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Shrinking the Pentagon: Will the Biden administration dare cut military spending now?

Now that Joe Biden is slated to take office as the 46th president of the United States, advice on how he should address a wide range of daunting problems is flooding in. Nowhere is there more at stake than when it comes to how he handles this country’s highly militarized foreign policy in general and Pentagon spending in particular.

Defense spending increased sharply in the Trump years and is now substantially higher than it was during the Korean or Vietnam War eras or during the massive military buildup President Ronald Reagan oversaw in the 1980s. Today, it consumes well over half of the nation’s discretionary budget, which just happens to also pay for a wide array of urgently needed priorities ranging from housing, job training, and alternative energy programs to public health and infrastructure building. At a time when pandemics, high unemployment, racial inequality, and climate change pose the greatest threats to our safety and security, this allocation of resources should be considered unsustainable. Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the arms industry have yet to get that memo. Defense company executives recently assured a Washington Post reporter that they are “unconcerned” about or consider unlikely the possibility that a Biden administration would significantly reduce Pentagon spending.

It’s easy enough to understand their confidence. Many of the officials rumored to soon be appointed to lead the Pentagon, including a number of former Obama administration figures, have spent the past few years working, either directly or indirectly, for defense contractors. Not surprisingly, then, their policy prescriptions emphasize some of the most expensive and risky military technologies imaginable like hypersonic weaponry. The expected next secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, has already insisted that Washington needs to make “big bets” on unmanned systems and artificial intelligence. Of course, she won’t be the one who will pay the price if they fail — or even if they succeed and take money that might have been used for crucial domestic purposes like health care in a pandemic moment.

Still, contrary to the wishes and hopes of the military-industrial complex and figures like Flournoy, there is a growing congressional interest in trying to bring runaway Pentagon spending under control. This July, for instance, Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI), Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pushed parallel measures in the House and Senate to cut Pentagon spending by 10%, a savings of more than $70 billion that could have been put to good use elsewhere, including aid to increasingly desperate low-income communities. Although their initiatives lost, the very fact that they were proposed may be a turning point in a Congress that, for years, has signed off on whatever the Pentagon asked for, without resistance of any sort.

Think of those votes on Pentagon budget reductions as just the beginning of a long-term effort to tame that out-of-control institution. Representatives Pocan and Lee, for instance, created a defense-savings caucus in the House focused on going after misguided Department of Defense spending. During campaign 2020, both Joe Biden and the Democratic platform emphasized that this country and the world can indeed be made safer while spending less on the Pentagon.

Clearly, the fairy-tale explanation that more spending equals better security needs to be ditched. Will it happen soon? Who knows? At least it’s time for the rest of us to begin thinking about how much less should be spent on the Department of Defense and how to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent more wisely.

A Pentagon spending agenda for the Biden administration

In reality, it’s not that complicated. Pentagon spending could easily be reduced substantially even as the world was made a safer place. For that to happen, however, its budget would have to begin to deal with the actual challenges this country faces rather than letting billions of dollars more be squandered on outmoded military priorities and artificially inflated threats supposedly posed by our biggest adversaries.

One blueprint for doing just that has been put together by the Center for International Policy’s Sustainable Defense Task Force, a group of former White House, Pentagon, and congressional budget officials, retired military officers, and think-tank experts from across the political spectrum. They have crafted a plan to save $1.25 trillion from proposed Pentagon spending over the next decade.

As that task force notes, for durable reductions in such spending to become feasible, this country’s leadership would have to take a more realistic view of the military challenges posed by both China and Russia.

In recent years, the regime in Beijing has indeed been increasing its military spending, but when it comes to an armed presence in the Pacific region and the ability to make war there, the United States remains staggeringly stronger. As a start, it has an arsenal of nuclear weapons five to six times as large as China’s (though, of course, using it would mean a planetary Armageddon). And while Beijing’s influence is primarily focused on its own region, the U.S. military has a historically unprecedented global reach, deploying nearly 200,000 troops overseas garrisoned on at least 800 military bases scattered across continents, and maintaining 11 aircraft carrier task forces to patrol the global seas. In reality, the sort of “arms race” with China now being considered will be costly and unnecessary, while only increasing the risk of war between those two nuclear-armed powers, an outcome to be avoided at all costs.

China’s real twenty-first-century challenge to this country isn’t military at all, but political and economic in nature. Its leadership has focused on increasing that country’s power and influence through investment programs like its ever more global Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Despite many problems, such efforts are clearly giving Beijing the sort of growing global clout, especially in the America First era of Donald Trump, that a hopeless attempt to match U.S. military power never could. Add to this one other factor: if there’s to be any hope of preventing future pandemics from ravaging the planet, curbing the growing impact of climate change, or reviving a global economy that’s distinctly in the dumps, increased cooperation and transparency between the two greatest powers on the planet, not confrontation, will be a necessity.

As for Russia, a relatively shaky petro-state, its primary tools of influence in recent years have been propaganda, cyber-threats, and “hybrid warfare” on its peripheries (as in its use of local allies to destabilize Ukraine). Despite its still vast nuclear arsenal, Russia does not represent a traditional military challenge to the United States and so shouldn’t be used to justify another pointless Pentagon spending boost. To the extent that there is a military challenge from Russia, it can be more than adequately addressed by various European nations with the United States in a limited, supporting role. After all, European members of NATO cumulatively spend more than three times what Russia does on their militaries and far outpace it economically. Keep in mind that this just isn’t the Cold War era of the previous century. In reality, Russia’s economy is now smaller than Italy’s and Moscow is in no position to engage in an arms race even with the nations of Western Europe, no less Washington.

Despite its disastrous forever wars in distant lands, if the institution still often referred to as the “Department of Defense” were to refocus on actual national defense rather than global military domination, it could, as a start, instantly forgo a number of ill-conceived and staggeringly expensive new weapons systems. Those would range from plans to “modernize” the country’s already vast nuclear arsenal by buying a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines at a cost of up to $2 trillion to the fantasy of building up from current levels to a 500-ship Navy.

High on any list of programs to be instantly eliminated would be a proposed new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has pointed out, ICBMs are among “the most dangerous weapons in the world” for a simple reason: a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch such missiles upon being warned of another power using similar weaponry to attack the U.S. Since, in the past, such warnings have proven anything but accurate, new weaponry of this sort will only increase the chances of an accidental nuclear war being started. The Pentagon has, however, already given the giant arms maker Northrop Grumman a sole-source contract and $13.3 billion to develop just such a new weapon, a down payment on a program that could ultimately cost $264 billion to build and operate. Funds like those could go far to meet other genuinely pressing national needs.

As for the nuclear arsenal’s upgrade as a whole, the organization Global Zero has outlined an alternative nuclear posture that would halt the Pentagon’s costly nuclear “modernization” plan, eliminate ICBMs altogether, and reduce the numbers of nuclear-armed bombers and submarines. The idea would be to switch the U.S. to a “deterrence only” strategy and dump the elaborate and dangerous nuclear warfighting scenarios the Pentagon now swears by. The ultimate goal would, of course, be the global elimination of such weaponry, as called for in the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which is slated to enter into force early next year.

Then there’s that dream (or nightmare) of a future Navy to deal with. Building up to a fleet of 500 ships is not just unaffordable, but a sign of the degree to which the Pentagon has an urge to run stark raving mad with taxpayer dollars. Even a previous plan to build 330 ships was so mismanaged that it left the Navy 50 ships short, $11 billion over budget, and years behind schedule. Rather than seeking to preserve the capability to have warships virtually everywhere on Earth all the time, the Navy set up to surge into areas of tension could be roughly half the size of the 500-ship one and still be powerful beyond words.

More savings could easily be found by ending the procurement of unworkable weapons systems like Lockheed Martin’s disastrous F-35 jet fighter. Already the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken (at a cumulative cost of $1.7 trillion over its lifetime), the Project On Government Oversight has determined that the F-35 may never truly be ready for combat. Upgraded versions of current jet fighters integrated into a smaller Air Force would save tens of billions of dollars and be more effective.

President Trump’s cherished Space Force is a bad idea that predated his presidency but received a major boost during his tenure. A new military bureaucracy geared up primarily to spend more money, it could cost tens of billions in the years to come while only increasing the risk of an arms race in space.

You could add to the above billions in savings from cutting waste and bureaucracy at the Department of Defense. To cite just two obvious examples, the Pentagon routinely overpays for spare parts and sustains a work force of more than 600,000 private contractors, many of whose jobs are either redundant or could be done more cheaply by government employees. Symbolic of the broken nature of the procurement process, the Air Force seriously contemplated paying $10,000 for a toilet seat cover and one contractor charged so much for a spare part that it stood to make a 4,451% profit on it. Fixing the Pentagon’s procurement system and rolling back spending on private contractors could save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

And don’t forget the savings that could be had from reforming how the Pentagon does business, including, for example, retaining intellectual property rights to weapon systems researched and developed with taxpayer dollars. As a Marine Corps captain wrote in the New York Times last year, the military too often lacks the “right to repair” its own equipment. Acquisition laws written in the interests of defense contractors need to be revised so that the Department of Defense can negotiate fair and reasonable prices and auditors need to be empowered to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

And, of course, in an institution that has never even successfully auditeditself, who knows what other savings might be conceivable were you to be able to get inside it and take a serious look at its finances — and financial shenanigans?

Obstacles to change

Even if the Biden administration could be persuaded to take a deeper look at the Pentagon’s spending priorities, it would still face immediate and stiff political obstacles. The jobs generated by the Pentagon’s $700 billion-plus budget (and the political funding of congressional representatives by defense companies) have created a broad constituency in Congress poised to block any effort to close unnecessary military bases or defund major weapons programs. To policymakers in Washington, it seems to matter not at all that virtually any other form of spending would create more jobs than throwing money at the Pentagon. New infrastructure spending or a green-new-deal-style emphasis on creating a renewable energy economy would be guaranteed to generate at least one-and-a-half times as many jobs per dollar spent, while new expenditures on education would create twice as many.

Another impediment to change is the two-way revolving door between the Pentagon and the arms industry. Senior government officials go to work for weapons makers, using their contacts with former colleagues to curry favor for their corporate employers. Meanwhile, arms-industry executives head for the Pentagon and other military-related government posts where they make policies that favor their former (and possibly future) employers. Despite criticisms from both President Trump and his son, Donald, Jr. about the damaging influence of that very revolving door, expect former Trump administration officials to set up shop as lobbyists, join the boards of directors of major defense contractors, and otherwise ally themselves with arms makers like Raytheon Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics.

No one should be surprised either by early indications that figures with defense-industry ties will fill key policy positions in the Biden administration. Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense and already an unofficial spokesman for the incoming administration, still sits on the board of Raytheon. Michèle Flournoy, the most likely candidate for secretary of defense, and Anthony Blinken, whom Biden will nominate to be secretary of state, both work for a private consulting firm with undisclosed defense-industry clients. While this practice may not be as prevalent as under Trump — three of his secretaries of defense served as board members, executives, or lobbyists for General Dynamics, Boeing, and Raytheon, respectively — the role of former industry advocates and employees in the Biden administration is nonetheless guaranteed to cause conflicts of interest.

“Independent” experts at influential inside-the-Beltway think tanks are already receiving millions of dollars from arms manufacturers and the Pentagon in an ongoing effort to shape any debates about future spending. Meanwhile, individuals with close ties to that industry populate government panels like the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission, which advocated in 2018 for a whopping 3%-5% annual increase in Pentagon spending. If their analyses of the supposedly abysmal state of national defense were true, a case would have been made for firing all the top civilian and military officials in the building, not for increased spending.

Possibilities for change

The best hope for reducing Pentagon spending is the collision between that department’s never-ending, ever-rising desires and the overriding economic and political realities of this difficult moment. It’s simply not possible to fund pandemic prevention, as well as any kind of economic revival that would begin to address longstanding inequalities, no less a much-needed green revolution, while keeping the Pentagon budget at near-record levels. Something will have to give and it shouldn’t be the civilian communities and businesses that have been most negatively impacted by the coronavirus.

As for politics, it’s important to remember that this year’s presidential election was decided primarily by voter concerns about Covid-19 and the economy, not by voters crying out for a continuation of America’s endless wars or demanding yet more money for the Pentagon. The political clout of the military-industrial complex may diminish as Americans move forward, however chaotically, into a new era with radically different challenges to public health and safety.

The arms makers and their allies in Congress and the executive branch won’t give up without a fight when it comes to the pandemic of Pentagon spending. You can count on that. A crucial question of this moment is: Will fear, exaggerated threats, and pork-barrel politics be enough to keep the Pentagon and its contractors fat and happy, even as the urgent priorities of so many of the rest of us are starved of much-needed funding?

Copyright 2020 William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger

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Fox News host fact-checks Trump aide’s claim that “election was stolen”: “Judges do not see that”

During a segment on Fox Business this Friday, Trump aide Peter Navarro got some pushback from host Liz Claman, who pointed out to him that a whole litany of judges don’t share his view that the 2020 election was wracked with mass voter fraud.

“Everything I’ve seen, Liz, tells me that this election was stolen,” he said. “Everything I’m seeing across six states, I mean, to the point . . .”

“Why do judges not see that, Peter?” Claman interjected. “More than 24 judges do not see that.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter:

Trump campaign and RNC spent over $1 million at Trump properties in final weeks of election: report

According to a report from the Washington Post, Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee spent just over a million dollars at properties owned by the president while his election prospects foundered in the polls presaging a loss at the polls.

With the report noting that the Trumps enriched themselves to the tune of $6.7 million from donors that funneled into the properties over four years, it appears the spending accelerated in the last three months.

“The filings from Trump Victory — a fundraising committee managed by Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee — show $1.06 million in new spending at Trump properties in September, October and November. Trump’s own campaign, which files a separate spending report, reported spending another $66,000,” the report states while noting that details — so far — remain sketchy about where the money was specifically spent and for what.

The report goes on to state, “. . . There were several bills in excess of $100,000 for facility rental and catering.”

“Trump visited his own properties nine times in the last weeks of his campaign: He held fundraisers at his golf clubs in Bedminster, N.J., and Doral, Fla.; announced endorsements at his hotel in Las Vegas; and spent nights at the Las Vegas and Doral properties, as well as his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., between campaign stops,” The Post reports. “Those trips were the final stops in a long series of trips that allowed Trump to convert campaign donations into revenue for his own company — which has struggled with empty rooms, lost customers and declining revenue at some properties since he took office. Trump’s first 2020 fundraiser, held back in June 2017, was at his hotel in Washington.”

The report on self-dealing comes as first daughter Ivanka Trump is being scrutinized as part of the D.C. attorney general’s lawsuit probing potential misuse of the Trump 2016 inauguration fund.

You can read more here.

The chattering classes got the “Hillbilly Elegy” book wrong–and they’re getting the movie wrong too

Film critics have had nary a good word to say about Netflix’s new movie “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Reviewers varyingly called it “Oscar-Season B.S.,” “woefully misguided,” “Yokel Hokum,” “laughably bad” and simply “awful.”

I admit to delight when I read professional critics trashing the film, which is based on J.D. Vance’s widely praised memoir detailing his dramatic class migration from a midsize city in Ohio to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School. I was expecting the worst based on my dislike of the book, and these reviews confirmed my expectations.

But once I saw the film, I felt it had been harshly judged by the chattering classes – the folks who write the reviews and seek to create meaning for the rest of us. In fact, the film is an earnest depiction of the most dramatic parts of the book: a lower-middle-class family caught in the throes of addiction.

Everyday viewers seem to find the film enjoyable enough – it has solid audience reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

So why the big gap between the critical response and audience reaction? Could it be yet another sign of the country’s steadily growing class divide?

A bootstrap manifesto

The film’s negative reviews are an about-face from critics’ warm embrace of the book, which was published in 2016, when Vance was just 31.

In telling his story of overcoming his mother’s addiction and attendant familial and economic precarity, Vance credits his Mamaw and Papaw, along with luck and hard work.

Fair enough. But he gives no nod to the government structures – K-12 schools, the military and the GI bill, the public university where he earned his B.A – that greased the skids of his sharp ascension into the ruling class. Worse still, Vance expressly blames laziness as the culprit of those left behind, with only cursory attention to the impact of policies that encouraged the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and weakening of the social safety net.

The book is not subtle in its message: Working-class grunts are to blame for their own struggles. If they’d just get off their duffs, go to church and stay married, everything would be OK.

Yet commentators from across the political spectrum greeted the book with a big wet kiss. Published months before Donald Trump’s election, it was perfectly timed for the zeitgeist, and Vance’s extended personal anecdote suddenly became the authoritative text about enigmatic working-class whites, all presumptive Trump supporters. The New York Times fawned over its “discerning sociological analysis,” overlooking Vance’s one-sided invocation of data and scholarly literature, while prestigious think tanks like the Brookings Institution elevated Vance to expert status.

I was one of few progressive elites to push back against the media’s early, broad embrace of the book. Admittedly, I was moved by Vance’s compelling biography, which featured many of the hallmarks of my own: hillbilly roots, addicted parent, family violence and – ultimately – a dramatic class leap into elite legal circles.

But I was put off by Vance’s singular focus on personal responsibility and use of his story to advance an agenda antagonistic to the social safety net. Many of Vance’s positions run contrary to my own scholarly work about the white working class and rural America.

Vance also suggests that his family – in both its best and worst manifestations – is representative of Appalachia. Yet like all families, Vance’s is typical in some ways but not in others. And that’s what got so many Appalachians up in arms when the book came out. Not all of them are drug addicted any more than they’re all coal miners. Further, not all Appalachians are white. Many lead boring lives.

From curiosity to disdain

I wasn’t happy when Ron Howard and Netflix paid US$45 million for the movie rights, because I didn’t want the book to get an even wider audience. But the film leaves Vance’s politics aside and instead focuses on three generations worth of Vance family saga. That means the positive potential I saw in the book is at the heart of the film.

For one, working-class white people can see themselves on screen. When I read the book, I initially laughed out loud – but also cried – over the ways Vance’s hillbilly grandparents reminded me of my own extended family. I also related to his “fish out of water” experiences in elite law firms.

Second, the story is a reminder that white skin is no magic bullet. Folks where I live and work in California often use “white privilege” as synonymous with “you’re white, you’ll be all right.” Members of the Vance family are white, but they are clearly not all right. The movie has the potential to foster empathy between the two worlds J.D. Vance straddles – the ones I also straddle – between working class and professional class.

Yet to some critics, the film amounted to no more than “poverty porn.” They lamented a lack of complexity, nuance, motivation and internal conflict in the film’s characters.

Really? Those reviewers must have looked right past the trauma both Mamaw and Bev experienced in their early lives – the former as a child bride, the latter as a child raised in the violent home of that child bride. J.D. is a product of both.

There are surely other reasons, too, that the film world has turned a cold shoulder to this cinematic packaging of Vance’s book. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the four-year span between the book and the film neatly coincided with the beginning and end of Trump’s presidency. During that same period, what started as progressive elites’ curiosity about the white working class gave way to bald disdain and fury.

Nowadays, my Twitter feed is awash with resentment every time “mainstream media” run a story about white Trump supporters.

The woke whine that such coverage implies that these are the “real Americans” who we should try to understand, while overlooking other marginalized subsets of the population. Film critic negativity about “Hillbilly Elegy” may reflect similar attitudes – a mix of exasperation and boredom with a pet topic for media outlets since the 2016 election.

Audiences have a different response

To me, the real pity is that so many coastal elites know so few working-class folks of any color, let alone the hillbilly subset of them. Indeed, studies show that, increasingly, people from different socioeconomic strata no longer mix even within the same metro areas.

The crummy reviews ultimately evince this profound and persistent disconnect between those who write the reviews and “regular” folks.

A week after its release, the film’s critic score on Rotten Tomatoes was 27, while its audience score was 82. That’s a massive spread, and one that may align with the yawning chasm cutting across our national electorate.

The cosmopolitan set can’t believe viewers would want to watch “those people” – and may even be able to relate to them – any more than we can believe so many people voted for Donald Trump.

When critic Sarah Jones, an Appalachian by upbringing, argues that “Hillbilly Elegy” wasn’t made for hillbilly viewers, I’m not convinced. Jones places “Hillbilly Elegy” among “an old and ignoble genre” that “caricatures the hillbilly for an audience’s titillation.”

Maybe. But there are far worse depictions of rural folks and other hillbilly types. Look no further than this appalling scene from “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” or the 1972 classic “Deliverance.”

Howard and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor certainly took liberties in condensing and dramatizing decades of Vance family dysfunction, but we shouldn’t pretend that families like these don’t exist. I know people like them – heck, I’m even related to some.

Many viewers will relate to “Hillbilly Elegy” simply because addiction is such a shockingly common phenomenon, one that touches many families and every community. Others will appreciate the film because it presents J.D. Vance achieving the “American dream.” It’s an ideal many find irresistible in spite of the fact that – or, indeed, because – upward mobility is more elusive than ever.

With Vance’s politics tucked out of sight, can we simply judge the film for its entertainment value? Can we acknowledge that we don’t all like the same things?

After all, there may be a few things elites don’t “get.” And that could be because the movie wasn’t made for them in the first place.

Lisa R. Pruitt, Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Law, University of California, Davis

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

Our wish for the future host of “Jeopardy!”: Who is LeVar Burton?

Alex Trebek’s legacy is forever entwined with “Jeopardy!,” America’s favorite quiz show, in the same way that Johnny Carson’s legend still looms large over “The Tonight Show” decades after his death. Both series existed existed before each man took over as host, and although they defined their respective eras, there is (and was) little to no question as to whether their respective shows would go on after they were gone. The main difference is that Carson retired, whereas Trebek hosted “Jeopardy!” until he couldn’t anymore. He died of pancreatic cancer in November.

But a year ago when he appeared at a press event for TV critics to promote the multi-night prime-time special “Jeopardy! The Greatest of all Time,” Trebek shared his belief that the right person would enjoy the same level of respect and fandom that he did. He believed that the game itself was the main event, not him.

“Keep in mind that my success to a great extent has depended on the success of the game,” Trebek sagely offered. “You could have put somebody else in as the host of ‘Jeopardy!’ 36 years ago – not everybody, but there are some individuals who could have been named as host of ‘Jeopardy!’ – and if the show had lasted 36 years, they would be enjoying the same kind of favorable reviews and adulation that I have enjoyed in recent years.”

Maybe that’s true. We’ll never know. But as it stands, the quest to find the host who can usher the trivia series into its next era is very much afoot. New episodes are set to begin airing in 2021, and the series resumed production on Monday with Ken Jennings, who holds the all-time record for most consecutive games won, as the show’s first of a series of guest hosts.

Trebek’s successor has yet to be named, and subsequent guest hosts have not yet been announced.

“Alex believed in the importance of ‘Jeopardy!’ and always said that he wanted the show to go on after him,” said “Jeopardy!” executive producer Mike Richards in a statement. “We will honor Alex’s legacy by continuing to produce the game he loved with smart contestants and challenging clues. By bringing in familiar guest hosts for the foreseeable future, our goal is to create a sense of community and continuity for our viewers.”

We can only assume that fellow “Jeopardy!” GOATs James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter will be in the mix, but at this point the hosting job is anyone’s game to win. But I’m rooting for one person in particular: LeVar Burton.

Granted, “Jeopardy!” producing studio Sony Pictures Television has an opportunity to break away from the longstanding practice of selecting male hosts, and they should certainly seize that. In 2019 Trebek himself surmised in an interview conducted  at New York’s 92nd Street Y that the show’s next host would be a woman, “somebody younger, somebody bright, somebody personable, somebody with a great sense of humor.”  

He went on to jokingly suggest his great friend Betty White, who is 98 years old. Then he offered a few more realistic options, including CNN’s Laura Coates. She’d be wonderful. Here’s hoping she gets slotted into the guest host mix and blows away the competition.

Among the world of well-known possible contenders, though, Burton deserves to be at the front of the pack.

Full disclosure: this opinion is not an original idea. Right now there’s a Change.org petition endorsing Burton for the job, created to “show Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and producers Mike Richards and Harry Friedman just how much love the public has for Burton.” It has almost 109,000 signatures as of this article’s writing.

Even other celebrities are down for seeing Burton step into the role that Trebek formerly occupied.

Not that I’d turn down the opportunity, but I do love the thought of @levarburton landing the role as new host. https://t.co/qWRzKXRTD0

— KeithDavid (@ImKeithDavid) December 4, 2020

Petitions are popular these days, and only a few truly move decision-makers in situations such as this. But in this case Burton’s boosters are on to something, because has a number of key qualities that make him the perfect bridge between the Trebek era and the one to come.

First, he’s already a familiar face. This can cut both ways, mind you; the law that stars make TV and not the other way around very much applies here. But Trebek was already somewhat of a known factor when he came to “Jeopardy!,” having hosted game shows in Canada and a few in America during the ’70s prior to becoming the trivia show’s master of ceremonies when it was relaunched in 1984.

Burton has been far more recognizable since he played Kunta Kinte in the original 1977 miniseries “Roots.” But most viewers under the age of 50 know him as Geordi LaForge from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and/or the friendly man who instilled in them a love of books as the host of public television’s “Reading Rainbow.” He’s famous, but in a way that augments the “Jeopardy!” brand as opposed to overpowering it.

Second, both his “Star Trek” role and his “Reading Rainbow” tenure are associated with intellectual curiosity. Burton’s range is broader than these two parts, of course, but it’s not as if he was invited to appear on “The Big Bang Theory” for his voice work on “Family Guy.” In this respect, Burton can easily continue the spirit Trebek cultivated on “Jeopardy!” Trebek’s stabilizing presence was rooted in a sense that he knew the answers even with his cue cards, but this awareness was devoid of arrogance or ego. He was the series’ soul, but the contestants’ knowledge and intelligence has always been its star.

Third, Trebek set the tone of polite respectfulness that pulsed through that studio, in that he maintained a levelheaded calmness whether a contestant delivered the correct answer in the form of a question or got it entirely wrong. And that warmth of his was singular. Nobody can entirely replicate it, and nobody should try. The best a producer can do is select someone who comes close.

And Burton fits that bill. He’s consistently personable, serene and genuinely pleasant. His podcast “LeVar Burton Reads” is a contemplative, kindly gem that promotes a sense of wonder about literature and writing that is utterly welcoming.

Lastly, he’s not controversial. As soon as Jennings was announced as the show’s first guest host, several offensive tweets in which he mocked the disabled resurfaced and made headlines. Social media is its own world, and surely if Jennings knocks his guest host performance out of the park the studio will like bet that any of his past stumbles will fade away if they haven’t already. Still, isn’t it better to place someone in the “Jeopardy!” slot with no such baggage?

Burton’s no milquetoast and, in fact, speaks his mind without apology, sometimes with a little spice. But he’s decidedly inclusive and champions educational equity, traits anyone who permanently steps into the “Jeopardy!” host role would do well embody.

This is because “Jeopardy!” is not merely a game show. It’s a beacon of equanimity and standing evidence that reason and knowledge are still prized in our society. Therefore whomever ends up hosting it is taking on something greater than another entertainment. It’s a duty.

Should Burton choose to accept the opportunity to guest host if offered – and according to a recent tweet, he’s open to the possibility – I’ll certainly be watching and rooting for him. For while he may not be a “Jeopardy!” GOAT, in my book he’s the best person to usher the beloved institution into its future.

New episodes of “Jeopardy!” begin airing on Monday, Jan. 11. Check your local listings.

Nancy Pelosi says Mitch McConnell agreed to attach coronavirus relief to upcoming spending bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced on Friday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had agreed to combine this year’s annual omnibus spending bill with a coronavirus relief package, offering hope that stimulus for Americans economically suffering during the pandemic may be on its way.

McConnell, who has not talked with Pelosi in weeks about the possibility of moving another stimulus bill, was apparently motivated to do so after a $908 billion stimulus proposal was proposed by a bipartisan coalition of centrist Democratic and Republican senators earlier this week. One day after the bill was first unveiled on Tuesday, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., released a joint statement saying they supported using that measure as a starting point for bipartisan talks on ultimately getting relief passed, and urged McConnell to do so as well. By Thursday a growing number of Republicans also said they would be open to beginning negotiations around the relief package, adding further pressure to McConnell. The Senate Minority Leader had previously supported a much smaller bill and indicated he was not flexible about it.

“There is momentum — there is momentum with the action that the senators and House members in a bipartisan way have taken,” Pelosi explained on Friday. “The tone of our conversations is one that is indicative of the decision to get the job done.” She also told reporters that she is hoping for “a big, strong vote” behind any relief package that is passed.

Not all of the news is good. There are a lot of details that Democrats and Republicans will have to work out before any final relief measure is passed, and government funding runs out next week, Congress may need to pass a brief stopgap spending bill in order to buy themselves enough time to develop an omnibus spending bill and coronavirus relief package that can pass both chambers of Congress.

The $908 billion proposal includes four months of unemployment benefits amounting to $300 a week, $160 billion in funding for state and local governments, help for students paying off their loans and assistance for small businesses, health care facilities and schools. The bill did not include any consensus on issues like liability protections for businesses and other organizations in the event that people who do to their physical locations get infected.

“Our action to provide emergency relief is needed now more than ever before. The people need to know we are not going to leave until we get something accomplished,” one of the bipartisan bill’s co-sponsors, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, explained when announcing it. “I’m committed to seeing this through.”

Notably, the new stimulus proposal does not include direct cash payments to every taxpayer like the CARES Act passed in March, although President-elect Joe Biden said on Friday that he would prefer to include those payments and added “I understand that may be still in play.” It is also much smaller than that original bill more generally. The CARES Act, which cost more than $2 trillion, included $1,200 payments to taxpayers making less than $75,000 each year and gradually reduced the amount for people in higher tax brackets before being entirely eliminated for families who made more than $99,000 each year. It also includes $500 for every child in the household of eligible families, expanded the eligibility criteria for unemployment relief, extended benefits by 13 weeks, increased maximum unemployment benefits by $600 per week, provided $500 billion in relief for corporations, gave $350 billion in relief to small businesses and allocated $100 billion in assistance for hospitals.

Biden asks Americans to wear a mask for 100 days to stop COVID deaths. Scientists agree with him

President-elect Joe Biden is urging Americans to wear a mask for the first 100 days after he takes office — and scientists agree that, if people listen to him, it will save lives.

“Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days. And I think we’ll see a significant reduction,” Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper during an interview on Thursday. President Donald Trump, by contrast, has repeatedly downplayed the importance of wearing a mask, not only avoiding wearing one in public but mocking Biden for doing so. In this respect Trump followed in a long tradition of presidents who ignore common sense medical advice, most notably William Henry Harrison who refused to wear a coat or hat during a blizzard (he later died of what his doctor believed to be pneumonia).

Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump is the first president to actively buck medical experts’ public health advice in a way that encouraged others to follow his example. His anti-mask rhetoric was one of the reasons why Scientific American, the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States, broke its 175 year history of nonpartisanship to endorse Biden’s candidacy in 2020. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that wearing a mask in public is necessary to both protect people from being infected with the novel coronavirus and to stop those who already have it from spreading the infection.

“At this stage of the pandemic, it’s important for the individual to know that the simple but effective expedient of wearing a mask will both reduce their ability to transmit the virus to others and reduce their own vulnerability to becoming infected,” Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, wrote to Salon.

The question, though, is how effective will it be if Americans follow Biden’s plan to have everyone wear a mask for 100 days.

“Would it reduce transmission? Absolutely. Would it be enough, alone, to stem the epidemic? Probably not, and some other social distancing type control measures will need to remain in place in order to bring case numbers down,” Dr. Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon by email. After mentioning that he and his colleagues have done studies which show that masking measures taken early “reduced transmission by around 18%,” he added that “more universal masking would likely do a lot more. However, evidence on direct protection suggests that masking alone in non-medical settings is 40-60%, so that is likely an upper limit of how much transmission could be reduced from masking alone.”

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, echoed Lessler’s observation.

“We would of course like everyone that can wear a mask to do so,” Benjamin wrote to Salon. “The way the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation models this is to point out that if we achieve 95% universal coverage we would save 66,000 lives by April 1, 2121. (12/4/2020 projection) They adjust this weekly based on infectious conditions in the USA.”

Benjamin also praised Biden for making his request that Americans wear a mask, telling Salon that “the President-elect is showing the leadership necessary to get better compliance. He has been demonstrating this by wearing the mask as appropriate; letting the public know he plans to make mask wearing required in the places the federal government controls (federal buildings, transportation, etc) and giving people a date certain that aligns with many people being vaccinated.”

He added, “While mask wearing may be needed beyond that in some places I think giving people a date certain to strive for is a reasonable step to get better compliance.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California — San Francisco, echoed Benjamin’s observations. After saying that she is “thrilled” with Biden’s “display of strong leadership” in calling for people to wear masks during the first 100 days of his presidency, she wrote to Salon that “masking is one of the most important public health interventions to combat COVID-19 that we have. We are in the middle of a huge surge in the U.S. and data from multiple sectors have shown high compliance to mask-wearing can reduce transmission by up to 75% in just 20 days (as shown in a recent study from Germany).”

Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote to Salon that “for anyone with half a brain, it will work. For those who are stupid enough to go to rallies without masks, his advice (and that of every public health professional) seems useless.” As he noted, mask wearing “will ONLY be ‘effective’ for those who congregate and interact with others using masks! Masks go a some way to protecting the wearer, but a long way protecting others around them. So EVERYONE has to wear a mask, except those who have been in a bubble with friends and family who are extremely careful about their lives.”

Lessler also pointed out that “every additional person that wears a mask” contributes to a decline in transmission, although he added that the location of where people wear masks is also important.

“Wearing a mask all of the time but then going to an indoor restaurant and bar and (necessarily) take off the mask to eat or drink is a very different prospect than if the same person kept all of their eating and drinking to home,” Lessler explained. When asked what percentage of the population needs to wear a mask for there to be a statistically significant drop in cases, Lessler said that “a rough guess is 80% or more plus other social distancing measures. A reduction in cases from what we would have seen without masks? Even 10% or so would be enough to make some impact.”

Gandhi made the same point, writing to Salon that “models have shown 80% of the population need to wear masks for transmission reductions to be significant. Since other estimates have shown only about 50-60% compliance at best in the U.S., this call by President-elect Biden should boost our rates.”

Medford was also hopeful, telling Salon that “the more people who take up President-elect Biden’s request, the greater reduction we will see within these 100 days of viral transmission, hospitalizations and death. This could result in the saving of many thousands of lives.”

Felicity Huffman is making her Hollywood comeback; now what about Lori Loughlin?

Hollywood loves a comeback story.

From Martha Stewart to Mel Gibson, the entertainment industry is known for welcoming back their own with open arms. After enduring public scandals, many stars have taken a break from the limelight, eventually bouncing back onto the A-list.

More than a year and a half after the college cheating scandal first made headlines, actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin may be facing two very different realities.

Huffman, who spent 11 days in prison after being released early from her two-week sentence for cheating on her daughter’s SAT test, is eying her return to television, having just signed on to headline a single-camera comedy that landed a pilot production commitment at ABC.

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Huffman and her representatives declined to comment for this story. But those close to the Oscar-nominated actress say there was no shortage of interest from business partners, despite the admissions scandal. According to multiple insiders, after completing her short sentence, Huffman was courted by other Hollywood parties who were eager to work with her and displayed no signs of skepticism, before signing onto the ABC project.

“From day one, she just wanted to do the right thing and that’s what she’s done and that’s what she’s doing,” a source close to Huffman says. “She is grateful there is work available for her.”

Meanwhile, Loughlin — typically the TV queen of Christmas — is currently serving a two-month jail sentence at federal prison in Dublin, Calif., while Hallmark, the network that cut ties with the “Full House” alum, is airing its annual slat of holiday programming of which Loughlin used to be a key star.

While the notion of any-press-is-good-press is a longstanding mantra in showbiz, Huffman’s swift turnaround with a major network deal illuminates the issue of who gets a comeback during the era of “cancel culture.”

As famous actors, Huffman and Loughlin became the primary faces of the nationwide scheme, though more than 50 people were charged as part of the conspiracy with 33 parents of college applicants accused of paying more than $25 million, collectively, to William “Rick” Singer, the organizer who collected money from wealthy parents to fraudulently cheat their children’s way into elite universities, becoming the center of the FBI investigation, dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues.”

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Two months after federal prosecutors exposed the scam, Huffman pleaded guilty in May 2019, and became the first parent sentenced in the case. (Her husband, actor William H. Macy, who stars on Showtime’s “Shameless,” was not charged.) When speaking to the judge, Huffman, who accepted responsibility from the get-go, apologized to all students and parents “who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly.”

“There is a perception that she handled a very bad situation very well, and that she’s done her time,” longtime Hollywood crisis manager, Howard Bragman, says of Huffman. “She handled it with great humility, great class and great sincerity towards the severity of the situation,” he adds. “It couldn’t have been done any differently.”

Loughlin and her husband, multi-millionaire fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, submitted not guilty pleas, maintaining their innocence for more than a year. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in May 2020 — one full year after Huffman – admitting to paying $500,000 to get their two daughters admitted to the University of Southern California as crew recruits, although they never participated in the sport.

Giannulli recently began his five-month sentence in a federal prison near Santa Barbara, Calif., overlapping with his wife’s two-month sentence, which is expected to end before the new year.

While Huffman’s handling of the situation was widely deemed more appropriate than Loughlin (who signed autographs for fans on courthouse steps when arriving to a federal court appearance, after being indicted in 2019), Huffman’s return to the biz after her major faux pas is also due to her level of work and longstanding positive reputation across the industry. The Oscar-nominee and Golden Globe winner, who has a star on the Walk of Fame, is known to be adored by those with whom she works.

“People don’t get reputations, people earn reputations,” Bragman says. “People in this town know who you are. She has proven herself and made one mistake on top of decades of professionalism.”

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For three decades in the entertainment business, Huffman and Macy have largely stayed out of the tabloid fray, and for the first time ever, real-life behavior served as a distraction on-screen. In the height of the scandal, Huffman missed out on a likely Emmy nod for her critically acclaimed portrayal of Linda Fairstein in Netflix’s Ava DuVernay series “When They See Us.”

“Felicity is not a celebrity and she never has been,” a person close to the actress says. “Obviously, it was going to take time before she could work again. And she needed time. But it didn’t change her status.”

Loughlin’s fallout, immediately, was more severe. After Hallmark was made aware of her involvement in the bribery scam, the network cut ties with the actress, stopping all production and development with Loughlin, who had starred in a handful of their made-for-TV Christmas movies, along with producing and starring in two series, Hallmark’s “When Calls the Heart” and “Garage Sale Mystery” on Hallmark Movies & Mystery channel. While she was embroiled with legal issues, Loughlin also departed the final season of Netflix’s “Fuller House,” the sequel series to Full House,” which made her a household name in the 90’s and gave her endless nostalgic fandom as Aunt Becky.

When asked about Loughlin’s current relationship with the network, a spokesperson for Hallmark’s parent company, Crown Media, said, “We are not making comments at this time.”

According to those close to her, Loughlin is said to be focused on serving her time, before even considering any return to Hollywood. While she doesn’t have any projects on the horizon post-prison, Loughlin would like to get back to acting.

“She very much loves acting and would like to work again,” a source from Loughlin’s inner circle says. “Her greatest passion has always been acting. She’s been doing it since she was a teenager. That’s what she would love to do.”

Loughlin’s rep declined to comment for this piece, but a person close to the actress says no plans are being made, in regards to future work or a publicity plan to stage her comeback, as Loughlin’s focus remains on the legalities that the case has presented to her and her husband.

“There is no discussing work when you know you have to go to prison. Until the legal case is put behind her, there is no discussing anything with anybody,” a person familiar with Loughlin’s situation says. “Nothing is being dealt with until she serves her time, does her duty and put this behind her.”

Though Huffman has already been cast in a major broadcast project, for both actresses, how they move forward will be crucial as they work to make their way back into America’s living rooms. With any new show or film comes a press tour, and even after sitting down with an esteemed journalist for the most perfectly-conducted mea culpa, in the age of Twitter and Google, this story will follow participants of the college scandal for years to come.

The differences in how Huffman and Loughlin handled the situation are certainly noteworthy in the court of public opinion, more significant are the severity of the charges. Loughlin committed more egregious crimes than Huffman, who admitted to paying $15,000 towards her daughter’s faulty college admission, in comparison to the half a million dollars paid by Loughlin and her husband, who played a more active role in the scandal.

“Lori won’t have as easy of a time coming back for a couple of reasons,” Bragman predicts. “Lori hasn’t been cast in the range of parts that Felicity has been. And I don’t think she handled the situation quite as deftly as it could have been handled – and that’s an understatement.”

Whether any network or studio will gamble on Loughlin remains to be seen. But by casting either Loughlin or Huffman, there is a risk of audience alienation, especially in the midst of a pandemic that has resulted in soaring unemployment numbers for millions of Americans, who very well may perceive the college scandal as a case of upper-crust entitlement; not a case of making an honest mistake.

ABC – which has a long history with Huffman, who starred on “Desperate Housewives,” and was nominated for the lead actress Emmy all three seasons of “American Crime” – declined to comment for this story or make a network executive available for an interview, at this time. But insiders familiar with Huffman’s new project say those involved with series are thrilled to be working with her.

“Both of these women need to do a catharsis interview,” Bragman, who is a contributor at ABC News and founder of La Brea Media, advises of Huffman and Loughlin.

However, the Hollywood fixer points to one issue with the media coverage and public consumption of the entire college admissions scam.

“It was never a Hollywood scandal. It was a wealth and power scandal,” he says. “Felicity and Lori became the poster children, only because they were the most well-known, but that’s the price they have to pay being public figures, seen by millions of people who feel like they’ve known them for decades. No one said it was fair.”

 

Astronomers just created an awe-inspiring 3D map of the Milky Way — and updated the universe’s atlas

For millennia, human philosophers have waged spirited debates over what precisely is our place in the universe. Now, we may have finally figured out just where we stand — geographically speaking, at least.

The first survey of the whole southern sky ever was completed by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a radio telescope created and run by Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The survey managed to map out roughly 3 million galaxies over the course of 300 hours, including around 1 million that had never been seen before, according to SciTechDaily.

Since only 12 percent of the human population lives in the Southern Hemisphere, the southern sky is often ignored, culturally and in astronomy: few know the southern constellations, and the northern ones are hegemonic in song and in culture. However, by virtue of less air pollution, the southern sky is brighter; also, the black hole at the center of our galaxy is visible only from the southern hemisphere. 

Mapping out the southern sky’s galaxy was a feat of information technology as much as it was of astronomy. CSIRO Chief Executive Dr. Larry Marshall told SciTechDaily that the researchers behind the technology used for radio telescope managed to “generate more raw data at a faster rate than Australia’s entire internet traffic.”

He concluded, “In a time when we have access to more data than ever before, ASKAP and the supercomputers that support it are delivering unparalleled insights.”

Meanwhile, a space-based telescope issued the results of a similar mapping project. The Gaia observatory, which has been compiling data about the Milky Way since being launched in 2013 from Kourou in French Guiana by the European Space Agency, created a newly detailed map of the galaxy. The data acquired from the spacecraft was used to develop the most sophisticated 3D map of the Milky Way created so far, one that includes more precise information about the locations and movements of stars. This will help scientists calculate the mass of the galaxy, learn about the acceleration of the solar system and perhaps even glean more information about the origins of the universe.

“The new Gaia data have allowed astronomers to trace the various populations of older and younger stars out towards the very edge of our galaxy – the galactic anticentre,” the European Space Agency explains on its website. (The galactic anticentre is the point in outer space opposite the center of the galaxy, as viewed from Earth.) “Computer models predicted that the disc of the Milky Way will grow larger with time as new stars are born. The new data allow us to see the relics of the 10 billion-year-old ancient disc and so determine its smaller extent compared to the Milky Way’s current disc size.”

“It’s an extraordinarily rich data set, and I look forward to the many discoveries that astronomers from around the world will make with this resource,” Timo Prusti, ESA’s Gaia Project Scientist, said in a press statement. “And we’re not done yet; more great data will follow as Gaia continues to make measurements from orbit.”

The map, which includes roughly 1.8 billion local stars, includes about 1% of all the stars in the Milky Way. It has allowed scientists to detail how our solar system is slightly accelerating its orbit in the Milky Way and is likely to yield a wealth of other information.

“Essentially all of astronomy benefits from this one way or another because it’s very fundamental data,” Anthony Brown, an astronomer at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands who chairs the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium Executive team, explained to Space.com. “It’s a very, very broad survey mission.”

Letitia Wright reacts to anti-vax outrage after posting video questioning COVID vaccine

Marvel star Letitia Wright has responded to fans left outraged by her decision to share a video on social media Thursday night questioning the coronavirus vaccine and vaccines in general. “My intention was not to hurt anyone,” the “Black Panther” actress posted on Twitter early Friday morning. “My only intention of posting the video was it raised my concerns with what the vaccine contains and what we are putting in our bodies. Nothing else.”

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Wright’s since-deleted Thursday night post included the prayer hands emoji along with a 69-minute YouTube video from the “On the Table” channel. The video is hosted by Light London Church leader Tomi Arayomi and finds him questioning the legitimacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. Variety noted the video also contained climate change skepticism and transphobic comments. Wright was labeled an anti-vaxxer after sharing the video and initially responded to the backlash by posting: “If you don’t conform to popular opinions. but ask questions and think for yourself….you get cancelled.”

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As fans condemned Wright for sharing the video, the actress started defending herself in replies. One fan called Wright’s post “embarrassing” and encouraged her to look up videos on the vaccine posted by qualified doctors, to which Wright answered: “My point has been made. You said go and look up qualified doctors. I did. They shared. They also got cancelled. So what now?”

“Totally respect what you are saying here,” Wright replied to another fan urging her to be more informed on the matter. “I’ve also heard from medically qualified doctors who got their articles and videos taken down. Am I still wrong to question whats going on?”

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Don Cheadle, Wright’s co-star in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, called the “On the Table” video “hot garbage” when pressed for a reaction by fans online. While the actor does not agree with the video, he said he would not “throw [Wright] away” because she posted it.

“Jesus. Just scrolled through. Hot garbage. Every time I stopped and listened, he and everything he said sounded crazy and [fucked] up,” Cheadle wrote. “I would never defend anybody posting this. But i still won’t throw her away over it. The rest i’ll take off twitter.”

Wright earned rave reviews for her performance in Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” entry “Mangrove,” which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The actress is expected to take an even more central role in the upcoming Marvel tentpole “Black Panther 2.”

Giuliani’s communications director quarantined with COVID-19 following infamous Nov. 19 press event

Christianné Allen, the communications director for lead Trump campaign lawyer and former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani, has been in quarantine after testing positive last month for COVID-19.

The results came the day after Giuliani spearheaded the campaign’s “elite strike force” at a press conference alleging voter fraud, though the group’s wild, false theories were ultimately overshadowed by an unfortunate application of hair coloring.

Allen, a close Giuliani aide for more than a year who accompanies the former New York mayor to most events, told Salon in a text message that she began her quarantine after first experiencing symptoms on Nov. 20. She tested negative twice, but a third test Nov. 28 came back positive.

“It’s been rough but I’m doing much better today,” Allen wrote of the experience, adding: “I would say I definitely had more than mild symptoms.”

The day before Allen quarantined, Giuliani emceed a 90-minute Trump campaign press event at Republican National Committee headquarters, where he and Sidney Powell, the top lawyer defending former national security adviser Michael Flynn, pushed lies and fringe conspiracy theories about the election results under high-powered media lights until brown-tinged hair coloring sweated down Giuliani’s cheeks.

Allen told Salon she had attended that press conference, after which other attendees in Giuliani’s orbit announced they had contracted the deadly coronavirus.

When it comes to exposure to the new coronavirus, the president’s pro bono personal attorney has apparently enjoyed a streak of good fortune. A number of characters in Giuliani’s circles have tested positive for the virus, and the former mayor has recently been in a number of rooms with individuals who later announced a positive diagnosis.

One of them was Giuliani’s adult son, Andrew, who holds a vaguely defined White House post. Like Allen, he tested positive for COVID-19 the day after attending the Nov. 19 press event.

Another press event attendee, longtime Trump associate and 2020 campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn, announced his positive diagnosis on Nov. 25 just ahead of Giuliani’s trip to Gettysburg. Trump was also slated to travel to Gettysburg but canceled the trip, citing the positive test.

Earlier in the month, Giuliani spent election night at the White House, after which a number of fellow attendees announced positive tests, including several top West Wing and campaign aides.

One of the president’s closest advisers, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was in attendance that evening, told associates that he had tested positive sometime after the election, though it was not clear when, CNN reported on Nov. 6.

Meadows had also quarantined after possible exposure at the conservative CPAC conference in late February. In October, the top aide had accompanied a COVID-positive Trump on his helicopter trip to Walter Reed hospital, where Meadows also stayed overnight.

CNN reported that campaign aide Nick Trainer, who manages election data and spent election night in the executive mansion, also tested positive.

White House political director Brian Jack tested positive shortly after the election night event, as well, along with one of his aides. So did political adviser Healy Baumgardner, a Trump ally who had attended the party as Giuliani’s personal guest.

The outgoing president’s eldest adult child, Donald Trump Jr., was also present that night. Don Jr. disclosed his diagnosis on Nov. 20 before emerging from quarantine a week and a half later.

Giuliani also appeared to have skated unscathed through an apparent White House superspreader weekend in late September, after which at least 25 people in Trump’s orbit contracted the virus, including the president, first lady Melania Trump and their 14-year-old son, Barron.

That weekend, Giuliani joined campaign manager Bill Stepien and former Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., to prep Trump ahead of the first presidential debate. The group convened at the White House several times, after which everyone but Giuliani tested positive. Christie was later hospitalized.

After an Oct. 5 appearance on Fox News, in which Giuliani coughed heavily, the man formerly known as “America’s Mayor” told Salon that he had tested negative and had “no symptoms.” Allen, his aide, later confirmed multiple further negative test results.

On Oct. 7, Giuliani told Bloomberg TV that as a preventive measure following the extended exposure, he had been taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment which has not been shown to be effective against the coronavirus and may increase the risk of heart failure. It is unclear when he stopped taking the drug.

Fox News executives concerned about Sean Hannity’s outsized influence: “They’re terrified of him”

According to a report from the Daily Beast, Fox News executives are concerned about the outsized influence prime time host Sean Hannity has at the network, fearful that he will do something that will irreparably damage the network but also afraid he will leave and take his show to a competitor.

With Donald Trump already doing damage to the conservative network by telling his loyal followers to switch over to upstarts Newsmax and OAN, network officials are trying to right the ship over fears of declining viewership. That, in turn, is leading them to depend even more so on the nighttime lineup of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Hannity who has long been one of Trump’s biggest advocates

As the Daily Beast report notes, a former Hannity producer named Porter Berry has assumed control of the digital on-line side of Fox News where he changing the tone of the once serious news side of the network that has some executives worried and others departing.

“According to multiple staffers, Berry’s editorial vision and management style has resulted in the departure of key digital news employees like Jason Ehrich, the former executive vice president of audience development and strategic partnerships, and Greg Wilson, the former managing editor of the Fox News website, among others,” the report states, adding that complaints to the HR department have soared under his leadership. The report goes on to note that Berry is in constant contact with Hannity and the evening host is helping direct the change in editorial policy.

According to one former Fox News exec who was close to former Fox head honcho Roger Ailes, management at the network feel helpless when it comes to dealing with the editorial interference.

“The fact is that Sean Hannity is untouchable, on the one hand, and they’re terrified that he’s going to do something that is so offensive that it’s going to bring everybody down,” ex-exec John Huddy explained. “He’s come really close a few times. He’s the devil in the deep blue sea. They’re terrified of him but they can’t lose him. If they lose him, they know they’re f*cked. And they don’t have a Roger Ailes to call him in and kick his ass.”

“Berry has also plucked employees from the opinion side of Fox News to staff the news website. He’s brought in a former producer for Hannity, as well as multiple former Fox & Friends producers to edit the site. Berry’s deputy, Stefanie Wheeler Choi, is a fellow former staffer on The Five who followed him over to the digital side as a managing editor and executive producer. The elevation of Choi, who is seen as Berry’s right-hand person, on the digital news side has apparently rankled other staffers as she had no previous digital experience,” the report adds.

According to one staffer, Porter has few allies working for him.

“The digital staff has no respect for Porter,” the Fox employee told the Beast. “They see him as someone who is driven by everything that is antithetical to real journalism—snubbing truth for distortion that furthers an ideological agenda, prioritizing factory-scale productivity over quality that you get only through taking the time to confirm, to check, to challenge information and then writing and rewriting it to ensure a balanced and fair presentation of that news, and echoing the cable channel’s Republicans-are-always-right mantra.”

You can read more here.

“Selena: The Series” is a triumph for representation in a rough year for shows

The second episode of “Selena: The Series” opens with the titular singer (played by Christian Marie Serratos) on stage. She’s not a celebrity yet —at this point, Selena and the Quintanilla family were still just playing weddings, quinceañeras and fairs— but to the young girl watching in the wings, that didn’t matter. 

The little girl, who can’t be more than 10 years old, is absolutely starstruck. You can tell it means so much to her to see someone who looks like her in the spotlight. That moment is an apt metaphor for the Netflix’s new bio-series, which executive producer Jaime Dávila says is an opportunity to both take a deep dive into the life of the legendary artist, as well as offer representation for people who rarely make it to the small screen.

“I was representing this idea of showcasing a Mexican-American family like you’ve never seen, but who went on to change the world,” Dávila said. 

Selena Quintanilla was born in 1971 in Lake Jackson, Texas. Bolstered by her siblings, A.B and Suzette Quintanilla (who was an executive producer on the series), and her parents, Abraham and Marcella, she became known as the “Queen of Tejano music” — a particular blend of mariachi and polka music rooted in South Texas. When she was 23, she was fatally shot in the back by Yolanda Saldivar, the president of her first fan club. 

Three months later, her unfinished fifth album, “Dreaming of You,” topped the Billboard 200, and her legacy hasn’t diminished in the 25 years since. 

In 1997, Jennifer Lopez was catapulted into superstardom when she played the singer in the biopic “Selena.” In a 2017 issue of “Interview” Beyonce and her sister Solange discussed Selena (Solange had recently come out with a cover of “I Could Fall in Love”). Drake wears her face airbrushed on his shirt. Cardi B has sampled from her work. Puerto Rican Rapper Bad Bunny — who scored the highest-charting all-Spanish-language album ever in March — has listed Selena as the icon with whom he wishes he could have collaborated. 

But through this project, Dávila wanted to “explain how this legend happened,” and to celebrate what it means for Mexican-Americans to make art. 

“We think of Kacey Musgraves singing her. We think of Renee Zellweger thanking her in her Oscar’s speech, but all of those things are abstracted with the question, ‘How did this young Mexican-American girl from South Texas change the world?'” he said. “When you peel back the onion, as it were, you really find out that it’s a beautiful family story.” 

That’s why Dávila and his team made the intentional choice to split the series into two parts. The first set of nine episodes debut on Friday, Dec. 4, while an announcement regarding the release of the final nine episodes is expected in the coming weeks. 

“The first part focuses on the making of a legend, but what was the hard work to get there?” he said. “I think that there was something just so beautiful in showcasing what Mexican-American families are really like. I think that’s a big part of growing up. All the success I’ve had in my life is due to my family.” 

Dávila’s upbringing also impacted the kinds of projects he wants to bring to the screen through his production company, Campanario Entertainment. His parents were Mexican immigrants and his father, Jaime Dávila, Sr., was a former president of Univision and executive at Televisa. Dávila says that as a kid, he would eagerly wait for new episodes of Mexican telenovelas — many of which his father had a hand in — just as he would programs like “Seinfeld” and “The Real World.” 

“I was constantly in that sort of middle ground — both — not ‘either-or,'” he said. “That’s how I see my identity and I really wanted to create something that celebrates the idea that being an ‘American’ can mean multiple things, and the idea that ‘being American’ can be different from what we think it is. And part of that is that Mexican-Americans like me and other Latinos are already part of that mainstream. We’re already part of this fabric.” 

“Selena: The Series” is thoughtful in its representation of that, showing how the young singer was impacted by American musicians like Madonna and Janet Jackson, and how she embraced her South Texan “Spanglish,” since she wasn’t raised speaking Spanish (she typically conducted interviews in English, and began taking formal Spanish lessons in the early 1990s). Like Dávila — and the 36.6 million people who identify as Mexican Americans currently living in the United States — Selena wasn’t just Mexican, or just American. She was both. 

And presenting that point of view on television is especially important this year as several series featuring female Latinx leads, including “Vida,” Beauty and the Baker” and “One Day at a Time,” have seen their conclusions or cancellations (though “Gentefied,” a fantastic series also about a Mexican-American family, thankfully saw a second-season renewal). 

“It’s very disappointing, right?” Dávila said. “It’s disappointing when you have amazing shows like ‘Beauty and the Baker’— or a lot of Latinx shows — that don’t get the opportunity. If you look at the ratings for the first season of ‘Seinfeld,’ it was not that great. But they were like, ‘No, we believe in the show, give us a chance because we love these characters and we know where we’re taking it.'” 

Dávila said he’d like to see more shows with non-white casts get a chance to expand into a second season, and for the rhetoric around those show’s cancellations to shift. 

“Not every Latinx show is going to work, nor should it; not every white show works,” he said. “But what I think happens so much in Hollywood is that when a Latin American show doesn’t work, often I will hear, ‘Oh Mexicans didn’t show up,” versus when there is another white show about 20-year-olds in Brooklyn that is cancelled., no one says, ‘Girls in Brooklynn don’t watch TV.'” 

He continued: “It’s about Hollywood taking more chances on us, taking more chances on seasons for our shows. It paid off for you with ‘Seinfeld,’ which was a super specific show. I promise you, it’ll work for us.”

The first nine episodes of “Selena: The Series” are now available to stream on Netflix.

Rudy Giuliani’s star election fraud witness recently got off probation for “computer crime”: report

A star witness in President Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election just recently got off probation for committing a “computer crime,” the Daily Mail reports.

Mellissa Carone was sentenced to 12 months probation in September of 2019 for the crime which took place the year before. Carone struck a deal with prosecutors who dropped a first-degree obscenity charge against her.

Carone became a viral story after she appeared as a key witness in the Trump campaign’s Michigan voter fraud claims.

Everything that happened at that TCF Center was fraud,” she said, when appearing on December 2 in front of a Michigan House oversight committee. “Every single thing.”

“I have 19 things in my affidavit. I was at the TCF Center for 27 hours. I am a mother, I have two children, and I have two degrees,” Carone said in a video that was shared by President Trump on Twitter. “I don’t know any woman in the world that would write an affidavit under oath just to write it. You can go to prison for this. So anyways, I want to make this very clear. My, I was initially supposed to work at the Detroit Department of Elections building. That was an order by my manager . . . part-owner of Dominion. I have it all in emails . . . I was trained on the adjudication and tabulation process. . . . I know for a fact there was illegal activity going on there. People have pictures of people carrying ballots out of that place.”

Before her testimony, Carone gave interviews to right-leaning media where she claimed ballots were being smuggled inside food vans. Her claims even seemed to spark confusion in Fox Business host Lou Dobbs.

Elliot Page coming out is a historic moment for trans masculine visibility

By coming out as trans, Elliot Page has joined the ranks of transgender celebrities like Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, and Chaz Bono — the first three photos that appear after a Google search for “famous trans people.” Notably, only Bono is trans masculine in the group, and while he is a trailblazer who came out during a much different time, his story is lesser known by the young people who would most benefit from his example. As a trans masculine person, I wish I had grown up with a role model like Elliot Page, and I am so happy for all the kids who get to live in a world where he can, as he so eloquently wrote, “love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self.”

Read more from IndieWire: December TV premieres: 13 new shows to look out for

There are many reasons why trans feminine identities have been more visible in the years that have seen a steady growth in trans media representation, which Time dubbed “The Transgender Tipping Point” in its historic 2014 Laverne Cox cover story. As “Her Story” writer and actress Jen Richards told me in 2017, “I think it’s more intriguing to the imagination and repelling to many people. That a man can become a woman, that’s more titillating. Trans women are more visible, but they’re visible as objects of consumption.” Essentially, media is much more comfortable objectifying and commodifying women.

Page has been a household name since his Oscar-nominated breakout performance in the indie hit “Juno,” and went on to achieve greater notoriety in “Inception” and several “X-Men” films. He is coming out in a highly public way after being a known entity for over a decade. This is undoubtedly the Caitlyn Jenner moment for trans masculine people, but it’s made all more impactful by Page’s thoughtfully nuanced words and informed queer politics.

Read more from IndieWire: The 23 breakthrough performances of 2020

While Jenner’s wealth and privilege made her story highly visible, she was largely insulated from the LGBTQ+ community when she came out. This discrepancy became apparent in the short-lived reality show “I Am Cait,” which ran for two seasons on E! from 2015-2016 and featured a surprisingly robust history of trans issues. “I Am Cait” showcased Jenner’s budding friendships with a variety of brilliant trans women that included Richards, the actress Candis Cayne, activist Chandi Moore, filmmaker Zackary Drucker, and writers Jennifer Finney Boylan and Kate Bornstein. It was fascinating to watch these trans icons lovingly and painstakingly educate Jenner on issues facing the trans community. (Jenner is a longtime Republican, though she denounced the Trump administration over transgender rights in 2018.)

Since coming out as queer in 2014, Page played queer roles in a number of projects including “Tales of the City,” “Freeheld,” and “My Days of Mercy.” Page was a producer on the latter two, and also produced the queer docuseries “Gaycation” and the documentary “There’s Something in the Water,” which highlights Canada’s history of environmental racism and injustices towards indigenous communities. In his statement, Page deftly centers the violence and discrimination facing the trans community, highlighting the murders of at least 40 trans people this year alone, most of them Black and Latinx women. In this way, Page is worlds apart from Jenner, embodying a radical queer politic in his work and life long before he came out.

Read more from IndieWire: “The Crown”: Gillian Anderson on the “essential” stridency of Margaret Thatcher

While visibility of trans masculine people has lagged behind that of our trans feminine sisters, the last few years have seen the rise of actors Asia Kate Dillon (“Billions”), Theo Germaine (“The Politician”), Elliot Fletcher (“Shameless”) and Lachlan Watson (“The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”). Still, the average cis moviegoer would be hard-pressed to rattle these names off. For years Bono was the most notable trans male celebrity, and not to knock his “Dancing With the Stars” moves, he is most known for — as RuPaul once put it — coming out of Cher’s vagina.

While the media coverage of Page’s announcement hasn’t been perfect, the reception has been largely positive and respectful. IMDb, which only recently changed its policy around publishing trans actors’ birth names, swiftly changed all of Page’s credits and pronouns, as did Wikipedia and Netflix. Outlets used Page’s correct pronouns when reporting the news, and most headlines avoided using his former name. Page is coming out in a vastly different media landscape than Bono or Jenner did, a marked improvement ushered in by years of tireless work by trans activists and educators.

In addition to centering Black and Latinx trans women, what is also remarkable about Page’s statement is the omission of any discussion of medical transition. Media and the world at large have been narrowly focused on trans bodies and transition for far too long, and Page’s coming out is a boon to trans folks like myself who choose not to medically transition. Many outlets mistakenly referred to Page as non-binary, though that particular label is nowhere in his statement. It will be interesting to see how the media covers Page as he continues his career, regardless of whether or not he chooses to alter his body.

As for Page’s acting career, Netflix announced he would continue to play the role of Vanya Hargreaves in its superhero series “The Umbrella Academy,” and that the character’s gender would not change. While some commentators say the role should be recast, they would be wise to consider the message that firing a trans person for coming out would send. Identity is complex, Page is a versatile actor, and progress is not black and white. Page should be afforded all of the nuance and leeway necessary to continue his career while being his most authentic self — and being the queer icon we so need right now.

Dr. Fauci’s gamble pays off — white-knuckling his way through Trump set him up to steer Biden

After a career of being largely unknown to the vast majority of Americans, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has become a celebrity during the pandemic. With Donald Trump both unwilling to take a responsible leadership role and frankly incapable of it, Fauci filled in the void. Despite working full days directly on the pandemic, he also did countless TV interviews and appeared at multiple congressional hearings, all to educate the public about the coronavirus and encourage steps to limit its spread. 

No good deed goes unpunished, and Dr. Fauci has learned this lesson more than anyone. For his efforts, he has spent months being terrorized by Trump, who is childishly jealous of the positive attention Fauci gets, and is incapable of understanding why people might like the kindly old medical expert more than they like the raving sociopath in the Oval Office.

To add insult to injury, Fauci has also been called upon to resign his position. Not by Trump’s loyal supporters who want to believe that COVID-19 is somehow a “hoax” (although they certainly called for Trump to fire him) but by people who do take the virus seriously. For months, Fauci has heard repeated calls to walk away from his job, in protest of Trump’s malicious and incompetent handling of the pandemic. 

But Fauci’s strategy of hanging in and meeting Trump’s vitriol with bland responses, while it may not have been dramatically satisfying, turned out to be successful: Not only is President-elect Joe Biden planning to keep Fauci on in his current role, the incoming president is also designating the famous disease expert as his chief medical adviser. 

This isn’t just good news for Dr. Fauci — arguably, it’s not even good news for him personally, since his life is about to get much harder — but it’s good news for the nation.

Public health officials will soon face not just the biggest logistical problem of their careers, but quite possibly the knottiest problem likely ever faced by the public health infrastructure: How to distribute vaccines to nearly 330 million Americans efficiently and effectively. 

We’re going to need Fauci for this. He probably knows more than any single person in the country about the shape and size and challenges of this disease. His experience will be invaluable, if there’s any hope of bringing an end to the COVID-19 pandemic anytime soon. 

On and off throughout the pandemic, in response to Trump’s various efforts to make things worse, there have been a chorus of voices demanding that Dr. Fauci stand up to Trump by resigning. 

Describing both Fauci and his colleague Dr. Deborah Birx, Nicholas Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times wrote this: “But surely late at night, they must have moments of moral doubt, looking hard into the mirror and asking themselves whether they’ve made the right decision to stick by President Trump’s side.”

In July, a White House memo was leaked detailing efforts by administration officials to discredit Fauci. Trump did little to disguise his hatred of the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, both because of petty personal jealousy and because he resented Fauci for insisting the virus was a real and serious threat, which ran contrary to Trump’s desire to pretend it was no big deal and likely to “disappear” any day now.

In response, NYU professor of medical ethics Arthur Caplan escalated his calls on Fauci to resign, claiming, “Anyone who cares about facts, truth and public health ought quit this vacuous coverup.”

In response to the same incident, Joel Mathias of The Week wrote, “Quitting would allow Fauci to speak to the public more freely about the ongoing health crisis than he can now.” 

Annoyance at Fauci’s refusal to resign was heightened by his tendency to make bland and genial public comments about Trump, clearly as a way to soothe the notoriously thin-skinned president’s ego. When a Trump campaign ad falsely implied that Fauci had offered lavish praise for Trump’s handling of the pandemic, his critics took this as further proof that the doctor had failed by not resigning in protest months earlier. 

For journalists, of course, it made some sense to focus on Fauci’s public presence and how it had been hamstrung by having to tiptoe around the mercurial and intensely envious creature in the White House. Politics and communications are what journalists do, and it was frustrating to see Fauci refuse to do more to undermine Trump. 

But communications is only part of Fauci’s job, and probably not the most important part. He certainly makes a lot of media appearances, but his principal task is to run a major federal agency dedicated to fighting infectious disease. Under Fauci, the NIAID has been heavily involved with the research side of the pandemic, helping develop clinical trials for the vaccine and outline treatment strategies for COVID-19 patients. Fauci clearly believes that communicating with the public is important, but it’s not all he does. He evidently decided that to abandon all his other duties to become a full-time communicator and Trump critic, while it would have pleased a lot of pundits, was not the best use of his time. 

Now the doctor’s bet has paid off, and he will play a crucial role in distributing the vaccine and conquering the pandemic, under a sane presidential administration. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for that. 

More broadly, the case of Dr. Fauci illustrates the damage done not just by Trump, but by decades of Republican attacks on the very concept of government. One of its worst effects has been the partisan politicization of federal bureaucracies that otherwise would have been perceived as above the fray. Now even liberal commentators — who, in theory, value attributes like competence and experience — get caught up in seeing federal officials like Fauci primarily through a political lens, and underrate the important aspects of their job, such as managing large agencies and executing public policy, that exist outside the world of cable-news mudslinging. 

One of the biggest jobs the Biden administration will face is that of restoring the massive federal bureaucracy to its real job, which is to serve the public, rather than serving a deranged president’s ego or the anti-government ideology of the right. A big part of that will be allowing people like Dr. Fauci to return to doing what they do best, instead of asking them to represent a political agenda. Perhaps the biggest gift that Joe Biden can give Tony Fauci — and by extension, the rest of us who need his expertise — is to let him focus on his actual job, which is to protect the American public from dangerous disease. 

What hath the Republicans wrought: Will Trump’s insanity finally rip the party apart?

Over the past few years both the media and Democratic officials have often reported that certain Republicans say on background or in private that they really can’t stand Donald Trump. Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein even named some names a few days ago. Some people in the media and political classes would apparently prefer that the public see the Republican establishment as terrified of Donald Trump’s base rather as than the cynics they are, eagerly taking advantage of Trump’s chaos to advance their agenda.

Trump’s post-election flights of lunacy provide an excellent case in point. While “mainstream” Republicans covertly whisper in Joe Biden’s ear that they know he won the election, and assure him that they find Trump’s twaddle about “rigged” votes and what have you terribly uncouth, they remain quiet in public, ostensibly because they want to let Trump have his tantrum and run out the clock, at which point we will pretend that all this unpleasantness never happened. This is, of course, nuts. President-elect Biden and every other Democrat who goes before the cameras to reassure Americans that the Republicans understand that Trump is off his rocker and that as soon as he’s gone we’ll all get back to normal are enabling them to continue the sabotage of our democracy. Democrats have no obligation to cover for Trump’s accomplices and they need to stop doing it.

Republicans have been wringing their hands about “voter fraud” for years — despite no evidence to support such claims — in order to make voting more difficult, which is of course their ultimate goal. It’s not as if Donald Trump came up with all this on his own. It’s been a GOP staple for decades. He’s just turned the dial up to 11, as he does with everything.

It’s not hard to imagine that the more flamboyant Republicans who are egging Trump on, as well as the quiet ones who are content to let this play out, see an opportunity to leverage Trump’s following to enact some truly egregious vote suppression tactics in swing states they know are not going their way. With 50 million angry Trump voters out there who at least claim to be convinced that the entire system is corrupt, who knows what they may be able to accomplish?

Republicans are counting on Trump fading away quickly while they continue to take advantage of the system he has broken. It’s a risky play. The conspiracy theories have become so byzantine and surreal that it won’t be easy to appease the mob, not even with extreme measures like outlawing early voting or voting by mail. Trump’s followers are being whipped into a frenzy, and it’s starting to blow back on the GOP.

Earlier this week Trump stood behind the presidential podium in the diplomatic reception room of the White House and delivered what he called “the most important speech” he’ll ever give. You might have assumed a speech described in those terms would have been about the massive death toll the country is currently experiencing from the pandemic. But no. As the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker put it, it was a prepared teleprompter speech in which “Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.”

Oddly, perhaps, Trump didn’t invite the press or an audience of any kind. (The number of cuts suggest the speech was delivered in several takes and then edited together.) Instead, the speech was streamed on Facebook and later broadcast in full on the right-wing cable networks. This was by design, obviously, in order to inject this diatribe directly into the Trumpist bloodstream, unadulterated by any commentary or fact checks. To my ears and those of anyone else who is living in reality, it sounded completely insane. To his followers, it was a formal presidential address.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell once said, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” I’m sure he will dedicate himself to the same task with respect to Joe Biden’s incoming administration, if McConnell can hold on to power. I’m also sure he wishes Trump would shut his trap about the supposedly rigged votes in Georgia, but there’s just no way to keep him quiet about this. And the longer Trump keeps his up, the more it’s twisting the Republican Party in knots. Every day he’s tweeting something like this:

The two screwball pro-Trump attorneys filing incompetent lawsuits on his behalf all over the country, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, as well as the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani (who is also filing incompetent lawsuits all over the country), are holding rallies and testifying in various venues to make ridiculous demands. Powell and Wood held a rally on Wednesday in which they excoriated Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for failing to call a special session of the state legislature to overturn the election results (inspiring “Lock him up ” chants from the crowd) and exhorted voters not to vote for Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the Georgia Senate runoffs unless those two get with the program.

Giuliani was in Atlanta on Thursday, making his own plea for state legislators to overturn the election and select their own electors. His “evidence” had already been investigated and his understanding of Georgia law was incorrect, of course.

Republicans are reportedly very nervous about Trump’s planned super-spreader rally in Georgia on Saturday because he’s likely to dwell on the “rigged election” instead of focusing on getting out the vote for Loeffler and Perdue. It will be a huge surprise if Trump doesn’t just let his freak flag fly. It’s his first rally since the election and he’s hardly been seen on TV at all. He’s dying for an audience. It’s the air he breathes.

So it’s left to others to fight this “Stop the Steal” movement. A Breitbart report exposed Lin Wood as someone who voted for Democrats in the past and Newt Gingrich, who’s been fanning the conspiracy flames like crazy, calling the Georgia election a “left-wing power grab financed by people like George Soros,” abruptly reversed course and accused Powell and Wood of being “totally destructive.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas jumped in, calling Wood a “clown” who is trying to “mislead voters.” Even the Trump War Room got in on the act.

Wood hasn’t backed down, telling the Daily Beast:

[T]he Trump campaign needs to demand that Governor Brian Kemp call a special session of [the] Georgia legislature. … Loeffler and Perdue should make that same demand. The general election was a fraud. After [the] legislature fixes the voting process, then get out and vote. Seems like good old common sense to me.

Look who sounds like he’s on the same page:

And here we have Michelle Malkin of Newsmax, a formerly fringe network whose ratings are going through the roof as the MAGA crowd emigrates from the deep-state propaganda of Fox News:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave. It appears that the cult has a life of its own now and is in the process of disengaging from the Republican mothership. Whether this will affect the Georgia runoff remains to be seen. But it’s pretty clear that this “rigged election” gambit may have some far-reaching effects that the Republican establishment did not anticipate when they sat back and smugly let Donald Trump run wild with his conspiracy theories. 

RNC’s highest-paid vendor of the 2020 election: A mystery company formed nine months ago

In August, Salon reported that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had paid about $5 million to a mystery marketing services company called Digital Consulting Group LLC, starting with a $2 million expenditure in February, just a month after the company was formed.

Now, filings with the Federal Election Commission show that the RNC paid Digital Consulting Group more than $42 million for media buys, consulting and marketing between February and October. The company went from nonexistent to being the Republican Party’s highest-paid vendor of the 2020 election, all in the space of eight months.

But Digital Consulting Group presents a mystery. No other political campaign or committee has reported any payments at all to the company. While a number of organizations share the name, this particular Digital Consulting Group — a Delaware company founded Jan. 15, 2020 — does not appear to have a website, and a Delaware business entity search does not reveal an owner or location. The RNC’s spending reports list a virtual address in Wilmington, but beyond that the company cannot be traced.

That $42 million in expenditures makes this anonymous company the RNC’s highest-paid vendor of the last two years, pulling in nearly $3.5 million more than the next-largest vendor, the direct-mail firm Communications Corporation of America (CCA), and topping third-place JDB Marketing, another direct mail provider, by about $19 million.

For further perspective, Digital Consulting Group received four out of the five largest payments that the RNC doled out between 2019 and 2020, including a flat $6 million on Oct. 7 for an unspecified media buy. In fact, it has received three of the 10 largest payments that the RNC has ever made — all to a company that was evidently constructed to conceal is origins and prevent the public from knowing anything about it.

“Pretty impressive that an LLC that didn’t exist at the beginning of this year and still doesn’t have a website has received $42 million from the RNC,” Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, told Salon. “The RNC likely wouldn’t take a $42 million gamble on a newly-created operation with no track record; presumably, Digital Consulting Group LLC was set up by trusted political operatives.”

The RNC did not reply to Salon’s request for comment for this article, but a party official previously told Salon that the RNC had hired the firm to place “targeted acquisitions across all platforms,” adding that the firm works with individuals with “industry knowledge and expertise” in order to “increase efficiencies, improve service and achieve better market rates.”

Then the official added a “reminder” that as of August, “the RNC previously announced that we would not be using Parscale Strategy for digital media buys.”

Indeed, the RNC cut ties with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s company in response to bad press and internal criticism resulting from revelations that Parscale had directed millions of dollars from the RNC to his personal consulting outfit.

Reached for comment about Digital Consulting Group, Parscale told Salon that he had “never heard of it.”

“I have one company and my name is on it,” Parscale said.

But Parscale still holds about half of the shares of a digital marketing company called CloudCommerce, SEC filings show. He sat on the company board until last December, a month before Digital Consulting Group was born.

Four days before Parscale left CloudCommerce, however, the company bought marketing rights to a set of data on 80 million “faith-based” individuals, a term of art likely designating evangelical Christians.

A former Trump campaign official told Salon that Digital Consulting Group appears to be an in-house operation, as was Parscale Strategy. If the company had been designed to fill the role previously occupied by Parscale Strategy, the official said, “there is no way” Parscale wouldn’t know about it. Furthermore, the official added, Parscale worked on the Trump campaign until September, and would certainly be aware of a marketing and media vendor that had billed the RNC for $42 million.

In late July, the CLC filed a complaint with the FEC accusing the Trump campaign of laundering nearly $170 million through firms belonging to Parscale and campaign lawyers. The complaint claims that the campaign used one of those companies, American Made Media, to launder money to other vendors without disclosing the spending to the FEC.

Last month, Salon reported that the Trump campaign also made undisclosed payments to top strategist Jason Miller, via a media contractor called Jamestown Associates.

The CLC’s Fischer told Salon that the Digital Consulting Group arrangement struck him as possibly similar.

“These transactions are likely permissible if the LLC actually provided $42 million in goods or services to the RNC,” Fischer said. But the party may have violated federal disclosure requirements, he said, “if the LLC merely acted as a pass-through to disguise the ultimate recipients of the RNC’s spending.”

Campaign finance expert Brett Kappel told Salon that transparency regulations are in place so donors know how their money is spent.

“One of the purposes of the FEC disclosure requirements is to reveal whether a candidate or committee is using donor funds to engage in self-dealing,” Kappel said. “That purpose is thwarted if donor funds are transferred to an anonymous LLC.”

The RNC would not explain how the party discovered a company with no web presence one month after it was formed. It also did not respond when asked whether Digital Consulting Group was affiliated in any way with officials of the RNC or the Trump campaign.

At the end of November, the RNC reported four more payments to Digital Consulting Group — part of its marketing efforts for Georgia’s runoff election next month.

Is Dwight Eisenhower’s ghost haunting Joe Biden’s foreign policy team?

In his first words as President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken said, “We have to proceed with equal measures of humility and confidence.” Many around the world will welcome this promise of humility from the new administration, and Americans should too.

Biden’s foreign policy team will also need a special kind of confidence to confront the most serious challenge they face. That will not be a threat from a hostile foreign country, but the controlling and corrupting power of the military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned our grandparents about 60 years ago, but whose “unwarranted influence” has only grown ever since, as Eisenhower warned, and in spite of his warning.

The COVID pandemic is a tragic demonstration of why America’s new leaders should listen humbly to our neighbors around the world instead of trying to reassert American “leadership.” While the United States compromised with a deadly virus to protect corporate financial interests, abandoning Americans to both the pandemic and its economic effects, other countries put their people’s health first and contained, controlled or even eliminated the virus. 

Many of those people have since returned to living normal, healthy lives. Biden and Blinken should listen humbly to their leaders and learn from them, instead of continuing to promote the U.S. neoliberal model that is failing us so badly.

As efforts to develop safe and effective vaccines begin to bear fruit, America is doubling down on its mistakes, relying on Big Pharma to produce expensive, profitable vaccines on an America First basis, even as China, Russia, the WHO’s Covax program and others are already starting to provide low-cost vaccines wherever they are needed around the world.

Chinese vaccines are already in use in Indonesia, Malaysia and the UAE, and China is lending money to poorer countries that can’t afford to pay for them up front. At the recent G20 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned her Western colleagues that they are being eclipsed by China’s vaccine diplomacy.

Russia has orders from 50 countries for 1.2 billion doses of its Sputnik V vaccine. President Vladimir Putin told the G20 that vaccines should be “common public assets,” universally available to rich and poor countries alike, and that Russia will provide them wherever they are needed.

The U.K. and Sweden’s Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine is another nonprofit venture that will cost about $3 per dose, a small fraction of the U.S.’s Pfizer and Moderna products.

From the beginning of the pandemic, it was predictable that U.S. failures and other countries’ successes would reshape global leadership. When the world finally recovers from this pandemic, people around the world will thank China, Russia, Cuba and other countries for saving their lives and helping them in their hour of need. 

The Biden administration must also help our neighbors to defeat the pandemic, and it must do better than Trump and his corporate mafia in that respect. But it is already too late to speak of American leadership in this context.

The neoliberal roots of U.S. bad behavior

Decades of U.S. bad behavior in other areas have already led to a broader decline in American global leadership. The U.S. refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol or any binding agreement on climate change has led to an otherwise avoidable existential crisis for the entire human race, even as the United States is still producing record amounts of oil and natural gas. Biden’s climate czar John Kerry now says that the agreement he negotiated in Paris as secretary of state “is not enough,” but he has only himself and Barack Obama to blame for that. 

Obama’s policy was to boost fracked natural gas as a “bridge fuel” for U.S. power plants, and to quash any possibility of a binding climate treaty in Copenhagen or Paris. U.S. climate policy, like the U.S. response to COVID, is a corrupt compromise between science and self-serving corporate interests that has predictably proved to be no solution at all. If Biden and Kerry bring more of that kind of American leadership to the Glasgow climate conference in 2021, humanity must reject it as a matter of survival.

America’s post-9/11 “Global War on Terror,” more accurately a “global war of terror,” has fueled war, chaos and terrorism across the world. The absurd notion that widespread U.S military violence could somehow put an end to terrorism quickly devolved into a cynical pretext for “regime change” wars against any country that resisted the imperial dictates of the wannabe “superpower.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell privately dubbed his colleagues the “fucking crazies,” even as he lied to the UN Security Council and the world to advance their plans for illegal aggression against Iraq. Joe Biden’s critical role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was to orchestrate hearings that promoted their lies and excluded dissident voices who would have challenged them.

The resulting spiral of violence has killed millions of people, from 7,037 American troop deaths to five assassinations of Iranian scientists (under Obama and now Trump). Most of the victims have been either innocent civilians or people just trying to defend themselves, their families or their countries from foreign invaders, U.S.-trained death squads or actual CIA-backed terrorists.

Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR only a week after the crimes of September 11, “It can never be legitimate to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done. We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others.” Neither Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine, Libya, Syria nor Yemen was responsible for the crimes of September 11, and yet U.S. and allied armed forces have filled miles upon miles of graveyards with the bodies of their innocent people.

Like the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis, the unimaginable horror of the “war on terror” is another calamitous case of corrupt U.S. policy-making leading to massive loss of life. The vested interests that dictate and pervert U.S. policy, in particular the supremely powerful military-industrial complex, marginalized the inconvenient truths that none of these countries had attacked or even threatened to attack the United States, and that U.S. and allied attacks on them violated the most fundamental principles of international law.

If Biden and his team genuinely aspire for the United States to play a leading and constructive role in the world, they must find a way to turn the page on this ugly episode in the already bloody history of American foreign policy. Matt Duss, an advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, has called for a formal commission to investigate how U.S. policymakers so deliberately and systematically violated and undermined the “rules-based international order” that their grandparents so carefully and wisely built after two world wars that killed a hundred million people. 

Others have observed that the remedy provided for by that rules-based order would be to prosecute senior U.S. officials. That would probably include Biden and some of his team. Ferencz has noted that the U.S. case for “preemptive” war is the same argument that the German defendants used to justify their crimes of aggression at Nuremberg. 

“That argument was considered by three American judges at Nuremberg,” Ferencz explained, “and they sentenced [Otto] Ohlendorf and 12 others to death by hanging. So it’s very disappointing to find that my government today is prepared to do something for which we hanged Germans as war criminals.” 

Time to Break the Cross of Iron

Another critical problem facing the Biden team is the deterioration of U.S. relations with China and Russia. Both countries’ military forces are primarily defensive, and therefore cost a small fraction of what the U.S. spends on its global war machine — 9% in the case of Russia, and 36% for China. Russia, of all countries, has sound historical reasons to maintain strong defenses, and does so very cost-effectively. 

As former President Jimmy Carter reminded Trump, China has not been at war since a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979, and has instead focused on economic development and lifted 800 million people out of poverty, while the U.S. has been squandering its wealth on its lost wars. Is it any wonder that China’s economy is now healthier and more dynamic than ours?  

For the United States to blame Russia and China for America’s unprecedented military spending and global militarism is a cynical reversal of cause and effect — as much of a nonsense and an injustice as using the crimes of September 11 as a pretext to attack countries and kill people who had nothing to do with the crimes committed.

So here too, Biden’s team face a stark choice between a policy based on objective reality and a deceptive one driven by the capture of U.S. policy by corrupt interests, in this case the most powerful of them all, Eisenhower’s infamous military-industrial complex. Biden’s officials have spent their careers in a hall of mirrors and revolving doors that conflates and confuses defense with corrupt, self-serving militarism, but our future now depends on rescuing our country from that deal with the devil.

As the saying goes, the only tool the U.S. has invested in is a hammer, so every problem looks like a nail. The U.S. response to every dispute with another country is an expensive new weapons system, another U.S. military intervention, a coup, a covert operation, a proxy war, tighter sanctions or some other form of coercion, all based on the supposed power of the U.S. to impose its will on other countries, but all increasingly ineffective, destructive and impossible to undo once unleashed. 

This has led to war without end in Afghanistan and Iraq; it has left Haiti, Honduras and Ukraine destabilized and mired in poverty as the result of U.S.-backed coups; it has destroyed Libya, Syria and Yemen with covert and proxy wars and resulting humanitarian crises; and to U.S. sanctions that affect a third of humanity.  

So the first question for the first meeting of Biden’s foreign policy team should be whether they can sever their loyalties to the arms manufacturers, corporate-funded think tanks, lobbying and consultant firms, government contractors and corporations they have worked for or partnered with during their careers. 

These conflicts of interest amount to a sickness at the roots of the most serious problems facing America and the world, and they will not be resolved without a clean break. Any member of Biden’s team who cannot make that commitment and mean it should resign now, before they do any more damage.

Long before his farewell speech in 1961, Eisenhower made another speech, responding to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. He said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

In his first year in office, Eisenhower ended the Korean War and cut military spending by 39% from its wartime peak. Then he resisted pressures to raise it again, despite his failure to end the Cold War.

Today, the military-industrial complex is counting on a reversion to the Cold War against Russia and China as the key to its future power and profits, to keep us hanging from this rusty old cross of iron, squandering America’s wealth on trillion-dollar weapons programs as people go hungry, millions of Americans have no health care and our climate becomes unlivable.

Are Joe Biden, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan the kind of leaders to just say no to the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about, and consign this cross of iron to the junkyard of history where it belongs? We will soon find out.

Trump’s intelligence chief admits the obvious: Government can track your browser history

The Trump administration recently used one of the most controversial surveillance provisions in U.S. history to record an unidentified person or group’s visit to an unspecified website, the New York Times revealed Thursday. 

The Times reports that President Trump’s director of national intelligence, former Republican congressman John Ratcliffe, wrote to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on Nov. 6 to inform him that Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act had not been used to collect internet search terms, and that none of the 61 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders issued in 2019 involved “web browsing” records.

However, Ratcliffe was later forced to change his story. 

Under pressure from the Times and following clarification from the Justice Department, Ratcliffe wrote to Wyden to admit that “one of those 61 orders resulted in the production of information that could be characterized as information regarding browsing,” and that one order approved the collection of data regarding computers “in a specified foreign country” that were used to visit “a single, identified U.S. web page.” 

Wyden responded to Ratcliffe’s clarification — the director called it a “corrective action” — by urging Congress to enact more robust privacy protections.

“The DNI’s amended letter raises all kinds of new questions, including whether, in this particular case, the government has taken steps to avoid collecting Americans’ web browsing information,” Wyden said in a statement on Thursday.

“More generally, the DNI has provided no guarantee that the government wouldn’t use the PATRIOT Act to intentionally collect Americans’ web browsing information in the future, which is why Congress must pass the warrant requirement that has already received support from a bipartisan majority in the Senate.”

Section 215, which was passed in the fear-filled days following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, weakened protections put in place in 1978 with the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was meant to correct the most egregious and illegal surveillance revealed by the Church Committee.

Armed with what privacy advocates have called flagrantly unconstitutional surveillance powers, “the executive branch has been in nearly constant violation of FISA and the rules governing surveillance since [9/11], and during this time, it has warrantlessly collected information on virtually every American,” according to Demand Progress. The group explains that:

Section 215 expanded a provision of FISA to provide the government with broad authority to collect vast swaths of records held by businesses — including in the absence of any allegation of wrongdoing. These records reveal personal details about people’s lives, like whom they call, when, and for how long.

Section 215 orders also apply to people’s purchase records, which reveal what people buy, when, and where. Location, medical, and firearms sales records are among the other digital and physical things subject to Section 215.

During the George W. Bush administration, Section 215’s authorization of the collection of library records sparked widespread national outrage. Later, during the administration of Barack Obama, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that Section 215 was being used to enable the bulk metadata collection of every U.S. phone call. 

Snowden’s revelations prompted Congress to limit such collection by passing the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015. 

Section 215 expired in March 2020. In May, the Senate voted to reauthorize the FREEDOM Act. The bill is currently stalled, however, pending reconciliation with the House. 

“Fox & Friends” finally promotes science behind mask mandates as US sets new COVID-19 death record

After 10 months of downplaying the coronavirus pandemic and disparaging government restrictions designed to mitigate the spread, the hosts of President Donald Trump’s favorite morning show “Fox & Friends” devoted significant air time to an in-depth scientific study showing that mask mandates were an effective tool to combat the spread of the virus for the first time on Wednesday. 

On the same day, the U.S. set new records for hospitalizations and deaths in one day.

Co-host Steve Doocy presented the study, which was conducted over the summer in his home state of Kansas and appears to have been published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about two weeks prior to the broadcast.

“Ultimately right now, what’s going on with the pandemic is — and we don’t know exactly how many people may have been infected over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend — but the number of cases in our hospitals is going through the roof,” Doocy said. “And, in 41 states, it’s going up.”

“I read a great survey,” he continued. “They looked at the scientific data in my home state of Kansas. In the month of July, they had a statewide mandate for masks. Now, the problem with Kansas was some counties would actually enforce it, and other counties would not. In the counties that enforced the mask mandate, the number of cases of coronavirus actually went way down. And in the counties where they did not enforce the mask mandate, it went way up.”

“Really?” co-host Ainsley Earhart asked nearly eight months to the day after the CDC first officially advised Americans to wear face coverings.

“Yeah,” Doocy replied.

“You just have to do it smartly,” Earhart said, “and do it safely.”

“It means: Apparently, masks work,” Doocy concluded.

MSNBC host Brian Williams, who later showcased the segment on his evening broadcast, deadpanned that the discussion was “a breathtaking moment of situational awareness on live television.”

Williams added that he believed Doocy’s segment was an important artifact for a full moral accounting of the era.

“In the rush to a vaccine, in the rush to get life back to normal, to have a spring and summer in 2021 that feel like spring and summer, it’s important we never forget who the deniers were,” he said. “Because those 270,000 mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives — they ain’t coming back, so it’s incumbent upon all of us to honor their memory.”

Fox News has faced criticism surrounding its coronavirus coverage from the start of the pandemic, especially for the entertainment side of the network — though not exclusively. A Media Matters study this summer found that the “straight news” side of the network had contributed to 35% of its COVID-19 misinformation.

That same study found that of the 253 instances of misinformation that Fox News programs peddled in one week, 115 claims challenged government guidelines, such as social distancing and mask requirements. (It also found that “Fox & Friends” was one of the network’s top two culprits for pushing misinformation.)

Another study in May, conducted by researchers at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, linked Fox News viewership with reduced compliance with states’ stay-at-home orders in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

But while a number of the network’s hosts, including Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, have falsely presented masks as a tool of government oppression with no grounding in medical science, others have gently urged the public to adopt them.

Fellow primetime host Sean Hannity, who has urged viewers to wear masks on his show, released a PSA in July saying he did not “have a problem wearing a mask” to “defend grandma.”

Doocy himself urged the president to wear a mask this June as a “powerful symbol” to encourage his supporters to “slow down the spread of this thing.” 

And White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany embraced wearing masks last week in a pre-Thanksgiving appearance on the morning show.

“Let me start by saying the CDC has put out considerations as we prepare to go about Thanksgiving — about socially distancing, wearing masks, doing what you can,” she said, adding that such “considerations” were “the American way.”

As for the types of mandates that Doocy endorsed this week, McEnany described them as “Orwellian.”

Ivanka Trump gave “highly misleading” defense in inauguration corruption probe: DC attorney general

The attorney general for Washington, DC on Thursday harshly criticized the defense offered by first daughter Ivanka Trump after it was revealed she was deposed in a lawsuit over the misuse of non-profit funds by Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee.

Attorney General Karl Racine was interviewed on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

“There’s a long list of people and entities who have been subpoenaed for documents as part of your investigation,” Maddow noted. “Have you been able to talk to everybody you’d like to talk to?”

“Yeah,” Racine replied. “Our prosecution of this civil case has been thorough, and indeed, we’ve received numerous documents. We think that the productions to date have been complete.”

“I want to emphasize a couple of points, and I think that with all due respect to Ivanka Trump, what she put out today was highly misleading and at best only a part of the story. For example, Rachel, she makes a lot of an email wherein she claims that she directed the foundation to pay market rate for the Trump Hotel. That email was dated Dec. 14. Days after that email, there was clearly an attempt to pay a lot more than the market price. Stephanie Winston Wokoff sent emails — including to Ivanka Trump — raising alarms about the prices that the Trump Hotel was seeking to charge the inauguration committee,” he explained.

“Interestingly, Ms. Trump does not cite any email after Ms. Wolcoff’s red-alarm email saying, ‘Oh my goodness, this should not be charged at these high levels.’ And, in fact, as we know, the foundation was charged at extraordinarily high levels,” Racine explained.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Donald Trump Jr. denies he is vying to take over the National Rifle Association: “Total fake news”

President Donald Trump’s eldest son on Tuesday denied reports he is seeking to replace Wayne LaPierre in leading the National Rifle Association (NRA).

“I love and support the NRA and have been a longtime member, but I don’t want Wayne’s job. This story is total fake news,” Donald Trump, Jr. posted on Twitter on Tuesday. 

He went on to urge his followers to donate to the organization, which is in deep financial distress.

Alleged pay-for-pardon scheme involved Jared Kushner’s lawyer — and a California billionaire: report

More details are coming out about the pay-for-pardon scheme that was first revealed in federal court filings.

“The Justice Department investigated as recently as this past summer the roles of a top fund-raiser for President Trump and a lawyer for his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a suspected scheme to offer a bribe in exchange for clemency for a tax crimes convict, according to two people familiar with the inquiry. A federal judge in Washington unsealed heavily redacted court documents on Tuesday that disclosed the existence of the investigation into possible unregistered lobbying and bribery. The people said it concerned efforts by the lawyer for Mr. Kushner, Abbe Lowell, and the fund-raiser, Elliott Broidy, who pleaded guilty in October to a charge related to a different scheme to lobby the Trump administration,” The New York Times reported Thursday.

“A billionaire San Francisco real estate developer, Sanford Diller, enlisted their help in securing clemency for a Berkeley psychologist, Hugh L. Baras, who had received a 30-month prison sentence on a conviction of tax evasion and improperly claiming Social Security benefits, according to the filing and the people familiar with the case. Under the suspected scheme, Mr. Diller would make ‘a substantial political contribution’ to an unspecified recipient in exchange for the pardon. He died in February 2018, and there is no evidence that the effort continued after his death,” the newspaper reported. “As part of the effort, someone approached the White House Counsel’s Office to ‘ensure’ that the ‘clemency petition reached the targeted officials,’ according to the court documents. They did not say who made the contact or how the White House responded.