N.Y. Democrats push to change messy voting laws after GOP wins controversial upstate race

While Republicans across the country are trying to crack down on ballot access, Democrats are pushing to reform the state’s arcane election rules after thousands of voters were disenfranchised in the 2020 election for showing up at the wrong polling place, which may well have cost the party a House seat in a largely blue state.

More than 13,800 ballots in New York were rejected last November because voters showed up at the wrong location, according to data from voting advocacy nonprofit Vote Early NY. State law requires poll workers to send registered voters to their correct polling site, but these voters were told to fill out affidavit ballots instead, all of which were rejected.

That rule may have cost the Democrats a House seat in the state’s 22nd congressional district, which includes all or part of eight largely rural counties in central New York, and the population centers of Binghamton and Utica. Republican Claudia Tenney defeated incumbent Democrat Anthony Brindisi last year by 109 votes out of 320,000 ballots cast in one of the most expensive races in the country. The close finish between Tenney and Brindisi — who had unseated her just two years earlier in another razor-tight contest — prompted a months-long legal battle before a judge ruled in January that 128 disqualified ballots cited in hearings could not be counted under the law, even if those voters were legally registered. Data from Vote Early NY shows that the number of affected votes was actually closer to 273, which might have been enough to swing the race.

It’s impossible to know how those votes would have gone, as Jarret Berg, an election attorney and founder of Vote Early NY, said in an interview with Salon. But “the margin of just this group of ballots that were thrown out,” he noted, “was larger than the certified total between the candidates.”

State Supreme Court Justice Scott Del Conte said in his ruling that the ballots must be disqualified under state law, but criticized local election boards for “systemic violations of state and federal election law,” citing another issue in Oneida County (which is within the 22nd district) where election officials had disenfranchised 2,400 people by failing to process their voter registrations in time for the election.

“We knew this was an issue but this is the first year we were able to get a complete snapshot of just how big this problem is in our state,” said Berg. “To be honest, it was much bigger than I would have even imagined.”

Some states like nearby New Jersey and Massachusetts have so-called “ballot-saving” statutes that allow votes for statewide and congressional races to be counted if a registered voter casts a ballot at the wrong polling location but in the correct county.

New York’s state Senate this week approved a bill that would likewise require votes cast in incorrect polling places to be counted whenever possible, as long as voters cast them in the county where they are registered, though it is still pending in the state Assembly.

“While other states around the U.S. are working overtime to restrict voting rights, here in New York we’re taking the opposite approach: the law should stand, as much as possible, on the side of voters looking to make their voices heard,” Senate Elections Committee Chairman Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat and the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement to Salon. “Allowing an eligible voter to cast ballots in an election where they are otherwise qualified to do so, even if they show up to the wrong school cafeteria on Election Day, is a step toward protecting the rights of all voters.”

Assemblyman Robert Carroll, anothert Brooklyn Democrat who is sponsoring the legislation in the Assembly, said in an interview with Salon that the bill aims to “correct an ill that I see as both a former practicing election lawyer and just as somebody who is an elected official and somebody who has been involved in New York state politics for a long time.”

The current rules are “unfair to the voter” and are “really an inadvertent way of suppressing what are otherwise valid votes,” he said, adding that “in a place like New York City, oftentimes folks live across the street from a polling place that isn’t their own or have to walk past the polling place that otherwise could be their polling place. So there’s lot of confusion.”

While the state’s confusing rules may have impacted the close race in central New York, it has also disproportionately impacted “majority-minority assembly districts in New York City,” Berg said, likely resulting in effective vote suppression.

Brindisi is backing the change after criticizing the violations that may have cost him the seat. “Out of 320,000 ballots cast, I lost by 109 votes,” he told WPIX. “Losing by 109 votes is frustrating, but what was more frustrating for me is knowing there were hundreds of legally registered voters who cast their ballots, but who through no fault of their own never had their vote counted.”

Tenney, who is now working with former President Donald Trump to push for voting reforms including voter ID and signature verification in response to his false claims about the election, did not respond to questions from Salon.

New York is one of the few states that provide no funding to its counties to run elections. Counties set their own rules for counting absentee and affidavit ballots after the November election, which can result in immense confusion.

“The thing that stood out to me is that we had eight counties in the district with eight different ways of doing things,” Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, told Syracuse.com. “There was no accountability whatsoever. As a voter, I want to make sure my vote is counted and not subject to the whims of what side of the county line I live on.”

The issues that plagued the election prompted a federal investigation that found that Oneida County had improperly rejected hundreds of affidavit ballots and violated voter rights by failing to process at least 2,400 valid voter registration applications in time for the election. A Justice Department official notified the county in March that it would file a civil lawsuit over apparent violations that had disenfranchised voters. Federal and county officials are reportedly in settlement talks.

Oneida County’s election commissioners resigned after blaming a lack of resources and issues that impacted elections across the board, including the pandemic and expanded absentee voting.

But “the resourcing can only explain so much about what those commissioners did,” Berg said. “From our perspective, it illustrates the need to modernize and standardize how we run elections in New York. We can’t have 58 boards of elections freelancing how we document absentee and affidavit challenges and objections.”

Berg called for the state to create uniform standards that all boards must follow and to require training for commissioners and elections staff. He described the Oneida County case as a “civil rights violation at scale,” and said it showed that voters “can do everything right and still be disenfranchised.”

It also sparked a realization that “if you had shone a bright spotlight on any board’s activities [in the state], you would find some kind of ugly stuff,” he said. “One thing that should come out of that is some professionalization, where commissioners and top-level staffers should be required to take some standardized training. Right now, we really don’t have much of that.” In too many places, he said, election jobs are still handed out as patronage, just like in the old days of machine politics. “We should be looking at the quality of our local election administration and what should that look like in a modern world to make sure people’s rights aren’t infringed.”

A new bill in the state Senate, S5800, would require mandatory uniform training for election commissioners and key staff, though it has yet to advance out of committee. But the state legislature has taken significant steps to address voting concerns in a state that has long been criticized for some of the nation’s most ungainly election laws, advancing constitutional amendments that would enact both same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration through the DMV.

“Same-day voter registration, allowing voters to request absentee ballots without requiring an ‘excuse,’ and simplifying the timeline for receiving and returning absentee ballots are just a few of the important voting changes we’re pushing in New York this year,” Myrie said. “These build on our previously successful efforts to establish early voting, allow voters to correct technical errors with their ballot like a missing signature, and automatically restoring voting rights to people on parole. At a macro level, New York must pass a voting-rights act that would create a host of protections for voters and restore many of the safeguards eliminated when the Supreme Court invalidated portions of the federal VRA.”

Carroll predicted that legislation to allow votes to be counted in the wrong precinct “would be a precursor to on-demand voting,” which he described as the “gold standard of voting.” In fact, that’s already available in some parts of New York for early voting, when voters can go to centralized polling sites and have correct ballots printed rather than needing to vote in a specific precinct.

“You have to vote in your county, but we’re going to give you real latitude of where it’s easier for busy people to go,” he said.

But at least some of New York’s election woes are the result of more insidious problems in the way the state runs elections. Carroll said he supports a “large-scale overhaul” of the Board of Elections and other rules that are “vestiges of Tammany Hall,” the corrupt political machine that dominated New York’s government for nearly two centuries.

“There’s things that create really weird outcomes that are very antiquated and Byzantine,” he said. “Those are most obviously shown in the way we select our Supreme Court judges through party conventions,” as well as “the way we go about our petitioning process and the partisan nature of the Board of Elections.”

Berg called on the state to make voting more transparent, allowing ballots to be tracked online and ensuring that voters are afforded due process. He pointed to the case of a smudged ballot cited in the legal battle over New York’s 22nd district. Tenney pushed to disqualify that ballot based on the bizarre argument that the smudge might have been blood, which could hypothetically have been used to identify the voter through a DNA test in violation of a person’s right to a secret ballot.

“That kind of preposterous garbage is held up all the time in these close contests to void perfectly good ballots,” Berg said. “We need to enshrine a counting principle, which is based on due process.”

Another bill introduced by Myrie, S253, would require votes to be counted regardless of stray marks as long as the intent of the voter is unambiguous.

But the larger issue is that the current system allows candidates to object to ballots for any number of reasons, potentially disenfranchising voters in haphazard fashion.

“Those practices are a threat to people’s rights and they should basically be whittled down to only good challenges,” Berg said. “The voter should have some due process and the ability to respond before we throw those people’s ballots out or put them before a judge who’s not even going to talk to the voter,” Berg said. “The person challenging it should swear under penalty of perjury that there’s foul play. We have none of that right now.”

More and more Americans are dying from “diseases of despair,” according to a new study

Nearly two years ago, I found myself standing in a humid, grimy motel room in Pennsylvania, talking to opioid addicts about what drove them to their addictions. At the time I was struck by the many differences in their stories: One was sexually abused and bullied as a child; another accidentally became addicted while taking pain medication. They were, in retrospect, all victims of what public health experts call “diseases of despair” —specifically, medical conditions that are often found in groups that feel despair due to a bleak economic or social outlook.

As evoked by the name, diseases of despair are profoundly political, in that nation-states with poor or non-existent welfare states see such disease more commonly. Drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide are among the most common diseases of despair. And and those diseases are killing an increasing number of people each year in the United States.

A recent study in the peer-reviewed open access medical journal BMJ Open found that suicide, alcohol-related diseases and accidental drug overdoses were the main factors driving a year-to-year drop in average life expectancy between 2015 and 2017 in the United States. Indeed, deaths in all of those categories have soared over the past decade, coinciding with a large-scale economic decline and the ongoing opioid crisis.

There are many alarming statistical nuggets buried in the scientists’ research. Suicidal thoughts and behavior among minors jumped by 287% between 2009 and 2018. During that same period, those tendencies increased by 210% among 18 to 34 year olds. Alcohol-related diagnoses spiked by 37% within that decade, while substance-related diagnoses skyrocket by 94%.

“Increasing clinical rates of disease of despair diagnoses largely mirror broader societal trends in mortality,” the authors write. “While the opioid crisis remains a top public health priority, parallel rises in alcohol-related diagnoses and suicidality must be concurrently addressed.”

Salon spoke by email with study co-author Dr. Danny George, an associate professor of medical humanities at Pennsylvania State University. (George clarified that because discussions about diseases of despair invariably lead to politics, the views he expresses here are entirely his own.)

As George noted, a so-called “disease of despair” is not the same thing as simply feeling momentarily depressed or stressed.

“The formal category of ‘diseases of despair’ would refer to people who don’t just feel down but actively seek out medical care for suicidality and substance abuse,” George explained, adding that not everyone is able to do this because of America’s health insurance system. “It’s important to emphasize that ‘despair’ does not merely refer to an aberrant internal state but is rather the consequence of a particular set of political-economic and cultural conditions that are producing distress.”

He stressed that those who suffer or die from diseases of despair are victims, and should not be blamed for their plight. “There are larger structures driving despair and distress in peoples’ lives en masse,” said George.

George identified a number of factors that have caused an increase in disease of despair. These range from the weakening of labor unions and growing income inequality to globalization and deindustrialization. When the working class sees that its economic situation has decline, this leads to “weakened family structures, destabilized communal and social bonds, reduced participation in social organizations like churches, and just generally sown loneliness, disconnection, and loss of hope for the future.”

In terms of concrete policy solutions, George pointed out that “any policies that would improve the biopsychosocial wellbeing of working-class Americans could be expected to move the needle on both diseases and deaths of despair.” This is why he personally supports things like jobs that pay living wages and full benefits, universal access to college or vocational education, debt relief and guaranteed healthcare for every citizen.

“My personal view is that despair-related illness reflects a failure of capitalism and the consequences of a political class that has served the needs of the elite while largely abandoning the working class,” George told Salon.

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Meghan McCain, Joy Behar clash over COVID-19 vaccines in segment-ending feud

Another clash broke out on “The View” Thursday as Meghan McCain and Joy Behar fought over conservatives who continue to refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine to “own the libs.”

McCain argued that it isn’t the way conservatives feel and that many people she knows are concerned about how the vaccine impacts their fertility. Studies showed that the vaccine didn’t have any adverse impact on pregnant women, but McCain said that the same studies haven’t examined the fertility of women who got the shot. Presumably, all women of childbearing age could be examined for fertility who got the vaccine.

Co-host Sunny Hostin called those who refuse to get the vaccine “selfish,” noting that people are “supposed to be our brothers and sisters keeper.”

“We’re supposed to take care of each other,” said Hostin. “The notion we have to incentivize people to get vaccinated so they not only protect themselves and their families but their fellow citizens — I guess I can’t make sense of something like that when you have a country like India where there are 4,500 deaths every day from COVID and people there are begging for the vaccine. I don’t understand why in this country where people say this is just the most glorious country in the world where we have all of these freedoms and we have, you know — we just have so much that you have to actually give free metro cards to people, give money to people, enter people into a million-dollar lottery in order for them to take a life-saving vaccine, I just find it, you know, sort of sad and selfish and quite frankly kind of absurd.”

Behar said that Dr. Anthony Fauci has to remain polite to anti-vaccine people as he continues his attempt to reduce vaccine hesitancy with information.

“It’s not that complicated, people. It’s not nuclear physics. All you have to do is get the damn vaccine. When you go inside, wear a mask, even if you have the vaccine,” Behar said. “There might be variants around. Get the damn vaccine. Get the booster when that time is coming. What is the complicated problem here with people? I don’t understand. Is this just to own the libs? Maybe they’re not seeing enough on television the way people suffer when they get the disease. Even though the numbers are going down, people are still dying.

She recalled the Polio vaccine being huge when she was a child after watching so many children be put in iron lungs and lose their ability to walk.

“You’re not owning the libs by not gets the shot,” Behar explained. “Nobody is growing an extra arm or head. Everybody is fine. It’s the people not taking it who are not fine. I’m sick of it.”

McCain complained that the “messaging” to conservatives isn’t helpful because mocking them for being “stupid” and trying to “own the libs” by dying are insulting and that people should be nicer. She also complained that there aren’t figures or numbers on television to help quell “some of this.” Most news stations have shown a substantial decline of COVID infections as a result of the vaccine and of COVID deaths. Specifics are available with a Google search.

“I think, again, the White House and the CDC has done a terrible job in saying what do you want to own the libs and that’s that?” said McCain. “It’s not productive. That’s why people go into their corners. This is coming from a place of fear. I don’t think it’s a place of politics. People don’t understand and don’t know. I don’t like to judge people who aren’t accessible to the same resources and education I am. This is a serious, serious problem in this country. I agree with Sunny it’s a luxury to have the vaccine. I was happy to get vaccinated. Maybe they should make the vaccine card in a size I can carry around in my wallet. It’s this big right now. A lot of things they’ve done, they’re really stupid. I’m also sick of that.”

Behar came in noting that people of color absolutely have justifications for being fearful of the vaccine given the disgraceful history. McCain cut in, talking over her, which prompted Behar to talk over her.

“When you come on the show and say we’re owning the libs, it’s factually inaccurate about the demographics who are not getting vaccinated,” McCain said.

“A lot of these people that we’re talking about, Meghan, are watching Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson who are telling them that–” Behar said before McCain shouted over her.

“They are not! They are not!” McCain maintained.

“We’re going to come back,” Whoopi Goldberg said as the women yelled in the background.

See the video below:

FAUCI SAYS PUBLIC MISINTERPRETING MASK GUIDELINES: As the confusion continues after the CDC announced fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear a mask, the co-hosts react to Dr. Fauci’s recent comments on mask guidelines. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/css2rXEbxn

— The View (@TheView) May 20, 2021

Right wingers blame Biden for Chick-Fil-A sauce shortage: ‘It’s just so embarrassing’

Last week, Chick-Fil-A announced that because of supply chain difficulties, it was limiting the amount of sauce it was giving to customers. And some far-right Republicans, insanely, are blaming President Joe Biden for the sauce shortage the fast food chain is experiencing.

The wingnuts pointing the finger at Biden include Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt. Cruz, who is never shy about making ludicrous statements, tweeted:

Joe Biden is destroying America. https://t.co/0G1zpgS2ax

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 12, 2021

On Twitter, Boebert — a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy cult — posted:

Is there no limit to how awful Biden’s America can get? https://t.co/fm9eGHhkel

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) May 12, 2021

Far-right wingnuts have a long history of coming up with ridiculous lines of attack against Democratic presidents. The late radio host Rush Limbaugh, in 2009, blamed President Barack Obama for the death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, claiming that Jackson had given up on life thanks to Obama’s presidency.

Stitt is using the claim that Biden caused Chick-Fil-A’s sauce shortage as a cynical fundraising opportunity. A fundraising e-mail from the Oklahoma governor read, “Chick-fil-A has a sauce shortage. And you want to know why? Because of Joe Biden’s radical liberal policies.”

The e-mail went on to say, “Gas stations are having mass shortages, gas prices are soaring, the cost of groceries is through the roof, and now Chick-fil-a (sic) has a sauce shortage. And who is paying the price? Everyday Americans.”

Oklahoma Gov Kevin Stitt’s re-election campaign is now claiming that “Joe Biden’s radical liberal policies” are to blame for Chick-fil-A’s sauce shortage.

It asks readers to donate to Stitt to “make sure Chick-Fil-A never has another sauce shortage.” pic.twitter.com/uWm8wY6zD9

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) May 17, 2021

Here are some responses to Republicans blaming Biden for Chick-Fil-A’s sauce shortage.

When capitalism creates a shortage of sugar sauce you need to make unseasoned bland chicken breast palatable just blame Biden https://t.co/MqzTlJb7Hy

— Arthritic Contortionist (@edlouhan) May 17, 2021

It’s just so embarrassing. https://t.co/U7b05kQjxP

— Abby Broyles (@abbybroyles) May 17, 2021

Ngl, this is the hardest I've laughed in a while https://t.co/65dKSyJOZl

— Sully (@Gn0ki) May 12, 2021

Trump DOJ secretly collected CNN reporter’s email, phone records: report

On Thursday, CNN reported that the Justice Department, under former President Donald Trump, secretly collected email and phone records from a CNN reporter, without notifying either the reporter or the news organization.

“The Justice Department informed CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, in a May 13 letter, that prosecutors had obtained her phone and email records covering two months, between June 1, 2017 to July 31, 2017,” reported Jeremy Herb and Jessica Schneider. “The letter listed phone numbers for Starr’s Pentagon extension, the CNN Pentagon booth phone number and her home and cell phones, as well as Starr’s work and personal email accounts.”

“The seizure of Starr’s records is the third disclosure in as many weeks where the Trump administration used its Justice Department to secretly obtain communications of journalists or to expose the identity of critics of former President Donald Trump’s allies,” continued the report.

Starr reportedly was not the target of a criminal investigation.

“CNN strongly condemns the secret collection of any aspect of a journalist’s correspondence, which is clearly protected by the First Amendment,” CNN President Jeff Zucker said in a statement. “We are asking for an immediate meeting with the Justice Department for an explanation.”

Under Trump, the Justice Department was frequently controversial for its attitude towards the press. At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General William Barr stumbled over a question about whether he would use the DOJ to imprison journalists.

House progressives and conservatives both vote against bill to increase funding to Capitol police

On Thursday, the House approved a $1.9 billion emergency spending package designed to fortify Capitol security in the wake of the Capitol riot – but not without significant resistance from the Squad.

The coterie of progressives took particular issue with one provision in the bill that would allot more money to the Capitol Police. The bill, which eked out a 213-212 vote, was in fact met with vocal pushback from Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo., Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. – all of whom voted “no” – as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y. – who voted “present.” All present Republicans voted against the measure.

“There are some things about the bill that I support, like making sure our custodial staff and our cleaners have the resources they need to respond and deal with this trauma,” Bowman explained. “But there are other parts of it that I don’t support, like adding more funding to police budgets. So that’s why I decided to vote present.”

Bush, Omar and Pressley echoed Bowman in a joint statement: “We cannot support this increased funding while many of our communities continue to face police brutality while marching in the streets, and while questions about the disparate response between insurrectionists and those protesting in defense of Black lives go unanswered.”

Their resistance sparked annoyance from many Democrats who threw their support behind the bill, thinking it would be overwhelmingly backed by their caucus. “That kind of gotcha thing does not help,” one Democrat said, suggesting that the Squad members did not forewarn their colleagues prior to the floor vote.

House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., stood her ground against the Squad, arguing that “the funding is not optional.”

“This vote is not a show vote,” DeLauro said. “It’s about protecting the seat of our democracy and the men and the women and the young people who work here and serve it.”

Other provisions under the bill would compensate the National Guard and Washington, D.C. for the damages they incurred as a result of the insurrection on Jan 6. It would also assemble an emergency response team dedicated to fortifying the Capitol building in cases like the riot, where members of Congress are in physical danger.

Rep. Kay Granger, R-Tex., a ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, expressed frustration over the bill’s suddenness, saying that it amounted to a “one-sided solution.”

“The bill we are considering today implements permanent recommendations before ongoing security assessments are complete,” she said, adding that it raises “serious concerns about the role of our military on American soil.”

The bill is expected to see significant pushback in the Senate, many of whose Republican members have actively sought to downplay the significance of the insurrection. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Thursday expressed reservations. “We’re not sure what to spend the money on yet,” he said. “So I think we are pushing the pause button here.”

The bill comes just after the House on Wednesday passed a bill to assemble a bipartisan commission to investigate the details behind the Capitol riot. Senate Republicans have expressed vehement opposition to the commission, making the bill unlikely to reach the president’s desk.

Trump Organization financial chief under investigation for possible tax crimes: reports

The New York attorney general’s office has spent months criminally investigating Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, according to reports from The New York Times, CNN and other outlets.

Attorney General Letitia James’ office notified the ex-president’s company in January that it had opened a criminal probe into Weisselberg, according to the reports. Investigators are looking at whether Weisselberg paid taxes on fringe benefits from the company, which included cars and tens of thousands of dollars in private school tuition for at least one of his grandchildren.

James had been leading a civil investigation into the Trump Organization for some time, but her office said this week that it had informed the company “we are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity,” joining the Manhattan district attorney’s years-long criminal investigation. Two assistant attorneys general from James’ office have embedded with Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s team.

Vance’s investigation has also increasingly focused on Weisselberg in recent months, reportedly in an effort to gain his cooperation as a witness against former President Donald Trump and the company.

Weisselberg has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Along with the probe into Weisselberg’s finances, Vance and James are also looking at whether the Trump Organization inflated the value of its assets when applying for loans while deflating their value in an effort to reduce the associated tax burden. Former Trump Organization vice president Michael Cohen testified to Congress that this was routine practice at the company and has since been interviewed more than a half-dozen times by Vance’s office.

Trump lashed out over the reports on Wednesday in a lengthy block of text, claiming it was an “investigation that is in desperate search of a crime.” Trump accused the Democratic prosecutors of a politically motivated harassment campaign aimed at destroying his “political fortunes.”

Advisers told the Times that Trump has become “agitated” by the ongoing investigations.

The attorney general’s investigation into Weisselberg is focused on his individual tax returns, though it could expand to include actions he has taken at the Trump Organization, where he has handled the company’s finances for four decades, according to CNN. Weisselberg recently hired prominent tax attorney Bryan Skarlatos, according to the report.

Investigators are reportedly looking at whether the Trump Organization used fringe benefits as compensation to lower their payroll taxes.

The attorney general’s interest in Weisselberg stems from a trove of documents that Jennifer Weisselberg, his former daughter-in-law, shared with prosecutors after a referral from state tax authorities, according to ABC News. Jennifer Weisselberg told CNN she has been in contact with James’ office since September. Her attorney told the outlet that she has more than two decades of bank records, credit card documents and tax records related to the investigation. Vance’s office recently subpoenaed those documents.

Jennifer Weisselberg was married for 14 years to Barry Weisselberg, who managed Trump’s skating rinks in Manhattan for 20 years. Barry Weisselberg testified during a 2018 divorce deposition obtained by CNN that his father had largely funded their “lavish lifestyle.” Documents in the case show that thousands of dollars in payments for cars, rent, tuition and medical bills from Allen Weisselberg to the couple.

Vance’s office earlier this month subpoenaed documents related to more than $500,000 in tuition payments for Allen Weisselberg’s grandchildren at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, which Trump’s son Barron also attended. The checks were signed by either Allen Weisselberg or Trump himself, Jennifer Weisselberg told The Wall Street Journal.

“I know for a fact Donald wrote those checks,” she told CNN last month, referring to some of the payments for one of her children.

Her attorney told media outlets that she will continue to cooperate with investigators.

“My knowledge of the documents and my voice connect the flow of money from various banks and from personal finances that bleed directly into the Trump Organization,” she told the Washington Post last month.

She also told Air Mail in an interview that her ex-husband’s “real job was to be Trump’s eye on the cash” at the largely cash-only Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park as well as the Lasker Rink and the Central Park Carousel. Once a week, Barry Weisselberg would collect all of the cash and walk it to his father’s office in Trump Tower, she said.

“What does Allen do with it? I don’t think all the cash was reported. It was for Trump,” she claimed in the interview. “That’s why he wanted [Barry] there so bad.”

It’s unclear whether prosecutors have made headway in their bid to “flip” Allen Weisselberg, though he previously cooperated with the New York attorney general’s investigation into Trump’s charitable foundation, which resulted in a $2 million penalty and forced it to close down, as well as the federal investigation into hush-money payments that Cohen paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels on Trump’s behalf.

“Trump doesn’t care about Allen,” Jennifer Weisselberg told Air Mail, “but Allen knows every bad thing he ever did.”

CNN’s Chris Cuomo secretly advised brother to remain defiant in face of sex harassment allegations

In the days after several women accused New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, his brother, the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, joined a series of calls with senior members of the elder Cuomo’s staff and others to strategize how the governor should respond, according to a report.

The 50-year-old cable host advised his brother to remain defiant and not resign, several sources told The Washington Post. At one point, the CNN star even reportedly used the phrase “cancel culture” to describe the situation.

The news is a stunning departure from commonly accepted journalistic norms, which state that those involved with reporting the news should not personally be involved in the events they are covering.

CNN admitted in a statement that Chris Cuomo participated in the strategy calls for his brother, and called his involvement a “mistake”

“Chris has not been involved in CNN’s extensive coverage of the allegations against Governor Cuomo — on air or behind the scenes, in part because, as he has said on his show, he could never be objective. But also because he often serves as a sounding board for his brother,” the statement reads.

“However, it was inappropriate to engage in conversations that included members of the Governor’s staff, which Chris acknowledges. He will not participate in such conversations going forward.”

Prior to Thursday’s news, Chris Cuomo had already come under fire in 2020 for a series of softball interviews with his brother, one of the most powerful politicians in the country, as his state became the epicenter of a global COVID-19 pandemic. The coverage gave CNN a huge ratings boost.

“Obviously I love you as a brother, obviously I’ll never be objective, obviously I think you’re the best politician in the country,” he said during one of the conversations.

It was later revealed that the younger Cuomo also benefited directly from his sibling’s powerful perch in Albany, receiving preferential COVID-19 testing at his Hamptons home from top state officials in charge of the state’s pandemic response.

CNN said it will not discipline Chris Cuomo as a result of the news.

The parentification trap: How evangelical daughters like the Duggar girls become mothers in training

By the time she was 13 years old, Ruth’s daily schedule was almost identical to that of her mother’s.

Both would wake up at 5:30 a.m. and spend an hour picking away at the seemingly endless list of chores associated with running what would eventually become a 12-person household: laundering and mending the mountain of hand-me-down clothes that occupied a corner of the kitchen, loading up three slow cookers with ingredients for dinner, cleaning the bathrooms before they’d be in use, on-and-off, all day.

If Ruth’s mom was pregnant — which is how Ruth, who asked that only her first name be used, primarily remembers her — then the bulk of the work would fall to Ruth. She would be the one to wake her younger siblings and prepare them breakfast before walking the ones who were old enough to a church-run elementary school nearby.

“I didn’t really have the option to pursue school outside of homeschooling, though, because my mom needed me to help with the much younger kiddos,” Ruth told me in a phone call.

“I remember complaining about it for the first time when I was probably 11 and I’ll never forget what she told me,” she continued. “She said, ‘Ruth, this is what God made you for.'”

Ruth, who is now 31 and lives outside of Atlanta, describes her family’s religion as a “slippery slope that led to Quiverfull.”

Her father was raised in a sleepy independent Baptist church in rural Georgia in the 1970s.

“But he always had a flair for the dramatic,” Ruth said. “Dad liked the Bible stories about the ‘big miracles.’ Jesus feeding the thousands, Moses parting the Red Sea, that kind of thing. So, when he visited a Pentecostal tent revival, where they were handling snakes and speaking in tongues, I think that was it for him.”

Her father, she says, was deeply compelled by the idea of demonstrating one’s faith in God through outsized public displays. He gravitated towards scripture that encouraged followers of Christ to “be in the world, but not of the world.” After traveling through the South for a few years as a self-made evangelist who did odd jobs on the side, he married and saw an opportunity to follow God to the extreme by having as many children as possible to serve Christ.

When asked about his decision, Ruth remembers her father would recite a Psalm from the King James Version of the Old Testament: “As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.”

It’s the same verse that other adherents to Quiverfull ideology — as well as the scandal-ridden Duggar family of TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting,” who have previously said they do not identify as part of the Quiverfull movement — point to as a theological backing for their movement. They interpret it as a command to reproduce often without any birth control or family planning.

“I grew up around at least a half dozen other Quiverfull families, maybe more,” Ruth said. “And the parents, the fathers mostly, would talk about what a blessing children are, but I’ll tell you, they didn’t care about the female arrows in their quiver.”

* * *

Even in many more mainstream evangelical congregations, girls are trained up to be wives and mothers.

Before I hit puberty, youth leaders at my parents’ Baptist church would talk to us about the virtues inherent to “Proverbs 31 wives,” which was based on a description of the ideal Godly woman that was purportedly written by King Solomon — who, if you’ll remember, also supposedly had 700 wives and 300 concubines. (The irony is overwhelming in retrospect).

It was made clear that we were to be pure and virtuous “help meets” for our future husbands, someone to assist them in their role as spiritual leader of the household.

In Quiverfull families, however, the eldest daughters often take on the role of “little mothers,” as the blog “Quivering Daughters” aptly put it, or as additional help meets.

While it’s inevitable in any family with multiple children that the older siblings will have some responsibilities that younger siblings do not, in families that reach the double-digits in size and where Biblical patriarchy is preached, the burden falls heavily to the girls, which can have long-lasting psychological effects.

In 2017, The Atlantic published an article titled “When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life,” which dove into the concept of “destructive parentification,” a form of emotional abuse or neglect where a child becomes the caregiver to their parent or sibling. Researchers are increasingly finding that in addition to upending a child’s development, this role reversal can leave deep emotional scars well into adulthood.

Lisa M. Hooper, a University of Louisville professor who studies parentification, told the publication that many children who were made to parent their siblings now “experience severe anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. Others report succumbing to eating disorders and substance abuse.”

“The symptoms look similar to some extent, from cradle to grave,” Hooper told the Atlantic.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa, the author of “Childhood Disrupted,” added: “Chronic, unpredictable stress is toxic when there’s no reliable adult.”

Much of the research that has been done on destructive parentification focused primarily on children whose parents were neglectful or unavailable because of alcoholism or addiction. But a survey of writings from women who were raised as Quiverfull daughters shows similar evidence of feeling anxiously unmoored.

Hillary McFarland, the author of “Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy,” shared an excerpt of an old diary entry on her blog in 2009. She’d written it when she was 14.

“I’m having a bad day today,” she wrote. “I’m just so tired! I’m so tired of working—there is always something that needs to be done and dad is never satisfied. I’m tired of being overwhelmed with everything. I’m tired of washing dishes every night, I wish that the house would stay clean for 2-3 days—the kids are always cutting up paper, getting out toys, splashing water all over the bathroom sink, getting mud and sand all over the bathroom floor.”

She continued: “I’m tired of getting mad at my brothers and sisters, I wish I were perfect. I absolutely abhor the thought that every idle word will be judged . . . lately I have been doing some self-analyzing, or examining—I’m trash . . . I’m sick of disappointing God.”

That concept of disappointing God runs heavily through Quiverfull families. In many cases, there aren’t enough hours in a day or resources, emotional and financial, to go around and it’s burdensome; but as Vyckie Garrison, a former Quiverfull wife told Salon in an interview last week, many mothers approach it as a spiritual challenge or a backyard mission field.

“The [fellow Quiverfull] women would tell me, ‘Missionaries risk their lives every day and they do it because it’s their calling,'” she said. “‘When they get to heaven, they’ll get their martyr’s crown.’ There’s a huge martyr’s mentality.”

Over the last decade, the concept of parentification has gained enough mainstream traction that former viewers of the now-cancelled TLC show “19 Kids and Counting” have started to question whether the network’s framing of the family as an oversized “Waltons” was shielding something more sinister, especially as the family’s eldest son, Josh, has fallen into scandal after scandal, and has now been arrested for the possession of child pornography.

Throughout the years, there have been numerous web forums and subreddits dedicated to going back and watching old footage of the show while advocating for the “freedom” of some of the Duggar family’s daughters. Former Quiverfull daughters are now speaking out as well while the family is under increased scrutiny.

“One time, my family attended a talk by the Duggar parents and my baby brother was crying, so I had to take him out to the hall where all the other older daughters were handling their parents’ babies, including Jessa and we all shared this exhausted look that I remember to this day,” one Twitter user wrote.

She continued: “Looking back now, it’s so f**king funny that you had all these families who worshipped the Duggars and their way of life and all these daughters were in the hall with their parents’ babies just like… f**k this, I’m tired.”

Ruth felt this acutely while growing up. Most nights, she would only get five hours of sleep — between staying up late to finish chores, waking throughout the night to feed or comfort one of the babies, and getting up early — and was always exhausted.

“Since I was so tired, I would lash out at my parents and siblings and then I would get reprimanded,” she said. “While I was being punished, I would angrily pray to God, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I’m just trying to serve you.'”

* * *

Ruth ended up running away when she was 17 after watching “Now, Voyager,” a 1942 film starring Bette Davis. Her parents were strict about what she and her siblings watched, but most “black and white classics” were deemed acceptable.

The film takes its name from the Walt Whitman poem “The Untold Want,” which says, “The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted, Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

“In it, Bette Davis’ character lives with a controlling mother who always puts her down and then she has this mental break,” Ruth said. “She ends up moving away, getting healthy, becoming fashionable and then she comes back. I thought that I could do that, too. All I really wanted was a break.”

Her break was a little less glamorous than Davis’. She got a job at a local convenience store and split rent with an elderly coworker. At night, she studied for her GED and on weekends, she’d eat cereal in her pajamas and watch television — trashy reality shows and Animal Planet, mostly.

It was the first time in Ruth’s life that she didn’t have a schedule; it was also the first time that she really watched the Duggars on television. “I watched this sanitized version of what Quiverfull life was like and I was hurt, I was disgusted,” she said. “I can’t even look at them to this day without getting angry.”

Ruth said she hopes that the Duggars’ crumbling facade in the face of Josh’s scandals will make the public question other aspects of the family life they modeled for years on TV.

“I think back to how my mom said, ‘God made you for this,’ and I finally had to say, ‘No, God made me for more,'” she said.

Devos denied: Citing “extraordinary circumstances,” judge orders Trump Cabinet member to testify

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will have to testify in a class action lawsuit over her handling of the Education Department’s student debt loan forgiveness program.

Judge William Alsup said “exceptional circumstances” warrant issuing DeVos a subpoena, a move that goes against both Devos’ and the Biden administration’s requests to excuse her from providing testimony.

The lawsuit, which has been brought on behalf of about 160,000 borrowers, alleges that the plaintiffs were defrauded by for-profit colleges and then neglected by the federal government.

The controversy dates back to 2018, when the Department of Education unexpectedly stopped making decisions on “student-loan borrower-defense applications,” in which students could petition the department to have their debt federally relieved if they believed their colleges had misled them.

After an 18-month halt on the program, the Trump administration began rejecting a disproportionately high number of applications issuing scant explanations as to why, instead citing that the Department needed to mull over its policy on the issue. At the time, Devos claimed that making decisions on these applications was “time-consuming and complex.”

DeVos will be pressed in her hearing on the department’s inadequate record-keeping of loan forgiveness claims, as well as whether the Trump administration lied about its rationale for the vast number of rejections it issued.

“If the judicial process runs to presidents, it runs to Cabinet secretaries — especially former ones,” Alsup wrote in his decision, adducing the subpoena of former President Richard Nixon over the Watergate tapes following Nixon’s departure from office. “Extraordinary circumstances warrant the deposition of Secretary DeVos for three hours, excluding breaks.”

Over the past several months, four depositions have been conducted with testimony from numerous Education Department officials, all of which have denied responsibility for the sudden discontinuation of the loan relief program, as well as the unexplained wave of rejections. Many pointed to DeVos as a prime suspect.

“Beyond illuminating her involvement, these material gaps at the highest rungs of the Department’s decision-making record reveal the necessity of Secretary DeVos’s testimony for an independent reason,” Alsup argued. “We lack an official and contemporaneous justification for the eighteen-month delay because this suit concerns agency inaction, and not the usual agency action.”

Alsup specifically claimed that DeVos appears to have had a personal hand in the department’s decision-making process. Lawyers are expected to ask the former official whether she “directed her subordinates to cease issuing student-loan borrower-defense decisions, or whether she tacitly approved of the halt once manifested.”

Theresa Sweet, a leading plaintiff in the suit, told Forbes in March: “Nearly 200,000 defrauded students are still waiting for justice, due in no small part to the malicious efforts of Betsy DeVos and the for-profit education lackeys with which she surrounded herself as Secretary of Education. She utterly failed in her duty to protect students from harm and to hold scam schools accountable.”

A hearing for the suit had been scheduled for June 3.

“He’s very much a peacock”: Raúl Castillo on his “Army of the Dead” role and not feeling tokenized

Raúl Castillo is one of those characters actors who really should be a leading man. While he has had starring roles in the indie films “We the Animals” and “El Chicano,” he frequently works in television as part of an ensemble — he was the sensitive romantic, Richie, in the gay series “Looking,” and one of the guilty cops in “Seven Seconds.” He also has appeared in some great shorts, including “Limbo,” and “Sloan Hearts Neckface.”

Castillo is currently appearing in three films that showcase him playing characters with machismo. In Zack Snyder‘s “Army of the Dead,” his trigger-happy YouTuber, Mikey Guzman, fights off zombies in Las Vegas while on a mission to recover $200 million in cash. In Guy Ritchie’s “Wrath of Man,” Castillo plays Sam, one of a crew of thieves looking to jack cash trucks. And in “iGilbert,” which is screening at the Maryland Film Festival and the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, Castillo is in toxic male mode as Tony, an Iraq vet with PTSD trying to win back his girlfriend, Jana (Dasha Polanco).

In real life, the actor is far more modest — and thoughtful — than the outsized characters he plays, which only shows how deep he will go in a role. In a recent interview, Castillo talked about his career choices and his current crop of films.

One of the things I wanted to discuss is your range. I like that you constantly work and mix it up. Do you feel you still have to prove yourself as “a Brown man in a mostly white industry”?

Less and less I worry about proving myself, and more and more I think about what kinds of projects I want to put out in the world. The slate of projects I put out this year were no-brainers for me. I try to trust my gut and when something comes through, I look for reasons to get excited about the work — or reasons to disconnect from it. With each of these projects, there were elements about them that excited me and made me thrilled to take them on.

You are starting to appear in more Hollywood films, as “Army of the Dead” and “Wrath of Man” attest. What observations do you have about working in big budget action films? Do you feel you are living the dream?

In certain ways, doing the big budget movies was confirmation that I could do them. Before it was the unknown. I had not worked on a production on the level of “Army of the Dead,” or “Wrath of Man,” so being in that playing space, and knowing that I could bring everything that I learned up to this point and apply it to the work that I’m doing in these very different projects is exciting to me — to stretch and leap into new territories. It’s something I always wanted to do as an actor. I didn’t want to stay on one path or play one kind of character. I wanted to play characters that are remarkably different from each other, and the characters in these projects certainly are.

How important is it for you to appear in Latinx films like “iGilbert” and even “El Chicano,” for visibility and inspiration? Do you feel tokenized being part of an ensemble, or a responsibility to represent?

I never felt tokenized in these spaces because I’ve been part of an ensemble. Even when I was doing theater, I loved being part of an ensemble play. “Wrath of Man” and “Army of the Dead” are very much ensemble films, and it’s fun to be part of a team. It’s always fun to play in both, be with the family and be with Latinx artists and then to be the one [Latinx] person. Even in college at Boston University in the ’90s, I knew it was important for me to be navigating in those spaces. Being a Mexican American from the border to explore in these spaces we don’t get to explore a lot, traditionally. I don’t feel responsibility [to do Latinx films] the only responsibility I feel is to myself. When I read a script and I’m excited about it and the character is specifically Latinx, I know where to ground him and if he’s not, it’s another conversation.

In “Army of the Dead” your character had dyed-blonde hair, wears a snakeskin shirt, and makes YouTube videos. You seem to be having fun playing a character who is having fun. Can you discuss how you created Mikey?

[Laughs] He was such a fun character to play. He’s so different from anything I’ve played before. He’s very much a peacock, and it was fun to put that on because I’m not like that in my daily life. That’s why I became an actor — to explore other ways of being in the world. When I read the script, I figured him out, I knew he needed to be bold. It’s a testament to Zack Snyder that he’s very collaborative in nature. I came to him with this idea that he was a YouTuber and brash, and the blonde hair was an interesting choice. [Snyder] was open to it and we came up with this look. Zack really let me be creative with it. The character was so much fun — we got to shoot some YouTube videos that were not in the movie that might have another life. It was fun to play with the character of Mikey outside the realm of the film. We got to take him out into the world and have fun with him. The whole YouTube influencer gaming world is so rich and complex.

What can you say about playing tough guys with guns as you do in “Wrath of Man,” and “Army of the Dead”?

There is a power and freedom to it. I like to mix it up. It’s certainly something that I knew as a kid growing up in Texas. Hunting and that culture was ingrained in my immediate family in Texas. I was a typical kid who played with GI Joes, and I loved zombie films when I was a kid. I really did. Horror movies — I ate that stuff up before I started acting, I was obsessed with horror movies. A lot of times [on set] it feels like being a kid. The process of making [“Army”] is actually quite silly and joyful. The cast had a great camaraderie. It gave me respect for being an action star. It’s really hard work, it’s very tiring. It was humbling to experience that. It felt like child’s play, even though it was all high stakes and you had to take the work seriously because when you do stunts, people’s lives and livelihood is on the line. But at the same time, it’s about having fun.

Did you get to do any stunts?

We did some stunts. Zack used doubles, and the zombies were stunt actors — they worked harder than anyone in all honesty. It was learning a whole new skill set as an actor. [Doing stunts] is all about relaxation, which boils down to theater training, which is rooted in relaxation. If you’re tense doing a stunt, you’re more likely to hurt yourself than if you relax.

In “iGilbert” you are menacing when your character kisses his girlfriend Jana (Dasha Polanco). He later tries to seduce her, but it is painful; she calls him a “tear drinker,” because he is someone who enjoys her suffering. How do you get into that mindset of playing such a toxic man?

That’s a testament to Dasha and the trust we felt with one another. It was such a dark journey and their relationship was so complicated. There is a lot of toxicity in it. She had my back and I had hers, and I could go there with her. I wasn’t afraid to because she would tell me if she was uncomfortable. She trusted me, and that was important. You have to keep each other safe. The last thing I ever want to do is traumatize someone. It is dark and toxic, but Dasha let me go there.

While I admire your swagger, which you display in all three of these films, I like when you reveal some sensitivity. Do you crave playing romantic parts?

I am such an emo kid. I love romantic, dramatic work and I can’t wait to do more of it. I have a subscription to the Criterion Channel, and I love arthouse movies, European, and foreign films and films that explore authentic versions of humanity. If I read a script that leans into that direction, I’m interested. It has to be good. That’s what matters to me — a storyteller who can command a voice and working with directors who are real visionaries in any genre.

You made two “bag of money” movies back to back. How would you spend a big bag of cash?

[Laughs] There is so much going on in the world right now and so many people in need. My castmate Huma Qureshi from “Army of the Dead” is raising funds for the children of India that have been infected by the coronavirus.

You have told me in the past that you have written plays. Do you have any aspirations to film them, or write or direct a short or feature to create opportunities for yourself as an artist?

Definitely. There are a couple projects I’ve set in motion. Certainly, the last year, being in quarantine, I think a lot of artists have been creative and started thinking of how to tell their own stories. I want to put the muscle I developed as a playwright to use now. There are a couple on the producing end that I’m not writing, and one that I’m involved in the early stages of the script. It’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for a very long time and hoping that I can see that through.

“Wrath of Man” is currently in theaters. “Army of the Dead” releases Friday, May 21 on Netflix.

Why studying Uranus and Neptune could help us find habitable planets in other solar systems

Astronomers have long predicted that deep beneath Neptune’s thick blue clouds lies a super-hot body of water that, despite its high temperature, never boils because of its incredibly high-pressure atmosphere. Uranus, another planet in the outer solar system of similar size and composition, is also believed to have a similar water-rich interior. Unfortunately, due to their distances from Earth, it is hard to directly probe these two planets to test our assumption. But scientists have found novel ways of testing their theories about these ice giants from Earth.

As described in a newly-published study from Nature Astronomy, scientists recreated the pressure and temperature of the interiors of Neptune and Uranus in a lab. The aim of the experiments was to test hypotheses about the chemistry of the deep water within these planets. But the study could have additional implications for what we know about potentially habitable planets in other solar systems.

“We were seeking to extend our knowledge of the deep interior of ice giants and determine what water-rock interactions at extreme conditions might exist,” said lead author Taehyun Kim, of Yonsei University in South Korea. “Ice giants and some exoplanets have very deep water layers, unlike terrestrial planets. We proposed the possibility of an atomic-scale mixing of two of the planet-building materials (water and rock) in the interiors of ice giants.”

To replicate the conditions, scientists dipped rock-forming minerals — including olivine and ferropericlase — into water, and then compressed the sample in a diamond-anvil to very high pressures. From there, they took x-ray measurements while a laser heated the sample to extremely high temperatures, then measured the reaction. They found that the chemical reaction led to high concentrations of magnesium in the water, leading the team to conclude that oceans on planets like Neptune and Uranus might have similar chemical properties as oceans here on Earth.

Indeed, part of the intrigue of these two planets is the presence of magnesium within their water. Early Earth is believed to have had magnesium-rich waters, which likely played a role in the evolution of early life.

The study’s co-author, Sang-Heon Dan Shim of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, explained during a phone interview that the differences in pressure between planets like Earth and Neptune and Uranus can cause “completely different types of chemical reactions” at the bottom of these oceans.

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“If you have thick oceans interfacing with rock at the bottom, what happens to that?” Shim said. “And we found that magnesium, which doesn’t dissolve a lot in the water at low pressure, begins to sort of dissolve a lot in the ocean, or liquid water, to the degree that you would expect for solubility of salt in water at low pressure.”

The study has interesting implications for the study of exoplanets, meaning planets that exist in other solar systems. As Shim explained, their study implies that the oceans of Neptune-like exoplanets may have different chemistry.

Typically, the presence of water on an exoplanet perks up the ears of astronomers and astrobiologists, as anywhere with water implies the potential for either life or habitability. Given the super-hot temperatures in the deep oceans of Neptune and Uranus, Shim said life is unlikely to exist in these planets, despite the rich presence of magnesium.

“The temperature is expected to be like thousands of degrees in those oceans, so it would be a very difficult environment for us to expect life,” Shim said. “But that’s probably a different story for the exoplanets, the sub-Neptunes outside of the solar system.”

Shim noted that some Neptune-like exoplanets do exist in their stars’ habitable zones. “In those type of cases, this magnesium-rich water will be very interesting to think about in terms of how it’s going to change the way life develops and represent itself there.”

Trump is still collecting taxpayer funds

Despite Donald Trump’s alleged status as one of the richest men in America, the former president had reportedly has been raking in tens of thousands of dollars in federal pension payments since January.

Back in 2015, Trump made a campaign promise to donate the entirety of his yearly presidential salary up until the end of his term. The former president has apparently made good on this promise, writing personal checks to various federal agencies since then, including the Department of Interior’s National Park Service, the National Park Service, the Department of Education, and more.

But according to an Insider report, Trump cannot say the same when it comes to his federal pensions. The General Services Administration told Insider that Trump has collected $65,600 through May 14 – and it’s not clear how he’s using it.

The presidential pension program started back in 1958, when the Former Presidents Act (FPA) was passed, which entitles former presidents to a package of lifetime benefits, including medical insurance, a Secret Service detail, private staff, and pensions. The first former presidents to receive such benefits were Herbert Hoover and Harry S. Truman.

Presidents are now legally required to accept a yearly salary, but pensions are optional. As of 2021, presidents may receive $221,400 in pension money, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Many critics of the FPA have argued that former presidents have no need for the benefits, since the vast majority of them are already independently wealthy, according to the Congressional Research Service. In May of this year, Forbes found that Donald Trump had a net worth of $2.4 billion. Furthermore, every living former president, including the nation’s current president, is a multimillionaire.

Before Trump took office, he claimed that his net worth was over $10 million, which was later found to be false. During the first three years of his presidency, the former president’s businesses raked in $1.9 billion in revenue, according to Forbes, with much of this money stemming from his commercial real estate ventures.

But Bloomberg found back in March that Trump’s net worth had in fact plummeted from $3 billion to $2.3 billion over the course of his presidency. That same month, the Washington Post found that Trump’s “hotels, resorts, and other properties” had lost over $120 million in revenue last year. His Washington hotel and Doral resort in Miami respectively suffered from 60% and 44% drops in overall revenue.

The President is currently using taxpayer funds to employ 17 staffers to assist with post-transition activities, according to Insider. His staff is expected to collect approximately $1.3 million of this money.

In the past, Trump has received other pension payments, including those of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 2019.

House Democrat unleashes on Republicans who refuse to “recognize reality”

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) unleashed on Republicans during debate over the creation of the Jan. 6 Commission.

Screaming at the top of his lungs, Ryan said, “Benghazi, you guys chased the former SoS all over the country, spent millions of dollars. We have people scaling the Capitol, hitting the Capitol Police with lead pipes across the head, and we can’t get bipartisanship. What else has to happen in this country?!”

“We need two political parties in this country that recognize reality and you ain’t one of them,” he closed as the gavel pounded in the background.

Ryan is vacating his House seat to run for U.S. Senate in Ohio.

See the video below:

Wow Tim Ryan has had enough pic.twitter.com/xAvjLikr6H

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 19, 2021

Republicans are sleeping on the jobs bill. Democrats need to move on before it’s too late

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is worried. Congressional Republicans have tied up President Joe Biden and other Democrats in endless “negotiations” over the American Jobs Plan and Gillibrand, for good reason, believes Republicans are just trying to hamstring the administration. Speaking with Politico for a piece published Wednesday morning, the Democratic senator from New York called on Biden to end negotiations and pass a bill through the budget reconciliation process, which would only require Democratic votes, instead of endlessly compromising to snag Republican votes that are never coming.

“I do not think that the White House should relegate recovery to the judgment of Mitch McConnell, because he will not function in good faith,” Gillibrand explained.

Gillibrand has every reason to be concerned. Democrats have been down this path before. Republicans will dangle the possibility of passing that holy grail, “bipartisan” legislation, in order to mire Democrats in endless, go-nowhere negotiations that only ever serve to shrink Democratic ambitions but never seem to actually produce any of those badly desired Republican votes. It’s especially frustrating to see this trick being played on Biden, who was vice president when Republicans did this to then-President Barack Obama on the Affordable Care Act. It was eventually passed, in a shrunken form, without a single Republican vote. Biden saw Obama’s hopes for immigration reform slowly snuffed out by Republicans who were able to run out the clock with fake “negotiations.”

Even now, Republicans are playing this game with the creation of a commission to investigate the insurrection on January 6. Democrats met all the demands laid out by Republican leaders in drafting the plans for the commission, but the vast majority of Republicans in the House nonetheless voted against it, and the Senate GOP leadership has made it clear they plan to kill it with a filibuster.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already admitted that stalling and killing Biden’s ambitions is his plan. He told reporters earlier this month that “100% of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” reminiscent of when he said, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” As many with a Twitter profile quoting the poet Maya Angelou would say, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

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Yet Biden’s response to having McConnell quoted at him was entirely dismissive.

“He said that in our last administration,” Biden claimed of McConnell, “I was able to get a lot done with him.”

As usual, one dearly hopes that Biden is BS-ing to appease the people who are still committed to the myth of bipartisanship, because, well, this is Mitch McConnell we’re talking about. This is the same man who literally refused, for nearly a year, to hold a single hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, and who then violated the Constitution by seating a justice nominated by the next president, Donald Trump. One of the reasons McConnell enjoys flaunting his obstructionist desires to the press is because he’s trolling. He knows that quisling Democrats, afraid of being accused of being “partisan,” will pretend that they didn’t hear the plain words he spoke.

Republicans have long been showing us who they are: People who will tank the American economy in hopes that will get a Democratic president blamed and they’ll reap the rewards at the ballot box. Republican governors across the country are currently in the process of literally turning away free money for their own constituents, by shutting down the expanded unemployment insurance programs offered under Biden’s American Rescue Plan.

The logic they’re operating under isn’t especially obscure. Unemployment insurance is up there with food assistance as one of the simplest and most efficient ways to bolster the economy, by getting money directly into the hands of people who, out of economic necessity, will immediately turn around and spend it. By cutting that money off, Republicans threaten the fragile economic recovery and the eventual success of Biden’s presidency. Even though it will absolutely be their own fault, Republicans will blame Biden is the economy tanks when they run against his record in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential elections.

The good news is that Biden and Democrats have the power to keep boosting the economy. They must pass the American Jobs Plan, quickly and without a bunch of concessions to Republicans who aren’t going to vote for it anyway. A cash infusion that invests in infrastructure will help create jobs and get the economy clicking again, which could help make up for the loss of consumer spending Republicans are trying to force by deliberately cutting Americans off of unemployment.

But in order for that to happen, the damn bill has to actually pass, and soon.

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On Monday, a group of progressive legislators sent a letter to Democratic leadership underscoring this exact point, pointing out that “the previous unanimity of Congressional Republican opposition to the American Rescue Plan” — not a single Republican voted for the wildly popular bill — should be an incentive to move forward with a robust jobs bill now instead of letting Republicans weigh it down with bad faith negotiations.

Of course, one theory about Biden’s strategy here is not that he’s trying to get Republican votes, but that this is a dog-and-pony show for Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom are cobbled by terminal cases of “Morning Joe” brain and are thus unable to let go of the myth of “bipartisanship,” no matter how many times Republicans gleefully refuse to work with the Democratic majority. And so, the thinking goes, these two need to see with their own eyes how Republicans are never going to agree with anything before they reluctantly move forward to pass a bill without them.

It may be the case that the problem children are Manchin and Sinema, and not Biden and other Democratic leaders. But still, the ultimate problem remains: Any time spent on fake “negotiations” with Republicans is time wasted, and every moment wasted is a moment in which Democratic hopes of winning in 2022 and 2024 — which are already dim, due to gerrymandering and outright GOP cheating — fade even further. If there’s any hope of Democrats retaining power, they need to get the economy moving and, ideally, to pass bills to protect voting rights. Letting Republicans waste time so that Democrats can do neither isn’t just bad for the American people, it’s political suicide, drawn out slowly each day that these crucial bills are fake-negotiated instead of brought up for a vote in Congress.

What does the approval of the Pfizer vaccine for teens and preteens mean for my child?

Q: The federal government approved the Pfizer vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds. What does this mean for my child?

Extending the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to preteens and young adolescents adds nearly 17 million more Americans to the pool of those eligible to be immunized against covid-19, helping to build a vaccinated population closer to herd immunity. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are also testing the efficacy of their vaccines in teens and children.

Although children appear to catch covid less often and develop milder symptoms than adults, they can develop a rare, severe inflammatory response or “long-haul covid” symptoms. It also remains to be seen what, if any, long-term effects these younger patients may experience from covid.

The share of covid cases in children and teens is increasing — nearly a quarter of the new weekly covid cases were found in this age group, as reported May 6 by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

And, though kids have been less likely to develop severe illness, they still can pose a risk to vulnerable people around them because they may not even know they are carrying the virus, as documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Margaret Stager, a pediatrician and the division director of adolescent medicine at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, said she has had to explain to her young patients that getting immunized would help their community curb the spread, cut the risk of variants and help society reopen.

“I talk about them doing their part,” Stager said. “That this is all part of them contributing to the greater good.”

The Fine Print

The CDC this week recommended use of the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 12 to 15 after the Food and Drug Administration extended its emergency use authorization to include these preteens and young adolescents. That means this age group now can receive the same shots in the same time frame — 21 days apart — as adults do.

In a reversal of its previous guidance, teens and adults do not need to wait 14 days before or after getting the covid shot to receive a vaccine for another condition. This could be a boon for health care providers who have child patients lagging on other, routine vaccines, which has been a persistent problem during the pandemic.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity to play catch-up,” said Stager.

CDC officials noted in the May 12 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendation that they do not have data specifically looking at potential side effects in patients immunized against covid and other illnesses at the same time. However, the agency made the decision given the strong safety data of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot and previous experience with other immunizations.

This question will become more important as covid vaccines are studied in younger children. Trials are planned to test the vaccine in children as young as 6 months old.

As in adults, the question of how long the immunity lasts in children remains unknown, said Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota. However, she said, it’s likely that any waning immunity detected in adults will also be seen among the young.

“Whatever we learn in adults,” Wurtz said, “kids will be not far behind.”

Whether this approval will prompt schools to require vaccination against covid for K-12 students returning to the classroom this fall is a pending question, said Stager. It is unclear whether federal law allows state authorities to mandate a vaccine that has not yet been fully approved. That said, the government’s approval will also likely play into parents’ decisions about sending their children to summer camp.

What Did the Trial Find?

Pfizer tested the vaccine in 2,260 preteens and young adolescents living in the United States. Researchers followed participants for two months or more, the FDA said. Pfizer’s clinical protocol says the company will continue to follow participants for two years after the second dose.

Results show the vaccine is safe to use in this age group, causing side effects similar to those seen in young adult populations for whom it had already been cleared, according to the FDA in a press release. Those vaccinated also produced a strong immune response — the level of antibodies recorded in this age group was even stronger than what was seen in 16- to 25-year-olds.

The vaccinated group also had no covid cases when tested seven days after their second dose. Sixteen participants out of 978 who did not get the shot but were followed as part of the study as a control group tested positive for the virus. In short, the vaccine was 100% effective in preventing covid, according to the FDA.

Why So Few Kids?

One data point that may give parents pause is the trial’s number of participants. The relatively low number — especially when compared with the tens of thousands enrolled in adult trials — is a reflection of what the researchers were trying to accomplish, said Dr. Kawsar Talaat, an assistant professor of international health at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health.

Gauging whether the shot was safe for children and if it generated a strong immune response did not require a large study group, she said. Statisticians can calculate how many people a trial needs to generate meaningful results without unnecessarily exposing people to dangerous pathogens like the coronavirus.

In addition, the findings pertaining to the younger age group built on what has already been learned in earlier studies.

“It’s just not practical to do 30,000-person trials over and over with the same vaccine,” Talaat said. Large trials are expensive, she added. Including minors also poses extra challenges, said Stager, such as getting parental consent.

Jerica Pitts, a Pfizer spokesperson, said in an email the company is using a “careful, stepwise approach” to including minors in clinical trials.

Stager said physiological similarities among 12- to 15-year-olds in response to vaccines have previously been documented. Studies related to a vaccine for the human papillomavirus have shown kids at this age generated similar, strong immune responses, too.

Administering the vaccine to preteens and young adolescents in large numbers may reveal additional effects that weren’t detected in the clinical trials, said A. Oveta Fuller, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

That said, when weighing the threat of the virus versus the vaccine’s proven safety, she said, the choice is clear.

“The thing is the danger is really not so much the vaccines as it is what it protects against,” Fuller said, “and that’s covid disease.”

This story also ran on PolitiFact.

Chernobyl radiation surge “cause for concern,” say scientists

Scientists monitoring the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine are detecting increased fission reactions inside an inaccessible chamber built around the radioactive ruins of a reactor that suffered a catastrophic meltdown in 1986—and they aren’t sure why.

New Scientist reported this week that since 2016, researchers have detected a 40% surge in neutron emissions from a sealed room containing large amounts of corium, a highly radioactive and hardened lava-like material containing much of the uranium fuel from Reactor Four of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, the site of history’s worst nuclear disaster.

Scientists say the increased emissions are indicative of a growing nuclear fission reaction, but they don’t know whether the surge will burn itself out, as has previously occurred in other parts of the former plant, or if further intervention might be necessary.

“There are many uncertainties, but we can’t rule out the possibility of [an] accident,” Maxim Saveliev of Ukraine’s Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) told Science earlier this month.

"It’s like the embers in a barbecue pit."

Nuclear reactions are smoldering again at Chernobyl – so what does this mean going forward? Former #RAEngResearch Chair Neil Hyatt, a nuclear materials chemist at the University of Sheffield comments: https://t.co/GBEis7gens pic.twitter.com/ckazCoujLZ

— Royal Academy of Engineering (@RAEngNews) May 12, 2021

Saveliev said that neutron levels are rising slowly enough that scientists should have a few years left to determine how to best address a threat that Neil Hyatt, a nuclear chemist at the University of Sheffield in Britain, desribed as “like the embers in a barbecue pit.”

Hyatt told Science that the threat cannot be ignored because the rainwater that collected inside the damaged reactor due to flaws in the sarcophagus hastily built to entomb it in the months immediately after the disaster is now receding following the construction of the New Safe Confinement (NSC). This massive steel arch, completed in 2019, is the world’s largest mobile steel structure. It covers the damaged reactor and is designed to prevent further radioactive leaks.

However, water slows neutrons, and as NSC does its job and water levels inside the structure continue to fall, scientists fear that the fission reaction will accelerate “exponentially,” according to Hyatt, causing “an uncontrolled release of nuclear energy.”

30 years after the world's worst nuclear accident, the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement area is still radioactive 😲 pic.twitter.com/8t3vErxGBL

— Insider (@thisisinsider) November 12, 2018

Hyatt told New Scientist that the situation is “cause for concern but not alarm,” adding that additional acceleration in neutron production could require further intervention.

ISPNPP says it believes the risk of a catastrophic containment failure in the near future is low, and that it is working on ways to diagnose and address the cause of the surging fissile emissions. One possible solution involves deploying a robot that can drill holes in the hardened radioactive material and then insert boron cylinders to absorb neutrons like control rods do in a normally functioning nuclear reactor.

The April 26, 1986 explosion at Reactor Four—the result of a flawed reactor design and inadequately trained personnel—caused widespread ecological devastation, considerable loss of life, and sand rendered a 1,000-square mile area around the town of Pripyat in what was then the Soviet Union unihabitable for all but a handful of human beings who returned to their homes despite the risk.

The massive containment and cleanup effort following the meltdown cost tens of billions of dollars and won’t be completed until the latter half of this century.

Michael Cohen says Donald Trump will flip on his own children

President Donald Trump’s former lawyer made a startling prediction speaking with MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Wednesday: the former president will flip on everyone to save himself, even his own children.

Cohen explained that while the Trump Org. may seem like a large company, it’s nothing more than a “glorified mom-and-pop company.”

“When I was there, there were 14 executive vice presidents, myself being included,” Cohen recalled. “Other than that, you had a lot of support staff, a lot of secretarial staff and so on. At one point in time Trump, which is, again, part of his ongoing continuous lies, made allegations that he employed 10,000 people. Well, that’s not true. Again, he doesn’t own the buildings that he had employees in. It’s either owned by homeowners associations or its licensing deals. He included them. He included everybody.”

“I want to go back,” Cohen paused. “I think it’s worth me saying when he’s talking about my credibility, I personally think — I’ll ask you your opinion on it — that my credibility is a lot more in demand than Trump’s petty, pathetic temper tantrums massacre reading as strength. That’s what he does. He goes ahead and puts out these statements, and the great thing is he’s no longer on Twitter. I didn’t even know about this denigration of me until your producers called to tell me about it. He’s really — he’s mic’d out right now.”

Trump went off on a tangent through his little blog, claiming it was about the Russia investigation and linked to special counsel Robert Mueller. It isn’t. He also claimed that someone from the New York attorney general’s office leaked the information about the Trump case. In fact, it was released in an official statement to the press.

Reid wanted to know specifics about the Trump Org. assets. She also asked if his children should be getting their own lawyers, which Cohen explained they must do. Cohen explained that on their specific projects, the Trump children would be very aware of the assets and the financials.

“Allen Weisselberg knew every dollar — not even to the dollar, every penny in and every penny out, went through Weisselberg’s desk and reported before and after to Donald J. Trump,” he continued. “As I stated, there was a very small core group of executives, a larger subset, but a very small core group. It’s interesting because I also watched the segment before this where you were talking about Trump and whether or not the kids need to — I believe they do need it, and I’m going to tell you why: everyone keeps talking about Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, what did we get off his electronics, what are they going to get now from the Trump Organization? How are they going to get Weisselberg to flip? It’s not just Barry, but his other son Jack, who is part of Ladder Capital. I think they already know this. I think Donald Trump is going to flip on all of them. What do you think about that? Including his children.”

The comment left Reid with her mouth hanging open in shock.

“I really believe that Donald Trump is going to turn — you always get shocked when I say things, Joy,” Cohen continued. “I believe that Donald Trump cares for only himself. And he realizes his goose is cooked. When he turned around and gets questioned about what you were asking about, inflation. It wasn’t me. It was Allen. It was my accountant, it was the appraiser. It’s never Donald. This is the problem. It’s never, ever Donald Trump. It’s always somebody else. It wasn’t Donald Trump who had the affair. It wasn’t Donald Trump who directed me to make the payments to Stormy Daniels. It wasn’t Donald Trump who got the benefit of the relationship and the actions. It was Michael Cohen. I’m the bad guy. Why? Because I didn’t take the fall.”

He went on to anticipate that when the DA and AG begin asking questions about his taxes that Trump will simply say, “I don’t do my taxes. It’s my accountant.” He’ll turn on the accountant, say that Don Jr. handled something, even Ivanka or Melania handled it.

“He’s going to tell them to take everyone other than himself,” said Cohen.

Watch the video below via MSNBC:

Not all corporations are “woke”: In Big Tech, the boss wants you to shut up about politics

During last summer’s racial justice protest movement, more than a few executives in corporate America leveraged their platforms to weigh in on a number of fronts: They beefed up diversity and inclusion efforts, issued public statements in support of Black Lives Matter or other ostensibly progressive political issues and, in some cases, publicly supported employees’ efforts to have “difficult conversations” with co-workers, suggesting those might lead to long-term changes in the way people related to each other in the workplace.

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic has upended our connection to physical workspaces, the last year has also forced white-collar workers to rethink their relationship to office culture. At the heart of this debate is the shifting role that work, and the companies that sign our checks, should play in our lives: personal, political and even spiritual.

But other executives, particularly in the tech world, saw these efforts through a completely different lens: as distractions from the paramount or sole purpose of their business — turning a profit.

At Coinbase, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange, CEO Brian Armstrong dove headfirst into the culture war with a lengthy and influential public screed last September about his company’s “mission first” mindset. Armstrong suggested, perhaps improbably, that work should be a “refuge” from the world rather than a part of it.

“While I think these efforts [to create a dialogue around social and political issues] are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division,” he wrote. “I believe most employees don’t want to work in these divisive environments.” In the future, Armstrong said, Coinbase would not weigh in on social issues or support political candidates, and would not divert significant time or money to charitable causes. Employees were expected to do the same during work hours.

Many critics, both inside and outside the company, questioned how a cryptocurrency company would possibly manage to stay out of politics, given the clamor for increased regulation of the industry — but the response went unaddressed.

Armstrong extended a severance offer to any employees who didn’t agree with the company’s new direction. At least 60 people at Coinbase took the offer, Insider reported, about 5 percent of the company’s total workforce.

Despite the turmoil it created within Armstrong’s company, the post resonated with other members of the managerial class, who have spent much of the last few months parroting the sentiments in public and in private.

“Yet again, Brian Armstrong leads the way,” Paul Graham, the founder of influential seed capital firm Y Combinator, tweeted in response. “I predict most successful companies will follow Coinbase’s lead. If only because those who don’t are less likely to succeed.”

Echoes of the controversy sounded last month as Basecamp CEO Jason Fried, who helms the influential project management software firm, announced an outright ban on “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal chat features.

It was a huge win for the “mission-first” crowd — Fried, who along with co-founder David Heinemeier has authored five how-to books on productivity and business strategies, is widely considered to be a thought leader on corporate culture.

Last week, a leaked email obtained by Insider written by Tobias Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, to the company’s employees also revealed similar internal policies at the Canadian e-commerce giant. We’re a business, Lütke wrote, not a family. Stop trying to solve social problems on company time — that’s not what Shopify exists for, and it’s certainly not what employees were hired to do.

Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can’t un-family you. It should be massively obvious that Shopify is not a family but I see people, even leaders, casually use terms like “Shopifam” which will cause the members of our teams (especially junior ones that have never worked anywhere else) to get the wrong impression. The dangers of “family thinking” are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family. …

Shopify is also not the government. We cannot solve every societal problem here. We are part of an ecosystem, of economies, of culture, and of actual countries. We also can’t take care of all your needs. We will try our best to take care of the ones that ensure you can support our mission.

When Lütke wrote the email last June, Shopify had already embarked on an increasingly precarious tightrope walk. In the midst of a pandemic, an economic crisis and a contentious election year, the company was under increasing pressure to drop certain retailers from its platform, most notably Donald Trump’s campaign.

It wasn’t the first time the influential business-to-business platform courted controversy with its customer base. A boycott campaign over the company’s hosting of an online store for the far-right website Breitbart gained steam in 2017 under the hashtag #DeleteShopify.

At the time, Lütke wrote a viral Medium post likening the company’s mission to that of the ACLU (yes, really) and little came of it. In the summer of 2020 Lütke dusted off the same playbook, and was again largely successful — although the company eventually agreed to drop the Trump Organization and Trump campaign after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

But what these viral sermons on workplace culture always conveniently fail to mention are the incidents that led to their existence.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder last June at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, a group of Coinbase employees reportedly staged a walkout after asking Armstong to affirm publicly his support for Black Lives Matter, and being rebuffed. That news emerged in a Twitter thread from Democratic party operative Erica Joy, and Verge technology writer Casey Newton later reported that Armstrong’s letter was seen within the company as a direct response to the walkout.

Armstrong did later state his support for Black Lives Matter in a Twitter thread specifically mentioning the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor that March in Louisville, though Newton reported that “the post referred to the killing only as ‘recent events regarding Breonna Taylor,’ before the coldness of the language was mocked on Twitter and he deleted any reference to her.”

Newton also broke the news that the internal discussions Fried hoped to stifle at Basecamp weren’t as “political” as he had made them out to be — for several days before the CEO made his post, employees had been outraged at the existence of a list the company’s customer service team had created that compiled “funny customer names,” which included a number of clients of Asian and African descent. Many saw the practice as racist.

At Shopify, Lütke failed to mention that the Slack channel he shut down in accordance with his new no-more-politics-at-work diktat had become focused on a noose emoji that another employee had imported into the system.

“Beyond straight performance output, everyone that engages in endless Slack trolling, victimhood thinking, us-vs-them divisiveness, and zero sum thinking must be seen for the threat they are,” Lütke wrote in his email. Some employees interpreted the language as meant to silence dissent over an increasingly toxic workplace, according to Insider.

“It’s worth saying that much of what we have been discussing this summer has not been ‘politics’ so much it has been ‘human rights,'” Newton wrote of the controversies. And many of the employees he spoke with agreed.

One Basecamp employee said that the “political discussions” the CEO was so eager to shut down had “always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp.” The topics included “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals?” this person said. “It has never been big political discussions, like, ‘Should the postal service should be disbanded?’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.'”

These incidents are also inspiring a new wave of activism within the tech world. Executives at Amazon, Salesforce and Pinterest, for example, have been forced to respond in various ways to an increasingly vocal workforce — especially on the issue of sexual harassment.

The most successful group of these white-collar employees works at Google, where several hundred formed a union earlier this year. Organizers say their goals are not necessarily to agitate for better pay or benefits, but to overhaul the industry’s culture, diversity and ethical considerations.

“Our goals go beyond the workplace questions of ‘Are people getting paid enough?’ Our issues are going much broader,” Chewy Shaw, a San Francisco-based engineer and union vice chair, told The New York Times. “It is a time where a union is an answer to these problems.”

They hope the union push can also counter Google’s leap into a range of dystopian technologies: developing artificial intelligence for the Defense Department and offering facial recognition to immigration authorities, for example.

Precisely the sorts of topics that management doesn’t want workers to talk about.

America’s right-wing political monsters are real — and they are coming for you

America’s national mythology is a story of inexorable progress. This narrative of progress is also a tale of hope, constructed on the belief that the American people are inherently good. In addition, America’s national mythology is a story of perpetual reinvention, intentional forgetting and rewriting of the past, where democracy is taken to be a given, a special bequest to the American people from God. And of course, the American people and the country itself are somehow “exceptional” among the nations and peoples of the world.

These claims wither away under any serious empirical investigation or historical inquiry — that’s why they are myths. It is not facts which give myths the force of meaning but rather the way people internalize them and make them true for themselves and the larger community.

Even the more sophisticated popular understandings of American history that include the fact that the country is a racial settler state, founded on the evils of genocide against First Nations people and the enslavement of Black people, in which “white democracy” was the ideal norm, still emphasize an arc of progress and positive change. In those more nuanced stories, America is an “imperfect union” that is always striving, however difficult and complicated the work may be, to become a better nation.

The Age of Trump shattered many of these myths. It revealed that fascism is not something “over there,” but a toxic weed that can blossom in the United States. Black and brown folks and other marginalized people already understood this fact: White supremacy is itself a form of racial fascism and authoritarianism. Such an understanding has been obligatory for their survival.

But many white Americans and others who have bathed in the privilege of racial innocence were gobsmacked by the Trump regime’s relentless attack on the country’s democracy, rule of law, civil society, and governing norms and institutions.

Tens of millions of other Americans, the vast majority of them white, were shocked in a different way by Trump’s ascent and what it wrought: It was a revelation and a dream come true. A leader and defender of “white civilization” and “real America” had finally arisen to speak for and protect “people like them.”

In so many ways, the calamity of the Age of Trump has seen the story of inherent American progress, the goodness of its people and the permanence of the country’s democracy run into a brick wall.

The American people can no longer deny that political monsters are real. These monsters want to overthrow America’s secular and multiracial democracy and replace it with an American apartheid plutocracy. The monsters want to take away the basic human and civil rights of nonwhite people, women, LGBT people, immigrants, liberals and progressives, along with any other groups they deem to be “un-American” and “the enemy.” Across the country, this monstrous agenda is well underway. For all of the Biden administration’s early successes, they occur under the ominous shadow of a right-wing terrordome, now nearing completion for 2022 and 2024 and beyond. Trump’s coup attempt and his followers’ attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 is but a preview of what is to come.

The alarm about America’s monstrous politics is being rung loudly. How will the American people respond?

Writing at the Daily Beast, Wajahat Ali describes these right-wing monsters and their agenda:

There is no civil war in the Republican Party — the Confederates won long ago.

Instead, we are witnessing the end of a long molting process as the GOP slithers into its final form: a counter-majoritarian, fascist entity.

Republicans are shedding their masks and hoods, spitting out their dog whistles and outright embracing the Big Lie and the violent insurrectionists, conspiracy theorists, and racists who make up the party’s base and, increasingly, its representatives in Congress. …

Trump was not a cancerous growth but the end product of the party’s decades-long molting process. He’s the beating heart. He’s Republicans’ orange avatar, their unrestrained id, their boiling, festering rage that quenches its appetites while securing power and wealth by any means necessary. Democracy, rule of law, equality, fairness, voting rights are all unnecessary and cumbersome obstacles that must be either removed or weakened to achieve the ultimate goal: power for an overwhelmingly white, Christian conservative minority….

The Republican Party a few outliers like Rep. Liz Cheney and Sen. Mitt Romney belonged to “is dead,” Ali writes. “It’s over. Gone.” The “final molting stage” of the new party will produce an entity that openly supports “violent insurrections, lies, conspiracy theories, authoritarians, and racists,” and “will attack democracy, voting rights, the rule of law, our allies and the truth.”

In another important recent essay, Thom Hartmann warns that the Jim Crow Republican Party and Trump’s neofascist movement are led by psychopaths and encourage antisocial behavior:

There’s something fundamentally different about psychopaths. And the failure to recognize that goes to the core of the crisis within the Republican Party — which has become a magnet for such people — and our overall political system today….

For America to survive as a democratic republic, we must restore the legal guardrails that keep psychopaths from entering, controlling or buying our political process. And we must hold the obvious psychopaths and their enablers — the Former Guy and those in Congress who encouraged and continue to baldly lie about the January 6th insurrection attempt — to account.

To reduce the power of psychopaths in politics, we must pass the For The People Act or similar legislation that psychopath-proofs our political system. We must stop them from continuing their efforts to rig the 2024 election.

Umair Haque reminds us that the monstrous politics that have taken over the Trump-controlled Republican Party are also global in scale, addressing the strange political self-immolation of the British working class, long a reliable vote for left-wing parties and candidates, but now “voting for its own self-destruction”:

If you’re working class, you need the following things: healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare, housing, and so on. The British working class began to flip conservative in 2007, and is now solidly ultra conservative. Why is that? Because the conservatives have convinced them that demonizing and scapegoating everyone else — foreigners, immigrants, all those hated “metropolitan elites,” Europeans — for the lack of a functioning society matters more than having a functioning society.

It’s important to call this what it is. Stupidity. Folly. Idiocy. There is no other word for it, and words shouldn’t be minced. …

The problem isn’t the Labour Party, and it’s not politics at all. It’s people. Brits have become violent, selfish, backwards idiots. You know how the American Idiot is a legendary figure around the world? Welcome to the British Buffoon. He’s a figure that doesn’t care about anything, will accept any level of indignity, any collapse in living standards — as long as he gets to wave the Union Jack, shake a fist at the world, and sing Brittannia Uber Alles….

What happens when people fail at democracy like this? Well, it’s pretty simple. Democracy fails. A society becomes a failed state. Not in the way we’re used to thinking of it — there’s a coup, there’s a revolution, the army rolls in, the government collapses. But in a softer, altogether more dangerous way. Consensually. A country commits suicide as a modern, functioning society not with a bang, but with a million whimpers, shrieks of rage, howls of xenophobia, guttural snarls of nationalism. And soon, there’s nothing left but poverty, despair, rage, and hate.

The Age of Trump was and remains a type of cruel tutelage for the American people on the reality of political monsters and monstrous political movements. These truths cannot be wished away or made to disappear. These anti-democratic, antisocial and anti-human politics must be confronted and defeated.

To accomplish that goal, American neofascism and Trumpism must be described using the moral language of right and wrong, good and evil. Without the correct moral language, civic evil is reduced to a question of “both sides” and “differences of opinion” and “just politics” instead of being understood as an existential threat.

The American people are quickly running out of time to save their democracy and themselves.

They must put aside childish, fairytale beliefs about the country’s past, present and future. To this point, there is no clear indication that they possess the maturity to do such a difficult thing. The monsters are watching and waiting.

A tiny number of companies are responsible for the majority of plastic pollution

A new report by the Minderoo Foundation, a philanthropic group in Australia, found that 100 companies create more than 90% of the world’s single-use plastic waste. Indeed, just 20 of those 100 companies are responsible for more than half of the planet’s single-use plastic waste.

The shocking report confirms the view of environmental activists who have for years combatted individualistic environmentalist narratives that posit that consumers’ individual actions can stop pollution more so than systemic private sector regulation.

Roughly 98% of this single-use plastic waste is made from fossil fuel-based feedstocks rather than recycled products, meaning they exacerbate global warming. The worst offenders include Exxon Mobil (which told NPR that it is trying to environmentally responsible), Dow Chemical Co. and the Chinese company Sinopec. Those three companies alone create more than one-seventh of all waste from single-use plastics, including food packaging, bags and bottles.

The Minderoo Foundation, which worked with other groups like the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute, says that pollution has been getting worse. The world’s largest manufacturers of single-use plastic are planning on ramping up production because they see high demand throughout the world (the COVID-19 outbreak has certainly increased that demand, although it existed before the pandemic). As a result, the Minderoo Foundation projects that an additional one trillion plastic bags will be created, used and thrown away just by 2025. By 2050, single-use plastic manufacturing will drive between 5% and 10% of climate change.

Former Vice President Al Gore, who penned the foreword to the study, wrote that plastic pollution poses an “existential” threat to humanity for reasons beyond global warming. Because of its prevalence in our environment — from countless everyday products that we use to so-called “microplastics” that have seeped into our food, water and air — chemicals in certain types of plastics have been linked to everything from dangerously dropping fertility rates to cancer. Plastic pollution also clogs up our oceans, waterways and wilderness, destroying ecosystems that we need economically and for our very survival.

“Only a fraction of the tens of thousands of tons of plastic waste that end up in blue bins across the country actually get recycled, while the majority of it is buried, burned, or borne out to sea,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who has sponsored legislation to address this crisis, told Salon in April. “If we keep proceeding with business as usual, the air we breathe, the soil we use to grow our food, and the waters that countless communities rely on will only become more and more polluted — putting Americans’ health, particularly in communities of color and low-income communities, at serious risk.”

The Minderoo Foundation study builds on previous research that finds that a small number of corporations are responsible for the vast majority of pollution. A 2017 study that found that 71% of global emissions were caused by just 100 companies.

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Far-right blog whips up bizarre conspiracy about Joe Biden “pretending” to drive Ford truck

A pro-Trump blog stirred up a bizarre conspiracy theory Wednesday, claiming that President Joe Biden wasn’t actually driving during a Tuesday event in which the 78-year-old took an electric truck for a spin in front of the press.

The claim originated on right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit, an outfit known for their rather sticky relationship with the facts. The publication claimed in a post that Biden was not diving but instead “pretending” to be behind the wheel of an electric Ford F-150 test truck during a visit to a Dearborn, Michigan Ford Motor Company plant.

President Biden test drives Ford’s new electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck pic.twitter.com/A3jrsIi5mR

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) May 18, 2021

“Biden made an unscheduled visit to a Ford driving course at which safety tests are normally conducted, and had the opportunity to test drive the new Ford F-150 Lightning — the electric vehicle Ford is manufacturing at a plant in Dearborn, Michigan,” CNN reported on Tuesday.

“This sucker’s quick,” Biden said after speeding around the race track to members of the press.

On Wednesday, however, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft floated the idea that Biden wasn’t actually controlling the truck’s wheel.

“Following his speech, the declining septuagenarian was put in an electric vehicle where he pretended to be driving,” Hoft claimed. “This was all a show by his handlers to make Joe Biden look like he’s in charge.”

Hoft, who Media Matters for America describes as “a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist and hoaxer,” went on to write that “Joe wasn’t driving” before asserting, “it was all a stunt.”

Checkin in with Gateway Pundit pic.twitter.com/ZeW8zn5vfD

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) May 19, 2021

By mid-afternoon Wednesday the article already been shared over 3,000 times on Facebook alone, according to SharedCount.com. The article continues to trend on social media platforms despite the clear falsehood — according to photos, video and eyewitness account from reporters Biden was clearly driving the vehicle, with two hands firmly on the wheel.

The Gateway Pundit has a long history of publishing inaccuracies and easily debunked conspiracy theories, notably hiring right-wing smear artist Jacob Wohl and publishing several of the hoaxster’s false claims.

In October of 2018, Wohl posted a document to the site baselessly alleging then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller of sexually assaulting a non-existent woman. The website eventually walked back the claims (and suspended Wohl as a writer) after the article was thoroughly debunked.

“On Thursday, the Gateway Pundit suspended our relationship with Jacob,” Hoft penned at the time. “We need to collect more information on this explosive situation. We are not afraid to take chances, as you well know, but we want to also be careful and accurate.”

The site, which is monetized and relies on low-quality ad content, currently appears to have a mutually beneficial partnership with 2020 election fraud conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — hawking Lindell’s products from dog beds to his company’s namesake pillows.

“Now, Mike Lindell has teamed up and made available to Gateway Pundit readers a special discount code to use at MyPillow.com,” reads a promoted post on The Gateway Pundit from mid-May.

Tlaib confronts Biden over U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing “atrocities” in Gaza

Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first woman of Palestinian descent to serve in Congress, directly confronted President Joe Biden on Tuesday over his unwavering support for a right-wing Israeli government that continues to massacre civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip—in some cases using U.S.-made bombs and aircraft.

When Biden arrived in Detroit for an event Tuesday, Tlaib greeted the president on an airport tarmac and—according to an aide—expressed that “Palestinian human rights are not a bargaining chip and must be protected, not negotiated.”

“The U.S. cannot continue to give the right-wing [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government billions each year to commit crimes against Palestinians,” Tlaib said during the brief exchange, which was captured only in photographs. “Atrocities like bombing schools cannot be tolerated, much less conducted with U.S.-supplied weapons.”

The Michigan Democrat also told the president that “the status quo is enabling more killing, that the current U.S. approach of unconditional support for the Israeli government is not working, and that the White House must do far more to protect Palestinian lives, dignity, and human rights,” Tlaib’s aide said.

While it is not clear what Biden said in response to Tlaib’s remarks on the tarmac, the president praised the Michigan congresswoman during a speech at a Ford Factory in Dearborn.

“I admire your intellect, I admire your passion, and I admire your concern for so many other people,” Biden said. “From my heart, I pray that your grandmom and family are well. I promise you, I’ll do everything to see that they are.”

Tlaib is among the group of progressive lawmakers that has vocally criticized Biden’s inaction as the Israeli government—with the diplomatic and military support of the U.S.—has killed more than 200 Palestinians in Gaza, leveled residential buildings, bombed the besieged territory’s medical facilities, and attacked the offices of local and international media outlets.

Throughout the onslaught, the president has defended the Israeli government’s actions as reasonably proportionate and categorized the devastating bombing campaign in Gaza as “self-defense.”

In response to Biden’s belated endorsement of a cease-fire during a call with Netanyahu on Monday, Tlaib tweeted, “If you support a cease-fire, then get out of the way of the U.N. Security Council and join other countries in demanding it.”

“Apartheid-in-chief Netanyahu will not listen to anyone asking nicely,” Tlaib added. “He commits war crimes and openly violates international law.”

.@POTUS + @SecBlinken: If you support a cease-fire, then get out of the way of the U.N. Security Council and join other countries in demanding it.

Apartheid-in-chief Netanyahu will not listen to anyone asking nicely. He commits war crimes and openly violates international law. https://t.co/KuDSbFStBv

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) May 18, 2021

Tlaib has also slammed the Biden administration’s attempt to greenlight a $735 million weapons sale to Israel amid the country’s bombardment of Gaza, an assault that has killed dozens of Palestinian children and displaced tens of thousands of people.

Early Wednesday, as the Associated Press reported, Israeli airstrikes “killed at least six people across the Gaza Strip and destroyed the home of an extended family.”

“No more weapons to kill children and families, Joe Biden. Enough,” Tlaib tweeted earlier this week.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, echoed that sentiment in a statement late Tuesday, warning that the sale’s “timing and significance threaten to undermine U.S. diplomacy to secure an immediate end to this violence.”

“In light of disproportionate Israeli bombings that have destroyed the Associated Press offices, targeted a refugee camp, and damaged a Doctors Without Borders clinic,” said Jayapal, “I am deeply concerned by the message sent by a pending $735 billion U.S. weapons sale to Israel.”

“Congress and the Biden administration should consider delaying this arms sale to carefully review whether transferring these precision-guided missiles at this moment is consistent with protecting human rights, achieving an immediate cease-fire, and is in accordance with the Arms Export Control Act, which only allows such weapons transfers for legitimate defense and prohibits their use to escalate conflict,” Jayapal added.

QAnon believers see Trump’s mounting legal troubles as part of ‘the plan’

As Donald Trump’s legal problems continue to mount, some would think that his dire straits would be a refutation to the predictions and conspiracy theories disseminated by the QAnon movement, but true to QAnon form, adherents to the movement are saying it’s all part of “the plan.”

As VICE News points out, this claim is popping up on pro-Trump message boards where QAnon adherents are claiming the news is meant to distract from Arizona’s audit of votes from the 2020 election and derail Trump’s chances at winning in 2024.

“Do you think they realize how much MOAR powerful Trump will be after being falsely arrested?” a Telegram user called TruthHammer wrote.

“You don’t think Trump left office without enough classified dirt on every one of his enemies, do you?” a Patriots.win user called queenicarius wrote.

According to VICE, the perceived continuous persecution of Trump is causing some within the QAnon movement to increasingly call for violence.

“Honestly if [New York Attorney General Letitia James] ever even seriously tried to put Trump in prison on any bullsh*t I am pretty sure there would be at least a million Patriots marching on that prison and tearing it apart,” wrote Patriots.win user EvilGuy.

Read the full report over at VICE News.