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Giuliani’s “disgraceful” courtroom election fraud arguments are from a “fantasy world,” defense says

Former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly asked the Trump campaign to pay him $20,000 a day for legal representation, was criticized on Tuesday by attorneys representing the state of Pennsylvania for living in a “fantasy world” after making a series of baseless and confusing allegations of election fraud in his first federal court appearance since 1992.

During the hearing before Pennsylvania Middle District Judge Matthew Brann, Giuliani falsely alleged that “widespread nationwide voter fraud” had tarnished the election. Peddling unsubstantiated claims that “big cities controlled by Democrats” had conspired to rig the contest, Giuliani asked the court to toss nearly 700,000 mail ballots and block the key swing state from certifying its results.

At one point, the former New York mayor wildly claimed that Democratic officials across the country had somehow ensured that only “their little mafia” could count ballots, and that 1.5 million votes should be invalidated.

The case, which is the campaign’s biggest legal challenge yet to President Donald Trump’s election loss, involves a lawsuit filed against seven Democratic Pennsylvania counties alleging unspecified inconsistencies in how ballots were counted. 

Giuliani also revived discredited allegations that the ballots had been improperly processed without Republican poll observers present. He argued the entire state’s results should not be certified as a result.

But the Trump campaign had already dropped those claims from its lawsuit ahead of Giuliani’s appearance in court. Republican election officials confirmed they were allowed to monitor the process and denied any irregularities. Independent fact-checkers likewise found no evidence to corroborate the Trump Team’s allegations. 

Mark Aronchick, an attorney defending Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar’s office, blasted Giuliani, whose legal services one year ago led directly to his client’s impeachment, as living in a “fantasy world” and making arguments that were “disgraceful in an American courtroom.”

Uzoma Nkwonta, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee, pointed out that the campaign’s actual lawsuit did not include Giuliani’s hyperbolic allegations of widespread fraud.

The animated Giuliani established an early rapport with Brann, who gave him wide berth to make his case. At one point, Brann paused to recommend local martini bars to the Trump team. 

The judge later pushed back during questioning, asking Giuliani to explain why the court should toss more than 6 million votes and thus disenfranchise “every single voter in the commonwealth.”

“Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?” Brann asked Giuliani.

Giuliani, his voice notably hoarse, responded with a long-winded rant, claiming that votes “could have been from Mickey Mouse” and voters should not be given a chance to “cure,” or correct, their ballots.

However, Giuliani eventually admitted that the campaign’s case did not “plead fraud with particularity.”

At one point Giuliani told Brann, “I’m not sure what ‘opacity’ means. It probably means you can see.”

“It means you can’t,” the judge replied.

The former federal prosecutor had petitioned the court earlier that morning to allow him to argue the case following the resignation of all but one of the campaign’s lawyers the day prior. The remaining lawyer — a local business attorney and radio host — not only said in a post-election broadcast that President-elect Joe Biden had won the race but also that the Trump campaign’s lawsuits would not alter that result.

Giuliani appears to have presented false information to the court. Once the lead U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Giuliani told the court in his sworn petition that he was in good standing to practice law in a number of federal jurisdictions, including Washington, D.C., where his license had been suspended for failure to pay dues.

Since Giuliani took over the campaign’s legal efforts, courts have dealt Trump a series of defeats, and attorneys have dropped out of a number of cases, with some former campaign lawyers reportedly expressing concern that the frivolous litigation could “undermine” the election.

Giuliani asked the Trump campaign to pay him $20,000 a day for his contributions to the last-ditch crusade, multiple people briefed on the matter told The New York Times. The rate would make Giuliani, who often says he represents Trump for free in his personal capacity, among the most highly paid lawyers in the world.

Giuliani, who has scraped for cash in the last year, denied to The Times that he had asked the campaign for such a high amount.

“I never asked for $20,000,” he said. “The arrangement is — we’ll work it out at the end.”

Giuliani added that whoever told The Times he had requested the exorbitant pay rate was “a liar — a complete liar.”

Is the pandemic making turkey more expensive?

Like everything else that has been ruined by 2020, it looks like Thanksgiving is going to take a hit — or, at the very least, become much more expensive.

Wholesale turkey prices are going up, as the actual number of turkeys available to be consumed goes down, according to Texas A & M Today. According to AgriLife Extension economist David Anderson, turkey production has fallen by 7.7% in October 2020 compared to where it was at the same time last year. Overall turkey production for 2020 has fallen by 2.7% compared to where it was in 2019. The culprit, he says, is the fact that there are fewer turkeys being produced.

“The turkey industry has struggled with profitability and some of the trends when it comes to consumer choices around the holidays and the consumer trends when it comes to deli meat,” Anderson explained. “You have producers trying to gauge demand and what the market will be, and that’s been difficult the last few years.”

John Zimmerman, owner of P and J Products in Northfield, Minnesota, reinforced that impression in an interview with Vox last week, commenting on how the pandemic has taken a toll on turkey farmers.

“It started quickly in March and April, because at our processing plant we started to have employees test positive for Covid,” Zimmerman told Vox. “A lot of those employees live in large family groups, so one employee would be positive, and you’d have to quarantine 15 or 20 people. We saw a definite decrease in the workforce at the plant, and that affected the farm because we’re working at half speed so we can’t get the birds out on time.”

This lowered production is naturally causing an increase in prices. What’s more, Americans are being advised to hold smaller Thanksgiving gatherings as a precaution against COVID-19, which makes smaller turkeys more desirable and more likely to be purchased early than larger ones. This means that people who wait until the last minute to go turkey shopping may find themselves stuck with bigger birds. As Phil Lempert, food industry analyst and editor of SupermarketGuru, told CNBC, “it takes about five months for a turkey to grow to be 20, 22 pounds, which is the typical turkey size.”

On the one hand, turkey producers are likely to do well this Thanksgiving season because of the higher prices. 

“The producers are going to come out well because they’re selling at prices higher than last year’s prices,” Dr. Thomas Elam, president of FarmEcon LLC, told Watt Poultry USA, an industry trade publication. “And it’s traditional for retailers to lose money on whole turkeys this time of year and they may take a little deeper losses if demand’s gone weak.”

Not all turkey farmers feel the same way, though. As one turkey farmer in Pennsylvania told a local news affiliate, he is concerned that not as many people will be interested in purchasing his 16 to 22 pound birds by Thanksgiving and that he could be stuck with a surplus if they are not sold by Christmas.

“If you get stuck with 500 turkeys after Thanksgiving and they don’t buy them at Christmas, your bank (is) going to be tapping you on the shoulder saying, ‘what’s going on?'” the turkey farmer, David Jones, explained.

A spokesperson for the National Turkey Federation offered a different view to Salon.

“The overwhelming majority of turkey farms are family owned, and we have had no reports of outbreaks,” the spokesperson wrote. “NTF member companies have been incredibly responsive to the challenges of COVID-19.” The spokesperson emphasized that there had been “illnesses in some turkey plants, but the industry largely has been able to contain them quickly, implement additional safety procedures and minimize plant downtime.” “We do not anticipate any supply challenges for Thanksgiving,” they concluded.

The spokesperson did note that wholesale turkey prices were higher than in 2019.

Turkeys are not the only food product that has become more expensive due to the pandemic. Food prices have been rising throughout the world during the pandemic due to factors ranging from supply chain disruptions to hoarding tendencies among people fearful of food scarcity.

Democrats sound alarm over possible last-minute cuts to safety-net programs by Trump administration

Democrats sounded the alarm over potential last-minute rules and regulations implemented by the Trump administration which would cut Social Security and other safety-net programs before President Donald Trump leaves office.

The Social Security Administration on Monday finalized a rule which would allow the agency to use its own attorneys to hear appeals from individuals denied disability benefits instead of administrative law judges, who are more independent from the administration.  

Democrats warned that the change would make it more difficult for individuals to appeal such decisions and “erode due process for Social Security and Supplemental Security Income applicants and beneficiaries and threaten their access to their earned benefits.”

“The rule puts unqualified agency staff in control of deciding appeals hearings and contradicts the congressional intent of the law governing such proceedings. We condemn this political decision that will go into effect just as the Trump Administration is on its way out the door,” House Ways and Means Chairman Richie Neal, D-Mass., said in a joint statement with Rep. John Larson, D-Ct., the chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee, and Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., the chairman of the Worker and Family Support Subcommittee.

Lame-duck periods often feature a flurry of rule and regulatory changes. The Trump administration is also pushing to finalize two rule changes which would cut food aid to millions of individuals and racing to implement a plethora of changes at the Environmental Protection Agency ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Democrats warned the White House against implementing “midnight rules” which “may be rushed through without providing Congress adequate time to review these rules, as required by law.”

“We have strong concerns that there may be last-minute roll-backs of health, safety and environmental protections,” House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. wrote in a letter to Russell Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and Paul Ray, the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The letter noted that “agencies publish more final regulations at the end of presidential administrations,” adding that the final years of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations saw significant “midnight rulemaking.”

But the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency, found that 25% of “economically significant rules” implemented in the lame-duck periods of those three administrations “did not comply” with federal law, the lawmakers said.

“Because the departing administration may rush the adoption of midnight rules during the transition, the quality, public input and review of these rules may suffer,” the letter added with a call for the officials to “immediately instruct agencies to avoid promulgating midnight rules.”

The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to overturn new rules imposed by federal agencies within 60 days, as the Republican-led Congress did following Obama’s departure. Republicans overturned 16 regulations issued in Obama’s final days in office after Trump took over, Politico noted, suggesting that Democrats may be teeing up a similar effort if they are able to win control of the Senate in both runoff elections in Georgia.

Nadler and Maloney sent a similar letter to the Government Accountability Office, urging the agency to “closely monitor” the Trump administration’s last-minute changes and report any major rules that “do not fully comply” with federal law.

Graham’s pressure campaign to throw out ballots may have violated federal law, legal experts say

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, on Monday said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and other GOP lawmakers had pressured him to exclude legally cast absentee ballots as the state conducts a hand recount of its presidential election.

Raffensperger over the weekend issued a surprisingly forceful rebuke of the election misinformation pushed by Trump and Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., who is leading the campaign’s recount effort in the Georgia. The secretary of state said Georgia’s recount would “affirm” the initial result, which showed President-elect Joe Biden leading by more than 10,000 votes. 

Graham, who has echoed Trump’s baseless claims sowing doubt in the results of the election, asked Raffensperger on Friday about the state’s signature-matching law, which has been the target of misinformation from the president, the secretary of state told The Washington Post.

Here’s how the outlet described Raffensperger’s account of the conversation:

Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said.

Graham denied the allegations, calling Raffensperger’s characterization of their discussion “ridiculous.”

“If he feels threatened by that conversation, he’s got a problem,” Graham told The Post. “I actually thought it was a good conversation.”

But Raffensperger told The Wall Street Journal that Graham had placed two calls to his office, adding that staffers were present on the second occasion. 

“I’m asking him to explain to me the system,” Graham told The Hill. “If you send a mail-in ballot to a county, a single person verifies the signature against what’s in the database. They don’t mail out ballots. You got to actually request one. So they expanded mail-in voting, and how you verify the signature, to me, is the big issue of mail-in voting.”

Graham later admitted that he had also called officials in Arizona and Nevada as a senator concerned about the integrity of the election.

On the same day that Graham spoke to Raffensperger, Lin Wood, an Atlanta attorney and Trump supporter, filed a lawsuit seeking to block the certification of the election results until all absentee ballot envelopes could be inspected. Trump also targeted Raffensperger over the signature-matching rules.

“Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud,” the lame-duck president wrote on Twitter. “Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state.”

Raffensperger, whose election was backed by Trump, clarified that the consent decree not only allowed election clerks to check signatures but also required them to be matched twice before a ballot is cast. He added that Wood’s lawsuit sought to match the envelope signature to the one on the ballot, which would potentially expose the identity of individual voters.

“It doesn’t matter what political party or which campaign does that,” Raffensperger told The Post. “The secrecy of the vote is sacred.”

Raffensperger doubled down on his allegations about Graham during a Monday interview with CNN.

“It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard, and see how many ballots you could throw out,'” he said.

The revelations prompted calls by legal experts for Graham to be investigated

Democratic lawyer Marc Elias called for Graham to be probed by the Senate Ethics Committee over the “outrageous” allegations. Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner went one step farther.

“Remember when Graham said, ‘use my words against me’?” he asked. “It looks like that time has come. A grand jury investigation into Graham MUST be initiated.”

“Whatever a probe reveals, it wouldn’t be necessary for Graham to have committed a crime to say his conduct was unethical,” Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, tweeted. “There’s no defending a Senate Judiciary chair calling a state’s top election official during the counting to brainstorm ways not to count legally cast votes.

Politicians from the other side of the aisle also raised concerns about the possible criminality of Graham’s actions.

“This is insane and illegal,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said.

Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., suggested that Graham’s alleged comments amounted to “voter fraud.”

“Senator Graham pressuring the Ga. SoS to throw out legally cast ballots is morally reprehensible, and possibly a federal crime,” Rep. Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., tweeted. “If true, he should resign from the Senate immediately.”

Raffensperger reserved his harshest criticism for Collins, who is leading Trump’s recount effort in the Georgia after losing finishing third in his Senate race. The secretary of state called Collins a “failed candidate” and a “liar” for his attempts to sow doubt in the results of the election.

“I’m an engineer. We look at numbers. We look at hard data,” Raffensperger said. “I can’t help it that a failed candidate like Collins is running around lying to everyone. He’s a liar.”

The attacks from within his own party have led to death threats, Raffensperger told The Post. One text he received read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”

“Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” the Republican official said, “particularly when it comes from people on my side of the aisle. Everyone that is working on this needs to elevate their speech. We need to be thoughtful and careful about what we say.”

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., praised Raffensperger for “doing his job” and “defending” democracy despite receiving “death threats” and “vitriol.”

Raffensperger told CNN that he would not step down or be bullied, even though he is personally unhappy with the election result.

“I’m going to probably be disappointed, because I was rooting for the Republicans to win, obviously,” he said. “But I have a process. I have a law that I follow. Integrity, in this office, matters.”

There’s one big, important difference between Pfizer and Moderna’s coronavirus vaccines

In the span of two weeks, two competing pharmaceutical companies have announced separate, promising coronavirus vaccine candidates, both of which have passed the second-to-last phase of clinical trials. Biotech giant Moderna announced earlier this week that their vaccine displayed “94.5% vaccine efficacy”, while Pfizer and BioNTech SE announced similarly positive results for their vaccine candidate last week. 

The dual announcements hints that there may be a light at the end of the tunnel that is the pandemic. But there’s a lot of work still to be done from here — and the differences between the two vaccines could have big repercussions for when we may see them, and under what circumstances.

First, the way that both vaccines work, biologically speaking, is the same — they’re both mRNA (synthetic messenger RNA) vaccines. mRNA vaccines are a relatively new technology, and have yet to be produced on a mass scale. As STAT News explains, mRNA is the part of a living creature’s DNA that tells cells which proteins to make so that they can remain healthy. The concept behind mRNA-based vaccines is that synthetic messenger RNA — whose composition is bespoke, based on the virus in question — is injected, which the body’s cells then take in, and in turn, being to produce precise proteins that are akin to those already found in the virus.

Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, explained to Salon how these work in greater detail. “The current COVID-19 mRNA vaccines introduce the genetic information that enable human cells to produce a single, important SARS-Cov-2 protein, known as Spike,” he said. In illustrative drawings of the novel coronavirus, the spike proteins are the little points that stick out around the sphere of the virus, like points on a sea urchin. Training human cells to produce Spike thus “trains the immune system to recognize Spike and thus protect the human body from SARS-Cov-2 viral infection,” Medford continued.

Yet the biggest difference between the two vaccines, and the one that may affect which one ultimately sees the light of distribution, lies in the temperature at which they need to be stored. That’s important because it could affect how easy it is to distribute either vaccine. According to Science Magazine, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine candidate needs to be kept at –70°C. By contrast, Moderna’s vaccine candidate can be kept at –20°C and, the company claims, can remain stable for up to one month at consumer refrigerator temperatures of 2°C to 8°C.

“More ‘end user’ locations will be equipped to use the Moderna vaccine, with its less stringent cold chain requirements,” Dr. Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote to Salon. “Likewise, if that vaccine is more thermostable it should be less sensitive to accidental breaks in the cold chain (e.g., a batch being left out on the table for longer than it should) which may increase practical effectiveness.”

“That being said, Pfizer has shown commitment to overcoming the issues with distribution and they certainly can be overcome,” Lessler added.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, expressed a similar view.

“The Pfizer vaccine will have greater logistical challenges, especially in low and middle income countries,” Sommer wrote to Salon. “Not so much in wealthy countries but still some. I’ve been told that the because of its need for very cold temperature it will be distributed in special containers holding more than 1,000 doses which will pose a problem for sites servicing smaller numbers of people.”

As Benjamin told Salon, “The current vaccine distribution system is well positioned to deal with vaccinating people that don’t require unusual storage or handling requirements. A freezer or a refrigerator certainly is okay. And apparently the Moderna product can stay out even at room temperature for a longer period of time. So that means that places like CVS and other retail clinics like Walgreens or your regular pharmacy will be able to handle it a lot easier because they have certainly refrigerators and getting something that’s like a small freezer would not be a problem for them.”

He added, “The Pfizer product requires ultra-cold storage and boxes using dry ice. Managing dry ice can be pretty tricky. You can get severe frostbite from it.” Benjamin said that it would be inconvenient to keep that ultra-cold supply chain going across the country during distribution.

The final, biggest question is when these vaccines will be available for the market. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Science Magazine that he believes doses of one or both vaccines could start to be offered to people at the highest risk from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, by late next month.

Candace Owens’ attack on Harry Styles’ masculinity reveals itself in that Marxist red herring

An image of Harry Styles wearing a periwinkle Gucci gown with a slim black blazer is going to single-handedly dismantle good ol’ rugged American masculinity. Or at least that’s what right-wing commentators want their followers to believe. 

Styles — who was a teenage heartthrob in the 2010s as part of the boy band One Direction, and has since released two wildly successful solo albums and made his acting debut —  became Vogue’s first-ever male cover model last Friday. In the photograph, the dress-wearing Styles is situated in a pastoral meadow with his hair slightly mussed. He looks into the distance, while holding a yet-to-be-inflated blue balloon up to his lips, while the gauzy skirt cascades off the page. The phrase “Harry Styles Makes His Own Rules” is splashed across his waist.

In the Vogue interview, Styles reveals he often goes into shops and finds himself looking at women’s clothing because the items are “amazing.” 

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes,” he says. “I’ve never really thought too much about what it means — it just becomes this extended part of creating something. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away.”

Conservative commentator and pro-Trump activist Candace Owens disagreed. On Monday, she retweeted an image of Styles’ Vogue cover and wrote, “There is no society that can survive without strong men.” 

She continued: “The East knows this. In the west, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack. Bring back manly men.” 

The tweet was like catnip for fellow conservatives. It racked up nearly 110,000 likes and commentator Ben Shapiro responded within hours, “This is perfectly obvious. Anyone who pretends that it is not a referendum on masculinity for men to don floofy dresses is treating you as a full-on idiot.” 

There are two dominant, but deeply interwoven, threads in Owens’ tweet that bear pulling: there’s the right’s obvious, knee-jerk discomfort with sexual ambiguity and shifts in our cultural understanding of masculinity, and then there’s the Marxism red herring, which points to something essential for understanding her fearmongering. 

While this situation may read like a completely modern phenomenon — social media discourse based on a the cover of a magazine catering to the trend of non-binary dressing, which is increasingly popular with millennial and Gen-Z buyers — the conservative conflation of queer aesthetics and anti-capitalism ideology has a storied history in the United States. 

According to historian David K. Johnson, the “Lavender Scare,” a moral panic during the mid-20th century about LGTBQ members of the United States government, fanned the flames of the Red Scare, the widespread fear of a potential rise of communism or anarchism that was prevalent in the States after both World Wars. 

“In popular discourse, communists and homosexuals were often conflated,” Johnson told the University of Chicago Press. “Both groups were perceived as hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. Both groups were thought to recruit to their ranks the psychologically weak or disturbed. And both groups were considered immoral and godless. Many people believed that the two groups were working together to undermine the government.” 

In her paper, “‘Commies And Queers’: Narratives That Supported The Lavender Scare,” Holly S. Heatley wrote that both groups were portrayed as actively working to indoctrinate children. “Communists sought to destroy public order through political subversion, while homosexuals sought to destroy social order through sexual subversion,” she wrote. 

As a result of these fears, which were largely spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and then codified when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 that “barred homosexuals from working in the federal government,” nearly a thousand LGBTQ staff were forcibly outed and fired from the State Department. 

Though the main vein of McCarthyism petered out in the late ’50s, the Lavender Scare lived on in other branches of the government, notably through the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. It wasn’t until 2017, after prompting from Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, that the State Department formally apologized for the investigations and terminations, which continued as late as the 1990s. 

The Lavender Scare also had a lasting impact on our current definition of masculinity and attitudes towards the LGBTQ community. 

“Our current definition of masculinity is very limited, and it’s that limited understanding of what it is to be male that may lead us to aggression,” said psychologist Hector Torres in an interview with the American Psychological Association. “By having a limited scope of coping mechanisms, we go very quickly to explosion and aggression.” 

That can be especially true when others question a young man’s masculinity, said Torres, adding that being called “gay” is often the worst possible insult among adolescent boys. And when men display characteristics that register as more traditionally female — such as being soft-spoken, displaying empathy, crying — their masculinity is called into question and, in extreme cases like the Owens/Styles situation, they’re held up for examination for social and political deviance. 

This dichotomy between what conservatives view as “manly” and what contemporary masculinity should encompass has been on full display throughout the Trump presidency. After President-elect Joe Biden’s October ABC News Town Hall, Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, tweeted that watching Biden was like “watching an episode of Mister Rodgers [sic] Neighborhood.” 

As Salon’s Melanie McFarland wrote in 2018, the actual Fred Rogers was “unwavering in his presentation of gentle masculinity.”

“The host of ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ had a kind, soothing voice that never spiked in frustration or sagged with sorrow, even in episodes navigating such rocky emotional terrain as divorce, or death, fear or anger,” she wrote. “He never roughhoused with guests or invalidated the observations of the children to whom he spoke. Above all, he celebrated the importance of feelings, the very thing boys are too often counseled to ignore or stifle.” 

It’s the kind of masculinity that stands in contrast to Trump’s overt, if pugilistic, hypermasculinity, which was a defining characteristic of his campaigns and presidency — whether he was, as NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben put it, “talking about his testosterone count or his penis size or shrugging off the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which he talked about committing sexual assault as ‘locker room talk.'” 

Fred Rogers would never. 

Nor, likely, would Harry Styles — though his brand of bucking the constraints of American masculinity is garbed in a Gucci gown instead of a button-down cardigan and paired with a certain rock star swagger perfected first by gender-bending icons like Prince and David Bowie. (Though the recent images of Styles feeding a fan’s fish are reminiscent of Rogers feeding his own fish). 

In both cases, these men’s choices in gender presentation don’t sit quite right with some conservatives. It reminds me of an “SNL” sketch from earlier this year, in which Kate McKinnon plays Fox News host Laura Ingraham. 

As Ingraham, McKinnon cites a list of things Americans should be more concerned about than the coronavirus, including women keeping their maiden names, fat Barbies, a group of teenage girls practicing a quinceanera dance in the park . . . and Harry Styles. 

“What’s he doing?” she asks, voice dripping with suspicion. “Who is that for?” 

I guess the answer is for people who want a broader, arguably healthier definition of masculinity than Candace Owens’.

 

Hey, Republicans — your guy lost. Can you please take the coronavirus seriously now?

In the weeks leading up to the election, Donald Trump made a promise: That “on Nov. 4, you won’t hear” anything more about what he sarcastically called “COVID COVID COVID.” He loved this line and repeated it over and over again at rallies, to raucous cheers from crowds of conservatives who, despite rising rates of coronavirus infection and death, wanted dearly to believe the pandemic was being overblown to hurt Trump’s re-election chances — or even that the whole thing has been a hoax from the start. 

Like most things that Trump says and his followers believe, of course, this was not true. The election came and went — and Trump lost, whether or not he admits it — but the coronavirus pandemic remains in the news as pretty much the top story, is as jaw-dropping new records in transmissions are set nearly daily and hospitals are overflowing. In fact, the U.S. had over a million transmissions in one week, meaning that nearly one in 10 people who have tested positive for COVID-19 did so just in the last seven days or so. Public health experts believe things will get much worse, as many Americans ignore the warnings not to travel or socialize over the holidays. 

The election is over. Trump’s promise that the coronavirus would miraculously evaporate after the election has been proved false. One major question remains: Will Republicans finally start taking this pandemic seriously, now that there are no political points to score with continued denial? 

Trump’s approach wasn’t just cynical, it was sociopathic. But there was no doubting his purpose. By pretending that the pandemic was over and holding large, maskless rallies to reinforce that illusion, Trump hoped to trick voters into believing all was well and he had done his job in protecting the nation. The months he spent discouraging his supporters from wearing masks or social distancing were meant to hide the realities of the pandemic and turn basic concern for public health into another culture-war flashpoint. 

The whole exercise was deeply immoral, but it was calculated to serve the selfish ends of Trump and his base by getting him re-elected.

With the election over, coronavirus denialism provides no material gain for the right. It’s not going to get Trump a second term. With the winter surge upon us, now would be an excellent time for conservatives to drop the act, admit the pandemic is real, and start taking measures to mitigate risks for themselves and the larger community. 

There can be little doubt that the real reason much of the American right developed a skeptical attitude about COVID-19 was out of loyalty to Trump, and a collective faith in his plan to win the election by minimizing the virus. Yes, there were some efforts to make a larger ideological argument against taking the coronavirus seriously, usually some incoherent ramblings about “personal freedom,” but in the end that was glossing over the reality: This was all about helping Trump. No one falls in line like lemmings the way right-wingers do.  

Unfortunately, eight months into the pandemic, coronavirus denialism has taken on a life of its own. People started to believe their own half-baked arguments against public health measures. The idea that wearing a mask is “unmanly” took hold. Most of all, conservatives’ refusal to wear masks, maintain social distance or even admit that the pandemic is real turned out to be an excellent way to “trigger the liberals.” Liberals do get fussy when you’re threatening their health, after all. Since “triggering the liberals” is the entire reason for identifying as “conservative” these days, that kind of negative attention only made Trump’s followers more determined to deny that the coronavirus is a problem. 

In other words, coronavirus denialism has evolved from being a Trump campaign tool into an identity. Once a behavior becomes linked to expressing one’s identity, it’s far harder to dissuade people from engaging in it. 

On Nov. 4, the pandemic did not go away. It got worse that day, and every day since then — much worse than we could have imagined, even in the spring.

But Nov. 4 was an important day nonetheless. That was the day coronavirus denialism became a vestigial phenomenon. It now serves no practical propaganda purpose. Still, it lingers on, not only useless to its hosts but actively threatening their health. Because right now, the only thing denial buys for its loyalists is an increased chance of illness and death. No political benefit is even possible.  

The good news is there are small signs of hope that, without a Trump campaign to prop up with coronavirus denialism, the allure of this deadly form of right-wing identity-signaling may actually recede.

Before the election, for instance, Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds disparaged mask mandates, sneeringly calling them a “feel-good” measure that wouldn’t actually help. (This, needless to say, is false.) On Monday, she changed course, issuing a three-week mask mandate while admitting that the state’s health care system has been “pushed to the brink.”

Reynolds is just the latest in a group of Republican governors who, with the election safely in the rear-view mirror, suddenly developed a strong interest in admitting the pandemic is serious and taking measures to curtail it. In Utah, North Dakota and West Virginia, for instance, Republican governors discovered a newfound enthusiasm for public health in the past week and a half. 

So not only was Trump lying when he said that “COVID COVID COVID” would disappear from the public conversation after Nov. 4, the opposite happened: The election freed up some Republican officials to admit that this is a real problem. 

It’s easy to imagine a situation where the Republican base follows the lead of the governors, dropping coronavirus denialism in favor of whatever shiny new culture-war object is dangled in front of them next.

Unfortunately, Trump himself is trying to keep this from happening, threatening Republican politicians who take the pandemic seriously with primary challenges. (Trump’s post-election motives for keeping up coronavirus denialism aren’t hard to figure out — he’s angry at Americans for refusing to re-elect him, and wants to kill them.) For whatever reason, Fox News continues to lean hard into the right wing death cult, even though, again, there’s no reason to think that doing so helps Republicans’ electoral fortunes now or in the future. 

So it’s frustratingly likely that conservatives will cling to this vestigial denialism, refusing to wear masks and spreading disease to make some “point” that is increasingly incoherent. (“Screw liberals if they want to live” is all they seem to have left.) So far, the culture wars have not led to the full-on civil war some were anticipating, but the death toll will be astonishingly high nonetheless. 

Trump weighed options for Iran attack that “could easily escalate into a broader conflict”: report

Following a report that Iran had substantially bulked up its reserves of nuclear material, President Donald Trump considered attack options against the Middle East country last week, according to The New York Times.

But other officials counseled the president on Thursday against aggressive steps, the report found, with at least one cautioning that “a strike against Iran’s facilities could easily escalate into a broader conflict in the last weeks” of Trump’s term.

Though Trump has reportedly decided to refrain from taking action at this point, The Times made clear he may be keeping his options open.

“Mr. Trump might still be looking at ways to strike Iranian assets and allies, including militias in Iraq, officials said,” according to the report. “A smaller group of national security aides had met late Wednesday to discuss Iran, the day before the meeting with the president.”

The news comes at a particularly insecure time for the president, as he has lost his re-election bid against Joe Biden but refuses to concede. Trump also recently ousted and replaced top leadership at the Pentagon for reasons that have yet to be fully explained.

And the increasing tensions with Iran reflect a deeply regrettable fact: Trump pointlessly tore up the Iran nuclear deal that had been crafted under President Barack Obama and was never able to replace it. That has given the regime much more latitude to ramp up its nuclear program. Biden has expressed a desire to return the United States to the nuclear deal, but it’s hard to be confident that will even still be an option by the time he is inaugurated.

Trump’s previous saber-rattling with Iran around the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 resulted in a series of escalating tit-for-tat strikes, including an assault on American soldiers that reportedly caused dozens of injuries. And in the fog of conflict, Iran shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, a passenger jet, killing 176 people.

Giuliani suggests losing election suits is part of bigger plan to get Trump’s case before high court

Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for the President Donald Trump, said on Tuesday that the Trump campaign is “prepared” to lose election lawsuits with the hope that one or more are heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since election day, more than a dozen lawsuits brought on behalf of the president have failed to produce results. Giuliani talked about the losing streak during an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

“Frankly, this is a case we would like to see get to the Supreme Court,” Giuliani said of one lawsuit in Pennsylvania. “So, you know, we’re prepared in some of these cases to lose and to appeal and to get it to the Supreme Court.”

“You’re not going to win every one of these,” he continued. “I don’t want to say it’s because of a Democrat judge or whatever. Some of them are just as fair as anybody. But in some cases you win, in some cases you lose.”

Giuliani added: “The most important thing is this will be our first established vehicle on the way to the Supreme Court.”

You van watch the video below via YouTube:

Red States’ case against ACA hinges on whether they were actually harmed by the law

Attorneys for GOP-controlled states seeking to kill the Affordable Care Act told the Supreme Court last week that at least some of the 12 million people who newly enrolled in Medicaid signed up only because of the law’s requirement that people have insurance coverage — although a tax penalty no longer exists.

The statement drew a rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said it belies reason. Several health experts also questioned the argument that poor people apply for Medicaid not because they need help getting health care but to meet the ACA’s individual mandate for coverage.

The point is vital to the Republicans’ case to overturn the ACA, an effort supported by the Trump administration. The states are trying to prove they were harmed by the 2010 health law — and thus have “legal standing” to challenge its constitutionality. They argue their Medicaid spending increased because of the mandate, even though Congress eliminated the tax penalty for not having health coverage in 2019. Even when the penalty existed, most poor people were exempt because of their low income.

Under the ACA, states can opt to expand Medicaid eligibility to all adults earning less than 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $17,600 for an individual. States and the federal government share the cost of their care.

If the states cannot prove they have standing, the justices can toss their case without ruling on its merits. The case also involves two individuals who purchased private insurance from Texas and are suing to have the law overturned.

The Medicaid costs issue was one of several ways Texas and other GOP-controlled states participating in the lawsuit say they were harmed by the ACA even after the individual mandate penalty was reduced to zero. Several justices, including conservatives Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, posed questions about whether the states had standing.

The case heard last Tuesday, California v. Texas, was the third time the high court has taken up a major suit on the ACA. Republican attorneys general in 18 states and the Trump administration want the entire law struck down, a move that would threaten coverage for more than 20 million people, as well as millions of others with preexisting conditions, including COVID-19.

Even if the court rules the states have legal standing, the ACA opponents must prove the elimination of a penalty makes the entire law unconstitutional.

The Republican states assert that since the law was upheld under Congress’ taxing powers by the Supreme Court in 2012, once the tax penalty is gone, the entire law must fall, too.

A group of Democratic-controlled states led by California and the Democratic House of Representatives are urging the court to keep the law in place.

Sotomayor raised serious doubts about the plaintiffs’ Medicaid argument and whether the states had suffered injury.

“At some point, common sense seems to me would say: Huh?” Sotomayor told Kyle Hawkins, Texas’ solicitor general, who is leading the GOP states’ legal fight. She questioned whether it seemed reasonable that once Medicaid enrollees are told there is no tax penalty for people who don’t have coverage they would “enroll now, when they didn’t enroll when they thought there was a tax? Does that make any sense to you?”

Hawkins defended his case, saying states need to show that only one person signed up for Medicaid because of the individual mandate. “There’s a substantial likelihood of at least one person signing up for a state Medicaid program, which, of course, would cause at least one dollar in injury and satisfy the standing requirement,” he said.

He cited a Congressional Budget Office report issued in 2017, when lawmakers were considering the change in the penalty. It said some people would continue to buy insurance or seek coverage “solely because of a willingness to comply with the law,” even if the individual mandate penalty were eliminated.

Few surveys have asked Medicaid enrollees why they signed up for the program.

One of them, by University of Michigan researchers that same year, posed the question to 1,750 adults who had become eligible for Medicaid in the state as a result of the ACA expansion. The most common reasons respondents gave for enrolling were that they had lost other health coverage and had a medical condition that required care. Just 2% of respondents cited the need to avoid the individual mandate tax penalty.

With the tax penalty eliminated, legal and health policy experts said, it’s likely the share of respondents signing up for Medicaid because of the health coverage mandate has dropped closer to zero.

Richard Kay, a law professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, said it’s clear most people don’t seek coverage because of the individual mandate — particularly since there is no longer a financial penalty. But there could be a few who still do.

“Do you stop at a stop sign if you are in the country and no one is around for miles?” he said. “It’s not impossible that some people get insurance just because the law requires them.”

Kay said there is no precise guidance on how courts decide whether a plaintiff has been penalized enough to prove it has legal standing. “It’s a very confused area of the law,” he said.

Pratik Shah, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represents America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group fighting to preserve the law, said the plaintiffs in the case have not proved standing.

“It does not make logical sense,” he said of the argument that state budgets were harmed by people signing up for Medicaid even after the individual mandate penalty was eliminated.

“It’s hard to see how the 2017 amendment to the health law would have forced more people into Medicaid,” he said. “If they weren’t signed up before, they would be less likely to get it without the penalty.”

The court is expected to rule on the case by the end of June.

Our politics isn’t about left vs. right anymore — it’s about reality vs. dreadful fantasy

There’s a visual image I’d like you to embed in your mind, to be wheeled out whenever you might feel even the slightest bit complacent about the incoming Biden administration. For many of us, it’s impossible to forget.

Back in April, Columbus Dispatch photographer Joshua Bickel snapped an unforgettable image of Trump supporters — no distancing, eyes vacant and maskless mouths agape — protesting the COVID protocols in Ohio during the first major spike in cases. Bickel stood inside the lobby of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus while the protesters shrieked and chanted outside, pounding on the locked doors. It looked almost exactly like that scene in “Shaun of the Dead” in which Simon Pegg and the rest of the cast is trapped inside the Winchester Pub with a large gaggle of zombies pressed against the front door.

Never forget that image. 

It’s perhaps the best illustration of the political stakes following Joe Biden’s decisive and, by Donald Trump’s own standards, landslide victory. While the ousting of Trump was fantastic news for the preservation of the American republic and the national values we cherish, it’s become abundantly clear that the Red Hat cult isn’t going anywhere. In fact, Trump managed to add millions of voters to his army of suckers.

Given the relentless horror show we’ve experienced since Trump was inaugurated, it should be supremely worrisome that he actually gained voters — 11 million more than in 2016, so far — and it happened in the midst of an uncontrolled and incompetently mismanaged pandemic that has killed nearly a quarter-million Americans, manifesting the steepest downturn in the economy since forever. And that’s just the most recent disaster. We could be here all day listing the tens of thousands of other disasters, including the fact that Trump was impeached and put on trial for attempting to cheat in the election while running sadistic, for-profit internment camps for children — at least 666 of whom have reportedly been permanently separated from their parents. 

If four years of suffocating madness didn’t convince Trump’s followers to abandon their messiah in droves, I seriously doubt that traveling to Midwestern diners and talking to them about health care or economic anxiety will change their badly deluded, badly brainwashed minds. They are unreachable. Seventy-three million Americans have gone bye-bye, hoodwinked by an unstable con man and the conservative entertainment complex that backstops him. 

They’re so unwaveringly devoted to their supreme leader that they’ve refused even acknowledge the results of the election, despite the fact that Fox News was one of the first to call Arizona for President-elect Joe Biden, while eventually calling the entire race for Biden. I get that they’re upset, but it’s entirely possible to be devastated about the results while acknowledging the reality of the numbers. That’s what grownups do. But as long as Trump continues to pitch the world’s most gargantuan hissy-fit, insisting he won the election, his fans will follow.

As I’ve written before, we’ve entered a dangerously precarious age in American politics in which the debate is no longer right versus left. Today, we’re fighting a cold war between the forces of reality and the forces of fiction. Here. In America. On one side, there are 79 million of us who recognize things like math, science, history, expertise and the difference between “your” and “you’re.” On the other side is a movement of 73 million Americans whose entire worldview is based upon whatever counterfactual gibberish Trump farts into the world, along with the exact opposite of whatever the other side says. Trump supporters don’t have an agenda as much as they have the politics of “nuh-uh.” The politics of impotent rage. The politics of tall tales. 

The other day, an emergency room nurse from South Dakota published a revealing Twitter thread about her Red Hat patients: 

The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine. … All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real. … And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated.

Again, reality versus fiction. Trump supporters are so utterly devoted to the horseshit of Trumpism that they deny reality even as it’s killing them.

The nurse’s observations are backed up by what we observed during the so-called “Million MAGA March” on Saturday. It goes without saying there wasn’t any social distancing, but there weren’t any masks, either. Obviously. Why not? According to one Trump voter interviewed by ABC’s Martha Raddatz, the virus can go right through a mask. (No, it can’t.) So, naturally, the Red Hats in attendance acted as though they were immune, just like the alleged “immunity” of their cult leader. Proud Boys engaged in full-contact initiation rituals while other maskless disciples accosted reporters and cameramen documenting the event. The truth is that the “Million MAGA March” will surely end up causing a large and potentially deadly spike in COVID infections, and dozens upon dozens of the reckless, irresponsible attendees will soon be intubated in crowded ERs somewhere, separated from their families at Christmastime — but hey, at least they can wheeze “Merry Christmas” now. Thanks, Trump.

Likewise, at least two QAnon believers are headed to Congress in January. Not surprisingly, they’re also Trump-supporting Republicans, and at this point the Republican Party has made no effort to distance itself from these knuckleheads who believe that there’s a deep state of pedophiles and blood-drinkers running the government. They believe John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive. They believe mass shootings are false flags. They make Alex Jones look like Walter Cronkite, and they’re not going anywhere. 

Meanwhile, the “reality” side of this new paradigm, centered in and around the Democratic Party, has to be supremely vigilant moving forward, given that the fiction side is pounding on the door, waiting to reacquire the White House and to expand its reach in Congress. Never forget what’s happened here. It’s immensely important that we’re fully cognizant of this movement of Trump adherents, even after their guy is dragged out of the White House on Jan. 20. 

The usual suspects will try to convince us that Democrats should somehow engage with them, but engagement is nothing but an archaic exercise in futility. Democrats from the Lincoln Project on the right all the way to the AOC and Elizabeth Warren progressives on the left have no choice but to refocus this newly coalesced, reality-based big tent away from trying to convince the unconvinceable and instead focus on winning as many elections as possible, starting with the Senate runoffs in Georgia in early January. Sure, all campaigns are about winning, but many more of us have to reprioritize winning as a primary goal — to embrace it and pursue it as our political destiny — to overwhelm the vote and win elections by any legal means. 

Because through great pain and suffering, we have learned what the alternative will look like.

So, how do the reality-based Normals keep the Red Hats far away from the levers of power in the long run? Exit polls indicate that 14 percent of voters who cast ballots this year had never voted before. Among those first-timers, 64 percent voted for Joe Biden. What’s the strategic lesson here? From today forward, we have no choice but to engage in the nation’s most aggressive 50-state voter registration drive ever, adding as many Democrats as possible. From there, it’s all about getting out the vote: delivering all of those new voters to polling places or making sure they vote by mail. Overwhelm every election: state, local and national. It needs to be unrelenting. The alternative is gathered at the doors, shrieking for another chance to crush American democracy beneath the ungainly bulk of Trumpism. The moment we let up, they’ll be back.

Our politics have changed, and not for the better. It used to be that if the other side won, there’d be a fierce battle on policy, but neither side would necessarily have to worry about the literal end of the republic or worse. Those days are over. The old strategies of engagement and appeasement are obsolete. 

Perhaps one day in the future, we’ll return to rational political conversations with our opponents based on factual reality, but it’ll never happen as long as there are 73 million active voters who wanted four more years of Trump’s ceaseless trolling and anti-democratic politics of death, destruction and paranoia. There’s no reasoning with people who unquestioningly trust a brittle, desperate and obvious liar who’d rather tear down the integrity of our elections than concede like a grownup — like literally every losing presidential candidate in our history. The only thing that will keep idiocracy securely confined to the margins is to simply overwhelm, outnumber and outhustle the idiocrats. That means you, that means me, that means everyone inside the front door.

The U.S. and the coddling of Donald Trump

Those who have created nothing of lasting value always want to portray themselves as victims.

— Bernhard Schlink, German novelist and the author of the international bestseller “The Reader,” in his latest book “Colors of Departure.”

Everything is always about him. The role of the electorate is just to admire him and to bask in his glory. 

Donald Trump’s supporters should become familiar with the ancient myth of Narcissus. It tells us that “he disdained those who loved him.”

What irks women around the United States almost two weeks after the 2020 election is the grotesque coddling of the ego of the President of the United States. Can’t he simply man up and acknowledge his defeat at the ballot box?

Lock her up — and coddle him?

After all, that’s what Hillary Clinton did in 2016 after a hard-fought election. And even though she had manned up, the Republican — largely male — chorus bizarrely continued chanting: “Lock her up.”

Now, it’s not new that Donald Trump is a big-time narcissist and that his inner childishness seems to know no limits. The Donald increasingly appears like a child who has just been told that there is no Santa Claus, but refuses to take in the news. 

So far, so Trump. But here is the big question: Why do the other leading men in the Republican Party, with very few exceptions, not only keep coddling Mr. Trump, but also have the audacity to force the entire nation to do so?

The following “rhetorical shrug” was reported in the Washington Post from an “anonymous senior Republican official” when asked about the baseless claims and legal proceedings being pushed by the President and his legal team: 

What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the official said. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.

Republicans’ extreme double standards

Did any Republican call for slathering Al Gore’s ego when his bid was injudiciously taken away from him by the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2000? 

How about John McCain, Mitt Romney, George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter, for that matter? Like Hillary Clinton, they all bit into the very sour apple of publicly admitting defeat in a dignified form and conceding the election to the winner. 

Clinging to a bygone role model

Donald Trump’s main promise has always been to provide a protective harbor against the often rather brutal pressures of modernity. 

Many of the 70 million Americans who voted for him, men and women alike, are attracted by his offer to stick to the 1950s version of the gender role model, the father as the breadwinner, the mother the housewife (in a United States that was really not so “great” for very many). 

This is of particular appeal to the rather large segment of many American men who feel that their own status as “the decider” in the household has been greatly diminished. 

Of bullies and cowards

Many of these men ascribe to the Republican Party and its philosophy. They worship at the altar of the “Greatest Generation” that fought the last “good” war, World War II. 

Many of them tote guns around — the ultimate sign of their insecurity. They love to talk big. One sees them on TV, in the news, at gun shows, at demonstrations and at Fourth of July parades. 

Of course, one hardly ever sees the same fellows sign up for risky business such as military service or as FBI or Secret Service agents. To them, it’s all about show biz, just as with their esteemed leader Donald Trump. 

They are bullies and cowards at the same time. Why is this so? Because bullies ARE cowards.

Afraid of women

And they are afraid of women, which is part of their cowardice. Particularly intelligent and accomplished women like Hillary Clinton. 

Whatever her — no doubt, considerable — flaws as a candidate, the fear of being governed by an intelligent and accomplished woman was perceived by many men as the ultimate letdown. 

And she was dissed, too, by a stunning number of women, who saw her as an uncomfortable reminder that they themselves prefer a comfortable backseat, which is fine. What is not fine is their resentment for a woman who tried to do great things.

Donald Trump’s particular political ability lies, first, in his ability to play to those sentiments perfectly. And, second, to exploit these emotions to the fullest degree for his own political positioning. 

What Was Needed: A good ole American Joe

Given their experience in 2016, Democrats calculated that this time around, it had to be a good ole white guy to attract a sufficient number of swing voters. That calculation proved prescient.

Heaven bless Joe Biden — he is a man for his time and he cannot be blamed for living in a culture where it seems extra-hard, compared to most other countries, to have a woman in the job of President. The U.S. major “allies” in this retrograde regard are, curiously enough, Communist China and Russia.

Women as wolves?

It is instructive in this context to realize the lingering relevance of Edward Albee’s 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Its topic was the hollowness of the 1950s role assignments for men and women as husband and wife. 

That — and how — those themes resonate to this very day becomes even clearer if one remembers that the play’s title was a pun on a song from Walt Disney’s 1933 “Three Little Pigs” cartoon. Its theme song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”

Albee substituted the words “Big Bad Wolf” with the name of the renowned English author Virginia Woolf. Woolf had a truly independent intellect — and for that, in her day, she became a hot target of male disdain, i.e., insecurity. 

Just as did Hillary Rodham Clinton as well as other female leaders in the United States and abroad between 1992 and 2020.

Lawyers as coddlers?

It is a longstanding tradition in the United States to spend a great deal of money to pay lawyers to bring specious law suits. As they unfortunately say in our country, the possession of a lawyer is nine-tenths of the law. 

Because so many of them have a price, it is not hard to find lawyers to bring immoral, specious or irresponsible lawsuits anytime, like the suits currently being brought by the Trump campaign and the Republican Party in various U.S. states to claim fraudulent elections. 

It is clear to most clear-thinking Republicans that these suits are specious. But when it comes to the Presidency — they pile on! As the Republican Party official cited at the top of this essay stated: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?”

Democracy and coddling

“Humoring him” implies that, by delaying the acknowledgment of defeat, Mr. Trump is not doing any harm. But by delaying the transition process, he is exactly doing that. 

Just remember 9/11 and the very slow start of the George W. Bush administration in 2001.

Trump and his enablers are also dangerously coddling their base to convince them that their votes did not count, generally sowing distrust in democratic practices and specifically targeting the upcoming Georgia elections for two United States Senate seats. 

Where is the courage to speak out?

The courage to speak truths has failed lately — especially among Republicans. And the failure to speak honestly about this election is really neither rocket science nor is it a tough legal problem. 

It is a matter of abiding by the existing rules, respecting the institutions of the land as well as long-established rules of democratic conduct. 

It is disheartening to see that so many Republicans evidently don’t care about the system at all, except when it works for them. Then they like it and defend it sternly. (Witness, most recently, the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett).

But when the democratic system doesn’t produce the results they want, they have no hesitation to go great lengths to sabotage it. 

Motherhood as a political art

Any woman who has raised a son and brought him through American schools, Little League, high school sports and all the rest, knows about the prevalent practice of coddling men. Surely, there are times to cut them a break.

But any mother also knows that it is at least as important to stop the coddling — lest they want to keep their child from becoming a man. 

That’s the moment when they need to say, “Stop this — it is above all harmful to you. Never mind that you are hurting those who supported you along the way. Think about the big picture — and beyond just yourself.”

Trump and motherhood

The entire world knows by now that Donald Trump, in effect, grew up in a motherless household. He never had the privilege of hearing that advice. 

But 70 years later, that cannot seriously mean that the United States as a nation is held at the mercy of Trump’s de facto motherless childhood. 

The latter fact may explain why the misogynist-in-chief is so intent on and is able to rev up his base. It, too, doesn’t want Santa Claus to be history. 

In their joint act of being wedded to disillusion, they obsess about being disenfranchised by the electoral system and outcast by the political system — when in reality they just lost. 

That pact is tearing at the threads of U.S. democracy, pure and simple. 

Growing up at age 74

One has to be a legitimate loser sometimes. After the 2020 election, Trump is truly that which he never wanted to be — an outright loser. 

Donald Trump simply cannot accept legitimate loss. But this time, no lawyer can help.

Yet, that so many senior-level U.S. politicians — all those Republican senators and Congressmen, all those amazingly spineless men in Washington — are so eager to “humor” their leading man speaks to one of the greatest weaknesses of the country — courage and character among the men of the Republican Party. 

Seamus Heaney’s message to Republican men

Guys, you need to look honestly at and evaluate your actions. As the Irish poet Seamus Heaney so pointedly wrote, 

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
is beneath all adult dignity.

Ally of far-right Florida candidate Laura Loomer launches “Blood of Liberty” super PAC

A former deputy campaign manager for far-right provocateur and anti-Islam activist Laura Loomer‘s failed congressional bid has launched a super PAC for far-right causes, called the “Sang de Liberté Foundation,” according to a filing posted on Thursday to the Federal Elections Commission website.

The group was created by Florida resident and open-carry enthusiast Scott Barrish, a denizen of the heavily pro-Trump Villages community who worked as a regional director for Trump Victory Florida 2020, in addition to his work for Loomer’s campaign. According to the PAC’s profile on the right-wing social media platform Parler, the Sang de Liberté Foundation is “devoted to the restoration of the integrity and trust of limited government to foster a free society that respects the rule of law.”

Its name, however — French for “blood of liberty” — invokes a phrase attributed to Thomas Jefferson and often cited by right-wing groups, justifying violent overthrow of the government: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

“It’s allegorical and it’s purposeful as well,” Barrish explained in a call with Salon. “It means, ‘Welcome to the rebirth of the republic.'”

He added: “The purpose of the name is to be very forward, very upfront with people, and to show the intent of organization — that we believe in limited government and the rule of law. And it also has the French Revolution dimension.”

The French Revolution started as a class upheaval and ended up being defined by the guillotine.

“Our mission is all going to be aimed at civics education, litigation, lobbying and support of candidates,” Barrish explained. “We want to make sure we hold federal, state and local officials accountable to their limited enumerated powers, and respect for the rule of law.”

“If a party official oversteps those lines, then that official will be a project for the PAC,” he added.

Barrish, who outside his political work most recently made headlines this June when an alligator “banged” on the front door of his villa, has replied “God save the Republic!” to several posts on his Parler, a new social media platform which refuses to restrict content and has provided a haven for the far right. He invariably follows the phrase with a series of hashtags: “#God #Family #Country #Freedom #Blood #LibertyTree #Conservative #Republic.”

The alligator that visited Barrish’s home was later euthanized, according to local reports. Barrish told authorities he believed it had sought refuge at his doorway after engaging in a stand-off with a coyote.

Despite his work with Loomer, a notorious right-wing conspiracy theorist, Barrish — who runs a travel agency out of his house — describes Sang de Liberté as a “center-right-leaning organization.”

“It’s all just on paper right now,” he told Salon, fresh off a call with a prospective member he characterized as a PR veteran in Florida politics. “We don’t have a platform yet, but I’m putting together a board of directors, and we’ll develop the mission from there.”

He said he plans to pitch Loomer on the PAC during a post-campaign debriefing scheduled in the coming days.

Over the last few years, Loomer gained notoriety as an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist and social media provocateur. In a congressional election cycle studded with fringe right-wing ideologues and QAnon supporters, Loomer rode her image to a Republican primary victory as a Trump-favored congressional candidate in the president’s official home district in Palm Beach County. (Trump most likely voted for her, assuming he voted in down-ballot races.) 

In the Nov. 3 election, Loomer lost to incumbent Rep. Lois Frankel, a Democrat. 

In writing about Loomer’s candidacy, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte described her as an “obsessive bigot” who trafficks in “openly genocidal” rhetoric:

To call Loomer a “far right” or “fringe” candidate is understating the case. She’s an obsessive bigot with a long history of unvarnished hatred of Muslims — or anyone she just suspects may be a Muslim — calling them “savages” and labeling herself a #ProudIslamophobe. Her rhetoric is openly genocidal, such as when she declared that “we should never let another Muslim into the civilized world” and urged taxi and ride-share companies not to hire Muslim drivers. 

For this bigotry, Loomer was banned by both Uber and Lyft, who were eventually joined by Twitter after Loomer falsely called Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat who is one of two Muslim women in the House, “pro Sharia” and “pro-FGM,” and linked her to religious laws that prescribe the death penalty for gay people.

Barrish too has a colorful history. In 2016, when he served as the Trump campaign’s political director for the Tampa Bay region, Barrish was cited in an Associated Press story about Trump campaign staff who had made openly racist comments.

According to the article, Barrish drew local press attention in 2011 when he wrote the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a nonprofit advocacy group, saying that he saw through its plans to establish a totalitarian theocracy in America.

“This is us vs. you,” he wrote. “In the great words of the late President Ronald Reagan, ‘I win, you lose!'”

A familiar face in conservative political circles around the Sunshine State, Barrish will endeavor to tap a number of  connections for the board and financial backing of his super PAC. Beyond Loomer, his targets include former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Barrish says his relationship with Bondi goes back to his work on her first campaign, in 2010.

“Pam Bondi and I are very good friends,” he told Salon, offering an anecdote from a re-election party as evidence.

“After her speech we were three-deep in the rope line, my wife and I, but Pam and I made eye contact. She did the ‘Red Sea part’ with her arms, and came up through the crowd and gave me a big hug. And my wife’s looking at me like, ‘Do I need to cut a bitch?'” he said, laughing at the kicker.

About a week after Loomer (and President Trump) were defeated, Barrish posted a graphic of Jefferson’s quote to his Facebook page, with an image of a bald eagle clutching arrows and olive branches at the base of the tree of liberty, where the proverbial blood would be poured.

A few GOP officials “liked” the post, including the Republican state committeewoman for Polk County, Florida, as well as John Colon, a board member of the Florida Department of Education. Former U.S. Mint director Edmund C. Moy “loved” the post, and commented, “Indeed.”

Another comment read simply, “Final Solution.”

When Salon brought that comment to his attention, Barrish, whose former employer, Loomer, is Jewish, said, “I usually catch those and delete them because I don’t want people to take it literally.” (He has since removed the comment.)

Confronted with the fact that the future third president had indeed meant it literally — that preservation of liberty occasions revolutionary bloodletting — Barrish laughed in agreement.

“Yes, he was literal,” he said. “And it’s still very valid in today’s climate. It’s a strong position to take with the name and the symbolism, and I take your point completely, but I feel that invoking those emotions and invoking that history is what the country needs right now.”

Last month, Barrish, at one point a staunch critic of mask mandates, shared a Facebook post disclosing his recent battle with COVID-19, which he says put him in the hospital for a week and grew so severe that he got the presidential “right to try” combo: an antibody injection and Remdesivir.

His wife had a less severe case, he said, but his lifelong lung issues made him a high-risk patient.

“Whatever weakness you have,” he told Salon, “that’s what COVID attacks.”

Barrish, who says he ran the regional ground game for Trump Victory Florida 2020, told Salon that he had practiced social distancing and limited his time outside his home.

“My big pet peeve was the masks,” he admitted, saying he has since changed his tune.

“Coronavirus / COVID-19 is real,” he wrote in his Facebook post.

That anti-government streak traces back years. According to the 2016 Associated Press article, Barrish tweeted in 2013, two years before Trump announced his candidacy, that he hoped America was not on track for a second civil war, but “if our freedoms must be defended against a tyrannical government, so be it.”

“Those comments at that time were made by me and were my own personal view,” Barrish told the AP, saying he had stopped working for the Trump campaign after the Florida primary. “I don’t want to detract anything from the campaign,” he said.

Asked today whether he personally ruled out violence as a political tool, given the admitted reference to the French Revolution, Barrish told Salon that he “[hopes] that never comes to fruition.”

“We’ve already had one civil war in this country,” he said. “It was very detrimental to society, and we still feel its effects today.”

Barrish clarified that violence was “beyond the scope” of the Sang de Liberté Foundation, but conceded that, given the frequent literal interpretations of his PAC’s name — such as the “final solution” comment — he might be open to rethinking the name.

“Nothing is set in stone,” said Barrish, evoking a modern spin on the epitaph of the Romantic poet John Keats, who wrote that his “name was written in water.”

“I’m a former Red-Crosser,” Barrish said, “and we used to have this saying: Everything’s etched in Jell-O.”

Corporate Democrats are to blame for the party’s losses — so naturally they’re blaming the left

Corporate Democrats got the presidential nominee they wanted, along with control over huge campaign ad budgets and nationwide messaging to implement “moderate” strategies. But, as the Washington Post notes, Joe Biden’s victory “came with no coattails down ballot.” Democratic losses left just a razor-thin cushion in the House, and the party failed to win a Senate majority. Predictably enough, corporate Democrats are scapegoating progressives.

The best members of Congress are pushing back — none more forcefully or eloquently than Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan congresswoman who just won her second term in one of the nation’s poorest districts. She was the most outspoken against an anti-progressive pile-on during a Nov. 5 conference call of House Democrats. And she continues to hold high a shining lantern of progressive principles. 

Tlaib has pointed out that “Democratic candidates in swing districts who openly supported progressive policies, like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, won their races.” And she refuses to retreat.

“We’re not going to be successful if we’re silencing districts like mine,” she told Politico days ago. “Me not being able to speak on behalf of many of my neighbors right now, many of which are black neighbors, means me being silenced. I can’t be silent.”

Politico reported that Tlaib was “choking up as she expressed frustration” near the end of an interview as she said: “If [voters] can walk past blighted homes and school closures and pollution to vote for Biden-Harris, when they feel like they don’t have anything else, they deserve to be heard. I can’t believe that people are asking them to be quiet.”

In an email to supporters, Tlaib was clear: “We’ve got to focus on working class people. We are done waiting to be heard or prioritized by the federal government. I won’t let leaders of either party silence my residents’ voices any longer.” 

Tlaib offers the kind of clarity that should guide progressive forces no matter how much “party unity” smoke is blown in their direction:

We are not interested in unity that asks people to sacrifice their freedom and their rights any longer. And if we truly want to unify our country, we have to really respect every single voice. We say that so willingly when we talk about Trump supporters, but we don’t say that willingly for my black and brown neighbors and from LGBTQ neighbors or marginalized people.

When Rashida Tlaib talks about “pushing the Democratic Party to represent the communities that elected them,” she actually means what she says. That’s quite a contrast with the usual discourse coming from dominant Democrats and outfits like the Democratic National Committee.

Let’s face it: Most of the nearly 100 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are not reliable when corporate push comes to shove, assisted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. What has been startling and sometimes disturbing to entrenched Democrats is that Tlaib — along with House colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ro Khanna and some others — have repeatedly made it clear that they’re part of progressive movements. And those movements are serious about fundamental social change, even if it means polarizing with Democratic Party leaders.

Anyone with a shred of humane values should be aware that Republican lawmakers are anathema to those values. But that reality shouldn’t blind us to the necessity of challenging — and, when feasible, organizing to unseat — elected Democrats who are more interested in maintaining the status quo that benefits moneyed interests than fighting for social justice. 

While satisfying their impulses to blame the left for centrist failures, corporate Democrats and their mildly “progressive” enablers — inside and outside of Congress — are striving to paper over basic fault lines. The absence of a functional public health system, the feeble government response to the climate emergency, the widening and deadly realities of income inequality, the systemic racism, the runaway militarism and so many other ongoing catastrophes are results of social structures that constrict democracy and serve oligarchy. Those who denounce the fight for a progressive agenda are telling us that, in essence, they don’t want much to change.

These freshman House Republicans might actually care about climate change

Since the presidential race was called more than a week ago, election coverage has mostly focused on President-elect Joe Biden’s win and what a (probably) Republican-controlled Senate might mean for his legislative agenda in 2021. But the upper chamber isn’t the only legislative body with the ability to jeopardize Biden’s plans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lost six seats in the House so far and may yet lose more — 14 districts still haven’t been called. That means her majority will be more tenuous in the 117th Congress than it was in the 116th, and she’ll likely have to do a lot more wheeling and dealing to get the centrist and progressive factions of her party to unite behind major bills.

Pelosi will also have to play ball with a formidable right flank, some of whom may seek to obstruct her agenda. But it’s not a foregone conclusion that all of the House’s Republican members, particularly the new ones, are diametrically opposed to every policy item on Pelosi’s list.

A few of the Republicans who won House seats this cycle seem genuinely interested in pursuing environmental policy in Congress, and many of them campaigned on platforms that included a green plank.

“Having a proactive message on climate was a winning issue for folks on the right side of the aisle,” Quillan Robinson, vice president of government affairs for the conservative environmental activist group the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), told Grist. Every single one of the 24 Republicans ACC endorsed beat out Democrats this cycle. “These are all people who have been proactive on these issues, have led bills, have been cosponsors, have been talking about the issue of climate change,” Robinson said.

The incumbents whom ACC endorsed have a mixed record: Some of them, like Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, the only licensed forester in Congress, have voted against climate bills far more often than they’ve voted for them, according to the League of Conservation Voters’ environmental scorecard. But others are more legit. Brian Fitzpatrick, for example, representing Pennsylvania’s 1st district, is the only Republican left in Congress who supports a carbon tax. Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader and a perpetual thorn in Pelosi’s side, has been pushing his caucus to do more to address climate change, motivated in part out of fear of alienating younger members of his party.

As for the Republican challengers who won House seats last week and don’t yet have a legislative record to point to, a couple of them talk about climate change with a fluency that’s more commonly found across the aisle. Maria Elvira Salazar, a former TV journalist who beat incumbent Democrat Donna Shalala in Florida’s 27th congressional district, says evidence of climate change is “right here in Miami.” “Areas like Miami Beach may become uninhabitable in a matter of decades, not centuries, unless we work to combat the problem,” she said on her website.

Peter Meijer, a 32-year-old Republican business analyst and a member of the billionaire Meijer supermarket family, beat Democrat Hillary Scholten for an open seat in Michigan’s 3rd district. Michigan voters across the board want to see action on climate change and value environmental conservation. In order to appeal to those voters, Meijer made a three-part video series in which he talks about Michigan’s natural resources, the role Republicans should be playing in the conversation around climate change, and water supplies threatened by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the so-called forever chemicals.

“Granted, a lot of our policies have not been acknowledging either present-day realities or any of the best estimates about where we’re going forward, and that’s something that has frustrated me about my party, ” the millennial says in one of the clips. “But ask a fisherman if they care about the environment, ask a hunter if they care about the environment. That sort of conservation ethos has been within the Republican party for over a century.”

Meijer’s website doesn’t mention climate change, but his language around the environment and energy matches the way most moderate Democrats talk about climate policy. “We need to encourage the private sector innovation which is driving the transition to renewable energy sources,” his site reads. “I support an all-of-the-above energy strategy that includes wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and natural gas components.” In an interview with the Detroit News on November 5, the victorious political newcomer said protecting the Great Lakes and addressing the climate crisis would be among his priorities in Congress.

There’s still no guarantee that Meijer (or Salazar, or Fitzpatrick, or McCarthy) will vote for green legislation after being sworn in. There are plenty of Republicans in Congress who are willing to admit climate change is happening but are loath to actually do anything about it. Take, for example, Lindsey Graham. In 2019, the senator from South Carolina joined a climate caucus and called on President Trump to take climate change seriously. He earned a measly 29 percent score from the League of Conservation voters for the way he voted on climate and environment legislation that year.

But if Meijer, Salazar, and some of the other Republicans heading to Congress next year are the real deal on climate, they’ll have to strike a delicate balance between toeing the party line on climate change and championing environmental policy. Republicans who have come to Congress with the aim of passing climate policy in the past have generally ended up losing their seats. Carlos Curbelo, a two-term former representative from South Florida and co-chair of the bipartisan House Climate Crisis Committee, lost his seat to a Democrat in 2018. (In total, 21 Republican members of that climate caucus lost their seats that year.) In 2010, Bob Inglis, a Republican and loud champion of a carbon tax, was forsaken by his party and lost his district in South Carolina. It’s on Meijer and company to break that cycle.

How Trump set up nursing home residents to die in the pandemic

As the coronavirus pandemic rages to new heights and we gear up for a new administration, there’s an important step President-Elect Joe Biden could take right away to protect our most vulnerable population. He could restore the ability for nursing home residents to sue their facilities for poor health standards.

Coronavirus cases for people living in long-term care facilities total just 8% of all cases. But that demographic accounts for 45% of all COVID-19 U.S. deaths through August, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The state-level data is even worse. Nursing home deaths from COVID-19 in Minnesota and Rhode Island, for example, accounted for 81% of coronavirus deaths in those states as of early June, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation data.

Long-term care facilities are a major driver of COVID-19 deaths in the country.

But seniors at long-term care facilities and their families have little legal recourse when it comes to fighting for better conditions.

Trump stripped seniors of those protections his first year in office. He rescinded a rule President Barack Obama put in place in 2016 which would have prevented corporate-run facilities from receiving federal funding if residents were forced into arbitration after suffering harm in their care. That rule also would have prevented facilities from making arbitration agreements a condition of admission or continued care.

The Obama administration found significant evidence that pre-dispute arbitration agreements negatively impact the quality of patient care and create negative incentives on staffing and care because there is no threat of a substantial jury verdict for sub-standard caere. These are findings team Trump did not dispute.

The move to erode protections for seniors prompted a group letter by 17 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia to the health department in 2018. The letter urged the agency not to “lower the level of regulatory oversight” by “rolling back reforms to improve the safety and wellbeing of nursing home residents.”

The new rule, implement in mid-2019, has been promoted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The Trump administration has taken an extra step to line the coffers of the corporations running these facilities. Since May, HHS has dedicated some $10 billion to facilities as incentive pay for curbing COVID-19 deaths and infections, among other things.

Long-term care facilities have not blunted the spread of coronavirus but they are taking the money.

As COVID cases rise, Alex Azar thanks Trump for his “leadership that’s gotten us where we are today”

As the number of new coronavirus cases in the United States hit a record high for the third straight day on Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tried to praise outgoing President Donald Trump’s response to the pandemic.

Azar’s comments came at a late afternoon news conference about Covid-19—during which Trump, who has refused to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, took no questions from reporters and did not directly mention last week’s election.

Speaking after Trump, the health secretary said: “Thank you, Mr. President, for providing the leadership that’s gotten us where we are today. The success that Operation Warp Speed has realized so far has been made possible only because of the bold vision you announced not even six months ago right here in the Rose Garden.”

As of Friday, the United States shattered records yet again by reporting over 165,000 cases. According to the Washington Post, “Eighteen states, most of them in the Midwest, have reported record numbers of hospitalizations, a ‘catastrophic’ surge that experts say is rooted in distrust of the government.”

The contrast between Azar’s attempted praise during the event to update the public on Covid-19 vaccine trials and the reality that Americans are facing right now in terms of both health and financial conditions was immediately highlighted on social media by journalists and critics of Trump:

The Trump administration, along with the president personally, has faced intense criticism for mishandling the pandemic. In the wake of Trump’s defeat, cases have kept climbing—including among Secret Service agents—and critics have continued to call him out for failing to adequately tackle the crisis.

“Instead of fighting to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed over 242,000 Americans, the Trump administration is spending its final days in office fighting a bogus voter ‘fraud’ problem that does not exist,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) saidThursday. “Pathetic. The Biden-Harris Administration cannot come soon enough.”

Ivanka Trump claims the media’s “silent” on violence against conservatives as Proud Boys clash in DC

As right-wing groups clashed with counter-protesters at pro-Trump demonstrations over the weekend, Ivanka Trump, the senior White House adviser and daughter of outgoing President Donald Trump, condemned the media on Twitter for “near total silence” over alleged assaults on conservatives. The tweet came as selectively edited video wrongly portraying Trump supporters as victims of violence circulated online in right-wing circles.

“The media’s near total silence about the physical violence being perpetrated against conservatives is shameful & dangerous. Just image the outrage and indignation if this went the other way,” Ivanka tweeted. “Violence is never the answer and instigators must be condemned and prosecuted.”

Donald Trump Jr. one-upped his sister’s allegation an hour later by claiming, without evidence, that the media was “complicit.” He also suggested that “they might as well” put Trump supporters on a non-existent Gulag list controlled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

“The media’s silence on the violence against Trump supporters is deafening. After four years of calling them Nazis, at this point they might as well just dox them all or add the[m] to AOC’s lists for the Gulags,” Don Jr. baselessly tweeted. “They are complicit in the violence. They are the worst of the worst.”

Trump supporters and right-wing groups marched in several cities on Saturday in protest of the president’s recent electoral loss to President-elect Joe Biden. The demonstrators echoed the president’s evidence-free allegations of a stolen election.

Many of these groups were met by counter-protests, and violence broke out in some instances. The most serious of these incidents took place in Washington, where Proud Boys and other right-wing groups and militia members clashed with counter-protesters, according to multiple reports. Contrary to the Trump family’s assertions, conservatives were filmed launching attacks.

It was not the first time Ivanka had misleadingly tweeted about political violence. In a tweet referencing “inner city communities,” the first daughter cited the wrong number of people killed and wounded in the wrong location (“near a playground”) over the course of a weekend in Chicago in August 2019.

In his first debate with Biden, President Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back, and stand by.” Unlike his offspring, the president outwardly applauded Saturday’s violence in the streets.

“ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back,” he tweeted.

The president also shared a selectively edited video posted by Andy Ngo, a right-wing sympathizer with a history of wrongly framing left-wing groups. The clip showed a man getting knocked out by a counter-protester after being attacked from behind.

“A close-up angle of BLM rioters knocking a man unconscious who was leaving the #MillionMAGAMarch in DC earlier today,” Ngo wrote. “They also steal his phone when he’s on the ground.”

“Human Radical Left garbage did this,” the president added, quoting Ngo’s original tweet. “Being arrested now!”

But an extended clip appears to shows the man was with a group of Trump supporters who earlier attacked a counter-protester holding a bullhorn by pushing him down to the street and stepping on his head. 

D.C. police on Sunday said they had arrested nearly two dozen people, many of them on gun charges, according to The Washington Post. One person was stabbed, and four officers were injured.

Police Chief Peter Newsham told The Post that groups on both sides had descended on the city “intent on clashing,” and “the police department was put directly in the middle of it.”

In Sacramento, Calif., a group of Proud Boys met counter-protesters with bear spray, according to the Bay Area’s ABC7 News. Police broke up the incident.

President Trump urged police to use force on counter-protesters, tweeting: “Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!”

There is no evidence to support the protesters’ accusations of widespread electoral fraud in the presidential election. Courts have summarily dismissed the vast majority of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits.

Georgia GOP secretary of state furiously debunks claims by Trump and “liar” leading recount effort

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Sunday issued a surprisingly forceful rebuke of the election misinformation pushed by President Donald Trump and Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., who is leading the campaign’s recount effort in the state.

Raffensperger, a Republican whose election was endorsed by Trump, hit back at Trump’s baseless claims raising doubts about the integrity of Georgia’s elections by pointing out in a series of Facebook posts that he had repeatedly made it harder for people to vote. Raffensperger also called Collins was a “failed candidate” and a “liar.”

Trump falsely claimed that a consent decree signed by Raffensperger and backed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp “at the urging” of Democrat Stacey Abrams made it “impossible” to match signatures on ballots. In a fact-check, Raffensperger clarified that the consent decree not only allowed election clerks to check signatures but also required them to be matched twice before a ballot is cast. (The Associated Press also deemed Trump’s claims about voter signature checks in the state “wrong.”)

“They knew they were going to cheat,” Trump alleged. Collins also labeled the signature matches a “sham.”

“Frankly, the secretary of state’s office has caused this problem to develop. They’ve been continually problematic in this, and I will continue to call them out and force them to do this,” Collins told the conservative outlet Newsmax. “The problem is we’re dealing in areas in which the secretary of state is setting the rules. We’re having to challenge him on the rules. They seem to be changing as we go . . . But these ballots will be counted, and we’ll see (that) those ballot counts.”

“Let’s address this disinformation about signature match.” Raffensperger wrote. “We strengthened signature match. We helped train election officials on GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) signature match—which is confirmed twice before a ballot is ever cast. Failed candidate Doug Collins is a liar— but what’s new?”

Raffensperger also hit out at a lawsuit alleging that the consent decree was unconstitutional.

“My team secured and strengthened absentee ballots for the first time since 2005. As Secretary of State the first thing I did was push legislation that —OUTLAWED—absentee ballot harvesting in Georgia,” he wrote. “Next, for the first time in the history of Georgia, Absentee ballots submitted through our electronic portal required photo ID. My team—we made that happen.”

In another false claim, Trump alleged that poll “watchers and observers” had not been allowed into counting rooms. Raffensperger wrote that the state “placed responsibility of recruitment of monitors solely on both parties,” adding that any issues should be directed toward “your state party.”

Raffensperger also refuted an attempt by Trump to link the Dominion voting system, which is used by about half of states, to Venezuela. The company, Raffensperger wrote, is “American owned. America. ‘Merica. Not Venezuela.”

It was far from the first time that the secretary of state had to correct misinformation about Georgia pushed by Trump and his allies. Last week, Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., dubbed the recent elections in the state an “embarrassment.” The pair called for Raffensperger to step down, even though the lifelong Republican managing the state’s voting system dismissed allegations of fraud as “hoaxes and nonsense.”

Raffensperger refuted that there were any widespread problems with the votes, adding that his resignation was “not going to happen.”

“As a Republican, I am concerned about Republicans keeping the U.S. Senate,” he added. “I recommend that Senators Loeffler and Perdue start focusing on that.”

Raffensperger ordered a hand recount after President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by about 14,000 votes in the state. With the recount nearly completed, about 48 county officials said they finished “with either no change or minor shifts” like “differences of fewer than five votes,” according to Bloomberg News. Four counties reported no changes at all.

“More Georgians voted for President-elect Biden than voted for President Trump,” Democratic lawyer Marc Elias told the outlet. “There is nothing that the recount’s going to do to change that.”

“Last Week Tonight” is a 2020 mood – bizarre, fatalistic, and inexplicably thirsty

Underneath this avalanche of the unthinkable under which we’re buried – the obscene count of preventable deaths, the laments over time’s meaninglessness, the emergence of end-of-days creatures, all this and much more – lurks a simple truth that surely must be universally acknowledged: 2020 is a sadist.

What’s strange and wonderful is that “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver chose to help us laugh about that by fantasizing about that force as a live human mascot played by Adam Driver.

To be clear, never has Oliver implied that Driver is evil, or thoughtless or uncaring. But for reasons that may only be slightly more apparent now, Oliver ushers his bizarre, violently sexualized fantasy statements about what the “Marriage Story” star could do to him into a recurring bit apropos of nothing. 

“Last Week Tonight” has a tradition of ending its seasons with a massive stunt its viewers anticipate with the same glee as other holiday traditions. Some people look forward to annual broadcasts of “Frosty the Snowman” or “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Oliver’s devotees hang in there to see whether he’ll send off the year that was with a smile or a massive F. U.

In 2016 producers compiled a montage of statements from people on the streets of New York listing all the ways that year sucked. Oliver referenced Trump’s election as a dispiriting capper while also adding, “We cannot lose sight of all the other multiple ways this has been a s****y year.”

Looking back on those complaints now, most people would give anything to be subjected to the irritations those 365 days served up, save for 2016’s celebrity losses. That was the year we lost Prince, David Bowie, Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest and Alan Rickman, for starters.

However, what we remember most fondly is how he wrapped up that litany of woe: by gleefully blowing up a gigantic “2016” in the middle of an empty stadium.

As we approach the end of 2020 we have very little of such fire left in us. Replacing it instead is an urge to feel – more, or better, or anything at all. Maybe that’s why Oliver’s Driver obsession somehow makes sense. Bewildering, unexplainable and a tad frightening, it is the murder hornets of late-night bits.

At various points during Season 7 of “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver saucily invites Driver to “Shatter my knees, you f***able redwood”; or “jam your mandible claw down my throat, you irredeemable steer” or other lines even E.L. James would characterize as “a bit much.”

This walked up to Sunday’s season closer that we should have seen coming: Driver, at last, confronting Oliver via FaceTime with a rage that was decidedly non-erotic. Instead he is frustrated and confused, particularly after Oliver’s request that Driver “crush his larynx” while lending him the pet name of “you unwieldy boulder.”  

“I was having some weird fun,” Oliver explains to the actor, who he yells at the host for creating a situation in which the Internet stans the pair of men and declares, “That you thirsting over me is ‘a mood.'”

Fair enough. Also, and I’m just throwing this out there. . . . what if it is?

Across the board, late night comedy has provided us with clarity, catharsis and bracing honesty wrapped in laughter in a time of extreme separation on many fronts – physical, emotional, certainly political. Quarantine and divisiveness have worn on us in large ways and small, and while several hosts are getting us through this nightmare with gentle, soothing jokes and counseling tenderness with ourselves and each other, others have seized upon the surreal nature of our collective lot to create some next-level screwiness.

Then there’s John Oliver and his void.

Oliver long ago proved that he doesn’t need an audience to pump up his jokes. But like everyone else, being in other people’s presence lights him up in ways that the void simply cannot. 

Don’t get me wrong – “Last Week Tonight” has been as searing, effective and necessary as ever, but recent episodes also reveal its host’s humanity and the impact of surge depletion. You can see it in the shift in energy between early in the season and later half-hours either by watching a few of them, or simply scanning the tiles on the HBO Max episode page and noticing the weight in his facial expression as our collective mood transformed from early 2020 bemusement to late-year exhaustion.

Oliver has never shied away from expressing his anger at the outrageous malfeasance and greed he reports in the top stories on his program, but the closer we drew to the election, the more amplified his urgency for sanity to reign again became. If he looks drained, who can blame him? We’re all running on fumes.

Surely the void contributes to this. While every broadcast late night series has returned to their studios with limited audiences or none at all, and Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee continue to produce their shows from their homes, Oliver’s programs purposefully came to us from some space resembling stasis or a plane between life and death.

By electing to broadcast the majority of the seventh season from this entirely white space, Oliver reflected a metaphor of our shared condition back to us along with a share of the host’s psyche. All told, it validated our impression of the extreme abnormality of daily and weekly life.

Oliver devoted more than a third of the season to the current administration’s failure to curb the coronavirus on top of election coverage and close looks at other injustices afoot in the world while we’re all in quarantine. He also found time to get Danbury, Conn., to name a sewage plant after him, devote a worshipful segment to Wendy Williams’ loopy approach to broadcasting her daytime series from home and become an art patron, purchasing paintings of rat erotica, ties and a portrait of Williams devouring a lamb chop. This is all usual “Last Week Tonight” fodder.

But the Driver fiending is something else.

Oliver’s first sexy Driver reference occurred during a February segment exploring the dangerous nationalism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in which he used Driver’s walking out on an NPR “Fresh Air” conversation with Terry Gross as a point of contrast with Modi storming out an interview. The contexts are very different. Modi stormed off because a journalist asked him whether he felt a sense of accountability for riots that occurred in 2002 under his watch as chief minister, in which more than 1,000 people lost their lives. Driver was angry at Gross because she played an audio clip of him performing on Broadway despite knowing that Driver does not like hearing or seeing himself perform.

But Oliver was not likening Driver to Modi. He affirmed the actor’s exit simply because, in his estimation, Driver can do “whatever the f*** he wants.” And here is where the dirty talk began. “Step on my throat, Adam Driver, you rudely large man. Break my fingers, you brooding mountain.”

Oliver initially busted this out in front of a studio audience, one of only four such telecasts that “Last Week Tonight” was able to host in its 30-episode seventh season that ended on Sunday. But for . . . reasons . . . Oliver kept finding ways to come back to his fictional obsession with having Driver “demolish him” (his words, not mine).

“And what of Adam Driver himself? Is he bothered by this continued sexualization?” Oliver asked midway through the season. “He seems like a fairly private guy who’s generally uncomfortable with attention, making what I’m doing possibly some form of harassment! He might actually have pretty good grounds to have my reprimanded legally to which I say, ‘DO IT. Slap a restraining order on me, you forlorn block. Beg me to stop, you menacing obstacle.'”

In the season finale, Driver did not beg. He ordered Oliver to stop . . . and Oliver, playing the shocked and mildly titillated submissive, complied. It was the culmination of a season-long gag that good-naturedly reminds us of how strange we’ve gotten in the absence of normality or public places to visit, see others and be seen, save via Zoom.

It also bookends Oliver’s 2016 season ender, down to the explosion – this one taking place in what appeared to be some sort of quarry.

“This year has been an absolute parade of misery,” Oliver says before listing everything that occurred before the pandemic, including the Australian wildfires and Kobe Bryant’s death. Now we’re living with mass unemployment and evictions on top of mourning the losses of Chadwick Boseman, civil rights pioneer John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“This year ruined lives, jobs, concerts, and sanity. It also brought on a new wave of wrenching videos of police brutality that brought on a national reckoning with race, and a ferocious and depressing backlash. And sure, the presidential election ended well, but it was grim to live through,” he said.

Taking all that into account, perhaps we can understand why Oliver, a host who describes himself as “six feet of nasty, spankable bird meat crammed into a suit,” took a bit in which he daydreamed about a famous stranger slapping him around and ran with it for 10 months. At first it was absurd and seemed to come out of nowhere. Soon enough we came to wait for it, wondering what that was all about. Maybe that mood prevented us from completely retreating into our own numb nothingness. More realistically, it was just the sort of strange that felt right for right now.

As he does every year, Oliver ended his season with a warning for the future, laced in faint hope. “I really hope next year is going to be better. But the truth is, what happens is up to all of us. It’s going to depend on how willing we are to fight, how well we learned from what’s happened, and how much we’re able to care about each other. So I don’t know what happens next. But I do know what happens now.”

At this point he takes a pen-sized detonator and fulfills an explosive fantasy on behalf of millions of us by demolishing something as opposed to getting demolished. “F*** you 2020,” Oliver commands, adding for emphasis, “Get f***ed.”

All episodes of Season 7 of “Last Week Tonight” are currently streaming on HBO Max.

Trump campaign drops claim that GOP poll observers weren’t allowed to watch Pennsylvania vote count

President Donald Trump’s campaign has dropped the allegation from its federal lawsuit challenging the results of Pennsylvania’s election which claimed that hundreds of thousands of ballots in the key swing state had been illegally counted without Republican poll observers present.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani had vowed the lawsuit would overturn the results of the election, presumably by invalidating the votes of hundreds of thousands of citizens. The lame-duck president and his personal attorney repeatedly claimed that more than 600,000 ballots in Pennsylvania had been improperly processed without Republican poll observers present. 

Republican election officials confirmed they were allowed to monitor the process and denied any irregularities. Independent fact-checkers have likewise found no evidence to corroborate the Trump Team’s allegations. 

The campaign quietly dropped the accusation from its lawsuit on Sunday. And Porter Wright, the law firm which filed the legal challenge, withdrew from the case entirely, the campaign’s lawyers confirmed in a court filing. 

Even though the allegation was struck from its lawsuit, the Trump campaign denied that it had dropped its argument.

“We are still making the strong argument that 682,479 ballots were counted in secret,” campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told The Washington Post. “Our poll watchers were denied the legal right to meaningful access to vote counting and we still have that claim in our complaint. We have preserved our rights to make these arguments.”

But the amended complaint filed by the campaign showed that its lawyers had redlined the allegation in its lawsuit, allowing the public to see exactly what claims it was “abandoning,” according to Reuters reporter Jan Wolfe.

The lawsuit now focuses on complaints that “Democratic-heavy” counties made it easier to fix mail-in ballot mistakes like missing signatures, while “Republican-heavy counties” did not.

The claim would affect an “insignificant number of ballots,” noted Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. It now focuses on the fact that many Republican-leaning counties “didn’t choose to provide the same ballot-curing opportunities as larger,” Democratic-leaning counties.

Cliff Levine, a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, told the Associated Press that the number of ballots which could potentially be affected by the lawsuit was minimal — and not enough to impact the nearly 70,000-vote margin in the state.

“The numbers aren’t even close to the margin between the two candidates,” he said. “Not even close.”

The Trump lawsuit claims that Republican-heavy counties “followed the law and did not provide a notice and cure process, disenfranchising many.” However, Levine pointed out that there was not a state law barring counties from allowing voters to fix their ballots.

“They really should be suing the counties that didn’t allow (voters) to make corrections,” he said. “The goal should be making sure every vote counts.”

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, called on the judge to dismiss the lawsuit in a court filing, arguing that the amended complaint “materially narrows the pending allegations to a single claim.”

Trump refuses to concede, even though he would need to overturn the popular vote in at least three states to change the outcome of the presidential election. The Republican has vowed to prove the contest was stolen from him, but election officials across the country in his own party have said there was no evidence at all of widespread voter fraud or irregularities.

Not only has Trump’s team failed to show any evidence of widespread fraud but also their lawsuits have been legally dubious. So far, the Trump campaign has lost 12 of 13 cases, according to Politico.

In Pennsylvania, a lawyer for the Trump campaign admitted that the team had a “nonzero number of people” observing vote counting. The admission prompted a judge to ask, “Then what is your problem?” NBC News correspondent Pete Williams noted that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party were now 0 for 5 in their Philadelphia lawsuits alone.

Republicans have also alleged there were improprieties in the ballot-counting in Michigan but lost both times in court after failing to provide any evidence of wrongdoing.

Trump’s campaign also filed a lawsuit in Georgia targeting a small number of ballots which it alleged might have been submitted after polls closed. A judge rejected the suit after finding “no evidence” of impropriety.

Along with the Pennsylvania suit, the campaign also dropped multiple complaints in Arizona and Nevada, where it targeted a small number of ballots which would fall well short of the number needed to change the results.

Barry Richard, a longtime Republican lawyer who was a key part of the 2000 George W. Bush recount case, told Politico that the Trump legal team’s strategy was par for the course.

“This is just purely outlandish stuff,” he said. “But we have an outlandish president, so I guess this makes sense.”

Ted Olson, who represented Bush in the Bush v. Gore case, and David Boies, who represented Al Gore, penned a joint op-ed in The Washington Post over the weekend refuting that the “outcome of this election is somehow in doubt, as it was in 2000.”

While the 2000 case was centered on just more than 500 votes in Florida, the margins are in the tens of thousands in the states that Trump would need to flip. There has “simply” not been any “evidence of system or widespread fraud or miscounting in those states,” the lawyers wrote.

The idea that the Republican secretary of state in Georgia is part of a vast conspiracy is “ludicrous” and “wrong,” they said, adding that election officials and poll workers around the country “worked tirelessly and conscientiously to count all legal votes fairly” and “deserve praise and gratitude — not to be the targets of unsupported attacks on their integrity.”

“Political candidates . . . have an obligation not to inflame passions and undermine the public’s faith in democracy with unsupported charges of fraud and malfeasance. And the lawyers who represent those candidates have an obligation to the courts, of which they are officers, not to make frivolous claims or arguments,” they added. “The sooner that Trump and his supporters accept the election result, the better it will be for the nation.”

Can Joe Biden find a student loan forgiveness plan that will make everyone happy?

When President-elect Joe Biden takes office on Jan. 20, one of the first questions he will face is how to help the millions of Americans struggling to pay off student debt. His answer to that question could prove one of the touchiest ones of his presidency, as there are Americans who will likely be upset with him no matter what he does. And as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently told reporter Anand Giridharadas, he is hoping that Biden will forgive the first $50,000 of student loan debt through an executive order, a measure far more ambitious than what Biden himself proposed during the 2020 campaign.

Although the U.S. Department of Education has provided student loan borrowers with temporary deferments, that period will end on Dec. 31 and there is no immediate plan to replace it, according to CNBC. During the 2020 presidential election, Biden promised to forgive the first $10,000 of student debt for all borrowers, as well as provide total forgiveness for individuals who earn less than $125,000 annually and attended either a public or historically Black university. Schumer, by contrast, is urging Biden to follow a path shaped by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., namely “a proposal… that the first $50,000 of debt be vanquished.” Schumer also argued that “we believe that Joe Biden can do that with the pen as opposed to legislation.” Even if Biden goes with his original plan, he would still eliminate student debt for roughly 10 million borrowers and reduce America’s $1.7 trillion outstanding student loan tab by roughly one-third. 

As Georgetown University law professor John Brooks told Salon by email, there is no historical precedent for anything “of this magnitude” in the United States, although he added that “student debt forgiveness itself is very common.” He noted that student debt can be forgiven if a student’s school closes, they become permanently disabled, “there was some bad behavior by the school or lender (‘borrower defense’ or ‘false certification’ discharge),” the student works in public service and has “paid for 10 years (still working out the kinks in this program though)” or someone discharges their student loan debt due to a bankruptcy.

Dr. Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, echoed Brooks’ observation.

“I have never seen any historical episode with debt forgiveness on this scale in the US,” Mathy told Salon. “I have never heard of another country forgiving student debt on this scale either. In terms of debt relief, there is a long history of debt jubilees.”

A “debt jubilee” is when all debt is purged from the public records across a sector or nation. Debt jubilees have a long history, stretching back to Babylonian King Hammurabi roughly 3800 years ago to modern Germany, where in 1953 an international decision was made to cancel much of the country’s external debt. Some scholars, like anthropologist David Graeber, have advocated a “great reset” in which both international sovereign and consumer debt would be immediately and completely cancelled.

Unless Democrats win the two Georgia Senate runoff elections in January, Biden will have to attempt to implement his program with a Republican Senate that may be inclined to obstruct him. If that happens, he could have to resort to using executive orders to implement student debt forgiveness, a policy move that would almost certainly be challenged in court. At the same time, Senate Republicans may be inclined to work with Biden given that 22 million Americans are currently benefiting from having their student loan repayments paused.

“For millions of borrowers, the fallout from the pandemic is still raging,” Seth Frotman, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, told The New York Times. “The thought that their student loan payments will be turned back on and they will get money taken out of their account via auto debit, or they will see their wages garnished once again — the results will be cataclysmic for their finances.”

Politically, there is the threat of blowback from those who have already paid off their student loans and think it is unfair for others to not be forced to do so as well.

In a viral editorial last year, Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner argued that Warren’s plan to cancel the debt of up to $50,000 for more than 42 million people, or roughly 95% of those with debt, would be “tremendously unfair to those who have been struggling for years to pay off their student loans.” He argued that politicians should feel sympathy for “those who may have taken higher-paying jobs they didn’t necessarily want to pay off loans. And there are those who have cut expenses to the bare bones to pay off loans while watching their friends with similar salaries eat out and travel and deprioritize paying off loans.”

He concluded, “Those who were more responsible will feel justifiably enraged at the idea that those who may have been more profligate will now get a bailout from the government.”

Klein’s editorial received considerable backlash, with people on Twitter commenting sarcastically that his logic was akin to saying “Free pizza in the HuffPost DC office today. What a slap in the face to those of us who have already eaten” or “Child labor regulations a slap in the face to children who worked in coal mines.” Kathi Valeii of The Independent denounced Klein’s argument as a “self-centered, mean-spirited ‘by-the-bootstraps’ mentality.” Jessica Young of Medium wrote “implementing a plan like Warren’s is not a slap in the face. It’s a way to remediate the economic costs of higher education for those who need it most, especially for a generation who was strongly encouraged to go to college and take on risky student loans, with the unfulfilled promise of that it will all pay off in the long run. It is righting a wrong.”

This idea of forgiving debt as “righting a wrong” has roots all the way back in the Bible, as economist Michael Hudson wrote in The Washington Post in March.

“Until recently, historians doubted that a debt jubilee would have been possible in practice, or that such proclamations could have been enforced,” Hudson explained. “But Assyriologists have found that from the beginning of recorded history in the Near East, it was normal for new rulers to proclaim a debt amnesty upon taking the throne. Instead of blowing a trumpet, the ruler “raised the sacred torch” to signal the amnesty.”

He added, “It is now understood that these rulers were not being utopian or idealistic in forgiving debts. The alternative would have been for debtors to fall into bondage.”

Perdue backs out of debate after being called a “crook,” Ossoff will face off against empty podium

Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff called Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., a “coward” on Sunday for refusing to participate in any debates ahead of their January runoff election in Georgia.

Perdue will be “represented by an empty podium” at the Atlanta Press Club’s Dec. 6 debate, according to Georgia Public Broadcasting. The debate organizer said the move was not its “preference,” but Perdue had “decided not to participate.”

Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., is scheduled to debate her Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s other runoff race on Dec. 6, the Atlanta Press Club said. The two runoffs will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate for the next two years. Democrats will retain control of the House of Representatives as they reclaim control of the White House under President-elect Joe Biden.

Perdue likewise withdrew from his previously scheduled final debate with Ossoff before Election Day after a clip of the Democrat calling the incumbent a “crook” went viral.

“It’s not just that you’re a crook, senator. It’s that you’re attacking the health of the people that you represent. You did say COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while, you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio,” Ossoff said as he brought up the senator’s stock trades.

As the Associated Press reported, “Perdue was among a group of senators whose stock trades came under scrutiny. Perdue denied any wrongdoing, saying the trades were handled by outside advisers and that he was cleared by a Senate Ethics Committee investigation.”

After Perdue declined to participate in the Dec. 6 debate, Ossoff said, “Perdue isn’t just a crook — he’s a coward too.”

“David ’empty podium’ Perdue,” Ossoff also tweeted, adding that the Republican “can’t defend his lies about COVID-19, self-dealing stock trades, his bigotry, or his votes to take away Georgians’ health care.”

The Perdue campaign said the runoff was “an extension” of the Nov. 3 election, and “we’ve already had two debates.” It also accused Ossoff of “lying to Georgians on TV” as it criticized the state’s runoff rules. 

“In nearly every other state, Perdue would have been re-elected already,” the campaign added. 

Perdue edged out Ossoff by a margin of 49.7% to 48%, falling just short of the 50% threshold needed to win the race outright.

“This is one of the most consequential elections in Georgia history, unfolding amid a health and economic crisis, but it appears Sen. Perdue is too much of a coward to defend his record in a public debate. If Senator Perdue doesn’t want to answer questions, that’s fine. He just shouldn’t run for re-election to the U.S. Senate,” Ossoff said in response. “I offer the senator any or all of these six debates — if he has the self-confidence to debate in public.”

The debates between the two candidates were tense as Ossoff hit out at Perdue over an “anti-Semitic” ad which appeared to have enlarged his nose, as well as Perdue’s attempts to tie payments to Ossoff’s documentary production company from a Hong Kong telecom agency to “Communist China.”

“You’ve continued to demean yourself throughout this campaign with your conduct. First, you were lengthening my nose in attack ads to remind everybody that I’m Jewish,” Ossoff said at one of the debates. “Then, when that didn’t work, you started calling me some kind of Islamic terrorist. And then, when that didn’t work, you started calling me a Chinese communist.”

After Perdue declined to participate in any subsequent debates, former Obama adviser David Axelrod said, “Given the beating that Perdue took in their last debate, this is no surprise.”

After calling out Perdue at the debate, Ossoff hit out at the senator for mockingly mispronouncing Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ name.

“The most insidious thing that Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden are trying to perpetrate, and Bernie, and Elizabeth, and KAH-mah-la, or Kah-MAH-la, or KAH-mah-la or Kamala-mala-mala,” Perdue said during a Trump rally in Georgia. “I don’t know. Whatever.”

Ossoff said one day later that his campaign had raised $1 million “since my opponent disgraced himself with bigoted mockery of Kamala’s name at yesterday’s Trump rally.”

If Ossoff and Warnock win, Harris would have the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, giving Democrats control of the upper chamber.

Moderna says its coronavirus vaccine exhibits “94.5% vaccine efficacy.” Here’s what that means

On Monday, biotechnology company Moderna announced that its coronavirus vaccine candidate is 94.5 percent effective in preventing disease infection. Along with Pfizer, which made a similar announcement last week, Moderna is now the second company with a promising, well-tested vaccine candidate in the race to halt a pandemic that has killed 1.2 million people across the world.

“This is a pivotal moment in the development of our COVID-19 vaccine candidate,” Stéphane Bancel, the Chief Executive Officer of Moderna, said in a statement. “This positive interim analysis from our Phase 3 study has given us the first clinical validation that our vaccine can prevent COVID-19 disease, including severe disease.”

Specifically, the company announced that its vaccine candidate has 94.5 percent “vaccine efficacy.” As explained by the World Health Organization, vaccine efficacy is the percentage of “reduction in disease incidence in a vaccinated group compared to an unvaccinated group under optimal conditions.” This shouldn’t be confused with vaccine effectiveness, which is the “ability of vaccine[s] to prevent outcomes of interest in the ‘real world.'”

The results surfaced in the company’s Phase 3 trial, which had 30,000 participants. Out of the study’s participants, there were only five infections in patients who developed COVID-19 after receiving Moderna’s vaccine. There were 95 cases of infection among patients who received the placebo in the study. (A placebo is a substance that has no effect on a patient but is administered to provide a control in pharmaceutical tests.) Previously published research regarding a Phase 1 trial found that all the participants developed neutralizing antibodies in response to two vaccinations.

>> Read more about what the different “phases” of vaccine production mean

According to the company’s release, Moderna will apply for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the next few weeks.

“The primary endpoint of the Phase 3 COVE study is based on the analysis of COVID-19 cases confirmed and adjudicated starting two weeks following the second dose of vaccine,” the company’s statement explains. “This first interim analysis was based on 95 cases, of which 90 cases of COVID-19 were observed in the placebo group versus 5 cases observed in the mRNA-1273 group, resulting in a point estimate of vaccine efficacy of 94.5%.”

All participants who received the vaccine or a placebo were over the age of 18. The trial included more than 7,000 Americans over the age of 65; more than 6,000 participants identified as Hispanic or Latinx, and more than 3,000 participants identified as Black or African American.

As Salon reported last week, Pfizer, which is developing a vaccine with a German biotechnology company called BioNTech SE, announced that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate is more than 90 percent effective at preventing infection.

So, what does this mean about when the general public can expect to have a vaccine readily available?

According to health news site Stat News, such a vaccine won’t come until spring 2021 at the earliest; initially, a limited supply will be allocated to frontline workers and people with increased risks of having severe cases of COVID-19. For everyone else, spring 2021 is the earliest possible point at which a vaccine will be available. As Stat News explained:

Pfizer and Moderna expect to produce just 70 million doses of their vaccines by the end of 2020, enough for only 35 million people around the globe. In 2021, the companies could have as many as 2.3 billion doses between them, but in a pandemic-ravaged world of 7.5 billion people, that’s not going to be enough to satisfy demand. Unless more Covid-19 vaccines prove to work in the coming months, the world will be rationing doses well into next year.

Similar to Pfizer, the Moderna vaccine is mRNA-based and produces antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and T-cells that respond to the virus. This means that the mRNA, which is genetic material from the coronavirus, evokes an immune response.

While we now have a better understanding of the efficacy of the vaccine, we don’t yet know the durability of the vaccine—meaning how long that vaccine lasts before the body’s immune system “forgets” how to protect against the coronavirus again. Research continues to suggest that COVID-19 infection confers transient immunity in hosts, meaning that the antibodies produced after an infection only last a short while. As Salon previously reported, vaccines can confer different types of immunity than actually contracting the virus. Indeed, immunologists have noted that a vaccine could create durable immunity (meaning long-lasting) in a patient, even if the natural response to infection is transient immunity.