Donald Trump’s last stand: How his desperate attempt to overturn the election failed

Many things have confounded me about Donald Trump over the last five years, but perhaps most confounding has been the spectacle of so many Republicans cowering and shivering in fear of his almighty tweets. I simply could not understand why they were so afraid of him. Yeah, I read all of the analysis pointing to the likelihood that if Republicans didn’t go along with Trump’s every little whim, he would insure they were “primaried” the next time they came up for election. They were in fear for their political careers, it was said. I got it. I’ve watched many men during my lifetime exhibit abject cowardice in the face of nothing more fearsome than an unreasonable asshole of a boss. Some of them had wives and kids and mortgages and didn’t want to lose their jobs. Others simply got comfortable where and were willing to put up with crap from their superiors so they could stay put. So it’s understandable, if hardly commendable, that so many Republicans lived in dread of the fearsome Tweeter in Chief.

I waited in vain for some Republican, any Republican to stand up to him. In the end, it took losing re-election for Trump to appear wounded enough that Republicans, or at least a few of them, began to show some backbone. After he was beaten and on the ground, a few of them finally decided it was safe to give him a few kicks.

This week, Democratic House managers described Trump’s campaign to intimidate Republicans around the country into helping him overturn the election.. They showed how a few of them stood up to him, as if suggesting to the senators in his party that they could risk his wrath and survive, too.

Trump fired his first shot at the courts. His campaign, and outside forces friendly to him, filed no fewer than 61 lawsuits aimed at overturning the presidential election in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. When he began to lose the lawsuits one by one, Trump ramped up his tweeting, trying to intimidate the judges, some of whom were Republican appointees, who consistently and repeatedly ruled against him. He turned loose his house hit man, Rudy Giuliani, in appearances such as the notorious Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, and in hearings held by rogue legislative committees in Michigan and elsewhere, trying to intimidate the local judges who were hearing his cases. When his campaign of intimidation didn’t work, he simply ignored adverse rulings and filed new cases in the same states — in different jurisdictions, and based on marginally different claims. When he had lost 60 of the 61 cases, he sent his lawyers directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which he apparently thought was bought and paid for. When the Supreme Court slapped him down in two or three sentences, he erupted in rage.

His rage at the courts, he hoped, would intimidate Republican secretaries of state and Republican leaders in state legislatures. Trump began tweeting directly at some of them, mentioning Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger by name and calling him 18 times before he finally got him on the phone. Trump invited the leaders of Michigan and Pennsylvania’s state legislatures to the White House and tried to talk them into refusing to certify their states’ electoral votes and appoint Trump electors in their stead. When Raffensberger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, also a Republican, ignored Trump’s entreaties or outright denied them, Trump effectively blackmailed Georgia’s two U.S. senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue — both of whom faced tight runoff elections — into calling for Raffensberger and Kemp’s resignations. When that didn’t work, Trump fired more tweets calling Raffensberger and Kemp RINOs and traitors. Raffensberger and his family began getting death threats and had to be protected by Georgia state police. It shouldn’t be shocking, but actually is, that none of the battleground-state officials targeted by Trump yielded to his attempts to intimidate them.

On Dec. 14, the Electoral College met and certified Joe Biden as the winner of the election. Having lost with the courts and the state legislatures, Trump then took his campaign directly to the U.S. Congress, directing his threats and tweets at Republican senators and House members. In a series of rallies, he called Republicans in Congress who weren’t going along with his scheme traitors to their party and the country. He mentioned by name senators and congressmen he had campaigned for and called on them to “Stop the Steal,” making clear that otherwise he would make sure they’d find themselves out of a job come re-election time.

He turned next to his own Department of Justice, calling on Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate all the election fraud he had been yapping about (but failing to prove) for the past month and a half. In mid-December, Barr announced that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Trump called him to the White House and screamed at him in anger. House managers reported during the impeachment trial this week that Barr responded by “towering over Trump in the private White House dining room” and calling his charges of fraud “bullshit.”

Barr quit just before Christmas, and then Trump went after the deputy attorney general who had replaced him, Jeffrey Rosen. He called Rosen into the Oval Office and tried to get him to order yet another Justice Department investigation of voting fraud. When Rosen refused, Trump threatened to fire him and replace him with a lower-level lackey he had identified in the department who would follow his orders. He kept up his efforts to intimidate Rosen until Jan. 3 when his threats nearly caused a “Sunday Night Massacre,” with multiple deputy attorneys general threatening to resign en masse if Rosen was fired. Trump backed down.

It was only three days before the Congress met to certify the Electoral College ballots, and Trump had gotten more and more desperate. Now he turned on his own vice president, Mike Pence. Trump called him into the Oval Office for repeated tongue lashings, trying to get Pence to use his ceremonial role in the certification of electoral ballots to overturn the election by approving challenges to the totals in battleground states and giving those electoral votes to Trump. Pence apparently refused several times, sending Trump to Twitter to punish him with one blast after another, calling him a coward and telling him he’d be remembered as a “pussy” if he didn’t do his “duty” to help Trump cheat and overturn the election.

Pence stood up to Trump and was in the middle of overseeing the certification of the electoral votes when Trump sent his mob of looters, racists and militia members to attack the Capitol. More than 140 Republicans in the House and Senate caved to Trump’s pressure and objected to the electoral ballots from two states — even after a full day of televised violence — but all the Democrats and the other Republicans in both houses voted them down. In the wee hours of Jan. 7, Vice President Pence and Speaker of the House Pelosi — who only hours before had fled from a mob that wanted to kill them — presided over a joint session in the still-damaged House chamber and announced that Joe Biden had been elected president of the United States.

Trump tried to strong-arm and intimidate every level of government in the United States from the courts to state legislatures to secretaries of state and governors to the Department of Justice to individual congressmen and senators to a final violent attack on the U.S. Capitol itself. He failed. Now he stands accused of inciting an insurrection against the government and the Constitution he had sworn to uphold and protect. The House managers have made their case, step by step, incident by incident, tweet by tweet, threat by threat.

Trump lost the presidency. He failed in his attempt to overturn the election and remain in power. He’s a beaten man. Now we’ll see how many Republicans in the Senate are willing to recognize the corpse at their feet and finally put him in the ground.

Why the world’s pandemic response needs more female voices

In March of 2020, Uddhav Thackeray, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra in India, spoke directly to his male constituents about the emerging Covid-19 crisis. “I am at home listening to Mrs. [Chief Minister],” he said, referring to his wife, Rashmi. “You listen to your home minister.”

It was a significant message in a patriarchal society where women’s voices have traditionally been muted in the political, economic, and public discourse. Leading by example, Thackeray was acknowledging that women would have a key role to play in encouraging the adoption of public health precautions. And he seemed to anticipate that they might be more conscientious than men in responding to the new viral threat.

A year on, as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage across the globe, research suggests that Thackeray may have been onto something. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that women are more likely to take Covid-19 seriously — and more likely to comply with public health recommendations like mask wearing and social distancing. The researchers surveyed more than 21,000 individuals across eight different countries last March and found that 59 percent of female respondents considered Covid-19 to be a very serious health problem, compared with just 49 percent of men. Women were also 6 percentage points more likely to agree with proposed social distancing measures.

It’s worth noting that the study considered gender only in binary terms, rather than along a spectrum, and that the authors were not able to single out an underlying mechanism. In an email, two of the study’s authors, Vincenzo Galasso and Paola Profeta of Bocconi University in Milan, stressed the need for further research. Nevertheless, the trend held across all eight countries, and a follow up survey in April yielded similar results. The authors also say their results are consistent with another much-discussed observation: Women-led countries have been among the most effective in responding to the pandemic.

This makes it all the more discouraging that, at virtually every level of society, women have been inadequately represented in policy and decision-making surrounding Covid-19.

A survey of 30 countries conducted by the social justice organization CARE International found that, on average, only 24 percent of Covid-19 task force members were women. In conflict-affected countries, the number fell to 18 percent, according to U.N. Women, the United Nations group dedicated to gender equality. Unfortunately, this is nothing new. As U.N. Women also notes, women’s social ties and skills often go underutilized in times of crisis and in peace-building measures.

Women-led countries like Germany, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Iceland have been exemplary in their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. “In recovering better — we must not lose sight of this leadership that women can provide alongside men,” U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said in May. Yet, despite the warning, the world seems to have done exactly that.

There is no shortage of ways to include gender in our pandemic response, amplify the voices of women, and capitalize on their influence in households and communities. For one, we can embrace gender-based public health policies and communication, as Profeta and Galasso advocate. This might mean including gender-related questions in analyses of Covid-19 impacts, ensuring that data collection plans allow for gender disaggregation, and considering the different needs of women and men in vulnerable populations.

We must recognize that the pandemic has affected women in unique ways. With social distancing measures in place, many women found themselves trapped with abusive partners, increasing their risk of intimate partner violence. Sexual and reproductive health services were disrupted in many places. Around the world, women faced increased risks of early and forced marriage, and of being victimized by sex trafficking. Inadequate representation at all levels of decision-making meant that many of these gender-based impacts of the pandemic went unrecognized longer than they should have, and that the response was slower than it could have been.

Women — who tend to serve as primary caregivers to children and the elderly, and who often hold considerable influence in their homes and communities — could also play a key role in promoting compliance with Covid-19 protocols. Even simple behavioral changes could have untold impact. Mask-wearing mandates alone reduced the number of new Covid-19 infections by around 45 percent, one German study found.

As governments around the world continue to order lockdowns and quarantines — and as many countries move into a new, vaccine-rollout phase of the pandemic — it will be important to engage women, especially marginalized women, in our public health interventions. A more inclusive Covid-19 response will not only help us address a myriad of gender-based issues, it just might help us all navigate a quicker path to a new normal.

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Disha Shetty is an independent science journalist based in Pune, India. She writes on health, environment, and gender, among other subjects.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Trump’s COVID response was deadly — but decades of dreadful, racist policy set up the catastrophe

About 40% of coronavirus deaths under President Donald Trump were avoidable — but even the total number of U.S. pandemic deaths last year is dwarfed by the annual number of preventable deaths caused by four decades of racist and pro-corporate policies, according to a new Lancet Commission report.

Months into Trump’s presidency, dozens of medical experts formed a commission to study the health impacts of his policies for The Lancet, a highly-respected British medical journal. The Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era found that roughly 40% of coronavirus deaths in the United States could have been prevented if the average death rate matched that of other wealthy nations.

“We became concerned that even within a few weeks of him coming into office he had started to implement policies which we thought would be deadly,” Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a health policy expert at the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College and co-chair of the commission, said in an interview with Salon. “And now that we’re in 2021, we have actual data and, in fact, his policy has been very deadly.”

Instead of galvanizing the public to fight the pandemic, the report said, Trump “publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation.”

“His refusal to develop a national strategy worsened shortages of personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests,” the researchers added. “President Trump politicized mask-wearing and school re-openings and convened indoor events attended by thousands, where masks were discouraged and physical distancing was impossible.”

But the commission went further, finding that life expectancy in the U.S. has diverged from other major industrial nations since the 1980s, despite continuous economic growth. As a result, the country sees more unnecessary deaths each year than all the 2020 coronavirus deaths combined.

“In 2018, 461,000 Americans died who would still be alive if our life expectancy were as long as in other wealthy nations,” Woolhandler said. “So COVID killed about 400,000 people in 2020, which was horrible. But every single year, the United States was losing that many people relative to other developed nations, because our policymakers had failed to create the conditions for health.”

There’s little doubt that the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s mismanagement has significantly worsened that trend, particularly in communities of color. The pandemic has increased the life expectancy gap between Black and white people by more than 50%, the report said. The average Latino life expectancy in the U.S. has fallen by 3.5 years since the start of the pandemic.

“Overall, in the USA, Black and Latinx people have incurred more total years of potential life lost than white people because of COVID-19, although the white population is three to four times larger,” the researchers wrote.

“The strong focus on racism in all its forms and its impact on almost every area of public policy is very important,” Richard Gottfried, chair of the New York State Assembly’s health committee and a member of the commission, said in an interview with Salon, adding that many Americans “may not fully understand the all-pervasive nature of the impact of racism.”

Even before the pandemic hit America, Trump’s policies were linked to an increase in preventable deaths. Despite repeatedly failing to repeal Obamacare, Trump undermined the program in various ways and the number of uninsured Americans increased by 2.3 million before the pandemic, a number that rose further amid rampant job losses during the health crisis. He used the deficit caused by the 2017 tax cut that primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations to “justify cutting food subsidies and health care,” the report said. His deregulation agenda worsened pollution, “resulting in more than 22,000 extra deaths in 2019 alone.”

Trump’s “disdain for science” and cuts to global health programs and public health agencies hampered the coronavirus response, “causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths,” according to the report, and those cuts “imperil advances against HIV and other diseases.”

But the researchers warned that “focusing narrowly on Trump’s policies and rhetoric, while ignoring the failings that precipitated his election, risks obscuring the causes and remedies for the longterm downward trajectory of health” in the United States.

“The disturbing truth is that many of President Trump’s policies do not represent a radical break with the past but merely accelerated the decades-long trend of lagging life expectancy that reflects deep and long-standing flaws in US economic, health, and social policy,” the report said.

In fact, Trump’s county-level vote share was closely correlated with worsening life expectancy trends. Counties where more than 60% of voters backed Trump had higher life expectancy in 1980 than counties where Clinton won more than 60% of the vote, according to a 2017 study. But in 2014, the Trump counties had an average life expectancy two years lower than the average Clinton county.

“People’s deteriorating life prospects appeared to be feeding unhappiness and dissatisfaction that Trump was able to adequately cynically mobilize for his own purposes,” Woolhandler said.

Many lower-income white people with “deteriorating life prospects” have gravitated toward Republican policies because they believe people of color disproportionately benefit from expansions of public health and social safety nets, even though they themselves would greatly benefit from policies that improve public health.

“Ironically, the ascendance of right-wing populism and Trump’s weakening of the US Government’s role in protecting health are likely to exacerbate the income and place-based health disparities that harm many of his voters,” the report said. “A negative feedback loop — with low-income white people helping to stifle demands for vital public investments — risks inflicting additional and long-lasting damage to their health and wellbeing.”

Trump, the researchers argued, used this racial animus to “deflect attention from policies that abet billionaires’ accretion of wealth and power,” arguing that his America First narrative “camouflaged policies that enriched people who were already very wealthy and gave corporations license to degrade the environment for financial gain.”

Meanwhile, the report said, Trump “halted progress in almost every domain, undermined care for low-income people and the middle class, weakened pandemic preparedness; withheld food and shelter from those in need, and persecuted those who were vulnerable and oppressed.”

But Trump is obviously not the first president to push the privatization of public services and deregulation aimed at helping corporations maximize profits. Arguably every president since at least Jimmy Carter has played a role in that process.

“Although Trump’s actions were singularly damaging, many of them represent an aggressive acceleration of neoliberal policies that date back 40 years,” the report said. As a result of policies that chipped away at New Deal and Civil Rights-era progress, the “widening income inequality has widened inequalities in health.”

The deepening inequality began in earnest during the Reagan era as unions were “stifled,” the tax code and government policies increasingly favored the wealthy, and high-paying manufacturing jobs began to disappear, the report said. Despite a booming stock market and low unemployment, the report added, many people have been “forced into precarious jobs that offered low pay and insufficient benefits.”

After Reagan’s election, “we saw U.S. life expectancy begin to lag [and] health care costs begin to soar,” Woolhandler said. In 1980, American life expectancy was around the average for developed nations. By the time the pandemic hit, U.S. life expectancy was 3.4 years below the G7 average, according to the commission.

The damaging policies were not limited to Republicans. Through Bill Clinton rejected many Reagan-era policies, he expanded trade agreements that weakened protections and unions and imposed restrictions on welfare and food benefits. He also signed bills that expanded mass incarceration and worsened wealth and income inequality.

“A major problem with trade policies has been that they made drugs too expensive,” Woolhandler said.

Though Barack Obama expanded health coverage, his signature health program funneled money through private profit-seeking companies and exploded out-of-pocket costs.

Between 2002 and 2019, the share of public health spending in the U.S. fell from around 3.1% of the GDP to 2.45%, roughly half the proportion in Canada and the U.K.

“Market-oriented health policies shifted medical resources toward high-income people, burdened the middle class with unaffordable out-of-pocket costs and deployed public money to stimulate the corporate takeover of vital health resources,” the report said.

Although the Affordable Care Act expanded health coverage to tens of millions more people, the program still left between 25 million and 30 million uninsured before Trump took office. Despite the coverage expansion and a booming economy since 2010, “there’s been essentially no improvement in Americans’ life expectancy, which is all the more shocking,” Woolhandler said.

“That is really historically unprecedented, because usually when the economy grows, life expectancy grows,” she said. “It’s good for you to have more resources. But in the United States, we actually have an uncoupling of life expectancy growth from economic growth.”

The decline in life expectancy has been especially stark in communities of color. Life expectancy for Black Americans is about 3.4 years shorter than for white people. Life expectancy among Native Americans is poorest of all, Woolhandler observed, saying these statistics “are related to structural white supremacy.”

The report found that all people of color except Asian Americans receive significantly less medical care than white Americans despite having worse life expectancy and seemingly greater need. Mass incarceration, the drug war and police violence are also major factors in the lagging life expectancy of people of color. The report cited estimates that roughly one in every 1,000 Black men will be killed by police, a rate 250% higher than that of white males. While discourse around the opioid epidemic has largely focused on drug use among white people, Black Americans saw the sharpest increase in opioid deaths between 2012 and 2018, a problem that has likely been exacerbated during the pandemic due to economic stress and social isolation.

“We still have an unequal society based on a history of white supremacy with discriminatory treatment continuing to this very day,” Woolhandler said. “That’s something that needs to be changed. We concluded that racism is obviously bad for the health of people of color, but also that we think it threatens everyone.

“Racism has been manipulated by cynical politicians like Trump to encourage low-income white people to oppose social services. They’re opposing social services in the mistaken belief that they only benefit people of color. So low-income whites are often mobilized against their own self-interest on services that would benefit them personally, opposing it just for people of color. So racism harms health directly for people of color, but also harms health by poisoning the political climate that we need in order to get our government to act.”

The commission’s report included dozens of recommendations for President Biden’s administration and lawmakers, many of them focused on addressing the racial inequities in public health. But the extent of these policies shows that Congress and Biden need to “go beyond simply repairing Trump’s damage,” the report said.

“Racism has a profound impact on what health care providers are available in communities of color and their access to it,” Gottfried said. “It denies people full health coverage disproportionately and has an impact on the quality of care that’s available in their neighborhoods. And you see the results in shocking data on infant and maternal mortality and life expectancy and almost every measure of health care quality and bad outcomes.”

The researchers called on lawmakers to address structural racism, decriminalize drug use, and reform policing and criminal justice systems that “oppress” communities of color and “fill prisons.” The recommendations also include addressing policies that suppress voters, particularly voters of color, and creating a National Center on Anti-Racism and Health within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The commission also called for reparations to African Americans, Native Americans and residents of Puerto Rico “for the wealth and education confiscated from (or denied to) those groups in the past.”

“To repair health deficits in the USA, we must redistribute wealth and income through taxation, fortify social programmes and regulation, remediate the structural racism that afflicts Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, and heal US democracy by eliminating obstructions to voting,” the report said.

The report also called on lawmakers to address the worsening pollution caused by Trump’s deregulation of environmental regulations and to mobilize “massive resources to avert climate catastrophe.”

Funding for these major reforms could come from redirecting resources from the military, raising taxes on the wealthy, and ending corporate subsidies and programs that funnel public funds through private companies.

At the heart of the report’s recommendations is the need for a universal health care program that does not allow tens of millions of people to be denied coverage while forcing tens of millions of others to pay skyrocketing out-of-pocket costs that lead to bankruptcies and avoidance of medical care.

“Almost every problem we face in health and health care, whether as patients or providers or employers or taxpayers, is made much worse and much harder to solve because of the way we pay for health care in America,” said Gottfried.

Gottfried has sponsored a single-payer health care bill called the New York Health Act in the state legislature for nearly three full decades.

“Really the only solution to the coverage problem that is effective is a single-payer system,” he said. “Everything else leaves us with gaps and a fragmented system and all the wasted spending that is caused by a fragmented system dominated by insurance companies. … Getting rid of that waste would generate enough money to provide complete coverage for everyone, including long-term care. Until we get rid of that waste, it is virtually impossible to achieve high-quality and equitable healthcare.”

A study by Woolhandler and fellow commission co-chair Dr. David Himmelstein last year found that eliminating overhead and administration costs from health care spending by transitioning to a government-run health care program similar to Canada’s would save enough money to pay for the entire cost of the program. Woolhandler and Himmelstein are also the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program, which has long advocated for a single-payer system. Their findings were echoed in another study published last year in The Lancet and a review of 22 studies published in PLOS Medicine.

Biden has made clear that he opposes a Medicare for All-style single-payer system, although he has vowed to expand Obamacare. Gottfried said that progress will first likely have to come at the state level if New York and others can pass bills like his single-payer proposal.

“I think the most we can expect from the Biden administration is cooperation with states that want to do single-payer systems,” he said. “I believe New York can implement single-payer coverage even without federal cooperation. It would be more complicated, but we can do it.”

In Canada, Gottfried observed, single-payer health insurance “began in one province and then another province joined in and in just a few years it became a provincial-based program but funded largely with federal money.” He suggested that the same could happen in the U.S. “After one state enacts it, you’ll see more states doing it. Eventually, either there will be a national program or there will be federal funding to help support state single-payer programs.”

The commission’s report included numerous immediate reforms the Biden administration could use to improve public health en route to an eventual single-payer system, including providing incentives for states to expand Medicaid if they have yet to do so — primarily in the South where half of America’s Black population lives. The commission also recommended rolling back all Trump’s efforts to undermine Obamacare and undoing his expansion of the public charge immigration rule.

“The public charge rule is a long-standing immigration term that originally just applied to people who receive cash benefits and who resided in long-term care institutions paid for at government expense,” Woolhandler said. “Trump has expanded that rule so that it can encompass virtually any use of public benefits, and that has really frightened many people in immigrant communities. People are afraid to enroll themselves or their children in Medicaid. They’re afraid to use nutrition benefits. They’re afraid to seek housing benefits, and those things are very important for health.”

Biden quickly signed dozens of executive actions to roll back many of Trump’s policies related to health care, immigration, climate and racial equity, and plans additional executive orders and legislation to undo Trump’s damage. But the commission emphasized that correcting inequity will require much more than rolling back four years of Republican policies.

“Policymakers are going to have to create the conditions that allow my patients to be healthy,” said Woolhandler, who is also a practicing primary care physician. “We need to change the direction of American public policy to make sure that people’s needs are met, and that the conditions for their health are met.

“If we fail to do that, we’re going to continue to see people feeling desperate, see people feeling angry. Those are the conditions that allow the rise of autocratic leaders like Trump. So Trump may be gone, but Trumpism will come back and cause problems for us unless we build a society that actually takes care of people.”

“The Mauritanian” rekindles debate over Gitmo detainees’ torture — with 40 still held there

“The Mauritanian,” directed by Kevin Macdonald, is the first feature film to dramatize how the war on terror became a war in court.

As a sociologist of law and a journalist, I have spent the past two decades researching and writing about the kinds of legal battles the film accurately portrays. My research has included 13 trips to observe military commission trials at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The film stars Tahar Rahim as a Mauritanian named Mohamedou Ould Slahi who is captured and held at the Guantánamo detention center, where many suspected terrorists were sent. Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley play Nancy Hollander and Teri Duncan, Slahi’s attorneys. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who is assigned to prosecute Slahi’s case.

Hollander is, in real life, among the hundreds of lawyers I interviewed for my forthcoming book, “The War in Court: The Inside Story of the Fight against Torture in the War on Terror,” from the University of California Press. This book traces the work of lawyers who fought the U.S. government over the post-9/11 torture program and how, against the odds, they won a few key battles and changed the way the United States waged the war on terror.

Challenging secret detention

In November 2001, after the events of Sept. 11, President George W. Bush’s administration issued an order creating a process by which people suspected of ties to terrorism would be detained and held, and potentially tried. This would not be the customary process, where they’d be tried in federal court, but instead before a new military commission system.

In December, the Guantánamo Bay naval base was designated the main site for long-term detention and interrogation of men suspected of having ties to terrorism. Prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere began arriving there on Jan. 11, 2002.

Guantánamo was selected because it was under full control of the military and relatively close to the mainland, but outside the U.S. and therefore beyond the reach of American courts — or so the Bush administration assumed.

The idea was that if the detainees were not on U.S. soil, they would have no legal right to seek a judge’s order of habeas corpus. That principle is a centuries-old protection against unlawful imprisonment and a cornerstone of the rule of law. It allows a prisoner to claim he is being unlawfully held captive, and to require the government to prove to a judge that there is reason to continue to hold him.

Nearly everything about the detainees was deemed classified, including their names and the very fact that they were in U.S. custody. In February 2002, though, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a left-leaning legal organization, teamed up with two death-penalty lawyers, Joseph Margulies and Clive Stafford Smith, to file a habeas petition in federal court on behalf of several detainees who were known to be in Guantánamo.

That lawsuit demanded the U.S. government explain why it was holding those men. It was the opening shot of what would become a war in court. In June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo prisoners did, in fact, have habeas rights.

That same month saw the publication of Justice Department memorandums and Pentagon policy directives exposing the fact that torture of terror suspects, including Guantanamo detainees, had been authorized by the White House. Together, the ruling and the documents, which became known as the “torture memos,” galvanized lawyers to volunteer to represent Guantánamo detainees. Their work involved searching for information to challenge the government’s basis for detaining their clients — including evidence that they were tortured in custody.

Presumed guilty

When that Supreme Court ruling came down, Slahi was one of the most “valuable” detainees at Guantánamo. He had been arrested in Mauritania in November 2001, at the request of the U.S. government, on suspicion that he had recruited Marwan al-Shehhi, one of the hijackers of United Flight 175, the second of two airplanes to hit the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11.

Slahi was handed off to the CIA and then sent to Jordan, where he was brutally interrogated for seven months by Jordanian authorities in the service of global U.S. investigation into 9/11. In July 2002, the CIA sent him to the Bagram prison in Afghanistan before sending him to Guantánamo the following month.

Slahi’s case was one of the first slated for prosecution under the military commission system, which let prosecutors use evidence that would never be allowed in U.S. courts, including coerced confessions and hearsay.

Couch, the prosecutor, was personally tied to Slahi’s case because he was a close friend of the pilot on the plane that al-Shehhi had hijacked. He was told that Slahi had confessed to everything he was accused of. Couch insisted on seeing the evidence himself.

He would not like what he found.

Learning dirty secrets

When attorney Hollander met Slahi in 2005, she knew very little about him or his case, and had only a short window of opportunity to persuade him to sign a paper authorizing her to represent him. Her meeting, like other detainees’ talks with their lawyers, took place in the same rooms in Guantánamo where prisoners were interrogated, replete with monitoring devices.

Slahi, who had taught himself English while in detention, accepted Hollander’s help and began writing her long letters explaining what had happened to him — but as the film’s audience learns, not everything.

Hollander, even as Slahi’s lawyer, had to fight the government to get his case files, which at one time included more than 20,000 pages that were almost completely blacked out to hide information that had been classified, including details of Slahi’s detention and the circumstances of his confessions.

Torture and lies

The movie’s climax comes when both attorneys — prosecuting and defending — get their long-sought documents. The pages reveal the big secret about Slahi’s case: He was brutally tortured on direct orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

All Guantanamo detainees were subjected to abuse, humiliation and harassment as part of their interrogations. But Slahi was also subjected to 70 days of what the government called “special measures” — which included a mock execution in which he was taken out to sea in a boat and threatened with drowning.

His captors also constructed an elaborate deception that his beloved mother had been arrested and was on her way to Guantanamo where she would be raped by other detainees. Only after those experiences did Slahi begin to “confess” to every accusation laid against him.

Hollander knew the government would not want to make public the evidence that his alleged confessions were coerced through torture, and pushed harder for Slahi’s release. Part of that effort included publishing Slahi’s letters as a book, “Guantanamo Diary,” which became a best-seller.

Couch decided not to prosecute Slahi because the confessions wouldn’t pass legal muster. Accused by the chief prosecutor of being a traitor, Couch was one of several military lawyers who quit the military commissions for ethical reasons.

The long road home

In 2010, Hollander’s fight paid off — or so it seemed — when a federal judge ordered Slahi’s release. But the Obama administration appealed, and it would be another six years before Slahi was allowed to return home to Mauritania. He spent a total of 14 years in U.S. military custody without facing a single criminal charge.

The movie has a happy ending, with scenes of the real Mohamedou Slahi home in Mauritania smiling as he reviews translations of his book into many languages — and with photos of him and one of the guards, who had befriended him, visiting in Mauritania.

But there is no happy ending at Guantánamo, which remains open. Of the 779 men and boys ever held there, 40 prisoners remain — including six who, like Slahi, were cleared for release years ago.

Lisa Hajjar, Professor of Sociology, University of California Santa Barbara

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

Ex-aide to Melania suggests “enormous trove” of communications after DOJ drops lawsuit

Former top Melania Trump aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff took a victory lap on Monday night after the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was dropping a lawsuit against her over her tell-all book about the former first lady.

The DOJ had previously alleged that Wolkoff violated a White House nondisclosure agreement when she published her book “Melania and Me,” which was released this past September.

The department issued a one-page notice on Monday informing the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that it had dismissed its claims against Wolkoff, who promptly took to Twitter to tease that she had a large stash of recordings of the former first lady that could now potentially be released.

“Melania opened Pandora’s box involving the DOJ,” Wolkoff wrote, before declaring that she possesses an “enormous trove of communications and documentations.”

In a followup tweet, Wolkoff decried the lawsuit as “a meritless attempt by Donald and Melania to use the Justice Department to pursue their personal interests, silencing and intimidating me over speech protected by the First Amendment.”

The U.S. economy excels at one thing: producing massive inequality

To grasp the sheer magnitude of U.S. economic inequality in recent years, consider its two major stock market indices: the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 and Nasdaq. Over the last 10 years, the values of shares listed on them grew spectacularly. The S&P 500 went from roughly 1,300 points to over 3,800 points, almost tripling. The Nasdaq index over the same period went from 2,800 points to 13,000 points, more than quadrupling. Times were good for the 10 percent of Americans who own 80 percent of stocks and bonds. In contrast, the real median weekly wage rose barely over 10 percent across the same 10-year period. The real federal minimum wage fell as inflation diminished its nominal $7.25 per hour, officially fixed and kept at that rate since 2009.

All the other relevant metrics likewise show that economic inequality in the United States kept worsening across the last half-century. This happened despite “concerns” about inequality expressed publicly across the years by many establishment politicians (including some in the new Biden administration), journalists, and academics. Inequality worsened through the capitalist downturns after 1970 and likewise through the three capitalist crashes of this century (2000, 2008, and 2020). Nor did the deadly pandemic provoke soul-searching or policies adequate to stop, let alone reverse, the ongoing redistribution of income and wealth upward.

No advanced economics is required to grasp that divisions, bitterness, resentment, and anger flow from such a persistently widening gap between haves and have-nots. Among millions who search for explanations, many become prey for those mobilizing against scapegoats. White supremacists blame Black and Brown people. Nativists (calling themselves “patriots” or “nationalists”) point to immigrants and foreign trade partners. Fundamentalists blame those less zealous and especially the non-religious. Fascists try to combine those movements with economically threatened small-business owners, jobless workers, and alienated social outcasts to form a powerful political coalition. The fascists made good use of Trump to assist their efforts.

U.S. history adds a special sharpness to the search for explanations. The dominant argument for capitalism in the 20th century after the 1930s Great Depression was that it “produced a great middle class.” Real U.S. wages had risen even during the Depression. They were generally higher than elsewhere across the globe, and especially in comparison with those in the USSR. High wages showed the superiority of U.S. capitalism according to the system’s apologists in politics, journalism, and academia. Demolition of that middle class at the end of the 20th and into the new century pained especially those who had bought the apologies.

And indeed, the Great Depression and its aftermath had lessened inequality significantly, enabling such a defense of capitalism to have some semblance of validity. However, for that defense to be persuasive required two key facts to be forgotten or hidden. The first is that the U.S. working class fought harder for major economic gains in the 1930s than at any other time in U.S. history. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) then organized millions into labor unions utilizing militants from two socialist parties and a communist party. Those parties were then achieving their largest-ever numerical strengths and social influences. That is how and why together the unions and the parties won the establishment of Social Security, federal unemployment compensation, a minimum wage, and a huge federal jobs program: all firsts in U.S. history. The second fact is that capitalists in the 1930s and afterward fought harder than ever against each and every working-class advance. The “middle-class” status achieved by a large portion of the working class (by no means all and especially not minorities) happened despite not because of capitalism and capitalists. But it was certainly clever propaganda for capitalism to claim credit for working-class gains that capitalists tried but failed to block.

The reduction of U.S. economic inequality accomplished then proved temporary. It was undone after 1945. Particularly after 1970, capitalism’s normal trajectory of deepening economic inequality resumed through to the present moment. Simply put, capitalism’s basic structure of production—how it organizes its enterprises—positioned capitalists to reverse the New Deal’s reduction of economic inequality. Much of the temporary U.S. middle class is now gone; the rest is fading fast. Over the last half-century, U.S. capitalism brought inequality to the extremes surrounding us now. No wonder a population once persuaded to support capitalism because it fostered a middle class now finds reasons to question it.

In capitalist enterprises, tiny minorities of the persons involved occupy positions of leadership, command, and control. The owner, the owner’s family, the board of directors, or the major shareholders comprise such minorities: the class of employers. Opposite them are the vast majorities: the class of employees. The employer class determines, exclusively, what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production occurs, and what is done with its net revenue. The employee class must live with the consequences of employers’ decisions from which it is excluded. The employer class uses its position atop the enterprise to distribute its profits partly to enrich itself (via dividends and top executive pay packages). It uses some of its profits to buy and control politics. The goal there is to prevent universal suffrage from moving the economic system beyond capitalism and the economic inequality it reproduces.

Deepening U.S. inequality flows directly from this capitalist organization of production—its class system. Occasionally, under exceptional circumstances, rebellious social movements win reversals of that inequality. However, if such movements do not change the capitalist organization of production, capitalists will render such reversals temporary. To solve the extreme inequality of U.S. capitalism requires systemic change, an end to capitalism’s specific class structure pitting employers against employees. If production were organized instead in enterprises (factories, offices, stores) that were democratized—one worker, one vote—as worker cooperatives, economic inequality could and would be drastically reduced. Democratic decisions over the distribution of individual incomes across all the participants in an enterprise would far less likely give a small minority vast wealth at the expense of the vast majority. The same logic that dispensed with kings in politics applies to employers in capitalism’s enterprises.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The monstrous predicament Trump left behind

This week’s Senate trial is unlikely to convict Donald Trump of inciting sedition against the United States. At least 17 Republican senators are needed for conviction, but only five have signaled they’ll go along.

Why won’t Republican senators convict him? After all, it’s an open and shut case. As summarized in the brief submitted by House impeachment managers, Trump spent months before the election telling his followers that the only way he could lose was through “a dangerous, wide-ranging conspiracy against them that threatened America itself.”

Immediately after the election, he lied that he had won by a “landslide,” and later urged his followers to stop the counting of electoral ballots by making plans to “fight like hell” and “fight to the death” against this “act of war” perpetrated by “Radical Left Democrats” and the “weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party.”

If this isn’t an impeachable offense, it’s hard to imagine what is. But Republican senators won’t convict him because they’re answerable to Republican voters, and Republican voters continue to believe Trump’s big lie.

A shocking three out of four Republican voters don’t think Joe Biden won legitimately. About 45 percent even support the storming of the Capitol.

The crux of the problem is Americans now occupy two separate worlds – a fact-based pro-democracy world and a Trump-based authoritarian one.

Trump spent the last four years seducing voters into his world, turning the GOP from a political party into a grotesque projection of his pathological narcissism.

Regardless of whether he is convicted, America must now deal with the monstrous predicament he left behind: One of the nation’s two major political parties has abandoned reality and democracy.

What to do? Four things.

First, prevent Trump from running for president in 2024. The mere possibility energizes his followers.

An impeachment conviction is not the only way to prevent him. Under Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, anyone who has taken an oath to protect the Constitution is barred from holding public office if they “have engaged in insurrection” against the United States. As constitutional expert and former Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman has noted, a majority vote that Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States is sufficient to trigger this clause.

Second, give Republicans and independents every incentive to abandon the Trump cult.

White working-class voters without college degrees who now comprise a large portion of it need good jobs and better futures. Many are understandably angry after being left behind in vast enclaves of unemployment and despair. They should not have to depend on Trump’s fact-free fanaticism in order to feel visible and respected.

A jobs program on the scale necessary to bring many of them around will be expensive but worth the cost, especially when democracy hangs in the balance.

Big business, which used to have a home in the GOP, will need a third party. Democrats should not try to court them; the Democratic Party should aim to represent the interests of the bottom 90 percent.

Third, disempower the giant media empires that amplified Trump’s lies for four years – Facebook, Twitter, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators. The goal is not to “cancel” the political right but to refocus public deliberation on facts, truth, and logic. Democracy cannot thrive where big lies are systematically and repeatedly exploited for commercial gain.

The solution is antitrust enforcement and stricter regulation of social media, accompanied by countervailing financial pressure. Consumers should boycott products advertised on these lie factories and advertisers should shun them. Large tech platforms should lose legal immunity for violence-inciting content. Broadcasters such as Fox News and Newsmax should be liable for knowingly spreading lies (they are now being sued by producers of voting machinery and software which they accused of having been rigged for Biden).

Fourth, safeguard the democratic form of government. This requires barring corporations and the very wealthy from buying off politicians, ending so-called “dark money” political groups that don’t disclose their donors, defending the right to vote, and ensuring more citizens are heard, not fewer.

Let’s be clear about the real challenge ahead. The major goal is not to convict Trump of inciting insurrection. It is to move a vast swath of America back into a fact-based pro-democracy society and away from the Trump-based authoritarian one.

Regardless of whether he is convicted, the end of his presidency has given the nation a reprieve. Unless America uses it to end Trumpism’s hold over tens of millions of Americans, that reprieve may be temporary.

Thankfully, Joe Biden appears to understand this.

Did Meghan McCain just accuse “View” cohost Ana Navarro of being a “pretend” conservative?

Friday morning on ABC’s “The View,” co-host Meghan McCain argued that people should stick to their values instead of switching between parties, referencing Nikki Haley’s Politico profile while seeming to obliquely criticize her cohost, Ana Navarro, for voting for Democratic candidates.

After previously siding with former President Trump, Nikki Haley told Politico in a recent interview that “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

McCain said on Friday that the reason Haley has decided not to side with Trump anymore is because “Nikki Haley wants to be president. She’s making absolutely no qualms about it.” She added: “I don’t think she’s someone who’s going to be the frontrunner because I don’t think you can really vacillate between the two lanes … Do you think it’s going to be the Trump party, or you think it’s going to be an anti-Trump party?”

“I wasn’t someone who became a leftist that gave up all my conservative ideals and decided that the party was irredeemable,” McCain continued.

.@MeghanMcCain reacts to the new interview with Nikki Haley: “I don’t think that you can really vacillate between these two lanes. I think you’re going to have to make a choice, like the way someone like Matt Gaetz has done and the way that someone like Liz Cheney has done." pic.twitter.com/HpyLulDb9D

— The View (@TheView) February 12, 2021

That is when Ana Navarro appeared to fire back at her cohost.

“I think a lot of Republicans — I can speak for me, and I think some people who I know are of the same mindset — voted for Democrats not because we’ve changed our values or our principles, but because we knew the only way of holding Trump accountable was putting Democrats there,” said Navarro.

“Make no mistake about it: if Democrats didn’t have the majority in the Senate right now, there would be no impeachment trial.”

NIKKI HALEY BREAKING WITH TRUMP? After the former U.N. ambassador under Pres. Trump said a few weeks ago that Americans need to give him a break, she’s changed course in a new interview and says the GOP should never have followed him—the co-hosts react. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/dx59Da9VUH

— The View (@TheView) February 12, 2021

U.S. could face a simmering, chronic domestic terror problem, warn security experts

After President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021 without any violent incidents, many in the United States and worldwide breathed a sigh of relief.

The respite may be brief. The ingredients that led an incensed pro-Trump mob to break into the Capitol and plant pipe bombs at other federal buildings on Jan. 6 remain.

Several U.S. security experts say they now consider domestic extremism a greater threat to the country than international terror. According to my research on political violence, the U.S. has all the elements that, combined, can produce a low-intensity terrorist conflict: extreme polarization and armed factions willing to break the law, in a wealthy democracy with a strong government.

Terror can thrive in affluent democracies too

Chronic domestic terror is not the same as civil war.

In the modern era, civil wars usually take place in poor countries where the government is too weak and unstable to maintain control over a sprawling, often mountainous territory. Rebels take over swaths of the country and seek to replace the authorities in those areas. This is happening in Afghanistan, India and Nigeria, to name a few places.

In the United States, one of the world’s more powerful nations, armed factions have a hard time permanently seizing land. Several dramatic standoffs between fringe extremists and American authorities – including the 1993 Waco siege and the Bundy family’s 41-day occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016 – ended poorly for the extremists.

A huge asymmetry of power between the state and armed factions prevents militants from openly battling to usurp its authority, as rebel groups like the Taliban do and the American Confederates did. It forces armed groups to act underground, hiding among the general population. Because democratic states cannot, at least on paper, openly violate human rights by systematically persecuting militants or torturing prisoners, underground armed rebels can thrive in democracies.

But operating in secret imposes heavy logistical constraints, my research shows.

It limits the number of operations they can sustain, meaning thinner ranks than full-fledged insurgencies and fewer overall fatalities than in civil wars. And although all rebels may dream of Che Guevara-style guerrilla adventures – heroically liberating “the people” from tyranny – in practice, militants working underground cannot avoid resorting to quintessential terrorist tactics such as bombs, shootings, bank robberies and kidnappings.

Take Italy’s Red Brigades, for example. In the 1970s, this far-left organization aimed at overthrowing the capitalist system, but the Italian state was too strong. So the group resorted to terrorism. For two decades, the Red Brigades carried out a low-intensity campaign that killed perhaps 500 people, mainly with bombings and assassinations. They used violence as a strategy to raise consciousness about communism and provoke an insurrection.

In reaction to this communist violence, far-right groups like Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari responded with indiscriminate attacks, including a no-warning 1980 train bombing in Bologna that killed 85 civilians. They sought to create a level of disruption so high that it would justify military intervention against the “enemies of the state” – a fascist coup d’etat.

Both sides lost. There was no insurrection, no intervention. Italian democracy prevailed.

Lone wolf terror

The U.S, too, has experience with coordinated domestic terror.

Throughout the early 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan waged vicious campaigns against Black Americans in the South. As the tide of the civil rights movement ebbed in the late 1960s, radical Marxists like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army emerged, using violence to oppose American military intervention in Vietnam and push for racial equality.

Between 1969 and 1981, these two groups – one predominately white, the other Black – conducted some 200 attacks, from bank robberies to prison breaks. Fifteen people were killed, most of them security officers.

The FBI engaged in heavy-handed repression, particularly against Black militants. And Americans had scant interest in far left-wing goals like helping the oppressed peoples of the world. Both groups dwindled without much fanfare.

U.S. history has also featured a smattering of fringe, lone wolf terrorists, from the Unabomber on the left to the Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph on the right. This trend has recently accelerated, with a deadly new massacre each year. Individual white supremacists, in particular, have attacked immigrants and people of color, in Charleston, South Carolina, El Paso, Texas and beyond.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate crimes, 2019 was one of the deadliest years for “domestic extremist-related killings” since 1970, with 42 victims in 17 separate incidents.

Trump’s militias

Attacks characterized by lone wolf perpetrators have the advantage of limiting legal scrutiny on the extremist milieu. But with coordination, armed campaigns can scale up to do much more damage.

To overcome the lone wolf stage, disparate militant groups must organize around a common theme that gives coherence to their violence. Trump’s electoral defeat gave his armed followers a big one: the myth of a stolen election.

The Trump presidency emboldened a cabal of armed groups with a far-right agenda. Seeing their leader out of power will only grow this feeling of frustration. So will new repression of the far right, in the form of arrests, surveillance and social media clampdowns.

With Democrats controlling Washington and elections perceived as rigged, American far-right groups may believe further violence is the only way to counter what they see as federal overreach.

If they pursue terrorism, history shows their chances of succeeding are negligible. But this won’t stop them from trying.

Luis De la Calle, Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and Associate Professor in Political Science, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

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

Why you shouldn’t eat out for Valentine’s Day: An epidemiologist explains a few facts of life

Editor’s Note: With another holiday approaching, it’s tempting to want a taste of freedom from COVID-19 social distancing. Who doesn’t want sweet nothings over a glass of Champagne and some chocolate cake? But it’s also important to remember that daily case numbers are still higher now than they were throughout most of 2020. The risk of catching COVID-19 is still extremely high in most parts of the country. Epidemiologist Ryan Malosh answers some questions about eating out and socializing.

Why can’t I eat out for Valentine’s Day if I socially distance?

Restrictions on indoor dining are some of the hardest to swallow. We all have our favorite restaurants, and the experience of eating out is a big part of feeling normal. In addition, many restaurants are cornerstones of our communities, and owners and staff have struggled throughout the pandemic.

But dining indoors remains a high-risk activity. The most effective prevention strategies – ventilation, physical distancing and wearing masks – are challenging in this setting. Even when physical distancing is possible, scientists have found that long-range transmission can occur. Restaurants are trying to innovate ways to determine how safe their spaces are – including using CO2 monitors to gauge ventilation – but these technologies are far from guarantees of safety.

One recent study suggested that policies such as indoor dining restrictions may have saved nearly 2,000 lives in Michigan in the past few months. Takeout and delivery are much safer options (and, I think, more romantic).

Would it matter if I go at off-hours?

Another study, using mobility data to examine community spread, found that capacity restrictions can reduce the number of new infections tied to indoor dining, but they do not eliminate the risk.

Further, with new SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating in a number of states, sitting for hours, maskless and indoors, with anyone outside your own household becomes even riskier. Experts know these variants spread more easily. Case counts, hospitalizations and deaths are starting to come down, but those encouraging trends are unlikely to continue if we collectively decide to throw caution to the wind now.

I’ve been vaccinated, so why can’t I burn my mask?

First, the good news. The vaccines that have been authorized are marvels of medical science. The efficacy against symptomatic and severe infections is phenomenal, as high as 95% for the Pfizer vaccine. They are a big part of how we get back to something approximating normal. And evidence is emerging that vaccination can prevent asymptomatic transmission and reduces viral load, or the amount of virus people have inside them. These findings suggest that vaccination will also reduce transmission of the virus and contribute to herd immunity.

But the unknowns about how well vaccines work against these new variants mean we have to be careful just a bit longer – and we don’t yet know how long that will be. Plus, masks and other prevention strategies may also be lowering our risk of other serious illnesses, such as influenza.

Everyone in my pod has been vaccinated. Is it safe to gather at someone’s house without masks?

I think small gatherings where everyone has completed the vaccine regimens are probably going to be relatively safe. There isn’t much data to support this yet, because the proportion of people vaccinated in the U.S. is still relatively low. But the studies I mentioned above all suggest that once your “quaranteam” is fully vaccinated, it will likely be safe to reconnect in this way. And discouraging people from doing so might actually discourage vaccination.

A “Saturday Night Live” skit shows how everyone thinks they are being safe.

Everyone I know says they are being safe but then I hear that they had brunch out with a group of friends. How can I best tell when my friends’ ideas of being safe align with my own ideas?

Some studies suggest people are downplaying the risks they’re taking. People do this because they don’t want to be judged. I can tell you from my personal experience that the best way to get honest answers is to be honest yourself. Talk about what level of risk you’re taking and what level you’re willing to accept. If someone is taking risks that you’re not comfortable with, it is OK to tell them you’ll see them after you get vaccinated.

The bottom line is that there is a lot to be hopeful about as vaccine distribution ramps up in the U.S. and cases come down. The major challenges over the next few months are to continue the progress we’re making on community spread and to ensure that vaccines are available to the most vulnerable communities in an equitable way.

Ryan Malosh, Assistant Research Scientist, University of Michigan

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

In 2021 alone, GOP introduces 100+ voter suppression bills in 28 states

Since former President Donald Trump failed to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in more than two dozen states have introduced over 100 bills to restrict voting access, an alarming development that voting rights advocates have pointed to as yet another reason for Democrats to abolish the filibuster, an anti-democratic tool currently allowing the GOP minority to block the enactment of a suite of popular pro-democracy reforms.

Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman on Thursday reported on the GOP’s ongoing nationwide push to make voting more difficult — particularly for communities of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies — and in some cases to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. He called state-level Republicans’ efforts “a huge scandal that should be getting as much attention as Trump’s plot to overturn the election.”

Republicans across the country, Berman said, are “weaponizing Trump’s lies” about fraud in an attempt to roll back voting rights after last year’s historic turnout and expansion of mail-in ballots.

“Democrats have a clear choice,” Berman continued. “They can get rid of the filibuster to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act to stop GOP voter suppression, or they can allow the GOP to undermine democracy for the next decade.”

“The stakes,” Berman added, “couldn’t be higher.” That’s because, according to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice in late January, Republicans at the state level have introduced three times as many bills to chip away at voting rights compared to the same point last year.

Already this year, 106 bills have been introduced in 28 states — including 17 under complete GOP control, where passage is more likely — to undermine access to the franchise. According to the Brennan Center’s report, “These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) limit successful pro-voter registration policies; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.”

“These bills,” the report argues, “are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election.”

106 bills introduced in 28 states already this year to restrict voting access finds @BrennanCenter

That's 3x as high as last year

"These bills are unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election."https://t.co/0WwCkuDEmy pic.twitter.com/qnnyD82Dkk

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) February 4, 2021

And this week, as CNN reported on Friday, “lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Georgia Senate added more. They include proposals that would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting for many state residents and end automatic voter registration when obtaining a driver’s license.”

According to Berman, the nine bills that Georgia Republicans introduced on February 1 would amount to “one of the worst voter suppression laws ever passed.”

On first day of Black History Month Georgia Republicans introduced NINE bills to make it harder to vote, including ending automatic voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting & mail ballot drop boxes. This would be one of worst voter suppression laws ever passed pic.twitter.com/0nvQmebkwe

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) February 4, 2021

Not to be outdone, Arizona Republicans have since the start of 2021 introduced 34 bills to make voting harder, including reducing the number of polling places in Maricopa County from 100 to 15.

Georgia and Arizona are not alone; similar reactionary proposals are being pushed by Republicans in more than two dozen additional states.

The spike in anti-democracy bills represents an intensification of an existing trend rather than a new development. As Common Dreams reported last November, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) admitted shortly after the election that making voting more accessible hurts the GOP’s electoral prospects.

“If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country,” Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The GOP has been trying to undercut efforts to expand voting access for years. “A decade ago,” Berman wrote, “Republicans passed new voter ID laws and other efforts to curtail voting rights when they took power in the states following [former President] Barack Obama’s election.”

But now, he added, “Republicans are taking their assault on voting rights to the next level.” Like the Brennan Center, Berman attributed the surge in anti-democracy legislation to Trump’s failed bid to subvert the will of the people in last year’s election.

According to Berman, the GOP is “trying to accomplish through legislation what Trump couldn’t with litigation. All in all, these efforts amount to the most concerted attempts to roll back voting rights since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.”

Meanwhile, at the federal level, Democratic lawmakers are pushing to expand ballot access.

CNN reported that “the voting bills in Congress—which Democrats have said are an early priority—would establish at least 15 days of early voting in federal elections, allow for automatic voter registration, restore voting rights to former felons, and bar states from prohibiting mail-in and curbside voting—along with a slew of other changes to election and campaign-finance laws.”

As Common Dreams reported last month, Democratic leaders have said the For the People Act, a far-reaching package of democracy reforms, is a legislative priority. But GOP opposition to the bill renders passage unlikely unless lawmakers kill the filibuster.

The Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser told CNN that “you have an absolutely necessary piece of legislation to restore our democracy. The filibuster absolutely shouldn’t stand in the way of accomplishing it.”

Scientists have successfully taught pigs to play video games

No, pigs haven’t learned to fly — but they have learned to play video games. In fact, they may even have fun while they’re gaming.

A quartet of pigs — Panepinto micro pigs Ebony and Ivory, and Yorkshire pigs Hamlet and Omelette — learned how to play a video game by using their snouts to move an arcade-style joystick that would steer a cursor into various walls on a computer screen, as described in a research paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. In the process, they provided scientists with a new insight into the depth of pig intelligence and revealed that pigs, like human beings, may be able to both have fun playing video games and bond with other living creatures as they indulge in the sheer joy of gaming.

“The pigs were allowed to work at their own pace always and could end sessions at will,” Dr. Candace Croney, lead author of the paper and professor of comparative pathobiology and animal science at Purdue University’s Center for Animal Welfare Science, told Salon by email. “When we were cleaning and allowing them time to freely interact with toys and trainers who were present, it was common for them to walk up the ramp and try to initiate a computer session even if it wasn’t scheduled.” They continued gaming even when the food dispenser broke; that dispenser had been used to provide them with tasty rewards as an incentive for playing.

“On some occasions, they probably kept playing even if the food dispenser jammed because they were hoping treats might start dropping again,” Croney explained. “At other times, they did seem to enjoy the experience and would keep going just with verbal praise and petting, which based on their behavior, they clearly enjoyed as they solicited that often. So it may have been a combination of something they enjoyed about doing the task itself, but also the positive social interactions they got while working, even though they routinely got those outside of their computer sessions.”

Dr. Sarah T. Boysen of the Comparative Cognition Project, a co-author of the paper, echoed Croney’s observations, writing to Salon that “while we can’t know what the pigs were thinking, I think they did, in fact, enjoy working on the video task. They are, no surprise, highly food-motivated, so that also likely played a part.”

Croney explained to Salon that scientists already knew that pigs were quite intelligent, so the remarkable find here is not that our four-legged porcine friends are a brainy bunch. It’s that they were able to display a highly specialized type of intelligence and learning ability that “nothing in the natural behavior or evolutionary history of the pig” would have previously indicated they were capable of doing.

“What’s different here from any other sort of learning previously demonstrated, where a pig simply performs a learned behavior and gets a reward, is that the pigs had to grasp the very difficult concept that the thing they were manipulating (the joystick) was having its effect on a 2-dimensional computer-generated image (the cursor) that they could not touch, smell or interact with directly,” Croney told Salon. “That sort of conceptual learning is a huge mental leap for any animal as this would never happen in the real world.”

The study tells us much about how sophisticated and intelligent pigs are. And the pigs themselves had a happy ending: they did not get addicted to video gaming as humans do, and had good lives after they were no longer involved in the study.

“At the end of their time on our study, all pigs (except one who developed a serious health problem that required us to make the difficult decision to have a veterinarian euthanize him to avoid suffering) were rehomed to farm sanctuaries,” Croney wrote to Salon. “The micro pigs lived out their lives interacting with other animals and people at children’s zoos. We’ve had several people inquire and, in retrospect, I wish we’d thought to add this information to the scientific paper.”

Why bother? Trump’s lawyers don’t even offer an impeachment defense because Republicans don’t care

Going into Friday, the fourth day of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, Trump’s legal team announced that their defense would be short. In one sense, that was an understatement.

While the House managers who prosecuted Trump took nearly all of their 16-hour allotment to present evidence and carefully lay out a convincing case for Trump’s guilt in inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6, Trump’s lawyers wrapped their defense in less than half of that time. However, in proof of time’s curious relativity, the defense arguments felt many times as long as those offered by the House managers on Wednesday and Thursday. Low on reason or evidence and high on whining, every moment Trump’s lawyers spoke felt like an eternity — at least for viewers who don’t share the right-wing enthusiasm for Fox News-style self-pity and bad faith.

The contrast between the House managers and Trump’s defense team was starkest during Friday’s closing arguments.

House managers were there to persuade; laying out the evidence, connecting the facts together in a rational manner, and building their case — which they did quite successfully — that Trump’s actions prior to and during the riot proved that he intentionally incited the insurrection.

Trump’s legal team, however, was there to rationalize.

Specifically, their goal was to give Senate Republicans some talking points to hide behind when justifying their indefensible but inevitable vote to acquit Trump, despite the overwhelming evidence of his guilt. Several Republicans sitting in judgment of Trump met with his lawyers both before and during Friday’s arguments. “What I encouraged the Trump lawyers to do is take their standard and apply it to the conduct of Democrats,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., revealed on his podcast. That advice helps with the secondary goal to produce footage for Fox News and social media — giving defensive Trump voters something to say when arguing with their kids.

As such, there was little effort to make a coherent argument, much less a persuasive one. Instead, Trump attorney Michael van der Veen set the tone right away with a speech that was less legal argument and more a litany of right-wing grievances: “Cancel culture”, “Russia” and, of course, whining endlessly about property destruction during Black Lives Matter protests which existed far more in the conservative imagination than in real life.

Nothing Trump’s lawyers said refuted the central claim established with a great deal of evidence by the House managers, which is that Trump incited an insurrection by feeding his base lies about a stolen election for months, which culminated in a riot after promised they’re “allowed” to follow “very different rules.” And little surprise, as Trump’s guilt is irrefutable.

So Trump’s team primarily relied on whataboutism. They even played a supercut of Democrats using the word “fight,” equating what was clearly a metaphorical use of the word to Trump’s exhortations to “fight” that his followers took literally, in the spirit that they were intended.

The claim that Trump’s language was mere “ordinary political rhetoric” depends heavily, as most conservative arguments do these days, on the speaker deliberately pretending to be incredibly stupid. In this bad faith case, pretending to be too dumb to understand that words derive their meaning from context. As such, equating Trump’s use of “fight” in the context of a violent insurrection with Democrats using it in much different contexts got real dumb, real fast.

I can’t believe Chuck Schumer incited violence against Covid like this pic.twitter.com/npT53XnKVz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2021

It’s infuriating, but of course, infuriating liberals with obnoxious bad faith is part of the game being played by Trump’s lawyers. It refocuses Republican minds away from concerns like the depravity of backing a violent sadist like Trump and towards more entertaining goals, such as trolling the liberals. And so long as they’re thinking happy thoughts about triggered liberals, they aren’t thinking about how scary it was to face a murderous mob looking for congressmen to kill.

While Trump’s lawyers claimed to be defending his innocence, they no more meant that that Trump meant “peacefully” when he sicced a mob on the Capitol. Instead, as Paul Waldman argued in the Washington Post, “Faced with questions, criticisms or even legal jeopardy, Trump often defaulted to claim that his words and actions were defensible not because they adhered to any standard that could be generally applied, but because everyone else is just as debased as he is.”

This is not the kind of argument meant to establish innocence. It’s about rationalizing bad actions through deflection. And even if someone can conclusively prove the equivalence is false — as is easy to do, since not a single Democrat has ever sent a violent mob to storm the Capitol — whataboutism gets the job done by diverting a discussion of Trump’s actions towards a pointless and bad faith debate over what the word “fight” means and if it means the exact same thing in every single context.

Trump’s team was not worried about logic or reason, but about giving whoever needs it — from Senate Republicans to your Trump-voting uncle — a wall of words they can use to drown out those who are making sense. These days, Republican discourse is rarely, if ever, about explicating a belief system, so much as concealing it through the heavy application of bullshit.

And no wonder. Trump’s reasons for inciting an insurrection are indefensible, as are the reasons for Senate Republicans in shielding him from consequences. In both cases, it’s about a belief that Republicans should not be accountable to voters and Republican power should not be dependent on the will of the governed. That level of entitlement collapses in the face of any kind of reasoned debate. So reasoned debate is what Republicans will go to any length to avoid. Which is how we got the clown show masquerading as a legal defense in the Senate on Friday.

“The Stand” finale is aggravating confirmation that Stephen King still needs more Black friends

If you watched all nine episodes of the CBS All Access remake of “The Stand” . . . why? Why did you do that to yourself?

This is not a facetious query, I swear. I’m asking because I want to understand why you willingly subjected yourself to nine hours of a series that established its predictability and mediocrity by the third episode. You experienced the stupidity of this version’s Trashcan Man as interpreted by an actor who really should know better, Ezra Miller. Miller took one of the better-known characters from Stephen King‘s ginormous novel and transformed him into a slavering, blithering idiot, adding one more thing to despise atop a mountain of mediocrity.

There are many better shows – past and present – that you could be watching right now. So why did you devote your precious waking energy to this one? I have a firm guess about the answer, because it’s the reason I returned to watch the conclusion – I was lured by the promise of seeing completely new and original ending penned by none other than King himself.

It’s an intriguing sell even for someone who was done with “The Stand” before much of the world had seen its first episode, especially when you look at the novel’s history. “The Stand” first published in 1978, but King re-released his expanded “Complete and Uncut” edition of the story in 1990, adding hundreds of pages left out of the original release as well as updating the setting from the 1980s to the 1990s.

The precedent proves that King isn’t precious about tweaking certain plot details in a way that speaks to America in 2020 and 2021 and even more to the point, speaks to who he is in this moment. Recall that in recent years King has styled himself as an anti-Trump agitator, famously taking on Ted Cruz at several turns.

He also stepped in it a little over a year ago when the Oscars nominated only one person of color, Cynthia Erivo, across four of its major acting categories. “For me, the diversity issue – as it applies to individual actors and directors, anyway – did not come up,” King tweeted in response to the resulting furor. “That said I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.”

If you’re wondering what this has to do with the ninth and final episode of “The Stand” then you haven’t been keeping up with the numerous critiques of King’s representations of Black or non-white people in his work, and this one in particular.

His habit of leaning hard on the Magical Negro trope has fueled a number of thoughtful and widely circulated critiques, one of the best having been authored by Africanfuturist writer Nnedi Okorafor in 2004. After she lists what she calls the Five Points of the Magical Negro she breaks it down further.

The archetype of the Magical Negro is an issue of race. It is the subordination of a minority figure masked as the empowerment of one. The Magical Negro has great power and wisdom, yet he or she only uses it to help the white main character; he or she is not threatening because he or she only seeks to help, never hurt. The white main character’s well-being comes before the Magical Negro’s because the main character is of more value, more importance.

This pretty much describes Mother Abigail. Well, also Dick Hallorann in “The Shining” and John Coffey in “The Green Mile,” but we’re writing about “The Stand” so let’s stick with Whoopi Goldberg‘s character.

By the time this finale rolls around Mother Abigail has expired, as have three of the characters she sent to Las Vegas on a suicide mission to confront The Dark Man, Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård) and die for the sins of others.

This happens in the eighth episode, where the hand of God reaches down with a ball of energy and smites Flagg and his faithful with lightning before setting off Trashcan Man’s nuke.

Evil is vanquished, and the surviving good guy and primary antagonist Stu Redman (James Marsden) is shivering with a broken leg in the desert until he is saved by the sweet and determined Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke). This penultimate episode ends with Redman’s love Frannie (Odessa Young) going into labor. Honestly, the show could have ended there or perhaps tacked on a brief epilogue.

Oh, but this would have denied us the chance to take in King’s new finale which, as it turns out, more or less adapts the ending he wrote in his uncut edition. Frannie’s child is born healthy at first, then comes down with Captain Trips but miraculously recovers. Stu and Frannie are reunited. All is well in Boulder, Colorado . . . which of course means the pair, along with Glen’s dog Kojak, decide to move to – where else? – Maine. All roads in King’s universe lead to and through Maine.

Along the way they drive through Nebraska, Mother Abigail’s home state, and decide to stop over at a very nice, empty farmhouse to rest for a day or two. What they don’t realize is that in a nearby cornfield, camped out under a dirty sheet is . . . a little Black girl.

A very wise and supernaturally attuned Black child who, despite appearing to be connected to the secrets of the universe and God, decides to live outside instead of inside the perfectly solid farmhouse sitting just a hop, skip and a jump from the cornstalks.

Why is she there? I mean, other than to prove No. 5 on Okorafor’s list, which is: “He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.”

Well, because while Stu is out on a supply run and gets delayed by a flat tire, Fran tumbles down a well shattering her hip, puncturing a lung and breaking her leg in several places. While she’s unconscious Flagg appears and tempts Fran and she rebukes him.

While this is happening Stu returns and sees Fran has pulled a Baby Jessica. Assisted by Magical Black Girl Whose Name He Doesn’t Know, Stu retrieves her from underground. Stu lays Fran’s broken body supine and Supernatural Black Girl – who, by the way, is dressed in a shabby sheath straight out of the Depression Era – faith heals all her breaks and fractures. After this, while Stu and Fran are embracing with relief the girl vanishes, leaving behind her doll for Fran’s baby.

Speaking of Flagg, the miniseries ends with the same problematic scene as the re-issued version of “The Stand” with The Dark Man emerging stark naked from a pool of water in the middle of some unspecified jungle. There he’s confronted by a tribe of bare-chested indigenous folks. After he makes one of their warrior’s head explode, they all drop to their knees and worship him, leading him to announce himself as Russell Faraday.

Again, if I’m recalling correctly this scene is pretty much straight out of the 1990 edition of “The Stand,” and that means the ending isn’t exactly new. Neither are the stereotypes that birthed it.

Okorafor credits genre writer Steve Barnes for introducing her to the term Magical Negro in 2001, a full 20 years ago. Within that time King must have encountered a least a few critiques of his addiction to this specific cliché.

It doesn’t take much of a deep dive; type Stephen King Black people into Google’s search engine and the first entry that comes up is “Stephen King Needs More Black Friends.” The second is . . . the Wikipedia entry for Magical Negro.

Like Okorafor, I still appreciate King’s work. I also agree with her opinion that he’s not racist.

What he consistently proves himself to be is a 73-year-old rich man who lives in one of the whitest states in the nation and probably doesn’t encounter many people of color who aren’t Academy Award nominees like Erivo, who plays his character Holly Gibney in HBO’s adaptation of “The Outsider” (a character that also is neuroatypical and supremely gifted). Or, for that matter Sexiest Man Alive winners like Idris Elba, who plays the hero in the unfortunate 2017 film adaptation of “The Dark Tower.”

One crucial way that King is like anyone else is he’s capable of the sort of thoughtful evolution we never see in this version of “The Stand” – not from the start and at no point in an ending that isn’t merely unoriginal, it’s uninspired.

I can only guess that King viewed Mysterious Black Healer Child as an improvement over past renditions of mystical Black people in his books. Maybe in his mind she represents his nod to Black Girl Magic.

Obviously she’s the reincarnation of Mother Abigail, placed on Earth to combat Flagg’s return and establishing that the war between good and evil continues. But Mother Abigail got housing. He didn’t even give this child a roof to sleep under or a name. And I am not an Indigenous person but if I were I’d still be re-attaching my jawbone to my face.

King isn’t obligated to take on more Black friends, but maybe before he or someone else decides to reprise non-white characters the author made famous for the wrong reasons they might consult a wiser person who can point out these bad choices and ask, “To what end?” Because for so many reasons this one isn’t worth the extra attention.

We regret to remind you that all episodes of “The Stand” are currently airing on CBS All Access.

With “Me You Madness,” Steve Mnuchin’s wife creates a bold, bipartisan comedy to annoy us all

As shameful as it is to admit, “Me You Madness,” the flashy directorial debut by Louise Linton, the wife of Steven Mnuchin — is not the complete and utter debacle one might hope (or expect) it to be. This is, to be Swarovski crystal clear, absolutely damning with the faintest of praise. Linton’s ambitious film is, a pastiche of other films, “American Psycho,” “Neon Demon,” and “Basic Instinct” chief among them. But as much as one might want to hold Linton in contempt, she generates a few real chuckles in this sporadically amusing comedy-romance, which is being released on demand just in time for Valentine’s Day.

“Me You Madness” is as superficial as its protagonist, Catherine Black (Linton), a fast-talking hedge fund manager who wears shiny gold knee-high boots that might make even a seasoned sex worker blush. She is addicted to exercise, taking black-lit spin classes wearing glow-in-the-dark bunny ears, lifting weights (a funny sight gag), and doing 1,000 butt crunches. The actress/filmmaker smugly displays her fit body in a crop top as well as a shower scene as if to troll haters.

But Linton certainly does her damnedest to charm. Her Catherine is, admittedly, a sociopathic serial killer and self-proclaimed shapeshifter, who displays her brilliance when she addresses viewers to inform them, “There are no f**king spiders on Antarctica.” She then eats the one crawling on her finger like a potato chip. One can even hear it crunch. (The sound design is calculated, like everything else in this film, to impress and amuse).

Linton is not only breaking the fourth wall here — though it is hardly a wall, more like a dazzlingly bejeweled, very expensive, sheer curtain — but she is also providing character development, symbolism, and foreshadowing. (Female spiders often eat their male mates after sex, Catherine woman-splains).

But don’t be threatened by this “really special” lady, who is amazing, beautiful, elegant, charming, smart, and sexy. (Those are words from the script; Linton also penned the screenplay). Sure, Catherine kills people, cuts them up, and keeps their body parts in a freezer. She also later cooks and serves the naughty bits to her dinner guests. But she justifies her behavior; her victims are homophobes, pedophiles, sex traffickers, neo-Nazis and even — gasp! laugh! — Republicans. (Don’t worry, she’s a bipartisan, bisexual murderess who also dispatches Democrats).

Moreover, Catherine is a self-described “materialistic, narcissistic, self-absorbed, raging misanthrope with an acute lack of conscience.” She also has a strong sense of style. (She keeps bundles of cash and a handy gun in her accessories drawer.) The conspicuous consumption is designed to be jaw-dropping; Catherine collects sports cars including a 1965 — not 1968 — candy-apple red Mustang Fastback, and the $294,950 Aston Martin Vanquish that was used in a Bond film, “Die Another Day.”

When Catherine wakes up, she is happy and says, “Because I remember I’m me, and my life is incredible.”

Viewers who don’t laugh with Linton/Catherine will laugh at her. And they will laugh at the sheer gall of this film and this character. “Me You Madness” is certainly, deliberately outrageous — Catherine dances with body parts to “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” in one whacked-out sequence. And watching her play a trivia game with her on-demand nail technician (Jimmy Dinh) or banter in Mandarin with her sometimes lover, Yu Yan (Shuya Chang), is good for a snicker.

But what exactly is funny here? The thin plot has Catherine drugging Tyler Jones (Ed Westwick) and sexually assaulting him while he is passed out. He has come to steal from her, but she has planned revenge for one of his previous crimes. However, after a night of passionate sex, he doesn’t want to rob her, and she doesn’t want to kill him. What’s a couple in love to do?

Alas, the film stalls once the kiss-or-kill narrative begins in earnest. The lovey-dovey pillow talk between the couple is remarkably unconvincing. And viewers will likely not be very invested in what follows — a cat and mouse game that has Catherine trying to kill Tyler, who discovered her dirty little secret in the freezer, and makes the mistake of asking her if she is on her period.

Linton fails to create any tension — sexual, comic, dramatic, or otherwise — between Catherine and Tyler, which is the juice this comedy needs. Instead, the filmmaker goes for a wink-winkiness that is more often than not, exasperating. Sure, it’s clever when Catherine recounts all the films where killers use guns, and gushes about nunchucks as a weapon, but a sidebar enumerating all the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” films is excessive. And while Catherine pauses to give a PSA about not leaving animals in cars (even with the windows cracked), this important information is misplaced.

Linton seems to tickle herself, not viewers, by having Catherine and Tyler verbally volley the word “cute” back and forth during their epic face-off, but it is not particularly adorable. Nor is their endless debate about “couch” versus “sofa,” or how to pronounce “Van Gogh.” Linton’s penchant for juvenilia seems limitless; she includes not one, but two fart jokes, and the both, ahem, stink.

“Me You Madness” is certainly designed to showcase its writer, director, and star. A scene of Catherine attacking a victim with an unidentified object — one imagines it is a Louboutin — allows Linton to perform a scene covered in blood and lie about what happened. Her deadpan delivery here earns a genuine guffaw. As does her ability to make the word “Uber” sound sexy and funny when Catherine insists Tyler stay for a drink and call for a ride home. Even the way she mixes her cocktails may induce an adolescent giggle with its overt sexual suggestiveness. But even in 97 brisk minutes, Linton can wear out her welcome. “Me You Madness” is a one-joke film that might have worked better as a punchy short.

As her love interest, Ed Westwick has a strapping bohunk quality that is appealing to a degree that is as limited as his acting. His big scene is an energized lip-synching dance sequence to “I’m So Excited,” performed in a silk robe, boxer shorts, and boots. It may be totally ridiculous, and unabashed male objectification, but to the film’s credit, all of the scenes set to the wall-to-wall upbeat ’80s soundtrack are slightly irresistible.

“Me You Madness” is certainly audacious, which is why it is attention-getting. Alas, Linton’s broad film actually never goes over the top enough often enough, making it, ultimately, a dubious achievement at best.

“Me You Madness” premieres on demand on Friday, Feb. 12.

Justin Timberlake is “deeply sorry” for his sexist behavior toward Britney Spears & Janet Jackson

In a lengthy Instagram post, singer Justin Timberlake apologized to fellow musicians Britney Spears and Janet Jackson for his past actions, which have been recontextualized in light of a new documentary.

“I’ve seen the messages, tags, comments, and concerns and I want to respond,” Timberlake wrote on Friday. “I am deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right. I understand that I fell short in these moments and in many others and benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism.

“I also feel compelled to respond, in part, because everyone involved deserves better and most importantly, because this is a larger conversation that I wholeheartedly want to be part of and grow from,” Timberlake added. “The industry is flawed. It sets men, especially white men, up for success. It’s designed this way. As a man in a privileged position I have to be vocal about this. Because of my ignorance, I didn’t recognize it for all that it was while it was happening in my own life but I do not want to ever benefit from others being pulled down again.”

Timberlake’s social media post comes a week after the release of “Framing Britney,” an FX on Hulu documentary that was produced in collaboration with The New York Times. The documentary is partially about how Spears has been under a conservatorship, led by her father Jamie Spears, since 2008. This has given rise to the #FreeBritney movement, led by fans who want the public and legal system to more critically assess the arrangement.

But, as Salon reported, a dominant thread running through is the deep misogyny that shaped the public perception of Spears, which was only amplified by paparazzi intrusion. Timberlake, whom Spears dated for several years, is portrayed as eagerly playing into that sexism following their break up.

While the tabloids portrayed her as unfaithful, Timberlake only fanned the flames of those rumors by releasing the song “Cry Me a River,” with a music video that featured a Spears look-alike cheating on him. On the talk show circuit he repeatedly bragged about having sex with Spears, who had spoken publicly about wanting to wait until marriage for sex.

During one rado appearance, Timberlake was asked: “Did you f**k Britney Spears?” He laughed and paused, before finally responding, “Okay, I did it.” In a later interview, he confirmed that he’d had “oral intercourse” with her, saying, “I did it. I’m dirty.”

Timberlake faced new backlash for his behavior towards Spears following the premiere of the documentary, which also coincided with Super Bowl weekend. This reminded some viewers of Timberlake’s 2004 Super Bowl performance with Janet Jackson wherein Timberlake ripped some cloth from Jackson’s outfit, exposing her breast.

There’s been a lot of speculation about whether it was a publicity stunt or an accident, but the response to the musicians was wildly different — just like in the case of Timberlake’s break-up with Spears. Jackson was essentially disinvited from the Grammys the following weekend, while Timberlake attended and won two awards.

“It’s clear from Justin Timberlake’s career choices that he allows for women to take the fall in order to avoid accountability — Britney Spears, Janet Jackson — both major pop stars where the former influenced the latter in terms of performance and sexual charisma,” author Morgan Jerkins wrote on Twitter.

Dylan Farrow also once called out Timberlake’s hypocrisy after he was seen wearing a Times Up pin, while also starring in Woody Allen’s film “Wonder Wheel.”

Fox News legal analyst trashes Trump for betraying the Constitution

Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy did not mince words when he lambasted former President Donald Trump’s “indelibly stained” presidency due to the poor behavior he exhibited during the final days of his time in office.

When McCarthy appeared for a podcast interview with Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin, he discussed a number of Trump’s controversies including his election fraud claims and the Capitol insurrection that opened the door for his second impeachment trial. McCarty, also a columnist at the National Review, admitted that he could not of any American president that behaved as poorly as Trump has.

“I can’t think of any other president, if you (don’t) just take Jan. 6 by itself, but this whole continuum from Nov. 3 up until he left office, that’s as bad as anything I’m aware of in American history from an American president,” said McCarthy.

He also weighed in on the second impeachment trial as he noted discussed the strategy needed to prove Trump’s incitement. To prove incitement in a regular criminal trial, you’d have to show that there were unambiguous calls to violence that were imminent and probable,” McCarthy explained.

He went on to discuss the most “indefensible” aspect of Trump’s reaction to the Capitol riots. McCarthy said, “The most indefensible thing about this episode is the hours during which the siege was going on when former President Trump didn’t respond to it.”

“As commander in chief of the armed forces, he had an absolute obligation to take action to repel an attack on the seat of government,” he said, adding, “And what the reporting at least shows, and I don’t have any reason to think the proof will come out any differently, is he was basically sitting on his hands — at best.”

When asked if he believes Trump’s presidency is “indelibly stained,” McCarty said, “The easy answer to that question is yes,” McCarthy said. “And I don’t want to make it more complicated than that because in the end, it’s really not.”

Jamie Oliver’s meatball buns are the kind of mess you won’t mind getting yourself into

It’s always nice to feel like you’re eating the (even slightly) fancy version of a simple meal. After days (months) of throwing together odds and ends, eating leftovers, and ordering in, all we want to do at Salon Food is cook up something crave-worthy and delicious for dinner.

Good news: Jamie Oliver got the memo. He just shared a simple, protein-packed, and oh so fancy Sloppy Joe alternative. The cherry on top? Covered with melted cheese, sandwiched between toasted buns and dunked in warm tomato sauce — it’s the ultimate companion for a cold, winter night.

One of the many 5-ingredient meals from Oliver’s “Quick & Easy” cookbook, you only need a handful of ingredients to assemble what’s destined to become a favorite weeknight staple: messy meatball buns. Plus, you’ll have a hot meal on the table in about 20 minutes flat!

You’ll start by combining ground beef and pesto, plus seasoning the mixture with salt and pepper to taste. This blend gets divided into 12 pieces, which are then rolled into individual portions. Using a non-stick frying pan —we like the Five Two Essential line from Food52 — brown the meatballs on high heat.

Once you have golden meatballs sizzling away in a pan, pour in a can of tomatoes. Break them up with a spoon, and let them come to a boil. Then grab some Mozzarella, and spread it over the meatballs.

When the Mozzarella melts and the sauce has thickened, spread a generous helping of pesto onto toasted hamburger buns. In addition to the meatballs, add some extra sauce to your buns (but be sure to save the lion’s share for dipping).

With only five ingredients and six total steps, you’re already finished cooking and ready to give your sandwich a dunk. Enjoy Jamie Oliver’s full recipe for messy meatball buns here.

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

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“There’s a racial component”: Newsmax host complains impeachment is racist against “white folk”

Newsmax host Greg Kelly claimed on Thursday that the push to convict Trump has a “racial component” and is ultimately fueled by anti-white sentiment.

“Right now in America, who doesn’t have much status?” Kelly asked. “White folk. Especially poor, white folk. Especially poor, white people who stormed the Capitol,” the top-rated cable news host asserted, ignoring data that shows most people arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are professionals like business owners and police officers.

“They should not have done it and I think the rioters should be prosecuted,” the host added, before qualifying that not all rioters should be held equally responsible. “Some of them were led inside…some of them just happened to be there,” explained Kelly, in a strange attempt to remove the rioters of their own agency.

“Did you see the video outside of Nancy Pelosi’s office?” Kelly continued, “This is evidence and it should be looked into and –– and those responsible should be punished. But why so selective? Why is this like 9/11?”

Security camera footage presented by impeachment trial managers on the second day of trial showed members of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s, D-NY, staff running into an office that they barricaded as the riot was underway. Rioters managed to breach the outer office door but did not succeed in getting past the inner one.

The Newsmax host then contrasted the media’s coverage of insurrection to what he thought was the deferential treatment of the Minneapolis racial. “What about when they took over that police precinct in Minneapolis?” he asked.

“I mean, they took over a police precinct. Guess what?” he continued. “They went inside. They trashed the place. The cops had to evacuate. The cops actually had to evacuate. And this was considered a beautiful thing somehow.

“Now why is that? What’s the difference?” he asked, one difference, of course, being that, while one group of demonstrators was protesting against the racism in law enforcement –– a phenomenon widely documented throughout U.S. history –– another other was raging against a non-existent case of election fraud.

How I turned my hallway into a dining room

I am utterly devoted to taking dinner in the living room. I turn the TV on, let my meal grow cold by the time I find the perfect show, and hunch over the coffee table to spoon pasta in my mouth, eyes glazed over. It’s not the most refined picture, no, but it’s worked quite well for me so far. I think the main reason I’ve never liked sitting at the table to eat by myself is because I’ve never had a kitchen or dining room I loved.

My current “dining room” is really the size of a breakfast nook, and is directly off of my galley kitchen. It’s approximately 5×7′, and since it’s the only way to get from the living room to the bathroom, it functions more as a natural hallway. Being that I’ve never been one to eat at the table unless I really had to, I also never gave this space much thought. A year after moving into this apartment, though, it was ready for my attention.

Here’s how I completely overhauled a space that simply wasn’t doing its job — and made it into a mini-version of my dream dining room:

Finding more room

For about a year, there were two shelving units that lived in the dining nook: one that held wine, cookbooks, and decor, and another that acted as a catchall for an assortment of random items. While they served their purpose, removing them from the space immediately made it feel so much larger; and without the two shelves, there was now room for four chairs to fully pull out and allow a human being to fit — it’s the little things! (Honestly, with the shelves gone, I felt like I could breathe again.)

Paint, paint, paint!

In the height of quarantine I (and by I, I mean myself and my ever-patient boyfriend) had painstakingly applied peel & stick wallpaper to the back wall of the space, but four months later, I loathed it.

So, I traipsed over to Home Depot with a rough idea of the color I wanted, but also totally open for inspiration to strike me while flipping through paint swatches. I knew, from the very beginning, that I wanted to go with a statement-making color that’d be a focal point in the apartment, wavering between sagey greens and moody blues, but ended up choosing Binary Star by Behr. I painted the top two-thirds of the wall and left the bottom-third white — somewhat mimicking the look of a room with board and batten — and even though the color is dark, this change made everything feel brighter and bigger.

Before (Photo by Caroline Mullen)

After (Photo by Caroline Mullen)

New furniture makes . . . a big difference

The IKEA table and chairs (procured from Facebook Marketplace, my favorite store) sufficed for a while, but when they started to squeak, it became time, finally, for some big girl furniture. I wanted to keep the styles relatively timeless, so I went with a walnut table (with drop-down leaves in case I need more space) from Raymour & Flanigan, because that’s where adults get furniture, right? They also brought it in and set it up which was . . . amazing (aka, no struggling with instructions and a teeny-tiny hex wrench). I also opted for black slat-back chairs which lean somewhat farmhouse, but paired with the mid-century-style table, I don’t think I’ll be getting sick of them any time soon.

A rug defines the space

Before, this little room had a yellowy oak table on yellowy oak floors, and it looked . . . very outdated. I was a little bit concerned that the walnut table might clash with the floors, so a rug was the obvious choice to break up the space. Since the room is 5×7′, I wanted to leave a little blank space around the outside of the rug, and chose a 4×6′, which fit just right. Usually I’d lean into some kind of patterned rug, but I’m so glad I went with a neutral gray jute (similar to this one). It’s got lots of texture, so it’s not boring, and it perfectly balances out the warm tones with some cool.

Intentional light fixtures change the game

OK, I know decorators, designers, and influencers are always saying that changing out a light fixture makes a huge difference, but if there’s one takeaway here: Change. That. Light fixture. The dining room had an oh-so-classic boob light (actually one of the last in my apartment to go) so I hopped up on the table, Facetimed my dad, and changed it for a simple black pendant light.

I won’t lie, changing light fixtures is far from my favorite task. Do I enjoy holding my arms above my head for prolonged periods of time, stripping wires and twisting them together? Nope, not so much. But the moment you flip the light switch and it actually works . . . magic. If you’re ready to tackle some beginner electrical work (and you are!), I found this video very helpful.

Hanging frames high emphasizes height

Even before I painted and replaced all the furniture, I had multiple frames hung from about halfway up the wall to about a foot from the ceiling, so I had already realized that hanging frames at an appropriate height for your walls makes a huge difference.

This time, I knew I wanted to frame some vintage alcohol advertisement posters my grandfather had given me, and choosing four larger, matted frames (17×21″) makes the small space feel somehow . . . very grand.

And with that, the teeny-tiny dining room was complete. It’s been three months since I made the updates, and I haven’t changed a thing — possibly a record for me.

This post contains products independently chosen (and loved) by Food52 editors and writers. Food52 earns an affiliate commission on qualifying purchases of the products we link to.

GOP Senate jurors caught helping Trump impeachment lawyers plot their legal strategy

Three Republican senators privately met with former President Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers on Thursday to discuss their legal strategy for the Senate trial.

Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, met with Trump’s legal team ahead of their arguments on Friday, CNN first reported.

Graham, who joined Trump’s effort to pressure Georgia officials to throw out legitimate votes and overturn the result in that state, refused to discuss the meeting with reporters. Cruz, who led the Republican objections to the certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6, acknowledged to CNN’s Manu Raju that they were helping the Trump attorney’s with their defense.

“We were discussing their legal strategy and sharing our thoughts,” Cruz said.

Trump attorney David Schoen said the meeting was about “procedure.”

Asked if it was appropriate to meet with jurors in the Senate trial, Schoen told Raju, “I think that’s the practice of impeachment. There’s nothing about this thing that has any semblance of due process whatsoever.”

Democrats quickly slammed the meeting as highly improper.

“That’s very unusual, I’m surprised to hear that,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told CNN. “It seems a little bit strange to have separate meetings with the counsel.”

“I’m no lawyer, but I’m fairly certain jurors aren’t supposed to strategize with defense counsel in the middle of a trial,” tweeted Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who recently replaced Graham as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN that the meeting signals desperation on the Republican side.

“The reason why these three Republican senators are meeting with the attorneys … is because they’re worried,” he said. “The House managers have put together a powerful case against this president. They have a mountain of videotape to back up what they say, countless tweets, all sorts of information that really is not in the best interest of the president, so I’d imagine they’re pretty desperate to come up with a good defense strategy.”

The meeting comes after the Trump attorneys, who were hired at the last minute after Trump fired his legal team amid a pay dispute, unsuccessfully argued that the hearing was unconstitutional in a presentation that was widely panned, even by Trump’s allies.

Graham told reporters he was perplexed by Trump attorney Bruce Castor’s meandering performance. Cruz said he did not think Trump’s attorneys “did the most effective job.” Trump himself was reportedly enraged by Castor’s rambling presentation, to the point where he was nearly screaming at the television.

Although both sides are allowed 16 hours to present their arguments at the trial, Castor later told CNN that Trump’s defense team intends to “shorten” its arguments to just one four-hour presentation after Democrats presented their case for three days. Despite Trump’s fury, Castor is expected to have a speaking role in the Friday session. CNN also reported that “the legal team is so disorganized, Trump’s allies are apprehensive about how the defense will go.”

But with most Republican senators already on record as endorsing the view that the trial itself is unconstitutional, Trump’s acquittal is all but guaranteed, Cruz argued.

“I think the end result of this impeachment trial is crystal clear to everybody,” he told CNN. “Donald Trump will be acquitted. It takes 67 votes to convict him and every person in the Senate chamber understands that there are not the votes to convict, nor should there be.”

Graham criticized the Democratic House impeachment managers, who presented dramatic video and testimony from the deadly Capitol riot Trump is charged with inciting, calling their presentation “offensive and absurd.”

“The ‘not guilty’ vote is growing after today,” he tweeted on Thursday.

Lee, who is presiding over his second Trump impeachment trial in 13 months, told Fox News that Trump deserves a second chance.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” he said. “Everyone is entitled to a mulligan once in a while.”

Republicans were similarly accused of betraying their oath to stay impartial during Trump’s first impeachment trial.

“I’m going to coordinate with the president’s lawyers,” then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declared at the time. “There is no chance the president is going to be removed from office.”

“We all know how this is going to end,” he said.

A journey in enriched sourdough: buttery, savory cheese rolls

The Perfect Loaf is a column from software engineer-turned-bread expert (and Food52’s Resident Bread Baker), Maurizio Leo. Maurizio is here to show us all things naturally leavened, enriched, yeast-risen, you name it — basically, every vehicle to slather on a lot of butter. Today, a guide to making fluffy, perfectly enriched rolls.

* * *

Harmony — a word that sums up the primary concern when developing a recipe that involves multiple ingredients and components; cooks and bakers know this all too well. When creating a new baking formula, I often step back to assess what I’m making to ensure all the components work in greater unity. The texture and flavors must play their part in contributing to the overall eating experience, and a successful recipe hinges on the presence of all these components in just the right proportion.

In the case of these savory ricotta and Parmesan rolls, I wanted to make sure the dough had all the requisite lightness and tenderness, but also that it was more than just a vehicle for the filling. Thankfully, one of the beautiful things about sourdough is its inherent flavor development over time. Layers of complex flavors permeate the dough when it’s given sufficient fermentation time, and part of developing a formula with sourdough means emphasizing these flavors to full effect.

In addition to natural fermentation flavors, the dough for these rolls is enriched, meaning it has a percentage of butter, eggs, and milk added (conversely, a lean dough is one without these additions). Each of these ingredients brings tenderness, richness, and flavor. And while their percentages are relatively low, compared with something like a proper brioche, their additions do make the dough increasingly harder to handle as their quantity increases.

Here, I aim to point out how small changes in a few key areas — enrichment level, dough thickness, and filling adjustments — led to a savory roll with a dough that is easy to work with, has a soft texture, and with a filling that is delicious enough to eat with a spoon straight from a bowl (always buy extra ricotta!).

* * *

Dough enrichment: What to keep in mind

Developing an enriched dough has considerations a typical bread dough does not. First, adding milk, butter, eggs, and sugar will have an effect on the dough’s fermentation activity and schedule, and they will affect the dough’s strength and consistency. If any of these ingredients are pushed to too high of a percentage, you’ll end up with a dough that’s sluggish in fermentation (especially with natural leavening) and one that’s challenging to work with when shaping.

Finding the right balance for enrichments in a dough usually requires several rounds of testing and tweaking, where each iteration hopefully gets you closer to your ideal. And ultimately, this ideal is a dough that satisfies in both flavor profile and texture—it’s a judgement call made when tasting the result of every iterative step.

In terms of strength and consistency, a leaner dough is always easier to work with because fewer enrichments mean a stiffer and stronger dough. And this ease of handling is important, especially when you have to quickly roll the dough out to a rectangle to spread the filling before it warms and begins to become sticky. So deciding on just how much milk, butter, and egg go into a dough you must weigh the ease of handling versus the benefit of their inclusion in the end result.

In terms of fermentation, sugar has a big impact, and even more so when exclusively using natural leavening. At a high enough concentration, sugar begins to rob yeast of water, which is necessary for growth. But, because the focus for these rolls was for a savory application, I decided to omit sugar altogether from the dough. Doing so not only ensured reliable fermentation, it also worked well in the end as the ricotta filling had plenty of sweet notes to complement the other ingredients.

* * *

How to mix in enrichments

In addition to the fermentation and dough strength impact enrichments have, you must also determine how the ingredients will be added to the dough during mixing.

It’s preferable to add butter at the very end of mixing dough, once the gluten in the dough has been strengthened to a moderate degree. This is because the butter, a fat, coats protein strands, preventing gluten cross-linking. When the dough is mixed and strengthened, the gluten cross-linking creates a tight matrix almost like a net, which traps gas produced by fermentation and allows for the dough to rise properly. If a large percentage of butter is added too early in the mixing process, mixing times have to be stretched out considerably, and the dough may never reach the same level of strength as if it didn’t have butter.

Milk and eggs are easier: They almost always are added right from the start of mixing. Why? Because they contribute more to the liquid portion of a recipe, and without them at the start, the dough would likely be impossible to mix. In order for the dough to come together, there must be sufficient liquid to hydrate the flour in the recipe. And while these two each contain fat content, it’s not quite to the level of solid butter, which means they won’t have as significant of an impact on gluten development.

Once the dough formula was set and the mixing process complete, next on the list of considerations was how to roll and fill the dough.

* * *

Adjusting the texture and thickness

When I make any rolled dough, whether it be something sweet like cinnamon rolls or babka, or something savory, like these cheesycheesey rolls, it’s important to consider the thickness of the dough at each layer. If you roll the dough out to a smaller square or rectangle before spreading the filling, you’ll end up with rolls that have thicker dough layers sandwiching the filling. If the dough you’re working with is heavily enriched dough like brioche (which is usually north of 40% egg and 40% butter!), the thicker layers work because the dough is texturally very soft. But, as discussed earlier, I wanted this dough to be leaner with less egg and butter.

Because the dough is more doughy, when I tested rolling the rectangle out to about 12 x 12-inches (instead of the 16 x 15-inch in the recipe) the resulting rolls were too doughy and tough — there simply was too thick of a lean dough between the layers of soft ricotta filling. While the flavor was still great, the eating quality wasn’t quite there.

In subsequent tests, I began to slightly increase the enrichment level while simultaneously rolling the dough out farther and farther, to create more layers in the final rolls. More layers in each roll meant an overall softer end product with a dramatic textural improvement.

* * *

Tackling the savory filling

Once I had the dough formula mostly decided upon, I then sat back to decide what type of filling would work well in a slightly rich and light dough. I’m well versed in making sweet rolls of all kinds, but a savory slant requires a shift in thinking: What ingredients would taste great on their own but also shine when paired with a dough? For inspiration, I seem to always turn to my Italian heritage, and there’s no better place to look for dough and filling pairings than pasta.

Ricotta, perhaps my favorite of fresh cheeses, is used heavily in many stuffed pasta dishes, but it also takes on a slightly sweet flavor when paired with certain foods. While these rolls were intended to be savory, it’s always nice to have sweetness as a counter note, something to enliven the palate and provide respite from anything excessively savory. Drawing further from classic Italian pairings, ricotta is usually matched up with fresh herbs and I knew it would go well with freshly chopped thyme.

My first test of this recipe was simply with a filling of ricotta blended with fresh thyme, and while the flavor was great, it was missing something. The filling didn’t have the depth of flavor and it was a bit on the under seasonedunderseasoned side — it needed more salt and even more savoriness. ParmesanParmesean always springs to the fore when looking for something salty with layers of savoriness.

My second test was with a blend of fresh ricotta, thyme, and a good helping of Parmesan mixed into a spreadable medley that had all the notes I was after — a little sweet, herby, and savory. The flavors worked well with the modestly rich dough with its milk, egg, and butter; the only thing left to tweak at that point was just how much filling to use, and that was easily arrived upon through a few more trials.

As a baker, part of the joy in creating new recipes is learning to walk that fine line between too much and not enough. It’s all about learning to tease out that balancing point — the point where the flavor of all the ingredients and the texture of the dough work together to form a harmonious loaf of bread, a sweet or savory roll, or a delicate pastry. And what’s the other part of the joy in creating new recipes? Well, it’s the eating part. Happy baking!

Related reading:

Schools walk the tightrope between ideal safety and the reality of COVID

California mom Megan Bacigalupi has had enough. She wants her kindergartner and second grader back in their Oakland classrooms.

But the coronavirus is spreading too quickly to open schools in Alameda County, based on the current state standards. And the local teachers union hasn’t agreed to go back — even after teachers have been vaccinated. So she expects her kids will be logging on to school from home for a while.

“The impediments to opening are just too great,” said Bacigalupi, who is lobbying California lawmakers to establish firm, statewide health metrics that, once met, would require schools to open. “In the end, it comes down to a lack of political will to get the kids back in the classroom.”

Parents across the country, many of whom relied on schools to care for their children while they worked, are frustrated and angry that remote instruction has gone on so long, even as grocery store clerks, city bus drivers and other essential workers have braved the risks of their workplaces. Lawmakers are increasingly joining their calls to get kids into classrooms, citing the loss of worker productivity and parents’ concerns about the social, emotional and academic effects on children.

President Joe Biden has pledged to open most schools within his first 100 days in office if Congress provides funding, and if states and cities adopt safety steps.

But that will be a herculean task. Nearly one year into the pandemic, fewer than half of students are attending schools that are teaching in person every day, and the question of how and when to get kids back into classrooms often depends less on science than politics — including the strength of local teachers unions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded recently that schools can reopen safely if their communities have low levels of the virus and they adhere strictly to measures such as requiring everyone to stay 6 feet apart and wear masks.

But in numerous communities, those basic measures haven’t been followed, even before the vaccine rollout — and many teachers aren’t convinced they will be safe on campus.

With infection rates starting to decline nationally, many parents, superintendents, school boards and politicians insist this is the moment to stop striving for perfection and embrace the health measures necessary to get kids into classrooms safely. Some are even taking dramatic measures, such as the city of San Francisco, which sued its school district Wednesday to force it to open.

The same day, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a press briefing that schools can safely reopen even if teachers aren’t yet vaccinated.

“If we wait for the perfect, we might as well just pack it up and just be honest with folks that we’re not going to open for in-person instruction in the school year,” Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently told school administrators — breaking with the politically powerful California Teachers Association, which wants all teachers vaccinated before reopening.

Teachers Fear for Safety

In many states, teachers lobbied to be among the first to be vaccinated after health care workers and nursing home residents. But they also argue the vaccines alone are not enough to open schools. They want low levels of community spread. They want as many school staffers as possible vaccinated, which could take months. And they want assurances that schools won’t relax masking, physical distancing and other safety measures.

“We’ve had concerns about some districts being more lax even before the vaccine,” said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

Dr. Mark Schleiss, a pediatrics professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, agreed that health measures must be enforced even after vaccination.

“It’s unfortunate that people think life goes back to normal, that once we get the vaccine, the masks come flying off,” he said. “Vaccination doesn’t take things back to normal.”

That’s because there are still unknowns about the vaccines: It’s unclear if vaccinated people can transmit the virus. Plus, not all adults can get a vaccine (for medical reasons), and about 5% of those who receive the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech versions might not be fully protected. Kids are another matter entirely: No covid vaccine has yet been approved for use in children younger than 16.

Teachers say they feel especially vulnerable when the virus is running rampant in a community, but health experts don’t agree on exactly what that means.

“We don’t know a definite threshold,” said Dr. Neha Nanda, medical director of infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California.

In Montgomery, Alabama, four educators died within 48 hours in January, spurring the city’s district to go remote starting Feb. 1.

“We have educators who are dying from this. We know they’re taking it home,” said Theron Stokes, associate executive director of the Alabama Education Association teachers union.

The Politics of Reopening

As of late January, about 38% of K-12 public school students attended virtual-only schools, 38% attended in-person schools, and 24% attended hybrid schools that offered a mix of both, according to Burbio, a company tracking a representative sample of 1,200 school districts.

Decisions about returning to school have often been driven by ideology in the absence of firm scientific guidance about community spread.

Politics plays as big a role as health, said Bree Dusseault, practitioner-in-residence at the Center on Reinventing Education, a nonpartisan research center that has tracked 477 school districts since March. “Because the pandemic became so politicized, districts found themselves in political debates in their own communities.”

For instance, some politically motivated decisions to reopen schools were made despite dangerous surges in covid cases over the summer. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott told schools in July they’d have to transition to in-person education after the state attorney general declared “sweeping” school closures unlawful. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis threatened to withhold state funding from schools that did not reopen in person.

In Democratic strongholds such as New Jersey and Chicago, powerful unions have protested and delayed school reopenings.

Union opposition played a part in the Oakland school district’s decision to stick with remote-only learning in the fall, which boggled Bacigalupi’s mind because covid cases had dropped after the summer surge. At the time, restaurants, gyms and hair salons in her county were allowed to partially reopen, and some schools in neighboring counties had also opened.

“One of the reasons it’s so frustrating is that we can look at so many places and we see tens of thousands of kids back in school,” said Bacigalupi, whose children, ages 5 and 8, have been out of school for nearly a year. “I’m also just sad. And the sadness gets worse as you see what’s happening to your kid. It’s harming them.”

Bacigalupi said her second grader is like a different child — he’s quick to anger and struggles to regulate his emotions. He now gets counseling once a week.

Balancing Risks

Under pressure, more schools are reopening by the day. In Cincinnati, city schools returned to a hybrid model of in-person and remote learning this month after a judge dismissed a teachers union lawsuit seeking to delay reopening.

Public health officials say districts must acknowledge that holding school in person is a calculated risk, and take concrete steps to minimize the danger for staff members and kids. These include separating desks in classrooms — even if that means holding class in a gymnasium — erecting plexiglass barriers where possible and limiting school sports.

“Implementing a combination of all of these layered approaches will make it a lot safer,” said Krystal Pollitt, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, which last year issued guidance to help schools determine when to reopen.

For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country, has taken a number of measures, including installing upgraded air filters, purchasing an ionized cleaning system to sanitize surfaces and rearranging furniture in classrooms, said Kelly Gonez, president of the school board.

But like the local and state teachers unions and the district superintendent, Gonez believes the rampant spread of covid in the region must be addressed first.

“Once the broader covid conditions are in a safer place in the community, I think we will be ready,” Gonez said. “We have the protocols in place to do this successfully.”

On Wednesday, the local American Academy of Pediatrics chapter countered that schools should reopen immediately because the social isolation, anxiety and lack of structure are “causing undue harm” to children.

“‘Safe’ is a relative term,” said Schleiss, the Minnesota professor. “Continuing to attend school with careful monitoring is reasonable. We don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Trump adds last-minute impeachment lawyer who previously sued him for spreading voter fraud lies

As Donald Trump’s lawyers are set to present their defense of the former president against the charge of inciting an insurrection during his second impeachment trial, he added a last-minute attorney who previously sued him for spreading baseless claims about voter fraud.

According to The Washington Post, Pennsylvania lawyer Michael T. van der Veen, now representing Trump in his second impeachment trial, sued the former president late last year for making “repeated claims” that mail-in voting was riddled with fraud.

Van der Veen –– co-founder of Philadelphia-based personal injury law firm van der Veen, O’Neill, Hartshorn and Levin –– brought the suit in August of last year, alleging that the former president’s attacks on the U.S. Postal Service had “no evidence” to bear. In December, van der Veen’s firm brought on Pennsylvania-based attorney Bruce Castor, who was just hired by Trump’s impeachment team last month. Van der Veen’s name now appears in Trump’s impeachment filings alongside those of Bruce Castor and David Shoen, an Atlanta-based lawyer who Trump scrambled to recruit just last week.

Back in August, however, van der Veen’s name had appeared on a document strikingly different in nature.

As the Philadelphia Inquirer first reported, van der Veen sued Trump, the U.S. Postal Service, and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on behalf of their independent client, Melvin Johnakin. Taking aim at Trump’s moves to delegitimize the election system, the lawsuit’s complaint stated: “These actions…arise in an environment subject to repeated claims by President Donald J. Trump that voting by mail is ripe with fraud, despite having no evidence in support of these claims, and lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign to stop mail-in voting in states such as Nevada and Pennsylvania.”

The suit accused the Postal Service –– and namely Postmaster General DeJoy –– of instituting a series of operational changes that undercut the Postal Service’s ability to process mail-in-ballots. These changes included “reducing staff hours, prohibiting overtime, removing hundreds of high-volume mail-processing machines from facilities across the country and removing mailboxes in urban areas with high concentrations of minority, low income and Democratic voters.”

Van der Veen, who tarred Postmaster General DeJoy in the suit as a “Republican Party and Trump campaign megadonor,” had reportedly circulated an email to Pennsylvania voters arguing that state Republicans were “running a campaign to unfairly and illegally intimidate voters.” Another email of van der Veen’s emphasized Trump’s corrosive influence on the integrity of the election system. “Donald Trump doesn’t want you to be able to vote,” he claimed, “It’s time to stand up for what’s right.”

Interestingly, van der Veen’s website continues to advertise itself in the spirit of last summer’s lawsuit. “To exercise the fundamental right to vote,” it reads, “many voters have and will utilize all available means to vote by mail rather than in person at a polling place. Advanced planning and proactive measures will be necessary to ensure that voters have sufficient access to vote by mail to preserve and protect the essential right to vote and prevent large-scale disenfranchisement.”

A past client of van der Veen, Justin Hiemstra, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the Philadelphia-based lawyer had regarded Trump as a “f***ing crook” two years ago, a charge the attorney strongly denied. “He definitely came off as fairly anti-Trump in the context that I knew him,” Hiemstra insisted.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-PA, casted doubt on whether Trump even knows van der Veen opposed him. “…Since he generally demands total loyalty,” Scanlon noted, “It does seem a little out of character for the former president to embrace someone who so recently sued him.”