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One year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion care has become a patchwork of confusing state laws

In the year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling struck down the constitutional right to abortion, society has been seeing the results of a post-Roe world.

While there is no law in the U.S. that regulates what a man can do with his body, the reproductive health of women is now more regulated than it has been in 50 years. And the scope of reproductive health care that women can receive is highly dependent on where they live.

This creates a system of inequalities and further exacerbates health disparities.

I am a nurse practitioner who studies women’s reproductive health across the lifespan.

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My research found that college women are concerned about pregnancy, but they lack knowledge and skills about navigating sexual consent and often participate in sexual activity without explicit consent, leaving them at risk for not using contraception and exposure to sexually transmitted infections.

These findings indicate that women are at risk of pregnancy at a historic time when women’s reproductive rights in the U.S. are restricted and not guaranteed.

A retrospective on Roe v. Wade – and a look ahead.

Current state of abortion in the US

The Dobbs v. Jackson ruling returned decisions regarding abortion to individual states. This has led to a patchwork of laws that span the entire range from complete bans and tight restrictions to full state protection for abortion.

In some states, such as Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, abortion is banned beginning at six weeks gestational age, when very few women even know they are pregnant. Other states, such as Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and Oregon, have enacted state-level protections for abortion.

The patchwork of state laws also results in a great deal of confusion. In the past year, women’s rights organizations and women’s health advocates have brought numerous legal challenges to restrictive abortion laws. These cases have halted the implementation of some of the strictest abortion regulations until additional court rulings are finalized.

Downstream effects for health care professionals

Abortion training is considered essential health care and a core competency for physicians in obstetrics and gynecology, or OB-GYN, residency programs. Approximately 50% of OB-GYN residency programs are located in states with restricted or highly restricted access to abortion. This will logically result in not only fewer health care providers being trained to perform gynecologic procedures for abortion, but also other conditions such as miscarriage, fetal death and nonviable pregnancies.

In states with changing abortion laws and legal challenges to new laws, physicians are uncertain of what procedures can be legally done. Penalties for violating abortion laws may include arrest, loss of medical license, fines and discipline by state boards of medicine.

As a result, physicians are choosing to leave states with the most restrictive abortion laws, and clinics are closing, which is contributing to the current shortage of health care providers.

Inequalities in health care access

The unequal access to abortion procedures across the country is most directly affecting the poorest women in the U.S.

Currently, 12 states restrict abortion coverage by private insurance, and more than 30 states prohibit public Medicaid payment for abortion. Women who qualify for Medicaid are among the poorest in the U.S. Lack of access to abortion limits education and wage earning and contributes to poverty. States with the most restrictive abortion laws also have limited access to pregnancy care and supportive programs for pregnant and parenting women.

In addition, traveling to a different state to obtain an abortion is often not possible for poor women. Lack of transportation and limited financial resources reduce or eliminate options to obtain an abortion in a different geographic location.

What’s more, states with the most abortion restrictions have some of the worst pregnancy and maternal health outcomes for women, especially women of color. Pregnancy itself is associated with a risk of dying.

Maternal morbidity is the term used to describe short- or long-term health problems that result from pregnancy. Maternal mortality refers to the death of women during pregnancy or within the first six weeks after birth.

For example, Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest rates of maternal mortality in the U.S. and also have the most restrictive abortion laws. Black women have the highest maternal mortality of all races and ethnicities. Women in these states who are unable to terminate a pregnancy have a higher risk of dying as a result of the pregnancy than women in other states.

Additionally, research shows that a woman’s risk of dying related to pregnancy or childbirth is about 14 times higher than the risk of death from an abortion.

In addition to the increased risks of death, there are other physical and mental health implications associated with carrying an undesired pregnancy to term. Being denied access to abortion is associated with increased anxiety and fewer future plans for the next year. Research also shows that not being able to obtain an abortion makes women more likely to live below the federal poverty level and to lack partner support.

Conversely, research has shown that there are few if any significant negative mental health outcomes among women who have abortions.

Unsafe abortions

Restricting legal abortion increases the risk that women will seek out pregnancy termination from unskilled people in unsafe settings. Or they may not seek care quickly for pregnancy complications due to fear of being accused of a crime.

In Texas, physicians are reporting an increase in sepsis, or an overwhelming response to infection, from incomplete abortions. These physicians predict that sepsis will become the leading cause of maternal death in Texas.

Prior to 1973, when Roe v. Wade established constitutional protection for abortion in the U.S., women often resorted to unsafe methods to induce abortion that resulted in a high death toll. Septic abortion wards – or designated areas of hospitals where women were treated for sepsis as a result of illegal abortions – were common. In 1965, 17% of all deaths related to pregnancy were attributed to illegal abortion.

Now that the constitutional right to abortion has been eliminated, more women will inevitably die or become seriously ill due to lack of safe access to abortion services. In states with the most restrictions on abortion, whether a woman meets the criteria for an exemption to save the life of the mother may be decided by a hospital committee. This can delay necessary care and increase the risk to the mother.

Said one: “I didn’t know I was important enough to draw boundaries around what people could and couldn’t do with my body.”

Women affected by violence

In the U.S., more than 25% of women will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Violence from an intimate partner is a leading reason for abortion. My research shows that women affected by violence have a higher risk of pregnancy and that college women are at increased risk of nonconsensual and forced sexual encounters.

Currently, there are 14 states with abortion bans that contain no exception for rape or incest or require that the sexual assault be reported to law enforcement to qualify for exception.

Research has shown that women often don’t report sexual assault due to stigma, embarrassment or fear of not being believed. Even if women qualify for an abortion as a result of sexual violence, those who have not filed a formal police report lack “proof” that their pregnancy resulted from assault.

While the changes that have occurred since the fall of Roe one year ago are already deeply concerning, the full effect of eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion won’t be known for years. And as laws are enacted and subsequently challenged, uncertainty and confusion regarding women’s reproductive health care will undoubtedly continue for years to come.

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

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Andrew Tate was never “just trolling”

Even after the #MeToo movement, we’re still in a world where the dominant narrative is that feminists are overreacting to online misogyny and the so-called “manosphere,” a loose collection of “pick-up artists,” “incels,” “men’s rights activists” and various troglodytes who spend hours online spitting venom at women and celebrating the most toxic of masculinities. When feminists point out the proliferation of online forums dedicated to misogynist talk or organized social media harassment campaigns like Gamergate, they are generally dismissed as hysterical or told that they can simply log off and it will all go away. 

“Our society has sublimated the threat posted by online misogynistic extremism ito the perception of a small group of immature, annoying, sometimes funny teeangers, joking around and playing technological tricks,” Laura Bates writes in her book “Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All.” Bates explains that “The most important element of this caricature is that it is perceived, above all, as harmless, or at least not genuinely harmful.” Online misogynists are generally spoken of as “trolls,” she writes, a non-threatening term that implies they are “too stupid to do much real damage beyond giving people the occasional scare.” 

It’s a persistent bit of wishful thinking in our culture, that misogynist talk somehow has no relationship to actual violence against women.

That discourse dimmed a little in the past couple of years after the Proud Boys — a group that emerged from the world of online misogyny — were involved in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. There have also been numerous examples of real life violence committed by so-called “incels,” a subset of online misogynists whose main gripe is that women don’t “give” them the sex they feel entitled to. Still, the tendency in both mainstream media and the larger public is to minimize online misogyny as mere “trolling,” something that fundamentally will go away if studiously ignored. 

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This week, the world got another stark reminder that the world of online misogyny is not contained to the internet, but shaping the behavior of boys and men offline. British national Andrew Tate, one of the most popular “masculinity” influencers on the internet, was indicted on Tuesday after initially being charged with rape, human trafficking and organized crime with his brother in Romania. Tate, who has denied the charges, is up there with pseudo-intellectual Jordan Peterson and thick-necked podcaster Joe Rogan as a leading figurehead in the wildly popular online movement to protect and restore caveman-style masculinity. Except Tate, a former kickboxer, speaks to a much younger male audience, targeting primarily teenage boys. 

As Shanti Das at the Guardian explained last year, Tate “is one of the most famous figures on TikTok, where videos of him have been watched 11.6 billion times.” He “talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping them from going out,” Das writes. He also “says women belong in the home, can’t drive, and are a man’s property.”

Tate is a phenomenon among boys junior through college age. As Madeline Will wrote in Education Week in February, “Teachers across the world, including in the United States, have shared on social media that they’ve seen an uptick in male students repeating sexist vitriol” they picked up from Tate. Even though Tate has been banned from TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, “fan clips of his videos still circulate on those sites” and he’s able to post on Twitter, which is now controlled by alt-right troll and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, after initially being banned from the social media site. 

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“Tate draws young boys in with his talk of fancy cars, the money he makes, and his experience as a professional kickboxer,” Will writes. He also offers supposed “advice” on working out and meeting girls. But once in, young boys get drawn into his misogynist worldview. As sociologist Mairead Moloney told Education Week, it’s “really seductive” for boys to listen to “a worldview that puts you at the very center of the world and, in essence, makes all other groups beholden to you.”

The Tate fans who are making pro-rape and anti-woman comments in class will often pivot to a “just joking” stance when teachers confront them. But as these charges show, Tate is not actually kidding when he suggests men have a right to abuse women at will.

The Tate fans who are making pro-rape and anti-woman comments in class will often pivot to a “just joking” stance when teachers confront them. But as these charges show, Tate is not actually kidding when he suggests men have a right to abuse women at will. His online bragging about controlling women is reflected in the stories women tell about his offline behavior, including accusations of rape and strangulation. One woman shared a recording with Vice News of Tate sounding very much like he’s rubbing her nose in a recent rape. 

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It’s a persistent bit of wishful thinking in our culture, that misogynist talk somehow has no relationship to actual violence against women. Donald Trump, for instance, was able to wave away a tape of him bragging about sexual assault by claiming it was just “locker room talk.” It was not, as a jury found just this spring, ruling that journalist E. Jean Carroll told the truth when she said Trump sexually assaulted her in the 90s. 

In February, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report on the teen mental health crisis which had an alarming statistic in it: Nearly 20% of teenage girls reported being the victim of sexual violence in 2021. More than 1 in 10 said they’d been raped. This cuts against longer term trends showing an overall decline in sexual assault, and so was especially alarming. Some conservative writers tried, and largely failed, to discredit the survey, which also found that 30% of teen girls had considered suicide and 20% reported online bullying. 

The pandemic, of course, is the most dramatic event in the lives of kids (and everyone) in the past few years and got the lion’s share of the blame for these stomach-churning numbers. But what cannot be overlooked as a likely factor: American boys are swimming in online propaganda that celebrates sexual violence as both their god-given right and as a way to demonstrate their manliness. One of the most famous figures in the world of teenage boys right now is imprisoned in Romania on charges of rape and forcing women into sex work. It’s highly unlikely that the legions of boys who admire Tate and imitate his workouts, his tastes, and his rhetoric aren’t also emulating the violence against women celebrated in Tate’s videos. 

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In most other aspects of life, it’s generally viewed as common sense to see a link between a person’s beliefs and behaviors. A person who believes in god is more likely to pray. A person who agrees with traffic laws is more likely to obey them. A feminist is more likely to date and marry a man who treats women with respect. A person who likes Donald Trump is more likely to vote for him, etc. But when men say terrible things about women, there’s persistent resistance to the idea that their actions might reflect their words. There’s so much pressure to write it off as “just trolling” or engaging “locker room talk,” and ignore the fact that men who hold misogynist beliefs are also a danger to women. 

Sociologists have tried valiantly to break the stranglehold the “just joking” argument has on our discourse. Study after study shows what common sense should tell us, which is that men who tell rape “jokes” or otherwise express hostile views towards women are also more likely to beat and rape women. Worse, when men hear other men expressing misogynist beliefs, their proclivity to commit rape rises. 

This sobering set of serious charges against Tate will hopefully be a wake-up call. When men brag about violence and egg each other on with competitive misogyny, it’s not just talk. Tate’s popularity isn’t just disturbing because teen boys are repeating his misogynist rhetoric in classrooms. There’s a very real danger that many of them are acting on his words in real life. 

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about the persistence of rape culture

“Trump could win from jail”: Experts explore the limits of prosecuting a presidential candidate

As documented by historian Nancy MacLean and other experts, the Republican Party and larger right-wing and “conservative” movement have spent decades weakening the country’s democratic institutions to make such a revolutionary campaign even more successful and likely. Donald Trump and his forces were able to “win” the 2016 election, spend four years gutting long-standing democratic norms and institutions, and then come perilously close to a successful coup on Jan. 6, 2021, which was a plot that combined a terrorist attack on the Capitol, the Republican fascists in Congress sabotaging the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and a nationwide plan consisting of election fraud, legal challenges, voter intimidation, and outright voter nullification. In the end, it was the American legal system and the courts, while bent and almost broken, that consistently impeded Donald Trump and the Republican fascists’ plans to end multiracial pluralistic democracy.

With Trump’s long-overdue indictment for federal crimes connected to his wanton (and now publicly admitted) violations of the Espionage Act, the rule of law is once again an obstacle to Trump’s plans to return to power where he will most certainly continue with his project to transform the country into a fake democracy and system of “competitive authoritarianism” modeled on Viktor Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.

It is in this context that Trump’s historic indictment on federal crimes takes on the most serious and potentially dire meaning. If Donald Trump is not convicted and put in prison for a very long time, then he and the neofascist movement and broader white right will be even more energized and free to continue their assaults on American democracy and freedom. In that way, Donald Trump’s trial for federal crimes related to the Espionage Act – and likely other federal felonies connected to Jan. 6 – will truly be the trial(s) of the century.

In an attempt to make sense of his truly historic moment, I asked a range of experts for their reactions to last Tuesday’s events and predictions for what comes next in the Age of Trump and the country’s democracy crisis.

Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

David Austin Walsh is a historian and interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. His forthcoming book is “Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right.”

Aside from a general sense of schadenfreude, it is refreshing to actually see a former president held accountable for violating the law. I think it’s a healthy sign for the rule of law in this country and for democracy. These concerns from conservatives—and even some liberals—that prosecuting a former president for violating the law is somehow dangerous for American democracy is ridiculous—this is exactly what liberal democracy is *supposed* to look like.

Now, that being said, I’m ambivalent about the specific charges. Let me stipulate by saying that, although I’m not a lawyer, the case seems to be pretty much a slam dunk, and the photos of boxes of documents in Trump’s bathroom are incredibly politically potent. And Trump being held to legal consequences for anything that he has done is ultimately a net positive. But the Espionage Act itself is a horrid law—a relic of World War I jingoism—that has historically been used to persecute political dissidents and whistleblowers and aggregate power in the national security establishment. And while Trump’s seizure of classified documents and refusal to return them is a textbook violation of the Espionage Act, it is significantly less serious a political—as opposed to legal—crime as his actions on January 6.

Former president Donald Trump is being prosecuted for crimes committed as a private citizen. If the message of prosecuting a former president is that no one is above the law, it’s muddied by this distinction.

There’s another reason I’m ambivalent. Trump’s indictment is a dramatic break from past practice with regard to legal prosecution of former presidents. Ford pardoned Nixon. Reagan and George H.W. Bush got off scot-free for Iran-Contra. Clinton never faced serious legal jeopardy post-presidency for his various scandals. And George W. Bush, of course, never faced justice for the Iraq War. Significantly, Trump is in legal jeopardy not for his actions as president, but for what he did after he left office. President Donald Trump, like his predecessors, remains legally inviolate. Former president Donald Trump is being prosecuted for crimes committed as a private citizen. If the message of prosecuting a former president is that no one is above the law, it’s muddied by this distinction. But they finally got Al Capone for federal income tax evasion, not for murder, racketeering, or Volstead Act violations, so sometimes you have to pick the clear-cut legal case to put away a career criminal.

I honestly don’t know what comes next. We’re in unprecedented territory, for any number of reasons. Obviously, a former president has never been indicted for federal crimes before, but even if we narrow our focus down to the personal, Donald Trump himself has never been indicted for federal crimes before! For all of the lawsuits the guy has faced over the years—and even hardened Trump watchers can lose count—this is by far his most serious legal jeopardy. In terms of the 2024 election, Trump is already positioning himself as the unjust victim of persecution by the Biden administration, which can and does play well to his core supporters within the Republican Party but is absolutely politically toxic outside of that space. It’s important not to exaggerate this — Trump could still very much win in 2024 — but given just how poorly the GOP has fared at the ballot over the past two years, a combination of anti-Dobbs backlash and the fallout from January 6, it’s important not to exaggerate the GOP’s level of electoral support. There’s also the question of violence. Trump, of course, actively incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, after flirting with thinly veiled calls for violence during the entire election cycle. Just the other day, Louisiana congressman Clay Higgins had to walk back a tweet that suggested that armed Trump supporters take matters into their own hands. But—so far—there hasn’t been much violence.

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The rally in Miami last Tuesday was relatively small and non-violent. The New York Times coverage suggested that this might be because of the aggressive prosecutions of January 6 insurrectionists, which is probably true, but it’s also significant that Trump himself is no longer president, and what’s at stake here is not the right’s control of the government but rather the prosecution of a private citizen by the government. I do take the January 6 insurrectionists at their word—most were convinced they were in a life-or-death struggle for democracy, which Joe Biden and the Democrats were maliciously subverting. Now, that was obviously a ridiculous and racist fantasy, but they believed it, and the emotional stakes there were intensified by the symbolism of the Capitol Building. It’s hard to generate that kind of political energy for a criminal case in front of a Miami courthouse.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and author of “Criminology on Trump.”

First and foremost, I was both excited and relieved as there was always a possibility that this indictment or the others might not materialize. However, those feelings were short-lived and in less than one week’s time my anxiety and angst about the dire political realities facing this nation had returned to where they have been since the GOP won back control of the House this past January. I was especially distressed — but not surprised — by the reactions of the GOP leadership and those of the primary candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president. This includes Chris Christie, who as a former prosecutor did not really address Trump’s diversity and widespread criminality nor did he critique the former president’s weaponization or politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and State Department nor did he try to curb let alone kibosh the current GOP attempts to attack the DOJ and to delegitimate its separate or independence from the White House post-Watergate.

With respect to governmental or classified documents, the Republican ringleaders all understand the critical differences between the intentionally lawless behavior of Donald Trump and the behaviors of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence. They know perfectly well that there are not any factual equivalencies here and that the responses of the DOJ to the former president as compared to the others do not represent contradictory expressions of law enforcement and due process. They also know that the DOJ bent over backwards not to have to come after Trump until there was no other alternative but to indict him. Yet, GOP elected officials inside and outside of the House of Representatives and to a lesser degree in the Senate continue to circle the political wagons around Trump who is without any type of viable legal defense.

It is even more depressing that after being caught with and refusing to return nuclear secrets, for example, that Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and other high-profile Republican players are still on a mission to bankrupt the rule of law and our constitutional democracy by, so far, fruitlessly trying to politicize and weaponize these on behalf of themselves and the Racketeer-in-Chief whether he remains at large or confined in a federal prison cell somewhere. The problem in a nutshell is that the GOP still mistakenly thinks that their own abuse of power and corrupted behavior is somehow beneficial to their own political interests of power as if this was some kind of a fantasy game of thrones rather than a reality game of law and order.

There are several things that happen next in this saga:

“I can only imagine two ways that Trump does not get his party’s 2024 nomination – either death by natural causes or death by unnatural causes.”

Frontstage: Everything will be revolving, or should I say spinning chaotically around Donald Trump, which is precisely what his narcissistic and sociopathic personality feeds off of. Trump and his multiple lawsuits, both civil and criminal, will continue to grow in the near future, sucking up most if not all of the political oxygen, for at least the next two years as if the past eight years of this “stable genius” was not much more than enough. This will most certainly be the case unless somehow Trump does not become the GOP nomination for president in 2024. Unfortunately, because of the pathetic nature and composition of the Trumpian Republican Party, I can only imagine two ways that Trump does not get his party’s 2024 nomination – either death by natural causes or death by unnatural causes.

More specifically, by Labor Day Trump should be facing at least two more indictments, one in Georgia and the other in Washington, D.C. I can think of at least one or two if not three more possible criminal indictments in the not-so-distant future.

We will certainly continue to experience the polarizing narratives of democracy for all vs. anti-democratic authoritarianism (e.g., book and curricula censorship, or anti-woke, anti-gender, and anti-ethnic legislation) for the few. There will also be in the present time the continuing tensions between the competent Democratic governing as evidenced by Biden’s rather amazing track record over the first two years of his administration versus the incompetent Republican governing, warfare, and trashing of our institutions without any kind of constructive policy agenda besides that of defunding the people, the commons, and the environment while reappropriating those capital resources to the wealthy and to multinational corporations vis-à-vis a terribly regressive taxation system. 

The collective violence and assault on the Capitol that occurred on January 6th was an organized affair and not spontaneous in nature. This has been confirmed by the lack of any violence at both the Manhattan and Miami criminal indictments. In part, this has had to do with the government’s prosecuting and criminalizing of these violent behaviors as a deterrent, and in part, this has had to do with the historical circumstances that led up to and culminated in a failed coup by insurrectionists who believed in their heart of hearts that they had some kind of realistic possibility of stopping the certification of Joe Biden and returning Trump to the White House.

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In other words, even MAGA folks are not prepared to throw themselves under the bus for the Insurrectionist-in-Chief without some kind of purpose other than to scare or intimidate the authorities which nobody seems up for doing as Trump called for these actions in both Manhattan and Miami to no avail. Nevertheless, my concerns are that nothing much if anything has changed in the authoritarian thinking and behavior of Republican legislators on multiple legal fronts where they are busily engaged in eviscerating both constitutional democracy and the rule of law by trying to establish legally what Trump was unable to complete or accomplish illegally as president.

What is most disconcerting about these partisan trends by Republican in Congress like Ohioans J.D. Vance and Jim Jordan is that while they may be less likely to foment violence like Boss Trump in order to deconstruct the state apparatus, they are stepping up their political leverage or retaliation to accomplish the very same kinds of deconstruction of the state. For example, since the classified documents indictment Vance has been threatening as retaliation to block all Justice Department nominees, including the appointment of federal prosecutors. He and his allies are also working against the FBI and its quest for a new headquarters.

Alan Jenkins is a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on Race and the Law, Communication, and the Supreme Court. His new book is “1/6: The Graphic Novel.”

Equal justice under the law is one of the foundations of our democracy, and it’s crucial that no one be above the law, no matter how powerful. Donald Trump should be treated no better and no worse than anyone else under our legal system.  If Trump did what he’s accused of doing with classified documents, it’s an outrageous threat to our national security as well as a federal crime, and there’s no question that any other American would be prosecuted for it.  By contrast, we have not yet seen legal or political accountability for the elected leaders who tried to undermine our democracy before, during, and after January 6, 2021. That includes Donald Trump, as well as over 150 election deniers in the U.S. Congress, among many others. 

We’re in uncharted territory with Donald Trump’s federal indictment. Trump’s strategy will be to delay the legal process as long as possible, in the hopes that he or some other Republican will be in the White House in 2025 and can either halt the prosecution or pardon him if he’s convicted. The prosecution will pursue a speedy process and, of course, multiple convictions.

I do hope that we will see the same kind of careful and incisive inquiry and, if the facts warrant it, prosecution of elected leaders for the insurrection that we are seeing with the recent Espionage Act indictment.

Charlotte Hill is a political scientist and policy analyst who focuses on revitalizing democracy. She is the director of the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.

Emotionally speaking, it’s a tricky moment. Trump has been a flagrant criminal his entire life, and it’s a big win for the rule of law that he might finally be held accountable. Our criminal legal system is premised on the idea that no one is above the law. If a person with extraordinary political and financial power were to walk away with a mere slap on the wrist, that would destabilize the entire system. And yet—the promise of Trump’s prosecution is stoking the worst impulses of MAGA adherents. One survey estimated that sixteen million Americans agree that “the use of force is justified to prevent the prosecution of Donald Trump.” In our toxic hyper-partisan culture, Republicans would rather go to bat for a criminal co-partisan than denounce one of their own and suffer the ensuing identity crisis. Forgive me for not being ebullient. 

What happens in the primary is still up in the air, but I’d bet that Trump wins the nomination. The only thing he thrives on more than media controversy is political resentment—and this saga has both in spades. If past predicts future, the vast majority of Republicans will then vote for him in the general. It won’t matter what they think about his criminal issues, because they will never, ever vote for a Democrat. This destructive dynamic is a direct result of our two-party, “winner-take-all” political system—which we’ll hopefully reform before it’s too late. In a multiparty democracy, conservatives who were turned off by Trump’s lack of respect for the law and abhorrent personal character could rally around another candidate who hadn’t violated federal statutes (or, for that matter, incited an attack on the Capitol), all while maintaining a stable sense of political identity. But that’s not the party system we’re operating in today. 

“I am hoping everyone focuses on building strong relationships, investing time and energy into creating meaningful art and enriching their lives. That is the only thing that can sustain us through what has been and is bound to be a very challenging and dangerous period in our nation’s history.”

One interesting question will be how young people end up reacting to the indictment and prosecution over the coming year. We already see huge divides within the GOP by age group: when it comes to their beliefs about the importance of hot-button issues of immigration, violent crime, and gun policy, young Republicans are more closely aligned with young Democrats than with older Republicans. There’s also new evidence of young Republicans defecting from their party at the ballot box: in the 2022 midterms, a full 11% of young Republicans voted for a Democrat or a third-party candidate. If the indictment inspires young people across parties to consolidate in opposition to Trump, that could help drive a 2024 victory for Biden.

Shan Wu is a former federal prosecutor who served as counsel to Attorney General Reno. He is a frequent contributor the Daily Beast and appears regularly as a legal analyst in the media. 

I am experiencing a bittersweet reaction– there is satisfaction at seeing the well put together indictment and investigation yet bitterness at how slow the Department of Justice pace has been.  At this point, despite the excellent investigation by Jack Smith’s team being brought to a conclusion, Garland could have sped this up without the lost time it took to appoint a Special Counsel and had a hope of concluding the case before the red zone period of the elections. He failed to do this not once but twice by also missing the mid-term election “deadline.” In the futile effort to protect the Department of Justice from being attacked as partisan Garland has lost precious time that the country will not get back. The effort to avoid criticism has been futile. 

I also am frustrated that they brought the case in Florida. The delay game begins anew with every conceivable effort by Trump’s legal defense team to play to the weaknesses of Judge Cannon who previously showed herself susceptible to baseless legal ploys by Trump’s lawyers in the entire special master case. Whether her intentions really are seeking to corruptly aid Trump, or she is just inexperienced and clueless doesn’t really matter – what matters is the Trump lawyers will strive to throw every manner of delaying tactic at her and it will likely work.

I believe that the Department of Justice and Garland need to ratchet up the aggressiveness. If there are any other potential charges against Trump – for example in another jurisdiction like New Jersey – they need to ramp it up to gain prosecutorial leverage. Right now, despite building a case with very strong evidence they have zero leverage which is not a position that prosecutors are used to being in. They are used to the evidence supplying prosecutorial leverage, but this is an entirely political universe in many ways. Ironically, an Attorney General who truly is not politically motivated is at a severe disadvantage in a situation like this.

Paul Mason is a journalist, filmmaker, and author. His most recent book is “How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance.”

Throughout every stage of the psychodrama that Donald Trump has unleashed, I keep remembering one thing: fascism is the process, Trump is its product.

Where this goes next depends not on him but on the social forces trying to shape America.If a significant portion of GOP lawmakers, in Congress and at state level, take the line that this is a political prosecution, then when he goes down, they will be forced to follow the insurrectionary logic. They established the response – “this is political, America’s a dictatorship” – rhetorically over the Espionage Act in order to prepare for the much clearer slam dunk of any Georgia prosecution.

The problem is, I think Trump could win from jail.

The Democrats – observing a separation of powers on their own side – don’t seem to have a coordinated strategy to stop that from happening. The presidency has to lead a mass movement for democracy and the rule of law. Unless you adopt the strategy called in the 1930s “militant democracy” using all and active measures to disrupt plots, disinformation, armed groups, insurrectionary threats – then if the law and court sends Trump to jail, it could achieve very little.

Why this is important concerns not just the small fry with their open carry demonstrations: the state – across a wide range of institutions – has to confront the GOP leaders and the business leaders supporting Trump’s face-off with the law with the following scenario. The law will take its course. If Trump is guilty, and you act in a way that incites an insurrectionary response, you’ll find out whether the corporation is more powerful than the state.

Steven Beschloss is a journalist and author of several books, including “The Gunman and His Mother.” 

Any time I hear or read aggressive dismissals by Donald Trump’s defenders that it’s all political or just some corrupt plot by President Biden and the Justice Department to deny their hero his rightful return to the White House, I wonder: Did they actually read the 49-page indictment? Anyone who reads the plainly written indictment can grasp the reckless, willful behavior and see Trump is in serious legal jeopardy. Anyone insisting he did nothing wrong or claiming these 37 felony charges involving willful retention, obstruction of justice and the Espionage Act—often detailed with transcripts of Trump’s own damning words—are merely political persecution is simply gaslighting.

Related

Jack Smith is no hero

But as uplifting as I find the work of Special Counsel Jack Smith and his investigators to pursue the criminality without fear or favor—indeed to support the rule of law and equal justice—I worry about the seriously inexperienced and proven pro-Trump inclinations of Judge Aileen Cannon managing the criminal trial. I also wonder if we’ll ever learn whether Trump sold or otherwise shared this classified material with America’s adversaries, putting our national security and intelligence operatives at great risk.

But the fact is that, with this indictment, Donald J. Trump has never been closer to real accountability. That gives me hope for the months ahead.

Jennifer Taub is a legal scholar and advocate whose writing focuses on “follow the money” matters— promoting transparency and opposing corruption. She is the author of “Big Dirty Money: Making White Collar Criminals Pay.”

The initial news of the indictment on Thursday filled me with a sense of relief. This meant that Attorney General Merrick Garland decided not to block Jack Smith from seeking the grand jury indictment.

Then, the following day, when the document was unsealed, my sense of relief was replaced with a range of other reactions. What I was most pleased about was that several of Trump’s employees decided to cooperate with the government, it seems, and provided text messages and testimony without which this case might not have been brought. I was surprised by the number of Espionage Act counts. While I’d anticipated there would be obstruction, lying to the government, and some Espionage Act charges, I did not expect 31 counts along with a description of each document. Yes, there was reporting to this effect, but it was still infuriating that Trump would be retaining and, in some cases, sharing with members of the public documents with the most sensitive information that could harm our national security. Things like our nuclear preparedness and the like. I was also surprised that his lawyer Evan Corcoran kept such detailed notes of Trump requesting that he destroy documents or withhold them from the government. To be clear, I am not surprised he asked Corcoran, as that’s what he did according to the Mueller report, I am just shocked that Corcoran both wrote it down and still continued to represent Trump up until last week.

In terms of next steps for this case in particular, I expect Trump’s lawyers who remain on the case to file motions to request dismissal of the indictment. Plus, they will use any and every tactic they can to delay any trial until after the 2024 presidential election. Outside of court, Donald Trump will continue to attack the prosecutor personally, the case specifically, and the entire Biden administration more generally. He will repeatedly and publicly make false comparisons between himself and others to the point that out of repetition and confusion hundreds of millions of people who support him as well as those who have been neutral or soured on him will begin to sympathize with him. He will continue to bully and threaten Republican elected officials and will most likely win the nomination from his party. He may also support a third-party candidate who could pull votes away from Biden. I hate to be so pessimistic, but he will not give up his egotistical drive to regain the office of the presidency. 

Meanwhile, there will possibly be an indictment out of Fulton County, Georgia (related to the interference in the vote count) and a second one from Special Counsel Jack Smith (related to the 2020 presidential electoral count interference and the January 6th insurrection.)  How this will all fit in before the 2024 election while there is also the Manhattan DA case is a mystery to me.

I am hoping everyone focuses on building strong relationships, investing time and energy into creating meaningful art and enriching their lives. That is the only thing that can sustain us through what has been and is bound to be a very challenging and dangerous period in our nation’s history.

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Why some people will risk their lives to see the Titanic in real life

Ranked among the deadliest sinkings of an ocean liner, the RMS Titanic is one legendary boat. It lies in wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, about 12,500 feet (3810 meters) beneath the waves. While Titanic enthusiasts can easily view artifacts in museums and related exhibits (safely, on land), some fanatics are determined to make the voyage below the ocean to see what remains in real life.

But the trip is extremely dangerous and potentially fatal, as the world is unfortunately witnessing in real-time, following news of a submersible called Titan that went missing Sunday on a journey to the wreckage, sparking an international search-and-rescue effort.

Related

Missing Titanic sub: What are submersibles, how do they communicate, and what may have gone wrong?

Thanks to the operations of a private diving company called OceanGate Expeditions, anyone with the cash can visit the Titanic, if they embark on a eight-day trip. It’s only a quarter of a million dollars per ticket. Founded in 2009 by CEO Stockton Rush — also one of five passengers aboard the missing sub — OceanGate’s 23,000-pound vessel known as the Titan was the cornerstone of his initiative to make sea exploration more accessible to scientists and tourists.

“Dreams don’t have a price. Some people want a Ferrari, some people want a house, I want to go to Titanic.”

Despite the $250,000 price tag, accommodations are far from first class. Passengers stay on a working vessel when they set sail from St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, to the wreckage site 460 miles away. Descending to see the Titanic itself, the customers still have to board a five-person submersible made out of carbon-fiber and titanium that is only 22 feet long. In the cramped conditions, where passengers sit cross-legged, the hope is to reach the wreckage after a two-and-a-half hour descent. (As the company notes on their website, there is a bathroom on the vessel, but they actually advise passengers to restrict their diets before the trip to reduce the likelihood of using it.)

A previous CBS report on the Titan by reporter David Pogue shed light on the risks of the trip. As he said in the segment, the waiver that Pogue had to sign warned about the risk of death. People might be wondering, who would risk their life to see the Titanic in person, if they aren’t scientists or experienced divers — especially when you can see artifacts above ground?

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In the CBS report, Rush explained that they usually have three different types of clientele.

“We have clients that are Titanic enthusiasts, which we refer to as ‘Titaniacs,’ we have people who have mortgaged their home to come and do the trip and we have people who don’t think twice about a trip of this cost,” Rush said. “We had one gentleman who had won the lottery.”

In the report, Pogue interviewed a woman named Renata Rojas who had been saving up to see the Titanic for thirty years.

“Dreams don’t have a price,” Rojas said in the interview. “Some people want a Ferrari, some people want a house, I want to go to Titanic.”

Rojas had been aboard multiple trips that, for a variety of reasons, failed to make it to the wreck site. In an interview with Reuters six years ago, before she finally ended up seeing the Titanic on the trip with Pogue, Rojas elaborated that she had made a lot of “sacrifices” over time.

“I don’t own an apartment. I don’t own a car. I haven’t gone to Everest yet. All of my savings have been going towards my dream, which is going to the Titanic,” she told Reuters in 2017.

“The Titanic just has all the makings for a great drama and subsequent disasters wouldn’t have all these elements to make this fabulous story.”

As Rush alluded, Titaniacs will do anything to see the Titanic in real life. In fact, it was Canadian filmmaker James Cameron’s obsession with seeing the infamous passenger liner in person that led to the creation of his 1997 hit movie “Titanic.” While the “Terminator” and “Avatar” director has not commented publicly on the missing submersible, Cameron personally knows what it’s like to make the harrowing trip, as he should — he’s only done it 33 times. Many of the underwater shots in the film are actual footage. In an interview with Playboy in 2009, Cameron described the Titanic as “the Mount Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver I wanted to do it right.”

In fact, Cameron claimed he got the idea to make a Hollywood movie in part to pay for an expedition to the wreck site. “I made ‘Titanic’ because I wanted to dive to the shipwreck, not because I particularly wanted to make the movie,” he said.

In an article I wrote in April about how misinformation about the Titanic was swirling around TikTok — influencing how a generation of young people learn about the tragedy — Don Lynch, historian of the Titanic Historical Society, told Salon why he believes the public obsession with the Titanic lives on over a century later.

“It is the ultimate story: it’s unsinkable, supposedly, and you’ve got it full of all these key people, like the president of the company that owns it, and the president of the company that built it, and as well as all these famous people . . . and then on its maiden voyage, it hits an iceberg and then sinks so slowly,” Lynch said. “And then there’s all this time for all this drama to be acted out, like the band playing — that just doesn’t get duplicated.”

Lynch added there are other shipwrecks that he personally finds fascinating, but for some reason, the Titanic continues to be particularly captivating to people.

Titanic historian Parks Stephenson and executive director of USS Kidd Veterans Museum told Salon the fascination is interesting, especially as there are worse maritime disasters in history and greater losses of life. For example, in late 1987, a passenger ferry known as MV Doña Paz collided with the oil tanker Vector, triggering an explosion that sank both vessels and left more than 4,300 people dead. In contrast, the death toll on the Titanic was around 1,500 people.

“It just happened at a time when the world was fairly sure of itself, and at that point, it was the top headline,” Stephenson said. “The Titanic just has all the makings for a great drama, I think, and subsequent disasters wouldn’t have such a collection of all these dramatic elements to make this fabulous story.”

As Rush said in the CBS interview, it’s not just “Titaniacs” who will spend the money and risk their lives to see the Titanic. Akin to space tourism, there is also a psychological element to the reasoning why extremely wealthy people will spend so much money to embark on such risky adventures.

“When people get used to a certain level of wealth or comfort or possessions and so on, they quickly get used to it and then they want the next level up,” Suniya Luthar, professor emerita Columbia University’s Teachers College, told Salon in 2021 about the desire to go to space among wealthy people. “You have an individual who’s basically bought all that money can buy, or has had all that money can buy, then, what’s next?”

Television producer Mike Reiss, best known for his work on “The Simpsons,” who took an OceanGate trip 11 months ago, even compared the experience to being shot into space. “It sounds a little grand,” Reiss told CNN this week. “But in every way, it felt like being a Mercury astronaut. This wasn’t a vacation, it wasn’t tourism. It was exploration.” Reiss also described “constant trepidation, constantly knowing this could be the end.”

As search and rescue crews attempt to find the missing submersible, it’s likely the public’s fascination that is contributing to the widespread interest in this mission. But as James Cameron noted in the retrospective documentary “Titanic: 25 Years Later,” it’s easy to get caught up in details of the wreck — but that undermines the real tragedy of the disaster. “You get so into the forensics of how the wreck happened that you forget the people,” he said.

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DeSantis anti-immigrant law sparks mass worker exodus in Florida

A new Florida law cracking down on undocumented immigrants, signed last month by far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis and set to take effect on July 1, has pushed thousands of workers to flee the state.

Now even some capitalists who otherwise support DeSantis and the state’s GOP-controlled House and Senate are beginning to speak out about how the law is likely to hurt their bottom lines.

As The Tallahassee Democrat reported Tuesday:

In his packing plant, Graves Williams, a lifelong Republican, proudly explained the skill, labor, and manpower needed to provide tomatoes across North America, a feat that he says wouldn’t be possible without immigrant laborers.

“We all love them to death,” said Williams, whose family has been farming tomatoes for decades. “We couldn’t run a business without them.”

Williams, the owner of Quincy Tomato Company, may soon be forced to try. Following right-wing lawmakers’ passage of Senate Bill 1718, thousands of working-class immigrants, including many who are residing lawfully in the U.S., have opted to leave Florida.

The new law places harsh restrictions on undocumented immigrants. Among other things, it also requires the “repayment of certain economic development incentives” if the state, which plans to conduct random audits of businesses, “finds or is notified that an employer has knowingly employed” an undocumented immigrant without verifying their employment eligibility.

At the bill signing ceremony on May 10, DeSantis, who is now campaigning for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, slammed President Joe Biden’s ostensibly lax immigration policies, saying: “We have to stop this nonsense, this is not good for our country… this is no way to run a government.”

Data released earlier this month showed that unauthorized crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border fell sharply after the Biden administration imposed new asylum restrictions that went into effect when Title 42 ended on May 11. Undermining DeSantis’ dubious accusation of inaction at the border, immigrant rights groups have condemned Biden’s crackdown on asylum-seekers, saying the president’s new ban deepens the bipartisan abandonment of international human rights law set in motion by the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Florida, DeSantis’ xenophobic approach has sparked fears that “a labor shortage will leave crops unpicked, tourist hotels short of staff, and construction sites idle,” The Tallahassee Democrat noted.

Notably, concerns are emanating from some Republican proprietors.

“How can one man pass one law and destroy all these businesses in Florida?” asked Williams.

“It’s almost like he’s doing it on purpose,” Williams said. “I know he’s doing it for politics, but the end results, it’s going to be hard.”

According to The Tallahassee Democrat: “Florida employers in construction, restaurants, landscaping, and many other service sectors already are struggling to fill jobs during what has been a post-pandemic, sustained stretch of low unemployment. The new immigration limits will compound that, many say.”

However, the newspaper observed, many business owners still “refuse to speak publicly about the measure, fearing it could antagonize DeSantis.”

House votes to censure Trump investigator Adam Schiff

On Wednesday, The US House of Representatives voted 213-209 along party lines to censure Rep. Adam Schiff for allegations relating to his motives and methods in association with the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia.

This vote comes after considerable back and forth stemming from a prior move on the part of a mishmash of 20 Republicans and a majority of Democrats who effectively blocked his censure last week, resulting in Trump’s call for the Republicans to be primaried.

Related

Trump calls for replacement of 20 Republicans who voted to block censure of Adam Schiff

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) led the charge to censure Schiff — who is running for a US Senate seat in California — and issued a statement to Twitter after the vote to say he “is being referred to ethics for an investigation.”

On Tuesday, Schiff made statements to press maintaining his innocence and calling the move against him “a badge of honor.”

“They wouldn’t be going after me if they didn’t think I was effective,” he said.

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“Now Trump is threatening to primary any Republican that doesn’t vote for it. It shows you just who is behind this whole effort to distract from Trump’s legal problems is Trump,” Schiff said in a quote obtained from CNN. “But to waste the floors time on this false and defamatory resolution is a disservice to the country.” 

As The Recount points out in their coverage of the vote, this decision “makes Schiff just the third congressperson this century to face that formal rebuke from the House.”

During his reading of the censure vote, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was met with audible pushback in the way of jeers and boos from the House floor.

“It’s pathetic you’re doing this. Pathetic,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif said on the vote.

Ramping up to the decision, Schiff stood his ground saying, “My colleagues, if there is cause for censure in this House — and there is — it should be directed at those in this body who sought to overturn a free and fair election.”

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GOP aims to use 2024 budget to restrict abortion access across the US

House Republicans have advanced a bill that would majorly restrict access to abortion pill mifepristone as part of a quiet effort to attack abortion rights at the federal level.

Last week, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee advanced funding legislation regarding the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that would revoke an FDA decision finalized earlier this year that greatly increased access to mifepristone. The decision allowed mifepristone to be prescribed in telehealth appointments and sent by mail, as well as allowing the drug to be dispensed by retail pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens rather than just at specific health care providers.

The bill, which passed the committee 34 to 27, would severely restrict access to mifepristone — the second drug in a two-drug medication abortion regimen — across the country. It now goes to the full chamber, where it will likely pass, but it’s unclear if it would pass the Democratically controlled Senate.

Democratic Appropriations Committee member Rep. Norma Torres, Calif., had introduced an amendment to the legislation to get rid of the provision and keep the FDA rule in place.

“Republicans are trying to hijack the routine appropriations process to push through their extreme agenda. Today, they tried to use a government funding bill to restrict access to medication abortion,” Torres said.

The amendment was rejected via voice vote after Republicans voiced their opposition. Republicans touted the provision in the bill, saying that it “protects the lives” of fetuses.

This is one of a series of bills recently advanced by Appropriations Committee Republicans that would restrict abortion access. The day before the FDA funding bill was passed, Republicans on the committee voted to advance amendments to Veterans Affairs (VA) legislation that would ban federal funding for abortions that save the lives of veterans and VA beneficiaries.

Last September, the VA announced that it would provide abortions to veterans and beneficiaries if the pregnancy put their lives in danger. Thirty-four individuals were treated under this policy — which was evidently a step too far for Republicans, who also voted to ban Pride flags from being flown at VA centers and to bar federal funds from being used for gender-affirming care at VA facilities.

The bills are part of an all-out assault on abortion and trans rights that the right wing has been waging recently. Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee issued a bulletin directing congressional Republicans to pursue the “strongest” abortion restrictions “possible.”

With a Democratically- controlled Senate and a Democratic president, Republicans may not be able to achieve the all-out bans that state Republican leaders have imposed, but they appear to be making smaller, less headline-grabbing moves that can be blended into larger bills like regular funding legislation; after all, the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions, has been passed in every congressional funding bill for decades.

“You’ve been nothing but a little b***h to me,” MTG says to Boebert during a House floor squabble

After a House floor voting session on Wednesday, several sources reported witnessing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., in a heated exchange that resulted in Greene allegedly calling Boebert a “little b***h.”

According to The Daily Beast, the argument centered on “competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden,” with Greene making accusations that Boebert copied her in her efforts.

“I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you. But you’ve been nothing but a little b***h to me,” a witness recounted hearing MTG say. “And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to cosponsor them.”

Related

House Democrats erupt in laughter after MTG calls for “decorum” while presiding over chamber

Leading up to this blow-out, Boebert was actively pushing a vote on her own articles of impeachment, which MTG reportedly felt she already had a handle on.

“Lauren Boebert never addressed the conference,” Greene said in a quote obtained from The Daily Beast. “I made it clear to the conference that I have introduced articles of impeachment, literally since Joe Biden’s first day in office. I have been talking about it with everybody forever. Literally, everyone. Forever, ’til I’m blue in the face. You see me? I’m blue in the face.”

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After being confronted by Greene, sources report that Boebert said, “OK, Marjorie, we’re through.” 

“We were never together,” Greene is said to have shot back.

Watch a clip of the moment captured by CSPAN here:

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Alito’s WSJ op-ed didn’t mention SCOTUS takeover architect Leonard Leo’s key role in ethics scandal

The investigative outlet ProPublica reported late Tuesday that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took an undisclosed private jet flight to Alaska in 2008 with billionaire Paul Singer, whose hedge fund repeatedly had business before the high court in subsequent years.

Alito refused to answer questions for the ProPublica story, opting instead to pen a Wall Street Journal opinion piece attempting to prebut the outlet’s contention that his private jet trip with Singer was likely a violation of a federal law requiring Supreme Court justices to disclose most gifts.

The conservative justice insisted there was nothing untoward about the private jet flight to Alaska; his stay at a commercial fishing lodge owned by Robin Arkley II, a donor to the right-wing legal movement; or his decision not to disclose them. Alito wrote that he was “invited shortly before” the fishing trip—without mentioning by whom—and “was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.”

Notably, Alito also omitted the detail that Leonard Leo, co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society and a key figure in the decades-long effort to pull the U.S. judiciary to the right, helped organize the Alaska trip. A. Raymond Randolph, a conservative appellate judge, also attended.

According to ProPublica, Leo “invited Singer to join” and asked the hedge fund tycoon “if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet.”

“Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court,” ProPublica reported. “Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a longtime critic of the Supreme Court’s complete lack of binding ethical standards, argued in a series of tweets late Tuesday that Alito’s attempted prebuttal of ProPublica’s reporting is riddled with holes.

“He just happened to be flying to Alaska and there just happened to be a private jet going to Alaska with an empty seat, and he just happened to find that out, like on some weird billionaire shared-ride Uber?” Whitehouse asked. “Oh, and would that ’empty seat’ trick fly with legislative or executive ethics disclosures? (Hint: no.) And how about with the Financial Disclosure Committee? (Right, you didn’t ask.)”

“This just keeps getting worse,” the senator added.

ProPublica’s reporting on Alito—who authored the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade—comes weeks after the outlet revealed that another right-wing justice, Clarence Thomas, has been taking billionaire-funded trips for decades without disclosing them.

A common thread in the reporting about the two high court judges is Leo, who five years ago attended a vacation with Thomas at billionaire Harlan Crow’s lakeside resort in upstate New York.

In a statement to ProPublica, Leo declared that he would “never presume to tell” the conservative judges “what to do, and no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip.”

ProPublica reported Tuesday that Singer “has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.”

The outlet detailed the most prominent example:

His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles…

Singer’s most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression… Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer’s fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespreadmediaattention.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer’s fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

In 2014, years after the Alaska fishing trip, “the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter,” specifically “how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund’s legal maneuvers in U.S. courts,” ProPublica reported.

Judicial Crisis Network, a right-wing group with connections to Leo, filed a brief in support of Singer’s fund.

“The court ruled in Singer’s favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority,” ProPublica reported. “The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer.”

In his Journal op-ed, Alito claimed he wasn’t aware of Singer’s connection to the case, even though his role was well publicized.

Singer also has connections to a high-profile Supreme Court fight involving the Biden administration’s plan to cancel student debt for many borrowers.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that Singer chairs, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging justices to block the debt relief plan, ProPublica reported.

“If the Supreme Court kills student debt cancellation nobody can pretend the court has an ounce of legitimacy,” the Debt Collective tweeted Wednesday. “Singer became a billionaire buying debts for pennies on the dollar and then weaponizing the courts to collect the full amount from the poorest people. Alito must recuse.”

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan added that “in any just world, and in any world in which Dems could do politics, there would be calls tonight for both Alito and Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court—and calls for impeachment if they refused to do so.”

“But in our real world,” Hasan lamented, “they won’t even be subpoenaed by the Senate.”

Crucial evidence against Trump likely lost due to pace of DOJ’s Jan 6 inquiry

A new report from The Washington Post showcases how slowly and cautiously senior leaders at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI moved to open up an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s actions during his final weeks in office as he attempted to usurp the democratic process by overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Although the reasons behind the snail’s pace, bottom-up approach may appear to some to be appropriately nonpartisan, they may have also hindered the investigation in the long-run, allowing evidence that could have helped the probe to potentially be destroyed.

It took almost a year for the inquiry into Trump’s actions, prior to and on January 6, 2021, to be opened at the department, according to The Post’s reporting. Even then, the investigation didn’t put as strong a focus on the former president as it could or should have, former officials told the publication.

Trump decisively lost the 2020 race to President Joe Biden, but has falsely claimed ever since that election fraud was responsible for the outcome. Trump peddled those claims for months after his loss, demanding, without rational or legal justification, that Congress disregard the results of the election and keep him in office for another term.

At the urging of Trump on January 6, 2021 — the day that congressional lawmakers were set to certify the election outcome through the counting of the Electoral College — a mob of the former president’s loyalists descended on the U.S. Capitol building. There, the mob turned violent as it forced its way into the halls of Congress, disrupting the certification count for several hours. Dozens in the mob engaged in chants calling for the killing of lawmakers, including Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Behind the scenes and in the weeks leading up to January 6, Trump’s presidential campaign, too, was attempting to undermine the Electoral College. By sending fake electors from key states where Trump had lost they hoped to have those invalid votes included in the certification process. However, upon consulting with legal advisers at the time, Vice President Pence decided not to take part in the scheme, much to Trump’s public dissatisfaction).

Rather than launch a two-prong investigation into both actions, however, the DOJ and the FBI — including Attorney General Merrick Garland, upon his swearing-in to lead the department — decided to approach the investigation in a different way, focusing first on those who directly attacked the Capitol and pursuing others higher up in the Trump administration later – if the evidence led to them.

The decision to approach the investigation in that manner was to dispel any appearance of being partisan in the investigation. Of course, at several junctures between then and when the DOJ finally started formally investigating Trump, charges of partisanship were levied at Garland and the department anyway. Such charges remain, although they are being made by Trump and his loyalists without proof of any kind.

Acting in this manner made sense to leadership in the DOJ, but some former investigators, speaking to The Post, said it was an inappropriate approach to take.

“You can work so hard not to be a partisan that you’re failing to do your job,” one former DOJ official said.

Another former official said that things got so bad, in terms of purposely pushing focus away from Trump, that “you couldn’t use the T word” (alluding to the former president’s last name) when discussing the investigation.

The decision to avoid looking at Trump’s actions, as well as those of his immediate underlings, lasted for almost a year. Even then, it took until April 2022 for the DOJ and the FBI to decide to investigate the fake electors scheme.

Earlier this month, Trump was indicted on charges relating to his improper hoarding of government documents, including hundreds marked classified, and his obstruction of efforts by federal officials to get them returned.

In its latest reporting, The Post said that it was “unclear” whether DOJ officials, taking a different approach and investigating Trump sooner over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 race, could have filed charges against him even before the indictment over the Mar-a-Lago documents. Reporting from the publication, however, appears to suggest that it could have been possible if the investigation had begun earlier and without excessive emphasis on not wanting to appear partisan.

In separate interviews after publishing it, the authors of The Post article, Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis, both alluded to issues that arose as a result of the decision to take a slow approach to opening the Trump inquiry.

The DOJ, it seemed, was embarrassed about not taking action sooner, after the congressional January 6 committee presented its case to the American people about what Trump had done, Leonnig said on MSNBC Monday.

In the summer of 2022, the department was still “sort of [turning] its eyes away from” investigating Trump over January 6 and his attempt to usurp the democratic process, Leonnig explained, “until it became a drumbeat of criticism, news stories” lambasting the DOJ for being too slow.

Beyond investigating things happening behind the scenes, it was also clear that “Trump committed crimes in plain sight,” Leonnig said, adding:

He committed the crime of blocking an official proceeding. Even with the limits to their investigative powers, he committed the crimes of insurrection. I mean, there were criminal acts that were ignored.

Even though the DOJ has denied that the January 6 committee played a role in how it treated its own inquiry, “when you interview people who were right in the thick of it, they said, ‘Look, we were embarrassed and goaded into it,'” Leonnig elaborated.

Davis, interviewed by the PBS “NewsHour” about his reporting, said that the refusal to expedite investigating Trump may have hampered the inquiry.

“In those early months, White House officials were not interviewed,” Davis said. “Records were potentially lost. Social media posts and private encrypted messages were potentially deleted. We just don’t know what could have been done quicker, if we were always destined to be in this position now, where Trump is running again and his potential legal culpability from 2020 is still an open question.”

 

“Victory!”: Federal judge strikes down Arkansas gender-affirming care ban

Human rights defenders on Tuesday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge in Arkansas overturning that state’s law banning gender-affirming healthcare for children and teenagers, the first time such a prohibition has been struck down in the United States.

“I’m so grateful the judge heard my experience of how this healthcare has changed my life for the better and saw the dangerous impact this law could have on my life and that of countless other transgender people,” Dylan Brandt, the 17-year-old lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement published by the ACLU of Arkansas.

The civil liberties group filed the lawsuit on behalf of four trans youth, their families, and two doctors in response to Arkansas’ 2021 gender-affirming healthcare ban—the first such law passed in the United States.

“My mom and I wanted to fight this law not just to protect my healthcare, but also to ensure that transgender people like me can safely and fully live our truths,” Brandt added. “Transgender kids across the country are having their own futures threatened by laws like this one, and it’s up to all of us to speak out, fight back, and give them hope.”

ACLU of Arkansas executive director Holly Dickson said: “This decision sends a clear message. Fearmongering and misinformation about this healthcare do not hold up to scrutiny; it hurts trans youth and must end.”

“Science, medicine, and law are clear: gender-affirming care is necessary to ensure these young Arkansans can thrive and be healthy,” Dickson added.

Lacey Jennen, a plaintiff in the case, tweeted, “To say we are relieved is an understatement.”

Judge James M. Moody Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock—a nominee of former President Barack Obama—wrote in his 80-page ruling in Brandt v. Rutledge that Arkansas’ law discriminated against transgender people and violated doctors’ constitutional rights. Then-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, vetoed the bill after its approval by the GOP-controlled Legislature; however, lawmakers subsequently overrode the veto.

Moody also found that Arkansas officials had failed to substantially prove claims, including that gender-affirming healthcare is carelessly prescribed to youth and is “experimental.”

“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” Moody wrote.

“Further, the various claims underlying the state’s arguments that the act protects children and safeguards medical ethics do not explain why only gender-affirming medical care—and all gender-affirming medical care—is singled out for prohibition,” the judge added. “The testimony of well-credentialed experts, doctors who provide gender-affirming medical care in Arkansas, and families that rely on that care directly refutes any claim by the state that the act advances an interest in protecting children.”

At least 19 other states have passed legislation limiting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, with federal judges temporarily blocking similar laws in Alabama, Indiana, and Florida.

According to the website Trans Legislation Tracker, 558 anti-trans bills have been introduced in 49 states so far this year. Eighty-two of the proposals have been signed into law.

The indulgent joy of (very late night) cooking

The exact allure of late-night cooking is difficult to adequately describe, but I think for me — at the core of it all — is this feeling that it is somehow more indulgent than cooking in the daylight. 

Not all nighttime cooking is glamorous, of course. Ask anyone who has worked in a restaurant kitchen or had to pull together dinner after getting off a second-shift job; but often, one’s reasons for getting out the olive oil and frizzling garlic at 2 a.m. are a little more compelling. Perhaps someone is coming in from somewhere interesting. Or they stayed in with someone interesting. 

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I think of the now-iconic scene from Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” when Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson’s characters go to bed together. After working up an appetite, Streep’s character dips into the kitchen and returns with a single bowl of simple, luscious pasta (and two forks). 

 “This is the best spaghetti carbonara I’ve ever had,” Nicholson declares. “When we’re married, I want this once a week.” 

When I was in graduate school, I briefly lived in a cheap apartment catty-corner to the university hospital ambulance bay. As I moved in, I remember asking one of my new neighbors if the noise was ever too bad. “It takes some getting used to,” he responded. The statement was punctuated by a yawn, which I should have taken as the harbinger of sleepless nights that it was. 

Perhaps someone is coming in from somewhere interesting. Or they stayed in with someone interesting.

Studies have shown that the majority of emergency medical calls for EMTs are made on Friday nights, and that trauma cases — the kind that typically require an ambulance response— peak on Friday and Saturday nights around midnight. That also happened to turn into my new waking time for what I began to refer to as my “second evening.” 

You see, most nights, my first evening was taken up by teaching a night class from 5 to 8 p.m. So, I got in the habit of getting home, slipping in bed and taking a short nap until I naturally woke back up around midnight or one when the sirens began to really wail. That’s when I’d make dinner. 

Initially, I kept things simple; I’d grab a few crackers, some cheese and plant myself in front of the television. But over time, I began to romanticize my second evenings a little bit more. I’d light a few candles so I didn’t have to rely on the glaring fluorescent overheads and pop on some music. I realized that, other than the sirens, things were actually pretty quiet at this time of night. 

This became the time I devoted myself to project recipes. Inspired by Julie Powell, I worked my way through chapters of “The Art of French Cooking” and “Lidia’s Italian Table.” Some nights, after slipping into the bathtub at 3 a.m. following a meal of coq a vin or ziti, I wondered if I was throwing my body-clock into some kind of irreparable disrepair by playing fast and loose with what had been my sleeping hours. I had heard my entire life that one shouldn’t eat after 8 p.m. and that you should get an uninterrupted eight hours of sleep. 

But I also didn’t have class until noon. 

I asked one of my professors, who had always said his best writing hours were between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., his opinion. He pointed out that throughout history, there are numerous accounts of what scholars call “biphasic sleep.” Especially in pre-industrial agrarian communities, it was common for entire towns to congregate between first and second sleeps. “Anyways, that doesn’t matter,” he said with a wry smile. “After all, the life of an artist does require a little risk.” 

Cooking at night changed my views on solitude, as well. I lived in that apartment alone and while I was in a long term relationship at the time, it was one that, in retrospect, grew increasingly lonely through time. In spending those evenings caring for myself, feeding myself, eating with myself — I realized that I liked my own company. Especially as a woman, I don’t really think there’s anything more powerful than that. 

 In spending those evenings caring for myself, feeding myself, eating with myself — I realized that I liked my own company. Especially as a woman, I don’t really think there’s anything more powerful than that.

Years have passed since my initial foray into night cooking. Eventually, I got a newsroom job that had me in bed at 10 p.m. and up chugging iced coffees at my desk at six., which broke my nocturnal dining streak for quite a bit.

But then last Saturday, my schedule was beautifully thrown. I went for a late walk to the beach and stayed there for much longer than I anticipated, lazing on the sand and floating in the water. By the time I got home around 7 p.m.,  I downed some juice and fell asleep on top of my comforter. 

When I woke up at 1 a.m., initially disoriented by my pitch-black bedroom, I groggily stumbled into the living room where my boyfriend was quietly listening to music. He grabbed me for a kiss.”You eaten?” I asked. He looked at his watch. “A few hours ago.” 

“Want to turn that up? I’m going to make dinner.” 

Standing in our darkened kitchen, I pulled out rigatoni, vodka, some canned tomatoes and cream. As my big pot of salted water began to boil, I looked out the window and — as I surveyed the surrounding apartment buildings and highrises — I noticed that a light flicked on in an apartment in the distance. 

While it was much too far away to be sure, I liked to think that they, too, were starting dinner. 

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from Salon Food

Ethics expert: Trump “Hamptons of the Middle East” deal poses “greatest threat” to national security

Former President Donald Trump has partnered with the government of Oman for a multibillion-dollar project to build a hotel and golf complex with luxury villas costing up to $13 million each, according to a New York Times report.

For over a decade, Trump has been leveraging his name in deals with real estate developers worldwide. But the agreement in Oman has raised concerns among ethics experts as it comes after Trump’s presidency – a timeline where his business ventures and political endeavors intertwined so much so that he made millions of dollars from international business dealings.

“The Trump Organization’s partnership with the government of Oman is the very type of foreign entanglement that represents the greatest threat to our national security and foreign policy interests if Trump were to be re-elected,” Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Salon.

The Trump Organization has already brought in at least $5 million from the Oman deal without putting up any money for the development, The Times reported. His organization will help design a Trump-branded hotel, golf course and golf club and will be paid to manage them for up to 30 years.

The new affluent community, which Eric Trump has described as “the Hamptons of the Middle East,” will house a cliffside hotel offering infinity pools, fine dining, and a 360-degree view of the water below.

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But the migrant laborers who are building the city are working in less than ideal conditions, “toiling in shifts from dawn until nightfall” in 103-degree heat and earning as little as $340 a month in a country rife with exploitative working conditions, the Times reported. 

However, this hasn’t stopped the former president from entering into a business partnership with the government of Oman, with whom he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, fostered connections during Trump’s time in office.

“This type of business engagement gives him an opportunity to line his pocket with millions of dollars in foreign income but at what cost for the American people,” Canter said.

The Saudi real estate firm Dar Al Arkan, which has close ties with the Saudi government, brought Trump into the deal. The Omani government is providing the land, investing in infrastructure and will also receive a share of the profits.

Since leaving office, Trump collaborated with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to organize the LIV golf tour meanwhile Kushner earned a $2 billion investment from the Saudi fund for his own investment venture, The Times reported.

Trump’s financial interests have long received criticism as he faced unprecedented conflicts of interest during his time in office and refused to divest from the Trump Organization. 

These conflicts were particularly significant when it came to his business dealings in foreign countries that had vested interests in U.S. foreign policy.

The former president made up to $160 million from international business dealings while serving as president, according to an analysis of his tax returns by CREW.

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Trump’s financial interests played a role in influencing his decision-making as president, the report pointed out. 

“The Trumps were openly engaging in multiple international business deals and let the world know that they hoped to continue expanding internationally after Trump left office,” according to the report.

Throughout his presidency, Trump’s family business directly benefited from funds spent by foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, at his Washington hotel. 

Trump also leveraged the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to benefit his own business ventures, according to CREW. For instance, his Ambassador to the United Kingdom reportedly told embassy staff that Trump urged him to secure the British Open for one of his Scottish golf resorts. 

With Trump’s bid for re-election underway, his second presidential campaign raises familiar concerns about the potential impact of his personal financial interests on foreign policy should he be re-elected as President.

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about Trump’s foreign deals

“You lost all the cases you brought to trial”: Dems go off on “partisan hack” John Durham at hearing

House Democrats took aim at special counsel John Durham Wednesday in intense exchanges during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on his findings that the FBI should not have investigated potential collusion between Russia and former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., questioned Durham’s lack of convictions during the yearslong probe, according to The Daily Beast.

“You only filed three criminal cases. You only brought two cases to trial, correct?” Nadler asked Durham, to which he responded in the affirmative.

“You lost all the cases you brought to trial, correct?” Nadler asked.

Durham responded that he was correct before Nadler asked about the length and cost of his investigation. Though Durham tried to defend the case, he ultimately agreed that the probe took four years for him to complete.

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Their exchange was one of several between Durham and Democrats, including a contentious interaction he had with Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who challenged the merit of Durham’s inquiry for five minutes straight. 

Schiff rehashed the Mueller report findings with Durham, indicating that Trump’s campaign did collaborate with Russian election interference efforts in the 2016 election.

Though House Republicans considered the hearing to be an illustration of the “two tiers of justice” that several of Trump’s allies and supporters allege, Schiff’s questioning forced Durham to admit his respect for Robert Mueller and that he didn’t find any evidence that discredited Mueller’s probe.

In one instance in their back-and-forth, as Schiff asked Durham about Russian intelligence and Trump’s campaign working together in 2016, Durham responded that he didn’t know.

“You really don’t know those very basic facts of the investigation,” Schiff fired back.

“I know the general facts,” Durham replied. “Yes. Do I know that particular fact myself? No. I mean, I know that I’ve read that in the media anywhere.”

The Trump-appointed Justice Department official, according to the outlet, seemed to hesitate when Schiff prompted him to decide whether Donald Trump, Jr. violated campaign laws by being receptive to Russia’s offer of information on Hillary Clinton interference.

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Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., also at one point criticized Durham during the Wednesday hearing, accusing him of acting like a “partisan hack.”

Lieu began his questioning by going down a list of Trump’s campaign staff — chairman Paul Manafort, policy adviser George Papadopoulos and deputy campaign manager Rick Gates — asking Durham if each had been convicted.

Durham responded to almost each question with “that’s correct” but clarified that Gates’ conviction was not in relation to the “Russia matter.”

“Alright. Mr. Durham, you can hold yourself out as an objective deportment justice official or as a partisan hack. The more that you try to spin the facts and not answer my questions, you sound like the latter. So I’m just asked this simply,” Lieu continued before asking Durham about Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and longtime advisor, Roger Stone’s, convictions.

Durham told Lieu that he was correct that both had been convicted.

“In contrast to multiple Trump associates who were convicted, you brought two cases to a jury trial based on this investigation, and you lost both. And so I don’t actually know what we’re doing here because the author of the Durham Report concedes that the FBI had enough information to investigate and thank goodness FBI did, because multiple Trump associates who committed crimes were held accountable. And the best way to summarize what happened is, thank you to the brave men and women of the FBI for doing their jobs. I yield back,” Lieu concluded.

Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., remarked in another exchange that Durham was risking damage to his reputation. Durham, however, responded that he only cares about his reputation among his family and the “lord,” according to The Daily Beast. His reply sparked applause from Republicans at the hearing.

Durham met privately with members of the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday to suggest some reforms to the Justice Department and the FBI.

He told members of the panel Wednesday that his suggestions did not pose “an easy fix.”

“It’s going to take time to rebuild the public’s confidence in the institution,” he said.

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about John Durham

Keto diet may slow cancer tumor growth in mice — but not without potentially deadly consequences

The ketogenic (keto) diet has been popular in recent years among people looking to lose weight and keep fit. But what many people don’t realize is that this low carb, high-fat diet has actually been used for centuries in the treatment of medical maladies, such as epilepsy. More recently, researchers have been investigating its use alongside chemotherapy to improve remission and survival in patients with advanced metastatic cancers.

A recently published study in mice has now shown that the keto diet may also have use in treating tumors. But while the diet appeared to slow the tumor growth in mice with colorectal and pancreatic cancers, it was also shown to accelerate the onset of cachexia — a severe wasting disease thought to cause 30% of all cancer-related deaths.

To conduct their study, the authors selected two types of mice that were predisposed to cachexia. They then transplanted half of them with colorectal cancer and induced pancreatic cancer in the other half. The mice were then allocated into two groups: One group was fed a standard diet while the other group was fed a high-fat, low carb keto diet.

Over the course of the next month, the investigators found that mice on the keto diet showed slower tumor growth than the mice fed a standard diet. However, it also appeared that the keto diet was associated with shorter survival times due to the faster onset of cachexia.

 

Keto and cancer

The reason the ketogenic diet works to slow the growth of tumors is down to the way in which cancer cells metabolize their “food” compared to normal, healthy cells.

All the cells in our bodies get their energy from glucose (sugar) first and foremost and then from fats. Since cancer cells grow quickly, they have much higher energy needs — so they rely solely on glucose for energy.

Glucose is released from the carbohydrates we’ve eaten as they’re broken down in our bodies. But since the keto diet has a very low carbohydrate intake, it’s thought that this “starves” the cancer cells of the energy they need to grow. This is what the authors were able to demonstrate in their study.

Keto also kick-starts a process called lipid peroxidation, which causes the body to use fats for the energy it needs instead. However, this process also creates a number of highly reactive molecules as a by-product which need to be cleared from the body before they cause further cell damage.

Since the mice’s cells lacked an adequate energy supply to quickly remove these highly reactive molecules, this led to an increase of a molecule called GDF-15 which suppressed their appetite and contributed to their weight loss.

The researchers also found that the keto diet impaired the production of corticosteroids — naturally-occurring hormones which help reduce inflammation and regulate the immune system. This accelerated the onset of cachexia in the mice, shortening their overall survival.

Interestingly, when the researchers treated the mice with an injection of dexamethasone — a corticosteroid drug that counteracts the stress hormone cortisol and is often used to treat various cancer-related conditions, such as anemia — they were able to delay the onset of cachexia and improve their overall survival.

 

Cancer treatment

Although it’s tempting to draw conclusions from this research, it’s also important to bear a few things in mind.

First, this study was performed in mice — and of course, we aren’t mice. It’s imperative that further research be carried out to see whether the keto diet has a similar effect in humans — and crucially, whether treatment with dexamethasone delays the onset of cachexia in humans, too. At the moment, there are a number of ongoing trials and some emerging evidence suggesting the keto diet has beneficial effects on many types of cancer.

Second, patients who follow a keto diet will experience different benefits depending on the stage of their cancer. For example, studies in cells have shown fasting or following the keto diet while undergoing chemotherapy may improve how responsive the cancer is to chemotherapy — while also reducing damage to nearby healthy tissues.

This is because fasting (and keto) act like a “magic shield”, protecting healthy cells from chemotherapy-induced damage.

Fasting shuts down all non-essential processes, including metabolism. However, cancer cells ignore this message and continue growing. Chemotherapy targets rapidly growing cells — and so in a fasted state, it will target the cancer cells instead, leaving healthy cells safe.

Although this latest study demonstrates that the keto diet may also have the harmful effect of accelerating cachexia in mice, several studies looking at the effect of a keto diet on pancreatic cancer actually find keto protects against muscle loss.

These differing results may be down to the methods used in each of these studies, with some experiments being conducted in cells and others in mice. But given these contradictory findings, it will be important for more detailed investigations to be done.

While evidence suggests keto may have benefits for slowing cancer growth, less is known about any adverse effects it may have (such as accelerating cachexia). Given there’s still so much we don’t know, it’s advised that patients undergoing cancer treatment speak with their medical practitioner about any diet changes they may be planning to make.

Mhairi Morris, Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry, Loughborough University

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

Humans have changed the Earth’s axis — and our GPS and satellite navigation systems need it to work

As humans extract more and more groundwater, we are literally changing the composition of the planet, so much so that we are also shifting the tilt of the globe.

According to a recent study in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, countless amounts of groundwater have been extracted from beneath our feet. Consequently, the True North Pole has shifted at a rate of 4.36 centimeters per year (or more than 1.7 inches). Between 1993 and 2010 alone, that amounted to more than 2 trillion tons of groundwater, which exists in saturated regions underground and can be used for drinking, irrigation, sanitation and manufacturing.

The North Pole is iconic for being the northernmost point on our planet — yet there is no single place that officially exists as a fixed “North Pole.” Instead Earth’s so-called “True North Pole” is whichever place that is northernmost on the planet, a fact determined by where the globe’s axis of rotation meets its surface. (The True North Pole is distinct from — though close to — the northernmost magnetic pole, which is the point where Earth’s magnetic field points vertically downward.) All of this may be a bit hard to follow but the important part is, if physical changes to the planet Earth alter its axis of rotation, the location of the True North Pole will alter accordingly.

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This northern shift is far from the only way that humans have changed the planet by extracting groundwater. As this process ultimately redistributes water from aquifers to oceans, it has been speculated that it (along with man-made climate change) contributes to the ongoing problem of rising sea levels. The new study used relevant climate and groundwater data to create a model that showed how the total groundwater depletion between 1993 and 2010 was equivalent to 0.24 inches (6.24 mm) of global sea level rise. 

“The contribution of our study was to take these groundwater extraction data and compute the effect on the drift of the rotation axis (pole).”

“The contribution of our study was to take these groundwater extraction data and compute the effect on the drift of the rotation axis (pole),” study co-author Clark R. Wilson, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, explained in an email with Salon. He argued that there are three main takeaways from their research.

“The volume of groundwater and geographical locations in the published estimates for the year 1993-2010” are reliable and shows that “the projected drift of the pole from their estimate agrees with the well-measured polar motion (including also estimates of other contributors)” on the subject, Wilson told Salon. He added that “given that the groundwater extraction volume and geographical distribution estimate is confirmed as good by point number 1, the associated contribution to sea level rise due to groundwater extraction is also confirmed.”

The final conclusion is thus that “an important contributor to the drift of the pole (rotation axis) is now identified by this study,” one that has “very important practical implications. Knowing via measurements from several space geodetic techniques (and also being able to predict in the future) the precise location of the rotation axis within Earth is essential to making the Global Positioning System and other satellite navigation systems work. This is because the rotation axis location is essential to convert the ranges to the GPS satellites into geographical locations on Earth.”

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“Measuring the location of the rotation axis very precisely is really important to the GPS system and so to everyone who uses it, either with a cell phone, flying in an aircraft, etc.”

If this news is causing you to picture a world where cars start directing owners off of cliffs and cell phones become completely useless, don’t worry. The effects will be more subtle — but no less real.

“Most are not aware that the rotation axis wobbles and has drifted from North Geographic pole in the last 123 years by 10-15 meters,” Wilson told Salon. “So the influence of this motion on human time scales is not observable to most and has no significant effect on processes on or within Earth. But measuring the location of the rotation axis very precisely is really important to the GPS system and so to everyone who uses it, either with a cell phone, flying in an aircraft, etc.”

Wilson added, “The military is quite interested in predicting future positions of the pole as this affects their use of GPS in weapons.” He also noted that the study’s findings have serious implications for regions that are water-starved but rely on groundwater for things like irrigation.

Looking at “the geography of water extraction,” Wilson highlighted the “Middle East, Northern India and China, and [the] Western US” as areas that are at risk of suffering “future limitations on irrigation.” In a similar vein, “the mid-latitude locations of these regions of depletion is very efficient at causing the pole to drift (the most efficient latitude for causing polar drift is 45 degrees north or south)” as a result of all the groundwater being taken out of the Earth there.

Lorenzo Rosa, a principal investigator at Carnegie Institution for Science and a scientist who was not involved in the study, told Salon that if irrigation becomes more difficult in water-starved regions due to limited groundwater access, “the alternatives to groundwater are desalination or water transfers to increase supply.” At the same time, Rosa pointed out that “it is also important to reduce demand by increasing efficiency by planting less water intensive crops.” The consequences of failing to do so are dire indeed: “If we run out of water we will need costly solutions to overcome water scarcity,” Rosa concluded.

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about human impacts on Earth

Trump team refers to Mark Meadows with “rat emoji” over fears that he’s helping prosecutors: report

Former President Donald Trump’s team of advisors and political allies have been referring to his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with a rat emoji in personal communication since Meadows’ lawyer refused to comment on whether the former top aide had testified before a federal grand jury, sources with knowledge of the matter told Rolling Stone.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s office sought to question Meadows under oath in two probes into twice-indicted Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election and retain classified government materials after leaving office.

Earlier this year, the former president assigned his advisors and lawyers to go on a so-called “small fact-finding mission,” sources told the outlet, to find out if Meadows, who ended communication with Trump and his team several months ago, had cooperated with the government and how much information he had disclosed to them.

The group of lawyers and political allies informed Trump they could not confirm Meadows’ whereabouts and instead opted to recite rumors and speculation.

Meadows’ legal team has maintained its silence even after The New York Times revealed that the former Trump staffer had testified before the grand jury. Very few details about the specifics and subject of his testimony are publicly available.

“Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so,” Meadows’ lawyer George Terwilliger said in a statement earlier this month.

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Two other sources told Rolling Stone that several of Trump’s lawyers and close allies had shared with Trump their suspicions that Meadows was being very helpful to federal investigators in an effort to mitigate his own potential legal blunder. In the days following Terwilliger’s comment, some of the former president’s confidants have taken to using a rat emoji to refer to Meadows in private messages, according to another source and a screenshot the outlet reviewed.

However, other allies have attempted to advise Trump against reading too deeply into Meadows’ silence, two sources with direct knowledge told Rolling Stone. The aides, the sources added, have informed Trump that there’s no evidence pointing to Meadows’ cooperation with the government and that he could just be adhering to legal advice to lie low and answer questions as needed until the investigation concludes.

The distinction reportedly does not matter much to Trump, according to the report. Sources who have spoken to the former president about federal inquiries said they have historically seen few differences between a witness agreeing officially to cooperate with authorities and someone being legally required to answer questions that could possibly reveal damning information. 

Trump and Meadows’ once close relationship has deteriorated since their time at the White House with Meadows’ team coming to believe in the summer of 2022 that the former president’s lawyers and advisors were making strides to set him up “as a fall guy” while the Jan. 6 Capitol attack investigation advanced.

The action pushed Meadows and his attorneys to “take a more skeptical approach, not necessarily towards the [former] president, but towards some of the people around him,” a source who knows both Meadows and Trump said.

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Meadows’ 2021 memoir “The Chief’s Chief”, which endeavored to sing Trump’s praises, also contributed to his falling out with Trump and his allies. The 330-page book revealed several major activities that have since led to three instances of PR damage or legal troubles for the former president.

The latest example came with the Justice Department’s indictment earlier this month, which featured Trump’s comments from a recorded meeting with Meadows and two assistants for the former chief of staff’s book indicating that Trump knowingly retained classified materials post-presidency about a possible attack on Iran.

Over the last few years, the book also almost threatened Trump’s claims of executive privilege in his attempts to delay the House Jan. 6 committee and revealed that Trump and his team orchestrated a cover-up of his COVID-19 diagnosis, which potentially put the health of a number of people — including his then electoral challenger Joe Biden — in danger.

Three people with knowledge of the gripes said that the book has outraged what Rolling Stone calls “key Trumpland figures,” including Trump, since its publication.

“How many times can Mark f—king put the [former] president in a bind because of that book…[that basically] no one read?” a senior Trump aide said last week, the day of the ex-president’s most recent arraignment.

But the fury was not the intended effect, a source told The Daily Beast in 2021, Meadows “thought Trump was going to love it.”

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about Mark Meadows

Is it finally time to ban junk food advertising? A new bill could improve kids’ health

Today independent MP and former GP Sophie Scamps will introduce a bill into federal parliament that would restrict junk food advertisements aimed at children.

The bill would target advertising for unhealthy foods Australia’s health ministers have previously defined, including sugar-sweetened drinks, confectionary and unhealthy fast food meals. Advertising for these foods and drinks would be banned on television, radio and streaming services from 6am to 9:30pm and banned altogether online and on social media. The proposal highlights one of our biggest health challenges and does something about it.

The share of Australian adults who are overweight or obese has tripled since 1980. Today, about a quarter of Australian children are overweight or obese. The consequences are serious. Obesity increases the risk of a range of illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease, setting children up to develop chronic disease. The health care costs of obesity run into the billions of dollars each year, not to mention all the years of life lived with illness and disability or lost to early death.

This isn’t the first time a ban on junk food advertising has been floated. But there is more reason than ever to make it happen.

 

Why now?

Unhealthy diets are the main cause of Australia’s obesity epidemic and restricting advertising for unhealthy foods could help improve what we eat.

That’s why experts have been calling for advertising restrictions for years. Back in 2009, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency recommended them and they have long been recommended by the World Health Organization. They’re supported by evidence that advertising influences children’s diets and preferences, driving cravings and feelings of hunger.

Even without this evidence, it would be a safe assumption that junk food advertising works. Otherwise, companies wouldn’t spend money on it and they certainly do.

One study found Australian advertising on sugary drinks alone costs nearly five times more than government campaigns promoting healthy eating, physical activity and obesity prevention. And companies carefully design advertising to entice children. Their strategies include promotional characters, gifts and games and shifting advertising online to follow changing viewing habits.

Most parents don’t need any persuading to know advertising works, having seen younger children employ “pester power” and older children spend their pocket money on unhealthy options. That’s probably one reason two thirds of Australians support bans on junk food advertising during children’s viewing hours.

 

What’s taking so long?

So why haven’t governments acted? When health bodies started calling for advertising restrictions nearly 15 years ago, the industry promptly came up with a plan of its own. Optional codes of conduct were drawn up for “responsible advertising and marketing to children”. But there are significant loopholes and gaps in these codes, which are voluntary, narrow, vague and consequence-free.

Predictably, self-regulation hasn’t reduced junk food advertising to children. While countries with mandatory policies have seen junk food consumption fall, it has increased in countries where the industry sets the rules.

In the meantime, Australia and its children have been left behind. Since Quebec in Canada introduced the first ban back in 1980, more than a dozen countries around the world have followed and more are planning to. The proposals being debated in our parliament are modeled on policies adopted in the United Kingdom in 2021.

This isn’t the only area where Australia has fallen behind when it comes to setting sensible food rules. We are not among the 43 countries with rules to reduce trans-fats, which cause cardiovascular disease or one of the 85 countries with a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, which are linked to diabetes.

Our policies to reduce salt consumption and improve food labelling are weaker than those in leading countries too.

 

It’s time to make healthy choices easier

Unhealthy diets need to improve, but the simple answer of blaming the individual is the wrong one. Unhealthy food choices are shaped by things like time pressures, cost of living pressures, the availability of fresh food and the marketing adults and children are constantly bombarded with.

That’s why governments need to make healthy choices cheaper, more convenient and more appealing, so that they can compete with unhealthy options. Taking advertising aimed at children out of the equation would be a good first step.

Peter Breadon, Program Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute

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

“We can make it to the end”: Jermaine Fowler of “The Blackening” on why Black horror’s moment is now

There’s an inside joke in the Black community about the way Black people are always the first to die in major Hollywood productions, but sadly, there is a world of truth in those jokes. Need a reminder? In “A Christmas Story,” when Ralphie gets his BB gun, he fantasizes about shooting a Black guy. In “Gremlins,” a Black teacher is the first to kick the bucket. A Black jogger is the first to go in “Sleepy Hollow.” Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith were the first to die in “Scream 2,” and even Terrence Howard was the only person to die in “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” The list goes on.

Black actors know this better than anyone and have spent years building up the mental toughness needed to survive in an industry dedicated to making sure that they don’t make it past Act 1. Comedian Jermaine Flower articulated the funny found in this flawed history when I sat down with him on “Salon Talks” to talk about “The Blackening.”

Fowler, an actor, writer and comedian who is most known for staring in films such as “Sorry to Bother You,” playing Eddie Murphy‘s long-lost son on “Coming to America 2” and television shows like HBO’s “Crashing” and the CBS comedy “Superior Donuts.” His newest film, Tim Story’s “The Blackening,” is a horror-comedy that takes the history of the Black person dying first head on. If the whole cast is Black, then who do you kill first?

“It was really hard to stay focused on set,” Fowler shared about working with cast mates like Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharoah. “We would be on set just laughing the entire time that we forget they would say ‘Action!’ and we’re still talking, joking around doing bits or whatever.”

Watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Jermaine Fowler here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below, to learn more about why “The Blackening” and Black horror’s moment is important to Fowler, his early days doing stand-up and why he prefers to go to the movies alone.

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

It’s nice to be talking to a fellow Maryland guy like myself — I’m actually from Baltimore, so it’s debatable if we seceded from Maryland.

My God. Wow. I didn’t know you’re from Maryland, first of all. I’m from Hyattsville. I’m like 45 minutes away from you.

You’re not that far away.

Not at all. Just down the highway. When I go to Baltimore, I feel like it’s a mix of Jersey, Philly and New York. I think that’s why Baltimore dudes and DC dudes got such a weird relationship.

It’s a love-hate relationship.

I have no idea. Baltimore just breeds so much talent musically and actors. There’s just so much talent down there. I remember when the N.E.R.D. song came out, “All the girls standing in the line in the bathroom,” Pharrell said he borrowed that sound from Baltimore club music. I was like, “What?” I don’t know if it happened ever since, more Baltimore mainstream house music. But I love to hear more of that, man. 

We have this amazing talent of getting really, really close to being something special and then making sure it doesn’t happen.

When I was a kid, I went to the harbor and I was like, “Man, it was so beautiful when I was a kid seeing the harbor.”

Don’t go now.

I went back as an adult, and there was just garbage everywhere. I’m just like, “What happened in the harbor?” But as a kid, that’s what happens to you all the time. You’re a kid, everything’s different and beautiful. When you get older, you’re like, “I didn’t recognize half this stuff when I was a child.” That’s what Baltimore is to me.

Did you do comedy clubs in Baltimore? 

Yeah. Baltimore Comedy Factory when I was coming up, and one more Baltimore room, off the harbor. I performed all around just that area. Columbia, Maryland. I just drove around doing shows.

Was acting always a part of it? You could’ve played in “The Wire,” right?

I probably could’ve, actually. I didn’t know how to get into acting, so I chose to do stand-up as a way to get into that. When I was in high school, I would just do improv class after school. I had a drama teacher named Mr. Spencer, he really helped us get into the whole acting world and writing too, writing our own material. The other drama teacher was named Mr. Gentry. He was on “The Wire,” and that was a big deal.

Who did he play?

I don’t remember, but I remember that was his thing. I think he played one of the homeless dudes in the show. Anyway, Mr. Gentry was a big deal when he had that credit. We were like, “Yo, Mr. Gentry’s a celebrity.” He was like, “Y’all are going to listen to me today. I was on ‘The Wire.'” It’s like, “All right, Mr. Gentry.”

Congratulations on “The Blackening.” It’s hilarious, and for me, it’s also kind of scary too.

Good. I hope so.

I was jumping a little bit. Can you talk about how the film came about? 

“Every character in the film kind of represents an insecurity. I feel like every Black person is inherently insecure about something.”

I’m a horror movie fan, fanatic of horror movies. The fact that it creeped you out in some ways makes me very happy because it did to me as well. The conception was from Dwayne Perkins, one of the co-writers of the film. He made a sketch years ago, through his comedy sketch route, called “3Peat.” It was a sketch based on what you just saw in the film. Tracy Oliver saw the sketch and wanted to make it longer form. She wanted to write it as a film with him, and they did. So I read the script, my manager sent it my way, and she said, “They want you to play Clifton.” I read it and I was like, “Wow, this dude’s such a nerd.” It was crazy. I had some reservations about it at first because of what he represented and I was just like, “I’m going to do it.” 

Clifton was the funniest dude, though.

Thanks, man. On paper, he was just a nerdy guy, and without ruining anything, he definitely had a story behind, he had a POV behind his actions, of course. When I got the script, I spoke to [director] Tim [Story] about it, and Tim and I just clicked like that. He just trusted me with a lot of the things I wanted to bring: the mannerisms, the way he spoke, the way he dressed. It was definitely a process.

It’s a real POV because there’s something to say about he’s a Black dude who wants to . . .

Just be accepted. This is all he wants.

But he doesn’t really fit. He doesn’t listen to Lil Durk. He can’t hoop. You know what I’m saying?

But that’s the thing. You probably would never know that about him because people don’t give him a chance at all. By first glance, you go, “I can’t hang out with that dude.” You don’t even know if he might like King Vaughn. No one knows because he just comes off as such a dweeb, you know what I’m saying? But also, you wouldn’t even know he voted for Trump if he didn’t say he voted for Trump. So, that’s the thing about the film. You don’t know who these characters are unless you really get to truly open yourself up to them.

Yeah, Black people voting for Trump is not always a secret, unless they’re on Twitter. 

That’s the issue with Twitter. I feel like I know too much about people because of social media. I don’t even want to know that much about people. I hate social media for that reason.

“I had jelly for lunch.”

Yeah. Like, I didn’t need to know that about you. OK, jelly and Trump. Okay, cool. Whatever. I don’t care. Man, people are so open to that. But every character in the film kind of represents an insecurity. I feel like every Black person is inherently insecure about something. I feel like in the film it all comes out. But Clifton’s the one that honestly, he let it get to his psyche a bit.

The film takes place in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Would you go to a cabin like that in real life?

Me and my lady, we go to Palm Springs and Arizona. Actually, the creepiest place we went to was this Airbnb in Sedona, Arizona. I don’t know why Sedona just looked beautiful, but at night, it was so quiet. In LA, helicopter’s always floating above you or whatever, and traffic or whatever, but it was the quietest place I’ve ever been to. I thought that night I was going to die. I did. But I’m open to it. I’m open to doing stuff like that.

I’m missing something because it hasn’t resonated with me yet. I have a friend, him and his girlfriend had rented a cabin in North Carolina and he has a five-minute video of a bear that was hanging out in front of the door. They’re like, “Y’all should come the next time.” And I’m like, “For what? To be a bear snack?”

Is the bear going to be there next time? Does he know I’m coming? Should we tell the bear ahead of time? 

I love animals, but there’s a boundary. You’re in their territory, so you got to understand that. You are a guest in their home, honestly. That bear knocking on the doors and him going, “Hey, you didn’t check in. You should probably check in next time.”

That’s what I’m saying. I shouldn’t be there. 

I love nature. I’m a big nature guy. Give me some shrooms, I’m going outside.

You got to check in with nature. You got to check in.

I think you should. I think you should. That bear was reminding you.

Send me a postcard, man. I’m not coming out there. I think the scary part, and in relation to the film, it’s these friends are getting together to have a good time, but there’s so much unknown. It’s like, “Yo, y’all could’ve did that at an Airbnb in Oakland or some s**t.”

You definitely could’ve. But I truly feel like getting out of their comfort zone is very important. I think everyone should do a field trip sometimes.

You’re a horror movie guy. A lot of horror movies start in a cabin. 

Every one of them.

Maybe we should rethink cabins.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe the word cabin. We should change the word cabin or something else. A cabin is inherently creepy. It is a creepy word because of the implication. Anything can happen in the cabin because of the horror movies. It’s the atmosphere. Wood creaks, you’re secluded from everything. It’s the perfect place to murder a bunch of people.

There’s so many hilarious people in the film. Jay Pharoah‘s in there.

Yvonne [Orji].

How did you guys get any work done?

We didn’t. It was really hard to stay focused on set. In fact, the cast is so big, we would be on set just laughing the entire time that we forget they would say action and we’re still talking, joking around doing bits or whatever. Our set word was Fela Kuti and that meant “shut up.” We got to work. So, anytime the AD would be like, “Action.” Like, “Fela Kuti. Fela Kuti.” You’d be like, “Fela Kuti. Fela Kuti.” So, we get back to work. 

“I didn’t know how to get into acting, so I chose to do stand-up as a way to get into that.”

We love each other, man. It was a great cast and everyone was just happy to be there. We shot it during the pandemic, so we was just happy to be out the house and just be around other people. Everyone had masks on. You had to abide by the masks rules and all that good stuff. It was creepy as hell, man. We shot it during the apocalypse.

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You said you’re a horror movie guy. What are some of your favorite horror movies of all time? 

“Sleepy Hollow” is No. 1. I watched that almost every day. I don’t know what it is about that movie. It is atmospheric as hell. I love horror movies set during the Victorian period. It’s just the juxtaposition of the blood and the outfits and the music. The score is gorgeous. That’s my favorite movie in general. 

Are you one of the people who are like, “Run, run, run”?

You know what’s funny? When I go see a movie, I’m very cerebral. I’m watching it. I don’t even like when people talk during the movies. I just want to watch it and enjoy and digest it. I say nothing. I’m always up here. 

That’s why going to a movie on a date is a terrible idea.

I want to go by myself. Does anybody else go to the movies by themselves? It’s me and the movie. Not me, you in the movie. I want to watch this for me. I don’t like when people be like, “Hey man, what’s happening next?” I’m like, “We’re seeing this at the same time. What are you talking about?” 

“Slashers don’t scare me. It’s really the unknown that scares me.”

I would say the original “Halloween,” John Carpenter’s “Halloween” with Jamie Lee Curtis is the best horror movie ever made. I saw “The Exorcist” for the first time during the pandemic because as a kid I would hear the legend of how scary this movie was. Slashers don’t scare me. It’s really the unknown that scares me. So, “Exorcist” creeped me out because the whole religious horror stuff really does creep me out. But it’s movies like “Final Destination,” which is on my list too, that scares the s**t out of me. After I saw the first one, I couldn’t just walk around normally. I had to look over my shoulder. I was afraid to just exist because of that movie. That movie scared the hell out of me because there was no killer. You couldn’t see it, you couldn’t feel it. 

Everyone talks about that scene in the second “Final Destination,” that log scene. I think every road was closed after that movie came out because one, the chain broke and I was like, “All right, the chain broke.” But then, the log . . . And the log just shoved its way through the windshield. The funniest part about that scene is the officer, he dropped his coffee and he looks up to the log and he [makes a face]. It’s the funniest part of the movie, it’s just the reaction. I’m like, “His last face was that?”

If you grow up in a f**ked up neighborhood and somebody’s shooting or something and a bullet doesn’t hit you, you kind of feel like “Final Destination” because now it’s like, “I dodged death.”

Dude, it’s funny you say that because I’m sure a lot of people have never been on a plane before. In the first one, the plane explodes and stuff, so that probably wasn’t relatable to a lot of people. But in the hood and you dodge a bullet, that’s your “Final Destination.” That’s it. They should do a Black “Final Destination.” That should be the sequel. That’s the sequel. Just reality from Trenton, New Jersey. That’s where it takes place. Maybe Camden. I don’t know. Baltimore, maybe Baltimore.

With the success of movies like “Get Out” and “Us,” and now we have “The Blackening,” it feels like we’re in the Renaissance of the Black Horror Film. This is the Black Horror Film Civil Rights Movement. You too can die. You too can make it to the end.

We can make it to the end. We’re going to make it to the end. You’re right. I feel like when I first did “Sorry to Bother You,” me, Tessa [Thompson] and LaKeith [Stanfield] and Steven [Yuen], and we were all just vibing just about the fact that we aren’t in a lot of the films that we love. We were talking about “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” It was like, “Love that movie. No n*****s in it.” And a bunch of movies that I love. A bunch of ones I named.

The fact that they’re giving filmmakers like Boots [Riley] and Jordan [Peele] and Tim [Story], Dewayne [Perkins] and Tracy [Oliver]. They’re building and paving their own way. They’ve built their own lane. And I think it’s beautiful, man. It’s beautiful that I can see myself in films like that now, and my daughter can see me in the films. It’s really nice, man.

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It also gives you the confidence to just create outside of what we’re always taught to create. We can dream in a different way now.

Yeah. I mean, the confidence is always there. It just took time. It took time. I think “Get Out,” we can talk about the movie all day. That movie just really is one of the G.O.A.T.s. You can watch the movie so many times and pick up different things from it. But what it built out, the careers it built out. Like “Friday,” you watch “Friday” and you see what that movie is. It’s a great film. Greatest ending movie ever made to me is “Friday.” Ever made. You look at that movie’s success and the careers it built out. The cast, it opened the world. Bernie Mac, Chris [Tucker]. [John] Witherspoon. Everybody, man. I see this movie, “The Blackening” being the same, doing the same thing.

Mike Epps.

Katt Williams.

Even Terry Crews. I knew Terry Crews from that gladiator show from way back in the day on UPN. But then, “Friday [After] Next.” It’s an introduction. I knew of everybody in our cast individually, but the fact that I got to work with them on one project, man, everyone is so perfect in the film and played their position so perfectly and it just built such a great movie.

What’s next for you?

For me? Man, it’s a bunch of stuff. I always like to keep it under wraps. People don’t want surprises anymore. Everyone wants to know everything right now. I’m a big fan of just keeping everything tucked away.

Watch more

“Salon Talks” with D. Watkins

“No experience”: Judge rejects Trump “coup memo” author’s “expert” witness at disbarment hearing

Proceedings for the disbarment hearing of Donald Trump’s “coup memo” author John Eastman began Tuesday in Los Angeles and they’re not looking good for the former president’s key adviser on his Jan. 6 plot.

Eastman became a central figure in the House Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation into the insurrection for his efforts in advising Trump on ways to overturn the 2020 election in Congress. Additionally, a Politico report showed that Eastman also encouraged Republican poll workers and allies to file complaints that could be compiled to challenge the then-upcoming midterm and presidential elections.

On Tuesday, Eastman called a man named Joseph Fried to the stand, referring to him as an “expert witness.” The Daily Beast reported that Fried is a public accountant and author of an eBook that detailed his skepticism about President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

California State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland was less than impressed with Eastman’s attempt to pass off Fried as an expert. 

“I don’t see how Mr. Fried is qualified to be an expert. He has no experience in voting or election matters,” the judge said.

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“We don’t believe the opinion of a CPA … is relevant,” reiterated state bar attorney Duncan Carling, adding that Fried “never identified any instances of fraud” in the 2020 presidential election.

Eastman is facing 11 disciplinary charges and is at risk of having his law license suspended or revoked in the state of California. Eastman’s attorney, Randal Miller, tried to invoke the First Amendment in defense of his client’s alleged actions.

“Lawyers get to argue debatable issues, which is what Dr. Eastman did,” Miller said. 

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Carling, however, said Eastman’s purported behavior was a “last-ditch effort” in a series “of increasingly desperate attempts to overturn the election.”

“He was fully aware in real time that his plan was damaging the nation,” Carling said. “Dr. Eastman sought at every turn to avoid every public test of his theory, and he privately confessed … that his theory had no chance of persuading the court.”

Carling also cited email correspondence between Eastman and former Vice President Mike Pence’s then-attorney Greg Jacob, in which Jacob informed Eastman that it was “gravely irresponsible” to “entice the president with an academic theory that had no legal viability and you would well know we would lose in front of any judge who heard the case.”

In a separate email shared by an independent journalist, Jacob wrote, “And thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.”

Miller, however, described the email exchange as “two smart people” having “an honest debate held in good faith.”

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Experts say Hunter Biden deal is actually “harsh” — and question when Trump will face tax charges

Congressional Republicans on Tuesday accused President Joe Biden of intervening to get a lighter penalty for his son, Hunter Biden, and vowed to escalate their investigation into the family after the younger Biden reached a plea deal with the Department of Justice, The New York Times reports.

Hunter Biden is expected to plead guilty to two misdemeanors for neglecting to pay taxes on time and could forgo prosecution over a separate gun charge. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., slammed the deal while speaking to reporters at the Capitol, saying it “continues to show the two-tier system in America.”

Like several other Republicans, McCarthy falsely compared Hunter Biden’s criminal charges to the far worse charges against former President Donald Trump, who the Justice Department indicted earlier this month on 37 counts over his alleged efforts to illegally retain national security documents and obstruct the government’s retrieval of them.

“If you are the president’s leading political opponent, D.O.J. tries to literally put in you jail and give you prison time,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters. “If you are the president’s son, you get a sweetheart deal.”

He added that the agreement should “enhance” House Republicans’ investigation into the Bidens’ alleged bribery and money laundering schemes.

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“Whataboutism”: GOP immediately rushes to “shift the goal posts” over Hunter Biden plea deal

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the chairman of the House Oversight Committee probing the president and his family, said in a statement that he would intensify the investigation and called Hunter Biden’s charges a “slap on the wrist.”

“We will not rest until the full extent of President Biden’s involvement in the family’s schemes are revealed,” said Comer, who has failed to produce any evidence to back his claims against the president.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., pushed the narrative that the plea deal reflects a politicized Justice Department’s unfair and unequal treatment toward Hunter Biden and Trump.

“A slap on the wrist for Hunter Biden while ‘The Big Guy’ continues to hunt down his top political opponent,” he wrote on Twitter. “This doesn’t show equal justice. It’s a mockery of our legal system by a family that has no respect for our laws.”

Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who said he would block any Biden administration nominees to DOJ positions after Trump’s indictment, said Hunter Biden’s plea deal further supported his cause.

“This is exhibit 1,402 for why I’m holding Biden’s DOJ nominees,” he tweeted. “We have a two-tiered justice system in our country. It’s a disgrace.”

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Democratic leaders and legal experts pushed back against the comparison, arguing that bringing charges against Hunter Biden proves that the Justice Department is anything but politically motivated against conservatives.

“This development reflects the Justice Department’s continued institutional independence in following the evidence of actual crimes and enforcing the rule of law even in the face of constant criticism and heckling by my G.O.P. colleagues who think that the system of justice should only follow their partisan wishes,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the House Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement.

“Important context for Hunter Biden deal: it was made by a Trump appointee who has said he had 100% authority to decide what to do ultimately on the matter,” NYU Law professor and attorney Andrew Weissmann noted in a tweet, citing a letter Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney David Weiss sent to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

Other experts and justice reporters further countered the GOP leaders’ claims of unfair prosecution online, arguing that the charges against Hunter Biden are unusual.

“A federal public defender with 30 years of experience who was working an addict-in-possession case in DC a few years back said he’d never seen prosecutors move forward on that charge,” NBC News reporter Ryan J. Reilly tweeted, linking to his article titled “Legal experts say the charges against Hunter Biden are rarely brought.”

“I spoke to multiple former federal prosecutors today. The only one who could recall charging the addict-in-possession statute was a prosecutor with decades of experience who remembered a lone case from many years ago,” legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti added.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

In an opinion for The Daily Beast, former federal prosecutor Shan Wu argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland was more “harsh” on Hunter Biden in an attempt to make the DOJ appear less politicized, arguing that any other person with a drug addiction “who was not the son of a sitting president would not have been prosecuted for these charges.”

“But AG Merrick Garland—ever sensitive to accusations of DOJ looking political—kept the original prosecutor on the case to insulate DOJ from accusations of political partisanship, and refused to exercise what could easily be considered reasonable prosecutorial discretion in refusing to bring criminal charges for such minor offenses,” Wu wrote. “As usual, Garland’s efforts to avoid political backlash are doomed to failure.”

Other legal experts cited reporting that Trump turned down his lawyers’ pleas to strike a settlement with the DOJ before he was indicted.

“If he had listened to his lawyers, rather than to Tom Fitton, he likely could have avoided criminal charges entirely,” attorney Bradley Moss tweeted, referring to Trump’s adherence to the Judicial Watch activist’s advice to keep documents and argue that they were his.

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“DOJ really had no choice”: Experts say non-lawyer Tom Fitton’s advice horribly backfired on Trump

Others wondered why the DOJ had not looked at Trump’s well-publicized tax issues.

“The biggest issue the Hunter plea underscores is where are the federal tax audits/cases with respect to Trump, the Trump Org and related businesses, and his former CFO Weisselberg— all of whom have reported tax issues,” Weissmann wrote.

“Frankly, it seems a little ridiculous and more than a little hypocritical for GOP supporters of their favorite orange defendant to make a stink about prosecutors supposedly going light on, um, … *tax* *charges*,” conservative lawyer and Trump critic George Conway added.

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about the GOP’s Biden crusade

Bret Baier confronts Trump for bragging he freed Alice Johnson: “She’d be killed under your plan”

Former President Donald Trump struggled to defend his plan to execute drug dealers when Fox News anchor Bret Baier pointed out that his policy would have killed Alice Johnson, the non-violent drug offender Trump has repeatedly bragged about freeing from prison.

The rambling interview — which mainly focused on Trump’s latest indictment in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case — eventually meandered into the topic of Trump’s stance on drug dealing in the United States. 

“You’ve said you’d be in favor of the death penalty for drug dealers. Still the case?” Baier asked.

“That’s the only way you’re gonna stop it,” Trump replied, dubiously arguing that “a drug dealer will kill approximately 500 people during the course of his or her life.”

Baier pointed out the ex-president was “a big proponent of the First Step Act, the criminal justice reform.”

“But I focused on non-violent crime. As an example, a woman who you know very well was in jail. She had 24 more years to serve, she served for 22 years,” Trump said, referring to Johnson whose sentence was commuted by Trump after lobbying from reality star Kim Kardashian.

“But she’d be killed under your plan,” Baier pointed out.

“Huh?” Trump replied.

“As a drug dealer,” Baier said.

“No, no. No. Under my, oh, under that? Uhh, it would depend on the severity,” Trump argued.

“She’s technically a former drug dealer,” Baier observed. “She had a multi-million dollar cocaine ring.”

“Any drug dealer,” Trump replied.

“So even Alice Johnson?” asked Baier.

“She can’t do it, ok? By the way, if that was there, she wouldn’t be killed, it would start as of now,” Trump insisted.

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“Starting now,” Trump emphasized. “But she wouldn’t have done it if it was death penalty. In other words, if it was death penalty, she wouldn’t have been on that phone call. She wouldn’t have been a dealer.”

Trump followed by comparing Johnson’s situation to his own while in office.

“Now she wasn’t much of a dealer ’cause she was sort of like, I mean, honestly, she got treated terribly,” he said. “She was treated, she was treated sort of like I get treated. But Bret, she was treated very unfairly. She got 48 years and that was bad.”

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At another point during the sit-down, the former president lauded his widely-panned COVID-19 response.

“There are people that say I saved 100 million lives — I don’t even talk about it,” he claimed without evidence.

Speaking about “a Democrat friend who is very smart,” Trump stated that the friend “said, ‘I don’t understand one thing about you. I watch your rallies, they’re incredible. You talk about defeating ISIS, you talk about taxes, you talk about regulation, you talk about everything. You never said — I’ve never heard you talk about the incredible job did you with the vaccines.'”

“Because, as you know,” Trump continued, “I got them done in nine months and it was supposed to take anywhere from five to 12 years. I broke their ass, ok? And do you know who doesn’t like me too much? The FDA because they were very bureaucratic and I got it done. And he said, ‘You may have saved in the world, throughout the world, a hundred million people and you never talk about it.’ I said, I really don’t want to talk about it because, as a Republican it’s not a great thing to talk about because, for some reason, it’s just not.”

“For some reason?” Baier pushed Trump to explicate.

“Yeah, for some reason,” Trump replied. “Because, people love the vaccines, and people hate the vaccines. But, conservatives aren’t — and I understand both sides of it, by the way. I understand both sides very well. What I didn’t do is the mandates — the mandates and the vaccines don’t go.”

The former president then seized the moment as an opportunity to take a brief dig at his 2024 presidential opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who Trump argued loved “radical masker” Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“So, the mandates are horrible. And I was always against the mandates,” he said. “But really on the vaccines, I let the governors make their decisions. But you have a lot of people that love the vaccines. I mean, you do. They happen to be more Democrat than they are Republican.”

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“Beyond parody”: Experts pound Alito for pre-buttal op-ed defending luxury trip with GOP billionaire

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito fired off a preemptive defense in the Wall Street Journal before ProPublica reported his luxury trip with a Republican billionaire who later had cases before the court.

Alito in 2008 flew on the private jet of hedge fund billionaire and GOP megadonor Paul Singer to a luxury $1,000-a-night lodge in Alaska owned by another Republican donor who did not charge him for the stay, according to ProPublica.

Alito did not report the flight on his financial disclosures, according to ProPublica, which noted that the flight would have cost the justice more than $100,000 each way if he chartered it himself.

Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times since the trip, including a 2014 case in which Alito voted with the 7-1 majority in favor of Singer’s hedge fund in its case against Argentina, leading to a $2.4 billion payout for the fund.

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Samuel Alito took luxury fishing vacation with GOP billionaire who later had cases before the court

The report comes months after ProPublica reported on the luxury trips and lavish gifts Justice Clarence Thomas has received from Republican billionaire megadonor Harlan Crow.

ProPublica sent Alito a list of detailed questions last week but the justice on Tuesday refused to comment through a spokesperson and then published a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending against the upcoming report.

“ProPublica has leveled two charges against me: first, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose Report,” Alito wrote. “Neither charge is valid.”

Alito wrote that it is “incorrect” to suggest that his failure to recuse created an “appearance of impropriety.” Alito claimed that it “would be utterly impossible” for his staff to determine all individuals associated with an LLC and argued that “even if I had been aware of Mr. Singer’s connection to the entities involved in those cases, recusal would not have been required or appropriate.”

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Legal experts: Clarence Thomas appears to have violated law with secret luxury trips from GOP donor

Alito argued that his interactions with Singer have been limited and that the two have “never talked about any case or issue before the Court.”

“He allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska,” Alito wrote. “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”

Alito also wrote that he believed he was not required to disclose the trip under the court’s rules at the time.

“When I joined the Court and until the recent amendment of the filing instructions, justices commonly interpreted this discussion of ‘hospitality’ to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts,” he wrote. “The flight to Alaska was the only occasion when I have accepted transportation for a purely social event, and in doing so I followed what I understood to be standard practice.”

Alito wrote that he stayed for three nights in a “modest one-room unit” at the lodge, “which was a comfortable but rustic facility.”

“As I recall, the meals were homestyle fare. I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000,” he wrote, adding that he only agreed to take a seat on a flight that “would have otherwise remained vacant.”

“It was my understanding that this would not impose any extra cost on Mr. Singer. Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me,” he added.

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Billionaire Harlan Crow bought property from Clarence Thomas. The justice didn’t disclose the deal

Legal experts hammered Alito’s unreported trip and his attempt to defend it.

Leah Litman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan, called Alito’s op-ed “beyond parody.”

“Here you have a Supreme Court Justice *admit* that they pay ‘little personal attention’ to the ‘vast majority’ of cases that parties ask them to hear. and pout that it would be REALLY HARD for them to try and figure out whether they have an interest in all of these cases,” Litman tweeted.

“‘It’s OK that I secretly flew to Alaska on this private jet because it had an empty seat!’ is the comically bizarre excuse of a man caught red-handed, and yet it is still more persuasive logic than anything Alito wrote in Dobbs,” tweeted Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the Supreme Court for Slate.

“When you’re trying this hard to justify why you weren’t unethical, maybe just don’t,” wrote Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Don’t accept the private flight to Alaska. Report it if you do. Do support a code of conduct so the rules are clear going forward and you don’t get into this situation.”

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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., raised questions about the op-ed.

“First, who orchestrated this weird pre-buttal with the infamous WSJ Polluter Page, and did Alito get help from a PR firm? If so, who paid?” he tweeted, questioning Alito’s reasoning for determining that he did not need to disclose the trip.

“He just happened to be flying to Alaska and there just happened to be a private jet going to Alaska with an empty seat, and he just happened to find that out, like on some weird billionaire shared-ride Uber?” Whitehouse wrote. “Oh, and would that ’empty seat’ trick fly with legislative or executive ethics disclosures? (Hint:  no.) And how about with the Financial Disclosure Committee? (Right, you didn’t ask.) This just keeps getting worse.”

Experts told ProPublica they could not identify another single instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift from one of the parties involved.

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” Indiana Law Prof. Charles Geyh, an expert on recusals, told the outlet. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?”

Georgetown Law Prof. Abbe Smith, who co-wrote a textbook on judicial ethics, said that if she had a client who learned the judge took a gift from the other party she would immediately move for recusal.

“If I found out after the fact, I’d be outraged on behalf of my client,” she said. “And, frankly, I’d be outraged on behalf of the legal system.”

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Behind the Hunter Biden hype: GOP scramble to keep up the outrage — but they’ve got nothing

Something real finally happened in the Hunter Biden saga besides all the innuendo and gossip that has had the right wing in a permanent state of excited agitation for the past few years. On Tuesday morning, he was charged with three crimes.

 U.S. Attorney David Weiss, (a Trump appointee who the former president was very proud to nominate, saying that he “shares the President’s vision “) released a letter laying out the charges against Biden:

The first Information charges the defendant with tax offenses—namely, two counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7203. The defendant has agreed to  plead guilty to both counts of the tax Information. The second Information charges the defendant with a firearm offense—namely, one count of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) and 924(a)(2) (2018). The defendant has agreed to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information.

I didn’t know that failing to pay your taxes on time was a criminal offense but apparently it can be, although according to the experts most of the time it’s dealt with as a civil offense. Biden had paid those taxes some time back so he was given probation for his crime. The gun charge pertained to his lying on a form saying that he hadn’t done any drugs during that specific period of time. The Diversion Agreement declined to prosecute him for that crime as long as he agreed to never own a firearm again and to stay drug-free for 24 months.

After five long years of investigating every aspect of Hunter Biden’s life, these are apparently the only crimes they could come up with to justify their work. They were unable to prove the Rudy Giuliani allegations that Hunter had accepted bribes from Ukrainians or vast sums from Chinese interests. They didn’t even get the chance to enter into evidence anywhere all those salacious pictures of him on that infamous “laptop.” So, needless to say, the Republicans are now engaged in intense breast-beating and lamentation. How is it possible that the black sheep of the so-called “Biden Crime Family” can get away scott free?

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GOP immediately rushes to “shift the goal posts” over Hunter Biden plea deal

Actually, he didn’t.

Take for example the case of Trump adviser and personal confidante Roger Stone and his wife, who failed to pay taxes from 2007 to 2011 and again in 2018. They were sued by the government in civil court for two million dollars. They also tried to hide their wealth from the government which some people would call tax evasion. But the government did not charge them — even though Stone had been stringing them along pretending to be trying to pay for years until he finally just stopped altogether. So, what happened to Roger Stone? He was allowed to settle with the government after they attempted to obtain records that it was strongly suspected would prove that he’d committed a felony by trying to evade paying his taxes. It all ended very amicably with no criminal charges filed. Isn’t that nice?

I would have thought that no sentient being on the planet would have the nerve to compare what Donald Trump is accused of with the charges against Hunter Biden.

As for Hunter’s other charge, all the legal experts point out that this is usually only charged in high-profile cases when the person under investigation hasn’t violated any other laws. As NBC reported, this charge was recently brought against “the mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his teacher in Newport News, Virginia, [who] pleaded guilty to the charge — possessing a firearm while using marijuana — along with a charge of making a false statement.” Biden’s case was certainly high profile and they clearly wanted to charge him with something and couldn’t find any other violation, so it fits.

And as it happens, the law Biden violated is being challenged by gun proliferation activists. One appeals court has already held that the government can’t ban people convicted of a non-violent crime from having a gun and another ruled that drug users have a right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. Personally, I think the government should have broad powers to regulate gun ownership so it doesn’t offend me that Biden agreed to forego using drugs and owning a gun in the future to avoid being charged with a felony. That seems like a fair deal for a first offense in a non-violent crime. But that’s just me. I would have expected the right, which even defends violent terrorists’ right to bear arms, to scream bloody murder that someone was charged for lying on a background check or required to give up their right to own a gun.

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The legal consensus is that Hunter Biden was actually treated more harshly than most people in America would have been treated in these circumstances.

As expected, the right-wingers are having a full blown meltdown over this. The “sweetheart deal” talking points were in instant circulation:

I would have thought that no sentient being on the planet would have the nerve to compare what Donald Trump is accused of with the charges against Hunter Biden. Not even Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. But as long as we’re talking about him, perhaps McCarthy would care to comment on the big story By Eric Lipton in the New York Times yesterday about the Trump family’s latest “sweetheart deal” with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Oman.

Mr. Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India.

Mr. Trump has been selling his name to global real estate developers for more than a decade. But the Oman deal has taken his financial stake in one of the world’s most strategically important and volatile regions to a new level, underscoring how his business and his politics intersect as he runs for president again amid intensifying legal and ethical troubles.

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Worse than a bust: Republicans’ Biden blockbuster blows up in their face

Let’s just say this might be just a bit more relevant than Rudy Giuliani’s moldy, thoroughly-investigated Hunter Biden Burisma pseudo-scandal. It’s happening right before our eyes in real time.

We already knew about Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s $2 billion “sweetheart deal” with the Saudi Investment Fund and now Trump and his son Eric (Don Jr is apparently now a professional MAGA influencer) have done a major mega deal with the government of Oman, partly financed by the Saudis —- as Trump is running for president and is under indictment for stealing highly sensitive national security documents, some of which reportedly have to do with the Middle East. Alrighty then.

What’s all this I keep hearing about a “crime family?” I didn’t quite catch the name. 

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