NY Attorney General subpoenas pro-Trump troll Jacob Wohl for voter suppression scheme

The New York Attorney General’s office has issued subpoenas to right-wing trolls Jacob Wohl, 22, and Jack Burkman, 58, in connection to an alleged voter-intimidation robocall scheme that has already led to felony indictments in Ohio and Michigan, as well as a federal civil suit filed in the Southern District of New York.

The three subpoenas, each signed Dec. 22 and obtained by Salon, target Wohl, Burkman and Burkman’s consulting firm, Burkman & Associates. Prosecutors are seeking information about who funded the robocalls, including about the source of funds in the firm’s Bank of America account, as well as any relevant communications. More broadly, investigators also want to see all documents concerning Project 1599, Burkman’s organization, which not only claims credit for the calls in the recordings but has also been linked to a number of other political stunts the duo has carried out over the years.

The New York Attorney General specifically asks about payments to a voice broadcasting company called Message Communications, which Wohl and Burkman paid for the service. Robert Mahanian, who runs the L.A.-based company, confirmed to Salon that he has complied with requests from a number of attorneys general regarding Wohl and Burkman.

“This really was disgusting, what they did,” Mahanian said. He told Salon that Burkman and Wohl paid his company only $2,000 to place the calls, which went out to hundreds of thousands of people in communities of color across at least five states.

“They spent $2,000 with me, and I got complaints immediately. Literally the next day I terminated their account,” said Mahanian, whose service he says can reach 100,000 recipients for less than $1,000.

An email from Burkman to Mahanian, revealed in the federal civil suit, reads: “Check to you Robert just went out in the 2 day pouch you will have in 2-3 days Then we attack.”

In the recordings, a woman’s voice falsely tells recipients that mail-in ballots could be used to “collect outstanding debt,” “track down old warrants” and “track people for mandatory vaccines.” The recordings said the calls came from Project 1599, Burkman’s group.

“Stay safe,” the call concludes, “and beware of vote by mail.”

Prosecutors in Michigan and Ohio have charged Wohl and Burkman with numerous felony counts, including fraud, voter intimidation, bribery and related conspiracy charges, for allegedly stoking fears about voting by mail in a spate of phone calls that targeted minority communities this summer. Warrants have been issued for their arrest, and they each face a combined 42 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

Mahanian told Salon that his company has been in business since 2003 and typically blasts out public service calls for things like school closings or security bulletins. “I’ve never seen a criminal type situation arise from anyone using our network,” he said. “This was just crazy,” he added, calling the alleged scheme “disgusting” for the second time.

“I love these robo calls[.] getting angry black call backs[.] win or lose the black robo was a great jw idea,” Burkman wrote Wohl in an email on Aug. 26, revealed by the plaintiffs in the federal civil lawsuit, which was brought on behalf of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and alleges that Wohl and Burkman violated the Ku Klux Klan Act with the calls. The “jw” in the email is an apparent reference to Jacob Wohl’s initials.

“The right to vote is the most fundamental component of our nation’s democracy,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said in announcing the Ohio indictment in October. “These individuals clearly infringed upon that right in a blatant attempt to suppress votes and undermine the integrity of this election. These actions will not be tolerated. Anyone who interferes with others’ right to vote must be held accountable.”

In a statement announcing the charges in Michigan — where the pair went free after pleading not guilty and posting $100,000 bail — state Attorney General Dana Nessel indicated that investigations were ongoing in Ohio and New York, as well as in Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Mahanian told Salon that he had complied with requests from investigators in a number of states, some of which had not yet been made public. Burkman first paid Mahanian in June, according to one subpoena, for calls that Mahanian said Burkman oddly never ended up making. The second payment, in August, was connected to the calls currently under investigation.

In August, Burkman denied involvement but appeared to confess during a hearing New York hearing. When the judge asked whether he had been “acting alone or with anyone else prepared that message and caused it to be sent,” Burkman replied in the affirmative.

“Oh, yes, your honor. Yes,” he said, adding: “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Wohl and Burkman achieved internet infamy through a series of hapless attempts to tag their political enemies with absurd allegations of sexual impropriety, in which they coerced, paid or otherwise convinced real people to make the false accusations, often in slapdash news conferences held in the driveway of Burkman’s Arlington, Va., townhome. An ill-devised but elaborate plot against former special counsel Robert Mueller collapsed in spectacular fashion, reportedly prompting the FBI to open an investigation into a fake intelligence company Wohl created for the purpose.

The New York Attorney General’s office declined to comment. Burkman did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment. Wohl replied to a text message seeking comment with: “???”

Listen to a recording of the robocall here.

Trump supporters file a lawsuit against Mike Pence

Trump supporters who are desperate to stop President-elect Joe Biden from being sworn in have now filed a lawsuit against a very unexpected target.

As flagged by Democratic election law attorney Marc Elias, the conservative Thomas More Society has now filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence and the entire electoral college in a desperate bid to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The lawsuit names Pence as a defendant due to his “legal obligations under the Constitution and federal law” to preside over Congress’s ratification of the presidential election that’s due to take place on January 6th.

The suit claims that Pence should not be allowed to count the electoral college’s votes because state legislatures have not “affirmatively voted to certify the Presidential electors,” despite the fact that the electoral college has already voted and given Biden 306 votes, which is more than what he needs to win the presidency.

“The Vice President and U.S. Congress act unconstitutionally in this election and future elections when they count votes of Presidential electors where the respective state legislature has not affirmatively voted in favor of post-election certification,” the lawsuit states.

Commenting on Twitter, Elias says he can’t even be bothered to do a detailed analysis of the suit’s claims because they make such little sense.

“I can’t even describe it,” he wrote of the lawsuit. “It’s really dumb.”

Read the whole complaint here (PDF).

Substack isn’t a new model for journalism — it’s a very old one

If you haven’t heard of Substack – you probably will soon.

Since 2017, the platform has provided aspiring web pundits with a one-stop service for distributing their work and collecting fees from readers. Unlike many paywall mechanisms, it’s simple for both writer and subscriber to use. Writers upload what they’ve written to the site; the readers pay from US$5 to $50 a month for a subscription and get to read the work.

Enticed by the independence from editorial oversight Substack offers, several media figures with large followings – including Andrew Sullivan of New York magazine, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Peterson, and Vox’s Matthew Yglesias – are now striking out on their own.

Substack has also elevated a few commentators – perhaps most notably Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College historian whose “Letters from an American” is currently Substack’s most-subscribed feature – to near-celebrity status.

Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder, has compared his company’s promise to an earlier journalistic revolution, likening Substack to the “penny papers” of the 1830s, when printers exploited new technology to make newspapers cheap and ubiquitous. Those newspapers – sold on the street for 1 cent – were the first to exploit mass advertising to lower newspapers’ purchase prices. Proliferating throughout the United States, they launched a new media era.

McKenzie’s analogy isn’t quite right. I believe journalism history offers more context for considering Substack’s future. If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it.

But if Substack’s pricing precludes widespread distribution of its news and commentary, its value as a public service won’t be fully realized.

Mass advertising subsidized “objective” journalism

As a journalism scholar, I believe Substack’s subscription-based plan is, in fact, closer to the model of journalism that preceded the penny papers. The older versions of U.S. newspapers were relatively expensive and generally read by elite subscribers. The penny papers democratized information by mass-producing news. They widened distribution and lowered the price to reach those previously unable to buy daily newspapers.

Substack, on the other hand, isn’t prioritizing advertising revenue, and by pricing content at recurring subscription levels, it’s restricting, rather than expanding, access to news and commentary that, for a long time, news organizations have traditionally provided free on the web.

History has shown that the economic basis of American journalism is deeply entangled with its style and tone. When one primary revenue source replaces another, much larger evolutions in the information environment occur. The 1830s, again, offer an instructional example.

One morning in 1836, James Watson Webb, the editor of New York City’s most respected newspaper, the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, chased down James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, and beat Bennett with his cane. For weeks, Bennett had been insulting Webb and his newspaper in The Herald.

In his study of journalistic independence and its relationship to the origins of “objectivity” as an established practice in U.S. journalism, historian David Mindich identifies Webb’s assault on Bennett as a revealing historical moment. The Webb-Bennett rivalry distinguishes two distinct economic models of American journalism.

Before the “penny press” revolution, U.S. journalism was largely subsidized by political parties or printers with political ambition. Webb, for example, coined the name “Whig” for the political party his newspaper helped organize in the 1830s with commercial and mercantile interests, largely in response to the emergence of Jacksonian democracy. Webb’s newspaper catered to his (mostly) Whig subscribers, and its pages were filled with biased partisan commentary and correspondence submitted by his Whig friends.

Bennett’s Herald was different. Untethered from any specific political party, it sold for one penny (though its price soon doubled) to a mass audience coveted by advertisers. Bennett hired reporters – a newly invented job – to capture stories everyone wanted to read, regardless of their political loyalty.

His circulation soon tripled Webb’s, and the profits generated by The Herald’s advertising offered Bennett enormous editorial freedom. He used it to attack rivals, publish wild stories about crime and sex, and to continually stoke more demand for The Herald by giving readers what they clearly enjoyed.

Huge circulation propelled newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and Benjamin Day’s New York Sun to surpass Webb’s Morning Courier and Enquirer in relevance and influence. Webb’s newspaper cost a pricy 6 cents for far less timely and exciting news.

It should be noted, however, that the penny papers’ nonpartisan independence didn’t ensure civic responsibility. To increase sales, the Sun, in 1835, published entirely fictional “reports” claiming a fantastic new telescope had detected life on the Moon. Its circulation skyrocketed.

In this sense, editorial independence encouraged publication of what’s now called “fake news” and sensationalistic reports unchecked by editorial oversight.

Substack: A blogging platform with a toll gate?

Perhaps “I.F. Stone’s Weekly” offers the closest historical antecedent for Substack. Stone was an experienced muckraking journalist who began self-publishing an independent, subscription-based newsletter in the early 1950s.

Yet unlike much of Substack’s most famous names, Stone was more reporter than pundit. He’d pore over government documents, public records, congressional testimony, speeches and other overlooked material to publish news ignored by traditional outlets. He often proved prescient: His skeptical reporting on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, questioning the idea of an unprovoked North Vietnamese naval attack, for example, challenged the U.S. government’s official story, and was later vindicated as more accurate than comparable reportage produced by larger news organizations.

There are more recent antecedents to Substack’s go-it-yourself ethos. Blogging, which proliferated in the U.S. media ecosystem earlier this century, encouraged profuse and diverse news commentary. Blogs revived the opinionated invective that James Gordon Bennett loved to publish in The Herald, but they also served as a vital fact-checking mechanism for American journalism.

The direct parallel between blogging and Substack’s platform has been widely noted. In this sense, it’s not surprising that Andrew Sullivan – one of the most successful early bloggers – is now returning to the format.

Information doesn’t want to be free

Even if Substack proves simply an updated blogging service with an uncomplicated tollbooth, it still represents improvement over the “tip jar” financing model and reader appeals that revealed the financial weakness of all but the most famous blogs.

This might be Substack’s most important service. By explicitly asserting that good journalism and commentary are worth paying for, Substack might help retrain web audiences accustomed to believing information is free.

Misguided media corporations persuaded the web’s earliest news consumers that big advertisers would sustain a healthy news ecosystem that didn’t need to charge readers. Yet that economic model, pioneered by the penny papers, has clearly failed. And journalism is still sorting out the ramifications for the industry – and democracy – of its collapse.

It costs money to produce professional, ethical journalism, whether in the 1830s, the 1980s or the 2020s. Web surfing made us forget this. If Substack can help correct this misapprehension, and ensure that journalists are properly remunerated for their labor, it could help remedy our damaged news environment, which is riddled with misinformation.

But Substack’s ability to democratize information will be directly related to the prices its authors choose to charge. If prices are kept low, or if discounts for multiple bundled subscriptions are widely implemented, audiences will grow and Substack’s influence will likely extend beyond an elite readership.

After all: They were called “penny papers” for a reason.

Michael J. Socolow, Associate Professor, Communication and Journalism, University of Maine

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

A chocolate cake that celebrates mothers — lost and found

Good food is worth a thousand words — sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.

* * *

In the first months after my husband, Erik, died while mountain climbing in 2014, I spent much of my time shuffling about my sister’s house in a teary, sleepless haze. I wore rumpled variations of pajamas or sweats every day, and I had no appetite — everything I tried to eat tasted like the color grey. Prior to the accident that took his life, before I knew the term “young widow,” I had loved food.

Erik and I married in 2012, when he was in business school at Georgetown, and I had already swapped careers from lawyer to pastry chef. When he graduated the next year, we moved back to Brooklyn. He went to his new job in the Financial District, and I began pursuing a food writing career.

Amid all the life changes, we had our constants: He had a great appetite, and I loved cooking. In the evenings, I roasted, braised, and sautéed from our little apartment stove using new spices and ingredients I discovered at Sahadi’s or the Park Slope Food Coop. I baked layer cakes and pie for no particular occasion. On weekends, when he was not trekking through the Appalachian Trail, Erik trekked to outer boroughs with me to eat at obscure momo restaurants and hand-pulled-noodle stands.

But loss has a funny way of rearranging your priorities, your brain, and your life. One day, we were newlyweds. And then, just like that, he was dead. His death did not make sense or even seem real. I remember thinking that he could not be dead, because I’d already bought the ingredients for his “Welcome Home from Mount Rainier!” dinner: pasta with meatballs and a big salad. Worse still, the park service could not find or recover his body. He was just . . . gone.

After he died, I did not want to be in the kitchen, or even eat. Food didn’t matter. All that did was that my young, happy-go-lucky husband was dead, and I was stuck holding the shattered pieces of our barely-begun life. Instead of cooking, I did things like eat cereal and stand in front of our refrigerator, watching the expiration date on his yogurts lapse because I was too sad and disbelieving to throw them away.

What I didn’t know was that 225 miles south of Brooklyn, in Washington, D.C., two other people were grieving a parallel loss.

A few days after Erik’s memorial service, a law school friend mentioned that his buddy Brodie had just lost his wife to a long illness. He asked if I would like to be connected, since we were both now navigating similar experiences at the same time.

I said yes, desperate to connect with someone who could understand this specific grief and loneliness. A few days later, our mutual friend introduced us by email, and right away, Brodie and I began exchanging sad emails and short texts like, “I’m at the office crying in the lactation room” and “If one more person tells me it was ‘God’s plan,’ I’m going to lose it.” He told me about single parenting his nine-year-old daughter, Margot.

Throughout the summer, we checked in regularly. We kept tabs on each other’s insomnia and debated which of our spouses’ belongings to keep and which to donate. We talked about Margot starting fourth grade in the fall and about normal things like travel and books and whether “Rushmore” or “The Royal Tenenbaums” was the funnier movie. (For the record: “Rushmore.”)

In August, Brodie came to Brooklyn to visit friends. We met for the first time in a park and hugged like old friends. We walked for a long time and stopped for beers at a wood-paneled German bar. For a minute, I felt almost like myself again.

Summer turned to fall. I traveled to D.C. for a weekend with college friends. Over the weekend, I met Margot for the first time, a talkative little girl with wavy, strawberry-blond hair and freckles across her nose and cheeks like those I had seen in photos of her mother. She told me all about the book she was reading, and how once, in England, she spoke in a British accent for an entire day. I laughed. The laugh felt real.

Fall turned to winter, and Margot’s 10th birthday. Knowing I had a pastry background, Brodie asked if I would bake Margot’s birthday cake. I’d have to drive down to D.C., though, so was that OK?

I hadn’t made a birthday cake in seven months, not since my husband’s — a carrot cake with vanilla frosting and sprinkles on top. His last. I told Brodie that I was honored he’d asked, and yes, I would.

I didn’t mention my nervousness. Before “grief brain” (a very real thing) set in, a simple layer cake would have been easy. But now, fuzzy-headed with sadness and trauma, I had real worries about whether I might burn the cake or forget to add sugar.

“Oh, good!” Brodie said. “Could she talk to you about it?”

Children’s worlds are limited, and, as I’ve learned since, so are their concepts of death. Most children do not grieve through deep revelations about the scope and permanence of death. Instead, young children tend to experience a parent’s death in small, quotidian losses: Who will braid my hair? Who will take me shopping for my first-day-of-school outfit? And: Who will bake my birthday cake?

Margot’s small, chipper voice got on the phone. After chatting about Christmas and school, I asked her what kind of cake she would like.

“Chocolate cake with whipped cream frosting.”

“What about decorations?” I asked. She considered.

“Can it have owls?” she asked. “They are my favorite.” A pause. “And can I have Napoleon ice cream?”

“What’s Napoleon ice cream?” I asked.

“It’s the kind with chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry all in one container,” she explained.

“Ohhhh,” I laughed. “You mean Neapolitan ice cream.”

I regretted correcting the malapropism.

In the days leading up to the party, I dyed and sculpted balls of fondant into a little family of light blue owls. I used special cutters to press white sugar paste into snowflakes, which I dusted with edible glitter so they sparkled like new snow.

I decided I would bake my mom’s chocolate cake, the one she always baked so lovingly for everyone’s birthday. The cake has been around so long my mom no longer remembers where the recipe came from. It has simply always existed: at birthdays, Fourth of July cookouts, and whenever life demanded chocolate cake.

My mom dropped by as I was mixing the batter.

“Don’t make the whipped cream too sweet tomorrow,” she said. “And make sure you use a lot.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes. “I know,” I said. “I have a pastry degree from the C.I.A.”

She couldn’t help it. Moms will be moms.

The next day, I drove to Washington with the cake, decorations, and cake platter in the passenger seat. I arrived at Brodie and Margot’s house an hour before the party. I knocked on the yellow front door. Margot and Brodie answered with hugs.

In the kitchen, I set up my cake decorating area: cake, offset spatulas, heavy cream, sugar owls. I hefted the KitchenAid mixer onto the countertop and attached the whisk.

I felt certain that I was the first person to use the mixer since Brodie’s late wife. I processed this over a sad, shaky breath and set to work whipping the cream with renewed determination to make sure this woman’s daughter had the cake she could no longer make. I spooned in small amounts of vanilla and confectioners’ sugar until it was just right.

Margot watched with big hazel eyes as I smoothed thick dollops of whipped cream over the chocolate cake layers and grinned as I nestled the sugar owls, snowflakes, and “Happy 10th Birthday Margot!” lettering atop the cake. The first guests arrived. The girls ran into the kitchen to see the cake and let out a chorus of happy squeals.

While the girls played karaoke and dress-up and ate pizza and cake, Brodie and I refilled cups and did the tedious cleanup things adults do at a kid’s birthday party. I felt strange. I felt . . . happy.

After cake, we all piled into the car and went ice skating. I hadn’t ice skated since Friday nights at the local ice skating rink in middle school, so I clung to the wall.

Margot peeled off from her friends and skated up to me. She took my hand in hers. And there, in the swirl of skaters and bad pop music, my heart cracked open. Not in heartbreak, but in an outpouring of love for this sweet, freckled girl in her oversize sweater with light blue pom-poms.

I let go of the wall. We skated clumsily forward, together.

In the five, nearly six years since her 10th birthday party, I have baked Margot four more chocolate birthday cakes with whipped cream. Brodie and I fell in love and got married two years ago. Now I am Margot’s stepmom.

We are a package deal, moving clumsily forward, together.

Each year, Margot — now well into high school — and I talk about her birthday party and her cake. My mom’s chocolate cake with whipped cream frosting is a given, though each year, the decorations evolve. One year, I made her a movie-themed cake with a ribbony spool of edible film. The next year, I covered it in rainbow sprinkles.

She hasn’t decided on this year’s birthday cake decorations yet. We probably won’t have a party. But there will be my mom’s chocolate cake with whipped cream frosting.

Inevitably, I will suggest some vegetables and fresh fruit along with the usual pizza, cake, and ice cream. As usual, she will sigh, roll her eyes, and then eventually say OK to my misplaced goal of promoting a balanced meal at a teen birthday celebration.

I can’t help it. Moms will be moms.

***

Recipe: Chocolate Cake with Whipped Cream Frosting

Prep time: 15 minutes

Cook time: 35 minutes

Makes: 2 x 8″ round cake layers

Ingredients

Chocolate cake

3 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa, sifted
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 cups cold water
3/4 cup neutral vegetable oil, such as canola
2 tablespoons white vinegar
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder

Whipped cream frosting

1 pint heavy whipping cream, very cold
3 tablespoons confectioner’s sugar, sifted
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

Directions

Chocolate cake

Preheat the oven to 350° F and grease two 8-inch cake pans or line the cupcake tins.
Add all the ingredients to the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low, and then on medium, for about three minutes, until the batter is smooth. Scrape the bowl to make sure the cake batter is fully mixed. This can also be done by hand with a spatula until the batter is smooth and the ingredients fully incorporated.
Divide the batter between the cake pans and bake until the center of the cake springs back lightly when pressed and a cake tester comes clean, about 30 to 35 minutes for 8-inch cake layers.
Cool fully.

Whipped cream frosting

Add the heavy cream to the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Extra points for chilling the bowl first—keeping the cream as cold as possible makes it whip better and adds stability.
Starting on low to medium-low to prevent splashing, increase the speed to medium high and whip the cream until it thickens slightly. Add the confectioner’s sugar and vanilla. Continue to whip, checking often, until the whipped cream just barely comes to stiff peaks and holds its own shape. Do not over whip. (If the whipped cream looks grainy or chunky, it has over-whipped.)
Layer, fill, cover and decorate the cake as you like!

Republicans enabled Trump for four years — of course he’s betraying them in the 11th hour

Let’s get one thing straight: Donald Trump does not care about the American people. Whatever Trump may say, he is not threatening to blow up the coronavirus stimulus bill Senate Republicans finally agreed to pass because the bill isn’t generous enough. Trump could not care less if all Americans starve to death, and he certainly isn’t breaking a sweat trying to get the COVID-19 vaccine out to the public. He was not defending working Americans when he released a video calling the GOP-endorsed coronavirus bill a “disgrace” and pushing for a Democrat-friendly plan to send out $2,000 checks instead of the $600 ones Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to.

No, what’s likely going on is that Trump, the self-identified master negotiator, is turning to the only negotiation tactic he’s ever really known: Extortion.

Trump likely thinks he’s blackmailing McConnell into stealing the election for him. While we have no direct proof this is an extortion scheme, the circumstantial evidence is abundant and compelling. Here’s what we know:

Trump really does believe that Republicans know some super secret method for nullifying the election he just lost, and that they’re just not revealing it to him for some reason. In reality, Republicans probably would help him steal the election if they could, but they can’t. But Trump refuses to accept this so he is constantly wheedling GOP officials to do more and whining publicly that they’re holding out on him. He’s even considering canceling a Mar-A-Lago trip and staying in D.C. for Christmas, probably because he’s talked himself into believing he can strike a “deal” to nullify the election.

Trump is particularly incensed at McConnell right now for not doing more to make Trump’s failed coup successful. On Monday, Trump’s office sent out emails to congressional Republicans in which Trump took credit (falsely) for McConnell’s successful re-election, and implied that McConnell should show his gratitude by doing more to steal the presidential election for Trump. Trump believes that Congress will have an opportunity to overturn the election on January 6, by refusing to certify the Electoral College vote. We know he believes this, even though it’s false because he’s been scheming with House Republicans on how to do it. We also know — because Trump keeps tweeting about it — that Trump believes Senate Republicans are, for whatever reason, not doing enough to help him and need so more threats to get motivated to back his coup.

McConnell believes that this $900 billion coronavirus bill is needed to help Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the two Georgia Republicans trying to retain their Senate seats in the January 5 run-offs. McConnell told Senate Republicans last week that “Kelly and David are getting hammered” by their Democratic opponents for not passing a bill. This $900 billion package, which is only a fraction of the spending Democrats in the House passed months ago, is the smallest bill McConnell can get away with while still saving those two Senate seats he needs to keep his majority. Trump’s most ardent supporters have singled out the Republicans’ desire to win in Georgia as a leverage point, and keep threatening to tank that race if Republicans don’t do more to help Trump steal the election.

To be clear, this isn’t 11th level chess. It’s actually Trump employing junior high school bully logic: McConnell wants a thing (this paltry coronavirus relief bill), and so Trump is threatening to take it away unless Trump gets what he wants (a successful coup). Trump, being very dumb, has not considered the possibility that McConnell couldn’t give in to the extortion if he tried because there’s actually no secret file in McConnell’s office labeled “How To Steal Any Election.” Nor has Trump apparently given much consideration to how Democrats might react to him threatening McConnell by pretending that he wants a more generous bill.

Democrats have called Trump’s bluff.

Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks. At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 — Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it! https://t.co/Th4sztrpLV

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) December 23, 2020

I’m in. Whaddya say, Mitch? Let’s not get bogged down with ideological offsets and unrelated items and just DO THIS! The American people deserve it. @senatemajldr https://t.co/L1b5rUkc7h

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) December 23, 2020

Washington Post reporter Mike DeBonis confirmed that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is planning the unanimous consent vote Christmas Eve, which will force Republicans to go on the record against mailing $2,000 checks to Americans. Considering that McConnell is hoping $600 checks will be enough to buy off Georgia voters on January 5, a vote against a more generous bill is clearly something Republican politicians likely hope to avoid.

In no way does this theory require believing Trump is crafty, clever, or heaven forbid, intelligent. Trump is a moron who is employing what he thinks is a clever Roy Cohn-style scheme to blackmail McConnell. It is, however, an idiotic misfire, because he’s trying to extort something McConnell simply doesn’t have, that is some deeply buried secret method to steal the election.

The best part about this is that Democrats handed Republicans a chance to get rid of Trump a year ago, when the Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump for, yep, another one of Trump’s many extortion schemes to keep himself in office. (As a refresher, Trump threatened to withdraw military aid from Ukraine if the Ukrainian president didn’t help him cheat in the 2020 election.) But rather than accept this golden opportunity to rid themselves of an erratic and disloyal narcissist in favor of a more easily controlled President Mike Pence, Senate Republicans chose to acquit Trump and keep him around.

To thank them, Trump is now blowing up their spot on this coronavirus bill. Because Trump is loyal to no one and can only be failed. To him, you’re only as good as the last illegal or unethical thing you did to help him.

And boy, it’s hard not to wonder if McConnell isn’t regretting his choice to acquit Trump. Because if he’d just taken the chance Democrats gave him back then, he’d have President Pence happily just doing what he’s told. But no, like so many discarded lawyers, staffers, and other Trump enablers, McConnell made the mistake of thinking he could somehow protect and enable Trump without Trump screwing him over. But Trump will always betray his allies in the end. It’s like the moral of the story Trump loved telling at campaign rallies: Republicans knew Trump was a snake when they picked him up.

Amidst federal execution spree, Trump pardons Republican friends charged with fraud and war crimes

President Donald Trump on Tuesday granted clemency to 20 people, including corrupt former Republican lawmakers and convicted killers, as his administration rushes to kill more than a dozen people since recently ending a 17-year moratorium on federal executions.

Trump granted 15 pardons and five commutations, the White House said in a statement, including three former Republican congressmen, two targets of special counsel Bob Mueller’s Russia investigation, four Blackwater guards convicted in the slaughter of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians, and two former Border Patrol agents who shot an unarmed border crosser. In many cases, the pardons and commutations “bypassed the traditional Justice Department review process” and “more than half of the cases did not meet the department’s standards for consideration,” The New York Times reported.

Former Reps. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., Chris Collins, R-N.Y., and Steve Stockman, R-Texas, all received pardons.

Hunter was scheduled to begin serving an 11-month prison stint after pleading guilty last year to misusing campaign funds. Prosecutors said that Hunter, one of Trump’s earliest supporters in Congress, spent more than $200,000 on personal expenses like lavish vacations, theater tickets, and even to facilitate multiple extramarital affairs. Hunter won his 2018 re-election bid despite the charges but ultimately resigned.

Collins, another of Trump’s earliest congressional backers, was serving a 26-month sentence after he pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI and conspiring to commit securities fraud. Collins was infamously photographed appearing to commit insider trading while attending a White House event.

Stockman was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018 after he was convicted of 23 counts of fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors said Stockman stole hundreds of thousands intended for charity to pay for personal expenses and his political campaigns. Stockman’s pardon was urged by former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who has pushed a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming a Venezuelan voting machine plot to switch votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden, according to The Times.

“It is a good night to be a corrupt Republican congressman,” CNN host John Berman said while announcing the news on Tuesday.

Trump also granted a pardon to George Papadopoulos, who served 12 days in jail after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian intermediaries in Mueller’s investigation. He later wrote a book alleging to be a victim of a “deep state” plot to “bring down” Trump. Papadopoulos infamously revealed to an Australian diplomat that he learned that Russia had dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while drinking at a bar. Trump also pardoned Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who was convicted in Mueller’s probe of lying to investigators about his contacts with a business associate believed to be a Russian intelligence officer who worked closely with former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort.

Trump’s list of pardons also included four former Blackwater contractors convicted in the 2007 slaughter of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two young boys, in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The shooting also left 17 others wounded. One of the contractors, Nicholas Slatten, had been sentenced to life in prison after the Justice Department went to “great lengths to prosecute him,” the Times noted. Slatten, along with Paul Slough and Evan Liberty, who were sentenced to 15 years, and Dustin Heard, who was sentenced to 12 years, were convicted in 2014 after prosecutors said they used “powerful sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers on innocent men, women and children.” Some of the people were “shot inside of civilian vehicles while attempting to flee,” prosecutors said.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is a longtime Trump backer who has been involved in multiple right-wing schemes and drew scrutiny in Mueller’s investigation. Fox News host Pete Hegseth and Hunter both lobbied for the pardons, according to The Times.

Trump also granted pardons to two former Border Patrol agents who already had their sentences commuted by President George W. Bush after they were convicted in 2006 of shooting an unarmed border crosser accused of drug smuggling as he tried to flee and covering it up.

The president also pardoned former Republican Utah state lawmaker Phil Lyman, who was sentenced to 10 days in jail over a 2014 ATV protest against federal land management practices.

Trump previously pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian official before attempting to reverse his plea, and commuted the sentence of longtime adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted of numerous federal charges in Mueller’s investigation.

Trump granted 45 pardons or commutations before Tuesday, 88% of which went to people with personal ties to the president or people who advanced his political goals, Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith told the Times.

The pardons “continue Trump’s unprecedented pattern of issuing self-serving pardons and commutations that advance his personal interests, reward friends, seek retribution against enemies, or gratify political constituencies,” he said. “Like his past pardons, most if not all of them appear to be based on insider recommendations rather than normal Justice Department vetting process.”

Trump is expected to issue more pardons before his term expires, according to the Associated Press. His allies have discussed pardons for his family members and attorney Rudy Giuliani, who is under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York while leading Trump’s failed legal effort to overturn the election.

While Trump is handing out pardons to allies, there are 14,000 people in line for pardons and commutations who have waited for years, according to The Washington Post. Trump has granted far fewer acts of clemency than former President Barack Obama and Bush. Of the 20 people who received clemency on Tuesday, only seven had active petitions to the Justice Department.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., accused the president of abusing his power by granting clemency to allies and attempting to effectively undo Mueller’s investigation.

“Trump is doling out pardons, not on the basis of repentance, restitution or the interests of justice, but to reward his friends and political allies, to protect those who lie to cover up him, to shelter those guilty of killing civilians, and to undermine an investigation that uncovered massive wrongdoing,” he said in a statement. He later tweeted, “If you lie to cover up for the President, you get a pardon. If you are a corrupt politician who endorsed Trump, you get a pardon. If you murder civilians while at war, you get a pardon.”

My Oma’s apple pancakes — and why they never taste the same without her

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.

* * *

In Marcel Proust’s book “In Search of Lost Time,” the narrator famously reminisces about tasting a madeleine dipped in tea. We all have these moments, perhaps not as eloquently recounted, but nevertheless indelible in our minds. But did our madeleines really taste that good, or did the lens of time blur reality into a prelapsarian food idyll — before globalization made us more “sophisticated” eaters?

I prefer to think some things really were that memorable, or else they wouldn’t take up so much mental space.

In the summer of 1976, when I was 10 years old and my brother Stephen was 8, we flew unaccompanied from Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport to Frankfurt, Germany. Back then, no one batted an eye when our parents decided to send us over for two weeks — two minors traveling overseas alone with only a few harried flight attendants to watch over us. Our mom had emigrated to the States in 1962 — well, not quite emigrated, but came for a yearlong adventure in a foreign country, fell in love, and stayed to raise a family — so we alternated visits with our German family each summer. That summer it was our turn to cross the pond to see our Oma.

With her ramrod-straight back and short, stocky physique, our Oma’s physical bearing rivaled that of a military officer, but behind her formidable stature was a kind woman who loved us beyond measure. She’d admonish us but then quickly after, proffer a plum or a piece of chocolate. We were her only grandchildren, and there was always a touch of pride in her voice as she introduced us to neighbors, friends, and acquaintances as her grandchildren “from America.”

And then there was our aunt, Tante Elsbeth, who shared a home with Oma. In her signature red lipstick, miniskirts, and platform shoes, she was fun and hip — especially next to Oma in her house dresses and thick-soled walking shoes. She was also the cruise director, determined to give us a visit we would never forget. On that trip we hiked up the Drachenfels) to the ruins of a medieval castle along the Rhine River, and saw an outdoor theater production featuring Winnetou, famed German author Karl May’s fictional Native American, who rode onto the stage on a live horse.

We picked blackberries by the railroad tracks and went to a nearby playground with a cousin. We brought home a stray cat, which couldn’t stay. At night we played board games, and on some afternoons we were sent to the corner kiosk to buy cigarettes for Elsbeth and fruit pops for ourselves.

The freedom of those little jaunts was a huge thrill to two kids raised in the American suburbs. Our favorite outing was to the Waldau am Venusberg, a nature preserve with dark woods and trails, filled with wild boar and Bambi-like deer, which we fed stale bread and shriveled apples through a fence. We laughed at the tameness of the deer, their noses cold and dry as they gently nibbled at our open palms. The boar were separated by a wider berth, and we’d toss crusts and apples to them, watching as the alpha male inevitably horned his way in, eating the most while the babies squealed in frustration.

A decade later I would find myself back in the very same park, this time as a college junior spending my fall semester at the Heidelberg University. By then my Oma was living in an assisted care facility, crippled by a stroke and relegated to a wheelchair. On my weekend visits to Bonn, I would take her to the same park, which was nearby. Our late afternoon walks were more contemplative and less giddy than they once were, taking on a tone of urgency as I pushed her along the paths. Asking to stay a little longer, my grandmother was like the child I once was, not wanting to go home just yet—the setting sun and cooling fall air reminders of life’s transience.

* * *

As children we used to stop at kiosks in town and along the Rhine to eat pommes frites with little plastic forks and a side of mayonnaise (even though we preferred ketchup). Stephen and I delighted in Spaghettieis, vanilla ice cream made to look like pasta noodles with raspberry sauce and white chocolate shavings on top. We ate cold cuts and bread for breakfast and big, warm lunches of pork chops, peas, carrots, and mashed potatoes.

Nothing compared, however, to my grandmother’s cooking, especially her Apfelpfannkuchen, or apple pancakes, which we ate some afternoons in lieu of lunch. The sweet and doughy concoctions were the size of dinner plates, layered with sliced apples and sprinkled with sugar. Composed of only a few basic ingredients — flour, eggs, milk, apples, sugar — the recipe was far from complicated. Oma was the master of a-pinch-of-this and a-touch-of-that. Everything she made was prepared on a small counter and cooked over a tiny electric stove, enjoyed in a little apartment kitchen on the top floor of a small, nondescript, three-story building.

When we got home I’d beg my mom to make Oma’s Apfelpfannkuchen. An accomplished cook, my mom’s attempts — by her own admission and my unvoiced opinion — paled in comparison. Perhaps it was the apples, we surmised, but whatever the reason, the memory of those pancakes remained just that. I’ve tried over the years to replicate them, but some things are best left as they were.

* * *

On a trip to Germany a few years ago with Stephen and my mom, who wished to see the Christmas markets of her hometown “just one more time” (never mind that she was then, and remains now, in fine health), we felt our Oma’s presence everywhere. When Elsbeth used a small paring knife to slice the world’s best potatoes, I saw happily that some things never change — Oma’s knife and her method of peeling were evidenced in her daughter.

We ate foods reminiscent of our Oma, heavy meals followed by afternoon coffee and cake that we didn’t object to because we knew they were a treat — something we could indulge in for a week. We shared memories of her: her one porcelain cup and saucer that survived the war; her preference for stale brown bread, crediting it for her strong teeth, all of which were intact till the end; the dolls she knitted for her children — bodies, limbs, heads, hair, and clothes made from itchy leftover yarns, and without a pattern. We looked through photo albums with images of our Oma and other family members and friends at different times in their lives, the occasional pressed flower stuck in between the yellowing pages.

* * *

These days, when I recall our 1976 trip to friends, even the more lax ones, they are flabbergasted, suggesting an unaccompanied trip like that today would warrant a call to Social Services. That we made just one phone call after our arrival and wrote postcards dictated by our Oma only adds to the disbelief and head-shaking.

Dear Mom and Dad, we arrived safely. The weather is beautiful. Oma and Tante Elsbeth are taking good care of us. Love, Kristina and Stephen.

For me, though, that particular trip is just one of many reminders of the prelapsarian idyll that was my childhood—my precious madeleines.

***

Recipe: Oma’s Apfelpfannkuchen (Apple Pancakes)

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 10 minutes

Serves: 2

Ingredients

2 large eggs, separated
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sparkling water (San Pellegrino or any carbonated water)
1 pinch salt
2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 apple, peeled and thinly sliced (any tart apple will do, especially Granny Smith)

Directions

In a mixing bowl mix together the egg yolks, sugar, flour, baking powder, milk, mineral water and salt. (The batter consistency should be runny like a thick soup.)
Whip the egg whites into soft peaks, using a handheld mixer. Fold into the batter mixture. The mixture can be adjusted for feel and taste (denser batter could use more flour etc.).
Heat two tablespoons of oil in a small or medium cast iron pan. When hot, pour pancake batter in like you would to make a thick pancake and cook on medium heat.
Add the sliced apples on top like you would on a tart.
Run the spatula down around the edges and lift it gently to check firmness/doneness before flipping over.
Turn over (you can flip onto the pan lid and slide back into the pan).
Repeat for the second pancake.
When done, let sit and serve with powdered sugar on top.

Leaked documents show how China’s army of paid internet trolls helped censor the coronavirus

In the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.

The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of COVID-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information.

Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets.

They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”

The orders were among thousands of secret government directives and other documents that were reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. They lay bare in extraordinary detail the systems that helped the Chinese authorities shape online opinion during the pandemic.

At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies, China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus. To stage-manage what appeared on the Chinese internet early this year, the authorities issued strict commands on the content and tone of news coverage, directed paid trolls to inundate social media with party-line blather and deployed security forces to muzzle unsanctioned voices.

Though China makes no secret of its belief in rigid internet controls, the documents convey just how much behind-the-scenes effort is involved in maintaining a tight grip. It takes an enormous bureaucracy, armies of people, specialized technology made by private contractors, the constant monitoring of digital news outlets and social media platforms — and, presumably, lots of money.

It is much more than simply flipping a switch to block certain unwelcome ideas, images or pieces of news.

China’s curbs on information about the outbreak started in early January, before the novel coronavirus had even been identified definitively, the documents show. When infections started spreading rapidly a few weeks later, the authorities clamped down on anything that cast China’s response in too “negative” a light.

The United States and other countries have for months accused China of trying to hide the extent of the outbreak in its early stages. It may never be clear whether a freer flow of information from China would have prevented the outbreak from morphing into a raging global health calamity. But the documents indicate that Chinese officials tried to steer the narrative not only to prevent panic and debunk damaging falsehoods domestically. They also wanted to make the virus look less severe — and the authorities more capable — as the rest of the world was watching.

The documents include more than 3,200 directives and 1,800 memos and other files from the offices of the country’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, in the eastern city of Hangzhou. They also include internal files and computer code from a Chinese company, Urun Big Data Services, that makes software used by local governments to monitor internet discussion and manage armies of online commenters.

The documents were shared with The Times and ProPublica by a hacker group that calls itself CCP Unmasked, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. The Times and ProPublica independently verified the authenticity of many of the documents, some of which had been obtained separately by China Digital Times, a website that tracks Chinese internet controls.

The CAC and Urun did not respond to requests for comment.

“China has a politically weaponized system of censorship; it is refined, organized, coordinated and supported by the state’s resources,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times. “It’s not just for deleting something. They also have a powerful apparatus to construct a narrative and aim it at any target with huge scale.”

“This is a huge thing,” he added. “No other country has that.”

Controlling a Narrative

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, created the Cyberspace Administration of China in 2014 to centralize the management of internet censorship and propaganda as well as other aspects of digital policy. Today, the agency reports to the Communist Party’s powerful Central Committee, a sign of its importance to the leadership.

The CAC’s coronavirus controls began in the first week of January. An agency directive ordered news websites to use only government-published material and not to draw any parallels with the deadly SARS outbreak in China and elsewhere that began in 2002, even as the World Health Organization was noting the similarities.

At the start of February, a high-level meeting led by Xi called for tighter management of digital media, and the CAC’s offices across the country swung into action. A directive in Zhejiang Province, whose capital is Hangzhou, said the agency should not only control the message within China, but also seek to “actively influence international opinion.”

Agency workers began receiving links to virus-related articles that they were to promote on local news aggregators and social media. Directives specified which links should be featured on news sites’ home screens, how many hours they should remain online and even which headlines should appear in boldface.

Online reports should play up the heroic efforts by local medical workers dispatched to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus was first reported, as well as the vital contributions of Communist Party members, the agency’s orders said.

Headlines should steer clear of the words “incurable” and “fatal,” one directive said, “to avoid causing societal panic.” When covering restrictions on movement and travel, the word “lockdown” should not be used, said another. Multiple directives emphasized that “negative” news about the virus was not to be promoted.

When a prison officer in Zhejiang who lied about his travels caused an outbreak among the inmates, the CAC asked local offices to monitor the case closely because it “could easily attract attention from overseas.”

News outlets were told not to play up reports on donations and purchases of medical supplies from abroad. The concern, according to agency directives, was that such reports could cause a backlash overseas and disrupt China’s procurement efforts, which were pulling in vast amounts of personal protective equipment as the virus spread abroad.

“Avoid giving the false impression that our fight against the epidemic relies on foreign donations,” one directive said.

CAC workers flagged some on-the-ground videos for purging, including several that appear to show bodies exposed in public places. Other clips that were flagged appear to show people yelling angrily inside a hospital, workers hauling a corpse out of an apartment and a quarantined child crying for her mother. The videos’ authenticity could not be confirmed.

The agency asked local branches to craft ideas for “fun at home” content to “ease the anxieties of web users.” In one Hangzhou district, workers described a “witty and humorous” guitar ditty they had promoted. It went, “I never thought it would be true to say: To support your country, just sleep all day.”

Then came a bigger test.

“Severe Crackdown”

The death of Li, the doctor in Wuhan, loosed a geyser of emotion that threatened to tear Chinese social media out from under the CAC’s control.

It did not help when the agency’s gag order leaked onto Weibo, a popular Twitter-like platform, fueling further anger. Thousands of people flooded Li’s Weibo account with comments.

The agency had little choice but to permit expressions of grief, though only to a point. If anyone was sensationalizing the story to generate online traffic, their account should be dealt with “severely,” one directive said.

The day after Li’s death, a directive included a sample of material that was deemed to be “taking advantage of this incident to stir up public opinion”: a video interview in which Li’s mother reminisces tearfully about her son.

The scrutiny did not let up in the days that followed. “Pay particular attention to posts with pictures of candles, people wearing masks, an entirely black image or other efforts to escalate or hype the incident,” read an agency directive to local offices.

Larger numbers of online memorials began to disappear. The police detained several people who formed groups to archive deleted posts.

In Hangzhou, propaganda workers on round-the-clock shifts wrote up reports describing how they were ensuring people saw nothing that contradicted the soothing message from the Communist Party: that it had the virus firmly under control.

Officials in one district reported that workers in their employ had posted online comments that were read more than 40,000 times, “effectively eliminating city residents’ panic.” Workers in another county boasted of their “severe crackdown” on what they called rumors: 16 people had been investigated by the police, 14 given warnings and two detained. One district said it had 1,500 “cybersoldiers” monitoring closed chat groups on WeChat, the popular social app.

Researchers have estimated that hundreds of thousands of people in China work part-time to post comments and share content that reinforces state ideology. Many of them are low-level employees at government departments and party organizations. Universities have recruited students and teachers for the task. Local governments have held training sessions for them.

Engineers of the Troll

Government departments in China have a variety of specialized software at their disposal to shape what the public sees online.

One maker of such software, Urun, has won at least two dozen contracts with local agencies and state-owned enterprises since 2016, government procurement records show. According to an analysis of computer code and documents from Urun, the company’s products can track online trends, coordinate censorship activity and manage fake social media accounts for posting comments.

One Urun software system gives government workers a slick, easy-to-use interface for quickly adding likes to posts. Managers can use the system to assign specific tasks to commenters. The software can also track how many tasks a commenter has completed and how much that person should be paid.

According to one document describing the software, commenters in the southern city of Guangzhou are paid $25 for an original post of longer than 400 characters. Flagging a negative comment for deletion earns them 40 cents. Reposts are worth one cent apiece.

Urun makes a smartphone app that streamlines their work. They receive tasks within the app, post the requisite comments from their personal social media accounts, then upload a screenshot, ostensibly to certify that the task was completed.

The company also makes video game-like software that helps train commenters, documents show. The software splits a group of users into two teams, one red and one blue, and pits them against each other to see which can produce more popular posts.

Other Urun code is designed to monitor Chinese social media for “harmful information.” Workers can use keywords to find posts that mention sensitive topics, such as “incidents involving leadership” or “national political affairs.” They can also manually tag posts for further review.

In Hangzhou, officials appear to have used Urun software to scan the Chinese internet for keywords like “virus” and “pneumonia” in conjunction with place names, according to company data.

A Great Sea of Placidity

By the end of February, the emotional wallop of Li’s death seemed to be fading. CAC workers around Hangzhou continued to scan the internet for anything that might perturb the great sea of placidity.

One city district noted that web users were worried about how their neighborhoods were handling the trash left by people who were returning from out of town and potentially carrying the virus. Another district observed concerns about whether schools were taking adequate safety measures as students returned.

On March 12, the agency’s Hangzhou office issued a memo to all branches about new national rules for internet platforms. Local offices should set up special teams for conducting daily inspections of local websites, the memo said. Those found to have violations should be “promptly supervised and rectified.”

The Hangzhou CAC had already been keeping a quarterly scorecard for evaluating how well local platforms were managing their content. Each site started the quarter with 100 points. Points were deducted for failing to adequately police posts or comments. Points might also be added for standout performances.

In the first quarter of 2020, two local websites lost 10 points each for “publishing illegal information related to the epidemic,” that quarter’s score report said. A government portal received an extra two points for “participating actively in opinion guidance” during the outbreak.

Over time, the CAC offices’ reports returned to monitoring topics unrelated to the virus: noisy construction projects keeping people awake at night, heavy rains causing flooding in a train station.

Then, in late May, the offices received startling news: Confidential public-opinion analysis reports had somehow been published online. The agency ordered offices to purge internal reports — particularly, it said, those analyzing sentiment surrounding the epidemic.

The offices wrote back in their usual dry bureaucratese, vowing to “prevent such data from leaking out on the internet and causing a serious adverse impact to society.”

More frightening than Nixon’s final days: Trump’s firing Pentagon civilians, pardoning war criminals

One of the more haunting images from “The Final Days,” the sequel to Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” is that of Richard Nixon wandering drunkenly through the White House giving speeches to the portraits of the previous presidents as Watergate was unraveling and he realized he was about to endure the worst humiliation of his life. In a meeting with some congressman, at one point, he said, “I can go in my office and pick up a telephone and in 25 minutes millions of people will be dead,” prompting California Senator Alan Cranston to warn Defense Secretary James Schlesinger about “the need for keeping a berserk president from plunging us into a holocaust.”

Schlesinger went on to issue an order that if the president gave any nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them, which is a serious departure from the normal protocol requiring an order from the Commander in Chief to launch immediately. Luckily, Nixon just moped around the White House for a while until he was finally given the heave-ho by members of Congress.

Looking back on it, what we thought of as a frightening, dangerous episode now looks like a staid and dignified affair compared to what’s going on in Donald Trump’s final days. We can only wish that Trump was just crying into a glass of scotch and asking Henry Kissinger to get down on his knees and pray for him as Nixon did. Instead, he seems to be having a very public nervous breakdown. Since the election, he’s fired the civilian leadership at the Pentagon and replaced them with henchmen and sycophants, apparently setting of serious concern among the top brass.

Axios reported on Tuesday that he has become so frustrated that he’s even starting to turn on his most trusted accomplices, including Vice President Mike Pence, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, all of whom he believes are failing him. He is said to believe that everyone around him who isn’t actively egging on his futile efforts to overturn the election is either “weak, stupid or disloyal” and he is increasingly only listening to propagandists at OAN, Newsmax, a few select programs at Fox News and his inner circle of conspiracy mongers.

We know from various reports that Trump has been meeting with his former National Security Adviser, the recently pardoned, admitted felon Mike Flynn, and his lawyer Sidney Powell, who was formerly Trump’s lawyer as well. Powell wanted to be named a “special counsel” to investigate election fraud, but according to the Daily Beast, that has been nixed by the president for now. The president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani is hostile to Powell and has told the press that she is not affiliated with the president’s legal team, but he too is pushing ridiculous schemes such as having the Department of Homeland Security seize the voting machines in certain states, which the DHS has said they have no authority to do. Flynn has also publicly proposed Trump invoke Martial Law in the states that Biden won narrowly and order the military to run a new election. That Trump has been open to discussing such far-fetched plans is bad enough in itself. And for some bizarre reason, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who also happens to have had a long term affair with convicted and deported Russian Spy Maria Butina, has been present at at least one meeting with all of these people, as slightly less unhinged members of the White House attempted to push back on their wacky plots.

At the moment Trump seems fixated on the idea of having the Republicans in congress refuse to accept the certification of the electoral college vote on January 6th. This week QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a newly elected member of the House of Representatives from Georgia, organized a strategy meeting with Trump at the White House along with some of his most loyal supporters in the House like Matt Gaetz, R-Fl, Louis Gohmert, R-Tx, Mo Brooks, R-Al, among others. They seem hopeful that at least one Republican in the Senate will join them to object — which would turn the whole thing into a circus but change absolutely nothing.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell begged his senators not to go along with the whole charade because it would look bad to vote against Donald Trump since he clearly lost the election. His deputy, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, said “it’s going down like a shot dog and I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be.”

That put McConnell and Thune on Trump’s ever-growing shit list. First Trump sent around a graph supposedly showing that he was responsible for McConnell’s re-election and than on Tuesday night threw this out there::

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1341547750710800385

But perhaps he’s taking his greatest revenge by threatening to veto the COVID-19 relief bill unless they agree to give every American who qualifies a $2000 check instead of the measly $600 that they finally squeezed out of McConnell and his caucus. Democrats immediately endorsed Trump’s idea and the ball is in McConnell’s court as I write this. If Trump wants to wreak revenge on his “disloyal” Republicans by agreeing to send badly needed money to Americans who are suffering from his and the Republican’s malfeasance I couldn’t be happier. However, it’s very likely that this will do nothing but blow up the bill at the last moment, resulting in some very bad outcomes. Had he involved himself in the negotiations and pushed hard for relief he just might have won the election and helped people sooner. But he preferred to pretend the pandemic was over instead. The stable genius blew that one bigly.

Trump also pumped out some pardons on Tuesday night, showing that no matter how much he is trying to convince himself that the Greek chorus in this farce isn’t chanting “it’s over,” he knows he’s still got some business to take care of. He pardoned two people convicted in the Mueller probe, three corrupt Republican allies, more horrific war criminals and some border guards who shot an unarmed drug dealer. (He also pardoned a small handful of people who deserved it, proving there is a Santa Claus after all.)

Trump is all over the place and it’s hard to know what’s serious and what’s just the usual Trump sideshow. But he’s making one thing very clear. If someone is loyal to him he will make sure they never have to pay a price for committing an illegal act as long as he’s president. The incentives to do so on his behalf are right out there. We’ll just have to hope none of his ecstatic followers in or out of government decide to do something about it while he’s still got the power to pardon them.

Trump pardons Blackwater war criminals — but ignores Julian Assange, who exposed U.S. war crimes

President Donald Trump late Tuesday unveiled a slate of pardons and commutations that includes four Blackwater military contractors jailed for massacring more than a dozen Iraqi civilians—including two children—in Baghdad in 2007.

Absent from Trump’s wave of 15 pardons was Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who helped bring to light war crimes committed by the U.S. in Iraq and elsewhere.

Observers decried as “grotesque” Trump’s full pardon of Blackwater guards Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard, and Nicholas Slatten and failure to pardon Assange as the publisher struggles to survive in a notorious British jail ahead of an expected extradition ruling on January 4. If extradited to the U.S., Assange could spend the rest of his life in prison for the “crime” of obtaining and publishing classified documents—an act of journalism.

In a statement accompanying the new pardons and commutations—a list that also included former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and former Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.)—the White House described the former Blackwater mercenaries as veterans with “a long history of service to the nation.”

The president could still pardon Assange before leaving office next month, and he is being urged to do so by NSA whisteblower Edward Snowden, the U.N.’s top anti-torture official, and many others.

“While U.S. Army contractors convicted of massacring civilians in Iraq are pardoned, the man who exposed such crimes against humanity, Julian Assange, rots in Britain’s Guantanamo,” tweeted Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and parliamentarian.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald also weighed in on Twitter:

This is a grotesque pardon: Blackwater contractors who indiscriminately shot into an Iraqi crowd, killing 14 (2 kids):https://t.co/L3qa52NuKc.

Meanwhile, 2 people who exposed war crimes rather than committied them – Snowden & Assange – wait to see if Trump can find the courage https://t.co/7GBBRu5Ooy

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 23, 2020

As The Guardian reported Tuesday, Slough, Liberty, Heard, and Slatten “were part of an armored convoy that opened fire indiscriminately with machine-guns, grenade launcher, and a sniper on a crowd of unarmed people in a square in the Iraqi capital.”

“The Nisour Square massacre was one of the lowest episodes of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq,” The Guardian noted. “Slough, Liberty, and Heard were convicted on multiple charges of voluntary and attempted manslaughter in 2014, while Slatten, who was the first to start shooting, was convicted of first-degree murder. Slattern was sentenced to life and the others to 30 years in prison each.”

This is what the four Blackwater mercenaries Trump just pardoned did in Iraq. A cold blooded massacre of men, women and children. https://t.co/QSBMoB8MQV

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) December 23, 2020

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of anti-war group CodePink, tweeted Tuesday that “Trump could have pardoned whistleblowers Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.”

“Instead he chose to pardon four Blackwater mercenaries who murdered 17 Iraqi civilians, including two boys [aged] eight and 11, in an unprovoked attack on a crowd of unarmed people,” Benjamin wrote. “Disgusting.”

Nothing to see here: Why media keeps downplaying Trump’s coup attempt

In the original “Star Wars” film — now known as “Episode IV: A New Hope” — Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker and the droids R2-D2 and C-3P0 are stopped by a group of stormtroopers, the elite troops of the evil Empire.

The stormtroopers demand to see Luke and Obi-Wan’s identification. With a wave of his hand, Obi-Wan Kenobi uses the mystical power of the Force to dispel their suspicions. Without doubt or hesitation, the stormtroopers say, “You can go about your business. Move along.” The heroes escape to continue with their mission. The stormtroopers behave as though nothing unusual has happened.

When Luke Skywalker asks Obi-Wan for an explanation, the wizened Jedi knight explains that the Force can have a powerful influence on the weak-minded.

In their efforts to downplay the dangers of Donald Trump’s ongoing coup against democracy, too many members of the commentariat and other “professional smart people” are attempting to use a form of the Jedi mind trick on the American people.

Based on the lack of broad public outrage about Trump’s continuing effort to overturn the 2020 election, it would appear that many Americans may in fact be vulnerable to such a ploy.

Over the last few days, the Trump regime’s coup attempts have escalated into an ever more desperate and dire stage. The New York Times reported that a cabal of Trump’s conspirators met in the Oval Office last Friday where they had a “discussion” about how to overturn the 2020 presidential election by invoking martial law, using a special counsel to invalidate the election, and seizing voting machines to “inspect them” for “irregularities.” Of course, the intended result of any such “investigation” would be to manufacture Trump’s “re-election.”

It should have been the headline in every newspaper and other news media outlet in the United States. But it was buried on page A28 of the print edition of the New York Times, and was also not a leading story in the online edition.

Predictably, Trump raged on Twitter that there were no such discussions and this was all another example of “fake news.”

Axios added this additional reporting:

A senior administration official said that when Trump is “retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends.”

“People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe,” the official added. “These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.”

On Monday evening, the Washington Post also reported on Trump’s cabal, observing that the president “has turned to a ragtag group of conspiracy theorists, media-hungry lawyers and other political misfits in a desperate attempt to hold on to power after his election loss.” Trump’s “unofficial election advisory council now includes a felon, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a White House trade adviser and a Russian agent’s former lover.”

Once again, this report was not among the leading stories in the online edition.

Matters have become so serious that on Friday Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville felt compelled to issue a statement that there “is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

This is not the first time during Trump’s reign that military leaders have publicly said they will not interfere in elections. As with most other things about Trump’s presidency, such an announcement has no obvious precedent in American history.

Why have the chattering classes with a few notable exceptions, continued to minimize Trump’s coup attempt?

It is easier to mock and deride the Trump regime’s coup attempt as being “lazy,” “failed” or “incompetent,” or to describe it in some other liberal-schadenfreude language than to speak of an on-going national emergency. Likewise, calling Trump’s coup attempt just a “grift” or a “con job” also minimizes the danger to the country and ignores the kleptocratic aspects of authoritarian and fascist regimes.

Moreover, it is comforting for the mainstream news media to bask in the glow of Joe Biden’s victory and the absence of widespread of political violence and then to declare that democracy endures and Trump’s coup attempt is a joke.

By necessity, such high-minded talk excludes Trump and his allies’ efforts to suppress the votes of nonwhite people, slow down the mail and otherwise interfere with democracy.

Members of the “Church of the Savvy” and other hope-peddlers and stenographers of current events have an instinctive revulsion to speaking too much truth to power. As a group they have refused until very recently to accurately describe Donald Trump and his regime as being fascistic or authoritarian. Likewise, the mainstream news media and other public voices have been reluctant to state that Donald Trump is a compulsive liar. Instead, they have used euphemisms: The president “misspoke,” or “distorted” or “misrepresented” the facts.

Despite abundant evidence, these same voices still refuse to consistently describe Donald Trump as a racist or a white supremacist. All of this reflects a desperate desire to return to perceived “normalcy,” as embodied by the incoming Biden administration.

Part of this “normalcy bias” is a function of legitimate fear and anxiety, and an instinct for self-preservation given Trump and his movement’s violent threats against reporters and journalists.

This is an example of “organized forgetting”: The Trump regime and this version of American neofascism have traumatized not just the American people but many of the country’s elites as well. Both groups, albeit in different ways, are deeply invested in reassuring fictions about our “healthy institutions” and “the democratic system.” Thus, the compulsion to rapidly forget the horrors of the Trump regime and embrace the hopeful possibilities of the Biden administration.

In practice, this means that the rot in our civic, political, and cultural institutions that produced the Trump regime remains, but has been whitewashed over.

For the mainstream news media, this organized forgetting also involves a rewriting of history in which journalists did not consistently fail in their responsibilities as guardians of democracy by normalizing Trump’s politically aberrant behavior, and by downplaying the threat posed to American democracy by his movement. As a practical matter, when the country’s mainstream political voices finally started speaking some truth to power during the final months of Trump’s first term, they sounded insincere. Where were those criticisms before? Why are they suddenly speaking up now, after Biden has been elected? What explains this sudden “courage,” or the force of revelation about the dangers of Trumpism?

In many ways, the American media is stuck in a feedback loop of credibility failure, one which its leading figures largely created. The Age of Trump was merely a tipping point that exposed long-standing institutional problems.

As media scholar Eric Alterman observes at The Nation:

We know that our democracy is at stake and that the country may be on the precipice of significant political violence. If ever the mainstream media needed to shake its self-destructive addiction to false equivalence, now is the time….

Now those same network executives need to decide which side they are on: democracy or fascist rebellion. Network bookers should refuse to amplify the words of anyone who denies Biden’s victory without immediately pointing out that that person is a liar. Nothing is “disputed.” Nothing is “controversial.” Nothing is “lacking in evidence.” There is only truth or lies….

This should be simple. The news divisions of the major networks, together with CNN (and to a lesser extent, the liberal-branded MSNBC), have all sacrificed much of their credibility during the Trump presidency. They should welcome the opportunity to win it back.

Ultimately, the mainstream media’s refusal to highlight the true danger of Trump’s ongoing coup attempt, and the depths of the country’s democratic crisis more generally, are a symptom of a much broader denial of truth in our society.

In his latest column for Scheerpost — republished by Salon — Chris Hedges warns:

One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile…. We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.

There is less than a month remaining before Joe Biden becomes president of the United States. These next weeks, however, will be some of the most unpredictable and dangerous in the country’s history. As time winds down for Donald Trump, he and his cabal will become even more desperate, dangerous and destructive. Like other authoritarians and fascist leaders, Trump will attack the country and its people as revenge for being “disloyal” to him.

The American media in this moment of crisis can choose to tell the truth, which may at least help to prepare the public for the struggle necessary to reclaim the country’s democracy. Or it can remain in denial about the long struggle ahead to rehabilitate our democratic institutions and public life.

The first choice could also begin to address the American news media’s crisis of legitimacy. The second will make that crisis exponentially worse.

The Biden administration: Who will hold the power?

Joe Biden is in the process of appointing several hundred people who are critical to what the administration gets done over the next four years. But not all these people will wield the same amount of power – as I discovered during my own time as a cabinet secretary. Here’s what you need to know about where the power really lies.

Appointments can generally be separated into three categories: cabinet members, presidential advisors, and heads of task forces.

1. Cabinet appointments

Cabinet appointments usually get the most media attention, so we’ll start there. But just because you’re in the cabinet doesn’t mean you’re in the loop. In fact, as I discovered as Labor Secretary, it’s possible to be in the cabinet and not in the loop – and sometimes not even know the loop exists.

Despite the media coverage – and the hoopla over Senate confirmations – most cabinet members don’t actually play a large role in a president’s major decisions. Presidents almost never meet with their full cabinets, and most cabinet members rarely see a president. Cabinet members run departments which implement or enforce laws enacted by Congress. A capable and conscientious cabinet member keeps everything on track and rarely makes headlines.

Now, there are a few cabinet positions that have a significant influence on public policy, and you should pay attention to who fills them. A cabinet member’s role in policymaking varies depending on a president, but generally, the big four are the Secretary of the Treasury, who plays a major role in economic policy; the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, on foreign policy; and the Attorney General, in the administration of justice.

Health and Human Services is important because of the coronavirus as well as the Affordable Care Act and any move toward Medicare for All. Homeland Security is important because of all the abuses that can occur under it.

But Commerce, Transportation, Energy, Interior, Veterans Affairs, even, dare I say it? Labor – well, they’re not at the same level.

2. Presidential advisors

The most important influencers on day-to-day policy-making, who are very much in the loop, are presidential advisors, who don’t need Senate confirmation. The most influential of them work inside the West Wing of the White House – and the closer their office is to the Oval Office, the more influence they have.

From the view of the White House staff, cabinet officials are provincial governors presiding over independent domains. Anything of any importance occurs in the center – the West Wing – a rabbit warren of offices squeezed into three floors clustered around the Oval. It’s such a maze that I used to get lost in it more times than I’d care to admit.

The advisor with the most influence on day-to-day economic policy is the chairman of the National Economic Council. The advisor with the most influence on foreign policy is the National Security Advisor.

Then there are the assistants to the president, such as on international trade; a director of the Office of Management and Budget; a Council of Economic Advisors, and a variety of people with titles like Counselor to the President.

A good rule of thumb for understanding who really wields power is the location of their office. If it’s in the West Wing, they’re in the loop and you need to know who they are. If it’s in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which lies west of the White House, they’re more likely to be staff who don’t directly advise the president – and aren’t in the loop.

The president’s most important and powerful advisor is the Chief of Staff, whose office is just down the hall from the president. They control the flow of paperwork and people into the Oval Office and manage the President’s schedule, setting the President’s agenda. In other words, the Chief of Staff controls and manages the loop.

Even with a competent, experienced chief of staff, day-to-day life in the West Wing of the White House in any administration is one of controlled chaos. Don’t be misled by the TV series the West Wing, where everyone’s witty and loves each other. Realistically, the West Wing is intense, sometimes even backbiting and competitive, but this is where crucial policies are made.

3. Task forces

The last category of presidential appointments to pay attention to are the heads of task forces the president sets up – composed of cabinet and sub-cabinet members from different departments and agencies, usually assistant secretaries and the heads of various bureaus. Particularly important are task force heads who meet often with a president – such as John Kerry and his upcoming climate group.

Finally, keep in mind that every president has a different way of making policy decisions and using advisors and cabinet members. George W. Bush, in his response to 9/11, deferred almost entirely to his chief of staff and Secretary of Defense. Barack Obama responded to the financial crisis by drawing on several economic advisors simultaneously. Donald Trump rejected all expertise and focused only on issues that fed his ego.

My guess is Joe Biden, in tackling the pandemic and reviving the economy, will rely heavily on experts in Health and Human Services, the Treasury Department, and his National Economic Council.

All of these people – cabinet members, White House advisers, and special appointees who run task forces – formally answer to the president, but they work for the people, for you. This is where your power lies. Let’s make sure Biden’s appointees never forget who they work for.

In new court filing, Bill Barr accused of arresting impeachment witnesses to shield Trump

Lev Parnas, a former business associate of Rudy Giuliani, made explosive allegations against outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr in a federal court filing on Tuesday. Parnas, who is under indictment for campaign finance violations and fraud charges, has accused Barr of timing his arrest last fall in order to prevent him from testifying at House impeachment hearings.

The motion was filed in the Southern District of New York by attorneys for Parnas, a Ukrainian-born businessman who in 2018 and 2019 ran political errands in Ukraine on behalf of Giuliani and Trump. Parnas argues that his indictment last October was part of an intervention by Barr “to protect the President and thwart [Parnas’] potential testimony in the impeachment inquiry.”

Parnas filed his complaint as reports broke that federal prosecutors in New York have discussed with Justice Department officials in Washington seeking a warrant for Giuliani’s electronic communications, and, according to a person familiar with the case, at least one of the former New York mayor’s cell phones. Approval from higher-ups at Justice is required before prosecutors may request a search warrant for any materials that may be protected by attorney-client privilege. It is unclear whether such approval has been granted in this case.

According to multiple reports and individuals familiar with the case, Giuliani’s business dealings abroad have been part of a federal probe led by the FBI and the Southern District of New York — the very office Giuliani once led as U.S. attorney. Those investigations grew out of the arrest last October of Parnas and business partner Igor Fruman, who were detained at Dulles International Airport outside Washington as they waited to board an overseas flight. The two men were arrested just hours after meeting with Giuliani at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. According to the court filing, Giuliani was originally supposed to join Parnas and Fruman on their trip to Ukraine, but canceled earlier that day. Two other Giuliani associates also slated to make the trip had canceled a few days earlier, according to the document.

Prosecutors charged Parnas and Fruman, along with two other associates, with conspiring to make campaign donations on someone else’s behalf and violating the federal prohibition on soliciting donations from foreign sources. A superseding indictment this September added fraud charges in connection with their company, Fraud Guarantee, which contracted with Giuliani to do promotional work. Giuliani has not been charged in connection with any aspect of the case. Parnas and Fruman have both pleaded not guilty.

In the new filing, Parnas argues that the arrest deprived him of due process, and cites the Mueller report when claiming that the indictment undercut his constitutional right to testify against the president in impeachment proceedings — in Mueller’s eyes, the only available constitutional remedy for executive wrongdoing. He also claims that prosecutors targeted him for his Ukrainian ethnicity and, in something of a contradiction, for his support for the president and other Republicans, before laying out a series of events that he believes Barr helped engineer to secure his silence.

In late September, Parnas received a letter from House investigators asking him to preserve documents and prepare for a deposition. When Parnas told Giuliani about this, he was directed to attorney John Dowd, who had previously represented President Trump in connection with Robert Mueller’s investigation of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair now serving time in prison. After securing the president’s personal approval, Dowd took Parnas as a client.

On Oct. 8, a Tuesday, Dowd sent an email to a number of attorneys affiliated with Trump’s defense team, calling the president “Boss” and promising that Dowd would “eliminate any doubt” that Parnas and Fruman would answer questions before Congress. Dowd then sent a letter to House investigators informing them that Parnas and Fruman would not appear for their scheduled deposition on Thursday, Oct. 10.

The next day, Parnas and Fruman were arrested. Two of the attorneys copied on Dowd’s email were the same people who had been scheduled to fly with them to Europe. That night, Barr, who had been informed about the indictment in advance, met Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch for dinner in New York. The attorney general visited the Southern District offices the following morning on what aides described as a “routine” visit.

At the time of the arrest, however, the federal investigation into Parnas was not over, and did not in fact conclude for 11 more months, until a grand jury returned the fraud charges. It is not entirely clear why an immediate arrest was deemed necessary, although Parnas was described as a flight risk — on a trip the president’s personal attorney was supposed to make with him.

Days after the arrest, Giuliani parted ways with his own attorney, Jon Sale, a prominent Miami lawyer Giuliani said he had retained for impeachment defense. Giuliani previously told Salon that Sale had been the person who first connected him with Parnas in 2018. He and Sale also shared a significant client: Venezuelan financier Alejandro Betancourt, who was under investigation in a multibillion-dollar money laundering probe and also knew Parnas.

Within a few weeks of these events, Parnas fired Dowd, after what he later described in a TV interview as a jailhouse loyalty shakedown.

“I called Dowd to come there. And I started seeing in the process of the bail stuff, the way things were going on … I didn’t feel they were trying to get me out,” Parnas told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in January. “John Dowd, instead of comforting me and trying to calm me down and telling me I’m going to be OK, he started talking to me like a drill sergeant.”

“Were they telling you to sacrifice yourself to protect the president?” Maddow asked.

“That’s the way I felt,” Parnas replied. He dismissed Dowd along with Kevin Downing, another former Manafort attorney. In subsequent months, Parnas apparently turned over evidence to House impeachment investigators, but was never called to testify, likely because of his tarnished reputation following the arrest.

Parnas’ motion seeks to convince the court to turn over numerous documents about the circumstances surrounding his investigation and arrest, as well as the investigation (or lack thereof) of other people associated with the Ukraine affair.

To make his case, Parnas must show that Barr improperly intervened in the indictment. His filing cites numerous instances of the attorney general improperly inserting himself on Trump’s behalf in other legal matters, such as the cases of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone and Trump sexual-assault accuser E. Jean Carroll. Parnas must also show that he and his associates were singled out for these campaign finance violations where others involved, such as the people who actually made the donations, were not.

The court filing quotes a voicemail Giuliani left with Parnas’ attorney, the second half of which was apparently captured accidentally after Giuliani forgot to hang up. In the message, Giuliani asks whether it’s possible to speak with or about Parnas, and leaves his number. After a pause, according to the transcript, Giuliani can be heard telling his attorney, who apparently was also present, “That’s the soon-to-be-gotten-rid-of number.” The two carry on a short conversation, then the voicemail ends.

Progressives tell Biden: Don’t roll out the red carpet for “torture enablers”

It was painful enough to live through the U.S invasion of Iraq that caused untold devastation and human misery for no justifiable reason.

Now we are again reminded of the grim legacy of the George W. Bush administration with President-elect Biden’s nomination of Avril Haines as director of national intelligence. Haines, who has an inside-the-Beltway reputation for being nice and soft-spoken, was a little too nice to CIA agents who hacked into the computers of Senate Intelligence Committee investigators looking into the CIA use of torture — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, rectal feeding, whippings, sexual humiliation — at Guantánamo Bay and Afghan prisons during the Bush-era “war on terror.”

As deputy director of the CIA in the Obama administration, Haines chose not to discipline those CIA hackers who violated the separation of powers, crossing the boundary line and beaching the firewall between the executive and legislative branches. To add insult to injury, Haines led the team that redacted an exhaustive five-year, 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture until it was reduced to a censored, 500-page summary smeared with black ink to cover up the horrors and shield those responsible.

That’s why torture survivors and their advocates have just released a damning Open Letter urging senators to vote no on Haines when her nomination lands in their laps in mid-January or February, after the cyber-pomp and circumstance of a virtual presidential inauguration. The letter, signed by several decade-long detainees and survivors of torture at Guantánamo, also objects to the possible nomination of Michael Morell — who was a CIA analyst under Bush and two-time acting director under Obama — as CIA director.

“Elevating torture apologists to a leadership position within the Biden administration will damage the USA’s standing and give the world’s dictators succor and comfort,” said Djamel Ameziane, a Guantánamo detainee from Algeria who was tortured and held without charge from 2002 to 2013, until he was finally released from prison.

Morell’s traction may be on the wane with the Biden administration, however, after progressives launched a campaign against Morell’s potential nomination and Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon — a powerful Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — called him a “torture apologist” and said his appointment to head the CIA was a “non-starter.”

Objections to Morell include his defense of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” practices: mock drownings, “walling” 9repeatedly slamming prisoners against a wall), whipping detainees with electrical cords, dumping freezing water on detainees who were naked except for diapers.

Morell refused to call these practices torture. “I don’t like calling it torture for one simple reason: to call it torture says my guys were torturers,” Morell told Vice reporters in 2015. “I’m gonna defend my guys till my last breath,” he said, evidently putting his “guys” above truth, the law and basic decency.

Morell doesn’t call it torture, but Guantánamo survivor Moazzam Begg knows exactly what torture is. Begg, who signed a false confession while tortured, is Outreach Director for CAGE, a U.K.-based organization serving communities hard hit by the War on Terror. Begg recollects his days in U.S. custody. “They tied me up with my hands behind my back to my legs, kicked me in the head, kicked me in the back, threatened to take me to Egypt to be tortured, to be raped, to be electrocuted,” he said. “They had a woman screaming in the next room who I believed at that time was my wife. They bought pictures of my children and told me I would never see them again.”

Contrary to the Senate report and the CIA’s own internal review, Morell justified the torture by insisting that it was effective in thwarting future plots against Americans. Senate staffers said Morell got names, dates and facts all mixed up, and was dead wrong on the effectiveness of torture.

Torture survivor and award-winning writer Mansoor Adayfi, who was sold to U.S. forces in Afghanistan for bounty money and imprisoned without charge at Guantánamo for 14 years, knows firsthand that torture doesn’t work. “In Guantánamo, when they put you under very bad circumstances — like 72 hours under very cold air conditioning, and you are tied to the ground and someone comes and pours cold water on you — you are going to tell them whatever they want you to say. I will sign anything, I will admit anything!”

In addition to soft-pedaling the use of torture, Morell helped shield the abusers from accountability by defending the CIA’s 2005 destruction of nearly 90 videotapes of the brutal interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and other detainees a CIA black sites.

Progressives should know soon whether Morell’s cozy relationship with Bush-era CIA agents buries his nomination for good.

Biden is expected to nominate his candidate for CIA director any day now. For Jeffrey Kaye, author of “Cover-Up at Guantánamo” and a signatory to the open letter, the president-dlect must pass on Morell and the Senate must reject Haines. “Morell and Haines have put loyalty to CIA torturers above adherence to U.S. treaties and domestic law, as well as basic morality,” Kaye said. “To allow them to serve in government would send a message to all that accountability for torture is passé, and that war crimes will always be dismissed with a wink from those in high office.”

Other signatories to the letter objecting to Morell and Haines include:

Mohamedou Ould Salahi, Guantánamo prisoner held without charge for 14 years; beaten, force-fed, deprived of sleep; released in 2016; author, “Guantánamo Diary“;
Maj. Todd Pierce, U.S. Army (retired); Judge Advocate General attorney on the defense teams for Guantánamo military commission defendants;
Sister Dianna Ortiz, a U.S. missionary and teacher of Maya children, who was tortured by members of the CIA-funded Guatemalan army;
Carlos Mauricio, a college professor kidnapped and tortured by U.S.-backed right-wing death squads in El Salvador; executive director, Stop Impunity Project;
Rev. Roy Bourgeois, Roman Catholic priest who founded School of the Americas Watch to protest U.S. training of Latin American military officers in torture techniques;
Col. Larry Wilkerson, whistleblower and former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell;
John Kiriakou, former CIA officer imprisoned after exposing classified information about CIA waterboarding;
Roger Waters, musician and co-founder of Pink Floyd, whose song “Each Small Candle” is a tribute to a torture victim.

Progressives have been lobbying against the inclusion of torture apologists in the Biden administration since the August Democratic National Convention, when 450 delegates delivered a letter to Biden urging him to hire new foreign policy advisers and reject Haines. CODEPINK later launched a petition signed by more than 4,000, and organized Capitol Hill calling parties with Muslim delegates and allies to leave “No on Haines, No on Morell,” messages at the offices of Senate Intelligence Committee members, who are slated to question Haines during confirmation hearings.

For months, Morell was considered the frontrunner for CIA director, but opposition to his disgraceful defense of torture has cast a pall on his nomination. Now anti-war activists say they want to make sure his nomination is off the table, and that Biden and the Senate also understand Haines must be rejected for her complicity in suppressing evidence of CIA torture.

There’s more. Both Morell and Haines supported Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel as CIA director, a nomination that Sen. Kamala Harris, along with other prominent Democrats and the late Sen. John McCain vigorously opposed. Haspel supervised a black-site prison in Thailand and drafted the memo authorizing the destruction of CIA videotapes documenting torture.

In the words of the aforementioned Col. Larry Wilkerson, “Kidnapping, torture and assassination have no place in a democracy and [they] turn the CIA into a secret police. … Abuses of the kind documented in the Senate’s report could happen again.” Indeed, they very likely will — if Biden and the Senate elevate torture apologists and whitewashers to the highest levels of power.

We need intelligence leaders who acknowledge that torture is illegal under international law; that is inhumane; that it is ineffective; that it puts at risk U.S. military personnel captured by adversaries. The American people must send a clear message to President-elect Biden that we will not accept torture enablers in his administration.

Will the Dems sell us out in the midst of a pandemic?

I have written many columns at the Reader and other alternative publications warning that corporate control of the federal government will bring catastrophe for our children and for the planet. I receive a lot of pushback, especially from liberals who argue that Trump is/was such a unique menace that the Democrats had no choice but to join with corporate America to assure victory.

The Democratic Party sold out working people long before Donald Trump. It was President Bill Clinton who pivoted to Wall Street. Clinton then ended the main federal antipoverty program (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), passed NAFTA, escalated the drug war, and ended the New Deal restraints on big banks, leading directly to the housing meltdown and the Great Recession of 2008.

Later, Barack Obama took in record amounts of Wall Street cash for his 2008 presidential campaign. Then, as emails obtained by WikiLeaks later revealed, he allowed Citigroup to select nearly his entire Cabinet, which helped funnel trillions of bailout dollars to the banks, declined to prosecute a single Wall Street executive for mortgage fraud, and blocked legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.

The Democratic Party now uses this same fear-based argument every four years: support our corporate-backed candidates or else you will get someone more horrible. By allowing the party to control us by fear, we invite further betrayals.

Nor should we accept the premise that Democrats have to sell out to win. Bernie Sanders relied on small donors rather than corporate bundlers and PACs, and he raised plenty of money to compete. Indeed, Sanders likely would have won the nomination had not the corporate-backed candidates joined together, at Obama’s urging, to support Joe Biden before Super Tuesday.

Moreover, candidates who take policy positions favoring the 95 percent rather than the five percent are much cheaper to sell and thus don’t need to raise huge sums of money. For one thing, they can call out their opponents for being tools of corporate interests, a devastatingly powerful argument that is unavailable to most Democrats and Republicans. Yes, it’s true, voters prefer representatives who are not in the pocket of big business.

To illustrate this point, in the November elections, voters approved dozens of ballot initiatives brought by public interest groups that relied on grassroots organizing rather than expensive media campaigns. Arizona voters said yes to a tax surcharge on incomes above $250,000 a year specifically to raise teacher pay and recruit more teachers. Oregon voters approved a populist proposition to put strict controls on the corrupting power of big-money corporate donations in elections. Floridians voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, a working-class advancement vehemently opposed by corporate giants. Colorado voted yes to require corporations to let employees earn paid time off for medical and family needs. Voters in six states—including in such supposedly conservative bastions as Arizona, Montana, Mississippi, and South Dakota—approved initiatives legalizing marijuana and other drug use.

The groups sponsoring these voter initiatives did not have corporate backing. They won because ordinary people liked what they were offering.

Contrary to what you hear in corporate media, the policies pushed by progressives are not radical or scary to ordinary people. Recent polls show that three in five Americans favor Medicare for All, two in three support a wealth tax, and even higher numbers support free college tuition. The Green New Deal is likewise broadly popular, even when respondents are informed that it will cost trillions of dollars.

In other words, the story propagated by corporate media that Americans are afraid of change is a lie. A recent New York Times article illustrates how the deceptive game is played. The piece tries to make the point that Americans don’t want real change by quoting South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, who cautioned that if Democrats pursued policies like Medicare for All, “we’re not going to win.” What the article didn’t mention was that Clyburn has taken more money from the pharmaceutical industry in the past decade than any other member of the House or Senate.

Some readers accuse me of unfairly painting all corporate leaders as evil. This is untrue. I come from a family of corporate leaders who have high integrity. The reality is that publicly traded companies have no morality. They are profit-seeking engines. The personal views or morality of corporate directors is immaterial. They are under fiduciary obligation to seek maximum profits for the shareholders. Thus, if greater profits can be made by offshoring production to a country with lower wages and fewer environmental restrictions, this will be done even if it means screwing American workers and destroying the environment.

Allowing these profit-seeking engines to direct public policy—the current practice of D.C. Democrats and Republicans—will bring destruction to our country and planet. This is not hyperbole.

Consider the example of foreign policy. The American people don’t want forever wars or the bloated Pentagon budget that currently consumes well over half of our discretionary funds, and is greater than the military spending of the next nine countries combined. Meanwhile, one in eight Americans don’t have enough food to eat and 30 million Americans will soon be at risk of losing their homes.

But the American people have no say in the matter. Tragically, America’s foreign policy is controlled by the military-industrial complex and by the resource extraction industries. Bomb makers like Raytheon demand zones of active conflict to keep their assembly lines moving. Under Trump, our bombs fell at the rate of one every 12 minutes, killing thousands of defenseless Black and Brown people in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen—surpassing Obama’s record of one bomb every half hour. Many of the people we slaughter are civilians; none were threatening to invade the United States.

Manufacturers of big-ticket items demand hostile relations with larger nations like Russia and China to justify new sales of aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, F-35 fighter jets, and new generations of nuclear bombs. The mineral extracting industries demand that we maintain our empire of nearly 800 foreign military bases to crush the will of local people who oppose foreign exploitation of their lands.

None of this will significantly change under President Biden. In early December, while Congress bickered over whether to provide relief to desperate Americans, both parties joined together to approve $741 billion for the Pentagon, assuring that the war machine will be well funded for another year.

The status quo also ensures the continued deterioration of the planet. The U.S. war machine is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. In 2017, the U.S. military bought about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted more than 25,000 kilotons of carbon dioxide by burning those fuels.

If the American people could choose our next secretary of state—the nation’s chief diplomat—they would select someone skilled at negotiating with our adversaries and easing tensions around the world. But the war industry demands a toady with the opposite skill set. So Biden has selected Antony Blinken, a man whose career has been a pendulum between government and the defense industry, where he made himself rich by writing memos advocating for new smarter, more sustainable wars, and by selling his Rolodex of government contacts to help clients obtain defense contracts. Within the Obama administration, Blinken backed the interventions in Libya and Syria as well as the 2014 Ukraine coup, and he was a major proponent of backing the Saudi-led mass atrocities in Yemen. The fact that all these policies were disastrous for the people on the ground is not a negative for Blinken, because they were also highly profitable for the war industry. Blinken’s greatest career achievement appears to be his ability to keep Pentagon budgets rising while transitioning from Bush-era ground wars to smaller-scale “sustainable operations.”

Thus, under Biden, we must expect more dead children, more destabilization and suffering, and more global warming.

Some believe that the Democratic Party can still be rescued from the clutches of its corporate masters by electing progressives. This strategy is currently being tested. Progressives get themselves elected to Congress promising to stand up to the establishment Democrats and to fight for things like universal health care. Right now, they have a chance to demand a debate and floor vote on Medicare for All (MFA), a bill introduced in February 2019 by Representative Pramila Jayapal with dozens of cosponsors, but never brought to the floor despite its overwhelming popularity with Democratic voters. Because the Democrats now have such a slim majority in the House, a handful of progressives in Congress could force a vote on Medicare for All in exchange for their support for Nancy Pelosi’s reelection as speaker.

This idea that progressives might use their leverage to force a vote on Medicare for All was not proposed by any member of Congress but by Jimmy Dore, a comedian and activist, on his YouTube show. Yet his plan has gained wide support on social media. Dore has called out Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives for shrinking away from the fight over MFA after running on the issue and promising to stand up to Pelosi and the corporate Democrats. Forced to respond, AOC called Dore’s strategy too risky because the Dems might lose the speakership. But Speaker Pelosi can guarantee her reelection simply by scheduling a floor vote on a bill introduced almost two years ago with dozens of cosponsors, supported by 85 percent of Democratic voters, and about half of Republican voters. That is not an unreasonable demand of the speaker.

AOC also says we might lose the vote on MFA. But if not now, when? We are in the middle of a deadly pandemic, and we all need our neighbors to be able to go see a doctor if they feel sick without fear of bankrupting their families. Fifteen million Americans have already lost their health insurance and their jobs. Dore asks—are the House progressives fighters or are they posers?

The progressives had similar leverage back in the spring when the big donors demanded that Congress pass the CARES Act, giving Wall Street trillions of dollars and an assurance that it would face no hardship from the shutdown. But progressives let that leverage slip away and then accepted only scraps for working people, many of whom have been forced to stay home for months with no income. Now is the time to demand that the richest country on Earth provide health care to its people.

Of course, a government-run health care system will hurt the profits for big pharma, big insurance, and big hospital groups. But we all must sacrifice in times of great struggle.

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

Black pastors call on Kelly Loeffler to “cease and desist” her “attack against the Black Church”

A coalition of more than 100 Black pastors in Georgia blasted unelected Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler over the weekend, arguing in an open letter that her recent attacks on Democratic opponent Rev. Raphael Warnock amounted to an affront on the Black church.

“We call on you to cease and desist your false characterizations of Reverend Warnock as ‘radical’ or ‘socialist,’ when there is nothing in his background, writings or sermons that suggests those characterizations to be true, especially when taken in full context,” the religious leaders said in the letter. “We see your attacks against Warnock as a broader attack against the Black Church and faith traditions for which we stand.”

Early voting is already underway for the Loeffler-Warnock matchup next month, one of two runoffs in The Peach State that will together determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. After President-elect Joe Biden’s upset win in Georgia last month, outside groups have flooded the swing state with money and ads.

The Loeffler campaign has recently targeted Warnock’s patriotism, highlighting a 2011 sermon in which he said that “nobody can serve God and the military” — a variation on the biblical verse that “no one can serve two masters.” In a debate earlier this month, the former financial executive called Warnock a “radical liberal” more than a dozen times, while declaring “There is not a racist bone in my body.”

The letter called such criticism “naked hypocrisy,” asking Loeffler “what can be more radical, more seditious” than her support for the Trump campaign’s nearly 60 post-election lawsuits, a great many of which would have disenfranchised countless Black voters.

“Through your silence you demonstrated your disdain for Black elected officials and Black Lives Matter marches,” the pastors wrote in the letter. “You characterized these campaigns as mobs and lawlessness but remained silent on the antics of the Proud Boys and Wolverine Watchmen,” they added, referencing the militia group that plotted to kidnap and kill Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They called for Loeffler, who had months ago characterized perceived attacks on Amy Coney Barrett’s faith as “disgusting,” to “cease and desist” her criticism of Warnock’s ministry.

Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church — Martin Luther King Jr’s pulpit — endorsed the letter.

“My faith is the foundation upon which I have built my life,” he said in a tweet. “It guides my service to my community and my country. [Loeffler’s] attacks on our faith are not just disappointing — they are hurtful to Black churches across Georgia.”

Loeffler responded in a tweet, saying, “No one attacked the Black church.”

“We simply exposed your record in your own words,” the appointed Senator wrote. “Instead of playing the victim, start answering simple questions about what you’ve said and who you’ve associated yourself with. If you can’t — you shouldn’t be running for U.S. Senate.”

Loeffler recently drew backlash for appearing in a photo with Chester Doles, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard with extensive ties to the neo-Nazi movement.

“Kelly had no idea who that was, and if she had she would have kicked him out immediately because we condemn in the most vociferous terms everything that he stands for,” Stephen Lawson, a Loeffler campaign spokesperson, explained to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Doles, however, had been thrown out of a Loeffler campaign event in September — not by Loeffler’s campaign, but by Rep.-election Marjorie Taylor Greene, who caught fire for his attendance at one of her campaign events earlier that year.

Warnock has also seen recent criticism from faith leaders. Earlier this month, two dozen conservative Black pastors called on Warnock, a “pro-choice pastor,” to reverse his position on abortion, and last week a group of Orthodox rabbis published an open letter criticizing his past statements on Israel, such as comparing Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank to South Africa’s occupation of Namibia during apartheid.

GOP Rep. Doug Collins, who has flipped to backing Loeffler after losing to her in the state’s “jungle primary” on Nov. 3, responded to the conservative ministers by alluding to Warnock’s church as the “bed of hell.”

“There is no such thing as a pro-choice pastor,” Collins said at a Loeffler campaign event. “What you have is a lie from the bed of hell. It is time to send it back to Ebenezer Baptist Church.”

Loeffler responded to the rabbis with an open letter of her own, in which she once again called Warnock “radically liberal.”

Jewish leaders in Georgia came to Warnock’s side.

“The recent attacks against Rev. Warnock misrepresent his position on Israel,” Rabbi Peter Berg, head of Atlanta’s oldest Jewish congregation, The Temple, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In contrast to Loeffler, Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., who is locked in Georgia’s other Senate runoff, has created distance between himself and the contest, steering clear of cameras and even refusing to show for a debate against Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff.

Ahead of the general election, Perdue, who once asked a Black voter about chicken and Herman Cain, was dragged for mocking Sen. Kamala Harris’ name.

The Perdue campaign said he had “simply mispronounced Senator Harris’ name, and he didn’t mean anything by it.”

In July, the Perdue campaign removed an ad that had enlarged the nose of his opponent, who is Jewish, amid criticism that it was anti-Semitic.

The solace of Joni Mitchell’s “River,” a holiday song that defies merry and bright expectations

Holiday music has a reputation for being merry and bright, largely due to the popularity of jaunty and chipper tunes such as Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” or Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

However, festive music is often much more complicated than it seems. Both the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” and Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” boast narrative twists and complications involving romance, while Wham!‘s “Last Christmas” is a sweetly passive-aggressive dig at someone who brought on holiday heartbreak.

Yet for many people, melancholy holiday music hits the spot more: the longing of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” the ache of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and perhaps the saddest festive tune of them all, Joni Mitchell’s “River.”

Tucked away near the end of her landmark album “Blue,” which turns 50 years old in 2021, the tune has grown into one of Mitchell’s most popular songs — covered by a staggering 761 artists, according to the artist’s website. Sarah McLachlan famously did a version, as have Herbie Hancock, Billy Squier, Sam Smith, Rosanne Cash, Linda Ronstadt, and Barry Manilow.

In recent years, “River” has enjoyed a resurgence of sorts. Pop star Ellie Goulding’s cover of the song hit No. 1 in the UK in December 2019, culminating in a year that also saw “River” appear prominently in Netflix’s “The Politician” (in the form of a Ben Platt-sung cover) and on Judy Collins’ album “Winter Stories.” Earlier this year, actress Olivia Rodrigo put her spin on the song during “High School Musical: The Musical: The Holiday Special,” and the song is featured in Netflix’s cozy and festive “Dasy & Lily.”

The song’s popularity stems in part from its simplicity. Sonically, “River” is a moodier inversion of “Jingle Bells,” with sleigh bells that slump and sigh, and frigid piano that rains down like a stinging ice storm. Mitchell’s vocals are fragile but clear, capturing a protagonist exhausted by (among other things) the consequences of her own actions.

“I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad,” she laments. “Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had.” Later in the song, where to place blame is even clearer: “I made my baby say good-bye.” That the sadness is self-inflicted makes it extra painful; the narrator is wrestling with both internal guilt and external constraints.

Mitchell is well aware that “River” is a different kind of holiday song. “We needed a sad Christmas song, didn’t we? In the ‘bah humbug’ of it all?” Mitchell told NPR in 2014, and then elaborated on what the song meant.

“Well, it’s taking personal responsibility for the failure of a relationship. And my generation — you know, the ‘Me Generation’ — is known to be a Peter Pan, narcissistic generation, right?

“So it’s really, you know — it’s really that aspect of our inability — you know, ‘I’m selfish and I’m sad.’ Right? You know, people think that’s confessional, but I’d say, you know, in my generation, you think that that’s a unique personal statement?” she continued. “You know what I mean? It’s like, no wonder there’s so many covers of it?”

“River” emerged during a creative time for the Canada-born songwriter, when she was immersed in the Laurel Canyon scene after stints living in Detroit and the U.S. East Coast. In 1970, Mitchell was especially coming into her own as an artist (her second LP, “Clouds” won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance) and songwriter (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s version of her tune “Woodstock” was a hit that year).

However, travel was still driving her creative evolution. A 2018 Oxford American article described Mitchell and then-boyfriend James Taylor traveling to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, over the Christmas 1970 holidays. The pair’s vacation was idyllic: caroling around the neighborhood, visiting friends, and both musicians previewing soon-to-be-famous songs, such as “A Case of You” and “Fire and Rain.” As the article details, at least one person around at that time suspected “River” arose from Mitchell’s visit

The rub, of course, is that “River” already existed by then; Mitchell had even performed it at an October 1970 concert with Taylor that was broadcast by the BBC. Speaking to The Washington Post in 2006, Taylor noted that he first heard the song in California; his take, unsurprisingly, is influenced by the state’s temporal bent.

“It starts with a description of a commercially produced version of Christmas in Los Angeles, then juxtaposes it with this frozen river, which says, ‘Christmas here is bringing me down,'” he says. “It only mentions Christmas in the first verse. Then it’s, ‘Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on’ — wanting to fall into this landscape that she remembers.”

That people believe the song fits both a cold December in North Carolina and decidedly non-wintry Los Angeles illustrates the song’s subtle, genius malleability. It’s both incredibly specific to one situation — a breakup around the holidays — and exudes universal longing for escape and a desire to start over.

In 2018, the BBC released an episode of the Soul Music series about “River” that illustrated this point beautifully. The radio segment featured people detailing what the song means to them, with responses that varied wildly and covered a lot of ground: love, death, birth, home, distance.

Part of these varied reactions come from Mitchell’s word choice — she lost her “baby,” a term of endearment with a connotation of deep, intense familiarity for the entire gender continuum — and the vivid imagery, described in economical language: “They’re cutting down trees/They’re putting up reindeer/And singing songs of joy and peace.”

The protagonist daydreams a concrete plan of how to get a better life (“I would teach my feet to fly/I wish I had a river/I could skate away on”) that brings to mind childhood innocence and frivolity. That’s no accident: If she can only find or get to that elusive river, a metaphorical rebirth — getting back to those happier, younger days — is within reach.

In 2020, a year where social distancing from family isn’t a choice but a necessity, and going anywhere feels like a thrill and a treat, “River” offers great solace. The song’s longing and melancholy feel more acute, the equivalent of what it feels like to be outside on a bitterly cold day.

At the same time, “River” is even more of an emotional balm — a poignant reminder that it’s okay if the holidays are difficult this year (or any year), and all we can do is hold on to hope that a way forward to better days exists.

Best of 2020: How I stole my bike back

I learned what the word “paranoid” meant from my grandfather. “Yes, I’m paranoid,” he would quip in a very grandfatherly way, in that he was always forgetting that he’d told us this joke many times before. “But am I paranoid enough?”

The answer to that question, when it comes to bicycle security, is probably a resounding “no.”

Years of living in cities like San Francisco and New York had taught me that there was no such thing as being too paranoid when it came to bike safety. Still, despite my precautions, I tried to train myself to see my bicycles as ephemeral. “You never own a bike; you merely rent it from the bike theft gods,” I told myself.

And yet I still wasn’t prepared when the inevitable happened. On Sunday, February 16, at 5 p.m., my bicycle was stolen from a bike rack outside of Old Town Music on Sandy Boulevard in Portland, Oregon. As a cyclist commuter who does not own a car, I was devastated: the bike was my primary mode of transit.

When I saw the empty rack, I immediately felt depressed: I knew the probability of its safe retrieval was low. One in 10 bicycles stolen in Portland are ever recovered. Many of them are sent to chop shops, cut into constituent parts, reassembled and sold off here or elsewhere. And while I didn’t want to blame myself, I did: I had spent so much time and money over the years putting anti-theft tricks, some psychological and some physics-based, on my trusty Trek road bike. These included such ridiculous measures as anti-theft stickers designed by a London artist to look like rust spots, which theoretically should deter thieves looking to make a quick buck off a nice bike.

Besides that I had some serious, non-aesthetic safety measures in place. I used a brand of axle wheel locks called Pinhead locks, which meant that only I had the specially-shaped wrench that would take the wheels off. A bike mechanic once told me that in his entire career, he had never seen anyone successfully remove Pinhead-locked wheels without the original wrench. I also had a hex bolt on my seatpost to make it slightly harder to steal my seat or seatpost — something that I implemented after having my seat stolen twice in two days in San Francisco.

So the theft was a double disappointment. It didn’t help that it happened in broad daylight on a busy street.

But I did have one small element working in my favor: a tiny, cheap bluetooth tracker hidden in a hard-to-find place on the bike. Still, recovering the bike was going to be a long shot — the bluetooth tracker would only activate when a phone with the app installed passed nearby. Otherwise, it was useless. In any case, I marked the bike as “missing” in the tracker app. If anyone with the app installed on their phone walked within 150 feet of the bike, I’d get a notification of the location it was spotted.

And my quest for requital was about to start.

* * *

Though the probability of return was low, I got the word out online in all the usual places to increase my odds: a Facebook page for Pacific Northwest bike theft, Craigslist lost and found, my personal social media pages. I reported the theft to the police and got a case number. On the advice of Reddit, I started scanning sites like OfferUp, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for a Trek bike of the same model for sale.

I figured the odds for recovery were highest on that first night. It seemed probable someone in the neighborhood had it; I rented a bikeshare bike and searched in concentric circles around the point where it was stolen, continually checking my bluetooth tracking app to see if anything had been detected. Like most non-mugging thefts, bike theft is a non-violent crime, so I figured that the thief was probably someone whose life was hard. I didn’t blame them for this. I knew this wasn’t personal.

Still, I was despondent. Portland in February is uncomfortably cold in a biting way that eats through your clothes. I watched a stranger start a fire in a barrel right next to a stack of half-dissembled bikes, but none were mine. It was dark and miserably cold. After circling around the neighborhood for an hour, it was time for me to go.

Halfway back to my neighborhood, about two hours after the theft occurred, I got a ping on my phone. The bike had been found! The app placed it by the Goodwill up on Broadway in North Portland, about 20 blocks north from the site where it went missing. I was far enough away at that point that it would take me a while to get back on the bus, so I called two friends who lived nearby. They agreed to pick me up and drive me around the area where it was spotted.

We scoured the radius where the bike was supposedly seen. Here, I quickly realized the weakness of the tracker tool. It doesn’t tell you much else about the missing object besides where it is at a single moment in time. So the bicycle could have been driven or steered past someone on the sidewalk with the app, and then connected momentarily. Or it could have been in a garage, unseen, and someone walked by with the bluetooth tracking app installed. Or — worst-case scenario — the tracker was discovered and thrown out a window at this intersection, and perhaps subsequently destroyed. There was no way to know.

So we walked around the last known location for about an hour, phones out, trying to see if the bluetooth would connect to the bike. We studied the buildings in the 150-foot radius, looking for garages or locked driveway alleys. Nothing stood out.

My phone never connected to the bike directly. No new pings.

I was defeated. I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

* * *

On Monday, I went about my day, trying to enjoy myself and forget that I had lost my main mode of transit. There were no pings on the bluetooth tracker’s app, and no word online. I tried to cease having any expectations of its retrieval. In a way, I rationed, it was good to have a bike stolen — it would teach me in the future to be less wed to such things, and to think of them, like all material goods, as ephemeral.

Once I had time to meditate on it, I realized another shortcoming of the bluetooth tracking device: It gives one false hope. To make an quantum mechanics analogy, the bike was in a superposition — neither lost to the void nor in my possession. Because of the tracker, the possibility of the bike’s return was always there. I suppose people who lose a pet but never find its dead body must feel like this — there is forever the chance of being reunited. I debated deleting the app entirely, telling myself that the tracking widget had probably been discovered and destroyed anyway.

Then on Tuesday, I had just finished work and started my commute home on the bus when all of a sudden I got another ping: the app located my bike at the corner of 10th and Oak, next to Basecamp Brewery, merely 5 blocks from where it was stolen.

This time, I was close — only about 20 blocks away — and I thought could probably make it over within 15 minutes if I got off the bus now and called a Lyft ride.

The five-minute wait felt interminable. I paced on the corner, debating what to do if my bike was actually there. I doubted that the thief would react violently if confronted — but I had to consider the possibility, and this time I had no friends with me. I did not even know exactly what kind of situation I might find the bike in: Would I find it in pieces? Was it behind a door or wall, invisible to me? Would I go there only to discover a crushed bluetooth tracker on the asphalt? To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there were more known unknowns (things that we know we don’t know) than known knowns.

The driver, Marc, picked me up, and made small talk, asked me about my day. I explained that I was on a bike rescue mission. As he drove, a second ping on the bike came through my phone, at the same location.

That meant the bike was not in motion — for now. The chances of recovery were inching up.

Now Marc was invested in the adventure. As we pulled up to the intersection, he told me that he’d turn off his driving app and observe, in case I got in trouble.

I didn’t know exactly what to look for. At the northwest corner, there was an empty, tree-lined sidewalk; to the northeast, the solid brick wall of a large building. Walking south, I saw a white bike hanging in the window of the brewery and ran towards it, only to realize it was a Giant, not a Trek.

Then, down the street, I saw a woman about my age loading a white bike covered with black tape into an old, beat-up black van. Just as the human brain can identify a friend approaching by subconsciously memorizing their gait, I knew from afar that this was my bike — the way the handlebars wiggled on the fork, the way that it hung in the holder’s hands.

Ping.

My bluetooth app connected directly to the device, evidently still hidden on the bicycle.

I only had a moment to improvise. Since the bike and my phone were now connected, I could click a button that would make the bike start beeping. But that might alarm the thieves, causing them to take off with my bike before I could get to them. They could also stick around for a confrontation. Either scenario sounded bad to me. I just wanted my bike back.

So I made a split-second decision, and ran right towards the person who had my bike.

“Oh my god,” I yelled. “You found my bike! You found it! Thank you!”

She didn’t run or freeze, but she did look extremely surprised. Turning towards me, with wide eyes, she said, “Uh, I did?”

“I’m so glad to see it again,” I said.

Allowing her plausible deniability seemed to be the safest option. After all, I didn’t actually know that she was the thief herself — maybe she was simply a middleman for a larger bike fencing operation, or maybe she’d bought it from someone just a moment ago.

“I have a bluetooth tracker on it and I got a ping that it was here,” I said.

I pressed the button and the bike started beeping. If she had any doubts, I thought, this would confirm to her that the bike was mine. But judging from the look on her face, she knew I was telling the truth already. Her expression shifted from utter confusion to a smile with a hint of panic.

I don’t remember a moment of transfer — I didn’t grab it from her, nor did she push it towards me. In a moment, it was in her hands, being shoved unceremoniously into the side door of this primer-stained black van. In the next moment it was in mine. There was no protest or struggle; she just kind of gave it to me.

But I still felt nervous about the veracity of my story and wanted to drive home the impression that I was genuinely grateful for her help. I gushed. I amped up the sappiness.

And then we were both smiling. A hug felt somehow appropriate. I’m not even sure who initiated it.

“Thank you for finding it,” I said as we embraced. “I really do appreciate it.”

Caught up in an adrenaline rush, I don’t remember entirely how I got from the sidewalk to the street, but I knew instinctively that I should probably bike away immediately before an angry accomplice emerged. That’s when I realized Lyft driver Marc was still there — with the trunk of his SUV open.

“I can’t believe you found it,” Marc said. “I’ll give you a ride anywhere you want — don’t worry about it.”

* * *

It is tempting to view this bike un-stealing story as a technological victory. But I don’t think “get a bluetooth tracker” is the bottom line here. There are other elements that made this turn out how it did.

First, the security features. My extra-secure seatpost and the aforementioned axle locks make my bike extremely hard to chop up. It was very unlikely anyone would be able to take off the wheels and replace them or sell them separately, meaning the bike was probably going to have to be kept intact and sold as-is. It seems like that is what it was destined for when I discovered it. I suspect that it was going somewhere outside of Portland, though, as it was a distinct bike. And no bike shop would buy a bike whose wheels were impossible to remove. Hence, because of the features I’d installed, the bicycle remained intact all the way up until the moment that I found it.

That’s not to say my bike was unchanged when I retrieved it. Oddly, there was black tape all over it — something like electrical tape but stickier. Some of this was clearly meant to obscure its colors and logos, but other examples of the tape were sort of random. In any case, the changes were all superficial. And speaking of superficial, rust clearly doesn’t deter some thieves — my anti-theft stickers didn’t prevent the bike from being taken.

But the security measures I took also contributed to a case of false confidence. I had axle locks, so I thought there was no need to lock up my bike with two locks while I was in the music store, as I used to do when I lived in New York and San Francisco. Every time you add a lock to a bike, you double the amount of time it takes to steal and increase the likelihood that a thief won’t bother or will be interrupted in the act.

My other big blunder was never writing down my bike’s serial number. If you own a bicycle and you don’t know its serial, stop reading this, go find your bike, turn it upside down, write the number down and email it to yourself. Recovery of a stolen bike is far more likely if you remain in possession of that number.

This is not to say the bluetooth tracker was not the key component in retrieving the bike. But luck was a huge factor, too. If I had arrived several seconds later I might not have seen it; the bike would be inside the windowless black van, and I may never have found it. I am lucky that the person holding it was not physically intimidating, nor did they react with anger or violence, which I had no way of knowing when I rushed them with gratitude. And there were no accomplices to intimidate me.

I wish I could offer a clear-cut lesson on how to prevent bike theft. But the best I can do is paraphrase my grandfather’s words. Are you paranoid? Ask yourself if you’re paranoid enough. Park your bike near where you go, use two locks and an axle lock, get a bluetooth tracker, sit by the window so you can watch it. Be extra-careful in areas where bikes are frequently stolen. Hide the bluetooth tracker VERY well. (I don’t want to say exactly where I hid mine – if everyone put theirs in the same place on their bike, it would cease being a secret and thieves would look for these and rip them off. Plus, every bike has different geometry.) And if your bike is hard to chop up, you’ll be more likely to get it back intact.

Why a new coronavirus mutation has some scientists worried

Earlier this week British scientists announced that they had identified a mutated version of the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, with the new strain appearing to be more contagious than other variants of the virus that have run rampant throughout the planet.

But is that alone reason for alarm?

Scientists have mixed opinions. The virus mutation does not seem to be more deadly — although coronavirus is already comparatively far more deadly than other very contagious pathogens like flu and cold viruses.

So what does this mutation mean, and how will it affect our own lives and public health? Here’s what we know.

The many variants of SARS-CoV-2

Far from the only mutation, there are actually many variants of SARS-CoV-2 that have emerged throughout the world. Yet the discovery of this mutant strain — which apparently has abounded in southern England and existed in samples collected from as early as September — is more concerning. That’s because the new strain, known as B.1.1.7, has a relatively larger number of mutations (23). In addition, because B.1.1.7 has spread with unusual virulence in southern England, epidemiologists believe the mutations have made the virus more contagious.

The virus is “just twice as infectious — which makes it very infectious,” Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon by email. “And some suggestions it might primarily increase infection in children, who are far less likely to become seriously ill.”

His view was echoed by Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, who wrote to Salon that “this variant seems to be more efficient at spreading from person-to-person although this increases in transmissibility is still being evaluated. Of note, this particular strain does not seem to have more virulence or make people more sick, although it likely spreads faster.”

What does this mutation mean for vaccines?

Presently, it does not seem like this mutation will make the recent vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna less effective. The reason is that those vaccines defeat the novel coronavirus in a way that the new mutations do not appear to change. The Moderna and Pfizer candidates are mRNA vaccines, which use synthetic version of mRNA (a single-stranded RNA molecule that complements one of the DNA strands in a gene) so that cells produce proteins similar to those in a given virus and can train the immune system to fight it.

In the case of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they train the body to recognize and fight a SARS-CoV-2 protein called Spike, which is visible as the little points that stick out of the sphere of the virus like spines on a sea urchin.

“The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines produce antibodies that target several parts of the Spike protein,” Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, wrote to Salon. “To evade immunity, the [coronavirus] would have to develop a variant with multiple mutations targeting these same specific locations of the Spike protein. There is no evidence that this is occurring, or is likely to occur, in B.1.1.7 or other variants.”

But…

Still, this does not mean the mutation is not worrisome. Dr. Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, told Science Magazine that out of the 17 mutations that B.1.1.7 was able to develop all at once, eight are in the gene that encodes the Spike protein on the viral surface. Two of them are particularly troubling to Rambaut: N501Y, which increases how tightly the protein binds to the enzyme that helps the virus enter human cells, and 69-70del, which has been discovered in other versions of the virus that have managed to avoid being targeted by the immune systems of patients who are immunocompromised.

Pfizer/BioNTech also expressed concern that the increased contagiousness of the English virus could mean that more people will need to be vaccinated to halt its spread.

And about those vaccines…

The vaccines are still being distributed throughout the United States, although thanks to President Donald Trump missing out on an offer from Pfizer/BioNTech, it is likely that only 50 million Americans will be able to receive its vaccine before the summer of 2021. Priority is currently being given to health care workers, residents at elderly care facilities and essential professionals whose jobs require them to interact with the public and therefore put them at greater risk of infection.

At the time of this writing, more than 77 million people have been diagnosed worldwide, including more than 18 million in the United States. More than 1.7 million people have died worldwide, including more than 320,000 in the United States.

“It isn’t even really a stimulus in my opinion”: Economists lament paltry $600 checks to citizens

On Sunday night, congressional leaders announced that they had reached an agreement on a $900 billion stimulus bill that would issue $600 checks to every American whose income fell below a certain threshold. By Tuesday, the bill had passed.

Public reaction to the meager stimulus bill was swift and angry. David Sirota of The Daily Poster tweeted that Biden had worked with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to “halve” the bill and accused him of “longtime austerity zealotry.” Author and small business owner Dan Price tweeted that the bill does not do enough to help small businesses, noting that the first stimulus bill did nothing to help small businesses re-open. Forbes Advisor journalist Natalie Campisi tweeted that the bill was “too little too late” and that “this was all very disappointing as so many people are struggling needlessly.”

So why can’t the richest country in the world do better for its struggling citizens? Economists speaking to Salon said the underlying problem is that America’s government does far less than many other countries to protect the working class.

For instance, France has so far passed two legislative packages that provided more than $389 billion of relief to help small businesses negatively impacted by the pandemic. France also worked with Germany to make sure that the European Union provided $608.2 billion to businesses, workers and government institutions that were financially struggling as a result of the virus. Germany, meanwhile, is expected to supply $26 billion of relief to small businesses and self-employed individuals between January and June 2021. In November the country paid more than $17 billion to help businesses negatively impacted by the lockdown.

But most importantly, these countries passed stimulus measures that almost completely prevented pandemic-related unemployment. Specifically, Germany and France “subsidized the continued employment (or payroll status) of most employees,” thus avoiding a massive increase in unemployment as happened in the United States, Dr. Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote to Salon. “The latest ‘stimulus’ bill adds too little to unemployment payouts to change the fact that since March over 60 million US workers (more than a third of the US labor force) have had to file for unemployment compensation for some or all of the last 9 months,” he continued.

Wolff added that as a result of America’s inadequate protections against unemployment, “the working class is tapped out here far worse that European countries.”

Wolff was not alone in expressing this view.

“In general the USA has had the largest discretionary packages passed this year, larger than the new packages passed in France or Germany,” Dr. Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, wrote to Salon. “However, partially that’s the result of a very stingy unemployment insurance program in the USA, which needed to be expanded in the crisis much more than in France, for example.”

Constantine Yannelis, associate professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, explained to Salon by email that while most countries have passed stimulus bills that provide direct cash payments, loan guarantees and assistance to small businesses, “other countries had institutional advantages in terms of making payments directly to households and businesses. For example, kurzarbeit — or short-term working arrangements in which the state makes up for part or all of lost wages for private sector workers that agree to or are forced to accept work and pay cuts — allow companies in many counties to temporarily reduce house for workers rather than laying them off.”

He added, “Germany and Austria have kurzarbeit programs. Those have been in place for some time and kick in during recessions.”

The new US stimulus bill, which is expected to be incorporated into a larger legislative package to maintain government funding for the rest of the fiscal year, is believed to include direct payments of $600 to American adults and children. In addition, it will provide businesses with $284 billion of relief, re-establish a federal loan program for small businesses called the Paycheck Protection Program and spend $25 billion on rental assistance and extending the eviction moratorium. It also includes $82 billion in aid for education providers like colleges and schools and will offer unemployed Americans $300 in weekly supplemental federal unemployment benefits for an additional 11 weeks and grant extensions to federal payments for Americans whose regular benefits have expired.

“It isn’t even really [a] stimulus in my opinion,” Austan Goolsbee, who served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote to Salon. “It isn’t [going] to jump start growth. It’s disaster relief to prevent permanent damage and hopefully keep things from getting worse. But if we can’t get control of the spread of the virus, it’s just going to be a matter of time until we need another relief bill.”

Michaela Pagel, associate professor of business at Columbia Business School, explained that the specific conditions of the 2020 economic crash make it more difficult for stimulus to be effective than was the case during the downturns in 2001 and 2008.

Pagel said that the “consumer spending response” was different in 2020, compared to 2001 and 2008 stimulus payments. “We find that individuals consumed more non-durables (food for instance) rather than durables (electronics or furniture),” in 2020, Pagel wrote to Salon. “The reason is that mostly Americans in need spent large fractions of the checks immediately, whereas other Americans saved most of the checks.”

She also pointed out that lockdown measures have made it so that “Americans cannot spend their stimulus money in the locked down sectors – with the people who really need it – so they cannot generate income for those people who really need it.” Pagel noted that these conditions did not exist in either 2001 or 2008.

Goolsbee made a similar point, telling Salon that “previous stimulus bills were attempting to jump start the economy in a downturn created from a normal economic cause.” Yet this recession was “the first recession caused by something that had nothing to do with the economy,” meaning that previous lessons don’t apply. Goolsbee also said it was a mistake for stimulus to not include assistance for states, since when their revenue declines they will have to spend more money on automatic programs like Medicaid. This, in turn, “will force them to raise taxes and cut employment due to balanced budget requirements, and will potentially make the downturn longer and more painful.”

According to Wolff, American policymakers should both acknowledge the new conditions created by the pandemic and learn from past economic programs that helped the working class, in particular the New Deal. The New Deal was a series of public works programs, regulations, financial reforms, labor protections and other progressive policies passed during President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. Wolff argued to Salon that, because the economy is locked down, stimulus packages that merely focus on increasing the “demand” side of “supply and demand” will not be enough.

“Demand expansion is not enough because the pandemic blocks the supply of goods and services because it is not safe to produce them or to distribute them,” Wolff explained. “The successful federal jobs programs of the 1930s could and should have been replicated now with the proviso of safe social distancing, constant testing and disinfecting, etc.” He pointed out that under the New Deal, the increase in taxes on corporation and the wealthy redistributed income and in the process increased purchasing power. Similarly, “the subsidization of mortgages and the minimum wage made demand stimulation also wealth redistribution.” The government intervened with regulations and controls to pick up the slack left by the private capitalist sector. The mistake, Wolff says, was that the New Deal still left enterprises in the hands of private capitalists, meaning that “they could and did push back and slow, distort or block government stimulus. They worked effectively to undo The New Deal from the moment it began. That error should not be repeated now.”

The current stimulus bill has its origins in a $908 billion package proposed by a bipartisan coalition of centrist senators earlier this month. Their proposal would have included $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits for four months and $160 billion in funding for state and local governments. The stimulus bill passed in March, known as the CARES Act, provided taxpayers who make less than $75,000 each year with $1,200 in direct cash payments, an additional $500 for every child in their household, expanded the eligibility criteria for unemployment relief, extended benefits by 13 weeks and increased maximum unemployment benefits by $600 per week.

Notably, President-elect Joe Biden has said that he will advocate for additional stimulus checks in future legislation, meaning perhaps the incoming administration has taken economists’ warnings to heart.

The ceramic Christmas tree is back! Why the retro holiday decoration is everywhere this year

When I called ceramicist Jim Bulleit at his Indiana workshop the week before Christmas, he had a waiting list of 15 people who wanted him to make them tabletop Christmas trees. “Can you hold on a second?” he asked as soon as he picked up. “I’m talking about a tree with a customer right now. She was telling me how she wanted her old one replaced.”

This is a really common story, Bulleit said. Ceramics, especially older ones, are fragile and accidents happen when pulling them out of long term storage. This leads to a small, but significant, annual influx of calls to Bulleit from panicked people who realize that they broke their mother’s or grandmother’s vintage tree right before the holidays.

He can typically help. He has a collection of vintage molds from the ’70s and ’80s (“The peak years for American ceramics,” Bulleit says) and will cumulatively spend hours with customers each year dissecting blurry family photographs and smudged Polaroids to figure out which tree is identical to the one they saw in their childhood home.

This year, Bulleit said, is a little different, however.

“Ceramic trees have been getting popular because they’re cool again,” he said. “People have been going nuts over them for the past few years.”

I’d reached out to Bulleit initially because of just that; I grew up seeing my great-grandmother’s ceramic Christmas tree as part of my mother’s holiday display. It’s about 3 feet tall and a kind of opal white, dotted with little colored plastic bulbs. I assumed that it was just a one-off decoration she’d made at an art studio in her Virginia hometown, but this year, I began to see them everywhere: Instagram pages for my favorite flea markets, an Etsy page promising faithful recreations, Facebook Marketplace, Michaels craft store.

I posted a photo of my great-grandmother’s on social media, and dozens of people began responding with images of their own. There was a lot of overlap in the stories, despite the fact that commenters were chiming in from all over North America. Rhode Island, Colorado, Florida, Alabama and Toronto. Many were either that lustrous milky white or a deep forest green (sometimes with snowy tips), all with little sparkling lights. There was a lot of overlap in form, like they all came from one of several molds, and they were all seemingly made by someone — mother, grandmother, aunt — who took a ceramics class.

Bulleit’s mother was one of those women.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, you know, they had garden parties, mahjong parties and, well, they had ceramics parties,” he said. “You’d go to someone’s house, sit around with the greenware, carve it all up and then they would fire them and come back and paint it. It just got really popular.”

The holiday versions of these parties, where attendees could make ceramic Santas, nativity scenes, nutcrackers (and, yes, tabletop trees) were immensely popular, especially because they coincided with the development of commercially cheaper lights and better molds. These came from a few makers, like Atlantic, Newell’s and McNees, hence why most of the family heirloom trees look the same, regardless of the family.

These parties and classes remained popular for the rest of the decade, and people like Roxanne Hawn’s mother continued to attend.

“My mom’s best friend from high school owned a ceramics shop,” Hawn, who lives in Golden, Colo., said. “I’m fairly sure that she made the tree as part of a class in her friend’s store. I don’t see a date on the bottom of the tree itself, but I also have a Santa and a Mrs. Santa Claus, she made, and Santa has 1979 on his foot. She likely made them all at once — or, at the least, a year or two apart.”

But then the ’80s hit, and as Bulleit said, mimicking the slogan of the now-defunct “Ceramics Magazine,” ceramics was no longer “America’s most fascinating hobby.” By the ’90s, a bunch of ceramics shops and mold companies either shut down or consolidated as an influx of ready-to-use ceramics flooded the market. For the next 30 years, ceramic trees entered that awkward outdated phase that so often comes between trendy and vintage.

Now, they’ve returned to the market and are being received enthusiastically. Prices vary. Some of the vintage trees in pristine condition go for $250 online, while one of Bulleit’s bespoke trees starts at $120; he jokes that if folks want something in the $40 to $50 price range, “they should check Cracker Barrel” (I did — they are $49.99 and have been sold out for weeks).

Nicole Slaughter Graham, who lives in Saint Petersburg, Fla., found hers at Home Goods and says that she “instantly started tearing up and had to buy it.” It’s a pearly white color and looks like her grandmother’s.

“This is my first Christmas not seeing my extended, 18-member family because of the pandemic, and that’s been really hard for me to deal with,” she said. “My grandparents had a huge part in raising me, and decorating their house for Christmas was always one of my favorite parts of the holiday season. Last year, my grandmother sold her house so it was the first year we didn’t have Christmas at her house.”

She continued: “I always thought that while she’s still living, I’d at least be able to see her for Christmas, but the pandemic took that from me so buying the tree didn’t even feel like a choice. It was just something I had to do to kind of feel some semblance of normalcy.”

Slaughter Graham hits on some of the unique appeal that these decorations hold for consumers this year. For individuals spending Christmas alone, the ceramic trees are a way to honor the holiday without having to splurge on or make space for a traditional tree and ornaments, especially since they come fully decorated.

That was the case for Birmingham-based writer and editor Sarra Sedghi, who found her $50 ceramic tree on Facebook Marketplace.

“I ended up not putting up a Christmas tree this year, so the ceramic tree is nice since I don’t have many decorations of my own,” she said.

There’s a definite nostalgia factor at play as they are reminiscent of simpler holidays. This is the element of the ceramic tree’s appeal that perhaps most resonates with Bulleit. He has dozens of stories about people — grizzled motorcycle club members, college kids, newlyweds — who come to him wanting to manufacture a little holiday magic.

“This year, it really reminds them of a time when Christmas wasn’t something that had to be avoided,” Bulleit said.

Obama’s new book offers key insight about how laws really get made

Amid all the attention on former President Barack Obama’s new book, what may not have shown up in the reviews is mention of a two-page summary that, for legislative scholars like me, includes what may be the shortest and perhaps best description of how legislatures really work, even for political scientists.

Based on his time as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, the brief passage crystallizes the inner workings of the legislative process. As a scholar who has observed and studied state legislatures and Congress for almost 50 years, I know there are hundreds of autobiographies by former members of Congress, former U.S. senators and former state legislators – all of whom offer lessons about what goes on in their respective chambers.

But none is so succinct as Obama’s.

Legions of accounts

One of the first legislative memoirs I read, in about 1972, was “Congress: The Sapless Branch,” written a decade earlier by Joseph Clark, who then represented my home state, Pennsylvania, in the U.S. Senate. I became fascinated with the idea of legislators evaluating their own institutions – and even proposing reforms to make them work better.

Most legislator autobiographies are heavy on personal journeys, describing why and how they ran for office, what happened during the campaign and their legislative successes once elected. These sorts of books include former U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri’s 2015 “Plenty Ladylike” and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky’s 2016 “The Long Game.” They pay little attention to the performance of the legislature or the wider political system – though McConnell does note the contrast between politics and reality, the difference between “making a point and making a difference.”

There are exceptions to this. For instance, in Philip J. Rock’s memoir, published after his 2016 death, “Nobody Calls Just to Say Hello,” the longtime Illinois Senate president carefully explains how at least a dozen important decisions came about.

Obama’s experience

In his 750-page book, Obama’s legislative insight comes early, on pages 33 and 34. Obama recounts an early speech opposing tax breaks to corporations using facts and figures that he felt certain were convincing. When he finished, Senate President Pate Philip came over to his desk:

“That was a hell of a speech,” he said, chewing on an unlit cigar. “Made some good points.” Then he added:

“Might have even changed a lot of minds,” he said. “But you didn’t change any votes.” With that he signaled to the presiding officer and watched with satisfaction as the green lights signifying “aye” lit up the board.

Obama went on to describe his view of politics in Springfield as “a series of transactions mostly hidden from view, legislators weighing the competing pressures of various interests with the dispassion of bazaar merchants, all the while keeping a careful eye on the handful of ideological hot buttons – guns, abortion, taxes – that might generate heat from their base.”

Obama explained that it wasn’t that legislators “didn’t know the difference between good and bad policy. It just didn’t matter. What everyone in Springfield understood was that 90 percent of the time voters back home weren’t paying attention. A complicated but worthy compromise, bucking party orthodoxy to support an innovative idea – that could cost you a key endorsement, a big financial backer, a leadership post, or even an election.”

In that passage, Obama describes the central weakness of representative democracy: Nice-looking political institutions don’t work the way they seem, partly because organized special interests keep them that way, and more importantly, because “90 percent of the time voters back home weren’t paying attention.”

Legislators respond to people and interests they see and hear. Usually that means other politicians, lobbyists and their staffs. Without an attentive public, the public interest loses out.

We all know better than we live

His account reinforces a truth I first struggled with in 1981 while interviewing an Indiana legislator for my dissertation. I asked him if he looked for information to better understand legislative proposals. He told me, “I can’t help but think that you think that our problem is that we don’t know what we should be doing here. It’s just like in farming, I already know how to farm better than I farm.”

People already know the facts of how to live healthier, work more effectively and save more money. And politicians largely know how to address what the public actually needs. It is motivation and discipline that are often the obstacles, not a lack of knowledge.

Academic books and articles are useful for understanding pieces of the legislative process. But they, and lawmakers’ own reflections, seldom so clearly reveal – as Obama captures – how legislators understand it.

David Webber, Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Missouri-Columbia

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

Trump’s COVID task force coordinator Deborah Birx to retire after violating WH travel guidance

Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, recently revealed that she will retire after coming under widespread criticism for a Thanksgiving weekend trip she took that broke with her own travel guidance.

Birx said she intends to help the incoming Biden administration “in any role people think I can be helpful in” and then “retire” in an interview with Newsy’s Amber Strong on Tuesday. Her announcement came after the Associated Press reported on Monday that Birx traveled with “three generations of her family from two households” to one of her vacation properties in Fenwick Island in Delaware one day after Thanksgiving. The trip came despite Birx appearing on multiple television networks to urge Americans to limit any holiday gatherings to their “immediate household.”

Birx cited the media coverage around the trip as a reason for her departure.

“This experience has been a bit overwhelming,” she told Newsy. “It’s been very difficult on my family. I think what was done in the last week to my family — you know, they didn’t choose this for me — to drag my family into this when my daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months, they’ve become deeply depressed as I’m sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters. My parents haven’t seen their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”

EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Deborah Birx tells @newsy that she is willing to help with the #Biden transition but ultimately plans to retire, citing her family's treatment over the past week. pic.twitter.com/yEPy9s0Tf9

— Amber Strong TV (@AmberCStrong) December 22, 2020

Birx, 64, has served in the federal government since she joined the Reagan administration as an Army physician and AIDS researcher. An expert in immunology and vaccine research, Brix served as the United States Global AIDS Coordinator under former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump before being tapped to lead the White House coronavirus response with Vice President Mike Pence in February.

While Birx was a reassuring presence at the White House coronavirus briefings early in the pandemic, she ultimately came under widespread criticism for feeding rosy projections to the president and enabling Trump’s efforts to downplay the threat of the virus and failing to speak up when he repeatedly contradicted medical advice. Birx had expressed a desire to remain in a “significant position” on the task force after Biden’s inauguration, according to the AP, but the recent media scrutiny appears to have waylaid those plans.

Birx warned in multiple interviews and statements ahead of Thanksgiving that Americans should not travel and avoid indoor gatherings with people outside of their household.

“People who do not currently live in your housing unit, such as college students who are returning home from school for the holidays, should be considered part of different households,” she warned before bringing her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren to the vacation property. Her daughter and elderly parents live at a home in nearby Potomac, Maryland, where her children’s other grandmother also visits, according to the AP.

“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in a statement to the outlet, acknowledging that she shared a meal with her family. Birx insisted that the family members were in her “immediate household” even though she acknowledged that they live in two different homes. Birx said she visited the property to “deal with the winterization of the property before a potential sale — something she says she previously hadn’t had time to do because of her busy schedule,” according to the report.

While in Delaware, Birx appeared on CBS News to lament that some people “went across the country or even into the next state” for Thanksgiving weekend.

“Some people may have made mistakes over the Thanksgiving time period,” she said. “If you’re young and you gathered, you need to be tested about five to 10 days later. But you need to assume that you’re infected and not go near your grandparents and aunts and others without a mask.”

Birx urged people to “take it upon yourself to be restricted.”

“You need to not go to these places,” she said. “You need to protect your family now.”

Birx is an “essential worker” under federal guidelines and has often traveled but said she kept her family safe by isolating, wearing a mask, and regularly testing. Birx also works at the White House, which has seen repeated coronavirus outbreaks. Early in the pandemic, Birx highlighted her personal sacrifices by noting that she avoided visiting the Potomac home when one of her grandchildren has a high fever.

“I did not go there,” she said. “You can’t take that kind of risk.”

Birx has since resumed traveling to the Potomac home. Kathleen Flynn, whose brother is married to Birx’s daughter, said she told reporters about the trip because she was concerned for her own parents, who visit the Potomac home.

“She cavalierly violated her own guidance,” Flynn told the AP.

Flynn’s father, Richard, told the AP that Birx has visited the home every few weeks but argued that he trusts her.

“Dr. Birx is very conscientious and a very good doctor and scientist from everything I can see,” he said.

Public health experts, however, criticized Birx for contradicting her own guidance.

“To me this disqualifies her from any future government health position,” Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security, told the AP. “It’s a terrible message for someone in public health to be sending to the American people.”

Lawrence Gostin, another public health expert at Georgetown who has known Birx for years, told the outlet he is confident that Birx took necessary precautions but said she still undermined the government’s efforts to fight the pandemic.

“It’s extraordinarily important for the leaders of the coronavirus response to model the behavior that they recommend to the public,” he said. “We lose faith in our public health officials if they are saying these are the rules but they don’t apply to me.”

“Trump is turning on Pence” as his anger over his election loss grows: report

President Donald Trump has turned on everyone — including Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — as he continues trying to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden.

The president has been meeting with conspiracy theorists and other fringe characters in the Oval Office to discuss ways to override the will of the voters and the U.S. Constitution, and Axios co-founder Mike Allen reported that Trump has grown paranoid about his own vice president and the Republican majority leader.

“We have late reporting out of the White House last night that President Trump now is turning on Vice President Pence, on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, on the White House counsel [Pat Cipollone] — anyone who doesn’t want to go out and impound voting machines is now suddenly considered by the president to be weak,” Allen told MSNBC’s “Way Too Early.” So one example of this, the Lincoln Project which always seems to get inside the president’s head, ran an ad saying that Vice President Pence was turning on Trump, and sources tell Jonathan Swan that this clearly stuck in the president’s head. He’s starting to doubt even Mike Pence.”

Axios reported Monday night that Trump was trying to set fellow Republicans against McConnell, who the president insisted was indebted to him for his re-election in Kentucky.

“He had his personal assistant last night send around to Republican lawmakers a [Power Point] slide arguing that Senate Majority Mitch McConnell was, quote, ‘First off the ship,’ and Trump taking credit for McConnell’s win in Kentucky,” Allen said. “Of course, the president had nothing to do with that. If anything, the president created headwinds because McConnell won and Trump didn’t.”