James.galbraith

By March 2020, researchers knew that uncontrolled spread would be disastrous.

A year ago, on March 17, I wrote a piece about how scientists were predicting that we might have to social distance for a year or more. Soon I was hearing from friends and family via chats and text. “Brian, I literally don’t know if I can,” one friend wrote me. Their responses could be summarized as, “SAY IT ISN’T SO.”

Being physically apart from one another for so long has been among the bitterest pills to swallow in the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s also one of the hardships scientists warned early on we’d have to endure.

By mid-March 2020, “I think we had a pretty good sense of what we were in for,” Stephen Kissler, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard who co-authored an influential paper on a possible timeline of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, told me recently.

Once uncontrolled spread started outside of China, scientists knew what we were in for

By then, scientists who’d long anticipated a pandemic had seen the out-of-control spread of the coronavirus in China and Italy. They had estimated the virus’s transmissibility (i.e., how contagious it was), they knew it spread through the respiratory system (which upped its pandemic potential), they saw how the virus could overrun hospitals, and they knew this was a novel virus and most people would not have natural immunity to it. The whole world was susceptible to this disease.

Plus, they were beginning to see that the virus could spread before people felt symptoms, which makes it harder to contain. All of that added up to a long-haul scenario.

In Kissler’s eyes, last March, there were two extreme potential scenarios given the information epidemiologists had at the time.

One was the catastrophe: The pandemic could have unfolded, without any precautions in place, ripping through the population, killing many more people in the US, over a “roughly nine-month period,” Kissler says. “The early models that showed that we would have catastrophic things happen if we just lived our lives as normal.”

The other was longer, but still painful: “We could extend it out to a year and a half, two years, and try to save some of our infrastructure and reduce overall death. ... There was this overwhelming realization that no matter what we did, the only way that we can keep our hospitals safe and try to prevent too many people from dying was to really be persistent about social distancing for a very long time.”

What scientists didn’t know at the time was how exactly the US and other countries would respond to the clear and present danger.

With social distancing, mask-wearing, business closures, and other precautions, we definitely avoided that first, worst case. It’s also hard to argue the best-case scenario was reached, either. (America failed its Covid-19 challenge on many fronts.) We’ve seen wave after wave of infections in the United States, and at least 530,000 deaths.

Every time precautions were relaxed, cases grew

Many of these waves were predictable. Early in March 2020, I was told that if America lifts social distancing and doesn’t have a strong containment strategy in mind to replace it, the virus was just going to cause new outbreaks. That’s what happened last summer after many states reopened around Memorial Day.

“This is totally predictable, and there have been many warnings,” Sarah Cobey, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Chicago, told me at the time. The big fall wave, too, was predictable: It’s common for respiratory viruses to spread more easily as temperatures drop and people spend more time indoors. Researchers also could anticipate the waves because it’s what they’ve observed before in flu pandemics, which spread in similar ways to Covid-19. “When [pandemic] flu comes in, it spreads in a couple of waves — usually at least three — and it just takes about a year and a half for that to sort of run itself out,” Kissler says.

Opening indoor restaurants and bars and rescinding mask mandates (or failing to ever implement them) before vaccines were available, before better rapid testing was available, was always going to invite more infections and lead to more hospitalizations and deaths.

If anything, it was always going to be more dangerous to relax restrictions when the virus was more widespread. That’s because keeping people safe from the virus also keeps them vulnerable to the virus. Opening up early means exposing these vulnerable people to an environment where the virus is more widespread.

Even a year ago, none of this seemed like it would be easy. The experts knew that.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me last March that the social distancing measures might need to be in place for months. “I don’t think people are prepared for that and I am not certain we can bear it,” she said in an email at the time. “I have no idea what political leaders will decide to do. To me, even if this is needed, it seems unsustainable.” She added that she might just be feeling pessimistic, but “it’s really hard for me to imagine this country staying home for months.”

Again, by then, we had some idea of what we were in for. Were there still big question marks? Yes. We didn’t know if there would be good treatments for Covid-19; we didn’t know how long the vaccines would take to test. We were hopeful that with a clearer understanding of where transmission was taking place that we could replace broad business closures with targeted interventions. While it was impossible to precisely predict how the pandemic would unfold, and where, it was easy to see, broadly, which policies would make things worse, and which would make things better.

And now, it’s been a year. There are vaccines. There are treatments. A new spring is about to bloom.

Covid-19 isn’t likely to just go away. It may linger, for a long time, as a common illness. But now, we can feel some cautious optimism that the crisis is easing. It’s unlikely this epidemic will continue for another whole year in the United States, at least.

“Not another full year, hopefully,” Kissler says. “Maybe closer to five, six months.”

Their efforts are so blatantly partisan that they risk a serious backlash from Democratic voters.

If people start expecting this kind of help from government all the time, conservatism is in trouble.

New cases of COVID-19 remain plateaued at a level around 60,000 cases a day, though the seven-day rolling average for deaths has now dropped below 1,500 for the first time since November. That this seems like something worth celebrating only shows how easily we’ve become acclimated to things getting worse—the three deadliest months of the whole pandemic in the United States have been December, January, and February. So, better than that is a long, long way from really better.

However, with a quarter of all adults now having received at least one dose of vaccine, cases at extended care facilities down by 96%, new CDC guidelines endorsing the idea that it’s okay for groups of vaccinated people to gather without masks, and the sheer rate of vaccination still accelerating—there is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel. In case there is any doubt, things are getting better. The nightmare created through downplaying the virus and ignoring science is being swept away as Joe Biden keeps the promises he made a year ago.

But the pandemic will not end like the flip of a light switch. The 1,500 Americans dying each day from COVID-19 are still 1,500 stories of grief and loss that will never be replaced. The end of the pandemic is being drawn out by governors who are dropping mask-mandates and reopening businesses in full knowledge of the threat these actions bring.

In communities of color, the grief is also being extended by an inability to get access to vaccines. And part of the problem is a lie that’s being repeatedly told about levels of vaccine acceptance in the Black community. 

According to the CDC COVID-19 Data Tracker, the states of Georgia and Alabama are at the very back of the pack when it comes to getting vaccines delivered into the arms of their citizens. These states are running well behind even neighboring states like Mississippi and Florida both in the percentage of citizens vaccinated, and in the percent of vaccines actually administered.

As NPR reports, there’s at least one clear reason that vaccines aren’t getting where they’re needed in Georgia—officials are making assumptions about vaccine acceptance among the Black community that are based on preconceptions rather than looking at the facts on the ground.

It's a story we've heard again and again since the beginning of the vaccine rollout. The shots that can keep people from getting COVID-19 are not being given equitably to people of color who are more likely to die of the disease. In Alabama, one Birmingham clinic that serves a mostly poor Black population has not been given a single dose.

The result of situations like this is that whites in Georgia are getting vaccinated at twice the rate of Blacks. And because Black workers have all the risks they’ve faced since the beginning of the outbreak—more likely to work essential jobs, less likely to have adequate access to health care—the lopsided rate of vaccination means that infections and deaths from COVID-19 are being preferentially shifted away from white communities into communities of color.

Jefferson County commissioner Sheila Tyson provides a number of reasons for this inequitable response. One of those is how Georgia, like many states, has depended on internet access to schedule vaccine appointments. Those who don’t have good internet, or the ability to spend time constantly searching for appointments, are being shut out. Transportation is also an issue, when vaccine events may be scheduled many miles away in areas not accessible by public transportation.

But in an interview with NPR’s Ari Shapiro, Tyson points out another frustrating factor that’s contributed heavily to the unequal rates of vaccination.

SHAPIRO: You said state leaders are telling you they are not distributing the vaccine to majority-Black neighborhoods because they expect people there are going to be vaccine-hesitant, that they're not going to want to get vaccinated. Is that your experience when you talk to people? Is that what you hear?

TYSON: No. I am finding out thousands and thousands of people within the state of Alabama want the vaccine. We have over 125,000 people in Jefferson County on the waiting list. We want it now.

This idea that Black folks are unwilling to accept the COVID-19 vaccine is completely counter to information that is readily available. The latest numbers from Civiqs show that 57% of Black Americans who have not already been vaccinated are a definite “yes” for the vaccine. This compares with 40% for white Americans. Monmouth University measured the number of people unwilling to accept the vaccine, and found this to be 14% among people of color, and 28% percent among whites. 

But the idea that Black people will not accept the vaccine continues to be pervasive, continues to appear in media accounts, and is clearly being used as an excuse to withhold vaccine from communities of color. As Tyson states in the NPR interview, there’s little that people or officials in these communities can do, because all of this is dependent on the actions at the state level. 

It’s not clear how much this failure to meet vaccine demand in communities of color has contributed to the overall low level of vaccination in Georgia, but it’s obvious that each time vaccine is sent to areas where it is not used, there is a level of waste and a delay that can be extensive. As KSDK reported on March 1, of the doses sent to a vaccine event in one largely white rural county in Missouri, over half of the doses ended up not being utilized. Some of those doses had to be discarded after the vaccine was allowed to be thawed for too long. Three days later, Gov. Mike Parson admitted that the event had been a mistake saying, “That site should have never happened the way it did; that’s just the bottom line.”

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on March 4, Parson acknowledged that distribution vaccines was shortchanging urban areas. “A higher percentage of people are interested in receiving the vaccine in urban centers than in rural areas,” said Parson. However, Parson then announced he was making no change in that distribution, because “For the urban areas we know because the population is much larger, it’s just going to take much longer to do.” At the same time, Parson said people who live in rural areas “are less likely to want the vaccine.” That is in line with a Kaiser Family Foundation survey from February that found 3 in 10 rural Americans saying they would “definitely not” get the vaccine. 

If that sounds like communities of color are continuing to be shortchanged even though Parson was absolutely aware that he was sending more vaccine than necessary to areas where it wasn’t going to be used … it sounded like that to local officials as well. After considerable pressure, Parson announced a change. As the Gasconade County Republican reported on March 10, Parson promised to make more vaccine available in “urban areas” and “vulnerable communities.” At the same time, he once again acknowledged again that demand for vaccine is not even. 

“We do recognize that some Missourians are less interested in receiving the vaccine than others,” Parson said, noting people in urban areas tend to be more eager to be vaccinated.

The urban areas here would be St. Louis (50% Black or Latino) and Kansas City (39% Black or Latino).

This story is being replicated across the nation. The excuse may be that urban areas are “too large” to tackle right away, or it may be the persistent myth that Blacks are less likely to accept the vaccine. But the result is that Black Americans are getting vaccinated at a lower rate, despite a higher level of vaccine acceptance. This inequity demands to be remedied across every state. 

With things getting better, there’s a real tendency to treat the pandemic is as if it’s over. As of now, after all these months, America can finally relax and just let the rest of this spool out toward an inevitable end. But there is still plenty of time to get sick, plenty of time to be left with a lifelong disability from the still mysterious effects of the virus, still plenty of time for families to suffer irredeemable loss. That burden should not fall unequally on communities of color—the way it has been falling, since the first moments of the pandemic.

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A group of bipartisan senators is reintroducing a bill that would make Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent. New submitter McTohmas shares a report: In the United States, most states observe DST -- which starts on the second Sunday in March at 2 a.m. and ends on the first Sunday in November at 2 a.m. -- for eight months out of the year, and four months of standard time. But the Sunshine Protection Act, proposed by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, calls for not "falling back" in November and instead enjoying DST year-round. It would not change the country's current time zones or the number of hours of sunlight. The bill was already passed in Rubio's home state of Florida in 2018 -- but in order to go into effect, it requires a change at the federal level. Fifteen other states -- including California, which voted to make daylight saving time permanent in 2018, and Washington, which did the same in 2019 -- have passed similar legislation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The bill, like all gun control legislation over the past several years, will likely fail in the Senate.

The House of Representatives has passed a bipartisan bill that would mandate universal background checks Thursday by a vote of 227-203, with eight Republicans joining all but one Democrat to send the bill to the Senate.

The background checks bill would expand federal oversight of gun sales, requiring unlicensed and private sellers to conduct background checks.

While gun sales between licensed sellers and buyers are contingent on the buyer’s passage of a federal background check for red flags like a criminal record or a history of mental illness, unlicensed sellers, including online sales, gun shows, and sales between family members and friends, are currently under no obligation to request a background check.

Under the bill, sponsored by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA), gun loans for activities such as hunting or gifting among family members are still permissible.

Its passage would represent the first significant federal gun control law in more than 25 years. Further legislation, such as gun licensing or a registry, is likely needed to make a significant dent in the US’s staggering gun violence statistics, but universal background checks are an important first step, as Vox’s German Lopez explained:

The universal background check bill would help close a major loophole under the current law. About one in five gun transfers (sales or otherwise) are done without any background check at all, based on recent research. The bill would aim to close this loophole and, in doing so, attempt to ensure that fewer potentially dangerous people are obtaining firearms.

Universal background checks are the top legislative priority for Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group and network that includes Moms Demand Action, and are supported by President Joe Biden. The issue polls extremely well — a Gallup poll from 2018 found that 92 percent of respondents favored universal background checks. Polling from Everytown and the gun control advocacy and research organization Giffords conducted after the 2020 election found that 93 percent of Americans want universal background checks — including “strong” support from 64 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of gun owners.

But for all of their popularity, universal background checks — like every major gun legislation proposal in the past 20 years — are an extremely hard sell to elected Republicans.

In 2019, the House passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act with the support of eight Republicans. At the time, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not bring the bill to the Senate for a vote, stalling the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Senate Democrats would hold hearings on gun violence and promised to hold a vote on the legislation.

“Last time, it went into Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard,” Schumer said in a press conference Thursday. “The legislative graveyard is over. H.R. 8 will be on the floor of the Senate, and we will see where everybody stands. No more thought and prayers — a vote is what we need.”

Advocates of the bill are touting its narrow bipartisan support in the House as evidence for Senate optimism: Three Republicans — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Chris Smith (R-NJ), and Fred Upton (R-MI) — co-sponsored it, and five additional Republicans voted for it. But considering the 60-vote threshold and Republicans’ immovability on the issue in the past, the bill faces slim odds in the Senate.

Democrats acknowledge the bill’s passage will be an uphill battle but are cautiously optimistic. Senate leadership and the president now support the bill, and, in a statement to Vox, Senate sponsor Chris Murphy (D-CT) said Democrats got “pretty far down the road” in cutting a deal with Republicans to expand background checks in 2019.

“While it might be a hill to climb, I’m confident this is the Congress that can finally make a change to save lives and make our communities safer,” Murphy said.

How effective are universal background checks?

Research from Giffords shows that 22 percent of all guns — including 45 percent of those acquired online — were sold without a background check. But if the goal is a reduction in gun violence, universal background checks are likely just one part of what a safe environment would look like.

Cassandra Crifasi, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said universal background checks are a “really important first step.”

“The system right now makes it too easy for people who might not be able to pass a background check to lawfully buy a gun from someone who is under no obligation to do a background check,” she said.

But she and other experts say it’s just the first step if America wants to meaningfully reduce its levels of gun violence. As Lopez explained, the evidence on background checks’ ability to do that is mixed: While “establishing a background check system, as the US has already done on a national scale, likely has an effect” on reducing gun violence, several studies in the past few years “found that universal background checks, enacted at the state level, have a limited effect” on firearm homicide and suicide rates.

A universal background check system would be most effective, Crifasi said, if followed by policies that require a license for gun ownership, such as the ones states have for vehicles.

Such a system seems to be the most effective method of bringing down gun violence rates, as Lopez explained:

The big studies so far come out of Connecticut and Missouri. In Connecticut, researchers looked at what happened after the state passed a permit-to-purchase law for handguns — finding a 40 percent drop in gun homicides and 15 percent reduction in handgun suicides. In Missouri, researchers looked at the aftermath of the state repealing its handgun permit-to-purchase law — finding a 23 percent increase in firearm homicides but no significant increase in non-firearm homicides, as well as 16 percent higher handgun suicides.

In the past, advocates pointed to these studies as evidence that comprehensive background checks work, because the licensing systems in the states were paired with comprehensive background checks. But the evidence increasingly suggests that it’s the licensing system, not the comprehensive background checks, that’s key.

But, critically, any gun licensing system has to be built on a foundation of universal background checks. And there is promising data — in states where universal background checks have not been passed, Giffords found guns used in crimes were exported across state lines at a 30 percent higher rate than in those with universal background checks. Eighty percent of guns obtained for criminal purposes were acquired through unlicensed sellers, according to Giffords. And there’s no shortage of examples of mass shootings in which the shooter acquired their gun without a background check, including the 2019 shooting in West Texas.

In addition, passing universal background checks would raise the minimum requirements for states, bringing them to an equal playing field — which is critical for a problem like gun violence, in which guns used in crimes are often bought in states that have not strengthened their gun laws past the federal standard.

Twenty-two states and Washington, DC, currently have universal background checks in place. But buyers often cross state lines to acquire firearms — Illinois, for example, has relatively strong gun laws, but a 2017 City of Chicago report found that 60 percent of crime guns come from out-of-state.

“One of the biggest challenges we have with the way our current laws are set up is that states with really strong gun laws are at the mercy of states with weak ones,” Crifasi said. “Lifting the floor for everyone is going to make folks safer.”

Previous background check bills have failed in the Senate. This one likely will, too.

Barring a new wave of Republican support or filibuster removal, universal background checks seem poised to fail in the Senate, just as background check expansions and assault rifle bans did in 2013, another universal background check bill and a ban on suspected terrorists buying guns did in 2015, and tightened background checks did in 2016.

A few Republicans, including Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), who famously negotiated a background check bill amendment in 2013 with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that did not pass, have been open to gun control. But getting 10 members of the GOP to buck the party line is a different story.

“If I had an answer to that, we would have this bill through the Senate already,” a congressional aide said when asked if there are 10 Republicans who would be on board with some form of background check expansion. The aide did say there are Republicans who “understand the gravity of the situation.”

But any path to 10 Republicans begins with Toomey — and even he did not pledge support for universal background checks in a statement to Vox, suggesting any potential deal would require watering down the bill. Toomey pointed to his proposal with Manchin, which specifically expands background checks to gun shows and online sales rather than all private sellers with few exceptions, as Senate Democrats’ bill does.

“Sen. Toomey remains supportive of his bipartisan proposal with Sen. Manchin to strengthen firearm background checks,” Toomey’s press secretary said. “Progress is only possible on this issue if the measure in question is narrow and protects the rights of law-abiding gun owners.”

John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown, said just having a vote on the issue represents significant progress — and Schumer committed to scheduling one.

“For years, Mitch McConnell wanted to protect Republicans from voting against a set of policies that 90 percent of Americans support,” he said. “Now, with Leader Schumer, there’s nowhere to hide. There’s nowhere to run. They’re going to have to put their names on the vote.”

Considering the stiff odds universal background checks face in the Senate, gun control advocates are pressing the Biden administration to take executive action.

On background checks specifically, Everytown has called on the administration to direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to independently extend background checks to all firearms in order to target so-called ghost guns, or firearms built by purchasers through acquiring parts, making the weapons untraceable. Everytown also believes Biden can help prevent gun sales without background checks by directing the FBI to alert state and local law enforcement of denied background checks and having the Justice Department crack down on online sales by clarifying its licensing rules.

Politico reported last month that Biden is considering pursuing ghost gun regulations after meeting with advocates, but would stick to supporting congressional action — for now. Any meaningful executive orders would need to be done with an ATF director in place.

Having campaigned on taking quick action to combat gun violence, executive action might be the only feasible path forward for Biden if a universal background checks proposal proves immovable in the Senate.

“The background checks in particular are unfinished business for [Biden], and the same for [House] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and Leader Schumer,” Feinblatt said. “They’re going to get it done.”

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Aurelia no

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that the United States plans to order another 100 million Covid-19 vaccine doses from Johnson & Johnson.

The president made the announcement after a White House meeting with J&J CEO Alex Gorsky and Merck CEO Ken Frazier — one week after the two companies struck a deal for Merck to produce millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine.

The planned purchase would bring the country's total vaccine order to 800 million doses split among three manufacturers. But J&J and Merck are unlikely to deliver the additional 100 million shots in time to speed the vaccination of American adults this spring.

"There's always a chance that we'll encounter unexpected challenges, or will there be a new need," Biden said at the press conference. "A lot can happen, a lot can change. And we need to be prepared."

The president also signaled that his planned Thursday primetime address would kick off a broader push to restore Americans’ sense of normalcy. “I’m going to talk about what comes next; I’m going to launch the next phase of the Covid response," he said.

J&J has supplied roughly 4 million doses to the U.S. government since the single-dose vaccine was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration in February, but the company struggled with early production snags that diminished its initial supply. It enlisted Merck to help with production in an agreement announced by Biden last week as he promised most Americans could get shots by May, moving the timeline up by two months.

But it will take Merck at least two months to prepare its “fill-finish” plant, which will help package and ship the J&J vaccine, and even longer to ready another plant to produce the vaccine itself. The second facility will not be ready to manufacture vaccine until at least the second half of the year, according to a senior administration official, who insisted the true “bottleneck” was in filling vials and finishing the vaccine.

The administration must also finalize the purchase of the 100 million shots with J&J, adding to the delay. Merck did not respond to questions about its timeline.

The White House's latest vaccine purchase is aimed at preparing for a range of longer-term scenarios, including the need to give people second "booster" shots to guard against emerging Covid variants. Biden also suggested that additional J&J shots could also be donated down the line to other countries in need, or aid an eventual push to vaccinate children.

"If we have a surplus we’ll share it with this rest of the world," he said at the press conference.

The administration’s May timeline for broad availability will largely be hit by increased production from Pfizer and Moderna, the first two vaccine makers authorized for use, Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci told POLITICO earlier this week.

Merck’s assistance with J&J packaging might feed in “towards the end, but not right this minute,” he said.

J&J had already promised it will supply 20 million shots through this month and 100 million by June. Between this vaccine and 300 million shots apiece from Pfizer and Moderna, the federal government had already secured enough supply to vaccinate the entire American population.

The addition of Merck's manufacturing facility is expected eventually to almost double J&J's production capacity, senior administration officials said earlier this month.

J&J also enlisted Emergent BioSolutions, a smaller Maryland company, in early 2020 to help with vaccine production.

In a highly misleading article, The New York Times is attempting to rewrite the dismal history of the Trump administration’s miserable failure regarding vaccine production and distribution. It’s a  transparent effort to imply an equivalence with the Biden administration’s actions; Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner dives into the broken system left by Donald Trump, while the Times’ bogus headline blares, “Biden Got The Vaccine Rollout Humming, With Trump’s Help.”

The piece, authored by Sharon LaFraniere, begins by halfheartedly acknowledging the Biden administration’s “public relations” victory in “conjur[ing] an image of a White House running on all cylinders and leaving its predecessor’s effort in the dust,” but sternly advises us that the truth, if only we were correctly informed, would present a more “mixed picture.”

That “mixed picture,” however, gets off to a strangely unsatisfying start in LaFraniere’s piece.

First, the author notes that even before inauguration, the Biden team had announced it would be invoking the Defense Production Act to provide Pfizer the equipment necessary to expand its plant in Kalamazoo so as to roll out its vaccine at a rate far surpassing its capabilities up to that time. She then notes that Biden’s administration essentially forced Johnson & Johnson to lean heavily on a subcontractor to increase the rate at which the vaccine itself was being bottled and packaged, enabling the pharmaceutical giant to produce vaccines by May of this year.

Nevertheless, LaFraniere contends, Biden owes the Trump administration gratitude for its prior “efforts.”

At the same time, though, Mr. Biden benefited hugely from the waves of vaccine production that the Trump administration had set in motion. As both Pfizer and Moderna found their manufacturing footing, they were able to double and triple the outputs from their factories.

LaFraniere notes that both Pfizer and Moderna were so well-situated “less than a month” after Biden assumed office, they were announcing production rates of double and triple their prior estimates. She attributes this increased pace of production to groundwork laid by the prior administration. And that is where the sum of her analysis completely evaporates.

LaFraniere relies on exactly one Trump administration source to justify the premise of her article.

“They criticize what we did, but they are using our playbook every step of the way,” said Paul Mango, the Trump administration’s deputy chief of staff for health policy and a senior official in the crash vaccine development effort then known as Operation Warp Speed. He said Mr. Trump’s team oversaw the construction or expansion of nearly two dozen plants involved in vaccine production and invoked the Defense Production Act 18 times to ensure those factories had sufficient supplies.

Mango is quoted multiple times in LaFraniere’s drive to illustrate that the Trump administration is being unfairly maligned by the press for its lackadaisical efforts to increase vaccine production. However, she makes no attempt to verify his aggrieved statements and appears to simply accept them at face value while backhandedly acknowledging that “corporate, state and federal officials agree that Mr. Biden’s White House has been more active than his predecessor’s in trying to build up the nation’s vaccine stock.”

Believe it or not, this ends LaFraniere’s foray into what the Trump administration did or did not do to accelerate vaccine production. Yes, the Times published an entire article boldly declaring that the Biden administration owes Trump a debt of gratitude, and the only supporting piece of evidence for this astonishing assertion is an unsourced and unverified quotation from a former Trump official.

That’s it. Read it yourself.

LaFraniere does acknowledge a key, contradictory bit previously reported by the Times.

Pfizer officials privately suggested that the Trump administration not only was wrongfully bad-mouthing the company but also had refused for months to invoke the Defense Production Act to order suppliers to prioritize Pfizer’s needs, as it did for the other vaccine developers under federal contract.

But the true act of journalistic malfeasance here is one of omission. LaFraniere neglects to mention that the Trump administration had, as early as July of last year, previously refused to pre-authorize Pfizer to roll out as many as 500 million doses of their newly developed vaccine. This colossal blunder had the perverse effect of allowing Europe to receive the vaccine before the U.S., where Pfizer is based. The omission is even more bizarre considering that LaFraniere broke that story on Dec. 7, 2020, with Times reporters Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland.

Before Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine was proved highly successful in clinical trials last month, the company offered the Trump administration the chance to lock in supplies beyond the 100 million doses the pharmaceutical maker agreed to sell the government as part of a $1.95 billion deal months ago.

But the administration, according to people familiar with the talks, never made the deal, a choice that now raises questions about whether the United States allowed other countries to take its place in line.

[...]

Despite repeated warnings from Pfizer officials that demand could vastly outstrip supply and amid urges to pre-order more doses, the Trump administration turned down the offer, according to several people familiar with the discussions.

This information never appears in LaFraniere’s latest piece. Did it just not fit in with her goal of giving sole credit to Donald Trump?

Let us, then, do her homework for her, specifically regarding her solitary Trump administration source, Paul Mango. On Jan. 31, Stat News reported that Mango and other Trump administration officials engaged in deliberate and calculated efforts to hobble the vaccine distribution rollout.

Top Trump officials actively lobbied Congress to deny state governments any extra funding for the Covid-19 vaccine rollout last fall — despite frantic warnings from state officials that they didn’t have the money they needed to ramp up a massive vaccination operation.

The push, described to STAT by congressional aides in both parties and openly acknowledged by one of the Trump officials, came from multiple high-ranking Trump health officials in repeated meetings with legislators.

Without the extra money, states spent last October and November rationing the small pot of federal dollars they had been given. And when vaccines began shipping in December, states seemed woefully underprepared.

Who was the chief instigator of this callous effort to deny states the very funds they absolutely needed in order to distribute the vaccines? Paul Mango.

Much of the lobbying push came from Paul Mango, the former deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services. He argued, repeatedly, that states hadn’t demonstrated they needed additional funding because, at least as of last October, they hadn’t spent the $200 million that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent to states in September.

To recap: The Times published a blatantly misleading article designed to create a phony “equivalence” between the Biden and Trump administrations’ efforts on vaccine production. The lead reporter on that story omits a key piece of contradictory information—which she herself previously reported—and relies solely on the unverified claims of a piqued and disgraced Trump administration official, who in fact was responsible for deliberately delaying the ultimate distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine to millions of Americans.

This is journalistic malpractice by The New York Times, pure and simple.

A path to citizenship continues to be overwhelmingly popular among voters across party lines—and a strong majority of them will be unhappy if legislation legalizing undocumented immigrants isn’t passed and signed into law, new polling conducted by Global Strategy Group, Garin-Hart-Yang, and LD, Insights in partnership with FWD.us and America’s Voice has found.

“Nearly two-thirds (63%) of voters say they would be upset if immigration reform does not pass and undocumented immigrants remain vulnerable to deportation, while just 37% say they would be happy with that outcome,” researchers said in a memo. “Notably, 75% of Latinos say they would be upset, including 38% who say they would be very upset by this outcome. The Democratic base would also be upset over inaction (86% upset; 42% very upset).”

A slew of legalization bills have been introduced by both President Joe Biden’s administration and congressional leaders, following Democratic wins in both the White House and the U.S. Senate this past 2020 general election and run-off races in Georgia. In addition to Biden’s “big, bold, and inclusive” immigration bill, legislators in both chambers of Congress have introduced piecemeal bills featuring specific paths to citizenship backed by the new polling data.

“The survey found the DREAM Act to have 72% support, citizenship for undocumented farmworkers to have 71% support, and citizenship for undocumented essential workers to have 66% support,” researchers said in a statement.

Last month, bipartisan senators reintroduced the DREAM Act, which would put Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients on a path to citizenship. Early this month, House Democrats reintroduced the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers and their families. Also earlier this month, bicameral Democrats introduced legislation legalizing novel coronavirus pandemic essential workers.

The overall path to citizenship from the Biden administration’s bill is similarly popular, with polling showing that voters prefer legalization over deportation, 79% to 21%. “Even base Republicans prefer citizenship over deportation by a 61% to 39% margin,” the memo said. “Citizenship for the undocumented is a consensus  issue—not  a  divisive  one—as  the major citizenship proposals facing Congress are all very popular, with substantial support across partisan lines.”

“Significantly for the battle for the majority in the Senate, a majority of all voters (55%), and a strong majority of Latinos (65%) say they would be less likely to vote for a Senator who votes against citizenship bills like the DREAM Act,” researchers continued. Republican leaders are going to keep going with the anti-immigrant playbook because that’s all they know—but maybe everyone else can stop pretending Stephen Miller is some genius strategist? I mean, he’s a former White House aide, not a current one, after all.

“For most Americans, the debate is not controversial,” America’s Voice executive director Frank Sharry said in a statement. “The frustration is that Congress has not gotten it done. For those many Democrats and those few brave Republicans who will be voting on legalization proposals in the coming days, the way forward is clear: lean in, vote to change people’s lives in a way that strengthens our nation, and formally recognize undocumented immigrants as the Americans they already are.”

Amen. Congressional Democrats have also reintroduced other important pieces of immigration legislation in recent days. Last month, Senate Democrats reintroduced legislation putting Temporary Protected Status holders on a path to legalization. House Democrats including the chair of the chamber’s Veterans’ Affairs committee last month also reintroduced legislation that would protect immigrant U.S. military veterans and their family members, and importantly allow eligible deported veterans to return back home to the U.S.

“It’s a disgrace that veterans are falling through the cracks of our broken immigration system and being deported,” Veterans’ Affairs chair Mark Takano said, who reintroduced the bill with fellow Californian Juan Vargas and Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva. “Deported veterans are exiled from the country that they call home and that they fought to defend, and they face significant barriers to access the benefits they are entitled to and eligible for under the law. Congress must act and fix this injustice, and passing this comprehensive legislative package can help us achieve that.”

Have you seen that high-speed rail map on Twitter? Gen Z is hoping President Biden has.

Cara only has about 700 followers on Twitter. The 20-year-old frequently garners a handful of “Likes” on her content, which consists mostly of takes on pop culture and singing videos.

But when she tweeted a popular image of a potential US high-speed rail map in January, saying “I want her so fucking much,” her tweet quickly went viral, earning over 185,000 “Likes” and more than 50,000 retweets.

Such is the popularity among Gen Z-ers of high-speed rail.

“We look at other countries that have good examples of it, and we wonder why our country can’t do that,” Cara said. “It seems like a simple solution that we can’t find the reason as to why we’re not doing it.”

For members of the young online left, the high-speed rail map has become a ubiquitous fixture of politics Twitter. Created by graphic designer Alfred Twu in 2013, the map depicts a system of interconnected high-speed rail lines, linking Los Angeles to New York and Minneapolis to Miami, among other projects. (High-speed rail refers to lines that typically run over 160 miles per hour.)

The map has been tweeted out by tiny personal accounts and the Sunrise Movement alike. It has its share of problems — the proposed rail lines go right through tribal lands — but it serves as a handy analog for what the promise of high-speed rail represents to Generation Z.

“We are so much more connected with people across the country, across the world,” says Matt Nowling, a 21-year-old college student from Columbus, Ohio, who has worked on Democratic campaigns. “High-speed rail provides an opportunity for people to connect in a more sustainable manner. You don’t have to worry about your car, about gas. It’s just so much easier.”

High-speed rail infrastructure exists across Europe and Asia, where publicly owned and maintained tracks can connect passengers from Beijing to Hong Kong in nine hours, or Madrid to Barcelona in under three hours. In the United States, there is currently one high-speed rail line — arguably. Amtrak’s Acela Express, which runs through the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington, DC, can reach speeds of 165 miles per hour, but frequently runs at an average of 70 miles per hour between those cities.

Even with America’s resident Amtrak champion, Joe Biden, now in the White House, and the administration preparing a $2 trillion green infrastructure proposal, a network like the one in Twu’s map is at best decades away. To get there, the US would have to overcome a number of obstacles, from Republican and corporate opposition to a dearth of expertise. Perhaps most importantly, it would require a level of federal commitment — both budgetary and planning-wise — the likes of which have not been seen in generations.

The map, then, represents Gen Z’s ambitious, sincere wish — for a more connected, more sustainable future — and their inherent recognition of how impossible the dream of high-speed rail may be.

Gen Z loves high-speed rail, but no one’s really fighting for it

Gen Z isn’t the first group of young, online voters to care about transit. But they represent a culmination of trends that have been building in younger Americans: less interest in cars as status symbols, more interest in environmentally friendly transit methods.

The popularity of the high-speed rail map meme builds on years of similar conversation, some of it in the Facebook group New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (Numtot), first created in 2017 and now serving as a “haven for people who love trains,” as administrator Emily Orenstein described it. The meme, and high-speed rail more generally, are popular topics with the group’s more than 200,000 users, its three administrators say, because it allows them to dream big.

“I love the high-speed rail map image because I think a lot of urban planning and urbanism today, especially in the United States, is so devoid of inspiration because it’s so beaten down by so-called pragmatism, labor costs, legal issues, things like that,” said Jonathan Marty, a Numtot administrator who goes to Columbia University. “The high-speed rail thing, the map that circulates a lot, it touches people because it’s this genuinely bold and tangible image of the future. People can feel that.”

In addition, high-speed rail is a blunt example of just how behind the US is. After the 2008 global financial crisis, China, in particular, made massive investments into high-speed rail, building over 15,000 miles of rail lines that service more than 1.7 billion passengers yearly, according to the World Bank. And the high-speed TGV in France, for example, goes 200 miles per hour.

“At that speed, you could get from New York City to Chicago in about four hours,” Juliet Eldred, a Numtot co-founder and transit planner, said. “The current train is about 20 hours. That makes me viscerally enraged.”

High-speed rail also checks a lot of boxes for the young left that’s interested in traveling but conscious of its carbon-intensive consequences. As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained, “high-speed trains run on electricity, which is only as clean as the generators that produce it,” but it’s definitely less carbon-intensive than flying:

A 2018 study in the Journal of Advanced Transportation looking at transit in Europe reported “a remarkable advantage of high speed trains compared to aircraft, with regard to direct [CO2-equivalent] emissions per [passenger-kilometer].”

It will likely never fully replace air travel or cars, but particularly for short-haul flights, Irfan notes, high-speed rail could give “travelers more options if they don’t want to fly.” And it can help achieve equity for low-income and minority communities, which have disproportionately low access to adequate transit infrastructure, the Department of Transportation has found.

Equity is a common benefit transit advocates cite for a number of different projects: With poverty increasing most quickly in the suburbs, the Numtot admins said better local light rail systems, for instance, could help strike a balance between the expenses of either living in increasingly unaffordable cities or taking on the costs of car ownership in a suburb.

“People don’t necessarily think about [transportation policy] in the same way they think of health care or housing, but fundamentally, having options that are safe and affordable and sustainable and effective and efficient is where we need to be,” Eldred said.

But while better-funded light rail and redesigning a city bus network fall into the push for transportation justice, they are not quite as sexy as a national high-speed rail project. And that’s the catch: High-speed rail is bold and attention-grabbing, but the scale of the project makes it near impossible.

Despite Gen Z’s enthusiasm, there aren’t high-profile advocacy groups for high-speed rail specifically, nor are there large protests against competing methods of travel — unlike, say, the March for Our Lives gun violence actions, or the organized protests against oil pipelines.

Fighting for high-speed rail is something Sunrise, for example, is passionate about and considers part of the Green New Deal, according to press secretary Ellen Sciales. But it does not get a specific mention in the group’s priorities for action in the first year of the Biden administration, though investing in “clean and equitable infrastructure projects” does.

“I don’t think people can conceive of a world that isn’t designed around cars,” Marty said. “But you can see in infrastructure projects, you can do this. A big part of that fight is helping people to imagine a world in which that is possible.”

Why America still does not have a high-speed rail network

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, rail was a fundamental part of the US’s transportation ecosystem. But after World War II, the US instead chose to subsidize the interstate highway system and the aviation industry through massive investment and deregulation, respectively, leaving the railroad industry unable to compete without federal investment.

In the early 1970s, the federal government finally got into the railroad game by buying rail networks that had gone bankrupt to create Amtrak, a quasi-public corporation owned by the government. But any momentum fizzled with a 1980s move toward smaller government.

“We have a federal government system that perhaps had a moment of national purpose in the years following World War II that allowed the creation of the Interstate Highway System, but then fell apart,” Yonah Freemark, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute, said.

A number of significant challenges have prevented high-speed rail projects from getting started: the multistate nature of the projects, Republican and corporate opposition, and a lack of resources.

There have been moments in Democratic presidencies when it looked like rail was poised for a comeback. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton secured funding for the improvement of Amtrak trains in the Northeast Corridor, leading to the opening of the Acela Express in 2000.

President Barack Obama came into office in 2009 with plans to include massive infrastructure improvements as part of the American Recovery Act. But he got just $8 billion for new rail projects passed — and Republican governors promptly shot down the funding offers in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

One project in California successfully received federal funding in 2010. The line will run from Anaheim to Los Angeles to San Francisco, and is expected to open in 2029 — though its continual delays have become a popular punching bag for California Republicans.

“National planning has not been fully accepted, especially by the Republican Party,” Freemark said. “It’s a multilevel, multistate decision-making process that requires decades of commitment. It’s just not something we have had in the US.”

Joe Szabo headed the Federal Railroad Administration from 2009 to early 2015. He remembered the early days of the Obama administration as “incredibly exciting.” But the newness of the grant program, Republican opposition, and a lack of “predictable, dedicated funding” for rail projects squelched a lot of the early optimism.

“For high-speed rail to succeed, it can’t be done with fits and starts,” Szabo said. “Major projects take years to build out, and so there has to be predictability.”

When President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the Interstate Highway System, Congress created a Highway Trust Fund to pay for the construction, and guaranteed states that the federal government would pay for 90 percent of the construction costs. Based on a planned national map, the federal government issued contracts to states to commission roadways.

The project took 35 years, and is still a partnership between federal and state agencies — highways are owned and maintained by the states they are in, but have reliable federal funding. Rail, however, does not enjoy the same federal financial commitment.

Additionally, Freemark said, there is a shortage of institutional rail knowledge among engineers at state transportation departments, where most employees focus on highways. Szabo confirmed this. He said one state he worked with had half an employee focused on rail among the hundreds of employees at the department.

“Here’s the key — it takes a strong federal partner,” Szabo said. “That is the piece that has been missing for rail. There are states that have interest in building out good projects, but there hasn’t been a strong federal partner for rail like there has been for highways and roads.”

In addition, there are strong, moneyed interests lined up against the construction of a high-speed rail network, including the Koch brothers, who have poured millions into killing projects through advertising, think tanks, and donating to GOP politicians.

Andy Kunz is the president and CEO of the US High Speed Rail Association (USHSR), a trade group that advocates for high-speed rail. The group launched in 2009, and despite the energy around high-speed rail in the Obama administration, Kunz says it was swiftly met with an apparatus of opposition.

“We were up against this nonstop anti-rail propaganda machine cranking out lies and myths — rail is yesterday’s technology, all this nonsense — from these think tanks funded by oil companies and car companies and the road industry and the aviation industry,” he said.

All of these challenges have proven frustrating to everyone from officials in the Obama administration to the Gen Z-ers who champion the map meme. The type of system depicted by the map, by definition, would require political consensus and investment because it would be a decades-long initiative.

“Are we willing, as a nation, to make the sort of generational commitment to mode shift in transportation that is necessary to make HSR effective?” Freemark said. “I haven’t seen that.”

“A generational opportunity”

If there were ever a president to champion high-speed rail, it would be Joe Biden.

“Amtrak Joe” used to travel by train daily as a senator. Szabo said in his time at the FRA, it was the then-vice president who always asked for briefings on passenger rail. And during the Democratic primary campaigns, he made a frequent commitment to prioritizing rail.

“My administration will spark the second great railroad revolution to propel our nation’s infrastructure into the future and help solve the climate emergency,” Biden said in December 2019.

Infrastructure is expected to be Democrats’ next project after Covid-19 relief. It’s the rare idea that attracts both wings of the Democratic Party — left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is already working with the White House on shepherding an infrastructure bill through the budget reconciliation process, while centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has called for up to $4 trillion in spending on infrastructure.

The Biden plan calls for providing every city with high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation options, including funding rail projects and creating the cleanest, fastest rail system in the world. It’s an ambition new Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has shared — he wants the US to become a global leader in high-speed rail.

USHSR released a five-point plan for feasible things Biden can include in the infrastructure bill or do on his own, including fast-tracking existing, ready-to-go projects that need funding, creating a high-speed rail development authority within the federal Department of Transportation, and selecting suggested second-tier projects, mostly across the Midwest and South, for immediate funding and planning assistance. Kunz believes that, realistically, the Biden administration could lay the groundwork for a rail system that replaces short-haul flights.

“It seems like now, a lot of the planets are lining up that we can actually do this and push the tipping point,” Kunz said. “It’s a real fork in the road.”

In thinking about the immediate future, Kunz is an optimist. (More on the pessimists — or realists, as they would say — later).

Szabo is with Kunz. He said Biden is assembling a strong transportation team with lots of rail expertise. Unlike in his time, the DOT now has greater internal infrastructure and readiness to pursue rail projects.

And existing projects are already jockeying for funding in anticipation of the infrastructure package, according to Bloomberg’s CityLab.

Other projects throughout the country, some of which already have funding from the private sector, are preparing for an influx of federal funding, developing equity and environmental standards to prove project viability.

Szabo and Kunz also believe 2021 will not be a repeat of 2009, when Obama’s best-laid plans were derailed, because climate change has forced the issue. Global warming is a much more accepted and visible problem than it was in 2009, and a much greater priority for Biden than it was for Obama in his first term.

Other experts — and some of the Gen Z voters I spoke with, drawing on a lifetime of governmental disappointment — are not nearly as hopeful.

“These projects take decades to get implemented and are just at the opening stages of what would be required to do that,” Freemark said. “It’s worth pointing out that the Obama administration said the exact same thing in 2009. We don’t have the evidence yet that this is going to be any real commitment in the long term.”

Already, Biden and Buttigieg’s comments praising rail have received pushback from Republican-aligned groups, like the libertarian Cato Institute, which has suggested high-speed rail is useless, outmoded technology.

Additionally, high-speed rail is just one of many environmental and equity issues Gen Z is agitating for — and Biden’s window to enact new policy, especially if Democrats lose the 2022 midterms, is limited.

The Numtot administrators were cautiously optimistic about rail’s potential but had concerns about the similarities between the present moment and Obama’s first term.

“We had a Democratic administration that wanted sweeping change, and it didn’t happen,” Orenstein said. “The people’s idea of what kind of change is possible maybe doesn’t match Washington’s idea of what kind of sweeping change we can and should be doing.”

Even with a perfect storm of opportunity, Cara, who posted the high-speed rail meme, is not confident she’ll ever see a system like the one in the map.

At 20, she has not been particularly encouraged by the government action — or lack thereof — she’s seen throughout her life, from climate inaction to political gridlock to multiple recessions.

“I would like to see a proposal come about within this administration,” she said. “Do I think it’s going to happen? Probably not.”

A new memo from the White House vows an aggressive public push.

The party in power using legislation to enact its agenda? Imagine!

If the rich, powerful, and corrupt thought the added separation of video conferencing during COVID-19 would protect them from Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of California, and her relentless pursuit of answers, they were wrong. Rep. Porter’s great strength is her reliance on facts and very easy-to-understand presentations of those facts and the incongruities between those facts and the explanations that people in power frequently give to explain away their exploitation of Americans.

On Tuesday, a New Mexico-based oil and gas exploration company, Strata Production, sent their president Mark Murphy to answer questions in front of the House Natural Resources Committee. Rep. Porter is new on the committee and has been championing a bill she recently introduced that promises to “raise fees on polluters extracting from public lands.” Companies like the one Murphy runs have not simply acted as polluters for decades, they have been incentivized to so do by the government through special tax breaks and the like. 

Porter asked Murphy whether or not the technology and costs of drilling had become more streamlined since his grandfather first received big tax breaks to offset those costs 100 years ago. Murphy gave a mealymouthed answer saying some costs went up and others went down—of course he didn’t mention how his profits have been fantastic for 100 years. This led to Murphy’s condescending attempt at questioning Porter’s understanding of royalties versus profits, and dug Murphy’s grave just that much deeper.

As her time came to a close, Rep. Porter asked about one of the special incentives that make Murphy and Strata’s business model completely rigged in comparison to other business models—Intangible Drilling Costs. Intangible Drilling Costs (IDCs) are “one of the largest tax breaks available specifically to oil companies, allowing companies to deduct most of the costs of drilling new wells in the United States.” They are above the line tax deductions that allow fossil fuel companies to deduct up to 70% of their costs right up front. It’s important to also understand that depending on the estimate, drilling costs make up 60-90% of IDCs, to which Murphy gave an incomprehensibly fraudulent answer, saying that the oil industry did not receive any different tax breaks or structures than any other business or industry.

It may be true that the tax breaks Murphy and his daddy and his daddy’s daddy received have continued to make their business model almost risk free for decades, but that’s not the way it is for the rest of us. A clearly frustrated Porter cut Murphy off for a reality check:

REP. KATIE PORTER: You do benefit from special rules. There’s a special tax rule for intangible drilling costs that does not apply to other kinds of expenses that businesses have. You get to deduct 70% of your costs immediately, and other businesses have to amortize their expenses over their entire profit stream. So please don’t patronize me by telling me that the oil and gas industry doesn’t have any special tax provisions. Because if you would like that to be the rule, I would be happy to have Congress deliver.

The argument for IDCs has always been that oil and gas exploration is an expensive proposition and we need to incentivize “investment” in it. Of course, these incentives were thought of 100 years ago, and made a lot more sense than back when no one really had any idea where they might find gas or oil. Better technology means easier and deeper drilling and extracting, and better success rates on where to drill. The oil industry has been established and now it is time to spend some of the government incentivizing power on renewable energy, because climate change is very real.

Surprise, surprise, after decades where the fossil fuel industry has received ten times as much taxpayer money as the U.S. education system, gas and oil men have been spending lots of time and lobbyist money whining about the renewable industry’s tax breaks and incentives being unfair. There are many reasons why the fossil fuel industry sided with an overt white supremacist and incompetent Trump administration. But the reality we all face is that the world must move away from fossil fuels and that process must take a one direction approach—contraction, not expansion. 

One of the maneuvers that the rich and powerful of our country have relied on for decades is corporate welfare, in the guise of tax breaks, incentives, and special deductions that allow them to hide their profits and deduct their costs. The initial reasons for incentivizing these industries is always the same, and not bad on paper. These industries are going to provide services and jobs that will make all of our lives better, rising tide and boats and all of that. The problem always reveals itself the same way: after that initial incentivized investment, the industries squash competition, do not share in the egregious profits they make off of people, and then fight tooth and nail to do as little as possible to grow their business and make it independent of government welfare.

The rich and their corporations are the lazy people they claim everyone else will become if we all get even a sliver of aid to ease stagnant wages and rising costs. Their laziness and the lack of accountability, coupled with the pretend mythology that these leaders of industry carved out their fortunes all alone in some rugged-individualist bootstrap factory, evolves their organizations into unsafe and fragile businesses. This leads to environmental disasters like the DeepWater Horizon oil spill because of corner-cutting, and cost-cutting.

It’s the reason why rich CEOs like Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin seemed to only have an aptitude for hiding money from the American public and not giving out the way that Congress required him to do. In some cases, certain industries, like the telecom industry and the fossil fuel industry get special incentives and tax breaks. The reason that energy companies were given these tax incentives initially was because of the common good their innovations and ability to find and produce fossil fuel-based power to people was considered worth incentivizing. 

That is no longer true, and if they cannot make money being oil barons then maybe they need to do something else.

The House passed Democrats’ wide-ranging overhaul of labor laws Tuesday, inching President Joe Biden closer to fulfilling a campaign promise and coinciding with Amazon workers’ ongoing push to unionize an Alabama warehouse.

But the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which advanced mostly along party lines, is unlikely to win the 60 votes needed for passage in the narrowly controlled Senate. And already, some union leaders — who hold outsize sway in the Biden administration — are amping up pressure on Democrats to eliminate the filibuster so they can see one of their top priorities enacted.

“We’re not going to let a few people stop it from happening,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said. “Its time has come. Its time is long past due to be enacted. And we’ll do it.”

“Everything is on the table so far as we’re concerned.”

Just five Republicans voted for the measure: co-sponsors Jeff Van Drew and Chris Smith (N.J.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), along with Reps. John Katko (N.Y.) and Don Young (Alaska). One Democrat voted against it: Henry Cuellar (Texas), an aide said.

The bill’s advancement concludes several days of behind-the-scenes wrangling by Democratic leaders after a group of moderate members pushed for last-minute changes to the bill. By Monday night, top Democrats had agreed to include an amendment that would study the bill’s impact on gig workers, which the centrist bloc — led by Blue Dog Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who voted against the bill last session — described as a win.

“There were some concerns about the flexibility aspect of the PRO Act, and if people could opt out if it didn’t suit their personal needs and circumstances,” Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), who was among those backing the amendment, told POLITICO.

That change, Wild said, would help address some of the many concerns in the Senate, adding: “There’s a way to do it if we all really focus on it and we don’t insist on being purist.”

“If people need to do things to be able to support the bill, I’m all good with that,” Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) said. “I don’t consider it much of a change.”

The legislation — which would make it easier for workers to join and form unions by empowering the National Labor Relations Board to levy fines and extending collective bargaining rights to independent contractors — is a real-time example of the thin line Biden must walk as he works to appease both the pro-union forces he has aligned himself with and the business groups who helped him win.

“People are realizing that unions are important,” House Education and Labor Chair Bobby Scott (D-Va.) told POLITICO. “They noticed this during the pandemic when there were unfair, unsafe working conditions.”

Businesses, fiercely opposed to the PRO Act, spent the days leading up to passage lobbying against it. More than 150 trade associations, including the influential Chamber of Commerce, sent a letter to lawmakers last week urging them to vote against the legislation, which they wrote “would cost millions of American jobs, threaten vital supply chains, and greatly diminish opportunities for entrepreneurs and small businesses.”

Employers "have deep concerns about the PRO Act’s intrusions on worker privacy and restrictions on workplace communication — among many other issues,” Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, said. “It will make it harder for manufacturers to thrive and more difficult to foster positive, inclusive workplace cultures.”

Republicans echo many of the same concerns, fretting that the bill — which Rep. Virginia Foxx, the top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, has dubbed the Pro Union Bosses Act — will cost employers and eliminate jobs. They also take issue with the fact the bill would preempt state right-to-work laws, which guarantee no worker can be required to join a union or pay dues as a condition of employment.

It's "a left-wing wish list of union boss priorities which undermines the rights of workers by forcing them to pay into a union system, whether or not they want to be represented by a union," Foxx said.

The PRO Act "is yet another attack on states’ rights," Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) said on the floor. Iowa is a right-to-work state.

Unions have thrown their weight behind the legislation, which leaders have described repeatedly as one of their top priorities for a Biden administration. Indeed, the executive board of the AFL-CIO — the nation’s largest federation of unions — plans to meet Wednesday to discuss its position on eliminating the filibuster, likely the only path forward for seeing the PRO Act enacted.

“I assume that [Senate passage] requires getting rid of the filibuster for sure, or finding some way around it,” Levin said.

Senate HELP Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told POLITICO that she plans “to fight hard to make sure we honor the essential workers that have kept us going during this pandemic by getting the PRO Act across the finish line.”

“As workers continue to bear the brunt of this pandemic, ensuring they can stand together and fight for better pay, quality health care, a safer workplace and a secure retirement has never been more important,” she said.

Prior to passage, lawmakers adopted a package of Democratic amendments containing the Murphy amendment, among others. They rejected a set of Republican amendments.

Passage coincides with Amazon workers’ ongoing push to form a union at one of the retail giant’s Alabama facilities. Biden was notably mute on the issue until February, when he released a video expressing support for organized labor. Despite declining to mention Amazon by name, it was nonetheless hailed as the most pro-union statement from a sitting U.S. president.

The House first advanced the bill in February 2020 after it languished for months amid many of the same concerns floated this session: worries from moderate Democrats that it was anti-business and relentless bashing from groups including the Chamber of Commerce, which labeled it "a litany of almost every failed idea from the past 30 years of labor policy." But it was never taken up by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Biden pledged on the campaign trail that he would see the legislation enacted, and reiterated his support for the legislation Monday with a full-throated Statement of Administration Policy encouraging House passage.

“We should all remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that we shouldn’t hamstring unions or merely tolerate them. It said that we should encourage unions,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday. “The PRO Act would take critical steps to help restore this intent.”

“We have a champion who more than any of his recent predecessors understands that labor isn’t just another constituency group that exists only during campaign cycles, and his rhetoric on the campaign trail has been carried into the Oval Office,” Trumka said. “This is a president who jumps at the chance to tell a roomful of CEOs that he’s a union guy. He released the most pro-union statement of any president since FDR, and just yesterday, he chose to double down.”

“To borrow a lightly tweaked quote from Joe Biden, this is a big freaking deal.”

Unions have fought to enact labor law reform since 1947, when a Republican Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act and, in doing so, made changes to the National Labor Relations Act that labor advocates consider anti-union. But the efforts have yet to be successful.

Even under former President Barack Obama, a package containing many provisions similar to the PRO Act — the Employee Free Choice Act — stalled in Congress as his administration focused its efforts elsewhere.

Not one but three professors from the University of South Alabama have been placed on leave after photos of them dressed in racially insensitive Halloween costumes surfaced. According to the Associated Press, the photos are from a 2014 on-campus party, in which one professor identified as Bob Wood dressed as a Confederate soldier while the other two identified as Alex Sharland and Teresa Weldy posed with whips and nooses. At the time of the photo, Wood was the dean of the Mitchell College of Business, the same campus at which the party took place.

The photos surfaced last week prompting the university’s president Tony Waldrop to announce the professors would be placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. Waldrop noted that not only were the costumes and symbols used in the photos “offensive” but against the university’s “core principles of diversity and inclusion.” 

“We have pledged our full cooperation to Ms. Williams-Maynard in her investigation. The faculty members involved have been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation and any related proceedings,” Waldrop said in a statement Friday.

Investigations into the incident will be carried out by attorney Suntrease Williams-Maynard, a former trial attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Mobile, and a former assistant U.S. attorney for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Alabama and the Southern District of Texas.

“Along with the leadership of the University, I assure you that we are treating this situation with the utmost seriousness and with a commitment to acting upon the results of the investigation," Waldrop added. "In the meantime, please join me in continuing our ongoing work to make the USA community one that proudly and steadfastly treats every person with respect and dignity.”

While the university has only placed the professors on paid leave while investigations continue, students have gathered together to call for the professors to be fired. At least two protests on campus occurred Friday, with students carrying signs that read “I don’t pay to employ racists” and “There is no excuse for holding a noose,” NBC 15 News reported.

Additionally, an online petition urging the university to terminate all three professors collected more than 3,000 signatures by Sunday. "The fact that these professors are still currently employed by the University shows a deep failure to commit to a safe, welcoming environment for students of all backgrounds," the petition said. "Racism cannot simply be given a slap on the wrist. It must be addressed as the serious issue it is. We cannot have professors who partake in this kind of behavior." 

According to The New York Times, the photos in question are not new. The photos were once posted on the university’s Facebook page and were later deleted in 2020, without repercussions to the educators in question. In his statement Friday, Waldrop acknowledged this and noted that the university should have had a “stronger and broader” response to the photos in 2020. 

"The actions taken in response to these pictures, which were brought to the attention of University leadership in 2020, should have been stronger and broader, and should have more clearly demonstrated our unwavering commitment to a safe and welcoming environment for every member of our community," he said. "We acknowledge that, in our response to this incident, we failed in our obligations and responsibilities to our students, our employees and our community. For this, we are deeply sorry to everyone who is rightfully hurt and offended by these images."

Following the announcement and calls for their termination, two of the three professors apologized in a post published on Inside Higher Ed. “Seven years ago, I rented and wore a last-minute costume that was ill-conceived to a faculty and student Halloween costume contest, at which I served on a panel of judges to select the winners,” Wood said. “I sincerely apologize and am sorry for doing so, and ask for forgiveness for this error in judgment.”

“In retrospect I can see why someone might find the image hurtful, and I regret this attempt at humor that clearly failed,” Sharland said. “It was not my intent to hurt or be offensive, and if anyone is offended by this picture I apologize.”

Weldy has yet to comment on the issue.

The photos, which can be seen in the online petition, are not only inappropriate and offensive but perpetuate ideas of white supremacy. Having professors who think it is okay to dress like this and post the photos online, especially on a college campus, makes one question the safety of Black students at the university. 

While Wood and Sharland are regretful and have apologized for their actions, that does not excuse them. Their apology comes as a non-apology as they fail to acknowledge the history behind the symbols they used. For years the noose has been a symbol of America’s horrific history of lynching. According to the NAACP, more than 4,700 people were lynched in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968, of which almost 73% of them were Black. "The noose always means much more than a knot in a rope,” Jack Shuler, an associate professor at Denison University and author of The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose, told CNN. "The noose was a tool used to kill people and, therefore, it is a threat -- it is violent speech. The noose has become the new burning cross.”

Dressing up and taking photos with symbols that are known to be both hurtful and representations of hate is not funny. As academics, these professors should have known better and these actions cannot be ignored “Take professors - who are in the power to educate and be around students that have racist attributes or do racist things and think that is funny or cool - out of this university,” Jaylen Williams, a student, told WKRG-TV.

House Republicans seem to have a permanent slot for a designated white nationalist member in their ranks these days. Steve King, the Iowa congressman who finally stepped aside in the election, used to play the role. Nowadays, Paul Gosar of Arizona seems to have become the go-to guy.

Last Friday, Gosar was the keynote speaker in Orlando, Florida, at the America First Political Action Committee (AFPAC) conference organized by white nationalist troll Nicholas Fuentes, leader of the alt-right “Groyper Army.” He followed that up Monday by tweeting out a meme featuring the group’s motto, “America First is Inevitable.” And just as they largely did right up until King wondered aloud what was wrong with the phrase “white supremacist,” Republicans pretended as if nothing had happened.

Fuentes’ gathering was organized to run simultaneously with the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference also in Orlando last week since Fuentes and his “Groypers” were banned from that gathering. Fuentes and some of his cohorts nonetheless made a stunt out of invading the conference, and some managed to get selfies with far-right celebrities like Congressman Matt Gaetz before being escorted out by security.

Gosar’s AFPAC appearance was highly touted by organizers, and his keynote speech did not disappoint them. “I suggest that senators and members of Congress that fail to put America first should be held accountable at the ballot box,” Gosar told the audience. “This is the era of America first, not some reincarnation of neocon control.”

Fuentes followed Gosar on stage and delivered a speech neck-deep in white nationalist cant, saying that if the U.S. "loses its white demographic core, then this is not America anymore." He warned that “white people are done being bullied” by groups like Black Lives Matter. Such groups, he claimed, want to create “a new racial caste system in this country, with whites at the bottom.”

Fuentes played a key role in the protests leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, notably helping lead a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12.  He was also present at the insurrection but claims he did not go inside the U.S. Capitol building; however, a number of followers—including the woman believed to have stolen a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office—did so. The ADL found that among the 212 people charged as of Feb. 17, 10 of them were white nationalist “Groypers. ”

He boasted about the Capitol siege in his AFPAC speech and was particularly proud that the mob managed to delay the certification of election results.

“While I was there in D.C., outside of the building, and I saw hundreds of thousands of patriots surrounding the U.S. Capitol building and I saw the police retreating ... I said to myself: ‘This is awesome,’” Fuentes said. The audience roared.

Gosar, who had skipped out on floor votes in Congress to make his AFPAC speech, made an onstage appearance at CPAC the next day as a panelist and mumbled an anodyne disavowal of white supremacists: "I denounce, when we talk about white racism, that’s not appropriate," Gosar said during a panel discussion. "I believe in a strong immigration system, but a legal immigration system."

Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts noted that none of Gosar’s Arizona colleagues—including Republican congresspeople Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko, and David Schweikert, Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, and Gov. Doug Ducey—offered any condemnation or even commentary on his open embrace of white nationalists.

Likewise, HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias notes that no rebuke has been forthcoming from national Republican leaders: “HuffPost this week reached out to the offices of seven prominent Republican politicians—including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—to see whether they would condemn Gosar for attending an explicitly white nationalist conference. None responded.”

The GOP entity to respond to his queries was the Republican National Committee, whose spokesman, Tommy Piggot, replied with boilerplate text: “There is no place for anti-Semitism or racism in the Republican Party. We condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”

Gosar has built a substantial far-right voting record in Congress and has a history of embracing far-right conspiracy theories and making racist remarks. His own siblings publicly denounced him in 2017 after he claimed that George Soros was responsible for funding the neo-Nazi movement in the U.S.

A fanatical Donald Trump supporter, Gosar was notably outspoken after Trump lost the election in November, posting an endless stream of conspiracy theories on Twitter—especially in the days leading up to Jan. 6. “Patriots: The time is now. HOLD THE LINE. Join me in DC January 6th,” he posted on Jan. 2.

The same day, he tweeted: “Notice how present day fascists who support a technology coup project. Sedition and treason for stealing votes is appropriate; gaslighting like this guy is transparently idiotic.”

The organizers of the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” event credited Gosar as one of their key supporters. Afterward, Gosar and Biggs pleaded with Trump for a preemptive pardon for their roles in the insurrection. Trump, predictably, threw them under the bus.

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The booming housing market helped stave off economic collapse in 2020. But soaring prices are starting to worry policymakers, who fear the market could lock a generation of would-be buyers out of homeownership.

Home prices in January — typically a slow month for the market — were up 14 percent over the same month the previous year, while sales jumped 24 percent, despite an unemployment rate that was almost twice as high. Demand for existing homes is so strong that the average residence is on the market for just three weeks, and inventory is at a record low after seeing its steepest drop last year since the data was first tracked in 1999.

It all threatens to freeze broad swaths of the population out of the market, leaving millions of Americans in a less secure financial position, widening the racial wealth gap and forcing millennials, already lagging previous generations in building wealth and forming families, to fall even further behind.

“The dream of homeownership is out of reach for so many working people,” said Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “Rising home prices and flat wages means that many families, especially families of color, may never be able to afford their first home.”

Brown, who insists on calling his panel the “Senate Banking and Housing Committee," vowed that these issues will be a top priority in the months ahead as the country struggles to recover from the pandemic-induced recession. Among other things, he said he plans to work with the Biden administration to address the rising cost of housing and expand access to homeownership “so that more families can rent and own homes in inclusive communities.”

The last time the U.S. saw such skyrocketing home prices, the ensuing crash brought down the global economy. Most industry analysts say the current boom is not a “bubble” akin to that frenzy of more than a decade ago, which led to the financial crisis.

Still, the current pace of home price appreciation is unsustainable, they say. “I am worried that the price run-up is going to choke off first-time buyers,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. “This simply cannot continue.”

The median price for a home in San Jose, Calif., was $1.4 million in the fourth quarter, a 12.4 percent surge from the same period a year earlier. But some of the largest increases have occurred outside of the most expensive cities, as residents fled crowded urban centers during the pandemic. Prices in Phoenix rose 14.4 percent in December from the same month the previous year, while Seattle saw gains of 13.6 percent, according to the Case-Shiller Index.

How has the housing market thrived during one of the deepest economic slumps in U.S. history?

For one thing, the crisis is unusually lopsided: White-collar employees who can work remotely have for the most part emerged unscathed, with many actually adding to their savings while reaping the benefits of higher stock prices. Historically low mortgage rates — a result of the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy response to the crisis — nudged some of those buyers off the fence to buy a first or second home, according to analysts.

Meanwhile, a glut of millennials — the largest generational cohort in the country consisting of those born from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s — is reaching the prime age for buying first homes, and regional data suggests the pandemic spurred plenty of them to pick up stakes and head for the suburbs.

But there are simply not enough houses to meet the demographic demand, driving up the price of those houses that are for sale and potentially delaying many other millennials’ ability to become homeowners, the primary way Americans build wealth.

Another concern is that a potential spike in mortgage rates as the economy recovers could leave borrowers who rushed to buy when rates were low — and in some cases paid above asking price, given fierce competition for a limited supply of homes — in the lurch. And a sudden drop in home prices would hit sellers who have held off on listing their homes during the pandemic.

“Right now I wouldn’t describe it as a bubble, but that doesn’t make it less concerning,” said Mike Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association. With home prices rising at “3 times the rate of income growth, that means we’re going to outrun the buyers out there.”

“I think we could continue at this rate for a couple of quarters before we sort of hit that wall,” Fratantoni added.

At first blush, market activity appears reminiscent of the boom before the 2008 credit crisis. Mortgage balances grew by $182 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, the biggest quarterly uptick since 2007, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest report on household debt. More mortgages were originated in the fourth quarter of last year than in any single quarter since the Fed started tracking it in 2000, surpassing the previous high from 2003.

But the loans being made today are much stronger than they were then: 71 percent of originations in the fourth quarter of 2020 went to borrowers with credit scores above 760, considered a very strong number, compared with 31 percent of mortgages going to such creditworthy borrowers in the third quarter of 2003.

Strict regulations enacted after the crisis are partially responsible for the change. And major industry players still bear the scars of the meltdown: Yun is not concerned that the heated market will encourage lenders to relax their standards, because for “Wall Street and Fannie and Freddie, it’s fresh in their minds — don’t chase after bad mortgages or stretch people’s budget.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the government-run companies that stand behind about half the country's $11 trillion residential mortgage market.

And unlike in the early 2000s, when there were too many homes, housing production has been low for years, plagued by a shortage of skilled labor and rising costs of raw materials. Homebuilders expect construction of single-family homes to pick up this year after freezing at the start of the Covid crisis, but lumber prices remain a major hurdle.

The price of lumber is up about 180 percent since April — an increase that works out to about $24,000 being added to the price of the average home, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

Just as supply reached new lows, meanwhile, demand has spiked, with families rethinking what they want from their homes as the pandemic pushed everyone inside.

“I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to migration,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “There are going to be more people who want to move once they get more clarity on what post-pandemic life will look like.”

Those shifts — what Zillow economist Matthew Speakman called “the great reshuffling” — are taking place against a backdrop of over 70 million millennials reaching peak home-buying years.

“There’s just a huge glut of young adults in the country now that wasn’t there a decade ago,” Speakman said. “The force driving the demand forward is here to stay and should provide more support in the year to come even as the pandemic craziness calms.”

If there aren’t enough homes to meet that demand, though, the largest generation in the country won’t be able to start building equity, which will in turn delay other financial decisions. Despite making up over a third of the workforce, millennials own less than 6 percent of all U.S. wealth, according to Federal Reserve data.

The delays will have long-term societal impacts. Even before the pandemic struck, more than 1 in 5 millennials — 21.9 percent in 2019 — lived with their parents, up from 11.7 percent in 2001, according to a Zillow analysis of census data. Partially as a result, millennials are significantly behind previous generations in forming families.

And Black and Latino Americans — who are twice as likely to rent as whites and more than twice as likely to report being behind on housing payments during the pandemic — could see the barriers to homeownership increase in the wake of the crisis. Renters behind on payments will face hits to their credit scores and potential eviction once the crisis passes — making it more difficult to rent their next home and more expensive to eventually buy one.

Most analysts expect home prices to continue to increase this year, even as gradually rising mortgage rates temper demand a little bit. But it could be years before the supply of housing can meet demand. In the meantime, millions of people will find themselves priced out.

“One wonders what is the end game, how does this play out given the heated market conditions of too many buyers, multiple offers?” Yun said. “As prices simply outpace people’s income by a large margin, people won’t qualify to get a mortgage.”

ALBANY, N.Y. — Another aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has reported harassment by the governor, this time during an encounter at New York's Executive Mansion, the Times Union reported Tuesday.

The unnamed aide told a supervisor that the governor inappropriately touched her at the mansion, the governor's home, where she'd been summoned for work late last year, according to the newspaper.

This is the fourth allegation of harassment or inappropriate behavior by an employee of the governor during his time in office.

Another woman, Anna Ruch, has said Cuomo made an unwanted advance when she met him at a wedding. She was not a state employee. Karen Hinton, a former aide to the governor and Mayor Bill de Blasio, has also accused him of an inappropriate encounter when she was working as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development when Cuomo was the department's secretary.

The new report has been referred to state Attorney General Tish James' office, according to the Times Union. James is overseeing the investigation of harassment claims against the governor, and on Monday named the outside attorneys who will head up the probe — one of whom, Joon Kim, previously served as a top deputy to former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and prosecuted the case against former Cuomo aide Joe Percoco.

Percoco was sentenced to six years in prison on corruption charges in 2018.

The latest allegation against the governor is likely to escalate calls from some Democratic lawmakers for Cuomo to resign. The majority leader of New York's state Senate, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, called on the governor to quit on Sunday. Cuomo has said he has no plans to do so and vowed to continue leading the state until the conclusion of the investigation into his conduct.

Some legislators have also threatened to impeach the governor, but the idea has yet to garner serious momentum. Cuomo's allies have instead urged Democrats to hold off on calling for the governor's ouster while the outside investigation is pending.

More than 20 female members of the state Assembly, all of whom were Democrats, signed onto a joint statement Monday supporting the idea of giving James "the appropriate time to complete her investigation rather than undermine her role and responsibility as the chief law enforcement officer of the state of New York." The list of signatories included the second- and third-highest ranking members of the Assembly.

Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday similarly voiced support for the attorney general's investigation, citing the announcement of the outside attorneys.

"With yesterday’s announcement launching the independent investigation led by Joon H. Kim and Anne L. Clark, I am confident everyone’s voice will be heard and taken seriously," Hochul said in a statement. "I trust the inquiry to be completed as thoroughly and expeditiously as possible. New Yorkers should be confident that through this process they will soon learn the facts."

Hochul would succeed Cuomo should he leave office before his term expires at the end of next year.

On both Monday and Tuesday, Cuomo has held public events that reporters were denied entry to, purportedly "due to COVID restrictions," according to his office. Shortly after the Times-Union article published, the governor's office announced a conference call with Cuomo set for 4 p.m.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday urged Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to support President Joe Biden’s nominee for the top Pentagon policy job amid criticism of his past Twitter posts. But the moderate senator says he's still undecided.

The administration is seeking Manchin’s support after Colin Kahl, the nominee to be the undersecretary of defense for policy, faced backlash from Republican senators during his confirmation hearing last week over past tweets criticizing GOP officials and Trump administration policies.

Manchin, following Austin's call, said he had not made up his mind on the nomination, but expressed concern with some of Kahl's attacks on Republican lawmakers.

"I've reached out to Republicans who he's worked with and who he's worked under," Manchin told Fox News' Bret Baier. "I'm gathering all that information. I have not made a final decision."

The White House directed Austin to reach out to Manchin, a congressional aide said, adding that it "tells you that this nomination is serious trouble." In addition to speaking with Austin, Manchin said he also spoke to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, under whom Kahl worked as the Pentagon's Middle East policy chief.

The West Virginia moderate was the only Democrat to voice his opposition to Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget, over inflammatory tweets. The White House ultimately pulled Tanden’s nomination due to concerns she did not have the votes to be confirmed.

"I've seen some [of Kahl's] tweets and they are concerning and I've talked to him about those and he's well experienced and well accomplished in that area they want to confirm him to," Manchin told Baier. "And we spoke about all those things."

"First of all his tweeting is nowhere near what Neera Tanden's was, and we spoke about that, too," he added.

Without Manchin’s vote, Kahl would need a Republican senator to support him in order to be confirmed in a 50-50 Senate. The committee could vote on Kahl’s nomination as early as this week, according to two congressional aides.

Earlier on Tuesday, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby confirmed that Manchin and Austin were to talk, but did not provide details. He also signaled Austin's support for the nomination, saying during a Tuesday press conference that "Colin Kahl is exactly the right individual to help us lead the policy effort."

However, he noted that defense officials are "mindful" of the concerns expressed by some lawmakers over Kahl's nomination.

"We value the oversight, the advice and consent responsibility of the committee," Kirby said. "We look forward to working with them through the confirmation process.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday published a scathing op-ed arguing that Kahl is the "wrong choice" to lead the Pentagon's policy shop, criticizing the nominee for his inflammatory tweets and his past positions on Iran policy.

"A no vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee could push the Administration toward a Mideast approach that better serves America’s national interest," the editorial board wrote.

Senate Republicans ripped Kahl at last week's Armed Services confirmation hearing for tweets criticizing former President Donald Trump’s policies and Republican lawmakers. The outing was far and away the most contentious yet for a Biden Pentagon nominee.

In one such tweet, Kahl said Republicans "debase themselves at the alter [sic] of Trump. He also called the GOP "the party of ethnic cleansing," citing statements by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas defending Trump's decision to move troops out of northeast Syria in October 2019, making way for a Turkish invasion.

Kahl apologized for the tweets during the hearing, saying that he would approach the top policy job from a nonpartisan perspective.

But some senators are not convinced that Kahl is the right fit for a Pentagon policy position that is intended to be strictly bipartisan.

"The real tense moments are going to happen when you're in the Pentagon and Iran hijacks another American ship or China shoots down an aircraft," said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who plans to vote against Kahl. "And if this is the way you respond to mere policy disagreements when you're sitting at home reading the news, I do not think that you're fit to sit in the Pentagon and make decisions about life and death.”

Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii noted that GOP lawmakers had avoided commenting on Trump's tweets by saying they hadn't seen them

"That kind of criticism regarding tweets from folks who didn't say anything about the kind of lying, racist tweets out of the former president I think is pretty rich," she said.

Several top GOP members declared during the hearing that they would vote against Kahl, citing his rhetoric and views on Middle East policy, including his advocacy for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Alex Thompson and Bryan Bender contributed to this report.

Since the beginning of the federal vaccine rollout, there has been an effort to distribute vaccine equally across the nation by population. That’s sometimes come under question as vaccine seems to be much more plentiful in some areas than in others. But equal distribution doesn’t mean equal administration. Based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data through the beginning of the month, New Mexico had converted 90% of the doses delivered into vaccine administered. Meanwhile, Alabama had left two-thirds of the vaccine sent to that state (hopefully) waiting in a freezer.

Though there are exceptions at both ends—North Dakota has done an exceptional job at vaccinating its citizens while Delaware is among the five worst when it comes to turning vials into jabs—there’s a regular relationship between red states and bad vaccination statistics. On Tuesday, Alabama, Texas, and Tennessee were among the four worst, joined only by Georgia as a Biden state. Part of the reason for the poor performance in these states may simply be miserable operations on the part of individual state governments. After all, Georgia is still being run by Gov. Brian Kemp, and even if Donald Trump doesn’t like him, that doesn’t make Kemp any sharper than the average bowling ball. 

When Republicans have long run their campaigns on the basis that government is ineffective, then set out to prove it by making government worse, it shouldn’t be any surprise that red states aren’t particularly great at distributing vaccines. But there’s a bigger issue: Republican vaccine refusal. With fully 40% of Republicans saying they won’t take a COVID-19 vaccine, party registration is the most reliable indicator of vaccine acceptance. Not race. Not age. Not income. The one thing that best informs those in charge of the logistics who is most willing to accept a vaccine is simply the big “R” on their voter registration. 

To effectively administer, not just distribute, as many vaccines as possible, more vaccine should be sent to blue states. Less to red.

This effect can be seen on a smaller scale within states. As the Associated Press reported on March 1, even healthcare workers were being forced to drive hours away from their homes in more urban areas of Tennessee because vaccine was in short supply there while it was abundant in rural areas. The same thing happened in Missouri. And in Alabama. 

The story of “I traveled miles to get a vaccination at a rural location” has become a regular feature of local news stories, some of which have been focused on heaping scorn on urban folks who darted out to “steal” vaccine in small towns. But those stories haven’t often asked the question: Why is there vaccine available in these rural locations and not in urban areas? Why have there been so many stories of vaccine going to waste in rural areas when an insufficient number of people showed up for a vaccination event, or stories of “come one, come all” calls going out at the last minute to people who were not technically qualified to receive a vaccine under state laws after an insufficient number appeared to use available doses? It’s bad enough that several states haven’t even been counting how many doses of vaccine have simply gone to waste. 

At the same time that some areas have seen vaccine overabundance, events in other areas have encountered so much demand that websites have crashed and thousands have attempted to register for each available dose. Stories about these events have tend to behave as if the fault lies with health departments not up to the logistical challenge, or a simple shortage of vaccine—but that shortage isn’t being felt equally across regions. And there’s a simple reason why.

From before Biden took office, a plurality of Republicans were saying that they did not want the COVID-19 vaccine. As more vaccine has become available, the “Yes” and “Unsure” components of the Republican cohort have become increasingly satisfied. At this point, only a quarter of Republicans are still out there saying “Yes,” they want to get the vaccine.

Compare this with the vaccine demand on the Democratic side. 

Vaccine demand among Democrats was high to begin with, it moved sharply higher as soon as vaccine was available, and has declined only by conversion to the “already been vaccinated” category. Only 5% of Democrats say they do not intend to get a vaccination, and 63% of Democrats still intend to be vaccinated. 

Again, these are better indicators for vaccine demand than race, or gender, or age, or education. A large majority of Democratic adults want the vaccine. Only a quarter of remaining Republicans are committed to being vaccinated.

The reasons for this are rooted in a long campaign by right-wing media that has been very effective in peeling Republicans away from following the advice of scientists and medical experts. It doesn’t matter if those scientists are speaking for the environment or for public health—the right has staked out ground that says, “If enough people with PhDs and MDs are for it, we’re against it.” It’s become an integral, even vital, piece of their underlying philosophy, and a little thing like a global pandemic that has already killed over half a million Americans isn’t going to stop it. In fact, the right-wing media has essentially nurtured their own anti-vax movement into being during the pandemic. 

They’ve created a situation where attempting to distribute vaccine equally based on population simply doesn’t work, because the higher the level of Republicans in any population, the more likely they are to refuse the vaccine. In those circumstances, distributing vaccine equally without taking party demographics into consideration is a formula for wasting vaccine. It also prolongs the pandemic because the Americans who would most readily accept vaccination are not getting doses as quickly as they could. 

And the answer is simple: Send less vaccine to red states. Increase the percentage going to blue states.

If anything will get Fox News to suddenly make a 180-degree turn and begin demanding that Republicans should get vaccinated, that will do it.

Republicans cannot stop showing us who they are by which Biden nominees they give the hardest time. With Neera Tanden’s nomination to head the Office of Management and Budget scrapped because of “mean” tweets, the fight—or maybe better to say attack—has moved on to other candidates. Specifically and not at all mysteriously, other women of color.

Vanita Gupta, President Biden’s nominee for associate attorney general, has been the target of nearly $1 million in attack ads by the far-right Judicial Crisis Network, as well as attacks by a group of Republican state attorneys general, centering around her work in the Obama Justice Department heading up investigations of police departments after white officers killed Black people.

She’s anti-police, the Judicial Crisis Network and the Republican attorneys general from Indiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana claim. 

Actual police vehemently disagree. 

”She always worked with us to find common ground even when that seemed impossible,” the president of the nation's largest police union wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Although in some instances our disagreements remain, her open and candid approach has created a working relationship that is grounded in mutual respect and understanding.”

”Ms. Gupta has demonstrated a seriousness and willingness to understand the intense challenges, and even dangers, facing police officers with the intent of improving policing at large without degrading the overwhelming number of brave and honorable police officers,” a group of police chiefs wrote.

Not that this stops the Republican attacks. As usual, Republican politicians only listen to their supposed heroes when it’s convenient to do so.

Sen. Tom Cotton took another angle in attacking Gupta during her Wednesday hearing. Cotton was outraged, outraged I tell you, at Gupta’s past statements that implicit bias is a thing, and he really thought he was going to get a gotcha out of it, with questions like “Against which races do you harbor racial bias?” 

Gupta responded by owning a universal problem. “I hold stereotypes that I have to manage,” she said. “I am a product of my culture. It’s part of the human condition. And I believe that all of us are able to manage implicit bias, but only if we can acknowledge our own, and I am not above anyone else in that matter.”

Cotton, though, was ready to pounce with the razor-sharp point that Gupta, in her role at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, had opposed three Trump judicial nominees who were people of color, and since she had admitted to implicit bias, “Should members of those communities be worried that you harbor racial bias against them, because you oppose those judges’ nominations?”

Pretty sure she opposed the white Trump judicial nominees, too, Tom. 

But of course it’s not about that. It’s about Cotton’s desire to score points with the Republican base by attacking a woman of color who cares about racial justice.

Similarly, Republicans are targeting Kristen Clarke, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Clarke is under fire for alleged anti-Semitism based on an incident more than 25 years ago in which she was part of a student group at Harvard that invited the author of an anti-Semitic book to speak. Clarke has said “Giving someone like him a platform, it’s not something I would do again,” and the Anti-Defamation League endorsed her, citing her “steadfast support in the fight against anti-Semitism.”

But Republicans aren’t letting this one go. At Merrick Garland’s confirmation hearing to be attorney general, Sen. Mike Lee brought it up. 

”You know my views on anti-Semitism; no one needs to question those,” Garland, whose grandparents came to the United States to escape anti-Semitism, responded. "I'm a pretty good judge of what an anti-Semite is, and I do not believe that she is an anti-Semite. And I do not believe she is discriminatory in any sense.”

Gupta would be the first woman of color to serve as associate attorney general. Clarke would be the first Black woman to head the civil rights division. Tanden would have been the first woman of color to head OMB. Rep. Deb Haaland, who is an enrolled citizen of the Laguna Pueblo and would be the first American Indian Cabinet member, has faced fierce opposition and efforts to slow her confirmation.

There’s an undeniable pattern here. Republicans, so outraged by the concept that people harbor implicit bias, aren’t really bothering to hide their bias—at least their sense that women of color are easy objects of attack, vulnerable to whatever ridiculous charges get lobbed. Tom Cotton and Mike Lee and their buddies in the Senate like the look of giving women of color a harder time than other Biden nominees. It tells us something about them, and it tells us something about who they’re trying to appeal to.

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A massive rollback of voting access in Georgia hints at a terrible truth.

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