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Spilling ink and spilling blood: Fighting and writing against America’s forever wars

If you have a moment, how about joining two retired officers, Bill Astore and me, Danny Sjursen, as we think about this country’s catastrophic forever wars that, regardless of their deadly costs and lack of progress, never seem quite to end?

Recently, in a podcast chat about our very different but somehow twin journeys through those wars, he and I got to thinking about what might have happened if our paths had crossed so much earlier. Both of us, after all, have been writing for TomDispatch for years. As Bill once said to me, thinking about his post-military writing career, “You know, Danny, in my small way I was trying — and failing — to stop the wars you were heading into.”

Now that’s an interesting, if disturbing, thought. But Bill, what would you have said to Lieutenant Danny (that was me once upon a time!) and how might he have responded then?

Who could know now, of course? Still, here’s our retrospective attempt to sort that out in joint correspondence in which we track about 15 years’ worth of this country’s unending wars.

The “Frankenstein” and “Star Trek” years of American War

Bill: When you were graduating from West Point in 2005 and shining your lieutenant’s bars, Danny, I was putting my uniform away after 20 years in the Air Force and driving to Pennsylvania for a new career as a history professor. I thought I’d teach and maybe write a book or two. I never pictured myself as a dissenter, and I’d never spoken out publicly against the wars we were in. The one time I was interviewed about them, in 2005 when I was still the military dean of students at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, I remember saying that I preferred our troops use words rather than rifle butts to communicate with the Afghans and Iraqis. Of course, we had so few troops who spoke Arabic or Pashto or Dari that we leaned on our rifles instead, which meant lots of dead and alienated people in both countries.

In the summer of 2007, I was increasingly disgusted by the way the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney was hiding behind the bemedaled chest of Iraq commander General David Petraeus. Our civilian commander-in-chief, George W., was avoiding responsibility for the disastrous Iraq War by sending Petraeus, then known as the “surge” general, before Congress to testify that some sort of victory was still possible, even as he hedged his talk of progress with words like “fragile” and “reversible.”

So I got off my butt and wrote an article that argued we needed to end the Iraq War and our folly of “spilling blood and treasure with such reckless abandon.” I submitted it to newspapers like the New York Times with no success. Fortunately, a friend told me about TomDispatch, where Tom Engelhardt had been publishing critical articles by retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich. Luckily for me, Tom liked my piece and published it as “Saving the Military from Itself” in October of that same year.

That article put me on the path of dissent from America’s forever wars, even if I wasn’t so much antiwar as anti-dumb-war then. As I asked at the time, how do you win someone else’s civil war? Being a “Star Trek” fan, I referred to the Kobayashi Maru, a “no-win” scenario introduced in the second “Star Trek” movie. I saw our troops, young lieutenants like yourself in Iraq, being stuck in a no-win situation and I was already convinced that, no matter how much Petraeus talked about “metrics” and “progress,” it wasn’t going to happen, that “winning” really meant leaving, and we haven’t won yet since, god help us, we’re still there.

Of course, the so-called surge in Iraq back then did what it was actually meant to do. It provided an illusion of progress and stability even while proving just as fragile and reversible as the weaselly Petraeus said it would be. Worse yet, the myth of that Iraqi surge would lead disastrously to the Afghan version of the same under Barack Obama and — yet again — Petraeus who would prove to be a general for all presidents.

Lucky you! You were on the ground in both surges, weren’t you?

Danny: I sure was! Believe it or not, a colonel once told me I was lucky to have done “line duty” in both of them — platoon and company command, Iraq and Afghanistan, Baghdad and Kandahar. To be honest, Bill, I knew something was fishy even before you retired or I graduated from West Point and headed for those wars.

In fact, it’s funny that you should mention Bacevich. I was first introduced to his work in the winter of 2004 as a West Point senior by then-Lieutenant Colonel Ty Seidule. Back then, for a guy like me, Bacevich had what could only be called bracing antiwar views (a wink-nod to your Bracing Views blog, Bill) for a classroom of burgeoning neocons just about certain to head for Iraq. Frankly, most of us couldn’t wait to go.

And we wouldn’t have that long to wait either. The first of our classmates to die, Emily Perez, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb in September 2006 within 18 months of graduation (and five more were to die in the years to come). I took a scout platoon to southeast Baghdad a month later and we didn’t leave — most of us, that is — for 15 months.

My partly Bacevich-bred sneaking suspicions about America’s no-longer distant wars were, of course, all confirmed. It turned out that policing an ethno-religious-sectarian conflict, mostly of our own country’s making, while dodging counter-counterinsurgent attacks aimed at expelling us occupiers from that country was as tough as stateside invasion opponents had predicted.

On lonely outpost mornings, I had a nasty daily habit of reading the names of our announced dead. Midway through my tour, one of those countless attacks killed 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich. When I saw that name, I realized instantly that he must be the son of the man whose book I had read two years earlier, the man who is now our colleague. The moment remains painfully crystal clear in my memory.

By the way, Bill, your Iraq War take was dead on. During my own tour there, I came to the same realization. Embarrassingly enough, though, it took me seven years to say the same things publicly in my first book, fittingly subtitled “The Myth of the Surge.” By then, of course, ISIS — the Frankenstein’s monster of America’s misadventure — was already streaming across Syria’s synthetic borders and conquering swaths of northern and western Iraq, which made an anti-Iraq War screed seem quaint indeed, at least in establishment circles.

But Bill, do go on.

Bill: It was also back in 2007 when something John McCain said on PBS really ticked me off. In essence, he warned that if the U.S. military lost in Iraq, it wouldn’t be the generals’ fault. No, it would be ours, those of us who had questioned the war and its conduct and so had broken faith with that very military. In response, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch with the sarcastic title, “If We Lose Iraq, You’re to Blame,” because I already found such “stab-in-the-back” lies pernicious beyond words. As Andy Bacevich noted recently when it came to such lies about an earlier American military disaster: we didn’t lose the Vietnam War in 1975 when Saigon fell, we lost it in 1965 when President Johnson committed American troops to winning a civil war that South Vietnam had already lost.

Something similar is true for the Iraq and Afghan wars today. We won’t lose those conflicts when we finally pull all U.S. troops out and the situation goes south (as it most likely will). No, we lost the Afghan War in 2002 when we decided to turn a strike against the Taliban and al-Qaeda into an occupation of that country; and we lost the Iraq War the moment we invaded in 2003 and found none of the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and his top officials had sworn were there. Those were wars of choice, not of necessity, and we could only “win” them by finally choosing to end them. We lose them — and maybe our democracy as well — by choosing to keep on waging them in the false cause of “stability” or “counterterrorism,” or you-name-it.

Early in 2009, I had an epiphany of sorts while walking around a cemetery. With those constant deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries globally, the U.S. military, I thought, was becoming a foreign legion, almost like the quintessential French version of the same, increasingly separated from the people, and increasingly recruited from “foreign” elements, including recent immigrants to this country looking for a fast-track to citizenship.

Danny: Bill, one of my own soldiers fit the mold you just mentioned. Private First Class Gustavo Rios-Ordonez, a married father of two and a Colombian national. Partly seeking citizenship through service, he was the last trooper to join my command just before we shipped out and the first killed when, on June 20, 2011, he stepped on an improvised explosive device within sight of the Afghan outpost I then commanded. Typing this now, I stare at a framed dusty unit guidon, the pennant that once flew over that isolated sandbagged base of ours and was gifted to me by my soldiers.

Sorry, Bill, last interruption… scout’s honor!

Surges to nowhere

Bill: So I wrote an article that asked if our military was morphing into an imperial police force. As I put it then: “Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks.” And I added, “Now would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for whom, our troops are currently fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and the hostile hills of Afghanistan.”

A few people torched me for writing that. They thought I was saying that the troops themselves were somehow foreign, that I was attacking the rank-and-file, but my intent was to attack those who were misusing the military for their own purposes and agendas and all the other Americans who were acquiescing in the misuse of our troops. It’s a strange dynamic in this country, the way we’re cajoled into supporting our troops without ourselves having to serve or even pay attention to what they’re doing.

Indeed, under George W. Bush, we were even discouraged from commemorating the honored dead, denied seeing footage of returning flag-draped caskets. We were to celebrate our troops, while they (especially the dead and wounded) were kept out of sight — literally behind curtains, by Bush administration order — and so mostly out of mind.

I was against the Afghan surge, Danny, because I knew it would be both futile and unsustainable. In arguing that case, I reached back to the writings of two outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War, Norman Mailerand Mary McCarthy. As President Obama deliberated on whether to surge or not, I suggested that he should confer with broadminded critics outside the government, tough-minded freethinkers cut from the cloth of Mailer and McCarthy.

Mailer, for example, had argued that the Vietnamese were “faceless” to Americans (just as the Iraqis and Afghans have been all these years), that we knew little about them as a people and cared even less. He saw American intervention in “heart of darkness” terms. McCarthy was even blunter, condemning as “wicked” the government’s technocentric and hegemonic form of warfare with its “absolute indifference to the cost in human lives.” Predictably, Obama listened to conventional wisdom and surged again, first under General Stanley McChrystal and then, of course, under Petraeus.

Danny: Well, Bill, paltry as it may now sound, I truly thank you for your post-service service to sensibility and decency — even if those efforts didn’t quite spare me the displeasure of a second stint in a second theater with Petraeus as my supreme commander for a second time.

By the way, I ran into King David (as he came to be known) last year in a long line for the urinals at Newark airport. Like you, I’ve been tearing the guy’s philosophy and policies up for years. Still, I decided decorum mattered, so I introduced myself and mentioned that we’d met once at a Baghdad base in 2007. But before I could even kid him about how his staff had insisted that we stock ample kiwi slices because he loved to devour them, Petraeus suddenly walked off without even making it to the stall! I found it confusing behavior until I glimpsed myself in the mirror and remembered that I was wearing an “Iraq Veterans Against the War” t-shirt.

Okay, here’s a more instructive anecdote: Have I ever mentioned to you that my Afghan outpost, “Pashmul South” as it was then known, featured prominently in the late journalist Michael Hasting’s classic book, “The Operators” (which inspired the Netflix original movie “War Machine”)? At one point, Hastings describes how Petraeus’s predecessor in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, visited an isolated base full of war-weary and war-exasperated infantrymen. In one of the resident platoons, all but seven of its 25 original members had “been killed, wounded, or lost their minds.” And yes, that was the “palace” I took over a couple of years later, an outpost the Taliban was then attacking almost daily.

By the time I took up the cause of “Enduring Freedom” (as the Afghan operation had been dubbed by the Pentagon), I had already resigned myself to being one of those foreign legionnaires you’ve talked about, if not an outright mercenary. During the Afghan surge, I fought for pay, healthcare, a future West Point faculty slot, and lack of a better alternative (or alternate identity). My principles then were simple enough: patrol as little as possible, kill as few locals as you can, and make sure that one day you’ll walk (as many of my scouts literally did) out of that valley called Arghandab.

I was in a dark headspace then. I didn’t believe a damn thing my own side said, held out not an ounce of hope for victory, and couldn’t even be bothered to hate my “enemy.” On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, staff officers at brigade headquarters sent a Reuters reporter deep into the boonies to profile the only commander around from the New York City area and I told him just what I thought, or close enough in any case. Suffice it to say that my colonels were less than pleased when Captain Sjursen was quoted as saying that “the war was anything but personal” and that he never “thought about 9/11 at all” or when he described the Taliban this way: “It’s farm-boys picking up guns. How do you hate that?”

Rereading that article now, I feel a certain sadness for that long-gone self of mine, so lost in fatalism, hopelessness, and near-nihilism. Then I catch myself and think: imagine how the Afghans felt, especially since they didn’t have a distant home to scurry off to sooner or later.

Anyway, I never forgot that it was Obama — from whom I’d sought Iraq War salvation — who ordered my troops on that even more absurd Afghan surge to nowhere (and I’m not sure I’ve forgiven him either). Still, if there was a silver lining in all that senselessness, perhaps it was that such a bipartisan betrayal widened both the breadth and depth of my future dissent.

The struggle itself

Bill: Speaking of surges, Danny, even the word is a military misnomer. It’s dishonest. Real generals advance and retreat. They reinforce. They win (or lose). They occupy the battlefield. Lines move on maps. Foes are beaten and surrender. None of this happens with a “surge.” Our generals just added more troops to exert temporary control over an area in what was nothing more than a fallacious face-saving gesture. A mask. A conceit. All those surges did was sustain a losing cause and reinforce failure. Consider them a fundamental mistake of military strategy, like throwing good money after bad or doubling down on a losing hand.

Why didn’t they listen to me? Why didn’t they stop the Iraq and Afghan surges and end those wars? And now that, with other retired military types, we’re both in the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN) you organized, continuing to speak out against the twenty-first-century American way of making war, why do they still not listen to us? I fear that the answer’s simple enough: they have a trillion reasons not to. After all, roughly a trillion-plus dollars is spent each year on the Pentagon, on so-called homeland security, on nuclear weapons, on intelligence and surveillance, on buying weaponry and then more of the same after that. Why won’t they listen to us? We threaten their bottom line, their profits. And why should we get invites to CNN and MSNBC and other mainstream media sites when they already have Pentagon cheerleaders on their staffs and retired senior officers who spout the party line, as journalist David Barstow revealed in his Pulitzer-award-winningseries? We aren’t really in EMN, Danny, we’re in the IMF, the impossible missions force.

I remember reading old newspapers from the 1930s that were quite blunt about how to end war: get the profit motive out of it. That was when the standing U.S. military was fairly small and Americans were skeptical of weapons makers, the “merchants of death” as they were so rightly called back then. Almost a century later, we’re the leading merchant of death, the country that arms the world. Domestically, we’re awash in weaponry, with a gun for every American and a mini-tank for every police force. I’ve attacked this creeping militarism, this degradation of our democracy, but with little success. So welcome to the IMF from the classic TV show Mission Impossible. Unless we smarten up and end these perpetual wars, this democracy will self-destruct in five seconds. The odds are long, but it’s a mission we just have to accept.

Danny: I couldn’t agree more, Bill. The militarism problem is cyclical and systemic with a backstory that’s sure to ping our shared historian’s radar. I hinted at this two months ago in remarks I made at legendary antiwar vet Smedley Butler’s graveside (the former major general I wrote about at TomDispatch in February). Highlighting his prophetic aspect, I noted that the two-time Medal of Honor-recipient had diagnosed core components of the military-industrial complex a quarter of a century before our new organization’s namesake, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, coined the term in his Cassandra-like 1961 farewell address. If that isn’t proof our forever-war problems are systemic rather than discrete, I don’t know what is.

That short speech of mine was occasioned by the 19th anniversary of our absurd Afghan War, the conflict you couldn’t singlehandedly stop in time to save me from a second surge excursion. Anyway, don’t beat yourself up about that, Bill. Like you said, the war-state beast is humongous and our buddy Bacevich has been beating this drum since you were still wearing Air Force blue. Under the circumstances and in these pandemic times, what could be more appropriate than a buck-up from that ever-cheery French novelist of plagues and philosopher Albert Camus: “The struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

And you won’t believe this, but I had to stop there a moment to field a tortured text from an ex-student of mine turned Army lieutenant who’s now straddling those spheres of doubt and dissent that you and I know all too well. You may recall that I penned a piece last year for our mutual friend Tom Engelhardt on “Watching My Students Turn Into Soldiers of Empire.” Damned if that wasn’t a hard pill to swallow. Come to think of it, that must be precisely the feeling of failure you’ve described in our recent correspondence.

Well, at least the military dissent gestation period seems to be shortening. I commissioned exactly 20 years after you. The last crop of cadets from the freshman history class I taught at West Point after I returned from those wars were just 15 years behind me and some of them are now in doubt deep.

The thing is, I fear you’re a better man than I am, my friend. I can see the script that’s coming down the dusty and well-trodden trail, but I’m not sure I could stomach writing a co-column with one of those kids — let alone attending one of their funerals.

I guess we old hands had better get to work. In the battle against endless war, our motto has to be: no retreat, no surrender.

Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen and William J. Astore

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If Joe Biden really wants bipartisan action, experts say foreign policy is his best bet

Republicans and Democrats may have more common ground than it seems, a new survey finds.

Our survey — conducted in August and September in partnership with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the University of Texas at Austin — asked more than 800 government officials, congressional staffers, researchers, journalists and advocates to assess the likelihood of unified American efforts to address critical international challenges by 2022. They identified several foreign policy issues where building bipartisan policies was “more likely than not.”

Bipartisanship was one of the central messages of President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign.

Our research did not assess the possibility of unified action on domestic issues, which many experts see as exceedingly unlikely. But it found four foreign policy issues where Democrats and Republicans might come together.

1. China

Behind the poisonous partisanship on display in Washington, Democrats and Republicans mostly agree on U.S.-China policy.

During the Trump administration, Congress acted in a bipartisan manner to sanction China for persecuting the Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, and for repressing pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Democrats and Republicans also agreed that the United States needed to overhaul how it finances overseas development to compete with China, which has earned goodwill from Africa to Latin America by building roads, dams and other critical infrastructure.

More than nine out of 10 foreign policy officials and experts we surveyed thought it at least somewhat likely that the U.S. will make a major effort during the next two years to counter the continuing rise of China. Among those who expect such an effort, 87% think it is more likely than not to be bipartisan.

2. Pandemic preparedness

Despite the severe politicization of COVID-19, bipartisanship is within reach on future global health challenges, our study shows.

Six out of seven foreign policy professionals anticipate a big push within the next two years to prepare for another global pandemic. Of those, 78% think it will attract support from both sides of the aisle.

A substantial gap separates the two parties on the preferred balance between protecting public health and maintaining normal economic activity during the coronavirus pandemic. But the parties have worked together in the past to reduce the global spread of HIV/AIDS and to invest in the development of coronavirus vaccines.

3. Cyberthreats

Cooperation is feasible, too, to protect Americans’ digital information from overseas adversaries.

After numerous state-sponsored attacks on U.S. computer networks by countries including China, North Korea, Russia and Iran, Congress is close to approving bipartisan legislation to establish a White House cybersecurity czar.

By 2022, more than three-quarters of officials and experts predict Democrats and Republicans will have come together on other major steps to protect the United States against international cyberattacks.

4. Trade

Trade is another policy area Democrats and Republicans may rally around, according to our research.

It won’t be easy to undo Trump’s “America First” policy, which imposed tariffs on key imports like steel and closed off foreign markets to American manufacturers. But 65% of those expecting a major effort by 2022 to expand international trade anticipate that it will be bipartisan.

There is precedent for such collaboration. Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement was passed with bipartisan approval earlier this year.

Going alone on climate

Americans today are more polarized than at any time since the Civil War, and Congress is bitterly divided.

But history shows foreign policy can rise above the partisan fray. And dozens of Republican former national security officials endorsed Biden’s candidacy because they were “profoundly concerned about the nation’s security and standing in the world under Donald Trump.”

Biden’s nominations of foreign policy officials who are highly regarded across the aisle, such as Anthony Blinken for secretary of state, lay the groundwork for bipartisan action.

Still, our survey identified one major issue where experts believe Biden will struggle to gain Republican support: the global climate crisis.

Six of 10 Americans see climate change as a critical threat, and Biden signaled the importance of the issue by naming former Secretary of State John Kerry his climate envoy, a new Cabinet-level position.

But Republicans are much less concerned about climate change than other Americans, research shows. Only a few GOP legislators acknowledge that even gradual steps must be taken. The two parties are sharply split over such basic policies as whether to mandate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

[Get our most insightful politics and election stories. Sign up for The Conversation’s Politics Weekly.]

Only 18% of the foreign policy professionals in our survey who foresee a major climate initiative by 2022 think that it will be bipartisan.

To aggressively tackle the climate crisis, Biden will likely need to rely largely on executive action — just as President Barack Obama did.

Jordan Tama, Associate Professor of International Relations, American University School of International Service; Jonathan Monten, Lecturer in Political Science and Director of the International Public Policy Program, UCL; Joshua Busby, Associate Professor, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts; Joshua D. Kertzer, Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School, Michael J. Tierney, Director of William & Mary’s Global Research Institute and George and Mary Hylton Professor of Government and International Relations, College of William & Mary; and Dina Smeltz, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

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

Off-target pesticide service douses neighboring properties, people

Angela Mancuso had just dropped off her kids at Glenwood Elementary School when she started to smell something “funky.” She was driving back to her home just a mile away in Stockton, Calif., and decided to roll down her window for some fresh air. 

She noticed too late that a helicopter applying pesticide to a nearby walnut grove that Tuesday morning in September 2016 kept flying back and forth across the road, spraying continuously.

“It got me really good,” Mancuso told FairWarning. 

In recent years, Alpine Helicopter Service has been implicated in at least eleven incidents of pesticide spray landing off target on people or properties in California’s Central Valley, according to records and interviews. Now it’s the target of a lawsuit filed in October by the state attorney general on behalf of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. 

“Time and time again, Alpine Helicopter Service and its pilots knowingly endangered the health and safety of innocent communities,” Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “Who would choose to run their business with such callous disregard for the safety of our children and families nearby? Our health and safety laws are serious business. So, too, should be the consequences for violating them.”

The suit, filed in San Joaquin County Superior Court, seeks civil penalties for the three most recent alleged pesticide drift incidents involving Alpine—two in 2019, and one in 2020. In 2019, pesticide twice drifted onto the San Joaquin County Regional Sports Complex—including a day when children were playing soccer there, according to the complaint. In the 2020 incident, the lawsuit says the pesticide landed on a woman and her goats, poultry, rabbits and vegetable garden in her backyard in Isleton. 

Alpine Helicopter Service did not respond to requests for comment. The company has been granted an extension until December 18 to respond to the complaint, an Attorney General spokesperson told FairWarning. 

The Alpine incidents appear to be an extreme example of a common problem. In California alone, the state has tracked more than 2,000 pesticide drift cases—both on farms and in other settings—that caused harm over a period of 25 years. Spokesperson Abbott Dutton said the pesticides department has occasionally referred cases to the attorney general, but the vast majority of enforcement is done at the county level.  

Pesticide drift—movement of the chemical mist away from the intended target area—occurs to some extent in all pesticide applications. Up to 70 million pounds of pesticide blow onto unintended targets each year, according to estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

The EPA registers pesticides for legal use, laying out guidelines for safe application in detail on the label—including drift precautions. Pesticide applicators are supposed to carefully monitor weather, wind and other conditions to prevent extensive drift that could harm people, plants and animals nearby. States can adopt additional restrictions on the labels, but most don’t.

In 2017, pesticide drift became a national controversy when the EPA approved herbicide dicamba for use on Monsanto-designed soybeans and cotton resistant to its poison. When it drifted onto conventional crops, millions of acres were damaged across 25 states, triggering a flood of private litigation. Amidst the uproar, a farm hand shot and killed an Arkansas farmer who accused him of using dicamba and damaging his crops. The farm hand was convicted of second-degree murder.

In November, the California pesticide regulators filed a separate action to consider revoking or suspending the licenses and certifications of Alpine Helicopter Service, its president Joel Dozhier and two of its pilots, Charles Heppe and William Heppe—all named in the state’s lawsuit. All three men and the business itself have held licenses and certifications for years, even as complaints against them mounted. 

Asked why the licenses hadn’t been suspended earlier Dutton said that the misconduct hadn’t “risen to the level of needing to take this step” until now. 

Alpine, which operates out of Lodi, Calif., was first registered as a business by Dozhier in 1980. It mostly serves growers in and around San Joaquin, Sacramento, and Stanislaus counties, in the middle of the state’s fertile Central Valley, where 40 percent of the country’s produce is grown. In 2004, a Charles Heppe faced $60,000 in fines when the pesticide he sprayed by helicopter over a potato field drifted onto farmworkers in a neighboring peach orchard. Some of the workers lost consciousness and 13 were hospitalized, according to news reports at the time. 

Back in 2016, when Alpine sprayed Angela Mancuso, enough fell on her car that, “I remember I was turning on my wipers,” she said. And because her window was open, the pesticide also landed on her face and arm. She said it wasn’t painful, but soon she developed a headache that lasted for days. Her husband, a grower of wine grapes who uses pesticides himself, encouraged her to call the office of the San Joaquin County Agricultural Commissioner, which handles local pesticide complaints. She reported to the county biologist that her eye was twitching and felt tight. The pesticide, later found to be Ethephon 2, is used to ripen fruits like cantaloupes and blackberries. It can also cause permanent eye damage.

Mancuso eventually fully recovered. Meanwhile, the county issued Alpine a $500 fine. 

An organic farm in San Joaquin County, Delta Blue Blueberries, got sprayed by Alpine in April 2014, leading to the loss of its entire crop that year. Weeks later, Delta Blue claimed it was hit again by another Alpine spraying on nearby Bouldin Island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. That event, known locally as the Bouldin Island Drift Incident, led to five people reporting health symptoms and 139 claims of crop damage as far as 39 miles away, according to the attorney general. Delta Blue settled with Alpine for $300,000 over the April incident. 

“You could write a book on what we went through,” said John Glick, who owns Delta Blue Blueberries. 

In April 2017, pesticide sprayed by Alpine over a walnut orchard in Lodi drifted onto the playground and picnic tables of Turner Academy, a school for first through eighth grade children with behavioral issues, according to court documents. In November that year, with state officials citing 50 cases of pesticide-related illnesses on school campuses since 2005, California banned the application of some pesticides within a quarter mile of schools and daycare centers from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on school days. The new statewide rule was the first of its kind.

In its database tracking pesticide drift, the pesticides department lists 2,145 incidents that made bystanders ill between 1992, the first year of available data, and 2017, the most recent. In 2017, 482 people got sick from agricultural pesticide exposure—two thirds of them farmworkers, according to state data. 

Ángel García, an organizing director with Californians for Pesticide Reform, works in farmworker communities in and around Lindsay, Calif. He said that pesticide drift is such a pervasive problem that his organization is helping to amplify the stories of victims on the site caughtinthedrift.com, featuring art by documentary photographer Joan Cusick. 

“Pesticide drift is something that is in a way normalized because it happens so often,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Ok it’s that time of the year, we’re going to just have to shut our windows and not go outside.'”

One proposed reform is for county agricultural commissioners to post notices on their websites when companies plan to spray especially potent pesticides, Garcia said.   

The pesticides department “is exploring its options in developing a statewide notification system,” spokesperson Dutton told FairWarning. 

Jay Feldman, of the advocacy group Beyond Pesticides in Washington, D.C.,  said state regulators slowly ramp up enforcement of repeat violators, from warnings to fines to license suspensions of a week or so. But only “really strict penalties” will stem the sloppy practices, he added. 

Chris Lamke and his wife have lived in the countryside on the edge of Modesto, Calif. for 35 years. Though they’ve always had big farms as neighbors, they became victims of drift for the first time in the spring of 2016, when Alpine applied pesticide to rice fields across the road. One day, Lamke came outside to see his yard covered in a granular substance, with large patches of the grass turned bleach-white. 

“I’ve experienced lawns dying and they get more of a yellow,” he told FairWarning. “This was white, it really stood out.” 

The couple ended up pulling out their extensive gardens, including organic vegetable beds and half a dozen lemon and tangerine trees. They filed a lawsuit against the rice grower and Alpine, which ended with an undisclosed settlement. 

“I just assumed it was an accident,” Lamke said. “When you start seeing it repeating like that…you think they would have been a little more careful.”

Tommy “Tiny” Lister, “Friday” actor and wrestler, dies at 62

Tommy “Tiny” Lister, who appeared in “Friday” and “The Fifth Element” and was also a professional wrestler, died Thursday, his manager Cindy Cowan confirmed.

Cowan said he was found unresponsive in his apartment in Marina del Rey, Calif. after displaying symptoms of COVID-19 in recent days. He had been working on a film and had to cancel shooting after falling ill, Cowan said.

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“He was a wonderful guy with a heart of gold. Everyone loved him. A real gentle giant,” she said, “We’re all devastated.”

Lister wrestled Hulk Hogan in the World Wrestling Federation after appearing as Zeus in 1989’s “No Holds Barred.” He later spent time in World Championship Wrestling, where he was billed as Z-Gangsta.

The actor, who was blind in his right eye, played the neighborhood bully Deebo in the 1995 “Friday” and appeared in the sequel “Next Friday.”

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His other appearances include playing a prisoner in “The Dark Knight,” and the bail agent in “Jackie Brown,” as well as roles in “The Players Club,” Ice Cube’s directing debut and Mario Van Peeble’s “Posse.” He had a supporting role in “Zootopia” as the voice of the fennec fox, in Adam Sandler’s “Little Nicky” as Nicky’s brother Cassius, and in “Austin Powers in Goldmember.” In “The Fifth Element,” he played the Galactic President.

In the pilot of “Star Trek: Enterprise,” he played Klaang, the first Klingon to make contact with humans. Also on television, he appeared as Mr. Matlock’s bodyguard in “Matlock” and on “In the Heat of the Night.”

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Lister appeared in music videos for French Montana, 50 Cent, Sublime, Ice Cube, Chamillionaire and Young Bleed.

The 6 foot 5 inch Lister grew up in Compton, Calif. and won the national shot put title in college, briefly playing football before deciding to become an actor.

He is survived by a daughter.

— Dave McNary contributed to this report.

FKA Twigs sues Shia LaBeouf over abusive relationship marked by sexual battery and assault

Shia LaBeouf has been sued by his ex-girlfriend, pop star FKA Twigs, citing sexual battery, assault, and the infliction of emotional distress. According to a New York Times report, LaBeouf “abused FKA twigs physically, emotionally and mentally many times in a relationship that lasted just short of a year.” LaBeouf, who stars in Netflix’s awards contender “Pieces of a Woman,” has a history of chaotic, documented behavior, with an arrest record with since dismissed charges of assault and disorderly conduct.

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“I’d like to be able to raise awareness on the tactics that abusers use to control you and take away your agency,” said FKA twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett.

Twigs’ allegations include physical and emotional assault, including the incident that incited the lawsuit, just after Valentine’s Day 2019 when LaBeouf “was driving recklessly… removing his seatbelt and threatening to crash unless she professed her love for him.”

On a drive back from the desert, the “Transformers” star “raged at her throughout the trip,” FKA twigs said in the lawsuit, “once waking her up in the middle of the night, choking her. After she begged to be let out of the car, she said he pulled over at a gas station and she took her bags from the trunk. But Mr. LaBeouf followed, and assaulted her, throwing her against the car while screaming in her face, according to the suit. He then forced her back in the car.”

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FKA Twigs met LaBeouf in 2018 when she was cast in “Honey Boy,” an autobiographical film written by LaBeouf, and they began dating after the movie wrapped. The relationship quickly turned abusive following a “honeymoon period.”

FKA Twigs, along with another ex of LaBeouf’s involved in the suit, Karolyn Pho, allege “LaBeouf did not like it if they spoke to or looked at male waiters; in an interview, Ms. Barnett said she learned to keep her eyes down when men spoke to her. She also stated in the suit that Mr. LaBeouf had rules about how many times a day she had to kiss and touch him, which he enforced with constant haranguing and criticism.”

According to the lawsuit, LaBeouf kept a loaded gun by the bed, and FKA Twigs was afraid to use the bathroom for fear he mistake her for an intruder and fire the weapon. The suit also alleged he refused to let her wear clothes to bed, and would deprive her of sleep.

This situation reached a boiling point as FKA Twigs was completing her critically acclaimed 2019 album “Magdalene.”

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LaBeouf, who has admitted to not being recovered from either alcoholism or PTSD, said in an email to the Times, “I’m not in any position to tell anyone how my behavior made them feel…I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations. I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years. I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I’m ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt. There is nothing else I can really say.”

“What I went through with Shia was the worst thing I’ve ever been through in the whole of my life,” Twigs said. “I don’t think people would ever think that it would happen to me. But I think that’s the thing. It can happen to anybody.”

Read the full story over at the Times.

 

“Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” adds Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy

“Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” has found more Targaryens.

The HBO series has added three more key players to its cast: Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy and Matt Smith.

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Cooke, known from Amazon’s “Sound of Metal,” is set to star as Alicent Hightower, the daughter of Hand of the King Otto Hightower who was raised in the Red Keep, close to the king and his inner circle. Described as “the most comely woman in the Seven Kingdoms,” Hightower has both “courtly grace and a keen political acumen.”

Cooke has several other upcoming projects slated for 2021, including feature “Pixie” opposite Alec Baldwin and sci-fi thriller “Little Fish” opposite Jack O’Connell. She also appears in this year’s “Naked Singularity” opposite John Boyega.

D’Arcy will star as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, the king’s first-born, pure Valyrian-blooded child who is a dragonrider. Some say Rhaenyra was “born with everything… but she was not born a man.” The theater performer’s stage credits include “The Crucible” at the Yard Theatre and “Against” at the Almeida Theatre; on TV, D’Arcy has appeared in Amazon Prime’s “Truth Seekers” and “Hannah II” and BBC/Netflix’s “Wanderlust.” She recently wrapped filming on the feature adaptation of “Mothering Sunday.”

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Smith is set to play Prince Daemon Targaryen, King Viserys’ younger brother and heir to the throne. Described as a “peerless warrior and a dragonrider, Daemon possesses the true blood of the dragon. But it is said that whenever a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air…”

The former “Doctor Who” and “The Crown” star will appear in 2021’s “Morbius” opposite Jared Leto, Edgar Wright’s psychological horror film “Last in Soho,” and John Michael McDonagh’s “The Forgiven,” based on the Lawrence Osborne book of the same name. Smith most recently reunited with his “Crown” co-star Claire Foy on stage for a streamed production of Duncan Macmillan’s play Lungs, directed by Matthew Warchus.

Smith, Cooke and D’Arcy will join Paddy Considine, who was previously announced as King Viserys Targaryen.

“House of the Dragon” has also rounded out the rest of its directing team with Clare Kilner, Geeta V. Patel and Greg Yaitanes. Yaitanes is also co-executive producing.

Cooke is represented by The Artists Partnership, CAA, Grandview and attorneys Gretchen Rusch and Huy Nguyen. D’Arcy is repped by Dane Millard at Roxane Vacca Management and James Adams and Scott Winston at Schreck Rose Dapello Adams Berlin & Dunham LLP. Smith is repped by B-Side Management in the U.K., UTA and Darren Trattner and Karl Austen.

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Kilner is represented by Paradigm and Ragna Nervik Management, Patel by UTA and Mosaic, and Yaitanes by CAA.

HBO has given “House of the Dragon” a 10-episode order. Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal will serve as co-showrunners and will also serve as executive producers along with George R. R. Martin and Vince Gerardis. Sara Lee Hess will also serve as writer and executive producer; Rom Schmidt will also executive produce. Sapochnik will direct the pilot and additional episodes.

Texas Republicans lost their supermajority in the state Senate. Will it matter?

Nine months before the November election, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made headlines by suggesting that if Republicans lost their supermajority in the Senate, he would pursue a bold procedural move: further lowering the threshold that is required to bring legislation to the floor.

Now that the election has come and gone — and the GOP indeed lost its supermajority — it remains to be seen how serious Patrick is about the idea, which would strip Senate Democrats of the one tool they have to block legislation they unanimously oppose.

The lieutenant governor, who presides over the Senate, has not made any known public comments since the election about the potential rule change, and senators are being tight-lipped or saying they have not heard anything. The uncertainty comes less than a month and a half before the Legislature gavels in for the 2021 session — and each chamber takes up its rules as one of the first orders of business.

Right now, Senate rules require 19 members, or three-fifths of the body, to vote to bring legislation to the floor. With the reelection loss of Sen. Pete Flores, R-Pleasanton, this November, Republicans are set to begin the session with 18 members.

Patrick already led the charge to decrease that threshold from 21 members — two-thirds — during his first session as lieutenant governor five years ago.

Since the election, Patrick’s office has not responded to requests for comment on whether he plans to push a rule change that would lower that threshold so Republicans can keep steamrolling Democrats. Such a change would happen at the beginning of the legislative session and only require the support of a simple majority in the chamber, or 16 members.

Four GOP senators’ offices said Tuesday they were unavailable to discuss the topic of Senate rules going into the session.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston, chairman of the Senate Republican Caucus, said Tuesday he is completing his term as chairman and cannot comment “in advance of the caucus taking a position or not” on a rule change. The caucus is holding a retreat this week.

Another GOP senator, granted anonymity to candidly discuss internal caucus workings, said they expected the issue to come up after the election but have not heard anything yet.

To be sure, it has been an unusual runup to the session so far. The normal preparations have been overshadowed by still-pending discussions about how exactly lawmakers will conduct their business amid the coronavirus pandemic. And when it comes to the hot-button issues that could benefit from a rules change, state leaders have largely held back on detailing their agendas for the time being.

While speaking at a January conference hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Austin-based conservative think tank, Patrick first raised the possibility of dropping the current three-fifths rule.

“If we lose one or two seats, then we might have to go to 16 next session,” Patrick said. “We might have to go to a simple majority because we will not be stopped in leading on federalism in the United States of America.”

Democrats denounced Patrick’s January comments, saying the rule change would bring a Washington, D.C.-style gridlock to Austin. On Monday, the chairwoman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Sen. Carol Alvarado of Houston, said Democratic senators have discussed the possible procedural move since the election, but they have not received any “communication from the lieutenant governor or his office if that’s still something that they wanted to do.”

“We’ve just talked among ourselves, and our position remains the same,” Alvarado said. “Like I said back then, we like the rule that’s in place and keeping the tradition of the Senate of bipartisanship and building consensus. That’s important for good government.”

The supermajority loss was not entirely unexpected. Flores captured his Democratic-friendly seat in a special election upset two years ago, and his reelection bid was always expected to be an uphill battle. Still, he came closer to hanging on than most expected, losing by 3 percentage points to state Rep. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio.

Senate observers note that not all hope is lost for Republicans with 18 members under the current rule. Democratic Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. of Brownsville has previously sided with the GOP on some issues, particularly socially conservative measures opposed by other members of his party, and is likely who the Republicans will turn to if they need a 19th vote. Patrick was advertised as giving a “special guest welcome” Tuesday at a virtual fundraiser for Lucio, who won reelection last month after beating back a primary challenge from his left.

Gutierrez said Wednesday that he has not heard anything about Patrick moving to drop the three-fifths threshold, including in a post-election conversation with the lieutenant governor. Gutierrez said he was “gonna give everybody the benefit of the doubt … that we’re gonna move forward with the existing rules.”

“It’s my hope he doesn’t do it,” Gutierrez said, describing such a move as “absolutely bad for the institution.” “I think there’s a lot of issues right now in this particular session that are going to be less about partisanship and [more about] getting the business of government done, particularly the pandemic, budget and redistricting.”

Currently, there is one vacancy in the Senate — the seat of former Sen. Pat Fallon, R-Prosper — though it will be filled in a Dec. 19 special election runoff in which both candidates are Republicans. The session starts Jan. 12.

As the days tick down, it has not gone unnoticed outside the Capitol as well that Patrick’s January float of ditching the three-fifths rule has not gotten much of a public airing post-election.

TPPF’s executive director, Kevin Roberts, said the think tank will work with anyone to implement its agenda this session regardless of any changes to the rules, “but it has been noticeably quiet” when it comes to revisiting Patrick’s January float.

“I suspect that once the speaker’s in position and the lieutenant governor and speaker and governor have had an opportunity visit about policy priorities,” Roberts said, “all kinds of rules will be revisited.”

Disclosure: The Texas Public Policy Foundation has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/12/02/texas-dan-patrick-senate-three-fifths-rule/.

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Supreme Court shuts down election challenge: Every Trump-picked justice votes to reject Texas case

As was expected by countless legal observers, the United States Supreme Court threw out a Texas lawsuit on Friday night that had sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The court said that Texas, which argued that four key swing states that had voted for President-elect Joe Biden had improperly conducted their elections, didn’t have standing to bring its case.

“The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections,” it said. “All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”

“It’s over,” said Brad Heath, a legal reporter for Reuters. “The court’s decision – that Texas lacks standing to bring this case – means it could not and did not reach the other issues. But these claims have all been rejected for many, many, many other reasons by other state and federal courts. Many.”

In fact, the case was largely rejected as a joke even by many conservative legal experts. While the standing issue proved a key roadblock, the case would have almost certainly failed on the merits had the court agreed to hear it.

But much of the GOP didn’t see it that way, or at least pretended not to see it that way. Seventeen GOP attorneys general signed on to the suit, brought first by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who many believe was simply trying to please Trump to get a pardon. More than 100 Republican members of the House also voiced support for the argument.

Trump himself threw his weight behind the push to overturn the election. After more than 50 cases brought in an effort to undo Biden’s win had failed, the president said this case was the real deal:

He was wrong.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote an additional comment, joined by fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas:

In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___ (Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.

This means that while Alito and Thomas thought that though the law would have required the court to let Texas to file its arguments, they wouldn’t have issued any injunction to block the finalization of the election. The Electoral College is slated to meet on Monday to cast a majority of its votes for Biden. Despite Trump’s hopes, the Supreme Court has no plan intention of stopping it.

There’s no comfort & joy in Melania Trump’s bleak and impersonal Christmas decor

On Nov. 30, the White House unveiled Melania Trump’s last Christmas decoration scheme. Not only was this lame-duck hall-decking her final expression of holiday pomp as First Lady, despite what her husband publicly proclaimed, but it came tinted with her own admission of hostility. On Oct. 2, her former friend and senior advisor released audio from 2018 in which Mrs. Trump states, “I’m working my ass off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f**k about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?”

The décor, to the disappointment of snarky cultural commentators and Twitter, was a non-starter. Unlike the seasons past with their grim barren branches and “Handsmaid’s Tale” cosplaying red trees, Trump’s 2020 Christmas was as generic and unmemorable as this year has been unprecedented and difficult. “America the Beautiful” was the announced theme, a jingoistic phrase used as a title for everything from documentaries on the sexualization of American youth to the 50 designs of state quarters. The Christmas trees, in the familiar pine style, look ready for a stock photo shoot. Red glass spheres, gold ribbon garland, white lights. A family photo background with no family present, only a woman in gold examining the work of the unpaid help.

It’s easy to dismiss this year’s decorations because, even in the best-lit official White House photography, they’re instantly forgettable. We know there’s a lot on the Trump family’s docket right now, with all the pardoning and undermining of American democracy, and Christmas decorating was clearly not the First Lady’s favorite responsibility in the first place. If there was a year to phone it in, 2020 was the right pick.

But in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot cut into the official holiday 59-second video, that creepy East colonnade hallway of creepy Christmas past returns. This year it is packed with urns. Fifty, to be exact, said to display foliage from each state. With zero holiday context, the black urns evoke a sea of funeral arrangements. It’s easy to overlook in the banality of the other rooms and trees with inoffensive subjects like Transportation and Wildlife. Until you notice, deep in the notes, that the crimson-walled Red Room decorations have been dedicated to first responders. As the official White House press release briefly explains, “We salute America’s everyday heroes who serve as first responders and frontline workers. Handmade ornaments highlight the many professionals and volunteers who serve their communities with a spirit of generosity.” As each day brings more COVID-19 cases, more deaths, more strain on our healthcare system resources, the White House cannot even mention the calamity by name with its small token tree.

Our Nightmare Before Christmas queen is right back at it.

In years past, Twitter and memes have laughed off Melania’s bleak holiday decorating schemes as sad Soviet throwbacks. She grew up in Slovenia in the 1970s and ’80s, which was at that time governed by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. As an atheistic socialist state, Slovenia, with the rest of the Balkan nations, followed the USSR’s lead in discouraging the celebration of Christmas on Dec. 25. This official stance remained until Slovenia’s independence in 1991, five years before Melania immigrated to the United States on a visitor’s visa. 

This forbidding of Christmas, including a ban on decorated trees, has led to the false assumption by Westerners that Eastern Europeans and Russians dislike the holiday in the same humorless, utilitarian way we use to stereotype their disposition (“In Russia, television watches you!”). In fact Slovenia has a rich history of embracing and influencing the Christian traditions we’re so familiar with here in the States. Their cities are covered in thousands of lights, often shining down on a thick blanket of snow. The holiday markets, hives of food, drink and gifts during Advent, are large and grand enough to rival those in Germany. Like Italy’s panettone and England’s fruitcake, Slovenia even has their own traditional Christmas bread — the potica, a sweet rolled Bundt-style cake filled with nuts, fruits and cinnamon. When faced with the Soviets and their Christmas cancellation, Slovenians didn’t abandon their celebrations. They just scooted them down a week to New Year’s, calling their gilded evergreens New Year’s Trees and eliciting a big shrug from the powers that be. 

Blaming barren, disturbing holiday decorations as being lost in translation doesn’t shake out. Slovenian culture gives many f**ks about Christmas. Where, then, does this aesthetic hostility come from? And what does it mean? 

Christmas decorating has been an official First Lady duty since 1961, when Jacqueline Kennedy unveiled the first themed tree in the Blue Room. She chose The Nutcracker ballet, and commissioned a collection of handmade ornaments depicting toys, birds and ballerina angels. Tracing the evolution of the White House Christmas tree and its decorations follows along in perfect symmetry with the styles and sensibilities we associate with each era’s zeitgeist. In 1967, Lady Bird Johnson‘s tree echoed a more natural, handspun philosophy in line with hippie counterculture expanding its influence into the mainstream. The wildly colorful blue spruce was adorned with popcorn strings, daisy strands and cranberry garland. Ten years later, Rosalynn Carter worked with special needs Americans to create a tree exclusively of their artwork. In the 1980s, Barbara Bush‘s tree represented characters from children’s books, tying into her personal literacy work. Michele Obama’s first Christmas tree emphasized the need for environmental sustainability, using LED lighting and recruiting the National Parks Service to replant the trees after the holiday season. 

Although the decorations have evolved significantly over the decades, they have consistently represented the nation at the moment. They do not represent the individual woman or the First Family; the focus is shifted onto groups or causes deemed worthy of attention. The point was to be inclusive, a festive arrangement for the nation. 

This tradition veered off the tracks in 2017, when the Trumps came into power on a populist wave. Their administration made no secret that their main focus and priorities remained in their personal circles of family and loyalists. Keeping in step with her husband and well-appointed stepchildren, Melania made the 2017 holiday White House over in her own aesthetic. In a dress as white as her dead tree branches she wandered through a cursed forest throwing clawing, ominous shadows up the walls. The theme, “Time-Honored Tradition,” was as contemptuous as her “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” Zara coat. 

Because that’s what is on full display here in the dead branches, the blood-red trees and the funeral urns. Trump doesn’t simply fail to give a f**k about Christmas. Many Americans don’t celebrate or enjoy the Christmas season. It’s a fraught time of year packed with impossible expectations, the irrepressible rise of the past, and an obsessive focus on togetherness that is unavailable to so many of us. Loving the holidays isn’t a prerequisite for being a compassionate and capable presidential spouse. It’s safe to assume that, in the over five decades of Decembers since Kennedy’s first master-plan, the White House has been home to a few women who have no personal fondness for gingerbread or tinsel. 

However, each of these women allowed their staff and volunteers to create a representative display because it was an American tradition. A constant through years holding personal and national tragedies for all citizens. There is a comfort to seeing this ubiquitous landmark displaying the trappings of winter, of celebrating another year gone. These decorations hold space for that most idealistic of visions that one day out of 365 can be magical. It is one of the only days most Americans are sure to have off work, to spend with our favorite people — or at the very least, with our favorite takeout and streaming shows.  It’s about as close to peace as we get.

By centering the image of the official United States White House Christmas into her own aesthetic, Trump harnesses yet another tool in the First Family’s arsenal to attack the concept of a collective union. The past doesn’t matter because it doesn’t feed the tastes and ego of present power. The norms that have been unwritten for generations of leaders, decorum and expectations that are vital to keeping a nation of millions on an even keel, aren’t just ignored. They’re gleefully torched to the ground.

Tradition should not be immovable. Reinvention of our customs and adaptation is important. We should celebrate changes that make our winter celebrations more inclusive. It’s important to continue honoring other holiday observances that go beyond a Judeo-Christian mentality. Conversations on how we can adapt the trappings of the season to be more sustainable are worth having. In nearly six decades of White House Christmas themes, there is an evolution of the familiar into the present. As important as it is to remain relevant to the wide United States audience, reinvention must be done in the spirit of expansion, not funneling the focus down to the aesthetics of one ruthless family that is openly hostile to any “non-believers.”

Trump’s contempt for our traditions is on full display not just in her first years of inhospitable decorating, but even in this, the supposed generic answer. The inoffensive trees, identical to those placed next to Santa at every suburban mall from East to West coast, are a phoned-in effort in a year the country needs extreme comfort. Not caring in her recordings, and in her practice. There is an emptiness that fails to pull focus. I’ve been staring at these photos for hours, and I still can’t commit to memory what they look like. As unremarkable as the White House tennis pavilion project completed this week, joining the Rose Garden make-under as her permanent, pointless contributions to the grounds. It’s a minor void of leadership in a staggering line of leadership voids, but it is another willful abandonment of the rhythms of American democracy and public ceremony.

A few steps away from the token First Responder tree, down the funeral home hallway, President and Mrs. Trump have chosen to continue hosting large holiday gatherings with a full calendar of December social events. As “America’s everyday heroes” beg people to stay home and ease our overloaded healthcare system, the Trumps won’t even condescend to requiring guests to wear masks. Melania doesn’t need haunted, gothic arrangements to communicate her apathy for Americans. After all, what is materialistic hatred when you can put your heart into action this Christmas?  

How Hanukkah came to be an annual White House celebration

President Trump’s plan of holding an in-person Hanukkah reception at the White House on Dec. 9, despite concerns over the coronavirus, is getting much attention on social media.

Some asked whether anyone would be reckless enough to attend, observing that an in-person party, amid the COVID-19 surge, could turn out to be another superspreader event. Others wondered who would be invited, recalling that President Trump, in the past, limited his invitation list to supporters, and why the event was being held on that date. The eight-day festival of Hanukkah, regulated by the Jewish lunar calendar, begins this year on the night of Dec. 10.

Overlooked amid these questions is one that to me, as a historian of American Jewish life and a scholar of American religion, seems far more fascinating and important. How did the office of the president of the United States come to hold an official White House Hanukkah party in the first place?

White House traditions

For most of American history, the only December holiday that gained White House recognition was Christmas. President John Adams and first lady Abigail Adams, back in 1800, threw the first White House Christmas party, a modest affair, planned with their four-year-old granddaughter in mind, and with invitations sent to selected government officials and their children.

In 1923, President Calvin Coolidge inaugurated the practice of lighting an official White House Christmas tree. He also delivered the first formal presidential Christmas message. His message assumed, as most Americans of that time did, that everybody celebrated Christmas.

It displayed, according to The Washington Post, “the reverence of a Christian people giving at the seat of their government the expression of their praise for ‘the King of kings’ on the eve of the anniversary of His birth.” Neither Adams nor Coolidge uttered one word about Hanukkah.

Official notice of Hanukkah waited another half-century — until 1979 — by which time Jews had become much more visible as members of American society and government. Ironically, the president who first paid attention to Hanukkah was Jimmy Carter, although he wasn’t the Jewish community’s favorite Democratic candidate. When he ran for reelection in 1980, he got less than 50% of the Jewish vote — less than any Democrat since 1928.

In 1979, following weeks of seclusion in the White House after Iranian students took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran seizing 52 diplomats and citizens, President Carter emerged and crossed over to Lafayette Park. He lit the large Hanukkah candelabrum, dubbed the “National Menorah,” erected in the park with private funds and delivered brief remarks.

Seeing that Jews celebrate their own holiday in December — not Christmas but Hanukkah — he directed his next annual Christmas message only “to those of our fellow citizens who join us in the joyous celebration of Christmas.”

Every president since has recognized Hanukkah with a special menorah-lighting ceremony, and limited his Christmas messages to those who actually observe the holiday.

Menorah lightings

Hanukkah came to the White House itself, in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush displayed a menorah there, a candelabrum given to him by the Synagogue Council of America.

But Bill Clinton was the first president to actually light a menorah in the White House. In 1993, he invited a dozen schoolchildren to the Oval Office for a small ceremony. The event made headlines when 6-year-old Ilana Kattan’s ponytail dipped into the flame and a wisp of smoke was visible around her head. Clinton was reported to have gently rubbed her ponytail with his fingers.

Menorah lightings grew in prominence during the Clinton years. Memorably, in 1998, Clinton joined Israel’s then-President Ezer Weizman in lighting a candle on the first night of Hanukkah in Jerusalem.

But no White House Hanukkah parties ever took place under Clinton. Instead, he included Jewish leaders in a large annual “holiday party.”

Annual Hanukkah parties

The first president to host an official White House Hanukkah party, and the first to actually light a menorah in the White House residence and not just in its public spaces, was George W. Bush, beginning in both cases in 2001.

Since Bush made a point of inserting religion, complete with baby Jesus, into his many annual Christmas parties, he sought to underscore through the Hanukkah party that, as he explained, the White House “belongs to people of all faiths.” Since then Hanukkah has become an official White House tradition.

Hasidic leaders in the distinctive black suits worn by members of their community regularly appeared at these parties. Beginning in 2005 the parties became completely kosher.

Barack Obama maintained the tradition of the White House Hanukkah party, holding two of them in 2013, and Donald Trump maintained the tradition as well. Both in 2018 and 2019, he also held two Hanukkah parties for his friends and Jewish family members — including his daughter, Ivanka — and invited selected non-Jewish guests to attend them.

The fact that this year, amid COVID-19 concerns and a presidential transition, the White House is planning just one Hanukkah party, has pruned the guest list and will hold the event on Dec. 9, before Hanukkah starts, remains noteworthy.

What is truly significant, however, is how much America has changed since Presidents John Adams and Calvin Coolidge invented America’s White House Christmas traditions and paid no attention to Hanukkah at all.

Jonathan D. Sarna, University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

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

Rebekah Jones, Florida’s COVID-19 whistleblower, says Gov. DeSantis has health officials “terrified”

Rebekah Jones, a data analyst who was once in charge of maintaining Florida’s online COVID-19 dashboard, never expected to be famous. As she spoke to Salon on Friday about her efforts to publicly challenge Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ statistics about COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations in her state — data that she says is highly misleading — she remarked on a recent police raid on her home, one that has put her in the national spotlight.

“It’s really weird, I have to say, for a kid who grew up thinking that the world was this huge place and I was this tiny, small, insignificant piece of it,” Jones mused.

On Monday, armed agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) forcibly entered her home to seize her computers as well as many other electronic devices. According to the warrant, Jones was accused of “hacking” for allegedly sending a message through Florida’s Department of Health emergency communication tool asking people to “speak up” about censored COVID-19 data. Yet court records reveal that the person who accessed the system merely used a login that was shared by the entire department and had been posted publicly. Jones herself was not arrested and, some observers suspect, may not have been the primary target; the goal instead may have been to learn about anyone in Florida’s government who is communicating with her to assist in her campaign for transparency regarding the COVID-19 crisis in the state.

The shocking armed raid on a public health official’s home contributed to a climate among Florida health experts in which everyone is “afraid, terrified of [DeSantis],” Jones told Salon. “They saw what he did to me in May [firing her]. They’ve seen what he’s done to me now. Who would not be terrified by that?”

Fortunately for Jones, she had the presence of mind to record the raid and later posted the video on Twitter, sparking widespread outrage. Among the incensed was Ron Filipkowski, a prominent Republican lawyer who resigned from the nominating commission for the state’s 12th Circuit to protest the way Jones had been treated. (Filipkowski told Salon that, despite being a lifelong Republican, he voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election because of his disgust with President Donald Trump.)

“It really wasn’t just the raid,” Filipkowski told Salon, although he added that “the raid is what triggered it.” He explained that he had followed Jones on Twitter before the raid and supported her efforts to make sure that COVID-19 statistics in Florida were being accurately reported. Even so, when he first learned about the raid, he made a point of not automatically believing Jones’ side of the story but of reading the warrant itself, since as a criminal lawyer and former federal and state prosecutor he reads search warrants every day.

After reading the warrant, though, Filipkowski said he was “even more shocked.” As he explained, “the crime alleged is basically like a computer hack,” and he has frequently defended people accused of that. Although the relevant statute is “broadly worded,” its purpose is to prevent things like identity fraud, hostile third parties crashing servers and intellectual property theft. “The statute is not designed to prevent somebody from sending an email or a text message,” Filipkowski pointed out. “So I just thought, ‘This is completely ludicrous, that this is the crime that they’re alleging to justify the search warrant.'”

He was also suspicious because the judge who signed it — and who had been appointed by DeSantis himself – had only been on the bench for a few weeks and had no background as a criminal lawyer. Additionally, Filipkowski was alarmed that the warrant “allowed them to go in and take all of her electronic devices, including her cell phone, laptops, zip drives.” In addition it did not impose any limits on what authorities could do with Jones’ property once they had it, even though “normally there’s minimization language involved in extracting the information” to make sure authorities can only access materials pertinent to their investigation. “It was just basically a blank check, grab all her stuff and do whatever you want with it,” he noted. Filipkowski also argued that DeSantis’ later claim that he did not know about the raid in advance was “not credible” and “crazy ‘because “FDLE is an agency that reports directly to the governor.”

That governor has caught a lot of flak recently for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in his state. Following Trump’s lead, DeSantis has ignored scientists and implemented more lax public health policies in the name of reopening the state’s economy. He has done this even as Florida hospitals have been overcrowded and infections continue to surge. At the time of this writing, nearly 20,000 Floridians have died of COVID-19 and more than 1 million have been confirmed to have contracted the disease.

Not surprisingly, DeSantis’ approval rating has taken a hit as a result: Although 66% of Floridians approved of his job performance as of December 2019, with only 26% disapproving, that number had fallen to 42% by October. Fifty-two percent of Floridians say that they disapprove of how DeSantis has handled COVID-19 and of his determination to send kids back to school, with 56% saying COVID-19 is the main problem facing their state.

In the midst of all this, according to Jones, DeSantis was ordering Florida health officials to cover up the true extent of the crisis facing Floridians.

“The manipulation is most prevalent in Florida with our statistics and reporting on death and hospitalization,” Jones told Salon, accusing the governor’s office of directly interfering with death and hospitalization reporting on several occasions. Among other things, she says that instead of automatically allowing hospitals to update data regarding COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations, “they decided to wait until a death certificate had been received and signed by a medical examiner, and this essentially created a very long delay in how long between somebody died and when we were reporting it,” creating an “infamous backlog” in the process. She said the government also twice changed how deaths were counted and later implemented a policy so that “every COVID-19 deaths not only had to be signed by a medical examiner where the person had a positive PCR [test] and lab results, there had to be an actual investigation into the death to determine if it was COVID-19 or not.”

Jones also accused Florida of deciding in July, when the state’s COVID-19 cases were “really bad,” that when it came to ICU bed counts, “if you were in the ICU, but you did not require an intensive level of care, then that bed would not be counted as occupied.” She also said that the percent positivity rate used in Florida “no other state in the country uses, and every single person who deals with this data or works with this data just ignores [it] because it’s useless.” Jones alleged that “according to the way that we came up with calculating percent positivity, that doesn’t actually exist, we’re only at 9% positivity.”

Jones expressed concerns about data suppression to other Florida health officials while she still was in charge of the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, emphatically accusing the department of downplaying the extent of the pandemic so that DeSantis could more easily reopen the state. In May she was fired; she claims it was because she objected to an order to remove critical data from the state’s website, although DeSantis insisted it was for insubordination. (At the time that Jones was fired, a number of Florida media outlets were reporting that data had been taken off of the website and failed to receive direct answers as to why.) DeSantis also attacked Jones’ character at the time, saying that she was the target of criminal charges for sexual cyber harassment (those were later dropped) and cyberstalking.

Yet despite DeSantis’ attacks on her, Jones was shocked by the raid — although she had been warned.

“I received a tip late Sunday night that something was going down,” Jones told Salon. “The language in it did not say ‘They’re going to bust down your door tomorrow morning.’ It wasn’t that overt, the language in it. The person sounded urgent as in, ‘This is happening soon.'” She said that she spoke with her husband and mother afterward saying, “I might be arrested this week” and asking her mother to help with her family if that occurred.

“I did not think it would be literally the next morning,” Jones added. She claimed that when the raid occurred, police officers entered with their guns drawn and even pointed them at her children. Recently released bodycam footage of the raid also shows Jones saying that the police were pointing guns at her kids; before that it shows the officers knocking at her door numerous times and demanding that they be allowed inside while pointing their guns at her home.

Not surprisingly, DeSantis has gone back to attacking Jones, denying again on Friday that he knew about the raid but admitting to knowing about the investigation. He also described Jones as “a darling of some corners of the fever swamps” and someone who has “got issues” and got snippy with reporters, accusing one of “editorializing.” Jones, for her part, told Salon that she has been “blown away” by the amount of support that people have shown her since the raid, even telling Salon that she has received support from celebrities like George Takei, Gabrielle Union and Alyssa Milano.

“The longevity of the burst of fame is not sustainable,” Jones said. “But for the period of time that I have it, I’m going to make sure that it is used to inform and educate people about what is going on with this crisis.”

Trump’s VA Secretary worked with GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw to smear vet who alleged sexual assault: IG

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Tx., told Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie that a Navy veteran who reported a sexual assault at a VA hospital had filed frivolous allegations when they served in the same unit, according to multiple senior officials in an internal investigation report released yesterday.

The report outlines a number of “troubling” issues with the department’s handling of the assault investigation, including testimony that Wilkie had disparaged the woman after looking into her background himself. Pressure from the top of the agency also allegedly prompted VA police to investigate the victim.

However, the report, issued by the office of VA Inspector General (OIG) Michael Missal, could not corroborate any wrongdoing because the secretary and top staff would not cooperate with investigators, and neither would Crenshaw. Missal concluded that Wilkie and senior officials showed “a lack of genuine commitment” that jeopardized a “safe and welcoming environment” for accusers.

It would not be the first time Wilkie withheld inconvenient information: In 2019, CNN reported that, in violation of Senate rules, Wilkie had failed to disclose a speech he gave in 2009 to a chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a 1995 address in which he praised former Confederate President Jefferson Davis at the U.S. Capitol.

“The tone set by Secretary Wilkie was at minimum unprofessional and at worst provided the basis for senior officials to put out information to national reporters to question the credibility and background of the veteran who filed the sexual assault complaint,” Missal wrote, adding that the conduct would “appear to undermine V.A.’s stated goals of providing a safe and welcoming environment for all veterans and to treat complainants of sexual assault with respect.”

The woman, Andrea Goldstein, claimed in 2019 that while she waited in a VA hospital, a contractor “bumped his entire body against mine and told me I looked like I needed a smile and a good time.” Following a request from House Veterans Affairs Committee chair Mike Takano, D-Calif., for whom Goldstein had once staffed, Wilkie ordered the OIG to investigate.

After the investigation, Wilkie sent Takano a letter saying that the investigation concluded that the claims were “unsubstantiated,” counter to the OIG’s explicit directions to VA staff not to comment on the merits of the accusation. Wilkie also highlighted the statement in an email to press outlets.

Missal reminded Wilkie he had not reached that conclusion.

“Neither I nor my staff told you or anyone else at the Department that the allegations were unsubstantiated,” Missal wrote in an email, adding: “Reaching a decision to close the investigation with no criminal charges does not mean the underlying allegation is unsubstantiated.”

Following press requests, the secretary retracted the description, calling it “a poor choice of words.”

Missal cites an email Wilkie sent to two top aides after the fundraiser he attended with Crenshaw: “Ask me in the morning what Congressman Crenshaw said about the Takano staffer whose glamor (sic) shot was in the New York Times,” it said.

The secretary acknowledged to investigators that Crenshaw had initiated a conversation, but claimed the Texas Republican only said that he served with her. When asked why such an innocuous remark had prompted the email, Wilkie replied, “Well, I don’t remember. I have no idea.”

A Wilkie deputy also told investigators that Crenshaw “might have said something to the fact that [Goldstein] made allegations in the military.” Another official testified that Wilkie had mentioned that Crenshaw told him about Goldstein’s alleged past complaints.

Although Crenshaw did not cooperate in the investigation, he denied any discussions about Goldstein in an interview with ProPublica. That contradicts Wilkie’s testimony.

The secretary had also speculated in an email that Takano requested the investigation because the HVAC chair was “laying the grounds for a spectacle.” Department staff had also expressed suspicion due to Goldstein’s specific work on sexual assault issues for Takano.

Testimony from current and former VA officials indicates that Wilkie had looked into Goldstein himself almost immediately after she filed her complaint, and that department pressure had focused the VA police investigation on the victim.

One former VA official testified that Wilkie told him he knew Goldstein had filed “at least six EEO-type complaints” while on active duty, which the former official believed the Secretary got from his contacts at the Pentagon. Another witness said that only three days after the assault was reported, a senior VA official had remarked in a meeting that the secretary or others had already obtained information about Goldstein.

The report says that VA police described an “unusual level of engagement by VA senior officials” for a criminal investigation, such as an immediate visit to the medical center to review possible video footage. When police met to review the video, they ran a background check on Goldstein and later passed around the results. Only two days later did they run a background check on the alleged assaulter.

Indeed, half a dozen senior staff told investigators that Wilkie had personally remarked multiple times about Goldstein’s alleged history of complaints. The secretary denied all accusations against him, but despite the fact that Missal found his testimony “incomplete or incorrect,” the OIG could not reconcile the contradictions because Wilkie declined a second interview.

Ranking member of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs Jon Tester, D-Montana, told Salon in a statement that the department’s “deep failures” exhibit a “higher priority on politics and personal vendettas than on seeking justice for a veteran who was sexually assaulted at one of its facilities.”

“The Inspector General’s report sheds light on deep failures and unprofessional conduct by VA Secretary Wilkie and his senior political team. Above all else, it uncovers a disturbing pattern of unethical behavior at VA that placed a higher priority on politics and personal vendettas than on seeking justice for a veteran who was sexually assaulted at one of its facilities,” Tester said.

“The men and women at VA, particularly those at the highest levels, are entrusted with doing right by our nation’s veterans. Secretary Wilkie and his leadership team have violated that trust,” he continued. “Moving forward, it is critical that all veterans, especially the survivors of sexual violence, are heard and respected.”

Wilkie gave Salon a lengthy statement denying the allegations and attacking his accusers as well as his own inspector general, whose investigation he said set “an impossible standard” dedicated to “scoring political points.”

The IG “cannot substantiate that I sought to investigate or asked others to investigate the veteran,” Wilkie said. “That’s because these allegations are false.”

“The OIG is criticizing VA for not doing the very same thing it has spent months investigating,” Wilkie said. “Such faulty rationale is not the product of a serious investigation. In fact, it’s indicative of one that has become more dedicated to scoring political points than improving the department — a dynamic that has defined the OIG’s conduct throughout this investigation.”

That language, however, reflects the OIG’s own conclusion:

The evidence is replete with examples of VA senior leaders undertaking defensive actions and engaging in confrontational messaging while failing to recognize the need to take corrective action to address known problems. The tone set by Secretary Wilkie was at minimum unprofessional and at worst provided the basis for senior officials to put out information to national reporters to question the credibility and background of the veteran who filed the sexual assault complaint.

Diego Luna and Sienna Miller can’t figure out what’s real in the trippy, exhausting “Wander Darkly”

For films about trauma to work well, they have to make a personal story about someone processing grief not just compelling, but universal. With “Wander Darkly,” writer/director Tara Miele does an admirable job of grabbing the viewer’s attention. She also provides useful readings of her film as a story about the importance of truth in relationships, or even, perhaps, as a drama about managing mental illness. Miele does both of these things by creating a slippery narrative that shifts in and out of reality. This is both the film’s conceit and its drawback. Viewers will likely be engaged by the action, but they may ultimately be disappointed by the resolution. 

Adrienne (Sienna Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are an unmarried couple who have just had a baby and bought a new house. But there is trouble in the relationship — unhappiness, suggestions of affairs, and other concerns about staying together. When they go out for a date night, they end up in an argument on the ride home and are unexpectedly hit by an oncoming car.

“Wander Darkly” then becomes a trippy story of Adrienne trying to determine if she is alive, concussed, or in some form of purgatory or limbo. Miele shrewdly creates different scenarios that guide Adrienne — and viewers — such as one where Matteo recounts their lives together. So, he tells her that the birth of their child, Ellie, was traumatic, and Danish doctors suddenly appear to discuss what transpired. He reminds her of their first date, who said “I love you” first, and the first time they had sex, in a candlelit room that catches fire. These scenes from their lives are meant to help Adrienne “make sense of everything,” but the memories may contain lies.

Adrienne, she insists, recalls things differently from how Matteo does. Is her alternate reality the truth, or an imagined fantasy? There is a lovely scene of the couple in in the water at a beach in Mexico where Matteo admits that he wanted to propose, but he did not have a ring. Adrienne’s response is that she would have appreciated that, despite her later remarks about not wanting to be married. But is this all woulda, coulda, shoulda? When Adrienne suddenly starts to bleed in the water and then the action shifts to her in a bathroom, it is hard to tell if it is a dream, a memory, or a psychotic break. 

“Wander Darkly” does allow for multiple readings, which is good, but at some point, viewers may become exhausted trying to delineate reality, and let the film just play out. There are “clues” dropped throughout the film — a digital clock flashing “88:88” or a dark figure in a hoodie — that are explained in the end, but they fail to register as significant enough to puzzle out the meanings. Another scene involving a psychic’s assistant predicting death, is perhaps a red herring.

Miele does employ some heavy-handed music and obvious symbols. A sequence at the “Urban Light” sculpture in Los Angeles, is used to visually convey the characters getting lost in a maze. When Adrienne is watching “Night of the Living Dead” on TV, Matteo observes that she hates zombie movies, to which she replied that she “feels like a zombie.” 

Better is a critical scene that has Adrienne parsing out the truth and lies as she and Matteo bump into Shae (Aimee Carrero) — who flirts with Matteo — at a Day of the Dead celebration. The film is strongest in moments like these, when it expresses how Adrienne and Matteo should have communicated more honestly, so they could love each other better.

However, a heated encounter between Adrienne and Matteo, where she exclaims, “Even my dying isn’t enough to get you to step up,” comes off flat, and unconvincing. Perhaps that is deliberate, but Sienna Miller’s performance is uneven. She may understand Adrienne’s confused mental and emotional state for every scene, but she is not always able to communicate that to viewers. Her blank stares and looks of despair are never not appropriate, so it becomes her default expression. In contrast, Diego Luna plays Matteo with tremendous conviction; he is often charming and largely sympathetic. Miller’s character is, unfortunately, neither. 

“Wander Darkly” features two scenes of Adrienne contemplating suicide that reveal her strain in processing grief and trauma. These moments suggest mental issues that need to be addressed with therapy, but there is no indication of that (and perhaps deliberately so). 

And this is why the film wavers in walking the tightrope between personal and universal, engrossing and distancing. It is interesting to see how Adrienne — who needs to be in control — processes images and situations she does not fully understand. But the flexible storyline may frustrate viewers who try to want meaning in something that may be meaningless. Miele wants to have it both ways, and in the end, her ambitious and intriguing film only half works. 

“Wander Darkly” opens in select theaters and on demand on Friday, Dec.11.

House Republican said COVID is “sensationalized.” Now he’s asking for prayers from his hospital bed

Rep. David Byrd (R-TN) made a post on Facebook this Thursday saying that he may be soon placed on a ventilator due to coronavirus, and asked people to pray for him.

“I really need a miracle today!!” Byrd wrote Thursday. “My doctor said if my oxygen level doesn’t improve then he has no choice but to put me on a ventilator. So please pray that God will breathe His healing spirit into my lungs!!”

Byrd was flown by helicopter from Wayne County Hospital to St. Thomas in Nashville, where he still remains. According to the Tennessean, he was among the nearly 70 House Republicans who attended a caucus meeting held in the House chamber on November 24. A week and a half later, he was hospitalized with the virus. Reports say he was seen on the House floor without a mask. Just days before, he hosted a dinner for dozens of his fellow caucus members at a restaurant.

Byrd is at least the second House Republican to be hospitalized with coronavirus.

As the Tennessean points out, Byrd and GOP Rep. Mike Carter, who was placed in the ICU with coronavirus in August, supported a House resolution stating that “mainstream media has sensationalized the reporting on COVID-19 in the service of political agendas.”

“Stand by for lawsuit”: Twitter users taunt Trump as TIME names Biden-Harris “Person of the Year”

Twitter users are anticipating President Donald Trump’s reaction to losing once again to incoming President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. 

On Thursday when TIME magazine announced its annual “Person of the Year,” social media users were shocked, and pleased, to see more than one person on the newly unveiled cover of its December issue. But they also know there is one person who won’t be happy: Trump.

Now, Twitter users are trolling the lame-duck president with posts predicting how they think Trump will respond to the magazine’s prestigious selection, reports HuffPost.

Actor Mark Hamil predicted that Trump would try to contest the magazine cover in a baseless argument similar to the one he has been pushing about voter fraud. 

“Stand by for lawsuit alleging the magazine’s selection process was fraudulent and rigged,” he tweeted.

With a cartoon image of Trump, television producer Corey Reynolds offered a comical impersonation and prediction of Trump’s reaction tweeting, “I’m mad. I’m soooooooooo bigly f**ing mad right now. Knowing that people are laughing at me (again) and saying, ‘d**n you just can’t stop losing, you orange-faced fascist’ makes is so much worse… Completely unrelated but, my kids are awful too. We’re all just… terrible.”

Some wondered if the president had already gone to bed for the night as they predicted the Twitter firestorm would likely come in the morning. “Has Trump started ranting about Time magazine yet? If not, either he’s not watching tv – the only place he gets his news – or he’s asleep,” one Twitter user said, adding, “Or calling his corrupt Proto fascists in the GOP with more thoughts on their war on democracy.”

One Twitter user even reflected on Trump photoshopping himself on a TIME magazine cover as he noted how much of a blow the loss might be for the embattled president.

Trump has yet to comment on TIME magazine’s selection but many Twitter users are expecting the tweetstorm to come sometime today.

 

Mike Lee becomes lone Republican to block bipartisan bill creating American Women’s History Museum

After decades of calls for the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino and an American Women’s History Museum as part of the Smithsonian Institution and months of bipartisan work, a lone Republican single-handedly torpedoed the measure — at least for now.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah,  blocked a bipartisan effort to establish national museums for Latino and women’s history on Thursday, triggering a heated debate on the Senate floor. Democrats and Republicans tried to establish the museums by unanimous consent, which allows any single senator to block the measure. 

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, tried to pass the legislation Thursday night to establish a museum dedicated to Latinos on the National Mall. “By creating a new museum in the Smithsonian Institution, we can honor American Latino contributions and highlight their stories for future generations,” Cornyn said when he introduced the bill last year.

“I am not white or Black or Native American, I am Latino,” Menendez said Thursday. “I am one in five Americans today. My grandchildren are one in four school children today. When we walk to the National Mall or when … anyone walks to the National Mall, no one is inspired by the story of Latinos and Latinas in this country because that story is not being told.”

But Lee argued that “the last thing we need is to further divide an already divided nation with an array of segregated, separate-but-equal museums for hyphenated identity groups.”

“My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity — what Theodore Roosevelt called hyphenated Americanism — is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities,” Lee said. “It’s a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.”

Lee then launched into a soliloquy about “cancel” culture and critical race theory, a topic President Donald Trump has repeatedly harped on. “The so-called critical theory undergirding this movement does not celebrate diversity; it weaponizes diversity,” he said. “It sharpens all those hyphens into so many knives and daggers. It has turned our college campuses into grievance pageants and loose Orwellian mobs to cancel anyone daring to express an original thought.”

Lee’s comments infuriated Menendez, who tore into the senator for blocking a measure with considerable support from both parties.

“I’m sorry,” Menendez said. “Sixty million Latinos in this country are watching tonight because this is a much-expected moment. Univision, Telemundo, affiliates across the country, national organizations and others have been waiting for this moment — a moment that everybody in the Congress of the United States agrees to, except for one colleague.”

The bill had already passed the House without objections and was unanimously approved by the Senate Rules Committee.

“The House of Representatives passed this on [a voice vote]. The Rules Committee passed it on voice in a bipartisan manner,” Menendez said. “And tonight, one colleague stands in the way. One Republican colleague from Utah stands in the way of the hopes and dreams and aspirations of seeing Americans of Latino descent having their dreams fulfilled and being recognized. Just being recognized.”

Menendez said that Latinos deserved their own cultural institution as much as Black and Native Americans, who have had dedicated museums established in recent years.

“I don’t know if these arguments were made against the Native Americans; I don’t know if these arguments were made against African Americans; I don’t see them as being separate and apart,” Menendez said. “I see them as being a part of the collective mosaic that is coming together under the Smithsonian.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, made a similar argument.

“I could not help but wonder as I heard the comments of my colleague from Utah whether he also tried to block the museum celebrating and telling the history of African Americans,” she said. “It seems wrong that one senator can block consideration of a bill that would have overwhelming support by a majority of this body.”

Collins then tried to pass a bill to establish a Smithsonian Women’s History Museum, which the House overwhelmingly voted to approve in February.

“I can think of no better way to tell the story of American women, to inspire those young girls and young boys who come to Washington to tour all the wonderful museums that are part of the Smithsonian, than to create a museum of American women’s history so that they can better understand the contributions of American women to the development of our nation and its proud history,” Collins said.

Lee similarly blocked the vote. Collins, who has pushed for the creation of a women’s museum for nearly two decades, lamented the move as a “sad moment.” .

“Surely in a year where we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage,” she said, “this is the time, this is the moment to finally pass the legislation unanimously recommended by an independent commission to establish an American women’s history museum in our nation’s capital.”

Lee said that while he shared his colleagues’ “interests in ensuring that these stories are told,” he does not believe women or Latinos should have their own museums.

Lee argued that while “all racial, ethnic, religious groups in America are worthy of celebration, even to the extent of having their own museums,” in “many instances” those museums do not get federal funding.

“There is a brand that comes along with the Smithsonian Institution and a lot of money that’s taken from the American people in the form of tax revenue,” Lee said. “And so as a result of that, the Smithsonian Institution has a unique role.”

Menendez during the debate cited a 1994 Smithsonian task force report titled “Willful Neglect: The Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Latinos,” which said that the Smithsonian “almost entirely excludes and ignores Latinos in nearly every aspect of its operations.”

“It is difficult for the Task Force to understand how such a consistent pattern of Latino exclusion from the work of the Smithsonian could have occurred by chance,” the report said.

The report’s authors issued a follow-up in 2018 that found that the problem had largely gone unaddressed.

“Latinos remain largely excluded from participation in arts and cultural institutions that tell the American story,” the report said. “The Smithsonian has an opportunity to play a leadership role for the field.”

Rust Belt warning for the GOP: These 3 counties spell trouble for future Republican wins

Of the five Trump states from 2016 that President-elect Joe Biden flipped this year, three were in the Rust Belt: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (Biden also flipped Arizona and Georgia). Ohio-based journalist Daniel McGraw analyzes Biden’s performance in three Rust Belt counties in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 11, arguing that if those counties are any indication, Republicans might run into problems in the Rust Belt in 2022 and 2024 as well.

The counties that McGraw focuses on are Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County (which includes Pittsburgh), Michigan’s Oakland County (which includes the Detroit suburbs) and Wisconsin’s Dane County (which includes Madison).

“Trump won the three states that house these counties by about 77,000 votes combined in 2016,” McGraw explains. “They were the three states that he flipped, and they put him in the White House. This time, Trump lost these states by about 250,000 combined votes.”

McGraw adds that Biden’s success in the Rust Belt can’t be attributed to densely populated urban areas exclusively.

“While some in the Trump circle have tried to say the race was lost in these states in the big cities — Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee — it wasn’t,” McGraw observes. “For example, in Philadelphia County, Biden beat Trump by about 4000 fewer votes than Hillary Rodham Clinton did. In Allegheny County, Biden beat Trump by about 40,000 more votes than Clinton did. In other words: Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,000 or so votes in 2016, and Biden just about made up that amount in one county.”

According to McGraw, the differences between 2016 and 2020 for Trump in the Rust Belt were that “Trump’s campaign failed to recognize that the suburban population changed; women’s earnings have gone up in the Midwest states, and they are often now the primary breadwinners in their households; and midterm successes increase turnout by generating new voters, as seen by the fact that 2018 midterms in these counties moved the needle in 2020.”

Another problem for Trump, McGraw notes, is “the fact that the African-American population has increased in the suburbs.” McGraw points out that Oakland County was 93% White in 1980 but is 75% White now.

Biden’s greatest disappointment in the Rust Belt was McGraw’s state, Ohio, which Biden lost to Trump by 8%. Although President Barack Obama won Ohio in 2008 and 2012, Democrats have been struggling in the Buckeye State during the Trump era.

But other Rust Belt states were much better for the president-elect in 2020. And in future elections, McGraw argues, Republicans will have problems in the Rust Belt if they don’t take a close look at the reasons why Biden prevailed in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

McGraw writes, “People will be seeking stability rather than chaos, and there will be more counties like Dane, Oakland and Allegheny than not in the next few years…. Republicans have a choice. Take some short-term heat from Trump and his most dedicated fans by ditching him now. Or carry him around the party’s neck like an albatross, alienating voters in must-win suburban counties in 2022 along the way — which would, in turn, imperil their chances in 2024 of defeating Joe Biden’s reelection efforts.”

Republicans want more than a coup: Trump’s loyalty test exposes their hatred for democracy 

When Texas attorney general Ken Paxton first filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court demanding that all the votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — 10.4 million votes in total — be thrown out completely, the general media response was to call it a stunt. Paxton is under investigation for an alleged bribery scheme, and observers speculated that, by filing this ridiculous lawsuit, he is trawling for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, whose recent pardon of his crony Michael Flynn has instilled hope among other GOP lowlifes that they can bribe Trump to do the same for them. 

Yet even though this suit is widely dismissed as a joke, a slew of other elected Republicans joined the lawsuit on Thursday, lending support to Paxton’s argument that red states should be able to overturn the results of an election that didn’t end well for Republicans. So far, 17 Republican state attorneys general and 106 Republicans in the House of Representatives — more than half the GOP caucus — have signed onto amicus briefs supporting Paxton’s absurd demands that all the votes of the residents of these four states be destroyed. Six states have asked to join Paxton’s lawsuit directly. On Monday, only a couple of House Republicans — mainly Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama — were willing to openly support Trump’s efforts to steal the election. Now it’s the majority of the House GOP caucus.

In doing so, these Republicans have outed themselves as opponents of democracy. There is no other way to read this, and no wiggle room to pretend otherwise. This isn’t about “voter fraud” or any of the other bad-faith gambits that Trump and his supporters are throwing out as distractions. It’s about throwing out entire state elections because they favored a Democrat. 

And while Republicans in the Senate have not formally signed onto this assault on the concept of democracy, many have done so informally.

Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, Georgia’s two Republican incumbents who are competing in runoff elections on Jan. 5, have also publicly sided with Paxton. In other words, these two senators are literally asking Georgians to vote for them, while simultaneously demanding that those same voters watch their most recently cast ballots get thrown in the trash. 

As confusing as this may appear, it’s ultimately about the Republican belief that elections should be democratic in name only, and the only real choice available to voters should be to vote Republican. If the voters are foolish enough choose otherwise, their right to vote should be stripped away. 

Paxton’s claim is that the voting pools of these states are irrevocably tainted by “fraud.” Yet he doesn’t even bother to pretend there’s any evidence of any actual fraud, much less any evidence of fraud on a scale that could conceivably change the election results. Indeed, the legal brief filed by Paxton admits that the fraud he’s supposing is “undetectable.” To get around this problem, Paxton literally argues that the burden of proof is not on those making accusations of fraud, but on the accused — the state governments of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — to prove that they did not commit fraud. 

“The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable,” Paxton writes in his suit. 

Trump loves to whine about “witch hunts,” but this lawsuit is actually the real deal. It’s making a broad-based, evidence-free accusation of fraud and refusing to prove it, instead insisting that the accused prove their innocence.

Of course, the states in question have already done that, time and again. With the nation watching, these states have audited their elections, performed recounts and defended their voter integrity processes successfully in court. But it’s in the nature of witch hunts that the accused can never offer enough proof of their innocence. The accuser will remain unpersuaded. 

Instead of evidence of fraud, Paxton’s lawsuit implicitly argues that fraud should be assumed in an election — that is, in any election won by a Democrat. Using numbers that appear directly pulled from their asses, Paxton and company are arguing it was “improbable” that Biden could have won those states, which should be reason enough to assume fraud — and fraud on such a grand scale that there’s no clear way for states to disprove the accusation. 

As anyone who has been following the rhetoric spewed by Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and their minions and supporters can tell you, this is all operating from the overtly racist proposition that Black voters are inherently illegitimate. Time and again, Trump and Giuliani have focused their ire on the way election results tipped blue late in the vote-counting process, when Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Detroit — all cities with large Black populations — were finally counted. 

Those were the vote “dumps” that Trump keeps ranting about. There’s no mystery: In reality, those were large batches of votes that were counted late because they came from the biggest population centers in the state. It’s entirely normal for big cities to finish counting votes later than small towns and suburban districts do. More people equals more votes equals more time. But Trump knows this language about “dumps” will resonate with his racist base, because the votes in question come from racially diverse cities. 

Paxton’s lawsuit folds in this racist logic by pointing out that votes counted towards the end of the process leaned more towards Biden than those counted earlier. 

As Amber Phillips of the Washington Post notes, “Paxton is literally arguing that the Supreme Court overturn an election because states counted their votes.” 

It only makes sense if you assume, say, that the entire state of Michigan’s votes are inherently tainted because Detroit’s voters were included in the total. There is no non-racist way to assume that. 

It’s tempting to write off this entire situation as another Trump-flavored clown show. The fact that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who never turns down an opportunity to make a fool of himself, has offered to argue the case in front of the Supreme Court is just further proof. (Free drinks to the justice who asks Cruz if Trump was right to accuse his father of murdering JFK.) It remains unlikely that the Supreme Court will even take up this insultingly dumb case, let alone rule in Trump’s favor. 

Still, the reality is that this cannot and should not be laughed off. As Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro has written, this whole exercise is a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.” 

Sedition is a serious charge, but it’s the right word. Most House Republicans and 17 state attorneys general are standing against the right of Americans to choose their own leaders. As elected officials, they are using the power granted to them by the people to declare that the people should not have such power. Even if they lose this case, this time around, the fact that so many traitors hold elected office in America is a major crisis all by itself. 

Trump’s bankers questioned by prosecutors in “significantly escalating” criminal probe: report

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has interviewed employees of President Donald Trump’s bank and insurance broker in a signal that the criminal investigation into the president’s business practices has “intensified” just before he leaves office, according to The New York Times.

District Attorney Cy Vance is “significantly escalating” the investigation with interviews of employees from Deutsche Bank, Trump’s biggest lender, and insurance brokerage Aon, according to the report. The two companies were among the few financial giants willing to do business with Trump after a series of bankruptcies and defaults in the 1990s. There is no indication either company is suspected of impropriety but their employees “might offer investigators a rich vein of information about the Trump Organization,” The Times reported.

Vance initially launched an investigation more than two years ago into Trump’s hush money payments to former adult film actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal. While that particular line of inquiry has stalled amid a legal battle over the president’s tax returns, Vance’s probe has since expanded to include potential tax, insurance, and bank fraud, his office said in a court filing earlier this year. More recently, Vance’s office has “stepped up” its investigation by issuing new subpoenas and interviewing witnesses, according to the Times. Some witnesses were interviewed before a grand jury. The Times notes that the grand jury appears to be “serving an investigative function” rather than “considering any charges.”

Still, the ramped-up criminal probe is the latest sign that Trump could face legal jeopardy after leaving office. Although he has floated the idea of pardoning himself, a dubious idea that has never been challenged in court, the Manhattan probe is out of the reach of any federal pardon.

Vance’s criminal investigation is focused on whether Trump and his business committed financial crimes. Vance’s office appears to be particularly interested in whether Trump inflated the value of his assets to obtain loans while deflating those same assets when paying taxes, according to the court filing. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to paying Daniels on Trump’s behalf during the campaign among a number of other federal charges, testified to Congress that Trump inflated his assets while seeking a Deutsche Bank loan in a failed bid to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills but “deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”

Trump’s allies have alleged that Cohen lied in a bid to reduce his prison sentence. The Trump Organization is “likely to argue… that Mr. Trump could not have duped Deutsche Bank because the bank did its own analysis of Mr. Trump’s net worth,” The Times reported.

The outlet previously reported that Deutsche Bank officials were well aware that Trump was inflating his assets. “The bankers determined he was overvaluing some of his real estate assets by as much as 70 percent,” two former executives said, but decided to approve loans to his company, including one that he used to pay off a loan to another division of the bank.

Vance’s prosecutors have interviewed two Deutsche Bank employees about the bank’s lending practices, according to the Times, which also noted that neither served as one of the Trump Organization’s bankers. Bank officials expect Vance to question more employees in the near future. The bank was subpoenaed in the probe last year and said it is cooperating with prosecutors. Aon also confirmed to the Times that it received a subpoena from Vance’s office and said it would cooperate with any document requests.

The Times also reported last month that Vance’s office subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to tax write-offs on millions in consulting fees, some of which appear to have been paid to daughter Ivanka Trump. The Times first reported the write-offs after obtaining years of Trump’s tax returns and documents, which showed he paid no federal income taxes for years while declaring large business losses.

Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten claimed last month that the subpoena was part of an “ongoing attempt to harass the company” and said that “everything was done in strict compliance with applicable law and under the advice of counsel and tax experts.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James is leading a separate sweeping civil investigation of Trump’s business practices. Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, predicted that James’ probe could “quickly turn into a criminal inquiry.”

While Trump faces potential legal jeopardy in New York, the idea of pursuing a federal investigation of Trump has divided President-elect Joe Biden’s team and Democrats. Weissmann, who led the successful prosecution of former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, argued that it was imperative for the next attorney general to “investigate Mr. Trump and, if warranted, prosecute him for potential federal crimes.”

Weissmann said in an op-ed last month that “Trump’s criminal exposure is clear,” noting that Mueller’s team “amassed ample evidence to support a charge that Mr. Trump obstructed justice.” The Manhattan and New York state probes “may well reveal evidence warranting additional federal charges.”

“In short,” he wrote, “being president should mean you are more accountable, not less, to the rule of law.”

American democracy might just survive Trump — but no, “the system” isn’t working

It was inevitable that people would begin to argue that because Donald Trump has so far been unable to overturn an election that he lost by a decisive margin, we can all relax: There were no tanks in the streets and “the system worked.” There are people who have blithely brushed off his machinations as some kind of therapy for the poor guy, who just needed some time to deal with his disappointment. One Republican famously told the Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.” 

Apparently, this person sees no harm in allowing Trump to convince 70% of Republicans to believe that Joe Biden’s presidency is illegitimate. Indeed, he no doubt sees that as the party’s consolation prize. That dismissive view of Trump’s refusal to accept his loss has more recently taken hold among others who believe that for all the Democrats’ fears that Trump wouldn’t leave office, it’s apparent that the courts are rejecting his sloppy, evidence-free legal filings, which means the “guardrails” are holding. 

Election prognosticator Nate Silver mocked concerns about Trump’s coup attempt as hysterical, writing in a tweet that “‘SCOTUS will steal the election for Trump’ is one of those takes that was popular (for different reasons) both among a certain type of liberal and on the Trumpy right and obviously doesn’t look too good in retrospect.”

Trump openly admitted that he wanted Amy Coney Barrett to be confirmed to the Supreme Court before the election in order to ensure his victory in any election case. That was reason enough for worry. Slate’s Mark Stern laid out another reason why people were justified in their concern, despite the fact that the courts have so far rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Stern points out that there were three important pre-election cases argued by real election lawyers (not by Trump’s “elite strike force”) in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota. These cases were all denied by the court but they featured some very disturbing arguments by Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas (and quite likely Barrett would have joined them if similar cases had followed the election). It seems apparent that in a narrowly-decided election the Supreme Court might well have mustered a majority to discard a whole bunch of legal votes and hand the election to Donald Trump. As Stern explained:

I tried to make it clear before Nov. 3 that (1) these scenarios were possible though not probable; (2) four SCOTUS justices telegraphed their intent to toss out these ballots; and (3) this was the only way SCOTUS could throw the race for Trump.

So we dodged that bullet. Meanwhile, in courts across the land, in all the battleground states — Nevada  Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Arizona — Trump has been losing, which is reassuring. The judicial system has apparently not completely lost its bearings. That does not mean the system “worked.” In a healthy democracy the president of the United States would not be attempting to overturn a legal election, nor would he be able to convince tens of millions of his followers that he was justified in doing so based upon a series of lies so preposterous that normally only a naive child could believe them. In a system that was working, any leader would be humiliated at having been shown to be such a pathetic sore loser in one courtroom after another. His party would show him the door.

Instead, Trump has been working the phones, strong-arming, threatening and cajoling Republicans in those states, hoping to convince them to discard the election results and have the state legislatures send Trump electors to vote in the Electoral College on Monday. He has not had any luck with that — largely because state laws generally make that impossible — but has succeeded in making Republican election officials the target of threats of violence, for which he has shown not one iota of concern.

Now we have reached a new front in the battle to overturn the election, with a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment for securities fraud for the last five years and has recently been accused of various legal violations by his own staff. Paxton is using an obscure procedure to ask the Supreme Court to intervene directly to discard all the electoral votes from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, on the theory that alleged voting irregularities in those states have had the effect of disenfranchising Texas voters. The case is absurd on its face, a silly Hail Mary that no one would even pay attention to at this stage if it weren’t for the fact that 17 other state attorneys general and 106 Republican members of Congress have signed on to the case — which no legal observer believes has the remotest chance of success.

It’s impossible to know the motivations of all of these people. Some are opportunists looking for money or higher office, while some are probably true believers. Paxton himself is almost surely angling for a presidential pardon (although that wouldn’t clear him of the charges he faces in Texas). One thing they all have in common is a desire to delegitimize the Biden presidency, regardless of the facts. Even some of the so-called Republican heroes who stood up to Trump are already using the fake voter fraud claims to restrict voting in their states. That’s as cynical as it gets.

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein asked some scholars for their view on where this might all be leading. This response made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

“Where their hearts are is hard to know, but their behavior is not small-d democratic,” Susan Stokes, a political-science professor and the director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, told me.

Stokes, like other experts, says the Republican Party is on a continuum toward the kind of “democratic erosion” visible in other countries, including Turkey under Recep Erdoğan, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, or, in the most extreme example, Russia under Vladimir Putin. In those nations, a party that wins office through a democratic election then seeks to use state power to tilt or completely undermine future elections.

The guardrails are hanging by a thread. You would be a reckless fool not to be worried about how long they are going to hold. The system is not working.

Lindsey Graham’s a small fish who “hovers around a larger predator,” says Lincoln Project co-founder

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is under fire again, this time it’s for telling Georgia to throw out millions of votes to hand President Donald Trump a win in the state. It prompted a flood of comments questioning Graham, because he should know better. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner thinks he has the answer for what happened to the Trump sycophant. His argument comes after a slate of attacks against Graham this week.

“Seriously, senator? Do your words still come from your brain, or just some reservoir of bile?” asked CNN’s Chris Cuomo during the Tuesday episode of his show.

Former Republican and Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt issued a statement about Graham too, saying that many people have tried to understand Graham over the years. He encouraged people not to look at it “through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things he used to believe and what he’s doing now.”

Instead, Schmidt said, “The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers around a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump is the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”

But Kirschner has another idea. Back in 2016 it was revealed that Russians hacked Graham’s email.

“I do believe the Russians hacked into the (Democratic National Committee). I do believe they hacked into (John) Podesta’s email account. They hacked into my campaign account,” said Graham just four years ago. “I do believe that all the information released publicly hurt Clinton and didn’t hurt Trump. I don’t think the outcome of the election is in doubt. What we should do is not turn on each other but work as one people to push back on Russia.”

Kirschner thinks it’s entirely possible that Graham is being manipulated using incriminating information found in those emails.

“So, after Lindsey Graham’s emails are hacked by the Russians, and Donald Trump beckons Lindsey Graham out to a golf course meeting, all of the sudden, Donald Trump is fit to be president,” he said. “Folks, that leaves us with two questions: What did Russia get when it hacked Lindsey Graham’s emails? And what did Donald Trump say to Lindsey Graham when they were about to tee-off.”

Kirschner thinks it’s high time to find out the truth.

See the video below:

Eric Trump mocked for begging people to praise his dad on a record day for COVID deaths

This Wednesday, President Trump’s second son, Eric Trump, tried to gin up some enthusiasm for his dad, who is currently on a crusade to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

It’s worth noting that Eric’s call for Trumpland to praise his dad came on the same day the U.S. set a new record for coronavirus deaths.

As one could imagine, the tweet was great fodder for Trump’s critics.

Rush Limbaugh says belief in a future “secession” is growing over US political divides

During his long career in talk radio, Rush Limbaugh has thrived on us-versus-them rhetoric — claiming that that liberals and progressives have a viewpoint that is diametrically opposed to true Americanism. And during his December 9 broadcast, the far-right radio host argued that the divisions between Red America and Blue America are so huge that “secession” might be inevitable.

The 69-year-old Limbaugh told listeners, “I actually think — and I’ve referenced this, I’ve alluded to this a couple of times because I’ve seen others allude to this — I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York? Especially if you’re talking about votes.”

Limbaugh went on to say that Red America and Blue America might have reached the point where agreeing to disagree is no longer possible.

“A lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant and separated and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way,” Limbaugh argued. “There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.”

Although President-elect Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive win in the 2020 presidential election — winning 306 electoral votes and defeating President Donald Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote — most Republicans in Congress have been afraid to publicly acknowledge that Biden won. They are afraid of being attacked by Trump on Twitter or slammed by Limbaugh or another far-right pundits. Yet Limbaugh claimed that “RINOs” — Republicans in Name Only — are doing a lot to prevent conservatism from prevailing in the U.S.

“I know that there’s a sizable and growing sentiment for people who believe that (secession) is where we’re headed, whether we want to or not — whether we want to go there or not,” Limbaugh told listeners. “I myself haven’t made up my mind. I still haven’t given up the idea that we are the majority and that all we have to do is find a way to unite and win. And our problem is the fact that there are just so many RINOs, so many Republicans in the Washington establishment who will do anything to maintain their membership in the establishment because of the perks and the opportunities that are presented for their kids and so forth.”

Don’t look past Trump’s coup attempt: This is a dark moment in American history

Imagine the following: There is an arsonist in your neighborhood. He has tried dozens of times to set fire to buildings, including schools and hospitals. The arsonist keeps failing because he does not know how to start a proper fire.

There is a mad bomber loose in your neighborhood. He puts explosives in mailboxes, in packages on the street corner, in public bathrooms and on people’s front stoops or back porches. When the bombs “explode” they shoot out confetti. On other occasions the bombs simply make a loud noise. Is the bomber “only kidding”? Is he incompetent?

There is a man who keeps trying to rob banks. But he cannot write a legible ransom note. When he tries to verbally demand money from the teller, he gets nervous, starts mumbling, is scared and runs away.

The police and other law enforcement agents would pursue such a person with great diligence. If that person was eventually apprehended, he could not claim incompetence as a defense. Attempting to commit a crime is a crime in and of itself.

Donald Trump is a political criminal. He is attempting a fascist coup against American democracy and the American people. That Trump and his gang have technically not succeeded in no way means that he and they are innocent of their crimes.

Moreover, the fact Trump has publicly announced his plans to stay in power by any means necessary, however stupid, illegal or ineffective his scheme may be, also does not make him innocent of committing major crimes against the democratic order and the rule of law.

There are too many examples to count.

After losing to Joe Biden in the 2020 election by at least 7 million votes, Donald Trump has encouraged the crime of insurrection by his supporters, including armed paramilitaries, to keep him in power.

Trump’s agents (most notably, now-pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn) have publicly called for a military coup to keep the Trump regime in power against the will of the American people. Trump has continued to purge senior officials deemed to be “disloyal” from their positions at the highest levels of the national security state. Trump is also placing loyalists in other positions throughout the government in an effort to sabotage the incoming Biden administration.

Trump, his attorneys and other agents are engaging in a campaign of intimidation against Republican officials who have performed their public duties by certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s attorneys have also repeatedly abused the legal system with increasingly ludicrous attempts to find some way to nullify the presidential election.

Over the weekend, Trump’s lawyers tried appealing to the Supreme Court with the extraordinary demand that votes in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania should be thrown out, allowing the state legislature to appoint a slate of Trump electors. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

On Wednesday, 17 Republican state attorneys general filed briefs in support of a suit filed by the Texas attorney general that seeks to have all the electoral votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin rejected because of “voting irregularities.” Biden won all those states, but all have Republican-majority legislatures that would presumably appoint Trump electors if the election results were declared invalid. To state the obvious, no such “irregularities” in favor of the Democrats exist. By all legitimate accounts, this election was conducted fairly.

On Trump’s attorneys and their role in abusing the law and subverting democracy, the Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic writes:

But even though the worst has not come to pass, Trump and his team are doing lasting damage to American democracy as the president struggles to come to grips with the reality of his loss. And yet, these lawyers and officials will likely face no real consequences for their actions — and if they do, those repercussions will not be enough to address the scale of the problem. …

Trump and his legal team’s various efforts are an affront to democracy, the most essential principle of which is that losers at the ballot box accept their defeat. And judges have not been gentle with Trump and his allies in court. “Come on, now!” a Michigan judge admonished the Trump campaign over a sloppy effort to stop votes from being counted. In a crucial decision that denied an effort to halt certification of Pennsylvania’s vote, Judge Matthew Brann wrote that the Trump campaign had presented the court with “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence.” The judge went on, “Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

Trump himself has committed the crime of sedition by attempting to nullify the results of a democratic election in which he was defeated. Trump’s coup is part of a much larger pattern of political crimes. Those include vast corruption, likely collusion with a hostile foreign country during the 2016 election, attempted extortion against the president of Ukraine with the goal of damaging Biden in the 2020 election, stochastic terrorism and other political violence, a negligent response to the coronavirus pandemic, and betraying the president’s oath of office.

In response to Donald Trump’s ongoing coup, many among America’s political class, specifically the fourth estate and other “mainstream” opinion leaders, choose to mock Trump’s assaults as being “stupid” and “cartoonish.” In effect, the country’s chattering class is counseling the American people: “Move along — nothing to see here.”

Trump’s coup attempt has been widely viewed as a distraction rather than an existential threat to the country’s democracy — or as a test run for a future coup, when a closer election will be more vulnerable to an attempt by Republicans or other American fascists to overturn democracy.

A featured essay by the Daily Kos writer “Hunter” summarizes this:

The [Republican] party continually tests which democratic norms can be dispensed with, and have been successful at dismantling many or most. The push to overturn the results of a presidential election, and specifically to do so by nullifying the actual votes and tasking loyalist state elected officials [to] create new ones, has very little chance of being successful this time, based on these states and these claims.

That does not mean that the party will not lend its weight to similar calls to overturn a future election. It does not mean that, in a Republican Party that continues to aggressively purge itself of the insufficiently sycophantic, it will with certainty run afoul of local officials unwilling to lend their own names to the effort. It does not mean that every collection of party lawyers and provocateurs will be as incompetent. There will be those that analyze these fraud claims not to discredit them, but to determine how they can best be made more compelling. And the movement of out-and-out imbeciles, Americans who pride themselves on believing hoaxes while condemning expertise, only continues to grow.

Almost on cue, Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday that the 2020 election should be overturned, claiming it had been “rigged” against him.

There have been a range of misguided and wrongheaded reactions to Trump’s coup attempt, and those reactions are doing the work of normalizing and enabling his political crimes.

The average American is exhausted by the Age of Trump and his pandemic. Many people, understandably, want it all to stop. Exhaustion breeds passivity and surrender, but fascism must be confronted at every turn. Disengagement normalizes and encourages fascist and other authoritarian movements.

The mainstream news media is already normalizing the Republican Party’s campaign of obstruction against President-elect Joe Biden by reverting to its default frame of “both-sides-ism.” All of this is seen as “politics as usual,” and the result of “polarization” and “division,” rather than as part of an ongoing, slow-motion coup and a long-term strategy to undermine American democracy.

The hope peddlers and other members of the Church of the Savvy continue to underestimate, distract from and downplay the fascist-authoritarian attacks by Trump and his allies. On Tuesday, Nate Silver — a veritable high priest of that church — posted this on Twitter:

“SCOTUS will steal the election for Trump” is one of those takes that was popular (for different reasons) both among a certain type of liberal and on the Trumpy right and obviously doesn’t look too good in retrospect.

To deny the reality of Donald Trump and his movement’s assaults on democracy and the rule of law is a dangerous manifestation of the “organized forgetting” common to societies that have experienced fascism and authoritarianism.

It is difficult for political elites to confront the actual harm done by the fascist or authoritarian leader, not to mention the level of historical reckoning and the concerted effort to change that is required to prevent such a regime from emerging and taking power in the future.

Why? Because those same political elites are financially, professionally and personally invested in a return to “normal.” They are parasites and symbiotes who feed on “normalcy.”

Such voices in America’s political class are already engaging in organized forgetting as they try to reframe and rewrite the realities of the Age of Trump.

Their fictions include the narrative that Trump is not a “real” fascist and that because his agents were too stupid or too bumbling to execute a coup, it was never a real danger. There are associated fictions: The country’s institutions have shown themselves to be “strong”; the “rule of law” stopped Trumpism; the American people voted to jettison Trump and his entire movement; those who have said the country was under siege by fascism and authoritarianism were self-serving “alarmists.”

Circulating and believing such fictions all but ensures that American fascism in a more sophisticated version will emerge and take power, sooner rather than later.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s coup attempt and broader war on democracy are an example of the normalization of political deviance. This is an important marker on the road to American fascism and authoritarianism.

There are several dimensions to this process: Anti-democratic behavior is increasingly normalized. Elections which Republicans do not win — and more specifically, in which white right-wing Christian extremists do not win — are judged to be illegitimate. The very idea of free and fair elections is replaced with an understanding that some votes — those cast by and for Republicans and right-wing extremists — mean more than others, and specifically those of urban and coastal Democrats and nonwhite voters.

Political violence is acceptable and normal if committed by Republicans and other factions of the white right against progressives, anti-fascists or other targeted groups. Violence in the reverse — which rarely occurs, even in self-defense — is deemed to be “terrorism”.

Right-wing political violence is justified by a political logic where authoritarians perceive themselves as “real patriots” who are “protecting the nation” against “enemies of the state.” They stand for “the people,” meaning that those they attack are the enemy Other.

In a healthy democracy, violence is the near-exclusive monopoly of the state. Authoritarians and fascists break through that barrier by granting their followers the right to commit violence against their designated enemies. As we have seen, Trump’s unofficial paramilitaries and other street thugs are threatening the lives of elected officials who refuse to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election.  

Social scientists and other researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that political polarization in the U.S. is asymmetrical: Republicans have become far more extreme and drifted steadily to the right making reasonable compromise with the Democratic Party in the interests of the common good difficult, if not impossible.

To that end, today’s Republican Party behaves more like a hostage taker or political crime syndicate than like a responsible actor in the give-and-take of democratic government. The party’s leaders and voters have almost officially embraced authoritarianism and other anti-democratic values.

As political scientists have recently shown, today’s Republican Party has more in common with right-wing extremist parties in Europe than with centrist mainstream political parties. Research shows that Trump supporters and other Republican voters are hostile to democracy as a concept, very willing to embrace authoritarianism to ensure the continued dominance of white people, and increasingly support fascistic and authoritarian leaders and policies as a way of imposing their will on other Americans.

Despite the feigned dismay of too many observers and commentators, Republican elected officials and other leaders will not abandon Donald Trump and his movement in this extraordinary moment. Why should they? After all, they agree with him, endorse his policies and fear his voters.

Writing at the Washington Post, columnist Brian Klaas explores that relationship:

These dynamics, which might seem like abstractions, help to explain why so many Trump voters are not only willing to go along with Trump as he tries to overturn the results of a democratic election that he lost — they’re actually willing to punish Republican politicians who don’t indulge Trump’s despotic whims. It’s clear that elected Republicans — who largely refuse to answer basic factual questions about the winner of the presidential election — know that their voters are authoritarians. And they are catering to them.

In the aggregate, Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their supporters are part of a fascist and authoritarian movement whose strategic goal is to tear down multiracial democracy, and by doing so to prevent implementation of the types of progressive social and economic policies favored by most Americans.

Donald Trump will almost certainly leave office on Jan. 20, when Joe Biden becomes president of the United States. But Trump will not disappear as a force in American life and politics, despite how political elites including the mainstream news media are trying to convince themselves and the public otherwise.

America’s democracy is a house built on top of a sinkhole. Donald Trump, his successors and followers and their movement will continue to burrow beneath it, trying to make the whole structure collapse. On top of that rubble they hope to build not a shining city on a hill but an ugly monument to white supremacy, Christian fascism and kleptocratic depravity.

If such an outcome is to be avoided then the reality of Trump’s ongoing coup attempt must be confronted. The immense damage inflicted by his regime must be assessed and repaired. His collaborators in the American fascist project must be confronted and repudiated. If that can happen, we can perhaps save the nation.