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Inmates’ distrust of prison health care fuels distrust of COVID vaccines

One November night in a Missouri prison, Charles Graham woke his cellmate of more than a dozen years, Frank Flanders, saying he couldn’t breathe. Flanders pressed the call button. No one answered, so he kicked the door until a guard came.

Flanders, who recalled the incident during a phone interview, said he helped Graham, 61, get into a wheelchair so staff members could take him for a medical exam. Both inmates were then moved into a covid-19 quarantine unit. In the ensuing days, Flanders noticed the veins in Graham’s legs bulging, so he put towels in a crockpot of water and placed hot compresses on his legs. When Graham’s oxygen levels dropped dangerously low two days later, prison staff members took him to the hospital.

“That ended up being the last time that I seen him,” said Flanders, 45.

Graham died of covid on Dec. 18, alarming Flanders and other inmates at the Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron, about 50 minutes northeast of Kansas City. His death reinforced inmates’ concerns about their own safety and the adequacy of medical care at the prison. Such concerns are a major reason Flanders and many other inmates said they are wary of getting vaccinated against covid-19. Their hesitancy puts them at greater risk of suffering the same fate as Graham.

Inmates pointed to numerous covid deaths they considered preventable, staffing shortages and guards who don’t wear masks. While corrections officials defended their response to covid, Flanders said he’s apprehensive about how the department handles “most everything here recently,” which colors how he thinks about the vaccines.

Reluctance to get a covid vaccine is not unique to Missouri inmates. At a county jail in Massachusetts, nearly 60% of more than 400 people incarcerated said in January they would not agree to be vaccinated. At a federal prison in Connecticut, 212 of the 550 inmates offered the vaccines by early March declined the shots, including some who were medically vulnerable, The Associated Press reported.

The Missouri Department of Corrections said March 12 that more than 4,200 state inmates had received the vaccine out of 8,000 who were eligible because they were at least 65 years old or had certain medical conditions. Officials were still working to vaccinate 1,000 additional eligible inmates who had requested the shots. The department had not begun vaccinating the remaining 15,000 inmates or surveyed them to determine their interest in the vaccines. So far, about 18% of the total prison population has been vaccinated, which roughly tracks with the overall rate in Missouri even though inmates are at higher risk for covid than Missourians generally and should be easier to vaccinate given they are already in one place together.

Missouri placed the majority of inmates in its lowest vaccine priority group. It is one of 14 states to either do that or not specify when they will offer the vaccines to inmates, according to the COVID Prison Project, which tracks data on the virus in correctional facilities.

Another is Colorado, where Democratic Gov. Jared Polis moved inmates to the back of the vaccine line amid public pressure. The emergence of a more contagious variant of the virus at one prison, however, forced officials to adjust their plans and instead start vaccinating all inmates at that facility.

Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, prison project co-founder and professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina, said that disregarding health officials’ recommendation to prioritize people living in tight quarters might make inmates less trustful of prison staff “when they come around and say, ‘Hey, it’s finally your turn. Let me inject you with this.'”

States cannot mandate that inmates take the vaccines. But Missouri officials have tried to encourage them by distributing safety information about it, including a video debunking myths featuring a scientist from Washington University in St. Louis.

But persuasion is proving difficult at Western Missouri, given inmates’ longtime distrust of prison management. Flanders, Graham and others were transferred there from neighboring Crossroads Correctional Center following a 2018 riot that caused an estimated $1.3 million in damage and led to its closure. Inmates were angry that staff shortages had reduced time for recreation and other programming.

Officials acknowledge that staff shortages have persisted through the pandemic. “Corrections is not the most popular place to work right now,” Missouri corrections director Anne Precythe said at an early March NAACP town hall on covid and prisons.

Flanders, who is serving a life sentence for first-degree robbery, said the prison didn’t have enough nursing staffers to check on him during a bout with mild covid in November. He said other sick inmates also didn’t receive appropriate medical attention. Karen Pojmann, a corrections department spokesperson, said she could not comment on specific offenders’ medical issues.

Tim Cutt, executive director of the Missouri Corrections Officers Association, said he’s seen no evidence that Western Missouri even had a plan to contain covid. “They were quarantining for a while,” he said, “but it was a haphazard attempt.”

Also fueling skepticism of prison health care, inmates said, is the failure of many staff members to follow the corrections department’s mask mandate. Byron East, who is serving a life sentence for murder at South Central Correctional Center, two hours southwest of St. Louis, said in a phone interview that he has begged officers — many of whom live in conservative, rural areas where masks are less common — to wear face coverings.

“As an employee, your job is to protect, and we are not able to protect ourselves,” said East, 53. “You can catch something and then come in here and spread it to us.”

Amy Breihan, co-director of the Missouri office of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit civil rights law firm, said she didn’t see a single officer wearing a mask on Feb. 10 when she visited a correctional facility in Bonne Terre, Missouri.

Corrections Department Deputy Director Matt Sturm confirmed Breihan’s account at the NAACP town hall and said it has been addressed. He said the department expects staff members in all prisons to wear masks while inside when they can’t stay 6 feet apart from others.

“Right from the beginning, the Department of Corrections in Missouri has taken covid extremely serious,” Sturm said. The department deployed “everything we could get our hands on to help either prevent or contain covid,” including equipment for ventilation and disinfection.

Still, Missouri has reported at least 5,500 covid cases and 48 deaths among inmates at the state’s adult correctional institutions during the pandemic. The department doesn’t break down covid deaths by prison, but data from the advocacy group Missouri Prison Reform showed Western Missouri had 21 total deaths from covid or other causes last year, more than any other state prison even though its population isn’t the largest. Statistics on deaths in the previous year were not immediately available.

An automatic email reply from Eve Hutcherson, a former spokesperson for Corizon Health, which manages health care in Missouri prisons, directed a reporter to Steve Tomlin, senior vice president of business development, but he didn’t respond to questions. The company, one of the country’s largest for-profit correctional health care providers, faced more than 1,300 lawsuits over five years, according to a 2015 report from the financial research firm PrivCo. In Arizona, Corizon paid a $1.4 million fine for failing to comply with a 2014 settlement to improve inadequate health care for inmates.

Despite concerns about prison health care, however, some inmates have agreed to get the shot. East, who is Black, said he initially decided against it because he didn’t trust prison health and thought about the legacy of the Tuskegee experiments from 1932 to 1972, when researchers withheld treatment for Black men infected with syphilis. But he changed his mind after reading about how safe the vaccines are.

Flanders, meanwhile, is still weighing whether to get vaccinated as he mourns the death of his longtime cellmate Graham, a convicted murderer whom he considered a friend and father figure.

Flanders’ mother, Penny Kopp, said Graham helped Flanders manage his finances and kept him from gambling and getting involved with “inmates who are troublemakers.” Kopp, a former corrections officer in Indiana and Colorado, said she understands the challenges of working in a prison but wonders if enough was done to save her son’s cellmate.

Flanders said getting the shot would mean putting himself at the mercy of prison staffers, as Graham did — and that’s something he’s not ready to do.

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.

The legendary allure of Britain’s AGA stove

I had always assumed the origins of the AGA stove were uniquely British, but this stalwart appliance was actually created about a century ago by blind Swedish physicist Gustaf Dalén, a Nobel Laureate. It took Dalén and his company seven years of prototyping to develop the AGA, and it was purpose-built as a solution to his wife Elma’s frustration at having to constantly stoke their cookstove and closely watch over the food she prepared.

At first glance, the AGA, while not without its throwback charm, may look like a curious relic of a bygone era to the uninitiated eye — an intimidating enameled hunk of no-thank-you, salvaged from a locomotive museum. Or something passed on from an old house’s original tenants, left in place, too heavy to extract or dismantle. Certainly, it’s not something one would intentionally purchase today, and have placed in their contemporary kitchen, right? Well, guess again. The desire and considerable expense put forth to own and install this venerable tool continues seemingly unabated to this day. Never mind that it also demands users recalibrate their preconceptions of everyday food preparation techniques.

As an American, I cannot adequately describe the passionate following of generations of British chefs who adore the AGA. One famous chef is Fergus Henderson, who uses an AGA in his London eatery St. John’s to turn out an array of delicious nose-to-tail dishes.

Due to its unique design, the AGA stays on all the time, and has no knobs or settings to speak of. It is insulated, and makes surprisingly efficient use of a single, internal heating unit that distributes consistent yet varied temperatures to its several cooking zones simultaneously.

The basic components of a traditional three-oven AGA are as follows: The top two silver-domed surfaces (that resemble a steampunk DJ setup) are in fact insulated, hinged covers that lift to expose raw iron “burners” for pots, kettles, and such. Depending on the side of choice, and proximity to the center, they can simmer, boil, braise, or char. It’s a common practice to use the palpable heat, even when the covers are closed, to dry kitchen towels or press cloth napkins.

Facing front are multiple compartment doors, with the upper left providing access to the burner unit, which in this case is gas-fed. The remaining three compartments are for baking, roasting, and simmering, in order of descending temperatures. The simmering oven compartment is a perfect spot for taking the chill off serving dishes before serving a meal. A clothes-drying rack — or even a chair with a damp shirt slung over the back — is another common companion to the AGA. The cast-iron construction radiates a gentle, welcoming warmth, especially vital in the cold and damp seasons.

In an attempt to convey the adaptation necessary to truly get on an AGA’s wavelength, let’s say it’s more like a musical instrument than any adjustable stove experience you’ve become familiar with. One needs to tune recipes to an AGA, and patiently practice with it in order to be rewarded with the kind of harmony that will make your recipes truly sing.

When I asked her to detail why she covets the classic AGA cooker, renowned British food writer and Food52 contributor Elaine Lemm said, “For me, it’s the versatility. You learn to work with the AGA, get to know its sweet spots and its hot spots. You can leave your kettle simmering over there and you can pull that pot a bit closer and you’ll get a bit more simmer on it. It’s alive. When I was younger I perhaps didn’t have the time for it in the same way, but now it’s just lovely and very soulful, and brings a whole different feeling to the food.”

When asked about the stove’s learning curve, Lemm offered this anecdote:

“My very best friends had an AGA, and this one ran on solid fuel, so it had to be kept ‘alive.’ I went to house-sit for them one Christmas, and forgot to feed the AGA, which sent out this beautiful warmth all the time, whether you were cooking or not. And so in this watermill house they had, which was down in a valley I didn’t realize was as damp as it was until I let the AGA go out, it took a week to get it going again. I was not very popular. They’d had this AGA alight for about 10 years, and I killed it in four days.”

My first magical encounter with the enameled iron beast at the center of this story was while visiting a friend’s country home in the Hudson Valley, in New York. The kitchen is the usual gathering place, with generous overhead lamps that illuminate a long central table made from lengths of the house’s original flooring. This home has truly old bones, dating from about 1750, but has been lovingly renovated to integrate all the conveniences of modernity you could desire. It strikes a charming balance between historic preservation and polished fit and finish.

Contemporary appliances, cabinetry, counters, and walls coexist with the house’s original stone slabs and ancient pine-plank flooring. A perfect, eye-comforting mix, and yet the undeniable draw of the room is their three-oven AGA. It’s built like a tank, and weighs roughly the same as a grand piano.

While visiting with the “parents” of this cream-colored beauty, I learned that their AGA is a beloved member of the family. I watched them make sourdough naan using only the top-covered hot plates as makeshift tandoor ovens, and was excited to see multiple balls of dough at the ready.

After a quick rolling out, the dough went straight onto the right-hand cook surface, and the immediate aroma of fresh-baked bread was intoxicating. After a brief bubbling under the covered right burner, my host deftly flipped the naan over to the left-hand burner with a spatula for a speedy char and final flip to crisp both sides. Watching his process was like witnessing a culinary magic trick, puff of steamy smoke and all, right before my eyes. This was no casual first attempt — his ease spoke volumes of the practice behind a maestro’s symbiotic mastery of his AGA. All happened in less than a minute, and the resulting flatbread was sprinkled with olive oil, cumin, and salt, then chopped into triangles.

As quickly as my host had made the naan appear, it disappeared into my hungry gullet. When an impromptu dinner invitation was offered, I gladly accepted the opportunity to sample more of my generous friend’s AGA creations. If you are lucky enough to know an AGA chef, I encourage you to embrace them dearly.

More hot stove stories:

Is the U.S. joining the “rules-based world” — at least when it comes to Afghanistan?

On March 18, the world was treated to the spectacle of Secretary of State Antony Blinken sternly lecturing senior Chinese officials about the need for China to respect a “rules-based order.” The alternative, Blinken warned, is a world in which might makes right, and “that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.”

Blinken was clearly speaking from experience. Since the U.S. dispensed with the UN Charter and the rule of international law to invade Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and has used military force and unilateral economic sanctions against many other countries, it has indeed made the world more deadly, violent and chaotic.

When the UN Security Council refused to give its blessing to U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush publicly threatened the UN with “irrelevance.” He later appointed John Bolton as UN ambassador, a man who famously once said that if the UN building in New York “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” 

But after two decades of unilateral foreign policy in which the U.S. has systematically ignored and violated international law, leaving widespread death, violence and chaos in its wake, U.S. foreign policy may finally be coming full circle, at least in the case of Afghanistan.

Secretary Blinken has taken the previously unthinkable step of calling on the UN to lead negotiations for a ceasefire and political transition in Afghanistan, relinquishing the U.S.’s monopoly as the sole mediator between the Kabul government and the Taliban.

So, after 20 years of war and lawlessness, is the U.S. finally ready to give the “rules-based order” a chance to prevail over unilateralism and “might makes right,” instead of just using it as a verbal cudgel to browbeat its enemies? 

Biden and Blinken seem to have chosen America’s endless war in Afghanistan as a test case, even as they resist rejoining Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, jealously guard the U.S.’s openly partisan role as the sole mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, maintain Trump’s vicious economic sanctions, and continue America’s systematic violations of international law against many other countries. 

What’s going on in Afghanistan?

In February 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban to fully withdraw U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. 

The Taliban had refused to negotiate with the U.S.-backed government in Kabul until the U.S. and NATO withdrawal agreement was signed, but once that was done, the Afghan sides began peace talks in March 2020. Instead of agreeing to a full ceasefire during the talks, as the U.S. government wanted, the Taliban only agreed to a one-week “reduction in violence.”

Eleven days later, as fighting continued between the Taliban and the Kabul government, the United States wrongly claimed that the Taliban was violating the agreement it signed with the United States and relaunched its bombing campaign. 

Despite the fighting, the Kabul government and the Taliban managed to exchange prisoners and continue negotiations in Qatar, mediated by U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who had negotiated the U.S. withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. But the talks made slow progress, and now seem to have reached an impasse.

The coming of spring in Afghanistan usually brings an escalation in the war. Without a new ceasefire, a spring offensive would probably lead to more territorial gains for the Taliban — which already controls at least half of Afghanistan. 

This prospect, combined with the May 1 withdrawal deadline for the remaining 3,500 U.S. and 7,000 other NATO troops, prompted Blinken’s invitation to the UN to lead a more inclusive international peace process that will also involve India, Pakistan and traditional U.S. enemies China, Russia and, most remarkably, Iran.

This process began with a conference on Afghanistan in Moscow on March 18 and 19, which brought together a 16-member delegation from the U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul and negotiators from the Taliban, along with U.S. envoy Khalilzad and representatives from the other countries.   

The Moscow conference laid the groundwork for a larger UN-led conference to be held in Istanbul in April to map out a framework for a ceasefire, a political transition and a power-sharing agreement between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed Jean Arnault to lead the negotiations for the UN. Arnault previously negotiated the end to the Guatemalan civil war in the 1990s and the peace agreement between the government and the FARC in Colombia, and he was the secretary-general’s representative in Bolivia after the 2019 coup, until a new election was held in 2020. Arnault also knows Afghanistan, having served in the UN assistance mission to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006.

If the Istanbul conference results in an agreement between the Kabul government and the Taliban, U.S. troops could be home sometime in the coming months.

President Trump, belatedly trying to make good on his promise to end that endless war, deserves credit for beginning a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But a withdrawal without a comprehensive peace plan would not have ended the war. The UN-led peace process should give the people of Afghanistan a much better chance of a peaceful future than if U.S. forces left with the two sides still at war, and should reduce the chances that the gains made by women over these years will be lost.

It took 17 years of war to bring the U.S. to the negotiating table and another two and a half years before it was ready to step back and let the UN take the lead in peace negotiations.

For most of this time, the U.S. tried to maintain the illusion that it could eventually defeat the Taliban and “win” the war. But U.S. internal documents published by WikiLeaks, along with a stream of reports and investigations, revealed that U.S. military and political leaders have known for a long time that they could not win. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal put it, the best U.S. forces could do in Afghanistan was to “muddle along.” 

What that meant in practice was dropping tens of thousands of bombs, day after day, year after year, and conducting thousands of night raids that, more often than not, killed, maimed or unjustly detained innocent civilians. 

The death toll in Afghanistan is unknown. Most U.S. airstrikes and night raids take place in remote, mountainous areas where people have no contact with the UN human rights office in Kabul that investigates reports of civilian casualties. 

Fiona Frazer, the UN’s human rights chief in Afghanistan, admitted to the BBC in 2019 that “more civilians are killed or injured in Afghanistan due to armed conflict than anywhere else on Earth…. The published figures almost certainly do not reflect the true scale of harm.” 

No serious mortality study has been conducted since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Initiating a full accounting for the human cost of this war should be an integral part of UN envoy Arnault’s job, and we should not be surprised if, as with the Truth Commission he oversaw in Guatemala, it reveals a death toll that is 10 or 20 times what we have been told.

If Blinken’s diplomatic initiative succeeds in breaking this deadly cycle of “muddling along,” and brings even relative peace to Afghanistan, that will establish a precedent and an exemplary alternative to the seemingly endless violence and chaos of America’s post-9/11 wars in other countries.

The U.S. has used military force and economic sanctions to destroy, isolate or punish an ever-growing list of countries around the world. But it no longer has the power to defeat, re-stabilize and integrate these countries into its neocolonial empire, as it did at the height of its power after the World War II. America’s defeat in Vietnam was a historical turning point: the end of an age of Western military empires.  

All the U.S. can achieve in the countries it is occupying or besieging today is to keep them in various states of poverty, violence and chaos — shattered fragments of empire adrift in the 21st-century world. 

U.S. military power and economic sanctions can temporarily prevent bombed or impoverished countries from fully recovering their sovereignty or benefiting from Chinese-led development projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, but America’s leaders have no alternative development model to offer them. 

The people of Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela have only to look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya or Somalia to see where the pied piper of American regime change would lead them.

What is this all about?

Humanity faces truly serious challenges in this century, from the mass extinction of the natural world to the destruction of the life-affirming climate that has been the vital backdrop of human history, while nuclear mushroom clouds still threaten us all with civilization-ending destruction.

It is a sign of hope that Biden and Blinken are turning to legitimate, multilateral diplomacy in the case of Afghanistan, even if only because, after 20 years of war, they finally see diplomacy as a last resort. 

But peace, diplomacy and international law should not be a last resort, to be tried only when Democrats and Republicans alike are finally forced to admit that no new form of force or coercion will work. Nor should they be a cynical way for American leaders to wash their hands of a thorny problem and offer it as a poisoned chalice for others to drink.

If the UN-led peace process Secretary Blinken has initiated succeeds and U.S. troops finally come home, Americans should not forget about Afghanistan in the coming months and years. We should pay attention to what happens there and learn from it. And we should support generous U.S. contributions to the humanitarian and development aid that the people of Afghanistan will need for many years to come. 

This is how the international “rules-based system,” which U.S. leaders love to talk about but routinely violate, is supposed to work, with the UN fulfilling its responsibility for peacemaking and individual countries overcoming their differences to support it.

Maybe cooperation over Afghanistan can even be a first step toward broader U.S. cooperation with China, Russia and Iran that will be essential if we are to solve the serious common challenges confronting us all.

Conservatives are mad at Michael Moore again — because he’s right about gun culture

The right-wing “cancel culture” mob has once again grabbed their torches and pitchforks. Their newest target is documentary filmmaker and political commentator Michael Moore.

What is Moore’s most recent offense?

In response to Monday’s mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, Moore tweeted “The life of Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa shows that people can come from all over the world and truly assimilate into our beloved American culture,” and included an image of the Statue of Liberty.

Alissa is the alleged shooter in the Boulder tragedy. He was born in Syria but came to the United States as a child in 2002.

Reasonable persons may choose to disagree with Moore’s timing, or his tone. But the fact remains that his comments about the Boulder mass shooting are largely correct.

Those on the right and elsewhere who are performatively “outraged” at Moore’s comment are just angry because he spoke the truth about America’s gun culture and our societal addiction to mass shootings and gun violence.

A society’s culture is not a buffet where a person chooses the things they like and then ignores or denies the existence of those they do not. Such thinking is immature, simplistic and lacks nuance. In other words, it confirms what research by social psychologists, neuroscientists and others has shown about how conservatives and right-wing authoritarians think about morality, politics and society more generally.

As demonstrated by historian Richard Slotkin in his landmark book “Gunfighter Nation”, guns and gun violence are central to America’s culture and identity.

During an interview with Bill Moyers about the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Slotkin elaborated:

And what we have in this country is we have a history in which certain kinds of violence are associated for us with the growth of the republic, with the definition of what it is to be an American. And because we are also devoted to the notion of democratic individualism, we take that glorification of social violence, historical violence, political violence, and we grant the individual a kind of parallel right to exercise it, not only to protect life and property but to protect one’s honor and to protect one’s social or racial status. In the past that has been a legitimate grounds.

To that end, mass shootings and other examples of gun violence are one of the principal ways that America is truly an “exceptional” nation.

As I explained in an earlier essay at Salon:

The U.S. has the highest rate of gun-related deaths among wealthy nations. The number of deaths from gun violence would be even higher if not for dramatic recent advances in trauma and emergency medicine.

The U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country in the world — even more than Yemen, a nation torn apart for years by a bloody civil war. In fact, there are more guns in the United States than there are people. Gun violence is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $200 billion a year, according to a 2019 report.

It is especially worth noting that just 3 percent of gun owners possess half the total number of guns in America. Some of these “super-owners” have dozens of guns. They are overwhelmingly white and male. …

While gun “advocates” have created superhero narratives, such as the fantasy about “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun,” the reality is that a gun owner is much more likely to shoot a family member, a neighbor, a friend or themselves — by accident or suicide — than a criminal assailant. “Defensive gun use” statistics are inaccurate and wildly exaggerated. 

Many members of the right-wing chattering class and others of that tribe are responding to Michael Moore’s basic observations about guns and American culture as though they had suffered a narcissistic injury. This is true more generally in how the American right responds to nearly all attempts to enact reasonable gun safety laws.

But what is the source of this injury? For many gun owners, especially right-wing white men, the gun is a key part of their core identities in terms of privilege, sense of self and power. It is not just the gun that they fear will be regulated — they believe their literal personal existence will be imperiled if access to guns were to somehow be even marginally curtailed. Such deep attachment to guns as an extension of the self is largely explained by what social psychologists have termed “terror management theory.”

This posits that because human beings are aware of their own mortality, they therefore develop compensatory behaviors which include cultural institutions like religion and patriotism. Symbols such as flags, and in the case of Christianity the crucifix, have a totem-like power which gives the believer and follower a sense of immortality. These systems of meaning and dynamics are at work on both a conscious and subconscious level, for individuals and society as a whole.

In American culture, guns have effectively become sacred objects. In that role, the gun is a means of symbolic and literal protection from death. It is also a tool for getting and keeping one group’s power over others as seen with the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of black people, militarized policing, and the creation and maintenance of American empire.

Moore’s tweet about guns and American culture were even more triggering for conservatives and other members of the right because he included an image of the Statue of Liberty, a sacred object in the national imagination.

It is no coincidence that death anxieties are a key factor that correlate with high levels of support for Trumpism and other authoritarian movements.

Public opinion polls show that as mass shootings and other gun violence has increased in America, Republicans actually oppose gun safety efforts even more. Predictably — and far more logically — Democrats and liberals respond to mass shootings and other gun-violence tragedies with greater support for gun safety laws.

Death anxiety has a profound influence on American politics in other ways as well: In red-state regions where coronavirus rates (and death rates) are highest, support for Donald Trump during the 2020 Election was also at its highest. In essence, death and sickness have made Trump’s followers increasingly loyal to him and the Republican Party.

Ultimately, America’s inability to create and enforce effective gun laws is rooted in competing conceptions of freedom. Conservatives emphasize “negative freedom” and a belief that government should be shrunk down to the bare minimum, and that “freedom from” is the most important aspect of democracy and human existence.

Liberals, progressives and other more humane thinkers understand that government can play a positive role in society. In this conception, “positive freedom” means that citizens can live better and more productive lives where, for example, they are free from anxieties about being killed in a mass shooting, or free from the fear that they may fall ill and not have access to health care, or free from the fear that their environment is dangerously polluted.

To state this equation differently, a gun owner’s freedom ends at the boundaries and limits of public safety. Likewise, the “personal freedom” not to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic ends at the health and safety of other people.

A healthy democracy always involves a balance between these positive and negative understandings of freedom.

What Michael Moore hinted at in his tweet about gun violence is the reality that we need to embrace a new form of American patriotism, one grounded in the facts and realities of American history, life and culture.

If the American people keep on lying to themselves about who they are, then the plague of mass shootings and gun violence will continue — and all the other existential problems in our society that feed into this epidemic of violence will keep getting worse as well.

Biden administration blasts Trump for only granting 0.1% of COVID-19 relief funds to Black farmers

The Biden administration is admonishing the Trump White House for its failed effort to fairly include Black farmers in the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP).

During an interview with The Washington Post, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently disclosed details about funding disbursements which underscore the ongoing financial disparities and wealth gap in the U.S.

“We saw 99% of the money going to white farmers and 1% going to socially disadvantaged farmers,” Vilsack said. “And if you break that down to how much went to Black farmers, it’s 0.1%.”

“Look at it another way: The top 10% of farmers in the country received 60% of the value of the COVID payments,” he added. “And the bottom 10% received 0.26%.”

Vilsack reported the “hard numbers” as he noted that the Trump administration awarded a staggering $26 billion to white farmers while Black farmers only received a meager $20.8 million as Black Americans continue to face an array of ongoing challenges due to the disproportionate economic and financial austerities fueled by the pandemic.

Under the American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration measures aimed at resolving the disparities between Black and white farmers. According to The Post, approximately $10.4 billion in funds designated for agriculture will be awarded to disadvantaged farmers. The publication reports that a quarter of those farmers have been identified as Black.

Vilsack noted that “the Biden administration would be focused on closing those inequalities. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will battle three systemic problems concurrently, he said: a broken farm system, food insecurity, and a health-care crisis.”

At Joe Biden’s first news conference, it wasn’t the president who was out of touch

The White House press corps’ abysmal failure to ask important questions about pressing issues during President Biden’s first news conference on Thursday was the clearest demonstration yet of the contrast between what the political press cares about and what is real.

There were no questions about any element of the COVID crisis — not the vaccine, the prognosis, the economy, nothing! — although it’s by far the most important issue on any normal person’s mind right now. There were no questions about the substance of his ambitious plans related to infrastructure and climate change, immigration and voting rights.

Instead, the questions reflected the insider, horserace obsessions of the political press corps. There were repeated questions about the filibuster and about the 2024 election(!).  

There were several contentious questions about the situation at the border, which the right wing is intent on turning into a cause for hysteria, with the mainstream media’s collaboration. The first border question, from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, contained such a false and loaded assumption — straight out of far-right talking points — that Biden actually fact-checked it.

That’s right, after four years of the media desperately needing to fact-check the president (and often failed), now we’ve reached the point when the president has to fact-check the media.

Alcindor told Biden that “the perception of you, that got you elected as a moral, decent man, is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and trusting you with unaccompanied minors.”

Biden corrected her, explaining that it was largely a continuation of normal trends. “Does anybody suggest that there was a 31 percent increase under Trump because he was a nice guy, and he was doing good things at the border? That’s not the reason they’re coming.”

And NBC’s Kristin Welker suggested that Biden’s decision to roll back Trump executive orders “too quickly” worsened the situation at the border — leading Biden to correct her, as well.

“All the policies that were underway were not helping at all, did not slow up the amount of immigration,” he said. “And rolling back the policies of separating children from their mothers? I make no apology for that. Rolling back the policies of ‘Remaining in Mexico,’ sitting on the edge of the Rio Grande in a muddy circumstance with not enough to eat? I make no apologies for that. I make no apologies for ending programs that did not exist before Trump became president that have an incredibly negative impact on the law, international law, as well as on human dignity. And so I make no apologies for that.”

After four years in which the media desperately needed to reality-check the president (and often failed), now the president was the one talking about things that mattered and marveling at not one but two reporters asking about the 2024 election. “Look, I don’t know where you guys come from,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

Reporters certainly should have known that Biden wasn’t ready to make any major pronouncement about the filibuster, but they kept asking, over and over again, including this totally wasted question (was it supposed to be a gotcha?) from Washington Post reporter Seung Min Kim: “Do you believe it should take 60 votes to end a filibuster on legislation, or 51?”

What sounded at first like an important question about voting rights turned into a pathetic example of false equivalence, when CBS’s Nancy Cordes raised the issue of how “Republican legislatures across the country are working to pass bills that would restrict voting,” but ended up asking if Biden was “worried that if you don’t manage to pass voting rights legislation, that your party is going to lose seats and possibly lose control of the House and the Senate in 2022?”

Biden essentially corrected her, too. “What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick.”

If reporters were trying to show they could be tough on a Democrat, their attempt backfired terribly. Far from knocking Biden off message, the vapidity of the questions actually strengthened Biden’s central theme: Regardless of what others are up to, he’s just trying to get stuff done.

“I got elected to solve problems,” he said. “And the most urgent problem facing the American people, I stated from the outset, was COVID-19 and the economic dislocation for millions and millions of Americans. And so that’s why I put all my focus in the beginning — there were a lot of problems, but all my focus on dealing with those particular problems. And the other problems we’re talking about, from immigration to guns and the other things you mentioned, are long-term problems. They’ve been around a long time, and what we’re going to be able to do, God willing, is now begin one at a time to focus on those as well. And whether it’s immigration or guns or a number of other problems that face the country.”

White House reporters should be tough on the president — on every president. But that doesn’t mean asking questions based on their own obsessions or right-wing talking points. It means coming at the president with tough questions on behalf of the American public. It means pushing him to be govern better, more humanely and more transparently.

The questions about the border were a particularly missed opportunity because, to the extent the issue is worth asking about, the focus should have been on whether his polices are humane and effective in the long run. Reporters pressed him about overcrowded conditions for the unaccompanied minors who are being allowed to remain in the U.S. after they’ve crossed the border — but ABC’s Cecilia Vega, for instance, seemed outraged that by letting young people in Biden is “encouraging” more to come.

Biden should have been asked why he continues to use the draconian Trump-era policy known as Title 42 to turn back everyone but unaccompanied children and keep the border closed. “They should all be going back. The only people we are not going to let sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children,” Biden said.

But how does that comport with his acknowledgment that the migrants headed to the U.S. “didn’t want to leave, but they had no choice” — that they are coming here “because of earthquakes, floods. It’s because of lack of food. It’s because of gang violence. It’s because of a whole range of things.”

Los Angeles Times reporter Molly O’Toole recently explained how Biden’s decision to uphold key Trump rules seems to be about political optics rather than humanitarian cost. Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, tweeted his deep dismay over Biden’s remarks.

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wondered: Why didn’t anyone ask why Biden “hasn’t yet honored his promise to raise the cap on refugees“?

Reporters had a rare chance to push Biden on his moral ambiguities and get him to reveal more about what’s really going on inside his White House. There’s still so much we don’t understand. But they blew it. As I’ve argued a million times before, they should all be replaced with people who care about governing, not politics — in other words, who care about what’s real.

How dissent gets criminalized: America’s right to insult the government is under attack

We shouldn’t have to repeat this: Americans have the right to insult those in charge, from President Biden to a local councilman, and, yes, even an armed policeman. Yet this bedrock right to vent our spleens against officials is now being challenged. A federal appeals court judge on Friday echoed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in calling for the reversal of New York Times v. Sullivan—the landmark decision permitting “vehement, caustic and … unpleasantly sharp attacks” on government officials. And a year after the protests in Louisville in response to the police killing of Breonna Taylor, Kentucky’s senate approved a law criminalizing insults to the police.

If the Kentucky statute makes into law, police could arrest anyone who hurls “offensive or derisive” words at them that tend “to provoke a violent response” from a reasonable person. In other words, cops—who are supposed to de-escalate conflicts, not make them worse—would be invited to throw protestors into the paddy wagon in response to words that anger them. Even if a court later rules the cops were wrong, the voices of dissent would still be silenced.  

The statute is so vague and overbroad that it would likely not survive a constitutional challenge, and the attacks on Sullivan are for now confined to dissenting opinions. But historically speaking, these measures are anything but aberrations. In fact, they reveal a key underpinning of centuries of political censorship: Power is fragile, resting on a thin veneer of infallibility as much as force, and authorities often feel compelled to suppress anything that may crack that illusion. The Louisville police can bust into a young woman’s home and kill her without being charged, but despite that overwhelming firepower they still need protection against mere words.

Why the vulnerability? Because “authority requires a mask,” as the sociologist F.G. Bailey puts it, to conceal its failings and shield it from contempt. This Niccolò Machiavelli knew when he counseled his prince to guard his grandeur above all else. Even autocratic power requires a measure of popular faith, and all faith is brittle and fleeting. By 1704, England’s lord chief justice pronounced that “no government can be safe” unless those who cause people to have an “ill opinion” of it are punished.

Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” in 1532, just as censorship laws were appearing everywhere to halt the printing press’s metastatic spread of seditious ideas. His contemporary, Henry VIII of England, took matters to extremes, imposing harsh controls on printing and executing people for treason when they so much as “imagined” his death or uttered words that deprived him of his “dignity.” It got so bad that his doctors were afraid to declare him ill, lest that lead them to the executioner.

But England’s (and, for a time, the United States’) main weapon against dissent was the doctrine of seditious libel, which allowed whipping, mutilation and imprisonment for speech that could lower the public’s esteem for the government, even — or especially — when it was true. The idea was that authorities were to be revered as well as obeyed: Criticism violated God’s plan for a well-ordered society. The quasi-religious overtones of seditious libel appeared in a famous 1735 New York case against the newspaperman John Peter Zenger, who criticized the colonial governor. The prosecutor invoked St. Paul’s teaching that speaking against the state offended God, “for it is written, thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of the People.”  

Zenger managed to beat the rap, but a Pennsylvania man with the temerity in 1723 to state that King had no authority over him was fined, pilloried, paraded around while tied to a cart, whipped and imprisoned until the fine was paid. As the scholar Leonard Levy observed, “A sentence like that did not have to be repeated to have a lingering, cautionary effect on the tongues of citizens.”

The 1791 ratification of the First Amendment did nothing to stop seditious libel in the young United States. Just seven years later, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which made most dissident speech a federal crime — from the writings of a congressman to a drunkard jailed for his expressed wish that a cannonball flying overhead land in President John Adams’s backside.

By 1964, when the Supreme Court decided Sullivan, seditious libel looked like it had become a dead letter. The Court declared that the Sedition Act had been invalidated by the “court of history,” and later decisions expanded the right to criticize government. Yet some state laws have kept the concept alive, or, like zombies, not entirely dead. About half the states still have “criminal libel” statutes on the books, and about 20 prosecutions are brought each year.

A New Hampshire man was arrested in 2018 for writing on Facebook that a policeman who gave him a traffic citation was “dirty” and the local police chief “covered up” the matter, while in 2010 a Kansas man was charged after he put a sign on his lawn accusing a town administrator of ignoring a water drainage problem.

Utah’s similar law was struck down after a 16-year-old boy was arrested for calling his high school a “town drunk,” and each of the other state laws should be as well. But specific laws are not always required to squelch speech, especially when it concerns police. In 2018, a South Carolina police union challenged the inclusion on a school’s reading list of the award-winning novel, “The Hate U Give,” about police brutality. The union claimed the book is “almost an indoctrination of distrust of police.” The book was banned in several places.

If it goes into law, the Kentucky statue against insulting police should be struck down by the courts, but then again it may not be. Crazier things have happened. In any event, the very possibility of such a law, and the judicial rumblings against Sullivan, are reminders that our rights to open, even crude, dissent are relatively recent, and are as vulnerable as the tender sensibilities of Louisville’s riot police. This is no time to criminalize speech. 

Fox News guest predicts on Tucker Carlson’s show that GOP will “pick a fascist” to lead the party

On Fox News Thursday, Tucker Carlson and his guest, right-wing talk radio host Jesse Kelly, openly speculated that Republicans may soon get tired of “following the rules” and “pick a fascist” to lead the party.

“I think you make a really solid point about the sadness and powerlessness that people feel in the face of this,” said Carlson. “And some people are just going to say, why should I follow the rules? Why should I be a good citizen if they don’t have to follow the rules? I mean things kind of break down at some point, don’t they?”

“They will break down, they are breaking down, Tucker,” said Kelly. “I’ve said this before, and I’m telling you, I worry that I’m right, the right is going to pick a fascist within 10 to 20 years, because they’re not going to be the only ones on the outs. There’s 60, 70 million of us, we’re not a tiny minority. And if we’re all going to be treated like criminals, and all subject to every single law while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, the right’s going to take drastic measures.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

Did a top Trump adviser mislead a Florida court to get out of paying child support?

Former Trump 2020 campaign adviser Jason Miller has persistently claimed that he lacks the money to make his court-mandated child support payments — but new documents unearthed by The Guardian tell a different story and show he “appears to have misled” courts about his financial situation.

According to the newspaper, Miller last year was “secretly re-engaged” by Washington-based political strategy firm Teneo, which paid him $500,000 to work as a consultant via a “hastily formed LLC.”

Teneo had publicly fired Miller in 2019 after he went on an obscene social media tirade against Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., but the firm wanted to covertly keep him on the payroll because he provided access to former President Donald Trump’s White House.

Just days after signing the secret agreement with Teneo, Miller asked a Florida state court to “abate and modify” his child support payments because he was unemployed.

“The Florida court records show that Miller made other misleading or false statements under oath in the case of his faux firing in multiple instances,” reports The Guardian. “He not only falsely portrayed himself as unemployed, but asserted under oath that he could no longer afford to travel to Florida to attend court hearings related to the case, and asked a trial in the matter be postponed until he could find work. As evidence of his supposed ‘major financial setback’ Miller cited newspaper articles reporting his resignation from the firm.”

Trump brags to Fox host Laura Ingraham that he did opposite of what top expert advised amid pandemic

Over 30 million Americans have contracted coronavirus, with over 546,000 fatalities, but former President Donald Trump took to Fox News on Thursday to brag about refusing to follow the medical advice of Dr. Anthony, Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert.

Trump made his comments during a telephone interview with Fox News personality Laura Ingraham.

“If you saw him throw out the first pitch in Washington, right? He is a better pitcher than he is as what he does,” Trump taunted.

“But if you really look, I didn’t really listen to him too much, because I was doing the opposite of what he was saying,” Trump admitted.

Joe Biden ignores Fox News at his first White House press conference, upsets right-wing media

Fox News was shut out of asking President Joe Biden a question during his first press conference held in the White House’s East Room on Thursday and several right-wing media figures were quick to loudly complain. 

During the presser, the president fielded questions from many reporters including CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes, CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins, and PBS White House reporter Yamiche Alcindor, among others, but snubbed the Fox News correspondent who has a knack for sparring with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki at press briefings along with other Biden White House officials, Peter Doocy.

Reacting to Biden not selecting him to ask a question during the press conference, Doocy on Fox News touted how many questions he had prepared ahead of time while showing off his black binder full of papers. 

“And I mentioned last night on ‘Special Report’ that I had a binder full of questions,” the reporter began. “We had a lot and most of the stuff we did not get to,” Doocy riffed while paging through a binder on-air. “Nobody ever asked him about this big plan that he has got, this big idea to completely transform the economy, to make it all green. That is something we were hoping to get on the board with, and there were not a lot of questions about Covid, particularly the investigation into the origins of it,” Doocy continued. “We did not get on the board with that, nobody else asked about that.”

But the fact that The New York Times didn’t get the chance to ask a question either didn’t faze conservatives on Twitter who pounced at the opportunity to call a foul. 

“Remember when it was a big deal if the White House didn’t call on opposition media?” the conservative outlet The Daily Caller snarked on Twitter. “Not one question taken from Fox and Peter Ducey (sic). Pure shameful,” Fox News contributor Leo Terrell commented while incorrectly spelling Doocy’s name. “One more question? What about a @pdoocy Fox News question?” Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz remarked. “Biden refused to take questions from Fox News,” conservative radio host Todd Starnes complained. “This was an illegitimate press conference. Biden is hiding from having to answer tough questions,” Ryan Saavedra, a right-wing Daily Wire reporter, added.

Other news that came out of Biden’s first press conference included announcing that he plans on running for re-election in 2024. “Yes, my plan is to run for re-election,” the president stated when asked by CBS reporter Nancy Cordes. “That’s my expectation.” 

Rachel Maddow rips Sen. John Cornyn on blocking Biden DOJ nominee with epic throwback

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow tore into Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, over his efforts to derail one of President Biden’s key Justice Department nominees, rolling back the tape and calling out the GOP senator over turning a blind eye to a racist mass arrest scheme targeting innocent Black people in Tulia, Texas.  

Maddow dug into the record book and appeared to come up with a reason why Cornyn might be trying to block Vanita Gupta’s appointment as associate attorney general, the third-highest DOJ position. The apparent tensions between the two date back to 1999 when an undercover officer named Tom Coleman was busted for sending “dozens of black people to prison on bogus drug charges in Tulia,” according to The Associated Press. 

As Maddow pointed out on Wednesday night, it was Cornyn who gave Coleman a “Lawman of the Year” award in Texas, while Gupta spearheaded a legal effort to overturn the dubious convictions and free wrongfully imprisoned people. Here’s how Maddow put it:

A senator from Texas who used to be attorney general … Texas Sen. John Cornyn … is the guy who gave officer Tom Coleman the Texas “Lawman of the Year” award for his great work in Tulia, Texas. Before Vanita Gupta came in and exposed who that guy actually was. Before he was convicted of perjury. Before every single one of those cases was overturned because that guy made them all up.

The MSNBC host further compared the Texas mass arrest scheme to a “Kafkaesque nightmare,” which Cornyn “celebrated.” 

All those wrongfully arrested got full pardons from then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Maddow observed, “because of the Kafkaesque nightmare that was that guy, who John Cornyn named ‘Lawman of the Year.’ I just wonder if Sen. John Cornyn might be at all embarrassed about this and about the young lawyer who came to Texas and exposed this thing, this terrible and cartoonishly evil thing that he had helped along, that he had celebrated, that he had given an award to.”

“Vanita Gupta is going to be confirmed by the Senate ultimately,” Maddow continued. “She will be the No. 3 official at the U.S. Justice Department under [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, despite Republican opposition to her led by the senator who she humiliated for his enabling, encouraging, celebrating role in one of the worst, most racially explosive, astonishingly brazen law enforcement put-up jobs in the last generation. Sen. Cornyn, I do not know if he’s ashamed by his role in all that. I wonder if he ever tried to get the award back? But his effort to get revenge on the woman who had to come in and fix his mess, that effort will fail.” 

“She will win, and he will lose. Again. God bless Texas,” the MSNBC host concluded. 

As NPR reporter Carrie Johnson noted on Wednesday morning, Cornyn has made it clear that he wants to speak ahead of Gupta’s confirmation vote. 

 

In the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, “after nearly two hours of debate, the committee voted along party lines, 11-11,” on Gupta’s nomination,” The New York Times reported, leaving the nominee in limbo for the moment. “Several Republicans gave lengthy comments opposing Ms. Gupta, including Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who called Ms. Gupta a liar for saying that she has never advocated for the decriminalization of all drugs. He pointed to a 2012 editorial in which she said that simple possession of drugs should be decriminalized,”  

Now it will be left up to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to bring the nomination to the floor and marshal the votes of every single Senate Democrat — and either at least one Republican, or Vice President Kamala Harris as tiebreaker — to confirm Gupta. 

You can watch the full clip above via MSNBC. 

The best Sunday night comfort meal is rotisserie chicken chili, especially with a pinch of cinnamon

From the title alone, I was all in on Sam Sifton‘s new book of “The New York Times Cooking No Recipe Recipes.” I’ve been a fan of Sifton’s relaxed, flexible and confidence-building approach for ages, and his latest is a treasure trove of unfussy, intensely flavored dishes and desserts for people who truly love to eat. 

Yet I’ll admit that the book and its bold first line — “You don’t need a recipe” — would have seemed an absolutely ludicrous concept for a large portion of my life. Maybe that’s true for people who grew up in their family kitchens, standing on chairs, stirring stews and peeling potatoes. I was in my thirties the first time I ate a homemade pie, and I was sincerely flabbergasted to learn that pie didn’t come from Drake’s.

You probably do need a recipe to make a pie, even if it’s a pretty loose one. But getting satisfying food on the table isn’t very hard, and it definitely isn’t rigid. Above all, the results don’t have to bland or boring. Low maintenance doesn’t mean compromise, as amply evidenced in Sifton’s adjective-dense collection of dishes, which feature words like “buttered,” “glazed,” “roasted” and “spicy.”

“I think,” Sifton tells Salon Food during a recent phone call, “this is an argument in favor of more cowbell, always.” That’s the simplest but often most overlooked advice to make your food taste better. As Emeril would say, just kick it up a notch.

“I’ve long said the reason that restaurant food tastes better than home-cooked food so often is because they use more butter and salt than you can imagine — and that’s true,” says Sifton, adding that “I’m talking a lot about big flavors here, but I’m not talking about big portions.”

RELATED: Few things taste as good as roast chicken. This is Sam Sifton’s secret to cooking a perfect bird at home

“But I also think that once you realize that,” he continues, “you can expand your understanding to say that actually, you need more hot sauce, you need more lime juice, you need more yogurt. You need more.”

As a product of a watery, canned vegetable upbringing myself, I’ve found this the most revelatory trick I’ve ever learned. Add another clove of garlic. Add an extra squeeze of lemon. The secret to my unstoppable chocolate chip cookies? I double the amount of chips. Bam!

Sifton’s newest work arrives at exactly the moment we home cooks are ready for it. We’ve done our homework for more than a year, perhaps without even knowing it. 

“Because so many of us have spent so much time cooking over the course of the past year, our skills have improved to the point where the barrier to entry to a new ‘no recipe recipe,’ which is confidence, has been cleared,” he says. “People are more confident in their cooking now and understand that they actually can put stuff together on the fly, should they choose to. And it’s freeing to do that, both creatively but also physically freeing as well, because you’re released from the tyranny of the printed recipe. You’re released from the tyranny of the cookbook that demands that you have a precise amount of star anise in this dish or that one.”

“It’s an argument for looking into your pantry and making of it what you will,” he adds. “If you have chicken thighs, I’ve got plenty of ideas for what you can do with them, and I don’t need to give you a proper recipe to do that. I can just give you the prompt, and you’ll make something delicious. And that will be your recipe — not mine.”

Like Sifton, my recipes frequently involve a rotisserie chicken. You can transform one purchase into so many different meals.

“There’s so much that you can do with them both in the moment and later on,” he says. “I, of course, have no problem with just plopping that thing on the table and just having at it. [Or] shredding that meat off and using it in tacos and quesadillas. Freestyling a chicken salad for a chicken salad sandwich the next day is sublime, and you can take that chicken salad in any direction you want. It can be a curry chicken salad. You can go old-school waspy, and get some grapes and nuts in there. And then, at the end of the day, you have a carcass that you can turn into stock that you can use in something else.”

I came late to rotisserie game, perhaps because I pride myself on my roast chicken. That all changed one particularly hot, stressful summer, when all I wanted for dinner was something that required not heating up our small, stuffy kitchen. Sifton’s rotisserie chicken salad and rotisserie chicken panzanella are kindred spirits of the salads I put together in a regular rotation. While the last gasps of winter still bring blustery nights, I turn more to something cozier.

On weekends these days, my spouse stays a few towns over to care for his elderly mother, and my high schooler and I mostly hunker down with our respective school work. On Sunday nights, however, we emerge, bleary-eyed, and spread a picnic blanket on the living floor. We watch dumb YouTube videos together, and we usually eat something out of a bowl. Often, it’s chicken chili.

The first time I ever made chicken chili, I read the recipe wrong and added cinnamon instead of cumin. Oddly enough, it somehow worked. Over time, the cumin returned, but I still always add a little cinnamon. Every time I do, I remember that even if I have a recipe right in front of me, I can always go off book.

***

Recipe: Rotisserie Chicken Chili

Inspired by The Pioneer Woman and Cooking Light 

Serves: 4 to 6 (If you’re cooking for 2, you can freeze half and eat the rest next week!)

Ingredients:

  • 1 1/2 cups of chicken or vegetable broth (canned or homemade)
  • 1 can of small white beans (or beans of your choice)
  • 1 cooked medium rotisserie chicken
  • 1/2 cup of shredded cheddar cheese, plus more for topping
  • 3 (or more) green onions, washed and thinly sliced
  • 1 handful of cilantro, washed and sliced, stems and all (unless you’re a cilantro hater, then use parsley!)
  • 1 tsp. ground cumin
  • 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper or ground chipotle 
  • Pinch of cinnamon (optional)
  • A few chopped canned jalapeños, if you like

Instructions:

  1. Wash your hands thoroughly and shred the meat from the chicken. (If you’re feeling up to it, put the carcass is a stock pot, and cover it completely with water. Throw in a green onion. Simmer while you make dinner, and by the time you’ve finished eating, you’ll have stock. Strain and refrigerate or freeze.)
  2. Heat the broth and beans over medium heat in a large, heavy-bottomed pot until they come to a low simmer.
  3. Add the shredded chicken, and stir it in to incorporate. You may not need all of it.
  4. Add your spices and the cheese. Stir until everything is blended and the cheese is melted. 
  5. Stir in green onion, cilantro and jalapeños.
  6. Spoon into deep bowls, and top with a sprinkle of extra cheese.

Pro-tip: This is delicious with plain old cornbread baked from a box of Jiffy (and it’s even better with a handful of corn kernels stirred in to the batter!). If you are committed to vegetables, serve with a salad or add some leafy, wiltable greens like spinach or chard to your chili.

More Sam Sifton: 

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Gathering, grief and the pandemic Passover

With longer days and hints of spring, it is time for the holidays that celebrate renewal and freedom. I think back to Passovers spanning my adulthood, reminded of everything that has changed, of our fragility and endurance.

Greeted by the sea breeze and the ship’s anchor on the lawn of my parents’ home, my father welcomed us at the door.  For decades, our family including rotating guests like Holly Woodlawn, the transgender Puerto Rican actress and Warhol superstar, other old friends and relatives who gathered every spring for Passover Seder at my parents’ house in Brooklyn, an oasis of belonging. It was our family’s biggest holiday of the year, one to which we all looked forward.

In the living room, sitting on the green silk sofa and arm chairs around the large wood coffee table, Dad offered Armagnac, a prelude toast, while my mother served her stuffed mushrooms, chopped liver and eggplant salad. Moving to the dining room, on a built-in wood console was a tray with little glass memorial yahrzeit candles for our many relatives who had passed. My mother lit the candles that blazed a ghostly glow. Twelve of us gathered around the large mahogany dining table. A bronze chandelier hung above, interspersing electric lights with unlit tapers, which leaned and bent as the evening wore on.

Customarily the conversation during the meal was competitive. As a working painter and feminist, I was involved in a women’s artist activist group. Jimmy, my brother, was a gay probate and immigration lawyer. We along with our guests were used to expressing ourselves. Whoever could voice their opinions the loudest received my father’s attention and the power to engage with him on politics. It was usually Jimmy.

My father beamed with happiness. A practical, yet emotional man, his eyes welled up with tears as he expressed his gratitude of sharing the holiday with all of us. My smiling mother plopped in her chair at the other end of the table exhausted by the food preparation. We began the Seder.  About 20 minutes into the reading, she said, “That’s enough.  The turkey’s getting dry. Let’s eat.” I rose from my seat along with Bruce, my husband and Jimmy’s partner, to bring out the matzo ball soup and then the seven other dishes. I passed each one to mom, offering to put some on her plate.  She waved them away too tired to chew, yet still managing to sparkle with Jimmy’s entourage.

One spring, the Seder was more subdued because I had laryngitis and my brother, congested with a very bad cold, could barely get through the evening. The conversation lagged. Bruce and I offered to stay and help clean up. My mother shoed us all out, telling Jimmy and me to take care of ourselves. She said she would wash and put everything away at her leisure, with a smile indicating another successful holiday dinner. 

The next morning Jimmy died of an asthma attack at 40. The Hansel to my Gretel was gone. I had just become an only child instead of a big sister.  

We gathered for Passover the following year without my brother, but with our baby Jaime, named for him.  Everyone was grateful for the new life in our family, but the loss of Jimmy hovered over the room like a tent. The extra yahrzeit candle seemed to tip the tray. That year marked the beginning of the holiday as a family memorial event, instead of the lively gathering it had been.

The first Passover after my mother died in 2009, teenage Jaime made the stuffed mushrooms with great effort to duplicate my mother’s recipe. He recreated the dish dissecting the memory of the tastes he knew so well. Before dinner, he proudly presented the tray to us in the living room as we sat on the same green furniture, a little more worn. My father asked me to take mom’s seat at the table in the dining room. The chair felt too big for me. I was surprised that my feet could touch the ground. Bruce, who was no longer my husband, but still part of this family ritual, made the turkey at his apartment and brought it to dad’s house. I improvised the rest of the meal. Jaime, as the youngest, asked the four questions beginning with “why is this night different from all other nights?” The Passover story provided the answers.

Departing from my mother’s format, I initiated singing the songs, talking about what freedom and bondage meant to us and finishing the Passover story before dinner.  It wasn’t the same cool dinner party as in the past, yet the Seder bound us together in the absence of my mother and brother. Memories haunted and filled the house.

After my father passed, five years ago at 95, I hosted the Seders in my apartment ready to take on the role of Mistress of Ceremonies and infuse the holiday with some of the old joy it used to have retaining good memories of my late family. Each year the definition of kin was bent and expanded. In March 2020, I zoomed into a Seder at my Rabbi’s apartment. The sense of community was larger than one I had known, though each of our personal worlds constricted.   My dining table had a Seder plate and my ex, now my best friend. Isolating, we were too vulnerable to COVID for our son to join us. The little squares of screen sharing, many of the people unknown to me, held us together as a group but didn’t generate the warmth of close proximity.

As we approach Season 2 of the Pandemic, anticipating the zoom Seder once again, we are still in the desert of COVID traveling towards the time when we can laugh, hug and eat in the same room. 

This past year has taught me to make adversity my ally. The majority of days I spend alone has taught me to enjoy my own company. The zoom Seders sparked innovation, connecting a community in a ritual together, sequestered in our own homes. Without technology, we would have been more isolated during this holiday celebrating the strength of a People who travelled from slavery to freedom together. We are survivors. We bear personal tragedies and those of planetary proportions and yet here we are planning for another celebration.

After a year of letting the world into my home for meetings, classes, holidays, readings, support groups, I feel my sphere of communication has expanded because of physical isolation. I don’t think this way of connecting should be tossed aside when we are able to be more intimate with each other. We have gained a tool of bringing us closer in a larger sense. There is something wonderful about knowing I will see and hear authors, artists, great minds, and information by just showing up in front of my computer at a certain time. In this age of adversity, our culture has bounced forward with technology meeting our human need to connect. Added to that, the future actually looks rosy. This year, my ex and I will be able to celebrate with our son because we will all have had our vaccines. Physically being with people in addition to our closest family without masks, touching and sharing meals and closeness is part of the longed for future we can see.

Kayleigh McEnany faces brutal backlash for “still lying” about Biden presser

In a tweet this Thursday, former White House press secretary and newly-minted Fox News contributor Kayleigh McEnany accused the press of giving President Joe Biden the respect that they refused to give Donald Trump.

“Right out of the gate, the White House press corps stands for President Biden,” McEnany tweeted In reference to Biden’s first press conference this Thursday. “Would have been nice if they would have routinely shown that level of respect for President Trump. I hope this is not indicative of softball questions to come!”

But as many pointed out, McEnany’s claim that the press never stood for Trump is outright false.

 

Republicans know their war on voting is racist — so they’re barely bothering to defend it

This week, Congress finally started work in earnest on the topic of voting rights. On Monday, the House of Representatives held a hearing on the topic of making Washington, D.C. a state, granting its 700,000 residents actual representation in Congress. On Wednesday, the Senate held a hearing on the House-passed H.R. 1, called the For the People Act, which would reform democracy in a multitude of ways, including protecting the right to vote against a series of anti-voting laws in red states known collectively as the “new Jim Crow.” 

It would be an understatement to say Republicans are panicked by both the ideas of voting protections and D.C. statehood. After Donald Trump, the GOP understands their party exists because of racism and white grievance. Rather than try to moderate those views and appeal to more diverse voters, they instead are laser-focused on trying to prevent people of color from exercising their right to vote. That means keeping D.C. from becoming a state and enacting a series of draconian laws in states to make it harder for people, especially people of color, to vote. 

As the Associated Press reported, conservative activists have declared this an “all-hands-on-deck” situation for the GOP.  Without massive, racist voter suppression, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas argued in a call with Republican state legislators, Democrats “will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century.”

Clearly, separating voters of color from the ballot is a top priority for Republicans. And yet, all week, Republican arguments against both bills were a joke, ranging from outright denials of reality to arguments so ridiculous that it was surprising they were able to keep a straight face while making them. Republicans, it appears, can’t be bothered to make a substantive case for what is their number one issue. 

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The arguments made by Republicans and conservative activists against D.C. statehood, for instance, were so bad that even junior high school debate kids would be embarrassed to offer them. 

Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., in tones of maximized faux outrage, complained that D.C. would be the only state “without an airport, without a car dealership.” That’s not true, however, it does have a car dealership. Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., insisted that D.C.’s lack of manufacturing, mining, or agriculture disqualifies it from deserving equal voting representation in Congress. As the Revolving Door Project pointed out on Twitter, this argument relies on assuming “public sector work is somehow unworthy.” And what these arguments elide, of course, is that what D.C. has is people — more people than states like Vermont and Wyoming. Congressional representation, after all, is not about car dealerships or farms, but about people. And despite their goofy arguments about airports and yard signs, it’s the people of D.C. — who are 46% Black  — Republicans really object to letting vote. But they know that outright saying so reveals their true motives, which are deeply racist and anti-democratic. 

Over in the Senate hearing about H.R. 1, Republicans’ strategy was largely to pretend that their war on voting is “fake news” concocted by liberals. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., flatly lied to reporters, claiming, “states are not engaging in trying to suppress voters whatsoever.” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said it was a “false narrative” that “states are passing massive legislation that changes the voting structure to people’s disadvantage.”

This is, of course, not true in the slightest. Republicans on the state level have rolled out at least 253 bills to keep people from voting. Blunt pretended this didn’t matter because so few have passed this legislative session, but that’s largely because most states are early in their sessions and haven’t finalized the bills for passage. They fully plan to do so. And that’s on top of the wave of previous voter suppression from the past few years that was unleashed when the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.  

When Republicans were forced to acknowledge the efforts at voter suppression this week, their true ugliness came out.

Discussing a Georgia proposal to ban Sunday voting, an obvious effort to end the “souls to the polls” Sundays practiced by many Black churches in the South, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., decided to God-splain Christian ministers. She claimed Republicans are just interested in forcing people to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” This would not only be a violation of the First Amendment prohibition of government dictating the religious beliefs of citizens, but was also just plain hypocritical lying on Hyde-Smith’s part. A quick perusal of her Twitter feed shows that she’s only too happy to cheer on college basketball games held on the Sabbath. 

Cruz, who got lurid with his racist fantasies, whined that H.R. 1 will “promote widespread fraud and illegal voting” and insisted repeatedly that “illegal aliens” would vote. This is, of course, flatly false. But Cruz is just taking a page from Trump, who spent months equating legal votes from Black and Latino with “fraud,” not out of any evidence but out of a conviction that such people shouldn’t have the right to vote in the first place. 

The battle over voting access has, of course, partisan implications. Republicans clearly believe, as Cruz said on the reported call, that their party cannot win without massive, racially targeted voter suppression. Democrats, on the other hand, believe — with good reason, as the Democratic wins in Georgia’s January Senate run-offs show — that the more diverse the voting population, the better they will do. Unfortunately, these realities have caused far too many journalists to reach for the comforting both-sides-do-it frame. 

This kind of practiced cynicism may make journalists feel hip, but it’s misleading, as The Atlantic’s Isaac-Dovere even kind of admits in his tweet. It doesn’t really matter if politicians have self-interested reasons. What matters is the larger moral argument at stake. On that front, Democrats and Republicans couldn’t be more different. Democrats are making a substantive, moral argument that every citizen has a right to vote, regardless of race, geography, or ethnic origin. Republicans, on the other hand, have such blatantly racist and immoral arguments that they can’t even speak their own reasons out loud. Instead, they rely on lies and comically dumb arguments to waste time during hearings.

Ultimately, Republicans know it doesn’t matter if they have substantive arguments. They’re depending on the continued existence of the Senate filibuster to keep H.R. 1 or D.C. statehood or any other bill to secure voter rights from ever touching the Senate floor. Defenders of the filibuster claim that it encourages robust debate and discussion. As Republicans demonstrated this week, however, the opposite is true. Republicans don’t even bother to offer a real defense of their own views, because they don’t have to. All they have to do is block bills from ever reaching the Senate floor. For those who know their own policies are indefensible, the filibuster is their best friend. It must be reformed, if only to force Republicans to start actually explaining themselves — which they know they can’t really do — to the voters. 

Now Tom Cotton wants to ban “critical race theory” from U.S. military

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., is slated to introduce a bill Thursday in the Senate endeavoring to ban critical race theory, an academic and civil rights movement that seeks to explore and understand the consequences of racism found in many American institutions, from the U.S. military. 

The bill would not allow military officials to teach troops that the United States is “a fundamentally racist country,” which defenders of critical race theory say is an important aspect of understanding compounded and systematic racial inequalities that have helped to create an unjust society. 

“Anti-American and racist theories, such as Critical Race Theory, teach students to distrust and even hate their country and fellow citizens,” Cotton opines in a draft copy of the bill. “The United States Armed Forces should not promote or otherwise encourage anti-American and racist theories that demoralize and divide its members while undermining its mission to ‘bear truth, faith and allegiance’ to the Constitution.” 

Cotton enjoyed a moment of particular notoriety last year after he published an op-ed in the New York Times urging then-President Trump to send the military into American cities to quell Black Lives Matter protests. The resulting controversy led to the resignation of the Times’ editorial page editor. 

Loyola Law School professor Priscilla Ocen, explained to Time last year that critical race theory attempts to make society more just and inclusive by examining the country’s racial divisions and understanding how historical racism impacts minorities in the country today. 

“Critical race theory ultimately is calling for a society that is egalitarian, a society that is just, and a society that is inclusive, and in order to get there, we have to name the barriers to achieving a society that is inclusive,” Ocen told Time. “Our government at the moment is essentially afraid of addressing our history of inequality, and if we can’t address it, then we can’t change it.”

Cotton has previously been extremely critical of the intellectual movement, falsely alleging that its end goal is “segregation.” “Critical race theory is the belief that people have value based on the color of their skin, and that our race defines everything about us,” the senator stated in a March 16 tweet. Speaking to Fox News’ Shannon Bream on Wednesday night, Cotton called critical race theory “left-wing nonsense.” Needless to say, there were no follow-up questions regarding the persistence of systematic racism in the United States. 

Cotton isn’t the first Republican trying to destroy the critical race theory movement or its ideas, and surely won’t be the last. During a presidential debate leading up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump was asked about the intellectual movement and responded, “I ended it because it’s racist. I ended it because a lot of people were complaining that they were asked to do things that were absolutely insane, that it was a radical revolution that was taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place.”

In January, when President Joe Biden took office, he revoked Trump’s executive order banning federal employees from hearing information about critical race theory during workplace training. Other topics taught at workplace training that stem from critical race theory ideas include conversations and education on micro-aggressions and inclusion, among other thing. 

While Cotton continues his one-person crusade against critical race theory, the coronavirus pandemic continues to reveal the racial disparities that remain prevalent in the United States. A recent report from the prestigious Mayo Clinic found that “research increasingly shows that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by coronavirus disease in the United States.”

Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that Native American or Alaska Native people were hospitalized for COVID about 5.3 times more than white people, while the rates for Black and Latino people were about 4.7 times the rate of non-Hispanic whites. Many public health advocates understand these numbers as evidnce that people of color continue to face institutional racism that manifest themselves in many different ways, including housing segregation, workplace discrimination, exposure to environmental toxins and access to health care.

Trump adviser Jason Miller hid income and misled court to avoid paying child support: report

Trump adviser Jason Miller signed a “secret deal” to hide his $500,000 income at a Washington PR firm in a child support case, claiming in court that he couldn’t pay up because he had lost his job, according to records obtained by The Guardian.

The confidential records from Teneo, the firm that employed Miller, corroborates previous reporting from Salon’s Roger Sollenberger that Miller hid his income at Teneo and elsewhere in a bitter child support dispute with former Trump campaign aide A.J. Delgado stemming from an extramarital affair they had in 2016. Salon reported last year that Teneo had publicly severed ties with Miller, who continues to serve as Trump’s spokesman, but continued to pay him through an LLC even as Miller claimed in court filings that he could not make the court-ordered payments because he was unemployed. The Trump campaign paid Miller through a similar arrangement after Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner personally signed off on the deal. This allowed Miller to reduce his child support payments to just $500 per month, even as he reported an income of as much as $99,000 per month.

Records reviewed by The Guardian confirmed that Miller’s departure from the company was a “sham.” The same day that he signed a formal “separation agreement and general release” in June 2019, he signed a new contract with the firm to serve as a consultant paid through a “hastily formed LLC” at the same $500,000 base compensation he had previously earned as the company’s managing editor.

The move allowed the firm, which largely works with Democrats, to hide Miller’s involvement after he posted a series of profane attacks against House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., while the company sought to build inroads with the Trump administration. It also allowed Miller to claim in Florida court documents that he was unemployed as he sought to “abate and modify” his child support payments.

Miller repeatedly made false statements under oath, according to the records, claiming that he could no longer travel to Florida to attend hearings in the case and asking for postponements citing a “major financial setback.” But Miller did not miss a “single paycheck” from Teneo, and even got an additional $90,000 in severance pay despite starting his new position the following day, according to the report.

“When my employee/employer relationship with Teneo was severed, I faced the loss of … income due to lost bonuses and benefits,” Miller said in a statement to The Guardian. “This financial setback greatly reduced my income.”

He denied that he had misled the court, arguing that he paid “over $100,000 in total temporary child support, which supports the entire household, even though I am not required to support his mother.”

“I take my parental responsibilities seriously,” he told the outlet.

But records show that three days after signing the contract with Teneo to continue receiving $500,000 annually, he claimed in a sworn statement that he had a “substantial change in financial circumstances.”

“Under penalties of perjury, I declare that I have read the foregoing verified motion to abate and modify temporary child support and the facts stated in it are true,” the statement said.

In July 2019, he filed another sworn statement claiming he “does not have the financial ability to meet [his] child support”.

Miller repeatedly cited newspaper reports citing his alleged split from Teneo as evidence of his financial situation.

“The petitioner’s unemployment is public knowledge,” he wrote in one filing.

Salon previously reported that Miller likewise concealed his income he was paid by the Trump campaign. Miller did not receive direct payments from the campaign, despite serving as its most visible aide, but Trump’s 2020 campaign instead paid tens of thousands to Jamestown Associates, a New Jersey media company that lists Miller as an executive and partner. He also hid income earned from nonprofit founded by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Miller received about $20,000 per month from Citizens of the American Republic, which was linked to an alleged money laundering scheme, where Miller co-hosted a podcast with Bannon.

Miller also received payments from a consulting firm co-founded by former White House official Justin Clark and former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien.

The Trump campaign payments raised red flags. Brendan Fischer, director of the Federal Reform Program at the Campaign Legal Center, told Salon last year that these revelations showed that the Trump campaign had “disguised millions of dollars in payments to personnel and vendors by routing the money through LLCs created or managed by senior Trump campaign officials.”

The CLC filed a Federal Election Commission complaint last year accusing the campaign of illegally hiding at least $170 million in payments through shell companies, including payments to Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle.

“This scheme is illegal,” Fischer told Salon, describing the reported payments as “a well-orchestrated scheme designed to undermine laws and transparency requirements.”

Holdover Trump appointees are delaying stimulus payments, House Democrats complain

While Internal Revenue Source officials have touted the agency’s swift delivery of the latest batch of stimulus checks for much of the American public, there are still millions of disabled and retired Americans who are waiting for theirs, a holdup largely attributable to the Trump administration, Democrats said on Wednesday. 

According to House Democrats, the Social Security Administration still hasn’t handed over the necessary payment information required by the IRS to deliver the relief checks to the 30 million Americans currently on disability or retirement benefits. 

“We were alarmed to learn recently that most [Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Railroad Retirement Board and Veterans] beneficiaries who are not required to file a tax return have not yet received their payments and that the IRS is unable to provide an expected timeline for these payments,” Democrats wrote in a letter to Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul.

“Some of our most vulnerable seniors and persons with disabilities, including veterans who served our country with honor,” they added, “are unable to pay for basic necessities while they wait for their overdue payments.”

The IRS has sent stimulus payments to over 127 million Americans so far. On Monday, it promised to deliver an additional batch of checks on Mar. 24, though it’s not clear whether Americans on disability or retirement plans will be the beneficiaries of the incoming batch. According to CBS News, the IRS has prioritized Americans who filed their 2019 or 2020 tax returns.

In the letter, House Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal, D-Mass., asked both the IRS and SSA to provide an update on their timeline to deliver the payments by Mar. 26. 

In the past, several Democrats, including Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., called on Biden to oust SSA Commissioner Saul, a Donald Trump appointee whose term does not expire for another four years. Biden has not signaled any intent to meet their demands, even though he’s removed Trump appointees in other agencies. 

The SSA plans to send the payment information to the IRS on Thursday, an agency spokesperson told the Huffington Post. He explained that Social Security has been unable to work on the payments because lawmakers provided unusually low appropriations for the agency compared to previous years. 

“Social Security staff is working day and night with Treasury and IRS representatives to ensure that the electronic file of Social Security and SSI recipients is complete, accurate, and ready to be used to issue payments,” the spokesperson said.

Last year, the IRS offered an online payment portal for Americans who didn’t file their taxes. But IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said last week in a Ways and Means hearing that the IRS opted out of the portal in an attempt to encourage more lower-income people to file. 

“Many of these folks are also entitled to an [earned income tax credit],” he said to lawmakers. “They’re also entitled to a child tax credit. We did not get that information from the non-filer portal.”

Under Saul, the Social Security Administration has been rife with conflict. In the past, Saul has sidelined federal employee unions and sought cuts to disability benefits, often wresting control of the agency’s disability hearing. Last December, the Association of Administrative Law Judges issued a vote of no confidence backed by 88 percent of its members.

CNN’s Don Lemon on why Trump was good for America: “Now we see them for what they are”

For anyone who has watched CNN anchor Don Lemon on his nightly show “CNN Tonight,” you know he’s not bashful about speaking the hard truths about race in America. Lemon didn’t hold back when I talked to him on “Salon Talks” about his new book, “This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends about Racism.”

Lemon traces the history of white supremacy in our country back to his own ancestors being brought to America as slaves, or as “property” as he put it. He even shares a story of returning to Africa with his mother to trace his roots to the Slave Coast in Ghana. The CNN host explained that the fact he is a descendant of slaves actually makes him prouder of what he and others in his family have accomplished, given where they began on our soil.

He also traces our nation’s history of white supremacy through the acts of violence visited upon Black Americans such as the 1898 violent coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, by white supremacists to overthrow the biracial government that also led to the slaughter of Black leaders and the destruction of Black-owned businesses. As Lemon made clear, Americans need to know the full history of our nation — not to make white people feel pointlessly guilty, but in order to address the issues of racism and white supremacy in an open and honest way.

The title of the book, “This Is the Fire,” is inspired by one of Lemon’s heroes, the late great writer James Baldwin, who like Lemon spoke truthfully and often poetically about race in America. Lemon may be more optimistic than Baldwin, who might have been dismayed at Lemon’s view that Donald Trump’s election actually will lead to positive changes. As Lemon puts it, “With the election of a blatant white supremacist, the problem became palpable, impossible to ignore.” For the sake of our nation, I hope Lemon is right. Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Lemon below or read a transcript below, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Don, your new book, “This Is the Fire,” is compelling and provocative. You talk about one of your heroes, James Baldwin. In fact, you start with a letter to your nephew, similar to one Baldwin wrote. There is a famous quote of Baldwin’s from 1961 where he says, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” Do you think that still resonates today?

It does resonate. And I think more there can be a state of rage, but I think it’s also more in a state of paranoia. Especially if you look at social media, if you look at what’s happening videos all over the internet of people calling the cops on Black people, and then just sort of the garden variety discrimination that happens. I write about it in the book, it’s almost like a race when you’re ready, set, go: African Americans live in a perpetual state of set, where we’re concerned about what’s going to happen, and if we are going to be discriminated against, or something weird is going to happen, and sadly it does. Sometimes when it happens, you don’t realize it until after the event is over, so it’s a strange sort of paranoid state to live in.

On your show this week when you were covering the shooting of the six Asian women in Atlanta you talked about this idea of people on the right saying that they have the freedom to say whatever they want, even if it’s horrible things, negative comments, nicknames about Asian Americans, about any group. Deep down, do you think it comes from a place of white supremacy, the idea of, “How dare you minorities tell me, as a white man, what I can say and what I can’t say?”

I look at it this way. People want to be able to say the most horrible things without impunity. You can say whatever you want to say, you can be a bigot. You could say it, but you have to suffer the consequences of it. People are just surprised that they’re actually facing consequences for saying horrible things. I hate that little catchphrase, “cancel culture,” and all that. I hate those things. I think you have a First Amendment right to say whatever you want. But if you say something that is offensive and someone calls you out on it, you suffer consequences. That’s not cancel culture, that’s called reality. That’s called life. That’s how it should work. People have been used to doing it for so long and not suffering any consequences and just kind of laughing about it, or that they did it for so long they thought it was normal, right? It’s not normal, and now people are saying, “Hey, no.”

You write about Trump and you say, “It breaks my heart and burns my tongue to say it, but in 2016 Donald Trump was exactly the president we deserved, and probably the president we needed, in the way that you need symptoms that alert you to the disease. With the election of a blatant white supremacist, the problem became palpable, impossible to ignore.”

That’s when you threw the book out the window, right?

No. [Laughter.] I get what you’re saying. I have questions about it, though. Who didn’t know that white supremacy is a problem in America? How has it made things better?

I think people knew. Obviously, I think people knew about white supremacy, but when was the last time you saw a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist boldly walk down a street in khakis with tiki torches? When was the last time that that happened? And then you have a president saying, “It was very fine people on both sides.” When was the last time that white supremacists and neo-Nazis and bigots and racists have been so emboldened in our society?

Look, Dean, I’m older than you, and I knew it existed, of course. I come from the South. But as I have been saying recently, I think that the former president was the bigots’ greatest imprimatur. He gave them a seal of approval, a stamp of approval. I haven’t seen people so emboldened probably since I was a kid in the late ’60s or early ’70s. I think people knew it was there, but I think we were sort of lulled into this false existence that we were somehow moving towards a post-racial society because we had elected a Black president, and the bigots were hiding. They just weren’t out there. Now we see them. Now we know who they are because there were a lot of them that we weren’t aware of. And now we’re aware of them. They walk around in suits every day, a lot of them are on television, and a lot of them are holding public office.

I agree with you 100 percent that Donald Trump took it to levels we had never seen. Like when he called for a total, complete shutdown on Muslims on Dec. 15, 2015, I had heard that before, but from the bigots. I didn’t expect the leading candidate for president on the Republican side to say that.

As I said, they wear suits and they hold public office. So, I’m glad you’re agreeing with me!

Oh no, I agree with you on the fact that he brought it to a new level. But how has that made it better?

Because, Dean, I would rather see it. I’d rather expose them. I don’t necessarily want to give them a platform, and I don’t do that on my show, but I would rather expose people so that you see who they are. Do you think that Ron Johnson or, what’s his name, Paul —

Gosar.

Gosar. Do you think they would be so out in the open with their bigotry? No, they would just hide it amongst themselves privately, with their family, or maybe with some of their constituents. Now we see them for what they are, out in the open, and now you know how to refute it, how to rebut it, how to handle it. Otherwise, it was just this hidden problem that was festering underneath the surface.

This is really what I’m getting at here. We know Ron Johnson says I’m not afraid of white, angry people literally carrying Confederate flags and images of white supremacy coming to the Capitol, but I would be afraid of Black Lives Matter. And Paul Gosar goes to an open white nationalist event, gives the keynote, gets no pushback from the GOP leadership at all. Trump has emboldened them. I just don’t know how it’s made our society better because I don’t see them suffering or any penalty. It seems they’re embraced by the GOP.

I don’t think it’s made our society better, but I think it’s for the betterment of our country, and if you want to say society, it’s that we know. That you see it. That you know how to combat it. Otherwise, they would be going there, and you’re saying they’re suffering no consequences from their constituents. They would have suffered no consequences from their constituents had we not known who they are.

Now they can at least suffer the consequences from people like you and me and others in the media, and people who are aware, who are calling them out for it. I think it’s up for people who are of right and sound mind and body to stand up to them even when their own party won’t hold them to account. Because otherwise, you would have been living in this false sense of, “Well everything is better,” because you wouldn’t know what they were doing.

What’s remarkable is laws have changed. We have the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act and we’ve had a Black president. But when I look at a poll, two thirds of black people say George Floyd was murdered. How many white people say it was murder now in a new poll? Only 28 percent of white people. So a man had a knee put on his back for nine minutes, and only 28 percent of white people say, “That’s murder.” How are we different from 1961? And I’m not putting this on you. I think we’re in a dire circumstance.

I think that has a lot to do with our politics. I think that has a lot to do with not being taught the true history of this country. Because if you know the reality of this country, if you know who actually helped to build the country, if you know that before the Mayflower came over that there were plenty of Africans who had been here long before and were already helping to build this country for free. It’s slave labor.

We celebrate the people, “Oh my gosh, these people came over on the Mayflower and they were somehow vaunted and distinguished. And it’s really great.” Well, what about the slaves who were here before them helping to build? Why aren’t they vaunted and distinguished and great for helping to build the country for free? Why aren’t there reparations for those people?

So I think first of all, what we need to start doing is teaching the true history of this country to all people, starting as children, and when they’re adults, they probably won’t grow up to be a Paul Gosar or a Ron Johnson or people who will march on the Capitol and try to overturn an election because what they’re thinking and the reason they’re doing it are all built on lies. They will be living in a state of reality and they probably won’t be able to be co-opted or somehow won’t be able to be persuaded by a cult of personality. Let’s put it that way. So easily persuaded.

In your book, you bring up history in America that is talked about so little. I didn’t learn about it until later in life. You talk about 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, where white supremacists actually had a coup and drove out the Black leadership there, burned down Black businesses. You talk about — people know a little bit more now about 1921, the Tulsa massacre. Why is it so important that in our schools we are taught the full history, including the fact that in the original Constitution, it had the fugitive slave clause, it had the three-fifths compromise? We’re not taught that slavery was enshrined in our Constitution. It was part of our DNA as a nation. You have people on the right, Trump, Tom Cotton, others, Josh Hawley, who don’t want people to learn about our history. Why is it so important?

Because then you’re not acting on a lie. It won’t lead you to believe in the white supremacy that is embedded in the culture, in a whitewashed history. I know it infuriates some people to hear it. They don’t want to hear it. They believe that Christopher Columbus discovered America. You go talk to any Native American and they will look at you and either laugh or cry because America was here before Christopher Columbus. If we actually learn that Christopher Columbus or Europeans conquered America, and you can decide, good or bad, however you feel about it, most people will tell you, once you know the true history, that it’s not so great.

Instead of saying, “Oh, Christopher Columbus is this great guy,” and you celebrate Christopher Columbus and you celebrate, “Oh my gosh, it’s Independence Day.” Independence for what? Independence for whom? Certainly not for the people who were here before, and certainly not for the Native Americans, and certainly not for the African Americans and the people of color who helped to build this country.

It’s all based on a lie. And I know people get upset when I also talk about, as well, why does America portray Jesus in the Western world as a white man? As a hippie? He wasn’t. He looked nothing like that. If you want your kids to know the truth, tell them how Jesus really looked. That he was a Jew, and he looked like a Middle Easterner, and that he had dark skin. Put that picture up in your house and see what kind of conversation you get with your kids. Except for Easter, we’re running around in our pastel colors painting, coloring white Easter eggs, and celebrating a white Jesus. It’s not true! It’s all built on a lie! Of course, Paul Gosar and Josh Hawley and Donald Trump and all of those people, they don’t want you to know that. Why? Because then they can’t trick you into believing in the fake America that they use to stay in power and to separate and divide people. It’s just that simple.

My dad was born about 15 miles from Bethlehem.

Right next to Norway and Sweden, right? With the people who looked like Jesus.

Exactly! Bethlehem in the West Bank, which is part of the Palestinian Territories now. In the book you also write about when you went with your mom and CNN to your roots and you saw where your family was taken as slaves. You talk about bluntly, and I think it’s so important that people get this, that slaves were purely livestock. In fact, they were treated worse than livestock in a lot of cases.

Property.

Does it shape your view of this country that you are a descendant of slaves?

Of course it impacts my view, and it should impact all of our views. I don’t know what’s happened to the Republican Party. They’ve just gone, like, off the deep end, saying that I’m somehow not as American or living a lie, or that by telling the truth about America that I somehow don’t like America or I don’t like white people. No, that’s not it. I like the truth. I believe in the truth. The more I learn about the real history of this country, and the more I learn about my ancestry and what my ancestors’ contributions were to this country, the prouder it makes me feel.

I have accepted the history of this country, that I’m a descendant of a slave. That doesn’t make me feel bad, quite frankly. It makes me feel good because it makes me feel like a survivor. Now, would I have rather that the history be different or somehow better for my ancestors? Absolutely. The reality of their lives? Absolutely. But I must accept reality, as my brothers and sisters who happen to be white must accept reality, that the history of this country that they learned about, for the most part, are built on lies.

All we need to do is start teaching the true history. And that doesn’t mean selective history, it just means teaching all of it. That’s having a more fulsome perspective about the origins of this country, and then we all won’t be living a lie, or something, or a history that was used to elevate some and denigrate others. It’s just that simple. So, how does it make me feel? Every time I learn more about my ancestry, it makes me stand taller and prouder, with a straighter back, and I have even more dignity than the dignity that my parents taught me as a kid.

Conversely, I always wonder, what’s it like for those descended from slave owners and their view of this country? You have a remarkable exchange in your book with a descendant of a Confederate military leader, who actually was like, “You got to take these statues down of my ancestors.”

Wickham, yeah.

I thought that was really remarkable stuff because, you know clearly white people are not monolithic either. Have you talked to those who were descended of slave owners?

I haven’t really spoken to those kinds of people. I do a podcast called “Silence Is Not an Option” and in that podcast, I have spoken to people like Robert Lee, who is a descendant of Robert E. Lee. I spoke to Wickham’s great, great, great, great, great grandson or what have you and his descendants, both white and Black. Initially the whites in the family were like, “Why take the statue down?” And then they started to learn about the history of why the statue was erected and about their ancestor, and they’re like, “Maybe that statue should come down.” That’s why I say history is important.

People should learn about when those statues, and all that iconography and all of the pictures and whatever, when it was erected. Most of it was erected after Reconstruction, after African Americans and people of color started to gain political clout and some power in society, and what? The white folks said, “No, no, no, we can’t have this.” And so those figures started to come back. That was the resurgence of the Klan, they started going in and tearing down Black communities. That’s all the true history of this country and I’m sure it hurts some people to hear that because they’re like, “No, no, no, that’s not true. That’s not what I was taught.” Of course it wasn’t what you were taught, because people don’t want you to know it.

You’re very hopeful about the future of our country. And I’m an optimist too, and I always look for that hopefulness. Talk about how change will happen and why you’re hopeful for a brighter future for all of us?

One is demographics, because by 2040, 2045, we’re going to be a minority-majority country. You know what that says, right? It’s hard to fight numbers. Unless people really find even more strange and unusual and cunning ways to gerrymander districts to favor the minority, then, you know, we’ll see, that could happen. But there’s going to be a minority-majority, quite frankly, rule in this country. I think that will take care of it, but I also believe that we’re in the throes of the end of white supremacy and that’s why people are fighting tooth and nail for it.

When I say white supremacy I don’t mean normal white people who just want to live their lives and believe in equality. I’m talking about the folks who believe that they are the preeminent voice and that they should be the preeminent voice, and quite frankly the only voice, and who are used to things being the way that they are.

Everything evolves, so I am hopeful because I think there are enough right-thinking people who believe in the promise of the country, which is a more perfect union. And I think that we will continue to go along that path. My evidence of it is November of 2020, where there were millions of people who voted in the right way, but there were a lot of people who didn’t. But those people, so far — I’ll take the glass-half-full approach, outnumber the bigots. That’s why I’m hopeful about going forward in this country. And I’m hopeful because there are Americans like me and you, who can have these conversations, and who know what’s right, who are doing, every day, what’s right in pointing out all of the hypocrisy and all of the lies. As long as we continue to do that, I’m going to be optimistic about this country. I have to be.

Capturing how Aretha Franklin could “alchemize her pain into sonic gold”

When Suzan-Lori Parks was tapped to be the showrunner for “Genius: Aretha” (now streaming on Hulu), she recalled turning to an old friend – the dictionary.

“I used to read the dictionary for fun,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright explained in a recent interview. “And under a definition of a word they’d have the most often used definition. Then they’d have the next one and the next.”

Parks explains that to most people the standard interpretation of “genius” is rooted in scientific terms, and meant to describe the great scientists. “Usually that scientist looks like Einstein as he thinks up brilliant formulas. And that’s pretty great,” she said, “but then there are other ways of viewing genius. That’s what I started looking for.”

“Genius: Aretha” is the product of that search, an eight-episode work Parks brings to life through executive producer and director Anthony Hemingway and most crucially through the astronomical talent of Cynthia Erivo’s personification of Aretha Franklin. Erivo sings on all the limited series’ tracks, but she channels Queen of Soul through every note – interpretive genius layered atop of the story of an extraordinary person.

Brian Grazer and Ron Howard selected Franklin as the third subject for their National Geographic series following seasons celebrating Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, and after drawing criticism for featuring two white men to personify the term for two seasons in a row.

Franklin’s expansive talent, larger-than-life personality and unparalleled musicianship make the choice a no-brainer, although she wasn’t the first selection for the third “Genius” installment. Initially the producers announced “Frankenstein“ author Mary Shelley as the first woman to be featured in the series only to realize they just wasn’t enough content there to fill eight episodes.

A dearth of material was never going to be an issue with Aretha, as Parks discovered after getting the call from Grazer in 2019.  She was also grateful to start with an established title because “the title points us in the right direction. It shows us the path, it’s like a compass north, you know. We know we’re going that way.”

Illuminating Franklin’s unique genius invited her to redefine the word’s meaning. She wasn’t going to find examples of it in equations or theorems. “Genius is kind of heaven-sent or a gift you have from birth. Genius is paradigm-shifting. Genius is something that’s sustainable. Right?” Parks said. “And with those three qualities, how does Aretha demonstrate genius?”

Continually discovering answers to that question helped her sort through a vast trove of articles, books, magazines, thrifted vinyl and online content to discover what she defines as “genius” moments. You’ll know precisely what those moments are when you watch each episode because you can feel them, but Parks shared a few of her favorites.

There’s her 1967 recording session at Muscle Shoals with Jerry Wexler where she defines what soul music is and can be, an event Parks explains is an example of “genius of synthesis”: “For a Black American woman to walk into a studio filled with white guys and not only making it work, but making it work brilliantly? Genius moment,” she said.

Then there’s the depiction of Franklin’s 1972 recording of her “Amazing Grace” live album. Her triumphant surprise performance of “Nessun Dorma” at the 1998 Grammys. Her committed devotion to the smallest details like keeping an empty pizza box on top of a piano during a session in order to capture a certain sound in the studio.

And it’s also there in Franklin’s work during the Civil Rights movement, Park explained. “The work she did with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or her support of Dr. King gives me an idea that genius is someone who doesn’t only hold their own light to themselves,” she said.

The anthology series also highlights the genius Franklin demonstrated as a child, evident in what Park explained was her ability to “alchemize her pain into sonic gold as a little girl.”

Parks’ gained national attention for becoming the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002 for her play “Topdog/Underdog.” More recently she adapted Richard Wright’s “Native Son” for HBO’s in 2019 and crafted the screenplay for Lee Daniels’ “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” which garnered its star Andra Day a Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture drama and scored her an Oscar nomination.

The film itself was not as well reviewed, and among the criticisms is the script’s focus on Holiday’s suffering at various men’s hands along with her artistry. “Genius: Aretha” walks some of this same territory in portraying Franklin’s tumultuous relationship with an abusive, manipulative husband and her father, pastor C.L. Franklin (fiercely portrayed by Courtney B. Vance).

This places Parks in a challenging position of telling her subject’s story honestly without doing what other writers have done in telling women’s stories and presenting pain as a necessary ingredient in the equation that yields brilliance or strength.

Parks had a pointed response to this. “There are a million stories about white men, let’s say, climbing mountains. Wow, the world has an appetite for that, and womanizing along the way. But gee, show two, or three, maybe or four or five stories where a Black woman triumphs, but she has to go through some difficulty. And the world is tired of it.

“They label it the ‘dynamic of pain’ instead of, ‘Oh, this is Aretha Franklin’s specific story,'” she continued. “If she had a hard life, I’m sorry. But it’s the truth.”

Then Parks poses her own question to those making that criticism. “Why is the appetite so limited when it’s time for folks like me to speak my truth? That’s what I want to know. And you know what, I don’t even ask that question. Because I know the answer. And it’s okay . . . this is the truth. Aretha Franklin had many triumphs. Aretha Franklin is a winner.

“So if we’re going to tell the truth, we’re going to tell it,” Parks declared. “This is a story of Aretha’s genius, and her triumph and we see how she wins. She goes toe to toe with some of these people, whether it be disagreements with her husband, whether it be disagreements with her father, whether it be disagreements with her producers, whether it be conflict with her sisters – it’s not only toe to toe with men. She’s struggling, she’s trying. She’s triumphant. She’s a fighter. We see how she wins.”

All eight episodes of “Genius: Aretha” are now streaming on Hulu.

The hype has faded, but don’t count out convalescent plasma in COVID battle

Six months after it was controversially hailed by Trump administration officials as a “breakthrough” therapy to fight the worst effects of covid-19, convalescent plasma appears to be on the ropes.

The treatment that infuses blood plasma from recovered covid patients into people newly infected in hopes of boosting their immune response has not lived up to early hype. Some high-profile clinical trials have shown disappointing results. Demand from hospitals for the antibody-rich plasma has plunged. After a year of large-scale national efforts to recruit recovered covid patients as donors and the collection of more than 500,000 units of covid convalescent plasma, known as CCP, some longtime advocates of the therapy say they’re now pessimistic about its future.

“I fear the CCP train has left the station,” said Dr. Michael Busch, director of the Vitalant Research Institute, one of the largest blood-center based transfusion medicine research programs in the U.S. “We created all this enthusiasm, and then these studies came out and they say this stuff didn’t work in the first place.”

But that sentiment is by no means universal. Other respected proponents say we are watching the science progress in real time, and it’s simply too soon to count out convalescent plasma. They note that larger studies employing more calibrated doses of convalescent plasma and more targeted groups of patients, during a set window in their illness, have met the standards for moving forward and may show promise.

“It’s just been a really interesting story to see it unfold,” said Dr. Julie Katz Karp, director of transfusion medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia. “People are doing a good job of reading the literature, but one week the answer is ‘yes,’ the next week, ‘maybe not.'”

Convalescent plasma was thrust into the national conversation last August, when the Food and Drug Administration, under political pressure, made the decision to authorize the treatment for emergency use despite objections from federal government scientists cautioning that the therapy was unproven. In the months since, tens of thousands of Americans have been infused with plasma.

Enthusiasm faded in recent weeks following two serious setbacks: A large federal clinical trial, dubbed C3PO, testing the use of convalescent plasma in high-risk patients who came to an emergency room with mild to moderate covid symptoms was halted late last month after researchers concluded that, while the infusions caused no harm, they were unlikely to benefit patients. That same week, a pooled analysis of 10 convalescent plasma studies, published in JAMA, found no clear benefit.

In January, the FDA scaled back the emergency authorization of convalescent plasma, limiting its use to hospitalized covid patients early in the course of the disease and those with medical conditions that impair immune function. The agency also said that only plasma with high concentrations of virus-fighting antibodies could be used after May 31.

At the same time, the covid surge that engulfed the U.S. through much of the winter eased, sending demand for convalescent plasma plummeting. Hospital infusions fell from a high of about 30,000 units a week at the start of the year to about 7,000 per week in early March.

Further complicating matters, federal contracts worth $646 million that paid U.S. blood centers to collect covid convalescent plasma are about to expire, prompting centers nationwide to reconsider whether the complicated process of collecting the plasma is still worth the work. Given the added complexity, blood centers have been reimbursed $600 to $800 a unit for the covid product, compared with the $100 price for a regular unit of fresh, frozen plasma.

“We’re not getting orders,” said Dr. Louis Katz, chief medical officer at the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center in Davenport, Iowa. “I don’t want to collect a product that is not going to get used and will cost me more money.”

Officials with the American Red Cross have paused direct collection of convalescent plasma, citing changes required by the FDA’s revised emergency use authorization and an “evolving” market. People previously infected with covid may still donate whole blood, and those units that test positive for high levels of antibodies could be used as CCP.

Even as they acknowledge the setbacks, plasma proponents say declaring its death just a few months into the research would be a foolish overreach. The idea of using plasma from recovered patients to treat the newly ill is a century-old concept that has been employed on an experimental basis during a host of plagues, including the devastating 1918 flu, the 1930s measles outbreak and, more recently, Ebola.

Rather than abandon efforts, scientists need to refine the way convalescent plasma is used and temper their expectations, said Dr. Michael Joyner, principal investigator of the Mayo Clinic-led program that supplied convalescent plasma for more than 100,000 U.S. patients last year.

“This is an unstandardized dose of an unstandardized product being given to all comer patients for a disease with variable progression,” Joyner said in an email. “So it is unrealistic to expect cookie-cutter results like you get for statin/heart attack trials.”

Joyner and others pointed to research that continues to show promise. In mid-February, scientists in Argentina reported that giving convalescent plasma with very high concentrations of antibodies within three days of onset of mild covid symptoms helped slow the progression of disease in older patients. In mid-March, researchers in the U.S. and Brazil reported in a study that has not yet been peer-reviewed that plasma therapy didn’t improve symptoms during hospitalization for patients with severe cases of covid. But it was associated with a 50% reduction in death after 28 days that “may warrant further evaluation,” the authors wrote.

Oversight committees this month gave the nod to two federally funded clinical trials of convalescent plasma to continue enrolling hundreds of patients. One, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, is testing convalescent plasma in people who were infected and developed symptoms of covid but were not hospitalized. The other, led by scientists at Vanderbilt University, is testing high-potency plasma in hospitalized patients.

There’s no question “antibodies work against the virus,” said Dr. David Sullivan, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University and a principal investigator for the institution’s plasma trials.

“It’s all dose and time,” Sullivan said, adding that giving convalescent plasma with high concentrations of antibodies within the first few days of infection is crucial.

The most promising use of convalescent plasma might come from “super donors,” people who were infected with covid and then vaccinated, said Dr. Michael Knudson, co-medical director of the DeGowin Blood Center at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

Knudson said his early research shows plasma from recovered then vaccinated people can provide five to 20 times more neutralizing antibody than the plasma from those who have not been vaccinated. “This would be almost a completely different product compared to what is used to date,” he wrote in a presentation to colleagues.

Joyner and others believe “boosted” plasma could be used as a potent antiviral treatment early in infection, similar to how monoclonal antibodies — laboratory-made proteins that act like human antibodies in the immune system — are used. It could be a cheaper option for low-resource countries unable to afford the monoclonal treatments at more than $1,200 per dose.

Even the National Institutes of Health scientists conducting the halted C3PO trial, Dr. Simone Glynn and Dr. Nahed El Kasser, agreed that more data about the usefulness of convalescent plasma is needed. “The answer is no, it is not the final word,” they said in an emailed statement.

But overcoming skepticism about the use of any type of convalescent plasma, let alone “super” plasma, won’t be easy, given the roller coaster of recent results. And broad use of convalescent plasma will depend on continued funding. If the federal contracts with blood collectors are not renewed, covid convalescent plasma likely will be paid for by hospitals or private insurers, depending on where patients receive the treatment.

In the meantime, the federal government, along with academic centers and private donors, has continued to fund the Hopkins and Vanderbilt trials. And the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority has allocated at least $27 million to for-profit companies that collect covid convalescent plasma from paid donors to create hyperimmune globulin, a purified and concentrated form of plasma that may halt disease. Results from late-stage clinical trials of that therapy are expected later this spring.

“I think that it would be a mistake to stop now,” said Dr. Claudia Cohn, chief medical officer of the AABB, an international nonprofit focused on transfusion medicine and cellular therapies. “We have some evidence that it works and evidence that we can produce high-titer plasma. Let’s see what we can do to keep people out of the hospital.”

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.

Did AstraZeneca fudge vaccine efficacy data? Fauci raises concern over inconsistent numbers

On Tuesday morning, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) issued a statement regarding the vaccine trial data released by pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca from its COVID-19 vaccine. NIAID’s statement said that they were “concerned by information released by AstraZeneca on initial data from its COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial.” It continued: “the DSMB [Data and Safety Monitoring Board]  expressed concern that AstraZeneca may have included outdated information from that trial, which may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data.” 

In the statement, NIAID urged AstraZeneca to review the vaccine efficacy data and ensure its accuracy and timeliness.

It was an unusual statement for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to release, and it arrives at a time when public perception of AstraZeneca, and confidence in its vaccine, is dwindling. As Salon previously reported, use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine was suspended abroad last week following reports of the recently-inoculated experiencing blood clots.

Following an investigation, European health regulators deemed the vaccine safe and effective; data suggests that the blood clots may have been a fluke and that those who received the vaccine actually had a lower risk of blood clots than the population at large. Still, the brief suspension and investigation added to negative public PR for the vaccine and its maker.

On Tuesday morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIAID, told Stat News that the NIAID’s Data and Safety Monitoring Board raised concerns because the results in an AstraZeneca press release appeared to show different efficacy numbers than more recent data about the vaccine. Specifically, on Monday, AstraZeneca said its vaccine appeared to be 79 percent effective at preventing COVID-19. The news prompted several news reports, included one in Salon. However, a panel of independent experts said the actual effective number was lower — between 69 percent and 74 percent, as reported by the New York Times.

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“I was sort of stunned,” Fauci told Stat News. “The data and safety monitoring board were concerned that the data that went into the press release by AZ [AstraZeneca] was not the most accurate and up-to-date data. That is what the DSMB communicated to AZ in a rather harsh note. Having seen that letter we could not just let it go unanswered.”

Fauci told Stat News that NIAID released the statement because the agency felt they “could not remain silent.”

“Because if we did remain silent, we could be understandably accused of covering something up,” Fauci said. “And we definitely didn’t want to be in that position.”

In a public response, AstraZeneca said: “the numbers published yesterday were based on a pre-specified interim analysis with a data cut-off of 17 February.”

“We have reviewed the preliminary assessment of the primary analysis and the results were consistent with the interim analysis. We are now completing the validation of the statistical analysis,” the statement said. “We will immediately engage with the independent data safety monitoring board (DSMB) to share our primary analysis with the most up to date efficacy data. We intend to issue results of the primary analysis within 48 hours.”

In a moment when vaccine hesitancy is one of the biggest barriers to achieving herd immunity against the novel coronavirus, public health experts worry the ongoing public saga of AstraZeneca’s woes could lower confidence in this vaccine —especially as it prepares for regulatory approval in the United States.

“Any type of thing like this could unfortunately contribute to a lack of confidence in the process,” Fauci said.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine, told the New York Times that any of these “unforced errors” can be very damaging to the public confidence in this vaccine.

“And that will really affect our ability to combat this pandemic,” Hotez said.

Why Biden’s climate agenda might be very, very “quiet”

The United States made its last, best attempt to pass a comprehensive climate plan 12 years ago. The bill, known in Congress as the Waxman-Markey Act, was big, splashy, and controversial. It included a nationwide cap on carbon dioxide emissions, restrictions on coal plants, and $190 billion in clean energy spending. For some Americans and oil lobbyists, it was sure to lead to higher fuel prices and lost jobs. For others, it looked like the last chance to avoid increasingly dangerous levels of global warming.

Waxman-Markey is now seen as an object lesson in the problems with giant, well-publicized legislation. The bill died, only narrowly passing in the House and never reaching a Senate vote. And it was the start in a long string of failures to curb carbon pollution across the country: President Barack Obama’s follow-up, the Clean Power Plan, got tangled up in the courts and was never implemented. Statewide proposals for prices on CO2 in Washington and Oregon were shot down by those worried about rising energy costs.

Now, with President Joe Biden — who has said that “we can, and we will, deal with climate change” — in the White House, and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress, the country is poised to try again. But this time lawmakers and policy experts have a new idea about the best way to shepherd the U.S. into a new, greener era. It’s not big or splashy, not a sweeping, nationwide carbon tax, or a giant, economy-transforming Green New Deal. It’s “quiet climate policy” and, in the post-COVID-19 era — with Congress planning a package to revamp the country’s decrepit infrastructure — it just might work.

Too boring to be polarizing

The idea behind “quiet” climate policy is simple, if a bit counterintuitive. To save the climate, the thinking goes, the U.S. doesn’t need a gigantic bill that tries to do everything at once. Instead, cutting emissions will require hundreds of tiny interventions, tucked into bigger Congressional bills or into departmental spending. No fanfare, little media attention. Shhhh.

“The ‘quiet’ approach is doing climate action through investment in infrastructure, technology, and innovation,” said Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, which recently released a report on the idea. In practical terms, that means giving tax credits to developers of wind and solar energy, installing EV chargers across the country, and investing in research to capture carbon and store it underground.

It’s not particularly sexy, or particularly interesting. And that’s the whole point. “Lack of public attention is a feature, not a bug,” Trembath explained.

Big, flashy bills are more likely to polarize an already polarized nation — and then crumple under the weight of disagreement. Matt Grossmann, a professor of political science at Michigan State University, argues that bills introduced with a lot of fanfare provoke immediate opposition and media attention — which, ironically, makes them more difficult to get through Congress. 

“When the media is talking a lot about a bill, the public tends to learn things they don’t like,” Grossmann said.

The Affordable Care Act, for example, was so polarizing that it continues to attract controversy more than a decade after its passage. The legislation — which protected Americans with pre-existing conditions and cut the number of uninsured by an estimated 21 million — passed the House in 2010 without a single Republican vote, and has been under conservative attack in the courts ever since. (The Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether one of the law’s key components, the “individual mandate” for Americans to have health insurance, in June.)

Legislation that flies under the radar, on the other hand, can avoid both public scrutiny and political posturing. It’s hard for even the staunchest climate denier to get riled up about the 45Q tax credit— a $50 tax break for each ton of carbon captured and stored underground — or a Department of Energy program to close up drafty homes. “A lot of actions that have big climate benefits get disarmed” under quiet climate policy, said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. “They’re not barbed enough for Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson to be able to scream and get eyeballs on.”

And, crucially, this strategy seems to have worked in the past. U.S. emissions have fallen almost 12 percent since 2005, not because of legislated federal limits on greenhouse gases (there haven’t been any) but because of the shift from coal to natural gas, along with the growth of renewable power spurred by Obama’s 2009 Recovery Act. 

There have already been a few examples of Congress approving “quieter” climate policy in the past year — even with Republicans in charge of the Senate and President Trump in the White House. In December, a climate package hitched a ride on the giant omnibus spending bill, which authorized $35 billion in clean energy spending and set limits on emissions of hydrofluorocarbons, so-called “super greenhouse gases.” Earlier this month, Biden signed the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which included $30.5 billion for public transit and another $100 million for tracking air pollution and cleaning up environmental toxins. 

And while climate and energy experts might have noticed this happening, most average Americans — and political pundits — did not. “These things sort of sneak into omnibus legislation and reauthorization packages that no one really pays attention to,” Trembath said. 

Many carrots, few sticks

The other advantage is that for the average American or corporation, “quiet” policy seems to provide more benefits than costs. Most political scientists and economists have long thought that the U.S. needs two forms of policies to cut emissions: boosting spending for clean energy (the carrot), and putting strict limits on CO2 spewed into the atmosphere (the stick). But the stick is … unpopular. Steep carbon and fuel taxes have faced heavy backlash in recent years — consider France’s 2018 “yellow vest” protests — putting them at risk of reversal once power changes hands.

Incentives are another story. Once funding green energy is started, it’s hard for future administrations to reverse it. Upon entering the White House, President Trump tried to slash fundingfor efficiency and other green programs in the Department of Energy, only to be stymied by members of Congress and clean energy groups. Freed says this is an example of what has been called “the green spiral”: If the government creates a program to, say, benefit developers of solar farms, it creates a constituency of solar companies which defend the benefits and lobby for even more federal support.

“Entire communities have seen their livelihoods, their tax base, really benefiting from the switch over to clean energy,” said Freed. “They want to see those investments protected.” 

Lawmakers can also target funding to a particular region — simultaneously pleasing their own voters and avoiding public attention. (Nationally, no one is likely to care if a western Pennsylvania town gets funding to build a new carbon capture storage plant.) That may become even easier in the next Congress, as both Democrats and Republicans are planning to bring back “earmarks,” or projects slipped into big bills without being subject to a direct vote. This practice has been banned for almost a decade — and criticized for being a way to add “pork” to legislation — but it can help hold a party together on crucial votes.  

Quiet but also … loud?

The biggest test of this new trend, however, may be yet to come. Just weeks after passing the massive, $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, the Biden administration has turned its attention to assembling another multi-trillion dollar bill — this time, focused on infrastructure. The package could include hundreds of billions of dollars to take on climate change — boosting electric vehicle charging, building a federal “green bank,” and retrofitting buildings to save energy. (Some have even suggested that the package could include some form of a “stick”: a requirement for utilities to produce energy from clean sources by 2035.)

The problem is that if enough dollars are on the table, even the quietest policy can start to sound … uncomfortably loud. Obama’s 2009 Recovery Act was, in a way, the original attempt to quietly fund clean energy. It passed with $90 billion to boost wind, solar, nuclear, and energy efficiency — all carefully tucked into an $800 billion economic rescue package. But after the solar panel company Solyndra defaulted on a $535 million loan, the clean energy aspects of the bill became a talking point for right-wing media.

Of course, in the COVID-19 era, $90 billion looks like small potatoes. A $1 trillion aid package once seemed unthinkable; during the pandemic, one seems to pass every few months. Even so, as price tags for the infrastructure package reach into the hundred billions, and federal debt nearing $27 trillion, lawmakers (and the public) could start getting skittish. 

“If all the ‘quiet’ parts of climate policy are assembled into a big enough package, does it cross the line into loud policy?” Freed said. “We’re hopeful that it doesn’t. But that’s what we’re going to find out.”