Chick-fil-A to launch new family-friendly app and streaming service, Chick-fil-A Play, in November

Looks like Netflix may soon face some competition from an unlikely entrant in the streaming wars: Chick-fil-A, believe it or not.

The fast-food chain announced Monday that it's launching a new streaming service and app called Chick-fil-A Play. According to AdWeek, Chick-fil-A described its family-friendly platform as a digital “playground” focused on four main themes: Listen, Play, Create and Read. Chick-fil-A Play will feature original animated shows, original scripted podcasts, games, e-books and interactive stories, video-based recipes and kid-friendly crafts.

“As these pieces were coming to life, we saw a need for a digital space to deliver the entertainment and activities our guests were asking us for via a platform that a majority of families use and have access to,” Dustin Britt, executive director of brand strategy for Chick-fil-A, told AdWeek. “We started designing the app as a place where parents and kids could connect through the content, with everything on the app intentionally designed to be listened to, watched, and played together.”

Chicken nuggets with a side of entertainment? Chick-fil-A slated to launch its own streaming service

The recent news comes two months after Deadline first reported that Chick-fil-A was launching its own streaming service. The company has also clarified that Chick-fil-A Play is not just a standalone streaming service — it's both a streaming platform and an app.

Chick-fil-A Play is slated to launch on Nov. 18. In anticipation of the app’s launch, Chick-fil-A released a trailer for “Legends of Evergreen Hills,” a new animated series that will premiere next month.

The company said its app will be available free of charge and it has no plans to make viewers pay to use it.

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Huge volumes of whey go to waste. We could do much more with this nutrient-rich liquid

Every year, 7.6 million tons of food is lost or wasted in Australia. When we think about this, we might picture moldy fruit, stale bread and overly full fridges. But in fact, almost half of this waste happens before food ever gets to us. Waste is common in food production, processing and transportation.

For example, the process of making cheese from milk results in a comparatively small amount of cheese and a lot of whey – up to 90% the mass of the raw milk.

Whey is useful, as it still has about half the nutrients of milk. But whey remains one of the largest sources of food loss and waste in Australia's large dairy sector. Every year, about 350 million liters goes down the drain, costing businesses over A$580 million to dispose of it and wasting some of the resources it takes to make milk.

In our new research, we interviewed cheesemakers from 42 companies – representing almost a third of Australia's cheese industry.

We found cheesemakers knew what waste whey could be used for but were put off by practical challenges.

What can you do with whey?

You can already buy whey products such as fermented drinks and protein powders. Infant formula may contain the highly valuable lactoferrin, which would be usually left in whey. A popular Swiss soft drink, Rivella, is also made from whey.

In Australia, some producers have begun making alcoholic spirits by fermenting the lactose in whey. Researchers have found whey-based alcohol can emit less greenhouse gases than traditional grains.

Our research found over half of our cheesemakers were using multiple methods to reduce whey going to waste, from making animal feed to making ricotta to irrigating paddocks. Even so, there is still room to make much more use of whey.

What did we find?

Every year, 43% of all milk produced in Australia is used to make cheese – about eight billion liters a year. When we did this research, there were 132 cheesemakers, using cow, goat, sheep, and camel milk to make cheese. The industry is characterized by a few large manufacturers (about 2% of companies) and many small manufacturers (about 90% of the total). Cheesemakers are largely concentrated in Australia's southeast.

To understand the challenge of avoiding whey waste, we spoke to cheesemakers, big and small, right across Australia between November 2022 and June 2023.

All of our cheesemaker respondents knew of at least one whey-based product.

But there were barriers to using whey themselves by a range of things, from the set-up cost of a new facility to the challenge of scale, competing priorities and the distance to potential partners. As one respondent said:

Every single part of the business would have to be changed, upgraded, or increased to accommodate using the whey in any way

Another said:

We're all doing 60 to 70-hour weeks and you [need] someone to actually drive it

How can we overcome the barriers?

Based on our interviews, we found four possible ways to encourage cheesemakers to put their whey to use:

turning whey into value-added products in-house. This could be quite effective – one of our respondents reported making more money from whey-based products than cheese. But setting it up requires time and money.
engaging other companies to take the waste. Partnering with outside companies can help overcome time and money issues – but everyone needs to agree on a price for a product previously considered waste.
starting joint ventures, such as teaming up with other cheesemakers. This method suits cheesemakers wanting to keep the value of the whey. Successful ventures require clear leadership and transparent business plans.
scaling up. Some cheesemakers are already using their own whey. If they move to accept whey from other makers, they can scale up – as long as the new whey sources can meet their specifications.

We found giving Australian cheesemakers the full range of options greatly increased how willing they were to find ways to use whey.

When they only had in-house options, 33% of respondents said they would find ways to use way. This rose to 79% when

Which whey forward?

Our research shows there's no silver bullet to solve whey waste. We'll have to come at it from different angles and focus on collaboration between cheesemakers, governments, industry bodies and consumers.

One crucial thing is to make sure there there is demand for these changes. In separate research, we found there is currently little expectation from consumers and retailers about what happens to whey waste. Increasing demand for whey-based products and setting expectations for cheesemaking practices could drive this change. But food safety regulations and taxes on alcohol can make it more challenging still for makers.

In regions with a cluster of cheesemakers, it might make more sense for one or two makers to take all the whey waste and turn it into value-added products to benefit from the scale. While many cheesemakers told us they felt isolated from potential partners, we found a potential partner was right around the corner – just one or two kilometers in most cases.

This is where decision support tools may be able to help in future. These software tools help you lay out your options so you can compare them and pick the best one. They can take into account financial outlay, risks and environmental impacts.

The good news is, there is an abundant, nutrient rich byproduct able to be converted into other products. The challenge now is to find ways of boosting collaboration between cheesemakers and other companies – and ensuring whey-based products have a market.

Jack Hetherington, Phd Candidate in circular business models, University of Adelaide; Adam James Loch, Associate Professor, Centre for Global Food and Resources, University of Adelaide, and Pablo Juliano, Group leader, Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO

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

“We know that those threats are out there”: Philadelphia officials brace for election shenanigans

The Republican who helps oversee elections in Philadelphia is prepared for a certain someone posting his name on Truth Social. Already the former president has pledged that people like him — “Corrupt Election Officials” who refuse to manufacture evidence of fraud for the GOP campaign — will be “sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

That’s if he wins. If he loses? Donald Trump has demonstrated that, where the state won’t act, his supporters will. In fact, City Commissioner Seth Bluestein already experienced it firsthand.

“In 2020, we had to have police protection outside of my house to protect my wife and kids while I was at the Convention Center counting ballots,” he recounted in an interview with Salon. This time, again: “We have preparations in place to ensure that, if we do receive threats, that my family will be safe.”

"I won't be intimidated": Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on elections and death threats

Last time around, Bluestein was working as a deputy to former City Commissioner Al Schmidt, the only Republican on Philadelphia’s Board of Elections, which by law is required to have one of its three members come from the non-majority party in a city where Democrats hold almost all the elected offices. Schmidt, now overseeing elections across Pennsylvania as secretary of the commonwealth, was singled out by the former president and blamed for this 2020 loss.

“A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia,” posted on Nov. 11, 2020. “He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty.”

“The window in time from when the polls close until when the race can be called is the biggest window where disinformation could spread."

Schmidt was then inundated with death threats from Trump supporters. “The threats became much more specific, much more graphic,” Schmidt testified before the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss. Those threats “included not just me by name,” he noted, “but included members of my family, by name, ages, our address, pictures of our home — every bit of detail you can imagine.”

Bluestein, witnessing that ordeal and experiencing some of the blowback himself, decided to accept a promotion when Schmidt left.

“I did see it up close,” Bluestein said, but despite the threats he felt it was important “to have an experienced, bipartisan Board of Elections, especially in Philadelphia, which is the most populous county in the largest swing state in the country.” Counting votes, he said, “is not a Democratic value or a Republican value: It is an American value, and we need to do everything possible to do the job well.”

In 2024, however, counting votes is very much seen through the lens of partisanship. A super-majority of Republican voters claim to believe the leader of their party, who falsely insists that he won the 2020 election only for it to be stolen by an array of shifting villains: voting machines hacked by Italy or China or Venezuela, perhaps, or American election workers counting ballots by hand.

The only thing certain about the November election is that Trump will say he won, whatever the vote tally. There is no process so transparent and secure that it will prevent the Republican nominee from claiming there is widespread fraud — even when he won, in 2016, he claimed his popular vote loss was a product of immigrants voting illegally (a task force set up to prove this was disbanded by the former president himself with nothing to show for it).

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What happened in 2020 will happen almost certainly happen again: Trump will claim any election-night lead in Pennsylvania should be the final tally — and that any ballots counted in the days to follow will be fraudulent and should be tossed out. He will do this knowing, then as four years ago, that election workers in Pennsylvania are legally barred from counting mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Nov. 5.

“The window in time from when the polls close until when the race can be called is the biggest window where disinformation could spread,” Bluestein noted. In the last presidential election, that window was four days, plenty of time for Trump to cry foul and incite what experts describe as “stochastic terrorism,” a term for the acts of intimidation and violence that follow his vilification of political opponents and even just public officials doing their jobs.

In 2020, 48 hours after the polls closed, a pair of out-of-state Trump supporters pulled up in a Hummer loaded with guns and ammunition outside the Convention Center, where other Trump supporters, answering their president’s call, were demanding that election workers simply stop counting other people’s votes. The men, believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory who each had a handgun on their person, were arrested before any violence transpired.

Republicans, who control the Pennsylvania Senate, saw this play out and chose to stand in silence as local members of their party, like Schmidt and Bluestein, were made targets of disinformation. They also blocked legislation, passed by the Democratic-controlled House, that would have prevented a repeat of 2020 by allowing officials to begin counting mail-in ballots up to a week before Election Day.

“I’m aware of every little thing that happens at the commissioners’ office that could potentially evolve into some type of threat."

Counties, then, are doing what they can on their own to speed up the process. In Philadelphia, that means new ballot-counting machines that could cut in half the time it takes to tally the votes, at least if the city matches the pace of election workers in Pittsburgh and the rest of Allegheny County, Spotlight PA reported. The actual process of counting ballots has also been moved from the Convention Center, in the heart of Philadelphia, to a secure location in the northeast of the city.

“Combine that with the fact that there will be fewer people voting by mail and I am cautiously optimistic that we are in a good place right now,” Bluestein said, while declining to speculate on how long the count would take this time. There also does not seem to be as much enthusiasm for harassing election officials, at least in Philadelphia: “At this point in 2020, we were already receiving threats," he said. "That’s not the case right now.”

One concern is that the threat to election integrity won’t necessarily present itself until Election Day. In training sessions sponsored by the Republican National Committee, conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec have encouraged volunteer poll watchers — already primed to believe that Philadelphia and other “Democrat” cities are ground zero for fraud — to be far more aggressive than they have been in years past.

“You need to think of yourself as the ground forces, as the army that’s going to be out there,” Posobiec said at one recent session, per The New Yorker, “the eyes and the ears of the Trump campaign, of the Republican Party, that are there on the front line to say, ‘We are going to catch you, and when we catch you we’re going to make a stink about it.’”

In Pennsylvania, poll watchers must be registered to vote in the county where they wish to observe ballots being cast, their status certified by the local election office. Once approved, they are allowed supervised access to voter lists and are entitled to “make good faith challenges to an elector’s identity or continued residence in the election district,” according to guidance issued by the commonwealth.

Whether those challenges have any merit — or whether they are unlawfully based on a voter’s race, ethnicity or national origin — is assessed by a local Judge of Elections, who in turn is empowered to call the police on anyone disrupting the process.

Philadelphia officials say they are prepared to defend poll watchers’ right to observe the process at the same time as they defend others’ right to cast a ballot.

“Anyone who has the right to vote should be able to vote without interference,” Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Joshua Barnett said in an interview. Working under progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, Barnett, head of the DA’s special investigations unit and chief of the office’s Election Task Force, told Salon that he and a team of prosecutors are prepared for a repeat of 2020.

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The last election, and in particular the efforts to intimidate those counting the votes, “was really the catalyst” for changing how the city approaches election security, Barnett said.

“No one ever expected the count to be the part where people might try to interfere. So now the counting is in a much more secure location. There’s a larger police involvement. We’re much more involved,” he said. “We’ve been in meetings with federal, local and state stakeholders like once or twice a month, if not more, and have done multiple tabletop exercises, which are essentially gaming out election day and the days after.”

“That’s the difference now,” Barnett added. “I’m aware of every little thing that happens at the commissioners’ office that could potentially evolve into some type of threat. If they get a weird letter; if someone’s been hanging around one of their locations and it seems sketchy or for whatever reason is making people feel uncomfortable — those are things they’re letting us know about,” he said. “It may not be criminally actionable, but it gives us a much larger view of everything and that way we can look and it say, ‘Hey, is this something that warrants further investigation?’”

Barnett said his office is also on the lookout for voter fraud. But he stressed that, despite the claims of a former president and his allies, it is exceedingly rare. In the past few years that he’s been working on election-related issues, Barnett said “the amount of people who have been flagged for even potentially having issues with their voting has been less than 10.”

Matthew Stiegler, senior counsel with the district attorney’s office, said he and other Philadelphia officials are “confident” heading into November that they can address “any attempt to threaten or intimidate voters or election officials.”

“We know that there could be attempts to interfere with certification, interfere with the process of counting votes, to try and get the courts to improperly intervene and to overturn the result of the election,” Stiegler told Salon. “We know that those threats are out there. But we're confident that voters are going to be able to cast their vote however they choose to cast their vote — and whoever they choose to cast their vote in support of, we're confident that those voters are going to be able to do that safely and securely.”

about the 2024 election

North Carolina Republican urges supporters to challenge voters with “Hispanic-sounding” names

The leader of a right-wing “election integrity” activist group in North Carolina was recorded in a virtual meeting telling volunteers to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” because they might be a “suspicious voter,” according to a video obtained by CBS News.

"It doesn't mean they're illegal. It just means they're suspicious,” the man, James Womack, said in the video. He is founder and president of the "North Carolina Election Integrity Team," a group that purports to investigate potential voter fraud in the battleground state. Womack is also the chair of the Republican Party in Lee County.

The virtual call was attended by over 1,800 people, the majority of whom are retirees and work remotely to analyze voting records for corruption, like non-citizen voting, Womack told CBS.

Experts warn: GOP using "great replacement theory" to push mew voter suppression tactics

Throughout his campaign, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly pushed the baseless claim that Democrats are encouraging newly arrived migrants and undocumented immigrants to vote for them in November, which is both illegal and incredibly rare. The fabrication has circulated in conservative media and has even been used by Congressional Republicans to push for proof-of-citizenship voting requirements.

Speaking to CBS, Womack claimed that investigating non-citizen voting is essential to ensuring “no other legal citizens vote is diluted.” Flagging “Hispanic-sounding” names is part of that work, he insisted.

"Citizens, individual citizens have a right to that information and they analyze that information to identify potential illegal or improperly registered people,” he said.

The "North Carolina Election Integrity Team" is one of eight groups in the “Election Integrity Network," a national coalition of “conservative leaders, organizations, public officials and citizens dedicated to securing the legality of every American vote," led by GOP election attorney Clea Mitchell. In 2020, Mitchell was on the call where Trump demanded that Georgia election officials "find" him the votes needed to overturn his loss.

about elections

Ex-Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries arrested in shocking sex trafficking scandal

Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was arrested on Tuesday — along with his partner Matt Smith and a third man, Jim Jacobson — and hit with a 16-count indictment in the latest development of an extensive criminal sex trafficking investigation led by the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.

According to ABC News, the three men are accused of operating an international sex trafficking and prostitution business that recruited young men for parties in the U.S. and abroad, using their combined vast wealth for an illegal endeavor "that was dedicated to fulfilling their sexual desires and ensuring that their international sex trafficking and prostitution business was kept secret," per the indictment.

6 shocking Abercrombie & Fitch revelations from Netflix's new documentary "White Hot"

"We will respond in detail to the allegations after the Indictment is unsealed, and when appropriate, but plan to do so in the courthouse – not the media," Brian Bieber, an attorney for Jeffries, and Joe Nascimento, an attorney for Smith, told ABC News in identical statements.

Jeffries, who ran A&F from 1992 to 2014, was the subject of the 2022 Netflix documentary, "White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch," which detailed accusations made towards the CEO over the years which included encouraging a culture of racial discrimination and ranking employees based on their looks.

"All that mattered was that the employees that you took pictures of and sent back to headquarters were hot," journalist Moe Tkacik, who describes the whole process as feeling "illegal," says in the documentary.

In a 2006 interview with Salon, Jeffries commented on the emphasis on "the brouhaha surrounding the A&F Quarterly, which, until it was discontinued in 2003, boasted articles about the history of orgies and pictures of chiseled, mostly white, all-American boys and girls (but mostly boys) cavorting naked on horses, beaches, pianos, surfboards, statues and phallically suggestive tree trunks," saying, "I think that what we represent sexually is healthy. It's playful. It's not dark. It's not degrading! And it's not gay, and it's not straight, and it's not black, and it's not white. It's not about any labels. That would be cynical, and we're not cynical! It's all depicting this wonderful camaraderie, friendship, and playfulness that exist in this generation and, candidly, does not exist in the older generation."

As The New York Times states in their coverage of Tuesday's arrest, the three defendants could face at least 15 years in prison and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. A conviction on the interstate prostitution charges could result in a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

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“I think he’s wrong”: Lindsey Graham loses it when asked about Mark Milley calling Trump a “fascist”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wouldn't stop repeating "I think he's wrong" in an NBC interview on Sunday after he was asked about retired Army Gen. Mark Milley’s assessment that former President Donald Trump is a "fascist."

Milley, who was the top general during the Trump administration. revealed his opinion of the 78-year-old in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War.”

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” Milley told Woodward. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”

Graham bashes Harris-backing Republicans

When asked what he thought about Milley’s comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Graham quickly pivoted to criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ policies — but not before taking a dig at Milley’s leadership.

“He has the right to his opinion, but this is the man who oversaw 20 years of training of the Afghan-Iraqi army that folded like a cheap suit,” Graham told NBC host Kristen Welker. “I like General Milley, but I disagree with him. You know what I fear? I fear four more years of Biden-Harris policy,” Graham added, before criticizing Harris’ policy stance on Israel, Ukraine and the border.

“If you want the world to stay on fire, vote for her,” Graham argued.

Graham had previously praised Milley as late as 2020, including after the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he regretted appearing alongside Trump for a campaign photo op at Lafayette Square. “General Milley is a tremendous military leader who understands the long tradition of maintaining an apolitical, nonpartisan military,” Graham said at the time.

On Sunday, when Welcher tried to redirect the conversation to Milley’s more recent comments, mentioning Graham’s previous admiration for the general, the senator lost it.

“I think he’s wrong, I think he’s wrong,” Graham repeated, cutting off Welcher’s question. She also brought up remarks from Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, who said Trump told him to use the FBI and IRS to “go after people.”

“I think they’re wrong,” Graham repeated at least four more times.

about the 2024 campaign

“Sweetpea” star Ella Purnell discusses her latest dark role post-“Yellowjackets”

In a cultural landscape that has inundated, if not altogether walloped us over the head, with content about male murderers, Ella Purnell finds herself in a decidedly unique position.

She stars as Rhiannon Lewis, the underappreciated and oft-ignored wallflower turned serial killer in the dark comedy “Sweetpea” which is currently streaming on Starz and is based on the popular book series by C. J. Skuse.

Rhiannon’s breaking point looks quite different than most people’s. Traumatized by memories of a childhood punctuated with vicious bullying and bereft at the more recent death of her father, the beleaguered administrative assistant soon finds solace in slashing her way to some semblance of justice. Viewers can hear her catalog “People I’d like to kill” at various points throughout the series. Let’s just say it’s a lengthy list.

It’s not like she hasn’t been part of bloody ensembles before. Prior to portraying Rhiannon, Purnell played Jackie, the doomed soccer team captain on Showtime’s “Yellowjackets.” More recently she’s helmed Amazon Prime Video’s post-apocalyptic drama series, “Fallout,” adapted from the video game of the same name.

"We want to kind of try to get the audience to relate to Rhiannon, relate to her emotions — obviously not her actions."

But there’s something altogether different about her lead role on “Sweetpea,” and not merely the fact that it’s her first time serving as an executive producer. Speaking to Salon in a recent interview, Purnell explained the intricacies of embodying a character with whom we can simultaneously empathize with and criticize, while also learning how to shed certain gender-based inhibitions.

“We want to kind of try to get the audience to relate to Rhiannon, relate to her emotions — obviously not her actions,” she said. “And that seemed really challenging. I wanted to watch that show; it seemed like something I would want to watch. I'm fascinated by psychology, and I love anything that kind of makes me feel torn.” This same sense of consternation is ultimately what piqued her interest in “Sweetpea.”

“I didn't know if I could do it, to be honest, because it scared me,” Purnell said. “And so, therefore I needed to do it.”

On "Yellowjackets," sex is violence

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

I’m interested to learn what drew you to the project.

For me, it was just the initial pitch. I hadn't even read the script and I knew I wanted to do it. I sat with Patrick Walters, who's our executive producer, and he said, “We want to make this show. It's going to be a dark comedy.” Immediately, I was like, “I'm all ears,” because I love dark comedies.

And we wanted to make it about this female serial killer. We wanted, psychologically — we wanted to make the audience feel conflicted, morally conflicted. We want to kind of try to get the audience to relate to Rhiannon, relate to her emotions — obviously not her actions. And that seemed really challenging. I wanted to watch that show; it seemed like something I would want to watch. I'm fascinated by psychology, and I love anything that kind of makes me feel torn.

I didn't know if I could do it, to be honest, because it scared me. And so, therefore I needed to do it.

I like that you brought that up because one of my questions relates to the viewer’s connection to Rhiannon. I think despite her really violent tendencies, she feels like a character with whom we can potentially empathize. Do you agree with that, and do you empathize with her?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have to empathize with her in order to play her. I have to be able to get into her head to a certain degree, obviously. There's this thing with playing villains that is challenging inherently because you're not supposed to ever judge your character. But what I found very useful — an actor said this once and I forget who it is — they said, "No bad guy thinks they're the bad guy."

And that for me was kind of the key to unlocking Rhiannon because I really was struggling. I'd never played a villain really like this — not one this bad, not one who is a serial killer. I was really struggling to understand how and why anyone can do that. And so realizing, “Oh, of course, I'm thinking like Ella, I'm not thinking like Rhiannon, because Rhiannon doesn't know why she can do that.” In fact, the whole series is about her not being able to face what she truly is, not understanding, not even being able to begin to think about, “What is wrong with me? Why have I done that? Why can I do this? Why do I like this?” She doesn't know that.

So actually, to really get into Rhiannon's head, I have to think, “I'm OK, I'm not a monster. These bad things happened to me and I'm a good guy.” That's kind of the key to unlocking her actually.

You obviously play the lead role in "Sweetpea," but you're also an executive producer. Can you discuss your involvement at that level?

Prior to “Sweetpea,” I had produced a couple of shorts and directed a show. I'd been writing and I wanted to get onto the other side of the camera for years, and finally the last couple of years I've actually had more time and been able to do that. I wanted to do it on a larger scale, and I really wanted to hold out for the right project. I wanted to do it properly. I didn't want to just throw my name on something and not be involved. I wanted to really earn my seat at the table and feel like I was able to contribute fully as well as get the experience that I think — that I hope — is gonna make me a better director, a better filmmaker, a better actor in the future.

And with Rihannon, as soon as I read the script and I read the books and it was running in my mind — I just knew her. I had a very clear vision of how I wanted to do it. And this would never have worked out unless those visions had aligned. I sat with Ella Jones, the director. We both care so much about this project and so much about Rihannon. We met and I said, “Look, this is how I would want to do it. What do you think of these ideas?” And she liked them. And I liked the way she had such a clear idea of how it was gonna look. I felt like that lent itself so well to Rihannon’s internal journey that I had in my head. It really just was like, love at first sight.

I was like, “God — this is what it's gonna be like working with this woman! I will follow her into the fire because I just think she's so smart, so articulate, so talented.

And then I just got super involved. I was in the writer's room mapping out the series outline and giving script notes. I was in the edit. I kind of got as involved as I wanted to and I'm really grateful that they welcomed me with open arms and allowed me to be included to the degree that I was. Because I feel like often actors are so sheltered, and I didn't want that to be the case. I didn't want them to shelter me. I wanted to get down and dirty and they really let me do that, so that was great.

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And what were your favorite parts of getting “down and dirty” as a producer? Was it being involved in the scriptwriting process, for example, or weighing in on hair and makeup?

You know, that's such a great question. My number one favorite part was the writer's room. That was amazing to be a part of. I've always loved writing and I write a lot and I have always just wondered what that day-to-day looks like, being able to be behind the scenes in that way. And it was everything I ever wanted to be and more. I cannot express enough how much I adore a group of creative people getting together and making something. Even when I'm sitting at a dinner party with my friends and we play the game where you make up a story and you have one word each. I love being creative. I love like, coming up with an app idea with your best friend — anything like that. You just get to collaborate and take each other's ideas and build on them. Like you're building a world, you're building a house from the ground up with other people and it's amazing when you get to do that with a group of incredible women creators.

I also loved the hair and makeup. That's always been very important to me. And in all honesty, that part wasn't too dissimilar to what I've always been doing, because hair and makeup and costume have always been very important to me. I've been lucky enough to always work with fantastic department heads who wanna hear my ideas and wanna work with me to build a character. And so, yeah, getting on calls early on with our costume head of the department in hair and makeup and figuring out how we were gonna physically show that transformation she [Rhiannon] goes through. I also loved the casting process. I got to read in with all of our actors — every single one of them — in person, which I think makes such a huge difference. And I really think you can tell. I think the chemistry between all of these actors is amazing and getting to do a week of rehearsals ahead of time with those actors … I mean, that is invaluable in my opinion.

What were the unique challenges of portraying a female serial killer?

For me, as an actor, it's not being afraid, not concerning yourself with vanity, and not being afraid of being messy and being ugly. I don't care what my face is doing. I don't care if I ugly cry. I don't care if I look bad . . . good. I wanna look like all of those things. There is an inherent fear of being messy. We have it because we've just been conditioned to be so together and so careful with what we say and how we say it and what we look like all the time. So that was just a new experience.

"When we were creating the show, we didn't even really talk about female rage that much. We talked about rage."

As a producer, it was definitely when we were writing, and we were trying to toe that line with making the audience feel morally conflicted. Rhiannon is not like other people. She is a sociopath and she's capable of murder. There is a very distinct difference between her and most human beings, I hope. But also people — all of us, women included — subconsciously judge women more harshly than men. We all do, it's put into us. It's the result of the society that we're born into. And so, how do we make this unlikeable character someone that we can empathize with, without being caught up in whether she's likable or not? We're not trying to make Rhiannon likable. She's not likable, I don't want her to be likable. And I think being able to empathize with someone that you don't like, that's a tricky thing to try to navigate, whilst also trying to tell a truthful and authentic story.

How do you think we can reconcile Rhiannon's killing with the undeniably real emotion of female rage, which is often presented as something deviant, or that goes against the grain of how we often see women depicted as sort of quiet and controlled?

Rhiannon's not thinking about female rage. In fact, when we were creating the show, we didn't even really talk about female rage that much. We talked about rage. We talked about anger as an emotion that Rhiannon experiences. And since the show has come out, female rage has been talked about a lot in these interviews. And I think that it's probably because we don't see it a lot on screen. So when we see it, it's shocking to us and it's surprising. That's what makes it so scary — its unpredictability because it's so underrepresented.

Rhiannon doesn't kill out of rage. She kills out of a need to be seen. Rage is something that resides in her as a result of unresolved trauma. But the two are not necessarily linked. It's easy for us to link them as a consumer when we're watching that show. It's very easy for us to do that, but Rhiannon doesn't know that.

And so when I was doing it, I was more focused on what's happened to her in her past that hasn't been dealt with, that has psychologically influenced the way that she interacts with the world today as a grownup.

"Sweetpea" is streaming now on Starz.

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A bite of history: Reviving the election cake that helped fuel America’s first vote

Elections for the president of the United States have always been long and kind of messy. Even in the first election, when George Washington ran unopposed, it took Congress more than two months to count the votes and certify the Election Day results.

The bakers at Hewn Bakery in Evanston, Illinois, are working to educate people about the length of the electoral process through what they know best — baked goods.

Specifically, through a little bundt cake dubbed “Election” or “Hartford” cake. One bite into the dense dough, laced with allspice and cinnamon, dotted with red cherries, blueberries and dried ginger, and topped with a white sugar glaze, and it becomes more than a tasty snack — it’s a 200-year-old piece of history.

From suffrage to abortion access: A brief, subversive history of women baking for liberation

“I'm a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a Mayflower daughter,” says Ellen King, co-owner and Director of Baking Operations at Hewn Bread. “I was cleaning out family stuff that got dumped on me. In one book belonging to my grandmother’s grandmother I found a reference to this cake that they made for elections and I was like ‘Oh, alright, because, you know, they would feed the poll workers through the long process of counting votes.’”

Back then, electors were first voted for and then sent to cast their votes as representatives of their state (how electors were chosen was left up to each state). In December 1788, that process took six weeks and leaked into January 1789, with electors gathering a month later to vote for who would become president.

The birth of a new republic meant not everything was operational from the start. In this first election, New York failed to agree on its electors in time for Election Day. North Carolina and Rhode Island couldn’t participate because they hadn’t yet ratified the Constitution. After a quorum was finally established, Congress counted and certified the electoral vote on April 6, 1789.

“Elections were such a big deal, they were an all day affair,” says King, who began her career as a historic preservationist. “There weren’t primaries like today, everything would be done in one day so it was a festive time. People you hadn’t seen in awhile, because they were out working their farm or lived far away, turned up. Hartford, Connecticut became the town that capitalized on the election cakes because Hartford was pretty much the place that was the colonial capital.”

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Pulling from her historical background, King points out that recipes back then were made for industrial-sized quantities, not for home bakers. This was emphasized by Amelia Simmons in her 1796 cookbook, “American Cookery” — the first of its kind in the U.S. — a reprint of which King owned and referenced to craft her own product.

“Those recipes call for 14 pounds of sugar, 30 quarts of flour, and like, 10 pounds of butter,” says King. “They also didn't necessarily have an oven in their house or ovens big enough unless they were really wealthy and had people that worked for them.”

Today, King and her partner, Julie Matthei, co-owner of Hewn, have taken the guesswork out of a 200-year-old recipe and adapted it for anyone who wants a bite of history. King credits Owl Bakery in Asheville, North Carolina, for inspiring this Election Day tradition, which began in 2016 but was skipped in 2020 because of the pandemic. The Election Day cake is available for pre-order through Oct. 30 for $17.89 (an homage to the year of the first presidential election), with a portion of sales going to Common Cause, a pro-democracy advocacy group. The cake will only be available on Election Day as a way of honoring the traditions of the past.

And if you’re wondering about the duo’s politics, King says it’s all in the cake.

“I added a whole lot more blueberries to this cake, and cherries were very subtle,” the baker stated. “Some people won't even get a bite of the cherry.

about baking

“Disrespectful”: Arnold Palmer’s daughter slams Trump’s comments about her father’s genitalia

Arnold Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears, said former President Donald Trump’s comments about her late father were “disrespectful” and “unacceptable,” ABC News reported.

While campaigning last Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump described Palmer as "all man" and began talking about the golfer's genitalia before a crowd of men, women and children.

"When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there. They said, 'Oh my God. That's unbelievable,'" Trump told the crowd.

Trump's apparent decline might make his next coup tougher to pull off

Wears said she disapproved of Trump’s “hackneyed anecdotes from the locker room,” telling ABC News his speech was “inappropriate” and a waste of voters’ time.

"The people coming to these rallies deserve substance about plans Trump has as a candidate, if he could elucidate on some of the threats he's made to people," Wears told ABC. "I mean, these are important issues that should be discussed for people when they're getting ready to vote, and using my dad to cover the important things just seems unacceptable to me."

Palmer, a self-described political conservative, died in 2016 shortly before Trump was elected. In 2018, Wears told Sporting News that her father would have been “appalled” by Trump.

"What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he'd cringe," she said.

about the 2024 campaign

McDonald’s distances itself from Donald Trump and his dubious claim about Kamala Harris

Despite hosting former President Donald Trump for a shift, McDonald's does not support his claims that Vice President Kamala Harris is lying about her stint working at a California McDonald's in the summer of 1983, The Washington Post reported.

Throughout her campaign, Harris has mentioned her time as a McDonald's employee, an experience shared by one in eight Americans.

Trump hasn’t let go of the mention of Harris’ teenage summer job, repeatedly telling Americans that she never worked at McDonald's and is making the whole thing up. As Harris’ employment was 41 years ago, in the pre-digital era, there are no official records of her employment at the Bay Area McDonald's.

Trump will be campaigning at McDonald's, where workers have fewer rights thanks to his presidency

“We have checked with McDonald’s, and they say, definitively, that there is no record of Lyin’ Kamala Harris ever having worked there,” he wrote Sunday afternoon. “In other words, she never worked there, and has lied about this ‘job’ for years.”

On Sunday, the Republican nominee took the attack a step further and pretended to work a shift at a Pennsylvania McDonald's. He stood in the drive-thru window and handed food to “customers,” who were in fact supporters pre-screened by the Secret Service.

“I’m looking for a job,” Trump said to the owner of McDonalds location. “And I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s, but I never did. I’m running against somebody that said she did, but it turned out to be a totally phony story.”

McDonalds has welcomed the attention, but its staying neutral in the debate about Harris’ employment, according to a statement obtained by The Washington Post.

“Though we are not a political brand, we've been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches,” the message to its employees reads. “While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes ‘1 in 8’ so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had.”

The multi-billion dollar franchise also told the Associated Press it is an apolitical company and does not support either candidate.

“Upon learning of the former president’s request, we approached it through the lens of one of our core values: we open our doors to everyone,” the company said. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next president. We are not red or blue — we are golden.”

about the politics of McDonalds

“A backdoor way of paying people”: GOP legal experts ask DOJ to investigate Musk “lottery” scheme

Are there rules for billionaires that they must follow like anyone else, or does Elon Musk experience life beyond the reach of mere human campaign finance law?

According to 52 U.S.C. § 10307(c), anyone who “pays or offers to pay” someone “either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned no more than five years, or both.”

Now consider that the CEO of Tesla and X is offering to pay $1 million (and give free admission to hear him talk) to swing-state registered voters who hand their personal information over to America PAC, the political action committee he founded to support former President Donald Trump. Musk, a Pentagon contractor who has already sunk at least $75 million into his campaign for the Republican nominee, who has in turn promised him a government job should he win in November, has also been paying people $47 for every other person they get to hand over their information.

“We are aware of nothing like this in modern political history,” a group of former Republican officials, including some who worked for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, wrote in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry. Dated Oct. 21, the letter, obtained by The Washington Post, calls for a law enforcement response to Musk’s get-out-the-vote scheme. “We urge you to investigate whether America PAC’s payments are prohibited payments for voter registration," the letter states, with the signatories — including former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission — pointing to a critical analysis by UCLA law professor Richard L. Hansen, who describes the giveaway as “clearly illegal.”

"It raises serious questions": Shapiro wonders if Musk election giveaways are illegal

The wiggle room is this: Musk’s payments are framed not as reimbursement for voting, or registering to vote, but as a reward for signing a “petition” drafted by someone who was barely trying: “By signing below, I am pledging my support for the First and Second Amendments,” it states. But the only people eligible for a monetary reward are those who are “registered voters in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.” The offer expired Oct. 21, according to the website.

The defense, then, is that Musk is not paying people to register to vote — no, he is paying people who have already registered to vote in exchange for their signing up with the Trump campaign, or at least the arm of it run by a South African billionaire.

The nefarious genius of the plan should not be overstated: It’s not clear that this is actually a good use of the billionaire’s money, just as his paying people to canvas for Trump is generally viewed as less effective than having motivated volunteers do the same thing for free (the latter are less inclined to fake the work). According to Politico, the first two people who won the $1 million prize were Republicans who had already voted by mail, with one woman’s Trump-Vance campaign merchandise suggesting her mind had long since been made up (Musk, who previously cast absentee ballots himself, has since adopted Trump’s baseless claims of fraud and termed mail-in voting “insane”).

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Still, “arguably ineffective” is not the same as “completely above board, legally.” That someone must be a registered voter to receive Musk’s prize is, to be sure, an incentive for someone who isn’t already registered to get on that and do so.

“To facilitate that, the petition webpage includes links to voter registration websites for each of the seven [swing] states, directly alongside the offer of payment,” the ex-GOP officials note. Musk may be playing cute by tying the prize to a vacuous petition, but “critically, America PAC has not made the names of or numbers of petition signers public — so the petition provides no demonstration of public support.”

Bruce Castor, who represented Trump during his second impeachment trial, said even he could not defend Musk’s latest intervention in the presidential race. Castor noted that Musk could be running afoul of both state and federal laws by essentially running a lottery, which is itself “a backdoor way of paying people, at least with a chance of renumeration, if they register.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea and I would hope Mr. Musk would reconsider doing these sorts of things,” he told NewsNation. “It doesn’t look good. I think it has a bad vibe about it.”

about the 2024 campaign

“Egregious lies”: Dark money groups flood most expensive Senate race with “disinformation”

Ohio's dead-heat Senate race has become the nation's most expensive, with nearly $500 million spent on ads in this race alone — and more spending expected ahead of Election Day.

Ohioans have spent the home stretch of the 2024 election cycle inundated with TV and social media ads boosting and opposing incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and his Republican challenger, former luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno, who has earned the backing of former President Donald Trump. Democrats, Republicans and outside groups have spent $483 million on ads and both parties' ad spot reservations through to Nov. 5 in this race, AdImpact data showed, according to Axios.

The face-off between Brown and Moreno is one of the most highly anticipated congressional races in the nation as the Democrats fight to retain control over the Senate. But the swell of funds being funneled into the election — particularly from megadonors and interest-specific PACs — raises concerns about the effect such big spending can have on democracy, experts argued.

"Without Ohio, Democrats have no hope": The Brown-Moreno race will decide who controls the Senate

"It's too much money, it's just kind of flooding the campaign. And I think it's, for democracy, not a particularly good thing," Paul Beck, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University, told Salon in a phone interview. "Particularly when you move away from the candidate campaign ads into the PAC ads and the 501(c)4 ads — the so-called dark money — you get more and more negative advertisement."

Beck, who said he has donated to Brown's campaign, pointed to largely Republican but some Democrat-affiliated ads that have "not been factually accurate."

Several Brown attack ads have pegged him as a career politician whose radical left ideology makes him too liberal for Ohioans. They've taken aim at his Senate voting record on immigration and sought to connect him to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris despite his best efforts to distance himself from the top of the Democratic ticket.

Controversial ads from the Senate Leadership Fund, a conservative PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have accused Brown of voting to allow "transgender biological men to compete in girl's sports" and supporting "allowing puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries for minors."

The ads "are broadcasting disinformation, in some cases, really egregious lies about one candidate or the other."

The vote in question, however, was Brown's March 2021 Senate vote against including an amendment in the American Rescue Plan Act that would have stripped federal funding from Ohio schools if those schools permitted transgender Americans to participate in women's sports. Brown's campaign told WKYC that the comments on youth gender-affirming care the ad drew on were, instead, a call to keep politicians out of families' and doctor's decisions.

Senate Leadership Fund has spent upwards of $55 million in the Senate race, a majority of which went to opposing Brown, according to Open Secrets.

Similarly misleading ads continue to flood the airwaves.

"It's very hard to fact-check the ads, and the fact-checking that does occur probably doesn't get through to many of the people in the audience for the ads, and that's not a good thing," Beck said, noting their increased frequency as Election Day approaches.

The ads "are broadcasting disinformation, in some cases, really egregious lies about one candidate or the other — this confuses voters," he argued. "It may lead voters to be much more cynical about the electoral process and about politics in general."

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Some ads against Moreno have swiped at his work as a Mercedes dealer, while others have bashed his support for a nationwide ban on abortion with no exceptions. Moreno has since tempered his abortion stance, backing a states-decide solution and some exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the pregnant person.

An ad from the Democrat-affiliated WinSenate super PAC, which has put more than $56.7 million into opposing Moreno, according to Open Secrets, brushed with anti-immigrant sentiment to accuse Moreno of funneling "our money" into "Latin American banks" with the help of his "powerful Colombian family." The claim drew on Associated Press reporting outlining the Moreno family's wealth, political connections and ties to international investing.

Last week, the Brown campaign also seized on the backlash from comments Moreno made last month calling suburban women "a little crazy" and single-issue voters for considering abortion access protections when casting their ballots. The clip characterized him as out-of-touch with Ohioans, who voted last year to codify a right to abortion access and reproductive care in the state's Constitution.

Beck said that having candidate-authorized ads — as opposed to ads from outside groups, which the Federal Election Commission prohibits from coordinating with candidates — has the benefit of requiring candidates to take responsibility for them. Ads from outside PACs and, particularly 501(c)4s or "dark money" groups can obscure or altogether conceal their donors, keeping the public from knowing exactly who their donors are.

Ian Vandewalker, the senior counsel of the Brennan Center's elections and government program, said in a phone interview that the 501(c)4s concealing their donors can create opportunities for politicians to engage in "backroom deals" should they be elected and a donor calls them with a request.

A similar problem can arise with megadonors to super PACs, he added.

"If I've given a super PAC $10 million to elect you, and you get elected, you're going to take my phone call in a way that you're not for the average constituent or the average voter," he told Salon. That dynamic "seems to imply that the people who have the most money have the most influence over policymaking in Washington when, theoretically, we have a democracy with one person, one vote."

Vandewalker also underscored that these super PAC megadonors often aren't residents of the state whose race their money has been used to influence.

"In as much as you think residents, who are the people who have the right to vote for and against these people, should have an influence over their policymaking, someone who lives in New York and just happened to give millions of dollars getting influence over that person is a concern for democracy," he argued.

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The crypto and blockchain industry has made efforts to influence the Ohio Senate race outcome in its favor, lending massive financial support to Moreno, who has a background in crypto as the founder of Champ Titles, which puts car titles on a blockchain.

Open Secrets data shows Defend American Jobs, a super PAC affiliated with cryptocurrency industry super PAC FairShake, has put more than $40 million behind boosting the GOP candidate and taking down Brown, the Senate Banking Committee chairman and a vocal skeptic of the industry. The ads from the group boast Moreno's positions on illegal immigration, Social Security and energy but do not mention cryptocurrency, according to Spectrum News 1.

Conor Dowling, a University at Buffalo professor of political science, told Salon PAC-purchased ads also present the issue of voters not knowing what the entities stand for and support based on their names alone.

"Defend America Jobs, for example, doesn’t on its face sound like something that is backed by the crypto industry, so an ad sponsored by them could come across differently to voters who see it as 'sponsored by Defend America Jobs' rather than, say 'sponsored by the crypto industry'," he explained in an email.

He added that, while massive spending like what the Ohio race has seen can make a difference, each dollar spent typically comes with "diminishing marginal returns" and "tends to even out" when parties' spending is balanced.

As of last week, Republicans had outspent Democrats in the race by around $29 million, according to local outlet WTOL11, demonstrating the party's confidence in its ability to flip the Senate seat.

Vandewalker said that in the hyper-partisan era, individual candidates in congressional elections "are less important than party control of either chamber," which often leads to megadonors and partisans flocking to spend their money in the most competitive Senate or House races.

"Sherrod Brown is very vulnerable, and these groups see that."

The Ohio Senate race is one of the most contentious in the nation as the Democratic Party fights to retain control over the upper chamber. Sen. Joe Manchin's, I-W.Va., seat is expected to flip to Republicans as he retires at the end of the term. As Democratic incumbent senators fight for seats in states like Pennsylvania, Montana and Wisconsin, the party is banking on maintaining at least 50 seats and holding out hope that Vice President Harris will win the presidency, allowing running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to be the deciding vote in the Senate that puts them up to 51.

Brown's reelection bid has become the fight of his political life as he faces an election map that favors his opponent. The last decade has seen the Buckeye State go from purple to ruby red, with Ohioans electing Trump by over eight points in the last two presidential contests.

That rightward shift in Ohio's political ideology has left Brown, a progressive who has held office in the state since the 1970s, the only statewide Democratic elected official — except for some Ohio Supreme Court Justices — and at much higher risk of being ousted by wealthy businessman Moreno.

The incumbent had a five-month head start in filling the airwaves with ads but in the six weeks before the election, Moreno, the GOP and his backers are kicking their ad spending into high gear and have closed the gap between the candidates, making it a toss-up by most polls' standards. Brown leads Moreno by 1.6 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight's polling average.

"Sherrod Brown is very vulnerable, and these groups see that. They recognize that if they can defeat him for reelection, there's a very, very good chance the Republicans will control the Senate," Beck said. "And once you control the Senate, there are all kinds of things you can do legislatively you can't do if you don't have that kind of control."

about 2024 congressional races

Does the Constitution even apply to Donald Trump? If he wins, probably not

Donald J. Trump infamously called for the termination of the Constitution when he was seeking to be declared the “RIGHTFUL WINNER” of the 2020 election in December of that year.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he wrote on Truth Social.

If Trump wins the election next month, that wouldn’t even be necessary, because the six Republican-appointed members of the Supreme Court did that for him on July 1 of this year when they decided his petition seeking immunity from prosecution in his favor in Trump v. United States.

Legal experts writing on that blasphemous decision have concentrated on the court’s distinction between a president’s “official” and “unofficial” acts. When the court found that “the President may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts,” it also found that “the president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts.”

How Kamala Harris can fight the renegade Supreme Court — and win

Wow, thank you for that, Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett. Since the Constitution itself is utterly silent on the matter of presidential immunity, it was nice of you to create it for us.

I got down into the weeds of Roberts’ decision and some of Barrett’s concurrence, and I have to tell you that only in the Olympic sport of gymnastics have I ever seen such an ability to bend over backward while bowing before power. Within the first two dozen pages, I lost count of the number of citations of previous Supreme Court decisions and decisions by lesser courts, an obvious and extensive attempt by Roberts to be taken seriously.

Roberts' law clerks must have put in for disability pay after the time they spent paging through the impenetrable gibberish of former Supreme Court justices and other federal judges, none of whom, it should be noted, ever located the paragraph or sentence in the Constitution where the word “immunity” is found alongside the words “president” or “presidential.” Not a peep from all the “originalists,” incidentally, whose squawks could be heard for miles when the Supreme Court found, in Roe v. Wade, a right to privacy in the Constitution that they pointed out, ad infinitum, was not in its text.

There is one gigantic omission in the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Trump v. United States. They somehow forgot the implications of their decision found in the fourth clause of Article II, Section 3, which states that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That is, if a president’s official acts are immune from prosecution and oversight by the Congress, which the court's decision also makes clear, then a president is a law unto himself. How can a man who has been given the power, in effect, to unilaterally make law also make sure that he “takes care” that any such laws are “faithfully executed,” since he is the one executing them?

Do you see the problem of circularity here? The court had an opportunity to notice this problem when Roberts effectively dismissed the charge against Trump for conspiring to overthrow the election when he told Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Republican congressmen.” Roberts found that the charge must be dismissed because any conversations between Trump and Department of Justice officials fell within the scope of his official duties.

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So here we go: We’ve got a law that needs to be faithfully executed, the one against defrauding the United States by conspiring to interfere with its official function, that being the election and certification of a president; and we’ve got the man who should be ensuring that this law be faithfully executed — that is, not violated — engaged in wholesale violation of the law himself.

This is as clear an example of Donald Trump unilaterally making law as can be imagined. The law he sought to make was to appoint himself and Republican members of Congress as the arbiters of which electors were properly elected and which were not. That was clearly intended to allow false electors to be certified, thus negating the genuine electors from certain states who had been certified and submitted by those states’ governors to the National Archives and thence to the Senate.

The Supreme Court decision, in throwing out the federal indictment of Trump for conspiring to overturn the election, also throws out paragraph four of Section 3 of Article II of the Constitution. So, the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States not only created an immunity not found in the Constitution, it unilaterally overturned and rewrote the language of the Constitution itself — a power which, we might add, is also found nowhere in the Constitution.

There are either checks and balances, or there are not. One of the checks established by the Constitution is the power to write laws. This check restrains certain behavior by human beings who are citizens by making that behavior illegal. It is a federal crime, for example, to steal money deposited in banks whose deposits enjoy protection under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. If this law did not exist, it might be a state crime to steal from a bank, but it would not be a federal crime. The way that the executive branch — that is, the part of the government overseen by the president — enforces this law is through the Department of Justice and the FBI, the duties of which, in part, include investigating bank theft. Another federal crime investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the DOJ is wire fraud, which can include the theft of funds carried out across state lines using “wires,” which now include the internet.

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So let’s posit something, shall we? Let us say Donald Trump is elected president, and sometime next year, after his inauguration, he calls in Jeffrey Clark, the former assistant attorney general who tried to get Trump to appoint him as acting attorney general, and whom Trump has now appointed as the actual attorney general. Don’t laugh; it has been suggested. – The two of them engage in what the Supreme Court has said is protected “official” conversation: Trump tells Clark that he wants him to steal some money from a bank, and tells him to use wire transfers to move funds from one account to another one, of course controlled by Trump. Clark does this, naturally.

One: Trump cannot be prosecuted for theft. John Roberts says so.

Two: If an attempt is made to prosecute Jeffrey Clark, say, by a rogue U.S. attorney in the state where the bank is located, Trump can immediately pardon Clark.

So what we have here is the perfect crime. A theft takes place, enriching one man, who happens to be president of the United States. He is immune from prosecution because the Supreme Court created that immunity, despite the fact that he indulged in two crimes: theft and his failure to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed.”

Chief Justice Roberts was already the author of one of the most ignorant, upside-down and despicable lines in any Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott. But he has outdone himself this time.

Now, you may say there is still what they call in the law a recourse: Trump could be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors” and removed from office. The Congress tried that twice, for crimes far more serious than theft, and was stymied each time by Republicans in the Senate. But no matter whether impeachment and removal takes place or not, the Supreme Court has made Trump immune forever from the crime he committed while he was in office because it was an “official act.”

The Constitution does not say in Article II, Section 3, that the president will take care that the laws be faithfully executed except for the laws that apply to the president. It says “the laws,” presumably meaning they apply to us all.

Chief Justice Roberts is the author of one of the most ignorant, upside-down and despicable lines in any Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott. He wrote in his Shelby County decision, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Now he has outdone himself. In Trump v. United States, he wrote, “The President is not above the law.”

He may as well have added, “but Donald Trump is,” because that was the real-world effect of his decision. Donald Trump, who wanted the Constitution “terminated,” has achieved his ends, because if he is elected next month, the Constitution will not apply to him. He will be untethered from reality, oversight and law. He won’t be just a dictator. John Roberts, with the help of Alito, Thomas and the three justices Trump appointed, will effectively have made Donald Trump a god.

from Lucian K. Truscott IV on 2024

“An uphill battle”: Why semiconductor manufacturing jobs will take years to fill

Job creation, particularly in the manufacturing sector, is a key focus in a tight presidential race that has seen both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris pitch various plans.

Of the many manufacturing jobs the U.S. has lost to countries with lower production costs over decades, semiconductor manufacturing is making a strong comeback.

Its return stemmed from a significant microchip shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic that affected everything from cellphones and cars to satellites and generative AI. In response, President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022, allocating $52.7 billion to fund semiconductor manufacturing over five years. The goal is to revitalize the industry, create high-paying jobs and address growing competition from China.

Since the law was enacted, semiconductor giants like Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung have committed nearly $400 billion in investments and are projected to create 115,000 jobs nationwide by 2030, representing a 33% growth from the current 345,000 jobs, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

Want a good manufacturing job? You need computer and programming skills now

But filling these positions remains a significant challenge two years after the law took effect.

"On the talent front, semiconductor players face an uphill battle. Already contending with considerable attrition and recruitment challenges, companies must compete with other industries for a shrinking population of skilled workers to build and operate their new US facilities," consulting firm McKinsey said in a report.

The Semiconductor Industry Association predicts that by 2030, 67,000 of the anticipated 115,000 new jobs could go unfilled at current degree completion rates. Of the unfilled jobs, 39% will be technicians, most of whom will have certificates or two-year degrees; 35% will be engineers with four-year degrees or computer scientists; and 26% will be engineers at the master's or doctoral levels, the association said.

Staffing shortages could put domestic objectives for the industry at risk, drive up labor costs and delay or diminish the return on this monumental investment, McKinsey said.

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The shortage of skilled workers has already impacted Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, which produces the majority of the most advanced semiconductor chips for clients like Apple and Nvidia. As a result, TSMC has been forced to delay production at two of its Phoenix, Arizona, plants—pushing completion from 2024 to 2025, and from 2026 to 2028, respectively.

TSMC first announced plans to build a chip production facility, known as a "fab," in Phoenix in May 2020, followed by additional investments in two fabs that will bring its total Arizona investment to over $65 billion. These facilities are expected to create around 6,000 jobs, more than 20,000 construction jobs and tens of thousands of indirect supplier jobs. As of February, TSMC had filled more than half of the 4,500 positions needed for its two Arizona fabs. A TSMC spokesperson did not disclose the company's latest staffing situation.

To address the talent gap, TSMC has launched several programs. For engineer roles, TSMC collaborates with state universities, including Arizona State University, in training centers, mentorships and engineer recruiting efforts. For technician positions, TSMC has partnered with Maricopa Community Colleges and the public school district West Maricopa Education Center to provide technical education programs, along with launching a Registered Technician Apprentice program, the spokesperson said.

Other major players in the semiconductor industry, such as Intel, GlobalFoundries and Samsung, have forged partnerships with academic institutions. Moreover, various government-supported initiatives and programs are sprouting across the country to help meet workforce demands.

However, some argue that more needs to be done. A report by the Institute for Policy Studies highlighted issues such as low pay, lack of career advancement, long hours and unsafe working conditions as factors that may deter people from staying in the industry.

Low pay, lack of career advancement, long hours and unsafe working conditions may deter people from staying in the industry.

According to job search and community site Glassdoor, semiconductor technician salaries range from $50,000 to $74,000, while engineers earn between $131,000 and $215,000 annually. However, workers often face 10 to 12-hour shifts, night shifts and weekend on-call rotations.

The Institute for Policy Studies has called for the CHIPS Act to ensure that public investments lead to actual good jobs, urging the Department of Commerce to require CHIP grantees to offer equal employment opportunity, minimum living wages and benefits, safe working conditions, opportunities for career growth and the right to organize.

"Taking all possible steps to ensure that jobs created by the CHIPS Act are well-paid and safe is not only important for protecting workers but for the success of the whole program," the report concluded.

about personal finance

Trump’s apparent decline might make his next coup tougher to pull off

Anyone who's paying attention has noticed that Donald Trump isn't doing so well. First came the bizarre town hall last week, in which the Republican presidential nominee swayed back and forth to music for 39 minutes to avoid taking questions. Trump followed up last weekend by boring a crowd in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with a meandering 12-minute story about Arnold Palmer, ending with the apparent boast that he'd seen the famous golfer's genitalia. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, even the loyal rally audience reacted with "stone silence" to most of this. Even the smattering of laughter when Trump marveled at the Palmer penis was, Bunch suggested, mostly a "nervous outlet for this American unraveling."

It remains to be seen if swing voters know how badly Trump is decompensating. Most people have better things to do than watch his long, strange rallies. His campaign team has canceled a series of press interviews, claiming the candidate is "exhausted." The press is finally starting to report how much Trump's behavior aligns with what medical experts cite as signs of age-related cognitive decline: such as disinhibition, confusion and erratic moods. He is sometimes unable to answer a basic question, forgetting what was asked and talking about random nonsense instead. At a different town hall event on Sunday, Trump bragged about his "cognitive tests" before forgetting the host's name and then seeming to forget his own age, saying he's "not that close to 80," even though that's about a year and a half away.

Today, Trump:

—Continued to insist he is not cognitively declining while still refusing to release his medical records
—Appeared to forget his age and went on an unintelligible rant about “donuts” and “stoves”
—Said Americans who don’t support him are the “enemy” while dictators… pic.twitter.com/Em3oTLvTmY

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 21, 2024

On CNN, Leigh McGowan suggested that the Trump campaign is hoping to distract voters just enough to get him over the finish line, where presumably he would be managed and possibly replaced by his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

McGowan: When are going to stop pretending that this is the real candidate. They’re just trying to get him across the finish line. There is no way that this man who can't make it through an entire speech, who keeps canceling things, is going to be a person that does 4 more years. pic.twitter.com/uAb5MXOtZE

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 19, 2024

It's terrifying that so many voters are ignorant and indifferent about the fact that this increasingly confused and angry person has a coin-toss chance of once again winning the presidency. That only adds to the terror of knowing that so many people actually back him, despite his past attempt to steal an election, which led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. But there's a small sliver of hope in this alarming situation: Trump's mental state will make it much harder for him to steal the election if he loses to Kamala Harris in November.

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Stealing an election is hard work and requires focused leadership. As anyone who watched the Jan. 6 committee hearings or has read some of the indictment materials from special prosecutor Jack Smith can attest, Trump spent the last months of 2020 working the phones, conspiring with lackeys and pushing propaganda with a level of energy and sharpness he can no longer summon up for a 15-minute interview.

Despite his admission there is no evidence of election fraud, the certainty that Trump will attempt a coup if he loses in November is approximately 100%. But he failed in 2020, when he had the power of the presidency. As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times wrote last week, "He has no legal authority. If he loses, he’ll be just another private citizen, urging other private citizens to commit state and federal crimes on his behalf." Melissa Ryan, a researcher who was instrumental in sounding the alarm in 2020, is far more chill about the possibility this time around. "We know what they’re planning," she wrote Monday, noting that the press now takes those plans far more seriously than they did in 2020. So does the Democratic Party is. The Harris campaign has built a small army of lawyers and election experts to fight Trump's potential coup, mostly composed of people who cut their teeth demolishing his efforts in 2020.

Experts: Analysis shows Trump proposal would "dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances"

Politico published a lengthy article on Sunday detailing exactly how Trump plans to steal the 2024 election. As Ryan notes, it's the same plan he used in 2020: Lean on election officials in swing states to refuse to certify the results, and then send slates of fake electors to D.C. These would be criminal acts, to be clear. Many of the people who participated in Trump's last coup attempt time are now facing criminal penalties — including Trump himself, who is under both federal and state indictments for election-related felonies.

It was difficult enough for Trump to convince enough people to play along in 2020 — when he was in the White House and before those folks knew that going to prison was a real possibility.

As Bouie writes, Trump's "ability to reverse a loss is limited to his ability to inspire others to commit crimes on his behalf." As we learned from the 2020 attempt, that requires him to apply personal pressure to a large numbers of state and local officials. It was difficult enough for Trump to convince enough people to play along in 2020, when he was in the White House and before those folks knew that going to prison was a real possibility. Now the person tasked with bringing together a large-scale criminal conspiracy cannot maintain his focus or contain his temper, both of which are baseline skills for persuading others.

Republican voters may not be paying attention to their candidate's possible cognitive decline, or may not care. But Republican leaders must know that Trump, who already demonstrates a myriad of personality disorder symptoms, is falling apart. As was widely reported in the months before Joe Biden withdrew from the race, the chatter within the Democratic power class was almost deafening levels, as leaders and party officials spoke behind closed doors about the president's age-related decline. It's hard to imagine that the same thing isn't happening among Republicans, who already have a robust culture of talking smack behind each other's backs. Add to the mix that Trump frequently holds court at Mar-a-Lago, where a rotating cast of gossipy, power-hungry strivers bears direct witness to his incoherence and unpredictable behavior. That's not an environment conducive to getting everyone on board with committing a bunch more serious crimes.

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Naturally, there are some caveats we must address. It may be that, as progressive researcher Will Stancil argues, "Republicans think Trump will be a vegetable in office, so Thiel/Vance were hoping to puppeteer him." If that view is widespread, it could be that Republicans reluctant to back the rapidly failing Trump in a coup could muster up the will for the far more coherent Vance. It's also true that many Republicans who stood in Trump's way in 2020 have been drummed out of the party, replaced by even more rabid MAGA types. So it would be unwise to conclude that it simply can't happen. It's good news that Democrats and the press are monitoring the situation far more than they did in 2020.

Still, Bouie is right: If Trump wants to marshal hundreds — or more likely thousands — of people into risking prison on his behalf, he will need to bring maximal powers of personal persuasion to bear. These people may giggle when Trump rambles through a bunch of unrelated MAGA buzzwords, but that's because they're not really listening. They're mostly excited that his gross and uninhibited talk triggers the liberals. But if they're forced to focus on committing crimes for this guy, they will likely pay closer attention. His declining ability to generate a comprehensible sentence, much less string together a coherent argument, will raise serious concerns. It's one thing to back a jumbled, messy figurehead when your principal goal is sticking it to the woke liberals. But when the pressing question becomes "Will I go to prison for this?" a lot of people, MAGA loyalists or otherwise, most people will require some reassurance from somebody who's capable of making sense.

about Trump, Vance and the 2024 race

Why “playing it safe” could lead to disaster for Kamala Harris and the Democrats

When Joe Biden made the historic decision in July to step aside as the Democratic Party's 2024 nominee, Donald Trump was clearly taken off guard. Kamala Harris immediately leveraged a high-dominance leadership strategy, buttressed by positive messaging, to launch a sustained offensive that was immediately reflected in public opinion polls.

It took weeks for Trump and his surrogates to recalibrate and react — and when they did, the Trump campaign launched increasingly racist, authoritarian, sadistic and outright fascistic attacks — not just against Harris and the Democrats but against large segments of American society. In the days remaining before Nov. 5, Trump’s attacks are likely to escalate even further. In all, one could compare this election campaign to a fight inside a phone booth. Harris and Trump appear to have virtually equal odds of victory in what now appears to be one of the closest elections in American history, as well as one of the most important, the bitterest and the most highly combustible.

New polling from Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion reports that 84 percent of African-American likely voters in the seven key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — support Harris. While that is obviously a large majority, it probably isn't enough. In 2020, Biden won 90 percent of the Black vote across the country. Harris will likely need the similar near-unanimous support from African-American voters — who are indispensable members of the Democratic base, generally speaking — to win this election. A new NBC News poll shows that young voters and Black voters, in particular, have low levels of interest and engagement with the 2024 election. Lack of interest among those groups appears to be at its lowest level in 20 years.

Donald Trump's counterproductive final campaign push: Now is not the time to get cocky

A New York Times report published earlier this month adds further context to this electoral problem:

Democrats have been banking on a tidal wave of support from Black voters, drawn by the chance to elect the first Black female president and by revulsion toward former President Donald J. Trump, whose questioning of Ms. Harris’s racial identity, comments on “Black jobs” and demonizing of Haitian immigrants pushed his long history of racist attacks to the forefront of the campaign.

Ms. Harris is no doubt on track to win an overwhelming majority of Black voters, but Mr. Trump appears to be chipping away broadly at a longstanding Democratic advantage. His campaign has relied on targeted advertising and sporadic outreach events to court African American voters — especially Black men — and has seen an uptick in support. About 15 percent of Black likely voters said they planned to vote for the former president, according to the new poll, a six-point increase from four years ago.

Donald Trump continues to experience what appear to be worsening challenges with his speaking, thinking and overall behavior, although his appeal is largely predicated on the notion that he is a vibrant and energetic personality, even at age 78. (If Trump takes office and serves a full term, he would become the oldest president in American history, surpassing the 81-year-old Biden.)

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump’s erratic and frequently offensive behavior — which is a principal factor in the limitless adulation of his followers — reached a new low, even by his standards. Historian Heather Cox Richardson described it in her daily political newsletter, beginning with Trump's "long, meandering story" about golf legend Arnold Palmer "that ended with praise for Palmer's … anatomy":

He went on to call Vice President Kamala Harris — whose name he deliberately mispronounced — “a s**t vice president. The worst. You’re the worst vice president. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here, you’re fired. Get out of here. Get the hell out of here, Kamala.”

As Trump’s remarks got weirder and weirder, the Fox News Channel cut away and instead showed Harris being cheered at a packed, exuberant, super-charged rally in Georgia.

Donald Trump has repeatedly implied or hinted at his desire to be America’s first dictator, and is escalating that rhetoric. Last week, he suggested, not for the first time, that he might invoke the Alien and Sedition Acts to crush “the left” and other “enemies," by using the military if necessary. By implication, those “enemies” include virtually anyone who opposes Trump and his MAGA movement.

M. Steven Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has appeared on BBC, CNN and other major networks, and has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy and elsewhere. His new book is “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.”

In the second part of my conversation with Fish, he argues that Harris' "joyful warrior" campaign strategy can be combined with an aggressive, sustained effort to highlight Trump’s flaws of personality and character and his overall failures of leadership. Fish warns that one of the Harris campaign’s greatest weaknesses has been a failure to dominate the news cycle. He is concerned that Democrats may lose a highly winnable election against a greatly weakened opponent through being overly careful, restrained and passive — in other words, defaulting to the party's worst habits rather than highlighting its successes and defining the terms of political battle.

This is the second part of a two-part conversation.

How is Kamala Harris' campaign doing at this point? She has increasingly turned to podcast appearances instead of focusing on the legacy news media. Is that a viable strategy?

The joyful-warrior approach is a winner. Exuberance projects confidence, which voters experience as strength. From the moment Harris took the helm on July 21 through the early aftermath of the Sept. 10 debate [with Trump], the Democrats weren’t just joyful; they also displayed the marks of warriors. But over the next few weeks, they started sinking back into their old risk-aversion, lying low and hoping Trump would discredit himself. It’s encouraging that Harris seems to be picking up the pace of interviews.

"If the candidates are unwilling to say anything new and provocative, the media will focus on their misstatements and artless dodges. … Playing it safe is the most dangerous thing Harris can do."

But her success will depend on what she says and how she says it. In recent interviews she has made a habit of stonewalling, dodging and reformulating questions to render them amenable to stock, scripted responses. When she was confronted with this matter recently, she said that her approach was a sign of discipline. She might see it that way, but many voters — including those she most needs to impress — are more likely to see it as annoying and craven. Warriors don’t lack the courage to answer questions directly. What’s more, if the candidates are unwilling to say anything new and provocative from day to day, the media, to the extent they cover them at all, will focus on their misstatements and artless dodges. Thus, the New York Times' only top-of-the-news story on Harris recently was headlined, “In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues to Bob and Weave.” She can’t afford those kinds of headlines. At this point, playing it safe is the most dangerous thing Harris can do.

The medium in which she broadcasts her message — traditional media, podcasts, whatever — is of little importance, though some non-traditional outlets could be helpful in broadening the campaign’s reach. What matters most is that Harris and Walz stay on offensive against Trump while offering dramatic narratives of their own lives and careers, including times when they won big, fell short or changed their minds due to their own deeply-held values. If they do that, they will command coverage across all media.

As we discussed in one of our previous conversations, I don't know why Harris and her campaign aren't constantly attacking and mocking Trump everywhere he goes. They should counter-program every Trump event. They should be across the street from every major Trump event.

Absolutely. You’d think the Democrats would get this all the more, since when they did bear down on ridiculing Trump it worked magnificently and Harris shot up in the polls. The proof of concept could not be clearer.

But after mid-September, the Democrats seemed to fall back on their old fear-driven messaging: How will Trump’s campaign react? Will voters turn against us if we admit a past mistake? Won’t Trump’s base be so offended by attacks on their hero that they’ll rush to the polls in record numbers?

Again, in recent days there are signs that the Harris-Walz campaign is taking a more aggressive tone, and they have gotten off some good shots. Last week Harris mocked Trump for cutting off questions at a recent town hall event in Pennsylvania to sway awkwardly onstage as a musical playlist blared for over 30 minutes. It was funny, and it made news.

Harris is explicitly discussing Trump's apparently damaged capacity. Is that a bad idea, or is it too little too late?

It’s great that she’s doing so, and now she’s got to escalate. Trump’s derangement shines forth more brilliantly every day, so she’s getting a constant stream of great material to work with.

But Harris can’t expect to prevail if she falls back on the Democrats’ old practice of standing back and ceding the spotlight, hoping that it will be enough to just let Trump be Trump. Nor should she or other top Democrats breathlessly repeat his outrageous statements and implore voters to join them in being offended.

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Sen. Chris Murphy’s recent barrage of frantic tweets reminding voters that Trump calls undocumented immigrants “rapists” is an example of what does not work. Those passive tactics have defined the Democrats’ approach to Trump since 2016, and they’ve left him in command of the news. They’ve also left many people who don’t like his message impressed with his cheek, gall and ability to drive the libs nuts. If Harris wants Trump’s extremism and apparent derangement to stick to him, she’s got to peel his Teflon off with her own hands. That means relentless, exuberant ridicule that is bold and entertaining enough to command attention, rattle Trump, thrill her base and earn her a reputation as a real fighter who is ready to rule.

The mainstream media is committed to its horserace narrative. Now they are in a phase of emphasizing anti-Harris stories. They are also continually upset that she is supposedly not giving enough interviews.

I’m always skeptical about blaming the messenger. The media report news that earns clicks and revenue, and the Democrats cannot expect the media to adhere to their narrative if they don’t offer a compelling one about themselves and entertaining takedowns of their opponents.

When the Democrats were raucously celebrating their own accomplishments and eviscerating Trump nonstop — as they did during the DNC, for example — that’s what the media covered. Once they seemed to be sinking back into fear-and-fretting mode, the race that they should have been running away with remained, predictably, a dead heat. The uptick in interviews may quiet some media critics, but the Democrats never should have opened the door to these complaints in the first place.

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Harris was smart to go on Fox News. Wandering into that jungle shows no fear, which is exactly what Harris must do every day from now until Nov. 5. Just agreeing to do it left her looking confident, while a sputtering Trump unloaded on Fox for inviting her. Bret Baier turned the interview into a belligerent joke, but Harris stood her ground, and you’d have to be pure MAGA to have seen her as anything other than the adult in the room.

At the same time, Baier predictably tried to make the whole thing about illegal immigration, and Harris failed to take advantage of that. Like Biden and Hillary Clinton before her, she keeps acting as if soft-pedaling the distinction between legal and illegal immigration is the way to the hearts of Hispanic voters, even though in a recent survey 53 percent of Hispanics, and 62 percent of all respondents, said they favored a plan to deport people who are here illegally. Other polls show that most Hispanic citizens don’t think Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric is aimed at them. This all helps explain why Hispanics have been going over to Trump in droves.

Of course Harris doesn’t have to ape Trump by calling for mass deportation, but she does have to make a hard distinction between legal immigration (glorious, the source of our nation’s people and power), and illegal immigration (bad, punishable by laws that Harris, as a longtime guardian of law and order, will vigorously enforce). Talking about prosecuting human traffickers and fentanyl smugglers isn’t enough.

Another warning sign is that Harris is struggling to get endorsements from the big labor unions.

The Democrats have often reflexively feared they just aren’t showing Jack and Diane enough love, but nobody has ever showered them with more of it than Biden and Harris, and it has not moved the needle.

"Once [the Democrats] seemed to be sinking back into fear-and-fretting mode, the race that they should have been running away with remained, predictably, a dead heat."

The contest over who loves America more is far more important to blue-collar folks across the ethnic spectrum than the competition over who loves the middle class more. An overwhelming majority of working-class voters, and especially men, vote for Trump, and they do so above all because they think he is strong and patriotic and treats them like Americans. At least since Hillary Clinton, the Democrats have seemed to think that treating them like a low-status group in dire need of a government-supplied break would provide the terms of endearment.

Liberal elites have grown blind to the visceral power of patriotism, especially among working-class people. For a while, especially during the DNC, I thought the Democrats were correcting course, but I’ve yet to see a hardcore, relentless red-white-and-blue blitz. To be sure, the Democrats aren’t neglecting the flag entirely. But they should be dumping a fortune on ads that show Harris saluting troops, backgrounded by the fluttering Stars and Stripes, and ringed by generals and former national security officials calling Trump a disgrace and a menace to American security, honor and pre-eminence. We heard a lot about such patriotic heavyweights and their contempt for Trump at the DNC and during the debate. Now we need nonstop carpet-bombing. Harris is a red-blooded patriot, and Trump is a yellow-bellied traitor. The Democrats should be pounding that truth into voters’ heads around the clock.

When I look at Trump, I see a charismatic malign actor who in his own way is very intelligent, with dangerous people around him backed by hostile foreign powers who have been shaping the media and larger information space on his behalf. Many liberals and progressives instead choose to mock Trump and his allies or laugh at them, while feeling smug and superior. That will not stop Trump or save America's democracy and freedoms. What do you see?

The problem isn’t that liberals look down on Trump and regard themselves as superior, since Trump is laughable and most Americans are decent people who are far superior to Trump. The problem is that liberal elites apparently still don’t understand that Trump’s superpower is his ability to “own the libs” who look down on him and his followers. Still beholden to the mistaken notion that Trump’s bigotry is his greatest source of appeal, liberals too often take a pass on "owning" Trump instead, while murmuring among themselves about how racist the other half of America must be. By so doing, they fail to take out Trump’s dominance advantage while continuing to look like snooty elites.

Think about how Harris could deal with this effectively. Opportunities arise every hour. Bill Whitaker asked, in her "60 Minutes" interview, how millions and millions of Americans could support a man she called a racist. She evaded the question, leading Whitaker to ask it again. She dodged again, offering something about Trump being divisive and Americans wanting a uniter, not a divider. She could have given an answer that would blunt the perceptions of liberal condescension, seize the flag, earn herself a reputation as a bold truth-teller and crush Trump’s dominance game. Something like: “Trump is a racist and therefore an enemy of the United States, but most of those who voted for him aren’t racists. What they loved about him is how he owned the libs — but nobody owns this lib. No wonder he chickened out of a second debate; did you watch me whip him in the last one? And why are we even talking about Trump? Biden smoked him four years ago and I’m gonna smoke him in four weeks.”

"They should be dumping a fortune on ads that show Harris saluting troops, backgrounded by the fluttering Stars and Stripes and ringed by generals and former national security officials."

Americans would get to see what we long for most, and that is a real leader — someone who tells the truth and is up to her ears in vitality, the courage of her convictions, and confidence in herself and her fellow Americans. Consistently answer questions like that and 300+ Electoral College votes would sit in Harris’s column on Nov. 6.

I predicted, quite early, that Trump would win in 2016. I was widely mocked for that. I think Trump has a much better chance of winning this year than many people would like to believe. To me, the 2024 election stinks of 2016. Please calm my anxiety, if you think it's unjustified.

Harris has immense advantages, as we saw in spades during the initial stages of her campaign. The economy could hardly be better. There are signs that her campaign knows they must return to a high-dominance strategy. Harris recently has been saying that Trump is too weak, exhausted and mentally unstable to lead, which is exactly the kind of language she should be using. Trump’s apparently already addled mind and debauched morals are in terminal decline, and his campaign isn’t doing much right. Even without a shift in tactics, Harris might still win.

But the specter of 2016 looms, and for the same reason it did then: While Trump is ignoring the polls and saying anything he pleases, the Democratic candidate has too often been treating risk like kryptonite and exaggerating the importance of “the issues” while underestimating the importance of perceptions of candidates’ mettle. As a result, according to today’s 270-to-Win, Michigan and Nevada are tied, Harris is up in Pennsylvania and Trump is ahead in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Maine’s 2nd district. In this scenario, even if Harris took the tied states, Trump would win, 272-266. And by the way, Trump gained ground recently in Michigan after, as the Democrats put it, he “insulted Detroit.” Michiganders couldn’t care less; Trump’s remarks might have even lifted his numbers outside the Motor City and Ann Arbor. Relying on simply repeating Trump’s tirades to stoke voters’ umbrage has never worked, and it won’t work now.

All these states are of course extremely close, and Harris and Walz could sweep them and put a stake in Trumpism’s rotten heart. But to do so, they must recapture the news-making, Trump-owning, drama-rich spirit of mid-July to mid-September. They’ve got to gut Trump while telling their own compelling personal stories, loud and clear. For Harris, the key to motivating supporters, impressing the undecided and deflating turnout for Trump is telling her own truth and letting the chips fall where they may. In other words, the way to please the most voters is to show that she doesn’t care if she pleases anybody. Nothing else will suffice — and nothing more is necessary.

about the anxiety-producing 2024 race

Climate change despair has never been higher — but experts say hope is still possible

Julie France is a 34-year-old Millennial in Denver, a high-altitude Colorado city theoretically safer than other places from one of the most conspicuous ravages of climate change: hurricanes, such as Helene and Milton, the pair of hurricanes responsible for recently battering the Southeastern United States. Aware of climate change from a very young age, France has spent her life making choices about driving, meat consumption, buying locally and other carbon-sensitive issues with the global crisis in mind. She continues to be mindful of global heating as an adult, telling Salon that “it does impact my everyday decisions.”

France’s experience echoes similar decisions made by hundreds of millions of Millennials who are likewise aware of climate change — often painfully so — and must plan their futures accordingly. For decades, scientists and sociologists alike observed that Millennials have been growing up disenchanted with the future, being the first generation constantly aware of the changing climate. Now the next generations are also succumbing to that uniquely modern version of existential despair… but experts say hope is not lost for any generation.

This famous hurricane-chasing weatherman says people are avoiding the ugly truth on climate change

A recent survey study Lancet Planetary Health found, using data of more than 15,000 16-to-25-year-olds, that human-caused climate change is impacting the mental health of 85% of young Americans. This includes overwhelming majorities of Democrats and independents (96% and 86% respectively), as well as nearly three out of four Republicans (74%). The study comes with potentially serious political consequences, as respondents of all ideological persuasions wanted more government action on the environment.

More than three out of five report feeling anxious, powerless and/or angry because of climate change, while almost two out of five say it impacts their ability to function daily. More than half (52%) report basing their decisions to have children on the reality of climate change, with more than two-thirds (69%) saying it also influences where they choose to live.

"The study shows widespread distress among U.S. adolescents and young adults about climate change."

But one of the main takeaways from this research is that feeling despair about the climate is not unusual. Lead researcher Dr. Eric Lewandowski, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University told Salon that “it's clear from this study that if you are feeling anxious or concerned about climate change, you are not alone! Very much the opposite. That creates a potential for change.”

“The study shows widespread distress among U.S. adolescents and young adults about climate change, and that climate change is affecting their expectations and plans for the future,” Lewandowski said. “The study of course indicates that young people want decisive action from elected and business leaders, but it also shows really anyone who is concerned with the well-being and mental health of the younger generations that they have an important role to play as well.”

And there is still time for meaningful action on climate change, as the crisis has not degenerated to the point where absolute catastrophe cannot be averted.

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“It is still possible to avert warming of 1.5º C or 2º C” above pre-industrial levels, the threshold many climate scientists regard as a crucial point of no return, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann told Salon. “The obstacles aren’t physical or technological, they’re entirely political at this point.”

Mann, who was not involved in the study, added that he knows firsthand that both Millennials and Gen Z feel despair about their future because of climate change. He recalled a focus group performed with University of Pennsylvania undergraduates which found climate anxiety arises from two different sources: “a sense that it’s too late to act, and a sense that our politics are too fraught to address the climate crisis. The first is easily alleviated — the science tells us it’s not too late to avert the worst impacts.”

"I think the anger, to be righteous in nature, has to be directed at the bad actors who have blocked climate progress: fossil fuel executives and petrostate authoritarians."

While Mann acknowledged that the political situation “is more challenging,” he added that “it is my hope that the upcoming election will show that science, reason and justice can prevail in our political system.”

According to Dr. Peter Kalmus, a NASA climate scientist who was likewise not involved in the study, the underlying problem is the way in which people in power are still consciously choosing to prioritize fossil fuel profits and power over the lives and futures of young people. “Society in general is supporting this decision due to intentional disinformation from the fossil fuel industry but also because of fossil fuel comforts and convenience,” Kalmus, who emphasized his opinions are his own, told Salon.

Lewandowski urged young people to do more than vote, but also “go a step further to think what ways you can get involved in trying to help tackle the problem. Worry is our signal to act and taking action helps, especially when we take action with others.” Instead of feeling like passive and helpless victims, people can join activist organizations or talk to “climate-aware mental health professionals and resources,” which can be found online. It can also be helpful to explain to climate change deniers how their actions are harmful to them.

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“Well over half of the respondents in this study who said they have tried to talk about climate change said that they have felt dismissed or ignored,” Lewandowski said. “If sharing concerns about climate change with others and having them validated is helpful, then denial of climate change and related distress can have the opposite effect.” Speaking from his own experience, Lewandowski noted that “this can feel like a rejection which can be disorienting and alienating.”

Despite this perhaps understandably hostile reaction, Mann told Salon that it is never productive to direct anger against innocent people, particularly by indiscriminately blaming the older generations.

“I think the anger, to be righteous in nature, has to be directed at the bad actors who have blocked climate progress: fossil fuel executives and petrostate authoritarians,” Mann said. “Many elders are actually working hard to effect the needed change.”

Kalmus had his own hopeful note: “We have the alternatives we need: solar, wind and batteries,” he said. “It’s just a question of taking power away from the people who are blocking that transition due to prioritizing their bank accounts over all of life on Earth.”

about climate change

Frog habitats are drying up due to climate change, study finds

A recent study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that severe increases in aridity caused by climate change is drying out frog habitats across the globe. In fact, unless humans significantly reduce burning fossil fuels, the international team of scientists found that by 2080 to 2100, anywhere from 7 percent to more than one-third of frog habitats will become too arid for survival.

An even higher percentage of these areas, between 15 percent and 36 percent, is expected to regularly experience droughts due to the frequent heat waves caused by climate change. Unsustainable land use also contributes to the aridity problem, with frogs frequently suffering as humans develop their homes for commercial, residential and other uses.

A fungal pandemic is massacring frogs, but scientists just found a virus that could lead to a cure

This is not the first paper to draw attention to how frogs are vulnerable to climate change. A 2022 study in the journal Scientific Data revealed that scientists do not know the heat vulnerability for 93 percent of recognized amphibian species — yet many of the 616 species of toads, frogs and salamanders were chronicled as possessing wildly varying levels of heat tolerance.

“We focused on amphibians because 41% of the assessed species are threatened, and temperature is an important driver of their extinction,” the authors said.

As the scientists behind the Nature Climate Change study explain, their findings do not only have implications for frogs. Species all over the planet are going to struggle as the Earth unnaturally heats. And like ripples in a body of water, the damage caused to one species can spread to other forms of life.

"To understand and manage the effects of climate change on biodiversity, we must integrate knowledge on biologically relevant processes for different types of organism in different habitats," the authors explain.

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Britney Spears announces marriage to . . . herself

Britney Spears is committed to one person and one person only — herself.

On Sunday, the pop star took to Instagram to post a video in which she's seen in a white ankle-length silk dress and a lacy veil, as though dressed for a wedding — which, in a sense, she was.

"The day I married myself … Bringing it back because it might seem embarrassing or stupid, but I think it’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever done !!!," Spears writes in the caption for the video, which features Sting's "Fields of Gold" playing in the background.

"Kindly f*** off": Britney Spears fires back at Ozzy Osbourne for calling her dancing "sad"

Spears' divorce to her third husband, Sam Asghari, was finalized in May. Prior to that short-lived union, she was married to dancer Kevin Federline — with whom she shares two children — and Jason Allen Alexander, whom she split with only 55 hours after their spur-of-the-moment Vegas wedding in 2004.

In her memoir, "The Woman in Me," Spears reflects on her marriage to Alexander, writing, “The third night we were together, he and I got s—faced. I don’t even remember that night at all, but from what I’ve pieced together, he and I lounged around the hotel room and stayed up late watching movies — 'Mona Lisa Smile' and 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' – then had the brilliant idea of going to A Little White Chapel at three thirty in the morning. When we got there, another couple was getting married, so we had to wait. Yes – we waited in line to get married . . . People have asked me if I loved him. To be clear: he and I were not in love. I was just honestly very drunk — and probably in a more general sense at the time in my life, very bored.”

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Infant deaths rose nationwide following overturn of Roe v. Wade, study finds

Infant mortality increased in the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leading to legislation across the country that drastically limited the accessibility of abortions with widespread reproductive health consequences.

In the 18 months following the Supreme Court decision rescinding the federal right to abortion in the Dobbs decision in June 2022, the infant mortality rate was 7% higher than expected, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics today. This corresponded to 247 excess deaths in three months studied — October 2022, March 2023, and April 2023. More than 80% of those deaths occurred in infants with congenital abnormalities.

A leading abortion provider on why restrictive laws are taking us back to the Dark Ages

As of this writing, 20 states have banned abortion or passed legislation that bans abortions within early gestational limits, and the majority of these states do not have exemptions for fetal anomalies. This pushes some pregnant people to give birth to babies with congenital anomalies and watch them die just after birth, when they may have elected for an abortion before to avoid such a traumatic experience.

Infant mortality was trending downward until 2022, when it increased for the first time in 20 years by 3%. Negative trends in maternal and infant health have coincided with legislation that restricts abortion access, and research has shown that infants die at higher rates in states with stricter abortion bans. A similar study also published in JAMA Pediatrics earlier this year found infant mortality rose by 13% in Texas after it banned abortions after six weeks in 2021. Also in that study, infant deaths caused by congenital abnormalities increased more than overall deaths.

“Whether the pregnancy was wanted or unwanted, we know that many of these are pregnancies that would have ended in abortion had people had access to those services,” Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, an associate professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science at the University of California, San Francisco, told CNN.

about abortion

“Wicked” memes have taken a nasty turn following Cynthia Erivo’s poster slam

A now viral fan-edited poster for "Wicked" has triggered a chain reaction, with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande — who play frenemies Elphaba Thropp and Glinda Upland in the upcoming film — positioned at the center of an online firestorm.

While both stars were traveling across the country to promote the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, set to hit screens on November 22, new photos of the movie poster were shared with the public, emulating imagery from the musical that inspired it. However, there were some slight changes that one fan took issue with online — namely, the fact that Elphaba's eyes were visible and not covered by the brim of her witch's hat, as in the original Playbill — so they changed it.

With the power of Photoshop, the fan took to TikTok to debut their edit of the poster, with their version pulling the witch hat further down Erivo's face, covering her eyes. The edit also changed Elphaba's lip color from green to red and upturned her lips. Safe to say, the edit wasn't met lightly by Erivo, who lashed out in a post to Instagram, writing, “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen, equal to that awful Ai of us fighting, equal to people posing the question ‘is your ***** green.' None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us.”

Erivo continued, in a now heavily memed line, “I am a real life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer . . . because without words we communicate with our eyes. Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.”

"Wicked" star Cynthia Erivo slams fan-edited poster that covers her eyes

Since Erivo addressed the controversy regarding the fan-edited poster, there's been a serious uptick in nasty memes about her, pushing back on her statements.

Why is the internet trolling Erivo so hard over this? And what does Grande have to say about it? Salon explains it all:

The internet memes Erivo not once, but twice

When Erivo called out the edited fan poster, the Tony winner also made mention of her disgust over an AI-generated video of the poster that depicts Erivo and Grande fighting each other. The AI video has been viewed a million times on X and continues to circulate on the internet, trolling the relationship dynamic between frenemies Elphaba and Glinda, and the actors themselves.

waittt, lowkey wanna know what was the tea 😭 pic.twitter.com/KLIIJQJjp5

— ⱯRTEM 👹 (@artemxcx) October 12, 2024

Even worse, there is also another meme circulating on the internet that sexualizes Elphaba, featuring text that reads: "Is your p***y green?"

Erivo made it clear to "Wicked" fans that this is unacceptable.

In her statement about the poster, Erivo hammered down on the offensiveness of this, writing, "I am a real-life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer . . . because without words we communicate with our eyes." However, this line is being used in an endless meme format on X, with countless tweets that have been viewed millions of times.

One X user riffed on her comment by sharing a video of a green drag queen with bulging eyes.

cynthia erivo when she chooses to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer pic.twitter.com/MueIHZkzuU

— Callum Asplen (@callumasplen) October 16, 2024

Writer and journalist Hunter Harris played off Build-A-Bear's new "Wicked" bears: "Elphaba choosing to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer — good."

elphaba choosing to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer — good https://t.co/m2qtJFco7x

— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) October 19, 2024

Another user, posting a photo of Karlie Kloss' "looking camp right in the eye" Met Gala photo, wrote, "Cynthia Erivo looking right down the barrel of the camera to look at you, the viewer, right in the eye."

cynthia erivo looking right down the barrel of the camera to look at you, the viewer, right in the eye pic.twitter.com/SirFDYoh7H

— jennifer check (@wh0rchata) October 16, 2024

One person even brought Halsey's viral "The Greatest Impersonator" homage to Britney Spears into the mix, writing, "I hope she doesn’t impersonate Cynthia Erivo because that would be just deeply hurtful, like erasing her."

Ariana Grande's statement and responses to it

Following the meme storm, Ervio's co-star Ariana Grande addressed the controversy in a quote to Variety at the Academy Museum Gala on Saturday.

“I think it’s very complicated because I find AI so conflicting and troublesome sometimes, but I think it’s just kind of such a massive adjustment period. This is something that is so much bigger than us, and the fans are gonna have fun and make their edits,” Grande stated.

Ariana Grande on the #Wicked poster that Cynthia Erivo criticized: "It's very complicated, because I find AI so conflicting and troublesome sometimes, but I think it's such a massive adjustment period…I have so much respect for my sister Cynthia, and I love her so much." pic.twitter.com/PIsBeK225l

— Variety (@Variety) October 20, 2024

When questioned whether the memes and AI have gone too far, Grande said, “I think so. And I have so much respect for my sister, Cynthia, and I love her so much."

However, people online are not buying Grande's support of her cast member.

"You can tell she doesn’t feel the same way but was very respectful & considerate of Cynthia’s feelings," a fan wrote to X.

"Why would they even ask her this? Of course she was gonna dodge the question, she’s not gonna throw Cynthia under the bus, no matter how she actually feels about the memes," another fan posted.

Additionally, others came to the defense of Erivo, citing that Black women face higher levels of harassment and ridicule online.

"People are bullying Cynthia Erivo now and yes, it’s rooted in misogynoir," a fan chimed in. "She said she didn’t like the memes and people are intentionally making memes to humiliate her and disrespect her and they’re even tagging her so she’ll see. They would never treat Ariana this way."

Even a large unofficial "Wicked" update account clocked in on the mess, writing in a post, "Y'all always talk about mental health and how sad it is when something happens to someone, but then continue to bully and harass celebrities on things they’ve already stated make them feel uncomfortable. Y'all are heartless and performative."

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Water challenges — made worse by rising temperatures — are threatening the world’s crops

A new report finds that one-quarter of the world's crops are grown in places facing high levels of water stress, water unreliability, or both. The analysis comes from the research nonprofit World Resources Institute, or WRI, and highlights the difficulty of growing enough food to meet rising demand on a warming planet.

One out of every 11 people in the world are hungry, meaning they don't get enough food to maintain basic health, according to a recent United Nations report. The water challenges outlined in WRI's latest research could potentially contribute to increased levels of food insecurity, especially as global temperatures continue to rise.

The report looks at both irrigated crops, in which water is transferred from reservoirs to cropland, and rain-fed crops, which receive water through precipitation. The authors relied on WRI's existing global water risk data and compared it to crop production data from the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Analyzing both sets of data, the report authors found that both irrigated and rain-fed crops face complications when it comes to water access. For example, about 60 percent of irrigated crops by weight come from regions of the world facing high or extremely high levels of water stress. Water stress refers to heightened competition over water resources; it is considered high when 40 percent or more of an area's local water supply is spoken for by agriculture, energy, industry, and household use.

Areas facing high levels of water stress require robust water management and governance, said Sam Kuzma, one of the report authors. The problem, she said, stems partly from a common tendency to take water for granted and treat it like an endlessly renewable, on-demand resource. "Because we don't put a value on water, you can irrigate and not pay much at all for the water that you're using," said Kuzma, who runs the water data program at WRI. "That means we can be pretty reckless with how we're growing and in what environments. That's why you see alfalfa being grown in the desert."

The majority of the world's irrigated crops — 72 percent — are grown in just 10 countries, including Brazil, China, India, and the United States, according to WRI. These crops include staples like rice, wheat, and corn that make up a good chunk of the world's calories.

The high rate of water stress in areas that grow irrigated crops spells trouble for global food security. India, for example, is a major agricultural producer and the world's largest exporter of rice. The country faces significant water risks; about one-fourth of its total crop production comes from areas using more water than can be naturally replenished, according to WRI's analysis. Kuzma noted that this can lead to groundwater depletion in parts of the country that rely on a source of water that "just isn't going to be there forever" if current usage rates continue. "If that's a key part of our global food supply chain and we no longer have the water to create those commodities, then sorry, everyone is impacted," she added.

WRI also looked at water unreliability facing rain-fed crops, which make up two-thirds of the world's food supply. Its analysis found that 8 percent of rain-fed crops by weight face high to extremely high levels of water unreliability, which refers to fluctuations in the annual water supply such as periods of drought and extreme precipitation events caused by climate change. As the planet continues to warm, the amount of rain-fed crops affected by these conditions could jump 40 percent by 2050, compared to 2020 levels. Warming temperatures are also likely to impact irrigated crops, as crops need more water to survive in hotter climates.

Nicole Silk, the global director of freshwater outcomes at the environmental nonprofit The Nature Conservancy, noted that these challenges are having a dire impact on people and communities. Floods and droughts are just as likely to put both "people and crop production in jeopardy," she said. "We're increasingly moving towards a world where both people and food production are going to be in places that are particularly water stressed," she added.

As a sector, agriculture is the number one consumer of freshwater globally, accounting for 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals — the process of removing freshwater from surface-water sources, like rivers and lakes, as well as groundwater sources like underground aquifers. In its latest report, WRI refers to agriculture as the largest driver of water stress. And yet, food has to be grown somewhere, somehow, by someone. Indeed, all signs point to more food needing to be grown, as the global population is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050. The challenge, then, becomes how to grow crops without exacerbating water resources.

"We have to be smarter about what we grow, and we can be smarter about how we grow what we're growing," said Silk. She endorsed some of the interventions proposed by WRI as potential solutions — particularly, paying more attention to soil health (because the more moisture soil can retain, the less water farmers need to add to crops). WRI also recommends shifting diets away from meat, which requires a tremendous amount of land and water to produce, towards less water-intensive foods.

Silk also mentioned incorporating more nature-based solutions, "green" strategies that attempt to replicate an ecosystem's natural rhythms, as opposed to "gray" interventions that involve humans building new infrastructure. The most effective nature-based solutions for managing water on cropland will vary from place to place, depending on geography as well as what's being grown. Silk observed that "because water is always on the move," finding the best management strategies will require taking a step back to see the full picture — for instance, reforestation can improve water quality and regulate the water cycle within a landscape. "I think ultimately it becomes a really interesting opportunity for conservationists to meet with farmers and ranchers, to meet with local water regulators and utilities, and also with Indigenous peoples and populations," she said.

Kuzma noted that farmers know better than anyone — and typically before anyone else — about the water challenges they face, and that WRI's analysis is really meant to communicate those risks to a broader audience. And she recognized that these management shifts and policy recommendations involve asking farmers to "change how they operate," which usually requires them to shoulder the financial burden of climate adaptation alone. "We also need to be thinking about what type of financial policies and corporate sponsorship we can be providing" to make those shifts possible, she said.

Silk agreed. "Sometimes farmers and ranchers are willing to change their practices, but they don't necessarily have the financial resources to do so," she said. "So if they're incentivized to change those practices or somebody else can come in and help them, it makes a big difference."

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/article/water-availability-farmers-crops-food-agriculture/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Exonerated “Central Park 5” sue Trump for defamation

The "Central Park 5," a group of five men who were wrongfully convicted of rape and assault in 1989, are suing former President Donald Trump for defamation after he’s repeatedly claimed they were responsible for the crime, most recently in the 2024 presidential debate.

“Plaintiffs have suffered injuries as a result of Defendant Trump’s false and defamatory statements and bring this lawsuit to obtain redress,” the filing reads.

The lawsuit was filed by Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise. In 1989, the five men were falsely accused of brutally raping and beating 28-year-old Trisha Meili while she was jogging in Central Park. The men, who were between 14 and 16 at the time, served several years in prison before being exonerated in 2002. The case exposed racial inequities at the heart of the American criminal justice system.

"We will write the next chapter": Exonerated Central Park 5 wins New York City election

Trump’s attacks on the "Central Park 5" span back nearly 30 years. Just two weeks after Meili was attacked, Trump took out full page ads in major New York City newspapers calling for the teenage boys to be executed.

“During our trial, it seemed like every New Yorker had an opinion. But no one took it further than Trump. He called for blood in the most public way possible,” Salaam wrote in an article for The Washington Post.

Even after the men were exonerated, Trump has insisted they are guilty. “If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case — so we’ll leave it at that,” he said in 2019.

When Vice President Kamala Harris brought up Trump’s history with the Central Park 5 during the presidential debate on Sept. 10, Trump lied once again, falsely claiming that the group pleaded guilty and "killed a person ultimately.”

“These statements are demonstrably false. Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing. Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed,” the filing reads.

The lawsuit asks for an unspecified amount of compensation.

about criminal justice

“Clearly illegal”: Legal experts slam Musk’s $1 million “lottery” for registered voters

Tesla founder and X CEO Elon Musk announced Saturday that he will hand out $1 million daily in a lottery for registered voters in battleground states up until Nov. 5, prompting harsh criticism from critics who say the move appears to clearly violate federal law.

“I have a surprise for you. We are going to be awarding $1 million to people who have signed the petition — every day, from now until the election,” Musk told a crowd in Pennsylvania. He then handed the first daily lottery winner a check for $1 million.

To be eligible for the proposed lottery, voters have to sign a petition “to support free speech & the right to bear arms” put out by Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC. Musk has poured over $75 million into America PAC, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

"It raises serious questions": Shapiro wonders if Musk giveaways are illegal

According to its website, the petition’s goal is to “get 1 million registered voters in swing states to sign in support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.” Registered Voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and North Carolina are eligible.

“All you need to do is sign the @America petition in support of the Constitutional rights to free speech & bear arms to have a daily chance of winning $1,000,000!” Musk wrote in a post on X. “You can be from any or no political party and you don’t even have to vote.”

Musk, the world’s richest man, has emerged this election cycle as one of the GOP’s most important mega-donors. A vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, he is also in control of one of the world’s most far-reaching social platforms, which he’s used to spread pro-Trump messaging and misinformation about the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

But legal experts say the billionaire may have gone too far this time.

“Though some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” UCLA law professor Richard L. Hansen wrote on his website, "Election Law Blog."

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Hansen pointed to Section 52 U.S.C. 10307(c) of the federal code, which states that any person who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." He added that Musk is also in violation of the Department of Justice Election Crimes Manual, which defines illegal bribes to incentivize voting as “anything having monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery chances, and welfare benefits.”

“I’d like to hear if there’s anyone who thinks this is not a clear case of a violation,” Hansen wrote.

Former Justice Department official David Becker also pointed out that anybody who accepts a Musk payment could be in legal jeopardy too.

“Not only Musk, but anyone accepting this payment, could be subject to fines and up to 5 years in prison,” Becker wrote on X.

“Admittedly, I would be happy to sign a meaningless petition for Elon Musk to give me one million dollars. But I’m not eligible, because I’m not a registered voter in a swing state,” Democratic pollster and strategist Matt McDermott wrote. “Which is what makes his actions a federal crime. It should be swiftly investigated and prosecuted.”

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Musk’s lottery was “deeply concerning” and raises “serious questions” worthy of investigation.

“I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race — how the dark money is flowing, not just into Pennsylvania but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians,” Shapiro said.

about Musk and the 2024 campaign