James.galbraith

The arguments from Trump's co-conspirators are hitting rock bottom.

Donald Trump lost in court again, but as usual, he’s delaying his way into something like a win. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Treasury Department could disclose Trump's tax returns to Congress. But District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, put his ruling on hold for 14 days while Trump appeals. And assuming Trump loses that appeal, he’ll likely appeal to the Supreme Court, all with a goal of dragging out the process until the possibility of a Republican-controlled Congress in January 2023.

Trump is losing regularly and decisively, though, with another recent loss on his claim of executive privilege to block the Jan. 6 select committee from getting his documents. In his efforts to keep his tax returns from the House Ways and Means Committee, he was “wrong on the law,” McFadden wrote, as a “long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquiries.”

Rep. Richard Neal, the committee chair, said that “this ruling is no surprise, the law is clearly on the Committee's side. I am pleased that we're now one step closer to being able to conduct more thorough oversight of the IRS's mandatory presidential audit program.”

Trump also faces legal concerns that a change in the control of Congress won’t make go away. State and local prosecutors in New York continue looking at his longtime business practices there, which his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has alleged are fraudulent. Prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office are looking at financial documents in which Trump characterized the value of his real estate business to potential lenders, The New York Times reports, with a key question being whether Trump exaggerated his assets to the point of fraud.

In a cover letter attached to the documents in 2011 and 2012, Trump’s accountants wrote, “Donald J. Trump is responsible for the preparation and fair presentation of the financial statement in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.” The accountants also wrote that, in putting together the document, they had “become aware of departures from accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.” So a question is whether Trump’s own accountants’ discomfort with his falsehoods will save him from fraud charges now, since potential lenders had been warned that the documents weren’t entirely reliable.

Trump is exceedingly unlikely ever to go to prison. His supporters are likely to continue being fanatically loyal to him no matter what gets revealed in these investigations. The Republican Party remains deferential to him. Donald Trump, in other words, probably won’t face any kind of real justice. But as long as there’s a chance of even a little accountability, it’s worth it for investigators and prosecutors to keep looking into his business and tax payment practices. And it is heartening to watch him lose and lose again, including at the hands of his own judicial appointees.

John Eastman, the attorney who helped former President Donald Trump try to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 presidential election, on Tuesday sued Verizon and the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6.

Eastman’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., follows a similar lawsuit filed Monday by four organizers of the Jan. 6 rally. Monday’s lawsuit, against Verizon, argued the select committee doesn’t have the proper authority to obtain the cell phone data.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday says the committee subpoenaed Verizon “without prior notice,” requesting nine categories of data from Eastman’s personal cell phone over a three-month period.

It argues the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoena of cell phone records is invalid for multiple reasons, claiming the committee is “attempting to exercise a law enforcement function,” that the subpoena infringes upon attorney-client privilege, that the subpoena is a violation of the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, and that it was issued in violation of House rules and the committee’s “own authorizing resolution.”

“The Committee’s lack of validly appointed minority members or a validly appointed ‘ranking minority member’ makes such compliance impossible,” the suit says. The Jan. 6 panel has seven Democrats and two Republicans — the only two House Republicans who voted in favor of the panel’s formation.

Eastman’s suit notes that he is a law professor and practicing attorney, as well as a member of the Republican Party and supporter of the former president. The suit argues his political affiliation “puts him at odds with the Committee’s highly partisan membership,” adding that Eastman is not alleged to have breached the Capitol on Jan. 6. The attorney did speak at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, alongside former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Eastman lawyers have sought to direct the suit to Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee handling former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ suit filed against the House panel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week. House investigators voted unanimously Monday night to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress.

Eastman has not cooperated with the committee’s investigation thus far, asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In a letter to the committee’s chair, Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), dated Dec. 1, Eastman’s attorney said his client would assert his Fifth Amendment right “not to be a witness against himself in response to your subpoena.”

Eastman worked closely with the former president in his attempt to overturn the election. A former Chapman University professor now affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute, Eastman was deeply involved in the efforts, from pushing state legislative leaders to reject President Joe Biden’s victory in a handful of swing states to pressuring Pence to unilaterally refuse to count some of Biden’s electors and send the election to the full House for a vote.

The U.S. death toll from Covid-19 topped 800,000 on Tuesday, a once-unimaginable figure seen as doubly tragic, given that more than 200,000 of those lives were lost after the vaccine became available practically for the asking last spring.

The number of deaths, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Atlanta and St. Louis combined, or Minneapolis and Cleveland put together. It is roughly equivalent to how many Americans die each year from heart disease or stroke.

The United States has the highest reported toll of any country. The U.S. accounts for approximately 4 percent of the world’s population but about 15 percent of the 5.3 million known deaths from the coronavirus since the outbreak began in China two years ago.

The true death toll in the U.S. and around the world is believed to significantly higher because of cases that were overlooked or concealed.

A closely watched forecasting model from the University of Washington projects a total of over 880,000 reported deaths in the U.S. by March 1.

Health experts lament that many of the deaths in the United States were especially heartbreaking because they were preventable by way of the vaccine, which became available in mid-December a year ago and was thrown open to all adults by mid-April of this year.

About 200 million Americans are fully vaccinated, or just over 60 percent of the population. That is well short of what scientists say is needed to keep the virus in check.

“Almost all the people dying are now dying preventable deaths,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “And that’s because they’re not immunized. And you know that, God, it’s a terrible tragedy.”

When the vaccine was first rolled out, the country’s death toll stood at about 300,000. It hit 600,000 in mid-June and 700,000 on Oct. 1.

The U.S. crossed the latest threshold with cases and hospitalizations on the rise again in a spike driven by the highly contagious delta variant, which arrived in the first half of 2021 and now accounts for practically all infections. Now the omicron variant is gaining a foothold in the country, though scientists are not sure how dangerous it is.

Beyrer recalled that in March or April 2020, one of the worst-case scenarios projected upward of 240,000 American deaths.

“And I saw that number, and I thought that is incredible — 240,000 American deaths?” he said.

“And we’re now past three times that number.” He added: “And I think it’s fair to say that we’re still not out of the woods.”

The Bank of England has said that bitcoin could be "worthless" and people investing in the digital currency should be prepared to lose everything. The Guardian reports: In a warning over the potential risks for investors, the central bank questioned whether there was any inherent worth in the most prominent digital currency, which has soared in value this year to close to $50,000 a piece. The deputy governor, Sir Jon Cunliffe, said the Bank had to be ready for risks linked to the rise of the crypto asset following rapid growth in its popularity. "Their price can vary quite considerably and [bitcoins] could theoretically or practically drop to zero," he told the BBC. The Bank's financial policy committee, set up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to monitor risks, said on Monday there was little direct threat to the stability of the UK financial system from crypto assets. However, it warned that, at the current rapid pace of growth, such assets could become more interconnected with traditional financial services and were likely to pose a number of risks. Publishing its regular health check on the financial system, the Bank said major institutions should take a cautious approach to adopting crypto assets and that it would pay close attention to developments in the market. "Enhanced regulatory and law enforcement frameworks, both domestically and at a global level, are needed to influence developments in these fast-growing markets in order to manage risks, encourage sustainable innovation and maintain broader trust and integrity in the financial system," it said. In a separate blogpost published on its website on Tuesday, a member of the Bank's staff said bitcoin failed to fulfill many of the features required of a currency and that it risked being inherently volatile. Thomas Belsham, who works in the Bank's stakeholder and media engagement division, wrote: "The problem is that, unlike traditional forms of money, Bitcoin isn't used to price things other than itself. As Bitcoiners themselves are fond of saying, 'one Bitcoin = one Bitcoin'. But a tautology does not a currency make." He said scarcity of the crypto asset -- which is limited to 21m bitcoin -- is among the key reasons for its attraction for investors, but this feature embedded into its design "may even, ultimately, render Bitcoin worthless." About 19m bitcoin is currently in circulation, with new coins added when "miners" validate changes to the blockchain ledger underpinning the cryptocurrency. While the ultimate number of bitcoin in circulation is not expected to be reached until February 2140, it would become harder to sustain this system over time, Belsham said. "Simple game theory tells us that a process of backward induction should, really, at some point, induce the smart money to get out. And were that to happen, investors really should be prepared to lose everything. Eventually."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Georgia Republicans are back to their old tricks, doing everything in their power to take control back from Black voters and Democrats—including a repeat of suppressive Jim Crow-era voting practices, such as replacing Black election board members with white men and killing early voting on Sundays. 

Thanks to the passage of S.B. 202, which allows the Republican-controlled State Election Board to control county boards it judges to be failing, for months, Republicans have been stealthy in reorganizing boards to remove Black board members and replace them with white, conservative, Trump-supporting men. 

A year ago, the five-member Spalding County election board comprised three Black women and a Black elections supervisor. Today, all three of the women have been replaced by white Republicans and a new board chairman, Ben Johnson—a former official of the county Republican party, who supports not only the one-term, twice-impeached President Trump but also the “big lie” and is (of course) an anti-vaxxer. 

Spalding, a rural neighborhood south of Atlanta, is one of six county boards Republicans in Georgia have reorganized leading up to the 2022 midterms. As reported by Reuters, up until 2013, Georgia elections operated under federal oversight to ensure Black citizens weren’t being disenfranchised in a state proud of its long history of racial segregation. 

Five of the counties—Troup, Morgan, Pickens, Stephens, and Lincoln—the reorganized boards shifted to members of local county commissions, all of which are controlled by Republicans. Prior to the switch, the split was even between parties to make sure the board was nonpartisan. In Spalding, each party still chooses two members, but the fifth was once chosen with a coin flip; now, it’s decided by local judges, who are primarily right-wing conservatives. 

According to Reuters, Morgan County ejected two outspoken Black Democrats. In Troup County, a Black Democratic member claims the board restructuring aimed to oust her after she fought to increase access to voting for residents.

Local county election boards hold a great deal of power. They decide polling locations, procedures for early voting, and control provisional-ballot tallies, audits, and recounts. Of course Republicans want that control—especially in Georgia. 

In addition to eliminating early Sunday voting in Spalding County, Lincoln County is considering a consolidation of seven of its polling places, making it difficult for those who live a long distance to get to their polling station. 

Trump won Spalding County with 60% of the vote in 2020, but that was down 4% from 2016 as Black turnout jumped 20% with a population of 35%. Reuters reports that Trump supporters searched through the trash for tossed ballots, but none were found. 

As hard as Georgia Republicans argue that reorganizing the board is meant to restore voter confidence, the truth is that this is all just old-fashioned systemic racism. 

Monday, Georgia Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, introduced S.B. 325, a ban on ballot drop boxes in the state. 

As it stands now, counties must have at least one absentee ballot dropbox, but not over one box per 100,00 active, registered voters or the number of advance voting locations in the county, whichever is less. 

“This is the next step in our fight to restore Georgians’ faith in our election systems,” Miller told Fox-5 News Atlanta. “Drop boxes were introduced as an emergency measure during the pandemic, but many counties did not follow the security guidelines in place, such as the requirement for camera surveillance on every dropbox. Moving forward, we can return to a pre-pandemic normal of voting in person. Removing drop boxes will help rebuild the trust that has been lost. Many see them as the weak link to securing our elections against fraud. For the small number of Georgians who need to vote absentee, that will remain as easy and accessible as it was before 2020.”

Miller presided over Senate Bill 202. 

“I’m proud of it,” Miller has said. “Republicans and Democrats were asking for election reform, and we have election reform that builds confidence, gives trust and transparency to our election process.”  

Helen Butler, one of the two Black Democrats on the Morgan County board, removed and replaced by a white Republican man, testified before a special U.S. Senate subcommittee in July, arguing that she was removed for fighting for fair elections with ballot drop boxes and multiple polling locations.

She warned the committee the moves by GOP in her state could “enable members of the majority party to overturn election results they do not like.”

[The Court rules that the lawsuit against SB 8 can proceed by targeting state licensing officials. But the implications for future cases are far from completely clear.]

This morning, the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Texas SB 8, the controversial anti-abortion law structured to evade judicial review. As I have explained in previous posts (e.g. here and here), the key issue at stake in this case is whether Texas can evade judicial review by limiting enforcement authority exclusively to private parties. SB 8 seemingly bars enforcement by state officials, and instead delegates it  to private litigants, who each stand to gain $10,000 or more in damages every time they prevail in a lawsuit against anyone who violates the law's provisions barring nearly all abortions that take place more than six weeks into a pregnancy. If Texas' ploy succeeds, it would set a dangerous precedent for insulating attacks on other constitutional rights from judicial review.

Today's Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson, allows preenforcement lawsuits against SB 8 to go forward, but only against state medical licensing board officials, who - eight of nine justices conclude - still have some potential enforcement authority under SB 8. It denies relief against the Attorney General of Texas, state judges, state court clerks, and the one private litigant who was a defendant in the case. The plurality opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by three other conservative justices (Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Alito) concludes that relief against the AG is impermissible because of state sovereign immunity, and relief against the clerks is not allowed because the latter's interests are not genuinely "adverse" to those of the abortion providers challenging SB 8:

Private parties who seek to bring S. B. 8 suits in state court may be litigants adverse to the petitioners. But the state-court clerks who docket those disputes and the state-court judges who decide them generally are not. Clerks serve to file cases as they arrive, not to participate as adversaries in those disputes. Judges exist to resolve controversies about a law's meaning or its conformance to the Federal and State Constitutions, not to wage battle as contestants in the parties' litigation. As this Court has explained, "no case or controversy" exists "between a judge who adjudicates claims under a statute and a litigant who attacks the constitutionality of the statute." Pulliam v. Allen, 466 U. S. 522, 538, n. 18 (1984).

On the other hand, Justice Gorsuch concludes that the plaintiffs can bring a preenforcement action against state medical licensing officials. On this issue, eight of nine justices agree with him (all but Justice Thomas):

While this Court's precedents foreclose some of the petitioners' claims for relief, others survive. The petitioners Thomas, Allison Benz, and Cecile Young. On the briefing and argument before us, it appears that these particular defendants fall within the scope of Ex parte Young's historic exception to state sovereign immunity. Each of these individuals is an executive licensing official who may or must take enforcement actions against the petitioners if they violate the terms of Texas's Health and Safety Code, including S. B. 8. See, e.g., Tex. Occ. Code Ann. §164.055(a); Brief for Petitioners 33–34. Accordingly, we hold that sovereign immunity does not bar the petitioners' suit against these named defendants at the motion to dismiss stage.

Gorsuch goes on to reject Justice Thomas' solo dissent arguing that the licensing officials are not proper defendants:

JUSTICE THOMAS suggests that the licensing-official defendants lack authority to enforce S. B. 8 because that statute says it is to be "exclusively" enforced through private civil actions "[n]otwithstanding . . . any other law." See Tex. Health & Safety Code Ann. §171.207(a). But the same provision of S. B. 8 also states that the law "may not be construed to . . . limit the enforceability of any other laws that regulate or prohibit abortion." §171.207(b)(3). This saving clause is significant because, as best we can tell from the briefing before us, the licensing-official defendants are charged with enforcing "other laws that regulate . . . abortion."

Consider, for example, Texas Occupational Code §164.055, titled "Prohibited Acts Regarding Abortion." That provision states that the Texas Medical Board "shall take an appropriate disciplinary action against a physician who violates . . . Chapter 171, Health and Safety Code," a part of Texas statutory law that includes S. B. 8. Accordingly, it appears Texas law imposes on the licensing-official defendants a duty to enforce a law that "regulate[s] or prohibit[s] abortion," a duty expressly preserved by S. B. 8's saving clause…..

JUSTICE THOMAS advances an alternative argument. He stresses that to maintain a
suit consistent with this Court's…. precedents, "it is not enough that petitioners 'feel inhibited' " or " 'chill[ed]' " by the abstract possibility of an enforcement action against them….  Rather, they must show at least a credible threat of such an action
against them…. [W]e agree with these observations in principle and disagree only on their application to the facts of this case. The petitioners have plausibly alleged that S. B. 8 has already had a direct effect on their day-to-day operations….. And they have identified provisions of state law that appear to impose a duty on the licensing-official defendants to bring disciplinary actions against them if they violate S. B. 8. In our judgment, this is enough at the motion to dismiss stage to suggest the petitioners will be the target of an enforcement action and thus allow this suit to proceed.

If the plaintiffs prevail in their lawsuit against the licensing officials,  they will, most likely, be able to get an injunction that applies only against those defendants.  But the precedent set can then be used to defend against lawsuits by private SB 8 litigants, and thus should eliminate all or most of the "chilling effect" created by SB 8.

This should enable the plaintiffs to get relief against SB 8, should federal courts ultimately rule it unconstitutional on substantive grounds. As Justice Gorsuch notes, there is also preenforcement state-court litigation against SB 8, which just yesterday resulted in a decision ruling against its enforcement mechanism. One way or another, the SB 8 ploy is likely to fail to insulate SB 8 itself against preenforcement review. The big question, however, is whether Texas and other states can successfully insulate other similar laws from judicial review.

Justice Sotomayor's partial dissent on behalf of the three liberal justices raises the possibility that states can do just that, simply by going farther than SB 8 did in precluding enforcement by government officials:

My disagreement with the Court runs far deeper than a quibble over how many defendants these petitioners may sue. The dispute is over whether States may nullify federal constitutional rights by employing schemes like the one at hand. The Court indicates that they can, so long as they write their laws to more thoroughly disclaim all enforcement by state officials, including licensing officials. This choice to shrink from Texas' challenge to federal supremacy will have far-reaching repercussions. I doubt the Court, let alone the country, is prepared for them…..

[B]y foreclosing suit against state-court officials and the state attorney general, the Court clears the way for States to reprise and perfect Texas' scheme in the future to target the exercise of any right recognized by this Court with which they disagree.
This is no hypothetical. New permutations of S. B. 8 are coming. In the months since this Court failed to enjoin the law, legislators in several States have discussed or introduced legislation that replicates its scheme to target locally disfavored rights. What are federal courts to do if, for example, a State effectively prohibits worship by a disfavored religious minority through crushing "private" litigation burdens amplified by skewed court procedures, but does a better job than Texas of disclaiming all enforcement by state officials? Perhaps nothing at all, says this Court. Although some path to relief not recognized today may yet exist, the Court has now foreclosed the most straightforward route under its precedents. I fear the Court, and the country, will come to regret that choice.

This is a genuine danger. It is the main reason for my own support for the SB 8 plaintiffs, as well as that of many others concerned about the threat to other constitutional rights. On the other hand, given the reach of the modern regulatory state, litigants will often - perhaps almost always - be able to find some state or local regulatory official of some kind, who has some kind of tangential connection to enforcement of the law in question. For example, the "religious minority" posited by Justice Sotomayor may be subject to regulation by state officials tasked with enforcing laws involving nonprofit organizations (if the minority's church or other house of worship has nonprofit status), officials regulating land use (if they use property to conduct their services), and so on.

If the tenuous connection between the medical licensing boards and SB 8 is enough to allow the present case to go forward, other indirect connections may be enough, as well. It is, notable, also, that Justice Gorsuch highlights the fact that "[t]he petitioners have plausibly alleged that S. B. 8 has already had a direct effect on their day-to-day operations" as one of the reasons why their case against the licensing officials can go forward. The "direct effect,"  is, of course, brought on by plausible fear of ruinous litigation. If that is a relevant factor in this case, it might be in others, too.

In sum, it may be difficult for states to insulate SB 8-like laws from judicial review, because it may not be possible to foreclose all the ways in which various kinds of state and local officials might have some kind of indirect enforcement authority. All sorts of private organizations and individuals are subject to various kinds of licensing rules, land-use regulations, tax exemptions, and so on. And all of these might have at least a tangential connection to an SB 8-style law.

But the ultimate impact on future SB 8-like laws remains uncertain. We can expect a constant cat-and-mouse game to arise, as state governments try to insulate these types of schemes from judicial review, while private parties targeted by them search for state and local officials to sue, based on some kind of connection to the law. Federal courts will then have to try to sort through the confusion on a case-by-case basis.

The difficulty of resolving future cases is heightened by the fact that there is no one opinion that commands a majority of the Court on the crucial question of which government officials can be sued and why. Justice Gorsuch's opinion has the support of only four justices. Justice Thomas' opinion that would have barred all the anti-SB 8 lawsuits commands only his own vote. Chief Justice Roberts' opinion that would have allowed lawsuits against the Texas attorney general and state-court clerks commands four votes, as well. And Justice Sotomayor's opinion, which would go further than Roberts in some ways, only has the support of the Court's three liberals.

The part of Justice Gorsuch's opinion focusing on the Attorney General, state clerks, and the one private defendant is styled as an "opinion of the Court," and does have the support of a majority. But the most important part going forward is the section on the licensing board officials, which is described only as an opinion by Gorsuch.

Probably, Gorsuch's opinion is the one lower courts will view as binding, under United States v. Marks (1977), which requires them to credit the Supreme Court opinion resolving the case on the "narrowest grounds." But the issue is not a certain one. Moreover, it is not clear how tight a connection between the state regulators and enforcement of the law in question is needed in order to authorize a lawsuit against the former.

All of these problems could have been avoided if only the Court had adopted the sensible position urged by Chief Justice Roberts in his partial concurring opinion:

In my view, several other respondents are also proper defendants. First, under Texas law, the Attorney General maintains authority coextensive with the Texas Medical Board to address violations of S. B. 8. The Attorney General may "institute an action for a civil penalty" if a physician violates a rule or order of the Board. Tex. Occ. Code Ann. §165.101….

The same goes for Penny Clarkston, a court clerk. Court clerks, of course, do not "usually" enforce a State's laws. Ante, at 5. But by design, the mere threat of even unsuccessful suits brought under S. B. 8 chills constitutionally protected conduct, given the peculiar rules that the State has imposed. Under these circumstances, the court clerks who issue citations and docket S. B. 8 cases are unavoidably enlisted in the scheme to enforce S. B. 8's unconstitutional provisions, and thus are sufficiently "connect[ed]" to such enforcement to be proper defendants. Young, 209 U. S., at 157. The role that clerks play with respect to S. B. 8 is distinct from that of the judges. Judges are in no sense adverse to the parties subject to the burdens of S. B. 8. But as a practical matter clerks are—to the extent they "set[ ] in motion the machinery" that imposes these burdens on those sued under S. B. 8. Sniadach v. Family Finance Corp. of Bay View, 395 U. S. 337, 338 (1969).

Justice Gorsuch does highlight other ways in which judicial review remains available in this case, including through preenforcement actions in state court of the kind already underway against SB 8. But actions in state court could potentially be precluded by state law. Moreover, one of the main functions of federal courts is to provide a forum for constitutional claims against state and local governments that is independent of the latter's own authority.

In sum, the ultimate implications of the SB case remain to be seen, and will surely be litigated in future cases. Perhaps the only people who can be truly satisfied with today's result are all the lawyers who will get extra business, as a result of it.

UPDATE: I have made some additions to this post.

 

The post A Murky Decision in the Texas SB 8 Case appeared first on Reason.com.

How much more dystopian can modern life get here in the United States? This question feels more than a little dangerous, given that Republicans continue to show us that they seem to have no boundaries—they’re willing to attack vulnerable trans youth, argue against teaching intersectional history, and, of course, some are willing to sow anti-science hysteria during the pandemic. Even still, a recent video out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has people feeling like we’re diving even deeper into disarray when it comes to our country’s values.

The video—which has gone viral on Twitter with millions of views—shows 10 teachers scrambling for dollar bills to go toward their classroom supplies as part of a Dash for Cash. As reported by Argus Leader, $5,000 in single dollar bills were placed on the skating rink during a Sioux Falls Stampede hockey game at the Denny Sanford Premier Center on Saturday. Teachers then competed against one another to gather as many bills as possible (shoving them into their hats, for example) in less than five minutes. Meanwhile, the stadium crowd watched and cheered. 

In speaking to the Leader in an interview, a marketing spokesperson for CU Mortgage Direct explained that they donated the money to the event. “With everything that has gone on for the last couple of years with teachers and everything, we thought it was an awesome group thing to do for the teachers,” Ryan Knudson explained. 

The outlet reports that high school teacher Barry Longden ended up with the most money, taking home $616 to go toward an esports program he puts on for his students. 

Fifth-grade teacher Alexandria Kuyper walked away with $592 and said the funds will go towards decorations and treats for her classroom. The elementary school teacher said she thinks it’s “really cool” when communities offer funds for things that educators usually “pay out of pocket for.”

What would be even cooler? If teachers were paid fairly, and schools got enough money to pay for these supplies from the start. This isn’t to shame teachers who participate, of course, especially considering, as The Washington Post points out, teachers in the state are some of the most poorly paid in the entire country. Still, we can understand why educators would want to participate while criticizing the overall system that pushes them into a spot where they’re thinking, Sure, I’ll shove dollar bills down my shirt if it means my students can get pencils this year. 

Here is some of the initial footage that went viral.

South Dakota Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba spoke to the Post about this concept in an interview, saying that the competition was likely put together with the best intentions, the result was a “terrible image.”

“Teachers should never have to go through something like this to be able to get the resources they need to meet the basic educational needs of our students,” Nesiba stated, noting that this should be the case whether it’s in Sioux Falls or anywhere else in the country.

People online certainly agreed, with plenty of comparisons to The Hunger Games and Squid Game dystopian series coming up. 

You can also watch a short clip below, originally from Annie Todd at the Argus Leader and reshared by The Guardian on YouTube.

The tornado that tore through Kentucky, leaving 64 dead and more than 100 missing, is a disaster that will require significant emergency aid. Federal emergency assistance is already on the way, but the needs of a state that saw whole areas virtually flattened will go beyond the immediate. Votes for that aid can be expected from congressional Democrats, because congressional Democrats reliably vote to fund recovery efforts from areas battered by natural disasters. Votes for the aid can also be expected from Kentucky Republicans who don't extend the same courtesy when other states are hit.

President Joe Biden has already announced an emergency and is sending immediate federal assistance after Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, asked for such a declaration, backed by Kentucky’s entire congressional delegation. That delegation includes Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie, both of whom have long histories of objecting to funding after other natural disasters.

Paul’s votes against disaster relief bills include opposing funding for recovery from Hurricane Sandy, which struck in 2012; Hurricane Harvey in 2017; Hurricane Maria in 2017; and a 2019 bill including aid for multiple disasters.

This time? Well … “The Governor of the Commonwealth has requested federal assistance this morning, and certainly further requests will be coming as the situation is assessed,” Paul wrote in a letter to Biden. “I fully support those requests and ask that you move expeditiously to approve the appropriate resources for our state.” 

Massie also opposed that 2019 bill providing funding for multiple natural disasters. In fact, he blocked it from passing by unanimous consent. And, yes, he opposed funding for Sandy—which, he said, “recklessly increases the national debt”—and Harvey and Maria. But it has always been a different story when it comes to Kentucky, as the Courier-Journal detailed in 2019.

In July 2015, Massie’s signature was on a letter asking then-President Barack Obama for aid to counties hit by storms, which ”are confronting a number of significant economic challenges, and the need among many of these citizens is great.” In April 2018, another set of storms “causing extensive damage exceeding the ability of the state government and localities to effectively respond” left Kentucky in need of aid, according to a letter to Donald Trump signed by Massie, Paul, and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation.

Look, hypocrisy is nothing Republicans are ashamed of. People like Massie and Paul will never hesitate to act all pious about their opposition to disaster relief for other people while demanding that their state get everything it needs. But everyone else should be clear that this hypocrisy speaks to their basic truthfulness on other issues. These are people who are telling us, loud and clear, that they are in it for themselves and that nothing they say should ever be believed, because it will always be tailored to fit their political needs in that moment. We should listen to them on that—which means not listening to the words they spew to justify their actions.

President Joe Biden is set to sign an executive order Monday that will make several government agencies more efficient and easier for Americans to navigate. The new order fast-forwards the nation into the digital age by cutting the time and vexation of federal services such as renewing passports, applying for Social Security benefits, and getting needed aid after natural disasters. 

The White House is looking to bolster confidence in government in a post-Trump era. Between the terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the ongoing rhetoric of a stolen and rigged election, and the conspiracy theories about COVID-19, masks, mandates, and U.S. postmaster general Louis DeJoy’s brilliant “slow down plan,” to name a few, it’s no wonder Americans don’t trust the government. 

“We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works and can deliver for our people,” Biden has said. 

Dubbed Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government, the new order is designed to “put people at the center of everything the government does.”

The order affects 36 “customer experience improvement commitments” across 17 federal agencies.  

Listed in the order are 35 providers in federal agencies directed to reduce administrative speed-bumps and create “new online tools and technologies that can provide a simple, seamless, and secure customer experience” by next year. 

The new order will ensure that those Americans 65+ can claim benefits online more smoothly, and Medicare recipients can better manage online tools to save money on medicine.

Taxpayers will now be able to schedule callbacks instead of waiting on long phone holds or relying on snail mail or faxes. Also, updating addresses or name changes in the Social Security Administration will be more accessible. 

Passport services will be online, giving Americans the opportunity to renew and pay digitally versus via a personal check or money order. 

Students and military veterans will have a single portal to pay federal loans or access benefits. 

Lower-income families will be able to enroll in social service programs without having to manage reams of paperwork and will have the ability to order groceries online. 

Those who’ve suffered a natural disaster and are applying for federal aid can now upload photos of damaged property to support claims, forgoing filing via multiple forms from various agencies. 

Small businesses and farmers can now access loans online. 

“We do our banking online,” Bill Sweeney, senior vice president of government affairs for AARP told the Associated Press. “We do our work online. We can order food online. We can order groceries from our phones. I think people are accustomed to that now, and they’re demanding that government keep up as well.”

Biden will sign the order in the Oval Office. He’ll be accompanied by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, Small Business Administration head Isabel Guzman and TSA Administrator David Pekoske.

This week, Daily Kos senior political writer Kerry Eleveld joined Michelangelo Signorile on his show to talk about the fate of Roe v. Wade, the future of Georgia, and what Democrats can do after they pass President Biden’s Build Back Better plan.

A repeal of Roe v. Wade is becoming more and more likely but if it were to happen, not everyone would feel its effects in the same way. “There’s been this abortion fight looming for decades and what I think they’re failing to see is the way this is going to be like a bomb dropping when, in somewhere around half the states, women lose access to abortion,” Eleveld said. She also highlighted what is at stake given that a majority of Americans support abortion rights and unpacked the conservative argument surrounding states’ rights to decide the issue:

Somewhere around roughly two-thirds of the country thinks that abortion should be legal in all or most cases … but there isn’t more than 20% support in America for not having abortion access at all. What Republicans want to go back to and what they want to sell is, ‘Well, we’re just going to let this be decided in the states.’ Well, if you don’t have abortion access in your state, and you don’t have the money to go out of state, then you don’t have abortion access.

The pair also touched on the future of Georgia, especially now that Stacey Abrams has announced her intent to run for governor again. Eleveld believes that Republicans in Georgia are still struggling after losing both U.S. Senate seats early this year.

In the House, Republican leadership continues to be “morally bankrupt,” as Eleveld underscored:

What is happening in Republican caucus right now, and especially among House Republicans, is what happens when you have a total dearth of moral leadership, right? And anyone who’s had kids know that if you let kids sort of run wild and control you … and they will do anything they want and you will be at their behest. You will be begging them to sort of, you know, do whatever it is that you want them to do.

That’s basically where McCarthy is now. He isn’t putting any firm guardrails in place, he’s not putting any boundaries in place. He’s not saying what is unacceptable for his caucus, because he’s so desperate for every single vote he can get in order to ultimately become speaker if Republicans take the majority next year. And at the same time, while he’s doing this, while he’s letting them run wild and just [exhibit] total moral bankruptcy, he’s already probably on the chopping block.

Lastly, Eleveld shared her thoughts on how Democrats can continue pushing for more on the issues that really matter. If Democrats can pass the Build Back Better Act, they need to focus on some version of a Voting Rights Act immediately after, she argued, and turn the media’s attention to other pressing things:

If they can pass the Build Back Better bill and be done with that … I want them to get it done, and then they need to let reporters get back to seeing what a total dumpster fire Republicans are. They need to spend time redirecting the energy of reporters to the dumpster fire that is the Republican Party right now.

You can listen to the full audio here:

They aren't even trying to hide it. When they take back the House, they're taking us all hostage.

We're in another post-Watergate moment. But unlike last time, we may not act.

They're in the midst of an attack on the Establishment Clause and the idea of church-state separation.

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The weird part is they've been dating for 10 years now.

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The texts expose how the rich exploit culture wars to benefit themselves.

As the Capitol riot unfolded on January 6, Fox News hosts knew exactly how bad things were.

“The president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Laura Ingraham texted to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “Please, get him on TV — [the riot is] destroying everything you accomplished,” Brian Kilmeade wrote to Meadows. “Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?” wrote Sean Hannity in yet another Meadows text.

The texts, revealed during a Monday hearing of the House January 6 Commission, were at odds with the hosts’ on-air comments on the night of the attack. Ingraham suggested that “antifa supporters” may have been responsible for the violence. Kilmeade took a similar line: “I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation.” Hannity, for his part, asserted that “the majority of them were peaceful.”

This is tangible proof that some of Fox’s marquee personalities knowingly lied to their audience about January. The lying began basically immediately, in the direct aftermath of a national tragedy.

This isn’t the only issue on which Fox’s dishonesty has been exposed. On one of the fundamental policy topics of the day, the pandemic, the right’s most influential news network is saying one thing to its audience and doing another in private.

Fox News’s programming on vaccines and vaccine mandates has been relentlessly hostile. Yet more than 90 percent of Fox News employees are fully vaccinated, and the company has a vaccine mandate that’s actually stricter than the one President Joe Biden has proposed for large corporations. Hosts tend not to mention this on air and, on the rare occasions that they do, they mislead their audience about it.

They are lying to their audience, and anyone paying close attention can see it.

These incidents speak to a deep pattern in modern conservatism, a parasitic relationship in which a super-wealthy elite preys on the fears of the conservative base for profit.

Fox and the GOP’s “plutocratic populism”

Last summer, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson published a book titled Let Them Eat Tweets that diagnosed what they see as the central political strategy of the modern Republican Party. They call it “plutocratic populism”: a “bitter brew of reactionary economic priorities and right-wing racial and cultural appeals.”

The basic idea is that the super-rich and their allies are in the driver’s seat of the GOP’s policy agenda — and what those elites want, more than anything else, are tax cuts and attacks on the social safety net. Recognizing that making the rich richer is an unpopular policy agenda, they have married their political fortunes to the forces of cultural reaction. The GOP wins elections by engaging in thinly veiled appeals to racism, xenophobia, and sexism; the super-rich win when those GOP majorities pass deeper and deeper tax cuts.

Fox News, which Hacker and Pierson call in their book “the epicenter of resentment politics,” plays a crucial role in cementing this relationship.

Fox’s programming is 24-7 conservative backlash politics, relentlessly focused on ginning up fear: fear of Democrats, of Black people, of immigrants, of feminists, of LGBTQ individuals, and even of college professors and students. Study after study has found Fox News has a profound effect on its viewers and American politics: It has helped Republicans get elected, pushed incumbent members of Congress to the right, and likely even facilitated the early spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

And yet, Fox’s corporate structure is at odds with its actual product. The network is part of an international media empire owned by Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who has badmouthed Trump in public and in private. Its headquarters are in midtown Manhattan. The network’s most aggressively populist host, Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson, is from a patrician family; his stepmother comes from the Swanson family of frozen food fame.

Fox, in short, is plutocratic populism incarnate — the purest distillation of the Hacker-Pierson analysis of the GOP. Fox hosts lie about January 6 and Covid-19 because that is what they exist to do.

Of course, not all plutocratic populism is disingenuous. Some of the right’s billionaires, like leading Trump backer Rebekah Mercer, appear to be true-believer culture warriors in addition to being plutocrats.

This is consistent with a separate body of political science research that finds that, on the whole, self-interest is less politically salient than partisan and cultural identity. Broadly speaking, people identify with a political party based on cultural affinities; once they do, they tend to bring their economic views in line with whatever the party’s mainstream is. That’s part of why white working-class voters vote against social safety net expansions that would benefit them.

But there is at least some dishonesty going on in today’s conservative movement, as the January 6 commission and Fox vaccine mandate debacle have exposed. And that’s something that we, as a society, need to be honest about.

Democrats’ best tool for fighting child poverty could be expiring soon.

For the past six months, families with kids have received monthly payments from the federal government as part of the expanded child tax credit — a policy that has slashed child poverty in the US.

If Congress doesn’t act, however, this measure is set to expire for future payments near the end of the month. The last monthly payment was scheduled to go out on December 15, after which these installments will end. (This year, six monthly payments have been sent out; one larger payment will be distributed next year during tax season 2022.)

The policy, approved this spring as part of the American Rescue Plan, made three key changes to the child tax credit, a provision that enables families with kids to reduce their tax liability. The credit got bigger, up to $3,600 for children under the age of 6 and $3,000 for children between the ages of 6 and 17, an increase from the $2,000 families could previously receive for children 16 and under. It became fully refundable, meaning low-income households could benefit even if they didn’t earn enough to owe taxes. And it made the payments monthly, giving families the option to receive something other than an annual lump sum, as had been the case in the past.

The payments have only been going out since July, but they’ve already had a major impact. In October, they reduced child poverty rates by as much as 28 percent compared to what they would have been otherwise, according to the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy. If the expanded benefits were to continue long term, it could cut child poverty by as much as 40 percent in a typical year, per analyses by the Urban Institute, drastically improving the lives of many of the nearly 10.5 million US children who lived in poverty as of 2019.

Democrats’ social spending and climate package, the Build Back Better Act (BBB), would extend the policy for another year, but its fate is increasingly uncertain.

According to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR), Congress needs to approve an extension by December 28 in order for the Internal Revenue Service to ensure there isn’t a break in payments in January.

Democrats hope to advance the BBB Act by Christmas, though the prospects for doing so are still up in the air, largely because of opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).

With Christmas rapidly approaching and growing concern among the caucus that the bill may fall apart, there’s hope that, if nothing else, the child tax credit — a policy that is perceived as broadly popular and a boon to Democrats’ electoral chances in 2022 — will push Manchin to support the BBB Act despite his misgivings.

It’s “the single best deadline that might get us finally to act,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) previously told the Hill.

Manchin wasn’t too concerned about the urgency of the deadline when asked about it last week, however, signaling that he believes these payments could be addressed retroactively if needed. “I’ve never seen a situation where we weren’t able to make up whatever you thought time would be lost,” he said at the time.

If Democrats don’t pass the BBB Act before the end of the year, the monthly payments and expansion to the credit will likely end, and child poverty could increase once again as a result.

Millions of children could fall back into poverty

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank focusing on social programs, estimates 9.9 million children could fall back into poverty or deeper into poverty if the credit is not extended. It estimates, too, that poverty rates for Black, Latino, and American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) children, in particular, will be hardest hit. If BBB doesn’t pass, poverty rates would be 22 percent for Black children compared to 13 percent if it did, 21 percent for Latino children compared to 12 percent, and 18 percent for AIAN children compared to 10 percent.

All told, the families of roughly 61 million children have received the monthly tax credit payments so far, with many using the funds for basic household needs like food, utilities, and rent payments. Because of the boost that it’s provided, it’s played a major role in helping families navigate economic uncertainty during the pandemic, when many have experienced major child care challenges and a fluctuating employment market.

“Getting these payments now, I know that at least I have help covering food,” David Watson, a technician and single parent of two, told Tiffanie Drayton for Vox in July. “Now I can pull back on overtime. I need sleep, man.” A Census Bureau survey found that food insecurity among families dipped dramatically after the first expanded child tax credit payment. For those making less than $50,000 a year in household income, food insecurity declined from 26 percent of families to 18.5 percent.

Longer term, the credit could enable families to build up their emergency savings and invest in additional activities and opportunities for their children, which they might otherwise be unable to afford. Columbia University researchers found that each $1 distributed via the child tax credit translates to a long-term societal return of $8 in lower health care costs and increased earnings for children who benefited.

An abrupt lapse in these payments, ultimately, could be a major shock.

“In the absence of the CTC, more families — and low-income families in particular — will go hungry more often and be at risk for things like eviction, utility shut-offs, and other hardships,” Stephen Roll, a research professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the effects of the expanded child tax credit, previously told Vox.

There’s a lot of uncertainty around the Build Back Better Act right now

While most Democratic senators are in favor of the expanded child tax credit, uncertainty surrounding the Build Back Better Act is putting the potential of an extension in doubt.

Democratic leaders have been confident that they’d be able to pass the BBB bill before Christmas, but it’s not clear they’ll have the votes by then. Because Democrats are using the budget reconciliation process to pass the bill with a simple majority, they need all 50 members of their caucus on board to approve the legislation.

Manchin, a moderate who has had longstanding concerns about adding to the debt, has repeatedly warned that he believes the costs of the legislation could be much higher if certain programs in the measure are made permanent, indicating that more cuts may be needed to win his support.

He’s pointed to a score from the Congressional Budget Office, which concluded that BBB would add $3 trillion to the debt if its programs were made permanent, instead of sunsetting after a short period of time, though Democrats note that the current bill does not extend policies in this way. The expansion of the child tax credit, for example, is scheduled to sunset after a year, though Manchin argues that its expenses should be evaluated as if it’s being put in place long term.

“I don’t think that’s a fair evaluation of saying we are going to spend X amount of dollars but then we are going to have to depend on coming back and finding more money ... I’m concerned about paying down debt too,” Manchin has argued.

Relatedly, Manchin has suggested the expanded child tax credit’s true cost has been vastly underestimated because of the duration that’s currently used to determine its cost, according to an Axios report. Additionally, Manchin has noted that he believes lawmakers could address an extension even after the policy expires at the end of the year.

Were BBB to stall, lawmakers could also approve an extension of the expanded child tax credit in a standalone bill, though such legislation would require 60 votes in the Senate if Republicans chose to filibuster it. And although there is some Republican interest in the child tax credit, it’s unlikely Democrats could secure the 10 GOP votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

If Manchin’s position doesn’t change, and Congress fails to pass the Build Back Better Act or another bill addressing the issue, the extended child tax credit payments could sunset soon. It would be the premature end of one of Democrats’ most important recent policy achievements, a big loss for their party. And it could have devastating impacts on the millions of children it has helped lift out of poverty in the last six months.

One of Sondheim’s most beloved shows appears on Broadway, now gender-swapped, just weeks after his death.

The thrilling new gender-swapped production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, opening now on Broadway, will give you at least two reasons to be grateful to Sondheim’s memory in the weeks after his death at age 91. Or, as the man himself would have put it, it will give you reasons to be sorry-grateful.

First, you can be grateful that Sondheim wrote Company at all. Originally staged on Broadway in 1970, Company is considered the first concept musical. It’s a show without a plot, with only meditations on a theme; in this case, marriage. In addition to an acidic book by George Furth, it contains some of Sondheim’s most soaringly beautiful ballads (“Being Alive”), arguably his best cabaret standard (“Ladies Who Lunch”), and almost certainly his most infuriatingly clever rhyme (“personable/coercin’ a bull”).

Second, you can be grateful Sondheim made such a habit of signing off on ambitious or outré new stagings of some of his most beloved work. Company is the show that made Sondheim’s reputation as a genius of musical theater, but he seemed to hold no desire to be precious about it. Just as he signed off on a Sweeney Todd set in a mental institution where the audience was served real meat pies, he went ahead and okayed director Marianne Elliott’s idea to turn the toxic bachelor Bobby at the center of Company into a flippant feminine Bobbie.

The result is the gold standard for any major adaptation of a major work. This new Company is so good, you can’t help thinking that it might work better than the original.

Bobbie (Katrina Lenk) is turning 35 years old as the play begins, and her age weighs heavily on her mind. Single and surrounded by married friends, she feels immense pressure to decide what her future is going to look like. Is she going to be alone forever? Is she going to have a baby? Is she going to get married? One? Both? Neither?

The number 35 chases her across Bunny Christie’s clever interlocking sets. On a New York City block, every house is number 35. A living room features a stylized 35 over the couch as wall art. In a kitchen, the analog clock hands point to 3:05. A clock ticktocks ominously in the background, and sometimes a baby can be heard wailing. Bobbie’s friends bicker in a constant stream about whether or not she should find someone or whether she’s perfect as she is or whether her boyfriends are worthy of her. When she’s in bed with one boyfriend, all of her friends’ husbands come into her room to serenade her with their thoughts on why she shouldn’t be with him.

The male Bobby is classically played as a hollow shell of a person searching for something to fill him up — but Lenk’s sardonic, flirty, and deeply charismatic Bobbie is already her own person. She’s simply terrified both by the idea of not having a man and child and by the idea of being trapped taking care of them, and she can’t decide which scares her more. When her boyfriends coo in lilting harmony, “She’s a troubled person, she’s a truly crazy person,” she flinches in genuine humiliation. Then she has a nightmare about being trapped in a never-ending cycle of housework and child care.

Still, Bobbie has a rich appreciation for the ridiculous in life. When her married friends launch into another needy stunt — an impromptu jiujitsu match, a speech on the joys of cohabitating as a divorced pair — Bobbie is always ready with a cocked eyebrow and a smirk. Her ally here is her older friend Joanne, who seems to appear every time Bobbie’s feeling particularly cynical to exchange side-eyes and clink cocktail glasses.

Joanne has always been one of Company’s most important players, an imperious old broad working on her third husband between grim-faced demands for another drink. Her solo “Ladies Who Lunch” stops the show every time, and it’s Joanne who eventually spurs Bobby/ie on to their final epiphanies about life, love, and company.

But in Elliott’s production, Joanne goes from important to vital. Her relationship with Bobbie becomes a sort of nihilistic mentorship, Bobbie hanging on to Joanne’s stories with wide-eyed awe and Joanne preening herself over her own outrageousness. It’s also a warning. When Joanne starts in on the final verse of “Ladies Who Lunch,” toasting the girls who “just watch,” who stay on the sidelines of life with their drinks and their brilliant zingers, she turns to look Bobbie straight in the eye. They both know exactly who Joanne is singing about now.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that Joanne is played by living legend Patti LuPone. LuPone has played this part before, most prominently in a 2011 production with Neil Patrick Harris, but that doesn’t stop her now from finding new layers of vitriol and suppressed pain in Joanne’s every bon mot. There’s a moment toward the end where she enters sitting at a bar table, looming hugely up out of a cloud of fog, motionless in a fur coat and sunglasses and smoking a cigarette, and you could just about die from the theater of it all.

Thank goodness for Lenk, who has the miraculous strength of personality it takes to stand up to Lupone in full Broadway diva mode and keep the show balanced. Lenk has an easy, naturalistic way with Furth’s often stagy dialogue, and she manages to put across every single joke that should have died in 1970. While she lacks the vocal range Sondheim’s score demands, she can talk a song like no one’s business, and she knows how to turn her defects into assets. Every time her breath can’t quite support her as she reaches for a note, she finds a reason for Bobbie’s voice to break from emotion, and she makes it feel natural.

As the supporting cast churns busily about the stage around Bobbie and Joanne, there are a few standouts. Matt Doyle puts across the notoriously tricky rat-a-tat patter song “(Not) Getting Married Today” with absolutely precise timing, and Jennifer Simard makes a comic meal out of the tiny role of Sarah, the jiujitsu-loving wife.

But most often, this ensemble shines as a, well, company. They’re forever chiming, “Bobbie, baby! Bobbie, honey!” from the back of the stage as Bobbie tries to go about her business, and while she pretends it doesn’t bother her, she finally cracks. “Marry me,” she says to her gay friend, almost joking, “and then everyone will finally leave us alone.”

And you think, “This must have just been written for a woman and a gay man. It doesn’t make sense any other way!”

One of Sondheim’s greatest gifts was to write a show so layered and so meaty that whatever context you see it in, it will feel tailor-made for that moment in time, as though no one could have ever done it any other way — right up until the next time you see it done some other way. He found collaborators who were willing and excited to change his work.

Marianne Elliott’s Company will remind you of both. It will leave you sorry-grateful, regretful-happy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to let Californians sue some firearm manufacturers and sellers.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Saturday that his administration will push for a new measure, modeled after Texas’s controversial abortion ban, to limit the sale of assault weapons and “ghost guns” in the state.

The proposed bill, according to a press release from Newsom, would allow Californians to sue “anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts” for damages — the same injunction-skirting mechanism Texas has used to ban all abortions after six weeks, which has so far been permitted by the Supreme Court.

“If that’s the precedent then we’ll let Californians sue those who put ghost guns and assault weapons on our streets,” Newsom said in a tweet Saturday. “If TX can ban abortion and endanger lives, CA can ban deadly weapons of war and save lives.”

Newsom’s statement comes on the heels of a Friday Supreme Court ruling, which further entrenched Texas’s ability to ban virtually all abortions in the state, despite allowing a suit against Texas state health officials to advance. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser explained:

The upshot of this decision is that, while the abortion provider plaintiffs in Jackson may be able to get a federal court order declaring that SB 8 is unconstitutional, the only real relief they are likely to win is an order preventing a few state health officials from carrying out the minor role they play in enforcing the law. The most important provisions of the law — the ones that effectively prevent anyone from performing an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy by threatening them with financial ruin if they do so — will most likely remain in effect.

Currently, few details are known about the proposed California legislation other than its enforcement mechanism; according to Newsom’s announcement, plaintiffs suing firearms manufacturers could be awarded at least $10,000, plus attorney’s fees if they win their case. As the LA Times reports, however, the California State Assembly and Attorney General Rob Bonta won’t be able to move on putting together a bill until January 3, when the legislature reconvenes after the holiday break.

Newsom wants to use Texas’s abortion tactics for gun control

SB 8, the law that Newsom references in Saturday’s announcement, hinges on a novel, convoluted enforcement scheme. Though it functionally bans all abortions after a mere six weeks of pregnancy, Texas officials are prohibited from directly enforcing the law, according to its text. Instead, SB 8 is constructed so that an individual — who doesn’t even have to be a Texas resident or have anything to do with the abortion in question — can sue an abortion provider or someone suspected of aiding an abortion performed after the six-week window.

As Vox’s Millhiser explained in August, SB 8 is an intentionally perplexing piece of legislation, designed to thwart legal challenges:

The anti-abortion law, which is before the Supreme Court in a case called Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, presents a maze of procedural complexities that are rarely seen in even the most complicated litigation. The law appears to have been drafted to intentionally frustrate lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. And Texas, with an assist from a right-wing appellate court, has thus far manipulated the litigation process to prevent any judge from considering whether SB 8 is lawful.

Already, SB 8 has resulted in a number of copycat bills. According to Forbes, state legislatures in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Ohio have all introduced similar abortion bans, and even more could be on the way.

The proposed California legislation, however, would be the first measure to use an SB 8-style enforcement mechanism for a different goal. Newsom’s proposal would empower private citizens to sue the manufacturers of assault rifles and so-called ghost guns — firearms made from kits, which are difficult to track because they don’t have serial numbers like those that come from licensed companies and are sold by licensed dealers. Ghost gun kits are sold online, are easy to assemble, require no background check to buy, and are impossible for authorities to trace, as the New York Times’s Annie Karni explained in April.

California’s longstanding ban on assault weapons was overturned by federal district court Judge Robert Benitez in June; the same judge ruled in 2017 against a ban on magazines with a capacity of more than 10 bullets, and last year blocked a 2019 law requiring background checks for people purchasing ammunition.

Benitez overturned the previous ban on the grounds that it violated the Second Amendment, and explicitly pointed to the AR-15’s military utility in his decision. “Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Benitez wrote. “Good for both home and battle.”

As Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained in 2019, the AR-15 “is not a specific model — it gets its name from ArmaLite, the company that originally manufactured the rifle,” but the design is no longer patented. Though the AR-15 was initially designed as a military weapon, it has since become one of the most popular rifles in the US.

At the time, Newsom called Benitez’s ruling “a direct threat to public safety and innocent Californians.”

Newsom’s new tactic — adapting the SB 8 model to gun control — would ostensibly circumvent Benitez’s June ruling, taking enforcement of the law out of the hands of the state and shielding the ban itself from judicial challenge in the same way SB 8’s enforcement mechanism does.

California legislation could be a political win-win for Newsom

In some ways, the proposed legislation could be a no-lose strategy for Newsom, who is running for reelection next year after surviving a recall effort in September. It’s a way for him to take aim at the June ruling overturning the assault rifle ban, and to rebuke the Texas law that infringes on the right to an abortion and presents an alarming subversion of legal and judicial processes.

While Newsom’s proposed bill probably stands a good chance in the California legislature, where Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers, it’s also proof positive of the warning that SB 8 presents a slippery legal precedent, as gun rights group the Firearms Policy Coalition described in an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson.

“To the extent this tactic is effective at evading or outright blocking pre-enforcement review, while still deterring protected behavior, it will easily become the model for suppression of other constitutional rights, with Second Amendment rights being the most likely targets,” the group’s attorney, Erik Jaffe, wrote in the brief.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor echoed that assessment in her dissent to Friday’s ruling, which allows SB 8 to stand while another legal challenge is argued before the Court, saying the Texas law would create a path for other states to “reprise and perfect Texas’ scheme in the future to target the exercise of any right recognized by this court with which they disagree.”

With Newsom’s Saturday announcement, that now appears more likely to come to pass.

“Gov. Newsom is following through on the threat,” UC Berkeley School of Law professor Khiara Bridges told the LA Times. “It’s just been academic up until now.”

As Bridges points out, the proposed bill won’t necessarily succeed. Should it become law and end up before the Supreme Court, it’s still possible judges could strike it down while leaving SB 8’s citizen enforcement mechanism intact.

“I have no doubt whatsoever that the Supreme Court will find some bizarre, disingenuous argument to distinguish gun rights from abortion rights,” Bridges told the Times.

Newsom’s proposal does, however, have the potential to underscore the absurdity of the mechanism behind SB 8, whatever the actual outcome for the gun bill. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Friday in a minority opinion, “If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion is sneaky, underhanded, and a big blow to abortion rights.

On first glance, it would be easy to see the Supreme Court’s decision Friday in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson as a win for abortion rights. It would also be wrong.

More than two months after the Supreme Court allowed SB 8, a Texas law that effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, to take effect, the Court followed it up with a 5-4 decision that is an even larger defeat to proponents of abortion rights, and a victory to anti-abortion lawmakers in Texas.

The specific question in Jackson is whether abortion providers are allowed to bring a federal lawsuit seeking to block SB 8. Although Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion technically answers this question in the affirmative, it permits suits only against state health officials who play a very minimal role in enforcing the law. It does not allow suits to proceed against the Texas state officials who play the biggest role in enforcing SB 8: state court judges and clerks.

The upshot of this decision is that, while the abortion provider plaintiffs in Jackson may be able to get a federal court order declaring that SB 8 is unconstitutional, the only real relief they are likely to win is an order preventing a few state health officials from carrying out the minor role they plan in enforcing the law. The most important provisions of the law — the ones that effectively prevent anyone from performing an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy by threatening them with financial ruin if they do so — will most likely remain in effect.

Though procedural sophistry, Gorsuch and the other justices who joined his opinion engineered the outcome Texas wanted. And the implications of this case could stretch far beyond abortion cases.

SB 8 was written for the very purpose of evading judicial review, and Jackson largely blesses that tactic. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in dissent, Gorsuch’s opinion “leaves all manner of constitutional rights more vulnerable than ever before.” If states can use an SB 8-style law to nullify the constitutional right to an abortion, they could very well use it to nullify any other constitutional right.

How SB 8 dodges judicial review

SB 8, as Sotomayor explained in a September opinion, was “engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.”

Under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), “a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,” which occurs around the 24th week of pregnancy. But the Constitution is not a self-executing document. Typically, someone who believes that a state is violating their constitutional rights must obtain a court order mandating the state’s compliance. SB 8 seeks to thwart that process by making it nearly impossible to challenge the law.

Normally, private plaintiffs can’t sue a state directly in federal court — but they can sue the state official tasked with enforcing an unconstitutional law. SB 8 seeks to exploit this structure by forbidding any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing the state’s anti-abortion law. Instead, the law may only be enforced through private lawsuits.

Such lawsuits may be filed by “any person” who is not an employee of the state against anyone who either performs an abortion or who “aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” Plaintiffs who prevail in these lawsuits receive a bounty of at least $10,000, which must be paid by the defendant — and there is no upper limit on this bounty.

Thus, the idea behind SB 8 is that no one can challenge the law in federal court because there is no state official who can enforce it. And thus there is no proper defendant.

Why Gorsuch’s opinion is a victory for Texas

The Jackson plaintiffs argued that there are, in fact, several state officials who are charged with enforcing SB 8. Most importantly, they sued a state court judge and the clerk of a state court — the idea being that lawsuits seeking a bounty under SB 8 cannot move forward unless a judge hears the case and a clerk performs certain administrative tasks.

But Gorsuch’s opinion holds that suits against these judges and clerks may not move forward. Indeed, Gorsuch audaciously claims that allowing a lawsuit to proceed against state court officials tasked with enforcing a law that was designed to nullify the Constitution would lead to a slippery slope.

“If it caught on and federal judges could enjoin state courts and clerks from entertaining disputes between private parties under this state law,” Gorsuch writes, “what would stop federal judges from prohibiting state courts and clerks from hearing and docketing disputes between private parties under other state laws?”

That said, Gorsuch’s opinion does allow the plaintiffs’ suit to move forward against a list of state health officials, including the executive directors of the state’s medical, nursing, and pharmaceutical boards. These officials, Gorsuch explains, do play a small role in enforcing SB 8. “Each of these individuals is an executive licensing official who may or must take enforcement actions against the petitioners if they violate the terms of Texas’s Health and Safety Code, including S. B. 8.”

So that means the plaintiffs may seek a court order forbidding these officials from moving forward with such an enforcement action. But so what?

Typically, when a federal court wants to halt a state law that violates the Constitution, it issues an order known as an injunction, which forbids the relevant state officials from enforcing that law. But injunctions typically cannot be issued against someone who is not a party to a lawsuit.

Under Gorsuch’s opinion, the only remaining defendants in the SB 8 litigation will be the smattering of health officials tasked with bringing enforcement actions against licensed health providers who violate SB 8. The state court judges and clerks who hear SB 8 lawsuits seeking a bounty from abortion providers are no longer a party to this litigation, and therefore cannot be enjoined.

(It’s theoretically possible that someone might bring a suit seeking to block an individual SB 8 plaintiff from filing a lawsuit. But such a suit would likely run into a similar problem — an injunction against that plaintiff wouldn’t apply to other potential plaintiffs.)

A federal court, in other words, isn’t allowed to block the most important parts of SB 8 — the part allowing “any person” to seek a bounty from an abortion provider, and the part allowing state court judges to order providers to pay such a bounty. The Texas legislature, moreover, could potentially shut down federal lawsuits challenging SB 8 altogether, simply by repealing the provision of state law that permits health officials to bring enforcement proceedings against people who violate it.

So the bottom line is that Texas won. The state devised a scheme to evade judicial review, and five justices just blessed that scheme.

As the natural gas industry tries to defend its turf, chefs are touting the benefits of induction cooking.

The American stovetop is increasingly a battleground in a war over the fate of the 70 million buildings powered by natural gas.

On one side of the stove wars is the natural gas utility industry, which has tried to thwart cities considering phasing out gas in buildings. One of its PR strategies has been to hire influencers to tout what they love about cooking with gas to generate public opposition to city efforts.

On the other side are climate and public health advocates who point to years of mounting scientific evidence on what combusting methane in a kitchen does to one’s health. Even the relatively small amount of gas burned by the stove has an outsized effect on indoor health because it releases nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, two pollutants known to increase risks of respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Dozens of cities in California have passed stronger building codes that encourage new construction to be powered by electricity instead of natural gas pipelines. New York City and Eugene, Oregon, may be the next cities to adopt these ordinances.

As more cities move to electricity, what will replace gas stoves? Instead of the electric coiled stoves Americans have learned to hate, there is a newer technology that many chefs prefer: induction.

One of the foodie influencers weighing in is the rising TikTok star Jon Kung, a Detroit-based chef who adopted induction years ago because it keeps his kitchen cool and his air cleaner. Kung, who grew up in Toronto and Hong Kong, learned to love induction while training in China, where induction is more common than in the US. He considers the climate benefits of a stove powered by an increasingly clean grid an added bonus.

Kung’s home kitchen has a gas stove. But he almost always uses a portable induction cooktop — for private dinners and pop-up events he’s hosted around Detroit and, more recently, for his short, playful cooking tutorials on TikTok, where he’s amassed 1.5 million followers.

Climate advocates have sought to elevate Kung and other chefs with their own education campaign on induction. In March, the group Mothers Out Front hired Kung for a paid promotion on why he prefers induction to gas.

I called up Kung to learn more about why the health and working conditions of kitchens are less safe than most people realize, and the role chefs can play in advocating for environmental and worker health. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Leber

Let’s start with the basics. What is induction?

Jon Kung

Essentially, induction stoves use a magnetic field to heat the pan itself from within. [Only certain kinds of pans work with induction.] With gas, the flame heats underneath to get the pan hot. You’ll hear a fan go off to keep the induction burner cool itself, but you’re literally pressing a button and turning it on.

Rebecca Leber

What do you see as the environmental benefits of induction?

Jon Kung

Gas stoves produce a lot of indoor air pollution, there’s a lot of exhaust and fumes. After a certain period of time, your gas stove will burn less and less cleanly.

With induction, the pollution is limited to what you generate to make that electricity. In an electric grid that uses hydroelectric, solar, or wind power, you’re actually using cleaner sources of power to cook with. It just depends what your grid is like. So, for example, I am building a home that is all induction and will be installing solar power on the roof at that home. Most of my energy for home-use cooking will be generated through clean energy.

Rebecca Leber

What was your introduction to induction cooking?

Jon Kung

I’ve had the pleasure of working in both large kitchens that use gas and large kitchens that use induction. [The latter] was over seven years ago, I was working at this 24-hour restaurant in Macau in China. All of the facilities that I was using were all 100 percent induction. There were woks the size of me to boil water for pasta and noodles.

Rebecca Leber

And lately you’ve been using induction for doing pop-up dinners and cooking at home, right?

Jon Kung

In my own home kitchen I’m doing as much induction as I possibly can, just for the sake of my own comfort and issues like indoor air pollution. It’s just a much more efficient way of cooking in the sense that any of the heat you need to do your job is concentrated at what you’re trying to cook, not just displaced into the room and your body.

Rebecca Leber

Interesting you say you used induction out of necessity. What made it a necessity?

Jon Kung

Lack of ventilation was the biggest thing because I lived in a super-old building in Detroit, and even though there was a gas range in there, there was no ventilation that was helpful. It predated any kind of safety and health regulations. Because of that, I started using induction ranges.

I was also doing pop-ups in places like museums where it was really important I didn’t have a lot of exhaust in these rooms. So induction does seem like the natural way to go because it provided me with the power I need, with portability and cleanliness, and lack of fumes that requires me to have a fan.

Whenever I tried to cook at my home [with gas] in the same way that I cook in that restaurant, I set off the fire alarm because there wasn’t enough ventilation. The fans just weren’t strong enough to take in all of the smoke and gas.

Rebecca Leber

You’ve worked in professional kitchens in restaurants, too. What’s it like in a restaurant kitchen that is relying on gas?

Jon Kung

The heat is uncomfortable. It’s almost like disregard for the comfort of workers the way that kitchen life here is just accepted. You’re supposed to suffer for your art and for your craft here, and the open flame cooking is just one of the components of that.

If we ever got a break at all, I would run downstairs just to change a T-shirt because one of them was so soaked that you literally could wring through it. We would get that sweaty depending on how much the restaurant cares to put in the appropriate ventilation. We’d go to the walk-in coolers and freezers and we’d be steaming off of our skin simply because we’re so hot.

Rebecca Leber

What about air quality?

Jon Kung

Because of workplace regulations, the ventilation for professional kitchens has to be so much stronger than what people have at home. It all depends on the [restaurant] owner; how much money the owner is willing to spend could determine what kind of air quality you have. If you did all induction, that just takes that factor completely out of it — all you need is ventilation that will get steam and some heat out of there. But you won’t need to force fumes into one specific direction to prevent it from going into your lungs.

Gas burners, if they ever burn clean in a professional setting, would probably only be that way for the first month. Those things are, by and large, so dirty and get so clogged and become so inefficient over time. Very few kitchens operate at 100 percent efficiency and 100 percent cleanliness, simply because manpower isn’t there to maintain restaurants in that way.

There’s no way that being around any of that is good for you. Especially if that is your job, being there 12 to 14 hours a day. Over time it creates a very unsafe environment for our workers’ long-term health and well-being.

Rebecca Leber

I’m not sure home cooks always think about ventilation either. Most gas stovetops, like your apartment kitchen, aren’t even equipped with a hood that vents to the air outside. At best, they have a fan that recirculates polluted air. What’s ventilation like in a restaurant kitchen versus at home?

Jon Kung

Having working ventilation is part of the health code to make sure your restaurant is approved to run. And it’s usually really powerful to the point that you have these fans going and it’s really hard to hear people right next to you because they’re just so loud. These ventilation systems are not in everyone’s home. Even though the gas burners may not be quite as strong, I don’t see how these little microwave-over-the-range things are doing enough to mitigate the pollution caused by these burners.

Obviously, even when you’re using induction, you’re gonna want ventilation for things like offsetting steam, for when you’re boiling water or when you’re frying food. But ventilation is mainly there to take in the fumes of your gas burner. You don’t really need strong ventilation if you were just using electric burners, but because most people use gas they need one that is stronger.

Rebecca Leber

What would it take for more restaurants to adopt induction burners?

Jon Kung

There are no financial incentives to get people to adopt this new technology. Especially in the restaurant industry where margins are so small people are terrified to try anything new because what is new might be something that doesn’t work.

Certainly high-end restaurants have the budgets to do this. [Dan Barber’s Blue Hill restaurants in New York use both kinds of stoves.] It seems like when you have a lot of money, that’s when you’re able to budget a damn to give for the quality of life for your workers because restaurants at that caliber have a high interest in retaining workers. Therefore, every little bit helps, including maintaining comfort, health, and safety for those workers. But when you’re trying to talk about people on the ground level, people that are operating at a loss in their restaurant and restaurant groups, then that becomes a little less of a priority.

Rebecca Leber

What is your advice for the readers who are mulling over a kitchen renovation or are eyeing a plug-in induction stovetop?

Jon Kung

There are simple plug-in burners that people can use that cost $200. [There are other models for under $100.] The quality will vary based on how much money you’re willing to spend. At the same time, the cost of adopting this just to try is relatively low, and people might appreciate the fact that they can actually use this burner anywhere in their kitchen and can maximize use of counter space or whatnot.

Rebecca Leber

Is there much of a learning curve to induction?

Jon Kung

As with any kind of tactile skill and everything that is different or new, it takes a little bit of time to get used to. Honestly, if people just give it a shot, they’ll realize it’s a lot more like gas cooking than people give it credit for.

The trade-off of adopting induction is learning a new kind of timing for your cooking. Also: Make sure that your pans are compatible. If a magnet will stick to your pan, it should work. Cast iron works beautifully with it as well — if you have a saucepan or dutch oven.

Rebecca Leber

There’s a lot of myth-building around gas cooking and its place in the food and restaurant industry. What do you think is the biggest myth?

Jon Kung

Any argument or reluctance to adopt induction seems to come from a refusal to change and possibly an old toxic masculine perspective, where it’s, “Oh, I want to cook with fire, fire is part of our job.”

I’ve never heard any argument for gas that really makes sense from a professional standpoint except maybe for initial investment and cost. But otherwise, any kind of romance of cooking doesn’t come from a place of logic. It comes from a place of nostalgia, which is not really how to run a business.

Rebecca Leber

What is the role of chefs like you doing this kind of advocacy?

Jon Kung

If we normalize induction in the restaurant it becomes something desirable to people at home because they want to be able to do everything the pros do. And it’s funny because the best of the best have already adopted this technology. I just don’t think anyone’s really vocal about it yet, for whatever reason. But chefs will do it for one of a few reasons. One might be for the environment, one might be workers’ safety and comfort. Either way, both of those things apply to your home.

Toyota is charging drivers for the convenience of using their key fobs to remotely start their cars. From a report: According to a report from The Drive, Toyota models 2018 or newer will need a subscription in order for the key fob to support remote start functionality. As The Drive notes, buyers are given the option to choose from an array of Connected Services when purchasing a new Toyota, and one of those services -- called Remote Connect -- just so happens to include the ability to remotely start your car with your key fob. Buyers are offered a free trial of Remote Connect, but the length of that trial depends on the audio package that's included with the vehicle.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit writes: When Thomas Edison hit a wall with his inventions, he would nap in an armchair while holding a steel ball. As he started to fall asleep and his muscles relaxed, the ball would strike the floor, waking him with insights into his problems. Or so the story goes. Now, more than 100 years later, scientists have repeated the trick in a lab, revealing that the famous inventor was on to something. People following his recipe tripled their chances of solving a math problem. The trick was to wake up in the transition between sleep and wakefulness, just before deep sleep. The study team also identified a brain activity pattern linked to the creativity-boosting phase: moderate levels of brain waves at a slow frequency known as alpha, associated with relaxation, and low levels of delta waves, a hallmark of deep sleep. Experts say researchers can now focus on this brain signature when investigating the neural mechanisms of creative problem-solving. One team has already planned an experiment to help people reach a creative zone by monitoring their brain waves in real time. "Edison's intuition was somewhat right," says the lead scientist, "and now we have a lot more to explore."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A special panel created by the faculty at the University of Florida has completed a review of the academic environment there, and what it has to say is not flattering.  As The Miami Herald reports, the report shows that academics in Florida live in a literal state of fear; one where they don’t dare tell the truth out of fear of reprisals from Gov. Ron DeSantis. That’s particularly true when it comes to revealing the facts about COVID-19. 

The report makes it clear that researchers felt a great deal of outside pressure in preparing research information for publication. That sometimes meant that information was delayed, or not published at all. In some cases, scientists were told not to reveal their affiliation with the university when releasing information, or to take the University of Florida name off presentations.

All because they were not allowed to do anything that could be viewed as criticizing DeSantis, or policies related to COVID-19. Faculty in the university’s Health Department were warned that funding might be “in jeopardy if they did not adopt the state’s stance on pandemic regulations in opinion articles.”

The report details a set of “specific challenges” that came with trying to study COVID-19 in Florida. Those challenges included:

• “External pressure” to destroy data
• Barriers to accessing and analyzing data
• Barriers to publication of scientific research

The result was that scientists at the University of Florida found it difficult to contribute research in the face of a worldwide pandemic that had a direct impact on that state. When they could produce an article or presentation, it was robbed of impact through the university’s disassociation with the work.

It wasn’t just COVID-19 that came in for academic censorship. Course descriptions, websites, and other materials concerning the study of race and privilege had to be hidden, altered, or removed. The persecution in this area became so ridiculous that instructors were told:

“The terms ‘critical’ and ‘race’ could not appear together in the same sentence or document.”

The review describes a university operating under the heel of an overbearing governor, and a board that failed to push back against attempts to stifle research—or simple facts—that didn’t fit with the falsities being pushed by DeSantis and others. According to the report, there was a “palpable reticence and even fear” that just speaking up to protest the way research and classroom teaching were being affected would be dangerous.

“There was grave concern about retaliation and a sense that anyone who objected to the state of affairs might lose his or her job or be punished in some way.”

Of course, just a week ago, a committee created by the university’s leadership came to exactly the opposite conclusions, declaring that the University of Florida is “free from undue influence by external persons or bodies through clear and consistently enforced policies and procedures.”

The refusal of the university leadership to admit there even is a problem provides significant insight into the level of effort they will apply to solving the issue.

That's the approximate 10-year cost of the defense budget. Yet no one complains about its effect on the national debt.

Just like their Puritan brethren, credited with banning the first book in 1637 in the U.S., Republicans in Texas have jumped into the business of book banning and censorship with both feet. 

A San Antonio-area school district recently proactively pulled around 400 books from its shelves in response to a letter from GOP lawmaker Rep. Matt Krause, demanding schools statewide provide information on 850 books on his list for review.

In a statement Tuesday, North East Independent School District (NEISD), one of the largest districts in the state said it was reviewing the books “out of an abundance of caution.

“For us, this is not about politics or censorship, but rather about ensuring that parents choose what is appropriate for their minor children,” NEISD spokesperson Aubrey Chancellor wrote. Adding: “NEISD asked our staff to review books from the Krause list to ensure they did not have any obscene or vulgar material in them.”

Krause wrote that the books on his list are based on what might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex

Oh, and by the way… most of the books were authored by women or people of color or LGBTQ writers.

Krause, a member of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus, additionally mentioned reviewing books for review if they contained material on issues HIV/AIDS, race, gender equality, sexual orientation, and human sexuality. 

The list includes books such as 2020 Black Lives Matter marches (Protest! March for Change), by Joyce Markovics, narrative nonfiction that introduces young readers to the large protests during 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron and The Cider House Rules by John Irving. 

Ovidia Molina, president of the Texas State Teachers Association tells NPR the review of books is “disturbing and political overreach into the classroom.” 

"Nothing in state law ... gives a legislator the authority to conduct this type of witch hunt," Molina said in a statement. She added: "This is an obvious attack on diversity and an attempt to score political points at the expense of our children's education."

More than 100 books have already been deemed age-appropriate, Chancellor said, adding that the “review process is moving quickly and we anticipate the majority of books will be deemed appropriate.” 

But Chancellor’s comments haven’t swayed the more than 2,000 folks who signed an online petition demanding that all of the 850 books on Krause’s list be removed from review by the North East Independent School District.

“Many Black and LGBT students in NEISD are appalled and hurt by NEISD’s decision to comply with Matt Krause and suppress our harmless resources and stories,” the petition reads.

This latest from Krause fits perfectly with Gov. Greg Abbott’s ongoing censorship and autocratic rule.

According to reporting from the Texas Tribune, in November Abbott ordered Texas education officials to develop statewide standards for blocking books with “overtly sexual” content in schools and to launch an investigation into the possible “availability of pornography” in schools. The Texas Education Agency and State Board of Education leaders have said they’ll comply.

Sadly, the move to ban books isn’t just a Texas issue, it’s happening in other states as well, and the common denominator is often the race or gender identity of the author. 

Last month in Virginia Beach at-large school board member Victoria Manning, founder of the “Wokeness Checker” website, along with co-board member Laura Hughes, sent an email to Virginia Beach City Public Schools Superintendent Aaron Spence to demand that four books be removed from circulation or used in the classroom “due to their pornographic nature.”

On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a virtual appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Summit where he called for the government to end subsidies for something that might seem surprising—electric cars. But that opposition to supporting a product sold by his own company seems a lot less puzzling when expressed in these terms: Now that he has climbed to the top, Musk is extremely anxious to burn the ladder below him.

The Build Back Better bill which passed the House and is now under consideration in the Senate, with hopes of final passage before the end of the year, provides as much as $12,500 in incentives for the purchase of an electric vehicle. That bill would also provide monies for building out the charging infrastructure that give consumers the confidence to replace gas-powered vehicles with electric alternatives as their primary means of getting around.

But Musk is against both of those things. In fact, he calls for an end to all government subsidies … which is a quite a statement considering that Tesla built its business on subsidized vehicles. Not to mention that the company itself was built on a government loan that it received at a critical point in the company’s history. Without government funding and subsidies, there would be no Tesla. The same is true of Musk’s other company, SpaceX, which not only developed its rockets on the back of government funding, but is still getting subsidies for it’s Starlink space-based internet service and seeking even more. 

In both cases, Musk did what America so often applauds entrepreneur for doing—he took tremendous risks and succeeded, making himself enormously wealthy in the process. But Musk was only able to succeed because of government loans and subsidies. Without them, he would be Elon who?

Government subsidies and loans are an investment meant to improve the nation and increase opportunities going forward. That’s why they exist. Like any investment, they’re not always successful; the government frequently hands out subsidies and awards contracts to companies that ultimately prove unable to produce the product or service they were subsidized to provide. Those are investments that failed—though even then, they’re not always bad investments.

Occasionally, these investments by the government succeed spectacularly, creating whole new industries. 

And sometimes, the government don’t even have to hand out cash to get results. Just the promise that the government will buy a product or service when it becomes available, can be the instrument that a start up can carry to the bank, or to investors, to get the funds necessary to fulfill that a government goal.

Subsidies take a lot of other forms than just cash on the barrelhead. They can come in the form of the cheap government land that made oil and gas drilling wildly profitable, or as federally funded highway infrastructure that allowed cars to definitively outpace trains as the nation’s primary means of transportation … after other government subsidies first made those trains possible. Every dollar the government spends, like every dollar any consumer spends, ultimately subsidizes something.

Subsidies that succeed in funding a breakthrough can easily stoke a “gilded age” as those first up the government ladder find access to whole new realms of wealth. It happened with trains. It happened with cars. It happened with the internet. It’s happening again with electric vehicles, renewable energy, and space—all the industries where Elon Musk happens to operate.

Back in 2015, the Los Angeles Times detailed the billions in government funding that had underwritten Musk’s efforts. That includes tax abatements that saw a Tesla HQ avoid property tax for 20 years. Musk’s connection to government subsidies has continued, right up to funds that are right now subsidizing SpaceX’s space-based internet gamble:

• The battery factory that Tesla has in Nevada was built on hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies.
• The launch tower that SpaceX is building right now in Texas is being built using $20 million in subsidies.
• Every car that Tesla sold from 2008 right up through 2020 came with a government subsidy.

As finical analysis firm Space Angels pointed out in 2019, SpaceX was just one of 67 space companies which together received $7.2 billion in government funding between 2000 and 2018.  SpaceX was one of those who succeeded. Many of them did not.

Both SpaceX and Tesla are great success stories, not just for Musk, but for the power of timely investment by the government. Both of those companies exist because of loans, incentives, and contracts provided to them precisely because government analysts saw the potential. 

There are forms of government subsidies—such as tax abatements for locating factories or offices within a specific state or area—that have no redeeming value. In fact, these subsidies reward companies while creating tremendous burdens. Tax abatements don’t unlock a competition to create new technologies, or even generate economic improvement. They’re just a competition between politicians eager to talk about “job creation” that ultimately carries a price tag far above their worth.

Also, like any portfolio of investments, the subsidies that government provides need constant review. We’re long past the day when we should be providing assistance to oil, gas, and coal industries. One day, we’ll be past the point where we need to provide subsidies to accelerate the use of renewable energy or encourage the move to electric vehicles. We’re just not there yet.

And we shouldn’t let the man who has the most to gain by locking in the status quo determine when that day comes. That’s especially true given that the subsidies in Build Back Better provide support for something else that Musk really doesn’t like—union jobs that provide fair wages, good benefits, and job safety.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked President Joe Biden’s administration from enforcing a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for employees of federal contractors, the latest in a string of victories for Republican-led states pushing back against Biden’s pandemic policies.

U.S. District Court Judge R. Stan Baker, in Augusta, Georgia, issued a stay to bar enforcement of the mandate nationwide.

The order came in response to a lawsuit from several contractors and seven states — Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. It applies across the U.S. because one of those challenging the order is the trade group Associated Builders and Contractors Inc., whose members do business nationwide.

Baker found that the states are likely to succeed in their claim that Biden exceeded authorization from Congress when he issued the requirement in September.

“The Court acknowledges the tragic toll that the Covid-19 pandemic has wrought throughout the nation and the globe,” wrote the judge, an appointee of former President Donald Trump. “However, even in times of crisis this Court must preserve the rule of law and ensure that all branches of government act within the bounds of their constitutionally granted authorities.”

A White House spokeswoman said the Justice Department would continue to defend the mandate.

“The reason that we proposed these requirements is that we know they work, and we are confident in our ability, legally, to make these happen across the country,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at Tuesday’s briefing.

A federal judge in Kentucky also had issued a preliminary injunction against the mandate last week, but it applied only to contractors in three states that had sued together -- Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

Biden issued an executive order Sept. 9 requiring federal contractors and subcontractors to comply with workplace safety guidelines developed by a federal task force. That task force subsequently issued guidelines that new, renewed or extended contracts include a clause requiring employees to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 18. That meant those receiving a two-dose vaccine must get their second shot by Jan. 4.

Limited exceptions were allowed for medical or religions reasons. The requirements would apply to millions of employees of federal contractors, which include defense companies and airlines.

“This is a big win in removing compliance hurdles for the construction industry, which is facing economic challenges, such as a workforce shortage of 430,000, rising materials prices and supply chain issues,” Ben Brubeck, a vice president of the construction industry group said in a statement.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said in a Twitter message that the ruling will provide relief to workers “who were in fear of being forced to choose between this vaccine and their livelihood.”

Other Republican officials also praised the court ruling. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said the mandate was “just an outrageous overreach by the federal government.”

With Tuesday’s ruling, all three of Biden’s broad vaccine mandates affecting the private sector have been put on hold by courts. Judges already issued a stay regarding one that applies to businesses with 100 or more employees and another for health care workers across the U.S.

Separately, Biden has imposed vaccine requirements for employees of the federal government and the military.

The mandates are a key part of the administration’s strategy to stop the spread of Covid-19, which has killed more than 788,000 Americans since last year.