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Trader Joe’s 11 best dips for better snacking

My obsession with dips knows no bounds, which is why Trader Joe’s refrigerated varieties are unsurprisingly a staple in my weekly dipping rotation. From hummuses and spreads to cheeses and vegan offerings, I’ve pretty much sampled them all. Here are the 11 best Trader Joe’s dips that always deliver in taste, texture, and versatility — must-haves when putting together your next grocery list.

A quick note: I’ve selected dips that are Trader Joe’s regulars. Seasonal items like the truffle dip and blue cheese roasted pecan dip are fabulous, though somewhat difficult to find on a consistent basis. (But if you do find them, by all means toss them in your cart!)

1. 5-Layer Dip

She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’s five layers of ingredients you know and love in your face. Southwestern standards like guacamole, sour cream, pico de gallo, and shredded cheese shine like they normally do, but it’s the black bean hummus base that’s this tub’s real star. Creamy and teeming with savory richness, it will guarantee you won’t miss the refried beans.

2. Mediterranean Hummus

When it comes to hummus, TJ’s has a bevy of delicious options, including this parsley-infused Mediterranean offering topped with pine nuts and olive oil. It’s definitely the most basic of the bunch, but one that will play a lead role in any party setting or gathering. Honorable mentions include cilantro and jalapeño or sriracha (for a spicy kick), tomato and basil (for the pizza-lover in all of us), eggplant (if you love baba ghanoush), and roasted garlic (for an extra-zippy dip that will also ward off any nearby vampires).

3. Pimento Cheese Dip

If you’re from the South, you know that anything with pimento cheese is worth dipping into. TJ’s spin on this classic preparation is no exception. The blend of cheddar, peppers, mayonnaise, and seasonings make it the perfect pairing for buttery crackers or even a toasted bagel. Looking for something cheesy with a bit more heat? Trader Joe’s cheddar with jalapeños pub cheese is also an excellent option.

4. Caramelized Onion Dip

Featuring cream cheese, mayonnaise, and sour cream, this dip is unmistakably rich, smooth, and creamy, with silky slices of ever-so-sweet-and-lovely caramelized onions hidden throughout. This is the dip I could eat with a spoon, but it’s really ideal dolloped on top of red meat dishes like burgers and steaks.

5. Garlic Spread Dip

I can’t get enough of this dip. It is, perhaps, the dip I buy most frequently because of its ability to enhance nearly every savory dish that’s on my dinner table. From pastas and salads to proteins and roasted vegetables, this tangy treasure is so much more than something to dunk your favorite carb into — it’s a veritable meal-elevator.

6. Tzatziki Creamy Garlic Cucumber Dip

This dip may be looser than most tzatziki sauces, but its refreshing flavors of cucumber, dill, mint, and lemon juice make it a wonderful accessory for any Greek feast. You can also use it to marinate kebabs before throwing them on the grill for extra juiciness (and serve more on the side).

7. Buffalo Style Chicken Dip

Imagine everything you love about buffalo wings, but in dip form. You’ve got cayenne-spiced chicken with notes of vinegar and garlic supported by cream cheese, sour cream, and Monterey Jack, to give it a luxuriously velvety base. All that’s missing are carrot and celery sticks, and perhaps a generous sprinkle of crumbled blue cheese on top. Don’t wait till game day for this creamy, spicy treat.

8. Artichoke & Jalapeño Dip

Zest, spice, and everything nice, this chunky dip will sit pretty in your refrigerator as a go-to indulgence for anything crunchy, like chips, raw veggies, and even fried plantains. Craving cauliflower? You’re in luck! Trader Joe’s cauliflower and jalapeño dip is equally scrumptious when the clock strikes snack time.

9. Zhoug Sauce

Cilantro may be a polarizing ingredient for some palates, but when combined with jalapeño peppers, chile flakes, garlic, cardamom, sea salt, and cumin seeds, it makes for a beloved Trader Joe’s dip everyone can get behind. The spicy Middle Eastern–inspired gem is made for pita and falafel, but you’ll probably find yourself putting it on go-to meals like scrambled eggs, turkey sandwiches, and even pasta.

10. Vegan Kale, Cashew, And Basil Pesto

It may be your inclination to pile this on top of a bowl of penne or gnocchi, but this simple, vegan blend is also a fantastic sandwich-topper and marinade for all kinds of protein. I’ve even used it to finish a bruschetta or mozzarella and tomato stack for a warm weather picnic highlight that blows your average potato salad out of the water.

11. Organic Salsa (Medium)

A classic never goes out style, and this rings truer than ever with Trader Joe’s take on a Taco Tuesday night classic. This salsa is all about balance, boasting an appetizing array of everything we know and love in our favorite tomato-centric condiment (with all apologies to ketchup): diced Romas, onions, cilantro, lime juice, and both Anaheim chile and jalapeño peppers for a user-friendly level of heat.

More Trader Joe’s favorites: 11 New Trader Joe’s Must-Haves We’re Adding to Our Carts

The one good thing Trump ever did

There were many bizarre moments during the Trump administration but one of the oddest has to be that time he spontaneously invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2019. The story went that the peace talks preceding withdrawal were on the verge of bearing fruit and President Trump wanted to have a big ceremony like Jimmy Carter did with the Camp David Accords — only much bigger and better. The New York Times reported that during a meeting with various advisers the idea was floated to invite the Taliban to the U.S. and Trump, of course, was thrilled. He could smell that Nobel Peace Prize finally coming home to papa.

There were quite a few people who were just a tad appalled by this idea, needless to say. There may be no choice but to leave Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban but considering the history of the past 20 years, the idea of inviting them to the U.S. for a big party wasn’t a welcome one. Doing it on the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, attacks which were enabled in part by these same people, sent shudders through those who knew how that would be received by the 9/11 families and the military. And while a majority of Americans are in favor of a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, rewarding the repressive, violent, fundamentalist authoritarian Taliban, who the U.S. government officially designates a terrorist organization, with a dazzling ceremony a la Kim Jong Un is not something anyone wants to see. The plan fell apart when the Taliban insisted that the deal be announced before they came to the U.S. while Trump insisted that it be announced after so that he could take the credit for negotiating the deal personally at Camp David. And that was that.

Nobody would have even known the plan existed except that Trump inexplicably decided to tweet about it on a Saturday night and let the cat out of the bag. He soon lost interest in Afghanistan when it became clear that he wouldn’t have his big celebration, but withdrawal negotiations continued with a final agreement to an American withdrawal in May 2021. Trump sporadically made promises on the issue that he didn’t keep, the last one being an announcement that all troops would be home by last Christmas. Needless to say, that didn’t happen and there’s no way of knowing if he would ever have followed through.

Perhaps the only thing Trump has in common with the current president is that Biden’s also been an Afghanistan skeptic for years and was known as a voice pushing for ending American involvement within the Obama administration. He said very clearly that he intended to end that war if he won the election. Upon taking office the administration set up a policy review on the subject and for good reason. Who knows what kind of diplomatic landmines the Trump administration had left lying all over the place? That review is still ongoing but on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Biden had made a decision to extend the May 1st deadline to leave until September 11th, but leave he will do regardless of whether the Taliban and the Afghan government come to an agreement.

He is scheduled to make the announcement today. According to Spencer Ackerman at the Daily Beast, the Biden administration hopes that a hastily drawn-up summit in Istanbul can bring the two parties together to agree on a power sharing deal before the May 1st deadline and help soothe any ruffled feathers from the Taliban over the short delay. (The Taliban leaders said late Tuesday that they would boycott any such summit until the U.S. completely withdraws, so it remains to be seen whether this will mark a collapse in the ongoing talks or not.)

The New York Times’ David Sanger reported that Biden and his staff had to work hard to get the Pentagon on board with this plan but that he was unwilling to bend in his desire to make a date certain announcement despite their insistence that it should be conditional. It’s not hard to see why. American withdrawal has been contingent on various conditions being met for nearly two decades and somehow it just never seems to happen. The US must make the decision and follow through unless it intends to be a permanent occupying force, something for which the American people have no appetite.

Trump’s desire to withdraw from Afghanistan was always one of his few positive foreign policy objectives although I don’t think anyone expected that he would succeed. He had no understanding of the complexities and only saw it as a way to burnish his reputation as a “winner” and a “deal maker.” But in a way, his ignorance helped drive the decision beyond the typical hawkish national security dogma to put in place a serious negotiation to finally end America’s presence there. He got Fox News people to start talking about the need to end the “forever wars” and soured most of the GOP base on the relics of the post-9/11 War on Terror.

And his vendettas against his enemies have led to a fracturing of the Republican foreign policy establishment. Trump’s enemy number one, super-hawk Liz Cheney is predictably leading the charge to oppose Biden’s decision to withdraw at all, while Trump acolytes are struck unable to do the same since Trump’s only criticism of the deal must be that it’s delayed. The usual screeching about “cutting and running” is muted, giving Biden much more room to make this move than any Democrat normally would have. It may be the one good thing Trump ever did.

As Sanger put it in the Times:

Mr. Biden is declaring that war is over — no matter what, and even though the United States is leaving with most of its goals unmet, and Afghanistan’s stability deeply in jeopardy. If there is no terrorist attack launched from Afghan territory again, no echo of Sep. 11, 2001, Mr. Biden may well have been judged to have made the right bet.

Let’s hope so. But it’s a risk that he must take if we want to turn the page and face the challenges of the future. The War on Terror was a mistake from the beginning. It’s long past time to admit that and move on.

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Florida, however, there were 41 travel-related cases in 2020, compared with 71 cases that were transmitted locally.

Native mosquitoes in Florida are increasingly resistant to the most common form of control — insecticide — and scientists say they need new and better techniques to control the insects and the diseases they carry. “There aren’t any other tools that we have. Mosquito nets don’t work. Vaccines are under development but need to be fully efficacious,” says Michael Bonsall, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, who is not affiliated with Oxitec but has collaborated with the company in the past, and who worked with the World Health Organization to produce a GM mosquito-testing framework.

Bonsall and other scientists think a combination of approaches is essential to reducing the burden of diseases — and that, maybe, newer ideas like GM mosquitoes should be added to the mix. Oxitec’s mosquitoes, for instance, are genetically altered to pass what the company calls “self-limiting” genes to their offspring; when released GM males breed with wild female mosquitoes, the resulting generation does not survive into adulthood, reducing the overall population.

But Oxitec has been proposing to experimentally release GM mosquitos in the Keys since 2011, and the plan has long been met with suspicion among locals and debate among scientists. Some locals say they fear being guinea pigs. Critics say they are concerned about the possible effects GM mosquitoes could have on human health and the environment. In 2012, the Key West City Commission objected to Oxitec’s plan; in a non-binding referendum four years later, residents of Key Haven — where the mosquitoes would have been released — rejected it, while residents in the surrounding county voted in support of the release. With the decision left up to the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, officials approved the trial to be conducted elsewhere in the Keys.

According to Oxitec, the release was delayed due to a transfer of jurisdiction over the project from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The company reapplied for approval to release a new version of the mosquitoes, called OX5034, in the Keys. In May, the EPA granted a two-year experimental use permit, which the agency can cancel at any time. State and local sign-off soon followed — finally giving the project the greenlight.

Oxitec’s OX5034 mosquitoes are the first GM mosquitoes approved for release in the U.S. The company has already conducted a trial with the OX5034 mosquitoes in Brazil and released more than a billion of a previous version, called OX513A, there and in other locations over the years — including the Cayman Islands. The company says it is confident in the effectiveness and safety of the technology.

But some scientists want to hit pause on Oxitec’s Florida trial, to find what they say is a fairer process in deciding to release the mosquitoes. Others want to see clearer proof that this technology is even necessary, claiming that the company has only released its most positive data with the public and has kept other key data, including whether the mosquitoes curb disease transmission, private. And if the release actually launches as planned, some Keys residents say they aim to interfere.

Critics also say that Oxitec failed to engage with local communities in Florida and get their consent to release the mosquitoes. “What’s the most upsetting is that the very people that are going to be most impacted, both by the benefits or the risks of such a decision, have like the smallest voice in how these choices are made. I think that’s a really big issue,” says Natalie Kofler, a molecular biologist and bioethicist who founded Editing Nature, a platform that advocates “for inclusive decision-making processes to steer” the use of genetic technology. “If Oxitec doesn’t do this right,” she adds, “we could have huge impact on delaying the use of other beneficial technologies like that in the future.”

* * *

Oxitec’s OX5034 mosquitoes are programmed to combat the transmission of mosquito-borne illnesses by suppressing local Aedes aegypti populations. Oxitec — which is U.S.-owned and based in the United Kingdom — describes their mosquitoes as “friendly” because they will only release males, which, unlike females, do not bite humans or transmit disease.

At Oxitec’s laboratory in the U.K., the company genetically engineers the mosquitoes, giving the insects the “self-limiting” gene that makes the females dependent on the antibiotic tetracycline. Without the drug, they will die. Eggs from these genetically-altered mosquitoes — which will hatch both male and female insects — will be shipped to the Keys. Mosquitoes require water to mature from an egg to an adult; when Oxitec’s team adds water to the boxes the mosquitoes will be deployed in, both GM males and GM females will hatch. With no tetracycline present in the box, the GM females are expected to die in early larval stages.

The male mosquitoes will survive and carry the gene. When they leave the boxes, the insects will, hypothetically, fly away to mate with wild females to pass the gene to the next wild generation, according to Nathan Rose, head of regulatory affairs at Oxitec. Kevin Gorman, the company’s chief development officer, says the local female mosquito population will be increasingly reduced — which will also reduce the number of wild male mosquitoes in the treatment areas.

Gorman emphasized to Undark that the EPA and other regulators found no risk in using tetracycline in breeding their genetically-altered mosquitoes. But some scientists think the presence of this antibiotic in the environment does pose a risk. According to Jennifer Kuzma, co-founder and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, tetracycline is commonly found in sewage, and it is also used in Florida to prevent bacterial diseases in agriculture — particularly in citrus groves. The presence of the antibiotic may mean that it will remain in the environment, especially in water where the mosquitoes breed, which could allow Oxitec’s female mosquitoes to survive. While the company does not plan to release the mosquitos near areas where the antibiotic is used, Kuzma says the EPA’s risk assessment did not include testing of any standing water for tetracycline — something, she adds, “would have been easy enough to do for good due diligence.”

Skeptics of Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes include local residents, physicians, scientists, and environmental activists. Many of these opponents say they aren’t anti-GMO, but disagree with how the approval process has been handled. One group has even kept a running list of what it sees as Oxitec’s wrongdoings since it first began experimental releases. The list includes Oxitec’s lack of disease monitoring in the countries where it has released mosquitoes; the unknown price of its technology; and complaints that the company has overstated the success of some of it its trials.

“I cannot trust this company. I cannot trust this technology,” says Mara Daly, a resident of Key Largo who says she’s been following Oxitec’s plans for nine years.

“This is not a traditional pesticide,” she adds. ” This is not a chemical that you can trace. This is something completely different, new emerging technology and we need better regulation.”

Phil Goodman, chairman of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (FKMCD), an independently-elected commission carrying out mosquito control within Monroe County, says that many of those who discredit Oxitec’s evidence do not understand the technology. “They’re fearmongering,” he says.

“They have very little credibility here in the Florida Keys as far as I’m concerned,” he adds.

But people like Daly and Barry Wray, executive director of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, disagree. “We want to know it’s safe,” says Wray, who notes that his group more generally supports GM technology. “We don’t have another Florida Keys ecosystem. We don’t have another Florida Keys community. We have this one.”

Daly, Wray, and others point to what they perceive as the FKMCD’s disrespect for public opinion. They argue that the community wasn’t given a chance to consent before the EPA approval. There was a 30-day public forum in September 2019 about Oxitec’s technology application, with 31,174 comments opposing release and 56 in support. A statement emailed to Undark by Melissa Sullivan, an EPA spokesperson, noted that the agency considered these comments during the review, but critics think it happened too quickly to be of real use.

In June, Kofler and Kuzma wrote an opinion piece in The Boston Globe about the EPA approval, critiquing the agency’s regulatory system and calling for a better process for evaluating new biotechnologies. The researchers expressed concern that “the EPA did not convene an independent, external scientific advisory panel to review” Oxitec’s claims about its mosquito strategy and that the agency only publicly released its risk assessment after approving the technology. The “American public,” Kofler and Kuzma wrote, “needs to be assured that these decisions are made free of conflicts of interest.” The statement from the EPA’s Sullivan noted that the agency “conducted an extensive risk assessment based on the best available science.”

Some critics also wanted there to be more public engagement. Kofler and Kuzma say they offered to provide their expertise, along with other outside experts, to the mosquito control district to allow more discussion about the GM mosquitoes with the Keys community. But Kofler says the district wasn’t responsive. Oxitec itself launched webinars about their new product, but not until after the EPA approval. “Here we are, like in the final hour, having these conversations that needed to be happening a year ago,” says Kofler.

Without public trust and enthusiasm, it doesn’t matter whether Oxitec’s mosquito technique works, says Guy Reeves, a genetic researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, who stresses that he doesn’t think the company’s approach is unsafe. “If the population in Florida Keys becomes so sensitized to this issue — that they can no longer cooperate with each other — that’s good for the mosquitoes, not good for the people,” he adds.

Based on their first generation mosquito OX513A, Oxitec says it has shown that the approach reduces a targeted mosquito population in trials in both Brazil and the Cayman Islands. But there’s no evidence that this new OX5034 mosquito release will actually be worth it for mosquito suppression, says Reeves. Oxitec also hasn’t explained how their new mosquito will directly curb human diseases, such as dengue. Reducing disease transmission and burden should be measures of efficacy for this technology, says Kofler.

According to Gorman, independent disease suppression data has only been collected by municipalities in Brazil because that’s where most of the company’s trials have been released in larger scales. These municipalities have shown that Oxitec mosquitoes have reduced dengue cases in areas of release, Gorman says. In order for Oxitec to collect additional data, he adds, the company needs to release and test large areas over sustained periods of time. Gorman maintains that the company is not required to report formal health impact studies.

Reeves adds that Oxitec also hasn’t explained what resources are needed to sustain this product, how long it could take to be effective, or the cost. When asked about the cost of the Florida Keys project, Oxitec responded to Undark by email: “Oxitec is a pre-commercial, pre-profit company. We will not profit from this pilot project in Florida. We are paying for it ourselves.”

* * *

Oxitec has released more than a billion of their OX513A mosquitoes over the past 10 years. According to independent scientists, some of those experiments did not go well.

For example, researchers at Yale University and collaborators from Brazil analyzed Oxitec’s 2015 release of OX513A in Brazil. The scientists confirmed that some offspring of the genetically modified mosquitoes — which were supposed to die and not pass new genes to the wild population — survived to adulthood and mated with their native counterparts. Between 10 and 60 percent of the native mosquitoes contained genes from Oxitec, according to the Yale study, which published in Nature in 2019. The paper’s authors concluded they do not know what impacts these mixed mosquitoes have on disease control or transmission, but added that their findings underscore the importance of monitoring the genetics of the insects.

Oxitec disagreed with the findings and responded on the journal’s website. Oxitec told Gizmodo that Yale’s study includes “numerous false, speculative, and unsubstantiated claims and statements about Oxitec’s mosquito technology.” And when Kofler and three other scientists wrote about Oxitec’s Brazil trial in The Conversation, Oxitec pushed to have the article retracted, says Kofler.

For this coming release, some Key Largo locals are willing to act on their anger. Daly, for instance, says that if the mosquitoes are deployed in her neighborhood, she’ll try to put insecticide in any box she finds or send it to an expert to test — even if it means getting in trouble with the federal authorities. “I already have my arresting officer and she said she’s gonna clean her handcuffs for me,” she says. “I don’t care.”

Ideally, Daly says, it won’t have to come to that. She and other locals hope to stop Oxitec before the latest mosquitos are delivered. Daly says she has been busy organizing protests — like one that happened recently in Key Largo — and giving out yard signs to residents who don’t want their property used in the trial. “Locals are pissed off. So I have been busy getting the press to cover the local opposition,” Daly wrote in an email to Undark.

“The first flying insect or animal that can actually use our human blood for a friggin trial for a product to come to market without my consent,” Daly says.

“That’s my blood,” she adds. “That’s my son’s blood. That’s my dog’s blood.”

* * *

UPDATE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly suggested that the antibiotic tetracycline is used to treat sewage in Florida. While it can be found in sewage, this is the result of the drug being metabolized by users and flushed into the waste stream. It is not used to treat sewage.

Taylor White is a freelance journalist based in Cape Cod, MA and a graduate of the Science, Health & Environmental Reporting Program at the NYU school of journalism. Her work has appeared in NOVA GBH, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, GenomeWeb, Spectrum, and Science Vs.

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

The gender vaccine gap: More women than men are getting COVID shots

Mary Ann Steiner drove 2½ hours from her home in the St. Louis suburb of University City to the tiny Ozark town of Centerville, Missouri, to get vaccinated against covid-19. After pulling into the drive-thru line in a church parking lot, she noticed that the others waiting for shots had something in common with her.

“Everyone in the very short line was a woman,” said Steiner, 70.

Her observation reflects a national reality: More women than men are getting covid vaccines, even as more men are dying of the disease. KHN examined vaccination dashboards for all 50 states and the District of Columbia in early April and found that each of the 38 that listed gender breakdowns showed more women had received shots than men.

Public health experts cited many reasons for the difference, including that women make up three-quarters of the workforce in health care and education, sectors prioritized for initial vaccines. Women’s longer life spans also mean that older people in the first rounds of vaccine eligibility were more likely to be female. But as eligibility expands to all adults, the gap has continued. Experts point to women’s roles as caregivers and their greater likelihood to seek out preventive health care in general as contributing factors.

In Steiner’s case, her daughter spent hours on the phone and computer, scoping out and setting up vaccine appointments for five relatives. “In my family, the women are about a million times more proactive” about getting a covid vaccine, Steiner said. “The females in families are often the ones who are more proactive about the health of the family.”

As of early April, statistics showed the vaccine breakdown between women and men was generally close to 60% and 40% — women made up 58% of those vaccinated in Alabama and 57% in Florida, for example.

States don’t measure vaccinations by gender uniformly, though. Some break down the statistics by total vaccine doses, for example, while others report people who have gotten at least one dose. Some states also have a separate category for nonbinary people or those whose gender is unknown.

A handful of states report gender vaccination statistics over time. That data shows the gap has narrowed but hasn’t disappeared as vaccine eligibility has expanded beyond people in long-term care and health care workers.

In Kentucky, for instance, 64% of residents who had received at least one dose of vaccine by early February were women and 36% were men. As of early April, the stats had shifted to 57% women and 43% men.

In Rhode Island — one of the states furthest along in rolling out the vaccines, with nearly a quarter of the population fully vaccinated — the gap has narrowed from 30 percentage points (65% women and 35% men) the week of Dec. 13 to 18 points (59% women and 41% men) the week of March 21.

 

A few states break the numbers down by age as well as gender, revealing that the male-female difference persists across age groups. In South Carolina, for example, the gender breakdown of vaccine recipients as of April 4 was slightly wider for younger people: 61% of vaccinated people ages 25-34 were women compared with 57% female for age 65 and older.

Dr. Elvin Geng, a professor at the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, said women of all age groups, races and ethnicities generally use health services more than men — which is one reason they live longer.

Arrianna Planey, an assistant professor who specializes in medical geography at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said it’s often women who manage medical appointments for their households so they may be more familiar with navigating health systems.

Decades of research have documented how and why men are less likely to seek care. A 2019 study in the American Journal of Men’s Health, for example, examined health care use in religious heterosexual men and concluded masculine norms — such as a perception that they are supposed to be tough — were the main reason many men avoided seeking care.

Attitudes about the covid pandemic and the vaccines also affect who gets the shots.

Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, director of public health administration and policy at the University of Minnesota, said women have been more likely to lose jobs during the pandemic, and in many cases bear the brunt of teaching and caring for children at home.

“Women are ready for this to be done even more than men are,” Wurtz said.

Political attitudes, too, play a part in people’s views on coping with the pandemic, experts said. A Gallup poll last year found that among both Democrats and Republicans, women were more likely to say they took precautions to avoid covid, such as always practicing physical distancing and wearing masks indoors when they couldn’t stay 6 feet apart from others.

In a recent national poll by KFF, 29% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats said they definitely would not get the shot.

Paul Niehaus IV of St. Louis, who described himself as an independent libertarian with conservative leanings, said he won’t get a covid vaccine. He said the federal government, along with Big Tech and Big Pharma, are pushing an experimental medicine that is not fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and he doesn’t trust those institutions.

“This is a freedom issue. This is a civil liberties issue,” said Niehaus, a 34-year-old self-employed musician. “My motto is ‘Let people choose.'”

Steiner, who plans to retire at the end of the month from editing a magazine for the Catholic Health Association, said she was eager to be vaccinated. She has an immune disorder that puts her at high risk for severe illness from covid and hasn’t seen some of her grandchildren in a year and a half.

But she said some of the men in her life were willing to wait longer for the shots, and a few nephews haven’t wanted them. She said her brother, 65, received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine in early April after her daughter made it easy by arranging it for him.

Steiner, who has now received both doses of the Moderna vaccine, said she doesn’t regret taking the more difficult step of traveling five hours round trip to get her first shot in February. (She was able to find a closer location for her second dose.)

“It’s for my safety, for my kids’ safety, for my neighbors’ safety, for the people who go to my church’s safety,” she said. “I really don’t understand the resistance.”

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

Mike Lindell’s “free speech” social media site to ban porn, swearing and taking God’s name in vain

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced this week that so-called “free speech” on his new social media site will not include swearing, porn or taking God’s name in vain.

In a video posted on what appeared to be a placeholder page for the new site, Lindell explained some of the membership rules for Frankspeech.com.

“I have my own servers and everything,” he said. “We’re not going to be worried about Amazon taking it down or YouTube or Google or Apple and we are going to get our voice of free speech out there.”

Lindell asked his fans to sign up for early “VIP access” by providing their telephone numbers.

“All the cancels of our First Amendment rights we’re seeing right now, well guess what? It’s coming back,” he continued. “You’re not going to have to worry about what you’re saying and worry about being able to speak out freely.”

“We went back to our Founding Fathers and stuff to find out what defines free speech,” Lindell said. “You don’t get to use the four swear words, you know, the C-word, the N-word, the F-word or God’s name in vain. Free speech is not pornography. Free speech isn’t, ‘I’m going to kill you.'”

According to Lindell, the new site will officially launch on April 20.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Mike Lindell’s “free speech” social media site to ban porn, swearing and taking God’s name in vain

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced this week that so-called “free speech” on his new social media site will not include swearing, porn or taking God’s name in vain.

In a video posted on what appeared to be a placeholder page for the new site, Lindell explained some of the membership rules for Frankspeech.com.

“I have my own servers and everything,” he said. “We’re not going to be worried about Amazon taking it down or YouTube or Google or Apple and we are going to get our voice of free speech out there.”

Lindell asked his fans to sign up for early “VIP access” by providing their telephone numbers.

“All the cancels of our First Amendment rights we’re seeing right now, well guess what? It’s coming back,” he continued. “You’re not going to have to worry about what you’re saying and worry about being able to speak out freely.”

“We went back to our Founding Fathers and stuff to find out what defines free speech,” Lindell said. “You don’t get to use the four swear words, you know, the C-word, the N-word, the F-word or God’s name in vain. Free speech is not pornography. Free speech isn’t, ‘I’m going to kill you.'”

According to Lindell, the new site will officially launch on April 20.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Right-wing propaganda is annihilating the truth about Jan. 6 — Democrats must fight back

The attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump’s forces on Jan. 6 is one of the most documented crimes in American history. Trump’s coup attempt and related events were publicly planned. As president, Trump himself continually made such threats throughout his time in office. He personally summoned his followers to Washington in the days leading up to the 6th, and many of his followers recorded themselves attacking the Capitol and its defenders, or posed for selfies after they breached its defenses and entered the building. These acts of collective narcissism have become key evidence in the federal manhunt for Trump’s insurrectionists. The events of Jan. 6 were also recorded and tracked by surveillance cameras, both at the Capitol and throughout Washington and the surrounding area.

A new feature in Time magazine by Vera Bergengruen and Bill Hennigan offers the following details:

Surveillance and law enforcement body cameras captured more than 15,000 hours of footage. The federal government has snagged some 1,600 electronic devices, each likely teeming with electronic communications. Citizens from across the country have flooded the FBI with more than 270,000 tips, which include videos, photos and social media posts. And the rioters themselves extensively captured their exploits on camera, posting hours of digital evidence of the rampage. Thanks to that torrent of evidence, more than 370 suspects have been arrested on charges related to the insurrection.

When viewed in total, the images, sounds and video footage of the mayhem at the Capitol (including news coverage of the day’s events) offer a compelling story about Donald Trump and his Republican Party’s treason and embrace of terrorism. Democrats could and should use Jan. 6 to tarnish the Republican Party and Trump’s movement such as to effectively force them from public life, so that being identified as a Republican or Trump follower would be a mark of ignominy.

Every media appearance by a Republican in an interview or appearance on a cable news panel should be prefaced with the question, “Do you support Donald Trump and the events of Jan. 6?” That way, prominent Republicans could constantly be forced to reject Trump and his movement and followers. Television ads recycling the most striking images from the Capitol attack could be used to ensure that the American people are not permitted to throw the insurrection down the memory hole in an act of organized forgetting. Treason, terrorism and betrayal of America would forever be linked to the Republican Party and Donald Trump.

One can only imagine how effectively the Republicans and their news media and myth making machine would use such a gift if the situations were reversed.

What has the Democratic Party chosen to do instead? It has collectively decided to move on, in order to avoid what its leaders fear might be the “distraction” caused by public hearings and other investigations into the Trump regime and its crimes against democracy and the American people. That decision is a tactical and strategic error, one based on the false assumption that the Republican Party’s obvious involvement in the national betrayals of Jan. 6 cannot or should not be used to advance the Democratic Party’s overall agenda.

Moreover, by attempting to put aside events of Jan. 6 for reasons of political expediency and “bipartisanship,” the Democrats are all but guaranteeing that the Jim Crow Republicans and larger American neofascist movement will continue to attack multiracial democracy — and will attempt another coup at some point in the near future.

There is another dimension to these dangers as well: Not to punish the coup plotters and attackers to the maximum extent possible is to grossly underestimate the power of ideas and images.

When Trumpists and other right-wing extremists in the United States and around the world watched the Capitol being overrun, and a coup against the “world’s leading democracy” come perilously close to succeeding, they witnessed what was possible for their movement. Victory is achievable — not as something far off in the future, but in the here and now.

The Republican Party and the global right have created an alternate reality and closed epistemology uniquely suited to weaponizing the images and symbolism of Jan. 6. The Democrats and others beholden to “normal politics” and the norms of shared reality, truth and the presumed merits of democracy do not have that advantage.

That inability is in many ways the result of their role in the managerial state and a largely unquestioned belief in the inevitable nature of progress and the triumph of reason. This translates into how Democrats, liberals and progressives are overwhelmingly focused on facts and figures, the details of public policy, and are committed to the counterfactual belief that the public is rational and will make good decisions if presented with rational arguments and factual evidence.

By comparison, Republicans, Trumpists and members of the global right have fashioned themselves as heroes, conquerors, saviors, destroyers, disrupters, accelerationists and chaos agents. Their political agenda functions as a type of religion, in which faith is more important than empirical reality and where dogma supersedes intellect and reason.

Ultimately, today’s Republican Party and right-wing movement have created a parallel universe. They are also immersed in a storytelling tradition and political imagination that is fixated on violence and the apocalypse. For Christian fascists this manifests as the “end times.” To the degree such groups can be disentangled from one another, for white supremacists, anti-government militias and right-wing libertarians the apocalypse will take the form of a “race war” or other societal collapse. QAnon cult members are obsessed with “the Storm” and Donald Trump’s supposed defeat of the “deep state.” Other “conservatives” have a wish-fulfillment paranoid fantasy about a chaotic new civil war in which they can use their assault weapons rifles to kill “radical leftists,” Black Lives Matter supporters, antifa members, nonwhite immigrants or whatever other group is deemed to be the enemy.

Fox News and its lead propagandists, such as Tucker Carlson, are central to the how today’s right-wing and conservative movement are annihilating the truth and empirical reality. Carlson is particularly skilled and effective in that role. Most recently, he has begun to mainstream white supremacist lies about how Black and brown people will “replace” the white majority population in America. The implication is clear: White people, especially white “conservatives” in rural or exurban areas, need to use violence to defend themselves against an existential threat from unnamed others, seen as usurpers or invaders.

Carlson has also been working to destroy the truth about Trump’s coup attempt and his followers’ attack on the Capitol. Now, in the Fox News MAGAverse, the insurrection did not really take place. Instead, Trump’s supporters are peaceful “patriots” who are being demonized by “the left.” Such lies only serve to encourage more right-wing terrorism.

On this, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns in a new essay for CNN:

The truth of Jan. 6 — that the insurgents showed rabid hatred of the police officers and security guards — presents a problem, given the pro-law enforcement sentiments of Trump’s base. So it’s best just to flip the script and turn murderous rage into hugs and kisses.

That’s why the Fox News host Tucker Carlson opened a recent show with the claim that the insurgents “didn’t have guns,” which attempts to direct attention away from (and also contradicts) hours of video evidence and testimonies about the large number of weapons, some military-grade, the exceedingly well armed insurgents carried into the Capitol.

Trump and his allies are using a second tactic as brazen as the first. Even while denying the violence, they are blaming it on a familiar enemy: the left. Johnson and Carlson have been prominent fabricators of a reality in which left-wing extremists were the real Capitol rioters. This, too, is a propaganda classic: accusing an enemy you have already invested many hours in demonizing. It’s far more efficient. And with some audiences, it works.

Although 61% of Americans responding to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll think Trump “is at least partly to blame for starting the deadly Jan. 6 riot,” only 28% of Republicans agreed with that statement. And more than half of the Republicans questioned agreed that Jan. 6 was the work of “violent left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad.”

What should Democrats, liberals and progressives do to counter the right-wing “disimagination” and fantasy machine?

First, they must accept the fact that diehard Trump Republicans and other right-wing extremists are not going to return to normal society. Their commitment to authoritarianism and neofascism is deep: It is now a part of their core identities. No amount of effective legislation to improve the material realities of their lives will win them over as a group. Despite supporting aspects of Biden’s political agenda such as COVID relief and infrastructure, Trumpists and other Republicans as a whole will not abandon their political cult in the upcoming 2022 and 2024 elections. Fascism in its various forms is a sickness of the soul and spirit more than of the mind.

More important, Democrats, liberals and progressives need to learn to tell better stories. These stories must claim the moral high ground and embrace the idea of a righteous crusade to protect the America’s democratic values. In turn, such a crusade can create space for legislation that improves the lives and futures of the American people. There have been recent moments when such moral clarity has been summoned: see Sen. Bernie Sanders and his unrepentant, unapologetic truth-telling. President Biden has had such moments as well in his quest to become a progressive, transformational leader in the mold of Lyndon Johnson or Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

The advice to “tell better stories” is not new. To save the soul of America in this ongoing battle against neofascism, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and their allies on the left need to embrace that advice wholeheartedly. It is the foundation for defeating the Jim Crow Republicans, the right-wing extremists, the Christian fascists, the plutocrats and other anti-social, anti-life and anti-democracy forces.

Biden’s massive infrastructure bill: The biggest public investment most of us will ever see

Reporting on the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Bill — aka the infrastructure bill — has been is particularly uninformative, Paul Krugman thankfully aside, on the crucial issue of what, besides a massive economic stimulus, America will get out of it. What are the long-term returns on these massive investments? Indeed, one major Washington Post article referred to all the actual economic or social value of the proposed investments as “ancillary” to the number of dollars expended and jobs created. 

We need to be analyzing and debating what this will all mean, beyond the administration’s talking points — roads and jobs — and Mitch McConnell’s response: “not enough roads and too many taxes.”

It helps to keep three facts in mind:

The proposal is not a classic stimulus bill, nor a conventional congressional highway bill. It is a comprehensive 21st-century economic development strategy, framed by the need to embrace equity and accelerate climate progress. Its diversity of beneficiaries reflects that goal; no one sector of the economy can, all by itself, power America through the century.

Second, the discussion of whether the $2 trillion expenditure plan will risk runaway inflation largely ignores that the money will be spent over 10 years. Many of the investments will already be generating revenues, cutting costs and reducing deficits before all of the money is spent. If we are only counting the expenditure side of the ledger, the program looks much more expansionary and potentially inflationary than its reality is likely to be.

Third, by far the largest single category of spending, more than $1 trillion, is investments designed to help the U.S. accelerate the scaling-up of high-tech industries to stay ahead of Chinese and other competitors. Among the targets: $100 billion for modernizing the U.S. electrical grid, $174 million for electric transportation, $100 billion for extending broadband to every American household, $213 billion for upgrading and modernizing America’s building stock. The administration also favors setting aside $400 billion in tax credits for advanced manufacturing, focused on the energy sector. 

These are investments which at the current, ultra-low federal cost of borrowing are collectively profitable. Most will become wildly so over time. More than half the total Build Back Better program will, over time, be deficit-neutral, just as the financing of rural electrification in the 1930s and 1940s through REA made money for the government, and just as the Obama-era Advanced Energy Loan programs authorized in 2009 have already returned to the taxpayer more than was spent on them. 

This use of the federal government’s financial leverage to jump-start an “infant industry” (along with the term “infant industry” itself) goes back to Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 “Report on Manufactures.” It then became the basis of Henry Clay’s “American System,” which inspired Abraham Lincoln to use land grants to finance the transcontinental railroad. It was revived by Calvin Coolidge to create a commercial airline industry by setting aside subsidies for airmail and, of course, famously served as the heart of much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the post-World War II era, many of these initiatives were disguised for the public as national defense expenditures — hence the puzzling title “Interstate Defense Highways” — but they continued through the 1960s. 

So we know how to design programs which speed new industries to scale. The Treasury can borrow money far more cheaply than private borrowers. Small sums of such federal borrowing encourage much larger volumes of private investment in innovation. Again, the taxpayers will make money, if much less than the borrowers who directly benefit. American farmers made far more from rural electrification than the federal government did — and that was by design. 

Wind and solar power have already demonstrated their profitability. The largest renewables company, NextEraEnergy, has a market cap roughly equal to Exxon’s. Tesla, the pioneer electric-vehicle manufacturer, is worth more than the half dozen largest automakers combined. (Tesla was one of the success stories of the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program — and has fully repaid all its federal loans, ahead of schedule.)

But program design is critical if we want to get maximum leverage from federal financial support for emerging industries, and also ensure that the taxpayers get a fair return on their investment. (Interestingly, the idea that the taxpayers should earn a return on their investment in infant industries has actually been opposed by conservatives and Republicans over the years, and is more likely to be supported by liberal Democrats.)

But we won’t design the right mix of loans, tax credits and direct grants, nor the right set of priorities and performance standards, unless we start paying attention to the return we expect to get on our investment. Will we insist that if we support expansion of broadband internet, as we must, that everyone gets served — or will we allow difficult-to-reach rural areas and small towns to be left behind? If upfront loans are needed to finance electric vehicle charging stations on the interstate highway system, but a decade later they are making money, will we insist that those loans be repaid when they can be? If the federal government is effectively providing huge investments to make offshore wind power possible, will the taxpayers get a fair return for that support once offshore wind becomes hugely profitable?

There’s plenty to debate in Build in Back Better. I might argue there isn’t enough money dedicated to water supply and purity, that America’s 1,000 most dangerous dams need priority attention and that perhaps high-speed rail is not our sweet spot.

But for God’s sake, let’s start debating the actual substance of this enormous legislative package — the biggest set of public investments most of us will live to see.

Wildfire researchers have a “grim” forecast for 2021’s fire season, say it could be worse than 2020

Earlier this April, researchers at San José State University’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center in Northern California were gathering chamise at Blackberry Hill, a site in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. In the past few years, it was a site that they had revisited to gather samples of the native shrub. While surveying the land at the site, the researchers made a disconcerting discovery: new, green growth was nowhere to be found.

“Wow, never seen April fuels look so… dry,” the research center tweeted.

In a separate tweet, the researchers stated that fire season in 2021 was looking “grim.” The reason? This year’s live fuel-moisture content (FMC), a metric which measures the ratio of moisture to natural combustible material, is historically low. Average fuel-moisture content in the wild is 137 percent; low is usually considered to be 115 percent. Right now, in 2021, the Northern California region is at 97 percent. Lower fuel-moisture content means higher flammability, and therefore higher chances of wildfires.

“Fire danger is a function of not only the weather, but the condition of the fuels — and the most important thing about the fuels is their moisture content,” said Craig Clements, a professor and director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San José State University. Clements said he was “shocked” that they didn’t see new growth.

Every year, for two weeks during the spring, Clements and his colleagues go to the same three sites near the Santa Cruz mountains to take samples of scrub clippings to measure the FMC. Usually, April is a good month for new growth and moisture. It’s when Clements and the other researchers expect to measure their highest FMC ratios. Hence why the low ratio and lack of new growth was so shocking.

Clements checked in with other researchers who sampled various sites around the state of California and found that an astonishing number of sites are reportedly drier than normal.

“Some sites have new growth, but it’s still not what we expect in a normal year, and this is directly related to drought,” Clements said. “No rain, or low precipitation, equals drier-than-average fuel moistures.”

Indeed, the state of California has found itself in yet another drought this year. Meaning the likelihood of another severe wildfire season following a catastrophic 2020 wildfire season is high.

But it’s not just California. It’s the entire West Coast that is poised to have a wildfire season more catastrophic than the last. Indeed, the combination of low winter rainfall, fewer new shrubs and plant growth this spring, and a predicted dry summer are of great concern to climatologists and wildfire researchers. 

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The upcoming wildfire season could top even 2020, which, for the state of California, was its most severe in modern history. Over 10,000 wildfires tore through the state; nearly 4.2 million acres burned. Its northern neighbor Oregon also experienced one of its most destructive wildfire seasons in modern history, as did the state of Washington. In total, wildfires burned 10.2 million acres on the West Coast, killing at least 37 people and causing over $19.8 billion in damages.

“The long-term fire weather forecast doesn’t look good,” said Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington. Prichard agreed that one of the main reasons was that “in parts of all of California and a lot of the Southwest, fuels are already dry.”

Nicholas Bond, a climatologist for the state of Washington and principal research scientist at the University of Washington, said that the state of Washington had a higher-than-normal snowpack this winter, which was quite wet. That might seem like good news. Yet historically, there is a trend over the past decade of increasingly destructive wildfires each year.

“That trend is staring us in the face,” Bond said. He noted that an anticipated hot, dry summer will cause the snowpack to melt. “Even though we have right now an abundant snowpack right now, that’s not going to last forever,” he added.

As the snow melts in the later part of the summer, the landscape dries out and becomes prime fuel for wildfires, with the exception of the highest elevations in the mountains. 

“It helps to have those great snowpacks for various reasons — for forest health, it’s a good thing,” Bond said. “But even if you have a good snow year like we have right now, you can have a bad fire season.”

In spring 2020, wildfire researchers began expressing their concerns about a severe wildfire season. But strange weather events, like lightning storms in California, made matters worse.

Bond said weather forecasters predict a hot and dry summer across the West Coast, but it can’t be predicted now if there will be strong winds or similar storms.

“We can’t anticipate whether we’re going to have one of those [weather events] or not — chances are there won’t be anything of that severity this year, but that’s kind of a wild card,” Bond said. “Climate change is a real thing, and this is one of the manifestations that we’re having in the West.” 

As Prichard explained,  the fire season is not entirely in the hands of Mother Nature — there’s a human factor, too. 

“The dice are loaded, but we still get to roll the dice,” she said, paraphrasing a colleague. “I thought that that was a perfect way to describe the upcoming fire season because with these dry fuels and these longer, hotter, often windier summers that we’re getting. But the variable that we don’t know about is lightning and human fire starts.” And that last possibility, of course, is preventable. 

Fox News hosts accused of conspiring behind the scenes with Trump attorneys as network faces lawsuit

A new court filing argues that Fox News anchors cannot hide behind the First Amendment after helping former president Donald Trump and his allies spread election lies.

Voting technology company Smartmatic filed a 120-page motion asking a New York state court to reject the conservative network’s attempt to dismiss a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit by claiming its coverage was protected speech, arguing those protections should not apply because anchors knew election fraud claims were untrue, reported Law & Crime.

“This is not a game. The First Amendment does not provide the Fox Defendants a Get Out Of Jail Free card,” the motion argues. “The Fox Defendants do not get a do-over with their reporting now that they have been sued.”

Smartmatic attorney J. Erik Connolly accused Fox News anchors, including Maria Bartiromo, Jeannine Pirro and Lou Dobbs of inviting Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell onto their programs and asking questions intended to promote the former president’s claims of election fraud.

“The Fox anchors were not innocent bystanders and the disinformation generated during their interviews was no accident,” the motion claims. “Prior to the interviews, the Fox anchors decided to join forces with Giuliani and Powell to disseminate disinformation about Smartmatic. The Fox anchors knew what Giuliani and Powell would say on their shows, asked questions to elicit lies about Smartmatic, and endorsed Giuliani’s and Powell’s investigation. The Fox anchors added their own defamatory comments about Smartmatic for good measure. This was a scripted performance by the Fox anchors, Giuliani, and Powell to defame and disparage Smartmatic for personal gain.”

“The filing only confirms our view that the suit is meritless and FOX News covered the election in the highest tradition of the First Amendment,” the spokesperson said.

Jon Stewart shuts down Fox News host’s attempt to bait him into attacking President Biden

On Fox News Tuesday, in a segment first flagged by The Daily Beast, comedian and activist John Stewart appeared on Martha MacCallum’s show to discuss his efforts to push legislation that would expand medical benefits for veterans and first responders sickened by exposure to “burn pits.”

During the course of the interview, MacCallum tried to turn Stewart’s cause into an attack on President Joe Biden, by implying that his sweeping infrastructure proposal is money that could have been spent on burn pit victims.

“You know, you see the trillions that we’re talking about spending for a lot of different things right now, for COVID, for infrastructure,” said MacCallum. “How does that make you feel about what you’re pushing for here?”

Stewart, however, was having none of this spin, and immediately shut her down, pointing out these issues are much larger and therefore require more money to solve than benefits for burn pit victims.

“Listen, just even at the Pentagon, you’re talking about $750 billion, $800 billion a year,” said Stewart. By contrast, he is advocating a “fraction of that to implement the card and benefits that these folks have already earned.” MacCallum conceded his point, thanking him for appearing on the show.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Giada De Laurentiis’ cinnamon rolls are cozy and inviting, especially fresh out of the oven

One of the coziest and most inviting foods on the planet is cinnamon rolls, especially when they’re fresh out of the oven. Even though they’re a cornerstone of brunch, cinnamon rolls are satisfying at absolutely any time of day. And having a go-to recipe for this nostalgic treat in your back pocket means you’re always one step closer to comfort.

Of course, the queen of comfort, Giada De Laurentiis, has her own spin on this classic bake. On Instagram, she recently shared her recipe, which is inspired by Italy’s Pane di Pasqua. Typically adorned with decorative eggs, this bread flavored with anise and orange is an Easter staple. Though this spring holiday comes only once a year, we prefer to indulge in Giada’s citrusy and spice-filled pastries all year long. 

 

Once you’ve cut your dough, grease a large baking dish with butter to prepare it for your pastry. In about half an hour, they’ll double in size. Bake your rolls at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes until they’re perfectly golden.

As always, allow your bake to cool before icing it. Making Giada’s glaze is simple: All you have to do is whisk orange juice and powdered sugar until combined. We love to serve these rolls warm, and yes, they’re acceptable for dinner. Full recipe here.

For more of our favorite recipes from Giada, check out: 

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Too high, or not high enough? Study finds cannabis potency labeling is often wildly inaccurate

If you’ve bought marijuana products legally in the United States, you might be familiar with the regulatory labeling system, which features two three-letter acronyms accompanied by percentages: CBD and THC. Just as alcoholic drinks list their potency by denoting alcohol-by-volume (or ABV), both recreational and medicinal marijuana products list the amount of two different naturally-occurring chemicals, cannabidiol (CBD), and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), as a means for consumers to gauge how high they do (or don’t) want to get.

But while alcohol-by-volume is a fairly easy number to test, THC and CBD content aren’t as simple. Now, a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggests that this labeling system could frequently be way off — giving consumers radically different psychoactive experiences than what they might be expecting.

“People are buying products they think are THC-free but in fact contain a significant amount of THC,” said Jodi M. Gilman, PhD, the study’s lead author and an investigator in the Center for Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. “One patient reported that she took a product she thought only contained CBD, and then when driving home that day she felt intoxicated, disoriented and very scared.”

The crux of the discrepancy relates to these two naturally-occuring chemicals, CBD and THC. Because CBD has a reputation for being a non-psychoactive, “soothing” chemical, while THC is its psychoactive cousin, the listing system theoretically lets marijuana consumers decide what kind of high they prefer. Those who prefer cannabidiol (CBD) instead of the psychoactive compound in cannabis, THC, are often looking to experience a more soothing “high.” On the other hand, THC connects with cannabinoid 1 receptors in the brain and can sometimes create unwanted psychoactive effects — the glued-to-your-chair, immobilizing kind of high.

Indeed, the JAMA study from Massachusetts General Hospital researchers found that many consumers who are told that they are taking CBD to help with anxiety, depression, pain or insomnia, are often actually consuming products with unwanted THC in them.

Researchers analyzed urine samples from 97 patients who enrolled in a clinical trial to study the effect of using medical cannabis for anxiety, depression, pain or insomnia. The researchers wanted to see if the products were delivering the expected ingredients to patients or if they were mislabeled.

According to the results published in JAMA Network Open, there was no CBD in about one-third of the urine samples from patients who said they were using products that were mostly CBD or were roughly half CBD and half THC. In total, THC was detected in 80 percent of those samples — which included people who thought they were only consuming CBD.

The participants reported that they were using products from licensed dispensaries within 48 hours. Vaping was the most common method reported of consuming CBD, and yet nobody who reported vaping had measurable cannabinoids in their samples.

“A lot of questions about the content of the products and their effects remain,” said Gilman. “Patients need more information about what’s in these products and what effects they can expect.”

The findings are consistent with previous ones that hint at mislabeling. For example, one study published in JAMA Network in 2015, found that only 17 percent of 75 edible marijuana products were labeled correctly.

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“Edible cannabis products from 3 major metropolitan areas, though unregulated, failed to meet basic label accuracy standards for pharmaceuticals,” the researchers stated. “Greater than 50% of products evaluated had significantly less cannabinoid content than labeled, with some products containing negligible amounts of THC.”

A more recent survey by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2020 yielded similar results. The FDA randomly tested 200 capsules, edibles, drinks, pet products, tinctures, and oils containing CBD; nearly 50 percent of them had THC, too.

“These preliminary data are from a limited sample size and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the marketplace and supports the need for the long-term study, which will capture multiple retail sources (on-line and brick and mortar) and a greater number of products,” the report concluded.

The FDA at the time emphasized that more testing is needed. But some experts have previously stated that the FDA needs to step in and regulate such products.

“The big problem, with this being something that is not federally legal, is that the needed quality assurance oversight from the Food and Drug Administration is not available,” Marcel Bonn-Miller, PhD, an adjunct assistant professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a press statement previously. “So, right now, if you buy a Hershey bar, you know it has been checked over; you know how many calories are in it, you know it has chocolate as an ingredient, you know how much chocolate is in there. Selling these oils without oversight, there is no way to know what is actually in the bottle.”

Correction: A previous version of this story stated: “For example, one study published in JAMA Network in 2015, found that only 17 percent of 75 edible marijuana products were labeled incorrectly.” We meant “correctly.”

Leaked calls show ALEC’s secret plan to fight Biden on climate

Republican efforts to stall President Joe Biden’s climate agenda are slowly beginning to take shape. In March, a coalition of 12 Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging Biden’s executive order creating a working group to establish a metric for the “social cost of carbon.” Led by Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, the lawsuit charges that the order is an “enormous expansion of federal regulatory power” and that such cost calculations are “inherently speculative, policy-laden, and indeterminate” and should instead be undertaken by Congress. 

In a similar vein, 21 Republican-controlled states, led by Texas and Montana, have sued the Biden administration over its decision to revoke a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, calling it an unconstitutional overuse of executive power that would diminish the states’ economies and tax revenue. Both lawsuits are pending in federal courts. Separately, in response to Biden’s alleged “hostility to the energy industry,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order in January directing state agencies to “use all lawful powers” to challenge federal policies that disadvantage oil and gas operators. (Texas state agencies with the ability to loosen environmental regulations on the oil and gas industry largely do not appear to have changed policies in response to the order.) 

Ultimately, many of these actions may amount to little more than grandstanding, and it’s difficult to discern whether or not a broad, deliberate strategy is at work. But behind the scenes, call records obtained by Grist show that the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, has formed a new working group to build upon these efforts.

On a one-hour call with ALEC members in late February, former Utah state representative Ken Ivory claimed that each directive in the president’s January executive order on climate action unduly entrenched federal power and stripped authority from the states. He surfaced fears that Biden will declare a national “climate emergency” that “unlocks more than 130 unilateral executive actions.” (It’s unclear how Ivory, who did not respond to Grist’s request for comment, arrived at that figure.) Ivory also faulted the Democratic administration for promoting climate-focused policies within federal agencies through executive orders, rather than routing all proposals through Congress.

“We’re seeing something that they’re identifying as a new age in climate federalism,” Ivory said.

The call was the first of two that have taken place so far as part of ALEC’s new Functional Federalism Working Group, which exists separately from a longstanding ALEC task force on federalism and international relations. The new group hasn’t been publicized on the ALEC website beyond two brief mentions in blog posts penned by Ivory. Its name suggests that the group is meant to redress what Ivory described as an imbalance of power between Biden’s presidency and state governments, a majority of which are dominated by conservatives.

“What’s the reasoning or the exact strategy for them in creating this secretive working group, we still don’t know,” said David Armiak, a research director with the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit government watchdog group that tracks ALEC’s initiatives and provided Grist with a verbatim record of the two recent calls. “Fossil fuel and pharmaceutical companies do still play leadership roles and very active roles in sponsor meetings, and they’re worried about some of these executive actions.”

A spokesperson  for ALEC did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.

ALEC is a membership organization for state lawmakers and industry representatives that is best known for drafting model bills that are then picked up by state legislatures. Its bills have been linked to a number of state laws discouraging clean energyand criminalizing protests against pipeline projects. ALEC’s efforts to block climate progress, combined with its alliance with right-wing groups that explicitly promote climate change denial, has led major corporations such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Microsoft, and Google to cut ties with the group. 

While it’s still too early to tell exactly what shape opposition to the Biden administration’s climate proposals will take, the ALEC calls provide a few indications. On the calls, Ivory floated three potential ways for state lawmakers to present a united front  against the Biden agenda: nullification, or passing state legislation to invalidate federal actions that states believe are unconstitutional; the initiation of a constitutional convention that would pass amendments giving states more power; and the passage of non-binding resolutions reaffirming the U.S. Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which declares that powers not explicitly granted to the federal government belong to the states, in state legislatures.

“The states have to be able to speak with one voice,” Ivory said. “As John Adams said, ‘The clocks all have to strike at one.'”

Political scientists who spoke to Grist doubted the likelihood of a constitutional convention or nullification actions, but they cautioned against underestimating the effects of passing resolutions at the state level and discussing ways to wrest power from the federal government. 

“They’re providing the intellectual scaffolding for this elite movement,” said Jacob Grumbach, a University of Washington political science professor who has studied ALEC closely. The moves are symbolic and help unify disparate camps within the conservative movement — from anti-abortion groups to pro-gun groups and fossil fuel interests — by highlighting the shared benefits of more power at the state level, he said.

Grumbach noted that, during the Trump years, ALEC was less involved in the issues animating national politics than it had been during previous administrations, and it further cemented its position as a bill mill for state legislatures. ALEC’s federalism initiatives are already cropping up in state legislatures. Resolutions reaffirming the Tenth Amendment and ostensibly nullifying Biden’s executive orders have been introduced in at least four states — Idaho, Texas, South Carolina, and Montana — this year, but they have not yet passed. The bills are based on a theory that states have the right to veto federal policies or declare them “null and void” within their borders if they believe they are unconstitutional. The theory has its roots in the antebellum efforts of some states to preserve slavery and has not been upheld in federal court.

Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that it was predictable that ALEC’s new federalism working group would be laser-focused on climate policy. (Editor’s note: Stokes was selected as a Grist 50 Fixer in 2020.) With the exodus of technology companies from ALEC, many of the organization’s remaining members are oil and gas interests.

“It’s not surprising to see the fossil fuel industry try to push back and weaken progress because they don’t want us to get off fossil fuels,” she said. “They want to keep making profit and imperil the climate stability and the health of people all across the United States. That’s how they make money.”

New “bombshell” motion in “Making a Murderer” case points finger at someone else Steven Avery knew

There’s new movement in the “Making a Murderer” case, but whether it inspires a Netflix follow-up remains to be seen. For now, Steven Avery is still behind bars after being convicted of murdering photographer Teresa Halbach. 

“Making a Murderer” attorney Kathleen Zellner filed a motion Monday afternoon in Manitowoc County that alleges Avery’s nephew Bobby Dassey was seen moving Halbach’s car onto the Avery property. A former Wisconsin newspaper delivery driver signed a sworn affidavit attesting that he notified the sheriff’s office at the time of Halbach’s disappearance that he witnessed this, but was never contacted for more information. 

“Mr. [Thomas] Sowinski was a motor-route driver for Gannett Newspapers, Inc. and delivered papers to the Avery Salvage Yard in the early morning hours of November 5th of 2005,” the motion reads. “Prior to delivering the newspapers to the Avery Salvage Yard, he turned onto the Avery property and witnessed two individuals, a shirtless Bobby Dassey (“Bobby”) and an unidentified older male pushing a dark blue RAV-4 down Avery Road towards the junkyard.” 

As Zellner  told The Patch reporter John Ferak, “this is an evidence bombshell in the Avery case.” 

As outlined in the popular Netflix docuseries “Making a Murderer,” Avery was once already wrongfully convicted and served 18 years in prison for a sexual assault he did not commit, though was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. Two years later, as Avery was in the midst of civil lawsuit against Manitowoc County to recover $36 million dollars in damages for his wrongful conviction, he and his nephew, Brendan Dassey — who is Bobby’s brother — were arrested in connection to Halbach’s murder. 

Her car, a dark blue RAV-4, was found by law enforcement on November 5, 2005, just hours after Sowinski alleges he saw it being pushed by Dassey. However, when Sowinski called the sheriff’s office to file a report, he says he was told by a female officer, “We already know who did it.” He was told to leave his phone number, but no one ever called to follow up on his tip. That phone call was not included in evidence during Avery’s trial either. 

The newly filed motion — which can be viewed in its entirety here — has left viewers of the series with some questions. Here’s what you need to know about how it could impact the Halbach case. 

What role did Bobby Dassey play in Steven Avery’s conviction? 

As Zellner mentions in the motion, Bobby “was the State’s primary witness against Mr. Avery at his trial.” Prosecutor Ken Kratz told the jury that Bobby was the last person to see Halbach alive and that he should be recognized for his credibility as “an eyewitness without any bias.” 

During the trial, Bobby told the jury that he observed Halbach, who was a photographer for Auto Trader Magazine, arrive on Avery’s property and begin taking photographs of his mother’s van. He testified that he then saw her walk to Steven Avery’s door. 

“After seeing this woman walking toward your Uncle Steven’s trailer, did you ever see this woman again?” Kratz asked, to which Bobby responded, “No.” He testified that when he returned from hunting later that evening, Halbach’s vehicle was no longer in the driveway. 

What does this mean for Steven Avery’s legal case? 

Zellner argues that the prosecution committed a Brady violation because they suppressed evidence that was favorable to the defense and was material to an issue at the trial. 

The motion reads: “The suppressed evidence from Mr. Sowinski was favorable to the defense and material to a pivotal issue in trial because it would have 1) destroyed the credibility of Bobby as the State’s primary witness; 2) established that Bobby was directly involved in the murder of Ms. Halbach; and 3) established that Bobby planted evidence to frame his uncle, Mr. Avery.” 

Consequences of a Brady violation can include having a conviction vacated, as well as disciplinary actions against the prosecutor. 

Will this impact Brendan Dassey’s conviction? 

Brendan Dassey’s attorneys have long maintained that his confession that he assisted in the murder of Teresa Halbach was coerced by Manitowock County law enforcement. However, after navigating through lower courts, his legal team failed to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case in 2018. His only chance at parole is in 2048; he’s been serving in prison since he was 16 years old. 

However, in a 2019 interview with the Daily Beast, Zellner said that if Avery is freed that may “ultimately help him” as Brendan Dassey’s legal team could go back to the lower court in Wisconsin with new evidence to dispute the validity of the confession. 

“But the problem in the post-conviction world is there are so many procedural hurdles,” she said. 

Who was the second man allegedly seen pushing the car? 

According to Sowinski, the man pushing the car with Bobby was at least 6-feet tall and had a beard between 8 to 12 inches long. Zellner said in her interview with The Patch that the man does not match the description of Scott Tadych — whom she has previously theorized might be involved in the murder — and “it certainly does not match Steven Avery.”

For now, the man remains unknown. 

Former Trump official Sebastian Gorka banned from YouTube over election conspiracy theories

Former Trump White House senior adviser turned right-wing radio host Sebastian Gorka was permanently booted off of YouTube over the weekend after receiving his third strike on the platform in 90 days for touting unhinged election conspiracy theories. 

Gorka’s channel was suspended for misleading users on the platform by pushing the baseless claim that the 2020 election was plagued with widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Salon found the infamous Trump flack, formerly accused of wearing Hungarian pro-Nazi regalia, was pushing voter fraud claims as recently as last week in a video entitled: “Can We Stop the Next Steal?”

YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi told Salon on Monday afternoon that Gorka’s channel, where he has live-streamed his “America First” Salem radio show, was terminated over “repeated violations” to the company’s “presidential election integrity policy”: 

In accordance with our long-standing strikes system, we terminated the channel America First with Sebastian Gorka for repeated violations of our presidential election integrity policy. As we’ve publicly shared, our presidential election integrity policy prohibits content uploaded after last year’s safe harbor deadline that alleges widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Any channel that violates this policy will receive a strike, and channels that receive three strikes in the same 90-day period are permanently removed from YouTube, as in the case of America First with Sebastian Gorka.

Gorka didn’t return numerous requests for comment from Salon. Salem Media Group, which syndicates Gorka’s radio show, also did not return Salon’s request for comment. This reporter, until now an avid viewer of Gorka’s channel, can only imagine that the onetime White House aide is disappointed. Gorka would frequently brag to his producers whenever he noted a few hundred concurrent viewers watching via YouTube.

Fellow conservative radio host Dan Bongino leapt to Gorka’s defense by promoting the latter’s channel on Rumble (a conservative-oriented alternative to YouTube) on his daily podcast. “My friend Sebastian Gorka has been targeted by YouTube; they are trying to take his channel down, one of many conservatives under attack by YouTube,” Bongino said on his Monday program. “Go check him out on Rumble. … I feel like what they are doing to him is disgusting.”

This isn’t the first time Gorka has run into problems with YouTube. In 2019, he was temporarily suspended from the platform because he “refused to stop playing songs from pop-rock band Imagine Dragons on episodes of his radio show that were later uploaded to the site,” according to The Daily Beast. The apparent copyright dispute was later resolved, and Gorka subsequently stopped playing music on his YouTube live streams.

But when not on Twitter blocking 16,000 “asshats” or hosting his radio show, the EcoBoost Mustang-driving onetime Trump adviser also hosts a new Sunday night Newsmax show called “The Gorka Reality Check,” which recently received a less-than-flattering review in Politico:

Routinized Songs of Praise for President Donald Trump would be a good title for the Gorka TV hour-long show, which debuted on Sunday at 7 p.m. The program, shot cheaply on a no-budget set in front of a Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument screen, consumed its first quarter-hour extolling Trump and Trumpism in the grandest and blandest terms possible …

There is at least one obvious downside to Gorka’s YouTube ban from the platform: Viewers will be denied Canadian prankster Chris James‘ imaginative efforts to troll the self-professed terrorism expert, whose PhD has been described as “about as legitimate as if he had been awarded it by Trump University.”

Hank Azaria apologizes for voicing “The Simpsons”‘ Apu, a character who is “practically a slur” now

During a Monday podcast appearance, Hank Azaria, who voiced “The Simpsons” character Apu from 1989 to 2020, said that he now understands that the character contributed to “structural racism” in the United States. 

When speaking with Dax Shepherd and Monica Padman, who is Indian-American, for their podcast “Armchair Expert,” Azaria said that he had taken time to consider how his voicing of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon was offensive to the Indian American community after drew criticism from viewers for racial stereotyping. 

Despite having a doctorate in computer science, the character, who was originally written as an undocumented immigrant from West Bengal, runs the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store in Springfield. As comedian Hari Kondabolu explained in his 2017 documentary “The Problem with Apu,” the character’s signature four-word phrase — “Thank you, come again!” — was often used against him during acts of bullying as he was growing up and racist slights as an adult. 

“The popularity of ‘The Simpsons’ and Apu perpetuates the image of Indians being servile, devious and goofy, something he and millions of other Americans of South Asian descent deal with every single day,” wrote Salon’s Melanie McFarland in her review of the documentary. 

Azaria acknowledged this during the podcast. 

“I was speaking at my son’s school, I was talking to the Indian kids there because I wanted to get their input,” he said. “[There was] a 17-year-old, he’s never even seen ‘The Simpsons’ but knows what Apu means. It’s practically a slur at this point.”

Azaria hadn’t taken any of this into consideration when he had first accepted and developed the role.

“I didn’t think about it. I was unaware how much relative advantage I had received in this country as a white kid from Queens,” he said. “Just because there were good intentions — it doesn’t mean there weren’t real negative consequences to the thing that I am accountable for.”

He then apologized to Padman. “I know you weren’t asking for that, but it’s important,” he said. “I apologize for my part in creating that and participating in that. Part of me feels I need to go round to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize.”

Kondobulu tweeted in response to a Hollywood Reporter article about the podcast that “@HankAzaria is a kind & thoughtful person that proves that people are not simply ‘products of their time,’  but have the ability to learn & grow. Nothing. But. Respect.” 

He later tweeted that he disliked people referring to the recasting of Apu as a “controversy.” 

“Racism isn’t ‘controversial,’ it’s a constant,” he said. “Unless you think People of Color finally standing up for themselves is ‘controversial.’ However, I suppose a word like ‘controversy’ is more clickable than ‘comeuppance.'”

Azaria had initially announced he would be stepping back from voicing the character in a 2020 interview with Slash Film. He later told the New York Times, “Once I realized that that was the way this character was thought of, I just didn’t want to participate in it anymore. It just didn’t feel right.”

The show’s executive producers initially responded with a short statement that said, in part, “We respect Hank’s journey in regard to Apu. We have granted his wish to no longer voice the character.” Later that year, Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons” announced that characters of color would no longer be voiced by white actors. 

“Bigotry and racism are still an incredible problem and it’s good to finally go for more equality and representation,” Groening said.

In an interview with USA Today last month, Groening also said that while the show has yet to recast a new voice actor for Apu, “they are working on something kind of ambitious” and that the writers have “plans for Apu, but we have to see if we can make the stories work.”

 

The enigmatic gift from my estranged mother that I decided to keep

A few years ago, I built a writing studio in my backyard. One hundred square feet, four windows and a door. I painted it gray to match the main, bigger house, dragged in a couch and a desk, put up some shelves that I filled with books, a lamp, and a small birdhouse my mother had given me that had been too long in the elements. When I picked up the birdhouse, a nail slipped out and a roof slat fell off. Exposure had left it fragile as an egg shell and I worried that if it fell to pieces, I could never put it back together. The delicate structure would never withstand the tapping of a hammer, so I pushed the nail back into place with my thumb and it seemed to hold.

It meant nothing to me when my mother gave it to me. Just another trinket, a too-late expression of what? An apology, a token of love? We’d been so long estranged that at times it annoyed me to see the thing sitting out there next to a potted plant on the deck. I kept it all these years even though birds never used it.

She was so excited when I told her I had finished my first novel. She said she had always wanted to be the mother of someone famous. Immediately, I was annoyed. That wasn’t why I was writing. I wanted to be heard, to process the world around me and get it on the page. Once again, I felt the gulf between us grow. We were so unfamiliar with each other. We had never been close even when I was a child, but especially as a teenaged queer. Coming out at the age of eighteen completed the rift and as an adult I would go years without seeing her. But as the years passed, we each made efforts to bridge the differences between us; me the queer, her the devout Baptist.

Days before she died, she asked me to move her into a barn. She wanted a bed of hay and to smell the earthy things of this world, the ground beneath her, and fresh air on her skin. She settled for wheelchair rides beneath the shadow of the pines on the hospice grounds.

In her eulogy I chose to tell her favorite story from her childhood. She was thirteen, a hurricane was churning in the Gulf, headed inland, and there was a leak in the roof of her family’s house. She was home alone with her little brother so she found some spare shingles, climbed to the top, and patched the roof. This is my best memory of her, even though I wasn’t born for another seventeen years. Memory is what we claim as our own when there’s not much else to grab. For a writer, memory is where story begins.

It can’t be a surprise that I write from an outsider’s point of view, instinctively gravitating toward characters that exist on the perimeters of society — loners, with limited resources, who have to be creative to get by and stay alive. From the beginning I’ve been drawn to explore the impact on familial relationships of societal influences such as poverty, religion, constricted gender norms. Images and dreams return me to this point of view every time.

My mother was born poor and she died poor. As a society, we like to imagine hardworking people rising above poverty. We want stories where the mother works two jobs but somehow keeps her kids’ clothes clean and ironed. The mother in my story, Racine, works two jobs while raising a young son, oblivious to what he’s experiencing at school and the event that brings them irreconcilable trouble.

A dream of my father emerging from death to hand me the reins of a reddish-brown horse appears in “Long Time Coming.” A baby turtle crawling down a blacktop resulted in a mother-daughter exchange in “Low Tide.” A single image of seahorses swimming in the Gulf of Mexico produced the story, “Lucky Girl.” All of these stories began with pieces of dreams and memories that became short stories, which I explored on the page until they revealed elements of universal truth.

This birdhouse is gray and weathered. Its boards are so dried and split from years of sun and rain that its nails are rusted and loose. A five-dollar item from Big Lots was actually a big purchase for my mother to afford. What all had she seen in that birdhouse? What was she trying to say with that gift? The birdhouse sits safely on a shelf now, out of the wind and rain. It might fall apart the next time I pick it up, but if it does, I will fix it. It holds nothing. But somehow, it’s holding together.

Cruz, Hawley want to “break up” MLB as punishment for protesting Georgia voting restrictions

Three Republican senators introduced a bill on Tuesday that aims to punish Major League Baseball for its decision to move the All-Star game out of Georgia over the state’s new voting restrictions.

Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced a bill that would end the MLB’s antitrust exemption, which dates back to a 1922 Supreme Court decision, in response to its protest of the Georgia law.

The senators discussed the proposed change as a matter of fairness at a news conference on Tuesday, criticizing corporations for seeking “handouts” and “subsidies,” even though all three of them voted to drastically slash corporate taxes and have backed numerous corporate subsidies they like. The trio made clear that the bill was in response to a corporate action they disagreed with.

“This past month we have seen the rise of the ‘woke’ corporation,” Cruz said. “These woke corporations have decided to become the political enforcer for Democrats in Washington.”

Cruz accused the companies of “spreading disinformation” about the law, which Republicans dubiously claim expands voting access, even though more than a dozen provisions will make it harder to vote and could allow Republican state lawmakers to subvert elections. Cruz himself has spread misinformation about voting in Colorado, where the MLB moved its All-Star Game, falsely arguing that the state’s all-mail elections are more restrictive than the new Georgia rules that Democrats have lambasted as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

Cruz, who along with Hawley was among the biggest backers of former President Donald Trump’s false election claims that sparked the restrictive efforts in Georgia and dozens of other states, argued that the Georgia bill was in response to concerns about voter integrity, even though multiple recounts and audits have confirmed Trump’s loss.

“Major League Baseball’s decision is indefensible on the merits,” he said. “Major League Baseball made a decision that the more than half of its fans that happen to be Republicans are now disfavored and that voter fraud is not a concern legislatures should focus on. That decision was harmful. It’s going to hurt baseball.”

Hawley, who has previously waded into antitrust legislation amid his ongoing feud with tech companies he accuses of censoring conservatives, said that the solution to corporations trying to “amass” political power is to “break them up.”

“This is about preserving the ability of the democratic process to go forward,” he said. “The fact that Major League Baseball would get together and punish a state because the elected representatives of that state and the elected governor of that state signed a law to preserve election integrity is unbelievable.”

Hawley claimed that the MLB and other corporations that have criticized voter restrictions in Georgia and other states are doing “exactly what the railroad barons tried to do a century ago.”

Major League Baseball is the only sports league not subject to federal antitrust laws and there’s nothing new about lawmakers seeking to change that. At least a half-dozen efforts have tried and failed to overturn the exception. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2019 called on Congress to “reconsider its antitrust exemption” in response to the league’s decision to eliminate dozens of minor league baseball teams. But the senators’ effort to cancel the MLB’s antitrust exemption comes amid a growing GOP campaign against “cancel culture.” It follows years of Republicans pushing to make it easier for corporations to influence politics. It also comes amid a nationwide Republican push to make it harder to vote after Trump lost an election that saw record turnout but zero evidence of any widespread fraud.

Georgia’s law limits absentee voting and require a voter ID for mail-in ballots, restricts the use of drop boxes, bans Fulton County’s mobile voting buses, makes it difficult to correct ballot mistakes, and makes it a crime to serve water or food to voters in long lines, although it does expand early voting in rural areas. It would also allow the Republican state legislature to replace the secretary of state, who pushed back against Trump’s false claims, as head of the state election board and allow the board to take over local election offices, a move that appears aimed at Atlanta-area counties where Biden ran up the score in November. The New York Times identified more than 15 provisions that would make it harder to vote or give more power over elections to Republican lawmakers, though the original version of the bill also included a complete ban on no-excuse absentee voting and automatic voter registration and other provisions that would disproportionately impact voters of color.

MLB is hardly the only corporation protesting the law. Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola have come out against the law and nearly 200 companies signed a statement against state legislation “threatening to make voting more difficult.” A coalition of more than 100 corporate leaders recently met on Zoom to discuss how to respond to the Georgia law and others proposed in states like Texas.

The criticism has led to backlash from Republican lawmakers, who have courted corporate support and funding for decades.

The Georgia House voted to strip a tax break from Delta, though that effort was shot down in the state Senate. A group of Republican state lawmakers called for Coca-Cola products to be removed from their state house offices.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who filibustered efforts to restrict corporate donations and led a lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission to remove those limits before backing the Citizens United lawsuit that allowed corporations to pour unlimited sums of cash into politics, warned corporations to “stay out of politics” in response to the criticism.

He walked those comments back a day later, saying, “I’m not talking about political contributions.”

Biden to order immediate US withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan after 20 years

President Joe Biden plans to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11 of this year, a day that marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which first led the nation into what many called its “forever war.”

Biden’s announcement, expected to be made public on Wednesday, flouts a Trump-era deal brokered with the Taliban in which the former President promised to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1, according to the Washington Post. At the time of the deal, the Taliban threatened attacks on U.S. and NATO troops if U.S. troops hadn’t been pulled out by America’s past deadline. It is unclear whether they will remain under threat with Biden’s extension.

Federal authorities currently say there are approximately 2,500 on Afghan soil, with an additional 7,000 foreign troops, a majority of them NATO forces. 

The announcement comes on the heels of a three-month administration review of America’s protracted military intervention in Afghanistan. The review, according to a senior official, determined that U.S. national security threat from Afghanistan is “at level that we can address it without a persistent military footprint in the country and without being at war with the Taliban.” The official added that the U.S. may in fact withdraw before the official deadline. 

Meanwhile, a bipartisan groundswell of U.S. lawmakers worries that a troop withdrawal might undermine the American-led progress made in female empowerment for Afghan women. 

Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Fla., a co-chair of the Women, Peace and Security caucus, expressed concern that the “gains made by women over the past years could evaporate.”

“We don’t want to go backwards,” she said, adding that Congress would have to “work closely with our administration to do everything that’s reasonably possible to make sure that the progress made for human rights in Afghanistan continue.” 

According to CNN, the Biden administration has routinely made sure that deals made between the U.S. and the Taliban must ensure human rights and especially the rights of women, who are repeat victims of violence or misogyny in Afghanistan.   

Former U.S. diplomat Annie Pforzheimer, who was the acting deputy assistant secretary of state for Afghanistan until March of last year, stressed to CNN that “there is a difference between saying that you want to protect the rights of women and then taking actions which genuinely would do so.” According to Pforzheimer, withdrawal should “also include the beginnings of a social agreement on that outline of a political road map.”

Many on the left, however, argue that the U.S. itself has likely to have committed a whole host of human rights abuses in Afghanistan. Just last month, for example, a U.N. report found that a third of all detainees held in Afghan prisons run by the U.S-backed Afghan government. In 2016, the International Criminal Court said that there was a “reasonable basis to believe” that U.S. soldiers had committed war crimes in Afghanistan from 2003-2004. 

Biden administration officials reportedly intend to remain involved in peace talks with Afghanistan, as well as provide aid and assistance where it is needed. It is unclear when NATO will withdraw, but one person familiar with the matter suggested to the Post that NATO countries will do work in tandem with the U.S.’s withdrawal.

“I applaud President Biden for achieving an impossibility here in Washington: ending a forever war,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said in a Tuesday statement. “It is an act of extraordinary political courage and vision. After 20 years, thousands of lives lost, and trillions of dollars spent, we are finally bringing home our troops from Afghanistan.”

Tiny and mighty: Indie artist Ken Sharp recorded bite-sized baroque pop “Miniatures” on his iPhone

“Miniatures,” the latest album from indie recording artist Ken Sharp, is a wonder to behold. Working from the ethic that “less is more,” Sharp has crafted an album for our on-demand times, a record that rewards binge-listeners with an unforgettable song cycle overbrimming with joy, love and everything in between.

Comprised of 32 bite-sized tracks, “Miniatures” is delightfully difficult to pin down. When it comes to assigning genre, Sharp describes his creation as “baroque pop meets the folks effusions of Simon and Garfunkel, with the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, and the Latin lilt of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 thrown in for good measure.” And the album is all of those things, to be sure. But as the blissful sum of its own parts, “Miniatures” is much more.

For the record, Sharp undertook a thought-experiment in which he produced an album of “miniature songs that take you into their world without overstaying their welcome.” With the longest song “Rise” topping out at 1:57—making it the veritable “Hey Jude” of the collection—Sharp never strayed from this philosophy. After compiling a core selection of songs, he began writing and recording a new composition every day, not unlike the countless Internet diarists who mark each new sunrise with a selfie to document their lives in slow-motion.

In truth, such web-diarists inevitably accent life’s mundane qualities. But when it comes to “Miniatures,” there’s nothing ordinary about Sharp’s LP. Taking his concept fully to heart, Sharp produced the album entirely in his Encino apartment, performing all of the instruments himself, save for occasional guest appearances from multi-instrumentalist Fernando Perdomo and violinist Kaitlin Wolfberg.

In keeping with his principle of miniaturization, Sharp even took to recording the album on his iPhone, deploying GarageBand as his tiny mixing desk and utilizing the built-in microphone for his acoustic guitar and vocals. When it came to recording his electric instruments, Sharp used iRig 2 as his interface, resorting to an app when he wanted to reproduce the sound of, say, a mellotron, which he played on a keyboard—a little one, naturally, that he connected to his iPhone. But while the album may have been recorded in small, there’s nothing miniature about the result, with some songs utilizing as many as 32 tracks and providing a feast for our earbuds generation.

Although the concept is intriguing in and of itself, a thought-experiment only genuinely works if it delivers in the execution. And “Miniatures” doesn’t disappoint. From “Me & My Big Fat Mouth” through the title track that closes the album, Sharp transports the listener on an emotional, heartfelt journey through the joys and conundrums of our humanity.

Listen to Ken Sharp’s “Me & My Big Fat Mouth”:

In songs like “Susannah Silently Shining” and “Lorelei,” Sharp deploys his unique brand of falsetto vocals and baroque pop in moving confections about the heart-rending nature of memory and nostalgia. Not surprisingly, it’s the little things that come up trumps on “Miniatures.” Most of the tracks are informed by Sharp’s penchant for crafting exquisite interlocking harmonies. Take “Rise,” for instance, with its soaring backing chorus that accents his buoyant, almost conversational lead vocals.

Listen to Ken Sharp’s “Rise”:

And then there’s the quirky, inventive “When You Fall,” with its whimsical electric guitar figures working in counterpart with Sharp’s lyrics about the abiding exuberance of love and memory. Sharp draws his ideas from a range of source material, like the animated holiday classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the “Dollhouse” episode of The Twilight Zone, and even Ezra Pound’s imagistic poetry — the diminutive, haiku-like pieces, of course.

Listen to Ken Sharp’s “When You Fall”:

The album also benefits from Sharp’s playful sense of homage in such songs as “A Kind of Blue and Smokey Too,” with its references to Miles Davis and Smokey Robinson. Which brings us to the album’s most idiosyncratic cut, “Black Coffee, Cigarettes, and Bach’s Minuet,” a wacky samba concoction that name-checks Bach’s “Minuet in G Major,” the melodic source for the Toys’ “A Lover’s Concerto,” a 1966 hit single and a personal favorite of Sharp’s.

But Miniatures isn’t all fun and games. In “You’ll Be Known,” Sharp eulogizes the life of Zak Nilsson, who recently lost his fight with cancer, while never losing his dignity along the way. Meanwhile, songs like “Down the Drain” amplify our shared sense of frustration during these pandemic days, when so often nothing seems to work in the face of so much loss, when our workaday lives seem overcome with futility.

As with pop music’s finest albums, Miniatures reminds us, ultimately of ourselves. And for all of the joy and charm that Sharp packs into “Miniatures,” the record, to the artist’s great credit, is never cloying, only sincere. With his tiny snapshots rendered in miniature from a magical world, Sharp has produced a mighty achievement, indeed. Mighty like a rose.

Watch the premiere of Ken Sharp’s “World of Wonder” video:

CDC, FDA recommend a “pause” on Johnson & Johnson vaccine to investigate rare blood clot issue

U.S. federal health agencies are recommending a “pause” on the use of a Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine over fears that the vaccine may be causing rare cases of blood clots within two weeks after inoculation. 

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told federal health authorities that they are investigating six cases of blood clots in women aged 18 to 48 that occurred anywhere from 6 to 13 days after vaccination. One woman has died as a result of the condition and another has been hospitalized, according to The New York Times. 

“We are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, and Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, issued in a joint statement. “Right now, these adverse events appear to be extremely rare.”

Notably, there have been 5 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines administered in the United States, with only six cases of blood clots. According to CDC estimates, around 60,000-100,000 Americans die of blood clots every year, or between 160 and 275 every day. The average American’s lifetime risk of developing a blood clot falls between 2 to 5 percent, and their relative risk increases with age, obesity, illness, and surgery.

Because mass vaccinations involve millions of people, it is not uncommon for unrelated, random illnesses to be misinterpreted as resulting from the vaccine. Statistically, in a sample size of 5 million — the number of people who have been given the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States — between 2.4 and 4.2 of those 5 million people would, on an average day, die of a blood clot for reasons unrelated to the vaccine.

Johnson & Johnson has maintained that there is “no clear causal relationship” between their vaccine and the blood clots, according to CNBC, but the company is currently working with regulators to investigate the incidents. In a statement provided to Fox News, the pharmaceutical giant said that “safety and well-being of people who use our products” is still its first priority, and that it was already aware of an “extremely rare disorder involving people with blood clots in combination with low platelets in a small number of individuals who have received our COVID-19 vaccine.”

The blood clot, called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, is primarily seen in people with low platelet levels. However, it is extremely rare and requires a specific kind of treatment. “Treatment of this specific type of blood clot is different from the treatment that might typically be administered,” the CDC and FA stated. “Usually, an anticoagulant drug called heparin is used to treat blood clots. In this setting, administration of heparin may be dangerous, and alternative treatments need to be given.”

The FDA said the pause will “ensure that the health care provider community is aware of the potential for these adverse events and can plan due to the unique treatment required with this type of blood clot.” But federal authorities do not think the pause will be particularly lasting. “I’d like to stress these events appear to be extremely rare,” FDA Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock said at a presser. “COVID-19 vaccine safety is a top priority. We expect it to be a matter of days for this pause.”

Last week, European federal regulators found a potential link between blood clotting and AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has not yet been authorized for use in the U.S. According to infectious disease specialist Isaac Bogoch, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson use a similar platform called an adenovirus, which often triggers the short-lived immune response people typically register as symptoms of a mild cold. 

The halt is yet another blow to Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine rollout. Last month, the company found that workers at a Baltimore production plant had accidentally contaminated a new batch of vaccines, forcing the company to dispense with anywhere from 13 to 15 million shots, according to The Times. That plant’s production has since been delayed, reducing the company’s overall supply. 

According to White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients, the pause will not have any “significant impact” on Biden’s goal to vaccinate 200 million Americans in the first 100 days of his presidency. 

“Based on actions taken by the President earlier this year, the United States has secured enough Pfizer and Moderna doses for 300 million Americans,” Zients said in a statement. “Over the last few weeks, we have made available more than 25 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna each week, and in fact this week we will make available 28 million doses of these vaccines.”

Florida’s Ron DeSantis flouts YouTube rules after his COVID-19 video is removed for misinformation

Last week, YouTube removed a roundtable meeting of controversial health policy experts led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over misinformation surrounding mask-wearing. But on Monday, flouting YouTube’s guidelines, DeSantis held another discussion inviting back those very same experts. 

DeSantis said that YouTube’s original decision to take down the Mar. 18 panel was an attempt to stifle free speech, his outcry part of a larger push against Big Tech which many on the right feel systematically censors conservative voices.

“Google/YouTube has not been throughout this pandemic repositories of truth and scientific inquiry, but have instead acted (as) enforcers of a narrative, a big tech council of censors in service of the ruling elite,” DeSantis said during a press conference with Atlas. 

The video’s removal was first discovered by libertarian think tank American Institute for Economic Research.

A spokeswoman for YouTube told the Washington Post that the video was removed because “it contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

As part of its rationale, YouTube specifically cited several instances in which the panelists condemned mask-wearing for children, which despite public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, they argued was ineffective in limiting the spread of the virus. 

“Children should not wear face masks,” argued Harvard University biostatistician Martin Kulldorff. “They don’t need it for their own protection, and they don’t need it for protecting other people either.”

Other participants included Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and Stanford Medical School economist Jay Bhattacharya –– both of whom have disputed the efficacy of lockdowns and other public health precautions –– and Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and an adviser to former President Trump who now works as a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Last year, Stanford faculty came together to demur Atla’s rejection of mask mandates and other COVID-19 public health measures, accusing him of “promot[ing] a view of COVID-19 that contradicts medical science,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. 

During their discussion, the panelists also rejected the efficacy of contact tracing, school closures. One panelist called vaccine passports the “new vaccine Jim Crow.” 

Central to the panel’s purpose was promoting the notion of “immunity through infection,” according to Orlando Sentinel, which calls for lifting all COVD-related restrictions and letting the virus run its course for low-risk Americans under 60. The idea was first posited in the Great Barrington Declaration, a joint letter consigned by three of the panelists. 

Last year, 80 researchers wrote a joint letter in the esteemed medical journal the Lancet to unilaterally condemn the practice as “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” 

Amy Jewett, a professor of political science, told the Orlando Sentinel that DeSantis is boosting his national profile by flouting COVID restrictions, perhaps making him a key contender in the 2024 race by likening himself to the former President. 

“It’s hard to tell what issues will be most important in voters’ minds when we get down the road more than two years,” Jewett said. “But in the present, it certainly continues to raise Gov. DeSantis’ profile nationally […] He’s certainly one of the most well-known Republican governors in the country right now. And a lot of Republicans seem to like what he’s saying and what he’s doing.”

Even Roger Stone seems to back away from Rep. Matt Gaetz amid growing scandal

Notorious GOP operative and informal Trump adviser Roger Stone, who previously urged embattled Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to go on “offense” and make cable news appearances, has gone silent on the matter following a series of news reports detailing the widening scandal around the firebrand lawmaker. Stone’s apparent pullback comes as former President Trump reportedly rejected an invite to meet with the congressman, and while denizens of TrumpWorld are not precisely flocking to Gaetz’s defense.

“He needs to go on offense, this is right upfront in Stone’s Rules,” Stone said on Alex Jones’ program on April 2. “The left-wing, non-journalist, fake-news media are the most vicious, malicious, dishonest people that I have ever come across. All of these stories that are maligning Matt Gaetz today are based on leaks. Where is the beef? Where are the facts? I don’t think there are any facts. I think this is a good old-fashioned smear.” Stone went on to encourage Gaetz to stay in the public eye, not hide in a “hole” and make additional TV appearances.

“He [Matt Gaetz] should not go hide in a hole, he should be out there, like he was on Tucker [Carlson] last night,” Stone declared. 

Since Stone’s initial remarks, an expositive April 9 report from The Daily Beast outlined that Gaetz allegedly sent a $900 Venmo payment to several young women through Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg in May 2018. Greenberg, a flamboyant figure in Florida politics, has reportedly been under investigation for some time and now faces multiple charges of sex trafficking.

Stone, who at one time posted virtually nonstop on Parler about Gaetz’s innocence, has since gone silent on the matter online and in media appearances and hasn’t mentioned the Gaetz saga on his newly minted TikTok account. “The ‘leaked’ smear on Congressman Matt Gaetz is an extortion play and an effort to destroy the up and coming conservative leader who has the balls to call the left out,” Stone wrote on Parler at the beginning of the month. 

Salon checked in with Stone last Thursday and Friday, seeking to inquire whether he still believes the Florida congressman is innocent. A few days passed, and Salon heard nothing back anything until the above tweet sent out by this reporter, which noted that Stone has gone silent on Gaetz. Shortly after that tweet was sent, Stone responded to Salon early on Monday morning, never directly mentioning the Gaetz scandal but taking swings at the media, a classic Stone tactic. 

“Much like Salon, nothing reported in the Daily Beast can be considered either true or accurate,” Stone told Salon in an email on Monday. When asked a series of additional questions regarding GaetzGate, Stone simply responded, “Stay tuned.”