Why opening restaurants is exactly what the coronavirus wants us to do

On Jan. 29, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was promoting “marital bliss” at a coronavirus news conference.

Announcing that indoor dining would reopen at 25% capacity in New York City on Valentine’s Day, and wedding receptions could also resume with up to 150 people a month after, Cuomo suggested: “You propose on Valentine’s Day and then you can have the wedding ceremony March 15, up to 150 people. People will actually come to your wedding because you can tell them, with the testing, it will be safe. … No pressure, but it’s just an idea.”

Cuomo isn’t alone in taking measures to loosen pandemic-related restrictions. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer allowed indoor dining to resume at 25% capacity starting Feb. 1. Idaho Gov. Brad Little increased limits on indoor gatherings from 10 to 50 people. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is raising business capacity from 25% to 40%, including at restaurants and gyms. California Gov. Gavin Newsom lifted stay-at-home orders on Jan. 25.

To justify their reopening decisions, governors point to falling case counts. “We make decisions based on facts,” Cuomo said. “New York City numbers are down.”

But epidemiologists and public health experts say a crucial factor is missing from these calculations: the threat of new viral variants. One coronavirus variant, which originated in the United Kingdom and is now spreading in the U.S., is believed to be 50% more transmissible. The more cases there are, the faster new variants can spread. Because the baseline of case counts in the U.S. is already so high — we’re still averaging about 130,000 new cases a day — and because the spread of the virus grows exponentially, cases could easily climb past the 300,000-per-day peak we reached in early January if we underestimate the variants, experts said.

Furthermore, study after study has identified indoor spaces — particularly restaurants, where consistent masking is not possible — as some of the highest-risk locations for transmission to occur. Even with distanced tables, case studies have shown that droplets can travel long distances within dining establishments, sometimes helped along by air conditioning.

We’re just in the opening stage of the new variants’ arrival in the United States. Experts say we could speed viruses’ spread by providing them with superspreading playgrounds or slow them down by starving them of opportunities to replicate.

“We’re standing at an inflection point,” said Sam Scarpino, assistant professor at Northeastern University and director of the school’s Emergent Epidemics Lab. Thanks to the arrival of vaccines, he said, “we finally have the chance right now to bring this back under control, but if we ease up now, we may end up wasting all the effort we put in.”

Dr. Luciana Borio, an infectious disease physician who was a member of the Biden-Harris transition team’s COVID-19 advisory board, put it more bluntly at a congressional hearing on Feb. 3. “Our worst days could be ahead of us,” she said.

I interviewed 10 scientists for this story and was surprised by the vehemence of some of their language. “Are you sure it could be that bad?” I asked, over and over.

They unanimously said they expected B.1.1.7, the variant first discovered in the U.K., to eventually become the dominant version of coronavirus in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that B.1.1.7 will become dominant in March, using a model that presumes it’s 50% more transmissible than the original “wildtype” coronavirus. The model’s transmission rate was based on experience in the U.K., which first detected B.1.1.7 in September and saw an increase in cases that became apparent in December, straining hospitals despite stringent closures and stay-at-home orders. So while our country appears relatively B.1.1.7-free right now, the situation could look drastically different in a matter of months.

Experts are particularly concerned because we don’t have a handle on exactly how far B.1.1.7 has spread. Our current surveillance system sequences less than 1% of cases to see whether they are a variant.

Throwing an even more troubling wrench into the mix is that B.1.1.7 is continuing to morph. Just this week, scientists discovered that some B.1.1.7 coronaviruses in Britain had picked up a key change, known as the E484K mutation. That mutation had previously been found in the B.1.351 variant, which was first discovered in South Africa. Scientists have hypothesized that it’s the E484K mutation that has reduced the efficacy of some vaccines in South African trials, so this is incredibly worrying news.

“It’s really hard to thread this needle without sounding like a prophet of doom,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. While vaccines bring hope, she said, governors who are moving to expand indoor dining are “completely reckless”; if they don’t course correct, “I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say the worst could be yet to come.”

The choices that our federal and state leaders make right at this moment will determine if we can bend the curve once and for all and start ending the pandemic, or if we ride the rollercoaster into yet another surge, this one fueled by a viral enemy harder to fight than ever before.

All of us have agency in deciding this narrative, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stressed. “Certainly you need to be prepared for the possibility that things might get worse in the light of the variants, but that is not inevitable because there are things that we can do to mitigate against it,” he said in an interview. “We’re not helpless observers of our own fate.”

Fauci urged states to “double down on your public health measures … to have virtually everybody wear masks, to have everyone maintain social distance, to have everybody avoid congregate settings, and to have everybody wash their hands very frequently.”

And don’t wait until it’s too late, warned Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“We are so good at pumping the brakes after we’ve wrapped the car around the tree,” he said. The new variants aren’t being complacent. “There’s still a lot of human wood out there for this coronavirus to burn.”

To understand the epidemiologists’ warnings, it helps to understand what variants are, how they have been behaving and our limitations in knowing exactly how far they have spread.

People have a bad habit of anthropomorphizing the coronavirus: ascribing human-like intentions to it, as if a microbe can discern that we finally have a vaccine and try to evade it. But viruses don’t really have any schemes; they just reproduce. “Coronaviruses are a single strand of RNA in a sac of fat,” epidemiologist Larry Brilliant reminded me. “They’re preprogrammed to replicate and continue replicating. That’s their job.”

Once in a while, when a virus replicates, a mistake occurs, and a letter in the strand of RNA is copied inaccurately. That’s called a mutation. Many times, those mutations are neutral. Sometimes they are detrimental to the virus, and that lineage will quickly die off. Other times, they’re beneficial to the virus in some way, such as by making it more transmissible. When a version of the virus becomes functionally different, that’s when scientists consider it a variant.

As of Feb. 4, according to the CDC, the U.S. has found 611 cases of B.1.1.7, the variant first discovered in the United Kingdom, five cases of B.1.351, first identified in South Africa, and two cases of P.1., first identified in Brazil. But that’s almost certainly an undercount.

Part of the reason why epidemiologists are advocating for us to stay hunkered down is because the U.S. doesn’t know exactly where all the variant cases are.

The term that public health uses is “surveillance.” I like to think of it as having eyes on the virus. In order to have good eyes on where coronavirus infections are in general, all you need is the regular swab tests that we’re all familiar with. But in order to tell whether a positive case is the wildtype coronavirus or one of the more nasty variants, an additional step is needed: genomic sequencing. For that, the sample needs to be sent on to a lab that has specialized machinery capable of conducting sequencing.

Until recently, sequencing in the U.S. was a patchwork effort, conducted by a mix of academic and public health agency labs keen to track the evolution of the coronavirus. Though the CDC hosted a weekly call where those scientists already conducting sequencing could compare notes, there was no dedicated federal funding or coordination to ensure that samples were routinely gathered from across the country.

Today, the U.S. sequences less than 1% of its total cases. This is a pittance compared to the U.K., which sequences around 8-10% of its positive test results. But volume alone isn’t the only thing that matters. Representation, meaning where the samples come from, is another crucial factor. Since most of the sequencing so far has come from voluntary efforts, the U.S. has suffered from uneven visibility, with a whole bunch of eyeballs in parts of the country that are biotechnology and academic hubs, like Boston, San Francisco and San Diego, and less in “surveillance deserts” like North and South Dakota. There, barely any samples have been sequenced at all, even when those states had explosions of COVID-19 cases.

Dr. Phil Febbo is chief medical officer at Illumina, one of the world’s biggest sequencing technology companies. Like so many parts of the coronavirus response, keeping a lookout for variants has suffered from a lack of federal leadership, Febbo said. As early as March of last year, Illumina representatives began meeting with federal agencies, advocating for a national genomic surveillance system.

“We talked to any three-lettered agency we could,” Febbo said. “Those conversations were cordial: They said they heard what we were saying, but then they’d say, ‘But we need more tests, but can you do it in five minutes, can it be point-of-care?'” It wasn’t until Dec. 18, when B.1.1.7 was taking off in the United Kingdom, that Illumina finally got a call from the CDC offering to sign a contract with the company. (Since December, CDC has engaged Illumina to do surveillance work by signing two contracts potentially worth up to $4.6 million.)

Today, Illumina sequences positive samples that are passed on from a diagnostic testing company, Helix. Each RNA strand of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has about 30,000 nucleotides, each represented by one of four letters. Illumina’s sequencers read through each sample’s code and compare each letter to a reference sequence, looking for significant changes. The data gets passed back to the CDC, which uses location data stripped of personal identifiers to map the spread of any variants that Illumina has picked up.

The CDC said it has contracted with several large commercial companies with the goal of sequencing up to 6,000 samples a week by mid-February. Through another program, called the National SARS-CoV-2 Strain Surveillance System, state public health labs are supposed to send a total of 1,500 samples to the agency every other week. This program went into effect on Jan. 25 and is still ramping up, according to a CDC spokesperson.

Febbo says more can be done to increase surveillance. He notes that the Biden administration, while clearly more invested in variant surveillance than the Trump administration, hasn’t set a public target in the same way it has for vaccinations with its “100 million shots” campaign. Illumina estimates that sequencing 5% of all samples would allow us to be confident that we are catching all variants of concern, and he would like the Biden administration to make that a public goal. It can be done, Febbo says: “It hasn’t been the lack of capacity, it’s been the lack of will.”

Having clearer information about where variants are would give governors and local officials actual information with which to make decisions. Then they could say with confidence, “We can open indoor dining because we know that the variants aren’t circulating in our community.” Absent that information, the only thing we can do is act like the variants are here.

The good news is that so far, the vaccines that have been made available to the public appear to be reasonably effective against the coronavirus variants. They may be slightly less effective against B.1.351, the variant discovered in South Africa, but none of the variants are total “escapes,” so a vaccine should offer you at least partial protection against any form of the coronavirus you encounter.

All of the available shots give your immune system some familiarity with the virus, allowing it to be more prepared to meet the bug in the wild, whether it’s the original strain or a variant. Having a savvier immune system, in turn, means that even if you do get infected, you’re less likely to need to be hospitalized, and less likely to die.

“Regardless of what’s happening with this variant, we’re much better with [people’s immune systems] seeing SARS-CoV-2 after seeing the vaccine than not,” said Derek Cummings, a biology professor at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.

However, we’re not very far along with vaccinations yet. As of Feb. 4, only 2.1% of the U.S. population had been reported to have received both doses of the vaccine; 8.5% had received one dose. That means we’re in a precarious moment right now where the vast majority of the U.S. hasn’t had a chance to get protected, and the variants have a window to multiply. (Of course, those who have already gotten sick with COVID-19 have natural immunity, but some scientists are concerned that those who develop only mild symptoms may not gain as much innate immunity as those who receive a vaccine.)

Of the scientists I talked to, Caitlin Rivers, a computational epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, was the most optimistic about a potential variant-fueled surge. “I do think that B.1.1.7 has the possibility to precipitate a wave, but it probably won’t be as bad as the last wave, because we have a lot of preexisting immunity and we are rolling out the vaccines,” she said. Thanks to the vaccines, the U.S. will have more population immunity by March, when the CDC predicts B.1.1.7 will become dominant, than the U.K. did when the variant hit there late last year. “It’s a low likelihood that we will have a gigantic fourth wave, but not impossible,” she said.

Still, Rivers said, “now is not the time to relax.” She, too, was critical of state policies to loosen restrictions. “When you create the same conditions that allowed the last surge, you should expect the same results,” she said. “Our main move should be to reduce transmission as much as possible while we vaccinate as much as possible.”

Time is not on our side, as the morphing B.1.1.7 variant showed us when it picked up the E484K mutation. While we are lucky that our vaccines still work against the current variants, we have to keep in mind that in this race between vaccines and variants, the variants aren’t staying static.

The big fear is that eventually, a variant will come along that provides the virus with a complete immune escape, preventing our vaccines from working against it. Even though we can update our vaccines, that would take time. The only way to guarantee that the virus won’t mutate into a variant that our current vaccines don’t cover is to lower transmission significantly, said genomic epidemiologist Alli Black: “The virus will continue to mutate as it continues to spread. We’re not going to stop that biological fact unless transmission stops.” And vaccinating everyone quickly is one key way to make it harder for the coronavirus to get from person to person in the first place.

“We need to start responding like the variants are going to take over and they are one of the biggest threats,” said Cummings, “or we won’t have vaccinated enough people when this rolls through.”

Throughout this pandemic, the U.S. has often been in the fortunate position of not being first when it comes to novel viral encounters. We weren’t the country where SARS-CoV-2 originated. We weren’t the place where B.1.1.7 was spawned. We’ve had the opportunity to look to other countries and learn from them, if only we’d choose to.

Epidemiologist after epidemiologist pointed out that the U.K., Denmark and Portugal required drastic measures — the dreaded L word, “lockdown” — to get B.1.1.7 under control. “We’ve seen that multiple different countries in Europe have had to close schools after making it a policy that schools would be the last to close,” Rivers, from Johns Hopkins, noted.

If we don’t want the same fate to befall the U.S., now is the time to act, the scientists urged.

Improving surveillance can help. Utah Public Health Laboratory has a robust state sequencing program, analyzing a random sample of cases sent by the state’s two largest hospital groups. Kelly Oakeson, its chief scientist for next generation sequencing and bioinformatics, has set a goal of sequencing 10% of all cases in the state; his lab is currently doing about 3%. They could do more, he said. The only problem is that they don’t have enough pipette tips due to a national shortage. Oakeson said he’s hoping that the Biden administration will leverage the Defense Production Act to produce more pipette tips so he can increase his state’s surveillance capabilities.

“We can’t get transmission down through vaccination alone,” said Rasmussen, the Georgetown virologist. “We need to be encouraging leadership, both at the state and federal levels, to protect people, to have paid sick leave for people if they become symptomatic.”

A restaurant server in New York City, who was laid off early in the pandemic from a high-end steakhouse, told me he understood what the epidemiologists were saying from a scientific point of view. But, he asked, “if you want to shut everything down, who’s going to pay the bills?”

He continued, “In order to do what the epidemiologists want to get done, you can only do that with policies to support the people and make it worth their while to do it.” He’s job hunting, and he said that if he was offered a position that put him indoors on Valentine’s Day, “I would have to take it.” He’d put on a double mask and go to work.

Whenever we have options, though, individual decisions can make a difference. Black, the genomic epidemiologist, encouraged everyone to limit travel as much as possible: “It just really facilitates introductions of these circulating variants.”

Hang in there, urged Scarpino, the Northeastern professor, painting a hopeful picture: “Cases are coming down, vaccines are going up. Let’s pretend that politicians wake up and don’t reopen restaurants and we avoid a big wave in March. Then we’re running downhill on the vaccines because the pipeline gets better and better. Then we can get our lives back.”

That sounded so tantalizing. Dream-worthy. Just a matter of good science-based public policy and collective compliance driving down the case counts until those little mindless RNA-filled fat sacs have nowhere to go, no one to infect, no way to replicate, no chances to mutate. I imagine them bumping around, lost without crowded indoor spaces to breed in, thwarted by vaccine-boosted immune cells, unable to find a host, dwindling, going, gone.

What caused the Texas disaster? Decades of Republican deregulation: “Laissez-faire run amok”

The massive energy failure that brought Texas to a halt in the middle of a record-setting winter snap this week was not an unavoidable natural disaster. It has roots in decades of deregulation driven by conservative elected officials that prized the state’s rogue mythology and short-term gains over long-term catastrophic risk.

When temperatures plummeted across the Lone Star State on Sunday night, demand for heat soared. The Texas power grid, uniquely detached from the Eastern and Western national grids, faltered under the strain, forcing the state’s energy regulator, ERCOT, to mandate that cities and towns cut as much usage as possible to head off a total collapse which could have left residents in the dark for months.

Much of the state’s generator capacity goes offline for maintenance during low-demand winter months, and the sustained extreme temperatures knocked out critical functioning infrastructure that hadn’t been winterized, creating an insurmountable deficit with no backup to speak of, either internally or across state lines. Without that headroom, the rolling blackouts enacted as a temporary measure soon stopped rolling, depriving millions of people of power during one of the bitterest cold streaks Texas has ever seen. Icicles grew on hammocks and ceiling fans. Water mains burst. Homes and apartments were flooded with numbing water. People died for lack warmth.

In a media blitz, Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, tried to pass blame to perceived liberal enemies with baseless claims about the longtime oil- and gas-producing state’s dependence on renewables like solar and wind. Those source indeed comprise an increasingly large share of the state’s energy blend — a change largely driven by the market conservatives claim to love — but had little to do with the collapse, which primarily concerned the natural gas sector. Those lies also obscured a broader truth, which is that the renewables that failed did so for the same reasons that fossil fuels failed: The wishful thinking that Texas winters will always be mild, and therefore cheap.

Former Texas Democratic state senator Kent Caperton said in an interview that it’s difficult to capture the full story behind the current crisis, because it has been so long in the making, and the consequences are decades removed from some of their most immediate causes.

In 1983, Caperton introduced a bill that created the Office of Public Utility Counsel (OPUC), the first state agency dedicated to representing the interests of residential and small commercial energy consumers before the courts and state and federal regulators. OPUC was a step in the right direction, Caperton said, but its ultimate aims were thwarted in 1999 when the state opened its utility markets to retail competition, which created complexities for pricing and regulation.

“It was a big deal for Texas to open up to regulation, but that didn’t last. In hindsight it looks like my bill was successful, because we didn’t have any major failures in that time,” Caperton said. “The 1999 bill essentially allowed private providers to take over and set their own rates, and after that it seems like ERCOT has been a toothless institution. The providers have had all the control.”

The trade-off, Caperton said, was wider profit margins and short-term savings — at the price of unknown long-term risks. “You might not have an event like this every 10 years, or even every 50, and it could come in the summer or the winter,” he said. “But you’ve at least got to prepare for it, because it will happen.”

In the old system, local plants generated power for local use. But in the open market, retailers purchased electricity at wholesale from generators anywhere in the state, putting a new strain on the state’s power grid. Deregulation also led to a less uniform and predictable consumer base, Caperton said, which is more difficult to serve, and in recent years the state’s production capacity has not kept up with demand. Texas can largely fend off blackouts in the summer because producers are at the ready to take advantage of the high rates that accompany scorching seasonal heat, but that base demand disappears in the winter, and many operators take their generators offline.

Such a system is specifically vulnerable to the kind of deep freeze that struck the state this week. Add to that the fact that Texas has uniquely refused to join the larger national power grid, which allows the state to duck federal winterization requirements while isolating it from outside support, and the stage was set for disaster.

Caperton noted that the national health care debate offered a good analogy. “You have a common need, which requires certain agreements and tradeoffs, and the state and various private interests do not want to be part of that,” he said.

But former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes, also a Democrat, told Salon that the state’s leadership doesn’t get to hide behind the state’s famous independent streak, because Texas picks and chooses what it accepts from the federal government.

“I think it’s a mistake that Texas isn’t connected to the national grid. We’re going it alone and don’t have the necessary support,” Barnes said. “But we’re happy to take federal regulation for other things, like our drugs and our water. Just not this.”

Texas also had advanced warning for this specific scenario. In 2011, a deep freeze knocked out power to millions of Texans and triggered a review of the state’s energy systems. Federal regulators recommended that private utilities take steps to insulate and winterize their production and transmission facilities. But because Texas operated on its own grid, it was free to ignore the guidance — which it did.

“It’s an ideological failure,” Caperton said. “Laissez-faire run amok.”

Deregulation did kick-start the state’s wind energy industry by opening the market to new competitors, but consumer prices did not drop as planned because those competitors found it difficult to offer distinct products. On that front, the blackout offers a possible opportunity: Weatherizing windmills to sustain a long freeze, as is routinely done in colder climes around the country and the world. In Texas, natural gas picks up if wind power drops off, but the winter demand for natural gas heat had already put strain on that resource, and when those production facilities themselves froze and failed, there was nowhere to turn.

Deregulation also left state leaders flying blind through the crisis. Austin Mayor Steve Adler told Salon that neither he nor his city’s community-owned utility, Austin Energy, had been able to access real-time information or state-level insight into the situation, which left as many as 200,000 of his constituents without power, a number that he said has since fallen to 50,000.

“Our power crews have been working incredibly hard this week. When the state says you have to dump power quickly, it’s disruptive, and left us in a position where we weren’t able to do rolling outages, so some people have gone without power here for 60-plus hours,” Adler said.

“Everybody in the community is angry and frustrated, and I am too, because I can get just about as much information from the state as you can. Every one of these utilities is independently owned and operated, and the state doesn’t appear to require public reporting. I would have hoped that ERCOT would have been able to give us a better read. It’s frustrating not to know the details and make assessments about when the power will be back on, so we can plan, and help our community plan.”

Adler also pointed to the future: “We don’t have a system hardened to withstand a long period of time in these extreme temperatures, and it’s happening every 10 years now. Changes in climate will happen more frequently, and with so much deregulation I’m not sure that the incentives are built in to invest what it takes to harden our energy system and make that as inexpensive as possible. The state should set new standards, at a minimum.”

The fight against climate change in Texas has been hampered by Republicans who appear ever more eager to fight against climate change legislation, even in the face of shifting public opinion and overwhelming scientific consensus. Caperton, a moderate Democrat even by Texas standards, said that he became a pariah for introducing legislation in the 1980s to commission a study on wind energy. “It was just a study, but I was basically seen as a commie for doing that,” he said.

“There are some disasters that you just can’t prepare for, but this wasn’t one of them,” said Barnes, the former lieutenant governor. “This was a failure of leadership. There are things we could have done to prevent this, but we didn’t.”

“The View” hosts pile on Ted Cruz for Cancun getaway — then Meghan McCain deflects to Democrats

The hosts of “The View” slammed Texas senator Ted Cruz on Friday for his decision to leave his constituents to deal with water and heat failures amid Texas’ crippling freeze — prompting Meghan Mccain to call his Mexico trip “tone-deaf” and “despicable.”

“As a constituent, you want your public servants — not spring breakers, public servants — serving their communities in a time of need. As someone who has lived through a lot of hurricanes in Florida, that’s what you want to see, but not only did he abandon his state, he abandoned his duties, then he lied about it. The only reason he came back is because he got caught,” Ana Navarro said, commenting on the topic.

McCain briefly acknowledged senator Ted Cruz’s mishap — before quickly shifting her focus to Democrat scandals.

“The explosion is warranted, but I just wish last night, when I was seeing the absolute outrage and more time being dedicated on this scandal, I wish we had a modicum of what was dedicated to the Cruz scandal dedicated to the scandal with Governor Cuomo where 15,000 elderly people tragically died in nursing homes and the media ignored it for a year,” McCain said.

REPERCUSSIONS OF CRUZ TRIP? Sen. Ted Cruz was slammed for a Cancún trip while his state of Texas reels from a historic storm that has left hundreds of thousands out of power—the co-hosts react after he returned a day later. https://t.co/qf2Vd5jU9B pic.twitter.com/PQdIPviCHA

— The View (@TheView) February 19, 2021

Joy Behar agreed that McCain had a valid point about media reactions to blows from Democrats versus Republicans. Meanwhile, “View” co-host Sunny Hostin said that while senator Ted Cruz did ” get caught” he is “probably not going to be held accountable for this”.

In the midst of uncertainty, Sara Haines directed one question to Sen.Cruz, “Why are you not feeling a need to help your people?’

To address the fallout, senator Ted Cruz appeared on Fox News and offered his excuse.

I’m making sure we do everything we can to get the power turned on in Texas and to make sure this never happens again. pic.twitter.com/aSrrZuFjNl

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 19, 2021

“From the moment I sat on the plane, I began really second-guessing that decision,” he said.

Cruz added, “As much as you can do by phone, and Zoom, it’s not the same as being here, and so I returned this afternoon and I’m here working to make sure to do everything we can to get the power turned on.”

Real-life “Inception”: Scientists have figured out how to enter your dreams

The tornado was clearly visible to my friends and I, but we didn’t care. In fact, as we drove to the center of town, we didn’t even feel any wind. My friend in the driver’s seat pushed down hard on the gas pedal and we plowed straight through the funnel, a mild breeze whooshing past our faces as we did so.

Something seemed off. “Wait a minute, this is ridiculous,” I said to them. “We just drove right through a tornado. There is no way this is real. I’m obviously dreaming.”

I was experiencing what scientists call a lucid dream, or one in which the person sleeping is aware of the fact that they are not awake. It’s a state that is well-known to psychology and sleep scientists; for generations, many have studied the art of intentionally inducing this state so that they can fly or cultivate other imaginative experiences. Curiously, lucid dreaming may also be the key to communicating with the awake: a new study reveals that it is possible to communicate with someone while they are dreaming, although the catch is that it has to be a lucid dream. The study’s premise is reminiscent of the blockbuster sci-fi movie “Inception,” in which dream mercenaries are paid to enter others’ dreams and manipulate them while unconscious.

The paper, which was co-authored by a team of researchers and published in the journal Current Biology, involved a quartet of independent teams in the Netherlands, France, Germany and the United States. Between the four of them they studied 36 volunteers who either had experienced lucid dreaming or could recall at least one dream that they had had within the week prior to the experiment. They then trained the recruits on how to communicate with researchers while they were lucid dreaming; techniques ranged from the researchers using lights and tapping their fingers, to the dreamers moving their eyes in predetermined patterns. Scientists then held dozens of sessions in which they used electronic devices to confirm when participants were sleeping. Once they were asleep, the researchers tried to communicate with them by asking simple math or yes-or-no questions.

On 15 separate occasions, six sleeping individuals indicated to researchers that they were lucid dreaming. Between them they were asked 158 questions.

“Across all teams, we observed a correct response on 18.4% of these trials; the independent experts unanimously scored the polysomnographic evidence as indicating REM sleep for 26 of these 29 trials,” the authors write. “On a further 17.7% of the trials, expert raters did not agree on deciphering the response (and on 9 of those trials two raters thought there was no response). An incorrect response was produced on 3.2% of the trials. The most common outcome was a lack of a response (60.1% of the trials).”

Salon interviewed Dr. Ken A. Paller, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and co-author of the study, about its larger implications.

“Our repeated demonstrations of successful interactive dreaming now provide a new way to gain knowledge about dreams,” Paller told Salon by email. “This new method has advantages over the retrospective reports people give after waking up, particularly because communication is while an individual is in the midst of a dream, rather than later when the individual has transitioned to the waking state and their recollection of the dream is less reliable.”

Paller explained that the research could help scientists better understand why we dream and how “sleep cognition” helps people. He ticked off possible explanations for dreaming including “maintaining memory storage, for using our memories creatively, for problem solving, and even for general well-being.”

“A second set of implications is for applying the methods as a function of people’s specific needs,” Paller added. “Applications could be developed for problem solving, practicing well-honed skills, spiritual development, nightmare therapy, and strategies for other psychological benefits.”

Paller told Salon that the researchers also managed to develop ways to help people have lucid dreams.

“We call our method Targeted Lucidity Reactivation, and it involves 20 minutes of training prior to sleep and an unobtrusive sound presented later, during REM sleep,” Paller explained, using the acronym for “rapid eye movement” sleep that is associated with dreaming. “We are continuing to work on improving these procedures, and we are also exploring possibilities for running experiments in people’s own homes. There may be some advantages to doing so, as people will not be bothered by the unusual environment of a sleep laboratory or the monitoring technology we use.”

“We have developed a smartphone app that we are testing out for this purpose,” Paller added.

Women’s participation in the workforce hasn’t been this low since 1988

In early February, The U.S. Labor Department released its monthly jobs report showing a small sign of hope in economic recovery: the economy gained 49,000 net jobs in January 2021.

Yet the broader picture remains dire, particularly for women in the workforce.

Nearly one in 16 women over the age of 20 were unemployed in January 2021, and an estimated 275,000 women left the workforce that month. In total, nearly 2.5 million women have lost their jobs or dropped out of the workforce since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020; 1.8 million men have left the workforce. Black women have experienced the steepest drop in workforce participation. Overall, women’s participation in the workforce hasn’t been this low since 1988, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

The culmination of these harrowing data points is precisely why Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that women leaving the workforce is a “national emergency” that “demands a national solution.” For many women, a mix of furloughs, layoffs, and the demands of childcare and virtual schooling have forced them out of the job market. “Our economy cannot fully recover unless women can participate fully,” the vice president said on Thursday in a video call.

“The longer we wait to act, the harder it will be to bring these millions of women back into the workforce,” Harris said.

Last week, the vice president penned an op-ed in the Washington Post outlining how the American Rescue Plan will particularly benefit women workers.

“It will get $1,400 in checks to those who need it and at least $3,000 to parents for each of their children,” Harris wrote. “The plan includes unemployment insurance and housing assistance.”

She added: “It provides funding to help schools safely reopen and makes a big investment in child care to help providers keep their doors open or reopen them. And it will make sure that vaccines are available and accessible to everyone.”

Currently, members of the House and Senate are working on getting the bill for the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package, passed. As Harris wrote, the proposed plan allocates $10 billion for child care centers to stay open. It also expands a child tax credit to $3,600 per year for children under six and $3,000 per year for children between six and 17. Parents with children over the age of 17 could qualify for a credit, too.

One benefit of the proposed child tax credit plan is that half of the credit would be paid in advance by having the IRS send monthly payments to families. Currently, the child tax credit is $2,000 per kid under the age of 17.

“Families everywhere are shouldering a huge burden as homes have become classrooms and child-care centers, and uncertainty plagues each day,” Harris wrote. “Because of that, many working women have been forced to cut their hours or leave their jobs entirely. Even those who’ve managed to keep working full-time are stretched.”

“I Care a Lot” is a darkly amoral joyride for Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage

Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), who is at the center of the slick, darkly comic caper flick, “I Care A Lot” is one shady lady. She comes off as caring, but — watch out! — she is crafty. Marla may be a court-appointed legal guardian for the elderly, but she swindles her wards out of their homes and income. She even has a discreet network of accomplices who assist her.

Just watching Marla exhale smoke from vaping suggests she is the devil incarnate, and Pike embraces her devious character with the same ruthlessness as she embraced her Oscar-nominated role in “Gone Girl.” Marla even says in the film’s opening voiceover, “Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people to keep the rest of us poor.” She is a self-proclaimed lioness not a lamb. She schemes because she has been poor and knows that being rich is better.

Marla’s ethical boundaries are squishy, even though she maintains that she cares — a lot — for the seniors she legally represents. Moreover, given that Family Court Judge Lomax (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) claims she is a “well-respected professional guardian,” one might think he is on her payroll.

“I Care a Lot” opens with Marla working her, ahem, charm in Judge Lomax’s courtroom when the disgruntled Mr. Feldstrom (Macon Blair) accuses her of keeping his mother from him and draining her assets. He is right, of course, but Marla’s airtight defense — plus the fact that Feldstrom assaulted a staff member and vandalized the facility’s reception area — finds the case in her favor.

Ready to build on that success, Marla is made aware of an opening at a Berkshire Oaks Senior Living in part because the manager Sam Rice (Damian Young) is in Marla’s pocket. Through the help of another paid contact, Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt), Marla finds “a cherry” (a perfect mark) in Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest). This single, childless woman, who happens to be sitting on a pile of cash, is, thanks to Marla’s court-appointed guardianship, soon unhappily ensconced in a new unit at Berkshire Oaks.

The entire operation is insidious, invasive, and swift. Marla and Fran (Eiza González) — her partner in crime and in bed — clean out Jennifer’s house, sell off her estate, and find a safety deposit box that contains something that is both very expensive and untraceable. Goldmine!

But “I Care a Lot,” written and directed by J. Blakeson, is only just getting started. When Alexi (Nicholas Logan) meets Fran at Jennifer’s house, his boss Roman (Peter Dinklage), is none too happy about this turn of events. Roman sends his shark of a lawyer, Dean Erickson (a scene-stealing Chris Messina) to meet Marla. He offers her money and even threatens her, but the lioness won’t back down — or lose. A game of one-upmanship and various reversals of fortune quickly ensues.

Blakeson makes his glossy film go down smoothly as the sharply dressed characters behave badly and sometimes use tasers. “I Care a Lot” is cleverly plotted to the extent that the film lets viewers feel like they are accomplices in the subterfuge. Part of the film’s giddy fun is waiting to see if, when, and how Marla and/or Roman will be taken down.

In fact, the film’s best joke may be the mutual respect these two criminals have for each other as they play “Who will blink first?” during a particularly tense meeting. That said, both Marla and Roman seem to be efficient types, so the fact that they each give the other an opportunity for a comeback is curious, and perhaps, even sloppy. Blakeson’s film also gets a bit flabby when it depicts an extended sequence involving a knocked-out tooth.

Despite the expected setbacks, the film’s plotting does have some opportunities fall neatly into Marla’s lap. Given how much her character hopes to gain, she could struggle more.

Pike, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for “I Care a Lot,” impresses with her phony politeness and inability to flinch. It is highly satisfying watching her verbal sparring with the natty Dean Ericson in her office or a courtroom. But her exchanges with Jennifer are even better; they show that Marla may have unexpectedly met her match. When Wiest purrs, “I’m the worst mistake you’ll ever make,” it is hard not to hope that is true.

Marla’s relationship with Fran, however, is arguably the weakest part of the film. It almost fails to serve a purpose, which is a good thing to a degree (nothing is made of it), but it also feels like a missed opportunity (nothing is made of it). Blakeson doesn’t quite equate homosexuality with villainy but “I Care A Lot” also doesn’t measure up to the “lesbians take on the mob” pleasure that is “Bound.” Alas, Marla and Fran come across more as fiends (sic) with benefits than two women in love. González is just given far too little to do.

In support, Peter Dinklage plays Roman as coolly menacing and his tantrums when things do not quite go his way are dryly amusing. And Dianne Wiest’s expressions as her life is ripped asunder are priceless. (She too, could have been better utilized).

“I Care a Lot” delivers the same kicky pleasure as the recent “Promising Young Woman,” as these female protagonists use a ruse to get what they want. Marla does not have an altruistic reason for her actions, which imbues the film with some amorality, but there are some feminist messages about women besting men.

Blakeson’s film is not deep, but it is enjoyable because Pike makes viewers care about Marla. And that may be more than enough.

“I Care a Lot” is now available to stream on Netflix.

Florida to fly flags at half-mast for Rush Limbaugh on Ron DeSantis’ order

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Friday at the Hilton Airport Palm Beach in West Palm Beach that he plans to lower flags at half-mast in honor of the now-deceased conservative radio titan Rush Limbaugh.

According to ABC’s WTXL Tallahassee, flags across Florida have been ordered to be lowered when Limbaugh’s funeral, the date of which has yet to publicly announced, occurs. Limbaugh, who died of lung cancer at age 70, left behind a $50 million estate in Palm Beach Florida and taped his show just one mile away.

“What we do when there’s things of this magnitude,” DeSantis said, lamenting Limbaugh’s death, “once the date of internment for Rush is announced, we’re going to be lowering the flags to half-staff.” The pronouncement was met with applause from a mostly maskless audience.

DeSantis recounted on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday how Limbaugh had once asked him to appear on the show during a tough gubernatorial race. “I was getting the tar kicked out of me every day and he had me on the week before the election in 2018,” DeSantis said, “He didn’t have a lot of guests. I was honored to be on his show a couple of times.”

The governor gushed, “He would have been great in radio even without the conservative thing. He’s just that talented. Obviously, he was a conservative icon up there with Scalia, Reagan, and Buckley.”

DeSantis also announced that he intends to strengthen Florida’s electoral system by instituting a series of state-level policy changes, despite praising the fairness of 2020’s election. “There’s no state where your vote matters more than the state of Florida,” DeSantis said. “There’s no state with more voting transparency than the state of Florida.”

For a remedy, DeSantis intends to put an end to ballot harvesting –– the practice of allowing third parties to collect voters’ ballots and turn them into polling stations en masse. Critics have feared that the practice allows political operatives to tamper with votes, but proponents have said that it expands voting access to the elderly and disabled.

DeSantis also wants to ensure the mail-in-ballots are sent only by request. “We’re not going to do mass mailing of ballots,” DeSantis said. “It doesn’t work. I think it creates a lot of hazards, a lot of problems.”

In addition, the Florida governor hopes to increase the monitoring of ballot drop boxes, as well as improve real-time reporting at voting precincts. He also addressed the COVID-19 crisis, criticizing the supposed stringency of other state’s lockdown measures. “This country needs to move forward,” he said. “Florida has shown these lockdowns don’t work.”

The death of the public political apology

When Georgia representative and sometime QAnon enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Greene met with fellow House Republicans on Feb. 3, she may have apologized. Or she may not have.

During the closed-door meeting in which Greene’s conspiracy theory beliefs came up, we don’t know exactly what went down because, well, it was behind closed doors.

Speaking after the event, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy described Greene’s remarks as an apology, saying that Greene had denounced her previous statements and social media postings — which included the idea that mass school shootings are “false flag” operations and that California forest fires were started by Jewish space lasers — and that “she said she was wrong.”

U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of 10 Republicans who voted in support of the 2021 impeachment of Donald Trump, had a different take: “She was somewhat contrite, but personally I never heard an apology.” He added: “I didn’t hear an ‘I’m going to say this publicly.'”

As a scholar who has written about the art of the public political apology, I found the whole episode fits into a larger pattern of nonapology apologies in the modern political landscape.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

An apology, according to the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, is “a splitting of the self into a blameworthy part and a part that stands back and sympathizes with the blame giving.” Goffman goes on to say that after an offense has occurred, the job of the person apologizing is to show an understanding of the norm violated and the harm done.

What this means in practice is that offenders must identify what they did wrong and then demonstrate that they take responsibility for that wrong, that they accept the blame. To be a true apology this has to be accompanied with some sincerity and with a sense of how the offender will act differently in the future.

If a public apology includes these four elements – naming the harm, taking responsibility, sincerely accepting blame and committing to act differently – then it can help repair a relationship or even save a reputation.

Even if we are to take McCarthy’s word that an apology occurred in Greene’s case, we are none the wiser as to which parts of her embrace of QAnon and other conspiracies she had said sorry for.

The day after the Republican conference meeting, Greene took to the floor of the House of Representatives and characterized her past posts in this way: “These were words of the past and these things do not represent me, they do not represent my district and they do not represent my values.”

She went on say that she had “stumbled across” QAnon and “was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them. And that is absolutely what I regret.”

So, is this to be taken as an apology?

Whether Marjorie Taylor Greene has met the criteria established by Goffman is, at best, open to interpretation.

But she isn’t alone – good public apologies seem rare today.

“Mistakes were made”

Part of the difficulty has to do with the loss of standards held in common by a community. For a scholar like Goffman, it was taken for granted that an apology reflected common norms of behavior.

Gone are the days when Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy could agree, as they did in their second debate in 1960, that the United States should apologize when it is wrong, as when a long-planned Paris summit in 1960 collapsed after it was revealed the U.S. had covered up spy-plane flights over the Soviet Union. They naturally disagreed about whether the U.S. was in the wrong, but they agreed that apology was sometimes necessary.

Nixon went on to become an expert in the art of the nonapology, as seen in his response to the Watergate scandal. His “mistakes were made” approach, which uses a passive voice to avoid laying the blame directly on oneself, was later adopted by others, including Ronald Reagan over the Iran-Contra affair.

Today’s culture is too fractured for most public figures to risk a full-fledged apology. In the U.S., gerrymandered districts, continual fundraising appeals to a base, hyperpartisan media and a polarized electorate have conspired to deliver an environment in which apologizing is fraught with concerns. If one apologizes, it signals a backtracking to the base one is courting. If one refuses to apologize, that rallies supporters and donors.

In such circumstances, it is hard to admit you are wrong much less that you have behaved badly. In such an environment, it is perhaps understandable why Greene’s apology was behind closed doors and not delivered in public.

The death of the public apology has been long in the making. It fits an approach best exemplified by Nathan Brittles, a character played by actor John Wayne in the John Ford Western “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” The 1949 film popularized the expression “Never apologize – it’s a sign of weakness,” which has become the slogan of a type of public toughness over the past half-century. Ironically, that slogan is misunderstood; Nathan Brittles takes responsibility for the failure of his mission in the movie. The line should be “Never make excuses – it’s a sign of weakness.”

This (mis)understanding of the apology as a sign of weakness has certainly been the mantra of Donald Trump for many years. The former president’s style was to attack and insult, playing effectively to a base, and never say sorry.

Four-star apology

In the absence of public apologies from elected political leaders, perhaps it is better to look to the military, like the fictional Capt. Brittles, for outward signs of contrition.

While Trump avoided taking responsibility over failings in the response to the coronavirus pandemic, the four-star general heading the government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, Gustave Perna, was more accountable.

Speaking in late December, Perna took responsibility for how errors in the projections of COVID-19 vaccines to be distributed resulted in states getting fewer doses than they had been promised.

“I want to take personal responsibility for the miscommunication. I know that’s not done much these days. But I am responsible. And I take responsibility for the miscommunication,” he said, adding, “I failed. I am adjusting. I am fixing. And we will move forward from there.”

That apology names the harm, takes responsibility, accepts blames and commits to doing better. And it was delivered in public, in stark contrast to Greene’s expressions of regret.

Edwin Battistella, Professor of Linguistics, Southern Oregon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Texas blackouts show that even the weather is polarized now

In the midst of a freezing cold winter storm that left millions of Texans without power or heat, Republican Governor Greg Abbott appeared on Fox News on Tuesday to bash the Green New Deal. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott told host Sean Hannity. “Our wind and our solar got shut down — and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid.”

Fact-checkers descended upon Abbott’s claims almost immediately, pointing out that wind and solar played only a small part in the statewide catastrophe. According to a representative from the state’s power grid operator, only a fraction of the total outages were caused by icy wind turbines; the primary culprits appear to have been frozen natural gas plants and a shoddily designed grid disconnected from the rest of the country.

But the governor’s false claims sounded eerily familiar, and not just because they echoed the bizarre Republican opposition to the Green New Deal over the past few years (remember Trump’s “tiny windows“?). In this rapidly warming and heavily polarized country, Abbott’s interview was yet another sign of how every storm, fire, or heat wave has become a political sparring match — with everyone pointing the finger at someone else.

The problem is that people tend to interpret disasters, and most other things in life, in a way that validates their preconceived opinions. Last year, for example, when much of the West was on fire and the skies over San Francisco had turned bright orange, former President Trump blasted California’s forest management, tellingthe state government, “You gotta clean your floors” and blaming the state’s rolling blackouts on too much wind and solar. Governor Gavin Newsom countered the following month, warning: “This is a climate damn emergency.”

Those arguments aren’t equally valid — climate change has dramatically worsened the likelihood of wildfire in the West, and most of California’s forested area is actually federal land. But they do point to a larger trend. Republicans blame environmentalists, Democrats call out fossil fuel emissions: This is an old story, and one that will probably continue for years to come.

At this point, though, the United States (not to mention the rest of the world) should be long past bickering over trees or frozen wind turbines. Winter ice storms and scorching wildfires can no longer even remotely be considered “natural disasters.” The planet has already warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, and U.S. infrastructure — think highways, electrical grids, water pipes, and much more — is woefully unprepared.

And while hurricanes, storms, and fires have always been fodder for political conflict, recent fights over climate change have kicked those fights into a higher gear. Most Republicans, facing a Democratically controlled White House, House, and Senate, are anxious to impede any potential progress on Biden’s climate plan — or, like Abbott, to avoid taking responsibility for their own mismanagement of energy supply. Sowing doubt about the reliability of wind and solar, with the help of widespread misinformation on social media, can be yet another way to keep fossil fuels in business and slow down the pace of energy transition.

There are going to be more disasters, and worse ones, ahead. America will need to prepare its electricity grid for ice storms and heat waves, raise sea walls to keep the water out, and somehow shift the whole economy to clean (and, wherever possible, disaster-proof) renewable energy. It’s going to be near-impossible to do that if we can’t agree on what even happened.

Six Capitol Police suspended, 29 others under investigation for alleged roles in riot

Capitol Police announced on Thursday that the agency has suspended six officers for their alleged role in the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and that dozens of other officers are under investigation.

A spokesman for the Capitol Police told WTTG that 35 officers in total are under investigation in connection to the riot, which killed five people and injured dozens of Capitol and Washington, D.C., police officers.

“Our Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the actions of 35 police officers from that day. We currently have suspended six of those officers with pay,” a spokesman said in a statement to the outlet. “Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman has directed that any member of her department whose behavior is not in keeping with the Department’s Rules of Conduct will face appropriate discipline.”

CNN previously reported last month that at least 10 officers were under investigation and two had been suspended.

Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, who chairs an appropriations subcommittee that oversees Capitol Police funding, told the network last month that one of the officers was suspended for taking a selfie with the rioters while the other wore a “Make America Great Again” hat and was seen directing people around the Capitol complex. Lt. Tarik Khalid Johnson, the Black officer who wore the MAGA hat, told The Wall Street Journal that he put the hat on in an effort to help rescue one of his colleagues.

Videos taken on Jan. 6 show that the perimeter set up by Capitol and D.C. police was quickly overrun by violent Trump supporters, some of whom are reportedly members of hate groups like the Proud Boys and extremist groups like the Oath Keepers. But some videos showed officers standing by as the pro-Trump crowd funneled through the Capitol doors.

At least 13 off-duty police officers from around the country took part in the riot, according to The Washington Post, some of whom have been arrested or face disciplinary action from their departments.

Some Black Capitol Police officers, who reportedly faced a barrage of racial slurs during the riot, have faulted the department for failing to respond to racism within its ranks, telling ProPublica that they had repeatedly sued the department and issued warnings about racist officers.

“We got Jan. 6 because no one took us seriously,” former officer Sharon Blackmon-Malloy told the outlet.

Some officers said that department leaders had actively prevented officers from responding more forcefully to the invading mob.

“There were command-level people telling (officers) to put their sticks away,” one officer told CNN. “One came up and grabbed his arm … and said, ‘Stop, stop, we don’t do that to protesters.'”

Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund resigned after the riot after saying that his requests for National Guard backup had repeatedly been denied due to concerns about “optics” expressed by former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving and Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger, both of whom resigned shortly after the riot. Some officials have also said that the Pentagon delayed its response to the Capitol despite pleas from Congress, governors and D.C. local officials.

Pittman, who replaced Sund, said in January that the department “has been actively reviewing video and other open source materials of some USCP officers and officials that appear to be in violation of Department regulations and policies.”

Pittman, who was Sund’s top deputy, told Congress last month that the department had “failed to meet its own high standards” and did not take the necessary steps in response to the “strong potential for violence.”

“We knew that militia groups and white supremacist organizations would be attending,” she said. “We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target.”

Gus Papathanasiou, the head of the Capitol Police union, said after Pittman’s testimony that department leadership had failed to warn officers of the threat.

“The disclosure that the entire executive team knew what was coming but did not better prepare us for potential violence, including the possible use of firearms against us, is unconscionable,” he said in a statement. “They have a lot to atone for.”

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died following the attack, though the circumstances around his death are unclear. Sicknick collapsed at his division office and later died “due to injuries sustained while on-duty,” the department has said. Investigators now believe initial reports that Sicknick had been struck with a fire extinguisher are inaccurate, although he was reportedly sprayed with a chemical irritant by the rioters. Sicknick’s brother told ProPublica that he died of a stroke resulting from a blood clot.

About 140 Capitol and D.C. officers were injured in the attack. Two other Capitol Police officers died by suicide in the weeks following the riot.

Earlier this week, the Capitol Police union issued a vote of no-confidence in Pittman and six other department leaders.

“The results of our No Confidence vote are overwhelming because our leadership clearly failed us,” Papathanasiou said in a statement. “We know because we were there.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Rules committees will hold a joint hearing next week to examine the security failures that resulted in the Capitol breach. Sund, Irving, Stenger and acting D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee have been asked to testify.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has called for a “9/11-type commission” to investigate the Capitol riot. Pelosi also appointed retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré to review the Capitol’s security leading up to the riot.

Honoré told WVUE that Capitol officers who “were doing their job showed a lot of constraint” but faulted the department’s leadership for the security failure.

“I’ve just never seen so much incompetence, so they’re either that stupid, or ignorant or complicit. I think they were complicit,” he told the outlet, later adding that the failure to assemble enough officers ahead of the event “has led me to believe that there was some complicity on behalf of the Capitol police and that will come out in the investigation. I hope I’m wrong.”

Texas disaster exposes what happens when Republicans replace governance with trolling

By any reasonable standard, the disaster in Texas, as winter storms break the backbone of basic utility services and leave millions to suffer, should be the death knell for conservative ideology. It’s evidence of how wrong Republicans are on two of their most important beliefs: That climate change is a hoax best ignored and that government disinvestment and deregulation will magically lead to better services as the private sector fills in the gaps. And as many progressive analysts, energy experts, climate scientists, and Democratic politicians have been pointing out, the catastrophe in Texas proves that the U.S. government needs to move swiftly on two fronts that Republicans hate, climate change mitigation and public sector investment in infrastructure.

To add to the political humiliation of Republicans this week, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas made a spectacle of himself by abandoning his frozen state to fly to Cancun, Mexico for a vacation. Aided by Cruz’s own unique loathsomeness as a human being, the story spiraled as a crystalline illustration of Republican neglect and even malice towards the people they’re elected to represent. The gleeful dunking on Cruz got to the point where even the dog his family left behind, aptly named Snowflake, became a meme for balefully gazing out a window at a New York magazine photographer.

Snowflake was left at home while the senator and his family slipped away to Mexico https://t.co/mBzaZpwCIR

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) February 19, 2021

The situation in Texas is so bad that it started to feed progressive fantasies that this might actually be the moment that Republicans start to pay a political penalty for years of neglecting basic governance duties in favor of endless culture war politics and liberal-baiting.

“Weather might be the least controllable force a politician faces, but it comes with a severe price for mishandling its consequences,” Jeff Greenfield wrote Friday morning at Politico. “And it’s not clear that Cruz, despite a quick return home, will be able to dig himself out.” Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times tweeted, “not to make a prediction but i really don’t think cruz is talented or charismatic enough to come back from ‘went to cancun while his constituents froze to death,'” before hastening to add, “i’m not even saying a democrat will beat him,” so much as “a few high profile texas republicans who have the juice to run a primary campaign.”

But I would not be writing the eulogies for Cruz’s political career just yet.

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Donald Trump had a similar journey with the coronavirus pandemic, not only failing on the policy front but also illustrating his own recklessness to the country by becoming sick after hosting a superspreader event at the White House. But rather than lose Republican support, Trump actually gained 11 million voters over his 2016 performance, only losing to Joe Biden because Democrats improved their turnout even more.

Republicans have mastered the art of turning their own failures as leaders into a story about how it’s the government that’s the true problem — not their deliberate mishandling of it.

The expansive right-wing propaganda machine gets to work exploiting every catastrophe caused by Republican neglect and using it for a morality play about how government itself can never be trusted to handle important responsibilities. As such, their audiences are encouraged to vote not on the basis of policy, but instead to elect politicians based on culture war politics and trolling liberals.

We’re already seeing this strategy play out with Ted Cruz. Rather than throw him under the bus for this optics failure, conservative pundits are rushing forward to argue that taking a vacation is exactly what a senator should be doing in the middle of a pandemic and historic energy outage. They’ve mocked criticism and people who expect government leaders to take responsibility during an infrastructure failure. Right-wing pundit Erick Erickson kicked it off with a tweet complaining that it was stupid of people to imagine a U.S. senator “can do anything about a state power grid,” and mocked the belief that politicians have power in these situations as “the ignorance of so many people who cover politics.” On his program, Ben Shapiro snarled that the crisis is not something Cruz “can do anything about” and pretended people were asking him to “go there with, like, a blowtorch and start defrosting all of the pipelines.”

There are, of course, many things politicians can do. As many liberals pointed out on social media, a lot of Democratic politicians are hustling to get aid to people in Texas, even ones like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents New York. More broadly, however, there’s plenty Cruz, as a senator, could be doing to leverage this crisis to push for policy. For instance, he could be backing the Green New Deal, which tackles the twin problems of decaying infrastructure and climate change at once. No blowtorch skills required.

But this is what Republicans are good at doing: creating crises and then using them as evidence that politics is useless for anything but for whining about liberals.

Tellingly, many liberal commentators who mocked Cruz’s trip on Twitter suddenly saw their mentions fill up with angry conservatives accusing them of “ignoring” the story of New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, screwing up his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. This was, of course, hypocritical coming from the COVID-is-a-hoax crowd, but also flat-out untrue. Salon’s Igor Derysh, for instance, was on top of this story, even before the mainstream media got hold of it. (Needless to say, if it weren’t for the “fake liberal media” coverage, none of these fools would have even heard about Cuomo’s failures.) A quick Google search uncovered that the talking point was being disseminated from professional troll Donald Trump Jr., who, under his blue check mark, whined that “blue check Twitter” wasn’t focused on “Gov Cuomo’s lies, coverups, and strong arm tactics that killed thousands.”

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Setting the dishonesty, which is built into all conservative communications, aside, however, what we get is a fairly sophisticated propaganda effort to leverage Cruz’s bogus journey into a larger Republican narrative about how all government is bad and will fail you. The point of conservatives harping on Cuomo’s failures is not to encourage better governance. These are, after all, the same people who applauded Trump encouraging people to get COVID-19. The point is to sow the narrative that there’s no such thing as a competent politician and that Americans therefore should vote based on trolling-the-liberal skills rather than on competent governance.

Of course, this is classic cherry-picking. Cuomo’s failures aren’t the failures of the Democratic party generally, as evidenced by the quiet successes of Democratic governors such as Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, much less the rapid turnaround of federal competence under President Biden. But that hardly matters, since the point is propping up Republican voters in their desire to believe good government isn’t possible. Which, in turn, justifies voting for politicians not on the basis of their governing skills, but how good they are at trolling liberals and whining on Fox News. And when it comes to those skills, Ted Cruz has few equals.

Ted Cruz’s colleagues and competitors step up to help Texas after he leaves for Cancun

As Sen. Ted Cruz jetted back to Texas from his Cancun getaway after facing calls to resign for abandoning his home state in its time of crisis, his congressional colleagues and former political competitors rallied around Texans abandoned without electricity in historically frigid temperatures.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and Cruz’s former challenger Beto O’Rourke organized aid efforts to help Texas residents weather the storm without heat or electricity. On Wednesday, O’Rourke set up a virtual phone bank to check in on Texas seniors, offering them advice on how to secure food, water, and transportation. “BIG THANKS to the volunteers who made over 784,000 phone calls to senior citizens in Texas today,” O’Rourke tweeted on Wednesday. “You helped to connect them with water, food, transportation, and shelter. And you made sure that they knew we were thinking about them and that they matter to us.”

On Thursday, O’Rourke lampooned Cruz on MSNBC for “vacationing in Cancun right now when people are literally freezing to death in the state that he was elected to represent and serve.”

O’Rourke also tipped his hat to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who managed to raise more than $1 million in aid for Texas on Thursday over the span of four hours. The funds will be directed to various charities –– including The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, Ending Community Homeless Coalition (ECHO), Family Eldercare, Houston Food Bank, and Feeding Texas –– to provide food and shelter to the houseless, as well as senior citizens.

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign hit $325,000 after just two hours, approximately the time it takes to fly from Houston to Cancun. The Bronx-born lawmaker also encouraged Texans to continue pushing for Cruz’s resignation, something she’d called for back in January after Cruz egged on a violent mob of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol building by challenging the election certification process.

Team Ilhan is supporting local organizations like Housing Crisis Center, Tarrant Area Food Bank, and Houston Food Bank who are on the ground providing relief to Texans.

If you can, please chip in to help people who have been impacted by the storm. https://t.co/oCtncefgmj

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 19, 2021

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-TX, joined the effort by handing out water on Thursday with the NACC Disaster Service at Emancipation Park in Houston. Rep. Colin Allred, D-TX, phone banked in Texas’ 32nd District providing welfare checks and access to various resources. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-TX, penned a letter with eight other signatories from the Texas congressional delegation demanding that the state’s grid operators and regulators answer for the outages faced by Texas residents.

Sen. Cruz has now returned to Texas amid intense scrutiny.

“It was obviously a mistake and in hindsight I wouldn’t have done it,” Cruz told ABC News, claiming that he had no intention to underplay “the suffering and hardship other Texans had experienced.”

Cruz went on to scapegoat his daughter. “With school cancelled for the week,” he said, “our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon,” adding, “From the moment I sat on the plane, I began really second-guessing that decision.”

Tonight, I called Governor Greg Abbott to discuss the ongoing situation in Texas and identify ways we can support the state’s recovery from this storm. I made clear to the Governor that I’ll work relentlessly to get his state what they need. pic.twitter.com/UBwH8DMep2

— President Biden Archived (@POTUS46Archive) February 19, 2021

President Biden declared a national emergency in Texas last Sunday and directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to send 60 generators with fuel to critical sites like hospitals and nursing homes along with 729,000 liters of water, more than 10,000 wool blankets, 50,000 cotton blankets and 225,000 meals, according to Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall.

Nearly 200,000 Texas residents are still without power as of early Friday. The catastrophe has claimed at least twenty-one lives. On Thursday, the Texas government recently issued a boil-snow advisory to 7 million Texans as a result of the weather-induced pipe bursts that may be contaminating their water supply. Food supply disruptions have left many shelves bare.

Princess Tensley, a Houston resident now living with her cousin’s family due to the storm, told NBC News, “We only have like two cases of water left. … So, we’re trying to divide it between two families, and it’s really hard,” Tensley said. “We don’t know what the next day is going to look like — and that’s the scary part.”

Giada De Laurentiis’ slow cooker Italian wedding soup transforms cold weeknights into warm affairs

Though we can’t gather in groups to celebrate special occasions as we did before, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t treat ourselves to the very dishes that make those occasions — well, special!

Right on cue, the queen of Italian comfort food is back with another fresh take on a classic dish. Giada De Laurentiis just reminded us that Italian wedding soup doesn’t have to be associated with the stress that encompasses an actual wedding. This no-brainer, slow-cooker take on the timeless dish delivers elegant flavor — no dress-up required!

“Simmering for hours on end gives this soup a wonderfully flavorful broth and succulent meatballs,” Giada wrote on Instagram.

The magic of this recipe is that a slow cooker does all of the work for you. To achieve a robust broth and tender meatballs, all that have to do is select a cook time of at least 4.5 hours. (By the way, did you know that slow cookers don’t have to be plugged in?)

To get things started, add your low-sodium chicken broth of choice and a bay leaf to your slow cooker. This allows the light aromatic qualities of this leaf to fully develop and lighten up the base of your soup.

Once everything begins to simmer, it’s time to start assembling your meatballs. Simple is almost always better, and Giada’s take on this Italian staple requires only six ingredients. In addition to ground beef, you’ll need the following: breadcrumbs, eggs, garlic, oregano, parmesan cheese and salt. (FYI: Giada recommends using sirloin in order to create the juiciest meatballs possible.)

Cover the pot, and set it on high for four hours. For those who drink, here’s your cue to pour a glass of wine (or two) before you kick up your feet as you cheer your slow cooker to the finish line.

Last but certainly not least, sprinkle in your pasta of choice. Though this recipe recommends ditalini, which is traditionally included in Italian wedding soup, elbow pasta works just fine, too. After 30 more minutes on high heat, you’ll add in some greens for good fortune: spinach.

Serve your soup in bowls topped with additional parmesan cheese, if desired (yes, please!). The final result is a hearty and comforting dish guaranteed to make any cold weeknight a warm celebration. Full recipe here.

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

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

From Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump: Rush Limbaugh’s legacy is the modern GOP

Back in 2014, former Trump staffer Sam Nunberg was assigned to listen to talk radio all day and summarize the talking points for his boss as he assessed whether he was going to enter the presidential race. Trump had already learned the power of the right-wing media when he flirted with a run in 2012 by flogging the absurd “Birther” conspiracy theory and had decided that if he ran it would be as a Republican. But he didn’t really know right-wing media. His experience with talk radio over the years had been with Howard Stern, whose show appealed to a different crowd. He was a TV guy and in those days he watched CNN as much as he watched Fox News.

So he got the notes and picked out the issues that appealed to him, like immigration and terrorism, and chose a few about which he was clueless but were crowd-pleasers like railing against “common core.” He picked up some discrete stories that seemed to resonate with the GOP base such as the story of “Bowe Bergdahl, the dirty, rotten traitor” which also signaled his aggressive attitude toward military matters. And, of course, he added his own hobby horses like foreign trade which fit into this issue matrix perfectly since it was driven by the same xenophobia that drove the anti-immigrant fervor that was already at fever pitch on the right.

As it turned out, Trump was perfectly suited to become the first Republican nominee to run exclusively on the culture war issues that had animated conservative talk radio for the previous two decades. He may not have been a listener but he was a member of the tribe. And because he was naive about politics he had no sense that projecting the worst of hate radio was politically dangerous so he just put it all out there, unfiltered. I think most observers, including his GOP rivals, assumed that would be the kiss of death. Instead, it turned out to be massively popular among Republican voters.

They should have known, of course. The right had been primed for such a thing for years. And there is no one more responsible for that than Rush Limbaugh.

His radio show almost single-handedly created the culture war narrative that has come to define conservative politics. It’s not that Limbaugh came up with every element on his own. There were plenty of racists, xenophobes, sexists, religious hypocrites and violent extremists long before he came along. But he found a way to synthesize their point of view into one over-arching worldview: coastal elites, Black people, immigrants, gays, feminazis and environmentalists are your enemy and they want to destroy America.

Seeing its organizing potential back in the early 90s, backbench congressman Newt Gingrich turned Limbaugh’s narrative into a partisan weapon, launching a program designed to teach fledgling, right-wing politicians how to talk about themselves as heroic warriors for the American way and portray their political opponents as depraved savages bent on destroying everything Real Americans hold dear. When the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in decades in 1994, Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the freshman class. The new House Speaker said he couldn’t have done it without him.

Gingrich was right. And there would have been no Donald Trump without Limbaugh either because there would have been no Trump base without him. Gingrich may have turned partisan, electoral politics into a blood sport but it was Rush Limbaugh who brought in the fans.

Limbaugh passed away this week and the right-wing encomiums to his decency and intellectual prowess are unsurprising but infuriating nonetheless. I don’t think any single political figure other than Donald Trump has ever been this polarizing, so seeing these flowery tributes to his decency and fine character is hard to take. But if there’s one thing the entire country, regardless of party or ideology, can agree upon it’s that Rush Limbaugh is one of the most influential political figures of our time. His mean-spirited, crude “guy at the end of the bar” routine was the template for all of right-wing media and remains so today.

And for a time, the mainstream media was more than willing to accept him as one of their own. Back in 2002, the former Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, complained that Limbaugh had unleashed a torrent of invective against him, resulting in death threats to Daschle’s family. The reaction from then Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz was stunning:

Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws? Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence? He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.

We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader’s job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month’s Democratic debacle. What we can’t understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.

Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.

Limbaugh had indeed appeared on election night coverage, shocking anyone who knew what a depraved character assassin he was. The idea that he “poked fun” at Democrats “mainly about policy” was beyond absurd. After all, this was the man who shared insane conspiracy theories for years, like the one that claimed Vince Foster had been murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton. The mainstream media were finally forced to stop featuring Limbaugh after he made racist comments on ESPN, but that only made him more powerful in the GOP. Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics”, observed:

As Limbaugh’s political strength became evident, many Republican politicians felt they couldn’t cross him, or run the risk of alienating his millions of listeners, Hemmer said. “Many of these listeners didn’t care if Rush Limbaugh crossed the line (of propriety),” she said. “They cared more about loyalty to him than any kind of underlying set of principles.”

As you can see, the cult Limbaugh created was simply appropriated by Donald Trump. The “Us vs Them” ethos fit him to a T. He saw no need to pander to anyone but his own voters and set about demonizing those who didn’t vote for him, even to the point of threatening to withhold federal aid and favoring the states that voted for him. And he in turn has inspired a whole new generation of politicians to follow his example:

UPDATE: DeSantis responded to the allegations of favoritism on Wednesday by threatening to pull vaccines from Manatee County altogether https://t.co/GGVtw7JYhS

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 17, 2021

Rush Limbaugh’s legacy will, unfortunately, live on in the Republican politicians who grew up listening to his derisive, contemptuous rhetoric and then watched as Donald Trump used it to wield power. He created a monster and we’ll, unfortunately, be living with it for a long time to come.

If you like chicken eggs, you’ll love duck eggs

Every month, Melina Hammer, Food52’s very own Hudson Valley correspondent, is serving up all the bounty that upstate New York has to offer.

* * *

Duck eggs are a special delight. Sometimes I am lucky enough to gather a few from my neighbor’s birds. Other occasions, I score a half or full dozen at my local food co-op, or at the farmers market here in the Hudson Valley. However I find duck eggs, I covet them.

Most often I incorporate this ingredient into special occasions, whether as skillet egg dishes for our Catbird Cottage B&B guests, or added in to especially luscious baked goods. Living at the intersection of various farms and homesteads here upstate, I am fortunate to have relatively easy access to these wonderful eggs.

Wherever you live, duck eggs will likely be pricier than chicken eggs, in part because they’re not as widely available. Expect to pay $6 to $12 per dozen. Farmers markets are the best places to find them, but these days an increasing number of specialty markets, food co-ops, and higher end grocery stores stock them too. I have even seen them at good butcher shops. Ask around.

If you haven’t tried them before, many characteristics make them unique. Duck eggs are more muscular than chicken eggs: The whites have less water content, which gives them more body and substance. The yolks are creamier and substantially larger, sitting tall like golden orbs, inviting all kinds of magic-to-come.

Because duck eggs also contain more fat and protein, they are an excellent choice for baking. That means fluffier cakes, higher loft to meringues, more structure to breads, and more sumptuous, silky custards. To substitute duck eggs in baking recipes, experiment by trying two for every three chicken eggs to account for their size difference.

Duck eggs also stay fresher longer, in part due to their thicker shells. The theory is, since ducks are aquatic birds, the eggs need to survive both water and mud, depending on where they are laid. This also means there is a small learning curve to cracking them successfully. Just give an egg a good thwack on your counter surface to blunt the shell, and you should be able to free the egg intact.

Now you can put it toward tomatoey spaghetti. Or turn it into the creamiest crème brûlée of your life. Sky’s the limit!

Put those duck eggs to good use:

How a self-taught baker became a pro bagel consultant

Making bagels is sort of like practicing law. At least, it is according to lawyer and full-time “bagel consultant” Beth George.

The 57-year-old is the mastermind behind Fair Lawn, N.J.–based BYOB Bagels (the acronym is for both “Build Your Own Business” and “Be Your Own Boss”), a bagel-focused consulting firm that has helped open more than 60 bagel shops across five continents.

“A lawyer starts with a problem and has to figure out what went wrong, how to repair it, and how to move forward,” says George. Her experience teaching people how to start a bagel business is similar: One “could boil and bake bagels the standard way, but it’s very expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale that model.” George does teach her clients the standard method of bagel making, but she also sings the praises of a “boil-in-place” system, a term she coined herself for “boiling and baking in a self-contained oven.” Using less energy, space, and water than the standard boil-and-bake system, the boil-in-place proprietary maneuver involves “water pouring automatically into a very hot oven and cascading down stainless-steel panels to soak the bagels.” George has also developed an accessible business model that’s helped countless entrepreneurs dive in to the industry. Her lessons include vendor and ingredient sourcing options, overall financial considerations, and marketing efforts, among other details necessary to opening a small food business.

Though George is an experienced self-taught baker, BYOB isn’t a formal bagel store (still, locals can purchase her creations online), but rather helps hopeful entrepreneurs open their own shops. While other bagel shop owners effectively offer consulting services, George stands apart by providing her clients with a step-by-step guide to enter the bagel world, including a highly adaptable recipe, alongside additional tools and ideas needed to get their businesses off the ground.

Some of the shops she helped get off the ground aren’t in places you’d typically expect to find a great bagel, like Florida and Massachssetts, as well as Sweden and Australia; she’s also consulted in New York, for Bake a Bagel and Bantam Bagels, where bagel competition is fierce.

Although the intricacies of George’s company and her ability to marry two seemingly dissimilar careers are worthy of exploration, her origin story when it comes to bagels leans personal. George started making bagels at home in 2006 to satisfy her son Spencer’s cravings. They couldn’t simply go to a local bagel shop: In an attempt to combat Spencer’s ADHD without pharmaceuticals, George found research supporting the idea that reduced gluten could soothe certain types of behavioral disorders. Indeed, without wheat, Spencer’s behavior improved. But he missed bagels.

George created a spelt-flour bagel in her home kitchen. (Though it contains gluten, “spelt is considered an ancient wheat, one that Spencer could actually digest,” she explains.) So successful was the result — and so potent her desire to help others in similar situations — that she decided to trademark her recipe and scale up the project into a business through the help of Frank Mauro, bagel-making-equipment salesman and now her business partner.

Following Mauro’s encouragement and the positive feedback she’d received from friends and family, George eventually decided to shift the business to emphasize her consulting abilities in addition to her unique recipes, which now embrace commercial wheat, by setting up a company that offers advice on all aspects of bagel making. It was a risky move: George had never opened a store herself and had spent the bulk of her career practicing law, but Mauro’s experience and the seeming success of her creations convinced her to take the plunge.

George’s process isn’t a quick seminar. When she takes on a client, they enter into a yearlong contract. “I don’t just take on anybody,” she explains, detailing that she and her potential client interview each other at their first meeting. “I have to make sure that they have the means to finance a business that is going to cost them between $200,000 and $400,000.” After the initial meeting, George advises potential clients to scout for possible bakery locations within a recommended price range. “You can’t go on pure passion — you have to make sure that you can pay the bills and are making money,” she says.

Much of the consulting process isn’t even about making bagels. Next steps involve conversations about everything from square footage and paying for utilities to marketing plans. According to George, it usually takes the duration of the 12-month consultation period for one of her clients to open a store. Her advice clearly works: Of the 60 bagel shops that she has helped open since first establishing her business, only one has closed as of 2021. “The woman just had a baby, then COVID-19 hit, and she decided it was too much to balance,” explains George, who has also helped an additional 10 store owners incorporate bagels into their menus, improve their already-on-offer baked goods, or build separate bagel enterprises in addition to their existing shops.

It may seem strange to some business-minded folks that BYOB doesn’t indefinitely capitalize off each store George helps open. Although she receives a standard payment from clients for the consultation process, she doesn’t operate their stores as franchises; ultimately, she thinks they have a tendency to kill mom-and-pop shops.

As for those sought-after bagel recipes, which are at the heart of each business she helps launch, don’t hold your breath. She won’t share her secrets with folks that aren’t her clients, but does voice her devotion to using only whole-food ingredients and her distaste for bagel mixes. In total, she teaches clients seven formulations for bagels that can be changed depending on the desired flavor profile. Montreal-style bagels, for example, are baked following one formulation, while New York style follows another. “It starts with a plain bagel,” she says. “If you understand the science behind it, you can do an infinite number of mix-ins and toppings.”

Speaking of toppings: Her consultancy work also involves teaching about schmears and assisting with the ideation of menus as they relate to the greater business plan. “You need to know your menu, how much you’re going to charge, and how many bagels of a kind you think you’ll sell each day,” she explains. “And then you’ll know how much money you are going to make.” Following menu-related talks, the prospective store owner is asked to look into a state’s minimum-wage requirements and more.

While her favorite bagel shop is Orwashers Bakery in Manhattan, who she did not consult for, George’s go-to bagel is of course one of her own creations: a toasted za’atar bagel, which she drizzles with extra virgin olive oil from Beirut and smears with French butter.

* * *

Clearly, George’s entire business rests on the steadfast popularity of bagels. Which begs the question: What is it about a simple bread product that originated among the Jewish communities of Poland that is so special, let alone worthy of a consulting business with outreach all over the world? Could it, perhaps, be its long, intricate, and multinational history? The fact that it’s one of the only types of bread that is boiled before baked? Or maybe, it’s all about its thought-out structure. That hole, after all, serves a purpose: It allows the bagel to bake faster than other breads its size, and makes it easier to stack a few on a wooden pole, which is how street vendors used to sell them.

“I think about this a lot: What makes the bagel so different?,” wonders George. “It is super resilient. There’s something about it that you can’t really describe — a depth of flavor that comes through.” Though the process is simple, requiring just five ingredients, that’s also where bagels present the ultimate challenge to the maker, only adding to the food’s mystical qualities: “You could get it wrong by getting tripped up on that simplicity”

It always comes back to George’s lawyer-like attention to detail, best exhibited in her advice to hopeful bagel shop owners — though it does feel like this could apply to ventures outside of bread, as well: “Do your homework first, because you want this to be your dream, not your nightmare.”

Related reading:

Trump inauguration donor sentenced to 12 years in prison for tax evasion: report

On Thursday, NBC News reported that Imaad Zuberi, a California investor who donated $1 million to former President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison. According to the report, Zuberi was also required to pay a fine of $1.75 million and another $15.7 million in restitution.

“Zuberi, 50, agreed to plead guilty in 2019 to tax evasion, filing false foreign agent registration records and providing almost $1 million in illegal campaign contributions to various presidential election campaigns and other candidates for elected office, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California,” reported Andrew Blankstein.

Zuberi has contributed to a number of politicians in both parties, including Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., but also former President Barack Obama, former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Vice President Kamala Harris when she was attorney general of California.

Federal prosecutors also charged Zuberi with obstruction of justice during the course of their investigation of the Trump inaugural fund in 2020. The fund was the subject of intense scrutiny from federal prosecutors amid allegations that donors traded money for political favors.

Roger Stone-connected “Stop the Steal” group hasn’t filed IRS reports — and its agent disappeared

A political nonprofit with ties to longtime Trump associate Roger Stone, which was supposedly created to challenge the 2020 election results, has missed two federal deadlines to disclose how much money it spent and received before and after the election. Furthermore, the law firm that employed the group’s registered agent told Salon that she no longer works there, and her LinkedIn page appears deactivated.

“Committee to Stop the Steal” was registered with the federal government as a 527 tax-exempt political organization on Oct. 16, a few weeks before the election, by a clerk at a Southern California personal injury firm called Jensen & Associates. The IRS does not require 527 groups to disclose their donors, but it does mandate that they publicize how much money they raise and spend, including in post-election and year-end reports. Committee to Stop the Steal has missed the deadlines for both.

Jensen & Associates is led by Paul Rolf Jensen, a friend of Stone’s who has represented the right-wing provocateur in an array of matters for at least two decades. The firm’s website appears to have been unattended in recent months, but an archived version from last February does not mention political work. While Jensen himself isn’t listed on the IRS registration for the Committee to Stop the Steal, the group’s listed address is a UPS Store mailbox located near the firm’s physical address, and its custodian of records, Ashley Maderos, worked at Jensen for a time as a post-bar law clerk.

When Salon called to inquire about the missed deadlines, an unidentified employee of the firm said that Maderos no longer worked there, but would not say when she left, where she went or what had become of the nonprofit. Maderos also appears to have taken down her LinkedIn profile, which has not been archived but was active as recently as Jan. 29. Multiple attempts to contact her went unanswered.

Maderos’ LinkedIn page also noted that she had worked for a time as an intern for former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican notorious for being “Putin’s best friend in Congress.” Rohrabacher reportedly worked with Stone in an attempt to get former President Trump to pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and upon retirement from Congress took up lobbying for a biotech firm run by a Republican fundraiser who worked with one of Stone’s super PACs. Jensen & Associates is located in California’s 48th congressional district, which Rohrabacher represented for many years.

In 2016, Jensen represented Stone when his earlier incarnation of Stop the Steal was sued for voter intimidation. Stone created that group in April 2016, and registered it at another UPS dropbox in the same area. Jensen was also on the payroll for Stone’s Committee to Restore American Greatness, which ultimately became a target of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in that same election.

The precise whereabouts of Ashley Maderos could well be of interest to federal investigators now seeking to untangle the roots of the Jan. 6 insurrection. In recent weeks prosecutors have expanded the scope of indictments to include conspiracy charges. Details are still unclear about who bankrolled the effort, which in part required coordinating numerous loosely affiliated conservative and militia groups from across the country.

Stone’s first Stop the Steal nonprofit raised and spent tens of thousands of dollars in anticipation of defending Trump through a contested 2016 GOP primary, and then, after he won the nomination, challenging a possible Hillary Clinton victory in the general election, neither of which proved necessary. The group was accused of suppressing minority votes in that election and terminated its registration with the IRS in early 2017. But Stone, a Florida resident, reactivated the movement in 2018 to protect then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s narrow victory in his midterm U.S. Senate race against Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Stone got help at the time from fellow convicted felon Ali Alexander (formerly Ali Akbar), an itinerant provocateur who helped recruit for that effort and went on to play a central role in organizing the 2020 Stop the Steal movement. Alexander went into hiding after the riot and has so far not been accused of a crime.

The night before a mob of thousands of Trump diehards laid siege to the Capitol, Stone gave a pump-up speech at a rally hosted by Alexander, who noted early in the evening that “It was Roger Stone who coined the term first: Stop the Steal,” but laid claim to being the “founder of the movement.” But when Stone, escorted by bodyguards from the Oath Keepers anti-government militia group, delivered his keynote address a few hours later, he clarified that Alexander had only “revived the Stop the Steal movement.” It was, at its heart, a Roger Stone production.

Let’s tell the truth about the Republican Party: It’s the real enemy of the people

Donald Trump has an amazing instinctive gift for survival. Despite his many failures in business, politics, government and his personal life, Trump has rarely if even been held accountable. In that sense he remains a “winner,” as well as the figurehead of a political movement that will not disappear from American life anytime soon.

Last Saturday, Donald Trump was officially acquitted at the conclusion of his second impeachment trial, this time for committing insurrection and encouraging his followers to participate in a lethal attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Why? Simply put, congressional Republicans largely agree with Trump, and are beholden to him. They also fear his followers. With this most recent vote to acquit Trump for his obvious crimes, the Republican Party has become a de facto terrorist organization that embraces the use of political violence by members of the white right against Democrats, liberals, progressives and any other group or individual deemed to be the enemy.

Trump’s first impeachment, of course, was for his attempt to extort the government of Ukraine to aid him in the 2020 presidential election by launching a fake investigation of Joe Biden. As a preview of that behavior, Trump and his inner circle colluded with Russian agents to undermine the 2016 presidential election. As revealed by the Mueller report and the U.S. Senate investigations, Trump and his agents went on to commit other crimes, including obstruction of justice, in order to conceal their obvious guilt in the Russia scandal.

Donald Trump won that time too: He established the precedent that Republicans can break the law — up to and including illicit aid from hostile foreign countries — to meddle with elections without fear of punishment or other consequences.

In these and other ways, the Republican Party and the broader right-wing movement have shown the American people and the world that they are anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian, fascist and authoritarian. They are enemies of multiracial democracy and pluralism, and committed to winning power and holding it by any means necessary and at any cost. Yet too many among the American news media, the Democratic Party and the public at large remain in denial.

Trump’s second impeachment trial was a grand stage for comforting yet empty narratives.

One such narrative holds that now Trump has been shamed for posterity, and the Republicans who voted to acquit him have been shamed too. But Trump has shown himself to be a sociopath, perhaps even a psychopath. He is incapable of shame. Trump leads a political cult. Polling data shows that he is far more popular than the Republican Party as a whole. Republicans in Congress are loyal to him, either out of fear or because they share his vision. Nearly all of them voted for nearly all of Trump’s policies. By implication, they are part of a sociopathic political party and movement.

Trump’s followers are definitely not ashamed of him. They believe that he and by extension the are noble “patriots” who are being victimized by “political correctness” and the intolerant or “socialist” left in general.

Another narrative holds that “history is watching” and that impeaching Trump a second time set an important precedent. But Republicans and Trump supporters do not care about the “truth” or the abstract judgment of history. Their commandments are victory and power by any means. Today’s American right wing understands that history is a malleable thing, which in many ways is written by the victors.

As with other fascists and authoritarians, today’s Republican Party lives in a type of eternal present. They may speak of “tradition” and a return to some idyllic, fictive past of “greatness” and “glory,” but those are just linguistic devices deployed to achieve victory by destroying existing societal institutions and norms. As for precedent? That assumes a future America where there is a substantive commitment to real democracy and the rule of law. Given the enduring power of Trumpism and other right-wing fake populist movements, such an assumption is very much in doubt.

A third important narrative holds that the Republican Party is in disarray, or at war with itself. This is objectively untrue. Most of the Republican Party’s leaders and voters continue to support Donald Trump. Those Republicans who dared to vote in support of impeaching and convicting Donald Trump are being censured and otherwise punished by the party. Any and all Republican elected officials who oppose Trump face the real possibility of losing their seats at the next election.

Trump’s second impeachment and Joe Biden’s election have led to unwarranted schadenfreude among the hope-peddlers and professional centrists in the news media, who are desperate to throw the Age of Trump down the memory hole. So we are told that “tens of thousands” of registered Republicans are supposedly fleeing the party because of Donald Trump.

Such joy is misplaced and unearned. A temporary move by a few thousand potential voters away from the Republican Party does not mean they will then become Democrats. Those same voters will likely come back to the Republican Party, sooner rather than later. Even assuming the most generous reading — that Trump will damage the Republican Party in the 2022 midterms, the 2024 presidential election and beyond — Republican elected officials are largely immune to the pressures of public opinion because they have used gerrymandering, voter suppression and other means to solidify their power and remain in office.

These misreadings of Trump’s second impeachment trial and its implications signal to a much larger problem in American politics and society: Many opinion leaders, as well as average Americans, are in the grip of a willful crisis of imagination. They are naive about the true nature of the Republican Party, Trumpism and the right more generally.

The Republican Party and right-wing movement do not believe in real democracy. Their policies are anti-democratic and antisocial. Democratic norms, values and traditions are but a way of getting and keeping power. Once power is won by Republicans and other members of the right, democracy is dismantled — whether piece by piece, or all at once — in service to authoritarianism, fascism, white supremacy, Christian fascism and gangster capitalism. In such a failing democracy, “bipartisanship,” “consensus” and “unity” are polite ways of announcing one’s surrender.

Ultimately, folk theories of democracy, with their assumptions about consensus politics based on a shared political culture and commitment to political institutions, are incapable of responding to a fascist and authoritarian movement that rejects such values.

The American mainstream media, the nation’s cultural and political elites and the American people en masse also have a very bad case of the “should haves,” a form of cognitive bias if not an addiction to a fantastical normative view of politics and reality that cannot effectively grapple with realpolitik and American neofascism.

When prominent public voices pronounced that Republicans should impeach Trump, they were projecting their own beliefs about democracy and decency on a political party which does not believe in such things.

Media and political commentator Eric Boehlert recently warned of precisely this error in inference and assumption in his newsletter Press Run, writing that Republicans who had voted to acquit Trump “will sleep just fine at night.” After all, they had “advanced the Big Lie all winter,” pretending that Trump had possibly somehow won an election he lost by 7 million votes. They had said nothing “while the White House unleashed the most vicious and sustained attack on U.S. election integrity in the last century,” and while Trump “pressured Georgia elections officials in January to go ‘find’ him enough votes (11,780) to swing that state’s election tally.”

Boehlert continued:

Why on earth do D.C. journalists think that voting “No” on impeachment would change the equation and create an ethical dilemma for Republicans? Why are reporters so committed to the myth that a GOP tipping point exists?

The wayward assumption continues to be, that of course Republicans support free and fair elections. Of course they oppose white supremacy. And of course they want to help families that have been devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Those claims have no basis in fact today. Yet that remains the Beltway media’s starting point. Specifically, that the GOP has been torn apart by Trump and there’s a burning desire to “move on” from his erratic and hateful ways. That a “reckoning” awaits.

That’s the story the Beltway press likes to tell. It’s just not true.

For weeks after the presidential election, as Boehlert observes, the media wrote about “Trump’s ‘tactics,’ his vague ‘moves’ and ‘chicanery’; his legal ‘strategy’ and ‘power play’ while ‘sulking’ and ‘brooding’ inside the White House.” An article in Politico that Boehlert cites “dismissed Trump’s ongoing rampage as nothing more than ‘performance art’ and ‘bad sportsmanship.'” He concludes that as the Republican Party “has morphed into something sinister and dangerous,” the model used by the media to cover the GOP “is now clearly obsolete.”

Once again, the Republican Party has proven itself to be a uniquely dangerous political organization. But our mainstream American news media primarily speaks for the powerful and not the powerless, too often prizes access over truth-telling, compulsively practices “both-sides-ism” and is existentially committed to a return to “normal” and myths of American exceptionalism. For them to tell the truth about today’s Republican Party is a bridge too far. For the sake of the country and the world, let us hope that at least some major figures in the media find some courage.

Such courage begins with acknowledging what the Republican Party truly represents: As Donald Trump was so fond of saying, it is “the enemy of the people.”

New round of GOP gerrymandering in Southern states could be the most racist yet

Republican control over redistricting in key Southern states, along with Supreme Court decisions that gutted protections for voters of color, could result in historically unfair congressional maps after the next round of gerrymandering, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

The redistricting that followed the 2010 census resulted in “some of the most gerrymandered and racially discriminatory maps” in history but the next cycle of redistricting could be even more fraught with abuse in Southern states, according to the report. Florida, Texas and North Carolina, all of which are expected to gain House seats following the 2020 census, as well as Georgia, pose the highest risk of producing maps that are racially discriminatory and favor Republicans.

The report cited a confluence of factors for the growing risk. The next round of redistricting will be the first since the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of racial discrimination to receive advance clearance from the Justice Department before making any electoral changes. The court’s conservative majority later ruled in 2019 that federal courts had no jurisdiction to review partisan gerrymanders, which have been “heavily accomplished by discriminating against communities of color,” said Michael Li, the author of the report and senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.

Single-party Republican control over the map-drawing process and rapidly changing demographics, coupled with the weakened protections, are likely to result in even more “unfair” maps in those states than the last round. “Invariably, communities of color would bear much of the brunt, facing outright discrimination in some places and being used as a convenient tool for achieving unfair partisan advantage in others,” the report said.

Li said that Southern Republicans often focus on race because “it’s really hard to gerrymander” without “using communities of color.”

“While last decade you saw Republicans pack Black voters in states like North Carolina into districts and try to justify it on the basis of complying with the Voting Rights Act,” he said, “the danger this decade is they will pack Black voters and Latino voters into districts and simply say they were discriminating against Democrats because the Supreme Court said that’s OK.”

Democratic groups argue that despite the Supreme Court’s decisions, there has been progress in forming nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions to take redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures.

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, “there has been this sort of chipping away at voting rights, a lot of really frustrating decisions coming from the court,” Marina Jenkins, director of litigation and policy at the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in an interview. “That is sort of balanced, at the very least, by gains that have been made in a number of states in terms of changing who holds the pen on map-drawing.”

Though some states with past abuses have moved toward creating nonpartisan commissions for redistricting, the majority of House districts will be drawn under single-party control. Republicans have a massive edge over Democrats in terms of state legislative power: They hold control over 181 congressional districts while Democrats will determine the maps for just 49 seats. Single-party control is “by far the biggest predictor of redistricting abuses,” the Brennan Center report said.

Republicans have worked for years to carve up states to benefit the party using extensive demographic research that typically sought to dilute the voting power of Black residents. Files obtained from the computer of Thomas Hofeller, the late Republican gerrymandering guru, showed that the GOP in some states relied on spreadsheets breaking down neighborhoods by race to draw more friendly districts. But technological advances have birthed efforts like REDMAP, which helped the Republican Party pick up seats by carving out favorable districts using advanced software and terabytes of data. Improved data and technological advances have only increased the danger posed by single-party control since 2011, according to the Brennan Center report.

The 2011 redistricting cycle was one of the most extreme examples in history of how highly partisan gerrymanders allow lawmakers to choose their own voters, rather than the other way around, and allow the GOP to wield a disproportionate amount of power.

Republicans took over full control of redistricting in states like Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on the strength of the 2010 Tea Party wave, allowing them to set up near-permanent majorities for the following decade. Republicans created maps that allowed them to win 10 of 13 House seats in North Carolina and 13 of 18 in Pennsylvania, even though they received roughly the same amount of votes statewide as Democrats did. The Brennan Center in 2016 found that gerrymandering in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania alone was responsible for giving Republicans an additional 16 to 17 more seats in the House than they would have had with fair maps.

Democrats have tried to draw favorable maps as well, in states like New Jersey and Maryland, but have held control over far fewer states’ redistricting processes and have been far less aggressive with their gerrymandering efforts.

The increased media attention on gerrymandering may make some states reluctant to openly discriminate against communities of color, Jenkins said.

“There’s so much attention that states are going to have a really hard time conceiving maps that are worse than they are now,” she said. State lawmakers would be hard-pressed to “reduce the political power of communities of color,” she added.

Since the 2011 round of redistricting, voters in Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, New York and Utah have approved reforms aimed at creating more fair maps. Colorado and Michigan both created independent commissions that will oversee the new maps. Virginia created a bipartisan commission. New York and Utah created advisory commissions that will recommend maps to state legislatures. But it remains unclear whether those two states will comply with the commissions’ recommendations, while Republicans in states like Michigan have repeatedly sued to try to strike down the new system.

Other states, like Minnesota, have adopted fairer maps as a result of a divided government, giving either party veto power over any potential partisan abuses. But Republicans continue to hold single-party control across the South from Florida to Texas and are more likely than ever to draw unfair maps as a result of changing racial demographics that threaten their hold on power and reduced protections for communities of color.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause case overturned lower court decisions and effectively prohibited federal courts from weighing in on partisan gerrymanders, after those courts struck down several gerrymanders in 2016.

That decision followed the 2013 ruling in the Shelby County v. Holder case that ended the pre-clearance requirement for 16 mostly Southern states that had previously been required to prove that their maps were not discriminatory. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that the formula used to determine which states were covered by the requirement was outdated, even though it had been used to reject a gerrymander in Texas just one year earlier.

The gutting of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act could also increase the risk that states “potentially game the timing of redistricting,” according to the Brennan Center report.

“In the past, states had an incentive to complete redistricting expeditiously to allow enough time for the back-and-forth of preclearance review,” the report said. “Now, states previously subject to Section 5 may choose to delay completing redistricting to limit time for litigating any challenges brought under other laws.”

The risk of delayed maps is even higher this year after the Census Bureau announced that the data needed for redistricting would not be ready by the usual deadline of April 1 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, pushing the new date back to Sept. 30. Some states will have to change their laws to avoid overshooting deadlines related to redistricting while Virginia, which will hold legislative elections in 2021, likely won’t have enough time to draw new maps before the election. Many states will likely be forced to hold special legislative sessions to draw maps, which the Brennan Center report argued “significantly increases the risk of abuses” because these sessions are often short, “reducing the opportunity for hearings and effective public oversight.” Delayed maps also mean that courts will have less time to review challenges to new maps.

Jenkins said the delay was “absolutely a concern” but was optimistic that states can begin their normal redistricting process and hold hearings in advance of the data release.

“Hopefully, the energy and engagement from advocacy communities will put the heat on states to actually do that,” she said. “Litigation or petitioning courts for extensions of time, I think, is on the table. This is a crunch, but I think there is lots of time for the appropriate planning, to make sure that redistricting doesn’t have to be done in a manic short timeframe.”

Li predicted that some states may try to use data sets like the American Community Survey to draw preliminary maps without public feedback, and only release the final maps once the Census data is in.

“The reality is lots of people are already looking at maps,” he said. “They’re already trying to figure in Texas where to stick congressional districts, how to gain extra seats or protect seats. People are already looking at maps behind the scenes.”

Jenkins said that it is to be expected that “there are bad actors who are going to try to game the system.”

“That was true before, as it is true now,” she said. “I don’t think those bad actors are different from the bad actors who were expected to behave poorly even before the delay was announced. I understand the concerns and I share them. But it is not something that we are not fighting. We were already prepared for that.”

The delays also create a lot of unknowns about upcoming election cycles. Courts may block maps from going into effect or decide that legal challenges come too late, Li said. They could order states to redraw maps or order that special elections be held at a different time.

There are other changes that states could make to further dilute the voting power of communities of color. The Census Bureau was embroiled in a years-long legal battle after the Trump administration tried to include a citizenship question that voting rights advocates worried would result in an attempt to exclude non-citizens from the count, which would likely disproportionately affect Latinos. Though the Trump administration ultimately dropped the plan — which had been pushed by Hofeller — after the Supreme Court ruled that it had lied about the true reason for the addition, the Brennan Center report warns that the next round of redistricting could also restart the fight over whether states can draw legislative or local government districts based on the adult citizen population rather than the total population.

Such an effort would almost certainly be challenged in court. The Supreme Court in 2016 rejected a case brought by conservative activists which sought to require states to base maps only on the adult citizen population, but “left unresolved the question of whether it is constitutional for states to voluntarily use adult citizen populations as the basis for drawing districts,” the report said.

“The Missouri constitution was changed to add ambiguous language that potentially could open the door to draw legislative districts on the basis of adult citizens rather than total population,” Li said, although it’s unclear whether Missouri officials will attempt to do that. Other states may also try to change their state constitutions, or may limit such efforts to local government and county positions rather than legislative seats.

The report highlighted the particularly high risk of gerrymandering abuse in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.

Though a 2010 constitutional amendment barring partisan gerrymandering and various state supreme court decisions have “created some guardrails that could help constrain the most blatant abuses,” the report said, the appointment of new conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court has raised questions about “how vigorously the court will enforce those limits on gerrymandering in state law should Republicans decide again to aggressively gerrymander.”

Georgia, which just voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in 28 years and elected two Democratic senators for the first time in two decades, has seen its share of nonwhite voters grow quickly since the last round of redistricting, while white suburban voters also increasingly back Democrats.

“These two trends in tandem threaten Republicans’ hold on power, making it tempting to use their single-party control of the process to gerrymander maps to safeguard against change,” the report said. “And as in southern states in general, the existence of racially polarized voting means that the most efficient way to gerrymander is often to target communities of color.”

In North Carolina, Republicans still control the redistricting process because Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, plays no role. Though state courts struck down the state legislature’s previous gerrymander, “those decisions will not stop Republicans from again passing gerrymandered maps” though they will “provide voters with an avenue for redress,” the report said. But given the increasingly conservative makeup of the state Supreme Court, “it remains to be seen how vigorously the court will apply” those precedents.

Texas’ previous gerrymander also resulted in a years-long federal court battle, and the state’s rapidly changing demographics increasingly threaten once-safe Republican seats.

“A crucial question this decade will be whether Republicans try to aggressively maximize seats — at the risk of losing some of them by decade’s end due to political and demographic changes,” the report said, “or try to draw a smaller number of safe seats.”

Other high-risk states include Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina, which have not seen the same degree of demographic change or population growth but were also previously covered by Section 5 of the VRA and have single-party Republican control.

Though the report highlights concerns around potential gerrymandering abuses in the South, there have been some positive signs in changes to the redistricting process since the 2011 cycle. State courts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina struck down Republican-drawn maps in recent years, suggesting that these lawsuits could serve as a “model for other states’ efforts to ensure fair maps.” The Supreme Court’s decisions over the last decade to block blatantly racial gerrymanders as unconstitutional could also be used to target partisan gerrymanders that rely on race data. But Li said Congress must act to crack down on the potential for abuse.

Li pointed to H.R. 1, a sweeping pro-democracy bill that would expand voting rights and, among other things, ban partisan gerrymandering, strengthen protections for people of color and expedite judicial remedies.

He also pointed to the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would renew Section 5 of the VRA and require states with a history of discrimination to once again seek approval of their maps from the Justice Department.

“Those are all things that could be done and have a huge impact on congressional redistricting,” he said.

Jenkins said the NRDC is “enthusiastic about the possibility of the Voting Rights Advancement Act passing this year” and is “very focused on the possibility of a federal statutory partisan gerrymandering ban from H.R. 1.” But she is also optimistic that there are already enough public engagement and resources to prevent the worst gerrymandering abuses.

Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, shares that optimism.

“As the process gets underway this year, we’re going to scrutinize Republicans’ every move and use every tool at our disposal to fight for fair maps,” Post said in a statement to Salon, vowing that the mistakes of 2010 that led to electoral disaster for Democrats will not be repeated. “We know that Republicans will do whatever they can to rig these maps — unlike 10 years ago, we will have a comprehensive legal strategy and resources to fight back.”

An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man

“Were you interested in witches before Willow?” my partner asked. We were on Season 6, the second to last season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a show I have seen many times but was introducing to my partner and 10-year-old son.

I hadn’t intended to do a “Buffy” rewatch — but the pandemic has compelled us to do many things we never thought we would: cancel plans; stay inside; admit to your partner you know all the words to the “Buffy” musical episode “Once More With Feeling,” and in fact, own the cast album.

In many ways, “Buffy” is a good show for kids like my own, who is funny and wise: the jokes aren’t complicated, the monsters aren’t scary, and the main characters are badass women, important for my child who has been raised by a single mom.

But how badass can a female character be if she was created by an abusive man?

* * *

Last week, Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia in the show, publicly accused “Buffy” creator Joss Whedon of abuse, including mocking her faith, taunting her about her weight while she was in her second trimester of pregnancy, and firing her from “Angel,” the “Buffy” spinoff Carpenter appeared in at the time, once she had a baby.

Multiple cast and crew have since come forward to confirm or show support for Carpenter’s claims, including Sarah Michelle Gellar (lead slayer Buffy), James Marsters (Spike), and — after deleting his Instagram and making his Twitter private — David Boreanaz, who played Angel in the show and spinoff and who settled in 2011 a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him by an actress.

Carpenter spoke publicly now in large part to support actor Ray Fisher, who accused Whedon of “abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” treatment on the set of “Justice League.” Last year, WarnerMedia did an internal investigation on Whedon. But while the investigation has been concluded and “remedial action” taken, it’s unclear what those actions are. Blaming the pandemic, Whedon recently left his new HBO series, “The Nevers.”

Carpenter’s accusations felt like déjà vu to me, like I was stuck in the “Buffy” episode where time keeps repeating. I thought Carpenter had already come forward — but maybe I was remembering how her character was totally annihilated and died off-camera? (Most pregnant characters on Whedon’s shows suffered similar fates.) Or maybe I was remembering the allegations from Whedon’s ex-wife Kai Cole of serial cheating and decades of psychological abuse?

Or maybe I was just paying attention to the show, which wears its misogyny on its sleeve.

* * *

Casual sexism seeps through most episodes, certainly each one written or directed by Whedon; my partner and I realized early on we could tell. Is there a joke about breasts? A joke conflating witchcraft with lesbianism? Is Xander (played by Nicolas Brendon, who has not commented on the abuse claims) aggressively pursuing Buffy even though she has repeatedly expressed disinterest? As a teenager, the sexism of “Buffy,” which I watched faithfully, was such a part of my own daily life, it barely registered. Whedon’s show kinda seemed to hate women — but didn’t everyone?

As a younger Gen X-er, I think I am not alone in that the dawning of #MeToo and women speaking more publicly about abuse called into question the way I had survived the world. How could I account for my entire life before? I can’t even count how many times a man (a teacher, a boss) commented on my body, what he wanted to do to me, though I remember the first time: when I was nine years old.

I knew everything that happened to me wasn’t OK — but everyone said it was, and it happened to so many girls, to all of us. It seemed like a collective hallucination we were having, a nightmare we just couldn’t wake up from.

How you survived girlhood was together with other girls. You were facing a Big Bad every season, every day — and he only changed faces: the neighbor boy (“If you died now you’d die a virgin,” he told me at 13), the deacon at your church (“You’ve really blossomed,” as he sidled up to me when I was in middle school), the 9th grade English teacher (we girls had a secret hand signal for when he was looking up our skirts; we called the non-consensual shoulder massages he gave us the “Gerber squeeze”).

This is the world of “Buffy” too — the world Whedon made and maintained. Though the show included women writers, notably Marti Noxon who went onto to write for “Mad Men,” “The Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce,” and “Sharp Objects,” Noxon has confirmed Whedon’s abuse. Whedon bragged about making women writers cry, according to screenwriter Jose Molina. One of Whedon’s tactics was forcing writers to relive the worst day of their lives and then mining that trauma for plot.

An example of this is one of the most awful episodes, when Spike attempts to rape Buffy. The scene is stomach-churning, not in the least because it is played for maximum distress (and traumatized actors during filming). This scene pokes another hole in Whedon’s self-proclaimed feminism: that women can only be really strong if the source of their power comes from their sexuality or from “overcoming” trauma. Of course Faith, another slayer, is promiscuous. Of course sex with Buffy turns Angel evil — her sexualized teen body is that powerful.

The rape scene seems totally out of character and to come out of nowhere, though Whedon stated his reasoning was to remind viewers that Spike is a vampire and therefore “soulless.” What’s the easiest way to do that? Have a sympathetic and frankly, non-toxic male character suddenly rape.

Much in the way in later seasons Willow shifts from kind and loyal to someone who lies, cheats, and is vindictive to a woman friend, this slipshod character development sometimes renders the dialogue of “Buffy indistinguishable. Characters are more like mouthpieces for Whedon, and less like fully realized individuals. So Dawn, a teenager, says the same fifty-cent words as Willow. Cordelia, who is not Southern, says “bubba.” And Xander (the character Whedon said he based on himself) calls Cordelia a “hooker” and Buffy “a little slut,” ogles Dawn from behind, and spouts lines like “the more I scare you, the better you smell.”

Characters are the mouthpieces not just for the sexism of Whedon, but for racism and ableism. There are few characters of color (mostly caricatures with heavy accents), and those are swiftly killed. My partner, who is Chicano, filled up his phone with screenshots of “Buffy”‘s racism, which is directed acutely toward Mexicans. Giles dresses in a sombrero, characters returning from Mexico talk of speaking “Mexicano.” As a partially deaf person myself, the overt ableism of the show is difficult (characters say “lame” and “retard” and make fun of lovable demon Clem’s deformity).

I do believe “Buffy” still has redeeming qualities, namely in the work of its actors. Emma Caulfield (Anya) makes even one-word lines hilarious. Anthony Steward Head (Giles) does the same for complicated exposition. Marsters turned a throwaway villain into a leading man (and responsible babysitter) who is still one of my favorite characters in any story.

The strength of “Buffy” is its ensemble, not the titular character but the Scooby gang who support her. This not only reinforces that even heroes can’t actualize in a vacuum (Spike or Clem need to babysit, Willow needs to hack a computer system, we need a small loan from Giles), it impacted my own creativity. My first novel “Road out of Winter” features a group trying to make it across the country during an apocalyptic snowstorm. My second novel takes the idea of the group even further; this time, I wrote about a whole community. I know that “Buffy”‘s ensemble lodged itself in my heart.

There are great moments of female power in “Buffy”: Willow learning to control her magic, “Buffy” knocking out — twice — the boy who used her sexually, the slayer sacrificing herself for her sister. The musical episode is wonderful, although some of the songs’ time changes and discordant “harmonies” left my partner and I, both with musical theatre training, confused. Written by first-time composer Whedon, it seems another example of his unchecked license.

“Buffy” also has many teachable moments. I’ve been surprised in this rewatch to realize how many lessons are about toxic relationships. “That’s abusive!” my son called out when Willow cast a spell on her girlfriend to make her forget a fight. We can identify Riley’s behavior — jealous of Buffy’s abilities, harming himself to get her attention, giving her ultimatums — as abusive in way that was lost on me when I was 20, a time when that lesson could have altered my life. I hope it can help my son.

“Buffy” made me interested in my own power — yes, including witchcraft, or specifically: herbalism, studying and caring for plants in a way that has fundamentally changed me. I’ve made my own magic in my books. But I’m still and will always be disappointed that a show set in a supernatural universe, a world where magic is possible, couldn’t imagine beyond sexism and bigotry, that its creator could only confirm it, again and again.

Why does teen Dawn have to describe a hamburger as a “meat party in my mouth”? Why is Cordelia constantly shamed for the way she dresses? Why are multiple strong women (Buffy and Faith, Buffy and Kendra, Willow and Anya) pitted against each other? I’m reminded of a friend who complained about the sexual violence in “Game of Thrones.” “But,” she rationalized, “that’s just how it was back then.”

Back then . . . with dragons?

The monsters of “Buffy” aren’t scary. But the monster of Whedon is, as is the precedent he has counted on his whole career: people looking the other way; people (men) in a position to make change doing nothing, saying nothing, allowing abuse to continue, mistreatment to escalate, and a sophomoric abuser (who created another show where the plot is literally raping people every night and erasing their memories) to rise. If only we could slay that.

NASA’s helicopter-bearing Perseverance rover sticks the Mars landing

On Thursday, a rover the size of a Mini Cooper parachuted through thin Martian air for seven nail-biting minutes before successfully touching down on the red planet. The landing of Perseverance, as the rover is dubbed, marks a new era in Martian exploration — as the fifth NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) rover to ever touch down on Mars and the first that carries a helicopter in tow.

Mars is 126 million miles from Earth, meaning it takes 11 minutes for radio signal traveling at the speed of light to reach us. Hence, during the landing, which many Americans were watching live at home, Perseverance had to autonomously control its descent without real-time instructions from NASA engineers on Earth, who could only watch as the signals came in.

Perseverance, which launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30, 2020, differs from its predecessor Martian rovers in a few key ways. First, it is the heaviest and most technologically complex rover to land on Mars. It also landed on Jezero Crater, located north of the Martian equator, which is considered the most dangerous landing spot a rover has ever landed. Yet its location is critical to the core of the rover’s mission: to look for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars, and understand how Mars evolved from a habitable world to the cold, barren planet it is today. Jezero Crater is a 28 mile-wide impact crater that used to be a lake; scientists believe it’s an ideal place to look for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.

Perseverance is also unique for being a sample-return mission, meaning that Perseverance will collect and store Martian rock and soil samples, which will eventually be returned to Earth. Sample return missions are extremely rare due to their expense; indeed, there has never been a sample return mission from another planet. While the mission to return samples from Mars has yet to be fully planned, NASA scientists say that if all goes to plan we could have samples from Mars back on Earth by 2031.

As part of the Perseverance mission, NASA will also deploy the Ingenuity helicopter, which is mounted on the rover, to study the Martian atmosphere. This will help NASA study how to produce oxygen from Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere, an important step for the future of human exploration on Mars.

Immediately after Perseverance landed on Mars on Thursday, NASA received its first images from the rover. The image included rocks, pictured through a dusty lens— likely, remnants from its decent.

Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6X

— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 18, 2021

This is a developing story that will be updated.

Josh Hawley dipped into campaign funds to help bankroll family trip to Universal Studios

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, is facing new scrutiny for billing $197 in food expenses for his family during a “lobbyist retreat” in Orlando after his fellow Republican senator and purveyor of the election fraud myths that lead to the deadly Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol Ted Cruz received widespread condemnation after fleeing Texas for Cancun during a winter storm crisis in his state.

Federal Election Commission filings show that Hawley’s campaign footed the bill in seven separate charges paid to Voodoo Doughnut, Seuss Popcorn, Lard Lad, Lagoon Popcorn, Hopping Pot, Bumblebee Taco, and Margaritaville during a personal vacation last March. The New York Post reports that the event was organized in conjunction with fellow Missouri Senator Roy Blunt’s Rely on Your Belief PAC, which spent $4,680.65 on admission to the theme park.

Because politicians are strictly prohibited from using campaign money for personal expenditures, Hawley’s splurge sounded alarms amongst campaign finance experts. “It appears to not be a legal use of campaign funds,” said Ann Ravel, the former F.E.C. chairwoman under Obama. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, echoed her, arguing that Hawley’s charges “warrant some scrutiny.”

Hawley’s office defended the expenses and told the Post, “This was a trip for the respective Leadership PACs of Senators Hawley and Blunt. The event is designed specifically for families to attend. Guests are encouraged to bring their children and Sen. Blunt has been hosting it for a number of years.” His office maintained that “the expenses were reimbursed on Jan. 30,” ten months after they were made.

Campaign finance violations, of course, have the potential to swiftly derail a politician’s career. Last year, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-CA, resigned over a misuse of campaign money, $200,000 of which the Congressman spent with his wife on medical procedures, travel, donations, clothing, and more. In 2018, Hunter and his wife were convicted of corruption and misuse of campaign funds. However, in 2020, Donald Trump pardoned the couple before leaving office.

Hawley’s impropriety comes after the Senator was cast into the spotlight after being indicted in a trial by public opinion for having incited the insurrection at the Capitol. Hawley was one of more than a dozen Senators who vowed to oppose the results of the 2020 election on President Trump’s behalf. The Senator went on to grossly exaggerate claims of “Antifa scumbags” protesting outside his Virginia home following the Capitol riot, who he claimed “vandalized” and “pounded on the door,” despite local police claiming otherwise.

The Kansas City Star, the largest newspaper in Hawley’s home state, rebuked the senator as having “blood on his hands.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, another Missouri newspaper, panned him as “a phony,” quoting, “This is a man who will say and do anything to advance his personal political agenda.”

In early January, Loews Hotels, where the senator stayed on his trip to Orlando in March of last year, canceled a fundraising event for him, posting on Twitter, “We are horrified and opposed to the events at the Capitol and all who supported and incited the actions.”

Cruz ripped to shreds for blaming widely condemned Cancun vacation on his daughters

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) threw his daughters under the bus after he was caught flying to Cancun as Texans suffered through a power outage during extreme winter weather, and his blame-shifting didn’t go over well.

The Texas Republican flew home from Mexico hours after accompanying his wife and daughters — ages 12 and 10 — to the vacation destination, which he insisted was the girls’ idea after the power outage shut down their school.

“With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends,” the senator said in a statement. “Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon.”

The excuse was met with scorn and ridicule.

Someone on here predicted Ted Cruz would blame his family. Give that person their award. https://t.co/8YT5EJ4EKQ

— Midwin Charles, Esq. (@MidwinCharles) February 18, 2021

Blaming your daughters is just next level. You gotta just tip your cap. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) February 18, 2021

who among us doesn’t immediately blame our kids when we get roasted for a bad decision

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) February 18, 2021

I am trying to imagine the kind of hell that'd be rained down upon me if I tried to throw my kids under the bus for my fuckup.

— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) February 18, 2021

If I was "a good dad," wouldn't I *stay* in some vacation spot with them after escorting them there?

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) February 18, 2021

Ted Cruz heading to Cancun- pic.twitter.com/EOyN5URq7d

— Duncan Jones (@ManMadeMoon) February 18, 2021

literally no time elapsed between Cruz’s laughably absurd statement and the debunking of Cruz’s laughably absurd statement https://t.co/e8HfbieIUN

— shauna (@goldengateblond) February 18, 2021

Ted Cruz had a huge container of luggage for each hour he planned to stay in Mexico pic.twitter.com/WL1Drp2vpW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 18, 2021

come on everyone this is entirely reasonable ted cruz just needed to test the pina coladas to make sure antifa didn't poison them https://t.co/e3lmdkGdFG

— jordan (@JordanUhl) February 18, 2021