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“Fire this guy”: Louis DeJoy wants more money from Congress to further slow mail

Handing congressional Democrats additional reasons to demand his removal, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on Thursday asked House appropriators for more money to implement his forthcoming plan to further slow mail delivery and gave himself an “A” grade for his performance thus far at the U.S. Postal Service — a nearly nine-month tenure that has been marked by scandal and nationwide package delays.

“I would give myself an ‘A’ for bringing strategy and planning and effort to here,” DeJoy said when pressed by Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., to assign a letter grade to his job performance. The postmaster general continues to resist calls to resign over the sharp and persistent mail slowdowns that followed his rollout of major operational changes last year.

Pocan, chair emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, made clear that he disagreed with DeJoy’s self-assessment, pointing to an October inspector general report that found DeJoy imposed policy changes without considering their potential impact — which turned out to be destructive. The IG report observed that package delays reported by post offices across the nation jumped 143% in the weeks after implementation of DeJoy’s policies, some of which were later halted by federal courts in the run-up to the November elections.

But with the elections in the rearview, DeJoy — a Republican megadonor — is planning to unveil a fresh set of operational changes that would likely exacerbate mail slowdowns while also hiking prices for consumers and businesses. In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, DeJoy asked congressional appropriators for money to implement the new plan, the details of which have yet to be finalized.

As the Washington Post reported Thursday, DeJoy confirmed earlier news stories indicating that “he would stop flying first-class mail cross-country and planned to eliminate a speedier category of first-class mail to cut costs and help the agency make delivery windows.”

While members of Congress, led by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., have sought to shore up the Postal Service’s finances by proposing legislation to eliminate the onerous 2006 mandate requiring the USPS to prefund retiree benefits decades in advance, Democratic lawmakers have voiced opposition to DeJoy’s plans for additional mail slowdowns.

“The Postal Service has, frankly, become wholly unrecognizable from what it once was,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said during Thursday’s hearing. “Under your leadership, on-time delivery for something as simple as a letter to a loved one declined to just 60 percent and has still not fully recovered.”

“This is unacceptable, and frankly, your leadership of the Postal Service has been an utter disgrace,” DeLauro continued. “It is simply inexcusable that, even after all this hardship, you are working on a new strategic plan that would permanently slow first-class mail and abandon current service standards.”

Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., who worked at the Postal Service for 30 years prior to her election to Congress, told DeJoy Thursday that “we’ve never had the service issues that I’ve seen.”

“I’ve never seen trucks backed up for miles to get into a facility,” said Lawrence, “and the responsibility of all these things that you’ve mentioned does rest on your shoulders.”

DeJoy’s latest appearance before Congress came as President Joe Biden continues to face calls to remove and replace the entire U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, the body with the authority to terminate the postmaster general. The board is currently dominated by Trump appointees.

“Louis DeJoy grades himself with an ‘A’ for destroying the Post Office. Fire the entire postal board and then fire this guy now,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., tweeted Thursday night.

But Biden has opted to pursue a less aggressive path by nominating officials to fill the three existing vacancies on the postal board, potentially giving the panel’s Democrats enough votes to remove DeJoy. The postal board nominees must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, which is narrowly controlled by Democrats.

Mark Dimondstein, president of the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, wrote in the latest issue of the American Postal Worker magazine that “there is no argument that DeJoy is the captain of the ship that is sinking on his watch.”

“He must be held fully accountable by the Postal Board of Governors, elected officials, and the public for the delays, loss of revenue and business, and for breaking the bond of trust between the people and the public Postal Service,” Dimondstein added.

An asteroid that could wipe out a country will just miss Earth this week

An asteroid the size of the Pentagon is headed our way. 

The celestial passerby, named 2001 FO32, is expected to be the largest asteroid to approach Earth in 2021, measuring somewhere between 1,300 to 2,230 feet wide, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The key word here is “approach” — this wide rock isn’t going to actually hit Earth. But its close approach is a good warning that an asteroid of this size is guaranteed to hit Earth eventually. 

2001 FO32 will be at its nearest on March 21. It is not expected to come any closer than 1.25 million miles to our planet — roughly 5.25 times the distance between Earth and the Moon — so there is no threat of it colliding with us anytime within the next few centuries. At the same time, it will come close enough for scientists to be able to get a good look at it. And while it won’t be visible with the naked eye, amateur astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere with an 8-inch telescope or larger should be able to spot it in the early morning, when it will appear inside the Sagittarius constellation. 

“By getting so close to Earth, it will be very bright in the sky,” Dr. Tom Burbine, a senior research associate who studies asteroids at the Planetary Science Institute, told Salon by email. “It will be easier to get infrared spectra of the body, which allows us to estimate its composition. Radar observations can be done to determine its size and shape.”

Dr. Henry Hsieh, who studies asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust and small satellites at Planetary Science Institute, said that it was an exciting chance to study an asteroid.

“The scientific significance of asteroids coming extremely close to Earth mean that astronomers can study them in much greater detail,” Hsieh wrote to Salon. “Astronomers often study the composition of asteroids using spectroscopy, meaning they take the reflected sunlight from the asteroid and split it up by wavelength and search for signatures of various minerals. The closer an asteroid is, the brighter it will appear, and so the stronger the mineral signatures will be, meaning that astronomers can potentially get a really detailed picture of an asteroid’s composition.”

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Hsieh added that astronomers hope to learn more about how an asteroid’s rotation and composition corresponds to its size. While that is usually difficult for smaller asteroids because they are so small, this one will be easier to observe because it will be brighter as it approaches Earth. In addition, “if asteroids get close enough, they can actually be studied by radar, i.e., by bouncing radio waves off of the asteroid which can give a highly detailed picture of the asteroid’s surface.”

Naturally, Salon was curious what would happen if 2001 FO32 actually did crash our planetary party and make a menace of itself, as happens every few million years. Such an impact would not be good for life on Earth, to be sure, but it would not cause a repeat of the type of extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

“When talking about asteroid impacts, astronomers typically use the Torino scale for asteroid impact threats (similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes),” Hsieh explained, referring to charts that show what different numbers represent and how they are determined. Because 2001 FO32 is definitely not going to hit Earth, it rates at a zero on the Torino scale. If it was certain to collide with us, on the other hand, it would get a nine and cause what is known as “regional damage.”

“This kind of damage would be roughly on the continent-wide or ocean-wide scale depending on where it hits, so in other words, it could potentially wipe out the US or Europe, or create tsunamis on all surrounding landmasses around the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans if it landed in the water,” Hsieh explained. “The exact effects depend on the composition of the asteroid (i.e., if it’s very fragile or more solid) and where it hits.”

If an asteroid is fragile, it may explode in the air and create shockwaves that flatten all of the buildings and trees in a given area, such as happened in Russia in 1908. If a solid asteroid hit the ground in one piece, it would destroy a smaller area of land but throw up throw up a lot of debris that could cause air quality problems and harm agriculture. Should that same solid asteroid land in the water, it could also create debris clouds and would additionally result in tsunamis.

“Returning to the Torino scale and your second question, the threshold for a civilization-destroying impact is thought to be about 1 kilometer, so about twice the size of 2001 FO32,” Hsieh told Salon.

Astronomers have gotten better at detecting asteroids near Earth. Indeed, in 2020, they detected a record number of asteroids passing our planet, identifying thousands of objects that were previously unknown.

Notably, this wasn’t because there are more asteroids coming near Earth, but rather that detection technology has improved. 

“I think the increasing number of detections of Earth-passing asteroids is entirely due to the fact that more asteroid search programs are going on with more telescopes dedicated to asteroid detection,” Dr. William K. Hartmann, who among other things studies asteroids, comets, meteorites and small satellites at the Planetary Science Institute, wrote to Salon.

Correction: This article originally compared the distance between the asteroid and the Earth to Mars rather than the Moon. The author regrets the error.

Why the left loves Martin Scorsese movies – especially right now

Suddenly, the Mafia was everywhere in my life. The podcasters I listened to were constantly joking about and referencing Scorsese’s mob movies. My Gen Z housemate and her friends were binge-watching “The Sopranos” — a show that came out when she was two. The leftist Instagram posters I followed were dense with screencaps from “The Irishman” and “Goodfellas.” The Harper’s magazine on my coffee table had a Scorsese story on its cover. And most crucially, the people I followed on Twitter —  a cross-section of what you might call The Very Online Left — was awash with jokes and memes about Mafia-related movies and shows. 

Sometimes, cultural trends start randomly, as if the entropy of the universe were jostling artifacts off their shelves. The rise of Hush Puppies shoes in the 1990s, for instance, has been attributed to random influencers deciding they were suddenly cool. In other cases, however, trends come about for complex social reasons that relate to our political moment. 

I’d thought that the sudden Scorsese renaissance was a case of the former: his movies are well-shot, well-acted, well-directed, and hearken back to beloved filmmaking tropes of the New Hollywood era. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the latter. There are deep political reasons that young Americans, particularly those like me that are left of liberal, are swallowing the Scorsese pill right now. 

When I talk about Scorsese being everywhere, I should clarify that I’m mostly talking about his mob movies — “Goodfellas,” “Mean Streets,” “The Irishman,” “The Departed,” “Casino” and so on. Yes, the man can make an incredible kids’ film (“Hugo”), but that doesn’t seem to be what’s on the mind of the zeitgeist. It’s the Mafia movies that are most resonant.

It might seem odd that organized crime flicks would resonate with the American left. After all, mobsters aren’t exactly the paragon of revolutionaries. Most mobsters, both in real life and on-screen, are generally capitalists of the black market ilk: business owners who exploit their own workers, and have little compunction for their worker’s own rights or freedoms. What could explain the sudden fascination of my political cabal for these type of characters?

Of course, a mob movie — like a superhero movie — isn’t merely a film about mobsters. These movies, at least through the lens of someone like Scorsese, are larger stories about a group of friends (often very close friends) working together as a community, supporting each other, and undermining the state and its intelligence apparatuses — even, if their capers are successful, circumventing it. There’s something faintly politically recognizable in those themes, particularly the subversion of the state and the camaraderie of one’s fellow gangsters. 

As a leftist and an anti-capitalist, I can say definitively there isn’t a lot of positive representation of my kind in mainstream cinema (“Sorry to Bother You” being the very, very rare exception). That’s to be expected: executives of media corporations, like most capitalists, aren’t eager to greenlight movies about how rich people like them shouldn’t exist. 

But we’re in a weird political moment, where the capitalist system is apparently collapsing in on itself and America is on the verge of becoming a failed state. Citizens of the Western World seem to know this on a subconscious level, but those who haven’t accepted the reality sublimate it, and see it transformed psychologically into and through other objects.

To wit: The global rise of xenophobic nationalism, which Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Jair Bolsonaro all epitomize, embodies voters’ regressive reaction to the failure of liberal managers of capitalism to maintain our standard of living over the past decades as the rich looted the commons. QAnon is a mass sociological delusion among those who can’t accept that their populist leader was a fraud. And the “resistance liberals” of the past four years — who, I must note, are far to the right of what I speak of when I speak of “the left” — deluded themselves as to why someone as odious as Trump was able to rise to power, scapegoating Russia rather than confront the plummeting standards of living that had resulted from decades of unfettered capitalist accumulation.

Consciously or not, we’re all looking for answers as to why things are so bad, and never seem to change. That means that all kinds of seemingly unrelated political phenomena stem from the shared wish to see an alternative to capitalism, or at least a return to some imagined “normal” existence. And on a visceral level, all of the above groups wish to see those whom they believe responsible for wrecking our future brought to their knees. 

Consider, for instance, the public delight over the recent “GameStonk” debacle — in which retail investors organized on Reddit to drive up the price of GameStop stock, which many hedge fund managers had short-sold believing the price would fall; the result of GameStop’s skyrocketing price was that these hedge fund oligarchs lost billions. Seeing Wall Street goons lose millions was a source of much online mirth, a joyful reaction to the common sentiment that we live in an undemocratic oligarchy in which we have no control. The public excitement over GameStonk was relatable: screwing over hedge fund assholes by using their own financial tools against them felt like a blow, albeit minor, against the goliaths who rule and fool us. 

Of course, in reality, the Gamestonk incident wasn’t really a case of little guys defeating the big guy: far from being proletarian leaders, those with the privilege to trade thousands of shares of stock tend to be middle-class or richer. Moreover, retail investors are not an oppressed caste, and their politics are not necessarily aligned with the global working class. Still, the GameStonk incident was the only incident in recent memory in which oligarchs suffered some kind of retaliation for destroying the planet and the middle class. For that reason it inspired great glee among onlookers. 

Something similar can be said about organized crime cinema, in that it also depicts a David versus a Goliath. Hollywood is bloated with stories about future capitalist dystopias, because that’s all that the capitalist imagination can envision: a depressing future with more oppression, or the status quo. Crime cinema is a way through, a subtle play on how a group of “revolutionaries” might interact with the world and try to win it back from those who uphold a rotten status quo in which their source of income is shut out. After all, what is a revolution besides a group of paranoid, cool guys and gals who hang out together, own a lot of guns, and try to do illegal things while the state’s intelligence agencies try to stop them?

The idea of leftist themes being subtly “laundered” through other pop culture genres is not a new idea. In 1979, famously abstruse Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson said something similar about “The Godfather.” In an essay he wrote for Social Text, Jameson says he disagrees with the vulgar notion that such big-budget commercial flicks are void of larger political themes. Rather, Jameson posits that such art often has a hidden “psychic function” — often, the mass yearning for, say, freedom from capitalist oppression, which will be shunted through the clumsy artistry of big-budget action or adventure movies. In other words, the soiled masses need a cathartic outlet for their class-based rage, lest they explode and revolt against the elites.

Multinational media corporations produce entertainment that offers a “psychic compromise,” Jameson says — media that “strategically arouses fantasy content within careful symbolic containment structures which defuse it.” In other words, you, the media executive, give people something to yearn for and connect with, and it prevents them from coming at you with pitchforks.  

As for “The Godfather,” Jameson sees the film as a larger twofold metaphor. “When indeed we reflect on an organized conspiracy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-makers and in the name of an abstract conception of profit — surely it is not about the Mafia, but rather about American business itself,” he writes. In “The Godfather,” the mob, then, is a metaphor for a universal political sentiment.

But that movie is also about family. Jameson noted the utopian element in the tight-knit Corleone family — “a figure of collectivity and as the object of a Utopian longing.” The ethnic element, of it being an Italian family, symbolizes an old-fashioned ideal of “ethnic neighborhood solidarity.” For most of us in atomized capitalist societies, such tight-knit communitarian bonds are unfathomable. Would any of your friends help you bury a dead body? 

Thus we can watch the mobsters in “The Departed” outwit the South Boston cops and perhaps cheer for them; but, we’ll never see an action film in which the Bolsheviks rob a bank to fund the revolution (at least not one funded by Disney or Paramount). Still, Hollywood gives us a few pointed examples of mobster comrades subverting the state, chilling and drinking with friends, and sticking it to the man — and for now, that will have to suffice.

Biden’s COVID stimulus is the biggest economic relief yet. Here’s what that means for you

President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 stimulus bill, which he signed into law on Thursday, is going to directly and significantly improve the lives of millions of Americans. 

First things first: This is a very important moment in American history.

Make no mistake about it, Biden’s bill is a historic achievement. After the major left-wing social and economic achievements of the Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson presidencies, Democratic presidents became increasingly timid and centrist in their approach. (I’ve argued, however, that both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are in many ways underrated.) One of the concerns about Biden when he ran in the 2020 Democratic primaries was that, because he presented himself as a moderate alternative to more left-wing opponents like Bernie Sanders, he would not do enough to help ordinary people.

The COVID-19 stimulus bill indicates that Biden may actually be listening to his left-wing critics. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently pointed out, the bill provides $27 billion in rental assistance, helps make the Affordable Care Act health plans less expensive and assists states that need to be fiscally healthy to properly care for their citizens during the pandemic. It also extends unemployment assistance until Sept. 6, provides nearly $30 billion in aid to restaurants and invests nearly $20 billion in COVID-19 vaccinations, with Biden later instructing states to open vaccinations to all adults by May 1.

While the bill did not raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour (as many progressives hoped it would), reduced weekly unemployment checks from $400 to $300 each week and moved up the date at which those checks expire, it is still a much more progressive measure than many anticipated. Here are the three policies in the legislation — formally known as the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 — that are likely to directly help you and your loved ones.

The bill includes $1,400 stimulus checks

Do you, as an individual, make less than $75,000 per year? When your income is lumped in with that of your spouse, do you make less than $150,000 per year? If so, this stimulus bill will give you a check of either $1,400 (if you’re single) and $2,800 (if you’re married). People who annually earn $80,000 individually or $160,000 with their spouses will also receive stimulus checks, but with lower amounts.

The same standard applies for children and other people who are dependent on income earners. If you are a dependent for an individual who annually makes less than $75,000 or a couple that earns less than $150,000, you will also receive a $1,400 stimulus check. What’s more, this plan differs from predecessors in that it includes adult children who are students.

The White House says Americans may start receiving these as soon as this weekend.

The bill makes it easier for unemployed people to maintain health insurance

To understand this provision of the bill, you must first know about COBRA.

COBRA, which is an acronym for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, was passed by Congress in 1986 so that eligible workers who lose their jobs or have their hours reduced can continue to receive their original health insurance for a limited period of time. There are some conditions: Generally, COBRA coverage only lasts for 18 to 36 months and companies need to have 20 or more full-time employees (or the equivalent thereof) to be required to extend COBRA coverage. Most importantly, it is usually expensive — indeed, often prohibitively so — because the worker or ex-worker in question has to pay the entire cost for their insurance.

The new COVID-19 stimulus plan will make things much easier for Americans who want to use COBRA to help with their health insurance. Under the relief bill, the government will subsidize the COBRA expenses of laid-off workers so they can remain on their employer-sponsored insurance plans from the start of April through the end of September. If people lose their jobs or have their hours reduced — or already had these things happen and would have been eligible for COBRA at the time — they can inform their employers that they wish to use COBRA. The employers who pay for their premiums will then be reimbursed by the government. The only groups to whom this does not apply are those who quit their jobs or were fired for gross misconduct.

It is unclear how many people this will help since, as of 2017, it was estimated that only around 130,000 unemployed working-age adults had health insurance through COBRA. (Again, it was extremely expensive before this new bill.) That said, millions of people who lost their jobs during the pandemic may sign up as a result of Biden’s new subsidy.

The bill’s reformed Child Tax Credit (CTC) that will help lift children out of poverty. It is also a small step toward universal guaranteed income

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a universal basic income, it is the idea that the government should automatically provide each citizen with a certain amount of money every year to make sure that no one falls below the poverty line.

The reformed CTC does not go that far — not even close — but it is still a step in that direction. As David Wessel, director of The Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at The Brookings Institution, told CBS News, “It’s a big deal. It’s one of the most significant steps we’ve taken to lift children out of poverty.” The CTC used to provide a tax credit of up to $2,000 per child as long as the child was under the age of 17, with the amount being reduced by 5 percent of adjusted income for single parents who made over $200,000 annually and married couples who made over $400,000. (If the credit is greater than the amount owed by a family in taxes, families were only eligible for a refund of up to $1,400 for each child.) Children who are 17 to 18 and full-time college students who are 19 to 24, as well as other dependents, were eligible for nonrefundable credits of up to $500.

The COVID-19 stimulus bill’s changes to the CTC are only temporary (although some Democrats want to make them permanent), but they are drastic. The reformed CTC will be extended to all children under the age of 18, meaning 17-year-olds are now included. For another, single parents who make up to $75,000 a year and married couples who make up to $150,000 will receive a $3,600 credit for children under the age of six and $3,000 for children between six and 17. Parents who make more than that amount will find their credits reduced by $50 for every extra $1,000 they earn in adjusted gross income. It is also fully refundable, even for taxpayers whose credit is larger than what they owe in taxes, and extends even to people who are unemployed. In its earlier incarnation, the CTC was not given to people who earned less than $2,500 each year and was only offered in limited amounts to families with very low incomes.

The old credit will still be available to parents who are not eligible under the current system. While matters are complicated for divorced parents, and there will likely be snags that have to get worked out, under the old rules the credit goes to the parent who has custody of the child for more time. For parents who split custody 50/50, the credit is given to the one with the higher adjusted gross income.

But this bill is still not enough

As The New York Times recently noted in a harrowing report on how the pandemic has caused massive economic suffering in Nevada, this bill is not going to immediately solve the poverty crisis that long preceded the pandemic but has been made much worse by it. On a deeper level, the problem is that America lives in a capitalist society. Wealthy individuals and businesses have rigged the system to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else, leading to a growth in income inequality since the 1970s as well as other major social ills (climate change and our inadequate response to COVID-19 come to mind). This bill does not address any of those deeper structural flaws. There are millions of people who have been struggling to survive during the pandemic because government relief simply isn’t enough, and the bill is not going to fill a lot of those gaps. It does, however, provide some meaningful relief in the short term.

This bill was passed without any Republican support, with Democrats pushing it through Congress using the budget reconciliation process. Republicans are attempting to spin away its likely success by arguing that any upcoming economic benefits will have been Donald Trump’s doing. Trump had absolutely nothing to do with shaping the bill and the economy suffered immensely during his pandemic stewardship.

Astronomers hope to use a quasar as a “flashlight” to see into the universe’s dark past

At the center of the most distant galaxies in our universe sits a very bright object powered by a supermassive black hole a billion times as massive as our sun. These objects are called quasars — short for quasi-stellar object — and sometimes they shine so bright that they can obscure nearby galaxies. From a telescope, quasars appear as stars, and thus astronomers can readily observe these celestial objects despite their vast distances. But sometimes, they shine bright not in visible light but in the invisible radio spectrum, like a great glowing cell phone in the sky. 

Such is the case with a newly discovered quasar dubbed P172+18. Thanks to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers spotted this, one of the most distant quasars ever, and its powerful, prominent radio jets, which only about ten percent of quasars have.

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P172+18 is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us. That means that we are able to see it as it was when the universe was just around 780 million years old. Technically, more distant quasars have been identified, but this is the first time one has been observed sporting radio jets this early on in the history of the universe. That’s throwing astronomers’ working model of the universe’s evolution for a spin.

The findings were presented in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal last week. 

Chiara Mazzucchelli, who co-led the discovery, told Salon via email that the quasar is significant because it will help astronomers advance their understanding of the early universe — and particularly of the first massive galaxies and black holes that formed during that time.

“Quasars with powerful radio jets are quite rare,” Mazzucchelli said. “These radio jets are important because theories suggest that they can trigger mechanisms of very fast growth of the central black holes, and indeed the black hole at the center of P172+18 is accreting at a very high pace — it is amongst the fastest in the universe that we know so far.”

Mazzucchelli said astronomers usually expect to find quasars with radio jets in a certain kind of galactic environment — “surrounded by overdensities of galaxies that will evolve in the clusters of galaxies that we see nowadays.” Our galactic neighborhood likely formed from an object that looked similar.

“We do not have the data to confirm or discard this in our case yet, but we might be observing one of the most dense regions in the early universe,” Mazzucchelli said.

Crucially, astronomers can use this quasar as a “flashlight” for “the state of the universe at that time,” Mazzucchelli explained — meaning one can observe how the light from the quasar interacts with nearby matter, and deduce what the nature of the universe was back then.

Indeed, this period — around 1 billion years after the universe formed — is still ill-understood.

“Around 1 billion years after the Big Bang we have ‘transition phase,’ in which the first stars and galaxies start to form, shine, and ionize the precedent neutral medium permeating the universe before,” Mazzucchelli said. “In practice, the first stars and galaxies turn on and the universe becomes then ‘transparent’ to light, while before it was only filled by neutral gas.”

This transition phase, as Mazzucchellii said, is called the epoch of reionization (EoR).

“In practice, we still do not precisely know how/when/how fast this transition happens,” Mazzucchelli said. “P172+18 can help us constraining how ‘transparent’ the region around the quasar was at time, and so constrain the epoch of reionization.”

In other words, the quasar can function as a so-called flashlight, one which we can use, in a sense, to observe how transparent the universe looked 13 billion years ago. In a sense, this massive quasar belching out radio waves is helping human astronomers clear the fog of the early universe.

Sharon Osbourne’s meltdown defense of Piers Morgan was a live lesson in misogynoir

This week Sharon Osbourne achieved the previously unthinkable by making “The Talk” more of a conversation piece than “The View.” Granted, its ABC rival had a strong start on Monday, but all it took for Osbourne to unseat Whoopi Goldberg and Meghan McCain was to take Piers Morgan‘s side in his one-sided war with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, and fail to comprehend why the public responded by accusing her of racism.

To review: Morgan reminded us of what a peach he is on Monday by responding to the vulnerability Markle showed during Sunday’s “Oprah with Meghan and Harry” special on CBS, including her confession that at one point she “didn’t want to be alive anymore,” by declaring on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” that he didn’t believe a word she said.

In response some 41,000 viewers complained to the network about Morgan’s comment, including the Duchess herself. On Tuesday his colleague Alex Beresford took him to task for his hateful obsession with Markle, leading Morgan to storm off the set mid-show and tender his resignation.  

That alone would have given Osbourne and everyone else on “The Talk” a pile of thoughts to sort. But she unwittingly (and perhaps witlessly) redirected the squall back on her by tweeting “@piersmorgan I am with you. I stand by you. People forget that you’re paid for your opinion and that you’re just speaking your truth.” For clear reasons to nearly everybody but Osbourne herself, the public turned on her.

This brings us to Wednesday’s episode of “The Talk,” of which it’s safe to say most people have seen approximately two minutes and 20 seconds.

Within this timespan Osbourne attempts to address her gaffe head-on, letting us and co-hosts Sheryl Underwood, Elaine Welteroth and Amanda Kloots know how disquieted she is to be called a racist. Mind you, she didn’t say this with as much clarity as she proved it by subjecting the audience to an expletive-laced insistent rant while, in a burst of extreme irony, attacking Underwood, one of her Black colleagues.

Osbourne seems calm at first. “I feel even like I’m about to be put in the electric chair because I have a friend who many people think is a racist. So that makes me a racist,” she opines. “And for me, at 68 years of age, to have to turn around and say, ‘I ain’t racist.’ What’s it got to do with me?”

Then the hinges start to rattle loose. “I’m,” – at this point the censor hits the mute button before cutting back in to her diatribe – “OK? How can I be racist about anybody? How can I be racist about anybody or anything in my life? How can I?”

Blindsided by her fury, Underwood does her level best to throw to a commercial with, “Well . . .” before Osbourne interjects with an aggressive, “Well what?!”

“Well,” Underwood resumes, “we will be right back. We have more topics, so don’t go away.” Before the producers cut the mics they pick up one more rabid morsel from Osbourne: “And I think we should stop this fu—”

I don’t think the word was “fun.”

After the break production cuts in as a noticeably rattled Underwood is speaking. “We are doing live TV right now,” she says, her voice straining not to break as she keeps on trying to save Osbourne from herself. “But I want you to hear from me –”

“I will ask you again, Sheryl,” Osbourne snipes at Underwood with boiling indignation, clutching a tissue in her hand.  “I’ve been asking you during the break. I am asking you again. And,” – she jabs her finger at Underwood – “don’t try and cry because if anyone should be crying, it should be me! This is the situation. You tell me where you have heard him say – educate me, tell me – when you have heard him say racist things. Educate me! Tell me!”

Underwood is under no obligation to do that, but she does her best anyway, explaining that words themselves don’t have to be racist – the implication of what Markle understood is enough. For Morgan to try to dismiss that or downplay the gravity is racist, Underwood continued before adding, “But right now, I’m talking to a woman who I believe is my friend. And I don’t want anybody here to watch this and think the we’re attacking you for being racist. And that for that, if I articulated –”

But Osbourne is unmoved. “It’s too late!” she sniffles. “I think that seed’s already been sown.”

To address this kind of struggle, “Inside Amy Schumer” once produced a parody infomercial for a place called “Generations,” advertised as “a revolutionary new facility where we give your elderly loved ones the politically correct social skills they need to get along in the modern world.”

On its menu of offerings are various classes designed to help clients overcome deeply rooted stereotypes, including a “two-week Asian intensive” where “your loved one will first learn what words are ‘never says.'”

Although “Generations” was made in 2014 that sketch has bobbed to the surface of my consciousness over the past year because of an uptick in encounters and exchanges like Osbourne and Underwood’s. Or maybe it isn’t that these moments have increased so much as the feeling that women of color have grown tired of handling them with a dignity such questioners do not afford them in return.

Perhaps it’s knowing that people who cry “Educate me! Tell me!” aren’t seeking understanding as much as they want absolution without amends. They’re content with saying sorry to make themselves feel better and they want to be able to say they’ve apologized without honestly making an effort to grapple with the reasons they were wrong. The “never says” aren’t the issue; it’s what they’re doing, refusing to do and refusing to recognize.

To wit, read Osbourne’s mea culpa by tweet.

One of the unfortunate roles we assign to daytime personalities cast on a panel shows like “The Talk” is the obligation to express points of view that segments of the audience are feeling but don’t have the confidence or the knowledge to articulate.

Because of this, it can burden some members of the cast with the expectation of having all the answers while others can play upon their personality and skate free from disasters they’ve created. Paroxysms of this magnitude aren’t typical on “The Talk,” but people who tune in to see Osbourne think of her as the foul-mouthed but jolly mom from “America’s Got Talent” or MTV’s “The Osbournes.” They enjoy the woman who threw a ham over a fence to protest a noisy neighbor and overlook the fact that she’s also done things like kneed a man in the nuts after he defaulted on money she was owed.

To be clear, the unfortunate party here isn’t Osbourne. It’s Underwood and Welteroth, who cogently take on the emotional labor that Osbourne won’t do for herself. That part can only be witnessed in the full 20 minutes of back-and-forth surrounding that viral clip, and if you care enough to find out why Osbourne’s reflexive support for Morgan felt to many women like a jab in the eye, it is worth a watch.

A fuller examination of Osbourne’s meltdown doesn’t exonerate her, understand. If anything it’ll remind viewers that despite her protests, nobody should expect Sharon Osbourne to be particularly enlightened when it comes to racism. This is a woman who has spent most of her life insulated within a fame bubble with an opaque membrane.

Instead, the reason to watch it is to see how Underwood and Welteroth handle their colleague’s freak-out in order to understand why this clip angers Black women in ways that are specific and distinct. The short answer is that many of them have some version of a Sharon Osbourne in their lives they’re forced to navigate and placate. But they don’t have a camera rolling when these interactions happen, granting them the agency to tell those people to do their own homework while knowing they probably won’t.

Underwood and Welteroth couldn’t do that without opening themselves up to criticism about their inability to verbalize why Osbourne was wrong to all of the viewers who identify with her. As such, they found themselves with extra chores on their plates.

What we didn’t see in that two-minute clip was Underwood telling Osbourne, “to speak upon something and not accept that what she is saying, what Meghan has been saying – it could be true. . . . And the fact that you don’t even want to take into consideration that her desire to want to end her own life is connected to her race, that dismissal makes it a racist situation.”

Neither does the clip show what Welteroth says to Osbourne prior to her implosion to explain why expressing support for Morgan wasn’t a good look. “In this moment, we need people to stand up for anti-racism,” she explains. “People feel that he’s racist, people have receipts. I wish we had them today so that we could actually go deeper into this conversation, so people could see why people feel that he’s racist and sexist. And I mean, there’s a lot, but we don’t have those receipts here.”

At this, Osbourne only thinks to ask Welteroth to explain what she means by “receipts.”

Remember Underwood and Welteroth came to set that day expecting to debate cancel culture and Pepe Le Pew and chat up Lisa Vanderpump. That’s what makes this unfair. They didn’t expect to teach a masterclass in misogynoir to a woman who doesn’t understand why she can’t be there for her friend in his time of need.

Welteroth does have an answer for her: “When we kind of give passes or give space to people . . . who are saying damaging harmful things, what we’re kind of doing is permitting it,” she says, before introducing Osbourne to the term unconscious bias. Mrs. O’s head explodes anyway, but not due to overstuffing with new information.

“The Talk” is to “The View,” its ABC rival, what curling is to hockey, which is to say its fans show up to enjoy its gentility and maybe laugh at the thorny cluelessness of Mrs. O. She’s been with the show since its debut, when creator Sara Gilbert envisioned it as a show speaking from a mother’s perspective as opposed to a kaffeeklatsch of frenemies.

That is one of the reasons “The Talk” attracts about half the viewership of “The View” – people enjoy conflict and especially love hating on McCain. This is not to suggest “The Talk” should add more trauma into its schedule to succeed so much as to observe what got people to notice and discuss this show is the very thing nobody wants to talk about, playing out in front of our faces.

If “Generations” were real, this episode would be central material for an advanced class in weaponized privilege and white lady tears, gaslighting and the expectation too many white women place upon Black women to incentivize them to be anti-racist.

Underwood, Welteroth and fellow cohost Carrie Ann Inaba, who was out on Wednesday, should never have such discomfort sprung upon them or be forced to attempt dispel a co-star’s ignorance.

“This is challenging,” Welteroth said. “This is a really challenging thing to have to talk about on national television.” Yes it was. But her and Underwood rising to meet that challenge ended up having a lot more staying power than a meme, and more meaning than simply staring stupidity in the face and moving on with a simple “Okaay.”

The March 10th episode of “The Talk” is currently streaming on Paramount + and at CBS.com.

Cuomo decries “cancel culture” after group of New York lawmakers calls for his resignation

The majority of the House of Representative’s New York delegation has called on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to step down amid a slew of recent sexual misconduct allegations.

“Gov. Cuomo has lost the confidence of the people of New York,” House Judiciary Chairman, Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said in a statement. “Gov. Cuomo must resign.”

Nadler continued, “The repeated accusations against the governor, and the manner in which he has responded to them, have made it impossible for him to continue to govern at this point,” he said.

The other New York Democratic lawmakers who have also publicly supported the governor’s resignation are Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Nydia Velázquez — both of whom have worked closely with Cuomo for decades –– as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mondaire Jones, Jamaal Bowman, Sean Patrick Maloney, and Paul Tonko.  

“As members of the New York delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman in a joint statement, “We believe these women, we believe the reporting, we believe the Attorney General, and we believe the fifty-five members of the New York State legislature, including the State Senate Majority Leader, who have concluded that Governor Cuomo can no longer effectively lead in the face of so many challenges.”

Added pressure from the House comes as Cuomo is already under intense scrutiny over his administration’s choice to undercount the number of deaths linked to nursing homes in New York, according to an attorney general report from January. The Cuomo administration methodically omitted the deaths of Covid patients that had been transferred out of nursing homes or to hospitals by a factor of 50%.  

On Thursday, over fifty Democrats in the New York state Senate and Assembly penned a missive calling for the Governor to resign after two weeks of the piling allegations –– now at six in total. Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a top Democrat in the state Senate, said: “For the good of the state Governor Cuomo must resign.”

The state-level call was preceded by the sixth allegation recently made against the governor, in which an unnamed aid alleged that Cuomo had invited her to the New York State Executive Mansion and groped her last year. 

On Thursday, New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D, allowed the Assembly Judiciary Committee to begin a formal impeachment investigation into the Governor over the claims of abuse. According to a source familiar with Friday’s coordinated call for Cuomo’s resignation, Heastie’s green light served as a tipping point for the call. 

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, announced on Monday that her investigation of the sexual assault claims is moving forward, with the appointments of two veteran lawyers to spearhead the investigation.

Cuomo, for his part, remained defiant at a press conference on Friday. 

“There are facts and then there are opinions. And I’ve always separated the two,” he said, refusing to resign. “Politicians who don’t know a single fact, but yet form a conclusion and an opinion, are in my opinion reckless and dangerous. The people of New York should not have confidence in a politician who takes a position without knowing any facts or substance. That, my friends, is politics at its worst.”

He then lashed out at the so-called cancel culture. 

“People know the difference between playing politics, bowing to cancel culture, and the truth,” Cuomo said.

Rachael Ray’s Tuscan meat sauce lasagna is the ultimate weekend comfort food

One of the best things about finding ourselves suddenly at home for a year (and counting), has been the chance to take our love affair with comfort food to the next level. It still feels nice to throw a frozen pizza into the oven when we don’t feel like cooking, but who can argue with the opportunity to spend more time in the kitchen. And whether that means whipping up cinnamon rolls or macaroni and cheese, we can always count on one of our favorite celebrity chefs and their go-to recipes to help us bake our way through it.

Lasagna is no exception. This pasta dish checks all the boxes of comfort food: It’s cooked with love, sparks joy and leaves every appetite feeling satisfied. Yes, that feeling never gets old!

As it turns out, the queen of 30-minute meals also found herself slowing down during quarantine. Luckily for us, Rachael Ray just shared the product of that extra time spent in the kitchen with fans on social media.

RELATED: From Italian monks to Airbnb: The storied history of Parmigiano-Reggiano 

“Last year, I made so many lasagnas that I thought I might be done with them for life,” Rachael writes in the latest issue of her “In Season” magazine. “But here’s the thing: Lasagna is layers and layers of love, which makes the time you put into it worthwhile.”

Rachael’s lasagna requires a fairly hefty list of ingredients, but the final product will make the trip to the grocery store well worth your while. There are three things to prepare here: the meat sauce, the “besciamella” (white sauce), and the ingredients needed for assembly. 

To begin this five-step recipe, combine all of the ingredients for the meat sauce in a sturdy saucepot. Next, make the besciamella in a large skillet or saucepan. Once both sauces are ready, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil; cook the pasta for five minutes. Now, you’re ready to preheat your oven . . .

Finally, assemble your noodles and sauces in layers in a baking dish, and fold in mozzarella and the Parmigiano-Reggiano. Bake the lasagna for 40 minutes; remove foil, and return to the oven until the top is nice and bubbly. 

Now, this is the most important thing to remember: Unless you want to ruin the lasagna that you’ve just poured your heart into, let it breathe for 20 minutes. Otherwise, the layers could collapse, and your dinner may look a lot more like a lasagna smoothie.

Rachael came up with the perfect activity to occupy us while we (impatiently) wait to dive in — and it involves bread and booze. Her Roasted Red Pepper & Caper Crostini and a glass of your favorite wine are here to liven up the waiting game, and this entire meal will remind you why comfort food will never go out of style. Full recipe here.

More comforting pasta recipes: 

If you’re looking to cut some corners, try this instead:

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. Salon has affiliate partnerships, so we may get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

Study: Republican-led states had highest COVID cases and death rates

A new study found that while states with Democratic governors suffered from higher COVID-19 incidences and fatality rates at the outset of the global pandemic, states with Republican governors suffered more severely as the COVID-19 crisis continued throughout the second half of 2020. 

The analysis published on Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina reviewed 19 COVID metrics across 50 U.S. states between Mar. 15 and Dec. 15. 

“From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower COVID-19 incidence rates compared with Democratic-led states,” stated the study. “On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence.”

The researchers noted that Republican states reached up to 1.8 times the amount of deaths in Democratic states by Aug. 5. The test positivity discrepancy peaked on June 23, when it was 1.7 times higher in Republican states than that of Democratic states.  

The study also theorized that the reason for these discrepancies is because Democratic-run states, namely New York, New Jersey, and California, were “home to initial ports of entry for the virus in early 2020,” welcoming more people abroad who had already contracted the disease. 

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo took the threat more seriously than most Republican governors at the height of the pandemic by shuttering schools and businesses. His quick response to the pandemic lent him an initial air of authority that has now since passed in light of more recent revelations that he flouted much of the guidance he received from state public health officials, as Salon reported in early February. The New York governor also controversially decided to mandate that nursing homes accept recovering coronavirus patients at the beginning of the pandemic, a move which led Cuomo to systematically undercount nursing home deaths. 

By contrast, at the beginning of the crisis, Republican states took a more hands-off approach sometimes openly flouting social distancing and mask mandates, causing the incidences and death rates to spike in the long-term.

In West Virginia, for example, Gov. Jim Justice ousted one of the state’s top health officials after claiming that her office had overstated the number of coronavirus cases in the state. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem actively ignored the White House Coronavirus Task Force’s guidelines, even amid what the White House called “remarkably high” test positivity rates.

One of the things that drew Republican and Democratic leaders apart, the study noted, may have been the over-politicization of the pandemic. “The response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic became increasingly politicized in the U.S.,” the researcher argued, “and political affiliation of state leaders may contribute to policies affecting the spread of the disease.”

Referring to other literature on the subject, the study pointed out how “Democratic governors were more likely to issue stay-at-home orders with longer durations. Moreover, decisions by Republican governors in spring 2020 to retract policies, such as the lifting of stay-at-home orders on April 28 in Georgia, may have contributed to increased cases and deaths.” The decisions to roll back such health restrictions could be drawn across party lines, indicating that partisanship was prioritized over public health. 

“Gubernatorial party affiliation may drive policy decisions that impact Covid-19 infections and deaths across the U.S.,” the researchers concluded. “Future policy decisions should be guided by public health considerations rather than political ideology.”

Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the City University, praised the study’s correlations between health policy and party affiliation. “One of the most concerning things last year is the politicization of public health restrictions,” Lee said. “They’re not opinions, they’re based on evidence.”

The report comes amid a wave of state-level rollbacks of coronavirus restrictions in states like Texas, Arizona, West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. In West Virginia, the GOP governor announced that the state would be re-opening restaurants and bars soon at 100% capacity. Texas Governor Greg Abbott vowed to open the state back up by lifting the mask mandate in July. Mississippi has already ended its mask update, and Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama vowed to end her state’s restrictions by April 19. 

Many Republican-led states have also been suffering from dysfunctional vaccine rollouts.

Allies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, reportedly recently organized a vaccine distribution event that specifically targeted wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods in Manatee County in an effort to boost the governor’s re-election.

Many public health officials say that the U.S. is not entirely out of the woods with respect to the crisis. 

According to a Johns Hopkins analysis, the U.S. is still averaging a daily 57,436 new infections. “History with this virus has told us when you start to plateau at a level as high as this, which is about 60,000 to 70,000 cases a day, then you are by no means out of the woods,” said White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday. He noted that homegrown variants, such as the B.1.1.7 strain originating from the U.K., could also pose more health challenges along the way.

Questions for Joe Biden: There’s still so much we don’t know

When Joe Biden finally gets around to holding the first news conference of his presidency — he told reporters on Thursday that he would take their questions “in the next couple days” — the White House press corps will almost inevitably blow it.

They’ll ask incremental, trivial questions; they’ll try to catch him in gotchas; they’ll smugly demand to know why he failed to rally Republicans; they’ll ask about the dog and Dr. Seuss and maybe even Mr. Potato Head. He’ll end up saying a lot of stuff he’s said a million times before.  

What the reporters in that room really need to do, because they are the only ones who have the ability and the responsibility to do so, is dig deeper, hold him accountable and increase the public’s understanding of what’s going on inside his head — and his White House.

Some smart, clear questions about the news of the moment would be entirely appropriate. And let’s acknowledge that it’s a huge relief to have a functioning executive branch and officials who don’t lie all the time.

But the fact is that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the Biden administration, its intentions, its decision-making processes and its approach to power. So far, by limiting his statement to specific topics, Biden has left a wealth of others entirely unaddressed. 

That’s why I’d like to see at least some questions that don’t have talking-point answers, and that will add to our understanding of how this presidency is going to work. Ideally, they would not only provide transparency, but encourage even more of it. So I’ll start with some of those:

Transparency, the public’s right to know and increased visibility into the White House 

  • Some have argued that after the past four years, the best way to restore trust to the office of the presidency is with radical transparency — showing people the actual process of governing, warts and all. What are your instructions to your White House staff, to your Cabinet officials and to federal employees generally about transparency? Will you give them permission to speak publicly, on the record, without negative consequences, about the public’s business? 
  • You’ve committed to releasing logs of in-person visitors to the White House. Will you also divulge the names of attendees at virtual meetings, which are the primary mode of interaction for the moment? 
  • Will you proactively establish entire classes of documents that will be made public by federal agencies without reporters having to ask? That would include the calendars of agency heads, agency org charts, top contracts and grants, all unclassified correspondence with Congress and a summary of classified inspector general reports, for starters.
  • So far, your White House has really failed to use new technology to engage with citizens — for instance. by seeking input or improving oversight. Similarly, your website doesn’t provide anything like a window into what’s going on inside the White House: Who works there, where they’re coming from, what they’re working on. Do you want that to change?
  • Here are 10 requests that reporters made using the Freedom of Information Act in the previous administration that were refused despite their obvious public-interest value. Would you commit to looking at this list and getting back to us about why you think they should be made public, or why not? 
  • You’ve said you were always the last person in the room with Barack Obama when he was president. Who is the last person in the room with you? Who are the people you turn to the most?

Use of military force and abuse of intelligence

  • Describe what you want the process to be before someone asks you to approve a targeted killing. 
  • Describe what you want the process to be before someone asks you to approve military action. Please explain when you feel that process requires congressional consultation or pre-approval.
  • Will you dial back claims of unilateral presidential power by vowing to not use force abroad — beyond your Article II authority to respond to or prevent armed attacks, or to defend U.S. nationals in peril — absent congressional authorization?
  • When did you realize that U.S. troops in Afghanistan were doing more harm than good? How and when does that finally end?
  • Now that other countries are using armed drones, too, do you think the U.S. should establish rules for their use? 
  • When will the Guantánamo Bay prison finally be shut down? When will you reject the government’s use of indefinite detention without charge?
  • How safe from government surveillance are the American people? To what extent is the government, on your watch, engaged in the mass collection of private communications involving Americans?

The Trump factor

  • How do you explain what has happened to the leadership of the Republican Party? What happened to the Republican senators you used to consider friends, but who now spread lies and conspiracy theories and show no interest in actually governing?
  • Do you think that political figures and others who are unwilling to acknowledge that you legitimately won the election should be part of the national discourse? Will you reach out to them on legislative issues?
  • As your administration learns more about what happened inside the executive branch during the last four years, have you discovered abuses of power that the public still doesn’t know about?
  • Are there any parts of the executive branch that you have found so badly damaged that they are effectively unable to enforce the law? Which ones need rebuilding the most? 

The Biden factor

  • During the campaign, you were able to avoid talking much about the bad choices you made in your political life. But now that you are here, wouldn’t it be helpful for everyone to learn more about your evolution, and how you have learned from your mistakes?
  • For instance, when did you finally realize that your Iraq war vote had enabled a full-fledged disaster, and what did you learn from that? 
  • You certainly appear to have shifted away from being a deficit hawk. When did you realize that was a mistake? 
  • How do you feel today about the Bankruptcy Act you championed in 2005, which caused incredible damage to the middle class? 
  • You are obviously not the same person you were when you were younger. What abilities would you say you have lost and gained over time? Do you turn to others for help more than you used to? Do you feel the same command over a wide range of issues that you had when you were younger?
  • When speaking extemporaneously, you occasionally interrupt yourself in mid-sentence and go on riffs that don’t seem directly related. Sometimes it’s not easy to figure out exactly what you mean. What are we to make of that?

Executive power

  • You criticized your predecessor for his overly broad interpretation of executive power. Give us some examples of how you interpret it less broadly. 
  • Trump denied the legitimacy of congressional oversight and asserted blanket immunity from congressional subpoenas. Will you commit to respecting congressional subpoenas?
  • Will you continue to broadly assert that any communications with you directly are privileged? Why or why not?
  • Here are 10 specific requests for information from Congress that Trump flatly rejected. Would you commit to looking at this list and getting back to us about why you think they should be made public, or why not? 

Pardon power and criminal justice

  • Are there any pardons that you believe are out of line for the president to grant? Will you rule out issuing any pardons to members of your administration, your friends and family? 
  • You have an opportunity to make a powerful statement about historic wrongs in the criminal justice system by enthusiastically using your pardon and commutation power. You’ve said you regret your votes to increase mandatory minimums for drug offenses; now you could act on that regret with a stroke of your pen. Do you have any plans along those lines?
  • Isn’t it past time to remove marijuana from the federal schedule of controlled substances?
  • What do you think is the maximum amount of time someone should spend behind bars for simple possession of marijuana in this country?
  • People who are unable to afford bail are detained while they await trial for weeks or even months. In what circumstances do you think that’s fair?

Voting rights (and the filibuster)

  • Making it harder to vote has become a major goal of the Republican Party in almost every state. What do you make of a political party that wants fewer people to vote? Should that make voters angry?
  • How essential to the future of our democracy is H.R. 1, the For the People Act? Given that it will never get 60 votes in the Senate, what do you do about that?
  • Do you think Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico should get statehood? What more could you possibly need to know before you decide?

The value of dissent

  • Presidents live inside a bubble, isolated from real life and surrounded by people who agree with them and try to make them happy. What, if anything, are you doing to make sure that you keep in mind the views and needs of Americans unlike the ones in the White House? 
  • Do you hear dissent? Do you encourage it? Some good government groups have suggested that you “prioritize the institutionalization and protection of dissent across government.”  Will you do that?
  • What is your message to civil servants or federal contractors who have concerns about policies, corruption or inappropriate interference? Should they come forward? Should they go public? Will they be protected from retaliation?
  • Could you give us a recent example of a time someone disagreed with you and it changed your mind?
  • Let’s take the issue of canceling student debt as an example. Walk us through the views you are hearing as you consider the issue.

The state of the media

  • One of the country’s major media outlets, Fox News, traffics in outright disinformation and far-right propaganda, arguably even incitement. Most other media outlets, by contrast, respect facts, to a greater or lesser degree. Do you personally see a gulf between Fox and the others? Would you encourage the public to consider them differently? Should the White House?
  • Why is your administration still prosecuting Julian Assange? Did you approve the decision in February to continue seeking his extradition from the U.K.? 
  • Will you pledge not to use the Espionage Act of 1917 to pursue people who leak to journalists?
  • How concerned are you about the decline of local journalism, and what do you think should be done about it?

Corporate power, regulation and antitrust

  • You’ve appointed quite a number of people with serious credibility when it comes to regulating big corporations and breaking up monopolies. What do you hope you will have accomplished in those areas in four years? 
  • You have yet to identify nominees for three of the biggest potential chokepoints for a progressive regulatory and antitrust agenda: chair of the Federal Trade Commission, assistant attorney general for antitrust, and head of the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. What’s going on there?
  • Some of your hires have a history of serving special interests — Big Tech, other large corporations, for-profit prisons and the like — rather than the public interest. As you fill the many remaining positions in your administration, how seriously will you take potential conflicts of interest? What do you consider disqualifying?
  • Do you consider high-speed broadband internet service as a requirement for modern citizenship? If so, how do you see the government ensuring that it is accessible and affordable to all Americans? 

Justice for Khashoggi

  • Human rights and free-press advocates here and across the globe were outraged by your decision not to directly punish Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even after identifying him as the man ultimately responsible for the ambush, murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. They feel this will only increase his sense of impunity. Is “stability” with an ally more important than anything else? 
  • Are there any penalties or plans involving MBS that we don’t know about yet? Will you ever be willing to meet with him in person?
  • You released a very abbreviated report about the killing. Would you consider disclosing more? In particular, if U.S. intelligence agencies knew that the Saudi regime was planning to abduct or kill Khashoggi, they were required by law to warn him. Did they have any such advance knowledge?

Trade, China and manufacturing

  • Trump’s trade war with China was a disaster — but so were the “free trade” policies of the last two Democratic presidents. Where does the balance lie for you between protecting American jobs, the economic reality of massive trade with China, and improving working conditions in China and other manufacturing and export nations?
  • Major auto manufacturers now say they’re likely to phase out internal-combustion engines over the next 10 years. Does that need to be a federal standard? At what point do we get gas-guzzlers off the streets forever?

Immigration and the border

  • Who should get a pathway to citizenship — and who shouldn’t?
  • Do you anticipate a surge at the border? What are you going to do about it?
  • Walk us through exactly what should happen when an unaccompanied minor arrives at the U.S border.
  • Do you consider the facilities in which these children are currently being kept to be humane? How is  this any better than what was happening under the previous administration?
  • What is your response to right-wing claims that you are opening up the country to an invasion?
  • What do you say to the ICE officers who think you’re soft? What do you say to the immigrants’ rights activists who say the ICE officers aren’t changing their attitudes?

In conclusion

There’s nothing magical about a news conference. As I wrote in 2004, in my first piece ever for Salon, they generally don’t make much news. Lou Cannon, who covered the Reagan White House for the Washington Post, told me: “News conferences have always been a forum for the president to say what he wants to say, not for us to get the information that we want to get.”

But as the late, great legendary White House press corps veteran Helen Thomas put it: “The presidential news conference is the only forum in our society in which the president can be questioned. If he doesn’t answer questions, there’s no accountability.”

It seems to me that a key to making presidential news conferences of value to the public is to establish, at the first one, that a reporter has the right and responsibility to follow up on their question. That doesn’t mean asking a second question; that means the reporter should listen to the answer (unfortunately a non-starter for some of them right there). If it wasn’t fully responsive, they should say so, and ask again. If it was responsive, they should try to pin down any ambiguities, or try to tease out a bit more information.

A news conference, unfortunately, is nothing like a sit-down interview for really drilling down on where a president is coming from. But the first news conference is a significant milestone. Will the new president answer questions or duck them? Will he be honest? Will he be clear? And will we learn anything new?

Republicans are trying to sabotage Biden’s COVID vaccine plan to “own the libs.” We must ditch them

Good news has been so rare for so long that it hardly seemed real to hear him say it, but sure enough, during his national presidential address Thursday night, President Joe Biden said that COVID-19 vaccination rates are speeding up so much that by May 1 states should be able to make every adult eligible for the shot. 

“If we do our part, if we do this together, by July Fourth, there’s a good chance you, your family and friends can gather in your backyard and have a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day,” Biden said from the East Room of White House.  

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of Americans who refuse to do their part — and it’s the Donald Trump fandom that is the problem. 

New polling shows that all that anti-vaccination propaganda on Fox News is working and Republican voters, especially men, are hardening their personal opposition to getting vaccinated. 

To be clear, the data collected by PBS Newshour/NPR/Marist shows that there is an alarming amount of vaccine hesitancy in all corners of the American population. Even 1 in 10 Democrats is vaccine-hesitant. Education rates appear to be a big factor, with 22% of college graduates saying they won’t get the shot versus 34% of noncollege educated people. Age is also a major factor, with younger people being more opposed to the vaccine than older people, which is unsurprising considering who is most likely to die from COVID-19. 

But a lot of that vaccine hesitancy can be addressed through education efforts. Formal efforts like the Ad Council spot showing all former living presidents (except Donald Trump) getting the shot will help, as will informal efforts, such as ordinary people sharing their vaccine selfies on social media. A lot of the fear is being driven by ignorance, and as most people learn more and see that the shots are safe, they will be more willing to get them. 

The exception to this rule is the Republicans.

They aren’t being driven by ignorance but out of what has turned into a chronic, now deadly willingness to put “owning the liberals” before every other goal — including apparently surviving. That was evident in the way so many conservatives refused to wear masks and now is evident in the hardening opposition to getting vaccinated. Being willing to die for one’s values is often an admirable thing, but in this case, it’s just a recklessly dangerous unwillingness to admit that liberals might be right about something. 

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Fox News shares a huge part of the blame, of course. The network has been pumping out a steady stream of anti-vaccination messages, which are now spreading across all right-wing media like wildfire. The reasons aren’t hard to guess. Much of it is not wanting Biden’s presidency to be a success, even if that means letting their own audiences die to get there. And a lot of it is plain old unwillingness to admit liberals were right all along about the coronavirus being dangerous. Trump’s refusal to get his vaccine on-camera no doubt is contributing, as well. 

This is a large group of Americans — large enough that it might keep the country from achieving the desired levels of herd immunity. Add to it that there will be a number of Americans who won’t get vaccinated not because of political identity, but out of laziness or because they believe the conspiracy theories being pumped out by right-wing media. There’s a very real chance, then, that the July 4 date isn’t met not because of a lack of resources, but because of the toxic political situation bred by decades of right-wing propaganda. 

It’s time, then, to start thinking of a Plan B: re-opening the country without herd immunity.

Unfortunately, we are going to have to let the vaccine refusers take their chances. This might sound callous, but it’s already how we handle vaccine refusal with diseases like the flu, where thousands of adults who didn’t get their free shot end up getting sick or even dying every year because of it. It’s worth remembering that the main problem with COVID-19 has been the way it overwhelmed our health care services and led to mass illness and death. But if we can get those numbers under control, the situation really can be something more like the flu or other communicable diseases that haven’t disappeared but also aren’t wreaking havoc on our health care systems. 

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, spoke with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker about this. He noted that once “there are plenty of vaccines available and they are cheap and easy to get,” then restrictions become “about protecting people who have chosen not to be vaccinated.” Jha questioned whether the rest of us should sacrifice normalcy to protect people who refuse to protect the rest of us. 

“If you choose not to get vaccinated for measles or polio, we tend to not make a whole lot of policy changes to try to protect you in those contexts,” he added. 

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With the full caveat that this is a new disease and there might be developments that change this equation, right now, Dr. Jha’s calculus is the smart one. We simply cannot remake our entire society around people who refuse to play nice with others. Ideally, we would simply force the vaccine-reluctant to get the shot, by withholding privileges like travel or the right to eat in restaurants from them. But it’s already probably too late for that, as there’s not a good tracking system in place to prove who has and hasn’t gotten vaccinated.

It is important to realize that there is one silver lining here: Vaccine refusal among right-wing Americans has meant that the vaccines are becoming more widely available to everyone else a lot sooner than expected in many parts of the country. Fox News has caused so much grief and misery for the majority of Americans who reject their message of hate and bitterness. So it’s really the least they can do for the non-hateful majority to help us get our vaccines just a little bit faster.

Biden’s goal of July 4 is a good one. But instead of setting the baseline for returning to normal at “herd immunity,” it might be wiser to set it at “more shots than people willing to get them.” Otherwise, we might be waiting forever. 

 

Slumping Trump properties under Manhattan DA probe placed on debt “watch lists” by banks

Four of former President Donald Trump’s New York properties, which have come under scrutiny in a Manhattan criminal investigation, have been placed on debt “watch lists” by banks over their struggling finances, according to CBS News.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated New York’s real estate industry, but the Trump properties’ slump has been much worse than that felt by competitors, according to the report.

Last year marked the fifth consecutive year that the former “Apprentice” host’s four most prominent buildings — including Trump Tower — have missed lenders’ earning projections, according to documents obtained by CBS. As of January, loans tied to those buildings have been flagged by mortgage payment processors because of their “worsening financial shape,” the network reported, noting that only about one in four commercial real estate loans nationwide have been put on such watch lists amid the pandemic.

The report comes as all four properties have come under investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported last month. Though the focus of the examination of those properties is not clear, investigators could be looking at potential discrepancies between the loan documents and financial information that Trump provided to other institutions, legal experts told the Journal. Former longtime Trump personal attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen, who has been interviewed seven times by Manhattan investigators, previously testified to Congress that Trump routinely inflated the value of his assets to acquire loans while deflating the value of those properties when it benefited him. Vance’s probe is examining potential fraud by the Trump Organization, which has denied any wrongdoing and called the investigation a partisan “witch hunt.”

Banks package mortgages on properties like Trump’s into commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) that pay out interest to investors based on income generated by the properties. But Trump’s properties have never met their income targets, and banks like Wells Fargo are now warning investors that the properties “might not generate enough cash to cover their mortgage payments” amid the COVID-related slump, according to documents obtained by CBS.

“The loan is being monitored,” a recent PNC Bank note obtained by the outlet warned investors.

In fact, Trump’s properties were struggling well before the pandemic hit. In 2012, Trump Tower was expected to generate over $20 million per year when its $100 million loan was sold to investors, but never hit that target in the subsequent nine years.

Steve Jellinek, who heads up CMBS research at the credit rating firm DRBS Morningstar, told CBS that such properties are expected to meet their projections in the first year and grow in subsequent years.

Wells Fargo also placed a loan tied to Trump’s property at 40 Wall Street on its watchlists three days after the November election, according to CBS. Trump, who falsely bragged on the day of the 9/11 attacks that 40 Wall Street was now the tallest building in Manhattan, still owes $135 million on the property.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower near New York’s Central Park was also placed on a list of “Loans of Concern” by the Kroll Bond Rating Agency in January due to “deterioration in financial performance.” Trump owes nearly $6.5 million on the property, including $270,000 in annual interest, according to the report, but the pandemic has “nearly erased” the building’s profits after mortgage interest payments dropped more than 80% last year.

PNC Bank also placed a loan tied to the Trump Plaza on New York’s Upper East Side on a watchlist due to its “weak performance.” The Trump Organization asked PNC for loan relief on the property last May due to “coronavirus-related hardship” but was denied. The bank ultimately removed the property from its watchlist last month.

“The Trump buildings have missed their targets during a time when real estate did very well, so one would expect most properties to outperform their past underwritten income,” John Griffin, a commercial real estate expert at the University of Texas at Austin, told CBS News. “The fact that actual income fell short of underwritten income — not on one loan but several, and by a large percentage and dollar amount — does raise concerns about how the financial health of the buildings was presented at the time of the deals, and how they have performed since.”

The CBS report noted that the Trump Organization has not missed any interest payments on the properties and is not currently in danger of defaulting on the loans. But the company saw a massive 40% revenue drop from its collection of properties last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The financial slump comes as Trump faces large debt bills in the coming years. The New York Times reported last year that Trump is personally on the hook for $421 million in debt over the next four years, though other analyses have put that number closer to $1 billion.

Vance is investigating more than $280 million in loans to the Trump Organization provided by the New York real estate investment trust Ladder Capital, one of the few financial firms willing to do business with Trump after a series of bankruptcies and defaults in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ladder Capital also employs Jack Weisselberg, the son of longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. The elder Weisselberg has increasingly drawn the focus of Manhattan investigators, The New York Times reported earlier this month, though he hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing.

Trump’s financial troubles may only get worse after he stoked a mob of supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress. Trump’s role in the Capitol riot prompted the PGA to pull next year’s PGA Championship from his New Jersey golf course, and New York City canceled its contracts with the Trump Organization to operate a golf course and ice skating rinks. Trump’s properties have also seen an exodus of tenants looking to vacate their leases, according to the Wall Street Journal, including large organizations like the Girl Scouts of Greater New York. Vornado Realty Trust, a longtime Trump Organization partner run by Trump friend Steven Roth, is also looking to cut ties with the former president’s company, the Journal reported last month, amid growing concern that the Trump brand has become increasingly toxic. Deutsche Bank, Trump’s biggest lender, is looking to distance itself as well.

Republicans are slamming Joe Biden’s July 4th COVID goal as “un-American”

President Joe Biden delivered a speech on Thursday –– the one-year anniversary of Covid-19 lockdowns –– emphasizing the need for unity and courage as the country nears the light at the end of the tunnel. The president predicted that the U.S. would be able to “mark our independence from this virus” by the 4th of July, offering hope that the country will return to some semblance of normalcy by Independence Day. 

“I will not relent until we beat this virus,” Biden told the nation in his first primetime address as president, “But I need you […] I need you to get vaccinated when it’s your turn and when you can find an opportunity. And to help your family, your friends, your neighbors get vaccinated as well.”

“Because here’s the point,” he continued, “If we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together –– by July the Fourth, there’s a good chance you, your family and friends will be able to get together in your backyard or your neighborhood and have a cookout and a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day. … After this long hard year, that will make this Independence Day something truly special.”

Biden also announced that he would be compelling all states, tribes, and territories to make every U.S. adult eighteen and older eligible for a COVID vaccination by May 1, vowing to build out the necessary public health infrastructure to make this goal a reality.

His speech, praised by many Democrats as far cry from the histrionic falsehoods of his predecessor, was met with significant disapproval on the right, both in Congress and in right-wing media. 

“If every willing person in America is vaccinated for #COVID19 by May,” tweeted Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., “As POTUS has said, why put our lives on hold till July the 4th?” Fellow Lone Star lawmaker Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Tex., a ranking member of the House Committee on Ways and Means, tarred the President’s call for unity as “an absolute fraud.”

“Despite the success of five previous bipartisan bills totaling $3.5 trillion, Democrats hijacked relief efforts and rejected GOP efforts in this bill to get vaccines distributed even more widely, to strengthen child poverty funding, to reopen schools, to help people return to work, and to support struggling Main Street businesses,” said Brady, adding, “Yet tonight’s speech was all about how President Biden solved everything. This is unity?”

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., mocked Biden’s message of unity.

“I would like to ask President Biden,” Mace told ABC News, “Where was he over the last two weeks? Republicans wanted to work on a package in a bipartisan manner and it just didn’t happen.”

Fox News aired Biden’s address, but of course, included a “live Tucker reaction” box featuring host Tucker Carlson’s perpetually perplexed face:  

On “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham said that Biden’s speech reminded her of a funeral while Fox News and Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway complained that “to pick Independence Day as the day where he says he might allow people to gather is just so un-American.”

“Joe Biden doesn’t get to tell me when I can have a barbecue in my backyard and certainly not to tie that to Independence day.”

Federalist founder and Fox News host Ben Domenech, husband to conservative “The View” co-host Meghan McCain, daughter to former Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain, was so disgusted by Biden’s promises to return the country to a pre-pandemic normal by mid-summer that he was left stammering incoherently. 

Conservative radio host Ben Shapiro echoed Republican lawmakers on Twitter: “Once again, President Houseplant is running out in front of a moving parade and then claiming he is leading it. This was going to happen already.“

Biden’s speech comes just after the passage of his sweeping $1.9 trillion covid relief bill, which was pushed through without bipartisan support. Still, according to a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll taken in early March, 62% of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the pandemic. 

“There’s a sense of progress,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. “We may not be there, but we may be getting closer to getting out from under [the pandemic]. … There are Trump people, who obviously didn’t vote for [Biden], but have come on board because of COVID.”

This is why we need government that actually works

We don’t have to look very hard to see some common themes running through the Texas freezes, consternation over school re-opening and the worries over significantly unseen recent cyber-attack on U.S. government agencies and private company networks.

In fact, at a glance, there’s a recognizably simple demand on the table that we have a government that can anticipate emergencies, plan for them and stand ready to execute, rather than suffer the talk of lawmakers who insist on throwing the inevitable verbal bombs about ideology. Thinking otherwise, that we can stint on investment and preparation is as effective as sticking your head in an oven and yelling.

For Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott and Fox News commentators to spend their time blaming wind turbines for years of forgoing investment in a weather-resistant statewide electric grid dependent on fossil fuel sources is not only silly; we now see it is dangerous.  The state’s insistence that Texas remain out of the two national electrical grids to avoid federal rules has come home to roost.

Having spent a lot of years overseeing news, production and technology issues in newsrooms, I can assure you that emergencies don’t just get dealt with spontaneously. They require procedures and investment to invoke when they are needed. That Y2K deadline that passed without serious incident in 2000, for example, was not the result of luck; the lack of problems resulted from months of planning and rebuilding.  The ability of The New York Times, where I worked, to continue publishing digitally and in print despite a blackout that hit a large portion of the aregion required adaptation, but came about because we had anticipated such a problem.

That decision by the Donald Trump White House to shut down its National Security Council pandemic office had consequences in delaying the response to coronavirus. This raging debate we’re having about whether teachers must be vaccinated before schools open overlooks the obvious need to look at having appropriate ventilation in aging school buildings.

The continuing reports about bridges failing, outmoded airports and failing mass transit systems are open pleas for giving government the money to fix things.

Disasters All

Add into emergencies our incessant need to find blame – usually skewering a political foe – and you have the legends of hurricanes dating back to Katrina, wildfires in California, floods, tornadoes and even terrorist attacks. You have all the effectiveness of a Donald Trump throwing paper towels to workers in Puerto Rico.

For Governor Abbott to attack the aspirational Green New Deal proposals for climate while people are freezing in their homes doesn’t help make either heat or water start working again. It just makes him look as if he is trying to use the problem for partisan political points, which he is.

Even worse, his predecessor, Rick Perry, unbelievably the U.S. Energy Secretary under Trump, says that for Texans to go days without power is a sacrifice they should be willing to make if it means keeping federal regulators out of the state’s power grid.

Whether for freezes or hurricanes, pandemics or terror attacks, Americans want to be able to count on some government agency to have anticipated the issue and to be ready to act.

With the climate changes now worsening every major storm, it is anticipatable that we will be seeing more severe effects on systems of all kinds. With rising tensions and rivalries in international relations, we’ve long expected that our military and national security agencies will have adjusted to whom they are listening.

With months of anti-election organizing and actions by pro-Trump forces who refused to recognize the November elections, we should have been able to anticipate a problem that became the Jan. 6 swarm on the U.S. Capitol.

We Resist Government

The Texas story is pretty straightforward: “What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service,” reports The Washington Post.

In the case of the coronavirus, it was an insistence by the feds for the states to deal with the problem. With Joe Biden, we finally have a plan rolling out, though it too is drawing complaints about speed and uncertainties about when it will be complete – as if that is the only goal. We remain unprepared for changes in climate, immigration, population, manufacture and education.

With all that in mind, it seems more than weird that we have not yet moved very far in Congress on adopting the coronavirus aid package, though it is inching along as a one-party proposal. How do we square having general upset in the country over a patchwork of half-open, half-closed schools if we are not providing the funds to ensure safety for students, teachers and staff? For that matter, how do we account for Americans refusing to wear protective masks in the name of personal convenience and resistance to government orders?

We are ready at the drop of any hat to be insistent on immediacy without doing the work or raising the money. We’d rather find fault with our partisan foe than try to put in place the institutional network that would help us to succeed.

Only now are we really assessing the effects of those cyber-attacks thought to have been directed by Russia, and already we have questions about when damages still being assessed will all be fixed.

The takeaway here is equally straightforward: If we want immediate response to public problems, we need the work – and the will – to be ready. In most cases, we have neither.

Biden’s big COVID bill proves a lot of his critics wrong

A new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes about Joe Biden’s campaign for president is called “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency,” which seems like an unnecessarily disparaging title about a man who won a decisive popular vote victory in the midst of a global pandemic. But, I guess, that’s just the way politics goes these days. I haven’t read the book but early reviews focus on the fact that nobody, even Biden’s former boss Barack Obama and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (whom the authors call the “vampire in the bullpen”) thought he had a chance and were, apparently, not afraid to say so. It sounds like the typical campaign book gossip, which is fine as far as it goes, but the truth is that in 2019 I don’t think anyone but Biden’s family and team thought he was the strongest candidate to beat Donald Trump.

It was assumed that the 2020 campaign would be a bare-knuckled brawl and that the Democrats should put up someone who would relish going toe-to-toe with Trump. It was going to be a very big show and Biden’s old school political style didn’t have the razzle-dazzle most people thought would be necessary to compete with The Trump Show. But, as we know, everything changed in the first months of 2020 and the world suddenly got very serious. I don’t know if the Democratic electorate had some sort of collective instinct or it was, as the title of the book implies, just a matter of luck, but in that moment of great fear and anxiety, Joe Biden, with his years of experience and what felt like calm, compassionate wisdom, rose to the top of the field and eventual victory. 

That weird political moment provided an opening for a leader with empathy, the word that’s so often referenced in relation to coverage of Biden that it’s become like his middle name. But I wouldn’t call it lucky.

With the country reeling from five years of a bizarre political circus topped off by over half a million dead and an economic catastrophe for tens of millions, good presidential leadership requires equal measures of humanity and competence. And while I think most people had confidence in Biden’s ability to handle the first, the second was harder to predict. So far, it’s looking pretty positive on that front as well.

Because Trump couldn’t bear to admit he’d lost and insisted on contesting the election, Biden didn’t have a normal transition. And the congressional Republicans’ outrageously undemocratic behavior during the post-election and insurrection did not bode well for any kind of productive cooperation between the two parties. Nonetheless, Biden confidently proposed the American Rescue Plan and invited Republicans to the table to offer their ideas. When they showed they had no intention of negotiating in good faith, he accepted that and gave the green light for the Democrats to move the bill as quickly as possible. We are, after all, in the middle of a crisis. Biden signed the bill on Thursday and as Salon’s Jon Skolkik reports, it is very popular.

Biden gave his first primetime address to the nation after signing the bill to note the one year anniversary of the pandemic and announce some new goals for his administration, namely that vaccines would be available to every American by May 1st and, if all goes well, we should be able to gather together with some degree of confidence and safety by July 4th, Independence Day. 

The White House also announced that checks will start going out to people this weekend. It’s been an impressive, productive, 50 days.

Last week Bloomberg reported that Biden has quickly reshaped the presidency in his own image as a contrast to his predecessor. And polling shows that the public approves of what they are seeing — a return to a traditional presidency. But that anti-Trump style doesn’t mean that Biden simply plans to undo all of Trump’s policies so he can restore the Obama legacy. As Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein puts it, Biden’s so far “unobtrusive presidency masks his desire to dramatically reshape the country.” While we don’t know how possible it’s going to be, that appears to be true, and I don’t think that’s something most of us expected of him. He just doesn’t seem like a transformative guy. And maybe that’s his secret weapon.

The truth, however, is that we are in a period that would offer this opportunity to any leader who has the guts to pursue it. Republican “small government” ideology is moribund and they have cast their lot with demagoguery and manipulation of the voting system to fill the void. More importantly, many of the economic assumptions that undergirded that ideology have proven to be useless at best and destructive at worst, particularly in a crisis. Zachary D. Carter, the author of “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes” wrote in the New York Times this week that the only reason the US economy didn’t completely collapse this past year is because the government rediscovered Keynes’ fundamentals:

An economic crisis demands a confluence of coordination, expertise and judgment that governments alone can provide. If the government gets out of the way, everything falls apart. And when the government gets out of the way for decades, it can transform a manageable emergency into a national calamity.

Trump was worried that an economic crisis would destroy his re-election prospects and because the stock market was crashing and their donors were panicking, the Republicans did the right thing for a change, despite their self-interested motives, and the first couple of rounds of coronavirus relief passed with bipartisan support. They staved off disaster using traditional Keynesian principles and the Biden administration has taken the necessary next steps with the American Rescue Plan to restore the economy as we emerge from the crisis.

But it’s the latter part of Carter’s comment about the government getting out of the way for decades that pertains to this big Biden agenda. He points out that while the worst of the possible economic disaster was headed off by government action, the overwhelming disaster of Trump’s response to the public health crisis was driven by decades of government neglect, largely due to the dominance of right-wing laissez-faire economics:

The trouble was not spending too much ahead of the crisis, but spending too little — on research, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity…[T]here is more to Keynes than deficits: He was, above all, a thinker for an age of crisis. No one could predict the future, but maintaining state-of-the-art information, transportation and medical infrastructure through sustained public investment could prevent a problem from becoming a calamity.

President Biden has a big agenda that includes working toward equity in race relations, repairing America’s relationship with its allies, immigration reform, etc. His role as consoler-in-chief is obviously a priority for him and the country. But his clunky campaign slogan “Build Back Better” seems to be what animates him on a policy level.

If this president who was elected as a return to traditional politics follows that part of the Keynesian model he could end up being the most transformative president since FDR. If that happens, the lucky ones will be our kids and grandkids. 

Have marinated artichokes? Make this pasta

Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer — not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we’re guessing you have those covered. Psst, did you hear we’re coming out with a cookbook? We’re coming out with a cookbook!

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Arguably the simplest pasta sauce is that jar of marinara you grab from the pantry — and if you’re wondering which brand is best, of course we have thoughts on that — but lately, there’s another sauce that I’ve been turning to on weeknights.

All you have to do is reach for a different jar: marinated artichokes.

These don’t advertise themselves as pasta sauce because, technically speaking, they’re not. But with a few minutes of prep — and by a few, I mean a few — they turn into just that. Confidently vegetal and tangy, with a whisper of richness.

In other words? Exactly what I’m craving right now, as we’re less than two weeks out from spring.

The marinade depends on the brand, but any 12-ounce jar will do the trick. Expect oil and vinegar and just enough spices to turn up the corners of your mouth, not unlike the house vinaigrette at a pizza joint slash sports bar.

Marinated, past tense, means the hard work is already accomplished. The artichokes have been wrangled into quarters. The marinade has been measured and mixed. The goodness has been soaked up like sunshine on a June afternoon. Which is why you could drain the jar, throw the artichokes on a cheese plate, and call it a day.

But we’re not going to do that.

No, instead, some artichokes will get slivered, a meaty-chewy topping for our forks to chase after with each bite. The rest we’ll purée with a big splash of marinade, yielding a creamy, silky, intensely artichoke-y pasta sauce.

Err on the side of too thick versus too thin in the food processor. You can always add salty-starchy pasta water or more marinade to get the consistency right, keeping in mind that it’ll thicken as it sits.

The only question is: What shape will you choose? I like a chunky monkey, say rigatoni or penne, something with tunnels for the sauce to burrow into. But as with marinara, as with any pantry pasta, the best shape is the one that’s already in your kitchen. Go look.

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Recipe: Pasta With Marinated Artichoke Sauce

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 10 minutes
Serves: 2

Ingredients

  • 1 (12-ounce) jar quartered marinated artichoke hearts
  • Kosher salt
  • 1/2 pound rigatoni (or another short pasta)
  • Freshly grated Parmesan
  • Red pepper flakes

Directions

  1. Set a pot of water over high heat to come to a boil. 
  2. Meanwhile, set a sieve over a bowl, then pour in the whole jar of artichoke hearts. Fill a 1/2-cup measure with artichokes and set those aside. Add the rest of the artichokes to a food processor, along with 1/4 cup of their marinade. Purée until smooth, adding more marinade if you’d like. Season with salt to taste. Transfer to a bowl.
  3. When the water is boiling, generously season it with salt. Add the pasta and cook until al dente, according to the package instructions. 
  4. While that’s cooking, halve the reserved artichokes lengthwise.
  5. Use a spider or slotted spoon to transfer the hot pasta to the artichoke purée. Sprinkle with Parm and pepper flakes and toss. Add pasta water if needed. Top with the artichoke slivers, more red pepper flakes, and more Parm.

We need to better protect food and farmworkers during COVID-19 and beyond

Before the coronavirus hit last year, many shoppers in the US had little understanding of the people who picked and processed their food. But by April, as meatpacking facilities shuttered and food shortages hit grocery stores, the food workers and farm laborers — now designated essential — became more visible than ever before. National publications including Time, Vice, The New Yorker, and NPR began spotlighting the plight of these workers during the pandemic, sharing stories about farm laborers who continued to show up to work for fear of losing their jobs; migrant workers who were contracting the virus in record numbers; and food processors working without personal protective equipment or proper distancing protocols.

This week, the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FWCA) released a report showing just how much COVID-19 has impacted workers across the food system and highlighting how these essential workers have received few protections on the job. Workers, who come predominantly from communities of color, have gotten sick and taken the virus home. At the same time they’ve had little access to healthcare and have been excluded from many economic stimulus programs. As vaccines roll out and Congress debates the next round of economic relief, advocates for workers in the food system are working tirelessly to make sure that food and farmworkers are not left behind. Moving forward, advocates, like those working with FWCA, are pushing for change in several priority areas that they say will help protect food and farmworkers during and after the pandemic.

Food and farmworkers should be prioritized for vaccination 

Since distribution began in December 2019, about 13.5% of the US population has been vaccinated against COVID-19. While medical workers have generally gotten the first doses, other essential workers, including those in the food system, were included in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for priority vaccination. By the numbers, jobs in the food system have been some of the most dangerous when it comes to virus exposure: outbreaks in meatpacking plants and other food processing facilities have infected nearly 90,000 workers. Food workers are clearly in need of priority vaccination.

But not every state has given food workers that needed attention. In New York, grocery workers were given priority, but farmworkers were not, with officials citing low supply. And in Florida, food system workers are slated to receive the vaccine after the state’s large elderly population. Advocates there point to the high rate of positive tests among farmworkers — up to 30% in some areas — as evidence that agricultural workers are in real danger.

Some workers in Florida also face an additional barrier: receiving the vaccine requires proof of residency. As many workers are undocumented or lack permanent residency, they won’t be able to recieve it even when foodworkers do become eligible for vaccination. This highlights a broader problem faced by undocumented food system workers around the country: despite their essential designation, they still suffer from discriminatory policies. Nebraska’s governor indicated in January that undocumented meatpacking workers wouldn’t be eligible for the vaccine, stating his narrow viewpoint that these workers shouldn’t be in Nebraska at all.

But advocates point out that the virus doesn’t infect based on immigration status, and putting undocumented workers at the back of the line needlessly endangers people who are already poorly compensated for their difficult and dangerous work. Leaving so many people vulnerable to infection isn’t just unconsionable: considering about half of all farmworkers and many other foodworkers are undocumented, it also undermines the stability of the entire food system.

Recognizing that Nebraska’s meatpacking industry wouldn’t be able to operate without undocumented workers, the governor’s office walked back his statement, clarifying that undocumented workers would be elligble after their coworkers with formal legal status. But still, advocates feel that even this might make vaccination — much like medical care or worker’s compensation — into something that undocumented people are afraid to access for fear of deportation. With supply projected to go up as more vaccines gain approval, it’s critical that food workers (regardless of legal status) be given priority. Timing is critical, and making sure that food workers get early access would both save lives and make the food supply more secure.

Meatpacking plants and farms must be made safer 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was originally designed to create and enforce workplace safety standards across multiple industries, including farming and food processing. But with its ties to industry and disdain for regulation, the Trump administration’s use of the agency was extremely limited, even before the pandemic. The number of OSHA inspectors fell steadily to its lowest number in 45 years through 2019, and the number of workplace safety inspections dropped as well. Jobs across multiple industries became more dangerous as a result: 2019 saw more than 900 investigations into fatal or catastrophic workplace accidents, many of which occured in food processing.

Meatpacking was one notable beneficiary of the Trump administration’s eagerness to deregulate. Meatpackers pushed for increases in slaughter and processing line speeds, which are capped by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to prevent injury and ensure adequate food safety inspections. Labor unions have long held that faster line speeds are unsafe for workers, and new data backs them up: after pork processors got the greenlight to run lines faster, workers are seeing increases in cuts, sprains and other injuries.

Once COVID-19 hit, jobs across the food system became even less safe. Farmworkers often work closely together in fields and live in temporary housing where social distancing isn’t possible, a situation made even riskier by the fact that employers don’t consistently provide personal protective equipment or adhere to other rules. The situation in meatpacking plants is even worse: the cold indoor environment, combined with faster line speeds that make distancing impossible to follow are a perfect spreading ground for the virus. Early in the pandemic, the meatpacking industry used dubious claims of impending food shortages to lobby the government for permission to stay open with minimal oversight.

Some of these issues are being addressed through executive action: Biden issued an order in January instructing OSHA to be more aggressive in its implementation of COVID-19 safety guidelines, and the administration scraped a USDA rule change that would allow poultry plants to process as many as 175 birds per minute. It’s a welcome move for workers across the food system: as the FCWA’s report details, OSHA issued only 295 citations for COVID-19 related violations issued in 2020, and only 10 for food companies. The total penalties for these violations amounted to just over $95,000 — a meager amount for these multi-million dollar companies. More enforcement from OSHA — especially much stiffer penalties for failures — would go a long way towards providing workers with a safer environment.

There’s still more room for improvement, however. Trump’s executive order for meatpacking plants to remain open is still in effect. While OSHA officials have insisted this won’t prevent plant closures, they don’t have the authority to revoke the order themselves. Activists, concerned it could still allow for plants to operate without proper COVID-19 protections, say that Biden should withdraw the order. Doing so would allow state and local health departments to do more to stop outbreaks themselves, regardless of OSHA action.

Frontline food and farmworkers still need hazard pay

Many companies, including Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Walmart, awarded benefits to help compensate for hazardous working conditions in the early months of the pandemic. But most employers dropped the programs within a few months. While food companies justified these rollbacks as cost-saving measures that would prevent consumers from seeing high prices, there’s little evidence the programs caused a financial burden. In fact, analysis from the Brookings Institution shows that despite record profits during the pandemic, food and grocery companies were the least generous when it came to pandemic pay increases. Per their analysis, companies like Walmart could have quadrupled the amount of hazard pay they offered and still maintained profit growth from 2019.

Public support for hazard pay remains high, however. Measures that would grant hazard pay to farmworkers also have popular support in areas with a large agricultural industry, with more than 70% of respondents to one California poll stating their support for hazard pay and sick leave for farmworkers. In some instances, labor unions have successfully leveraged their essential status to extend or increase hazard pay; produce handlers of Hunts Point Produce Market in New York, one of the country’s largest food distribution facilities, secured a raise after successfully focusing media attention on their strike. The workers were supported by a number of politicians and celebrities, who helped draw national attention to the fact that people who had been labeled “heroes” only months before were now struggling to make ends meet. FCWA’s report highlights many similar campaigns, many of which are still struggling to gain similar traction and support from the public.

Labor organizers have some support from the Biden administration, who have stated their support for “generous back hazard pay” for grocery workers during the pandemic. How they plan to accomplish this is less clear: their plan only specifies that they would pressure CEOs to take action. The city of San Francisco passed a non-binding ordinancance to the same effect. This kind of public encouragement to do the right thing can help  — it was certainly instrumental to many companies granting hazard pay in the early months of the pandemic — but as the quiet withdrawal of those benefits only months later shows, it isn’t a legal commitment.

But while encouragement lacks teeth, legal mandates can face serious resistance: after Long Beach, California passed legislation that secured a $4 hourly raise for grocery workers, for example, Kroger closed two of its locations there. Considering the grocery chain’s enormous size, the action seems to be less about their profits in those stores and more about preventing other cities from adopting similar measures. The United Commercial and Food Workers International Union vowed to fight the action, stating that “Kroger does not have the right to ignore laws designed to protect workers and the public.”

Activists have also noted concern about offers that would supplant hazard pay with less substantive compensation. In Kroger’s case, employees can receive a $100 stipend for getting vaccinated. Many other chains are offering even less. Between the fact that these rewards cover only a few hours worth of hazard pay and the reality that many food workers can’t even get the vaccine yet, these one-and-done approaches feel more like out-of-touch PR opportunities than substantive help for workers.

Long term changes

While hazard pay to compensate these workers during the pandemic is vital, the work activists were doing pre-pandemic to secure basic labor rights like health insurance coverage, paid sick leave and workers compensation is also of utmost importance. These kinds of protections will have resonance for food workers beyond the pandemic. “I feel very strongly that we need more than just the gains we might earn under what basically feels like plague time,” Lux, a Minneapolis-based Caribou Coffee worker, is quoted in the FCWA report. “Caribou workers deserve to have family leave…we deserve to have higher pay. We deserve to have sick and safe time across the board. There are so many things that we as workers have realized that we deserve and we’re not getting . . .”

Ultimately, hazard pay and other pandemic demands are a way to show workers in the food system that their efforts are appreciated in a pandemic, but it’s important to remember these are small steps towards making workplaces more equitable and protecting food and farmworkers all the time — the bare minimum for workers who have always been essential.

“The walls seem to be rapidly closing in”: Trump “may be in real trouble” with the law, experts say

Investigators are ramping up criminal probes into former President Donald Trump, and two legal experts argue that Trump may not even be able to count on his few remaining lawyers to help him.

Writing in the Washington Post, legal experts Donald Ayer and Norm Eisen argue that Trump’s decades-long evasion of legal accountability may now finally be coming to an end thanks to the multiple investigations he’s facing.

Although Trump in the past has employed top-notch lawyers to get him out of trouble, they write that the president’s remaining “legal enablers” may have difficulty staying with him given their own mounting troubles.

“Judge James E. Boasberg of the D.C. District Court recently referred attorney Erick Kaardal to a court grievance committee for potential punishment because Kaardal filed an allegedly bogus case attacking the November election results,” they write. “Giuliani is beset with even greater challenges: Late last week, news reports indicated that federal prosecutors in Manhattan had resumed their investigation into whether he broke federal law in his Ukraine dealings, which helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment.”

 

They conclude by saying that Trump’s indictment and conviction are far from assured, although at this point prosecutors seem to be barreling toward slapping him with criminal charges.

“This is not to say that exacting justice will be easy — as a private businessman, Trump was notorious for using the law as a weapon,” they write. “But the walls seem to be rapidly closing in. If they do, they may finally mark an end to the ex-president’s involvement in our public life. It is not easy to be involved in politics if you are broke and in jail.”

What Chris Wray didn’t say: Unpacking the FBI chief’s wobbly Capitol riot testimony

Why didn’t the FBI arrest anyone at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6? And why wasn’t the National Guard sent in, until many hours later, to stop the attack? Those were the main questions that still remain unanswered after FBI Director Chris Wray’s grilling before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

I myself was highly skeptical on Jan. 6 about what law enforcement and the FBI would do to address the violence: The inaction was blatant and glaring as the world wondered, “Why are they allowing this?”

The Senate hearing on March 2 was a chance — two months later, after the dust had settled — to dispel and address many of the mysteries surrounding the Capitol attack and the grossly inadequate response, which so many of us found incomprehensible as we sat glued to our TV sets at home. At the Wray hearing, I expected to get answers. I basically didn’t.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., dived straight into the “elephant in the room” issue, pressing Wray on the National Guard mystery: Why weren’t they called? Who decided not to send them? Wray was shifty on all these points, which prompted the Louisiana senator to stop him mid-sentence several times to stop him from dancing around the questions. Wray tried to shift the focus to local D.C. government, away from federal responsibility, and didn’t answer Kennedy’s question about whether Wray himself would have called in the National Guard, if he could have, based on what the FBI knew and saw at the time.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., was highly critical of Wray and the FBI’s inaction regarding the distinction that Wray sought to make between the horrible things that people say as online chatter, as opposed to genuine aspiration and traction. At least Wray did not use the phrase “keyboard bravado,” which Justice Department officials rolled out right after the attacks to explain the FBI’s lack of response. “Keyboard bravado” at the time sounded too much like Donald Trump’s “locker-room talk” — in other words, like something Trump’s circle would say to diminish something bad that Trump did.

To summarize the episode between Wray and Blumenthal, the Connecticut senator was obviously irritated that obvious preparations for an attack could be seen and defended as empty chatter, even as the FBI had clear geolocation data that the same people were actually descending upon Washington and intended to go to Capitol Hill. “Keyboard bravado” is not supposed to include action and planning. At that point, it rises from locker-room talk to a sequence of actions, and chatter becomes a motive in the legal sense.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a former prosecutor, was the fiercest in the whole hearing. He raised the FBI stonewalling that Democratic senators experience, citing answers the Judiciary Committee has been waiting for, in some cases since 2017. Wray’s response was to default to the complex and mysterious “interagency” process, which is something like the tooth fairy — everyone’s heard of it, but no one has actually seen it in action. Whitehouse was having none of that, making clear that he knew there is a special channel for Senate Republicans who get information from the FBI anytime they ask. That really raised the not-quite-spoken question of whether the FBI is in fact a partisan, Republican-friendly institution, responsive only to one side of the congressional aisle.

Whitehouse tore down the house — even Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey noted “the heat” Wray took from the gentleman from Rhode Island. Wray started out the hearing with a pleasant, upbeat, confident attitude and often made use of folksy expressions such as “darn tooting.” By the time Whitehouse was done with him, all the darn tooting had evaporated and the Wray looked like a little boy who had just been reprimanded by the teacher in front of the whole class.

Wray also tried to blame other people at the FBI for the Senate stonewalling — any fault the FBI may have did not lie with its leaders. It must have been someone else. Wray seemed willing to personally promise Whitehouse that they would always be cool. That only pissed off Whitehouse further; he pointed out that Wray is in fact the FBI director. An issue as serious as stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Democrats is not terribly likely to be an issue on which unnamed “others” have decided.

The committee’s new chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.,  was concerned about the lack of a formal threat assessment report by the FBI at the time, with all that was known and publicly available. Wray outlined three ways in which the risk assessment was communicated through various channels, but did not directly explain why no formal threat assessment was issued in advance of the Capitol attacks. It must be noted that the FBI has intercepted and defeated much more intricate and secretive plots, such as foiling the attack on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was saved by the FBI from kidnapping and assassination ahead of the presidential election. The FBI didn’t need strangers to call them and send them photos to stop that.

As Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a pro-Trump Republican, mentioned, even people who were not violent and did not participate in the Capitol attack, but who had traveled to Washington as Trump supporters, were tracked through geolocation and later contacted by the FBI. The bureau didn’t need data after the event. The intelligence was obviously on top of these things, and the information has been there all along. These are the same groups. No arrests were made by the FBI on the day of the Capitol attacks — and that’s an issue for leadership. It wasn’t “other people” who made that call, somehow overruling Wray.

Some commentators have called the Capitol attacks “the most catastrophic failure of intelligence since 9/11,” but I am just not sure that’s the case. The intelligence was there, but the policy action required to do something about it was not. It was purely a political decision not to go after Trump’s supporters right there and then, and the FBI director was absolutely a part of this politicized intelligence and security loop.

Most commentators see Wray as a decent man who has successfully stood up to Trump and who had some tough luck with the Capitol attacks. Many commentators also see the whole situation as a politically neutral, well-intentioned failure of intelligence. But the American public and media need to stop seeing the FBI as some sort of professional, neutral institution that is there to protect them. The FBI is every bit as partisan, as, let’s say, Trump’s Department of Justice. 

Sen. Kennedy, who deserves credit as a straight shooter, also asked Wray if the FBI was a “systematically racist institution.” Race showed up again in the hearing when Booker used the occasion to address the lack of diversity at the FBI — an issue I have raised previously in Salon and The Crime Report. Booker’s argument came close to what I have been saying for a long time now: Diversity actually makes the FBI smarter, better and stronger. It is not an exercise in charity or “virtue signaling.”

Wray responded that diversity has rapidly grown in the applicant pools that the FBI is seeing. Whether that will translated into actual diversity at the hiring and retention stages is something we will have to wait and see. When prodded by Booker about diversity in top FBI leadership, Wray actually excluded himself and the FBI’s No. 2 and 3 officials from the discussion, even though those are the positions that actually form the bureau’s top tier. Wray pointed out that on the second-tier leadership level, among the FBI’s executive assistant directors, there have been two nonwhite or non-male recent promotions. One of them was the appointment of a woman to an HR position — which, let’s face it, is not what we mean by women leadership in law enforcement. It is actually more in line with stereotypes, which diversity efforts are trying to combat. So the highest-ranking woman at the FBI is the HR lady: Groundbreaking! In Wray’s mind, the actual FBI top tier is not even a discussion point when it comes to diversity. I actually expected that the Biden administration might make history by appointing a woman to lead the FBI for the first time.

Perhaps the best thing to came out of that hearing was that Wray dispelled the fake-news conspiracy theory that antifa activists, disguised as Trump supporters, had actually attacked the Capitol in order to harm Trump — something that I’ve had to argue against and debate time and time again. That was welcomed by the media and political Twitter, and we can hope we never have to hear about this laughable fantasy again. I wouldn’t say, on the other hand, that it’s a big win for the truth or a sign of great heroism for the FBI to be significantly better than the most out-there, far-right fringe conspiracy theorists. That entire exchange was low-hanging fruit.

Wray also specified that the FBI hasn’t seen evidence of anarchist violent extremism — not just relating to the Capitol attack but anywhere else in general, and he clearly pointed to white supremacy as the driving force behind the majority of domestic terrorism. Yet despite what is said in public, the FBI continues to see the organized left as an enemy, as I have argued for Salon previously. In the very same Senate hearing, while talking to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Wray talked about anti-government, anarchist violent extremism. Apparently, the FBI has two interchangeable narratives when it comes to extremism on the left, ranging from “It doesn’t exist” to “It’s a big problem,” and these parallel narratives can come out of the FBI director’s mouth within a matter of minutes.

In that sense, Sen. Blumenthal’s point should be recalled: He the was “disappointed” that Wray dodged the opportunity to denounce lawmakers who endorse the so-called ideology of QAnon. As we should know by now, Wray would never say any such thing to Republicans’ faces. The FBI has several versions of events, and which one emerges depends on whom they’re talking to. For the FBI, it is never a question of taking a clear stance based on evidence and information. 

One more major good thing came out of the hearing. As the FBI has already said, Wray specified that the Capitol attack is unequivocally considered “domestic terrorism” by the FBI. Long ago, the FBI raised the threat racially-motivated domestic terrorism to the highest threat rank, along with ISIS. Wray also mentioned white supremacy as the main motive and cause behind the violent movement. That was said loud and clear. Indeed, in many respects Wray said “all the right things,” such as that he was appalled that America’s elected leaders were victimized in the Capitol, that rule of law is “the bedrock” of American democracy, that in a way “we are all the victims” of the attacks, that the FBI’s best partner is the American people themselves, and so on. He offered some elegantly phrased zingers for the most critical and frustrated senators, saying: “it pains and frustrates me when we’re not able to be as responsive as you need us to be”.

On all these points, the FBI director was forced to be crystal-clear because, under Biden, there can no longer be so much beating about the bush. The FBI can’t afford to shield or cover up the most fringe right-wing creations and narratives. Wray clearly drew a line between “the new reasonable” and “the new criminal” under a new Biden administration. I am confident his answers would have been very different had the hearing taken place under Trump.

In summary, Wray’s testimony offered some much-needed clarification and put an end to many ridiculous speculations, but it left the biggest single lingering question — How and why was this allowed to happen? — basically unanswered.

The hearing also confirmed some of the things we already knew: Yes, the FBI is a Republican-leaning and Republican-serving institution. Yes, if it had been up to him, Wray wouldn’t have sent in the National Guard either and would have let the whole thing slide. And yes, all the talk about racism and sexism talk at the FBI is probably true. But for now, there isn’t much more we can do except to continue applying pressure, whether through the political process or the media.

But perhaps the most important message Chris Wray delivered is that he absolutely understands there’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s willing to play along. That’s well short of the full transparency we might have hoped for, but it’s a big improvement on the recent past.

After opposing wildly popular stimulus package, GOP hopes to gnaw away at public support

It’s a situation that would normally have public relations professionals kicking themselves: Nearly $2 trillion is about to go out the door to tens of millions of Americans across the country — including individual $1,400 checks — and congressional Republicans can’t claim credit for any of it to their constituents back home.

With zero Republicans in either chamber voting for the whopping pandemic relief bill just signed by President Biden, GOP lawmakers have backed themselves in a difficult corner, publicly at odds with widely popular legislation among the public. The message thus far from Republicans has been that the measure was riddled with “state bailouts,” as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy put it, that “rewarded [Democrats’] political friends instead of solving a problem.”

But now that the bill has become law and financial relief is about to land in the pockets of most Americans, Republicans are starting to tailor their strategy toward gradually chipping away public support. Part of that includes the continuation of a reality-warping message that a post-pandemic boom will have “nothing” to do with the latest stimulus (economists have said that is not the case) because the economic recovery was already well underway thanks to actions taken under former President Donald Trump.

The move is a blatant attempt to get ahead of Democrats and deny them the ability to claim future credit.

“The American people already built a parade that’s been marching toward victory,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday. “Democrats just want to sprint in front of the parade and claim credit.”

McCarthy contended that as the aid is doled out and Americans learn more about the law, they’ll grow to dislike it. He cited former President Barack Obama’s stimulus that he claimed was initially popular until that support was diminished in time for the 2010 midterms, when Republicans scored huge gains. 

“By the time November came around,” McCarthy said, “more people thought Elvis was alive than the stimulus created a job.”

That’s likely an unprovable comparison, but in any case McCarthy was exaggerating the initial popularity of Obama’s stimulus; Biden’s package is far more loved — as much as 20 points in some polls.

Republicans, of course, will have ample time to publicly bash the law and potentially twist reality to suit their ends, just as they did after the presidential election, citing concerns about fraud among the public as a basis for contesting the results. Those concerns emerged only after a months-long coordinated effort by Trump and many of his elected Republican supporters, which began long before Election Day.

For now, Republicans are trying to draw attention to anything and everything but the stimulus, given the disconnect between broad public polling for the package and the total absence of GOP backing in Congress. Immigration, cancel culture, barring trans women from female sports and other culture-war issues have been front of mind for Republicans and conservative media outlets.

“I guess their Dr. Seuss approach didn’t work, so they’ve had to change the subject,” as Hous Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters this week.

When one Republican senator — Roger Wicker of Mississippi — tried to take credit for aid coming to his home state despite his “no” vote, the backlash for his evident hypocrisy came swiftly. In separate tweets, Wicker bragged that “one bright spot” was that his provision for restaurant bailouts had been included and would bring billions in targeted relief to “ensure small businesses can survive the pandemic.”

When asked how he could justify opposing the bill while praising portions of it, Wicker responded: “I think it’s a stupid question. I’m not going to vote for $1.9 trillion just because it has a couple of good provisions.”

Pelosi, without mentioning names, threw shade at Wicker and any other Republicans who may have tried the same tactic.

“Unfortunately, Republicans, as I say, vote no and take the dough. You see already some of them claiming, ‘Oh, this is a good thing,’ or ‘That’s a good thing.’ But they couldn’t give it a vote,” she said. “Anyway, enough of them.”

The White House’s official response, which was more welcoming, came from press secretary Jen Psaki: “We invite [Republicans] to work with us on the agenda moving forward because clearly the bill that the president just signed into law is something that the American people are excited about.”

To be sure, the $1.9 trillion stimulus is massive, even bigger than the 2021 fiscal year $1.4 trillion package to fund the entire U.S. government. As with the $2.2 trillion Cares Act last year, there will undoubtedly be hiccups, mistakes and incidents of fraud that Republicans will seek to leverage as evidence that the entire thing was bloated and wasteful.  

McCarthy sought to claim on Thursday that his party was taking the high road of ideological principle and didn’t care about political calculus. That would sound unlikely coming from any member of Congress, but doubly so from the House GOP leader, who has a reputation as a ruthless political climber. After all, he once “joked” that he believed Donald Trump was on Vladimir Putin’s payroll, before becoming one of the former president’s staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill.

“Should we vote on things because we think they’re politically positive or should we vote on things that are good policy?” McCarthy said. “I think good policy makes good politics.”

 

How many GOP House members are mired in conflicts of interest? No one knows

After Congress passed the Paycheck Protection Program last year, pumping billions of dollars into small businesses struggling under the weight of the pandemic, reports surfaced that sizable chunks of that money went right back into the pockets of Congress. A slew of members, many of them already wealthy, received millions in federal aid for their personal businesses ventures under the auspices of job-saving. That reanimated debate about a longstanding, conflict of interest entrenched within the legislative branch: Members of Congress can hold positions in for-profit corporations while officially serving their constituents in Washington. 

Senate ethics rules address this conflict —but the House does not. Senators are prohibited from “from serving as officers or members of the board of any publicly held or publicly regulated corporation, financial institution, or business entity.” No such stricture applies to members of the House. Rules restrict all members of both chambers from making 15% in excess of their salaries in “outside earned income,” but passive income derived from investments and holdings doesn’t necessarily count. 

According to a six-month investigation released by Sludge in early February, about a quarter of all House members hold positions in private, for-profit companies, serving as partners, board members, vice presidents or even presidents in corporations that span the industrial spectrum, including finance, agriculture, the automotive sector and more. It’s no huge surprise that Republicans are disproportionately represented in these roles. 

In 2017, for example, Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., held significant positions in 29 small businesses, according to the Sludge report. Buchanan, who worked in business for 30 years before his 2012 election to Congress, earned as much as $20 million in 2018 and has an estimated net worth of $74 million, eighth-highest in Congress.

In 2016, Buchanan sponsored the Main Street Fairness Act to “ensure that small businesses never pay a higher tax rate than large corporations.” No doubt that sponsorship was intended to make the congressman appear to be looking out for the little guys, but Buchanan — who represents an affluent district on Florida’s central Gulf Coast — never mentioned that the bill could have personally saved him millions in taxes. 

Rep. Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican who received a PPP loan of up to $1.5 million, offers another interesting case study. In a research paper published in 2018, the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee found that Kelly had made anywhere from $669,000 to $2.1 million from his auto dealerships between 2011 to 2017. In 2015, Kelly spoke on the floor of the House in support of a bill that would have allowed his business to rent or lease cars under recall. “There is not a single person in our business that would ever put one of our owners in a defective car or a car with a recall. But that could happen. That could happen,” he assured the House. In 2019, Action News Investigates discovered that indeed it had happened: Kelly had offered for sale at least 17 vehicles with active recalls. 

In 2018, Kelly also fought for a tax reform bill that decreased the burden on auto dealerships. The bill — termed the “Kelly Kickback” by opponents — passed the House after the National Automobile Dealers Association named it the group’s “highest priority.” The association, perhaps not coincidentally, has donated some $55,000 to Kelly’s congressional campaigns. 

Many these conflicts of interest, however, go unnoticed. For example, in November of last year, Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., sponsored the FAIR Meat Packing Act to “provide incentives for livestock processing facilities.” The bill sought to credit “an amount equal to 25 percent of the basis of each livestock processing facility property.” According to Smith’s financial disclosure forms from the previous year, he has an ownership interest in Smith Land & Cattle Company, LLC, which is registered under his name. Until now, no one appears to have noticed this apparent conflict of interest, and there was no discussion of Smith’s commercial background or business interests when the bill he sponsored was debated in Congress. 

Liz Hempowicz, policy director at the Project on Government Oversight, told Salon it would be “incredibly naive to assume” that House members’ business interests are “not playing any role in the decisions members are making.”

One reason these conflicts are underreported, Hempowicz said, is because the information is so “decentralized.” Identifying such conflicts “would really require going through each member’s voting record, every floor statement they’re making, and all the various ways we have to try and understand what’s going on in their minds when they’re making decisions.”

The legwork required to unveil every member’s possible conflicts of interest would be nearly insurmountable, Hempowicz said, both because there are so many ways officials can support bills and also because there are layers of opacity that prevent the average person from pulling back the curtain. For example, many of the corporate entities listed in financial disclosures have generic or nondescript names, making them especially difficult to track down. Furthermore, privately held companies are not required to disclose their financial activity to the public, which makes it nearly impossible to prove beyond a doubt that they have benefited from a particular member’s voting record or policy positions.

This lack of transparency in how members of Congress conduct their business dealings is particularly salient now, in a historical moment when trust in democratic institutions is abysmal. According to a Gallup poll conducted last year, just 25% of the American public held “confidence in the institutions” of government.

“It’s no secret that there’s this perception that members of Congress are driven by their own incentives — whether those are financial or professional,” said Hempowicz. “Whether or not that perception is accurate, that is the perception, and it’s incumbent on members of Congress to take whatever steps they can to address that.”

Currently, a significant pressure campaign — both within and outside Congress — is demanding greater accountability and transparency in the legislature. One major step forward is contained within H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, an omnibus political reform bill which, among other things, would overhaul campaign finance and ethical rules for both the Senate and the House. 

“H.R. 1 will set a new tone in Washington and usher in an era of greater political transparency and accountability,” sponsor Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., told Salon. “It will help ensure that members of Congress put the public interest first — not their personal financial interests or wealthy and well-connected special interests. Chief among these new ethical standards will be a ban that precludes members of Congress from serving on for-profit boards.”

Given the bill’s enormous scope, however, it can’t possibly address all the real or potential financial entanglements of House members. “H.R. 1 is a good start when we’re talking about congressional ethics,” Hempowicz said, “but it definitely wouldn’t solve all these problems.”

For example, H.R. 1 would mandate that members of Congress “may not serve on the board of a for-profit entity.” However, not every member of Congress who holds a position in a for-profit entity sits on its board. Many of the small, privately-held companies listed in House members’ financial disclosures don’t even have boards, as reported by Sludge. Furthermore, major corporate officers, such as CEOs or CFOs, don’ t always sit on company boards, a distinction not addressed by H.R. 1. 

While the bill is decidedly imperfect, it has strong support from law and public policy organizations, which have hailed it as a solid first step. “Historically, Congress has exempted itself from a fair number of ethics and accountability and transparency laws that it’s applied to the executive branch,” said Martha Kinsella, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “For instance, Congress is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. There has been some movement over the years to change that double standard, and the ethics provisions in H.R. 1 are a big step forward.”

A new provision was recently added to the bill that largely mirrors the language used in the Senate Code of Official Conduct. It reads: 

No Member, officer, or employee of a committee or Member of either House of Congress may knowingly use his or her official position to introduce or aid the progress or passage of legislation, a principal purpose of which is to further only his or her pecuniary interest, only the pecuniary interest of his or her immediate family, or only the pecuniary interest of a limited class of persons or enterprises, when he or she, or his or her immediate family, or enterprises controlled by them, are members of the affected class.

This provision might prove especially consequential with respect to spousal involvement. Many members’ financial disclosures suggest that the members’ conflicts of interest extend to their families. Some members jointly own businesses with spouses, siblings or adult children, or employ them as workers. 

H.R. 1 currently has support the support of every Democrat in the House. Republicans, however, are determined to stop it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., claimed the bill would enable Democrats to “grab unprecedented power over how America conducts its elections and how American citizens can engage in political speech.” According to a recent Data for Progress poll, 70% of Democratic voters said they would back the bill — and even among Republicans, the number was a startling 57%. 

“I think the bill will pass the House,” said Hempowicz, “I think the Senate is a big question mark. It really comes down to whether Democrats are going to get rid of the filibuster.”

Indeed it does. “We think that the filibuster in general poses real problems to democracy,” Kinsella told Salon. Given that Democrats do not seem resolved to ditch the filibuster despite considerable pressure from progressives, H.R. 1 may well be a dead letter for now. 

There are other ways for the House to hold its members accountable. Adding the “pecuniary interest” passage from H.R. “would be as easy as amending the House rules,” explained Hempowicz. “They can amend their own rules to include that prohibition whether or not H.R. 1 is signed by the President … It would also be much more difficult to vote against that. You don’t want to be the member voting against a conflict of interest prohibition.”

As the apparent gap between members of Congress and their constituents continues to widen, the need to instill some sense of greater transparency, accountability and credibility becomes ever more urgent. “We’re in a real moment of reckoning when it comes to these issues,” said Hempowicz. “The legitimacy of our legislature really relies on the public having some kind of faith that the actions their elected officials are taking are in the public good.”

The offices of Buchanan, Smith and Kelly did not respond to Salon’s requests for comment.

Fox News pundit gives possible Geraldo Rivera Senate campaign a giant thumbs down on live TV

Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera got a rejection on live TV on Thursday after he suggested that he might run to be the next U.S. senator from Ohio.

In a tweet Wednesday afternoon, Rivera revealed that he was “pondering” the idea of running after Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, announced that he would retire.

Fox News contributor Leo Terrell confronted Rivera about his potential candidacy during a Thursday appearance on Fox News.

“Hey, Leo,” Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked, “if Geraldo ran for the Senate, would you endorse him?”

“I’ve been dreaming about this tweet,” Terrell replied. “One, I need to hear Geraldo’s position on school choice. I need him to reinstitute Trump policies at the border. Geraldo, are you willing to answer those two questions right now with Bill Hemmer?”

“First let me give you my slogan,” Rivera volunteered. “Geraldo for Ohio, from the great river to the Great Lakes, I will fight for you. A lot of the Trump policies are policies that were also Geraldo policies.”

“You didn’t answer the question!” Terrell complained. “Border and school choice for everyone! Yes or no?”

“I think school choice, yes,” Rivera said. “The border is more complicated though. It’s not a yes/no question.”

Terrell responded by giving Rivera’s candidacy a visible thumbs down.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Susan Collins: Schumer “going out of his way to alienate the most bipartisan member of the Senate”

Sen. Susan Collins is clearly not happy with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and she hasn’t been for a long while.

In an interview this week with Politico, she called his recent criticisms of her “extraordinary” and said: “Why Chuck seems to be going out of his way to alienate the most bipartisan member of the Senate is a mystery to me.”

She was focused on Schumer’s recent comments during a CNN interview. Asked by Anderson Cooper whether Democrats should have tried harder to get Republican votes on the COVID relief bill, he said: “We made a big mistake in 2009 and ’10. Susan Collins was part of that mistake. We cut back on the stimulus dramatically, and we stayed in recession for five years. And what was offered by the Republicans was so far away from what’s needed, so far away from what Biden proposed, that he thought that they were not being serious in wanting to really negotiate.”

It wasn’t even that harsh of a statement — he was criticizing his own failings, and saying Collins was a part of that.

Collins didn’t have much of a substantive response to Schumer’s claims in the Politico interview, but she pivoted to a grievance she’s been nursing against Schumer for over a year.

“It must just reflect his extraordinary frustration at having wasted $100 million in the state of Maine in an attempt to defeat me,” Collins said. “And for me to win by a strong margin.”

Point, Collins. Schumer really did seek to take her down in 2020, and he failed miserably. She was seen as one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the Senate, but the polling in her race turned out to be way off. As it happens, she’s still wildly popular in her state and likely knows Maine better than anyone else. A lot of her critics, including this writer, were wrong about her vulnerability.

But while she can rightly tout her victory over those who tried to take her down, her indignance over the attempt is pretty galling. She knows she’s in politics, she knows she’s a Republican. She should expect that Democrats will want to replace her — yet somehow finds herself shocked and appalled at the prospect.

“If I had been in his shoes, I would have acted differently and done outreach to say: ‘Well, I tried to knock you off three times. It didn’t work. I hope we can still work together,'” she told Politico.

Other Republicans chimed in for the piece to defend Collins and criticize Schumer’s remarks. But the whole thing comes off oddly childish. It’s certainly true, of course, that lawmakers’ feelings matter and poisoning a relationship in politics can result in worse outcomes for one’s side. But it’s frankly shocking to see a politician herself centering these issues in the narrative, acting as if it’s reasonable if the votes she casts on issues of national importance are appropriately decided based on how nice Scheme was to her that day.

The response a politician might give if they weren’t trying to make the story all about their own personal feelings would be something like this: “Schumer can say whatever he wants about me, what ultimately matters is that I serve the American people and the people of my state to the best of ability.”

So what’s actually going on here? And why does any of this really matter?

It does matter for the country whether Schumer can or can’t get enough votes in the Senate to pass his party’s priorities. But the problem for Collins — and probably part of the reason she’s so mad — is that her vote just isn’t that crucial. The writer of the Politico article doesn’t seem to understand this, claiming that “unless Senate Democrats can muscle through a unilateral rules change to end the legislative filibuster, Collins’ vote will probably also become a sought-after prize for Schumer.”

But this isn’t right at all. Schumer has 51 votes in the Senate, including the vice president’s tie-breaking vote, which is enough to pass anything that needs a simple majority with no Republican votes. Because of the current filibuster rules in place, of course, many important measures need 60 votes to pass the Senate.

It’s highly unlikely, then, that Collins’ vote will ever be crucial in the next two years. Along with Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Collins is among the most likely members of her party to break ranks to vote for a bill. But if the bill needs 60 votes, that means Schumer will have to find ten Republicans to vote in favor of it. It’s hard to think, though, that there will be any measure that can get nine Republican Senate votes with Collins being the only one still up for grabs. More likely, if nine other Republicans are on board for a particular bill, then Susan Collins is already supporting it, and other GOP votes will be on the table. Part of her brand back home is being a centrist in the Senate, so a bill with that kind of wide bipartisan support is almost something she’d want to sign on to, regardless of her feelings about Schumer.

It’s possible that Collins could be a crucial vote if Schumer loses a single Democratic colleague’s support on a particular measure. But that’s not really likely to happen, either. If even one Democrat opposes a bill, Collins is almost certain to conclude that it’s too far left for her to support, too. And if it’s a completely idiosyncratic issue without clear partisan divides, then Collins’ vote is just in play as much as any other.

This is probably why Schumer didn’t hold back in openly criticizing Collins (though he doesn’t seem inclined to repeat his remarks.) He’s done the math, he knows the history, and he knows he’s not likely to need her, unless the make-up of the Senate party split changes in an unforeseen way.

Collins got that message, too. And that’s why she’s so rankled. When Barack Obama was president, he frequently had 59 Democratic seats in the Senate — making her vote potentially crucial for any 60-vote measure. That made her feel important and special.

Not anymore. Schumer doesn’t think that situation worked out all that well for the Democrats, and he’s happy he doesn’t have to repeat it. That means he doesn’t have to worry so much about Collins’ feelings.

The “South ParQ Vaccination Special” fails to be funny – but maybe that’s the point

One day we’re going to look back upon all this and laugh. Seriously though . . . no. No we won’t. Provided enough of us recall the broader details of this pandemic year, very few will find anything funny about it. A more likely scenario takes the shape of choosing to forget and move forward, having learned nothing. Not all of us can or will; bearing the weight of 500,000 deaths does that to a country; or perhaps it’s better to say, it should.

But if there’s anything we should recognize on this one-year anniversary of the global pandemic, it’s that many aspects of America society remain fundamentally broken. A glorious summer may be a real possibility. Returning to a previous state of “normal” probably is not.

That about sums up the general message of the “South ParQ Vaccination Special,” the hour-long companion to last fall’s “Pandemic Special” and the only new episode of the series we’ve seen in the 15 months since the 23rd season’s finale in 2019. Referring to it as a companion is an assumption, I’ll admit. Although Matt Stone and Trey Parker previously oversaw serialized seasons of the animated series, they returned to one-offs after the 2016 election.

A few changes had to remain consistent including the election of the show’s Donald Trump stand-in Mr. Garrison to the nation’s highest office. That’s something the creators probably weren’t expecting and had to follow through the 21st, 22nd and 23rd seasons. Having him roast a scientist alive at the end of “The Pandemic Special” before cheerfully reminding the audience to vote was a brutally humorous shocker. In light of Wednesday night’s new hour it also doubles as a plea.

Last fall Parker, who wrote and directed that hour and “Vaccination Special,” may not have predicted how extensive QAnon’s infection would spread or even how quickly pharmaceutical companies would develop effective vaccines.

But when Stan said, “I can’t take these shutdowns anymore and I’m scared of what it’s doing to me,” we should have paid closer attention. Maybe the “South Park” guys didn’t have a clue as to how the pandemic would reshape their two-dimensional world back then. They do now.

“South ParQ Vaccination Special” begins with relatable absurdity and ends with an imperfect reset of the show’s world that rebuilds a wall between it and our society’s very real madness. Everything in-between, like life itself right now, feels irregular.

The opening scene restyles the town’s local Walgreens as an exclusive club complete with velvet rope and bouncer, with elderly patrons designated as V.I.P.s.

Once vaccinated the town’s old folks go full “Cocoon” – they’re revitalized and mischievous, taking over bars and burning rubber on motorcycles.

While this is taking place, at South Park Elementary Cartman worries that the forced separation of quarantine has threatened to break up the “bro-ship” he has with Stan, Kyle and Kenny, inspiring him to pull a prank on a teacher in the hopes of lifting everyone’s spirits.

Since he never thinks about anyone but himself, Cartman doesn’t get why the teacher responds by ranting about risking her life only to be mistreated and walks off the job. This further endangers said “bro-ship,” so Cartman redirects his tendency toward opportunism into organizing the boys to steal enough vaccine to inoculate the school’s teaching staff.

This is the scenario to which a post-White House Mr. Garrison returns flanked by Mr. Service, a Secret Service agent sporting a thong instead of trousers.

Most of South Park hates him, including the administrators at South Park Elementary, who refuse to hand his old job back to him. But then he stumbles across a family of supporters, the Whites, who also organize the town’s QAnon faction.

From there Parker weaves his usual web of pandemonium only to tear it apart at the climax. Classrooms empty out after the cult organizes a private teaching service, “Tutornon,” that indoctrinates most of the children into a youth sect called Lil’ ‘Q’ties.

The boys succeed in their mission only to be set upon by hordes of people who also want the vaccine – and even Kyle, who is usually sensible, can’t resist attempting to steal some for his parents. All of it collapses into a battle royale in front of the school at the same time that Mr. Garrison and Mr. White discover that in the world of “South Park,” one part of the QAnon conspiracy is true: There really are Hollywood elites controlling their world. Their names? Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Not every “South Park” episode succeeds in its aim. Some of them aren’t particularly funny. The “South ParQ Vaccination Special” is an odd entry, though, because reminds us that sometimes hilarity is beside the point. Sometimes we need to see the obvious and disturbing parallels between actual examples of human behavior and the facile reasoning that informs cartoon characters’ decisions.

The “Vaccination” one-off proves the near impossibility of satirizing a reality that has become a living parody to such a degree as to make one-upping it nearly pointless, and in case you haven’t noticed, this is the world we’re living in right now.

We really do have teachers and parents preaching QAnon conspiratorial nonsense to kids, or attempting to pass off the big lie about November’s election results as fact. We really do have wealthy people going to impossible lengths to obtain a vaccine meant to protect members of vulnerable populations, including working class folks who don’t have the luxury of staying at home.

In both cases the reasoning is similar to Butters’ excuse: “I just wanted to believe in something that got me out of the house.”

Usually “South Park” refracts the image of who we are back to us in a way that skewers our smug sense of righteousness, snickering at religion, politics and all manner of sacred cows while usually validating some part of our beliefs. The land of flawed logic is their playground. And yet, what is there to laugh at in our current state of affairs? An alarming number of people are so hungry to return an inept and dangerous man to power that they refuse to believe facts regardless of who is presenting them.

A dangerous band of terrorist cultists attacked the capitol. People died there, on top of the half a million people dead of COVID-19. Yet half of our political leadership, along with their followers, wants us to move on. Sadly, we have, as Wednesday’s special depicts by having the town gather for a character’s funeral only to ditch the mourning midway through the eulogy, kick over chairs and start partying.

There is no “going back to normal” in our reality. “South Park,” though, is subject to the whims of its makers, which it shows by zapping Mr. Garrison, Mr. White and Mr. Service into an arctic void. In a flash Mr. Service turns into Mr. Hat, and Mr. White – railing at the unseen forces controlling everything – endures a series of ridiculous transformations, including mixing up his body parts and putting him in a shapeless dress, before turning him into a gigantic talking phallus. The perspective shifts, showing Mr. Garrison, and us, how this world works, that at any time the people making it can add layers or remove them. So Mr. Garrison strikes a deal with his invisible, omnipotent puppeteers – everybody in town gets shots, and he gets his old job back. The lesson he’s learned, he explains, is to always be sure to be on the same side as the people with the most power.

It’s as if the last five years of madness never happened.

Stan, Kyle Cartman and Kenny won’t forget it. As the special ends, their “bro-ship” is fractured, and they agree to share custody of Kenny using the standard 2-2-3 schedule familiar to children of divorce.

“South Park” has depicted existential crises several times through its 23 seasons and somehow manages to keep going. These pandemic quarantine-created specials are evidence of its dedication to rolling with the times, however that manifests.

Although Comedy Central hasn’t set a premiere for its next 10-episode season, it’s been renewed through 2022 and the channel is more or less keeping the lights on by heavily stripping repeats throughout the week.

Between this and access to the full library of past seasons on HBO Max, it’s very easy to escape to ye olden pre-pandemic times when the show inflated the vulgarity of our culture-wide egocentrism in ways that made us roar.

But if the “Pandemic” and “Vaccination” specials aren’t the most entertaining entries in the “South Park” library, that’s because they refuse to discount the ways in which this past year on top of the four that preceded it have changed the boys, and us, and Parker – and presumably Stone. By admitting to this, they can also do something those of us living in a three-dimensional living, breathing reality can’t do. They can rebuild the divide between the world and their cartoon, and write a story in which its star characters find ways to air their grievances and get past them.

They can even decide to simply and eventually agree to move on and return to the way things have always been, reminding us that while “South Park” isn’t really America, it is a true mirror of who we really are. One day soon we’ll be eager to belly laugh at what it shows us. Just not now.

The “South ParQ Vaccination Special” is available to stream for free online.