The “mortality gap” is growing: College-educated Americans live longer than those without degrees

Two Princeton University economists, one a Nobel Prize winner, released a study on Monday that highlighted the important way education level relates to lifespan — namely, that the two-thirds of Americans without bachelor degrees have been dying younger since 2010. By contrast, the life expectancy of those with bachelor degrees has increased over the past three decades.

The paper, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, found that the mortality gap has grown between people with different levels of education even as it has shrunk between different racial groups. They studied a cohort of people between age 25 and 75 with varying postsecondary educations. As of 2018, Americans without a bachelor’s degree lived on average for 45.1 years after their 25th birthday, marking a decline since 2010. Americans with a bachelor’s degree, on the other hand, lived for 48.2 years after their 25th birthday, a number that has been increasing but at a slower rate since 2010. The study’s authors explained that they chose to focus on people younger than 75 because “the patterns of adult life expectancy since 1990 have been shaped by what has happened to deaths before age 75.”

Economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case also found that the gap between white and black Americans in terms of how many years they can expect to live between 25 and 75 years old has narrowed by 70% since 1990. Within both races, however, the life expectancy gap between those with and without bachelor’s degrees has more than doubled.

Deaton, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015, told Salon by email that the correlation between education level and life expectancy has “always been there”

“Educated people are less likely to smoke, less likely to binge-drink, and less likely use drugs, such as legal painkillers and illegal drugs,” Deaton explained. “It may also be that people who are healthier in childhood get more education — they don’t miss the math class, or years of education — and so there is a mechanism from health to education if adult health is linked to childhood health.” He added that some have argued that there is a correlation between people who are patient and forward-looking being more likely to both look after their health and get an education. He also noted that being better educated makes it easier to navigate the health care system.

Deaton also elaborated on why the educational life expectancy gap widened while the racial life expectancy gap narrowed.

“The proximate cause was the opioid epidemic and associated deaths, which first affected whites without a BA, but before 2010, did not much affect African Americans,” Deaton told Salon. “So the educational gap within whites expanded as drug deaths rose. Suicides also rose for whites, and again among those without a BA. These two things widened gaps between more and less educated whites and narrowed the gap between whites and Blacks.”

He noted that when fentanyl became a popular illegal drug after 2010, more African Americans without bachelor’s degrees started dying at younger ages, widening the educational gap within the black community.

“More broadly, American society has recently widened its opportunities and shared growth largely with educated people, and much less for less educated people,” Deaton explained.

The solution to this problem, Deaton argued, is not as simple as expanding educational opportunity, although he emphasized that both he and Case (who is also his wife) believe that education is too expensive and everyone who desires and is capable of attaining a bachelor’s degree should have the opportunity to do so.

“The deeper economic and social issues are to do with the destruction of working class life, of falling numbers of good jobs, elimination of unions, gig jobs etc., all for people without a BA,” Deaton told Salon. “Good to have a BA, but we also need to find ways of slowing automation and preserving jobs. The absurd cost of healthcare eliminates jobs for less educated people when employers have to pay $20k for an employee’s family health insurance policy.”

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Anne Lamott on coping with “existential exhaustion,” from the healing power of Target to forgiveness

“That’s really all I write about, is hope and despair,” says Anne Lamott. Clearly, she was born into the era she was meant for. The bestselling author of durable classics like “Bird by Bird” and “Operating Instructions” is back once more with a new book, a new(ish) marriage and very much the same curiosity, humanity and sense of humor that been her brand for nearly 30 years. “Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage” considers friendship, forgiveness, aging and the collective “existential exhaustion” that haunts us.

Salon spoke to Lamott recently about what’s changed since she wrote prophetically about “stockpiling for the apocalypse,” and finding grace in a big box store run.

This is an important question to be asking right now, and one you touch upon in the book. Sincerely, how are you, Annie?

I am sincerely well. I got both of my shots because I’m old. In California, they’re vaccinating 65 plus. I’ll be 67 next month. Neal’s getting his second shot today, so he’ll be less of a contaminant to all of us.

We’re all fine. Nothing interesting, which is just great. Everyone’s kind of coping. Some days are just too long and you just hate everybody and all of life. Then it passes, and it’s kind of a miracle that everyone’s doing as well as they are.

I loved the woman in the book who says, “My definition of okay is constantly changing.” That speaks very much to this moment.

Your last book opens with, “I’m stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse.” Annie, then an apocalypse kind of came. That book is about hope, but also very much about despair and about this dark moment that we were in two years ago. Writing this book, what was the narrative through line that you were feeling was pulling you through?

I was on tour for the last one, the hope book, which had originally been called “Doomed: Thoughts on Hope,” but then my publisher thought it wasn’t a really selling title. This book I wanted to call “The Third Third,” because I’ll be 67 in April. The publisher thought, again, not a selling title. On tour for the last one, everywhere I went, people were really in despair. They weren’t in the hope.

I mean, it was the UN climate report. It was Trump. And Australia was then on fire. It seems like a decade ago, but it wasn’t. Everywhere I went people, especially parents, felt very, very scared and doomed. Like, “If nothing changes, our kids end up in gas masks in their 30s and their children are born wearing gas masks.” I was just so struck by where you even start to revive after the catastrophe, the one-two-three punch of the last five years.

I of course wanted to write about my marriage because it’s so wonderful and so hilarious and such a mixed grill, like all of life. It was really that I couldn’t write a book ostensibly on hope because I was touring for one, and talk about beating a dead horse. That’s really all I write about, is hope and despair and second winds. This book, “Dusk, Night, Dawn,” was really about second winds.

Now it is coming out into the world when we are one year into this very strange and deeply sad time. How do you approach this book in particular now? You must be looking at it through a different lens, as I’m assuming you are looking at everything through a different lens. We all are who we are, but we are all also now collectively traumatized in a way that is in some sense unifying.

I’ve just been enraged since February of 2020, when the first cases surfaced and it was clearly not going to be addressed, even recognized, like the U.S. recognizes nations. We weren’t going to recognize it as a reality and there was going to be no real help. There was only going to be propaganda. I’ve been so angry for so long. But I’ll tell you I’m less angry this year. I am a lot less angry.

What’s that great line of Martin Luther King’s? Don’t let them get you to hate them. Even though I did hate them and kept going into that rabbit hole all through 2020, I kept remembering that line, and how it really destroys your center of gravity. It destroys yourself. I do have an inner Donald Trump, this petty, narcissistic blowhard, but to hate him took away my mostly “me” self, which is really decent and loving and caring, and mostly compassionate and mostly tenderhearted.

When I go into the hate, it’s like this cold sheet metal heart that I operate from and then I’m of no good to anyone. Probably every book I’ve written has had a great sorrow in it. My dad, and then my friend Pammy in “Operating Instructions,” I’ve just been a person who’s had a lot of death in her life and also I’m a person who doesn’t run from people when they are experiencing death. My best friend’s child just died. He was 23. She’s who said she had to keep changing the goalposts on “okay.”

All of the books have been about that mixed grill, and that it’s devastating to be here on earth and to have had children and to not be able to save them from really much of anything. That’s really my only driving desire, is to save my child and my grandchild. Sam is 31 now, and left to my own devices, I would run alongside him on his hero’s journey with juice boxes and sunscreen and ChapStick. That would be the most heinous, destructive thing I could do to him. You release, release, release. You release, release, release with your heart in your throat, you know?

How do we do that with any modicum of grace or confidence, with COVID, and with all these things that we’ve gone through as a community? There’s the Salon community, I was there forever. Then a recovery community, a community of progressives. How, in that community, do we keep our heads above water? How do we fish people out when they just couldn’t any more that week? You’re aware of all that no longer works.

In the ’50s and ’60s, people and politicians always talked about the common good. When you’ve lost faith that Americans are choosing that and it doesn’t work anymore to think that it will, you notice what still does work. Marches still work. Neal, who was much more worried about COVID than I am, because I have this nutty religious faith, put on two masks to march with Black Lives Matter, every time.

All the old people were in the back of the long marches past the Civic Center in San Francisco. That still works. Candles still work. A hot bath still works. All through 2020, the generosity and the outpouring of goodness just brought tears to your eyes. That people, when they didn’t know what to do, gave money to the food pantries. You took in either all your canned items or you went to Safeway and bought $50 bucks of canned items, or you just sent money over and over and over again.

I always come back to that amazing thing that Mr. Rogers’s mother told him when he was a little boy and scared because of a tragedy. She said, “You look to the helpers.” That’s what I did all of 2020. Who’s helping, and how can I help the helpers?

You’re reminding me of what you say in the book — how we are collectively good at going through hard things and we are good in extraordinary circumstances. I think the part where we’re not as good is what happens in the aftermath. What happens when the dust from all of this clears and how do we find our way back to each other? Because we’ve all been so isolated for so long.

I think that’s what the entire book is about. I don’t have a short answer, but the subtitle is, “On Revival and Courage.” How does my friend, who just lost her son, make a comeback? How do you come back from that kind of loss? How do you find the courage when it’s just so scary? The world has always been a very scary place. It was scary for the cave mothers.

It’s always been a scary place, and we’re a violent species. Cain is always killing Abel over and over and over again. Cain is killing Abel today. Four thousand people will die again today, or 3,200 or whatever the current number is, because of “Trump’s response” to the pandemic. What do you do in the face of it? Where do you even start?

The literary types like myself, we read a lot more poetry. You read Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer Liberation Front, the manifesto. Read that today. It’s a complete owner’s manual. My favorite line is, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” Be joyful and faithful in the goodness of humanity even though you look around.

What do you do in the face of that? Well, you send money to Doctors Without Borders. It’s not a direct lineage, but you do something like that. You take the blankets that you bought that were expensive, that you love so much, and you haven’t used in five years and will never use again, unless you move into a mansion next to the Kardashians and have a lot more guest rooms. Barring that, you give them away. That’s what they need at Goodwill and Salvation Army. You wash the blankets and you fold them up and you drive them to Goodwill because it’s very, very cold right now.

This brings up another big theme in your book, forgiveness. That feels like a button that I have to keep resetting constantly lately, Annie. How do we keep trying, when there is so much that feels almost unforgivable?

Well, for one thing, forgiveness doesn’t mean that you want to have lunch with the person, right? It means you stop hitting back. Forgiveness is not my strong suit. I’m one of those Christians who’s not heavily into forgiveness. I’m reform. You don’t get anywhere if you pretend to forgive or if you have a nice bumper sticker response when talking about it. For me, the willingness to do anything to change, to give up an old habit, or to forgive, is an old habit.

Not forgiving is a part of the comfort zone from childhood, because I was raised intellectual, and of course you don’t forgive Barry Goldwater or you don’t forgive the Ku Klux Klan. I have so many thoughts. I’ve written whole books on this, but as C.S. Lewis said, when you decide to become a person of forgiveness, maybe you don’t start with the Gestapo.

It’s like with pickup sticks. Maybe you start with the neighbor down the street who’s just really awful to you for no good reason. I had a neighbor down the street who left doggy bags with dog poo and my name written out on the doggy bag because he hated me so much. Where do you even start with that? Well, you don’t hit back. You understand, as with Trump, that this is someone who was never loved, whose only safety came from hatred and revenge. For me, the willingness comes from the pain of not forgiving.

When I have made myself mentally ill enough in my revenge, and when I make myself just so toxic with not forgiving, then I may surrender. When I come before God, I come bitterly and with my arms crossed and I say like a teenager, “Okay. Fine. Whatever, whatev, God.” Then I think God wipes her brow and goes, “Oy gevalt.” Then something happens. There’s a tiny shift. You know what it’s like for me, Mary Elizabeth?

It’s like how good we were as little girls at untangling knotted gold bracelets. They get knots that everybody else would give up on, but not me with my OCD and my tiny fingers. You don’t tug. You jiggle. You don’t give up.

Sam, my son, has “We never give up,” tattooed on his left forearm. You don’t give up and you gently jiggle. You jiggle a little bit and there’s a tiny space where before there wasn’t. Forgiveness is so hard for me, but it’s so painful not to forgive. I am the one who is damaged and punished by not forgiving. Where do you start? You start by just telling the truth to someone, like you just did. Like I just did. Like we both do with our closest friends or with our church community or with my recovery community or with my husband or Sam or with Janine who lost her son. I’ll call her and I’ll say, “I hate everyone and I hate all of life except for you and the kitty.” She’ll say, “Well, that’s a start. We better go to Target.” We’ll go to Target, and overeating with a girlfriend helps, always. It’s 90% of the solution.

That is a pretty top-notch coping mechanism.

Right. It is.

I’m going to ask you about sobriety because it’s hard for people to be sober. This is a tough time to keep your head above water. What do you say to the people who are struggling with this right now? It’s so, so challenging for all of us, whatever it is. If it’s depression, if it’s addiction, if it’s alcoholism. These are very challenging, very isolating times. I wonder how you’re finding that community and strength every day.

I’ve been sober almost 35 years. I’ve had eating disorders too. I have 30-some years away from that, but I’ve actually thought about rekindling the eating disorder, just to have any measure of control in this world that is spinning away. One day at a time I haven’t. People are going out. People with 25 years. There’s an old Christian saying from the south that I just love, which is that the voice of the devil is sweet to hear.

The voice of the devil doesn’t say, “You are a piece of s**t and you’re going to drink anyway. Why don’t you just drink? Because anyway, no one particularly noticed that you were any less annoying sober or less of a disappointment sober.” It doesn’t talk to you like that because it couldn’t get you, it couldn’t win you over.

What the voice of addiction, the devil, toxic obsession says is, “Oh sweetie, this is really a nightmare and I want to help you stay off the bottle too. It doesn’t make any sense to me that right now is a good time to stay sober, to stay off those opiates. You know what I’m going to recommend,” it says gently, “is that we revisit this in the spring when more people are vaccinated. For now, no one will judge you, right?”

You go, “Ooh, ooh, that’s right. I’m going to go get half of a carrot cake sheet cake at Safeway.” I actually got about a quarter of one, a couple months ago when I had hit a new bottom of hating everyone in the family and all of life. I just got a very large, maybe a six-by-six piece of carrot cake at Safeway, which does not have a single ingredient found in nature, which is why it’s so great. A half-inch cream cheese frosting. This is what happened. I ate it and I did it with weird radical self-love. I said, “It is whatever it takes except for drugs and alcohol.”

Sober people with 20 years are dabbling in CBD with ever so slightly elevated amounts of the THC. People are dabbling with pain that they suddenly can’t take care of with Advil. All I can remind them is, the willingness comes from the pain. If the scary thoughts that you’re having, if the fear of losing your sobriety is big enough, then maybe just for today, you’ll pick up the 200-pound phone and call me. I am literally here all day. I am on the bed, reading with the kitty. I’m trying to teach the kitty to read during the quarantine. Call me.

That’s what works. Call one of us. If you call another sober person, it’s going to be their favorite thing that happened that day because it’s going to help us stay sober and feel great about our sobriety. You can’t get somebody not to use or drink. I saw the statistics for the very elevated numbers of overdoses and it’s heartbreaking. That is what my destiny was, you know? I will go to my grave not knowing why I’m one of the addicts and alcoholics who got fished out of that and pulled back to my feet and dusted off one day at a time all these years.

Alcoholism is a disease of isolation. It’s a disease of this extremely stark reverberating loneliness, whose solution to that is to isolate. It’s a disease that wants you dead, as all self-destruction does, but will settle for getting you drunk. The way that you don’t get drunk is that you pray. I was thinking of Christopher Robin’s little pop gun in Winnie the Pooh. You get out your little Christopher Robin pop gun and you hold it to yourself and you say, “I am going to call Caroline. I’m just going to call her. I’m going to tell her how close I am. Then if it doesn’t help, I’ll have a cool, refreshing bottle of gin.” You do the one thing. You start with one thing. I will call Caroline. I hate her too. I will call her and then also, you know what it’s like for me? Addiction, the addictive desire to change how I feel, which is awful. It’s like contractions, when you’re in labor. When you’re in the labor, the contraction says it’s never going to end and the craving for a cigarette the third day tells you it’s not going to end unless you smoke.

In contractions, you realize you don’t like children or want children and that you’ll do anything to get out of like eight more hours of this. But it will end. It’ll end in several minutes, a contraction and a craving. You remind yourself of what worked before and that’s a lot of “Dusk, Night, Dawn.” If that’s what worked before, it may, and I’m underlining and italicizing “may,” just work again. You try it. You take the action. “Figure it out” is not a good slogan. You take the action. You get yourself a lovely cup of tea and you call horrible Caroline, and you leave the rest in God’s good hands.

Biden’s COVID relief bill is a BFD: House passes historically progressive package — and it’s popular

While people might have soured on public polling in recent years, the overwhelming popularity of President Joe Biden’s sweeping $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday and expected to be signed into law on Friday, is certainly not a good starting point for the Republican minority standing in opposition and looking to regain power in 2022.

A CNN poll released Wednesday finds 61% of Americans support the massive relief package that received not one Republican vote in either chamber of Congress. A Pew Research poll released on Tuesday found that 41% of Republican voters support the Democrats’ bill.

The House of Representatives voted 220-211 on Wednesday to the sweeping legislation choke-full of longtime progressive priorities, sending it straight to the President’s desk after it narrowly passed an evenly divided Senate over the weekend.

Dubbed the “American Rescue Plan,” the bill marks a defining victory for the Biden administration and its effort to navigate the country out of the year-long economic and public health crises that is the coronavirus pandemic. Despite fierce opposition from across the aisle, Democrats are hailing the bill as a landmark piece of anti-poverty legislation.

“This legislation represents the boldest action taken on behalf of the American people since the Great Depression,” House Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said on Tuesday. House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., echoed Aguilar: “This is seismic legislation.”

As Salon’s Ramsey Touchberry reported, Neal has already indicated that temporary child tax credit provision within the package, which he says is “going to change lives,” will likely become permanent.

“One thing you should know about the tax code,” Neal told reporters on Tuesday, “getting something out of the code is oftentimes harder than getting something in the code. I’ve already had some thoughts about how we’re going to expand it and make it permanent.”

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center projected that Biden’s stimulus will boost incomes for the poorest 20% of Americans by a margin of 20%. With unemployment benefits set to expire for millions of Americans within a week, the stimulus assistance is meant to financially buoy jobless Americans crippled under the weight of the pandemic. Provisions in the bill include $1,400 direct payments to individuals making up to $75,000, an extension of weekly $300 unemployment payments until Sep. 16, a boosted child tax credit of $3,600 for kids up to age 5, a $350 billion spending package to cities, $128 billion to assist K-12 schools in re-opening, as well as money for increased COVID testing and for hospitals.

Last week, the bill passed in the Senate by a 50-49 vote following a prolonged marathon of late-night amendment proposals (i.e. “vota-a-rama”). In an effort to stall the bill’s passage, Republicans forced the clerk to read the 627-page bill, a delay that cost Democrats eleven hours. This week, Republicans in the House, lead by freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene set off on a similarly delaying stunt.

“This is a critical moment in our country’s history,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said before Wednesday’s delayed vote. “Today, we have a real opportunity for change.”

The bill, however, will not include the $15-an-hour minimum wage provision backed by progressives following the Senate Parliamentarian’s ruling that the addition violated the rules of the budget reconciliation process, which Democrats used to expedite the bill’s passage. Vice President Kamala Harris declined to overrule the Senate Parliamentarian’s decision.

Republicans have widely denounced the bill as a Democratic power-grab, specifically taking issue with many of the non-Covid-related provisions sought by progressives. GOP lawmakers also questioned whether another relief bill was needed after December’s $900 billion package. House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., for example, demurred the bill as a “laundry list of leftwing priorities that predate the pandemic and do not meet the needs of American families.”

Alluding to Obama’s passage of the Affordable Care Act in March of 2010, Eric Levitz wrote in New York Magazine, “The $1.9 trillion bill, which passed the Senate on Saturday, is a ‘BFD’ at both the ground level and the 10,000-foot one.” He continued, “The legislation’s immediate policy consequences are profound and far-reaching, while its most significant provisions represent paradigm shifts in the Democratic Party’s approach to governance, which is to say the law could plausibly mark a leftward realignment in American policymaking, at least if Biden & Co. continue to govern in its spirit.”

Favorables in the New @MorningConsult Poll (Among RVs):

Joe Biden – 58/38 (+20)
Nancy Pelosi – 39/50 (-11)
Kevin McCarthy – 23/40 (-17)
Chuck Schumer – 34/39 (-5)
Mike Pence – 41/49 (-8)
Donald Trump – 37/59 (-22)
GOP in Congress – 33/57 (-24)
Dems in Congress – 50/43 (+7)

— Jessy Han (@hjessy_) March 10, 2021

Despite a sharply divided Congress, the relief package has long held bipartisan support from the general public. According to a poll taken by Morning Consult in February, 76 percent of American voters backed the bill. 89 percent of Democrats supported the bill while 60 percent of Republicans signaled their support as well.

“For weeks now, an overwhelming percentage of Americans – Democrats, Independents, and Republicans – have made it clear they support the American Rescue Plan. Today, with final passage in the House of Representatives, their voice has been heard,” President Biden said in a statement. “This legislation is about giving the backbone of this nation – the essential workers, the working people who built this country, the people who keep this country going – a fighting chance,” he added.

Oil companies want you to think they’re feminist. It’s BS

Monday was International Women’s Day, and oil companies want you to know — they’re feminists, too! Shell, Chevron, and even the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s biggest lobbying group, posted messages about the importance of women in the oil and gas industry. “Here’s to the women making a difference at Chevron,” tweeted the Chevron account.

Symbolic gestures of corporate solidarity are nothing new for the oil and gas industry. Last year, in a particularly cringe-worthy commemoration of International Women’s Day, one Shell gas station run by two women temporarily added an apostrophe to its logo, becoming She’ll. The stunt quickly became the object of Twitter mockery (“more women gas pumps!” said one user). Last summer, Shell, BP, and Chevron similarly released statements against racism, declaring themselves allies of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Many of the oil companies’ recent posts allude to their inclusion of women in the workforce; the Canadian oil magnate Enbridge, for example, pointed to its goal of having 40 percent women in the workplace and on the board of directors by 2025, while Shell tweeted an article highlighting women in positions of power at the company. But oil companies’ claims to anti-racism or feminism ring hollow — even with women at the helm — when the effects of oil and gas extraction and climate change fall disproportionately on women, particularly women of color.

For instance, women make up 80 percent of people displaced by climate change, according to the United Nations. Women are more likely to die in extreme weather events, including heat waves, according to studies on France, China, and India, and in tropical cyclones, according to studies on Bangladesh and the Philippines. Climate change is also tied to pregnancy risks — people exposed to higher temperatures or air pollution from fracking are more likely to have underweight, stillborn, or preterm babies, with Black and Hispanic pregnant people experiencing the worst impacts.

Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, is a case study in how natural disasters hit women hardest. A study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that recovery policies following the storm ignored the needs of Black women, resulting in displacement. Extreme weather has been linked to violence against women, and that was similarly the case after Katrina, when women experienced higher rates of rape and violence.

Oil and gas infrastructure is also tied to gender-based and sexual violence. Company-owned housing for fossil fuel workers known as “man camps” are well-documented sites of sexual assault and trafficking, and is one of the factors linked to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. In a letter to President Biden urging the cancellation of the Keystone XL and Line 3 pipelines, Indigenous women leaders wrote, “We still have daughters, aunties, mothers, cousins, and two-spirit relatives who have never been found and whose perpetrators have never been brought to justice.”

The irony is particularly stark when you consider that International Women’s Day originated out of a radical, anti-capitalist political movement meant to highlight the insecurities faced by women workers. While oil companies celebrate milestones of installing women in leadership positions with cutesy tweets, women around the world continue to suffer assault, displacement, and death due to the effects of oil extraction. All the hashtags in the world can’t erase that.

Marco Rubio, GOP call massively popular child tax credit “welfare”; Democrats vow to keep it

The temporary child tax credit provision within Democrats’ massive $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill could ultimately become a permanent pillar of the U.S. tax code — and could even transform the way the nation handles child poverty.

But any substantial policy change invites bitter partisan opposition, and all signs point toward a major forthcoming political battle between Democrats and Republicans over whether families should continue to receive such large tax savings for children.

The new stimulus, approved Wednesday by the House along party lines and now moving to President Joe Biden’s desk for approval, will increase the annual tax credit from $2,000 per child to a maximum of $3,600 for parents with qualifying income. Children aged 6 to 17 would qualify for a $3,000 credit ($250 a month) and those under age 6 would qualify for $3,600 ($300 a month).

The credit will also be offered to parents who are typically ineligible because of low incomes and will be given monthly, providing families with a consistent economic boost. The amount would be phased out for single parents who make more than $75,000 and joint filers who earn above $150,000.

The tax break alone, experts have said, could put a major dent in the number of children living in poverty. The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the proposal would lift 4.1 million children out of poverty — a 40 percent decrease.

Democrats have made it clear that this is a temporary policy in name only, and they want this major reform to last beyond the COVID pandemic and the current economic downturn. But without future action, those who may rise out of poverty thanks to the credit could fall right back into it once the provision expires at year’s end.

That tees up a difficult political battle for Republicans. Public polling suggests the stimulus is widely popular — even though it has zero support from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill — and that the child tax credits are even more well-liked. Trying to cancel those credits heading into the 2022 midterm elections could hand the Democrats a golden political issue.

The credits targeting families, along with the various other tax credits included in the legislation, are “going to change lives,” House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., told reporters Tuesday.

“One thing you should know about the tax code: getting something out of the code is oftentimes harder than getting something in the code,” Neal said. “I’ve already had some thoughts about how we’re going to expand it and make it permanent.”

Neal declined to share what those ideas were, or how the new tax credits would be paid for, but added: “What we did is unlikely to go away.”

Republicans aren’t prepared to let that happen without a fight. They’ve already argued that the tax credits are an extension of “welfare” that would act as yet another disincentive to work.

One potential solution, Republicans have said, would be to tie the benefits directly to work: If you’re not working, you don’t get the credit. GOP Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah have even said they could get behind as much as $4,500 in credits — if properly incentivized under their criteria. They claim, however, that the current proposal amounts to “universal basic income to all parents.” (In Republican Land, of course, that would be a bad thing.)

“That is not tax relief for working parents; it is welfare assistance,” the duo said in a joint statement last month.

Rubio went a step further in a National Review op-ed.

“No questions asked and no strings attached. That is not pro-family policy, no matter how much Democrats will claim it to be,” Rubio wrote. “If pulling families out of poverty were as simple as handing moms and dads a check, we would have solved poverty a long time ago.”

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has offered a similar proposal to the Democratic plan included in the relief bill, with one big difference: To pay for the new tax credits, Romney suggests eliminating other assistance and credits for families, which Democrats oppose.

In this partisan battle, unlike so many others of the still-young Biden era, Democrats appear to have Republicans on the defensive — and the American public largely behind them.

“Please don’t patronize me”: Watch Rep. Katie Porter tear into an oil executive

Congresswoman Katie Porter took a fossil fuel industry executive to task for falsely suggesting during a House hearing on Tuesday that oil and gas companies don’t receive special treatment in the U.S. tax code, a claim that the California Democrat quickly refuted—while also offering to eliminate the tax breaks.

Asked by Porter to explain how much of his company’s intangible drilling costs is tax deductible, Mark Murphy of Strata Production—a New Mexico-based oil and gas exploration company—responded that “we get to deduct all of those just like any other business.”

“There seems to be a misconception out there that you’re operating from that somehow the oil and gas industry benefits from some special sort of tax structure,” said Murphy, the president of Strata Production. “We don’t.”

Porter, a second-term congresswoman who has developed a reputation for her incisive grilling of corporate executives and government officials, swiftly undercut Murphy’s narrative, explaining: “You do benefit from special rules. There’s a special tax rule for intangible drilling costs that does not apply to other kinds of expenses that businesses have.”

“You get to deduct 70% of your costs immediately, and other businesses have to amortize their expenses over their entire profit stream,” Porter added. “So please don’t patronize me by telling me that the oil and gas industry doesn’t have any special tax provisions. Because if you would like that to be the rule, I would be happy to have Congress deliver.”

Watch the exchange:

A Big Oil exec told me I had a "misconception" about a special tax break polluters get that other businesses don't.

So, after explaining the deduction to him, I offered to write it out of the tax code if that what he wants. Just let me know! pic.twitter.com/ML25PMnrg5

— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) March 9, 2021

Environmentalist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, was among those who applauded Porter’s debunking of the fossil fuel executive’s false claim.

“The wonderful Rep. Katie Porter provides a signal moment in congressional history,” McKibben tweeted. “And it’s a sign of the weakening position of the oil industry—no deference to these liars any longer.”

Porter is the lead sponsor of Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act, legislation introduced last week that would—according to a summary from the California congresswoman’s office—”raise royalties, rental rates, inspection fees, and penalties on oil and gas companies that extract resources from public lands.”

“Public lands are a collective national treasure that belong to the American people—polluters that want to extract energy on these lands owe taxpayers a fair price,” Porter said in a statement. “We haven’t raised the rental rate for mining on public lands since I was in junior high, and we’ve been charging oil and gas companies the same royalty rate for over 100 years. My Ending Taxpayer Welfare for Oil and Gas Companies Act would protect taxpayers and give these prices a decades-overdue update.”

Following Tuesday’s hearing, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) welcomed Porter to sign on to his bill with Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) calling for the elimination of nearly a dozen tax provisions that “unfairly benefit oil and gas companies.”

“Count me in!” Porter responded.

Bowman and education experts blast Biden admin for mandating standardized tests amid pandemic

Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Tuesday joined progressive education experts in criticizing the Biden administration’s decision to mandate standardized testing in schools despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Bowman (D-N.Y.)—a former teacher and principal—argued that “prioritizing testing in the middle of the pandemic is a big mistake.”

“It’s a mistake that reflects a broader problem in American education,” the first-term congressman said in a statement. “We have an obsession with arbitrary testing metrics above all else, even in the middle of a pandemic that’s dislodged every facet of American life. We’ve forgotten that testing is one useful tool, and should not be the goal of education in and of itself.”

“The pandemic created the world’s largest education crisis,” asserted Bowman. “All students were impacted, but we know which students took the hardest hit… We must empower educators to provide the best learning environment possible for students. This is not the time to waste time. Let’s dive into action to fix the problems we already know exist.”

Bowman’s statement follows a letter sent Monday by acting Assistant Education Secretary Ian Rosenblum to state school superintendents informing them that the department will not invite state requests for “blanket waivers of assessments” required by the Every Student Succeeds Act, even though such waivers were granted last year due to the pandemic.

“It is urgent to understand the impact of Covid-19 on learning,” the letter states. “We know… that some schools and school districts may face circumstances in which they are not able to safely administer statewide summative assessments this spring using their standard practices.”

“It is clear that the pandemic requires significant flexibility for the 2020-2021 school year so that states can respond to the unique circumstances they are facing; keep students, staff, and their families safe; and maintain their immediate focus on supporting students’ social, emotional, and academic development,” the letter continues.

Progressive education experts, including Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters and board member of the Network for Public Education, echoed some of Bowman’s sentiments.

Falling behind? Falling behind what? Corporate created standardized tests that do more to generate profits than knowledge? No. Artificial benchmarks are not what we should be worrying about. Staying healthy is. #TBATs #Covid @WaBATs_ @OregonBATs @MontanaBATs @WyomingBATs pic.twitter.com/bIrqrmBG8Q

— Cali Bats (@CaliBats) February 21, 2021

“Surprising and depressing that they would make this announcement before Miguel Cardona, appointed as secretary of education, even took office, in the midst of a pandemic,” wrote Haimson. “If states have to give these exams remotely, watch out for the surveillance spyware schools will ask to install on your children’s devices,” added Haimson. “Best advice is to refuse and opt out of these exams altogether.”

Mercedes Schneider, a career teacher and education reform advocate, said that “surveying district and state superintendents about what they need in order to provide equitable education opportunities for their students would be a much better use of U.S. Department of Education time and money than spending multiple millions on standardized tests.”

“I have been teaching the better part of three decades, and I have yet for any parent to ask me for standardized test scores so that the parent can know how their children are doing,” stressed Schneider. “They ask about grades on class assignments; they discuss specific skill areas that are challenging and ask for help with addressing the specific challenges arising from completing classroom assignments; they discuss supports needed when the children or other family members are facing health issues or other crises at home; they ask for assistance addressing behavior issues, but they never ask for standardized test scores out of a need to know how their children are doing.”

A convicted “incel” mass murderer tried to use autism as an excuse for his crimes — and failed

Last week 28-year-old Alek Minassian, a Canadian software and mobile app developer, was found guilty of killing 10 people in 2018, when he intentionally drove his van into a crowd of pedestrians in a commercial district in Toronto. The fatalities included eight women and two men ranging in age from 22 to 94, while sixteen other people were injured. Minassian’s social media posts immediately prior to the murders give an insight into his motive: in a statement that he posted on Facebook minutes before the attack, he identified himself as an “incel,” shorthand for “involuntarily celibate.” As Minassian wrote: “the Incel Rebellion has already begun!”

As my colleague Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote in 2018, the incel movement is rooted in greivances related to sex; specifically, incels often feel angry “when women do not behave in a sexually conciliatory way toward them” because “they don’t see sex as a mutually pleasurable experience but as a reward they have been deprived of.” Of course, being bitter at women for not sleeping with you is a poor justification for mass murder, and Minassian nor his lawyers opted not to justify his rampage for those reasons. Rather, Minassian and his team have forged an entirely novel excuse: he is autistic.

As a psychiatrist who testified for the defense wrote in a report he submitted to the court, “despite the fact that [Minassian] was not psychotic, his autistic way of thinking was severely distorted in a way similar to psychosis.” The court emphatically rejected this argument.

I should mention that I am autistic myself, and have written extensively about life on the spectrum. My outrage about Minassian’s excuse — and gratitude toward the Canadian court which snubbed it — is very much personal. And I am not alone in my community. As Temple Grandin, a renowned scientist and autism activist, told me in an email: “Autism should never be used as a defense for deliberately committing a serious crime such as murder. Autistic people are very capable of rational thought and knowing the difference between right and wrong.”

Grandin and I were hardly the only austistic individuals to feel outraged. At the time that Minassian began using his “I did it because I’m autistic” defense, Autism Canada issued a statement saying “these claims are wholly unsubstantiated, merely speculative, and made carelessly without any published evidence proving autism, on its own, is a risk factor for becoming violent against other people.” They added that “when researchers consider other psychiatric disorders as a risk factor for violence, in particular ADHD and Conduct Disorder, any association with autism is NOT statistically significant.” Autism Ontario issued a similar statement: “In reality, people on the autism spectrum and with other disabilities are much more likely to be victims of crime, rather than the perpetrators. The myth that autism causes criminal behaviour is exactly that: a myth.”

It is not surprising that, when searching for a way to excuse his behavior, Minassian would glom on to autism. To understand why, though, it is first important to comprehend the nefarious world of incel ideology.

Involuntary celibate culture is defined by hatred of women. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists incel beliefs as a “male supremacist” ideology, noting the often violent tendencies of both incels specifically and other men who claim they have a right to women’s bodies — from pick-up artists to mass murderers who denounced their own sexual frustration (like George Sodini, who killed three women at a Pittsburgh gym) or women’s rights (like Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway while denouncing feminism and “divorce on demand”). Yet incels have become particularly conspicuous in part because they have their own cult-ish lingo which has leaked into mainstream meme culture. “Chads” are desirable and sexually successful men, “Stacys” are desirable and sexually successful women and “Beckys” are less attractive but still desirable and sexually successful women. Non-incel, average looking men are “normies,” people who have embraced their values have taken the “red pill”; and people on the autism spectrum are “Aspies” (short for Asperger’s Syndrome). Yet the shared grievance at the heart of self-identified incel culture is the belief that they are victims because women they consider attractive do not want to have sex with them.

It cannot be stressed enough that self-identified incels have been allegedly linked to numerous acts of violence, from a murder in Toronto and a shooting spree in Arizona to Elliot Rodger’s rampage in California in 2014, during which a college dropout went on a high-profile killing spree. (There have been conflicting reports on whether Rodger had autism.) It is reasonable to say that, while not all incels are violent, incels’ hate for women makes them capable of violence. This is true in the same way that a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party, though not automatically violent, has such a hateful worldview that it is not surprising if one of them commits violence.

This brings us back to Minassian’s misogynistic violence and why he used autism to try to get away with it. Incel prejudices about autism amount to something of a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, many incels either identify as or express sympathy for autistic individuals, claiming that they are more likely to struggle to find romantic partners; in that, perhaps some see solidarity. At the same time, there is a tremendous amount of internalized self-hatred among self-identified autistic incels, as well as a tendency to belittle autistic people in general. One report in Spectrum News discovered that incels found various ways of attributing their lack of success with women to being autistic, or at least claiming that autistic men struggle more.

Yet because incels are also prone to lauding strength and loathing weakness, many feel contempt or ridicule for people who are on the spectrum.

“In pop culture, autism is often reduced to very stereotypical ‘geeky’ behavior,” Jude Ellison S. Doyle, author of “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power” and “Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why,” told Salon by email. “That’s a double-edged sword. Incel communities are next door to organized fascist and white nationalism movements, and if someone shows those stereotypical signs of being autistic, that sets off the typical bully’s instinct to torment the most vulnerable person in the room. It also sets off the eugenicist thinking that says people with disabilities aren’t worthy of life. There’s exceptionally violent ableism in these communities.”

None of this means that autistic people do not struggle with dating. Since dating requires strong social skills — as does applying for and holding down a job, developing friendships, managing mundane day-to-day interactions and many other things — being autistic creates very real difficulties. Yet those difficulties are born of broad social intolerance toward neurodivergent behavior, not because of anything involving women as a group or feminism an an ideology. (I should note that, as an autistic person, I am currently in a relationship and have had several past relationships… and I have also struggled with romantic relationships, as well as virtually every other kind of interpersonal interaction.)

What’s more, when incels mix their supposed sympathy with and/or self-identification as autistic with flagrant self-loathing, they make it clear that they are utilizing bitter stereotypes rather than coming from a place of compassion and scientific understanding.

In addition, incels who use autism as an excuse for violent behavior do so for the same reasons that men in general will try to pass the buck after harming women — because we live in a patriarchal society.

“This is part of a larger pattern of people looking for any excuse to look away from the misogyny that inspires so much male violence,” Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has written extensively about women’s rights, says. “We see this all the time with rape and domestic violence — people grasping for any reason except that the perpetrator wants to dominate women for the reason that he committed the crimes he did.”

There are also self-proclaimed autistic incels who, because they are white and male, have a level of privilege that they take for granted. (Minassian, for what it’s worth, was half-Armenian and half-Iranian.) As with so many other experiences in our society, race intersects with what it is like to be autistic.

“I can’t help but point out something that I immediately thought of when I learned of this situation, and that’s the fact that even being able to debate this concept is indicative of the fact that White Autistics such as the perpetrator live in a completely different world than Autistics of color,” Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, author, autism activist and former chair of the Autism and Race Committee for the Autistic Women’s Network, told Salon by email. “You see, if the perpetrator had been my Black Autistic son or, perhaps, my Black intellectually disabled son, he wouldn’t be alive to ever have a trial to be found guilty of murder in the first place. The police would have shot his Black behind dead, and no one would be debating whether or not ‘autism’ or ‘disability’ had anything to do with it.”

Minassian’s actions were entirely his fault. He murdered innocent people because he embraced a hateful ideology.None of that can be attributed to his autism. More likely, he is just an evil person.

Even with precautions, indoor dining increases spread of COVID-19, CDC says

Masked servers and cooks, socially distanced tables, and rules about removing one’s mask only to eat still aren’t enough to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus during indoor dining.

That’s according to a new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which adds to mounting research that there is a connection between dining out and increased COVID-19 outbreaks.

Researchers examined county-level data from March 1 to December 31, which found that daily infections and death rates decreased 20 days after mask mandates. They also found that six to 11 weeks after counties reopening their restaurants for on-premise dining, a rise in infections and deaths followed.

“Mask mandates were associated with statistically significant decreases in county-level daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation,” the researchers state in the study. “Allowing on-premises restaurant dining was associated with increases in county-level case and death growth rates within 41–80 days after reopening.”

Notably, the CDC has some theories as to why there was delayed increase in COVID-19 cases six to 11 weeks after the point at which counties and states allowed restaurants to reopen. First, they speculate that restaurant-goers may have behaved “more cautiously” during the first weeks of dining re-opening, and then became less cautious as time passed. Alternatively, it may be that restaurants waited a few weeks to formally re-open after counties lifted their orders prohibiting restaurant dining. (COVID-19 symptoms generally surface two weeks after infection, which is why a six to 11 week delayed increase in infections is peculiar.)

One caveat to the study is that the data the CDC collected “did not differentiate between indoor and outdoor dining, adequacy of ventilation, and adherence to physical distancing and occupancy requirements,” according to the report. In other words, we are seeing an overall statistical sampling of what happens when jurisdictions open up dining, both indoor and outdoor. Ominously, that implies that outdoor dining could be unsafe, too.

“Further analyses are necessary to evaluate the delayed increase in case and death growth rates,” the CDC report states.

A separate CDC study published in September 2020 found that people with confirmed COVID-19 cases were twice as likely to have dined at a restaurant in the last 14 days before getting sick than those who tested negative for the coronavirus. The study received a critical response from the National Restaurant Association. “It is irresponsible to pin the spread of COVID-19 on a single industry,” the trade group said in a statement. “Restaurants have historically operated with highly regulated safety protocols based on the FDA’s Food Code and have taken additional steps to meet the safe operating guidelines required by CDC, FDA, OSHA, federal, state, and local officials.”

The CDC’s latest study arrives at a time when more states and cities are letting restaurants open their doors without limitations— and when restaurants and bars are on life support after being shut down, on and off, for nearly a year. The National Restaurant Association estimated that industry sales fell by $240 billion in 2020.

There have been dozens of articles asking the question: “Is indoor dining safe?” Most, if not all, suggest it’s not by accumulating research and advice from medical experts—unless it’s done carefully. Measures like social distancing in a well-ventilated space, and having patrons wear masks unless they’re eating and drinking, are often advised and reported to lower the activity’s risk. The CDC explains on its website: “The more an individual interacts with others, and the longer that interaction, the higher the risk of COVID-19 spread.”

“Masks may reduce the risk of COVID-19 spread when they are consistently used by customers and employees, especially when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain,” the CDC states. “The risk of COVID-19 spread increases in a restaurant or bar setting as interactions within 6 feet of others increase, as described below.”

Yet in the new CDC study, the federal agency concludes that prohibiting on-site dining could slow the spread of COVID-19 in the case of future outbreaks with new variants.

“With the emergence of more transmissible COVID-19 variants, community mitigation measures are increasingly important as part of a larger strategy to decrease exposure to and reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” the study states. “Community mitigation policies, such as state-issued mask mandates and prohibition of on-premises restaurant dining, have the potential to slow the spread of COVID-19, especially if implemented with other public health strategies.”

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DeSantis allies discussed how vaccine sites in wealthy areas could boost his re-election hopes

Allies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who organized a controversial vaccine distribution event that targeted wealthy and predominantly white areas in Manatee County discussed in text messages how the event might boost the Republican governor’s re-election hopes.

Manatee County Commission Chair Vanessa Baugh and Republican donor Rex Jensen, who organized pop-up vaccination sites in two affluent areas of the county, discussed how the event could aid DeSantis politically, the Bradenton Herald first reported.

“Gov said he might show up,” Jensen, a developer in the ritzy Lakewood Ranch area, wrote in a text message to Baugh on February 9. “Should try to see if that would help him get exposure here.”

“Excellent point. After all, 22 is right around the corner,” Baugh replied, referring to the upcoming gubernatorial election.

“Yup,” Jensen agreed, adding that the campus where the Lakewood Ranch pop-up site would be held “could have a nice setup for him.”

“Absolutely,” Baugh replied, adding: “This can be huge for him.”

DeSantis, who is expected to run for re-election next year but has yet to formally announce his plans, has denied providing any special access to vaccines and insisted the sites were set up in wealthier areas of the county to boost vaccination rates for seniors. But the texts also suggest that DeSantis’ aides played a role in developing a list of VIPs who would be vaccinated during the governor’s visit. Baugh, who is under investigation by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office and faces an ethics probe following complaints that she abused her position, put her own name and Jensen’s on the list.

Jensen, who said he had just finished a call with DeSantis and fellow Lakewood Ranch developer and GOP donor Pat Neal, said he was asked to compile a list of vaccine candidates — even though the county commission had unanimously voted to create a randomized system to determine who was eligible.

“Chief of staff Adrian was also involved,” Jensen wrote to Baugh, referring to Adrian Lukis, DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff, who was announced on Monday as the governor’s new chief of staff. An advance team from the governor’s office also visited the site, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

A DeSantis spokesperson denied that political considerations factored into his push to set up vaccine sites in the area.

“It’s unclear why these individuals would make such absurd remarks,” the spokesperson said in a statement to WFLA. “The Governor’s only focus remains getting shots in arms and protecting our most vulnerable.”

The texts were obtained through a public records request by Sarasota paralegal Michael Barfield, who said they were “proof” that political advantage had been a key priority in setting up the sites.

“So what we’ve suspected is actually in black and white and they can no longer say that politics are not involved in the distribution of the vaccine, and that’s really disappointing,” he told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “I know we’re in this hyper-partisan era, but it’s really disappointing.”

Barfield filed a complaint with the Manatee Sheriff’s Office accusing Baugh of “misuse of public position.”

Baugh has said that DeSantis asked Jensen to set up the sites and Jensen reached out to her for assistance. She has apologized for adding her own name and others to the vaccine list but defended setting up the sites in two zip codes in her district during a commission meeting, arguing that the areas “really encompass lots of southeast area of Manatee County, which is what the governor wanted to do.”

“People need to look at the statistics,” she said. “There have been other clinics and many people out east haven’t received the vaccines and are underserved. I see it as a win-win. This is not a negative situation.”

But fellow Commissioner Carol Whitmore said Baugh should resign.

“I think she should have stepped down because — and it wasn’t because of the vaccines, amen, let’s hope we get more,” she told WTSP. “It was because of the list.”

Neal, a DeSantis donor, was also asked to set up vaccination sites that ended up opening in three communities where Neal is developing homes, according to the Herald-Tribune, including a Sarasota County development where homes are valued at more than $1 million.

The ultra-wealthy Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, home to many Republican donors, also got priority access to a special vaccine site in January, according to the Tampa Bay Times. DeSantis said the “state was not involved” in the decision but both hospital systems that supplied the vaccines said the state had authorized the distribution, according to the Times, around the same time that one of the hospital systems was forced to cancel hundreds of vaccination appointments because it ran out of supply.

Florida Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Fried, the state’s top Democratic elected official, and State Senate Democratic leader Gary Farmer called for the FBI to investigate.

“If this isn’t public corruption, I don’t know what is,” Fried said.

The DeSantis-led vaccine prioritization effort appears to have been a financial boon for his campaign. DeSantis’ political committee has raised $3.9 million since December, including $2.7 million in February alone.

Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla., who is also a former Florida governor, called on the Justice Department to investigate whether the vaccine events had benefited DeSantis’ allies and donors.

“The more we learn about Governor DeSantis’s abuse of power, the worse it is. We already knew the Governor was directing vaccines to his favored donors and constituents,” Crist spokesman Joshua Karp told CNN. “Now it’s clear that the Governor’s team handpicked vaccine recipients, bypassing a county’s random selection process — for political gain — denying seniors and others the vaccines they need. The authorities must investigate this abuse of power immediately.”

Twitter sues Texas over Trump ban, says Attorney General Paxton now “retaliating” with investigation

Twitter is suing indicted Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The social media company says an investigation launched by Paxton into why Twitter banned Donald Trump from the platform is political retaliation.

The lawsuit, first reported in Politico on Monday, alleges that Paxton abused his office to investigate whether Twitter’s content moderation policies warranted a ban. Twitter, which called Paxton’s move an act of “retaliation,” maintained in its complaint that the ban was in line with “its First Amendment rights.”

“Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office,” Twitter alleged, “including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees.”

“In this case,” the company continued, “the Texas Attorney General is misusing the powers of his office to infringe on Twitter’s First Amendment rights and attempt to silence free speech. As we’ve repeatedly stated, and recent research underscores, we enforce the Twitter Rules judiciously and impartially across our service.”

On Jan. 13, just days after the fatal insurrection at the Capitol, Paxton announced that he would be launching an investigation into Twitter –– as well as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple –– for what he called a “seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President”.”

Paxton said in a statement back in January that “the seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President of the United States and several leading voices not only chills free speech, it wholly silences those whose speech and political beliefs do not align with leaders of Big Tech companies.”

According to Politico, Twitter reportedly attempted to find a compromise with the attorney general by limiting the ambit of the evidence his office was requesting. However, no such deal was ever struck

The suit comes amid a wave of state-level Republican backlash against Big Tech coming off the back of the Capitol riot. In December, Paxton spearheaded a lawsuit leveled by ten conservative attorneys general against Google for running an illegal digital advertising monopoly in conjunction with Facebook.

Other GOP politicians have introduced bills that would make it easier to sue tech companies for “censoring” posts –– a phenomenon many conservatives erroneously believe affects them far more than those on the left.

Back in January, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Tex., tweeted that “Big Tech is increasingly wielding their power and market dominance to silence conservative voices, and we need to put an end to it.”

Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Tex., echoed her in a Jan. 7 tweet, alleging that Section 230 –– which provides tech companies immunity from civil liabilities that would come of objectionable content –– has allowed “Big Tech to SILENCE the leader of the free world.”

Some have predicted that Big Tech “censorship” will become a kitchen table issue as the anti-Silicon Valley sentiment takes greater hold of the Republican Party.

ACLU slams Biden on migrant policies: He “just dusted off Trump’s CLOSED sign”

Civil rights groups have slammed the Biden administration for denying entry to thousands of people affected by Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” as immigration advocates grow frustrated with President Biden’s slow rollback of his predecessor’s policies.

Biden, who called the Muslim ban “morally wrong,” rescinded the ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries immediately after taking office. The State Department said on Monday that those denied entry by the ban could reapply but applicants who were selected for the diversity lottery — which aims to boost migration from underrepresented populations — but then denied entry because of the ban would not be eligible for new visas. The department said that the “deadlines for visa issuance” under that program have “expired.”

The American Civil Liberties Union sharply criticized this announcement, warning that a disproportionate number of Africans would be impacted by the ban, saying Biden “has failed to help so many of those harmed” by his predecessor.

“The opportunity to ‘win’ a diversity visa is a rare and life-changing opportunity that was snatched away from thousands of people because of President Trump’s hatred and discrimination,” Manar Waheed, the ACLU’s senior legislative and advocacy counsel, said in a statement. “Instead of restoring this opportunity, President Biden just dusted off Trump’s ‘CLOSED’ sign and locked the door behind him.”

Waheed added that the decision “threatens to forever prevent thousands of Black and Brown immigrants who meet all the legal requirements to immigrate to the United States from doing so.”

“Although Biden made the Muslim ban recession a day one priority, that alone is not enough,” she said. “Today, he cemented Trump’s legacy of harm.”

Abed Ayoub, the legal policy director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, called the decision “disheartening and disappointing.”

Progressive lawmakers also criticized the decision.

“This is infuriating,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., tweeted on Tuesday.

“The Muslim ban is a stain on our national conscience,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., tweeted, quoting Biden’s remarks about the policy. “So the cycle of harm must be broken. This is unacceptable.”

Critics say the decision highlights the Biden administration’s lack of impetus in rolling back Trump-era policies decried by Biden on the campaign trail.

The New York Times reported on Monday that the number of unaccompanied migrant children detained in “facilities akin to jails” has tripled in just the last two weeks and that more than a third of them have been detained longer than legally allowed amid a shortage of capacity at shelters. The children are being held at Customs and Border Protection facilities that were intended to house adults and have drawn scrutiny for horrific conditions.

This year has seen a surge of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border greater than any in the past decade, straining the government’s capacity. The Biden administration already decided to reopen an emergency border facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, that had been shuttered under the Trump administration after a backlash over its poor conditions. The White House has argued that the additional space was necessary because the alternative is either to send children back or release them without a proper sponsor. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said earlier this month that it “takes time to build out of the depths of cruelty that the administration before us established.”

Linda Brandmiller, a Texas attorney who represents unaccompanied minors, told The Washington Post that reopening the emergency facilities was “unnecessary, it’s costly, and it goes absolutely against everything Biden promised he was going to do.”

“It’s a step backward, is what it is,” she said. “It’s a huge step backward.”

Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said on Twitter that “this is not okay,” no matter the “administration or party.”

The Biden administration has also drawn scrutiny for its handling of family detention. Though Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a court filing last week that it is transitioning to a system that will release families after no more than 72 hours, an ICE official told NBC News that the administration is not ending the family detention policy.

“ICE does maintain and continues to a system for family detention,” the official said. “We are not ending family detention. We are not closing the family detention centers.”

Despite the court filing, the official told NBC, the agency “will not impose a 72-hour limit” and “will continue to hold families until the 20-day court mandated limit.”

Mayorkas did not address that policy question but told NBC that a “detention center is not where a family belongs” and the department will work to make sure everyone is treated humanely.

Immigration advocates have expressed outrage. “The Biden administration promised to stop the detention of families by private prison companies,” Shalyn Fluharty, director of the legal immigration assistance group Proyecto Dilley, told NBC. “This is not the just and humane response these vulnerable families deserve.”

Biden has rolled back Trump’s policies preventing foreign students from getting visas, restarted the program to protect Dreamers, and vowed to expand the number of refugees admitted into the country. But there is no timeline for changes to the refugee program and Biden has left numerous Trump-era policies in place, including a pandemic rule that turned away migrants who aren’t unaccompanied children at the border.

Immigration advocates agree that rolling back Trump’s legacy of hundreds of changes to immigration policy will take time, but want to see the Biden team moving forward, not backward. Administration officials say changes won’t be made overnight but agree that it’s imperative to undo Trump’s damage.

“At every step of the way we’re looking at where are the bottlenecks and then trying to eliminate those bottlenecks and yes it won’t be solved by tomorrow,” Esther Olavarria, deputy director for immigration at the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, told The New York Times. “But if you don’t start to do each of these things, you are never going to solve the problem.”

New York prosecutors now looking into Seven Springs Estate, one of Trump’s “bigger legal nightmares”

Prosecutors in New York are advancing two separate probes into Seven Springs Estate, a 213-acre estate in Westchester County that Donald Trump unsuccessfully attempted to develop in conjunction with the Trump Organization. While not one of the former president’s marquee estates, the twin investigations into Trump’s sleepy mansion, Associated Press reporter Michael Sisak noted, “could end up being one of his bigger legal nightmares.”

Trump originally valued the estate –– which he bought for $7.5 million in 1995 –– at up to $291 million in financial statements that New York prosecutors alleged were given to a variety of lending institutions. There is suspicion that Trump may have inflated the value of the property in order to secure larger loans.

The grand jury subpoena demands access to documents related to Seven Springs’ valuations, tax assessments, conservation easements, and tax appeals.

The new subpoenas come amid a three-year-long investigation launched by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance back in 2018, initially probing the hush-money payments Trump allegedly made to women with whom he’d had extramarital affairs. However, the ambit of Vance’s investigation has widened since then, covering possible tax and insurance fraud. Vance is also reportedly probing loans received by several of Trump’s flagship Manhattan properties.

Last year, Trump’s legal team repeatedly asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block Vance’s probe, but the Court has since shot down his efforts. The Wall Street Journal reports that Vance has now issued new subpoenas requesting recordings of government meetings in which the development of Seven Spring was discussed.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is also conducting a civil probe into the Trump Organization. James’ office has indicated that 2015 court documents show Seven Springs received a $21.1 million tax deduction. Her office is “seeking information concerning whether the Trump Organization and its agents improperly inflated, or caused to be improperly inflated, the value of the Seven Springs Estate.”

“Valuations of Seven Springs were used in connection with an appraisal….to claim an apparent $21.1 million tax deduction for donating a conservation easement on the property in tax year 2015, and in submissions to financial institutions as a component of Mr. Trump’s net worth,” James’s office wrote back in August of last year.

The engineer of the estate, Ralph Mastromonaco, told CBS News that the Trump Organization attempted to get approval for a luxury subdivision, an effort that dates back to at least 2004 and continued through 2015.

By 2015, after Trump failed to secure the necessary zoning permits, the Trump Organization had reportedly nixed the plans, instead opting to put 158 acres of the estate’s land in a conservation easement, which yielded the $21.1 million tax deduction.

The New York Attorney General’s office alleged back Aug. 2020 that the Trump Organization refused “to produce records sufficient to show how a $21.1 million apparent tax deduction in connection with the Seven Springs conservation easement was reflected on applicable tax returns.”

Cacio e pepe pie is an insanely easy pasta dinner to make on nights when you don’t feel like cooking

It often feels like the word “cook,” both as a noun and verb, is a female thing. Whether stirring a pot or pulling a cake from the oven, the image of the woman at the stove is ubiquitous. It’s powerful, and sometimes it’s really suffocating.

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. Author and illustrator Lindsay Gardner says she also “just started questioning that whole thing” only a few years ago.

“Why do I spend so much time doing it?” she asked. “What does this mean about my identity as a woman that I’m in the kitchen a lot? And then what happens when I don’t actually want to be here, and it still has to get done?”

The result of that questioning is “Why We Cook: Women on Food, Identity, and Connection,” a new collection of essays, interviews, illustrations and (of course) recipes from the most influential women in the culinary world. In addition to Dorie Greenspan, Carla Hall, Priya Krishna, Christina Martinez and Ruth Reichl, “Why We Cook” also features ordinary home cooks like me. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful book, a buffet of approaches to the kitchen that show we’re all in this together even though we’re inevitably doing it a different way.

What’s your go-to comfort food? Tell us in the comments!

“There’s so much gray area in this conversation that I don’t think gets talked about a lot,” Gardner says. “You can love cooking and also really not want to do it sometimes. You can totally respect the art form and be curious about it and also resent having the burden of it in your life. Those two things can exist in the same person — and that’s OK.”

She adds, “One thing that really stands out is that it’s OK to have all of the feelings. In having those conversations, there was so much connection. That actually does stick with me when I am in the kitchen. Whether I’m in a great mood when I’m cooking or when I’m like, ‘I really don’t know what to make for dinner, and I guess it’s going to be pasta and whatever’s in the veggie drawer,’ I feel there’s strength in that.”

I do, too. My own desperation dinners often revolve around a similar version of Lindsay’s script, and they usually conclude with a baked pasta dish. So I was simultaneously appalled and intrigued when a truly horrifying “SpaghettiOs pie” recently went viral. The first time I watched the clip of a cheerful young woman with a perfect blowout pouring milk — to make this dish “juicy” — into a pie shell filled with the Campbell’s staple, I found myself moaning, “Oh, nooooooo,” into the void.

She was cheerfully flattening buttered bread with her forearms to form the crust. Her forearms. Is this new wave of gag-inducing cooking videos all an elaborate prank? Or are they sincere culinary attempts? As The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull conjectured in February, the answer is probably both. But while the gross-out recipe may be an easy way to rack up clicks, I just need to feed my family.

I always seem to make too much pasta, resulting in a near omnipresent storage container of plain, cooked noodles somewhere in the back of the fridge. I also always seem to have a variety of assorted hunks of miscellaneous cheeses floating around. Cacio e pepe pie is the perfect solution — a very Italian, incredibly flexible and truly delicious spiffed-up version of mac and cheese.

There are similar recipes out there that call for blobs of ricotta cheese or outrageous amounts of eggs, but I prefer to tread as lightly as possible so that all of the other good stuff shines. Because black pepper is the star ingredient here, I highly recommend revisiting the whole black pepper you’ve had rattling around in your grinder since Barack Obama was president. Good black pepper is inexpensive; available at any supermarket, it should be fragrant and a little floral. Don’t be shy about it tonight: It has the power to elevate this lazy weeknight dinner into something pretty special.

Cheesy, crusty and very peppery, cacio e pepe is always a very good answer (at least for another meal) for what to make if you love cooking but also don’t feel like making dinner.

***

Recipe: Baked Cacio e Pepe Pie

Inspired by David Leibovitz and Food & Wine

Serves: 6 to 8 (Yes, there will be leftovers for lunch!)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of whole milk (or the milk of your choice)
1 cup of grated hard cheese like parmesan or romano, plus extra for topping
1 1/2 cups of melting cheese like mozzarella, provolone or Swiss (in any combo you like)
2 eggs
4 (or more!) cloves of minced garlic
1 lb of pasta, cooked (Round is fun, but any shape works!)
Black pepper
A healthy pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Grease a 9″ springform pan. Though softened butter is amazing, any oil will do. Wrap foil around the base of the pan, and put it on a baking sheet. (If you don’t have a springform pan, substitute a 9″ cake pan, cast-iron skillet or baking dish.)
Whisk together your first 5 ingredients in a large bowl. Generously grind in black pepper; add red pepper flakes, if desired.
Add cooked pasta, and stir to coat.
Pour the mixture into your pan. Do not pat the pasta down; you want some crunchy parts. Top with remaining cheese.
Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until the center is set and the top is lightly browned. (For extra golden color, run under the broiler for 1 to 2 minutes.)
Allow pan to cool, then gently run a knife along the sides of the pan to loosen the pie. Release from springform pan, or simply cut slices straight from your pan or skillet. Top with a very big grind of pepper.

Pro-tip: You should pair this insanely easy pasta dish with a relaxed white wine (if you drink!) and a salad of bitter greens.

***

More Quick & Dirty: Have you read the first four columns?

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A (culture) war of desperation: Without Trump, Republicans wage their last stand

Back in the 1970s and 80s, a group of young Republican campaign operatives and consultants, including familiar names from today like Karl Rove and Roger Stone, took up the baton that was dropped when Richard Nixon’s crooked men all went to jail. One of them was a canny strategist from South Carolina named Lee Atwater, who became powerful and famous first working for hardcore racists in his home state, then joining the Reagan revolution and finally becoming campaign manager for George H. W. Bush in 1998. Atwater gave an infamous interview in 1991 in which he explained how conservatives had been able to win for years by simply screaming racial epithets, only for the strategy to backfire as the country evolved:

So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than [the “N” word.]

Such dog whistles, phrases that only racists understand as racist, are repeated over and over again by the right-wing media and Republican politicians until the subliminal meaning becomes so reflexive that GOP voters can’t articulate why terms like “tax and spend” evoke such an emotional response in them.

Consider the violent reaction against Obamacare, a health care program designed to benefit people of all races who weren’t covered by employer insurance or some other program like the VA. Republicans lost their minds over it and they were never really able to explain why except for some vague notion of a government takeover of everyone’s health care despite the fact that the program was backed by the insurance and hospital industries. Republicans just rejected the reforms rooted in right-wing ideas initially pushed by the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney automatically and it’s clear their fury was even more fueled by the fact that such a program had been championed by the first Black president. Obamacare pushed every button the Republican strategists had built into their narrative for the previous 40 years.

So by the time Donald Trump finally committed to running for president as a Republican, he didn’t have to care about or be inconvenienced by even the slightest of subtleties such as a dog whistle. He just spewed blatantly racist rhetoric all over the place and it turned out that it was exactly what those Republican voters had been yearning for.

Back in 2016, I wrote a piece for Salon called “Nothing Left But The Dog Whistle” when it became clear that all the right-wing intellectuals’ worship of Ayn Rand and paeans to free markets had no substantive meaning in themselves to their base voters. They wanted their red meat plain and sizzling and they loved that someone was finally feeding it to them. Five years later, Trump has been defeated, the country is reeling from the wreckage he left behind with the Democrats back in charge trying to clean up the mess. To the extent the GOP establishment cares at all about their former small government, laissez-faire ideology, they seem content to make a few passing comments about “liberal wish lists,” vote against everything and then go back to delivering shrill diatribes about cancel culture to entertain the faithful on Fox News. And as a Media Matters analysis found, the right-wing media’s coverage of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill expected to pass in the House of Representatives on Wednesday has been lackluster as well. Fox News and company are all much more concerned with the culture war battle of the day.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) yells at the GOP over union organizing bill: “Heaven forbid we pass something that’s going to help the damn workers in the United States of America.”

He adds: “Now stop talking about Dr. Seuss, and work with us …” pic.twitter.com/0RbmxQUPxB

— The Recount (@therecount) March 9, 2021

And whither the venerable conservative economic institutions like the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth? The Chamber endorsed the COVID bill. The fact that GOP officials didn’t even blink tells you everything you need to know. The Club for Growth lobbied GOP senators to vote against President Trump’s first COVID relief bill last March and were similarly ignored. They haven’t been heard from since.

This would have been unimaginable a decade ago. In fact, we don’t have to imagine it. In 2009, they went into hysterics over President Obama’s stimulus package that was half the size of this one.

I suspect the Republicans are betting, as many of the experts have predicted, that the economy is going to rebound sharply once the pandemic is under control and they may be looking at a very robust recovery going into the midterms anyway. Trying to run against that is unlikely to be very popular even with their own voters. So culture war is probably all they’ve got anyway.

CNN’s Ron Brownstein took a look at some recent polling of Republican voters and the results lay out a roadmap for their strategy. He found that in one recent survey of GOP voters, “anxiety about America’s changing identity in an era of growing racial and religious diversity has emerged as the core unifying principle of the GOP coalition” with immigration, lack of support for the police (read: Black Lives Matter), liberal media and moral decline as their top issues. A poll in January showed that “roughly 9 in 10 Trump voters agreed with a series of stark propositions: that America is losing faith in the ideas that make the country great, that Christianity is under attack in the US and that discrimination against Whites ‘will increase a lot’ in years ahead.” Virtually all of these people are convinced that there is no discrimination in America against well, anyone except them.

Citing some interesting research in the journal Political Behavior about the role of victimization in American politics, Parker Molloy at Media Matters reports that it was central to both Donald Trump’s success as well as a necessary component of right-wing media’s hold on its audience. She writes:

The authors found that people who engaged in egocentric victimhood (“I am the victim because I deserve more than I get”) were more likely to support Trump during his 2016 campaign, while people who engaged in systemic victimhood (“I am the victim because the system is rigged against me”) were less likely to vote for Trump.

This is what’s driving the GOP’s current assault on voting rights and their mind-numbing obsession with “cancel culture.” The racist genie is out of the bottle and after four years of Donald Trump giving voice to all their cultural resentment and anxieties it can’t be pushed back in. The Republican establishment has simply lost whatever will they might have had to resist. They have obviously decided that their only chance to stay in power is to join the club.

Hojicha powder adds nutty, roasty flavor to desserts and drinks

Though brown in color, hojicha is actually a type of green tea made from the plant’s lower leaves, stalks, stems, and twigs. These components are charcoal-roasted in a ceramic pot over high heat, and sold either as a loose-leaf tea or ground into powder. Hojicha powder can be used easily in a number of applications as an extraordinary flavor element for both savory and sweet culinary ideas

Though hojicha is roasted, doing so doesn’t change its green tea health benefits. Hojicha does have a lower caffeine content than matcha, which is a powder made from dried (and comparatively babied) young green tea leaves. For those with sensitivities to caffeine, a cup of matcha ingested at the wrong hour may lead to a sleepless night, so it might be time to switch to drinking hojicha at teatime and beyond.

Hojicha also has an instantly pleasing smell that happens to make you feel good when you inhale. And that’s because there is some nifty science involved!

“Hojicha produces an aroma from pyrazine,” explains Candice Ng, who works as the general manager at Stonemill Matcha in San Francisco, which sells hojicha grown in its birthplace of Kyoto, Japan. “This natural compound is produced during the roasting process,” she says. “Pyrazine can also be found in coffee and charred items like chicken on a grill. This aroma is known to help with relaxation, the same way the smell of roasted coffee does.”

“Hojicha is steamed to prevent oxidation, then dried,” Ng adds. “This process helps maintain the sweetness of hojicha but doesn’t necessarily lower the caffeine level, which is more likely due to the fact that hojicha comes from tea leaves and stems that already contain lower caffeine levels.”

What does change significantly during the process of roasting hojicha is its aroma and flavor, maturing into something deep and nutty. Hojicha powder is a versatile and sophisticated ingredient to add to your baking and beverage arsenal. Stonemill Matcha uses the powder for a steamed hojicha latte, blended with horchata for a “hojichata,” and stirred into yuzu lemonade for a hojicha Palmer. When it comes to baking, Ng recommends adding hojicha to desserts like ice cream, cookies, or chiffon cake.

“Items that have a high-fat content, like cream and butter, go well with hojicha powder, since the powder doesn’t dissolve,” she advises. “You need fat to coat the gritty texture.”

You also don’t need to use much in order to get big, no-grit results — a package or tin of hojicha powder goes a long way. Try adding a tablespoon to your everyday dishes — perhaps your hard-boiled egg or noodle water, French toast batter, pudding, or anything you think could use some roasted magic. It may just end up being your new secret ingredient.

Bake with hojicha:

Hojicha Almond Florentines

The 7 pantry essentials in my Malaysian kitchen

Welcome to Yi Jun Lo’s Pantry! In each installment of this series, a recipe developer will share with us the pantry items essential to their cooking. This month, we’re exploring seven staples stocking Jun’s Malaysian kitchen.

***

“Malaysia, Truly Asia.” It’s the singsong slogan my country is known for, blared in our travel ads across the world, with scenes of brilliant blue seas and dew-dropped rainforest accompanying the tune. While lush greenery and picture-perfect beaches are what many think of when it comes to the country, I’ve always thought they don’t show off just how “truly Asian” Malaysia is. To me, there’s no better example than our food. It’s where I see, smell, and taste the true extent of our multicultural, multifaceted country — without the need for any slogan-slinging or airbrushed ads.

Geographically, Malaysia is wedged between Thailand and Singapore, two countries with more internationally popular cuisines. While one is likely to find a tom yum and pad Thai outside of Thailand, and Singaporean chicken rice and chile crab is slated to be the new Asian culinary frontier, Malaysian food is still somewhat of a mystery to most who live outside of Southeast Asia. Those not in the know are missing out: The food of my country has centuries of history and rich veins of culture running through it. And when it comes to flavor, it’s packed with just as many tangy, spicy, slurp-able bites as its better-known brethren. (I’d argue it’s above all the rest, though I’m certainly biased.)

At its core, Malaysian food is a confluence of Malay, Chinese, and Indian flavors, pointing to our varied population demographic — the three ethnicities make up over 90 percent of the country. Ingredients like serai, the Malay word for lemongrass, and ulam, the catchall term for local herbs like pennywort and water celery, are native to the region, but due to the influx of Chinese and Indian immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, and an even longer history of European colonialism, Malaysian cuisine has greatly evolved over the centuries. We’ve adopted a procession of curries, spices, noodles, and rice, drawing from India, China, and even the Portuguese and British.

Walk through any town in Malaysia and you might find Malay warungs, or roadside restaurants, serving spicy rendang meat stews and lemang rice stuffed into bamboo tubes cooked over charcoal. Next door might be a few bustling Indian-Muslim restaurants, or mamaks, with roti, biryani, and colorful curries on the menu. Stroll a little farther along the same street and you’ll spot Chinese hawker centers touting Hokkien noodles, Hakka mee with minced pork, Cantonese roast meats, and chicken rice. Though vastly different, these food cultures intertwine on the daily in Malaysia.

Indeed, the punchiest, funkiest, most fun-to-eat flavors of Malaysian food often come from the melding of these disparate cuisines — from Malaysian chicken curries and tempoyak, a fermented durian condiment, to fish-forward laksas and our national dish of nasi lemak, served with fried anchovies, peanuts, crunchy cucumbers, hard-boiled egg, and a generous splash of sambal. Despite — in fact, because of — the myriad influences on Malaysian cuisine, many ingredients are cemented in the pantheon of the Malaysian pantry, and are indispensable to cooking any truly Malaysian meal. Here are seven of my favorite Malaysian ingredients, which I always have stocked up in my fridge and pantry.

* * *

My 7 Malaysian pantry essentials

1. Nasi Putih (White Rice)

Rice, or nasi putih, is the choice starch in most Malaysian dishes. While jasmine, basmati, and glutinous rice each have their place in Malaysian meals, the local medium-grain white rice is the true workhorse of our cuisine. From nasi ulam, a Malay dish of herbed rice and vegetables, to Indian banana leaf rice and Hainanese chicken rice, the common carb is rice. Heck, even our national dish, nasi lemak, features rice front and center.

2. Cili Padi (Bird’s-Eye Chiles)

Like its neighbors Thailand and Indonesia, Malaysia is also known for its eye-watering, head-tickling, capsaicin-heavy dishes. Bird’s-eye chiles, or cili padi, are notorious for their unsympathetically spicy kick, but when used in moderation, they can add an extra dimension to curries and sauces, and get you craving and salivating for the next mouthful.

3. Belacan (Fermented Shrimp Paste)

Fermented shrimp paste, or belacan, typically dehydrated and packaged as a compact cake, is a key ingredient in many of Malaysia’s slew of piquant dishes. While not spicy on its own, the pungent umami fishiness of belacan pairs perfectly with heat, adding complexity. The most common application is in the spicy, fishy relish sambal belacan. But beyond that, belacan is tossed into fried rice, mixed into laksas, and often tempered into stews and curries to lend savory, funky depth.

4. Serai (Lemongrass)

Lemongrass, or serai, is used liberally in Malaysia and throughout Southeast Asia. We trim the leaves, peel away the outer layers, then bruise or mince the fragrant stalks and throw them whole into curries, stews, and even in refreshing, summery drinks, harnessing that herbaceous perfume.

5. Gula Melaka (Palm Sugar)

Dark and floral, with notes of butterscotch and smoke, palm sugar, or gula melaka, is the choice sweetener in most, if not all, of Malaysia’s desserts. Local classics like cendol, shaved ice with pandan jelly, glutinous rice pastries called ondeh-ondeh, and the pearled tapioca pudding known as sago gula melaka use this sugar to great effect. Palm sugar is one-third of the holy trinity of Malaysian dessert ingredients, which also includes santan and pandan.

6. Santan (Coconut Milk)

Coconut milk, which we call santan, is the silky, aromatic cream from the flesh of the coconut fruit, and a must in Malaysian snacks and desserts. But in addition to adding richness to our cendols and bite-size steamed cakes known as kuihs, we use santan to temper spicy stews, enrich rendangs, and add body and subtle fragrance to rice.

7. Pandan

The leaves of this screw pine shrub, known as pandan, are a classic in Malaysian cooking. Adding a knotted and bruised bunch of pandan leaves to curries will bring herbaceous depth; blending the leaves and extracting their juices makes for grassy green-tinted desserts with a floral touch.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson calls pregnant women in US armed services a “mockery of our military”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson took a moment to trash women in the military who get pregnant.

Carlson began his show Tuesday mistakenly assuming that Piers Morgan was fired after he walked off the set of “Good Morning Britain.” Morgan, in fact, quit his job, and later tweeted that his mentor would have done the same.

In the battle between Harry and Meghan and the royal family, the real victim is men in the media like Morgan, noted one person mocking Carlson.

Carlson then turned to attack women in the military after it was revealed that flight suits would be made to accommodate pregnant mothers. Most women who are pregnant go on to take maternity leave or avoid combat while pregnant.

Scoffing, Carlson, who identifies as “pro-life,” said there are “new hairstyles” and “pregnant flight suits” because “pregnant women are going to fight our wars.”

“It’s a mockery of the U.S. military,” said Carlson. He went on to say that China’s military is “more masculine,” implying that the U.S. military should be more masculine like China. That said “men and women no longer exist,” said Carlson.

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

The Capitol attack: White supremacist terrorism meets evangelical Christianity

According to the fantastical, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory known as QAnon, a secret cabal of liberals, Hollywood celebrities and foreign governments is kidnapping and sexually abusing children before eating them. This ritual grants members of the evil global elite special powers they use to manipulate the world and oppress (white) Christians and other groups.

In QAnon’s alternate reality, a shadowy figure known as “Q” — who has been notably silent of late — sends out secret “drops” containing messages, clues and orders to true believers. As explained by Q, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have led a resistance movement against the Deep State, preparing for a great cataclysm called “the Storm,” in which Trump will seize full power (or, latterly, return to power) and all will be revealed. Ultimately, QAnon is an updated version of the infamous anti-Semitic libel “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a conspiracy theory which has existed since the early 20th century and played a central role in the Holocaust.

QAnon is also much more than a mere conspiracy theory. It is a cult that has destroyed families and relationships. It is a con that lures in the weak-minded and the vulnerable. It is a political force with ambiguous but substantial influence within the neofascist Republican Party. It could also be described as a live-action roleplaying game for lonely and socially alienated adults who are desperate for a sense of agency, meaning and community in their lives.

QAnon also has elements of religion. Adrienne LaFrance writes at the Atlantic:

The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

Trust the plan. Enjoy the show. Nothing can stop what is coming.

As a new religion, the emergence of QAnon coincides with and has fueled the Republican Party and Trump movement’s embrace of right-wing terrorism and other political violence.

Terrorism and extremism expert Colin Clarke told the Independent how white right-wing Christian evangelicals are being radicalized by the QAnon conspiracy theory into committing acts of terrorism:

“It’s not going to get better anytime soon, unfortunately… Conspiratorial thinking is very closely associated with high-anxiety situations and endless wars, elections and national tragedies,” he said.

Moreover, Clarke said there has been a “crossover” between the QAnon systems and evangelical Christianity that is going to imbue right-wing extremism with the sort of violent fanaticism more associated with al-Qaeda or Isis.

“Religious terrorism tends to be more lethal, because people believe they’re serving a higher purpose by committing acts of violence, as opposed to secular groups or ethno-nationalists who are fighting over territory or land,” he explained. “You can’t negotiate with these people, and you especially can’t negotiate with QAnon, because how do you assuage grievances that don’t exist?”

Clarke also posited that synergies between QAnon and the American anti-abortion movement — another religiously inspired faction that dominates the GOP — could spark extremist violence in the mold of the string of bombings carried out by Eric Robert Rudolph between 1996 and 1998.

In an effort to understand how white Christian evangelicals are being radicalized into terrorism and other forms of extremism, I recently spoke with Robert Jones, CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Jones is also a leading scholar on religion, politics and culture. His essays and other commentaries have been featured by the Atlantic, CNN, NPR, The Washington Post and the New York Times.

Jones is also the author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity” and “The End of White Christian America.”

In this conversation, Jones explains how Trump’s insurrection and the Capitol attack should also be understood as expressions of white supremacy and Christian nationalist violence. He also details how white evangelicals actually believe that they are being oppressed and have become victims in America — false beliefs which make them very susceptible to conspiracy theories such as QAnon, political extremism and, in the worst-case scenario terrorism and political violence such as we witnessed on Jan. 6. Jones also explores why white evangelicals are so loyal to Donald Trump and his political cult and what that reveals about American politics and society.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How do we explain white Christian evangelicals’ enduring devotion to Donald Trump, no matter what he does? He can encourage terrorism, attempt a coup, incite a lethal attack on the Capitol and engage in all manner of apparent crimes, and they still love him.

Polling shows that even after the insurrection on Jan. 6, there are still supermajorities of white evangelicals reporting that they hold favorable views of Donald Trump. There was a majority of evangelicals saying before the 2020 election that they saw President Trump as being called by God to be president. That has been true throughout Trump’s presidency.

One of the most remarkable things about white evangelicals in terms of Donald Trump is how little their favorability toward him have changed. Two impeachments, major scandals —including sex scandals involving sordid matters such as having affairs and paying hush money — none of that really seems to have shaken their favorability towards Trump. It’s been very stable, somewhere between two-thirds and 80% favorable of Trump during the entire four years he was president.

There are two likely reasons for this. The slogan “Make America Great Again” was supposed to be changed to “Keep America Great” [for 2020]. The Trump campaign very quickly pivoted away from that and just stayed with the old slogan. The power of Trump’s appeal is a backward nostalgia which involves going to back to a previous time when white Christians had more power in the United States. “Making America Great Again” signals to that desire to “restore” that state of affairs.

During Trump’s campaign speeches, and even on Jan. 6, Trump would say things such as, “If you’re not ready to stand up and fight, America as you know it will be over. You’re going to lose your country.” But who is the “your”? Who is the “our”? Trump is appealing to a white Christian base. What he is communicating is, “I’m the person who’s going to help you continue to hold onto your sense of ownership of this country.”

For Trump’s base of voters that is what it is all about. His appeal is not about policies. It’s certainly not about abortion or same-sex marriage. The appeal is based around a single issue.

Looking at the Jan, 6 attack, what did you see when you analyzed that crowd of insurrectionists?

It was remarkable to me. There were Bibles, there were crosses, there were Bible verses on signs. There were flags that said things such as, “Trump is my president, Jesus is my savior.” There were shofars being blown, not by Jews but by Christians, who were convinced they were fulfilling some prophecy by bringing Trump into office.

Perhaps the image that stuck with me the most is that there was a fair amount of attention being paid to the Confederate battle flag being marched through the Capitol building. But what did not get enough attention is that there was also the Christian flag. Many people may not be familiar with it. That flag was being marched right into the House chamber along with the Confederate flag. They were all there. There was also a big white cross being carried up the steps along with all those other banners.

I am not quite sure that the American people as a whole really understand what the coexistence of all those symbols really means. The insurrectionists are telling us who they are. They very deliberately chose those symbols. They wore them on their clothes. These were white supremacists. These were Christians. Those two groups were not fighting each other. They were marching side by side.

The Ku Klux Klan is a white Christian right-wing terrorist organization. Many of the white supremacists and other terrorists who attacked the Capitol likely identity as “Christians.” Why the tendency to parse “Christianity” and “white supremacy” as somehow being distinct from one another?

I guarantee you that if all those people had been carrying Muslim symbols, the narrative would be that they were radical Islamic terrorists. America has such a long history of being dominated by Christianity that many people are reluctant to really see the connections between white supremacy and Christianity as part of American culture.

But you are exactly right. The Ku Klux Klan targeted not just African Americans but also Jews and Catholics, because they considered the United States to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant country.

What do we know about the relationship between the QAnon conspiracy theory and white Christian evangelicals?

Paul Djupe, who is a political scientist at Denison University, did a recent study looking at the overlap between QAnon and evangelicals. He found that more than half of white evangelicals agree with the basic beliefs of QAnon. It has made deep inroads. But that’s really not that surprising. When you look at the structure of QAnon, it is essentially a loose collection of pseudo-Christian ideas that have been floating around evangelical Christianity for decades. If we go back to the “Left Behind” novels from the 2000s, the building blocks of QAnon are right there.

For example, there is a big battle of good versus evil, a worldwide conspiracy to control the government, and the job of Christians is to be local prayer warriors who are allied with angels in a literal fight against their enemies, who are working with the devil.

QAnon has many of those same things. There is supposed to be a great “Storm” that will sweep away all the illegitimate holders of power and bring in a figure who is essentially the messiah. Donald Trump has been overlaid onto that “Left Behind” narrative. Combating the influence of QAnon is a really serious challenge for white Christian pastors.

What about the overlaps between QAnon and anti-Semitism? In many ways, QAnon really goes back to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Such ideas have been around for quite some time. They are certainly not new. QAnon is just their current manifestation. It is very important for pastors to make those connections for parishioners so that they can see the dangerous historical lineage that they are continuing with QAnon.

Why do white evangelicals somehow feel under siege or disadvantaged in the United States? In reality, they are oppressing other groups of people — white evangelicals are not “victims” in America.

I am from the South and understand how the idea of being under siege runs deep here. That is especially true in the culture of Southern evangelicalism. It goes way back to the Lost Cause mentality of the Civil War and as a backlash to the civil rights movement.

A proclivity to be the “victim” runs deep in terms of theology here as well. This is particularly true in white evangelical circles. Both Republicans and white evangelicals believe that they face more discrimination than other groups such as African Americans and gays and lesbians. That trend has been documented in the polling data and other research for several years. That sense of being under siege has become even stronger during the Trump years. It was certainly there before that, but it’s become even stronger.

What do we know about why white evangelicals gravitate to QAnon more than other groups of Christians? Both groups believe in invisible people who tell them things and share secrets only with them. One would think that Christians who are so oriented would be joining QAnon across the board.

By way of comparison, both white evangelicals and African American Christians share many similar theological beliefs. However, it is white evangelicals who are much more likely to be connected to QAnon and similar conspiracy theories. I do not believe that the answer lies in a common belief in something invisible. QAnon and other like beliefs are ultimately self-serving. At the end of the day, QAnon preserves white power.

We passed from being a majority white Christian country to one that is no longer majority white Christian. That happened proximate to Obama’s time in office. With him, the first black president, there was a very vivid symbol of demographic change. That really has set off a desperate struggle where many white Christians are now in a bid to hold onto their group’s power.

Weird things happen when you get desperate. Those white Americans are reaching for almost anything that will tell them that they are still the most important group in the country, that they still own the country, the country was created for their benefit. In many ways the bedrock of their worldview is crumbling.

PRRI has completed new polling and research on questions of “religious freedom.” What have you learned?

One of the clearest findings is when we ask people the direct question, “Do you think religious liberty in America is under threat”. Most Americans say no. But we have a very loud minority, four in 10 Americans, telling us that religious liberty is being threatened today.

Again, it is white evangelicals who really stand out as a group, with more than 70% of them saying religious liberty is being threatened. No other religious group in the United States comes anywhere near that. It really is just this one very loud minority group of white evangelicals. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that if you go back to 2008, they were 21% of the population. Today they’re only 15% of the population. As white evangelicals have started shrinking as a group, they are getting louder and more desperate.

When a group feels existentially threatened, they are more prone to engage in terrorism and other violence. They literally believe they are in a life-and-death battle.

White evangelical Protestants are at a very dangerous place in their history today. They have been accustomed to being in the majority, as part of the mainstream of American culture. They find themselves increasingly out of step with the country in terms of their beliefs and their attitudes. Their children and grandchildren are disaffiliating from white evangelical churches. It is a shrinking movement.

The danger then becomes that if part of your worldview depends on the belief that America is a Christian nation — and not just a Christian nation but really a Protestant nation — and moreover that your group are rightful inheritors of that country, and you add in leaders telling you that your country is being unfairly taken away from you, it all becomes a very dangerous powder keg. Such beliefs can lead to extraordinary responses. I believe that the extremes of this view are violent. We should take that very seriously.

We could fix our badly damaged democracy — but Republicans don’t want to

What could be the most momentous transformation of the U.S. political system in generations kicked off last week, but most Americans probably didn’t hear much, if anything, about it in their normal news diets.

A sweeping package of voting rights, election, ethics and campaign finance measures aimed at expanding the franchise, reducing the influence of money and fighting political corruption passed the House in the form of H.R. 1, the For the People Act.

Unlike when it passed the House in 2019, this time around the bill has a chance at winning Senate approval and has the enthusiastic support of the White House.

But the modest coverage of H.R. 1’s passage in major outlets was quickly submerged beneath other news. There was no mention of it on front pages or the evening network newscasts.

For big-media political reporters, democratic reform is boring. It’s old news. It’s painfully earnest. It is not sexy.

But the dearth of coverage of H.R. 1’s passage was a terrible disservice to the American public, and not just because it should have produced major headlines after the vote.

Political reporters should be writing about H.R. 1 — as a reflection of the need to bind the injuries our democracy has suffered — every single day, because those injuries are the underlying cause of all the political dysfunction they report on every single day.

H.R. 1 is a huge deal because it speaks directly to the ways American democracy has been warped — and that warping is what makes all the strange things that happen in Washington explicable. Why is there so much gridlock? Why don’t measures with widespread public support make it into law? Why do the wealthy so often get their way? Why are some votes worth more than others? Why aren’t liars and radical extremists held accountable?

All of that would be different if more people voted, if their votes were counted more equally and if big money didn’t corrupt elections and governing.

Republicans know it. That’s why, after decades of spreading disinformation about voter fraud to suppress voting, they are now weaponizing the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump to push for literally hundreds of bills in 43 states to even further limit the franchise, part of their increasingly overt attempt to subvert majority rule.

Progressives know it. That’s why almost every major labor, racial justice, voting rights, faith, environmental, women’s rights and good government group has joined the coalition advocating for H.R. 1 and is making its passage a top priority.

Most political journalists would acknowledge the extraordinary significance of democracy erosion and democracy reform if you pressed them. But only some of them see that an important aspect of their job as to explain the big picture, which generally isn’t obvious to ordinary news consumers.

Ron Brownstein at the Atlantic does that sometimes, and he wrote a terrific scene-setter on the day of the vote:

It’s no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy. The outcome could not only shape the balance of power between the parties, but determine whether that democracy grows more inclusive or exclusionary.

Every major news organization should have someone on the democracy beat. I see ProPublica is hiring. Until then, thank God for Ari Berman, now at Mother Jones, and his extraordinary coverage over the years, most recently about H.R. 1 and the GOP’s extreme voter suppression measures.

As Berman wrote, H.R. 1 “will soon move to the Senate, where this critical fight will likely lead to an all-out battle over how that chamber conducts its business.”

In 2019, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t even let the Senate consider it. Now, as David Hawkings reported for The Fulcrum, “Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised to force a vote on the measure,” but “has not signaled how quickly he will do so … or whether there’s a chance he might use that debate as the moment to undo the decades-long power of 41 dissenting senators to block legislation.”

Indeed, although the Biden White House issued a strong statement of administration policy describing the bill as “landmark legislation … urgently needed to protect the right to vote and the integrity of our elections, and to repair and strengthen American democracy,” the only way H.R. 1 could conceivably get passed in the Senate is if it can’t be stopped through a Republican filibuster.

As Berman tweeted:

Dems have a clear choice: they can get rid of filibuster to pass John Lewis Voting Rights Act & For the People Act to stop GOP voter suppression

Or they can allow GOP to undermine democracy for next decade

The stakes couldn’t be higher pic.twitter.com/S0lQifZLbq

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) March 1, 2021

Fellow progressive journalist Brian Beutler thinks it’ll happen:

If an asteroid were headed our way, and saving Earth required spending $10T, but Republicans were asteroid denialists and promised to filibuster the asteroid rescue bill, I think Dems would abolish the filibuster. This is more or less why I think the For the People Act will pass. https://t.co/XlQ4ExVdnu

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) March 5, 2021

Too much of what little coverage H.R. 1 got was procedural rather than contextual. Ella Nilsen’s story for Vox was actually headlined “House Democrats’ massive voting rights bill, explained,” but still focused on the politics and the filibuster.

Even worse has been the occasional story that tries to both-sides the issue of voting. No self-respecting reporter should validate political arguments they know are utterly fraudulent. An early version of a Los Angeles Times story last week got me pretty hacked off.

No. No. I'm sorry, but if you write a both-sides story when one side is trying to STOP PEOPLE FROM VOTING, you are dead to me.

"Both parties describe their clash in near-apocalyptic terms."

I am throwing up in my mouth, @DavidLauter. Retire in shame.

Democracy, yes or no? https://t.co/mKX4G0Awd1

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) March 3, 2021

Heck, polls show that even Republicans (voters, that is, not the party leaders) support H.R. 1.

Efforts to attack the core of H.R. 1, like the one last week from former Vice President Mike Pence, are compendiums of lies — from the old ones about nonexistent mass voter fraud to the new ones about “vulnerabilities” that led “large numbers of Republicans” to “not trust the outcome of the 2020 election.”

Yes, Republican rhetoric on H.R. 1 is apocalyptic, as a recent Washington Post editorial put it — and yes, it’s because the GOP is afraid of democracy, as the editorial asked. There is no bigger political story in America right now.

Joe Manchin vows (yet again) the filibuster is here to stay — so much for Biden’s agenda

Reminding his party one more time exactly how much power he yields in a split chamber, Sen. Joe Manchin delivered another blow to a potential progressive agenda under President Joe Biden amid renewed — but only brief — optimism that the moderate West Virginia lawmaker could be open to dumping the time-honored Senate filibuster.

A procedural tool that offers immense power to the minority, the filibuster requires a 60-vote threshold to advance legislation, effectively ensuring — given the current 50-50 Senate — that Republicans would have the power to prevent Democrats from enacting sweeping policy changes under Biden. (No party has held 60 seats in the Senate since Democrats briefly did after Barack Obama’s election in 2008.)

Manchin, the Senate’s leading proponent of preserving the filibuster, expressed openness over the weekend to slightly reforming it, such as reinstating the “talking filibuster.” That would require that senators physically remain on the chamber floor to block legislation. Currently, members can simply inform leadership they plan to filibuster without being present.

Effectively, a talking filibuster would create a higher bar for the minority to block bills and might mean that the Senate majority could simply play a sort of waiting game. For a fleeting moment, progressives thought that perhaps Manchin was coming around, only to have their hopes squashed on Tuesday when he clarified his position. In the Senate’s 50-50 split, Democrats would need every single one of their members to be on board in order to vote the filibuster into oblivion.

“I want to make it very clear to everybody: There’s no way that I would vote to prevent the minority from having input into the process in the Senate,” Manchin told Politico. “That means protecting the filibuster. It must be a process to get to that 60-vote threshold.”

Manchin will undoubtedly face increased pressure the deeper we go into the Biden administration, since it’s abundantly clear Senate Republicans will block any number of the president’s initiatives. Moderates like Manchin say the remedy is found in bipartisanship and negotiation. Progressives say it’s long past time to trash the filibuster, which is not enshrined in the Constitution and certainly wasn’t contemplated by the founding fathers.

But Manchin isn’t alone; Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is right there with him. The Arizona Democrat is also against removing the filibuster. Unlike Manchin, the lone elected statewide Democrat in what is now a red stronghold, Sinema represents a state that has been trending increasingly blue for some time. Biden narrowly carried Arizona, and the state now has two Democratic senators. (Sen. Mark Kelly, who ousted GOP incumbent Martha McSally in November, is the other.)

The Grand Canyon State’s voters are apparently more interested in passing new laws than preserving abstruse Senate rules, or so recent polling suggests. A Data for Progress survey reported by Vox showed that 61 percent of voters indicated they favored passing significant legislation, while just 26 percent said they preferred to “preserve traditional Senate procedures and rules like the filibuster.”

In a recent letter to a constituent, Sinema noted the long-term consequences dumping the filibuster could have on a future Democratic minority.

“Regardless of the party in control of the Senate, respecting the opinions of senators from the minority party will result in better, common-sense legislation,” Sinema wrote. “My position remains exactly the same now that I serve in the majority. While eliminating the filibuster may result in some short-term legislative gains, it would deepen partisan divisions and sacrifice the long-term health of our government.”

Rachel Maddow explains how prosecutors could nail Trump in Georgia criminal investigation

The immediate former president of the U.S. is facing several investigations and possible criminal charges. But in Georgia, prosecutors revealed Tuesday that the expert prosecutors involved in the criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s conversations with officials he tried to get to change the election results in the state.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow cited several cases in Georgia in which the RICO statutes were used to convict and jail multiple offenders. RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.

Over the weekend, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed that she would be looking at whether the RICO laws would apply to Trump in this case. She then brought in Atlanta lawyer John Floyd, who not only wrote a book on RICO cases, but has prosecuted the top ones in Georgia for the past two decades.

“Floyd’s appointment signals that racketeering could feature prominently in the investigation,” said Reuters. “It’s an area of law where Willis has extensive experience — including a high-profile Atlanta case where she won racketeering convictions of 11 public educators for a scheme to cheat on standardized tests.”

“And Fani Willis has announced a criminal investigation into efforts by former President Trump and others to corrupt the results of the presidential election in Georgia,” said Maddow. “She said when she announced the opening of that investigation, that racketeering was one of the crimes she was potentially investigating in question, efforts to corrupt the election results.”

“It’s not a stretch to see where she’s taking this,” Reuters cited Cathy Cox, dean of Mercer University’s law school. “If Donald Trump engaged in two or more acts that involve false statements — that were made knowingly and willfully in an attempt to falsify material fact, like the election results — then you can piece together a violation of the racketeering act.”

She explained that there are not a lot of people who avoid prison time on racketeering offenses and a charge can carry a 20-year sentence.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

Wallace compares Lindsey Graham to drug addict talking about “taking the good parts out of cocaine”

Not one Republican in the House or the Senate voted for the COVID-19 relief bill, which, according to former President Barack Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, is a big political gamble. Previous polls showed 77% support for the bill and a Pew Research Survey released Tuesday put support for it at 70%.

Meanwhile, the GOP is struggling to figure out how to hold on to whatever power they have left and search for their own identities in the post-Trump era.

Playing the clip of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, from an Axios interview over the weekend, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said that “listening to him talk about harnessing the magic is like listening to a drug addict talk about taking the good parts out of cocaine.” Graham told Axios that he wants to try and find the good parts of Trumpism and lift those up and keep the “dark side” away.

“That’s their best hope, someone who could destroy something that they’ve spent their lives as a part of,” said Wallace.

Politico reporter Eugene Daniels highlighted how Graham has evolved over the course of his relationship with Trump.

“It’s a gamble. It is a huge gamble, right? It’s not the type of loyalty that President Trump will give back, and it’s the kind of loyalty that he’s always demanded. He’s someone who says, ‘just trust me, follow me, I’m not going to tell you where we’re going.’ And he’s not going to give that back, and so Graham seems like he’s spent the last four and a half years kind of explaining away President Trump’s worst instincts and he can’t go back now, right? He can’t go back to the person who was saying that President Trump shouldn’t be the nominee of the party. He has to continue forward.”

When there are people like Graham willing to follow Trump, Daniels said that Republicans are aware that it’s a dangerous deal to make. Trump is already planning his revenge tour where he can trash Republicans who refused to support him and try and bring them down. It just adds more money the GOP will have to spend to defend them in 2022, at a time that many Republican Senators are retiring.

You can watch the video below via YouTube:

“Frightening” new data shows humanity has degraded or destroyed two-thirds of world’s rainforest

New data from a Norwegian nonprofit is generating fresh concerns about humanity’s destruction of the natural world, revealing Monday that people have ravaged about two-thirds of original tropical rainforest cover globally.

The Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN) analysis found that human activities including logging and land-use changes—often for farming—have destroyed 34% of old-growth tropical rainforests and degraded 30% worldwide.

RFN defined degraded forests as those that are partly destroyed or fully wiped out but replaced by more recent growth. The group’s definition for intact forest, considered too strict by some experts, includes only areas that are at least 500 square kilometers or 193 square miles; trees and biodiversity are at greater risk in smaller zones.

Two-thirds of the world’s original tropical #rainforest cover have been degraded or destroyed, new @RainforestNORW data reveals.

We need to stop destroying forests & other nature, for the sake of our health, biodiversity & #climate.https://t.co/JpCnyO2CR3 #Together4Forests

— WWF EU (@WWFEU) March 8, 2021

The RFN findings, reported by Reuters, show that over half of the destruction since 2002 has been in the Amazon and neighboring rainforests. Deforestation in South America—particularly within Brazil, home to the majority of the Amazon—has caused recent alarm given the role of rainforests in trapping carbon.

“Forests act as a two-lane highway in the climate system,” explained Nancy Harris, Forests Program research director at the World Resources Institute (WRI), earlier this year. “Standing forests absorb carbon, but clearing forests releases it into the atmosphere.”

A forest carbon flux map released in January by organizations including WRI found that between 2001 and 2019, forests emitted an average of 8.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually due to deforestation and other disturbances but also absorbed 16 billion metric tonnes per year over the same period.

Reuters reported Monday on RFN’s analysis:

As more rainforest is destroyed, there is more potential for climate change, which in turn makes it more difficult for remaining forests to survive, said the report’s author Anders Krogh, a tropical forest researcher.

“It’s a terrifying cycle,” Krogh said. The total lost between just 2002 and 2019 was larger than the area of France, he found.

Deforestation has surged in Brazil since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro—a foe of both environmental regulations and Indigenous people in his country—took office in early 2019. Brazilian forest loss hit a 12-year high in 2020, according to satellite imagery from the country’s space research agency.

“Instead of acting to prevent the increase in deforestation, the Bolsonaro government has been denying the reality of the situation, dismantling environmental agencies, and attacking NGOs who work on the ground in the Amazon,” said Greenpeace Brazil Amazon campaigner Cristiane Mazzetti in response to the data.

A look at tropical rainforest deforestation globally in 2019. Brazil/Americas far and away the leader. The drivers of destruction are similar everywhere though, logging or agriculture, whether for beef cattle in Brazil or palm oil in SE Asia. https://t.co/1ISxV6BL1A pic.twitter.com/I1zm1RZ9Mr

— Jake Spring (@jakespring) March 8, 2021

Bolsonaro enjoyed a close relationship with former U.S. President Donald Trump—and both leaders faced an onslaught of global criticism for their similar response to various crises, from the raging coronavirus pandemic to the climate emergency.

Comments from Brazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo on Friday suggest that the recent swearing-in of U.S. President Joe Biden may mean a shift. According to Reuters, Araújo—who has called human-caused climate change a “Marxist conspiracy”—said the administrations are now collaborating on the crisis.

“Something that was regarded as an impediment… is totally out of the way. We are now working together… as key partners towards a successful COP26 and fully implementing climate agreements,” said Araújo, referring to the United Nations climate summitrescheduled for November due to the pandemic.

A U.N. report released late last month found that the international community is quite far off from meeting the Paris climate agreement’s 1.5°C and 2°C temperature targets based on the greenhouse gas emissions reduction pledges that governments have proposed for the next decade.

Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian group Observatório do Clima, calledBolsonaro’s plan “a trainwreck of reduced ambition” that “violates the Paris agreement by giving the country a free pass to emit 200 million tons to 400 million tons of CO2 more than the 2015 pledge.”

“It totally eliminates any mention of deforestation control and it lacks clarity on its conditionality,” added Astrini. He warned against accepting “such a dangerous precedent” and called for global pressure on his government “to go back to the drawing board” and formulate a pledge “with real targets.”

Our new global report shows humans have degraded or destroyed 2/3 of the world’s original tropical #rainforest cover – key natural buffer against #climate change quickly vanishing https://t.co/CGnWVPfdr6

— Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN) (@RainforestNORW) March 8, 2021

The Amazon “represents the best hope for preserving what rainforest remains,” Reutersnoted, adding that Krogh found the world’s largest rainforest “and its neighbors—the Orinoco and the Andean rainforest—account for 73.5% of tropical forests still intact.”

While that fact “gives hope,” RFN tweeted Monday, the “current rate of destruction is frightening.”

The group found that after South American rainforests, the top deforestation hot zones since 2002 have been Southeast Asian islands where trees have been cleared for palm oil plantations followed by Central Africa—specifically around the Congo River basin, where forest loss results from agriculture and logging.