NBC News’ Al Roker reveals he has prostate cancer

Al Roker, one of morning-TV’s most durable presences, told viewers of NBC’s “Today” Friday morning that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and would be taking time off for surgery and recovery.

“It’s a good news-bad news kind of thing,” Roker told viewers during the morning program’s Friday broadcast. “Good news is we caught it early. Not great news is that it’s a little aggressive, so I’m going to be taking some time off to take care of this.” NBC said Roker will be undergoing surgery next week at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Roker has been with “Today” since 1996, and he has seen the program through many of its most notable transitions and during the tenures of its famous morning anchor teams, including Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, and Meredith Viera — and, more recently, Ann Curry, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb. He succeeded longtime weather personality Willard Scott, and audiences have kept track of Roker through medical issues; seen his family members on air; and followed him through non-stop “Roker-thons,” mammoth record-setting weather forecasts, one of which involved travel across the nation. He also works as a co-anchor during the program’s third hour, and has led a series for the franchise’s streaming efforts in which he talks to celebrities about their favorite sandwiches.

The A.M. personality has also demonstrated a willingness to blaze new business paths. He maintains a separate production operation, where he has experimented with new forms of video entertainment, including streaming programs. “It’s sort of like radio in the 1920’s. Why not take a shot at it?” Roker asked in an interview with Variety in 2015, after unveiling new efforts via the mobile app Meerkat. “You don’t know where it’s going to go, but I think it’s going to be fun to be the first out there. It’s not like anybody’s going to get hurt.”

The diagnosis calls into question whether Roker will be able to take part in NBC’s annual broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, of which he has been a part since 1995. The NBC broadcast will be different this year, owing to conditions set in place by the coronavirus pandemic, but Roker’s association with the event has led to some interesting moments, including an incident in 2019 when he tangled with a man dressed as a stick of butter as he sought to give viewers some colorful details of the procession.

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“I don’t want people thinking, ‘Oh, poor Al,’ you know, because I’m gonna be OK,” Roker said Friday.

Viewers of morning programs tend to rally around the shows’ anchors and health issues. Robin Roberts’ battle with the bone-marrow disease myelodysplastic syndrome in 2012 and 2013 inspired viewers of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” as did the travails of her colleague, Amy Robach, who fought breast cancer in 2013. More recently, “Today” viewers rallied around co-anchor Savannah Guthrie late last year after she suffered an eye injury that appeared to compromise her vision for a period of time.

Read more from Variety: “Fantastic Beasts 3” release date delayed to 2022

In a 2014 interview with Variety, Roker acknowledged how connected the nation’s morning anchors are with viewers. ” They celebrate with us. They mourn with us. I’ve lost both parents on the show,” he said. “It’s just one of those natural sorts of things. I don’t think anybody would hold it against you. We are all aging. We all have aging parents. The morning is probably the place where life happens…It’s a different beast.”

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Our problems aren’t just with Karens, but a nation of Meghan McCains

On the day after the election, Meghan McCain was feeling nostalgic. Accompanying an Instagram graphic that urges, among other observations, “Vote for whomever, but it will be up to us to rebuild the division this political process has established by being decent, respectful, kind, loving, supportive, and compassionate human beings during these trying times” were a few of McCain’s personal thoughts.

“My first Election Day without my dad is my first with my daughter Liberty. Feeling overwhelmed with nostalgia and warm sentiments about the circle of life. . . ” she wrote.

Then came this. “I love Election Day, always will. Don’t let the ugly, divisive fleeting politics of today remove what’s beautiful about our democratic process and our incredible country I will forever love so much. I am so proud to be an American and to have the privilege of living in the greatest country that has ever existed. No president or time or political party will ever change that. In the words of my dad – we’re Americans and we fight, never surrender.”

With that warm, Hallmark-ready closer, McCain illustrated the mindset of the white women who voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020 – some of them doing so again, others for the first time and altogether in greater numbers.

In the coming weeks media analysts are going to engage in some generalized hand-wringing and soul-searching in an effort to figure out why about 70 million voters wanted a second term for Donald Trump, despite his miserable handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, his overt bigotry, misogyny, documented corruption and malfeasance and, oh yeah, the fact that he was impeached.

Within that study are subsets of curiosity to dig into, like figuring out the reasons for Trump’s increased support among a small subset of Black and Latino voters. But to the immediate horror of liberal white women who believed that somehow at least some of their conservative sisters would wash their hands of Trump – after five years of sexist comments, the Stormy Daniels saga, caging migrant children at our southern border, #MeToo and multiple sexual assault allegations – it turns out they did not.

On the contrary, those white women responded to Trump’s various moves on other women and women’s rights overall with a lusty embrace. Some 55% of white women voted for Trump in 2020, compared to the 52-53% who threw their support behind him in 2016, according to a recent New York Times exit poll.

And even with the usual disclaimers, such as the fact that exit polls are far from precise and it isn’t clear whether this includes information from voters who submitted via absentee ballot, the rise in support for this misogynist is astonishing . . . to everyone who hand knit pink pussy hats for their girlfriends as Christmas presents back in 2017.

It really isn’t to women of color who have been dealing with these types of women forever. And to clarify, by these types of women I’m not talking about Karens. I’m talking about the Meghan McCains of the world. The differences are subtle, but they’re there. McCain, for example, probably wouldn’t have called the cops on a birdwatcher or a kid selling water or stood on her front lawn waving a gun at protesters marching near her home; I imagine her as much more of an eye-roller.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have feelings about all of those folks – she just saves her thoughts for other forums. For example, on the same day McCain posted her national kumbaya on Instagram, here’s what she offered on Twitter as a quote reply to Politico correspondent Anna Palmer’s declaration that Tuesday was an “abject disaster” for Democrats:

“Normalizing socialism, ‘mostly peaceful protesting‘, cancel culture, insane tax rates, arrogant identity politics, apologizing for loving America and patriotism, and overall coastal elitism about Christianity and anyone making under 100k a year,” McCain offered, adding as a smug kicker, “There I explained it, Democrats.”

McCain has been on maternity leave from “The View” over the last few weeks, denying us a televised window into the psyche of how half the country politely, comfortably and quietly supports authoritarianism. However, that tweet tells us a lot about her overall appeal.

For the sake of focus let’s not get into her strange accusations about apologizing for patriotism or Christianity or get into the ways that the term “coastal elite” is a dog whistle or parse the coded language conveyed by the reflexive usage of the term socialism. I assure you that Kamala Harris’ alleged socialism isn’t the reason some of these women I’m talking about refused to vote for Joe Biden, even though they may allege that it is.

We also need acknowledge that McCain and her mother publicly declared that they did not vote for Trump, choosing instead to throw their support to Biden. However, just read the text of that tweet cited above and imagine if Trump hadn’t insulted her father, the late John McCain, or prisoners of war in general or American military servicemen and women killed in battle.

Imagine if Trump has simply stuck to demonizing progressives, feminists, Black Lives Matter protesters, journalists and liberals living in large cities. Maybe, given those circumstances, you might envision McCain voting for Trump. Hence her similarity with the expanded plurality if not majority of white women who voted for Trump.

Remember, McCain’s role on “The View” is to translate the world from the conservative perspective, to represent the sensible right-wing woman who hasn’t gone full QAnon and maybe mingles with people of color insofar as they’re in her orbit, who decries racism and yet refuses to make an effort to understand where all the inconvenient divisiveness is coming from.

You know, beyond “political process.”

Hence, when millions watch her on the “The View,” she presents a version of a conservative firebrand that is at best atypical, which is to say a woman who sits down at the table with other women of different ethnicities and political points of view and isn’t afraid to spar, but then appears to find common ground with the rest of the group.

This is why McCain can ask all the “but what if” questions she wants on “The View” and not demonstrate that she’s listening to or learning from the insights her subjects provide. As McCain shared in a tweet she has since deleted, she’s interviewed Stacey Abrams multiple times, during which Abrams offered concise answers supported by data.

In one such exchange back in 2019, Abrams pushed back against McCain’s attempt to dismiss Democratic policy proposals as identity politics by actually defining that term. Abrams explained that it is an effort to honestly tend to the needs of marginalized people who are asking for help and not getting it. That includes people in rural communities that aren’t getting adequate investment and, in her example, Black women whose high maternal mortality rates aren’t being addressed.

“Identity is simply saying, ‘I see you and I see the obstacles to you getting the things that all of us want: healthcare, economic security, educational opportunity,'” Abrams said. “What I look for in this Democratic primary are conversations that say, ‘We see all of you.’ Because if we want people to turn out and vote in November, they have to be seen long before that. You don’t win elections by convincing the same people to do the same thing. You win elections by getting new people to say, ‘I care too.'”

Democrats were successful in doing that to some degree with Black voters, and in part because of the party’s support of racial justice demonstrations sparked by George Floyd’s killing, regardless of what McCain’s social media thread posits. Data from TargetSmart, a Democratic political data and data services, shows a surge in voter registrations in several states, particularly among young voters and people of color, as protests took place across the country this summer.

Yet in her paradigm and that of people like her, supporting those protests was an “abject disaster,” politically speaking, because it disturbed their world.

McCain and people like her aren’t interested in following up with the information she learns in her interviews to glean more facts or draw their own conclusions. This is not out of laziness – Meghan McCains aren’t lazy, not by a mile – but because it would threaten to shift their convenient view that everything would be fine if everyone would simply go back to being the “decent, respectful, kind, loving, supportive, and compassionate human beings” they were before election season kicked off.

This posits that American culture was already all of those things, along with just and equal. The point of all the unrest and anxiety that’s finally boiled over across the country is that it never was.

There have been times when McCain acknowledges this, as women like her do to maintain the polish on their legitimacy. But it’s entirely performative and therefore meaningless. All you have to do is scroll back through these last few months for examples.

Take mid-May, for example, when a segment of “The View” was dedicated to examining Barack Obama’s virtual commencement speech, during which Obama took a shot at the current administration’s incompetent response to the pandemic. Most of the hosts gave it high marks. McCain blamed Obama for ushering in “the culture war that I believe is real, and is raging in this country” leading to Trump exacerbating it.

A few weeks later after Floyd’s murder, McCain expressed empathy and copped to the shortcoming of looking at the world from a place of privilege, saying, “All of us have a responsibility to take a hard look at our responsibility confronting race . . . I hope this is a watershed moment that we can learn and grow from.”

She may have suggested that Fort Benning be renamed in honor of Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman killed in combat – “As long as we start highlighting wonderful icons like that in our military history, I really think it is something people can get on board with,” she said – but her Nov. 4 tweet blasting Democrats for normalizing “‘mostly peaceful protesting'” and arrogant identity politics does not show much learning and growth.

And yet, the left is failing to win over these women and other Trumpists not because of their passionate enthusiasm for white patriarchy, but because progressives aren’t pushing a comfortable sort of identity politics – the type everyone can get behind.

See, the difference between McCain and the average white woman Trump supporter – not the ones who show up at rallies unmasked, co-opting Village People songs and braying racist mispronunciations of Kamala Harris’ name – is that she’s paid to put it all out there.

Out in the wild, many of the women holding those views tend to keep their politics to themselves because discussing such matters in company that may not share their opinions isn’t polite and, indeed, may lead to irritation and bad feelings.

Not surprisingly, a lot of these folks aren’t exposed to many people of color on a regular basis save for the few at work or church or who marry into their families. They may feel affection for those individuals and still vote for candidates who back policies designed to harm them because those politicians also speak to their personal beliefs and, with Trump, fears.

Since they’d rather keep their interactions polite, nobody engages them or challenges them to explain why they voted for a fascist white supremacist because I’d wager it would lead them to expose some unpleasant and impolite qualities about themselves that they can’t quite defend, like their racism. To someone who supports racists while insisting she isn’t racist, that’s uncomfortable.

The Meghan McCains of the world deeply resent being made to feel uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s time for the people who cater to them to stop feeling bad about that and thoughtfully confront them over their harmful politics and cloaked bigotry, regardless of how impolite they insist we’re being in doing so. The challenge is to keep the engagement going for longer than an hour or an episode, because four years of treating our democracy like a TV show is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Lindsey Graham, who begged for cash on Fox News, tells Sean Hannity he will give Trump $500,000

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who earlier this week won re-election to a fourth term, told Fox News host and Trump “pillow-talk” pal Sean Hannity on Thursday that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to challenging the results of a democratically-held presidential election. To boot, Graham pledged half a million dollars to the President Donald Trump’s “defense legal fund.”

“I’m here tonight to stand with President Trump,” Graham told Hannity. “He stood with me. He’s the reason we’re going to have a Senate majority . . . He helped Senate Republicans. We’re going to pick up House seats because of the campaign that President Trump won.”

Graham ignored one basic fact: Trump has not won the election. (He currently trails in must-win states as outstanding ballots continue to be tabulated. He also is more than 4 million ballots down in the popular vote.)

“I’m going to donate $500,000 tonight to President Trump’s defense legal fund,” Graham then revealed.

“I’ve been on your show,” he told Hannity. “You’ve raised a ton of money for me. Your audience was incredibly helpful to Lindsey Graham dot com. Give to Donald J. Trump dot com so we will have the resources to fight. The allegations of wrongdoing are earth-shattering. It makes the Carter warrant, Page application, Carter warrant, uh — Carter Page warrant application look on the up and up.”

Over the final weeks of his Senate campaign, Graham, at times out-raised two-to-one by Democratic rival Jaime Harrison, took to begging for campaign donations on Fox News shows, including Hannity’s primetime program. He also appeared to violate Senate ethics rules and federal law when he solicited contributions in the Senate building after a round of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

“I don’t know how much it affected fundraising today, but if you want to help me close the gap,” he told reporters outside the hearing room. “Lindsey Graham dot com — a little bit goes a long way.”

Graham, fresh off a victory in the most hotly contested and high-profile election of his political career, announced his Hannity appearance after the president’s eldest adult son, Donald Trump Jr., called out the Palmetto State Republican for not defending his father on Twitter.

“No one is surprised,” Don Jr. wrote.

The president has repeatedly lied that he has already won the election, claiming that victory was stolen from him because officials continued to count lawfully count votes after he baselessly declared himself the winner early Wednesday morning.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” Trump told reporters during a Thursday press conference at the White House.

There is no evidence of illegal voting, and judges have summarily dismissed some of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits within hours of filing.

Trump’s baseless claims were met with unusually fierce criticism from fellow Republicans, some of whom warned that his rhetoric was not only “insane” but also “dangerous.”

“We want every vote counted, yes every legal vote (of course). But, if you have legit concerns about fraud present EVIDENCE and take it to court,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., tweeted on Thursday. “STOP Spreading debunked misinformation . . . This is getting insane.”

During the Hannity interview, Graham, who said that the Trump campaign had plans to brief Republican lawmakers on Saturday, called on his party colleagues to step up.

When Hannity asked whether Graham, in his capacity as a lawyer, thought that Pennsylvania state Republican lawmakers should appoint their own electors regardless of the final vote, Graham said “everything should be on the table.” He also claimed, without evidence, that Philadelphia elections operations were “crooked as a snake” and that there were “a lot of dead people voting” in Nevada.

“Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake,” he said. “Why are they shutting people out? Because they don’t want people to see what they’re doing. But you’re talking about a lot of dead people voting. You’re talking about — in Nevada — people voting who are not legal residents.”

Graham praised the system in Arizona, where Trump still trails in the count, and complimented Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, for his honesty.

“I trust Arizona,” Graham said. “I don’t trust Philadelphia. I don’t trust what’s going on in Nevada. So everything should be on the table.”

“Let’s stand with President Trump. He stood with us,” Graham added. “And this reminds me of the Carter Page warrant application, where they’re just trying to get an outcome — damn the law, damn the process.”

As Hannity lauded Graham’s $500,000 pledge, the senator began to plug the president’s campaign website: “Donald J Trump dot com. Five bucks from a million people goes a long way.”

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sidelined after “close contact” tests positive for coronavirus

Rachel Maddow, the most-watched anchor on the MSNBC lineup, will come off the air for a period of time after a close contact tested positive for coronavirus.

“I’ve tested negative thus far, but will be at home quarantining ’til it’s safe for me to be back at work without putting anyone at risk,” Maddow said in a message posted Friday on social media. MSBNC declined to elaborate on the statement.

Maddow’s 9 p.m. weeknight berth is the linchpin of the MSNBC primetime lineup, and she has had a key role in the cable news outlet’s coverage of the 2020 election. She has been anchoring hours of programming along with Brian Williams, Nicolle Wallace and Joy Reid.

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Wallace, Reid and Williams are expected to continue without Maddow. “Wishing everyone patience and calm; may these remarkable times bring out the best in us,” said Maddow. “See you soon!”

Read more from Variety: “Fantastic Beasts 3” release date delayed to 2022

pic.twitter.com/rZoiT1Upbd

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) November 6, 2020

More to come . . .

Inside “Stop the Steal”: How right-wingers are organizing to spread baseless claims of voter fraud

On Thursday, Facebook shut down a rapidly growing online group rallying around baseless claims that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election.

According to reporter Sheera Frenkel at the New York Times, the Facebook group titled “Stop the Steal” was one of the fastest growing Facebook groups in the social media company’s history. It launched on Wednesday and grew to over 350,000 members on Thursday. Group members were organizing protests against the presidential election, and some members were calling for violence.

A Facebook spokesperson told The New York Times that the group was shut down as part of its crackdown on misinformation during the election.

“The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” Tom Reynolds, a Facebook spokesperson, said.

Although Facebook has shut down the group, alternative groups have sprouted up, and many have organized under the same title. One group that was created in 2018 called “Hardcore Trump Nation” changed its name to “Stop the Steal” on November 5, and now has 5,000 group members as of Friday. Salon found other examples of pro-Trump groups created in the last couple years that have suddenly changed their names to “Stop the Steal” as well.

As Salon previously reported, the same “Stop the Steal” hashtag trended baselessly during the 2018 midterm elections. It now appears that the current iteration of the Stop the Steal movement is not only being promoted by die-hard Trump supporters, but also Tea Party activists or others who have organized Trump-adjacent campaigns in the past.

Mother Jones reported this week that the domain StolenElection.us is registered to the Liberty Lab, which is a digital marketing firm that offers digital services to conservative clients. Liberty Lab bills itself as a “boutique digital agency” that offers digital services like social media marketing. Its clients include a PAC behind an effort to recall California’s Democratic governor; the right-wing think tank The Mackinac Center for Public Policy; Salem Media Group, which owns various conservative media properties; the 2012 Newt Gingrich presidential campaign; Women For Trump; and a couple more MAGA-Trump related campaigns, including Steve Bannon’s “Build the Wall” campaign. Scott Graves lists himself as the firm’s president on LinkedIn. According to the Mother Jones report, the Stop the Steal Facebook group was linked to the non-profit Women for America First, which is led by Amy Kremer, a former Tea Party activist.

In 2016, Cambridge Analytica played a big role in creating and executing a massive misinformation campaign on behalf of Trump, which was widely reported on after their efforts to suppress the Black vote came to light. It appears that Liberty Lab is doing similar work under the banner of “digital services” for Trump’s attempt to undermine the vote-counting process.

Organizing around the Stop the Steal movement extends beyond Facebook and Twitter. Salon found a link to a Google drive folder posted on Twitter with examples of scripts for people to contact their state legislators to “encourage them to cast their electoral votes as republican” in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In addition to the script, the organizers provide suggested answers to questions such as “Is this movement a result of a political bias?” To which constituents are advised to respond: “No, this is an American movement. I am doing this because I believe in fair elections.”

As Twitter has been labeling tweets attempting to undermine the electoral process and Facebook has been banning similar groups, many associated with the baseless Stop the Steal movement have turned to the social media platform Parler, which is known to harbor Trump supporters, as a report in The Verge notes. On Parler, a user with the handle @StopTheSteal has been sharing rumors and conspiracy theories about voter fraud and is urging people to attend Stop the Steal rallies across the country.

The rhetoric and messaging being used in these groups is being amplified by Trump himself and his high-profile allies. Trump has repeatedly communicated baseless claims that the Democrats are “stealing” the election, alleging that there are “missing” military ballots, “illegal ballots,” and decrying the ongoing counting of votes in many of these states.

Politifact, which is run by the Poynter Institute, has corroborated that these claims are false. For example, Wisconsin state election officials said it’s completely untrue that “thousands” of pro-Trump military ballots were found in the trash. Yet, a story published by the conservative blog PJ Media, which is part of Salem Media Group who’s been a client of Liberty Lab, appears to be one source of this conspiracy theory that’s being spread on social media.

And then there’s #SharpieGate, which has been publicly discussed at in-person rallies in addition to social media. This conspiracy falsely claims that Arizona polling places handed out Sharpie pens to Trump supporters to intentionally invalidate their ballots. According to Snopes, this isn’t true, either. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has stated that ballots marked with Sharpie pens would be counted.

There have also been claims that dead people voted, which multiple state departments have explained is false. For example, the Michigan Department of State explained on Twitter that ballots of deceased people are rejected in Michigan.

As baseless as these theories are, cyber experts think they might be around for a while.

“We expect now at this point that these narratives are going to survive the election and last for quite a long time, perhaps becoming either consolidated into existing conspiracy frameworks such as QAnon or becoming the basis of completely new conspiracy theories,” Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, said in a press briefing.

“The Informer” star on the “aggressive nature” of filming in prison

Joel Kinnaman (“Easy Money,” “Altered Carbon”) gives a wiry, intense performance as the title character in “The Informer,” a gritty police thriller finally receiving its long-delayed release. Kinnaman plays Peter Koslow, a prisoner who is helping FBI agent Wilcox (Rosamund Pike) arrest a Polish crime boss, Klimek (Eugune Lipinski). However, en route to the sting, Pete’s sidekick, Staskek (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz) takes a detour, and things go sideways.

Circumstances — and Wilcox’s boss, Montgomery (Clive Owen) — force Pete to go undercover in jail to get information to nail Klimek. And, of course, things don’t go as planned behind bars either.

The Swedish-born actor, who may be best known for “The Killing,” spends much of the film calculating how to handle the sticky situations Pete finds himself in. What can he reveal? Who can he trust? And at several pivotal moments in “The Informer,” Pete has to resort to violence to save his own life. The performer is especially impressive during several do-or-die moments.

In a recent Zoom interview Kinnaman spoke with Salon about his decision-making process, prison movies, and playing “The Informer.”

Pete tries to be in control at all times, but more often than not, he encounters situations beyond his control. What can you say about control both as the character and as an actor?

Control is an interesting thing when it comes to acting and art in general. The more you prepare the more you can let go of control in terms of performance. It’s like how Robert DeNiro and Jodie Foster were always rehearsing making “Taxi Driver” so she knew it inside out and she got bored with it, that’s when he went off book and improvised. In terms of performance —it’s a key. The more prepared you are, the more rehearsed you are, you can really throw yourself into the moment and be present and let in some chaos.

Can you give an example from “The Informer”?

I think there are several, especially in the violent moments. [Laughs] When Pete was getting hung, there was some chaos in that and some things that weren’t planned. One of my passions in life is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and in any Jiu Jitsu school every night, someone is going to get choked out. They try to escape, refuse to submit, and pass out. You become accustomed to that fine line of consciousness when your brain is not getting enough blood. In the scene where I am getting strangled, I could control the pressure myself to keep level, and there were times when I went out. But I could still play the scene in that state where you are almost losing consciousness, that’s a little chaos. In terms of the character, of course he is trying to be in control, but it’s his desperate fight to get back to family — that is the core of the film. He is trying to control a situation that is slipping out of his hands, and he is losing control of it and that makes him more and more desperate and willing to take risks.

“The Informer” belongs to the genre of prison movies. Do you have any favorites?

“A Prophet” is my favorite, and this Danish film “R,” by Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer. “A Prophet” came out a few weeks before “R,” so it got buried, but the filmmakers had the reverse experience with “A Hijacking” coming out before “Captain Phillips.”

I love both of those prison films! I’m curious what it’s like to make a film in a penitentiary. Can you talk about the mindset of the character and even yourself in those scenes? Even though it’s make-believe I can’t imagine you don’t feel something being in a prison.

I always wanted to make a prison film. A lot of men think about, “What it would be like to end up in prison if I made a mistake? How would I fare under those circumstances?” It’s one of those nightmare scenarios. I wanted to explore that in a film. We shot this particular part of the film in London, in this real, abandoned prison. It had been closed for 10 years. I don’t get affected and I don’t think about places being haunted, but that place was haunted. There was a thick energy in there. Everyone was affected by it. We put all these people inside, and there is something with the group mentality. Even though they are extras, 100-200 rough-looking dudes together, they all bring out their aggressive nature. It’s not the real thing, but you feel it. It’s a scary thing to deal with.

What can you say about Pete’s moral compass? He tries to do the right thing but has to make some difficult decisions. His end game is clear — he wants to get out, but the only way out is through. He keeps getting deeper rather than having it become easier. How did you recalibrate his mindset?

When you’re in that situation, he has to double down on it. The stakes can’t get higher. Either he’s successful and he breaks out, or he dies. Or if he doesn’t die, it’s life in prison and it is very likely that he’ll be killed by this organization. At first, he had backup and a plausible way out if people held their promises, but as things escalate, he descends into chaos. He has to put everything on the line. That’s why the plan gets crazier and crazier.

“The Informer” has some rather violent scenes, one scene in particular made me a little squeamish. Can you describe performing those scenes and the fun or degree of difficulty in creating such visceral moments?

The fun comes from succeeding in making it realistic. But to make it realistic, you have to take a little bit of a beating to get it there. Fight scenes are a combination of technique and knowing what you are doing, and planning things very particularly, but then giving a performance as you get a beating. They are not real punches, because if you punch for real, it looks less violent than a fake punch in a good way. The falling down and rolling around and grabbing and pulling hair — those you have to do that for real as much as you can. It is more fun to see it when it’s done than doing it. It’s also a dance, and when you are working with great stunt performers, it is a creative process, especially in a life or death fight, there’s a very particular psychology in that. If you have ever been in a fight or a car accident, you know how time warps in a situation like that, where 2-3 seconds feel like 25 minutes. There is so much brain activity and scenarios playing out at rapid pace and you try to capture are in that kind of time warp. It is a fun, creative challenge to give some reality.

Pete is very observant — both as an undercover agent and as a prisoner. He sizes up situations and responds smartly, especially when he’s cornered. I like that you conveyed his intelligence in his blank expressions; he can’t give himself away. Can you talk about that aspect of his character?

I think he’s a smart guy, but he’s has a lot of different competencies. He’s originally a street guy, then he spent time in the military, and he spent several years in prison. He knows these environments and these characters. When he’s making these plans on how to play these people, he’s doing that from an educated place. But he might be a little too trusting — believing people will be good on their word. It’s this breakdown in trust and realizing that he has to do it all by himself and that process becomes really dramatic.

With a few notable exceptions, (“Knight of Cups,”) you have mainly worked in films that are action-oriented (e.g., the “Robocop” remake, “Altered Carbon,” and “Hanna” on TV). Can you talk about the playing these kinds of roles, and how you avoid being typecast?

I just did two films, “The Secrets We Keep,” which is a straight up drama, and I have “The Sound of Philadelphia” coming out in January. I’ve done more drama on TV. I come from the theater, and I started out doing stage work and independent drama. Over the course of my career here I found action, and fell in love with that, but I approach my work more as a theater actor and that’s my education. I was trained in the National Swedish theater school for five years. I have tried to find a balance between doing action and drama, but the balance has tipped a bit on the action side.

“The Informer” is available in theaters and digitally beginning Friday, Nov. 6.

Hey, Fox News: Go home, you’re drunk — it’s time to admit that the Trump party’s over

Most still-rational Americans, watching Donald Trump’s atrocity of a press conference on Thursday night, had two simultaneous reactions: Wow, that man really is the worst living American, and also, yeah, this is all over except for the paperwork.

It was an odd mix of emotions. There was the disgust of watching the actual president of the actual United States demand that legal votes be thrown out insinuating that millions of American voters were somehow fakes. But there was also the relief of seeing Trump’s facade of bravado collapsing, exposing the loser that was always hiding behind that wall of bluster. Even many Trump voters knew, at that moment, that it was over. Trump’s attempted coup is collapsing under the weight of his own incompetence and laziness.

We are now at the portion of the right-wing cycle of failure where the supporters of the corrupt and failed Republican president slink away and pretend that they were never that into him in the first place. (See: Nixon, Richard M., and Bush, George W.) But for whatever reason, a decent number of rats are clinging fiercely to the side of the sinking ship, insisting, as the water starts lapping against their skinny tails, that Captain Bleach-Injector can still somehow save himself.

Thursday night, a frantic Sean Hannity was on Fox News, baselessly claiming that Philadelphia election officials counting Pennsylvania ballots are “violating the law” and suggesting, apparently not as a joke, “a do-over in that state.” On his radio show, Hannity begged for state-appointed electors who’ll vote for Trump, defying the actual voters of Pennsylvania. (State GOP leaders have declined.)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show and falsely claimed that “Trump won this election,” demanding, “Everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet.” He then tweeted out the video clip, in case there was any doubt he was trying to rile up Republican voters with these lies. Twitter put a content warning on the video.

Ingraham went along with McCarthy’s antics, demanding that other Republican politicians “better stand and fight” for Trump and claiming that “we have huge amounts of money from Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros and others flooding” into “canvassing, you know, states like Pennsylvania.” This claim is not only untrue but also nonsensical: The apparent implication is that, while Republicans are allowed to canvass and organize, Democrats have no such right.

Tucker Carlson was relatively limp, trying to boost Trump’s conspiracy theories and complaining about “the media” calling the election. The latter is a particularly shameless play, as Trump’s entire coup plot — which he has laid out in great detail over the past couple of months — was to seize on the appearance that he was ahead in early media reports on Tuesday night as evidence he had “won,” even though all votes hadn’t counted.

On Hannity’s show, South Carolina’s Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham let loose with baseless accusations, which carried a strong whiff of racism, that Philadelphia’s elections are “crooked as a snake” while Arizona’s are to be trusted. (News flash: Trump will probably lose that state too.)

Even former football coach Tommy Tuberville, having defeated Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama, decided that one of his first acts as a senator-elect was to declare that “the game is over” but “the referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other team’s side of the scoreboard.” It’s a false analogy that elides the fact that votes are always counted after the polls close.

Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye has an astounding list of other examples from GOP politicians, so readers can get the full scale of how bad this is.

Right-wing media whining has already drifted toward violent fantasies. Newt Gingrich, after letting loose with a racist rant about the “Philadelphia machine,” the “Atlanta machine” and the “machine in Detroit,” demanded on Fox News that Attorney General Bill Barr arrest election workers and menacingly declared that “federal agents can carry guns in the pursuit of people who are breaking the law.”

While interviewing Rudy Giuliani on his radio show, Trumpian pseudo-fascist crackpot Sebastian Gorka declared that “we should just force our way in” to voting centers to keep votes from being counted. This was a bridge too far even for Giuliani, who suggested “that would require a fistfight, which I guess our people don’t want to get involved in.”

After falsely announcing that “Trump won an overwhelming victory” and was already “in his second term” in a Fox Business interview, disgraced former Trump adviser Steve Bannon went on his own radio show and fantasized about killing Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

“I’d put the heads on pikes,” Bannon said, “as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”

All of this, it should go without saying, is deeply evil. These people aren’t just undermining democracy and telling outragous lies, they’re often trying to incite violence against their fellow Americans. But evil is, sadly, to be expected. That’s what has become of the Republican Party after decades of dehumanizing propaganda and five years of Trumpism.

But what’s more puzzling is how irrational this behavior is. All these pundits and politicians are out there, flailing around and lying for Trump, and for what? He’s a dead man walking, and they know it. The lawsuits Trump’s team are filing are unbelievably feeble, so much so that it’s clear they’re less meant as a serious effort to rescue Trump from electoral defeat than to bolster his delusions that he’s being unfairly victimized.

There’s no point in defending Trump now, especially not in the stick-your-neck-out way we’re seeing from Fox News hosts and politicians like Graham or McCarthy. It’s certainly not going to make it more likely there’s some miracle where Trump pulls himself out of a nosedive.

The only purpose of all this nonsense is to soothe Trump’s injured ego with pretty lies about how he should have won and it’s all rigged and he’s the real winner here and not the massive loser he looks like to the whole world right now.

And I have to ask: To what end? It’s one thing to flatter Trump when he’s the president — it’s gross and cynical, but entirely rational, to want the power of having a president on your side. It’s another thing entirely to keep at it when he’s on his way out. It’s especially weird to demonstrate loyalty to Trump, a man who will never return it and would sell out all his bootlickers to black-market organ salesmen if he thought that might save his sorry ass.

I’m forced to conclude that these people merely stunned and falling back on bad habits. After four years of relentless lying and toadying to this reality-TV villain who sleazed his way into the Oval Office, the Trump apologists don’t know how to quit him. Even as the building collapses around them, they’re carrying on as if Trump will somehow find a way to survive this, because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to believe.

The saddest part? Their audiences and supporters will forget all this when Trump finally leaves office. That’s when the right will move seamlessly into Phase II: Forget This Ever Happened.

Will Mitch McConnell back Trump’s delusional last-ditch battle? So far the signs are ominous

This has been a tumultuous week, to say the least. But if there was one silver lining — even before Joe Biden’s apparent or imminent victory — it was the blessed 36 hours in which we didn’t have to hear Donald Trump’s voice. After his obnoxious declaration of victory at 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, he stuck to primal tweeting until Thursday evening when he emerged to make the worst speech of his career. He disconsolately rattled off a fantasy laundry list of voting irregularities and declared, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” Reading haltingly from a script, he rambled about media conspiracies and lied about vote-rigging, saying, “Ultimately, I have a feeling judges are going to have to rule” which he has always believed was his failsafe. It set a new standard for awful, which is really saying something.

Once again, a majority of Americans were no doubt horrified, embarrassed and frightened that their so-called president was declaring the American system that elected him to be corrupt because he is now on track to lose.

If you wondered where Trump was getting all these alleged horror stories, you need look no further than his favorite news network. It’s on Fox News that the conspiracy theories and propaganda have been disseminated to the faithful who were already primed to believe that a Biden presidency cannot be legitimate because Trump told them so. He is continuing to tell them so, and there’s a good chance that a large number of Americans will never accept the legitimacy of this election based upon Trump’s outrageous lies to cover for his failure. Here’s a little taste of what they’re seeing:

LOL! Newt compares Trump's apparent loss with the battle of Gettysburg pic.twitter.com/UGdGcAE1vA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 6, 2020

After watching Trump’s atrocious speech, I thought perhaps the Republican establishment might take a breath and do one of those “Goldwater walks” to the White House to tell Trump it was time to hang up the gloves. It really was that bad. As usual, that was a vain hope. There have been a few half-hearted remonstrations from former GOP officials and commentators. Beyond Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a longtime Trump critic, and Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who’s been lukewarm toward Trump all along, hardly any prominent Republicans have spoken out.

Trump’s adult sons have taken their angry demands to social media, urging elected Republicans to step up in defense of their father, and saying they would “remember” who failed. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri stepped up to announce that he was very concerned about the “confusion” and would introduce “election integrity” legislation. Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas also jumped in to back Trump, without being entirely specific about his claims.

But it was Lindsey Graham, the newly re-elected senator from South Carolina, who outdid himself, going on Fox News and slobbering all over the camera, apparently vying for the dubious honor of most obsequious Trump bootlicker of the week:

"Everything should be on the table" — Lindsey Graham won't rule out that Republican legislatures should invalidate the election results and (presumably) award their electoral votes to Trump pic.twitter.com/ykNdFCicZW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 6, 2020

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a likely 2024 candidate, also got in on the action:

We need transparency. Now. pic.twitter.com/fHmXivl6Y5

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 6, 2020

This “observer” hysteria was resolved earlier. But apparently they’ve decided this is the magic bullet that, in some unknown fashion, may require a do-over of the whole election. Or, if Sean Hannity has his way, maybe just have Trump declared president for life.

You’ll notice that with the exception of Haley, all the Republican luminaries rushing to Trump’s defense are members of the U.S. Senate. You have to wonder why they would feel so strongly about fighting for a Trump victory that has clearly slipped away. Sure, they might feel that Trump will continue to have influence in the party for a while, but Cruz and Hawley have four more years in their terms, while Cotton and Graham just got re-elected. It’s possible they are all made men in the Trump cult, but I doubt it. All of them have big ambitions, and it’s difficult to believe they actually believe it will be good for them to perpetuate Trump’s struggle to overturn this election result on the basis of phony allegations made up to soothe his shattered ego.

Aside from reflexively responding to the call of the Trump scions, they may have a compelling reason. They may not care much about Donald Trump getting another term, but they care deeply about keeping their Senate majority. They need him to keep stirring up the base in advance of a likely double cage match in Georgia come January. There are almost certain to be two Senate runoff elections there that could yet tip the balance of the Senate to the Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made no comment about Trump’s antics on Thursday evening. And he’s been quite cagey about Trump in recent weeks, saying he hasn’t been to the White House recently because of its lax COVID protocols and even gently chiding the president for his election night speech, saying that all the votes should be counted. But I would imagine he’ll walk over hot coals to help Trump now if it means keeping his majority. Power is the air Mitch breathes.

Democrats had better get some sleep this weekend and then get ready for round two. The disappointment of all those defeats in Senate races hasn’t really sunk in with all the anxiety surrounding the presidential race. But it’s a huge problem. If McConnell remains in charge of the Senate, we can kiss the Democratic agenda good-bye. He is a ruthless opposition leader who is already giving notice that he plans to veto any Biden cabinet choice that doesn’t please him. There will be no liberal judges, and if another Supreme Court justice dies or retires, that seat could well stay empty indefinitely. He will enable Graham and other Senate committee chairs to run endless investigations into Biden and his family, regardless of the merits.

And of course, any hopes of the legislation required to clean up this mess and actually improve the lives of the American people will be dashed. In fairness, we should note that even if Democrats had won the majority, there’s no guarantee the Senate could pass any progressive legislation, thanks to both the filibuster rule and the presence of conservative Democrats who become very powerful veto points of their own. Nonetheless, it’s necessary to have a majority simply to set the legislative agenda and with these domineering Republicans running the Senate we are looking at gridlock. Again.

I don’t know if the Democrats can gain those two Senate seats in Georgia. But you can bet that Mitch McConnell will do everything he can to prevent it. If that means helping Donald Trump turn this country inside out over the next couple of months so that his people stay active and engaged, he will do it. And so will his troops. If the last four years have shown us anything, it’s that any niggling concerns Republicans might have about destroying our democracy are easily disregarded, when it’s a question of maintaining their own power.

Lost in the fog of four years in Trump’s America

My Netflix history lies to me. But I suspect it’s for my own good.

Before I started writing this piece, I wanted to see if I could size up how bad the situation was. When I checked, I saw only partial truths. Yes, I’d watched the entire run of “Great British Bake Off” over the last few weeks, it assured me. That’s fine! Plenty of people binge shows! It’s a pandemic! You’re stressed!

But I knew better. See, not only had I watched the entirety of “Great British Bake Off” seasons available to stream, I had done so multiple times. On repeat. For weeks on end. According to Netflix, though, it was just the once. Much like how Spotify doesn’t call in a wellness check when you listen to the same sad song for two and half months straight, Netflix scrubs your viewing history to only show an episode of a series once. I’m sure their internal records still record the truth and that the uncaring monolith judges me accordingly, but it never lets it show. It knows, perhaps, what’s up.

What’s up, is the same thing that’s been up for the last four years: low-key disassociation. Though raised in a small town (Pop. 1,992) in the upper Midwest, I quickly came to realize my own deeply progressive leanings shortly after turning 18. One of those loud-mouthed feminists I was raised to revile, I felt at home when my wife and I eventually relocated to Los Angeles, safe in the deep blue heart of the country.

This is all to say that the 2016 election broke me. Hillary Clinton was my deeply-flawed hero and I truly believed that when it came right down to it, the country would identify and select the “lesser of two evils.” I was wrong. And suddenly, America was not a country that I recognized anymore.

Except, America hadn’t changed. America was the same as it ever was. I was just seeing it for the first time, as reality was finally beginning to erode the rose-colored glasses of privilege. Or so I thought.

Sorry. We were talking about “Great British Bake Off.”

During the last four years, but more specifically, over the last 10 months, I’ve been using TV to anesthetize myself to the outside world. I suspect I’m not alone. Revisiting old favorites, discovering new stories, hunkering down and looking for any distraction that can drown out the sound of the apocalypse knocking at our door.

There were pauses, of course, when the world itself demanded action that surpassed the fear of everyday life, when we took to the streets in outrage over the murder of George Floyd and banded together to grieve the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not to mention the ongoing sorrow over nearly a quarter million Americans killed by a pandemic still running rampant throughout the country.

But as soon as enough time had passed, it was always back to the fog.

And, listen, the fog was great. In the fog, all your favorite TV shows wait for you, your favorite characters urging you to forget your worries and return to a place where everyone knows your name. It was like being trapped in purgatory, but with every confidence that it was a clerical error you just had to wait out. I turned to the fog because I believed, misguidedly, that there would be a normalcy to return to if I was patient enough. In the meantime, I dedicated myself fully to “GBBO,” and “Parks and Recreation” before that, “The Office,” “30 Rock,” “Designing Women,” and on and on.

Read more from IndieWire: Being disabled under Trump has caused me to question myself

It probably goes without saying that the fog was not actually a great place to live. I first noticed it when I would venture into older shows, like the aforementioned “Designing Women.” Trump’s name gets dropped as a punchline to a joke surprisingly often on the sitcom from the late 1980s and each time, it felt like an incursion in to my safe space. How dare this 35-year-old TV show disrupt my stupor with a joke about a buffoonish real estate magnate, not knowing the twisted resonance it would hold decades later.

The self-deceiving nature of this state was further revealed last weekend, when some internal barometer sent the entire system offline and nothing I used to distract myself was effective anymore. All of the fears and negative stimuli I had been trying to keep at bay for months and years came crashing in and things were really ugly for awhile.

Things are still really ugly today.

To say that I’m in pain over the election results would be putting it lightly, but so much of that hurt is self-inflicted. While in my TV-soaked stupor throughout the administration, I fell back into pre-2016 bad habits, like assuming that progress is self-evident and that people would vote in their own best interest. I forgot that even though the world is on fire, not everyone cares about putting it out, and that sometimes groups would rather win than admit they’ve made a mistake.

I was hoping for a Biden landslide because I wanted to believe that we’d all learned an important lesson and were back on the same page. It’s easy to believe in America when your team wins decisively. It’s harder to be a patriot when the hard work is ongoing. I failed our country over the last four years because I assumed we were all sorry for the mess that had been made of it. I genuinely forgot that for many people — for the 5 million more people who voted for Trump this year over 2016 — they love the mess and the pain and the hurt and the hate.

Once the election results have been finalized and the court challenges cease, I hope not to return to “GBBO” or any series as a form of anesthetic — TV as general frivolity, as well as the basis for my career is fine, however — because at some point self-medication does more harm than good.

Spending so much time on the couch, watching U.K. bakers watch and worry over their cakes and breads and ridiculous pastry towers, sometimes my foot will fall asleep and need to be brought back online. Sometimes I’ll be impatient and attempt to walk on it all the same and marvel at how dangerous it is, the lack of tension or resistance in my joints carrying with it an implicit threat, telling me that I’ve gotten myself into a state where my body can’t protect me from myself. Generally it’s enough to spook me into sitting down and waiting it out.

Over time, the paresthesia fades and my nerve endings register their displeasure, an electric frisson of pain and relief at again being alive and alert and part of a whole.

Pain happens for a reason. It reminds us we’re alive and warns us that that might not always be the case. After 2016, I tried to flee what was happening in my mind and my heart and my country, without ever leaving the safety of my own protective bubble. I told myself that running away from the truth was a temporary state of being, but four years later, it’s clear that wasn’t true.

The disappointment of the 2020 election, in which Biden seems likely to win — but in such a lackluster way that it almost feels like a loss — feels clarifying in a way that 2016 was not. What seemed like a fluke then is now an unavoidable reality. Does it hurt? Hell yes, it does. Do I want to run away? You better believe it.

But the fog is gone. It’s done. We can’t look away from the country as it truly is and the only way we’re going to change it is by fighting for it and, in some cases, against it. Let’s put away our remotes and our streaming queues, close our laptops and put on our masks, get organized, stay safe, and work for something better. Something clearer. We owe it — I owe it — to those people who never stopped fighting, never had the luxury of sinking into the fog, and always saw plainly the country as it is: a work very much in progress.

Joe Biden elected president — at last — as major media declares an end to grueling race

Joe Biden has finally been elected as the 46th president of the United States, according to the Associated Press, CNN, the New York Times and other major media outlets. On Saturday morning, after the former vice president took a 34,000-vote lead in Pennsylvania — just above the 0.5% threshold that would have dictated a recount — AP called the Keystone State, and the presidential election, at 11:28 a.m. Eastern time. With that, Donald Trump’s contentious and divisive presidency apparently draws to a close.

According to numerous reports from news sources and social media, celebrations of Biden’s victory have begun to break out in major cities across the country, on a beautiful fall day on the Eastern seaboard and throughout most of the nation.

President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will address the nation at 8 p.m. Eastern time from outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, according to the AP. All major broadcast networks and news networks will carry the speech live.

President Trump was reportedly playing golf at a course he owns in Virginia at the time Biden was declared president-elect. He has not yet conceded defeat, in yet another departure from the norms of electoral politics, and there are no signs he will do so anytime soon.

The president issued a statement in his typically combative and borderline-nonsensical style soon after the AP election call, which began: “We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed.” The statement observed that Biden “has not been certified as the winner of any states,” which is true — because no states certify their final votes for several weeks after Election Day. Trump further alleged that his campaign “has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor,” without clarifying what any of those might be.

Representatives of Trump’s campaign, led by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, were holding a news conference in Philadelphia to discuss alleged voting irregularities in Pennsylvania at virtually the same time as the AP announced Biden’s victory. Giuliani appeared taken aback by the news that all the major news networks had called the election, and the press conference rapidly veered off the campaign’s apparent script.

Meanwhile, @RudyGiuliani is not taking this well. Here's what happened when he was asked about @CNN, @FoxNews, @MSNBC, @AP, etc calling the race for @JoeBiden. pic.twitter.com/gOmlRaMiyg

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) November 7, 2020

This long-delayed moment brings an end to an extraordinary five-day vote count during which time seemed suspended for many Americans, while rumors and conspiracy theories flowed freely on social media. Results have remained in doubt in several states ever since election night — and at this writing, Alaska, Georgia and North Carolina have still not been called by any major media organization for either candidate. (Biden was declared the winner in Nevada shortly after the Pennsylvania call.) Biden holds a narrow lead in Georgia, which is heading for a recount. Trump seems certain to win Alaska and likely to win North Carolina, but those states may not report final vote totals for days or weeks.

As a result, the final electoral vote total will not be clear for some time. The AP currently has Biden at 290 electoral votes, because that organization called Arizona for Biden several days ago, whereas other media outlets have not done so. The New York Times credits Biden with 279 electoral votes. (At least 270 are required to win the election.) Biden’s final total could be as many as 306 electoral votes, while Trump will likely finish with at least 232. The final result could well wind up as a virtual mirror image of the 2016 count, won by Trump over Hillary Clinton, 304 to 227.

In any event, Biden has won a conclusive victory in the popular vote, in an election with a remarkably high turnout. With vote counting not yet complete in a number of large states — including New York, California and Illinois, where millions of Democratic-leaning votes remain uncounted — Biden currently has about 74.5 million votes, or 50.5% of the total, to 70.3 million for Trump, or 47.7%. Both candidates in this race received more votes than any previous presidential candidate in U.S. history, one of many reasons why the 2020 election will long be remembered as an extraordinary event.

Multiple news outlets have reported that Trump has told friends and advisers he has no plans to concede. Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates responded to the reports by predicting the president would be escorted from the White House if he refuses to leave.

“As we said on July 19th, the American people will decide this election,” Bates said in a statement. “And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

A statement from the Trump campaign on Thursday protested the “false projection of Joe Biden as the winner” and argued that there were “irregularities” in Pennsylvania and Nevada that might affect the result, though the campaign’s legal challenges have thus far fallen flat. The campaign also predicted a victorious recount in Georgia and an “outright” win in Arizona, although both those outcomes seem doubtful — and have now been rendered irrelevant. At this point, there is no realistic way for Trump to overturn the verdict of the voters in numerous states.

Biden’s long-expected victory comes after Trump’s repeated and blatantly false claims of voter fraud in states where Biden has won or holds the lead. On Wednesday, the president even attempted to declare victory, via Twitter, in states that had not been called, and where he has now been conclusively or apparently defeated. Trump has also demanded that officials “stop the count,” though there is no legal reason to halt the counting of valid votes.

Although some Republicans have echoed Trump’s false claims about the vote count, other GOP lawmakers have begun publicly speaking out against his inflammatory rhetoric.

“The president’s allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are not substantiated,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said on Friday. “I’m not aware of any significant wrongdoing here.”

“There is no defense for the President’s comments tonight undermining our Democratic process,” said Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who said he cast his vote for Ronald Reagan. “America is counting the votes, and we must respect the results as we always have before.”

Biden campaign attorney Bob Bauer said the suits were legally “meritless” and only intended to “create an opportunity” for the Trump campaign “to message falsely about what’s taking place in the electoral process.”

Some Trump allies have even floated the idea of Republican-led state legislatures appointing electors that would override the popular vote result in their states to back Trump. Although the Constitution allows for that possibility, nothing similar has occurred since the 19th century. Republican legislative leaders in Pennsylvania again rejected that idea on Friday.

“We have said it many times and we will happily say it again,” state Senate leader Jake Corman and House leader Kerry Benninghoff, said in a joint statement. “The Pennsylvania General Assembly does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors or in deciding the outcome of the presidential election.”

What “reasonable” Republicans? GOP leaders are boosting Trump’s attack on democracy

Is it too soon to let out a sigh of relief? At the end of a long week, it looks as if America has avoided the worst-case scenario. With Joe Biden likely to be declared president-elect on Friday, we’ve officially reached the point where the biggest attempt to discredit the U.S. election is coming from President Trump, even as judges across the country are laughing his lawsuits out of court and the media is largely portraying him as a whiny baby throwing a tantrum.

But it is entirely too early to rest easy.

After Trump took to a podium at the White House late Thursday to deliver another baseless rant about a stolen election, in what felt like an effort to explain away his impending and inevitable defeat, CNN contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator and presidential candidate, claimed that no GOP official would stand behind Trump’s efforts to delegitimize our electoral process. Republicans like Santorum have long waved away concerns about this very scenario and many in the media have insisted that the “institutions will hold. Many people remain confident that Trump appears flailing and impotent in defeat and that the so-called adults in the room will swiftly reject him — but nothing about the last four years should offer us much confidence about that.

Remember the “Access Hollywood” tape? With days to go before the 2016 election, several Republicans in Congress rushed to rebuke Trump as a sexist boor who in no way represented their values — only to turn around after his shock victory and become his most fervent boosters. We are already seeing much the same turnaround from the usual GOP suspects today.

Chris Christie garnered plaudits when he immediately called Trump’s decision to petition the Supreme Court “a bad strategic decision” and “a bad political decision” in the early morning hours after Election Day. The admonishment of James Baker, the former secretary of state who led George W. Bush’s Florida recount battle in 2000, was shared widely on Thursday. Baker told the New York Times, “I think it’s pretty hard to be against counting the votes.”

“We never said don’t count the votes,” Baker explained. “That’s a very hard decision to defend in a democracy.”

On Fox News, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich initially warned Trump against undermining confidence in the electoral system. After White House officials blew a gasket about election-night coverage on the right-wing network, particularly its declaration that Biden had won Arizona, Gingrich rapidly switched to dutifully peddling Team Trump’s unfounded charges on Twitter.

After Trump’s Thursday remarks, Gingrich returned to Fox News, and literally suggested that federal agents arrest election workers and law enforcement officers in Pennsylvania. Those shocking and dangerous comments came after the Department of Justice informed federal prosecutors that they were permitted to send “armed federal officers to ballot-counting locations around the country to investigate potential voter fraud.” DOJ lawyers are reportedly looking into Republican claims of fraud in Nevada while Trump reportedly contemplates firing a handful of top officials, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and FBI Director Chris Wray, in an attempt to look as presidential as possible.

Infamous GOP operative Karl Rove, now a frequent Fox News contributor, has managed to release a few words downplaying Trump’s plans — but only on his personal blog. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s statement on the matter was so useless it completely failed to mention the main perpetrator of these spurious allegations: Trump. The Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, was a bit more forceful in his pushback — but Hogan has long been a Trump critic, and has said he cast a write-in vote for Ronald Reagan in this election. (Reagan is not technically eligible on at least two constitutional counts.) Just as they failed to push back on Trump when he falsely claimed voter fraud after actually winning the 2016 election, the “reasonable” Republicans will not save us now.

The president’s campaign has called for the counting of citizens’ votes to halt, has encouraged his supporters to interfere with the counting of ballots — in the apparent hope that disturbances will help with his lawsuits — has solicited examples of supposed voter fraud from disreputable sources, like bottom-feeding lawyers looking for clients, and is openly pleading for the intervention of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s newly-installed Supreme Court nominee. on Fox News. Within just a few days, Team Trump has done everything short of unleashing right-wing con artists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman from their jail cells. Yet most Republicans in Congress are rushing to Trump’s side.

The trifecta of Republican senators most likely to run in 2024 — Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley — have amplified Trump’s baseless claims loudest, even encouraging their supporters to donate to the president’s legal defense fund. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who easily fended off a Democratic challenger this week to win a new term, said he would personally donate $500,000 to Trump’s effort. Telling Fox News’ Sean Hannity that while he does “trust Arizona,” where Trump is gaining in the vote count, Philadelphia elections are “crooked as a snake.” Asked whether the Republican-dominated Pennsylvania legislature should appoint its own slate of Trump electors, Graham said, “I think everything should be on the table.”

The American people, whatever their party, deserve total transparency in the election vote. Allow poll watchers to be present as ballots counted. Full accounting of all ballots. Ban ballot harvesting pic.twitter.com/SvnO5NN8Ep

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) November 6, 2020

Republican members of the House have joined protests at vote-counting sites in Arizona, complained about “shady ballot counting” in key states, and falsely suggested that votes are being counted in secret. The Republican majority leader of Pennsylvania’s House is now blaming Democrats for the commonwealth’s failure to have a final count of mail-in ballots on Election Day — but it was his legislative body that blocked Democratic efforts to allow counting to begin early.

This election was supposed to be a drag on down-ballot Republicans. Not so much. Just as in 2016, Trump turned out to be a boon, not a burden, to the GOP. It was only in 2018, when Trump wasn’t on the ballot, that the party faced a modicum of accountability. Republicans have apparently learned their lesson. As they’ve also demonstrated with the COVID pandemic, Republicans are more than willing to sacrifice truth, democracy and their own long-term political viability to make their political opponents suffer in the near term.

If Trump tries to sue his way to election victory, here’s what happens

A hearing on Wednesday in an election case captured in miniature the challenge for the Trump campaign as it gears up for what could become an all-out legal assault on presidential election results in key swing states: It’s easy enough to file a lawsuit claiming improprieties — in this case, that Pennsylvania had violated the law by allowing voters whose mail-in ballots were defective to correct them — but a lot harder to provide evidence of wrongdoing or a convincing legal argument. “I don’t understand how the integrity of the election was affected,” said U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage, something he repeated several times during the hearing. (However the judge rules, the case is unlikely to have a significant effect; only 93 ballots are at issue, a county election official said.)

“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Levitt said judges by and large have ignored the noise of the race and the bluster of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. “They’ve actually demanded facts and haven’t been ruling on all-caps claims of fraud or suppression,” Levitt said. “They haven’t confused public relations with the predicate for litigation, and I would expect that to continue.”

If Levitt is right, that may augur poorly for the legal challenges to the presidential election. Either way, the number of cases is starting to rapidly increase. But lawsuits will do little good unless, as in the 2000 presidential election, the race winds up being so close that it comes down to a very thin margin of votes in one or more must-win states.

One of the few certainties is that we will not see the instant Bush v. Gore replay that Trump seems to have in mind. A few hours after voting ended, in a 2 a.m. speech that drew bipartisan condemnation for the president’s premature declaration that he had won the election, Trump baselessly described the ongoing ballot count as “a fraud on the American public.” “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” he told his supporters. “We want all voting to stop.” Trump is famously litigious, but he’s not a lawyer, and he seemed not to understand that apart from a small class of cases (largely territorial disputes between states), lawsuits don’t originate at the Supreme Court. The Trump campaign would have to file suit in a state or federal court and eventually appeal an adverse decision to the high court. Along the way, as the Pennsylvania court anecdote suggests, the Trump campaign would need to show evidence to back up his claim, and so far there’s no evidence of fraud in the ongoing ballot counts, which often run beyond election night. Tallying legitimate votes is not, despite the president’s tweeted claims, a form of fraud.

Once there’s a clearer picture of the outcome of the presidential election in key states like Pennsylvania, one party or the other may file lawsuits in state court challenging the legality of certain ballots or asking for a recount, a process described in ProPublica’s guide to election laws and lawsuits. Trump campaign officials told supporters on a conference call Wednesday that they believed they’re “in recount territory” in Wisconsin and Michigan, according to a report in The Washington Post. In a statement to The New York Times on Wednesday, Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said the campaign planned to request a recount in Wisconsin “immediately.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Michigan state court asking that elections officials be ordered to stop opening mail-in ballots and tabulating votes until campaign officials are granted “meaningful access” to observe the process. The campaign’s statement about the suit did not explain in what way election officials had limited their access or why the campaign believes those limitations violate state law. The campaign also demanded “to review those ballots which were opened and counted while we did not have meaningful access” — a possible prelude to a hunt for technicalities that might allow the Trump team to challenge ballots cast for Democrats. The campaign made a similar request Wednesday in Pennsylvania state court.

Similar lawsuits filed by Republicans in Nevada and elsewhere have met with little success. In those lawsuits, the campaign has asked for essentially unfettered access to ballot canvassing locations. A judge who dismissed a similar lawsuit in Nevada observed that Trump campaign officials “seem to request unlimited access to all areas of the ballot counting area and observation of all information involved in the ballot counting process.” That was more than state law required, he wrote, and granting the request would slow the ballot count and impede social-distancing protocols. State election codes generally permit campaign officials to observe ballot canvassing, but not without reasonable limitations.

Trump campaign officials also said their legal team had or would challenge ballots in North Carolina and Georgia, traditional red states that remain too close to call.

It’s not likely the recount requests or ballot challenges, which are common in the wake of close elections, will make a difference in the outcome. “Recounts rarely change the vote totals very much,” said University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas, and the same is true of challenges to the validity of ballots. That fact certainly won’t impede the filing of suits.

As of this moment, keeping in mind that the situation is developing by the hour, here are the other active lawsuits that could affect the election. Most of them are left over from among the more than 300 lawsuits filed before the election in 45 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, according to a database maintained by the Healthy Elections Project, a joint project of researchers at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The election could come down to Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state where the outcome may not be known until the end of this week, and five lawsuits challenging the state’s election administration are currently pending in state and federal court.

In September, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ordered state election officials to accept mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days late, so long as they were either postmarked by Election Day or lacked a legible postmark. As in other states, the goal was to prevent mail delays from disenfranchising the historic number of Americans who, on account of the coronavirus pandemic, planned to vote by mail. Republicans appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week declined to rush a decision before the election.

Before the election, Trump derided the high court’s refusal to intervene as a “terrible decision.” “We’re going to go in the night of — as soon as that election’s over — we’re going in with our lawyers,” he told reporters gathered on a tarmac on Sunday ahead of a campaign rally in Hickory, North Carolina.

The president’s prediction was off by a day or so, but on Wednesday afternoon, his campaign asked to be allowed to intervene in the litigation (which was filed by Pennsylvania’s Republican party). The next move is up to the justices, who are still mulling whether to hear the case at all. Three justices — Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — indicated last week that the court might still take the case and void late ballots after the election, and Pennsylvania election officials have agreed to store late-arriving ballots separately, in case the high court orders them thrown out. The case’s fate may hinge on the views of the newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, who didn’t participate in last week’s decision.

As noted, Republicans have sued Pennsylvania (there are actually two cases, one each in state and federal court), targeting efforts by state election officials to alert voters who submitted defective mail-in ballots — like failing to include a “secrecy envelope,” a requirement voting-rights advocates have worried could invalidate an unusually high volume of ballots — so they could either fix their error or submit a provisional ballot. Election officials have defended their practices as in line with state law. In the federal case, as noted, the judge expressed skepticism about the claim. An initial conference will be held Wednesday afternoon in the other case, which targets this practice statewide. Also Wednesday, the Trump campaign said it was filing a lawsuit in federal court in Pennsylvania over a decision it said election officials had made to extend the deadline for first-time voters to provide proof of identification.

In Nevada, late on Tuesday, the state’s Supreme Court rebuffed a last-minute effort by Republicans to temporarily block certain aspects of mail-in ballot processing in Clark County, a bastion of Democratic voters that is home to Las Vegas. That included the use of machines to speed the process of checking voter signatures against state records.

The court agreed to hear the case on an expedited basis, with a decision possible as early as next week. But its ruling expressed doubts about the lawsuit’s core claims. The plaintiffs “have not demonstrated a sufficient likelihood of success,” the state’s highest court wrote. The lower court had found their “allegations lacked evidentiary support, and their request for relief to this court is not supported by affidavit or record materials supporting many of the factual statements made therein.” The order went on to observe that the plaintiffs had also failed to identify “any mandatory statutory duty” that election officials “appear to have ignored,” and that they had failed to counter certain key conclusions of the district court.

In Minnesota, former Vice President Joe Biden has a sizable lead, but should that lead narrow, a ruling last week from a federal appeals court could have implications for the outcome in that state’s presidential vote. The court, in a 2-1 ruling along ideological lines, ordered state election officials to separate late-arriving ballots and indicated that it was likely to invalidate them when it ruled on the legality of a post-Election Day buffer period agreed to by state officials in light of the large number of mail-in ballots expected amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Texas, comfortably in Trump’s column, is the inverse of Minnesota. But a late effort by Republicans to throw out ballots cast via drive-thru voting in Harris County — home to Houston and a large chunk of the state’s Democratic electorate — remains live. A district court judge ruled against the plaintiffs, and on Monday a federal appeals court declined to block drive-thru voting on Election Day. The Republicans, however, have not ruled out seeking review by the full appeals court or taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. (The Texas Supreme Court, in a separate case, declined to block drive-thru voting.) Nevertheless, Harris County officials closed nine of 10 drive-thru polling locations on Tuesday to minimize the risk that large numbers of votes would get tossed if the plaintiffs ultimately prevailed.

Finally, North Carolina is not viewed as likely to decide the presidential election, but a tight Senate race there has major implications for control of the chamber come January. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to temporarily block a buffer period for late-arriving ballots, but the case is still working its way through the lower federal courts and could return to the high court. The three justices who expressed skepticism about Pennsylvania’s buffer period raised similar questions about the legality of North Carolina’s.

Detroit women may help Joe Biden win

Danielle Atkinson, the director of Mothering Justice, a Detroit advocacy group, didn’t expect a blue wave on Tuesday. She’d seen all the Trump signs dotting lawns in the suburbs. Her members, mostly Black women who work retail, child care and service jobs, had been on the phones with voters in recent weeks.

Those interactions with friends and family networks were, at times, harder than she might have expected. “The conversations were, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to vote. I don’t know if my vote matters. What did we get from Obama?'”

COVID may have laid bare this country’s racial and economic disparities, but, thus far, it appears that the pandemic election has not created a tsunami of support for a broad agenda to tackle them. For those working at organizations like Mothering Justice who are in the trenches with voters, this election-day reckoning may be less of a shock to the system.

“What we’re looking at right now is not a surprise,” Atkinson said on Wednesday as Michigan’s votes were still being tallied. “We were under no illusion that the entire country was ready for the change that needs to happen.” Still, she remained bullish on the hustle and grit of her members. “We knew that Black women would save the day.”

That afternoon their work seemed to be paying off. CNN and NBC called the state for Joe Biden, with the help of heavily African American Wayne County, making a path to the White House for the former vice president appear more likely. Biden had won 13% more Wayne County votes than Clinton did in 2016.

* * *

But that triumph comes with a large caveat. Trump also won more votes this year in the Southeastern Michigan county than he did in 2016, suggesting increased voter enthusiasm over four years ago on both sides of the aisle. The current 37 point margin in Wayne County between Trump and Biden is identical to Clinton’s 37 point margin with Trump in 2016, but well below Obama’s 49 point margin over John McCain in 2008.

Exit polls bear out Atkinson’s take on a nation divided. Trump voters believe the economy is humming along nicely, that the pandemic is somewhat or completely under control, and that racism is not a serious problem. Obamacare should be repealed in part or entirely, they tell pollsters.

The vast majority of Biden voters, meanwhile, think the economy is in poor shape, the pandemic is raging out of control, that racism is a serious societal problem, and the Affordable Care Act should remain intact or be expanded.

Regardless of the disagreement, these facts remain:

On Election Day, 1,130 people died from COVID-19.
Eight million people have fallen into poverty since May as economic relief has evaporated.
The unemployment rate is down to 7.9% but it’s still higher than it was near the height of the Great Recession.

The growing economic strains are apparent in Atkinson’s Detroit, a mostly African American city that has weathered the scars of deindustrialization, redlining and white flight, and was hit early and hard by the virus. “In March, April, people were dying,” she remembered. “And every day it was another person who knew somebody.”

Her organization of about 4,000 mothers has also harnessed its informal networks for voter outreach. Each member was responsible for reaching out to 50 other members and ensuring they voted. But the decision to shutter their door-knocking program out of health concerns hurt the voter outreach effort, Atkinson believes. And that wasn’t the only challenge.

“There wasn’t clear enthusiasm around the alternative to the [Trump] administration,” she said. That enthusiasm gap required each organizer to engage in longer conversations with voters about the issues they cared about and to explain how a Democratic administration could help advance an agenda that mattered to them.

Mothering Justice’s “Mama’s Agenda,” reflecting its constituency of low income women, calls for investment in a comprehensive child care program that takes into account the interests of family day care providers, as well as parents and children, COVID relief and paid family leave. But Atkinson argues its appeal is universal.

“Mothers of color have been a canary in the coal mine for the country,” she said. “And when we put their agenda first, when we are factoring in our most underrepresented and marginalized women, we are fixing the country for everyone.”

Trump delivers a pathetic stream of lies from White House as he desperately tries to claim victory

As election officials continue to count ballots across the country, President Donald Trump delivered a low-energy and belabored speech in the White House press room on Thursday in a desperate effort to seize control of the narrative.

His strategy was clear. He wanted to cast doubt on the results of the election and claim he won. Near the end of the speech, he said forthrightly that he’s claimed some states and his opponent Joe Biden has claimed some states, “but ultimately, I have the feeling, judges are going to have to rule.” (Biden has not “claimed” any states, which is meaningless, though some key swing states have been called in the Democrat’s favor.)

Trump wants to trigger enough confusion and chaos around the election results so that he can take his case to judiciary, and possibly even the Supreme Court, which he knows is stacked with his ideological allies. The problem is, however, that as of yet, he appears to have no legal ground to stand on to actually challenge what appears to be the most likely result of the counting: a Biden victory in enough key states to hand him the presidency.

To support the strategy, Trump delivered a deluge of lies about the electoral process, trying to claim that he is victorious and being undermined by nefarious actors.

He started out by falsely claiming, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win.” He has no basis for making this claim, and it’s almost certainly wrong. He simply wants to declare votes against him as de facto illegitimate.

He claimed that no House Republicans had lost races in the November election, which was false, and that Republicans kept control of the Senate — which remains to be seen. Control of the Senate will likely be determined by runoff elections in Georgia, which won’t be held until January.

He lied and said that his election observers were not allowed to watch the results get tabulated in key areas, a fact quickly refuted by people who had actually been on location. He lashed out at pollsters, who do indeed appear to have underestimated his level of support to some degree, but he falsely said they used “suppression” polls to try to discourage his voters.

In a contradictory rhetorical strategy, Trump tried to claim that he had won in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, where his lead in the reported ballots has been dwindling as more votes are counted. But when he discussed Arizona, where Biden is currently leading as the ballots are counted, Trump claimed that he expects to come out ahead as more of the vote is assessed. He alleged that votes continue to be “found” for Biden, suggesting they were somehow fraudulent, even though the counting process is simply continuing as expected.

He even said, “It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided.” While the mail-in votes being counted do tend to favor Biden, that’s exactly what everyone expected — largely because Trump actively discouraged his voters away from using mail ballots for months. Election Day votes, predictably, heavily tended to favor Trump.

Overall, it was an incredibly weak display, the desperate act of a desperate man. It may fuel the fires of conspiracy that drive many of his fans, but it will likely discourage his allies from defending his case — because it is so evidently meritless.

Many networks broke away from covering Trump’s speech in real time to fact check his lies. Even on Fox News, hosts were critical of the president.

“The election is not going his way,” said Fox News reporter John Roberts. “He’s trying to plan an alternate route to the White House.”

Phillip Rucker of the Washington Post noted: “Keep in mind Trump is reading his speech from a prepared text, which presumably means that a number of aides helped him compose this litany of lies and attacks on the integrity of America’s democracy.”

“President Trump without providing any evidence for his claims says of Democrats: They are trying to “steal” and “rig” the election. He is saying many, many things that are not true right now,” said Yamiche Alcindor of PBS NewsHour.

Daniel Dale, CNN’s prolific Trump fact-checker, observed: “I’ve read or watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he has ever given.”

Trump’s election lies are dangerous to democracy. Twitter must suspend his account

As Twitter on Thursday continued to slap warning labels on “misleading” tweets from President Donald Trump, two national democracy watchdog groups in the U.S. called on the social media giant to immediately suspend the president’s account for “repeated violations” of its own rules.

In a joint letter (pdf) to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Common Cause and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law express appreciation for the social media company’s “removing and flagging” of certain posts “that could potentially harm voters,” but say that “in certain instances, these remedial steps do not go far enough.”

Since Election Day, Twitter has hidden several of the president’s posts containing lies about the results and voter fraud behind the message: “Some or all of the content shared in this tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Users can still opt to “view” the tweets.

In their letter, the two groups urge Dorsey to temporarily suspend the personal account from which the president generally tweets—@realDonaldTrump—noting that the company has taken such action in response to violations by other public figures.

Can Twitter just man up and suspend @realDonaldTrump already?

He’s spreading lies, propaganda, and inciting violence. pic.twitter.com/2Tpz30QaOx

— David Leavitt 🎲🎮🧙‍♂️🌈 (@David_Leavitt) November 5, 2020

“We are not aware of any exceptions for current elected officials who, by virtue of their position, pose an even greater threat to the public when allowed to repeatedly violate your policies with impunity,” the letter says. “President Trump’s repeated use of Twitter’s service to amplify false claims regarding our elections stand in deliberate violation of the platform’s Civic Integrity Policy.”

The letter cites lines from the policy and provides examples of Trump appearing to violate it over the past day before expressing concern that “President Trump’s continued use of Twitter’s platform to spread disinformation may incite the public in ways that could prove harmful to public safety, if it has not done so already.”

“We fear that, in the absence of action by Twitter, the president may be successful in his goal of delegitimizing the integrity of our democratic processes for many, and not just Twitter users but other voters and members of the public, sowing uncertainty about the voting and elections process, and potentially inciting violence against civil servants or others,” the letter adds.

While recognizing that Twitter must work to “balance the newsworthiness of a public figure’s use of the platform, and the potential threats to democracy and public safety from its unfettered use,” the groups conclude that “particularly in the next 24-48 hours, the balance must be weighted towards the free, fair, and transparent operation of our civic processes.”

NEW: @KristenClarkeJD & I are calling on @Twitter/@jack to suspend @realDonaldTrump's account. Trump has repeatedly violated Twitter's Civic Integrity Policy and has spread disinformation about the vote counting process.https://t.co/wwB9dElFGi pic.twitter.com/uZ2R0GHr3R

— Karen Hobert Flynn (@KHobertFlynn) November 5, 2020

The letter is signed by Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn and Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Clarke said in a statement Thursday that “Twitter has a duty to ensure that its platform is not used to attack the foundations of our democracy.”

Hobert Flynn concurred, explaining that “we are a democracy and democracies count all the votes. But the president is freely using his Twitter account in an attempt to deliberately undermine the nation’s vote count and undercut Americans’ faith in our elections.”

“We are urging Twitter to take immediate action to enforce its own policies and curb President Trump’s Twitter campaign to spread disinformation and sow unrest amongst his followers,” she added. “The president’s actions are dangerous and irresponsible and Twitter has an obligation to be a responsible corporate citizen and safeguard our democracy.”

As of press time, ballots were still being counted in several states, but the New York Times projected that Trump had secured only 214 electoral votes compared with Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s 253. Biden currently leads in Arizona and Nevada—which, with 11 and six electoral votes each, would be enough for the former vice president to win the race.

Republicans caught conspiring to commit mass election fraud in Pennsylvania

President Donald Trump is often criticized for psychological projection, where his guilty conscience accuses his opponents of committing his own schemes.

Trump has been arguing that there was widespread voter fraud, but without providing any evidence.

Republicans may have just provided such evidence in a way that backfired spectacularly.

“Hours before President Donald Trump went on national television Thursday to declare the inherent illegitimacy of ballots received after Nov. 3, local Republican officials recruited volunteers to call Pennsylvania voters and urge them to get their ballots in by Friday—three days after Election Day,” The Daily Beast reported late Thursday evening.

“The request, election lawyers say, appears to flagrantly run afoul of state law. Under Pennsylvania law and a recent state Supreme Court decision, absentee and mail-in ballots are valid as long as they were postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 6. Any Trump supporter who sends in their ballots either Thursday or Friday would not have it postmarked within the acceptable deadline—creating the precise situation that the president himself has deemed fraudulent and corrupt,” The Beast explained.

“The email, which was sent by the group Kenosha For Trump and forwarded to The Daily Beast, said it was marshaling the effort on behalf of Trump Victory, the committee established by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to run the field program for the president’s re-election,” The Beast noted.

The Beast interviewed Jonathan Diaz, the chief counsel for the Campaign Legal Center.

“This seems like encouraging people to improperly submit ballots that should not be counted,” Diaz noted. “That would be exactly what the president and his campaign are accusing Democrats of doing.”

Attorney Ben Geffen of the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia wondered if there might be a darker motivation.

“I wonder if they’re doing this in hopes of slipping one through and then waving it around as an example of the flawed process,” Geffen said. “The real story is, it sounds like the Trump campaign is promoting cheating.”

Law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen weighed in on Twitter:

This is some really 4th dimensional chess stuff: solicit PA Republicans to commit voter fraud to make the election look fraudulent to cause courts to throw out election results—after using the Supreme Court to force late ballots to be segregated so that can’t happen. LOL https://t.co/g6DC6laKZ2

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) November 6, 2020

Even Fox News hosts aren’t buying Kayleigh McEnany’s attempts to spin a Trump campaign election suit

Faced with dwindling hopes for a electoral win, White House press secretary turned unpaid Trump campaign official Kayleigh McEnany struggled to explain the legal merits of her boss’ last-minute lawsuits in a Wednesday interview with Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

Specifically, McEnany strained to justify the campaign’s attempt to join a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Republicans seeking to intervene in a state Supreme Court decision. That court order, handed down before the election, validated mail ballots with an Election Day postmark received by Friday, Nov. 6.

Citing the case’s proximity to the election, the U.S. Supreme Court let the order stand. In anticipation of a renewed challenge, state officials segregated their 3.1 million mail ballots between those received before and after the election.

“We believe the American people deserve answers, which is why we are in court currently fighting in Pennsylvania,” McEnany said. “They want to count ballots that come in three days after. We have election days in this country for a reason, because votes are counted on Election Day.”

The normally Trump-friendly hosts pushed back against the senior administration official, whose media appearances as an unpaid campaign official have drawn the scrutiny of ethics experts.

“Kayleigh, we always have had provisional ballots and military ballots — things that get counted later,” MacCallum said. “The votes have to be in by Nov. 3 . . . The voting is happening on Election Day. It’s just how long it takes to get them counted: three days.”

“In Pennsylvania, they want to extend arrival for three days after,” McEnany responded, adding that she believed Trump would win even if the ballots were permitted. (In 2015, McEnany said then-vice president Joe Biden was a “man of the people” who would beat “tycoon” Trump in a head-to-head contest.)

But MacCallum challenged the Harvard Law School graduate on legal grounds, citing the likely infringement on due process.

“Even if they voted on Nov. 3 in Pennsylvania because they were told that that was OK to do, you’re going to throw their — toss their ballot out if it doesn’t come in until the day after or two days after?” MacCallum asked.

“No, we believe every vote on Election Day should be counted,” McEnany replied. “But it’s those that arrive after the Election Day that we are fighting.”

Unsatisfied, MacCallum pressed for more clarity.

“Even if they already voted on Nov. 3, which is the postmark?” she asked.

McEnany again dodged the central tenant of the question.

“We’re fighting for those that are after Nov. 3,” she replied. “We want Election Day ballots to be counted, and we will prevail.”

Moments before this exchange, McEnany had made the opposite argument about the outstanding ballots in Arizona, where Democratic nominee Joe Biden was hoping to maintain a thin lead. She predicted that the ongoing ballot count would end up offering a “very good drop” for Trump.

“About 400,000 of those [remaining ballots] are right there in Maricopa County, which is crucial,” she said. “They’ve released party ID of these ballots. There are more Republican ballots than Democrats, and we believe the unaffiliated ballots will break our way at the end of the night.”

“In fact, we’re predicting by about 30,000 votes we win, and there will be a very good drop — it looks like tomorrow morning in Maricopa County — which we think will change the analysis,” she claimed.

After McEnany’s circumlocutory bout with MacCallum, co-host Brett Baier stepped up to ask if the Trump aide was able offer “any real evidence that anything untoward has actually happened” in Pennsylvania.

McEnany did not offer such evidence, pointing instead to the past.

“Philadelphia, in particular, has a history of very peculiar results,” she replied. “You had . . . 59 different precincts where Mitt Romney got precisely zero votes, which is very unlikely and curious indeed.”

Trump made this same claim in October, and it has repeatedly been fact-checked as utterly false.

McEnany then pivoted to a valid fraud claim, albeit one which did not apply to this election. She also presented the claim, which was apparently not impactful enough to stand on its own, in a misleading manner.

“Just six months ago, you had a Philadelphia judge who was convicted in a scheme to accept bribes as he cast fraudulent ballots,” she said, accurately. “Four months ago, you had a Democrat individual who was charged for — in 2014, 2015 and in 2016 — stuffing the ballot box with fraudulent ballots.”

These seemingly two separate instances were, however, the same. A former congressman who stuffed the ballots, was charged with paying the aforementioned judge, who was convicted.

In total, the congressman stuffed 118 ballots across three elections. He, and the judge, were both caught.

Judges are tossing out President Trump’s last-minute attempts to sue his way to victory one by one

Federal judges have already begun to toss last-minute lawsuits brought by President Donald Trump’s campaign, which has turned to attempting to litigate a victory as its electoral hopes dwindle.

The campaign, which has falsely alleged that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election by counting all the votes cast, has so far filed lawsuits in three states: Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Within hours, judges had thrown out the suits in Georgia and Michigan. The Supreme Court has already declined once to rule on the Pennsylvania case.

On Thursday, the campaign announced its intent to file a fourth suit in Nevada. It has also vowed to request a recount in Wisconsin, where Democratic nominee Joe Biden has what appears to be an unassailable 20,000-vote lead.

Election law experts called the suits frivolous and unlikely to make a difference.

“They’re totally small potatoes,” Jon Sherman, senior counsel at the Fair Elections Center, told Salon. “Each has been rejected so far, and honestly, I’d rather not give them any oxygen.”

“None of Trump’s small bore lawsuits have been able to stop the count, and of course, there is no basis to do so,” Rick Hasen, election law expert at University of California, Irvine, wrote on his Election Law blog, adding that the suits’ minor claims are only “tinkering on the edges.”

In Georgia, Chatham County Superior Court Judge James Bass tossed a case in which Trump campaign poll observers claimed that 53 absentee ballots had been unlawfully commingled with ballots cast on Election Day. Elections officials in the coastal county, which contains the city of Savannah and skews heavily Democratic, testified that all 53 ballots had arrived on time. The judge heard the case for an hour before ruling against the campaign without providing an explanation.

But where Hasen argues that outside of Pennsylvania, Trump’s strategy “is not created to lead to a difference in results,” Sherman pointed out that Georgia promised to be a nail-biter.

“That state could in fairness be decided by a 53-vote margin,” he said.

In Nevada, which like Georgia has not yet been called, the campaign hopes to challenge thousands of ballots, alleging that the rise of mail-in ballots this year resulted in votes from people who are dead or otherwise do not meet state residency requirements.

At a publicity event put on by Nevada Republicans, state resident Jill Stokke claimed that when she tried to vote, polling place officials told her that she had already cast her ballot.

“In years past, I always voted in person,” Stokke said. “This time, they mailed out the ballots, and somebody took my ballot. They also took the ballot of my roommate.”

Stokke added that she had pursued the matter, but she did not say what came of it.

Lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania called for the temporary halt in vote counting until campaign poll observers were granted more access in a number of locations.

Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Cynthia Stevens ruled against the Trump campaign on Thursday, saying that the state could not accommodate the remedy requested by the campaign, because the counting process was almost complete.

Stevens also dismissed allegations of ballot tampering as “hearsay,” adding that campaign lawyers had failed to sustain their complaints about restricted access to observation.

While the campaign won its request to grant observers closer access to ballot counters in Pennsylvania, that suit did not challenge the validity of the count.

Though Pennsylvania still remains too close to call, Biden continues to eat into Trump’s lead as mail ballot continues. However, the campaign has sought to sign onto a lawsuit brought by the state’s Republican Party, which seeks to intervene in a state Supreme Court ruling handed down before the election.

That court order validated mail ballots received by Friday, so long as they had been postmarked by Election Day. The U.S. Supreme Court let that order stand in a decision ahead of the election, but in anticipation of a renewed court challenge, state election officials segregated their 3.1 million mail ballots between those received before and after the election.

“I’m not sure that the Trump campaign can even get into the case. Not sure that’s procedurally proper,” Sherman said. “But, regardless, on the merits, it’s absolutely nothing new.”

“And my earlier view still stands: It would violate the due process rights of voters,” he said, referencing a pre-election analysis he gave to Salon.

Trump tweeted Thursday that, “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Twitter immediately flagged the post as misinformation, the seventh time it had done so since Election Day.

The president also tweeted, “STOP THE COUNT!”. Doing so would hand the presidency to Biden, who currently has the lead in Nevada, the only state he needs to hit 270 electoral votes, according to the Associated Press.

Why Proposition 22’s victory in California is a major setback for American labor

When Uber first launched, it seemed like a convenient, money-saving novelty for customers and a lucrative side hustle for drivers — in other words, a win-win. Drivers, initially, were well-remunerated: in 2014, a study by a Princeton economist found Chicago Uber drivers made $4 more than the average taxi driver in the city.

However, like most cheap commodities, the cost for consumers didn’t reflect that actual cost it took to get a ride. Instead, heavy subsidies from both investors and drivers (in the form of them owning their own cars and phones) made Uber and Lyft rides seemingly less expensive. In other words, the ride cost didn’t reflect the hidden costs.

At its dawn, the fact that Uber drivers didn’t receive benefits seemed like a trade-off for the flexibility and good wage. That changed when Uber became popular: a glut of drivers meant that supply was high, and thus work — and driver wages — would dip.

A 2018 Economic Policy Institute study, which used Uber administrative data, showed that after calculating Uber’s commissions, fees, a driver’s vehicle expenses, and the cost of a modest health insurance package, Uber drivers earn on average $9.21 or less. That’s slightly above the national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which has not changed in a decade.

For other gig worker–reliant delivery and driver companies, the stats were even more dismal. A study from earlier this year published by Working Washington found that contract delivery workers for food delivery company DoorDash earned $1.45 per hour on average, after other expenses are accounted for.

The seeming success of Uber spread the concept of an on-demand, at-will contract labor force, hired at the command of an algorithm. Similar models emerged in Instacart, Doordash, Wag, Caviar, Postmates and Rover. In each case, the business model was nearly identical: exploit workers’ non-status as employees to avoid having to pay them benefits or pay into other payroll taxes; make them expendable, and without guaranteed work at any given moment, to save money; have the employee own their own mode of transit and phone, thus saving on equipment costs, and obscuring the true wage. Indeed, pushing costs onto employees were built into the gig economy business model; once the dust settled, many gig workers realized it would be difficult to make a decent living.

“I quickly discovered that it’s impossible — that when you need to actually exist on this income and pay things like health insurance for myself and my teenage son, and just put food on the table, and pay rent and all the other costs in the Bay Area, it’s impossible to exist on a Lyft income,” Edan Alva, who started driving for Lyft in 2014, told me.

Salaried tech workers and contractual gig workers had a joint awakening around the same time in 2016, as a nascent labor movement began rising in Silicon Valley. By 2019, white collar tech workers were organizing against tech CEOs, and gig workers were, too. Grassroots labor groups like Gig Workers Rising and Rideshare Drivers United bubbled up, organizing protests when Uber and Lyft slashed their wages as those companies readied to IPO.

Their organizing helped pave the way for Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) to be passed in California’s Congress, which codified a 2018 California Supreme Court decision known as Dynamex and applied a “test” to independent contractors that would determine if they were misclassified, which would change many of them to full-time, benefitted and salaried workers.

No one knew then how that well-meaning state assembly bill would eventually lead us to where we are today, with California voters approving Proposition 22, Uber and Lyft’s astroturf campaign to exempt their workers from AB5, which passed only after an alliance of gig worker–reliant corporations spent $200 million on campaign advertising — making the ballot fight the most expensive in the history of the United States.

Californians’ approval of this ballot measure cements gig workers as permanent independent contractors, keeping them from qualifying to be full-time employees and receive basic benefits. Labor experts at University of California – Berkeley did an analysis which found that Proposition 22’s passage means that Uber and Lyft drivers will only make $5.64 an hour on average. It’s a major setback for labor rights in a state that has set historic precedents for labor, including raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2023.

As the most populous state in the union, the passage of Proposition 22 could be a harbinger — and a political model that Uber, Lyft and their peers may export to other states. As Ken Jacobs, the chair UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, told me in 2019, “what happens in California will be closely watched around the country.”

“As we have seen with paid sick leave, $15 minimum wages, and fair scheduling, policies that start in one state or locality often spread elsewhere,” Jacobs added then.

More recently, Jacobs told me that he feared the approval of Proposition 22 would send “signals to other states” from these tech companies to forget about enforcing their laws because of their political power.

Labor expert Rey Fuentes, Skadden Fellow at the Partnership for Working Families, previously told Salon that Proposition 22’s passage would “lock in” a “permanent underclass of workers.” Fuentes warned that, because of the way the measure is written, workers would no longer be able to unionize. More shockingly, it is written such that it would require a 7/8ths majority of state legislators to undo — a bar that is so high as to be effectively impossible to undo.

“From an abstract perspective, the idea that some of the richest companies in the world are passing a ballot initiative that would exempt their workers from basic labor protections is just, I think beyond the pale,” Fuentes added.

Proposition 22 was the most expensive ballot measure contest in California — and the United States — in history. The tech companies who funded it collectively spent over $29 per “yes” vote; together, nearly $204 million was spent on the astroturf campaign. The astonishing sum of money reveals the lengths tech companies are willing to go to keep drivers in a precarious labor situation with low pay and substandard benefits.

Organizers in California were deeply upset by the setback, while admitting that they could not compete with tech companies’ deep pockets.

“We went up against Goliath and Goliath had $204 million, but I don’t think it’s wavered us as a collective,” Mekela Edwards, who has driven for both Uber and Lyft, told Salon. “Our next step is to continue to fight for what we believe is right.”

Curiously, the ballot measure faced its strongest opposition in San Francisco, where both Uber and Lyft are headquartered — suggesting that the locals distrust them most.

This story was updated November 18 to clarify which apps that follow a similar gig economy, middleman model as Lyft and Uber.

Fox News hosts question election results as international observer debunks Trump’s claims of fraud

Fox News opinion hosts baselessly raised doubts about the validity of the election results even as the network’s own decision desk showed Democratic nominee Joe Biden on the cusp of defeating President Donald Trump.

Fox News was the first network to call Arizona and several other states in favor of Biden. It currently shows Biden sitting at 264 electoral votes, with Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina still too close to call.

But even as the network’s “news side” refuted the Trump campaign’s complaints about the vote, its opinion hosts sought to echo the president’s attempts to sow doubt in the integrity of the results.

“Tonight every American should be angry, outraged and worried and concerned about what happened in the election and the lead-up to the election,” host Sean Hannity complained, stopping short of echoing Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud.

“Do you trust what happened in this election? Do you believe these election results are accurate? Do you believe this was a free and fair election?” he asked. “I have a lot of questions.”

Host Tucker Carlson claimed that the “outcome of our presidential election was seized from the hands of voters” and put in the hands of “clearly corrupted city bureaucrats.”

“Many Americans will never again accept the results of a presidential election,” he added.

Host Laura Ingraham wondered if “the fix” is “already in,” citing “many questions” about unspecified “unverifiable dumps of votes.”

“Fox & Friends,” meanwhile, hosted an array of pro-Trump guests who spread debunked propaganda.

Former Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie asserted without evidence on Wednesday that “they” may be “stuffing the ballot boxes” in Biden’s favor.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said on the show that Trump had “already won” Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. Michigan was later called for Biden, and Pennsylvania and Georgia appear to be slipping away from Trump.

“He was reelected last night,” Lewandowski claimed, echoing Trump’s false declaration of victory.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich falsely claimed that there was “vote theft” in Pennsylvania as he echoed Trump’s claim that the vote counting which tipped some elections in Biden’s favor looked like a “setup to steal the presidency by the Democrats.”

“It is a very deliberate model of, you know, sending ballots after the vote. They don’t have to have a signature. They don’t have to have a witness. It’s an invitation for vote theft,” he falsely claimed.

No state allows voters to submit ballots after Election Day, but some count mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day if they arrive days later. Only a handful of states require a witness signature, though Pennsylvania is not one of them.

On "Fox & Friends," @newtgingrich does everything he can to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote and suggest Dems are working to steal the presidency. Gingrich recommends Trump demand Congress open up investigations in several states and be prepared to file lawsuits. pic.twitter.com/WcTIE38ZrK

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 4, 2020

The network’s news side has tried to inject some semblance of fact into its coverage.

“This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn’t won these states. Nobody is saying he’s won these states,”anchor Chris Wallace said after Trump prematurely declared victory on Wednesday morning. “There’s no question that all these states can continue to count votes for days. They don’t have to certify for weeks who has won the state.”

Chris Wallace: "This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn't won these states … the president doesn't get to say he won states … there's no question that all these states can continue to count votes." pic.twitter.com/iquygEE39Y

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 4, 2020

Arnon Mishkin, the head of the network’s decision desk, pushed back on the Trump campaign’s complaints about the network’s call in Arizona.

“I’m sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven-point lead that the former vice president has,” he said.

Fox News Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin doubled down on calling Arizona for Biden.

"I'm sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven-point lead that the former vice president has."

Here are his full comments on why pic.twitter.com/0KJAdY8v5S

— Stephanie K. Baer (@skbaer) November 4, 2020

The head of a delegation at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe who is observing elections in the U.S. refuted Trump and his allies’ baseless stoking of conspiracy theories around the vote.

“Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions,” Michael Georg Link, the head of the U.S. observer mission, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Nobody — no politician, no elected official — should limit the people’s right to vote.”

Join Arya Stark for a gun-toting good time in HBO Max’s action farce “Two Weeks to Live”

Actors who luck into an iconic TV role early in their careers basically have one of two options available to them once their series ends: they can either seek out a role that somehow outshines or obscures the work that first landed them on the map, or they can lean into it and hope that gamble evolves into a career.

Somehow “Game of Thrones” star Maisie Williams manages to have it both ways with “Two Weeks to Live,” a nervy black comedy that enables her to show off her chops as a comedic performer and an action star in one swift six-episode pass. She knows the world still sees her as Arya Stark, the small girl who trained to be a killer quick and smart enough to Westeros’ all-powerful Night King with an up close and personal stab through the heart.

But despite all of her skill and strategy-minded discipline, Arya’s character lacked a sense of humor, a deficit for which series creator Gaby Hull compensates with William’s teen survivalist Kim Noakes. An early 20-something, Kim decides it time to break out of her humdrum home life and see what the wider world has to offer.

Familiar scenario, right? Except for the important note that Kim’s home is a cabin in the woods where her mother Tina (“Fleabag” true hero Sian Clifford) has been sequestered her since a very young age. Heretofore Kim has relied on her mother for every bit of knowledge about the world, including weapons training, hand-to-hand combat and covert entry into unfamiliar places. She’s raised a tiny “Hanna,” is what we’re saying.

Tina also fudged things a bit when it comes to the state of world, and that means when Kim ventures forth into the unknown, armed with a long list of things she’s never done along with actual armaments, that leaves her open to dangerous manipulation.

Soon enough, Kim meets a kind awkward boy named Nicky (Mawaan Rizwan) and his numbskull older brother Jay (Taheen Modak), and when Jay cooks up a prank video that purports to show her that the world is ending, let’s just say a few of the most dangerous to-do items move up in priority, and bodies start dropping.

“Two Weeks to Live” announces its affection for the genre it is aping from the start when Kim tells Nicky that the only four films she’s ever seen in her life are “Terminator 2,” “Shawshank Redemption,” “Home Alone 2” and “Braveheart.” The deeper we get into its six episodes, the more we realize that Tina probably chose those entertainment tools for a purpose, even though they’re also the sort of all-purpose crowd-pleasers a person might encounter in a rental cabin.

However you look at it, the impression these movies and other morsels of throwback entertainment Tina permits her daughter to watch or listen to really burrowed into young Kim, and they burst forth in moments you can tell play one way in her head and manifest in reality quite differently and often awkwardly.

“Two Weeks to Live” also aspires to be something other than how it is presented, in that Hull obviously is writing to an audience that both loves blockbuster American cinema and appreciates her winks to the stupidity of its conceits. She also consciously caters to the female gaze her by creating an all-purpose action spree with mother-daughter conflict and care at its center, which gives it real spirit.

A few scenes in the opening couple of episodes are a bit too cutesy by half as Kim tries and fails to impress by dreaming up a killer catchphrase only to have her mark call out how cheesy it is, leading to perfectly placed banter designed to inject lightness into serious moments. This lends a mechanical quality to the dialogue in addition to the arch twists and cliffhangers that feel methodical after a point. The idea is to leave us wondering how Kim, Tina and the boys are going to get out of that episode’s predicament, and the problem is that we know they will, which robs “Two Week to Live” of any sort of dramatic tension.

The flipside of this is that if you enjoy Williams’ balance of sweet and dangerous that she serves up here, and the tart assuredness Clifford punches into every line, “Two Weeks to Live” is a ton of fun and nimble to boot. (“How many times have I said to you ‘gloves and a gun if you want to have fun’?” might be a contender for most memorable mother-daughter exchange of the year.)

Williams and Clifford make the most of the opportunities they’re given to show off their action chops, which gunplay fans should heartily enjoy. The main reason to tune in is to enjoy Kim’s knockdown, drag-out fight with a much-larger heavy played by Sean Pertwee, who is obviously getting a kick out of this. Their crisply choreographed melee takes up a good stretch of an episode and includes a few conscious nods toward Williams’ most famous duel.

It’s also the kind of roadworthy, basic crime farce that the actors make sing owing to the good time they’re having, which is precisely the type of compliment an action movie director is going for. It might as well be one; with each episode coming in under 25 minutes, it’s a comedy built for binging. This may lead a person to ask why the producers didn’t just make this into a movie, and the answer is that very few people are watching those anymore. However, we do seem to be interested in shows that ask what we’d do if the world were ending, and this one answers that with laughter and a few good wallops.

All six episodes of “Two Weeks to Live” are currently streaming on HBO Max.

Presidents presiding over recessions usually lose in a landslide. Why didn’t Trump?

It is something of an axiom in American presidential election years that if the economy is in poor shape, the incumbent party will lose. And indeed, as Americans cast their votes earlier this week, the United States was facing a recession largely due to President Donald Trump’s bungling pandemic response — while what little economic recovery had occurred since its dawn primarily benefited the upper class.

As of writing, it seems Biden is favored to win, although the election is not yet called. Yet the fact that the race is so close — indeed, the candidates are virtually tied — belies this old political adage.

So what happened? Is the economy no longer the main concern for presidential voters, or was this year a special case?

Interestingly, exit polls show Trump still received significant support from economy-minded voters, meaning many voters still see him as “strong” on the economy despite economic data to the contrary. Perhaps the pandemic situation is seen as a special case.

Or perhaps Joe Biden was not perceived as strong on the economy — or as doing anything to help struggling Americans.

“Trump is an extreme blabbermouth,” Dr. Richard D. Wolff, the professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon. “He’s offensive. I get all that. But out of his mouth comes what significant groups of our society want to hear, so he can achieve the normal Republican goals — which is an alliance between the servants of big business and enough members of the employee class to get them into power — so they can serve big business. That’s the game.”

Wolff contrasted this with the Democrats.

“Big business shells out the bucks and the Republican Party uses it to win the offices that will then give to their constituents — anti-immigration, white supremacists, gun lovers, abortion haters, and everybody else they can collect — give them what they want, and then you have the deal,” Wolff explained. “The Democratic Party is caught in a contradiction that it doesn’t want to face. It goes to the same corporations and rich people for money, and they get money, but then you can’t [be] the champion of the employee class because what the employee class wants is a direct threat to big business and the rich, and so you’re stuck.”

As a result, Wolff believes that Biden took moderate positions on many issues, being caught in this “contradiction.” That, Wolff says, may have cost him voters.

As Wolff noted, one secret to Trump’s success is that he is enlivening various members of his base — something that Biden, in contrast, didn’t really do. “[Trump] is giving to the evangelicals more of what they want. He’s giving to the white supremacists more of what they want, more than all the previous Bush-type Republicans ever were . . . . he has strengthened and rallied the collection of people Republicans always had — the gun enthusiasts, the opponents of abortion, all of that — only he’s made them more happy and more enthusiastic because he differentiates himself from the other Republicans precisely by being extreme.”

Whereas Biden, Wolff opined, is “milquetoast. . . . Whatever policy gets behind, he does it moderately. He has always done that sort of thing unless it’s something where this is no opposition, like beating up on the Chinese or the socialists or whatever it is that has no political costs.”

Wolff is not the only economic expert who has argued that ostensibly liberal parties suffer when they fail to support bold measures to help working-class voters. In 2018 French political economist Thomas Piketty wrote a paper which explained that parties claiming to be left-wing do not perform as well when their supposed support for the working class clashes with the perception that they are elitist. While the Democratic Party in the United States and its closest counterparts in the United Kingdom and France (the Labour Party and Socialist Party, respectively) did well in the 1950s and 1960s when “the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters,” over time those parties “become associated with higher education voters.”

As a result, Piketty wrote, these countries developed a system of “multiple-elite” parties where “high-education elites now vote for the ‘left,’ while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the ‘right’ (though less and less so).” This has led to rising income inequality and the inability of democratic institutions to effectively address it. Just as ominous, it has paved the way for right-wing populists like Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France.

“Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low- education, low-income voters from all origins within the same party,” Piketty observed.

Other economists who spoke to Salon agreed that voters were concerned about the economy, yet somehow did not blame Trump.

“The pandemic tanked the economy, but many Trump voters didn’t seem to blame the president for that, seeing it more as an act of God or China’s fault,” Dr. Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, wrote to Salon. “The economic recovery since 2009, while slow, has been steady, and resulted in one of the hottest economies before the pandemic. Trump’s tax cuts that benefitted corporation and the very wealthy also boosted the stock market beyond the strong economy, and people’s 401k’s were doing well. So I don’t think that there’s much Biden could have done: voters reward incumbent Presidents for strong economic performance, and Trump didn’t seem to take much blame for the current recession.”

He added, “Presidents are also rewarded for stimulus packages, and Trump was president when the CARES Act was passed, which was insufficient but still one of the most ambitious stimulus packages in US history.”

Another economist who spoke to Salon echoed Mathy’s views.

“Even years from now sweeping claims about what cause this election’s outcome will be largely guesswork,” Dr. Karl Widerquist, an American political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University’s Qatar campus, wrote to Salon. “It is possible that large numbers of people blame COVID-19 precautions rather than the lack of government relief for the cost of COVID-19 precautions, and perhaps Democrats could have done a better job of blaming Republicans for the failure to pass more economic stimulus.”

Salon also asked economic experts about the policies that will best help financially struggling and working-class voters.

“Given immediate needs, having more transfers to households and businesses through additional checks, [Paycheck Protection Program], and expanded unemployment insurance would help alleviate the current situation,” Mathy suggested. “We will see if there is a stimulus package to be passed in the lame duck: McConnell may want to pass the package under Trump and then point to Biden’s inability to pass a stimulus package in the 2022 midterms. McConnell also has more leverage now as the House Dem majority will be narrow and the Dems will not take back the Senate.”

Widerquist expressed similar views, writing to Salon that “direct individual universal cash grants are the best response to emergency. They are a bonus to those who remain in work, and a cushion for those who can’t find work or can’t work because of the crisis. All people have different needs. With cash, they are free to buy who they know they need. As people spend their bonuses, the money trickles up to business owners and investors who figure out how to provide people what they need at this time.”

He added, “Some proposals on the table included $2000 per person per month for 4-6 months or perhaps longer if the crisis lasted longer. That would have been a great idea when the lockdown started, and it’s still a good idea now.”

Wolff told Salon that Americans need a modern day equivalent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, perhaps something akin to the Green New Deal proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. He specifically said that Americans need to improve their Social Security system so that those who live on it will not be poor, raising the minimum wage so that people can live off of it (including tying it to inflation), increased unemployment insurance and a federal jobs program.

“What in the world is going on that this is not part of our national discussion? How in the world does Joe Biden look himself in the face in the morning?” After describing the success of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs — which created millions of jobs in response to the Great Depression — Wolff explained that “we now have, depending on your estimates, 20 to 25 is in Americans unemployed. They shouldn’t be. They should be hired by the government tomorrow. The actual amount of money you’d have to pay them, if you paid them, isn’t that much more than the state on employment and the federal supplement that are now in place. Only the difference would be a significant gain for them, some increase in the money they take home, and there’s an enormous benefit to the society in terms of all the work they could do.”

Mitch McConnell is already preparing to torpedo Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks

As a stream of key swing state votes begins to turn the election in presidential nominee Joe Biden’s favor, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., wasted no time in signaling that he would block potential progressive nominees for Cabinet positions if the GOP keeps its grip on the upper chamber.

A source close to the majority leader told Axios that a Republican-controlled Senate would work with Biden to confirm centrist nominees but reject so-called “radical progressives” or other individuals who rankle conservatives.

The source said Republicans would do all they could to limit a Biden agenda, adding: “It’s going to be armed camps.”

After expressing confidence in an eventual electoral victory on Wednesday, the Biden campaign quietly launched a website for its transition team. The site posted a message telling Americans that while the vote counts were not over, the transition team would continue its preparations so “the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One.”

However, electoral math currently suggests that the GOP will control enough Senate seats to scuttle the ambitions of some Democrats to fast-track a progressive agenda.

But those calculations may not bear fruit: North Carolina’s contest between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham remains too close to call, while at least one of the Georgia races has resulted in a runoff between Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democrat rival Raphael Warnock. If Democrats win both of the seats, they would claim 50 — a virtual majority under a future Vice President Kamala Harris.

A possible second runoff in Georgia between incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue and Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff would further offer Democrats a shot at outright control. That race may be a long shot, but President Donald Trump will not be on the top of the ticket to drive Republican turnout, which could cut into Perdue’s advantage in the historically red state.

Should Republicans defend all three seats, they could feasibly force Biden to nominate centrists. Sources told Axios that conservatives would prefer Lael Brainard to head the Treasury Department over a progressive in the vein of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Tony Blinken or Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., for secretary of state in lieu of former Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, who clashed with Republicans over the Benghazi pseudo-scandal during former President Barack Obama’s administration.

Coons has already made the case for bipartisanship in the press, arguing that the U.S. government needs to “speak with one voice” after four years of Trump.

“For the United States to play a steady, stabilizing role in world affairs, its allies and adversaries must know that its government speaks with one voice and that its policies won’t shift dramatically with changing domestic political winds,” Coons wrote, in an Oct. 7 op-ed in Foreign Affairs titled, “A Bipartisan Foreign Policy is Still Possible.”

The Senate traditionally yields to an incoming president’s nominees. Indeed, a number of Democrats voted in favor of Trump picks on whom the majority of the party had soured. But Secretary of Education Betsy Devos’ confirmation proved to be the most contentious in U.S. history, marking the first time a vice president had to cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm a Cabinet nominee.

McConnell, who embraces the nickname “the Grim Reaper,” has publicly displayed no qualms about shutting down disagreeable bills or nominees. He notoriously froze nominees for federal judgeships during the Obama administration, including his unprecedented election-year block of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, a position he reversed four years later when Trump put forward Amy Coney Barrett.

McConnell’s obstructionism could offer Biden a reason, should he want one, to pass over more progressive candidates, such as Warren or Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The former vice president has considered keeping any sitting Democratic senators out of the running in order to avoid special elections that may throw seats to GOP control, according to Axios.

How to fix our country’s empathy problem, starting with the farmworkers who keep us fed

Bruce Goldstein, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based organization Farmworkers Justice, said that after the novel coronavirus was declared a global pandemic in March, he saw many people become worried about their access to food for the first time. Not necessarily because of cost, but because the farmworkers who grow, harvest and manufacture it — the majority of whom are undocumented immigrants — may have been forced to stop working.

“They became aware, or more aware than in the past, of who exactly is producing food for them,” Goldstein said.

But then states across the country quickly began classifying those farmworkers as “essential employees,” people who — even if they didn’t have legal protections against deportation or access to healthcare in the country — were needed to keep food on American tables.

The pandemic spotlighted exactly how integral the labor of undocumented and migrant workers is to our country’s food system. However, as election results continue to trickle in, it’s clear that many Americans still voted for Trump, whose platform has consistently included vocal anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric.

A large part of that is due to America’s eroding sense of empathy, which only seems to have further disintegrated over the last four years.

Dr. Sarah Konrath is an associate professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University and director of the Interdisciplinary Program on Empathy and Altruism Research. She studies the decline of empathy and rise of narcissistic behavior, and published a study in 2011 about North American college students’ self-reported scores on a widely used empathy scale.

“In that paper, we tracked those scores from 1979, when the scale was first developed, to 2009, which was the latest year,” Konrath said. “We found out that the college students in the late 1970s and early ’80s scored higher in empathy than college students over time, especially in the post-2000 period.”

Empathy can be defined in several ways, but many researchers agree that it can be summarized as the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. According to Konrath, who is in the middle of producing an update to the study, there are a number of potential contributing factors, including shifts in family, community and government structures. One of the most perceptible is the relative isolation in which many Americans now live.

Dr. Jamil Zaki, a Stanford neuroscientist and author of “The War for Kindness: Building empathy in a fractured world,” said that people empathize most easily “when they can see others’ suffering with their own eyes, or when their actions are visible to others.”

“But the modern world has stripped them away,” Zaki told the Washington Post in 2019. “Humans increasingly live in cities and live alone. We see more people than ever but know fewer of them. Rituals that used to bring us into regular contact, ranging from bowling leagues to grocery shopping, have been replaced by more solitary pursuits, often carried out online. The result is our interactions with each other are often thinned out, anonymous and tribal — barren soil for empathy.”

In the age of Instacart orders and Whole Foods check-outs lined with Amazon Prime lockers, it’s easy to see how many Americans have become increasingly disconnected from the reality of who harvests their food, and that kind of anonymity could certainly breed the idea that whomever is doing that work isn’t a member of your community, but a faceless stranger. Add in potential differences in racial background and immigration status, and — as Zaki asserts, our interactions have grown increasingly tribal — that only accentuates a certain sense of “otherness.”

It also contributes to ignorance about some of the main issues that impact migrant and undocumented farmworkers.

“Many employers in this country benefit from the vulnerability that undocumented immigrants have, which causes them to be reluctant to ask for better wages and working conditions,” Goldstein said. “They’re often ineligible for basic services and benefits, like federally funded legal aid programs, so if they are ripped off by their employer, they often can’t afford a lawyer and are not eligible for free legal services. Employers can also pay a poverty-level wage, but the workers can’t get public benefits like food stamps.”

So how do we as a country bridge the empathy gap between many American consumers and the (to them) invisible masses who put food on their tables? Thankfully, empathy is a cultivatable skill.

But Mel Schwartz, a therapist and author of “The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live, and Love,” says creating a more empathetic country will require a seismic shift in how we think about otherness.

“Our worldviews, the way we see reality, particularly in our country, is so overly individualistic and self-interested,” Schwartz said. “It’s oriented toward greed — and not just financial greed. It’s narcissism, it’s ‘all about me,’ social media, how many ‘likes’ you have. When we live in a culture that is too focused on individualism, we lose the capacity to think about and feel the realities of others.”

To change that would require individuals to start valuing caring for other people and tending to their communities above the individual self. In his book, Schwartz posits that quantum physics has “actually told us that all reality is actually inseparable.”

“It’s all as one,” he said. “Everything is connected to everything else. And my point is that, from that vantage point, if everything’s connected to everything else, then we should be caring for each other, because in my caring for you, I recognize that you’re not separate from me. We need to introduce this new paradigm of oneness.”

While that concept may sound spiritual or intangible, the pandemic and the subsequent disruptions of the food supply chain in the states — from COVID-19 outbreaks at meatpacking plants largely staffed by immigrant workers, to agricultural counties across the U.S. facing higher rates of infection — drive the point of oneness or connectedness home. The issues impacting a farmworker thousands of miles away can determine what’s on your plate tomorrow night.

For some, that may still be too abstract a reason to care deeply about the working conditions with which vulnerable farmworkers are faced, and that makes sense. Researchers have found that trying to imagine how someone feels is often not enough to elicit true empathy — you need to actually ask them.

“For me, the core of empathy is curiosity,” Jodi Halpern, a psychiatrist and bioethics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times. “It’s what is another person’s life actually like in its particulars?” Exchanging stories with other people, especially people whose realities look very different from your own, is a way to vicariously “try on” someone else’s life.

Organizations that work with undocumented individuals and workers know this, and many are poised to pair personal storytelling with political messaging as a way to better serve their organizations’ missions.

Greisa Martinez, the executive director of the immigrant youth-led network United We Dream which advocated for DACA, says that the organization’s “secret sauce” is in members having the capacity to share their own stories.

“There are people out there that know what it’s like to have your electricity cut off, they’re likely the same people out there that know exactly what it feels like to not have access to food,” Martinez said. “So there’s this feeling of moving people from isolation into community.”

Once they’ve found community with people like them, they feel more empowered to share their personal experiences on a wider stage.

“We found one another and we shared our stories, we shared our pain, we celebrated the things about our culture that made us resilient,” Martinez said. “We then said, ‘Why don’t we do something together?’ and we went after the DREAM Act in 2010, and failed, but because we found community we didn’t let go. We came up with a strategy to win DACA and eventually persuaded the most powerful man in the world to use his executive power to grant protection for us and for our people.”

Since then, United We Dream has launched a community-driven research initiative leading on topics of importance to the immigrant community. These publications help tell the story of the communities they represent in their own words — and hope that it’s enough to spark some people to action, which is an important key to systemic change.

“It isn’t enough to just feel what other people are feeling,” said therapist and writer Dr. Mary Lamia, “Empathy can show up in a lot of different ways, it’s what you do with it that matters.”

So, actively seek out the stories of farmworkers to listen to and read. If you live in or nearby an agricultural community, see what worker-led organizations exist close to you and get involved. Spend time elevating the voices of farmworkers sharing their concerns.

For advocates like Bruce Goldstein from Farmworkers Justice, they’re hoping to capitalize on how the pandemic highlighted the conditions of farmworkers because their stories were told more frequently in these ways.

“We think that there’s a greater awareness of the difficulties that farmworkers are experiencing, and the need to take action,” Goldstein said. “So, I’m hopeful the empathy quotient went up. Then over the next couple of years, farmworker advocates can take advantage of that and motivate people to take action that results in the change in policy and in business practices.”