James.galbraith

Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene were about to kick off a road show, traveling the nation to attack “the radical left” and insufficiently extremist Republicans. And then the other shoe dropped in the ever-developing scandal around Gaetz’s apparent habit of paying for sex, in one case with a minor.

That scandal has been developing for a month, starting with the revelation that Gaetz is under federal investigation as part of a broader sex trafficking investigation involving former Seminole County, Florida, tax collector Joel Greenberg, who is under indictment already. Gaetz initially tried to deflect by claiming his family was being extorted in a bizarre scheme involving a hostage in Iran who is generally believed to be dead—a claim that Gaetz mostly moved on from when it became clear that no one thought it exonerated him. Revelation after revelation followed: Gaetz had showed nude pictures of women to fellow members of Congress. As a Florida legislator, he participated in a sex game in which points were awarded for sex with different categories of women, including interns. He took a trip to the Bahamas paid for in part by a “marijuana entrepreneur” … and part of what was paid for may have included women.

So we’ve already heard a lot. Really, we’ve probably heard more than enough about Matt Gaetz and sex, because even before you get to the predatory behavior, just … ick. But there is more.

Gaetz typically didn’t pay women for sex directly—instead, he paid Greenberg, who then paid the women. That means Greenberg knows a lot, and since Greenberg is facing significant legal trouble, he appears to be motivated to talk. But before he started talking to the federal government, Greenberg talked to Roger Stone in late 2020 in hopes that Stone could convince Donald Trump to give him a last-minute pardon.

Greenberg talked to Stone a lot, and The Daily Beast has the receipts in the form of Signal chats between Greenberg and Stone, and a lengthy confession letter Greenberg wrote for Stone to use in his efforts with Trump. Of note, Gaetz had at one point posted a social media picture of himself, Stone, and Greenberg.

In the letter, of which The Daily Beast has multiple drafts, Greenberg describes learning through “an anonymous tip” that a woman—well, as it turned out, girl—in his and Gaetz’s sex trafficking scheme was 17 years old.

“Immediately I called the congressman and warned him to stay clear of this person and informed him she was underage,” Greenberg wrote. “He was equally shocked and disturbed by this revelation.”

They were so shocked and disturbed that they stayed away from the girl only until after she turned 18. She was one of the women paid by Greenberg immediately after Gaetz sent him $900 through Venmo with the note “hit up [her nickname].”

In his communications with Stone, Greenberg was hanging his argument for a pardon in part on the threat to Gaetz. “And while I have not had any communication with MG, he absolutely has to know that the sex charge they hit me with would be what they would hit him with,” he wrote in one of the Signal messages. “All he has to is explain to POTUS the situation and his exposure, and it would be very easy to do.”

”MG is like a son to POTUS. MG is like a brother to me.”

Well, we know how far “like a son” goes to Donald Trump, and now we know how far “like a brother” goes to Matt Gaetz. And to Greenberg, who seems to have been screenshotting his Signal chats with Stone before they could disappear, in just one of a series of insurance policies he set up for himself should the pardon effort fail, as it did.

Gaetz is defiant and is attempting to remain a significant figure in the Republican Party, as his planned tour with Greene shows. But even before the investigation into him became public, it was serious enough that then-Attorney General William Barr was reportedly taking steps to avoid being photographed near him. Attacking the media will only go so far if and when he faces federal charges.

I looked for a country that got the economic response to Covid-19 right. I found the US.

This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here.

Jasmine Holloway knows it sounds odd. But March 2021, when she and the rest of America were enduring the 13th month of a brutal pandemic, may have been the best month of her life.

When the pandemic hit, Holloway was working at a day care center, taking night classes at the University of the District of Columbia, and raising her three kids.

Initially, the lockdown was a blessing: Suddenly her kids — ages 14, 5, and 3 — were at home where she could watch them more easily. Her 14-year-old, who had been arrested in a particularly rough period shortly before lockdown, found the time especially beneficial. “All the bad influences he was doing before, it stopped because the world stopped,” Jasmine recalls.

But the juggling act eventually took its toll on Holloway. It got so stressful that a bald spot began to grow on the back of her head.

Then more terrible news: In mid-February, a few days before her birthday, she lost her job.

But instead of hitting rock bottom, something strange happened: Holloway started making more money. First, she was able to easily enroll in food stamps and DC’s cash assistance program. Getting unemployment insurance took a bit more work, but once she signed up, she started getting weekly checks larger than the paychecks she was getting from the day care center, thanks to the $300-per-week unemployment bonus — that is, $300 on top of the typical amount — included in President Joe Biden’s relief plans.

There was also a one-time check for $5,600 — $1,400 for her and each of her three kids —as part of the most recent round of stimulus. And another $850 a month, $300 each for her 3- and 5-year-old and $250 for her 14-year-old, is coming, thanks to the fully refundable child tax credit Biden enacted.

For Holloway, who spent some time in foster care growing up and currently lives in DC’s Ward 8, a historically disadvantaged area east of the Anacostia River, the pandemic wound up leading to a period of unprecedented prosperity. The pandemic relief “has enabled me to do things I’ve only dreamed about doing for my family,” she says. “I’m getting passports for my children so that when the world opens back up we can travel.” She wants to take them to a Nickelodeon resort in the Dominican Republic. At the very least, she wants them to experience flying on a plane. She’s socking away the weekly $300 bonus for a rainy day. The bald spot on her head has completely grown back.

“Before me being let go, I thought, ‘I need to find other ways to make money, to get to my goals fast,’” Holloway recalls. “Never did I think me being laid off would be what did it.”

Holloway is not alone. For millions of Americans, the pandemic has been a nightmare. But many have also found that the country’s safety net actually caught them.

In March 2020, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law the CARES Act, which sent out no-strings-attached checks to the vast majority of Americans for the first time. The bill also dramatically increased the generosity of unemployment insurance, making many workers whole and, for some months, leaving most workers (including Holloway) with more money than they would have earned at their employer. It paused evictions and created a new near-universal child tax credit reaching the poorest families with children.

Then lawmakers did it again in December 2020, passing another bill that offered bonus unemployment benefits and one-time $600-per-person checks.

Under President Biden, the government passed yet another bill, with one-time $1,400-per-person checks, another bonus unemployment measure, and hundreds of billions in relief money for state and local governments.

The result? The poverty rate in the US fell in early 2020. The government did so much to assist its citizens that many people were left financially better off than before the pandemic.

As an American who supports large government intervention to help those in need, I’m used to envying other nations’ governments. I envy European universal health care systems, France’s crèches for child care, and Finland’s success at reducing homelessness.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

When my editors asked me to write a story for our Pandemic Playbook series on the country that I thought “got Covid-19 right” economically, I immediately looked abroad. I spent a few weeks researching and writing about Japan, which has kept unemployment low and spent big to fight the economic downturn.

But as I was working on my Japan article, the US adopted Biden’s American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion behemoth of a bill. With that step coming after the two Trump relief bills, the US just about matched Japan’s spending to fight the downturn. And as I looked into the details, it became impossible to deny that the US spent the money better.

To be sure, it’s not as simple as that. Would I rather have been in Japan for the outbreak or in the US? In public health terms, the answer was obvious: Japan has kept the virus under control vastly better. But in economic terms, the answer was also obvious: The US was more generous.

The comparison seemed even more favorable as I looked to Europe, which botched the virus on a public health level in a manner similar to the US, and offered less extraordinary support to its citizens. Most European countries have stronger safety nets to start with, but they largely didn’t use the pandemic as an occasion to strengthen them. The US did.

No country handled the economic shock of Covid-19 perfectly. Every country, the US included, made mistakes, sometimes grave mistakes. But a detailed comparison suggests that the US had the strongest economic response to the pandemic, in terms of providing income to its citizens during lockdown and ensuring a strong, rapid recovery as the economy began to reopen.

“The US will come out of this economically better than any country that was similarly affected by the virus,” Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard and former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, says.

The US passed some of the biggest Covid-19 relief packages in the world — and targeted those who needed the most help

When it became clear in March 2020 that the coronavirus would necessitate lockdowns across the world, policymakers immediately saw the event as the biggest economic crisis since the 2008 recession, or perhaps even since the Great Depression.

Because of the need for social-distancing procedures, businesses like restaurants, sports arenas, and movie theaters would need to be shuttered. But the hit was much broader. Orders of raw materials from metal to soybeans collapsed in March. The worst week for new unemployment claims in American history, in fall 1982, saw 680,000 people claim benefits for the first time. The week ending March 21, 2020, saw 3.3 million, more than four times the previous record. And the weekly tally stayed above 1 million for months.

This was an economic crisis of unprecedented speed and ferocity, one that brought predictions of enduring Great Depression-scale unemployment for months or years to come.

In the US, at least, that prediction (made by, among other people, me) seems to have been wrong. The country is recovering quickly from the economic shock of the pandemic.

And we did so despite botching our response to the crisis itself. Using aggressive social distancing, testing, and contact tracing to contain the virus — as nations like South Korea and Australia did early on — had huge economic benefits, and the US’s failure to contain its outbreak had enormous economic costs.

But many other large, rich countries also botched their response to the pandemic. If you compare the US to the five most populous countries in Europe, it fares roughly the same in terms of deaths from Covid-19. Germany does better, but the UK, Italy, Spain, and France are right there in the muck with the US.

If this past year is any indication, countries are not always going to be able to contain future pandemics. If and when that happens, they need to be able to manage the economic fallout.

A blunt, but useful, way to see if they managed the fallout successfully is to measure how much countries spent on stimulus measures. Pinpointing this number is tricky, and reputable researchers have produced a number of different estimates.

Christina Romer, a former chief economist to President Obama now at UC Berkeley and an expert on downturns, put together her estimates in a recent paper presented at a conference hosted by the Brookings Institution. She only looked at “early packages,” defined as stimulus passed before July 31, 2020. The US dominated the list, outstripping every peer country in the scale of its response, with only New Zealand really coming close.

Another estimate, this time drawing from International Monetary Fund data, comes from economists Ceyhun Elgin, Gokce Basbug, and Abdullah Yalaman. Their estimates include policies through March 2021, which takes into account the $1.9 trillion Biden package. Here, too, the US spending surpasses its European peers, though the authors estimate that Japan spent vastly more, around half of its 2020 GDP.

But the Japan figure is arguably misleading; Peterson Institute for International Economics researchers Madi Sarsenbayev and Takeshi Tashiro have argued that the Japanese government has recategorized ordinary spending as Covid-19 relief, and that an apples-to-apples comparison would show US spending of 27.09 percent of GDP as compared to 29 percent in Japan.

Regardless of the numbers you use, the US is near the top when comparing countries for the scale of their stimulus responses. What makes the US response more unusual is its focus on spending to increase the incomes of its residents, as opposed to backstopping businesses.

This shows up in data on disposable income, a component of GDP that measures the money available to spend by individuals and households. Almost all rich countries measure this quarterly, enabling us to see what happened to individual incomes across countries during the crisis. In the US, government support enabled a surge in disposable income in the second quarter of 2020. In other large rich nations, like France and Germany, it fell sharply (though Canada’s rose a similar amount as the US).

The US’s drawdown of stimulus in the third quarter caused the increase in disposable incomes to shrink, but it was still well ahead of its peer nations.

So the US spent big, and individuals and households reaped a windfall. But simply spending big isn’t good on its own. It’s valuable if spending enables a country to catch up to its economic potential and return to its trajectory pre-Covid-19.

That’s precisely what the stimulus measures — particularly Biden’s March stimulus — did.

Brookings Institution economists Wendy Edelberg and Louise Sheiner estimated the likely trajectories of US GDP with and without the $1.9 trillion injection. Without it, they estimated that the US would not return to pre-pandemic economic trends until after 2023 — akin to the long, slow recovery that followed the 2008 financial crisis. But with the Biden package, they project the US will be back on trend by the end of this year.

The effects of the stimulus are, of course, debated. The sheer scale of the stimulus drew substantial criticism from deficit hawks, who worried about the long-term cost of adding $1.9 trillion to the national debt. As it stands, this does not appear to be a major problem; investors are buying up 30-year federal bonds at real interest rates near zero, meaning the government can, in principle, delay paying the bill on the stimulus package for three decades without paying any interest.

But it’s striking that the most common critique from economists is not that the stimulus is inadequate for combating the downturn, but that it’s too much. Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, has warned that Biden could push spending so high that businesses start running out of the capacity to produce goods and services, sparking inflation.

By contrast, few other countries seem to be aggressive enough to risk overheating. The downturns in America’s peer nations have tended to be deeper, and the recoveries slower. The IMF estimates that the US lost 3.5 percent of GDP in 2020. Compare that to an average of 6.6 percent across the eurozone, including 8.2 percent in France, 11.1 percent in Spain, and 9.9 percent in the UK. These countries did not just suffer more than the US, they suffered two to three times as much. Canada and Japan, at 5.4 and 4.8 percent GDP loss respectively, were not as bad as their European counterparts, but still worse than the US.

Put it all together and the GDP picture in the US is much, much better than its peer nations.

“America is going to win this the way we won World War II”

Furman, the former Obama economist, has some misgivings about specific aspects of the US fiscal response to the pandemic. He thinks the US could have done roughly as well while spending a bit less money. But that might just be part of the reason the US succeeded during this crisis.

“America is going to win this the way we won World War II,” he told me. “Everything was larger than it needs to be, duplicative, just throwing lots of stuff at [the wall]. ... But you won the war.”

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the fiscal programs to assist Americans during 2020 and 2021 were excessive or merely generous. What’s inarguable, though, is that they were massive, and enough of them worked to make the overall economic response incredibly strong.

The most distinctive, and easiest to compare, part of America’s response was the stimulus checks. The US government has by this point sent out three rounds of “economic impact payments,” or stimulus checks. The March/April 2020 round was $1,200 per adult and $500 per child dependent; the December 2020 round was $600 per adult or child dependent; the March 2021 round was $1,400 per adult and child, including adult dependents with disabilities and college students.

For a family of four like Jasmine Holloway’s, those checks added up to $10,700 over the course of a year — a life-changing sum of money.

This was a remarkable aspect of the US response for two reasons. First, it had never happened before in American history. In 2001 and 2008, President George Bush sent stimulus checks to American households, but the policy deliberately excluded the poorest Americans. Meanwhile, both the Trump and Biden checks were designed so that all Americans below an income cap could receive it.

More strikingly, the checks were a distinctive policy internationally. The US, South Korea, and Japan were the only large countries to send checks to the vast majority of their citizens; Hong Kong and Singapore did something similar, but peer nations like the UK, France, and Germany did not.

And the US sent much bigger checks than Japan or South Korea did. If Jasmine Holloway lived in Japan, her family would have received about $3,800, or about one-third of what she actually received in America; in South Korea, she would have received 1 million Korean won or $1,151, far less. Even if you adjust for the fact that South Korea and Japan are poorer on a per-capita basis than the US, they sent out less.

America also distinguished itself by its incredibly generous approach to unemployment insurance. The UI system in the US is quite antiquated and rickety, relying on state-level systems that barely coordinate with each other and were not at all ready for the surge in applications that came in spring 2020. Policymakers wanted to expand the generosity of the program in percentage terms — to replace, say, 80 or 100 percent of workers’ wages for the duration of the emergency — but the system’s poor infrastructure made that impossible.

Ron Wyden (OR), then the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking Democrat and a primary author of the unemployment provisions in the CARES Act, explained that the choice to just tack on $600 each week to every unemployment check was an attempt to achieve “rough justice” in lieu of the ability to pay a set percentage of incomes.

The result was a system that was not merely generous — it was a great deal more generous than any of our peer nations.

University of Chicago economists Peter Ganong, Pascal Noel, and Joseph Vavra estimated in the summer of 2020 that the $600 bonus checks meant that overall, the typical out-of-work American saw 145 percent of their wages replaced. That replacement rate fell when the $600 bonus expired at the end of July, but it surged when $300-per-week bonuses were revived, first temporarily in September and then on a more ongoing basis in December (and even more when the Biden stimulus added another $100-per-week for health premiums).

Right now, with the $300 bonuses, the median replacement rate is close to 100 percent, far higher than unemployment offers in any of America’s peer countries.

Most countries relied less on unemployment insurance than on “job retention schemes,” which have become incredibly popular internationally during the pandemic. Under such programs, companies can reduce hours for workers (sometimes to zero) and get a set percentage of their labor costs paid by the government, so workers are still taking home pay. Some countries with existing programs — Japan with Employment Assistance Subsidies, Germany with kurzarbeit, and France with activité partielle — made them more generous during the pandemic; other countries like the UK and Denmark created new ones.

Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of largely developed nations, put together an October report comparing these schemes and, in particular, comparing their “replacement rates” — the share of pay that workers retain under the scheme, even if they’re working less or not at all. The replacement rates in the programs varied but were generally in the 60-90 percent range: 70 percent in France, upward of 87 percent in Germany, 75 percent for larger firms and 100 percent for smaller firms in Japan. Generally, the programs also had a cap on total government support per worker, so high-wage people would get less than the set replacement rate.

In other words, you would most likely get more money under the US unemployment system than under one of these job retention schemes. The US’s initial 145 percent replacement rate and its roughly 100 percent rate now blow countries like France out of the water. The US bonus UI approach has, for most of the pandemic to date, put more money in the pockets of its citizens than the European job retention schemes did.

You can see the effects of this in America’s poverty statistics. Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy researchers Zachary Parolin and Megan Curran have been tracking poverty during Covid-19 on a monthly basis, and found that for much of the pandemic, poverty rates have been below their January 2020 level, largely due to stimulus relief.

Economists Bruce Meyer, Jeehoon Han, and James Sullivan have their own poverty tracker, which shows poverty falling sharply in the spring as stimulus checks and bonus UI payments went out. It ticked up again when UI payments expired, before falling again with another round of stimulus in December.

So America was not just more generous than its peer countries, it took the crisis as an opportunity to cut poverty.

A good economic response — but not perfect

None of America’s successes in shoveling money to citizens during the pandemic should obscure its many failures.

The most important by far was its failure to control the virus. If the US had used aggressive social distancing rules, widespread testing, and contact tracing the way nations that successfully contained the virus like South Korea did, it would not only have lost 550,000 fewer lives, it would also be stronger economically.

A group of Korean researchers explains that because South Korea crushed the virus early, it was “able to avoid some of the severe long-term restrictions, such as lockdowns and business closures, that have led to troubled economies in many high-income countries.” By October 2020, the South Korean economy was growing again. That matches what analyses early in the pandemic were telling us. Lockdowns and test-and-trace are costly in the short run, but if implemented aggressively, they do not have to last long. And if they contain the virus quickly, the economy wins on balance.

Beyond that failure, the US response was too haltingly paced. The federal unemployment bonus was $600 per week from March through July, then $0, then $300 per week for six weeks in the fall, then $0 again, then $300 per week starting in December, then another $100 per week for help with health care premiums starting the following March. Those changes reflected gridlock in Congress, not the reality of the virus, and created harmful uncertainty for people pushed out of the workforce.

The loan programs for businesses included in the March 2020 stimulus package were a fairly mixed bag. The most famous, the Paycheck Protection Program, was geared toward small businesses and offered forgivable loans for businesses that pledged to keep workers employed. In that way, it attempted to mirror European job retention schemes, albeit for a subset of workers.

Did it work? It depends on who you ask. An early analysis by Harvard’s Opportunity Insights lab found the program “had no meaningful effect on unemployment” through the middle of May. Ten economists found in a July MIT paper that the program increased employment by about 2.3 million workers through the beginning of June — not that many, given the size of the US labor force.

But Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard and the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain found a more significant positive effect on small business employment. University of Maryland economist Michael Faulkender, then serving as assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy, and treasury economists Robert Jackman and Stephen Miran found a fairly massive effect: 18.6 million jobs saved.

Adam Ozimek, an economist who also co-owns a bar/arcade/bowling alley in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which received a PPP loan, has bemoaned how complicated the system is but argues that it played a useful role. “The extent to which PPP worked should be judged not on short-term employee retention,” he told me. “It should be judged on whether it helped reduce the business failure rate. I believe it did, given the surprisingly low business failure rate we most likely saw this year.”

The $454 billion lending program the March 2020 stimulus set up for mid-sized and large businesses, by contrast, seems to have been largely superfluous. It was set up to be run by the Federal Reserve and to enable riskier loans to be made to firms at risk of collapse, but by August, more than half the money was still unused. Corporate bond yields fell to record lows, so most large companies were able to borrow to finance their operations quite cheaply. The program didn’t actually cost any money; it arguably wasn’t particularly needed, and the $454 billion it added to the sticker price of the CARES Act could have been better used.

How to prepare for the next downturn

For all those failures, the US economic response to the crisis was overwhelmingly successful — and there’s no better evidence of that than the experience of people like Jasmine Holloway. The US didn’t do everything right during the pandemic. But it saved her and her family — and left her better off than pre-pandemic. And she’s hardly alone in that respect.

The question for the US is whether Americans want this to be a one-off success — or something more enduring.

There are a few ideas policymakers need to take seriously to cement the gains the country saw this past year. For one thing, America could stand to have a better unemployment system than the fractured, complicated one we currently have. People like Holloway found the system frustrating and time-consuming to access, and its generosity fluctuated seemingly at random. Recent proposals for reforming the UI system seek to make it so that it’s more heavily federally financed, automatically lasts longer during recessions, and is more generous week-to-week during recessions. (Wyden and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) have also proposed legislation around these lines.)

The US could also experiment with a real job retention scheme, like the ones many other countries use. Those programs were markedly less generous than the US unemployment insurance system during the crisis, but their structure was arguably superior, as it let workers stay on their employer’s payroll.

The US has a system meant to work like this — 27 states and Washington, DC, offer “short-term compensation” or “work-sharing” programs through the unemployment system — but it’s a mess. Shortly before Vox Media announced layoffs in the summer of 2020, some of my union comrades and I devised a work-sharing plan to avert the lost jobs. But getting the plan to work was a bureaucratic nightmare, involving different applications in different states, and excluding employees outside of states that didn’t offer them. The company ended up not pursuing it. A well-designed version of work-sharing could be a huge help in the next recession. There are other ways to make the future pandemic response more robust.

Economist Claudia Sahm has proposed automatically triggering stimulus checks when the unemployment rate rises. Furman, Matthew Fiedler, and Wilson Powell III have proposed having the federal government automatically increase Medicaid funding to states during downturns. Economists Hilary Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach have proposed the same for food stamps, and Georgetown’s Indivar Dutta-Gupta has a plan for a similar trigger in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash welfare program.

Better still, America could choose to strengthen its safety net not simply in a time of extreme crisis, but on an ongoing basis. The Biden administration has proposed extending the expanded child tax credit, which offers parents like Holloway $3,600 a year for each of their kids under age 6 and $3,000 for older kids through 2025 at least — and some in Congress want to make it permanent. That way Holloway would have ongoing support for babysitting, her continuing education, and activities for her 14-year-old that fall on the right side of the law.

Holloway says she is incredibly grateful for the support she’s gotten during the pandemic, but she expects and plans for it all to go away. “I know one day we’re going to wake up and all these things aren’t going to be here,” she told me. For some programs, that’s probably appropriate. Covid-19 was a unique crisis in need of unique remedies.

But what if some of the help wasn’t snatched away? What if families like Holloway’s could rely on some cash support from their government, not just this year, not just in a time of crisis, but every year, as a basic right of citizenship?

Republicans defunded the tax police.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A Maryland defense attorney has decided to challenge the conviction of one of his clients after it was recently discovered that the phone cracking product used in the case, produced by digital forensics firm Cellebrite, has severe cybersecurity flaws that could make it vulnerable to hacking. Ramon Rozas, who has practiced law for 25 years, told Gizmodo that he was compelled to pursue a new trial after reading a widely shared blog post written by the CEO of the encryption chat app Signal, Moxie Marlinspike. It was just about a week ago that Marlinspike brutally dunked on Cellebrite -- writing, in a searing takedown, that the company's products lacked basic "industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses," and that security holes in its software could easily be exploited to manipulate data during cell phone extraction. Given the fact that Cellebrite's extraction software is used by law enforcement agencies the world over, questions have naturally emerged about the integrity of investigations that used the tech to secure convictions. For Rozas, the concerns center around the fact that "Cellebrite evidence was heavily relied upon" to convict his client, who was charged in relation to an armed robbery. The prosecution's argument essentially turned on that data, which was extracted from the suspect's phone using the company's tools. In a motion recently filed, Rozas argued that because "severe defects" have since been uncovered about the technology, a "new trial should be ordered so that the defense can examine the report produced by the Cellebrite device in light of this new evidence, and examine the Cellebrite device itself." "I think it's going to take a while to figure out what the exact legal ramifications of this are," says Megan Graham, a Clinical Supervising Attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic with Berkeley Law School. "I don't know how likely it is that cases would be thrown out," she said, adding that a person who has already been convicted would likely have to "show that someone else identified this vulnerability and exploited it at the time" -- not an especially easy task. "Going forward, I think it's just hard to tell," Graham said. "We now know that this vulnerability exists, and it creates concerns about the security of Cellebrite devices and the integrity of evidence." But there's a lot that we don't know, she emphasized. Among Graham's concerns, she said that "we don't know if the vulnerability is being exploited," and that makes it difficult to discern when it could become an issue in past cases. "I think there will be cases where defense attorneys are able to get judges engaged [on this issue]. They will present the security concerns, worries about manipulated evidence, and it might be persuasive. I think there will be a wide array of responses when it comes to how this plays out in cases," she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden's top labor official said Thursday that most gig workers in the United States should be classified as "employees" deserving of related benefits, in what could be a policy shift that is likely to raise costs for companies that depend on contractors such as Uber and Lyft and impact millions of workers. From a report: Shares of Uber fell as much as 8 percent while Lyft dived as much as 12 percent. Doordash fell nearly 9 percent and Grubhub was down 3.3 percent. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, a son of Irish immigrants and a former union member, has been expected to boost President Biden's efforts to expand workers' protections and deliver a win for the country's organized labor movement. "We are looking at it but in a lot of cases gig workers should be classified as employees... in some cases they are treated respectfully and in some cases they are not and I think it has to be consistent across the board," Walsh told Reuters in an interview, expressing his view on the topic for the first time. "These companies are making profits and revenue and I'm not (going to) begrudge anyone for that because that's what we are about in America... but we also want to make sure that success trickles down to the worker," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s difficult to get honest feedback from workers who fear retaliation.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently said warehouse employees like working for his company so much that “94% say they would recommend Amazon to a friend as a place to work.” But some of his own employees aren’t buying that statistic.

The 94 percent number was gleaned from an employee survey program at Amazon called Connections, which asks Amazon employees to answer a single question each day before they can start working on their company computer or their warehouse workstation. Bezos cited the stat in mid-April in his final letter to shareholders as Amazon’s CEO.

But in interviews with Recode over the past two weeks, a half-dozen Amazon employees and managers, two of whom are familiar with the inner workings of the Connections program, said that many Amazon employees have widespread concerns about the Connections program and the accuracy of its data and insights.

These employees told Recode that many Amazon employees do not answer Connections questions honestly because they fear their responses are not truly anonymous, and they fear retaliation if they give negative feedback. Others told Recode that some managers, both in warehouses and in corporate offices, pressure their staff to answer questions favorably. A warehouse manager and employee also said workers often just choose the top answer to more quickly get on with their day.

Such skepticism is noteworthy not only because Amazon leans on Connections survey results for public statements and announcements, but also because the program was developed by Amazon’s human resources division and informs how the country’s second-largest private-sector employer evaluates employee job satisfaction.

While Bezos defended the company’s treatment of front-line workers in the shareholder letter, which came out shortly after a historic union vote failed at an Alabama warehouse, he also seemed to acknowledge critics when he wrote that Amazon needs “a better vision for how we create value for employees” and that his new goal is for Amazon to be “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” On Wednesday, LinkedIn named Amazon as the No. 1 workplace “to grow your career.”

Amazon spokesperson Adam Sedo sent Recode a statement about the Connections program that said: “Becoming Earth’s Best Employer and Safest Place to Work requires, among other things, listening to feedback from our employees as often as we listen to feedback from our customers. One way we do that is through Connections, a question our employees answer confidentially every day. Instead of having to wait for the results of an annual employee survey, Amazon managers receive access to daily feedback from their teams and use it to improve the employee experience continuously. This approach helps managers take action quickly and address concerns immediately.”

According to multiple sources, the survey program is a “pet project” of Amazon’s human resources leader Beth Galetti, a former top logistics executive at FedEx who first joined the tech giant in 2013 as a vice president of human resources. She now is one of approximately two dozen executives at Amazon on Jeff Bezos’s exclusive senior leadership team, or S team, and one of only four women.

Connections questions can include everything from asking an employee how they feel about their manager to queries about staff restroom cleanliness. According to a source who worked on the Connections team, the program was one of the first large-scale experiments of a company carrying out a daily employee survey. But this employee said that in the early days of the program, some colleagues felt that the daily cadence of questioning was a fundamental flaw that was less effective at accurately assessing an employee’s experience than a quarterly or monthly survey would.

Sedo, the spokesperson, said the company strongly disagrees with the idea that the daily cadence is a flaw. He added that Amazon asks several questions repeatedly over a period of time so that trends are detectable. Managers can view aggregate data about their staff’s answers on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.

Either way, one of the biggest issues with the survey program, according to all six employees who spoke to Recode, is that there is a common concern among Amazon’s employee base that their answers will not remain anonymous.

“It is a persistent concern that responses aren’t confidential/anonymous,” says a current Amazon warehouse area manager, a job that typically entails managing dozens of front-line warehouse workers handling a specific task, such as picking items from shelves, stowing them, or packing boxes.

Sedo, the company spokesperson, said that all answers are confidential and that employees can choose not to answer a question.

Two sources said that warehouse workers often choose the top answer, which seems to frequently be the most positive choice, just to get on with their day. Others, on small teams, fear that even if their name is not tied to their survey answers, managers may be able to take an educated guess at who responded negatively based on prior interactions and retaliate against them in some way. Managers of teams of more than four employees can view aggregate survey results from their staff, but those who lead teams smaller than that can’t, the Amazon spokesperson said.

“Depending on the size of team, people used to be able to figure out who said what,” according to a former Amazon employee familiar with the inner workings of the program. “So after a while, some employees decide, ‘I’m not going to be honest.’”

Beyond all of this, several sources, both in corporate and warehouse settings, say they know of managers who coach employees on how to answer questions in an effort to get ahead of survey results that might not reflect well on the manager. Sedo, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company prohibits managers from telling their staff how to answer questions or asking them how they responded.

Despite these concerns, some sources said Connections results can be useful if there is, in fact, trust between a manager and their staff.

“My experience with my team in the FC was that it was pretty accurate, but I also encouraged my team to be open and honest so I could use the scores as intended to address their barriers and concerns,” says the Amazon warehouse area manager. “It does allow me to easily understand what kinds of things are making the team unhappy and/or where my opportunity areas are as a manager.”

The source said the Connections website also provides tips on how to address low employee scores.

But this same manager said there are “definitely managers that will coach their teams how to answer because it’s a performance metric that will be referenced during reviews.”

That fact, plus concerns about anonymity and retaliation, cast enough doubt over the accuracy of survey results that they should be viewed skeptically, according to all of the sources who spoke to Recode, whether for internal use or in Jeff Bezos’s final annual letter to Amazon shareholders.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said he is meeting with members of George Floyd’s family on Thursday, one week after a former police officer was convicted of murdering Floyd and hours after Scott delivered the rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s first address to Congress.

Speaking on Fox News' "Fox & Friends," Scott, a Republican, said his plan was to “to sit down and listen.”

“Listen to what the family wants to talk about, listen to the proposals, the suggestions that reinforces common sense and finally go back to the drawing board taking all that information to heart,” he said.

Scott, the GOP’s lone Black senator, has been in discussions with Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) and other Democrats about the prospects for a bipartisan deal on police reform legislation, an issue that continues to be a perilous one in Congress. Scott and Bass are scheduled to meet on Thursday to negotiate on the issue with Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Bass, who has been deputized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to negotiate on police reform on behalf of House Democrats, sponsors a bill named after Floyd that passed the House on a near-party line vote. Scott has backed an alternative measure that Senate Democrats blocked last year, arguing that it did not do enough to reform policing in the U.S.

Scott on Wednesday offered a rebuttal of the way that Democrats talk about race and their differing view on its centrality to minorities’ present-day experience in the United States.

“America is not a racist country” he said at one point, adding that “race is not a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants.”

Scott said the way to improve relations between police officers and communities of color in the U.S. is not by demonizing law enforcement.

“I won’t cross that line,” he said. “It’s is a line that is bad for the community and bad for the officers.”

Scott also said he was stung by social media reaction to his speech Wednesday night calling him “Uncle Tim” — a variation of the insult for Black people perceived as sidling up to white people of power — and other slurs. He said it underscored the hypocritical way that some on the political left wield race as a cudgel against Republicans.

“What they want for us is to stay in a little small corner and not go against the tide that they think is America,” he said.

While at Fred & Ethel’s Lantern Light Restaurant and Tavern in Galloway, New Jersey, Lisa Smurro told a server that “There’s a man p---ing in the bathroom.” Smurro, the wife of Neptune Middle School Vice Principal Michael Smurro, continued telling the server, “She’s a man. There’s a man in the woman’s bathroom.” As seen in a now-viral video, Smurro continues to announce that it’s “not right.” Notably, under New Jersey state law, people are in fact allowed to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

Michael Smurro handled the situation by throwing a beer at the person who filmed his wife’s loud, transphobic rant. He was seen on video approaching his wife and outside diners while holding a beer and then throwing the beer at a person off-camera. On video, he says, “There you go." Unsurprisingly, the video quickly got national media attention. He has since apologized.

In a statement to the Associated Press, Michael Smurro said, “I allowed my emotions to get in the way of my normally sound judgment and reacted in a way that was inappropriate. I do not condone violence or discrimination of any kind and should have simply walked away.” He said he apologizes to the person who he threw his beer at as well as to anyone he offended. 

In an interview with NBC 10, Lisa Smurro told the outlet, “It wasn't about the transgender situation. It was more about the patrons taking a video and heckling and sneering and smiling." In speaking to AJ Advance, Lisa stated: “My whole thing is, that restaurant provided a bathroom for transgenders, and that’s where they should have gone. I just felt a little uncomfortable. Our daughter’s not young anymore, but if she was young and I brought her in there, that would have made me very uncomfortable.” She repeated her sentiment that people were “mocking” her and her husband and stressed that the couple “assaulted no one,” “touched no one” and “spoke to no one.” 

The same outlet spoke to a witness of the event who posted the video to Facebook. The witness asked the outlet to refer to her as Carrie and leave out her last name over the fear of retaliation. Carrie said the incident was “just disgusting” and claims that Lisa Smurro complained about a transgender woman using the bathroom while she was in it and continued to repeat: “She’s a man!”

The Neptune school district gave a statement via its website on Tuesday, describing the event as “troubling.” The statement notes that “actions shown in the video do not reflect our district’s commitment to inclusivity, cooperation, respect, and non-violence.” According to the statement, the board of education and superintendent will “respond to this incident in a manner that is appropriate and relative to the seriousness of the situation and that takes into consideration the impact this incident has had on the reputation of our wonderful district,”

According to the restaurant, no one involved called the police. 

In addition to the original Facebook video linked above, you can watch some of the incident below.

Rudy Giuliani on Thursday denied any allegations that he represented a Ukrainian national, a day after the FBI seized materials from Giuliani as part of an investigation that seems to focus on his work with Ukrainian officials and operatives.

“I never, ever represented a foreign national,” Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor, told Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “In fact, I have in my contracts, a refusal to do it because from the time I got out of being mayor, I did not want to lobby.”

He said his contracts contain a clause that indicates he will not participate in lobbying or foreign representation, something that he said would be “too compromising.”

His comments come after a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, Andrii Artemenko, told POLITICO that he had spoken with the FBI about Giuliani. Artemenko declined to elaborate further on his communications with law enforcement.

Giuliani, a longtime confidant of Donald Trump who until last year was the former president’s personal lawyer, said the FBI agents produced a search warrant over a single episode in which Giuliani allegedly failed to register as a foreign agent.

Agents had sought permission last summer to search Giuliani’s apartment, but Justice Department officials declined the request because of rules that limited certain actions in the run-up to the election. Giuliani and those in his circle have framed the situation as a political hit job, although President Joe Biden told NBC News he was not aware of the raids until after they happened.

Giuliani told Carlson on Thursday that he has offered to cooperate with law enforcement for the past two years. He called the warrant “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” adding that a warrant could be issued only if there were evidence he was planning to destroy the materials.

The FBI probe into Giuliani appears to focus on his work related to Ukraine as he tried to find incriminating material about then-candidate Biden’s son Hunter. At the same time, Trump officials signaled to Ukraine’s president that they wanted the country to announce an investigation into Biden’s son or else the U.S. would withhold military aid. That news was the impetus for Trump’s first impeachment.

Earlier Thursday, Trump defended Giuliani in an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

“Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot,” Trump said. “He does these things — he just loves this country, and they raid his apartment. It’s, like, so unfair and such a double — it’s like a double standard like I don’t think anybody’s ever seen before.”

In recent months, as less and less white people support voter suppression and more and more people of color organize around gaining political power, our country has once again reached an inflection point. Republican operatives across the country, long pushing for voter suppression laws that target Black and Latino communities, have decided to be even more overt in their attempts at returning to a pre-Brown v. Board of Education, segregated America, where law enforcement can stop citizens from voting based on their skin color or perceived non-whiteness. The feeble excuse from conservative lawmakers and their handlers is that there is massive voter fraud taking place by Jews and Blacks Democratic demons. Of course, the great con here is that the people pretending that Democrats participate in massive voter fraud are usually the only ones guilty of actual elections fraud.

On Wednesday, a 28-year-old former Georgia sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty to possessing “unregistered firearms resulting from an FBI-led investigation into a violent extremist group,” according to the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia Peter D. Leary. Cody Richard Griggers, an ex-Wilkinson County deputy, was fired in November after the FBI contacted his sheriff about an investigation the agency was conducting on Griggers. U.S. Attorney Leary released a statement saying “Griggers clearly violated his oath with his egregious actions and has no place in law enforcement.” But what Griggers did wasn’t simply “possess a cache of unregistered weapons, silencers, and a machinegun, keeping many of them in his duty vehicle.” An investigation of Griggers by the FBI revealed ties to a group of racist pricks calling themselves “Shadow Moses” or “Shadmo.” Griggers’ texts and the claims he made in this group, from his position of power in law enforcement at the time, is the real—and frightening—story.

Griggers, a former Marine, is facing up to 10 years in prison for having 11 illegal firearms. But it is the nature of his violent, racist, and antisemitic texts that initially prompted his removal from the police force. According to the Belleville News-Democrat, some of the text threads include Griggers boasting, “I beat the (expletive) out of a (racial slur) Saturday. (Expletive) tried to steal (a gun magazine) from the local gun store. ... Sheriff’s dept. said it looked like he fell.” According to Wilkinson Sheriff Richard Chatman, who is Black, he had Griggers removed from duty when he was contacted with this information by the FBI. According to Sheriff Chatman, after investigating this claim he believes that Griggers was lying to the group in the text thread, as he could not find any evidence that this had happened. “We don’t even have a gun shop here,” he said.

And while that is the single silver lining here, Griggers’ others statements reveal the true threats posed by white supremacists and our racism-infected law enforcement system. According to the News-Democrat, the affidavit highlighted Griggers’ claims to the text thread group that he planned on violating the civil rights and liberties of Georgia’s Black citizens, saying that he was planning on just arresting Black folks to trump up charges. “Also I’m going to charge them with whatever felonies I can to take away their ability to vote,” he claimed.

The right wing of our country would like everyone to believe that the real domestic terrorism in our country is the Black Lives Matter movement, and anyone else demanding racial justice. Conservatives say that there is no such thing as systemic racism and anyone who says there is, is trying to replace white people of European ancestry with Marxism.* It’s an old white supremacist belief that Jewish folks secretly rule the world and use Black people to destroy good old white folks. There was an entire war in Europe based on it back in the 1930s and 1940s.

There is a large conservative swath of the country that wants to say that there is no racism, and what racism there is is easily identifiable from filmed footage of KKK assholes dressed in white sheets and burning crosses, circa 70 years ago. There is an even larger swath of conservative Americans that want you to believe that any discussions of racism and systemic racism in our country’s institutions are a conspiracy by establishment liberal elites to control the populations in a reverse-style racism against white folks. While it is easy to laugh about how ridiculous these claims are around here, on a site based in discussions that use verifiably factual information, there is a large sector of the conservative media sphere that makes its money by promoting these racist delusions. 

At their most benign, these delusions are offensive and hurtful and, given the long history of hate crimes, slavery, and violence in our country, traumatizing for millions of Americans. At their worst these delusions have led to the deaths and torture of millions of people over the last half-millennium. The hate and conspiracies pushed on the right to hide their guilt, shame, and intransigent immoral position have been used to kill millions of Africans during the Middle Passage, thousands of Black Americans post-reconstruction, millions of Jews in World War II, and thousands of modern-day American citizens by a white supremacist law enforcement apparatus that needs to be pulled out by its roots and reimagined with all Americans in mind.

*Karl Marx was ancestrally European Jewish by the way.

Riot Games’ popular online character tactical first-person shooter game Valorant is about to get a lot more colorful according to a recent leak. Top Valorant dataminer RumbleMike revealed Friday that Riot Games is reportedly planning to release Valorant player cards depicting seven different Pride flags in a June 3 update.

Players will be able to purchase player cards representing the overall LGBTQ+ community as well as the trans, pansexual, non-binary, bisexual, asexual and lesbian communities through the official Valorant website. The cards will be visible to other players, giving players the opportunity to openly represent LGBTQ identities in the game.

The leak has drawn plenty of praise from LGBTQ Valorant fans and falls in line with Riot’s recent efforts to create more inclusive spaces within Valorant. The developer introduced the Valorant Champions Tour Game Changers program in February 2021 as a way to increase participation and representation for “women and other marginalized genders within Valorant esports.” It also introduced Pride-themed merchandise and in-game items to its other popular title, League of Legends, in recent years.

PRIDE Playercards | #VALORANT

~ Will be available with Code Redemption on June 3rd pic.twitter.com/27AVdhFh5C

— Mike – Valorant Leaks & Info (@ValorLeaks) April 23, 2021

But the potential addition also comes in the wake of several recent controversies centered on Riot Games’ higher-ups. A 2018 Kotaku report revealed a culture of misogyny and sexism throughout the studio. An investigation into allegations of sexism and sexual harassment against Riot Games CEO Nicola Laurent earlier this year cost the studio its partnership with gaming PC maker Alienware and Rito Games co-founder and chairman Marc Merrill tweeted and deleted an article about “critical race theory” last week.

Riot Games Turkey also drew criticism in April 2020 when it decided not to punish players for directing homophobic slurs at former League of Legends pro player Mustafa Kemal “Dumbledoge” Gökseloğlu because the comments weren’t reported within its twelve-month statute of limitations.

Concern doesn’t lie solely with the company’s practices, though. Some LGBTQ Valorant players express hesitancy at publicly displaying their LGBTQ identity while playing Valorant due to the regular use of homophobic, transphobic and every other kind of -phobic slurs by other players in the game’s voice chat.

“I’m gay and would be really nervous to use one of these in Valorant [to be honest],” said Reddit user Aphet. “I had Yoru highlighted and then 10 seconds later someone else grabbed and instalocked him and said, ‘Sorry, I had to grab Yoru because you smelled like a F*-slur’ out of nowhere. No one had spoken. And that’s indicative of a lot of experiences I’ve had. It’s super uncomfortable and it makes me sad [because] these look so cool.”

Riot Games has not confirmed the reported addition of Pride player cards to Valorant.

It could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Vaccination has worked wonders to drive down deaths from infectious disease. A few hundred years ago, less than 60 percent of children saw their fifth birthday. Now, 95 percent do. Vaccines — against smallpox, measles, polio, diphtheria, and more — have driven that progress.

But one of childhood’s biggest killers — malaria — has eluded effective vaccination. That, at long last, looks to be changing.

In a recently concluded clinical trial conducted by researchers from Oxford and the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro, Burkina Faso, a new malaria vaccine called R21/MM demonstrated 77 percent efficacy in children in Burkina Faso. That’s a dramatic increase over the efficacy of the only currently available malaria vaccine, RTS,S, and might represent a huge breakthrough in the fight against the disease.

Malaria infects hundreds of millions of people every year and kills hundreds of thousands, mostly young children and pregnant women. It has been one of the top killers of children for thousands of years, and still is today. For most of history, it ravaged warm regions the world over. But in the 20th century, it was successfully eradicated from much of the world through insecticide spraying. In sub-Saharan Africa, though, it has remained a major threat — and climate change means that the geographic range the malaria-carrying mosquito can survive in has expanded.

Unsurprisingly, a malaria vaccine has been a major priority for researchers. But malaria has proven absurdly difficult to vaccinate against. It’s caused by a parasite, not a bacterium or virus, and the parasite’s functioning in the body includes suppressing the immune response. For many diseases, infection leaves you immune for life, but it’s possible to catch malaria over and over again. And for many diseases, a vaccine just involves exposing the body to a dead or attenuated version of the disease agent. But that doesn’t really get results with malaria.

Fortunately, vaccine science has been rapidly advancing, and these days we can do far more than simple exposure vaccines. While the R21/MM vaccine doesn’t use the specific technologies that led to an unprecedented vaccine against Covid-19, it’s part of the same overarching story: Scientists are getting better at designing highly effective vaccinations, and their triumphs will be a huge part of the fight against death and illness in the 21st century.

Why it’s hard to vaccinate against malaria

The Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria in humans needs both blood-sucking insects and humans for its life cycle. It grows inside a mosquito and is transferred to a human host when the mosquito bites them. Then the parasite migrates to the liver, replicates itself, and infects the blood — where it can be taken up by the bite of another mosquito.

When the parasite is in the blood, it causes fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Healthy adults usually recover, but those with a weaker immune system — especially young children and pregnant women — can easily die. (Older people who live in regions where malaria is endemic are, surprisingly, not especially vulnerable. The theory is that after sufficient exposure to malaria over a lifetime, the immune system develops a general anti-parasite response that might be more durable than malaria-specific immunity.)

Vaccinating against malaria is tricky. Parasites have much more going on than viruses, making targeting a vaccine harder. Multiple life stages have been explored as vaccine targets, mostly without success. “Malaria vaccine [development] has been a graveyard for really great ideas,” Derek Lowe, a researcher who writes about drug discovery, told me. “We’ve learned about a lot of stuff that doesn’t work.” Targeting the parasite once it’s in the blood, for example, has been tried repeatedly but never succeeded. Exposing the body to dead or neutralized Plasmodium? A dead end. Researchers have been working on this for decades, and progress has been rare.

The earliest success stories of vaccination involved vaccines against diseases that produce lifelong immunity, like smallpox and polio. Those are viruses, so they’re much simpler to target. And since you can’t be reinfected with those diseases, the vaccine only needs to provoke the same immune response as the disease did originally, and the patient is safe for life.

But in the case of malaria, naturally acquired immunity against malaria typically is only partial and fades out in a few years. Researchers have been working for decades to figure out how a vaccine can induce durable immunity, and most of that work has ended in frustrating failures. The only vaccine approved for malaria today, RTS,S, has been around since 2016. While it’s much better than nothing, it’s not great — it has an initial efficacy of around 55 percent, and annual booster shots are needed.

R21/MM, the new vaccine, represents a significant improvement. At 77 percent efficacy — meaning that a vaccinated person is 77 percent less likely to get malaria than an unvaccinated person — it could cut malaria deaths dramatically.

That said, the new vaccine still doesn’t quite stack up to the efficacy of vaccines for other childhood diseases. The measles vaccine is 97 percent effective, for instance, and one dose of the chickenpox vaccine prevents 85 percent of cases and nearly 100 percent of severe cases (a booster shot brings efficacy up to 98 percent).

But there’s no question that the new vaccine is a huge step forward. If the efficacy statistics from the phase 2 clinical trial (the first test of safety and efficacy in the target population) hold up in phase 3 (when the vaccine is distributed on a much larger scale, so that its efficacy and safety can be evaluated with more information, and compared against the existing best treatment), the vaccine will have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year once it’s distributed widely throughout malaria-affected areas, primarily sub-Saharan Africa.

How the new vaccine works

The R21/MM vaccine is what’s called a pre-erythrocytic vaccine, which means it targets the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasite during the earliest stages of its life cycle in the body, before it multiplies in the liver and enters the bloodstream. During this stage, malaria doesn’t yet have any symptoms; the plasmodium sporozoites grow silently until they release their next life stage, merozoites, into the bloodstream.

Many candidate malaria vaccines try to help the body target and destroy the parasite at the pre-erythrocytic stage, including RTS,S, the existing malaria vaccine. If the body can learn to recognize and have an immune response to the parasite at this stage, it can prevent it from multiplying in the liver, entering the blood, and causing symptomatic malaria.

Exposing the body to the malarial parasite isn’t itself enough to create durable immunity. Fortunately, modern vaccine researchers have a lot more tricks up their sleeves. The R21/MM vaccine targets a specific protein present on the surface of the Plasmodium parasite in its sporozoite form. (RTS,S targets the same protein — earlier research has established that it’s a particularly good target — but exposes the body to less of the protein, due to differences in the structure of the vaccine.)

Targeting a single protein can produce better-targeted and more consistent immunity than exposing the body to the whole disease agent. When the body is exposed to the whole disease agent, it’s hard to predict exactly what it will “learn” to fight. Showing it a single target protein ensures it’ll develop the antibodies scientists have determined that it needs the most. And the protein that R21/MM and RTS,S target is one that researchers have determined is very unlikely to mutate or vary among strains of malaria.

The next step of a successful vaccination is what’s called an adjuvant, an additive to the vaccine that kicks the immune system into higher gear. Protein-based vaccines are generally understood to need an adjuvant, because the body will not necessarily react to unfamiliar proteins by mounting a full immune response.

“What those do,” Lowe told me, “is they’re a totally separate ingredient that has nothing to do with the pathogen. But they basically set off your innate immune system that’s always there, surveilling for foreign-looking crap.” What makes a great adjuvant? Something people have strong reactions to. As long as the body finds it irritating and mounts an immune response, it can function as an adjuvant.

The research team behind R21/MM tested many different adjuvants to figure out which one provoked the strongest immune response, and the winner was a formulation called Matrix-M (that’s the MM in the vaccine’s name), an extract from the bark of a Chilean soap tree. Matrix-M is a proprietary invention of Novavax, also used in its highly effective Covid-19 vaccine.

This research has been in the works for years. In 2016, a trial was conducted in healthy adults in the UK, looking at the R21 vaccine alone and with the Matrix-M adjuvant. After success in the UK, another trial in healthy adults followed — this time in Burkina Faso, where malaria is endemic.

Once that early research was established to be safe, the research team began conducting studies in steadily younger cohorts. The group at the most risk from malaria is infants, but it’s generally easier to see if vaccines have health risks or side effects by looking at older cohorts. Once the vaccine was determined safe, research began in 5- to 17-month-old babies in Nanoro, Burkina Faso.

The R21/MM vaccine is administered with three shots, plus a booster shot one year later. That means distribution of the vaccine will be a real challenge, especially in poor areas with limited health care infrastructure, but it’s an improvement over RTS,S, which requires four shots for a full course of vaccination and, again, is significantly less effective.

In the phase 2 study published this week, researchers found that the R21/MM’s single booster shot a year later returns immunity to the full level achieved after the initial course of three shots. The results are “very exciting,” Halidou Tinto, the principal investigator for the trial in Nanoro, said.

Phase 3 trials begin right away at five sites across Africa, in order to test how the vaccine works in areas with different malaria prevalence. “We look forward to the upcoming phase 3 trial to demonstrate large-scale safety and efficacy data for a vaccine that is greatly needed in this region,” Tinto told the BBC.

The phase 3 trials might also help clarify whether all three shots and the booster are necessary, or whether there’s a way to induce good protection with a less demanding dosing regimen. With any luck, within a few years we’ll have the efficacy, safety, and dosing data needed for a rollout across malaria-afflicted areas.

The big picture

Malaria isn’t just one of the world’s biggest killers of children. It’s also one of the biggest barriers to good childhood health and development in affected areas. Malaria infection causes long-term problems including cognitive impairment, and likely has long-term developmental impacts on children even when they survive it.

The world has done a lot over the past few decades to fight malaria. Interventions like insecticide-treated bed nets and seasonal preventive treatment in the form of medications have driven death rates down from around 1 million every year as recently as the 1990s to around 400,000 today. But without an effective vaccine that can be distributed everywhere, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to eradicate the disease.

Researchers know that, and malaria vaccine research is one of the most active areas of vaccine research, with human challenge trials in the UK (meaning clinical trials where volunteers are deliberately infected with the disease), phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials throughout areas with high malaria prevalence, and other promising ideas being pursued based on encouraging results in mice.

Now, all that effort is starting to pay off. In general, writing about malaria vaccines means emphasizing that everything is still early-stage, that there’s lots of reason to expect a new innovation or development to fall through, and that while every avenue is worth pursuing, the public should know that most of them won’t pay off.

That’s not true this time. This is a late-stage result, and there’s every reason to expect it to hold up. “This is excellent work,” Lowe told me. “This is the best news in the malaria vaccine world ever.”

This is the first vaccine to meet the World Health Organization’s threshold of 75 percent effectiveness for a malaria vaccine. With many other vaccine candidates making their way through trials, it almost definitely won’t be the last. The more we know about malaria — and about vaccination — the better we can design vaccines that are cheap, simple to store and administer, that don’t require too many booster doses, and that provoke a strong and enduring immune response.

For more than 100 years, vaccination has been one of humanity’s most powerful tools against disease. It’s a tool that gets more potent every day, as we learn more about what makes vaccines work and how best to point our immune system at the perfect target.

This latest development is worth celebrating. It’s an innovation that could mean saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. And if it fills you with optimism about the prospects of a world where vaccines inch us closer to eradicating diseases that have long plagued humanity, it should.

Women and people of color were crucial to Biden’s presidential win, and they’re crucial to his jobs plan.

The Biden administration’s theory of policy so far is to go big. The same goes for its politics.

Taken together, President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and newly introduced $1.8 trillion American Families Plan come out to slightly over $4 trillion in proposed new spending. It’s an enormous investment in American job creation; the last bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2015 clocked in at about $305 billion — about one-thirteenth the size of Biden’s proposed plan. And Obama’s $800 billion stimulus plan of 2009 was about one-fifth of Biden’s plan, not even taking into account the $1.9 trillion in Covid-19 relief that has already been signed into law.

That sheer amount of proposed federal funding is meant to do a lot of things, but the main goal is to get as many jobs to as many people in as many voter constituencies as possible. Under Biden’s plan, infrastructure no longer calls to mind images of white men in hard hats; it includes working mothers, home health aides who care for the nation’s elderly, and workers of color across the nation. Women and people of color were crucial to Biden’s presidential win, and they are also crucial elements in his jobs plan.

“We talk about the working middle class as white men in pickup trucks in Ohio, but they’re really Black and brown workers that are keeping our economy afloat,” said longtime Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who is advising the pro-Biden outside group Building Back Together on outreach to Latino voters.

Republicans are making a bet that the sheer size of Biden’s collective “Build Back Better” agenda could be a problem for him, and that voters will be turned off by trillions of dollars in new spending. Congressional Republicans have pitched a package that’s about a quarter of the size of Biden’s American Jobs Plan. Meanwhile, prominent progressives including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) want Biden to go as big as $10 trillion in infrastructure spending over the next decade.

But the White House and Democrats are already building a public case that infrastructure accounts for a lot more than roads and bridges. They seem to have had success so far; numerous pollsters Vox interviewed said “infrastructure” is a nebulous concept to many voters.

“What people don’t realize is that the majority of voters don’t know what infrastructure is to begin with,” said veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who advised and polled for Biden’s presidential campaign. “The caregiving situation is as critical as the road you drive on to get to work. The Covid experience has really brought that home.”

“Jobs,” on the other hand, is a term that voters understand well. And Biden’s massive plan — funded by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations — is jobs creation on steroids.

Democrats are arguing infrastructure is more than transportation

Historically, the word infrastructure has called to mind very male-dominated jobs: Construction, manufacturing, and maintenance, getting shovels in the ground. Indeed, just 10 percent of construction jobs are held by women.

Multiple experts told Vox that if roads and bridges are the physical infrastructure Americans need to get to work, the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare a long-existing reality about the lack of “human infrastructure” in the US. Often, affordable child care or elder care makes all the difference as to whether women with care obligations are able to work at all.

“Without a robust care infrastructure, we’re essentially choosing to bench half our labor market,” Rakeen Mabud, managing director of policy and research and chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, told Vox. “The fact we’re even having a debate of whether or not care is infrastructure ... is so deeply rooted in racialized and gendered deservingness.”

Biden’s American Jobs Plan contains $400 billion specifically to lower the costs of long-term care for elderly and disabled patients, keeping them in their homes. But it also aims to raise the low wages of home heath aides and caregivers themselves, who are predominantly Black and brown women.

“Receiving the respect, recognition and compensation they are due is not only essential and necessary, but it is just the beginning of what we must do to address the long history of racial exclusion that this workforce has faced,” Ai-jen Poo, the co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Vox.

The Biden administration also employs a number of progressive economists who have spent their careers focusing on how to make the US economy more equal for women and workers of color. Mabud’s argument is echoed within the administration by people like Janelle Jones, who formerly led policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative and is now the chief economist for the US Department of Labor.

“I think the pandemic and this recession have shown that ... an economy built on the structural flaws of racism and inequality is less stable for everyone,” Jones said during a recent interview with NPR. “It really has shown that when we have an economy that is just the rich getting richer and everyone else doing worse off — we’re all worse off.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has made this situation acute. Data shows that women and workers of color were forced out of the labor market, owing to lower-wage jobs being more likely to be cut during the pandemic, and women being unable to work while also providing at-home school and care for their children.

This makes good policy sense for Biden, but it’s also good political sense. Biden’s base is diverse; his presidential win and Democrats’ surprise wins in Georgia were powered by women and voters of color alike. Appealing to a large base that government policy has left behind for decades is a shrewd political move ahead of the 2022 midterms.

It’s also responding to the current moment. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 25 percent of women and 27 percent of workers of color said their family’s financial situation is worse off today than it was before March 2020, when pandemic shutdowns went into effect. The survey also found that middle-aged and younger women were impacted more, with 29 percent of women younger than 65 saying they are financially worse off today, compared to 10 percent of women who are 65 and older.

As the New York Times’s David Leonhardt writes, recent US census data showed the US birth rate grew by just 7.4 percent, the smallest increase since the Depression-era 1930s. One of the big reasons could be the high cost of raising children, coupled with relatively modest income increases in the US that often aren’t enough to compete with rising costs.

“The decline in the birthrate, in other words, is partly a reflection of American society’s failure to support families,” Leonhardt wrote. Biden’s American Families Plan is a bid to fix that.

Finally, while the current unemployment rate is hovering around 6 percent, it’s a different scenario for workers of color in the United States. Unemployment for Black workers is 9.6 percent, while unemployment for Latino workers is around 7.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And top economic officials including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell say this is likely an undercount; workers who dropped out of the workforce altogether to school their children at home wouldn’t necessarily be captured by these statistics because they are not actively looking for work. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was unequal, and the US recovery continues to be.

“We’re not just coming out of a crisis, we’re rebuilding from decades of disinvestment,” said Mabud. “We know women have been hit hardest in this crisis, and Black and Latinx women in particular. We can’t stop until we see a full recovery and then some for women.”

The public is receptive to Biden’s large proposals

A range of polling shows that Biden’s expansive view of what counts as infrastructure has fairly broad support among the American public.

A recent NBC News poll found that 59 percent of respondents supported Biden’s American Jobs Plan. A recent Vox and Data for Progress poll found that 68 percent of likely voters support the plan. And a Monmouth University poll released Monday found 68 percent of respondents supported Biden’s infrastructure bill, with another 64 percent supportive of the ideas in Biden’s American Families Plan, which aims to make child care, higher education, and health care more affordable.

As Republicans and Democrats argue over the semantics of what constitutes “infrastructure,” Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray told Vox that Biden’s broad brush does not appear to be turning off voters so far.

For instance, Vox and Data for Progress polling found that a majority of likely voters of all parties supported Biden’s proposal of putting $400 billion into bringing down the costs of long-term care: 88 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 55 percent of Republicans support the idea. And recent polling from Politico and Morning Consult shows that a large majority of Black voters support Biden’s pledge to increase housing options for low-income Americans; 80 percent of Black voters support that measure, and 58 percent “strongly” support it.

In other words, voters seem to care more about things that directly impact their lives than they do about whether these things meet a strict definition of “infrastructure.”

“[Biden] understood that just a straightforward infrastructure plan on roads and bridges was not going to sell as well as a broader plan where people could see a potential benefit coming directly to them,” Murray told Vox. “He knows he’s not going to get support from Republicans on this; certainly not on the Hill. But he might try to build Republican support in the public once these things start rolling out.”

Murray noted that though support for Biden’s plan is split along party lines, about one-third of Republicans support his plans, which is not extremely low. The pollster also cautioned that the problem that former President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden encountered with the 2009 stimulus bill was too small. Their initial plan polled well, but that changed after it was watered down to appease congressional Republicans.

“By the end of 2009, it tanked in public opinion,” Murray said. “What the public was asking at that point was, ‘What’s in it for me?’” The Biden administration appears to have absorbed this important lesson of the Obama era.

Both Murray and Cameron Easley, senior editor at Morning Consult, noted that Biden’s plan goes up in popularity when poll respondents are told it will be paid for with higher taxes on corporations and America’s wealthy. Easley told Vox that “pay-for” seems more popular among voters than deficit spending, where the government continues to borrow rather than pay for its plans outright. The popularity of raising corporate taxes also complicates congressional Republican opposition to the plan.

Easley said the public would “much rather fund it by hiking taxes on corporations or the rich than they would by deficit spending.”

Trying to define infrastructure as roads and bridges could be a problem for Republicans

Republicans struggled to effectively attack Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill in large part because the bill — which included $1,400 stimulus checks — was popular with their constituents.

Now, “it seems Republicans have had trouble finding an effective message on infrastructure like they have had finding an effective message on Covid relief,” Easley told Vox.

So far, the main Republican attack on Biden’s American Jobs Plan is that it takes too expansive a view of infrastructure, which Republicans more narrowly define as conventional transportation infrastructure, along with broadband access. Last week, Senate Republicans unveiled a $568 billion counteroffer, which they see as the starting point of their negotiations with the White House.

“What do people think of in our states when they think of infrastructure? Roads and bridges; public transit systems; rail — which could be cargo, passenger rail; water and wastewater …ports and inland waterways; airports; broadband,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) said at a press conference.

The Monmouth University poll found that a majority of voters equally favor Biden’s plan to spend heavily on infrastructure and his plan to spend on child care, health care, and education; 54 percent said both plans were equally important, compared to 19 percent who said infrastructure was more important and 21 percent who said a plan to extend health care and child care was more important.

Rocha, the political strategist focusing on outreach to Latinos, says he’s advising Democrats to scrap the word “infrastructure” and focus with laser-like intensity on jobs.

“When talking to voters, you should always use the word ‘jobs,’” Rocha said. “Infrastructure is just something that sits out there that people don’t understand. What I am advising all Democrats is to talk about American jobs.”

Ultimately, some Democrats anticipate the most effective Republican attack may be about the overall price tag of Biden’s cumulative plans. The nearly $4 trillion in proposed spending, plus the $1.8 trillion already out the door, will likely be featured in GOP attack ads.

“Where we have to win in the debate is the pay-for,” said Democratic strategist Molly Murphy. “Republicans are basically just going to say it’s a lie, there’s no way to pay for this without raising middle-class taxes, you’ll just pay for it. They will talk about how expensive this is the whole way through.”

But Murphy noted Republicans will also have to navigate the fact that paying for these plans by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy — the thing they dislike the most — is also popular with voters.

“Right now, Americans believe this can be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy, which they support,” Murphy said. “We need to keep it that way.”

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In the United States, the deck is often stacked to favor Republicans. In the U.S. Senate, House and other institutions, Republicans can govern without winning the most votes, effectively allowing minority rule.

CORRECTION (April 30, 2021, 11:35 a.m.): At 3:23 on an earlier version of this video, the graphic labeled “Pennsylvania Senate” was mislabeled “Pennsylvania House.”

Zero Republicans voted for the American Rescue Plan. They acted as a united party, voting against $1,400 relief checks, unemployment benefits, relief for small businesses, and so much more. And once the law passed on the strength of Democratic votes, Republicans rushed to condemn it.

Rep. Claudia Tenney’s response came in the form of a “Statement on Passage of Partisan, Progressive Spending Bill.” Rep. Beth Van Duyne called it a “partisan wish list.” Rep. Andrew Garbarino also called it “partisan.” Rep. Madison Cawthorn tweeted about the “legislative monstrosity known as the Pelosi Payoff.” Rep. Doug LaMalfa also went for “Pelosi Payoff.”

They really, really didn’t like this law.

Until its money started flowing to their districts, as The American Independent’s Josh Israel does valuable work cataloging. Then it was a different story.

Sen. Roger Wicker was an early entrant, taking credit just days after the passage of the law for its inclusion of aid to restaurants. Wicker had sponsored legislation helping restaurants, and he had voted for the amendment including help for restaurants in the American Rescue Plan. But then he voted against the plan as a whole. Sorry, try harder next time.

That restaurant provision is a favorite of Republicans looking to associate themselves with the help their constituents are getting from the law they opposed. 

”The SBA’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund provides emergency assistance for eligible restaurants, bars, and other qualifying businesses impacted by COVID-19,” LaMalfa recently wrote on Facebook. “I encourage interested applicants to click this link to find out more about eligibility and how to apply.”

I’m sorry, what? You want your constituents becoming part of the “Pelosi Payoff?” Shocking, congressman!

Tenney, too, suddenly set aside her opposition to the “partisan, progressive spending bill” and tweeted: “If you think you qualify for the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, you are encouraged to create an account through the SBA’s application portal.” To be clear, Tenney’s stated objection to the bill was that it included too many things that weren’t purely health-focused. Like, you know, money for restaurants.

Van Duyne likewise is suggesting that restaurants in her district jump right on that partisan wish list she formerly decried.

Garbarino and fellow New York Rep. Lee Zeldin celebrated that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority “listened to our calls” and reversed service cuts—service cuts that were reversed because of American Rescue Plan funding.

Cawthorn was “Happy to announce” Department of Health and Human Services money going to clinics in his district.

Rep. Elise Stefanik’s opposition to the law will sound very familiar, and since its passage she has been a regular source of press releases touting Head Start funding going to her district (the American Rescue Plan included $1 billion for Head Start) and on Thursday, she joined so many of her fellow Republicans in touting the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.

The list goes on. Republicans can never oppose something hard enough to be unwilling to turn around and try to get their constituents’ gratitude for the dollars they voted against and complained about. Someone should ask them if it’s fun to live completely without shame.

On Wednesday evening, President Joe Biden addressed the nation in a stirring speech that offered Americans a vision of the future that was both hopeful and extraordinarily ambitious. Biden didn’t run on a single issue, and his speech wasn’t so much a list as it was an invitation to revive the nation. The speech detailed the benefits of the infrastructure proposal, looked forward to Biden’s plan to help families, and ran through a list of his accomplishments in the first 100 days—and it was an impressive list. It’s little wonder that Biden’s speech is getting praise from both the press and the public; it was not only a refreshing return to something that looked normal after four years of Trump’s meandering, hate-filled rants, it was a broad and invigorating look at what’s possible when a president, and a party, have a genuine vision for the future. 

Then, as happens every year, Republicans got their opportunity to provide a response provided, this time, by Sen. Tim Scott. That response? Please stop doing anything that might help. Or anything at all.

Honestly, the entire Republican presentation went by without offering a single moment that looked like a policy or a proposal, other than a passing mention of school choice. Instead, other than give the kind of autobiographic handwaving that fills too many of these responses (Tim Scott once worked at Chick-fil-A, and in case you were wondering, he liked his boss) the entire message was that Biden is not doing what Republicans want. Darn it. Biden might have promised to be bipartisan, but when Republicans try to stop his bills, he passes them anyway. So down with Biden.

Biden keeps doing things, even when we try to stop him. That’s the entire Republican message.

Scott may have set a record for using the word “bipartisan,” which Republicans now define as anything they initiate. For example, Scott complained that when Republicans proposed COVID-19 relief packages, many Democrats voted with them. But when Biden put up a relief bill, no Republican voted for it. This, according to Scott, means that Biden is at fault. Because apparently he’s the one that’s not being bipartisan in this example. 

The most interesting moment of Scott’s speech was when he talked to police reform and his experience as Black man. Unfortunately, Scott didn’t use this moment to show that he supported serious efforts at police reform or to sign onto the initiative Biden had just proposed. Instead, he turned the issue into a supposed showcase of just how Democrats would “rather have the issue” than a solution.

In the process of attempting to show how partisan those Democrats are, Scott looked at Biden’s call for police reform and noted that Democrats had actually filibustered a police reform package put forward by Republicans. What Scott didn’t mention is that the reason the bill got filibustered—other than the fact that it was wholly inadequate, actually gave more money to police forces, and was opposed by every major civil rights organization—was that Republicans refused to even talk to Democrats about the bill before it was written, submitted, or put up for a vote. That’s right, the prime example of bipartisanship presented in this paean to bipartisanship was a bill written completely by Republicans who refused to let Democrats so much as see it before it hit the Senate floor. And one on which Republicans promptly defeated every amendment proposed by Democrats.

What was missing from the Republican response was a response. That is, anything that looked like a competing vision for America. Scott’s speech was devoid of alternatives. It was simply a call to do nothing and call that bipartisanship. It was a defense of playing defense from a party that doesn’t have a competing vision.

Somehow, the Republican response seems to have generally left out the two issues that are animating actual Republican policy across the nation: torturing trans youth and keeping Black and brown people from voting. Which is a shame. Because the nation really needs to hear what animates the party of Tim Scott. 

Biden spent a large part of his speech calling for national unity and working together. Biden’s history in Washington shows that he means it—he won’t just extend an olive branch, he would accept a helping hand, even if that means compromise. But what Republicans are calling bipartisanship is really surrender. And neither Biden, nor the Democratic Party, are in a mood to give up. 

And if Tim Scott really believes that Democrats would “rather have the issue” of police reform than an actual solution, he can shock them and vote for the police reform bill when it hits the Senate floor. That would actually be … bipartisan.

The criminalization of protest is the biggest attack on First Amendment rights of our time, and a major part of the authoritarian playbook. This Vox article breaks down the dangerous new Oklahoma law, which creates immunity for drivers who are "fleeing." (Republican sponsors of the bill say it sets a "high bar," but when it comes to policing and protests, such details seem highly malleable.) Florida, meanwhile, has passed a slew of draconian anti-protest measures that loosely define the concept of a "riot" and pretty much entrap anyone standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, leaving them open to felony charges.

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Vox's Andrew Prokop has a long writeup detailing pretty much everything you might ever want to know about West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, his ability to survive in a state now dominated by hard-right Republicanism, and his (ahem) peculiarly optimistic belief in compromise as antidote to all that ails us. Interspersed through the piece are quite a few quotes from Manchin that paint him as someone who ... hmm. How to put it? For a master of getting reelected in a Republican state, the man's observations about the current state of the Senate and of the nation in general feel more aspirational than sensical.

More than anything, the man seems to truly believe that both sides are to blame for this tragic time of widespread paranoia, violent insurrection, and single-minded Republican indifference to crookedness. And he seems to be quite set, at this point, in his belief that the most recently cataloged voting procedures of the U.S. Senate are the glue that holds this nation together, far more important than ... civil rights. Voting rights. The rest of it.

Hmm.

As one example: Manchin categorically dismisses concerns that Republicans will systemically obstruct Biden and Democratic priorities, even as he appears to acknowledge that that is precisely what Republicans did during the last Democratic administration—the same Republicans, in fact, with Sen. Mitch McConnell leading the way. “I don’t think that can be repeated, or that people would stand for it, or even that the Republican caucus would adhere to that again,” says Manchin.

Really? Based on what?

No, seriously, what moves have Republicans made, since looking to contest the election and prevent the Biden administration from even coming to existence, since shouting conspiracy theories that stoked violent insurrection, that give Manchin this optimism? Is it the demands that emergency pandemic relief be slashed? The new Republican discovery of yet another "crisis" on the southern border that is absolutely Joe Biden's fault and which no Republican senator gave a flying sulfur-encrusted damn about before Jan. 21, 2020?

The Republican caucus has moved on from blanket obstruction of non-Republican administrations so as to intentionally slow economic recoveries and block governmental competence during non-Republican rule since when? It's not so much that we're gonna need a flowchart on this one, it'd be nice to see even one plausible bit of evidence for this claim.

But it's Manchin's renewed expressions of scorn towards passing new civil rights protections—unless the Republicans curtailing those civil rights can be brought aboard—that's the kicker. Manchin is now very opposed to weakening filibuster rules (that Republicans are, despite Manchin's assurances that the party could never get away with such things these days, continuing to abuse in countless not-votes) for the purpose of passing the voting rights-centered For the People Act, an effort to push back on a wave of new Republican laws intended to curb voting rights and make voting more difficult after swing state voters rejected a corrupt and incompetent Republican incumbent who brushed off half a million pandemic deaths.

Protecting voters from a sea of new Jim Crow-borrowing laws meant to impose new costs on working or lower-income voters might be important, but Manchin believes the real danger here is protecting voters when the other side doesn't want them to be protected. Reports Prokop:

“'How in the world could you, with the tension we have right now, allow a voting bill to restructure the voting of America on a partisan line?' he asked. He says that 20 to 25 percent of the public already doesn’t trust the system and that a party-line overhaul would 'guarantee' that number would increase, leading to more 'anarchy' like that at the Capitol on January 6. He added: 'I just believe with all my heart and soul that’s what would happen, and I’m not going to be part of it.'”

Oh. Huh. So if we don't allow conservative state legislators to sabotage elections to suppress nonwhite, nonconservative votes, it will lead to more conservative ... terrorism?

Well, he does have a good handle on what happened during the civil rights era, so good on him. His prescription for what to do about it though—avoid challenging voting rights oppressors so that they won't do worse, and God forbid get partisanship involved—is certainly an odd lesson to take from those episodes.

On the filibuster specifically, Manchin is quoted to say he will not be “that one vote that would basically destroy” the rule that, in his mind, keeps the Senate a moderating force—a place where institutional sluggishness keeps the nation on an even keel even as members of the wacky, intractable House demand all sorts of changes and reforms.

To be honest, it all paints a rather familiar picture of a Senate that, to put things in the common vernacular, is so far up its own ass that the rest of the nation might or might not even exist. The notion of Senate as moderating force is especially peculiar after the Senate quite moderately immunized a sitting president from doing crimes not once, but twice despite widespread institutional agreement that he had definitely done those things and they were definitely things any prior president would have been run out of town on a rail for. It showed alleged moderation in announcing that the Black president would not be allowed to fill a Supreme Court vacancy for the entire last year of his term, while the Incompetent Blowhard White Nationalist successor would be allowed to drive his golf cart over the corpse of the next deceased justice on his way to the nominating ceremony for the next one. 

There was the moderation of intentionally thwarting not one, but two recent economic recoveries so as to better convince voters of governmental uselessness—yes, that was certainly a fine bowl of warm legislative milk. Now we’re to reckon with a new theory that the Senate—whose members promoted election hoaxes for the sake of wounding a new non-Republican administration—can immediately in its aftermath be trusted to find good, proper balance points between their party’s resulting moves to slash public access to democracy and the moderate position of perhaps slashing it a wee bit less.

This is all painfully familiar, though. There is a long tradition of senators insisting that their tea times and varnished phrases are the very glue that holds the fabric of American government together. In fact, it seems the more simultaneous catastrophes members of the world's most moth-riddled deliberative body launch the nation into during any given period of time, the more insistent senators become in describing their own even-temperedness and genius.

Now, there is no question that Joe Manchin is a savvy fellow. The man has toed all available political lines with the grace of an acrobat, becoming the only Democrat left in a state that lost interest in the rest of the Democratic Party after it started nominating environmentalists and Black people. But these notions that Senate Republicans would absolutely never pointlessly obstruct a Biden administration, and would absolutely be open to working with Democrats to circumvent state Republican efforts to clamp down on voting, and for certain will hold the nation together even through fascist agendas, obsessive propaganda efforts, and violent terrorism bent on erasing elections outright rather than recognize the legitimacy of another political party—these do not seem to be assurances based on vast political experience. These seem to be claims based solely on a notion that the Republican radicalism of (checks notes) less than 24 hours ago will surely give way to glad-handing cooperation any minute now, if only Democrats stop provoking their opponents by doing things.

Hmm. Yeah, we may need Manchin to show his work on this one. Not hard proof, even, just a hint or two.

Give us some sign this isn't just another instance of moderate senators being in love with the smell of their own, er, colognes, if you please.

A college student in Kansas who once made headlines for threatening local police officials who “got in his way” has now been appointed as part of Wichita State University’s student government. But his threatening to shoot police officials is not the only problematic thing giving him attention. The student—identified as Sam McCrory—chose to wear a “white lives matter” face mask to his first student government event Thursday.

McCrory was sworn into office while wearing the mask just one day after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd, The Wichita Eagle reported. When asked about the mask, McCrory expressed no regrets, noting that he wore the mask to push back against those who hate white people. “I’m not going to be a second-class citizen in my own country,” he said. “People can wear Black Lives Matter masks and nobody cares. But if someone wears a white lives matter mask, all of a sudden there’s a huge firestorm.”

According to The Wichita Eagle, despite him wearing the mask to the event and being sworn in with it, the mask went unnoticed by the Student Government Association until the university’s student paper, The Sunflower, posted photographs of the ceremony on social media. Students and others then called for the university to remove McCrory from his position as university student senator.

“Those pictures were posted the same week George Floyd’s murderer was (convicted) and after WSU released a statement talking about inclusiveness on campus and embracing diversity,” said Hannah Newby, a 23-year-old WSU student. “It was a horrible statement to begin with that just danced around police brutality and Black Lives Matter in general.” Newby called out university leadership for not condemning the mask and taking a strong stance against police brutality and racism.

“The fact that I got on to social media yesterday and saw my university posting students sporting white nationalist propaganda was disappointing and embarrassing to say the least,” Newby said. “I think having differing opinions within the SGA is different than allowing outright racists to take a seat with SGA.”

According to The Wichita Eagle, following the Chauvin trial WSU issued the following statement, saying universities have an obligation to be “safe harbors for diversity of thought and life, but also to be catalysts of positive change in all respects – knowledge, research, economics and culture. One of our distinctive university values is to be an institution of inclusive excellence: to be a campus that reflects and promotes – in all community members – the evolving diversity of society.”

Newby wasn’t the only student who shared their disappointment with the university.

“No person with a ‘white lives matter’ mask should have a place in SGA,” WSU Intersectional Student Leftists Association, a WSU student group, posted on Twitter. “Absolutely unacceptable.”

According to The Wichita Eagle, while school officials would not return calls or comments on who the student was, The Sunflower identified the senator as McCrory, which was later confirmed by McCrory himself to the outlet. 

Outside of his choice of attire, what is troubling is a student like McCrory would represent other students of a university. McCrory has not only threatened cops in the past but has been arrested and pleaded guilty to felony crimes. According to The Wichita Eagle, McCrory posted plans to storm the Sedgwick County Courthouse in 2015 in attempts to disrupt a murder trial. He not only threatened to shoot officers who got in his way, he also threatened the judge of the case.

“If we get a decent number of people to charge through the front doors and security, the police there will attack us. Often times, the only way to defend yourself from a cop is to kill the cop which means using a rifle to penetrate their body armor,” he posted on Facebook. Court records indicate he was sentenced to 34 months probation and an anger management course in 2015. He was also convicted of criminal possession of a firearm for showing up to protests with guns, despite his criminal record forbidding him from doing so. 

In response to people calling the mask racist, McCrory defended himself, claiming it wasn’t. “Do I think I’m racist? I think that the word has no meaning at this point. I reject the moral construct behind it.”

Wearing racist masks amid the pandemic is not a new trend. With mask mandates in place across the country, individuals have been wearing masks displaying racist slogans and symbols nationwide. In one incident, a couple wore masks with swastikas on them to protest Minnesota’s state mask mandate, Daily Kos reported. Such symbols are not okay and should not be tolerated wherever they are worn, especially in a school setting for those considered to be leaders.

Three white men were indicted on federal hate crime charges in connection with the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, while he was jogging through a Brunswick, Ga., neighborhood last year.

The Justice Department announced the charges Wednesday, adding that Gregory and Travis McMichael, a father and son, along with another man, William “Roddie” Bryan, willfully interfered with Arbery “because of Arbery’s race and color.”

“In addition to the hate-crime charges … all three defendants attempted to unlawfully seize and confine Arbery by chasing after him in their trucks in an attempt to restrain him, restrict his free movement, corral and detain him against his will, and prevent his escape,” according to a press release from the Department of Justice.

The three men were each charged with a single count of interfering with rights and one count of attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels face an additional count each for carrying and brandishing firearms during their encounter with Arbery.

The younger McMichael is charged with firing his weapon.

The charges stem from a Feb. 23, 2020, encounter where the father and son, suspecting Arbery was behind a string of thefts in the neighborhood, grabbed guns and pursued him.

Bryan later joined the pursuit, according to investigators.

Once Arbery was cornered, Travis McMichael exited his truck and engaged with Arbery. After a brief tussle, the younger McMichael shot and killed Arbery.

All three men face murder and aggravated assault charges in state court.

The new charges come as the federal officials have been moving swiftly to open up investigations into police departments that were at the center of some of last year’s most high-profile police encounters resulting in the killing of unarmed Black Americans.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced investigations into the Louisville and Minneapolis police departments to determine if there’s a “pattern or practice” violation of the civil rights of their residents.

Breonna Taylor, who was killed during a botched raid by Louisville police, and George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer last year, became rallying cries — along with Arbery — during national protests calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality.

At the time of the Arbery killing, Georgia was one of a handful of states that did not have hate crime laws on the books and also did not require officials to track or collect data on hate crimes.

In June, the Georgia legislature overwhelmingly approved hate crime measures, which Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law.

The news cycle during the last White House administration was a never-ending stream of corruption and nepotism. The Trumps (and Kushners) participated in such transparent acts of self-dealing and corruption that it became clear they believed their positions in government would immunize them from any prosecution of their actions. Added to this cocktail of criminality and power, is the fact that the Trump family is filled with starkly third-rate people, like Donald Trump Jr. It isn’t hard to see how they have broken the laws, stolen Americans’ money, and abused their positions in government. 

In January of 2020, Washington, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed a civil complaint against the Trump Organization and the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Racine alleged that these two Trumpian groups acted a lot like money laundering operations. A year later, while the Trump and Republican machine tried to overthrow our democratically elected government, Racine was asking for depositions from both Ivanka and Junior. Reportedly, Racine was asking the conman’s progeny about money purportedly spent by Trump’s Inaugural Committee on the Trump Organization—the latter technically being the family business. Ivanka worked the Inaugural Committee while Junior worked the Trump Organization. At the time, Racine reportedly said Trump Jr.’s deposition “raised further questions,” that his office would continue to pursue.

Mother Jones reports that some of the questions raised during Junior’s deposition may revolve around him lying during his testimony. [play sound of a rim shot]

Donald Trump Jr.’s deposition is filled with his inability to “recall” whether or not he was involved at all in the deals and moves being made to bring together Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration. One might say he pleads ignorance to most questions asked of him by attorneys. And even though the words “ignorance” and “Donald Trump Jr.,” go together like peanut butter and chocolate, Junior possibly being a liar is more believable. 

In documents and video obtained by Mother Jones, Donald Trump Jr. seems to have lied or at the very least mislead, prosecutors when he was asked about knowing close Melania Trump friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who raised concerns about the price-gouging the Trump organization was participating in when the Trump hotel was charging the Inaugural Committee “twice the market rate for event space.” According to Racine, the committee’s deal with the hotel ended up being well above market rates.

During his deposition, Trump Jr. was asked about Winston Wolkoff: “Do you know her?” He replied, “I know of her. I think I’ve met her, but I don’t know her. If she was in this room I’m not sure I would recognize her.” He added, “I had no involvement with her.”

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, you might remember, is the former senior adviser to Melania Trump. She’s the lady who wrote the tell-all memoir about her time with the former first lady. Mother Jones has video from inauguration night of Junior telling a camera how great Winston Wolkoff is, and they also have text exchanges showing that Winston Wolkoff and Junior likely spoke on the phone a bit, and emails from Trump Jr. to Winston Wolkoff asking about helping out with inauguration festivities. Winston Wolkoff didn’t comment on Junior’s testimony but she told Mother Jones that: “I did not think it was right for the Trump Family or the Trump Family’s businesses to be financially profiting from the presidential inauguration. It was a gross mismanagement of funds and an abuse of authority, and I made it very clear to people in the Trump Family and the inauguration committee how I felt.”

The video where Trump Jr. is praising Winston Wolkoff also happens to be at an inauguration event that Junior also didn’t recall attending. Video evidence says he definitely attended it. Most of Junior’s testimony is evasive. Many of the questions directed at him were about private Trump organization events that seem to have likely been paid for, or in part funded by, the Trump Inauguration Committee—something that would be the definition of self-dealing. Prosecutors have receipts for all of these expenditures and whether or not it matters if Junior is lying or simply an ignoramus, will be a legal question decided by the courts (hopefully).

To be clear, the Republican Party is fully complicit in self-dealing under the guise of self-promotion. And both the Trumps and the GOP use made-up cultural changes to try and obfuscate the real issues of their corruption and impotence as leaders. But lawyers don’t care about your incitements to overthrow the government on Fox News when they are investigating whether or not you stole money.

Here’s Trump Jr. talking about how great a person he told lawyers he didn’t really know was, at an event he couldn’t recall attending.

They're increasingly telling their supporters to live a life of anger and confrontation.

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Failed politician and person and current CNN pundit Rick Santorum has once again spoken in public and in so doing, condemned himself and those around him to ridicule for his outrageously racist and false ideas about the world and history. Speaking to a group called Young America’s Foundation (which to my ears is a dog whistle for ‘Hitler Youth’), Santorum gave his explanation of our country’s history and what he thought was uniquely white supremacist about it. “So they came here mostly from Europe and they set up a country that was based on Judeo-Christian principles. I say Judeo-Christian: the Mosaic laws, Ten Commandments, and the teachings of Jesus Christ. The morals and teachings of Jesus Christ. That's what our founding documents are based upon. It's in our DNA, you know.” It’s not. It wasn’t. Santorum, not unlike many evangelicals and born again-style Christians, have a Santa Claus-like understanding of the books of the Bible. 

Normally, white supremacists like Santorum and other evangelicals like him stop here, as details and facts about these assertions are easily complicated by reality. However, in the clip you can watch below, Santorum begins giving his revised version of the United States’ history, along with his equally historically inaccurate summary of non-white countries—a sort of comparative racism lecture, if you will. He says that places like Turkey and China, with millennia of history, have cultures and societies that have “evolved” or “changed” over time, but not the United States. Did you know that? You didn’t know that because it isn’t true. But then, as proof (maybe?) or something, Santorum explained that “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture." #RemoveRick began trending before you could spell G-A-R-B-A-G-E F-I-R-E.

The phrase “birthed a nation” naturally brings to mind American cinema’s first feature film The Birth of A Nation, and its horrific racism and promotion of the Ku Klux Klan as American heroes. Santorum is dumb enough to possibly not be aware of the racist lineage of one of his talking points. However, his general incompetence is coupled here with attempts at erasing nations of Native peoples from our blood-soaked history, erasing Black Americans from our white supremacist history, and being wildly incorrect about the history of other regions in the world, all at the same time.

Santorum’s offensive ideas—if they can be called ideas—on everything from race and culture to women and the rights of people not named Rick Santorum, are just some of the reasons he shouldn’t be allowed on television as a pundit. The most obvious reason is that he isn’t very smart. He’s not good at having or articulating ideas. He’s not good at articulating anything other than bigotry and ignorance—and sadly there are a lot of people better at selling that to the public than Rick Santorum. In fact, the only real reason to have him on television is to wonder at the spectacle of someone so truly inept being able to function at all, in any capacity. #RemoveRick very quickly became a trending topic on Twitter as calls grew for Santorum’s tenure on CNN to end.

The nonprofit IllumiNative, which works to center attention on the very viable and longstanding cultures of Native peoples, gave a very simple set of responses to Santorum’s vapidity.

And Native activists and citizens across the land are not here for Santorum’s bullshit.

You can read about the Iroquois Confederacy, founded in 1142, and its influence on our country’s earliest stages of development, here. Maybe Rick can go back to school and get that history lesson needed to graduate fifth grade.

Here are a few people that would have totally agreed with Rick just a couple of elections ago. Is that a culture change? Hard to say, as Rick and people like Rick don’t really have honest thoughts on the matter. They’re just rationalizing their racism.

Santorum’s continued existence in the public sphere is always infuriating.

Can someone please be more eloquent in their explanation for why #RemoveRick is trending?

Perfect.

Washington Post reporter Jeremy Barr reported that Santorum had this piece of new revisionist history to add to the conversation, tweeting: “I reached out to CNN PR for comment on this and got the following statement from an outside comms person representing Rick Santorum: Santorum: ‘I had no intention of minimizing or in any way devaluing Native American culture.’ That is the whole statement.”

The fact that Santorum is about as intelligent as a bag of 113-year-old toenail clippings doesn’t change the very intentional phrasing of “but candidly.” Santorum shouldn’t be allowed to have a job pressing his poorly thought-out theories on the public, because candidly, it’s irresponsible for anyone to even tangentially support his statements.