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Help! What vegetables should I be planting right now?

You can Grow Your Own Way. All spring and summer, we’re playing in the vegetable garden; join us for step-by-step guides, highly recommended tools, backyard tours, juicy-ripe recipes, and then some. Let’s get our hands dirty.

In the lockdown spring of 2020, when scores of people started vegetable gardens, a local farmer selling tomato plants by the honor system (yes, those still exist in the rural area where I live) had a large handwritten sign up that said in capital letters: “Do not plant tomatoes until after the last spring frost!” I hope that his customers followed this advice, otherwise instead of juicy beefsteak tomatoes in August, they would have dead plants in May.

There is no one-fits-all date for when to plant tomatoes or other warm-season vegetables. The USDA Hardiness Zone Map covers a vast spectrum of temperature zones, and the last spring frost and first fall frost dates vary greatly — in New Orleans, it’s Feb. 16 and Dec. 19, and in Billings, Montana, it’s May 15 and Sept. 26.

Instead, to plant your veggies at the right time, it is essential to know the difference between warm-season and cool-season vegetables.

Warm-season vegetables

Tomatoes are warm-season vegetables, as are other members of the nightshade family like eggplants and peppers, as well as beans, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, melons, watermelons, zucchini and summer squash, pumpkin and winter squash, sweet potatoes, and herbs like basil and cilantro. These crops are highly cold-sensitive. A temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) kills the entire plant right away. Temperatures in the mid 50s and lower stunt the plant’s growth, so it won’t produce fruit (or only stunted fruit).

To grow properly, warm-season crops need warm air and warm soil. Crops that are directly seeded in the soil, such as beans, won’t germinate well when the soil temperature is still below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius).

Because of their temperature requirements, in most climates, warm-season vegetables have only one growing cycle — from late spring to late summer — and only one harvest. The warm, and sometimes even hot days in fall, might lure you into thinking that you can grow warm-season vegetables way into fall. Sure, you can protect your tomato plants during the nights when frost is in the forecast but it’s cumbersome and does not work for all the crops. Even without a frost, the nighttime temperatures in early fall are already too cold for cucumber plants, for example, which could turn bitter.

In cooler climates, the relatively short growing season, which is calculated as the number of days between the last spring frost and the first fall frost, makes it necessary to start warm-season crops from seeds indoors, or buy young plants from a nursery that started them in a greenhouse. Watermelons, for example, take 90 days from seed to harvest, so you need to get a headstart on the growing season to fit them into the warm-weather window.

Cool-season vegetables

At the other end of the spectrum are the cool-season vegetables: asparagus, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, all the cabbages, carrots, cauliflower, Swiss chard, kale, leeks, lettuces, onions, parsnips, peas, radishes, spinach, rutabagas, and turnips.

They can be planted either early in the spring or in the fall so, unlike warm-season crops, they have two growing seasons. But just like warm-season crops, they need to be fitted into a specific time window. Warm-season vegetables need to be seeded or planted early enough in the spring to reach harvest before the temperatures get too warm. Hot weather does not necessarily kill them, but they become unpalatable. Take radishes, for example, that turn fibrous and develop a super sharp, unpleasant taste. Leafy vegetables like salad greens bolt in hot weather — they send up tall seed stalks, which is nature’s ingenious trick to ensure there is a next generation before the summer heat kills the plants.

Cool-season vegetables not only tolerate cold temperatures, they need them to germinate, grow, set fruit, and mature. Spinach needs a soil temperature between 45 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit (and 7 and 20 degrees Celsius) to germinate. If you live in USDA zones 9 to 11, you might be able to grow them in the winter. Any zone higher than that is simply too hot for cool-season vegetables.

Some of the cold-season vegetables are even winter-hardy. They stop growing when temperatures consistently remain below freezing but they can still be harvested, and root vegetables can be dug until the ground freezes.

It has always eluded me why kale is grown during the summer in the United States (in my native Germany, it is a winter vegetable only) because like other brassicas such as rutabagas and Brussels sprouts, it tastes even better after the first frost because the cold converts the starches into sugar. I have harvested kale and collard greens when they were covered with half a foot of snow.

Some cold-season crops are easier to grow than others. The leafy types are usually easy, those that form dense heads are trickier. Brussels sprouts have the reputation of being finicky to grow and I can attest to that; I’ve tried Brussels sprouts a few years in a row and have given up on growing them. Similarly, I have given up on growing artichokes, a warm-season crop, because the growing season here in Pennsylvania is too short.

Good reasons to grow cool-season vegetables

Growing cool-season vegetables can be easier than growing warm-season vegetables. They need less frequent watering because there is usually more rain in the fall, and the soil dries out less quickly because it’s cooler. Also, weed growth slows down in the fall so keeping your garden beds weed-free is less work. There are fewer insect pests, too, as many have already completed their annual life cycle. Fall is the only time when I can plant arugula without it getting devoured by flea beetles.

If you want to grow cool-season vegetables, planning is required now. Make a map (to scale) of your garden plot and jot down what you plan to plant and where to make sure you have the space for the cool-season vegetables when you need it. In the late summer when I usually seed kale, many of the warm-season vegetables are still in full swing, but I have an empty space because the peas that I planted in the spring are long gone. Always keep in mind that crop rotation — not planting crops from the same family in the same location for at least two years in a row — is essential for plant health.

A huge solar flare just struck Earth — and there may be bigger ones to come, experts say

The weather on the sun is frightful. 

For the past few weeks, solar flares have been violently erupting from the sun, and a few of them have whizzed past Earth. The solar flares have been so strong and powerful that they caused radio blackouts in Australia. One of the solar flares last week was the most powerful in the past five years, according to Space Weather Live.

Though they may seem unusual, the strong solar flares are a side effect of a natural, seasonal cycle that occurs on the sun. Earth’s sun has recurrent “seasons,” much like Earth — a phenomenon known as the solar cycle, which lasts for about 11 Earth years. Currently, the Sun is going through its 25th solar cycle since counting began in 1755. Scientists track this cycle by counting the Sun’s number of sunspots; when the sun has the fewest sunspots, it is in its solar minimum phase of the solar cycle. When the number of sunspots reach their pinnacle, the sun is undergoing its solar maximum phase of its solar cycle. During the solar maximum phase of the sun, solar activity increases — hence, the gusty space storm occurring at the moment.

RELATED: Meet the micronova, the supernova’s tiny counterpart

“A solar flare is an intense eruption of radiation and charged particles in the hot corona above the surface of the sun,” Avi Loeb, former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, explained via email. “Flares occur in active regions and are often, but not always, accompanied by coronal mass ejections.”

Some of the most recent flares were classified as X-class flares, the most energetic category. While these flares are to be expected during this solar season, they can cause issues with Earth technology. Specifically, flares can affect radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and space satellites.

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“The cloud of energetic particles could hit the Earth if we are unlucky, and disrupt communications and power grids,” Loeb said.

As solar activity ramps up in the sun’s 25th cycle, scientists worry that this week’s solar weather is merely prophesying a more disruptive solar flare, such as the one that hit Earth in 1859. The Carrington Event, as it is now known, wreaked havoc on telegraph lines. Widespread fires occurred in telegraph stations, and the flare caused an aurora that was visible over most of North America and even as south as the Caribbean.

Loeb said our increasing reliance on technology could mean that if another massive flare akin to the Carrington flare were to strike Earth, it would “wreak significant damage to electrical power grids, global supply chains and satellite communications.”

“Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly apparent that greater reliance on technology has also made us more vulnerable to risks posed by extreme space weather events,” Loeb said. “For instance, coronal mass ejections can produce powerful geomagnetic storms that disrupt a wide range of electrical systems.”

Loeb said the damage could tally up to $10 trillion dollars in economic losses, and a full recovery would take several years. Luckily, a study published in 2019 found the chance of a Carrington Event-scale flare occurring before 2029 to be less than 1.9 percent.

Still, astronomers like Loeb think that the most recent massive flares should serve as a warning that the world must be prepared for another event akin to the Carrington Event.

“In light of mounting evidence indicating that the economic damage due to large flares would be very extensive, I hope that the recent flare would serve as a wake-up call and will stimulate further research to identify methods for protecting our planet that are both physically sound and technologically implementable within the next century,” Loeb said.

Read more Salon articles on astronomy:

The best way to store basil, according to experts

It may be the herb that turns thick slices of mozzarella cheese and tomato into a Caprese salad, or what perks up marinara sauce, lemon cocktails, and grilled corn. Unfortunately, basil is also a ticking time bomb: The very second I buy it from the market, it slouches and slumps. Its arms are touching its toes before I even get it into my kitchen, and over the course of the week (if that long!), I inevitably watch the once-perky bunch lose the will to live. It pains me, the defeatist feeling that there’s nothing I can do to keep my basil alive. In the blink of an eye, a bunch of basil leaves will lose their vibrant green color and turn brown (or worse)

There are lots of tips for the best way to store fresh basil leaves — and I’ve tried most of them, with little repeated or sustained success. So it’s time to approach the issue more strategically, testing the methods side by side in order to determine which one will be the true lifeline.

The best way to store basil, according to experts

Before testing a few different methods myself — including storing basil at room temperature (both covered and uncovered in a glass jar), and storing basil in the fridge in a loose plastic bag — I reviewed what other cooking experts had to stay about this. Alexandra Stafford, who cooks a wondrous array of beautiful, delicious food (if you follow her on Instagram, I don’t have to tell you this), recommends storing the basil out of the fridge: Snip off any bands, trim the bottoms, then transfer to a tall jar with a small amount of water. But don’t just abandon it there. Instead, treat the basil like a flower bouquet, changing the water every couple of days and making sure no leaves are below the waterline (otherwise, they’ll get slimy and discolored).

While most tender herbs will last longer if they’re stored clean and dry, I couldn’t find many authorities that recommended rinsing basil leaves before storage. Some experts advise loosely covering the bunch with a plastic bag: J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats goes a step further. He has found that “keeping the tops of those herbs tightly covered by placing an overturned zipper-lock bag over them and sealing it against the base of the jar was also an essential step in keeping them fresh.” He stores herbs in sealed quart containers with just a small amount of water on the bottom. Would a tight seal be much more effective than a loose cover?

And most people say to keep basil at room temperature (as refrigeration will cause the leaves to darken and bruise), but you’ll find dissenters out there ( . . . can they be trusted? I shall see).

Testing basil storage methods

Armed with that information, I bought a few big bunches of basil, split them up, fetched my prayer beads, and organized six tests.

The first method I tried, which no one recommends, is placing the unwashed basil in the fridge in the plastic bag or clamshell it came in. This method is also known as “the lazy gal’s method” aka what my boyfriend would do if I weren’t there to scold him harshly. There’s no strategy or logic to this method, so it’s no surprise that this doesn’t work great, especially in the long-term (more on that later).

The more popular way to store fresh herbs, including basil, is by following the flower bouquet method. Trim basil and place it in a jar with a bit of water so that the bottom of the stems are just touching the water. You don’t want them to be completely submerged in water, because that will actually cause them to go bad more quickly. From here, I tried four different approaches: storing basil at room temperature, uncovered; storing basil at room temperature with a loose plastic bag draped over the leaves; storing basil at room temperature in a sealed quart container; storing basil in the fridge in a loose bag.

Finally, the renegade of basil storage: storing the fresh leaves like salad greens. I picked, washed, and dried the leaves, then wrapped them in a dry paper towel, sealed the parcel in a plastic bag, and stored in the fridge

Every evening at 8 PM on the dot, I made my “basil rounds” (I’m a doctor, did you know?), examining each of my patients and taking copious notes on the firmness and color of the leaves, as well as the smell and “slime” of the bunch overall. I’ll spare you the super detailed notes and get straight to a synopsis of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And, a quick disclaimer: My apartment is very warm, and the A/C does not reach the kitchen. Additionally, many of the “room temperature” bunches were actually quite close to my often-in-use oven, which has no heat retention. In other words, it’s a sauna in there. I’m sure all of the basil would’ve lasted longer in a more temperate environment. Keep this in mind as I share the results.

Day 1

Right away, winners were already being distinguished from the losers. The refrigerated bouquet was, out of the gate, the gloomiest and darkest of the bunch (my notes say: “Already sad and droopy. Wouldn’t be proud to put this on a Caprese. Probably won’t keep these past day 3”).

All of the others looked OK (this was the first day, after all), though I did notice some black spots on the renegade leaves. The room temperature flower bouquets, both uncovered and covered, were holding up, though I had some concerns with the method: It was hard to know whether all of the leaves were getting sufficient water, and I felt like I had to peel off a lot of low-hanging leaves so that they wouldn’t be submerged (which felt like a waste). Plus, the outer leaves seemed to have a higher propensity toward drooping than the inner ones.

As for the quart container bunch, I noticed troublesome condensation that I thought could lead to mold. I decided to keep the top of the container propped slightly open for the rest of the experiment so that there would be at least some air circulation.

The biggest surprise was that the control bag, which I just shoved into the fridge as it was, still looked just fine! I would’ve definitely used it to garnish a salad, with no need to blanch, pulverize, or manipulate it in any way.

Day 2

By Day 2, the control bag’s fortunes had taken a sudden turn. It was droopy, with crushed brown leaves, and many of the outer leaves had started to fall off. Nothing smelled funky or moldy, but it would never win a beauty contest.

The other big loser? The refrigerated flower bouquet. While the inner part of the bunch was fine (green, perky, fresh), the outer leaves were drooping, and some were almost completely black.

I noticed that the room temp bouquets were starting to droop a little, but not dramatically. Although some of the leaves on the uncovered bouquet were starting to yellow, it was faring better than its covered counterpart. When I took that bunch out of the jar to freshen the water, many of the leaves fell off, and I noticed there was sliminess and discoloration at the bottom of the stems.

The quart container leaves looked perky and smelled fragrant, while the renegade leaves were pretty much the same as the day before.

Day 3

When mid-week rolled around, I declared the control bag nearly dead (“would not eat 90% of it”). The refrigerated bouquet was nearly as bad, except that some of the leaves in the middle remained green and firm. Compared to those two, the renegade leaves looked and smelled fresher, though black spots continued to proliferate.

As for the room temperature bunches, the basil stored in the quart container looked the best: “No leaves are completely black and fewer leaves are falling off!” I noted. The other bouquets, both covered and uncovered, were losing a lot of volume.

Day 4

This is when I started to eliminate some altogether. I declared the control basil and the refrigerated bouquet dead. Of the refrigerated options, the renegade method worked best, but by this point, almost all of the leaves were spotted with black.

I also decided that the uncovered bouquet was healthier than the covered one. The shrouded bunch was much droopier, with many black leaves and an off smell. The uncovered bouquet still smelled fresh, with only a couple of discolored leaves. (Could it be because the uncovered bunch was slightly larger, with a high-sided jar that helped it to stand tall?)

Day 5

At this point, I’d crossed off all of the refrigerated options. Not only were the renegade leaves black and slimy, but they also smelled funky. That left the three room temperature options, among which the loosely covered bunch was definitely the weakest link. It was droopier and darker than the uncovered bouquet, and some of the leaves had even started to grow mold.

And so I was down to the uncovered bunch and the quart container bunch, both of which were fairly happy and healthy, even into the morning of Day 6.

Yes, there were black spots, some droopiness, and — in the case of the uncovered bunch — a thinning of leaves, but they looked and smelled fresh. Some of the leaves were even pristine enough to adorn an open-faced sandwich!

So which method is the best?

If you have to, you can store your basil in a plastic bag, just as it is, in the fridge, for a few hours. My “control basil” was fine for the first day or so. No need to tend to it immediately. You can also pluck the leaves, wash and dry them, and store them like salad greens if you’re going to be using them within a day. That’s the renegade technique, and it also presented no issues for the first couple of days.

For longer-term storage, avoid the refrigerator! Store your basil like a flower bouquet — uncovered — or tuck it into a quart, leaving the top propped open. Both work well, but I actually prefer the quart container method: It has the advantage of containing your bunch, which seems to stymy droopage and prevent leaves from shedding onto the counter. Bunch 2C seemed to maintain its volume better than 2A (this might not be an issue if you’re using a little basil every day).

Where to store basil

Keep your basil in a sunny — but not hot — location (a tricky balance). I’ve taken to keeping my basil in the windowsill in my bedroom, which is air-conditioned at night. Recognize that a) your basil probably won’t stay good for “weeks” (I’d say six days, max) and that b) you’re going to lose some leaves. Even the best storage methods presume that you’ll use the basil throughout the week, rather than buying it six days in advance and waiting to eat it.

Sure, keeping six bunches of wilting basil in my very small kitchen for a week was unduly stressful, but I feel more confident knowing the methods that are proven to work.

Dinosaur nuggets and juice boxes: In defense of making lunch fun again

When I first started working from home, I had grand designs for lunch. No longer was I constrained by what would hold up well in the Lisa Frank thermos I’d somehow managed to hold onto since middle school! I would have a full kitchen and all its contents right at my fingertips. Surely, I would get in the habit of pulling together midday meals that were at least interesting, if not extravagant, by comparison. 

But as most people who work from home do, I quickly found out that in the face of back-to-back-to-back Zoom calls and deadlines, lunch — intriguing or otherwise — was the first thing to get chucked off the to-do list.

RELATED: Take back your lunch hour (all of it!)

Suddenly, the pandemic hit, and a switch seemingly flipped. I realized that little moments of self-care, no matter how infinitesimal, were going to be key to staying sane and healthy. My inner Southern grandma would make an appearance around one o’clock every afternoon as I’d quietly murmur to myself, “Honey, you gotta eat.” 

One of the ways I encourage that habit is, quite simply, by following a formula. I’ve written about this before. Most days, my plates consist of a quick-cooking carbohydrate, like canned beans, instant rice or toast; a simple protein, such as chickpeas, edamame, eggs or tofu​​​; and some fat, which is most often avocado, nut butter or a drizzle of olive oil. 

RELATED: Tired of boring lunches? Try this genius formula for flavor-packed meals

On days when I need a little extra dopamine jolt, however, I have another little secret. I make lunch for my inner-kid. 

I know that sounds self-indulgent — and it is, a bit — but let me explain. About two months into the initial pandemic lockdown, I was placing a grocery order. I’d already selected my kitchen staples — the boring adult stuff like canned beans, chicken thighs and oat milk — yet something compelled me to check out the selection of chicken tenders, one of my longtime comfort foods. 

My cursor hovered over a bag of dinosaur-shaped nuggets, and I let out a little laugh. I hadn’t had those since I was probably in middle school, or around the same time I was carrying that Lisa Frank thermos. Suddenly, I realized, “Oh, I can buy those for myself. No one is stopping me.” 

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The next day, lunch rolled around, and I gleefully poured 1/4 of the bag onto a sheet pan alongside some olive oil-coated broccolini in the name of “balance.” I didn’t have pre-mixed honey mustard on hand, but I did have some agave, grainy brown mustard and a whisk. The entire meal was a delight. 

Since then, I’ve picked up other longtime favorites from my childhood. While some (notably Welch’s juice boxes) don’t hold up, most do. On the days that I feel like eating lunch is burdensome, I have Annie’s shells and white cheddar in my pantry, pre-chopped fruit salad in the crisper drawer and chocolate pudding in the refrigerator. In combination with some of my other kitchen staples, having those items on hand has made lunch fun again.

On the really bad days, there are always dino nuggets in the freezer. 

Some of our favorite lunch recipes from the Salon Food archives: 

Take back your lunch hour (all of it!)

In the decade I’ve been working from home — mostly as a full-time freelance writer — I’ve made plenty of mildly self-destructive decisions. The non-exhaustive list includes being too lazy to create a separate work email address and working in non-ergonomic environments like at countertops and on the floor. 

I have learned one crucial piece of work-from-home self care, however: I always set aside a whole hour to make and eat lunch. This decision arose out of a rather theatrical meltdown I will recount for you now. 

Related: How to dig out of your next salad rut (plus, a panzanella recipe fit for a hearty lunch)

My background is in magazine editing and writing, but for a short spell I was a correspondent for a daily news site covering the packaged food and beverage industries. I wrote two articles a day, meaning I spent my morning doing a couple interviews, transcribing them and writing feverishly; then I’d break for “lunch” (aka shoveling alternating slabs of cheese, bread and tomato into my mouth) before repeating this insane ritual in the afternoon. 

One day, I was waiting for a source to call me back when I thought I had just enough time to scramble up a couple eggs for a proper lunch. I’d barely whisked the eggs and minced a few chives when my phone rang. I knocked out the interview and posted the story, and was smugly strolling back to the kitchen thinking aloud, “I can have it all,” when I came upon a piteous sight.

The fridge door hung open, its incandescent light casting a sickening glow on six or seven chives that were strewn all over the kitchen rug next to half an egg shell, from which a string of egg white was forming a crust like dried-up drool. The counter situation was somehow sadder: a visual orgy of indecision. Four different-sized pans sat next to a flabby wad of softening goat cheese still in its plastic jacket. I’d pulled the entire loaf of bread out of the freezer (yes, I keep bread there — you should, too) to retrieve a single slice, which hung there half attached to the rest of the thawing loaf like a hangnail.

What’s worse, my initial thought upon entering the kitchen was, “Who did this?”

Who indeed? 

It was at that moment — eight months into a job that caused me more missed lunches and canker sores than I could count as I stared down my 30th birthday — that I realized it was time for a change. It’s been almost eight years since I started working for myself, and scarcely a day has gone by when I haven’t taken an hour to make and eat lunch. 

Weekday lunch demands time, attention and strategic shopping, which gets easier as you learn what you crave midday. Because I cook and eat for a living, my weekday lunches are usually vegetarian or vegan, and often eggy: things like shakshuka, oven-baked sweet potato hash and 15-minute saag paneer with halloumi and clean-out-the-fridge greens. I almost always have a salad, either as a side — think cabbage and mint slaw — or the main event. Go-tos include lemony tuna salad with white beans, panzanella with pickled pepper dressing, or seared cucumber and couscous tossed in my favorite tahini dressing (recipe below; you’re welcome). I’ve found that it helps to always have lots of fresh herbs and nuts around; that way I can mash together a quick herb sauce right on the cutting board with a garlic clove, olive oil and citrus juice — and my sharpest knife. From there, I’ll smear it on a sandwich, or toss it with roasted vegetables. 

Of course, there are plenty of days in which the prospect of preparing a midday meal feels insurmountable enough to order sandwiches or eat leftovers. But since I’ve embraced this almost-daily ritual, I find myself fantasizing about what I’ll make for that day’s midday meal while I’m still eating breakfast. When I’m between calls or struggling to come up with a good headline, I’ll make a mental inventory of my fridge contents and start putting the lunch-puzzle pieces together. Once 11 rolls around, I’ll sneak away from my laptop to get some farro going or wash and dry lettuce. I’ve also been known to appear a minute or two late to an interview after lunch because I was griddling a ham, cheddar and kimchi sandwich. (In my defense, you cannot rush a griddled sandwich.)

In other words, I’ve slowly taken back a slice of my day that for far too long belonged to work for no other reason than I let it. I even start my workdays a little earlier than I used to, if only to eke out time for my glorious midday break.

Now I realize that homemade weekday lunch is not a possibility for everyone for a whole litany of reasons. But the great thing about it is this idea translates. For instance, do you brew a perfect cup of coffee or tea? Can you whip up a mean batch of blueberry jam, granola or pan bread? Whatever your thing, the essence of this ritual is to carve out time for yourself every day to recharge with a little self-loving activity that puts you square in the present moment. It’s meditation for the meditation-averse. 

That’s why cooking works so beautifully. You have to eat anyway; plus, it’s pretty hard to successfully half-ass it. I should know, I once covered my entire kitchen in dried-up raw egg, chives and shame.

***

Recipe: Sumac-seared cucumber salad with tahini dressing

Yields
1 serving
Prep Time
5 minutes
Cook Time
15 minutes

Ingredients

1/2 cup Israeli couscous

Extra virgin olive oil, as needed

1 clove garlic

Salt

1 lemon

1/2 tsp tahini

1 tsp plain yogurt

1/2 English or regular cucumber*

Black pepper

1 shallot, sliced into rings

1 tsp(ish) sumac (could sub za’atar)

3 or 4 leaves Tuscan kale, stems removed and shredded




 

 

Directions

  1. Cook the couscous according to package directions. Drizzle in some olive oil and stir to keep from sticking. Set aside.
  2. Meanwhile, make the dressing. Finely chop the garlic. Sprinkle it with salt, then mash it into a paste with the side of your knife. Add the garlic to a medium bowl, along with the juice of half of the lemon, the tahini, yogurt, salt, pepper and a splash of water, whisking ’till combined. Slowly drizzle in 1-2 tsps olive oil, whisking constantly. Taste and adjust seasoning if needed.
  3. Cut the cucumber into 2-inch segments, then cut said segments into quarters the long way to make wedges. Pat the flesh dry with a paper towel. 
  4. Get a skillet hot, and add a few glugs of olive oil. Season the flesh part of the cukes with salt and pepper, and sear until each fleshy part is blistered and soft — about 3 minutes per side. (You might need a few more minutes for that first side. Seriously, let those babies BROWN.) Turn them skin side down. Add another dribble of oil if the pan seems dry, and toss in the shallots and a bit more salt and pepper. Cook 2 to 3 minutes more, till the shallots are soft and slightly caramelized. Squeeze in the other half of the lemon, and sprinkle in the sumac. 
  5. To assemble, toss the couscous and hot cukes into the dressing until well-combined and you smell the garlic (mmmm). Add the shredded kale, tossing again till everything is mixed, and serve. (P.s. It’s good at room temp too.)



     

 

Cook’s Notes

If all you have are regular cucumbers, peel them till they’re striped, and scoop out the seeds and gunk before chopping them.

 

More by this author:

Disgraced director James Gunn defends disgraced actor Chris Pratt

Director James Gunn has come to the online defense of Chris Pratt after a fan suggested Pratt could be replaced in Marvel movies with actor Patrick Wilson, tweeting a side by side image comparison of the two male actors, who look remarkably alike. 

Pratt, star of the popular “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise, has come under fire for his alleged involvement in a Los Angeles megachurch that may not be welcoming to queer members. Zoe Church, founded by former Hillsong preacher Chad Veach, who once executive produced a film that described same-sex attraction as “sexual brokenness,” is cagey about its views. 

But Hillsong released a “hate the sin not the sinner”-type statement in 2015 which attested the megachurch did not have any gay people in any positions of leadership, and included the line: “Hillsong Church welcomes ALL people but does not affirm all lifestyles.” Hillsong also notoriously supported gay conversion therapy.

RELATED: “Thor” teaser trailer suggests sometimes the right god for the job is a woman

Dangerous and disputed as pseudoscience, “rejected by every mainstream medical and mental health organization for decades,” according to the Human Rights Commission, “due to continuing discrimination and societal bias against LGBTQ people, some practitioners continue to conduct” the damaging practice of conversion therapy. The Human Rights Commission also notes that young people “are especially vulnerable, and conversion therapy can lead to depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness, and suicide.”

Pratt has been elusive – about his involvement with Zoe Church, the church’s views and his own views on gay rights. When “Umbrella Academy” star Elliot Page publicly criticized Pratt’s involvement with a “infamously anti-LGBTQ church,” Pratt gave a non-answer on Instagram: “I am not a spokesperson for any group of people. My values define who I am . . . I am a man who believes that everyone is entitled to love who they want free from the judgment of fellow man.” At that time, Pratt was attending Hillsong. 

Pratt also came under scrutiny in 2021 for a bizarre early birthday post for his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger (“Her heart is pure and it belongs to me“), in which he thanked her for everything she does for him, including giving him a “gorgeous, healthy daughter.” Many viewed this as an ableist slight toward his first wife, actor Anna Faris, and his son, who was born premature and is disabled. 

After the fan suggested Pratt might easily be replaced in films such as the upcoming “Thor: Love and Thunder,” director Gunn lashed out in the Twitter replies, asking why Pratt’s role could be recast, “Because of your made-up, utterly-false beliefs about him?” Neither Gunn nor Pratt confirmed or denied what those beliefs are.

Gunn also wrote, “I know the church he currently goes to. Do you?” He did not specify the church, adding: “Chris Pratt would never be replaced as Star-Lord but, if he ever was, we would all be going with him.”

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In 2018, Disney fired Gunn after tweets from the director surfaced in which Gunn had made jokes about pedophilia, the Holocaust and AIDS. As Newsweek reported, “In 2009, Gunn had tweeted about how he enjoyed “when little boys touch me in my silly place.”” Gunn also joked about rape: “The best thing about being raped is when you’re done being raped and it’s like ‘whew this feels great, not being raped!'”

When Gunn was rehired the next year to direct “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” Pratt said he was “so thrilled, so excited . . . I really stand behind it . . . I think it’s going to wrap up the trilogy in the best way.”

More stories like this:

Potential threat of Elon Musk’s Twitter is bigger than misinformation: He can exploit your data, too

During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, and the early decades of the 20th century, U.S. captains of industry such as William Randolph Hearst and Jay Gould used their massive wealth to dominate facets of the economy, including the news media. They were, in many ways, prototype oligarchs – by the dictionary definition, “very rich business leaders with a great deal of political influence.”

Some have argued that the U.S. is in the midst of a Second Gilded Age defined – like the first – by vast wealth inequality, hyper-partisanship, xenophobia and a new crop of oligarchs using their vast wealth to purchase media and political influence.

Which brings us to the announcement on April 25, 2022, that Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is, barring any last-minute hitches, purchasing the social media platform Twitter. It will put the wealthiest man on the planet in control of one of the most influential means of communications in the world today.

As a media scholar, I suspect Musk’s desire in buying Twitter goes beyond a desire to control and shape public discourse. Today’s equivalent of the Gilded Age oligarchs – the handful of super-rich Americans gobbling up increasing chunks of the media landscape – will have that, but they will also have access to a trove of personal data of users and news consumers.

All the newspapers fit to buy

Over the past decade, numerous American billionaires have purchased news media outlets such as the Boston Globe, Las Vegas Review-Journal, The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps the most famous example is Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, who spent US$250 million of his roughly $170 billion net worth to purchase The Washington Post in 2013.

Media scholars have aired concern for decades that unfettered wealth and tepid government regulation have enabled a handful of corporations to dominate news media coverage in the U.S. Indeed, the companies that produce the majority of news media in the U.S. have dwindled from 50 in the 1980s to roughly six today.

This consolidation of the media industry in the hands of wealthy individuals is, as media scholar Robert McChesney has argued, especially concerning for a healthy democracy, which necessitates that the electorate has access to an abundance of diverse views and free-flowing information.

The public relies on journalists to relay stories that they can interpret to determine how they vote; if they will vote; and if they should organize and engage in civil disobedience. The negative consequences of this concentration of ownership are that it can enable a handful of corporate news outlets to normalize baseless or false reporting that turns out to be misleading, such as the reporting on weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Just like the U.S. oligarchs of the 19th century and early 20th century, today’s billionaires recognize that by controlling the free flow of information they can control or shape the electorate’s democratic participation. For example, soon after casino mogul Sheldon Adelson purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports surfaced that stories about the billionaire were being censored or altered so he could manage the public’s image of his businesses in the gambling-centric city.

Similarly, some critics have suggested that after Bezos purchased The Washington Post, the newspaper’s coverage became noticeably soft in its coverage of Amazon, and tough on Bezos’ political opponents. The Washington Post denies both of these claims.

The user as a product

With an estimated fortune of $268 billion as of April 2022, Musk is just the latest and wealthiest to purchase a media platform. In opting to buy into social media rather than a traditional news outlet, the Tesla CEO is getting control of an important news delivery system. A 2021 Pew survey found that 23% of Americans use Twitter – and 7 in 10 Twitter users said they received news from the platform.

But the potential threats posed by an individual billionaire controlling Twitter are much more complicated and dangerous than that of earlier wealthy media proprietors, who primarily could only sway the news.

Even before Musk vied to buy Twitter, Silicon Valley was already controlled by billionaires who operated a handful of companies known as the FAANGs – Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (now Alphabet). These companies’ profits are derived from a new economic order that Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed “surveillance capitalism.” Under surveillance capitalism, the user is the product – that is to say, companies collect and sell information about users to those interested in predicting, or in some cases nudging, human behavior.

In this new economic order, tech companies constantly surveil users on and off their platforms for the purpose of collecting and analyzing data – which include audio, video, typed words, GPS or even DNA – to open a window into a user’s thoughts and cognitive processes.

In order to keep the data pouring in, big tech companies rely on techniques from the gambling industry to keep people addicted to their screen. Essentially, they keep users chasing the initial dopamine rush that comes from a “like” or “friend request” on Facebook, on a “retweet” or “new follower” on Twitter. Similar to the gambling industry, reports have found that these techniques are used with little regard for users’ mental health.

In 2022, for example, a Facebook whistleblower revealed that the company was aware that its platform design was harming users, particularly young people, but refused to make any changes out of fear it would weaken profitability.

A free speech enthusiast?

In this context, Musk is not simply a modern version of a 19th century oligarch. His power goes beyond shaping public discourse with narrowly framed stories and the removal of select content. Yes, he may be able to do this. But in addition, he will have a vast amount of personal data under his discretion. For example, when using Twitter content or products, including those integrated into other websites, Twitter collects data and stores what web pages the user accessed, as well as their IP address, browser type, operating system and cookie information.

Musk has said his purchase of Twitter is motivated by his support of free speech. But this runs counter to his reputation for actively seeking revenge against those who criticize his businesses. Furthermore, under his leadership, Tesla has maintained contracts that prevented former employees from criticizing the company.

Moreover, as it has been argued by computer scientist and philosophy writer Jaron Lanier and free-expression activist and author Jillian York, social media platforms such as Twitter are not conducive to “true” free speech, which is loosely defined as the right to express one’s opinions without interference.

Moreover, by making decisions about what content users do and do not see, social media companies, it could be argued, are interfering with speech. Indeed, social media platofrms’ algorithms customize news feeds with content that they believe the user will find the most engaging, to the exclusion to other content.

The era of surveillance capitalism has created new opportunities for billionaires to influence the electorate. Like his predecessors in the first Gilded Age, Musk can determine which reporting users see and do not see on his platform. Unlike his predecessors, he can also track and surveil users – collecting lucrative data that can be used to predict or nudge their behavior.

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

Legal expert: Ron DeSantis’ plot to retaliate against Disney is about to “run into a brick wall”

On Tuesday, writing for Bloomberg Tax, attorney Jacob Schumer walked through how the plan by Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., to strip the Walt Disney corporation of its special tax status could run into a brick wall.

The plan, passed as part of a special session bill in which legislators also approved DeSantis’ plan to cut the number of Black congressional districts, would eliminate the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the special taxing district Disney uses to essentially run its own mini-government on the land used by the Walt Disney World resort complex near Orlando — a measure Florida Republicans openly admit is retaliation for Disney criticizing their so-called “Don’t Say Gay” school legislation.

“Much ado has been made about the legality of Florida’s Senate Bill 4C purporting to dissolve Disney’s Reedy Creek Improvement District: whether it was retaliation prohibited by the First Amendment, whether it was passed with sufficient formality, and so on,” wrote Schumer. “But there’s a much more basic reason Florida can’t dissolve Reedy Creek — it promised bond purchasers that it wouldn’t.”

Some observers have noted that dissolving the special district would result in taxpayers in Orange and Osceola Counties being on the hook for $1 billion in Disney’s bond debt. But, wrote Schumer, it gets worse than that.

“Stating that the county assumes the debt is simple enough — actually figuring out what that means is a different story. Reedy Creek spans both Orange and Osceola counties, so how will the debt be divided? Would it be by taxable value of property or by the properties themselves? And how would that apply to the utility revenue bonds when there is no easy way to divide which county the utilities rest in?” wrote Schumer. “These difficult questions point to the basic contractual issue. By dissolving Reedy Creek, the legislature essentially rewrote the promises made in the district’s bond offerings. Instead of bonds backed by a special district with the power to levy up to 30 mills in taxes, the property tax bonds will be backed jointly by two governments that can only generate a maximum of 10 mills in taxes.”

“Florida simply cannot promise to prospective bondholders that it won’t interfere with Reedy Creek, and then dissolve Reedy Creek,” concluded Schumer. “If Reedy Creek is ever dissolved, it would be a monumental and complicated enterprise even on a years-long timeline. The district has a nine-figure annual budget for expenditures, and even ignoring its various debts, it has a plethora of other contracts that somehow would have to be assigned to and divided between Orange and Osceola counties. However, the dissolution will have to wait until all of its bonds are paid in full.”

You can read more here.

Brainstorming a coup: Meadows’ text reveal the anatomy of Trump’s Big Lie

There was much that was compelling about Monday’s CNN dump of another couple thousand coup-related Mark Meadows texts into the public domain. We learned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., can’t spell and that former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry apparently signs his text messages with his name and phone number. But while the linguistic faux pas of people conspiring to overthrow democracy are entertaining, I must confess that what I found most riveting and illuminating was the way the texts pulled back the curtain on how Republicans generate their lies.

Meadows’ texts offer a glimpse into the apparently routine Republican brainstorming sessions about which false narratives they knowingly plan to inject into the conspiracy theory dissemination machine anchored by Fox News and social media. We see this in the flurry of texts that were spread around on January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump’s co-conspirators began to realize that the violence of the insurrection was hurting their efforts at justifying the coup. Trump aide Jason Miller texted Trump’s social media manager and Meadows his ideas for “tweets from POTUS.” They included a conspiracy theory blaming the violence on “ANTIFA or other crazed leftists” and falsely accusing the media of “trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions.” As the CNN reporters wrote, “Trump’s allies in Congress appeared to get the message.” In real-time, you can see them workshopping the details of this conspiracy theory, inventing details like how “Antifa dressed in red Trump shirts.” 

RELATED: Newly revealed Mark Meadows texts appear to contradict denials by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rick Perry

Republicans may not be able to spell good, but holy crap, they are masters at generating disinformation, often on the fly, that will go viral among their followers. Of course, they are aided heavily by having a follower base that doesn’t care what is true or what is false. The average Republican voter now happily parrots obvious lies, glad to be of service to the larger fascist cause. 

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Monday’s cache of texts was quickly followed by a Tuesday report from ProPublica and Frontline that, once again using a massive cache of once-secret documents, illustrated how much Trump’s co-conspirators knowingly fabricated evidence and used false testimony to create the illusion of a “basis for Trump’s claims that the election had been rigged.”

What truly fascinates me is how these documents illustrate how the right-wing disinformation machine works.

That these folks were just making it all up as they went along isn’t even particularly subtle. Over and over, Trump’s lawyers like Sidney Powell or Big Lie proponents like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell would claim they had some proof of voter fraud which they would hand to low-level staffers or private investigators. And every time, those folks would warn them that the evidence they claimed to have was fraudulent. Inevitably, however, Trump’s cronies would ignore those warnings and use the lies anyway either as propaganda or in court filings. 

It’s tempting to shrug off these revelations. Politically plugged-in progressives have long assumed that all these folks are knowingly lying. The lies are so silly and often so self-contradictory — and the people disseminating so obviously evil — that these texts just feel like confirming what we already knew. But this hard evidence matters. 

RELATED: Sorry, New York Times: Republicans aren’t “concerned” about democracy — they want to destroy it

There’s still a mushy middle of voters who aren’t yet convinced that Republicans are such cynical liars, and instead want to believe they’re just a little deluded by partisan fervor. The potential legal ramifications could help convince them.

As has been widely reported, the likeliest defense is “we didn’t know any better,” if Trump and his co-conspirators were ever tried for their various crimes committed during the coup. The argument would be that they “sincerely” believed that the election was stolen and their efforts were an attempt to rectify this supposed great wrong. But the massive trove of documents showing they knew full well there was no voter fraud and certainly no stolen election cuts against this defense. It also takes away any excuse for the Department of Justice to keep avoiding criminal charges against the coup’s leaders, including Trump. 

But what truly fascinates me is how these documents illustrate how the right-wing disinformation machine works.

Being wrong never bothers them, because they think concepts like “true” and “false” have no value at all. 

What is clear from reading these texts and other documents is that the Big Lie is not really abut persuading anyone that the election was stolen. It’s more about creating so much noise that the truth never has a chance. It’s about creating a permission structure that allows Trump, his allies, and — crucially — his followers to say whatever they need to in a moment to justify their desire to overthrow democracy. Truth doesn’t matter to them. Making sense doesn’t matter to them. It’s about setting the concept of rational, evidence-based discourse on fire, thereby eliminating the main obstacle to their raw exercise of power.

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It’s telling how right-wingers will ping pong from one conspiracy theory to another, depending entirely on whether it’s useful in the moment, and indifferent to whether or not it flatly contradicts the lie they were claiming to believe five minutes ago. After all, new lies can always be made up on the spot! As ProPublica’s reporters write, when one of Trump’s team’s conspiracy theories “was debunked, they’d move on to the next alternative and then the next.” Being wrong never bothers them, because they think concepts like “true” and “false” have no value at all. 

We see how this works with the January 6 conspiracy theories. While the riot was happening, and it looked like it would make Republicans look bad, Miller threw out the “blame antifa” lie and the minions got to work on it. It was, indeed, trendy for a time for Trump followers to parrot that lie. In the weeks after the Capitol insurrection, about half of Republican voters were espousing some version of the “antifa did it, the MAGAs were peaceful” conspiracy theory. As the months wore on and it became clear, however, that Trump was proud of inciting the riot and wanted to take credit for it, the narrative shifted. Instead of “antifa did it,” it became “the insurrectionists are heroes.” Republicans who held to the old violence-in-bad line, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, were put on blast by the talking heads at Fox News until they gave in and acceded to the new violence-is-justified narrative. Sure enough, the Republican base got the message. Now the majority of them have stopped saying that the rioters were “antifa” and instead are calling them “patriots.”

Republicans collectively understand that empirical truth can be destroyed as long as they stick together

This shift matters, because it reinforces what I’ve been arguing for months now about the Big Lie: Republican voters don’t actually “believe” it. Instead, like their leaders, the Republican base simply doesn’t care what’s true and, frankly, finds truth to be an annoying obstacle on their way to power. So they’re happy to do their part to lay waste to the idea that truth has any value at all. 

Republicans collectively understand that empirical truth can be destroyed as long as they stick together, especially in a media environment where reporters are frequently allergic to calling lies out as lies. With nothing to lose from lying and everything to gain, MAGA world, from their top dog Trump to every ordinary person spewing nonsense on Facebook, is fully committed to the destruction-of-truth project. If Miller says “antifa did it,” then they will all pretend to believe that. When the narrative changes to “MAGA did it, but it was justified,” they will happily shift, without giving a fig that the new lie contradicts the last one. Truth simply doesn’t matter to Trump and his followers. All that matters is power, and they will say or do whatever it takes to get it. 

RELATED: Keep the leaks coming: The case against Donald Trump is being built up by Republicans’ big mouths

Susan Collins encourages Elon Musk to let Trump back on Twitter

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, encouraged Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is set to purchase Twitter, to let Donald Trump back on the site, calling out the platform’s “uneven” standards of conduct. 

“Although I obviously don’t agree with a lot of President Trump’s tweets, I do think he should have his account back. To me, it’s ironic that we allow Russian government sites to be on Twitter, but we don’t allow President Trump,” Collins told HuffPost on Tuesday. 

Collins’ remarks come just days after news outlets reported that Musk, the richest man in the world, plans on purchasing Twitter for $44 billion. After the announcement was made, numerous commentators speculated that the Tesla CEO might let Trump recover his Twitter account – which was permanently suspended shortly after the Capitol riot. 

But on Monday, Trump claimed that he had no interest in returning to Twitter, despite the site’s new ownership. 

“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News, referring to the social media platform he founded himself, called “Truth Social.”

“I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH,” he added. 

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RELATED: “All bets are off”: The “brains” behind Trump’s Truth Social app just quit amid botched launch

Meanwhile, shares of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, Trump’s SPAC, have fallen precipitously since news of Musk’s acquisition broke. According to CNN, Digital World has reportedly lost 44% of its entire value over the last several days. 

In Congress, Republicans have mostly lauded Musk’s purchase of Twitter, with some cheering on the notion that Trump might get back on the site. 

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., told HuffPost that the Tesla CEO should “absolutely” grant the former president access to his account again. Cruz also called the acquisition “the most important development for free speech in decades.”

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., also threw his support behind the idea, saying, “If Iranian leaders can be on and the Russians are going to be, I think that President Trump should be,”

Musk has yet to formally announce whether Trump’s account will be reinstated. 

RELATED: Twitter should have died long ago — let Elon Musk take it out back and shoot it

Bernie Sanders calls out Biden over federal contracts for Amazon amid “illegal anti-union activity”

Sen. Bernie Sanders demanded Tuesday that President Joe Biden cancel Amazon’s federal contracts over the e-commerce giant’s aggressive and unlawful union-busting efforts in New York, Alabama, and elsewhere, a call that came as union voting kicked off at a second Amazon facility in Staten Island.

In a letter to Biden, Sanders, I-Vt., pointed to the president’s campaign promise to “institute a multi-year federal debarment for all employers who illegally oppose unions” and “ensure federal contracts only go to employers who sign neutrality agreements committing not to run anti-union campaigns.”

“The essence of your plan for strengthening union organizing was to make sure that federal dollars do not flow into the hands of unscrupulous employers who engage in union-busting, participate in wage theft, or violate labor law,” the Vermont senator wrote. “In order to implement that plan, I urge you to sign an executive order preventing companies that violate federal labor laws from contracting with the federal government.”

“As you may know, Amazon, one of the largest and most profitable corporations in America, is the poster child as to why this anti-union busting executive order is needed now more than ever,” Sanders added.

In a floor speech Tuesday evening, the Vermont senator declared that “no government—not the federal government, not the state government, and not the city government—should be handing out corporate welfare to union busters and labor law violators.”

“So today I say to President Biden: You promised to prevent union busters like Amazon from receiving lucrative contracts from the federal government,” said Sanders. “Please keep that promise.”

Federal agencies have fined Amazon dozens of times over the past two decades for a range of offenses related to workers’ rights, including wage, hour, and workplace safety violations. A report released earlier this month estimated that the injury rate among Amazon’s warehouse workers rose 20% in 2021, a year in which the company spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants.

In recent weeks, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has sued Amazon for unlawfully retaliating against union organizers and other “flagrant unfair labor practices.”

In January, ahead of the historic union victory at JFK8 that Amazon is working to overturn, the NLRB alleged in a formal complaint that the company “repeatedly broke the law by threatening, surveilling, and interrogating their Staten Island warehouse workers who are engaged in a union organizing campaign.”

Despite its repeated and ongoing transgressions, the powerful company continues to benefit from federal contracts. The National Security Agency, for instance, has quietly awarded Amazon Web Services a cloud contract worth up to $10 billion.

Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, argued in his letter to Biden that Amazon “should not receive” the federal contract as long as it continues to engage in “illegal anti-union activity.” Next week, Sanders is expected to preside over a hearing examining how many federal contracts flow to companies, including Amazon, that are fighting unionization efforts.

“Since 2004, Amazon has received thousands of federal contracts worth billions of dollars,” Sanders wrote Tuesday. “Mr. President: Taxpayer dollars should not go to companies like Amazon and multi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos who repeatedly break the law.”

The Vermont senator’s demand comes as unions and lawmakers are pushing the New York attorney general to investigate whether Amazon has invalidated its eligibility for state-level taxpayer subsidies by violating labor laws. According to Good Jobs First, Amazon has received at least $4.18 billion in state and local taxpayer subsidies since 2000.

“If we do not stop subsidizing Amazon’s warehouses, New York state becomes complicit in subsidizing union-busting practices with taxpayer money,” New York Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-40) told The Lever last week.

Trump’s stunning admission in unrelated case could be damning evidence in NY criminal probe: report

Former President Donald Trump’s iron-like grip on his family business may come back to haunt him in a New York investigation into the Trump Organization.

“In a lawsuit’s never-before-seen testimony, Donald Trump admitted to personally overseeing the compensation of an executive whose corporate perks have been under scrutiny by the Manhattan district attorney, potentially strengthening the case against the former president and his company for tax fraud,” The Daily Beast reported Tuesday. “Trump’s sworn testimony was filed in New York state court on Tuesday, as part of a lawsuit against the Trump Organization over the way its security guards manhandled protesters outside Trump Tower in 2015.”

In the Oct. 18, 2021 deposition, Trump was asked about Matthew Calamari, Sr., the Trump Organization bodyguard who rose to become the company’s chief operating officer.

When asked who has “authority” over Calamari’s compensation, Trump repeatedly said, “It would be me.”

“That would potentially make Trump personally responsible for any tax dodging scheme, and more importantly, is useful evidence in the grand jury investigation that has yet to produce an indictment against him,” The Beast reported. “For months, three sources familiar with the Manhattan DA’s investigation have told The Daily Beast that investigators have been probing the way Calamari was paid off-the-books with allegedly untaxed perks, such as an extravagant corporate apartment at the Trump Park Avenue in New York City’s expensive midtown and a Mercedes-Benz. Prosecutors went as far as having Calamari’s son—corporate security director Matt Calamari Jr.—receive total immunity for potential crimes and testify before a grand jury.”

Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was indicted in a different “fringe benefits” case.

“In Calamari’s case, Manhattan DA investigators have been asking about the corporate perks since at least February 2021, according to one witness who was interviewed by prosecutors. It was clear to several witnesses that prosecutors had hoped to leverage a long-standing feud between the Calamari and Weisselberg families, a Shakespearean drama over who’s more loyal to the boss,” The Beast reported. “Prosecutors could present these newly available statements to the grand jury as additional evidence tying Trump to whatever illegal payment scheme the DA’s office is alleging took place at the Trump Organization.”

The older Calamari had worked for Trump for four decades, after Trump was impressed by watching Calamari tackle hecklers at the 1981 U.S. women’s semifinal tennis match.

“No negotiating with climate deniers”: Joe Manchin slammed for pushing GOP-friendly climate bill

Advocacy groups on Tuesday blasted new efforts by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin to strike a deal with the GOP on climate legislation after months of the West Virginia Democrat preventing the House-approved Build Back Better Act from reaching President Joe Biden’s desk.

Manchin and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) organized a Monday night meeting to “gauge bipartisan interest in a path forward that addresses our nation’s climate and energy security needs head-on,” a Manchin spokesperson, Sam Runyon, told Bloomberg.

Food & Water Watch managing director of policy Mitch Jones said in a statement Tuesday that “the Build Back Better bill was effectively stymied by Sen. Manchin, who is now apparently part of an effort to craft a bipartisan bill that would be even weaker than the compromise efforts he soundly rejected last year.”

While congressional Democrats attempted to use the budget reconciliation process to pass the $1.75 trillion package, it was blocked by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Manchin, who said Monday that “if I can find something bipartisan, we don’t need reconciliation.”

According to Bloomberg, “Manchin told reporters after the meeting that one area of common ground could be reform of the federal oil and gas leasing process.”

The outlet reported:

In addition to reform on permitting, a potential package could include revisions to federal land policy, aid for domestic pipelines, efforts to bolster production of both liquefied natural gas at home and abroad and critical minerals, a person familiar with the matter said. It’s possible the changes could be paired with hundreds of billions of dollars in new and expanded tax credits for wind and solar power, nuclear plants, biofuels and advanced energy manufacturing sought by Democrats and the White House and included in earlier iterations of the Build Back Better spending bill, the person said.

Runyon didn’t respond to a request for comment about the possible elements of a deal.

In his response to reports about Manchin’s negotiations, Jones said that “this approach could only be considered ‘climate legislation’ if we warp the meaning of that term to include bills that will make climate change worse.”

“Instead of letting Manchin and fossil fuel interests define the terms,” he added, “the White House and Democratic leadership must push for the solutions we need, not merely what pleases Joe Manchin.”

Sierra Club also released a statement Tuesday opposing attempts to compromise with the GOP, declaring that “just as there’s no negotiating with arsonists on how much of a building they can burn, there’s no negotiating with a party of climate deniers on climate action.”

“For decades, the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Washington, D.C. have made their views on climate change abundantly clear: It’s much ado about nothing, if it even exists,” the group noted, citing some prominent examples—including recent comments from Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who attended Manchin’s meeting.

During an NPR interview in January, Cramer said:

The vast majority of people that we work for, that would be our constituents, believe that there is climate change, that it is going the wrong direction in terms of the temperature of the Earth and that they want us to do something about it. My starting point is that it’s not near the crisis that the alarmists have made it out to be. But at the same time, nobody is going to solve the problem except humans. Other than God himself, we’re the only ones in a position to contribute or to lower our contribution, whatever that might be. And our constituents expect us to do that.

Asked what he says to young people concerned about the future, Cramer said that “what I would tell them is that the Earth has gone through cycles for as long as there’s been creation. What I would also tell them is what we can’t do is we can’t destroy ourselves in the process of trying to save the Earth.”

Discussing the Monday meeting with Axios, Cramer said that Manchin, “not surprisingly, likes to be proactive and he wants to see what’s possible.”

“What’s acceptable to them has got to be something that can get 10 of us,” he added. “And that’s going to be pretty tough.”

Sierra Club said that “even when Republicans are capable of recognizing the facts about the climate crisis, they’re unwilling to take any action to address it,” highlighting that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) “wasted decades denying the existence of climate change—collecting a small fortune in donations from corporate polluters along the way—only to now have no plan to address the crisis.”

“It’s past time for President Biden and Democratic leadership to reject this nonsense and deliver on their promises of action on climate, care, jobs, and justice,” the group asserted. “Our communities and our planet urgently need investments in transitioning to clean energy, reducing pollution, cutting costs for working families, creating good jobs, and promoting environmental justice.”

Sierra Club was among the groups that held “Fight for Our Future” rallies across the country this past weekend.

“Building on this momentum, the Green New Deal Network will place ads in D.C. specifically targeting the Senate and President Biden to deliver on their promises to protect communities from climate, economic, and racial injustices as they return from recess,” announced the group, which joined the rallies.

“Fighting for our future is more than just a slogan. It’s about demanding that those who we elected actually show up to represent our best interests,” said Angelica Zamora, the network’s political manager for Arizona. “It is vital that we invest in our planet and people so that we can ensure justice for our communities.”

“There is a small window of opportunity to reverse the damage of the climate crisis and provide vital resources that families in Arizona, and across the country, need to thrive,” Zamora added. “We need public officials to not waste this moment, but join us in rallying for the security of our future.”

This dressed-up lamb burger from Rick Martinez is topped with caramelized fennel and onion

There’s a lot going on in this burger, but be sure to make a batch of Carla Lalli Music’s Salsa Very Verde to drizzle over the top. You won’t regret it. 

***

Recipe: Lamb Burger with Caramelized Fennel and Onion

Makes
4 servings
Prep Time
 30 minutes
Cook Time
20 minutes

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds ground lamb, preferably grass-fed
  • Kosher Salt
  • 6 tablespoons olive oil, divided
  • 1/2 fennel bulb, thinly sliced; plus 2 tablespoons chopped fennel fronds (optional)
  • 1/2 yellow onion, thinly sliced
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 3 ounces chevre
  • 2 tablespoons heavy cream or milk
  • 2 tablespoons garlic chives, or common chives
  • 3 ounces watercress
  • 4 brioche rolls, toasted
  • Salsa Very Verde, for topping

 

Directions

  1. Shape lamb into 4 patties about 1″ thick, season with salt, and let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.
  2. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a large skillet, ideally cast iron, over medium. Cook lamb patties, working in batches if needed, until browned (they won’t take on as much color as a beef burger), 5–7 minutes. Turn and cook until browned on the second side, about 5 minutes for medium-rare. Transfer patties to a plate and let rest for 10 minutes.
  3. Add remaining 4 tablespoons oil into same skillet over medium heat and add sliced fennel, onion, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper and 1/4 cup water (or white wine) and cook, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan and stirring occasionally, until all the liquid has evaporated and the vegetables are tender and caramelized, 8 to 10 minutes. Transfer to a medium bowl and let sit until ready to serve.
  4. Mix chevre, chives, fennel fronds, heavy cream and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a medium bowl until completely combined. Season with salt if necessary.
  5. Generously spread herbed chevre on cut sides of buns and build each burger with a lamb patty, a mound of greens and a generous pour of salsa verde.

Journalist blasted by Los Angeles sheriff for exposing department’s alleged coverup

A Los Angeles Times reporter is being investigated by the county’s sheriff’s department after revealing an attempted coverup of misconduct by officers. 

The shocking announcement came on Tuesday during a presser held by Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who displayed a blownup photo of reporter Alene Techekmedyian, who he alleged is connected to an information leak. Villanueva reportedly refused to take questions from Techekmedyian during the presser. 

NPR correspondent Frank Stolze, who covers criminal justice in Los Angeles, called the move “an extraordinary escalation in the sheriff’s attack not only on the paper but also on the First Amendment.”

Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida similarly condemned the sheriff’s presser as “outrageous,” noting that the “attempt to criminalize news reporting goes against well-established constitutional law.”

The probe comes in direct response to a Monday exposé by Techekmedyian, which revealed that the department attempted to cover up an incident in which a deputy put his knee on a handcuffed inmate for three minutes. Department officials were reportedly concerned about the agency’s public image, given the incident’s “nature and its similarities to widely publicized George Floyd use of force,” according to an internal force review. 

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RELATED: Public records show California cities funneled COVID relief funds into police coffer

The incident reportedly took place on March 21, 2021, according to The Los Angeles Times, during the trial of Derek Chauvin, who murdered 46-year-old George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly ten minutes. It began when former Deputy Douglas Johnson ordered one of two inmates, Enzo Escalante, 24, to stop and face a wall. Escalante, who was awaiting trial on murder charges, shortly turned around and struck Johnson in the head. About thirty seconds into the brawl, Johnson pinned Escalante to the ground, kneeling on his neck. By that point, Escalante appears to be fully complying with Johnson’s orders while on the ground.

In the ensuing weeks, Johnson’s apparent misconduct went through various layers of review.

In one review of the incident, Commander Allen Castellano, wrote that Johnson “placed other deputies and inmates in a dangerous situation.”

“There appeared to be ample time for Deputy Johnson to reposition himself and still control Inmate Escalante, who was handcuffed and hobbled, while maintaining awareness of his surroundings,” Castellano said. 

RELATED: Derek Chauvin charged with violating the civil rights of a Black child in 2017

According to The Los Angeles Times, a number of other department officials agreed with Castellano’s general sentiment, calling Johnson’s restraint “unreasonable.” 

Custody Investigative Services, which handles crimes that take place in the department’s lockups, reportedly opted out of pressing charges over concerns about optics. 

“It was determined the case should not be filed given the misconduct/unreasonable force allegation and the potential for this incident to shed negative light on the Department given its nature and its similarities to widely publicized George Floyd use of force,” Castellano wrote, noting that “the potential optics of an incident should not be a determining factor on whether or not a criminal complaint is filed.”

Villenueva, who heads the department and is running for reelection, reportedly watched a video of the incident days after it took place, but did not formally investigate Johnson. 

 

“We have no interest in pursuing, nor are we pursuing, criminal charges against any reporters,” he said in a statement. “We will conduct a thorough investigation regarding the unlawful disclosure of evidence and documentation in an active criminal case. The multiple active investigations stemming from this incident will be shared and monitored by an outside law enforcement entity.”

House to hold hearing on Ginni Thomas’ text messages to Mark Meadows ahead of 1/6

A House panel is gearing up to hold an official hearing on the trove of text messages sent by right-wing activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows leading up to the Capitol riot. 

The hearing is set to be conducted on Wednesday, according to The Hill, which obtained copies of a related memo sent by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., the chairman of the House Judiciary courts subcommittee. The memo, distributed by members of the committee, reportedly details the code of conduct expected to be upheld by judges outside the courtroom as well as the procedures that would be involved in impeachment proceedings for a Supreme Court justice.

The hearing comes amid intense public scrutiny of Ginni Thomas’ role attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Back in February, The New York Times revealed that Ginni Thomas helped draft a scheme to reverse the election as part of her work with the conservative Council for National Policy. She also repeatedly urged Meadows via text to ramp up Donald Trump’s baseless theory of election election fraud, according to The Washington Post.

“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!,” she wrote to him in November 2020. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

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RELATED: Lawless: Clarence Thomas and his wife’s texts expose Supreme Court’s missing ethics rules

Numerous ethics experts and dozens of lawmakers have expressed concerns that Clarence Thomas did not recuse himself from multiple cases that his wife lobbies on. In one case, Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter on a decision that prevented the former president from blocking Congress’ access to January 6 records. 

In March, the select committee investigating the insurrection opened a formal probe into Ginni Thomas’ text exchanges with Meadows.

Clarence Thomas’ impeachment would be relatively unprecedented. Only one Supreme Court justice, Abe Fortas in 1969, has ever resigned for breaching the court’s code of conduct. In the past, wrote Johnson, “threats or inquiries of impeachment as a means of regulating the conduct of Supreme Court justices have had varying effects.”

Still, Johnson’s memo did note that the idea for a heightened ethical standard for the Supreme Court has become more popular “following the reporting about text messages between the spouse of an associate justice and the then-White House Chief of Staff.”

RELATED: “Extraordinary level of corruption”: Legal experts shocked by Ginni Thomas’ QAnon texts

“The Supreme Court has long operated as though it were above the law. But, Justice Clarence Thomas’ refusal to recuse himself from cases surrounding January 6th, despite his wife’s involvement, raises serious ethical — and legal — alarm bells,” Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., vice chair of the House Judiciary courts subcommittee, told The Hill. “The need for strong, enforceable ethics laws is clearer than ever. We have to do more to hold the Court accountable and restore public trust through a binding code of ethics and recusal.”

Madison Cawthorn may have broken insider trading laws in alleged pump-and-dump crypto scheme: report

On Tuesday, the Washington Examiner reported that experts suspect Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., may have violated insider trading laws when he promoted a cryptocurrency named after a vulgar chant against President Joe Biden.

“On Dec. 29, the beleaguered North Carolina congressman posed at a party with James Koutoulas, a hedge fund manager and the ringleader of the Let’s Go Brandon cryptocurrency, a meme coin set up in the wake of the chant mocking President Joe Biden,” reported Andrew Kerr. “‘LGB legends. … Tomorrow we go to the moon!’ Cawthorn, who has stated publicly he owns the cryptocurrency, posted on Instagram in response to the picture posted on Koutoulas’s Instagram page.”

Just one day later, Brandon Brown, the NASCAR driver from which the anti-Biden chant originated, said the meme coin would sponsor his 2022 racing season.

“Multiple watchdog groups told the Washington Examiner that Cawthorn’s Dec. 29 Instagram post suggests the lawmaker may have had advanced nonpublic knowledge of LGBCoin’s deal with Brown,” said the report. “The watchdogs said the post, combined with Cawthorn’s statement that he owns LGBCoin, warrants an investigation from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine whether the lawmaker violated federal insider trading laws.”

Making matters worse, the coin itself is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging it was part of a so-called “pump-and-dump” scheme, where people create false hype to manipulate the value of the asset, then cash out before the price falls again.

“Immediately following Brown’s Dec. 30 announcement, the value of all LGBCoin in circulation eclipsed $570 million. By the end of January, the market cap of the meme coin dropped to $0,” said the report. “Koutoulas said in a Feb. 20 livestream that two factors led to LGBCoin’s precipitous decline: First, NASCAR rejected LGBCoin’s sponsorship deal with Brown on Jan. 4, and then later that month, unidentified insiders that owned an outsize share of the coin dumped all their holdings at once, causing the coin’s market value to evaporate The swift rise and fall of the meme coin led one jilted investor to file a class-action lawsuit in April accusing Koutoulas and other LGBCoin insiders of using the digital currency to orchestrate a pump-and-dump scheme.”

In addition to all of this, Cawthorn was also caught for the second time trying to carry a handgun through airport security, and was charged for driving with a suspended license earlier this month. He also became an internet meme after images leaked of him partying in women’s lingerie.

This all comes as House Republicans and North Carolina GOP officials are reportedly tired of his erratic behavior, with the latter moving to back his primary challenger.

Keep the leaks coming: The case against Donald Trump is being built up by Republicans’ big mouths

I’ve lost count of how many books have been published at this point about Donald Trump’s final days, but I’m glad that the staggered release of them has helped to keep the event fresh in people’s minds as each one offers up something that we didn’t know before. With the January 6th Committee selectively leaking information and the prospect of public hearings at some point in the near future, it’s still possible that the whole thing won’t be completely swept under the rug before the election in the fall.

A few days ago, Politico’s Kyle Cheney posted a useful overview of just some of what we have learned so far. We know that Trump went to great lengths in the days and weeks after the election to bully, coerce, strong arm and intimidate local and state officials in all the battleground states to illegally overturn the election results. He pushed the Department of Justice to declare the election results were tainted and only moved on when it became clear that they would all resign in protest if he installed a willing toady who would carry it out. And his legal team of fringe weirdos led by Rudy Giuliani descended upon courthouses in the targeted states with wild accusations of voter fraud that were all denied, many of them by judges Trump himself appointed.

Throughout this period, various conspiracy nuts, hucksters, crackpots and grifters were running in and out of the White House with ludicrous schemes, pushing conspiracy theories. On Tuesday, CNN published texts from one of them, an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania named Scott Perry, a former Army General like fellow weirdo Michael Flynn who was heavily involved in all aspects of the attempted coup. Among Perry’s texts were messages to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows accusing CIA director Gina Haspel of being in cahoots with “the Brits” to manipulate the voting machines and telling him the “DNI needs to be tasked to audit their overseas accounts at CIA – and their National Endowment for Democracy. ” (How many of these kooky Generals are there?)

RELATED: Newly revealed Mark Meadows texts appear to contradict denials by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rick Perry

When none of Giuliani’s legal claims came to fruition, Trump enlisted the help of a legal quack named John Eastman who devised a plan to have Republican-run states send alternate slates of electors and then have Vice President Mike Pence throw out the electoral votes from those states to dishonestly invoke the “contingent election process” which would result in Trump being elected because there are currently more GOP state delegations than Democratic ones.

And that’s just for starters.

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January 6th Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md, has said in recent days that “six of the most chilling words in U.S. history” were from Mike Pence, as first reported by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker in their book “I Alone Can Fix It.”

“I’m not getting in that car.”

Moments after Pence was whisked into an underground parking garage to escape the rioters and the Secret Service wanted to take him out of the building, he refused. The book quotes him saying this to Tim Giebels, his lead special agent:

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim. I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car.If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

According to the Washington Post, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short tried to say that he just didn’t want global adversaries to see the image of him driving away from the Capitol but that doesn’t explain why he would imply that he didn’t trust the Secret Service. At the same time, his national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, who was in the White House talking to a Secret Service agent named Tony Ornato who was so close to Trump that he had been given a White House adviser role, an unprecedented step for anyone from that agency, which is supposed to be non-partisan. Ornato said they were going to move Pence to Andrews Air Force base to which Kellog replied, “You can’t do that, Tony. Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”

Raskin believes, and it seems pretty obvious, that they wanted to get him out of there so he couldn’t do that job, which was to oversee the certification of the electoral college votes.

If that doesn’t add up to an attempted coup, I don’t know what does.

RELATED: Kevin McCarthy’s anti-democratic demise: How Donald Trump successfully sabotaged the modern GOP

The latest book, “This Will Pass” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, has not been released yet and with the exception of a couple of previewed excerpts, they have been promoting the book by releasing audiotapes of the Republican leadership in the days after the January 6th insurrection. These recordings, which have been dribbled out on a daily basis are perversely damaging to the House Minority Leader and hopeful next Speaker, not because they show him backing the coup attempt but rather the opposite. In today’s GOP, if you are shown to have had the least bit of conscience and concern about what took place on January 6th, you are considered to be untrustworthy (or “untrustable” as McCarthy once famously said.)

These audio recordings of calls with House GOP leadership reveal McCarthy being horrified by Trump’s behavior to the point at which he even said “I’ve had it with this guy” and indicated that he thought Trump should resign rather than be impeached. He also had grave concerns about the behavior of members of his own caucus, even wishing that Twitter would ban some of them from posting.

RELATED: Carlson attacks Democratic “puppet” Kevin McCarthy for worrying Republicans would “incite violence”

Martin and Burns also report that late on January 6th Mitch McConnell said he was “exhilarated” because he assumed the insurrection meant the final ending of the Trump phenomenon. He told Martin that Trump “put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, it couldn’t have happened at a better time.” He even asked him if he’d heard anything about the 25th Amendment.

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How this plays out politically is anyone’s guess but what it does show is that the GOP leadership knew exactly what Trump did that day and there was a moment in time when they thought it was the end of him — and they were happy about it.

That didn’t last, of course.

We don’t know if there will be any more details to come out in reporting or any more shoes to drop in the investigation or the upcoming hearings that will change the trajectory of the upcoming election. But there shouldn’t have to be. We know everything we need to know. There can be no more doubt in anyone’s mind who is paying attention that a coup was plotted and very nearly successful. The only question is if enough people care that American democracy is on life support to keep the people who planned it (or stood by while it was happening) from regaining power in spite of it.

Carlson attacks Democratic “puppet” Kevin McCarthy for worrying Republicans would “incite violence”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson lashed out at House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday after the release of audio recordings confirming that McCarthy privately called for Republican lawmakers to be kicked off Twitter after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

After then-President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, McCarthy told fellow Republican leaders that the social network should boot other Republicans who helped stoke the mob, such as Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, according to an audio recording released by New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin ahead of the release of their book “This Will Not Pass.” In an audio recording of a Jan. 10, 2021, call released on Tuesday, McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise expressed concerns that other lawmakers like Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Mo Brooks, R-Ala., could “incite violence,” according to a Times excerpt.

Carlson on Tuesday accused McCarthy of sounding like a Democratic “puppet.”

“Kevin McCarthy of California told his good friend Liz Cheney that he hopes the social media companies would censor more conservative Republicans in Congress,” Carlson said. “Donald Trump, the sitting president, had already been silenced by those companies. But McCarthy wanted the tech oligarch to do more.”

Carlson said that McCarthy “in private sounds like an MSNBC contributor.”

Carlson warned conservatives to “get their act together” or McCarthy or “one of his liberal allies, like Elise Stefanik,” would likely become House Speaker next year.

“That would mean we would have a Republican Congress led by a puppet of the Democratic party,” he said.

In an earlier audio clip, McCarthy also told Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., then the No. 3 Republican in the conference, that he would call Trump to recommend that he resign ahead of his second impeachment. Though Trump dismissed the call, some observers think McCarthy’s private comments could cost him the speaker’s job if Republicans retake the House in the November midterm elections.

RELATED: McCarthy and McConnell vowed to cancel “son of a b**ch” Trump over Jan. 6, then caved

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted that Carlson’s attacks could influence some wings of the GOP as “McCarthy hangs in the balance.”

“Someone’s not gonna be speaker,” predicted Atlantic columnist Molly Jong-Fast.

McCarthy in the recording discussed wanting to rein in far-right lawmakers in his party but ultimately “did not follow through” over concerns about “advancing his own career,” the Times reported, just as he backed off his vow to press Trump to resign. But those comments make clear that in the wake of Jan. 6, Republican leaders were highly concerned that members of the GOP would further stoke violence.

McCarthy’s concerns were particularly aimed at Boebert, Gaetz, Brooks, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, expressing worries that the country was “too crazy” for lawmakers to be posting inflammatory tweets. McCarthy was particularly alarmed by Gaetz attacking Cheney in a TV interview because she already faced threats amid Trump’s attacks.

“He’s putting people in jeopardy,” McCarthy said in the recording. “And he doesn’t need to be doing this. We saw what people would do in the Capitol, you know, and these people came prepared with rope, with everything else.”

Scalise responded that Gaetz’s actions were potentially “illegal.”

Gaetz lashed out at McCarthy and Scalise on Twitter over their “sniveling calls.”

“This is the behavior of weak men, not leaders,” he said in a statement. “While I was protecting President Trump from impeachment, they were protecting Liz Cheney from criticism. They deemed it incendiary or illegal,” he added, slamming the GOP leaders for disparaging “Trump and the Republicans in Congress who fight for him.”

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McCarthy in the audio also worried about Brooks, who told rally attendees before the Jan. 6 riot that it was “the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

“You think the president deserves to be impeached for his comments?” McCarthy asked in the audio. “That’s almost something that goes further than what the president said.”

Brooks dismissed McCarthy’s criticism, telling the Times that he “spoke before knowing the facts” and adding that McCarthy never spoke to him directly about his comments.

The GOP leaders on the call also discussed comments made by Boebert, Moore and Greene.

“Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?” McCarthy questioned.

Some Republicans in the conference pushed to strip Brooks of his committee assignments, Scalise said on the call. McCarthy asked the group to delay the decision on Brooks until a later time but when he met with them again he “had already lost his appetite” for confronting Brooks, according to the Times.

Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., who said he was horrified by Brooks’ comments, told the Times he quit the Republican steering committee in protest.

“I cannot tell you how angry I was,” he told the Times, adding that McCarthy never responded to his resignation letter. McCarthy’s handling of the incident, he said, “demonstrated a lack of leadership.”

After the initial report about his failed vow to pressure Trump to resign, McCarthy claimed that the account was “totally false and wrong.” Burns and Martin released audio of McCarthy telling Cheney just that. McCarthy claimed on Monday that he thought he had denied that he called on Trump to resign, and didn’t believe he had told Republican leaders he would do so.

But the recordings have frustrated Trump’s most ardent allies in Congress, putting McCarthy’s potential bid for the speaker’s gavel in question. He blew his last shot at becoming speaker, during Barack Obama’s presidency, by putting his foot in his mouth while discussing the GOP’s hearings on the 2012 Benghazi attack.

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., one of the lawmakers accused of helping to organize the pre-riot rally, told far-right news network OAN on Tuesday that McCarthy’s private comments have created a “huge trust issue.”

“It’s incredibly undermining,” he said. “We have our leader that’s basically negotiating with Liz Cheney on whether he should encourage President Trump to resign or not.”

McCarthy’s intra-party troubles may not be over. Martin and Burns last week teased additional audio recordings related to the riot.

“We have a lot more on tape from this period, which is at the highest levels of American politics. It is sensitive, it’s delicate and it’s high-stakes, and we have it all on tape,” Martin told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “I think it’s going to tell a very different story about this period than the story that many people are trying to tell right now.”

Read more:

In search of space, health systems take over malls

The hulking Hickory Hollow Mall — a full 1.1 million square feet of retail space in southeastern Nashville — was once the largest shopping center in Tennessee. But like many malls, it’s been in a downward death spiral for more than a decade.

Now the mammoth complex surrounded by acres of parking is on track to join the ranks of malls making a transition into a booming economic sector: medicine. Vanderbilt University Medical Center has had such success reviving a different mall that its health system, Vanderbilt Health, plans to add medical clinics at the former Hickory Hollow Mall, rebranded a decade ago as the Global Mall at the Crossings.

“The possibilities for service offerings in a facility of this scale are endless,” Dr. Jeff Balser, the medical center’s CEO, announced in March. What big-city health systems need most is something shopping malls have plenty of: space and parking. They offer convenience for patients and practitioners, as well as costing less than expanding an existing hospital campus.

Nationwide, 32 enclosed malls house health care services in at least part of their footprint, according to a database kept by Ellen Dunham-Jones, a Georgia Tech urban design professor. One of the first was Jackson Medical Mall in Mississippi, founded by Dr. Aaron Shirley in 1996. Nearly a third of those medical transformations have been announced since the start of the covid-19 pandemic.

The more recent additions include the Capital Hill Mall in Helena, Montana, where Benefis Health System is building a 60,000-square-foot primary care and specialty clinic on part of the 13-acre site that was razed in 2019. In Alexandria, Virginia, Inova Health System is part of a billion-dollar mixed-use development on the Landmark Mall site, which includes plans for a full-service hospital and trauma center.

The lockdowns brought by covid — both required and voluntary — pushed many bricks-and-mortar retailers already on the brink out of business. But medicine’s reuse of retail space is more than pandemic opportunism, according to a November article in the Harvard Business Review. The three authors suggest the rise of telemedicine and continued push toward outpatient procedures will make malls increasingly attractive locations for health care.

The proposition makes sense for commercial real estate investors, too, especially as mall owners struggle. A few went bankrupt during the pandemic. Every mall owner is now looking for mixed-use opportunities, said Ginger Davis of Trademark Properties in Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2017, her company started redeveloping the Citadel Mall, whose anchor tenant is now the Medical University of South Carolina. The clinics and surgery centers are housed in the old J.C. Penney department store.

“Right now they’re doing surgery where people used to buy sheets and towels,” Davis said.

In many cases, the transition to medicine is intended to complement what remains of the retail. At Citadel Mall, a spouse with a partner having outpatient surgery must stay on-site. But browsing Target, Davis said, still counts as on-site.

“We feel like this model can work in communities across the country that are struggling with similar malls that are underperforming,” she said.

Since 2009, Vanderbilt Health has added 22 specialty clinics to nearly a half-million square feet of One Hundred Oaks, a mall still owned by investors. The mall retains big-box retailers on the ground floor, but the mall interior is now virtually all medical.

In some of these deals, such as those for Alexandria’s Landmark and Nashville’s Hickory Hollow malls, the local government has bought the mall property that the hospital system leases, so those portions no longer generate property taxes.

Some failing malls like Hickory Hollow in Nashville are in diverse neighborhoods that need increased access to health services. The surrounding ZIP codes had Nashville’s highest rates of covid infections early in the pandemic and they have some of the lowest rates of primary care visits, according to survey data from the nonprofit NashvilleHealth.

Mall locations remain desirable. Many are even more convenient to dense populations and interstates than when they were built nearly 50 years ago, before surrounding suburbs filled in.

When retiree Jennifer Johnson moved to Nashville to be closer to her grandchild, her family warned her not to see a doctor at Vanderbilt’s main campus, which is under perpetual construction. She quickly understood why.

“It’s a zoo,” she said. “First you get to drive through the maze of the parking garage, which is under construction. Then you try to find out which elevator you’re going to get to, get to what floor you’re going to get to.”

At One Hundred Oaks, she said, “you can go straight up the escalator and straight down the hall — easy peasy.”

Despite the size and age of many malls, they are fairly easy to navigate compared with many hospitals. In Charleston, the Citadel Mall uses football-style yardage marked on the floor to help patients find the right clinic (a detail that its owner insisted on and dubbed the “secret sauce”).

By contrast, many hospital campuses confound patients. Vanderbilt’s main site in the West End area of Nashville has been expanded two dozen times since the first building was constructed in 1925.

“Most of these hospitals are in areas where there’s just no room to grow. And if you do, it’s so expensive,” said Andrew McDonald, a former hospital administrator who leads health care consulting for accounting and consulting firm LBMC. “These buildings are old. They’re antiquated. They’re very expensive to maintain.”

Malls make for a nice fit, at least for big health systems, McDonald said. They can essentially move everything short of the emergency room and intensive care unit — including surgery and imaging centers — and keep them clustered. While doctor offices are often scattered around a hospital district, in a mall setting, if someone needs an MRI, it’s right beyond the food court under the same sprawling roof.

“It just creates a whole lot more efficient flow for the patient going through the health care system with whatever infirmity they may have,” McDonald said.

Vanderbilt’s renovation of the former Hickory Hollow Mall will also create an employment pipeline for medical technicians from Nashville State Community College, which already has a location in what was previously a Dillard’s department store.

The mall has been mostly empty for years, which makes no sense to nearby resident Ricky Grigsby. The area around it is otherwise booming.

“Somebody needs to do something with it,” he said. “It could be jobs for somebody.”

Grigsby just retired from Vanderbilt after a career spent managing surgical instruments for busy operating rooms on the main campus. Now he’s a patient along with everyone else — looking for a more convenient place to receive care.

Bundling care in suburban shopping mall sites also makes sense because of their surrounding demographics, Dunham-Jones said. These areas are no longer filled primarily with young families, who first flocked to the planned neighborhoods and shopping centers built in the 1970s.

“The adults are still in the suburbs, but the kids have long since grown,” Dunham-Jones said. And now those aging parents who remain are “pretty heavy-duty health care consumers.”

What Macron’s reelection means for climate action in France

Just a few days before France’s presidential election, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron spent 20 minutes debating the best way to get France off of fossil fuels. Le Pen, a French nationalist representing the National Rally Party, called Macron a “climate hypocrite.” He jabbed back, dubbing Le Pen a “climate skeptic.”

For the moment, Macron has won out. On Sunday, the sitting French president defeated Le Pen with 58.5 percent of the vote — provoking a sigh of relief from many environmental activists, despite their quarrels with Macron during his previous 5-year term. 

Le Pen’s energy plan had called for exiting the European Union’s electricity market, accelerating the development of nuclear power, and establishing a moratorium on wind and solar development. (Nuclear currently provides about 70 percent of the country’s electricity; wind and solar combined provide only about 10 percent.) “Wind turbines are ugly and they ruin our landscapes,” Le Pen said in the April 20 debate. The far-right candidate had also vowed to cut the value-added tax on gas, electricity, and oil from 20 percent to 5.5 percent — a move that would have cost the government up to 12 billion euros (nearly $12.9 billion) and boosted demand for fossil fuels. 

Macron, on the other hand, vowed to turn France, the world’s seventh-largest economy, into a “great environmental nation.” He pledged to accelerate the country’s pace of decarbonization twofold, create a new leasing system for electric cars, and retrofit 700,000 French homes a year with better insulation. 

The president’s climate policies could also spill over into neighboring European countries. France is currently the leader of the European Union Council, which is tasked with implementing Europe’s “Green Deal” — a massive spending package designed to help the continent get off fossil fuels. And Macron has been one of the most outspoken critics of using Russian coal and oil in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, calling for an outright blockadeon the import of those fuels into the E.U. “The results of elections in France always reverberate way beyond the country’s borders,” Lucie Mattera, head of European politics at the think tank E3G, told E&E News last week. “And 2022 is no exception.” 

But critics have argued that the president struggled to implement his climate agenda during his first term. After promising to cut emissions in his first presidential election, in 2017, Macron instituted increases in France’s fuel tax, with the aim of reducing emissions from the transportation sector. The resulting price hike sparked the gilet jaunes, or “yellow vests” movement, with hundreds of thousands of French citizens protesting in the streets.

Chagrined, Macron repealed the tax increases and launched a program of public participation in government — including a Citizens’ Convention on Climate, a randomly selected group of 150 voters tasked with helping the country create new climate policy. The president promised to pass their proposals on to the legislature or to a referendum “without filter” — but there, too, he ran into conflict. After the convention released its 149 proposals, Macron preemptively vetoed three of them, including a tax on corporate profits to fund clean energy. Only a few dozen of the citizens’ suggestions ended up in France’s sweeping 2021 climate law, and those often in watered-down form. 

In the short term, the reelected president has promised to create a new prime minister position focused on “ecological planning” and increase investments in renewable technologies. Part of that may be an act of political expediency: Macron was shifted left during the campaign by the popular primary run of the leftist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who attracted many young voters with his calls for a 200 billion euro ($214 billion) investment in green infrastructure and a constitutional amendment to protect biodiversity. The support for Mélenchon, Macron said in a speech last week, had sent a “powerful message.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene to right-wing Catholic site: How come “God hasn’t destroyed” America?

Last Thursday, on the eve of testifying in a lawsuit that seeks to prevent her from running for re-election, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the legendary or notorious Georgia Republican, granted an hourlong interview in her home to an unlikely outlet: the far-right Catholic news organization Church Militant, which for years has positioned itself as one of the noisiest and most outlandish partisans in the Roman Catholic Church’s ongoing fight with itself. Greene is an evangelical Protestant, not a Catholic, but Church Militant is making the most of this opportunity, and has featured segments of the interview all week, starting with its opening video on Monday, entitled “Marjorie for Pope.” 

In the interview, Greene rehashed old beefs, described herself as a victim of Jan. 6, said the United States is so sinful she doesn’t understand “why God hasn’t destroyed us” and — most exciting for Church Militant — suggested that Satan is controlling the Catholic Church. 

That might sound like a claim that would offend most Catholics, but Church Militant is not most Catholics. Originally founded as Real Catholic TV by former CBS News producer Michael Voris in 2008 to offer a more orthodox depiction of Mother Church than is found in pop culture fare like “The Da Vinci Code,” the organization grew increasingly strident and at odds with the formal church, until the Archdiocese of Detroit, where it’s located, successfully blocked it from using the word “Catholic” in the outlet’s name. 

RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene denies calling for Pelosi’s execution during trial, then backtracks

These days, Voris describes the website as an apostolate trying to preserve authentic Catholicism in the face of a church hierarchy he describes as an “international crime syndicate” run by a gay cabal. In his crusade against the church, Voris has launched two coalitions for what he calls “canceled” and “persecuted” priests as well as an anonymous network he calls “the New Catacombs,” comprising clerics who denounce “the evil in the hierarchy.”

In 2020, Church Militant pronounced itself the home of “the red-pilled laity” and became such a vitriolic supporter of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign that Voris warned that a Biden presidency would result in faithful Catholics being declared “illegal” and “hunted down” and said that if any viewers considered Trump too “crass” to support, they’d better not complain when they were “herded onto the trains headed for the camps.” 

The Church Militant site calls itself the home of “red-pilled laity” and warned that a Biden presidency would end with Catholics “herded onto the trains headed for the camps.”

After cheering on the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, last summer Church Militant brought disgraced former “alt-lite” personality Milo Yiannopoulos into the fold. He had recently declared that returning to the Catholic faith had helped him become “ex-gay” — similar to Voris, who in 2016 publicly repented for having had same-sex relationships and committed to live a “chaste” life — and that he was planning on opening a Catholic conversion therapy clinic in Florida. 

After starting as a columnist, by last fall Yiannopoulos was hawking Virgin Mary icons and CDs of himself reading from the books of Psalms and Proverbs on Church Militant’s home shopping service. He even appeared on behalf of the group in a Baltimore court as Church Militant fought to hold a protest rally outside the annual gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. When the protest took place last November, Yiannapoulos served as emcee, pairing jokes about gay culture with homophobic slurs as he egged on the audience to chant “Lock them up” at the bishops meeting next door. 

This February, Yiannopoulos also facilitated Greene’s appearance as the honored “surprise guest” at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ third America First Political Action Conference. At that gathering, Greene greeted the crowd of 1,200 white nationalists as fellow “canceled Americans,” and told them they had been “handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand up for our freedoms and stop the Democrats who are the Communist Party of the United States of America.” In the aftermath of that colorful event — which featured chants in support of Vladimir Putin, calls to hang political enemies, abundant “great replacement” theory and Fuentes praising Hitler — Greene defended her appearance as an effort “to break barriers and speak to a lost generation of young people” who had “gathered to declare that Christ is King.” 

In a tweet on Monday, Greene referenced Yiannopoulos again, seemingly in response to the news that Elon Musk had bought Twitter, calling on unseen forces to “bring back” her personal Twitter account as well as those of Trump, COVID skeptic Robert Malone, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Yiannopoulos and the entire “canceled nation.” It’s fair to speculate that Yiannopoulos helped facilitate Greene’s interview with Church Militant as well, in which Voris praised her as “the lioness in the Congress, defender of traditional values, America, all of that,” and suggested that she might become the next speaker of the House. 

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In the interview, MTG did what MTG does. She insulted Joe Biden, claimed that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had forbidden members of Congress from using “pronouns and family names” such as “mother” and “grandparent,” recounted confrontations with fellow lawmakers and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, and described efforts to address the student loan debt crisis as “Satanic.” Here’s the logic on that one: “When people think they don’t have to be responsible with their money and they can just borrow as much as they want and not have to care about giving it back, that is Satan destroying rules.” 

This interview was recorded just before Greene’s appearance in a lawsuit challenging her eligibility to run for Congress again on the grounds that she supported the Jan. 6 insurrection. So she protested, predictably enough, that she too was “a victim” of Jan. 6, since she’d been evacuated from the House chamber as well. The lawsuit, which is unlikely to be successful, is based on a provision of the 14th Amendment, written in the aftermath of the Civil War, which holds that people who have sworn an oath to protect the Constitution and subsequently support an insurrection are barred from holding any political office in the future. 

But in the interview, Greene showed herself willing to be party to another civil war: the one within the Catholic Church, which for most of the last decade has pitted conservative American Catholics against a pope they consider too liberal to be legitimate, as well as against much of the rest of the global church. 

After asking Greene how she gauged the “spiritual character of the United States right now” — the question that prompted her to wonder why God hadn’t destroyed America yet for its failure to end abortion — Voris guided her into issues within Catholic World, taking specific aim at the church-affiliated aid organization Catholic Relief Services, which has recently been targeted by conservative Catholics for its work to help immigrants at the southern border. 

“What it is, is Satan’s controlling the church,” Greene responded. Catholics and other Christians who cite biblical mandates to “love one another” by taking care of migrants, she continued, are “perverting” both the meaning of the Bible and the Constitution. 

Greene argued that Christians who cite the biblical mandate to “love one another” by caring for migrants and refugees are “perverting” the Bible and the Constitution.

Instead, Greene argued, the U.S. government should cut off all aid to Central American countries until they repatriate any citizens who have immigrated to the U.S. “We should hold those countries accountable. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Guatemala, you’re not getting a check this year because you’ve sent X number of thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of people to illegally invade our country as if they’re an army,'” she said. “‘We won’t be able to send you your foreign aid until you bring your people back.” 

As for the Catholic Church, she continued, “The bishops of Catholic Relief charities and services, they should be all in support of that…. If the bishops were reading the Bible and truly preaching the word of God to their flock… and not covering up child sex abuse and pedophilia, that would be loving one another, would have the true meaning and not the perversion and the twisted lie that they’re making it up to be.” 

Greene isn’t the only political figure to have visited Church Militant, despite its marginal reputation. Onetime Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been a frequent guest. Former Newsmax host Michelle Malkin, who has openly associated with white nationalists, spoke at the group’s November rally in Baltimore, charging that U.S. bishops’ aid to immigrants was part of their larger agenda to “destroy the historical American nation.” In the fall of 2020, just weeks before the election, Trump’s Federal Election Commission chair Trey Trainor talked with Voris in a lengthy interview in which he described the election as a “spiritual war.” This year, Church Militant has interviewed a number of right-wing Catholic candidates for higher office, including gubernatorial candidates Dan Cox of Maryland, Ryan Kelley of Michigan and Jim Renacci of Ohio, as well as Missouri Senate candidate Mark McCloskey, who became internet-famous for waving a gun at Black Lives Matter marchers in the summer of 2020. 

“What I find interesting about Church Militant’s increased focus on promoting far-right politicians and influencers is that, a year and a half after the 2020 election, the alliance between reactionary Catholic media and the Republican Party seems to have only grown stronger,” said Mike Lewis, founder of the website Where Peter Is, which tracks the role of the far-right within the Catholic Church. 

“In a lot of ways, a significant part of the U.S. Catholic Church resembles today’s Republican Party,” he continued. “I think that Greene and her advisers see in this group a small but motivated segment of her base.” As for Church Militant, he continued, “the benefits are obvious. When [Voris] gives attention to politicians, especially well-known figures like Greene, he raises his own profile and gets attention in the mainstream press. He’s trying to expand his audience, and he’s going to do that more effectively if he interviews fewer Catholic figures and more national figures.”

“There used to be a genuine ‘ecumenism of the barricades’ among culture-war believers, like the old First Things crowd in the Richard John Neuhaus days,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, referencing the ecumenical Christian right magazine that helped cement the partnership between conservative Catholics and evangelicals. “But they were believers.” Greene and Voris, by contrast, he continued, “seem to be political performers following a script more than scripture. They are so alienated from their respective faith communities it is hard to see them as evangelical Protestant or Roman Catholic. They seem to be trying to pump each other up more than pursuing some actual goal.”

Read more from Kathryn Joyce on religion and the far right:

Progressive Caucus goes full “PINO”: Why dumping Nina Turner is a turning point

Sometimes one decision speaks volumes. And so it was when the Congressional Progressive Caucus — with 98 members in the House — recently chose to have its PAC endorse a pro-corporate “moderate” against the strong progressive candidate Nina Turner. In the process, the Progressive Caucus underscored its loyalty to establishment Democrats while damaging its credibility among progressives nationwide.

The endorsement of Rep. Shontel Brown against Turner in their upcoming May 3 Democratic primary rematch came just five months after Brown took office, following last year’s special election in a Cleveland-area House district. In last August’s Democratic primary, Brown defeated Turner with the help of funding from big corporate, Republican and hawkishly pro-Israel donors — as well as support from Republicans who voted for Brown in Ohio’s open primary. (Brown’s two most notable national endorsers were Hillary Clinton and Rep. Jim Clyburn, the centrist South Carolina Democrat.)

Brown is such an establishment politician that she didn’t just join the Progressive Caucus — she also quickly joined the rival New Democrat Coalition, an alliance of the most corporate Democrats in the House.

RELATED: New York Times message to progressives, in translation: Give up on challenging corporate power

By siding with Brown against Turner, the Progressive Caucus appears to be operating the way so much of official Washington does — as an incumbent protection racket.

This endorsement brought questions to the surface that have been festering for a long time. For example, does the Progressive Caucus represent the interests of progressive constituencies to the establishment? Or does it represent the interests of the establishment to progressives? If the answer is “both,” then how does that work in practice?

Unless such questions are answered with clarity, illusions will undermine the efforts of grassroots progressives to assess situations accurately and organize effectively.

While the caucus’ endorsement of Brown is a bellwether event, it is not an isolated incident. After a long history of backing down rather than using its leverage (as when it abandoned its demand, back in 2009, that a “public option” be part of the Affordable Care Act), the Progressive Caucus appeared to wield some real clout during the early months of the Biden presidency. Most importantly, its leaders insisted that it would not support last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill unless that moved through Congress in tandem with the Build Back Better legislation, which was proposed by President Biden with major input from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

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Build Back Better was crucial for economic and social justice as well as for substantively addressing the climate emergency. For a while, it seemed that the Progressive Caucus, under the leadership of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., was holding firm on the necessity of passing Build Back Better along with the infrastructure measure. That linkage was crucial because Senate obstructionist Joe Manchin badly wanted the infrastructure bill signed into law but was hostile to Build Back Better.

The Progressive Caucus leadership vowed not to back down. And then it caved, opting to wave the infrastructure bill through the House. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was concise when she said: “I’m a No. This is bullshit.”

Other members of the expanded Squad — including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Cori Bush of Missouri, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — also voted against the stand-alone infrastructure measure (and took plenty of abuse as a result). 

Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Bush, Tlaib, Bowman and Pressley saw what was coming, as a result of the caucus’ surrender. The infrastructure bill got through Congress, and Biden signed it on Nov. 15. Progressives immediately lost all leverage on Build Back Better — and it died.

Many members of the Progressive Caucus apparently believe the label helps them with activists back home, but in Washington vote for the corporate status quo.

In December, RootsAction.org (which we co-founded) published an in-depth report on the Congressional Progressive Caucus, documenting that many of its members fail to support the CPC’s main priorities (like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal) and that some in the caucus are just PINOs — “Progressive In Name Only.” Those lawmakers obviously believe the “progressive” label helps them with activists and constituents back in their districts, but in Washington they tend to legislate on behalf of the corporate status quo.  

The PINO report found that “16 CPC members are also part of the ideologically corporatist New Democrat Coalition” — a “moderate” caucus that advocates “market-oriented” and “fiscally responsible” policies to solve the big economic and environmental crises of our time. Add Shontel Brown to this list of dual members. (When the CPC’s PAC endorsed Brown this month, it also announced its endorsement of several of the worst PINOs running for re-election, including Rep. Jimmy Panetta of California, son of former Defense Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta.) 

The report analyzed the lack of cohesion in the Progressive Caucus and cited that deficiency in asking how one of Congress’ biggest caucuses did not muster the power to get Build Back Better across the finish line.

The Progressive Caucus leadership approach that gave up leverage for Build Back Better is akin to the one that just endorsed Shontel Brown against Nina Turner. Progressives around the country should take note and not forget: We can’t depend on the Congressional Progressive Caucus to provide the kind of leadership we need. That must come from the grassroots.

Read more on the Democratic Party’s internal struggle:

Moguls get a “free pass”: Prosecutions of corporate criminals hit record low under Merrick Garland

Despite the Biden administration’s pledges to be tougher on corporate crime than its business-friendly predecessor, a new report published Monday shows that corporate prosecutions reached a record low in 2021, continuing a decline that accelerated under former President Donald Trump.

Citing data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the Corporate Prosecution Registry, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen notes in its analysis that just 90 corporations either pleaded guilty or were found guilty of federal crimes last year even as the Justice Department—led by Attorney General Merrick Garland—announced policies aimed at strengthening enforcement efforts against white-collar offenses.

The previous record low was 94 corporate prosecutions in 2020, down from a peak of 296 in 2000.

“The Biden DOJ’s policy changes away from Trump’s soft-on-corporate-crime approach suggest enforcement against corporate lawbreakers should be ramping up, but the numbers for 2021 don’t reflect those changes,” Rick Claypool, a research director for Public Citizen and author of the new report, said in a statement.

“Deterring corporate monopolists, polluters, fraudsters, and workplace abusers requires the DOJ to bring tough prosecutions,” Claypool added. “It’s the only way to show big business that the cost of crime outweighs any perceived benefit of profit-driven lawbreaking… Garland must prioritize prosecuting these cases, and President Biden and Congress need to provide the DOJ with the resources to do the job.”

Public Citizen also found that the Justice Department’s use of so-called corporate-leniency agreements as an alternative to bringing criminal charges against law-breaking companies remains “extraordinarily high” under Biden.

Such agreements, according to Public Citizen, made up 26% of all concluded federal cases against corporations in 2021—a decline from 32% in 2020 but a massive increase over 1996, when federal prosecutors entered leniency agreements with companies just 1% of the time.

“The rationale for the DOJ’s use of these agreements with corporations is that they facilitate corporate compliance with the law,” the report notes. “The empirical evidence, however, shows that corporations that receive leniency agreements instead of facing prosecution are not deterred from reoffending.”

Public Citizen points out that the Biden Justice Department has taken a number of promising steps aimed at cracking down on corporate crime, an effort that is widely popular among U.S. voters.

“Two weeks after Inauguration Day, Biden’s DOJ rescinded Trump-era policies to weaken enforcement against corporate polluters,” Public Citizen observed. “In October of 2021, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced changes to the DOJ’s corporate enforcement policies, including ratcheting up penalties for corporate repeat offenders, widening the scope of individuals who can be implicated in corporate investigations, and directing a squad of FBI agents tasked specifically with targeting white-collar crime.”

But the administration’s push to intensify enforcement has been hampered by a number of factors, including U.S. attorney vacancies and recalcitrance from Republican members of Congress.

“The top prosecutor vacancies leave offices in the hands of holdovers and career staff, who may be less likely to embrace policy shifts,” Public Citizen noted. “Polluter-friendly Senate Republicans like Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), meanwhile, are blocking the confirmation of Biden’s top environmental law enforcement nominees.”

“The Trump administration’s soft-on-corporate-crime enforcement policies are having a holdover effect on the Biden administration’s enforcement numbers,” the group warned. “Allowing corporate crime to go unpursued and unpunished is not an option. Rampant corporate crime means Americans are at increased risk of being victimized by businesses putting the pursuit of profit above the law, and faith in the American justice system, which so often brings the harshest consequences down on the most powerless defendants, is undermined.”

“Obstacles or no obstacles,” the report added, “the DOJ must zealously pursue its new policies with the resources that it has.”

Public Citizen’s report comes weeks after an analysis by the Revolving Door Project (RDP) found that the Biden administration “has taken at least 24 opportunities to either prosecute corporate crime or begin writing new regulations to ban heinous corporate practices” but “has missed 48 such opportunities.”

“Private equity moguls who defrauded the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) have gotten a free pass so far while prosecutors pursue small-ball schemes,” RDP said. “The Environmental Protection Agency referred the fewest-ever pollution crimes to the Justice Department for prosecution.”

“And while the administration has continued investigating Meta’s Facebook and Alphabet’s Google for antitrust violations,” the watchdog group added, it hasn’t “taken any action against the slew of other white-collar crimes allegedly committed by these Big Tech titans, like bid-rigging, insider trading, and lying to investors and Congress.”