James.galbraith

As Americans nationwide are being vaccinated in record numbers, states across the country are debating coronavirus restrictions. Many are lifting mask restrictions for those vaccinated following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations that those vaccinated do not have to wear masks. But this has caused issues with those who refuse to get vaccinated but also refuse to wear masks, including some GOP officials.

In order to ensure all individuals follow COVID-19 regulations, some states are implementing penalties for those who refuse to abide. In Nevada, a Republican lawmaker was stripped of her voting and speaking privileges in the state’s legislature after ripping off her face mask while on the assembly floor on Tuesday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

The Nevada assemblywoman identified as Annie Black then refused to put her mask back on claiming that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that masks are no longer required. But of course, this guideline only applies to Americans who are fully vaccinated and Black refused to confirm whether or not she was.

“What President Biden, Gov. Sisolak and Speaker Frierson, and the CDC are doing is setting a trap to usher in ‘vaccine passports,’ ” Black said in her newsletter. “Either PROVE you’ve been vaccinated or become a second-class citizen. Papers, please.”

She added that it was her body and choice whether or not to be vaccinated.

But it doesn’t end there. After creating a scene on the floor Tuesday, Black returned Wednesday again without a mask. This resulted in the group voting to remove her speaking and voting privileges because she continuously and intentionally was breaking new legislative protocols.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, assembly members noted that Black was in violation of Rule 150, which stated: “… a member shall cover his or her mouth and nose with a multi-layer cloth face covering and observe social distancing guidelines in accordance with recommendations of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when in … [either] House Chamber of the Legislative Building.”

In order for her to regain her lost privileges Black was told to apologize, which of course she refused to do. "Trust me, this ain't over," she wrote in a newsletter on Thursday. She also took to Twitter to express that she would “not back down” and retweeted a post equating the Nevada Legislature to "Nazis."

This isn’t the first time Black has come under fire for her actions. Black was also found to be one of the local lawmakers who attended protests in Washington, D.C., on the day of the Jan. 6 insurrection. But while she’s making headlines for her commentary and response to the voting and speaking ban, Black isn’t the only one who refused to wear a mask on the floor.

Another lawmaker also refused to comply with mask regulations in addition to refusing to state whether she was vaccinated on Thursday. According to the Associated Press, Assemblywoman Jill Dickman was escorted out of the floor Thursday after staff told her that she would have to prove that she had been vaccinated. She participated remotely in the meeting. "I am not sharing my personal medical information with anyone," she said. "Apparently we have de facto vaccine passports in the Legislative Building."

For months the Nevada state house has had back and forth arguments on what restrictions should be placed or lifted. Republican legislators have argued in favor of opening the legislature after bars, restaurants, and casinos opened; however, Democrats who control the statehouse have argued otherwise. The building was initially closed to the public except for a limited number of reporters prior to April.

The current mask standoff of staff and visitors wearing masks if not fully vaccinated could continue until the end of session on May 31. It’s sad how far some people will take things instead of simply apologizing.

Earlier this May, Republican Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed House Bill 1182, a deeply exclusionary and transphobic bathroom bill, into law. This law would require government facilities open to the public and businesses to post signs explicitly stating the establishment allows transgender folks to use the bathroom, changing room, or locker room that matches their gender identity. This would effectively function as a warning for cisgender people if they happen to use the bathroom with someone who is transgender. Sound like a hate-filled disaster? That’s because it is.

On the smallest bright side, Nashville District Attorney General Glenn Funk said he will not enforce the law, as reported by the Associated Press. “I believe every person is welcome and valued in Nashville,” he said in a statement. He stressed that enforcing transphobic or homophobic laws is contrary to his values and that his office “will not promote hate.”

If you’re wondering how Lee feels about the top prosecutor in Nashville not enforcing the law he signed, he told reporters as reported by local outlet FOX 17 in part, “I signed the law; it’s his decision how he wants to respond to it.”

As some important context, this is far from the first anti-trans bill Lee has signed into law. In fact, it’s far from the first anti-trans bill he’s signed into law just this year. In March, Lee signed a bill banning trans girls from participating in girls’ sports middle and high school teams under the guise of preserving equity and fair competition in women’s sports.

More recently, the governor signed a bill—House Bill 1233—into law that essentially forces both transgender students and staff to either use the bathrooms that align with their sex aligned at birth—meaning not their actual gender identity—or to use separate, single-occupancy, or employee bathrooms. The law explicitly bars trans folks from using multiperson facilities, including places like locker rooms for the sex with which they identify. 

In addition to wondering why one would sign a bill into law if they weren’t actually concerned with it being followed, people are seriously confused about how this law, set to go into effect on July 1, is supposed to be enforced. Back in March, Republican Rep. Tim Rudd told a legislative committee that the bill did not actually provide specific penalties or fines. Rudd, who sponsored the bill, suggested people could enforce the law if district attorneys asked a judge to make the business in question comply or if people filed lawsuits. 

According to the bill Lee signed into law, the sign posted outside of the facility in question would read: “This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom.”

Luckily, Funk is not the only person with power in Tennessee who refuses to enforce this hateful new legislation. In a statement to The Tennessean, Nashville Mayor John Cooper told the outlet that this law is “part of an anti-LGBT political platform of hate and division.” He added that these bathroom signs “can be the equivalent of hanging up another sign — a ‘do not come here’ sign.’” Cooper described Nashville as an “inclusive” city but that it might suffer economically from this legislation. Given the way the NCAA has responded to anti-trans sports bills, Cooper is almost certainly right. 

Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two Democrats who have made the most attention-grabbing noise about not getting rid of the filibuster, are at least having to defend their positions right now. Here's their latest, a joint statement imploring Republicans to play nice on the Jan. 6 commission. Literally. "We implore our Senate Republican colleagues to work with us to find a path forward on a commission to examine the events of January 6th."

Or what? They’ll finally decide to do the right thing to save the nation by voting with Democrats to end the filibuster?

Manchin blew any chance of any Republican taking that implied threat on the filibuster seriously just minutes before tweeting out that statement.

He won't nuke the filibuster no matter what—even for the Jan. 6 commission bill—because of the fallout? The only fallout would be from Republican senators. The rest of the nation would consider him a hero if he finally stood up for our democracy. Instead he's worried that the Republicans won't let him sit at their lunch table anymore?

Manchin and Sinema say, "A bipartisan commission to investigate the events of that day has passed the House of Representatives with a bipartisan vote and is a critical step to ensuring out nation never has to endure an attack at the hands of our countrymen again." Great. Fine. A bill that already structures a commission that can be sabotaged by Republicans leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell should be watered down even further so it can continue to be bipartisan?

There are now two Republicans, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, who say they’ll vote in favor of a commission. They're going to be it, because McConnell won't allow anymore.

Instead, he's deputized Susan Collins to do exactly what Manchin and Sinema are inviting: find a way forward to Republicans supporting it, which means watering it down even more.

Note that the supposed problems Collins sees with the existing bill aren't actually problems. It already does the two things she insists it must do—end by December 31, 2021 and allow Republicans to hire Republican staff. It does more as it stands. It allows McCarthy and McConnell to pick whoever they want to serve on it. They could pick racist Trump adviser Stephen Miller, or any of the corrupt former Trump administration officials who helped foster the Big Lie and cover up the insurrection from the inside. If McConnell were actually the savvy politician every Beltway reporter wants to make him out to be, he'd see that and take this chance, releasing eight more of his members to vote for the thing.

In some ways, it's good that he's refusing to do even that. He remains opposed to what he's calling a "purely political exercise." It might end up being the thing that finally breaks through to Manchin and Sinema, the thing that proves to them that Mitch isn't their friend and has been using them.

Maybe. But that might take more self-awareness than either are capable of.

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We won't reach herd immunity and defeat the pandemic unless we can cajole them into thinking of someone other than themselves.

By now the basic contours are visible to anyone who cares to look. The idea that Republicans would actually sign on to an investigation into their own party’s deliberate embrace of fascism—which is precisely what any legitimate investigation into the events of Jan. 6 would reveal—was doomed to fail from the start. 

Nowhere was this outcome more preordained than in the reaction of Republican House members whose votes could have authorized a commission to conduct such an investigation in the first place. Of the 210 GOP House members who voted this week, only 35 agreed to create such a commission.  Of the 147 Republican House members who objected to the vote count certifying the 2020 presidential election, only five voted in support of the commission. The Senate has not yet voted on the House bill creating the commission, but Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has given his membership sufficient cover to oppose it in numbers that will make its passage effectively impossible, thanks to the filibuster.

So there will be no bipartisan commission to examine the events of Jan. 6. There will be no cooperation between Democrats and Republicans in uncovering the reasons those attacks occurred, or their support and coordination by specific members of the Republican Party and the Trump administration.

Max Boot, writing for The Washington Post, thinks this was all to be expected. In fact, it may well be a blessing in disguise. As Boot points out, the bipartisan commission, as agreed to by Reps. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, and Republican John Katko, would have permitted Republicans to hamstring its effectiveness by requiring a majority vote of its 10 commissioners to issue subpoenas. On the Republican side, the five GOP commissioners would be appointed by the very people whose political futures could be implicated by the findings of the investigation: Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and McConnell, both of whom have now gone on record as opposing any investigation.

The GOP commissioners would simply be people approved and vetted by Donald Trump—the person responsible for the Jan. 6 attacks in the first place. 

Boot writes:

Even if this bill were passed — which now appears unlikely — it would have still allowed considerable room for Republican obstructionism if all of the GOP-appointed commissioners voted in lockstep. There would have been nothing to stop McCarthy and McConnell from appointing rabid Trumpkins for precisely this purpose. (Imagine if, say, former Trump White House aide Stephen Miller were the vice chair.)

That McConnell and McCarthy are opposing even this balanced approach suggests they are intent on simply covering up what was arguably the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

Put simply, you cannot put a thoroughly corrupt political party in charge of investigating its own corruption. The nature of the Jan. 6 attacks itself is inextricably tied to the lie of election fraud, a lie that is at this very moment being perpetuated and furthered by the GOP, at both the national and state level. Since Republicans are wedded to this lie, they cannot be expected to willingly participate in any good faith effort to uncover its origins, its blatant falsity, or its relationship to the Jan. 6 insurrection. As Boot points out, “the Republican leaders have become Trump’s collaborators in a coverup.” To expect them to willingly cooperate, while their ties and affinities to violent white supremacists and other assorted domestic terrorists are revealed and dissected for public consumption is, putting it mildly, preposterous.

So there can never be any bipartisan accounting of Jan. 6, by definition. It was a wholly partisan attack, condoned and even encouraged with the near-universal complicity of Republican members of Congress, at the explicit direction of their leader, Donald Trump. This is why McCarthy’s first reaction to the commission has been a tortuous but classic exercise in whataboutism: What about antifa?  What about Black Lives Matter?  

And if Democrats had agreed to this framing, the GOP would have moved the goalposts yet again: What about Hunter Biden? And so on. 

Republicans cannot allow a legitimate investigation into Jan. 6 because Republicans were responsible for Jan. 6. It’s really that simple.

Boot believes the best course—in fact the only course, moving forward—is for Democratic House leadership to appoint a select committee.

The Republican refusal to agree to the bipartisan 1/6 Commission bill could actually be a blessing in disguise. It will free Pelosi to set up a January 6 Select Committee in which Democrats will be more firmly in charge — as Republicans were on the Benghazi committee. The Benghazi investigation was a political stunt, but this investigation is deadly serious. We must get a full accounting of the events of Jan. 6 despite Republican attempts to bury the truth. If we do, Republicans may come to regret their opposition to the bipartisan 1/6 Commission.

President Joe Biden describes the Jan. 6 insurrection as the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” That attack was perpetrated by one party, and one party alone. There’s no room for bipartisanship here, and there never was.

Democrats and Republicans alike have to face that fact.

George Floyd died after former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than nine minutes, murdering the Black father. But an initial press release police officials sent to media representatives about the murder didn’t even mention Chauvin’s involvement. “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” was the title of the release. An investigation of California law enforcement agencies published by The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday found that this kind of marketing spin on police killings is hardly unique.

“The George Floyd press release was not an anomaly," journalist Sam Levin tweeted. "It's standard procedure." 

He added in another tweet: “I found cases where police:

-cited vague ‘medical emergencies’ without disclosing officers caused the emergencies through use of force.

-falsely claimed civilians were armed

-falsely claimed they overdosed-blatantly misrepresented the civilian's actions before the killing”

In one case Levin reported on, Dujuan Armstrong, 23, died inside the Santa Rita Jail in what the Almeda County sheriff described as a "drug overdose" following a spokesman’s account that Armstrong was acting "bizarre."

“Body-cam footage showed deputies had strapped Armstrong in a full-body restraining jacket and put a spit mask over his head while transporting him within the jail,” Levin tweeted. “The coroner determined Armstrong died of asphyxiation due to the tight restraint and hood.  There was no overdose.”

In a San Mateo case, the sheriff's office accused Chinedu Okobi, 36, of “running in and out of traffic” and “immediately" assaulting the deputy who tried to contact him. "The suspect was also transported to the hospital, where it was later learned that he died," a sheriff representative said in a media statement. "Okobi was on the SIDEWALK when an officer approached to stop him by claiming he had jaywalked, and it was then that Okobi walked into the street, away from police," Levin tweeted. "A group of officers tried to detain him + repeatedly Tased him, causing him to fall and scream in pain."

Levin added: “When a cop hit Okobi with his baton, Okobi swung back at him. There was no ‘immediate assault.’ The coroner ruled Okobi’s death a homicide, citing the Taser shocks and being restrained. The first press release had made no mention of Tasers, and neither did some first news reports.”

Ebele Okobi, the victim's sister, told Levin that officials painted a picture of a brother as "a wild, agressive person that they had no choice but to kill" and "because he's dead, he can't speak for himself … They kill the person twice,” she said. “The police killed him and then their statement kills his reputation.”

Vallejo police accused Angel Ramos, 20, of being armed with a knife when they shot him for having attacked a minor. Levin tweeted: “No knife was recovered near Angel. What’s more, two officers said they had not seen him holding a knife. Two paramedics said they had seen no knife near his body. And the teenage victim told police and later testified that Angel didn’t have a knife.”

Take a look at how police initially described Floyd being murdered:

RELATED: It's not cops beating Black people to death. It's the sickle cell trait, medical examiners allege

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Folks, you thought “injustice” was all about police brutality in the Black community, the abuse and torture of immigrants on our southern border, gross economic inequality that has seen wealth accumulate at the upper socio-economic strata, the environmental degradation of our planet, but particularly focused on poor communities, rampant propaganda and misinformation in the right-wing echo chamber, attacks on a woman’s right to choose, and evil demonizing of transgendered individuals. And that’s just scratching the surface!

But no, it turns out that’s nothing compared to the plight of our nation’s bullied, ostracized, and demonized hedge fund and private equity billionaires. 

They are being “reverse discriminated,” yo. 

Before you take a knee-jerk stance against these embattled Americans, take a moment to witness the abuse they might suffer under President Joe Biden’s proposed elimination of the carried-interest loophole so beloved by the finance industry.

Under the Biden carried-interest plan, the average partner at a major private-equity firm, who would make $30 million in carry if certain returns are met, could expect to pay about $13 million in taxes, up from $7 million under the current system, according to a Bloomberg analysis of pay data by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles. 

If you don’t grasp the extent of the cataclysm facing this industry, the average private equity partner’s take-home compensation would shrink from $23 million to $17 million. How are they supposed to make ends meet with just $17 million, when $23 million was formerly in the cards? If Biden won’t retreat from this lunacy, some of these people—particularly ones living in high-tax states, might pay 60% of their compensation to help fund important programs and infrastructure upgrades. Why, that average partner making $30 million in compensation may be left with a measly $12 million. JUST $12 MILLION, people! 

Opponents of tax increases on the wealthy have been arguing that even the slightest increase will send affluent New Yorkers fleeing to Florida, the would-be Wall Street South. That may already be happening. Almost 10% of New York-area residents who moved during the pandemic fled for one of the nine states without income tax -- and the bulk of them went to Florida, according to U.S. Postal Service data.

Ninety percent of New Yorkers who moved during the pandemic didn’t move to low-tax states, so we need to panic over a few assholes moving to Florida, ready to give up some of the world’s best cuisine and cultural amenities for … golf? Can’t have that! Can’t you see this is madness? 

Please, just for a second, look beyond these embattled hedge fund managers and think of the businesses they won’t invest in, choking off the engine of American ingenuity. Why would anyone work in a business where their average compensation would be just $12 million? Would you? Of course not! 

Some are expecting the changes to prompt early retirement.

Can you imagine? Some people might retire! And there will be no one left willing to work for $12 million poverty wages! [Insert wailing and teeth gnashing here.]

FIGHT FOR $30 [million]! Fight for $30 [million]!

Okay, okay, in all seriousness, that article is actually really good, with little sympathy for the whiners—few of which were willing to speak on the record, proving again that they’re not just insufferable out-of-touch whiners, but they’re cowards as well. And perhaps it’s for the best, because the last time Democrats broached eliminating this loophole, back in the Obama years, hedge fund billionaire Steve Schwarzman claimed “It’s a war! It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” 

Yeah, best to keep their traps shut. 

And the article closes with this quote, which is actually quite fantastic:

[I]f private equity is so good at what it does, it shouldn’t need a tax loophole to make money.

“You can make billions of dollars in this industry if you’re good and if it’s taxed at 43%, oh well,” said Elizabeth Edwards, founder of H Venture Partners, a Cincinnati-based venture fund. “You’ve got $600 million instead of $1 billion. You can’t take it with you.”

Truth. This corner of the finance industry has had a free ride for too long. It’s well past time to end this unfair loophole.

And once we do that, we can set our sights on a real wealth tax, and further rectify the economic wealth imbalances that are a scourge on our country. This tax adjustment wouldn’t raise that much new money—just $14 billion over the next decade. But that’s nearly one and a half billion that would shift from the wealthiest one percenters to the public coffers. It would make the tax code a little more equal and fair, and would be a good start towards clawing back the advantages enjoyed by our nation’s wealthiest. 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: In a national effort to get through to horny but vaccine-hesitant Americans, the White House announced Friday that it is joining forces with dating apps to encourage people to get their COVID-19 vaccines so that they can go forth and fuck freely this summer. Vaccinated users on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Badoo will have access to some premium features for free. OkCupid, Chispa, BLK, and Match are giving out a free "Boost" to those who've been vaccinated so that their profiles are more likely to be seen first. Plenty of Fish is also offering free credits to vaccinated members for its livestreaming feature. The dating apps will add badges or stickers that users can include on their profile to indicate that they've been vaccinated, as well as filters so that you only swipe on fellow vaccinated people. There will also be in-app links to find your closest vaccination site. "People who display their vaccination status are 14% more likely to get a match," White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt said at a press conference, citing research from OkCupid. "We have finally found the one thing that makes us all more attractive." The new features are expected to launch on the apps in the next few weeks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Trump loyalists are determined to chase Rep. Liz Cheney out of the Republican Party for daring to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election and that an insurrection to overturn that election is a bad thing. House Republicans have already booted her out of her leadership role, but that may not be enough. Rep. Matt Gaetz—prior to his sex trafficking problems—went to Wyoming to rally Republicans against Cheney, and Donald Trump Jr. has attacked her. And Cheney very predictably faces a primary challenge, which got interesting this week thanks to a Facebook Live and interview offered by one of her primary opponents.

“So, bottom line, it's a story when I was young, two teenagers, girl gets pregnant,” Wyoming state Sen. Anthony Bouchard said on Facebook Live. “You've heard those stories before. She was a little younger than me, so it's like the Romeo and Juliet story.”

Romeo and Juliet, he said, and he was being more serious than he might have sounded.

Bouchard then went into a little more detail with the Casper Star-Tribune, and … it didn’t get better. She was 14, he was 18. They got married when she was 15 and he was 19, divorced three years later, and she died by suicide when she was 20.

It’s a sad story. Time has passed. But his effort to get out in front of opposition research about that part of his life was, well, creepy. “She was a little younger than me.” She was 14! And, okay, had they stayed together and she lived past 20, when they were 28 and 32 it wouldn’t have seemed like a huge age difference. But 14 … no, man, no. And Romeo and Juliet? Yikes.

Bouchard is not Cheney’s only primary challenger, but he is a credible one—because he’s a state senator and “one of Wyoming's most prominent gun rights advocates,” according to the Star-Tribune. He also raised $334,000 in the first quarter of 2021, after entering the race in January. That said, Republicans looking to punish Cheney for her disloyalty to Trump are likely to have choices, which is why another Republican was apparently trying to use the opposition research to push Bouchard out of the race. But one of the most disturbing things to contemplate is, if the race came down to Cheney and Bouchard, who would Wyoming Republicans choose?

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is still intent on messing with our U.S. Postal Service (USPS), permanently slowing down delivery of the mail, and undermining the one thing the agency is supposed to do: that whole "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" thing. What USPS has prioritized, however, is its covert operation—entitled Internet Covert Operations Program (subtle, huh)—revealed last month by Yahoo News.

Investigative reporter Jana Winter followed up that report this week with new disclosures, including that the "the program is much broader in scope than previously known and includes analysts who assume fake identities online, use sophisticated intelligence tools and employ facial recognition software." It uses the controversial facial recognition technology Clearview AI to spy on Americans' images scraped from social media posts.

The analysts searching social media posts use software called Nfusion, which lets users create and maintain untraceable and anonymous accounts on various social media sites. This allows them “to help identify unknown targets in an investigation or locate additional social media accounts for known individuals," according to materials that Yahoo News has reviewed.

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"The U.S. Postal Inspection Service appears to be putting significant resources into covert monitoring of social media and the creation and use of undercover accounts," said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Liberty & National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice. "If these efforts are directed toward surveilling lawful protesters, the public and Congress need to know why this is happening, under what authority and subject to what kinds of oversight and protections."

Clearview AI has been credibly accused of attempting to skirt domestic privacy regulations in its service to American law enforcement agencies by opening subsidiaries in Panama and Singapore.

The Postal Inspection Service doesn't see the problem, to say the least. "This review of publicly available open source information, including news reports and social media, is one piece of a comprehensive security and threat analysis, and the information obtained is the same information anyone can access as a private citizen," a spokesperson told Yahoo News. "News report and social media listening activity helps protect the 644,000 men and women who work for the Postal Service by ensuring they are able to avoid potentially volatile situations while working to process and deliver the nation’s mail every day."

But as Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA) national President Frank Albergo told Daily Kos last month, the actual protection of USPS employees doesn't seem to be that high a priority.

Last year, DeJoy ordered the uniformed police force of the Postal Service to stop patrolling. The order was to "end all mail-protection and other law-enforcement activity away from the confines of postal real estate," according to a complaint filed by the PPOA. Albergo sees that "as the first step to abolish the postal police force in its entirety." He said that "in the absence of PPOs, all USPIS law enforcement functions will be performed by the predominantly white Postal Inspectors—at twice the cost. In other words, the Postal Service intends to replace lower paid Black and Brown employees with higher paid white employees."

"It seems that the Inspection Service trusts its predominantly white criminal investigators with law enforcement authority which is ostensibly unbounded, but the opposite is true for the predominantly Black and Brown postal police officers," Albergo told Daily Kos. "I would argue that PPOs are one of the most successful police forces in America insofar as respecting the rights of citizens. But that doesn't seem to matter to the Agency. Our officers are the wrong color. It's disgraceful."

Respecting the rights of citizens seems not to be the top priority of DeJoy's Postal Service. Neither does delivering the mail. Take this truly horrendous example: It lost the remains of a Holocaust survivor. Eugenie Yuspeh, on of the oldest survivors of the Holocaust, died at 97 in late April in Milwaukie. She was cremated on May 3, and on May 4 her son entrusted her remains to the USPS—the only delivery service that can legally ship cremated human remains. They were to be sent overnight to New Orleans, where the family was holding her funeral. Finally, on May 15—after the intervention of news outlets and members of Congress and postal service officials—the remains were delivered.

As of now, it doesn't look like getting rid of DeJoy is the priority of the board of governors of the Postal Service, even with the new members appointed by President Biden now on board. Both the House and the Senate have introduced legislation to shore up the USPS' finances.

That's a start to restoring it, but it's not enough. DeJoy's plan to slow the mail has to be stopped. In fact, DeJoy has to be stopped. He needs to be fired.

Across the country, Republicans use political power to stamp out classroom discussions of racism.

Arizona Senate Republicans intended their fake “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election to carry costs in voters’ confidence in elections and to undermine the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s win in the state. But it will carry major financial costs for the state as well. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has now told Maricopa County that all of the voting equipment seized for the “audit” should be replaced, due to serious security concerns.

In a Thursday letter to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Hobbs wrote, “I have grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas’ control.” Given that the head of Cyber Ninjas has publicly embraced “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theories and retweeted predictions that recounting Arizona would deliver Donald Trump hundreds of thousands of extra votes, it’s not a stretch to worry about what the company is doing intentionally to the machines—to say nothing of the unintentional damage the documented incompetence of the “auditors” could do.

“The lack of physical security and transparency means we cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them,” Hobbs wrote, which means that the county “should acquire new machines to ensure secure and accurate elections in Maricopa County going forward.”

Hobbs is a Democrat who has been critical of this “audit” from the outset, but the advice to replace the machines doesn’t come only from her. Her office consulted Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, among other experts, and “each unanimously advised that once election officials lose custody and control over voting systems and components, those devices should not be reused in future elections.”

A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency spokesperson confirmed this to The Washington Post, saying “CISA regularly provides security best practices to critical infrastructure partners. If it is determined that the chain of custody of critical systems have been compromised, the safest practice is to decommission and replace those systems. Election officials are best positioned to make that determination for their systems.”

The nine tabulating machines and 385 precinct-based tabulators involved would cost millions of dollars to replace. The county is “working with our attorneys on next steps, costs and what will be needed to ensure only certified equipment is used in Maricopa County,” a spokesperson for the county elections department said, adding, “We will not use any of the returned tabulation equipment unless the county, state and vendor are confident that there is no malicious hardware or software installed on the devices.” It’s not clear if that confidence will be enough for Hobbs, who has warned that, because “no comprehensive methods exist to fully rehabilitate the compromised equipment or provide adequate assurance that they remain safe to use,” her office would consider “decertification proceedings” if there was a move to use the machines.

Republicans in the state Senate intended to do damage with their “audit,” even if they didn’t directly intend to cost Maricopa County millions of dollars in lost equipment. The damage to election integrity and public faith in our democracy is far, far more important—but the financial cost underlines how careless and irresponsible the “audit” backers were willing to be.

So far, the record of “hopes and prayers” is distinctly lacking when it comes to halting mass shootings in America, but Sen. Joe Manchin has made it clear this is his go-to option when dealing with Republican refusal to support an investigation into the events of Jan. 6. 

As Politico reports, Sen. Mitch McConnell is determined to filibuster the bill that just passed the House, even though the bipartisan committee it creates is divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Because in 2021, even when Democrats bend over backwards to be more than fair, that’s not fair enough to suit Republicans. 

McConnell’s filibuster of the proposal—which gained the support of 35 Republican members in the House—makes it clear that GOP senators aren’t worried about the structure of the committee. They’re worried about what the committee might learn. They’re terrified that putting an official bipartisan stamp on any investigation of Jan. 6 means that they won’t be able to simply blame any evidence on Democrats. Republicans are confident that Democrats will not get 10 Republicans to go along and break McConnell’s filibuster, which is a pretty good bet because not a single Republican has so far said they will vote for the commission.

But Manchin has an answer: “So disheartening. It makes you really concerned about our country. I’m still praying we’ve still got ten good solid patriots within that conference.”

The problem is, we don’t. That’s been made blindingly clear over and over as Republicans have realized that after four years of Trump, they have nothing but Trump. That was the deal they made when they first put on those red MAGA hats on Trump’s first day in Washington. They got Trump’s angry base. They surrendered everything that even resembled a principle, position, or plan. 

Coming out of Trump’s time in office, Republicans had a chance. They could have distanced themselves from Trump, and from the toxic mix of white supremacy and ignorance-driven conspiracy theories that fuel his violent supporters. But going into a rebuilding period looked like work. So instead, they took the easier choice. They marched right back down to Mar-a-Lago, kissed the ring, and signed on for a billion years of “whatever Trump wants.” 

Their end of that deal is simple enough: protecting Trump from having to face the truth about his election loss, his multitude of crimes, and anything that resembles the truth. There is no negotiating with Republicans on this issue—on almost every issue—because negotiations require an exchange of value, and there is nothing that Republicans want.

It’s not as if there is some form of commission that would satisfy them. In fact, here’s the big secret: If Democrats were to agree with Republicans that the commission should also investigate everything that happened over the summer related to Black Lives Matter and protests following the police murder of George Floyd, Republicans would still filibuster the commission. Because they know that any actual investigation of those summer events would show that most of the tales of violence were fabricated for a Fox News audience, and nothing that happened was an existential threat to democracy—like Jan. 6.

There is nothing that can get Senate Republicans for vote for the commission, because there is nothing Republicans want except for there to be no commission.

And if guarding Trump’s posterior isn’t reason enough to stick with McConnell’s filibuster, let Richard Burr drive that final nail in the coffin when it comes to any potential for cooperation. Burr was the biggest surprise when it came to Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. But he’s not signing on to investigate events that put his own life at risk. 

And why? “So this myth that you could finish this by December?” said Burr. “You probably couldn’t even get your staff security clearance to read the documents. There’s no question” this would bleed into the midterms.”

Here’s a Republican senator telling everyone flat out that Republicans know that an impartial look into events of Jan. 6 will hurt them in the next election. Because of this, Barr says bluntly that there are “no changes that could be made to the legislation to win his support.”

Manchin’s plea for 10 good patriots among the Republican Party doesn’t have a prayer. But this would be an excellent day to end the filibuster.

Since May 10, the federal government has dispersed $105 billion of the $350 billion included in the American Rescue Plan to state and local governments. The Treasury Department says 1,500 entities have received that funding, the funding Sen. Mitch McConnell adamantly opposed for the entirety of the pandemic, calling it a "blue state bailout."

"This state and local aid program is going to provide transformative funding to communities across the country, and our Treasury team is focused on getting relief to these communities as quickly as possible," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement announcing the progress of the funding thus far. "In the past 11 days, almost a third of the funding has gone out the door, and I'm hopeful communities will be able to rehire teachers and help businesses re-open much sooner than otherwise."

Tens of thousands of state, local, territorial, and tribal governments can request funding. The Treasury Department details the uses of the relief: "Support urgent COVID-19 response efforts to continue to decrease spread of the virus and bring the pandemic under control; Replace lost revenue for eligible state, local, territorial, and Tribal governments to strengthen support for vital public services and help retain jobs; Support immediate economic stabilization for households and businesses; Address systemic public health and economic challenges that have contributed to the inequal impact of the pandemic."

Let's check in on how that "blue state bailout" funding is going so far. Arkansas' Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has $1.57 billion for the state, and at the Arkansas American Rescue Plan Steering Committee Wednesday said that they could do a lot with it, from vaccine distribution to expanding broadband. "It is unique in history. It's a unique opportunity to improve the infrastructure in our state from broadband to health care to cybersecurity, from IT to water projects," Hutchinson said. Arkansas received a total of $5 billion, with the remaining $3.5 billion going to local governments and other projects.

"We need all the help we can get. It wasn't until vaccines rolled out that we rounded the corner. I think money allocated for vaccines, not just vaccines, but the education of the public about the safety of the vaccines, is essential to continuing to solve what has been a really long year-plus problem," Rogers, Arkansas Fire Chief Tom Jenkins, a COVID-19 response force member, said. The steering committee chair, Larry Walther, agreed: "COVID response, decreasing the spread of the virus, getting the pandemic under control, vaccinations, contact tracing, those sort of the things are the number one," Walther said.

This week, Muncie, Indiana, Mayor Dan Ridenour, a Republican, announced the city's preliminary plans for using the first tranche of the $32 million his city is getting. Just over $2.7 million will help the city overcome a budget shortfall; another $2 million will help the city's restaurants recover; $2 million each will help small businesses and nonprofit organizations; and over $4 million will go to hotels. There's also funding for substance abuse and behavioral health treatment, public art, and neighborhood assistance.

In another not-blue state, Iowa, "both the city of Des Moines and Polk County are receiving nearly $100 million in aid, the most of any Iowa city or county. Twelve Iowa cities are receiving aid, and all 99 counties are receiving at least $600,000." That means each county is getting about $200 per resident, based on 2019 census data. The state as a whole is getting $1.48 billion in American Rescue Plan money.

Idaho is going to get $1.1 billion, and state officials have said it will be used to "substantially bolster the state's water, sewer and broadband infrastructure." Alex Adams, Republican Gov. Brad Little's budget chief, touted the five-year window for completing projects with the funding. "That's a huge benefit for a rural state like ours where it's going to take years for some of these large sewer, water and broadband projects to come to fruition," Adams said. Idaho's largest cities in the state are getting a total of $124 million, smaller cities $108 million, and counties another $314 million.

McConnell's home state of Kentucky is getting $2.183 billion. "Our economy is surging and strong," Gov. Andy Beshear (a Democrat) said. "We are in a strong position to sprint out of this pandemic with continued positive economic indicators and with this funding that will create jobs, momentum and a better quality of life in every corner of the commonwealth." The state had already planned to use "use 1.3 million to boost the state’s economy, expanding broadband, delivering clean drinking water and building new schools," and is "expected to create more than 14,500 new jobs." The state's general fund will be shored up.

The Tennessee Comptroller, Jason Mumpower, talked to one county's leaders this week to tout the projects available with the funding. "This could include helping workers, households, small businesses, nonprofits and impacted industries, such as tourism, travel and hospitality industry. Yes. You can use this money to make grants to individuals and small businesses," Mumpower said. "We look out across the landscape of Tennessee on a daily basis and think, 'Where does the greatest financial peril lie?' It lies in water and sewer. It lies underground," Mumpower told the Wilson county officials, who are expecting $28 million in relief funds.

All these Republican states getting all that funding passed solely by Democrats in the Senate, benefitting from the commitment to good governance and acting like they’re goddamned adults like Democrats continue to model.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas mostly spends his days saying foolish and easily debunked things out loud and then tweeting out similar witless things. It’s not a unique stance for a Republican to take these days. In fact, it seems to be the GOP’s concept of a job description now that the party has zero policy ideas. On Thursday, Cruz decided to retweet an edited comparison of a purported 2021 Russian military recruitment commercial and the much-fretted about in the right-wingosphere U.S. military advertisement considered too “woke.” He wrote “Holy crap. Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea....”

What passes as clever in right-wing circles is historically lame, and the intention of Cruz and the person that juxtaposed the videos is to show how soft and weak our country’s recruitment advertisements are in comparison to the very manly Russian recruitment video. One video is shot using single-light sources, with darkness and shadows adding dramatic grittiness, while the other video employs animation and bright colors to promise a more inclusive and positive experience. It’s a recruitment video, to be clear. The tweet was so homophobic, so sexist, and so archaic you wouldn’t believe someone could be so backward as to believe it funny. But of course, we are talking about Ted Cruz, the epitome of Republican “manhood.”

Let me preface this by saying I’m not a fan of military recruitment ad campaigns in general. They give me the jingoistic willies and the use of the military as a funnel for military contractors and siphoning money away from more productive avenues of investment is a never-ending source of consternation for me and other commies. But the idea of a military recruitment video that attempts to attract people who look, and hopefully act, more like people such as Sen. Tammy Duckworth than, say, Sen. Ted Cruz, makes sense. In fact, even if you are going by Cruz’s own old-timey concepts of strength, masculinity, and integrity, Tammy Duckworth is your still your soldier. 

Cruz is a man who let another man accuse Ted’s own father of murder and called Ted’s wife ugly and grotesque. Cruz then made arguably the lamest pantomime of what he clearly considers to be masculinity, which he promptly reversed course on when Donald Trump became president. What makes this cisgender bullshit bit of archaic heteronormativity quadruply pathetic is that the cis male douchebag pushing it so clearly fails in every category that he proclaims to believe proves one’s manhood. This is true of all the right-wing operatives. I’m looking at people like Tucker Carlson, whose shrill cries for things to revert 100 years backward don’t cover up the fact they they are bagmen for wealthier interests.

Forget the fact that the Russian military ad looks like a video game commercial for a World War II-themed game, and forget the fact that the Russian recruitment video is arguably the single most homoerotic thing you’ll see this year. Is Cruz under the impression that modern warfare consists of pushup contests and poorly lit cage matches? The last Republican president’s idea for a military advertisement used Russian military planes instead of American ones, by the by. The Twitterverse made sure Cruz got to hear the sound of a thunderous ratio.

For the old-timey among us.

Remember this?

How about this?

Food for thought.

And simply:

As Pride Month comes closer, you’ll likely see corporations including rainbows in their advertisements and on T-shirts. You might also notice an uptick in LGBTQ-related content in your favorite magazines, newspapers, and even your social media feeds. There’s nothing wrong with any of that—though there is much to be said about how corporations can actually help communities and not just profit off of them—but discussions about LGBTQ+ people should not begin and end in those spaces.

As evidenced in a new report from The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization, LGBTQ+ youth, LGBTQ+ youth of color, and specifically transgender and nonbinary youth have a greater risk of suicide attempts than their peers. That risk increases if they have experienced discrimination. These numbers are always important, but especially so when Republicans are pushing anti-trans legislation after anti-trans legislation, attacking LGBTQ+ youth on all sides. Let’s break down the numbers—including the numbers on what helps support and affirm LGBTQ+ youth—below.

The Trevor Project’s survey includes close to 35,000 respondents from between 13 and 24 years old and was conducted online from Oct. 12 to Dec. 31, 2020. Given that this time period included COVID-19, the survey asked respondents about life amid the pandemic as it tied in to mental health. More than 80% of LGBTQ youth said that the pandemic made their home life more stressful, and 70% reported having “poor” mental health either most of the time, or all of the time, amid the pandemic. Just one-third of respondents said they felt their home was actually affirming of their LGBTQ identity. Almost 60% of transgender and nonbinary respondents said the pandemic impacted their ability to express their gender identity.

About half of respondents said they experienced validation at school. Where did respondents report experiencing the most validation? Online. 71% of transgender and nonbinary respondents said they found gender-affirming places online instead of at school or in their own homes. 

As is true for many across the nation, COVID-19 contributed to food insecurity. 30% of respondents reported food insecurity in the past month—and that 30% of respondents were twice as likely to attempt suicide than LGBTQ+ youth who did not report food insecurity. One-third of Black and Latinx youth reported experiencing food insecurity in the past month, as well as one-half of the Indigenous respondents. 

The survey found that more than 40% of respondents reported seriously considering a suicide attempt in the past year. 21% of Black youth surveyed, as well as 31% of Indigenous youth, 18% of Latinx youth, 12% of Asian and Pacific Islander youth, and 21% of multiracial youth attempted suicide in the past year, compared to 12% of white youth. 

Transgender and nonbinary youth who said people they lived with respect their pronouns reported half the attempted suicide rate of those who did not, according to the survey. Respondents who were able to change their name or sex (or both) on legal documents also reported significantly lower rates of attempted suicide. Mind you, this isn’t the first time a report has backed how important acceptance is for the mental health of LGBTQ youth. 

LGBTQ+ youth who survived conversion therapy reported more than double the rate of attempting suicide than those who were not subjected to the archaic, non-scientific abuse. Transgender and nonbinary youth also reported being subjected to conversion therapy twice as often compared to cisgender respondents. 

More than 30% of LGBTQ youth who reported experiencing discrimination based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, and race reported attempting suicide. 50% of LGBTQ youth of color reported being discriminated against because of their race or ethnicity. This number breaks down to 60% of Asian/Pacific Islander youth and 67% of Black youth. 

Here are five simple ways you can support transgender loved ones, a guide on how to use they/them pronouns, and a general round-up of free mental health and suicide prevention resources. 

Politicians tend to focus on universal background checks. License requirements have more evidence behind them.

After a shooting in America gets national attention, the debate usually centers around a few gun control measures, particularly universal background checks and an assault weapons ban. That’s what happened after the April mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis — with President Joe Biden calling on Congress to pass both measures.

But if America wants to make a real dent in gun violence, it might want to consider another approach: requiring a license to buy and own a firearm.

For one, the evidence on the effects of universal background checks and assault weapons bans is pretty weak. Several studies in recent years have found that universal background checks, at least on their own, don’t seem to have a big effect on gun deaths. Similarly, the research on assault weapons bans, including the national ban that Biden helped pass in 1994, found they have little effect on gun violence, largely because the vast majority of such violence is committed with handguns.

But there’s some solid evidence that a license system reduces gun deaths. A 2018 study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that universal background checks alone correlated with more gun homicides in urban counties, while license systems were associated with fewer gun homicides. Other studies have similarly found that license requirements lead to fewer gun deaths.

One way to explain these findings is that the reach of universal background checks and assault weapons bans is too small. The US already has background checks for most legal gun purchases, and all universal background checks would do is cover the minority of gun purchases not detected in the existing system. An assault weapons ban would cover a minority of guns used in crimes and would probably have loopholes that miss segments of that minority.

A license system, though, is more comprehensive. In Massachusetts, one of the few states with a license system, obtaining a permit requires going through a multi-step process involving interviews with police, background checks, a gun safety training course, and more. Even if a person passes all of that, the local police chief can deny an application anyway. That creates more points at which an applicant can be identified as too dangerous to own a gun; it makes getting and owning a gun harder.

Whatever one makes of all of this, the evidence strongly suggests the license requirement works. Massachusetts, for one, has the lowest rate of gun deaths in the country.

Democrats in Washington, DC, however, seem unenthusiastic. Only a few lawmakers, like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have embraced a license requirement. On the campaign trail, Biden voiced skepticism about the idea, claiming it “will not change whether or not people buy what weapons — what kinds of weapons they can buy, where they can use them, how they can store them.”

Public opinion can’t be blamed here. A recent poll by Data for Progress found that 69 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans and gun owners, support a license system — more support than an assault weapons ban received in the same survey.

Now, the reality is Democrats are unlikely to do anything big on guns in the coming years, given their razor-thin margins of control in the House and Senate. But if Biden and other party leaders want to raise the issue of gun violence, they might as well focus on the policies with the strongest evidence behind them — especially if those same policies happen to have the public’s support.

It’s not clear if universal background checks and an assault weapons ban meet those criteria. But requiring a license to buy and own a gun does.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hit is now poised to be the movie of the summer.

Every reaction to a work of art is always linked to the moment in which we see it. How it came to exist in the first place, and what the world is like when we view it, matters. So when a movie first hits theaters, it’s ridiculous to pretend it can be evaluated from some objective, context-neutral vantage point. With the perfectly pitched, spectacularly revealing, sensational screen adaptation of In the Heights, I wouldn’t even try.

One of the first major films to be delayed out of its summer 2020 slot, the long-awaited release of In the Heights will always be tied up with the 21st century’s first world-altering pandemic. The musical’s creator and composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, briefly campaigned for the movie to bypass theaters altogether and debut on streaming platforms, thinking it might be, in essence, a morale boost for audiences stuck at home. But he ultimately didn’t win out.

Now he says it was probably for the best. Instead of creeping solely onto people’s televisions, In the Heights is exploding into reopening cinemas and onto HBO Max at the same time — another pandemic-era innovation on Warner Bros.’ part — and unless my spidey sense has gone wonky during the last year, I think it’s poised to be a massive hit.

The musical on which the movie is based opened on Broadway in March 2008, in the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency; it closed during the Obama administration; the movie’s landing in theaters post-Trump. For some shows, that wouldn’t mean much. For In the Heights, it does.

In the Heights is a tale of dreamers (and, in the movie version, DREAMers), a mostly Latino community in upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. It’s set during a very hot summer when a blackout occurs and the community starts to lose faith in those dreams.

Until recently, a movie like this would have been a huge gamble for a major Hollywood studio, largely because the finished film doesn’t have obviously “bankable” stars in the lead roles — which for most of Hollywood history has meant white stars or, at least, stars who movie executives think white audiences will recognize. Even a few years ago, Universal — which had originally optioned the project, but eventually dropped it — wanted Shakira or Jennifer Lopez for a lead role. No matter that the Broadway show won four Tony awards, including Best Musical. Broadway is one thing; Hollywood is a whole different world.

The movie languished in development hell at Universal, so Miranda picked up a biography of Alexander Hamilton in an airport, and history moved again. Hamilton became a sensation, joining a larger movement of pop culture phenomena like Black Panther and Get Out, which shattered the notion that only stories about white people were “universal.” In early 2017, once Hamilton was a hit, the Weinstein Company signed on to push In the Heights to the big screen.

That Weinstein Company.

In the wake of the explosive Harvey Weinstein stories that emerged in October 2017 — and launched their own industry-shaking moment — Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes, who wrote the musical’s book, got the project back from the Weinstein Company and regained full control. Not long afterward, Warner Bros. successfully courted them for the suddenly buzzy adaptation, which was eventually slated for a June 2020 release.

It was a smart move, smarter than Warner Bros. could have ever anticipated. The story that In the Heights tells is particularly well-suited for a moment when it feels to many like the world is starting to reopen. Set mostly on a “block that was disappearing” amid ubiquitous gentrification (per the film’s opening lines), it’s the tale of a bodega owner named Usnavi. Usnavi came to the US from the Dominican Republican when he was a kid and has not-so-little dreams of going back and running his father’s old restaurant. On Broadway, Usnavi’s role was originated by Miranda; in the movie he’s played by Anthony Ramos, whose beauty, charm, and easy grace are a revelation even if you’ve previously seen him onstage and screen. (Ramos’s credits include playing John Laurens and Philip Hamilton in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton, and Ramon in the 2018 A Star Is Born.) He’s a movie star, through and through.

For now, Usnavi dreams of the beach but works with his teenage cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV) at the store, supplying the neighborhood with cold drinks, light and sweet coffee, lottery tickets, and anything else one might need on an ordinary day in New York City. He lives with Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz, reprising her Tony-nominated role from the Broadway show, which she played for its entire run). She is his surrogate grandmother and plays that role for most of the neighborhood’s young people, too.

Usnavi has long been in love with Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who works at the local beauty salon but dreams of moving downtown and pursuing her goal of becoming a fashion designer. Another young woman, Nina (Leslie Grace), is the daughter of the widowed neighborhood car service owner Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits). She’s the local kid who made good, home for the summer from Stanford, where she’s on the verge of dropping out. Her high school sweetheart Benny (Corey Hawkins) works for the car service and dreams of taking it over someday.

Warner Bros.

There are a host of other characters in the film, too. Miranda has a small part as Piragua Guy, dishing out flavored ices and dueling playfully with the guy who owns the ice cream truck. That guy’s played by Chris Jackson, who played Benny on Broadway and later, George Washington in Hamilton.

Hudes adapted her book for the stage show into the screenplay, updating it here and there, cutting some storylines, adding references to undocumented people and the fight for DREAMers, pulling the tale out of its 2008 origins and into today. Miranda made a handful of changes to the music as well (including tweaking a line about former President Donald Trump). In the Heights is still about a community that knows trouble going through a three-day blackout in the heat of summer. Those who’ve seen it onstage will find a different but familiar story — now with an expanded sensibility.

What cinema affords so readily to its storytellers is the ability to visually build a full, richly layered world in a way you really can’t do onstage. In the Heights director Jon M. Chu, hot off his Crazy Rich Asians success, leans into the possibilities. Now, Washington Heights is a character, not just a few buildings. Its residents are singing and dancing on the street corners, in the alleys, in living rooms, in salsa clubs. The film is an intoxicating capture of both a culture and a city. No wonder Warner Bros. is premiering the film — on the opening night of the Tribeca Film Festival — in the actual Heights.

The nervy electricity and joy of the film, arriving at this moment in time, are an unbeatable combo. It’s hard to imagine a movie-hungry audience returning to the theater and not being swept away. (It was my own first movie back, and I sure was.)

Can I find stuff to criticize about In the Heights? Absolutely. At times, I found myself a little frustrated with Chu’s directing choices. He’s trying to make an intimate and personal film, one that really feels like a movie and not like a stage production adapted for the screen. That means getting up close to actors and frequently cutting between shots, which is not in itself a terrible choice. But it can come at the expense of letting the film breathe and feel like a movie musical. Old-school musicals from Hollywood’s Golden Age — think Singin’ in the Rain, or West Side Story, toward which this movie makes subtle gestures — often rest more on wide shots that let us watch the dancers do their thing. At times here I wanted to yell “HOLD STILL!” so I could see amazing performers — and they are all truly fantastic — do their thing.

But Chu at least knows he’s doing it, and he sometimes lets the camera swing back so we can indulge in the effervescence. One show-stopping scene, shot at the Highbridge Pool, knowingly draws on lavish synchronized water numbers from Busby Berkeley musicals of the 1930s; others lean on the vibrance of dance and cultural traditions from the various Latin American cultures that make up the neighborhood. I don’t have those roots, but even I can tell there’s enormous specificity and care in the crafting of In the Heights’ world.

Macall Polay/Warner Bros.

It does feel a bit as if In the Heights tends toward elision when it comes to the reason the block is “disappearing”: the gentrification creeping into the barrio, which drives the local hair salon up to the Bronx and manifests in a new neighborhood dry cleaner that charges a whopping $9 per shirt. Those forces are definitely present in the film. In the first number, Usnavi sings, “Our neighbors started packin’ up and pickin’ up / And ever since, the rents went up / It’s gotten mad expensive, but we live with just enough.” But an audience that’s not attuned to gentrification patterns might miss them and read what’s happening in the Heights as a natural shift rather than one rooted in the broader economics of the city.

The neighborhood people know what’s really going on, though. So in a sense, that says everything about the movie and the show more broadly: It doesn’t feel the need to hold the hands of an audience of outsiders. Spanish is sprinkled throughout. The lyrics move fast and fluidly. You need to pay attention, and if you don’t catch everything, well, that’s more on you than on the film. In a movie industry that’s proved resistant for so long to anything that doesn’t put white culture at the center, it’s exhilarating to watch, no matter where individual audience members fall.

It is still, in the end, a story about the details and moments that make up the texture of life, and the ways the foods and items and people and dances and stories that we make together fill our souls. That specificity and Miranda’s electrifying music made In the Heights a surprise hit on Broadway, and they’re what give this adaptation its heartbeat. The film is a beautiful, stirring story about people, as Abuela Claudia puts it, who are “asserting our dignity in small ways,” making sure “little details that tell the world we are not invisible” get their chance on center stage.

And, of course, it’s arriving in summer 2021 — a time when, in America at least, it’s starting to feel like the days of an isolating, brutalizing pandemic are waning. A lot has happened in America, and to the communities in the barrio, since In the Heights’ Broadway debut, its struggles to make it to the big screen, and its delayed release. Midway through the film, when a blackout hits the neighborhood, the characters sing “we are powerless,” and it stings, no matter who or where you are.

So if In the Heights hits different this summer than it might have last year, or 10 years ago, it’s because we’re watching it in a different world. The chorus of “Paciencia Y Fe” — patience and faith — has a different resonance. The need to assert dignity in small ways, to actively not disappear, feels new. That’s the mark of a vital work of art: that it has something new to say each time someone is willing to listen. I suspect we’ll be listening to In the Heights for a long, long while.

In the Heights opens in theaters and on HBO Max on June 11.

As dating and marriage evolve, so is the way couples are splitting finances.

Part of The Fairness Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

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Melinda Fakuade is a fellow for The Goods by Vox. She has written for The Cut, The Outline, Rolling Stone, and MEL Magazine, among many other outlets.

Kazimir Lee is an immigrant, a parent, and a degenerate. They won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Erotica, and their work has appeared in Slate, the New Inquiry, the Nib, and Oh Joy Sex Toy.

["Despite Chief Justice Marshall’s legacy as one of the nation’s most significant U.S. Supreme Court justices, the newly discovered research regarding his role as a slave trader, slave owner of hundreds of slaves, pro-slavery jurisprudence, and racist views render him a highly inappropriate namesake for the Law School.”]

The John Marshall Law School is no more. The University of Illinois at Chicago, which recently acquired the formerly-private law school, has approved the name-change.

The vote comes after months of review by a task force that gathered input from students, faculty, staff, and alumni, conducted research and proposed principles to guide the institution in evaluating a potential name change.

The task force report noted, "that despite Chief Justice Marshall's legacy as one of the nation's most significant U.S. Supreme Court justices, the newly discovered research regarding his role as a slave trader, slave owner of hundreds of slaves, pro-slavery jurisprudence, and racist views render him a highly inappropriate namesake for the Law School."

"The university has arrived at this new name following a thorough and carefully studied process that included input from all corners of the institution and beyond, considered issues of racial injustice and aimed to ensure that our university continues to be a place where diversity, inclusion and equal opportunity are supported and advanced," said UIC Chancellor Michael Amiridis.

John Marshall has officially been canceled. The greatest jurist in American history has been summarily excommunicated. Inclusion demands exclusion. These purges will not stop with slavery. None of us are safe.

I previously wrote about efforts to cancel Marshall here, here, and here.

As one more week elapses without a plan from Senate Republicans, they're having a hard time avoiding being the butt of a new round of "infrastructure week" jokes. Like their former president for whom it was perpetually infrastructure week, Senate Republicans just can't deliver. That's becoming fodder for headlines like this one, from Business Insider: "Biden gave Republicans a Tuesday deadline for an infrastructure proposal. They missed it."

"The meeting came and went between this group and Biden, Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg, and Commerce Sec. Gina Raimondo and a new plan wasn't introduced," the news report states, "with [GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito] telling reporters after the meeting that there was 'progress, but we still got a ways to go.'" That didn't stop Capito from trying to put the onus back on the White House. "I think they're [Buttigieg and Raimondo] digesting what we proposed, and I think the plan is for them to react to that," Capito said. By all accounts, what was proposed was essentially what they've been proposing for a month.

Since they offered up their vague, obscurely funded plan nearly a month ago, President Joe Biden has been giving them every opportunity to do better. They just keep failing. They've even been shown up by—get this—House Republicans. Yes, those people managed to come up with a proposal even while being consumed with their internecine warfare and preschool-worthy tantrums.

Granted, it's a pretty crappy plan, but it exists and in fact "directs historic levels of funding to highways, bridges and transit systems." That would be $400 billion over five years devoted entirely to fossil fuel-dependent technology, but it does have specifics. Elements of it could end up in a final bill, but since it leaves out broadband, water projects, airports, mass transit, and all of the elements of the Biden plan for a sustainable 21st century, that would be just a few elements. But, hell, they committed to something.

Meanwhile, the frustration among Democrats with the Senate Republicans' game is increasing.

Those games include their ridiculous threat to be really, really Republican when they get the chance again. They'll—prepare yourself for a shock—lower taxes on the rich again if Democrats try to raise them. Man, these Senate Republicans have gotten lazy. They can't even come up with a novel threat.

Nor can they avoid reality: "A Quinnipiac University poll conducted last month found that support for Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan grows by 9 points if it is attached to a corporate tax increase. By 2-to-1 ratios, respondents said they support higher taxes on corporations and on people earning more than $400,000 a year." So they really think taxes are what they'll win this fight on? As Dan Pfeiffer, former top adviser to President Barack Obama, says: "If Republicans want to run for election by doubling down on more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, more power to them. The 2017 tax bill is the single worst polling piece of legislation that I have seen in my career. Good luck running on it again."

They do want to do that, apparently. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas boasts: "They're the party of big government. We're the party of lower taxes and more freedom. That's kind of the problem with doing business this way on a purely partisan basis." Cornyn needs to check in back home, where his "lower taxes and more freedom" message has been lost on the state's truckers. That's because Cornyn's answer to infrastructure funding is a big tax the trucking industry. "Senator Cornyn's vehicle miles traveled tax is an assault on the trucking industry and the more than 735,000 hard working Texans who keep the Texas economy strong," the Texas Trucking Association said.

Meanwhile, Capito is making the rounds and pretending like they've offered up something real. She told Bloomberg that the Senate Republicans are "moving up" from their initial $568 billion offer, but won't say how much. She said they're also open to Biden's proposal to fund electric vehicle charging stations in the package, but hasn't said if they will still insist that electric vehicle owners have to pay additional fees and that "nothing is off the table at this point with regard to funding mechanisms," except that the White House and Biden have insisted repeatedly that user fees are off the table. Sounds like perhaps she has a selective hearing problem.

She also, bizarrely, claimed that "she expects the White House to respond to the GOP ideas, hopefully Thursday or Friday." Meanwhile in the real world, Biden has been touting electric vehicles and giving Republicans more rope: “We believe we can find a bipartisan deal on infrastructure. And we look forward to hearing more details of their proposal," Biden said, adding that he expected to see that proposal "today," meaning Tuesday. He didn't.

"But we've made one thing clear," Biden added. "We'll compromise, but doing nothing is not an option. Doing nothing is not an option. The world is not waiting, I say for a second time." Doing nothing is all Republicans seem to be good at, and the patience of congressional Democrats is growing thinner by the day.

The “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 votes demanded by state Senate Republicans is the current leading edge of a major war in the Republican Party. Maricopa County’s Republican officials are furious about the conspiracy theory-driven, mistake-riddled “audit,” and it’s broken out into truly vicious fighting, with Republican state senators and the chair of the Arizona Republican Party having called for the arrest of anyone who stands in the way of the effort.

All this in defense of what a post-election audit expert said is “not an audit” after serving as an observer and seeing both sloppiness and conspiracy theories at play. But it’s not just Arizona. Just as Trump supporters spent the months immediately following the 2020 election bringing dozens of lawsuits aimed at overturning the result or at least casting it into doubt, now they’re frantically pushing recounts and audits done by their preferred list of vendors, where loyalty to Trump trumps experience at election audits.

In San Luis Obispo County, California, Trumpists are aggressively questioning the use of Dominion voting machines based on the widespread and baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion machines switching votes. That’s not the only conspiracy theory at play, either: One woman asked if the county’s top election official, a third-generation Chinese American man, is “in any way in relationship to the Chinese Communist Party?”

The furor in San Luis Obispo County is instructive because there is no reason to believe that anything was amiss with the count—a sample recount conducted last fall found just a two-vote difference from the machine count. In other areas, though, Trump supporters have seized on vote-counting problems that were discovered and fixed to insist that there are more problems just waiting to be discovered ... if only the right conspiracy theorists could be brought in to find them.

In Windham, New Hampshire, a problem with the count in a multiway race for state representative has led to an effort by Trump supporters to force the town to hire J. Hutton Pulitzer—who has worked on the Maricopa situation with a specialty in finding fake ballots by examining the paper they’re printed on—to audit the votes. At a meeting at which the town selectmen instead chose a qualified election auditor, hundreds of people showed up, drowning out the meeting with “stop the steal” chants and standing and turning their backs when the decision was made official. The chair of the board of selectmen characterized their goal: “If there’s an error found in the machines, you could extrapolate that to all the machines in New Hampshire. Then, it could go nationwide.”

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski lives in Windham, and Trump has weighed in to support “the great Patriots of Windham” in their attempt to find “the truth on the massive Election Fraud which took place in New Hampshire and the 2020 Presidential Election.”

There are also efforts to get Maricopa County-style audits in two Michigan counties won by Trump with more than 60% of the vote. In Antrim County, an election night error that was quickly caught and fixed has been offered as the reason for continuing suspicion, despite Trump’s win there. A lawsuit trying to force an audit has been dismissed, but the effort continues. And in Cheboygan County, a lawyer who tried last fall to overturn the state election results is trying to get a Maricopa County-style audit started. In both counties, election officials are Republicans.

”If you’re listening to these people, you’ll never learn the truth,” said Sheryl Guy, Antrim’s Republican county clerk in Antrim. “It’s very frustrating and exhausting, and there have been moments of being fearful.”

“My canvass board certified my November election,” said Cheboygan County’s Karen Brewster. “There weren’t any problems at all. I think it just had to do with the allegations from Antrim County. That’s what sparked this.”

But exactly these kinds of local Republican officials are coming under attack by their fellow Republicans because they stand by the integrity of the elections they conducted and reject conspiracy theories. The House Republican vote to kick Rep. Liz Cheney out of leadership for her insistence that the election was not stolen and the insurrection was wrong has gotten a lot of attention, rightly. But the civil war in the Republican Party goes down to the local level, too, pitting Trump loyalists against Republicans who have any values beyond Trump.

If one party is abandoning democracy, then protecting it in a bipartisan way might not be an option.

NEW YORK — Andrew Yang’s grip on the New York City mayor’s race continued to loosen this week, as rival Eric Adams maintained a competitive presence in the polls and Yang’s command of local issues was repeatedly called into question.

The former presidential candidate flubbed a question about homeless shelters during a candidate forum Thursday morning, one day after he exhibited a lack of understanding about MTA operations. Later on Thursday, he seemed stumped by the mention of a controversial law governing the discipline records of police and correction officers.

During a discussion hosted by shelter provider Win, Yang vowed to create residential space specifically for survivors of domestic violence. The problem with his answer is such facilities already exist.

“One thing that I think would be extraordinarily helpful is to have specific shelters for victims of domestic violence, who are often fleeing from an abusive partner,” Yang said during the forum. “It’s a distinct population with distinct needs, and they should have separate [facilities].”

At that point moderator Courtney Gross, a NY1 reporter, corrected him and noted the city already provides those types of shelter.

Yang then tried to walk back his comments, suggesting he knew that but wanted an expansion of the facilities. “Oh, no, they — of course they do exist, so that’s one aspect of something that we should be increasing capacity of,” he said.

His campaign website calls for increased services for survivors of domestic violence.

“Domestic violence is one of the main drivers of women and children ending up in shelters. However, only 23% of the domestic violence victims are in specialized DV shelters. The overwhelming majority are in the regular shelter system and are not receiving appropriate services,” the site reads.

His rivals pounced when Gross tweeted the exchange.

“It turns out not only is Andrew Yang underprepared to be mayor of New York City but, apparently he's underprepared for every forum, debate, and press conference he steps into,” Adams spokesperson Madia Coleman tweeted.

Candidate Scott Stringer, the city comptroller who has been trailing Yang in the polls, tweeted: “To be this ignorant about something this important is yet another reason @AndrewYang is not fit to be mayor. These shelters exist. The next mayor needs a plan to make them more accessible.”

Later in the day, Yang appeared confused when asked a question about 50-a, the name of the statute that previously shielded law enforcement officers’ discipline records from public disclosure. The state Legislature repealed the law last year, sparking a lawsuit from police unions.

“Do you agree with the repeal of 50-a” he was asked during a police-focused campaign stop in Brooklyn Thursday.

“The repeal of 50-a,” Yang repeated, leading a reporter to ask, “Do you know what 50-a is?”

“This is not the — it’s not the mandatory interview of the—” he began, at which point City Council candidate Edwin Raymond, who stood beside Yang at the podium, clarified the reference.

Yang then replied, “I think that we should get more transparency in terms of police officers and their records and one of the concerns is that if you have officers that do something wrong, like there are times when unfortunately they end up turning up in other environments, in other departments.”

On Wednesday the early frontrunner in the race, who prides himself on a command of facts and figures, was asked by a reporter if he knew about the debt of the MTA — a hurdle he’d have to address to achieve his plan to take over the city’s subways and buses, which are now effectively controlled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“The MTA doesn’t break its numbers out that cleanly, but you’re looking at revenues around eight or nine million dollars and an operating deficit of around three-and-a-half,” Yang said.

Yang likely meant to say "billions," but the MTA dedicates an entire page of its website to the debt, and the state comptroller issues an annual report on it.

He then incorrectly intimated that not all MTA bridges are within the city — only the Port Authority, a bistate agency, has control over interstate bridges.

“Andrew’s positions on issues of police transparency, accountability and public safety are clear as day to anyone who’s willing to listen,” campaign spokesperson Jake Sporn said. “New Yorkers aren’t going to be distracted from the fact that he’s as pragmatic, progressive and thoughtful on these issues as anyone who’s ever competed for this job.

“Whether he recites statutory code numbers and letters is besides the point to anyone else who is listening,” he added.

Jonathan Custodio contributed to this report.

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The answer won't give you a great deal of hope.