“The Expanse” shows the dangers of treating extremism as a joke

Events depicted in Amazon’s “The Expanse,” which just wrapped its fifth season, take place two centuries in the future when humankind has colonized Mars and cultivated a downtrodden working class in the asteroid belts between Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Apparently no amount of time diminishes the solid charms of a classic joke setup, because early on in the season an Earth admiral attempts to lighten a deposed politician’s dark mood by telling his version of the classic “A, B and C walk into a bar . . .”

This joke stars a Belter, an Earther and a Martian. The Belter orders the finest Martian whiskey from the bartender, and the Martian orders Earther tequila. Both give the same explanation for their choices: “Drinking like my enemy helps me think like my enemy.” Before the admiral can get to the punchline they’re interrupted by urgent business, which turns out to be a warning about an impending disaster enormous in scale.

Six full episodes transpire before the admiral, Felix Delgado (Michale Irby) gets to the punchline. By that point in the season millions have been slaughtered on Earth, Mars and a Belter colony instigated by sadistic Belter extremist Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander), shifting the solar system’s power balance.

The politician, Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) has been restored to power as the acting Secretary-General of the United Nations after her predecessor orders a military strike against the economically devastated Belter outpost Inaros once called home, leading most of his cabinet to resign.

In a moment of calm and candor she asks Delgado to finish the joke, and the admiral complies: “The Earther says, ‘Give me a shot of the finest Belter liquor you have, the best the Belt has to offer.’ The bartender says, ‘Because it helps you think like your enemy?’ And the Earther says, ‘No, because I’m trying to drink less. The best the Belt has to offer is terrible!'”

Neither Delgado nor Avasarala laugh, and in those seconds the Admiral’s flippant twinkle melts. “It used to be funnier,” he flatly offers.

Simple exchanges like this remind viewers why “The Expanse” is consistently underappreciated in the realm of epic dramas. Here we see two people tasked with serving humanity and seeking peace revealing their arrogance and prejudice by way of a derogatory joke; they are leaders and ostensibly diplomats. To use a familiar and loaded 2021 term, they are the “elites.”

But even these supposedly wise leaders are not above ignorant wisecracks about the presumed inferiority of the downtrodden – or, we should say, they didn’t used to be. By the time the joke has stopped being funny the Belt has delivered a wallop to the system that threatens to bring the established order to its knees.

Several times, including very recently, I’ve written about the limited appeal of end-of-the-world dystopias to audiences living in the middle of one, and on the surface it may be tempting to lump “The Expanse” in with other examples of apocalyptic visions. It was never that type of show.

From the beginning “The Expanse” has always extrapolated the probable direction our future would take with an eye on humanity continuing, not ending. In the same ways some hoary, dumb jokes don’t really change, neither does humankind’s greedy nature and its ages-old habit of optimizing civilization’s function to benefit the wealthy and leaving the rest to struggle over scraps. Ever imagine what happens to a society that never quite makes it beyond late capitalism? Watch this show.

And I recommend that you do because “The Expanse” this season served up several disaster movies, a bullet-riddled action thriller and family drama, and it did a spectacular job with each. Each of its 10 episodes is a spectacle that refuses to sacrifice its stunning aesthetics even in the worst of circumstances. This also differentiates “The Expanse” from, say, an endless grind to survive a zombie world or a desperate frozen locomotive.

As terrible as the situation gets for the show’s protagonists, the worlds depicted never look anything less than interesting, and the writing gives us a view into humanity’s shortsightedness in broad strokes and intensely personal ones.

Human greed and perseverance will always be this show’s roiling guts, especially once we know these characters and all they’re capable of, for better or for the absolute worst.

Season 5 breaks free of the show’s habit of viewing the solar system’s intense political machinations, class warfare and economic disparity from the somewhat neutral view of the Rocinante, an independent gunship whose crew consists of Captain James Holden (Steven Strait) and chief engineer Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), who originate from Earth; pilot Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar), a citizen of Mars; and executive officer Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), a Belter.

Spaceship crews that transcend cultural and political strife are a sci-fi mainstay, but the Rocinante’s tight family sticks together because they don’t fully trust any government while maintaining connections to each faction through their individual relationships. They’ve also bonded over their perilously close interactions with the story’s X-factor, a sentient phenomenon known as the protomolecule that can wipe out entire colonies. Through the protomolecule the Roci crew also discovers a network of gates to other parts of the universe, some with inhabitable planets and some containing dead space.

Over the show’s five seasons the Roci has contended with various factions wanting to use the protomolecule for their own benefit, but only recently Holden and his cohorts believed they had banished it from this system. But where there are zealots there must be world-ending weapons for them to steal.

Strangely enough, the protomolecule is not season’s greatest ordeal nor its main strength.

Following a mild restart in the fourth season (the first to stream on Amazon after Syfy dropped the show) showrunner Naren Shankar’s decision to temporarily break up the Roci crew to pursue personal missions refreshes the series yet again. Doing so expanded the development of Tipper’s Naomi and Chatham’s Amos, and enabled the writers to humanize the figures that could have been most easily written off as terrorists.

“The Expanse” cast’s performances are powered with the same level of devotion to profundity that the producers give to getting the details of physics and space travel right. It follows that the series would operate with the same steadiness in its shift from a political saga fueled by struggles over resources into a provocative warning about ignoring so-called fringe actors and their passions.

“The Expanse” isn’t shy about depicting Inaros as a self-serving, dangerous cult leader, to be clear. But through Naomi, who goes in search of the son she has with Inaros, Filip (Jasai Chase-Owens), we are given a tight shot on how easily abusive personalities can radicalize the disillusioned . . . which is entirely relevant at the moment.

Naomi is never seduced by his message but her son is fully indoctrinated, and through both of their stories we come to understand why and how a figure who begins the season as the system’s most wanted man ends it as its most feared. Everything comes back to that punchline and the political arrogance of underestimating a livid underclass. Designate people as a joke for long enough and eventually they’ll make it their mission to turn their oppressors into one.

Amos returns to Baltimore, just in time to coincide with the Inaros faction’s crippling attack. Earth’s dire disarray pushes Amos to use his abilities as a strategist and negotiator instead of relying on brute force, and allows Chatham to spread his dramatic range wider than he has before. He also was part of the underclass. Now he has the Earth’s chief executive on speed dial.

Anvar’s Alex probably received the least amount of expansion next to Strait’s character, but given that most of “The Expanse” makes Holden the center of the story sidelining him in order to beef up Naomi and Amos is excusable.

Alex’s deemphasis may have been in the editing, however; the actor was fired in the wake of multiple sexual misconduct allegations brought against him in the summer of 2020. If you didn’t know that, his sudden death-by-stroke in the finale may have taken you by surprise.

Nevertheless, the Rocinante crew finishes this season as heroes celebrated by Avasarala as the exemplar of what Inaros hates: an assembly of people pitted against one another by the powers that be, now working together for the common good. “All we have to do now is turn Belter, Martian and Earther into this,” she says with a warm smile, adding, “This is how we win.”

Genre fiction teaches us that whenever a character delivers a line like this with pure certainty, evil will surely test it – and right on time Inaros responds in another part of space, setting the table for a sixth and final season that looks like it could be an existential battle pitting a pseudo-democracy against fascism.

Ignoring the real-world parallels that may hit too close to home for some people, the painstaking level of intricacy laced through every corner of “The Expanse” could make the prospect of leaping into this series daunting especially in a time when everyone’s attention span has been taxed beyond belief.

Then again, right now much of the country is blanketed in snow, and many millions more are slumped into the midwinter doldrums. We crave some element of departure from the world’s woe, but prestige habit also dictates that the writing gives us enough realism to hold onto.

“The Expanse” is a journey removed enough from reality to release us from its gravity, but relatable enough to draw us in. If you ever considered taking on the show, it would be tough to come up with a better time than right now.

All five seasons of “The Expanse” are currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Pregnant women pass coronavirus antibodies to placenta, study finds

Last December, when many healthcare workers were excited to receive the first round of COVID-19 vaccines, some pregnant healthcare workers were wary. Then, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published an advisory note stating that the available vaccines “should not be withheld from pregnant individuals.” The group based its advisory on theoretical risks because the definitive ones were unknown; a consequence of pregnant women being excluded from vaccine trials.

As Salon previously reported, the exclusion speaks to a long-lived trend in America’s healthcare system — based on the unsubstantiated fear of harming a fetus — that once again led to a “missed opportunity,” as Dr. Melissa Simon, Director of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at Northwestern’s Center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, explained.

But now, scientists are gaining more information about how COVID-19 affects pregnant women. A new study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics last week adds a new piece to the puzzle.

According to the study, coronavirus antibodies from a mother can cross the placenta. In other words, mothers can pass on some natural immunity to their newborns. Notably, the antibodies that scientists detected in the placenta were immunoglobulin G, or IgG, antibodies. These antibodies are made days after getting infected and are believed to offer some protection against the coronavirus.

Researchers tested more than 1,500 women who gave birth at a Philadelphia hospital between April 2020 and August 2020. Of the 1,500 women, 83 had COVID-19 antibodies. After they gave birth, 72 of those babies had antibodies, which were tested via their cord blood. About 50 percent of those babies had antibody levels that were as high, or higher, than the levels detected in their mother’s blood. About 25 percent of the babies had antibody levels that were nearly twice as high as their mother’s. The researchers suspect more antibodies were transferred in cases when there was more time between the coronavirus infection in the mother and the mother’s delivery.

As the researchers stated, this could affect when a pregnant woman is vaccinated against the novel coronavirus. An earlier inoculation might be better.

“When vaccines are widely available, the optimal timing of maternal vaccination during pregnancy will need to consider maternal and fetal factors including the time needed to ensure neonatal protection,” the researchers stated. “The majority of women in our study who were seropositive [meaning they had detectable antibodies in their blood] were asymptomatic, with uncertain timing of viral exposure.”

There is still more to learn about the correlation between the levels of antibodies in the newborn, and when the mother was infected. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the amount of antibodies passed through the placenta are enough to prevent newborns from getting COVID-19. As for non-pregnant people, how long natural immunity lasts is unknown; the most recent research suggests that it lasts for at least five months.

But most urgently, scientists need to have a better understanding on how and if immunity induced by the vaccines can pass to the placenta; the study focused on natural immunity. Since pregnant women were excluded from coronavirus vaccine trials, scientists still don’t have an answer— something doctors raised concerns about late last year.

“Is the dosing the same? Is the vaccine schedule the same in pregnancy?” said Dr. Stephanie Gaw, PhD, assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Reproductive Sciences. “On the plus side, it might be more beneficial in pregnant women; it could also protect the newborn baby and then you’re vaccinating two people, there are a bunch of positives and negatives that essentially we just don’t know because we’re missing data at this point.”

Dr. Mark Turrentine told the New York Times that this is one reason why including pregnant women in such trials is “essential.”

“Particularly when the benefit of vaccination is greater than the potential risk of a life-threatening disease,” Turrentine said.

“Minari” is an American film about the American dream — why did the Globes categorize it as foreign?

The Golden Globe nominations were announced Wednesday morning and to the disappointment of many cinephiles, A24’s acclaimed fillm “Minari” only received a nod for the Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language Film category, despite being an American film. Its stars — “Walking Dead” star Steven Yeun, Han Ye-Ri and Yuh-jung Youn — were also snubbed in the Best Drama Actor, Best Drama Actress and Best supporting Actress categories.

Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film follows a Korean American family who relocate from California to Arkansas in the 1980s in search of their own American dream. It’s a film made by Americans in the United States and takes place entirely in America, but according to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the voting body behind the Golden Globes, it features too much Korean dialogue to compete for the night’s top Best Picture Drama prize on Feb. 28.

This decision created controversy and a significant amount of backlash that has affected other critically acclaimed films that feature non-English dialogue in the past — though curiously, not all of them. This has led many in the industry to call for an examination of how the HFPA’s rules are applied and, on a larger scale, how American filmgoers and critics categorize “foreignness” in a country that is fundamentally built on the immigrant experience. It’s also a decision that contributes to the dangerous anti-Asian sentiment and rhetoric that has constantly plagued the community, and especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Take a look at “Minari”:

Here’s everything you need to know about HFPA’s decision, industry members’ responses, and what’s next for “Minari.”

Why exactly, according to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, was “Minari” ineligible to compete for the Best Motion Picture – Drama category?

In December, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association completed its annual review of film submissions for the Golden Globe awards and announced that “Minari” would not be eligible to compete in the Best Motion Picture – Drama, category, and would be considered in the foreign language film category instead.

The justification offered at the time, per the Hollywood Reporter, is that HFPA guidelines stipulate that in order for a film to be submitted for the best picture category, the script must be at least 50% in English. “Minari” is predominately a Korean-language film.

Also in the category are the films “Another Round,” “La Llorona,””The Life Ahead” and “Two of Us.”

Why was this a controversial opinion?

“Minari” is very much an American film — one was created, produced and bankrolled by Americans. Lee Isaac Chung, a Denver-born filmmaker, wrote and directed “Minari,” which was financed and distributed by Plan B and A24, two American companies. The film was primarily shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lead actor Steven Yeun immigrated from Korea to America with his family when he was five years old.

When it was announced that “Minari” was being categorized in the foreign language film category, it immediately raised questions with many filmmaker and industry professionals about whether the guidelines were antiquated — especially in a country where 20% of households speak a language other than English — and whether they were applied uniformly.

Korean-American actor Daniel Dae Kim likened the categorization to “the film equivalent of being told to go back to your country when that country is actually America,” a sentiment that was echoed by “Kim’s Convenience” actor Andrew Phung.

“A sad and disappointing reminder that a movie about the American dream, set in America, starring an American, directed by an American, and produced by an American company, is somehow foreign,” he said.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in the Washington Post that “‘Minari is about immigrants who speak Korean, that doesn’t make it ‘foreign.‘”

“If, hypothetically, Steven Spielberg were to make an epic about the Jewish immigrant experience and script much of it in Yiddish, he could probably persuade the HFPA to consider his movie an American story, and rightly so.” he wrote.

As Hollywood Reporter writer Scott Feinberg pointed out, at least two other 21st century films — “Babel” and “Inglourious Basterds,” which, per IMDB, is only 30% in English and therefore fell short of the HFPA non-English dialogue guidelines – yet still won in the Best Picture category. However, both of those films starred Brad Pitt, alongside other white A-list stars.

Has the HFPA made similar categorization decisions in the past?

In 2019, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association opted to categorize “The Farewell” as a contender for best foreign language film, as opposed to best comedy. The film, which stars Awkwafina, centers on a Chinese-American family who return to China under the guise of a fake wedding to stealthily say goodbye to their beloved matriarch – the only person that doesn’t know she only has a few weeks to live.

The film was beloved by critics and viewers alike, but since it was predominately in Mandarin, it was ineligible for the top category — a decision with which director Lulu Wang took issue. On Twitter following the announcement, she wrote: “Can a ‘foreign film’ be in OUR language (i.e. English)? Can a domestic (i.e American) film be in a foreign language? What does it mean to be foreign? And to be American?”

That same year, two other critic favorites — “Parasite” and “Pain & Glory” — did not qualify for the Golden Globe Best Motion Picture – Drama award because they were, respectively, filmed entirely in Korean and Spanish.

What is next for “Minari” and its talent?

There’s long been a precedent of films that were placed in the Foreign Language category at the Golden Globes going on to garner nominations for Best Picture at the Oscars – a far bigger film competition – including: “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Letters from Iwo Jima,” “Amour,” “Roma” and last year’s “Parasite.”

And while the film’s talent — actors, screenwriter and director — were eligible to compete in their respective categories, they weren’t nominated. To many, the exclusion of Yeun felt like the biggest snub. They all will, however, have an opportunity for Academy Awards nominations, which will be announced in March.

Will the Golden Globes ever adjust their rules regarding foreign language films?

The answer to that question is a big “maybe.”

Per The Hollywood Reporter, “studio sources who have frequently dealt with the HFPA suspect that the organization may be open to amending its rules after this season is over,” perhaps even reverting to an old rule that stipulated that “American productions — films with major financing and/or creative elements from the United States — would henceforth not be allowed to compete in the foreign language category in order to save spots for productions without ties to America.”

However, it’s not likely that the Golden Globes will ever adopt the Academy Awards’ position that a film can compete for both best foreign-language film and best picture.

Wednesday’s Golden Globe nominations included some other expected turns, as well. David Fincher’s “Mank,” a drama about screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, earned six Golden Globe Award nominations, the most of any film. “The Trial of the Chicago 7” was close behind with five. In the Musical/Comedy category, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” snagged three nominations, which was trailed by Netflix’s “Prom” with two.

In the television categories, Netflix’s “The Crown” nabbed six nominations, while “Schitt’s Creek” landed five.

There were some welcome surprises, too, like when the HFPA actually nominated female directors — Regina King, Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell — for the first time in seven years. Here is a full list of nominations.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will host the virtual 78th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, Feb. 28. NBC will air the telecast starting at 8 p.m. EST.

As Americans’ views on wellness evolve, Subway is suffering an identity crisis

As many Americans on the East Coast finalized dinner plans on Friday, Subway’s corporate Twitter account posted a photo of a tuna salad sub sandwich decked with verdant spinach leaves and unbelievably plump tomato slices against a black background. The accompanying caption read, “Keep fishing folks, we’ll keep serving 100% wild-caught tuna.”

It was a not-so-subtle subtweet directed at anyone who had come to doubt if Subway’s tuna salad actually contained tuna over the prior week after a lawsuit alleged that the chain’s tuna products were instead “made from a mixture of various concoctions.”

As San Francisco Chronicle reporter Soleil Ho wrote, the lawsuit itself was kind of a non-story. The plaintiffs, Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin, and their attorney repeatedly declined to specify what was found in an analysis of the tuna salad.

“Surely, if the results were something outrageous, disclosing that fact would be a public relations coup — and a potential boon to public safety — ensuring mass enlistment in a class-action suit and headlines for months,” Ho wrote. “But the vagueness of the allegations so far leads only to questions and a confusing deductive trail.”

Yet the damage was done. Multiple headlines ran positioning the idea that Subway’s tuna was some mystery substance as fact, which were shared eagerly and obviously without further examination by social media users.

This led to a a kind of virtual replay of some of the chain’s worst public relations nightmares from the past few years. There was the viral assertion from the blogger known as Food Babe that Subway bread contained a “yoga mat chemical.” (The chemical, azodicarbonamide, is a bleaching agent commonly used in flour and dough conditioner in North America, in addition to being found in synthetic leather.) Then, there was the story that Subway’s bread contained too much sugar to be classified as bread in Ireland. Plus, the claims that the chain’s chicken was actually “half soy” — a statistic which Subway leadership said came from a “stunningly flawed test.”

All of these allegations were met with a mix of disgusted shock and schadenfreude from social media users — kind of like, “I wish I was surprised, but at least I don’t eat there much.” Perhaps underlying the viral response were concerns about the unknowns inherent to an amorphous food supply chain or an unspoken responsibility to hold corporate entities to account.

But I think this story is simultaneously way more simple and way more complex: As Americans’ definitions of wellness have consistently evolved over the last 20 years — at a pace that was only hastened by the advent of social media — Subway largely stayed the same. Now, the company is in the throes of an identity crisis — and the hits just keep coming.

***

Aspiring doctor Fred DeLuca launched Subway under the name Pete’s Super Submarines in the summer of 1965 in Bridgeport, Conn. The franchise model took off in 1974, and Subway was opening 50 new shops a week by 2013.

By the mid-2000s, Subway positioned itself as a healthy but affordable alternative to fast food (despite the fact that its footlong Chicken Bacon Ranch Sub contains approximately 1,220 calories, or the equivalent of almost five McDonald’s hamburgers). It partnered with the NBC reality show “The Biggest Loser,” which wove segments into the series showing trainers Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper walking contestants through what to order at the Subway counter: whole wheat bread, lean protein like chicken or turkey breast, a pile of greens and vegetables and condiments like mustard instead of mayonnaise.

They also brought on Jared Fogle, who incorporated Subway sandwiches into his diet for weight loss, to serve as “the Subway guy.” Fogle was later dropped as a spokesperson for the brand after he pleaded guilty to possession or distribution of child pornography and traveling across state lines to have commercial sex with a minor.

While employed by Subway, Fogle would pose with his old, oversized pair of jeans in locations across the country. He would also make guest appearances on “The Biggest Loser” alongside contestants, touting the importance of a healthy diet (read as: Subway sandwiches) for maintaining weight loss.

But then came the explosion of fast-casual dining, featuring restaurants like Baja Fresh Mexican Grill, Chipotle, Shake Shack and Sweetgreen. When it came to adapting to wellness trends, these rivals seemed more nimble than Subway, which is still classified as a QSR, or “quick service restaurant” (the industry-preferred term for “fast food).

Restaurants have had to contend with simultaneous increased interest in both ketogenic and plant-based diets, as well the fetishzation of “superfoods” like acai berries, kale and quinoa. Above all, customers want their meals to be “clean.” (Panera ran an entire ad campaign predicated on the concept.) According to a 2015 survey from the market research firm The Hartman Group, “65 percent of customers are looking for food and beverages with ingredients they recognize.”

While Subway has tried to keep up with the times by launching products like hummus and offering its signature sandwiches as salads, sans roll, allegations — even unfounded ones — of mystery chicken and “yoga mat bread” don’t fit the current formula for wellness.

***

One day after Subway had tweeted about its tuna, “Saturday Night Live” ran a sketch about the chain. But it wasn’t about Subway’s tuna — it was about its freshly-launched protein bowls, a real product that basically looks like a footlong sub’s worth of toppings crammed into a bowl. The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner joked on Twitter, “Mazel tov to Subway for inventing the antipasto salad.”

In the sketch, Beck Bennett and John Krasinski play Dino and Rocky, a couple of old Subway corporate ad men who are shocked when the new kid (Andrew Dismukes) unveils the protein bowl concept.

“So, is this like a fetish I don’t know about?” Dino asks. “You get off on watching people eat a bowl of ham?”

Bowls are another wellness trend that fast-casual and fast food restaurants have turned to over the last year. Chipotle has a burrito bowl (now with Shawn Mendes-approved cauliflower rice), Panera has a Baja grain bowl with chicken and Taco Bell has a “power bowl. Subway’s timing isn’t wrong, but its execution isn’t quite right.

Subway hasn’t been at the forefront of American wellness trends for a while now, and in a restaurant culture where many diners want even their fast-food virtuous, it’s unclear how it can adapt the old make-your-own-sandwich formula for today’s customer.

You can watch the full clip below via YouTube:

It turns out fried food is even worse for your heart than you thought

A bucket of fried chicken from your local restaurant. A deep fried egg sandwich by a nearby bistro. Fried tomatoes cooked up with your parents’ special recipe. There’s no question that Americans absolutely love their fried foods; indeed, we consumed over 10 million metric tons of soybean oil, the most-used of the cooking oils, in 2019 alone.

Yet all that oil comes at a price to our bodies. A new study published in the medical journal Heart found that those who regularly eat fried foods are 28 percent more likely to experience a major cardiovascular problem, like a heart attack or a stroke.

The article analyzed 17 studies taken over a period of more than nine years that involved roughly a half-million adults, keeping track of how their consumption of fried foods correlated to whether they developed cardiovascular diseases like infarctions (heart attacks), strokes, high blood pressure and diabetes. It specifically found that, for every extra weekly serving of a half-cup of fried foods, one’s chances of developing a major cardiovascular event increased by three percent. It also found that such an increase raised one’s chances of coronary heart disease by two percent and of heart failure by 12 percent.

As the authors put it, “Fried-food consumption may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease” but they added that “the high heterogeneity and potential recall and misclassification biases for fried-food consumption from the original studies should be considered.”

The researchers noted a number of limitations in their article including the fact that participants had to rely on their own memories, the fact that several of the studies they cited only examined one type of fried food (for instance, potato chips) and the fact that they are not certain about how specifically fried foods damage the body’s cardiovascular system in such a way that increases the likelihood of disease.

There are deep neurological and biological reasons that humans find fried foods so appealing. Writing for Salon in 2011, journalist Anneli Rufus explained that comfort foods like fried foods are popular because of “a complex interplay of memory, history and brain chemistry,” adding that “while some basics apply — most of us are soothed by the soft, sweet, smooth, salty and unctuous — the specifics are highly personal.” She added that “when you begin to eat, your eyes, hands and mouth start the chain of command. Then the brain kicks in. Sugar and starch spur serotonin, a neurotransmitter known to increase a sense of well-being. (It’s what makes Prozac work.) Salty foods spur oxytocin, aka the “cuddle chemical,” a hormone that is also spiked by hugs and orgasm. Hence, potato chips.”

A mutant strain of the coronavirus may be able to evade vaccines — but you should get yours anyway

Several mutant strains of the novel coronavirus have evolved a new trait that could allow them to effectively evade vaccines, according to a new report. But fear not: Experts tell Salon that this will not change the public health strategy, meaning mass vaccination, all that much.

The variant, which was first identified in the United Kingdom last year and was dubbed B.1.1.7, has spread around the world and is more transmissible than other versions of SARS-CoV-2. British state documents reported by Live Science revealed that, out of approximately 214,000 samples which were genetically sequenced, 11 of them had developed a further mutation known as E484K. This mutation, when discovered in a South African mutated strain of the virus known as B.1.351, seemed to correlate with certain COVID-19 vaccines becoming less effective in that country. Scientists are concerned that the E484K mutation could make it more difficult for the immune system to produce the antibodies necessary to subdue the virus before it can enter human cells.

At the same time, the presence of the E484K mutation on the British strain of the virus does not automatically mean it will be able to evade vaccines. Just as different breeds of dogs can contain a wide variety of characteristics despite belonging to the same species, so too can different versions of the same virus effect the body in a wide spectrum of ways depending on their exact genetic composition.

Hence, experts say that even if this strain is able to periodically evade vaccines, that is all the more reason to get vaccinated, as the medications will still protect many people and help humanity build up herd immunity.

And although the new variant strains might be slightly more resistant to existing vaccines, the existing vaccines “still provide important levels of protection,” Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon by email. Sommer said that he suspected that vaccine-makers would start modifying their vaccines to “better match” the new strains, but probably only on a “periodic basis.”

Sommer emphasized that the licensed vaccines have all been 95% effective against the strains circulating in the United States, a number that he called “remarkable.” “Even 75% effectiveness (or even less) against the UK strain is important to protect individuals and reduce circulation of the virus in our communities,” Sommer noted.

His views were echoed by Dr. Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“I think they should see this as us possibly moving into a flu-like world, where we will have to update the vaccine and revaccinate folks against SARS-CoV-2 regularly,” Lessler wrote to Salon. “Even if the virus is starting to evade it, the vaccine will still offer some protection and likely lessen the severity of any infection (just like the flu vaccine when there is immune escape). So people should definitely be still planning to get their shot as soon as they are eligible.”

Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, also pointed out to Salon that “if the need arises, the mRNA vaccine technology used for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines enables for the rapid development of new vaccine boosters that can specifically target these viral mutants.”

These mRNA vaccines are unique because, while traditional vaccines use weakened or dead versions of a pathogen (disease-causing agent) in order to train the immune system to fight it, mRNA vaccines use a different approach. They create synthetic RNA, or a single-stranded RNA molecule that complements one of the DNA strands in a gene, and inject that into the body so that cells can produce proteins like those in a virus on their own and learn to fight a given disease based on recognizing those proteins.

That is why, as Medford told Salon, he is “concerned” about the data on vaccine effectiveness against the E848K mutation.

Yet all the alarming news about E848K doesn’t change the basic plan for fighting COVID-19. As Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and former secretary of health in Maryland, explained to Salon by email: “We should get vaccinated as quickly as possible. Viruses can only mutate if they can replicate. So getting vaccinated and following the public health measures that prevent infection is the best way to extinguish the infection.”

Lauren Boebert calls for probe of Trump — for moving Space Command to Mo Brooks’ district

A last-minute Trump administration decision to relocate a major Air Force command office to Alabama may bear marks of a favor to Republican Rep. Mo Brooks, who shilled for the former president’s election lies and played a role in the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The full Colorado congressional delegation, including GOP freshman outsider Rep. Lauren Boebert, has called on the Biden administration to investigate “significant evidence” of unspecified political influence behind the decision.

“Significant evidence exists that the process was neither fair nor impartial and that President Trump’s political considerations influenced the final decision,” the nine lawmakers wrote in a Jan. 26 letter, led by Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. The letter criticizes an unusual decision process conducted after the Pentagon had previously selected Colorado’s Peterson Air Force Base in 2019, which former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper declared “unfair.”

The delegation asked Biden to “pause all actions” before an inquiry is settled.

The dispute centers on which state will host the new permanent headquarters of Space Command. For months, it appeared to be a foregone conclusion that the call would go to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, which is already home to SPACECOM’s current temporary base. But with just a week remaining in former President Trump’s term, the administration announced that SPACECOM would be relocated to Huntsville, Alabama.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers told Colorado Public Radio that his city had offered $130 million in incentives to make the station permanent: “It is not in the interest of national security and the American taxpayer to move Space Command.”

Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn also demanded an investigation, saying in letter to Biden last Wednesday that “this last-minute decision” to award Alabama a “political trophy” was based “entirely on political expediency [and] will devastate our space capabilities.”

Bennet, the Colorado senator who was briefly a 2020 presidential candidate, told Salon in a statement, “Politics has no role when it comes to our national security. Colorado is the only home for U.S. Space Command –– we have the assets, infrastructure, personnel, and ecosystem to support the mission. I will do everything in my power to keep U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs.”

On Dec. 18, Boebert, fresh off her election win but not yet officially seated in the House, signed on to a letter with more than 600 officials and business and community leaders urging the Trump administration to keep the command in her home state. Her name apparently did not sway the former president, who had repeatedly emphasized his support for her candidacy.

Rumors have swirled that Mo Brooks, who represents Huntsville and celebrated Trump’s decision, claimed to have “cut a deal” with the outgoing president, but local reports have repeatedly questioned that account. However, a series of events, as well as personal connections, suggest that Brooks may indeed have been secretly working the White House.

Brooks had for months demonstrated his loyalty to Trump by pushing the then-president’s lies about the election results, and has been implicated in the events surrounding the Jan. 6 rally-cum-riot, including by one of the organizers. (A number of his Democratic colleagues have demanded Brooks’ removal, and an outside GOP group has called on him to resign.) Salon reported last week that after the Capitol attack, longtime Brooks donor and politically-connected Huntsville trial lawyer Mark McDaniel signed on to represent the family of one of the rioters who died in the siege. One of Trump’s final acts as president was to name McDaniel to a federal board, which Brooks announced on Jan. 18, five days after the Space Command decision.

McDaniel, coincidentally, has over the years advised several Alabama congressmen on space policy, and has twice been appointed to a federal NASA advisory board, where he is still a member, according to NASA’s website. The veteran attorney and GOP donor also gave more than the legal limit to the Brooks campaign last year, even though the Republican incumbent ran unopposed in his deep-red district. Brooks reported refunding that overage on Dec. 2, but just two weeks later McDaniel maxed out to the Alabama conservative’s 2022 campaign with a $5,600 contribution on Dec. 17 — one of two donors that month, nearly a full two years before Brooks is again on the ballot.

The day before McDaniel made that donation, he publicly defended Brooks’ right to challenge the election results. “Not only does Congressman Brooks have a right to do it, he has a duty to do it. If he feels there is a problem with the election, then he should raise objections to it,” he told Huntsville’s News19. “And I know there will be a number of other members of the House of Representatives that will probably go along with Congressman Brooks on this.”

Brooks sits on two House committees, both of which have oversight related to Space Command: Armed Services and Science, Space and Technology, where he is a member of the Space subcommittee. He has held seats on defense and space-related committees since his first congressional term in 2011, and his campaign finance disclosures show a number of defense contractors among his top donors.

John Henderson, assistant secretary of the Air Force for installations, environment and energy, told Politico that Trump weighed in, but did not “pressure” the military’s final decision, which was made in consultation with senior military officials and defense congressional committees — which clearly included Brooks.

The Air Force appraised several cities in its search for the new SPACECOM base, and in announcing the decision said that Huntsville made top marks in “factors related to mission, infrastructure capacity, community support, and costs to the Department of Defense.”

“Huntsville compared favorably across more of these factors than any other community, providing a large, qualified workforce, quality schools, superior infrastructure capacity, and low initial and recurring costs,” the Air Force said, adding: “Redstone Arsenal offered a facility to support the headquarters, at no cost, while the permanent facility is being constructed.” A number of defense-related companies have operations in Huntsville, which is nicknamed “Rocket City” for its involvement with NASA.

The new command will function like other armed services command units, such as Central Command or Cyber Command. It is not the same as the new Space Force branch, which will train and equip troops, but it will provide instruction on space-related operations.

Brooks and the Air Force did not immediately reply to Salon’s request for comment.

Can the U.S. keep COVID variants in check? Here’s what it takes

The covid-19 variants that have emerged in the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa and now Southern California are eliciting two notably distinct responses from U.S. public health officials.

First, broad concern. A variant that wreaked havoc in the U.K., leading to a spike in cases and hospitalizations, is surfacing in a growing number of places in the U.S. This week, another worrisome variant seen in Brazil surfaced in Minnesota. And on Thursday, two cases of the South African variant were confirmed in South Carolina. If these or other strains significantly change the way the virus transmits and attacks the body, as scientists fear they might, they could cause yet another prolonged surge in illness and death in the U.S., even as cases have begun to plateau and vaccines are rolling out.

On the other hand, variants aren’t novel or even uncommon in viral illnesses. The viruses that trigger common colds and flus regularly evolve. Even if a mutated strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid, makes it more contagious or makes people sicker, the basic public health response stays the same: Monitor the virus, and any mutations, as it moves across communities. Use masking, testing, physical distancing and quarantine to contain the spread.

The problem is that the U.S. has struggled with every step of its public health response in its first year of battle against covid-19. And that raises the question of whether the nation will devote the attention and resources needed to outflank the virus as it evolves.

Researchers are quick to stress that a coronavirus mutation in itself is no cause for alarm. In the course of making millions and billions of copies as part of the infection process, small changes to a virus’s genome happen all the time as a function of evolutionary biology.

“The word ‘variant’ and the word ‘mutation’ have these scary connotations, and they aren’t necessarily scary,” said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs for the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

When a mutation rings public health alarms, it’s typically because it has combined with other mutations and, collectively, changed how the virus behaves. At that point, it may be named a variant. A variant can make a virus spread faster, or more easily jump between species. It can make a virus more successful at making people sicker, or change how our immune systems respond.

SARS-CoV-2 has been mutating for as long as we’ve known about it; mutations were identified by scientists throughout 2020. Though relevant scientifically — mutations can actually be helpful, acting like a fingerprint that allows scientists to track a virus’s spread — the identified strains mostly carried little concern for public health.

Then came the end of the year, when several variants began drawing scrutiny. One of the most concerning, first detected in the United Kingdom, appears to make the virus more transmissible. Emerging evidence suggests it also could be deadlier, though scientists are still debating that.

We know more about the U.K. variant than others not because it’s necessarily worse, but because the British have one of the best virus surveillance programs in the world, said William Hanage, an epidemiologist and a professor at Harvard University.

By contrast, the U.S. has one of the weakest genomic surveillance programs of any rich country, Hanage said. “As it is, people like me cobble together partnerships with places and try and beg them” for samples, he said on a recent call with reporters.

Other variant strains were identified in South Africa and Brazil, and they share some mutations with the U.K. variant. That those changes evolved independently in several parts of the world suggests they might present an evolutionary advantage for the virus. Yet another strain was recently identified in Southern California and flagged due to its increasing presence in hard-hit cities like Los Angeles.

The Southern California strain was detected because a team of researchers at Cedars-Sinai, a hospital and research center in Los Angeles, has unfettered access to patient samples. They were able to see that the strain made up a growing share of cases at the hospital in recent weeks, as well as among the limited number of other samples haphazardly collected at a network of labs in the region.

Not only does the U.S. do less genomic sequencing than most wealthy countries, but it also does its surveillance by happenstance. That means it takes longer to detect new strains and draw conclusions about them. It’s not yet clear, for example, whether that Southern California strain was truly worthy of a press release.

Vast swaths of America’s privatized and decentralized system of health care aren’t set up to send samples to public health or academic labs. “I’m more concerned about the systems to detect variants than I am these particular variants,” said Mark Pandori, director of Nevada’s public health laboratory and an associate professor at the University of Nevada-Reno School of Medicine.

Limited genomic surveillance of viruses is yet another side effect of a fragmented and underfunded public health system that’s struggled to test, track contacts and get covid under control throughout the pandemic, Wroblewski said.

The nation’s public health infrastructure, generally funded on a disease-by-disease basis, has decent systems set up to sequence flu, foodborne illnesses and tuberculosis, but there has been no national strategy on covid. “To look for variants, it needs to be a national picture if it’s going to be done well,” Wroblewski said.

Last week, the Biden administration outlined a strategy for a national response to covid, which included expanded surveillance for variants.

So far, vaccines for covid appear to protect against the known variants. Moderna has said its vaccine is effective against the U.K. and South African strains, though it yields fewer antibodies in the face of the latter. The company is working to develop a revised dose of the vaccine that could be added to the current two-shot regimen as a precaution.

But a lot of damage can be done in the time it will take to roll out the current vaccine, let alone an update.

Even with limited sampling, the U.K. variant has been detected in more than two dozen U.S. states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned it could be the predominant strain in the U.S. by March. When it took off in the United Kingdom at the end of last year, it caused a swell in cases, overwhelmed hospitals and led to a holiday lockdown. Whether the U.S. faces the same fate could depend on which strains it is competing against, and how the public behaves in the weeks ahead.

Already risky interactions among people could, on average, get a little riskier. Many researchers are calling for better masks and better indoor ventilation. But any updates on recommendations likely would play at the margins. Even if variants spread more easily, the same recommendations public health experts have been espousing for months — masking, physical distancing and limiting time indoors with others — will be the best way to ward them off, said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a physician and professor at the University of California-San Francisco.

“It’s very unsexy what the solutions are,” Bibbins-Domingo said. “But we need everyone to do them.”

That doesn’t make the task simple. Masking remains controversial in many states, and the public’s patience for maintaining physical distance has worn thin.

Adding to the concerns: Though case numbers have stabilized in many parts of the U.S. in recent weeks, they have stabilized at rates many times what they were during previous periods in the pandemic or in other parts of the world. Having all that virus in so many bodies creates more opportunities for new mutations and new variants to emerge.

“If we keep letting this thing sneak around, it’s going to get around all the measures we take against it, and that’s the worst possible thing,” said Nevada’s Pandori.

Compared with less virulent strains, a more contagious variant likely will require that more people be vaccinated before a community can see the benefits of widespread immunity. It’s a bleak outlook for a nation already falling behind in the race to vaccinate enough people to bring the pandemic under control.

“When your best solution is to ask people to do the things that they don’t like to do anyway, that’s very scary,” said Bibbins-Domingo.

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

The latest Trump EPA rule to get tossed? The “secret science” ban

Former President Donald Trump will forever leave his mark on the federal government, but some of his administration’s rules aren’t standing the test of time. President Biden wants to reconsider and possibly scrap more than 100 anti-environmental actions his predecessor took during his term, including Trump’s efforts to weaken protections for migratory birds and gray wolves and loosen regulations on pesticides, oil and gas drilling, and appliances. That could take years, but the process has already begun. And Biden is getting an assist from courts.

On January 19, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Trump’s rollback of emissions regulations for coal-fired power plants, ruling that Trump’s rule replacing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan “hinged on a fundamental misconstruction” of the Clean Air Act. Last Friday, a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court found that parts of Trump’s rollback of ozone pollution laws were illegal. The judges found that elements of Trump’s policy “contravene the statute’s unambiguous language,” and “rests on an unreasonable interpretation of the statute.”

On Monday, a federal court in Montana dealt another blow to Trump’s industry-friendly environmental legacy. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris, an Obama appointee who was a thorn in Trump’s side for much of his presidency, vacated the Trump administration’s so-called “secret science” rule that limited the kinds of studies the Environmental Protection Agency could use to craft its policy.

The rule, which was finalized just two weeks before Biden took office, would have required researchers to disclose the underlying data from their health studies, like medical records, before the government could use the studies’ conclusions as evidence in its rulemaking. Researchers typically do not disclose this data in order to protect the privacy of their human subjects. Many health studies rely on anonymized health data, and federal agencies have been using their findings to inform policy for decades.

“By shining light on the science we use in decisions, we are helping to restore trust in government,” former EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in January.

Environment groups didn’t agree. Last month, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Montana Environmental Information Center, and Citizens for Clean Energy challenged the rule in court, arguing that the Trump administration misclassified the rule in its rush to finalize it before Trump left office. Morris sided with the environmental groups and said that Trump’s EPA had acted out of order by issuing the rule as though it were procedural rather than substantive. It’s now up to Biden’s EPA to reconsider the rule.

“The ‘censored science’ rule was one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. “Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched.”

Accused Capitol rioter asks judge to let her take pre-planned vacation to Mexico

On Tuesday, Business Insider reported that a businesswoman in Midland, Texas who allegedly participated in the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol is asking a federal judge to allow her to take a pre-planned vacation to Mexico while awaiting trial.

“Jenny Cudd’s lawyers asked the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday to approve Cudd’s request to travel outside of the country,” reported Sinéad Baker. “The motion, seen by Insider, says Cudd ‘planned and prepaid for a weekend retreat with her employees for the dates of February 18 through February 21, 2021, in Riviera Maya, Mexico.'” The motion added that, “This is a work-related bonding retreat for employees and their spouses.”

Cudd, a former candidate for mayor of Midland who owns a flower shop, was arrested by the FBI after security footage showed her in the crowd that stormed the Capitol.

“We did break down the Nancy Pelosi’s office door and somebody stole her gavel and took a picture sitting in the chair flipping off the camera,” she bragged to her friends in a Facebook video. “F*ck yes, I am proud of my actions. I f*cking charged the Capitol today with patriots today. Hell, yes I am proud of my actions.”

Dozens of Capitol rioters now face state and federal charges, including some affiliated with far-right paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.

Mitch McConnell isn’t fooling anyone — Marjorie Taylor Greene is the true face of the modern GOP

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-loving construction heiress who recently won a deep-red congressional seat in Georgia, is getting quite a bit of attention for her nutty, violent, and racist views that she has long enjoyed sharing freely on social media. There is no doubt that she’s a doozy, from her 2019 video demanding that her followers “flood the Capitol” and use violence “if we have to” to her 2018 Facebook post blaming wildfires on Jews with space lasers. Democrats in Congress have been making hay over Greene’s committee assignments, using the presence of someone who stalked a school shooting survivor on the House Education and Labor Committee to embarrass House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and highlight the way that extremism has been mainstreamed in the GOP.

The whole situation is apparently too much for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who started to insult Greene in public on Monday, in a belated bid to suggest that the QAnon faction is more fringe in the Republican Party than it actually is. “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country,” McConnell groused in a statement that did not name Greene explicitly.* Sen. Todd C. Young of Indiana, a close colleague of McConnell’s, picked up the baton on Tuesday, calling Greene “nutty” and “an embarrassment to our party.”

It’s tempting to be comforted by these words and to imagine that powerful Republicans are drawing a line in the sand when it comes to how far the party will go in catering to the extremist element. In reality, however, it’s just a feint to make McConnell appear to be a reasonable person while he continues to empower and support the fascistic faction of the GOP. This is about looking good to the cable news pundits while not doing anything substantive that would actually curtail the power of the Trumpist right.

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“[E]verything Greene has said, done and endorsed has been similarly said, done and endorsed by Donald Trump,” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted, arguing that Greene is a “scape goat some Republicans are trying to push off the cliff to expiate the sins of Donald Trump, who they can never cross.”

As usual, this is a situation where it’s more useful to look at what Republican leadership does, rather than what they say.

What Republicans are planning to do is let Trump off the hook for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. Ninety percent of Senate Republicans voted against even holding a trial for Trump, using nonsense procedural objections, because they know full well that he’s guilty and can’t be defended on the merits.

There is no wiggle room here: Acquitting Trump is endorsing his insurrection. Trump himself made that clear by getting rid of a legal team that expressed queasiness about centering his lies about a “stolen” election. His new lawyers are more willing to make Trump’s false claims about election fraud part of their defense.

Senate Republicans want to have it both ways. They want to encourage and benefit the kinds of conspiracy theorists that stormed the Capitol, because they think pandering to these people — and coddling their “god-emperor” Trump — is the way to win elections. But they also don’t want to look like a bunch of loons and fascists, wanting to present themselves as eminent statesmen on the Sunday shows. That’s why Senate Republicans are flipping out over the very idea that the House impeachment managers might bring forward actual evidence in Trump’s impeachment trial next week. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was so freaked out at the idea of hearing testimony from victims of the Capitol riot that he made a bunch of impotent and incoherent threats that he would retaliate by having “the FBI to come in” to talk about “the security footprint at the Capitol.” (Not sure why this would bother Democrats, who have also criticized Capitol security and even forced the Capitol Police chief to resign.)

It’s no mystery why Graham and other Republicans don’t want Democrats airing live testimony from Capitol officers and congressional staff who were assaulted and terrorized by rabid Trump fans attempting to overturn an election. The severity of the injuries and the trauma will underscore how truly depraved it is of Senate Republicans to acquit Trump of his crime.

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Greene makes an easy scapegoat for Republicans. For one thing, she’s a woman, and it’s always easier to make a spectacle of women in power than it is to do the same to men. Note that McConnell and his buddies aren’t targeting Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, even though he was filmed cheering on the insurrectionists at the Capitol, or Rep. Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina, who keeps doing uncomfortably Nazi-friendly stuff.

For another thing, Greene relishes the attention, dramatically playing the victim of “career politicians” who “murdered babies with your tax dollars.” Few, if any, people have ever been so excited and eager to step into the role of the bug-eyed lunatic here to make the rest of the caucus seem saner by comparison.

But it’s all a charade.

Even if Republicans toss Greene on her duff, the larger problem — that the party is catering to a radical minority who supports the insurrection and has soured on democracy itself — remains in place. We know this because Republicans are doing everything they can to shield Trump from the consequences of inciting an insurrection. If Republicans really wanted to clean house, they’d start by convicting Trump and barring him from running for president again. Their unwillingness to do this shows that the GOP really is the party of QAnon now, regardless of what happens to their most obnoxious new congresswoman.

*Correction: Salon incorrectly reported that McConnell’s statement explicitly named Taylor Greene. McConnell did not mention Greene by name in his statement and this column has been corrected to reflect that.

Lloyd Austin removes hundreds of Pentagon advisory board members to purge last-minute Trump picks

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered hundreds of Pentagon advisory board members to resign in a move aimed at removing Trump loyalists who were added to the boards in the final weeks of his presidency.

Austin removed all members serving on 31 of the Pentagon’s advisory boards and suspended the operations of all 42 boards amid a Pentagon review, according to a Defense Department memo first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Austin’s purge of the Pentagon’s 42 advisory boards, which advise the secretary on various areas of their expertise, came after former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller removed dozens of board members and replaced them with Trump loyalists like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former acting Pentagon official Anthony Tata, a onetime Fox News pundit whose nomination to serve in the third-ranking Defense Department post had been rejected by the Republican-led Senate over Tata’s tweets disparaging Islam and suggesting that former President Barack Obama was a “terrorist leader.”

Four Trump appointees named to a board tasked with renaming Confederate-named military bases will also be removed, including Trump’s former Pentagon liaison Joshua Whitehouse, who oversaw the purge of the advisory boards, according to Politico.

“I am directing the immediate suspension of all advisory committee operations until the review is completed unless otherwise directed by myself or the deputy secretary of defense,” Austin said in the memo, ordering all members appointed by the defense secretary to resign by Feb. 16.

The 42 boards have more than 600 members. Defense officials said it’s unclear how many were asked to resign but the number “will be in the hundreds,” according to the Associated Press. Those previously dismissed from the advisory boards by Miller included former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and former Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif.

Austin removed all members of the 31 boards because he felt “this was the most fair, most equitable way” to address questions about their membership, a defense official told the Journal. Austin was “deeply concerned” by the “frenetic activity” of sudden firings and new appointments in Trump’s final weeks, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told CNN.

“The Secretary was deeply concerned with the pace and the extent of recent changes to memberships of department advisory committees and this review will allow him now to quickly get his arms around the purpose of these boards and to make sure the advisory committees are in fact providing the best possible advice to department leadership,” Kirby said.

Austin last week suspended the onboarding process for new advisory board picks, which included former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former deputy campaign manager David Bossie, who led Trump’s legal challenges to the election. Kash Patel, a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who served as Miller’s chief of staff and was accused of blocking Pentagon officials from assisting the presidential transition, said his appointment said was blocked as well, according to Politico. The move blocked the appointees from receiving security clearances and being added to the boards.

These new moves do not apply to Trump allies who were selected to the boards of visitors at U.S. military academies, which include former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer and former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought. The boards of visitors are appointed by the president and Austin has no authority to remove them, but they will also be subject to review.

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a frequent critic of Trump, said on Twitter that Austin’s move “brings honor back to the DOD civilian leadership.” The left-leaning veterans’ group VoteVets also praised Austin for “taking the proper actions to eradicate those remnants of Trump from the Pentagon.”

“Not only were most of Trump’s appointees ill-qualified political cronies, but these boards were stale relics,” tweeted Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who sponsored the bill to remove Confederate names from military bases. “I hope Austin breathes new life into these boards by appointing a truly diverse group of people.”

Why do Democrats still support the Prayer Breakfast after its leaders backed Trump’s election lies?

Will President Biden and other Democrats participate in this week’s National Prayer Breakfast? A given in past years, presidential attendance has taken on new weight this year in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Run by the Fellowship Foundation, a secretive Christian group also known as The Family, the breakfast is traditionally held the first Thursday of February. Since 1953, every U.S. president has addressed the breakfast.

This year’s National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) will be virtual, but the White House isn’t saying whether Biden will participate. Neither is The Family. A source who has been involved with the breakfast told TYT they believed Biden would pretape a video for the event.

If Biden does participate, it will represent a remarkable endorsement, less than a month after the Jan. 6 attack, of a group that includes leaders who supported Pres. Trump’s election lies.

In addition, The Family keeps its finances and leadership secret. The group does not disclose its funders and has not released its most recent tax return, as required by law.

Biden is in something of a political bind, however, the source suggested. “The headline if you don’t [participate] will be that you’re the first president that snubbed it. So just do the thing, or Fox News will go crazy. That’s the leg up the breakfast always had.”

And the breakfast was already controversial the last time Biden was in the White House. LGBTQ advocates protested Pres. Obama’s appearance at the event. Other issues have arisen since, including Family sponsorship of congressional travel that included meetings with anti-LGBTQ leaders overseas.

Last month, TYT reported that Family leaders made campaign donations after Election Day to Trump and Republicans who were helping Trump convince millions of Americans that Biden stole the election. TYT has since identified donations from two more Family leaders.

In addition, the Congressional Prayer Caucus, which is closely tied to the NPB, is dominated by Republicans who objected to Congress counting Electoral College votes and supported other efforts, such as a Texas lawsuit, to subvert Americans’ vote. The caucus is run by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), a returning co-chair of this year’s NPB who only retracted his vote-counting objection after the attack.

Congressional Democrats have taken a hard line against Republicans and others who egged on the attack. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has referred to “the enemy within.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rebuffed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

On Monday night, Ocasio-Cortez did a live video in which she gave a dramatic account of the Jan. 6 attack. Her video and remarks from other women in Congress reignited a national discussion about the seriousness of the attack and the gravity of the threat.

Twelve current Democratic members of Congress have signed off on using their names as “honorary” representatives and senators for Thursday’s breakfast. TYT emailed all 12, asking them to address the Family donations and other reporting about The Family.

A spokesperson for Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) said in a statement, “The issues raised by this reporting deserve attention and answers.” The statement described the breakfast as “an institution in Washington, one of the last bastions of bipartisan fellowship, where elected leaders can come together in worship. It would be very sad and disappointing if the organization were to fall into the hyper-partisan trap that’s engulfed our national politics — to our nation’s severe detriment.”

In a statement provided by Communications Director Daniel Gleick, Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) said, “I am providing the closing prayer this year because it gives me the opportunity to hopefully demonstrate what true love, inclusion, and compassion look like by my presence and my words. We must all do better. I pray my life is a light of hope and inspiration.”

The other ten Democrats did not respond. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) are listed as this year’s Democratic co-chairs. The remaining Democrats who let their names be used for the event are Reps. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Juan Vargas (D-CA), and Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Pelosi, who spoke at last year’s event, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The source involved with the breakfast told TYT that they couldn’t fault Biden if he participates. “Biden’s been pushing on the religious language in the inaugural [speech].”

The source was more critical of those Democrats who let their names appear on the invitation. “There’s a difference for me between [Biden] and the people that are lending their name and enabling.”

One Democratic congressional staffer told TYT that their boss was asked to sign on, “because they’ve had a hard time getting Democrats.”

And getting Democratic names is more than a symbolic gesture, according to Jeff Sharlet, a journalist whose work on The Family was the basis of a Netflix documentary series. In 2019, Sharlet told Esquire how a former member of The Family described the value of Democratic participation: “We felt we had more influence as long as we can keep a couple of Democrats in the fold,” the former member told Sharlet. “And so we have access to everybody.”

The Rev. Rob Schenck, who said he attended last year’s breakfast, told TYT, “I think [Democrats] should certainly be cautious enough to vet the whole event and its leadership and intentions as well as they would anything else that the president would associate himself with.”

Schenck, a longtime national evangelical leader, said he remains conservative on some issues but voted for Biden and now considers himself politically independent. He said he has advocated for The Family to be more transparent.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State spokesperson Rob Boston also gave TYT a statement in response to recent reporting on The Family. Citing “recent discussions about the corrosive effects of white Christian nationalism participation in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol,” Boston said, “this might be a good time for Democrats to reassess their attendance at the National Prayer Breakfast…It’s time to cut this organization loose.”

Last year, conservative columnist Cal Thomas responded to Trump’s breakfast speech by suggesting, “Perhaps it is time to suspend this annual event.”

In that speech, Trump attacked Democrats as dishonest, corrupt, and hurting the country. Trump’s subsequent remarks about his popularity and pro-life record drew laughter and applause from the NPB audience.

But Schenck told TYT that he wasn’t even thinking about Trump when he said that the breakfast and the Fellowship Foundation are more partisan today.

For years, The Family was run by Doug Coe, who Schenck knew for some 20 years, until Coe’s death in 2017. “During the Doug era they moved easily between the two [partisan] poles,” Schenck recalled. “Sometimes it feels like the old Fellowship to me…But other times it looked like it was no longer hospitable for Democrats or liberals. So I wasn’t quite sure: Was it getting captured?”

The breakfast source painted a similar picture. “We used to think we were nonpartisan: Democrats were welcome. I was like, yes, that’s true in many respects, but now that Trump stuff’s here, there’s a lot laid bare that’s typical Christian conservative. It’s a conservative Republican thing.”

Even before Trump’s first NPB speech, The Family apparently recognized the threat he posed to their image. As Coons revealed last year, “Several longtime organizers of the breakfast urged me [in 2017] to speak immediately following the president and to help sustain the tradition of an uplifting, bipartisan and nonsectarian breakfast.”

(Coons in 2019 told TYT he was “concerned about the perception that it is a partisan event.” Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Ted Lieu (D-CA) dropped the breakfast that same year.)

Both the NPB source and Schenck said the partisan shift predated Trump. Referring to a former Democratic congressman active in The Family, Schenck said, “I always read Tony Hall as kind of the anchor of sort of keeping them moderate…And then I saw him fade.”

Then, Schenck said, “People like Eric Metaxas started coming around…I would see Ben Carson there.” Both men would serve as a speaker at the annual event. (Carson later ran Trump’s Housing and Urban Development Department, while Metaxas, a conservative author and radio host, has echoed and amplified Trump’s lies about the election.)

“The old Fellowship crowd started buzzing about…Carson [and] Metaxas,” Schenck said. “I would hear, like, ‘Eric’s an up-and-comer; he’s a voice. Ben Carson is the person we need.”

Both of their breakfast speeches struck partisan tones. “There was some negative reaction to each of those instances, but not enough to serve as a rebuke and a correction,” Schenck said. “It continued on that track, and then, once Trump took the stage, I thought that was kind of it, completed it.”

And Trump’s speeches were not his only links to The Family.

One of Trump’s biggest donors is Ron Cameron, a past Family board member who watched the 2018 election returns at the White House with Trump. Cameron has donated millions to Trump and PACs supporting Trump.

Last year, Cameron’s poultry company, Mountaire, tried to bust its union, which was accusing the company of failing to protect workers from coronavirus. (Mountaire’s CFO was president of The Family’s board of directors until 2016 and continued to serve on the board.) Trump, of course, had forced America’s meat-processing workers back on the job with what unions called inadequate protections.

Cameron has given millions of dollars to The Family via his nonprofit, the Jesus Fund, which is bankrolled by him and Mountaire.

After Cameron’s donations were revealed by the Center for Responsive Politics, the Jesus Fund began to shift its money to the National Christian Foundation (NCF), a donor-directed fund which has been criticized for funneling donations anonymously to right-wing causes including some that have been labeled hate groups. As the Jesus Fund stopped funding The Family, NCF donations to The Family picked up.

In 2019, according to a tax filing provided to TYT by the NCF, it gave The Family just over $3 million, or about a quarter of its annual budget. Neither Cameron nor The Family have responded to prior inquiries about his current funding for the group.

Schenck said he did not know who funds The Family but did discuss it with Coe. In contrast to Schenck’s model of a broad base of small donors, Coe “was like, ‘We don’t do it that way.’…I always felt they had a very small number of high-end donors.”

The source of The Family’s funding has been an issue in part because of how it uses its funds.

The Family has sponsored congressional travel including meetings with anti-LGBTQ and anti-semitic leaders overseas. Family-sponsored trips apparently ended several years ago after drawing public attention, but Ukrainian prayer groups associated with The Family appear to have picked up the slack, travel disclosure filings show.

In a 2019 video shared by a Michigan political blog, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) told a Ukrainian prayer breakfast that marriage is between a man and a woman. Walberg is an honorary representative for this year’s breakfast and vice chair of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (which received $28,750 from the NCF in 2019).

No such travel was disclosed last year, presumably due to the pandemic. “Not much been happening for the last year,” Family member Claude “Mick” Kicklighter told TYT in a brief phone call.

(Kicklighter, a much-decorated military veteran and former Defense Department inspector general, told TYT he was “not in the epicenter” of The Family. He said he did not have time to speak further, but did not return a followup call.)

Doug Burleigh, The Family’s Russia liaison, also appears in the 2019 video with Walberg. Burleigh, another Trump supporter, appears to have survived as a Family leader despite helping Maria Butina bring Russian guests to the breakfast and establish a back channel to Trump.

Burleigh, Cameron, Kicklighter, and other Family leaders, including at least one board member, all made donations after Election Day to Trump, Republican committees, and candidates bolstering Trump’s election lies. Candidates who gave varying degrees of support to Trump’s claims included Tommy Tuberville (D-AL), Sen. Tom Cotton (D-AK), and then-Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), David Perdue (R-GA).

Out of the 14 Republicans named as part of this year’s breakfast, six objected to Congress counting some Biden votes. Three more announced their opposition beforehand but flipped after the attack.

Almost all of the 14 at some point gave credence to Trump’s suggestion that election fraud swayed the results. Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX), for instance, said, “In violation of the Constitution and with full knowledge of mail-in voting vulnerabilities, state officials, activists, and Democrat-led lawsuits in numerous states opened our electoral processes to fraud and abuse.”

Rep. French Hill (R-AL) notably took a stand against Trump, later pointing a finger at Trump for the violence.

One of the 14 Republicans, Senator Lankford, was one of the first senators to announce he would object to counting electoral votes. Lankford backed down after the attack and later apologized to his constituents of color for perpetuating “doubt on the validity of votes coming out of predominantly Black communities.”

Lankford also heads up the Congressional Prayer Caucus, which has multiple members associated with both The Family and the NPB. Out of the caucus’s 54 members, only a handful didn’t object to the Electoral College count.

Lankford’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

With additional research by TYT Investigates Intern Zoltan Lucas.

Why Republicans can’t dump Trump: The future of the GOP looks as bleak as its past

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t seem to know whether he’s coming or going these days. One minute he’s condemning Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as “a cancer” on the Republican party and the next he’s voting with the majority of GOP senators to reject the idea that Greene’s mentor, Donald Trump, can constitutionally be impeached and convicted for inciting a violent riot. McConnell now appears uncharacteristically unsteady, unsure how to proceed in a world in which his party has become so radicalized that average Republican voters are capable of storming the Capitol and demanding the execution of a stalwart conservative and Trump loyalist like former Vice President Mike Pence.

He shouldn’t be surprised by any of this, however.

The GOP’s intensifying radicalization has been building for a very long time and McConnell and the rest of the establishment adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” stance because they benefited from the energy, dedication and money they received from the ever more crazy Republican grassroots. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent observed that this actually goes all the way back to the early post-WWII years, drawing on the work of political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld’s authors of “The Long New Right,” who say that the right’s addiction to the “politics of conflict” has always made any wall between the extremists and establishment fairly porous. Sargent points to the back and forth between the mainstream and the John Birch Society in the 1960s, flirtations with the Ku Klux Klan and “Newt Gingrich’s conversion of GOP politics into nationalized scorched earth warfare,” the latter of which was the first step to openly marrying extremist rhetoric and tactics to the party itself.

Norm Ornstein, who has written a number of books on the radicalization of the modern GOP noted recently that it was Gingrich who turned the Republican Party into a cult, saying Gingrich “very deliberately generated tribalism” creating a “situation where people could view Democrats as evil, trying to destroy their way of life.” Of course, it wasn’t just Gingrich. He came to prominence at the same time that talk radio became a toxic hatefest creating star propagandists like Rush Limbaugh. Roger Ailes then joined up with Rupert Murdoch to create a TV and print empire to similarly stoke the partisan acrimony. The Clinton years were a dumpster fire of partisan rancor.

The GOP establishment was fine with that, of course. By the time the Bush administration came along, their base was well primed and the media infrastructure solid. The Republican leaders of the Bush-era may not have been as bombastic as Gingrich or Trump but they played a major part in radicalizing the Republican party as well. If you want to talk about Big Lies, look no further than “Saddam had WMDs” and “Saddam was involved in 9/11” for a couple of propaganda success stories. Years later, former Vice President Dick Cheney unsuccessfully tried to wriggle out of it, but of course, it had already gotten the job done and they had moved on to their favorite enemy: Democrats.

After Barack Obama took office in the midst of an economic catastrophe, the big money funders were on hand to help and the Tea Party was born. They ratcheted up partisan hysteria over President Obama’s health care proposal, giving their activist base something tangible to do by instructing them to storm town hall meetings and disrupt the proceedings. They were even known to hang and tar and feather lawmakers in effigy, even converging on the Capitol to get in the faces of a group of Democratic congressmen, screaming the “n” word, spitting at them and taunting an openly gay representative.

The GOP establishment said not a word and they won the 2010 midterms that year in a landslide. Imagine that.

Among their new members was a group of far-right extremists who formed themselves into the Tea Party-aligned House Freedom Caucus, who believed in using the same confrontational tactics with legislation as the Tea Party activists. There was no longer any such thing as compromise or negotiation. It was “my way or the highway” with the Democrats and if the Republican leadership didn’t like it, well, that was too bad.

By 2014, they were gleefully devouring their own. In a shot heard round the beltway, a Tea Party candidate backed by right-wing radio took on the House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., in a primary, and beat him. Cantor’s sin? He had strayed from the orthodoxy very slightly on immigration, which was bubbling up (again) on the right as a central issue. Soon, Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-OH, was forced out as well, replaced by Wisconsin dreamboat Paul Ryan. By the time Donald Trump came along in 2015, Ryan too was already in their crosshairs.

Trump watched all of this and in his instinctual, feral way, understood exactly what the Republican party base had become. He didn’t create the cult. It already existed. He just took it over.

For the past 30 years, the Republican establishment has either guided or accepted every step of their party’s descent into extremism. And no one has been more willing to make that deal with the devil than Mitch McConnell. In fact, he made one of the greatest contributions to the radicalism of the GOP by exploding one Senate norm after another and turning the filibuster into a partisan weapon.

Now he’s facing a big problem.

January 6th laid bare just how fanatical and downright seditious the Republican base has become. He’s lost his majority and has several vulnerable members up for re-election in 2022. They are going to have a hard time winning statewide if 25% of their voters reject the Republican party because it’s turned the asylum over to the inmates. He’s greatly worried about corporate America’s revulsion at his party’s behavior and their unwillingness to finance it going forward. Seeing a so-called moderate senator from Ohio, Rob Portman, cutting and running has to hurt.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand, is caught between a deep desire to please Donald Trump and a competing desire to please his corporate donors. He’s handling his dilemma even less gracefully than McConnell. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen in the fight between Liz Cheney of Wyoming and the faction backing the Trump worshiping conspiracy monger from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the mere fact that such a battle is even happening is testament to the fact that McCarthy has no control over his caucus. I’m sure John Boehner is chuckling mordantly at the thought of his former Freedom Caucus nemesis’ little dilemma as he sips his glass of Merlot on the back nine.

McCarthy also has to be thinking about what happened to Eric Cantor just six years ago. At one time the two of them, along with Paul Ryan, were feted in the GOP as the so-called Young Guns, the new generation of GOP leadership. But the rabble rousing Tea Party candidate who took Cantor’s seat was ousted by a Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, in 2018 and she held on to it in 2020, against all odds. McCarthy is now getting some blowback from Trump voters in his conservative district for failing to show undying fealty to the former president. It’s unlikely his district would go Democratic — but in California’s jungle primaries you just never know what might happen.

The radical chickens have come home to roost and they have taken over the place. The Republican establishment turned a blind eye to right-wing extremism for decades and now it’s come to define the Republican Party. They have no one to blame but themselves.

5 hilarious details from “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency”

Axios has published a massive 3,000-word-plus report detailing what it describes as “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”

The meeting revolves around conspiracy-spewing attorney Sidney Powell, along with former national security adviser Mike Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, storming into the Oval Office and trying to convince former President Donald Trump to command federal law enforcement officials to seize Dominion voting machines.

The report is filled with moments of slapstick comedy that highlight the ineptitude of the former president’s allies. Here are the five funniest parts.

1. Sidney Powell gets called out for claiming Dominion flipped a county that Trump won.

During the meeting, Powell told Trump that she could prove that Dominion voting machines flipped votes to President Joe Biden in a Georgia county.

White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann, however, immediately spotted a flaw in Powell’s claims: Namely, Trump had actually won the county in question.

“So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?” he asked her incredulously.

2. Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne gets utterly humiliated after trash talking Trump’s staff members.

Byrne, who had never before met the president in person, nonetheless didn’t hesitate to throw his weight around and accuse his staff members of being disloyal for not doing enough to help him overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“You’re a quitter,” Byrne told Herschmann.

“Do you even know who the f*ck I am, you idiot?” Herschmann asked him.

“Yeah, you’re Patrick Cipollone,” Byrne said.

“Wrong!” Herschmann shouted. “Wrong, you idiot!”

3. Sidney Powell gets lambasted for making embarrassing spelling mistakes in her legal filings.

White House staff secretary Derek Lyons quickly ran out of patience with Powell, whose “kraken” lawsuits infamously crashed and burned when brought before courts.

“You’ve brought 60 cases,” Lyons told Powell. “And you’ve lost every case you’ve had!”

Lyons not only ripped into Powell’s legal arguments, but her sloppy spelling and grammar.

“You somehow managed to misspell the word ‘District’ three different ways in your suits,” he told her.

4. Patrick Byrne claims that he gave Hillary Clinton an $18 million bribe as part of an FBI sting.

In one of the more nonsensical portions of the meeting, Byrne repeatedly claimed that he knew the FBI to be corrupt because they used him to catch Hillary Clinton taking bribes but somehow never arrested her.

“I know how this works,” he said. “I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation.”

Herschmann was incredulous and demanded to know what Byrne was talking about. The former Overstock CEO never elaborated, and yet still stood by his claim that he had successfully bribed the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

5. Mark Meadows and other staffers scrambled to stop Trump from appointing Powell as special counsel to investigate voter fraud.

Powell tried to convince Trump that he needed to appoint her as special counsel to probe voter fraud allegations, which is something Trump did not have the authority to do.

Former chief of staff Mark Meadows could not believe that such a proposal was being contemplated and quickly tried to throw cold water on it to dissuade the president from trying to make it happen.

“Meadows indicated that he was trying to wrap his mind around what exactly Powell’s role would entail,” reports Axios. “He told Powell she would have to fill out the SF-86 questionnaire before starting as special counsel. This was seen as a delaying tactic. The sense in the room was that Trump might actually greenlight this extraordinary proposal.”

Read the entire report here.

The future of war, American-style

Hard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the U.S. war machine. He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America’s unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns. In terms of active U.S. combat, that’s only happened once before, in the Philippines, America’s second-longest (if often forgotten) overseas combat campaign.

Yet that conflict was limited to a single Pacific archipelago. Biden inherits a global war — and burgeoning new Cold War — spanning four continents and a military miredin active operations in dozens of countries, combat in some 14 of them, and bombing in at least seven. That sort of scope has been standard fare for American presidents for almost two decades now. Still, while this country’s post-9/11 war presidents have more in common than their partisan divisions might suggest, distinctions do matter, especially at a time when the White House almost unilaterally drives foreign policy.

So, what can we expect from commander-in-chief Biden? In other words, what’s the forecast for U.S. service-members who have invested their lives and limbs in future conflict, as well as for the speculators in the military-industrial complex and anxious foreigners in the countries still engulfed in America’s war on terror who usually stand to lose it all?

Many Trumpsters, and some libertarians, foresee disaster: that the man who, as a leading senator facilitated and cheered on the disastrous Iraq War, will surely escalate American adventurism abroad. On the other hand, establishment Democrats and most liberals, who are desperately (and understandably) relieved to see Donald Trump go, find that prediction preposterous. Clearly, Biden must have learned from past mistakes, changed his tune, and should responsibly bring U.S. wars to a close, even if at a time still to be determined.

In a sense, both may prove right — and in another sense, both wrong. The guess of this long-time war-watcher (and one-time war fighter) reading the tea leaves: expect Biden to both eschew big new wars and avoid fully ending existing ones. At the margins (think Iran), he may improve matters some; in certain rather risky areas (Russian relations, for instance), he could worsen them; but in most cases (the rest of the Greater Middle East, Africa, and China), he’s likely to remain squarely on the status-quo spectrum. And mind you, there’s nothing reassuring about that.

It hardly requires clairvoyance to offer such guesswork. That’s because Biden basically is who he says he is and who he’s always been, and the man’s simply never been transformational. One need look no further than his long and generally interventionist past record or the nature of his current national-security picks to know that the safe money is on more of the same. Whether the issues are war, race, crime, or economics, Uncle Joe has made a career of bending with the prevailing political winds and it’s unlikely this old dog can truly learn any new tricks. Furthermore, he’s filled his foreign policy squad with Obama-Clinton retreads, a number of whom were architects of — if not the initial Iraq and Afghan debacles — then disasters in Libya, Syria, West Africa, Yemen, and the Afghan surge of 2009. In other words, Biden is putting the former arsonists in charge of the forever-war fire brigade.

There’s further reason to fear that he may even reject Trump’s “If Obama was for it, I’m against it” brand of war-on-terror policy-making and thereby reverse The Donald’s very late, very modest troop withdrawals in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Yet even if this new old hand of a president evades potentially existential escalation with nuclear Russia or China and offers only an Obama reboot when it comes to persistent low-intensity warfare, what he does will still matter — most of all to the global citizens who are too often its victims. So, here’s a brief region-by-region flyover tour of what Joe’s squad may have in store for both the world and the American military sent to police that world.

The Middle East: Old Prescriptions for Old Business

It’s increasingly clear that Washington’s legacy wars in the Greater Middle East — Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular — are generally no longer on the public’s radar. Enter an elected old man who’s charged with handling old business that, at least to most civilians, is old news. Odds are that Biden’s ancient tricks will amount to safe bets in a region that past U.S. policies essentially destroyed. Joe is likely to take a middle path in the region between large-scale military intervention of the Bush or Obama kind and more prudent full-scale withdrawal.

As a result, such wars will probably drag on just below the threshold of American public awareness, while avoiding Pentagon or partisan charges that his version of cutting-and-running endangered U.S. security. The prospect of “victory” won’t even factor into the equation (after all, Biden’s squad members aren’t stupid), but political survival certainly will. Here’s what such a Biden-era future might then look like in a few such sub-theaters.

The war in Afghanistan is hopeless and has long been failing by every one of the U.S. military’s own measurable metrics, so much so that the Pentagon and the Kabul government classified them all as secret information a few years back. Actually dealing with the Taliban and swiftly exiting a disastrous war likely to lead to a disastrous future with Washington’s tail between its legs is, in fact, the only remaining option. The question is when and how many more Americans will kill or be killed in that “graveyard of empires” before the U.S. accepts the inevitable. Toward the end of his tenure, Trump signaled a serious, if cynical, intent to so. And since Trump was by definition a monster and the other team’s monsters can’t even occasionally be right, a coalition of establishment Democrats and Lincoln-esque Republicans (and Pentagon officials) decided that the war must indeed go on. That culminated in last July’s obscenity in which Congress officially withheld the funds necessary to end it. As vice president, Biden was better than most in his Afghan War skepticism, but his incoming advisers weren’t, and Joe’s nothing if not politically malleable. Besides, since Trump didn’t pull enough troops out faintly fast enough or render the withdrawal irreversible over Pentagon objections, expect a trademark Biden hedge here.

Syria has always been a boondoggle, with the justifications for America’s peculiar military presence there constantly shifting from pressuring the regime of Bashar al-Assad, to fighting the Islamic State, to backing the Kurds, to balancing Iran and Russia in the region, to (in Trump’s case) securing that country’s meager oil supplies. As with so much else, there’s a troubling possibility that, in the Biden years, personnel once again may become destiny. Many of the new president’s advisers were bullish on Syrian intervention in the Obama years, even wanting to take it further and topple Assad. Furthermore, when it comes time for them to convince Biden to agree to stay put in Syria, there’s a dangerous existing mix of motives to do just that: the emotive sympathy for the Kurds of known gut-player Joe; his susceptibility to revived Islamic State (ISIS) fear-mongering; and perceptions of a toughness-testing proxy contest with Russia.

When it comes to Iran, expect Biden to be better than the Iran-phobic Trump administration, but to stay shackled “inside the box.” First of all, despite Joe’s long-expressed desire to reenter the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran that Trump so disastrously pulled out of, doing so may prove harder than he thinks. After all, why should Tehran trust a political basket case of a negotiating partner prone to significant partisan policy-pendulum swings, especially given the way Washington has waged nearly 70 years of interventions against Iran’s politicians and people? In addition, Trump left Biden the Trojan horse of Tehran’s hardliners, empowered by dint of The Donald’s pugnacious policies. If the new president wishes to really undercut Iranian intransigence and fortify the moderates there, he should go big and be transformational — in other words, see Obama’s tension-thawing nuclear deal and raise it with the carrot of full-blown diplomatic and economic normalization. Unfortunately, status-quo Joe has never been a transformational type.

Keep an Eye on Africa

Though it garners far less public interest than the U.S. military’s long-favored Middle Eastern playground, Africa figures significantly in the minds of those at the Pentagon, in the Capitol, and in Washington’s influential think-tanks. For interventionist hawks, including liberal ones, that continent has been both a petri dish and a proving ground for the development of a limited power-projection paradigm of drones, Special Operations forces, military advisers, local proxies, and clandestine intelligence missions.

It mattered little that over eight years of the Obama administration — from Libya to the West African Sahel to the Horn of East Africa — the war on terror proved, at best, problematic indeed, and even worse in the Trump years. There remains a worrisome possibility that the Biden posse might prove amenable yet again to the alarmism of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) about the rebirth of ISIS and the spread of other al-Qaeda-linked groups there, bolstered by fear-mongering nonsensemasquerading as sophisticated scholarship from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, and the Pentagon’s perennial promises of low-investment, low-risk, and high-reward opportunities on the continent. So, a savvy betting man might place chips on a Biden escalation in West Africa’s Sahel and the Horn of East Africa, even if for different reasons.

American Special Forces and military advisors have been in and out of the remote borderlands between Mali and Niger since at least 2004 and these days seem there to stay. The French seized and suppressed sections of the Sahel region beginning in 1892, and, despite granting nominal independence to those countries in 1960, were back by 2013 and have been stuck in their own forever wars there ever since. American war-on-terror(izing) and French neo-colonizing have only inflamed regional resistance movements, increased violence, and lent local grievances an Islamist resonance. Recently, France’s lead role there has truly begun to disintegrate — with five of its troops killed in just the first few days of 2021 and allegations that it had bombed another wedding party. (Already such a war-on-terror cliché!)

Don’t be surprised if French President Emmanuel Macron asks for help and Biden agrees to bail him out. Despite their obvious age gap, Joe and Emmanuel could prove the newest and best of chums. (What’s a few hundred extra troops between friends?)

Especially since Obama-era Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her then-favored errand boy, inbound national security adviser Jake Sullivan, could be said to have founded the current coalition of jihadis in Mali and Niger. That’s because when the two of them championed a heavy-handed regime-change intervention against Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, thousands of his Tuareg fighters blew back into that region in a big way with more than just the clothes on their backs. They streamed from post-Gaddafi Libya into their Sahel homelands loaded with arms and anger. It’s no accident, in other words, that Mali’s latest round of insurgency kicked off in 2012. Now, Sullivan might push new boss Biden to attempt to clean up his old mess.

On the other side of the continent, in Somalia, where Trump began an eleventh-hour withdrawal of a long-failing and aimless U.S. troop presence (sending most of those soldiers to neighboring countries), there’s a real risk that Biden could double-down in the region, adding soldiers, special operators, and drones. After all, if Trump was against it, even after exponentially increasing bombing in the area, then any good Democrat should be for it, especially since the Pentagon has, for some time now, been banging the drum about Somalia’s al-Shabaab Islamist outfit being the biggest threat to the homeland.

However, the real selling point for Biden might be the fantasy that Russia and China are flooding into the region. Ever since the 2018 National Defense Strategy decisively shifted the Pentagon’s focus from counterterror wars to “great power competition,” or GPC, AFRICOM has opportunistically altered its own campaign plan to align with the new threat of the moment, honing in on Russian and Chinese influence in the Horn region. As a result, AFRICOM’S come-back-to-the-Horn pitch could prove a relatively easy Biden sell.

Toughness Traps: Poking Russian Bears, Ramming Chinese (Sea) Dragons

With that new GPC national security obsession likely to be one Trump-era policy that remains firmly in place, however ill-advised it may be, perhaps the biggest Biden risk is the possibility of stoking up a “new,” two-theater, twenty-first-century version of the Cold War (with the possibility that, at any moment, it could turn into a hot one). After making everything all about Russia in the Trump years, the ascendant Democrats might just feel obliged to follow through and escalate tensions with Moscow that Trump himself already brought to the brink (of nuclear catastrophe). Here, too, personnel may prove a key policy-driver.

Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, is a resident Russia hawk and was an early “arm-Ukraine” enthusiast. Jake Sullivan already has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills on the subject, as when he described a minor road-rage incident as constituting “a Russian force in Syria aggressively attack[ing] an American force and actually injur[ing] American service members.” Then there’s the troubling signal of Victoria Nuland, the recent nominee for undersecretary of state for political affairs, a pick that itself should be considered a road-rage-style provocation. Nuland has a history of hawkish antagonism toward Moscow and is reportedly despised by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her confirmation will surely serve as a conflict accelerant.

Nevertheless, China may be the lead antagonist in the Biden crew’s race to risk a foolhardy cataclysm. Throughout the election campaign, the new president seemed set on out-hawking Trump in the Western Pacific, explicitly writing about “getting tough” on China in a March 2020 piece he penned in Foreign Affairs. Joe had also previously called Chinese President Xi Jinping “a thug.” And while Michèle Flournoy may (mercifully) have been passed over for secretary of defense, her aggressive posture toward Beijing still infuses the thinking of her fellow Obama alums on Biden’s team.

As TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich pointed out last September, a Flournoy Foreign Affairs article illuminated the sort of absurdity she (and assumedly various Biden appointees) think necessary to effectively deter China. She called for “enhancing U.S. military capabilities so that the United States can credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” Consider that Dr. Strangelove-style strategizing retooled for an inbound urbane imperial presidency.

Endgame: War as Abstraction

Historically, foreign-policy paradigm shifts are exceedingly rare, especially when they tack toward peace. Such pivots appear almost impossible once the immense power of America’s military-industrial complex, invested in every way in endless war, as well as endless preparations for future Cold Wars, has reached today’s grotesque level. This is especially so when each and every one of Biden’s archetypal national security nominees has, metaphorically speaking, had his or her mortgage paid by some offshoot of that war industry. In other words, as the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair used to say: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Count on tactics including drones, commandos, CIA spooks, and a mostly amenable media to help the Biden administration make war yet more invisible — at least to Americans. Most Trump-detesting, and domestically focused citizens will find that just dandy, even if exhausted troopers, military families, and bombed or blockaded foreigners won’t. More than anything, Biden wishes to avoid overseas embarrassments like unexpected American casualties or scandalous volumes of foreign civilian deaths — anything, that is, that might derail his domestic agenda or hoped-for restorative leadership legacy.

That, unfortunately, may prove to be a pipe dream and leads me to two final predictions: formulaic forever war will never cease boomeranging back home to rot our republican institutions, and neither a celestial God nor secular History will judge Biden-the-war-president kindly.

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Biden must not surrender

Ten Senate Republican have proposed a COVID relief bill of about $600 billion. That’s less than a third of Biden’s plan. They promise “bipartisan support” if he agrees.

Their proposal isn’t a compromise. It would be a total surrender. It trims direct payments and unemployment aid that Americans desperately need. Biden should reject it out of hand.

Republicans say America can’t afford Biden’s plan. “We just passed a program with over $900 billion in it,” groused Senator Mitt Romney.

Rubbish. We can’t afford not to. Millions of people are hurting.

Besides, with the economy in the doldrums it’s no time to worry about too much spending. The best way to reduce the debt as a share of the economy is to get the economy growing again.

Beyond COVID relief, Biden has other proposals waiting in the wings, such as repairing aging infrastructure and building a new energy-efficient one. These would make the economy grow even faster over the long term – further reducing the debt’s share.

There’s no chance that public spending will “crowd out” private investment. If you hadn’t noticed, borrowing is especially cheap right now. Money is sloshing around the world in search of borrowers.

It’s hard to take Republican concerns about debt seriously when just four years ago they had zero qualms about enacting one of the largest tax cuts in history, largely for big corporations and the super-wealthy.

If they really don’t want to add to the debt, they have another alternative: A tax on super-wealthy Americans.

The total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has grown by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic, a 40 percent increase. They alone could finance almost all of Biden’s COVID relief package and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. So why not a temporary emergency COVID wealth tax?

Let’s be honest. The real reason Republicans don’t want Biden’s plan is they fear it will work.

This would be the Republican’s worst nightmare: All the anti-government claptrap they’ve been selling since Ronald Reagan will be revealed as nonsense.

Government isn’t the problem and never was. Bad government is the problem, and Americans have just had four years of it. Biden’s success would put into sharp relief Trump and Republicans’ utter failures on COVID and jobs.

If Biden gets his plans through, he and the Democrats would reap the political rewards in 2022 and beyond.Democrats might even capture the presidency and Congress for a generation. After FDR rescued America, the Republican Party went dark for two decades.

Trumpian Republicans in Congress have an even more diabolical motive for blocking Biden. They figure if Americans remain in perpetual crises and ever-deepening fear, they’ll lose faith in democracy itself.

This would open the way for another strongman demagogue in 2024 – if not Trump, a Trump-impersonator like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, or Trump Junior.

If Biden is successful, though, Americans’ faith in democracy might begin to rebound – marking the end of the nation’s flirtation with fascism. If he helps build a new economy of green jobs with good wages, even Trump’s angry white working-class base might come around.

Biden doesn’t really need Republicans, anyway. With their razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats can enact Biden’s plans without a single Republican vote.

My worry is Biden may want so much to demonstrate bipartisanship that his plans get diluted to the point where Republicans get what they want: Failure.

Forget bipartisanship. Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans didn’t give a hoot about bipartisanship when they and Trump were in power.

If Republicans try to stonewall Biden’s COVID relief plan, Biden and the Democrats should go it alone through a maneuver called “reconciliation,” allowing a simple majority to pass budget legislation.

If Republicans try to block anything else, Biden and the Democrats should scrap the filibuster – which now requires 60 senators to end debate. The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. It’s anti-democratic, giving a minority of senators the power to block the majority. It was rarely used for most of the nation’s history.

The filibuster can be ended by a simple majority vote. Democrats now have the power to scrap it. Biden will have to twist the arms of a few recalcitrant Democrats, but that’s what presidential leadership often requires.

The multiple crises engulfing America are huge. The window of opportunity for addressing them is small. If ever there was a time for boldness, it is now.

Lindsey Graham under fire for blocking Merrick Garland: Does this sound familiar?

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was accused Tuesday of exercising “the last vestiges of power” by obstructing — again — U.S. Senate confirmation of Merrick Garland.

President Joe Biden last month tapped Garland — whose 2016 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was blocked by the then-Republican controlled Senate — to be U.S. attorney general.

Graham, R-S.C., is able to exert the control over the new nomination even though his party no longer controls the chamber, as Politico explained Monday:

The dispute over Garland’s confirmation hearing is the latest complication of the 50-50 Senate. While Democrats control the Senate, party leaders have yet to finalize an organizing resolution that will determine the committees for the upper chamber. Until the organizing resolution is approved, Republicans like Graham still hold committee gavels from the previous Congress.

As such, Graham still chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee; Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois is the committee’s incoming chair.

In a letter to Graham on Monday, Durbin wrote that “there is simply no justification for delaying Judge Garland’s hearing any further.” Durbin called for a hearing on Feb. 8, a timing he said would align with Republican requests that the hearing not coincide with former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

Durbin wrote, in part:

On January 6, then-President-elect Biden alerted both Democratic and Republican committee members and staff that he would nominate Judge Garland as the nation’s next attorney general. Given the attorney general’s role as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, this committee should promptly consider attorney general nominees as a general practice. But the events of January 6 — when armed insurrectionists attacked the Capitol, killed Officer Brian Sicknick, injured dozens of other law enforcement officers, and threatened the lives of lawmakers and staff — made even clearer the need to quickly process Judge Garland’s nomination.

Graham rejected the request.

Responding to Durbin, Graham asserted that the request was “highly unusual” and that Democrats want to “rush through Judge Garland’s hearing” while the impeachment trial “requires the Senate’s complete focus.”

“Democrats do not get to score political points in an unprecedented act of political theater on one hand while also trying to claim the mantle of good government on the other,” said Graham.

Writing at MaddowBlog, Steve Benen pointed to Republican senators’ “unprecedented blockade” of Garland’s Supreme Court nomination five years ago, observing that Graham joined that effort, “refusing to even give Garland the courtesy of a meeting.”

And now, Benen wrote, “the GOP senator is managing to mishandle a Garland nomination for the second time.” Benen suggested that Graham “apparently has a knack for leaving Merrick Garland hanging.”

The rules always change to whatever Senate Republicans want. https://t.co/Wpxh6Kj5B2

— Alliance for Justice (@AFJustice) February 2, 2021

Graham’s fresh blockade also drew criticism from Mairead Lynn, spokesperson for the government watchdog group Accountable.US’s Senate War Room campaign.

“Since apparently it wasn’t enough for Senate Republicans to refuse Merrick Garland a hearing when he was nominated to the Supreme Court — now they are delaying his hearing to head up the Justice Department,” Lynn said in a statement.

She blamed Republicans who “sat on their hands during the lame-duck” session for the chamber’s delays on Biden’s agenda and called it “ridiculous that Sen. Graham is now holding onto the last vestiges of power to delay the confirmation of the administration’s top law enforcement official.”

“It’s well past time for this obstruction to end,” Lynn said, “and if Sen. Graham refuses to work in good faith to quickly confirm President Biden’s highly qualified nominees, then it’s time for him to step aside and let more serious legislators get to work.”

Why do 70 million Americans — and many members of Congress — still follow Trump?

The persistent Trump “base” and the Republican members of Congress who maintain fealty to Donald Trump do so for a variety of reasons. They are not a monolithic body but a loosely associated conglomeration of supporters with their own individual or group reasons for remaining loyal to the twice-impeached ex-President.

“Membership” in the Trump base may include entry into one or more of the following categories.

“All-in” isolationists, ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, racists and insurrectionists Arguably all those who marched in Charlottesville in summer 2017 and many of those stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are openly racist, and have felt liberated by the rhetoric and policies of the Trump era. For them, Trumpism represented an enticing outlet for perceived slights or a platform upon which to boost their identity, sense of meaning or being, and self-importance.
Opportunists and political chameleons Those who fall into this category recognized that the Trump train presented itself as a vehicle by which one could achieve fame, success, ambition and political or personal gain. Those with political ambition watched Trump’s tactics, saw its success and made the decision to be a Trump sycophant and copycat. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, mediocre members of society who had the financial means to run for Congress, are noted Trump exampled who will ride this train until it throws them off (and even then will continue to chase it). Fox News talking heads fall into this category as well. Following opportunity often requires suppressing any logic, rational thought or independent notions. This is a key factor behind the flip-flopping of politicians like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who has vacillated in his defense and indictment of Trump and his insurrection), Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (two former Republican rivals to Trump who were mercilessly dragged by him only to become full-throated supporters), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for whom every Trump-related decision comes with an eye on the next election cycle. These are the political chameleons who will change as needed to survive.
Narrow-minded, limited information input and vulnerable to cultism This group of followers is either actively or passively limited in the information that they receive through on-air and online media outlets. As a result of their “soda straw” approach to Republicanism, conservatism or Trumpism, they are simply not exposed to the damning evidence that exists to show Trump and the GOP’s unethical, immoral and likely criminal behavior. This is the consumer of a steady diet of right-wing sources such as Fox News, OANN and Newsmax. One cannot discuss this group without referring to the concept of shared omnipotence, a cult leader tactic by which followers are repeatedly told that the leader will take them to a “promised land” (e.g., a place of increased wealth, no immigrants or people of color, world superiority or dominance, protection from death) and if they don’t follow, the result is certain doom.
Voting with their pocketbook Members of this group are totally focused on individual and family wealth. They voted for Trump twice because of his tax breaks for wealthier Americans. They may be repulsed by Trump the man, but they feel compelled to vote for him because they are profiting from his policies. They are one-issue voters and they will not be deterred by any of Trump’s antics, lies or dishonesty.
Hold your nose and vote Republican These group members are cousins of the previous group. This faction is diehard conservative Republicans who are unwavering in their support of the GOP based on years of support and the hope that this period is an aberration that will correct itself soon. Sen. Mitt Romney is one of the remaining stalwarts of this group.
But he and I are Christians! In many ways an outgrowth of the latter group, these followers maintain their identity and faith as evangelical Christians. They have consistently voted Republican for a widely varying set of reasons, the abortion issue first and foremost among them. Now, electing and supporting Donald Trump, who is arguably the embodiment of sin, requires resolution of a huge case of cognitive dissonance. To accept Trump and Trumpism requires that a “true” Christian must fit this obviously square block into a circular halo. Attempts to reconcile this dissonance include pairing Trump with known Christian leaders and evangelicals, citing scripture that appears to validate this choice, or projecting Christian values on to Trump and Trumpists.

Not all Trump supporters are alike. It is inaccurate and wrong to lump them together. It misses the point and undermines any chance for reaching out to supporters in order to reinvent a Republican Party that is reasonable, more moderate and hinged to our American democracy.

Short of convicting and repudiating Trump at his upcoming impeachment trial — which appears highly unlikely — we will be left with the task of disambiguating and understanding his followers and what motivates them, and connecting with as many of them as possible. The future of our two-party democracy, and our entire country, will hang in the balance.

New filing suggests Mark Meadows under investigation for campaign finance violations

A year-end federal filing from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows shows legal expenses that experts say indicate it is “highly likely” the North Carolina Republican is under scrutiny for campaign finance violations.

In October, the nonprofit government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) requesting an investigation into Meadows, based on a Salon report that detailed a series of apparent violations of the prohibition on using campaign funds for personal expenses. Those payments covered gourmet cupcakes, grocery store purchases, a cell phone bill, posh meals and lodging at Donald Trump’s Washington hotel, according to filings with the FEC. Meadows’ campaign also spent thousands of dollars on “printed materials” at an upscale Washington-area custom jeweler on the day he left Congress for the White House. (The jewelry retailer has said it sells nothing that could be categorized that way.)

The year-end report filed over the weekend by Meadows’ leadership PAC, Freedom First — itself an extension of the onetime North Carolina congressman’s former campaign operation — shows only three expenses in the last month of the year, one of them an anomalous $6,339 payment to the law firm Foley & Lardner, designated for “PAC legal services.”

The only two other expenses listed in the filing went to Costco and Walmart, both for around $250 on Dec. 7, designated as “food/beverage for PAC reception honoring Secret Service members.” According to FEC filings, no other federal political committee of any kind has ever designated an expense for the Secret Service. Before leaving office, Trump reportedly issued an unprecedented directive that Meadows receive Secret Service protection for an additional six months.

A campaign finance attorney, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss potential legal proceedings, told Salon that the seriousness of the charges facing Meadows, together with the timing of the legal expense, indicate that it’s “highly likely” the FEC has launched an inquiry.

“The CREW complaint was filed at the end of October, and the FEC gives the persons or entities named in a complaint 15 days to file a response,” the attorney said. “The FEC frequently grants extensions to that deadline if they are requested. It is highly likely that these legal fees were incurred in November to prepare a response to the CREW complaint, or at least begin the process of preparing one.”

(Salon reported last week that Meadows liquidated as much as $200,000 in stocks in November.)

Another campaign finance and FEC enforcement expert, also speaking on background, agreed that the filing suggested the first stages of an investigation: “Looks like it, but with Meadows, there’s a lot of things he could need a lawyer for.”

Similar charges have landed other politicians in prison. Former Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican, was sentenced for using his campaign account for personal expenses, including at hotels and restaurants — including one of the venues Meadows routinely expensed, the Capitol Hill Club, a favored hangout of House Republicans that is just around the corner from Republican National Committee headquarters. Meadows made a $1,100 purchase there on Jan. 13, 2020, the same day Hunter resigned from the House for his numerous campaign finance violations.

(Hunter’s campaign spent more than $100,000 at the Capitol Hill Club, stretching back to 2008. The Meadows campaign expensed about half that amount at the club across 109 expenditures beginning in 2012, though most of that spending — more than $37,000 — came in the four years after Trump’s election.)

Meadows announced in late December of 2019 that he would not seek re-election in North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, but his campaign went on to spend more than $60,000 before he officially converted it into the Freedom First leadership PAC in July. In that same timeframe, filings show, the campaign only raised $300. Salon also reported that a number of Meadows’ campaign expenses in that time appear related to his effort to get Lynda Bennett, a friend of his wife, elected to his old congressional seat. Bennett lost to Madison Cawthorn in the 2020 Republican primary, and Cawthorn — himself a onetime Meadows protégé — is now serving in Congress.

Freedom First went on to spend about $14,000 between July and Oct. 21, the date of Salon’s report, federal filings show — including on cupcakes, Costco, a cell phone and rooms at Trump’s hotel. Despite those expenses, Freedom First reported raising no money at all in that time period, which is highly unusual for any PAC, especially in an election year. Further, federal records show that Freedom First never disbursed any money to Republican candidates until Oct. 23, two days after Salon’s report. On that day, the PAC gave $1,000 to 19 Republican candidates, including Cawthorn.

While the FEC would enforce any possible civil actions that may arise from CREW’s complaint, the charges against Meadows could veer into criminal territory, attracting attention from the Department of Justice, as was the case for Hunter. In December, Trump pardoned Hunter, one of his earliest supporters in Congress, just before his scheduled 11-month prison stint. Meadows has not been accused of any crime to date, but was reportedly also considered for a pardon list. In addition to possible campaign finance violations, he could face legal jeopardy for his role in a now-infamous phone call during which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes for him, an apparent solicitation of election fraud.

Also on that call was Cleta Mitchell, a veteran government law attorney who has primarily worked for Republican clients — including Meadows. On Jan. 4, CREW filed a criminal complaint against Trump that referred both Meadows and Mitchell to the Justice Department: “While this complaint focuses on President Trump’s conduct, we believe that your offices should also review the conduct of Mr. Meadows, Ms. Mitchell, and any other individuals who aided the President’s likely illegal activity.”

When the tape of the Raffensperger call became public, Mitchell resigned from her senior position at Foley & Lardner, the same law firm to which Meadows’ PAC paid more than $6,300 in December. It is unclear whether Mitchell or the firm still represents Meadows or the Freedom First PAC.

Neither Meadows, Mitchell nor Foley & Lardner replied to Salon’s requests for comment.

Throw her out of Congress!

Let’s put in perspective the atrocious conduct of freshman lawmaker Margorie Taylor Greene. She is the pistol-toting congresswoman from Georgia who wants to put a bullet in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.

Any private employer would have fired Greene immediately. Failure to do so would expose a private company, a nonprofit or any other employer to ruinous damages. What if Greene reached into her purse and used her Glock, or if a fellow QAnon fan were to fulfill these homicidal impulses.

Any decent human being would get a court order to keep Greene from being on the loose with a gun in her person.

But Greene works in the people’s House. Under our Constitution, she can’t be fired; she can, however, be expelled.

Our Constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote to expel Greene. That will happen only if 59 of the 211 House Republicans have the basic human decency to expel a member with murder, religious bigotry and anti-Semitism in her heart, a lethal weapon in her purse and a stated desire to overthrow the government in which she serves.

Expulsion, however, almost is certainly not going to happen.

It’s not what the Republican Party’s de facto leader, Donald Trump, wants. Trump endorsed Greene, untroubled by her racist and anti-Semitic screeds and her spouting of QAnon craziness.

Examples? Labeling Democratic Party leaders as pedophile cannibals was one. Another was her inane assertion that California’s wildfires were caused by a Jewish space laser financed by the Rothschild banking family.

Unrepentant Trump

But why would this, or anything else Greene has done, dissuade Trump? He is so self-centered and disloyal that he tried, and failed, on Jan. 6 to overthrow our government.

That attack on our Capitol left five people dead, including two police officers, and 140 police injured. In this Trump is like Greene – he is utterly unrepentant.

We now know that the attack on our Capitol and the hunt to kill Pelosi, then Vice President Mike Pence and others was the result of premeditation by rebels. Planning began just days after a large majority of American voters decided by Nov. 3 that Joe Biden would be our next president.

We also know that Trump riled up the crowd that January morning and told them he would go with them to the Capitol. Then he ducked out, hiding out in the White House, gleefully watching on TV the attack.

Trump was so enthralled by the mob violence on his behalf that he wouldn’t take his eyes off the TV to answer frantic telephone calls from members of his own political party who feared they were about to be executed.

What better evidence that with Trump, like every other mob boss and dictator, loyalty is a one-way street?

Coward Kevin McCarthy

As Trump plots revenge and hopes for a return to the White House, his ally is traitor Kevin McCarthy. The California Republican who is House Minority Leader could whip votes to oust Greene. But if he did, he might well be ousted as minority leader.

McCarthy is so weak he cannot bear the thought of that humiliation; cannot imagine being stalwart in defense of our Constitution. News reports indicate Trump uses a sexist epithet to describe McCarthy who only confirms the implication of the disgusting term by his conduct.

McCarthy shares with Trump the ability to speak out of four sides of his mouth. He muddies otherwise clear waters about where he stands, what he believes and what he will do.

Of all the scoundrels that Trumpism has inflicted in America, few will be judged more harshly by history than McCarthy. He is a coward who chose loyalty to Trump ahead of his office. He is doing Trump’s bidding by helping Greene cling to the office she does not deserve.

Five members expelled

Only five House members have ever been expelled, three for joining the Confederacy and waging war on the United States, two for corruption.

Greene clearly fits under the rebellion category. She is no less a traitor than John B. Clark and John W. Reid of Missouri and Henry C. Burdett of Kentucky, who all stood with the slave-owning Confederacy in 1861.

Any Republican who votes to keep Greene is making clear that they are as vile and disloyal as she is. A vote to retain Greene is a vote of utter disrespect for our Constitution and a violation of each representative’s oath to defend our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Harassing a fellow lawmaker

Greene is utterly unrepentant. Last week, Greene and her staff harassed a co-worker of equal rank, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.). It’s significant that Greene is white and spouts racist tropes while Bush, who represents St. Louis, is Black.

Greene, in a tweet, said Bush was the agitator. So did Greene’s chief of staff, promising he’d release a video to prove it. No video has appeared.

Bush told MSNBC that Greene approached her from behind while “ranting loudly into her phone” and “not wearing a mask.” Bush said she called out for Greene to put on her mask, as House rules require, prompting Greene and her staff respond by berating her.

Bush is having her Congressional office moved away from Greene’s. Providing Bush with armed escorts seems within the bounds of reason.

It is terrible to have to brand an entire political party this way, but it is what the facts demand. This is a tragedy not for the GOP so much as America, where our Constitution hangs as if by a thread and the Republicans are sharpening scissors.

What happened to Republican lectures about the need for those in high office to have moral standards? How about Republican themes of taking personal responsibility?

The awful truth is that those were never principled stands, just mere slogans no different in substance than the catchy phrases and jingles used to sell bubble gum and shampoo.

Don’t blame Fox News for the attack on the Capitol

In the days following the attack on the Capitol, The New York Times, in its print edition, ran an op-ed titled “Yes, You Should Blame Fox For Whipping Up Radicals.” The Washington Post ran an article with the headline “Trump Couldn’t Have Incited Sedition Without the Help of Fox News.”

But our analysis tells a different story.

We studied the official YouTube channels of six U.S. cable news networks. We looked at cable news powerhouses CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. But we also focused on three fringe networks – Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN) and Blaze TV – that have a relatively homogeneous audience, relatively extreme opinions and limited reach.

Our unique dataset – which consisted of all the comments made by viewers of those six networks from Nov. 3, the date of the presidential election, through Jan. 5, the day before the Capitol riots – showed that the fringe news networks were key players in the riots. And ironically, their outsize impact can be traced to Fox News’ controversial decision to call Arizona for Biden on election night.

Fox holds firm

Around 10 p.m. on Nov. 3 the Trump campaign was reportedly upbeat, having significantly outperformed the polls in Florida to win the state.

However, at 11:20 p.m. – with only 78% of the votes in Arizona counted – Fox News called the Grand Canyon State for Biden. It would be days before any other network would do so, yet Fox News’ call significantly narrowed the odds of a Trump victory.

According to The New York Times, “what ensued … was a night of angry calls to Republican governors” and “a middle-of-the-night presidential briefing” with claims that the election was fraudulent. Trump then spent the next few days urging his base to abandon Fox in favor of Newsmax.

In the days and weeks that followed, Fox’s coverage of the election continued to be much more accurate in its reporting of the results than any of the three fringe news stations.

Drawing from the transcripts of the relevant videos, our research shows that Fox was almost five times more likely to refer to Biden as “president-elect” than Newsmax from Nov. 3 to Jan. 5. In addition, drawing from the user comments during this entire time period, “stop the steal” was the 63rd most frequent three-word construct on Newsmax but only the 134th most frequent on Fox. In fact, Fox’s results on these measures were very similar to those of MSNBC and CNN.

This mode of reporting by Fox – along with Trump’s exhortations to his base to leave Fox for networks like Newsmax – seems to have had a swift and profound impact on the viewership of the fringe news networks.

Newsmax’s YouTube subscriber count increased over 300% in the two weeks following the election and stood at over 1.7 million subscribers by Jan. 5, compared with just over 200,000 at the end of August.

Conspiracies snowball in echo chambers

We can also compare how viewers responded to Newsmax’s content relative to Fox News’ content in terms of the ever-present social media currency of viewer “likes” and “dislikes.”

Those watching any of the YouTube newscasts can vote dislike or like. If the ratio of dislikes to the total number of impressions for a given video is, say, 0.4 – meaning 40 dislikes and 60 likes for every 100 impressions – we can conclude that it’s reaching a range of viewers, some of whom enjoy and agree with what they’re watching, and others who disagree with what they’re seeing.

For the period from the election to Jan. 5, this ratio was about 0.2 for both Fox News and CNN. In contrast, for Newsmax this ratio was between 0.01 and 0.02. In other words, for every 100 opinions on Newsmax videos, on average, only one or two dislikes surfaced, whereas for Fox, the number of dislikes, on average, exceeded 20.

There is no other way to interpret this: Newsmax viewers had fallen into an almost perfectly sealed echo chamber, in which commenters were reinforcing one another’s views with little to no pushback. One America News Network and Blaze TV showed very similar patterns in response to their content.

The hyperpartisan coverage on election integrity provided by Newsmax and others – combined with this echo chamber effect – makes them the more likely culprit for having riled up loyal Trump supporters.

Surely, these networks weren’t solely responsible for influencing those who stormed the Capitol. And we don’t deny that years of conspiracy theories promulgated by Fox undoubtedly helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s base of support.

But in the days and weeks following the election, these fringe networks gave viewers a space to vent and disseminate misinformation that went largely unchallenged by others in their comments sections, as well as by the hosts of the news and opinion segments.

Fox found itself in uncharted waters: maligned by the far right for being relatively restrained and responsible.

Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Project Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University; Mark Kamlet, University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, and Tom Mitchell, Founders University Professor of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University

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

Biden urged to fire Postal Service Board for complicity in “devastating arson” by Trump and DeJoy

Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. of New Jersey on Monday urged President Joe Biden to terminate all six sitting members of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors for their “silence and complicity” in the face of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and former President Donald Trump’s full-scale assault on the beloved government mail agency.

“Through the devastating arson of the Trump regime, the USPS Board of Governors sat silent,” Pascrell wrote in a letter to Biden. “Their dereliction cannot now be forgotten. Therefore, I urge you to fire the entire Board of Governors and nominate a new slate of leaders to begin the hard work of rebuilding our Postal Service for the next century.”

While the president does not have the authority under current law to fire DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to Trump who was unanimously appointed by the USPS Board of Governors last May—Biden does have the power to remove postal governors “for cause.” At present, the board consists entirely of Trump appointees—two Democrats and four Republicans.

Pascrell argued Monday that “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.”

Far from opposing DeJoy’s sweeping operational changes—which resulted in massively disruptive, nationwide mail delays that persisted through the November election and holiday season—USPS governors publicly praised the postmaster general, with one Republican board member gushing in September that “the board is tickled pink, every single board member, with the impact” DeJoy was having on the agency.

That glowing assessment of DeJoy’s performance during his first several months on the job did not comport with the experiences of postal workers—who in some cases resisted DeJoy’s policies—or the agency’s own internal evaluations, which showed that widespread delays followed the postmaster general’s changes.

DeJoy put his damaging policy moves on hold in August amid nationwide outrage and accusations that he was working to disrupt the election for Trump’s benefit. With the presidential election now in the past, DeJoy has recently signaled he plans to push ahead with his agenda.

In his letter to Biden, Pascrell wrote that the “continued challenges in preserving our Postal Service to survive and endure are gargantuan, and so demand bold solutions to meet them.”

“To begin that work,” Pascrell added, “we must have a governing body that can be trusted to represent the public interest.”

Today I am calling on President Biden to fire the entire Postal Board of Governors for their silence and complicity in trump and dejoy’s attempts to subvert the election and destroy the Post Office. pic.twitter.com/VGaXM8MyXT

— Bill Pascrell, Jr. 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@BillPascrell) January 25, 2021

There are currently four vacancies in top leadership positions at USPS, including three governor spots and the deputy postmaster general role. If Biden fills the remaining vacancies—USPS governors must be confirmed by the Senate—Democrats will have a majority on the board and potentially the votes needed to remove DeJoy from office.

“Trump confessed he was wrecking USPS to rig the election. His toady Postmaster General DeJoy carried out that arson. It’s time to clean house,” Pascrell tweetedMonday. “DeJoy should be fired but also prosecuted.”

Asked about Pascrell’s demand during a briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “It’s an interesting question.”

“We all love the mailman and mailwoman,” said Psaki. “I don’t have anything for you on it. I’m happy to check with our team on it and see if we have any specifics. I’m not aware of anything, but we’ll circle back with you.”

Read Pascrell’s full letter:

Dear President Biden:

After several years of unprecedented sabotage, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is teetering on the brink of collapse. Through the devastating arson of the Trump regime, the USPS Board of Governors sat silent. Their dereliction cannot now be forgotten. Therefore, I urge you to fire the entire Board of Governors and nominate a new slate of leaders to begin the hard work of rebuilding our Postal Service for the next century.

According to a report by the USPS Office of Inspector General, operational changes imposed by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy “negatively impacted the quality and timeliness of mail service nationally” and were “implemented quickly and communicated primarily orally,” resulting in confusion and inconsistent application across the country. As DeJoy’s efforts to dismantle mail sorting machines, cut overtime, restrict deliveries, and remove mailboxes slowed mail nationally, Donald Trump himself openly admitted that his administration was withholding funding for the Postal Service in order to make it harder to process mail-in ballots^.

Things became so bad that on August 14, 2020, I filed a complaint with our state’s Attorney General calling on him to seek indictments against your predecessor and the Postmaster General for election subversion. Postal operations have continued to severely lag benchmark levels under DeJoy and this slate of Governors. This holiday season, USPS reported an unprecedented level of mail disruption, with only 64 percent of first-class mail delivered on time in late December. Through it all, the Governors were either silent or in support of DeJoy’s havoc.

The members of the USPS Board of Governors have but one central responsibility: “represent[ing] the public interest.” Members may be removed by the President “only 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.

As America’s perhaps most enduringly trusted institution, a central economic and social engine for every community in America, and a vital vanguard of the democratic tradition, the Post Office must play an essential role in our national life for generations to come. The continued challenges in preserving our Postal Service to survive and endure are gargantuan, and so demand bold solutions to meet them. To begin that work, we must have a governing body that can be trusted to represent the public interest. Thank you for your continued dedication to saving our Post Office.

Sincerely,

Bill Pascrell, Jr.

Member of Congress

Democrats’ window to pass new legislation is already closing

When Democrats hit the federal trifecta that is control of the Senate, presidency, and the House of Representatives, they won a rare chance to pass new laws. The question is, which new laws will they prioritize, given the party only has two years before that window of opportunity likely closes?

After a decade of build up, Democrats’ to-do list is looking robust, to say the least. They have promised to lock in policy to reverse climate change, pass a new voting rights bill, reform policing, overhaul immigration, and finally lock in the health care system of their dreams. Oh, and thwart the spread of COVID-19, of course. There are more options than there is time; the president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterm elections, and If Democrats lose even a single seat in the Senate, they will become the minority.

With Democrats’ window of opportunity already beginning to close, the party has to choose its priorities carefully. Less than a month into the 116th Congress, it’s already possible to see how the politics of setting these priorities are playing out. Here’s what we know so far:

Priority #1 is impeachment

The drive to convict former President Donald Trump for his role in inciting January’s Capitol riot has pushed impeachment to the head of the party’s priority line — a sign that Democrats aren’t going to be bloodlessly efficient about passing their policy agenda.

It would take 67 senators to convict Trump — all 50 Democrats and 17 Republicans — and there’s almost no chance of that happening. Still, there’s an argument for taking the time to conduct the trial, said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy research organization. “Trump’s behavior was so exceptional, that it may be worthwhile to take really aggressive steps to disincentivize the type of behavior we saw from President Trump in the future,” she said. In other words, impeachment’s important enough that Democrats think they have to try for it, even if the odds are stacked against them.

While impeachment hearings seem like they would compete with the Democrats’ early chances of passing new laws, the slow pace with which most bills actually move through Congress makes that kind of overlap pretty unlikely. The idea that Democrats would come in on day one and start passing one bill after another is simply unrealistic, said Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “You have to go back to the 1930s, when, yes, they passed a lot of stuff really fast. But since then, the 2009 stimulus is the only major legislation that passed in the first 100 days since the New Deal. That’s it!”

After impeachment, Democrats will likely turn to passing another COVID-19 relief bill. Only then will they gear up for their first big priority, likely election reform, Glassman said, likely in the summer or fall. That’s a pace that fits with historical precedent. It’s also a pace that will force Democrats to choose to focus on just a couple of items from their agenda.

McConnell is still McConnell

Before Inauguration, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told Biden he was open to impeaching Trump, a move that would surgically cut the now-former president out of politics. That comment initially led some to wonder if there was an opportunity for cooperation between Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. But in the first days of the new Biden administration, it became clear that there was no grand reconciliation in the offing. McConnell held up the organization of the Senate — usually just a formality to hand over the gavel to the new majority — for days, trying to extract promises from Democrats. “It suggests that McConnell is unlikely to be terribly cooperative. It’s a strong sign that we are not in a new Senate,” Reynolds said.

Instead, McConnell is likely to keep throwing sand into the gears of politics, an art he perfected the last time Democrats had control of Congress (from 2009 to 2011). It’s even possible that he may have dangled the possibility of impeachment before Democrats as bait. Glassman says he does think McConnell is genuinely concerned about Trump’s influence, but now that the second impeachment is underway, McConnell has every reason to stretch the process out. Biden, on the other hand, would like to get it over with and focus on policy.

Hard partisanship will likely remain the norm, but McConnell also knows he can’t push too far as Senate minority leader. He doesn’t want his obstruction to infuriate the moderate Democrats — like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — who, so far, have said they won’t vote to abolish the filibuster.

Climate votes will be tough

There is a glimmer of bipartisanship in the Senate: A group of eight Republicans and eight Democrats are cooperating to get a coronavirus relief package passed. Politicians on both sides of the aisle agree that the government should step in to help with the pandemic. But that’s as far as the consensus goes. They don’t agree, for example, that the government should step in to help with climate change.

There’s a recurring pattern in which moderates lose their jobs for taking tough, pro-environment stands on issues, only to watch those efforts fizzle. Glassman remembers Marjorie Margolis-Mesvinsky, a Democrat from a conservative Pennsylvania district, tearfully walking down the aisle of the House in 1993 to announce that she would vote to tax each British Thermal Unit, or BTU, of fossil fuels burned. The bill didn’t even make it to the Senate and she lost her reelection bid. After that, “getting BTU’d” became Washington D.C. slang for losing reelection for a fruitless cause.

Yes, there are Republicans who swear journalists to secrecy and then admit they’d like to vote to reverse climate change. But they aren’t going to stick their necks out and risk getting BTU’d unless they think a bill can actually pass. “I have a hard time seeing major climate legislation with the razor-thin margins Democrats have in the Senate, and moderates already looking to the midterm elections,” Glassman said.

* * *

To be sure, it’s still early days for the Biden administration. But the initial heading of this blue Congress suggests that the chances for ambitious stand-alone climate legislation are already fading. So instead of holding out hope for a Green New Deal, look for bits of policy duct-taped onto the underside of stimulus bills, and under-the-radar bills on environmental issues where Republicans and Democrats can find common ground.