Spring Sale: Get 1 Year, Save 58%

What’s an “impeachable” crime — and what isn’t? History offers some dark lessons

Impeachment dramas on Capitol Hill have routinely skipped over a question that we should be willing to ask, even if Congress won’t: “What about a president’s unimpeachable offenses?”

The question is the flipside of one that Republican Gerald Ford candidly addressed when he was the House minority leader 50 years ago: “What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” 

By narrowly defining which offenses are impeachable, political elites are implicitly telling us which offenses aren’t.

So when the House approved two articles of impeachment on Donald Trump in December 2019 and one impeachment article last month, the actions were much too late and much too little.

On Feb. 6, 2017, less than three weeks into Trump’s term, I wrote in The Hill: “From the outset of his presidency, Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution in a way that we have not seen before and should not tolerate. It’s time for members of Congress to get the impeachment process underway.” I pointed out that “the president continues to violate two ’emoluments’ clauses in the Constitution. One prohibits any gifts or benefits from foreign governments, and the other prohibits the same from the U.S. government or any U.S. state.”

But, at the outset, treating President Trump as unimpeachable — despite those flagrant violations of the Constitution — greased the wheels for the runaway madness of his presidency in the years that followed. As Trump’s destructive joyride went on, reasons to impeach him proliferated. Researchers easily drew up dozens of articles of impeachment. But in the eyes of political elites, as with previous presidents, Trump’s offenses were seen as unimpeachable.

Two decades earlier, President Bill Clinton became the second impeached president in U.S. history. The frenzy was akin to vilifying Al Capone for tax evasion. “We all seem to have lost our sense of proportion,” historian Howard Zinn wrote five weeks before Clinton’s impeachment. “Why are the political leaders of the United States and the major media talking of impeaching Bill Clinton for lies about sex, surely not the most important sins of his administration?”

Writing in November 1998, Zinn added: “If Clinton is to be impeached, why do it for frivolous reasons? I can think of at least 10 reasons to impeach him, for acts far more serious than his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky or his lies to Kenneth Starr. I am speaking of matters of life and death for large numbers of people.”

Zinn cited such matters as missile attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan; Clinton’s refusal to accept a Canadian proposal to ban land mines; continuation of “embargoes on Cuba and Iraq, causing widespread misery in Cuba for lack of food and medicine, and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq according to U.N. statistics”; and squandering vast funds on the U.S. military while people were suffering and dying at home and abroad due to lack of health care, nutrition and housing.

There was no second impeachment of Clinton after he used a “diplomatic” scam called the Rambouillet accords to justify launching intensive U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, without congressional authorization. Clinton persisted with a continuous air war for more than two months, making history by blatantly violating the War Powers Resolution.

Trump — like Barack Obama and George W. Bush before him — was able to order missile strikes and deploy troops in numerous war-torn countries without congressional constraints. And there was no reason to be concerned that Congress might impeach him for war crimes. The reasons for such impunity are rooted in the history of “unimpeachable” offenses.

Consider the proceedings in Congress that forced President Richard Nixon to resign when impeachment was imminent in mid-1974. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment, focusing on Nixon’s obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in by operatives for his re-election campaign, misuse of federal agencies to violate citizens’ constitutional rights, and noncompliance with congressional subpoenas.

Unmentioned in the Nixon impeachment articles: the Vietnam War that he had prolonged with a vengeance while claiming to seek peace. With methodical deception, Nixon inflicted a massive and horrendous war — but his crimes against humanity were judged to be completely unimpeachable.

Also entirely excluded from the Nixon impeachment articles was the merciless U.S. bombardment of northern Laos that slaughtered people who lived on the Plain of Jars, making Laos “the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.” The impeachment articles likewise made no mention of Nixon’s ordering of the secret and illegal carpet-bombing of Cambodia, which began two months into his presidency and persisted year after year. 

On July 31, 1973 — nearly a full year before Nixon’s resignation — Democratic Rep. Robert Drinan introduced an impeachment resolution. He said it was triggered by the “recent revelation that President Nixon conducted a totally secret air war in Cambodia.”

As journalist Judith Coburn noted, “The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan’s Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.” 

Gerald Ford’s “only honest answer” — acknowledging that an impeachable offense is only “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history” — foreshadowed the impeachment proceedings against Nixon, Clinton and Trump.

If what’s impeachable is only what members of Congress say it is, constituents should insist that egregiously narrow definitions must no longer prevail. Otherwise, the operative standard for presidents will continue to be what they can get away with, in tandem with a collectively feckless Congress.

For now, the presidential offenses that are routinely considered unimpeachable — and therefore ultimately acceptable — tell us a lot about Congress. And about U.S. mass media. And maybe about ourselves.

Can we get back to “normal”? That would require addressing structural wealth inequality

Since the start of this mass death event, now on pace to kill a half million of our fellow Americans before the end of this month, our government has consistently failed to get ahead of the virus.

For decades we have plowed trillions of dollars, much of it borrowed money, into our military and security state apparatus in order to fight wars abroad on two fronts.

Of course, who does the media seek out after thousands of marauding Trump white supremacists almost seize the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the Electoral College and the peaceful transition of power? The very bipartisan array of generals and intelligence experts who didn’t see it coming. Despite our armed vigilance against enemies abroad, we were easily upended from within by the lack of disposable masks or enough mutual regard for one another to embrace basic public health protocols so people we didn’t know, or even our own family members, might live.

Here in the Northeast, we get daily briefings from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, but the awful truth is that we are in unchartered territory despite their certitude that “a return to pre-pandemic normal” lies just ahead, on the other side of the next mountain of death.

The media fixates on each iteration of in-person dining and the question of how long the bars could remain open for the Super Bowl. It rarely asks the tough questions, like how our states and our nation will handle the reality that several million of the Americans infected by a still-mutating virus will likely have long-term disabilities that require extensive care.

At the same time, millions of American families teeter on the edge of the economic abyss of eviction or foreclosure, having gone through whatever savings they had, while the millionaires in Washington posture for partisan advantage.

Not calculated in the aggregate data crunched by policymakers is the long-term impact on the future lifetime earnings for a generation of students cut off from in-person instruction during the pandemic. A Pew Research Center survey found that one in five households with homebound students told researchers it was “very or somewhat likely” that their children would not be unable to complete their schoolwork because they lacked a reliable internet connection.

Here in the New York and New Jersey region, a year into the pandemic, both Cuomo and Murphy have said repeatedly that the pandemic has been most devastating for low-income communities of color where the lack of access to health care means that chronic untreated diseases had established a foothold, decades before COVID came calling.

Across the country, public health experts have flagged the same connection between race, poverty and the prevalence of the highly contagious and deadly virus. As it turns out, this is the same demographic cohort that is the backbone of the essential workforce that has borne the brunt of the pandemic. Yet even now some members of Congress would deny them an increase from the current $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage.

Credit President Joe Biden with opting to go big as he finalizes his $1.9 trillion COVID relief package to try to contain this hydra-headed crisis.

Biden was “in the room” in 2009 when he and Barack Obama came into office amid the Wall Street meltdown that cost millions of Americans their jobs, life savings, retirement accounts and homes. The recovery plan they fashioned bailed out Wall Street and assured liquidity at the top — at the expense of too Main Streets and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards that never saw a recovery.

Far too many of our elected officials were caught by surprise by the recent images of thousands of cars lined up to get a bag of groceries during the pandemic.

As early as 2009, Dr. Stephanie Hoopes, the national director of the United Way’s ALICE project, had begun to document the prevalence of households in places like Morris County, New Jersey that struggled to make ends meet but were not on the radar — because they were not living below the actual poverty line, which failed to take into account the cost of essentials like child care or telecommunications.

This cohort was what United Way researchers would come to describe as “ALICE”: Asset limited, income constrained but employed.

“ALICE is your childcare worker, the cashier at your supermarket, the gas attendant, the salesperson at your big box store, your waitress, a home health aide, an office clerk,” describes the projects webpage. “ALICE cannot always pay the bills, has little or nothing in savings, and is forced to make tough choices such as deciding between quality childcare or paying the rent.”

By 2018, a decade after the Great Recession, 37 percent of New Jersey’s households were either living below poverty or struggling below the poverty line. Nationally, in that same year, the United Way reported that of the 121 million households in the U.S., 42 percent, or 51 million, “could not afford basic necessities of housing, childcare, food, transportation, health care, a smartphone plan, and taxes.” And that was before the pandemic.

Since 2018, millions of Americans have lost their jobs and millions more have battled a life-threatening disease whose potential long-term health consequences are still not fully understood.

“ALICE families increased during the Great Recession and never really recovered 10 years after, so I would expect that things are even worse with the coronavirus recession,” Hoopes said in a recent phone interview. “We are seeing an unequal impact of the recession on low-wage jobs, with women and minorities being hit harder than folks with a salary and higher wages.”

According to Hoopes, much of the ALICE cohort finds itself caught up as essential workers, who are forced to work overtime outside their homes, putting themselves and their families at greater risk of COVID infection.

“These are the same households that have fewer resources to rebound in terms of attending to their own health or of being able to be able to miss work if they have to quarantine, care for a sick family member or home-school children,” Hoopes said. “Then there’s the second category of ALICE workers, who are not essential workers who have lost their jobs or had their hours cut way back. Those folks are suffering in different ways and the crisis has escalated much more quickly for them.”

In their Feb. 5 joint press appearance, Cuomo and Murphy came out swinging at Washington, not on behalf of ALICE workers but over the $10,000 cap on the federal income tax deduction for local property and state taxes enacted as part of the Republicans’ $1.7 trillion 2017 tax cut, which proved to be a major windfall for the nation’s biggest corporations and wealthiest families.

With a tangible sense of grievance, both governors correctly observed that the cap had the result of transferring wealth from higher-taxed blue states to red states. They argued that this cap on property tax deductions was an extra penalty, on top of New York and New Jersey historically sending billions more to Washington than they get back in federal spending.

They argued that if the nation is to restore its pre-COVID economy, states like New York and New Jersey must be made whole on the SALT tax, and should get a cut of the $350 billion state aid that President Biden has proposed that reflects the proportionate impact of the pandemic.

But simply seeking to restore the pre-COVID economy cannot address the nexus of systemic racism and exploding wealth inequality that set the stage for the devastation of the pandemic. Both New York and New Jersey have their own ways of rigging the economy for the top one percent, who also, coincidentally or otherwise, are large campaign donors.

As Peter Woolley, the director of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s School of Public and Global Affairs, pointed out in a recent op-ed, this effort by Democrats like Cuomo and Murphy to reinstate the full property tax deduction for homeowners coincides with millions of Americans being “on the brink of eviction”:

That limit of $10,000 is relatively recent, a product of the faux Trumpian tax reform of 2017, the gift-of-the-century to America’s global corporate behemoths, Wall Street, and the upper-end of Main Street. But at that upper end of Main Street, where people own properties big enough to be taxed well over $10,000, there is apparently discontent — despite that they also had their top income tax rate reduced by four percentage points (to 35% from 39%).

The kind of structural change required to spark the broad-based economic expansion we need requires looking at the old arrangements and subsidies in light of current circumstances. For decades, even as productivity grew and technology proliferated, America’s working class couldn’t catch a break as student and medical debt exploded while wages declined or remained flat.

Should the fabulously house-rich be able to build ever larger castles that act as shelter not just for their family but for their income, while so many are homeless or living in unsafe conditions, where COVID and other diseases can run rampant, threatening not just families but entire communities?

Should New York State continue to let investors hold on to the 5 cents per $100 transaction that was first imposed by a Republican governor in 1905 and collected up until the 1980s, when a Democratic governor and New York mayor decided to let the investor class keep it?

New York Assemblyman Phil Steck, an upstate Democrat doesn’t think so. He has been leading the charge to stop letting the investor class keep the nickel.

“The tax is in sum and substance one quarter of one percent, it’s nothing,” Steck said in a phone interview. According to recent data he cited, it amounted to $1.6 billion in June of 2020 alone. “In the last 10 years, we have given up $138 billion,” he said. “It is the classic race to the bottom. The whole public sector has been starved. It all started with Reagan and the anti-tax thing and the idea that government is bloated. Yet huge private corporations have as much bureaucracy as government.”

My advocacy of Steck’s position recently earned me the disapproval of Errol Louis, a Daily News columnist and anchor for the cable news channel NY1, who suggested that pursuing that nickel was a fool’s errand in today’s world, where we need to do all we can to placate big wealth.

The fact that “the 1905 law remains on the books” has created “an artifact in everybody’s stock market paperwork,” Louis writes.

The tax is still calculated, but 100% of it gets returned. That makes it seem as if a mouth-watering treasure has been handed over to Wall Street players for the last 40 years. It’s a tempting target for activists, labor unions and cash-strapped state lawmakers.

A few weeks ago, for example, reporter Bob Hennelly of the Chief-Leader asked Gov. Cuomo about the tax at a news conference. “It’s generated, in the last 10 years, $138 billion, even as the state closed hospitals to communities of color,” Hennelly said, noting that “we’re shoveling out this hidden subsidy to Wall Street.”

Not so. Whatever the merits of not collecting the tax, the digital revolution has scrambled, and nearly obliterated, the remaining connections between Wall Street as a physical place and the multi-trillion-dollar financial transactions of the stock market, which take place on computers that can be sited anywhere in the world.

Louis observes that “most of the billion or so transactions processed by the New York Stock Exchange each day” actually take place across the Hudson River, on servers in Mahwah, New Jersey. “It isn’t clear whether New York has the legal authority to tax those transactions.”

The legal analysts I have consulted suggest that New York would prevail if it had the political will to press its case. But that, of course, would mean annoying some very deep pockets who’ve been running the table for a long time.

If Andrew Cuomo and the rest of the Empire State’s elected officials are too queasy to go after nickels from Wall Street, perhaps it’s time, as some in Congress believe, for a national stock transfer tax. Imagine just how many nickels we could have collected toward funding the Green New Deal from GameStop’s roller-coaster stock market ride.

Proud Boys Hawaii chapter founder faces up to 20 years in jail on new charges from Capitol riot

Nicholas Ochs, the founder of the Hawaii chapter of the Proud Boys, now faces 20 years in jail for his role in the Jan. 6 riots at the United States Capitol building.

The Honolulu Civil Beat reports that a grand jury on Wednesday indicted Ochs and accomplice Nicholas DeCarlo on a wide range of charges, including conspiracy, destruction of government property and theft.

The two men became infamous during the riot for breaking into the Capitol and then writing “Murder the Media” on a doorway. The two men also photographed themselves standing in front of the vandalized doorway giving thumbs-up gestures.

Additionally, the indictment alleges that the two men stole a pair of handcuffs from Capitol police.

The whole indictment can be found at this link.

We’re fighting the second American Civil War

The second American Civil War is here.

No official announced Trump’s Civil War. That’s why our major news organizations dance around the awful truth, using confusing language.

But we don’t need a press release to recognize Trump directed white supremacist followers to attack a branch of our national government on Jan. 6. The treasonous assault on Congress capped years of also undermining the judiciary and the executive branch’s intelligence, law enforcement and health agencies.

Trump apologists will quarrel with the word directed. Yes, Trump spoke, as he often does, out of four sides of his mouth when he said he would march with the throng to our Capitol. Recordings show people shouting they were invited by the president, and doing his will. It is the message the mob understood that matters as well as video during the siege where Trump expressed love for the insurrectionists.

That Trump will not attend the inauguration of Joe Biden should make you shudder. Without him on the outdoor platform, rebels hellbent on overthrowing our government could assassinate Biden and incoming Vice President Kamala Harris with no risk to messianic and delusional Trump.

This is why police and National Guard will flood that zone on Jan. 20. And it explains why Biden and Harris insist on being sworn in outdoors to signal fear has no place in the land of the free and home of the brave.

And it’s not just government buildings that require extra protection from disloyal and self-righteous Americans who love Trump more than our Constitutional liberties. Mosques, synagogues and some churches, especially Black churches, will be vulnerable to attack by those who want to make America white again. Many claim to be Christians but are in fact the embodiment of evil.

Trump’s mob will not win this war. No matter what buildings they attack, what leaders they assassinate, they cannot win because there are not enough of them to destroy the United States of America in favor of a dictatorship under Trump, his children or anyone else.

Making America endure

Eager and willing as Trump’s army is to assassinate for perceived betrayal outgoing Vice President Mike Pence, as well as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Biden and Harris, our freedom and continuity of our government does not hinge on any individual.

Our nation endures so long as we sustain a broad and deep commitment to the five noble objectives of the Constitution articulated in our Preamble. Each objective is designed to perfect our union over time.

If you don’t know the Preamble please click here and read the 52 words again and again until you memorize them. Take note that riches neither are mentioned nor implied. Liberty, the general welfare and justice are, along with their byproducts, peace and tranquility.

Even though the outcome of Trump’s Civil War is certain, Trump’s band of domestic terrorists can and already have imposed enormous and lasting damage.

These true believers in Trumpian rule can dissuade many from peaceful and joyful mingling in houses of worship, government buildings, sports arenas and political venues. While Biden and Harris are brave, millions will hold back because of their rational fear of violent attack. Doubt that? How eager are you to visit on vacation or ride a bus in Jerusalem? Kabul? Baghdad?

Our nation’s capital is an armed camp today. So are the downtowns of many of our state capitals. Law enforcement and the intelligence community sift through plots organized on the Internet in the hope of disrupting attacks before they occur. The police and soldiers are backups for the inevitable failures to prevent attacks.

Among the attackers

We also need to recognize we face danger beyond the lawless Trump mob.

We now know the insurgents attacking our Capitol included rogue active-duty military and police officers. Dozens of people on FBI terrorist watch lists were among the attackers, evidently not being watched at all closely. There are disturbing indications some members of Congress, Republicans all, may have helped the attackers reconnoiter the Capitol, pointing out hidden offices of Democratic Party leaders.

One Republican lawmaker openly encouraged rebellion. Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, outfitted in camo, riled up the Trumpian mob before its attack. Another, Republican Lauren Boebert of Colorado, tweeted out the location of Pelosi who was then being hunted by the mob. A Boebert text described a plan to put a bullet in Pelosi’s head on TV. Think about what America would be like today had the insurgents assassinated leaders by firing squad or hanging them from the gallows they set up outside the Capitol.

Brooks and Boebert must be expelled from the House. Failure to do this will only give succor to others tempted by traitorous opportunity.

Democratic lawmakers who reported seeing, pre-siege,  extremist Republicans giving guided tours to insurgency leaders are worried the riot had even further traitorous inside help. Coming investigations will tell us the facts, especially if prosecutors are smart about leveraging cooperation in return for less severe sentences.

That we may have a Fifth Column in Congress immediately alarmed unwitting collaborators from the dominant economic force in America, big corporations. From American Express and AT&T to Tyson Foods and United Parcel Service, many big companies stopped, at least for now, aiding and abetting with money these faithless enemies of America.

We live in strange times when we need help from soulless corporations to defend our liberties. To be sure, they acted out of self-interest. Under a dictatorship, corporate directors and executives would be forced to bend to the will of an unelected and unaccountable autocrat who could eviscerate their privileges and plunder their wealth.

Disloyalty and oath-breaking by officials also marked the 1860s, when some representatives, senators and federal judges used their power to wage war on the United States. Until they were stopped. Texas lawyer Barbara Radnofsky tells some of this compellingly in her concise book A Citizen’s Guide to Impeachment.

Our noble purpose

The costs of Trump’s Army waging war on our government will drain resources from improving America, from perfecting our union.

To secure our safety, National Guard troops sleep on the cold marble floors of America’s Capitol. Fences and walls are becoming ubiquitous, a twisted outgrowth of Trump’s lie that he would build a wall. Other barriers, metal detectors and other protections against domestic terrorists are abounding.

Trump’s Civil War did not begin with the murderous attack on our Capitol. It dates to at least August 2017 when his violent thugs marched in Charlottesville, Va., shouting Nazi slogans. “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil,” they chanted while marching past a synagogue. The next day one of them drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, the first fatality in Trump’s Civil War.

What these rebels heard the next day, what instilled them with bravado, was not Trump’s confusing comparison of anti-Semitic racists and the counter-demonstrators, but this line about themselves: “very fine people.”

Don’t make the mistake of thinking there is no Second Civil War just because all is peaceful where you are. Six days before rebels bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, The New York Times reported that an attack was imminent. But once the fighting began, there was no battle of Grand Rapids, no skirmish in Rochester, no siege in Cincinnati. In some states, such as Oregon, all regular Army were withdrawn and volunteers maintained military outposts and kept watch on Confederacy sympathizers.

That is how wars take place. People may be sipping espresso in sidewalk cafes or picnicking beside a stream while soldiers fire on one another within earshot.

As we prosecute this war on Trump’s militias and half-organized renegade insurgents, we must give no quarter in terms of criminal prosecution, especially for seditious conspiracy and murder. Where they fire their arms, we must respond with lethal force as the laws of war allow. But we must be better than the attackers.

We must take care not to give Trump’s army a perverse victory by destroying the soul of America, by losing sight of our nation’s great purpose. We must not descend into a militarized safety zone.

Instead, we must build up the institutions we have damaged with decades of malign neglect—schools, colleges, public health and more. We need law enforcement to act as guardians instead of warriors. Even restoration is needed of public furniture to parks and bridges, making life pleasant and commerce efficient.

We must make our union more perfect through caring for our citizens, providing the tools for stable and prosperous lives and vigorous debate about the way we want to order our liberty.

We must keep in our hearts and our politics the fundamental purpose of our government—to ennoble the human spirit with liberty and fraternity so that our people can attain the best that our nature makes possible.

Capitol mob wasn’t just angry white men — there were angry white women as well

The terror inflicted on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 laid bare America’s problem with violent extremism.

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have begun to piece together the events of that day, while attempting to thwart any impending attacks. Scores of people have been arrested and charged over the attack – the vast majority being men.

In the wake of these events, there were stories attributing the violence and destruction to “white male rage” “violent male rage” and “angry white men.”

But what about the women?

To distill the violent insurrection into a tale of angry male rage is to overlook the threat that women in the mob posed to congressional officials, law enforcement and U.S. democracy that day.

Long history of women’s involvement

Several women have been identified as alleged participants in the events of Jan. 6. Among those women are a former school occupational therapist, an employee of a county sheriff’s office, a real estate broker and a former mayoral candidate.

At least one woman is being investigated for her role in organizing the attack with fellow members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia movement. And Ashli Babbit, a female veteran, was shot dead by police while attempting to breach the Senate floor.

The women who took part in the siege of the Capitol are part of a long history of women’s participation in extremist violence, both in the United States and abroad.

Women have buoyed American far-right organizations and causes for centuries. In her recent book on women at the forefront of contemporary white nationalism, author Seyward Darby writes that women are not “incidental to white nationalism, they are a sustaining feature.”

Since the late 1800s, women have supported and enabled the terrorist white supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan, while hundreds of thousands joined its female affiliate, Women of the Ku Klux Klan, and its predecessors.

Women helped establish the Klan’s culture, bolstered its recruitment efforts and manufactured its propaganda. Despite its hyper-masculine ideology, which identifies white men as the primary arbiters of political power, women have also held leadership positions within the modern-day Klan.

More recently, women have joined the far-right Proud Boys movement, which has openly recruited female foot soldiers. In December, a growing rift between male and female Proud Boys was reported. After experiencing intense sexist backlash from men in the organization, women led by MMA fighter Tara LaRosa began their own group, the Proud Girls USA.

To leave one extremist organization in order to form another suggests a deep commitment to the far-right cause.

Discounting is dangerous

A 2005 study noted a disconnect between the rise in women within American right-wing terrorist organizations and the attention it received from law enforcement.

Despite a marked increase in women’s engagement in acts of terror against the state and racial minorities, security officials have largely failed to publicize, search and interrogate women operatives in these organizations, even after they become known to law enforcement.

There is also evidence that American far-right women have drawn inspiration and tactical knowledge from women engaged in extremist violence abroad.

Evidence from the global war on terror points to the potential dangers of ignoring the growth of violent extremism among women. In Iraq, for example, female terrorists carried out large numbers of deadly suicide attacks against American assets during the U.S. occupation.

The rest of the world has since been forced to grapple with the reality of violent women after female terrorists staged lethal attacks in Nigeria, Somalia, Tunisia, the Philippines, Indonesia and France.

Recent terror attacks in American cities such as San Bernardino, California, and Las Vegas that featured women among the perpetrators confirm violent women have already inflicted damage on U.S. soil.

Gender bias can be deadly

In fact, my research suggests that attacks by female terrorists are often more destructive than those executed by their male counterparts.

In an analysis of over 2,500 global suicide attacks, I show disparities in the severity of male and female attacks are greatest where gender stereotypes suggest that women are neither violent nor political. Such tropes can blind security officials and civilians to the threat posed by women terrorists, causing them to overlook the potential for female complicity.

Female terrorists, including in Iraq, Israel and Nigeria, have been able to deflect suspicion because they were women. My research shows that gender bias can become deadly when it stops effective counterterrorism policies, such as surveillance, searches and interrogations, from being implemented.

Additionally, since ordinary citizens played an unusual role in exposing the identities of the Capitol attackers, gender biases among civilians are also relevant. Failure to accept women’s complicity in the Capitol siege and the broader movement may prevent the identification of female offenders and impedes efforts to punish and deter future attacks.

American women have been key pillars of support for violent right-wing extremists for centuries. They have been right-wing extremists themselves – racist skinheads, neo-Nazis and Klanswomen. Women are also Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and Proud Boys. They were capitol rioters.

To construct an accurate account of the Capitol attack, it’s necessary to ask “Where are the women?” And the answer is, “Right there.”

Jakana Thomas, Associate Professor, Michigan State University

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

The Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle is finally getting the documentary treatment it deserves

In November, four days after the presidential election, a humble Pennsylvania landscaping business rose to national prominence after serving as the site for a bizarre press conference, led by Rudy Guliani, to make unfounded claims of voter fraud. Now, Four Seasons Total Landscaping — which also was the site of a Super Bowl commercial for the freelance marketplace Fiverr — is getting its own documentary, it was announced Monday. 

According to the press release, “Four Seasons Total Documentary” is an apolitical and feel-good “firsthand account of the rollercoaster journey that one well-meaning small business in Philadelphia went through when they agreed to host a political press conference in the midst of the most hard-fought American election in recent history.” 

The documentary, which doesn’t have distrubution yet, comes from director Christopher Stoudt, who is teaming with producers Glen Zipper and Sean Stuart. Chris Paonessa and Kevin Lincoln are also producers.

“It’s an honor and privilege to be able to help tell a story that the world has been waiting months to hear,” Stoudt said in the statement. “After such a hard year, everyone needed a moment to laugh. Little did we know it would come from a press conference that took place across the street from a crematorium (down the road from a sex shop).” 

The Four Seasons debacle all started with a tweet from former president Donald Trump — back before he was banned from Twitter — who wrote: “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 a.m.” 

Then came Trump’s clarification: “Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. 11:30am!” This was followed by a tweet from the hotel’s account. “To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping,” it said. “No relation with the hotel.” 

There were several, immediate questions that sprung from a collective sense of gleeful schadenfreude: Did Trump’s team actually originally try to book the Four Seasons Hotel and they were denied? Was this their attempt at a cover-up? If not, why in the world would you choose this business — located between a crematorium and a sex shop — as the site of a legal press conference? 

The weirdness didn’t stop after the press conference ended. A man featured at the press conference was a convicted sex offender, Politico reported the next day, while The New York Times later found out that the mistake was “not in the booking, but in a garbled game of telephone.” Trump’s legal team had supposedly told the president they’d booked the landscaping firm, but he heard the name and assumed it was at the upscale hotel. 

The debacle earned the landscaping business immediate meme status, as people snagged exterior shots to use as their Zoom and Google Hangout backgrounds and eagerly bought up the firm’s “Make America Rake Again” stickers. 

Then, as the Huffington Post reported, some Facebook users found posts shared by the Four Seasons Total Landscaping owner’s son that question vote counts, refer to Hillary Clinton as “Killary” and challenge Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. In turn, artist and cartoonist Shing Yin Khor began selling T-shirts to benefit the Democratic candidates in January’s special election in Georgia. 

But, the shelf life of a meme is fleeting. People moved on to other scandals — like when former Republication representative Dean Browning posted a tweet declaring himself to be a Black gay man who disapproved of Obama — and other memes, like the now-beloved, if tired, Bernie Mittens meme.

It wasn’t until this weekend that people began talking about Four Seasons Total Landscaping again after the business appeared as the location for a Super Bowl commercial for Fiverr, an online marketplace for freelance talent. 

The commercial opens on Four Seasons Total Landscaping owner, Marie Siravo, shouting, “Looks good, guys!” as a banner reading “& Press Venue!” is added to the business’ sign. The gist of the commercial is that “with the right talent, you can build anything — even a press conference parking lot.” 

The announcement of “The Four Seasons Total Documentary” builds on some of the buzz surrounding that commercial. While no release information is available yet, Stoudt indicated that the film will feature interviews with Siravo and the company’s director of sales, Sean Middleton, who would explain the decision-making that led to the infamous press conference — all with a sense of humor. 

“This film is a chance to wipe the slate clean, not just for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, but for the entire country,” Stoudt said.

That sexy “SNL” Zillow commercial reflects how many of us are dealing with our sad housing reality

I have a group chat with my three best friends from college and, as the pandemic has dragged on, our conversation has primarily become just a running series of real-estate listings. 

“Look at this place,” I texted last week, sending a link to a schoolhouse-turned-farmhouse in Vermont, which was in desperate need of some maintenance. My friends responded obligingly, “Oh my god, so much space,” one wrote, while another texted, “Think of the things you could do with that kitchen!” They know I have no intention of moving right now, nor do they, but that doesn’t stop us from trawling online listings, searching for zany wallpaper, clawfoot tubs and, more recently, conversation pits. 

My boyfriend and I play a similar game, beckoning the other to look at listings for pricy lakefront condos in Chicago, where we’re both from originally, with a kind of breathless enthusiasm — which is one reason why  this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” sketch, simply titled “Zillow,” felt just a little too real. 

In the style of an old-school, late-night television phone sex advertisement, Ego Nwodim murmurs suggestively to the camera, “Are you looking for something to spice up your life?” The answer isn’t sex. You’re in your late 30s, the sketch asserts, and you need a new fantasy: real estate porn. 

“The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other people’s houses,” Nwodim continues, as the camera eventually pans to Bowen Yang and guest host Dan Levy heading to bed together to scroll through Zillow. “The guest house has its own little kitchen,” Levy says. “So bad.” Yang proceeds to writhe in ecstasy. 

“So what are you waiting for?” Heidi Gardner adds in a voiceover. “Pick up your phone now. Open the app, and tell us what you really want.”

Viewers responded immediately. “We may be a divided country but I think most of us can at least agree that the Zillow sketch on SNL hit way too close to home tonight,” one Twitter user wrote, while another responded, “As a 35 year old, the Zillow commercial is probably the best, most-accurate SNL skit I’ve seen.” 

Even Zillow’s CEO, Rich Barton, tweeted a link to the sketch with the caption: “Wait. Have we been marketing Zillow wrong all these years???” 

Owning a home with the requisite white picket fence has long been part of the American dream, but the concept of “real estate porn” really took off in the mid-aughts, when sites like Zillow, Trulia, StreetEasy and Redfin all launched. They made real estate listings — including prices, pictures and mortgage rates — available to scroll from the comfort of your own couch. 

House hunting went from a necessity reserved for when you actually had to move to a kind of spectator sport, a development that was only catalyzed by networks like HGTV —  which, in 2016, overtook CNN as the third most-watched cable channel behind Fox News and ESPN — and publications like Curbed and Apartment Therapy, which break down popular listings and still run headlines like, “A Park Slope One-Bedroom for $528K and a West Village Apartment With Barrel-Vaulted Ceilings.” 

It’s a lot of fantasy fodder, especially as home ownership feels further and further out of reach for many millennials, many of whom have weathered two recessions during their careers. Additionally, as NPR reported in 2019, student loan debt in the United States has more than doubled over the past decade to about $1.5 trillion, and the Federal Reserve now estimates that it is cutting into millennials’ ability to buy homes.

“Homeownership rates for people ages 24 to 32 dropped nearly 9 percentage points between 2005 and 2014 — effectively driving down homeownership rates overall,” wrote reporter Yuki Noguchi. “In January, the Fed estimated 20% of that decline is attributable to student loan debt.” 

In many cases, the pandemic has only exacerbated housing inequality across the nation as approximately 34 million people are in danger of eviction. However, home sales have boomed over the last calendar year because, as the Washington Post reported, Americans who have savings, stable jobs and good credit scores are taking advantage of the cheapest mortgage rates on record to bargain shop for larger home (a draw when you’re social distancing and can’t go out).

In July, new mortgage applications hit a level not seen since 2008 and, as realtor James Dietsche told the publication, “People are literally trying to get back to a house in the suburbs with a yard and a fence. Those are the houses that are blown off the market in two seconds.” 

The pandemic also had people who lived in more densely populated urban centers contemplating what it would be like to move to that kind of suburban home with a yard, and what their city rents could do when applied to a smaller town mortgage — which has perhaps become the hottest real estate fantasy. 

Something that “SNL” writers obviously know too well. 

“I’d never live in North Carolina,” Dan Levy said during the sketch with a seductive smile. “But if I did, I could buy a big, gross mansion.” 

 

Biden says the pandemic response he inherited from Trump was “more dire” than he’d thought

President Joe Biden appeared in his first network television interview with CBS News since taking office, and provided insight into the COVID-19 pandemic plan his administration inherited from the Trump administration.

In the interview with Norah O’Donnell, she asked if the Super Bowl would have a full stadium next year.

“It’s my hope and expectation if we’re able to put together and make up for all the lost time in fighting COVID that’s occurred,” Biden said, indicating that the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic was “more dire than we thought.”

“One of the disappointments was when we came into office is the circumstance relating to how the [former] administration was handling COVID was even more dire than we thought,” Biden said. “We thought that it had indicated there was a lot more vaccine available and it didn’t turn out to be the case.”

Biden added that’s why his administration has “ramped up every way we can.”

Biden took office promising to aid the nationwide rollout of vaccines, with a focus on getting them to marginalized populations who have been hit the hardest by COVID-19. To do this, the Biden administration set a goal to reach 100 million vaccinations in its first 100 days of office. The administration has increased its weekly vaccine supply to states and is purchasing an additional 100 million doses of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to quicken the pace of the roll-out throughout the summer. The purchases will provide enough supply to vaccinate nearly 300 million Americans by the end of the summer.

Last week, the Biden administration also announced that it will start shipping vaccine doses to retail pharmacies across the nation;  this move is separate from an ongoing federal program to have Walgreens and CVS vaccinate residents of long-term care facilities.

“The Centers for Disease Control, which has quite a bit of experience working with pharmacies, is making sure that we are picking pharmacies in that first phase that are located in areas that are harder to reach to ensure that we have equitable distribution of the pharmacy doses,” said Jeff Zients , White House coronavirus response coordinator, adding that the first couple of weeks will be a dry run. “Eventually, as we’re able to increase supply, up to 40,000 pharmacies nationwide could provide COVID-19 vaccinations.”

Biden calling the vaccine situation “dire” during the CBS interview didn’t come exactly as a surprise. Politico previously reported that the Biden administration arrived at the White House ready to hit the ground running, but had to spend much of their first week trying to locate 20 million missing vaccines — a consequence of the Trump administration’s infrastructure that failed to track the route vaccines took once they left the federal government’s storage spaces.

“Nobody had a complete picture,” said Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to Politico. “The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”

The Biden administration is also gearing up to use sports stadiums as mass vaccine sites across the country, which Biden spoke about in the CBS interview. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell offered the league’s 30 stadiums as potential vaccination sites.

When asked if the Biden administration would accept the offer, Biden said, “Absolutely, we will.”

“Let me put it this way, I’m gonna tell my team they’re available and I believe we’ll use them,” Biden said. 

Drake and Jake, Disney, and Dew — which ads won the Super Bowl, and which fell flat

Live sporting events are among the few remaining places where advertisers can ensure that no one fast forwards through their commercials which is why companies were willing to pay US$5.5 million for just 30 seconds of air time on Super Bowl Sunday.

So who “won” the Super Bowl ad war?

For the last two years, I have been using the Adam Brown Social Media Command Center at the University of Tennessee to understand how social media like Twitter and Facebook react to major events such as presidential debates, breaking news like the GameStop craze and sporting events like the Super Bowl.

Engagement on Twitter is one measure companies use to determine an advertisement’s success and whether it was worth all those millions – not to mention the cost of making Super Bowl ads, which often include celebrities.

Here’s what I noticed from monitoring social media during Super Bowl LV.

The performers

I didn’t monitor the game itself – in which Tom Brady led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a 31-9 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. But I did notice the performers, including the first poet to ever present at a Super Bowl, received a lot of buzz.

The Weeknd‘s halftime performance – and his closeup – was the talk of Twitter, as Super Bowl performances usually are. With his prime time slot and greatest hits montage, he was the biggest hit on social media, with over 821,000 mentions during the game, most of which were quite positive.

Poet Amanda Gorman, who gained national recognition at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, received almost 60,000 mentions that were overwhelmingly positive after she read a poem during the pre-game show.

Amanda Gorman recites “Chorus of the Captains.”

Drake, Disney and Dew

Of the dozens of companies that bought ad time during the big game, three won the Twitterverse with the most positively talked about advertisements of the evening.

I reached that conclusion by analyzing the volume of tweets that mentioned the company or used a hashtag introduced in the commercial, as well as by examining the sentiment score to see whether the conversation around the ads was positive or negative.

One of the big winners was State Farm’s ads starring Drake, in which the rapper appears as a stand-in for “Jake,” who has appeared frequently in the insurer’s advertisements. Over 28,000 tweets mentioned State Farm within 40 minutes of the commercial’s first airing, for a total of 44,000 during the game. “Drake” was a keyword in most of them. Sentiment was very positive for most of the night as people found “Drake from State Farm” funny, until some users brought up the “Drake curse” that is supposedly bad luck for sports teams.

“Drake from State Farm.”

Disney’s trailer for its upcoming series “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier” performed even better, spurring over 100,000 tweets that specifically mentioned the show. Sentiment was also overwhelmingly positive for the show which stars two characters from the Marvel universe, with a score of over 90% throughout the evening.

Mountain Dew’s ad featuring pro wrestler John Cena driving through a “surreal watermelon-themed amusement park” won the evening on social media. It received over 300,000 mentions, likely driven by the $1 million offered to the first person who tweeted out the correct number of “major melon” bottles that appeared in the ad.

Mountain Dew’s million-dollar giveaway.

A few duds

Super Bowl mainstay Budweiser had a pretty bad night. At first it said it would not buy advertising this year and instead donate the money to coronavirus vaccination awareness efforts. But apparently it changed its mind and ran several ads for Bud Light and Bud Light Seltzer. Mentions of the two beers were under 10,000 and sentiment turned negative after the ads began running.

Shift4Shop, an e-commerce platform, advertised its partnership with the Inspiration4 civilian mission to space. The ad did not appear to leave much of an impact on Twitter users, however, with fewer than 2,000 tweets during the game – not much of an effect for the price tag. It reminded me of Quibi’s Super Bowl ad last year which was meant to be the TV streaming app’s debut to the world. It was not well-received, and the company called it quits in December.

Another big loser were advertisements that were “heavy” – ad jargon for commercials that are overly emotive, such as those referencing weighty events like the pandemic or the Capitol riots. Most Super Bowl advertisers avoided these themes – opting instead for escapism and nostalgia. And the ones that did go heavy didn’t do well, such as Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s ad, during which the narrator intoned that “in these trying times we need nature more than ever.”

Jeep’s ad starring Bruce Springsteen garnered a lot of attention – 20,000 tweets within minutes of its airing after half time – but most of it negative. Over two minutes, the Boss implores Americans to “meet in the middle” in a call for unity that some Twitter users described as “tone deaf.”

Too political?

Honorable mention

While it didn’t break the internet, vegan food company Oatly’s love-it-or-hate-it ad got a fair amount of attention given how minimalistic it was.

It featured the company’s CEO playing piano in a field and singing about Oatly’s products. People seemed evenly split on whether the ad was good or absolutely horrible – but it did generate over 16,000 tweets. The negative reaction may have been the company’s plan all along as it immediately began selling T-shirts saying, “I totally hated that Oatly commercial.”

The shirts sold out in five minutes.

Alexander Carter, Phd Student in Advertising, University of Tennessee

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

How steel might finally kick its coal habit

Coal’s grip on the global electricity sector is loosening as more utilities and companies invest in renewable energy. But one major coal consumer — the steel industry — is finding it harder to kick its habit.

Steel companies make nearly 2 billion tons of high-strength material every year for bridges, buildings, railways, and roads. The furnaces that melt iron ore to make steel consume vast amounts of coal. As a result, the industry accounts for roughly 8 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions, as well as a toxic soup of air pollutants.

Steelmakers worldwide are facing mounting pressure from government regulators and consumers to decarbonize operations. Doing so is essential to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and staving off most of the worst effects of climate change, experts say. In recent months, the world’s three top producers — Europe’s ArcelorMittal, China’s Baowu Steel, and Japan’s Nippon Steel — committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, echoing targets set in their home countries.

But in order to curb steel’s carbon emissions, the sector will have to transform how the material is traditionally made.

Outside Boston, in the industrial suburb of Woburn, one company is working to replace coal with electrons. Boston Metal, an outfit spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, uses electric currents to heat iron ore into a bright orange-white liquid, which converts into metal and cools as gray steel blocks. The process doesn’t create greenhouse gas emissions, and when powered with renewable electricity, can be completely emissions-free.

Tadeu Carneiro, the company’s CEO, said Boston Metal is “ushering in a new era of metallurgy.” The nine-year-old startup raised $50 million in January from a slew of investors, including the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures and the venture capital arm of BHP, one of the world’s biggest mining companies. The new funding will allow it to build a demonstration plant in Woburn that can produce 25,000 tons of metal per year; so far, the company has made only several tons of steel in total.

Boston Metal’s approach is one of a handful of breakthrough technologies with the potential to decarbonize steelmaking. Companies are piloting systems across Europe that use hydrogen in furnaces in lieu of coal. In Brazil, some steel mills are mixing in biochar, which is made from agricultural waste. Other firms are continuing the use of coal, but are considering retrofitting facilities with carbon capture devices to negate emissions.

Testing and scaling technologies that remove the emissions from steelmaking isn’t the only challenge to decarbonizing the building material. Greener products must also compete in an industry with relatively low profit margins and an excess supply of inexpensive Chinese steel.

To level the playing field, public agencies and private businesses will need to set policies that encourage buying emissions-free steel, or make it more expensive to purchase conventional supplies, said Nate Aden, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute who studies industrial sector transformations. (California, for instance, limits the total amount of carbon emissions associated with steel and other materials used in state-backed construction projects.)

“We haven’t had nearly enough research and development in this space for the past couple decades,” Aden said. “It’s exciting.”

* * *

About 70 percent of steel today is made how it’s always been made: in giant, extremely hot furnaces. Purified coal, or “coke,” is heated and melted with iron oxide and limestone, then injected with oxygen to reduce the carbon content of the mixture and to remove impurities.

Almost all other steel is made from scrap metal that’s melted down in an electric arc furnace. This approach doesn’t use coke as a raw material. But it does require significant amounts of electricity to heat metal to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — and most of that power comes from coal-fired power plants.

At Boston Metal’s research facility, the steelmaking process takes place inside a squat metal cylinder called an electrolytic cell. Electricity is fed in from the top and flows through a chimney-like tube made from a chromium-based alloy. The electric current then passes across a liquid solution made of iron oxide and other metallic minerals. This heats the oxide melt and drives chemical reactions that result in the production of oxygen gas and liquid iron. Oxygen bubbles to the top, while fortified iron pools at the chamber’s bottom and eventually hardens into steel.

Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials chemistry at MIT, said he first got the idea for “molten oxide electrolysis” decades ago while researching alternative ways to produce aluminum, another metal made via a carbon-intensive process. In 2012, he co-founded Boston Electrometallurgical (a.k.a. Boston Metal) with two partners, and they began testing the method in laboratory cells the size of highball tumbler glasses. The company now runs three pilot lines at the Woburn facility.

With the $50 million investment from Breakthrough, BHP, and others, Sadoway said the goal is to demonstrate the technology at a scale large enough to convince investors to back construction of an industrial facility. If that future plant comes to fruition, he estimates Boston Metal’s process will use about 20 percent less energy than a conventional blast furnace. And if the facility can use cheap, plentiful renewable electricity, perhaps from a hydropower plant, its steel would cost less than the competition.

“At scale, we expect to make better metal at lower cost and with no CO2 emissions,” he said.

* * *

As Boston Metal expands its efforts in electrolysis, many steel companies are placing their bets on hydrogen to curb emissions.

Hydrogen doesn’t emit greenhouse gases when burned and can be made by using renewable electricity to bust up water molecules (although most hydrogen today is made with natural gas, through a process called steam methane reforming). In steelmaking, hydrogen sets off a chemical reaction that removes oxygen from iron ore, eliminating the need for purified coal in the blast furnace.

Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal is building a demonstration plant using this method — called hydrogen-DRI, for “direct reduced iron” — in Germany. Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries plans to trial the technology this year at a 250,000-ton per year steel plant in Austria. And in Sweden, steelmaker SSAB and its partners have built a pilot plant to produce hydrogen supplies and test hydrogen-DRI, using only hydroelectric power for both operations.

Building a hydrogen-based steel industry will require significant spending to not only build new plants but also produce, transport, and store green hydrogen. For these projects to be economically viable in the world of cheap steel, the prices of hydrogen and renewable electricity must drop considerably, while the price of carbon dioxide must rise, Aden wrote in a 2020 paper as part of an international team of experts.

There’s another longer-term challenge for new, clean projects. Demand for steel is declining or stagnating in key markets, including the United States and Japan. Producers are already making more steel than the world needs. Meanwhile, construction companies and car makers are increasingly using lightweight aluminum, plastics, and even wood in their projects. That could make it harder to justify future investments or research, according to Aden.

Still, the steel industry remains an essential part of the world economy — as well as a significant source of the world’s emissions.

“What’s clear is that we’ll be needing steel for the next few decades,” Aden said. “So I think all these new projects are worthwhile.”

 

Republicans defend Trump ahead of impeachment trial by blaming Nancy Pelosi for Capitol riot

As Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial looms near, bringing the former president’s incitement of insurrection into greater focus once again, members of the GOP are –– in another ambitious act of baseless conspiracy –– deflecting blame onto their Democratic counterparts for the riot and framing impeachment as a “diversionary operation” meant to distract from Democratic culpability. 

The idea that Democrats, who were chiefly targeted by rioters themselves, are responsible for the riot, is not entirely novel. Shortly after the Jan. 6 riot, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, tried to put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, under scrutiny, asking in an interview with Fox News, “Where was Nancy Pelosi? It’s her job to provide Capitol security.” 

A month later, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Senator Ron Johnson, R-WI, are now taking Graham’s cue, leading the charge to position their Democratic colleagues as enablers of the insurrection.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Meadows assigned blame to Democrats for not organizing the Capitol Police adequately in anticipation of the riot. “The Capitol police do a tremendous job,” he said, “But they need to be in power to do that job.” Meadows continued, “Some…decisions weren’t made appropriately, in my opinion, and those decisions did not come from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It came from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue,” he said, referring to the Capitol. 

In another Sunday interview with Fox, Senator Johnson went a step further by zeroing in on House Speaker Pelosi –– who was evacuated from the Capitol as her office was stormed and ransacked –– speculating that she have ulterior motives for holding Trump’s impeachment trial. “Is this another diversionary operation? Is this meant to deflect away from potentially what the speaker knew and when she knew it?” Johnson asked. “I don’t know, but I’m suspicious,” he continued, without citing evidence that would, in fact, put Pelosi under suspicion. 

According to a fact-check done by AP News, Pelosi does not have any authority over the day-to-day operations of the Capitol Police. “No one person oversees USCP,” said Bee Barnett, the director of communications and programs for the US Capitol Historical Society, “The oversight apparatus includes representation from the Architect of the Capitol, the House and Senate Sergeants at Arms, as well as committees from both Houses of Congress.”

Last week, in a closed-door briefing, Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda D. Pittman apologized to members of Congress and acknowledged that the “the Department…did not do enough” to prepare for the violent unrest, dispelling the notion that Democratic lawmakers should be held in any way responsible for the unrest. 

According to Trump’s impeachment lawyers, Trump and the White House took immediate steps to quell the violence on Capitol Hill, noting that there was a “flurry of activity.” However, “complex procedural elements,” they implied, proved too cumbersome for swift action, citing a similar sense of bureaucratic vagueness as Meadows, perhaps alluding to an internal Democratic holdup 

As Salon reported, the Pentagon denied multiple requests by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to call in the National Guard. According to Insider, leading up the riot, the Pentagon also “curtailed the ability of DC guardsmen to deploy troops, receive ammo and riot gear, engage with protesters, share equipment with local police, and use surveillance without explicit approval from Trump’s acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller.”

Democrat-led investigations are currently underway to identify GOP members of Congress that may have led “reconnaissance” tours for rioters throughout the Capitol building on Jan 5, the day before Trump’s rally. 

AstraZeneca’s vaccine doesn’t work against mutant coronavirus strain, South African government says

The South African government is suspending the use of one of its COVID-19 vaccines on its citizens because it is ineffective against a mutated strain of the coronavirus known as B.1.351. 

The government announced on Sunday that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford failed to protect clinical trial volunteers from B.1.351, a more contagious mutant strain of the novel coronavirus.

Hence, South Africa is suspending the use of that vaccine, although they said they would reconsider using it if additional studies reinforce existing ones which suggest that the vaccine could protect people against more severe cases. The government’s challenge is that the existing studies included volunteers who were younger and less likely to develop severe infections, meaning they could not determine this on their own. The studies’ reliability are also hindered by the fact that they did not analyze a large number of cases.

“There’s plenty of uncertainty, but this is not good news, especially for countries that were hoping to use the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to curb transmission of B.1.351,” Dr. Dylan Morris, a postdoctoral research scholar at UCLA, told Salon by email. “It is still possible that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine will reduce the severity of B.1.351 infection, and still possible that it will work better with a longer dose gap. Scientists are investigating.”

He struck a cautiously optimistic note, telling Salon that the South African scientists also found that a single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine “showed efficacy against B.1.351 in a large clinical trial. It prevented symptoms well and prevented severe disease very well,” and that although there has not been a clinical trial for mRNA vaccines “lab evidence gives us reason to be cautiously optimistic that they will hold up more like J&J than like Oxford/AstraZeneca.” He also observed that the South African scientists based their conclusion in part on the lab results for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine being “substantially worse” than those for other vaccines, meaning that their decision to roll out the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is “very prudent.”

The news may be a bad omen for vaccination in South Africa, but it doesn’t mean the US mass vaccination strategy needs to be shifted — yet. 

“The low efficacy for the B.1.351 variant shows just how much we need to avoid more mutations, and get this pandemic under control ASAP with vaccines and mitigation strategies together,” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, told Salon by email. He noted that “other vaccines do work for the B.1.351 variant even if AstraZeneca doesn’t.”  

“We are fortunate B.1.351 is still relatively rare in the US, but we do know the more infectious B.1.1.7 variant from the UK is in the US and rising rapidly—likely to become the dominant variant by mid-to-late March,” he added.

The B.1.1.7 strain of the novel coronavirus, which originated in the United Kingdom and was first identified in September, is notable because it is unusually transmissible, has an abnormally large number of mutations (23) and has some of those mutations on the Spike protein. The Spike protein is what causes the little points on the virus’ surface, like the spines of a sea urchin, which the virus uses to enter the body’s cells — and which mRNA vaccines like those developed by Pfizer and Moderna target in order to inoculate people against the disease.

The South African B.1.351 mutation, by contrast, is notorious for developing a further mutation known as E484K, which seemed to correlate with vaccines being less effective in South Africa. In the United Kingdom, at least 11 individual B.1.1.7 viruses also had the E484K mutation.

“Much of this variant’s growth has been hidden in the underbelly of the old common strain’s decline,” Feigl-Ding wrote to Salon. “We can’t get complacent. The vaccines work — we need to use the critical time window now to slow and stop the transmission before B.1.1.7 wave crashes as the dominant variant across the US.”

Morris expressed a similar view, writing that “Americans are fortunate to have access to great vaccines: the mRNA vaccines, and possibly soon [Johnson & Johnson]. But the variants are still a major threat to Americans. All three are here already, and it is very possible that all three are more transmissible than the wild-type. That makes it harder to control the pandemic while we vaccinate, as places like the UK and Israel have seen.”

Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, wrote to Salon that the new information from South Africa illustrates three major points for the American people.

“First, it is fortunate that we have multiple other vaccines, such as those developed by Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax and Johnson and Johnson, that preliminary laboratory studies show to be somewhat less effective but still protective against B.1.351,” Medford explained. “Second, when necessary the technology underlying mRNA vaccines allows for the rapid development of vaccine boosters that can specifically protect against variants such as B.1.351.”

He added, “Third, to prevent the spread of B.1.351 and the emergence of new and similar variants, we can and must aggressively crush quickly the circulation of the SARS-CoV2 virus, including all its variants, through mass vaccination and the rigorous adherence to mask wearing, social distancing and handwashing.”

Five tangy-sweet rice vinegar substitutes

Oh, the versatility of rice. Cooked simply, it can slant savory or sweet. Try as they may, vegetables repurposed as rice, like cauliflower, can only dream of imitating its likeness. And while we all know (and love) rice in its granular form, this shape-shifter pantry staple can be ground or soaked into the main ingredient for noodles, bread, milk — you name it. Rice can even be fermented and processed into the main ingredient in a boozy beverage (hello, sake!)

Speaking of fermented rice: Rice vinegar, or rice wine vinegar, is a seasoning agent derived from similar ingredients, albeit produced with a different technique. Commonly used in East Asian and some Southeast Asian cuisines, it’s delicately tangy and slightly sweet, making it more mild in flavor and less acidic than its Western counterparts in the vinegar section. Rice vinegar comes in a range of colors, from white to yellow to red to black — each with varying flavor nuances and acidity strengths.

Rice vinegar enriches sushi rice, makes mild, snack-able pickles, and livens up dressings and marinades for any salad or protein. If you find your bottle is empty, and understandably don’t want to run to the store for just one ingredient, consider these substitutions. You’ll likely have one of these 5 pantry- and fridge-staple rice vinegar substitutes on hand.

Apple Cider Vinegar

If rice vinegar is on the milder end when it comes to vinegar, apple cider vinegar is right next door. The two are both tart condiments, yet share a subtle sweetness. You can easily substitute apple cider for rice vinegars for any recipe, with one note: the ACV will have a slightly (yet unsurprisingly!) fruity apple flavor, so keep that in mind when seasoning simple dishes like sushi rice or pickles.

Champagne Vinegar

Cheers to effortless swaps! Not unlike rice vinegar, champagne vinegar is made by fermenting the bubbly wine even further to produce a mild (but bright) acidic condiment. Use it where you would rice vinegar in a one to one ratio.

White Wine Vinegar

The “wine” in white wine vinegar is a critical component to this substitution. While distilled white vinegar is a bit harsh as a direct sub to rice vinegar, white wine vinegar is the tame pantry staple you can rely on to freshen up any recipe. The best rule: Taste as you go. If you sense something is missing in your dish sans rice vinegar, but you’ve already added the white wine vinegar, it could use a bit of sweetness. Try a 1/4 teaspoon of granulated sugar for every tablespoon of vinegar. That said, if all you have is regular ol’ white vinegar (or red wine vinegar, for that matter,) and you don’t want to harsh your mellow (vinegar), consider diluting the punchy condiments. Use half the amount of red wine or distilled white vinegar as you would rice vinegar. Splash in a few tablespoons of water, and a 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, and your dressings and marinades won’t know the difference.

Lemon Or Lime Juice

The bright acidity of lemon and lime juice makes a trusty alternative for rice vinegar in dressings and sauces. Keep in mind that the citrus leaves a distinct floral flavor, but will provide the mildly tart zing needed when replacing rice wine vinegar. Again, taste as you go: You may need up to double the amount of citrus juice when substituting vinegar in a recipe.

Mirin

The Japanese rice wine, similar to sake, provides an umami richness to dishes (looking at you, teriyaki glaze!). Though with more sugar and less alcohol than sake, mirin is a more appropriate ingredient for cooking, especially when looking to replace rice vinegar. Sub it in one to one, but keep in mind the intrinsic sweetness that mirin imparts. If the recipe calls for any additional sweetener, like sugar or honey, you most likely won’t need it — taste after adding the mirin and go from there.

What’s your favorite recipe that calls for rice wine vinegar? Let us know in the comments!

Mike Pence is starting a podcast … because of course he is

It seems that all white men of a certain age have a podcast (hosting data backs this up) and former vice president Mike Pence is now no exception. The Young America’s Foundation announced on Friday that Pence, who is serving as the organization’s Ronald Regan Presidential Scholar, plans to launch a video podcast “to share the good news of conservatism through one of today’s most popular mediums.” 

Through the position, Pence will also publish a monthly op-ed, speak at conferences and embark upon a cross-country campus lecture series for the conservative group, which is known for bringing inflammatory anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim speakers to college campuses

“Now more than ever, we need to take the case for freedom, free markets, and traditional values to the rising generation and I look forward to working with the great YAF team to ensure the torch of freedom shines bright for generations to come,” Pence said in a release. 

Public details about the proposed podcast are still sparse, but stepping behind a microphone won’t be entirely new for Pence. The former Indiana governor spent the ’90s hosting “The Mike Pence Show,” which positioned him as a relatively prominent Midwestern conservative radio personality — a reputation upon which he built his eventual political career and 2000 election to Congress. 

As Politico reported in 2016, “The Mike Pence” show dedicated a lot of time to Indiana news, some bashing of the Clintons and the “global warming myth,” and at least a couple episodes railing against adultery. 

“I mean, is adultery no longer a big deal in Indiana and in America? I’d just love to know your thoughts because I for one believe that the seventh commandment contained in the Ten Commandments is still a big deal,” Pence said. 

He continued:”I maintain that other than promises that we make of fidelity in our faith, the promises that we make to our spouses and to our children, the promises that we make in churches and in synagogues and marriage ceremonies around this, it’s the most important promise you’ll ever make. And holding people accountable to those promises and holding people accountable to respecting the promises that other people make, I, to me, what could possibly be a bigger deal than that in this country?”

It should be noted that, obviously, Pence’s hardline stance on accountability for adulterous politicians didn’t extend to former president Donald Trump, who, throughout his presidency, was accused of making hush payments to at least two women — adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal — with whom he allegedly had affairs. 

According to a Monday Associated Press report, former Trump attorney-turned-critic Michael Cohen interviewed Daniels in the latest episode of his own podcast, “Mea Culpa,” in which he apologized for “the needless pain” he put Daniels through when he arranged a $130,000 payment during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about an alleged dalliance with Trump a decade earlier.

However, Pence’s silence surrounding Trump’s behavior only got him so far. His relationship with Trump became publicly strained following his certification of Joe Biden’s election in the Senate and the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, during which rioters erected gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” 

As Politico reports, Pence’s podcast — as well as his larger role with the Young America Foundation — could be viewed as “an effort to smooth his transition back into the upper ranks of the conservative movement” as he reportedly weighs a book deal and a future presidential bid of his own in 2024.

The crispy-cheesy legend of Mimi’s pizza

Bake It Up a Notch is a column by Resident Baking BFF Erin Jeanne McDowell. Each month, she’ll help take our baking game to the next level, teaching us all the need-to-know tips and techniques and showing us all the mistakes we might make along the way. Today, a deep-dive into deep-dish pizza — and other cheesy pies Erin loves.

* * *

It’s no secret that I love my home state, and I’m one of the few family members who’s drifted outside a 50 mile radius of our family homestead in Kansas. I’ve grown fairly used to living so far from my family, but that’s only thanks to multiple visits each year. Even so, I spend a significant part of every year searching for cures for homesickness. The only one I’ve ever found with any real power, is to head to the kitchen, and make some of my mom’s food. It rarely tastes as good as when she makes it — but there’s true comfort to be found in the familiar smells and tastes of my childhood.

2020 made my longing for home worse than ever before. After nearly 400 days of not setting foot in Kansas, making my apartment smell like my parents’ home is pretty much the most powerful tool in my arsenal to battle the weepies after nearly every Zoom or Facetime call.

I could write about many of the things my mother cooks and tell you it’s the very best thing she makes. Her soups are the stuff of comfort food dreams. Just the smell of her dinner rolls can wake me from a sound sleep. In elementary school, her homemade salsa had an incredibly high lunchroom trade value — I could get two Oreos for just one chip dipped in salsa. (Proof that this salsa was more than lunchtime legendary: When I appeared on “Good Morning America” a few weeks ago, I was suddenly flooded with emails from long-lost friends and teachers from elementary and middle school. No joke, over half of these emails also contained pleading requests for my mom’s salsa recipe.) This is all to say, my mother is a great cook — and I have never been more thankful for her recipes than in the past year.

At Thanksgiving, I made her braised leeks to get me through. On Christmas Eve, I made a giant tray of her enchiladas to salve the “not good enough-ness” of watching my niece open her present on Zoom. And I rang in the New Year with the one recipe I can confidently say is one of her most memorable: her pizza. I grew up calling it “Mom’s Pizza”: an important differentiation, cravings-wise, from the rare occasion we got pizza takeout. That name has morphed somewhat as her grandkids started calling my mom “Mimi.”

The affectionately named “Mimi’s pizza” is baked on a sheet tray and boasts crisp outer edges and a slightly fluffy base crust. It’s not quite a classic Grandma pie, not quite a true pan pizza; it’s definitely not a thin crust pizza, but it’s not thick like deep dish, either. It’s delightfully in between. The crust — let’s call it thickish — makes it ideal for really loading up with toppings, if that’s your thing, and the sheet pan situation makes it fairly foolproof (no pizza stone or peel required).

I’m thrilled to share the recipe for Mimi’s pizza in this month’s episode of Bake it Up a Notch, but it’s not the only pizza we cover. In this deep-dive episode, we talk about everything from crisp, thin crust pizzas baked on a stone to gooey Detroit-style deliciousness. There are so many amazing types of ‘za out there. What’s your go-to pie?

Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Pizza Dough

This no-knead dough is a staple in our house. I love it best as a pizza diavola, topped with spicy soppressata, or when I can’t decide, as a pizza quattro stagioni (which means “four seasons,” where each quarter of the pie has a different topping: artichokes, prosciutto, mushrooms, and olives).

Mimi’s Pizza Dough

Try this dough to make its’ namesakes favorite (a white pie with garlic oil, thinly sliced potatoes, castelvetrano olives, fresh mozzarella, and crumbled feta) or keep it classic with a sausage and onion pie (the “Papa” to the aforementioned Mimi).

Deep-Dish Pizza Dough

I’m an equal-opportunity pizza lover, and I adore a chewy, doughy deep-dish pie. Try my Deep Dish Tomato and Mozzarella Pizza or my Skillet White Pizza With Broccoli Rabe.

Detroit-Style Pizza

The crispy edged, incredibly cheesy wonder has become one of my all-time favorites. The real key? Sauce on top!

Gluten-Free Pizza Dough (and Salad Pizza!)

Pizza is for everyone! This gluten-free dough bakes up crisp at the edges and fluffy on the inside. Try dousing it in olive oil and baking it on its own, then topping it with a pile of well-dressed salad greens.

No-Yeast Pizza Dough (and White Pizza)

Out of yeast? Yep, you can still pizza. This produces a more cracker-like dough when rolled thin, or a chewier dough if kept thicker. While it may not be exactly like your favorite pie, it’s certainly the quickest way to get from zero to pizza.

Trump-appointed USPS head Louis DeJoy readies for another assault on Postal Service

With Postmaster General Louis DeJoy reportedly preparing to unveil plans for another round of service cuts and operational changes as soon as this week, President Joe Biden is facing growing calls from lawmakers, mail carriers, and others to take urgent steps to protect the U.S. Postal Service from further damage, pave the way for DeJoy’s removal, and shore up the agency’s finances for the near and distant future.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to former President Donald Trump—soon intends to “outline a new vision for the agency, one that includes more service cuts, higher and region-specific pricing, and lower delivery expectations.”

“We want a Board of Governors that understands fundamentally this is not called the United States Postal Business. It’s not a profit-making business. It’s here to serve the people.”
—Mark Dimondstein, American Postal Workers Union

Meanwhile, the Post noted, “congressional Democrats are pressing President Biden to install new board members, creating a majority bloc that could oust DeJoy, a Trump loyalist whose aggressive cost-cutting over the summer has been singled out for much of the performance decline.”

Appointed unanimously by the Trump-appointee-dominated Postal Service Board of Governors in May despite his complete lack of experience with the Postal Service, DeJoy wasted no time imposing sweeping operational changes at the mail agency that resulted in precipitous drops in performance in the weeks ahead of, during, and after the November presidential election—prompting accusations of politically motivated sabotage of the nation’s most popular government institution.

While DeJoy was forced to temporarily suspend some of his operational changes last year in the face of a nationwide uproar and numerous court injunctions, the postmaster general now appears intent on moving forward with his plan to cripple the agency—a plan that has Democratic lawmakers and postal workers clamoring for action from the Biden administration.

Because Biden is prohibited by statute from firing DeJoy directly, congressional Democrats are urging the president to terminate every sitting postal governor—including those who publicly cheered on the postmaster general’s changes as they produced major package backlogs nationwide and slowed delivery of prescription medicines and mail-in ballots—and replace them with officials willing to remove the postmaster general and protect the agency.

“My solution starts at the top: firing the whole board who presided over Trump and DeJoy’s wrecking of USPS. Clean house,” Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.) tweeted Sunday.

Late last month, as Common Dreams reported, Pascrell became the first congressional Democrat to call on Biden to remove the sitting members of the Board of Governors, which currently consists of four Republicans and one Democrat—all appointed by Trump. Under federal law, the president has the authority to remove postal governors “for cause.”

“The board members’ refusal to oppose the worst destruction ever inflicted on the Postal Service was a betrayal of their duties and unquestionably constitutes good cause for their removal,” argued Pascrell.

Days later, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio.) echoed Pascrell’s demand, accusing the board members of complicity in “unprecedented sabotage” of the mail service.

“The response from the leadership of the USPS to the unconscionable delays we are experiencing with the mail is beyond unacceptable,” Ryan wrote in a January 29 letter to Biden. “We must do right by the American people, and we must do right by our postal workers and letter carriers.”

Last week, USA Today‘s editorial board joined the growing chorus demanding that Biden remove the sitting postal governors, pointing out that “beyond the hiring of DeJoy, the Board of Governors is led by a former Republican National Committee chairman tapped by Trump.”

The USPS board is set to meet Tuesday for the first time since Biden’s electoral victory. As the Post reported Saturday, “DeJoy has told mail industry officials he intends to remain in office to roll out an agency reorganization… The plan, parts of which were outlined to a Senate panel in August, includes geographic pricing and longer delivery windows. He’s entertained leasing out Postal Service properties and offering non-mailing services, such as private financial services.”

Short of terminating the sitting governors, Biden could instead move to fill the three remaining vacancies on the postal board—a step that would give Democrats a majority and potentially the number of votes needed to oust DeJoy. Nominees to the postal board must be confirmed by the Senate.

In the interest of protecting USPS from DeJoy and strengthening the mail agency as a public service, American Postal Workers Union (APWU) president Mark Dimondstein is urging Biden to make “bold appointments” to the Board of Governors.

“We want a Board of Governors that understands fundamentally this is not called the United States Postal Business,” Dimondstein told the Associated Press on Sunday. “It’s not a profit-making business. It’s here to serve the people.”

Democratic lawmakers and the APWU are also demanding swift passage of the USPS Fairness Act, legislation that would scrap the onerous mandate requiring the Postal Service to prefund retiree benefits decades in advance. The House passed the bill last year but then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to allow a vote on the measure in the upper chamber.

“Congress needs to pass the USPS Fairness Act again,” Pascrell tweeted Sunday. “We did last year and McConnell blocked it for 333 days. Let’s enact it again.”

Republican Senators aren’t beholden to their base — they’ll acquit Trump because they agree with him

‘Tis the night before his second impeachment trial, and all through the Senate, cowardly Republicans are still grasping for some way to let Donald Trump off the hook while not looking complicit in his attempt to violently overthrow the government by sending a fascist crowd to storm the Capitol. (Hint: It’s impossible.) So Republicans are reaching for their most potent weapon in the battle to convince the D.C. cocktail party circuit that they’re still respectable statesmen: the welcoming arms of Politico, the beltway media outlet always willing to lend a sympathetic ear to pathetic excuses and amplify the silliest of GOP spin in the name of neutrality. 

“Where Democrats and Republicans agree on Trump,” read a Monday morning headline at Politico. “Both parties want to be rid of him. They just differ on the means.”

Even without reading the full piece, one can tell this is hoary nonsense, as even the conventional wisdom holds that Republicans always make it a point to disagree with Democrats, even on basic questions of fact. “Always be ‘triggering‘ the liberals” has eclipsed any actual ideology as their main organizing principle. Still, we here at Salon buck the trends popularized by social media and make a point to actually read an article we deign to comment on. In this case, however, it does not improve the situation.

“Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in as many years has Democrats and Republicans in rare agreement: Most senators want to get it over with, and they want the former president to go away,” writes Andrew Desiderio.

As is typical with the dumber of GOP talking points, this one appears to have originated with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who was whining two weeks ago, “To coin a phrase, I think it’s time to move on.” (Fact check: Cruz did not coin the phrase “it’s time to move on.”) 

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

One thing is true: Senate Republicans would like the D.C. press to believe they’re eager to move past Trump.

But they do not actually want to move past Trump. We know this for a very simple reason: Senate Republicans refuse to do the one thing that would put Trump in the rearview mirror, which is to convict him in the upcoming impeachment trial. Convicting Trump would bar him from ever running for office again. That’s as close to a clean slate as Republicans will ever get, even though they don’t deserve it. Taking away that ability from Trump de-fangs him. Without the threat of running for office, he can’t make good on his threat to start a third party — or won’t, as Trump doesn’t do anything that isn’t centered on himself and his ego. Without the ability to run for office, the playing field opens up for all those other Republicans with dreams of running for president in 2024. 

So why won’t they do it?

Here is the excuse that was given to Politico: “Republicans, particularly those nervous about Trump’s continued stranglehold on the GOP, just don’t want to poke the bear.” As an anonymous GOP senator told Desiderio, “If he were to be convicted, there would be an uproar among his supporters. And it would probably energize them.” 

This senator supposedly wanted to remain anonymous “to candidly address the internal party dynamic.” Likelier, they just don’t want to sign their name to such a stupid argument. After all, who cares if Trump’s biggest fans are “energized”? What can they get energized around, if Trump can’t run for office? Tweeting abuse at feminists? Making more dumb costumes to wear at their mask-free fascist getdowns? Whining on family Zoom calls about Black athletes taking a knee? 

We know one thing they can’t get energized around if Trump is convicted: Another Trump run for the White House. Because that ain’t happening if he’s legally barred from office — hence one of the main points of an impeachment trial. 

It’s true Trump’s fans could have another violent revolt — though it would be harder with so many of the most fanatical in jail — but again, this underscores the idiocy of this argument. Trump is a socipathic monster whose fan base rejects democracy and is all ginned up on violent rhetoric. Giving Trump and his followers what they want is a terrible idea. What actually needs to happen is for Trump to face consequences, which is the only thing that history shows tends to slow him down. 

“I think he’s going to be a viable leader of the Republican Party,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said of Trump to Politico. “He’s very popular. And he’s going to get acquitted.”

Graham is leaning heavily on the passive voice as if he and his fellow Senate Republicans are merely conduits for the will of Trump’s base. But Trump’s popularity and future as a Republican leader depends on that acquittal. Without it, he’s nothing — even to his own base. 

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: Trump’s base is not here for Trump. There really aren’t millions of Americans whose purest political desire lies in a short-fingered wannabe mafioso clad in a fake tan and an ill-fitting suit. What they like about Trump is that he’s a naked racist and has access to power. Without the latter, Trump is little more than another flavor of David Duke, a washed-up bigot, except a billion dollars in debt and living in a dilapidated and overpriced country club. Trump isn’t even a very good pundit. His followers have Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh, if they want people expressing the same ideas but with a little more talent and flair.  

If Trump doesn’t provide an avenue to power for his followers, they will find some other leader who speaks to their white supremacist yearnings. And we, as a nation, will have a whole new set of problems, but at least they won’t be Trump-shaped problems. 

Don’t let Senate Republicans fool you with these pantomimes of powerlessness in the face of the almighty “base.” They have the power to turn Trump’s already dimming light completely off. The man isn’t a wizard. He’s not even a successful businessman. His coup failed. He is on the precipice of total irrelevance, and only needs the gentlest of pushes to fall into the abyss, reduced to shilling fake cancer cures on his email list. 

No, the reason Republicans don’t end Trump’s political relevance here and now is because they don’t want to. They, not the voters, are the ones who can’t quit Trump, even though Trump’s insurrection directly threatened the lives of congressional Republicans along with their Democratic colleagues. After all, Trump’s efforts to simply overturn democracy were simply a bolder and more direct version of the years of voter suppression Republicans have engaged in. Republicans can’t quite bring themselves to punish Trump for inciting an insurrection because, even if they can’t admit it to Politico reporters, they support his actions and are only making excuses because he failed. Anything else they say is just a cover-up for their complicity. 

Lou Dobbs goes on a Twitter rampage after being booted from Fox Business

Facing one of the largest libel cases in U.S history, Fox News abruptly canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” prompting the Trump-loving host to go on a Twitter tirade, tearing apart his former employer while refusing to back down from the baseless claims of election fraud that got him in such trouble in the first place. 

Fox News, three of its hosts, and two of Donald Trump’s former lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, are being sued for $2.7 billion. The case is brought on by a voting technology company, Smartmatic, and charges the defendants for spreading baseless claims that the company took part in stealing the 2020 presidential election. Antonio Mugica, the chief executive and founder of Smartmatic, told CNN Business, “We have no choice. The disinformation campaign that was launched against us is an obliterating one. For us, this is existential, and we have to take action.”  

The lawsuit was filed in New York state court on Wednesday and accuses the defendants of lying about Smartmatic’s ethical standards in order to persuade the public that the election was stolen. “Without any true villain, defendants invented one,” the lawsuit adds.

On Friday, Dobbs, the longtime host of the highest-rated show on the Fox Business Network, got canned — a move decried by Donald Trump:

Dobbs has since gone a multi-day Twitter tirade. Dobbs retweeted dozens of supporters from his more than a decade on Fox Business Network:

A spokesperson for Fox News said in a statement, “FOX News Media is committed to providing the full context of every story with in-depth reporting and clear opinion. We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court.”

Similarly, Powell said in a statement that she had not received notice of the lawsuit, and that it was “just another political maneuver motivated by the radical left that has no basis in fact or law.” Giuliani added that he looks forward to litigating with them.

As for Dobbs’ sudden departure, the network suggested it is unrelated to the lawsuits it’s facing. “As we said in October, FOX News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on FOX Business – this is part of those planned changes.”

The use of Smartmatic voting technology was confined to the Los Angeles area, a predominantly Democratic voter outcome, while Dominion Voting Systems voter technology was used in 24 states. On Jan. 25, Dominion Voting Systems also filed a lawsuit against Guiliani and Powell for $1.3 billion. 

Although Trump-appointed then-Attorney General William Barr confirmed that the Department of Justice found no evidence of election fraud, the disinformation campaign spread via FOX news continued to attack Smartmatic’s legitimacy, presenting a massive hill to climb for Fox Corporation. 

Sophia Tesfaye contributed to this report. 

 

Trump campaign funneled donor money to his debt-ridden businesses after election loss: report

New financial disclosures have raised numerous questions about the Trump campaign’s post-election spending following former President Donald Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden.

Campaign finance disclosures show that Trump’s re-election campaign spent at least $81,000 in donor money on Trump’s businesses. Trump joint fundraising committee that split its donations with the Republican National Committee spent another $331,000 in donor funds following the election, according to an analysis by Forbes.

Trump and Republicans plowed millions into his businesses during and after his time in office. All told, the campaign paid at least $2.8 million to the Trump Organization and the joint fundraising committee spent another $4.3 million on Trump’s businesses between Jan. 20, 2017 and Dec. 31, 2020.

The joint committee spent more than $300,000 for space, lodging and catering at Trump’s hotel business in the wake of his election loss. The campaign also spent tens of thousands to rent space at Trump Tower after Nov. 3.

The campaign and the joint committee each also separately paid more than $30,000 for air travel to DT Endeavor, a company believed to be owned by Trump.

Trump has as much as $1 billion in business debt that will soon come due. A New York Times investigation into years of his tax returns showed that he has reported hundreds of millions in losses in recent years.

The campaign also reported paying $6,037 to Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, a Republican who pushed to overturn Trump’s electoral defeat in the state, the Arizona Republic first reported. Finchem, who is not a lawyer, was paid for “legal consulting” in a “recount” effort through a company he did not include in his most recent financial disclosure, according to the campaign’s filings.

Finchem told the Republic that the payment was for costs related to “crowd control and security” for a meeting he held with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani at a hotel on Nov. 30 about unfounded claims of election-rigging.

Finchem was one of Trump’s most ardent backers, unsuccessfully calling for the state legislature to overturn the state’s election results and appoint its own slate of Trump electors. He later promoted the Trump rally that preceded the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot and was set to speak outside the Capitol that day, according to the Arizona Republic.

Finchem, who said he never got within 500 yards of the Capitol building, posted a photo of a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol steps, writing that it is “what happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”

Although Finchem has denied that he was part of the crowd and said he did not witness any violence, he refused to comply with a public records request filed by the Arizona Republic seeking his text messages and emails about his trip to Washington, citing “the threat of criminal prosecution.”

Finchem has previously claimed to be a member of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government extremist group that says it includes thousands of current or former police officers and members of the military, and made Facebook posts recruiting for the group. Members of the Oath Keepers, who were seen with longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone ahead of the Capitol siege, were charged with conspiracy last month over their alleged role in the riot.

After the riot, Finchem claimed that the mob was not “hostile” or “violent” and disputed that it had attacked police, even though the crowd injured dozens of D.C. and Capitol police officers, killing one.

“I heard many [protesters] say ‘thank you,’ and ‘bless you’ as they walked by officers,” Finchem insisted.

He also claimed that antifa was responsible for the breach of the Capitol even though there has been no evidence of antifa’s involvement.

State Rep. César Chávez, a Phoenix Democrat, filed an ethics complaint last month, arguing that Finchem’s social media posts “demonstrate beyond any doubt that he was participated in the insurrection in Washington, D.C. and supported others in their efforts.”

The left-leaning watchdog group Accountable.US said the financial disclosure suggested that Trump was “paying state legislators” to join his “two-month crusade to try and stay in power.”

“Mark Finchem must explain this payment from the Trump campaign and how it influenced his official work as a legislator to try and overturn a free and fair election,” a spokesperson told the Arizona Republic.

While the latest disclosures shed some light on the campaign’s post-election spending, Trump is still sitting on much of the cash he raised from supporters, ostensibly meant to fund his election legal challenges. Trump raised more than $170 million after the election, after bombarding supporters with fundraising appeals, but most of the money went to a fundraising committee he set up after his defeat rather than his legal efforts.

Trump spent just $10 million of those funds on legal fees, a fraction of the roughly $50 million he spent on ads and fundraising. The RNC, which backed at least some of Trump’s legal challenges to the election, likewise spent little of its portion of the funds on legal fees.

Despite sitting on tens of millions of dollars in unspent cash, Trump refused to pay his initial defense team for his Senate impeachment trial the $3 million they requested, leading to his lawyers quitting en masse just days before the start of the trial.

Taxpayers have been forced to spend big due to Trump’s weeks-long post-election tantrum as well. Trump’s lie that the election was somehow stolen has cost taxpayers at least $519 million, according to a Washington Post analysis. Taxpayers have spent more than $480 million on the National Guard deployment to protect the Capitol following the riot that Trump is charged with inciting, more than $28 million for security around state capitols, and more than $2 million in legal fees and security for election officials who defended the results against Trump’s baseless legal challenges.

Security officials have warned that the threat from Trump’s supporters emboldened by the Capitol siege could persist for months. Trump’s Washington hotel appears to be preparing for his supporters to descend on the city once again on March 4, the date when some QAnon conspiracy theorists believe Trump will somehow reclaim power and be sworn in as president. Trump’s D.C. hotel is the only one in the area to hike prices for March 3 and 4, according to Forbes. Some room rates are more than double their usual rate on those dates.

The conspiracy theory that Trump will be sworn in on March 4 — the date on which the inauguration was held until passage of the 20th Amendment in 1933 — is predicated on a bizarre notion that the government secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation in 1871. This appears to be based on a mistaken reading of a law that “incorporated” the government of Washington, D.C., to mean something very different and far more sinister.

Trump goes on trial — again: How his second Senate impeachment trial will differ from the first

The era of Donald Trump is not over, unfortunately. Yes, he has retreated to his compound in Southern Florida and has been uncharacteristically out of the public eye since he left office on January 20th. But his presence still hovers over the Republican Party like an evil genie pulling the party leadership’s strings and keeping the rank and file under his spell despite the fact that he’s been banned from social media and is refusing to appear on TV or talk radio.

This week, Trump will be very much at the center of our political world once more when his second impeachment trial begins.

As exhausting as it may seem to have Trump on the stage again, it is vitally necessary. The man tried to overturn the election and illegally install himself in the White House for four more years. While it’s still unlikely the impeachment managers from the House of Representatives will be able to get 17 Republicans Senators to put their country before their party, the record will be kept for posterity and hopefully the country will figure out a way to close the holes in our system that Trump exposed during his four years in office. The impeachment managers had better get to work doing that because just as it is highly unlikely they will be able to convict Trump of his abuse of power it’s equally unlikely that they will be able to disqualify him from running again (although that is disputed). God forbid, it is possible that we could have President Trump again on January 20th 2025.

There has been a lot of back and forth on the issue of whether or not it’s constitutional to even hold an impeachment trial of a president who is no longer in office. The brief Trump’s lawyers submitted suggests that they will be leaning hard on the idea that it’s unconstitutional as their defense, which is understandable since the GOP senators signaled that was the ticket out when 45 of them voted for a resolution saying that it was.

Interestingly, there has been pushback on this from some highly respected conservative legal scholars from the Federalist Society, notably former federal judge Michael McConnell and Charles J. Cooper, who is as stalwart a right-winger as exists in the Republican legal world. Cooper has worked closely with Ted Cruz of Texas and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy as well as provided counsel for every conservative legal crusade from anti-abortion cases to gun rights. Writing in the Wall St Journal on Sunday, Cooper points out that the idea a president cannot be impeached after leaving office makes no sense considering the provision that allows the Senate to bar him or her from holding office again. He says, “it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.”

There was a time when an opinion from Charles Cooper would hold great sway with Republican Senators. But they have mostly been immune to reason when it comes to Trump for years now and that hasn’t changed since he left office. Still, if there are any conservatives looking for some back-up to argue the point, he’s given it to them.

The House managers will be presenting a case that says, “you all know what you saw, here’s a reminder.” They will air video clips showing that for weeks Trump riled up his voters with the Big Lie about the election and then called them to Washington, promising it would be “wild,” and then incited them to storm the Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes. He told them he was going up there with them but went back to the White House instead. Did he suspect there was going to be violence? It’s a question worth asking. Back at the White House he watched the insurrection on television and did nothing for hours until he reluctantly issued this video:

And then, with the Capitol building still engulfed in tear gas and smoke, windows shattered, people wounded and the country in shock, he tweeted this which resulted in Twitter finally locking his account:

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

That is basically the case right there. In a courtroom with an unbiased jury, it would be a slam dunk.

But this won’t be a normal courtroom and it’s anything but an unbiased jury. It’s nearly the same jury that ignored Trump’s embrace of illegal electoral behavior going all the way back to 2016 when he was warned that the Russian government was interfering in the election and his reaction was to invite them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email and spend the next four years denying the interference had ever happened. When asked in the presidential debate that year if he would accept the results of the election, he refused to say. Days later he told his rally crowd that he would accept it — but only if he won.

Fast forward two years and Trump is caught trying to extort the Ukrainian president to sabotage Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in exchange for military aid, a gross abuse of power for which he was impeached and acquitted by the Republicans in the Senate. Many of those Senators argued that since it was only a year from the election they should let the people decide.

And then came the Big Lie that the election of 2020 was stolen and the incitement to insurrection on Jan. 6th. Many of those same senators who suggested the people should decide joined Trump in his post-election fantasy, refusing to admit that it was over, objecting to the results on the most specious of grounds.

From almost the moment Trump entered politics, he’s been telegraphing that he had no intention of following the rules or laws that govern our democracy, especially those pertaining to elections. Once he learned how the Electoral College makes it possible to win despite losing he clearly thought he could game the system to his advantage and might well have succeeded if it had been just a little bit closer in some states. At some point, he became convinced that he could overturn the election if he intimidated Mike Pence and the Congress with a violent mob. And all the way along, a majority of Republicans have collaborated with him, in the process normalizing this democratic dysfunction.

Republicans have shown us in living color that they will not forthrightly stand up against an assault on our democracy by one of their own. A handful voted to impeach in the House and it’s possible another handful will vote guilty in the Senate, but the number who stood by Trump, openly and boldly, to object to the election results despite massive evidence that the election was fairly decided is chilling. They now seem determined to let Trump off the hook once again. At this point, you have to wonder if it isn’t because at least some of them think he was on to something. 

Potent rhino pills outlast anything — even the arrest of their creator

In 2015, Nam Hyun Lee, a South Korean living in Southern California, got into the lucrative business of making herbal, over-the-counter sex supplements for men. He put an aggressive-looking rhinoceros on the label, and over the next several years shipped 10,000 capsules of “Rhino 69 9000” or “Rhino 8 8000” to distributors in Maryland and Texas, according an indictment by a federal grand jury in Santa Ana, California.

Lee is now awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to illegally importing bulk quantities of prescription drugs and faces up to three years in prison. But he was just one of many players profiting from the sale of sex pills with hidden drugs, and his products were a fraction of the questionable supplements still for sale in the U.S.

In recent months, the FDA has issued health warnings about more than 50 sex supplements, including the “Rhino 88 Extreme 9000,” the “Rhino 69 Power 500k,” and the “Rhino 69 Platinum 75000.” The FDA has also warned about brands called “Black Stallion,” “Stiff Nights,” and “Thumbs Up 7,” among others.

Rhino pills, as the many products named for the horned beast are known, are a familiar sight at gas stations all over the country. Men who tried them have reported that they are surprisingly effective. But users have also described troubling side effects like headaches, a common enough problem that some packages boast of a “new formula” that comes with “no headache.” In rare cases, people who took the pills have suffered life-threatening injuries.

A FairWarning review of FDA data since 2018 found 49 reports of problems ranging from penile pain and heart palpitations to congestive heart failure and coma. One death was reported: a 31-year old man believed to have taken a pill called Rhino Male Enhancement before suffering a fatal heart attack.  A federal investigation of Lee’s activities—dubbed “Operation Rhino”—revealed why the supposedly all-natural supplements seemed to work:  they were spiked with the same active ingredients used in Cialis and Viagra, as well as dapoxetine, which is prescribed for premature ejaculation. But even with their original creator behind bars, rhino pills continue to be sold nationwide. At least one product claims the pills were made in a “FDA registered facility” using such ingredients as “proprietary blend” and “horny goat weed.”

The situation is a testament to the largely unregulated nature of the $45 billion a year U.S. supplement industry. Sellers can easily register new dietary supplements with the FDA without submitting any safety data. The FDA typically tests products only after getting complaints from consumers or if products are seized by customs agents.

Vitamins, minerals, herbs

Under federal law, supplements are supposed to contain ingredients such as vitamins, minerals and herbs, but not pharmaceuticals, and can be sold over-the-counter. But after a supplement is flagged by the FDA as being unsafe or containing hidden drugs, sellers can make a slight name change to “create a new pill that is exactly what they were selling before,” said Steve Lipscomb, an attorney handling a lawsuit against Amazon over pills called  the “Rhino 50k.” In 2017, Jeffrey Sapp suffered a heart attack and permanent brain damage after taking the pills, according to his lawsuit. The suit argues that Amazon is liable for the products it sells and is scheduled for trial in 2022. Amazon, which has denied responsibility, did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2019, Walmart agreed to remove one rhino supplement from its website after it was flagged by the FDA as containing hidden drugs and highlighted by a local TV news station. But recently, other sex supplements were still for sale on Walmart.com, including a pill called the Rhino 17 Plus 5000 that retailed for $17.98. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.

Some consumer groups, as well as the FDA, have argued that the agency should have more legal authority to review supplements before they are sold to consumers.

Hiding pharmaceuticals  in over-the-counter products is already illegal, and some researchers question why the FDA hasn’t cracked down further on products it knows are in violation of the law.  Since 2015, the FDA has identified more than 200 sex supplements with hidden drugs. But an agency database shows only 15 recalls of supplements containing erectile dysfunction drugs. In most cases, the FDA has just issued alerts telling consumers to avoid the products.

“These are illegal products that are just openly being sold, and the FDA is not doing anything about it,” said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied the dangers of unregulated supplements for nearly a decade, and who says he has asked FDA officials about taking more aggressive action.

“People say it’s not in my jurisdiction. Within the FDA  there is a lot of bureaucratic arguing about who is responsible for taking these products off store shelves,” Cohen said.

In a statement, the FDA said that “the agency faces several challenges in deterring fraudulent marketing of these types of products.”

Among the obstacles, the FDA said, are that “even after recall and enforcement action against one distributor, a number of other distributors of a product may continue to sell it.”

The FDA also said that dietary supplements tainted with drugs are considered drugs under the law and the agency “does not have mandatory recall authority” over them.

“Despite these challenges, the FDA recognizes the seriousness of this problem and continues to act within its resources and authorities to address this problem as best it can,” said agency spokesman Jeremy Kahn.

Popular worldwide

Viagra, the brand name for sildenafil, made history in 1998 as the first drug approved to treat erectile dysfunction. Its competitor Cialis, made with tadalafil, was approved in 2003. Not long after, herbal supplements hiding those ingredients became popular worldwide. Consumers choose over-the-counter products because they are cheaper and easier to obtain. Some people may also be swayed by the idea of taking a supplement they are told is all-natural.

Unknowingly ingesting tadalafil or sildenafil is dangerous because the drugs can have negative interactions with other medications or with alcohol. Lab tests have found that the dosage in the over-the-counter supplements is not uniform, and can often be higher than in prescription pills.  Another concern is that the pills may be made with analogues, or experimental variations of existing drugs that have not been tested for safety.  As of 2012, at least 46 analogues of erectile dysfunction drugs were in use worldwide, according to researchers in the Netherlands.  For reasons that are unclear, supplement manufacturers have also mixed erectile dysfunction medicine with glyburide, a drug normally used in diabetes medication  The combination can be toxic and was linked to more than a dozen deaths in Hong Kong and Singapore in 2007 and 2008.

Closer to home, in 2019 in Virginia 17 men were hospitalized with hypoglycemia, a life-threatening drop in blood sugar, after ingesting supplements called “V8 male enhancement.” The drugs were marketed as all-natural but found to contain erectile dysfunction medication and glyburide.  Officials with the Virginia Department of Public Health seized the supplements from local stores, a spokesman for the agency says.

Sentencing looms

Nam Hyun Lee, who is in his sixties, looked tired but calm at a recent court hearing over Zoom.  Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, he held a listening device to his ear, straining to hear a Korean interpreter relay information from the hearing. His sentencing is scheduled for February 9.

Lee was not the first to sell adulterated sex pills in the U.S., but prosecutors say he was the first to market rhino pills specifically. The distinctive design of a holographic rhino staring back at buyers has made the pills synonymous with over-the-counter sex pills. A search of the phrase “pop a rhino” on Twitter turns up dozens of jokes about their effects.

Lee was arrested in 2018, and the rhino pills being sold today were probably made by someone else. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles says that most likely “someone else, or perhaps even multiple individuals, started marketing Rhino products” after Lee’s arrest.

Seeking leniency

In letters to the judge, Lee’s children say the family had enjoyed a comfortable middle-class life in Orange County. They describe Lee as self-employed throughout their childhood and active in his community and church. According to Lee’s daughter, a social worker, her father would go through periods of  reckless behavior, including heavy drinking and gambling. He never received mental health treatment, according to the daughter, but she suspected he suffered from bipolar disorder. His symptoms worsened over time, leading to “the behaviors that led to his current incarceration,” his daughter wrote to the judge. An attorney for Lee declined to comment on the case.

Emails obtained by prosecutors show that in 2016, Lee asked wholesalers in China for a quote on sildenafil and tadalafil. He stressed that he cared about “SAFETY and PURITY.” A wholesaler in China assured him that the drugs can easily be shipped in bulk to the U.S.

“We will change the name on the product label to make it easier to pass the USA customs,” the Chinese seller wrote, adding that the drugs would be shipped via FedEx, “just like we always do.”

Lee made the capsules at warehouses in Southern California before shipping them across the country, according to his indictment. He fell into the federal crosshairs in 2018, when customs agents seized a package of white powder from China addressed to him and labeled as “Acrylic Paint.” Lab tests revealed that the powder actually contained erectile dysfunction drugs. By the time of his arrest, prosecutors say he had netted between $3 million and $9 million in sales.

His family has requested that Lee be deported to South Korea rather than serving the recommended three year prison sentence. But a prison sentence, prosecutors have argued, will “deter others from engaging in similar conduct or continuing defendant’s operations now that he is in custody.”

Former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi: Capitol riot was “a form of terrorism”

On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s impeachment trial begins in the U.S. Senate. Last month, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting an armed insurrection and attack on the Capitol that left at least five people dead (including one police officer). Two other Capitol police officers have subsequently committed suicide, apparently because of the trauma of that day. Dozens of other people were injured, (including at least 140 police and other law enforcement agents).

There is abundant public evidence of Trump’s guilt, including the speech he gave at Ellipse Park in the hours before the assault in which he urged his followers to force Congress to change the outcome of the 2020 election. At the same rally, a Nazi-inspired propaganda video was shown that encouraged violence against Democrats and other Americans who do not support Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The Jan. 6 attack was part of a larger pattern of behavior by Trump, his spokespeople and his allies, who for at least five years have used stochastic terrorism to encourage political violence against their perceived enemies, especially nonwhite people, Muslims, Jews and immigrants. 

Of course, Senate Republicans have already made clear they will not convict Donald Trump for his obvious crimes. Today’s Republican Party is a political crime syndicate, and Trump is its leader.

With or without conviction, many questions remain about the events of Jan. 6 and Trump’s larger coup plot. Was it an “inside job” aided by Trump loyalists in strategic positions throughout the government? Why was the Capitol left largely undefended, despite readily available public information and warnings about the imminent danger represented by Trump’s followers? Will the whole truth about Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol ever be known? What, if anything, can be done to de-radicalize Trump’s political cult members and others being recruited into right-wing extremism and terrorism?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Frank Figliuzzi. He was a special agent with the FBI for 25 years and eventually rose to the rank of assistant director, where he led the bureau’s counterintelligence division. His new book is “The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau’s Code of Excellence.”

During our conversation Figliuzzi issued an ominous warning: The U.S. desperately needs a domestic terrorism law to defeat the country’s growing and increasingly violent right-wing insurgency movement. If no such laws are passed, then the attack by Trump’s followers on the Capitol will only be the beginning of a larger wave of right-wing terrorism that may continue for years if not decades.

It has been more than a month since the coup attack on the Capitol several weeks ago. Where is the big press conference such as the one that was held after 9/11?

I asked this question on national TV and I was sorely disappointed with what was announced as being a “DOJ, FBI press conference” which took place several days after Jan. 6. Instead of seeing Acting Attorney General [Jeffrey] Rosen and FBI Director Chris Wray, they sent the head of the Washington FBI field office and the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. My mouth hung open as soon as I saw what was happening. I have the same question you did.

I have some well-founded theories as to what happened. There was a great fear that Donald Trump was going to fire Rosen and Chris Wray. This isn’t about Wray being fearful that he’s going to get fired and then cannot put food on his table. That’s not the worry. The worry is that at a critical time in our nation where Wray was so out of favor with Trump, that if he got up behind the podium and said, “Look, these horrible terrorists are going to prison and we’re going to hunt all of them down,” then there would have been follow-up questions such as, “Do you think they were incited to violence by Donald Trump? Did you have intelligence information on this? Did anybody at the White House tell you that you cannot track down leads?”

And then, if Wray was fired by Trump, the country would have faced the prospect of acting FBI director Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell. Wray was literally trying to survive.

So why are there not regular briefings on the Capitol attack now? This is a sensitive topic. About 30 to 40% of our nation supports Donald Trump, 74 million or more people voted for him. If the FBI is perceived as hunting down people with different opinions or people who supported Trump, it makes life in America even worse than the polarized society we already live in.

The public is receiving updates as to the investigations and arrests. But I also feel that there is a deliberate decision not to put Chris Wray in front of a podium on a regular basis. Not because there is any fear of Trump anymore, but rather because the nation is polarized enough and we do not need FBI agents getting shot when they’re going door to door asking families, relatives, neighbors for information on that guy down the street. FBI agents do not need to be perceived as what Donald Trump wants you to think they are, jackbooted deep-state Nazis.

When you watched the attack on the Capitol, what did you see, given your expertise and background?

One, I was thinking that this is a form of terrorism. It was organized and planned, and our nation is under attack. As a career FBI official and former assistant director, I was at the same time thinking, “What in the hell has happened that we missed that? What happened here?” As I have been saying in my television commentaries and regular columns for MSNBC Daily, the attack on the Capitol was not so much an intelligence failure as it was a failure to act upon available intelligence.

Armchair intelligence analysts sitting at home saw this being developed and planned online about two weeks prior to Jan. 6. There were posts on extremist chat rooms, both private and public sites, about how to overwhelm the Capitol police. There were travel plans and buses where they would stop around the country and pick up team members.

The intelligence was there. We learned that the FBI passed their concerns to the Capitol Police and the entire capital region. Even the New York Police Department intelligence unit passed concerns about violence to the Capitol Police. I also am not satisfied when the FBI says, “Well, we passed our intelligence assessments to everybody.”

There are many questions that remain unanswered. I believe there’s going to be an independent commission that will have to get to the bottom of this. We need answers and I’ve got more questions to ask.

I do not believe the American people and the world will ever know the full truth about what happened with Trump’s coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol. For one thing, Trump and his administration have so eroded transparency and trust in the government that no answers, even if they’re true, will ever be believed.

Consider the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy. It was a national tragedy. And even today, there are people who believe, “Oswald didn’t do it by himself. The Russians did it. There was another shooter on the grassy knoll,” etc., etc. Fast forward to the present and now, more than ever before in our history, there are so many Americans who have fallen for false narratives such as “fake news” and conspiracy theories such as QAnon, a group that thinks the world is actually being run by pedophile cannibals.

We need to start with an independent commission. The allegation that members of Congress may have escorted some of the people, days prior, who would be in the mob that attacked the Capitol makes them ineligible to participate in an impeachment vote. We are going to have a jury of senators hear the impeachment case against Trump, and there are allegations they participated in the insurrection? Excuse me? How does that work? We cannot possibly have them sitting on a commission on the insurrection either.

One of the common observations about the attack on the Capitol has been that if the mob had consisted of Black or brown people, or Muslims or antifascists or any other group identified with “liberals” and “progressives,” the level of force used by law enforcement would have been totally different. The mob would have been annihilated if they were not white Trump supporters. Is that a reasonable conclusion?

It may be even worse than you’re depicting, in that not only would there have been a more aggressive response and police presence, but if they were a different skin color — particularly if they were a different religion — it is likely the attack on the Capitol never would have happened in the first place. The federal law enforcement structure would have been all over this event, and would have been given the freedom to do so. So let’s change the religion of these folks in the mob to Islam. Let’s say that they’re violent jihadists. Now, guess what? First of all, they would have been shot dead and you would have had a counter-assault team ready for them and other resources too. Those who were caught and survived would have faced international terrorism charges. That is a federal charge. It likely would have included giving material support to terrorism and they’d be off to prison for the rest of their life, or even executed.

We have nothing on the domestic terrorism side like that law. And what happens when you have a law is that you are allowed to do things to prevent the law from being broken. If you have ever wondered why we haven’t had a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, it is because the FBI is at war every day with violent Islamic jihadists. The FBI is all over their chatroom communications. They’ve got undercover agents, informants and wiretaps. These people can’t turn around without FBI. What happened at the Capitol would have likely been prevented.

What we also saw with the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a function of radicalization, which is true of international terrorism as well. We have been watching a radicalization process for the last four years under the Trump administration. But we are not doing enough about it because, in part, there is a lack of will or an incapacity to see people that “look like us” as an equal or greater threat than people who do not look like us.

I am a left-leaning civil libertarian. History has taught us hard lessons about how the government has all too often violated the rights of its citizens, especially those deemed to be “radicals” or “subversives.” But I also know that these right-wing extremists and other white supremacists need to be dealt with to the most extreme extent of the law possible. How should we balance these concerns about freedom and security?

I think we are savvy enough in this country to figure it out. Yes, there have been abuses in the past. Absolutely. As recently as 9/11 and the Patriot Act being passed. Congress eventually said to law enforcement, “Are you guys collecting metadata on phone records? Are you collecting everybody’s phone bill that shows the numbers they dialed and the numbers received?” Yes, we are. Congress said, “We don’t like that. Could you stop doing that?” Law enforcement then said, “OK, you don’t like it. We’re just collecting records for future use and it works, but we’ll stop.”

I’m being silent right now on things like designating groups and organizations as being domestic terror groups, like what is done in regard to al-Qaida and Boko Haram and ISIS. I fully understand that a corrupt president — and we just had one with Trump — could say, “I hereby declare antifa a domestic terrorist organization.” Thank God Trump did not have a mechanism to lawfully do that. If he did, his next step would have been to order the FBI to spy on antifa.

The discussion that should be right in front of us as a nation right now is, can we just agree on a federal law that makes it illegal to commit domestic terror? When you rob a bank, we don’t arrest you for trespassing in the bank. We arrest you for something called bank robbery. It’s a crime against the federal government. They insure the money in the bank, and you’re trying to steal their money. On Jan. 6, a bunch of people tried to steal our democracy. What are we arresting them for so far? Trespassing? Theft of Nancy Pelosi’s podium? Even assault on a federal officer, which is very serious — but it is not terrorism. Why not?

In terms of tradecraft, how does law enforcement approach the problem of foreign enemies as compared to domestic terrorism?

There are eerie similarities to the radicalization process that we saw happen internationally. The speed with which a young person can go from a sense of wanting to belong to something other than themselves, that sense of disenfranchisement, and then wanting to find spiritual and religious meaning and being recruited online, watching violent beheading videos and listening to violent inspiring sermons from a cleric and then moving to violent action. The speed with which that happens online now within the world of violent Islam is astounding. One can literally see a 19-year-old kid recruited in about nine days. By that, I mean actually getting the plane ticket to go somewhere and fight.

It is very similar on the domestic side here in the United States with social media. Online activity has played an enormous role and has almost everybody behind the curve. Back to free speech and civil liberties: Look, using social media to call for breaching the Capitol and overwhelming the police is not free speech. That is violence. We saw the same thing happen in international terrorism. A violent beheading video is not free speech.

If the Proud Boys are putting messages out about overwhelming the police, killing the police, invading a state house, putting a bullet in a congresswoman’s head, that is not free speech. We as a country have got to get over that hurdle. We did it pretty quickly on the international terrorism side. We’ve got to do it, carefully, domestically too.

We also need a more holistic, societal response that involves all hands on deck in terms of companies, government and law enforcement, everybody pulling together for a de-radicalization approach. That must happen. That is complicated. You’ve got to deprogram some people who believe Joe Biden didn’t win the election.

There was no follow-up attack on Washington during the inauguration or the days and weeks before and after. This is leading too many people to lower their guard about the threat of domestic terrorism. What do we know about the timeline for planning and executing a domestic terror attack?

Of course, no one’s going to succeed against a militarized target, but what happened a couple of days later in D.C.? “Hey, National Guard, you’re crowding up the hallways. Can you please move outside? By the way, it’s the garage floor. And then let’s talk about moving you along.” The bad guys are just waiting for a softer target. It has been reported that they’re waiting for the time to come when someone’s guard is down and a member of Congress is walking across Capitol Hill, for example. All of this is being discussed right now. If you look at the planning times for things like the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and other events, it takes time. The fact that we hardened the perimeter and succeeded for one day means nothing to these domestic terrorists.

If Trump had been impeached and removed for blackmailing Ukraine or the Russia collusion scandal, there would not have been an attack on the Capitol. How do you think future historians are going to look back on Robert Mueller and his investigation?

I’ve said this before with regard to contrasting Mueller with Attorney General Barr, who of course in his four-page summary that was released before the Mueller report, completely changed the narrative and shaped it into a falsehood. Mueller is a boxer and Barr was a street fighter. By that, I mean Mueller played by the rules, stayed with the mandate. He did not take the risks because a polite gentlemen and lawyer doesn’t go after a president if there’s a memo sitting at the Department of Justice which says, “Hey, you really shouldn’t indict a sitting president.” So, OK, we’ll take written answers from him. We won’t get him in front of a grand jury. In regard to obstruction of justice, I found 10 examples of it — see Volume Two of the report. But I understand Trump can ever get indicted, so what the heck, here they are.

On the Russian side, we indicted two dozen Russians, including 12 Russian intelligence officers. Paul Manafort clearly had a deputy on the campaign who was a Russian intelligence officer. Yeah, well, but there’s no criminal conspiracy.

Here’s how history is going to judge. There was not enough by Mueller and too much playing by rules that he probably needed to break through. It was a disservice to the public not to expose Trump and his connections and crimes for what they were.

Given the lawlessness of the Trump administration, and now this attack on the Capitol, how would you assess the morale level at the FBI right now?

It’s demoralizing, even for former agents like me. It’s like a kick in the stomach. The worst thing that can happen to the FBI is that it’s now perceived as being political or non-objective. In my book “The FBI Way,” I spend considerable time on the question of credibility. The FBI has got nothing if they lose their credibility with the public. When an agent flashes their badge at someone’s door, as they’re doing right now, and says, “I need information, I need your help,” if that citizen pauses for a moment and goes, “Ah, I don’t know. Comey did some weird things and Trump, boy, he bashed them and it’s a deep state. I don’t know if I can trust you people,” then we’ve lost it in terms of the national security mission.     

Given your leadership experience with the FBI, what advice would you give President Biden about the multiple simultaneous crises he is facing?

I would tell him, “Look, I know you’re busy, Joe. If you only read one chapter in my new book, please read the last one on consistency.” And by that, I mean that the FBI operates at an incredibly high degree of excellence when the stakes and stress are at their highest. And boy, do we have stress right now in this country.

The nation needs to do the same thing right now. We are a democratic republic. We have a constitution. We have the rule of law. We have three equal branches of government. We’re going to look at ourselves as the conservators and stewards of our country. And if we do that, and remember that we’ve been through a civil war, Vietnam War protests, presidential assassinations and impeachments, then we can get through this challenge by consistently clinging to our core values.

Trickle down Trumpism: How Pennsylvania’s Republican Party radicalized against democracy

It was very, very chilly in my corner of Pennsylvania the morning of last fall’s election. I live in Northampton County, a swing county in this very large swing state, a county so reflective of America as a whole that it has picked the president on all but three occasions since 1920. It was one of 206 counties out of America’s 3,141 that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 before flipping to Donald Trump in 2016. In 2020 it would once again pick the winner by backing Joe Biden — but I didn’t know that at the time, nor did Trump and many of his supporters. They would go on to act like sore losers on a historic scale and betray our state’s core values in the process.

At least one Trump supporter seemed to be trying to intimidate the waiting voters at my precinct, passing our polling place multiple times in a large truck covered in pro-Trump paraphernalia and blaring music. As it turned out, my precinct went to Biden by a very narrow margin, but more than two-thirds of those who voted in-person supported Trump. In a way, that moment encapsulates Pennsylvania politics. People in this county, part of an eastern region of the commonwealth known as the Lehigh Valley, are generally kind and laid-back folk regardless of their political views. As with the rest of America, however, there is a poisonous undercurrent emanating from the right-wing that is both tragic and dangerous. Sometimes it merely manifests itself in obnoxious boosterism, such as the macho posturing displayed by the driver of that pro-Trump truck. On other occasions, it becomes literally dangerous to democracy, as Americans saw earlier this month when a mob of Trump supporters (some of them Pennsylvanians) was egged on by the president to swarm the Capitol so they could overturn Biden’s victory.

Unfortunately, that toxicity has trickled up, transforming the Pennsylvania Republican Party in the process.

As a recent Politico article noted, a state GOP that only a few decades ago was renowned for producing independent-minded moderates like Sens. Arlen Specter and John Heinz and Govs. William Scranton and Dick Thornburgh has now bent the knee to Trumpism. All but one of the House Republicans in Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation voted to invalidate the commonwealth’s electoral votes, which were won by Biden. They did this even though Trump lost all of the voter fraud-related cases he brought to court (many presided over by Republican judges), lost all but one of the overall legal cases he pursued and was told by his own attorney general, William Barr, that the Department of Justice’s investigation into the election had found Biden’s win to be legitimate. They did this even though Trump had incited a riot on the Capitol — making him the first of America’s 11 incumbent presidents to lose a bid for another term and respond by attempting to stay in power through force — and despite the fact that Trump has undermined his own credibility for years by communicating as far back as 2016 that he only accepts an election’s results if he is declared the winner. They did this even though Trump has not provided a shred of evidence of widespread fraud, much less on a scale necessary to give him a victory, and even though Trump was caught on tape threatening Georgia election officials to “find” the votes he needed to win there.

The Pennsylvania GOP’s cravenness did not begin with their electoral certification vote. In the preceding weeks, Republican state legislative leaders urged Congress to object to Biden’s victory in the Electoral College or somehow “delay” the certification of his votes. One Pennsylvania GOP congressman, Scott Perry, has even aroused controversy for working behind the scenes to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia.

“I’m shocked at Scott,” Rich Grucela, a former Democratic state representative who served from 1999 to 2011 — and thus worked with Perry after the latter joined that body in 2007 — told Salon, recalling that he remembers when Perry first came into the General Assembly. “The Scott Perry that I’m listening to and seeing today is not the Scott Perry that I knew. I don’t understand what happened to Scott, but he’s a totally different person from what I see on the news or what I’ve read in articles.” Although Perry was always conservative, Grucela noted that “he wasn’t — I hate to use the term ‘off the wall,’ but he wasn’t…” He trailed off, sounding deeply disappointed. “I can’t believe he would be one of these guys that is enamored with Trump. I mean, he is a very intelligent guy.”

Grucela, whose daughter was one of my high school classmates, recalled fondly how he used to have close friendships with Republicans as well as Democrats, citing as an example that one of the Republican governors with whom he worked, Mark Schweiker, was “one of the nicest governors I served under.” He told Salon that for roughly the first eight years that he served, the ethos in the state’s Republican Party was very “collegial,” creating an environment in which people could work with each other and keep partisan differences at the office.

“Several Republican friends of mine, I might debate on the House and then afterwards in the evening, have dinner with them and talk about our families,” Grucela told Salon. He noticed a change in Pennsylvania Republican behavior when the Tea Party rose up during Obama’s presidency and began scaring more moderate Republicans with the threat of primary challenges, leading to increasingly intransigent ideological behavior and a reduced willingness to work with Democrats. Grucela drew a direct line between that development and the eventual rise of Trumpism.

Another local Pennsylvania politician, Northampton County Democratic Committee chair Matthew Munsey, told Salon that he noticed people are starting to lose a sense of shared reality since the rise of Trump. (I briefly served as a committee person under Munsey from 2014, two years before Trump’s election, until I was hired as a staff writer at Salon.)

“In general, we’ve really lost a sense of a common belief system,” Munsey explained when contrasting what he has witnessed prior to and after Trump’s rise to power. “It’s almost like people are living in an alternate reality, specifically with Trump supporters.” He said that this phenomenon has not only driven Republicans farther to the right, but also caused some to leave the party.

“We’ve seen some Republicans or former Republicans who have said, ‘I’m voting for the Democrats or I’m switching my party and I’m voting for Democrats from now on,'” Munsey told Salon. “It seems like they have not bought into that alternate reality and that’s probably the big overall shift and difference in things. It’s almost impossible to have coherent discussions with people who don’t even agree with the same basis of reality.”

I encountered this problem when I spoke with Dean Browning, a former Republican congressional candidate and former commissioner in Lehigh County (which is adjacent to Northampton County) whose Twitter account has in the past been the focus of controversy. More than once during our conversation, Browning admitted that there was no evidence that Biden had won Pennsylvania through fraud but insisted that it was still valid for Trump supporters to question the election’s legitimacy because Biden supporters could not prove that ballot harvesting had not occurred, an argument that I repeatedly pointed out is a logical fallacy.

“They’re questioning the legitimacy of this election because of mail-in ballots,” Browning told Salon, repeating the debunked claim that mail-in balloting is unusually susceptible to fraud. (Trump himself praised mail-in balloting in 2000 and cast an absentee ballot in 2020.) “I will absolutely concede that you’re correct that there has there has been no widespread proof of fraud and the reason there is not, or the difficulty with that, I will freely admit it is all but impossible to prove fraud with a mail-in voting system.” He ultimately acknowledged that Biden “is the president of the United States. I fully accept that he was sworn in, and that he is the president of the United States. He’s my president. He is the president for every American citizen.” 

The tragic irony is that, if the Pennsylvania Trumpists were willing to look at the state’s history, they would see that it helped create modern democracy itself.

When William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682, he designed its government to be one of the modern world’s first authentic democracies, particularly emphasizing the importance of religious freedom. He used his Quaker beliefs to create a peaceful colony that stressed individual dignity. Forty years later, a Bostonian named Benjamin Franklin fled to Pennsylvania and declared the colony to be his home after falling in love with its intellectually, socially and culturally liberating atmosphere. Franklin would later go on to become one of America’s most important founding fathers as well as a prolific writer, inventor, activist, scientist and advocate of Enlightenment ideals. Thanks to the legacies of people like Penn and Franklin, historian Henry Adams would later write that “had New England, New York and Virginia been swept out of existence in 1800, democracy could have better spared them all than have lost Pennsylvania.”

Subsequent centuries would prove him correct, as both the Democratic and Republican parties produced Pennsylvanians who distinguished themselves by being on the right side of history. Among the Republicans, you had Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, one of the most eloquent and passionate abolitionists to serve both prior to and after the Civil War, and Gov. Gifford Pinchot, an influential early 20th-century conservationist and close friend to one of America’s most iconic presidents, Theodore Roosevelt. On the Democratic side, you had Rep. David Wilmot, who famously proposed banning slavery from the western lands America conquered during the Mexican-American War and ultimately became a Republican (and a senator) as a result of his opposition to slavery. More than a century later one Democratic governor, Milton Shapp, implemented the nation’s most comprehensive Sunshine Law up to that time in response to the Watergate scandal, and later became the first practicing Jew to run for president in a major party. Roughly a decade later another Democratic governor, Bob Casey, created the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which covered uninsured children throughout the state and would later be used as a model for a federal program.

That isn’t to say there isn’t also a less savory side to Pennsylvania’s history. The noble spirit embodied by the likes of Penn, Franklin, Stevens, Pinchot, Wilmot, Shapp and Casey stands in stark contrast to that of James Buchanan, who until Biden’s victory last year was the only Pennsylvanian ever elected to the presidency. Like Trump, Buchanan’s presidency was dogged by scandals (he narrowly avoided impeachment) and notoriously put itself on the wrong side of history when it came to matters of racial justice, with Buchanan adamantly supporting slavery. (Trump, let us not forget, was elected in no small part due to racist dog-whistling against African Americans and Mexican immigrants, and as the president refused to denounce white supremacists, pushed for bigoted immigration policies and opposed the Black Lives Matter movement.)

Just as notably, Buchanan reacted to his disappointment with an election outcome in a manner not dissimilar from Trump. Although Buchanan was not on the ballot as his first and only term came to a close in 1860, he had made it clear to voters that he did not want to be replaced by the Republican nominee, Abraham Lincoln, because of Lincoln’s opposition to expanding slavery. When Lincoln won anyway, Buchanan refused to work with the incoming Lincoln administration and even tacitly encouraged the South to start the Civil War, saying in his State of the Union message that “the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union.” Although Buchanan never threatened to forcibly keep Lincoln from taking office, which is what Trump did to Biden, his willingness to support a Civil War because he didn’t like it that Lincoln won is analogous to Trump trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election because he didn’t like it that he lost.

So how does one address these issues? How does one reach out to a party that has become less about ideology than about a cult-like worship of a single politician?

First, it is important to remember that the people supporting Trump — while they are extremely wrong for doing so — are not monsters. They are human beings. I was reminded of this not only from my experience on Election Day, when all of the Trump supporters were quite kind to me, but from the words of Pennsylvania State Sen. John Yudichak, who was initially elected as a Democrat but switched to being an Independent in 2019 and began caucusing with Republicans. Despite his decision to leave the Democratic Party, however, Yudichak endorsed Biden in the 2020 election — and told Salon that his GOP colleagues’ response to this “has been as professional and as generous as I could have ever hoped for.”

In a similar vein Munsey also observed that in his experiences trying to reach Trump supporters, he has found it’s often more effective to find common ground on an emotional level than to overwhelm them with facts.

“We need to recognize that facts very rarely persuade people, because if they were open to hearing the facts, they already would have heard them,” Munsey explained. “So me telling the facts that are already out there in what I would describe as unbiased sources is not going to change anybody’s mind. We have to connect on a personal level. We have to talk about our shared values because as humans, we have shared values. We care about our families. We want to make sure that our families and the people that we love are taken care of.”

He added that it is also helpful to respectfully ask questions that “allow other people to examine whether the things they say they value match with what they are supporting politically, and whether the things they’re supporting politically are actually supporting the things that they value.” Munsey pointed out that the key here is to not try to directly persuade people but “by asking the questions and letting them realize in the answers.”

These may not seem like the most promising options, but they are the best ones we have — and they are in keeping with the spirit of Pennsylvania.

Anti-war Democrats applaud Biden for freeze on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia

Peace-loving people around the world and anti-war Democrats in Congress hailed reports Wednesday that the Biden administration is imposing a temporary freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pending a review of billions of dollars worth of weapons deals with the repressive regimes approved during the presidency of Donald Trump.

The Wall Street Journal reports unnamed officials said sales covered by the moratorium include nearly half a billion dollars worth of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia and F-35 fighter jets to the UAE. The latter are part of a $23 billion deal approved by the Trump administration under the Abraham Accords, the peace agreement signed between the repressive Gulf monarchy, Israel, and the United States last August. 

Critics, including CodePink’s Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold, lambasted the deal—which Gold called “peace through weapons sales”—as a thinly-veiled attempt to “give an Arab stamp of approval to Israel’s status quo of land theft, home demolitions, arbitrary extrajudicial killings, apartheid laws, and other abuses of Palestinian rights,” and a bid to boost Trump’s flagging reelection odds. 

More importantly, Saudi Arabia is leading a war against Yemen—fought with U.S. weapons, logistical, and political support—that has killed thousands of civilians in aerial bombardments and tens of thousands more in an economic blockade that has exacerbated famine and intensified human suffering on a mass scale. 

In 2019, the UAE began withdrawing most of its forces from the war against Yemen and handed control of its operations to Saudi Arabia. 

The U.S. has also been bombing Yemen since the early years of the so-called War on Terror, a global campaign that has claimed at least hundreds of thousands of lives in more than half a dozen Muslim countries. 

The United Nations—which has called the situation in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis—last September recommended that the International Criminal Court investigate possible war crimes committed by all sides in the six-year civil war.

Congressional lawmakers opposed to ongoing U.S. involvement in the war applauded Wednesday’s news as a positive development even as they called on the administration and others to go further: 

Despite being one of the world’s worst human rights violators, Saudi Arabia has long enjoyed warm relations with the United States, regardless of the political party of the president in the White House or the balance of power in Congress.

During the previous administration, Trump touted the billions of dollars worth of warplanes, missiles, warships, and other weapons the Saudi regime purchased from U.S. corporations, while reportedly boasting, “I saved his ass” about Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman after the heir to the throne was accused by the CIA and other international intelligence agencies of ordering the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In July 2019, Trump vetoed a bipartisan congressional resolution that would have forced an end to U.S. military funding and involvement in the five-year war. The Senate, then under Republican control, subsequently failed to override the veto.

While the Biden freeze stops far short of ending U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war, it does reflect campaign promises made by the president to halt weapon sales to the Riyadh regime, which he called a “pariah.” 

During his Senate confirmation hearing last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed to “take a hard look” at the Trump-approved sales. 

“We have real concerns [about] the policies that our Saudi partners have pursued,” Blinken said during the hearing, “and accordingly, [Biden] has said we will review the entirety of the relationship to make sure that, as it stands, it is advancing the interests [and is] respectful of the values that we bring to that partnership.”

Blinken added that Biden “has made clear that we will end our support for the military campaign led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, and I think we will work on that in very short order.” 

While peace advocates welcomed news of the arms sale freeze, military-industrial complex executives took a longer-term view.

On Tuesday, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes reportedly told participants in a company earnings call that the planned sale of 7,500 Paveway precision-guided bombs to “a customer in the Middle East [who] we can’t talk about” had been removed from the books in anticipation of the moratorium. 

However, Hayes offered this sanguine prognostication: “Look… peace is not going to break out in the Middle East anytime soon. I think it remains an area where we’ll continue to see solid growth.”