The awakening of the American white mind

Each semester for the past ten years I have taught creative writing, composition and post-colonial literature. I am a poet and creative nonfiction writer whose PhD dissertation creatively and critically explores the effects of cultural memory and trauma within the Black tradition. In every class throughout my decade-long existence in academia, I have never failed to address racism, gender biases, sexism, classism and the white power structure. I have never facilitated a class that didn’t have some component that pointed out these inequalities within structural governances. This pedagogical preference is rooted in the belief, influenced by James Baldwin, “that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” To borrow a phrase coopted from the Black experience, I want my students to be “woke.” I want to give them a learning experience that awakens a moral drive to challenge systems of oppression.

One could say the mere fact I am allowed to set foot on University of New Haven’s campus is perhaps miraculous given I am very likely the only tenured full professor in America with seven felony convictions. However, when I was released from prison in the early 2000s, one in three African American males were being incarcerated in comparison to one in every 17 white males, and if you juxtapose this statistic to today in that African American males are being incarcerated 5.8 times as often as white males — I am a total outlier in higher learning. Many students I teach are enrolled in the Henry Lee College of Criminal Justice, and these hopeful young minds will soon enter into various professions within the field. The majority are white and I am a Black man that has been to prison.

This is the perfect collaboration regarding race and the criminal justice system. Though, at times, I’ve wondered if the students believe I am speaking an indecipherable tongue when discussing privilege influenced by the total sum of history. I want them to know that one can always tell the climate and social condition of a nation by the literature that it does, or does not produce. Sometimes silence operates as historical fact. At some point during the semester I ask both Black and white students, “What privileges of race are you not willing to give up?” This is usually the mic-drop moment, as the room goes into deep reflection. In order to deconstruct white privilege there needs to be an inherent understanding of one’s own privilege and how that privilege affects those that have been relegated to other.

After the George Floyd public execution in Minneapolis, along with the subsequent and ongoing protests across the nation and around the globe, I received an email from a young woman majoring in criminal justice whom I’ve the pleasure of mentoring off and on since her freshman year when she was 18 years of age. I will call her M. M began the correspondence by letting me know the past few weeks had led her to reflect deeply on the issue of race and inclusion as it pertains to the United States. M wanted me to know that, “Dr. Horton, I was a product of a broken system that failed to tell the whole truth, and without being enrolled in your first-year composition class, I easily could have stayed that way. You were the first black teacher/professor that I ever had (and to this day, the only one who has educated me on such important topics).” This short but impactful confessional made me reflect on the day I lectured on the Central Park Five case from 1990 to M’s class, which none of my white students were familiar with. I remember their utter disbelief and questioning of how a system of justice could convict these five young men and have them endure a trauma from which they are still trying to recover.

But I also reflected on the day I was granted a reconsideration of sentence in Montgomery County, Maryland, after serving time in Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, Maryland. That day the district attorney stood before the court and informed the judge I would never be a productive human being, that I had no promise of a positive future, and that the hope that Mr. Horton would change and make a positive contribution to society was a pipe dream at best. The image of this man who talked about me as if I were the worst human on the planet lingers to this very day. Every day, I have tried to prove him wrong. Every day, I feel confident that the district attorney never could imagine me as Dr. Horton.

There is always value in experience; and yet, I would not wish incarceration on anyone, nor being entangled within the justice system as presently constructed. I’ve known my value within a university that has a prominent criminal justice program and of course, I think about the irony every day I teach class. I also think often on the long list of Black boys that never had a chance to be me, beginning with my indoctrination to the violent nature that is America in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, during the ’60s.

There had always been a lineage of Black boys to draw context from, beginning on September 15th 1963 at 11:15 a.m. Central Time. Two years after I was born, my baby crib shook and rattled from a dynamite blast at the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls on the most segregated day in America in 1963, a day where color was divided by the place of worship. That day, after the bombing, Virgil Ware, sitting on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle as they pedaled down Docena-Sandusky Road, caught a bullet to the chest from a shooter riding shotgun on the back of a Confederate flag-yielding motorbike. The end result: face down in a ditch. Johnny Robinson, angered by the bombing, reacted to a group of white boys in a car yelling, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate” and began throwing rocks at the white teenagers. When the Birmingham police arrived, Johnny Robinson and his crew dashed down 8th Alley North. The police car blocked the alley and an officer, Jack Parker, pointed a shotgun out the window — and make no mistake, the police account mattered more than the victim.

The usual responses came after the fact: he lunged, reached, thought he had, looked suspicious, made a move, they always flee, the police fired in the air, fired in self-defense, because Black folks be magical, hang themselves by themselves, turn water into wine, slip out of handcuffs, be looking like every other Black person, do other Black people’s time in jail: real and imagined, make freedom disappear in handclap, or turn it into a life sentence; or, worse yet, Black boys like Johnny and Virgil get shot dead and the world changes the television channel, unbothered, unfettered, unmoved.

However, M did not change the channel. Instead she has reflected on the moment we are currently living and has used every inch of knowledge through the various critical and creative text I taught that dealt honestly with systemic racism and the white power structure. These conversations came between poems, short stories, and critical essays, thereby sparking intense and rigorous discourse. I would like to think that when M witnessed the life squeezed out of George Floyd in eight minutes and 46 seconds, or when M watched Ahmaud Arbery enjoy a casual jog, and then get gunned down in cold blood — maybe one of these was the lightbulb moment and M became one of the many young white people we have seen across the country, standing side by side with Black Lives Matter, yelling, screaming — demanding change in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Birmingham. Perhaps M placed herself in Breonna Taylor’s body the moment before it was affirmed race matter(s). If Blackness is non-monolithic, then this new movement should be, too.

I try to give students a two-for-one experience, as in teach the material they signed up to take, and use the course as a platform to collectively change the world. This approach in turn allowed M to formulate her own opinions as evidence in her epiphanous correspondence that continued with, “I’m sorry that you were a victim of a system that was created to keep people like me in a position of privilege and opportunity. And I’m sorry that we are still fighting that system today.” Of course, as a teacher and one invested in the young American mind, I felt a sense of pride that M was able to articulate her point in a way that let me know she really wanted societal change. I really had no clue that M was listening that intently, though I had given her a copy of my memoir to read and maybe those experiences I’d written about prompted her curiosity.

M never took another class with me until her senior year; yet, after our composition class ended and we would run into each other on campus, M always stopped to ask how I was doing, often inquiring about sections of the memoir, as if trying to reconcile the person in the book that was an international drug smuggler to the teacher that she befriended. M came to my office from time to time to talk about life, aspirations, her plans for her future, never about race. This past semester, her last, M signed up for my Prison Literature course, and I could sense the maturity in her opinions and thought process that comes with being a 23-year-old woman who has been doing some deep contemplations on life. She raised her hand and shared in-depth opinions during discussions of texts such as “Are Prisons Obsolete,” “Felon,” “Locking up Our Own,” “The Residue Years” and “Until We Reckon.” Then, COVID-19 hit.

Prison Lit went online in March and the dynamics of the class shifted, as I needed to be mindful of the traumatic impact to my students, both physically mentally. Their world was turned upside down in a finger snap and in another finger snap they were asked to navigate uncharted territory. Prior to COVID-19 the class appeared to be on the brink of gelling into a creative think tank. The students had begun to offer better ways of policing in neighborhoods of color, alternatives to incarceration—restorative justice. When classes went virtual we lost that connective tissue as I needed to meet each student where they were in terms of stability and the ability to complete assignments.

M was no different than many students in the class who required extended deadlines and flexibility on my part. I had not taught Prison Lit in four years and had wanted to give the students a class they would remember. I’d given up on that sentiment until I heard from M three weeks after the semester ended in early June. I will admit I was blindsided in a good way when M told me, “The current events that we have been watching unfold have been weighing on me heavily and have pushed me to reach out to let you know what a large role you have played in my journey as an activist.” M went from a criminal justice student to a young person wanting to change the world for the betterment of humanity.

I truly believe we are living a flashpoint moment. The idea of addressing systemic changes within society requires mobilization and action by young people of various cultures and ethnic groups, and yes, white people are crucial to this movement. My student was letting me know the American white mind is awakening. However, in this woke state, M added, “I recognize it should not be the job of black people in America to teach white people about systemic racism and how it has fueled the issues of police brutality and our corrupt criminal justice system.” This is the reflection of an awakening mind filled with fire and passion, ready to dismantle the old power structures in search of something more equitable for us as human beings.

M has read several critical and creative texts on the Black experience and the effects of racism on a society, allowing her to formulate an opinion rooted in understanding. M has listened deeply to the experiences of those who consistently feel a never-ending pain inflicted by the original sin of slavery. It is apparent that M holds on to the quote I frequently use in class by the poet/writer Audre Lorde, which emphatically asserts, “Your silence will not save you.” Between M’s freshman and senior year, years that have allowed the killing of unarmed Black people to be displayed through national media outlets — a transformation — an awakening took place. Unwittingly, through her correspondence, M was informing her former professor that we are living in what James Baldwin described as “the fire next time” — and the time is now if the American experiment is to succeed.

This simple baking hack will help you get the most out of every cake you make

Layer cakes are overrated. There, I said it. Sure, if it’s your birthday or your wedding day, something tall makes an impression. But cake doesn’t need to be a special event with candles and songs, nor does it need to be an Instagram-worthy work of art.

As far as I’m concerned, cake belongs on the table after a run-of-the-mill Taco Tuesday, after sushi takeout or when it’s 4 p.m. and you just feel like a simple lift to brighten the day. And I believe one of the main obstacles people have to home baking is that it seems an overwhelming production. That’s why I think you should liberate yourself from two-pan tyranny. It’s time to break up with layer cakes.

I don’t recall when, exactly, I realized that you get plenty of mileage off a single-story dessert, but I suspect it was the first time I first made Depression cake. The one bowl wonder was effortless to make, satisfying and pleasingly short. Soon after, I found myself making a traditionally-sized cake recipe and thinking — duh — layers aren’t mandatory. I let the cakes cool, decorated one half, wrapped the other in foil and chucked it in the freezer next to its best friend: ice cream. BOOM, I suddenly felt like I’d doubled my family’s dessert options.

Whether you hail from a layer cake, sheet cake or even cupcake-friendly region, most cake recipes are designed to feed a crowd. But when you want a normal amount of food to tide a family over for two nights — or whatever math works in your home — before things start to get stale, small cakes are the way to go to keep everyone’s interest.

As a bonus, small cakes seem elegant and vaguely European, especially when left unfrosted and served with a dollop of whipped cream. They also take almost no time to thaw. I usually give them about an hour, taking one out of the freezer when I start to cook, so dessert is ready to serve by the time dinner is over.

I make box cakes without apology and on the regular, because I want as little clean-up as possible — and because they’re delicious. If you’re feeling marginally ambitious, you can divide your batter between different kinds of pans, though this will require keeping track of different baking times. (I am very fond of my Dala horse pan from IKEA.) You can also mix in different ingredients; for example, you could make one Funfetti cake and a chocolate chip cake. And we haven’t even mentioned different frostings and toppings: You can totally go to town.

There’s something very reassuring to me about having cake as an everyday part of my family’s life. Likewise, there’s something special about having a non bake sale-level quantity of cupcakes on hand now, and the beginnings of a buttercream topped chocolate cake in the freezer for next week.

Recently, I made cupcakes with peanut butter frosting and a mini bundt with an old-fashioned boiled cocoa glaze. It was just that simple to get two distinct desserts out of one trip to the kitchen. Nothing fussy, nothing fancy — just a little present from today me to future me, because a slice of something special at the end of the day should always be an option.

***

Recipe: Boiled Cocoa Frosting, adapted from AllRecipes

Ingredients:

1 cup white sugar 
 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder 
 1/4 cup milk 
 1/4 cup butter 
 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions:

Heat the butter in a saucepan until browned.
Add cocoa powder, milk and vanilla. Stir until smooth.
Add milk, and stir again until smooth. (This prevents lumping.)
Remove from heat and beat with standing or electric mixer for 2 to 3 minutes.
Pour or spread over cake.

Recipe: Cream Cheese Peanut Butter Frosting, adapted from The Semisweet Sisters

Ingredients:

3/4 cup of peanut butter 
 1/2 cup cream cheese 
 2 tablespoons softened butter
 1 cup confectioners’ sugar

Instructions:

Add peanut butter, cream cheese and butter to mixing bowl and beat with electric mixer until well combined.
Add powdered sugar and beat for one or two minutes longer until fluffy. 
Spread on cupcakes or cake.

Summer calls for pisto manchego — with a fried egg on top

Let me just say this: There’s no wrong way to eat a summer tomato.Some of my preferred methods include blended into a velvety salmorejoor sliced as thick as a porterhouse, slathered with mayo and sandwiched between two hunks of bread.

But when I want tomatoes to be more sociable and mingle with other vegetables, I turn to a dish I discovered while living in Madrid: pisto manchego. I first came across it at the elementary school where I taught English, where they served it for lunch. Filing into the cafeteria, some of the students would complain, “Que no me gusta el pisto!” (“I don’t like pisto!”), but I always looked forward to pisto day. Eventually, I learned to make the dish myself, incorporating touches and tweaks to make it my own.

Ubiquitous throughout Spain, “pisto” is a stewy dish similar to French ratatouille or Middle Eastern shakshuka. I like to describe it as a summer garden in a bowl—and yes, there’s an egg on top.

The essential ingredients are tomatoes, onions, and peppers. While the Manchego (Manchego = from La Mancha) version, with zucchini and a pièce-de-résistance poached egg, is arguably the most popular, each region has a distinct take on pisto. In the green and sunny southwest, Andalusians throw in eggplant, as do their neighbors to the east, in Murcia. In Rioja, land of great wine and excellent chorizo, a cook might finish her pisto by beating a few eggs directly into the mixture at the end. As do the Bilbaínos up north, except they double the eggs, so it skews toward a veggie-heavy scramble.

I recently stumbled upon a grainy episode of Con las Manos en la Masa, a Spanish cooking program that aired from 1984 till 1991. The year is 1985, and the episode’s guest is a young director named Pedro Almodóvar, sporting a fluffy mullet and an apron over his powder-pink blazer. Together, he and host Elena Santonja prepare pisto manchego.

Like Don Quixote and some very good hard cheeses, Almodóvar is Manchego himself, and grew up watching his mother prepare pisto.

Over a simmering stovetop and light, entertaining banter, they follow Almodóvar’s mother’s recipe. The director, who would go on to lead such legendary films as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother, jokes that this penchant for cooking—it was the ’80s!—may explain why he works so well with women.

Like Almodóvar’s films to Spanish cinema, pisto is a staple of Iberian cuisine.

Food historians agree that “pisto” comes from the Latin “pistus,” meaning pounded or crushed, and that’s the spirit of the dish: a handful of vegetables simmered together until broken down and tender. But the tomatoes present a point of contention. Some cooks swear by chopping ripe tomatoes and throwing them directly into the pan, to sizzle in plenty of olive oil. Others call for blanching and peeling the tomatoes beforehand. Still others skip the chopping altogether and pass the fresh tomatoes through a food processor. And then, there are adherents to canned tomatoes, pre-crushed, or, if we’re being fancy, pre-pistus.

Of course, the recipe also depends on what’s in season (or what’s in the pantry) and family tradition. The first step in Almodóvar’s mother’s recipe is frying cubed cuts of pork in the olive oil—lending it, and the forthcoming vegetables, a rich, salty flavor.

Chef Alex Raij, whom you might know from her mini-empire of Spanish-inspired restaurants in New York City, learned the gospel of pisto firsthand from her Basque mother-in-law. When she prepares the dish, she starts with an extremely large summer squash—so big, says Raij, that it “kind of freaks me out.” I googled it and immediately understood: in verdant Basque Country, squash can reach the size of a full-grown dachshund.

Her mother-in-law peels, deseeds, and coarsely chops the squash before slowly simmering it with tomatoes, onions, and garlic. “She doesn’t sauté or brown the vegetables, as one does with ratatouille,” Raij explains. And though her mother-in-law doesn’t, Raij always finishes her pisto with a drizzle of raw olive oil.

Many cooks recommend letting pisto rest for half an hour before serving, so the flavors really coalesce. A poor planner, I tend to cook when hungry, rendering the idea of waiting to eat the finished dish more than a little ambitious—hopeless, really. It’s always good, but it’s also always better the following day.

Almodóvar says, in the episode, that pisto is best eaten after a long night of partying. According to the Volver director, it’s the perfect dish for a resident of Madrid—where life is organized around dinners that linger well past midnight, followed by gallivanting around the city. When you return, he says, you reheat and enjoy your pisto before finally drifting off to sleep.

This advice might feel more than a little irrelevant given the state of things. But in a pre-pandemic world, I would have agreed with the sentiment. If you’re lucky enough to have the chance to call Madrid home, you have no choice but to live by its nocturnal rhythms. Even the earliest of birds finds herself regularly staying out all night and catching the first train home when the metro reopens at 6 a.m. And you do it wilfully because quickly you realize: Madrileños know how to live—no fabulous mullet necessary.

In the summertime, when I find myself especially nostalgic for Madrid’s intoxicating, food-driven lifestyle, I like to make Manchego-style pisto for a taste of my former home. I sometimes make a large batch and reheat it after a night of one too many glasses of Albariño—served with a freshly fried egg.

The Spanish phrase “darse pisto” means to be pretentious or braggy. This dish is the opposite. It’s a humble recipe that emphasizes ease of preparation: You cook it low and slow, using whatever’s on hand, either at peak ripeness in the garden or peak accessibility in the pantry. As Alex Raij says, pisto is great for anyone who receives CSA (community-supported agriculture) boxes—”when you get one of everything but not much of any one thing.”

After cooking pisto often enough though, you’ll find a way to make it your own.

Pisto Manchego With Eggs

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 20 minutes

Serves: 4

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more as needed
2 white onions, sliced thin
sea salt (to taste)
2 zucchini or yellow squash (or one of each), peeled and chopped
3 Italian peppers (or 2 bell peppers), cored and chopped
4 cloves of garlic, diced
6 medium tomatoes, cored and chopped
Splash sherry vinegar (optional)
1/2 cup water
4 eggs

Directions

In a large saucepan over high-medium heat, add a generous coating of olive oil. Once oil is hot, add onions, salt and continually stir.
When onions are golden and some are a little singed, add squash and a splash more olive oil. Throw in a few more pinches of salt.
Once the squash cooks down, add peppers and another splash of olive oil. Cook for a few minutes then add the garlic. If the mixture is getting dry, add another touch of olive oil. Keep stirring continually. Salt to taste—it should be a little extra salty at this point because the tomatoes (coming next) will absorb a good deal of it.
By now, your vegetables should be soft and coming together. Add the chopped tomatoes, which will contribute some much-needed moisture.
Cook tomatoes down until they seem to have released all of their water. Stir in a splash of sherry vinegar. After a couple of minutes, pour in a half cup of water, stir and lower heat, letting the ingredients simmer together for at least 10 minutes (feel free to go lower and slower). Salt (again! I know!) to taste.
In a medium saucepan, add a healthy glug of olive oil. Once oil is hot, crack four eggs into the pan and fry to preferred doneness.
Serve pisto with a fried egg for each person and a baguette (or any such delicious bread on hand).

“Dead to Me” creator on the show’s secret to success: “I’m interested in genre-nonconforming”

When “Dead to Me” debuted on Netflix in 2019, its stylish blend of comedy, tragedy and rapid-fire cliffhangers made it an instant, bingeworthy hit. But it was the chemistry between Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate, as unlikely besties Judy and Jen, that gave it its devoted following and critical accolades. This spring, the show’s second season dropped somewhere around the point in the pandemic where the reality of our new way of life for the foreseeable future was setting in, and its themes of fate, frustration and friendship struck an even deeper chord. The show has been nominated this year for three Emmy Awards, for stars Cardellini and Applegate, and as Best Comedy.

The show was created by writer and comedian Liz Feldman (who is also an executive producer and writer for the show), inspired by her own experiences of grief and trying to conceive. “In my experience of life,” she says, “any given day can be a comic tragedy.”

Salon spoke to Feldman recently about her plans for the show’s upcoming final season, and why she’s “genre nonconforming.” The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on the Emmy nominations, the WGA award and the love that the fans have for the show. That must be gratifying, that it has connected with people in such a profound way.

It really is gratifying. It’s more than you could ever hope for.

You once described “Dead to Me” as being about ordinary people living in an extraordinary circumstance. Now we are all ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances. I’m curious how that has changed your vision for Season 3.

I’ve had my own journey with how this current time should or should not be reflected in the show. Obviously, it’s beyond on everyone’s mind. Every writer in my Zoom room — those personally and sort of existentially affected by what’s going on — I think that we start from there. We are all facing an existential crisis and something that feels incredibly present but invisible. We’re finding a way to try to encapsulate some of those feelings while telling the story at hand, which is certainly not about people living through these exact times. But they’re living through their own existential crisis. We talk about it in more allegorical terms rather than in literal terms.

What is present and invisible — that seems exactly what the whole show is about. The second season dropped in May when we were already in the midst of the pandemic, and it had a huge impact. Do you see a connection between the way that viewers responded to it and the things that could not have been anticipated when you were shooting it?

I just sit back and try to feel grateful that we were even able to finish the second season in time for it to premiere in May. We finished post-production by the skin of our teeth. Right as the entire city was shutting down, we were in our final sound and color passes. It was very touch and go in terms of if we were going to be able to finish. I just feel so relieved and I’m grateful that we had a show to release.

It’s interesting. I know that I’ve been watching a lot more television and that I have been leaning on TV. It’s almost like a friend that you can turn to in a time where we’re not even allowed to see our friends. I think there’s definitely something to having the opportunity to give people these two friends, this relationship that people have really hooked onto and connected to.

This is a show about female friendship in particular, and about that kind of intimacy and love that is unique to female friendship. Part of that springs from the fact that this is a show told by women, directed by women, mostly written by women. I know that’s a huge priority for you. Do you feel that those opportunities are now being taken more seriously? You have three nominations this year.

When you look at the Best Comedy category, here you have us, you have “Insecure,” which is another great show very much about female friendship , you have “Maisel,” which is about a woman who is trying to make a career as a comedian in the ’50s and ’60s. Obviously, it’s working. There is an audience for female viewing stories, and I think more than that, there is evidence, especially given how large our audience is, that it isn’t just women who watch shows about women. There’s a universality to women just as there is a universality to shows about men. I think maybe the surprise is men watch our shows.

I would imagine that would have been one of the obstacles in the past, this notion that men don’t watch television that is about women or features women.

Some of the feedback that we got immediately, even in Season 1, was, “This is a show my husband will watch with me. We gave it a shot and usually he leaves after the first episode, but he stayed.” We definitely heard some of that. And look, I’m as feminist as they come, and I’m just looking forward to a time where this isn’t even a story, that women-focused stories and women-helmed shows are just so intrinsic to the success of television that it is as normal and neutralized as counterparts.

I love that the show introduced a female-female love story without any “Let’s sit down and talk about this.” It’s just, “This is the next relationship for this person. This is the next development in her story.” Even five years ago, that would not have been the case.

I think because I am a gay woman who’s had the opportunity to tell lots of gay stories, I was just ready to tell a story. This has always been something that’s important to me. I had a joke when I was a stand-up where I talked about the fact that they call it “gay marriage.” It’s just marriage. I don’t gay park my car. I park it. I didn’t have gay lunch. This is something that’s always been an important point for me to make — that when something is normal, you don’t have to hang a lantern on it.

Being gay is normal in my life. That is the neutral. I wouldn’t ever have to sit down with one of my best friends and say, “Look, I have to tell you something. I like women.” They know. I just was thrilled to be able to tell a story that was just about two people who really connected in this time in both of their lives, find this romance. It’s lovely and it can be good for Judy, and Jen can see that. There’s no weirdness or judgment or jealousy or any of the sort of tropes that you very often see associated with same-sex storylines. It doesn’t need to be a story. We have other stories that we’re telling.

I wanted to ask you about the phrase that gets pinned onto this show and others of its ilk — traumedy. It feels like that genre has taken off in past couple of years, really diving into mental health and grief and substance issues. How does it feel to be part of the leading edge on this?

It’s exciting to me because as a writer in this business, it is so easy to get boxed into your genre. I started as a comedy writer, with a capital C. I was a joke writer and a sketch writer. I wrote for many years. I’m a comedy writer. There’s definitely a limitation sometimes that you put on yourself or that other people put on you because this is the thing that you do. I just was excited at the opportunity to just try to stretch myself as a storyteller.

Luckily because the show is on Netflix, and they really are a place that lets you dig into your vision, I’m thrilled that I got the chance to see if I could write in a different genre. I think what I found as I started writing is that I’m interested in the genre-less. I’m interested in genre-nonconforming.

Why does everything always have to be binary, if you will, like comedy or drama? In my experience of life, any given day can be a comic tragedy and there are days where there’s truly a weird mystery afoot. Then terrible news comes in, but you end up laughing hysterically with your friend on the phone. My experience of life is twisty and turny. To be able to make a show that reflects that, it’s really exciting. I think that’s what a lot of writers are doing right now, leaning in to the fact that we don’t just have to be one thing, that we can make the full experience of being a human being.

You have a lot of other projects in the offing for after the show ends. Can you give a hint of what you’re thinking of next after the show is gone?

I can promise you this, after “Dead to Me” is done, I’m taking a vacation. That’s the light at the end of this tunnel of blood, sweat and tears.

Facing high costs at home, Americans seek fertility help abroad

The phone rang at 11:30 a.m., Prague time, just like it did every morning. Andrea Murillo accepted the incoming FaceTime call from her husband in her small, short-term rental apartment. Outside her window, the sun had just broken through the cloudy Czech sky. “Hey honey,” she said cheerfully when she could see his face, in a tone that would make it hard to guess that they had been more than 5,000 miles apart for over two months.

Tony was lying in bed alone, his chin on a pillow, the lights off and his face illuminated by the phone’s screen, inside their three-bedroom house in a Dallas suburb. He’d be off to work in a couple of hours, but he had to check in with his wife first. The summer before, neither of them would have pictured their attempt to get pregnant quite like this. When she hung up the phone, Andrea said, “Boy, it’s early for him.” It was 4:30 a.m. in Dallas.

Like many modern couples, the Murillos spent most of their young adulthood focused on their careers. They didn’t start trying to have children until they married in 2016, when Tony was 41 and Andrea was 38 — past her peak fertility, when it’s usually easier to conceive without medical intervention. Within six months, they had progressed from old-fashioned intercourse to medically-assisted conception — expensive procedures that weren’t covered under their insurance plan. The procedures all failed, nearly wiping out their life savings in the process.

As a last resort before turning to other routes like adoption, they cast their eyes overseas. It was Tony who first had the idea. “We were looking for whatever options we could before we had to say we’d give up on trying to have a child,” he said. Through online research — “all his YouTubing, all his whatevers” — as Andrea put it, he started to realize that costs for fertility treatments, also often called infertility treatments, were lower outside the United States. “The more and more I researched,” Tony said, “the more and more it made sense for us.”

As fertility rates fall around the world, including in the U.S., the Murillos and many other hopeful parents are part of a different trend: the fast-growing and lucrative globalization of fertility treatments, also known as “reproductive travel” or “fertility tourism.”

Although a handful of states require insurance companies to cover such treatments, most don’t. That means patients still need to pay out of pocket for common services like in vitro fertilization (IVF) — where a woman’s eggs are fertilized by a man’s sperm outside of her body and then implanted as an embryo — which can run into tens of thousands of dollars. Estimates vary on just how many Americans respond to that high cost by looking abroad. Some experts suggest the number is as few as 1,000, while others have put the number as high as 70,000 — all of it without firm basis, because governments don’t tend to track the trend. What’s clear, however, is that a steady stream of Americans with perfectly good health insurance are traveling to countries they otherwise might never have set foot in to go through one of life’s most fundamental pursuits: starting a family.

“The whole process of birth is a miracle itself,” Andrea said. “It’s the most normal and natural thing in the world to do,” she added, “but it’s the hardest thing for some women, and I’m one of them, and it sucks.”

After Tony mentioned the idea of traveling abroad to Andrea, she joined in the search and would spend all day exploring overseas clinics, which have flourished in some parts of the world and often cater to patients who live in other countries. Tony would do his part in the evenings after he came home from work. When they found a clinic that was promising, they would usually watch a YouTube tour with an introduction to the staff and facilities. If they were interested in the clinic, they could choose to have a Skype consultation with the doctor for a fee.

“You just kind of trust your gut,” Andrea said about the selection process.

After about two months of research, the Murillos had winnowed the list down to the Czech Republic and Spain, both countries that have thriving fertility industries, modern medical practices, and English speakers in clinics. But either way, they weren’t sticking around to try more treatments at home. “Either we could do it one time here in the U.S. and that was it,” Tony said, “or go overseas and do a couple of different times if we had to.”

* * *

It’s never been easy to have a baby, at least when it comes to the precise timing. In her lifetime, the average woman releases between 300 and 400 eggs through ovulation over a period of around 35 years. If an egg isn’t fertilized by sperm within about 24 to 36 hours, it dissolves, and since sperm can live inside a woman’s body for almost a week, there are only about six days each month where it’s possible to get pregnant through natural intercourse, without the help of a fertility doctor.

Couples who are unable to conceive after one year of unprotected sex (six months if a woman is over 35) meet the threshold of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define as infertility, which is also the point at which most doctors recommend seeing a fertility specialist. There are all sorts of causes of infertility — the CDC lists at least six in its 2016 Assisted Reproductive Technology National Summary Report, in addition to other health issues or combinations of factors. Most relate to female infertility, generally involving issues with the reproductive organs or the inability to produce eggs; around half involve male infertility, generally concerning issues with the quality or delivery of sperm. But 25 percent of women with fertility issues receive the most ambiguous of diagnoses: unexplained infertility.

According to one common metric, having a baby seems to be getting even harder: The number of women who have problems either getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term has risen by more than 21 percent since 1982, according to the CDC’s most recent National Survey of Family Growth.

Women are also having fewer children. In 2019, America’s fertility rate, the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime, reached an all-time low, according to the World Population Data Sheet, which is published annually by the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit that collects data about the structure of populations. Despite this contraction in fertility rates and a persistent public perception that infertility is on the rise, the infertility rate — which measures those couples having difficulty getting pregnant but doesn’t account for miscarriages or stillbirths — has been declining since at least 1965. Around one in 15 women in America meet this threshold, according to the CDC’s latest statistics (which only take into account married women). In 2014, the CDC published its first National Public Health Action Plan for the Detection, Prevention, and Management of Infertility. Three years later, the American Medical Association joined the World Health Organization in categorizing infertility as a disease.

But the issues of infertility are especially acute in older couples. “There is an infertility epidemic,” said Sherman Silber, director of the Infertility Center of St. Louis, who helped invent many of the treatments commonly used for infertility today. “But it’s simply related to the fact that people are starting at an older age.”

Age is inversely related to fertility, so the older you are, the harder it is to conceive. It affects both sexes but has an outsized impact on women because the quality of a woman’s eggs decreases with time. Until age 34, the probability of pregnancy goes down gradually; after that, it falls by 10 percent a year. At 40, 95 percent of women are infertile, according to Silber.

American women have children at a much older age than a century ago, and many couples just don’t anticipate problems getting pregnant. “People are like, ‘Oh, we live longer, we don’t have to rush into marriage and childbearing,'” explains Marcia Inhorn, an anthropologist at Yale University who studies infertility and infertility treatments. “So people are pushing it back, pushing it back, but without adequate fertility education.”

When people can’t have children and they start looking for help, it often comes in the form of assisted reproductive technology (ART) , a catchall term for treatments that handle eggs and sperm outside of the human body.

The earliest successful example, in vitro fertilization, or IVF, dates back to 1978 and involves mixing eggs and sperm in a Petri dish to encourage fertilization. Since then, many reproductive technologies have appeared, including, but not limited to: egg donation, where a healthy egg is removed from a donor, fertilized in a lab, and implanted into another woman; genetic screening, which helps identify potential illnesses and disorders prior to the embryo being implanted in the uterus; and intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI (pronounced “ik-sea”), a variant of IVF where a single sperm is inserted directly into an egg.

In many ways, ART has revolutionized pregnancy in America; it has so far been used in more than 1 million births in the U.S. In some parts of the world, its use has expanded more rapidly. For example, between 1997 and 2014, the number of ART cycles in Europe increased nearly fourfold, to just under 800,000 a year. Over the same period in the U.S., the number nearly tripled but only reached 200,000.

For the hopeful parent or parents, there’s a lot that comes along with these procedures. First, there are the tests: semen analysis, infectious disease screening, and an evaluation of the uterus to make sure everything is working properly. Next, for women, the medications — most of which are self-administered injections in the abdomen, thighs, or buttocks — one to suppress the natural menstrual cycle and one to stimulate egg development.

Then, more tests: blood analysis and vaginal ultrasounds that help doctors look at the ovaries to see how the woman’s body responds to the medications and when the eggs are ready. The second round of tests is followed by one more medication, an injection known as the trigger shot, which helps the eggs mature. Then, there’s the harvest. For the sperm, this usually entails a man masturbating into a plastic cup; for the eggs, this step takes place in an operating room and involves painkillers and often general anesthesia. After the eggs have been retrieved, there’s another medication, which prepares the uterus for the early stages of pregnancy. Finally, after the eggs are fertilized (creating embryos) and possibly tested for genetic abnormalities, one or more of the embryos are transferred into the uterus. The entire process — one cycle of IVF — takes up to four months. “Nothing in medicine is perfect,” said Eric Surrey, a fertility doctor at the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine. “But I mean, we’ve had great progress in this field over the last 20 years, and I don’t see any reason why that progress would stop.”

Despite rapid advances, there’s still a lot of uncharted territory. When asked about unexplained infertility, for example, a CDC representative bluntly replied by email: “If the cause of unexplained infertility was known, it wouldn’t be unexplained.” There are other mysteries to uncover, too. Doctors don’t entirely understand how some stages of pregnancy happen, including a key moment in which an embryo implants itself into the lining of the uterus, Surrey said. “If you don’t understand a mechanism, you can’t really treat the problem,” he added. “And I think that’s the biggest frontier that we need to pursue.”

For now, the odds of having a child with the help of medical science still aren’t great. For women under 35, only around 36 percent will get pregnant per IVF cycle using their own non-frozen eggs, according to the CDC. By 41, it’s less than two-thirds of that; after 42, it will have fallen by another half to 6 percent. The rates for IVF using a donor egg are higher but still below 50 percent overall.

In the U.S., fertility clinics often paint a rosier picture of success compared to the CDC — even though both draw from the same set of data. Private clinics can advertise cumulative success rates or use their own in-house calculations that remove certain categories of patients who were unsuccessful, while the CDC reports the clinics’ single-cycle success rates. One recent study from the U.K. found that from 53 clinics’ websites, there were 51 different methods used to measure the success rate, and many of these didn’t reveal how the rate was calculated. The inflated figures — which average around 60 percent for private clinics in the U.S., according to a 2012 article in the Indiana Law Journal — often mislead consumers. The “intermingling of business and medicine leads to lots of problems,” said Carolin Schurr, a geographer at the University of Bern who studies the transnational fertility industry. Schurr said she is leery of success rates advertised by clinics because “it really depends how you calculate them, and there’s a lot of room to manipulate.”

* * *

Before the Murillos began looking at fertility clinics overseas, they had already tried and failed to get pregnant several times in the U.S. Andrea, who is originally from California, had spent most of her adult life in the South, pursuing a career in corporate communications and marketing for Hilton Hotels, which brought her to Dallas in 2009. By the time she met Tony through a dating website in late 2013, they were both in their mid-to-late 30s. Both were big Cowboys fans. Both had been engaged before. Both wanted children but hadn’t had a chance. “Life didn’t line up that way for me,” Andrea said. Tony, a Dallas native and Marine Corps veteran who is a branch manager at a local bank, was excited to pass on his experience to a new generation of Murillos. In September 2016, they were married, and Andrea promptly updated her employment status on Facebook: “Started New Job at Working on getting Pregnant.”

Six months later, Andrea still wasn’t pregnant. Tony’s best friend had recently had three children through IVF, and his wife recommended that the Murillos think about it. “Tony and I would still be trying to this day if we didn’t have them in our life to say: IVF,” Andrea said. They consulted a doctor at Fertility Specialists of Texas in March 2017, where they were diagnosed with unexplained infertility. Like many couples in their situation, they first underwent a low-tech artificial insemination euphemistically known as the “turkey-baster method” — technically called intrauterine insemination, or IUI — which cost around $3,000 and wasn’t covered by their insurance policy.

This first method failed, so they started looking into IVF, where the odds are better but still not promising; in Andrea’s case, they were around 15 percent. It was also significantly more expensive. “You sneeze in the office and they’re going to charge you for the tissue,” Andrea said. “You don’t get away with anything with these people.” The Murillos weren’t satisfied with the experience they had at the first clinic, which Andrea compared to a cattle call. Their insurance wouldn’t provide any support for IVF either, and they couldn’t justify handing over an additional $25,000 for one round at a clinic they didn’t love.

Shortly after their artificial insemination failed, but before they had decided on a new clinic, Andrea’s mother, Dolores “Jeanne” Gaither, fell ill with leukemia. Gaither would be released from the hospital several months later after successful chemotherapy, but during that time, the Murillos put their dreams of parenthood on hold to help.

In the meantime, Andrea’s work had become stressful. In the fall of 2017, she had a panic attack. Because the Murillos believed that stress could impact Andrea’s ability to get pregnant, Tony suggested that she leave her job, even though they were already worried about how they would pay for IVF with two salaries. By Christmas of 2017, Gaither’s hair was starting to grow back, and the Murillos refocused on having a child.

In March 2018, Andrea began taking medications to increase the odds of conception at a different fertility clinic called Aspire Fertility. The couple also decided to take a course on money management through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. This round of IVF would cost them nearly $22,000, and that’s after a 25 percent discount on medications because Tony is a veteran and a 14 percent discount on the procedures for using a smartphone app called Glow to book the clinic.

At the end of April, the clinic harvested Andrea’s eggs. They collected 28, of which 20 were fertilized but only one passed the prerequisites to be implanted (the quality of an egg’s DNA deteriorates with age , and fertility doctors don’t typically use eggs with genetic abnormalities). Andrea’s single, healthy embryo was transferred to her uterus in the beginning of June 2018.

Around the same time, Andrea’s mother relapsed and was soon back at a hospital in Jacksonville. Andrea couldn’t wait to leave Dallas to be by her mother’s side again. She would have gone earlier, but she had to wait for pregnancy test results. Gaither needed a bone marrow transplant, but by the time Gaither’s brother volunteered to be the donor, it was too late. On a Monday in mid-June, Andrea received discouraging early results from a blood test, and by Wednesday she got confirmation: She wasn’t pregnant. On Thursday, her mother received her own bad news: She had 10 days to live.

Once Andrea arrived in Jacksonville, Gaither kept trying to shop online for the baby. “It was a heartbreaker,” Andrea recalled. “I didn’t ever tell her we weren’t pregnant because I had already told her we were,” Andrea added, “and she was so excited, so I couldn’t say we weren’t.”

After her mom died in July, Andrea and Tony waited a few months before deciding what to do next. If they had gone back to Aspire for another round of IVF, they would have exhausted their savings. “That would have been our last time,” Tony said. They also weren’t sure how much time and money they should spend before looking into alternatives such as adoption or fostering. “We want to be parents, ultimately,” Andrea said. “We both feel like we have that to give, and so that’s kind of where our heart is.”

* * *

Every step of fertility treatment has a price tag. The baseline cost for a single round of IVF in the U.S, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, is between $10,000 and $15,000. But factoring in doctor’s visits, medications, and optional procedures, the average cost jumps to over $22,000, according to a 2018 estimate by FertilityIQ, a website that provides research on treatments for infertility in the U.S. This is three to four times higher than in most European countries, write Margaret Marsh, a historian and chancellor at Rutgers University-Camden, and Wanda Ronner, a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania, in their book “The Pursuit of Parenthood: Reproductive Technology from Test-Tube Babies to Uterus Transplants.” Because the chances of success increase with the number of attempts, many women end up having more than one cycle — some many more than that — and costs can climb well into the six-figures.

The cost is so much greater in the U.S. thanks, in part, to higher pharmaceutical prices, the absence of a nationalized health care system, and the need for malpractice insurance. The U.S. medical industry is also market-driven. “Ultimately, it’s like any other product,” said Eli Adashi, a professor of medical science at Brown University. “It’s what the market will bear.”

By the time the Murillos began looking at options overseas, they had already spent much of their life savings. Andrea was still unemployed, and Tony’s insurance plan through the Bank of Texas would not cover their fertility treatments. Texas law only requires coverage for couples who have been infertile for at least five years or who have one of several specific medical conditions leading to infertility. The Murillos would have been excluded until Andrea was 42 years old.

The predicament the Murillos faced is not unusual. The majority of Americans don’t have insurance coverage to treat their infertility. Only 19 states even have laws dealing with relevant insurance coverage. Of those states, just 13 include IVF in their laws, and fewer than half actually cover the cost of IVF, according to Adashi. “Amongst those, there are so many exclusions that at the end, you don’t end up with a meaningful or large number of couples that are covered,” he said.

Only one in five employers nationwide provides any kind of benefits for help with infertility, according to Resolve, a national patient advocacy organization for those suffering from infertility. The federal government’s public insurance coverage is spotty and almost exclusively limited to some active duty military members and wounded veterans who have suffered a loss of reproductive ability due to an injury during their service. In the private sector, insurance coverage for fertility treatments has been gaining ground in recent years because companies are trying to attract employees who want these benefits, according to Adashi.

Insurers have been reluctant to offer coverage for several reasons despite the fact that about one in eight women of childbearing age have received infertility services, according to the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth. Many insurance companies consider treatment for infertility to be elective, like cosmetic surgery, or classify it as an experimental medical treatment, a category that is often declined coverage. Also, historically, it just hasn’t been an option, and this precedent has been slow to change.

The federal government has remained silent about fertility treatment benefit plans, in part due to the influence of America’s pro-life community. “Embryos are frozen, embryos are discarded. There’s great sensitivity, in this country anyway, to all of that, and that’s perhaps why the government, in the first place, is not in the business of funding IVF,” Adashi said.

“That’s sort of been an uneasy truth that has been in existence since 1981,” he added.

Still, public views on in vitro fertilization, and infertility in general, are changing. Many people have family, friends, or colleagues who have used assisted reproductive technologies, which helps to socially normalize the procedures. And now that the AMA classifies infertility as a disease, patients and their advocates might have a better chance of justifying coverage under American insurance policies. According to Elizabeth Britt, a professor at Northeastern University who studies legal rhetoric, in her book “Conceiving Normalcy: Rhetoric, Law, and the Double Binds of Infertility,” treatments are “generally not considered medically necessary” for conditions that are not defined as diseases, “and even procedures not considered experimental may be excluded” by insurers.

* * *

Both Spain and the Czech Republic have become hotspots for reproductive travel, which makes up a sliver of the greater medical tourism industry — probably less than 5 percent of the nearly $55 billion market, which is expected to nearly quadruple in size over the next seven years. Fertility tourism is one of its fastest-growing sectors. But nobody actually knows how many people or how much money is crossing borders. “Estimating medical tourism, even in general, is difficult because patients do not disclose this information to providers or insurance companies,” Ganesh Maniam, a medical student at Texas Tech University who has published on the phenomenon, wrote in an email. “And physicians do not typically report medical tourism statistics.”

Choosing between the two countries wasn’t easy for the Murillos. They were suspicious of the advertised success rates and concerned about the quality and modernity of the labs. It was also simply unfamiliar territory. Tony had never been to Europe and worried that outside the U.S., the treatments would be done “in the back of some warehouse or something like that.” Andrea, who had been to Spain before, hadn’t been to the areas where the fertility clinics were located.

As a first point of comparison, there was a notable price difference. The average baseline cost for IVF in the Czech Republic is around $3,000, which is half the cost of Spain’s and about one-fifth of the price in the U.S. The Murillos calculated that the total cost of one round of own-egg IVF and, should that fail, an additional round of donor-egg IVF in Prague — including medication, airfare, food, and several months of hotels — would be around $12,000, less than half the cost of one cycle in the U.S.

But for those who seek fertility treatment overseas, it’s not always about cost. A consumer might also be looking for higher quality of care, shorter waiting times, or medical treatments that aren’t available (or legal) in their home country. Many nations, for example, don’t allow fertility treatments for same-sex couples or for single women. The destination has a lot to do with the procedure you’re looking for. For egg donation, Spain and Eastern Europe are desirable. For high-quality treatment and liberal laws for same-sex couples, the U.S. is one of the most attractive options for those who can afford it.

For Americans, the Czech Republic has a lot to offer. In addition to its low cost, it has a large selection of fertility clinics to choose from. As of 2017, there were 43 clinics in the country — almost the same amount as its Starbucks coffee shops. Although the Czech Ministry of Health releases limited data regarding patients’ nationalities, its 2017 report on assisted reproductive technology shows that more than a quarter of IVF cycles, and nearly 90 percent of donated-egg transfers, were performed on foreigners. Liberal national legislation in the Czech Republic also allows genetic screening and egg donation, which isn’t true in some European countries. This was important to the Murillos because in case the IVF with Andrea’s egg failed, they wanted the opportunity to use donation. And they also wanted the donor to look like Andrea, who has a fair complexion and wavy blonde hair. “Their skin color and eye color is similar to us,” she said. “It’s a good match-up to U.S. genetics, if that’s what you’re looking for, and that’s what we were looking for.”

It turns out that this is what many white, lower-middle and working-class Americans, who have been priced out of the U.S. market, are also looking for. “That’s really the driving force,” said Amy Speier, a medical anthropologist at the University of Texas Arlington who has studied reproductive tourism in the Czech Republic. In the search for a White child, “a lot of people choose the Czech Republic over Spain because they imagine Spain only has Brown babies, which is totally wrong.”

Around September 2018, the Murillos happened upon a medical tourism agency called Medistella, which acts as a matchmaker bringing together doctors and patients — supply and demand — across international borders. “I’m not an embryologist,” said Anna Dostálová, Medistella’s co-founder, “but I can help to explain how it works in my point of view, which sometimes the patients understand better.”

Dostálová and her business partner, Michaela Novotná, help take care of the basics for incoming patients: selecting a clinic (which pays Medistella for the referral), providing information about tests, deadlines, and medication, recommending travel and accommodation plans, and following up after the patients return home. “It’s our job to put them at peace and let them know there’s somebody who cares,” Dostálová said.

After some consultation, the Murillos settled on a plan: They would use their winter holiday to try to get pregnant in Eastern Europe.

Their medical vacation would be a significant commitment. The average international patient only needs to spend one or two weeks abroad during a cycle of IVF. But if Andrea’s first round failed and she had to use an egg donor, she could be in Europe for more than three months.

* * *

The week before Christmas, Andrea and Tony flew to Prague. They knew the odds were against them. “I’ve already had two unsuccessful tries — an IUI and an IVF — so odds didn’t matter to me,” Andrea said. Tony was more stoic: “It might take, it might not.”

Two days later, Tony provided a sperm sample at Fertility Port, which the clinic froze for when they would need it later. The clinic was closed for the holidays, so the Murillos pretended to be traditional tourists: an excursion to Rome, ornament shopping at the Prague Christmas market, and taking in the New Year’s Eve fireworks from the iconic Charles Bridge.

After two and half weeks, Tony went back to work in Dallas, and Andrea handled the rest on her own. She befriended a couple from New York who were also in the city for IVF and met up with them several times in January. On Jan. 14, the doctors harvested her eggs. This time, six eggs were collected. Only one developed into an embryo, but it wasn’t viable because it failed during genetic testing, which means it was not likely to be born healthy or, possibly, born at all. There would be no transfer. IVF had failed for the second time, and Andrea’s last chance to have her own genetic children was gone. “And you don’t get any of that money back,” Andrea said. “It’s spent, so you just have to move on.”

The couple moved to the next plan: an egg donor. Unlike many other countries, including the U.S., the Czech Republic requires that egg donors remain anonymous and does not generally allow for sex selection, so there’s not much the Murillos could find out about their future child. They chose a donor with the limited criteria allowed: 29 years old, light brown hair and blue eyes, three inches taller than Andrea. “Tony’s Mexican, so we’re going to have a Czexican,” Andrea said. “Or a Czex-Mex, that’s the other one. Well, we hope anyway.”

Andrea spent the end of January and most of February with a friend in Ireland, only returning to Prague for four days for medical tests. Every time she came back to Prague, she stayed in a different apartment or hotel. Because they were on a tight budget, she spent much of her time in the rentals, cooked her own meals, cleaned and recleaned, watched documentaries, and had several daily video calls with Tony.

In mid-March, the Murillos learned that eight of the eggs from their anonymous Czech donor had fertilized with Tony’s sperm. Two of those would be implanted when they turned five days old. Since the length of pregnancy is measured from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual period, not from the date of conception, Andrea would be almost three weeks pregnant when the embryos were implanted. On day four, with one day to wait, Andrea was full of nerves. “Today, I’m zero days pregnant, and tomorrow I’ll be 19 days pregnant,” she said. “Just like that.”

The next day, Andrea came into Fertility Port looking anxious and hustled into the small waiting area — a room with a few cushioned lounge chairs and a Nespresso machine. The clinic’s logo, printed in oversized block letters behind the reception desk, is its name with a pink tadpole-like sperm swimming into the egg-shaped letter “O.” She had followed the doctors’ advice to prepare for the procedure: no makeup and no perfume. Also, her bladder was full to make the operation easier. “Afterwards, I can go as much as I want,” she said. Andrea held her phone up to give Tony the chance to say hello to everyone in the room, including Dostálová and Novotná, who had come to provide emotional support.

Before long, the doctors whisked Andrea into the operating room for the transfer, which was over in a few minutes. After half an hour’s rest, she returned to the lobby into a flurry of hugs and group photos. “American smiles,” one of the doctors said when they posed for a picture with Andrea and the Medistella team.

A few minutes later, Andrea was outside, alone on a bench facing the road. Soon, she would catch a flight for Dallas. In her lap, she was holding a bag the doctors had given her, which contained pregnancy tests that she was to use two weeks later.

When Andrea landed back home, Tony took the next week off from work. The couple quickly fell back into life as usual, running errands and playing with their two dogs. It seemed like Prague had been a dream, as if Andrea had never been gone, and they were both relieved. “I’ve always wanted a boy,” Tony said. “But going through everything we’ve gone through now, I just want a healthy child.”

As they waited to learn whether the time apart would pay off, the couple was in one of those uncomfortable periods that accompany fertility treatment: preparing themselves to deal with either possible scenario. They discussed getting the house ready for a child and contemplated whether they would try again if the pregnancy didn’t take. They didn’t have much money left, but if the donor eggs failed, they still had three embryos frozen in Prague. “Do we go until we exhaust all our embryos?” Andrea had asked before the transfer. “Or do we accept the fact? It’s definitely accepting the fact that you can’t do something. That’s hard, so I don’t know.”

In early April 2019, the wait was over. Andrea had a positive pregnancy test. Later that month, she had an ultrasound that detected a fetal heartbeat. She was pregnant. In early December, almost a year after traveling to Prague, the Murillos’ long journey ended when she gave birth to a son, Christian Cole.

Three months later, amid the prosaic demands of raising a child, the outbreak of the coronavirus led to statewide lockdowns in Texas. So for Christian’s six-month vaccinations, Andrea visited the nearly empty pediatrician’s office wearing a face mask while Tony waited in the car to sooth their baby after he had been given shots.

Even though it was a difficult experience, they don’t regret the path they took to and would encourage others to do the same. “Advice, do it,” Andrea said. “One thousand percent, do it. Save your money, take the time off work to build your family and visit a safe country to get IVF.” If money weren’t a consideration, the Murillos wouldn’t have hesitated to have one of their frozen embryos implanted. But money is still tight, so they’ve been weighing the importance of the lifestyle they want to provide for Christian — such as good schools, extracurricular activities, and vacations — against the benefits of having a second child, which include, not least of all, having “someone to call family after Tony and I pass away, since we started this whole thing late.”

About two weeks ago, the Murillos decided that they would follow their initial plan to return for a sibling in 2021, whenever it’s safe to travel again. The whole process might be made easier this time because Andrea started working for Medistella as a U.S. patient advocate last summer. The first step: apply for a passport for their infant son.

* * *

Brant deBoer is an ex-Navy officer and 2018 graduate of the Columbia Journalism School.

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

CDC warned the public against wearing valved facemasks — while recommending them to health workers

The politicization of science in the Trump era –– from the manipulation of the National Weather Service to the suppression of information on climate change at the Environmental Protection Agency –– has been as spectacular as it has been horrific. The latest and most peculiar example comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), once the standard for science that informs and shapes health policy in the US and around the world.

In a recent update to its recommendation regarding facemasks, which made national news, the CDC recommended that Americans not wear valved masks. These types of facemasks have a piece of plastic embedded in the fabric with a one-way valve that opens when you exhale and closes when you inhale.

Certainly amid the pandemic there is a great deal of confusion about masks. Yet the agency’s latest guidance adds to the confusion rather than clarifying it. In fact, the agency’s updated guidance contradicts years of their own safety advice to health care workers; indeed, the CDC’s website features a database that includes more than 600 models of valved facemasks recommended for health care settings.

Moreover, the agency admits that it updated the policy without any new data. Peculiarly, the new CDC guidance in early August aligns with a Delta Airline company policy issued in July. Like the CDC guidance update that followed, Delta’s earlier policy rejects valved N95 respirators while accepting the wearing of bandannas and neck gaiters — which offer far less protection to the wearer and to those around them.

How valved masks work

On its surface, the agency’s logic for this appears to make sense. Valved masks release a small amount of exhaled air, which, if a person has coronavirus, could be virus-ridden air — thus possibly putting those immediately nearby at risk.

While it is true that a small amount of unfiltered air escapes through the valves, there is scant scientific evidence studying how much and how high the risk is. One well-publicized paper (by Duke University physicists), released after the CDC mask guidance change, indirectly looked into the matter. The Duke paper was not actually a comparative study of the efficacy of masks — it merely examined a potential method to do that. This trial of a methodology had a tiny sample size and looked at only one model of valved mask. In any case, it suggested that, in comparison with the “gold standard” of respiratory protection (an N95 respirator without a valve), an N95 with a valve “can decrease protection” for those around the wearer, but is overall far better at stopping viral spread than a bandanna or neck gaiter – two other types of ersatz masks that the CDC does recommend. Indeed, the Duke scientists found that bandannas and neck gaiters “offer very little protection.” In any case, since scientific research doesn’t seem to have influenced the CDC’s guidance, the question remains as to why the CDC suddenly recommended against valved masks. The answer may have something to do with the work of airline industry lobbyists. But the media coverage of the CDC’s guidance has largely eclipsed the connection.

The media comes for valves

After the CDC’s recommendation against valved masks, the media hyped the news as if the science were settled. One headline at Fox News read: “Avoid wearing coronavirus face masks with vents, valves, CDC says in updated guidance.” CNN writes: “Do Not Wear Masks With One Way Valves or Vents“; The Washington Post concludes: “Face masks with valves or vents do not prevent spread of the coronavirus, CDC says.”

To be fair, no face covering, short of a properly-fitted N95 respirator, can claim to completely prevent coronavirus’ spread. Surgical masks are not designed to create a perfect seal, or to filter out 95 percent of virus particles, and they cannot be fit-tested. Those masks, as well as loose-fitting cotton masks, leave gaps that leak air. They could also leak virus particles, as people breathe in and out. It doesn’t take scientists in a lab to see this. Look at just about any random group of mask-wearing people in a store or on the street and observe that large gaps beside the nose or under the ears are visible, and that these are obviously far larger and probably of far greater consequence than the tiny vents on an exhale valve. The zealous focus on valves seems to be a case of missing the forest for a few trees.

Thus it may not be a surprise that the CDC guidance, revised August 7, aligns with the aforementioned Delta Airlines facemask policy dated July 25 that banned valved N95 respirators and any other masks with valves from flights. Delta based its policy on the fear that valves may leak virus particles through a tiny vent. Fair enough. But surgical masks, cotton masks, bandannas, and gaiters all allow particles to get directly through their material, as well as through gaps and leaks around the sides. The updated CDC guidance, which is not based on any new data, contradicts advice the agency has been giving to health care workers for years – and the advice it continues to give them on its own website.

In any case, the extensive media coverage about valved masks ignored that CDC documents published in February — reviewed by the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) on April 9, and updated by the CDC’s National Personal Protective Laboratory on August 3 — contradict its new guidance, issued on August 7. That new guidance followed a lobbying campaign by the airline industry.

The next day, in an updated Q&A for health care workers regarding Personal Protective Equipment, the CDC cautioned against wearing a valved respirator to protect against the novel coronavirus, “until data are available to describe how effective respirators with exhalation valves are in preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 from the wearer to others.” In other words, they cite no data on the alleged dangers from valved respirators; seemingly, they had none. No one did.

The CDC’s contradictory advice

3M, the principal manufacturer of N95 respirators, stated in June that they were “not aware of any studies on whether airborne germs exit a respirator through the exhalation valve.” They added that as of June, the CDC, NIOSH, and WHO had issued “no guidance on this issue.” But 3M noted that the valve does not open far, and that some particles would stick to the valve’s membrane rather than exit.

In this same FAQ updated August 8, the CDC stated that because N95s without exhalation valves make it “more difficult to breathe” and may be “hot and uncomfortable,” hospitals may want to “consider having employees who are not doing surgery, not working in a sterile field, or not potentially exposed to high velocity streams of body fluids wear a standard N95 with an exhalation valve.”

So health care workers may be forgiven if they disregard the CDC’s general recommendation against valved respirators. Some may choose to cover their valved respirators with surgical masks or pieces of cloth as an added precaution, as the CDC suggests; others may not because they need to breathe. However, 3M points out that “taping over or otherwise covering a respirator valve voids the regulatory approval and may impact how the respirator functions.”

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) agrees. NIOSH, which is the division of the CDC that approves N95 respirators, stated in June that “the effect of any coverings on N95 respirator filtration, fit, or comfort over a prolonged period has not been explored.” NIOSH pointed out that such a covering could interfere with a proper fit and seal and “may lead to leaks.” Therefore, “covering an N95 mask with either a cloth or surgical mask is not recommended by NIOSH.” So in addition to the CDC’s ongoing recommendation of valved N95 respirators to health care workers, this is another example of how the CDC’s updated guidance on N95 respirators with valves directly contradicts the recommendations of its own experts.

Concern about dangerous leakage in valved masks is unfounded in both directions –– both inflow and outflow. Indeed, the CDC website still advises health care workers to select from a NIOSH-approved list of N95 respirators “to help protect themselves from diseases potentially spread through the air, such as SARS or Tuberculosis.” The list sorts thousands of models alphabetically by brand name and model and specifies which ones contain an exhalation valve. By Salon’s count, CDC currently recommends 624 models of valved N95 respirators. For example, the list includes the kind of N95 respirators made by 3M and sold in hardware stores as dust masks. Of the 54 3M models that the CDC recommends to health care workers, after a review from NIOSH, 17 of these feature valves.

Likewise, an adjacent federal watchdog agency, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (or OSHA, within the Department of Labor) recommends valved N95 masks to prevent against tuberculosis spread. In their own investigation into the question of inward mask leakage, they conclude, based on examinations by several investigators, that “the concern that the exhalation valve would permit inward leakage of air contaminates is unfounded. . . . The wearing of a valveless fabric type disposable respirator has no advantage over a respirator equipped with an exhalation valve.” OSHA notes that of the studies that measured “leakage rate and/or aerosol penetration under dynamic test conditions,” and which evaluated masks with exhalation valves, “The general conclusion was that for a properly maintained exhalation valve of an elastomeric facepiece respirator, the inward leakage of the exhalation valve is less than the allowable leakage of the high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter (0.03%),” they write on their site.

Deconstructing malarkey around valved N95s

The CDC’s the current recommendation regarding valves that regulate outward flow of air notwithstanding, the agency previously recognized the benefits to valves, stating, “An exhalation valve reduces excessive dampness and warmth in the mask from exhaled breath.” Damp or wet masks are not merely uncomfortable, but they are dangerous — as they can increase the transmissibility of airborne viruses to the user.

Further, the CDC admits that N95 respirators (with or without valves) are safer than surgical masks when the user inhales:

“Surgical masks are not designed for use as particulate respirators and do not provide as much protection as an N-95 respirator. Most surgical masks do not effectively filter small particles from air and do not prevent leakage around the edge of the mask when the user inhales.”

So what does the CDC have to say about loose-fitting masks, like surgical masks? Those would seem to leak some air around the edges upon exhalation, perhaps in a similar manner as a tight-fitting valved mask. The agency suggests that they are no safer regarding COVID-19 protection than valved N95 respirators when the wearer exhales: “Loose fitting masks and respirators and N95 respirators with exhalation valves might allow unfiltered air exhaled by the wearer to escape.”

The operative word here is “might.” Yet the CDC does not point to evidence to support this assertion, however commonsensical it may be, just as they offer no evidence to support their claim about valved respirators, nor comparative data regarding their effectiveness in slowing the spread of COVID-19.

Incongruously, the CDC guidance now suggests that a coarsely woven and loosely fitted bandanna or neck gaiter is somehow safer than one of the 624 valved N95 respirators that the CDC recommends to health care workers. What might fly in the industry-friendly, science-averse Trump CDC might be seen as malarkey in another administration.

The basic logical premise of the CDC’s guidance is this:

Valved masks allow exhaled breath into the atmosphere.
Thus, if the wearer is infected, then their exhalations could infect others.
Therefore, these masks should not be relied on for “source control” of the spread of the virus.

While there is a common sense to this, the CDC employs inaccurate and loaded language rather than science to make its point –– a point that is far broader than the facts will support.

Many valved masks, such as those made by Cambridge Mask and Vogmask, are designed to securely fit so there is no leakage of air coming in or going out. Air is filtered at N95 filtration or better going in (removing at least 95% of airborne particles), and is gently dispersed by the valve going out.

An example of the CDC’s use of false and loaded language is its claim that valves “allow air to be exhaled through a hole in the material.” (This claim also belies OSHA’s study.) An actual valve is a secure plastic fixture with a membrane that opens when you breathe out and closes when you breathe in. It is not by any reasonable definition, a “hole.”

The CDC also claims that potentially contaminated respiratory droplets are “expelled.” This suggests an action of some force, which is a laughable misrepresentation of the way valves release exhaled air –– as anyone who has put their hand in front of a facemask valve can attest. Nevertheless, their broad conclusion is, “this type of mask does not prevent the person wearing the mask from transmitting COVID-19 to others.”

This may certainly be so in settings where people sit closely together such as on trains, planes, buses and in such other indoor locations as theaters, churches, and schools –– particularly if people sitting next to you are not wearing a mask or wearing one that is loosely fitted or made of porous fabrics. (The CDC also sensibly advises health care workers elsewhere on its web site that a valved N95 mask is not appropriate in sterile medical situations, like “during an invasive procedure in an operating or procedure room.”)

However, in most other situations, what breath emanates from the valve is diffused, indirect, and unpropelled into the air –– unlike talking, coughing, laughing, and singing without masks. Thus people nearby who are wearing masks are unlikely to become infected by the air emitted from mask valves, particularly outside, and particularly in the wind and sunlight. Sunlight contains UV radiation that damages or destroys COVID-19.

But if you don’t already have a loosely fitting mask made of porous fabric (like a bandana or a tee-shirt) the CDC will show you an instructional video by Surgeon General Jerome Adams making one from a cleverly folded tee-shirt and two rubber bands. The CDC avers, however, that such masks should allow “for breathing without restriction.”

But valves are important for many people, in many circumstances, precisely because they make breathing easier. In fact, the lives of people who are at the highest risk of infection and death from COVID-19, due to age and/or underlying medical conditions, may depend on N95 respirators with exhalation valves. Many masks, and not just N95s, are hard to breathe through, particularly for long periods of time. The greater the fit and protective filtration, the harder it can be to breathe. We have seen check-out clerks behind plexiglass screens, sweating and suffering because their valveless medical-style mask is too much for sustained periods.

Two-way protection

Another red flag in the CDC guidance is that it suggests that masks are intended only to protect others, when in fact they protect in both directions. While their stated concern is “source control,” the CDC has no warning against leaky unfitted masks, including those better-than-nothing cloth face coverings and other homemade masks of any quality. What’s more, the CDC not only recommends them, but features the Surgeon General showing us how to make one. While these loose-fitting T-shirt DIY solutions may suffice in a pinch (until the uncomfortable rubber bands break), obviously they work poorly for the purpose of source control.

3M states: “Note that surgical masks, procedural masks and face coverings – which are often worn to control the spread of infectious diseases – are not designed to fit tightly to the face and have gaps around the face through which air will leak both inward when the wearer inhales and outward when the wearer exhales, potentially including expelled particles.”

3M added that procedure masks and homemade cotton masks do not fully prevent the spread of virus particles either because in addition to gaps between the mask and face, “air and particles will also travel through the mask material at different rates depending on their construction.”

So what could have propelled the CDC’s recommendation to ditch valved masks?

It may have something to do with the Trump administration’s accommodation of the airline industry, and the struggle of the airlines to cope with the pandemic.

The airline industry connection

On April 24, United became the first airline to require employees to wear masks. Three days later, based on the CDC’s voluntary guidance to wear facemasks outside the house as a best practice, JetBlue announced that it would require passengers to wear masks, too, effective May 4, 2020. On April 30, Delta Airlines announced that passengers would be required to wear masks, also effective May 4. Frontier Airlines and Lufthansa announced the same day that they would require passengers to wear masks on planes and in terminals by May 8.

On July 27, Delta banned “any mask with an exhaust valve” on its flights, while allowing any basic “cloth face covering over their nose and mouth.” This would include a neck gaiter or loosely woven, loosely fitted bandanna with gaps around the nose, beside the ears, and under the chin big enough to poke fingers through. A sleeping passenger with a cloth napkin over his face might arguably pass muster by Delta’s standard.

After the CDC updated its guidance on valved masks on August 7, Delta claimed that it was “aligning with best practice guidelines from the CDC” – although Delta had actually banned valved masks nearly two weeks earlier. That suggests that the CDC was following Delta’s lead. It may not be coincidental that both the CDC and Delta are headquartered in Atlanta.

Yet there were no industrywide standards or federal rules for what kinds of masks would suffice, and no federal requirements for people to wear masks in airport terminals. Airports set their own policies, in line with local and state laws, leading to a patchwork of rules that were difficult to understand or enforce. Of the 30 largest airport hubs, 20 required facemasks in July.

The airports, along with unions representing pilots and flight attendants, lobbied for a federal regulation requiring passengers to wear face coverings on planes and in terminals. But the airlines opposed getting the Federal Aviation Administration involved, arguing that no other industry was subject to such a nationwide rule. The airlines preferred to set their own policies. The unions countered that a uniform federal rule would be easier for employees to enforce.

“Lawmakers want a federal mandate and so do flight attendants,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. “Just like anyone smoking on a plane faces federal charges and fines, so too should people understand the serious consequences of putting the health of others at risk by refusing to wear a mask.”

The airlines won. And the airports, the unions, the public, and the reputation of the CDC lost.

It is understandable that airlines want to be able to better justify seating people like canned sardines again. (They make more money that way). The question here is not only the risk to passengers and crew, but also to what extent the CDC may have accommodated this industry at a time when it is pushing hard to “open” the economy.

The Hill reported on June 21 that airports had begged the Trump administration to set a facemask policy for passengers. Airports Council International–North America President Kevin M. Burke, whose group represents commercial airports, had testified at a hearing of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security. In his testimony, he argued that if all TSA and airline employees, and all air passengers, wore masks, then it would be easier to decrease social distancing requirements while increasing airline consumer confidence.

“I can’t emphasize that enough,” he told The Hill, “we would welcome regulations on a temporary basis that you should wear a mask in an airport when you’re transferring through it.” The airports and the unions not only did not get the regulation that they had fought for, but the CDC guidance on valved masks achieved a key aim for the industry without appearing to be just for them. The guidance is cast as a uniform standard to be applied throughout society.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that government agencies and a compliant, conveyor-belt media have spread misinformation about masks in the name of (faulty) science.

Early in the pandemic, Americans were told not only that they don’t need to wear masks, but that they don’t work. It is possible that this was a lie intended to try to discourage consumers from buying up protective masks that were desperately needed by health workers, and were in short supply at the time.

But by lying and telling the public that they don’t need masks, as University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in The New York Times, “the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy.” CDC is repeating this error in issuing a broad recommendation about a narrow matter that requires a qualified view, one that would not merit bombastic headlines. And the CDC is repeating their error in scolding the public not to wear valved N95 respirators because they are allegedly dangerous, while recommending them to health care workers because they are safe.

The subtle scapegoating of valved masks notwithstanding, the exponential spread of the coronavirus in 2020 is not due to the relatively small number of people wearing valved masks, but rather a major factor is the overwhelming number of people who refuse to wear masks of any kind, those who wear inadequate masks or who do not wear masks properly, and who do not socially distance and who engage in large group events without adequate or even any protection.

Trump petitions Supreme Court to let him block users on Twitter again

President Donald Trump has made a formal request to the United States Supreme Court to reinstate his legal ability to block users on social media.

U.S. acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall filed a motion on Trump’s behalf to the High Court on Thursday, arguing that a lower court’s ruling last year requiring the president to unblock several Twitter users was improper. Wall argued in his petition to the Court that Trump’s account is a personal one, not used for official business, and thus he has the same rights as any other account to utilize the blocking functions that Twitter affords to users.

“President Trump’s ability to use the features of his personal Twitter account, including the blocking function, are independent of his presidential office,” the brief to the Supreme Court read. “Blocking third-party accounts from interacting with the @realDonaldTrump account is a purely personal action that does not involve any ‘right or privilege created by the State.'”

The petition further alleged that the decision from the lower court, if left to stand, may result in future presidents not utilizing their social media accounts in a way that would benefit the American people.

“Denying him the power to exclude third parties’ accounts from his personal account — a power that every other owner of a Twitter account possesses — would deter holders of his Office from using new technology to efficiently communicate to a broad public audience,” the brief read.

A three-judge panel unanimously ruled in 2019 that Trump did not have the right to block users on the social media platform, agreeing with a separate court ruling one year prior that the president’s account wasn’t personal because he used it to make official pronouncements.

“We conclude that the evidence of the official nature of the account is overwhelming,” Judge Barrington Parker, writing the unanimous ruling of the court, said. “We also conclude that once the president has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants, he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with.”

In order for the Supreme Court to hear the case, a writ of certiorari from at least four of the nine sitting justices must be granted. It’s unclear whether the Court will agree to hear the case or not at this time, but whatever choice they make will likely shape First Amendment protections on the internet, including the right of users on social media to petition government leaders in the U.S., for years to come.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which originally won the case on behalf of Twitter users to limit Trump’s blocking of users, called on the Supreme Court to reject Trump’s plea to reinstate his blocking ability.

“This case stands for a principle that is fundamental to our democracy and basically synonymous with the First Amendment: government officials can’t exclude people from public forums simply because they disagree with their political views,” Jaffer said.

What the Post Office needs to survive a pandemic election

This fall’s elections are the latest chapter in the slow-motion collapse of the U.S. Postal Service, one of America’s most venerated institutions. As November approaches, members of Congress and state election officials have grown increasingly concerned that the USPS will fail at a critical moment: a closely contested vote that will involve a record number of people casting a ballot by mail.

That worry was fueled by President Donald Trump’s unfounded allegation that voting by mail leads to massive fraud and by reports from Postal Service employees that key equipment was being removed and overtime was being slashed. The newly appointed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, responded to what he termed “areas of concern” by announcing that he would approve overtime “as needed” and delay the removal of mail sorting machines until after the election. But the problems at the Postal Service go well beyond those issues and predate DeJoy. Earlier this month, the USPS warned state election officials that it might not be able to meet deadlines for delivering ballots for the November elections.

With DeJoy scheduled to testify before an emergency session of Congress on Friday, here’s a guide to help you understand the issues and what remedies lawmakers could provide.

What’s going on at the Postal Service under DeJoy? Is mail being slowed intentionally?

There are at least three possible reasons for the unusual recent delays in mail delivery.

The first is both the most obvious and the most tragic: More than 8,000 postal workers have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, according to USPS’ official count. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has addressed more than 200 complaints against the USPS alleging insufficient COVID-19 protections, and the toll on workers could be slowing down the overall mail operation.

The second is that staff cost-cutting plans were implemented by DeJoy. One way that the USPS deals with variations in demand is by spending more on staffing, including overtime. For example, during the holiday season there is greater demand for mail, which translates into increased overtime spending. When the USPS reduces this spending, performance can suffer.

In July, the Postal Service told staff that in an effort to cut costs, it would no longer be making late or extra delivery trips from processing and distribution centers. The USPS also began eliminating overtime hours put in by workers. Because of the staff shortage caused by the pandemic, postal workers were using more overtime than usual, making the cuts especially severe.

The last possible reason is that the USPS went ahead with a previously approved plan to remove hundreds of letter processing machines from its facilities. The removals began around the time DeJoy took office, but the Postal Service adopted the plan before he arrived. An internal USPS document showed a goal of eliminating about 20% of the machines, though the number continued to change.

The USPS has seen a long-term decline in the volume of letters being sent, and the agency says that’s why it’s removing the machines. When asked by ProPublica, the USPS declined to comment on the notion that having fewer machines could slow the processing of election mail.

On Tuesday, DeJoy said that overtime “has, and will continue to be, approved as needed,” and that mail processing equipment will remain in place until after the election.

Isn’t the mail the same everywhere? Why would some states be better at delivering mail-in ballots?

There are five states with universal voting by mail, and those states have had enough time to get it right.

In 1998, Oregon became the first state to send ballots to all registered voters by mail. Washington, Colorado, Hawaii and Utah came next, setting up similar systems. Because they’ve been practicing for years, they have clear processes that are coordinated statewide along with significant security and voter education resources. Voters in these states won’t have to do anything differently this year.

There are also several states where voting by mail is not universal but is extremely common. More than half of voters in California, Arizona and Montana cast ballots by mail in 2016. In Florida in 2018, over 30% voted by mail. These states will also have an easier time scaling up their operations for November.

In states where voting by mail is uncommon or new, figuring out how to adopt a new form of casting a ballot will be a significant challenge. These states generally require voters to choose one of a limited number of reasons preventing them from voting in person.

In these states, election administrators lack experience and, perhaps more importantly, the appropriate equipment to rapidly ramp up voting by mail. These states will need extensive guidance from more experienced states, and they would most directly benefit from increased federal and state funding.

Trump has called the USPS a “joke.” Is he right? What, if anything, is wrong with the Postal Service?

Depending on whom you ask, the Postal Service is either an iconic provider of an essential public service or an ossified, money-losing agency badly in need of free-market discipline. What the Postal Service is not, however, is a normal business.

The Postal Service has a “universal service obligation” to offer affordable mail to all Americans and has a congressionally mandated monopoly on the mail. Many people, particularly those who live in hard-to-reach areas, depend on the Postal Service for delivery of vital medication, paychecks and letters. At the same time, the USPS has been disrupted by new forms of communication as well as competition from companies like Amazon, which nonetheless rely on it for the last mile of many deliveries.

Package volume has been rising over the last few years, and as more people shopped online during the pandemic, it soared 49% between April and June compared to the same period last year. The bad news? First-class mail volume, traditionally the Postal Service’s most profitable category, has fallen every year since 2001.

The long-term prospects for the USPS are indeed grim. Thanks to a wave of plant closures and consolidation, mail delivery has also gotten steadily slower, and the Postal Service has not hit any of its first-class mail delivery goals in five years. The pandemic has made things even worse. More than half of the nation’s 67 postal districts failed to meet any of their first-class mail delivery goals in the first quarter of 2020, Wisconsin Watch reported, with some of the worst problems occurring in swing states.

Can Congress do anything to help fix the Postal Service before the election?

The Postal Service is ordinarily a self-funding operation, but there are things that Congress can do in this unique situation.

Here are three options:

Get rid of a burdensome law. Congress could relieve the Postal Service of its obligation under a 2006 law to pre-fund decades’ worth of worker benefits, returning it to a more standard “pay as you go” model. The Postal Service has been warning for years that its business model is not sustainable in large part because of that requirement, a burden that has not been placed on other agencies. Without the 2006 requirement, the Postal Service would likely have been profitable in some years over the last decade, according to the Trump administration’s own estimates.
Pay the USPS some of the money it is already owed. Congress has neglected to appropriate more than $1 billion that it owes the USPS for the discounted mailing service the agency provides to nonprofits, local newspapers and disabled Americans.
Spend some new money. The biggest thing Congress could do is simply cut a few very large checks. As of Monday, House Democrats are finalizing a $25 billion bill to fund the Postal Service.

If states are struggling to run their elections in a pandemic, can Congress help?

Again, like so many things, it comes down to money. Election officials and voting experts have been warning, over and over, that states need more money to properly run elections during a pandemic. This year, many states have had to build large voting-by-mail operations for the first time and safe, socially distanced in-person voting processes, effectively running two new types of elections at once. This requires funding, and it has proved doubly difficult for cash-strapped states.

In March, Congress allocated $400 million in election funding as a part of the CARES Act. But that wasn’t anywhere near enough. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated states need more than $4 billion in spending to shore up their election capacity.

Last week, Trump said he opposes both additional election funding for states and additional money for the Postal Service.

Can states do anything to help the USPS deliver ballots on time?

Yes.

States can set reasonable timelines. For example, Minnesota allows voters to request an absentee ballot up to the day before the election — an obviously unrealistic timeline for the Postal Service and election administrators to meet.
They can work with the USPS. States can make an effort to ensure that local post offices are aware of deadlines and have a specific plan for how to identify and process ballots separately from regular mail.
They can educate the public. States will need to standardize their processes and materials and invest in education campaigns to teach the public how and when to cast their ballots.

I’m worried. What can I do to ensure my ballot doesn’t get lost in the mail? When should I mail it?

You should:

request your ballot early,
mail it back early or,
drop off your ballot in a designated drop box or at your local election office.

(Check your state and local rules first, of course.)

Acting early has another benefit: it flattens “the ballot request curve” and prevents your local election officials or post office from being flooded with last-minute demands.

The Postal Service’s official recommendation is to mail in your ballot at least seven days ahead of your state’s deadlines. Depending on your state, however, this may not be sufficient.

I’d rather just use a drop box to vote. Are drop boxes safe and fair?

Yes. Drop boxes have been used for years in elections and — when best practices are followed — they are secure alternatives to mailing your ballot or casting it in person.

There is no evidence that drop boxes benefit one party more than the other, but they have been shown to increase turnout at least a bit.

Given the pandemic and decreasing confidence in the USPS to deliver ballots on time, drop boxes are likely to be more popular this year. Manufacturers of the boxes have reported increased demand. The boxes are heavy — in the hundreds of pounds — and bolted to the ground much like ATMs. Tampering with them is difficult, and there have been no reported successful cases.

How common is vote-by-mail fraud?

Not very common at all. It is accepted among political scientists who study the issue that vote-by-mail fraud is slightly more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting. For example, in North Carolina the results of the 2018 congressional race were invalidated after officials discovered a Republican campaign consultant had orchestrated a scheme to collect and manipulate ballots. Such violations are often caught because of the clear security measures states have set up around voting by mail, enabling people to track their ballots and requiring officials to verify signatures.

At the same time, voter fraud is exceedingly rare across the board. Colorado, which conducts its election entirely by mail, referred only 0.0027% of ballots for investigation in 2018.

Robert Reich: Trump’s “law and order” campaign is a distraction

Trump has refused to act to contain the coronavirus, opting to sit on the sidelines as the pandemic ravages the country. But when it comes to waging violence against his own people, he’s quickly risen to the occasion.

Here are 6 ways Donald Trump has failed to attack the coronavirus, but instead has attacked Americans.

1. Leadership?

Trump has said he has “no responsibility” for the coronavirus pandemic, fobbing it off on governors and mayors whose repeated requests for federal help he’s denied.

But when it comes to assaulting Americans exercising their right to protest in defense of Black lives, Trump is quick to assert strong “leadership.” He called the NYC Black Lives Matter mural a “symbol of hate” and has sent federal agents to terrorize protestors even as mayors and governors urged him to stay out.

2. Strategy?

Trump has never offered a national strategy for testing, contact tracing, and isolating those who have the virus. He has provided insufficient funding for the schools he’s trying to force open, abysmal standards for reopening the economy, purchasing critical supplies, or helping the unemployed, and no clear message about what people and businesses should do.
But he has a strategy for attacking Americans. He deployed unidentified federal agents against protesters in Portland, Oregon, where his secret police pulled them into unmarked vans, and detained them without charges. Federal agents have since left the city, causing violence to go down almost immediately, but Trump has threatened to send agents to Kansas City, Albuquerque and Chicago. He also said he’ll send them to New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland – not incidentally, all cities with Democratic mayors, large Black populations, and little violent unrest.

3. Personnel?

Trump can’t find enough federal personnel to do contact tracing for the coronavirus.

But Trump has had no problem finding thousands of agents for his secret police, drawn from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.

4. Equipment?

Public health authorities don’t have adequate medical equipment to quickly analyze coronavirus tests.

But Trump’s police have everything they need to injure protesters, including military style armored vehicles, teargas, and tactical assault weapons – “the best equipment,” Trump boasted obnoxiously.

5. Legal authority?

There is ample legal authority for Trump to contain the coronavirus.

But he’s likely exceeded the legal authority for him to send federal troops into cities where mayors don’t want them. The framers of the Constitution denied police power to the national government. The local officials in charge of public safety have rejected Trump’s troops. (The mayor of Portland was tear-gassed. The mayor of Kansas City called them “disgraceful.” Albuquerque’s mayor announced: “There’s no place for Trump’s secret police in our city.” Chicago’s mayor said she does “not welcome dictatorship.”)

6. The truth?

Trump has tried to suppress the truth about the coronavirus. The White House instructed hospitals to report cases to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than to the CDC. Trump muzzled the federal government’s most prominent and trusted immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, while the White House tried to discredit him.

But the Trump campaign ran fictitious ads portraying cities as overrun by violent leftwing mobs, and Trump’s shameless Fox News lackeys have consistently depicted protesters as “rioters” and the “armed wing of the Democratic party.”

* * *

More than 160,000 Americans have already died from the coronavirus — tens of thousands more than would have died had Trump acted responsibly to contain it. And the economy is in freefall.

No matter how hard he tries, we can’t let Trump shift public attention from his failure to attack the virus to his attacks on Americans protesting to create an America where Black lives matter and everyone can thrive.

In fewer than 90 days, we must hold him accountable at the ballot box.

Whose alpha male is this? Donald Trump and America’s sad, failed model of masculinity

There are moments when merely following the news replicates how it must feel to enter a portal into a surreal realm of hallucination, where dropping acid is an act of redundancy and Lewis Carroll reads like the newspaper. Take the following sentences from a professional journalist in a serious publication, Vox, on the unique resistance many American men have against wearing face coverings in public during a pandemic involving an airborne virus:

It would seem that the obvious way to get more men to wear masks would be to make the manliest version of a mask possible. Maybe put guns on it, or a football team, or make a mask that makes men feel like a super-soldier spliced from Rambo and Captain America.

Nike and Under Armour, according to the same Vox story, are marketing masks similar to those that comic book heroes would wear to fight crime, and the leading men’s fashion magazine, GQ, recommends a particular mask that will make its wearers resemble gladiators in the video game Mortal Kombat. Donald Trump, forever arrested in the mindset of an evil six-year-old from a Stephen King novel, boasted that he looked like the Lone Ranger in his mask, prompting many Americans to wonder if he was wearing it incorrectly.

Epidemiologists and other doctors, insistent on ruining everyone’s fun, caution against several of the macho, costume-party masks. Because they are often made with more porous material than standard facial coverings, and feature “cool looking” valves, they may be less effective in preventing COVID-19 transmission.

If the United States were a sane society, the revelation that many seemingly functional adults require the enticement of looking like a video-game monster to observe public health protocols would provoke sustained soul searching and institutional deliberation to determine exactly where and how it all went wrong. How are families, schools and conduits of public information failing so miserably to raise men of minimal competence, maturity and compassion?

The inquiry becomes even more urgent when one considers the sad reality that the Batman-impersonators are not even the worst culprits of failed manhood. According to several polls, 20 percent of men never wear masks — but only 8 percent of women. A significant amount of American men are willing to risk the deaths of their neighbors to avoid looking “weak” or “afraid.” In high numbers among this group of dangerous fools are police officers, bikers and conservatives, or to use Trump’s proud assignation, “the tough people.”

Given that the “tough people,” including Trump himself, appear as frightened as kittens in a thunderstorm at the mere thought of women holding power, black families moving into suburban neighborhoods or Mexicans crossing the southern border, their posturing and preening, unlike their pandemic behavior, is the ultimate mask. The motorcycles, the guns and the eagerness to violate “political correctness” fail to conceal their obvious insecurity and frailty.

Donald Trump is the ultimate symbol of the sad state of American manhood.

Characteristically unable to advance in the 21st century, the United States has frozen into a form of primitive masculinity. Tom Digby, a philosopher and author of the brilliant book, “Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance,” identifies this largely obsolete conception of manhood as “warrior masculinity.”

When I asked Digby about Trump and the increasingly bizarre outbursts of his supporters, he responded that it’s impossible to comprehend this president without considering the desperation of attempting to maintain a rapidly fading masculine ideal.

Donald’s masculinity is a cartoon version of masculinity – it is all bluster. Donald is all about bravado; he never demonstrates actual bravery. From his reliance on fake bone spurs to avoid the Vietnam War to his present attempt to escape political defeat by sabotaging the Postal Service, Donald has consistently demonstrated a total absence of courage.

The notion of masculinity that prevails in the U.S. derives from the warrior ideal. Above all, the warrior needs not only to demonstrate courage by risking death or injury, but also to readily inflict such harm on others. The warrior must be able to manage the capacity to care about his or her suffering, as well as the suffering of others. The part of warrior masculinity that Donald gets right is not caring about the suffering of others. He actually seems to delight in inflicting harm on other people.

But Donald is an utter failure regarding the other side of the coin of warrior masculinity. Indeed, instead of playing the warrior, he plays the perennial victim. He continually whines about how he is treated by the press and political opponents. He thus consistently fails a core expectation of warrior masculinity — that one must always be ready to risk harm, and to endure suffering. Indeed, Donald routinely lies and cheats to fend off what he perceives as harm to himself (even straightforward reporting of what he has said or tweeted).

As for that other aspect of warrior masculinity, the suppression of caring about the suffering of others, one need not be playing the warrior role to do that. One can be a sociopath, as Donald appears to be. For Donald, disregarding the suffering of others is easy. It is automatic.

The evidence of Trump’s pathological inability to acknowledge the pain of his fellow human beings is on gruesome display every hour as the COVID-19 death count rises — this weekend we passed another dreadful milestone, at 175,000 deaths — and he refuses even to simulate empathy and sensitivity, much less demonstrate the leadership skills necessary to help the people he supposedly serves.

“It is what it is,” Trump said in a recent interview when reacting to reporter Jonathan Swan’s reminder that roughly 1,000 Americans are dying every day of this pandemic, while most European and Asian nations have daily death counts at less than one-tenth of that number. The statement encapsulates Trump’s solipsistic disregard for lives other than his own — from the children in cages at the Mexican border due to his own immigration policies to the coronavirus patients taking their final, labored breaths alone in hospitals and nursing homes across the country.

It also summarizes the “warrior masculinity” ethos.

This kind of calculation is contemptible, but one can understand that Trump, as an incumbent president seeking re-election, benefits from minimizing the danger of covid-19. It is more perplexing to consider why legions of “proud American” men identify with Trump, especially given who he actually is — a whiny trust-fund baby from New York City who perennially complains that life is unfair to him. In the abstract, he’s someone they would despise if they somehow met him in a bar.

Trump’s “cartoonish masculinity,” Digby believes, offers a vicarious thrill to men who wrestle with similar kinds of insecurities:

Many men respond positively to Donald’s cartoonish masculinity. They presumably also experience adrenaline rushes when playing violent video games. And presumably they are thrilled by fictional warrior masculinity in action movies. In all three of these cases, a projected fake masculinity offers some men a kind of reassurance about a notion of masculinity that is dear to them, but about which they must continually fight off doubts, of three kinds. First, there are doubts about their own ability to fulfill the ideals that are implicit in those notions of masculinity. Second, there are doubts rooted in criticisms they hear of “toxic masculinity,” which can’t be separated from their awareness of actual, real-life examples of violence and abuse by men. Third, perhaps on an even more subconscious level, men are increasingly aware of what I describe in “Love and War” as the inherently sacrificial nature of masculinity. At its core, warrior masculinity requires a willingness to sacrifice one’s own life, health and emotional well-being. I explain this sacrificial masculinity fully in the book, but in short, we can see it in two facts: Men are far more likely than women to commit suicide, and men are far less likely than women to seek medical care.

The pathetic attempt to project a Herculean image by forgoing medical care has reached its apotheosis in the anti-mask crusade. There is a tragicomic disconnect between the way these men believe they look, and the way that reasonable people perceive them. As they struggle to show strength, they expose their weakness and insecurity. A recent video from a grocery store showed a man screaming at an employee about the mask mandate. The confrontation ended with the imbecile’s adult son, visibly embarrassed, lifting him up from behind and carrying him out the front door. Someone suffering a neurotic breakdown over a store’s mask policy does not exactly resemble the stoical protagonist of a story by Ernest Hemingway, who famously defined courage as “grace under pressure.”

Digby explains that a coalescence of cultural, economic and political changes have drained the meaning out of “warrior masculinity,” rendering the men who have heavily invested in its ideology of manhood feeling desperate, lost and confused.

There is no longer a great need for militarism in the average American family or community. Women, in many households, have established themselves as breadwinners, erasing the distinctions between men and women in familial and career roles. Digby likens warrior masculinity to the “butcher block table” that his mother owned when he was a child. “The table must have weighed 100 pounds, and it seemed indestructible,” he recalls, “Nonetheless, eventually that butcher block table was hauled away with a bunch of other stuff nobody wanted anymore.”

No matter their hysterical denials, many men sense that the butcher-block table is on its way out the door. The insecurity attendant to that knowledge creates an intense bond with Donald Trump. As Digby says, “With all his power — both actual and imagined — Donald seems to offer a cultural refuge for men who were brought up to think that they are supposed to be dominant over women and other men. … He seems like the last hope for a role model, no matter how corrupt, deceitful, anxious and hateful his behavior. Whenever attention is called to his flaws, those men respond with desperate anger at what they perceive as attacks on themselves.

Joe Biden presents a different model of male leadership, exemplified in his selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as running mate. More than any of his other competitors in the Democratic primary, Harris scored a knockdown against Biden in an early debate, when she challenged him on his record related to school busing in the 1970s. The confidence necessary to choose Harris after she had embarrassed him — to say nothing of the fact that she is clearly the more charismatic politician — demonstrates what Digby calls a “masculinity quotient.”

“Try to imagine Donald campaigning in 2016 with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio as his VP candidate, both of whom had attacked Donald mercilessly in the primary,” Digby offers by way of contrast. “That would have destabilized him. He needed Mike Pence, the ultimate beta male sycophant.”

The policy prescriptions of the Biden campaign have underwhelmed many progressives, but voters of all ideologies would do well to remember that Americans do not elect a political robot as president, who functions according to doctrinal programming, to the presidency. We elect a human being, a point that Sen. Bernie Sanders, among others, made clear at the recently-concluded Democratic convention. Along with his cruel and destructive worldview, Donald Trump has proven that he is morally, intellectually and emotionally unfit to perform even the mundane tasks of public leadership.

Security and humility are essential to a healthy presidency.

In his fascinating study of gender issues and the political career of John F. Kennedy, “JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier,” historian Steven Watts writes that Kennedy’s “physical vigor, decisive action, personal heroism, individual initiative, tough-mindedness, and abundant sex appeal” enabled him to signal a regeneration of masculine ideals when American culture was lamenting the diminishment of purpose and courage in manhood following World War II and amid a new era of middle-class professionalism.

Nothing tested Kennedy as president quite like the Cuban missile crisis, when for 13 days in October 1962 the world danced along the edge of a nuclear holocaust. Kennedy’s clearheaded, intelligent and disciplined leadership prevented an unspeakable disaster. As his military advisers pressured him to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union — which could have led not just to World War III but to the destruction of human civilization — Kennedy showed resolve and pursued the path of peace. Following the crisis, members of his political team encouraged him to go public with the story, certain that it would guarantee his re-election. Kennedy rejected their recommendation, believing that any humiliation of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev would risk another conflict.

Watts argues that the Cuban missile crisis “shone a spotlight on Kennedy as the masculine ideal of the New Frontier who embraced neither wild-eyed military bombast nor weak-kneed capitulation but calm, pragmatic, valiant discernment. It enhanced the popular image of Kennedy as a man who had been under fire and could handle the most enormous pressure imaginable with grace, shrewdness, and a sense of proportion.”

Anyone looking for an incurable case of insomnia, or who requires further motivation to vote for Joe Biden, should imagine Donald Trump in a situation similar to the Cuban missile crisis.

Florida’s GOP Governor Ron DeSantis calls COVID a lower risk for school-aged children than flu

Even as his state is a hotbed for COVID-19, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been pushing schools to reopen so parents have the choice of sending children back to the classroom or keeping them home to learn virtually.

The Republican governor has said children without any underlying health conditions would benefit from in-person learning and the stimulation and companionship of being among other young people. He has also made clear that he thinks these benefits far outweigh what he considers to be minimal risks.

“The fact is, in terms of the risk to schoolkids, this is lower risk than seasonal influenza,” DeSantis said, during an Aug. 10 televised roundtable discussion on education.

DeSantis’ assertion got us wondering, so we asked the governor’s office what evidence it had to back up the claim.

Looking at the numbers

A spokesperson responded with data from the Florida Department of Health showing the state’s COVID-19 mortality rate is 0.02% for people 24 and younger. That’s the same as the influenza mortality rate for this age group.

But for children 14 and younger, the spokesperson said, Florida’s COVID-19 mortality rate is 0.009%, far below the 0.01% for flu for that age group.

And the risk of death is not the only concern children face if infected by the COVID-19 virus. They can develop complications that require hospitalization.

“The risk of complications for healthy children is higher for flu compared to COVID-19,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “However, infants and children with underlying medical conditions are at increased risk for both flu and COVID-19.”

The CDC estimates there were 480 deaths among U.S. children due to flu in the 2018-19 season, including 136 cases in which the virus was confirmed by laboratory testing.

As of mid-August, 90 children died of COVID-19 in the United States, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

More than 46,000 children were hospitalized for flu in that 2018-19 period. The hospitalization rate among children 5 to 17 was 39.2 children per 100,000 children.

The hospitalization rate for COVID-19 is six per 100,000 children for those ages 5 to 17, according to the CDC.

The number and rate of COVID cases in children in the United States steadily increased from March to July. “The true incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children is not known due to lack of widespread testing and the prioritization of testing for adults and those with severe illness,” the CDC wrote recently.

While children have lower rates of using a ventilator than adults, 1 in 3 children hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States were admitted to the intensive care unit, the same rate as for adults, the CDC said.

Dr. Chad Vercio, chair of pediatrics at Riverside University Health System in California, said DeSantis’ statement is partly true, with many caveats. Children’s risk from COVID-19 “entirely depends on how widespread COVID is in any area,” he said.

Data reflects a snapshot in time

U.S. hospitalization rates for children with COVID are lower than for those with flu, Vercio said. But that could be due to parents keeping children home and schools being closed since March, he added. “It is unknown if these COVID hospitalization rates would rise when we open schools,” he said.

About two-thirds of Florida school districts have opened in the past two weeks with the rest planning to resume by Aug. 31. Most districts are offering in-person classes while giving parents the option to keep students home for virtual learning. In South Florida, where the pandemic has hit hardest, districts are planning, at least initially, to offer only virtual teaching.

Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, had initially planned to reopen classrooms but reversed itself after doctors warned that school closures were likely to ensue. The county revised its plan to limit classes to online-only instruction, but the state’s education commissioner rejected that approach, saying it denies parents the option of sending their children back to school. Fearing the loss of millions of dollars in state funding, the district now plans to begin virtual learning for all students on Aug. 24, and, on Aug. 31, begin offering students the option to return to the classroom.

“The direct impact of COVID-19 on children is currently small in comparison with other risks and … the main reason we are keeping children at home is to protect adults,” concluded a report in the British Medical Journal published in June. Still, health authorities say parents should make sure children practice good hygiene and limit playtime with other children.

Based on data from February through mid-May, the report found 44 deaths from COVID-19 for people 19 and younger in France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Spain, England and the United States. In a typical three-month period, there would be 308 deaths from lower respiratory tract infections, including flu, in those countries.

“At this stage of the pandemic, COVID appears to be less dangerous for children than influenza,” said Sunil Bhopal, a co-author of the report and an academic clinical lecturer at Newcastle University in England.

“We don’t need to wait for a whole season because, even at its peak in most countries, COVID killed a smaller number of children than estimated influenza deaths averaged from across a year,” Bhopal said.

“While flu is likely to have caused more deaths than COVID, this may change as the pandemic progresses and major caution is necessary to ensure this doesn’t change,” said Bhopal, an honorary assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Dr. Sean O’Leary, professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said the growing number of U.S. deaths could be another reason to think about COVID-19 and children.

“We do know for sure that schoolchildren are major drivers of influenza epidemics in the community and, though that is not as much the case with COVID, it doesn’t mean they can’t spread it,” he said.

DeSantis also maintained that kids are less likely to spread COVID-19 than they are the influenza virus. However, experts cautioned that there’s still a lot that is unknown about children’s ability to transmit the virus to the people they interact with — parents, grandparents and even teachers. The perceived risk for teachers, for instance, is at the root of a lawsuit between the state’s largest teachers union and the DeSantis administration. The Florida Education Association wants a Leon County judge to stop the state’s order forcing school districts to open classrooms for in-person learning by the end of August.

Dr. Gabriela Andujar Vazquez, an infectious disease specialist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said children are more likely to have zero or mild symptoms from COVID-19 compared with adults.

“The bottom line is kids can get infected and they tend to have less severe disease,” she said. But the concern over reopening school is that children could spread the disease to others, including adults who are more likely to develop complications.

“Because schools are tied to the community — they are not in a bubble — and if community spread is not controlled in the community, it’s likely the school will reflect that,” she said. One factor that can determine if the disease is out of control is if positivity rates for people getting tested for COVID are over 5%. Many Florida counties have been well above that mark since June, although the rates have been dropping this month.

Back-to-school risks will be handicapped based on the ability of the school to adopt physical distancing measures and enforce wearing of face masks, said Dr. Andrew Pavia, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital.

“This fall, we may see a lot of kids get infected as schools reopen, and those could be just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “Even though most kids have mild or asymptomatic cases, what I worry about is just how big is the tip of the iceberg,” Pavia said.

He also noted there is a vaccine for flu — which about 50% to 70% of children receive. “The vaccine is not perfect but does reduce the impact of the disease, and with COVID everyone is at risk and susceptible,” Pavia said.

Dr. Vidya Mony, an infectious disease expert with Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, said data suggests COVID-19 is not as bad for children as flu and that children are not the main driver of the pandemic. But, she said, there isn’t enough data yet to say indisputably that the COVID-19 risk is lower. “We are learning something every day with this.”

Our ruling

DeSantis said that COVID-19 is a lower risk for schoolchildren than is seasonal influenza.

Studies show the numbers of COVID-related deaths and hospitalizations among children are lower than the average rates for flu. Still, it’s uncertain if these lower rates among children were partly because schools were closed since March and whether those rates will rise as classrooms reopen this fall. It’s also unclear whether opening schools — particularly in communities with a high number of people testing positive — will lead to more spread of the disease.

“Love in the Time of Corona” is not a drama worth catching

“Quarantine pick-up lines are the worst,” declares a lonely heart on “Love in the Time of Corona.”

Quarantine TV shows aren’t much better, if we’re using this show as an example of what to expect.

But we’re in the early days of this process of negotiating how TV is going to move forward in this socially distanced era, even though some of us feel like we’ve been suspended in this uncertain limbo forever. Freeform’s four-part limited series is merely one attempt, and certainly not indicative of the shape every COVID-cautious production may take.

Looking at it purely on the merits of its execution, it at least proves that it’s possible to pull off a decent-looking drama about a topic so near and dear to many of us that we’re living inside of it. That factor also explains why this series doesn’t quite work.

That “Love in the Time of Corona” seeks to address the very pertinent question of how we’re supposed to create and maintain interpersonal connections at a time when our very lives depend on staying apart would seem to make it a natural draw. Somewhere out there somebody is furiously developing a “Love Actually“-style anthology guaranteed to delight and melt hearts and maybe even recreate some version of Andrew Lincoln’s adorable cue-card confession.

This is not that project. This is an experiment sent straight to series at the beginning of May with a production that began at the end of June. Hasty creations aren’t necessarily terrible; in the right hands they can be brilliant.

Such creatives might also know that when being tasked to create in the middle of a natural disaster when everyone is flying blind, attempting to successfully illuminate that blindness is a fool’s errand. Society itself is in the midst of a realignment that could bend in any number of directions, one that’s moving quickly enough for last week’s intense conversations of the day to feel like like ancient history.

“Love in the Time of Corona,” created by “Good Trouble” executive producer Joanna Johnson, is nothing if not a collection of those old exchanges, annoyingly peppered with groan-worthy Gen Z outbursts about checking privilege. Freeform’s audience skews younger, but if I’m cringing at some of these messaging moments I have to believe that viewers hailing from a couple of generations behind me may get a headache from all the eye-rolling.

The good news is there’s something in within its four short episodes for everyone, designed to speak to a variety of quarantine conundrums. Real-life couple Gil Bellows and Rya Kihlstedt play Paul and Sarah, a couple recently separated before quarantine hit who haven’t yet broken the news to their daughter Sophie (Ava Bellows). When she returns home from college to shelter in place with them, they have some decisions to make.

“Hamilton” star Leslie Odom Jr. and his wife Nicolette Robinson portray a film producer named James and his wife Sade, who are contemplating getting pregnant . . . until James watches video of Ahmaud Arbery being hunted down in Georgia.

“Lost” star L Scott Caldwell portrays Nanda, an elderly woman forced to be apart from her husband (Charles Robinson), who is in an assisted living facility and struggling with dementia, while roommates and too-close besties Elle (Rainey Qualley) and Oscar (Tommy Dorfman) deal with their horniness and boredom by journeying into the weird wilderness of Zoom dating.

Situations portrayed in each of these stories make a mighty attempt at being about a hot topic some segment of the audience is living, which entirely misses the point of any diversionary activity. We’re all feeling our way through this fog slowly and clumsily, and the one of the last things most of us want to do is watch four earnest dramatizations of people who are also feeling their way through this fog and failing at it.

In normal times that precise quality could have made this series a worthy exercise in commiseration, but the scripts aren’t witty or exciting enough to make us want to relate to these characters, none of whom is compelling enough to make a person want to stick around.

“Love in the Time of Corona” does provide an important lesson in what not to do – a lesson that comes too late for the likes of HBO’s upcoming celebrity one-off “Coastal Elites” while also highlighting the ways that HBO Max’s “Selena + Chef” is onto something.

“Coastal Elites” is more tongue-in-cheek and a shorter time commitment, and benefits from the celebrity glow-up provided by Bette Midler, Sarah Paulson, Kaitlyn Dever, Dan Levy and Issa Rae. The Paul Rudnick-scripted, Jay Roach-directed project was supposed to be a monologue-driven live event to be filmed over three nights at Manhattan’s Public Theater but, well, we know what happened.

Instead the monologues are being served up from the cast’s homes with limited crews to film them, and to Rudnick’s credit, the stories aren’t about life in the time of the ‘rona. Each one is about . . . life under the thumb of Donald Trump, which presents its own hurdle for audiences to clear.

“Selena + Chef,” however, is about the very likable Selena Gomez receiving cooking lessons from world-class chefs – this week’s being Roy Choi – over a remote connection. She’s at home, they’re at home, and she says, “We’re gonna see if we can make a meal together, apart.”

Gomez’s series isn’t necessarily a cooking tutorial (although you can pick up a few tips!) as much as it’s a cathartic and lighthearted comedy gently inviting the audience to relate to the daunting task of learning something new. The pop star is refreshingly down to earth and adventurous, and she succeeds and flubs the dishes with equal enthusiasm.

Above all, the show is a funny experiential departure from the low-grade angst clouding our existence, which is TV’s main role in this time.

People may find something to connect with in “Love in the Time of Corona,” and it’s short enough for someone to commit to view it in its entirety without losing much time to it. But if one of the defining characteristics of this age is a radical reassessment of priorities, I find it difficult to conceive of how this series qualifies for our list of wants and needs.

But I’m guessing it’ll be a very useful example for the creative staffs developing NBC’s “Connecting,” Netflix’s “Social Distance” and other quarantine-themed series of what not to do in this crisis.

“Love in the Time of Corona” airs at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 22 and Sunday, Aug. 23 on Freeform.

USPS slowdown creates “another barrier for women” to access birth control as delivery times double

The mail slowdown resulting from operational changes implemented by new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has doubled the delivery time for birth control prescriptions, a reproductive health company executive told Salon.

Democrats have sounded the alarm over changes by DeJoy, a top donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, after the US Postal Service told 46 states it may be unable to meet their mail voting deadlines this fall. But the focus has increasingly moved to the potential impact on the delivery of medication, which threatens to leave patients without access to life-saving medicine.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is reportedly looking for alternatives to the USPS after shipments of medication were delayed. Meanwhile, there have been a growing number of anecdotal reports of elderly patients being left without critical medications for weeks.

Access to birth control has also been impacted, Carrie SiuButt, the CEO of SimpleHealth, an online birth control company, told Salon.

A “couple of weeks ago” the company noticed a few complaints “trickling in” but “now we’re seeing up to 5% of people” reporting delays,” she said. “What would have been three to five days now can take upwards of seven to 10 days.”

A recent Axios/Ipsos survey also found that about 5% of respondents who were awaiting a prescription delivery had either not received it, or got it late.

SimpleHealth had seen its business double amid the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the company’s clients use insurance to pay for their prescriptions, so the company is legally prohibited from moving up refill timelines to counteract the effect of the delays, though it is now offering six-month refills to patients that pay out of pocket.

“We are writing to patients that we are currently experiencing delays but… this is really frustrating for me because it’s another barrier for women to receive proper access to the medication they need,” SiuButt said. “We try to get our patients what they need right away but it’s unfortunate that some of the decisions being made are affecting women’s health care.”

SiuButt said her own experience has left her worried that her mother will not receive her diabetes medication in time.

“It’s less about the politics, to me it’s about human being welfare,” she said.

Postal workers have also noticed significant delays.

“Medications come in as parcels and we have seen that mail is taking longer,” Kimberly Karol, an Iowa postal clerk and the president of the state’s Postal Workers Union, told Salon. “In many cases, it was increasing the delivery time somewhere between three and seven days. That’s a big change.”

Karol warned that the delays could particularly impact customers in rural areas.

“If it hasn’t yet, which I would be surprised if it hasn’t, it will,” she said. “We’re in many cases the only way they can receive mail. If the system gets backed up, their mail is going to be included in that…. We see that there are issues getting items to the final destination.”

Medical groups have also sounded the alarm over the changes.

“My patients who rely on their insulin, or their inhalers, or any other type of medication can’t wait weeks to see whether or not their prescription will be delivered,” Jacqueline Fincher, president of the American College of Physicians, said in a statement, adding that the organization is “alarmed” that these changes will “exacerbate existing issues.”

DeJoy said on Tuesday that he would suspend further changes to the USPS until after the election but has made clear he has no plans to roll back the ones that have already been implemented.

“The Postmaster General’s alleged pause is wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement after meeting with DeJoy. “We are highly concerned that the slowdown of the delivery of medicines to veterans is not being sufficiently addressed.”

The VA acknowledged that it has been forced to find alternative ways to deliver medication, like FedEx and UPS, in an email to the Disabled Vets of America. The VA fills about 80% of prescriptions by mail, about 120 million prescriptions per year.

“The VA has now confirmed to us that the United States Postal Service (USPS), which is responsible for delivering about 90% of all VA mail order prescriptions, has indeed been delayed in delivering these critical medications by an average of almost 25% over the past year, with many locations experiencing much more significant delays,” Stephen “Butch” Whitehead, who heads the group, said in a statement. “To help mitigate these postal delays, the VA has been forced to switch to alternative delivery services in a number of areas across the country and is taking other actions to expedite processing and delivery of prescriptions.”

Last week, 31 senators wrote to DeJoy that they’ve heard from hundreds of veterans that weeks-long delays are “causing veterans to miss doses of vital medications.”

The VA’s website says that “prescriptions usually arrive within 3 to 5 days” but veterans and VA staff told the lawmakers that “these medications are often taking weeks to be delivered.”

A VA spokeswoman disputed the letter to ABC News, noting that the website urges veterans to request refills at least 10 days before they need it.

“VA always encourages veterans to order routine prescriptions in advance,” spokeswoman Christina Noel told the outlet. “When it comes to emergent prescriptions, VA either fills them onsite or uses commercial carriers to ensure timely delivery.”

Many companies rely on USPS for delivery as well. CVS, Express Scripts, and OptumRx, the three largest pharmacy benefit managers in the US, all use USPS to send prescriptions, as do startups like Honeybee Health and Amazon’s PillPack. The number of prescriptions sent through the mail has spiked during the pandemic.

HoneyBee Health said that about 20% of patients whose prescriptions were sent via first-class mail experienced delays though the other companies told BuzzFeed News that they have not been affected by the USPS slowdown.

While UPS and FedEx offer alternatives to the USPS, they do not offer the same low rates and often themselves rely on the USPS for “last mile” delivery in rural areas.

“We tend to use UPS and FedEx more for time-sensitive and expensive drugs,” Umar Afridi, the founder of the online pharmacy TruePill, told CNBC. “USPS is often the lowest cost and they have the biggest reach.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., launched an investigation this week into the effect of the USPS on medication delivery, sending out letters to top pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens to find out whether their customers have experienced delays as well.

“Millions of Americans with diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, asthma, and other chronic conditions, illnesses or health care needs rely on the USPS for delivery of their prescription drugs and are at grave risks if President Trump’s efforts to degrade mail service results in delays and disruptions,” they wrote. “These health threats are magnified by the ongoing pandemic.”

Former Rep. John McHugh, who now heads the Package Coalition, a group that advocates for reliable postal delivery service with members like PillPack, Express Scripts, CVS Health, and Amazon, warned that the effects could snowball.

“There’s an exponential factor to this,” he told CNBC. “Once you are behind, what happens next is you get further behind and then further behind.”

“Any additional strain will have an impact on patients,” added Dr. Lakshman Swamy, an associate medical director at Massachusetts’ state health care system. “It’s inevitable.”

How economic threats are a potent tool for changing people’s minds about the Confederate flag

Activists nationwide have resumed demanding the removal of statues and symbols that are considered racially offensive — such as of slave owners, Confederate leaders and the Confederate flag.

The requests — and related boycotts and threats of other economic protests — have been part of the national controversy about racism in American life and have sparked questions about how to recognize traumatic elements of U.S. history.

Typically, the debate about the role of Confederate imagery in public life is seen as a political, social or racial issue. But in recent research, we discovered that economic concerns could be effective in shifting Southerners’ attitudes about Confederate symbols.

Public officials and individual citizens alike are more likely to oppose the presence of Confederate symbols when they learn it may be bad for local business.

Longstanding support

Decisions to build Confederate monuments or display the Confederate battle flag were not, of course, controversial among white Southerners. Even recently, it wasn’t common for many white Americans — either in public service or as private citizens — to actively support removing Confederate imagery.

Yet some organizations have long opposed Confederate symbols. For instance, the NAACP called an economic boycott of South Carolina from 2000 to 2015 because the Confederate battle flag flew over the State House in Columbia, alongside the state and U.S. flags.

As recently as 2011 a plurality of white Southerners saw the Confederate flag as more positive than negative.

Political elites were not much different: In 2000, when South Carolina hosted a debate during the Republican presidential primaries, both George W. Bush and John McCain initially supported leaving decisions up to state officials about whether to keep the Confederate flag flying, though McCain equivocated on the issue throughout the campaign.

A rapid change

Opposition to public display of Confederate symbols has shifted in more recent years.

In some cases, public officials have encountered changing political circumstances. In 2015, for instance, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley supported a bipartisan call to remove the flag from the State House in the wake of a racially motivated mass shooting of African Americans at a Charleston church.

Our research found that presenting divisive social and political issues in terms of their potential economic consequences can change the views of both political elites and the public at large.

This came up, for instance, during a legislative debate in Mississippi in June 2020. Some of the people arguing that the Confederate flag should not be part of the state flag said that keeping it might impede job creation and economic development in their state.

Those tactics are similar to economic arguments from other groups seeking social change, such as LGBT-rights advocates explaining how the business community would be hurt by continued discrimination.

What’s the effect?

In our research, we surveyed voters as well as elected officials at both city and county levels. We wanted to measure whether, and how much, economic interests might affect Southerners’ attitudes toward the presence of Confederate symbols. We randomly assigned the participants into one of three equal-sized groups.

The first group read a vignette asking them to imagine that a Confederate flag was displayed on local government property in their county, and then asked them, on a scale from 1 to 7, how likely they were to support removal of the flag.

The second group was given the same basic information as the first group, but with additional language indicating that the continued presence of Confederate flag on public property in their county would mean a major multinational company would not want to relocate to the community.

The last group was given the same information as the second group, but with an additional assertion that the continued presence of the flag would have an effect large enough to affect the stock market in a way that would hurt the respondents’ personal economic bottom line.

We found that Southerners were far more likely to support removal of Confederate symbols from public property when told there would be economic harm if they stayed up. Both voters and elected officials became about a half-point more likely on our seven-point scale to support removal after receiving information about the economic threats associated with the continued presence of the Confederate flag.

Controversies around socially and racially divisive monuments and symbols are likely to continue in the U.S. Our findings indicate that social movements might change more people’s minds by emphasizing not only the history of Southern racial injustice, but also by using the potent threats of boycotts and other forms of economic pressure.

Jordan Carr Peterson, Assistant Professor of Political Science, North Carolina State University and Christian Grose, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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

As Georgia reopened, officials knew of severe shortage of PPE for health care workers

As the coronavirus crisis deepened in April, Georgia officials circulated documents showing that to get through the next month, the state would need millions more masks, gowns and other supplies than it had on hand.

The projections, obtained by KHN and other organizations in response to public records requests, provide one of the clearest pictures of the severe PPE deficits states confronted while thousands fell ill from rising COVID-19 cases, putting health workers at risk.

Georgia on April 19 had 932,620 N95 respirator masks — one of the best protections for health workers against infection — and expected to burn through nearly 7 million within a month. It urgently needed to buy 1.4 million more, according to documents obtained by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and shared with KHN. For gowns, officials expected to go through 16.1 million in 30 days, a staggering amount compared with the 21,810 the state had at the time.

“Making progress with PPE needs. Biggest challenge now is gowns and we are working it,” Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency Director Homer Bryson wrote on April 19 to two of Gov. Brian Kemp’s senior-most aides.

Even so, one day later, the first-term Republican governor announced he would begin to reopen the state’s economy, including gyms, restaurants, hair salons, theaters and a host of other businesses.

“We have relied on data, science and the advice of health care professionals to guide our approach and decision-making,” he said at a news conference, “putting the health and well-being of our citizens first and doing our best to protect lives and livelihoods.”

“Our state agencies and the governor felt confident in the state’s ability to meet daily PPE requests from our local emergency preparedness partners and medical facilities when Georgia began implementing its measured reopening plan,” Cody Hall, the governor’s spokesperson, said in response to questions. “We have continued to meet those needs since April.” He noted the state is now building a PPE stockpile.

A matter of life or death

After Georgia eased its lockdown, COVID cases spiked. Requests for PPE from health workers in the Atlanta area escalated through April and May, according to numbers provided by the nonprofit Atlanta Beats COVID-19, which makes face shields for health workers and other residents.

According to public data on the Georgia Department of Public Health’s website, at least 80 Georgia health care workers have died from COVID-19, including after the state reopened its economy.

One was John “Derrick” Couch, a nurse practitioner who worked in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Shortly after graduating with his master’s degree in nursing on May 10, the worker at Med First Immediate Care Medical Center grew sick with COVID-19. His wife, Karol, cared for him at home for a time before he was hospitalized. He died after 36 days on a ventilator, according to a GoFundMe page set up to help his family cover his health care expenses.

“Karol wants everyone to know that Covid-19 doesn’t care or discriminate. She says John would want all of his colleagues and friends in healthcare and community to demand proper equipment and protection,” it said. Med First Immediate Care did not respond to a request for comment.

Between March 16 and Aug. 9, 48 COVID-19-related complaints regarding inadequate PPE in Georgia health care facilities were closed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety. The PPE complaints accounted for the majority — roughly 6 in 10 — of Georgia’s COVID-19 complaints submitted to OSHA during the four-month period.

In April and May, “we received thousands of requests for N95 masks, but we couldn’t get our hands on the right materials to even make an N95 mask,” said Caroline Dunn, Atlanta Beats COVID-19’s communications coordinator.

Nationally, health workers continue to express alarm about protective equipment supplies as COVID-19 hot spots reemerge across the country. A National Nurses United survey in July found 87% of nurses working in hospitals reported reusing at least one piece of single-use PPE. Only a quarter of nurses surveyed felt their employers were providing a safe workplace.

“There’s really been this normalization and this acceptance that some people are going to be expendable. And that’s completely unacceptable,” said Dabney Evans, director of the Center for Humanitarian Emergencies at Emory University in Atlanta.

Another document projecting PPE supplies, dated April 10 and developed by Georgia health and emergency management officials, relied on a calculator from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate how quickly Georgia would burn through supplies across hospitals, nursing homes, dialysis clinics, jails and prisons. The state had 527,424 N95 respirators but needed a total of nearly 1.1 million to get through the ensuing seven days. The projected need grew to 4.8 million masks when estimating supplies for the following 31 days.

It had 196,500 gloves on hand but would need more than 12.1 million to get through a week, and 54 million for 31 days. The state had about 122,000 face shields but required more than 458,000 for the coming seven days. For a month, the projected need ballooned to over 2 million.

The April 10 estimates — a day when Georgia’s new COVID-19 case count rose by about 1,000 people — were sent to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Federal Emergency Management Agency as part of a broad effort to assess what states needed across health care settings to operate for at least seven days and up to a month. Federal officials asked state public health and emergency management officials to submit PPE projections daily, according to emails among state personnel, HHS and FEMA.

PPE estimates would be used “to determine projections for our region and the next hot spots within each state,” Jeanne Eckes, an HHS official working with FEMA on the federal government’s COVID-19 response, wrote in an April 3 email to officials in multiple states throughout the South, according to correspondence obtained by KHN.

Calculations matter

Georgia officials contend the state’s estimated PPE deficits were larger early in the pandemic because projections accounted for all COVID-positive cases. Once the state had more information on how many of these positives were asymptomatic cases and how many led to hospitalizations, it could better gauge what was needed, they argued. Multiple changes were made to its burn-rate calculations, including a May 8 adjustment that replaced the total case count with hospital-based COVID cases, which reduced the projected demand for PPE.

However, multiple experts disputed the idea that knowing the number of asymptomatic patients would be relevant for PPE projections. In facilities like nursing homes and jails — both of which were accounted for in the Georgia estimates — asymptomatic individuals could spread the virus if not quarantined immediately.

“Because there’s not on-the-spot, point-of-care testing available for the most part, you have to use PPE throughout the hospital all the time,” said Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “In this day and age, you just have to presume that everyone has COVID.”

When the state’s case count began surging in March, many COVID-19 patients treated at Tift Regional Medical Center in Tifton, Georgia, needed ICU-level care and were from nearby Dougherty County, a Georgia hot spot where hospitals were quickly overwhelmed.

“There were times to which we were down to only having a few days of PPE left,” said Dr. Kaine Brown, a physician and medical director at Tift, adding that the hospital was partly saved by donations of N95 and cloth masks. Gowns were the biggest problem. PPE supplies have since improved — as of early July, the hospital had stockpiled more than eight months’ worth of surgical masks and enough N95s and gowns to last six months and about three months, respectively.

Georgia’s stay-at-home order for most residents expired April 30; it remains in place for individuals at higher risk of severe illness.

“We were very apprehensive about [easing restrictions],” Brown said. “Those of us who had been working on the front lines knew how infectious this was.”

Since May, Georgia has reopened a broad swath of businesses. In early July, more than 1,000 health care workers signed a letter to Kemp urging him to institute a statewide mandate requiring face coverings, to close bars and nightclubs, and prohibit indoor gatherings of more than 25 people. Georgia currently bans gatherings of more than 50 people if social distancing cannot be observed.

State officials say PPE supplies have “greatly improved” since the start of the public health emergency. As of Aug. 14, the state had distributed 3.9 million N95s, 13.1 million surgical masks, 36.6 million gloves, 4.6 million gowns and 1.6 million face shields, among other items, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health. Early on, Georgia also relied on donations to bolster PPE supplies when many items were unattainable through normal supply channels, which have since become more reliable.

However, even with the increased stocks, workers still reuse protective equipment and many fret over the uncertainty about how long they can do so safely. Another community-based organization, the Atlanta chapter of Sewing Masks for Area Hospitals, said that from April to June the organization gave out over 59,000 cloth masks to 152 health care facilities in the Atlanta area, including large hospitals, such as Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory St. Joseph’s Hospital. Kayla Hittig, a co-founder of the sewing group, said that health care workers were using the cloth masks to cover their N95 or surgical masks to make them last longer.

“That’s the thing we hear the most — how often do we have to use these and how protective are they, for how long?” said Richard Lamphier, president of the Georgia Nurses Association.

Lamphier wasn’t critical of the state officials’ efforts to ensure health workers are protected.

“I think they’ve done the best they could with the situation they had,” he said.

It wasn’t enough to protect John Couch, whose family is reeling from his death.

“He was my whole life,” Karol Couch said. “My life is shattered.”

The three amigos of scam artistry: Steve Bannon, Roy Moore and the My Pillow guy

You forgot about Roy Moore, didn’t you? With the rest of the Trumpian shitstorm that slams you in the face every day, Roy Moore probably just slipped out of the old brainpan: Roy chasing teenage girls around Alabama malls, putting up stone monuments engraved with the Ten Commandments, getting fired as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for defying the U.S. Constitution, and running for the Senate and losing to Democrat Doug Jones in the reddest state in the union back in 2017 with the support of his good friend, Steve Bannon.

Yep, along with Donald Trump, Moore’s other big supporter back then was the same Steve Bannon who was just arraigned in federal district court in Manhattan on charges of mail fraud and money laundering that carry prison terms of 20 years each. The same Steve Bannon who ran Trump’s campaign back in 2016, and got up in front of the CPAC convention the following year and told everyone how he was going to “dismantle the administrative state” in Washington, before being fired from his White House job in a power struggle with Jared Kushner and slinking away to his lavish townhouse on Capitol Hill known as the “Breitbart Embassy” to change out of his pin-striped suit and wingtip lace-ups and don the three-shirt look of the Gulfstream populist he would transform himself into, as he jetted around with his “security detail” giving speeches to right-wing political parties all over Europe.

Who the hell are these people? How did we come to a place where we wake up in the morning and the first thing we hear is that this human tapeworm called Steve Bannon has been arrested on a 150-foot private yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire off the coast of Westport, Connecticut, for running a scam that raised money to build Donald Trump’s wall on the border with Mexico — but really what Bannon and three of his partners in the scam were doing was paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars so they could buy boats and Land Rover SUVs and first-class airfares and lavish dinners and high-end hotel rooms and fancy golf carts and cosmetic surgery and home improvements on Florida condos?

I read the indictment, all 24 pages of it, and the scam it describes is incredibly complicated. They set up a GoFundMe page and raised about $25 million to fund a private-venturer section of Trump’s border wall, and they pledged again and again in their fundraising pitches that they wouldn’t take a cent for themselves. Of course Bannon and the rest of them decided a better use of the funds they raised would be to pay for their lavish lifestyles, so they established a nonprofit corporation and a shell company and multiple bank accounts all over the country so they could clandestinely move the donated money around and pay themselves secret salaries amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars for at least one of them, and at least a million for Bannon. I read the indictment twice, trying to understand how the scam worked. The scheme was so byzantine, it was clear to me that Bannon or any of the other three scam artists could have made use of their talents to get themselves a real job, with a real nonprofit, and earn a real salary doing real work for a real cause, rather than the fake We Build the Wall scam that has built only 300 feet of wall somewhere near El Paso, Texas, according to the New York Times.

Bannon’s pal Roy Moore pulled a similar scam down in Alabama when he set up a phony nonprofit called the Foundation for Moral Law. After pledging that he wouldn’t take a penny for himself in salary, Moore proceeded to do just that, paying himself at least $180,000 a year over a period of years, totaling more than $1 million. The foundation also paid for Moore’s travel expenses, health benefits and security guards, and paid a salary of $65,000 a year to Moore’s wife and separate salaries to two of his children. When the foundation hit a rough spot in its fundraising and couldn’t pay Moore’s total salary, he was issued an IOU promising to pay him the difference in assets from the foundation at some future date.

The words “birds of a feather” come to mind, don’t they? I mean, these guys can’t seem to resist the urge to fleece believers of their hard-earned cash, promising dreams like building the wall Trump said the Mexicans would pay for, and in Moore’s case, promising to beat back the heathens and return prayer to the public schools and the Ten Commandments to the public square. All of which is apparently best accomplished from the back seats of Land Rovers and lie-flat seats in first class and leather recliners on private jets and sundecks of 150-foot private yachts.

As if Bannon and his scam-buddies weren’t enough, this was also the week that we learned that COVID-19 will soon cease to be a threat to the health and well-being of Americans because Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow guy,” is bringing a miracle cure to market. Called Oleandrin, it has not been approved by the FDA, it hasn’t undergone any double-blind testing and there is no proof whatsoever that it works. But there Trump was this week, meeting with Lindell and pushing the stuff like it was the new hydroxychloroquine. The My Pillow guy, naturally, has taken a seat on the board and has a financial stake in the company pushing the drug. Oleandrin, by the way, is the chemical that makes the plant Nerium oleander deadly.

What is it about these guys? Roy Moore is a religious nut, but even religious nuts are entitled to their beliefs, and if he wants to put a big rock with the Ten Commandments in his front yard, good on him. But he just couldn’t resist scamming his beliefs into a million dollars in salary. Steve Bannon and his buddies are entitled to be all-in for Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But they couldn’t resist raising money for the wall and using them for leisure boats and luxury SUVs and dinners at expensive restaurants and rooms in luxury hotels. As for the My Pillow guy, he’s a millionaire many times over from selling his ridiculous pillows to the rubes with ads on Fox News. He didn’t need to pad his bank with anything more than the stuffing from his pillows, but noooooo! He’s got to come up with some scam “cure” for COVID from a poisonous plant and add it to Trump’s bleach cure and hydroxychloroquine cure and sun cure, and yes, of course, make some bucks in the process.

Donald Trump has turned the White House into his own private piggy bank. There was so much self-dealing by the Trump Foundation that New York State shut it down and fined Trump $2 million for misusing the foundation for his own private business and political purposes. He could have established a real Trump University and taught the secrets of his real estate genius, but instead, he fleeced people out of their hard-earned dollars and was forced in 2016 to pay $25 million to settle claims by students he cheated.

Donald Trump didn’t invent scams like the ones run by Steve Bannon and Roy Moore and the My Pillow guy, but he’s based his entire life on the notion that there’s a sucker born every minute. He’s probably warming up the pardon pen for Bannon and his pals right now. The thing we’ve got to remember is that there will be no pardon for us if we don’t get rid of him in November.

Four years later, Republican senators admit, “yes, Trump conspired with the Russians”

It’s a red-letter, if sad, day on the hypocrisy beat when after three years a Republican-majority Senate Intelligence Committee comes out with a 1,000-page report finding there was a whole lot of direct contact between the Trump 2016 campaign with Russian intelligence operators.

You know, the opposite of what Donald Trump has argued forcefully over and over again is a hoax.

Even Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the new committee chairman, says while it does not represent “collusion” — a conclusion that prompted Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) to say Rubio was not reading the same report he did — he did acknowledge a whole lot of interaction between Team Trump and Team Russia.

Of course, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III also would not put the “collusion” label on myriad interactions with Russians, for different reasons, to avoid a political conclusion. That allowed Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr and supporters of the president, including the convicted Roger Stone and former campaign chair Paul Manafort, to repeat that lack of labeling as a launch point to investigate the investigators.

But the Intelligence Committee did “painted a stark portrait of a Trump campaign eager to accept help from a foreign power in 2016, and a candidate closely involved in the effort,” said NBC News.

Here’s a link to the report itself, which highlighted some previously unreported evidence, including three allegations of potentially compromising material relating to Trump’s private trips to Russia that were unconnected to the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, at which Rubio took aim once again.

The committee found that Trump’s team knew ahead of time that emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by Russian intelligence agents would appear in Wikileaks, and worked with Wikileaks to produce an “October surprise” toward winning that election.

Trump repeatedly has denied this, and has denied discussing the emails with Stone, who worked with Wikileaks. He lied to Mueller and to us, and has whined about it for four years. Now, Trump says he wants to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin again before November and we worry that not enough has been done to forestall new election interference.

The findings

Specifically, the committee said it found evidence that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort may have been connected to the Russian operation to steal and leak Democratic emails. If that had been proven in court, it would have constituted “collusion,” by any definition, but no such charge ever was brought. Manafort was convicted of fraud and tax charges unrelated to Russia.

Still, the report insisted that the Trump transition exposed itself to Russian influence, naming names and labeling the operatives as intelligence agents. “Russian and other countries took advantage of the Transition Team’s inexperience, transparent opposition to Obama administration policies and Trump’s desire to deepen ties with Russia…”

After three years of investigation, the committee “laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services,” said The New York Times.

According to the report, among other things, Russian spies worked to blame it all on Ukrainian officials and spies, identifying Manafort business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer.

The report says, “Despite Trump’s recollection, the committee assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with (Roger) Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

Now what?

We’ve had the Mueller report. We’ve had the Trump efforts to undo the Mueller report. We even have a Barr-assigned criminal investigation about to pop on some of those involved in the investigation itself. We’ve learned about missteps at the FBI. We’ve been subjected to an onslaught of Trump declarations that he was victimized during this process.

Just Monday, Trump inanely said he deserves a third term, in violation of the Constitution, to make up for poor treatment at the hands of the “deep state” under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Trump repeatedly denies that he favors Russia, just as he denied that he or his team had anything to do with seeking to lean on Ukrainians to throw shade on Biden.

Now we have two Republican-majority committees in the Senate teeing up to continue undercutting the FBI and U.S. investigatory efforts looking at Team Trump behavior. Remember, the Justice Department’s own independent inspector general has found that the FBI had sufficient basis to open the Russia investigation and acted without political bias, though made some mistakes.

This report affirms much of the Mueller effort that there were dozens of contacts between Trump associates and Russian operatives, that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s attempts to sabotage the election and “expected it would benefit electorally” from the hacking and dumping of Democratic emails.

Trump as victim? Hardly.

How does this Make America Great?

Virtual Democratic convention shows us that normal exists — and the Trump era ain’t it

The webcam-scaled Democratic National Convention showed us something that, it now becomes very clear, has been sadly missing from the wall of noise that is modern American political coverage: ordinary Americans, miserable and desperate for change.

Half a century ago, television coverage from the front lines in Vietnam turned the American people against the war because it brought the horrors of combat directly into their living rooms. This convention — completely unexpectedly — brought other people’s living rooms into our living rooms.

As a result, I suspect that many ordinary Americans are suddenly, viscerally aware that they are not alone in their misery and frustration; that they are not the only ones wholly disgusted by the government’s failure to control the pandemic; that they are not alone in experiencing Trump and Trumpism as aberrational, un-American and unacceptable.

They wouldn’t necessarily feel that way from reading the news. Modern American political news coverage focuses almost exclusively on the politicians, as seen through the eyes of pundits, with an occasional glance at the polls. The result is that you hear pro-Trump voices, you hear anti-Trump voices, but you don’t hear the voices of actual voters, many if not most of whom are heartsick over what is happening to their country.

You don’t hear from what is arguably a majority of voters who share a pluralistic and democratic vision of America, and who simply want someone competent to be in charge again.

But suddenly, you heard them this week.

It’s incredibly ironic when you consider what a ridiculous circus recent political conventions have been — what a freak show, quite literally, with conventioneers decked in outrageous paraphernalia, mouthing empty slogans and mugging for the cameras. As events, their journalistic value was close to nil.

But now, the intimate and personal windows this convention has provided into other people’s living rooms and kitchens and front porches has done something of great journalistic value: it has offered us a human-scaled alternate vision to Trump’s America.

Voter interviews have taken on something of a bad name in the past four years, as big-city editors sent way too many reporters out to red-state diners to record deceptive talking points from Trump supporters, thinking that’s what was missing from their 2016 coverage.

But talking – and listening — to voters is essential to political journalism. And as observers like New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie have been pointing out for some time now, anti-Trump voters are practically invisible in mainstream political coverage — even though, by all accounts, they make up a healthy majority of the public.

New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik, who has been particularly insightful about the Trump presidency as reality TV, called the convention “counterprogramming to the Trump-TV aesthetic of eat-or-be-eaten.”

Vulture writer Kathryn VanArendonk wrote that the webcam intimacy allowed for a “different emotional register” and called it “an unbelievable relief, almost gasp-inducing, really, to see familiar and powerful voices come together on a big national platform and give everyone a moment to just talk about how bad this shit has been.”

Most of our top political reporters have covered Trump like a normal president. They have quoted what he says as if it still deserves the presumption of presidential credibility. They have created false equivalence between two political parties, even though one has departed from reality. Now, they cover the campaign as if it involved two equally plausible choices.

But there is nothing normal about this president, or this election. And voters — who share none of the pressures of political reporters — know it.

Hearing from them – visiting with them – is good journalism. Hopefully, we’ll still see some now that the convention is over.

EPA chief’s former lobbying clients get a long list of favors from agency

At least three former lobbying clients of Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler have received favorable decisions from the EPA under his leadership.

Wheeler spent years as an energy lobbyist at the law firm Faegre Baker Daniels, where he represented companies like the coal giant Murray Energy, whose owner Robert Murray is a major Trump donor. Wheeler signed a pledge in May 2018 to recuse himself from matters related to former clients after he replaced embattled former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. But the two-year pledge expired earlier this year and he has been repeatedly accused of violating the agreement by approving rules that he lobbied for as a lobbyist for Murray Energy and others.

At least three of Wheeler’s former clients have pushed for rules that the EPA has proposed or implemented under his leadership.

“Andrew Wheeler is overseeing policies that damage the air we breathe and water we drink while his associates benefit,” Chris Saeger, a spokesperson for the progressive watchdog group Accountable.US, told Salon. “This is a clear abuse of his taxpayer-funded position and ethics agreement.”

In April, the EPA weakened regulations on the release of mercury and toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, which experts said was aimed at “potentially constraining or handcuffing future efforts by the EPA to regulate air pollution.”

The New York Times described the change as a “particular victory” for Murray, who pressed for the change in a “wish list” of environmental regulation rollbacks he handed to President Trump just weeks after his inauguration. Murray donated $300,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee.

The Trump administration and federal agencies “have completed or are on track to fulfill most of the 16 detailed requests” in Murray’s wish list, the Times reported in 2018. But Murray had “unsuccessfully pressed the administration in 2017” to roll back the mercury emissions rule, E&E News reported, before it was rescinded under Wheeler.

The government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington filed an ethics complaint against Wheeler last year over his involvement in the rule change, noting that he “participated in the matter less than a year” after signing the pledge.

“It is becoming more and more clear why coal and energy companies are happy to have their former lobbyist Andrew Wheeler in charge of the EPA,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said at the time. “Administrator Wheeler’s apparent failure to abide by ethics obligations and to avoid the reality or appearance of conflicts continues to undermine the EPA’s integrity and weakens public confidence in our government.”

Earlier this year, the EPA also finalized a rule that would extend deadlines to start closing unlined coal ash ponds. Coal ash from coal plants is dumped into excavated holes in the ground, where it mixes with water to create “coal ash ponds,” which can leak if they are not properly lined. The proposed rule would allow some coal plants five more years before requiring them to close the unlined ash ponds.

One of the major backers of the rule is the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group (USWAG), a secretive trade group whose members include Xcel Energy, a longtime former Wheeler client. Xcel Energy called for the rule change and the USWAG petitioned Pruitt for the rule in 2017. The USWAG praised the EPA for proposing the change under Wheeler last year.

Accountable.US criticized the EPA for rolling back regulations on coal ash at the behest of Wheeler’s former client.

“Administrator Wheeler is part of a corrupt pattern in the Trump administration, putting the interests of his allies above the public he is supposed to serve,” Saeger said last month. “This administration is abusing its power to hand out favors to corporate lobbyists, selling out Americans’ health and the environment in the process.”

In May, the EPA proposed no additional measures to mitigate negative air quality impacts associated with renewable fuel standards as required under the Clean Air Act. The proposed rule has been open for public comment ever since but has only received 16 thus far, including one supporting the rule from Growth Energy. The company has been one of the biggest supporters of the rule.

Growth Energy was one of Wheeler’s clients before he joined the EPA, according to his financial disclosure, which said he provided the company “strategic advice and counseling.” Wheeler had pledged to recuse himself from matters related to Growth Energy until shortly before the proposed rule was published.

The trend has played out in other agencies whose heads were appointed by the president. The Interior Department has made at least 15 policy changes or proposals that benefited Secretary David Bernhardt’s former energy industry clients. Several of acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf’s former lobbying clients have also received millions in government contracts while he held senior positions in the department. More than 280 of Trump’s political appointments have been former lobbyists, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

CREW has repeatedly called for the EPA’s inspector general to investigate whether Wheeler violated his ethics pledge in connection to rules that benefited his former clients.

“Administrator Wheeler has repeatedly used his government position at EPA to benefit the former clients that made him rich, and to the detriment of the agency’s critical mission,” CREW Deputy Director Donald Sherman said in a statement to Salon. “Administrator Wheeler’s continued lobbying on behalf of industry from within EPA, is clear evidence that patronage is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump administration.”

Newly resurfaced video reveals Steve Bannon accidentally previewing his own arrest

This week, former Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon became the latest ally of President Donald Trump to face criminal charges when federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York indicted him for fraud in connection with the We Build the Wall project. The indictment alleges that the more than $25 million raised in a crowdfunding campaign was being used for personal expenses rather than a U.S./Mexico border wall as Bannon, his associate Brian Kolfage and others named in the indictment promised.

But it seems Bannon should have seen his troubles coming. Media Matters’ John Kerr, following the arrest, posted an old June 24, 2019 video of Bannon which Kerr notes “foreshadowed his own indictment for fraud.”

When Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss announced the indictment earlier this week, she alleged that Kolfage used the money to pay for “his lavish lifestyle” — and Bannon was arrested on Kolfage’s yacht. In the June 24, 2019 video, Bannon jokes about living such a lifestyle, being on a yacht in the south of France and paying for it with We Build the Wall donations.

In the video, Bannon is heard saying: “This is Steven K. Bannon. We’re off the coast of St. Tropez in the Mediterranean. We’re on the million-dollar yacht of Brian Kolfage. And Brian Kolfage, he took all that money from Build the Wall. No, we’re actually in Sunland Park, New Mexico.”

Republican Senator Martha McSally begs supporters to “fast a meal” to donate money to her

Republican Martha McSally is making a big ask of her supporters as she struggles to raise money to win the Senate seat she was appointed to after losing in 2016.

“One of the most expensive political races in the country is the U.S. Senate seat up for grabs right here in Arizona,” CBS 5 reported Friday. “The latest poll, taken last month, shows Republican incumbent Martha McSally five-points behind her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly.”

The network noted that, “McSally is also behind in fundraising and now she’s telling her supporters that could come up with more campaign cash to donate if they just fast a meal.”

The network obtained audio from a recent McSally event.

There’s an air war going on on television right now, right, you see it. And look, we’re being outgunned in the air, OK,” McSally acknowledged.

“We’re doing our part to catch up, you know, to get our message out. But it takes resources. So, anybody can give, I’m not ashamed to ask, to invest. If you can give a dollar, five dollars, if you can fast a meal and give what that would be,” McSally begged.

McSally’s campaign complained about coverage of the story.

“This is a dumb non-story about a candidate making a joke on the stump,” the campaign argued in a statement.

Watch the full report.

Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots are a desperate attempt to undermine democracy

Joel Buchanan’s stomach turned when he watched poll workers deny ballots to Latinx voters ostensibly because the names and addresses on their driver’s licenses didn’t match those on election records.

And his blood boiled when election officials closed polling stations in poor neighborhoods, deliberately disenfranchising citizens unable to travel to other communities to cast their ballots.

“It’s ugly, and as un-American as you can get,” the retired Steelworker and Navy veteran said of the voter suppression he’s observed as a campaign activist and poll watcher in various states.

Although dismayed by the duplicity he witnessed during two decades of political activism, Buchanan never expected to see an American president openly try to steal an election by disenfranchising millions of voters.

But that’s what’s happening. Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to tear down the U.S. Postal Service and cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots are nothing but a desperate attempt to undermine American democracy.

“We’re talking about an assault on our rights and our form of government,” noted Buchanan, a longtime member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 2102, who first got involved in politics because local elected officials failed to support union members during a 1997 steel mill strike in his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado.

“When a president tries to manipulate the post office to benefit himself in an election, what’s going to happen if he wins that election?” Buchanan asked. “What’s the next step? These are scary times.”

Trump and his new, hand-picked postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, dismantled critically important mail-sorting machines, banned postal worker overtime, reduced hours at some post offices and eliminated trips to intentionally delay the delivery of mail-in ballots beyond election deadlines.

That would disenfranchise millions of Americans who want to vote by mail this year because they fear contracting COVID-19 at the polls.

Amid a ferocious public backlash and threats of lawsuits from more than 20 states, DeJoy recently agreed to suspend the changes.

But the danger of Trump suppressing votes during a crucial election remains very real.

There’s no guarantee that DeJoy will return postal operations to normal levels, as he promised to do, and the Trump toady and big Republican donor continues to hobble the mail in other ways.

Although he has no experience at the postal service, DeJoy fired or reassigned nearly two dozen seasoned executives who intimately understood the agency and knew how to ensure it operated at peak levels during the election season.

Attacking the postal service directly isn’t Trump’s only front in his war against mail-in ballots. His campaign already sued Pennsylvania and all 67 of its counties ‘ boards of elections, for example, to keep voters from depositing mail ballots in convenient drop boxes.

Trump repeatedly claims without so much as a shred of evidence that a surge in mail-in votes will lead to widespread fraud favoring his opponent, Joe Biden.

“It’s all just crap,” Buchanan said, noting Colorado has one of the most voter-friendly, equitable voting systems in the nation—thanks to the mail.

Colorado is one of the few states that not only mails ballots to all voters but encourages residents to return them the same way.

If they prefer, citizens can still cast their ballots at polling places or deposit them in secure boxes, similar to the ones in Pennsylvania that Trump wants to eliminate. But many Colorado residents simply drop them in the mail.

“Most people, Republicans and Democrats, like the system we have here,” said Buchanan, vice president of Chapter 38-3 of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) and District 12 representative to the group’s executive board. Members of both parties win elections in Colorado, he added, clearly demonstrating that the system works for Republicans and Democrats alike.

If the system is tilted toward anyone, it’s the voters.

Universal mail-in balloting provides equal convenience to all citizens, no matter where they live or how busy their Election Day schedules.

Mail-in balloting prevents election officials from questioning voters’ legitimacy and disenfranchising them on the spot, as Buchanan observed four years ago at a polling place where one of the elections officials had the audacity to display a Trump hat right on his desk.

And people voting in the privacy of their homes face no intimidation from overzealous campaign workers thronging the doors at polling places or activists who stage noisy rallies nearby.

“When somebody’s 75 years old and drives up and sees that happening, they just turn around and leave,” Buchanan said.

Because of the convenience of mail-in voting, Colorado has one of the nation’s highest turnout rates.

Although Trump claims mail-in ballots invite fraud, the opposite is true.

In Colorado, candidates appoint election watchers to observe election officials as they check voters’ signatures on ballot envelopes against signatures already on file. If signatures appear not to match, the unopened ballot receives further review.

Foreign governments cannot hack mail-in ballots, as they did with some electronic voting systems four years ago, and the post office has its own police force, the Postal Inspection Service, to guard against mail fraud.

During the spring of 2019, one of Colorado’s county elections officials invited presidential candidates to visit his office to see how mail-in ballots are counted and learn about the safeguards ensuring the integrity of the delivery and tabulation systems.

Trump never took him up on his offer.

Instead of working to improve election security, an issue he claims is a top concern, Trump continues to assail the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and use the president’s bully pulpit to undermine public confidence in the election system.

And instead of encouraging higher turnout to ensure as many Americans as possible have their voices heard at a pivotal time in the nation’s history, Trump refuses to say even whether he’ll accept the outcome of the November 3 vote.

Buchanan worries that Trump’s attacks on the system will lead to yet another form of suppression—Americans refusing to cast ballots because they have lost faith in the election process or fear their votes will go uncounted.

He just hopes enough voters understand that the real threat to democracy comes not from fraudulent voting but a president pulling every conceivable trick to suppress votes and usurp the people’s will.

“That’s exactly what this is all about,” he said. “I just never thought I’d see this kind of situation in this country.”

New ad uses Trump’s golf vacations to illustrate his many failed promises

President Donald Trump in 2016 promised that, unlike former President Barack Obama, he would be too busy working as president to go golfing.

In reality, Trump has gone golfing far more often during his first term than Obama did over the same period of time, and a new ad from the progressive Meidas Touch super PAC uses Trump’s golf addiction to show how he’s failed to keep multiple promises made during the 2016 campaign.

“Trump’s promise? Keep America safe,” the ad states. “Trump’s course? The most coronavirus deaths in the world.”

The ad then shows how Trump promised to grow the economy, while the American economy right now is “the worst since the Great Depression.”

The ad’s coup de grace comes when it contrasted Trump’s promise of “no vacations” with the reality that he’s enjoyed “more than a year of golf paid for by American taxpayers.”

Joseph DeAngelo sentenced to life in prison for Golden State Killer murders, kidnappings

Former police officer Joseph DeAngelo, 74, was handed down 11 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole on Friday for 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 kidnapping-related charges. “The defendant deserves no mercy,” Judge Michael Bowman said after delivering the ruling, which is the maximum allowed and also includes another life sentence and eight years. The sentencing comes after a week of harrowing statements from survivors and victims’ families.

“I’ve listened to all your statements. Each one of them,” DeAngelo said before sentencing. “And I’m truly sorry to everyone I hurt. Thank you, your honor.”

The sentencing took place at Sacramento State University, where spectators were spaced according to Covid-19 prevention guidelines; DeAngelo heard the sentencing masked, as did the rest of the courtroom. There was also a temperature check administered to all attendants.

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DeAngelo pleaded guilty to all crimes attributed to the serial murderer/rapist known as the Golden State Killer in June in an effort to avoid the death penalty; he also admitted to dozens of rapes he cannot be charged with due to the statute of limitations. DeAngelo’s crimes were committed in the Seventies and Eighties across six California counties, whose District Attorneys all addressed the court before sentencing.

“Over four decades, that’s a long to wait for justice to be served,” Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton said during her statement. “Finally, we have arrived at that day.” She then stressed the courage of DeAngelo’s victims, who came forward this past week to tell the court about the “trauma” and “pain” he inflicted. She also praised retired detective Paul Holes, who was on the GSK’s trail since the Nineties up until his arrest. Ventura District Attorney Gregory D. Totten and Tulare County DA Tim Ward also spoke to the bravery of the survivors, while Santa Barbra District Attorney Joyce Dudley implored victims’ family and friends to remember how their loved ones lived — not just how they died.

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Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer took the podium to deliver a darker message, telling the assemblage: “As he was destroying your lives he got to be on his boat, blow out birthday candles, hold his granddaughter…but in the back of his mind he knew, he knew we were coming for him.” Calling DeAngelo a “devil,” he added “you made it personal and it was personal for me. I honestly believe this person, this beast deserves the ultimate punishment of death.”

Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert counted down the thousands of days since DeAngelo’s crime spree began — and how Sacramento citizens who were alive during his reign of terror are still just that: terrified. At the end of her statement, she turned to DeAngelo directly, telling him that neither she nor anyone related to the case will allow him to seek better treatment in prison — to fool the department of corrections into thinking he is a feeble old man. The statement was met with applause, as the man’s recent displays of age have been hotly contested.

DeAngelo’s family members also delivered written statements to the court. “I feel moved toward writing this so that my brother Joe will know that my love for him will never go away,” DeAngelo’s sister said in a statement, blaming their military father and his abuse in part for her brother’s crimes. She also expressed remorse for his victims. DeAngelo’s niece then addressed the court via a statement, saying DeAngelo proved a stable father figure for her when her own proved abusive. “I’m thankful I had him in my life; I wouldn’t be here today,” she wrote. “I personally feel like there’s someone inside him that I do not know,” wrote another niece. Their names were not given.

The previous week of victim statements included a written statement from DeAngelo’s ex-wife, Sharon Huddle. “I will never be the same person,” she wrote (via CCN). “I now live every day with the knowledge of how he attacked and severely damaged hundreds of innocent people’s lives and murdered 13 innocent people who were loved and have now been missed for 40 years or more.”

A victim’s daughter told the court, “Monsters were real. The boogeyman had broken into my house,” while a victim who was raped by DeAngelo at age 15 said: “Finally the end of this trauma is here… He’s a horrible man. And now none of us has to worry about him anymore” (via the Washington Post).

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DeAngelo was arrested in April of 2018 on the strength of DNA evidence found using databases established for genealogical research. Also suspected of being the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker and the Visalia Ransacker, the GSK had been accused of least 12 murders, 50 rapes and 100 burglaries in California between 1974 and 1986. A former police officer, DeAngelo was fired in 1979 for stealing dog repellant and a hammer — an ominous clue to his many crimes.

DeAngelo’s sentencing follows close on the heels of the premiere of an HBO documentary centering on DeAngelo and his victims: “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” a six-part series based on late crime writer Michelle McNamara‘s 2018 book by the same name. McNamara coined the name “the Golden State Killer” and spent years trying to track him down, but died in 2016 before could finish her book — or find out the serial killer’s identity. The book, finished by friends and family, came out in 2018, just a few months before DeAngelo was arrested.