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Trump barred from moving $3.6 billion from military to fund border wall construction: Federal court

A federal appeals court ruled late Friday that President Donald Trump’s use of his emergency powers to build his long-promised border wall with military funds is illegal, striking a blow to one of his signature campaign promises just weeks before the November election.

The 2-1 decision from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes as $3.6 billion was slated for construction of about a dozen projects, including two projects in the Laredo and El Paso areas. The money was diverted from funds dedicated for military construction after the president declared a national emergency in February 2019 to tap the funds. The projects in Texas would have covered more than 60 miles, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The courts have once again confirmed what everyone knows: Trump’s fake ‘national emergency’ was just another pretext for targeting immigrants and border communities,” said Dror Ladin, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “It’s past time for Trump to finally give up on trying to raid the federal budget for his wasteful and illegal project.”

The lawsuit, Sierra Club v. Trump, was filed last year by the ACLU on behalf of the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition. The ruling Friday upholds a 2019 decision that halted the construction. But that order was put on hold, said Gloria Smith, the managing attorney at the Sierra Club.

“The district court was very careful and went ahead and granted an injunction and then stayed his own injunction pending a full resolution of the case,” she said. “So the stay is gone, the injunction is back in force, which means no construction.”

Trump’s emergency declaration came after the U.S. Congress allotted about $1.4 billion in a 2019 budget bill for wall construction. But Trump balked at the amount after he requested nearly $6 billion for the effort. Congress tried twice to stop the national emergency declaration, but the president vetoed both efforts.

Friday’s decision comes as the Trump administration is in an 11th-hour push to speed up construction of barriers on the southern border before the Nov. 3 election. Construction has increased to about 2 miles per day, nearly twice the daily rate since the start of 2020, The Washington Post reported late last month.

But Texas has been a persistent wrench in the president’s plans because, unlike in other border states, most of the land eyed for border barriers in Texas is on privately owned land. That means the Department of Homeland Security must secure some of that land through eminent domain, a process that can take long if landowners choose to file suit against the federal government.

Smith said the plaintiffs were celebrating Saturday but are prepared for future battles, including possible arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court because there are other aspects of the case that the administration can challenge.

“The administration, the Department of Homeland Security, needed to identify the provisions in the U.S. Code that it would rely on to take those monies,” she said. “As we started to learn that, and as we started identifying specific project sites, we would amend our complaint with more specificity. So there are offshoots of the main lawsuit.”

David Donatti, an attorney with the ACLU of Texas, said the Supreme Court could issue an emergency stay without making a final determination on the case before the Nov. 3 election.

“They could do that, but they would need a majority of the court to do it. But because at the moment we only have eight justices, we have to see how that would shake out,” he said.

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

Robert Reich: The end of Trump’s Fifth Avenue

I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump boasted in 2016.

Trump’s 5th Avenue principle is being tested as never before. So far, more than 214,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, one of the world’s highest death rates – due in part to Trump initially downplaying its dangers, then refusing responsibility for it, promoting quack remedies for it, muzzling government experts on it, pushing states to reopen despite it, and discouraging people from wearing masks. 

Yet some 40 percent of Americans have stuck by him nonetheless. They’ve remained loyal even after he turned the White House into a hotspot for the virus, even after he caught it himself, and even after asserting just days ago that it’s less lethal than the flu. A recent nonpartisan study concluded that Trump’s blatant disinformation has been the largest driver of COVID misinformation in the world. 

They’ve stuck by him even as more than 11 million Americans have lost their jobs, 40 million risk eviction from their homes, 14 million have lost health insurance, and almost one out of five Americans with kids at home cannot afford to adequately feed their children. 

They’ve stuck by him even though more Americans have sought unemployment benefits this year than voted for him in 2016, even after Trump cut off talks on economic relief, even though he’s pushing the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act, causing 20 million more to lose health insurance.  

Trump is in effect standing in the middle of 5th Avenue, killing Americans. 

Yet here we are, just a few weeks before the election, and his supporters still haven’t budged. The latest polls show him with 40% to 43% of voters, while Joe Biden has a bare majority. 

The most egregious test of Trump’s 5th Avenue principle is still to come, when he tries to kill off American democracy. He’s counting on his supporters to keep him in power even after he loses the popular vote. 

He’s ready to claim that mail-in ballots, made necessary by the pandemic, are rife with “fraud like you’ve never seen,” as he asserted during his debate with Biden – although it’s been shown that Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.

He’ll likely allege fraudulent election results in any Republican-led state which he loses by a small margin – such as Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.

Then he’ll rely on the House of Representatives to put him over the top. 

“We are going to be counting ballots for the next two years,” Trump warned at a recent Pennsylvania rally, noting “we have the advantage if we go back to Congress. I think it’s 26 to 22 or something because it’s counted one vote per state.”

He was referring to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that if state electors deadlock or can’t agree on a president, the decision goes to the House. There, each of the nation’s 50 states get one vote. 

That means small Republican-dominated states like Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming (each with one House member, who’s a Republican) would have the same clout as large Democratic states like California (with 52 House members, 44 of whom are Democrats). 

Trump does have the advantage right now: 26 state congressional delegations in the House are now controlled by Republicans, and 22 by Democrats. Two — Pennsylvania and Michigan — are essentially tied. 

But he won’t necessarily retain that advantage. The decision would be made by lawmakers elected in November, who will be sworn in on January 3 – three days before they’ll convene to decide the winner of the election.

Which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is focusing on races that could tip the balance of state delegations – not just in Pennsylvania and Michigan but any others within reach. 

“It’s sad we have to have to plan this way,” she wrote in a letter to her colleagues last week, “but it’s what we must do to ensure the election is not stolen.”

Trump’s 5th Avenue principle has kept him in power despite deprivation and death that would have doomed the presidencies of anyone else. But as a former New Yorker he should know that 5th Avenue ends at the Harlem River at 142nd Street, and the end is near.  

Does the federal health information privacy law protect President Trump?

Within one day, President Donald Trump announced his COVID diagnosis and was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for treatment. The flurry of events was stunning, confusing and triggered many questions. What was his prognosis? When was he last tested for COVID-19? What is his viral load?

The answers were elusive.

Picture the scene on Oct. 5. White House physician Dr. Sean Conley, flanked by other members of Trump’s medical team, met with reporters outside the hospital. But Conley would not disclose the results of the president’s lung scans and other vital information, invoking a federal law he said allows him to selectively provide intel on the president’s health.

“There are HIPAA rules and regulations that restrict me in sharing certain things for his safety and his own health,” he told the reporters.

The law he’s referring to, HIPAA, is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which includes privacy protections designed to shield personal health information from disclosure without a patient’s consent.

Because this is likely to remain an issue, we decided to take a look. In what cases does HIPAA restrict the sharing of information — and is the president covered by it?

Experts agreed that he is, but several noted there are exceptions to its protections — stirring debate over the airwaves and on Twitter regarding what information about the president’s health should be released.

Explaining the protections

HIPAA and the rules for its implementation apply to medical providers — such as doctors, dentists, pharmacists, hospitals — and most health plans that either provide or pay for medical care.

In some cases, the law permits the sharing of medical information without specific consent, such as when needed for treatment purposes or billing. Examples include doctors or hospitals sharing information with other physicians or facilities involved in the patient’s care, or information shared about tests, drugs or other medical care so bills can be sent to patients.

Other than that, without specific patient consent, the law is clear.

“The default rule under HIPAA is that health care providers may not disclose a patient’s health information. Period,” said Joy Pritts, a consultant in Washington, D.C., and a former privacy official in the Obama administration.

The experts we consulted all agreed that Trump’s doctors are bound by HIPAA. Since he is their patient, they cannot share his medical information without his consent.

Patients can allow some information to be released while demanding that other bits be withheld.

That may be why the public has been given only select details about Trump’s COVID-19 status, such as when Conley discussed the president’s blood pressure reading but not the results of his lung scans.

Trump “can pick and choose what he wants to disclose,” Pritts said.

So it is up to Trump to give his doctors the green light to report to the public on his condition.

“HIPAA does not prevent the president of the United States from authorizing the disclosure of all publicly relevant information,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “He can share it if he wanted to and he can tell his doctors to share it.”

Elizabeth Gray, a teaching assistant professor of health policy and management at George Washington University, said that because Conley shared some medically private information with the American public, there must have been a conversation between the president and his doctors about what was OK to include in their press briefings.

“He would have had to have given his authorization,” said Gray. In other words, Trump OK’d the details his doctors mentioned, but when follow-up questions were asked, she said, HIPAA was “a shield” because “the president hadn’t authorized the release of anything else.”

Still, beyond HIPAA, other factors could lead to less-than-complete disclosure of the president’s health.

For starters, Trump is the commander in chief, and his personal physician is a member of the military.

“If your commander in chief says, ‘I’m giving you a command — forget about HIPAA,'” said Thomas Miller, a resident fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.

Pritts and others also said the president’s physician may not be covered by HIPAA if his care is provided by the White House medical unit, which does not bill for its services or involve health insurance.

But, “whether covered by HIPAA or not, a physician has an ethical obligation to maintain patient confidentiality,” Pritts said.

And leaks?

It’s also important to note that HIPAA applies only to health care professionals and related entities working within that sphere.

So, when Sean Spicer, former White House press secretary, tweeted on Oct. 5 that a journalist had violated HIPAA (he misspelled it as “HIPPA”) by reporting that a member of the White House press shop had COVID-19, he was wrong, said the experts.

“Journalists are not bound by HIPAA,” said Gostin.

Gray likened HIPAA in that way to a door.

“Behind that door is health care information. Hypothetically, only doctors have access to that information, and HIPAA prevents health care providers from unlocking that door,” she said. “But, once the info gets out of that door, then HIPAA no longer applies.”

And the information is likely to come out — sooner or later, said Miller. “Leaking will take care of most reporting and disclosure” about the president’s health, he said.

The exceptions

Within HIPAA are a couple of exceptions identifying when health information can be disclosed without the authorization of the patient.

For example, the law does allow for disclosure if it “is necessary to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of a person or the public.”

Might that apply here, given that Trump took a ride around Walter Reed in a government SUV with Secret Service agents, or returned to a White House filled with other employees?

Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School, said he doesn’t think the public health exemption would apply in this case.

“If a patient is contagious and noncompliant, doctors can make disclosure in the interest of public health,” Turley wrote in an email. “However, the team of doctors stated that they felt that it was appropriate to send President Trump back to the White House to continue to recover.”

Moreover, Turley noted that nothing was withheld that would have qualified for this exception. “The world knows that the president is COVID-positive and still likely contagious,” he wrote. “It is unclear what further information would do in order to put the world on notice.”

Some experts, however, expressed a different view. They argued that the details of when the president last tested positive would provide insight into who may have been exposed and how long he should be considered infectious and asked to isolate. Even so, the law’s public health exemption is usually interpreted to mean such information would be shared only with state and local health officials.

There are two HIPAA exceptions that apply specifically to the president, said Gray.

“They could make that disclosure to people who need to know, to the Secret Service or the vice president, but it is essentially only to protect [the president],” said Gray. “There is also an armed forces exception, but disclosures are in regards to carrying out a military mission, which doesn’t apply here.”

What about national security?

Miller, at AEI, said concerns about national security could be among the reasons for more disclosure, such as questioning a president’s ability to carry out duties. But HIPAA wasn’t designed to address this point.

Some argue that because the president is not just an average citizen, he should waive his right to medical privacy.

“The president is not just an individual; the president is the chief executive,” said Charles Stevenson, an adjunct lecturer on American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University. “The president loses a lot of privacy because our political system, our governmental system demands it. The president always has to be available to the military and that means the state of his health is a matter of national security.”

Historical precedent

Trump is one in a long line of presidents who have not been completely transparent in sharing their medical information.

“There’s a pretty strong tradition of these things being obscured,” said John Barry, an adjunct faculty member at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. And no federal law requires a president to provide this information.

One of the most notable examples is President Woodrow Wilson, said Barry.

Wilson likely caught the so-called Spanish influenza in 1919, which was kept secret. Later that year, he had a severe stroke that disabled him, the gravity of which was also hidden from the public.

President John F. Kennedy used painkillers and other medications while in office, which wasn’t made public until years after his death.

And when President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, he was much closer to death than his White House spokesperson described to the public. There were also questions about Reagan’s mental acuity while in his final years in office. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease five years after his final term.

Why would White Houses want to obscure health information of presidents?

“Every White House wants the public to think the president is healthy, strong and capable of leading the country,” said Barry. “That’s consistent across parties and presidencies.”

Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis: What lies ahead could include a constitutional crisis over succession

Since Donald Trump was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19 treatment on Oct. 2, there have been conflicting messages about the status of the president’s health.

While his doctor, Sean Conley, gave an upbeat account around noon on Sunday, the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told reporters the day before, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

The prospect that Trump could be or become very ill raises the question of how the country can constitutionally transfer power if he is no longer capable of serving in his official capacity.

The answer is the little-used 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

That amendment has only been invoked a few times in history. And its lack of specificity about a situation in which the president is unable to determine himself whether he can carry out his duties means there is a potential constitutional crisis ahead in which the president may be unable or unwilling to give up power, even if he is clearly too ill to do his job.

Removal, resignation or death

The 25th Amendment, ratified by the states in 1967, declares that upon the removal, resignation or death of the president, the vice-president assumes the presidency.

Commonly referred to as the Disability Clause, this constitutional provision also specifies that if the president is unable to perform the functions of his office, the vice president will serve as acting president.

If the president is unable to determine his own decision-making capacity, it is possible – though this is an untested area of law – that the vice-president, independently or in consultation with the cabinet, would determine if he himself assumes the role of acting president.

But there is no precedent for this type of situation nor is there precise legal language that expressly outlines what the procedural processes should be if the president cannot determine his own ability to lead the nation. This is the constitutional crisis that may lay ahead.

In 2002 and 2007, President George W. Bush invoked the Disability Clause prior to scheduled colonoscopy procedures that required anesthesia and sedation. During this limited time, Vice President Dick Cheney became acting president.

Line of succession

In addition to the Disability Clause, there is legislation that clarifies the line of succession should the president become incapacitated.

The 1886 Succession Act made members of the president’s cabinet direct successors if the vice president could not serve.

Upon assuming the presidency in 1945 after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Harry Truman requested Congress to amend the 1886 Succession Act to provide greater clarification of succession protocol.

Truman wanted that succession to place the speaker of the House second in line after the vice president. After several years of negotiation, both houses of Congress agreed to this revision and passed the Presidential Succession Act in 1947.

The legislation specified that the line of succession begins with the vice president and is followed by the speaker of the House of Representatives, the president pro tempore of the Senate, the secretary of the U.S. Department of State, the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the remaining secretaries of cabinet departments in the order of when they were established as executive branch agencies.

Neither the Succession Act nor the 25th Amendment have ever been invoked for longer than a few hours.

Potential crisis

Since March 2020, the U.S. has faced an extraordinary public health catastrophe. More than 200,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus and more than 7.2 million have been infected.

Over the last seven months, the president has publicly disagreed with his own team of medical and public health experts regarding precautionary measures that should be taken in order to minimize exposure to the virus. His staff have largely followed his lead.

Of particular note is a private White House reception and Rose Garden announcement to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court. More than 200 people attended, including many of the administration’s most senior appointees and aides.

Few at this event wore a mask. And now a number of prominent attendees – including GOP senators Thom Tillis and Mike Lee, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway – have tested positive for coronavirus.

As someone who has worked in the office of the White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration, I can personally attest to the confining environment of the West Wing.

[Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Very few senior aides have their own offices. People are constantly in close proximity, including the president, which is why it remains perplexing that White House staff were not required to wear masks.

The decision to ignore CDC guidelines in the West Wing, at official government functions and at campaign events, coupled with the president’s disparagement of public health measures, have placed the country into a potential leadership crisis where it is not clear who should be in charge.

Stephanie Newbold, Associate Professor, Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University Newark

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

“Bloodbath of Watergate proportions”: Ted Cruz sounds the alarm about GOP defeats on Election Day

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is warning that Republicans could face a “bloodbath” in the coming elections if American voters remain unhappy with the state of the economy and the novel coronavirus pandemic.

During an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Cruz said that Republicans could win the election “if people are going back to work, if they’re optimistic, if they’re positive about the future.”

However, the senator warned that the opposite scenario could also come to pass.

“But I also think if on Election Day, people are angry and they’ve given up hope and they’re depressed, which is what Pelosi, and Schumer want them to be, I think it could be a terrible election,” he warned. “I think we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress, that it could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions.”

Cruz then falsely blamed Pelosi for holding up a relief aid deal, despite the fact that President Donald Trump was the one who unilaterally called off negotiations just this week.

However, Cruz said that he spoke with the president earlier this week and claimed that he’s now changed his mind and wants to make a deal after all.

Poet Maggie Smith’s new book is a mantra on how to “keep moving” in apocalyptic times

In the summer of 2016, three days after a gunman killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a poem went viral on social media. Called “Good Bones,” the text captured the balance between the tragedies of the world, the lure of ignorance, and the life of children in these exceptionally chaotic times — perhaps why it resonated with the public. “Life is short,” the poem, written by Maggie Smith, starts, “though I keep this from my children.”

Those lines became a sort of mantra for the Age of Trump. They also made Smith a household name, as celebrities tweeted snippets of her poem, and publications like Washington Post, the Guardian wrote articles about it; the poem was first published in the literary journal Waxwing.

This week, Smith’s new essay collection, “KEEP MOVING: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change” — which was appropriately born out of a series of tweets — hit bookstores. The book follows Smith’s journey over the last couple years, in which she’s had to rebuild her life after a divorce, and cope with the grief that follows the end of a marriage. For Smith, to keep moving isn’t necessarily a physical endeavor, but rather a mindset and a way to not get stuck in the past. While the book was written before the pandemic in a world that feels like a lifetime ago, there are many lessons that can be learned as we cope with constant loss during this tough time. “How do we not look back constantly and try to compare the current reality to what we may have had before?” Smith asks. Here, we talk about what it means to “keep moving” in a scary world.

I interviewed Maggie Smith in August. As usual, this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

We live in such a goal-oriented society, but your book “Keep Moving” defies that mindset, despite it literally encouraging people to move. Can you explain what the phrase “keep moving” means to you, in this book?

That’s a good question. For me, it was mostly about avoiding looking in the rear view mirror, and about being forward-thinking and forward-moving. Someone said fairly early on, “can’t we just stay still today, do we really have to keep praying every day?” And my response has always been, “It’s not about moving, it’s just about not looking back.” So for me, it was not as goal-oriented as you say, but more just about, “how do we not look back constantly, and try to compare the current reality to what we may have had before?”

And I think that can be dangerous in a couple of ways when things are hard in the moment. It’s really easy to get nostalgic about when things weren’t so hard. So when you’re going through a divorce, it’s really easy to be like, “Oh, remember when we were happy,” and to look at photos and rethink everything. And that can be painful. But also when things are good, it’s easy to taint that by looking back and thinking, “Well, it wasn’t always good, so probably something bad will happen again.” Instead of just living in the moment and just taking whatever it is the good and the bad, and just living with it and pushing forward.

Right.

I like what you say about living in a goal-oriented society, because I think we do. I think we’re always sort of pressing on and thinking, as soon as we get one thing, it’s like “OK, I have that so now what’s next? How do I top that?” Someone very wise told me recently that I should wake up every morning, and the question I should ask myself is “What else is possible?” Which is not really about setting goals or trying to amass or accumulate or achieve anything, it’s just more about being open to what might happen.

You wrote this before the pandemic, but the sentiment “keep moving” feels really important right now. How have you kept moving during this time?

Oh, this time has been tricky. It’s funny. I feel like I was in a better place emotionally for a while. After the divorce, before the pandemic, I had a narrow window of relative peace where I felt like, “Okay, I’m improving, things feel a little bit more even-keeled.” And then as soon as early March, as soon as we all went on lockdown, it was really interesting — which is maybe a euphemistic adjective for what I mean, in that I felt a lot of the same emotions I felt in the middle of my divorce again, which is very off-kilter, very destabilized. And just that sense of, “I don’t know what’s coming, but I know it’s not going to look like what the six months prior looked like.”

Totally.

That feeling of, “I know what my life used to be and now it’s not that anymore.” And so in some ways it was really triggering because that sense of losing my balance and my momentum, it brought me back to that place. One of the things that’s kept me moving is having my kids here. I have joint custody, so they’re not here every day. They’re here half the week and I cannot crumble because I’ve got them and they’re having their own struggles with this, not being able to spend time with friends, not having school or summer camp. And so having to parent through this has been challenging, but also it helps keep my priorities in check. I can’t really wallow about anything because I’m really trying to stay positive and things like that for them. So I would say that, that’s been one thing.

Another thing has just been writing. That’s how I process things. So I’ve continued writing maybe more during the last six months than I was in the six months prior. Writing has been really helpful, but I think whenever people are going through tough things, one of the best things you can do for yourself is whatever the thing is that makes you feel most like yourself. I know that’s different for everyone, but what makes me feel closest to myself is writing. That inner conversation I get to have with myself on paper. Regardless of what’s going on in my personal life or what’s going on with work stuff or with the kids or anything like that, it just helps me to kind of debrief with myself a little bit. And so that’s been really useful.

Could you share more about what your writing process was like for this book? You do such a good job of capturing your insights and epiphanies and I’m wondering how you do that?

Well, the book happened in two pieces, which is that I started writing a book without realizing I was writing a book. Really, I started [with] the tweets, and not until a few months in, basically people [were] saying, “This should be a book.” I had just planned on tweeting until I didn’t need it for myself anymore because these were all just notes to myself. And so when I started really listening to people saying, “This should be a book,” and I realized that made sense, people wanted something they could give to someone else who was going through a hard time, when flowers and casseroles don’t quite cut it.

Then I had a conversation with my editor. We thought more about, “how do we give the tweets a little bit more heft, and a little bit more context?” Really just to have a book that’s quote after quote after quote, that didn’t really seem like that was going to be the thing. So my editor was like, “Okay, so what if there are some essays in this book that kind of contextualize the quotes? What can you write about that might give some context to the quotes?” And so really I sat down and thought about it.

And for me, the natural place to go was metaphor and I think that’s the poet in me. So while they’re essays, I approached them with a poet’s sensibility. And I think a lot of what has helped me get through difficult times is telling myself a different story about the experience. When you’re going through something really difficult, it’s easy to default to like, “Well, this is what’s happening.” And it’s usually an unkind narrative that we tell ourselves in that moment. “This person is leaving because I’m X.” Or, “This didn’t work out because I’m Y.” Our self-talk is so unkind. And so, a lot of what has helped me press on […] are metaphors that helped me reframe some of these experiences and think about them in a different way. If that makes sense.

That totally makes sense. It’s interesting how you say that our self-talk can be really unkind. How do you grapple with that personally and as a writer?

I think part of it is just being aware of it. Maybe the trickiest thing is realizing that the way that you think of something may not be the truth. You know, feelings aren’t facts. And so when you’re going through something really difficult, it’s just so easy to blame yourself or to get bogged down and think, “It’s not going to get any better. It’s going to continue to be this hard. I can’t do this.” And, really what the tweets were born from was me needing to believe something different.

I call myself a recovering pessimist for a reason. I was always — anyone in my family would tell you that I was the pessimist in the family, and I think part of it is just self-protection. I think it’s natural to think and expect the worst.

It’s like if something decent happens, you’re pleasantly surprised, but you haven’t set yourself up to have your hopes dashed. And so I’m always the person who expected the worst quietly and then if anything good happens, I would be pleasantly surprised.

But it’s really hard to function as a parent and as a professional and just as a human, when you’re going through something really devastating and you honestly don’t believe it’s going to get any better. You can’t get out of bed if you don’t believe it’s going to get any better. Part of what I was doing with the tweets really was a pep talk to myself into believing over time that it will get better.

After a while, I think you can start feeling the hope. Sometimes I say that hope is like a garment that didn’t fit very well. And I kept trying it on over and over again. At first it was really oversized and scratchy and terrible, but the more I tried it on, the better it fit and the better I felt and I was able to press through and believe my own story.

Another part of the reason it got better was because of the other unexpected thing that happened, which was that in a time when I felt more alone than I’d ever felt in my life, I started being really vulnerable on social media and realized I wasn’t alone at all. And this community happened where I basically just stood up in front of thousands of people and said, “My life is really hard right now, but I’m really trying,” and I just kept doing that every day. And no one laughed at me or said, “No it’s not, it’s not going to be okay.” People showed up and said, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to be fine. And actually, I’m going through the same thing and I really needed to hear that.” Or, “I went through that five years ago and look at the better place I’m in.” And just the act of saying it out loud every day and feeling the sense of community honestly, really, really helped.

You wrote about how loss can be generative. And would you say that this book is an example of that for you?

Oh, certainly. I’ve joked before, like I would definitely have chosen an intact family over a divorce in a book written in the wake of a divorce, but I wasn’t given that choice. So I do feel glad to have had the opportunity to have written it, not just because it was good for me to have written it. It definitely helped, writing this book helped me process a lot, but my hope is that reading this book might help other people going through their own sort of “what now?” times and struggles, especially this year with everything happening around the world and that it wasn’t all in pain. It wasn’t just that I had a terrible couple of years for nothing.

So yeah. This certainly feels like, I don’t know, I don’t really believe in lemonade from lemons, but it feels like I have something to show for how much that hurt.

In the book, you also talk about how strength comes from asking for help and in many ways how we are more resilient when we work together and we’re more like collaborative and I’m wondering, how do you think we can normalize asking for help?

It is really hard. And I think we are, especially Americans we’re such individuals. We’re all about individualism and personal freedom. And unfortunately we still, I think carry a lot of the bootstraps mentality where you are sort of the goal just to be able to get through something on your own and say, “Look how strong I was. I did this by myself.” When really, yes, I guess we could see that as a sign of strength, but it also seems terribly lonely and unnecessary. Why wouldn’t the sign of strength be: “Look, I was really hurting and look at all of these beautiful people who came and lifted this burden with me.” To me, it’s one of the most beautiful things that happened to me over the past two years, which strengthened friendships and also new friendships because a lot of people helped me carry what I had to carry.

And, it’s not that I couldn’t have done it by myself, but it would have been A) a lot harder, and B), a lot lonelier and honestly, a lot less enjoyable.

Smith’s new essay collection, “KEEP MOVING: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change“, is out now from Atria/One Signal Publishers.  

Michael Des Barres on the John Lennon song that “blew my mind” — and it’s not “Imagine”

Marking what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday this past week has given us even more occasion to re-examine his solo work. And with the release of the “Gimme Some Truth” box set (read the review by Beatles scholar Kenneth Womack) we’ve been treated to remixes of not only some of Lennon’s better-known songs, but also several hidden gems.

Though not included on the new compilation, one song in particular holds resonance for our latest guest on the “Everything Fab Four” podcast, a new show produced by me and Womack, which he hosts, featuring conversations with artists and other notable figures about the Beatles’ legacy. Musician and actor Michael Des Barres (co-writer on the ’80s hit “Obsession”) tells Womack why Lennon’s “Mother” (released on 1970’s “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” album) resonates with him the most.

“My father was in jail and my mother was in an institution for schizophrenia,” Des Barres explains. “It’s okay, I grew up fine … [but] you become pretty cryptically cynical about the world when you’re not brought up by anybody.”

He continued, “John Lennon in particular was a real major force in my view of the world – because he, like me, didn’t have a mother. That song [“Mother”] blew my mind. Never mind “Imagine” – “Mother” was the song that did it for me. [But] Lennon overcame these incredible difficulties, and I related to that.”

Des Barres, who attended boarding school in London in the early ’60s, says of his experience being hand-picked by NME to attend a Beatles performance, “I’ve never experienced anything like it….these four kids came out of the rubble of the Second World War and changed the world. The lightbulbs went on when the Beatles arrived.”

Listen to the latest episode of “Everything Fab Four” with Michael Des Barres for more, and subscribe via Spotify, Apple, Google or wherever you get your podcasts:

“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin, the bestselling book “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles,” and most recently “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.” Read more of his work at Salon here. 

Make your own Fudgie the Whale for one: Easy individual ice cream cakes make every day a party

I was embarrassingly deep into adulthood before I discovered that you can eat ice cream cake during non-birthday times. And that is what’s known as a GAME CHANGER.

I grew up on Carvel, the East Coast-based ice cream chain and reputed originator of soft serve. Throughout my childhood and teen years, founder Tom Carvel’s gravel flecked voice was a regular fixture on local television ads, reminding frozen dessert fans that “Wednesday is sundae” and updating them on the seasonal varieties of a cake called Cookie Puss. (You can imagine the annual excitement around Cookie O’Puss time.) I never had a birthday that was not marked with a Carvel cake — perhaps a Cookie Puss, perhaps a Hug Me the Bear.

The real star of the Carvel lineup, however, was Fudgie the Whale. Originally created as a Father’s Day tribute — “a whale of a cake for a whale of a dad” — and frugally fashioned from the same mold as Carvel’s Santa Claus cake, Fudgie soon proved so popular he eventually became a year-round staple.

After I became a grownup, I stopped eating ice cream cakes for a long time. Then when I started my own family, birthday cakes were baked, not picked up at the ice cream shop or the frozen foods section of the supermarket. Eventually, though, my daughters attended enough children’s birthday parties to discover Carvel — and Baskin-Robbins, and Friendly’s — and they naturally demanded a piece of the action for themselves. And it turns out that a Cookies n’ Cream cake just for the hell of it on a Tuesday night is a pretty great way to wrap up the day.

But with my older kid away at college and my spouse now away half the time caring for his mother, a whole cake going cardboard stale in the freezer feels like too much. Yet I find that I long more than ever for the innocent cheer that only a Fudgie or a Cookie Puss can provide.  

Working from an Uber Eats video that deconstructs the famous Fudgie and a recipe from Sarah Hearts, I’ve discovered one can easily put together a dessert that efficiently evokes the spirit — if not the exact iconic shape — of the Carvel classic. Best of all, homemade means custom made, so my baby whale is just straight up chocolate ice cream and Oreo crumbs, no vanilla necessary. You can make yours with any combination of your own favorite flavors. The only hard part will be summoning the patience to wait for it to firm up. I find pouring the residual cookie crumbs down one’s throat to be an excellent way to pass the time. And besides, making it yourself still won’t take nearly as long as waiting for your birthday to roll around.

* * *

Recipe: Individual Ice Cream Cakes, adapted from Carvel and Sarah Hearts

Makes four ice cream cakes

Ingredients:

  • 1 pint of your favorite ice cream, softened 
  • 1 cup of your favorite cookies, crushed into crumbs  
  • Jarred hot fudge sauce, at room temperature
  • Reddi-Wip, canned frosting, sprinkles or decorating gel (optional)

Instructions:

  1. Line a muffin tin with 4 liners. 
  2. Divide half of the ice cream evenly into the 4 cups, smoothing it gently down.
  3. Sprinkle a layer of cookie crumbs over the ice cream, gently patting it down.
  4. Scoop the remaining ice cream evenly into your 4 cups. Smooth the top so it’s flattened.
  5. Stick the tin in the freezer to firm up, at least 30 minutes.
  6. Working quickly, take the tin out of the freezer, remove the cakes and put them on a cookie sheet. Spread a layer of the fudge sauce on each cake. Don’t spread too thickly or it will slide off. Return to the freezer for another half hour.
  7. Remove the tin from the freezer and take the liners off the cakes.
  8. Working quickly again, press more cookie crumbs around the sides of each cake, covering as completely as possible. Return to freezer for at least an hour.
  9. Immediately before serving, take the cakes out and decorate to your liking. Sprinkles or a blast of whipped cream are easiest.
  10. Serve and eat right away.

As GOP politicians continue to flout pandemic precautions, do restaurants have to serve them?

On Oct. 5 — three days after President Donald Trump confirmed via Twitter that he and his wife had tested positive for the novel coronavirus — Murray’s Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis announced that 13 of their employees were entering quarantine. 

As the Associated Press reported, the 13 had catered a fundraiser the Wednesday before Trump’s diagnosis. It was held at the Minnesota home of Marty Davis, CEO of the quartz countertop manufacturing company, Cambria. About 40 contributors paid $200,000 a couple or $100,000 per person for the chance to meet the president and hear him speak.

“Our staff was there to work the party only and at no point did any staff come in close proximity to the president,” the restaurant said in a statement. “Upon learning of the president’s positive COVID-19 test, we immediately enacted a 14-day quarantine for all staff who worked the party. Additionally, each staff member who worked the party will be tested for COVID-19.”

Murray’s management hasn’t provided more detailed information on the health status of their employees, whether any of them have tested positive for the virus or if the staff will be paid during their quarantine period. Meanwhile, multiple Republican leaders — including Reps. Tom Emmer, Pete Stauber and Jim Hagedorn — have since faced criticism for attending Trump’s rally in Duluth and taking a regular Delta Air Lines flight home to Minnesota on Friday night, potentially infecting both their fellow passengers and the airline staff. 

The entire story is both infuriating and expected in the way that many pandemic-era stories are. Am I surprised that members of the Republican party continue to flout basic coronavirus precautions, even at the expense of members of the service industry who are likely making minimum wage? Not really. The GOP has a tendency to make things that shouldn’t be political — like the personhood of immigrants and people of color, or basic health and safety measures — into nation-splitting matters of policy. 

But I can’t help but wonder if those same politicians — as well as others, like Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka and U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis, who were close to Trump during his visit — plan on eating out anytime soon. 

At this point, all 50 states have reopened in-person dining in some capacity (though some are pausing or backtracking amid continued outbreaks), but the industry is still at a place where a restaurant having to close, or lose a large number of their staff, for a 14-day quarantine period could literally force them to shutter permanently. 

With that in mind, and with no vaccine against the virus on the horizon yet, will restaurants get to a point where management will opt out of serving politicians who have publicly made it clear that they consider the virus to be either a hoax or treat basic precautions as a partisan issue? 

Restaurants around the country have already tried to mitigate some of the health risks associated with reopening, from installing private dining booths surrounded by shower curtains, to placing signs at entryways asking customers to refrain from entering if they are experiencing a fever, cough or shortness of breath. An increasing number of members of the restaurant and grocery industry have invested in de-escalation training for their staffs to better equip them for more civil interactions with customers who refuse to wear masks, while some restaurant owners, like Ryan Rogers — who owns several restaurants in Louisville and spoke with Salon in May — chose to stay closed to dining room guests for longer than their states required. 

“We do know that enclosed interior dining spaces will trap air and that our guests can’t eat or drink with their masks on,” Rogers said at the time. “We also know that our team members did not sign up to be essential workers and potentially risk their health and safety to serve our guests. Based on the information we do know and the information we don’t know, from a human perspective it doesn’t make sense for us to risk the safety of our team members or our guests by allowing anyone to dine inside of our restaurants at this time.” 

Additionally, refusing service to politicians — or otherwise allowing that service to be disrupted — has a precedent. 

In June 2018, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen, a popular Virginia restaurant, because the owner said “that many members of her LGBT staff were uncomfortable serving Sanders.” 

Days before that, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was protested at a Mexican restaurant in D.C. 

“Secretary Nielsen, how dare you spend your evening here eating dinner as you’re complicit in the separation and deportation of over 10,000 children,” shouted a member of the group. 

They proceeded to chant “shame, shame, shame” and left after about 15 minutes. Per the Washington Post, restaurant management chose not to intervene. 

These incidents, in combination with 2019 reports of Eric Trump being spit on by an employee at Chicago’s Aviary and of Mitch McConnell having his leftovers dumped into the street by a fellow diner, sparked national conversations about civility and rules of polite society in the Trump era, and while many of this administration’s stances have previously sparked real-world hardships and hatred, choosing to serve its members could now put restaurant employees’ health in immediate danger. 

Just take a look at the White House Rose Garden SCOTUS event now called a likely “superspreader.” According to a USA Today investigation, “President Donald Trump and other White House insiders infected with COVID-19 carried the virus across the country in a matter of days, potentially exposing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people as they went about their business.” 

“From a religious summit outside Atlanta to a campaign rally at a Pennsylvania airport and a private fundraiser in Minnesota, Trump, his aides and political allies attended events with thousands of people, often without masks and little regard for social distancing,” it said. 

And while the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities Act protect and provide accommodations for customers regardless of race, color, religion, national origin or impairments — under the law, businesses do have the right to turn away customers who, as Harvard Law School law professor Joseph Singer told USA Today, pose “a direct threat to the health and safety of others.”

According to Stacey Lee, a business law expert at Johns Hopkins University, a coronavirus diagnosis does not qualify as a disability under the law. 

“It would be absolutely within their purview to deny,” Lee said. “It’s a potential threat to other patrons.”

As the pandemic drags on, the country is plagued by unknowns. Will Trump’s diagnosis change how members of the Republican party personally and politically respond to the coronavirus? Who knows, but perhaps the time will come that members of the restaurant industry will have to change their response to them — both for the safety of their staff and their businesses as a whole.

Amy Klobuchar calls Barrett hearing a “sham” as Lindsey Graham defends against “hypocrisy” charges

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., called Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing a “sham” on Monday as Democrats argued the hearing should not have been held at all.

Democrats repeatedly accused Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee of hypocrisy after they blocked former President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for nearly a year before trying to confirm Barrett in time for the November election. Klobuchar said during her remarks that the Senate should be working on coronavirus relief rather than trying to rush through Barrett’s nomination.

“Yes Judge, I think this hearing is a sham. I think it shows real messed-up priorities from the Republican Party,” Klobuchar said.

Klobuchar also cited Barrett’s criticism of the Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare, warning Americans that “your health care is on the line.”

But amid her criticism, Klobuchar acknowledged there was little Democrats could do to stop Barrett’s confirmation by the Republican-led Senate, urging voters to show Republicans that “enough is enough” at the ballot box.

“This isn’t Donald Trump’s country,” she said. “It is yours.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., defended himself against allegations of hypocrisy after he not only supported blocking Garland’s nomination but vowed to block any Supreme Court nomination by President Donald Trump in the final year of his term.

Graham argued that the Barrett nomination was different than Garland’s because Democrats did not hold the Senate during Obama’s second term. He went on to quote late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to justify moving forward with the hearing.

“The bottom line is that Justice Ginsburg, when asked about this several years ago, said that a President serves for four years, not three,” he said. “There’s nothing unconstitutional about this process.”

Graham did not mention that Ginsburg’s reported dying wish was that whoever wins the election choose her replacement.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who blocked Garland’s nomination as the Judiciary chairman under Obama, also said in 2018 that he would not consider a Supreme Court confirmation in Trump’s final year but on Monday claimed that he only meant that if he was still the chairman of the committee.

Like Graham, Grassley also quoted Ginsburg to defend his turnaround.

“Justice Ginsburg delivered a eulogy for her friend Justice Scalia. Justice Ginsburg said, ‘We were different, yes, in our interpretation of written text. Yet one in our reverence for the courts, and its place in the U.S. System of governance,'” he said. “The Senate is now tasked with carrying out perhaps its most solemn duty under the Constitution. As we go through this process, we should heed Justice Ginsburg’s words with a shared reverence for the Court and its place in our Constitutional system.”

The Republicans defended their change of heart after polls showed that a majority of voters believe the election winner should pick late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the committee, said the Republicans “should honor” their past statements and “let the American people be heard.”

“Simply put, we should not be moving forward on this nomination — not until the election has ended and the next president has taken office,” she said.

“Instead of rushing to jam another ideologically driven nominee onto the Supreme Court in the middle of an election when over nine million Americans have already voted…let’s end this hypocritical, illegitimate hearing – return to the urgent work we have before us,” argued Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii.

Democrats sought to frame Barrett’s nomination as a political attack on Obamacare. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case that could decide the fate of the health care law a week after the election.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., called out the Republicans’ “screaming-tire 180” degree reversal on Supreme Court nominations in an election year and called Barrett a “judicial torpedo” aimed at Obamacare.

“This Supreme Court nominee has signaled in the judicial equivalent of all caps that she believes the Affordable Care Act must go, and that the precedent protecting the ACA doesn’t matter,” he said. “The big secret to influences behind this unseemly rush see this nominee as a judicial torpedo they are firing at the ACA.”

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., argued that because Republicans failed to repeal Obamacare in Congress “they’ve got to rely on the court to do their work.”

“In the midst of the pandemic, the Republicans want to strike down a law that 23 million Americans rely on,” he said, calling the hearing a “shameless, self-serving, venal reversal.”

Democrats spoke while surrounded by photos of people they said would be impacted by the repeal of Obamacare.

“President Trump has promised over and over and over again that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “To make good on that promise to achieve what they could not accomplish through the democratic processes, they’re looking to the courts, in fact, to the court; they’re looking to this nominee.”

Mike Lee goes maskless at Barrett hearing less than two weeks after testing positive for COVID-19

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, spoke without a mask at Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing on Monday less than two weeks after he tested positive for the coronavirus.

Lee appeared in person for the hearing and removed his mask while working and making his opening statement just 10 days after he announced that he had tested positive following a White House event to announce Barrett’s nomination.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who announced he had tested positive the same day as Lee, on the other hand, appeared at the hearing remotely. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who tested negative but is quarantining after being exposed to Lee, also appeared remotely.

Lee, who vowed to “remain isolated for the next 10 days” when he tested positive, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he had “gotten the sign-off from the office of the attending physician” and is “no longer contagious.” He did not say, however, whether he had actually tested negative for the virus.

A letter from Brian Monahan, the attending physician of the Congress, said that Lee had met the criteria to end his isolation. The letter said that he had no fever for the last 24 hours “and your other symptoms have improved.” The letter did not say whether Lee had been tested but does note that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “does not recommend” repeat testing for those who have isolated for 10 days and have not had a fever in the past day.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, noted that Lee “could still be infectious.”

Senate rules do not require members to wear masks and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who refuses to be tested for the coronavirus, said that the hearing room had been reconfigured to meet CDC guidelines.

Some on the left criticized Graham for holding the hearing while refusing to be tested and Lee for appearing without a mask.

“At least two members of @SenJudiciary have recently been diagnosed with COVID-19—and we have no idea what kind of threat they or others pose to those around them today because they refuse to agree to mandatory testing,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., a member of the committee.

“This proceeding today is a disgrace. It should not be happening,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “And Mike Lee’s mask-less presence and presentation powerfully exemplify the cynical lack of principle that has governed the actions of the leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

White House chief of staff Mike Meadows was among those seen speaking with Lee at the Capitol on Monday.

Meadows planned to speak to reporters outside of the hearing but changed his mind when reporters objected to him taking his mask off.

Meadows insisted that he was “more than 10 feet away” before putting his mask back on and walking away.

“I’m not going to talk through a mask,” he said.

NBC News reporter Josh Lederman pointed out that Meadows was “with Trump in close quarters” throughout the president’s coronavirus infection and that “CDC guidelines for essential workers exposed to people with COVID” require them to “wear a ace mask at all times while in the workplace.”

“Meadows has been in regular contact with a COVID-19 positive patient,” added Washington Post reporter Josh Rogin. “He should be quarantining, not insisting on taking off his mask inside.”

Donald Trump’s great performance nears its dramatic climax: Stay tuned!

If it weren’t for the human lives damaged or destroyed by Donald Trump’s presidency — the 215,000 or so killed by the coronavirus is only the beginning, of course — the whole insane experience could be understood as a brilliant, confrontational work of performance art. It’s a vulgar and moronic performance, to be sure, and one that pushes the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief to its outer limits. But it’s also a work of indisputable genius, one that has hypnotized media and public around the world for the better part of five years.

Viewed through the dark lens of a fully nihilistic or totalitarian aesthetics, where the work of art transcends all ordinary morality — and if Donald Trump had a theory of aesthetics, that would be it — even the cruelty and recklessness of his performance is an aspect of its brilliance. From the beginning, Trump told us that he could commit murder in public without alienating his supporters. Many of us understood that as a figure of speech. His greatest and most malicious accomplishment in public life (so far) has been to prove, on a grand scale, that it was literally true. 

To cite another example, there is no viable argument that the partnership between Trump and Stephen Miller, his most notably sadistic adviser, has been politically successful. Almost all of their vindictive anti-immigrant agenda has been wildly unpopular, and much of it has been abandoned or thrown out by the courts. But as a theatrical display of faux-macho dominance, fueled by shared bitterness and unconcealed racial resentment, the Trump-Miller act has been immensely satisfying to its intended audience.

To suggest that Trump is fundamentally a salesman, a con man and a performer is certainly nothing new. He has been shaped by the worlds of New York real estate, tabloid publicity, professional wrestling and reality TV, where bullshit is everything and even the physical reality of land, buildings and human bodies is a disputable afterthought. But some people seem to get stuck on an imaginary dichotomy or contradiction between Trump as showman and Trump as wannabe tyrant, as if his oft-expressed desire to seize full power and rule forever were not in itself an aspect of the performance.

With the apparent implosion of Trump’s re-election campaign amid his preposterous attempt to turn a major coronavirus cluster in and around the White House — including his own infection, and the possibility that he infected many other people — into a great symbolic victory, the distinction between Fascist Trump and Showman Trump has collapsed entirely. 

I’m not suggesting that Trump didn’t or doesn’t want to “win” again and is consciously sabotaging himself, or that he doesn’t enjoy the dimly-sketched fantasy world — its details no doubt supplied by Miller or Bill Barr or other factotums with a better grasp of logistics — in which he overturns the Constitution and is declared president for life. As New York Times critic James Poniewozik recently noted in an interview with Salon, Trump cannot conceive of any version of reality where he isn’t a “winner,” universally proclaimed as one of the great men of history. (He won’t come right out and claim to be the very greatest — but, you know, some people are saying that!)

Trump appears to possess no interior life worth talking about — I envision it as resembling an anthill, perennially under attack by a small boy with a stick — and clearly isn’t capable of the kind of subtle introspection that might lead to deliberate self-destruction, even as an expression of grandiosity. But he only wants to be installed as Führer of a New Trumpian Reich if that too is a performance and other people do the real work. 

We can all agree that Trump has shown no aptitude for governance, but despite the liberal paranoid trauma left over from the 2016 election, he’s no good at politics either: His vaunted “movement” consists entirely of red hats and vile rhetoric. He has never demanded any sacrifices from his followers, let alone that they actually do anything. He cheers on their dipshit outbreaks of violence and farcical terrorist plots — remove yourself from the proximate sense of alarm, and the scheme to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer sounds like a future season of the FX series “Fargo” — but, honestly, you can tell his heart isn’t in it. I don’t mean that he feels any sense of compassion or responsibility, only that he’s reluctant to endorse anything that pulls the spotlight away from him.

In the inner circles of TrumpWorld, whose denizens have sustained themselves by blending crime-family omertà with a shared delusion of historical destiny, the cognitive dissonance must now be off the charts. Faced with the prospect of a sweeping, landscape-shifting defeat just weeks from now, more cynical Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas — both of whom face unexpectedly tight re-election battles — have begun to subtly edge themselves away from Trump and rehearse the speeches they may need to make four or five days into November.

(Of course I’m aware of the nightmare scenarios that keep #Resistance liberals up all night: Millions of mail ballots thrown out, a reverse-engineered Electoral College, Trump re-elected in a state-by-state vote in the House of Representatives. It would be foolish to claim those things are impossible, or that Bill Barr hasn’t carefully considered them all. But honestly: Is that the way the wind is blowing? At the moment, a Democratic landslide in which Trump is conclusively defeated and Republicans lose six or seven Senate seats is a far more likely scenario.)

But that cognitive dissonance is far less of a problem for Donald Trump personally than for the people around him. I think Poniewozik is on the right track in suggesting that Trump can turn whatever happens into a grand narrative of heroism and martyrdom, with himself in the starring role. 

We’ve told ourselves all along that Trump is a pathological narcissist who doesn’t care about other people, and sees them only as reflections of himself. (The temperament, in other words, of a diva.) He slanders and demonizes his critics and opponents, betrays his so-called friends without a moment’s hesitation, feels only contempt for his worshipful supporters, and denies the existence of any objective reality. That was all true enough, but as things now appear, it was only the beginning. 

If the chaos and ugliness Trump has channeled into American political life will be with us for decades to come — and is just one part of a worldwide crisis of democracy with no clear resolution in sight — he himself is about to transcend all that. Like any great performer, Trump is following his instincts rather than plotting out a rational course, and the culminating act of his public performance will synthesize and outstrip everything that has before. Rather than yield to any external force — political, legal, medical or scientific — Trump stands ready to destroy his own political career, and the political party he adopted, invaded and conquered. 

It’s a bit of a cliché at this point, not to mention overly flattering, to compare Donald Trump to John Milton’s antiheroic Satan. But if Trump were capable of reading and understanding such things, he’d no doubt enjoy the comparison:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

Given the pimped-out, pseudo-Wagnerian theater of TrumpWorld, a spectacular auto-da-fé is the only remotely adequate way to bring down the curtain. He will of course proclaim this self-immolation to be a great victory, and as seen in the rearview mirror of history, he may have a point. Like Satan, Trump has shown us how far we have fallen and how easily we are corrupted. To see him as the villain of the story is missing the point.

Fauci says Trump ad misrepresented comments without permission as admin blocks his media appearances

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s campaign took his comments out of context and used them without his permission in a new ad.

The Trump campaign used an excerpt from an interview Fauci did all the way back in March to praise the president’s widely-criticized response to the coronavirus the same week that ABC News host Jon Karl accused the White House of blocking Fauci from speaking to the media.

The 30-second ad, which was released after Trump was discharged from Walter Reed Medical Center last week, touted Trump’s personal experience with the coronavirus.

“President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America,” a narrator said in the ad. “Together we rose to meet the challenge, protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time, sparing no expense.”

The ad then shows an interview with Fauci in which he said, “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”

Fauci said that the ad took his comments out of context and used his interview without permission. He made clear that he was referring to health officials’ efforts, not those of Trump.

“In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate,” he told CNN. “The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials.”

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh defended the ad.

“These are Dr. Fauci’s own words. The video is from a nationally broadcast television interview in which Dr. Fauci was praising the work of the Trump Administration,” he told the outlet. “The words spoken are accurate, and directly from Dr. Fauci’s mouth.”

The comments were taken from an interview Fauci did with Fox News in March, not long after the pandemic first hit the United States. Since then he has acknowledged that the Trump administration’s response has been among the worst in the world as the US, which makes up about 4% of the world population, reports 20% of all the coronavirus deaths in the world.

“We’ve never had a threat like this. The coordinated response has been…There are a number of adjectives to describe it — impressive, I think is one of them. We’re talking about all hands on deck. I, as one of many people on a team, I’m not the only person,” Fauci said in March. “Since the beginning, that we even recognized what this was, I have been devoting almost full time on this. I’m down at the White House virtually every day with the task force. It’s every single day. So, I can’t imagine that under any circumstances that anybody could be doing more.”

Trump, who has continued to downplay the severity of the coronavirus even amid his own infection, has repeatedly complained that Fauci receives higher approval ratings than he does.

“It’s interesting: he’s got a very good approval rating. And I like that, it’s good. Because remember: he’s working for this administration. He’s working with us,” Trump said in July. “So why don’t I have a high approval rating with respect — and the administration — with respect to the virus? We should have it very high.”

But Fauci has repeatedly pushed back on Trump’s rosy spin and criticized the White House for ignoring its own coronavirus guidelines during an event to announce Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, after which the president and numerous aides and allies tested positive.

“I think the — the data speaks for themselves,” Fauci told CBS News. “We had a super-spreader event in the White House and it was in a situation where people were crowded together and were not wearing masks. So the data speak for themselves.”

Karl had hoped to interview Fauci on Sunday’s edition of “This Week” amid the White House outbreak but said the White House blocked his appearance.

“We had hoped to talk to Dr. Fauci about both the outbreak at the White House and across the country. He was more than willing to join us, but the White House wouldn’t allow you to hear from the nation’s leading expert on the coronavirus,” Karl said. “In fact, they wouldn’t allow any of the medical experts on the president’s own coronavirus task force to appear on this show.”

CBS News and NBC News’ “Meet the Press” have been unable to book Fauci for weeks or months, according to HuffPost, and the White House turned down a Fox News Sunday request to interview Vice President Mike Pence, the head of the administration’s coronavirus task force.

Axios’ Jonathan Swan said that his attempts to interview the administration’s top health officials “keep getting rejected or slow-walked” for “months” unlike requests to interview other administration officials.

White House communications director Alyssa Farrah pushed back on the reporters’ allegations, arguing that Fauci appeared for interviews with PBS News and NBC News in the past week and that Karl “didn’t request any other member of the task force.”

Karl responded by publishing an email he sent to Farrah showing that he asked to speak with any of a number of Trump administration health officials.

“The truth matters,” he tweeted. “The requests for Dr. Fauci and the other members of the task force were made directly to you — multiple times.”

Karl later added that the Trump campaign told ABC that “they will continue to run this ad featuring Dr. Fauci’s despite his objection.”

Old drug becomes “cash cow” after company boosts price to $40,000 per vial, emails show

For a dad whose infant son was afflicted with a rare seizure disorder, a drug invented in 1952 was indispensable for his boy. It was also indispensable to executives at the pharmaceutical firm that acquired the drug in 2014 — not because it was a cure, but because it was a “cash cow,” according to documents released at a House hearing Thursday.

The firm, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, got ahold of the venerable drug called H.P. Acthar gel by buying the company that owned it before, Questcor, for $5.8 billion in 2014.

According to the documents obtained and released by the House Oversight Committee in a broad probe of drug pricing practices, Mallinckrodt targeted Questcor primarily because of Acthar, a so-called orphan drug that helps 2,500 kids a year in the U.S. afflicted by infantile spasms.

Acthar was a “premium-priced product” with a “robust cash flow profile” that would help the company “achieve aspirational goals with a single transaction,” according to the company’s internal discussions.

The premium price when Mallinckrodt acquired the drug was $31,626 for a single vial, after Questcor had hiked it from around $100 in 2000, according to the committee investigation. Mallinckrodt continued the trend, hiking the price five times to ultimately reach $39,864.

That’s what it cost when the father had a doctor prescribe six vials for a six-week course for his son. The premium price was a shock, and his insurance company would cover only four doses.

He appealed to Mallinckrodt.

“We are in a serious bind here,” he said in a message that was among 140,000 documents obtained from the company by House investigators. “Your medication is extremely expensive and we are unable to afford the 80,000 dollars needed for the remaining 2 vials.”

The father is not identified in the committee documents.

A spokesperson for the company said it helped patients who reached out “get access to Acthar,” but did not specify what that entailed.

Mallinckrodt CEO Mark Trudeau told the Oversight Committee on Thursday that his firm “is steadfastly committed to knocking down barriers to patient access — that’s particularly true with Acthar gel.”

“We’ve also improved the ability of patients with a prescription to obtain Acthar through our robust free drug and commercial copay assistance programs, which lead to many patients paying nothing out-of-pocket,” he said, later testifying that the company is committed to lowering the “net price” of the drug to 2015 levels.

Yet, according to the documents, knocking down barriers or lowering prices has had little to do with the interest in owning Acthar. It was more about expanding the market for the drug, and profits for the company, as was the case with five other companies hauled before the committee over two days.

Indeed, Acthar was so important to the goal that executives preparing a presentation on the company’s 2018 prospects bluntly wrote: “Acthar Modernization Strategy defines the Future of the Brand as either a Growth Asset or Cash Cow.”

Trudeau told the committee that presentation was never made. According to the documents, even executives preparing the material seemed aware the words were too bald — but just barely. One junior executive asked in an email, “Do we really want to say ‘cash cow’ to the board?” The company’s chief commercial officer, Hugh O’Neill, responded, “Instead of ‘cash cow,’ I will replace it with profit maximizer.”

Committee Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) quizzed Trudeau on the description, asking if it’s true “this is how you really see this drug, not as an innovative therapy?”

“That’s in fact not true,” Trudeau said. “That term is typically applied to products for which no investment is likely to be going forward, and, in fact, that’s exactly the opposite.”

He argued that Mallinckrodt had invested $660 million in improving manufacturing of the drug and in seeking evidence that Acthar works for many other uses that the FDA permits.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) said Trudeau’s answer misled the committee and he owed Maloney an apology.

“Replacing one term with another term, ‘cash cow’ with ‘profit maximizer,’ doesn’t change the intent of your company, which is to make as much money as possible,” Gomez said.

The “cash cow” document was about getting more patients, saying the strategy was to convince skeptics of Acthar’s other uses that it was not an “overpriced steroid,” and to overcome “lack of acceptance of academic opinion leaders” whose criticism “limits product penetration.”

Democrats on the committee argued that not only was Mallinckrodt’s intent to squeeze as much out of Acthar as it could, but also to get it from taxpayers through Medicare, where prices cannot be negotiated by law.

Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.) pointed out that about 25% of Acthar sales went through Medicare when Mallinckrodt bought Questcor, and that share is over 60% now. Revenue from Medicare rose from under $50 million in 2011 to $725 million in 2018. Overall, the drug accounted for about a third of all the company’s net sales in recent years, Trudeau said.

The hearing was the second this week stemming from an investigation into sky-rocketing drug prices that the committee launched in 2019. Besides Mallinckrodt, the committee hauled in executives at Amgen, Novartis, Celgene, Bristol Myers Squibb and Teva.

“What we learned was shocking. Drug companies are hiking their prices higher and higher — and placing an ever-greater burden on the very patients who rely on these drugs to survive,” Maloney said.

“We also learned that claims by drug companies that their price increases are necessary for research and development are completely bogus,” she added. “The internal company documents we obtained show that drug companies hike prices almost entirely for selfish reasons — they do it to meet internal revenue targets, or to increase their own bonuses in some cases.”

Republicans on the committee were far less critical of the pharmaceutical companies, though many of them also complained that drug prices are too high and that Americans should be able to pay the lower prices available to people in other nations. Some argued that clamping down on pricing in the United States might inhibit new medicines from coming to market.

Don’t believe the hype: Trump’s economy was plummeting even before the pandemic

There’s fresh evidence that the robust economy Donald Trump inherited from Barack Obama was faltering before the pandemic.

State personal consumption spending growth slowed sharply in 2019 compared to the year before, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday morning. The growth rate plummeted by a fifth.

Personal expenditures grew in 2019 but by only 3.9%, down from 4.9% in the previous year.

This official data came just hours after Mike Pence told a whopper about American incomes during the vice presidential debate Wednesday night, a lie that escaped the notice of our major news organizations. That’s because no official announced the numbers and mainstream journalists rely way too much on what officials tell them instead of doing their own analyses of official government data.

Pence said, “the average household income for a family of four increased by $4,000 following President Trump’s tax cuts.”

Incomes down, not up

In fact, the average income for the bottom 50% of income taxpaying households in 2018 averaged $300 less than in 2016, Obama’s last year in office, as DCReport showed more than a month ago from the Trump administration’s own official data. Please note this is not the poorest third of Americans but the poorest third of people who made enough to pay income taxes.

Less income under Trump wasn’t limited to the poorest third of taxpayers.

Consider the 9% of taxpayers making $75,000 to $100,000. Their average income in 2018 was $128 lower than in 2016 after adjusting for inflation, my analysis of IRS Table1.4 shows.

Total income reported by all Americans did grow, but the benefits were highly concentrated near the top of the national income ladder.

In real terms income reported on tax returns increased by almost $1 trillion over those two years. On the surface that’s good. But only those in the top 7%, those making more than $200,000 and up, saw their share of the national income pie grow. Every group making less had to get by on less.

Almost half of the trillion-dollar gain flowed to the 1%, those making $500,000 and up. But even among the one-percenters the gains were not widely shared.

Just one in 285 taxpayers makes $1 million or more. This very rich and very tiny group took in three of every four dollars of increased income flowing to the one-percenters. Under Trumpian policies, it’s good to be rich and very bad to be poor or middle class. But Lying Mike Pence bore false witness by telling you all people are doing well

Useful maps

When it comes to increased spending in 2019 you can learn how your state did by looking over this useful series of graphic maps at this government website. The first map shows how much the rate of spending declined in 2019 compared with 2018. The data excluded money that state residents spend overseas.

The economic weakness under Trump, pre-pandemic, wasn’t limited to the incomes of the majority or to spending by everyone. Job growth under Trump, pre-pandemic, ran about 3% below the rate of Obama after the Great Recession ended and job growth resumed in early 2010.

Candidate Trump promised to grow the economy by at least 4% annually and insisted he could achieve as much as 6% growth in Gross Domestic Product, which measures our country’s total economic output. Those of us who study these matters found Trump’s claim either laughable or a lie. Time proved we were right as Trump underperformed the average of the previous 70 years.

In 2017, still basking in the glow of the Obama economy, our inflation-adjusted or real Gross Domestic Product grew 2.3% compared with 2016. Growth reached almost 3% in 2018 as the Trump/Radical Republican tax giveaway to big corporations gave a brief kick to economic growth. In 2019, however, GDP growth slided to under 2.2%

And Thursday morning brought the latest job loss numbers. Last week 840,000 Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits. There were also 464,000 claims for pandemic unemployment aid.

In all, 25 million Americans are without work right now and many more will join them soon because Trump decreed Tuesday afternoon that he would not sign any new coronavirus relief bill until after the election and then only if he wins. The stock market instantly sank, prompting Trump to do a partial flip-flop. But counting on Trump to sign a new relief package would be like trusting that he actually knows how to improve the economy for all Americans, not just the already rich.

 

Americans aren’t worried about white nationalism in the military—because they don’t know it’s there

White nationalist groups, who make up some of the most serious terror threats in the country, find new members and support in the U.S. military. These groups believe that white people are under attack in America.

In their effort to create an all-white country where nonwhites do not have civil rights protections, these groups often instigate violent confrontations that target racial and religious minorities. Since 2018, white supremacists have conducted more lethal attacks in the United States than any other domestic extremist movement.

The Proud Boys group, for example, whom President Donald Trump addressed in the first presidential debate of 2020, includes veterans and active duty service members. The group’s members, who are required to engage in physical violence before joining, celebrated Trump’s statement to “stand back and stand by,” considering his call an endorsement of their extremist ideology.

While many Americans were appalled at the president’s statement, our research shows that most Americans remain unaware of the connections these groups have to the military.

The links between the U.S. military and white nationalists date back to the 1990s, with many believers seeing military service as an opportunity to hone their fighting skills and recruit others.

Our research has found that most Americans don’t know much about the level of white nationalism in the military – though when they find out, they’re worried about it.

White nationalists active in the military

Researchers do not have reliable data on how many active duty or veteran service members belong to white nationalist groups. But current military members are increasingly aware of the influence of far-right groups in the ranks.

In the most recent poll by Military Times, an independent media organization covering the military, about one-fifth of service members have reported seeing signs of white nationalism or racist ideology in the military community. Those include the casual use of racial slurs and anti-Semitic language, and even explosives deliberately arranged in the shape of a swastika.

More than one-third of service members surveyed in 2018 said white nationalism is a significant threat to the country – which is more than were seriously concerned about threats from Syria, Afghanistan or immigration.

White nationalists with military experience have committed acts of violence, usually after leaving the service – like the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing and the 2012 mass shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh temple.

But active duty personnel have also been involved in white nationalist activity. In July 2018, a white nationalist was dismissed from the Marine Corps for his involvement in hate groups, including attending the 2017 “Unite the Right” protest in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In February 2019, a Coast Guard officer stationed at the agency’s headquarters was arrested and accused of stockpiling weapons as part of a plan to start a race war.

In April 2019, a Huffington Post investigation revealed that at least 11 members of various military branches were under investigation for involvement in a white nationalist group.

In September 2019, an Army soldier who had expressed support for right-wing extremism was arrested after sharing bomb-making instructions with undercover agents. That same month, an Air Force master sergeant who had been involved with a white supremacist group was demoted but allowed to continue serving.

In June 2020, an Army private was charged with terrorism offenses after he leaked sensitive information about his unit to two white supremacist groups, including one that promotes rape and murder as part of its quest for a race war.

Congressional concern

Lawmakers have been paying attention to the problem. In 2019, the House of Representatives approved a requirement to screen potential military enlistees for signs of white nationalism, as part of the Pentagon’s annual budget allocation. But the Senate removed that provision before sending the bill to the White House for the president’s signature.

Military and academic experts agree that violent ideologies in the ranks make it harder for soldiers to form the bonds of trust with one another that they rely on in combat.

If Congress did ban white nationalists from serving in the military, members of white nationalist groups would have a harder time receiving military training. They would also be cut off from an important recruitment network.

American views of white nationalism

We wanted to find out how much the public knew about white nationalism in the military, and what they think about it. So in early May 2019, we conducted a demographically representative survey of 1,702 American adults.

First, we asked respondents how prevalent they thought white nationalism was in the military. Most – 70% – said there were “some” white nationalists on active duty. Another 20% said there were “many.” Just 10% thought there were none.

Then we sought to find out whether people thought it was a problem. To answer that question, we split our respondents into two groups. We asked one half of them whether “white nationalism in the military” is “not a problem,” a “somewhat serious problem” or a “serious problem.” Only 30% of them thought it was a “serious” problem; 47% percent thought it was “somewhat serious” and 23% thought it was “not a problem.”

The other half of the respondents got the same question – but before we asked, we gave them the results of a 2018 Military Times poll finding that “22% of service members … have seen evidence of white nationalism or racist ideology within the armed forces.” Having learned that information, 35% of this group said the problem is “serious” – a statistically significant increase of five percentage points.

After that, we returned to the first group, and gave them the information from the Military Times poll – and found that 39% of them considered the problem “serious.” This nine-point increase was also statistically significant.

We did see an initial political divide among our respondents. People who identified as strong conservatives were less concerned about white nationalism in the military than were strong liberals. But respondents across the political spectrum were willing to update their views, and considered white nationalism a serious problem, once we gave them additional, factual information.

The military is a trusted institution

The American public is deferential to the military, and trusts it as an institution. White nationalist groups and ideologies get a boost of credibility and legitimacy through their links to the U.S. military. Civilians often take cues from the statements and actions of those who served.

Our work suggests that informing the public about service members’ worries about white nationalism in the military could increase concern among both liberals and conservatives about the growing power of these groups. Increased public concern could create an incentive for policymakers to try to combat white nationalist groups, in the military and in society at large.

Jennifer Spindel, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of New Hampshire; Matt Motta, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma State University, and Robert Ralston, Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science, University of Minnesota

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

Federal judge bars Ohio from limiting ballot sites to one per county

A federal judge on Thursday blocked an order by Ohio’s Republican secretary of state limiting the number of absentee ballot drop boxes to one location per county, a move civil rights groups decried as a last-minute attempt to erect yet another barrier to safe and accessible voting amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The scathing decision by Judge Dan Polster of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio came in response to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s directive (pdf) earlier this week prohibiting counties from establishing ballot drop boxes “at any location other than outside the board of elections”—an order similar to one issued by Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott last week, prompting rights groups to sue.

“While it may be said that the 7,903 registered voters in Noble County may find a single drop box location sufficient, the record demonstrates that the 858,041 registered voters in Cuyahoga County will likely not,” Polster wrote in his 26-page ruling (pdf). “The Secretary is continuing to restrict boards from implementing off-site collection, and he appears to be doing so in an arbitrary manner.”

“We are in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century coupled with reasonable concern over the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to handle what will undoubtedly be the largest number of absentee voters in Ohio’s history,” Polster continued. “The Secretary has not advanced any legitimate reason to prohibit a county board of elections from utilizing off-site drop boxes and/or off-site delivery of ballots to staff.”

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represented the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that Polster’s decision “protects the right to vote for tens of thousands of Ohioans, especially black voters and people of color who disproportionately reside in some of the most populous county in the state.”

“No voter should have to sacrifice their health and well-being to cast their ballot,” said Clarke. “Drop boxes have proven to be a secure method of collecting ballots, and are crucial in allowing voters to safely cast their vote during this unprecedented pandemic. The court’s ruling is a success in the ongoing fight against eleventh-hour voter suppression efforts.”

Plaintiff Beatrice Griffin, a voter in the critical battleground state, said she was compelled to join the lawsuit against Ohio’s top election official “not only by my own need, but my awareness that many of the 860,000 voters in Cuyahoga County do not have cars and would spend hours reaching the one downtown drop box location on public transportation.”

“This is an unfair burden on any voter,” said Griffin.

Fake “official” drop boxes set up by California GOP may be in “violation of state law”: official

The California Republican Party is operating unofficial ballot drop boxes that Secretary of State Alex Padilla said on Sunday were in “violation of state law.”

Jordan Tygh, a regional field director for the California Republican Party, promoted an “official ballot drop off box” on Twitter and urged followers to message him for “convenient locations” to drop their ballots last week, The Orange County Register first reported. One voter reported an “Official Ballot Drop Box” that was “approved and bought by the GOP” outside of a Los Angeles area church before it was removed after county officials warned on social media that it was “not an official vote by mail drop box and does not comply with [state] regulations for drop boxes,” according to KCAL.

The boxes were set up across Southern California in front of churches, gyms, and gun stores by the California GOP, according to The Washington Post. One chapter of the state Republican Party in California rolled out its own drop-off sites while echoing President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations over the “security” of mail voting even though it has been repeatedly shown to be safe and secure.

“CONSERVATIVE VOTER ALERT!,” the Fresno GOP said while announcing a list of unofficial locations to drop off ballots. “President Trump is very concerned about the lack of security with mail in ballots. Don’t take a chance that your vote will not be counted. Once your ballot arrives in the mail, mark your ballot completely and then walk it in, as soon as possible, to one of the secure locations listed below. Make sure your vote counts!”

Padilla, a Democrat, said on Sunday that it was illegal to operate unofficial ballot drop boxes.

“Operating unofficial ballot drop boxes — especially those misrepresented as official drop boxes — is not just misleading to voters, it’s a violation of state law,” he told the Post. “My office is coordinating with local officials to address the multiple reports of unauthorized ballot drop boxes. Californians should only use official ballot drop boxes that have been deployed and secured by their county elections office.”

The OC Register reported that those operating the unofficial drop boxes could face felony charges that carry up to two to four years in prison.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley told the the outlet that he had received hundreds of complaints about the drop boxes.

“What we did was started to look into it, notified the state, and the Secretary of State issued guidance this afternoon that it is illegal and you can’t do that,” he said. “It would be like me installing a mailbox out on the corner – the post office is the one that installs mailboxes.”

The Republican Party defended the drop boxes on Twitter.

“If a congregation/business or other group provides the option to its parishioners/associates/ or colleagues to drop off their ballot in a safe location, with people they trust, rather than handing it over to a stranger who knocks on their door — what is wrong with that?” a spokesperson for the California GOP wrote on Twitter.

The national Republican Party also defended the drop boxes, arguing that they were not unlike “ballot parties” held by state Democrats where participants can fill out mail-in ballots and have them turned in en masse by party volunteers.

“This procedure has been in place since 2016 — not sure why people are all of a sudden surprised,” the California GOP argued, referring to a law approved by the state legislature allowing “ballot harvesting.”

Padilla said in a letter to election officials on Sunday that the unofficial drop boxes are not legal under the 2016 law because it requires voters to designate a specific “person” to submit their ballot. He said the drop boxes also do not meet the security requirements that are mandate for official drop off boxes.

“Voters are in control of how to return their ballot, and they have multiple safe and secure options for doing so,” Padilla said. “Ballots can be returned by mail, to any in-person voting location, or to an official secure drop box. Never hand your ballot over to someone you don’t trust.”

Election experts criticized the potentially illegal ploy amid concerns over mail voting, which have grown in no small part due to the president actively seeking to sow doubt in the election results.

“This is far less than ideal in a a far less than ideal election when we are desperately trying to tell people that they can trust the election systems, where we’re telling people if you don’t trust the mail, then use an official ballot drop box,” Loyola Law Professor Jessica Levinson told KCAL. “This does not do good things for people’s trust in our elections.”

In the stunning yet grim “The Last Ice,” melting glaciers and development threaten Inuit way of life

The stunning National Geographic documentary, “The Last Ice” may sound like it is about climate change — and the film does address that hot-button issue — but its greater focus is the cultural changes that have impacted the Inuit communities in the Pikialasorsuaq region, where Canada and Greenland meet. 

The film, directed by Scott Ressler, is a clarion call. The Inuit community depends on the animals as well as the ice, which is being threatened not just by melting, but by the white man’s development. Greed is prompting Russians, Europeans and the Chinese, to look into shipping routes, oil extraction, and tourism in the area, hoping to pump billions of dollars into the global economy.

As the documentary shrewdly shows, this is not the first time Inuit in the Eastern Arctic have been exploited. John Amagoalik, dubbed “The Father of Nunavut,” (he was instrumental in lobbying for native rights and securing a land claim agreement) remembers being treated, “Not as a human being, but as less than a human being,” when his community was forcibly relocated. Moreover, Danish and Canadian governments took children to residential schools to “civilize” them and, as Amagoalik says, “Turn them into white people.” He reports on the physical, mental, and even sexual abuse that took place as a result. Other stories of colonialization and outsiders coming into the Inuit’s homeland are recounted as well.

“The Last Ice” also shows how European influence in wildlife management is having a negative effect on the people and the region. There is an increasing need to protect the environment as one hunter notices fewer animals and hunting spots. Food insecurity is very real in the area. A bottle of orange juice at the supermarket can cost more than $12, Meanwhile, Arctic char is losing its color because of pollutants, making it difficult to find healthy fish or meat to eat or feed the dogs that pull the sleds.

Killing animals is a necessary and important part of the Inuit life; they need the meat for food and the skins for clothing. (There are a few brief scenes of animal deaths). But the hunters acknowledge that, “We are not above nature or animals,” showing respect for the non-humans they live alongside. It is not hard to make the connection that outsiders should show the same respect to the Inuit. 

“The Last Ice” breaks up some of its messaging by featuring some spectacular nature porn scenes of the landscape. (Some, sadly, are in fast-motion, but viewers can still absorb the beauty.) A hunter pulled on a dogsled across the snowy tundra is breathtaking. There are also some amusing scenes of a seal “prairie dogging” in the water, or overhead shots of polar bears on ice floes or swimming. The animals are poetry in motion and will tug at viewers’ hearts. 

However, despite these diverting scenes, Ressler crams arguably too many facts and themes into the brisk 83 minutes, and glosses over some key questions. What, if anything, is being done to protect the animals in this diverse biosphere and the environment? How can the Inuit protect themselves from the outsiders developing airstrips and radar stations, as well as increased military and mining efforts? These may be nagging questions, but the film raises and abandons them. 

The film does better when it focuses the micro issues. This is, in part, because “The Last Ice” showcases two very engaging subjects. Aleq and Maatalli. Aleq is a charming young hunter who loves living in Qaanaaq, Greenland. He claims he is less stressed on the ice than he was when he lived in Nuuk or Denmark. He is appropriately respectful of the hunting rules and traditions, though he is, admittedly, a bit clumsy. Aleq’s happiness may be short-lived. He is dealing with a medical condition that may restrict his way of life. He also gets somber, noting it is a harsh, hard life on the ice, and mentions in one interview that several of his friends have killed themselves. Yet his deep love for his work, the animals, the people and the region come across clearly, even as he worries about the future. 

Likewise, Maatalli, an Inuit Youth Advocate, is a cheerleader for her community and way of life. She has returned to the area to embrace her culture and heritage, and “reclaim what [she] lost not growing up in her homeland.” (Maatalli moved to Ottawa as a child). She regrets her disconnection, and that she is no longer fluent in her native tongue. She hopes to revitalize the culture, language, tradition, practices and environment. Her goals are noble; she does not want to be controlled, and her pride and determination are inspiring. Maatalli speaks eloquently and from the heart about her commitment to her community, and she is especially moving when she talks about the difficulties she experienced in the past.

While the people and the sense of place is appealing, “The Last Ice” is not a tourist advertisement. The testimonies of the subjects, who mourn the breakdown of their way of life, are affecting and impassioned. This important documentary provides a vital, humanizing glimpse into a community of indigenous people and their way of life that is, like the melting glaciers, changing much too quickly and not by choice.

“The Last Ice” airs on Indigenous Peoples’ Day – Monday, Oct. 12 at 9 p.m. on Nat Geo Wild.

My sister died needlessly of COVID-19 — and bias

As I write this, over 210,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. My sister is one of them. But it wasn’t just the coronavirus that killed her. It was also racism.

Julie Butler graduated from Wellesley College in 1979 — one of the few Black women in the class — with a double major in molecular biology and studio art. She went on to become a veterinarian, and practiced her calling in Harlem, New York, the community she lived in for more than 30 years and to which she contributed as a community leader and board member for several organizations. She was a wife, a mother, and my best friend.

As a solo veterinarian, Julie logged long days in the clinic, seeing patients until 7 p.m. and completing charts after that. Her patients were dogs, cats, turtles, snakes, lizards, rabbits, birds, and more. She was Harlem’s Steve Irwin.

In early March one of Julie’s assistants came to work with a cough and high fever. My sister promptly sent him to the emergency room. Later that week, a client who had recently returned from London came into the clinic with a fever to pick up his dog. And as the week ended, a close family friend tested positive for COVID-19. A few days later, my sister began feeling so sick she couldn’t go to work. It started with fatigue, fever, and general malaise. Her temperatures spiked at 103.5 degrees.

Julie’s daughter reached out to me, her physician aunt, for advice. I told her to get my sister tested for COVID-19 immediately. She contacted her mother’s primary care provider, who said she would not see my sister or order testing or prescribe medication for her.

With no medical care option, my sister’s husband, children, and my son, who worked for Julie as a veterinary assistant, provided round-the-clock home care, taking shifts to attend to her needs. These family members remained in constant contact with me and the other physicians in our family, including our brother and his wife, both family practitioners in California.

As Julie suffered in her sick bed, the Surgeon General of the United States and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans what to do if we suspected we had COVID-19: Stay at home, they told us. Do not go to the emergency room or urgent care center. Call your doctor for advice.

That advice was problematic for many people of color who do not have family doctors or health insurance. They are overly reliant on urgent care centers and emergency rooms for their acute medical needs. My sister and our family followed the advice of the Surgeon General and the CDC as the definitive directive in a rapidly expanding pandemic. But calling Julie’s primary care provider had not resulted in any meaningful advice or intervention.

The New York State Department of Health provided a hotline for getting COVID-19 information, advice, and intervention, including testing availability. We called the hotline on Julie’s behalf. But even though her symptoms of unrelenting fever, headache, body aches, chills, nausea, diarrhea, and nonproductive cough had already been going on for a week, we were told to call back in three days if they persisted. We tried three different times over the course of a week and received the same response.

Days later, Julie’s temperature hovered near 104 degrees despite tepid baths and round-the-clock Tylenol. Yet we could not get her tested for COVID-19. It made me angry to see my sister denied testing and treatment when I saw white friends, colleagues, and acquaintances get one or both almost immediately upon showing symptoms. But what was happening to Julie was happening all across New York City.

Julie was eventually tested for COVID-19, but here’s what it took to make that happen: I recommended that Julie’s family take her to a local urgent care center for a chest x-ray and additional evaluation. But this was not going to be an impromptu visit. The clinic had on-site radiology, the wait time was less than 10 minutes, and there was no one in the waiting room. I gave the green light to Julie and her family.

Julie arrived at this urgent care center at 6 p.m. on Monday, March 23rd. She was evaluated, and her chest x-ray showed both lungs were full of fluid and inflammatory cells. I spoke to the attending physician, who recommended immediate transport and admission to the hospital. The closest hospital, however, had a reputation of providing suboptimal care, especially to people of color. I asked the attending, “If she were your sister where would you want her to go?” The physician paused, then recommended taking Julie to a hospital in a more affluent, white community as her best chance of survival. I paid for a private ambulance to transport my sister to this hospital. She was evaluated in the emergency room, given a presumptive diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia, and then admitted. Her COVID-19 test came back positive a few days later.

Within 24 hours after the diagnosis, Julie was transferred to the intensive care unit and intubated. She received several medications, including hydroxychloroquine. The family held daily meetings by telephone with the medical staff taking care of Julie. We rejoiced as her fever gradually subsided and she was able to come off the ventilator, though she still needed supplemental oxygen to maintain her oxygen saturation. Finally, she was again able to breathe just room air.

I FaceTimed with Julie the morning she was discharged from the hospital. She appeared weak but in good spirits that day. She told me she was able to walk to the bathroom on her own and was even eating a little. We were hopeful. She also told me that she was experiencing severe back pain but the doctors and nurses in the stepdown unit where she was now a patient told her that this back pain was due to having been in bed too long.

She told me that she had developed a blood clot in her right leg. With the daily updates we received during Julie’s ICU stay, I was puzzled that no one had mentioned the clot. I asked her whether she was being treated for it and she told me yes.

My sister added, “They think I am well enough to go home.”

When Julie arrived home, she was still weak but optimistic. She was given a sponge bath in the dining room, since she was too feeble to climb the stairs. Shortly after her bath, Julie grew short of breath and quickly became unresponsive. The family called 911 and my son performed CPR on his aunt as she was in full blown respiratory arrest. Her oxygenation never went above 61 percent, despite supplemental oxygen. My niece tells me that the EMT tried to resuscitate her for a few minutes before pronouncing her dead just after 10 p.m., on April 4, 2020.

“They did not treat her right,” my niece told me afterward. “They were reluctant to touch her and after briefly working on her, they pronounced her dead, mumbled condolences, and left.”

The family, still shaken, was left to figure out what to do with Julie’s body. They called the police and were told to call the hospital. They called the hospital and were told to call the police. After several hours of calls, Julie’s body was transported to the morgue. A small funeral service was held days later for my only sister and best friend. I was only able to attend virtually.

Following her death, members of her household experienced various symptoms including low-grade fever and loss of sense of smell. Based on the New York Department of Health’s criteria for COVID-19 testing, all of them should have had easy access to testing, right? Wrong. It took intervention from high-level individuals in medical administration to get them all tested. As a Black physician, I am leery of using my professional associations to obtain what should be normal medical services. Someone should not need connections to obtain basic medical care. Yet I felt I had to use my connections on behalf of my family’s urgent health needs.

Reflecting on Julie’s circumstances, one might think that a highly-educated health care professional like my sister would not suffer from lack of access to medical care. But regardless of her medical standing, contributions to society, and level of education, my older sister Dr. Julie Butler still could not access timely assessment, COVID-19 testing, or medical care.

She, like so many unnamed others, experienced the ultimate in bad outcomes because of her access to health care was too little, too late. This lack of access is largely related to individual’s race, sex, age, and place of residence. These adverse outcomes are a result of implicit and direct biases from health care professionals. Unchecked discrimination and racism in the health care field is the silent killer among people of color and the pandemic exposed this ever-present epidemic.

According to the CDC’s report Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups, “Long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put many people from racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.” My sister was one of them.

As a physician with more than 30 years of experience, I have witnessed disparate treatment of people based on socioeconomic status, race, sex, age, gender, and even religious affiliation. It is shameful that in 2020, Black Americans and other people of color continue to experience disproportionate rates of chronic disease and premature death, including those related to COVID-19.

Of course, people of color are more likely to have risk factors that increase the likelihood of developing Covid-19. These include living in crowded housing and communities and working in “essential” fields such as environmental services, transportation, civil service, and home health, which aren’t possible to do from home. These risk factors should put health care professional on high alert to do more for these patients. But if my sister is an example, they are doing less.

Fellow health care professionals, your biases could be a death sentence for people. As healthcare professionals we must do more to hold each other accountable. If you see or suspect bias in the workplace, call it out or report it. Medical administrators must also implement ongoing mandatory diversity, bias, and sensitivity trainings for their front-office and frontline staff. In addition, we must recruit, hire, retain, and promote more diverse staff whose voices and experiences represent the multitude of people and communities we serve.

We all have a responsibility to do the right thing for all people. Remember and act on our Hippocratic Oath to not permit considerations of religion, nationality, race, gender, politics, socioeconomic standing, or sexual orientation to intervene between my duty and my patient. Otherwise, we become more of a threat to human life than a service to it.

 

Susan Collins wrote legislation that made millions for her husband’s lobbying firm

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who finds herself trailing Democratic challenger Sara Gideon in a hotly contested election battle with national implications, wrote contracting reforms as a member of the Senate Government Affairs Committee that appear to have directly benefited her future husband’s lobbying and consulting firm. 

While that firm had some contracts that coincided with Collins’ tenure on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, it also landed a major $49 million contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2013 — the year after Collins stepped away from that committee.

Collins first met Thomas Daffron in 1974 when she was an intern in the office of Rep. William Cohen, who went on to serve three terms in the Senate. (Cohen, a Republican, has endorsed Collins for re-election to the Senate — and Joe Biden for president.)

Daffron served as a consultant on Collins’ 1996, 2002 and 2008 Senate campaigns, and ran her leadership PAC from 2003 until 2012, when they married. Collins signed over power of attorney when the couple bought a $705,000 townhouse in Washington, public records show.

From 2006 to 2016, Daffron was chief operating officer at a K Street lobby shop called Jefferson Consulting, which also did some government contracting work. The firm took in nearly $60 million in federal contracts during his time there, with a significant increase after he became COO. 

For most of that time, from 2005 to 2012, Collins either chaired or served as a senior GOP member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, whose portfolio includes government contracting oversight. Daffron had “suggested [Collins] join the less desirable Government Affairs Committee,” the Portland Press Herald reported in 2001.

Tom Daffron, a 16-year Cohen staffer who worked with Collins, created her campaign advertising and suggested she join the less desirable Government Affairs Committee because of the opportunity for high-profile work. A shrewd choice, as she became the first freshman to lead the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations with a staff that enhanced her own. Daffron remains a close friend and one of the top advisers in her ‘kitchen cabinet,’ sources said.

While on the committee, Collins wrote contractor reform designed to “strengthen the procurement workforce,” an area in which Jefferson Consulting specialized, securing tens of millions of dollars in government contracts related to acquisition services.

One such measure was a piece of contracting reform signed into law as part of the 2008 defense budget. After the budget passed, Collins singled out acquisition language, saying that she was “particularly pleased that important reforms to the federal acquisition workforce were also included.”

The association representing government contractors “by and large” supported Collins’ bill, calling it a “serious effort to address the root causes of the government’s challenges with acquisition.”

Between 2006 and 2016, Daffron’s firm landed more than $76 million spread across dozens of federal contracts related to acquisition and procurement, according to searches on USAspending.gov. In 2010, Jefferson Consulting reported providing acquisitions services and support to nearly two dozen federal agencies.

Certain specific provisions included with Collins’ 2007 contract reforms appear to have benefited Daffron’s firm directly, by adding new requirements for acquisition services that Jefferson specialized in.

For instance, one item imposed new requirements on chief acquisition officers at each federal agency, at a time when Jefferson Consulting held a $331,000 contract to provide such services to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Chief Procurement Officer. (Collins’ committee had oversight of Homeland Security.)

Another provision required the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and the Federal Acquisition Institute to prepare an “acquisition workforce development strategic plan.” Daffron’s firm later reported helping the Federal Acquisition Institute with “Strategic Assessments of Acquisition Operations/Acquisition Workforce Studies” — as captured in April 2010, the earliest available version of Jefferson Consulting’s website on the Internet Archive.

Collins also created a new “acquisitions administrator” charged with overseeing the acquisition workforce and developing a strategic plan for the acquisition workforce. Jefferson claimed on its site that it had provided eight federal agencies with “strategic assessments of acquisition operations.”

Finally, Collins’ reform bill required USAID to revise its strategy to address acquisition problems in Afghanistan. In 2013, the year after Collins left the Senate Homeland Security committee, Jefferson Consulting secured a $49 million contract with USAID for procurement support services, according to government spending records. Two years later, the firm announced it had landed a $33 million acquisition contract with USAID.

Neither Collins’ office nor Jefferson Consulting replied to Salon’s request for comment.

In Nicaragua, forests and indigenous communities face threats

When Juan Carlos Ocampo, an Indigenous community leader in Nicaragua, was a child, deer regularly passed his home as they moved between dense riparian forests on the country’s northern Caribbean coast. Like others in his Miskito community, his family caught fish and crayfish from the rivers, hunted deer and large guinea pig-like paca, and used trees harvested from the forest to build their homes and boats.

Today, he says it’s not possible to hunt, fish, or harvest wood in his community. “It’s very painful to see the destruction of the forest,” he says.

In the past 30 years, swaths of Nicaragua’s vast Caribbean forests have been destroyed by settlers clearing land for agriculture, ranchers pasturing cattle, and loggers harvesting precious wood. Waterways have been contaminated by gold mining and damaging fishing practices. The transformation has intensified in recent years, with increasingly deadly conflicts between settlers and Indigenous communities and 23 percent of Nicaragua’s humid primary forest lost from 2002 to 2019, according to the Global Forest Watch initiative of the World Resources Institute, a sustainability-focused nonprofit research organization.

In 2018, protests by retirees and students over authoritarian policies sparked a widespread uprising against President Daniel Ortega’s regime. During months of clashes between dissidents and government forces, hundreds of people were imprisoned and more than 300 were killed. Ortega remained in power via a brutal crackdown on dissent. To date, an estimated 100,000 people have been exiled, including many activists and members of the press.

Since then, Nicaragua’s forests and Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities have been left without independent oversight at a time when poverty and population growth, as well as government policies, are driving migration to Indigenous and protected forest regions. These forests are increasingly vulnerable, even as the central government has received millions of dollars in World Bank-managed funding to protect them.

Nicaragua’s Caribbean region hosts two reserves recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for their expansive biodiversity. The Bosawás Biosphere Reserve on the northern border with Honduras forms part of the second largest tropical rainforest tract in the Americas after the Amazon, with a diverse mix of ecosystems from pine savannas to cloud forests rising more than 5,000 feet above sea level. On the Costa Rican border to the south, the Río San Juan Biosphere Reserve is a vast expanse of humid evergreen broadleaf forests threaded by rivers and wetlands.

Both reserves include Indigenous territories and are protected areas that restrict or ban settlement and resource extraction. The Bosawás Biosphere Reserve is home to the Mayangna and Miskito peoples, while the Río San Juan is home to the Rama Indigenous group and Creole-speaking Nicaraguans of African descent (also called Kriol).

These forests are crucial segments of the increasingly fragmented Mesoamerican biological corridor, which connects habitats in North and South America, allowing the migration of animals like jaguars and providing critical refuge for rare and endangered species. Rafael Reyna-Hurtado, a wildlife ecologist at Mexico’s College of the Southern Border, says the Bosawás, Río San Juan, and other intact Mesoamerican forests are “stepping stones” for animal migration, ensuring genetic diversity among dispersed populations, and resiliency in the event of threats like disease or hurricanes. “We are concerned that these big pieces of forests that are still remaining are losing connectivity,” he says.

Two Decades of Deforestation in Nicaragua 

 

Deforestation is defined as complete and sustained removal of at least 30 square meters of tree canopy, measured by Landsat satellite. Legal boundaries of Caribbean coastal territories are outlined in red, but several different Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities live in each territory.
 
Sources: Global Forest Watch; Joel Betts, Global Wildlife ConservationVisual: Aleszu Bajak for Undark

While these forests provide critical habitat for jaguars, large endangered hoofed mammals like peccaries and tapirs are most vulnerable, says Reyna-Hurtado. Unlike jaguars, they’re not able to travel long distances for suitable habitat. They are also more sensitive to human encroachment, preferring undisturbed forests. Tapirs and peccaries perform critical ecosystem services, he explains. Tapirs, sometimes called “gardeners of the forest,” are important seed dispersers since they defecate throughout forest ecosystems, including in water, while the voracious eating habits of peccaries encourage plant diversity.

In a recent study, Reyna-Hurtado and others warned of “precipitous” population declines of white-lipped peccaries in their most critical refuges in Central America, like Bosawás, where “wildlands” with limited human influence have been reduced by 30 percent in the last 15 years.

Armando Dans, a Nicaraguan conservationist with Global Wildlife Conservation, a U.S.-based conservation nonprofit, has seen a dramatic change in the proportion of forest to developed land between the Bosawás and Río San Juan reserves over the last 15 years. “Before, there would be deforested patches. Now it’s the opposite, there are patches of forest in the pastures” and fields, he says. As a result, some species may be unable to move between intact forests, becoming isolated in one reserve or the other.

The Bosawás and the Río San Juan forests are of “vital importance,” says Ivania Andrea Cornejo, an investigator at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Natural Sciences at the Central American University in Nicaragua. In addition to providing connectivity for wildlife, these forests store significant amounts of carbon. “It’s worrying to see the level of deterioration” in Bosawás, she says, and notes Río San Juan had been well-conserved until recently. According to her analysis of data collected by community rangers in Río San Juan, settler activity increased dramatically over the last few years, with observations of camps, homes, clear-cutting, agriculture, and roads doubling to even quadrupling from 2017 to 2019.

A 2017 study by Nicaragua’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Marena) found poverty, population growth, valuable domestic and export markets for beef, and perceptions of “unused” land were the drivers of migration of landless farmers from mestizo communities (those of mixed European and Indigenous descent), in western regions to Indigenous and protected areas on the Caribbean coast.

Since 2015, some 40 Indigenous people have been killed and dozens more injured and kidnapped in conflicts with settlers, according to the Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Nearly 3,000 Miskito people have fled their homes in the northern Caribbean region since 2015 due to conflict, according to a report by the Oakland Institute, a research nonprofit in California. So far this year, at least 10 Indigenous people have been killed and many have been injured in attacks by settlers. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently called on the Nicaraguan government to “take immediate steps to prevent such acts [and] investigate and punish those responsible for them.”

The Nicaraguan Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

* * *

Over the centuries, Indigenous and Kriol communities on the remote Caribbean coast have been subject to neglect and suppression by colonial and modern central governments. The region is home to around 135,000 Indigenous people from several groups and approximately 20,000 Kriol. While the federal government officially recognizes Indigenous and Kriol autonomous governments and communal land ownership, a long legal process to resolve land conflicts is incomplete, and settlers often take advantage of lax enforcement on the ground.

Becky McCray, a Rama attorney who works on behalf of Rama and Kriol communities in the Río San Juan Biosphere Reserve, says local communities have filed complaints with various state bodies including the police and Marena, detailing what she calls “a massive invasion” of the reserve and illegal activities like deforestation, slash and burn agriculture, and the logging of precious woods. Since 2018, she says, they have received no response from the government.

Settlers have forced Rama and Kriol families to leave homes and farming parcels on communal lands through displacement and threats of murder and sexual violence, McCray says. They often face food insecurity as they lose access to farming plots. The Rama and Kriol depend on natural resources for subsistence farming and fishing and water, as well as their health, she says.

McCray joined community leaders in a recent tour of their territory and witnessed significant new destruction: a road opening up a previously inaccessible area and large areas logged, burned, and cleared for agriculture.

“We’ve made every effort to convince them that in reality the reserve is at risk,” but the Nicaraguan government has done nothing, she says. Rama and Kriol communities have created their own patrols to document illegal settlement and other activities. They have also developed a community ranger program. But the remoteness of their posts can lead to greater vulnerability; McCray said that after one ranger’s family was attacked by settlers, the family decided to move, too frightened to pursue their case with the police.

Amaru Ruiz, president of Fundación del Río, an organization founded to preserve southeast Nicaragua, including the Río San Juan Biosphere Reserve, has documented churches, schools, and roads built illegally within the reserve. Ruiz attributes their presence to “municipal public policies to establish people within the reserve” carried out by local officials with tacit approval of the central government. He says these officials are among those profiting from the illegal sale of protected lands.

Ruiz, now living in Costa Rica, is one of the tens of thousands of dissidents who fled Nicaragua in 2018. After the government revoked its recognition of Fundación del Río as an organization that year, threats against him increased, he says. Most of Fundación’s members have been threatened, he says, and its radio and educational programs in Nicaragua have ceased. Recently, the caretaker of a small forest preserve owned by Fundación del Río was threatened by local authorities who want to take it over, Ruiz says.

* * *

Since 2012, Nicaragua has received nearly $6.5 million from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility’s Readiness Fund, part of the U.N.-created, World Bank-funded program REDD+ (Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) that provides funds for developing countries to create, and eventually implement, forest preservation plans. According to the Nicaraguan government, the country has carried out planning elements including training state agencies and holding “consultations” with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, but needs an additional $5 million from the fund to finalize its plan. The minister for national policies, Paul Oquist, recently told a Nicaraguan climate change conference that the government’s fundamental strategy is forest preservation in the Caribbean region, which the government designated a critical “carbon capture zone” under its REDD+ program.

Yet Ruiz charges that the government’s participation in REDD+ is really about extracting resources under the guise of conservation. He says the Ortega government “has shown environmental concerns don’t interest them.” The Alliance of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples of Nicaragua (APIAN) also criticized the program, saying the government has “promoted the advance of the agricultural and cattle ranching frontier through the forests that form part of our traditional territories” and fabricated “agreements” with Indigenous communities to comply with REDD+ requirements.

A World Bank spokesperson declined an interview request, but in a written response stated, “Nicaragua would have to reduce deforestation, reduce forest degradation, and increase reforestation at agreed rates to be able to receive any payment from the Carbon Fund” once its REDD+ plan is implemented. The program “benefits Indigenous and local communities, local governments, and others who manage the forest for emission reductions,” the statement continued. 

In 2019, Miskito community leader Juan Carlos Ocampo brought a complaint of land invasion to government authorities, which they declined to investigate. “As a Nicaraguan, I have the right to the state’s protection and defense of my rights,” he says.

But for his part, Ocampo believes the struggle of Indigenous communities throughout Nicaragua “has the tools to succeed.” On the Caribbean coast, as throughout the country, he says, what they need is to recover the rule of law.

* * *

Sara Van Note is a print and audio reporter based in New Mexico.

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

Observation of ancient galaxies provides new clues as to how supermassive black holes form

Perhaps the old saying “we’re better together” applies to the inner workings of the universe, too. On October 1, astronomers announced they found a giant black hole surrounded by protogalaxies that date back to the early universe—as in, when it was less than one billion years old.

The discovery was made with help from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope; the findings were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

It’s the first time a close grouping has been observed so soon after the Big Bang. Astronomers hope that this discovery will help us better understand how supermassive black holes formed and grew so big and so quickly. In a statement by the ESO, astronomers say this discovery supports the theory that black holes grow quickly within web-like structures. According to this theory, it’s because they need plenty of gas to fuel them.

“This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects — supermassive black holes in the early Universe,” Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics, said in a statement. “These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence.”

The new observations reveal that there are several galaxies surrounding a supermassive black hole lying in a cosmic web in which gas extends to an area over 300 times the width of the Milky Way galaxy.

“The cosmic web filaments are like spider’s web threads,” Mignoli explained. “The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas — available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole — can flow along the filaments.”

The light from this cosmic spider web has traveled to us from a time when the universe was 0.9 billion years old. (For comparison, the universe is currently 13.77 billion years old.)

“Our work has placed an important piece in the largely incomplete puzzle that is the formation and growth of such extreme, yet relatively abundant, objects so quickly after the Big Bang,” co-author Roberto Gilli, also an astronomer at INAF in Bologna, said in a statement.

Astronomers believe that the very first black holes grew very fast, to reach masses of a billion suns with the first 0.9 billion years of the Universe’s life. However, astronomers have long struggled to explain how these large quantities of fuel helped these black holes grow so fast, in such enormous sizes, in such a short amount of time, by the universe’s standards. Astronomers now think the cosmic “spider’s web” and the galaxies within it contain enough gas to provide the fuel that a black hole needs to grow enormously so quickly. How these web-like structures first formed remains a mystery, but scientists suspect that massive dark matter halos are key to better understanding.

“Our finding lends support to the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive dark matter halos in large-scale structures, and that the absence of earlier detections of such structures was likely due to observational limitations,” Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, also a co-author on the study, said in a statement.

These galaxies are some of the faintest that have been observed by current telescopes, leading astronomers to believe there is so much more to be discovered.

“We believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest ones,” co-author Barbara Balmaverde, an astronomer at INAF in Torino, Italy, said in a statement.

Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, told Salon via email that the concentration of galaxies are “in the neighborhood of a luminous quasar when the universe was about a billion years old.”

“The bright quasar is fueled by the infall of gas onto a massive black hole, weighing over a billion Suns,” Loeb told Salon. “Finding such a monster black hole is similar to seeing a giant baby, the size of an adult, in a delivery room; the only way it can form so early is inside a galaxy more massive than the Milky Way, which feeds it with a huge amount of cold gas.”

Loeb added “such galaxies are extremely rare in the early universe and can only be assembled in the densest environments where objects condense much earlier than in the rest of the Universe.”

“As a result, one expects the environment of the quasar to be denser than average with a concentration of additional galaxies,” Loeb said. “And this is exactly what Mignoli’s team found.”

Spaghetti squash carbonara is a seasonal take on an Italian favorite

I think, or at least hope, most people have one of those recipes in their repertoire that, when it comes together, feels like magic. It could be a loaf of honey-brown challah, made from braiding together pillowy strands of dough. Perhaps it’s a pot of braised oxtails — it’s amazing how heat and wine and a little salt can transform sinewy meat into something that melts in your mouth, especially when stirred through a bowl of buttery orzo.

For me, that recipe is spaghetti carbonara. It has been for years because it’s simple and cheap, but really does feel like culinary alchemy when you pull it off. With just a few egg yolks, some grated cheese and pasta water, you can create a golden, velvety sauce that feels very luxe. Add in your choice of cured pork and top with more cheese (obviously), and the whole dish is just kind of dreamy. 

I think that’s why I started leaning on that recipe heavily during the first few months of quarantine. It’s creamy, carb-heavy comfort that comes together in just a few minutes. If I was stressed about the pandemic, I’d make carbonara. If I was fretting about how it felt like all my days were running together, I took solace in the fact that it then meant that it could always be carbonara time. Besides, the dish’s main ingredients were all relatively smart pandemic purchases: dried pasta is basically eternal, while bacon and eggs can all be stored safely for a few weeks. 

But woman cannot live on yolk-soaked noodles alone. 

Heading into fall, it became apparent that it was time to toss some more vegetables into my meals — and that the generous dash of parsley that I stirred through my carbonara just wasn’t enough. Thus, spaghetti squash carbonara was created. 

When raw, spaghetti squash looks like your average squash, but once it’s roasted, its flesh can be pulled into thin ribbons that look like (you guessed it) spaghetti. Since this recipe doesn’t have pasta water, I’ve added in a few tablespoons of heavy cream, which really adds to the velvety texture of the sauce. 

Spaghetti Squash Carbonara 
Makes 4 to 6 servings 

1 large spaghetti squash (about 2 lbs.)
2 tablespoons of olive oil, divided
⅔ cup cubed pancetta or chopped bacon (about 7 slices)
2 large egg yolks
¾ cup grated parmesan cheese, plus extra for garnish
3 tablespoons of heavy cream
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. 

2. Slice the spaghetti squash in half lengthwise, from stem to tail. Remove seeds and brush the insides of the squash with 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Place them face-side down on a baking sheet and poke several holes in the squash skin using a fork. Allow it to bake for 40 minutes. 

3. Remove from the oven and let the squash cool to room temperature. Turn it over and use a fork to rake through the flesh to create noodles. Discard the skins and set aside the noodles. 

4. In a large skillet, heat the remaining one tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add your pancetta or bacon and allow it to crisp, stirring occasionally. 

5. Remove the cubed pancetta or bacon from the skillet and allow it to drain on a paper towel. Reserve the remaining pork fat in the pan. 

6. In a small bowl, whip the egg yolks, cheese and cream in a bowl. Set aside. 

7. Add the spaghetti squash and pancetta back into the skillet, heating thoroughly, then removing from heat. While it’s still warm, drizzle in the yolk and cheese mixture while stirring the squash. The squash should be warm enough to gently cook the egg, but not so hot that it scrambles. Once the yolk mixture is completely added, give the squash a few more tosses to thoroughly combine. Add salt and pepper to taste.

8. Garnish with parsley and more parmesan cheese if desired.