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It wasn’t an “intelligence failure” that left Capitol Police unprepared — it was racism

Steven Sund, the disgraced former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Department, was explicitly warned in a Jan. 3 memo from his own intelligence unit that thousands of desperate, violence-prone Trump supporters were planning to target Congress on Jan. 6, encouraged by the president himself. 

The memo didn’t really say much more than was already obvious to anyone paying attention, but it was authoritative, detailed and, of course, prescient.

Sund waved it off. He didn’t bother to share it with the rank and file. He didn’t equip his frontline officers with tear gas, or other non-lethal crowd-control weapons, or riot gear. Instead, he sent them out in street uniforms to man barricades made of bike racks, and get the shit beaten out of them. One officer died, and many others were injured. He let the Capitol fall to a mob.

But in his first public comments on Tuesday, Sund had the breathtaking gall to blame the breach of the Capitol not on his own poor decision-making, but on a “clear lack of accurate and complete intelligence across several federal agencies.” 

And the pathetic, credulous, ill-informed senators to whom he was testifying lapped it up.

They focused relentlessly on one minor data point — a Jan. 5 report from the FBI’s Norfolk field office, which described a single thread from a message board that called for war and included a map of the Capitol’s tunnels.

The report’s existence was disclosed by the Washington Post on Jan. 12, and the story made a huge splash because it was the first public evidence that the Capitol Police had in fact been forewarned.

But three days later, the Post published the real bombshell: a story about that Jan. 3 memo.

The Jan. 5 FBI report was shared with the Capitol Police intelligence unit. Sund said he didn’t get it, however, and under leading questioning from Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., blamed the unit’s director, John Donahue, for that failure. 

This one incident, arguably of no real significance, led senator after senator to express grave concern about what Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., called “colossal breakdowns” in intelligence gathering and intelligence sharing.

Sund’s story is that because of flawed intelligence, he judged the danger posed by the Jan. 6 protests as similar in scale to that posed by previous pro-Trump rallies nearby, none of which amounted to much. 

But take a few moments to read this one “redacted” excerpt from the internal Jan. 3 memo that the Post made public. Sund’s excuses fall apart. (The public really needs to see the full, unredacted memo, by the way.)

Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out. Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th. As outlined above, there has been a worrisome call for protesters to come to these events armed and there is the possibility that protesters may be inclined to become violent. Further, unlike the events on November 14, 2020, and December 12, 2020, there are several more protests scheduled on January 6, 2021, and the majority of them will be on Capitol grounds. The two protests expected to [be] the largest of the day — the Women for American First protest on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal protest in Areas 8 and 9 — may draw thousands of participants and both have been promoted by President Trump himself. The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event. This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike.

Imagine reading that memo and failing to put your own officers on red alert; failing to prepare them to repel what seemed like an inevitable onslaught. 

The closest any senator came to asking about that was Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. “It’s not that we had inadequate resources, but a failure to deploy the people that we were supposed to,” he told Sund. He noted that Sund had in a previous letter acknowledged knowing that white supremacist groups and other extremist groups were expected on Jan. 6 and might become violent.

“I really wonder why we didn’t take them seriously enough to be prepared for them,” Leahy said. “You said there wasn’t enough intelligence,” he said. “How much more intelligence do you need than that?”

Indeed.

The point is that something else was clearly going on in Sund’s head to reduce his sense of alarm. And if you think about it for just an instant, you know exactly what it was. 

As newly-elected Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. — a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests — put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps. … We would have been shot, we would have been tear-gassed.”

The reporting on this element of the story — why Sund and the House and Senate sergeants at arms, also older white men, weren’t particularly alarmed by the MAGA horde — has been terrible. Nearly nonexistent.

The one exception has been an article by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica, based on interviews with 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers. They reported:

The interviews …  revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.'”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once.

Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren’t even near the Capitol. Nobody asked why Sund didn’t give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two former sergeants at arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the “other“. 

Indeed, the only mention of possible complicity came when right-wing Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s choice of retired Lt. General Russel Honoré to lead a review of Capitol security. A day after the ransacking of the Capitol, Honoré told a TV station what a lot of people were thinking: “We knew they were coming; everybody knew they were coming,” he said. “I’ve just never seen so much incompetence, so they’re either that stupid, or ignorant or complicit. I think they were complicit”.

BuzzFeed’s Sarah Mimms tweeted:

Reporters from alternative media expressed some skepticism about the hearing and the senator’s questions. Daily Beast reporter Spencer Ackerman noted:

HuffPost reporter Igor Bobcic tweeted:

And veteran military reporter Sig Christensen tweeted:

But the mainstream media was typically disappointing. 

The lack of intelligent, appropriately skeptical reporting on the Capitol Police’s failure of preparedness has been absolutely shocking. It was shocking to me on Jan. 15. It’s still shocking six weeks later.

And now, reporters, like the senators, have focused on that one FBI report, and on Sund’s excuse that he didn’t have specific intelligence of a coordinated attack.

NBC reporter Ken Dilanian likened it to the 9/11 intelligence failures:

The AP reported: 

Faulty intelligence was to blame for the outmanned Capitol defenders’ failure to anticipate the violent mob that invaded the iconic building and halted certification of the presidential election on Jan. 6, the officials who were in charge of security declared Tuesday in their first public testimony on the insurrection.

The Washington Post reported:

An FBI warning of potential violence reached the U.S. Capitol Police on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack, but top leaders testified during a Senate hearing Tuesday that they did not see it.

But everyone paying attention at the time realized the Capitol was going to be the target on Jan. 6. And while in retrospect it all seems inevitable now, this momentous event in our history could very likely have been nipped in the bud by better preparation. Tear gas is very effective.

Similarly, while some of the insurrectionists were clearly coordinated, there is still no evidence that this wasn’t at heart, at least for some of them, a crime of opportunity: The hordes arrived at the Capitol, screaming mad, and — amazingly enough — were able to get in. While some appeared to be looking for victims, some of them simply wandered around taking selfies. Could they really have expected the Capitol to fall so easily?

The Washington press corps has finally found the courage to call out some lies: That the election was stolen; that the Jan. 6 insurrection was staged by antifa. Clearly, their bosses have given them the OK to call those out.

But when it comes to the regular business of Washington — particularly if there’s a whiff of racism behind the lies — it’s back to stenography.

At the very end of the hearing, Senate Rules Committee Chair Amy Klobuchar — did someone on her staff read my tweets? — finally mentioned that Jan. 3 report. She said it “contained … some pretty foreboding details that I would have thought would have resulted in planning and more preparation.”

So maybe there’s still hope.

Bernie Sanders breaks with Democrats to vote against a Joe Biden Cabinet nominee

Sen. Bernie Sanders broke with the Biden administration on Tuesday to vote against the confirmation of former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, as secretary of the Department of Agriculture.

The Senate on Tuesday voted 92-7 to confirm Vilsack, but Sander joined his Republican colleagues, including Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., Rand Paul, R-Ky., Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, in opposition. 

Biden lauded Vilsack for his handling of a vulnerable agricultural industry still reeling from the effects of the Great Recession when he announced his nomination back in December. When Barack Obama picked Vilsack as his secretary of Agriculture at the time to help implement the Recovery Act, he was confirmed with unanimous approval. However, Vilsack’s recent return to the Department of Agriculture had received more pushback.

“Tom Vilsack’s appointment to secretary of agriculture is the exact opposite of what an administration focused on ‘building back better’ needs,” wrote climate group 350.org in January. “In order to ensure a livable future, we need leadership that will fight for struggling family farmers, sustainable farming, and national food security, not corporate agriculture giants.”

Many progressives and civil rights groups representing farmers of color also rebuked the pick over Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, who has much stronger progressive and grassroots support from stakeholders but who Biden taped to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Lloyd Wright, former director of civil rights at USDA, told Politico, “When it came to issues of race, [Vilsack] was one of the worst I’ve ever come in contact with. What we don’t want is Vilsack to come back.” He added, “A reshuffling of the department leadership from four years ago will not do us any more good than what we have now. We didn’t gain anything under Vilsack.”

According to an investigative report referenced in Wright’s letter, from 2013 to 2015, a paltry seven percent of micro-loans were provided to black farmers and just 0.2 percent of USDA’s $5.7 billion loan provisions went to that same group. Other racial disparities relating to land and capital for farmers of color also occurred on Vilsack’s watch.

“There were no consequences to those very well documented discriminatory actions by USDA,” said Rudy Arredondo, president of the National Latino Farmers and Ranchers Trade Association. “To this day, there have been no consequences. Some of the folks that were there during that time are still in office.”

Opponents also took issue with Vilsack’s confirmation because of his past firing of Shirley Sherrod, the former head of USDA rural development in Georgia. Back in 2010, Sherrod was wrongfully terminated by the Obama administration because of a doctored video released by right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart that showed her ostensibly supporting racial discrimination. According to Politico, Vilsack’s nomination came just after a meeting held by Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., in which NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson had suggested that it would be unwise for Biden to pick Vilsack without at least consulting Sherrod. It remains unclear whether Biden made the call. 

During Vilsack’s confirmation hearing, the former governor made a point to emphasize the need to build up rural agriculture, rework trade policy, and tackle climate change. Vilsack also expressed reservations about Democrat-backed farming regulations. 

“USDA will lead the federal government in building and maintaining new markets in America that diversify rural economies,” Vilsack said in his prepared remarks, “investing in renewable energy; creating a thriving bio-based manufacturing sector […] and delivering science-based solutions to help mitigate and reduce climate change.”

Plastic trash can now be recycled into ultra-strong graphene

Packaging from the grocery store, lint from our clothing, plastic shopping bags – plastics and microplastics are everywhere, and they’re not going anywhere. In fact, it will take them hundreds of years to decompose in landfills . In order to speed up this decomposition process, scientists from Rice University are transforming these discarded plastics into non-toxic, naturally occurring materials. They’re doing this by using a newly developed technique called “flash Joule heating,” to rapidly heat plastic materials to very high temperatures .

Currently, there are a few plastic recycling techniques that are widely used, with differing results. For example, plastic bags are a huge contributor to the plastic waste stream – Waste Management, a trash collection company, estimates that over one billion plastic bags are used each year in the US alone. Even more shockingly, each plastic bag is used for, on average, less than one hour. Currently, the most common way to recycle plastic bags is by compressing them into composite lumber or small pellets, which can be used for building materials . While this is an excellent way to reuse single-use plastic, this plastic still is not biodegradable. 

In contrast, the “flash Joule heating” method turns plastic into graphene, which is highly recyclable and very stable. Graphene itself is incredibly strong and stretchy – 200 times stronger than steel. Graphene is a single layer form of graphite, a naturally occurring carbon-based mineral that is commonly found as pencil lead. Typically, graphite is mined and then mechanically processed in order to separate its layers, forming graphene. However, obtaining graphite can be expensive. By directly generating graphene from plastic waste, it is possible to reduce its production cost. Importantly, a reduced production cost can lead to broad implementation of graphene use outside of academic research – with lower production costs, graphene can be added to concrete, rubber, or asphalt to improve strength and performance. Innovations like this will likely make graphene much more widely available for commercial use.

In addition to reducing graphene production costs, using plastic to generate graphene has significant environmental impacts as well. First, high levels of pollution are caused by graphite mining. Generating graphene directly from plastic could disrupt the graphite supply chain, thereby decreasing mining activity and reducing pollution caused by mining. Second, this graphene production technique has the capability to transform landfills by reducing plastic waste. While graphene biodegradability is still being studied, research suggests that graphene can be broken down within a few months, which is much faster than other common plastics. Ultimately, direct laboratory production of graphene has the potential to make a huge environmental impact.

Flash joule heating is actually a fairly simple process that involves running a large current through plastic materials. Joule heating is a commonly used heating technique. If you’ve used an iron, you’ve seen Joule heating in action. When a current is passed through a conductive material, like the metal of an iron, it quickly generates heat. Flash joule heating just means that, rather than building up heat over time, a large initial current is passed through the material, which causes an intense burst of heat. In the case of plastic waste, with the right conditions, this intense heat can actually cause chemical transformations.

In order to transform plastic to graphene, there are some crucial intermediate steps. First, the plastic waste must be cut into small enough pieces to conduct electricity. Large sheets of plastic are typically resistive, meaning that they cannot conduct electricity. However, by cutting the plastic waste to an optimal size, it becomes conductive. After this initial processing, an extremely high current is applied to the plastic, heating it very quickly. This burst of heat chemically transforms the plastic, producing both a lower-quality graphene and some hydrogen and hydrocarbons. The low-quality graphene can then be flashed, or rapidly heated again, resulting in a high-quality graphene. 

The first author on the paper, Wala Algozeeb, explains that it was initially a challenge to obtain high quality graphene from the plastic waste. She says, “It was challenging to get high quality graphene from plastic waste in the beginning of our journey because of the [quantity] of volatiles that evolve upon flashing. We are fortunate to have a great team that thought of using two types of current (AC + DC) to improve the quality.” 

To produce high quality graphene, the current sent through the samples had to be optimized. The best graphene was made by using a combination of alternating and direct current.  First, an alternating current, where the direction of electric current periodically switches, is applied to the plastics for eight seconds. Alternating current allows the plastic to reach high enough initial temperatures to form graphene and facilitates rapid cooling in between pulses. The rapid cooling step, which is unique to alternating current, prevents the newly-formed graphene from stacking into layers. However, this alternating current generates an initial, low-purity graphene. 

At this point, a direct current can be applied for 500 milliseconds, a much shorter period of time. This direct current pulse reaches an even higher temperature than the alternating current step, which is necessary to form high-quality graphene. This study is the first example of using flash Joule heating on waste plastics. The authors had previously studied heating on different research-grade carbon materials, but applying their method to plastic required significant optimization of their system.

In addition to optimizing the currents, another challenge was determining what size to break the plastic into. In order to heat the sample, current needs to be able to run through the entire sample, not just one part of it. When the pieces of plastic were too large (larger than 2mm), the plastic powder was not conductive enough to flash. However, in contrast, when the pieces of plastic were smaller than 50 microns (1/20th of a millimeter), they just fell out of the flashing chamber. In order to solve this problem, the researchers tested a range of plastic grain sizes. After this testing, they found that plastic powders with a particle size between 1 and 2 mm was ideal for this process. 

Universal Matter, a startup company from this research group, is working on developing flash joule heating for plastic waste recycling on an industrial scale. This technique has a few major advantages over common plastic recycling techniques. One perk is that flash joule heating does not require any chemical pretreatment of the plastic materials, meaning that plastics can simply be broken up into small pieces and heated without the use of any additional harsh chemicals. Additionally, directly applying a current to the sample produces very similar results to using a furnace, but is more energy-efficient because it does not require high heating to an outside environment. Scientists estimate that this technique would cost only $124 to convert a ton of plastic waste into graphene. Curbside recycling programs can cost up to $150 per ton, with huge amounts of plastic ending up in landfills anyway. In addition to having a comparable cost, the development of alternative recycling techniques like this could be huge in terms of diverting plastic waste from landfills.

The researchers suggest that their strategy for converting plastics into graphite will be able to be widely implemented in factories and recycling plants. Algozeeb says “We think the future of flash graphene is big, especially in [the] waste management area. Given how affordable our graphene is, we think it will be used as an additive in cement, polymers and asphalt roads.” 

Market reports predict that the graphene market will increase by up to 40% in the next five years. Combined with the increased amount of trash generated in the US (approximately 35 million tons of plastic in 2018), developments like this one seem primed to move out of the lab into the real world. In the meantime, you can help fight plastic waste by making one small but significant change in your life: bring your own reusable fabric bag to the store with you.

Fishpocalypse? One-third of freshwater fishes are threatened with extinction, study says

The human population shows no signs of being threatened, though the same can’t be said for our fellow animals. In particular, freshwater fish, which humans have used for food, sport and as pets for millennia, are in the middle of an ecological crisis of our doing.  That’s according to a recent report put together by 16 global conservation organizations, which estimated that roughly one-third of the world’s 18,075 freshwater fish species face possible extinction.

The report, which was published by groups including the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Global Wildlife Conservation, argues that climate change, pollution, the introduction of invasive species, the destruction of habitats and overly aggressive draining and damming of the world’s rivers, lakes and wetlands have played a role in the decline of freshwater fish species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said that, of the more than 10,000 species whose conservation status has been studied, 30 percent are at risk of going extinct.

The extinction of billions of freshwater fish would have catastrophic consequences on the human world. As the study’s authors note, roughly 200 million people in South America, Africa and Asia rely on freshwater fisheries as their primary source of protein. Recreational fishing is a $100 billion industry in the United States and aquarium fishes are still popular pets, generating up to $30 billion worldwide.

Beyond these economic considerations, however, the report points out that “freshwater biodiversity is declining at twice the rate of that in our oceans or forests.” This includes 80 species of freshwater fish that were declared extinct by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 20 percent of them in the year 2020. The report also pointed out that, since 1970, populations of freshwater mega-fish (those which weigh more than 60 pounds) have fallen by a “catastrophic” 94 percent and those of freshwater migratory fish have fallen by 76 percent.

“Nowhere is the world’s nature crisis more acute than in our rivers, lakes and wetlands, and the clearest indicator of the damage we are doing is the rapid decline in freshwater fish populations. They are the aquatic version of the canary in the coalmine, and we must heed the warning,” Stuart Orr wrote in the report. “Despite their importance to local communities and indigenous people across the globe, freshwater fish are invariably forgotten and not factored into development decisions about hydropower dams or water use or building on floodplains. Freshwater fish matter to the health of people and the freshwater ecosystems that all people and all life on land depend on. It’s time we remembered that.”

The WWF has published other recent sobering reports on the animal kingdom. In September the conservation organization revealed that population sizes of “mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish” have declined by 68 percent since 1970. Once again, the organization identified climate change, pollution and poor management of natural resources as the main causes for the declines.

“Our planet is sending alarm signals between recent wildfires, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other extreme weather events,” Jeff Opperman, Global Freshwater Lead Scientist at the WWF, told Salon by email at the time. “We’re seeing our broken relationship with nature play out in our own backyards. The steep global decline of wildlife populations is a key indicator that ecosystems are in peril. Healthy ecosystems provide a range of benefits to humans like clean water, clean air, a stable climate, flood protection, and pollination of food crops. When populations decline and ecosystems begin to unravel so does nature’s ability to support human health and livelihoods.”

“This is unacceptable”: Democrats enraged by Joe Manchin’s plan to cut $15 minimum wage hike to $11

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia on Monday said he will push an amendment to slash the $15 federal minimum wage proposal in the emerging coronavirus relief package to $11 an hour, an idea that progressives immediately rejected as an “unacceptable” attempt to weaken a popular and long-overdue pay raise for tens of millions of workers.

Manchin—whose support Senate Democrats will need to pass a relief bill with a simple majority—told CNN that if the chamber’s parliamentarian rules that the proposed Raise the Wage Act of 2021 qualifies under reconciliation and can therefore be included in the final package, he will try to “amend it to $11.”

While the West Virginia senator provided little by way of specific details, he said that “we can do $11 in two years and be in a better position than they’re going to be with $15 in five years.” The minimum wage in West Virginia is currently $8.75 an hour, well below what workers in the state say they need to adequately provide for themselves and their families.

The Raise the Wage Act, reintroduced last month with the support of Democratic congressional leaders and President Joe Biden, would gradually phase in a $15 federal minimum wage over the next four years. Under the proposed phase-in structure (pdf), the $7.25 federal minimum wage would be raised to $9.50 by the end of 2021, $11 by next year, and $15 by 2025.

Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), who made clear earlier this month that he would prefer a much quicker phase in, said late Monday that progressives would not support Manchin’s proposal.

“This is unacceptable,” Jones tweeted. “The $15 minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular with the American people. One person should not be allowed to hold relief hostage.”

Evan Weber, co-founder and political director of the Sunrise Movement, noted that the estimated “living wage for an adult with no children in West Virginia right now is almost $14/hour.”

“By 2025 it will be well above $15,” Weber added. “$11/hr is not enough for West Virginia or anywhere.”

Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian, is expected to rule as soon as this week on whether the proposed minimum wage increase qualifies under reconciliation, a filibuster-proof process that requires all legislative provisions to have a direct budgetary impact.

Pointing to a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis showing that the proposed pay hike would have a broader impact on federal spending and revenue than two provisions of the 2017 Republican tax cut legislation—which passed through reconciliation—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Saturday that he is “confident” the parliamentarian will rule in favor of the Raise the Wage Act.

“I’m very proud of the strong arguments our legal team is making to the parliamentarian that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is not ‘incidental’ to the federal budget and is permissible under reconciliation,” said Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee.

 

While Vice President Kamala Harris has the authority to overrule the parliamentarian should she rule against the minimum wage increase, the White House has signaled that Harris would not be willing to take such a step.

As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) secured inclusion of the Raise the Wage Act in the House version of the coronavirus relief package, which is currently under construction in congressional committees.

The House doesn’t have to contend with the so-called Byrd rule—which empowers individual senators to object to reconciliation provisions they believe to be “extraneous” to the budget process—but both chambers must pass identical legislation for the relief measure to become law.

“A $15 minimum wage must stay in the Covid-19 relief bill,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the CPC, tweeted Monday. “I’m going to fight to ensure that it does.”

Biden nominee Merrick Garland vows to make Capitol riot investigation DOJ’s highest priority

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday as part of his confirmation as the U.S. Attorney General, Judge Merrick Garland pledged to make the Justice Department’s investigation into the Capitol riot his top priority.

“I don’t care who pressures me in any direction,” Garland told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The Department, if I am confirmed, will be under my protection for the purpose of preventing any kind of partisan or other improper motive in making any kind of investigation or prosecution. That’s my vow. That’s the only reason I’m willing to do this job,” Garland said.

Garland, who currently sits in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit as a circuit judge, recalled his experience investigating the Oklahoma City Bombings in 1995 when he was working in the Clinton-era Justice Department. “It looks like an extremely aggressive and perfectly appropriate beginning to an investigation, all across the country in the same way our original Oklahoma City investigation was,” Garland said during his hearing, noting that the current political climate is a far “more dangerous period than we faced in Oklahoma City.”

Over 230 individuals have been charged for their involvement in the Capitol riot, with hundreds more expected to be indicted on charges that span the criminal spectrum. Garland expressed his intent to follow trails of complicity from bottom to top. “We begin with the people on the ground and we work our way up to those who are involved and further involved,” Garland said, “and we will pursue these leads wherever they take us. That’s the job of a prosecution.”

Garland also spoke about the need for the Justice Department and federal prosecutors to have adequate resources to carry the investigation out. “I don’t know yet what additional resources would be required by the department,” he said, “I can assure you that this would be my first priority and my first briefing.” However, last month, Assistant Director of the FBI Assistant Director in Charge, maintained that the investigation currently suffers from “no manpower issue.”

With President Joe Biden considering the legislation of a new domestic terrorism law in the wake of the Capitol riot –– a law that Biden maintained “respects free speech and civil liberties” –– Garland was pressed on whether he too would be willing to expand the definition of domestic terrorism. Garland declined to give a clear answer, noting that the scope of current laws might already allow him to prosecute the insurrections to the fullest extent. Garland did, however, agree that domestic terror is rising in the U.S.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., asked Garland whether he intends to support the 9/11-style commission House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is launching. Although Garland expressed his support for the commission in spirit, he made a point to delineate any parallel investigations out of the Justice Department. 

Both Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C have expressed their support of the circuit judge, setting up Garland, who was famously blocked by Senate Republicans from even receiving a confirmation hearing as Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, is set to be confirmed vote by the Senate on a bipartisan basis.

At its heart, Obama and Springsteen’s podcast is redefining the toxic masculinity upheld by Trump

On Monday, former president Barack Obama and musician Bruce Springsteen launched the first two episodes of an eight-episode podcast collaboration called “Renegades: Born in the USA” on Spotify.

Springsteen and Obama have been friends for over a decade, and the podcast features them, as Spotify put it, “in deep and revealing conversation,” which took place in Springsteen’s New Jersey recording studio. 

“On the surface, Bruce and I don’t have a lot in common,” Obama said in the introduction to the first episode. “He’s a white guy from a small town in Jersey. I’m a Black guy of mixed race born in Hawaii with a childhood that took me around the world. He’s a rock n’ roll icon. I’m a lawyer and politician — not as cool.”

He continued: “But over the years, what we’ve found is that we’ve got a shared sensibility. About work, about family and about America.” 

The first two episodes of “Renegades” are primarily centered on race and racism. Obama talked about feeling like an outsider in Hawaii. Springsteen discussed the racial makeup of Freehold, New Jersey, and integrated neighborhoods. Both talked about the life and legacy of civil rights activist John Lewis. 

But a thread that already runs through “Renegades,” and is slated to be discussed specifically in a future episode of the podcast, is what modern masculinity can and should look like — a topic that was brought to the cultural forefront throughout Trump’s presidency, which was, in many ways, guided by his own pugilistic, narrow definition of manhood.

Take this section from the first episode of the podcast, in which Springsteen and Obama discussed that their wives, Patti Scialfa and Michelle Obama, had hit it off.  

“Michelle was very pleased in the insights you had about your failings as a man,” Obama said with a laugh. “And after we would leave a dinner, or a party, or a conversation, she’d say, ‘You see how Bruce understands his shortcomings and has come to terms with them in a way that you have not? Uh, you should spend some more time with Bruce, because he’s put in the work.’ So there was also a little of the sense that I needed to be coached in how to be a proper husband.” 

Springsteen, also laughing, responds: “It’s been my pleasure.” 

Already some key tenets of their shared understanding of masculinity come to light through that simple exchange: respecting your spouse as a partner, being cognizant of and owning up to your limitations, and continuting to work to become a better man and husband, which often means shedding some of the more toxic trappings of American masculinity. 

Both men have discussed the concept of toxic masculinity before. During a 2016 interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Springsteen detailed how he had to shed the idea that there is a singular pathway to being recognized as a man.

“You’re young and you’re always in pursuit of your young manhood,” he said. “You’re trying to figure out, what does that mean? There’s a lot of pressure on young men to sort that out and we tend to gravitate towards one-dimensional iconography as far as what it means to be a fully grown man.” 

He also clarified to “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross that his early on-stage persona was just that. 

“If you just looked at the outside, it’s pretty alpha-male, which is a little ironic, because that was personally never exactly really me,” Springsteen said. “I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad’s life and perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree.” 

Several years later, during a 2019 conference for his My Brother’s Keeper initiative in Oakland, Obama spoke about how racism plays a role in perpetuating toxic masculinity. 

“Racism historically in this society sends a message that you are ‘less than,'” Obama said. “We feel we have to compensate by exaggerating stereotypical ways men are supposed to act. And that’s a trap.”

Later in the presentation, he said that “the notion that somehow defining yourself as a man is dependent on, are you able to put somebody else down — able to dominate — that is an old view.” 

But it’s a view that did define Trump’s presidency. 

From shrugging off his “grab ’em by the pussy” rhetoric as “locker room talk,” to talking about his literal testosterone count, to portraying wearing a mask to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus as a form of weakness — and then allegedly wanting to rip open his shirt to reveal a Superman t-shirt after leaving Walter Reed after he was hospitalized for coronavirus —Trump’s form of masculinity was a kind of caricatured machismo.

“Donald’s masculinity is a cartoon version of masculinity – it is all bluster,” author Tom Digby told Salon in 2020. “Donald is all about bravado; he never demonstrates actual bravery. From his reliance on fake bone spurs to avoid the Vietnam War to his present attempt to escape political defeat by sabotaging the Postal Service, Donald has consistently demonstrated a total absence of courage.” 

However, as Salon’s Matthew Rozsa reported in January, a recent study found that support for a dominating style of masculinity could be used to predict one’s love for Trump. “Trump strategically used rhetoric in both his 2016 presidential campaign and during his presidency that evoked elements of hegemonic masculinity and attempted to position him as the ‘ideal man,” Schermerhorn wrote to Salon at the time. 

These limited views on what masculinity entails — stoicism, virility, dominance — can contribute to a fear of social and political movements that would upend current gender, race, and class-based status quos, which can result in aggression and violence. Through this lens, it’s not a surprise that Trump’s presidency culminated in an attempted insurrection at the United States Capitol. 

“Renegades: Born in the USA” promises to be a balm for that. At a time when the country is so fractured, due, in large part, to a president who refused to admit he was wrong, it’s refreshing to hear two men — who both represent America in their own ways — enthusiastically discuss overcoming their shortcomings and coming out better on the other side. As Springsteen puts it in the podcast, to change, you’ve got to forsake ego and “empty out and become a vessel” for empathy.

Episodes of “Renegades: Born in the USA” will be released weekly on Mondays on Spotify. 

 

COVID-19 survivors may be protected with just a “one-and-done” vaccine

This week, the United States reached a grim milestone: more than 500,000 people have died from COVID-19, while since the beginning of the pandemic an estimated 28.2 million Americans have been infected with the novel coronavirus. As the vaccine roll-out continues, scientists are working to better understand COVID-19 survivors’ immune responses as they gauge how many doses of the COVID-19 vaccine are needed.

Intriguingly, multiple studies now suggest that merely one shot of a two-shot vaccine regimen might suffice to protect the tens of millions of Americans who have already recovered from COVID-19.

According to one study posted on the preprint server medRxiv, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, one shot of either the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines significantly increased the amount of T-cells and antibodies in the blood samples of COVID-19 survivors. Notably, one shot of either vaccine also neutralized the B.1.351 variant in the same group’s blood samples. The B.1.351 variant emerged in South Africa and is believed to be more transmissible. Previous studies have found that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines in people who haven’t had COVID-19 are less effective against the variant.

The study adds to previous ones with similar results. Researchers at New York University found that a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in COVID-19 survivors didn’t add much benefit, either. A third study reached a similar conclusion.

Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that after patients have recovered from COVID-19, they should be vaccinated as usual — with no caveat about only needed one dose of the two-shot vaccines. 

“That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19,” the CDC states on its website. “Even if you have already recovered from COVID-19, it is possible—although rare—that you could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 again.”

However, the CDC adds that if a person were treated for COVID-19 with monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma, that person should wait 90 days before getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Notably, giving one dose of the vaccine to COVID-19 survivors could potentially speed up the vaccination process because extra doses could be redistributed by health officials.

“I think one vaccination should be sufficient,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, previously told The New York Times. “This would also spare individuals from unnecessary pain when getting the second dose and it would free up additional vaccine doses.”

The country’s initial limited supply has contributed to the slow roll-out. Vaccinating as many people as soon as possible is critical as the coronavirus mutates and more contagious variants emerge.

“We need as many people as quickly as possible, and this is one of the ways to go about doing that,” said Buddy Creech, director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program in Nashville, Tenn., told the Wall Street Journal. “If we had a significant portion of the population that could get only one vaccine and be done, that really allows us to move even more quickly.”

Beyond COVID-19 survivors, separate studies are also indicating that one shot of the two-shot vaccines are effective in people who haven’t had COVID-19, too.

Bullies aren’t all sociopaths — most are just trying to climb the social ladder, study says

If you were ever bullied as a child or teenager, the chances are that you were told at some point that bullies deserve your pity: That they have low self-esteem, are victims of abuse themselves or are acting out of mental illness.

Yet a new study reveals that a large number of bullies act as they do in order to gain status among their peers — and that in trying to climb the social ladder, they will often target their own friends. Indeed, researchers at the University of California–Davis, Pennsylvania State University, and Northeastern University have published a new paper in the American Journal of Sociology arguing just that. 

In the paper, the researchers describe an incident in which a Missouri seventh grader named Megan Meier was driven to suicide by her former middle school friend, Sarah Drew, who teamed up with her mother to bully the girl after she became popular and ended their friendship. The ensuing trial for Drew’s mother was heavily covered by media at the time.

Incidents like this, the researchers argue, demonstrate that there is a problem with the clichéd notion that bullying is primarily limited to children and teenagers with mental illnesses and damaged home lives. Instead, they claim experts should recognize that bullies are often motivated by the social rewards they believe they can receive from inflicting harm on others, even if those individuals are their own friends. “This is not because they spend more time with one another, but because they compete for the same social positions and relationships,” the authors explain. When people engage in bullying, they are frequently motivated by a desire to elevate their status at someone else’s expense.

“Our study differs from most of the previous work on adolescent bullying in that we don’t focus solely on the individual characteristics of young people, but instead pay attention to the broader social context in which adolescents are situated,” Dr. Cassie McMillan, professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University, told Salon by email. McMillan notes that a lot of anti-bullying programs have been ineffective because they focus on “individual-level traits” — meaning that they study the individual attributes of bullies and victims without placing them in the broader context of youth social networks. “We argue that adolescents often use bullying as a means to improve their social status,” McMillan continued. “We hypothesized that we should see a ‘frenemy’ effect where adolescents are more likely to target their friends and friends-of-friends, because these peers are situated on the same rungs of the social hierarchy.” Thus, bullying, McMillan argued, can be motivated by individuals within the same social group competing for “social rewards” — for example, “the starting quarterback position or the interest of a potential romantic partner.”

This position stands in stark contrast to the message that children often received in the ’90s and ’00s, which was that bullies were simply displaying pathological behavior.

“We are not the first or the only ones to make that case, but for a long time scholars did think of bullying as pathological behavior, rooted in psychological deficiencies and problematic home environments,” Dr. Robert Faris, professor of sociology at the University of California at Davis. He said that subsequent scholars learned through their research that “some bullies are actually quite popular and socially accepted,” and that through research he conducted with colleagues it was revealed that “aggression escalates as adolescents gain social status, until they approach the pinnacle of their school’s social hierarchy — when aggression is no longer needed and they desist.”

He said that another paper he had written looked at high school yearbooks and deduced that aggressive behavior works: “kids who are more aggressive are more likely to join high status social circles — the cliques of the prom royalty, the best looking, etc.”

McMillan noted to Salon that bullying creates trauma that lasts past the childhood and teenage years.

“Among the adolescents in our sample, we find that students who experience victimization from friends tend to report greater instances of depression and anxiety, and lower levels of engagement with their schools,” McMillan explained. “In other words, we are not observing casual horseplay or harmless locker room talk. Instead, these are serious incidents and victims are likely to experience long-term negative consequences that may impede their mental and physical health, educational attainment, and future social relationships.”

To avoid this type of suffering in both early and later life, Faris argued that “most anti-bullying programs do not work” and that kids who have already become popular through bullying are unlikely to stop simply due to group exercises and school assemblies.

“I think this leaves us with two alternatives,” Faris told Salon. “First, we can accept the reality of status hierarchies and try to find ways of co-opting or redirecting them to reward kindness instead of cruelty, building on the established finding that bullies may be popular but widely disliked.” He mentioned that there is an Israeli non-governmental organization, Matzmichim, that has adopted this approach. Faris argued that another strategy would be to “find ways to help kids forge stronger, more durable friendships, with the expectation that they will be less motivated to tear each other down to climb to the next rung of the social ladder.”

A fool-proof method for delicious pesto (and how to easily customize it with over 50 ingredients)

For many, a simple pasta dish is an easy, reliable weeknight option. However, said dish is almost always dressed with a relatively bare-bones marinara or possibly a simple garlic and oil sauce. Perhaps we’re talking about a a quick carbonara or even a cacio e pepe. But the actual easiest pasta dish seems to somehow get “lost in the sauce” — pun obviously intended. 

What dish am I alluding to? Pasta with basil pesto, of course! What a marvelous sauce, right? It’s colorful, healthful, bursting with vitamins and raw. Best of all, there’s truly no cooking required whatsoever to make pesto. It’s stellar when mixed with pasta, but have you ever had it as a sandwich spread? As a dip for crudites? Mixed with mayonnaise? Pesto cream sauces are on another level entirely — I can’t recommend them enough. 

A primer on pesto

The Washington Post states that “the first pesto recipe published in a U.S. magazine was in Sunset in 1946,” and the sauce didn’t “catch on” until the ’70s. Suddenly, during the ’80s, pesto experienced a huge popularity burst! But for the past 20 or so years, its enormous popularity seems to have waned.

While I’m unclear as to why pesto has somehow fallen a bit out of fashion since its initial boom in popularity, I appreciate the many virtues of the viridescent condiment. I hope this deep-dive makes you think, “Maybe I should make pesto tonight?” Or why not think of it as ’80s night? Put on some A+ Spotify playlists, and enjoy all of the wonders that pesto has to offer.

RELATED: 10 easy-to-make pasta dishes for satisfying weeknight dinners at home

Pesto, explained

Pesto — as we know it today — generally refers to pesto alla genovese. It hails from Genoa, the capital of Liguria, which is in northern Italy. According to this love letter to the region from Saveur, the earliest known pesto recipe dates back to Giovanni Battista Ratto’s La Cuciniera Genovese, which was published in the mid-1800s. Originally made with a mortar and pestle, you can certainly make pesto with a food processor or even a blender now. But if you DO have a mortar and pestle, you really can’t beat making the dish that way.

It’s all about the base

The standard, classic recipe is as follows: fresh basil, Parmigiano-Reggiano, pine nuts, garlic, salt, freshly cracked black pepper and a generally high-quality EVOO. Some minor adjustments include parsley instead of basil, pecorino instead of Parm or maybe even an alternate oil instead of olive. 

However, there’s really no need to limit the realm of pesto, or as we’re referring to it today, the “pestro matrix.”

A fool-proof method for delicious pesto

The method is rather straight-forward: You want to blend together the cheese, nuts and garlic. When they’ve reached a fine consistency, add in the greens. Once the greens and other ingredients have begun to blend together, you stream in the oil — slowly — letting it turn the gritty paste into a cohesive, rich mixture. That’s it! 

How to best enjoy pesto with pasta

If you’re enjoying your new homemade pesto with pasta, be sure to save some starchy pasta water before draining. The water will help the pesto stick to the pasta and create a true “sauce.”

***

Pesto Pasta

Recipe: Classic Pesto 

  • 3 1/2  cups basil, other green or combination of basil AND another green
  • 1/2 – 3/4 cup oil
  • 3/4 cup grated cheese
  • 1/4 cup nuts
  • 1-2 garlic cloves
  • Kosher salt
  • Cracked black pepper 
  1. In blender, food processor, or with mortar and pestle, crush or blend cheese, nuts, garlic, salt and pepper together.
  2. Add basil and/or other greens, crush or blend, and then slowly stream oil until the mixture becomes smooth and near-homogenous 
  3. Season to taste.

***

Adjustments for every diet

From a dietary restriction perspective, omit the nuts if you’re eating nut-free and/or omit the cheese if you’re vegan — that’s really it. The greens, garlic and oil are permissible on essentially almost any diet, so feel free to incorporate those with reckless abandon. But definitely don’t forget to scoop a bit of starchy pasta water before draining your noodles — the water will help the pesto stick to the pasta and create a true “sauce.”

The myriad assortments of ingredients help keep the pesto matrix completely customizable, so feel free to feel free to rifle through your cabinets, scour your refrigerator and put together the best darn pesto imaginable. Have fun — the combinations are endless!

***

A customizable Pesto Matrix 

The Green (in place of OR in addition to basil): parsley, arugula, radish greens, carrot greens, kale, chard, escarole, spinach, broccoli rabe, fennel fronds, cilantro, mint, dandelion greens

The Cheese (in place of OR in addition to Parm/pecorino): grana padano, romano, manchego, asiago, ricotta salata, piave, gruyère, fontina, bianco sardo, sartori sarvecchio, capra sarda

The Nuts (in place of OR in addition to pine nuts): walnuts, pistachios, pepitas, almonds, pecans, cashews, hazelnuts, brazil nuts, macadamias, chestnuts, sunflower seeds (toasted or untoasted)

The Oil (in place of OR in addition to olive oil): avocado oil, sesame oil, peanut oil, safflower oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, light olive oil, walnut oil, flaxseed oil, grapeseed oil

Misc. (in place of OR in addition to garlic): lemon, red pepper flakes, dehydrated powders (like dried mushroom), sun-dried tomatoes, etc.

***

The limit does not exist

Also, don’t limit pesto to just pasta sauce! It’s an amazing sandwich condiment, it’s terrific on crostini, it elevates any grilled protein and it’s unbeatable on pizzas. Lastly, it’s incredibly versatile — almost every ingredient can be mixed and matched. 

NOTE: Some heavier, tougher greens should be blanched prior to blending with other ingredients. A combination of basil and another green is also always delicious, but try not to incorporate any more than two greens in one pesto. Otherwise, go wild! 

***

Bright and acidic with bursts of flavor from pistachios and parmesan, this pesto adds an appealing and sometimes hard-to-identify flavor to sandwiches, pastas or anything else that it’s slathered on. 

Recipe: Fennel Frond Pesto 

Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups basil
  • 1 cup fennel fronds (just the frilly greens)
  • 1/2  – 3/4 cup EVOO
  • 3/4 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
  • 1/4 cup shelled pistachios
  • 1-2 garlic cloves
  • Kosher salt
  • Cracked black pepper 

Instructions

  1. In blender, food processor or with mortar and pestle, crush or blend Parm, pistachio, garlic, salt and pepper together.
  2. Add basil, crush or blend, add fennel fronds, crush or blend, and then slowly stream oil until the mixture becomes smooth and near-homogenous.
  3. Season to taste.

If you’re going the noodles route, here three tips for achieving pasta greatness at home:

Studies find that two-shot vaccines are effective even with just one shot

Two recent studies found that a pair of widely-used vaccines, which are administered through two shots given on different days, display vaccine efficacy even when patients receive just the first shot. The study has important implications for public health, particularly given that public health experts believe that many patients may not return for a second shot of the two-dose vaccine regimens.

The newer study of the two, by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, analyzed medical results for 31,000 people in four states who had been given at least one vaccine shot of either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, determined that the vaccines had a 75% rate of efficacy within 15 days of the first shot and an 83% rate of efficacy within 36 days of the first shot. (The term “vaccine efficacy” refers to how well a vaccine works based on the number of new cases of a disease that develops among a group that receives a vaccine compared to those who receive a placebo, or fake drug.)

Among those who received both doses, the vaccines had an 89% rate of efficacy for patients who received their first dose at least 36 days earlier. This means that the vaccines seem to be able to offer increasing protection against infection as time passes, even if only one dose has been administered of the two-dose vaccines. The Mayo Clinic’s study included both patients who displayed symptoms and those who did not.

The study comes on the heels of a recent study from Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical center that yielded similar results, although it only focused only on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. It found that Pfizer’s vaccine was 75% effective at protecting patients within two to four weeks of receiving just one shot. When the Sheba Medical center study focused on COVID-19 patients who displayed symptoms, it found that 85% of the people who had only received a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine seemed to be inoculated against SARS-CoV-2 within two to four weeks.

Both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are mRNA vaccines, which means that they use a synthetic single-stranded RNA molecule. Once inoculated, the mRNA enters human cells and programs them to produce proteins like those in a given virus — in this case, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 — so that the immune system will recognize them and develop antibodies to fight the virus before it enters your bloodstream. This makes mRNA vaccines different from conventional vaccine platforms, which generally use dead or weakened version of the disease-causing agent to train the immune system to recognize and fight it.

It must be emphasized that scientists believe all of the different vaccines which have been officially approved are safe and effective. As Dr. Carlos del Rio, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, told Salon by email earlier this month, “there is no ‘best here.’ They are all actually quite good and I keep telling people we will need to use all tools in the toolbox to defeat this pandemic.”

He added, “We have two vaccines available now in the US, Pfizer and Moderna. Both are very similar in terms of efficacy and safety profile. I am a Moderna investigator yet my healthcare system offered me Pfizer and I took it, as I want protection.”

Senate Republicans, too weak to convict Trump, should pray New York prosecutors lock him up

On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Republican party an enormous gift when it granted federal prosecutors in New York permission to access tax returns and other financial records for Donald Trump. The former president remains under investigation by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who spent much of the last four years going up against the powers of the White House in a bid to force Trump, who is almost certainly guilty of tax fraud and campaign finance violations, into opening his accounting books. Now there’s a very real chance that investigation can finally begin in earnest, and Trump may actually face real legal consequences — can we even dream of prison? — for his life of crime. 

Vance is a Democrat and Trump has latched on to that fact to paint the entire investigation as a partisan witch hunt. Unsurprisingly, “political Witch Hunt” was his exact wording in a released “statement” that was really more of a diatribe from the Twitter-deprived ex-president. He also whined that this “is all Democrat-inspired in a totally Democrat location, New York City and State, completely controlled and dominated by a heavily reported enemy of mine, Governor Andrew Cuomo,” even though Cuomo plays no part in the choices of federal, state or local prosecutors. 

The reality is that the Supreme Court which made this decision leans not only heavily conservative but has three justices appointed by Trump. Two of the three were sitting justices when the court decided a similar case in Vance’s favor back in July, and both of those justices ruled against Trump. Moreover, elected Republican leaders have been notably quiet in response to the decision, despite Trump’s desperate attempts to make this a partisan issue. 

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It’s no wonder. If Republican leaders know what’s good for them, they should want nothing more than for Trump to go to prison, ideally for a long time. It would be the perfect solution for the current conundrum facing the GOP. On one hand, they are addicted to Trump, dependent on him for his much-ballyhooed “base” of cranks and conspiracy theorists. They also generally support his agenda of gutting democracy, even if some of them balk at the violence of his methods. On the other hand, there is no doubt that many in Republican leadership are worried about Trump’s excesses and chaos — he did almost get his own vice president murdered, lest we forget — and would like Trump himself to be out of the picture. 

Republicans, in other words, want this Trumpism-without-Trump that there’s been so much talk about. They want the political energy he was able to generate and his power to turn millions of Americans against democracy, but without Trump himself. Trump, however, ever the consummate narcissist, just won’t let it happen. The former president is scheduled to be the headliner at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, where he’ll reportedly hint at a 2024 run. And he continues to make a big show out of moving politically against Republicans he believes are disloyal. They don’t get to miss him, because he won’t go away. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., clearly grasps that the thing that would get Trump out his hair permanently — without breaking up the Trump coalition — is a lengthy stint in the pokey. Even as he cowardly refused to vote to convict Trump at his impeachment trial, McConnell tried to have it both ways by giving a speech declaring that there is “no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking” the Jan. 6 insurrection that threatened the lives of so many in Congress and former vice president Mike Pence. And while he continued, in his cowardly fashion, to back away from the question of whether Trump was criminally liable, it was clear McConnell was hoping someone would rid him of the Mar-A-Lago menace. He just didn’t have the guts to be the one to do it. 

But if Cy Vance got rid of Trump by throwing him in prison, well, that’s a win-win for congressional Republicans. They really could have it both ways: keeping Trump as a symbol to rally their increasingly fascistic base for the cause of gutting democracy, while not having to deal with the annoying and dangerous man who left them to die during his insurrection. They even could — no doubt would — turn Trump into a martyr for the authoritarian cause, claiming his imprisonment is due to being “canceled,” instead of the logical endpoint of a life of crime. 

Not, to be clear, that any of these concerns should cause Democrats not to root for Trump finally getting what he deserves. Whatever short-term political benefits that Republicans get will almost certainly be outweighed by the value of reminding other would-be criminals in the GOP that there might actually be consequences for illegal behavior. 

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After all, one of the most frustrating aspects of the Trump tax return saga is how much of this information has been made public already, without mattering one whit politically. In September 2020, the New York Times — after years of trying — finally got their hands on Trump’s documents and revealed that his financial situation was even shadier than many of the more lurid fantasies of his detractors. He was a wretched businessman, who had pissed away two massive fortunes  — which totaled $840 million— granted to him first by his father and then by “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett. Somehow, despite these two massive cash infusions, the documents suggested Trump was up to a billion dollars in debt. Moreover, Trump was a promiscuous tax cheat, which was hyped at the time as the biggest takeaway from the story. 

But it all amounted to nothing, in terms of Trump’s political popularity. He likely lost no votes for his tax cheating or his business failures, the latter of which didn’t get nearly the press it should have. The reason is simple enough. Trump never bothered to hide that he was a cheater and a criminal from his followers. Instead, he simply argued that everyone in politics is a sleazy criminal, and suggested the only difference was that he was better at it. So his voters didn’t care that he was a criminal. If anything, they saw it as a bonus, as if he was going to use his criminal smarts on their behalf, instead of what he actually did, which is treat them like marks to be drained of cash. 

In a party where being an obvious criminal doesn’t come with any political penalty, the only hope of scaring other Republicans straight is, quite literally, the threat of prison. Trump’s flagrant disregard for the law has already empowered the beak-wetting urges of his fellow Republicans. If he ends up in the slammer, however, they might think twice before deciding that there’s no downside to abusing their offices for cash or other similar ethical transgressions. 

This is one of those few situations that’s a legitimate bipartisan win.

If Trump goes to prison, Republicans get what they always wanted, which is Trumpism without Trump. Democrats also benefit from getting rid of Trump — really, everyone does — and they get to send a message that crime does have consequences, even for rich Republicans. It’s something everyone should be rooting for. 

Fox staffers “embarrassed” over company’s sponsorship of CPAC: “It has become a channel for the GOP”

Fox News staffers are angry and embarrassed by the network’s association with the upcoming CPAC conference where former President Donald Trump and his allies will continue to spread election lies.

The conservative confab lists Fox Nation — a fledgling streaming service operated by Fox News Media — as a top corporate sponsor, along with the American Conservative Union and Christianity-based Liberty HealthShare, of this week’s CPAC 2021, where the former president, his son and congressional Republicans are expected to push bogus claims of election fraud, reported The Daily Beast.

“I’m not even surprised anymore,” a current Fox News employee told the website. “Fox is indefensible at this point as it has become a channel for the GOP . . . well, more than usual. So many employees at Fox don’t even support half the sh*t the channel does or says . . . It isn’t right, but Fox has rarely been on the right side of history and ethics.”

Fox News Media donated $250,000 through its streaming service, which had contributed at least $28,000 to last year’s conference, and “Fox & Friends” host Pete Hegseth will take part in the conference, along with current contributors Dan Bongino, Lawrence Jones, Deroy Murdock and former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz.

“Doesn’t surprise me at all,” said a second current staffer. “That’s their crowd, it’s their audience. I feel like they’re always there . . . CPAC is the Fox audience so it makes sense that they would have a presence there.”

A Fox News Media spokesperson declined to comment on the CPAC donation but pointed out that Fox Corp. chief executive Lachlan Murdoch, the son of company chairman Rupert Murdoch, said the streaming service was “doing tremendously well” — but network staffers say the sponsorship reeks of desperation.

“I think it’s desperate,” said a third staffer. “Fox Nation doesn’t have any clear identity of what it is. Pandering hard to right wing or a fluff HGTV lifestyle wannabe. But it clearly shows desperation and a lack of identity. I’d say it’s biased, but Fox Nation doesn’t pretend to be straight news. I have heard from several people they’ve struggled big-time to get subscribers and money from Fox Nation. I don’t think you advertise with CPAC unless you desperately want right-wing subscriptions.”

Progressives call out Joe Manchin for “double standard”: He backed “openly racist” Jeff Sessions

House Democrats grew increasingly frustrated with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., this week as he began to emerge as a key roadblock to some of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet appointments and stimulus negotiations.

The centrist Democrat has wielded a disproportionate amount of power in the evenly divided Senate during Biden’s early days in office, siding with Republicans in certain confirmation battles and legislative issues. Manchin’s spokesman told NBC News on Monday that he is undecided on whether to back the confirmation of Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., who would become the first Native American to head the Interior Department. Manchin, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, previously told E&E News that Haaland “has a little bid different agenda than us” and pushed back on her plan to enact Biden’s proposed ban on fracking on public lands.

The latest comments drew a rebuke from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who noted that Manchin was the only Democrat to support Donald Trump’s original attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

“Jeff Sessions was so openly racist that even Reagan couldn’t appoint him,” she tweeted. “Manchin voted to confirm him. Sessions then targeted immigrant children for wide-scale human rights abuses w/ family separation. Yet the 1st Native woman to be Cabinet Sec is where Manchin finds unease?”

Haaland, who joined protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been accused of being a “radical” by Republicans over her support for the Green New Deal and opposition to fracking and drilling on public lands. But even conservative Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said that Biden deserves to choose who leads his team.

“I have a theory, because I’m a mariner, that the captain of the ship has the right to choose his crew,” he said while testifiying on Haaland’s behalf at Tuesday’s Senate confirmation hearing, adding, “She’ll do a good job. I have a lot at stake here, I’m a representative of an oil-producing state too.”

Some House Democrats were already irked by Manchin’s opposition to Neera Tanden, Biden’s pick to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, over her past tweets criticizing senators.

“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” Manchin said in a statement last week. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination.”

Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., who heads the Asian Pacific American Caucus, accused Manchin and Republicans of a “double standard” on Tanden’s nomination.

“Her nomination is very significant for us Asian American and Pacific Islanders,” Chu told Politico. “I do believe that this double standard has to do with the fact that she would be a pioneer in that position.”

Many Democrats have cited Manchin’s support for Sessions, who was previously denied a federal judgeship over racism allegations, former U.S. ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, who had a long history of offensive tweets, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose conduct at his confirmation hearing alarmed many observers.

“We can disagree with her tweets, but in the past, Trump nominees that they’ve confirmed and supported had much more serious issues and conflicts than just something that was written on Twitter,” Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., told Politico. “This is not just about any one nominee like Neera, or whoever else — it’s just about this pattern that is happening and increasingly hard to ignore.”

Though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., vowed to find enough votes to confirm Tanden, her confirmation appears increasingly in doubt after Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said they would vote against her as well.

Biden administration officials have also complained that nominees of color have faced harsher criticism and slower confirmations, according to the outlet, citing the delayed confirmation hearings for Health and Human Services nominee Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Democrats are also unsure that Manchin will support Surgeon General-designate Vivek Murthy, whose previous appointment to the same post under President Barack Obama he opposed, according to the Associated Press.

Manchin has already emerged in the Biden era as a potential foil to the Democratic agenda by assuring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell he would preserve the filibuster and the Byrd rule, which limits the kinds of legislation that can be passed through the budget reconciliation process Democrats are using to push through coronavirus relief and other funding. After briefly feuding with Vice President Kamala Harris over the administration’s pressure on him in stimulus negotiations, Manchin came out against Biden’s plan to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour in the next round of relief, which would disproportionately lift the salaries of workers of color.

Manchin told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday that he would instead support a two-year increase to $11 per hour.

Freshman Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., called Manchin’s proposal “unacceptable.”

“The $15 minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular with the American people,” he tweeted. “One person should not be allowed to hold relief hostage.”

Evan Weber, co-founder of the progressive group the Sunrise Movement, cited data from an MIT analysis finding that the living wage for a childless adult in West Virginia is nearly $14 per hour and will hit $15 by 2025.

“$11/hr is not enough for West Virginia or anywhere,” he tweeted. “$15/hr + a union is the bare minimum any worker in this country deserves.”

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., have vowed to fight to keep the $15 minimum wage measure in the bill.

“A $15 minimum wage must stay in the Covid-19 relief bill,” Jayapal tweeted on Monday. “I’m going to fight to ensure that it does.”

After doctor calls her “misguided,” Meghan McCain doubles down on attacks against Anthony Fauci

“The View” co-host Meghan McCain got into a Twitter squabble on Tuesday morning after Dr. Vin Gupta — a cable news regular who provides information on the COVID-19 pandemic — blasted her for her “misguided” attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci.

On Monday, the always controversial McCain attacked the popular Fauci, saying he should be fired for his COVID-19 advice while complaining that she has been unable to obtain the vaccine.

That led to an avalanche of criticism of the daughter of John McCain, who appears to finally have had enough when she fired back at Gupta who tweeted, “The rejection of real, genuine expertise is what led us to today. So misguided to see people like @MeghanMcCain calling for the replacement of Dr Fauci. We should be empowering and amplifying his message to get out of this crisis and avoid any further milestones.”

McCain responded “He told me not to wear a mask and that masks don’t work when I was 3 months pregnant in the middle of Manhattan. He then later admitted it was an intentional lie so we would donate masks to essential workers. Now I’m being told to wear 2 masks. But yes I’m ‘misguided'” followed by an emoji for emphasis.

She then tweeted, “The messaging is incredibly inconsistent and confusing. I voiced my frustration honestly despite the fact that if you and twitter don’t like it, I represent the feelings of many Americans. I also believe sainting our public figures to infallibility is dangerous and irrational.”

You can see the tweets below:

Another Texas Republican ditched the state during historic blizzard: AG Ken Paxton jetted to Utah

Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, a Texas state senator, went to Utah last week during the catastrophic winter storm in Texas that has left millions without heat or electricity for over a week.

According to Business Insider, the Republican officials left on a business trip but the revelation comes just days after Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, fled his home state for a family trip to Cancun, a jaunt in which the Senator and his wife invited several of their personal friends. Paxton reportedly left for Utah on the very same day that Cruz jetted down to Mexico.

Paxton spokesman Ian Prior told the Dallas Morning News that the attorney general’s trip had been planned in advance of the blizzard. According to Prior, Paxton had already planned to meet with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes about an antitrust lawsuit that Texas is currently leading against Google for the company’s “anticompetitive conduct in advertising.” The meeting took place in Salt Lake City “over the course of several days,” according to the Texas Tribune, and involved “lengthy discussions, mostly about the Google antitrust case.” The two attorneys general also took part in a police de-escalation training demonstration. “This is a program that AG Paxton has been considering implementing in Texas,” Prior noted.

Prior, however, did not specify whether the trip’s expenses had been paid for out of pocket or billed to the state’s wallet.

“I cannot further share additional details or the specific reasons on the need for the meeting concerning Google as it involves an ongoing investigation,” Prior told the Dallas Morning News. Prior also alleged that the Paxtons did not leave the state of Texas “until after power had returned to most of the state, including his own home.”

On the day the two attorneys general met last Wednesday, approximately 2.7 million households in Texas were without power. Texas had issued a boil-water order because water pressure had plummeted as a result of the cold weather. As many as ten Texas residents had passed due to weather-related incidents, such as house fires, carbon monoxide poisoning, and vehicle collisions. 

Last week, Paxton’s office sent out several public health advisories that pledged to investigate the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) –– the organization the operates Texas’ power grid and is largely responsible for damages that Texas has incurred –– as well as “other entities that grossly mishandled this week’s extreme winter weather.” 

Paxton, who, as the state’s attorney general, is tasked with cracking down on incidents of price gouging, took to Twitter to condemn the price hikes on water and hotel rooms that came as a result of the storm. “ERCOT & other energy cos have slipped & fallen on their faces & it’s not the ice’s fault,” Paxton tweeted on Wednesday. “They have left 3+ million homes w/o power for days, including my own. What do they do in response? Jack up prices, go silent, make excuses, & play the blame game. It’s unacceptable!”

Paxton said in an interview on Monday that individuals and businesses profiteering off the storm may be fined up to $250,000 if the victim is sixty-five or older. According to Paxton, there have already been 500 reported cases of price gouging.

Paxton’s trip to Utah marks just one of his deviations from good conduct. For example, Paxton is still facing an indictment of securities fraud by a state grand jury from over five years ago. Last year, several attorneys in Paxton’s office resigned because they believed their boss had “[violated] federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” These allegations are still  under investigation. 

On Monday, state Democrats issued a statement condemning Texas lawmakers for their latest derelictions of duty. “This is a pattern,” said Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa. “Texas Republicans do not give a damn about the people they were elected to represent, and they continue to focus on issues that don’t affect the lives of everyday Texans to gaslight them into thinking they are doing their jobs.”

How to cook corned beef at home (that’s cornier, beefier and better)

We know how you got here — you want to know how to make corned beef. And so you will. But how did corned beef get here? Who thought to cure thick cuts of beef in salt and nitrates, and declare them “corned?”

According to Mark Kurlansky, author of “Salt: A World History,” the Irish began salting, spicing, and curing beef in the Middle Ages, finding that this process preserved the meat from spoilage (and particularly from the danger of C. Botulinum, the toxin-producing bacterium best known for causing Botulism . . . and Botox). The Irish, most likely, originally referred to this product as spiced beef (as they still do today). But when the British seized control of the Emerald Isle, trampling its fields with cattle and its culture with Imperial force, they dubbed the preserved meat ‘corned.’ The word corn, back then, was not yet associated primarily with the American crop, instead referring broadly to grains or small pieces. In this case, the ‘corns’ were likely grains of salt, or granules of potassium nitrate, known as saltpeter (also the name of my future celebrity child).

Corned beef travelled with the British navy across the colonies, spreading it to tables from the Carribbean to the Polynesian islands. When Irish immigrants themselves struck out across the waters in the 19th century, they found corned beef on the butcher blocks of New York’s Kosher delis, and quickly adopted this Jewish variation. There is still excellent corned beef to be had, whether in New York’s Jewish delis, in the English Market in Cork, or in the street markets of Manila. But if you have a few pounds of beef brisket and some saltpeter on hand, here’s how to make your own. This recipe is based on the version made in Ballymaloe, the Corkonian bastion of farm-to-table cookery, but you can adjust the spices according to your desires and tradition.

How to cook corned beef

Ingredients:

  • 4-lb. flank of beef, or brisket, trimmed
  • 1/2 cup, plus 1 Tbsp (70 grams) Kosher salt
  • 3 tablespoons (45 grams) demerara sugar
  • 3 tablespoons (15 grams) whole black pepper
  • 3 tablespoons (15 grams) whole allspice
  • 3 tablespoons (15 grams) whole juniper berries
  • 1/2 teaspoon (2 grams) saltpeter (or 3/4 teaspoon, 2.6 grams, pink curing salt)

Directions:

Grind the spices, salt, and saltpeter together, and rub onto the meat. Place in a rimmed dish, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 3 and ideally 7 days, turning every day or two.

Once it is fully cured, roll the meat into a tight log and truss with kitchen twine.

Place the corned beef in a Dutch oven on the stove, and barely cover with cold water. Bring to a simmer, and cook over low heat until tender, 3-4 hours, making sure the meat remains submerged. Remove from the pot and rest for at least 30 minutes before slicing. The corned beef should be succulent, fragrant, and pink from the saltpeter. Enjoy!

How to eat corned beef

Once you have corned beef on hand, the possibilities are endless. Serve it with cabbage and potatoes in the Irish-American tradition, or hash it with root vegetables. Or if you’re out of energy, just throw it on a sandwich. If a corned beef sandwich is good enough to bring to space, it’s good enough for lunch.

5 mirin substitutes that live in your pantry (or bar)

Mirin is a sweetened Japanese rice wine commonly whisked into sauces, dressings, and marinades, and added to simmered dishes like soups and stews. A little goes a long way, but a bottle won’t last forever. If you find yourself fresh out of this fragrant, umami-rich seasoning but still want to add the flavor and depth that comes from cooking with wine, here are our best mirin substitutes, so you can get that Japanese-style roast chicken on the table without further delay.

1. Sake

Sake makes a great substitute for mirin — already being rice wine takes it halfway to the finish line. Many kinds of sake, especially unfiltered, are sweet enough to substitute for mirin without any doctoring up. In the case of drier sake, a splash of apple or white grape juice or a pinch of sugar will make up for it.

2. Sherry

Sherry tends to be on the sweet side (even the drier ones), and has a delicate but complex flavor that can mimic the depth and acidity of rice wine. It has a sharp, strong flavor on its own, so add it by the teaspoon until you’ve achieved the richness you’re looking for.

3. Rice Vinegar

Rice vinegar has a similarly sharp fermented flavor as rice wine (seeing as it used to be rice wine). As with white wine, temper rice vinegar’s tartness with sugar, add a little splash of light-colored juice, or use the sweetened rice vinegar used to season sushi rice in your supermarket’s Asian foods section.

4. White Wine

You can also use most kinds of white wine to substitute for mirin, though it’s generally best to avoid very sweet ones like moscato or ice wine (as they can be too sugar-forward for cooking). If you’re using a medium-dry to dry white wine, dissolve a little sugar in it before adding to the dish to mimic the sweetness mirin would contribute.

5. Vermouth

You may notice you’ll be hitting the liquor stash more than the pantry when it comes to mirin substitutes. The same rule applies in this case: Use sweet vermouth, or add a little juice or sugar to dry vermouth to ensure the acid is balanced.

More easy ingredient swaps:

Do we need more scary climate change articles? Maybe.

Fires blaze across continents, seas submerge cities, deserts swallow up farmland — there’s no shortage of terrifying things about climate change. But does forcing people to confront all these horrible scenes (and worse, the unknowables to come) actually get people to do something about it? It’s become a hotly debated issue among those who care about climate change.

Every time a bleak, adrenaline-inducing article goes viral, the so-called “hope vs. fear” dispute rages on Twitter. The most recent conversation starter was Elizabeth Weil’s intimate profile in ProPublica of Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist whose death-spiraling dread was taking over his life — his whole family’s life, really.

With the title “The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try,” the piece was bound to get attention — and criticism. Why not highlight a more productive way to cope with the climate crisis? people asked. Weil seemed to anticipate this debate, which has remained contentious at least since David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” made a splash in 2017. Near the end of the piece, Weil asks, “How do you describe an intolerable problem in a way that listeners — even you, dear reader — will truly let in?”

It’s a tough question, and experts are split over the right response. “Some people believe that we should emphasize the risks and generate fear and that many people are not scared enough yet,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “And then other people think we really need to just focus on solutions.”

The debate is about more than just rhetoric; it’s about how people should feel about climate change. “When we’re specifically trying to promote action on climate, we know that one of the best ways to do that is to emotionally engage people in it,” Marlon said. The problem is, reading lots of scary articles might make one person take to the streets in protest, but lead someone else to disengage and shut down. There are an infinite variety of ways to respond to and talk about the climate crisis.

Studies have come to wildly different conclusions. One paper will proclaim that “Fear Won’t Do It” for motivating action on climate change; another will say the exact opposite. The research about hope is similarly mixed. Some studies have suggested that optimistic messages could prod people to behave in more climate-friendly ways and increase support for climate policies, but others found that hopeful appeals actually lowered people’s motivation to reduce emissions.

“It’s really cut down the middle,” said Joshua Ettinger, a PhD student studying public support for climate action at the University of Oxford. “You have study after study finding conflicting results.”

Ettinger’s new research, published in the journal Climatic Change, suggests that the whole “hope vs. fear” argument might be overblown. For the experiment, 500 Americans were shown different videos meant to evoke either hopeful or fearfulreactions to climate change. (One group got a message along the lines of “Humanity can stop climate change and create a better world for all!”; the others heard, “Unless we take major action, humanity is doomed.”) While both videos evoked the intended emotions, in the end, neither one altered people’s willingness to change their behavior or participate in climate activism.

“We’re so caught up in how a single message captures the narrative,” Ettinger said, but “we shouldn’t necessarily assume that a single piece of content is going to dramatically influence people.”

Americans are not a monolithic mass; they respond to global warming with alarm, concern, caution, denial, and everything in between, sometimes all in the same day. A 2017 article argued against making broad, simplistic assertions about how specific emotions will change people’s response to the climate crisis. Emotions are powerful, but they’re not “simple levers to be pulled,” the authors argued. Still, Marlon said, there are patterns in how people respond.

Some research suggests that while fear can prompt us to spring into action, hope actually gives us something to do. In other words, alarming and optimistic messages could simply be two sides of the same coin.

Margaret Klein Salamon, the founder of The Climate Mobilization, argues that “telling the whole, frightening truth” is a powerful asset for the climate movement that could unlock “tremendous potential for transformation” — provided that it’s paired with an ambitious, heroic solution. Her organization calls for “an all-hands-on-deck effort to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and safely draw down excess carbon from the atmosphere at emergency speed.”

This attitude is reflected in different ways across the spectrum of activist groups: While Extinction Rebellion focuses on doom, groups like the Sunrise Movement, inspired by the Green New Deal, emphasize an optimistic narrative about jobs and justice. What they share is a driving sense of urgency.

Salamon sees fear as a useful tool, an innate, protective mechanism that demands a response. The terror you feel when someone yells “snake!” shakes you out of complacency and primes you to spring into action … even if that action is simply running away.

“I don’t see how we could possibly achieve the scale of transformation we need if there’s not a shared national understanding that this is an existential threat, that this is a terrible danger,” Salamon said. “If people don’t think that, why would they change their lives? Why would they be part of a political movement? It’s always struck me as kind of an odd position, that somehow we can accomplish huge-scale change but without ever really telling the public the truth.”

Too much doom and gloom, however, can backfire, leading people to deny threatsand ignore distressing facts. People are rightfully concerned about exaggeration and “the kind of doomism that says there’s nothing we can do to stop climate change,” Ettinger said. According to a recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 14 percent of Americans think it’s too late to do anything about climate change (for the record, it isn’t).

A number of studies suggest that fear-based messages are persuasive and can change people’s behavior, particularly when they’re paired with messages that empower people to take action rather than wallow in misery. Marlon has found that what gives people hope around climate change is seeing others take action. That could be a neighbor putting up solar panels, a friend talking about climate change, or Swedish activist Greta Thunberg skipping school in protest of government inaction.

One recent study found that people who had heard of Thunberg said they were more likely to participate in activism, a phenomenon called the “Greta effect.” “You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” Thunberg told European leaders in 2019. “Then you are acting like spoiled irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something that you have to earn.”

Despite all the debate over hope and fear, the mix of messages people are hearing about the climate crisis seems to be resonating with a growing share of the public.

Watching a single video or reading a single article isn’t likely to have a lasting effect on people, Marlon said, but “the slow and steady drip, drip, drip of messages” is, along with people seeing change with their own eyes. Today, more than a quarter of Americans are alarmed about the climate crisis, twice as high as it was five years ago. “The messaging is working,” Marlon said. “And there are lots of emotions mixed up in there, but we’re going in the right direction.”

One phone call with Donald Trump destroyed this Republican lawyer’s career

Last month, veteran political attorney Cleta Mitchell was forced to resign as a partner at the prominent Washington-based firm Foley & Lardner after it became clear she had secretly aided former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, in violation of the firm’s policy.

It’s been a rough few months for Mitchell: The firebrand conservative activist and political lawyer was listed as an officer on a nonprofit run by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, which is now part of a federal fraud investigation. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a friend and client of Mitchell’s, has attracted legal scrutiny for allegedly misusing political contributions. Shortly after Mitchell’s departure from Foley & Lardner, the firm appears to have taken steps to resolve newly-discovered issues with its own super PAC.

Cleta Mitchell was born Cleta Deatherage in 1950, in Oklahoma, where she served in the state legislature from 1976 to 1984 — as a Democrat focused on women’s rights, believe it or not. In the 1990s, she changed her party affiliation to independent after the federal government investigated and convicted her husband, Dale Mitchell, of bank fraud, fining him $1.3 million in restitution and sentencing to five years’ probation. Though the judge in the case suggested that Dale had lucked out by avoiding prison time, the episode convinced Cleta Mitchell that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times,” and she soon became a registered Republican.

Since then, Mitchell has been one of the most influential, if largely invisible, figures in conservative politics, serving as legal counsel for both the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, as well as the National Rifle Association. Individual clients have included numerous Republican elected officials and candidates, including Sens. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Marco Rubio of Florida, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, whose GOP networking firm hired Mark Meadows a week after he left the Trump White House. Mitchell has also served on the boards of a number of powerful conservative organizations, including the NRA, the Bradley Foundation and the American Conservative Union Foundation, which runs the Conservative Political Action Conference and endured an embezzlement scandal while she was there.

Mitchell has spoken out fiercely against marriage equality, led attacks on the IRS amid allegations that Tea Party-affiliated nonprofits were treated unfairly during the Obama administration and, more recently, criticized coronavirus restrictions for allegedly infringing on religious groups’ rights.

In 2011, Mitchell represented Donald Trump against allegations that his exploratory campaign had violated federal election laws by accepting unlawful in-kind contributions from his own business. She defended Trump’s knowledge of campaign finance laws in a 2018 Wall Street Journal article about the Stormy Daniels scandal, a clip that Foley & Lardner deleted from its page shortly after her departure.

When news broke of Bannon’s arrest on fraud charges last August, Salon reached out to Mitchell for comment on her involvement with his nonprofit Citizens of the American Republic (COAR), which federal prosecutors allege Bannon and associates used as a vehicle to create phony invoices related to their larger scheme. Mitchell declined to speak about the matter, citing attorney-client privilege, but when Salon pointed out that she had not only represented the group but also served as an officer — the organization’s most recent IRS filing lists her as secretary — she hung up. Mitchell appears to have blocked this reporter’s phone number, and when Salon attempted to reach her through her husband for this story, her husband claimed he was “not authorized to share her contact information.”

Bannon was later pardoned by Trump, and is not clear whether COAR is still part of the ongoing federal investigation into the alleged conspiracy. Prosecutors in New York are now considering bringing Bannon up on state charges, which would likely not be shielded by the presidential pardon.

Not long before Bannon’s arrest, Trump appointed one of Mitchell’s friends to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan body whose investigatory ambit includes voting rights. Mitchell, a longtime proponent of baseless election fraud claims — in 2010 she said that then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., “intends to steal this election if he can’t win it outright” — appeared with Trump at an Oval Office event that same month, where Trump introduced her as a “great attorney.”

During the 2020 election, Mitchell publicly defended Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him. She told Reuters that the president’s allies were prepared to fight what she characterized as a “very well-planned-out assault” by liberals to change rules about ballot counting after Election Day, measures that Democrats say were intended to ensure that all proper votes were counted. After the election, Mitchell had a role in a Fox News clip that went viral, when anchor Sandra Smith was caught expressing disbelief at the attorney’s claims while her mic was still on.

“Just because CNN says — or even Fox News says — that somebody’s president doesn’t make him president,” Mitchell said, prompting Smith to roll her eyes and say, “What? Trace, we’ve called it,” referring to Fox’s projection that Joe Biden had won the election.

Despite the media appearances, Mitchell’s post-election work with Trump went largely unremarked until the Washington Post published a recording of a phone call in which the then-president asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes that would overturn his state’s result. Mitchell’s presence on that call — in an “informal” capacity, according to Meadows — was noteworth because at the time Trump was having trouble finding reputable attorneys to take up his desperate attempts to reverse his defeat, instead relying on conspiracy theorists such as Sidney Powell and former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani.

At one point in that call, Trump interrupted Mitchell when she spoke up about allegedly problematic ballots cast for Biden in Atlanta.

“I know about it, but —” Mitchell said, before Trump jumped in.

“OK, Cleta, I’m not asking you. Cleta, honestly. I’m asking Brad,” Trump said, in reference to Raffensperger.

It’s unclear exactly when Mitchell began working with Trump’s team, but Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that she had been advising him for “weeks,” and had been brought aboard by Meadows, her longtime friend. At the time, Meadows was the subject of a federal election complaint filed by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, based on Salon’s exclusive reporting that the former North Carolina congressman appeared to have habitually misused campaign donations for personal expenses. A recent filing with the Federal Election Commission, which includes a large, anomalous payment from Meadows’ PAC to Mitchell’s former firm, Foley & Lardner, suggests that the complaint triggered a federal investigation.

After news of the Raffensperger phone call surfaced, Foley & Lardner released a statement saying the firm’s policy barred it from representing anyone trying to contest the 2020 election results, and that it was “concerned” by Mitchell’s role in the call and was “working to understand her involvement more thoroughly.” She resigned the next day, blaming a “massive pressure campaign” brought against her by “leftist groups via social media.”

After her departure, however, the firm appears to have reviewed her work with its employee PAC, and decided to take control back from employees hired by Mitchell. Last year, the PAC received two letters from the FEC notifying it that the group’s treasurer, Chris Marston, had failed to sign monthly reports. Mitchell had hired Marston, a Republican operative, to replace the PAC’s former treasurer and firm partner Theodore Bernstein. Foley & Lardner reversed that decision after Mitchell resigned, reinstalling Bernstein. It is unclear why Marston did not sign the reports, and unclear when the firm first became aware of the FEC notices.

Foley & Lardner did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.

Why Texas froze (and California fried): This disaster was 90 years in the making

The catastrophe that swept Texas last week was 90 years in the making. Its roots lie in a decision during the 1930s to escape federal regulation of power rates under the terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal by forcing all Texas utilities to avoid importing or exporting power across state lines, thereby pretending that Texas electricity was not actually part of the national economy.

As the biggest oil and gas producer in the world, Texas had already set itself up in the business of regulating the global price of oil through the Texas Railroad Commission, which set limits on oil and gas production to keep oil prices artificially high. So going it alone on electricity prices seemed like a logical extension — except that in the case of electricity, Texas business wanted low prices, not high ones.

Implicit in the creation of what Texans call their “power island” was an understanding that cheap electricity was the only significant goal. Reliability came a distant second and clean air wasn’t even on the radar screen. When Texas deregulated its electricity sector in 1999, it went further than most states. ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, kept prices low by refusing to pay utilities for keeping standby generation capacity in case of an extreme weather event. Since Texas also remained disconnected from other regions which might have provided backup power in the case of a shortage, the state denied itself any kind of safety net, either in-state or elsewhere.

Extreme heat waves were very much on the Texas radar, because high-demand summer days were frequent — and profitable for generators. So money was made, and summer  blackouts were few, for almost 20 years. As the climate spun out of control, however, even in summer Texas barely avoided resorting to rolling blackouts to manage record demand during worsening hot spells. (In fact, in El Paso, on the state’s western border, they happened.)

Meanwhile, the pretense that it never gets cold in Texas kept obstructing efforts to make the ERCOT grid winter-hardened. In 1989, federal regulators pointed out that Texas lacked simple weatherization measures common to more northern states. In 2011, winter storms triggered rolling blackouts. In 2014, the term “polar vortex” came into common use as Texas once again lost winter power. In 2018 and 2019, the polar vortex struck two years in a row.

Yet Texas business and political leaders kept insisting that the cost of winterizing the power system was simply not worth it. The state’s major industrial power users didn’t want to pay their share of the bill. Any conversation about providing backup by connecting the Texas grid to the rest of America remained totally off limits.

This year, of course, disaster became catastrophe. Those who doggedly opposed investments in reliability have had to find a new tune — their favorite being to blame renewable energy, in spite of manifest evidence that this is untrue.

Former Texas governor Rick Perry went to bat for the state’s electron isolationism: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Perry went on to blame the state’s reliance on wind power for the crisis, a richly ironic canard. It was Perry himself who led the campaign to create Texas’s innovative and wind-power targeted CREZ transmission project, which was largely responsible for the fact that 2020 was the first year in which Texas got more electricity from wind than from coal.

Perry’s scapegoating of his own wind revolution for the blackout was echoed by current Gov. Greg Abbott, who said, “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.” That was a lie. As the chart below shows, most of the collapse in power generation came from natural gas, coal and nuclear, since even in a normal winter Texas gets relatively little of its power from wind and solar. (Although Texas wind turbines lack simple weatherizing technology used by wind farms in other states to its north.) 

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As the disasters cascaded — no power, shut-down oil and gas production, no water, unreliable food — voices from urban communities suffering freezing homes flooded by burst pipes began to fire back, blaming the state regulators for their refusal to invest in winter-hardy generation for the state. It was “just horrible to see,” said Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. “The power and water outages in Texas have created a situation that’s worse than even the early days of the pandemic,” warned Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio.

But deeply ingrained in the Texas power sector was the governor’s belief that hard freezes didn’t happen often enough to be worth preparing for. That misguided belief was os deeply ingrained that when the Texas Monthly asked ERCOT CEO Bill Magness if the savings from failing to build resilience were worth it to consumers, he dismissed the question: “I am not aware that we have ever conducted a real cost-benefit analysis on that topic.” That wasn’t true. ERCOT had analyzed this, and it turned out that the agency’s eight-year-old estimate of the daily cost of such a blackout was $2.8 billion — enough to cover a lot of weatherization. The 2020 freeze brought a whole new class of costs to bear. Not only was electricity generation shut down, but as a result so were many oil fields. IHS Markit estimated that the Texas freeze had shut down at least 20% of the nation’s  oil and gas production, largely in the Permian Basin, which made it harder to get gas-fired electricity back on line.  

As more and more voters got more and more upset, a new refrain was heard, even from Abbott: Texas needed to weatherize. The governor called for a special legislative session to get it done, and was suddenly outraged. “Everyone knows how challenging the past few days have been for our fellow Texans,” Abbott said. “All of us in the state of Texas believe it is completely unacceptable that you had to endure one minute of the challenge that you faced.” 

So can we write off the Texas tragedy to Lone Star exceptionalism? A quasi-secessionist electricity island, with inadequate requirements for getting ready for winter, pays the price?  

Up close it looks like it. But pull back and include the summer of 2020, and it’s clear that what went wrong in Texas has a lot do with the fires that brought California to its knees six months earlier. The summers of 2017 and 2018 had made it clear that California didn’t have nearly enough firefighters standing by for an event like the lightning strikes that rained down in August 2020. It was also clear the state had allowed PG&E and its other utilities to invest too little in fire hardening rural power lines. Worse yet, most communities in the fire-hazard areas had failed to adopt or enforce adequate fireproofing measures on homes and businesses. But California’s politics are — in the American context — at polar opposites to Texas. (In fact, California’s problem is significantly harder to fix than the polar vortex threat to Texas.)

To understand why neither red nor blue America can reliably and safely provide electricity to its population, we need to contrast the American attitude towards natural disasters — they happen, but we recover — with the Dutch approach to flooding, which is more like: We can’t prevent the storms, but we can protect ourselves against the damages. Since the Dutch adopted this attitude as national policy 70 years ago, not a single citizen has died in a flood. Prevention has proven cheaper than rescue and repair: Even though a third of the nation lies below sea level, Holland’s annual expenditures for flood prevention, at $1.5 billion, are a fraction of American costs for flood recovery, even on a per capita basis.   

If President Biden is looking for another issue on which he can unite the country, starting a conversation on the need to massively invest in fire, flood and storm resilience in a climate-stressed world offers a promising opportunity. How about “Build it back safely” as a subset of “Build it back better”?

The Lincoln Project’s implosion: A perfect time for Democratic donors to rethink their spending

For the past month, anti-Trump super PAC the Lincoln Project –– which promised to bridge America’s divides by bringing dignity back to the Republican Party –– has been put through the wringer and hung out to dry. First, allegations of sexual harassment by more than twenty people, including two minors, against Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver came to light in late January. According to various reports, several of the group’s prominent Republican founders knew about the allegations as early as March of 2020, yet no subsequent investigations were ever launched. Two weeks later, it was revealed that over two-thirds of the $90 million raised by the Lincoln Project was paid to firms run by the group’s founders, leaving only $27 million spent on the ad campaign in support of congressional Democrats and against Donald Trump it promised to run.

Additional allegations have since accused the Lincoln Project leaders of cultivating a toxic workplace rife with infighting, sexism, and homophobia. The Lincoln Project’s co-founders, Steve Schmitt and Jennifer Horn, as well as its senior advisor, Kurt Bardella, have resigned amid the turmoil, throwing the group into a chaotic state of disunity. 

It’s easy to dismiss the organization’s dissolution as a failure of workplace ethics or compliance, but let us not forget: the Lincoln Project was also a failure of political strategy.

Not only did highly-moneyed liberals rally behind a Republican-backed organization that now appears foundationally rotten; they did so because they erroneously believed its strategy to be new and bold. According to Federal Election Commission filings, here are some of the Lincoln Project’s biggest donors: 

  • Democratic dark money group Majority Forward ($1.35 million)
  • Democratic dark money group Sixteen Thirty Fund ($300,000)
  • Hedge fund manager Stephen Mendel Jr. ($1 million)
  • Oil heir Gordon Getty ($1 million)
  • Media magnate David Geffen ($500,000)
  • Bain Capital Co-Chair Joshua Bekenstein ($100,000)
  • Founder of Dreamworks Pictures Jeffrey Katzenberg ($100,000)
  • Philanthropist Liz Lefkofsky ($100,000)

Even with such support from big-moneyed liberals, however, it’s not readily apparent that the Lincoln Project did much of anything to help Democrats. More Americans voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election than they did in 2016, after all. Democrats also overwhelmingly lost state legislatures throughout the country. Despite all of the Lincoln Project’s sensationalized broadsides against key Trump’s congressional allies, the group also failed to weed out any of the most corrosive figures within the GOP, such as Senators Mitch McConnell, R-KY, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Ted Cruz, R-TX, or even Maine’s Susan Collins.  

Amid the big Democratic disappointment in 2020, however, there was one election that stood apart from the rest: Georgia’s election of Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate. Not only did their runoff victories over Republican incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, respectively, bring the Senate to an even split, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the designated tiebreaker, it re-introduced America to a strikingly quaint way of winning elections: organizing. 

Ossoff and Warnock both heavily relied on a Democratic organizing project that had actually preceded their bids for office and had built up the state’s political infrastructure through community-driven efforts for over a decade. The project’s co-founder, Stacey Abrams, has since been hailed for helping to flip Georgia blue, but it is instructive to compare her victory with the Lincoln Project’s failures.

Abrams was elected to the Georgia State House of Representatives in 2007, eventually climbing her way to minority leader in 2011. In 2014, dead set on flipping Georgia politically in tandem with its changing demographics, Abrams founded the New Georgia Project and the Voter Access Institute, two grassroots, working class-led organizations that seek to expand voting registration in communities of color. 

During her bid for governor in 2018, Abrams partnered with a vast ecosystem of political and non-profit organizations and emphasized the need to personally engage with voters through continued groundwork rather than swaying them with rancorous attack ads with titles like “Blood“, “Oath,” or “Bounty” for a few months during an election year. Abrams also defied conventional political wisdom by targeting non-voting Georgians of color as opposed to appealing only to registered voters. As she told The New York Times Magazine, “Our innovation was that [non-voters] could count, and we saw there were a lot of folks who simply wanted someone to invest in them.” 

After Abrams lost to her Republican gubernatorial opponent, Brian Kemp, who eked out a 55,000-vote win out of 4 million cast in 2018, she founded Fair Fight, a national voting rights organization that worked to educate voters and provide resources for them to engage in the electoral process during the 2020 election. 

“We’re going to train folks to protect the right to vote, to assure every ballot gets counted, to make sure there’s a hotline in each state so that when the new law shows up people know what they need to do,” Abrams said in speech to the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, explaining her strategy of informing Georgia’s electorate. “We’re going to have a fair fight in 2020 because my mission is to make certain that no one has to go through in 2020 what we went through in 2018.”

It was during this period that a wide array of social justice organizations based in Georgia, predominantly led by women of color, worked in conjunction with Abrams to push the Peach State blue. For example, ProGeorgia, a coalition of over thirty non-profit organizations promoting civic engagement, acted as a hub for various community interests. Other groups like SONG Power and Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) that led outreach programs for the Biden campaign continued their efforts through the Georgia runoffs. According to In These Times, SONG Power and GLAHR managed to knock on 150,000 doors all across Georgia during the summer. By the end of the 2020 election cycle, 800,000 new voters had registered in the state, forty-nine percent of whom were people of color. The increase made for a record turnout of more than four million voters.

Although Abrams’ political project benefited from a large pot of grassroots donations, she avoided giving money to specific candidates, instead building out the political infrastructure needed to amass broad support for progressive policies. Needless to say, the remarkable success of her project presents an important question for Democratic donors: Will they continue to bankroll short-term avenues of influence that focus on the success (or failure) of individual political candidates? Or will Democrats finally focus on enfranchising new voters and establishing a broader, longer-term coalition of support? Given how the 2020 election cycle played out, it appears that the latter strategy has more political potential. 

According to a study conducted by Democratic super PAC Priorities USA which examined the effects of the Lincoln Project’s ads on swing voters, the better an ad performed on Twitter, the less likely it was to persuade voters. “The underlying mechanism of persuasion, I think of it like cough medicine,” said Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, “People don’t enjoy having their mind changed.”

In fact, political advertising in general –– particularly for primary and general elections –– may be far less effective than its backers might have you believe. A study produced by scientific journal Science Advances found that ads of all kinds, in fact, had no virtually no effect on a candidate’s favorability. “Positive ads work no better than attack ads,” said coauthor of the study Alexander Coppock, an assistant professor of political science at Yale. “Republicans, Democrats, and independents respond to ads similarly. Ads aired in battleground states aren’t substantially more effective than those broadcast in non-swing states.” 

Yet Democrats have not begun to think about curbing ad expenditures. Out of the $6.9 billion budget Democrats spent on campaigning for the 2020 election, $600 million went to TV ads alone. (This excludes digital ads, print ads, radio, etc.) Imagine the kind of voter turnout Democrats would yield if they spent $600 million every couple years on building a more robust political infrastructure. It behooves Democrats –– and particularly high-net worth liberals in this case –– to think about how they will win elections over beyond the scope of one administration. Because, as evidenced by Trump’s personal vendetta against President Obama’s legacy, one election is simply not enough.

If there’s anything liberals have learned from Donald Trump’s election and everlong forever-years in the Oval Office, it’s that Trump’s ascendancy was not random; it was a product white working-class voters feeling increasingly disenfranchised by an economy that did not serve them. Democrats may have come to terms with this. But they have not reckoned with its broader implication: you cannot consistently win elections unless you consistently support those who vote in them.

Republican Senator Mike Lee tried to set a trap for Merrick Garland — but he didn’t fall for it

On Monday, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah was among the senators who questioned Judge Merrick Garland during his confirmation hearing for U.S. attorney general. Lee tried to paint Garland as hostile to gun owners, but the centrist Democrat wasn’t falling for it.

Lee told President Joe Biden’s nominee, “Let’s talk about policy as it relates to the 2nd Amendment briefly. Do you support universal background checks?” And the 68-year-old Garland responded, “I do think that it’s very important that we be careful that people who are entitled to have guns…. get the background check that allows them to have them — and that those who are not entitled and who we are concerned about, because they are threats because they are felons or whatever reason barred by the law, that there’s an opportunity to determine that they not be given a gun.”

The Utah senator asked Garland if he favors “banning specific types of guns”— to which he responded, “As I’m sure you know, the president is a strong supporter of gun control, has been an advocate all of his professional life on this question. The role of the Justice Department is to advance the policy program of the administration, as long as it’s consistent with the law. As I said so far, we have a little indication from the Supreme Court as to what this means; we don’t have a complete indication. Where there is room under the law for the president’s policies to be pursued, then I think the president is entitled to pursue them.”

Lee also asked the attorney general nominee how he feels about “policies that would support holding firearms manufacturers liable for damage caused by people using firearms they produced to commit a crime.”

Garland responded, “I don’t have — I believe that the president may have a position on this question. I have not thought myself deeply about this. I don’t think it raises a 2nd Amendment issue itself, the question of the liability protection. I have not addressed this in any way. I need to think about this considerably more.”

If Garland is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he will be the United States’ first permanent U.S. attorney general since William Barr—who left that position in December when Donald Trump was still president. Jeffrey A. Rosen served as acting U.S. attorney general during the final weeks of Trump’s presidency, and the current acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, took over when Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Garland’s nomination has a lot of symbolism for Democrats, as President Barack Obama unsuccessfully nominated him for the U.S. Supreme Court after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even consider the nomination, and that seat remained vacant until Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch in 2017.

MyPillow CEO and Trump fan Mike Lindell hit with $1.3 billion lawsuit over election fraud claims

Mike Lindell, the Trump-loving CEO of MyPillow, has been hit with a new $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit over his lies about the 2020 presidential election.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Dominion Voting Systems has sued Lindell for his false claims about the company conspiring to steal votes from former President Donald Trump at the behest of the Chinese government.

In its lawsuit, Dominion accuses Lindell of telling a “Big Lie” about the election being stolen from Trump as a shameless way to gin up publicity for his business.

“He is well aware of the independent audits and paper ballot recounts conclusively disproving the Big Lie,” the complaint says. “But Lindell…sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows.”

Earlier this month, Lindell released a three-hour TV special about purported voter fraud in the 2020 election in which he implied that Satan had a role in denying Trump a second term and interviewed a retired general who ranted about President Joe Biden being a front for “communism.”

Lindell also repeated his baseless claims about Trump votes “breaking” the algorithms in Dominion voting machines, which Dominion cites in its lawsuit as an example of defamatory speech that has irreparably harmed the company’s reputation.