Goodbye, right-wing populism

The decisive victory of the New Zealand Labour politician, Jacinda Arden, in her country’s general election confirms a significant global political trend away from the nationalist anti-immigrant right.

A global turning point?

Prime Minister Arden is the antithesis of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and other loud-mouth immigrant-bashing rightwing populists. She channels a desire for a more balanced politics which seeks to include.

Her approach stands in stark contrast to the “exclude and divide” mantra, which is the right-wing populists’ way of generating voter support via hostility to minorities, foreigners and international rules.

Also consider Thailand, where young voters are demanding change to a more tolerant, inclusive politics and are evidently no longer afraid by the military regime.

There is also outrage in Poland at the hyper-cynical way in which the populist nationalist PiS government abuses its political might, as well as its unconstitutional moves to control the judicial branch, to suppress the right of women to decide on what terms they might give birth to a seriously ill, deformed baby.

The last member of the 1968 generation

If Joe Biden, the last 1968 generation politician still standing for high office who, at least in an American context, is progressive, defeats Donald Trump, then the ill spirits of the 2016 election will be well and truly exorcised.

Of course, a President Biden would be demonized by all Trump Republicans and cast as a left-wing politician. He receives that charge just because he is a believer in government and committed to international rules and institutions.

When populism rings hollow

For the last decade, populists have been in the saddle in quite a few countries. And in some of them, notably in Brazil, India and Turkey, they still are.

At the time, academic commentators issued dark alarms that a new illiberal, anti-immigrant, even post-democratic politics was about to take over.

Doomsday sayers galore

In 2018, Professor Matthew Goodwin, of England’s Kent University, proclaimed that “National populism is unstoppable.

His influential book “National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy” was not alone. All over Europe and the United States, political scientists were sounding the tocsin for any balanced, values-based politics.

The incredibly shrinking right-wing populists

There was endless talk about Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Golden Dawn in Greece and the Austrian Freedom Party.

To the extent that they did not implode on their own through scandals, the establishment parties have sharpened their game to ensure that they stand up more effectively to the lures of the right-wing populists.

In Germany, the AfD’s support has shrunk considerably. And in France, Marine Le Pen herself saw to it that hard right-wing and neo-fascist elements were thrown out of her party.

The Austrian nationalist populists of the Freedom Party were thrashed by the Austrian socialists last month in a key election in Vienna to control their nation’s capital city.

Matteo Salvini hoped to make a breakthrough in Italy’s regional elections last month but lost out badly to moderate left and centrist parties.

Leaders of Greece’s Golden Dawn immigrant-hating nationalist populists are now in prison, after key figures in the party were convicted in an Athens court of promoting violence.

The center rises again

Sensible middle-of-the-road politicians govern in the EU’s three Nordic member states of Sweden, Denmark and Finland as prime ministers. They are all social democrats, but offer a balanced political approach.

The pandemic has exposed the hollowness of both of the populists’ punchiest suggestions. They argued that, nations were submerged by immigrants and, that by adopting 1930s-style orthodox fiscal economics and deregulation, the economies would do much better.

The world has seen foreign immigrant doctors and nurses putting their lives on the line to look after patient in hospitals. This includes Britain, with care homes in nearly every country is completely dependent on immigrant workers.

The EU steps up its game, too

The EU has stepped up to the plate with a massive Keynesian spending program to combat the pandemic’s economic effects.

As a result, the line from Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders that all would be well in France or the Netherlands if only the EU did not exist has fewer and fewer adherents.

Even in Britain, only 39% of those polled any longer think cutting links with Europe is a good idea.

Conclusion

A defeat for Trump will bury the populists’ spirit of 2016. Even if he wins a 2nd term, the good news is that the era of hard populism is fading.

The political scientists and commentariat will have to put their thinking caps on to define the new politics.

This article is republished from The Globalist: On a daily basis, we rethink globalization and how the world really hangs together. Thought-provoking cross-country comparisons and insights from contributors from all continents. Exploring what unites and what divides us in politics and culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. And sign up for our highlights email here.

Donald Trump’s insatiable hunger for more: More power. More money. More golf. More women

Remember this number: $3.

That’s how much Trump charged the federal government for a glass of water in April of 2018 when he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to the Washington Post, Trump’s company also charged the government “$13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements,” over the two days he held meetings with Abe at the resort. But one day, Trump was scheduled to meet with Abe without aides and advisers, with no meal service or cocktails or any other celebratory nonsense. Just the two leaders, alone in a room, talking. According to the Post, the bill for that day contained a line item reading, “Bilateral meeting. Water. $3.00 each.”

Donald Trump has been paid “at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government,” since taking office, according to official documents obtained by the Post. Trump has made more than 280 visits to his own hotels and golf clubs over the last four years, and the payments covered costs for “hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides.” according to the Post.

And water. A total of six bucks for water, no charge being too small to make it onto a bill to the government for a payment going straight into the pocket of the man who owns the Trump Organization and everything it comprises, including his resort in Palm Beach.

It’s apparently a good part of what the Trump base likes about him — his appetites, his pure, unadulterated, money-grubbing-right-down-to-$3-for-water greed. Trump has wanted more his entire life. He wants more money, of course. He has spent a lifetime in pursuit of more money, and then some more, and more and more. He borrowed so much money in pursuit of even more money that it drove him into bankruptcy, several bankruptcies in fact. Today, as president, he is said to be in debt for nearly $1 billion to banks and other lenders, a debt that will come due within the next few years, according to the New York Times and other reports.

Trump wants more fame, a drive that started off with mentions in gossip columns like the New York Post’s “Page Six,” during the years he was coming into his own as a builder in New York City. He used to call gossip columnists and plant items about himself, posing as a PR person, and then he would call the columnists the next day and comment on their mention of him in order to gain yet another column inch or two in the tabloids. Some said he ran for president back in 2016 to “burnish his brand,” to achieve even more fame and use it to make even more money. Since he became president, he has been relentless in his pursuit of attention, tweeting at all hours, criticizing cable networks who don’t give him enough coverage, calling in to shows like “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity” both to reward them for the coverage they’ve already given him, and to get more coverage.

He wants more women, from wife No. 1, Ivana, when he was just starting out, to wife No. 2, Marla Maples, after he jettisoned Ivana, and now wife No. 3, Melania, who replaced No. 2 when he determined she had a few too many miles on her. And then there were all the women in between, in and among his marriages, the women he groped on airplanes and at bars and during parties, the women he (allegedly) raped in places like a Bergdorf’s dressing room or a hotel room or a bathroom during a party, the women whose mouths he forced his tongue down, the women he pushed up against walls and pressed himself against, the women whose bodies he commented on in offices or across rooms, the women whose skirts he put his hand up at restaurant tables, the women whose breasts he grabbed at tennis tournaments and beauty pageants, the women whose rear ends he grabbed in green rooms before television show tapings, the women he dragged behind curtains at New Year’s Eve parties and forcibly kissed and groped. All of those women. Trump wanted their bodies and their mouths and he took them without asking permission because he was Donald Trump, and he took what he wanted.

He wanted more golf, so he played more golf more frequently than any president before him. He wanted so much golf that he went around the world buying and building his own golf courses, and then he played them, because he owned them, and because he owned the golf carts, as president he could charge the government for his own Secret Service agents. He could even charge the government for the hotel rooms the agents stayed in while they protected him. He charged the government $17,000 a month for a cottage at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course, which the Secret Service had to rent month after month just in case he had a mind to play a round of golf.

Trump wants more adulation, more love from the “base,” and when he feels he isn’t getting enough, he tweets. There aren’t enough hours in the day for Donald Trump. He was up at 3 a.m. this week, tweeting about the Supreme Court, the court to which he has appointed three arch-conservative justices, yelling at them for their recent decisions allowing mail-in votes to be counted after Election Day, because of course, he wants more votes. He’s been up at 3 a.m. tweeting before, taunting a Miss Universe contestant for a “sex tape,” taunting CNN as “low rated,” bragging about his debate performance, yelling at polls that show him losing.

And now Trump is making his final campaign swing through the “battleground states,” feeding the insatiable need of his base for more of himself. “Four more years” has become “12 more years.” Somehow Trump is owed more years of the presidency because “they” took two or three years away from him during the Russia investigation, because “they” spied on his 2016 campaign, because “they” don’t deserve to win. The red-hat-wearing mobs of un-masked fans at his rallies want more of the America they think Trump is bringing back to them. It’s an America that is more white, has more guns, has more churches, more of “us,” less of “them.”

That’s what they like about him. They want it all, the same way he does. That’s what opposition to affirmative action has always been. They don’t want some of the college admissions, they want them all. That’s what Shelby County v. Holder was about, that’s what voter IDs and all the restrictive rules about voting by mail are about. They want all the votes.
For the Trump base, making America great again means making America ours again, but he’s going to make sure he puts it on their tab, right there with $3 for water and $546 for rooms and $50 for decorative palm trees for table decorations and $1,005.60 for 26 servings of Patron and Don Julio tequila, 22 Chopin vodkas, and six glasses of Woodford Reserve bourbon consumed by White House staffers at the Mar-a-Lago bar. It’s going to cost us more than votes to get our country back. We’re going to be paying for Trump’s insatiable greed long after he’s gone. More than 228,000 of us have already paid with our lives. If the Friday totals keep up — 98,500 new cases and more than 900 dead — a half million of us may perish by the time Trump walks out of the White House for the last time.

How Trump gets away without paying taxes

To understand how Donald Trump got away with paying little to no income taxes for many years, even after he forged at least one income tax return, it helps to first understand the risks wealthy Americans face for cheating.

Let’s start with IRS audits of the 23,400 richest American households, average income $30 million each. In 2018 the Trump administration audited seven. You read that right—seven. That’s an audit rate of 0.03%.

If American police detected murders at the same rate it would mean that they would become aware of just five of the 16,214 reported homicides that year. Of course, not everyone is a tax cheat, but audits are about detecting taxes due, whether through error or intent.

It also helps to know that about 1 million rich Americans didn’t even bother to file income tax returns during Barack Obama’s last years in office. America’s tax police, the near toothless Internal Revenue Service, are so short-staffed that the inspector general says they aren’t even trying to make the scofflaws pay the estimated $47.5 billion they owe.

There’s no question Trump is a tax cheat because he has done it again and again. He cheated on New York City sales taxes in 1983, for which Mayor Ed Koch said Trump should have served 15 days in jail. He went to extreme, even farcical lengths to evade $3 million of payments he owed in lieu of taxes to New York City.

Trump has been tried twice for civil tax fraud. He lost both times, a story I broke four years ago but you may not know about because America’s major news organizations have not reported it except for one passing mention in the wedding announcement section of The New York Times. Two years ago, however, that newspaper did an exhaustive report showing years of calculated gift tax cheating by two generations of Trumps. In recent weeks income tax information that newspaper reported revealed many badges of tax fraud.

So why hasn’t Donald Trump been brought to justice? After all, everyday radio and television commercials tell us of the power the IRS has to garnish our wages, seize our bank accounts and even take our homes. Surely brazen tax cheats live in fear of arrest and losing their mansions, jets and yachts, right?

Auditing the working poor

Now let’s compare the audits of people in Trump’s income class with the working poor, defined as households with incomes under $25,000. They were the subject of almost a third of all IRS audits even though average income was just $12,600.

The audit rate for poor families is 0.28%. That’s nine times the audit rate for the richest Americans.

This is a dramatic shift from the recent past. Under Obama in 2015, America’s richest households were 270 times more likely to be audited than under Trump, my analysis of IRS Data Book tables data shows. That year 8.16% of these households had their tax returns audited, not 0.03%.

These vast disparities are just one aspect of a many-sided story about the myth of the all-powerful IRS and how a particular class of rich Americans, a class that includes Trump, almost always wins when they play what in tax world is called audit roulette.

The cold hard truth is that the richest Americans today face a teensy-weensy risk of being detected if they cheat. The hardest tax cheating to detect involves people in a particular class. It is a class with privileges Donald Trump lobbied for and testified about to Congress. The taxpayers who are by far the hardest to identify as cheats share these characteristics the IRS is ill-equipped to address:

Own their enterprises lock, stock and barrel, giving them total control with no independent verification of revenue
File tax returns that appear on the surface to be accurate, even clean as a whistle
Make use of hundreds and in some cases thousands of separate corporations and partnerships in many different locations, a tax evasion helper that will be explained later in this series
Operate domestically and abroad where tax treaties, rules on delaying reporting income on tax returns and mismatches between rules of different governments create opportunities to hide money
Own commercial real estate because the gains from selling property are not automatically reported to the IRS, unlike wages and dividends

Trump fits those conditions to a T. Later in this series, we’ll explore just how he always benefitted from the ways our Congress has instructed the tax police to operate.

Presidential powers

Now add to all this Trump’s powers as president. He appoints the Treasury secretary and the IRS commissioner, who had been a Beverly Hills specialist in helping suspected tax cheats avoid indictment. Trump also recommends how much money the IRS gets and how it will be allocated among various functions such as processing refunds and collecting unpaid taxes. This and more means Trump exercises enormous power and influence over which potential tax cheats, if any, will be found. Because he also appoints America’s attorney general, Trump influences which suspected tax cheats will be prosecuted.

In addition, Trump’s administration is violating an anti-corruption law enacted 96 years ago after the Teapot Dome scandal. That law gives certain people in Congress the same right he has to inspect any income tax return. At least three staffers on the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation work at the IRS just to inspect tax returns, especially those seeking individuals refunds of $2 million or more, for badges of fraud. Trump got a nearly $73 million refund; he recently confirmed the IRS wants it back.

Trump refuses to allow the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes our tax laws, to inspect his tax returns. The committee is suing for access. It is the only known case of a tax return being withheld by any president since 1924 when Calvin Coolidge was president. That sentence is qualified only because the IRS is stalling on DCReport’sFreedom of Information Act request for a single number – how many times has the IRS refused or declined to turn over a tax return request in writing by the appropriate lawmakers and staff.

Who gets audited

That 0.03% audit rate for America’s richest families is misleading. It overstates the risks to people in Trump’s situation.

Many in that highest income group have very limited opportunities to cheat. About a sixth of these rich Americans are CEOs of publicly traded companies or otherwise employed at huge salaries. Their pay is independently reported to the IRS. This means that they are more like Joe and Joan Sixpack whose taxes are withheld before they get paid.

Opportunities for workers to cheat almost nonexistent, even for those making more than $50 million in salary and bonus as more than 200 workers have each year under Trump.

We cite these facts to give you a lens through which to focus as this DCReport series examines the state of Trump’s taxes and the capacity of the Internal Revenue Service, our national tax police department, to enforce the tax laws.

DCReport’s investigation into how Trump and others like him enjoy robust opportunities to cheat on their taxes with little risk of detection shows how for decades Congress has handcuffed our tax police. It’s as if your local mayor and city council told their police officers to focus on tricycle thefts, not violent crimes, and wouldn’t pay for testing equipment and chemicals in the crime lab.

We relied in part on a database maintained by the TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. DCReport donors generously contributed money to purchase access to that database and to pay a Rochester Institute of Technology student to organize the data for analysis. Much of the data TRAC gets had to be extracted from our government through litigation over the public’s right to know what our government is doing.

Tax prosecutions vanishing

From various official documents and interviews with tax officials, tax defense lawyers and accountants we found our government operates a system of tax law enforcement with these features:

Tax prosecution, never a major government activity and generally slipping for decades, collapsed under Trump
In 2016, the last Obama year, the IRS referred 2,744 tax cases for prosecution. Since Oct. 1, 2019, the IRS has referred just 231 cases
Justice rejected 162 of those cases, or 70%, for “insufficient evidence,” an extraordinarily and hard to believe justification since on average each case involved more than a year of detective work
Justice rejected an additional 28 cases because prosecuting suspected tax criminals isn’t a “national priority”
Justice Department’s own data shows it is pursuing just 29 new cases
More than half of IRS criminal cases in the last decade were about illicit proceeds from narcotics trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activity, not tax cheating by people who underreport their income from lawful activities or overstate their deductions
Last year Justice Department prosecutors obtained just 530 guilty pleas and convictions after trial, making the odds of an American adult being found guilty of a federal tax crime about one in 473,000
The public never heard about most of those cases because the Justice Department failed to publicize them
Almost 900,000 high-income Americans didn’t even file a tax return in the last three years of Obama
Virtually no effort is being made to collect the estimated $47.5 billion these prosperous-to-rich Americans owe. An Inspector General report says the IRS already dropped 42,600 cases and it is unlikely that any of the others will be pursued

Defunding America’s tax police

The reality is Congress has defunded America’s tax police. The IRS in 2018 had less than half the resources it did, relative to the size of the economy, as when Ronald Reagan was president in 1988, my analysis of federal budget data shows.

Over several decades, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist persuaded Republicans to sign ironclad pledges to never raises taxes, these same officeholders have worked to make sure the IRS doesn’t have the tools or staff to make sure people and companies pay what the law says they owe. Trump personally lobbied for one key change creating an entitlement program for real estate investors that lets them live tax-free if they are rich enough and follow the rules, making his own tax behavior all the more curious.

The beneficiaries of this throttling of the tax police budget and hobbling its operations have been the thin and increasingly rich slice of Americans at the top, especially people who like Trump exert total control of their business affairs.

Republicans persuaded enough Democrats to go along in handcuffing our tax police through laws, some of them based on bogus testimony by people who said they were victims of abusive IRS tactics. By law, the IRS could not respond to the Senate testimony. Congress’ Government Accountability Office later wrote a secret report that showed the hearings were unreliable, Ryan Donmoyer of Tax Notes Magazine revealed in 2000. However, subsequent investigations by The Wall Street Journal, Tax Notes Magazine, The Virginian-Pilot and by me when I was the tax reporter for The New York Times showed the hearings were a sham from start to finish.

In response to the 1997 and 1998 Senate Finance Committee hearings led by the late Sen. William Roth of Delaware, and other hearings, Congress imposed all sorts of restrictions on IRS audits. Here are three telling examples we will explore later in this series:

IRS auditors who notice that a taxpayer reports income of under $100,000 but has mansions, fine art and more cannot use that to begin a “lifestyle audit.” One man was caught only because a mistress, furious that he didn’t keep a promise to buy her a condo, ratted him out to the IRS
Corporations must be told in advance what issues will be examined. If auditors find along the way evidence of tax owed for other reasons they cannot expand the audit unless they uncover clear evidence of criminality
While Congress authorizes what look to be major cash awards to whistleblowers who report tax cheating the program has added less than $1 to every $5,000 in taxes Uncle Sam collects and it takes more than a decade on average to pay these awards

The costs of these favor-the-rich policies even when they cheat are borne by the other 99% of taxpayers. Tax burdens could otherwise be eased through reductions in government spending for their benefit and in added federal debt.

Institutional corruption

The Framers of our Constitution were concerned deeply with corruption, but not the way they think of it today. They were well aware of the personal venality that today permeates the news from supermarket tabloids to the network news programs. But the Framers focused on how to ensure against institutional corruption ruining our democracy and our society. Law professor Zephyr Teachout explained it in plain English in her book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.

Congress pretty much has imposed on the IRS the same institutionally corrupt approach that New Jersey casino regulators employed when Trump dominated Atlantic City gambling.

New Jersey officials created the impression of zealous law enforcement by noisily going after small fries and others who lack the resources to fight back. Or the regulators announced actions raising questions about the behavior of casino owners in dealings with mobsters, cocaine traffickers and money launderers while working hard to avoid making inquiries that would expose wrongdoing by those at the top.

My first book, Temples of Chance, revealed this institutionally corrupt strategy with many examples like cheating novice roulette players at one Trump casino. Another tack was giving favors to gamblers connected to the Yakuza criminal gangs in Japan or the Medellín drug cartel. Casinos owned by Trump and others even extended credit, comped suites, provided liquor and sent limousines to empty the trust accounts of rich child gamblers.

Actually, Congress has gone much further to hobble America’s tax police.

The IRS is so short-staffed it cannot even send refunds it acknowledges are owed from 2017 tax returns. Instead of a refund check, some beleaguered taxpayers have shown me form letter after form letter directing them to not ask about their refund for yet another 60 days. An IRS that is not even staffed to refund people’s overpayments is going to have a much harder time enforcing the tax laws when it comes to sophisticated tax cheating.

The “hanging chads” of 2020: More than 1 million mail-in ballots could be rejected this election

More than 1 million mail-in ballots could be rejected in the 2020 election if recent trends hold up, experts say, raising fears that the rejections could swing close races.

Mail-in ballots have been rejected at around a 1% rate in recent years, though 2020 is expected to be on the higher end due to the number of voters casting ballots by mail for the first time, mail delivery issues at the U.S. Postal Service, and court decisions disenfranchising voters whose ballots were cast by Election Day but do not arrive in time.

“It is possible millions of ballots will be disqualified — at least one or two million due to the normal 1-2% disqualification of mail-in ballots, primarily for errors in completing the ballot, such as a signature problem or late submission,” Richard Briffault, a professor a the Columbia School of Law, told Salon. “Of course, in a close election, rejecting thousands of ballots would be enough.”

Just under 1% of mail-in ballots were rejected in the 2016 election, according to the Election Administration and Voting Survey, and about 1.2% of all mail-in ballots cast between 2016 and 2018 were disqualified, according to an analysis by ABC News.

But researchers at Dartmouth University found that first-time mail-in voters were about three times more likely to have their ballots rejected. More than 51 million mail-in ballots have already been cast in the 2020 election. With a surge in mail voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, about 2% of mail ballots were rejected in this year’s primary elections, according to research by University of Florida professor Michael McDonald.

Ballots are rejected for several reasons. About a third of all mail-in ballots rejected in 2018 were tossed because of problems with voter signatures, which in most states must match the signature on file. Some states also require a witness signature. Some ballots are also rejected because they are missing information like addresses or dates. Ballots can also be rejected if voters incorrectly bubbled in their candidate selection.

More than a quarter of mail-in ballots rejected in 2018 were disqualified because they were not received by the state’s deadline. Some states require ballots to be received by Election Day, while others allow ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day but arrive several days later.

Some states allow voters to fix or “cure” their ballot before the election but most states have no such mechanism.

Andrea Mercado, executive director of the grassroots racial justice group New Florida Majority, told Salon that educating voters to avoid having their ballot rejected has been a “massive undertaking.”

“It’s been a challenge to make sure people are educated on how to properly fill it out, how to properly sign the outside of the envelope,” she said. “And also that they don’t have to put it in the mail, they can put it in a drop-box. And then most importantly that their ballot has to be received by Election Day. It can’t be postmarked by that date, it has to be received by that date.”

Tens of thousands of ballots have already been flagged for rejection in states like Florida and North Carolina, though groups like Mercado’s have recruited thousands of volunteers to help voters cure their ballots in states where it’s possible. Mercado said the percentage of rejected ballots has not increased to a “number that gives us cause for great alarm” but the group is focused on the disproportionate impact of the ballot rules on communities of color.

“We’re seeing that here in Florida and it’s registering to us because we know that the GOP has used their stranglehold on power … to pass laws like the signature match law that disproportionately disenfranchises Black and brown communities,” she said.

About 0.47% of mail-in ballots have been flagged for rejection in Florida and about 1.2% of mail-in ballots have been flagged in North Carolina. Florida’s 2018 Senate race was decided by just 10,033 votes. North Carolina’s 2016 gubernatorial race was decided by just 10,277 votes. A recent study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that there is greater than a 10% chance that the Electoral College could be decided by just 20,000 votes in a single state.

These rejections don’t just affect the presidential race but every down-ballot election as well.

“Whether or not the rejection rates are higher enough to necessarily cause the presidential election to go one way or another, there is reason to think that these could be shifting local races, like races for local district attorneys,” Kevin Morris, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News.

“The vote-by-mail ballot rejections are going to be the hanging chads of 2000,” Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, told NBC News.

Smith estimated that more than 100,000 mail-in ballots could be rejected in Florida alone based on the rate of rejections in the primaries and Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley warned that more than 100,000 ballots could be rejected in Pennsylvania due to a rule barring “naked ballots,” or those submitted without a second privacy envelope.

“Every vote cast can affect the outcome of the election. Every ballot that is rejected could also potentially swing the election and the Electoral College. Rejected ballots can be the margin of error that swings the election results in certain states,” Hannah Fried, the national campaign director at the voting rights group All Voting is Local, told Salon.

Fried said “naked ballots” have been a “confusing issue” for voters, particularly in states like Pennsylvania.

“Mail-in ballots submitted without the privacy sleeve will be considered ‘naked’ and not counted. If a voter returns an absentee or mail‐in ballot but the ballot was rejected by a county elections official, and the voter believes they are eligible to vote in person, the voter may cast a provisional ballot on Election Day,” she said. “As long as their mail-in ballot was rejected, their vote will be able to be counted. For mail-in ballots, signature matching and/or accidentally writing your birthday on the ‘outer envelope’ instead of the date cannot be the sole basis for ballot rejection.”

Fried said the “most important thing” Pennsylvania could have done is install uniform cure procedures for each of the state’s counties. The state currently does not have any process that lets voters address naked ballot issues.

Fried stressed that voters should “get comfortable with the fact that we likely won’t know the election results until days or weeks after Election Day” due to the influx of mail-in ballots.

“The pandemic has disrupted every part of society and the election is no exception,” she said. “Different voters will make different choices about how they can vote safely during this pandemic. Some people will vote in person with a mask, some will vote by mail. While having multiple options for voting keeps people safe and socially distant, it also means election officials will need to take a little longer to count and verify that all the ballots are valid.”

The U.S. Postal Service and voting rights advocates have also warned that ballots mailed after Oct. 27 may not arrive in time to be counted.

“The time for mailing in your ballot has passed,” Mercado said.

Voters should use drop boxes to submit their mail-in ballots or vote in person either at an early voting location or their assigned polling place on Election Day to ensure their vote is submitted in time.

President Trump has repeatedly urged his supporters to avoid casting ballots by mail due to widely debunked claims tha mail ballots are plagued with fraud. Millions of Democrats are expected to vote in person on Election Day as well.

A recent investigation by Vice News found that nearly 21,000 polling locations have been closed ahead of 2020 and primaries in states like Wisconsin and Georgia were marred by poll closures and excessively long lines.

Mercado said the New Florida Majority is monitoring for issues with lines and other voting difficulties but some groups say the closures already pose an impediment to some voters.

“Having polling locations farther away or that are more crowded creates a hardship for many workers, particularly blue-collar and hourly workers,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, told Vice. “This level of doubt this late in the process is concerning. There are so many new variables on top of old problems. We’re talking about how voting will be carried out in the midst of a pandemic. We just don’t know.”

Democrats have been far more likely to cast their votes by mail and Republicans have long pleaded for Trump to stop sowing doubt about mail-in voting to no avail. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law, argues that Trump is “shooting himself in the foot” by discouraging mail voting and fighting mail-in ballot expansions in court.

“He’s discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, and some will have trouble voting in person on Election Day,” he said.

Voting rights groups, meanwhile, are working overtime to ensure that voters, particularly groups that have been disproportionately impacted like Black and Latino communities, have their voices heard.

“In the face of voter suppression, Black and Latino communities are organizing to address some of the structural problems in our democracy,” Mercado told Salon. “While there are agents of chaos that seek to sow confusion and distrust at the highest levels of our government, there are also thousands of organized volunteers and community members that are doing everything they can to protect and expand democracy.”

Why Americans are so obsessed with election polls

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned on Twitter and elsewhere the other day that if preelection polls in this year’s presidential race are embarrassingly wrong again, “then the polling industry is done.”

It was quite the forecast.

While it is possible the polls will misfire, it’s exceedingly unlikely that such failure would cause the opinion research industry to implode or wither away. One reason is that election polls represent a sliver of a well-established, multibillion-dollar industry that conducts innumerable surveys on policy issues, consumer product preferences and other nonelection topics.

If opinion research were so vulnerable to election polling failure, the field likely would have disintegrated long ago, after the successive embarrassments of 1948 and 1952. In 1948, pollsters confidently — but wrongly — predicted Thomas E. Dewey would easily unseat President Harry Truman. In 1952, pollsters turned cautious and anticipated a close race between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower won in a landslide that no pollster foresaw.

https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status/1319382548229681152

“Predictive failure,” I note in my latest book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections,” clearly “has not killed off election polling.”

So what, then, accounts for its tenacity and resilience? Why are election polls still with us, despite periodic flubs, fiascoes and miscalls? Why, indeed, are many Americans so intrigued by election polling, especially during presidential campaigns?

Illusion of precision

The reasons are several, and not surprisingly tied to deep currents in American life. They embrace — but go well beyond — a simplistic explanation that people want to know what’s going to happen.

Patrick Caddell, the private pollster for President Jimmy Carter, spoke to that tendency years ago, saying, “Everyone follows polls because everything in American life is geared to the question of who’s going to win — whether it’s sports or politics or whatever. There’s a natural curiosity.”

More substantively, election polling projects the sense, or illusion, of precision, which holds considerable appeal in troubled times.

A hunger for certainty runs deep, especially in journalism, where reporters frequently encounter ambiguity and evasion. Since the mid-1970s, large news organizations such as The New York Times and CBS News have conducted or commissioned their own election polls. And reports of crude preelection polls have been found in American newspapers published as long ago as 1824.

These days, polls guide, drive and help fix news media narratives about presidential elections. They are critical to shaping conventional wisdom about the competitiveness of those races.

Public ignorant of polling flubs

But polls have an uneven record in modern presidential elections — which, paradoxically, has contributed to their resilience.

Americans are mostly oblivious to that record. They may be vaguely familiar with the “Dewey defeats Truman” debacle of 1948. And they may recall that election polls in 2016 veered off target in key Midwestern states, disrupting expectations that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency.

But other cases, such as the unforeseen landslide of 1952 or the close election that wasn’t in 1980, are not often recalled. So polling is at least somewhat shielded from reproach by unfamiliarity with its uneven performance record over time.

Of course, election polls are not always in error. They can redeem themselves, which is another value in American life.

Horse races to high wires

Analogies from the sporting world further help to explain polling’s tenacity.

Election polling, and its emphasis on who’s ahead and who’s sinking, long has been likened to a horse race — a metaphor not always agreeable to pollsters. Archibald Crossley, a pioneer of modern opinion research, revealed as much before the debacle of 1948, in a letter to his friend and rival pollster, George Gallup.

“I have a distinct impression,” Crossley wrote, “that polls are still thought of as horse-race predictions, and it seems to me that we might be able to do something jointly to prevent such a reputation.”

Crossley’s “distinct impression” endures. Polls, and the coverage of polls, still invite comparisons to the horse race.

A better analogy, perhaps, is that polling resembles a high-wire act. A presidential election plays out over many months, typically to growing attention and building anticipation. Whether pollsters will slip up and fail in their estimates inevitably becomes a bit of mild election drama itself.

When forecasts go awry, as they did in 2016, astonishment inevitably follows. For example, Nate Silver, the data journalist who founded the FiveThirtyEight.com polling-analysis and predictions site, said Donald Trump’s victory was, broadly speaking, “the most shocking political development of my lifetime.”

Many pollsters insist that election polls are snapshots, not prophesies. But they don’t much mind crowing when their final surveys come close to estimating the outcome.

An example of pollster braggadocio came a month after the 2016 presidential election, when Rasmussen Reports declared that it had said all along “it was a much closer race than most other pollsters predicted. We weren’t surprised Election Night … look who came in second out of 11 top pollsters who surveyed the four-way race.”

George Gallup did much the same in the early years of modern survey research, taking out self-congratultory advertisements in the Editor & Publisher trade journal to tout polling successes in presidential races in 1940 and 1944. “The Gallup Poll Sets a New Record for Election Accuracy!” one of those ads proclaimed.

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Which polls to follow?

The proliferation of surveys over the years — Nate Silver’s site provides ratings of dozens of pollsters — also allows a sort of team-sport approach to election polls: Savvy consumers can identify and follow preferred pollsters and mostly ignore the rest. Not that this is necessarily advisable, but it is an option allowed by the abundance of polls, many of which can be routinely tracked in the runup to elections at RealClearPolitics.com.

So, for example, supporters of Donald Trump may take heart from Rasmussen surveys, which have been far more favorable to the president during the 2020 campaign than, say, polls conducted for CNN.

Polling, fundamentally, is an imperfect attempt at providing insight and explanation. The desire for insight and explanation is, of course, never ending, so polls endure despite their flaws and failures. They surely will remain features of American life, no matter how next week’s election turns out.

W. Joseph Campbell, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication

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

Fox News viewers write about “BLM” the same way CNN viewers write about “KKK”

It’s no secret that U.S. politics has become highly polarized.

Even so, there are probably few living Americans who ever witnessed anything that quite compares with this fall’s first presidential debate.

Was it really the case that the nation could do no better than a verbal food fight, with two candidates hurling fourth-grade insults and talking past each other?

To us, the discordant debate was just one more symptom of the nation’s fraying civic discourse, which, in a recent study, we were able to show extends to the words we use to talk about politics.

Earlier this year, we started constructing a data set that consists of all of the viewer comments on YouTube videos posted by four television networks — MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and One America News Network — that target slices of the political spectrum. Together, the data set contains over 85 million comments on over 200,000 videos from 6.5 million viewers since 2014.

We studied whether there are distinct variants of English written in the comments sections, akin to the distinction between British English and American English.

Using machine learning methods, we found these permutations do exist. Moreover, we can rank them in terms of the “left-ness” and the “right-ness.” To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical demonstration of quantifiable linguistic differences in news audiences.

Our second finding, however, was even more unexpected.

Our machine learning translation system found that words with vastly different meanings, like “KKK” and “BLM,” were used in the exact same contexts depending on the YouTube channel being analyzed.

The company a word keeps

When translating two different languages — say, Spanish and English — automated translation systems like Google Translate begin with a large training set of texts in both languages. The system then applies machine learning methods to become better at translating.

Over the years, this technology has become increasingly accurate, thanks to two key insights.

The first dates back to the 1950s, when linguist John Rupert Firth came up with the aphorism “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.”

To modern machine translation systems, the “company” a word keeps is its “context,” or the words surrounding it. For example, the English word “grape” occurs in contexts such as “grape juice” and “grape vine,” while the equivalent word in Spanish, uva, occurs in the same contexts — jugo de uva, vid de uva — in Spanish sentences.

The second important discovery came rather recently. A 2013 study found a way to identify — and thereby link — a word’s context in one language to its context in another. Modern machine translation depends heavily on this process.

What we have done is to use this type of translation in an entirely new way: to translate English to English.

When “Trumptards” become “snowflakes”

That may sound bizarre. Why translate English to English?

Well, consider American English and British English. Many words are the same in both languages. Yet there can be subtle differences. For instance, “apartment” in American English may translate into “flat” in British English.

For the purposes of our study, we labeled the language used in each network’s comment section “MSNBC-English,” “CNN-English,” “Fox-English” and “OneAmerica-English.” After analyzing the comments, our translation algorithms uncovered two different patterns of “misaligned words” — terms that aren’t identical across the comment sections but are used in the same contexts.

One type was similar to “flat” and “apartment,” in the sense that both are describing ostensibly the same thing. However, the word pairs we uncovered have different intonations. For example, we found that what one community calls “Pelosi,” the other one calls “Pelousy”; and “Trump” in one news-language translates into “Drumpf” in another.

A second — and deeper — kind of misalignment occurred when the two words refer to two fundamentally different things.

For example, we found that in CNN-English, “KKK” — the abbreviation for the Ku Klux Klan — is translated by our algorithm to “BLM” — shorthand for Black Lives Matter — in Fox-English. The algorithm is basically finding that the comments made by one community about KKK are very much like the comments made by the other about BLM. While the belief systems of the KKK and BLM are about as different as can be, depending on the comment section, they seem to each represent something similarly ominous and threatening.

CNN-English and Fox-English are not the only two languages displaying these types of misalignments. The conservative end of the spectrum itself breaks into two languages. For example, “mask” in Fox-English translates to “muzzle” in OneAmerica-English, reflecting the differing attitudes across these subcommunities.

There seems to be a mirrorlike duality at play. “Conservatism” becomes “liberalism,” “red” is translated to “blue,” while “Cooper” is converted into “Hannity.”

There’s also no lack of what can only be called childish name-calling.

“Trumptards” in CNN-English translates to “snowflakes” in Fox-English; “Trumpty” in CNN-English translates to “Obummer” in Fox-English; and “republicunts” in CNN-English translates to “democraps” in Fox-English.

Uncharted territory

Linguists have long emphasized how effective communication among people with different beliefs requires common ground. Our findings show that the way we talk about political issues is becoming more divergent; depending on who’s writing, a common word can be imbued with an entirely different meaning.

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We wonder: How far are we from the point of no return when these linguistic differences begin to erode the common ground needed for productive communication?

Have echo chambers on social media exacerbated political polarization to the point where these linguistic misalignments have become ingrained in political discourse?

When will “democracy” in one language variant stop translating into “democracy” in the other?

Mark Kamlet, University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University; Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Project Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and Tom Mitchell, Founders University Professor of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University

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

Texans cast 9 million early votes, becoming the first state to surpass total 2016 turnout

Early votes in the historically conservative stronghold of Texas on Friday morning surpassed the total number of votes cast in the state in 2016, according to voting data compiled by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. Texas has reported 9,009,850 votes cast so far this year, topping 2016’s total of 8,969,226, which was the all-time record turnout in the Lone Star State until Friday. With one day of early voting and Election Day itself still to go, the total number of votes will only rise.

Those early votes comprise about 10% of the 84,679,411 total votes already cast nationally — just north of 61% of 2016’s total national turnout, per U.S. Elections Project data.

While Texas does not provide party registration information, the online data analysis platform TargetSmart offers modeling which suggests that the early vote is promising for Biden. And this week, with that data pouring in, NBC News and election forecaster Cook Political Report shifted Texas away from President Donald Trump and towards Democratic nominee Biden. Both outlets moved the state from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.”

“Democrats trailed in the 2018 early vote by 14.1%, meaning the 2020 early vote electorate is 3.3% more Democratic than the 2018 electorate, which in the end resulted in a highly competitive US. Senate election,” TargetSmart founder Tom Bonier tweeted on Oct. 22, adding: “That’s the first good sign for Biden.”

“The next good sign for Biden,” Bonier continued, is “of the 5.2 million votes already cast in Texas, 1.3 million have been cast by Texans who didn’t vote in 2016. Among those voters, the party identification gap is 6.3 points more Democratic than among those early voters who did vote in ’16.”

“The enthusiasm is on Biden’s side in Texas thus far,” he added.

Bonier also pointed out a surge in young voters, who typically shade Democratic: 748,973 voters under the age of 30 have already voted in Texas, 66% of whom are new voters.

While unprecedented, Cook’s analysis says the shifts should not come as a surprise given current polling in the state, as well as its leftward voting trends over the last few years. Texas Republicans themselves appear jittery about the prospect, going to lengths to try to skew the state’s voter pool in their favor.

“Recent polling in the state — both public and private — shows a 2-4 point race,” Cook election analyst Amy Walter writes. “That’s pretty much in line with the hotly contested 2018 Senate race in the state where [Republican] Sen. Ted Cruz narrowly defeated [Democrat] Rep. Beto O’Rourke 51% to 48%.”

O’Rourke famously said, “Texas is not a red state; it’s a non-voting state.” And if Texas does go blue, it would seal a Biden victory and preclude a deluge of Republican litigation, which experts anticipate would follow a tight result.

Cook projects that Trump controls 20 safe states, worth a total 125 electoral votes. Biden, by comparison, holds 24 states, worth 290 electoral votes — 20 more than he needs to win.

With such a map, Cook says, Trump would need to take all of Cook’s “toss up” states: Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine’s 2nd District, North Carolina, Ohio, and now, Texas. Even then, he would still need at least two of the seven states which Cook now ranks “lean Democrat”: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Texas GOP senator didn’t “graduate” from Oxford University law program, as claimed in prior campaign

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tx., who currently finds himself in an unusually competitive race against Democratic opponent MJ Hegar, previously falsely represented himself as a graduate of Oxford University in England in the run-up to his successful election to the Texas Supreme Court, press and public records show.

In the eight months before Cornyn’s 1990 election to the state’s highest court, seven Texas publications, including regional standard-bearers such as the Austin-American Statesman and the Houston Chronicle, published 10 profiles claiming that Cornyn had “graduated” from “the Judicial Studies Program” at Oxford.

The profiles, archived versions of which were reviewed by Salon, ran from February until days before the election in November, with headlines like “Judge Promises ‘Restoration of Integrity'” and “Cornyn’s Record Makes Him Choice for Supreme Court.” The latter article concluded by mentioning the Oxford program.

However, during his campaign for attorney general of Texas eight years later, Cornyn repeatedly attacked Republican rival Barry Williamson for padding his resume “just like Lena Guerrero did” — a reference to a Texas Democrat who two years prior lost a race for state office to Williamson after it was revealed that she had lied about having a college diploma.

“It’s a question of inflating his resume to give the false impression that he has more judicial experience than he actually has,” Cornyn told the Austin-American Statesman at the time.

The Oxford claim misrepresents Cornyn’s qualifications, and though its origins are unclear, went uncorrected by Cornyn for the duration of the campaign, leaving voters with the impression that he passed through one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. In reality, Cornyn earned his highest degree from the School of Law at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio in 1977 — a Juris Doctor.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany erroneously claimed last month that then-Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, when she had actually attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.

A 2020 freedom of information request to Oxford University reviewed by Salon returned no record of Cornyn graduating from or attending a regular or continuing studies program offered through the school. The university’s Faculty of Law had no record of a Judicial Studies Program at all.

“The Degree Conferrals Office and Department of Continuing Education have been unable to find any record of a John Cornyn with a date of birth of 2 February 1952,” the institution wrote. “The Faculty of Law is unable to confirm the existence of a Judicial Studies programme.”

It appears that the claim stems from a two-week seminar jointly hosted by the National Judicial College at the University of Nevada, Reno and Florida State University Law School, which Cornyn attended in 1988, two years before his state Supreme Court run.

The advanced seminar, titled “Anglo-American Jurisprudence,” was held on the Wadham College campus in Oxford. While prestigious, the seminar was not affiliated academically with the university. Oxford faculty helped lead the program, along with faculty and judges from elsewhere in England and the U.S.

The program contrasted approaches taken by American and British jurists and included visits to historic sites, such as the Old Bailey criminal court and Grendon Underwood prison, according to university records. A Texas judge in Galveston County attended the same course.

Profiles from the 1990 race also included the unsubstantiated claim that Cornyn had graduated “top of his class” at St. Mary’s University School of Law. As with Oxford, this claim does not seem to appear in the public record beyond Coryn’s 1990 state Supreme Court run. The school would only confirm that Cornyn had graduated in 1977.

Neither claim appears in the biography on Cornyn’s Senate website. However, Cornyn’s misrepresentation of academic settings has apparently followed him into his 2020 campaign: In August, he ran an ad touting his commitment to safely reopening schools in the Lone Star state, which used stock footage of a classroom halfway around the world in Estonia. Unlike in Texas, COVID-19 was scarce in the European country at the time.

The Cornyn campaign did not reply to Salon’s request for comment.

Watchdog files complaint accusing Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows of campaign finance crimes

The government ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint on Friday accusing White House chief of staff Mark Meadows of campaign finance crimes for allegedly spending thousands of dollars in campaign funds on personal expenses, including clubs, gourmet cupcakes, a jeweler in Washington and lodging at the president’s hotel.

The complaint, which draws from Salon’s exclusive reporting last week, urges the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to administer any and all appropriate fines and to take further action, “including, but not limited to, referring this case to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.”

In the document, CREW isolates suspicious transactions among nearly $75,000 in campaign expenditures after Meadows announced his retirement from Congress last December, payments which extended well after his official resignation when he joined the White House on March 30.

“One of the clearest rules in campaign finance is you can’t spend your campaign’s finances on yourself,” Noah Bookbinder, director of CREW, said in a statement announcing the complaint. “That is what it looks like happened here, and it must be thoroughly investigated.”

Across the course of 2020, Meadows’ campaign committee, Meadows for Congress, continued to rack up expenses, including more than $6,500 in spending at numerous clubs and restaurants, including the Capitol Hill Club, the Trump International Hotel and its in-house restaurant BLT Prime. Other charges included grocery stores and Lavender Moon cupcakery in Washington.

As Salon first reported, the complaint also shows that the Meadows campaign dropped $2,650 at Ann Hand jewelry in Washington on the day that Meadows officially resigned from Congress. It also paid out more than $5,800 to a campaign aide for “field representative” mileage months after the former North Carolina representative announced he would no longer be campaigning — timing which CREW flags as suspicious.

At the time of the mileage charges, across a few weeks in February, Meadows’ hand-picked successor and friend of his wife Lynda Bennett had been conducting fundraising events in Meadows’ western North Carolina district. Salon on Friday reported that Meadows appears to have used taxpayer-backed congressional allowance funds to reimburse a congressional aide for travel “mileage” accrued across the exact days of one of Bennett’s fundraising swings with Debbie Meadows.

According to campaign finance law, funds are improperly converted to personal use “if the contribution or amount is used to fulfill any commitment, obligation or expense of a person that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign or individual’s duties as a holder of federal office.”

Despite the spending, Meadows for Congress does not appear to have been actively fundraising during the same period. The campaign reported a total of $786.00 in contributions from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2020, and $0 in contributions between April 1 and June 30, 2020, after which Meadows and McMichael converted the entity to the Freedom First PAC.

The alignment of expenditures, the complaint says, makes them “unlikely to be legitimate campaign expenses” and raises “serious questions about whether Meadows and Meadows for Congress violated legal prohibitions against converting campaign funds for personal use.”

Meadows, who drew fire recently for having hosted a “lavish wedding” in Atlanta in May in violations of state coronavirus restrictions, continued to report questionable expenses after the campaign converted to Freedom First PAC on July 2. Payments included more than $1,300 in food and beverage spending, including a $1,000 charge at Capitol Hill Club — a popular haunt for Republican officeholders — and nearly $400 at Trump’s Washington Hotel. The PAC raised $0 from July 2 through October 14, 2020, again making the committee’s spending unlikely to be legitimate campaign expenses, the complaint says.

“Accordingly,” the CREW filing says, “an FEC investigation of Meadows, Meadows for Congress, Freedom First PAC and McMichael is in order.”

The day Meadows formally tendered his resignation from Congress, March 30, 2020, his campaign reported a $2,650 expenditure on “printed materials” from Ann Hand jewelry, which does not advertise stationery or other “printed materials” on its website, as Salon reported. The closest item would be American Eagle Silk Scarves in three different colors, which go for $350.

An Ann Hand representative told Salon on Friday that the store does not sell anything which could be characterized as “printed materials.”

The complaint says that this payment “strongly suggests personal use.” Debbie Meadows has been photographed multiple times in Ann Hand jewelry, including at the Republican National Convention in August.

Some of the spending appears to intersect with Bennett’s campaign, which the Meadows campaign gave a maximum donation to in March, weeks before he stepped down. On June 23, the day of Bennett’s district primary — and nearly three months after Meadows had resigned — his campaign paid aide Henry Mitchell an additional $2,300 for “Management Consulting.”

Mitchell was also the individual who received the $5,800 in “field mileage” that winter. It is not clear what those costs may entail, and the complaint alleges they appear to constitute unlawful spending.

Seven days later, after Bennett lost the primary, Meadows for Congress spent $600 at Safeway grocers.

The complaint itemizes $5,577.50 spent on food and beverage from January through March, including $84 to Lavender Moon Cupcakery on Feb. 12, and $1,583.12 to the Capitol Hill Club on Jan. 13, Jan. 17, Feb. 11 and March 13.

Other food and beverage charges include a $500 payment to Trump International Hotel in early March, as well as multiple expenditures to its in-house BLT Prime restaurant totaling $581.40.

Despite these expenses in this period, the complaint notes that Meadows for Congress does not appear to have been actively fundraising, as Salon reported.

After converting the campaign to Freedom First PAC on July 2, Meadows reported more than $1,300 on “PAC food/beverage,” including $1,000 at the Capitol Hill Club on July 21 and $69 at Lavender Moon Cupcakery. The PAC spent an additional $400 on lodging at Trump’s Washington hotel in September.

FEC rules give the agency the authority to judge whether expenditures constitute personal use, including meal and travel expenses.

On Friday, Salon furthered its reporting on Meadows’ spending, detailing possible use of federal taxpayer resources to support his wife’s friend’s campaign.

From hypothermia to heat stroke: Here are the horrible things you can get at a Trump rally

“Trump is just going around the country giving people Covid-19, hypothermia, and heat strokes.”

That is how one observer summarized the mounting consequences stemming from President Donald Trump’s increasingly dangerous rallies following reports of at least a dozen attendees suffering from heat-related illnesses being rushed to a Tampa-area hospital during Trump’s packed campaign event on Thursday.

In addition to those who were hospitalized after waiting for several hours in 87-degree heat in a congested crowd, another five people required medical attention and were treated at the scene, according to NBC News.

President Donald Trump’s rally in Tampa, Florida, sent some heat-stricken fans to the hospital. pic.twitter.com/Dt4779HmqA

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) October 30, 2020

The Florida debacle came just two days after 30 people who attended Trump’s exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska required medical attention, including several taken to the hospital with possible hypothermia, when the president abandoned them in freezing cold weather without transportation from the stands to the parking lot where their vehicles sat, nearly four miles away.

This week’s Trump rally fiascos prompted a flurry of reactions on social media.

“Freezing his supporters on Wednesday, baking them on [Thursday], possibly exposing them to the coronavirus on both days,” noted journalist Aaron Rupar. “There’s truly no place more fun than a Trump rally.”

Author Rick Newman pointed out “all the things you can get at a Trump rally: heat stroke, hypothermia, Covid-19.”

The “Trump campaign goes into the home stretch by infecting, freezing, and now burning its own supporters,” tweeted economic analyst Patrick Watson.

Even before Trump subjected his backers to Florida’s harsh weather, many commentators—including Common Dreams columnist Abby Zimet—had already drawn attention to the highly symbolic nature of this week’s campaign events, which demonstrate the president’s evident disregard for the nation’s public health, and even his own supporters’ well-being.

“Trump in a nutshell,” wrote Zimet in response to the president departing Omaha on the Air Force One while leaving his fans stranded in dangerous conditions with no plan.

It is important to note that the negative impacts flowing in the wake of these campaign spectacles are not confined to the bleachers where they occur.

As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, Trump’s overcrowded campaign rallies are associated with county-level increases in Covid-19 cases, suggesting that the president’s in-person events attracting thousands of people may be unnecessarily intensifying the spread of coronavirus throughout the country.

“Trump’s rallies pose a risk not only to participants themselves,” said the Center for American Progress in a recent report, “but also to others in the communities in which they are held.”

Noam Chomsky: Donald Trump is “the worst criminal in human history”

Over his decades in public life, Noam Chomsky has often been highly critical of centrist Democrats — slamming them on everything from foreign policy to economics. But in this year’s presidential election, the progressive author, now 91, is passionately advocating for former Vice President Joe Biden to win. And in an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Chomsky lays out some of the many reasons why he considers President Donald Trump so dangerous and is hoping fervently that Biden wins.

Chotiner explains, “When I called Chomsky, who is 91, last month for a long-scheduled interview, I had meant to discuss his career and life, and his latest book, ‘Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal,’ written with Robert Pollin and C. J. Polychroniou. But he spent most of the hour-long session railing against the Trump Administration with a vehemence that slightly surprised me. Chomsky has always been extremely pragmatic in his political analysis, diverging from some other leftists in his belief in the necessity of voting for mainstream Democrats against Republicans.”

According to Chomsky, “We haven’t undergone a major revolution, but the last four years are very much out of line with the history of western democracies altogether. By now, it’s becoming almost outlandish. In the 350 years of parliamentary democracy, there’s been nothing like what we’re seeing now in Washington . . . a president who has said if he doesn’t like the outcome of an election, he’ll simply not leave office.”

Born on December 7, 1928, Chomsky has been alive since Republican Calvin Coolidge was president — and he argues, without hesitation, that Trump is by far the most dangerously authoritarian president he has seen in his lifetime. Chomsky told Chotiner that during the Trump era, he is troubled by everything from “the strategies that Republican leadership is thinking of to try and undermine the election” to Trump’s fondness for authoritarian leaders like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“The executive has been almost totally purged of any critical independent voices — nothing left but sycophants,” Chomsky told Chotiner. “If they’re not sufficiently loyal to the master, fire them and get someone else. A striking example recently was the firing of the inspectors general when they started looking into the incredible swamp Trump created in Washington. This kind of thing goes on and on.”

Another major criticism that Chomsky has of Trump is his climate change denial and terrible environmental record. When Chomsky described Trump as “the worst criminal in human history,” Chotiner pushed back — mentioning brutal dictators like Germany’s Adolf Hitler, the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin and China’s Mao Tse Tung. And Chomsky responded, “Stalin was a monster. Was he trying to destroy organized human life on Earth? . . . (Stalin) was trying to destroy lots of lives, but not organized human life on Earth. Nor was Adolf Hitler. He was an utter monster, but not dedicating his efforts perfectly consciously to destroying the prospect for human life on Earth.”

Chomsky went on to say, “I’m not talking about Trump the human being. I couldn’t care less about him. I’m talking about the policies. The policies are clear; the understanding is clear. There is nobody that’s not living under a rock that can’t comprehend that maximizing the use of fossil fuels and eliminating the restrictions is going to lead to disaster.”

Biden aides panicked over Black and Latinx turnout in key swing states: report

The Democratic Party ticket is worried about turnout numbers in key demographics during early voting in battleground states, according to a new report by Bloomberg News.

“Senior officials on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign are increasingly worried about insufficient Black and Latino voter turnout in key states like Florida and Pennsylvania with only four days until the election, according to people familiar with the matter,” Tyler Pager reported Friday.

“Despite record early-vote turnout around the country, there are warning signs for Biden. In Arizona, two-thirds of Latino registered voters have not yet cast a ballot. In Florida, half of Latino and Black registered voters have not yet voted but more than half of White voters have cast ballots, according to data from Catalist, a Democratic data firm. In Pennsylvania, nearly 75% of registered Black voters have not yet voted, the data shows,” the report explained. “The firm’s analysis of early vote numbers also show a surge of non-college educated White voters, who largely back President Donald Trump, compared to voters of color, who overwhelmingly support Biden.”

Biden advisor Symone Sanders disputed the report.

“No campaign in American history has devoted this level of resources that we have to outreach to voters of color, and we’re deeply proud of it,” Sanders said in a statement. “In community-specific advertising alone, we’ve dedicated tens of millions of dollars to each community, with a total into 9 figures. And we’ve committed tens of millions on in-person GOTV programs unique to communities of color. Earning the support of diverse voters is the beating heart of our operation. We’re also the most diverse general election campaign in American history, including at senior levels, and all of our strategic decisions are driven by our diverse leadership team.”

SCOOP: For months, senior Biden advisers focused on Hispanic and Black voters have raised concerns to leadership about insufficient investment. They say they have been ignored. Now, they are increasingly worried with just four days left. https://t.co/ndlb7QTpmH

— Tyler Pager (@tylerpager) October 30, 2020

Lincoln Project continues to troll Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner by sending boat to Mar-a-Lago

President Donald J. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner demanded that The Lincoln Project remove billboards featuring the couple from Times Square in New York City. The couple threatened to sue for “enormous” sums if the removal did not occur.

In response, The Lincoln Project co-founder Ron Steslow said, “In honor of their demands, here is the boat we hired, on its way to Mar-A-Lago.”

Not to be outdone, Steslow added, “And our digital billboard truck circling Trump Tower in NYC.”

See the post and photos below:

.@jaredkushner and @IvankaTrump demanded we take the billboards down.

They threatened to sue @ProjectLincoln for “enormous” sums.

In honor of their demands, here is the boat we hired, on its way to Mar-A-Lago.

And our digital billboard truck circling Trump Tower in NYC. pic.twitter.com/pZmqvRIrvL

— Ron Steslow 🌻 (@RonSteslow) October 30, 2020

Helen Mirren recreates the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape with comedian Sarah Cooper

Dame Helen Mirren guest stars in a recreation of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of Donald Trump bragging about committing sexual assault to Billy Bush.

The scene is from Trump impersonator Sarah Cooper’s new Netflix special “Everything is Fine.” Mirren plays Bush, while Cooper does her widely-praised Trump lip-syncing.

“Mirren is one of several A-list guest stars in the special, which also features Aubrey Plaza, Jon Hamm, and Megan Thee Stallion, among others. Everything’s Fine was assembled quickly over the last few months in order to release it ahead of the 2020 election, and includes various sketches tackling our current political and apocalyptic-seeming moment,” Entertainment Weekly reported Thursday.

A new study reveals media multitasking is bad for your memory

If you’re doing something else at the same time as reading this article, this story might be for you.

A new scientific study reinforces a longstanding concern among scientists and technologists — namely, that “media multitasking” may cause attention and memory difficulties.

The research paper, which was published in the journal Nature, argues that young people who regularly use a large number of screen-based or digital devices at the same time may wind up suffering memory or attention-based problems as a result.

The study attempted to determine the connection between the ability to pay attention and recall memories of specific experiences and events with media multimasking. To do this, “participants completed a goal-directed episodic memory task during which electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry measurements were obtained,” the authors explain. Electroencephalography is a medical technique that measures brain activity and pupillometry measurements assess the dilation of one’s pupils to determine the answers to various health questions.

The researchers, including scientists from Stanford University and Harvard University, studied 80 individuals between the ages of 18 and 26. By analyzing how their brains and eyes reacted to tasks associated with memory and attention, the co-authors discovered that people who reported higher levels of media multitasking tended to struggle with paying attention or remembering things they had seen and said earlier.

“We found evidence that one’s ability to sustain attention helps to explain the relationship between heavier media multitasking and worse memory,” Kevin Madore, the paper’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s psychology department, told Scientific American. “Individuals who are heavier media multitaskers may also show worse memory because they have lower sustained attention ability.”

This is not the first time that research has suggested that digital gadgets are having ill effects on our brains. In 2018 a study co-authored by Dr. Adam Leventhal of University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine followed roughly 3,000 high school students from 10 Los Angeles area schools between their sophomore and senior years. The study found that there was a modest but statistically significant correlation between increased use of digital media and symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan, told Salon by email at the time that “digital media have changed dramatically since the TV and video gaming studies were done – they are mobile, so can be taken into any daily routine – they are more social, interactive and persuasive, so teens develop a different relationship media than they had before.”

One of that study’s researchers, Chaelin Karen Ra, MPH, explained that “ADHD rates have been on the rise. However, many studies have focused on genetic factors related to ADHD.” As a result of this emphasis on studying genetic factors, Ra argues, scientists have overlooked the possible outsize role of digital media, particularly as “modern digital platforms are ubiquitous and intensely stimulating.”

It is important for scientists to understand the full spectrum of possible causes for ADHD — and not merely because the condition harms the mental health of those who have it. Concerns about ADHD have also contributed to a spike in the use of stimulant drugs like amphetamines and methamphetamines among young people. Some scientists are concerned that some diagnoses of ADHD have more to do with the goals adults place on children than on any actual clinical conditions.

“ADHD is diagnosed more in states in our country that emphasize test scores in kids, which suggests that there’s probably not really more ADHD in those states,” Dr. Steve Hinshaw, a professor of psychology at University of California Berkeley and of psychiatry at University of California San Francisco told Salon in 2018. “If you got a kid diagnosed with ADHD in your district… they no longer count in your district’s test score average, so it’s a great way to, hopefully, raise your achievement of your school district.”

Steve Bannon’s darkest plot yet is already starting to implode

During the final days of President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been desperately fighting to remain relevant in Trumpworld. Bannon’s ideas for getting Trump reelected range from firing FBI Director Christopher Wray to smearing former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. And in his desperation, Bannon has even been attacking major Trump allies like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Attorney General William Barr and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Vice’s Emanuel Maiberg is reporting that “a series of videos and photos which appear to show Hunter Biden having sex are going viral on a Chinese-language news and video sharing website” co-founded by Bannon. Maiberg notes that “the videos are often narrated by users in English with a Chinese accent, and claim that the explicit photos and videos of Hunter Biden are proof that he’s compromised by the Chinese government.”

So far, however, efforts by Bannon and Giuliani to smear Hunter Biden haven’t made a difference in the presidential election. And even the far-right Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told Axios’ Jonathan Swan that the e-mails and videos on a hard drive allegedly belonging to the former vice president’s son aren’t having an impact. Cruz told Swan, “I don’t think it moves a single voter.”

Reporter Madeline Peltz describes Bannon’s recent attacks on fellow Trump supporters in an article published by Media Matters this week.

“Poor Steve Bannon,” Peltz writes. “As the Hunter Biden hard drive story is lowered into the grave of failed October surprises, he’s run out of options to insert his ‘influence’ into the election media cycle. Having failed to recreate his media manipulation successes of 2016, the former White House chief strategist is melting down and attacking his would-be allies.”

Peltz notes how obsessed Bannon has been with getting Wray fired as FBI director. On October 25 in Axios, Swan and his colleague Alayna Treene reported that Trump, according to sources, plans to fire Wray as well as CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper if he is reelected. But as Bannon sees it, Trumpworld isn’t going after Wray aggressively enough — and he wants to see Wray fired right away, not after the election.

“In the past few days,” according to Pentz, Bannon has “lambasted Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Attorney General William Barr and even Donald Trump himself — calling them ‘weak’ for not pushing for, or bringing about, the immediate firing of FBI Director Christopher Wray.”

Trump has clearly been increasing angry with Wray in recent months, stemming from disagreements over multiple issues. Most notably, Trump is outraged that Wray hasn’t gone after the president’s political enemies, has emphasized the serious threats of right-wing violence and white supremacy, diminished the significance of antifa and left-wing violence, and failed to provide support for Republicans’ attacks on the integrity of mail-in voting.

The contents of a hard drive that supposedly belonged to Hunter Biden were first reported by the New York Post, and Bannon and Giuliani collaborated on that story. But Bannon, according to Peltz, has lashed out at Giuliani for not being hard enough on Wray.

“On October 29,” Peltz reports, “Bannon attacked Giuliani even though they’ve been working together to launder the bogus story that first appeared in the New York Post, calling him ‘one of the weak guys around’ Trump.”

In a transcript of that October 29 conversation, according to Peltz, Bannon declared, “Wray must be fired this morning” — and Giuliani agreed with firing Wray, but not until after the election. Bannon, in response, told Giuliani, “You’re one of the weak guys around him. You’re getting weak on me, Rudy. No, you’re weak. You sort of sound like Chris; you spent too much time with Chris Christie. You’re getting weak.”

Bannon also slammed Barr as “another weak link in this chain.”

In an October 29 broadcast of “War Room,” Bannon ranted against Wray as well as Trump allies who he believes haven’t done enough to get him fired.

“Fire him today,” Bannon declared. “Do not wait. You show weakness — the president is showing weakness by waiting. There’s not one person in this country, not one voter that will not vote for you by firing Wray. And don’t let the weak people around you convince you of that. Be strong, be who you are, be what your presidency is about.”

Trump’s own advisors are terrified about what he’ll do after Election Day: NYT

Journalist Ron Suskind has talked with multiple current and former Trump administration officials who say they’re deeply concerned about what President Donald Trump will do the day after the election next week.

In multiple interviews, these officials sketched out a scenario in which Trump would encourage his supporters to disrupt voting in cities in key swing states.

“Disruption would most likely begin on Election Day morning somewhere on the East Coast, where polls open first,” Suskind writes. “Miami and Philadelphia (already convulsed this week after another police shooting), in big swing states, would be likely locations. It could be anything, maybe violent, maybe not, started by anyone, or something planned and executed by any number of organizations, almost all of them on the right fringe, many adoring of Mr. Trump.”

The big danger, these officials tell Suskind, is that early news of unrest at polling places will spark further instances across the country.

“News of even a few incidents could summon a violent segment of Mr. Trump’s supporters into action, giving foreign actors even more to amplify and distribute, spreading what is, after all, news of mayhem to the wider concentric circles of Mr. Trump’s loyalists,” he writes.

Officials then say Trump will claim some kind of “victory” on November 4th even if the vote tallies show him behind.

“If the streets then fill with outraged people, he can easily summon, or prompt, or encourage troublemakers among his loyalists to turn a peaceful crowd into a sea of mayhem,” Suskind writes. “They might improvise on their own in sparking violence, presuming it pleases their leader.”

One FBI official tells Suskind that the agency has been gaming out how it will handle weeks of unrest that could come after the election.

“We’ve been talking to our state and local counterparts and gearing up for the expectation that it’s going to be a significant law-enforcement challenge for probably weeks or months,” this official said. “It feels pretty terrifying.”

Read the whole story here.

“The Mandalorian” message for 2020: “If we fight amongst ourselves, the monster will kill us all”

Tusken Raiders first appear in the “Star Wars” universe as criminals, ambushing Luke Skywalker in “A New Hope,” knocking him unconscious and starting to strip his land speeder for parts until Obi-Wan Kenobi scares them away. Luke’s wise and noble Jedi mentor advises him about the brutality of the Tatooine desert nomads known as Sand People, and whisks him off to safety.

In “Attack of the Clones,” Luke’s father Anakin begins his transition from Jedi to Sith by slaughtering a village of Tuskens where his captive mother Shmi dies in his arms. Blinded by his rage, Anakin later tells his love Padme that he slew all the villagers – men, the women and children alike. She replies by reassuring him that anger is human and natural, putting her arm around his shoulders in the classic “there, there” gesture as if Anakin had confessed to roasting a colony of ants with a magnifying glass as opposed to murdering an encampment of sentient humanoids.

Years later in “Star Wars” chronology and our own, “The Mandalorian” reacquaints us with the familiar desert dwellers by showing its hero Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) camping overnight with a group of them, enjoying a conversation around a campfire.

This brief moment is part of a travel montage showing Mando journeying from Peli Motto’s repair dock, where he parks the Razor Crest upon reaching Tatooine, and his destination of Mos Pelgo, an off-the-map mining town. But the fact our hero sits as a welcome equal with a band of beings heretofore painted as savages isn’t designed to escape notice.

Later in the episode we find out why the Tuskens view Mando as friend instead of foe or prey: he speaks their language and therefore understands who they are and how they see the world.

This isn’t the first time The Mandalorian crosses paths with Tuskens. In the first season episode titled “The Gunslinger” he encounters a band during a bounty hunting mission with a pompous rookie eager to prove himself. The greenhorn wants to use force, and by this point in the series it is established that Mando probably could take on a group of sand people and, if not win outright, at least hurt them greatly. Instead he negotiates a path through their territory using sign language, sweetening the deal by trading his companion’s binoculars for safe passage.

The inaugural season of “The Mandalorian” spends the majority of its eight episodes establishing the title character’s identity and fleshing out the mythology surrounding the Mandalorian creed. To the mild dismay of critics, these largely standalone adventures produced very little substance to explore, which was excusable because it also gave us lots of Baby Yoda cuteness and memes and quotable moments.

Season 2 arrives at a time of great disturbance in the Force, however. Untold millions are crying out for something to take our minds out of the madness bedeviling the planet, and while Baby Yoda is wonderful and the premiere’s guest star introduction of Timothy Olyphant as Cobb Vanth is a neato snack, it’s now imperative that “The Mandalorian” couple its distracting sheen with an undergirding of substance.

“Chapter 9: The Marshal” achieves this by introducing Vanth, a character first met in a series of official “Star Wars” novels, and by using Din Djarin’s communication skills to unite the Mos Pelgo miners and the Tuskens against a common foe.

Mando ventures to Mos Pelgo in search of one of his kind reported to have been spotted there (an allusion to Boba Fett, last seen tumbling into the belly of a sarlacc in “Return of the Jedi”) and finds Vanth wearing Fett’s armor instead. This greatly offends the warrior, who demands that Vanth hand over his armor. Following a standoff, they agree to a compromise. The lawman agrees he will do so freely only if the Mandalorian helps him kill the monstrous sand worm known as a krayt dragon, which has the town living in fear. But Din Djarin knows that’ll take more than a pair of gunslingers. Enter the Tuskens.

“The Marshal,” like the rest of “The Mandalorian,” is a careful exercise in merchandising, Easter egg placement and celebrity power; in addition to Amy Sedaris’ return as Peli Motto, this is Olyphant’s third TV marshal after Raylan Givens in “Justified” and his Mormon lawman in “Fargo,” which is exciting, funny and understandable typecasting. Honestly Olyphant’s an ace at portraying a flinty, seen-it-all cop, and depending upon the kind of nerd you happen to be, watching Raylan Givens swagger out in what is obviously Boba Fett’s beskar armor may have caused lightheadedness.

But if you watch this 54-minute action play through 2020 goggles, you may also notice that it doubles as a critique of colonialism and xenophobia while calling divided factions to unite against greater problems. When Mando defuses a tense confrontation by pointing out, “If we fight amongst ourselves, the monster will kill us all,” that sounds a lot like an election year rallying cry.

The “enemy of my enemy” plot is nothing new in genre entertainment, of course. But within the “Star Wars” cinematic canon, allowing the audience to view the Tusken Raiders as something other than mindless killers – a designation drilled into audiences from a young age – is relatively novel. Despite the culturally mixed vision of George Lucas’ Rebel Forces, his shaping of this universe isn’t entirely enlightened, to put it politely. (Never forget Jar Jar Binks. Never.)

In “The Mandalorian” Din Djarin explains that as Tatooine’s indigenous population, the Tuskens are the “locals,” not the humans who deem themselves as such. The movies portray the humans as innocent moisture farmers trying to eke out a living on a desert rock while in “The Marshal,” which is written and directed by series creator Jon Favreau, the Tuskens’ view of the miners and other humans as interlopers and water thieves is completely understandable. But then, many of us (not all, not by a long shot, but a fair share) are slightly more open to understanding the ramifications of colonialism and so-called settlement than we may have been in the 1970s.

“The Marshal” is also loosely following established “Star Wars” lore. (In the books Vanth and the Tuskens forge an alliance against organized criminals and slavers, and he also works with the local Jawas.) That means people who don’t want to see a shred of allegory in “The Mandalorian” can view it as an adaptation, or Western-influenced yarn about trust and goodness and underdogs teaming up to slay a giant. Pure Americana set in space. A surprise appearance of a mysterious figure played by Temuera Morrison – who played Jango Fett, Boba Fett’s father, in the “Star Wars” prequels – hints at the future appearance of one of “Star Wars”‘ best-loved characters.

“The Mandalorian” has already established its weightiness and worth to the “Star Wars” mythology and Disney itself by netting seven Emmys this year along with an Outstanding Drama Series nomination. Even so, the forces of franchise longevity demand something more than merchandise opportunities and attractive guest star parades if Disney and Lucasfilm want “The Mandalorian” to resonate beyond the current era.

Favreau appears to understand this as well as the opportunity he has to play with pieces of “Star Wars” mythology that fall outside of the Jedi-Sith binary of good and evil, light and dark, in an approach that speaks to who and where we are now.

The appeal of Din Djarin and “The Mandalorian” is that he’s a hero we can more realistically aspire to be – not the cool, precise killing machine part of him of course (we hope) but as a principled man who lives by a credo while accepting that other ways are valuable and worthy of respect, even those many prefer to vilify.

American audiences love antiheroes and swashbucklers; Din Djarin is both, and exactly who we need to inspire a little bravery in increasingly uncertain days.

The second season premiere of “The Mandalorian” and all of Season 1 are currently streaming on Disney+ with new episodes releasing on Fridays.

Navigating the workplace on the spectrum: What it’s like being disabled in the pandemic-era office

I am autistic. As a result, for most of my life, I have been labelled “annoying” — and this has made it difficult for me to obtain and hold down employment.

To be clear, I am not claiming that the epithet “annoying” is the only way in which I have faced employment-based discrimination as an autistic person (it is not). Yet as I researched on the experiences of autistic people in the workplace this month — which is, incidentally, National Disability Employment Awareness Month — I discovered that “annoying” is a common word to describe autistic people. I asked autism experts whether this was their experience as well.

The unanimous consensus was that, yes, neurotypicals (meaning a person who is not autistic nor otherwise atypical) do often describe neurodivergent individuals like autists as “annoying”… and that this very much contributes to workplace discrimination.

“I’ve had to learn how to do things to make myself less annoying,” Temple Grandin, an autistic autism rights advocate who has a flourishing career as an animal behavior specialist, told Salon. “Like I’ve learned not to go on and on and on talking about some movie or something that other people are just not going to be as interested in it as I am. I’ve learned not to do that.”

Being viewed as annoying is just one of the many challenges facing autistic people in the workplace.

“It’s incredible hard for [autistic people] to get a job in the first place,” Dr. Whitney Ellenby, a former U.S. Department of Justice Disability Rights attorney and author of the book “Autism Uncensored: Pulling Back the Curtain,” told Salon. “Just to get the necessary training to be qualified, to be a qualified person with a disability for a job, can be very difficult because education tends not to be geared towards preparing them for the workforce.” She added that, even if autistic people do find employment, “depending on their functioning level, they’re almost always paid sub-minimum wage. Many states are moving to change that. But so they’re not even earning the same amount as workers who get minimum wage, even frequently when they’re doing the same sorts of jobs. So the way it works in the disability community is often that they are either last ones hired, the most underemployed demographic, and potentially the lowest paid.”

Alex Plank — an actor, writer and founder of the online autistic community Wrong Planet — told Salon by email that the coronavirus pandemic has taken a disproportionate toll on the autistic community.

“Unfortunately things closing down has impacted the work opportunities for disabled people,” Plank explained. “But even long before shutdowns, disabled people have always faced significant barriers in employment. I’ve seen many stats that say that at least 80% of autistic people (including college graduates) are unemployed or underemployed. I’ve always noticed that the hiring processes tend to favor neurotypical people (focus on social skills, in person interviews, networking, etc).”

He added, “The job forum on WrongPlanet.net has always been filled with people asking things like how to do an interview, how to get along with coworkers, and what jobs would be good for autistic people. The pandemic has made this a much bigger issue.”

In other words, like so many other marginalized communities, the pandemic has exacerbated problems facing autists that were already very severe. The question, of course, is how to solve those problems.

The first part of the answer is that our culture, particularly our work culture, needs to change. Neurotypicals often are prejudiced in how they view us, something that is rarely talked about. Just because a neurotypical person does not consciously think of themselves as hating autistic people does not mean they don’t discriminate against them. If you expect everyone to behave in neurotypical ways — consistently making eye contact, picking up on unspoken social cues, being able to hold “normal” conversations, not requiring accommodations when seemingly innocuous stimuli cause them anxiety — and find it “annoying” when they do not, you have a prejudice. And once you have a prejudice, it does not take much to hurt an autistic person’s career.

“It’s almost a slippery slope, because a person can say, ‘Oh, well, I don’t think X person deserves civil rights or is a human being, but I’m not going to mistreat them,'” Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu, an American educator and autism and HIV advocate, told Salon. “I mean, just the fact that it came out of your mouth, it’s gaslighting the person. I really feel like we are adults. People in the workplace are adults and are expected to conduct themselves as mature individuals who are capable of holding down a job, of working. They therefore need to understand that in an environment or workplace people have different strengths and weaknesses, and you’re not going to like them all.”

Giwa-Onaiwu also told Salon that “the onus or the problem is on the other party, when you are the one who doesn’t understand.” She argued that “what would be better is if [neurotypical] people could find tools or ways or strategies to help them” figure out how to better communicate with and understand autistic people.

I can say that, from personal experience, I have coped with being autistic in the workplace through the same methods that Grandin described — to try “to make myself less annoying.” This and other attempts to behave neurotypically is known as “camouflaging” (studies have shown it can have a particularly harmful impact on women) and, as I can attest, is very much a mixed blessing. When you have to camouflage to hold down a job, or fit in socially, or not accidentally make a spectacle of yourself in public, it’s a bit of a no-win situation. If you fail, then you’re just one more annoying person that everyone wishes would go away. If you succeed, then people question whether your autism is really that big a deal (or real at all) — and since no autistic person is capable of successfully camouflaging every moment of the day, those people tend to be harsher toward you when your energy slips and you start to be “annoying” again.

The second part of the answer in terms of how to help autistic people in the workplace is for autistic people to lean into the strengths that come from having our condition. None of this is meant to excuse the prejudice that we face — it is wrong, full stop. Yet there are ways in which being autistic is a glass half-full situation, and we should not be oblivious to that.

“First of all, develop a skill that you’re good at,” Grandin told Salon. “Visual thinking is a skill that I was good at. And I was very good at doing drawing and designing equipment. I would recommend to do what Stephen Hawking says, concentrate on the things your disability doesn’t prevent you from doing well. He could do math in his head really well and not much else. So that’s what he did.”

She added, “The other thing I learned to be successful was selling my work. Like I started writing for our farm magazine and I got a reputation for writing good articles. When I covered a cattle industry meeting, I covered that accurately and people respected that.”

In terms of facing the problems unique to the pandemic, Plank offered this bit of wisdom.

“Looking for a solution, I asked the advice of a therapist who specializes in addressing the challenges faced by creative people like me (writers, musicians, and other artists who often can get stuck when isolated for long periods of time),” Plank told Salon. “He suggested getting on a zoom call with someone else who is working and work together virtually. I tried this and it was great. Sometimes we’d say something to one another but we both had our own work we needed to get done. Another piece of advice he gave me that helped with the procrastination was to just describe what I needed to do to someone else.”

A few years ago, I visited the set of “Sesame Street” and “interviewed” Julia, the the first autistic muppet in the history of the show. When speaking to Julia, I gave the same advice as Grandin — that one way to cope with being autistic is to find something you love, be really good at it and make it so that the rest of the world has no choice but to recognize your exceptional gifts.

Yet as I also wrote after my emotional visit to the set, “I wasn’t a Lonely One because I was autistic: I was a Lonely One because I was raised in a society which is intolerant of people who are different, which in my case happened to be as a result of autism. If we’re going to reduce the number of Lonely Ones out there, we need to start by making it clear that everyone deserves to be loved no matter how far they deviate from the norm.”

The riveting saga of “The Donut King,” who was seduced by dough, money and power

Yes, there are dozens upon dozens of donuts in Alice Gu’s enlightening documentary, “The Donut King.” But there is more to the story of subject Ted Ngoy than just fried, sugary confections. Behind the cream filling, icing, and sprinkles is the story of immigrant families, and the American Dream.

According to Ted, he owned around 70 donut shops in California during the height of his success. In fact, he was such a powerful businessman, his stores kept Dunkin’ Donuts from entering the marketplace. (He was trained by Winchell’s Donut House and then “drank their milkshake,” expanding his stores as Winchell’s franchise shrank).

Gu addresses this history, but there is actually more at stake here. Ngoy is Cambodian and he was in Phnom Penh when it fell. He was fortunate to escape with his wife, two kids and some relatives, arriving in California where he and his family were housed in a refugee camp. After a month in the States, he was sponsored by a church and started working various jobs to provide for his family. At one job, at a gas station, he smelled donuts, and that led not just to him building an empire, but sponsoring other Cambodians to come to the States, and giving them jobs. He saved more than a hundred of families through his efforts.

“The Donut King” celebrates Ngoy’s efforts at becoming a self-made man, but it also chronicles his conspicuous consumption — and not just of donuts. He bought a mansion, and threw parties, hosting a 52-person Cambodian dance troupe when they ran out of money during an U.S. tour.

Ngoy ran out of money, and Gu tells that story, too. But she also focuses on the younger generation whose parents worked 18-hour days, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year to provide a better life for them. Will the younger generation continue the family business? That is one of the interesting themes in “The Donut King.”

Gu spoke with Salon about her documentary, donuts, and the American Dream.

Ted shaped an entire ethnic community. How did you learn about him and his rags-to-riches story?

I found out about Ted very organically. It was through a nanny that I had. My husband brought home high-end, bougie donuts, and we offered them to her, and she declined. She only eats Cambodian donuts. She found a Cambodian donut shop, and one day she brought them and we ate one and thought they were great. But it was a regular glazed donut. “Right,” she said. “But it’s a Cambodian donut.” I asked, “Why is it Cambodian?” She said Cambodian people make it. I said, but if Cambodian people make it, it’s still an American donut. She said, they are fresher, less sweet, and fluffier. I googled Cambodian donuts Los Angeles. All these articles come up about Ted Ngoy, the rags-to-riches story. This is why the boxes are pink, and why there is no Dunkin’ Donuts on the West Coast. I was riveted.

I was riveted too! What are your thoughts about his character? He took risks to meet his wife. He did some great things, but he exploited his workers, disappointed his family, and self-destructed.

I’ve never met anybody like him in my life. He’s quite the complex character. He kept me on my toes for two years. His story is amazing, and then you hear the other stories — he exploited all these people — there’s a reason why he burned all these bridges. Ted is so charming and so likable and that’s how he got successful, he’s this hustler. As one interviewee in the film said, “Ted Ngoy could sell snow to an Eskimo.” That’s how smooth he is.

We were in Cambodia, and I couldn’t find anything on this 52-person dance troupe. It was our last day, and I thought, what if he made this up? What if this isn’t real? I said, “Do you remember the name of the troupe. Do you know anything?” Ted brought this guy over, and he was a kid in the dance troupe. He said, “Yes, I was a kid. Some guy who brought us over, lost all his money, and we were stranded, and Ted took us in. We played on his boat, swam in his pool. He took us to D.C., and we went to the White House and shook hands with President Bush. He took us to New York, and we saw Broadway shows.” Ted paid for this all for 52 kids. The kid never forgot this. When Facebook started, Ted was the first person he looked up — he was this generous angel. Right when you think you have Ted figured out — maybe he was bulls**tting us — not only is it true, it’s better than you thought it would be. My take on Ted is that he was a truly complex man. His intentions were good, but he was just a bit seduced by the power and the money. Too much power and too much money.

You assemble the film with a mix of interviews, history, archival footage, family photographs, animation, and more. Can you talk about how you visually approached the story that mixes the personal with the political?

We knew from the beginning that it would be a complicated edit, to weave all these stories together, because there was so much story we wanted to tell. We had to give enough historical context to show people what the stakes were. We had to show how untenable it was at home for him and he had to leave a country he didn’t want to.

I like the tool when you use a small story to tell a bigger story. Peeling Ted’s story back, there is so much more story we can tell. Using archival, and animation and pop culture elements — how pervasive donuts are in our culture. We never think of where they come from, or why they are there. They are thought of as an American food. It was so profound to me, that it’s still an American donut right, if a Cambodian person makes it? What does it mean to be American or Cambodian? That was very profound to me. I’m American. When we started this two-and-a-half years ago, immigration and refugees were a pressing issue. We wanted to show how the most American confection is on the west coast, largely made by Cambodians.

One of the subtexts in your film is this idea of assimilation and community building. Can you talk about this aspect of the story, and how these immigrants adapt and chase the American Dream?

The idea of community . . . with the rhetoric that was going on two-and-a-half years ago, there is so much “other” and “this and them” and demonization of other at the time. I had it with haters, and I really wanted to tell a story of optimism and hope and the best of humanity. What happens when we support each other so we can all rise? One of these stories within that community was about xenophobia. In Orange County, in the 1970s, many people had not heard of Cambodia, or had seen an Asian person. People made fun of him and his accent. He was hurt by that. So how did he overcome that? Well, little by little, our store gets better, and we had more of a standing in the community and you donate to a little league game, and you get more accepted.

During the making of this film, there was a donut shop in Seal Beach, and the owner’s wife got sick with cancer. His customers said you have to be with his wife. And the owner said, I’m the only one here. If I’m with my wife, you won’t have donuts. I have to keep the shop open. And the entire community of Seal Beach decided, let’s help him out. If we sell him out of donuts by 9 a.m. every day, he can close his shop and be with his wife. And they did that every day for a month. The kindness of community and the positive things that can happen when people come together is incredible. This is the same community that a couple decades early made fun of him for his language.

There is a discussion of how many of these Cambodian immigrant families are victims of their own success; their strong work ethic is why they provide a better life to their kids in the United States, but the kids don’t always want to run the businesses they benefitted from. What observations do you have about this trend?

While we made the film, an article came up in the New York Times about Chinese restaurants in New York. It’s super hard work. Donut stores are open 24 hours or at 5 a.m. so you have to start baking at 1 or 2 in the morning. It’s pretty unglamorous. They do that because they don’t have many options when they arrive here. Their English is not that good. You can work hard, and you can survive. They save, save, save. They want the best for their kids, who get educated, and their kids get a degree in Marketing and work for Facebook and Apple. They don’t want to be slinging 40-pound bags of flour and waking up at 1 in the morning. But a couple of the kids can’t quite let it go. One kid, whose parents were going to sell the shop, went to go work in it. But he does have a marketing degree and was raised here, and he is innovative and very savvy on social media. The donut shop evolves. DKs is still in a strip mall, but it has 86,000 Instagram followers.

Many of the subjects in the film are surprised they worked at donut shops. There has been an emphasis on innovation — from cronuts to the poop emoji donut. How do you think the donut has changed since Ted opened his first store?

You can’t just survive being that corner store anymore. The kids do not want to work at the Mom and Pop shops. The owners are getting old and not on Instagram and can’t drive business. It’s a different culture and a different generation. Those stores are going the way of the dodo. The kids who are innovating are able to compete with donuts as a treat or Instagramable. They have to find food that is beautiful to have a leg up over the competition. Donuts are not just two donuts and coffee for breakfast. That kind of innovation is limitless. On the west side of LA where every stereotype is true, there is a donut for every diet trend, the paleo donut, the vegan donut, the keto donut.

Your film appreciates the long hours and hard work of these mom and pop stores. What do you think about how the Cambodian Donut Empire competes and wins against chains?

It’s really incredible this David and Goliath component to the story. This unlikely group of Cambodian immigrants fighting off the giant, Dunkin’ Donuts. They operate on such low overhead. They have resentful kids as employees, but they aren’t paying out much. They themselves do the hard work. They keep the costs so low. They find every way to save costs, including reusing and washing coffee stir sticks. When I spoke with Bob Rosenberg of Dunkin, they have such a huge operation and marketing expenses. They needed to gross so much money per store and had too much competition. The Cambodians had cemented themselves in their communities.

Ted’s favorite donut is the glazed donut. What is your favorite, and how many donuts do you estimate having eaten during the making of this film?

We ate numerous donuts during the filming of “The Donut King.” I’m also a purist, my favorite donut is the glazed donut. But what was new to me and actually an out of body experience for me was a fresh buttermilk bar, 30 seconds out of the fire and glazed. It’s indescribable. We were at the shop, and they asked if I wanted one, and I said, “Nah, I’m good.” She cut it into quarters. I had a quarter, and then I didn’t share the rest. It was that good.

“The Donut King” is in theaters and virtual cinemas beginning Friday, Oct. 30.

It’s also the closing night film at the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, where it will be screening LIVE on Nov. 15 at 6:30PM followed by a Q&A.

Why your brain is having difficulty making plans right now, according to a neuroscientist

For the last month or so, I’ve desperately struggled with what I’ve termed as “planning paralysis,” this feeling that I can’t put anything on the calendar because everything around me feels like one big question mark. While at the beginning of the pandemic, I assuaged my stress by packing my free time with activities — Zoom happy hours and virtual fitness classes — my schedule is now marked in new increments; instead of days and hours, it’s project recipe bake times and Netflix releases.

With election day steadily approaching, my pandemic, personal and political anxiety are due for a high-speed collision, and as a result, my brain balks at putting anything on paper after Nov. 3. And I’m not alone.

Lauren Krouse and her partner are both freelance writers, and they moved to Virginia to serve as caregivers for her grandmother right before the novel coronavirus was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization.

“Since then, [my grandmother] has relocated to South Carolina to live with another family member for a while, and we’re now in the middle of a small town in Virginia house-sitting for her,” Krouse said. “We’ve considered saving up and buying a house, but that just seems too risky with the impact of COVID on the economy, real estate, and publishing.”

The couple had also seriously considered an international move, but Krouse said that feels implausible amid the pandemic, so any real planning has turned into daydreaming while looking at long-term Airbnbs in Uruguay.

For Chaya Milchtein, a Wisconsin-based writer and automotive educator, “planning paralysis” feels like a special kind of anxiety where “you are terrified that if you make plans, the world will just stomp on them and you’ll never see them through to reality.”

“When in mid-summer we decided to have a virtual wedding, I only gave myself four-and-a-half weeks to plan,” she said. “One of the reasons for that was because I was worried that COVID cases would rise again, ultimately forcing me to call off the wedding.”

She and her wife still haven’t put their honeymoon on the calendar for similar reasons.

According to Dr. Emily Mason, an industry neuroscientist based in Minneapolis, to understand “planning paralysis,” you first have to understand how our brains make plans and how stress impacts our ability to do so.

“Planning falls under the cover of what neuroscientists call ‘executive functioning,’ which is an umbrella term for things like planning, reasoning, making decisions — the things that make us very human,” Mason said. “All those functions take place in the frontal lobe and these are things that can be affected by things like dementia.”

Our brains, Mason said, are interested in two main outcomes when forming a plan: increasing the amount of reward and decreasing the amount of loss. Even subconsciously, we spend a lot of time weighing the probability of various rewards and losses.

For example, let’s say your friends want to set you up on blind date at a local restaurant. There are some potential rewards — you have a good time, you enjoy a nice meal, you meet someone with whom you are compatible; but there are also some potential losses, like your date stands you up or the dinner is very uncomfortable. Your brain will weigh the probability of each, which ultimately leads to a decision

It’s worth noting, Mason said, that our brains are naturally wired to put a higher weight on loss or punishment as a kind of self-preservation tool.

“But one of the things that stress can do is it can actually make you worse at figuring out probabilities,” Mason said. “We as humans think we’re good at assessing probabilities, but objectively, we’re just not. And if we’re under stress, that gets even worse.”

Mason brings up a particular type of stress that has been studied in rodents called “chronic unpredictable stress.”

“The mice are stressed out by playing loud noises or flashing lights or being placed in cold rooms,” Mason said. “All of those are stressful and can affect a mouse’s decision-making abilities, but the worst thing for them is if they don’t know when it’s coming. It sounds so much like 2020.”

The same concept is applicable for humans, and when stressed, it can be easy for some people to fixate on or overemphasize the potential for loss in the decision-making equation. That may look like putting off a honeymoon, a big purchase or even just flipping to the mid-November section of your calendar because there’s the fear that the world will just step on your plans (what’s that old truism — man plans, and COVID laughs?) and you’ll have to deal with feelings of disappointment and frustration.

So, how do you break out of pandemic- and election-induced planning paralysis?

Well, NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a recent panel that the U.S. may not return to “normal” until 2022. On one hand, this is deeply disappointing news (though not unexpected given President Donald Trump’s dismal pandemic response). However, knowing that allows us to adjust our expectations to be more in line with current realities. If you can’t quite bring yourself to plan a once-in-a-lifetime international trip for late 2021, maybe a socially distanced hiking trip at a state national park next spring?

And maybe I can bring myself to start putting things on my agenda further out than a week in advance.

Walmart removes guns and ammo from shelves over concerns about “civil unrest”

Walmart said it has pulled guns and ammunition from its U.S. store due to concerns about “civil unrest.”

“We have seen some isolated civil unrest, and as we have done on several occasions over the last few years, we have moved our firearms and ammunition off the sales floor as a precaution for the safety of our associates and customers,” a Walmart spokesman told The Wall Street Journal.

Even though the firearms won’t be appearing in store displays, Walmart customers will still be able to purchase them, according to the report. The discount retailer currently sells firearms in about half of its stores across the country.

It is unclear how long the weapons will remain hidden from view.

In a letter to store managers on Wednesday, the retail giant reportedly asked employees to remove guns from displays “due to the current unrest in isolated areas of the country and out of an abundance of caution.”

The retailer previously pulled guns and ammunition from stores amid protests over the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis earlier this year.

The company previously stopped selling some ammunition after a shooting at a Walmart left 23 dead and 23 more injured in El Paso, Texas. It also raised the minimum age to buy guns and ammunition to 21 after a school shooting in Parkland, Fla.

The decision to remove guns comes amid protests in Philadelphia over the fatal police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. by officers responding to a call for medical help. One Philadelphia Walmart location was looted, and torn boxes of ammunition were seen littered around the store, according to CBS Philly.

Gun sales have skyrocketed amid the coronavirus pandemic. An analysis by the Brookings Institution found that gun sales jumped from 92,000 per day to more than 120,000 per day after the Trump administration declared a national emergency in March.

The National Shooting Sport Foundation, which tracks gun background checks, reported that a record 12.1 million people went through the FBI background check system between January and July, a 72% increase from last year.

Walmart’s move also comes amid concerns over unrest surrounding next week’s elections. Governments and companies alike are preparing for the worst.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, told Politico that the state was preparing for potential unrest after polls close and “gaming out different scenarios and making sure that we are prepared.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a fellow Democrat, said his state was also making preparations.

“I am not sure what the reason might be for unrest, but if there is, we have been preparing for it,” he said during a Thursday news conference.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, said he would not “hesitate” to deploy the Arizona National Guard in the event of potential “civil unrest.”

Some businesses are also making preparations. Many storefronts have already been boarded up in cities like Chicago, Portland and Washington, according to USA Today.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network was also planning “to go well beyond what we’ve done before” in the event of “civil unrest.”

Some human rights groups that work to resolve conflicts surrounding overseas elections have turned their attention to the U.S.

“We thought we were immune to it,” Tim Phillips, the founder of Beyond Conflict, a group that works in divided societies like South Africa and Northern Ireland, told NPR. “When we looked at our own problems, we thought: ‘Of course, we have some big issues, but we’re in a sense immune from an us-versus-them mindset, a sectarian mindset, where there could be real conflict.'”

Hrair Balian, the director of the Conflict Resolution Program at The Carter Center, which focuses on ensuring fair elections overseas, said the concerns in the U.S. mirror those in nations with deep conflicts.

“I never imagined that in this country, I would worry about the same things that I was worried about when I lived in Lebanon,” he told NPR. “What we fear is that guns, protests and elections do not mix well.”

Sprites are haunting Jupiter’s atmosphere, NASA spacecraft finds

Ghosts and spirits are common sights on Earth the week of Halloween, but it turns out apparitions appear exist on other planets too. (No, we’re not talking about aliens).

According to a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter saw sprites or “elves” are “dancing” in the upper atmosphere of the planet. In English folklore, sprites are supernatural quick-witted characters. In the natural world, sprites are unpredictable, bright, brief flashes of light—formally known as transient luminous events (TLEs). ELVES, or Emission of Light and Very low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources, are a kind of TLE — bright and quick flashes of light. TLEs appear in Earth’s skies very rarely, but this is the first time they’ve been observed on another planet.

“We suggest that these are elves, sprites or sprite halos, three types of TLEs that produce spectacular flashes of light very high in the Earth’s atmosphere in response to lightning strikes between clouds or between clouds and the ground,” the researchers stated in the paper. “TLEs have previously only been observed on Earth, although theoretical and experimental work has predicted that they should also be present on other planets, including Jupiter.”

On Earth, this phenomenon usually happens about 60 miles above large thunderstorms. The light from sprites can span 15 to 30 miles. It’s quite a light show, though they last only milliseconds. Some observers have remarked that they resemble jellyfish in the sky.

The Jupiter discovery was unexpected, made by the Juno spacecraft’s ultraviolet spectrograph instrument (UVS), which observes ultraviolet light on the planet. According to the paper, 11 transient bright flashes were detected.

“UVS was designed to characterize Jupiter’s beautiful northern and southern lights,” Rohini Giles, a Juno scientist and the lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “But we discovered UVS images that not only showed Jovian aurora, but also a bright flash of UV light over in the corner where it wasn’t supposed to be. The more our team looked into it, the more we realized Juno may have detected a TLE on Jupiter.”

Scientists long suspected that sprites and elves occurred on Jupiter. Juno’s UVS instrument observed the bright flashes in a region where large lightning thunderstorms are known to occur.

Interestingly, their colors appear to be different on the largest planet in our solar system, as Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is mostly made of hydrogen, whereas Earth’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen.

“On Earth, sprites and elves appear reddish in color due to their interaction with nitrogen in the upper atmosphere,” Giles said. “But on Jupiter, the upper atmosphere mostly consists of hydrogen, so they would likely appear either blue or pink.”

Scientists hope studying these flashes on Jupiter will help improve our understanding of other planets’ atmospheric phenomena.

“We’re continuing to look for more telltale signs of elves and sprites every time Juno does a science pass,” Giles told CNN. “Now that we know what we are looking for, it will be easier to find them at Jupiter and on other planets. And comparing sprites and elves from Jupiter with those here on Earth will help us better understand electrical activity in planetary atmospheres.”

“Over 1,000 people died today”: Don Jr. falsely claims that COVID-19 deaths are “almost nothing”

Donald Trump Jr. falsely claimed on Fox News that COVID-19 deaths were down to “almost nothing” on the same day that the disease killed more than 1,000 people and cases hit a new record high.

Don Jr. tried to downplay the deadly pandemic spreading uncontrolled throughout most of the U.S. while complaining about Minnesota’s decision to cap attendance at an upcoming Trump rally at 250 people.

“I put it up on my Instagram a couple days ago, ’cause I went through the CDC data. Because I kept hearing about new infections,” he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday. “But I was like, ‘Why aren’t they talking about deaths?’ Oh, oh, because the number is almost nothing.'”

The comments drew harsh rebukes from medical professionals.

“Over 1,000 people died today,” Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Columbia University School of Public Health tweeted. “That’s not ‘almost nothing’ unless you believe that people you don’t know are worthless.”

More than 1,040 people died from the virus on Thursday, according to the COVID Tracking Project, as the U.S. hit a record 88,500 new confirmed cases.

Alexis Madrigal of the COVID Tracking Project noted on Twitter that Don Jr.’s comments “may result from a common misinterpretation of CDC provisional death counts.”

“The data for recent weeks is always incomplete, so recent weeks always decline. The CDC notes this in official charts,” he wrote, adding that although “fatality rates are down,” states have reported more than 700 deaths per day since mid-July.

Don Jr. went on to tout treatments like Remdesivir, which is has been limited only to the sickest patients and failed to prevent deaths from the virus in a recent large-scale study sponsored by the World Health Organization.

“We’ve gotten control of this thing,” Don Jr. falsely claimed amid the highest nationwide spikes in infections yet. “We understand how it works. They have the therapeutics to be able to deal with this. If you look at that — look at my Instagram — it’s gone to almost nothing. We’re outperforming Europe in a positive way — so well, because we’ve gotten ahold of this.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, issued a stark warning debunking Don Jr.’s claim in a Wednesday interview with CNBC.

“We are on a very difficult trajectory. We’re going in the wrong direction,” Fauci said. “If things do not change — if they continue on the course we’re on — there’s going to be a whole lot of pain in this country with regard to additional cases, and hospitalizations and deaths.”

“Things are very, very bad in the United States right now,” Dr. Ashish Jha, Brown University’s dean of public health, told Reuters. “We are having some of the largest breakouts that we’ve had during the entire pandemic . . . And nine, 10 months into this pandemic, we are still largely not quite prepared.”

President Donald Trump has also tried to downplay the threat posed by the virus as the U.S. enters its third wave of infections — by far largest — resulting in some of his tweets being labeled as “misinformation.” His new top coronavirus adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases who has pushed the discredited and unethical “herd immunity” strategy, has also been forced to remove tweets labeled as misinformation. Dr. Deborah Birx, who had taken a leading role in the coronavirus task force, has refused to participate in meetings with Atlas, whose dubious claims are often parroted by Trump, because of his “misleading” claims, according to CNN.

While Trump and his allies have tried to downplay the pandemic, which he has mismanaged since the beginning, in an apparent effort to win over voters ahead of next week’s election, the rhetoric and lack of response to the uncontrolled outbreaks in the Midwest and elsewhere may be having the opposite effect.

Some Trump supporters in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin, which has had some of the biggest spikes in cases in recent weeks, are quickly souring on the president, according to The Daily Beast.

“COVID has had a huge impact here in Wisconsin and the county I live in. I just bought a farm and am struggling to keep my animals fed and keep the farm going well,” Teri Leschner, a resident of Sharon, Wisconsin, told the outlet. “Trump, I feel, has lied to us all. He said he cares about the smaller family farmers, but we have not seen any help nor caring.”

Rich Thau of the Swing Voter Project, which polls voters monthly in key states, estimated that about 25% of former Obama voters who backed Trump in 2016 would vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden this time around.

“Most are doing it based upon dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of the pandemic,” he told The Daily Beast, “not out of a particular fondness for Biden himself.”