James.galbraith

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The monthly payments for child tax credits started hitting bank accounts on July 15. Most families with children younger than 18 have started getting monthly payments of $250 for older children, $300 for kids under six, per child. The payments were authorized by the American Rescue Plan, President Joe Biden's COVID-19 relief plan which passed with just Democratic votes, in a budget reconciliation bill.

The sheer relief and joy with which these payments have been received should be all that Democrats need to see to act on the next big thing, the big economic plan they've been working on with President Biden. "I can breathe a little bit more," Michelle Rodriguez, said after getting the payments for her three kids, aged 5, 6, and 7. She had to run up her credit cards in the pandemic, to cover added grocery and internet costs of having everyone home.

Julie Groce in Flint, Michigan, can help pay the $1,000 a month daycare bill for her 3-year-old. She might be able to get him a big boy bed and maybe even enroll him in soccer. "When she considers how much $300 a month will change their lives," The 19th reports she begins to cry. "I want him to have a better life and a better childhood than what I had, and I feel like that’s going to happen now," she said.

"I have this new monthly allotment to make sure that the health and well-being of my family is provided for," Lori Ament in Gilbert, Arizona, said. "More than making sure that I can afford daycare for my kid, which is a huge factor, or putting food on the table, which is a huge factor, I also see it as a mental well-being of both the parents and the child." She can pay for after-school care for her son Avery, who's just going into kindergarten. Maybe even swim lessons. She didn't think she'd ever be able to do that, but now "I'm giving that to my kid."

Stuart Wood, in Los Angeles, is contemplating having an actual family vacation. "Six hundred bucks for us is huge," he said, and "felt akin to a life-changing amount of money." His and his wife's salaries working for nonprofits keep them on edge every month in their expensive city. "Things are just normally very tight," he explained. "It's not going to go directly toward meeting like a basic need, but it is going to empower us to do something that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And the mental-health element of that is no small thing for us."

Gwnendolyn, a trans mother of two said even when she and her wife were both working before the pandemic "making ends meet was a real struggle." They've had to declare bankruptcy. "If we get the CTC or the Biden Bucks around the same time every month, that will cover two payments for two different medical debts that we have, and that also covers the trustee payment for our bankruptcy," she said. She can also look after her own health. "It's actually facilitated me getting a little bit of transition-related treatment as well that really helped one of the big areas that I have trouble with."

The payments are helping low- and middle-income families. They're giving breathing room, they're making budgeting and planning just a little bit easier in a time of continuing uncertainty. They need not to expire after a year. They'll be paid out monthly for the remainder of this year, then the first half of this year's payments will be paid as they usually are, in a tax refund next year. The most effective anti-poverty initiative enacted in decades needs to be made permanent.

Fifty mothers, from every state in the country, are asking for just that. "While we know that the CTC will help cut child poverty, we also know that the permanent expansion of the CTC will provide critical relief to mothers who are juggling needs at home—including serving as teachers and nannies—with demands at work, or trying to get back into the workforce," they wrote in an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris. "As mothers, we say loud and clear: we need help. Many moms want to be at work right now, but have either been laid off or can’t return because of demands at home. It is time for our government to have our backs."

This tax credit expansion, as a monthly instead of annual benefit, can be included in the reconciliation bill, along with all of the other groundbreaking and transformative economic proposals that are already in it. Biden wants to do just that. "The goal of this is not just to be one year. I think that people have somewhat different legislative strategies but I think that every advocate has the same goal: that we want this to be ultimately permanent," a senior administration official told USA Today. "There's no disagreement on that the ultimate goal is for this to go on indefinitely."

It is going to be included, but right now it's unclear how long the extension will last. It's also possible that it will be spun off as a stand-alone bill if Democrats can't get it in to the reconciliation package, which is not a particularly viable plan. Republicans will have few qualms about blocking it, figuring that by November 2022 people who won't be getting monthly "Biden Bucks" will be less motivated to vote for Democrats. Getting it done for at least one more year—if not three!—would be political manna.

More importantly, it would go most of the way toward eliminating child poverty in this country. Finally.

The United States runs out of power to keep borrowing money in 10 days. If Congress doesn’t act fast to handle the debt limit in the weeks that follow, Democrats say the fallout will be Mitch McConnell’s fault.

Top Senate Democrats accused the minority leader Wednesday of plotting to hold the economy hostage after McConnell said he doesn’t expect any Republican senators to vote to prevent the U.S. government from defaulting on its loans in the coming weeks. Unless Democrats can corral the support of at least 10 senators from the other side of the aisle, they will need to raise the debt limit in a package with their $3.5 trillion partisan plan to enact President Joe Biden’s social welfare and family aid proposal.

That package might not pass in time to remedy the debt issue and could force the majority party into a trickier vote on a new maximum for the $28 trillion national debt. So any solution could cut perilously close to the ultimate debt cliff — a moving deadline that could creep up as soon as next month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned. The Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday that Treasury could run out of cash in October or November.

“This debt is Trump debt. It's Covid debt,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor. “And the bottom line is that leader McConnell should not be playing political games with the full faith and credit of the United States. Americans pay their debts.”

Schumer met with Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to debrief on the issue Wednesday morning, after McConnell told Punchbowl News that he “can’t imagine a single Republican” voting to raise the debt limit amid Democrats’ “free-for-all for taxes and spending.”

Congress has averted default on the nation’s finances more than two dozen times over the last three decades. With a particularly uncertain deadline this time, however, a failure to act quickly could create turmoil for financial markets, increase costs for U.S. borrowers and smack the government’s credit rating at a time when the Biden administration is focused on making a full economic recovery.

Senate Republicans have signaled for months that they likely lack the support to suspend the debt limit without some spending concessions from the majority party, raising the possibility of another high-stakes standoff. A group of GOP senators held a press conference on Wednesday to rail against Democrats’ “tax and spending spree,” warning of skyrocketing inflation and strained economic growth.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, said he would have more to say about the debt limit next week. Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said there’s no appetite among Republicans for a big debt hike when Democrats are piling onto that figure.

But Warren insisted Wednesday that, “there is no compromising,” noting Democrats voted three times during Donald Trump’s presidency to avert a debt limit crisis.

“We don't compromise with America paying its bills,” she said. “The Republicans are trying to extract something and say that their leverage is they will have the United States default on its legal obligations.”

Wyden and Warren skirted questions Wednesday about whether they will try to raise the debt limit through the massive spending package Democrats are attempting to pass without Republican support or work with the GOP to suspend the limit until a later date.

“We just want to get it done — period,” Wyden said.

Two years ago, Congress struck a budget deal that suspended the debt ceiling through July 31 of this year. After that, the Treasury Department can deploy a number of tactics to delay the real deadline and keep paying the nation’s bills on time. But Yellen and economic experts have warned that those tactics might run out sooner than expected.

It has been particularly difficult this year to pinpoint the actual “X date,” or the official deadline for when the U.S. defaults on its financial obligations, due to uncertainty over pandemic-related spending.

The last time McConnell and his Republican colleagues made debt limit demands of a Democratic president — almost exactly a decade ago — the nation’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in U.S. history. Democrats now say they will not relive that 2011 standoff that spooked financial markets when then-President Barack Obama was in the White House.

“We saw what the Republicans did to Barack Obama on exactly this issue. It's not going to happen again on our watch,” Wyden said. “Mitch McConnell apparently thinks that unless he gets this political agenda — in other words, his particular priorities — we're going to hit the American economy. It's not going to happen.”

Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters on Wednesday that he’s still working to get all 50 Democratic senators on board with a budget resolution, which will unlock the privileged reconciliation process for party-line passage of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill. It‘s unclear if the caucus will coalesce around a debt ceiling increase in agreeing to that budget framework.

Moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) have previously opposed a debt ceiling suspension — let alone an increase — citing runaway spending. Tester told POLITICO last month that he would prefer to work with Republicans on a debt ceiling deal, rather than pursue a one-party approach.

Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

Guess it was a good day

Your location data is for sale, and it can be used against you.

One of the worst-case scenarios for the barely regulated and secretive location data industry has become reality: Supposedly anonymous gay dating app data was apparently sold off and linked to a Catholic priest, who then resigned from his job.

It shows how, despite app developers’ and data brokers’ frequent assurances that the data they collect is “anonymized” to protect people’s privacy, this data can and does fall into the wrong hands. It can then have dire consequences for users who may have had no idea their data was being collected and sold in the first place. It also shows the need for real regulations on the data broker industry that knows so much about so many but is beholden to so few laws.

Here’s what happened: A Catholic news outlet called the Pillar somehow obtained “app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr.” It used this to track a phone belonging to or used by Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who was an executive officer of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Burrill resigned his position shortly before the Pillar published its investigation.

There’s still a lot we don’t know here, including the source of the Pillar’s data. The report, which presents Burrill’s apparent use of a gay dating app as “serial sexual misconduct” and inaccurately conflates homosexuality and dating app usage with pedophilia, simply says it was “commercially available app signal data” obtained from “data vendors.” We don’t know who those vendors are, nor the circumstances around that data’s purchase. Regardless, it was damning enough that Burrill left his position over it, and the Pillar says it’s possible that Burrill will face “canonical discipline” as well.

What we do know is this: Dating apps are a rich source of personal and sensitive info about their users, and those users rarely know how that data is used, who can access it, and how those third parties use that data or who else they sell it to or share it with. That data is usually supposed to be “anonymized” or “de-identified” — this is how apps and data brokers claim to respect privacy — but it can be pretty easy to re-identify that data, as multiple investigations have shown, and as privacy experts and advocates have warned about for years. Considering that data can be used to ruin or even end your life — being gay is punishable by death in some countries — the consequences of mishandling it are as severe as it gets.

“The harms caused by location tracking are real and can have a lasting impact far into the future,” Sean O’Brien, principal researcher at ExpressVPN’s Digital Security Lab, told Recode. “There is no meaningful oversight of smartphone surveillance, and the privacy abuse we saw in this case is enabled by a profitable and booming industry.”

For its part, Grindr told the Washington Post that “there is absolutely no evidence supporting the allegations of improper data collection or usage related to the Grindr app as purported” and that it was “infeasible from a technical standpoint and incredibly unlikely.”

Yet Grindr has gotten in trouble for privacy issues in the recent past. Internet advocacy group Mozilla labeled it as “privacy not included” in its review of dating apps. Grindr was fined nearly $12 million earlier this year by Norway’s Data Protection Authority for giving information about its users to several advertising companies, including their precise locations and user tracking codes. This came after a nonprofit called the Norwegian Consumer Council found in 2020 that Grindr sent user data to more than a dozen other companies, and after a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found that Grindr shared users’ HIV statuses, locations, email addresses, and phone identifiers with two other companies.

While it’s not known how Burrill’s data was obtained from Grindr (assuming, again, that the Pillar’s report is truthful), app developers usually send location data to third parties through software development kits, or SDKs, which are tools that add functions to their apps or serve ads. SDKs then send user data from the app to the companies that make them. As an example, that’s how data broker X-Mode was able to get location data from millions of users across hundreds of apps, which it then gave to a defense contractor, which then gave it to the US military — which is far from the only government agency sourcing location data this way.

Grindr did not respond to a request for comment from Recode asking for details on which companies or third parties it shared or sent user data to, or which SDKs it uses in its app. But it does say in its own privacy policy that it shared users’ age, gender, and location with advertisers until April 2020. The Pillar said its data on Burrill is from 2018 to 2020.

Companies sell this data with ease because the data supply chain is opaque and the practice is barely regulated, especially in the United States. The $12 million fine from Norway was because Grindr violated the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The United States still doesn’t have an equivalent federal privacy law, so Grindr may not have done anything legally wrong here unless it lied to consumers about its privacy practices (at which point it may be subject to Federal Trade Commission penalties, such as they are).

“Experts have warned for years that data collected by advertising companies from Americans’ phones could be used to track them and reveal the most personal details of their lives,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has pushed for privacy regulations on the location data industry, said in the statement to Recode. “Unfortunately, they were right. Data brokers and advertising companies have lied to the public, assuring them that the information they collected was anonymous. As this awful episode demonstrates, those claims were bogus — individuals can be tracked and identified.”

In the absence of laws, companies could regulate themselves to better protect users’ privacy. But without anything compelling them to do so — and in an environment where any transgressions are difficult to identify and track — the user is simply left to hope for the best. App stores like Apple’s and Google Play do forbid selling location data in their terms of service, but we know some companies do it anyway. If Apple or Google finds out that apps are breaking those rules, they may ban them from their stores. But that doesn’t help the people whose data was already collected, shared, or sold.

So, what can you do? If you use Grindr and want to minimize or restrict any data you may have given to the app, its privacy policy has some details on how to opt out of advertising services and delete your account. Then you have to trust that Grindr will follow through ... just like you had to trust that Grindr would protect your data in the first place.

You can also advocate for privacy laws that forbid these practices from happening at all, by contacting your local and federal representatives. 2021 has seen the passage of two state-level privacy laws (Virginia and Colorado), but we’re still waiting for a federal law. Though Democrats have the presidency, House, and Senate (barely, and still not enough without filibuster reform), they have yet to advance any of the privacy bills proposed — and the year is more than half over.

The simple fact is, the data you give to apps powers a massive economy worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which is hundreds of billions of reasons for it not to change — until and unless it’s forced to.

“The FTC needs to step up and protect Americans from these outrageous privacy violations, and Congress needs to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation,” Wyden said.

An Alabama doctor gave the kind of account of her job during the COVID-19 pandemic that nearly brought me to tears in one paragraph. “I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections,” Dr. Brytney Cobia wrote in a gut-wrenching Facebook post on Sunday. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.

”A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same,” Cobia added. “They cry. And they tell me they didn't know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn't get as sick. They thought it was 'just the flu'. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can't. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has generally deferred to former President Donald Trump in matters related to the pandemic, but on Wednesday he reversed courses and shared the doctor's story, initially reported in The Birmingham News. "This is heartbreaking," the Republican senator tweeted. "Getting the COVID vaccine only takes a few minutes. It's effective, safe, and doesn't cost you a dime. I got mine, and I encourage you to talk to your doctor about getting yours."

Tuberville and high-profile Republicans like Fox News host Sean Hannity have started promoting the vaccine with oddly timed vigor given people have been dying of the virus for more than a year. “Please take COVID seriously. I can’t say it enough,” Hannity said Monday night on his show. “Enough people have died. We don’t need anymore death. Research like crazy.” 

Daily Beast Contributing Editor Justin Baragona tweeted on Monday: "There seems to be a concerted effort today by Fox's daytime news shows to promote the vaccines to its audience. Dr. Marc Siegel says ‘the Delta variant needs to be a wake-up call to get vaccinated.’  Anchor John Roberts then directs viewers to the government vaccine website." 

Experts have described the delta variant of the coronavirus as more contagious and "twice as infectious," Andy Slavitt, a former adviser to President Joe Biden's COVID-19 response team, told CNN. "Fortunately, unlike 2020, we actually have a tool that stops the Delta variant in its tracks: It's called vaccine," Slavitt said. 

CNN reported of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that less than half of the country's population is fully vaccinated, and 99.5% of deaths related to COVID-19 are among unvaccinated patients. "I am heartbroken to see just how hard (physicians are) working -- how exhausted they are," Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told CNN host Anderson Cooper. "Many of them are suffering with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, as a result of the stress that they have endured during this pandemic."

Murthy added: "There have been multiple times when we have been fooled by Covid-19, when cases went down and we thought we were in the clear and then cases went up again. It means we shouldn't let down our guard until cases not only come down but stay down, and right now cases are actually going up. Cases are going up, hospitalizations are going up, death rates are ticking up."

RELATED: Hannity, others at Fox share sudden reality-based thoughts on COVID-19 vaccines

You’re tired. I get that. Believe me, more than 600 articles (yes, really) into this pandemic, the last thing I want to talk about is COVID-19. I don’t want to talk about shots. I don’t want to talk about masks. The only variants I want to hear about are on Loki, and I could go about 1,000 years before ever visiting another site to check “daily deaths in the United States.” We are all so, so tired.

Well, buck up soldier. Whether you like it or not, you’ve been drafted. You are a member of the Army of People Capable of Making Rational Decisions. And we can’t afford to be tired.

Two months ago, it looked like we might actually get out of this thing in time to have something like a normal summer. When the CDC recommended that kids need not wear masks as they return to school in August, it was surprising, but not so unreasonable. Hell, it was even hopeful. Remember hopeful? But we didn’t count on two things. First, we didn’t count on how quickly the Delta variant would take over as the dominant variant in the United States. That’s because we didn’t really conceptualize the difference between the basic reproductive rate (R0) of this variant and everything that’s come before. We failed—and the “we” here definitely includes me—to really understand how this change would completely screw the small steps already taken toward normality. 

The other things we failed to calculate was just how badly 30% of the population could destroy the nation if they dedicated themselves to being aggressively malicious.

The march of variants

When it comes to the virus itself, what’s been happening is what should be expected—it’s increasing in its ability to infect humans. This is a brand-new virus. That means both that no one has a natural immunity to this virus and the virus itself has just stumbled into the combination of proteins that allows it to attach to human cells. So it should not be a surprise that, as quadrillions of new copies of the virus are produced, some will refine that ability.

When the original strain of COVID-19 rolled through the area around Wuhan, it had an R0 value just a little worse than that of seasonal flu. That rate of transmission, paired with a rate of serious outcome two orders of magnitude greater than flu, was enough to sound every alarm that this was a serious disease. A couple of months later, the version of the virus that rolled through Italy and France, then took up residence as the primary variant in the United States, had a reproductive rate that was about 25% higher. That variant was swept aside in the fall by the alpha variant, which was a full two times more contagious than the original version and formed the bulk of cases during the massive spike of cases that occurred around the start of the year. Now alpha has been dislodged by the delta variant. Best estimates put its R0 at numbers from 5.7 to 8.0. 

Now the lambda variant is making gains in South America and appears to be displacing delta in some areas. That almost certainly means that this variant has a higher R0 value. And not only is lambda almost certainly more contagious, it contains a specific change in the spike protein that could make it much more evasive of both vaccines and the immunity generated following previous SARS-CoV-2 infections. It’s particularly concerning that Chile saw a huge wave of cases in May and June that appear to be connected to the growing dominance of lambda, in spite of one of the world’s highest vaccination rates. 

How high can the R0 number go? We don’t know. What’s clear is that COVID-19 is still making large jumps. It’s not just a matter of how well the spike protein attaches to human cells, other changes in the virus can be just as important. For example, one new study indicates that people who are infected with the delta variant carry as much as 1000x as much virus in their nasal passages as those infected with the variants that were dominant over the summer. With that kind of load being pumped into the air, the virus could actually be worse, on a virus vs. cell basis, and still be much more contagious.

We should assume that new COVID-19 variants will continue to be kicked up which are more contagious and more vaccine evasive. How fast those variants appear is directly related to how many cases of the disease are kicking around the planet.

The march of obstinance

At the same time that the variants are getting worse, so are behaviors of the people who are spreading the disease. It should come as no surprise that the same people who were first in line to get vaccinated were also among those most likely to regularly wear a mask in public areas. And those who said they would not get vaccinated were always down at the bottom when it came to putting on a mask. But the extent to which this has gotten worse in the last three months is hard to exaggerate. 

Over 60% of the people whose response to questions about vaccine is “I will not get vaccinated” also respond to questions about masks by saying they “never” wear a mask. The latest Civiqs data shows that, far from falling as the delta variant generated a surge in some of the reddest, Trump-loving counties of the nation, Republican vaccine hostility has actually hardened.

Over the last couple of days, Sean Hannity has reversed some of his anti-vaxx positions and actually spoken favorably about getting the vaccine. That’s given some impression that perhaps, just perhaps, Fox is stepping back from their role as a disseminator of bioterrorism.  Don’t bet on it.

Immediately before Hannity, Fox viewers got a full hour of Tucker Carlson saying that the vaccine was ineffective, made people sicker, that the government was engaged in “vaccine coercion,” and to “ignore people giving medical advice on TV.” Somehow, Carlson did not disappear into a puff of logical contradiction. Immediately after Hannity, Laura Ingraham was up to tell Foxists that there was “every reason to doubt” the vaccine, and to insist that the efficacy was much lower than health experts would admit. The effect was to bookend even the slightest admission that vaccines were a good thing with a double injection of vaccine scorn. 

In the last week, some Republican politicians who had been holdouts have finally, and publicly, been vaccinated. On the other hand, there are still jackasses like Rand Paul doing everything they can to make things worse. There may be a day when Republicans finally realize that losing a significant portion of their voting base would be a bad thing. That day isn’t here yet. 

Just like Donald Trump when he cancelled plans for national testing facilities, Republicans are still in a position where they believe that spreading the disease is better for their poll numbers than taking action. If they didn’t believe that, they—and Carlson—would be singing a different tune.

So what are we going to do about it?

Every time I write about this, everyone seems to get the impression that I’m saying “pass a law that everyone has to get vaccinated, no exceptions.” And I absolutely confess there would be some righteous joy in watching the anti-vaxx crew mumble and snarl their way to getting jabbed. Putting on their masks with a hot glue gun also seems like a decent idea (Just watch. That sentence will be pulled out of context.)

But neither of those things is going to happen. So what do we do?

1. Send vaccines overseas The United States is, thanks to President Joe Biden, blessed not just with an abundance of vaccine, but with the mRNA vaccines that have proven to be most effective in combatting the latest variants. Multiple studies have now shown that several other vaccines, including Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and SinoVac (the vaccine most common in Chile, as well as many other nations) are far less effective against delta. Similar numbers can be expected when looking at lambda. The way to save the maximum number of lives and to do the maximum amount of good in slowing the pandemic and slowing the development of future variants is to get vaccine into the arms of as many people as possible. So send those vaccines now to South America, to Africa, to Asia, and to everywhere there are people who are willing to do the right thing. Dropping intellectual property laws to allow broader vaccine manufacture is also a great idea, but the biggest thing now is to get out the vaccines that are already waiting to be used.
2. Restore mask mandates Republican governors in some of the hardest-hit states—including new epicenter of steaming hot delta, Missouri—have passed laws that now make it all but impossible for county and city officials to create local mask mandates. Many of these states have also put in place rules that prevent schools or businesses from requiring either masks or proof of vaccination. Because of course they have. But where those mandates are possible, they should be restored. Where mandates are not possible, businesses should still put up signs asking that people wear masks and local officials should still insist that masks are necessary to stop the spread, even if it can’t be enforced. Look at San Francisco. Despite one of the highest rates of vaccination in the nation, it’s still experiencing a new “pandemic of the unvaccinated” that is also generating illness, if not deaths, among the vaccinated. There is no place currently vaccinated at a level to break community spread without also using masks.
3. Use what we’ve learned One thing that the current anti-vaxx/anti-mask crew loves to bring up is “Even St. Fauci said that masks didn’t work!” He did. He’s since apologized multiple times and encouraged the use of masks. That’s because in a reality-based society there is a thing called new evidence. Over the course of the pandemic, we’ve learned that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is spread primarily through fine aerosols that linger in indoor air rather than larger droplets that spray from speaking, coughing, or sneezing (though those definitely can spread the disease, as well). Based on what we know now, we have a better understanding of which activities are most dangerous and how  situations can be improved. That means moving events outside when possible, and that air volume and circulation is a large factor in the danger level of an indoor environment. We’ve also spent a year warming up those Zoom skills and learning that many jobs really can be done from home. None of that should be thrown away because some executive decides that he really misses being able to lord his authority over people in person.
4. Crack that nut Ultimately, we cannot live with COVID-19 as a recurring, endemic disease. This is not the flu. The million Americans who have already died is just a part of the price we’ve paid for the mistakes made to this point. We have no idea how many millions are going to face long-term, life-altering, debilitating effects from their exposure to this disease. We don’t know what COVID-19 does to people, even those whose symptoms are light. But here’s one reminder from back in June—“Even mild cases of COVID-19 may lead to loss of brain tissue.” Yeah, keep that in mind. Because I have notes on two upcoming studies that associate the delta variant and biomarkers generally associated with Alzheimer's. There is no way that we can stay economically, socially, or politically stable unless this thing gets squashed. Ultimately that means gaining a much higher level of vaccine acceptance. That’s very unlikely to happen through some must-get-jabbed law. It may be boosted by schools and employers who require vaccination (in places where Republicans don’t pass laws against it). But mostly that’s going to have to come down reasoning with, guilting, shaming, or simply wearing down those people who are currently refusing vaccines. Because you can’t run a society where a quarter of the population is reveling in their role as living bioweapons.

I know this is a lot. I know that even many of those are were once in the “gee, thanks for pointing out that this is going to be bad” camp have now climbed on the “would you please just shut up” bus. We are on the same page. I want to shut up. I want to never write about this topic again. None of us is getting what we want.

Because the hard work is still ahead.

A small number of sensible Republicans can't compete against the tide of pandering and misinformation.

“My shoulders already feel lighter.”

On July 15, millions of working-class parents across America woke up to a welcome surprise: hundreds of dollars directly deposited into their bank accounts with the label “CHILDCTC.” The first payment of the anticipated expanded child tax credit, passed as part of Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, had arrived for eligible families with children under 18.

Parents were granted the option to receive half of the annual tax credit in six monthly payments of up to $300 for each child under 6 years old, and $250 for children ages 6 to 17; the other half of the credit will be awarded in 2022. Eligibility is based on income and filing status — married filers, for example, must have an adjusted gross income of less than $150,000 a year in order to receive the full credit, which phases out gradually with higher incomes.

The money comes as Americans are still reeling from the devastating emotional and economic impact of the pandemic. But the financial impact of raising kids was a problem long before last year — in the US, almost one in five children lives in poverty. Parents, on average, spend a little over $750 per child per month on child care and about $722 on groceries for a family of three. And in 2021, rental prices have jumped 9.2 percent, bringing the national average monthly cost for one- and two-bedroom apartments upward of $1,700 and $1,900 respectively, according to real estate reports.

Low-income families have borne the brunt, especially as school closures have forced parents to forgo income to care for their children. For many of these families, the monthly benefit is a much-needed relief and a lifeline after a year of hardship. “Getting these payments now, I know that at least I have help covering food,” said David Watson, a technician and single parent of two. “Now I can pull back on overtime. I need sleep, man.”

Vox talked to three parents about how, after struggling financially in the pandemic, they believe these payments will enhance their lives. Our conversations have been edited and condensed for clarity.

“I can’t tell you how relieved I was”

David Watson, technician, father of two, New Jersey

My shoulders already feel lighter.

I am a single parent with two children — my son Suleemon, 11, and my daughter Haleemah, 17. Their mother has battled substance abuse and doesn’t provide for them financially. Money is always tight for us since rent and cost of living here is really high.

Before the pandemic, things were hard, but Covid made everything more uncertain and brought a lot of challenges. Between monitoring my kids’ online schooling and juggling my job, I felt like I was going to lose my mind. I can’t imagine how parents with younger kids do it.

Usually, I would do overtime to make up for rent and any unexpected costs, but with Covid, it was impossible to keep up with the regular workweek, making overtime impossible. Then my job announced that staff would be furloughed through the summer. They told us to put in unemployment claims to help keep us paid. Around then, unemployment benefits also came with the extra $600. I was excited to finally catch a break — but it never happened. My unemployment claim was denied because someone tried to open a fraudulent claim, which locked my Social Security number. I called every number and visited every unemployment and Social Security office, but everything is still not running back to normal, so I can’t get help. We relied on pantries and I took a loan from my pension to get us through. The struggle was real!

Then my son broke both of his arms in a freak skating accident. At one point, I couldn’t work, to help him do everything. I’m proud to say, this June, my daughter graduated high school. But between graduation costs and college applications, more money was needed.

When I heard of the child tax credit, I was hopeful, but after the year I had, I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high. Then, on July 15, I was on my last $60 and wondering how to make it stretch for two weeks when I got a text message saying I got a deposit of $500 into my account. The child tax credit came through. I can’t tell you how relieved I was.

Part of me wishes it was more, but I don’t want to sound ungrateful, and … it’s something. People I know never received it or didn’t get the right amount. I know I can opt out and receive this money next year, but, for us, that is not an option. Getting these payments now, I know that at least I have help covering food. I can pull back on overtime. I need sleep, man.

“My goal right now is building generational wealth”

Shakisha Harvell, entrepreneur, mother of two, Virginia

The father of my two children — Shakisha, 9, and Shaquan, 12 — and I separated a few years ago, and since then he has not been a consistent provider. We moved to Virginia from New York City not too long before Covid hit to find more affordable housing and to get a better standard of living. In Virginia, we settled in well. The kids went to better schools and I started my own business. I opened my own store selling clothing, jewelry, and home goods. Things were looking up.

In the summer of 2020, we shut down due to Covid restrictions and my income all but dried up. When we reopened, it just wasn’t the same. My usual clients found it a hassle to shop, especially with the then 10-person maximum restriction that was in effect.

Making it worse, my kids were now doing schooling online. If it wasn’t technical difficulties, it was battling teacher issues. When I tried working during school hours, I would get messages from teachers about the kids not attending or handing in assignments. My daughter and her teacher seemed to be always butting heads. And my son was getting withdrawn from a lack of social interaction. They seemed to be lagging further behind so I altered my work hours. Time I would usually spend on my business was now spent sitting through classes with my kids.

Eventually, I applied for unemployment and started receiving payments. We were now living on half of my usual income. My kids even got involved and started baking and selling cakes to help make up some money.

The extra $500 will help keep us stable — it’s not the generational wealth-building that politicians keep talking about, but it’s better than nothing. My goal right now is building generational wealth. Most of my family grew up in the projects, and I don’t want my kids stuck there. Black people in America never really get a chance to grow.

My kids have outgrown their clothes and need a new summer wardrobe, so I’m going to use some money for that. But at some point, I want to use part of it to encourage my children’s entrepreneurial spirit. I want them to learn, from a young age, everything about business. I’m thinking of a popcorn and icee machine to get them started. It can go well with their cake business.

“We will finally be able to afford some help again”

Melissa Petro, freelance writer, mother of two, New York

Before the pandemic started, I was scrambling to juggle motherhood and my work. I had two kids under 2 and it was hard. We couldn’t afford to hire anyone to watch them so I could work, but we needed the income. For a while, I would try to get assignments done during their naptime or after my husband got home from work. It was exhausting. Eventually, my son went to day care for six months. Then Covid began.

When day cares closed, working became impossible. Fortunately, I went on employment assistance, which was amazing. I finally didn’t have to kill myself with different jobs. I could just watch my kids and get paid for it. But we still couldn’t afford to get a nanny. We just hired young people to help watch them here and there. So that meant my career was really suffering.

With the extra money from the child tax credit, we will finally be able to afford some help again. Now, instead of hiring kids who don’t really need the work, we can pay an adequate wage and hire someone who is reliable. We are still unable to afford full-time care, which would cost about $4,000/month for two kids, but we are searching for a part-time nanny and I’m grateful to be able to afford any help at all. The money from the credit isn’t life-changing — because everything in New York is so expensive — but it puts a dent in the child care bill.

A legislative committee in the Republican-led Missouri General Assembly actually went about holding an invite-only hearing on how race is taught in schools without including a single Black parent or educator, according to NBC-affiliated KSHB-TV. The hearing on Monday only featured the voices of those who oppose critical race theory, a framework for interpreting law that maintains racism has an undeniable effect on the legal foundation of American society. One of the invited guests who got a chance to testify was Katie Rash, who leads Missouri’s chapter of the political group No Left Turn in Education, KSHB reported. "Some students are having serious emotional problems dealing with the CRT, or social justice, concepts being taught in our schools," Rash said.

Heather Fleming, a former teacher and diversity and inclusion trainer, told KSHB she wasn't allowed to testify and that legislators were "talking about us, without us." "What not having any African Americans in the room really showed was that this wasn't really about understanding," Fleming said. Missouri NAACP President Rod Chapel called the display of privilege “ridiculous,” "excluding the very people who are saying we've been treated inequitably."

"That talks more to the kind of hearing that they wanted to have than the information that they wanted to gather," he told journalists after the hearing. "They wanted to hear from their friends who were going to support their political talking points."

Republican Sen. Cindy O'Laughlin said she intended for the hearing of the Joint Committee on Education to feature parents who felt ignored when they raised concerns about critical race theory at their children's schools. "I felt today it was important to hear from people who have tried to go through the official cycle of authority within their districts and have basically been turned away," she told her peers.

O'Laughlin said an associate professor of Black history she invited decided not to testify but she’s “certain this won't be the last conversation."

Republicans throughout the country have been leading efforts to have critical race theory banned in public schools, but it's worth noting the upper-level framework wasn't being taught in many K-12 schools anyway. The GOP’s campaign has been about redefining critical race theory to mean anything remotely related to race, bias, or racism and having those topics banned. In Tennessee, a group of parents deemed author Robert Coles’ The Story of Ruby Bridges, a classic about a six-year-old girl’s work to integrate a New Orleans school in 1960, too closely aligned with critical race theory. In Texas, the Republican-led Senate is trying to push through the state legislature a bill no longer requiring teachers to teach Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," the emancipation proclamation, women's suffrage, Native American history, and works by civil rights activists Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta—all deemed critical race theory. 

The machinations of Senate Republicans have taken up a huge chunk of the oxygen on the infrastructure debate, largely because they are in a position to derail the whole damn thing if they can manage to finagle just one Democratic senator into helping them. Unfortunately, they found more than one who are at least sabotage-curious to engage in the prolonged negotiations on what will supposedly become a bipartisan hard infrastructure bill—roads, water systems, broadband, and what-not. Republicans are doing their best to get those Democrats so invested in this long-delayed and probably futile effort that they can spoil the well on the larger, Democrat-only reconciliation bill which is not subject to a Republican filibuster.

Because what's going into that Democrat-only reconciliation bill is some really good and essential stuff. It's also some really popular stuff, that would make voters happy and more likely to support Democrats in the next election. From education to health care to climate, much of President Biden's $4 trillion vision for both hard and human infrastructure will be in the Democrats' reconciliation bill in one form or another.

It's great stuff. Like free pre-school and two years of tuition-free community college for, well, everyone. There aren't even quibbles among Democrats about the necessity of this. "Infrastructure's about roads and bridges, but it's about the other things we need to have a fully engaged and active work force," Sen. Elizabeth Warren said, reflecting Democrats' thinking. "That means child care for parents. It means early childhood education, giving our kids the right start. And that means post-high school education or training. That's what it's going to take in the 21st century." It's an investment in the future that is as much a part of infrastructure as lead-free drinking water systems.

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Universal free education is absolutely foundational to the U.S. as a country, even predating the revolution. In 1635, Boston Latin School was founded as the first public school providing free education to everyone—as long as they were male, that is. It's still going, by the way, but now also educates girls, grades 7-12. The whole nation reembracing that is simply good, and so is adding free education after grade 12.

It's such a good idea even the Third Way likes it. "Both of these are huge investments and recalibrations," said Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way, taking time out from warning Democrats about the dangers of the deficit. "It's an acknowledgment that we end up sending our kids most in need to the most under-resourced institutions, and this fundamentally recognizes that's not fair or good policy." James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, calls it "creating a ladder into the middle class."

Speaking of the middle class, the reconciliation bill is intended to both help grow it and to protect it. Consider the expansion of home and community-based health care. That's providing living-wage jobs to the carers, and improving the lives of millions of senior and disabled people who will be better served living in their own homes and communities. Speaking of this community, those on Medicare would get dental, vision, and hearing benefits in the program for the first time.

In addition, the plan is likely to include a Medicaid expansion proposal to get around the refusal by state Republican lawmakers to expand the program, leaving some 4 million low-income Americans uninsured. How they'll do that isn't absolutely clear right now, but Georgia Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, along with Sen. Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin, have proposed a completely federally run Medicaid-like plan offered in the holdout states. At the same time, it would boost incentives for the states to move forward with expansion.

This idea is gaining in urgency, with the findings of a new study showing just how dire the burden of medical debt is for Americans—totaling $140 billion. Not surprisingly, medical debts are the largest in the holdout states. In 2018, the study in JAMA finds, collection agencies were holding that $140 billion in unpaid medical bills from 18% of the American public—yes, nearly 1/5 of the population has medical debts in collection. That's up from $81 billion in 2016. It's also not counting the debt owed to providers that hasn't gone to collection.

"If you think about Americans getting phone calls, letters and knocks on the door from debt collectors, more often than not it’s because of the U.S. health care system," Neale Mahoney, a health economist at Stanford University study author, said. "In 2018, Americans living in states that did not expand Medicaid owed an average of $375 more than those in states that participated in the program, roughly a 30 percent increase from the gap that existed the year before enactment," the study found. Even more dire: in the lowest-income zip codes studied, the average amount owed was $677, as opposed to $126 in the highest-income zip codes they looked at. This debt is ruining people's credit ratings, keeping them scrambling to make ends meet. Expanding Medicaid is a way to at least stop this debt accumulation for millions of people.

The growing of the middle class—and helping to save the globe—is in this reconciliation package, too. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Tuesday that the bill will include a climate jobs proposal called the Civilian Climate Corps. "Right now, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to confront the climate crisis and create millions of permanent good-paying union jobs," Schumer told reporters Tuesday. "It's a great opportunity to combine those things." More than 80 House and Senate Democrats have pushed for the inclusion of the new CCC in the bill, writing to Schumer and House Speaker Pelosi that the program's goals "are to provide employment opportunities; invest in natural climate solutions, clean energy, and resilience; and address environmental justice through locally-led, science-based projects."

The group of lawmakers say that the program, based on FDR's depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, would create jobs for people planting trees; dealing with the 65% of all voters support the idea.

All of this is popular with American voters. The latest CBS News/You Gov survey, just released, shows solid approval for the proposal overall—59% support to 41% disapproval—but massive support for the individual components of it; 87% approving more federal spending on hard infrastructure; 73% of support expanding rural broadband; and 71% support more spending on child and elder care. It is smart policy and smart politics. And might actually just end up helping to save everything.

The Republicans who lead Idaho’s Legislature spent more than two years smarting over the passage of a 2018 ballot initiative that forced the state to expand Medicaid. They were also plotting their revenge.

This spring, as the lawmakers worried about a looming proposal to legalize medical marijuana, they passed a bill instituting an aggressive new standard on ballot campaigns. The outcry was fierce, with liberal activists quickly gathering 16,000 signatures from residents opposed to the legislation — including from rural counties the lawmakers said they were trying to help. Former state Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones delivered the petition to Republican Gov. Brad Little.

But Little was unmoved and signed the legislation in April, making Idaho home to some of the nation’s most restrictive requirements for ballot petitions. Organizers there are now required to secure signatures from 6 percent of voters in all 35 legislative districts in the state to get a question on the ballot for voters to decide.

The Idaho bill is part of a wave of legislation moving through GOP-controlled legislatures that’s intended to combat progressive policymaking at the ballot box. Successful referendums to expand Medicaid, legalize marijuana and fund public education through taxes on the wealthy have all faced similar threats following consternation from conservative lawmakers.

As Democrats have decried Republican efforts to restrict voting rights, lawmakers have also quietly chipped away at the citizen-driven referendum process in statehouses across the country. A record 146 bills were introduced in recent legislative sessions to change the ballot process in 36 states, according to an analysis by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. Critics say lawmakers are intentionally trying to complicate the ballot process so that it becomes too expensive and cumbersome for grassroots organizers to get issues directly in front of voters. Lawmakers have also attempted to retroactively undo parts of initiatives approved by voters in some states.

“Those legislators are intimidated,” said Corrine Rivera Fowler, policy and legal advocacy director at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive group that advocates for left-leaning ballot campaigns. “Their political ideals are being threatened by progressive policies that are passing. Maybe they should consider that.”

Some of these bills contain tweaks to existing law, like changing font size and word counts allowed in ballot petitions, seemingly miniscule adjustments that could actually lead to signatures being thrown out. Others call for wholesale alterations to the ballot process, like raising the approval threshold for constitutional amendments or mandating that a certain percentage of signatures be collected from every legislative district.

The Republicans behind these measures brush off criticism that they’re taking away power from constituents as punishment for voters supporting progressive policies. They counter that the influence of out-of-state interest groups that run these ballot campaigns has gotten out of control and they don’t truly represent the interest of voters and therefore more requirements should be implemented to maintain integrity in the process.

In 2018, for example, the national group Fairness Project spent $6 million to support Medicaid initiatives that passed at the ballot box in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah. In 2020, the group spent nearly $700,000 on Medicaid expansion campaigns in Oklahoma and Missouri. The nonprofit is funded through grants, institutional donors like labor unions and individual contributions. And in 2020, marijuana advocates vastly outraised their opponents, supported by national groups like New Approach PAC and liberal dark money group the North Fund. Medicaid proponents have similarly outraised their opponents, and much of that funding came from local donors like hospital associations and individual health systems.

Ballot campaigners say that Republicans are actually the ones responsible for those high costs because they’re applying more rules to the process, driving up expenses. A typical campaign in Missouri costs close to $2 million just to get an issue on the ballot because of costs like hiring staff, printing flyers and airing advertisements, said Ron Berry, a Missouri lobbyist and political consultant for ballot initiatives. To get on upcoming ballots in 2022 and 2024, campaigns must gather more than 171,000 signatures for constitutional amendments and more than 107,000 for statutes and referendums.

“You can’t do it as a true voluntary citizen,” Berry said. “You just don’t get enough volunteers and it costs money.”

“One of the arguments for this is to take dark money out of the process,” he added. “But I would say they’re opening it up to dark money.”

So far, the efforts by Republicans to raise the bar for qualifying initiatives have been incredibly successful: Red states enacted 24 laws amending the ballot process in the most recent legislative sessions. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, for example, signed a pair of laws in May that allows for recounts of certain state questions and another that requires some initiatives to include fiscal impact statements.

That comes after voters narrowly passed an initiative to expand Medicaid last year. Residents in the state also recently legalized medical marijuana, reclassified drug possessions from felonies to misdemeanors, signed off on a political ethics package with redistricting reforms and overturned a right-to-work law.

Oklahoma state Rep. Chad Caldwell, a Republican, said he was suspicious of a discrepancy in the Medicaid expansion results: early voters were more likely to support the initiative while those who voted in person on the day of the election were often opposed. So he introduced a bill calling for recounts of state questions that fell within very narrow margins of victory. The Medicaid expansion initiative — which passed by 6,488 votes — would have qualified for a recount if that law was in effect at the time.

“It’s a very interesting breakdown and I think people just wanted to take an extra look at it,” he said. “It really doesn't have anything to do with trying to help or hurt initiative petitions. It 100 percent just has the opportunity to clarify things and bring transparency.”

But Oklahoma Democrats in the legislature didn’t buy that justification. The state has a secure election system and there was no evidence of any irregularities, said Senate Minority Leader Kay Floyd.

At the time of its passage, Oklahoma was one of 14 states that had not expanded Medicaid coverage to low-income residents. The state is in the process of enrolling new Medicaid recipients and at least 200,000 Oklahomans are expected to gain health care coverage under the new rules.

“Just call it what it is — the people made a decision to expand Medicaid and the legislature hadn’t done anything for a decade,” Floyd said.

In Missouri, Gov. Mike Parson may call lawmakers back from recess to consider an elections package that may include a bill passed by the state House that would require a two-thirds majority vote to enact constitutional amendments. The House Elections Committee requested a special session to further debate the bill, which would also increase the geographic signature requirements to 10 percent from each congressional district for constitutional amendments and 5 percent for petitions aiming to change state law.

Not all ballot initiatives have pushed liberal-backed policies. California, where initiatives campaigns have long been a big business for interest groups and political operatives, has had a cap on property taxes for more than four decades thanks to a 1978 proposition. A union-driven effort to roll back the cap failed to pass in 2020. It is common in the state for single industries — like tobacco producers, plastics manufacturers or bail bondsmen — to fund initiatives that affect their bottom lines.

But it is also true that Democrats have used the ballot process in many GOP-run states to score big victories of late. The most recent efforts from Republicans to restrict that process can be traced to Florida, where there’s been nearly a decade of political drama over progressive ballot measures.

That culminated in 2018, when nearly 65 percent of Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to restore voting rights to people convicted of certain felonies upon completion of their sentence.

That initiative had been in the works for years, and Republicans were ready to respond. Just one year later, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law prohibiting any people convicted of felonies from voting unless they paid off all legal financial obligations — an action estimated to prevent at least 770,000 people from voting.

While a federal court later found that law unconstitutional, a playbook had been written and replicated in other states.

Florida’s ballot restriction measures didn’t stop there, either. Lawmakers have created more and more rules around voting and public ballot initiatives, and there’s an ongoing court battle over a new law that limits contributions to initiative campaigns. The GOP Legislature passed a law this year that places a $3,000 limit on contributions to political committees collecting signatures for proposed constitutional amendments.

The state Attorney General’s Office defended the law by arguing that the cap was needed to ensure integrity in the ballot process and “that the significant funding needed for a successful initiative petition has not been provided by a small handful, or even a single, very well-heeled special interest donor.”

But a federal court ruled in early July that the law violated First Amendment rights. The state has not yet indicated if it plans to appeal.

Not all legislative efforts have been successful, though. While the Idaho Legislature passed the bill to increase signature requirements, other attempts to restrict marijuana measures at the ballot failed. One Republican senator attempted to change the constitution with a resolution that would have effectively barred marijuana legalization campaigns. The House ultimately rejected the proposal.

It’s not the first time Idaho lawmakers have sought to restrict the ballot process. In 2013, they passed a bill to do the same. Since then, very few initiatives have even made it before voters and only one has passed: the 2018 question to expand Medicaid.

Reclaim Idaho, the group behind the Medicaid expansion initiative, is challenging the new law increasing signature requirements in a lawsuit in state court. The group was working on an initiative that would raise taxes on the wealthy and invest in public education, similar to a measure Arizona voters approved at the ballot box last year (and that is now tied up in a court challenge of its own).

A court decision is expected in the next few weeks on the legality of the Idaho law. If the court rules in favor of the state, the group plans to focus on another ballot question to get rid of the new geographical distribution requirements entirely.

State Sen. Steve Vick, a Republican who sponsored the measure, did not respond to a request for comment, but said during a committee hearing in February that he was concerned about rural representation in the initiative process. He argued that requiring signatures from every legislative district would force organizers to give voice to residents from far flung corners of Idaho, ensuring “that we don’t forget some of those people.”

But Luke Mayville, co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, said rural voters “already are represented at the ballot box.” Tougher petition requirements, he said, means organizers need to run bigger campaigns.

“High thresholds for state-wide signatures are very hard to meet, especially for grassroots organizations,” Mayville said.

For direct democracy advocates like Mayville, the trend of restricting ballot initiatives is not treated with the same urgency as Republican-led legislatures passing bills to restrict voting access. As of June, 17 mostly red states enacted 28 laws to restrict voting, including restrictions for mail-in ballots, stricter voter ID requirements and reducing polling place hours on Election Day, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

"This set of attacks on the ballot initiative process is one part of a much broader set of attacks on democracy itself," said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project.

If the new geographic requirements stand, Mayville estimates that ballot campaigns will need $2.5 million to qualify for the ballot. Volunteer-driven grassroots efforts would struggle to access that kind of funding.

The medical marijuana initiative, which was filed before the bill was enacted, won’t be subject to the new restrictions, said Russ Belville, a spokesperson for Idaho Citizens Coalition for Cannabis. But his group is also working on another initiative that would decriminalize marijuana purchased from legal-marijuana states, which would run up against the new requirements.

“So far, we don't have the money,” Belville said. And he faces an uphill battle to raise the funds, even from national organizations that back state marijuana campaigns. While marijuana legalization campaigns in other states have vastly outraised their opposition, Idaho campaigns typically see little financial support because the state only allows statutory initiatives and not constitutional amendments. That means initiatives can be overturned by the legislature.

A similar fight is brewing in South Dakota over the ballot initiative process. Some Republicans, including Gov. Kristi Noem, are pushing back on an adult-use marijuana ballot measure that voters approved last November. Noem has supported a legal challenge to the measure, which the state Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on.

Marijuana advocates are already gearing up to put another marijuana legalization question on the ballot for 2022. And another group, Dakotans for Health, are collecting signatures to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot.

The legislature’s response? A resolution to require a 60 percent threshold for any ballot measures that create new taxes or will require the state to appropriate more than $10 million in the first five years of enactment.

The resolution, which asks voters to change the state constitution, was initially drafted to go on the ballot in the 2022 general election. But Republican Sen. Lee Schoenbeck amended the resolution to place it on the 2022 primary ballot instead.

“Even if you think the 60 percent [threshold] should be in place ... it's indefensible to place it on a primary ballot,” said Matthew Schweich, who leads ballot initiative efforts for marijuana advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project and also consults on other ballot campaigns.

That resolution is “100 percent because of Medicaid,” Schweich said. Lawmakers know that marijuana advocates can place another legalization question without qualifying for the 60 percent rule, he said.

Schoenbeck did not respond to a request for comment, but during debate on the measure in March said that his amendment would "give the voters a chance to build this protection into the system." Because Medicaid expansion could end up on the general election ballot, putting the resolution on the primary would allow voters to increase the threshold before the general election.

But even other fellow Republicans expressed concern over putting the measure on a primary ballot, when voter turnout is historically much lower, the Rapid City Journal reports.

Schweich is so concerned with the trend of legislative efforts to restrict ballot initiatives that he’s considering creating a nonpartisan political organization dedicated to defending the ballot initiative process.

“These attacks on the initiative process should not be fought on a one-by-one basis,” he said. Having an organization dedicated to the issue can help “build up institutional knowledge — learn lessons from one state and apply them to another.”

In Idaho, another attempt to restrict ballot campaigns has backfired on lawmakers. The legislature passed a bill in May to bar signature gathering for petitions outside the state, a rule designed to prevent marijuana advocates from collecting signatures at border town pot shops in Oregon.

But the attorney general deemed the bill likely unconstitutional because it would disenfranchise Idaho voters who resided out of state, prompting Little — no friend of the marijuana cause — to veto the bill.

Thanks to the bill's ultimate failure, advocates promptly started gathering signatures at a dispensary on the Oregon-Idaho border — something they didn't know they could do before.

“Some people had driven as far as five hours one way just to buy marijuana and sign the petition," Belville said.

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The price of bitcoin has come crashing below the $30,000 mark for the first time in a month. "At the time of this writing, Bitcoin is trading at $29,694.34," writes Paul Lilly via HotHardware. "That's down from around $31,000 yesterday, and less than half of where Bitcoin peaked at in April of this year, when it topped $60,000." From the report: Will it go back up? Probably, but for Bitcoin investors, there are definitely reasons to be cautious, outside of the normal volatility associated with cryptocurrencies. For one, China is cracking down on cryptocurrency in general. As such, crypto miners recently dumped a bunch of used GeForce RTX 3060 cards on eBay for relatively cheap (compared to what they had been selling for), as well as ASIC hardware, the latter of which is what Bitcoin miners use these days. But it's not just China. Malaysian police recently seized and then steamrolled 1,069 ASIC mining rigs after discovering that miners had illegally tapped into a power grid to steal electricity for their operations. Talk about sending a strong message. In addition, six people were arrested, jailed, and fined (but hey, at least they weren't steamrolled). Tighter regulations in various territories could affect Bitcoin's value, too. For example, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said lawmakers must "act quickly" to construct and adopt new rules on stablecoins. "Bringing together regulators will enable us to assess the potential benefits of stablecoins while mitigating risks they could pose to users, markets, or the financial system," Yellen said in a statement. "In light of the rapid growth in digital assets, it is important for the agencies to collaborate on the regulation of this sector and the development of any recommendations for new authorities." It's worth noting that other cryptocurrencies are down too. Dogecoin is down more than 5 percent to $0.16, while Ethereum dropped more than 3 percent to $1,755.99. Just over two months ago it was at nearly $3,900.

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The take-home question here is whether the fake accent is worse than the economic theory.

Today's News:

It was inevitable that Republicans would balk at paying for infrastructure by going after wealthy tax cheats.

This level of venality and bad faith is unacceptable. And we should say no to it.

It's time for another update on the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in this country, and the news is ... not good. The nation appears to be sliding irreversibly toward a summer pandemic surge, and one significant enough to have hospitals in some regions reactivating emergency measures that they had left behind after vaccinations and social distancing measures reduced hospitalizations to manageable, and there's further concerns that the current surge may be severe enough to overlap with the already expected fall and winter surge once cold weather drives Americans back indoors.

How did we get here? There's several reasons, but the short answer is that vaccination efforts have lagged enough, in some communities, for the now widespread delta variant to take hold among the unvaccinated. The new surge of patients is made up almost entirely of unvaccinated Americans, with approximately 97% or more of hospital patients being Americans who haven't gotten the vaccine.

That means the victims of the new surge are skewing younger, including hospitalizations of children who are too young to get any of the current vaccines. Immunocompromised and immunosuppressed patients are also being hospitalized; those Americans either can't get vaccinated due to severe medical risks or have immune systems that have not responded effectively to administered vaccines, leaving them without immunity. The delta variant that is now responsible for most U.S. infections is also believed to be both more contagious and more severe than previous pandemic variants—exactly what health officials were afraid of, when urging Americans to get vaccinated so that American cities could reach "herd immunity" before new variants could reach them.

The Wall Street Journal reports that some hospitals are now "reactivating surge plans used in the peak of the pandemic," and that hospitalizations may "potentially reach new pandemic peaks" in areas with low vaccination rates.

The new pandemic surge can be directly attributed to vaccine hesitancy, with low-vaccination states like Arkansas now facing dire potential conditions and rising death tolls. The situation in Arkansas may get exceptionally bad; less than 44% of eligible Arkansas residents have been fully vaccinated, with one health official grumbling to The New York Times that for about a third of unvaccinated residents, "I don’t think there’s a thing in the world we could do to get them to get vaccinated" and that knocking on doors to offer the vaccine "would probably do more harm than good" in the conservative state.

For the most part, then, the warned-of situation has now come to pass. High correlation between low vaccination rates and Republicanism is resulting in a new surge of deaths in majority-Republican communities. Hospitalizations in places like Jacksonville, Florida, are threatening to top the worst of last winter's horrific surge.

Welcome to the new reality, brought to you by Fox News and Republican leaders that have bellowed vaccine conspiracy theories while declaring that basic public health precautions during a deadly pandemic are tyranny. Welcome to the Republican pandemic surge.

That doesn't mean, however, that the new surge is confined solely to Republican states. Even as hard-conservative regions inside Arkansas, North Carolina, Florida, and other Republican-led areas face the prospect of new record surges, even Los Angeles County, in California, is seeing a steep enough surge of new cases to require the return of universal public mask mandates. The massive county has struggled through each point in the pandemic from a combination of widespread poverty in some regions and stubborn anti-government conservatism in more rural enclaves. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva is refusing to enforce the new mask mandate, claiming it goes against Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. (This appears to be a misleading stance at best; while the CDC has indeed said that vaccinated Americans are generally safe even without masks, experts have continued to urge masks in areas with high levels of community transmission, citing the small but still-present risk of breakthrough infections among the vaccinated.)

Even more importantly, the virus is surging among Americans who cannot be vaccinated for very good reasons. This surge is, again, almost entirely among the unvaccinated, but that doesn't mean it's running rampant only among Americans that have flatly refused vaccination. Children too young to receive the vaccine and the already immunocompromised are being hospitalized in this new surge—a direct result of low vaccination rates in the rest of their communities allowing the new delta variant to spread unchecked.

Worse still, rampant transmission of new variants among unvaccinated Americans has a non-zero chance of producing even more dangerous variants in the near future. Every new infection has a chance to produce a new virus mutation; each new mutation may end up being one that can evade current vaccines—and, potentially, mutate into variations that become difficult to control with any new vaccine. It's not just a new surge of deaths now on the cusp of overwhelming regional health systems; low vaccination rates in any community pose a danger of birthing an entirely new pandemic.

New approval polls show that the Biden administration continues to enjoy high support for their pandemic response, even as a conservative rump claims Biden is focusing "too much" on vaccinating Americans and continues to voice distrust for government safety measures. Whether that will last is unclear; on one hand, the pandemic is primarily spreading among conservatives who didn't want Biden's interventions to begin with. On the other, top Republican voices (and, of course, Fox News) will assuredly attempt to blame a new surge of mostly Republican deaths in mostly Republican areas as a failure of the Biden administration, rather than their own conspiracy-peddling non leadership.

Biden himself may be doing his team no favors by being unwilling to fully condemn the conspiracy-enabling Facebook for the rampant propaganda Facebook itself has identified and acknowledged on its platform—while refusing to act against the top identified propagandists.

In any event, the stage is now set. We are on the cusp of a new deadly pandemic surge, one centered primarily in Republican-run states and cities with low vaccination rates and high resistance to masking but which will undoubtably spread through the rest of the nation to at least some extent. It may overrun regional hospital systems; the full danger posed by that will depend on whether health systems in high-vaccination areas are able to accept some of those patients or are not. Even the willfully obtuse U.S. stock market is becoming alarmed by the reversal of our pandemic successes.

It can be blamed, near exclusively, on conservative disinformation about the pandemic and the vaccine pushed by Republican leaders and by Fox News personalities. Meanwhile, inside Fox News itself, the same network sowing nationwide suspicion as to the supposed dangers of vaccination and supposed triviality of COVID-19 infections has already implemented their own "vaccine passports" for use inside their buildings. Anti-vaccine rhetoric is meant to be a political tool for conservative governors like the ambitious Ron DeSantis and ever-grifting movement hacks like Tucker Carlson. Behind the scenes, they're all getting vaccinated and demanding pandemic safety measures even as they condemn those things to their conservative base.

Senate Republicans revolted on Monday against opening debate on infrastructure while a bipartisan bill is still being written, lining up in opposition to a squeeze play by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Schumer and Senate Democrats need at least 10 Republicans to agree to advance a still-unwritten deal to spend nearly $600 billion on roads, bridges and broadband during a vote expected on Wednesday. But both Republican leaders and the GOP lawmakers working on the bipartisan infrastructure package carried the same warning for Schumer.

“He’s not going to get 60, let’s put it that way,” said Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). “The legislation is not drafted, the pay-fors are a long ways away. Patience is going to be a virtue.”

But patience has run thin among Democrats who have watched the bipartisan talks play out for more than three months now. Schumer scheduled the anticipated test vote Monday evening and his deputies and Democratic members of the cross-aisle group made clear they wanted to move forward.

“It's Monday in the United States Senate. That’s Wednesday. That’s a long way between then and now,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democratic leader. “We need a resolution to this. There’s a lot more work to get done.”

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who is negotiating the bipartisan infrastructure bill, said, “You got to keep the pressure on.”

In his floor remarks Monday evening, Schumer said the legislation could be amended as early as Thursday if the bipartisan group finalizes legislative text by then. If not, Schumer said the Senate could begin voting on legislation that has passed infrastructure-focused committees with bipartisan support.

Schumer said all five Democrats negotiating the bill, including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), supported his approach. He reiterated that Wednesday's vote is part of a "routine process" and that "it's a sign of good faith from both sides that negotiations will continue in earnest."

A failed vote this week would amount to an embarrassing setback for the senators trying to clinch an agreement that already got a televised thumbs-up from President Joe Biden. The group planned to meet on Monday evening and try to finish drafting legislation on a topic that’s bedeviled both parties' presidents and Congresses for decades.

If there’s no finalized deal and the procedural vote fails, senators said they would still continue to work on the infrastructure legislation. But several Republican senators helping shape the bill said they were agitated by Schumer’s tactics and warned they might vote against advancing their own efforts.

“We can’t support cloture for something we haven’t accomplished yet,” said Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the lead Republican negotiator. “It is absurd to move forward with a vote on something that’s not yet formulated.”

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, another GOP negotiator, declined to say how she would vote Wednesday. But she added that if Schumer wanted the legislation to succeed, he would ensure “people have an opportunity to actually look at what they might be voting on.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), another negotiator, said he’d vote no “if we are still working on major provisions of the bill and we don’t have a bill in front of us.”

Though Portman and others cried foul over holding a vote on unfinished legislation, it’s a tried and true strategy for both parties. Republicans kicked off their drive to repeal Obamacare with a vote on proceeding to an unwritten bill; just this Congress, senators in both parties advanced hate crimes and competitiveness legislation before it was finished.

Yet in this case, Republicans said there’s no rush to make good on an agreement Biden touted beside five of them at the White House. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that Republicans “need to see the bill before voting to go to it. I think that’s pretty easily understood.”

“There’s no bill. You can’t expect that many Republicans to move forward on a pretty vague concept,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). “It’s pretty much up to the majority leader. If he wants to kill the bipartisan bill, insisting on a vote before there’s a bill is a certain way to kill the bipartisan discussion.”

Schumer is portraying the anticipated Wednesday vote as a first step in the debate, suggesting the group’s work could continue and be later added as an amendment. And notably, Schumer telegraphed his move; he's long warned that he wanted the bipartisan group’s product on the floor in July.

If the bipartisan talks end up fully imploding, Democrats can roll the group's work into their unilateral spending bill that’s still being written, with a top line price tag of $3.5 trillion. But that would carry its own challenges: namely, keeping in line all 50 Senate Democrats, including moderates preaching bipartisanship.

The bipartisan group of senators writing the bill will meet via Zoom on Monday night to try to produce legislative text for the framework they reached last month, and the White House is expected to participate. Over the past week, Republicans objected to a proposal to increase IRS enforcement to help pay for the infrastructure legislation, sending group members scrambling to come up with new financing plans to fill a hole of tens of billions of dollars in new revenues. Portman said the group had “over two dozen differences” and resolved about half of them.

Despite the time crunch, moderate Democrats are signaling they are comfortable with Schumer’s move.

“I still believe Chuck’s got the right schedule,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.). If the vote fails Wednesday, he suggested: “What the hell? Keep us here in August.”

But some in the caucus were less eager to vote Wednesday without legislative text. When asked if Schumer should still hold the vote Wednesday, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the group, replied: “If we have the bill, yes.” King added that “if you don’t have the bill, you can’t have a vote.” Still, King will support advancing the bill on Wednesday and supports Schumer's timeline, his office said.

The Senate is scheduled to break for the summer on Aug. 6, though it would not be without precedent for the chamber to scrap a week or two of that recess to complete its work ahead of fall deadlines for funding the government and raising the debt ceiling.

Schumer has set up this week as pivotal to Biden’s "two-track" infrastructure and social spending plans. In addition to the impending vote on the bipartisan infrastructure framework, he’s also set a deadline of Wednesday for his party to coalesce around a rough outline of $3.5 trillion in new spending for the rest of Biden’s agenda to tackle social programs, climate change and increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

The Pegasus spyware leak shows that iPhones are vulnerable to hacks, too.

If you were paying attention to the news over the weekend, you might have heard something about “Pegasus.” In this case, Pegasus is not a mythical flying horse, but powerful phone-hacking spyware sold by an Israeli company that’s allegedly been used to snoop on journalists, politicians, activists, and even business executives around the world. But if you don’t fall into those categories or are otherwise unlikely to be the target of a sophisticated hacking operation, how any of this directly applies to you may not be so obvious.

Does the average person really have to worry about the government of Azerbaijan breaking into their phone and listening to their conversations or surveilling them through their phone cameras? Probably not. But the reports do suggest that people who have wholeheartedly bought into Apple’s marketing about how secure its devices are — and how hard Apple fights to ensure that security — might want to think again: iPhones can be hacked.

That might be surprising to many, as Apple has long cultivated its reputation as the private and secure alternative to rivals Microsoft and Google, whose Android operating system powers most phones in the world that aren’t iPhones. Apple took a well-publicized stand against the United States federal government twice by refusing to help the FBI unlock phones that belonged to suspected terrorists. But the fact that the FBI was able to get into those phones without Apple’s help should be your first clue that iPhones and Macs are not impenetrable fortresses.

Now, multiple reports based on a leak of 50,000 phone numbers belonging to people said to be potential targets — including journalists, dissidents, human rights advocates, and heads of state — say that thousands of iPhones may have been hacked by Pegasus. This sophisticated spyware, which was developed by the Israeli intelligence firm NSO Group, can harvest a target’s phone’s data, access their location, and record them through their microphone and camera without their knowledge — and without a target even clicking a link.

NSO maintains that it only sells its technology to government agencies to investigate and combat terrorism and crime (“for the sole purpose of saving lives”) and that the allegations made in the report are false — though its co-founder and CEO Shalev Hulio also told the Washington Post that the reports were “concerning” and that the company was “investigating every allegation.” But news outlets that investigated devices owned by phone numbers on the list found that some people were targeted because they were investigating or speaking out against governments or otherwise powerful people — not because they were criminals or terrorists.

A detailed report from Amnesty International, which, along with nonprofit organization Forbidden Stories, spearheaded the investigation, shows how Pegasus used Apple’s own apps, including Apple Photos, Apple Music, and iMessage, as attack vectors. And some of the exploits were already known to security experts and researchers. For instance, the fact that a hacker can send malware over iMessage that infects a target phone even if the recipient never clicks on anything — known as a “zero-click” exploit — has been reported on for several years.

Apple insiders told the Washington Post they believed that the company wasn’t doing enough to protect against known vulnerabilities or vet new products for exploits before they were released to the public.

Apple told Recode that iPhone is “the safest, most secure consumer mobile device on the market” and that it takes multiple steps to detect and fix new threats.

“Apple unequivocally condemns cyberattacks against journalists, human rights activists, and others seeking to make the world a better place,” Apple said in a statement. “Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers.”

Whether you’re a likely target of spyware hacking or not, there are some measures you can take to make your devices safer, like frequently updating your operating system and apps. The iMessage zero-click exploit, for example, appears to have been addressed by iOS 14 update’s “Blastdoor,” which isolates incoming iMessages from the rest of the phone (including the iMessage app itself) and tests them for malicious code. But the key word here is “safer.” That’s not the same thing as “safe,” and it’s not a guarantee of anything.

The Pegasus investigation shows that iPhones — and any other device, Apple or otherwise — are not 100 percent secure and will always be playing catch-up to fix the vulnerabilities that hackers find and exploit. Even the most secure devices and encrypted messaging apps can potentially be hacked. It’s exceedingly unlikely that they’ll be used against the device owned by you, the average reader. But you shouldn’t assume it’s impossible for anyone else to get in.

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In yet another move hinting that the Merrick Garland Department of Justice places more value on moving forward than holding Trump-era corruption to account, Government Executive is reporting that the Justice Department indeed found that Trump Commerce secretary and crooked rich guy Wilbur Ross lied to Congress in sworn testimony—and that they won't be prosecuting Ross for it. No explanation for the move is being given.

That Ross lied to Congress, as well as to federal courts, has been known for some time. The white nationalist-stocked Trump administration wanted to add a question to the 2020 U.S. census asking whether respondents were U.S. citizens, even though the Constitution specifically orders the once-a-decade census to count all persons inside the nation's borders, whether they are citizens or not. While the move (which anti-immigrant forces have long demanded) was purported to be a mere attempt to collect useful data, it's been shown that asking such questions reduces the willingness of immigrant-heavy communities to respond to the census at all, fearing the information will be shared with federal immigration officials and result in targeted investigations, harassment, or deportations.

That's precisely what makes the question useful to anti-immigrant lawmakers and the Republican Party as a whole. By reducing census participation in non-white communities, those communities’ "official" population counts are lowered when it comes to reapportioning congressional seats. White communities receive a more accurate census count, while immigrant-heavy towns and neighborhoods are intimidated into smaller response rates. That outcome, in which non-white communities are given less representation in Congress than white ones, is precisely what the Republican Party wants. White Americans tend to vote more Republican; non-white Americans tend to lean heavily towards Democrats.

What Ross is now shown to have done is assist in the Trump White House's attempts to hide the political, partisan, and race-minded goals of the census changes by lying to Congress and to federal courts about who requested it and why. Disclosed emails cleanly prove that Ross lied to Congress about his interactions with the White House. The Commerce Department's inspector general forwarded its own findings of misrepresentation to the Department of Justice for potential criminal prosecution, and here we are. Or rather, here we were. With the new Justice decision, it appears the Ross case, as with numerous other cases of seemingly brazen corruption by top Trump officials, is now dropped.

What's baffling about this case is that while any attempt to prosecute Ross for lying to Congress is bound to meet with charges of partisan retaliation, in Ross' case it seems a rather open-and-shut case. Ross clearly did one thing, as proven by an email trail that eventually leaked to the public, and just as clearly lied about that trail to Congress as lawmakers sought answers as to why the census changes were made. But even more to the point, Ross lied with the explicit intent of hiding a Trump administration plan to artificially reduce the power of U.S. citizens living in less white American towns and cities—the precise goal that state Republican lawmakers have been simultaneously pursuing as they use false, propagandistic claims of "voter fraud" to ratchet up the difficulty of voting in poorer and less white neighborhoods.

It's an attempt to thwart the premises of U.S. democracy itself, via intimidation. Seek representation in government, Republicans hint, and consequences may befall you. That might mean your noncitizen relatives will be investigated by federal law enforcement if you fill out a census form the wrong way; it might mean extraordinarily harsh penalties doled out to anyone who thought they had the right to vote, but thought wrong.

Ross engaged in a cover-up of a Republican attempt to rig elections by stripping immigrant-heavy American towns from their full representation to begin with. There's evidence. That's not worth prosecuting?

It may very well be that the Garland Justice Department believes that avoiding all hints of partisanship is more important than fighting high-level corruption, and that the attacks they would face in attempting to prosecute Ross would result in heavy backlash from Trump-supporting Americans convinced that the prosecution against the longtime billionaire crook was a conspiracy against them.

But the plainer message being sent by ignoring multiple lies to Congress is that lying to Congress, like all the rest of the brazen corruption of Trump's Republican den of hyperpartisan sycophants, is allowable. It may not be technically legal, but it is something you can do without consequence so long as you have the backing of a political party when you do it.

That, like the rest of Republican Party-backed efforts to lie to the public in all settings, without consequence, is astonishingly dangerous. It's nearly inexplicably dangerous. The message sent during both of the last two Republican administrations is that the public not just can be, but ought to be deceived about even the most major issues of the day. It is being backed by a Republican House caucus that has slithered into blatantly fascist declarations and goals, and by Republican senators who have steadfastly refused to allow consequences to befall even outright criminality by Trump and his top officials.

It has gotten to the point where even sedition itself can be, and is being readily stoked by Republican Party leaders. And we can't prosecute a single crooked billionaire for lying to Congress and to federal judges in an attempt to alter the nation's electoral maps in the party's favor?

This one's going to require justification, and "the party attempting to overthrow U.S. government might get angry if we do it" won't be cutting it.

The evidence is overwhelming. The message being sent by letting him off is dangerous.

Surprise: Ted Cruz is, as usual, full of shit. The Republican senator had grossly claimed last week that COVID-19 cases in south Texas are on the rise as “a direct result” of undocumented immigrants “being released into communities.” Like noted at the time, we know this is a racist trope with a long, disturbing history. What Cruz said is just a straight-up lie—and there’s new data made public since then further knocking down his claim. 

“Several days ago, Ted Cruz blamed migrants for rising COVID cases in South Texas,” tweeted immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “Well, newly-released data from one of the largest migrant shelters in South Texas not only conclusively disproves that claims, but also shows that 90% of migrants have voluntarily gotten a vaccine!”

By comparison, just 42% of Texans have been vaccinated, The Texas Tribune reported this past weekend. Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, noted that while the “COVID test positivity rate among migrants has increased from 4% to 8%,” Texas’ rate “has risen to 10%.”

“In addition, every migrant is tested, which is obviously not happening elsewhere,” he continued in his thread. “So the true rate for the rest of Texas is likely higher.” Valerie Gonzalez reports for The Monitor that when migrants arriving at one overnight shelter in the region do test positive for the virus, they are quarantined for ten days. Most asylum-seekers have final destinations to the U.S. homes of relatives already here.

Cruz, who during the pandemic tried to secretly travel to a Mexican resort amid a blackout in Texas and was shamed into returning back home, sure isn’t pointing any fingers at Gov. Greg Abbott. The Republican governor in March rushed to lift pandemic restrictions, including blocking “county and city governments from requiring masks, or from limiting business operation, or doing essentially anything to protect their citizens,” Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner wrote at the time. 

In a great piece for Press Run Media, Eric Boehlert wrote that our nation “is the only country in the world that’s simultaneously trying to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic while battling a homegrown, deep-pocketed political and media crusade determined to keep the pandemic going,” aided by right-wing media.

Sure enough, when Greg and Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick also sought to disgustingly blame undocumented immigrants for COVID-19 cases, they went onto Fox News to do it. They of course did this with no proof. Because if there’s one thing anti-immigrant politicians are consistent in, it’s in blaming immigrants for problems facing our nation—especially problems anti-immigrant politicians made worse.

Voters don't care about process, they care about results. So pass the dang infrastructure bill.

Unfortunately, here in the United States, if you are an LGBTQ+ person—and especially if you are an openly trans person—your rights and protections vary depending on where you live. Obviously, human rights should not begin and end based on state or city lines. But as of now, trans folks might have a far easier time, say, updating their name or sex on a state form of ID in one place versus another. Two trans people, Amelia Marquez and a person identified as John Doe, are suing the state of Montana over just that sort of issue. Specifically, the plaintiffs—one trans woman and one trans man—who have filed a suit in state District Court in Billings, Montana, are hoping to overturn a new law that requires trans folks to get gender-affirming surgery and a court order in order to update the sex on their birth certificate, as reported by the Associated Press. 

Previously, trans folks in the state could update their birth certificate with an affidavit or updated photo ID presented to the state health department. No invasive, expensive surgery, nor proof of surgery, was required. In the suit, the plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberty Union of Montana, are arguing that Montana’s new law is unconstitutional as its a deep invasion of privacy and puts a burden on trans folks that cisgender folks simply don’t have to deal with.

Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed Senate Bill 280 into law in April, which repealed the rule Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock’s administration instilled back in 2017. This bill passed 26-23 in the Senate and 54-46 in the House. Surprising no one, Republican lawmakers in the state backed the measure pretty strongly. You might remember that Montana recently passed an anti-trans sports bill into law as well, banning trans girls from competing in school and college sports teams that align with their gender. 

Marquez explained, as reported by local outlet KTVH, “I would like to change the sex designation on my birth certificate to match my female gender identity, but I am unable to do so because of the law.” The 27-year-old added in a statement that it is a “painful and stigmatizing reminder” that the state refuses to recognize her as a woman. For Marquez, she doesn’t want the surgery right now, and nor can she afford it.

As the suit explains, Marquez has been taking hormones for two years and has already legally changed her name. She is generally read as a woman, so being forced to present an ID document that incorrectly labels her as male is at minimum confusing and could also be legitimately dangerous. The document would essentially “out" her as trans, not to mention the emotional trauma of being misgendered by your own documentation and government.

John Doe, the other plaintiff, has slightly different circumstances. The 22-year-old Doe has undergone one gender-affirming surgery, takes hormones, and is in counseling for gender dysphoria, but does not want to have to give that documentation in court. Why? Producing that document in public would also “out” him, and adds a financial and time burden that, again, cis folks don’t have to deal with.

In the big picture, there’s one takeaway that’s important to remember no matter what state or federal requirements are: Trans people are trans. Some people may want to take hormones, for example, or seek one or more surgeries. Some people don’t want to, or can’t access those services, or can’t afford them. Some people will try something, like hormones, then stop taking them, for whatever reason. Some people may change their name or pronouns more than once. That’s all fine, normal, and valid.

Insisting that trans folks meet arbitrary guidelines for being trans “enough” to update identifying documents is hurtful, discriminatory, and, frankly, a waste of time. Whether or not someone has a gender-affirming surgery really makes no difference to the state—it’s just another invasive, exhausting hoop for people to jump through and another way to make people feel excluded and othered. 

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Senate Republicans have found yet another way to prove that Trump rules their world. How ironic is it that his empire is tottering in a tax fraud investigation in which Trump himself is implicated at precisely the same time Republicans refuse to give the IRS the funding it needs to go after tax cheats in order to help pay for rebuilding infrastructure?

Sen. Rob Portman, who has been "leading" the handful of Republicans alongside Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in the never-ending bipartisan negotiations, broke the news Sunday. This one bit of funding—making sure that everybody has to pay their goddamn taxes—that they had agreed upon is now out of what they have been calling a deal.

Now it's back to the drawing board, so they can't possibly have anything ready to move forward in the Senate this week, as Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has asked. Never mind that they have been "working" on this for nearly seven weeks—they can't possibly be ready to vote Wednesday on whether or not they're ready to have a bill to vote on eventually.

Because that's what they'll vote on Wednesday—just a procedural vote, or cloture, for a placeholder bill that their plan would eventually be poured into. That's unconscionable, says Portman, that he would demand they show the tiniest bit of their work. "Chuck Schumer, with all due respect, is not writing the bill, nor is Mitch McConnell," Portman said. "So that's why we shouldn't have an arbitrary deadline of Wednesday. We should bring the legislation forward when it's ready." Which will be approximately never.

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Because while Portman had to make sure he got that part in there about how McConnell isn't writing the bill, McConnell is absolutely in charge of the Republicans. And when McConnell says he has "total unity" from his team in obstructing Joe Biden's presidency, he's not bluffing.

As if to demonstrate, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney—the one guy who supposedly stands for something among the GOP—parroted the party line about Schumer being too hasty. "I think we'll move quickly, but we're not going to vote on something until we actually have a bill," he told reporters at the end of last week.

Schumer has also set Wednesday as the deadline for agreement in the Democratic caucus on the budget blueprint that will form the basis of a larger $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that includes the major economic priorities of Biden's plan. He's been intent on making the two tracks of this process—the regular order bipartisan bill and the budget reconciliation, which can pass with a simple majority—proceed side-by-side.

"Everyone has been having productive conversations and it's important to keep the two-track process moving,” Schumer said Thursday when he announced the Wednesday deadlines. "All parties involved in the bipartisan infrastructure bill talks must now finalize their agreement so the Senate can begin considering that legislation next week."

On Friday, however, a right-wing and reliably anti-immigration federal judge in Texas threw a wrench into the works, adding more complexity to what the Democrats need to do by declaring the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program illegal. Which means that putting a path to citizenship for Dreamers and other immigrants into the reconciliation bill has become urgent and essential to make sure it's done this year.

At least Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin seems to be okay with adding immigration into the mix. He still finds it "very, very disturbing" that the proposal deals with climate change, however.

But supporting a reconciliation bill that might hike taxes on the wealthy and invest in lessening our reliance on fossil fuels? "That's a challenge," Manchin said. It's going to be a long, busy week.