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Upgrade your Frito pie with steak chili for a hearty winter dinner fancy enough for guests

Like many dishes that have become sort of synonymous with Americana, the origin of the Frito pie — corn chips smothered in spicy beef chili and sharp cheddar cheese — is hotly contested. In Santa Fe, some residents claim that it was created by Teresa Hernandez, who sold them over an old 1960s Woolworth’s department store lunch counter. 

According to Frito-Lay corporate lore, the chips originated in 1932 when C.E. Doolin purchased the recipe from a Mexican cafe in San Antonio, Texas, and began to sell what he called Fritos from his Model T. Soon after, wrote Joyce Saenz Harris for the Dallas Morning News, Doolin’s mother, Daisy Dean Doolin, “was inspired to pour chili over Fritos corn chips, and the rest is history.” 

Some believe that it was a dish that was invented in Mexico and then eventually crossed the border, pointing to Frito pie’s passing resemblance to chilaquiles. Regardless of its origin, Frito pies, especially those sold out of a freshly opened bag of Fritos as a “taco in a bag,” remain a popular lunch or snack item in the American Mid- and Southwest. 

To me, they taste like summertime, dusky evenings at the state fair. Now that the weather is snapping cold, I wanted to create a version that had a little more heft and was hearty enough to work as dinner. In the chili, which is usually made with ground beef, there’s thick chunks of stewing beef and a nuanced sweet-hot spice blend with smoked paprika, chili powder and dark brown sugar. 

I augmented the Frito topping with some cubed, toasted cornbread; it’s a natural fit with chili and it plays really well with the crispness of the corn chips. Top it off with some sharp cheddar cheese, diced red onions and sour cream, and it’s a match made in heaven. 

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Recipe: Steak Chili Frito Pie
Serves 4 to 6

Steak Chili
1.5 pounds of stewing beef, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 large white onion, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 to 2 jalapeno peppers, minced
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 5.5-ounce can of tomato paste 
1 14-ounce can of red kidney beans
3 cups of beef broth, divided
2 to 3 tablespoons chili powder 
2 tablespoons smoked paprika 
1 tablespoon coriander 
1 tablespoon cumin 
1 tablespoon of dark brown sugar 
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
Salt and pepper to taste 
Neutral oil 

Frito Topping 
1 cup of Fritos 
1 cup of cornbread, cubed and toasted 
1 cup of sharp cheddar cheese

Garnishes
Chopped red onion
Sliced jalapeno 
Sour cream

1. In a large dutch oven, pour 2 tablespoons of neutral oil and heat to medium. Pat the stew beef dry with a paper towel, season with salt and pepper, and then place it in the oil. Saute until browned. 

2. Remove the beef from the dutch oven and set aside. Add an additional tablespoon of oil to the pot and then add the onion, garlic and jalapeno. Cook until softened, then add the chili powder, paprika, coriander, cumin, dark brown sugar and soy sauce. Stir over medium heat until the spices are fragrant, about two minutes. 

3. Add the crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, kidney beans and 2 cups of beef broth to the mixture. Combine, then add the beef. 

4. Bring the chili to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Cover the dutch oven with a lid and allow the chili to cook for at least two hours, or until the beef shreds with a fork and the broth has reduced by nearly half. (Check it at the one hour mark and if the broth has reduced to the point that the meat is sticking to the bottom of the pot before tender, add the reserved cup of broth). 

6. When it’s done, remove the chili from the heat, season with any needed salt and pepper, and set aside. To make the topping, gently toss the Fritos, toasted cornbread and cheddar cheese in a large bowl and then place it on top of the chili. 

7. Place the dutch oven under the broiler until the cheese is melted and just starting to brown, five or six minutes. Remove and prepare to serve. 

8. Garnish individual servings with diced red onions, sliced jalapeno and sour cream.

 

“The Crown” returns with Princess Di & Margaret Thatcher testing the Queen’s humanity

For many, and the exhausted and traumatized especially, the return of “The Crown” offers a refuge at the end of a blistering presidential election season that stretched out for what felt like decades. Presumably Netflix scheduled its debut quite intentionally, realizing what the audience would have recently survived. What they didn’t predict was that our election stress would stretch up to the fourth season’s doorstep and pummel viewers to the point of wanting only to cocoon into a binge, ready to receive its comfort.

And this is a strange idea given that, overall, “The Crown” could not be described as a feel-good series.

Peter Morgan’s creation offers its balm in a different respect, though in that it is quiet, measured in its presentation and in keeping with its theme, unerringly elegant and soapy in all the right ways. Season 4 also indulges in more fun than past seasons, although part of that opinion may be influenced by the time period.

The Windsors are now in the 1980s and dancing to beats familiar to the many folks who grew up in the post-punk world and remember the royals bleeding over into mainstream culture in ways that previous generations resisted . . . all due to the popularity of Princess Diana, brought to life by Emma Corrin.

Diana’s entry into “The Crown” has been anticipated since the series was first announced, and Corrin’s portrayal of the Princess of Wales is delicate and assured enough to live up to the high expectations first-time viewers of the series may have. To watch her shimmy and dance to Blondie and Stevie Nicks is blissful and sad at once, because we know how this ends.

Both Corrin’s presence and that of the legend she plays transform the series from an examination of Queen Elizabeth II’s transformation from individual into symbol into a study of the tragedy that results when a person who has relinquished much of her humanity is confronted with a charming, loving, kind young woman who hugs, much to her majesty’s horror.

Elizabeth, as she is played by Olivia Colman, is a woman who was raised to abandon her sense of individuality and instead give herself entirely to the service of crown and country. What tenderness she had was shed in her youth (as Claire Foy played out in the first two seasons) and in middle age, she’s frequently made to question the suitability of her emotions . . . or lack thereof.

Season 3 asks her to weigh this in light of a disaster that destroys a working-class town and kills a school filled with children, forcing her to realize that some tragedies call for putting aside the stubborn tradition of royal detachment.

These new episodes force the monarch to confront this inner turmoil from different angles and through the lens of various points in history, including 1982’s Falklands War, the international outcry over the brutalization of Black South Africans oppressed under apartheid, and the rising anti-Monarchy sentiment in Australia. “The Crown” takes us along the edges of some of these moments in time and to the center of others, which is a smart way of preventing the history from weighing down the drama. We don’t get the full royal wedding, for example . . . but really, isn’t a glimpse of the dress enough?

Besides, the true tests in these new episodes have to do with Elizabeth’s clumsiness with intimate acts of diplomacy, mainly hitting her in the form of two forces of nature – Diana being one of them and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the other.

Part of “The Crown”‘s wondrous appeal is a tad meta, in that it is a drama about lives of carefully constructed performance enlivened by actors pouring themselves into carefully constructed performances. Both the characters themselves and the people playing them making their portrayals look effortless.

In this regard Gillian Anderson initially struggles to ease into Thatcher’s boiled leather persona. Her introductory moments are entirely over the top and verging on cringeworthy, to the point that it nearly looks and sounds like her jaw might break off. But she soon relaxes her grip on Thatcher’s mannerisms, and what emerges afterward is nothing short of masterful.

Corrin immediately achieves a balance between the coquette and energetic idealist we picture Diana to be, and her performance invites the viewer into the Princess’s interiority almost immediately. Plainly she studied the late Diana Spencer’s mannerisms and expressions, and when she cuts her eyes to the side or tilts up the corner of her mouth, the resemblance is uncanny. But Corrin carefully ensures her impersonation doesn’t override the portrait of who Diana was (in Morgan’s estimation, we should say) which allows her to play off of Colman’s queen as opposed to doing battle with her performance.

Both Corrin’s and Anderson’s representations define this section of the Queen’s life in ways that transform “The Crown” and our view of Elizabeth and our estimation of who these people are. Each of them wrestle with the weight of duty and the obligations of motherhood; the Queen and the Prime Minister spark a rivalry straightaway when it becomes apparent that their personalities don’t mix. But with Diana as a contrast, the Queen is suddenly less regal and a good deal stonier.

These new episodes also force Elizabeth to examine her connection to the world she has been tasked to mother and safeguard, which surprises her when one of her subjects, Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke), breaks into her bedchamber and implores her to take hard look at what Thatcher is doing to her country.

Of course in Buckingham Palace she only has a limited view of the world beyond the gates; when Fagan, who lives in a council estate apartment in a blighted London neighborhood, tells her where he’s from his queen can only ask, “Is it lovely?”

Incredibly, and intentionally on Morgan’s part, Elizabeth still comes off as more human than Thatcher, whose steely vision of Britain and its subjects is spelled out with the same level of cold honesty that she employs to appraise her children.

An episode titled “The Favourite” is inspired by Thatcher’s smooth and unrepentant declaration that she loves one of her twins more than the other, which tosses Elizabeth into a spin: How can a good mother admit with such casual certainty that she doesn’t love her children equally? To this, her husband Phillip (Tobias Menzies) simply answers that every parent has a favorite, even her – and challenges her to figure out who that is among her four children. (Those familiar with the Windsors and caught up on recent events can probably guess which one it is.)

The humor woven through the season born out of stiff propriety forefronts what “The Crown”  has in some ways been working toward since its beginning, which posits that the Queen took such care and passion to be an impeccable regent that she failed to be an adequate mother or fully embrace her humanity. And this places Elizabeth, first through Foy’s rendering, then Colman’s, on a path destined to collide with Diana, a woman depicted here as insistently maternal and personable, setting her up for despair.

The People’s Princess was never going to win with a family so insistently chilly. Nevertheless, Morgan doesn’t sacrifice any of his characters and the real people they represent unnecessarily. Instead, the gist of “The Crown” is that happiness, warmth and caring are luxuries the Windsors, symbols of a nation and its wealth, are not allowed to have. We can then see why Diana’s natural popularity utterly baffles and enrages the rest of the royals even as it raises their standing in the world.

Josh O’Connor evolves Prince Charles from a tragically awkward young adult into a full-bore petulant man-child who traps himself with Diana out of propriety while he pines for Camilla Parker Bowles. The real Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall should really thank Emerald Fennell for shaping her performance to present Princess Diana’s primary obstacle to happiness with Charles as a pragmatic woman who handles her less-than-ideal romantic circumstance with aristocratic strategy. Poor Diana never had a chance.

She, Princess Anne (Erin Doherty) and all of the women in this family or close to it bear the weight of the world while sublimating their unhappiness. But if there’s a character who gives sadness an aura of glamour, it’s Helena Bonham Carter’s Princess Margaret – a woman can feign being above it all until tradition once again interferes with her life and bumps her into obsolescence. Bonham Carter is a central delight in this season, and it’s bittersweet to bid her farewell along with the rest of the cast; the series’ final two seasons transition into the Queen’s golden years and has Colman passing the scepter to Imelda Staunton, with Lesley Manville taking on Margaret.

It all adds up to a bittersweet finish, and perhaps that makes it a welcome departure from the brutishness of this year. We all hunger for some kind of calm, even the type that haunts more than it soothes. The glory of “The Crown” is that we can savor it slowly, and drop in midstream and appreciate the order in its regal temperament. After all we’ve been through, it suits our mood.

“The Crown” Season 4 begins streaming Sunday, Nov. 15 on Netflix.

The U.S. voted out a climate denier, and world leaders jumped for joy

When Joe Biden clinched the presidential election on Saturday, many Americans took to the streets to party. In Philadelphia, one woman danced to Beyoncé with a cat bouncing in her backpack; another waved a stalk of Brussels sprouts on a crowded, music-filled street corner. Outside U.S. borders, world leaders were celebrating for a different reason — they were welcoming the election of a president who actually believes in climate change.

On Twitter, presidents and prime ministers from across the globe welcomed Biden with pointed mentions of climate change. “Congratulations to Joe Biden on his election as President of the United States,” wrote Boris Johnson, prime minister of the United Kingdom. “I look forward to working together on our shared priorities, from climate change to trade and security.” Frank Bainimarama, the prime minister of Fiji — a South Pacific nation facing rising sea levels and dying coral reefs — chimed in: “Now, more than ever, we need the USA at the helm of these multilateral efforts (and back in the #ParisAgreement — ASAP!).”

Others celebrated with a bit more enthusiasm. Christiana Figueres, a former United Nations official and key architect of the Paris Agreement was seen in one video jumping around her living room in flip-flops, screaming: “Yaaaaaaaay!”

Part of the international reaction is a result of Biden’s promise that he will rejoin the Paris Agreement on his first day in the White House, putting the U.S. back in the landmark accords that encourage all member countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. President Trump began the process of pulling the U.S. out of the agreement back in 2017, but thanks to bureaucratic red tape, the move wasn’t finalized until last Wednesday, the day after the presidential election.

It’s also a reflection of how world governments have begun to take the threat of global warming more seriously. “Over the last four years, climate change has just rocketed to the top of foreign policy agendas for many of our allies around the world,” said Nat Keohane, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund. That’s because, he said, “the impacts of climate change on everyday life are becoming impossible to ignore.”

Still, President-elect Biden will have a long way to go to restore trust after four years of the U.S. sitting on the sidelines. The Biden administration will have to quickly assemble new emissions-cutting targets to bring to the next international climate conference in Glasgow a year from now. And with a Senate likely controlled by Republicans, meeting those targets will be extremely difficult.

But there are forums outside of UN meetings where Biden and his administration could boost climate action. International gatherings like the G7 or the G20 provide opportunities for world leaders to strategize about how to pay for adaptation plans and cutting fossil fuel emissions. (President Trump has hamstrung such meetings in recent years, refusing to put climate change on the agenda and walking out on formal negotiations addressing the crisis.) The Biden administration could also throw its weight behind efforts to set international standards for cutting pollution from the aviation industry, or limiting methane emissions from large-scale agriculture.

Ultimately, a renewed commitment to fighting climate change could help the U.S. rebuild its credibility after four years of damage from the Trump administration. Keohane said that the rest of the world will be looking for proof that the U.S. actually cares about restoring relationships with other countries. “Climate,” he said, “is an opportunity for the Biden administration to lean in.”

How Biden’s COVID-19 task force is bringing humanity to science

When president-elect Joe Biden announced in his victory speech that he was going to immediately name a COVID-19 response task force, and created an “action blueprint” to hit the ground running on January 20, it was refreshingly innovative — a coherent, real-world approach to a devastating crisis. But what gave the incoming administration an even more groundbreaking tone was Biden’s vow to create a plan “built on bedrock science… constructed out of compassion, empathy, and concern.”

Science and empathy, together at last. Whew.

As anyone who has been to a doctor in America can attest, medicine and humanity generally run on separate tracks — if you’re lucky enough to get any of the latter at all. And somehow, that’s been considered acceptable. It shouldn’t be. I’ve spent the past two years studying narrative medicine and medical humanities, interdisciplinary approaches to healthcare that are challenging those outdated preconceptions. Sickness doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Cures can’t either.

A year ago, I was speaking before a large scientific organization and talked about the need for active listening and thoughtfulness in patient care. “That’s what nurses are for,” one male attendee shot back. I don’t know why I was shocked. His assumption is a common one, even among those of us outside the healthcare professions.

“Wouldn’t you rather have the best surgeon, instead of one who was just nice to you?” a fellow journalist asked me recently, as if “the best” is an objective judgment independent of mitigating factors, and that “nice” is a red flag of incompetence. The writer’s attitude reminded me how, a decade ago, I walked away from a clinician who was rude and insensitive to me during a consultation. The doctor’s track record with people he’s treated looks impressive to this day, but there’s no way of factoring in how many other patients like me may have left and found other other practices, or abandoned treatment entirely, because they didn’t feel confident in his level of sincere care.

Science is precise, but data only tells part of any story. If, for example, we look solely at press releases for updates on COVID-19 vaccines, it would not be easy to see how disproportionately clinical trials thus far have underrepresented black patients — even though they’re five times likelier to be hospitalized with COVID and twice as likely to die from it. Across a variety of challenging public health crises, including cancer, nonwhite patients typically make up fewer than ten percent of clinical trial participants.

That’s not a failure of science. It’s one of trust and communication. It’s rooted in grotesque abuses like the Tuskegee experiments, but often perpetuated by a lack of focused recruitment and engagement. In all aspects of medicine, but especially in innovation, respect for and curiosity about human beings has got to be baked in to the system.

At the research level, the virus or the disease is the primary focus of attention, but potential patients themselves are too often mere abstractions. No wonder, then, that when treatments finally enter the patient world, the patient can often feel like an afterthought. Clinicians babble out directives using complicated terminology. They rush through visits because they’re overbooked and overtaxed. Materials meant to clarify our questions only leave us with more. The informed consent paperwork for my immunotherapy clinical trial, for example, was 27 pages chock-full of medical terms I didn’t understand, communicated in legal jargon and handed to me at one of the most devastating, distracting moments of my life. It was a document that seemed entirely untethered to the real person who had to read it. I didn’t feel informed at all. How could I have truly consented?

And this is where the humanities — those often neglected, much derided studies our parents begged us not to major in — actually have profound value. As a feature in The Week condensed it in 2018, medical students who are educated in the liberal arts not only gain a much-needed “social and cultural context” to apply healthcare in the real world, they develop a deeper aptitude for empathy, as well as a broadened base of skills like spatial reasoning. Whether you’re in a lab working for a biotech company or a surgeon or a family practitioner, those are all necessary for competent, comprehensive medicine and research. Biden’s newly announced COVID-19 response team likely understands this. It’s certainly telling that one of its members is Atul Gawande, who describes his skills as “writing/surgery/research” and has carved out a bestselling career as an interpreter of medicine to the masses.

In clinical trials, participants have to be active reporters of their own experiences and symptoms. They have to have a strong motivation to enroll and to stay enrolled. That only happens when the studies are designed by people who see patients as humans instead of (ugh) “human subjects.” Reciprocal, respectful relationships are critical for the collection of meaningful data, and they’re essential for assuring that fewer trials fail before promising treatments make it to market. It’s just that simple.

Good science relies heavily on good people. It needs people with strong critical and abstract reasoning, who see their work in broader terms than endpoints. These things are not afterthoughts; they aren’t just what are insultingly referred to as “soft skills.” As my doctor, whose lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering bears his name, puts it, “I don’t treat cancer. I treat people.” Whatever comes next for all of us, we now have an incoming president who understands that humanity, compassion and empathy belong right at the side of bedrock science. And that curing a virus will mean listening to people.

Conservatives value personal stories more than liberals do when evaluating scientific evidence

The big idea

Conservatives tend to see expert evidence and personal experience as more equally legitimate than liberals, who put a lot more weight on the scientific perspective, according to our new study published in the journal Political Psychology.

Our findings add nuance to a common claim that conservatives want to hear “both sides” of arguments, even for settled science that’s not really up for debate.

We asked 913 American adults to read an excerpt from an article debunking a common misconception, such as the existence of “lucky streaks” in games of chance. The article quoted a scientist explaining why people hold the misconception — for instance, people tend to see patterns in random data. The article also included a dissenting voice that drew from personal experience — such as someone claiming to have seen lucky streaks firsthand.

Our participants read one of two versions of the article. One version presented the dissenting voice as a quote from someone with relevant professional experience but no scientific expertise, such as a casino manager. In the other version, the dissenting opinion was a comment at the bottom from a random previous participant in our study who also disagreed with the scientist but had no clearly relevant expertise — analogous to a random poster in the comment section of an online article.

Though both liberals and conservatives tended to see the researcher as more legitimate overall, conservatives see less of a difference in legitimacy between the expert and the dissenter.

Why it matters

Looking at both our studies together, while about three-quarters of liberals rated the researcher as more legitimate, just over half of conservatives did. Additionally, about two-thirds of those who favored the anecdotal voice were conservative. Our data also showed that conservatives’ tendency to trust their intuitions accounted for the ideological split.

Other studies of a scientific ideological divide have focused on politicized issues like climate change, where conservatives, who are more likely to oppose regulation, may believe they have something to lose if policies to curb climate change are implemented. By using apolitical topics in our studies, we’ve shown that science denial isn’t just a matter of self-interest.

In stripping away political interest, we have revealed something more basic about how conservatives and liberals differ in the ways they interact with evidence. Conservatives are more likely to see intuitive, direct experience as legitimate. Scientific evidence, then, may become just another viewpoint.

Though we conducted these studies in 2018 before the pandemic, they help explain some of the ideological reactions to it in the U.S.

Among conservatives especially, the idea that the pandemic itself is not a major threat can hold as long as there’s personal evidence on offer that supports that view. President Donald Trump’s recovery from COVID-19 and his assertion based on his own experience that the disease is not so bad would have bolstered this belief. Recommendations from researchers to wear masks can remain mere suggestions so long as the court of public opinion is still undecided.

What other research is being done

Social scientists are already documenting ideological reactions to the pandemic that fit our findings. For example, many conservatives see the coronavirus as less of a threat and are more susceptible to misinformation. They also tend to see preventive efforts as less effective. Our studies suggest these views will continue to proliferate as long as anecdotal experience conflicts with scientific expertise.

What’s next

An individual’s understanding of scientific evidence depends on more than just his or her political ideology. Basic science literacy also plays a role.

The pandemic has forced people to confront how hard it is to understand the uncertainty inherent in many scientific estimates. Even liberals who are initially more sympathetic to science information might find their confidence in public health messages tested if these messages waver and evolve.

As such, we expect future research will focus on how health officials can most effectively communicate scientific uncertainty to the public.

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More than 80% of Pfizer’s vaccine doses have already been bought by world’s richest

Campaigners in the United Kingdom on Wednesday warned that just two days after pharmaceutical giant Pfizer shared positive early results of its coronavirus vaccine trial, mass purchases of the vaccine by the world’s richest countries have left more than 85% of the global population—namely, the world’s poorest—without any way to access it. 

Pfizer says it can produce 1.35 billion doses of the vaccine, which was shown according to Pfizer’s first formal review to be 90% effective at preventing coronavirus infection in patients who have never had the virus, by the end of 2021. More than one billion of those doses—82% of the supply—have already been purchased by wealthy countries. 

The U.S. has purchased 100 million doses with an option to buy 500 million, enough to potentially immunize its entire population against the coronavirus with hundreds of millions of doses left over. Since Monday Pfizer has also sold 40 million doses to the U.K. and 200 million doses to the E.U., with an option to buy 100 million more. 

In a statement, the British campaign group Global Justice Now noted that Pfizer’s partner in the development of the vaccine, German manufacturer BioNTech, has received financing of €375 million ($441 million) from the German government and €100 million ($117 million) from the European Investment Bank.

“Pfizer claims not to have had any state support, but the advance purchase of a billion doses of an unproven drug, not to mention the tax breaks and direct public funding of Pfizer’s partner suggests their claim is misleading at best,” said Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden. “Unless we break the stranglehold of these massive corporations over our medicines, the injustice will continue.”

Global Justice Now noted that Pfizer is likely to give some doses to developing countries through the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (COVAX). However, those doses are expected to make up a small fraction of those produced by Pfizer, leaving billions of people without access to the vaccine. 

COVAX has been undermined by the refusal of some wealthy countries, including the U.S., to take part in the global effort to ensure vaccine access, and now by mass purchases by some of those same countries. 

“You couldn’t get a clearer example of how unequal the pharmaceutical system is—some make billions of pounds, while many others die because they cannot afford treatments or there are no more left for them to buy,” Dearden said. “It’s got to change.”

Global Justice Now repeated its call from earlier this week for the suspension of global patent rules to make it possible for poor countries to develop generic versions of Pfizer’s vaccine. South Africa and India last month proposed that the World Trade Organization suspend the rules on intellectual property for vaccines and treatments related to Covid-19.

“It is imperative that we end the vaccine nationalism and that sufficient supply is made available to all, on a fair basis, as a matter of urgency,” said Dearden. “That can be helped by supporting governments like South Africa and India who are trying to suspend intellectual property rules at the WTO during this global emergency.”

Trump made inroads in South Texas this year. These voters explain why

RIO GRANDE CITY — It was a strange sight in Starr County: More than 70 vehicles, decked out with Trump 2020 flags, parading 13 miles along the Texas-Mexico border from Roma to Rio Grande City.

Even Roel Reyes, who flew an “All Aboard the Trump Train” flag from the back of his Harley Davidson, was surprised to have so much company. And he helped organize the late October caravan.

“I was expecting 15 to 20 cars max,” Reyes said. “Usually this area is for Democrats.”

Ten days later, when the election results came in, the rest of Texas was just as surprised at what happened in Starr County. After losing the county by 60 percentage points to Hillary Clinton, President Donald Trump lost it by just 5% to Joe Biden.

In neighboring Zapata County, which Clinton won by 33 percentage points in 2016, voters didn’t just swing more to the right — the county flipped all the way red.

And that trend continued all the way up and down the Texas-Mexico border, where Trump won 14 of the 28 counties that Clinton had nearly swept in 2016 while winning by an average of 33 percentage points. This year those same counties went for Biden by an average of just 17 points.

The results have locals wondering whether this was simply a strange election in which a norm-busting incumbent, combined with the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, has temporarily upended the border’s longstanding political balance — or whether this is a sign of a profound political realignment in South Texas.

Roberto Barrera said his choice was easy. Born and raised in Zapata, he has worked in the oil and gas business practically his whole life. So he said he couldn’t cast a vote for Biden, who said during the second presidential debate that he would “transition” from the fossil fuel industry.

“The way I see it, they’d cut my job,” Barrera said. “What else can I say?”

Oil and gas is the largest industry in Texas and employs hundreds of thousands of Texans. But nearly 50,000 oil and gas-related jobs have been lost during the pandemic as worldwide demand for oil has plummeted because the virus is keeping more people at home.

After his debate statement, Biden — who now carries the banner for the establishment, moderate wing of the party — said he would not eliminate fracking. But some South Texas voters say the leftward progression of the Democratic party — its embrace of alternative and cleaner energy and the calls by some progressives over the summer to defund police departments — has left them behind.

It’s an echo of what voters in other small town and rural parts of America said about voting for Trump in 2016.

“Aside from Hispanic heritage, most of the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas have similar demographics to Trump’s strongholds in rural communities across the country,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, a moderate whose district includes both Starr and Zapata counties. “It’s homogenous, deeply religious, pensively patriotic, socially conservative, and it’s hurting economically.”

Back in Rio Grande City, Mary Stewart voted for Cuellar and for state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Democrat who represents Starr County in the state Legislature.

But the 80-year-old retiree also voted for Trump. After working for the Rio Grande City Police Department and for the state, Stewart said she fears Democratic officeholders will defund law enforcement agencies and come for her guns.

“Who’s going to protect us?” said Stewart, who planted a Trump-Pence sign in her front yard.

Stewart said she supported Cuellar and Guillen because she knows them, and they know the community. But Stewart and other South Texas voters who spoke to The Texas Tribune said the Democratic Party as a whole does not.

That could become a challenge for the party as it works to keep or expand its appeal to Latino voters, a large and diverse voting bloc that has become a big factor in deciding which party wins Texas and key swing states like Florida and Arizona.

In this year’s election, Cuban Americans in South Florida broke heavily for Trump as he carried the state. And a similar swing by Mexican Americans in South Texas offset some gains Democrats made in the state’s suburbs.

Trump’s statements condemning protesters and backing law enforcement connected with voters in South Texas, where a significant portion of the population either works in law enforcement or has friends or family members who do.

Federal law enforcement agencies advertise jobs on Instagram and Twitter in border counties, and the Border Patrol employs more than 3,000 people in the Rio Grande Valley alone.

Ernesto Alanis III, a land surveyor in Rio Grande City who voted for Trump, said the region’s close ties to the military and law enforcement helped push more people toward Republicans this year.

“My Border Patrol agent friends say the wall works, and helps them do their job,” Alanis said from his office, where his black Desert Storm veteran cap sits next to a red MAGA cap. “If anyone would know if a wall worked, it would be them, right?”

U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, won reelection by just three points after winning his last reelection in 2018 by more than 20 percentage points. He said his support for law enforcement and oil and gas did not help him in this month’s election.

“I think the party got penalized for being anti-law enforcement,” Gonzalez said. “People put up a sign next to one of mine in a rural area, and they had an arrow saying, ‘He’s a proud member of the party that wants to take your guns and oilfield jobs away.'”

Gonzalez added, “I get criticized by the left for this — I’m, like, as pro-oil and gas and pro-military as you can be. By no means do I support the Green New Deal and [transitioning to clean energy] overnight.”

Cuellar and Gonzalez both said the 2020 result was a Trump-specific phenomenon.

“Hispanics, especially Mexican Americans, they like this machismo, bravado, lucha libre-style politics — it’s like all-star wrestling, Trump style,” Gonzalez said. “It fits perfectly with the South Texas, Tejano person.”

And some voters said the Democratic Party is not as welcoming as it was in the decades after John F. Kennedy’s “Viva Kennedy” campaign that sought to reach more Mexican Americans.

“Biden staked the general election on disaffected Republicans and Black voters,” said Northwestern University historian Geraldo Cadava, who wrote a book about Hispanic Republicans. “It was a successful formula for Biden in a lot of ways. I just think as a result, he didn’t make Latinos a priority until way later.”

Some South Texas voters said they do not recognize the Democratic Party any more. Jay Peña, an attorney in Rio Grande City, said as a kid he was raised a Democrat like most people he knows.

“I’m one of those that was a lifelong Democrat and brought up Democratic because of our roots here,” he said. “Like basically everyone here in the Valley, the Democratic Party was ingrained in our childhood.”

Peña said he voted twice for President Barack Obama, “but I’m one of those that switched over.” He said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 because he realized his principles lined up more with the GOP than the Democrats.

“I used to consider myself left of center,” Peña said. “I don’t anymore.”

Jolie McCullough contributed reporting.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

If Democrats can’t stop acting like losers when they win, America is doomed

Anyone treating the ignorance, bigotry and delusion of 72 million Americans as revelatory hasn’t spent much time reading about American history, or even paying attention to cable news over the past four years. The poisons of racism and paranoia have stormed through the veins of politics since the nation’s inception, and despite occasional signs of detoxification, the body politic will never eradicate their influence. Richard Hofstadter, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, first analyzed the “paranoid style in American politics” in 1959, identifying it as not exclusively but predominantly a right-wing characteristic. 

Hofstadter was reacting to the temporary but widespread popularity of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In the decades separating McCarthyism and the electoral deflation of Donald Trump, the United States has suffered under the intellectual dead weight of dangerous bromides regarding “welfare queens,” “the gay agenda,” “the war on Christmas,” “death panels,” the Clinton murders, birtherism, the “Deep State,” QAnon and a whole host of other ideas whose acceptance should land people in a state mental hospital. 

The unique achievement and danger of Trump was that he was able to coalesce the cranks and kooks into one obstinate base. He wasn’t alone, but had the assistance of Fox News, which rivals any televangelist for the rate of nonsense-per-minute, and millions of people broadcasting on social media, who without the aid of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s wonderful creations, would have no other outlet but scrawling slogans next to “for a good time call” invitations in bathroom stalls. 

Hofstadter estimated that the extreme paranoid right of comprised 15 to 20 percent of the electorate. Their growth is certainly alarming, but as the midterm elections of 2018 and the presidential election of 2020 demonstrate, they are not unbeatable.

Despite massive voter suppression schemes, including the purging of nearly 200,000 voters — most of them Black — from Georgia rolls in 2019, and the Trump-directed, Louis DeJoy-administered sabotage of mail-in voting, Democrats managed to flip five states (and a Nebraska congressional district) in the presidential election, and have once again won the moral victory of a substantial popular-vote triumph.

Democrats still hold a majority in the House, even with some seat losses, and have a chance  to take control of the Senate with two January runoff elections in Georgia. Yet they are already acting like losers.

Writers in Slate, the Guardian, the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, along with a flurry of commentators on television, are bemoaning the strength of Trump’s turnout and warning Democrats that the country is beyond the influence of the progressive wing of the party. There are certainly deep-seated sicknesses in American culture that favor the far right, but all of the immediate lamentations, even after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris prevailed by a comfortable margin, resemble a football team apologizing because it only won the Super Bowl by three points.

Among mainstream liberals and even some progressives, there is an attitude of diffidence that constantly prepares them for defeat. The risk is that it becomes self-fulfilling. While progressives plan to lose, the right wing, even when it does lose, aggressively asserts itself as if it somehow held a political and moral mandate. As simple as this sounds, a lack of confidence and an unwillingness to fight contribute to the wounds of the American left.

The necessity of persistence and ambition is an old truth, but I recall Steve Earle, the protest singer-songwriter, expressing it well during his late 2002 tour — a run of shows that doubled as antiwar rallies, while the Bush administration plotted the unlawful invasion of Iraq. Rotating his own political music with versions of “Masters of War,” “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding,” and other songs of social consciousness, Earle told the audience, “I’m not worried about them as much as I am worried about us. They can only win when we all decide to go home.”

John Kasich, Lincoln Project Republicans, and even some moderate Democrats want progressives to go home, sit back with a good book, and allow President Biden to collaborate with a fantastical Republican caucus that is amenable to reasonable arguments, supportive of democracy and actually concerned about the lives of its constituents.

As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and other leading figures of the left faction of the party have argued over the past two weeks, the reality is that they have the momentum among Democrats, and should seize the moment to gain control of the party. Progressives who express disappointment with the overly conciliatory and corporate Democrats are correct in their condemnation, but too often miss what the far right has understood for decades: Political parties are malleable. 

There is no law of physics requiring that the Democrats govern under the influence of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” In 2010, the Tea Party weirdos and evangelical loons began to dominate the Republican Party. Reasonable figures like Mitt Romney appear like aliens from a distant planet while encouraging the use of masks, marching with Black Lives Matter or articulating gently-phrased derision of Trump’s dictatorial aspirations.

The left could stage a similar takeover within the Democratic Party, especially considering that the American people are open to persuasion on issues of economic justice and social liberalism. Countering the disappointments in state and local races, voters in Nebraska passed a restriction on predatory lending, Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota legalized the recreational use of marijuana, Colorado voters approved a paid family leave program, and even the eccentric civilization that anthropologists call “Florida” voted to increase the minimum wage to $15. 

If the gruesome Trump nightmare proved anything, it is that the era of Democratic capitulation and surrender must meet a violent death. It’s deeply disturbing that tens of millions of Americans voted for a tyrannical buffoon not once, but twice. It is no less disturbing that in years recent enough for living people to describe, the majority of Americans supported the state-sponsored terrorism of Jim Crow, the societal assault against LGBT citizens and the nationwide subjugation of women. One can imagine the political paralysis that would have frozen the entire country had the leaders of the civil rights movement, gay rights movement and feminist movement continually clutched their chests and cried over the popularity and monstrosity of their opposition.

It is also important to remember that much of Trump’s support is anomalous, a ghastly outgrowth of his unique personality. A boilerplate Republican is unlikely to arouse cultist passion without Trump’s strange brew of celebrity, media savvy, juvenile rebellion against social mores and con-man instinct.

The American people, by slim margins, are more sympathetic to progressive positions on health care, education, women’s rights, criminal justice and the environment. It is our political system, with its antiquated methods of arbitration, regulations of democratic procedure and prioritization of empty acreage over human beings, that gives an advantage to the regressive forces of the right. Systems, like political parties, are also malleable. The Progressive movement of the early 20th century won many victories for equality and the advancement of democracy — most notably in the contemporary context, the direct election of U.S. senators.

More than 60 percent of the American public supports the abolition of the Electoral College. Democrats must make the popular election of the president a major priority on their agenda, even if that initially requires building enough support and amplification that Republican officials realize they will politically suffer for their resistance. 

Many progressives are breaking out into cold sweats and reaching for anti-anxiety medication, because they fear that right-wing recapture of national power is right around the corner. The future of American politics is dependent upon Democratic navigation. If activists allow Biden and his advisers to take the helm without the application of organized pressure and influence, and permits them to adopt a “moderate” agenda, only softening the edges of the blunt instrument that is hammering down on the lives of poor people, the hopes of the working class and the life of the planet, then, yes, the far-right program that poses as worker-friendly will rise again out of the manure of racism and xenophobia. 

If Democrats, facing the insistence of an activist base, demonstrate the power of New Deal liberalism to materially benefit the lives of ordinary people, they can begin to remake American politics.

Steve Earle gave his speech about the necessity of political commitment as an introduction to his song, “Christmas in Washington.”

“Come back Woody Guthrie,” Earle sang with a crack in his voice, “So, come back Emma Goldman / Rise up old Joe Hill / The barricades are goin’ up / They cannot break our will.”

No one with any political awareness is likely to confuse Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with the heroes Earle invokes in his ballad, but a Democratic victory presents an opportunity for progressives and radicals to make demands, rather than simply settle for defending elementary rights against the abuses of an autocrat. 

The title of the song Earle played to close the show, sending his audience out into the street with an injection of urgency, contains an eternal truth that’s critical to remember, and even recite, in an era of turbulence: “Time Has Come Today.”

State of Chaos: Donald Trump knew us better than we knew ourselves

In 2016 as now, he was the candidate of chaos. Yes, he was a billionaire (or wanna-be billionaire or in-hock billionaire, not to mention a liar, a cheat, and a scoundrel), but from the beginning he appealed to the forces of order in America that were also, as it happened, the forces of chaos. Donald Trump entered the presidential sweepstakes, or to be completely accurate rode an escalator into it, from stage right. In another universe, he could have entered from stage left and he wouldn’t have given a damn either way.

After all, there never really was a left, right, or center for the king of apprentices. There was never anything but the imposing figure known as The Donald, the man of the hour, any hour, past, present, or future. Whatever his political position of the moment, he reflected one thing above all: the underlying chaos and bad faith of a world of wealth, power, and ever-growing inequality, a world, as it happened, just waiting to go down.

Now that he’s defeated, count on one thing: he’ll take as much of this country with him as he can. If he has his way, when he finally decides to jump ship, money in hand, he’ll leave the rest of us at a vast mask-less rally with death running wild in our midst. From the beginning, he was always the orange-faced, yellow-haired personification of chaos. Now, just as the Republican Party did in 2016, this country has taken on his chaos as our own and, in the wake of the recent election, one obvious question is: Are we, too, scheduled for the ventilator of history?

Do I sound extreme? I damn well hope so. We’re in a gridlocked, post-election moment of previously unimaginable extremity in an increasingly over-armed, ever more divided country that used to be known as the “last superpower” on Planet Earth. It matters (but not enough) that that aged Democratic centrist Joe Biden has taken the presidency and, if all goes faintly as previously expected, will make his way into the future White House. Without a Senate majority, however, and with a reduced majority in the House, without the Democrats having taken a single state legislature from the Republicans, and with Donald Trump’s America still fully mobilized and ready for… well, who knows what… don’t count on good tidings ahead.

The personification of carnage

From the start, he was imperial America’s candidate of decline, even if few recognized it at the time. Still, it should have been obvious enough in 2016 — it was to me anyway — that his trademark slogan, Make America Great Again, was nothing short of an admission that this “exceptional,” “indispensable” nation of ours, the greatest superpower in history (or so this country’s politicians then liked to believe) had, in fact, seen better times.

Donald Trump was then, and remains, a vengeful, preening peacock sent by god knows whom to make that reality obvious to one and all. That was certainly true of the slice of white, heartland, working-class America that decided to embrace the billionaire bankupteeand reality TV host. In a land of already staggering inequality, he was the one who would somehow give them back their lost status, their lost sense of American wellbeing and of a future that they could embrace for their children and grandchildren. And if he didn’t do that for them, he would at least be emotional payback when it came to all the loathed powers-that-be in Washington who had, they felt, taken them down.

His “base,” as they came to be known in the media, whom he abhorred, adored, and played like an accordion, embraced the man who, in the end, was guaranteed to leave them holding the bag without the slightest compunction. In those years, they became his property, his very own apprentices, like the political party he also absorbed without a second thought.

When it came to that base, he became, after a fashion, their god or perhaps their demon, and so he remains today, even in defeat. Of course, he won’t care if he ends up bankrupting them, leaves them in a ditch, or continues to rev them up at future rallies that, though they may spread death, leave him feeling whole and good and top of the line.

On the other hand, when Joe Biden, the definition of an old white man, finally limps into the Oval Office, he’ll represent a return to normalcy in Washington, the retrieval of an America that was. The only problem: the America that was — if you’ll excuse the repetition of a verb — was an America in decline, even if its leaders didn’t know it. It was a country on course for a previously un-American version of inequality and so instability that once would have been unimaginable.

Who can doubt that Donald Trump himself was the personification of hell on Earth? He was the witch in the wardrobe. He was a satanic art-of-the-dealer (every deal, by definition, meant only for himself). He was what this country vomited up from the depths of its disturbed innards as a uniquely symbolic president. From the moment he delivered that Inaugural Address of his on January 20, 2017, he would also be the personification of carnage.

And yes, goad me a little more, and believe me I could go on. But you get the drift, right?

And yet give Donald Trump the credit he deserves. However intuitively, he grasped just where this country was and was going (and, of course, how he could benefit from that). He understood its fault lines in a way no one else did. He even understood how to run a campaign for — instead of against — a pandemic in a way that should have left him 20,000 leagues under the sea, not floating in a heated pool at Mar-a-Lago.

There couldn’t be a grimmer moral to the American story than this: he knew all of us so much better than we knew ourselves. To so many Americans, he spoke what felt like reality itself. It mattered not at all that he looked like, felt like, and was a con man in a great American tradition, or that he had stiffed the government with those tax returns he’d never release. After all, whatever he was, he was the genuine (fraudulent) thing in a world where increasing numbers of Americans already felt conned by the 1% politics of a Washington that was filled with con artists of a different sort.

Now, despite the scads of lawyers he’s called into action to screw the works, Donald Trump has missed his chance for a second round in the Oval Office and, as a result, rest assured, we’ll all be left holding the bag. In the midst of the pandemic from hell — don’t doubt it for a second — this will be another kind of hell on earth.

A vote for doom

Now, let’s look on the bright side, because at such a moment who wants to just read a screed of negativity? So here’s the good news: thanks to President Trump’s defeat in election 2020 (however long it may take to play out in court), the world will go down more slowly, though how much more slowly remains to be seen. After all, there was one factor in any Trump second term that was going to be unlike any other.

Though it may not seem like it to us, the rest of what we would have seen from a Trump second term — autocratic behavior, raw racism, a red-hot version of nationalism (white and otherwise), aggrieved masculinity, all amid the pandemic of the century — would have been just another passing chapter in human history. In that long tale, autocrats and nationalists of every grim kind have been a dime-a-dozen and even nightmarish pandemics anything but unknown. Give it a decade, a century, a millennium, and it would be as if nothing had happened at all. Who but the historians (if they still exist) would even remember?

Unfortunately, that’s not true of one factor in election 2020, though it played the most modest of roles in the campaign itself. That was, of course, the phenomenon of climate change, the human heating of the planet through the never-ending release into the atmosphere (and the oceans) of greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels.

Certainly, since the coal-fired industrial revolution began in England in the eighteenth century, the warming of this planet has been sparked and fed by us humans, but it is not, in fact, part of human history. It will operate on a timescale likely to leave that history in the dust. Once released, and if not brought under some reasonable control (as is still possible), it’s a phenomenon that will stand, in the most devastating fashion imaginable, outside human history altogether. Unlike any other Trumpian phenomenon, once it truly sets in, give it a decade, a century, even a millennium, and it will still be working to ensure that Earth, to one degree or another, becomes a distinctly unlivable planet for humanity.

It’s little short of passing strange — you might actually call it suicidal — that Donald Trump (and the crew he brought to power) would be quite so intent not just on ignoring or “denying” climate change, as is often charged, but on amplifying it by, in essence, actively setting this planet afire. The president’s term for it was “unleashing American Energy Dominance.” How strange, however, that his intent to destroy a habitable planet proved quite so popular, not once, but twice — and who knows about a third time in 2024?

After all, a vote for Trump was, in essence, a vote for doom. At some level, it wasn’t even complicated, but from a base that seemed to glory in those mask-less, chanting love fests for their One and Only, perhaps none of this should have been a surprise at all.

If Donald Trump has become something like a god to his supporters, then perhaps it’s worth asking what kind of a god would be quite so intent on setting fire to the planet (and while he was at it murdering his own apprentices with Covid-19)? Perhaps we need to think of him, in fact, as our very own boatman Charon on the river Styx, paddling us all to what someday could quite literally be a hell on Earth.

After all, I’m writing this piece in New York City on a November day when it’s 74 degrees outside (and, no, that’s not a misprint). Yet another fierce tropical storm in a record year of them has drenched parts of Florida, a place that’s no longer a swing state but, like Mar-a-Lago, property of The Donald. Meanwhile, parts of the West, having burned and smoked and flamed in a historic fashion across millions and millions of charred acres amid heat waves galore, are still smoldering (though hardly noticed by anyone), and the world couldn’t be less together.

In a Senate controlled by Mitch McConnell, green new deals or two-trillion-dollar climate plans will become more fantastic than Donald Trump himself. Still, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at least partially running a deeply divided country in the midst of a pandemic and an economy that’s gone to hell, the pyromania will ease up somewhat. Some modest steps might even be taken toward alternate forms of energy and some to save the environment, as well as a humanity in distress. It won’t be what’s needed, but it won’t be a torch either and that’s the best thing to be said about our moment and why it truly mattered that Donald Trump was not reelected.

Now, return for a moment to 1991, when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, imploded. America’s power brokers then (including Joe Biden), believing themselves alone and powerful beyond imagining on Planet Earth, the inheritors of everything that had gone before, launched what would become disastrous forever wars, sure that this planet was theirs for the taking, even as history itself — just imagine — was ending.

Almost three decades later, that same last superpower is a democracy in decline, not to say chaos; an imperial power in decline globally; a military power that can’t find a winning war to fight (even as Congress, no matter the president, appropriates yet more funding for the military-industrial complex). We have a 78-year-old man getting ready to inhabit the Oval Office and another 78-year-old preparing to oppose him in the Senate, while an 80-year-oldruns the House. Doesn’t this tell you something about a country swept away by a pandemic — 100,000 or more cases a day — and, despite assurances from Donald Trump, without a turnable “corner” in sight? And none of this would be the end of the world, so to speak, if it weren’t for climate change.

Admittedly, Covid-19 has turned this country into a kind of hell on Earth, having been left to roam in an unprecedented fashion by a killer president. Cases are soaring, hospitals overwhelmed, deaths rising, and almost half of America can’t think about anything but crowding together for presidential rallies, living mask-less lives, and “opening” the economy.

Trumpism has split America in two in a way that hasn’t been imaginable since the Civil War. The president and the Senate are likely to be in gridlock, the judicial system a partisan affair of the first order, the national security state a money-gobbling shadow empire, the citizenry armed to the teeth, racism rising, and life everywhere in an increasing state of chaos.

Welcome to the (Dis)United States. Donald Trump led the way and, whatever he does, I suspect that this, for at least the time being, is still in some sense his world, not Joe Biden’s. He was the man and, like it or not, we were all his apprentices in a performance of destructive power of the first order that has yet to truly end.

Copyright 2020 Tom Engelhardt

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The Trump campaign can’t find a judge who will ignore facts — but it keeps trying

The reelection campaign of President Donald Trump, having failed to persuade the majority of American voters, is now making its case to the American courts. The campaign and its allies aren’t doing much better in the latter quest than they did in the former. Close to half of the two dozen or so cases brought since Election Day in key swing states have already been withdrawn or tossed by judges, with many of the rest seemingly destined for a similar fate. American politics may be notoriously divided, but inside the halls of justice, at least one example of unanimity seems to be prevailing: Whether the judges are liberal or conservative, working for state or federal courts, they’ve overwhelmingly demanded that the Trump and Republican plaintiffs deliver evidence to back their claims and they’ve been quick to reject what they consider baseless lawsuits.

One pattern has emerged in the fusillade of lawsuits: a frenzied search for a sympathetic judge. In each of four states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona — the Trump campaign and its allies have filed a succession of suits that make essentially the same claims before several different state and federal judges.

A little over a week into the Trump campaign’s postelection wave of litigation, the lawsuits have generated more heat than light. The GOP has scored some minor victories — an order, for example, from a Pennsylvania state judge who threw out a handful of ballots that were granted more than six days after the election to provide missing information.

But mostly things aren’t going according to the Trump campaign’s plan, to the extent that a coherent legal plan can be discerned from the pattern of lawsuits. For example, in Michigan, where the current 148,000-vote margin in Biden’s favor makes the odds of a reversal particularly steep, the Trump campaign and supporters have filed a total of five suits. In Wisconsin, where the margin is a much smaller 20,500 votes, only one has been filed, in this instance by a pro-Trump group on Thursday.

Still, failure hasn’t slowed the pace of the legal challenges, which can seem chaotic. One Michigan suit was apparently dispatched with such haste that it was filed first in the wrong federal court, the court of claims, before being refiled later the same day in federal district court.

A new suit the Trump campaign initiated Wednesday in federal court in Michigan goes so far as to append, in its entirety, another lawsuit, a 77-page document filed by a pair of GOP poll observers two days earlier in state court in Detroit. Both suits ask the courts to block the certification of the state’s presidential election. They claim widespread impropriety and fraud by election officials who allegedly prevented GOP observers from conducting oversight. The claims are backed by dozens of affidavits that offer much in the way of rhetoric, but little in the way of factual support. These lawsuits build on yet another couple of lawsuits with similar allegations, which were thrown out for lack of evidence by two different state judges. One of the judges, Timothy Kenny, was assigned to hear the new state court lawsuit filed this week.

“By now, we’ve seen this before, and we’re seeing it in multiple places,” David Fink, who is representing the city of Detroit and other municipal defendants in that case, told Kenny during a hearing Wednesday afternoon. “In some ways, it’s starting to feel, in this courtroom at least, like Groundhog Day.”

During a conference call with reporters, also on Wednesday, Michigan’s top legal official, who has responsibility for investigating allegations of election fraud, said aloud what Fink implied. “In my view, this is really a brazen case of forum shopping,” Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said. Even though the campaign’s new federal lawsuit focused on Detroit, Nessel observed, the suit wasn’t filed in the Eastern District of Michigan — the federal court that encompasses Detroit — but in the Western District of Michigan, where all five judges were appointed by Republican presidents. (The lawyer opposite Fink in Michigan state court, David Kallman, said during Wednesday’s hearing that neither he, his firm, nor his clients had any involvement with other Republican lawsuits. In an interview with ProPublica, Kallman called allegations of forum shopping in his case “just silly.” He has not coordinated with the Trump Campaign or the Republican National Committee, he said, and he didn’t seek the case and decided to take it on after being approached by a Detroit poll worker.)

There’s been similar gamesmanship in Arizona, where two nearly identical cases, centered on the allegedly unfair treatment of Sharpie markers used by Trump voters at polling precincts in the Phoenix area, were tripped up by several days of procedural misfires before the GOP lawyers finally appeared to get the cases consolidated under the judge they preferred.

Thor Hearne, the Trump campaign lawyer behind the Michigan federal lawsuit brought on Wednesday and a longtime evangelist of the view that voter fraud is rampant, took these types of tactics a step further and sought out a particular judge. Hearne marked the federal lawsuit “related” to another suit, which had been filed in June. The “related” designation assigns the same judge to both cases. To call the new case and the June case related — meaning, under the court’s local rules, that the underlying facts overlap and the cases share similar legal questions — is a stretch at best. The June lawsuit sought to require Michigan officials to purge 800,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls under a federal voter registration law. It has nothing to do with how the 2020 election was run. But the appeal for Hearne of the judge presiding over the June case, a George W. Bush appointee named Robert Jonker, is easy enough to pick out: Last month, Jonker denied a request by state officials to dismiss the voter purge case. The maneuver failed. On Thursday, the court deemed the cases not related and randomly assigned Hearne’s lawsuit to another judge. (Hearne did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)

Judges have repeatedly expressed irritation with Hearne and other lawyers on the Trump side. A judge in Michigan last week had to teach Hearne what hearsay is. The judge, Cynthia Stephens, provided this helpful definition — “I heard somebody else say something” — before adding, regarding one of Hearne’s key claims: “Tell me why that’s not hearsay. Come on, now.” At an emergency hearing in Philadelphia requested by the Trump campaign, a federal judge was exasperated with a local campaign lawyer, Jerome Marcus, who wouldn’t give him a straight answer about the representation of GOP observers at the city’s canvassing center. (Marcus’ legal filings claimed they were being barred from observing.) Marcus acknowledged that a “nonzero number of people” were there for the Republicans. “I’m asking you, as a member of the bar of this court, are people representing Donald J. Trump for president, representing the plaintiff, in that room?” the judge, Paul Diamond, asked. Marcus answered, “Yes.” “I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?” Diamond shot back. Earlier this week in a nearby suburb, another judge’s questioning of a lawyer representing the Trump campaign, Jonathan Goldstein, forced him to concede that the 592 ballots he was challenging were tainted by neither fraud nor improper influence. “Your Honor, accusing people of fraud is a pretty big step,” Goldstein said. The lawyer did not address the fact that his client, the president of the United States, is regularly making that precise accusation on Twitter.

At a hearing in the Arizona Sharpie case on Thursday, too, it was difficult to discern exactly what wrongdoing the Trump side believed had occurred. “This is not about fraud,” Kory Langhofer, a local attorney for the Trump campaign, told a judge. The lawsuit was premised, in part, on the idea that bleeding Sharpies and poll worker error had cost a slew of Trump supporters their vote. Sworn witness affidavits filed with the lawsuit included the sentence, “I believe my vote for Donald J. Trump and Michael Pence was not counted.” Under cross-examination, however, the witnesses told a different story. The refrain became familiar by the end of the six-hour hearing. A lawyer for the Arizona Democratic Party: “Do you have any reason to believe that your vote wasn’t counted?” Trump campaign witness: “No.” On Friday, Langhofer conceded in court papers that his case as to the presidential election was moot. (He’s still pursuing a separate part of the suit that relates to a State Senate election.) Biden’s margin of victory vastly exceeded the 191 ballots at issue in the case.

Even when the Trump side uncovered apparent irregularities, they tended to fizzle under closer scrutiny. A lawyer representing two Republican poll observers at Wednesday’s hearing in Detroit submitted the sworn affidavits of several witnesses who attested to what they believed to be fraud at Detroit’s main canvassing site. Kenny, the judge, summarized the pattern alleged by the claims as follows: “This is what I saw, with the conclusion being this must be representative of fraudulent behavior.” For example, workers at the convention center never checked the signatures on mail-in ballots, some witnesses alleged, which proved, as the president and his surrogates had been saying for months, that voting by mail was ripe for fraud. Others saw workers enter some voters’ birth dates as Jan. 1, 1900. The dead, they concluded, were voting in Detroit.

The city countered. You may have seen what you claim you saw, but the conclusion that you draw is incorrect, asserted Chris Thomas, a longtime state elections director who had come out of retirement this year to help Detroit run its election, in written testimony. The mail-in ballot signatures were checked at a different location, before the ballots arrived at the convention center. And the 1900 date was a placeholder. Workers counting mail-in ballots lacked access to voter birth dates, which the computerized tabulation system required them to enter, so they entered Jan. 1, 1900.

Only two days after the hearing, the judge dealt the Trump supporters a sweeping defeat. Kenny declined to block the state from certifying its election results or to order an audit. The affidavits of Republican observers and other witnesses were, as the judge described one affidavit, “rife with speculation and guess-work about sinister motives” by poll workers, claims they raised only after it became clear their preferred candidate, Trump, wouldn’t carry Michigan. GOP observers had skipped a training session ahead of the election and misinterpreted what they saw because they “knew little about the process.”

There’s little sign the newest (as of this writing) pro-Trump suit will have better prospects. On Thursday, three Wisconsin voters, backed by a controversial Texas conservative group called True the Vote, filed suit, asking a federal judge to block officials from certifying votes in three counties that favored Biden over Trump. (The group has filed similar lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania.) According to the lawsuit, the “Plaintiffs possess advanced technical capability to conduct statistical analyses” and want officials to give them a range of voting data to analyze. But when ProPublica interviewed James Bopp, an Indiana-based attorney representing the plaintiffs, he offered an account at odds with the document he filed. “None of the plaintiffs have the credentials to, or the resources to, conduct a very sophisticated data analytics operation,” he said. Bopp is hoping True the Vote, which is not a party to the suit, will be allowed to conduct the analysis.

Even if the Trump campaign were to turn its legal luck around, the quantities of votes questioned by most of the postelection lawsuits fall far short of the numbers needed to change the outcome of the election. The campaign has failed to find evidence of the kind of widespread irregularities that it would need to turn up in at least three states to have a chance to push Biden’s presumptive 306 electoral votes below the 270 threshold and throw the election to Trump. Biden’s margins in the states key to his victory range from nearly 148,000 in Michigan, as noted, to 59,000 (and counting) in Pennsylvania and 35,000 in Nevada, on down to 11,000 in Arizona, a figure that may tighten but is expected to allow Biden to carry the state.

The rare elections in which challenges to ballots make a difference tend to be dramatically smaller, and they tend to involve a conspiracy not in the theoretical sense raised by Trump’s lawsuits but in the criminal sense. In 2018, the North Carolina state elections board ordered a revote in the race for the state’s 9th Congressional District after a local operative working for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, was found to have perpetrated a ballot fraud scheme. Harris won by only 905 votes out of around 278,000 cast in the 2018 election and decided not to run in the re-vote in 2019. (The seat was then won by a different Republican candidate.)

More than two decades ago, a Florida court threw out 5,200 absentee ballots cast in the 1997 Miami mayoral runoff following the discovery that a massive fraud scheme had so infected the pool of ballots that they had to be invalidated. It was a rare instance where the outcome changed. Fewer than 3,000 votes separated the candidates, out of about 44,000 votes cast, and most of the people involved in the fraud scheme had worked for the candidate who initially appeared to have won. In both cases, indictments followed.

As the clock ticks closer to key deadlines in late November and early December, the Trump campaign and its allies have also grown more aggressive in what they’re asking of judges. In lawsuits filed over the past week in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania they have asked judges to block state officials from certifying the election results until the plaintiffs’ concerns are met or to order officials not to include ballots from entire counties that went to Biden. As of Thursday afternoon, there was no indication that judges would grant any of those requests.

In swing states with close margins, recounts offer another remedy for Trump. In Georgia, where Biden commands a 14,000-ballot lead, the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, announced an unusual manual recount after coming under pressure from members of his own party. (A New York Times article on Thursday asserted that the recount would technically be an audit.) Although Arizona is likely to produce the narrowest margin, the state will recount the votes only if the gap between Biden and Trump falls to within 0.1 percentage points. At present, Biden is ahead by a little more than 0.3 percentage points, and his 11,000-vote lead would need to fall to somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 votes to trigger a recount. Last week, the Trump campaign announced it intended to seek a recount in Wisconsin once the vote count is finalized. Biden’s 20,500-vote lead — a 0.6-percentage-point edge — falls within the 1 point margin for a recount. But because it’s greater than a quarter of a percentage point, the campaign will have to pay somewhere around $3 million for it.

It’s unlikely to be worth it. Biden’s margin in Wisconsin is similar to Trump’s over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and a recount that year paid for by Green Party candidate Jill Stein had a negligible impact on the outcome — netting Trump 131 additional votes. In the infamous Florida recount of 2000, there was a bit more movement, but not enough to change the result: 1,784 votes initially separated Bush and Al Gore, and the recount was eventually certified at a gap of 537 votes after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the process. Subsequentstudies found there was a high likelihood Bush would still have won had the recount proceeded. (It’s also worth noting that, for all the controversy about the Supreme Court’s role in 2000, the court’s decision was to halt a recount in one state. The court did not overturn the election results in a state, much less in multiple states, which is what would likely be required for Trump to prevail.)

So if challenges and recounts are unlikely to turn the tide in Trump’s favor, what’s the point of all this litigation? At present, it’s unclear, and it may be there is no single motivation driving it. Some reporting has suggested it’s the final flailing of a president who can’t stand to lose. Others believe the goal is to keep the Republican base fired up ahead of two Jan. 5 runoff campaigns in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate.

Given the nonstop solicitations for donations coming out of the Trump campaign, still others have pointed to the fundraising value of the litigation push. Tellingly, the fine print notes that 40% of donations to Trump’s “Official Election Defense Fund” goes to the Republican National Committee. The other 60% goes first to a new PAC Trump has set up, Save America, up to the maximum contribution, $5,000. Only after that limit is exceeded does the contribution go to funding election litigation. So, for a $10,000 donation, $4,000 would go to the RNC, $5,000 would go to Save America, and only $1,000 would go to the Trump campaign’s litigation fund.

The aim is, at least in part, to get judges to block states from certifying their popular votes before key deadlines, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that cited “advisers and lawyers involved.” Certification delays could prevent states from finalizing their presidential election results by Dec. 8, a key deadline under the federal Electoral Count Act. If a state has finalized its election results by that date — six days before each state’s electors meet to cast their vote for president — it generally prevents Congress from rejecting that state’s electors.

A lot of weird things can happen when Congress meets on Jan. 6 to tally the results of the Electoral College vote and the relevant laws are ambiguous and untested. Suffice it to say that states really don’t want to miss that Dec. 8 deadline. The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to choose how their state selects electors, and in theory a legislature could step in and vote for a slate of electors that would vote for Trump even though Biden won the popular vote in the state or vice versa. This would be worse news for Biden, though. Apart from Nevada, the legislatures of the states essential to his Electoral College majority are under Republican control. There are also scenarios where a state might certify competing slates of electors. It gets messy and confusing fast.

In the worst case, if somehow the situation ended up such a mess that neither Biden nor Trump received 270 Electoral College votes, the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution throws the decision to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation awarded one vote — a set of circumstances that would favor Republicans.

The threat of activist state legislatures isn’t as scary as it might sound to Democrats. It’s a politically fraught and legally complicated process for a legislature to disenfranchise its citizens after they’ve voted, though the Florida Legislature considered it as the 2000 recount dragged on. And there’s no sign that legislatures are moving in this direction. In Pennsylvania, for example, the GOP majority leaders of both houses of the legislature have disavowed this kind of intervention. Republican legislators in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have announced inquiries into the presidential election in their states, but though these inquiries may serve as pretext to push for more restrictive voting laws, there’s no reason yet to believe that it’s a way to gin up an argument for intervening to void an ostensibly illegitimate election.

Still, it’s worth keeping in mind — as it seems at least some in Trump’s orbit are — that the room for mischief grows if a state is at risk of missing, or does miss, the Dec. 8 deadline. If this kind of scenario is what Trump and his allies are playing for, that’s the date they’ve got their eye on.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Paul McCartney’s spectacular return to form: New solo album “McCartney III” sizzles and soars

With “McCartney III,” the Cute Beatle makes a spectacular return to form, produces one of his most compelling albums in decades, and reminds us that at age 78, his musical chops are as exquisite and profound as virtually anyone’s. Ever.

Working at his Sussex studio, Paul McCartney recorded nearly the entirety of “McCartney III” during the pandemic. A one-man band production in the spirit of his eponymous debut solo album in 1970, “McCartney III” arrives more than 40 years after the release of its predecessor, “McCartney II,” in 1980. That summer, the album topped the UK charts and yielded a chart-topping single Stateside in “Coming Up.”

In its own fashion, “McCartney III” functions as the logical extension of its precursors, each acting as lodestones of sorts for signal moments across his long career. As with the first two LPs, McCartney took a carefree, homespun approach to his efforts, allowing his imagination to guide the way. As he remarked in the album’s press notes about his process during its production, “Each day, I’d start recording with the instrument I wrote the song on and then gradually layer it all up; it was a lot of fun. It was about making music for yourself rather than making music that has to do a job. So, I just did stuff I fancied doing. I had no idea this would end up as an album.”

McCartney’s whimsical approach pays dividends from beginning to end, with the songwriter charting the emotional experience of not only surviving, but thriving in his eighth decade on earth. And he has the road miles to prove it. In many ways, McCartney himself is the “Long Tailed Winter Bird” who soars above the opening track, a spirited, largely instrumental number that is highlighted by one of the musician’s niftiest acoustic guitar licks in years.

Love the Beatles? Listen to Ken’s podcast “Everything Fab Four.”

In short order, McCartney rips off one musical confection after another, including Beatlesque pop ditties such as “Find My Way” and “Seize the Day.” And then there’s “Lavatory Lil,” a composition that, in a very different time and place, might have found a home in the Abbey Road medley nestled alongside “Mean Mr. Mustard” and “Polythene Pam.”

McCartney absolutely sizzles on such bone-crunching electric numbers as “Slidin'” and “Deep Down,” with hard-driving guitar licks that might find some listeners hearkening back to the “Band on the Run” track “Let Me Roll It.” Even still, his guitar work on “McCartney III” sounds equally fresh and urgent, as he wrestles with the endlessly fecund muse that has served him well since at least the mid-1950s, when he penned his first song as a paean for his mother Mary.

In the LP’s latter stages, McCartney offers up a pair of memorable acoustic tunes in “The Kiss of Venus” and “When Winter Comes.” He reportedly composed “The Kiss of Venus” after reading an astrological book about the balletic movements and synchronicity of the planets. It was “a fascinating book,” the songwriter recalled, about the ways in which our solar system structures itself as a “trippy” lotus shape.

“When Winter Comes” acts as a coda for McCartney III, which, like so many of his previous efforts, features a musical reprise—in this case, the “Winter Bird” exits with a final flourish before giving way to a gentle acoustic guitar. Originally produced by George Martin during the same 1992 “Flaming Pie” session that yielded “Calico Skies,” “When Winter Comes” is a quintessential McCartney number, with a wistful recitation of the natural world and our fleeting existence within its fabric. While “When Winter Comes” would have been at home during virtually any phase of his illustrious career, the song’s inclusion at the tail end of “McCartney III” makes perfect sense: it’s not only one of his most beautiful compositions, which is high praise indeed, but also an insightful realization of the ways in which the uncertainties of life and death are always, in spite of everything, roiling among us.

“McCartney III” (Capitol Records) is out now digital platforms, CD and LP manufactured by Third Man Pressing. 

Big Tech is leading the new space race. Here’s why that’s a problem

The coronavirus pandemic has made having a stable and reliable internet connection a matter of extreme urgency, as people all over the world struggle to work, access education, and participate in society while staying safe. Yet universal affordable access is far from being achieved; indeed, half of the world still lacks access to the Internet, despite sustained efforts from governments and corporations.

One popular proposal for ubiquitous connectivity comes from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. LEO boosters claims that such satellites will have the ability to deliver high-speed broadband anywhere on the planet. These satellites provide internet access from space, and require placing thousands of satellites into orbit at a much closer proximity to Earth than traditional satellites.

The prospect of a globe-encircling mesh of broadband communication satellites has attracted the interest and investment of billionaires ranging from Bill Gates in the 1990s to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos today. Currently there are at least four major LEO initiatives from the US and Europe, including Starlink (SpaceX), Project Kuiper (Amazon), OneWeb, and Telesat. China has announced at least three LEO constellations, and Russia one. The size and scope of these projects are massive. To put current LEO satellite ambitions in context: the current total number of satellites of any kind orbiting Earth is just over 2,500. Starlink, who already have nearly 900 satellites in orbit, recently petitioned the US communications regulator for permission to launch a total of 12,000 satellites. Not to be outdone, OneWeb recently applied for permission to launch 48,000 satellites.

So what’s not to love?

While the goal of these companies to ensure broadband anywhere and everywhere is laudable, the technology and the approach to connectivity are not free from concerns. Recent history, especially the development of the Internet itself, has shown us that simply having the capability to build something doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea. The Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things,” perhaps valid in developing small applications, becomes irresponsible when the consequences of failure may be catastrophic and irreversible. Criticism of LEO constellations to date have focused on practical concerns around a variety of issues, including: the economic viability of the constellations, the occlusion of the night sky from astronomers, wireless interference between different constellations, and the potential chain reaction of collisions from a single error in satellite trajectory, leaving near-space an inaccessible junkyard of debris.

Beyond that, LEO constellations have deeper and longer-term implications that have yet to find their way into mainstream public debate. For one, LEO constellations are part of a larger process in which space exploration is being redefined and reframed in military and commercial terms. Closer to Earth, LEO constellations raise important concerns around the potential for the further entrenchment of a global internet oligopoly that increases inequality and disempowers citizens.

The scramble for space

Over the past seven decades, as our ability to explore beyond our planet has evolved, national security interests in space have aligned with commercial ones to an extent that they are nearly indistinguishable today. In the United States, private space launch companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance are major recipients of government contracts and now provide the bulk of US launch capacity for both scientific and military missions. While close ties between the defense and aerospace industries is nothing new, we are in a decidedly new phase of this relationship due to technological advancement, new policy priorities and the rise of private actors.

As commercial launch capacity has increased and space exploration technologies have advanced, the decades-old agreements around how we treat space and recognize our solar system as a commons for the benefit of all humanity are beginning to unravel. One clear example of this is the White House’s recent “Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,” which emphasizes that “the United States does not view outer space as a ‘global commons'” and refers to the Moon Agreement as “a failed attempt at constraining free enterprise.”

It is necessary to better understand the deep ties of LEO companies to the hegemonic designs of national governments on near space. Recently, in exchange for $28 million USD, Starlink provided the services of its satellites for live-fire demos with the US Air Force to test its Advanced Battle Management System and lay the groundwork for a military Internet of Things. Speaking after the latest live-fire demo, William Roper, Air Force acquisition chief, opined that “the military needs to be ready to play a strategic role because we need communications in many areas of the world that there are no commercial providers . . . we can be the stability case for companies like SpaceX and others who want to sell communications worldwide.” 

SpaceX’s connections to the military-industrial complex were made clear in comments by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell in 2018, who stated that her company would be willing to launch a space weapon to protect the US, in contravention of established space norms. Only weeks ago, SpaceX signed a contract with the Pentagon to jointly develop a rocket that can deliver up to 80 tons of cargo and weaponry anywhere in the world in just one hour.

The Internet, too, from its very inception until today, has proven to be a useful tool for pursuing military and security objectives. Of these, surveillance remains at the heart of Silicon Valley’s highly profitable business model of manipulating our attention and preferences for the sake of profit. This profit model facilitates the designs of space-obsessed billionaires like Jeff Bezos who make it no secret that their ultimate goal and passion is the human colonization of other planets in our solar system. In general terms, with material and economic support from taxpayers through defense spending, the profits from the colonization of our data-bodies are being invested in the militarization, privatization and colonization of space.

Telecommunications: driving inequality or empowering citizens?

The telecommunications sector has always been a battleground for regulation. While the early days of the Internet seemingly teemed with competition and diversity, power and control has ultimately become concentrated with the growth of giant internet companies that now dominate our online life. The consequences of unregulated, technology-fueled expansion of globalization and inequality can now be seen in almost every aspect of life.  

Digital technology plays a critical role in amplifying inequality, highlighting the need to reframe how we approach network technology development. Some governments and citizen groups understand the connection between economic mobility and tech skills development.

One great example of this comes from Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN), a cooperative in Northern England, that delivers 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic capacity to homes in a region deemed economically unviable by the incumbent telecommunications giant. B4RN’s ability to build and sustain an affordable internet service at speeds many times that of commercial offerings is based upon the investment they make in both community engagement and the development of local capacity. Contrast this with the prospect of a broadband service from a LEO constellation, in which the role of the citizen is that of a consumer only. It is also worth noting that B4RN’s profits are reinvested locally, while revenues from LEO constellations are beamed straight out of the country.

The failure to invest in alternatives that build local capacity replicates itself at the national level as well. LEO constellations have the potential to further abstract Internet service to a supra-national level in a manner that disempowers not just individuals but nation-states themselves in terms of domestic expertise and infrastructure. Investment and deployment costs for LEO constellations are so “astronomical,” and in many cases so tied to national/military investment and subsidies, that only a small handful of corporations/countries will be capable of owning and managing their own constellation. This is likely to open up a new front in the ongoing wrangling by geo-political power blocs over the future of the Internet.

Furthermore, it is far from clear that LEO constellations have either the capacity or the economic model to deliver on their claims of providing affordable connectivity to the unserved in most parts of the world. Consider that the half of the world’s population that remains unconnected to the Internet are the most economically disadvantaged. As such, most people will not be direct consumers of LEO services but will instead need to rely on a telco building infrastructure and using LEO as backhaul—a scenario which already exists with conventional satellite services. A further concern is that LEO constellations may ultimately create a disincentive to investment in rural connectivity, based on the assumption by service providers and governments that LEO constellations will address that gap.

It is troubling that companies like Amazon and Google (the third largest shareholder in SpaceX), which already wield tremendous power and influence over society, are vying to expand their dominance by becoming global internet service providers with support from taxpayers via subsidies and military spending. With their hands in essentially every layer of the communication stack, it will prove challenging to regulate or even know about the data they harvest and how those are used to competitive advantage in other areas of their businesses.

Recovering a spirit of cooperation

At the time of their emergence, both space exploration and the Internet served as beacons of hope and of potential transcendence for humanity—one of shared imagination and resources, and of cooperation in human development. In both cases, that hope has been dimmed in a quest for profit and geo-political power. If we want to recover a sense of shared purpose as a species, the question as to “who gets to put their satellites into low earth orbit?” is more important than we might think. Is space for everyone, or just a few huge corporations and global superpowers? This is the question we ask when we ask who gets to park their satellites in orbit.

There is an opportunity to return to the spirit of internationalism that infused the early days of space exploration in which space was held as a shared resource to be protected and guarded from exploitation. Similarly, here on Earth, we see successful efforts to manage Internet infrastructure as a commons in contrast to Silicon Valley’s model of surveillance capitalism. Recognizing that individual and collective empowerment and agency are as important as the actual infrastructure itself is the key to a more egalitarian Internet. LEO satellite networks may deliver connectivity (although many doubts remain), but they are less likely to empower people and move us toward a more equitable world. The development of a healthy Internet that actually benefits humanity involves not just the end result of affordable access, but also the process through which people gain that access.

Trump gums up the transition works

We’re quickly seeing the effects of Donald Trump’s resistance to conceding his electoral loss. He is childishly and stupidly refusing to follow through on appropriate, expected and necessary cooperation on setting up the myriad aspects of the presidential transition.

Even as Trump commands a dwindling number of Republicans willing to say the election remains unsettled, his administration is stuck trying to carry out Dear Leader’s wishes.

The result pits a restless Joe Biden and company, who seem over-eager to jump in on governing during the malaise of a paralyzed Trump White House, against the “Steal-the-Election” crowd over issues that have nothing to do with elections. They concern the normal takeover planning duties.

There’s nothing wrong with giving Joe Biden access to the daily presidential briefing even while pursuing court cases about supposedly fraudulent votes. There is nothing wrong with cooperating on behalf of the country. But Trump prefers petulance and personal pique.

  • Emily Murphy, head of the General Administrative Services (GSA), so far is refusing to provide office space, computers and the $10 million in congressionally approved money for transition activities.
  • Trump’s abrupt firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other members of his own administration whom he perceives as opposing him is adding to transition problems by introducing new appointees late in the administration’s days. Why this had to wait until now is confusing and potentially dangerous to national security. Is Trump planning something else that Esper would oppose, including withdrawal of the last U.S. troops in Afghanistan or a new action against Iran?
  • The Trump White House may be destroying, encoding or hiding national security records, despite a Presidential Records Act that Trump apparently finds optional, say White House sources. We or the Biden administration may never see the transcripts of Trump calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, or the impeachable call with the Ukrainian leader.

However long the Trump tantrum, it will come to an eventual end – or end up creating the nation’s most severe constitutional knot ever if Trump tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn a decision by 74 million voters, a four million-vote plurality.

Biden’s complications

Meanwhile, the Biden would-be steamroller looks to be working to fend off early hints of political problems even in picking its own team – both from Senate Republicans, whose majority is hanging on two runoff elections in Georgia, and from the left, where progressives want more liberal choices for some key Cabinet positions.

Politico.com has offered a useful, if early, assessment of top contenders for most Cabinet selections. It notes Republicans are already at work to keep to the most moderate choices. The proposed names include a much more diverse roster of players than any view of the Trump team, and seems to favor people actual with technical or subject-matter expertise. Under the banner of attacking the deep state, Trump preferred appointees who actually hated regulation by the departments they were to oversee.

Biden’s team is driving for urgency in attacking the list of Trump executive orders that can be overturned simply because they were never backed by legislation. An early list starts with moves to restore ways to shore up Obamacare that Trump had undercut to canceling efforts to undercut Civil Services protections for federal workers.

Plus, each incoming administration has to fill about 4,000 positions. Reports suggest this process is already under way.

On top of all of this, Biden’s team will be reaching out to key people in Congress.

In the case of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, presumably friendly conversations are needed to align agendas and to decide the order in which to seek legislation, particularly with a potentially opposition Senate.

In the case of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the tack will be to find areas of commonality to decide either together or with minimal opposition.

So, some kind of stimulus package will be up front, possibly followed by such topics as infrastructure and outdoor construction jobs during a pandemic.

For Biden, the transition is about lining up the dominoes to start falling on Day One.

National security records

Of all of these, the most curious may be compliance with the Presidential Records Act, presuming we get past resistance to accept election results and reach the detail of actual transition.

The National Archive already is going to have its hands full trying to determine if all the presidential tweets are part of the presidential records. Advice is that they are. Just preserving them and figuring out how to catalog them will be a chore.

But larger issues loom for national security documents and transcripts.

“The mysteries have swirled over the past four years: What was really said during Trump’s many phone calls and one-on-one meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin? What has Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner discussed with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman on WhatsApp, where messages can be automatically deleted? Did Trump’s aides memorialize any of the reported conversations he had with U.S. and foreign officials about boosting his business empire?” asked Politico.

With no real enforcement teeth, the Presidential Records Act requires a president to preserve and ultimately make public all records relating to the performance of official duties, through the Freedom of Information Act beginning five years after the end of an administration.

The National Archives says the act covers as any documentary materials “created or received” by the president, immediate staff or anyone in the executive office of the president. But Trump likes to rip up documents and has made clear he is also hostile to note-takers. Trump also confiscated notes taken by an interpreter during one of his first meetings with Putin. He has kept private his letters with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Of course, other agencies keep copies of their records, and all emails are archived. Still, presidential daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner made frequent use of private email servers, the source of continuous Trump criticism of Hillary Clinton.

As has become usual with Trump, we cannot count on him doing his job even in transition.

Trump is going out the way he came in: A loser, a liar and a cheat

It’s one of the sad truths of the human experience that you can’t count tears. Maybe the first few you might be able to, but then they just flow from your eyes, running down your cheeks until you can taste them on your lips, a flood of salty sorrow and pain and helplessness.

That is where we are: beyond counting, beyond being able to measure the tragedy and loss of COVID. Statistics can’t do it for us anymore. We’re reduced to comparisons, a doctor quoted in the New York Times on Thursday comparing 1,000 deaths a day to “two jumbo jets dropping from the sky. If every day, two jumbo jets would drop from the sky and kill everybody, don’t you think that everybody would be in a panic?” asked Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University. 

Well, no, doctor. Everybody is not in a panic, especially not our president, who with just over two months left in office played golf at his Virginia course last Saturday, a day that two jumbo jets dropped out of the sky with 1,007 dead of COVID, and Sunday, a day when only one jumbo jet dropped out of the sky with 464 dead. Nearly 126,000 new cases were diagnosed on Saturday, and 103,416 more Americans came down with the disease as Trump piloted his presidential golf cart around the links the next day.

It’s an astounding fact that more than a million Americans have been diagnosed with the coronavirus since Trump lost to Joe Biden on Election Day. More than 10,000 have died. And what is he doing in the White House? This week, he was busy firing the secretary of defense, Mark Esper, and installing two acolytes of the execrable Rep. Devin Nunes in important positions in our national security infrastructure. 

Yes, you read that right. Trump appointed Ezra Cohen Watnick, one of the two snipe-hunters in the Trump White House who supplied Nunes with the “midnight run” secret papers he waved around during the early days of the Russia investigation in an attempt to prove that Obama’s White House had “spied” on the Trump campaign. The other snipe hunter elevated by Trump this week was Michael Ellis, a former aide to Nunes and lawyer on the National Security Council who was promoted to general counsel at the National Security Agency. 

That’s what Trump was doing this week while Americans got sick and died. On Monday, 130,340 were diagnosed with COVID, and 745 died. On Tuesday, 139,746 contracted COVID and 1,465 died. On Wednesday, there were 142,860 new cases of COVID, and 1,431 died. On Thursday, a new national record was set with 163,402 new cases, and the country suffered its seventh day since the election with more than 1,000 deaths from COVID, a total of 1,172 succumbing to the disease.

There are now estimates that at the rate we’re going, 400,000 Americans will be dead of COVID by the end of the year. Four hundred thousand! That is more than the population of New Orleans, and nearly the population of Minneapolis. 

I know I just said that we’re reaching the point where we’re beyond statistics, but unfortunately, they are all we’ve got. Think of it. We went through months of chest-beating and outrage that 1,800 lost their lives during Katrina in New Orleans, and now we’re looking at the equivalent of the entire population of that city being dead from COVID by New Year’s!

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: He wouldn’t be Trump if he wasn’t figuring some way to pocket some bucks for himself off his loss, and on Monday, he set up a website entitled “OFFICIAL ELECTION DEFENSE FUND,” with a button screaming “CONTRIBUTE NOW!” A careful scroll through the fine print reveals that not a single dollar goes to Trump’s so-called official recount defense fund until the Trump “Save America” PAC is paid $5,000, and the Republican National Committee gets $3,300. That means you would have to contribute more than $8,300 for Trump’s “election defense fund” to receive any money at all. The RNC is free to use its share to aid the Republican candidates in the Georgia Senate runoff elections, for example. 

Under rules that apply to regular political action committees like Save America, Trump is free to engage in all manner of self-dealing, such as appointing his children to salaried leadership positions in the PAC, or using the money to pay for fundraising events at Trump-owned venues like Mar-a-Lago, his Doral golf club or the Trump International Hotel in Washington, or to rent office space in Trump Tower. Every dollar paid by the PAC to any of those Trump-owned properties would go directly into the pocket of Donald Trump, the sole owner of all of them.

What else is Trump doing besides pushing pawns like Watnick and Ellis around his right-wing chessboard? Well, he’s stewing about how he’s going to get back at various Republican secretaries of state who aren’t helping him fudge the numbers to make up for his defeats in states like Georgia and Arizona. And of course he’s continuing to fight with senior health care officials like Dr. Stephen Hahn, the FDA administrator, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s chief infectious disease expert, yelling at them because somehow they conspired with the drugmaker Pfizer to delay the announcement about the efficacy of the company’s COVID vaccine until after the election, when it couldn’t do anything to boost his campaign.

Meanwhile, there is still no national plan from the Trump White House to deal with the fall and winter surge in the pandemic, no national call for wearing masks, no national requirement to limit public gatherings to less than 10 (or even lower), and no national plan to distribute medical gear and personal protective equipment. This has the governors of states like Utah and Wisconsin, facing record numbers of infections and hospitalizations, struggling to supply hospitals that are overrun with COVID patients. 

Forty-six of the 50 states have COVID numbers that are increasing, often exponentially. Deaths among residents of nursing homes have doubled in more than 20 states. In North Dakota, which opened up businesses like bars and theaters early in the pandemic and has resisted restrictions on social gatherings and imposing mask requirements, hospital capacity is maxed out. This week the state’s Republican governor issued a rule allowing medical workers who test positive for the virus to continue working so long as they are not showing symptoms. The Strategic National Stockpile, the nation’s emergency reserve for personal protective equipment and medical devices like ventilators, which Trump falsely claimed early in the pandemic had been left with “bare shelves” by the Obama administration, has only 115 million N95 masks, less than half the 300 million the administration had promised to have in time to deal with a winter resurgence of COVID. And Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, the nation’s national supply commander, retired on Monday, leaving the country’s medical resupply effort leaderless.

President-elect Joe Biden has appointed a new coronavirus task force, but his transition team is being prevented by the Trump White House from coordinating with the various departments of the federal government, like the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services, that are dealing with the surge in COVID infections now rampaging through the country. Trump’s petulant refusal to admit defeat and allow the legally mandated transition between his administration and Biden’s is costing the lives of thousands of American citizens. It’s not a temper tantrum. It’s a crime.

We’ve got more deaths from this virus than the number of soldiers killed in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The president of the United States we just voted out of office is sitting around watching Fox News, filing phony lawsuits, firing people he thinks are “disloyal,” and running a new scam on his way out the door to line his pockets with dollars from his adoring base. Donald Trump is living up to every expectation we ever had about him. He’s going out exactly the way he came in: lying, cheating and stealing.

Project Veritas could face legal liability for postal worker’s ballot fraud allegations, experts say

A Pennsylvania postal worker who initially alleged that a postmaster had tampered with mail ballots — an accusation embraced by Republicans as evidence of an unfair election — told federal investigators in a recorded interview that his sworn affidavit had been written by Project Veritas, and that he could no longer stand by his statement.

After congressional investigators said on Tuesday that the postal worker, Richard Hopkins, had “completely” recanted his allegation, Project Veritas posted a video of Hopkins denying that he had done so.

“I’m here to say I did not recant my statements,” Hopkins said in the video. “That did not happen.”

The next day, Project Veritas posted a two-hour audio clip of Hopkins’ interview with U.S. Postal Service investigators, apparently in the belief that it would bolster Hopkins’ case and show that investigators had manipulated him into confessing.

The audio recording, which Hopkins himself made secretly and Salon has reviewed, does not indicate that, however. Hopkins repeatedly disavows any first-hand knowledge of misconduct by the postmaster, saying instead that his allegation was largely an assumption, drawn from pieces of a conversation he overheard amid the noise of a mail processing facility.

“I didn’t specifically overhear the whole story. I just heard a part of it,” Hopkins said in the recording. “And I could have missed a lot of it.”

“My mind probably added the rest. I understand that,” he said at another point, adding: “All it is is hearsay, and that’s the worst part.”

When an agent asked Hopkins in the recording if he would still swear to the affidavit’s claim that the postmaster “was back-dating ballots,” he replied: “At this point? No.”

Hopkins also told the federal agents that the affidavit, which he signed under penalty of law and which was later provided to the Trump campaign and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had been written by Project Veritas.

Because he had signed the document in a state of “so much shock,” Hopkins said, “I wasn’t paying that much attention to what [Project Veritas] were telling me.”

In an email to Salon, a Project Veritas spokesperson described the group’s draft of the affidavit as “starter text” that Hopkins later “revised and discussed” with them. When asked how Hopkins’ input had changed the text, the spokesperson responded that “Hopkins was the author of the affidavit” — apparently contradicting Hopkins’ statement that Project Veritas had written it.

Hopkins also expressed remorse for how the saga had affected his supervisor, who has received death threats as a result of the amplification of the allegations.

“That’s f**ked,” Hopkins said, according to the audio.

To be clear, there is no evidence of significant or widespread voter fraud in the presidential election, which was clearly won by President-elect Joe Biden. President Trump’s campaign has filed at least a dozen lawsuits since Election Day. Most have been dropped or dismissed, and none is remotely likely to change the result in any individual state, let alone the Electoral College count. 

Recounts in statewide elections rarely shift more than a few hundred votes, and almost never overturn established results. Biden defeated Trump in Pennsylvania by more than 60,000 votes, according to the official count as of Friday. Hopkins’ allegation was about one single ballot.

Barry Burden, political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, lamented the accusation and its subsequent politicization in the context of a broader assault on the integrity of the country’s election systems.

“It is a sad situation that those who loudly raise questions about the validity of the election are relying on sketchy and sometimes fabricated incidents such as these to justify their reluctance to accept the results,” Burden told Salon.

Legal experts told Salon that if Hopkins’ allegations of ballot tampering are in fact unsubstantiated, he and Project Veritas could both be criminally liable in the case.

“The postal worker signed the affidavit under penalty of law, but if these accusations are indeed false, Project Veritas could also potentially be on the hook for defamation,” Jon Sherman, senior counsel at the Fair Elections Center, told Salon. “If those allegations are false, then they have defamed the Erie postmaster by falsely accusing him of instructing people to backdate ballots.”

“It could be witness tampering or suborning perjury, depending on the facts and Pennsylvania state law defining those crimes,” another election law attorney told Salon on condition of anonymity.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an election law expert and professor at Stetson University, outlined in an email to Salon the possible legal ramifications at both federal and state levels.

“If this was done before a federal court then there’s a strong argument that it would violate 18 U.S. Code § 1622 as a subornation of perjury,” Torres-Spelliscy said. “If it were before a state court then it could be illegal as perjury under the Pennsylvania statutes.”

Torres-Spelliscy added that Hopkins’ retraction may qualify for an exemption under Pennsylvania law, as long as his statement was changed before it could “substantially affect” legal proceedings.

But the Trump campaign cited Hopkins’ allegations in a federal lawsuit filed on Monday to block Pennsylvania from certifying the election results.

“He filed a very detailed affidavit. He named names. He described explicitly what it is that he experienced. And we don’t know what kind of pressure he has been under since he publicly made those statements,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told reporters on Tuesday evening.

The available audio, however, does not present a complete record of Hopkins’ interview with postal investigators. Project Veritas — which The Washington Post describes as “an organization that uses deceptive tactics to expose what it says is liberal bias and corruption in the mainstream media and government” — did not publish the full interview, which according to Veritas ran three hours, an hour longer than the version posted online.

When Salon reached out to Project Veritas for comment, communications director Neil McCabe initially replied, “I want to caution about republishing libel or falsehoods about James O’Keefe and Project Veritas.” O’Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2010, after previously working for Andrew Breitbart, the late founder of Breitbart News. The organization defines its mission as “to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.” It is best known for undercover video and audio recordings targeting media organizations and liberal groups.

McCabe added in his preface that the group “is not a right-wing or conservative organization.”

“In the past year, we have reported on Republicans and Democrats,” he said.

He also claimed that “we are not activists, we are journalists,” and insisted that “we do not deceptively edit video, although that is often repeated.”

“We are suing The New York Times for defamation and libel for stories that they posted about us,” McCabe added, without providing specifics. “Before we filed, the paper’s deputy general counsel wrote to us that their reporting was speculation, not fact, and that the academics they cited were also speculating.”

McCabe may be referring to a New York Times report from September, in which a group of Stanford University researchers concluded that a Project Veritas video accusing Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., of voter fraud was part of a “coordinated disinformation campaign.”

Later, in an emailed statement to Salon, Jared Ede, chief legal officer at Project Veritas, accused the Washington Post of witness intimidation. Ede also claimed that Veritas lawyers had been retained to represent Hopkins, though he would not verify that claim. (Hopkins told investigators that Project Veritas had lawyers ready if anything went “haywire,” but said he had no personal representation.)

Here is Ede’s statement in full:

In this country, we have rights, including the rights to representation when we are being interrogated.  The inspectors who interrogated Hopkins for three hours know better but refused to let Hopkins speak with the attorneys he unequivocally disclosed were “on retention for [him] … in case there’s anything that happens[.]”. They then refused to leave him alone or let him speak to anyone until he executed a watered-down statement drafted by them using their words (even overruling his objections as to the wording). 

To top it off, they refused to provide him a copy of what they forced him to sign, refuse to take Mr. Hopkins’ calls, and have not even given Mr. Hopkins’ attorneys a copy of the statement. 

As you heard, the inspectors then warned Mr. Hopkins not to discuss the investigation, all while their findings were being leaked to The Washington Post.  As The Post says, democracy dies in darkness.  It used to be The Post offered this as a warning — now it appears to be a motto as they coordinate to intimidate witnesses who dare defend the integrity of our democracy. 

Asked specifically whether Ede’s remarks rose to the level of accusing the Post of the crimes of witness intimidation and conspiracy to do the same, Anne Champion, a First Amendment attorney at Gibson Dunn, told Salon that she believed so.

“Yes, I think it is an accusation,” Champion said. “They flat out say that The Post is ‘coordinat[ing] to intimidate witnesses,’ and the implication is obviously that they are ‘coordinat[ing]’ with the ‘inspectors’ who were allegedly ‘leak[ing]’ to The Post information about the investigation which the inspectors ‘warned Mr. Hopkins not to discuss.'”

Champion added that she did not think the facts supported Ede’s accusation.

“Some wrongful means is necessary to constitute witness intimidation — it can’t just be that you interrogated someone, told them to maintain confidentiality and had them sign a statement regarding what they said. There is nothing wrongful there,” she said. “There needs to be improper influence, a threat, a bribe or some improper attempt to instill fear if the witness doesn’t testify in a certain way.”

McCabe, the group’s communications director, told Salon that Hopkins’ affidavit had been “drafted based on Mr. Hopkins’ Nov. 5 and 6 statements to James O’Keefe to create some starter text, which Mr. Hopkins revised and discussed with Project Veritas. His affidavit was consistent with his public statements and the narrative he gave Agent Klein on Nov. 6.  No further comment is offered.”

When Salon asked how Hopkins’ revisions had changed the content between the first draft and the final text of the affidavit, McCabe responded: “Hopkins approved the affidavit, because Hopkins was the author of the affidavit.”

Ede later wrote in an email, “If you intend to print that what we have told you contradicts what we have previously confirmed, you had best have evidence. I also warn that accusing us of committing crimes is in many jurisdictions considered defamation per se.”

In Hopkins’ interview with investigators, one federal agent tells Hopkins — who is now on unpaid leave and started a GoFundMe out of fear he might lose his job — that the Postal Service had an interest in protecting him against possible future charges that he had traded on his false claims to defraud donors.

Hopkins makes clear in the recording that while Project Veritas came up with the fundraiser idea, it was his own page and the group was taking no money. (GoFundMe deactivated Hopkins’ page soon after news of his interview with investigators broke.)

On Sunday, the day before Hopkins told his story to federal investigators, Project Veritas announced it would award $25,000 for “tips related to election, voter and ballot fraud in Pennsylvania.”

Hopkins has since then reasserted his initial allegation on the new fundraising site: “I am willing to testify under oath that my supervisors ordered workers including myself to deliver ballots received after November 3rd in order to ‘back date’ so they would still be accepted in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Asked whether Project Veritas planned to give Hopkins the $25,000 reward — and whether Hopkins had ever been under the impression that he might receive the money — Ede did not answer directly, but offered this response: “Project Veritas has and always will support and protect its sources to the fullest extent of the law,” adding that the group encourages whistleblowers to reach out.

On Thursday, O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, shared a new account Hopkins had opened on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo.

“Thank You, James O’Keefe and Project Veritas for letting me tell my story when others wouldn’t,” Hopkins writes in his personal note on the page. “Please support me as I go forward with this battle.”

As of this writing, the page had raised $215,301 toward its $250,000 goal, gathered from 5,223 donations. It has also accrued 2,272 “pray now” clicks.

QAnon supporting lawmaker ridiculed for whining that face masks are “oppressive” during orientation

Incoming Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Friday drew swift ridicule when she lashed out at being asked to wear a face mask during her congressional orientation.

“Our first session of New Member Orientation covered COVID in Congress,” she wrote on Twitter. “Masks, masks, masks… I proudly told my freshman class that masks are oppressive. In GA, we work out, shop, go to restaurants, go to work, and school without masks.”

Greene has a long history of peddling deranged conspiracy theories.

In addition to being a believer in QAnon, which states that President Donald Trump is working in secret to uncover a global Satanic pedophile ring, Greene has also questioned whether an airplane actually crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 and whether the 2017 mass shooting at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas was a “false flag” operation.

Given this, Greene’s rant about face masks was met with instant mockery — check out some reactions below.

 

Drug reform won a clean sweep in the 2020 election

In the days between Election Day and the announcement of Joe Biden as the projected winner of the presidential race, even as national election results remained muddy, one thing was crystal clear: the American public is ready for drug reforms. Drug reform initiatives went nine for nine on Election Day. From voters approving marijuana legalization initiatives in two of the reddest of the red states—South Dakota and Montana—to the first voter-approved psychedelic liberalization initiatives in Oregon and Washington, D.C., and a groundbreaking drug decriminalization initiative also in Oregon, we can see the erosion of drug prohibition happening right before our eyes.

Perhaps the most striking victory of all is Oregon’s Measure 110, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, which will decriminalize the possession of personal use amounts of all drugs and use revenues from legal marijuana sales to help fund expanded drug treatment. People caught with drugs can either pay a $100 fine or complete a health assessment. The distribution of such drugs would remain criminalized.

The notion of not arresting people just for having or using “hard” drugs is a radical one in the United States, but increasingly common in the rest of the world. At least 29 countries have embraced some form of drug decriminalization, and even the U.S. has seen marijuana possession decriminalized in a number of states as a stepping-stone toward legalization. But this has not been the case when it comes to cocaine or heroin or meth or LSD. November 3, however, marked the turning point when more than 58 percent of Oregon voters said let’s try something new.

“Today’s victory is a landmark declaration that the time has come to stop criminalizing people for drug use,” Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement on election night. “Measure 110 is arguably the biggest blow to the war on drugs to date. It shifts the focus where it belongs—on people and public health—and removes one of the most common justifications for law enforcement to harass, arrest, prosecute, incarcerate, and deport people. As we saw with the domino effect of marijuana legalization, we expect this victory to inspire other states to enact their own drug decriminalization policies that prioritize health over punishment.”

The Drug Policy Alliance and its political and lobbying arm, the Drug Policy Action Network, spearheaded the Measure 110 campaign, just as they backed Oregon’s successful 2014 marijuana legalization initiative.

Marijuana legalization initiatives were swept to victory everywhere they were on the ballot—not just in Arizona and New Jersey but also in deeply conservative states like Montana and South Dakota. This means the number of states that have freed the weed jumped from 11 to 15.

“From the Badlands to the Jersey Shore, and from the Grand Canyon to Big Sky Country, Americans across the country have embraced the idea that marijuana legalization is the policy decision that best serves the interests of public health, public safety, and, most importantly, justice,” Matthew Schweich, deputy director of the Marijuana Policy Project and one of the leaders of the Montana and South Dakota campaigns, said in a November 4 press release.

In Arizona, the marijuana legalization initiative, Proposition 207: The Smart and Safe Arizona Act, cruised to victory on election night after receiving 60 percent of the vote. It will legalize possession and consumption of marijuana for people 21 and over and allow for home grows of up to six plants. The state will regulate a legal marijuana market with a 16 percent tax on marijuana sales.

“Arizona voters have spoken, and they are ready for marijuana legalization,” Steve Hawkins, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, said in a press release on election night. “According to the latest Gallup poll, 66 percent of Americans support marijuana legalization, and this victory further reinforces that stance,” Hawkins added. “We are poised for major marijuana reform federally. Regardless of who controls the White House, the House, or the Senate, Americans are ready for legal marijuana.”

In Montana, Constitutional Initiative 118 and Initiative 190 won with 58 percent and 57 percent votes, respectively. I-190 is a statutory initiative that would legalize possession and use of limited amounts of marijuana for adults over the age of 21 while regulating its cultivation, transportation and sale and levying a 20 percent tax on it. CI-118 is a constitutional initiative that would allow I-190 to set the minimum age at 21, the same as the age for alcohol consumption in the state.

In New Jersey, Public Question 1 is a legislatively referred constitutional amendment that legalizes possession and use of marijuana for people 21 and over and allows for a system of regulated marijuana commerce with retail pot sales subject to the state sales tax of 6.625 percent. It leaves questions such as possession limits and whether to allow home grows up to the legislature and state regulators. It won with a resounding 67 percent of the vote.

In South Dakota, Constitutional Amendment A won 54 percent of the vote in a state where more than 60 percent voted for Donald Trump. The measure will legalize the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by people 21 and over and allow for the home cultivation of up to three plants in jurisdictions with no licensed retail marijuana outlets. It also envisions a legal marijuana market with a sales tax of 15 percent and requires the state legislature to pass laws providing for medical marijuana and hemp by next spring.

“This historic set of victories will place even greater pressure on Congress to address the glaring and untenable conflicts between state and federal laws when it comes to cannabis legalization,” said Hawkins. “With the passage of these initiatives, one-third of the population now lives in jurisdictions that have legalized cannabis for adult use, and 70 percent of all states have embraced cannabis for medical use.”

Medical marijuana initiatives, meanwhile, have been approved by two deep-red states, Mississippi and South Dakota. Mississippi’s Initiative 65 overcame a watered-down legislative alternative to win with 74 percent of the vote, while South Dakota’s Measure 26 won with 70 percent. That brings the number of states with access to medical marijuana to 35 (plus D.C.).

And then there’s the psychedelic front. On the East Coast, Washington, D.C., voters approved Initiative 81, the Entheogenic Plant and Fungus Policy Act of 2020, with 76 percent of the vote. The measure will have police treat natural plant medicines (entheogens) as their lowest law enforcement priority. The measure also asks the city’s top prosecutor and its U.S. attorney not to prosecute such cases.

“Initiative 81’s success was driven by grassroots support from D.C. voters. We are thrilled that D.C. residents voted to support common sense drug policy reforms that help end part of the war on drugs while ensuring that D.C. residents benefiting from plant and fungi medicines are not police targets,” Decriminalize Nature D.C. chairwoman Melissa Lavasani said in a press release.

And on the West Coast, Oregon voters didn’t just decriminalize drugs, they also passed Measure 109, the Psilocybin Services Act, with 56 percent of the vote. It will create a program to allow the administration of psilocybin products, such as magic mushrooms, to adults 21 and over for therapeutic purposes in supervised settings. People will be allowed to buy, possess, and consume psilocybin at a psilocybin services center, but only after undergoing a preparation session and under the supervision of a psilocybin service facilitator.

Altogether, November 3 proved to be a stellar night for drug reform at the ballot box. Marijuana legalization continues its inexorable advance across the land, and new fronts are now open for psychedelics and broader drug decriminalization. A few more bricks fell from the wall of drug prohibition on Election Day.

This article was produced by Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. The Drug Policy Alliance is a funder of Drug Reporter.

Will the coronavirus evolve to be less deadly?

No lethal pandemic lasts forever. The 1918 flu, for example, crisscrossed the globe and claimed tens of millions of lives, yet by 1920, the virus that caused it had become significantly less deadly, causing only ordinary seasonal flu. Some pandemics have lasted longer, like the Black Death, which swept out of Central Asia in 1346, spread across Europe, and ultimately may have killed as many as a third of the inhabitants of Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. That pandemic, too, came to an end, roughly seven years after it started, probably because so many had perished or developed immunity.

As far as scientists and historians can tell, the bacterium that caused the Black Death never lost its virulence, or deadliness. But the pathogen responsible for the 1918 influenza pandemic, which still wanders the planet as a strain of seasonal flu, evolved to become less deadly, and it’s possible that the pathogen for the 2009 H1N1 pandemic did the same. Will SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, follow a similar trajectory? Some scientists say the virus has already evolved in a way that makes it easier to transmit. But as for a possible decline in virulence, most everyone says it’s too soon to tell. Looking to the past, however, may offer some clues.

The idea that circulating pathogens gradually become less deadly over time is very old. It seems to have originated in the writings of a 19th-century physician, Theobald Smith, who first suggested that there is a “delicate equilibrium” between parasite and host, and argued that, over time, the deadliness of a pathogen should decline since it is really not in the interest of a germ to kill its host. This notion became conventional wisdom for many years, but by the 1980s, researchers had begun challenging the idea.

In the early 1980s, the mathematical biologists Roy Anderson and Robert May, proposed that germs transmit best when hosts shed a lot of the pathogen, which may often mean when they are quite sick. If you’re really sick, you are — the argument goes — shedding lots of virus, which makes it easier for the next host to pick it up. So virulence and transmissibility go hand in hand, until the germ gets so deadly it winds up killing its host too soon, and therefore can’t spread at all. This is known as the transmission-virulence trade-off. The most familiar example is that of the myxoma virus, a pathogen introduced to Australia in 1950 to rid the country of rabbits. Initially, the virus killed more than 90 percent of Australian rabbits it infected. But over time, a tense truce developed: Rabbits evolved resistance, the myxoma germ declined in virulence, and both rabbits and germ remained in precarious balance for some time.

A second theory, developed by evolutionary epidemiologist Paul Ewald, which he calls the “theory of virulence,” suggests that, as a rule, the deadlier the germ, the less likely it is to spread. The reason: If victims are quickly immobilized (think of Ebola, for example), then they can’t readily spread the infection. By this thinking, if a germ requires a mobile host to spread, its virulence will, of necessity, decline. Like the older conventional wisdom, the theory of virulence recognizes that many germs will evolve less virulence as they circulate and adapt to the human population. But Ewald’s theory also proposes that germs all have their own strategies to spread, and some of those strategies allow the germ to maintain high virulence and transmissibility.

Durability, Ewald says, is one such strategy. Variola virus, which causes smallpox, is very durable in the external environment, and it can have a high death rate of 10 to 40 percent. Ewald calls it and other durable germs “sit-and-wait” pathogens. Some deadly infections are spread from very sick hosts by vectors: fleas, lice, mosquitos, or ticks. Others, such as cholera, are spread in water. Still others, such as hospital-acquired staph infections, are spread by people taking care of the sick or dying. This is what happened in the women’s hospitals of the 19th century, when doctors spread puerperal or “childbed” fever from one postpartum woman to another.

All of these strategies, according to Ewald, may prevent a germ’s otherwise inevitable slide to lower virulence.

* * *

So what do these evolutionary theories suggest about SARS-CoV-2 and its likely trajectory? Is the novel coronavirus likely to decline in virulence as it cycles from person to person across the world?

SARS, an earlier outbreak of a serious coronavirus that disrupted the world from 2002 to 2003, offers an interesting contrast. That virus seemed to spread late in the course of infection from people who were very sick, and it eventually infected around 8,000 people, killing 774 before being driven out of existence by a hard-fought global effort to isolate sick patients. But SARS-CoV-2, researchers know, is transmissible early in the infection. There is no necessary relationship between transmissibility and severity. Even asymptomatic cases may shed significant amounts of virus, and there doesn’t necessarily seem to be an increased risk with exposure to sicker people.

It seems unlikely, therefore, that the course of SARS-CoV-2 evolution will strictly reflect Anderson and May’s transmission-virulence trade-off model. To predict SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary trajectory, Ewald looks to the durability of the virus instead. He points out that SARS-CoV-2 infectious particles last on various surfaces between hours and days, making it approximately as durable as influenza virus. He argues, therefore, that SARS-CoV-2 is likely to evolve virulence to levels much like that of seasonal influenza, with a typical death rate of 0.1 percent.

But there’s still no way to be certain that’s the course SARS-CoV-2 will take. And even the current death rate is uncertain because differences in testing for the coronavirus from country to country make a complete accounting of global infections impossible.

Still, scientists might have already observed evolutionary change in the virus, though apparently in the direction of increased transmissibility, not of lower virulence. A team led by Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, published a paper in the journal Cell in July showing that a strain carrying a mutation identified as D614G appeared to be replacing the initial strain that first emerged out of Wuhan, China. Korber and her team suggested that, on the basis of their research — conducted in cells in culture — the new strain seemed to be more infectious than the original. While the paper notes in its limitations that “infectiousness and transmissibility are not always synonymous,” Korber says the findings are consistent with higher transmissibility.

As with an earlier version of the study shared prior to peer review in April, this conclusion was soon subjected to a barrage of criticism: The replacement that Korber had taken for evidence that the change had been selected for, others ascribed to accident or to other evolutionary processes. Echoing a limitation noted in the Cell paper, critics further emphasized that cell culture studies aren’t able to replicate the complexities of real life, so results should be interpreted with caution. Shortly after the Cell paper was published, Yale epidemiologist and virologist Nathan Grubaugh told National Geographic, “There is a huge gap between infectiousness in a lab and human transmission.”

Neither Grubaugh nor his colleague Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University who has also expressed skepticism regarding the mutation’s impact on transmissibility, responded to requests for comment.

But time has shown — and scientists including Grubaugh agree — that this new strain is now the primary one. As Korber puts it: “The D614G strain is now the pandemic. You can hardly even sample the [original] Wuhan virus anymore. In early March, the virus was a different virus than it is today.” This near-complete replacement of the original strain indicates that selection — likely selection toward greater transmissibility — was responsible for the shift, says Korber.

According to Ewald’s analysis, high transmissibility is often associated with lower virulence. He expects to see evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is evolving in that direction. Still, right now, it’s hard to tease apart this kind of viral evolution from improvements in testing, treatment, and social distancing. SARS-CoV-2 testing, for instance, is more accessible than it was earlier in the pandemic. This means patients are hospitalized and treated sooner, offering a better chance at survival, wrote Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Duke University who treats many Covid-19 patients, in an email. Further, he wrote, experimental treatments might be helping hospitalized patients, while some of the most vulnerable people — those in nursing homes — are now better protected from exposure.

“Everyone talks about viral evolution” potentially leading to decreased mortality, wrote Wolfe. “But I haven’t seen any conclusive data to support that hypothesis yet.”

* * *

Like plague, Covid-19 is a stealth infection, and that might ultimately slow evolution toward lower virulence. Yersinia pestis, the germ that causes plague, tamps down the early immune response, so that infected people can travel and spread infection for days before they feel sick. Similarly, people infected with SARS-CoV-2 seem capable of infecting others before experiencing any symptoms. This sly mode of viral spread may make the evolution of lower virulence less likely, as infected but asymptomatic people are the perfect mobile viral delivery systems.

Yet even without an evolutionary process pushing SARS-CoV-2 towards lower virulence, over time, the virus might affect people differently, said Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello. “SARS-CoV-2 may become less deadly, not because the virus changes, but because very few people will have no immunity,” he said. In other words, if you’re exposed to the virus as a child (when it doesn’t seem to make people particularly sick) and then again and again in adulthood, you’ll only get a mild infection. Racaniello points out that the four circulating common cold coronaviruses “all came into humans from animal hosts, and they may have been initially quite virulent.” Now, he says, they infect 90 percent of children at young ages. At later ages, all you get is the common cold.

Compared to influenza viruses, coronaviruses are more stable and less likely to evolve in response to pre-existing immunity. As a result, many experts argue, safe and effective vaccines remain the best chance for escaping the maze of Covid-19 infection. Regular boosters may be necessary as the virus cycles, not because the virus is rapidly evolving, but because human immunity may wane.

Such an outcome would mark the end of this current pandemic. Yet even then, experts believe, some version of the virus will continue to circulate, perhaps as a common cold virus or an occasional deadly outbreak among the unvaccinated, for many years, if not forever.

* * *

Wendy Orent is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and science writer specializing in health and disease. She is the author of “Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease” and “Ticked: The Battle Over Lyme Disease in the South.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Clots, strokes and rashes: Is COVID a disease of the blood vessels?

Whether it’s strange rashes on the toes or blood clots in the brain, the widespread ravages of COVID-19 have increasingly led researchers to focus on how the novel coronavirus sabotages blood vessels.

As scientists have come to know the disease better, they have homed in on the vascular system — the body’s network of arteries, veins and capillaries, stretching more than 60,000 miles — to understand this wide-ranging disease and to find treatments that can stymie its most pernicious effects.

Some of the earliest insights into how COVID-19 can act like a vascular disease came from studying the aftermath of the most serious infections. Those reveal that the virus warps a critical piece of our vascular infrastructure: the single layer of cells lining the inside of every blood vessel, known as the endothelial cells or simply the endothelium.

Dr. William Li, a vascular biologist, compares this lining to a freshly resurfaced ice rink before a hockey game on which the players and pucks glide smoothly along.

“When the virus damages the inside of the blood vessel and shreds the lining, that’s like the ice after a hockey game,” said Li, a researcher and founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation. “You wind up with a situation that is really untenable for blood flow.”

In a study published this summer, Li and an international team of researchers compared the lung tissues of people who died of COVID-19 with those of people who died of influenza. They found stark differences: The lung tissues of the COVID victims had nine times as many tiny blood clots (“microthrombi”) as those of the influenza victims, and the coronavirus-infected lungs also exhibited “severe endothelial injury.”

“The surprise was that this respiratory virus makes a beeline for the cells lining blood vessels, filling them up like a gumball machine and shredding the cell from the inside out,” Li said. “We found blood vessels are blocked and blood clots are forming because of that lining damage.”

It’s already known that the coronavirus breaks into cells by way of a specific receptor, called ACE2, which is found all over the body. But scientists are still trying to understand how the virus sets off a cascade of events that cause so much destruction to blood vessels. Li said one theory is that the virus directly attacks endothelial cells. Lab experiments have shown that the coronavirus can infect engineered human endothelial cells.

It’s also possible the problems begin elsewhere, and the endothelial cells sustain collateral damage along the way as the immune system reacts — and sometimes overreacts — to the invading virus.

Endothelial cells have a slew of important jobs; these include preventing clotting, controlling blood pressure, regulating oxidative stress and fending off pathogens. And Li said uncovering how the virus jeopardizes the endothelium may link many of COVID-19’s complications: “the effects in the brain, the blood clots in the lung and elsewhere in the legs, the COVID toe, the problem with the kidneys and even the heart.”

In Spain, skin biopsies of distinctive red lesions on toes, known as chilblains, found viral particles in the endothelial cells, leading the authors to conclude that “endothelial damage induced by the virus could be the key mechanism.”

Is Blood Vessel Damage Behind COVID Complications?

With a surface area larger than a football field, the endothelium helps maintain a delicate balance in the bloodstream. These cells are essentially the gatekeeper to the bloodstream.

“The endothelium has developed a distant early warning system to alert the body to get ready for an invasion if there’s trouble brewing,” said Dr. Peter Libby, a cardiologist and research scientist at Harvard Medical School. When that happens, endothelial cells change the way they function, he said. But that process can go too far.

“The very functions that help us maintain health and fight off invaders, when they run out of control, then it can actually make the disease worse,” Libby said.

In that case, the endothelial cells turn against their host and start to promote clotting and high blood pressure.

“In COVID-19 patients, we have both of these markers of dysfunction,” said Dr. Gaetano Santulli, a cardiologist and researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

The novel coronavirus triggers a condition seen in other cardiovascular diseases called endothelial dysfunction. Santulli, who wrote about this idea in the spring, said that may be the “cornerstone” of organ dysfunction in COVID patients.

“The common denominator in all of these COVID-19 patients is endothelial dysfunction,” he said. “It’s like the virus knows where to go and knows how to attack these cells.”

Runaway Immune Response Adds a Plot Twist

A major source of damage to the vascular system likely also comes from the body’s own runaway immune response to the coronavirus.

“What we see with the SARS-CoV-2 is really an unprecedented level of inflammation in the bloodstream,” said Dr. Yogen Kanthi, a cardiologist and vascular medicine specialist at the National Institutes of Health who’s researching this phase of the illness. “This virus is leveraging its ability to create inflammation, and that has these deleterious, nefarious effects downstream.”

When inflammation spreads through the inner lining of the blood vessels — a condition called endothelialitis — blood clots can form throughout the body, starving tissues of oxygen and promoting even more inflammation.

“We start to get this relentless, self-amplifying cycle of inflammation in the body, which can then lead to more clotting and more inflammation,” Kanthi said.

Another sign of endothelial damage comes from analyzing the blood of COVID patients. A recent study found elevated levels of a protein produced by endothelial cells, called von Willebrand factor, that is involved in clotting.

“They are through the roof in those who are critically ill,” said Dr. Alfred Lee, a hematologist at the Yale Cancer Center who coauthored the study with Hyung Chun, a cardiologist and vascular biologist at Yale.

Lee pointed out that some autoimmune diseases can lead to a similar interplay of clotting and inflammation called immunothrombosis.

Chun said the elevated levels of von Willebrand factor show that vascular injury can be detected in patients while in the hospital — and perhaps even before, which could help predict their likelihood of developing more serious complications.

But he said it’s not yet clear what is the driving force behind the blood vessel damage: “It does seem to be a progression of disease that really brings out this endothelial injury. The key question is, what’s the root cause of this?”

After they presented their data, Lee said, Yale’s hospital system started putting patients who were critically ill with COVID-19 on aspirin, which can prevent clotting. While the best combinations and dosages are still being studied, research indicates blood thinners may improve outcomes in COVID patients.

Chun said treatments are also being studied that may more directly protect endothelial cells from the coronavirus.

“Is that the end-all-be-all to treating COVID-19? I absolutely don’t think so. There’s so many aspects of the disease that we still don’t understand,” he said.

COVID Is Often a Vascular ‘Stress Test’

Early in the pandemic, Dr. Roger Seheult, a critical care and pulmonary physician in Southern California, realized the patients he expected to be most vulnerable to a respiratory virus, those with underlying lung conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, were not the ones ending up disproportionately in his intensive care unit. Seheult, who runs the popular medical education website MedCram, said, “Instead, what we are seeing are patients who are obese, people who have large BMIs, people who have Type 2 diabetes and with high blood pressure.”

Over time, all those conditions can cause inflammation and damage to the lining of blood vessels, he said, including a harmful chemical imbalance known as oxidative stress. Seheult said infection with the coronavirus becomes an added stress for people with those conditions that already tax the blood vessels: “If you’re right on the edge and you get the wind blown from this coronavirus, now you’ve gone over the edge.”

He said the extensive damage to blood vessels could explain why COVID patients with severe respiratory problems don’t necessarily resemble patients who get sick from the flu.

“They are having shortness of breath, but we have to realize the lungs are more than just the airways,” he said. “It’s an issue with the blood vessels themselves.”

This is why COVID patients struggle to fill their blood supply with oxygen, even when air is being pumped into their lungs.

“The endothelial cells get leaky, so instead of being like saran wrap, it turns into a sieve and then it allows fluid from the bloodstream to accumulate in the air spaces,” Harvard’s Libby said.

Doctors who treat COVID-19 are now keenly aware that complications such as strokes and heart problems can appear even after a patient gets better and their breathing improves.

“They are off oxygen, they can be discharged home, but their vasculature is not completely resolved. They still have inflammation,” he said. “What can happen is they develop a blood clot, and they have a massive pulmonary embolism.”

Patients can be closely monitored for these problems, but one of the big unknowns for doctors and patients is the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the circulatory system. The Angiogenesis Foundation’s Li puts it this way: “The virus enters your body and it leaves your body. You might or might not have gotten sick. But is that leaving behind a trashed vascular system?”

This story is part of a partnership that includes NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Trump’s own people turn on him: Acting DHS secretary refuses order to fire top security official

Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf is refusing to follow President Trump’s order to fire top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, the New York Post reports.

Trump’s order came after Krebs openly refuted claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Krebs recently launched a “Rumor Control” website designed to debunk voter fraud claims.

A White House official speaking to the Post say there’s no question that the order to fire Krebs came directly from Trump.

“Honestly, it was the president saying, ‘What the heck is this guy doing? He’s giving me grief before the election and now he’s saying there’s nothing wrong in the world?'” the official said.

“Chad was asked by the president to fire Anonymous’ best friend and he’s refusing,” the official added. “He is not managing his agency, but that should not surprise anyone because he is a [former DHS Secretary Kirstjen] Nielsen lackey.”

Read the full report over at The New York Post.

Trump and GOP rush to “quietly pack the FEC with partisans” after election, watchdog group warns

Senate Republicans plan to move forward with three Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominations next week, raising concerns that the party is attempting to pack the panel with “partisans” after blocking it from enforcing election laws for more than a year.

The FEC has been without a quorum for most of the last 14 months, preventing it from holding meetings and enforcing laws throughout nearly the entire presidential campaign. The commission faces a backlog of more than 350 matters, according to Ellen Weintraub, the lone Democratic commissioner.

Shortly ahead of the election, the Senate Rules Committee announced plans to take up the nominations of two Republicans and an independent next week, which a watchdog group warned would stack the panel with “biased” commissioners and result in “gridlock” that would leave key cases undecided.

“For the sake of fair and functional oversight of our campaign finance system, the Senate simply cannot indulge the soon-to-be-ex-President Trump’s scheme to quietly pack the FEC with partisans and let bad actors off the hook indefinitely,” Kyle Herrig, the president of the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US, told Salon in a statement.

Herrig wrote a letter to Rules Committee Chairman Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and ranking member Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., warning of the “growing threat of harmful politicization” of the FEC by the Trump administration. In it, he called for the committee to block the “ideologically-driven” nominations.

“The Trump administration’s early and continuous undoing of the FEC has only changed course in recent weeks, in the closing days of an election cycle,” Herrig warned in the letter, which was shared exclusively with Salon.

The commission is designed to be evenly bipartisan with three Republicans and three Democrats. It currently has one Republican, one Democrat and one independent. The president typically nominates one Republican and one Democrat to fill vacant slots at the same time. But Trump, shortly ahead of the election, nominated two Republicans and one Democratic-backed independent after pushing through the confirmation of another lone Republican last year.

“In addition to the timing of FEC commissioner nominations and confirmation hearings, the administration’s disregard for creating a fair and equitable makeup of commissioners for the FEC is cause for grave concern,” Herrig wrote to the senators. “The traditional standard has been that two ideologically contrasting nominees are presented for a vote to the FEC at the same time. And yet, earlier this year, the Trump administration and Senate Republicans pushed through the nomination of James Trainor — a former attorney for the Trump campaign itself.”

Moving forward with the nominations of another Republican without a Democratic counterpart and a previously-negotiated Republican-Independent pairing would “undoubtedly create gridlock amongst FEC commissioners, essentially leaving the FEC in the same place it is today,” Herrig wrote, “unable to issue clear, decisive opinions on the critically important issues that come before the commission.”

The refusal of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to fill the three vacant seats left the commission toothless during the presidential campaign. Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, alleged earlier this year that McConnell was trying to “neuter the FEC” in hopes that he could get “three ideological opponents of campaign finance on the FEC” so he “can basically undermine the law from within.”

The commission has not even been able to meet to discuss complaints, including one from the Campaign Legal Center accusing the Trump campaign of disguising $170 million in campaign spending by “laundering” the money through companies run by former campaign manager Brad Parscale or formed by Trump campaign attorneys.

The nonpartisan watchdog also called on the FEC to impose more limits on leadership PACs, which are used to fund expenses that cannot be legally funded by campaign committees and are often used to fund other candidates, after the Trump team solicited donations for what it claimed was a “recount” effort but will largely go toward a new Trump leadership PAC instead.

Another complaint by Rep. Bill Parscale, D-N.J., called on the FEC to investigate whether the Trump campaign had violated campaign finance rules by failing to report unpaid debts stemming from his campaign rallies.

Trump, who spent months ahead of the election laying the groundwork to sow doubt in the results before ultimately losing to President-elect Joe Biden, has announced a flurry of legal moves to try to reverse the popular vote in multiple states based on unfounded allegations of fraud and irregularities.

Though numerous election officials from both parties have said there is zero evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities, the president’s claims have been echoed by Trainor, the Republican head of the commission who was confirmed without a Democratic counterpart last year.

“I do believe that there is voter fraud taking place in these places,” Trainor told the right-wing Newsmax TV last week, describing the president’s legal challenges as “very valid allegations.” But most legal scholars have said the claims are “meritless” and “frivolous.”

Trump waited until shortly before the election to nominate new commissioners.

In September, the president nominated Republican Allen Dickerson without a Democratic counterpart. Dickerson, who has long defended the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which injected hundreds of millions in dark money into elections, currently serves as the legal director of the Institute for Free Speech, a group funded by Charles Koch and other prominent conservative billionaires.

Dickerson has argued that “corporations have long had First Amendment rights, and for good reason” in defending corporate money in elections. He also once joined a lawsuit against then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris for requesting a Koch-backed group reveal its donors.

In October, Trump nominated Republican Sean Cooksey, the general counsel to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. Trump did not nominate a Democratic counterpart. Instead, he tapped independent Shana Broussard, whose selection was pushed by Klobuchar.

Though the panel would have three Republicans, two independents and one Democrat if the three nominees are confirmed, Weintraub and independent Commissioner Steven Walther have long since exceeded their six-year terms and could be replaced if another appointment is made for their seats.

If the confirmations move forward, the makeup of the FEC would likely result in similar gridlock as when the commission still had its quorum.

Last year, Weintraub warned in response to questions from House Democrats that the panel blocking enforcement of election laws had sapped staff morale.

“This is a morale-killing problem that will persist as long as the Federal Election Commission lacks a majority of members who are committed to robust law enforcement and effective policymaking,” she said.

And campaign finance watchdogs agree.

“The Federal Election Commission was already broken, but now it is in shambles and can’t even perform the most basic law-enforcement functions,” Meredith McGehee, the head of the campaign finance nonprofit Issue One, said in a statement.

“After nearly 80 million Americans voted to elect former Vice President Joe Biden to serve as the next president of the United States and with just 68 days until Inauguration Day,” Herrig said in his letter, “it is distressing to see that President Donald Trump and his allies could seat additional biased commissioners to the FEC in just a few short weeks.”

What’s next for Fox News without its “golden goose”

In the recent past a person may have dared to imagine a world with a significantly muted Donald Trump. Nearly 78 million voters pushed to make that a reality, spurred on in no small part by the desire to simply shut him up. That’s understandable. The man takes up a lot of mental real estate whether people want him to or adamantly do not.

However, that dream is predicated on the notion that the media organizations serving as Trump’s megaphone – Fox News, in the main – would wean themselves off of the endless mutual ego-stroking that joined man and network at the hip over the last five years.

But with around 73 million voters indicating their comfort with another four years of Trump’s madness, the one certainty is that while Trump may recede from the center of our lives, Trumpism isn’t going anywhere. The difference, at least for Fox, will be in finding and anointing the next star for the right wing to rally around.

On its face, that idea doesn’t quite wash. Trump insists on starring in anything that bears his name, including the political movement he birthed. Logically Trumpism cannot exist without the grifter for which it is named.

However, a new era is dawning for Fox and for Trump, and the former at least has been planning for the latter’s exit for much longer than he expected. Already the network has signaled a reduced level of allegiance to Trump; that was already happening before Fox called Arizona for President-elect Joe Biden on election night, a move that triggered angry pushback from the White House and the Republican party over its call, as Salon’s Igor Derysh reported:

Trump demanded that his team “get that result changed,” according to The Washington Post. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and top aide Hope Hicks, who previously worked as chief communications officer for the parent company of Fox News, repeatedly called the network to “get the call reversed,” the outlet reported. Kushner even called Fox News chief Rupert Murdoch to ask for the network to retract its call, The Times revealed.

In the days that followed, Fox’s decision desk editors, including chief editor Arnon Miskin, were brought on camera time and again to defend and affirm their decision, which Miskin did with utter calm and poise each time, which must have gotten under Trump’s skin like nothing else.

Meanwhile while other news outlets waited for more than a week until the count Miskin insisted would fall in Biden’s favor was obvious and inevitable, and on Thursday Arizona officially joined the blue state column.

By that point, Trump had already rage-tweeted his displeasure at the network that was once his most reliable ally. “@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”

Trump’s blossoming fits of narcissism are as predictable as the sunrise, as are his frequent lies and exaggerations. And while he’s not entirely wrong about Fox’s daytime ratings compared to its prime time bloviation lineup, to call himself the Golden Goose is pushing it a bit.

Fox has been the dominant cable news channel for most of its 24 years, and its success pre-dates Trump’s rise via NBC and “The Apprentice.” Sure, he and conservative media forged an unholy alliance long before he was elected president, starting with the odd guest appearance and call-ins to talk shows, particularly when he was shilling his racist birther nonsense to cast doubts on Barack Obama’s citizenship.

And over the past five years, Trump became an unofficial staff member at Fox. Trump’s White House and Fox were perfectly synchronized until a rift appeared between Fox and Trump over its impeachment coverage, along with reports of conflict between its news side and its pundits over the former’s adherence to fact-based reporting (albeit with little pushback) and the latter’s amplification of lies for drama’s sake. These internal divisions were highlighted when Shepard Smith exited without warning a year ago leaving Chris Wallace, Martha MacCallum and a few other journalists to carry the torch for fact-based reality.

That has not made the network’s remaining journalists popular with Trump’s faithful because sadly, it’s the anger-stoking lies and hyperbole that bring home the bacon for Fox.

Fox News’ ratings soared in June, July and August as protests against police brutality topped the headlines in cities around the world. In June and July, Fox News was the highest-rated channel in all of TV prime-time hours, broadcast and cable.

According to Nielsen, in August “Hannity” netted its best monthly ratings ever. Meanwhile in October Carlson had the highest-rated show in cable news leading Fox to its biggest prime time monthly average in its 24-year history.

These gains will fade but certainly not disappear with Trump. Despite his inflated impression of his place in the universe, to Fox he was always a spigot, a pumping station. Fox runs on anger, divisiveness and fear, and it has proven over the years that it can get that from any source that proves popular.

Allying with Trump while he was in the White House made financial sense owing to his pliability, bloated ego, and the fact that he was already a brand. Trump’s unchecked stream-of-consciousness ravings fill airtime and entertained his followers, and Hannity and Carlson benefited from riding his coattails.

But while half the country may have written Trump out of the show that is this godawful failure of presidency, Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham will continue doing what they do without a hitch.

Multiple reports have indicated that Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch and the network have been preparing for a post-Trump world for a long time, which means they’re to sell the scorn that a Biden presidency will yield. Already the election’s outcome, which the prime time hosts still have not acknowledged, has already provided some primo absurdist scaremongering. (If you haven’t watched Carlson’s warning to middle America that liberals want everyone to drink Starbucks, do treat yourself.) Post-inauguration, we may witness Trump appearing on Fox with diminished frequency, but Fox’s ability to incite its audience’s wrath against the left is eternal. And that is what Trumpism thrives upon.

Rest assured they will find and develop another political star – maybe not an established plug-and-play celebrity like Trump, but one who is camera-ready, marketable and eager to be molded, a la former House Speaker (and current Fox Corporation board member) Paul Ryan. Heck, the network might even find a figure who is charismatic enough to merit his own brand of right-wing ideology and make Trumpism as forgettable as every other conservatism subcategory that rose and fell, luring Newt Gingrich out of the woodpile along the way.

Noise is also circulating that Trump will go on to launch his own network, a rumor that’s been floating around since 2016 during his initial presidential campaign. There are many reasons to believe that may happen, and there are even more reasons to surmise that it won’t.

The Trump brand is either tarnished or more powerful than ever. One of his rumored post-election plans is to hold rallies and mine his followers’ info to directly sell them on a digital streaming network to compete with Fox Nation, according to Axios.

Then again, Trump’s debt is reported to be in the hundreds of millions, and his ability to negotiate his way out of it, as he has so many times in the past, is questionable. Don’t forget, New York’s attorney general and Manhattan’s district attorney are building legal cases against Trump. These are not the ideal scenarios under which one launches a TV empire or even attracts funding for one.

In recent months Trump has lashed out at Fox by directing his faithful to One America News Network and Newsmax, smaller cable channels that eagerly shower their audiences with disinformation and conspiracy theory. Their audience numbers are a fraction of Fox’s but like every other cable news network they’ve enjoyed an election ratings bump and are currently go-to sources for fantasies about voter fraud. There was talk earlier this year of Trump allies making a bid to acquire OANN, according to a Wall Street Journal report. But that was in January, and the world and Trump’s fortunes have substantially changed since then.

There has also been speculation about Trump launching his own digital presence or even diving into talk radio, both of which may be more financially attainable but require more writing and general discipline than Trump has demonstrated himself to be capable of adopting.

Mark Burnett and his producers may be holding back some damaging outtakes from Trump’s time on “The Apprentice,” but one factor that’s been widely reported is that the man required substantial editing to make him come across as palatable, let alone commanding. Wandering conversation doesn’t match well with the rigors of talk radio or even a regular digital series.

All signs point to a landscape with more news channels catering to right wing conservatives, with or without Trump holding court, in some fashion, either a long-winded guest or with his own hour of craziness.

Trump is a mercurial narcissist and as prone to making foes into friends within the same Twitter burst, and this is certainly true as it pertains to Fox. It’s too early to surmise how much the man needs the network, and while the network can and will thrive without Trump, the two entities might not be entirely done with each other.

On Friday Geraldo Rivera reported to Fox News’ Harris Faulkner about a “wellness call” between him and Trump and updated viewers that Trump, while not quite ready to concede, is more down than out and helpfully shared that he’s revving up to run in 2024. As Trump noted in his tweet, he may find that biggest difference between this election and his potential entry into the next is still Fox News.

Among the many lessons the past five years have taught us, however, is that nothing can be counted out when it comes to the soon-to-be-ex-President and his impact on television’s reality.

Amazon worker who was fired after leading COVID-19 safety protest files lawsuit against tech giant

Chris Smalls, a former Amazon worker who made headlines for organizing a walkout over working conditions at an Amazon fulfillment center in Queens, N.Y., is suing the tech giant that fired him, Smalls believes, for organizing workers. 

The class action suit filed in Brooklyn claims that Amazon violated federal and state laws due to the company’s failure to provide adequate COVID-19 protections, specifically to Black and other minority workers. Smalls, who is Black and who worked for Amazon for five years prior to being terminated, filed the lawsuit on the behalf of himself and all Black and Latinx workers who are “similarly situated” to Smalls, according to the lawsuit.

“We felt that it’s more beneficial to do something as a collective, obviously as we’re going up against this company,” Smalls told Salon in an interview on Friday. “And a lot of our workers, the Black and brown community was affected by this virus and affected by the fact that they [Amazon] didn’t protect us, so taking a class action collective route was more beneficial.”

The lawsuit was filed on November 12, 2020, and outlines the suspicious timeline of events that led to the suspicious firing of Smalls on March 30, 2020. Smalls is seeking unspecified damages for himself and Amazon workers.

“Within two hours of the public demonstration,” that Smalls led, Amazon terminated him, according to the lawsuit. Amazon claimed that Smalls “was violating its quarantine order and thereby jeopardizing the health and safety of other employees.”

US labor law stipulates that it is illegal to fire an employee for union activity, although in practice companies often make up alternative reasons for termination to avoid running afoul of the law. 

The Smalls-Amazon saga started in late March when Smalls gained attention for leading the demonstration outside the Staten Island fulfillment center. When reports surfaced that he was quickly fired, a public backlash ensued to criticize Amazon. From there, Vice obtained a memo from an internal meeting between Amazon leadership that revealed a plan to allegedly smear Smalls.

“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky wrote in the leaked notes from the meeting.

In an interview with Salon, Smalls said there were many events that led up to the protest that resulted in his firing, suggesting that the protest was a final straw to get Amazon’s attention and demand basic workplace protections during the pandemic. This included seeing coworkers get sick with COVID-19. Small mentioned that he had one colleague who suspected she was sick; Smalls told her to home. At the time, test results were not instant, and she went to work as she waited for her results. The lack of guidance and protocols, Smalls said, motivated him to start organizing and demand answers from Amazon before more people got sick. He says the initiative was largely supported by the fulfillment center’s management.

“I was seeing people on a daily basis get sick, physically ill, flu-like symptoms, vomiting, dizziness, they couldn’t finish their 10-hour shift, fatigue — all types of symptoms,” Smalls said. “And there was nothing being done, we were unprotected . . . there were no masks, no PPE, no cleaning supplies, so I tried to go through the proper channels at first.”

Smalls said he went to HR, a group of Amazon employees, but ultimately all of his efforts led to him being the third person at work to get quarantined. Nobody else was, peculiarly, including those who also had contact with the aforementioned infected colleague. 

“I took the quarantine, but what about everybody else? So in order for me to get this message out there I had to take action, and that’s when I held the protests on March 30,” Smalls said.

Two hours later, he was fired.

In a statement to Salon, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski said Smalls was terminated for “putting the health and safety of others at risk and violations of his terms of his employment,” even though that was precisely what he was protesting to protect. 

“Mr. Smalls received multiple warnings for violating social distancing guidelines. He was also found to have had close contact with a diagnosed associate with a confirmed case of COVID-19 and was asked to remain home with pay for 14-days,” Levandowski said. “Despite that instruction to stay home with pay, he came onsite further putting the teams at risk.”

Unprompted, Levandowski then said that “diversity” is important to the tech giant, and issued an extraneous statement praising Amazon’s work in “diversity and inclusion.” 

This reporter suspects it was a preemptive reaction to accusations that race was a factor in Smalls’ firing, along with Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky’s leaked words about Smalls being “not smart, or articulate,” a phrasing that many commentators interpreted as having racist undertones. 

Mark Zuckerberg defends decision to keep Steve Bannon on Facebook after violent post

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended a recent decision to not suspend the account of former Trump staffer Steve Bannon after he proposed beheading two top public officials in a Facebook post. 

“We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely,” Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting on Thursday, according to Reuters. “While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.”

In the video in question, which Facebook removed, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon suggested that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray be decapitated for their supposed disloyalty to Trump.

“I’d put the heads on pikes. Right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone,” Bannon said in the video. Bannon spokeswoman Alexandra Preate said in a statement that Bannon’s comments were meant metaphorically. 

This was not the first time that Bannon ran afoul of the social media giant. Last week the platform took down a network of Bannon-linked pages that inaccurately claimed Biden’s victory over Trump was illegitimate, with Facebook spokesman Andy Stone explaining that the company had removed “several clusters of activity for using inauthentic behavior tactics to artificially boost how many people saw their content.”

Zuckerberg also told Facebook employees on Thursday that “the outcome of the election is now clear and Joe Biden is going to be our next president. It’s important that people have confidence that the election was fundamentally fair, and that goes for the tens of millions of people that voted for Trump,” according to BuzzFeed News.

Facebook and Twitter have both slapped warning labels on Trump’s persistent claims of voter fraud, which are without merit. Facebook has taken a number of other measures to limit the extent to which election-related misinformation can be spread on its platform, including removing a large group called “Stop the Steal.” In response, many right-wingers have created accounts at an alternate social media platform, Parler, that does not curate misinformation.

The Facebook CEO has faced criticism from his employees before for his unwillingness to take a tougher stance against the Trump administration. In June, dozens of telecommuting Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout, not showing up for work to protest the company’s unwillingness to take a stronger stance against Trump. The company has also been accused of altering its news feed algorithm to give right-wing sites a disproportionate advantage over left-wing ones, giving right-wing websites preferential treatment when it came to removing fact checks, and having a supposed “bug” on Instagram (which the company owns) that concealed anti-Trump hashtags while allowing anti-Biden ones. Zuckerberg reportedly met with Trump at the White House in late 2019.

Trump has previously threatened to retaliate against social media platforms that hold him accountable for spreading misinformation. In May he responded to Twitter’s decision to fact-check his inaccurate tweets about voter fraud by writing that “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices” and said “we will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.” He later followed through on that threat by signing an executive order that could revoke certain social media platforms’ liability protections regarding content posted by their users.

Experts believe any attempt by Trump to punish private social media corporations over moderation would be unconstitutional. “Any such move would be blatantly unconstitutional under the First Amendment,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email at the time. “That doesn’t make [Trump’s] threat harmless, however, because the president has many ways in which he can hurt individual companies, and his threat to do so as a way of silencing dissent is likely to chill freedom of expression and will undermine constitutional democracy in the long run.”