Red alert for reporters: Trumpers are destroying evidence on their way out the door

The news that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield forced career staff to delete an incriminating email from a Trump political appointee is a red-alert moment for Washington-based reporters, who should fan out everywhere Trump loyalists may be destroying the evidence of their misdeeds as they head out the door.

“Reporters should start looking at that right now and start saying to the White House, to the executive branch agencies: ‘What are you going to do to preserve documents?'” said Lisa Rosenberg, executive director of the wonderful pro-transparency group, Open the Government.

I interviewed Rosenberg because of her leading role in a brilliant new report full of recommendations for how the Biden administration should repair critical gaps in transparency, ethics and oversight. The report also serves as an excellent guide for how reporters should hold the next administration accountable. I’ll have a lot more on that soon.

But first things first.

“One of the concerns we in the accountability community have right now is that there’s going to be a wiping of all the computers — that all the documents are just going to disappear,” Rosenberg said.

The potential scope of the problem is enormous, for obvious reasons.

“Donald Trump has absolutely no credibility when it comes to preserving documents,” Rosenberg said. “He’s been doing this all along: he deletes tweets, even though they’re public policy; he rips up notes, when they’re even taken — he rips up notes and some of his folks have to go and literally tape them back together again.”

Another example: Greg Miller of the Washington Post reported last year that Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials.”

“So we know that there’s a history where there are supposed to be documents preserved,” Rosenberg said, “but then they disappear or they vanish.”

Of course it wouldn’t just be Trump doing the destroying and deleting. “Because of Trump, and so many other folks that he surrounds himself with because of their history, there’s a real risk that they’re going to want to cover things up and hide things and prevent them from being embarrassed,” she said. “Potentially to protect them protect them from legal liability.”

Reporters can’t just sit back and wait for the destruction to reveal itself, Rosenberg said. “Journalists can hold folks’ feet to the fire. They can question people and they can remind people of what their duties are to preserve these records.”

Specifically, that means reporting that these official documents belong to the public, not to the president. That means reporting on the relevant federal laws, including the Presidential Records Act. It means a particular focus on electronic records, because they are so much easier to destroy — no bonfire or shredding party necessary.

The history of presidential records law is relevant. From a 2019 Congressional Research Service report:

Following his resignation as President, Richard Nixon wanted to destroy recordings created in the White House that, among other things, documented actions he and others took in response to investigations connected to a burglary in the Watergate building and his reelection campaign. Under policy at the time, presidential materials were considered the President’s private property. In response, Congress passed a number of laws to preserve the integrity of documents and other information related to Nixon’s presidency and made those laws applicable to all future presidencies.

Enacted in 1978, the Presidential Records Act (PRA; 44 U.S.C. §§2201-2207) established public ownership of records created by Presidents and their staff in the course of discharging their official duties. The PRA additionally established procedures for congressional and public access to presidential and vice presidential information and the preservation and public availability of such records at the conclusion of a presidency.

Several other laws are applicable, too. Richard Painter, the former ethics counsel to George W. Bush turned virulent Trump critic, recently explained on Just Security:

Destroying or stealing documents belonging to the United States government is a crime. Destroying or stealing documents to cover up another crime, or activity that may be under investigation, is also a crime. Lying about what happened to missing documents is yet another crime. A departing federal official may take personal property from the office but no more. That includes perhaps some family photos — and of course that red cap. But everything else stays where it is. Anyone who doesn’t understand that could end up staying with the government a lot longer than anticipated or desired.

Sadly, Trump is not the first president to make a mockery of records law. I extensively covered the George W. Bush administration’s many successful — if duplicitous — strategies to escape retention rules.

“I actually think journalists are the key enforcers of the records documents right now,” Rosenberg said. “And hopefully, they elevate the issue so that those good actors in the White House, if they see wrongdoing, if they see people covering up things, maybe they act, maybe they speak out, maybe there are whistleblowers.”

Reporters should encourage staffers to go public — or, barring that, to report what they’ve seen internally. One option would be to report to an agency’s inspector general, and insist that the IG request an immediate injunction, which would also make the issue public.

There are so many areas where Trump and his loyalists will face the judgment of history — if not of the judiciary — that it’s hard to know what to worry about the most when it comes to the destruction of documents. But it’s no surprise that the first solid evidence we’ve gotten relates to a cover-up of the Trump administration’s inexcusable and tragic politicization of the failed response to the coronavirus pandemic.

As Dan Diamond first reported for Politico, one disappearing document we now know about was an Aug. 8 email sent by Paul Alexander, who at the time was scientific adviser to then-Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo. Alexander was trying to get career employees in charge of the CDC’s canonical Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports to tone things down to match Trump’s downplaying of the virus.

Rep. James Clyburn, who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, disclosed the deletion in a letter to Redfield and HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

Clyburn summed it up in a tweet:

I am deeply concerned that the Trump Administration’s political meddling with the nation’s coronavirus response has put American lives at greater risk, and that Administration officials may have taken steps to conceal and destroy evidence of this dangerous conduct.

— James E. Clyburn (@RepJamesClyburn) December 10, 2020

Journalists should be concerned, too. They should make a full-court press on every source they have in the White House and the rest of the executive branch to root out any attempts to destroy the public record — before it’s too late.

Loeffler sides with Trump against “Big Tech” — after building a massive fortune in the industry

Earlier this week, the House approved a $740 billion defense spending bill by an overwhelming margin, in defiance of President Trump‘s threat to veto if Congress didn’t use the opportunity to strip internet platforms of a special legal shield — an unrelated issue that Trump has shoehorned into the debate under the guise of a national security risk.

The Senate, which already passed an earlier version of the annual resolution — the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — will now have to take up the measure again, setting up a showdown with Trump that puts additional pressure on a pair of Georgia Republicans headed for runoff elections: They can side with the military and risk Trump’s wrath, just weeks before the Jan. 5 election, or give Trump the votes he needs to ensure his veto stands.

Georgia itself has skin in the game: The bill funds upgrades to Robins Air Force Base, for instance, and includes a provision to help modernize combat equipment.

Both of the above provisions were requested by Georgia’s unelected multimillionaire Sen. Kelly Loeffler, former CEO of a cryptocurrency joint venture with Microsoft who has recently chosen to side with Trump on the Big Tech issue, apparently against the military’s immediate funding interests.

In July, Loeffler was touting her own contributions to the bill on her official Senate page, including an amendment “to further solidify our support for the security of Israel” and a bipartisan bill to help “enhance the VA’s capacity to provide care to veterans through telehealth.” She voted to pass the bill last month.

But with the January runoff approaching, after Loeffler survived a challenge from Rep. Doug Collins, her Georgia GOP rival, she has apparently aligned herself with Trump on the internet liability protections issue. This play to his base, however, is apparently at odds with Loeffler’s recent position as CEO of a cryptocurrency startup, not to mention her marriage to Jeffrey Sprecher, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.

In fact, Loeffler, who sold her individual stocks earlier this year amid questions about well-timed trades made ahead of the coronavirus pandemic, still appears to hold stakes in Georgia-based tech startup funds, according to her financial disclosures. Despite her claims that she does not take money from Big Tech, Loeffler’s campaign has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from major internet platforms, including Google and Facebook.

“HOLD BIG TECH ACCOUNTABLE!” Loeffler tweeted on Dec. 3, quoting a Trump tweet that targeted her GOP colleagues ahead of the NDAA vote.

“Looks like certain Republican Senators are getting cold feet with respect to the termination of Big Tech’s Section 230, a National Security and Election Integrity MUST,” Trump had tweeted, in reference to the liability protections. “For years, all talk, no action. Termination must be put in Defense Bill!!!”

But for years, Loeffler and Sprecher, invested heavily in that sector: Together, they held up to $10 million in tech stocks, including at least hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions — required financial disclosures do not offer exact dollar amounts — in Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Before her appointment to the Senate last December, Loeffler ran a startup called Bakkt, a joint cryptocurrency venture between tech giant Microsoft, Starbucks and her husband’s corporation, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which was Bakkt’s parent company. Bakkt converts digital holdings such as crypto and rewards points into cash, and offers a bitcoin futures market.

When Loeffler left Bakkt, ICE awarded her an unusually structured golden parachute estimated at some $9 million. The package also included a compensation agreement involving stakes in Bakkt.

Three months after Loeffler’s departure from Bakkt — and just after her final flurry of stock sales in February and March, which involved tech companies engaged in crypto — the company received a $300 million Series B injection from Microsoft and other companies. Loeffler still held that compensation agreement at the time, which according to her financial disclosures will vest her shares for any “future liquidity events.”

The NYSE, her husband’s company’s flagship subsidiary, also lists a number of tech companies, such as Verizon, Pinterest, Uber, Spotify and Oracle — if it seals the deal with social media platform TikTok, which Trump has repeatedly advocated.

According to NYSE data, following ICE’s 2013 acquisition, 75% of all tech IPO proceeds have been raised on that high-profile exchange.

Despite publicly vowing not to take money from Big Tech, and criticizing Collins during the 2020 campaign for accepting such contributions, Loeffler received tens of thousands of dollars from tech firms. Those contributions included $5,000 from a Google PAC before she even took office, as well as money from the tech monolith’s current and former lobbyists — the PAC allows employees to combine resources in support of candidates that share the company’s “common values.”

Still, in August, Loeffler told a small Georgia audience that she does not take money from big tech, but “speaks out against it.”

“Our freedom of expression is what makes us free as a country, allows us to have the important debate and conversations about important topics that we need to discuss,” she said. This was perhaps paradoxical, since the Section 230 protections Trump is obsessed with shield internet platforms from direct liability for content shared by users, and are widely seen as empowering free expression.

“I will never be silenced by the swamp and the fake news that want to attack conservative speech,” Loeffler added. “That’s why I’ve spoken out against Big Tech. I don’t take money from Big Tech, I speak out against it.”

The next month, a lobbyist for Facebook made the maximum allowable donation to her campaign.

We asked small business owners how they’ve weathered the pandemic

In April, a month after the pandemic hit the United States, Cliff Hodges was one of millions of small business owners teetering on the brink.

Hodges, who ran a small outdoor wilderness club in Santa Cruz, California, a beach town 75 miles south of San Francisco, applied for a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan to keep his business afloat — but he was denied, by three different banks, because they ran out of funds. The rejections weren’t a result of Hodges bad timing; he applied for the loan right away, the first day the banks made it available online. When Salon spoke with him in April, a fourth bank responded and marked his case as “closing.” He didn’t know exactly what “closing” meant, but he felt skeptical that a loan would actually come through. Disappointment clung to his voice.

“I haven’t been able to reach anyone, so maybe there is a small chance that I have money coming, but I don’t know,” he told Salon, nervously, in April.

Eight months since we last spoke, Hodges is relieved to report that the final bank delivered. He received a PPP loan and used it for payroll, and he’s already applied for forgiveness for a portion of it.

However, this doesn’t mean it’s business as usual for him, and he won’t go as far as saying the worst has passed. Instead, Hodges is living by a mantra that all small businesses live by — or at least, the ones that are lucky enough to still hang an “open” sign.

“We are surviving, I wouldn’t say we’re thriving, but we’re surviving,” Hodges said. “April, May and the first part of June were really tough.”

Hodges’ business, Adventure Out, offers small-group outdoor activities like surf lessons to wilderness survival training. Given what we know about how the novel coronavirus is transmitted outside, the services his business provides have been somewhat pandemic-proof. But as the state of California descends into another stay-at-home order, like most of the country, he’s buckling up for another season full of uncertainty.

“We’ve had a whole slew of cancellations and decreases in business,” Hodges said. “To get through this winter, and I think it’s going to be a really tough winter, another round of stimulus for small business is needed; I don’t see how we’re going to get through it without some sort of help.”

In September, business review site Yelp released a quarterly economic impact report with a harrowing statistic: 60 percent of business closures on its platform were permanent. The demographics of the small businesses that haven’t survived mirror the ongoing disparities we’ve seen throughout the pandemic. According to a separate survey by Color Of Change and Main Street Alliance, 46 percent of the Black small businesses polled were forced to close, or are planning to close within the next six months. And these statistics provide just a small snapshot of what’s happening.

“I think that we don’t know yet what the actual closure rates are going to be, but the ones that are surviving are surviving on a sort of skeletal operations, racking up a lot of debt,” Amanda Ballantyne, the executive director of Main Street Alliance, told Salon in an interview. “In the beginning of the pandemic, there were so many unknowns, and the federal relief packages were rolled out in ways that I think made it hard for a lot of real, independent small businesses to access them timely.”

The federal government designed the PPP program to provide small businesses with loans up to two and half times their monthly payroll. The loans could be converted into grants as long as 75 percent of the funds were used to retain employees; the loans had to be used within eight weeks from the time the loan was distributed in order for it to be forgiven.

That was in April, and small businesses have yet to receive further federal relief since then. Moreover, providing loans through private banks gave priority to business owners who had relationships with the bank, which exacerbated disparities, experts say.

“Moving the PPP loans through the private banking system was a big mistake,” Ballantyne said. “It sounds like Congress is going to restart the PPP again, but they should fix what we already know is wrong with the program.”

Small business advocates like Ballantyne, and John Arensmeyer, CEO of Small Business Majority, a small business research and advocacy organization, told Salon that grants will be key for “true” small businesses — meaning those that have fewer than 20 employees — to survive.

“We’ve been calling for grants from day one,” Arensmeyer said. “We want to see money set aside for lending institutions like CDFI [the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund] that serves more low income communities and communities of color, and we want to see loan forgiveness.”

Shayai Lucero, owner and floral designer of Earth & Sky Floral Designs in New Mexico, is relying on grants for Native American business owners and artists. She considered applying for the PPP loan, but ultimately given the size of her business and the amount she’d qualify for, she said it wasn’t worth it. Plus, most of her employees are seasonal. Lucero said one saving grace that has kept her business afloat is that she was already running her business out of her own home, and doesn’t have to pay for rent on a storefront. However, given the nature of her business, providing floral arrangements for life events, fewer celebrations this year means very thin margins.

“Last month, I operated at 35 percent of what I needed for the previous month in the previous year,” Lucero said. “I look at those numbers and I break down. . . . being able to be a home-based florist has helped me through the pandemic, but I don’t know how long it’s going to last.”

In Las Vegas, Nevada, Ron Nelsen, the owner and general manager of Pioneer Overhead Door, told Salon in an interview in April that he received an email stating that his bank no longer had PPP loan funds. Similar to Hodges, he eventually secured a PPP loan in “what they call the second tranche,” he explained.

Nelsen said he suspects that not having a personal relationship with the bank pushed him to the end of the line the first time he applied, and that the second tranche was an easier process to endure. But since then, operating a business that furnishes and installs garage doors, garage door openers, has come with its own set of pandemic-related challenges.

“There was a while we couldn’t find any masks, hand sanitizer, and all that stuff, for our employees,” Nelsen said. “And then you got the flip side of it, you go to customers houses and some people are COVID deniers, and they don’t want to have anything to do with the masks.”

Fortunately, he hasn’t had any employees get sick, but that’s in part due to more honest communication, and less privacy, between him and his seven full-time employees.

“You can’t just call in with a tummy ache, you have to tell me what your symptoms are,” Nelsen said. “Basically if you’re taking off work for any reason other than a hangover, you can’t come back the next day.”

As for what’s next, everyone Salon spoke with emphasized that shopping local will definitely help small businesses this holiday season, in addition to a much-needed federal relief package.

“Support small local businesses because Amazon doesn’t need any more of our dollars,” Hodges said. “I’m just really trying to promote that, not just in my professional life but also in my personal life.”

“Star Wars” spinoffs on Ahsoka Tano and “Rangers of the New Republic” coming to Disney Plus

Spinoffs of “Star Wars” fan favorite character Ahsoka Tano, “Ahsoka,” and “Rangers of the New Republic” will be coming to Disney Plus, Lucasfilm‘s Kathleen Kennedy announced during Thursday’s Disney Investor Day conference.

Rosario Dawson will star in “Ahsoka,” having made her debut as the character in “The Mandalorian” recently. Both new series are set within the timeline of “The Mandalorian.”

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Ahsoka Tano was the Jedi Padawan of Anakin Skywalker, but would go on to become something of a foil to him. She debuted in animated movie “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” and also appeared in the series “Star Wars Rebels,” voiced by Ashley Eckstein.

Dawson, though, was the first person to play Tano in live-action. In Season 2 of “The Mandalorian,” Pedro Pascal’s titular bounty hunter finds her in his search to deliver “the child” (now known to be named Grogu) to the Jedi. She ultimately, however, decides that she can’t mentor him.

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It was far from only bit of “Star Wars” news: Kennedy also announced new series “Andor,” starring “Rogue One’s” Diego Luna; “The Bad Batch,” a new animated series; and the fact that Hayden Christensen will be returning as Darth Vader opposite Ewan McGregor in “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” All the new series will be coming to Disney Plus.

Also on Disney Plus’ “Star Wars” docket are “Lando,” a new “event series” focused on Lando Calrissian with “Dear White People” director Justin Simien developing, and “Star Wars: Visions,” a series of animated shorts.

On the feature side, Patty Jenkins will be directing the next “Star Wars” feature film, “Rogue Squadron,” set to release on Christmas 2023.

Disney Plus announced earlier in the presentation that it would be releasing 10 “Star Wars” series, in addition to 10 Marvel series, over the next few years.

The news comes as “The Mandalorian” ends its second season on Disney Plus in triumph and the most recent “Star Wars” feature film, 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker,” endures a growing reputation as one of the worst of the 11 “Star Wars” movies to date.

Several creatives are attached to developing various “Star Wars” feature projects, including “The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson, Marvel Studio chief Kevin Feige, “Thor: Ragnarok” director Taika Waititi and “Sleight” director J.D. Dillard with “Luke Cage” writer Matt Owens.

See footage of “Andor” and “The Bad Batch” below.

“Alien” TV series from Noah Hawley set for FX

FX boss John Landgraf has confirmed an “Alien” television series is in development from Noah Hawley. Ridley Scott is also in talks to serve as executive producer.

Per Deadline: “The series is billed as being the first ‘Alien’ story set on Earth, and will blend the timeless horror of the original 1979 movie and the non-stop action of the 1986 James Cameron-directed second.” (Disney, apparently, does not consider the “Alien vs. Predator” series to be part of the official franchise.)

“We’re moving quickly to bring audiences the first television series based on one of the greatest science-fiction horror classics ever made,” Landgraf said during a Disney Investor Day announcement. “‘Alien’ will be helmed by ‘Fargo’ and ‘Legion’s’ Noah Hawley, stepping into the creator [and] executive-producer chair, working alongside Sir Ridley Scott. Set not too far into our future, it’s the first ‘Alien’ story set on Earth, and by blending both the timeless horror of the first ‘Alien’ film with the non-stop action of the second, it’s going to be a scary thrill ride that will blow people back in their seats.”

Deadline first reported in March 2019 that former Fox film chief Stacey Snider “fended off an attempt by Hawley and FX to take the ‘Aliens’ franchise and turn it into a miniseries,” but that was before the Disney-Fox merger. Hawley recently said that while an “Alien” limited series hasn’t gained much momentum post-merger, talks about developing one continue “from time to time.”

“I know that there’s an effort to reshuffle a lot of things post-Disney takeover and it was a conversation that I had a couple years back,” Hawley told Deadline earlier this year about the limited series. “I know that like any studio that there’s a great desire to make the most of one’s library so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like that.”

In a September interview with Observer, Hawley spoke for the first time in depth about his approach to an “Alien” miniseries.

“‘Alien’ is sort of about humanity at its worst,” Hawley said. “There’s this moment in the second film when Sigourney says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t screw each other over for a percentage.’ If you look at what ‘Alien’ [films] tend to be, it’s usually a trapped story — trapped in a ship, trapped in a prison, etc. And because the Alien has this life cycle to it, where it goes from egg, to chestburster, to xenomorph, there becomes a certain routine to it.”

Even beyond the voice recast, “Big Mouth” nails the adventures of an awkward Black girl

Geek culture’s coolness is only a very recent phenomenon. People tend to forget that. Many more people overlook the fact that geekdom isn’t an all-inclusive world, even now.

But it really, really wasn’t back in the day, when I was the approximate age of “Big Mouth” character Missy Foreman-Greenwald. Putting it simply, if you were a Black girl who was really into comic books, “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” and spent more time with her nose in high fantasy novels than thumbing through the pages of “Seventeen,” you were not getting a whole lot of attention at school dances.

Let me phrase that another way – I wasn’t. In “Big Mouth” Missy does OK. She’s has two guys fighting over her and doesn’t know what to make of that. She also has an active fantasy live in which she travels in the universe in a space ship with Nathan Fillion as her guide and consort. Totally normal girl stuff.

For most of its run “Big Mouth” treats Missy like every other middle schooler, highlighting her extreme awkwardness as opposed to the fact that she’s a biracial eighth grader in predominantly white school. But in the second episode of the recently premiered fourth season (written by Kelly Galuska) the series finally confronts its hesitancy to have conversations about race by way of a summertime trip to Atlanta, where Missy spends time with her cousins Lena (voiced by Lena Waithe) and Quinta (Quinta Brunson).

And while Lena and Quinta are kind to Missy, they let her know in no uncertain terms that her Black father and Jewish mother are depriving her of fully connecting to her cultural identity by avoiding talking about race and racism.

“Have you ever had your hair braided?” Quinta asks. The answer is no.

“Have you ever been forced to watch a bootleg of a Tyler Perry play?” Lena says. “I don’t know?” Missy answers.

“Do you prefer sweet potato pie or pumpkin pie?” Quinta queries. “What’s the difference?” Missy asks in reply. “I’m gonna slap her in the face!”

“Your parents,” Lena concludes, “haven’t let you be Black.”

Until Season 4, neither did the creators of “Big Mouth.” Not really.

When it comes to exploring and satirizing the horrors of puberty, “Big Mouth” has no parallel with regard to its sheer in-your-face grossness, played up to maximize the audience’s discomfort and thereby placing us, the viewers, in the same arena of squeamishness as its characters. “PEN15” gets close, but this one really captures the icky weirdness of the child-to-adult transformation.

The animated series primarily follows the adventures of series co-creator Nick Kroll’s character Nick and his best friend Andrew (John Mulaney) as they and their friends contend with their burgeoning impulses and individual senses of self and changing bodies. Along the way they and other kids in their school muddle through journeys of sexual and gender identity and face a number of conundrums and scenarios calling attention to the unequal playing field upon which society place men and women when it comes to how they interact, dress, speak or behave.

Preventing all of this from being too serious is the series’ crew of Hormone Monsters voiced by Kroll, Maya Rudolph, and – as of Season 3 – Thandie Newton, who debuted as Missy’s fairy godmonster Mona. Newton’s casting represents a major marker for Missy in that Mona is strictly hers; Rudolph’s monstress split duties for a time between Nick and Jessi Glaser (Jessi Klein), the other central female character.

Newton, like Missy, is Black. Until this past summer, however, Missy was voiced by Jenny Slate, who is not. Had “Big Mouth” continued to universalize the pubescent experience without addressing Missy’s Blackness, Slate likely would have remained in that role. The series itself would also lose some of its honesty, which is its main currency.

Instead of eliding that conversation, the writers step into the center of it. “Big Mouth” frequently gets meta with its dialogue, which is why this Missy quote from “A Very Special 9/11 Episode” has received so much attention: “I’m really struggling with my racial identity right now. My mom’s white, my dad’s Black, I’m voiced by a white actress who’s 37 years old!”

Slate recorded most of Season 4 but officially exited the role in June and was replaced by writer and comedian Ayo Edebiri, who takes over in the penultimate episode “Horrority House.” Her exit was one of many white voice actors leaving behind the animated people of color they played after years of being called out about it. Mike Henry gave up voicing Cleveland Brown, and Hank Azaria left Apu the iconic Kwik-E-Mart owner on “The Simpsons” (but not, presumably, the royalties earned by their many years in the respective roles). Kristen Bell voiced a biracial character on “Central Park” until this summer when she, too, announced she wouldn’t play the role anymore.

(The winds of change came too late for “Bojack Horseman” to recast Diane Nguyen with an Asian actor instead of Alison Brie, but Raphael Bob-Waksberg has loudly broadcast his mea culpas.)

Vacating a role to enable a person more fitting to play it is one thing, but the crucial difference with “Big Mouth” is how they’re doing it. As Lena and Quinta insist (and the series’ writers have acknowledged elsewhere) grappling with one’s cultural identity is central to the adolescent experience for people of color.

Missy only begins to figure out who she wants to be as she matures, starting with giving up her beloved and extremely unfashionable overalls and moving on to discovering via a classmate what it means to “code switch” in the 9/11 episode. “Big Mouth” doesn’t draw a single conclusion as to the legitimacy or propriety of any aspect of Missy’s identity, or allow any character to bully her into anything she doesn’t want to do or be.

The most touching part of her journey, however, is the handoff from Slate to Edebiri. It occurs in a hallucinatory nightmare sequence where Missy is berated by multiple mirror images of herself. (Mirror Missy is her aggressive alter ego, representing the character’s extreme suppression of rage and every other negative emotion.)

Each insists that there can only be one version of her which is, of course, every teenager’s quandary and personal horror. It was challenging enough for Missy to trade in her childish overalls for more mature jeans.

Eventually she finds a version herself that she recognizes by assembling shards of each image into a new whole, another alter-ego character called Mosaic Missy . . . which is where Edebiri permanently steps into Missy’s shoes. The changeover from Slate’s voice to Edebiri’s is barely noticeable. But everything leading up to it ensures that it matters.

“Big Mouth” hasn’t always hit the nail on the head with regard to portraying the singular difficulties faced by of its kids that don’t fit a heteronormative mold, and it has weathered criticism about those missteps.

In the wake of that, the show could have gone on doing what many other animated series featuring a Black character do and have done for many years, which is to content itself with featuring an animated character that’s brown in a sea of peach, tan or if you’re talking about “The Simpsons,” yellow. Diving into the layers of who Missy is growing to be only enriches the experience of the series while taking nothing away from how broadly appealing and relatable she is no matter who is traveling along with her adventures. For her, change is uncomfortable and inevitable; for the series, so far this change is only a good thing.

All episodes of “Big Mouth” are currently airing on Netflix.

“Wrath of Mark”: Antitrust lawsuits against Facebook accuse Zuckerberg of stifling competition

In a pair of antitrust lawsuits filed against Facebook on Wednesday, the federal government and 48 attorneys general accused the social media giant of engaging in illegal tactics to stifle competition, including subjecting companies that would not agree to sell to CEO Mark Zuckerberg to the “wrath of Mark.”

“For almost a decade, Facebook has had monopoly power in the personal social networking market in the United States,” the 46 state officials, as well as attorneys general from Guam and the District of Columbia, wrote in their complaint. This accusation was echoed in a filing by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which said that Facebook “has maintained its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire.”

According to the filings by the attorneys general and the FTC, Zuckerberg at one point wrote to a colleague that “[o]ne thing about startups . . . is you can often acquire them” in order to build a protective “moat” around their own company by neutralizing the competition. The state officials’ filing also claims that Zuckerberg would intentionally offer competing companies prices so high “they’d have to consider it” and alleges that “if you stepped into Facebook’s turf or resisted pressure to sell, Zuckerberg would go into ‘destroy mode’ subjecting your business to the ‘wrath of Mark.'”

The state officials’ complaint says that Facebook “intensively monitored” new apps and startups, purchasing those that they deemed a threat to Facebook’s “monopoly power.”

According to both filings, this was why Facebook purchased Instagram and WhatsApp. As the state officials put it, when Facebook decided not to purchase a company or was told by the owners that they were not interested in selling, “Facebook cut off access to key components of its immensely valuable network.”

In one anecdote from the state officials’ complaint, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom asked an Instagram investor who personally knows Zuckerberg whether the CEO would go into “destroy mode” if he refused the company’s $1 billion purchase offer in 2012. The investor allegedly replied, “probably (and probably also if we just don’t engage at all).” Zuckerberg later reinforced this impression when he is quoted as telling Systrom, “At some point soon, you’ll need to figure out how you actually want to work with us. This can be an acquisition, through a close relationship with Open Graph, through an arms length relationship using our traditional APIs, or perhaps not at all.” Zuckerberg also intimated that Facebook could develop services similar to those provided by Instagram and crush the competitor that way.

In an anecdote from the FTC filing, the federal government described how Facebook celebrated its purchase of WhatsApp in 2014 by clearly describing it as neutralizing a potential competitor. One manager allegedly wrote in an instant message that it was “w]orth it” because “their numbers are through the roof, everyone uses them, especially abroad…. Prevents probably the only company which could have grown into the next FB purely on mobile[.] . . . [1]0% of our market cap is worth that[.]”

The filing also describes how a Facebook executive wrote to colleagues that the company would not need to worry about spending 5-10% of its market cap every few years to “shore up” its position because “we think this is a ‘point in time’ where change is coming to the mobile landscape. I hate the word ‘land grab’ but I think that is the best convincing argument and we should own that.”

The state officials’ complaint argues that Facebook’s alleged illegal monopoly hurts users, as it gives the company “wide latitude” to collect and sell users’ private information, and controls what users see and do. The complaint alleges that the user experience has been degraded by the business interests of Facebook, which have distorted their experience of Facebook and led to “less choice in personal social networks . . . and reduced investment in potentially competing services”

The FTC lawsuit and the state officials’ lawsuit are both being brought to a D.C. district court, according to The Washington Post. The FTC lawsuit is being led by Republican Chairman Joe Simons and the state officials’ lawsuit is being led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat.

In response to the lawsuits, Facebook vice president and general counsel Jennifer Newland said in a statement that “people and small businesses don’t choose to use Facebook’s free services and advertising because they have to, they use them because our apps and services deliver the most value.”

Prior to the 2016 presidential election, American regulators generally avoided confrontations with Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies, and Facebook faced its main challenges from European regulators. Facebook has been harshly criticized since the 2016 election for unwittingly aiding in Donald Trump’s victory and allowing Russia to purchase political advertisements (perhaps also unwittingly). The company has also been accused by left-wingers of boosting right-wing news sources and simultaneously suppressing progressive counterparts. Conservatives have also accused Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies of discriminating against right-wing views.

Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley giant to face recent regulatory backlash. The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google last month and antitrust groups are also reportedly looking into actions against Amazon and Apple, according to The Washington Post.

Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School who has written extensively about antitrust laws, told Salon in October that antitrust lawyers will have their work cut out for them because traditional understandings of antitrust laws don’t necessarily apply to companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.

Even though these companies might generally “be doing a lot of bad things, they’re generally not charging high prices,” Hovenkamp said. She noted that most of their services, from email to social media accounts, were free to users. Hovenkamp made a similar point about Amazon. “You don’t see in consumer complaints about Amazon that they charge high prices for things, and the way they’ve managed their business to grow so incredibly is by low prices,” Hovenkamp said.

Yet a public report from a consumer rights group published in September 2020 did discover over a dozen instances of price-gouging by Amazon during the pandemic, particularly on consumer goods related to pandemic protection like hand sanitizer.

“Big win for religious freedom”: Supreme Court rules Muslims can sue over no-fly list

In a unanimous decision Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Muslim individuals who accused the FBI of placing them on the no-fly list in retaliation for refusing to spy on their communities may sue federal agents for damages, upholding a lower court opinion and rejecting the Trump administration’s challenge to the lawsuit.

The case—Tanzin v. Tanvir—began in 2013 and involves Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah and Naveed Shinwari, three Muslim U.S. citizens or permanent residents born abroad, who accused the FBI of trying between 2007 and 2012 to use the no-fly list to coerce them into becoming informants in violation of their religious liberty.

The 8-0 opinion, argued before Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court, was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. The justices ruled that the three men — who said their inclusion on the no-fly list prevented them from visiting family in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen for years and caused them reputational and employment-related harms — are allowed to seek monetary compensation from government officials under a 1993 federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which, as Reuters reported, “was aimed at ensuring the government had compelling reasons to substantially burden any person’s exercise of religion.”

“It is a soaring feeling,” said Tanvir, the lead plaintiff in the case, in a statement Thursday. “I made my life in this country, so this is important not just for me, but for everybody. I don’t want the same thing that the FBI did to me to happen to others.”

Matthew Callahan, a senior staff attorney at Muslim Advocates, a national civil rights organization that filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs, called the Supreme Court’s ruling “a rare, unequivocal victory for religious freedom that sets an important standard: government officials can be held accountable for the harm they cause.”

“We now know with certainty,” Callahan said Thursday, “that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act does allow people to sue the government for damages. This ruling closes a dangerous loophole that effectively gave government officials immunity for many violations of religious liberty.”

Big win for religious freedom!

The FBI placed Muslim men on the No-Fly List bc they wouldn't spy on other Muslims.

In Tanzin v Tanvir, #SCOTUS ruled that they, and all Americans, can hold the govt accountable for religious discrimination.

— Muslim Advocates (@MuslimAdvocates) December 10, 2020

Callahan added that the ruling “also clearly shows how our government has targeted and hurt Muslims.”

“It is plainly outrageous,” he said, “that the FBI would try and force Muslims to spy on their own community by placing them on the no-fly list.”

Diala Shamas, a human rights attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represented the plaintiffs, shared a pair of videos on social media in which Tanvir describes how he was punished by the FBI and Shinwari, another plaintiff in the case, explains why he refused to collaborate in the persecution of a “dehumanized … marginalized” minority group.

“The Supreme Court today vindicated our clients’ courageous stand for their religious freedom as Muslims who would not spy on their own faith community,” said Ramzi Kassem, a professor of law at CUNY who argued the case before the court.

According to Kassem, “The court’s unanimous decision also sends a clear message to FBI agents who should think twice now before abusing the power to put people on the no-fly list.”

“The FBI cannot continue to assume they can act with impunity in surveilling, harassing, and punishing the Muslim community, and other vulnerable communities federal law enforcement entities seek to target,” said CCR legal director Baher Azmy in a statement Thursday.

Callahan pointed out that “for decades now, government surveillance and anti-Muslim policies have been an unavoidable fact of life for American Muslims.”

“Because of this ruling,” he noted, “American Muslims now know that they can speak out and fight back in court against injustice.”

Why do smart people lie about alien encounters?

Astronomers, astrophysicists, and nonprofits like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute have been scouring the skies for signs of intelligent life for decades, and have thus far come up blank. Every year, thousands of stories of supposed alien abduction or interstellar communication emerge from citizens around the world, though just about all of them are dismissed by the scientific community outright for lack of evidence. Yet while most stories of alien abduction emerge from those who are either mentally ill or desirous of attention in some regard, occasionally someone with political clout makes such claims — as the former head of an Israeli space agency did last week when he announced that human beings have made direct contact with extraterrestrials.

Haim Eshed, who used to lead Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that extraterrestrials from a “galactic federation” have been in contact with human beings but do not want the public to know as they feel our species is not ready yet, according to NBC News. He also claimed that President Donald Trump had planned on revealing the extraterrestrials’ existence but was asked to not do so in order to prevent “mass hysteria”; that there is an “underground base in the depths of Mars” where American astronauts and extraterrestrials interact; that the U.S. government signed a contract with aliens allowing them to do experiments here; and that the extraterrestrials are seeking to learn about “the fabric of the universe.”

“They have been waiting until today for humanity to develop and reach a stage where we will understand, in general, what space and spaceships are,” Eshed said of the supposed galactic federation.

Astronomers and physicists are so accustomed to outrageous claims of extraterrestrial sightings that the phrase “it’s never aliens” has become a motto of sorts, repeated in Twitter memes and college course titles. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” popular astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan famously quipped. Sagan was fond of pointing out that skepticism formed the crux of the scientific method, and scientists still apply his lesson to claims of alien sightings. Recent fast-moving objects observed by the US Defense Department, for instance, went viral over public speculation that they might be alien craft; yet human engineers are perfectly capable of producing such fast-moving drone craft right here on Earth. Occam’s Razor suggests a human origin is far more likely.

Hence, an attention-hungry loner or a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic person reporting alien sightings is common enough as to not be newsworthy. That is because the public does not expect this type of person to be credible, and such people generally don’t provide evidence that would make their claims so.

But what about when someone with political power, influence and credibility makes such obviously bogus claims? Someone like Eshed, or astronaut Edgar Mitchell, or former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer?

“Without further information, it is impossible to know what psychological factors might underlie these claims from Haim Eshed,” Christopher C. French, a British psychologist who specializes in the psychology behind people claiming to believe in or have experienced the paranormal, wrote to Salon.

Notably, there are psychological disorders that commonly lead to their sufferers believing that they are under the influence of aliens. The connection between mental illness and claims of alien abduction is common enough that there are entire psychology studies devoted to the subject. A 1983 paper published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, titled “Psychoses and unidentified objects,” studied six subjects who claimed to have communicated with aliens who had given them missions to protect humanity. The study’s two co-authors concluded that “five of them suffered from a paranoid delusional state often akin to paraphrenia,” a mental condition characterized by paranoid delusions and hallucinations.

French speculated as to the possible psychological explanations for Eshed’s claims, explanations that apply to other prominent alien-seers like Hellyer and Mitchell. French noted that he could be telling the truth, although “given the outlandish nature of his claims and the lack of any direct evidence to support them” French agreed it was “extremely unlikely.”

A more likely possibility is that Eshed genuinely believes what he is saying despite it being false, in which case French says he would want to know the reasons. “Has he seen any actual evidence or is he basing his claims on reports from others? If the former, is the evidence convincing? If the latter, are these others credible? What are they basing their claims upon? Is it possible that Eshed is delusional? This is certainly a possibility.”

Finally, it is possible that Eshed and his ilk are deliberately lying; certainly, he has a financial incentive to do so, as he is promoting a book about UFOs. “He has already garnered much attention by his claims,” French mused. “He will no doubt become the latest ‘darling’ of the UFO community and be invited to address UFO conferences, not to mention appearances on talk shows, and so on. Maybe it’s all a practical joke and he is laughing all the way to the bank?”

“Mr. Eshed’s background as a space security official serves as a reminder that outlandish views are not limited to uneducated people,” Glenn C. Altschuler, a historian at Cornell University who regularly contributes to Psychology Today (where he has written about UFOs), told Salon by email. Altschuler also noted that “Eshed is, in essence, inviting journalists to ask President Trump what he knows about the alien presence on earth. It leaves one wondering what Mr. Trump, no stranger to outlandish theories, might say about Eshed’s claims.”

Altschuler also argued that belief in UFOs can be viewed in the broader context of people interpreting reality in different ways based on influences including those of “parents, peers, and charismatic figures.”

He added, “We know as well that when presented with evidence that seems to debunk their beliefs or conspiracy theories they often hug them ever more tightly, exhibiting what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Motivations, of course, vary from individual to individual — and it is important to understand that many people fervently believe that what they are saying is true. They may interpret attention as validation. If they are telling a story for material gain, of course, all bets are off.”

French made a similar point, noting that Eshed’s unsubstantiated claims are part of a larger phenomenon that can lead to misinformation being taken seriously by large sections of the public.

“The problem here is that these claims will fuel conspiracy beliefs of all kinds,” French wrote to Salon. “After all, if the US government are lying about this, what else are they lying about? Maybe the COVID vaccination programme really is just a cover to inject us all with microchips to control our minds? This way lies collective madness — and thousands more unnecessary deaths.”

He added, “If Eshed has any solid proof to support his claims, he should tell the world what it is. Until he does so, we should feel no more obliged to believe him than we would any other conspiracy theorist.”

In general, many well-meaning people believe fervently in UFOs, though few go so far as to claim to have been abducted or met a Galactic Council. Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told IBTimes UK in 2015 that people may also be more inclined to believe in UFOs if they are more open to new ideas in general.

“You get the sense that there’s kind of a dimension of suggestibility, so if you’re high on that spectrum … [you may be more] willing to entertain new ideas and fantasies. You start to get into the domain where people believe things that seem highly improbable,” Krauss Whitbourne explained.

“Best American Food Writing” spotlights kitchen abuse and the curious reformation of bad-boy chefs

For the last several decades, it seemed that a large swath of American restaurant culture was predicated on, and in some cases propelled by, vice. Some was of the more innocuous variety. Anthony Bourdain — whose own 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential” is home to the oft quoted, “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride” — once famously scandalized Oprah by divulging the amount of butter contained in most restaurant dishes. Late nights are the norm, while drug and alcohol use are open secrets.

Bad-boy chefs of varying shades — the bacchanalian reveler, the serial womanizer, the aggressive taskmaster —and drama-filled restaurants found their way into tabloid pages and scripted narratives like “Burnt” and “Sweetbitter.” And for a while, that all felt like the industry standard.

But then, starting in about 2017, a switch was flipped.

This was partly propelled by #MeToo. Several big-name chefs and restaurateurs came under scrutiny, including renowned New Orleans chef John Besh, pastry chef and TV host Johnny Iuzzini, and Ken Friedman, who owned the West Village gastropub The Spotted Pig — which had a private third floor that earned the nickname “the rape room.” In March 2019, chef and television personality Mario Batali surrendered shares in all his restaurants and Eataly, the fast-growing Italian grocery chain, following police investigations into two sexual misconduct allegations.

The New York City Police Department eventually closed the investigation due to New York’s statute of limitations, and lack of sufficient evidence, but several unnamed employees told the New York Times that Batali was “known for fostering a sexist, raucous culture that ignored misconduct by male employees and demeaned female workers.”

The article continued: “Before the #MeToo movement, however, that kind of atmosphere was hardly unique to Batali.”

And while the conversation about the state of the restaurant industry has shifted dramatically in 2020 — amid mandatory closures and the reduction of services, despite no promise of a large-scale government bail out — “The Best American Food Writing of 2020” draws attention again to the important topic of America’s changing professional kitchen culture.

Food writer and chef J. Kenji López-Alt, who co-edited the collection, points in particular to Hannah Goldfield’s piece, “Joe Beef and the Excesses of Restaurant Culture,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker in May 2019.

“I found it really interesting because it was about a chef that kind of exemplifies that sh**ty restaurant culture that people in the industry, well and people outside the industry, I guess, were familiar with,” López-Alt said. “It was specifically about him trying to redeem himself.”

Goldfield’s piece centers on the story of chef David McMillan and his partner Frédéric Morin, the men behind the Montreal dining institution, whose menu “is defined by exuberant immoderation, a blend of the haute and the gluttonous.”

“For a long time, McMillan and Morin made a point of living the experience that they were selling,” Goldfield wrote. “McMillan was known for drinking with his customers, and then downing bottles of wine long after dinner service was over. The chefs’ spirit of extravagance helped make Joe Beef a success.”

Despite its success, Goldfield reported, Joe Beef was sometimes a volatile and abusive work environment. She details what a former employee called “bulls**t frat-boy stuff.” McMillian would use homophobic slurs and greet female customers with the line, “You’re so hot I would chase you through the forest with an ax.” He one time forced a cook to drink a glass of chicken blood saying it was his “mother’s strawberry wine,” followed by a shot of whiskey to kill the salmonella. “That’s boys being bad in the kitchen,” McMillian told Goldfield.

“A former bartender, Sarah Reid, told me, without animus, that McMillan slapped her butt on several occasions after he’d been drinking,” Goldfield wrote. “At the time, she considered it a sign that he was pleased with her work. ‘We’re all brainwashed in this culture,’ she said, adding, ‘I don’t want to demonize Dave and say that he is the problem.’ (McMillan denies ever slapping Reid. “Even in my drinking, I remember everything,” he said.)”

But then in 2018, Morin and several employees and friends staged an intervention for McMillan at Joe Beef. He entered rehab for a month where he received a “crash-course in alcoholism, wellness, and the language of sobriety.” Morin soon got sober, as well.

Goldfield takes an in-depth look into how the men’s decision has changed the culture at Joe Beef — and how McMillian and Morin hope their example changes the industry at large, and parses out the mixed industry response to their shift. “Where they once promoted unbridled hedonism, they’ve now become unlikely crusaders against the excesses of restaurant culture,” she wrote.

“What I found interesting [about this story] is here’s this guy who perpetuated this culture for a long time and actually became popular and famous, in parts, for behaving that way,” López-Alt said. “And now here it is again, getting rewarded for changing. I don’t know, I find it interesting that as a white male chef, it’s hard to do wrong, right?”

He continued: “On one hand, it’s cool — he’s setting a good example, showing people they can change and maybe inspiring other people to change. But on the other hand, why are we celebrating this guy when there are people who never were a**holes and who never behave this way?”

López-Alt points to two other pieces in the collection that speak to the nuances of changing professional kitchen landscape: Kat Kinsman’s “Where’d You Go Rocco DiSpirito?” and Kim Seversen’s “It’s Not Always Easy to Be Jamie Oliver” (which originally published in Food & Wine and The New York Times, respectively). Both pieces center on chefs who saw their professional heights when the cultural concept of celebrity chefs was truly skyrocketing, and assesses what happened when their stars dimmed — through bankruptcies, health issues, vicious tabloids spreads, restaurant closures.

Underpinning both of these stories, López-Alt said, is an understanding of “male celebrity chef culture, both how it’s changed and how and how it changed these men over the decades.”

And the industry is changing, but perhaps not quickly enough. “The Best American Food Writing 2020” also features an excerpt from “Top Chef” alum’s Kwame Onwuachi’s memoir, “Notes From a Young Black Chef.” In it, he reveals a culture of kitchen abuse at Thomas Keller’s famed New York City restaurant Per Se.

“The kitchen at Per Se was a clean place but hard and heartless too,” Onwuachi wrote. “The hierarchy was a necessary one but the weight of it was crushing to those on the bottom. The brigade system ensures that food gets to the plate looking pretty; it also gives free range to rage-inclined pricks to indulge their worst impulses.”

Even with the best of intentions, Onwauchi wrote, those habits die hard.

“The anger was like black mold in the air ducts, infecting everything,” he wrote. “As I’ve opened my own kitchens, at times I’ve certainly been guilty of regurgitating the habits I learned at Per Se. But when I grow enraged, I also try to remember how it made me feel to be yelled at on the line. From Per Se, I try to extract the sense of urgency without the poison of anger.”

And while the local restaurant industry is in a undeniable, heartbreaking state of freefall from the pandemic, reading from the collection — especially paired with this recent report about kitchen abuse at Mission Chinese — it makes me wonder what it will look like when it finally settles again.

Ted Cruz bends the knee: He’ll argue Trump’s “garbage” Texas election lawsuit before Supreme Court

At President Trump‘s personal request, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has agreed to argue a longshot lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court that has been characterized as “insane,” “garbage,” and “simply mad.”

The lawsuit was filed earlier this week by Cruz’s fellow Texan Ken Paxton, attorney general of the Lone Star State and current target of an FBI bribery investigation. It was quickly met with derision from legal experts as a baseless and unconstitutional assault on the rights of voters.

There is no evidence of fraud in the presidential election, according to election officials in every state. President-elect Joe Biden won with a record-setting 81 million votes — a margin of victory of more than seven million votes over Trump.

Trump asked Cruz on Tuesday to argue the case, which was filed the previous night and asks the court to block what Paxton calls “unlawful and constitutionally tainted votes” about to be cast by electors from the key battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Paxton’s complaint, which cites bogus claims warmed over after weeks of failed GOP legal efforts in state courts, aims to convince the justices that those states made illegal procedural changes ahead of the election to limit the spread of the coronavirus, and the votes from those states should be invalidated.

Pennsylvania has already successfully argued that such an action would violate due process rights for millions of voters.

Legal experts immediately dismissed the suit’s chances of getting a hearing at the nation’s highest court. But on Wednesday afternoon, 17 Republican-led states, led by Missouri, joined an amicus brief in support of the quixotic crusade, despite the fact that several of those states had themselves implemented the same procedures that the lawsuit now seeks to invalidate post hoc.

Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, writing in a Bloomberg op-ed, called it a lawsuit from “Trump’s fantasy world,” and said it amounted to asking the Supreme Court to engage in “a constitutional coup d’état and give Trump a second term.” Republican attorney George Conway, husband of former top Trump official Kellyanne Conway, said the exercise was “insane,” and top election-law expert Rick Hasen called it “utter garbage” and “dangerous.”

Even Cruz’s Republican Senate colleagues have spurned the idea.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, called it “madness” to ask the Court to override voters. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., who along with Romney has been among a handful of GOP senators to vocally criticize Trump, pointed out that Texas’ solicitor general — the official who typically represents the state before the Supreme Court, and a position Cruz held before being elected to the Senate — declined to sign on to the suit.

Still, Cruz conceded to the will of a man who once called his wife ugly and insinuated that his father conspired in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Cruz may well believe, as experts widely agree, that the Court will simply reject Paxton’s application outright, as Bush-appointed Justice Samuel Alito did in a one-sentence order to Pennsylvania Republicans just this week. But Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, noted that because the complaint falls within the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court — as opposed to trickling up from a lower-court appeal — there is an outside chance the suit gets a hearing. That would put Cruz on the hot seat.

It is unclear why Cruz, an attorney experienced in constitutional law, would take such a risk. As Sasse pointed out, it may have to do with Paxton’s criminal exposure. Sasse summed up the filing as a “PR stunt” that amounted to “a fella begging for a pardon.”

Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, agreed, tweeting on Tuesday that Paxton “should be sanctioned” for abusing his office to angle for a presidential pardon.

“It goes against the will of millions of voters,” Hasen said. “He’s going for a pardon with Trump.”

Paxton faces dual threats: a federal probe into allegations that he committed bribery and abused his office on behalf of a wealthy political donor, and a state indictment for felony securities fraud.

The federal investigation was launched last month, but the fraud case has bounced around Texas trial courts for five years, reaching the state’s highest criminal court before getting knocked back down to the county level. Paxton has still not faced trial.

A pardon by Trump would end the federal investigation, but the president has no power over state criminal charges.

“40 Years a Prisoner” confronts the police we’re supposed to trust “telling bold-faced lies”

Eight-year-old me couldn’t imagine not seeing my dad’s smiling face on Christmas morning, or drawing my mom a cartoon-filled card covered in thank yous for Mother’s Day, or the thousands of other memories small kids get to share with their parents. These types of memories make up the foundation of our traditions and are the things that we pass down to our kids. Mike Africa Jr., who was born in prison, was robbed of the chance of creating those in-person memories with his parents. The Philadelphia police department forced him to figure out life on his own.

Africa Jr.’s journey is brilliantly related in the new HBO documentary film, “40 Years a Prisoner,” directed by Tommy Oliver and available now on HBO Max. Featuring an all-star ensemble of producers including The Roots, Common and John Legend, “40 Years A Prisoner” is a compelling film about the horrors of America’s criminal justice system. The story begins in 1978 when Philadelphia police raided MOVE, a back to nature organization based on love, among other peaceful principles. Africa’s parents, two MOVE members, were arrested during that raid on trumped up charges and convicted before he was born. In the film, Oliver documents Africa Jr.’s life pursuit of freeing his parents, along with other MOVE members, and a decades-long battle with the Philadelphia police department. I recently got a chance to talk with Africa Jr. and Oliver about the film on an episode of “Salon Talks.”

Watch or read our conversation below to hear more about the never-before-seen archival materials that Oliver dug up about MOVE, what life is like for Africa Jr.’s parents now, and how the original MOVE members are responding to seeing their 40-year story on-screen.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tommy, in the film you document Mike’s parents’ long journey toward freedom with Mike at the center of it. A lot of people have heard of MOVE, but don’t really know about some of the core principles and values. Can you give our readers and our viewers a brief history?

Mike Africa Jr.: The MOVE organization’s belief is life, and our mission is to encourage people to protect life. There are companies that barter life for money, enslave animals like the zoo, and we protested against it. And that’s really what started it because the industries that make the money off of enslaving life, they make money for themselves and they don’t want anybody interrupting those establishments. They came at MOVE the way they came at us to try to stop us from speaking the truth about them.

It’s crazy. And Tommy, you are a Philly native and a lot of this stuff was happening when you were growing up. When MOVE was in the news was it something people your age was connecting to?

Tommy Oliver: No, it wasn’t. There were people who talked about MOVE, but they never really talked about it in a way that made a whole lot of sense or with a lot of clarity. And so there was always this group MOVE. I didn’t really know what that meant or who that meant. And there was some bomb or something that happened and there was some incident and that was about it. I really didn’t understand who they were or what happened until I got older and started doing my own research.

How’d you get involved?

Oliver: I am a research junkie, so I just started going through as much as I could. I read maybe seven books, probably 60-plus articles. And then I went to the Temple Urban Archive and I went through 72 boxes of stuff there, but I realized there were still things that were missing from what was there. I had a buddy who was working for the mayor, Maxwell Brown, introduce me to MOVE. He then introduced me to Ramona Africa. Ramona and I were set to meet and she brought along Mike, and I was like, “Who’s this dude?” I wanted to meet Mona. But Mike and I, we hit it off very well in the beginning.

There were a couple of things that really stuck out to me at that point, which was almost four years ago at a cafe in West Philly. I remember it vividly. There was the idea that he was born in prison, which I had no idea about. That was just a strange thing. The fact that his parents and the rest of the MOVE nine, well, seven at that point – because two of them had passed away – were still in prison. And on top of that, he was fighting to get them out. Those were all very big things. He was somebody who had went through a ton of stuff yet, despite all of it, there was not a shred of bitterness about him. He had such a positivity that was clear even in that first meeting. I knew there was something to it.

The more that we talked and the more I understood the things that they were fighting against some 40 years ago — police brutality, wrongful incarceration, systemic racism, abuse of power — the same stuff we’re fighting against today. It just became something that I had to be a part of. In general, MOVE had been pretty resistant to any type of media or journalist or anyone because they had been mistreated and misrepresented by the media for so long. But for one reason or another, he allowed me in in a very real open and honest way.

It’s funny that you touched on bitterness because there are so many reasons for you to be frustrated, Mike. Instead, you give urgency and knowledge and power, but never bitterness. How are you able to tap into that and still be so driven around this case?

Africa, Jr.: A deep sense of clarity, right? I’ve had several meetings with the man that dropped the bomb on our house. He was the mayor of Philadelphia at the time. It was a really scary and hard thing to do. Wilson Goode was the boogeyman for me. When my cousins and my sister would come to my house and we would be talking about things, we’d try to scare each other. One of the ways that we’d try to scare each other is by saying, “Wilson Goode’s going to get you.”

If we don’t recognize the mistakes that we made and move forward and grow from it, then we’re going to be stuck in the same vicious cycle that we’re in right now. It’s really disheartening to see the police still say things like we “should have been killed.” Eleven of my family members were killed by the police, and I’m not calling for the death of those police officers. I’m not even calling for their imprisonment. All I want is for us to be able to move forward and progress because that’s the only way that we can actually make any kind of real change that could lead to any kind of peace.

What was the experience like to sitting down with the man responsible for the bombing?

Africa Jr.: It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life. I left the meeting vomiting. There’s so many emotions that went through my body. Members of my family that had spent 40 years in prison, their kids were in the house that the bomb was dropped on. I’m getting nervous just thinking about it right now. There’s this extreme feeling of dishonoring them. There was this horrible feeling of nervousness and fear, but I did it because those people were still in prison and this man was saying that he was willing to help them get out. I would do anything for my family, and going through what I went through with meeting the mayor and speaking to him over a dozen times, that is something that I would do a hundred times if it meant getting my people out of prison so they don’t die in prison.

With all of the meetings that we’ve had, the results were positive. All of the MOVE non-members came home. Even though two of the members died in prison before that, one of the big benefits to me was that Delbert Africa, who people remember for being beat by four cops on August 8th, he was kicked so hard he was lifted up off the ground by the police and he was beaten. He was the Rodney King before Rodney King. He got out of prison and he died just six months later. But I really feel confident that the work that I did and the meetings that I had that were so hard to do was a big part of him coming home. Even though he only saw freedom for six months, at least he saw freedom.

We’re living in a time and a space right now where people are finally starting to acknowledge that there’s a whole lot of racist cops with the power to offset people’s lives for generations. What we’re not talking about enough is the system that promotes and honors and nurtures and cherishes that racism.

Oliver: People talk about the idea of the system and the police department being problematic and corrupt and a justice system that can convict nine people for the murder of one officer. They forget that these are instances of the system doing exactly and specifically what it was designed to do. Those aren’t accidents. Those aren’t outliers. Those are within the bounds of how our system is and was designed to function.

You have to remember where police departments came from. They grew out of slave catching. None of these things are mistakes or accidents. It requires a real understanding of that in order to fix the problem and not just a bunch of surface-level things to make us feel good or sleep better at night.

That’s what we’ve done for the longest time. It’s been a lot of “Hey, let me do this thing because things are bubbling up and we have to make a statement.” One of the things that really bothers me is the idea that people have been talking about how alarmingly relevant this film is, how topical this film is. That breaks my f**king heart. We’re talking about stuff that happened 40 years ago. 40 years ago and, case in point, the film screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival and it was a drive-in screening on a Monday. That same Monday, that very same day, was the day that Walter Wallace Jr. was killed in Philly across the street. Literally the same street as somebody in the film, a MOVE member, she lives on that block around the corner from what happened to MOVE.

We have a lot of work to do. I love Philly. I really do. And in many ways, this film is a love letter to Philly, but Philly needs to do better. Not that long after George Floyd was murdered, there was a video that I saw of Philadelphia police who were arresting a Black man and he yelled out, “I can’t breathe.” And the police officers screamed back, “That sh*t don’t work here.” And kept on with their knee on his neck.

I understand why you would get frustrated by people talking about why the film is timely, but this film has been timely since our existence in this country. People ask me all the time, “What has changed?” And I’m like, “The names of the victims.” That’s the only thing that changes.

Oliver: Exactly.

Mike, I want you to speak to this. We always hear about a few bad apples within departments and that most officers are here to protect us and make sure we’re safe. But that’s just not the case. It’s not a few bad apples. I personally feel like it’s a system that constantly grows all bad apples. Every time something like Walter Wallace happens, like Ahmaud Arbery happens, like Breonna Taylor happens, like George Floyd happens, I come back to this point.

Africa Jr.: The thing about the police department is that their emblem is a shield. What is a shield for? A shield is not something that a person who is offering a service carries. It’s something that is in defense of something. It’s like they’re defending themselves against the public because they’re protecting something that the public should destroy. The police don’t exist to protect the people from each other. The police exist to protect industry from the people because the system that exists is destroying life. It’s destroying us. It puts money between us and the things we need.

There’s a system that exists that if you don’t have money, you can’t eat. If you don’t have credentials from the system, you cannot get money. Why do we live in this society, in a system that would rather have people have billions of dollars and some people have no dollars? That’s not because those people just work harder to get those things. Those things were stolen and protected by the police so that those people maintain it. But when the people rebel, they call us terrorists and violent. They call a person that breaks a glass window a rioter and a looter, but the man that kneels on George Floyd’s neck is at home and being held like he’s some kind of hero.

In Philadelphia, one of my friends, Ant Smith, was arrested because they said he was aiding and abetting a person that threw a Molotov cocktail at a police car and burned it up. The person that burned up the police car, allegedly, is facing 10 to 80 years in prison. She’s been in jail since this whole year started. And he, according to them, aided and abetted her, he’s facing 10 to 30 years in jail. But the people that actually did the murders throughout the country, they’re all home. Kyle Rittenhouse is home. This is a system that is so bad, three Black people every day are killed by the police.

When people start talking about defunding the police and the police start coming back like they’re so appalled by the fact that people are saying these things, they should understand that people are not saying these things because they just don’t like police. They’re saying these things because they are negatively affected by the actions of the police. People would not be saying those things if the police were doing the service that they claim to do. Calling for the abolishment of the police, is much more so about building community unity and providing the necessary resources so that the violent crime and the things that the police claim they’re there for don’t even exist. If f they’re honest, they know that they would not want to be treated the way that they treat Black people.

Oliver: If you think about the film and you think about what happened to Delbert Africa, there are a couple of points to really dig into. One, what happened to Delbert was clear as day. It was recorded on film. There were witnesses. There were photographs. It was clear as day. It took a year to charge those officers who beat him and those officers all got off. Not only did they get off, it was a jury trial and the judge decided to unilaterally take the case away from them and issue a direct verdict of not guilty. Then those three officers went on air and said that they would do the exact same thing again.

I don’t know how to reconcile that. It’s such a hard thing because these are people that we are inclined to trust, people who are supposed to protect and serve. We want to believe them. We want to trust them. In addition to that, you think about what happened with the police commissioner. The commissioner, right after all of that happened, he went on air, and this is where most people got their information about MOVE. He goes up there and he says that he had a knife in one hand and a clip in the other. And that’s one of the reasons why I showed you in the film when he said that versus what actually happened.

All you have to go off of is what the police commissioner said, who’s up there with the mayor and the DA and these people who we are, again, inclined to trust. These are elected officials. These are community officials. These are people who are these giants and they are sitting there telling bold-faced lies. In a place like Philly this happened year in and year out for a long time. When you have a system that does those sorts of things, it makes it really hard to trust them. It makes it really hard to think that when I call these people, things will get better.

Watching the archival footage in the film and the reporting you captured, it made me feel like I was living through these experiences or going through these experiences with the Africa family. What type of emotions came out of both of you guys when you actually saw the finished product?

Africa, Jr.: There was a lot of emotions. On the one hand, I was so happy that Tommy put it together the way he did because I trusted him but there was still a level of reservation because we had been done so wrong in the media in the past. No matter how kind or polite people seemed, there was always some kind of negative spin on it that just made it feel like you can never trust anybody in any type of media. There was a part of me that was relieved because I’ve worked with Tommy and I didn’t want to take a film to my family that I felt they wouldn’t approve of. So that was a big part of it.

There was another part that was just so emotional for me — seeing my family the way they were in 1978 and the way they are now. They were young. There’s a scene where he has the kids in the yard and those kids were in the house, May 13th. They were among the kids that were killed. So to see them and remember them, it was really touching and emotional. It felt like a piece of my life that was taken from me had been given back to me. When I watched it again with my parents and other MOVE members, I didn’t even really spend a lot of time watching the film, I spent more time watching them relive those days. I knew that they were going to feel what I felt when I saw it. It’s a breath of fresh air.

How have your parents been adjusting since they got home?

Africa, Jr.: There’s a roller coaster of emotions with them. Keep in mind, 40 years had passed. We went through cassette tapes, CDs, mini disks. They had never seen a VCR tape. Home Depot didn’t exist when they went to prison. We didn’t have cell phones. There’s so many things that they’re learning at such a fast pace because 40 years ago, when they wanted something, they had to put it together, assemble it and wait. Now if they want anything, it’s almost like it’s instant. When we first came home, my mom and I were in the restaurant and she was looking for the knobs on the sink to turn the water on and the water spit out the faucet and she was amazed. It felt like the Jetsons or something to her. When I gave her a phone and Siri said, “Hello, Debbie, what do you need?” She threw her phone on the floor.

You might assume that when they come home their life is complete and this is all they wanted and now they’re just happy and they’re probably going to be happy forever. But there’s also a deep sense of depression that comes with being released from prison. When they first went to prison my parents had all of their brothers and sisters, both their parents and a lot of friends. And even though they know that their parents passed away while they were in prison and that many of their brothers and sisters are gone. The last time they were actually home, they were with those people. When they come home, they still expect to see them and when that doesn’t happen, the gravity of how much time has passed and how much they’ve lost since they’ve been away, begins to set in. There’s a level of deep depression that comes. Fortunately, they came home to my house, and we were able to work through all of those things and get them to smooth sailing. Right now they’re really, really happy. They’re really good right now.

Oliver: The first time I’d been on a plane was in September, which was seven months after not being on a plane, and it was to go to Philly because I didn’t want MOVE to be blindsided. The film was about to premiere in Toronto and I wanted to make sure that they saw the film before it was released to the world. It was a 450-seat theater in downtown Philly, and there were 15 of us in there, 15 MOVE members or so. I’m not a particularly emotional person at all but I remember when it started watching Mike, in particular, talk about his journey it got to me because he’s talking about why he was fighting and continuing to fight to get them out and having been there for what followed that for years of the struggle, the heartache, the disappointment. I knew how much he wanted his family home and I knew that he was just a kid who wanted his parents home and the rest of his family home. And that was it. That’s all it was. That really got to me.

The film is going to be a call to action for a lot of people. It’s going to ignite something inside of them. In your opinions, what should the conversation be centered around and what type of actions should directly follow those conversations?

Africa Jr.: We need to do everything. There’s no one thing that is going to change things. We need to do everything possible. It doesn’t matter if it’s a political thing, if it’s a street thing, any type of activity that we can get to make some changes is what people need to do. There’s no right or wrong way to work to make a change, outside of just straight up violence, hurting somebody. This is not a MOVE fight. This is not a Tommy or Mike fight. This is a something that affects us all. Anything that people can do, they should do.

Oliver: I think people often get confused and they think that protesting is the work. Protesting is not the work, protesting is the sizzle. The real work happens away from those things. And that’s not to diminish the importance of protesting because it matters, but we need real change. We need legislation change. We need different people in office. We need a ton of things that happen away from when people are out protesting because protesting will sometimes make you feel good for a bit and it’s, “Hey, I did my part.” Well, no, that’s a part of it. That is a part of pushing the collective consciousness toward something that we need to be concerned with, but that’s not enough. If we’re going to have a place where our kids inherit a world that is better than the world that we are currently living in today, there’s a lot that we have to do. There’s a lot that we have to continue to push.

“40 Years a Prisoner” is streaming on HBO Max.

The U.S. Constitution is hopelessly outdated. It’s time to re-envision it

The electoral crisis, the decline of trust in government, and gross income inequality in the United States may seem like separate issues. But they have a surprising, common origin: the US Constitution, or more accurately, its shortcomings. Indeed, the depth of multiple crises in our nation in 2020 — if not their existence entirely — are all rooted in our flawed Constitution and the judicial decisions that it has facilitated.

If you don’t believe us, consider the following:

The electoral crisis would not have occurred if the Presidential winner was based on the popular vote instead of the Electoral College — an institution born of slavery.

The human impact of the pandemic would be less severe if health care, food, housing and income were deemed inalienable constitutional rights.

Declining public trust in government, a political situation caused by candidates being more beholden to wealthy funders than voters, is due to the Supreme Court ruling that political money in elections is First Amendment–protected “free speech.”

Corporate influence in federal politics, including disproportionate receipt of CARES Act funds by large corporations and rules that let corporations get away with not having to list toxic chemicals on food labels, would have been impossible if courts didn’t grant multiple constitutional rights over decades to corporate entities (“corporate personhood“).

The social justice crisis of ongoing police brutality against people of color and mistreatment of immigrants on our border would not have happened if the “We the People” line in the constitution actually included all people.

The Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett would have been less contentious if Supreme Court Justices weren’t constitutionally appointed for life and had not granted themselves the ultimate power of “judicial review” – to review any legislative or executive action.

And the fires, floods, hurricanes and other increasing destructive impact of human-caused climate change would have been far less severe if our constitution affirmed basic rights to nature.

And that’s just the beginning.

Constitutions at their best reflect national inspirations and aspirations. They define the legal framework of how people structure their societies. Moreover, constitutions are moral or ethical documents — designating what is right and wrong — with profound implications on literally every aspect of people’s lives, their communities, country and the natural world.

Americans view the the US Constitution and its framers with a reverence that is almost religious, as if it were a stone tablet delivered by Moses descending from Mt. Sinai. The constitution’s perceived sacredness implies that it is only to be minimally and periodically amended, overseen by legal priests with exclusive knowledge of what should and should not be altered.

Overlooked in the centuries-long myth and lore of the perceived hallowed document has been the fact that the white, male, property-owning (including enslaved human beings) framers originally established rules favoring property rights over human rights – and made it nearly impossible for the public to change the rules.

Yet, our Constitution’s most democratic features, the ones that reflect our highest collective moral aspirations – the Bill of Rights, and expanding inalienable rights to freed slaves and women through various Amendments – were the result of successful social movements organized by people who weren’t so-called Founding Fathers.

Though 2020 will, thankfully, soon end, the systemic crises engendered by our flawed constitution will continue. Joe Biden replacing Donald Trump does not alter the fact that the aforementioned crises will continue, if not significantly worsen. Indeed, many of them are intertwined: The pandemic has affected the economy and undermined trust in government. More intense human-caused climate change in the future will produce enormous political, social and economic disruptions.

Profound problems require profound solutions that must be proportionate and equivalent in scale. One profound solution needed is fundamental constitutional change.

That might sound difficult, but other countries do it all the time. And for Americans, it really just involves a shift in thinking. The first step is to reject the dominant cultural narrative that we don’t have the power or right to question our own Constitution. This narrative’s points are familiar; one might say, “you can’t possibly expect to do better than the genius ‘founders’ who produced the most democratic constitution ever written,” or, “ordinary people aren’t qualified to have this discussion.” Others might say such a task is too radical, or say it is too hard to reach consensus, or, worse, that such a plot legitimizes those on the far-right who want a constitutional convention to abolish the Bill of Rights.

These are elitist and anti-democratic views. We all have metaphorical PhDs in what it’s like to live in a nation rampant with systemic oppression, undemocratic policies, and environmentally unsustainable practices. Leaving important discussions solely to surrogates (be they elected officials or constitutional scholars) is dangerous and disempowering. We, the living, shouldn’t be shackled by what individuals over 200 years ago created to address issues and problems they couldn’t have foreseen.

People across the U.S. already engage in constitutional discussions. People in almost every state periodically examine their own constitutions – proposing, debating and voting on changes. Several states have had constitutional conventions to replace or seriously amend their original version. The same is true at the municipal level with “charter review” commissions established every 10 years composed of ordinary citizens to review and recommend changes to voters to their municipal charter/constitution.

Not all countries look at their constitution with the same odd reverence as Americans. Indeed, constitutional conventions happen all the time in other nations — on average, every nineteen years in most countries!

The public is ripe for a radically democratic discussion to envision constitutional change that serves the interests of people, communities and the earth – with the goal to democratize the U.S. Constitution.

Today, December 10, is the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a fitting date for two pro-democracy human rights groups, Democracy Unlimited and Move to Amend, to launch Toward a People’s Constitution, a website to serve as a participatory arena for a respectful, vigorous and strategic discussion for a new people’s constitution can be envisioned. This was the theme of a recent Peoples Movement Assembly, where more than 100 people collectively discussed and envisioned what a currently relevant Constitution might contain.

In that assembly, we learned that people want a constitution that protects human rights, not just property rights. Americans like a lot of what’s in the Bill of Rights, (with some changes and exceptions), but the rights should extend further. People want a right to healthcare, housing, rights of nature, gender equity, a right to vote, and a whole lot more.

We don’t have to start from scratch. We can get over the hangover of American exceptionalism and take inspiration from the constitutions of other countries, the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, and the Second Bill of Rights proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This process is open to all individuals and organizational representatives who feel that self-governing people should take charge of their conditions. The internet has opened up new avenues for Americans to collaborate on such an endeavor, avenues that Americans could have barely conceived of back in 1776 and which allow for a far more democratic document. A new website allows anyone to do just that, and contribute to what they’d like to see in a people’s constitution.

As organizers, we’re not suggesting that at this moment we rush ahead together to develop a specific plan for a new constitution given the current political realities. Nevertheless, it is time to transform this period of uncertainty into an era of possibility for authentic democracy and re-envision our most fundamental institution from the ground up, to achieve real liberty and justice for all — for the very first time.

Perdue diverted military money to Trump’s wall — while profiting from his own Pentagon bill

Last month, Salon reported that a government accountability watchdog filed a federal complaint accusing Sen. David Perdue, one of two multimillionaire Georgia Republicans facing a tight runoff election, of possible insider trading, following reports that he appeared to use the power of his office to maximize his investments in a defense contractor.

At the same time, however, Perdue was also casting votes that would have deprived his home state of military funding.

In the early months of 2019, Perdue, chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower, personally steered $4.7 billion to niche but lucrative submarine construction projects that boosted the company’s stock. Shares rose more than 42% while Perdue worked on the bill, and he turned a neat profit when he sold.

Throughout those same months, however, Congress was locked in a dispute with President Trump about funding for his quixotic campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

From December 2018 to January 2019, while Perdue was buying up stock in the submarine company, the president shut down the government and broke off negotiations with Democratic lawmakers over wall funding, a deeply unpopular decision: A Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that only 7% of voters approved of funding the wall to end the shutdown.

A few weeks after the government reopened, Trump tried to sidestep the problem by declaring a national emergency at the border. The declaration is “a great thing to do,” he said, because the United States has “an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” which he said posed a threat to national security.

Walls work “100 percent,” he claimed.

That move came after the passage of a bipartisan spending package that allotted nowhere near the $5.7 billion that Trump wanted to put towards building more than 200 miles of reinforced steel fencing. With the declaration, the president hoped to secure $6.5 billion more to start construction immediately, bypassing the legislative approval typically required from Congress.

“Some of the generals think this is more important,” he claimed.

Many of Trump’s allies, and about a half-dozen Senate Republicans, spoke out against the plan.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said it violated the Constitution, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine called the decision “a mistake.” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said he hated the idea, and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said “it would not be a practical resolution.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned that a “war” could break out among Republicans if Trump invoked the emergency act.

In March of 2019, 12 Republican Senators joined all 47 Democrats in a resolution blocking Trump’s declaration. Perdue, however, was not among them, and characterized the situation on the Mexican border as an “invasion.”

The president vetoed the resolution, and Congress failed to overrule the veto.

To pay for the wall, Trump diverted defense funds. The terms of the declaration opened up access to $3.5 billion from the military construction budget, and another $2.5 billion from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction program.

That would hit particularly hard in Georgia, which is home to about 70,000 active-duty service members.

The cuts threatened as much as $234 million in military funding for the Peach State, according to some analysts, depriving projects at Fort Benning and Fort Gordon alone of at least $112 million, Roll Call reported in March.

During that time, Perdue was using his voice on the Armed Services Committee to advocate for the wall, rather than for alleviating the cuts to his own state.

“I was not prepared for the amount of drug traffic that we saw,” he said at the time, remarking on a recent trip to the border.

He even rationalized the choice to sacrifice Georgia’s military budget in the very political context he faces today: A Democratic successor to Trump would not pursue the border wall, so it was imperative to act quickly.

“This is not a small thing for me because I know we may have a Democrat in the White House that I might disagree with,” said Perdue. “You have to look at it with all possibilities in mind, and I think we’ve got a full-blown invasion right now of illegal drugs.”

At the same time, however, Perdue was working behind the scenes on the defense bill that would soon play to his personal advantage — and he quietly began to sell off stock.

When the Senate passed the spending bill that June, Perdue released a statement touting a number of items in the bill, including the $4.7 billion he had landed for the submarine projects. Perdue sold between $1,000 to $15,000 in the company’s stock that same day. He sold the last of his shares in July.

The spending bill, however, took another six months before it became law last December, and in that time, the Pentagon — independent of any known pressure from Perdue — announced it would spare Georgia’s military projects from cuts related to the border wall.

Georgia’s military projects were back on the chopping block by February 2020, however, when Trump tried once again to appropriate border wall funds.

Perdue, who received private briefings on the emergent coronavirus pandemic that same month — and made a series of strikingly well-timed stock transactions — did not challenge Trump on the funding question. Instead, he pointed to Senate Democrats, despite the fact that Republicans controlled the chamber.

“Senator Perdue prefers that the wall at our southern border be funded through the regular appropriations process, but Senate Democrats have been unwilling to work with us to get that done,” Perdue spokeswoman Cherie Gillan told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time.

Meanwhile, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, blasted Trump’s power grab. He described Trump’s attempt to “re-program” funds for the wall as “contrary to Congress’s constitutional authority,” saying it required Congress “to take action.” Unlike Perdue, Thornberry had earlier announced his retirement from Congress, and was not running for re-election in 2020.

The wall budget has returned to the headlines in recent months. In October, a federal appeals court ruled against Trump’s move to redirect military construction funds, after which the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case.

And last Friday, a federal judge unsealed a whistleblower complaint that accused two defense contractors involved with wall construction of using taxpayer funds to smuggle armed Mexican guards into the U.S.

While Trump has falsely promised, ever since launching his first presidential campaign, that Mexico would pay for the wall (through some unexplained mechanism), it remains unclear which part of the government will actually foot the bill.

This week, Perdue faces another choice as the Senate votes on the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act amid threats of a veto from Trump, who has demanded that the bill strip social media companies of special liability protections. Perdue voted for an earlier Senate version of the bill, as did his Republican colleague Kelly Loeffler, who faces her own Georgia runoff on the same day as Perdue.

Trump is also irate language in the bill that would rename military installations honoring Confederate heroes.

Either way, the issue appears to pose a trap for the two Georgia senators, since two such bases, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon, are in their state. Voting to override Trump’s potential veto might risk alienating his base, especially if the president chooses to fight over the issue, while siding with Trump on the Confederate names might turn off independents.

Loeffler has sided with Trump on virtually every issue, this one included. Perdue has not made his position on the defense bill clear.

A new civil war? It’s here: The right’s grievance politics is killing thousands every day

On Wednesday, the United States set a devastating new record in the coronavirus pandemic: 3,124 people dead in one day. This was the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded 3,000, but it’s the first time the daily number of deaths has exceeded a dark benchmark that so many people have invoked, over and over again, since the beginning of the pandemic: It’s more people lost in one day to COVID-19 than were lost in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

There’s been criticism from various corners of those who make this comparison, but it’s understandable why it comes so readily to mind. The startling juxtaposition is meant to jar people out of the tendency to let all those COVID-19 deaths become a faceless statistic. The idea is to get people to take the virus seriously, since it’s far more likely to kill you than a random attack by terrorists.

But there’s a political side to this, as well: Liberals or leftists who draw this comparison are trying to draw attention to conservative hypocrisy. The Republicans who are pooh-poohing mask-wearing and social distancing are the very same Republicans whose panicked and partisan overreaction to 9/11 led us into two disastrous wars. If the deaths of 2,977 people in one day from a terrorist attack was so world-changing , why do conservatives refuse to treat the death toll of this pandemic seriously? As difficult as this is to process, the coronavirus has killed nearly 100 times as many people as died on 9/11.

The answer, unfortunately, is because of the American culture war, which is getting uglier and more uncontrollable all the time. While the right used to mock “identity politics,” the tribal sense of identity among conservatives seems to trump all other considerations these days. Displaying such tribal loyalty by attacking and antagonizing liberals matters more to many conservatives than their own health and safety. That’s doubly true in the face of a disease that is disproportionately affecting poorer people and people of color, allowing white conservatives to imagine that their “tribe” is not being hurt by the pandemic.

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For years now, we have lived amid rising fears of right-wing domestic terrorism, and for good reason. There have been multiple deadly terrorist attacks — such as the mass shootings in El Paso and Pittsburgh — inspired by Donald Trump and the white nationalist rhetoric he helped mainstream. Wannabe terrorists were caught plotting the kidnapping of the governor of Michigan. The “boogaloo” movement of angry white men is openly gunning for a new civil war. Some commentators worry that American politics have become so bitter and polarized that such a violent internal conflict could actually happen.

In a very real sense, the civil war has already come, just not in the fashion that we imagined it. This pandemic that’s washing across the country is, in many ways, a manifestation of the same tensions that have led to fears of terrorism and civil war. One major reason why the pandemic is so bad in the U.S. — which has more cases than any other country in the world, and consistently rates among the worst 15 countries on a per-capita basis — is what the press delicately calls “partisan divisions.”

But let’s face it, the real problem is the American right, and its profound loathing for a rapidly changing and diversifying country. From the very beginning of this pandemic, Trump, his supporters and the right-wing media have prioritized sticking it to the liberals over saving their own skins. In the end, grievance-mad conservatives — furious at a majority that rejects their claims to cultural superiority — didn’t have to pick up a single weapon. All they needed to do was refuse to take this pandemic like the public health emergency it is.

Research has borne this out. A paper published in Nature on Nov. 2 — and therefore lost in the election media frenzy — showed that partisan identity was a stronger predictor of how people reacted to the coronavirus than factors like age, race or the severity of the virus where they lived. Researchers hoped that conservative reluctance to practice social distancing would decrease as the pandemic grew worse, but the opposite happened. Conservatives grew more likely to take risks, not less. High levels of right-wing media consumption made refusal to take basic precautions much worse.

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But individual behavior is only a small piece of the puzzle. Republicans’ tribal hatred of liberals and total-war approach to partisan politics is probably the biggest single factor in why the coronavirus spiraled so badly out of control.

This didn’t happen just because of Donald Trump and his tendency to see the pandemic, and all measures to contain it, as personal affronts to be angrily resisted at every turn. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, motivated by his desire to maintain his enormous power in Washington, has been flying more under the radar, but the damage he’s doing is at least as bad.

McConnell has made it obvious for months that his goal is to pass no coronavirus relief bill at all, or to gut any such bill so thoroughly that it barely helps anyone below the CEO class. He clearly feels that blocking such a bill will lead to no political blowback. In part, he believes he can pin the blame on the Democrats, and also that voters are so bitterly divided along partisan lines that not even a massive economic catastrophe and hundreds of thousands of deaths will turn Republican voters against him. After all, he has the 2020 election, when 74 million voters turned out for Trump — and Republicans made unexpected gains in down-ballot voting — as proof of that.

McConnell’s refusal to pass a meaningful relief bill hasn’t just caused economic devastation. It has also contributed to the massive death toll. First, because the lack of any real relief has stymied the national health care response, for lack of funding. Second, and perhaps more important, the lack of economic relief has forced thousands of businesses to remain open and forced millions of workers to go to work who might have otherwise been able to stay home. Far too many people have been forced to choose between a paycheck and their family’s health, and are out there doing service-industry jobs that expose them and their loved ones to the virus.

The boogaloo boys got their civil war. It didn’t come in the form they expected, and it lacks the drama of bullets flying on battlefields. But the actual death toll has surpassed that of all American wars except World War II and the actual Civil War. Of course the coronavirus was coming to our shores one way or another, but what has made it so devastating to America was the ingrained rage and tribalist identity politics of the right. Just as with civil wars that are fought with bombs and guns, the price is being paid by everyone, not just those who fired the first shots.

Ellen DeGeneres tests positive for coronavirus, pauses “Ellen Show” production

Ellen DeGeneres has tested positive for COVID-19, and production on her talk show will be paused until January, Variety has confirmed.

Read more from Variety: Taylor Swift to release new album, “Evermore,” tonight

“Hi Everyone, I want to let you all know that I tested positive for Covid-19. Fortunately, I’m feeling fine right now. Anyone who has been in close contact with me has been notified, and I am following all proper CDC guidelines,” she wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning.

pic.twitter.com/8pKdgCXY1z

— The Ellen Show (@TheEllenShow) December 10, 2020

“I’ll see you all again after the holidays. Please stay healthy and safe,” she added. A Telepictures spokesperson confirmed to Variety that production will be halted until January.

Read more from Variety: BTS named Time’s Entertainer of the Year

Season 18 of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” premiered on Sept. 21 after months of controversy involving an internal investigation after allegations of racism, sexual misconduct and other workplace problems. Three top producers were fired in August, Variety exclusively reported. During the pandemic shutdown in the spring, “Ellen Show” staffers raised complaints about poor communication, pay reductions and mistreatment.

In an internal memo to staff DeGeneres apologized, writing “On day one of our show, I told everyone in our first meeting that ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ would be a place of happiness — no one would ever raise their voice, and everyone would be treated with respect. Obviously, something changed, and I am disappointed to learn that this has not been the case.”

She also addressed the allegations during her Season 18 opening monologue. “As you may have heard, this summer there were allegations of a toxic work environment at our show and then there was an investigation,” she said on air. “I learned that things happened here that never should have happened. I take that every seriously and I want to say I am so sorry to the people that were affected. I know that I am in a position of privilege and power and with that comes responsibility and I take responsibility for what happens at my show.”

Aides raise age concerns about Dianne Feinstein as she forgets key discussions and briefings: report

Numerous current and former aides and allies have raised concerns about the cognitive abilities and possible memory loss of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who recently agreed to step down as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

Feinstein, who is 87, agreed to take a diminished role on the committee after she was confronted by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., following backlash over her handling of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing. But some people close to Feinstein told Mayer that her handling of the hearing was the culmination of problems that had been raised for years. Others close to Feinstein argued that the concerns were “exaggerated.”

“Many” sources familiar with Feinstein’s situation told Mayer that it has been “evident for several years” that Feinstein is “seriously struggling.”

Feinstein’s “short-term memory has grown so poor that she often forgets she has been briefed on a topic, accusing her staff of failing to do so just after they have,” Mayer reported. “They describe Feinstein as forgetting what she has said and getting upset when she can’t keep up.”

These private concerns came to a head during the Barrett hearings, when the California senator was once again in the public eye as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

Feinstein also came under criticism during the 2018 confirmation hearing for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when she did not disclose Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school to the FBI before it was leaked to the media. Schumer installed a former aide to “embed” on the Judiciary Committee staff ahead of Barrett’s confirmation to “make sure the hearings didn’t go off the rails,” Mayer reported, but the “precaution nonetheless failed.”

As Democrats harangued Republicans for trying to jam through a justice in the final months of Trump’s presidency after blocking Barack Obama’s final-year nomination of Merrick Garland, Feinstein instead hugged committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and praised his “fairness” in running “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”

Barrett’s popularity rose during the hearings and Feinstein came under fire from Democratic-aligned groups.

Ilyse Hogue, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called for Feinstein to be replaced after she “offered an appearance of credibility to the proceedings that is wildly out of step with the American people.”

Brian Fallon, the head of the progressive advocacy group Demand Justice and a former aide to Schumer and Hillary Clinton, said it was time for Feinstein to “step down” and “if she won’t, her colleagues need to intervene.”

Schumer had “several serious and painful talks” with Feinstein and even made “overtures” for help to her husband, which “surprised and upset” the senator, according to Mayer.

“She wasn’t really all that aware of the extent to which she’d been compromised,” a Senate source told Mayer. “It was hurtful and distressing to have it pointed out.”

But Schumer then had to have another painful talk with the senator after she forgot the first conversation, according to the report.

“It was like Groundhog Day, but with the pain fresh each time,” the source said, comparing the incident to someone taking car keys away from an elderly relative. “It wasn’t just about a car. It was about the U.S. Senate.”

“The staff is in such a bad position,” a former Senate aide added. “They have to defend her and make her seem normal.”

Feinstein’s lapses have resulted in “disaster” for Democrats on the committee, the former aide said. “Other members were constantly trying to go around her because, as chair, she didn’t want to do anything, and she also didn’t want them doing anything. She’s an incredibly effective human being, but there’s definitely been deterioration in the last year. She’s in a very different mode now.”

The alleged memory problems have occasionally spilled out into public view.

During a committee hearing last month, Feinstein twice asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey an identical question about the company’s efforts to police disinformation, seemingly without realizing she had already asked it.

Did anyone else catch Dianne Feinstein repeating her question to Jack Dorsey of Twitter at the hearing today?

Within 2 minutes she asked same question twice. Maybe it's time to pass the baton? She's accomplished a lot for the Democratic Party over the years..but#DianneFeinstein pic.twitter.com/EBrNWGFGRh

— Texan (@Texan_21C) November 17, 2020

Some former aides defended the senator, arguing that the “rumors of her cognitive decline have been exaggerated,” Mayer reported, and that “video clips taken out of context can make anyone look foolish.”

Some argued that it was widely known that former male senators who had served into their 80s or 90s, like Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., and Robert Byrd, D-W.V., had significantly declined in their later years but kept their committee posts regardless.

“For his last ten years, Strom Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback,” a former Senate aide told Mayer.

There were some calls for Thurmond to step down amid his decline. But the social media age and propagation of viral videos have brought these issues to the forefront. President-elect Joe Biden, 78, and President Donald Trump, 74, have both faced extensive questions about their cognitive abilities and Twitter users have speculated for weeks about the mysterious bruises and bandages seen on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hands in October.

Some former aides agreed that Feinstein had declined but blamed Schumer and the Democratic Party for not intervening earlier, when Feinstein ran for re-election in 2018.

“She should have gone out on top in 2018,” a former Senate aide told Mayer. “We only have a hundred senators. I don’t think she should be there. Someone should have told her.”

In fact, the majority of the California Democratic Party backed Feinstein’s primary opponent in 2018 after supporting her through four previous terms. She ran without the party’s official endorsement and was easily re-elected.

“In her defense, Feinstein has had to fight for everything she’s gotten,” a Senate aide told Mayer. “She didn’t get where she is as a woman in politics by listening to the men.”

The report raised further questions about whether Feinstein will serve out the rest of her term through 2024, when she will be 91.

Schumer said earlier this year that he had a “serious talk” with Feinstein after the Barrett hearing, after which the senator announced she would “not seek the chairmanship or ranking member position in the next Congress.”

She added that she looks “forward to continuing to serve as a senior Democrat on the Judiciary, Intelligence, Appropriations and Rules committees as we work with the Biden administration.”

In Georgia Senate races, change comes knocking

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Brandon Brown appeared to have no room in his busy schedule for menu planning. The field director for the New Georgia Project had just come from a voter registration drive, one of a half-dozen planned around the state. He’d popped in on a Zoom meeting with about 4,000 volunteers. Soon he would be embarking on a hiring spree.

The organization had set itself an ambitious goal: knocking on 1 million doors before the Jan. 5 U.S. Senate runoff election. And for the task, a small army of foot soldiers would be required. “We’re looking for anywhere from 200 to 300 canvassers to knock on doors across the state of Georgia,” Brown said.

The Democratic U.S Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are also sending canvassers into the streets, and that represents a new turn of events in the pandemic era. When COVID hit in March, the national Democratic Party and many candidates and independent groups curtailed door-to-door canvassing out of health concerns, while the Republicans continued their ground game. Some say that had negative consequences for Democrats, particularly in down-ballot races.

Now that the balance of power in the Senate is resting in the hands of Georgia voters, Brown and others have been getting ready to go door-to-door. “We wanted to make sure that we had a plan if we were going back into the field,” Brown said. For the New Georgia Project, the plan includes ready access to personal protective equipment, testing and contact tracing.

The renewed interest in canvassing is happening when COVID cases are on the rise in Georgia and across the country. That may explain the careful message coming out of the Democratic Senate campaigns: “The stakes of turning out Georgians to vote for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock could not be higher. In close consultation with public health experts and an epidemiologist, we’ve created an in-person voter contact program with strict protocols that will allow organizers and volunteers to safely register new voters and knock doors across the state,” according to a statement released from the Warnock campaign.

The Warnock campaign also shared a list of safety procedures with Capital & Main that included masking, distancing, the availability of hand sanitizer and a constant reevaluation of protocols.

* * *

Mijente, a multiracial Latinx organization, is one group that persevered and knocked on doors in Georgia and North Carolina in the weeks leading up to the November election while others retreated. Tania Unzueta Carrasco, the political director of Mijente, said that face-to-face, socially distanced canvassing is particularly critical for new voters or infrequent ones. Her organization plans to knock on the doors of all 290,000 Latino households in Georgia.

Mijente was connecting with fewer than 2.5% of people contacted by text or phone, compared to 25% to 30% of people they reached at the doors, Unzueta Carrasco said. “People were just getting saturated with these messages because nationally, there wasn’t a lot of coordination,” she said.

At the doors, it’s not as easy to avoid contact as it is when reached by phone or text, and “relational” canvassing—where people contact those in their own personal networks—leaves out those who lack such connections. At the doors is “where most of the valuable conversations and movement with people came from,” she maintains.

But early on in the pandemic, Mijente canvassers met resistance as case counts rose. “We were getting negative feedback from people who were like, ‘Why are you guys on the doors? This is dangerous,'” said Unzueta Carrasco. The atmosphere shifted after the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in late May and widespread demonstrations did not lead to large COVID outbreaks. “I think that actually created an opening and an understanding of how to be outside and interacting with people in a safe way,” she added.

Mijente is not the only group that had a significant door knocking campaign leading up to the general election. UNITE HERE locals ran canvasses in Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Pennsylvania. For hospitality union members, it was their experience delivering meals to shut-ins as part of a publicly funded program that gave them the confidence that they could safely canvass in a pandemic, according to Rachel Sulkes, communications director for UNITE HERE, Local 11, which represents hotel workers in Arizona and Southern California. (Disclosure: The union is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

After the economy shut down in April, the Los Angeles Hospitality Training Academy, a business-labor partnership, received city and county funding to deliver meals to seniors and homeless people housed in hotel rooms as part of a program to protect a vulnerable population from COVID infection.

By July, the union local had set up a canvass in Arizona under the guidance of an epidemiologist, enduring not only COVID risk but day after day of extreme heat. In Arizona alone, Local 11 joined a coalition of organizations knocking on over a million doors without reporting a single case of COVID, according to Sulkes. To her, that on-the-ground presence proved crucial.

“It should have been a blowout election. It really should have been. But I think if you’re not running [a] field [operation], how is it going to be?” Sulkes said.

In a PowerPoint released to the media after the election, the union touted its decade-long investment in a voter-engagement program in Arizona, a state where Republicans stilloutnumber Democrats. Since 2008, voter registration and turnout have increased by nine points, and turnout in majority Latino precincts increased by as much as 20%, according to the union.

And, as with Georgia, Arizona turned blue. The Grand Canyon State will be sending a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut, beat the incumbent Sen. Martha McSally, during an election when President-elect Joe Biden generally outperformed down-ballot Democratic candidates.

* * *

But is this replicable in Georgia? A 2016 analysis of hundreds of field experiments makes modest claims for the power of the canvass. If a typical canvassing campaign succeeds in interacting with one-quarter of its targets, then the overall effect on the group’s turnout is one percentage point or less. Still, that could make the difference in a close election.

The Georgia Senate races could be close, if the Nov. 3 vote tallies can serve as a predictor. The four candidates are headed into a runoff because none received more than 50% of the vote. Ossoff, an investigative journalist, won 48% of the vote, compared to Perdue’s 49.7%. If Warnock, a pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, attracts the votes of the seven other Democrats in the November election while Loeffler gains those of the five vanquished Republican candidates, the two adversaries would be separated by a point in January, with Loeffler in the lead: 49.3% v. 48.4%. (Neither calculation takes into account the votes of third party candidates.) Still, the odds of Democrats capturing both Senate seats in a special election are not high, say analysts.

Gregory Huber, a professor of political science at Yale University who studies voting behavior, says he’s skeptical that a more robust ground game would have made a big difference for the Democrats in November’s competitive Senate races, either through persuasion or by mobilizing infrequent voters likely to vote for a Democrat. That’s because the expansion of voting opportunities during the pandemic also expanded turnout among those who might typically have trouble getting access to the polls.

“I don’t know if we’ve got much evidence that these more marginal voters were left by the wayside by the decline in in-person mobilization,” Huber said.

Of course, Georgia has been leaving voters by the wayside for years, drawing national attention for election officials’ zealous efforts to purge voters from the rolls in 2019. During this most recent election, many in Georgia braved hourslong lines for their chance to vote, a function of poll closures that have disproportionately affected African Americans.

A constellation of organizations like the New Georgia Project, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Black Voters Matter and Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight have been credited for increasing turnout in a state that last went blue in 1992. After Abrams narrowly lost the governor’s race to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, she set to work addressing what she saw as efforts to suppress the votes of minorities, young people and poor people in the state.

“We’ve been able to make great strides in mitigating many of the harms we saw perpetrated against Georgia voters in 2018, from purging to closure of polling places to mismanagement and underfunding of resources for polling locations,” Abrams told NPR a day before the general election.

The increase in voter registration was also attributable to the full implementation of the Motor Voter Act in 2016 under then Republican Gov. Nathan Deal. Allowing applicants for drivers’ licenses to automatically register disproportionately expanded the number of voters who lean Democratic, according to the Wall Street Journal. But it has likely led to increased turnout across the board.

Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are firing up their base. They call themselves the “firewall” that stands between their constituents and the far left, even though Ossoff and Warnock have been rallying voters in support of a relatively moderate agenda of economic relief, protecting people with pre-existing conditions and getting the pandemic under control.

It’s the high stakes around this election that has created a consensus on the Democratic side about the importance of the canvass. Democrats will need to campaign in maximum overdrive to have a chance of winning back control of the Senate. “If the Democrats can’t get at least the same level of turnout that they got in the presidential election, there is absolutely no way that they win the Senate races,” says Huber.

Unzueta Carrasco says she does not feel anyone should risk their life to knock on doors. But for some of her canvassers, the status quo is also fraught with peril, and that creates its own motivation. In addition to highlighting the presidential race in November, Mijente targeted two incumbent sheriffs in Cobb and Gwinnett counties whose cooperation agreements with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection have “created an atmosphere of terror for immigrants going about their lives,” Azadeh Shahshahani, a lawyer with Project South, an advocacy group based in Atlanta, told NPR. Those campaigns resulted in the election of the first Black sheriffs in those counties.

“Our communities are used to measuring risk,” Unzueta Carrasco said. “When we were figuring out whether to door knock or not, what’s at stake definitely came into the picture.”

“This is madness”: Mitt Romney blasts GOP lawmakers threatening to protest Electoral College vote

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, is not pleased with his Republican colleagues’ continued efforts to delay the upcoming Electoral College vote that will solidify President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory. During an interview with NBC News’ Frank Thorp, the Republican lawmaker described the legal challenges as “madness.”

“This is madness. We have a process, recounts are appropriate, going to the court is approp & pursuing every legal avenue is appropriate, but trying to get electors not to do what the people voted to do is madness,” Romney said on Tuesday. “It would be saying, ‘Look, let’s not follow the vote of the people, let’s instead do it what we want, that would not be the way a democratic republic ought to work.”

ROMNEY: "It would be saying, 'Look, let's not follow the vote of the people, let's instead do it what we want, that would not be the way a democratic republic ought to work."

Q: Are you very confident that anything like that would be rejected here.

ROMNEY: "Yes."

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) December 9, 2020

Romney’s latest remarks are not the first he has made regarding the outcome of the election. Shortly after Biden was declared the winner of the election, Romney was one of the first Republican lawmakers to speak out. On day after the election was called, Romney urged the nation to “get behind” Biden.

The Utah senator’s conversation with Thorp come just days after the state of Texas sued to overturn the election results in multiple battleground states Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that Biden won. Prior to the Texas lawsuits, Trump and his legal campaign had a total of 46 post-election lawsuits thrown out of courts across the country.

As Trump fights to stay in White House, Melania reportedly “just wants to go home”

While President Donald Trump is fighting to stay in the White House, his wife “just wants to go home,” one source said this week.

CNN reported on Wednesday that First Lady Melania Trump is not onboard with the president’s plan to run the country for another four years.

“She just wants to go home,” the source said, adding that a 2024 run might also “not go over well” with the current first lady.

According to the report, Melania Trump is focusing her energy on packing for her upcoming departure from Washington.

“While the President is busy figuring out a way to stay in the White House, the first lady is determining what to put in storage, what goes to Trump’s New York City digs, and what should be tagged for shipment to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” CNN reported.

In a statement, Melania Trump’s chief of staff Stephanie Grisham said that the first lady’s schedule “remains full.”

“Mrs. Trump is focused on her role as first lady,” the statement said. “Monday she unveiled her most current effort in preserving the White House by announcing the completion of the tennis pavilion. She also recently unveiled a new piece of art in the newly renovated Rose Garden. Her office just revealed this year’s Christmas décor.”

In historic vote, the UN no longer considers cannabis one of the most dangerous drugs

In a historic vote on December 2, the 53 member states of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) voted to remove cannabis from Schedule IV of the United Nations’ drug classification system during a meeting in Vienna. The CND is a United Nations body charged with supervising the application of the international drug control treaties that form the legal backbone for global drug prohibition.

According to a press release issued by the nonprofit For Alternative Approaches to Addiction (FAAAT) Think and Do Tank, “The vote followed an independent scientific assessment undertaken by some of our world’s leading experts, convened by WHO in 2017-2018.” The World Health Organization (WHO) is charged under the UN drug conventions with assessing the harms and benefits of substances and making scheduling recommendations. In January 2019, the WHO’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence formally recommended that cannabis be removed from Schedule IV and that CBD cannabis preparations containing less than 0.2 percent THC, such as tinctures and extracts, be removed from the schedules altogether.

Some organizations like the Transnational Institute (TNI), the Washington Office on Latin America, and the Global Drug Policy Observatory gave WHO’s recommendations mixed reviews. According to a policy briefing issued by these organizations in March 2019, there is a “very questionable rationale for keeping cannabis in Schedule I.” These organizations, however, also applauded WHO’s “obvious recommendations deserving support.” The removal of cannabis from Schedule IV, in particular, would signify the UN’s recognition that cannabis really does have therapeutic uses.

As explained in an October briefing paper by the International Drug Policy Consortium and TNI, cannabis, up till now, was “included in the most restrictive sections—Schedule I and IV…” under the international drug treaties. The paper further explains that Schedule I includes “[s]ubstances that are highly addictive and liable to abuse or easily convertible into those (e.g. opium, heroin, cocaine, coca leaf),” while Schedule IV includes Schedule I drugs with “‘particularly dangerous properties’ and little or no therapeutic value (e.g. heroin, carfentanil).”

The vote on December 2 removing cannabis from Schedule IV means the global anti-drug bureaucracy now recognizes the therapeutic value of cannabis and no longer considers it “particularly liable to abuse and to produce ill-effects,” like other substances that are included in both the schedules.

With medical marijuana legal in several countries in one form or another, the ever-increasing mountain of evidence supporting the therapeutic uses of cannabis, not to mention outright legalization in 15 American states, Canada and Uruguay—with Mexico about to come on board—this decision by the CND is long past due, but nonetheless welcome.

“With this decision, the UN closes a 60-year denial of what has been documented being among the most ancient medicinal plant[s] humankind domesticated,” said independent researcher Kenzi Riboulet-Zemouli, who has monitored the CND process for years, in a press release issued by FAAAT.

It will be 60 years in March 2021 since cannabis was placed in Schedule IV of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs without ever having been subject to any scientific assessment.

“As a medical patient myself I know how necessary this change in international law is, to help reduce the suffering of millions of people and how it adds a much needed pain treatment with promise in mitigating reliance on opiates at a key moment in history,” said the FAAAT press release, quoting Michael Krawitz, executive director of Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access (USA), one of the global civil society groups that have been pushing for reform in the UN.

While the CND accepted the WHO’s recommendation to remove cannabis from Schedule IV, it failed to advance some other recommendations, including rejecting a recommendation on medical CBD. That means CBD remains unscheduled, outside treaty controls, and is liable to national bans. The failure to adopt more progressive WHO recommendations was “disappointing and represents a lost opportunity to make the treaty best fit to purpose,” the press release further stated.

But this is the United Nations, and change comes at a glacial pace and even then, only incrementally. Still, this vote is a long-overdue step in the right direction.

Forty-one days of pure hell: How do we survive the end of the Trump presidency?

Donald Trump has 41 days to go before his presidency is over. Instead of assisting with the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden, he has chosen to spend his final days exhibiting his psychiatric disorder. His rhetoric and his behavior are manifestations of his pathology. He shows every day that he has no self-control, no insight and no capacity to function effectively at his job.

Trump lost the election fair and square. But he cannot handle the defeat because his narcissistic injury has triggered outrage, hostility, accusations and victimhood. Despite his loud proclamations of a rigged election, there is absolutely no evidence of it. Trump has been rejected by a majority of the American people, and now he is an angry, miserable and destructive loser.

Trump is not capable of experiencing true depression. His psyche is not equipped for such a normal response. Rather, he responds to loss or disappointment by becoming enraged and accusatory. He feels and acts as if he were a victim. Trump’s response is primitive and pathological. It is pathognomonic of personality pathology. It is entirely outside the realm of normalcy. It is dangerous.

Trump’s “alternative universe” is being threatened by the reality of his election loss. He is desperate to maintain the persona of being smart, superior, strong and almighty. This is his “false self,” a fantasy created to cover up the truth: that he is not very smart, that he is lazy, that he is disinterested, that he is not as rich as he claims, that he does not care about people, that he is corrupt and that he is cruel. That is Trump’s “true self.” He has spent his entire life spinning a fake web of grandiosity and superiority with enablers along the way to keep the ruse alive. As president, he has convinced millions that his false persona is more true than observable reality. That, my friends, is a skilled con man, an accomplished grifter, an unabashed criminal.

From all reports, Trump has stopped working. His days are filled with angry outbursts, watching television, promulgating conspiracy theories and playing golf. He is incapacitated by his psychiatric symptoms. He is abdicating his responsibility as president. The idea that he is our ultimate public servant could not be further from the truth. Trump is totally self-absorbed with his narcissistic injury and his grievances. Governing others is beyond his psychic capacity. In fact, it is his vindictiveness and his irrationality that have risen to the forefront.

So Trump’s mental pathology is not allowing him to tackle the existential challenge facing the American people: the deadly pandemic that is raging and the resulting economic fallout. He has washed his hands of it. He has not mentioned it in months. He has not attended a task force meeting in months. He has not mentioned the 288,000 deaths under his watch — a number that will have grown by the time you read this. He continues to oppose mask wearing and favor herd immunity, for no coherent or rational reasons. He just endangered the lives of many other people a few nights ago at his pep rally in Georgia. Trump’s lack of empathy, his inability to govern and his deep-seated cruelty are all on display in their most naked form.

Part of Trump’s pathology is his scorched-earth mentality in response to his electoral defeat. He is filing baseless and frivolous lawsuits to try to overturn our free election. He is trying to subvert democracy by pressuring election officials to be dishonest and corrupt. He is exacting his revenge on Americans for rebuffing him. He is trying to undermine his successor so that he will be unsuccessful. He wants to pardon everyone in sight so that the rule of law will not apply to them. He wants to reinstitute executions by firing squad. He is not allowing the Biden transition team to talk with our intelligence agencies. Fascist sycophants are coming out of the woodwork to condone Trump’s anti-democratic and anti-American rants.

He is so angry, embarrassed and humiliated that he cannot stand it. His instinct is to lash out, blame others, hurt others, distort reality, claim victory and exhibit false bravado. Nothing about his response is healthy, mature or normal. He is out of control. Our country is being forced to tolerate his crazed rhetoric and behavior.

Forty-one more days of hell are ahead of us. What could possibly save our country from this man’s decompensation before our eyes? His immediate removal from office would minimize his damage to America. But, of course, congressional Republicans are enabling him and will not intervene in any way, let alone appropriately. Short of that, we will just have to endure the angst of the next six weeks.

Historians will be critical of Republicans because of their complicity over the past four years. Their unwillingness to deal with this irrational and destructive president right now will stand as their unforgivable legacy. Almost to a person, they have been silent and absent. They have been weak. As of this week, only 27 congressional Republicans are willing to acknowledge publicly that Joe Biden is our president-elect. Donald Trump could have been contained by a Republican Party that put country over party, good over evil, and courage over cowardice. But it did not.

The moral of this nightmare is that we must never again elect a mentally disordered president. We must require a psychological and psychiatric examination of all presidential candidates going forward, to be administered by a team of qualified experts. We must have a process whereby dangerous psychopathology can be identified and specific recommendations for public service can be offered. We could have saved our country from the past four years of anguish if we’d had a such a process in place in 2016.

Forty-one days to go to rid ourselves of this toxic and self-destructive man. We will prevail. But it will be hell getting there.

Donald Trump will make sure of that. He wants it that way.

Legal expert: Mitch’s rush to confirm FEC commissioners is aimed at undermining election watchdog

The Senate voted to confirm three new commissioners to the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday after the agency spent years without a quorum or the ability to enforce campaign finance laws. But legal experts expect little to change due to partisan gridlock.

The Senate on Wednesday voted to confirm Republicans Allen Dickerson and Sean Cooksey and Democrat Shana Broussard, all of whom were nominated by President Donald Trump, filling all six seats for the first time since 2017. Broussard was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support while the votes on the two Republicans split mostly down party lines.

The panel is required to have no more than three members of one party. It now has three Republicans, including FEC Chair Trey Trainor, Democrats Ellen Weintraub and Broussard, and independent Steven Walther, who typically votes with Democrats. The agency has been without a quorum for most of the past year and without a full slate since 2017. The lack of a quorum left the agency unable to conduct any business during the 2020 campaign, resulting in a backlog of nearly 400 cases.

But the FEC’s inability to enforce election laws goes back even further than that. The panel requires at least four affirmative votes to pursue any action but has frequently deadlocked 3-3, with Democrats voting to investigate potential campaign violations and Republicans voting in opposition. The “last-minute” vote by the Senate to approve the nominees after the election appears to be aimed at undermining the agency ahead of Joe Biden’s presidency, Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, told Salon.

“These are last-minute kind of pushes by the outgoing administration and the Republican Senate majority,” he said, meant to ensure that “the commission [will] not be very effective heading into Biden’s presidency.

“It does seem like there is likely to be gridlock and the commission is not likely to do very much that’s substantive,” Tobias added. “That’s unfortunate, given what we’ve just come off of in terms of four years of Trump and dark money and all that was spent up and down the ballot.”

An estimated $14 billion was spent in the 2020 election alone, more than twice as much as during the previous presidential election cycle.

Tobias said he hopes the new members may “break that deadlock” but is not very optimistic given the backgrounds of the Republican commissioners. Cooksey worked as general counsel to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. and as an attorney for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Dickerson is the legal director for the Institute of Free Speech, a group funded by Charles Koch and other prominent conservative billionaires, and has long defended the rise of dark money in American elections.

“The two GOP picks are pretty closely aligned or worked for people who have engaged in a lot of the most vitriolic partisanship,” Tobias said.

The Senate already confirmed Trainor earlier this year. He worked as a lawyer for the Trump campaign but has refused to recuse himself from cases related to the campaign. Last month, Trainor echoed Trump’s unfounded claims that there was “voter fraud” in the election, which he described as “illegitimate” despite no evidence of fraud or widespread irregularities.

Accountable.US, a progressive government watchdog group, criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for prioritizing the controversial votes over much-needed coronavirus relief that has languished in Congress for months.

“The McConnell Senate still hasn’t passed a pandemic relief bill for hurting families facing hunger and homelessness, but it found the time to pack the FEC with partisans in an apparent effort to let President Trump and allies off the hook for a stack of backlogged potential violations,” said spokesperson Jeremy Funk, in a statement to Salon. “These are the priorities of people who want to leave as big a mess for the incoming Biden administration as humanly possible.”

Meredith McGehee, the head of Issue One, a bipartisan advocacy group that opposes dark money in elections, argued that even aside from the latest slate of commissioners the seemingly permanent deadlock is a feature of the FEC, not a bug.

“Congress intentionally structured the FEC to be weak at its creation,” she said in a statement. “After all, the FEC’s jurisdiction is candidates for federal office. Since then, the FEC has frequently shown itself to be a prime example of a ‘captured agency’ that is more interested in pleasing politicians and the lawyers who appear before it than in protecting the public interest.”

McGehee added that Trump and McConnell “appear to have advanced a set of commissioners this year who are likewise likely to put their own personal ideologies over their responsibilities to enforce the letter — and the spirit — of the law.”

Some Democratic lawmakers have called to reform the agency by reducing the number of commissioners from six to five, similar to the makeup of both the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, Business Insider reported.

“It’s the most dysfunctional agency I know, and unless you think a damaged commission with party loyalists lined up in it is a desirable outcome, you want significant reform,” Rep. David Price, D-N.C., told the outlet.

The FEC is “dysfunctional and toothless,” added Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., arguing that the structure of the agency needs to be overhauled in order to “effectively combat corruption, reduce the undue influence of wealthy donors and corporations, sniff out foreign money in our political system, and restore trust in our democracy.”

With Rep. Marcia Fudge’s Ohio seat opening, progressives look to Bernie ally Nina Turner

Nina Turner, the former Cleveland city councilwoman and Ohio state senator who electrified progressives nationwide while serving as co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, is considering a run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat that will be open if Rep. Marcia Fudge is confirmed as President-elect Joe Biden’s secretary of housing and urban development, Politico reported Tuesday.

A groundswell of grassroots support for a Turner House run followed reports on Tuesday that Biden has tapped Fudge, a Cleveland-area congresswoman and leading figure in the Congressional Black Caucus, for the top HUD post. Turner’s response to the speculation was measured.

“Currently, there is no vacancy in the district and if it becomes vacant, things will unfold as they should,” she told Politico. When pressed about whether she plans to run, Turner said, “Well, there’s been an outcry for me to at least consider it.”

“You know, I’m a public servant through and through, but I’m just going to leave it there for now,” Turner said.

News w/ @hollyotterbein
Bernie co-chair @ninaturner is weighing a run for Fudge's seat if Biden nominates her.
Reached by phone, Turner was coy + noted no vacancy yet
"I’m a public servant through and through, but I’m just going to leave it there for now"https://t.co/wxrk7B102q

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) December 8, 2020

Supporters of Sanders and other progressives don’t want her to “leave it there.”

“There is no one more popular among Bernie supporters, no one who received bigger cheers at rallies, and no one who works harder” than Turner, Ari Rabin-Havt, Sanders’ 2020 deputy campaign manager, told Politico.

Our ideas aren't radical, they're right on time.

Now is the time to for @ninaturner to run for Congress if Marcia Fudge accepts a job in the Biden admin. #OH11 pic.twitter.com/s8YLc3tbCG

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) December 8, 2020

No it’s not a dream, Nina Turner might run for Congress. 🤩https://t.co/8cDp6zOiAW

— SF Berniecrats 🌁 (@sfberniecrats) December 9, 2020

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who was also a Sanders campaign co-chair, told Politico that he has encouraged Turner to run “if the seat is open, as that is her congressional district and she would have the immediate support of the national Bernie movement.”

“She’d be a fantastic ally for the movement in Congress,” Khanna added.

Happy birthday to @ninaturner, one of the most passionate fighters for justice I know. I’m inspired by your courage to speak truth to power and your commitment to this movement.

Who thinks Congresswoman Turner has a nice ring to it in a potentially open seat? pic.twitter.com/E9gRBzTBzU

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) December 7, 2020

On Sunday, Rep.-elect Cori Bush, D-Mo., another former Sanders surrogate who defeated longtime incumbent Rep. Lacy Clay in a Democratic primary earlier this year, tweeted that it “would be a dream to work alongside” Turner in Congress.

Hello Somebody! Secretary Marcia Fudge and Congresswoman Nina Turner. That has a great ring to it. https://t.co/fOGbQXXsJ8

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) December 8, 2020

In an August 2019 interview with Common Dreams, Turner asserted that it was not enough for progressive candidates to run on their principles. “It’s not just about who has the best ideas,” she said. “It’s about who can excite.”

Heather Gautney, a former senior Sanders aide, told Politico that people are indeed “super-excited” about a possible Turner run.

“Everyone around her is saying, ‘Do it, do it, do it,'” Gautney said.

.⁦@ninaturner⁩ would be an amazing congresswoman! #RunNinaRun https://t.co/AwEmHVwWfB

— Heather (@KaplanHDG) December 8, 2020

Across social media, progressive reaction to the news of Turner’s prospective House candidacy ranged from positively giddy to calmer endorsements, including numerous nods to her trademark greeting of “Hello, somebody” that stirred Sanders rallies from coast to coast.

If Marcia Fudge joins the Biden cabinet, there’ll be a special election for a safe Dem seat in Cleveland.

Folks… pic.twitter.com/FrUSHAt1uQ

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) December 8, 2020

Just imagine what U.S. Representative Nina Turner, D-Ohio, could do to advance the cause of economic and social and racial justice, save the planet and end the forever wars.
https://t.co/MOyPhhEwpp

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) December 6, 2020

Turner, who turned 53 on Monday, represented Ward 1 in the Cleveland City Council from 2006 to 2008. She was then elected to the Ohio state Senate, where she served from 2008 to 2014. In 2016 she was asked to be Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s running mate, but declined. Turner became president of the Sanders-affiliated political action committee Our Revolution in 2017, and in February 2019 she was named a national co-chair of the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign.

“All of the great social justice advances that we ever had in this country have come not from people with big titles and not from people at the top, but just from everyday people getting together saying: ‘Enough is enough. I’m going to change this, and I’m going to get involved, and I am going to be engaged,'” Turner said in a 2017 interview.

Progressive activists in Ohio and throughout the U.S. are now hoping Turner takes her involvement in the movement for social change to the next level.