Spring Sale: Get 1 Year, Save 58%

Make a fudgier seasonal brownie by spiking it with spiced eggnog

There are seemingly an infinite number of lists out there that detail ways to update boxed brownie mix. Some of the common suggestions include add-ins like chocolate chunks, nuts or pretzel pieces, or swapping out the oil for another fat like butter or a sweet puree like applesauce or canned pumpkin. You can top them with condensed milk, swirl them with peanut butter or dot them with cream cheese icing. 

But Salon Food’s favorite upgrade, especially in the wintertime? Add eggnog. 

It makes for a moister, fudgier brownie with a light kick of spice, ideal for holiday sharing. 

What exactly is eggnog? 

Eggnog is a dairy-based drink made by beating egg yolks and whites with sugar, milk, cream, warm spices — and often alcohol. It’s incredibly rich, and in 17th Century England, eggnog was a drink for the wealthy. As Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir wrote in “What’s Cooking America: The History of Eggnog,” people didn’t usually consume straight glasses of milk. “There was no refrigeration, and the farms belong to the big estates,” she wrote. Eggs, sherry and spices were similarly expensive. 

Once the beverage crossed the Atlantic to the British colonies, its popularity skyrocketed. There, food historian Stephen Block wrote, “farms and dairy products were plentiful, as was rum. Rum came to these shores via the Triangular Trade from the Caribbean; thus, it was far more affordable than the heavily taxed brandy or other European spirits that it replaced at our forefather’s holiday revels.” 

Most commercial varieties available at supermarkets contain gelatin and other thickeners, while using less cream and eggs. For this reason, it’s worth splurging for organic varieties — we like Ronnybrook Egg Nog, which the New York Time’s once called the “Dom Perignon of dairy,” and Organic Valley — to drink straight and use for baking. (You can get away with the cheaper stuff if you’re mixing it with booze.)

Why does this substitution work? 

First, let’s take a look at what a typical boxed brownie mix calls for in the way of additional ingredients: water, neutral oil and an egg (or two). 

The water adds some much-needed moisture but not a lot of flavor. The oil tenderizes the final product due to the fat content; unlike butter, which contains milk solids and lactic acid that aerate the batter while baking and creates a cakier brownie, oil provides a fudgier texture. Eggs serve as a leavening agent, and adding an extra whole egg or egg white will yield a cakier brownie. 

I’m partial to a really (really) fudgy brownie, which is attainable if you manage your flour to fat ratio. The more fat you can pack into your batter, the better, in this case. That’s why eggnog — which is rich in fatty cream, milk and egg yolks — is an ideal swap for the water. It also adds a gentle, warm wave of seasonal spice. 

What will the substitution look like? 

Let’s say that your boxed brownie mix calls for 1/4 cup of water, 1/3 cup of vegetable oil and one egg, like the Ghirardelli Double Chocolate Brownie Mix does. To update it with eggnog, your final ingredient list will mirror the below recipe. 

***

Recipe: Boxed Brownies with Eggnog
Yields 16 brownies 

  • 1 box of Ghirardelli Double Chocolate Brownie Mix
  • 1/4 cup of eggnog
  • 1/3 cup of vegetable oil
  • 1 egg yolk (There are already whipped whites — which serve as a leavening agent — in most organic eggnog varieties.)
  • Powdered sugar and ground nutmeg for decoration 

1. Combine brownie mix, eggnog, vegetable oil and the egg yolk. Stir until smooth.

2. Pour into a prepared 8-inch by 8-inch or 9-inch by 9-inch pan. Heat oven to 325 degrees, and bake according to package instructions. 

3. Remove from the oven, and once cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar and a little bit of ground nutmeg to mimic the flavor of the eggnog. 

 

Read more from our recipe box: 

Revenge never tasted so deliciously venomous in the slick and twisty “Promising Young Woman”

One might expect that the title character in “Promising Young Woman” is Cassandra Thomas (Carey Mulligan, who appeared on “Salon Talks” to discuss the film), a former medical student now underachieving behind the counter at a coffee shop run by Gail (Laverne Cox, in supportive best friend mode). But as this slick and satisfying comedy-thriller — written and directed by Emerald Fennell (“Killing Eve” and “The Crown“) in her big-screen debut — shows, all is not what it seems. 

Take the pre-credit sequence where Cassie is splayed out in a bar, too drunk to stand. Jerry (Adam Brody) claims he is a gentleman and offers to take her home. Instead, he takes her to his home, plying her with more alcohol, and getting her into bed where he thinks he will have his way with her. Jerry gets a surprise as he removes Cassie’s panties. 

“Promising Young Woman” is full of surprises, and that is what makes this kicky film so delicious. Cassie may be 30 and living at home after dropping out of medical school, but she is a clever and determined woman. It is soon revealed that Cassie is exacting a very specific form of revenge to counteract the wrong done to her best friend Nina years ago. It may be a form of penance, but Cassie feels it is for the betterment of society.

Cassie’s plan is triggered after she reconnects with Ryan (Bo Burnham of “Eighth Grade”), a charming (though some might say smug) pediatric surgeon who knew her back in their medical school days. Ryan is smitten with Cassie, and she reluctantly agrees to date him. When he mentions their former classmates, Cassie starts tracking them down. Each was involved in a criminal episode involving Nina, and Cassie is looking to mete out her own brand justice for her friend.

Mulligan gives a bravura performance here, slipping in an out of a series of characters in an effort to achieve a kind of closure. (She is slinky, reminiscent of Michelle Pfeiffer). As she separately meets with Madison (Alison Brie) and Dean Walker (Connie Britton), she makes them both squirm by confronting them with the uncomfortable truth about what happened to Nina. Suffice it to say, after their encounters with Cassie, minds are changed.

It is best not to reveal too much about “Promising Young Woman” but what can be said is that Cassie is really all about teaching people a lesson on how to treat women. She has fun dressing down the unsuspecting Neil (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a date who thinks “they have a connection,” but cannot remember her name. That moment is practically a dress rehearsal for what she does to some of the other guys she targets. 

Fennell’s film is a wish fulfillment revenge fantasy, and viewers who go along for the ride will be entertained. There is an undeniable pleasure in seeing Cassie get the best of men. Even in a throwaway scene — where a truck driver yells at her for stopping in the middle of a traffic lane — Cassie responds soundly with a tire iron. 

That said, one of the most curious scenes has Cassie offering sympathy to a man who actually shows some contrition and regret for his past actions. Her ability to forgive him is poignant, showing she is capable of change herself.

Likewise, there is a key scene where Cassie meets with Nina’s mother (Molly Shannon) who tries to convince her daughter’s friend that it is time to move on from the past. The film also briefly suggests that Cassie has had psychological issues in the wake of the tragedy, a point that could have been more fully explored. 

Instead, “Promising Young Woman” shifts its tone up again. This uneven film sags during a montage sequence where Cassie and Ryan sing along to Paris Hilton in a pharmacy. There is a reason why the relationship with Ryan is emphasized, but as the pieces of the story come together, things fall almost too neatly into place. It is a shame that this carefully constructed plan starts to feel contrived. 

But Fennell (like Cassie) does have a twist (or two) planned as the film builds to its unsettling climactic confrontation. The filmmaker obviously delights in pulling the rug and the floor out from under everyone.

Watch “Salon Talks”: Carey Mulligan talks “Promising Young Woman,” a feminist revenge story for the ages

“Promising Young Woman” certainly makes its points about how women always deserve to be treated by guys with respect and dignity. Delivering this message in a clever framework, as Fennell has done, will surely make it go down smoothly. That said, it would not be surprising if this film empowers women to take more responsibility and control like Cassie does rather than prompt men to reform their wicked ways. But that is why this edgy film works. It is sure to spark debate. 

“Promising Young Woman” opens theatrically on Christmas Day.

Just another wacky weekend in Trump land

Even for Donald Trump and the Republican Tabernacle Choir of the Senate, this weekend was an all-star level of crazy-making – another in which the White House could ignore a pandemic killing 3,000 Americans a day, widespread misery and an attack on the nation while discussing the possibility of martial law over Trump’s election loss.

What saved it was the last-minute, roller-coaster deal in the Congress for a coronavirus aid bill, as ugly a compromise as possible, but an agreement nevertheless. Stand by for the conflicting credits and new discoveries about what actually passes today in the multi-hundred-page bill.

The whole weekend made me, at least, feel as if I live on a different planet – with theirs being one in which it is impossible to separate the important from the inane. We can all agree that the White House continues to make seeing the news an emotionally exhausting experience.

Just a sampling:

Transition interruptus: Donald Trump ordered halted any transition meetings between the Defense Department and the incoming Joe Biden team for the next few weeks.  In what universe other than the Trump ego-fantasy does it make any sense for incoming Pentagon leadership not to know about the readiness of military forces, the global danger signs that the Pentagon is tracking, even the Defense spending patterns. Apparently, such meetings were halted because Trump was angered by seeing a Washington Post article that suggested the Biden team was looking at how many billions of dollars could be saved from re-routing money taken from the Pentagon for the border wall construction back to the military. I would hope that is something they should be considering.

Screwing up coronavirus economic aid: Even to their own members, the movement among Republican senators to find new religion for relief from debts and deficits by blocking coronavirus aid to Americans was reportedly being seen as nuts. The situation was fluid, but barely, as Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), led a late charge to stop lending by the supposedly independent Federal Reserve for businesses that need credit to stay afloat. A compromise finally got through around narrowing the proposal, setting Congress towards bill approval, but not before once again putting hunger and evictions over non-payment of rent for millions on real display and requiring a third, brief reset of the deadline clock for the final votes. Republicans had seen it as a fiscal necessity; Democrats saw a bid to throttle the incoming Joe Biden administration even before it takes office. Though the participants will see it as a victory, It was politics at its worst.

Ignoring cybersecurity hacking: Even after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it was the Russians who broke through software walls guarding the Pentagon, the Treasury and Commerce Departments and the nuclear areas of the Energy Department, Trump still insisted Saturday it could have been the Chinese – adding that they could have adversely affected voting in the election as well, to account for his loss. Trump thinks we are idiots.

Trump’s never-ending election challenges: More than six weeks after the election, Trump met in the White House on Friday night with the Sidney Powell, the lawyer who’s outlandish arguments about election fraud were considered too far out of line for him to even keep her on as a personal lawyer, where they discussed making her a special counsel investigating voter fraud, according to two people briefed on the discussion. Even Rudy Giuliani, present by phone, said no, as did White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Apart from all else, declaring a special counsel is the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, not the Oval Office. Powell is the one arguing conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States. It was unclear if Trump will move ahead on it. Meanwhile, Trump associate and disgraced, but pardoned, former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn is going around the country telling Trump to declare martial law over the election results.

The pending pardons: Politico reported that Trump is considering preemptively pardoning as many as 20 aides and associates before leaving office, even to the frustration of Senate Republicans who are arguing that strategy could backfire politically. Again, pardons are supposed to move through the Justice Department and a review process, and again Trump is insisting on his own rules for family and friends. Those under consideration include personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, campaign staff and several members of his family. Of course, accepting a pardon includes the assumption that there was a crime committed. From my point of view, perhaps the smartest move Trump might make is to offer Hunter Biden the same pre-criminal pardon he apparently is considering for his own kids.

Fast and loose money: It turns out that Trump will be leaving with tens of millions of dollars with few legal limits on how he can spend it. And, records now show that his family members managed to interfere with campaign funds to direct hundreds of millions into slush funds controlled by Trump. This brazen attempt to siphon reportable campaign money into accounts for which there is no accounting is questionable on lots of grounds, if not legal grounds. In any event, the reports extend the pattern of loose financial ethics marking the Trump presidency, which has been built on using official office and functions into personal money-making activities, from spending his time golfing at Trump resorts to re-routing foreign trips to the benefit of his own properties.

Expanding Mining: Despite the timing, on his way out the door Trump is moving to open up vast amounts of federal land to widespread mining and drilling, The New York Times reported. It is a move bound to create yet more consternation and problems for the incoming Biden administration, which for procedural reasons as well as political ones, is bound to challenge a number of the individual sites involved. Again, whose interests are being served here?

And in possibly the dumbest attack of the week: Trump supporters took up the challenge to knock the doctorate earned by Dr. Jill Biden, defending and outdoing a particularly sexist, silly and anti-intellectual column from a Wall Street Journal op-ed that asked her to drop the honorific unless she was going to treat coronavirus patients. Go stuff it, kiddo.

Meanwhile, at far ends of the news worlds, both The New York Times and Lou Dobbs ran apologies for getting things wrong – the Times over trusting a source on ISIS without proper investigation and, under legal threat, Dobbs (or his employer Fox News) for allowing unsubstantiated lying about conspiracy theories about election fraud.

On the other hand, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence reached the enormously important and contentious decision to label members of Space Force as “guardians,” rather than airmen, sailors, soldiers or Marines. Wasn’t that the name of the universe-traveling robot Gort in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”?

Klaatu barada nikto.

You think we will miss these weekends after Jan. 20?

Forget “The Stand” – “Alice in Borderland” is the wild dystopian ride we’ve been waiting for

Dystopia became our reality in 2020, and it feels nothing like so many movies and TV shows predicted. Zombies haven’t overrun our cities. Roving marauders have been in short supply, relatively speaking. An airborne plague is the source of our woes, but the atmosphere is otherwise breathable. Mostly.

Those fortunate enough to ride this out at home watch the nation come apart on TV screens, marveling at how slowly time moves when everything cracks. This is part of the reason depictions of the COVID age left us wanting. Shows designed to reflect our new Zoom existence – “Connecting,” “Love in the Time of Corona,” “Social Distance” – arrived, and nobody cared.  

Movies like “Outbreak” and “World War Z” surged in popularity at the beginning of the pandemic, but more than half a year later and with no end in sight to quarantine living, Amazon failed to successful tap into our anxiety with “Utopia, ” a show set in the midst of pandemic. AMC’s long-running post-apocalypse soap “The Walking Dead” returned to close out its season and netted its lowest ratings ever.

And a week ago, CBS All Access debuted its highly anticipated, star-studded updated version of “The Stand” to a resounding “meh.”

Evidently we’d rather tune out reminders of the ways the world as we know it is falling down. Then again, maybe the issue is with how these stories are filtering our current reality. The “distanced” series failed to consider the audience’s Zoom fatigue into the equation. “Utopia” is too messy and convoluted. Whether “The Stand” is a hit or miss depends heavily on the depth of a viewer’s love for all or most things Stephen King, but its central conflict between light and darkness plays out onscreen as banal.

Thus I was utterly surprised to be drawn in by “Alice in Borderland,” Netflix’s recently released eight-episode suspense thriller directed by Shinsuke Sato and based on a manga series. This description automatically eliminates a vast swath of America from its potential viewership. For some reason we’d rather not deal with subtitles unless it’s attached to a show featuring Klingons, Jawas, dragons, barbarians or Danish detectives.

To make direct comparison with “The Stand,” “Alice in Borderland” handles the mechanics of introducing its characters more effectively and it doesn’t throw off the audience by leaning heavily on flashbacks. What glimpses it shows of its characters’ pasts are solely presented to contextualize their action in the present. Knowing the type of people they were before they tumbled into its dystopia is important, but unlike “The Stand,” the “before” profiles aren’t extensive to the point of dragging on the story’s progress.

On the other hand, “The Stand” is a gentler story, which says plenty about the vicious nature of “Alice in Borderland” and may further narrow its appeal.

Unless, I should say, you’re a fan of the 2000 cinematic cult classic “Battle Royale,” the story of a busload of schoolkids who are knocked out and wake up on an island, at which point they are informed that by law they must now hunt and kill each other until only one of them remains. This Netflix show hints at what a series adaptation of that film could look like, albeit one influenced by “Ready Player One” and  sprinkles of “Lost” thrown in for good measure.

“Alice in Borderland” doesn’t flow like some simple pop culture mash-up or behave expressly as an eight-hour, end of days action blast. The slaughter is over the top, yes. Lots of rooms and buildings explode, and the bullets fly freely. By no means is it a culture-shifting epic, either; the script makes the same dumb missteps other shows like it trip over. (I was especially irritated by a scene threatening sexual violence against a main female character in order to highlight Arisu’s impotence. Surely Sato watched “Game of Thrones,” right?)

“Alice in Borderland” also endeavors to say something about the conditions that lead to a society losing its humanity, eventually asking its protagonists, and the audience by proxy, how they want to live once they’ve made it through whatever nightmares they have to survive.

That’s the question posted to Arisu, this story’s Alice (Kento Yamazaki) and an avid gamer who refuses to get a job or contribute to society in any meaningful way. “If only we could reset reality,” Arisu sighs after his father kicks him out, which happens at the same time his friends Karube (Keita Machida) and Chota (Yuki Morinaga) suffer misfortunes of their own making. They meet up, blow off steam by goofing off and eventually dash into a train station toilet.

When they emerge, the city streets are inexplicably empty and without power. Not even their phones work. Then a digital sign suddenly appears on the side of a nearby skyscraper that directs them to their first game where they quickly learn by doing and barely surviving.

That Arisu doesn’t believe in his own cleverness and worth is central to the first couple of episodes until circumstances force him to find some purpose in this violent world. To make it out of this world alive, he has to use his wits.

Game types correspond to playing card suits: Spades are physical competitions. Clubs require teamwork. Diamonds favor intelligent, logical players. Hearts are downright evil because they force players to toy with and betray each another.

None of the rules in this upside-down hellscape are negotiable. Giving up is not an option, because refusal to participate means game over by way of laser execution.

Why would anyone living amid an era defined by a senseless death watch something like this? For the same reasons we flock to Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” series, “Logan’s Run,” “The Running Man” or any grim vision of humankind’s tendency to be inhumane to other people. Watching under-resourced  and outgunned heroes overcome the odds is eternally satisfying – and as Arisu insists, every game has a solution.

In the same way “Battle Royale” was not expressly about cruel violence for diversion’s sake, “Alice in Borderland” runs on a mystery hiding a critique of societal divisions enabled by technology and expanded as a result of other systemic failings.

Before “Borderland” Arisu spent most of his time in online battle royale games, the kind that foster thriving virtual economies and attract millions of player who use the space to socialize. (Think “Fortnite.”)  You can spend the majority of your waking life in these virtual spaces without physically engaging with real people and the world around you. Most gamers don’t do that, but enough do to make it a culturewide problem.

Such games became massively popular in recent years and not for nothing.  On Dec. 10, the same day “Alice in Borderland” debuted on Netflix, the Los Angeles Review of Books published an essay by writer Brendan Mackie that spells out why such games appeal to hundreds of millions of players, the majority of whom are under 25 years old.

In his estimation, they are the result of the broken promise of supposed neoliberal meritocracy. A good education no longer guarantees that a person will secure an income that helps build wealth, let alone pay the bills. Hard work does not necessarily equal economic advancement either, not in a society whose decks are stacked to favor the one percent. Hence Mackie’s thesis:

“Battle royale games are the stories kids tell themselves about this culture of cutthroat competition. Just like the real world, in battle royale games only the one percent win. But these games are a fantasy in which this unequal outcome is produced transparently and equitably, albeit violently, a fairy tale about how the meritocracy should really work. Though it is tough, brutal, and difficult, it is fair; and though you have only a small chance of winning, the forces that oppress you are not unseen — they are clear and distinct. The decks are not stacked: everyone has the same health, the same armor, the same access to weapons and upgrades. You’ll probably die. But you will live and die on your skills alone.”

The writer goes on to explain that even this is an illusion. Games and rules are constantly expanding shifting, and there are always bigger and more powerful weapons to find and buy.

The “Alice in Borderland” plot draws upon this concept, in that there is no obvious pathway to the ultimate goal when Arisu, Karube and Chota first set out on their journey. Eventually we discover that players don’t necessarily share a common goal. Most of whom they encounter are only focused on survival, and more than a few are dressed like salarymen, corporate drones slogging through dead-end careers.

Several also wonder aloud what’s the point of surviving if there isn’t anything else to live for beside earning free time in an empty, lawless city.

This is where this show endeavors to do something beyond plying the audience with spectacles of violence. A strain of pondering the difference between survival and living hums throughout the first eight episodes that clicks with conversations lots of people are having right now: Who do we want to be when this is all over? How will society change?

“Survive” and “survival” are said so frequently throughout “Alice in Borderland” that when someone mentions “living,” it stands out, and that’s probably intentional.

Arisu’s chance meeting and eventual alliance with an athlete named Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) firms up this notion; one of the first questions she asks of him is, “Do you want to live?” They’re not inside of a life-or-death contest when she asks it; he’s collapsed on the ground and professes he wants to die, and she has just picked up a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s “Life in the Woods.”

In a former life Usagi climbed mountains with her father, a famous pro who vanished after a scandal and is presumed dead. Through Usagi’s refusal to let Arisu give up, she shows a determination to live within this world as she survives each trial. This may also increase her odds of “winning,” whatever that means.

Watch closely and you may notice that she and other players who clear impossible games and navigate dangerous alliances share a drive to move forward as opposed to being motivated by the chance to return to their old lives.

Nearly every poor soul drawn into this terrible place is motivated to return to the original world, but only the ones who think like a game master as opposed to a powerless gamer have a chance. They win because they focus, determinedly, on the value of existing as opposed to surrendering to paralysis by fear which, in this scenario, is death. And the way this plays out here is dark, and wild, but also bizarrely thrilling.

“How will you live in this world that’s full of despair?” asks someone who happens to be one of the smarter and more skilled players in the game. We could, and should, be asking that of ourselves in this reality and more to the point, be determined to solve that puzzle.

“Alice in Borderland” is currently streaming on Netflix.

Ultra-crispy roast potatoes from a secret cooking club in Indonesia

Every week in Genius Recipes — often with your help! — Food52 Founding Editor and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

* * *

Crispy potatoes steal attention wherever they go, and deservedly so. The contrast of hot, salty crunch to soft, steamy belly is as Pavlovian as it gets. No wonder we’ve been pre-heating our pans and fiddling with pH and chasing the singular best technique all this time.

But once you’ve got your crisping technique down — and, oh, does this recipe have it down — there’s an even more impactful frontier to cross: flavor. What if they could taste the way they crunch? What if we could match the roasted potato’s position on the zero-to-French fry scale of craveability with umami, tang, and zing?

When Lara Lee was traveling through Indonesia writing her gorgeous new cookbook “Coconut & Sambal,” researching the recipes of both her own family and of home cooks and chefs all over Indonesia, she encountered such a potato, in the home of a member of a secret cooking club in Surabaya, the capital city of the province of East Java.

“It really started as this secret society of women — which I loved — and that generous hospitality that I got all over Indonesia where everyone wants to teach you their family recipes,” Lara told me in the video above.

“The original dish is a dish called sambal goreng kentang, which is essentially a fried potato dish,” she continued. “So the potatoes are chopped, and then fried in a wok in oil, and then stirred through with a really aromatic spice paste of lots of aromatics like ginger, like garlic, and then quite often stirred together with things like liver or gizzards . . . it was really, really delicious.”

Back home in London, Lara wanted to keep the flavors and crunch of sambal goreng kentang, and make it easy to recreate in home kitchens outside of Indonesia. She experimented with roasting techniques to mimic the crunch of a good fry, settling on this genius strategy: Swiftly simmer potatoes in salty water, drain, then toss them back in the pot for a couple minutes to steam-dry. Shake about to rough up the edges, then roast them hard in hot, garlicky oil. Finish with a quick, chunky stir-fry of ginger, garlic, and scallions, and a big dousing of soy sauce and rice vinegar.

When I first saw this recipe, I had to know if the crisp would hold up through dinner against such a generous, flavorful soak and — thanks to Lara’s smart technique — it does. Like a good Buffalo wing, the dressing seeps in without softening too quickly, while the shreds of chewy ginger and sweet twists of green onion give more textures for your fork to chase.

Lara likes to serve this with roasted or grilled meats, and I’ve had it in many week-brightening dinners with my husband’s famous fried eggs. In Indonesia, sambal goreng kentang is typically served with rice and sambal on the side — you also might want to put her potatoes in the center of the plate, since they will inevitably steal the show.

Recipe: Crispy Soy & Ginger Roast Potatoes From Lara Lee

* * *

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

Allergic reactions to Pfizer vaccine may have been caused by additive, not mRNA itself

Last week, a healthcare worker at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, Alaska, sat down to receive the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. As protocol would have it, the middle-aged woman had to be monitored for 15 minutes after receiving the shot. At the ten minute mark, according to the New York Times, she started to have symptoms of an anaphylactic reaction, which can be potentially life-threatening.

The healthcare worker reportedly began to experience shortness of breath as a rash spread all over her face and torso. Naturally, an elevated heart rate followed. At first, she received a shot of epinephrine and her symptoms subsided—but not for long. The symptoms returned and she was moved to the intensive care unit, where she stayed for at least two nights. According to a recent presentation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of December 19th, this unnamed healthcare worker is one of six anaphylaxis cases among the 272,001 people who have received the COVID-19 vaccine in the United States.

Medical experts have been emphasizing that severe allergic reactions to vaccines are rare, but they can happen.

“This is something that we see with vaccines,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Salon in an interview. “The key thing is is that when you get the vaccination you’re in a place where people are going to watch you to make sure that that doesn’t occur.”

Adalja added: “If you’re somebody that has a prescription for an epi-pen, or has had allergies to injectables in the past, meaning that you’ve received an injection or something and had an allergic reaction, you should talk to your doctor about getting the vaccine and should be much more wary about how quickly you get up from the site of vaccination.”

The Pfizer vaccine is a relatively new type of vaccine that relies on synthetic messenger RNA. When a person receives the first shot of the vaccine, a bespoke version of synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) is injected into the body, which causes cells to produce proteins that resemble the spike-shaped proteins that line the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The immune system learns to recognize the spike, which means it will know to attack a real version of the coronavirus if it should enter the body. The second dose of vaccine that is administered three weeks later is akin to a booster.

According to a report in Science magazine, it might not be the vaccine itself that is causing these rare, albeit severe, allergic reactions, but instead a common chemical compound called polyethylene glycol which is attached to the lipid nanoparticles on which the mRNA hitches a ride — essentially, the packaging used to carry the mRNA to the human body. Polyethylene glycol has never been used before in an approved vaccine, but it is found in many drugs and some everyday products. The report in Science states that some experts are growing suspicious that previous exposure to polyethylene glycol could put patients at risk of an anaphylactic reaction to the vaccine, because they’ve already built up antibodies against it. They cite a 2015 study that suggests 7 percent of people have enough anti–polyethylene glycol antibodies that could predispose them to anaphylactic reactions.

But not everyone agrees with this connection.

“If it is polyethylene glycol, we should see pretty much a similar reaction with the Moderna vaccine,” Adalja said, noting it also has PEG in it.

Sharon Castillo, a spokesperson for Pfizer, told Salon in an email that the company is looking into “all the details” of the reports from Alaska (a second healthcare worker had an allergic reaction, too).

“We will closely monitor all reports suggestive of serious allergic reactions following vaccination and update labeling language if needed,” Castillo said. “The prescribing information has a clear warning/precaution that appropriate medical treatment and supervision should always be readily available in case of a rare anaphylactic event following the administration of the vaccine.”

Castillo added that participants in their Phase 3 trial were excluded if they had a history of severe adverse reactions associated with a vaccine. Pregnant women and children under the age of 16 were also excluded.  

“Overall, there were no safety signals of concern identified in our clinical trials, including no signal of serious allergic reactions associated with the vaccine,” Castillo said. “However, reports of adverse events outside of clinical studies are a very important component to our pharmacovigilance activities.”

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is setting up a study in collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to further examine the allergic reactions, and a possible link to PEG.

Adalja emphasized the importance of not worrying about these reports.

“It doesn’t decrease my confidence in this vaccine; anytime you have an injection there’s going to be some small percentage of the population that has an allergic reaction, and that’s something that we’ve been preparing for,” Adalja said.

Why the Puritans cracked down on celebrating Christmas

When winter cold settles in across the U.S., the alleged “War on Christmas” heats up.

In recent years, department store greeters and Starbucks cups have sparked furor by wishing customers “happy holidays.” This year, with state officials warning of holiday gatherings becoming superspreader events in the midst of a pandemic, opponents of some public health measures to limit the spread of the pandemic are already casting them as attacks on the Christian holiday.

But debates about celebrating Christmas go back to the 17th century. The Puritans, it turns out, were not too keen on the holiday. They first discouraged Yuletide festivities and later outright banned them.

At first glance, banning Christmas celebrations might seem like a natural extension of a stereotype of the Puritans as joyless and humorless that persists to this day.

But as a scholar who has written about the Puritans, I see their hostility toward holiday gaiety as less about their alleged asceticism and more about their desire to impose their will on the people of New England – Natives and immigrants alike.

An aversion to Christmas chaos

The earliest documentary evidence for their aversion to celebrating Christmas dates back to 1621, when Gov. William Bradford of Plymouth Colony castigated some of the newcomers who chose to take the day off rather than work.

But why?

As a devout Protestant, Bradford did not dispute the divinity of Jesus Christ. Indeed, Puritans spent a great deal of time investigating their own and others’ souls because they were so committed to creating a godly community.

Bradford’s comments reflected Puritans’ lingering anxiety about the ways that Christmas had been celebrated in England. For generations, the holiday had been an occasion for riotous, sometimes violent behavior. The moralist pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes believed that Christmastime celebrations gave celebrants license “to do what they lust, and to folow what vanitie they will.” He complained about rampant “fooleries” like playing dice and cards and wearing masks.

Civil authorities had mostly accepted the practices because they understood that allowing some of the disenfranchised to blow off steam on a few days of the year tended to preserve an unequal social order. Let the poor think they are in control for a day or two, the logic went, and the rest of the year they will tend to their work without causing trouble.

English Puritans objected to accepting such practices because they feared any sign of disorder. They believed in predestination, which led them to search their own and others’ behavior for signs of saving grace. They could not tolerate public scandal, especially when attached to a religious moment.

Puritan efforts to crack down on Christmas revelries in England before 1620 had little impact. But once in North America, these seekers of religious freedom had control over the governments of New Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut.

Puritan intolerance

Boston became the focal point of Puritan efforts to create a society where church and state reinforced each other.

The Puritans in Plymouth and Massachusetts used their authority to punish or banish those who did not share their views. For example, they exiled an Anglican lawyer named Thomas Morton who rejected Puritan theology, befriended local Indigenous people, danced around a maypole and sold guns to the Natives. He was, Bradford wrote, “the Lord of Misrule” – the archetype of a dangerous type who Puritans believed create mayhem, including at Christmas.

In the years that followed, the Puritans exiled others who disagreed with their religious views, including Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams who espoused beliefs deemed unacceptable by local church leaders. In 1659, they banished three Quakers who had arrived in 1656. When two of them, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, refused to leave, Massachusetts authorities executed them in Boston.

This was the context for which Massachusetts authorities outlawed Christmas celebrations in 1659. Even after the statute left the law books in 1681 during a reorganization of the colony, prominent theologians still despised holiday festivities.

In 1687, the minister Increase Mather, who believed that Christmas celebrations derived from the bacchanalian excesses of the Roman holiday Saturnalia, decried those consumed “in Revellings, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.”

The hostility of Puritan clerics to celebrations of Christmas should not be seen as evidence that they always hoped to stop joyous behavior. In 1673, Mather had called alcohol “a good creature of God” and had no objection to moderate drinking. Nor did Puritans have a negative view of sex.

What the Puritans did want was a society dominated by their views. This made them eager to convert Natives to Christianity, which they managed to do in some places. They tried to quash what they saw as usurious business practices within their community, and in Plymouth they executed a teenager who had sex with animals, the punishment prescribed by the Book of Leviticus. When the Puritans believed that Indigenous people might attack them or undermine their economy, they lashed out – most notoriously in 1637, when they set a Pequot village on fire, murdered those who tried to flee and sold captives into slavery.

By comparison to their treatment of Natives and fellow colonists who rebuffed their unbending vision, the Puritan campaign against Christmas seems tame. But it is a reminder of what can happen when the self-righteous control the levers of power in a society and seek to mold a world in their image.

Peter C. Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

South Indian filter coffee is like no coffee you’ve had before

In April, my stainless steel coffee filter ran dry. Which is to say, I ran out of my favorite coffee — in the midst of a lockdown, no access to my Indian grocery store, and broken supply chains (both retail and by way of visiting aunties loaded with gifts). Anyone whose day begins with the certainty of that one precisely made cup would understand when I say: I was sad.

In the end I substituted, managed, survived. (OK, I may have begged a friend across town to mail me the dregs of her stash.) There were certainly far bigger worries to wade through, but its absence was felt. In a shaky world, it was the reassurance of that morning routine that I craved.

Filter coffee, or filter kaapi, is an integral part of South Indian food culture — and, for me, one steeped in nostalgia. When I was a child, unbeknownst to my mother, my grandmother gave me my first diluted half-mug, which carried with it the same sneaky thrill as that first furtive sip of beer a few years later.

As a teenager, the smell of freshly filtered coffee was my cue to get out of bed. As I shuffled down the stairs, my mother would be halfway through making coffee in her gnarled saucepan. Milk boiled first, to which a thick decoction (the coffee extract in the filter) was added — but never boiled — followed by sugar. The liquid was then deftly and repeatedly juggled between saucepan and mug to give it extra foam (norai)—this bit of food theater is entrenched in kaapi tradition (at many coffee houses you can see it poured from a meter high).

Our days began with the first sip and the crackling of a newspaper, my dad reaching for a pen to begin the crossword. Coffee consumed, we’d quickly fall into our practiced rhythms. There was no lingering or going for another mugful. This was a one-and-done kind of affair.

Because, when made right, one filter kaapi is all you need.

* * *

Though deeply ingrained in morning routines today, coffee isn’t native to India, let alone South India. Regardless of whom you speak to, its arrival is shrouded in myth. Did that one Sufi pilgrim really smuggle in seven beans from Yemen in the 16th century? Did the French introduce it? What is clear is that it proliferated under British rule, as Sandeep Srinivasa carefully reconstructs in his timeline of coffee in India. By the mid 1800s, coffee plants began to thrive in South India’s hilly regions, which proved to possess the perfect growing conditions for the crop.

Coffee drinking in South India had a shaky start. Seen as a predominantly upper-class Brahmanical drink, coffee played a direct role in the early-mid 1900s, as Srinivasa writes, in the Tamil caste’s struggle for equal access to the coffee houses of the time. By the time the struggle reached its zenith in the early 1940s, the Coffee Board of India (formed to promote coffee production) was born, and South India was producing enough arabica and robusta beans not just for export, but also to be consumed domestically.

It isn’t just the beans that make South Indian filter coffee so unique, though — it’s a combination of how those beans are roasted and ground, brewed, and eventually served. A lot of these practiced rituals, along with the impenetrable sentiment for them, are passed down within families.

* * *

One of my own abiding memories from when we lived in Mumbai was accompanying my mother to a neighborhood called Matunga, a South Indian stronghold, to buy our monthly supply of coffee. There, I’d stand by as she oversaw the grind, enjoying the opportunity to practice her Tamil in what was often a lopsided conversation. On the drive home, the car’s recirculated air would be flush with the aroma escaping from the loosely bound packs of coffee. That unmistakable smell was largely thanks to the particular addition of chicory to arabica beans — in my mother’s case, in a golden ratio of 1:5.

Indeed, the subject of chicory — a caffeine-free coffee substitute used for its resemblance in color and aroma — cleaves South Indian coffee lovers down the middle. Purists hate when it appears in their coffee blend; others, like me, love its special touch of bitterness and strong aroma. (On my first visit to New Orleans, I gushed over the coffee at Café Du Monde, which is a mix of chicory and coffee — a rare sighting in these parts.)

According to Srinivasa, the addition of (and substitution with) chicory in filter coffee, as we know it today, took off during World War II, when coffee trade routes were disrupted and the industry suffered a setback. However, in this fascinating account tracing the roots of filter coffee, writer Vikram Doctor finds an antecedent as far back as 1876, in a Scottish drink called Camp Coffee. When mixed with hot milk, Doctor notes that the sweetened coffee-chicory essence tastes remarkably like filter coffee.

The other distinguishing feature of filter kaapi is the filter apparatus itself. A simple but effective device, it is a stainless steel or brass percolator divided into two halves, with a plunger, and an airtight lid. The bottom of the upper half is pierced with the tiniest holes, through which the coffee drips into the container below. While similarly constructed percolators find mention in cookbooks like in Culinary Jottings for Madras, which dates as far back as 1878, as Doctor mentions here, the one in use today might well be a homegrown, practical, metal version of the foreign percolators introduced to India.

I think back to my own great-grandmother, who enjoyed working with her trusty metalsmith to design rustic versions of all sorts of non-native cookware — doughnut makers and dessert molds and egg poachers — and the evolution of filters from do-it-yourself to commercially produced seems entirely plausible.

* * *

Across the oceans today, in my Brooklyn home, filter coffee gives me the familiar foundation I need to start each day. Each morning, I get out my single-serving percolator (most filters for home use are sized for one or two) and measure out two heaping teaspoons of coffee. I take care to press down with the plunger — not firmly enough and you risk the hot water running through too quickly, too hard and it goes all clogged-drain on you — before I pour over the boiling water, and wait it out. It’s this slow-brewing process that makes the coffee so special. As Vikram Doctor tells me: “The initial heat gets some of the bitter aromas that you get from espresso, but not all of it, and then the longer brewing gets the mellow flavours.”

To the patient go the spoils.

A couple months into running out of coffee this past spring, and in an attempt to find a more sustainable supply, I came across a pandemic mini-miracle: Ministry of Kaapi, a supplier of “damn fine Indian coffee” right here in New York. Founder Danée Shows was introduced to South Indian coffee when her husband Shiv’s sister sent them a batch from India. She loved it so much, she searched high and low for replenishment here in the U.S. — and failed. Taking matters into their own hands, they set up shop, selling everything from coffee blends to paraphernalia, including the traditional tumbler and davara set that’s part of the ceremony of serving filter coffee (and is widely used today, but has its own troubled origins).

Shows enjoys the challenge of introducing kaapi to a new audience that often mistake it for American drip coffee (“it is a drip but a very slow one”). And for those intimidated by the filter or the brew time, they offer bottled decoction (liquid coffee extract) that can be stored in the fridge for up to a month. “Stocking your fridge with decoction means freeing up time, while still savoring a super fresh, small-batch brew,” she says.

At-the-ready decoction is a thrilling convenience, even for someone like me who carries her filter everywhere she goes. In India, friends tell me about iD coffee, decoction sold in sachets that have been a game-changer for those unfamiliar with the filtration process — North Indians particularly, but not exclusively, are more used to tea—but who crave the filter coffee made at friends’ homes.

My own mother is very used to requests for filter coffee from her (pre-pandemic) guests, and she’s always thrilled to oblige. Her only caveat: “Do you have 30 minutes? Because that’s how long it will take.” My father at this point would shift uneasily in his seat, having already prepared his goodbyes. He’d no doubt find a bottle of decoction or a stock of sachets very handy in these situations.

For the daily, and very necessary, morning cup, however, I will always enjoy the meditative ritual of slow-brewing that single, singularly delicious cup. On days when I know I’ll be short on time or patience, I let it drip the previous night, and it tastes just as delicious. But I almost never skip the frothing trick — the stretch-pouring between saucepan and mug — a bit of early-morning daredevilry to arrive at a coffee that hits the spot every time: smooth, strong, aromatic, with a lofty, wobbly crown of foam.

Hot tips:

  • Pick a ratio of chicory-to-coffee that you enjoy (15:85, 20:80 . . .) You can also just pick a “pure filter coffee” (without chicory).
  • Store your ground coffee in the fridge so it stays fresh longer (and retains its aroma).
  • If you’re short on time, set the filter to drip before you go to bed. In cooler months, it will stay fresh on the counter. If it’s very warm, you might consider storing your decoction overnight in the fridge (once it has dripped).
  • Decoction can stay in the fridge for up to a day.
  • When making your cup, boil the milk, then cut the heat and add the decoction, ie, don’t boil the decoction with the milk — it loses flavor.
  • While the traditional way to drink it is hot, Partnerships Editor (and fellow filter-coffee fan) Erin Alexander loves drinking it cold with milk and ice (like an iced latte). “I know it’s against the rules, but it’s sooo much better than regular iced coffee,” she says. My thoughts on that? Have it as you will, as long as you enjoy it!

Trump’s last-minute pardon spree shows why Joe Biden just can’t “move on”

No one should be surprised that Donald Trump is on a pardon spree for some of the most notorious crooks in politics. You have the men that were convicted for their role in colluding with Russia’s version of the Watergate conspiracy to hack Democratic emails during the 2016 election, such as Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trumpian gadfly Roger Stone. You have former congressional GOP scumbags Chris Collins, Duncan Hunter, and Steve Stockman, all convicted for financial crimes like insider trading stealing from campaign donors and stealing from charity. You have Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, who was sent to the clinker for tax evasion. And for good measure, Trump also sprung some outright murderers, mercenaries who worked for Blackwater, which is run by Trump’s buddy, Erik Prince. These men were convicted for their role in an outright massacre of Iraqi civilians, including a 9-year-old boy. 

No one is surprised. Indeed, social media is currently duking it out over the trophy for Least Surprised. But it is this very lack of surprise that underlines why Trump’s pardon spree is a problem. As we were repeatedly warned would happen when Trump took office, Trump is normalizing corruption — at least on the Republican side. All of which just makes it all the more urgent for the Department of Justice, when Joe Biden takes office, to ignore all calls to let bygones be bygones, and instead investigate and prosecute Trump to the fullest extent of the law. Forget all the claims that doing so is a threat to “national unity.” Failure to hold Trump to account is the true threat to national unity. 

After all, the standard Trump is attempting to set with his actions — where Republicans can break any law that they want without facing consequences — is a standard tearing this country apart. That’s a literal double standard, where the Democrats are expected to obey laws and respect the rules, but the Republicans can do whatever they want, no matter how illegal. That is why, despite reports that he “just wants to move on,” Biden can’t move past Trump’s crimes. 

By not prosecuting Trump, Biden’s administration would be consenting to this double standard. And there is no way to that we can have healing and unity in a country where half the country’s elected representatives have no rules or boundaries on their behavior, while the other side is expected to act like a bunch of Boy Scouts. That is a prescription for increasing acrimony, as the Republican side will continue to transgress and the Democratic side will continue to boil with resentment at this wild and unfair double standard. The only way for a people to be unified is for all people to have to live under the same set of rules and expectations. 

And make no mistake, this is a double standard. No one should doubt that Democrats will continue to be expected to obey the law — and if they transgress, both Republican and Democratic administrations will come down on them like a sack of hammers. Republicans have no restraint going after Democrats, even though their “investigations” usually turn up nothing of note. But Democrats tend to show no hesitation in holding other Democrats accountable, as well, because it’s widely believed that it looks bad to do what Trump is doing, which is to give license to fellow partisans who break the law. 

Look, for instance, how Hillary Clinton was treated during Barack Obama’s presidency — even though, unlike Trump and his cronies, she didn’t commit any crimes or transgress ethical norms. Nonetheless, Clinton was buried under Republican-led congressional investigations, often spurred on by incomprehensible right wing conspiracy theories like Benghazi. Her entire email history was investigated and investigated again by the FBI, and the FBI head, James Comey, even broke with FBI protocol to make a big public stink over the investigations.

The result of all this investigating was bupkis, of course, but tellingly, Obama himself didn’t get involved in any way. Not just because staying out of it was the right thing to do (arguably, it wasn’t, since let’s face it, she was being persecuted unfairly in many instances), but also because Obama understood that it would be scandalous for a Democratic president to interfere in any way with an investigation. Clinton’s own public behavior suggested she had the same belief, and she cooperated with investigations not just because she knew she was innocent, but because showing even the tiniest fraction of the same resistance Trump has shown throughout his presidency would have been a massive scandal. 

A country divided in this way cannot stand. The only way to rectify Trump undoing justice in this way is for Trump himself to face justice. If he doesn’t, and Biden prevents investigations in the name of “healing” and “unity”, it will only send a message to the already wildly corrupt GOP: Do what you want. No one will ever stop you. Rules are only for Democrats. 

Letting Trump’s crimes and cover-ups slide hurts the body politic in another way: It will increase cynicism and distrust in politics. Gallup polling in 2015 showed that three-quarters of Americans already believed corruption was widespread in government. Heaven only knows how much worse it’s gotten under Trump, who manifested this belief into reality. 

Indeed, it’s because so many Americans are skeptical of government that Trump got as far as he did. Not because, as many pundits naively thought, Trump voters believed his promise to “drain the swamp.” No, it’s because the belief that all politicians are corrupt allowed Trump voters to feel justified in their desire to vote for a shameless criminal, a man who literally bragged on the campaign trail that tax evasion makes him “smart” and who loved talking at length about how he cheats the system. 

If something isn’t done to counter the levels of corruption Trump has introduced into politics, expect a thousand more Trumps to flourish, brought to office by voters who figure all politicians are corrupt, so they might as well vote for the one who is the most flagrant about it. Corruption isn’t stopped by speeches. Even noble bills that introduce stronger rules don’t matter, if the norm in D.C. is that the rules are never enforced on Republicans. The only thing that can end corruption is consequences. 

Trump understands this, which is why he’s stripping consequences away for all the people who committed crimes for him, or even just crimes he likes. The only way to keep Republicans from going buck wild with the financial crimes and campaign cheating is to see Trump himself prosecuted. Trump and his cronies need to taste justice for there to be any hope of fixing what’s so broken in this country. 

 

Republicans rebuff Trump, setting up a government shutdown as unemployment benefits expire

President Donald Trump left to his Mar-a-Lago resort for the Christmas weekend on Wednesday without signing the $900 billion COVID relief package or the $1.4 billion omnibus spending bill recently passed by Congress, setting up the possibility that crucial aid for the unemployed will expire and the government will shut down during the holidays.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., attempted to pass a standalone bill that would provide $2,000 direct payments to most Americans by unanimous consent, meaning the speaker and the leaders of both the minority and majority must agree, on Thursday but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., objected to the measure. Democrats are expected to put the bill up for a full vote on Monday. Republicans will likely reject the relief checks, endorsed by Trump at the 11th hour, again. In the meantime, unemployment aid for 14 million people expires on Friday. 

Congress passed the relief and spending bills on Monday after months of stalled negotiations — which Trump chose not to participate in. A group of bipartisan senators got Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to eventually cave on his demand for a corporate liability shield to protect companies from the responsibility of keeping their employees and customers safe in a pandemic. Democrats dropped their demands for increased federal funding to aid states and municipalities hit by the economic lockdowns. After Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., drew bipartisan praise for calling to raise the $600 stimulus payments in the coronavirus bill to $1,200, Trump demanded the payments be increased to $2,000. While Sanders and Hawley had already backed off their demand in the interest of passing a relief bill before programs like unemployment insurance expire this month, Trump suddenly declared that he would not sign the much-needed aid package, which also includes relief for laid-off workers, small businesses, and the poor. He did not mention in a video he released late Tuesday that his own administration pushed the $600 payments.

Trump has also demanded that Congress strip foreign aid funding from the spending bill that the coronavirus package was paired with, even though his own administration called for the foreign aid funding. The foreign aid package was approved by the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee and got 128 of 195 votes from House Republicans on Monday.

The move blindsided Trump’s own staff and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who are now scrambling to figure out how to proceed. Trump, meanwhile, left for his golf resort days before unemployment benefits for 14 million people expire on Sunday, government funding expires on Monday, and a moratorium protecting 30 million people from eviction expires at the end of the month.

Congressional Democrats, who have pushed for higher stimulus payments since the Cares Act in their attempt to pass a much larger $3.4 trillion relief bill in May and $2.2 trillion package in October, welcomed the call for $2,000 checks after  McConnell objected to larger payments for months. But Trump’s own party now stands in the way of his last-minute demand.

McCarthy has demanded to renegotiate the foreign aid in the spending bill that Republicans approved after Trump’s demand but Democrats have little interest in revisiting a bill they already passed.

“Today, on Christmas Eve morning, House Republicans cruelly deprived the American people of the $2,000 that the President agreed to support,” Pelosi said in a statement after the vote. “If the President is serious about the $2,000 direct payments, he must call on House Republicans to end their obstruction.”

Since the original aid package already passed, Trump could simply veto the bill and Congress could seek to override his veto. “Yet it’s likely that the relief effort could fall apart entirely at that point, given that congressional Republicans have already indicated that they are reluctant to go against Trump, who remains widely popular with GOP voters,” The Washington Post reported.

“Amid all the craziness, it is worth pausing and recognizing the exercise in absurdity this is to try and pacify a single individual who is mad,” tweeted CNN Capitol Hill reporter Phil Mattingly.

“I regret to inform you that no one has a damn clue what the president is up to,” added Politico congressional reporter Jake Sherman. “Not Republicans. Not much of his White House. no one… There’s a dark sense that’s setting in among lawmakers, aides and even some of those Trump World ‘insiders’ that this entire tantrum is because Republicans are abandoning him on the Electoral College vote and acknowledging that his presidency is over.”

“Nobody knows exactly what Trump is going to do and they’re all trying to figure it out,” a source in contact with the White House told the Post, predicting that the odds of a veto were “a little less than 50-50.”

Depending on when Congress sends the package to the White House, Trump could also choose to pocket veto the legislation, meaning the bill would die once the next session of Congress begins on January 3.

A top Republican congressional aide told Politico the episode was a “complete clusterf*ck.”

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said Trump threw House Republicans under the bus during a call with his GOP colleagues, according to The New York Times.

“I don’t know if we recover from this,” Representative Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said on the call. “We will have a hell of a time getting this out of people’s head.”

The move could also impact the Republicans’ hopes of holding their Senate majority, putting Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., in a tough spot. Loeffler said on Wednesday that she would “certainly look at supporting it if it repurposes wasteful spending.”

“Trump has put Loeffler and Perdue in an impossible situation repeatedly throughout the entirety of the runoff. And this is just the latest chapter of the book of humiliation he has made them characters in,” a Georgia Republican strategist told Politico. “What do they do? Do they defy the president and stand by what they had been saying or do they once again look like weak puppets with no backbone?”

Democrats Jon Ossoff, who is facing Perdue, and Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, who is challenging Loeffler, have already made higher direct payments a key part of their platform.

“As I’ve said from the start, the Senate should have acted on this months ago, and support for Georgians should have been far greater,” Warnock said in a statement on Wednesday. “Donald Trump is right, Congress should swiftly increase direct payments to $2,000. Once and for all, Senator Loeffler should do what’s best for Georgia instead of focusing on what she can do for herself.”

Sherman reported on Thursday that Trump allies say that the president thinks his demand is “playing well with Americans” but Republicans increasingly believe they may have a better shot at passing a bill under President-elect Joe Biden. “Biden’s a Democrat, but at least you know his administration’s word is likely to be good,” he said, adding that this Congress began during a government shutdown and “it could end shut down.”

GOP senator who voted for Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich blocks stimulus checks

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who voted for President Donald Trump’s deficit-exploding tax cuts for the rich in 2017, blocked fellow Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s attempt Friday to pass legislation that would provide $1,200 direct payments to U.S. adults and $500 to children amid a devastating pandemic and ongoing economic collapse.

When Hawley of Missouri requested unanimous consent to pass the direct payments bill—which he introduced last week with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—Johnson objected, delivering a rambling speech complaining about the rising deficit.

Michael Linden, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, noted on Twitter following Johnson’s objection that “another round of stimulus checks at $1,200 would be roughly 1/7 of the size of the Trump tax cuts which Senator Johnson happily supported.”

“Needless to say,” Linden added, “$1,200 to everyday people right now is way more economically useful than hundreds of billions to corporations.”

Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, also slammed Johnson for blocking direct relief. “Millions are falling into poverty,” said Wikler, “and Ron Johnson—who loves tax cuts for the rich—is blocking help.”

Hawley’s attempt to pass stimulus checks in a standalone bill came as Congress continued working to finalize a roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief package that, as it stands, would provide one-time $600 direct payments to U.S. adults earning less than $75,000 a year and $600 to the children of eligible recipients.

The relief negotiations hit a snag after Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) demanded inclusion of language that would terminate emergency lending programs authorized by the CARES Act, a move critics warned would hamstring the incoming Biden administration’s ability to address the economic crisis.

Lawmakers are expected to work through the weekend, if necessary, in an effort to reach an agreement. Negotiators are also racing to avert a government shutdown, which will occur Friday night without passage of a sprawling funding bill or a stop-gap measure. Hawley and Sanders have both threatened to hold up an extension of government funding in order to push through direct payments.

In a speech on the Senate floor Friday, Hawley said the $1,200 payments to adults and $500 to children—modeled after the checks provided under the CARES Act—are “the least that we can do.”

“It should be the first thing that we can do,” said Hawley. “And as these negotiations drag on and on, fixated and focused and hung up on who knows what issues, let’s start with this. Let’s send a message to working families that they’re first, not last. That they are the most important consideration, not some afterthought.”

After Johnson blocked his request for unanimous consent, Hawley said Sanders will be on the floor later Friday to demand passage of the direct payments.

“This is not the end of this fight,” said Hawley. “I’m here right now on this floor. Senator Sanders will be back in a matter of hours to ask again for the same measure… I’ve been proud to partner with him on this effort.”

The coup and the grift: Understanding Trump’s evil endgame

Donald Trump’s villainy does not rest or find any respite during the holiday season.

As Michael D’Antonio, author of “The Truth About Trump,“ told Salon in a recent phone conversation, Trump will accept any help — legal or illegal, foreign or domestic, from friend or foe — in his effort to remain in power. Donald Trump is America’s fascist authoritarian stalker. He will not stop.

During a video released on Tuesday evening, Donald Trump again suggested that he will not leave office as required on Inauguration Day. In that same speech, Trump also offered the American people payments of $2,000 each (instead of the paltry $600 dollars yielded by Republicans) in coronavirus relief support. In effect, Trump hopes to bribe the American people — even at this late date — into supporting his attempted coup.

How has America’s mainstream news media responded to Trump’s ongoing coup attempt? With some notable exceptions, the professional political observers and commentariat are focused on the political countdown clock and what they see as Joe Biden’s inevitable ascension on Jan. 20. But while the media obsesses about a return to “normalcy,” Trump continues to scheme and plot.

Last Friday, Trump held a meeting with his cabal in the Oval Office. Apparently, there were discussions of a military coup that would allow Trump to “re-run” the election in states he has lost. Other options explored included the confiscation of voting machines to search for “irregularities” — which would presumably be found, leading to Trump’s miraculous “re-election.” Trump and his agents are also conspiring with Republicans in Congress to disrupt or delay the certification of Biden’s electoral victory on Jan. 6.

Last Sunday, two days after Trump’s seditious meeting in the White House, his campaign sent the following email to supporters:

Biden’s Campaign Manager said Republicans were “a bunch of f—ers.”

Friend,

Wow.

First, Hillary called you DEPLORABLE.

Then, Joe Biden said we aren’t good people.

Next, Nancy called you a DOMESTIC ENEMY.

And NOW, Biden’s campaign manager says we’re “a bunch of f—ers.”

This is what the Left thinks of you. They HATE you and only want to BRING YOU DOWN. Unbelievable. We cannot allow these LOW-LIFE DEMOCRATS to run our Country.

We’re turning to the President’s strongest defenders, like YOU, to step up and FIGHT BACK against the Radical Left. We must DEFEND the Election.

Please contribute ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW to support your President and to DEFEND America from the Left.

Donald Trump’s emails to his followers are not separate from the coup plot. In fact, they are central to it.

TrumpWorld is an alternate reality, a political cult whose followers are tied together with the Great Leader in a knot of collective narcissism and other antisocial pathologies. Through that process Donald Trump’s grievances become his followers’ grievances. Trump’s narrative of white victimology and “betrayal” — by Democrats, “the deep state,” antifa or Black Lives Matter activists, the media, immigrants, Muslims and whatever group may be targeted in a given day or week — is shared by his followers.

The language used in Trump’s emails to his fascistic flock, be it about “defending” the election or an appeal to “patriots,” or as in the above example the bugaboo of “the left” and the “low-life Democrats” who “hate” you and “your President,” is calculated to insult, enrage and activate a sense of grievance and anger.

The grand uniting theme of Donald Trump’s emails to his followers is a narrative of “us” versus “them,” the “real Americans” vs some imagined enemy. Stochastic terrorism is central here: Political violence is encouraged as a patriotic and necessary act to “defend” Trump and his “real Americans.”

To understand Trump’s campaign emails as purely a financial grift is to miss the larger picture. Authoritarianism is by its very nature kleptocratic. Moreover, Trump’s “fundraising” emails are a way to insulate himself against criminal charges (and possible conviction) after leaving office, and then to finance his rebellious shadow presidency.

Trump’s campaign emails fulfill another role as well: In conjunction with the vast right-wing disinformation machine, they psychologically condition his followers into giving aid, comfort and other support for political violence against the Biden administration, other Democrats and liberals and progressives more generally.

The Trump regime’s strategy of violence and intimidation against Democrats — as well as those Republicans deemed to be insufficiently loyal — has proven at least partly effective. Michigan’s State House was closed on the day the Electoral College cast its votes, for example, to protect its members from possible attack.

Several weeks ago, the Michigan secretary of state’s home was surrounded by dozens of armed right-wing gunmen in an act of political intimidation inspired by Trump’s blatant lies about electoral fraud. Earlier, a plot by right-wing terrorists to kidnap and execute Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in hopes of launching a “revolution,” was stopped by law enforcement. This plot also targeted other government officials, including Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. 

Overall, as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the FBI and other law enforcement and watchdog groups, hate crimes and other right-wing violence have greatly increased during Trump’s presidency. White right-wing terrorists are now a greater a threat to the country’s domestic security than terrorism by militant Islamists. Inspired by Trump’s presidency and the global right, white supremacists and neo-Nazis have committed mass shootings and other acts of lethal violence both in the United States and abroad.

Trump is not subtle in his embrace of white supremacist and other right-wing violence. After the mayhem in Charlottesville in 2017, which killed Heather Heyer and injured many other people, Trump described the Confederate sympathizers, neo-Nazis and white supremacists who led the rioting as “very fine people”. During the 2020 presidential debates Trump also delivered a nod to the Proud Boys, a right-wing street gang, inviting them to “stand back and stand by.“

The Proud Boys and other extremists fully understand Trump’s expectations. For example, the Proud Boys and similar groups are supposedly planning to infiltrate Biden’s inauguration with the goal of disrupting it. Right-wing militia leaders have threatened to resist Biden’s presidency, deeming him to be an illegal president and usurper. Two weeks ago in Washington, pro-Trump thugs ran amok, attacking innocent bystanders, engaging in street combat with antifascists and targeting Black churches for vandalism.

In Salem, Oregon, this week, dozens of right-wing thugs (some of them armed) attacked the State Capitol with the goal of forcing Gov. Kate Brown and state legislators to abandon coronavirus public health restrictions. After attacking journalists and police officers, these paramilitaries were finally dispersed by law enforcement. 

While this is obvious it must still be stated: If the Oregon State Capitol were attacked by Black or brown or Muslim people (armed or not), they would have been suppressed with lethal force. 

Barring the unthinkable, Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States. Trump’s coup attempt will metastasize into a shadow presidency, and his followers will mutate into a seditious fifth column, slavishly committed to the Great Leader, his family and his amorphous “cause.”

The danger here is not that 74 million Trump voters will pick up arms and begin a second American civil war. But instead that far too many of them will give aid, comfort and support, both material and symbolic, to Trump’s shadow presidency and the political terrorism it will likely inspire.

The ultimate goal of Trump’s coup attempt is to overthrow the norms of democratic governance and legitimacy, by any means necessary. Trump would of course like to remain in power indefinitely, but that is only the proximate goal. On Jan. 20, he will likely be deposed — but the struggle will continue. If the American neofascist movement empowered by Donald Trump is allowed to keep growing, then his coup attempt will have achieved a major strategic success.

Trump will do anything for Saudi crown prince, but won’t call U.S. victims of Saudi terrorism

One year ago, three U.S. servicemen were killed in a terrorist attack at Pensacola Naval Air Station by an officer in the Royal Saudi Air Force, who had been coordinating with al-Qaida operatives for years while completing a pilot training program at the base. Earlier this month the three service members were posthumously honored with the Purple Heart. Their families, however, are still waiting for President Trump to make good on what he had assured them the day after their children were killed: That he would get to the bottom of the attack, and that the Saudi royal family — specifically, King Salman himself, the desert monarchy’s absolute ruler — would take care of them.

They are also still waiting for Trump himself, or anyone in the administration, to contact them.

Now the Trump administration is reportedly weighing whether to grant Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman legal immunity from a federal lawsuit accusing him of targeting a former intelligence officer for assassination. The decision could also lead to the dismissal of other cases against MBS, including one accusing him of directing the murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

The move, however, could also thwart possible legal action on the part of the Pensacola victims, who may be covered under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which gives federal courts jurisdiction over a foreign state’s support for acts of terrorism against U.S. targets, even if the foreign county is not a designated state sponsor of terrorism.

Hanging over all this is the recently renewed possibility that members of the Saudi Royal family could be called as witnesses in a lawsuit brought against the kingdom by families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

The Pensacola attacker, Mohammad al-Shamrani, was later revealed to have been in regular contact since 2015 with what the FBI described as “dangerous operatives” in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That predates by two years his 2017 arrival at the U.S. on a special visa for flight training at NAS Pensacola, the same base where some of the 9/11 hijackers listed an address.

About a week before the attack, al-Shamrani visited the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, and on Sept. 11, 2019, just months before the shooting, he posted a social media message saying that “the countdown has begun.” While officials have not gone so far to say the attacker was directed by al-Qaida, they have said his ties to the group were “significant.” No foreign terrorist organization has successfully directed a deadly attack in the U.S. since 2001.

The attack lasted about 15 minutes before security forces killed the shooter. In that time he shot to death Ensign Joshua Watson, Petty Officer 3rd Class Mohammed Haitham and Petty Officer 3rd Class Cameron Walter, and wounded eight other service members, using a semiautomatic handgun with about 180 rounds of ammunition.

The morning after the shooting, President Trump told reporters as he departed for a fundraiser at another location in Florida that King Salman was “very, very devastated” about the shooting, and the royal family would help the affected families “very greatly.” The king, Trump said, would involve himself in the effort personally.

“I spoke with the King of Saudi Arabia. They are devastated in Saudi Arabia,” the president said. “We’re finding out what took place, whether it’s one person or a number of people. And the king will be involved in taking care of families and loved ones. He feels very strongly. He’s very, very devastated by what happened and what took place. Likewise the crown prince. They are devastated by what took place in Pensacola. And I think they’re going to help out the families very greatly.”

“But, right now, they send their condolences,” Trump continued. “And, as you know, I’ve sent my condolences. It’s a very shocking thing. And we’ll find out — we’ll get to the bottom of it very quickly.”

A family member of one of the victims told Salon that neither country had lived up to its promises. “No one from the Saudi government has reached out to any of the families,” this person said. “No one from the White House has ever called us. No one has been held accountable. We’re still waiting.”

The Navy released its investigation in November. The heavily redacted report concluded that the attacker had self-radicalized, but a synopsis added that “the organizational environment inherent in the aviation pipeline” played a role, and that conditions to an extent were little different from what could lead to similar actions from “our own Sailors and civilian personnel.” (The report notes “an adverse microclimate for all students” where superiors subjected foreign students to “derogatory and sometimes abusive comments as well as humiliating public reprimands” — such an incident in which an instructor referred to al-Shamrani as “Pornstache.”)

A month after the attack, Attorney General Bill Barr announced that nearly two dozen other Saudis in the U.S. for military training were being deported for having anti-American or “jihadist” content on their social media. Seventeen of them had also reportedly come in contact with child pornography.

However, the unclassified sections of the 267-page Navy report contain just one passing mention of AQAP. At one point the report reveals that investigators had not reviewed the shooter’s responses to security questions on his visa application: “The security portion contains 55 yes or no questions pertaining to such areas as terrorism, espionage, illegal activity, immigration violations, felony convictions, etc. The submitted A-2 visa application was not reviewed for derogatory material as part of this investigation.”

The document contrasts sharply with FBI Director Christopher Wray’s press conference six months earlier.

“The new evidence shows that al-Shamrani had radicalized not after training here in the U.S. but at least as far back as 2015, and that he had been connecting and associating with a number of dangerous AQAP operatives ever since,” Wray said. “It shows that al-Shamrani described a desire to learn about flying years ago, around the same time he talked about attending the Saudi Air Force Academy in order to carry out what he called a ‘special operation.’ And he then pressed his plans forward, joining the Air Force and bringing his plot here — to America.”

Wray said that the attacker associated with AQAP while he lived in Texas and Florida, and discussed his plans and tactics directly with the group, “taking advantage of the information he acquired here, to assess how many people he could try to kill.”

“He was meticulous in his planning,” Wray said, adding: “He wasn’t just coordinating with them about planning and tactics — he was helping the organization make the most it could out of his murders. And he continued to confer with his AQAP associates right until the end, the very night before he started shooting.”

In the days after that attack, Trump, offered a conspicuous non-response, strongly out of character for someone who has often been among the first public figures to politicize a terrorist attack apparently carried out by a Muslim. Early in his presidency he falsely denounced a casino robbery in the Philippines as an act of terrorism, a knee-jerk mistake that reportedly drew laughs in the White House situation room. He once appeared to invent a terrorist attack in Sweden that had not happened, and then doubled down on it.

But the president refused to call the al-Qaida-inspired attack on U.S. troops an act of terrorism, let alone “radical Islamic terrorism.” (Barr called it a terrorist attack the next month, following an preliminary investigation.) The closest Trump came was a retweet of a TV interview of Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., using the term.

(The president, whose retweets are a cesspool of fringe-right and white supremacist accounts, often uses the technique to create a layer of deniability between himself and the tweet’s actual claim. “That was a retweet,” he once said, after sharing a tweet that connected the Clintons to the death in custody of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “That wasn’t from me. That was from [the original account].”)

Trump’s own tweet after the attack, however, only said he’d spoken on the phone with King Salman, who expressed “sincere condolences”:

King Salman of Saudi Arabia just called to express his sincere condolences and give his sympathies to the families and friends of the warriors who were killed and wounded in the attack that took place in Pensacola, Florida. The King said that the Saudi people are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter, and that this person in no way shape or form represents the feelings of the Saudi people who love the American people.

By contrast, 11 months prior, Trump boasted on Twitter about avenging al-Qaida’s 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, claiming that “our work against al Qaeda continues.”

“Our GREAT MILITARY has delivered justice for the heroes lost and wounded in the cowardly attack on the USS Cole. We have just killed the leader of that attack, Jamal al-Badawi,” Trump wrote. “Our work against al Qaeda continues. We will never stop in our fight against Radical Islamic Terrorism!”

Two months after Pensacola, the U.S. confirmed that it had killed the AQAP leader who claimed responsibility for the attack, in a drone strike in Yemen. Trump had already alluded to the assassination in several tweets, but he still had not contacted any of the families robbed of their loved ones in an attack on his own soldiers at Pensacola.

“Where was our president?” asked the family member who spoke to Salon. “Where was the man that refuses to lose and loves America?”

For whatever reason, Trump’s fight stops at the gates of the Saudi royal palace. For instance, the president took the kingdom’s side when it blockaded Qatar, home to a critical U.S. military base. He has defended the country’s continued bombing of Yemen, which has created a humanitarian disaster, and vetoed an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill to halt weapons sales as that tragedy escalated.

Weeks before the Pensacola shooting, CNN reported that the State Department and Pentagon were deploying teams to Saudi Arabia to investigate the network’s reports that, only months after Trump jammed a multibillion-dollar Saudi weapons deal through Congress, U.S.-made weapons were being transferred to groups including al-Qaida fighters in Yemen, in violation of the sales agreement. The State Department said that the Saudis’ “continued insufficient responses” were muddling the probe.

(The joint U.S.-Saudi military training program at Pensacola NAS is a part of the weapons package.)

Trump’s deference to the Saudis came to the forefront the year before, in October 2018, when a hit team of Saudi nationals dismembered Khashoggi — a Washington Post journalist and U.S. resident — in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. U.S. intelligence concluded with its highest degree of certainty that Crown Prince Mohammed had personally directed the murder. (In October 2019, MBS took “full responsibility” for the killing, but denied any advance knowledge.) In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Congress condemned Saudi Arabia and passed legislation blocking arms sales to the kingdom — sales Trump had bragged about repeatedly.

Trump disputed his intelligence community’s conclusion on the Khashoggi murder, and the New York Times reported that Jared Kushner advised the president to ignore the bipartisan outrage and support Prince Mohammed until it passed. A few weeks after the murder, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Saudi Arabia, where in a closed-door meeting he reportedly passed the Crown Prince a “road map” meant to help him navigate the scandal.

According to a CNN report last year, Pompeo was reportedly one of only two men in the room with Trump — the other being former national security adviser John Bolton — during the president’s post-Khashoggi phone call with Saudi leaders. The transcript of that call was immediately sequestered.

“Officials who ordinarily would have been given access to a rough transcript of the conversation never saw one, according to one source,” CNN reported. “Instead, a transcript was never circulated at all, which the source said was highly unusual.”

Additionally, CNN reported that there were “no transcripts made of the phone conversations between Trump and the Saudi king or crown prince to prevent leaks.” The officials said the radical step didn’t stem from concerns about classified information, but instead seemed designed to shield Trump from potential political consequences.

The White House, of course, was not the only party capable of creating transcripts or recording those calls. Whoever else might have them — which would include various parties on the Saudi side or any intelligence agencies that might have intercepted the call — would have devastating blackmail material on the outgoing president. That would also include the Saudis themselves.

“They give us a lot of jobs. They give us a lot of business,” Trump said to explain his non-response to Khashoggi’s murder.

Though Trump has in recent years denied having financial ties to Saudi Arabia, he and a number of people close to him have had many business dealings with the kingdom. At a 2015 campaign rally, candidate Trump said, “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.” He also said that he likes doing deals with the Saudis because “Saudi Arabia pays cash.”

In May 2017, Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner flew to Saudi Arabia on the president’s first international visit. On that trip, Trump announced a $110 billion arms deal with the Saudis — a number since proved to be wildly overstated — as part of an even larger $350 billion investment deal, in which the royal family pledged to invest $20 billion in a $40 billion U.S. infrastructure fund.

Kushner is literally in debt to the company that manages this fund — the Blackstone Group — which over the last six years has loaned Kushner Companies, long plagued by financial woes, more than $400 million to fund a number of deals. Kushner also has ties to Tom Barrack, who went in with Blackstone on the fund. A 2019 congressional report alleged that Barrack urged the Trump administration to share nuclear technology with Saudi Arabia while simultaneously going in with the kingdom on a company that would benefit from the new policy.

In 2018, The New York Times reported that the Saudis have been ingratiating themselves to Kushner for years. In October 2017, a year before Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner made an unannounced visit to Saudi Arabia, where he reportedly gave Prince Mohammed a list of Saudi dissidents that came directly from the President’s Daily Brief, one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence documents. Six months later, MBS visited Trump in Washington, but a sizable portion of the Saudi entourage stayed in Manhattan at the Trump International Hotel. The Washington Post’s David Farenthold reported that the Saudis’ five-day stay yielded a profit for the quarter:

After two years of decline, revenue from room rentals went up 13 percent in the first three months of 2018. What caused the uptick at President Trump’s flagship hotel in New York? One major factor: “a last-minute visit to New York by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” wrote [the hotel’s] general manager Prince A. Sanders in a May 15 letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post….”Due to our close industry relationships,’ he wrote, ‘we were able to accommodate many of the accompanying travelers.”

And in the summer of 2016, weeks after Trump claimed the GOP nomination, Donald Trump Jr. met in Trump Tower with George Nader — an adviser to Prince Mohammed — along with a representative from an Israeli psy-ops firm. The New York Times reported that Nader told Trump Jr. that the Saudi and United Arab Emirates royal families were “eager to help his father win election as president.” It’s not clear what, if anything, came of this, but Nader later cut the owner of the Israeli firm a check for up to $2 million. One explanation for the payment, according to the Times, concerned “an elaborate presentation about the significance of social media campaigning to Mr. Trump’s victory.”

Pardoning the Blackwater killers: It’s a scandal, but not specific to Donald Trump

This week Donald Trump pardoned the four Blackwater killers of 14 Iraqi civilians in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre. America was justly outraged, but it is important to remember that there is nothing Trump-specific about security contractors’ impunity — rather, it is a hallmark of Republican administrations. While it’s true that Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, is the sister of Blackwater founder Erik Prince, the issue is much larger than a political connection.

Back in 2007 in Washington, I worked in the field of legal jurisdiction applying to government security contractors. There were a dismally small number of convictions and the debate over prosecuting security contractors was centered on the question of whether to try them as  civilians under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) or as military personnel under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). We were all told that this legal debate was too complex to move forward.

Security contractors could not be tried under the UCMJ, the industry’s counsels argued repeatedly, as it would be unconstitutional to bring civilians — which security contractors indeed are — to be tried by court martial. Security contractors also do not fall under the military chain of command; they do not have rules of engagement but rather rules for use of force, alongside many other differences. All of this might be acceptable if the other regime for trying security contractors as civilians under MEJA actually worked, which — you guessed it — it didn’t back in 2007. We often heard that extraterritorial jurisdiction cases, especially in conflict zones, were especially difficult because that there was typically no evidence and no witnesses left in such cases, and it was hard to move the whole show to the U.S. for a prosecution by regular Justice Department prosecutors and federal judges, rather than military prosecutors and judges as would be the case under UCMJ.

But behind the legal complexity and the practical challenges lurked the simple truth that these prosecutions would have moved forward had there been political will. As usual, the problem was political will within the Justice Department, and within the Bush administration more generally. Security contractors were Bush’s lap dogs, who ran around like mad in Iraq and Afghanistan, unconstrained by the regular chain of command and honor code that the rest of the U.S. military generally have to be abide by. Security contractors were out of control and out of the law’s reach by design — not because the legal issues were so insurmountably complex and unfathomable, as actual security contractors’ convictions during the Obama administration would demonstrate.

When the Blackwater contractors were finally convicted, seven years later, that was a sign of relief, but you needed political will for that. Do not forget that these convictions happened under the Obama administration and his Justice Department. Back in 2007, Obama was the leading senator proposing draft legislation to regulate the security industry. That was his issue. I helped his office review and introduce amendments to the draft bills in 2007, so that the laws could be more precise in a field that was often full of hidden legal traps crafted by the Bush administration and Republicans, and intended to shield security contractors from justice by design. If it had been up to Bush, the Blackwater defendants Trump has just pardoned would never have been convicted at all. 

Convictions of the Nisour Square massacre type are so difficult to finalize that overturning and pardoning something like that is a slap not only in the face of the Iraqi victims’ honor and memory, but also to those of us who have worked to bring more legal justice and transparency to the security contractor industry.

So in this regard, Trump is simply another Republican president who wants those types of guys to just get away with it. These four pardons are scandalous, but there is nothing specifically or strikingly Trumpian about them. This is just business as usual for the Republican Party, which does not make it any less of an outrage. 

As Trump’s behavior grows increasingly unhinged, the case for impeaching him — again

With President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration less than a month away, most of President Donald Trump’s critics aren’t giving much thought to impeaching him — after all, voters have already decided to remove him from office on January 20, 2021. But Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes, in his Bulwark column, argues that with Trump becoming increasingly unhinged during this lame-duck period, a second impeachment might be in order.

In a tweet posted on December 19, fellow Never Trumper Tim Miller (who served as communications director to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and recently left the Republican Party) suggested, “Impeach him again.” And conservative anti-Trump journalist David Frum, that same day, tweeted, “Plotting a military coup seems like the kind of behavior that impeachment and removal were invented for.”

Sykes says of Miller and Frum’s suggestion, “This is not a totally crazy idea. . . The obvious objections are — well, obvious. Time is short, and nobody has an appetite for this with a just a few weeks to go. It’s also not clear that merely raising a question constitutes an impeachable offense.”

Only four presidents in U.S. history have faced impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Trump. But none of them were actually removed from office by the impeachment process. Nixon resigned in August 1974 before a Senate trial could come about, and Johnson, Clinton and Trump received “not guilty” votes in their Senate trials.

Impeaching a president during a lame-duck period would be a first in U.S. history, and many of Trump’s most vocal critics in the Democratic Party would say, “What’s the point?”

Sykes, however, argues, “We are clearly in dangerous waters, and no one can be sure what a president desperate to hold onto power and terrified of defeat might be capable of attempting. What actual checks remain? We can hope for institutional resistance to any attempt to impose martial law. But if we have learned anything, it is that many of the checks on presidential power are, more or less, on an honor system.”

The Never Trump journalist continues, “He has virtually unlimited pardon power; he has technical control of the DOJ; and he remains commander-in chief of the (U.S.) Armed Forces. All of this is by way of saying that bad things can happen.”

Sykes notes that the United States has “really only three decisive checks on a president run amok” — and they are “(1) the 25th Amendment, (2) impeachment and removal, and (3) defeat at the ballot box.”

“Trump is so far undeterred by electoral defeat — and practically speaking, the 25th Amendment is a dead letter because it relies on his own hand-picked toadies,” Sykes argues. “Which leaves the alternative of impeachment, a process that is admittedly impractical. But, what if — what if Trump did try to declare martial law? Seize voting machines? Attempt to deploy the military? What stops him? Anything?”

Trump supporters who have been urging the president to declare martial law include attorney Lin Wood and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. And Sykes warns that when talk of martial law is coming from the president’s allies, it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

“The smart set has been telling us that we don’t have anything to worry about,” Sykes explains. “The guardrails will hold, they assure us. There’s no time, they tell us. But Trump is in the White House talking about coups. Maybe we need to have the hammer ready to break glass in case of emergency.”

Trump team may be trashing White House records

House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney expressed “grave concerns” Monday that the outgoing Trump administration “may be disposing” of presidential records in violation of federal law.

Maloney, D-N.Y., voiced her concerns in a letter to Archivist of the United States David Ferriero. She referenced the Presidential Records Act and the requirements the post-Watergate statute imposes on President Donald Trump and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which Ferriero heads. 

The law says that the president can’t get rid of presidential records, including memos, emails, and notes, without first getting “the views, in writing, of the Archivist concerning the proposed disposal.” The archivist must “request the advice” of several congressional committees — including the House Oversight Committee — regarding such proposals to see if the records in question “may be of special interest to the Congress” or if congressional consultation may be “in the public interest.”

And yet, wrote Maloney, her committee “has no visibility into what is happening at the White House in terms of archiving and transferring records to NARA.” What’s more, in light of Covid-19, “NARA has not detailed any employees to the White House to assist or oversee this process, as it has in past transitions.”

The Democratic congresswoman also pointed to reporting indicating that Trump has not been compliant with record-keeping obligations, citing a 2018 report from Politico indicating that White House staffers were forced — in the face of Trump’s habit of ripping papers and throwing them in garbage or on the floor — to reassemble pieces with Scotch tape.

Maloney added that “our existing laws may need review and revision to strengthen oversight and compliance.”

She demanded answers by January 5, 2021 to a number of questions including whether any Trump administration official has disposed of records since Inauguration Day and “What efforts, if any, have you made to determine whether President Trump and White House officials are disposing of presidential records without” adhering to PRA requirements.

The congresswoman’s demands to Ferriero follow a letter sent last week by a coalition of state attorneys general to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone reminding the administration of its “record preservation obligations.”

Led by New York’s Letitia James and dated December 16, the 15 AGs wrote that they “have serious concerns about compliance by White House personnel with their Presidential Records Act obligations, including preservation of records and proper use of non-official electronic message accounts.”

Beyond the reported ripping of papers, fueling concerns about record-keeping are Trump son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner’s communications via WhatsApp and first daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump’s use of personal email for White House business.

“The Trump administration shouldn’t have to be told that they need to comply with the law and keep all records of official business, but the last four years have shown that the president needs to be constantly reminded what the law is and how he must comply with it,” James said in a statement Wednesday.

“Even the president’s tweets, the private conversations he had with Russian President Putin, and Ivanka’s private email server must be archived,” added James. “Every bit of this information belongs to the American people and the White House cannot deprive the public of this information.”

Fox News host gives “kudos” to Trump for pardoning Blackwater contractors who massacred 14 Iraqis

Fox News host Pete Hegseth on Wednesday praised four Blackwater military contractors who were pardoned by President Donald Trump after they massacred 14 Iraqi civilians.

“What the president did for those Blackwater contractors — it’s been described as a massacre,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends. “What it was was the fog of a moment where they were doing their job to protect State Department employees in one of the most dangerous parts of Baghdad at one of the most dangerous moments.”

Hegseth, who is a former National Guard officer, argued that the evidence against the contractors was “mishandled.”

“They were tried in a civilian that has no connection to what it’s like to be in that war,” he opined. “They volunteered to be there.”

“And a huge credit to the commander-in-chief,” he said. “There’s no upside to a call like this other than sending a signal to our war fighters, whether you’re a contractor in uniform, we’re going to have your back when you make tough calls on the battlefield.”

Hegseth added: “Kudos from my perspective to the president for doing what he did for those Blackwater contractors.”

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Trump helps his corrupt cronies again: Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner’s dad pardoned

On Wednesday night, the White House released a new round of names of 26 people who President Donald Trump has given presidential pardons, in addition to three people who received commutations on their sentences for crimes.

Most notable of the people receiving pardons were former Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort, Trump ally Roger Stone, and Charles Kushner. Kushner is the father of Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law.

Manafort and Stone were charged as a part of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which the president is clearly seeking to undo. But Manafort’s crimes included conduct far beyond the scope of the 2016 election. He was found guilty of various financial crimes dating back and years and for illegally concealing his work as an agent of Ukraine. He also obstructed the Mueller investigation itself and lied to the FBI.

Stone, meanwhile, was found guilty of lying to Congress, obstructing an investigation, and tampering with a witness as a part of the Russia investigation. This last charge involved pressuring his friend Randy Credico to lie to investigators and threatening his dog. Trump had already commuted Stone’s sentence for this crime during the summer so that he didn’t serve any prison time.

The White House claimed that the prosecutors acted unfairly against Manafort and Stone, but no evidence of such allegations has emerged. In the Mueller Report, the special counsel argued that Trump’s repeated suggestions during the course of the investigation that figures including Stone and Manafort might receive pardons could constitute a criminal offense of obstruction of justice on the president’s part. If this line of argument were successful, Trump’s choice to in fact pardon them could count as further evidence of this crime. He has pardoned other figures found guilty in the investigation as well, including George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and Alexander van der Zwaan.

Charles Kushner was convicted for “preparing false tax returns, witness retaliation, and making false statements to the FEC.” He was sentenced to a two-year sentence as a result, which he finished in 2006. He was charged in the case by Trump ally Chris Christie, a fact that has caused tension between the former prosecutor and the president’s son-in-law.

The White House said that former United States Attorney Brett Tolman, along with the American Conservative Union’s Matt Schlapp and David Safavian recommended the pardon for the elder Kushner. It conspicuously did not say that Jared Kushner had advocated for his father’s pardon. The elder Kushner has also been a major donor to the president.

“Mr. Kushner pled guilty, he admitted the crimes,” Christie said recently in an interview with Margaret Hoover. “It’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was US Attorney, and I was US Attorney in New Jersey, Margaret, so we had some loathsome and disgusting crime going on there.”

Trump also pardoned Margaret Hunter, the wife of former California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter. They were both convicted of misusing his campaign funds. When the charges first emerged, the congressman attempted to pin the blame on his wife, and she admitted to her crimes. An early endorser of the president, Duncan Hunter was pardoned Tuesday night. Many noted that it seemed deeply unfair for the husband to receive a pardon and not the wife, which may have led to the additional pardon on Wednesday. Margaret Hunter has filed for divorce.

Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Newsmax sued by Dominion executive forced into hiding

A top employee at Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine company at the heart of Trumpworld’s baseless allegation that votes were flipped to President-elect Joe Biden, filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign and conservative media outlets for defamation.

Eric Coomer, the director of product strategy and security at the Denver-based firm, accused Trump allies of pushing conspiracy theories about him and his company of intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy in a Denver court. The lawsuit names Trump’s campaign, attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, pro-Trump news outlets Newsmax and One America News Network, and multiple other conservative outlets and commentators.

Giuliani during a news conference called Coomer “a vicious, vicious man. He wrote horrible things about the president … He is completely warped,” the lawsuit noted.

“Today I have filed a lawsuit in Colorado in an effort to unwind as much of the damage as possible done to me, my family, my life, and my livelihood as a result of the numerous false public statements that I was somehow responsible for ‘rigging’ the 2020 presidential election,” Coomer said in a statement.

The lawsuit says that the unfounded conspiracy theories about Coomer have resulted in death threats, repeated harassment, and “untold damage to his reputation as a national expert on voting systems.” Coomer fled his home a week after the election and is staying at an undisclosed location, the suit said.

“The widespread dissemination of false conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election has had devastating consequences both for me personally and for many of the thousands of American election workers and officials, both Republican and Democratic, who put aside their political beliefs to run free, fair, and transparent elections. Elections are not about politics; they are about accurately tabulating legally cast votes,” Coomer said.

Coomer told Colorado Public Radio that the conspiracy theories about him began when conservative activist Joe Oltmann, one of the people named in the suit, spread an allegation on his podcast that Coomer told “antifa” members that he “made effing sure” Trump would not win the election. Coomer said the conversation never took place and that he has no links to any political group.

The suit also names OAN reporter Chanel Rion, who reported the allegations; conservative bloggers Jim Hoft and Michelle Malkin, who interviewed Oltmann about his allegation; and conservative commentator Eric Metaxas, among others.

Fox News was not named in the lawsuit, and the complaint actually cited Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s rejection of Powell’s evidence-free claim about vote-switching to back its argument.

Coomer said his, his family’s, and his friends’ home addresses have been posted online and some have received threatening messages.

“It’s terrifying,” he told NBC News. “I’ve worked in international elections in all sorts of post-conflict countries where election violence is real and people are getting killed over it. And I feel that we’re on the verge of that.”

Dominion, which provides election equipment and software in 28 states, is not part of the lawsuit. But the company has also threatened legal action against Powell and the Trump campaign if they do not retract their false claims about the company.

Powell, who Trump reportedly considered appointing as a special counsel to investigate baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, has pushed a bizarre conspiracy theory that Dominion, as part of a plot hatched by long-dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and bankrolled by countries like China and Cuba, sent votes to be tabulated overseas and switched votes from Trump to Biden. She has provided no evidence of her claim, her expert witnesses were discredited, and she has lost every lawsuit seeking to overturn election results. She was ousted from Trump’s legal team after alleging that Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was paid off to stay quiet about the fictitious scheme.

“Your reckless disinformation campaign is predicated on lies that have endangered Dominion’s business and the lives of its employees,” Dominion said in a letter to Powell. “…Your outlandish accusations are demonstrably false. While soliciting people to send you ‘millions of dollars’ and holding yourself out as a beacon of truth, you have purposely avoided naming Dominion as a defendant in your sham litigation — effectively denying Dominion the opportunity to disprove your false accusations in court.”

Giuliani has tried to distance Trump from Powell but she has shown up at the White House for numerous meetings in the past week. Giuliani himself has pushed the vote-switching conspiracy without evidence and even falsely alleged that Dominion was a “front” for another voting software firm called Smartmatic. The two companies have no ties and Smartmatic’s software was only used in Los Angeles County in the election.

The company issued an extensive lawsuit threat to Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN for airing the baseless allegations, arguing that the networks “engaged in a concerted disinformation campaign.” The threat prompted Fox News to air segments debunking the false claims made by its hosts and guests about Smartmatic and multiple Newsmax hosts were forced to give on-air clarifications about the fraudulent claims.

The Trump campaign has apparently expected to face legal trouble over Powell’s conspiracy theory. Trump’s campaign legal team sent a memo to dozen of staffers obtained by CNN that warned them to preserve all documents related to Dominion and Powell. A law firm representing Dominion later sent a letter to Giuliani and White House counsel Pat Cipollone instructing them to preserve all records related to the company, warning that legal action was “imminent,” according to the network.

The letter demanded that Giuliani stop making “defamatory claims against Dominion” and ensure there is “no confusion about your obligation to preserve and retain all documents relating to Dominion and your smear campaign against the company.”

Scientists discovered a radio signal from the nearest star and want to know if it’s from aliens

Scientists at an Australian observatory have been studying a radio signal that appears to originate in Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the sun, to see if it may be a sign of intelligent life.

A narrow beam of radio waves was detected over a period of 30 hours in April and May 2019 by the Parkes telescope in Australia, according to The Guardian. The researchers studying the wave emission have not yet been able to identify any Earthly origin, whether a satellite in or something on the ground. As a result, scientists at the Breakthrough Listen project — an organization based at the University of California, Berkeley that searches for radio signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life forms in the universe — believe that the radio signal could originate from extraterrestrial intelligent life.

The beam, known as BLC1, is also attractive to E.T.-hunters because its frequency shifts in a way that is consistent with the movement of a planet. It resembles the kind of radio waves that humans would send into space and appears to come from the direction of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri.

Spokespeople for the Breakthrough Listen project said that this radio beam is, therefore, “the first serious candidate since the ‘Wow! signal'” that intelligent aliens may have sent a radio signal into space that was picked up by humans. The “Wow! signal” was a narrowband radio signal detected by Ohio observatory in 1977, and was given its name because astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote “Wow!” next to the data, noting the great degree of magnitude with which the signal was stronger than background noise. While the origin of the Wow! signal has never been definitively determined, recent theories suggest it resulted from a quickly-moving comet, not aliens.

Likewise, the jury is still out on the origin of the 2019 signal from Proxima Centauri. “It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it,” Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley, told Scientific American about the signal. He also pointed to the fact that the signal is in a very narrow band of the radio spectrum, 982 megahertz, which usually does not include transmissions from human-made spacecraft and satellites. “We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency,” Siemion told the magazine.

As with all news about the potential discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there are reasons to be skeptical. There may be an as-of-yet unexplained human cause for the radio signal, and even if it does originate in space, there could be a scientific explanation that does not involve extraterrestrial life. For scientists to learn more about whether this proves aliens exist, they will need to publish their full research and then other astronomers will have to spend an extended period of time analyzing it.

2020 has been a signal year for sensational stories about extraterrestrial life. The most scientifically robust story involved the purported discovery of trace amounts of phosphine — a gas emitted by anaerobic bacteria on Earth — in the atmosphere of Venus. After the initial excitement surrounding that paper’s publication, however, two subsequent scientific investigations were not able to replicate the original study’s results, throwing cold water on the original flame of excitement.

Similarly, there was much buzz over videos of purported “UFOs” that were recorded by American military pilots, which the Pentagon announced in August it was going to investigate. While those videos do indeed show aircraft that have not been identified, there is no evidence that the crafts are of alien origin, and the objects move in a manner consistent with human technological capabilities. Indeed, mundane explanations range from the possibility of technology being developed by another country or a corporation that did not disclose its work to the US military.

The most out-there piece of 2020 E.T. news involved Haim Eshed, an Israeli official who used to lead the Israeli Defense Ministry’s space directorate, and who claimed that a “galactic federation” had contacted human governments, that there is an “underground base in the depths of Mars” where American astronauts and extraterrestrials interact and that President Donald Trump knows these things but was convinced to keep them secret to avoid “mass hysteria.” There is no evidence to support his claims.

With “Midnight Sky,” George Clooney directs a visually arresting post-apocalyptic yawnfest

“The Midnight Sky” opens with Augustine (George Clooney) in a sterile environment — the Barbeau observatory in the Arctic Circle. It is February 2049, three weeks after “the event,” and he is alone, monitoring the spaceship Aether. The crew is returning home after a two-year mission to see if it the planet K23 “would be our future.” (Things didn’t turn out as they planned). 

However, when Aether crewmember Sully (Felicity Jones) is unable to make contact with NASA, and the ship veers off course, Augustine decides he must trek across a frozen tundra to a weather station to reestablish contact because planet Earth is, well, as Augustine tells Sully, “We didn’t take care of it while you were gone.”

This story, based on the book, “Good Morning, Midnight,” by Lily Brooks-Dalton, has the potential to be an interesting consideration of this apocalyptic scenario. But Clooney, who directs here, generates neither pulse nor point. His film has some visual flair, but too few emotionally engaging moments. “The Midnight Sky” is mostly a dull affair.

One of the problems is that the Augustine is more interesting than the story he is in. Flashbacks reveal him as a smart young scientist (Ethan Peck) who sabotaged his relationship with a woman he loved (Sophie Rundel). This may be why he is now a grizzled loner who takes pills with whiskey, gets blood transfusions, and vomits nightly.

But the plot has him realizing he is not alone. A young mute girl, Iris (Caoilinn Springall), has been hiding in the observatory. He shows her where to sleep, but she comes and stays in his room. She flicks peas at him during dinner to get his attention, and at one point laughs. c. 

Only slightly more exciting is the (in)action on the Aether. Sully is pregnant by Commander Tom Adewole (David Oyelowo) and there is endless, unamusing banter among the crew members — Mitchell (Kyle Chandler), Sanchez (Demián Bichir), and Maya (Tiffany Boone) — about what to name the child. 

“The Midnight Sky” does feature some impressive CGI, and there is a bit of nifty technology on display in a 3-D map Augustine consults, and the “virtual” experiences Mitchell and Maya have with their families.

However, the film does not really to come to life until a post-spacewalk sequence late in the film, when a character has suffered an injury and blood floats in the zero-gravity atmosphere. (Another terrific visual).  Alas, this episode, which generates some real drama, comes after a painful singalong to Neil Diamond‘s “Sweet Caroline” that most viewers will find “charming.” (Can there please be a moratorium on the use of that earworm in cinema?) 

Alas, a good chunk of the film’s first half depicts Augustine and Iris’ arduous trek through the Arctic tundra, and it is not tense but sleep-inducing. There is a curious scene of Augustine confronting a dying man, and a surreal moment when a safe place for shelter proves otherwise. But these set pieces are not very compelling. Yes, there’s a gorgeous underwater sequence at one point, but viewers may be focused on the cold, wintry atmosphere and wonder why Augustine and Iris are not wearing any face protection. A sequence of them lost among the wind and snow, unable to see each other yields surprisingly little concern even when the shadow of an animal suggests danger. 

The script by Mark L. Smith does not flesh out the characters much, even though the dialogue is, at times, quite didactic. A discussion the Aether crew has about slingshotting back into space is so familiar it is eyerolling. Likewise, when Maya expresses worry about her first spacewalk, what transpires is expected. 

Equally poor is the music by Alexandre Desplat, which is often intrusive and used during the poignant or intense moments to tell viewers what to feel.

The film’s narrative drawbacks point to the fact that Clooney is less assured as a director here. He delivers a decent performance as a man haunted by his past, so it is not as if he cannot connect with the material. But the film does not give the other actors much to do. Jones, Oyelowo, and Bichir all seem wasted, doing undistinguished work. Watching Sully and Tom play cards is a highlight if only because the two actors try to create some chemistry. Sanchez makes a decision late in the film that comes almost of out nowhere, until he explains himself, didactically, and then his decision feels forced.  

“The Midnight Sky,” does manage one nice, sentimental moment — an unusually soulful exchange between Augustine and Sully — but Clooney builds up to this almost by accident. Nevertheless, it shows what this lackluster film could have been.  

“The Midnight Sky” is available to stream starting Wednesday, Dec. 23 on Netflix.

Best of 2020: I’m a public defender. My elderly client might die in prison from COVID-19

Ironic as it seems, COVID-19 is a constant threat to the 73-year-old life of the man I’ll call Jake Green, yet it’s also his best shot at release from an unjust prison sentence. Mr. Green’s case will forever be lodged in my mind because it stands at the intersection of so many issues in the justice system: aging individuals in prison, victims’ rights, domestic violence, firearms, overcharging, pretrial incarceration, mandatory sentencing, parole eligibility — and now, COVID-19 running through prisons. Simply put, I don’t want him to die in prison. But I’m not having much luck getting him out. 

I met Mr. Green in May of 2019. He is one of the most unique people I’ve represented in my 17-year career as a public defender in Baltimore City. In case you were wondering, because some folks do, we PDs are “real lawyers.” We have the exact same schooling as every other attorney. The difference is that we don’t pick our clients. They come to us randomly. They are indigent folks, people without incomes or people stuck in jail who qualify for our services. I just get the file and go from there — no matter the charges, be it drugs or murder. 

I volunteered for my office fresh out of law school and really liked my colleagues — smart, blunt, open-minded folks willing to buck the system — but what has made me stay are the unchanging systemic hurdles that my clients face. Are we stretched thin at times? Sure. But most private attorneys are, too — and they have to run all over the state chasing dollars while we don’t. In my office, our lawyers try the majority of the criminal cases in the city. We know our way around a courtroom. I’ve found that when you stand up for your clients in court you quickly earn their respect and dispel any lingering negative stereotypes.  

Mr. Green was one of over a hundred or so clients whose cases I handled at some point over the last year. He is a 73-year-old man without a prior criminal record. His craft is millwork. He has used his hands over the years to do all sorts of home improvement and residential renovation work, but was always best at wood work. So when he moved to Maryland from his native North Carolina more than 30 years ago, Mr. Green found jobs as a cabinetry contractor. He scored some larger-scale projects for big home builders around the state, but also established a shop in the heart of Mount Vernon in Baltimore City, where he has always done custom work.

In recent years, as he’s aged, Mr. Green’s work has slowed (the cluttered, unkempt appearance of his workshop reflects that) and his income is largely based on social security checks. Mr. Green is a proud Native American of the Lumbee Tribe. He was raised in Native culture and still carries on its traditions. He was even arrested for my case while wearing a Lumbee reunion shirt. Mr. Green is an avid hunter who participates in state-sponsored deer and bear hunts. Mr. Green has a loving family including a daughter, Karen, who lives in North Carolina. He has a longtime girlfriend of over 30 years with whom he shared a house in Maryland up to his arrest. His longtime girlfriend’s daughter considers Mr. Green a stepfather. Everyone just calls him “Jay.” And no one I spoke with believed that he would ever intentionally shoot someone. 

In our case, Mr. Green was convicted of first-degree assault, the use of a firearm during a crime of violence and reckless endangerment. We had a jury trial last October. In January, the trial judge sentenced him to five years without parole, dating back to May of 2019. His sentence is a mandatory minimum sentence because of the gun charge. He got the minimum and nothing more, but it is still extremely problematic for many reasons.  

The incident involved an alcohol- and crack-induced tryst between my client and his girlfriend of over five years. (Mr. Green also had another girlfriend, with whom he had a 30-year relationship.) Mr. Green and Girlfriend Number 2 were hanging out at his workshop in Baltimore, where they would rendezvous. He was prone to imbibe (as was she). They started arguing and fighting. They might have been there for several hours before the actual fight, but their inebriated memories of the incident are a bit foggy. My client keeps a hunting shotgun, a Ward’s Western Deluxe model, in his shop for protection. (We are talking Montgomery Ward, the department store.) It is legal. He’s been robbed before so he has it there for protection. At some point during the argument (during which my client was admittedly drinking, and she admittedly smoked crack), she says he grabbed the gun and threatened her. The weapon went off, but hit her in her shin because it was pointed down at the time of firing. My client’s contention — which her injuries and her medical records support — is that the gun was loaded with birdshot. However, the State would not concede the point, despite the victim just having pellet wounds rather than missing an entire limb. 

The girlfriend says my client initiated the fight by pushing her and smacking her phone down, which Mr. Green denies. The girlfriend also hid the fact that she smoked crack from everyone until she told us in a meeting before trial and then conceded as much, along with drinking, on the witness stand. She also agrees that she has psychological problems. She and Mr. Green didn’t connect with the police after she was shot. She called her family, who drove her a couple of blocks up the street to the hospital. My client walked up and met them there. Hospital staff summonsed Baltimore police because it was a shooting. The cops found out my client was there and went to talk to him, with body cameras on. He was still drunk, but by all means coherent, and he admitted to accidentally shooting her. He even offered to take the police to the gun. Instead, he was arrested and has been incarcerated since. The victim has essentially recovered. 

Where to begin with all of the issues? First, the victim in the case, his girlfriend, did not want the case prosecuted. She said as much before the trial, which we argued during a bail review hearing to no avail. She reiterated this during the trial — in front of the jury — and at the sentencing, to the judge as our witness. She actually met with me and my investigator on several occasions to prepare the case. Yet, the State insisted on prosecuting. (Mr. Green’s girlfriend is Black.) It’s really interesting when the State takes a position like this when their default stance is to push a victim’s rights agenda. So many times, I’ve heard the refrain that the state has to “see what the victim wants.” Maryland legislators even made it a prerequisite to criminal sentencing that a victim — and that term is often made broader than just an individual, by prosecutors and judges — gets to weigh in. The now ubiquitous, nationwide court victim impact statement was referred to in a 2018 New Yorker article by Jill Lepore as a “signal victory” for the victim’s movement, born out of an unlikely marriage between feminism and conservatism. Yet, when it came time for sentencing several months after the trial, our victim was not offered up by the state to make an impact statement. However, she consistently kept in touch with me for updates on how Mr. Green was doing, and I had to bring her in as a defense witness to speak to the judge. 

Second, the case was overcharged by the prosecutor as a second-degree murder, which immediately makes a defense extremely difficult to argue to a jury knowing that higher counts make a compromise verdict more likely: Jurors think that they are sparing Mr. Green by not convicting him on the murder charge, but have no idea that first-degree assault still carries 25 years, and the gun charge has a minimum sentence attached. (We were OK with the misdemeanor assault charge, but the weapons and murder charges seemed excessive.) To say that Mr. Green intended to kill is a joke.

Contrast my client’s charges with those of prominent police murder cases and the way they are charged. For instance, it’s pretty hard to watch the video of George Floyd’s killing with a knee and not question why first-degree murder isn’t the top count. Along the same lines, the left-field theory of a second-degree, rough-ride killing of Freddie Gray similarly stunned those of us familiar with the justice system in Baltimore. We know that if our clients — men like Mr. Green, or the typical young Black men I represent — had been accused, the case never would be under-charged like that. It would be first-degree all the way — or in Mr. Green’s case, second-degree instead of just assault. 

Third, the prosecution was unrelenting; they classified the case as one of domestic violence. The state wants to determine what is best for a victim in all domestic scenarios, in a paternalistic sort of manner. So, despite the victim not wanting the case to go forward, or to put my client in jail, the state did not care. University of Maryland School of Law Professor Leigh Goodmark astutely refers to domestic violence as the “third rail of criminal justice reform.” In my experience, non-domestic violence cases similar to Mr. Green’s have hopes of working out, but domestic violence has achieved its own category of untouchability. Professor Goodmark noted in her New York Times article that giving these types of cases special statuses hasn’t reduced such crime. Coming down so hard on a one-time incident fueled by drugs and alcohol doesn’t serve as a deterrent. This is retribution on the part of the state, pure and simple. But for whom, when the victim doesn’t want it? To question the logic behind such heavy-handed prosecutions is essentially blasphemy —especially when raised by a scary male defense attorney like me. 

Fourth, the state would not offer anything less prior to trial than a plea of three years for a felony. My client had no criminal record in his 73 years — not the 30 spent in Maryland, nor prior to that in North Carolina. He’s even served as a juror for a murder trial. He’s lived in the same house (with his other girlfriend) almost the entire time he’s lived in Maryland. The longtime girlfriend, her daughter, and my client’s own family all knew of the charges and the affair, and still completely supported him. The victim’s family has also been helpful to us during the trial, knowing that we were trying to get my client out. Mr. Green didn’t see much difference in three years versus five at his age. He’d have taken probation, which makes sense for the crime and the circumstances. 

Either way, we lost the trial. My arguments were only so effective without being permitted to say to the jury, “this is stupid” or “Dick Cheney did worse with a shotgun” or to outright explain to them which counts could instead get Mr. Green home.

The judge had no option on the mandatory sentence for the firearm charge, which is why mandatory sentencing is so problematic. It removes discretion from the equation and, with this charge, lumps all firearm offenses together without taking into account each particular defendant and incident. However, the judge could have ordered the sentence served on private home detention. We set that up, but the judge said no. It’s rarely done, but so is sentencing a 73-year-old to prison in a case like this.

The judge could have let my client out on an appeal bond, which does happen sometimes. Again, the victim testified for us at the sentencing hearing, which is a total anomaly. Juxtapose my client, an average nobody, to Michael Gentil, a former Baltimore cop coincidentally on trial and convicted of the same gun offense in the same courthouse only the week before Mr. Green. Both received the same mandatory five-year sentences without parole. However, Gentil’s judge allowed the police officer to go on home detention while his appeal works its way through the courts, while Mr. Green sits in prison. Gentil is at home now. Meanwhile, we’ve got an aging individual with legitimate appellate issues incarcerated while COVID-19 lurks. Don’t tell me that’s not a slap in the face. 

Mr. Green has been in jail for 14 months. My client has not felt well in a long time. There are dozens of documented COVID cases in his prison and someone has even died there. Recently, he was hospitalized (a false alarm, apparently) and he had to be quarantined for about three weeks. Now, he’s right back in general population, living in a dorm unit with bunk beds set only a couple of feet apart. The inmates each have one mask, which they have to keep clean themselves. But mask wearing is not enforced while in the dorm.

Mr. Green was a smoker for years and has hypertension and high blood pressure. He is falls under the CDC’s classifications for high risk individuals. So I filed a motion to modify his sentence to home detention or to release him pending his appeal, which is what we wanted before. The state — despite Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s public statements on releasing vulnerable individuals — will not agree. Our trial judge is not hearing motions because courts are severely limited in function. I went to a telephone hearing without my client, with a stand-in prosecutor and a new judge, in which our motion was essentially denied. That was before my client was hospitalized. After that, I refiled the motion with a statement from the victim, who calls me about once a week in support, but again, the trial judge shut us down with an emailed ruling. 

COVID-19 has forced judges to reconsider holding our clients pretrial in many circumstances that never got second looks before, yet often merited them. I’ve had multiple clients released on home detention over the past several months  — which they must pay for, but it’s better than jail — and a couple who have been released to the community. And guess what? Nothing bad has happened. Taking that into account only reinforces a new level of cold justice for Mr. Green. The victim, his girlfriend, says she wants to write the judge to ask for his release because she’s worried about his health. 

Mr. Green is ineligible for Governor Hogan’s ordered release of vulnerable inmates because of the classification of his charges as violent. These types of classifications never explore the facts or circumstances of a case, or take into account what the victims want. They simply go by the superficial label of the offenses, and Mr. Green’s are prohibited. There’s no compassionate release possible with the charges either. The modification is our only shot at this point. Without the virus, we’d have nothing. My client is still in good spirts because that’s his nature, but I find this extremely frustrating and pointless. Everyone wants him out, but the state and court won’t agree. As prison conditions with the virus and my client worsen, all we can do is just keep filing motions. 

Did the pandemic stave off climate change? Here’s what the science says

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic caused international lockdowns, a meme surfaced: the words “nature is healing” overlain on a scene of environmental recovery, perhaps a shot of crystal-clear skies over an oft-polluted city. Whether made seriously or in jest, the underlying idea was that as humans were forced to stay indoors and reduce resource consumption, the planet would recover even as humanity reeled from a deadly disease. True stories like wild goats reclaiming a city in Wales and fake ones about dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice circulated the internet.

Behind the joke was a real, serious proposition: the notion that humanity, by being forced to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, may have inadvertently been saving ourselves from the impending climate change apocalypse. But was there any truth to this idea?

Certainly, there were hints: aforementioned instances of wildlife returning to urban areas, and a drop in oil prices that signified a reduction in demand. But on a macroscopic scale, quantifying the way human behavior may have affected carbon emissions in 2020 is much harder. Indeed, Salon reached out to a pair of climate change experts who had somewhat different conclusions.

“The estimates vary among the different groups doing these sorts of calculations, but the consensus seems to be about a 7% decrease [in greenhouse gas emissions] relative to 2019 levels,” Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, wrote to Salon. Although the holiday season traditionally exacerbates greenhouse gas emissions — as people consume more and travel more between Thanksgiving and the start of the new year — Mann was optimistic that this year would not see as much of an increase as usual.

“The average for the year is pretty much baked in at this point,” Mann explained, adding that air travel is a “very small contributor,” accounting for only 3 percent of total carbon emissions. Mann concluded that, “regardless” of holiday travel, “the decrease in carbon emissions for 2020 will be the largest on record,” as high as 6 to 7 percent.

Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, was more pessimistic.

“There has been a lot of rhetoric based on the Global Carbon Project suggesting a substantial decrease in emissions with the pandemic,” Trenberth emailed Salon, referring to a recent study which found that global carbon dioxide emissions from both fossil fuels and industry are expected to decline by roughly 7% in 2020. “This was a ‘bottom up’ estimate based on estimates of emissions from various places. It gives the wrong result.”

Trenberth argued, if scientists use a ‘top down’ approach based on the actual amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they reach a different conclusion. Citing the data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) facility at Mauna Loa, he claimed “that has shown no slow down at all. The rates of increase on average over the previous 5 years was 2.8 ppm per year and exactly the same rate applies to the last 12 months.” The NOAA announced earlier this month that there is more than a 50% chance that 2020 will be the hottest year on record.

“The reason relates to the sources,” Trenberth argued. “The [Global Carbon Project] is correct that fossil fuel emissions are down, but they have evidently been entirely compensated for by emissions from other sources: in particular wildfires. These are especially the bushfires in Australia a year or so ago, the wildfires in places like the Pantanal and Brazil, and especially the record wildfires in California, Oregon, Colorado, and so forth.”

Mann pointed out an unsettling fact: in the long run, climate change will kill far more than COVID-19. And it cannot be vaccinated against and stopped as easily. 

“Ultimately climate inaction will be even more deadly, costing millions of lives,” Mann told Salon. “If there is a silver lining, it is that the failure of the current administration to respond meaningfully to the pandemic lays bare the deadliness of ideologically-motivated science denial. This applies to the even greater crisis of human-caused climate change and the need to treat it as the emergency it is.”

Recent studies reaffirm Mann’s observations. Scientists at McGill University recently revealed that the threshold for dangerous global warming is likely to occur between 2027 and 2042, while a recent paper by top glaciologists and sea level experts that sea level rises due to climate change are likely to surpass the high end of previous expert projections. The World Health Organization estimates that 250,000 people will perish each year between 2030 and 2050 due to climate change–related factors. 

Tom Hanks’ “News of the World” is a toothless throwback Western

“News of the World” is a benign western that reunites “Captain Phillips” director Paul Greengrass with actor Tom Hanks. Here, Hanks is playing another captain, Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran first seen plying his trade — reading the news to townsfolk for money — in Wichita Falls, North Texas, 1870. 

Kidd travels from town to town telling stories from the newspapers to help people escape their troubles. He is a newscaster as performer, and at times he plays a comedian, making folks laugh at the absurdity in the far-flung world. What he is not is a charlatan. Which is a shame; it would be interesting to see some ambiguity or even an agenda with Kidd’s work. (The film gets at politics briefly, when he reports about President Grant, who is booed by some feisty Texans). 

There isn’t a cynical bone in Kidd’s righteous body. He may be both physically and emotionally scarred, but Kidd has integrity and nobility. Hanks, who is this generation’s Jimmy Stewart, is nothing if not honorable in the role. And the actor’s trademark gumption is what makes his performance persuasive but also exhausting.

Kidd’s morality is why he responds with compassion when he encounters Johanna (Helena Zengel), an orphaned Kiowa pre-teen, on his way out of Wichita Falls. He plans to deliver her to the authorities, however, upon arrival, he is told the agent he needs to see is away for three months. The principled Kidd decides to make the risky, 400-mile journey to Castroville to return Johanna to her aunt and uncle himself. 

“News of the World,” therefore, becomes an adventure featuring a grizzled older man and a young incommunicative child. (See “The Midnight Sky,” released on Netflix this week, as another example of this genre — or better yet, don’t.) Kidd talks to the unresponsive Johanna and he might as well be talking to Wilson the volleyball from “Cast Away.” And suspend disbelief as Johanna apparently understands everything Kidd tells her during the film’s action sequences.

Predictably, the pair encounter all the road movie genre staples, from wagon (“car”) trouble and setbacks to narrow escapes from danger. The best episode is actually one of the earliest. The villainous Almay (Michael Angelo Covino) wants to buy Johanna, who is, of course, not for sale. A chase and shootout soon follow, and Greengrass shows his action set piece chops in this exciting sequence. Set in a rocky, hilly region, Kidd and Johanna are situated above Almay and his men, which gives them an advantage — up to a point. Greengrass wisely avoids using music during the climax of this duel, which ratchets up the tension. 

If only the rest of “News of the World” were as compelling. The screenplay, which is written by Greengrass and Luke Davies (“Lion”), and based on the novel by Paulette Giles, feels lazy and uninspired. Kidd and Johanna are both haunted by pasts that become clear in “poignant” scenes that reveal their despair. Kidd evens talks about “moving forward,” and “putting the past behind you,” and counsels, “Don’t look back,” which may reveal his character’s mindset, but it also guarantees he will confront his demons before the credits roll. Alas, the film never quite generates the emotional resonance in the “closure” scenes that it should. 

One reason for the film’s lack of feeling is that too much of what happens is telegraphed. In Erath County, Kidd confronts Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy), who might as well be renamed Trump. He wants Kidd to only read the newspaper he published and edited. It reports on what a great man Farley is and uses illustrations to show how bad and dangerous the Mexicans and Native Americans are. What’s a decent, educated man like Kidd to do? Tell a captivating story about men who fought back and rouse the masses into action. The ploy works for a spell, but soon Farley has a gun to Kidd’s head. There are no surprises about how he is extricated from this near-fatal situation. Greengrass shows the audience exactly who has Kidd’s back. The action may not be as important as the message — that people deserved to be treated with respect and dignity — but that message is cudgeled into viewers.

 “News of the World” is so relentlessly old-fashioned, the characters might as well be wearing white or black hats to indicate who is good and bad. And it is fine that Greengrass wanted to make a throwback to the westerns of yore — the widescreen vistas are gorgeous — but his film does not have much impact for contemporary viewers. The lack of bloody violence makes it appropriate family fare, but it is hard to imagine many kids sitting through this pablum. Even the girl power messages feel as muted as Johanna. That said, Zengel is an expressive performer. Her frustrations at being forced to wear a dress is a nice, revealing scene.

One of the film’s worthier moments features the impressionable John Calley (Fred Hechinger), who briefly gets a ride with Kidd and Johanna on their way out of a town. John wants to know the end of a news story Kidd was telling that had him spellbound the night before. This exchange indicates the importance of reading, but the film doesn’t play up this point about education too much. Instead, it emphasizes the value of stories and memories. And this is why “News of the World” is ultimately unsatisfying. It favors earnestness and sentiment at the expense of real knowledge or feeling. 

The story here is nothing new, and only moderately interesting. 

“News of the World” opens theatrically Christmas Day.