets are off,” Vlasova said. “A one-time sampling is not going to tell you with accuracy how prevalent it is; the sampling has to be repeated and done over a period [of] time to see how many people become infected.”

As reported by The New York Times, this study is not meant to alarm, but merely to raise awareness that it is important for scientists to be in front of these viruses before they do turn into a pandemic.

“I think the key message here is that these things are probably happening all over the world, where people come in contact with animals, especially intense contact, and we’re not picking them up,” Gray said in an interview. “We should be looking for these things. If we can catch them early and find out that these viruses are successful in the human host, then we can mitigate them before they become a pandemic virus.

“Last Man Standing” bids farewell, while Tim Allen keeps on truckin’ with his right-wing shade

The final half hour of “Last Man Standing” finds the Baxter family mourning the theft of Mike Baxter’s classic pickup. Mike, played by Tim Allen, spent 10 years restoring that truck, and he loved it so much that the family organizes a wake in its honor. One by one family and friends share tributes that grow increasingly warmer and heartfelt, and the viewer understands it’s not about the truck, or the Baxters. What we’re really watching is the actors holding a wake for their departing show. The welled-up tears in their eyes, especially Allen’s, are real.

Conflating Allen’s persona with that of Mike Baxter has been the show’s selling point and, depending on who you are, its drawback. Allen is one of Hollywood’s most unabashed Trump supporters. Mike Baxter is conservative too, but Kevin Abbott, the final showrunner in a line of them spanning back to the show’s creator Jack Burditt, has long insisted that he’s a centrist.

Nevertheless, Mike’s final entry in his confessional Outdoor Man vlog was anything but. “I’ve been thinking a lot about makers and takers, you know, because I had something very valuable taken from me: Somebody took my truck. Ten years of attention to detail, and then, poof, gone! It’s an empty feeling,” he – nominally, Mike – tells his followers.

From there Allen erases the pretense of separation between himself and his character. “I loved every moment of that show, er, truck. It was a classic, simpler, happier time. You know…the truck. And that’s something that can’t be stolen from me. What kind of punks steal other people’s stuff? Make something yourself!”

“Last Man Standing” was never going to depart without circling back to its 2011 beginnings, but Allen’s choice to sign off with these right-wing dog-whistles shows he’s looking to infinity and beyond, and betting that this show’s legacy will be to vindicate the version of reality he shares with his base.

In this interpretation, car theft isn’t some random misfortune suffered by a wealthy man, but a symptom, somehow, of the undeserving reaping the fruit of honest people’s labor. “Makers and takers” was one of former Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s favorite phrases; it’s also white grievance terminology dating back to the pre-Civil War era. It rolls off the tongue so easily, this shorthand for the myth that tax-funded government assistance programs that help the needy also make them more indolent.

But shucks, maybe I’m seeing something that isn’t really there. Mike is only talking about his truck, and Allen is talking about his show; and in another interpretation the “taker” is 20th Television, now owned by Walt Disney, which also owns ABC, where “Last Man Standing” ran for six seasons.

I want to make it abundantly clear that its conservative skew doesn’t make it a terrible sitcom. There’s room on TV for all types of viewpoints, and certainly liberal creatives outnumber conservatives in Hollywood. Remove Allen from the mix, and “Last Man Standing” would be a harmless, decent family show demonstrating the ways that folks can hold different points of view, even quarrel, but still demonstrate loving kindness toward one another. This is how its fans would describe it and will remember it.

What’s concerning is Allen’s choosing to top off his show’s overall veneer of homespun sweetness with such direct shout-outs to white male resentment, expecting that somehow we are supposed to laugh it off. It’s not as if these concepts aren’t normal family sitcom fare, but they’re presented like harmless quips when they’re not. If anything, they make the show’s centrism look disingenuous.

Over the years, the show has been mischaracterized as a working class comedy, which it never was. That was abundantly clear when “Roseanne” returned to TV in 2018 and depicted the Conners struggling with money and health problems in ways the Baxters, an upper-middle class family living in a spacious Denver home, never did.

But where that show’s storylines attempted with varying degrees of success to wrestle with Trump-era politics related to such topics as race, immigration and gender identity, “Last Man Standing” generally shoots for the middle.

Mike, for all of his he-man grumbling, is balanced by his wife Vanessa (Nancy Travis), a geologist who voiced support for Hillary Clinton, and his daughters Eve (Kaitlyn Dever), Kristin (Amanda Fuller) and Mandy (Molly McCook). Eve, his youngest, aligns the most closely with Mike while Kris and Mandy skew liberal.

Conflicts arise all the time, as they do in families, but their arguments stem from culture war talking points as opposed to matters of impactful policy. The ninth and final season avoids the most divisive issues of the day entirely, in fact, by jumping the story a few years ahead to a happier time when there’s no need to get into pandemic-era tensions about mask-wearing and lockdowns.

This is in keeping with the show’s reflection of America as your Fox News–loving family member perceives it: a country where everyone is equal, where hard work and ingenuity are always rewarded with a good and easy life, and where racial and social strife are manufactured by and happening to other people.

Don’t get me wrong, some measure of escapism has long been the essence of the network sitcom’s duty. Broadcast comedies are designed to comfort and entertain, and whatever conflicts humming behind the smiles and the laugh tracks are usually solvable in around 22 minutes, and almost always bearable over the long term. Hence when a show like “Black-ish” or “The Conners” gently and intelligently guides the audience through topics like police brutality or transgender visibility, it is a real accomplishment.

But this show’s version of such field trips takes the form of conversations right-leaning families may have that don’t typically turn up on broadcast TV. Some of them are actually quite uplifting and hopeful, such as the conversations Mandy’s husband Kyle (Christoph Sanders) has with Mike’s business partner Ed (Hector Elizondo), a staunch atheist, about his studies at seminary college.

Neither man converts the other, but the pair sustains a mutually affectionate understanding that comes across as totally genuine. Threads like these are quite typical in this series, where Mike or someone else airs their spin on a conversation starter and everyone travels through the topic in their own way until they reach middle ground.

In the wider and real world, middle ground might as well be the lost empire of Atlantis. Maybe it was accessible at some point, but not anymore. We’re wrestling with a bevy of ills and in some respects TV is responding to that.

“Last Man Standing” premiered on ABC as part of a reactionary slate of shows catering to the false fear that the nation was suffering from a widespread affliction of low testosterone, a so-called “man-cession.”

It was flanked by “Man Up!” and briefly joined by a disaster called “Work It,” in which two men dressed as women thinking that they’d advance their careers in doing so – something like “Bosom Buddies,” but with an eighth of the charm and no Tom Hanks to speak of.

“Man Up!” failed as well, but “Last Man Standing” survived to see nine seasons – six on ABC, until the network cancelled it despite it being the second highest-rated comedy on the network. Fans accused ABC of penalizing the show for Allen’s Trump support, although executives maintained, and a number of journalists have researched and affirmed, that its dismissal had more to do with financial and demographic reasons. (Translation: the show wasn’t produced by ABC, it was getting more expensive; and its audience is older.)

On Fox, its viewership held steady during the 2016-2017 season, when Trump first entered office, only to decline in its eighth. Giving “Last Man Standing” enough notice to give fans a farewell, then, is a courtesy not every show gets, even those that earn it. How this translates to Allen’s show being “stolen” is baffling…unless it’s not about the show, or the truck, but partisan politics.

Looking back from that perspective, then, the toothless punchlines take on another dimension. Lots of people have examined the sharpening of partisanship in parallel with the coarsening of culture, a reaction to the “wokeness” that in previous eras was called political correctness. That term was as terrible as “woke” is when it drools out of Tucker Carlson’s mouth, but both are born of noble intentions that have been co-opted and twisted.

Where liberal comedians skewered political correctness as a release valve – correctly or wrongly – right-wing figures turned it into a process of attack and retreat. Cable news pundits, radio jocks, politicians and their followers honed a practice of lobbing vicious insults at their political adversaries and then, when called on crossing whatever imaginary line their might have been, throwing up their hands with an insistence that it’s all just jokes. Can’t you liberal snowflakes take a joke?

Allen wasn’t so sinister in his stand up, particularly after he discovered the magic formula of speaking to conservatives with a wink and a goofy smile. This is why the Baxters never had to be an overtly MAGA-tribe, and Mike didn’t have to prevail in his arguments or even follow through on cracks about Obamacare or gun control with cogent arguments. Acknowledging that a segment of the show’s audience – the dominant portion – thinks like Mike and discusses such topics with their families is enough.

Mike’s truck was stolen, no doubt about that. Allen’s show was not, though. A more realistic interpretation is that TV chose to drop him off and keep on rolling. Not just him or “Last Man Standing,” either. Sitcoms in general are entering a broadcast dry spell, indicated by the fall schedules NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox revealed this week.

Indeed, Fox’s fall schedule is utterly devoid of live-action comedy half-hours, saving its new sitcoms “Pivoting” (about three women) and “Welcome to Flatch” (about small-town life) for midseason. ABC, the first home of “Last Man Standing,” is corralling its sitcoms to one night, and all of them feature families that are working class or solidly middle class. Its remake of “The Wonder Years,” the quintessential show about a “classic, simpler, happier time,” shows how such an era was lived from a Black family’s perspective.

NBC is also saving its comedies for midseason; no half-hours grace its fall schedule as it currently stands, although its streaming service Peacock has a few outstanding new ones. The exception is CBS, but its comedy block has been consistently successful for years. Many of the ones returning to its schedule are produced by Chuck Lorre, the king of imperfectly empathetic comedy that means well.

Viewing this as a sign of social progress is optimistic, but it’s not entirely realistic. Television may influence changes of heart, and that’s crucial. But it’s tough to look at what’s happening to our democracy and society, and not be disheartened.

At the pinnacle of Mike’s speech, he shares the Thomas Moore–penned verse Reagan uttered when he lost the Republican nomination in 1976: “‘Though I am hurt, I am not slain. I lay me down to bleed awhile. Then I’ll rise and fight again.'”

That series-ending diatribe, served with Allen’s signature grin, reminds us that the show’s alleged centrism was always camouflage. It was never about the truck with “Last Man Standing,” but figuring out what was really lurking underneath the hood.

The series finale of “Last Man Standing” aired on Thursday, May 20. All episodes are streaming on Hulu.

Trump’s election “audit” should be treated as a trojan horse, Arizona secretary of state warns

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs announced on Thursday that the vote-counting machines used in the Maricopa County general election recount are not secure, suggesting that her office might “decertify” whatever results come from the audit.

Last month, the Republican-controlled Arizona state Senate moved to conduct a full-fledged audit of Maricopa County ballots in the 2020 general election, citing baseless concerns that the election fraudulently favored President Joe Biden, who won the county by a margin of about 45,000 votes. The state’s GOP-led Board of Supervisors, which noted that prior audits had already been conducted, attempted to impede the recount, but failed.

The audit – which requires a hand count of 2.1 million votes – is being conducted by Florida-based cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, which has no apparent experience in auditing elections and was not formerly known by any members of the Arizona state legislature. Cyber Ninjas’ owner, Doug Logan, is a known QAnon conspiracy theorist who erroneously believes the election was systematically “stolen” from former President Donald Trump. Currently, Cyber Ninjas is performing forensic analysis to determine the presence of bamboo fibers in ballots as an apparent indication that China meddled in the election.

In her letter, Hobbs wrote: “I have grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas’ control.”

“[M]y office did not reach this decision lightly,” she continued. “However, given the circumstances and ongoing concerns regarding the handling and security of the equipment, I believe the county can agree that this is the only path forward to ensure secure and accurate elections in Maricopa County in the future.”

Hobbs can legally decertify the ballot-counting machines with the approval of the state’s Election Equipment Certification Committee, a three-member panel that she appointed herself.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department expressed concerns about certain audit practices that were being carried out by Cyber Ninjas, issuing a formal warning that they could be in violation of federal law. “We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” the department wrote at the time. The letter was shortly rebuffed by Arizona Republicans.

Earlier this week, the Arizona Board of Supervisors demanded that state Republicans put an end to the audit, alleging that Cyber Ninjas was “in way over their heads.” A GOP state Senator recently called the recount “embarrassing.”

“It makes us look like idiots,” said state Sen. Paul Boyer, a Republican from Phoenix. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”

A spokesperson from Dominion, whose voting systems were used in the election, told Insider: “There are real concerns about what the unaccredited ‘auditors’ have done to Maricopa County’s voting equipment, and whether the machines remain useable for future elections. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the secure chain of custody has been broken.”

Replacing the machines could cost millions and would likely require that Arizona taxpayers foot the bill.

Former employees of famed GOP pollster Frank Luntz say his work is a “scam”

Republican pollster and Kevin McCarthy friend-slash-roommate Frank Luntz isn’t afraid of boasting about his personal achievements. “Dr. Frank I. Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today,” reads a biography on his website. But some of his former employees tell a remarkably different story.

Chris Ingram, a former senior vice president at the Luntz Research Company who worked at the company from 1997 through the early 2000s, told Salon that Luntz’s claim to deliver objective data is a “total shtick and a scam.”

Ingram described observing Luntz trying to manipulate focus groups that used “dial testing,” in which participants spin a small handheld device, yielding real-time results in response to questions asked by the presenter. “Frank, when he would be hired by clients, whether they would be corporate or political, would sit in that room yelling, ‘Keep turning the dials! Keep turning the dials!'” Ingram told Salon in a phone interview. Luntz’s primary concern, Ingram said, was results that would yield more “compelling” data to be “present[ed] to the client.”

Ingram said that Luntz does not work as an “impartial” or honest survey researcher but is better described as a pay-for-play pawn in Washington. In 1997, the American Association for Public Opinion Research largely agreed with Ingram’s current analysis, finding after a 14-month investigation that Luntz had “violated the Association’s Code of Professional Ethics and Practices.”

Luntz’s “keep turning the dials” approach, Ingram said, is “clearly not the type of stuff that legitimate public opinion and survey researchers employ,” adding that this was just one of many examples. He described additional ways Luntz would deceive viewers and media companies with such tactics, including screening and selecting participants in a manner that Ingram called “quite frankly bullshit.”

“The clowns at MSNBC didn’t have a clue about how the focus groups or panels worked, or what Frank was doing,” Ingram said. “The actions were basically contrived: He screened out anybody that isn’t going to give the viewers the opinion that Frank, on behalf of his client, is looking for. Somehow, he is able to bullshit people.”

MSNBC didn’t return Salon’s request for comment on this story. Luntz is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNBC and Fox News anchor Bret Baier’s program.

Another one of Luntz’s former employees, who still works in the Washington area and asked to remain anonymous in fear of professional retribution, spoke to Salon about Luntz’s lavish lifestyle and summarized his former boss as a “slimeball.”

A third former high-ranking Luntz employee confirmed to Salon the validity of the two other sources’ remarks. That third person said they believed negative experiences from working with Luntz were “widespread” in Washington. That former employee, also granted anonymity by Salon, said that Luntz rarely appeared at his own company’s offices during the workday but often called employees to abuse them late at night.

Luntz apparently doesn’t want the American people to know that he took a $77,900 Paycheck Protection Program loan for his company while living in his luxurious D.C. apartment. According to documents reviewed by Salon, the pollster was granted a PPP loan in April of 2020 through his company FIL Inc. The loan, apparently designated to help pay five of Luntz’s employees during the coronavirus pandemic, was first noted in a Washington Post report from fact-checker Glenn Kessler.

Throughout the pandemic, Luntz was living in his 7,000-square-foot luxury condo in Washington, and his former employees all told Salon he had no business taking the PPP loan, which was ostensibly meant to help struggling small businesses survive. Luntz also owns a Los Angeles mansion that includes a three-fourths scale replica of Bill Clinton’s Oval Office and a replica of the Lincoln Bedroom that features a photo of Clinton and Luntz on the bedside table — with a “version” of Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress hanging on a wall. (Luntz played an instrumental role in Clinton’s 1998 impeachment.)

Luntz didn’t respond to a Salon request for comment about the PPE loan and the comments made by his former employees through his website contact form.

An exclusive Salon report earlier this week detailed that when Luntz presented himself as an impartial pollster running focus groups for VICE News and HBO in 2018, he was actually being paid by Ted Cruz’s Senate campaign. In a statement to Salon, VICE News said it was “unaware of this affiliation, and Luntz did not disclose this information at the time of these productions.”

Luntz wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed last September presenting himself as a pollster “without bias,” a claim that may reasonably be viewed with suspicion. “As a pollster, I am ethically and professionally required to interpret public opinion accurately, factually, and without bias,” Luntz wrote.

In a 2007 profile of Luntz for the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner described him as “[n]ot particularly ideological or partisan” and “focused on disaffected and disgruntled voters,” but went on to observe that “Luntz’s career has been about nothing so much as cheapening language and obscuring honest discussion.” As Chotiner noted, Luntz had advised House Republicans under Newt Gingrich in the 1990s to lie about their plans to cut Medicare and to spread the idea that there was a “lack of scientific certainty” about climate change. Those GOP strategies remain very much in evidence more than 20 years later.

Ingram described Luntz’s ideas and his supposed commitment to impartial data science as “regurgitated crap.”

“Frank is very, very difficult to work with,” he said. “He’s an extremely intellectually intelligent man. But I like to characterize working for Frank as like having a boss with a 200 IQ who is five years old.”

How Biden and the Democrats can save abortion access before the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade

For the past six years, the Christian right endured a lot of entirely justified accusations of hypocrisy for backing Donald Trump — through “grab ’em by the pussy” and “Two Corinthians” to Stormy Daniels — for one major reason: so they could grab American women by their reproductive organs.

It’s working out. Trump made good on his promise to stack the federal courts with judges that would overturn Roe v. Wade, including tilting the Supreme Court with three anti-choice justices: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. Now the court, presumed to be 6-3 against abortion rights, has their chance to overturn Roe v. Wade in the form of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case about a 15-week ban on abortion in Mississippi that is so clearly in violation of Roe that even the extremely conservative Fifth Circuit Court ruled against the law.

Things are not looking good for abortion rights.

Nearly all experts believe that the only reason the Supreme Court would take this case, instead of merely letting the Fifth Circuit’s decision stand, is that the conservative justices believe this is their opportunity to reverse the key finding of Roe, which disallowed states from denying patients abortion access before a fetus is viable.

But there is good news. There’s already a bill in existence that, if passed into law, could stop the push to overturn Roe in its tracks.

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“The Women’s Health Protection Act has never been more important,” Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., who is a primary sponsor of the bill in the House of Representatives, told Salon. The Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) was first introduced by Democrats in Congress in 2013, in response to a crush of state laws creating deliberately unnecessary red tape meant to drive abortion providers out of business. It would, according to Chu, create “a statutory right for healthcare providers to provide abortion care and a corresponding right for their patients to receive their care free from medically unnecessary restrictions.”

On Wednesday, two days after the Supreme Court announced it was looking at Mississippi’s 15-week ban, the bill’s co-sponsor in the Senate, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., put out a press release declaring that “access to abortion is a fundamental right” and announcing plans to re-introduce the legislation in Congress in the coming weeks.

On the 48th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in January, President Joe Biden put out a statement declaring that his administration is “committed to codifying Roe v. Wade.” Many legal experts believe WHPA is the law that would get that done.

“This is a bill that addresses exactly the types of bans and restrictions like the 15 weeks case that’s in Mississippi,” Jackie Blank, the federal legislative strategist for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Salon.

“It creates that statutory right [to abortion] automatically,” Preston Mitchum, the policy director at Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, explained.

Chu expressed confidence that WHPA would, if brought to a vote, pass out of the House fairly easily, as it’s “the most supported pro-choice bill that we’ve ever had,” with 217 co-sponsors with its last version in the House alone. In the Senate, however, “that’s where the challenge is greater,” Chu acknowledged.

As with many Democratic priorities that are languishing in Congress, the problem is the Senate filibuster, which allows the Republican minority to kill any bill without even bringing it the floor for a debate. Most Democrats in the Senate wish to reform the filibuster so that Republicans can’t do this, but two Democrats — Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — have dug their heels in, refusing to budge on filibuster reform. So bills like WHPA, as well as gun control and voting rights bills, are currently doomed by this near-absolute GOP veto power — unless Manchin and Sinema change their minds.

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WHPA was first drafted to deal with the “hundreds of anti-abortion laws on the books that are already making it difficult for people to access care,” Blank explained. Many of which are still standing despite some of the more excessive regulations being struck down by a more pro-choice Supreme Court in 2016. But this Supreme Cout case could open the door to outright bans on abortion, by gutting one major limit anti-choice states have, until recently, been forced to respect, which is Roe’s restriction on gestational bans. Indeed Texas, empowered by the anti-choice shift in the court, went even further in passing a 6-week ban — which is functionally a total ban on abortion — and the court’s ruling in Dobbs could open the door to letting such a ban stand. Unless, of course, Democrats act make the WHPA law.

“Certainly I am feeling the urgency and I hope that Speaker Pelosi and the rest of her caucus are feeling the urgency,” Blank offered.

But some legal experts fear that WHPA may not be enough.

Jessica Mason Pieklo, the executive editor at Rewire News Group and the co-host of the “Boom! Lawyered” podcast, (disclosure: My partner, Marc Faletti, is the producer of Pieklo’s podcast), told Salon that WHPA would still face “the huge problem of the federal courts with Trump’s nominees.”

Trump was able to successfully stuff the federal courts with judges, most hand-picked by far-right groups like the Federalist Society, shifting the balance of power decisively to the anti-choice side. Pieklo worries that such judges would be eager, even through tortured legal logic, to argue that Congress simply doesn’t have the power to override state laws regulating abortion. Still, Pieklo said, it’s important to pass WHPA because “there still are the hurdles of then challenging it.” Lawsuits take time and that “creates political opportunity for additional pressures and fixes.” Plus, Pieklo pointed out, “not every judge on the bench is a Trump judge.” Biden is moving quickly to fill more seats, which could create a more favorable legal environment for WHPA.

Pieklo, however, thinks that a longer-term fix might be found in the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which has been on the cusp of joining the constitution for a few years now, even if it keeps not quite tipping over into reality. If it was fully ratified, the ERA would make discrimination on the basis of sex fully unconstitutional. Pieklo said this would strengthen the constitutional case for abortion rights. “This was actually something that Justice Ginsburg, when she was alive, wrote and spoke about. The premise behind abortion restrictions is basic sex discrimination,” Pieklo explained, adding that she hopes the push to preserve abortion rights brought more attention to the need to ratify this amendment.

In the meantime, however, the threat of a Roe overturn is barrelling towards the U.S. The Supreme Court will likely hear arguments in the fall and issue a decision next summer. And while there’s always the possibility that the court finds some way to keep chipping away at abortion access without signing off on a full Roe overturn, things are not looking good for abortion rights. Trump explicitly chose these judges to deliver a Roe overturn to the Christian right supporters that handed him the White House, and they are expecting their prize. Democrats have the power, right now, to end the filibuster and put abortion rights out of the hands out the Supreme Court. They just need to use the power that voters gave them to do it.

Cargo ships are cleaning up smog — by dumping pollution into the seas

Cruise and cargo ships around the world are cleaning up their dirty smokestacks, installing systems that prevent harmful pollutants in their exhaust from escaping into the air. Yet much of that pollution is winding up in the sea instead. And so a solution meant to reduce smog, experts say, is leaving a potentially toxic trail in its wake.

Thousands of ships use exhaust cleaning systems, or “scrubbers,” compared with hundreds of ships just a few years ago, as companies face rising pressure to tamp down on their pollution. International regulators now require vessels to burn low-sulfur fuels at sea, while local authorities are cracking down on emissions close to shore. Scrubbers offer a middle ground, allowing ship operators to keep burning sludgy, sulfur-laden “bunker fuel” and still comply with air quality rules.

The problem is that those ships are expected to dump at least 10 billion metric tons of what’s known as wash water — the contaminated byproduct — into seas around the world every year, according to a first-of-its-kind study from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group.

About 80 percent of that wash water ends up close to shore, including near major cruise destinations in the Bahamas, Canada, and Italy as well as in ecologically sensitive areas such as the Great Barrier Reef, the ICCT’s study said. The wash water can be a nasty cocktail of carcinogens from the fuel oil, heavy metals that harm marine life, and nitrates, which can worsen water quality in shallow waters. Instead of flowing into the open ocean, where pollutants might disperse, much of the wash water often pours into places that function more like bathtubs.

“It means that every year, quite high concentrations will accumulate in these areas and will be growing and growing,” said Liudmila Osipova, the study’s lead author and an ICCT researcher in Berlin.

Separate scientific research has shown that scrubber wash water can be acidic and poisonous to some marine life, though the overall effect on coastal environments and communities isn’t fully understood. “We don’t know what kind of consequences that will have,” Osipova said.

Only a fraction of the global shipping fleet — roughly 8 percent — uses scrubbers. Other vessels have switched to cleaner-burning but more expensive petroleum products like “marine gas oil.” But scrubber adoption continues to grow, particularly among giant cargo vessels and cruise ships with huge appetites for fuel. The bigger the vessel, the bigger its scrubber, and the more wash water the system will ultimately discharge.

Most scrubber systems are “open-loop,” meaning they mix seawater with exhaust gas, filter it, then discharge the resulting effluent. “Closed-loop” systems treat and recirculate their wash water and dispel a smaller amount, but fewer shipping companies use them because they cost more to install and operate. Until ICCT researchers studied some 3,600 scrubber-equipped ships, there wasn’t a solid sense of how much polluted water these systems produce around the world or where it winds up. Some 700 more ships now use scrubbers since the research data was collected, so the volume of wash water is likely much higher than estimated, Osipova said.

For environmental groups, the study compounds their broader frustration with the industry’s seemingly tepid efforts to address climate change. Cargo shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percentof the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Yet rather than pursue technologies to replace bunker fuel, some shipowners are spending millions of dollars to install equipment that addresses one problem — air pollution — but does nothing to advance the industry’s decarbonization efforts, said Dan Hubbell, manager of the Ocean Conservancy’s shipping emissions campaign in Washington, D.C.

“We’re facing a truly global crisis, and it’s the kind of thing that requires bold solutions,” Hubbell said. “A piece we’ve struggled with is the industry’s preference for short-term fixes.”

Proponents of scrubber systems pushed back against the ICCT study and other criticisms. The Clean Shipping Alliance, an industry group that includes the cruise giant Carnival, said the report’s estimates of 10 billion tons of wash water are “greatly exaggerated.” The alliance pointed to industry-funded researchthat suggests that wash water has the “same overall water quality” as the seawater it returns to. In a statement, Capt. Mike Kaczmarek, the alliance’s chairman, said that scrubbers have become “a successful bridging solution to carbon neutrality.”

Independent research had already raised flags about the effects of scrubber wash water on the marine environment. Last year, a study on ships in Belgium found their scrubber discharges to be acidic, with elevated concentrations of metals like nickel, copper, and chromium — all of which can hurt fish and other marine life. In April, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute foundthat wash water from North Sea ships has “severe toxic effects” on the zooplankton that serve as food for cod, herring, and other important fish species. Researchers suggested that ships’ scrubber systems might serve as a “witch’s cauldron,” meaning that chemical compounds brew in a hot, acidic environment and become more toxic together than they would if taken individually.

Kerstin Magnusson, an ecotoxicologist and co-author of the Swedish study, noted that scrubber wash water doesn’t affect all species the same, and it may be less toxic in certain environments than others. But research on the topic is still relatively limited, in large part because scientists have trouble getting their hands on wash water samples. “Ship owners don’t want us to collect it,” she said. “They think we are seeking to find adverse effects, but this is not the case.”

Given such uncertainty, governments worldwide are taking steps to protect the waters they control. Thirty countries and ports have banned or put limits on scrubber wash water in their jurisdictions, including major shipping countries like China, Singapore, and Norway, as well as authorities in charge of the Panama and Suez canals. In the United States, California and Connecticut have scrubber-related restrictions. And in Washington state, officials are considering a proposal to prohibit wash water in the Puget Sound, a busy cruise hub that’s home to threatened orca whales and Chinook salmon.

The Port of Seattle last year banned cruise ships from dumpingwash water “out of an abundance of caution” to protect fish and wildlife habitats near the Seattle waterfront, said Alex Adams, the port’s senior manager of environmental programs. “Until we can learn more about the impacts of wash water discharges, we’re going to continue this prohibition,” Adams said. In response to the policy, most cruise ships now plug into the port’s shoreside electricity to avoid running their scrubbers.

Groups like Ocean Conservancy and Stand.earth are calling for a blanket ban on scrubber use within U.S. and Canadian waters. The ICCT recommends that the International Maritime Organization — the United Nations body that regulates the shipping industry — prohibit ships from using scrubbers to meet environmental protocols and phase out scrubbers on existing ships. That might encourage companies to get more of their vessels to run on low-sulfur fuels like marine gas oil until fossil fuel alternatives such as green methanol, hydrogen, and ammonia become viable.

Without tighter restrictions on wash water pollution, or stronger requirements to reduce ships’ greenhouse gas emissions, cruise and cargo ships are expected to continue installing scrubbers. That could lead to even more wash water getting dumped overboard. The way things are going, Osipova said, “We’ll just see more and more emissions of water pollution in the future.”

Two-thirds of California’s counties are in a drought emergency. Get used to it

From a rise overlooking the unusually low San Luis Reservoir, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency for 39 of the state’s 58 counties on Monday. This was the second stop on his dry lake tour: Less than a month earlier, Newsom had stood on the cracked bottom of Lake Mendocino, a spot normally 20-feet underwater, and announced a drought emergency in Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Not far from where he spoke in April, an early wildfire raged, where spring grasses had prematurely yellowed to tinder.

“That’s unprecedented for this time of year, said Grant Davis, general manager of Sonoma Water, who spoke at the same lectern as Newsom that day. “We’ve had big fires three out of the last five years. Believe me this is climate change and extreme weather all rolled into one.”

As California’s not-so-wet season draws to a close, half the state is already in ‘extreme drought.’ That means that thousands of wells could go dry in the poorest rural areas in the coming months, and fish populations will suffer as rivers heat up. In the northern half of the state, reservoir levels are already as low as they were three years into the last major drought that ran from 2011 to 2017. But California emerged from that long spate of dry weather with hard-won skills that make it better prepared this time around.

The entire West has suffered from droughts in recent years, but there’s something that captures the public imagination when disaster hits California, the most populous state, that promised land of sunshine, fruit trees, and celluloid dreams. Whenever drought grips California, elements of the media fall into an ecstatic doom loop, producing headlines that make the state sound like an apocalyptic wasteland.

In some ways, things are definitely bad: The state has entered an era of consistent water scarcity and consistently higher temperatures. The last three California droughts have been among the driest, and also the warmest, on record. The little increase in temperatures has been disastrous, melting away snowpack, drying up soils, and exacerbating forest fires.

At the same time, California is adapting. Davis and other speakers at a presentation by the Public Policy Institute of California didn’t downplay the severity of the drought, but they also said officials were more prepared than in the past. “We have done a lot since the last drought, and we are in a much better position now,” said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a water research fellow at the institute.

Previous droughts spurred cities to invest in backup pipelines and wells. Some cities in the driest parts of the state — like in Mendocino and Sonoma — are beginning to ask residents to conserve but in general, Escriva-Bou said, “Cities shouldn’t see big impacts this time.”

It’s a different story in the rural parts of California: Escriva-Bou has projected that 2,400 wells could go dry around the state this year. That’s grim, but the fact that anyone is making those projections is an improvement over the last drought, when some 3,000 wells went dry without warning. “Now we know where they are and can be proactive,” he said.

State agencies have begun contacting communities that rely on shallow wells to help them find backups. If those preparations fail, California is ready to sweep in with emergency water supplies, said Laurel Firestone, a member of the California State Water Board. “We don’t want to be trucking water to houses or trucking fish to water,” she said. “Those are emergencies we want to do everything to avoid.”

Still, California is already making plans to move some fish in tanker trucks. Normally fish hatcheries release salmon into rivers, but this year those rivers are too low, and the water is too warm. So this year, instead of swimming downstream, the salmon will travel by truck to the Pacific Ocean.

California has also adapted by building better weather forecasting tools. In the past, water managers would open up dam spillways as big storms approached to make enough room in reservoirs to catch floods and protect towns downstreams. Errant forecasts often made a mess of the situation: The storm would turn off the projected course, leaving water managers with depleted reservoirs. The improved forecasting techniques this year have allowed water managers to hold onto an extra 3.5 billion gallons of water in Lake Mendocino, nearly a third of its remaining water, Davis said.

On Monday, Newsom vowed to spend $5 billion to improve California’s water systems and said the state had already made strides since the last drought. “Not only are we more prepared in terms of expertise and insight, but also by nature of the fact that 16 percent less water is being used in this state compared to the first drought proclamation last time,” he said.

Just a few short years ago, policy wonks were still arguing over whether governments should spend money on adapting to climate change, like preparing for droughts, or on efforts to prevent climate disasters from happening in the first place. Those debates seem quaint now.

Trump’s DOJ went to war against the press: Seizure of CNN reporter’s personal records is chilling

You may recall that in the wake of Former FBI Director James Comey’s firing in May of 2017, we got the first real reporting that clearly illustrated Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses as president. It was revealed that Trump went way beyond simply asking the then FBI director to go easy on his buddy Michael Flynn, which was bad enough. In Comey’s meticulously detailed memorialization of that famous meeting alone with the new president, he claimed Trump told him he wanted him to jail reporters for publishing classified information. Considering the context for that meeting, it’s pretty clear that Trump was referring to journalists who had published the information about Flynn conversing with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. during the transition and lying about it to the FBI. Turns out that was hardly the last time Trump instructed his henchmen to go after journalists and their source.

Trump, along with the right’s media apparatus, kept up the drumbeat against leaks, tweeting furiously on the subject for months after that, finally turning his sites on then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was already in the doghouse for following rules that required him to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Trump told the Wall Street Journal:

I’m very disappointed in the fact that the Justice Department has not gone after the leakers. And they’re the ones that have the great power to go after the leakers, you understand … and I’m very disappointed in Jeff Sessions.

The Trump administration was the leakiest administration in history. From beginning to end, the people in Trump’s orbit provided journalists with more copy than they could find time to publish. And according to many accounts, Trump was one of the top leakers himself, often ringing up his own favorite conduits on background. Yet he never stopped railing against leaks he felt were damaging and, as we know, his growing hostility towards the press became one of his most powerful organizing tools.

Sessions dutifully declared war on leakers and had the DOJ follow up on every referral — and there were many. He managed to put some leakers in jail including some who were tangentially involved in the Russia probe. But he never followed through on Trump’s order to go after the press, at least not to his satisfaction, no doubt adding to Trump’s loathing of him.

His successor Bill Barr, however, seems to have taken the task much more seriously.

Just in the last month, we’ve learned of some very serious encroachments on the First Amendment during Barr’s tenure. I just wrote about the new reports of the nefarious abuse of the Justice Department to track down an anonymous Twitter user who mocked one of Trump’s closest toadies in Congress, California Rep. Devin Nunes. And earlier this month we found out that in 2020, the Trump administration sought the 2017 communications records of three Washington Post journalists who had been covering the Trump Russia story and were responsible for the reporting on the Flynn-Kislyak calls. Most recently, CNN reported late Thursday that the DOJ informed the cable news network that last year federal prosecutors had also sought the records of CNN’s longtime Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr.

One would assume that if Sessions had thought these records were necessary to track down leakers, he would have subpoenaed them at the time. The rules for a zealous attorney general signing off on such requests are not particularly onerous and Sessions’ avowed mission to destroy the “culture of leaking” would have given him ample excuse to do it.

Basically, in order to at least attempt to abide by the First Amendment, the rules required that prosecutors use all other investigative methods before they take this step, that in most cases they alert the news organizations before they issue the subpoena, or in cases with national security concerns, they inform the individual journalists within 90 days of the subpoena being issued. And, of course, they have to deal with the various communications entities, phone companies, email platforms etc. many of which would have privacy concerns of their own.

These rules had been in place since the Clinton administration but after Sessions left, right wing journalist John Solomon reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein set about reworking them in order to make it easier for prosecutors to obtain journalists’ records and discard the requirement that the DOJ alert a media organization that they are planning to issue a subpoena. He evidently didn’t follow through on that. (It’s unclear why but for some informed speculation suggesting there was pushback from Microsoft and the judiciary, read this from national security reporter Marcy Wheeler.)

The big question in all this is why were they seeking these records in 2020?

The DOJ didn’t inform the media organizations or the reporters of their reasons but it seems logical to assume that it was part of Special Prosecutor John Durham’s ongoing snipe hunt for the “origins of the Russia investigation.” However, the fact that CNN’s Starr, who did not cover the Russia investigation, was also subpoenaed suggests that this went way beyond Durham’s mandate. If he is looking at leaks about North Korea policy he’s way off track. CNN was not informed of when these subpoenas were issued so there is a chance that this happened during Sessions’ tenure, but if that’s the case, the DOJ completely abandoned the rules that required them to inform the subject within 90 days.

These revelations just keep dribbling out and they suggest that for all their bellowing about “the Deep State,” the Trumpers sure took advantage of every lever of institutional, bureaucratic power to achieve their ends.

The current DOJ has apparently told these media organizations that they are willing to sit down and discuss what happened, but they are going to have to do better than that. The credibility of the Justice Department is so threadbare that they need to do a thorough investigation of everything that went on during the Trump era and they must then come clean to the American people. As Salon’s Chauncey DeVega wrote a couple of weeks ago, we need a full audit of the whole government for the entire Trump term.

The fact is that the Obama administration was no prize in this department either and we all know what happened during the Bush years. The tension between the free press, the intelligence community and law enforcement will always be there. But in this age of disinformation and rampant propaganda, it has literally never been more important to have a free press than it is now. DOJ should be protecting it not treating it as the enemy.

Why Israel attacks media offices and targets journalists: To keep us in the dark

Israel’s missile attack on media offices in Gaza City last weekend was successful. A gratifying response came quickly from the head of The Associated Press, which had a bureau in the building for 15 years: “The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.”

For people who care about truth, that’s outrageous. For the Israeli government, that’s terrific.

AP president Gary Pruitt said, “We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.”

There’s ample reason to be horrified. But not shocked. Israel’s military began threatening and targeting journalists several decades ago, in tandem with its longstanding cruel treatment of Palestinians. Rather than reduce the cruelty, the Israeli government keeps trying to reduce accurate news coverage.

The approach is a mix of deception and brutality: Blow up the cameras so the world won’t see as many pictures of the atrocities.

Of course there’s no need to interfere with journalists documenting the also awful — while far less numerous — deaths of Israelis due to rockets fired by Hamas. In recent days the Israeli government has spotlighted such visuals, some of them grimly authentic, others fake.

The suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tragically real on both sides, although vastly asymmetrical. During the last 10 days, as reported by the BBC, 219 people have been killed in Gaza. In Israel, the number was 10. In Gaza, at least 63 of the dead were children. In Israel, two.

In the midst of all this, shamefully, President Biden is pushing ahead to sell $735 million worth of weapons to Israel, a move akin to selling more whips and thumbscrews to torturers while they’re hard at work tormenting their victims.

On Wednesday, a few members of Congress introduced a bill that seeks to do what the Israeli targeting of media seeks to prevent: galvanize informed outrage. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., introduced a resolution opposing the sale of those weapons.

“For decades, the U.S. has sold billions of dollars in weaponry to Israel without ever requiring them to respect basic Palestinian rights. In so doing, we have directly contributed to the death, displacement and disenfranchisement of millions,” Ocasio-Cortez pointed out.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, said: “The harsh truth is that these weapons are being sold by the United States to Israel with the clear understanding that the vast majority of them will be used to bomb Gaza. Approving this sale now, while failing to even try to use it as leverage for a ceasefire, sends a clear message to the world — the U.S. is not interested in peace, and does not care about the human rights and lives of Palestinians.”

As usual, Israel’s latest killing spree can avail itself of lavish resourcews provided by U.S. taxpayers, currently amounting to $3.8 billion a year in military assistance. An article published last week by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace makes a strong case that the massive subsidy is legally dubious and morally indefensible.

Not many members of Congress can be heard calling for an end to doling out huge sums to the Israeli government. But some progress is evident.

A bill introduced last month by Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., designated as H.R. 2590, now has 21 co-sponsors and some activist momentum. Its official purpose flies in the face of routine congressional evasion: “To promote and protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and to ensure that United States taxpayer funds are not used by the Government of Israel to support the military detention of Palestinian children, the unlawful seizure, appropriation, and destruction of Palestinian property and forcible transfer of civilians in the West Bank, or further annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law.”

The government of Israel has exerted deadly force on a large scale to underscore an assertion of impunity — in effect, wielding its overwhelming military power to subjugate Palestinian people with methodical disregard for their basic human rights. The process involves reducing or eliminating, as much as possible, eyewitness news coverage of that subjugation.

Israeli leaders know that the truth about human consequences of their policies is horrific, when it’s illuminated for the world to see. That’s why they’re so eager to keep us in the dark.