3 unexpected ways Joe Biden plans to tackle climate change

Joe Biden’s climate plan lagged behind the plans introduced by his presidential primary opponents when he unveiled it in the spring of 2019. It was just one policy proposal (compared to the 14 climate proposals Elizabeth Warren ultimately released) and had a cost of only $1.7 trillion (compared to Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion). But now, the former vice president’s plan has one thing his opponents’ plans don’t: a real shot at becoming policy. And it’s also starting to look more like his former rivals’ plans.

On Tuesday, Biden unveiled a new climate plan that expands on his initial proposal by spending $2 trillion over four years instead of $1.7 over a decade. The price tag is still smaller than those of competing plans in the primary, but the proposal is significantly more ambitious than Biden’s earlier plan. It calls for getting rid of all emissions from the electricity sector by 2035, creating a million new jobs building electric vehicles and charging stations, retrofitting existing buildings and constructing new ones to make the housing sector energy efficient, and ensuring that 40 percent of the benefits of this spending on green initiatives goes to disadvantaged communities.

In addition to those big-ticket items, the plan includes some smaller and less well-known climate interventions that, despite their obscurity, could have wide-ranging impacts on emissions and the U.S. economy.

Precision agriculture

Biden’s plan suggests “helping farmers leverage new technologies, techniques, and equipment to increase productivity and profit.” In order to do that, he advocates for precision agriculture, which is basically just data-driven farming. Precision agriculture uses satellites, sensors, GPS, and software that helps farmers use resources more efficiently while getting more output. Instead of blanketing their fields in chemicals, Silent Spring style, farmers using precision agriculture techniques get to be more discerning with their spraying. Incorporating frequently updated soil, plant, and weather data can help reduce the amount of water, fertilizer, seed, and pesticides farmers use in their fields, which in turn curtails environmental degradation and saves water. Biden’s plan calls for “funding research and development in precision agriculture” and “leveraging precision agriculture through regional demonstration projects to minimize the impacts of drought.”

Micromobility

Micromobility vehicles — scooters, e-bikes, and other lightweight devices that don’t go faster than 15 miles per hour — also have a role to play in Biden’s plan. The nominee promises to help cities “invest in infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and riders of e-scooters and other micro-mobility vehicles.” The plan doesn’t specify whether that means bikeshare and scooter-share programs or just better streets for privately owned micromobility devices, but it does name-check “machine-learning optimized traffic lights,” which could help make bike and scooter trips faster. You can hate on e-scooters all you like, but you can’t deny that they’re a climate-friendly and coronavirus risk–free way to get to work.

Broadband doesn’t exactly sound like a cutting-edge climate solution, but it is. Transitioning from fossil fuels as our main source of energy to renewables will mean more and more remote, internet-based jobs. But millions of people don’t have access to broadband, which, the plan explains, means those households “are locked out of an economy that is increasingly reliant on virtual collaboration.” How will America transition to a green economy if millions of people, particularly in rural places that are behind on the transition to renewables, can’t participate? Biden suggests expanding broadband or wireless broadband via 5G — the fifth generation technology standard for cellular networks — to every American. “Just like rural electrification several generations ago, universal broadband is long overdue and critical to broadly shared economic success,” the plan says.

As the months until the general election continue to tick down, we’ll likely hear more from the Democratic nominee on climate change. As it stands, his climate plan calls for more spending than almost all of his other proposals, including education, housing, and the opioid epidemic combined. “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is hoax,” Biden said during a speech announcing his new climate plan in Delaware on Tuesday. “When I think about climate change, the word I think about jobs.” But as the new plan makes clear, Biden is also thinking about details.

As Mark Duplass makes his “Room 104” swan song, he carries its diverse vision to future projects

If you happen to be reading this on the day “Room 104” kicks off its fourth and final season, you might catch co-creator Mark Duplass live-tweeting a 16-hour marathon revisiting of all previous episodes leading up to the latest premiere. The whole thing sounds exciting and very tiring, but what else is new? Duplass and his brother Jay built their careers on the hustle of independent filmmaking. Now, in addition to co-starring with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon in “The Morning Show,” Mark Duplass is also co-managing Duplass Brothers Productions.

Out of all of the works incubating at his company, “Room 104” may be his and fellow executive producer Sydney Fleischmann’s most liberating and creative. Since the anthology series’ first season they’ve made a point of opening up the production to showcase a variety of voices. Six of the first season’s installments were directed by women. Subsequent seasons have afforded a number of emerging or underexposed talents to write or direct episodes – among them Miguel Arteta, So Yong Kim and performers such as Natalie Morales and Karan Soni.

Every creative mind behind the camera lends his or her own singular magic to the the stories about this small, unsuspecting room, a simple box outside of time alchemically transformed into something new week after week. Some “Room 104” stories are hilarious, others horrifying, and many encompass an assortment of emotions, none predictable.

In a moment when so many of us are fearful of travel, the ability for each half hour to morph into an unknown shape or feeling makes this show a departure from nearly anything else on TV.

It’s a small tragedy that “Room 104” is closing down for good after this season. But for Duplass and Fleishmann, it’s also been a paradigm-shifting experience that’s changed their approach to cultivating new voices in TV and cinema. “It became really evident to us in Season 2 and beyond that by deeply collaborating with people who haven’t had their shot, either in front of or behind the camera, to do what they can do, that not only is it good for the ecosystem and helps launch their careers, but it really benefits our show and it keeps us from repeating ourselves,” Duplass said.

“Whatever sphere of influence we have, and we know we’re not the hugest company in the world,” he added, “we’re trying to do our part to give people that first little lift.”

The premiere represents the first time in the series Mark Duplass stars, writes, directs and performs original music in a story that is part comedy, part thriller and entirely strange. Subsequent episodes include a wrestler’s lament; an animated fantasy about teen desire, danger, and power fantasy; a divorced woman’s night out that takes a mystical left turn, and other equally odd and wonderful tales. Each is brought to life by a roster of guest stars that includes “Brooklyn Nine-Nine“‘s Melissa Fumero, Kevin Nealon, Jillian Bell, and Dave Bautista.

In a recent conversation Duplass and Fleishmann talked about Duplass’ purposeful creative decoupling from his brother Jay and the importance of casting wide to keep their productions fresh and original. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I write a lot about representation and inclusion on television in particular, and one of the things that I’ve noticed about “Room 104” is, it’s really not had that problem for most of its run. All the stories have been incredibly varied, which keeps it surprising. But when I also look at the directors list, particularly for this season, and, you know, the stories we see in front of the camera, a variety of voices has always been part of the fabric of the show. Was that intentional from the start, or has your approach evolved particularly as the show has gone forward?

Because honestly, if you asked me a couple of seasons ago, I would not have expected to see Dave Bautista on this show.

Mark Duplass: It was definitely conscious. I can credit a lot of that to one of our executive producers, Xan Aranda, in our first season, who really pushed us to think about that in a more deep way. And I think that is also part and parcel with something that’s been happening with our company as a whole: Jay and I looked very closely at our relationship over the last five years, really with the ending of “Togetherness,” which I think was also simultaneously the end of our extremely codependent, artistic collaboration, where it was the two of us telling the certain kinds of stories that we felt we were authorized to tell well, in particular male intimacy stories between male friends and brothers and things like that.

As we sort of consciously uncoupled from that, we started to realize that there were all these different kinds of stories that we could tell and tell with authority, if we just partnered with the right people who could tell those stories well for us. We could be their allies in this wonderfully organic way.

With that “Room 104” became less about my vision or even Syd’s vision or Jay’s vision and became more about, how can we be good partners to these people so they can tell their stories which will in turn, make our show more interesting? So that became really conscious, I think, towards the end of Season 1, and we really leaned into it from there. But Syd can talk to more about how we find those people.

Sydney Fleischmann: It’s all kinds of different ways that we find the people who were these different perspectives and new voices to us. Some of them through friends of friends. Somebody like Lila Neugebauer, who is a theater director in New York, came to us when we put out the bat sign for theater directors with one specific episode. She’s a prolific theater director who was trying to get into film and TV, and this just proved to be the perfect space for it. We’re in this really special, cool space where, because it’s a new team of collaborators on every episode – new director, new cast – we’re able to just take different kinds of creative risks and, and bring in somebody who maybe hasn’t proven themselves in a certain genre. To say “we see the person that you are, we see the talent that you have, and this is a great fit for all of us,” it’s just been really cool to see that happen with all sorts of different people.

I want to return, Mark, to talking about decoupling from this identity that you and Jay built that yielded a very specific point of view, and ask you to elaborate on the idea of being an ally in terms of elevating which stories are getting told. Through what you’re doing on “Room 104” you and your team seem to be speaking to this moment of, as you said, giving people their shot by featuring voices that would ordinarily be skipped over.

You mentioned your efforts to expand your circle. But I think a lot of people are asking right now why hasn’t this happened before. From your point of view and a producer and director, as somebody who can bring new talent to the director’s chair or to a role in one of these episodes, what’s your take on why so little of this has happened until this point in time?

Duplass: And when you say it, you mean the awareness that [lack of diversity] an issue or are you referring to the change itself that’s actually happening?

The change has been happening incrementally. The example that you gave in your story is part of that – producer by producer, creative by creative, it’s been happening. But I’m curious to know what you believe the main barrier has it been. It sounds like you had a very personal revelation around this.

Duplass: One thing that I have identified for Duplass Brothers and for myself is that I think we have done a good job historically of supporting up-and-coming artists. That has been happening since we got any position of power . . . Here’s where the problem lies: historically because of the nature of every privilege that exists everywhere and the systemic nature of it, if you’re going to reach out to someone who’s got a bunch of filmmaking skills and is positioned and excited to make something but hasn’t gotten their shot yet, historically, that person has been a white male because the system has supported that and made them believe that they can get to step two or three and go from there.

And so what you have to do is not reach out to those people that the system has made ready, but you have to reach much further and go deeper and tap someone who either doesn’t have the resume or might not even believe in themselves. You have to see it in them and go more long-term to do that. And that is something that I think we failed to identify for a long time.

Go back and look at our IMDb lists and you’ll see a lot of collaborations with other white males, because those were the people who were in positions to more readily identify because of the system. And so when we identified that and we identified with “Room 104,” that helped us prep a little bit. But I mean, Jesus, we have so much work to do, and we’re still figuring it all out as a company right now.

And Sydney, what do you think is yet to be done both as a producer and personally on this front?

Fleischmann: These hurdles, they’re such big questions. And I think the way that we’ve approached “Room 104” is with this openness that I think is lacking in a lot of places. And I think that it’s that thing of like Mark and Jay realizing, like “We can’t create all these episodes because it’s going to get stale, it’s going to only be from one perspective.” We’ve tried really hard to keep it as open to new perspectives as possible. Coming at it with the intention of wanting to be as open, as supportive and as diverse as possible, not only with finding the people, but in the stories. And I think that those things are just so deeply connected, that we can’t tell diverse stories without having a diverse pool of collaborators.

Duplass: And we would be remiss if we didn’t say we were in a better and more powerful position than other shows often find themselves in to do these kinds of things, because we make this show so cheaply that HBO gives us full creative control and full trust to do whatever want. That includes hiring and everything. So admittedly, we don’t have to battle anyone else has in terms of, “Oh, you should be hiring this kind of person who has all these credits and all this proof,” because again, that can be problematic in terms of hiring the same kind of person over and over again.

Regarding this season, you’ve always had an impressive guest star roster. But how were you able to draw in some of the big names featured in this season? Did they come to you and say, “OK, I’ll do it for actor’s scale and not what my usual fee is”? Are they just big fans?

Duplass: I think it’s a combination of things. Syd, go ahead, you can speak to this.

Fleischmann: Oh, no, I was going to say, I think Dave Bautista is a perfect example. Nicole [Arbusto], our casting director, I’m pretty sure she found this article or interview that Dave had done, where he said that he wants to do dramatic roles and he just hasn’t been given them. Because he was a pro wrestler and then he was in Marvel movies and he was just sort of put in that category. So we were looking for him basically.

Just being able to offer this new role or a new opportunity for an actor is really appealing. And it’s only a couple of days, which is a big selling point, that it’s not a huge time commitment. It’s, “Come have fun with us, come try something different. Know that you’re in a really safe, supportive environment, and let’s just make something special.

Duplass: And I think that there are other things that are a little bit in a sort of a relationship of like, let’s help each other out. Let’s both bring like immense value to each other.

Natalie Morales, she’s a great example. She was about to do “Abby’s,” which was poised to be this huge network breakout sitcom, and she comes and works for scale as an actor with us on this show. In turn, she gets a chance to direct an episode and receive our love and support in doing that in a safe space. And we get all this amazing stuff. We got a huge TV star acting in our show, and then we get a really inspired new director. And God, I mean, she worked so hard and so overtime to make her episodes good that whatever she lacked in experience compared to a director like me, she more than makes up for in hard work, preparation and her own vision. That’s another way that this stuff can kind of happen.

No TV series that wants to last wants to necessarily speak directly to a particular moment in time, but remain timeless. However, I’m wondering if there were elements of “Room 104” that were created with what’s going on with social justice movements right now in mind, but that just in terms of the pandemic might come across differently in this moment than they might have otherwise.

Duplass: Yeah. You know, it’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about the sort of things that we have made posthumously having a different flavor or color.

But there is something really interesting that we found over and over again, that is a touchstone for “Room 104” that I think applies to what you’re talking about. And it’s this major sort of through line of “Room 104” being set in this room, an average motel room, which I think represents for people . . . like you know, when you’re traveling, you show up to like either an Airbnb or a hotel, or even if you’re camping, you’re like a little different than you were at home.

Part of it is because you’re outside of your comfort zone. Part of that is because you’re just like, “Well, this is not my place.” Maybe you’ll throw something on the floor, like you’ve never done before. And you’re like, “Ooh, who’s that a**hole? I’ve never done that.” It’s this way that people find themselves being slightly different, examining some sort of like personal growth, and accepting the paradox that exists inside themselves.

That’s something we keyed into really early on, I’d say probably toward the end of Season 1, that I’ve tried to string out through the seasons. For instance, in a lot of the tones of the show, they seem really, really funny, but they then turn and they become kind of, like, dramatic and sad and strange. And so I don’t know if that is exactly related to what you’re talking about, but that is this thing I’ve noticed that people keep coming back to that I think has been a consistent touchstone for all the episodes.

Given all that we’ve talked about in terms what the show has achieved both creatively but also just in terms of intentional casting, intentional hiring behind the scenes, what are you hoping to take forward into your next projects based on what’s been learned and developed in this experience of making “Room 104”?

Duplass: Yeah. I mean, God, I wish we had five hours to talk about this, because it’s been such a big part of our company discussions right now as a whole. And I think that the DNA of our next move is a part of the DNA of “Room 104,” right? It’s leveraging whatever position of power we have so that we can be in control of the hiring, the story, the creation the representation on screen and telling meaningful stories that don’t just clutter our queue with bulls**t so we can make money, but with meaningful representation.

We also want to try to expand that from the proving grounds of “Room 104,” of “take a shot at a 25-minute episode, because it’s done cheaply” into a more meaningful way to feature film directing, and to being able to be your own showrunner. Taking that next step with the people that we have already tapped and mentored and helped to, I don’t want to say “mentor,” but at least supported and helped to get that first step on “Room 104,” to get them to the next level and then find what our next “Room 104” is going to be, which is such a wonderful proving ground for so many types of people.

And, you know, secretly I’m hoping that “Room 104” will get the chance to ride again. I’m hoping that we’ll be a hit this season because people are at home and they want to watch it and HBO will let us go again. And we can double down on all the things we’re doing. But I’m not banking on it.

So you know, we haven’t really announced this yet, but like we’re making some secret projects right now that are kind of what I would call “contactless” productions that are very safe. They can be shot from where you are. And some of those are longer format things that are very focused on telling different kinds of stories and trying to support just underrepresented voices. Because that is what we not only should be doing, and it’s not only good for the ecosystem, it’s just more interesting to us. There’s an element of it that’s honestly just following our bliss.

“Room 104” kicks off its final season Friday, July 24 at 11 p.m. on HBO.

Mary Trump shuts down Meghan McCain during contentious “The View” interview

Conservative Republican activist Meghan McCain, co-host of ABC’s “The View,” is no fan of President Donald Trump, who she continues to hold in very low regard because of all the derogatory things he said about her late father, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. But when the president’s niece, Mary Trump, appeared on “The View” this week, McCain was critical of her new tell-all book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” — which is the top-selling book on Amazon and sold 1.35 million copies during its first week, according to publisher Simon & Schuster.

In a tense interview, the 55-year-old author pushed back against McCain’s insinuation that she was motivated by a desire for some type of “revenge” and to get rich.

“I think I’ve made it clear to your publishers: I don’t like books like this,” McCain told Mary Trump. “I don’t like family tell-all books, especially when it comes to families with fame and power, because they’re told from the one side — and often, the subjects are villainized to the point that I don’t actually end up believing the stuff written. There’ve been books written about my family which are complete and total garbage, told from a skewed perspective. And at the end of the day, you get a really good paycheck out of it. But I don’t think it’s that legitimate. What do you say to people like me who think this is just a really good way for you to get a paycheck right now?”

Trump’s response to McCain was calm and matter-of-fact, not angry to overly defensive, when she explained, “I think if you read the book, you see that I bring to the story my very deep experience within the family. I’m not some stranger writing it; I’m his niece.”

Mary Trump is the daughter of the late Fred Trump, Jr., one of President Trump’s brothers and the son of family patriarch, Fred Trump, Sr. In her book, she describes Fred Trump, Sr. as a highly domineering man who was furious with her father for pursuing a career in aviation rather than working in the family’s real estate business — and she alleges that some of President Trump’s worst qualities came from his desire to please his father.

The author described her book as a “narrative…. about my family and how Donald became the person that he is,” telling McCain, “If I had wanted some measure of revenge — if I had wanted to cash in, as you say, I would have done this ten years ago when Donald was still a very public figure and I would not have been taking the risks that I’m taking. We’ve all seen how whistleblowers fare in this administration. So, I would have much preferred not to do this, but I felt it was extremely important that the American people have all of the information they need in order to make an informed decision.”

McCain, however, questioned how many insights Mary Trump really has about her family since she isn’t close to her cousins, Donald Trump, Jr. and Ivanka Trump Kushner. And the author responded that her relationship with her cousins is irrelevant to the subject matter in her book.

Trump told McCain, “I’m not entirely sure why you’re so focused on my cousins, who, again, are so much younger than I am….. I think to focus on these things is to take away from the actually important things I write about in the book.”

A methane leak in Antarctica provides new insight into how methane-eating microbes evolve

Deep underwater in the Ross Sea off the coast of Antarctica, scientists have discovered a new active leak of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. The discovery marked the first time that scientists were able to directly observe a new underwater methane seep, and see how methane-eating microbial life in its proximity evolved over a five-year span.

In a study published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a research team led by Oregon State University oceanographer Dr. Andrew Thurber explained that the methane gas leak was first discovered in 2011 off Antarctic shores. Antarctica is believed to have as much as a quarter of the planet’s ocean-based methane trapped in permafrost and on the continental shelves.

Just as micro-organisms like fungi breed like crazy in the presence of a food source in our homes — say, an open soda can or jam jar left out in the open — methane-eating microbes are present in small numbers spread throughout Earth’s oceans, and only multiply precipitously when they find a prominent “food” source like a methane seep. Indeed, the scientists note that by 2016, methane-consuming micro-organisms began appearing by the leak and consuming a small portion of the gas, though not enough to offset the methane venting.

In the case of this Ross Sea methane seep, researchers sought to quantify the “response rate” of the microbial community over time — in other words, how fast these microbes took up residence around the seep, and how much methane they took in before it could reach the atmosphere. Five years after the seep’s formation, researchers noted that the microbial mat “had not yet formed a sufficient filter to mitigate the release of methane from the sediment.”

The discovery is particularly interesting in that the chronology of these kinds of phenomena is not well-understood; prior to this paper, it was unknown how long microbial life would take to filter methane in a similar methane seep. The researchers said that five years after the seep’s forming, the microbes were still in an “early successional stage.”

“This study provides the first report of the evolution of a seep system from a non-seep environment, and reveals that the rate of microbial succession may have an unrealized impact on greenhouse gas emission from marine methane reservoirs,” they wrote.

The presence of methane increases the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere. From a warming perspective, it is preferably that microbes consume the methane first and produce carbon dioxide — which is still a greenhouse gas, though not nearly as potent as methane, which absorbs 25 times more heat in the atmosphere compared to carbon dioxide.

“Our results suggest that the accuracy of future global climate models may be improved by considering the time it will take for microbial communities to respond to novel methane input,” the authors write.

Salon reached out to a pair of climatologists for their thoughts on the study. The common observation, which was made in the study itself, is that the methane leak itself did not appear to have occurred strictly because of global warming, though that is a scenario that scientists are actively concerned about.

“This study really just demonstrates a potential pathway by which Antarctic marine methane can escape to the atmosphere,” Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon by email. “It doesn’t demonstrate that climate change has lead to any increase in methane emissions. Relevant to this latter point is a study that just came out a week showing that methane increases in the atmosphere are due to natural gas extraction (‘fracking‘) and livestock methane emissions. There is no evidence that ‘methane feedbacks’ are contributing to rising methane, at least not presently.”

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a a Distinguished Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, made a similar point in an email to Salon.

“Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have increased prominently in the past few years, and a significant source is from leaky fracking installations and the resulting fugitive emissions,” Trenberth explained. After reviewing the economics of fracking during the coronavirus pandemic — and in particular how some of the industry has gone bust — Trenberth responded to the paper by writing that it “illuminates largely natural processes in the southern ocean. Carbon of various sorts (wood, sea weed, etc) decays and forms either carbon dioxide (if aerobic) or methane (if anaerobic and immersed in water). Certain different kinds of bacteria flourish under both conditions. My understanding is that a lot of methane from depth in the ocean is absorbed rather than emitted into the atmosphere. That would be a key question.”

He added, “What surprises me about this article is that the southern oceans are far from friendly to work in. There are strong winds and huge waves, and how they can even accomplish this work would be of interest. . . . Are their results biased as a result? In any case, evidently rich and new biogeochemistry has been discovered and can only help understanding and modeling.”

Mitch McConnell laughs when asked if coronavirus relief legislation will pass by end of next week

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell laughed Tuesday when asked whether he expects Congress to pass coronavirus relief legislation by the end of next week, when enhanced unemployment benefits are set to expire for around 30 million Americans who were thrown out of work by the pandemic-induced economic crisis.

“No,” McConnell said after letting out what Politico reporter Jake Sherman, who posed the question, described as a “big laugh.”

The $600-per-week increase in unemployment benefits provided under the CARES Act have served as both a lifeline for tens of millions of laid-off Americans and a significant cushion for the U.S. economy.

For weeks, economists and lawmakers have warnedthat letting the benefits lapse, even for a short period of time, could have devastating effects on those close to the brink of financial ruin. According to Census Bureau data, more than 13 million Americans who live in rental housing were behind on rent payments as of July 7.

“I have a bill to renew supercharged unemployment benefits until this crisis is over so families can continue to pay rent and buy groceries,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) tweetedTuesday. “Senate Republicans have had every opportunity to pass it and have refused to do so.”

While the enhanced unemployment benefits officially expire on July 31—a Friday—in effect the $600 weekly payments are set to end on either Saturday, July 25 or Sunday, July 26, the days states will send out the last boosted checks.

“Thirty million workers won’t be able to pay rent on August 1st and McConnell is laughing,” said Wyden spokesperson Ashley Schapitl.

Bobby Kogan, a mathematician for the Senate Budget Committee, tweeted that “there is no excuse” for allowing the enhanced benefits expire.

“We had months to get this done, and the House passed its bill back in May,” wrote Kogan. “Tens of millions of people will be harmed because of the cavalier inaction of Senate Republicans.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) laughed Tuesday when a CNN reporter askedwhether Congress would be able to reach a deal on coronavirus relief legislation by the end of this week—an even more daunting timeline than the one put to McConnell given the deep divisions roiling Senate Republicans and the White House, not to mention fundamental disagreements between the GOP and their Democratic counterparts.

“The end of the week? You mean the month,” Pelosi responded. “I’m hoping for the end of the month.”

In May, the Democrat-controlled House passed legislation that proposes extending the $600-per-week boost in unemployment insurance (UI) through January of next year.

In an interview Tuesday evening with CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer, Pelosi said Republicans “have had plenty of time to be thinking about this and this delay is unnecessary because, by the end of July, unemployment benefits will expire… a moratorium on evictions will expire—many things will expire that are addressed in our legislation.”

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that negotiations over the relief bill are “likely to spill into August,” leaving both chambers with little time to pass legislation before summer recess. Pelosi said last week that she would “absolutely” be willing to cancel recess to pass relief legislation; McConnell has not said the same.

“Republicans do appear to be gravitating toward a proposal on what to do about the expiring unemployment benefits,” the Post reported. “Democrats have proposed extending those benefits through January, but the White House and some Republicans now want to cut the extra benefits to about $200 per week. Democrats haven’t agreed to this, however.”

During a private meeting on Monday, according to the Post, “Trump criticized the enhanced unemployment benefit, saying it never should have been agreed to in the first place.” Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly characterized the boosted unemployment payments as “disincentives” to work.

Ernie Tedeschi, a former Treasury Department economist, noted in a series of tweetsTuesday that contrary to the narrative pushed by the GOP and the White House, “there’s no evidence in the data that emergency UI has been a net drag on the labor market so far.”

Allowing the benefits to expire, warned Tedeschi, “would be devastating to individual families, as well as to regional economies in aggregate.”

Dave Franco shares your Airbnb anxieties in new horror flick “The Rental,” starring wife Alison Brie

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a horror movie? I normally think of a creepy doll that sneaks up on you while you’re in the shower or some big mangled-face dude chasing you through the woods, swinging a chainsaw or machete at your head. So many films that dominate the horror genre fit that mold, but what about the horrors that develop out of social situations?

The creepy uncle, the crazy ex, the spouse that swipes the credit card as if limits don’t exist, or the thoughts that dance around in the cheating husband’s head on the day his mistress contacts his wife. Those stories are as scary as some of the horror flicks with vicious monsters. Dave Franco, star of “Neighbors,” “21 Jump Street,” and “Now You Can See Me,” perfectly tackles that social horror in his directorial debut of new film “The Rental.”

Staring Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, and Jeremy Allen White, “The Rental” is about two couples celebrating a business triumph by venturing to a beautiful rental for a weekend of hiking, partying, and enjoying life. What they don’t know is that the house will cause feelings to surface that are strong enough to make everything spiral.

I recently got the chance to talk comedy and horror with Franco on “Salon Talks.” Watch the episode with Franco here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about how he’s been surviving and collaborating in quarantine with his wife Alison Brie and how he is preparing to star in his next project, a Vanilla Ice biopic.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How’s it going?

Good, man. How you doing?

Still just holding my patience and trying to adjust to quarantine life. What about you?

Yeah, we’re doing the same. What gets you most excited right now? What makes you happiest right now?

New books.

I like that.

There are so many books that I wanted to read from my peers and colleagues that I just haven’t had time because everything’s always about what am I going to put out and what am I doing next? But I’ve been able to absorb art from other people. Films, too. What about you?

I would say watching movies. We were watching at least one every night and we got a list going of everything we’ve watched in the quarantine.

Anything that I need to see?

We revisited all of Spike Jonze’s movies recently. He might be my number one, just seeing how inventive that guy is. “Being John Malkovich,” that was his first film, which is one of the craziest concepts of all time, and just the execution is perfect. “Adaptation,” “Where the Wild Things Are,” and “Her” is just a perfect little foursome right there. For some good TV, have you been watching, “I May Destroy You”?

That’s such a good show, and heavy. It’s so heavy.

Heavy, heavy, but so well made. It’s crazy. Do you watch the Ruffalo show, “I Know This Much is True”?

No, I never saw it. I need to check that out.

Another really heavy one but very well made. A lighter one, “Dave” on FXX is fun. Yeah, what about you? You watching anything fun?

“Dave” is with the rapper Lil Dicky, right?

Yeah.

I like that show. That show’s cool. So congratulations on your film “The Rental.” What are some of the challenges in rolling a movie out during COVID?

Yeah, it’s a different time we’re living in, but I feel very lucky to have paired with IFC, who is distributing the film, because they they’ve just been really thinking outside the box and being agile. And for example, we did a premiere at a drive-in, which everyone kept telling us [that] this is the first time anyone’s done this. No matter what happens with the movie, we got that. It ended up being really fun, where most premieres are a little bit stuffy. I usually feel a little anxious, just the red carpet and all these cameras in your face. But with this one, it just felt more like a communal experience. Everyone was just excited to just congregate with a bunch of movie lovers and just share this experience together.

Give us a brief synopsis of the film.

I don’t want to spoil anything.

No spoilers, no spoilers, but just a quick little . . .

Yeah, the very basic premise is it’s two couples going away on vacation for what should be a celebratory trip, and secrets come out between the couples, and other things are revealed, and things start to take a very dark turn. What I will say is, it sounds like a premise that we’ve heard many times before in the genre, and it is, but within that premise, we really tried to subvert the genre wherever possible and try to bring things that horror audiences haven’t seen before and really keep them on their toes so they don’t know where the story’s going. Even if they think they know where it’s going from the beginning, we really try to just kind of, yeah, keep you guessing

Something that has really been popping up since COVID hit is house parties and Airbnb. All of the nightclubs are shut down and the bars that shut down, and those stubborn people who refuse to social distance had the great idea of going to Airbnbs and trying to have little parties and stuff like that. Were you trying to work at deconstructing that industry, without telling people too much who haven’t seen the film yet?

No, I promise my intention was never to take down Airbnb or any of these home sharing apps. The idea was more inspired by my own paranoia about the concept of home sharing, and thinking about how the country is as divided as it’s ever been and no one trust each other; yet, we’re trusting in the home of a stranger simply [because of] positive reviews online.

And the truth is, while we were filming the movie, I swear there was a new article coming out every week about homeowners who have hidden cameras in their place. All that being said, I still use Airbnb. I was staying in an Airbnb while filming this movie. I just think there’s this disconnect where we’re all aware of the risks of staying in a stranger’s home, but we never actually think anything bad will happen to us, and so I was just trying to explore like that mentality.

This is your first big film that you’re doing behind the camera as a director. What was the transition like?

It was really fun. I’ve been wanting to take this leap for a long time and I was waiting for the right project and the right time. I co-wrote this script with a friend of mine, Joe Swanberg, and I wasn’t intending on directing it originally. But after we just got into this writing process, I was like, you know what, I know this thing better than anyone and I just have such a strong vision for what I want to do. And it just finally, it felt like the right time and I just felt excited.

When I stepped on set, what I realized is I knew a lot more than I thought I did because I’ve been on so many sets as an actor. And I just thought about how a lot of first-time directors, when they step on set that first day, that’s their first time on any set ever. And so they’re just learning about the dynamics between everyone and just the basics of how things work on a set.

You already have that because you’ve been training for it before you even knew.

Exactly.

Yeah, you’ve wore a lot of different hats in your career as an actor. You’ve done drama, horror, comedy. Do you like mixing it up creatively or do you feel like this is your sweet spot?

No, I love mixing it up. I like trying to keep mixing it up so no one can really pin me down and pigeonhole me. But I do think that most people know me from the comedies that I’ve acted in, and I think a lot of people are surprised that my directorial debut was a horror film. But for me as a viewer, there’s nothing I love more than a smart genre film. I think about movies recently like “Hereditary,” “Get Out,” “It Follows,” “Blue Ruin”, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and this young group of filmmakers who are working in the genre space, they’re really approaching their work in a more tasteful, elevated way, where their films are more just nuanced and atmospheric as opposed to leaning too heavily on jump scares.

I think there’s a stigma against horror films where a lot of people look down on them and treat them like they’re just these schlocky, cheap projects. But out of the projects that I mentioned, I really think those are some of the better ones as of late and I think those films have just as much merit as any of these heavy dramas that are typically recognized during award season.

What’s brilliant about your film to me and why I think people will connect with it is when you think of a horror film, there are certain stigmas that always come to mind, but we never really focus on the horror of being in certain social situations. Am I doing the things I’m supposed to do in my relationship? Am I a supportive partner? Is my whole life a sham? Just thinking about the horror of some of these things coming to light. What makes your film so nuanced and why so many people are going to be able to sit down and relate to it is that I forgot I was watching a horror movie and I was just sucked into the dynamic of these couples and what is happening in their world. Was that something that you were going for?

I love to hear you say that. The reason I wanted to pair up with Joe Swanberg in the first place to write the script is because his main strengths lie in character and relationships, and so we basically wanted to write a really tense relationship drama where the interpersonal issues were just as thrilling as the fact that there’s a psycho villain lurking in the shadows. At its core, it really is about these relationships, and then we use kind of the horror elements to just sprinkle on top and accentuate all this stuff that these characters are going through.

Have you ever been in a social situation that felt like a horror movie?

Haven’t we all? What’s interesting is, I’m an introvert at heart. These times right now during quarantine, it’s been lots of ups and downs for me, but I do feel very comfortable with it just being me and my wife. I’m happy when it’s just two of us. And I’m totally fine in social situations in general, and I can be okay and not super anxious, but just my natural being is being a homebody and being just with the people who I know the most intimately. And so that’s not really an answer to what you’re saying, but I guess it’s a long way of saying I do have a little bit of social anxiety in general.

This is going to sound really petty, but I have to say it because it’s true. I can’t stand big, big, big family dinners at restaurants for a number of reasons. One, I really, really, really respect the industry and I think that people who work in that industry should be taken care of. They’re making the food for us. Well, it should be a good time for everybody, right?

Absolutely.

One, it’s always at a restaurant that doesn’t really respect the industry, so it’s like some big Red Lobster-type of situation. Two, there’s like 80 people ,and I already know that they’re going to stick me with the bill. And then three, before I even say I’m going to pay it because I have to just sit back and watch everybody pass it back and forth two or three times, to say like, “My dish was $20, so here’s a $20.” And I’m like, “Well, is gratuity included?” And then you had like eight Chardonnays. You drunk that whole bottle of box wine. But in all fun, in all fun, I’m happy for the family time, but that moment is always like . . . It’s funny, I could imagine a horror story about the guy who always pays the bill and he’s going out to eat with his family, but it’s like the day he got fired so he’s not going to have the disposable income. He has to take a knife and kill the server.

I love it. And you just let the music . . . From the beginning you’re like, “This seems like a pretty simple, straightforward story,” but you’ve got this music underneath where you’re like, “Oh God, this is ominous. Where’s this going in?” And then ultimately, the reveal in the end is just that he didn’t want to pay the bill. I’m in.

Another thing I liked about the film and I think that it ties into a lot of stuff we see happening in this country today with America being so divided and at the same time having open conversations about race. We get a chance to see a little bit of that in your film.

We made this movie over a year ago and so I couldn’t have anticipated what was happening now, but those elements of the film are based on friends of mine who have experienced racial profiling when trying to rent a home on one of these home sharing apps. I felt like it was important to include. We use it in a way to create immediate tension between one of the renters who is of Iranian descent and the homeowner who is white. That moment in the film, it makes everyone else in the scene uncomfortable because they’re forced to recognize that their friend, who’s played by Sheila Vand, was likely a victim of racial profiling and they can’t ignore that anymore.

What other cool projects are you working on right now?

I actually wrote a script with my wife during the quarantine. It’s a romantic comedy, and this would be for me to direct and for her to star in again. We loved the genre, but we we’ve been thinking about romantic comedies over the past decade or so and how the bar feels like it’s set really low. Where there’s this tendency to make the aesthetic, really overly bright, and for the acting and the stories to be really silly. We started looking at some of the classics, like “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Pretty Woman,” and first off, they’re really grounded, the acting’s amazing, and they are all shot like dramas. They look good. We were thinking like, why does no one approach the genre from that point of view, this more kind of smart point of view? And so that’s what we try to do with this new one. And so we’re going to try to sell that.

Then on top of that, I got a couple of things that I’m attached to as an actor. I can’t really talk about a few of them yet, but one I can talk about is we were developing a Vanilla Ice biopic for me to star in. I think it’ll surprise people, but we’re approaching it more from “The Disaster Artist” tone where we’re not leaning into the joke. It’s more like there’s so much inherent humor in this story already that let’s just play it as earnest and as straight as possible, and just let the humor come from that. And so there’s a lot of heart to it and it’s coming together really nicely.

Behind the scenes must’ve been crazy for that guy because he had one of the biggest songs of the decade. That was a mega hit.

Exactly. And you start to think of what being a one-hit wonder what that does to your mentality over the years and just being recognized for that one thing. There’s so many crazy twists and turns in his life, and I’m excited to kind of bring that to life and share that with everyone.

I think it’s cool that you get to work with your wife. That’s a cool thing because my wife and I, we work together on things too, and it brings a different type of clarity to the relationship.

It’s interesting because a lot of people have been almost a little scared to ask, “How was it working with your wife?” I think that’s more informative of those people thinking about what it would be like working with their own significant other. But with us, it’s like we love it. Honestly, I would love to collaborate with her on everything if possible and that’s why we wrote this script together so we have another chance.

Tell everybody where they can see “The Rental.”

It’s coming out on VOD and in certain drive-ins and certain standard theaters that are open, who knows where, but it’s out everywhere on July 24th.

Approval ratings of Republican governors plummet as coronavirus cases spike in red states: new poll

This summer’s surge in coronavirus infections has been felt all over the Sun Belt, from Florida to Texas to Arizona. David Nather, in Axios, reports that Republican governors in four Sun Belt states are now suffering from low approval of their handling of the crisis — whereas in California, another state that is being hit hard by the surge, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is still popular.

Citing polling data that Axios received from Survey Monkey, Nather notes that residents of Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Texas were asked whether or not they approved of the way in which their governors have handled the coronavirus crisis — and the Republican governors of those four states all fared badly, including Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Texas’ Greg Abbott, Arizona’s Doug Ducey and Georgia’s Brian Kemp. Disapproval ranged from 62% for Ducey and 58% for DeSantis to 55% for Kemp and Abbott.

“In all four states,” Nather explains, “there were sharp increases between May and July in how many people knew someone with the coronavirus. In Florida, for example, just 33% knew someone with the virus in (a) May 11-17 survey. By the July 13-19 (survey), that share had jumped to 55%. In Texas, the numbers for those weeks jumped from 32% to 62%.”

In contrast, Nather notes, Newsom “still has 60% support for his handling of the virus even though cases have exploded” in California. Jon Cohen, chief research officer for Survey Monkey, told Axios that Newsom fares especially well among Democratic voters. That 60% approval takes into account California voters in general — Democrats, Republicans or otherwise — but among Democrats or those who lean Democrat, Newsom enjoys 82% approval over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

One Republican governor who, according to Survey Monkey data given to Axios, enjoys more approval than disapproval over his handling of coronavirus is Ohio’s Mike DeWine. Although some far-right extremists have attacked the conservative governor over social distancing restrictions in the Buckeye State, Survey Money found that 68% of Ohio residents approve of the way DeWine has handled the crisis.

DeWine, it should be noted, is among the GOP governors who has received a lot of favorable coverage in the mainstream media over his response to COVID-19. While many pundits at MSNBC and CNN have been quite critical of DeSantis and Kemp, they have applauded DeWine, Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Massachusetts’ Charlie Baker as three examples of Republican governors who aggressively encouraged social distancing in their states.

“The political damage from the coronavirus won’t just be a factor in the presidential election,” Nather writes. “It’s going to affect the political standing — and the legacies — of the governors in the hardest-hit states, too.”

Fauci assigned security detail, “serious threats” come amid public attacks from Trump administration

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he and his family had been assigned a security detail after receiving “serious threats” amid public attacks from members of the Trump administration.

Polls show that Fauci is one of the most trusted sources of information about the coronavirus, which apparently irks President Donald Trump at the same time as it undercuts his attempts to downplay the threat posed by the pandemic. Trump himself cited Fauci’s high ratings in a tweet last month, and The Washington Post reported that he was “galled” by the numbers. The White House recently sent an “oppo dump” seeking to discredit Fauci to reporters, and Trump adviser Peter Navarro also published a USA Today op-ed claiming that Fauci was “wrong about everything.”

Against this backdrop, Fauci told CNN this week that he and his family had also been deluged with “serious threats,” prompting concern for their safety. Fauci said he had received plenty of hate during his time working on the federal response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s — but nothing like the recent wave of disturbing messages.

“I’ve seen a side of society that I guess is understandable, but it’s a little bit disturbing,” he said in an interview on “The Axe Files” podcast. “Back in the days of HIV when I was being criticized with some hate mail, it was, you know, people calling me a ‘gay-lover.’ And, ‘What the hell are you wasting a lot of time on that?’ I mean, things that you would just push aside as stupid people saying stupid things.”

But the attacks this year are “really a magnitude different now, because of the anger,” he added

“As much as people inappropriately, I think, make me somewhat of a hero — and I’m not a hero, I’m just doing my job — there are people who get really angry at thinking I’m interfering with their life, because I’m pushing a public-health agenda,” he told host David Axelrod, adding that he had received “not only hate mail but also serious threats.”

“It’s not good. I don’t see how society does that,” he said. “It’s tough. Serious threats against me, against my family . . . my daughters, my wife — I mean, really? Is this the United States of America?”

On the #AxeFiles, the usually unflappable Dr. Fauci opened up about the torrent of abuse and threats he and his family have endured since he became the most public advocate for the sacrifices necessary to curb COVID-19.
Listen to the full pod👉https://t.co/NuV5yEEPB6 pic.twitter.com/lIdAmTiL7q

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 24, 2020

Despite the attacks aimed at Fauci and his family, the Trump administration has continued to try to undermine him in the press.

The White House sent countless reporters a list of times in which Fauci “has been wrong” about the coronavirus. It was “laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document,” according to a New York Times reporter.

The “oppo dump” was followed by Navarro’s bizarre op-ed urging the public to respond to Fauci’s advice with “skepticism and caution.” Backlash over the op-ed prompted USA Today to issue a correction.

“Several of Navarro’s criticisms of Fauci — on the China travel restrictions, the risk from the coronavirus and falling mortality rates — were misleading or lacked context,” USA Today editorial page editor Bill Sternberg said. “As such, Navarro’s op-ed did not meet USA TODAY’s fact-checking standards.”

The White House sought to distance itself from the op-ed, but he did not repudiate Navarro’s comments.

“We’re all on the same team, including Dr. Fauci,” Trump told reporters, adding that Navarro “shouldn’t be doing that.”

But that same week, Dan Scavino, the White House deputy chief of staff for communications and one of Trump’s closest advisers, shared a cartoon depicting Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” drowning Uncle Sam by issuing advice to stay at home and close schools to contain the spread of the virus.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and Director of Social Media posts cartoon and message on FB attacking the nation’s leading infectious disease expert for telling the truth about this deadly pandemic. https://t.co/lqwUFHTCYP pic.twitter.com/gR3oHoV1eH

— Jake Tapper 🦅 (@jaketapper) July 14, 2020

Trump himself has described Fauci as a “little bit of an alarmist” in an interview with Fox News earlier this week.

Fauci called the attacks from the administration “bizarre.”

“I cannot figure out in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that,” Fauci told The Atlantic earlier this month. “I think they realize now that that was not a prudent thing to do, because it’s only reflecting negatively on them.”

New Lincoln Project ad calls out Trump’s ties to accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell

The Lincoln Project released a new ad highlighting President Donald Trump’s links to accused child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell has been charged with recruiting and grooming girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein and other rich and powerful men to sexually abuse, and the anti-Trump conservative group’s new ad shows the president’s longstanding ties to each of them.

“It’s despicable to hear the president express sympathy for an accused child sex trafficker,” said Tara Setmayer, senior advisor to The Lincoln Project. “While the country continues to grieve unspeakable loss from the Trump administration’s failed COVID-19 response, the president wishes an alleged pedophile pimp well from the White House podium. Shameful.”

You can watch the ad below via YouTube:

“Violent anarchists” are the new “migrant caravans” — and will flop just as badly

In 2018, Donald Trump’s very-stable-genius plan to win the midterm elections for Republicans was to hype the hell out of a so-called caravan of Central American refugees who were crossing Mexico in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States. About 7,000 people, mostly consisting of families with children, were indeed making the 2,500-mile trek to escape poverty and gang violence, but Trump and his Republican sycophants tried to convince American voters that they were coming to the U.S. to kill white people and burn down the suburbs. Through his preferred media of Twitter and Fox News, Trump endlessly hyped the “invasion” of these migrants, and suggesting they might be terrorists, and were coming to create gang warfare, not escape it.

The nonstop fear-mongering about the caravan did work its magic on the ever-gullible mainstream news media. A Media Matters study published two weeks before the election showed a precipitous rise in cable news coverage of what would have otherwise been a minor story, as similar caravans had been in previous years.

But if Trump and his minions succeeded in hijacking the news cycle with their racist hysterics, they failed in their goal of winning the 2018 midterm elections. While Republicans certainly leveraged their unfair electoral advantages to maintain a wildly disproportionate share of power, Democrats racked up historic wins, retaking the House of Representatives with a 40-seat pickup, as well as winning seven governorships and hundreds of state legislature seats.

While the news media let Trump’s racist hype machine around the caravan drive their coverage, the actual voters were worried about an issue that had fallen out of the headlines 15 months prior: Health care, by far the biggest concern cited by voters in 2018 exit polls.

Trump and the Republicans had tried to repeal the Affordable Health Care in the summer of 2017, failing only at the last minute when Sen. John McCain voted against the effort. But while McCain may have blunted the impact slightly, Democrats were still able to run a bunch of ads and hold numerous events highlighting the fact that Trump wanted to take away people’s health insurance. The strategy worked not only to win that election, but to keep the health care issue central to voters’ concerns, no matter how much Trump was hyping racist fears.

Now it’s time for another, even more important election and Trump, never one to believe that he was wrong just because he failed, is pulling out the same playbook. He’s replaced “caravan” with phrases like “professional anarchists, violent mobs or arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa,” all terms he uses to describe the largely peaceful protesters who have been demonstrating against police brutality and racism since May.

It’s essentially the same trick: Taking a group of people who are both peaceful and in fact genuinely opposed to violence — refugees who are fleeing violence, protesters who object to police brutality — and portraying them as a threat to life and limb (and most importantly, to property) of “real” Americans, defined as people who are sure Jesus was white.

Naturally, Fox News and other Republican camp followers are echoing the message in maximally hyperbolic terms, with Fox prime-time host Laura Ingraham declaring that if Joe Biden defeats Trump in November, “You will become the target for criminals, for radicals, and the cancel culture” who will destroy “our families, our kids, our churches, our schools, our whole way of life.”

To bolster this message, Trump is sending federal police, outfitted to look like invading troops, into American cities to arrest people without cause, tear-gas groups of protesters and beat people, all to generate images of violence and chaos he can use to scare what he imagines to be a “silent majority” of scared white people cowering in their suburban homes. With his usual lack of subtlety, Trump even tweeted Thursday that the “Suburban Housewives of America” should believe that “Biden will destroy your neighborhood.” (He appears unaware that most women with children under 18 at home work outside the home.)

But there is no reason to believe this strategy will work for him. As I wrote on Thursday, all the polling so far suggests that voters accurately perceive that Trump’s crackdowns are the source of violence, not the protesters themselves. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times pointed out on Friday, there is “a silent majority in this country,” but it opposes Trump’s racism and fear-mongering.

Perhaps more importantly, however, that silent majority cares a lot about protecting access to health care. They cared in 2018, when those concerns secured massive wins for Democrats in the midterms. They cared in 2019, when Democrat Andy Beshear won the gubernatorial race in Kentucky — a state Trump won by 30 percentage points — in large part because the previous Republican governor, Matt Bevin, kept finding ways to take away people’s Medicaid.

While there hasn’t been much polling in recent months to gauge the highest-priority issues, it’s a safe bet that these health care-sensitive voters aren’t particularly pleased with the way that Trump and the Republicans have let the coronavirus wash over our country, infecting more than 4 million Americans and killing 144,000 as of Friday morning — with both infection rates and death rates sharply on the rise once again.

Moreover, largely because Trump and the Senate Republicans have mishandled this crisis so badly, more than 5 million Americans have lost their health insurance since the pandemic hit. Many of these people are, or should have been, eligible for Medicaid coverage, but the refusal to expand Medicaid in 14 states, combined with massive Trump-era cuts to education and outreach programs have kept many Americans off the rolls.

Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 left many progressives wondering if he was some kind of political genius, even as he seems to think it’s a brag-worthy event to pass a cognitive test used to determine if someone has debilitating dementia. But that election was a fluke in many ways, a true black swan event. Thanks to his pathological narcissism, Trump cannot imagine what it would like to worry about losing health care access, and also can’t believe that other people might not be as racist as he is. So he’s running a campaign strategy, if you can even call it that, reflecting the “concerns” of a pampered racist poisoned by Fox News, instead of the things American voters are actually worried about. So long as Democrats stay out of the Trumpian media morass and continue to advertise their superior policies on real issues people, they have nothing to fear from Trump’s “anarchists and looters” strategy.

“Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade rejects Trump official’s claim that Fox News polls are “fake”

“Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade on Friday snapped at Trump campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley after he criticized Fox News’ own polling about the state of the presidential race.

During an interview, Gidley blew off Fox News polls that came out this week showing the president trailing substantially in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota.

“You touched on some polls, most of those are fake,” he said. “They over-sample Democrats.”

Gidley then claimed that the Trump campaign must be winning because there is much more enthusiasm for the president on social media than there is for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

However, Kilmeade interjected to defend his network’s pollsters.

“I know the people who do the polls, they’re not fake,” Kilmeade said. “They don’t do it fake, they do a really good job. They might not be accurate in the end, I don’t know, but they do a great job.”

Gidley tried to claim that the pollsters’ methodology was bad, but Kilmeade wasn’t having any of it.

“They’re professionals,” he said. “Don’t call the Fox News pollsters fake.”

You can watch the clip below via Twitter:

On Fox & Friends, Trump campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley calls Fox News polling "fake," and Brian Kilmeade tells him "don't call the Fox News pollsters fake." pic.twitter.com/kV6xS1keEK

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) July 24, 2020

GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert introduces bill to ban the Democratic Party for “supporting” Confederacy

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., on Thursday introduced a bill aimed at banning the Democratic Party for what he described as its historic support of slavery and the Confederacy one day after he voted in favor of keeping Confederate statues at the Capitol.

Gohmert, who joined more than 100 House Republicans to unsuccessfully oppose a resolution that would remove Confederate statues from the Capitol on Wednesday, responded to the defeat by introducing a resolution to ban organizations and political groups which historically supported slavery and Confederate states.

That list includes the Democratic Party, according to Gohmert. However, he did not mention that 72 Republicans who joined every Democrat in the House to vote to remove the Confederate statues.

While Democrats were for decades the preferred party of defenders of slavery and segregation in the South, Gohmert’s claims ignore the fact that the South overwhelmingly rejected the Democratic Party after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, switching in droves to the Republican Party. In contrast to the Democratic Party, leaders in the GOP continue to support the legacy of the Confederacy to this day.

“Instead of canceling our culture, it’s time to #CancelDemocrats,” Gohmert said in an op-ed he published at Breitbart, an outlet which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a platform for the “white nationalist ‘alt-right.'”

“A great portion of the history of the Democratic Party is filled with racism and hatred,” Gohmert said in a statement. “Since people are demanding we rid ourselves of the entities, symbols and reminders of the repugnant aspects of our past, then the time has come for Democrats to acknowledge their party’s loathsome and bigoted past, and consider changing their party name to something that isn’t so blatantly and offensively tied to slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination and the Ku Klux Klan.”

Gohmert, who made it clear in his statement that the move was entirely intended to troll Democrats in response to the vote, also called on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to remove “any item” that names Democrats or other parties which “supported slavery or the Confederacy.”

“To avoid triggering innocent bystanders by the racist past of the Democratic Party, I would suggest they change their name,” he said. “That is the standard to which they are holding everyone else, so the name change needs to occur.”

The resolution is co-sponsored by Reps. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., Andy Harris, R-Md., Jody Hice, R-Ga., and Randy Weber, R-Tex.

Gohmert’s comments came after numerous Black Democrats spoke passionately about the need to set the record straight on the racist history of the Confederacy.

“For those of us who are sons of the South, those of us who have endured hardship, discrimination and a lot of things that are very difficult to even talk about, for this moment in time where we are today, where we are going to start the process of healing and setting the record straight as it relates to the real history of this country, it is fitting and proper that those individuals who fought to keep many of our ancestors enslaved should not have to be recognized in a place where people who do good expect to be recognized,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

Gohmert complained in the Breitbart op-ed that Democrats were trying to “shift blame onto Republicans” for the country’s history of systemic racism and demanded the party “divest themselves of their name.”

Though Gohmert has long been on the fringes of the Republican Party, his sentiment has been echoed by mainstream Republicans. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., argued last month that the Democratic Party should “change” its name to leave behind its historic ties to racist policies.

“This is a very bad argument. It fundamentally ignores the way that both political parties and history actually work,” wrote Michael Austin, a professor who dug into the nation’s political history in his book “We Must Not Be Enemies.” “Today’s Republicans and Democrats have very little in common with Democrats and Republicans in 1860, or even in 1936. It makes no sense for anyone to give credit, or blame, to any modern party for anything that happened in the Civil War . . . The fact that the names remain the same has everything to do with branding and nothing to do with any kind of coherent ideology that anybody alive can take the credit, or the blame, for having held in the past.”

Trump suggests sending 75,000 feds to “help” cities while mocking Portland mayor who got tear-gassed

President Donald Trump said he is prepared to send up to 75,000 federal officers to “help” cities deal with an uptick in crime as he mocked Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler after he was tear-gassed by what Oregon leaders have labeled Trump’s “secret police.”

The Trump administration has deployed officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Marshals Service, ostensibly to protect federal property in Portland. However, they have been seen snatching protesters into unmarked vans away from any federal buildings. Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit seeking to force the feds out of the city.

The administration also launched a separate Department of Justice (DOJ) effort called “Operation Legend,” deploying hundreds of federal officers and DHS personnel to cities such as Kansas City, Chicago and Albuquerque in response to a recent rise in violent crime.

Trump on Thursday suggested that he could “solve these problems so fast” if cities “invited” up to 75,000 federal officers onto their streets.

“We want to go in and help the cities. We want help Chicago. We want to help all of them,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Detroit is having problems . . . We’ll go into all the cities — any of the cities. We’ll put in 50,000, 60,000 people that really know what they are doing. And they are strong, tough and we can solve these problems so fast. But as you know, we have to be invited in.”

He added that “at some point, we have to do something much stronger than being invited in.”

“We’d go in with 50,000 to 75,000 people,” he said. “We would be able to solve it like you wouldn’t believe it, like, quick.”

Trump’s insistence that he wanted to “help” cities was quickly undercut by his mockery of Portland’s mayor, who was tear-gassed by federal agents on Wednesday while condemning the federal deployment to a group of protesters who jeered his presence.

“He made a fool out of himself,” Trump said. “He wanted to be among the people so he went into the crowd and they knocked the hell out of him. That was the end of him, so it was pretty pathetic.”

Wheeler, a Democrat, has repeatedly demanded Trump withdraw the federal officers from his city.

“What I saw last night was powerful in many ways. I listened, heard and stood with protesters,” he tweeted on Thursday. “And I saw what it means when the federal government unleashes paramilitary forces against its own people.”

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, condemned the deployment as a “blatant abuse of power.”

“The Trump administration needs to stop playing politics with people’s lives. We don’t have a secret police in this country. This is not a dictatorship, and Trump needs to get his officers off the streets,” she told NPR. “There’s absolutely no question that by having the presence of federal officers here, it’s simply like adding gasoline to a fire . . . The situation had been improving over the past several weeks and that their presence here substantially escalated the situation . . . And honestly, this is about scoring political points. It’s about political theater. It’s clearly not about problem-solving, and it’s obviously not about public safety.”

Trump praised the feds in Portland for doing a “great job,” even as DOJ and DHS inspectors general launched investigations into the federal use of force in the cities of Portland and in Washington.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on Thursday announced that he would investigate how the U.S. Marshals Service has used force against protesters in Portland and how other DOJ officers were deployed in response to protests in Washington.

Federal officers deployed to Portland have been seen tear-gassing peaceful protesters and beating a Navy veteran. Earlier this month, a protester suffered a fractured skull after he was seen on video being hit in the head by “less-than-lethal” munitions fired by the feds. The U.S. Park Police, which is part of the DOJ, was used to clear protesters outside the White House so that Trump could stage a photo-op in front of a nearby fire-damaged church in a move reportedly ordered directly by Attorney General Bill Barr.

“The review will include examining the training and instruction that was provided to the DOJ law enforcement personnel,” Horowitz said, adding that he would also look at whether officers had complied with “applicable identification requirements, rules of engagement and legal authorities” and their “adherence to DOJ policies regarding the use of less-lethal munitions, chemical agents and other uses of force.”

DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari announced a separate probe into allegations that department officials had “improperly detained and transported protesters” in Portland, where they were seen putting protesters into an unmarked van.

The DHS probe was launched after the heads of the House Oversight, Judiciary and Homeland Security committees condemned tactics of the federal forces in Portland.

“Many of these federal agents are dressed as soldiers, driving unmarked vehicles and refusing to identify themselves or their agencies,” they said in a joint statement. “Nearly everywhere they have deployed, their presence has increased tensions and caused more confrontation between demonstrators and police.”

Will Joe Biden repeat Obama’s mistakes? Because repairing our damaged democracy is critical

I don’t know how many people have been watching Joe Biden’s speeches or reading about his policy rollouts, but they’ve really been quite good. This week’s socially-distanced conversation between Biden and Barack Obama was well done. These events may be under the radar but if the polls are any gauge whatever Biden is doing, or not doing, is working.

Biden is offering much more progressive policies than I think people expected and his rhetoric is exactly right for the moment. In contrast with Trump’s callous ignorance about what people are going through in this nerve-wracking crisis, Biden offers empathy and understanding in a way that is obviously authentic and heartfelt.

He has also demonstrated a willingness to sit down with people with whom he has policy differences and engage respectfully, in a way that shows he understands policy in a serious yet personal way. This dialogue with the health care activist Ady Barkan is an excellent example of his ability to listen and show open-minded consideration of views that challenge his own.

In this moment of national angst, it may just be that Joe Biden turned out to be the right man to challenge Donald Trump, for reasons we could not have anticipated six months ago.

So far, within the weird constraints of COVID-19, Biden is running a pretty skillful campaign designed to reassure progressives that he’s heard their demands, while also reassuring independents and some regretful Trump voters that he’s a safe harbor. Perhaps all concerned are so desperate to get rid of Trump that they are willing to cut him a lot of slack, but he hasn’t stepped on his own storyline and that in itself isn’t easy.

But the reality is that even if you set aside the three and a half years of chaos that had Trump’s campaign floundering even before the pandemic hit, his shocking demonstration of ineptitude and indifference to suffering has made that pitch more effective than it would have been before. I don’t think anyone would have predicted last January that the most technologically advanced nation in the world could be so incompetent and heartless that within a few months it would end up leading the world in death and illness in a global pandemic, all due to the lack of decent, capable national political leadership. This kind of failure really was unthinkable.

Donald Trump’s incompetence and narcissism contrasted with Joe Biden’s compassion and experience is the framework for a campaign that really isn’t about restoring America’s soul or its “greatness,” but rather about restoring Americans’ confidence that their government is even capable of recognizing their distress and delivering basic services, much less upholding its democratic ideals.

If Biden wins the election and we get through the transition without a constitutional crisis and civil unrest (and both are very possible) his administration will immediately have to deal with the economic fallout resulting from Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. It’s highly likely that the health crisis will still be acute as well. On top of that, there will be an immediate need to deal with foreign policy and national security issues, as well as a full appraisal of the destruction wreaked on the administrative state, particularly with respect to environmental and financial regulation. It’s a lot.

But as much as I think that Biden’s campaign of unity and healing has been effective, I’m terrified that spirit will carry over too far into actual governance, to the extent that the assault on democracy we’ve seen under the Trump administration is swept under the rug — much as the electoral hardball and abuses of power during the Bush administration were ignored when Obama took office. He too ran as a “uniter” and was forced to face a major crisis from the moment he took office. Obama and his closest advisers decided they would not “look in the rearview mirror” because the new president was convinced he could deal with the Republicans in good faith. He set out his disastrous proposal for a Grand Bargain, including major budget cuts, even before he was inaugurated.

That mistaken assumption of goodwill was rewarded with total GOP intransigence and an obstructionist “grassroots” movement funded by big-money interests that fought the new administration every step of the way. And I would argue that the Obama administration’s unwillingness to hold the Bush administration accountable for its crimes and misdeeds led inexorably to the disaster we’ve experienced under Donald Trump. The lesson the Republicans took from what Bush did (and yes, what Reagan and Nixon did too) was that they could get away with anything.

The damage Trump and his accomplices have done to our democracy is just as thorough as the disaster of his incompetent pandemic response and the resulting economic chaos. Unless the next administration treats that with the same urgency there is every reason to believe that the corruption, the shattered norms, the nepotism and cronyism, and the desire to use federal law enforcement, the military and the courts for partisan and personal purposes will be a permanent fixture of any administration led by a president with authoritarian impulses. (Tom Cotton, Liz Cheney and Josh Hawley are all out there waiting.)

Right now, we have a rogue Department of Homeland Security and a corrupt Department of Justice literally sending paramilitary troops into American cities, largely or entirely to stoke a violent reaction because Trump believes that will help him get re-elected. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is an unqualified Trump flunky put in place to protect him and provide partisan actors with information to smear their political enemies. God only knows what foreign actors are “helping” them do that.

This is not just a problem with Donald Trump. It’s a problem with the system that empowers him and the institutions that have rotted from within.

Just as Trump seems incapable of perceiving that he cannot get the economy back on track without dealing with the pandemic, Democrats have refused to accept that they cannot attempt to fix the nation’s problems until they fix the underlying wreckage of our democracy. That means they must hold hearings, form commissions, write new laws and otherwise tackle this ongoing Republican assault on our democracy once and for all. If Biden’s Department of Justice independently finds that laws were broken, they should prosecute. This simply cannot be ignored any longer.

I don’t think anyone would argue that America isn’t sick right now, both literally and figuratively. Joe Biden sees himself as a healer and, as I’ve shown, it’s a compelling part of his appeal. But you don’t heal a deep, festering wound just by putting a Band-aid over the problem and pretending that everything is fine. I think Trump has proved that. Biden and the Democrats must face up to the hard work of fixing our democracy if we expect it to survive. I wish I had more confidence that they were up to the task.

How the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrecked the economy — and made the pandemic worse

As hospital intensive care units overflow again, and delays in COVID-19 testing reports reach record levels in many cities, a conversation I recently with Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, reminded me that I had forgotten something utterly critical: Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally disarm America in the face of the coronavirus invasion was urged upon him by an ostensible defender of American business: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

When the pandemic reached America, we weren’t ready — any more than we were ready when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. But Trump had the tools to do what the U.S. has often done: make up for lack of preparedness. The crucial gaps to fill in March were supplies for testing to limit the spread of the virus, and medical equipment to treat those who got sick — testing kits, swabs, reagents, masks, gowns and gloves — by the billions. Government health agencies estimated that if the pandemic took hold, the country would need, for example, 3.5 billion N95 medical masks. We had 12 million.

Presidents have available, and have routinely used, the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to overcome such critical supply shortages — not just in wartime, but also to ensure adequate relief supplies after natural disasters. DPA can be used to put emergency purchases at the head of a supply chain, but also to require factories to convert their output to provide needed equipment in adequate volumes. Members of Congress urged Trump to appoint a military official as DPA czar to coordinate production and distribution of essential pandemic-related medical supplies, as was done in the Korean War.

In March, Trump was leaning towards robust use of the DPA, fashioning himself as a wartime president and the battle against the coronavirus as America’s “big war.” He invoked the DPA to require General Motors to speed up its production of ventilators. But he quickly discovered that he had an enemy within — not the virus as such, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Within days of Trump’s announcement that he would mobilize as if for war and use the DPA, the Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying army swung into action. Among the Chamber’s arguments: DPA would impose “red tape on companies precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories.” Unstated: if the government took charge of the supply chain for tests, masks and gowns, it could also prevent bidding wars from competing hospitals and states that would, and did, drive prices — and profits — through the roof.

In response, labor unions representing nurses, hospital staff and other frontline workers who were unable to be tested, or to obtain masks or gowns, protested and urged the Chamber to join a national mobilization to defeat the coronavirus. The appeal was not answered. On March 23, Markey and his Massachusetts colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote to the Chamber demanding an explanation. The Chamber’s response: Defense Production Act reliance was unnecessary, because “American companies will do whatever it takes to support America’s response to the pandemic and shore up the economy.”

But what the workers had feared — insufficient production, soaring prices and profits, chaotic delivery mechanisms — took over the health care market during the first wave of virus spikes in the Northeast. Some hospitals were paying 15 times the usual price for masks.

The Chamber continued its strenuous opposition to enabling the government to ensure an adequate supply of tests and PPE. Even Trump conceded that profiteering had taken over the market, and ultimately he did invoke the DPA to prevent it — but when it came to the export market.

Supplies increased, but often at exorbitant prices. Only when the shutdowns of most of the American economy brought the number of hospitalizations down sharply did supply and demand come into temporary balance. Americans believed that if there was a second wave later in the year, at least health care workers on the front lines would have the tools they needed.

Trump, denied by Chamber opposition of an easy pathway to acting like a heroic wartime president, seemingly lost interest. By June his focus had shifted from fighting the virus to reopening the economy and then reigniting the culture wars. Media headlines proclaiming his lack of interest didn’t even provoke “fake news” tweets from the East Wing of the White House.

The virus had a longer attention span. With major states like Florida, Texas and Arizona opening rapidly and prematurely, the holes in the jerry-built testing, tracing and quarantine systems each state had fashioned without federal guidance gave the virus its chance.

Cases — although not, initially, fatalities — began to soar. Suddenly, what any nationally coordinated effort would have been tracking and resolving all along — that the nation had stepped up production of tests, masks and gowns to meet the needs of an economy in shutdown, but had nowhere near the level of supplies for a massive second wave — came home to roost. By early July, new cases were flooding the hospital capacity of even some of the nation’s major health care centers, such as Houston.

In New Orleans, testing centers had to close eight minutes after they opened. In 100-degree heat in Phoenix, lines at testing centers were eight hours long. San Antonio and Austin were forced to limit testing to those with symptoms, leaving the system utterly unable to detect asymptomatic cases, when research suggests that to 40% of infections take place. Wait times for test results soared with caseloads, so that even those who got tested might not find out they were positive until they were well past the contagious stage.

Nurses were again forced to use one N95 mask for weeks at a time. Prices for what was actually available soared. States reported they could only fulfill 10% of their orders. Even now, in July, the U.S. has nothing like the 3.5 billion N95 masks that we knew in January we would need. Indeed, how could we? No manufacturer could have guessed in March how severe the crisis would be by fall. With no one managing the system, it was clearly foolish for any private company to produce, on speculation, several billion masks. Market signals cannot prepare America for the massive increase in possible scale required by such a pandemic. Nor can individual cities and states trigger the necessary ramp-up of supplies. Only a systematic national plan designed to ensure that we were ready for the worst-case scenario could have protected us.

Inevitably, the “market solutions” favored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have failed America not once but twice. In failing, they have taken the nation’s economy over the precipice into a deep, long, economic decline. That the loudest voice claiming to represent U.S. business chose to defend profiteering, embrace short-term thinking and risk the collapse of the American health care system and economy is both shameful and shocking.

And that most Americans, including me, had already forgotten this is scary. This is not the first time the Chamber has successfully pursued policies that put us enormously at risk — for years it has been one of the major forces preventing Washington from adopting even the most modest efforts to accelerate a transition off fossil fuels to save lives and protect the climate. But if the Chamber can get away once again with having caused massive economic damage while risking the health of millions, and with its public reputation unscathed, it’s unlikely to change its behavior.

Trump’s stormtroopers crush liberty on the streets of Portland

Pay close attention, very close attention, to Portland, Ore., where Donald Trump’s tin-horn-dictator moves against demonstrators threaten us all.

Sending armed federal law enforcement dressed in combat fatigues to grab people off the streets is an intentionally provocative strategy. Some of those arrested, and one shot with a rubber bullet that fractured his skull, appear in videos to have been acting lawfully when they were attacked by what amount to Trump’s secret police.

The attacks ordered by the wannabe dictator in the Oval Office — and overseen by his consigliere, William P. Barr — come with unlimited potential to provoke more violence. Widespread use of these tactics, especially as Election Day nears, could even create a pretext for attempting to overthrow our republic and the peaceful transition of power to a new president should Trump lose the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Such actions could provoke a civil war by emboldening the armed anti-Semites, fascists, nativists, racists and haters of liberty for people they dislike. That risk is remote, at least today, but that could change quickly.

Those are strong words, and the worst may not come to pass. But given the threat of Trump’s malevolent nature and mental illness pose, it would be foolish not to warn about the potential in his egregious abuse of power in Portland.

UPDATE: Trump on Monday threatened to send federal law enforcement into cities “run by liberal Democrats” naming Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Oakland (which he called “a mess”) and Philadelphia.

Tepid reactions

Sadly, the actions of local officials in Portland, its two U.S. senators and other elected officials have been milquetoast. Writing letters and making phone calls asking Trump officials to please stop is like holding a hand up to a tsunami.

While it would itself be provocative, Mayor Ted Wheeler could order Portland police to arrest anyone grabbing people off the street who is not in uniform. Wheeler is also the city’s police commissioner.

Trump is a friend to enemies of law and order. Not only has he called neo-Nazis, Confederacy romanticizers and anti-Semites “very fine people,” he has pardoned and commuted the sentences of criminals whose felonies he thinks were proper conduct, as with Roger Stone and former Phoenix-area sheriff Joe Arpaio.

In 2018, Trump pardoned two ranchers involved in the seizure of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon, part of a 41-day standoff by people who claim, like Trump, that they are above the law.

High-level lawlessness

And it’s not just private citizens who think violence is the answer to policies they dislike. Last summer State Sen. Brian Boquist, a Republican state senator in Oregon, threatened during a television interview to shoot any police the state’s Democratic governor might send to force GOP legislators to meet at the Capitol. The Republicans had fled the Capitol to avoid a vote on a climate change bill.

In these circumstances, who knows if those grabbing people off Portland streets — sometimes covering their heads as if they were battlefield prisoners and tossing them into unmarked rented vehicles — are indeed federal cops or just opportunistic and politically motivated kidnappers?

Law enforcement, used legitimately, has a duty to protect demonstrators and reduce the risk of violence. We see this all the time during heated protests, where local police often segregate opponents and confer with protest leaders to minimize risks to the safety of people and property.

So why arrest Trump’s insignia-lacking agents? Better to act in the name of safety and let it all be sorted out in court than to endanger the Portland citizenry by creating opportunities for private militias to exploit such situations. Better, too, to get a clear court ruling on whether Trump is abusing his powers or we need new federal laws to prevent such dangerous actions.

Contempt for the Constitution

The Portland abuses should be viewed in the context of Trump’s utter disregard for our Constitution. He has falsely claimedthat Article II lets him do anything he wants. George Consovoy, one of his lawyers, told a federal judge last October that were Trump to actually shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, the New York police could not investigate, even if the victim was killed.

At every turn, Trump emphasizes his view that he is above the law, even after all nine Supreme Court justices explicitly told him otherwise. (The two dissenters in the Manhattan grand jury case both agreed with that principle, just not Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in full.)

Trump said Sunday he may not accept the election results if he loses.

Chris Wallace of Fox asked, “Can you give a direct answer—you will accept the election?” Trump replied, “I have to see. Look, you — I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time, either.”

We’ve reported in the past about what will happen if Trump refuses to leave the White House. For sure he has thought about how to hang on if voters reject him. Of course, he may try to escape the ignominy of being a loser by playing golf on Inauguration Day or hosting a self-congratulatory party for sycophants at Mar-a-Lago. But should he try to hold on to the Oval Office the moment his successor is sworn in, the Secret Service’s duty will shift to the new president. They would frog march a recalcitrant Trump out of the building.

But that assumes we are not in the midst of nationwide violence fomented by Trump’s agents provocateurs and that he has not fired senior Secret Service agents who refuse to swear allegiance to him—as he tried to get James Comey to do when he was FBI director — and replaced them with loyalists.

Facts don’t matter

Trump appeals to his slowly shrinking base by conflating protesters and anarchists, with little evidence of the latter. But those who only get their news from Fox, Breitbart and the like evidently believe Trump is their savior and those who criticize him are — take your pick — anarchists, corrupt, communists, fools, idiots or, worst of all, liberals. For many Trumpers, empirical facts don’t matter.

On Sunday, Trump told Wallace on Fox, “You know, if you look at what’s gone on in Portland, those are anarchists and we’ve taken a very tough stand. If we didn’t take a stand in Portland, you know we’ve arrested many of these leaders. If we didn’t take that stand, right now you would have a problem like you, you—they were going to lose Portland. So, let’s see…”

Lose Portland? The locals are laughing.

More protests, not fewer

Trump is the principal reason protests in Portland have persisted and grown larger, as the smart newspaper Willamette Week reported Monday morning:

“Trump deployed federal police to Portland to quell six weeks of protests. He has achieved the opposite effect. The crowds gathering outside downtown courthouses on July 18 and 19 were as large as any Portland has seen in the past month. The crowd also appeared significantly older than at any previous demonstration.

“That’s in no small part because reports of aggressive tactics by federal officers — including shooting a protester in the face with a munition, detaining people in rental vans, and tear-gassing a county commissioner — have galvanized residents of this city to confront what they see as a military occupation.”

Homeland Security Chief in town

The Portland Oregonian, in a Sunday editorial, mocked a Trump minion for turning annoying protests into an attack on our nation and also called out Trump’s self-serving trouble making:

“It’s a good thing there was photographic evidence establishing that acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf actually visited Portland last week. Because based on his florid statement about our city “under siege,” a reasonable person would assume the entire city is in flames and no one can go outside safely at night.

“In Wolf’s Portland, a mob that ‘escalates violence day after day’ has been terrorizing the city. He paints a picture of the Wild West or a future dystopia where lawlessness abounds, and local authorities sanction criminality. And in go-for-broke hyperbole, Wolf equates vandalism of the federal courthouse with an attack on America itself.

“Yes, parts of downtown have been trashed. Many public and private buildings have been shuttered to protect them from further damage. But let’s call Wolf’s visit what it is: A political play by a Trump appointee using Portland as the backdrop. He is seizing the opportunity to create a false narrative of the federal government saving the day.

“In truth, federal intervention has only made things worse.”

Disappearing people

This kind of provocative behavior by the Trump administration is not all that far from disappearing people Argentina-style. That Customs and Border Patrol and other federal law enforcement agents are willing to shoot a man for holding up a portable music player should remind us that bureaucrats, including those who should be in uniform, do as they are told. That’s why we saw babies and small children ripped from their mothers and fathers and put in cages, some of whom have quite literally disappeared.

If ever there was a slippery slope argument to be made, it is over Trump’s egregious abuse of power in using specialized federal law enforcement — or what we at least hope and assume is federal law enforcement — to grab protesters off the streets and spirit them away.

Republican collaborators

These actions come as Trump is losing his bullying grip on Republicans. Since he won the Republican nomination four years ago this month only one Republican in Congress has had the fortitude to reject his antics, Justin Amash of Michigan. He quit the GOP. The rest act as collaborators, instead of officials charged with defending our Constitution against all enemies, including Donald Trump.

Even Mitt Romney and the now-former senator Jeff Flake have acted in inconsistent ways as they fear Trump in varying degrees.

After sometime-Trump-supporter John McCain died in 2018, the once vocally anti-Trump Lindsay Graham of South Carolina went all-in for Trump. Graham is a profile in cowardice.

That elected Republican officials and some Democrats so fear Trump they will enable his attack on our Constitution, or at least look the other way, tells us that we are not safe so long as Trump holds office. If he gets away with his dictatorial moves in Portland now, we may all soon discover that our liberties are but a memory.

Trump’s DHS tried to block Netflix from airing “Immigration Nation” until after the election: report

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that a pair of Netflix filmmakers shooting a behind-the-scenes documentary about President Donald Trump’s immigration policy were threatened by federal officials, ordered to delete footage unflattering to Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers, and told to delay release of the documentary until after the 2020 election.

“In early 2017, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to carry out the hard-line agenda on which President Trump had campaigned, agency leaders jumped at the chance to let two filmmakers give a behind-the-scenes look at the process,” reported Caitlin Dickerson. “But as the documentary neared completion in recent months, the administration fought mightily to keep it from being released until after the 2020 election. After granting rare access to parts of the country’s powerful immigration enforcement machinery that are usually invisible to the public, administration officials threatened legal action and sought to block parts of it from seeing the light of day.”

“In heated phone calls and emails, they said, [an] official pushed to delay publication of the series, currently set to air on Netflix next month,” continued the report. “He warned that the federal government would use its ‘full weight’ to veto scenes it found objectionable. Several times, the filmmakers said, the official pointed out that it was their ‘little production company,’ not the film’s $125 billion distributor, that would face consequences. The filmmakers said they were told that the administration’s anger over the project came from ‘all the way to the top.'”

According to the report, the filmmakers responded by “using an encrypted messaging service to communicate with their production team,” putting security cameras in their office, and concealing the hard drives on which they were storing raw footage.

Over the past four years, immigration policy has been one of the most controversial and contentious aspects of the Trump presidency, from the Muslim travel ban, to the “zero tolerance” family separation policy, to the recent effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from apportionment, which experts consider unconstitutional.

You can read more here.

Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton clash: A bitter battle for the post-Trump throne

The United States’ federal deficit was already huge before the coronavirus pandemic, but the pandemic has caused it to increase even more — and at a private lunch on Tuesday, July 21, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas clashed with a fellow Republican, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, during a discussion of coronavirus spending and the federal deficit.

According to the Washington Post’s James Hohmann, Cotton “suggested” that “Republicans should be willing to keep racking up debt to maintain power.” But Cruz vehemently disagreed, declaring “What in the hell are we doing?”

Cotton, Hohmann notes, “argued that the full conference needs to focus on protecting their most vulnerable members. Cotton postulated that Democrats would spend more money if they win the Senate majority in November — and therefore, it is cheaper in the long run to allow the size of the spending package to grow with more goodies to benefit incumbents who are up for reelection.”

It remains to be seen whether or not President Donald Trump will win a second term in November. Many recent polls have shown Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — in some of them, by double digits. But whether Trump leaves the White House in January 2021 or January 2025, Republicans will eventually have to debate what a post-Trump GOP will look like — and as Hohmann sees it, the clash between Cruz and Cotton could foreshadow a clash between the Republican senators in 2024.

“Cruz and Cotton are among the small clique of ambitious Republican senators in their forties who have been laying the groundwork to run for president in 2024, along with Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.),” Hohmann explains. “The dueling stances Cruz and Cotton staked out behind closed doors offer an early taste of the ideological battles we can expect as Republicans increasingly vie to take the torch from President Trump. These fights will flare up faster and hotter if the president loses in November. Others outside the Senate, such as Vice President (Mike) Pence and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are also expected to compete for the nod.”

N.H. GOP candidate’s firm defended Chipotle in numerous sex harassment, discrimination cases

New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Corky Messner is a partner in a law firm that has defended Chipotle in dozens of sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination lawsuits over the years.

The firm, Messner Reeves, has represented Chipotle in at least 250 federal cases. Most famously, the firm defended the restaurant after its food sickened more than 1,100 people in several states between 2015 and 2018. Those outbreaks prompted a three-year food-safety investigation by the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and, ultimately, the U.S. Justice Department, culminating in a $25 million criminal fine that DOJ called “the largest fine ever imposed in a food safety case.”

Messner, a climate science denier who has expressed reservations about a coronavirus vaccine and does not believe it should be mandatory, faces Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc in September’s primary. The winner will take on incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, in the general. Messner was quickly endorsed by President Donald Trump, who has been credibly accused by 19 women of sexual misconduct and assault. Messner participated Thursday at a Women for Trump event in the Granite State.

What has gone largely unreported, however, is that Messner Reeves has fielded nearly 100 discrimination cases on Chipotle’s behalf: Numerous employees have alleged over the years that the company tolerated abusive behavior, including dozens of allegations of sexual harassment, assault and gender discrimination.

Messner’s firm has settled multiple suits against Chipotle on behalf of pregnant employees who allege they were denied special consideration, such as bathroom breaks and time off for medical emergencies. Other suits allege workplace sexual harassment and assault, at times in graphic detail. Employees routinely claimed that their attempts to address the issues with superiors led to retaliation, frequently including termination.

Though one recent case attracted some press coverage — it involved a teenage male employee who was allegedly sexually harassed by his supervisor, who at one point locked him in a freezer — most lawsuits appear not to have been the subject of any reporting. The restaurant settled the majority of them out of court, so terms are unavailable.

While a certain number of such cases can be expected for any large company with hundreds of retail locations, Chipotle has faced harassment and discrimination lawsuits more than three times as frequently as have Panera or Starbucks.

“Corky is against discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, or age, as well as any and all forms of sexual harassment. He believes workplaces should provide a safe environment for all employees,” Messner campaign spokesperson Mike Biundo said in a statement to Salon.

Biundo added that “lawyers are ethically bound to rigorously represent their clients in any and all matters.” Messner, in his capacity as an attorney, “cannot comment on specific cases, settlements or dismissals involving clients, since that information is privileged communication that safeguards the privacy of both plaintiffs and defendants,” Biundo said.

Messner has not personally litigated cases on Chipotle’s behalf, but played a key role in securing the company as a client. Monty Moran, a Messner Reeves partner and close associate of Corky Messner, left the firm to head up Chipotle in 2005; he left that company in 2016.

In the late 2000s, Corky Messner served as Chipotle’s general counsel, working shifts on the grill at a local franchise to better acquaint himself with the business. His signature appears on share offerings and other financial filings.

The harassment and discrimination accusations, as detailed in court documents reviewed by Salon, range in severity, up to and including physical assault.

A 2012 court filing describes an assault on a female employee in a restaurant bathroom. Her co-worker approached her there while she was cleaning, then grabbed her and violently assaulted her, stopping only when he heard a female manager enter.

The store owner then called a meeting with the woman and her abuser present, the court document says. In the meeting he allegedly asked the woman if she could work with her abuser if he apologized, and if she would be OK if the company offered to “remove you from this store.” According to the filing, the woman declined, after which the owner said he would start his own investigation.

The company was sued for violating state and federal law for not firing the abuser and sweeping the assault under the rug. The case was settled.

In one filing, two female employees allege repeated discrimination, sexual harassment and inappropriate touching by their female manager. They said they were fired after they complained. That case was dismissed in 2013 following a settlement agreement.

Another female employee sued after alleged verbal harassment from a manager. The court document says the manager fired her after she registered complaints, and failed to pay her wages earned. The case was settled in 2015.

In events from 2013, a woman employee describes repeated harassment and groping by a superior, who at one point simulated masturbation in front of her, according to a federal court filing. When the woman asked him to stop harassing her, she claims she was told that “she was being terminated for lack of enthusiasm at work.” The case was settled in 2017.

Court documents also show that Messner’s firm defended Chipotle against discrimination suits brought by pregnant employees.

In one suit, a woman alleges she was fired shortly after she told her boss that she was pregnant. The restaurant did not offer a reason, she says, but advised her that she could reapply after having the baby. The case settled in December 2015.

In a 2012 suit, a pregnant employee alleged that her superior repeatedly harassed and inappropriately touched her at work. He fired her when she came to work late after a prenatal appointment, even though she had a doctor’s note, according to the document. The court ruled against Chipotle, which appealed. The case settled before reaching a conclusion.

A filing from 2017 alleges that a Chipotle manager fired a pregnant employee when she missed work after two days in the hospital. The case was settled and dismissed in 2019.

At least one pregnancy discrimination case appears to be ongoing.

The Trump campaign and Women for Trump did not immediately reply to requests for comment. Chipotle did not immediately respond when asked if it has taken steps to mitigate these problems internally, and has plans to address the pattern publicly.

As laid off workers face a financial cliff, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos grows $13 billion richer in one day

Days before the expiration of federal unemployment benefits is expected to bring about a wave of evictions, food insecurity and widespread economic pain for millions of Americans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world’s richest person—added $13 billion to his personal wealth on Monday.

The rise in Bezos’ assets represents the largest single-day net worth increase for an individual since Bloomberg began its Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s richest people, in 2012.

“In ONE DAY Jeff Bezos made well over 4,000 times what the average American earns in their ENTIRE LIFETIME,” tweeted Maura Quint, executive director of Tax March.

While the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has led to an historic increase in unemployment and a new reliance on food banks and SNAP benefits for millions of Americans, Bezos is among the elite set of American billionaires who have seen their net worth skyrocket since the pandemic began. With many people forgoing shopping trips and buying products online instead—often using Amazon—the wealth of the company’s CEO has grown by $74 billion since the beginning of the year and now sits at approximately $189 billion.

Such exponential growth in an individual’s wealth “should not be legal,” tweeted People for Shahid, a grassroots group working to elect democratic socialist Shahid Buttar to replace House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in November’s general election.

Jeff Bezos added 13 billion to his net worth yesterday.

This should not be legal. Period. https://t.co/6HqB8OJbjO

— Rose Movement 🌹 (@Rosemvmt) July 21, 2020

As the Working Families Party pointed out on Twitter, Republicans in Congress are currently pushing to end the $600-per-week boost in unemployment benefits whichhelped keep millions of Americans out of poverty in the first months of the pandemic.

In a few days, people are going to lose the $600 a week unemployment insurance lifeline that has kept them and their families afloat.

Yesterday, Jeff Bezos' net worth went up by $13 billion in one day. https://t.co/jSW2O61LPq

— Working Families Party 🐺 (@WorkingFamilies) July 21, 2020

Despite the success of the expanded unemployment benefit—which was passed as part of the CARES Act in March as 10 million people lost their jobs in the days after the public health crisis was declared a national emergency, forcing the closure of businesses across the country—President Donald Trump said Monday in a private meeting that the benefit should never have been offered.

The pandemic has also ushered in a crisis of housing insecurity, with nearly a third of Americans missing their mortgage or rent payments in June. Twenty percent of renters didn’t pay their rent on time in May and 31% weren’t able to in April.

As Common Dreams reported Monday, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) also saw unprecedented growth in demand this spring, and proved successful in providing a safety net for laid off and furloughed workers. Republicans are planning to cut the expansion of aid through the program as well as allowing unemployment benefits to expire.

While Amazon reported $13.9 billion in income in 2019, Bezos’ company managed to pay just $162 million in federal taxes last year—a 1.2% tax rate despite the United States’ 21% federal tax rate for corporations. The previous two years, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Amazon paid $0 in federal income tax.

After seeing Bezos’ huge single-day increase in wealth, Patriotic Millionaires, which advocates for reducing inequality on behalf of wealthy individuals, repeated their perennial demand to “tax the rich.”

#TaxTheRich #TaxTheRich #TaxTheRich #TaxTheRich #TaxTheRich #TaxTheRich #TaxTheRich https://t.co/Zs6I2MAubJ

— Patriotic Millionaires (@PatrioticMills) July 21, 2020

Grassroots group People for Bernie wrote that Bezos “stole,” rather than earned, $13 billion in a single day.

Jeff Bezos stole $13 billion today.

That’s more than the GDP of about 50 countries. In one day. To a single man

Jeff Bezos has added $61.4 billion to his net worth this year.

Amazon also cut $2/hour hero pay for its 400,000 warehouse workers & doesn't give them paid sick time pic.twitter.com/0Us9PBW3s0

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) July 21, 2020

While setting a new record on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the group wrote, Bezos’ company also cut a $2 per hour temporary raise given to warehouse employees when the pandemic began and in May Amazon reportedly told workers its paid sick leave policy doesn’t apply to its warehouses.

Mitch McConnell’s callous indifference leaves ordinary Americans’ welfare at risk

Ken Merkel started cutting expenses as soon as Packaging Corp. of America (PCA) furloughed him along with hundreds of other workers at its Jackson, Alabama, location amid the COVID-19 recession.

Although the Army veteran and community volunteer slashed his car insurance, quit his satellite TV service and canceled a life insurance policy, he still needs $600 in weekly federal unemployment payments to make ends meet.

But this lifeline for Merkel and more than 30 million other unemployed workers is in jeopardy because Senate Republicans refuse to extend the benefits period and pass other legislation critically needed to battle the pandemic.

Instead of safeguarding hard-working Americans who fell on hard times through no fault of their own, callous Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—the person who controls the Senate’s agenda—put them squarely in harm’s way.

The 54-year-old Merkel, for example, got his first job pumping gas when he was 12 and never stopped pushing himself. Now, as infection rates soar across the U.S. and COVID-19 threatens still more damage to the nation’s economy, the former military policeman could lose almost everything he spent a lifetime building.

The Democratic-controlled House already passed the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act to combat the pandemic and help millions of average Americans avert financial calamity.

The commonsense legislation would extend emergency federal unemployment benefits, due to expire at the end of July, through January. It would provide aid to local governments struggling to maintain essential public services because of COVID-19 budget crises, deliver another round of stimulus checks to hard-pressed families and ensure that those who lose their jobs continue to receive health insurance.

The HEROES Act would finally force the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration to take steps to protect workers from COVID-19 on the job. And it would allocate billions of dollars for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing, measures crucial for controlling the virus in hotspots like Alabama and McConnell’s home state of Kentucky.

But more than two months after the House passed the HEROES Act, it languishes in the Senate.

In refusing to bring the measure to a vote, McConnell flaunts both his disdain for average Americans and his indifference to the enormous damage that COVID-19 continues to inflict on the country each day.

He derided the HEROES Act as a “wish list” of giveaways—a windfall for people he considers freeloaders—when it’s really a responsible stopgap measure intended to save lives and sustain unemployed workers until they get back to the jobs they’re proud to do.

McConnell even claimed that continuing the $600 federal unemployment payments, provided on top of benefits supplied by the states, would just give workers a reason to stay home instead of returning to their jobs.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Laid-off Americans aren’t the lazy moochers McConnell evidently thinks they are. They’re loyal, patriotic workers who faithfully did their part to keep the nation functioning right up until the moment their employers furloughed them.

Walking a mile in Merkel’s shoes—or those of his co-workers—would show this out-of-touch millionaire just how much average Americans struggle right now.

Without the $600 in weekly federal benefits, for example, the PCA workers in Jackson will have to try to scrape by on a scant $275 provided by the state of Alabama. That’s all but impossible.

“I’ve already cut the best I can,” explained Merkel, a winder operator and member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 9-1083 who not only has his own bills to pay but helps his stepmother with hers. “Ask the congressmen and the senators how much they could go without.”

As if he isn’t already struggling enough, losing federal unemployment benefits will force Merkel to start dipping into his retirement savings. And at that point, he noted, “I’ll be hurting my future.”

Local 9-1083 President Valerie Creagh receives calls and texts every day from colleagues concerned about the $600 payments.

Without that assistance, some risk losing the cars and homes they worked hard to afford. Others would fare much worse.

“It would actually force some of our members into poverty,” predicted Creagh. “I hate to say that, but it’s just the truth.”

Merkel would be happy to let the federal government keep the unemployment money. What he really wants is to go back to work.

“I earned my place,” he said, noting the skills and training his trade requires. “My desire is to continue to gain, to work and to get more out of life.”

Workers around the country face the same plight as their PCA counterparts.

Another 1.3 million filed unemployment claims in the week ending July 11, joining the tens of millions who already lost their jobs because of COVID-19.

Layoffs began in the service sector; cascaded across the steel, rubber, aluminum, paper and auto industries; and now threaten thousands of airline workers.

Also, as Americans lost their jobs and businesses closed or scaled back, local governments lost billions in tax revenue that they rely on to pay public workers, provide essential services and even fight the pandemic.

Many cities, counties and transit agencies already cut personnel, services and programs because of huge budget shortfalls. And more will do the same in coming months if McConnell and other Senate Republicans fail to deliver the billions in local government aid allocated through the HEROES Act.

Despite this tsunami of destruction, McConnell feels no urgency to take up the legislation.

Workers don’t concern him. Corporations do.

As the COVID-19 death toll mounts, McConnell refuses to advocate for ordinary Americans. Instead, his goal is protecting companies that failed to take adequate steps to safeguard workers and customers sickened or killed by COVID-19.

He insists that Congress pass legislation giving corporations sweeping immunity from what—in his mind—will be a mountain of frivolous lawsuits filed by moochers. If he ever addresses the HEROES Act, McConnell likely will insist that corporate immunity become part of the deal.

The HEROES Act isn’t perfect.

It contains a provision called the GROW Act, for example, that would make it easier for employers to stop their contributions to multiemployer pension plans, putting workers’ retirement security at risk. This unacceptable provision must be stricken from the final version of the legislation.

But the HEROES Act provides crucial aid to Americans fighting to pay their bills. It ensures that local governments will continue providing police, fire and other essential services.

And it gives health officials the resources they need to conduct COVID-19 testing, track community spread and fight the infection rate while researchers work furiously on a vaccine.

“Maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Merkel said. “But meanwhile, we have to get through the tunnel.”

Trump moved his convention speech to flout virus restrictions. He just canceled it over health risks

Citing health concerns over the coronavirus, President Donald Trump revealed Thursday that he had canceled the portion of the Republican National Convention scheduled to take place next month in Jacksonville, Fla.

Speaking from the White House press briefing room, Trump said GOP delegates would still convene in person in Charlotte, and he would give an acceptance speech “in a different form.”

Trump announced on June 11 that he would accept the nomination at a live event in Jacksonville, canceling his in-person appearance in Charlotte after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper refused to commit to suspending his state’s coronavirus restrictions.

The president had been scheduled to deliver his address in Jacksonville on the 60th anniversary of a brutal Ku Klux Klan attack in the city known as “Ax Handle Saturday.”

GOP officials took care not to call the Jacksonville speech a “convention,” but rather an event “to celebrate the renomination of President Donald J. Trump.” The official convention had always been scheduled for Charlotte.

On Thursday, Trump claimed he told campaign officials that he had canceled the celebration, saying “the timing for this event is not right — it’s just not right. The flare-up in Florida — it’s just not the right time.”

“I have to protect the American people,” the president added.

In spite of plummeting poll numbers and approval ratings, Trump has in recent days attempted to strike a somber tone about the coronavirus threat. He declared Tuesday that the pandemic would “get worse before it gets better,” endorsing masks on camera for the first time since his administration recommended them in April.

However, the president seems incapable of selling even himself on the pivot. In an interview with Chris Wallace, which aired Sunday on Fox News, Trump harped on a favorite spurious argument about testing and lied about the country’s global rank in the metric. He has also sidelined Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert whose advice he has not sought since early June, from media appearances.

Sharks are now “functionally extinct” from reefs. That’s bad news for our oceans

Sharks are renowned as some of the most robust creatures on Earth. Not only have they existed in a similar form for over 300 million years and survived multiple planet-wide extinction events, but sharks have evolved to be able to repair their own DNA — making them extremely resistant to cancers.

Yet humankind may finally fell these ancient predators that have become a symbol of ferocity in our culture. As a result of human intervention, the iconic fish is “functionally extinct” in roughly one out of five of the reefs analyzed throughout the world in a recent study.

“We observed no sharks on almost 20% of the surveyed reefs,” write the authors, who conducted the study as part of the Global FinPrint organization and published their article in Nature. “Reef sharks were almost completely absent from reefs in several nations, and shark depletion was strongly related to socio-economic conditions such as the size and proximity of the nearest market, poor governance and the density of the human population.”

The authors establish that the problem of shark depletion is directly linked to overfishing — both accidental and, for those attempting to make money off of shark meat, intentional — and proposed a number of measures that could remedy the situation. These include establishing catch limits, creating shark sanctuaries, and discouraging the use of gillnets and longlines. The authors found that in areas where these policies had been implemented, there was a significantly higher percentage of reef sharks.

“These results reveal several policy pathways for the restoration and management of reef shark populations, from direct top-down management of fishing to indirect improvement of governance conditions,” the authors wrote. “Reef shark populations will only have a high chance of recovery by engaging key socio-economic aspects of tropical fisheries.”

Professor Colin Simpfendorfer of James Cook University, who worked on the study, told his college’s newspaper that he was encouraged by the fact that Australia, where James Cook University is located, has sound policies for protecting sharks.

“We’re up there along with such nations as the Federated States of Micronesia, French Polynesia and the US. These nations reflect key attributes that were found to be associated with higher populations of sharks: being generally well-governed, and either banning all shark fishing or having strong, science-based management limiting how many sharks can be caught,” Simpfendorfer explained.

Jody Allen, co-founder and chair of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation which supported the Global FinPrint project, touted the study to the newspaper by saying, “The data collected from the first-ever worldwide survey of sharks on coral reefs can guide meaningful, long-term conservation plans for protecting the reef sharks that remain.”

Another researcher, Damian Chapman, told CBS News that this is a “crisis” involving “functional extinction” for the sharks that would normally live near the reefs which are currently shark-less. He argued that this is not just bad news for sharks. His co-researcher Mike Heithaus pointed out that “you might think, ‘hey, let’s get rid of predators, they eat fish so we can have more fish,’ but it actually doesn’t work that way.” He argued that scientists are seeing “that you need to have healthy shark populations, you need to have healthy reefs, and that’s going to ultimately help people, too.”

Salon reached out to Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research and curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History, for his thoughts on the implications.

“In many ways sharks can be regarded as ‘sentinel species’ that reflect ecosystem health as much as anything — and we have long known that there has been intense overfishing and habitat destruction at many locations around the world,” Naylor told Salon by email. “So the absence of sharks on the reefs identified is further corroborating evidence of an alarming trend that has been ongoing for the past 50 years.”

When asked about the possible impact on human beings, Naylor said, “in the short term it will have consequences for the availability of protein (derived from fish) around the world. . . This will have severe effects on countries that rely on marine fishes as a food resource. In the longer term it will likely result in an adjustment of the steady state of ocean system food web dynamics which will affect the proportions of predators to prey which can impact the growth of algae, dinoflagellates and our climate.”

Overfishing is not the only threat facing sharks. The 1975 creature feature “Jaws,” which depicted a great white shark as it terrorized a small New England community, stoked anti-shark sentiments in ways that have influenced public policy. In Western Australia, the government implemented a catch and kill policy for sharks that swim within three nautical miles of the shore to thwart supposedly “rogue sharks,” a policy that seemed to many critics to be inspired by misconceptions about sharks popularized in the Steven Spielberg classic. In fact, most shark attacks on humans (which are rare) are either defensive or accidental, and there is no evidence that sharks will commonly return to shores in order to attack people.

“My position is that there’s no government decision that’s going to stop a shark bite,” Christopher Neff, a lecturer in public policy at the University of Sydney, told Salon in 2014. “I always say, it’s the decisions you make, not the decisions governments make, that’s going to determine your level of risk. Secondly, any policy needs to be predicated on the assumption that you share the ocean with sharks. In the U.S., we have ‘swim at your own risk.’ The ocean is the wild; it’s not a pool.”

Mnuchin supports unemployment extension based on “70% wage replacement” — here’s what that means

One of President Donald Trump’s top cabinet officials told a reporter on Thursday that the Republicans’ coronavirus relief plan will include an enhanced unemployment insurance extension “based on approximately 70 percent wage replacement.” Presumably, that means that the unemployed would see 70% of their employed wages replaced through unemployment insurance, as experts articulated to Salon.

In his interview with CNBC, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offered glimpses of the economic plan being proposed by Republican leaders to address the pandemic-induced economic recession. One key provision of any relief plan will be extending enhanced unemployment insurance, which is scheduled to expire at the end of July. The current benefits provide an additional $600 per week on top of state unemployment insurance, although some Republicans were reportedly considering reducing the benefits to $100 per week through the rest of the year.

The rationale for the federal government supplementing unemployment insurance by $600, rather than supplementing it to total a worker’s full-time employed wage, was that such a percentage-based supplement would require so much more computational and bureaucratic work as to delay distribution by months.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., responded to Mnuchin’s comment by arguing that 70 percent wage replacement is not “the policy we ought to pursue” but that “it’s not a dealbreaker.”

“I think it means having the weekly [unemployment insurance] benefit capped at 70 percent of the wage at the lost job,” Austan Goolsbee, who served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Salon by email. When asked about whether the 70 percent wage replacement plan would help people in need during the setback, Goolsbee replied that “cutting payments to individuals at a moment when the virus is resurgent and the unemployment rate is in double digits will threaten the recovery. I’m at least glad someone in the administration realizes that we need to maintain the safety net if we are going to keep bumbling the virus response.”

William Nordhaus, a professor of economics at Yale University, interpreted Mnuchin’s proposal in the same was as Goolsbee, telling Salon by email that the proposed policy “is definitely better than standard [unemployment insurance], which is closer to 50 percent replacement and has very limited eligibility. It is probably better than 120 percent replacement, which gives poor incentives to find a job. The main concern would be that people have free or low-cost health insurance when unemployed.”

Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, told Salon by email that there are deeper underlying problems with America’s unemployment benefits system.

“The root issue here is that the US system is so antiquated and decentralized that it must give fixed payments to workers,” Mathy told Salon. “[It] would be better to switch to a system of replacing X percent of wages using a federal [unemployment insurance] system. This would allow a political compromise which would result in more generous UI as payments could be closer to 100 percent without going over 100 percent as will occur when fixed lump sum payments are made to all workers, regardless of income.”

He added, “Seventy percent replacement rate is a big cut from the current situation, and would result in significant hardship for families. Expect a surge in defaults on payments/bills/loans/etc. from these cuts.”

The Republican relief proposal is expected to include another round of $1,200 stimulus checks to households whose pre-pandemic incomes meet the qualifying threshold, according to The Wall Street Journal. The bill will not include a payroll tax cut, even though the Trump administration had been pushing for that measure. Mnuchin said that it could be included in future relief legislation.

Mnuchin’s comments were made hours after Trump officials and Senate Republicans announced that they had reached a tentative deal about what that relief legislation might look like. The next step would be to enter negotiations with Democrats; because the House of Representatives is controlled by that party, Republicans will need to compromise with them in order for any relief measures to become law.

Before Republicans could release their plan on Thursday, however, they appeared to struggle when it came to figuring out how to write up the actual text of their legislative proposal. Democrats criticized Republicans for not moving with enough urgency and dismissed the idea of breaking the package into a series of smaller bills.

If Congress is unable to pass additional relief legislation before the unemployment benefits run out, the economic impact could be devastating. Democrats have criticized Republicans for seeming to drag their feet when it comes to providing economic relief, with Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., releasing a statement earlier this month drawing attention to how delays harm ordinary Americans.

“Mitch McConnell may already have doomed the tens of millions of American workers who depend on enhanced federal unemployment benefits to a sudden, sharp decline in income at the end of July,” Beyer said in his statement.

He added, “Because state unemployment benefits need to be extended by July 25 in order to be processed by states administering their programs, McConnell’s announcement that the Senate will not even begin drafting or negotiating legislation until next week effectively makes a lapse in those expanded payments unavoidable. We may already be out of time to avoid the iceberg.”